STUDIES OF CHRISTIANITY:

OR,

TIMELY THOUGHTS FOR RELIGIOUS

THINKERS.

A SERIES OF PAPERS,

BY

JAMES MARTINEAU.

EDITED BY

WILLIAM R. ALGER.

BOSTON:

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION,

21 BROMFIELD STREET.

1858.

CAMBRIDGE:

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY METCALF AND COMPANY.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTORY THOUGHTS,

FROM

MR. MARTINEAU'S WRITINGS.

[INTRODUCTION.]

The American Unitarian Association in 1835 reprinted from the English edition, among their Tracts, a Sermon on "The Existing State of Theology as an Intellectual Pursuit and of Religion, as a Moral Influence." Its rare merits elicited great praise. Its author was the Rev. James Martineau, then a settled minister in Liverpool. Since that time, his occasional publications from year to year have been winning a wider audience, and awakening a deeper admiration. The history of his mind has been a broadening track of light. And now the Association feel that they cannot do a greater favor to the reading public, or better aid that cause of Liberal Christianity whose servants they are, than by printing a collection of the later writings of this gifted man, whom they first introduced to American Unitarians a quarter of a century ago.

The list of works prefixed to the article here entitled "Distinctive Types of Christianity," as it appeared in the Westminster Review, and the opening sentence referring to them, have been accidentally omitted. Two or three of the papers belong to the author's earlier years, but are inserted here equally on account of their eminent ability, their special timeliness, and their striking adaptation to the general purpose of the work; namely, to throw light on the true nature of Christianity. They will also be new to most of those whom they now reach. The last paper in the volume is one of the first its writer published, in his comparative youth. We shall be disappointed if the benignant wisdom and moral fidelity of its catholic lessons do not secure a sympathetic response in many a quarter once closed against such appeals.

In selecting from Mr. Martineau's numerous invaluable articles, not already published in book-form, the contents of the present work, the rule has not been so much to choose the ablest productions, as to take those best fitted to meet the wants of the time, by diffusing among ministers, students of divinity, and the cultivated laity a knowledge of the most advanced theological and religious thought yet attained. We regret that the necessary limits of the volume exclude several of the author's most instructive and inspiring essays; particularly the magnificent one in the National Review upon "Newman, Coleridge, and Carlyle"; also the one upon "Lessing as a Theologian."

We have called this volume "Studies of Christianity," simply as a convenient indication of the general character of its contents. In justice to the author, it should be borne in mind that the separate papers were prepared to meet various occasions, without a suspicion that they would ever be brought together to form a book. Of course they do not express his complete views of the mighty subject which they fragmentarily treat. The relative order and rank of his convictions, the interpretation of Christianity from its inner side, appear much better in his "Endeavors after the Christian Life,"—by far the richest and noblest series of sermons in the English language. Still, a kind of unity pervades the different pieces composing this collection. One Christ-like strain of sentiment breathes through them all. The same consecrating fealty to truth presides over them all. The same grand outline of principles and unvarying standard of judgment are constantly evident. The same marvellous acumen, breadth of learning, and exquisite culture, everywhere appear. Each article is more or less directly an illustration of Christianity, as something moral, spiritual, vital, dynamic, to be practically assimilated by the soul, in distinction from the common exposition of it, as something sacerdotal, dogmatic, formal, forensic, once enacted and now to be mimetically observed. The energetic patience of labor, the detersive intellect, the unalloyed devoutness of spirit, the telescopic range both of faculty and equipment, revealed even in these wayside products, awaken in us an unappeasable desire for a more purposed and systematic work from the same mind, now in its fullest maturity. In the mean time we will express our grateful appreciation of the contributions already furnished, by giving them further circulation, assured that no truly pious and intelligent person, free from bigotry and shackles, can peruse them without receiving equal measures of delight and profit.

Mr. Martineau is so thoroughly acquainted with the processes and results of spiritual experience, with the sciences of nature, and with the whole realm of metaphysical philosophy, and his own wealthy faculties are so tenacious in their activity and freshness, that every subject he touches receives novelty, light, and ornament. He is emphatically a teacher for the teachers,—a greater guide and master for the common guides and masters. Traversing the whole domain of human contemplation with the defining lines of analysis, clothing the severe materials of science with the colors of æsthetic art, he sheds on every theme the illumination of intellectual genius, and transfuses every thought with the distinctive sentiments of piety. Thus is afforded that rarest of all spectacles,—and the one now most needed by the cultivated religious world,—of a man who is greatly endowed at once as philosopher, poet, and Christian, and who with simultaneous earnestness in each capacity is devoted, by the whole labors of his life, to the instruction of mankind.

For these reasons, we feel it a duty to attract as much attention as possible to Mr. Martineau's past and expected publications. The peerless intelligence, the bracing fidelity, the essential nobleness and catholicity, the tender beauty and reverence, of his utterances, his consummate mastery of the great topics he handles, seem to us fitted in a solitary degree to meet the highest wants of the age,—to do divine service in the conflict of scepticism, sensuality, and decay against all that is truest and purest in the religious faith and moral life of Christendom. Therefore, to persons who, unacquainted with the author's previous works, may read the papers here collected, we would recommend as the best books for educated and earnest Christian thinkers, Mr. Martineau's "Rationale of Religious Inquiry," the volume of his "Miscellanies" edited by the Rev. T. S. King, and the two series of "Endeavors after the Christian Life" recently republished in one volume by Messrs. Munroe and Company.

We shall make up the rest of this introductory paper by quoting from some of Mr. Martineau's articles, not generally accessible, a few specimens of those thoughts which, if freely received in these times of theological doubt and turmoil, would lead many a religious thinker towards the truth and peace he covets.

How clearly the following passage shows the true

RELATION BETWEEN NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.

The contempt with which it is the frequent practice of divines to treat the grounds of natural religion, betrays an ignorance both of the true office of revelation and of the true wants of the human heart. It cannot be justified, except on the supposition that there is some contradiction between the teachings of creation and those of Christ, with some decided preponderance of proof in favor of the latter. Even if the Gospel furnished a series of perfectly new truths, of which nature had been profoundly silent, it would be neither reasonable nor safe to fix exclusive attention on these recent and historical acquisitions, and prohibit all reference to those elder oracles of God, by which his Spirit, enshrined in the glories of his universe, taught the fathers of our race. And if it be the function of Christianity not to administer truth entirely new, but to corroborate by fresh evidence, and invest with new beauty, and publish to the millions with a voice of power, a faith latent already in the hearts of many, and scattered through the speculations of the wise and noble few,—to erect into realities the dreams which had visited a half-inspired philosophy, interpreting the life and lot of man;—then there is a relation between the religion of nature and that of Christ,—a relation of original and supplement,—which renders the one essential to the apprehension of the other. Revelation, you say, has given us the clew by which to thread the labyrinth of creation, and extricate ourselves from its passages of mystery and gloom. Be it so; still, there, in the scene thus cleared of its perplexity, must our worship be paid, and the manifestations of Deity be sought. If the use of revelation be to explain the perplexities of Providence and life, it would be a strange use to make of the explanation were we to turn away from the thing explained. We hold the key of heaven in our hands. What folly to be for ever extolling and venerating it, whilst we prohibit all approach to the temple whose gates it is destined to unlock.

One would search long to find a finer illustration than is here given of the real

NATURE OF DEVOTION.

In Devotion there is this great peculiarity,—that it is neither the work nor the play of our nature, but is something higher than either,—more ideal than the one, more real than the other. All human activities besides are one of these two things,—either the mere aim at an external end, or the mere outcome of an inner feeling. On the one hand, we plough and sow, we build and navigate, that we may win the adornments and securities of life; on the other hand, we sing and dance, we carve and paint, that we may put forth the pressure of harmony and joy and beauty breaking from within. Mechanical Toil terminates in a solid product; graceful Art is content with simple expression; but Religion is degraded when it is reduced to either character. It is not a labor of utility; and he who looks to it as a means of safety, to ingratiate himself with an awful God, and bespeak an interest in a hidden Future, is an utter stranger to its essence; his habits and words may be cast in its mould, but the spark of its life is not kindled in his heart. When fed by the fuel of prudence, the fire is all spent in fusing it into form; and the finished product is a cold and metal mimicry, that neither moves nor glows. Nor is Religion a simple gesture of passion; and to class it with mere natural language, to treat it as the rhythmical delirium of the soul working off an irrepressible enthusiasm, is to empty it of its real meaning and contents, and sink it from a divine attraction to a human excitement. The postures and movements and tones which simply manifest the impassioned mind are content to go off into space, and pass away; they direct themselves nowhither; they have no more object than a convulsion; they ask only leave to be the last shape of a feeling that must have way; and be the inspiration what it may, they close and consummate its history. But he who prays is at the beginning of aspiration, not at the evaporating end of impulse; he is drawn, not driven; he is not painting himself upon vacancy, but is surrendering himself to a Presence real and everlasting. If he flings out his arms, it is not in blind paroxysm, but that he may embrace and be embraced; if he cries aloud, it is that he may be heard; if he makes melody of the silent heart, it is no soliloquy flung into emptiness, but the low-breathing love of spirit to Spirit. Devotion is not the play even of the highest faculties, but their deep earnest. It is no doubt the culminating point of reverence; but reverence is impossible without an object, and could never culminate at all, or pass into the Infinite, unless its object did so too. In every case we find that the faculties and susceptibilities of a being tell true, and are the exact measure of the outer life it has to live; and just as many and as large proportions as it has, to just so many and so great objects does it stand related; so that from the axis of its nature you may always draw the curve of its existence. Human worship, therefore, turning to the living God as the infant's eye to light, is itself a witness to Him whom it feels after and adores; it is "the image and shadow of heavenly things," the parallel chamber in our nature with that Holy of Holies whither its incense ever ascends.

In a similar strain is this argument to show that

DEVOTION IS NOT A MISTAKE.

Be assured, all visible greatness of mind grows in looking at an invisible that is greater. And since it is inconceivable that what is most sublime in humanity should spring from vision of a thing that is not, that what is most real and commanding with us should come of stretching the soul into the unreal and empty, that historic durability should be the gift of spectral fancies, we must hold these devout natures to be at one with everlasting Fact,—to feel truly that the august forms of Justice and Holiness are at home in heaven, the object there of clearer insight and more perfect veneration. There are those who please themselves with the idea that the world will outgrow its habits of worship; that the newspaper will supersede the preacher and prophet; that the apprehension of scientific laws will replace the fervor of moral inspirations; that this sphere of being will then be perfectly administered when no reference to another distracts attention. But, for my own part, I am persuaded, that life would soon become intolerable on earth, were it copied from nothing in the heavens; that its deeper affections would pine away and its lights of purest thought grow pale, if it lay shrouded in no Holy Spirit, but only in the wilderness of space. The most sagacious secular voice leaves, after all, a chord untouched in the human heart: listening too long to its didactic monotone, we begin to sigh for the rich music of hope and faith. The dry glare of noonday knowledge hurts the eye by plying it for use and denying it beauty; and we long to be screened behind a cloud or two of moisture and of mystery, that shall mellow the glory and cool the air. Never can the world be less to us, than when we make it all in all.

Our author makes a striking reply to the common assertion that

"THEOLOGY IS NOT A PROGRESSIVE SCIENCE."

It may, however, be retrogressive; and it is sure to repay flippant neglect by lending its empty space to mean delusions. To its great problems some answer will always be attempted; and there is much to choose between the solutions, however imperfect, found by reverential wisdom, and the degrading falsehoods tendered in reply by the indifferent and superficial. Even in their failures, there is a vast difference between the explorings of the seeing and the blind. We deny, however, that Christian theology can assume any aspect of failure, except to those who use a false measure of success. It is not in the nature of religion, of poetry, of art, to exhibit the kind of progress that belongs to physical science. They differ from it in seeking, not the phenomena of the universe, but its essence,—not its laws of change, but its eternal meanings,—not outward nature, in short, except as expressive of the inner thought of God; and being thus intent upon the enduring spirit and very ground of things, they cannot grow by numerical accretion of facts and exacter registration of successions. They are the product, not of the patient sense and comparing intelligence which are always at hand, but of a deeper and finer insight, changing with the atmosphere of the affections and will. Instead of looking, therefore, for perpetual advance of discovery in theology, we should naturally expect an ebb and flow of light, answering to the moral condition of men's minds; and may be content if the divine truth, lost in the dulness of a material age, clears itself into fresh forms with the returning breath of a better time.

Most readers will find suggestions of great freshness in the passage next cited:—

THE HEART OF CHRISTIANITY.

To lose sight of this principle in estimating Christianity, and to insist on judging it, not by its matured character in Christendom, not by the unconscious spirit of its founders, but by their personal views and purposes, is to overlook the divine in it in order to fasten on the human; to seek the winged creature of the air in the throbbing chrysalis; and is like judging the place of the Hebrews in history by the court and the proverbs of Solomon, or the value of Puritanism by the sermon of a hill-preacher before the civil war. The primitive Christianity was certainly different from that of other ages; but there is no reason for believing that it was better. The representation often made of the early Church, as having only truth, and feeling only love, and living in simple sanctity, is contradicted by every page of the Christian records. The Epistles are entirely occupied in driving back guilt and passion, or in correcting errors of belief; nor is it always possible to approve of the temper in which they perform the one task, or to assent to the methods by which they attempt the other. Principles and affections were indeed secreted in the heart of the first disciples, which were to have a great future, and to become the highest truth of the world. But it was precisely of these that they rarely thought at all. The Apostles themselves speak slightingly of them, as baby's food; and the great faith in God, the need of repentant purity of heart, with the trust in immortality,—the very doctrines which we should name as the permanent essence of Christian faith,—are expressly declared by them to be the childish rudiments of belief, on which the attention of the grown Christian will disdain to dwell. And what did they prefer to these sublime truths, as the nutriment of their life and the pride of their wisdom? Allegories about Isaac and Ishmael, parallels between Christ and Melchisedec, new readings of history and prophecy to suit the events in Palestine, and a constant outlook for the end of all things. These were the grand topics on which their minds eagerly worked, and on which they labored to construct a consistent theory. These give the form to their doctrine, the matter to their spirit. These are what you will get, if you go indiscriminately to their writings for a creed: and these are no more Christianity than the pretensions of Hildebrand or the visions of Swedenborg. The true religion lies elsewhere, just in the things that were ever present with them, but never esteemed. Just as your friend may spend his anxiety on his station, his usefulness, his appearance and repute, and fear lest he should show nothing deserving your regard, while all the time you love him for the pure graces, the native wild-flowers, of his heart; so do the choicest servants of God ever think one thing of themselves, while they are dear to him and revered by us for quite another. "The weak things" in the Church not less than in "the world hath he chosen to confound the mighty; the simple, to strike dumb the wise; and things that are not, to supersede the things that are."

In rude ages, and amid feudal customs, it has perhaps been no unhappy thing that this image of servitude has been transmitted into the conceptions of faith: it may have touched with some sanctity an inevitable submission, and mingled a sentiment of loyalty with religion. But the external relation of serf and lord is no type of the internal relation of spirit to spirit, which alone constitutes religion to us. To God himself, with all his infinitude, we are not slaves; we are not his property, but his children; he regards us, not as things, but as persons; he does not so much command us, as appeal to us; and in our obedience, it is not his bidding that we serve, but that divine Law of Right of which he makes us conscious as the rule of His nature only more perfectly than of ours. To obey him as slaves, in fear, and with an eye upon his power, is, with all our punctuality and anxiety, simply and entirely to disobey him; nor is anything precious in his sight, except the free consent of heart with which we apprehend what is holy to his thought and embrace what is in harmony with his perfection. Still less can we be slaves to Christ, who is no autocrat to us, but our freely followed leader towards God; the guide of our pilgrim troop in quest of a holy land; who gives us no law from the mandates of his will, but only interprets for us, and makes burn within us, in characters of fire, the law of our own hearts; who has no power over us, except through the affections he awakens and the aspirations he sets upon the watch. We have emerged from the Religion of Law, whose only sentiment is that of obedience to sovereignty; we have passed from the religion of Salvation, whose life consists in gratitude to a Deliverer; and we are capable only of a religion of reverence, which bows before the authority of Goodness. And in the infinite ranks of excellence, from the highest to the lowest, there are no lords and slaves; the dependence is ever that of internal charm, not of external bond; the authority is but represented and impersonated in another and a better soul, but has its living seat within our own; and in this true and elevating worship, the more we are disposed of by another, the more do we feel that we are our own. This is a relation which the political terms of the expected theocracy are ill adapted to express; and if we have required many centuries to grope our way to this clearest glory of religion, to disengage it from the impure admixture of servile fear and revolting presumption; if it has taken long for us to melt away in our imagination the images of thrones and tribunals, of prize-givings and prisons, of a police and assizes of the universe; if only at the eleventh hour of our faith, the cloud has passed away, and shown us the true angel-ladder that springs from earth to heaven, the pure climax of souls whereon each below looks up and rises, yet each above bends down and helps;—the discovery which brings such peace and freedom to the heart, has been delayed by the mistaken identification of the entire creed of the first age with the essence of Christianity. Now that God has shown us so much more, has tried the divine seed of the Gospel on so various a soil of history, and enabled us to distinguish its fairest blossoms and its choicest fruits, a much larger meaning than was possible at first must be given to the purpose of his revelation. Even to Paul, Christ was mainly the great representative of a theocratic idea; and was in no other sense an object of spiritual belief, than that he was not on earth and mortal, but in heaven and immortal. That faith in Christ, which then prominently denoted belief in his appointed return, and allegiance to him as God's viceroy in this world, is now transferred into quite a different thing. It is altogether a moral and affectionate sentiment: an acknowledgment of him as the highest impersonation of divine excellence and inspired insight yet given to the world; a trust in him as the only realized type of perfection that can mediate for us between ourselves and God; a faithfulness to him, as making us conscious of what we are and what God and our conscience would have us to be. It is vain to pretend that revelation is a fixed and stereotyped thing. It was born, as the divinest things must be, among human conditions; and into it ever since human conditions have perpetually flowed. The elements of Hebrew thought surrounded the sacred centre at first, and have been erroneously identified with it by all Unitarian churches in every age. The Hellenic intellect afterwards streamed towards the fresh point of life and faith, and gathered around it the metaphysical system of Trinitarian dogma in which orthodox communions of all times have, with parallel error, sought the essence of the Gospel. The true principle of the religion has been secreted in both, and consisted in neither: it has lain unnoticed in the midst, in the silent chamber of the heart, around which the clamor of the disputatious intellect whirls without entrance. The agency of Christ's mind as the expression of God's moral nature and providence, and as the realized ideal of beauty and excellence,—this is the power of God and the wisdom of God, which has made vain the counsels of the world, and baffled the foolishness of the Church. This is the Gospel's centre of stability,—"Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."

Few persons can be insensible to the sublimity of this expression upon the relation between

CHRIST, NATURE, PROVIDENCE, AND GOD.

In conclusion, then, I revert, with freshened persuasion, to the statement with which I commenced. Jesus Christ of Nazareth, God hath presented to us simply in his inspired humanity. Him we accept, not indeed as very God, but as the true image of God, commissioned to show what no written doctrinal record could declare, the entire moral perfections of Deity. We accept, not indeed his body, not the struggles of his sensitive nature, not the travail of his soul, but his purity, his tenderness, his absolute devotion to the great idea of right, his patient and compassionate warfare against misery and guilt, as the most distinct and beautiful expression of the Divine mind. The peculiar office of Christ is to supply a new moral image of Providence; and everything, therefore, except the moral complexion of his mind, we leave behind as human and historical merely, and apply to no religious use. I have already stated in what way nature and the Gospel combine to bring before us the great object of our trust and worship. The universe gives us the scale of God, and Christ, his Spirit. We climb to the infinitude of his nature by the awful pathway of the stars, where whole forests of worlds silently quiver here and there, like a small leaf of light. We dive into his eternity, through the ocean waves of time, that roll and solemnly break on the imagination, as we trace the wrecks of departed things upon our present globe. The scope of his intellect, and the majesty of his rule, are seen in the tranquil order and everlasting silence that reign through the fields of his volition. And the spirit that animates the whole is like that of the Prophet of Nazareth; the thoughts that fly upon the swift light throughout creation, charged with fates unnumbered, are like the healing mercies of One that passed no sorrow by. The government of this world, its mysterious allotments of good and ill, its successions of birth and death, its hopes of progress and of peace, each life of individual or nation, is under the administration of One, of whose rectitude and benevolence, whose sympathy with all the holiest aspirations of our virtue and our love, Christ is the appointed emblem. A faith that spreads around and within the mind a Deity thus sublime and holy, feeds the light of every pure affection, and presses with omnipotent power on the conscience; and our only prayer is, that we may walk as children of such light.

It seems as if no one capable of understanding could resist the convincing cogency of the following exhibition of

THE IDEA OF VICARIOUS JUSTICE.

It is only natural that the parable of the Prodigal Son should be no favorite with those who deny the unconditional mercy of God. The place which this divine tale occupies in the Unitarian theology appears to be filled, in the orthodox scheme, by the story of Zaleucus, king of the Locrians; which has been appealed to in the present controversy by both the lecturers on the Atonement, and seems to be the only endurable illustration presented, even by Pagan history, of the execution of vicarious punishment. This monarch had passed a law condemning adulterers to the loss of both eyes. His own son was convicted of the crime; and, to satisfy at once the claims of law and of clemency, the royal parent "commanded one of his own eyes to be pulled out, and one of his son's." Is it too bold a heresy to confess that there seems to me something heathenish in this example, and that, as an exponent of the Divine character, I more willingly revere the Father of the prodigal than the father of the adulterer?

Without entering, however, into any comparison between the Locrian and the Galilean parable, I would observe, that the vicarious theory receives no illustration from this fragment of ancient history. There is no analogy between the cases, except in the violation of truth and wisdom which both exhibit; and whatever we are instructed to admire in Zaleucus, will be found on close inspection to be absent from the orthodox representation of God. We pity the Grecian king, who had made a law without foresight of its application, and so sympathize with his desire to evade it, that any quibble which legal ingenuity can devise for this purpose passes with slight condemnation; casuistry refuses to be severe with a man implicated in such a difficulty. But the Creator and Legislator of the human race, having perfect knowledge of the future, can never be surprised into a similar perplexity; or ever pass a law at one time which at another he desires to evade. Even were it so, there would seem to be less that is unworthy of his moral perfection in saying plainly, with the ancient Hebrews, that he "repented of the evil he thought to do," and said, "It shall not be," than in ascribing to him a device for preserving consistency, in which no one capable of appreciating veracity can pretend to discern any sincere fulfilment of the law. However barbarous the idea of Divine "repentance," it is at least ingenuous. Nor does this incident of Zaleucus and his son present any parallel to the alleged relation between the Divine Father who receives, and the Divine Son who gives, the satisfaction for human guilt. The Locrian king took a part of the penalty himself, and left the remainder where it was due; but the Sovereign Lawgiver of Calvinism puts the whole upon another. To sustain the analogy, Zaleucus should have permitted an innocent son to have both his eyes put out, and the convicted adulterer to escape.

The doctrine of Atonement has introduced among Trinitarians a mode of speaking respecting God, which grates most painfully against the reverential affections due to him. His nature is dismembered into a number of attributes, foreign to each other, and preferring rival claims; the Divine tranquillity appears as the equilibrium of opposing pressures,—the Divine administration as a resultant from the collision of hostile forces. Goodness pleads for that which holiness forbids; and the Paternal God would do many a mercy, did the Sovereign God allow. The idea of a conflict or embarrassment in the Supreme Mind being thus introduced, and the believer being haunted by the feeling of some tremendous difficulty affecting the Infinite government, the vicarious economy is brought forward as the relief, the solution of the whole perplexity; the union, by a blessed compromise, of attributes that could never combine in any scheme before. The main business of theology is made to consist in stating the conditions and expounding the solution of this imaginary problem. The cardinal difficulty is thought to be the reconciliation of justice and mercy; and, as the one is represented under the image of a Sovereign, the other under that of a Father, the question assumes this form: How can the same being at every moment possess both these characters, without abandoning any function or feeling appropriate to either? how, especially, can the Judge remit?—it is beyond his power; yet how can the Parent punish to the uttermost?—it is contrary to his nature.

All this difficulty is merely fictitious, arising out of the determination to make out that God is both wholly Judge and wholly Father; from an anxiety, that is, to adhere to two metaphors, as applicable, in every particular, to the Divine Being. It is evident that both must be, to a great extent, inappropriate; and in nothing, surely, is the impropriety more manifest, than in the assertion that, as sovereign, God is naturally bound to execute laws which, nevertheless, it would be desirable to remit, or change in their operation. Whatever painful necessities the imperfection of human legislation and judicial procedure may impose, the Omniscient Ruler can make no law which he will not to all eternity, and with entire consent of his whole nature, deem it well to execute. This is the Unitarian answer to the constant question, "How can God forgive in defiance of his own law?" It is not in defiance of his laws: every one of which will be fulfilled to the uttermost, in conformity with his first intent; but nowhere has he declared that he would not forgive. All justice consists in treating moral agents according to their character; the inexorability of human law arises solely from the imperfection with which it can attain this end, and is not the essence, but the alloy, of equity; but God, who searches and controls the heart, exercises that perfect justice, which permits the penal suffering to depart only with the moral guilt; and pardons, not by cancelling any sentence, but by obeying his eternal purpose to meet the wanderer returning homeward, and give his blessing to the restored. Only by such restoration can any past guilt be effaced. The thoughts, emotions, and sufferings of sin, once committed, are woven into the fabric of the soul; and are as incapable of being absolutely obliterated thence and put back into non-existence, as moments of being struck from the past, or the parts of space from infinitude. Herein we behold alike "the goodness and the severity of God"; and adore in him, not the balance of contrary tendencies, but the harmony of consentaneous perfections. How plainly does experience show that, if his personal unity be given up, his moral unity cannot be preserved!

The author himself is the best exemplification of the man described in this account of the

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN APPREHENSION AND INTERPRETATION.

The difference between the ordinary visual gaze upon the external universe, and the interpreting glance of science, is felt by every cultivated understanding to be immeasurable;—and the contrast is not less between that dull sense of what passes within him, which is forced upon a man by mere practical experience, and the exact consciousness, the discriminative perception, the easy comprehension of his own (and, so far as they are expressed by faithful symbols, of others') states and affections, possessed by the patient analyst of thought and emotion, and careful collector of their laws. The mighty mass of human achievement and human failure, in intellectual research, in moral endeavor, in social economy and government, lapses into order before him, and distributes itself among the provinces of determinate laws. The structure of a child's perplexity, and the fallacies of the most ambitious hypothesis, lie open to him as readily, as to the artisan a flaw in the fabric of his own craft. The creations of art fall before him into their elements; and, dissolving away their constituent matter, which is an accident of their age, leave upon his mind their permanent form of beauty, as his guide to a true and noble criticism. The progress and the aberrations of human reason, in its quest of truth, are as clearly appreciated by him, as the passages of happy skill or ignorant roving in some voyage of discovery, when the outlines and relations of the sphere on which it is made become fully known. Discerning distinctly the different kinds of evidence appropriate to different departments of truth, and weighing the scientific value of every idea and method of thought, he is not at the mercy of each superficial impression and obtrusive phase presented to him by the subjects of his contemplation; but he attains a certain rational tact and graduated feeling of certainty in abstract matters of opinion, by which he escapes alike the miseries of undefined doubt, and the passions of unqualified dogmatism. In short, the great idea of Science is applied by him to the complicated workings of the mind of man; interprets the activities of his nature, and gives laws to the administration of his life; and, with wonderful analysis, investigates the properties, and establishes the equation, of their most labyrinthine curves.

What a rebuke upon dogmatic sciolists, what a glorious invitation to study, are conveyed in the genial, broad, mental hospitality of the succeeding paragraph!

NECESSITY OF LEARNING IN PHILOSOPHY.

If there is one department of knowledge more than another in which a contemptuous disregard of the meditations and theories of distant periods and nations is misplaced, it is in the philosophy of man,—which can have no adequate breadth of basis till it reposes on the consciousness and covers the mental experience of the universal race; and to construct which out of purely personal materials, is like attempting to lay down the curves and finish the theory of terrestrial magnetism on the strength of a few closet experiments. No man, however large-thoughted and composite his mind, can accept of himself as the type of universal human nature. It will even be a great and rare endowment, if, with every aid of exact learning and unwearying patience, he is able to penetrate the atmosphere of others' understanding, and to observe the forms and colors which the objects of contemplation assume, when beheld through this peculiar medium. Simply to avail one's self of the experience of mankind, and know what it has really been, demands no little scope of imagination and versatility of intellectual sympathy. When these qualities are so deficient in a thinker that he cannot well achieve this knowledge, it is a great misfortune to his philosophy; when the want is such that he does not even desire it, it amounts to an absolute disqualification. Without, therefore, pledging ourselves to the eclectic principles which prevail in the present school of philosophy in France, we must beware of the intolerant dogmatism of Bentham in England, sanctioned, as we have seen, by one of the masters of the antagonist metaphysics in Germany. Indeed, it will be a chief purpose of all my lectures to enable you to profit by the light of other minds; in every province of the vast region which we shall explore together, to indicate the paths which they have traversed before, nor ever to turn away from their points of discovery, without raising some rude monument at least of honest and commemorative praise. To introduce you to the works, to interpret the difficulties, to do honor to the labors, to review the opinions, of the great masters of speculative thought in every age and in many lands, will be an indispensable portion of my duty;—a task most arduous indeed, but than which none can be more grateful to one who loves to trace, through all their affinities, the indestructible types of truth and beauty in the human mind; and to mark the natural laws, connecting together the most opposite continents and climes of thought, as parts, successively colonized and cultivated, of one great intellectual world. But in addition to the study of the several classes of psychological and moral doctrine as they present themselves in the order of science, it will be important to spread out the literature of philosophy before us in the order of time; to gain an insight into the natural development of successive modes of thought on speculative subjects; to notice the action and reaction of philosophy and practical life; to ascertain whether opinion on these abstract matters really advances into knowledge and has any determinate progression, or whether it oscillates for ever on either side of some fixed idea, or line of mental gravitation. In short, having surveyed our subject systematically, we shall go over it again chronologically; and call upon philosophy, when it has recited its creed, and revealed its wisdom, to finish all by writing its history.

The hints given in Mr. Martineau's frequent references to the bearing of scientific knowledge and laws upon theological speculations are very important. We adduce a single example.

PHYSICAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

An accomplished and thoughtful observer of nature—Hugh Miller, the geologist—has somewhere remarked, that religion has lost its dependence on metaphysical theories, and must henceforth maintain itself upon the domain of physical science. He accordingly exhorts the guardians of sacred truth to prepare themselves for the approaching crisis in its history, by exchanging the study of thoughts for the apprehension of things, and carefully cultivating the habit of inductive research. The advice is excellent, and proceeds from one whose own example has amply proved its worth; and unless the clergy qualify themselves to take part in the discussions which open themselves with the advance of natural knowledge, they will assuredly be neither secure in their personal convictions nor faithful to their public trust. The only fault to be found with this counsel is, that in recommending one kind of knowledge it disparages another, and betrays that limited intellectual sympathy which is the bane of all noble culture. Geology, astronomy, chemistry, so far from succeeding to the inheritance of metaphysics, do but enrich its problems with new conceptions and give a larger outline to its range; and should they, in the wantonness of their young ascendency, persuade men to its neglect, they will pay the penalties of their contempt by the appearance of confusion in their own doctrine. The advance of any one line of human thought demands—especially for the security of faith—the parallel movement of all the rest; and the attempt to substitute one intellectual reliance for another, mistakes for progress of knowledge what may be only an exchange of ignorance. In particular, the study of external nature must proceed pari passu with the study of the human mind; and the errors of an age too exclusively reflective will not be remedied, but only reversed, by mere reaction into sciences of outward fact and observation. These physical pursuits, followed into their further haunts, rapidly run up into a series of notions common to them all,—expressed by such words as Law, Cause, Force,—which at once transfer the jurisdiction from the provincial courts of the special sciences to the high chancery of universal philosophy. To conduct the pleadings—still more to pronounce the judgment—there, other habits of mind are needed than are required in the museum and the observatory; and the history of knowledge, past and present, abounds with instances of men who, with the highest merit in particular walks of science, have combined a curious incompetency of survey over the whole. Hence, very few natural philosophers, however eminent for great discoveries and dreaded by the priesthood of their day, have made any deep and durable impression on the religious conception of the universe, as the product and expression of an Infinite Mind; and in tracing the eras of human faith, the deep thinker comes more prominently into view than the skilful interrogator of nature. In the history of religion, Plato is a greater figure than Archimedes; Spinoza than Newton; Hume and Kant than Volta and La Place; even Thomas Carlyle than Justus Liebig. Our picture indeed of the system of things is immensely enlarged, both in space and duration, by the progress of descriptive science; and the grouping of its objects and events is materially changed. But the altered scene carries with it the same expression to the soul; speaks the same language as to its origin; renews its ancient glance with an auguster beauty; and, in spite of all dynamic theories, reproduces the very modes of faith and doubt which belonged to the age both of the old Organon and of the new.

The ultimate problem of all philosophy and all religion is this: "How are we to conceive aright the origin and first principle of things?" The answers, it has been contended by a living author of distinguished merit, are necessarily reducible to two, between which all systems are divided, and on the decision of whose controversy, all antagonist speculations would lay down their arms. "In the beginning was Force," says one class of thinkers; "force, singular or plural, splitting into opposites, standing off into polarities, ramifying into attractions and repulsions, heat and magnetism, and climbing through the stages of physical, vital, animal, to the mental life itself." "On the contrary," says the other class, "in the beginning was Thought; and only in the necessary evolution of its eternal ideas into expression does force arise,—self-realizing thought declaring itself in the types of being and the laws of phenomena." We need hardly say, that the former of these two notions coalesces with the creed of Atheism, and is most frequently met with upon the path of the physical sciences, while the latter is favored by the mathematical and metaphysical, and gives the essence of Pantheism. Each of them has insurmountable difficulties, with which it is successfully taunted by the other. Start from blind force; and how, by any spinning from that solitary centre, are we ever to arrive at the seeing intellect? Can the lower create the higher, and the unconscious enable us to think? Start from pure thinking, and how then can you get any force for the production of objective effects? How metamorphose a passage of dialect into the power of gravitation, and a silent corollary into a flash of lightning? In taking the intellect as the type of God, this difficulty must always be felt. We are well aware that it is not in this endowment that our dynamic energy resides. The activity which we ascribe to our intellect is not a power going out into external efficiency, but a mere passage across the internal field of successive thoughts as spontaneous phenomena. Nor have we, as thinking beings only, any option with respect to the thoughts thus streaming over the theatre of rational consciousness; our constitution legislates for us in this particular, and the order of suggestion is determined by laws having their seat in us. Finally, we are not, by mere thinking capacity, constituted persons, any more than a sleeper who should never wake, yet always be engaged with rational and scientific dreams, would be a person. Without some further endowment, we should only be a logical life and development. All these characters are imported into the conception of God, when he is represented as conforming to the type of reason. The activity of intellect being wholly internal, the phenomena of the Universe could not be referred to Him as a thinking being, were they not gathered up into the interior of his nature, and conceived, not as objective effects of his power, but as purely subjective successions within the theatre of his infinitude. Intellect again having no option, the God of this theory is without freedom, and is represented as the eternal necessity of reason. And lastly, in fidelity to the same analogy, He is not a divine Person, but rather a Thinking Thing, or the thinking function of the universe; we may say, universal science in a state of self-consciousness. The necessity under which Pantheism lies, of fetching all that is to be referred to God into the interior of his being, and dealing with it as not less a necessary manifestation of his mental essence than are our ideas of the mind that has them, explains the unwillingness of this system to allow any motives to God, any field of objective operation, any special relation to individuals, any revealing interposition, any supernatural agency.

Is it however true, that human belief can only choose between these two extremes, and must oscillate eternally between the Atheistic homage to Force, and the Pantheistic to Thought? Far from it; and it is curiously indicative of the state of the philosophic atmosphere in Germany, that one of her most discerning and wide-seeing authors should find no third possibility within the sphere of vision. In any latitude except one in which moral science has altogether melted away in the universal solvent of metaphysics, it would occur as one of the most obvious suggestions, that the intellect is not the only element of human nature which may be taken as type of the Divine, and as furnishing a possible solution to the problem of origination. Quitting the two poles of extreme philosophy, confessedly incompetent in their separation, we submit that Will presents the middle point which takes up into itself Thought on the one hand and Force on the other; and which yet, so far from appearing to us as a compound arising out of them as an effect, is more easily conceived than either as the originating prefix of all phenomena. It has none of the disqualifications which we have remarked as flowing from the others into their respective systems of doctrine. It carries with it, in its very idea, the co-presence of Thought, as the necessary element within whose sphere it has to manifest itself. Its phenomena cannot exist alone; it acts on preconceptions, which stand related to it, however, not as its source, but as its conditions, and are its co-ordinates in the effect rather than its generating antecedents. If therefore all things are issued by Will, there is Mind at the fountain-head, and the absurdity is avoided of deriving intelligence from unintelligence. While it thus escapes the difficulty of passing from mere Force to Thought, it is equally clear of the opposite difficulty of making mere Thought supply any Force. The activity of Will is not, like that of Intellect, a subjective transit of regimented ideas, but an objective power going out for the production of effects; nay, it is a free power, exercising preference among data furnished by internal or external conditions present in its field; and it thus constitutes proper Causality, which always implies control over an alternative. We need hardly add, that all the requisites are thus complete for the true idea of a Person; and an Infinite Being contemplated under this type is neither a fateful nor a logical principle of necessity, but a living God, out of whose purposed legislation has sprung whatever necessity there is, except the self-existent beauty of his holiness. Thus, between the Force of the physical Atheist, and the Thought of the metaphysical Pantheist, we fix upon the fulcrum of Will as the true balance-point of a moral Theism.

It would be impossible, perhaps, to find anywhere a finer instance of perspicuity in condensation, than is given in the following reference to

LESSING'S THEOLOGICAL CONCLUSIONS.

Lessing refused to surrender Christianity, on proof of error in its first teachers, uncertainty in its reported miracles, contradictions in its early literature, misapplication of Messianic prophecies. All these he regards as but the external accidents, the transitory media, of the religion, constituting, it may be, its support in one age and its weakness in another. They do not belong to its inner essence, in which alone the real evidence of spiritual truth is found; and he who detects anything amiss with them may even render a service by driving men from sham-proofs, that really persuade no one, to true ones that lie at the heart of things. Religious doctrine cannot be deduced from mere historical facts without a μεταβασις εις αλλο γενος vitiating the whole process. Facts indeed may become the proper ground of moral and spiritual faith; but then they must be facts which come over again and again, and betray an element that is permanent and eternal; which form part of the experience and consciousness of humanity; and ally themselves with the Divine by not losing their presence in the world. But unrepeated facts, which limit themselves to a moment, which are the incidents of a single personality, and are left behind quite insulated in the past, show—were it only by your not expecting them again—that they are detached from the persistent and essential life of the universe and humanity. They are but once and away; and least of all, therefore, can testify of the untransitory and ever-living. The real can teach us only so far as it has an ideal kernel, redeeming it from the character of a solitary phenomenon. Among the various expositions and applications of this favorite theme of Lessing's, we select the following sentences from his Axiomata.

1. "The Bible evidently contains more than belongs to Religion."

2. "That in this 'more' the Bible is still infallible, is mere hypothesis."

3. "The letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not the Religion."

4. "The objections therefore against the letter and against the Bible, are not on that account objections against the spirit and against the Religion."

5. "Moreover there was a religion ere there was a Bible."

6. "Christianity was in being before Evangelists and Apostles had written. Some time elapsed before the first of them wrote, and a very considerable time before the whole canon was constituted."

7. "However much, therefore, may depend on these writings, it is impossible that the whole truth of the Christian religion can rest upon them."

8. "If there was a period during which, diffused as the Christian religion already was, and many as were the souls filled already with its power, still not a letter had yet been written of the records which have come down to us; then it must be also possible for all the writings of Evangelists and Apostles to perish, yet the religion taught by them still to subsist."

9. "The religion is not true because Evangelists and Apostles taught it; but they taught it because it is true."

10. "Its interior truth must furnish the interpretation of the writings it has handed down; and no writings handed down can give it interior truth, if it has none."

In his controversy with Göze, he illustrates this distinction between the essence and the historical form of Christianity, by a parable to the following effect. A wise king of a great realm built a palace of immense size and very peculiar architecture. About this structure, there came from the very first a foolish strife to be carried on, especially among reputed connoisseurs, people, that is, who had least looked into the interior. This strife was not about the palace itself, but about various old ground-plans of it, and drawings of the same, very difficult to make out. Once, when the watchmen cried out "Fire," these connoisseurs, instead of running to help, snatched up their plans, and, instead of putting out the fire on the spot, kept standing with their plans in hand, making a hubbub all the while, and squabbling about whether this was the spot on fire, and that the place to put it out. Happily, the safety of the palace did not depend on these busy wranglers, for it was not on fire at all; the watchmen had been frightened by the Northern lights, and mistaken them for fire. It is impossible to convey by a clearer image Lessing's feeling, that a Christianity once incorporated in the very substance of history and civilization, seated deep in human sentiment and thought, and developed into literature, law, and life, subsists independently of critical questions, and is with us, not as the contingent vapor that a wind may rise to blow away, but as the cloud that has dropped its rain and mingled with the roots of things.

In immediate contrast with the foregoing application of a critical method to the historic documents of Christianity, it is beautiful to see the same genius turned with eager joy to a practical recommendation of the experimental life of Christianity.

THE REDEEMING LAW OF SYMPATHY.

It is quite true, that self-cure is of all things the most arduous; but that which is impossible to the man within us, may be altogether possible to the God. In truth, the denial of such changes, under the affectation of great knowledge of man, shows an incredible ignorance of men. Why, the history of every great religious revolution, such as the spread of Methodism, is made up of nothing else; the instances occurring in such number and variety, as to transform the character of whole districts and vast populations, and to put all scepticism at utter defiance. And if some more philosophic authority is needed for the fact, we may be content with the sanction of Lord Bacon, who observed that a man reforms his habits either altogether or not at all. Deterioration of mind is indeed always gradual; recovery usually sudden; for God, by a mystery of mercy, has established this distinction in our secret nature,—that, while we cannot, by one dark plunge, sympathize with guilt far beneath us, but gaze at it with recoil till intermediate shades have rendered the degradation tolerable, we are yet capable of sympathizing with moral excellence and beauty infinitely above us; so that, while the debased may shudder and sicken at even the true picture of themselves, they can feel the silent majesty of self-denying and disinterested duty. With a demon can no man feel complacency, though the demon be himself; but God can all spirits reverence, though his holiness be an infinite deep. And thus the soul, privately uneasy at its insincere state, is prepared, when vividly presented with some sublime object veiled before, to be pierced, as by a flash from heaven, with an instant veneration, sometimes intense enough to fuse the fetters of habit, and drop them to the earth whence they were forged. The mind is ready, like a liquid on the eve of crystallization, to yield up its state on the touch of the first sharp point, and dart, over its surface and in its depths, into brilliant and beautiful forms, and from being turbid and weak as water, to become clear as crystal, and solid as the rock.

One of the most elaborate and valuable productions from Mr. Martineau's pen, an article closely allied in all respects to the ensuing Studies of Christianity, is the one of some portions of which we herewith present an epitome.

THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF MORAL EVIL.

The Divine sentiments towards right and wrong every man naturally believes to be a reflection of whatever is most pure and solemn in his own. We cannot be sincerely persuaded, that God looks with aversion on dispositions which we revere as good and noble; or that he regards with lax indifference the selfish and criminal passions which awaken our own disgust. We may well suppose, indeed, his scrutiny more searching, his estimate more severely true, his rebuking look more awful, than our self-examination and remorse can fitly represent; but we cannot doubt that our moral emotions, as far as they go, are in sympathy with his; that we know, by our own consciousness, the general direction of his approval and displeasure; and that, in proportion as our perceptions of duty are rendered clear, our judgment more nearly approaches the precision of the Omniscient award. Our own conscience is the window of heaven through which we gaze on God; and, as its colors perpetually change, his aspect changes too;—if they are bright and fair, he dwells as in the warm light of a rejoicing love; if they are dark and turbid, he hides himself in robes of cloud and storm. When you have lost your self-respect, you have never thought yourself an object of Divine complacency. In moments fresh from sin, flushed with the shame of an insulted mind, when you have broken another resolve, or turned your back upon a noble toil, or succumbed to a mean passion, or lapsed into the sickness of self-indulgence, could you ever turn a clear and open face to God, nor think it terrible to meet his eye? Could you imagine yourself in congeniality with him, when you gave yourself up to the voluble sophistry of self-excuse, and the loose hurry of forgetfulness? Or did you not discern him rather in your own accusing heart, and meet him in the silent anguish of full confession, and find in the recognition of your alienation the first hope of return? To all unperverted minds, the verdict of conscience sounds with a preternatural voice; it is not the homely talk of their own poor judgment, but an oracle of the sanctuary. There is something of anticipation in our remorse, as well as of retrospect; and we feel that it is not the mere survey of a gloomy past with the slow lamp of our understanding, but a momentary piercing of the future with the vivid lightning of the skies. Our moral nature, left to itself, intuitively believes that guilt is an estrangement from God,—an unqualified opposition to his will,—a literal service of the enemy; that he abhors it, and will give it no rest till it is driven from his presence, that is, into annihilation; that no part of our mind belongs to him but the pure, and just, and disinterested affections which he fosters, the faithful will which he strengthens, the virtue, often damped, whose smoking flax he will not quench, and the good resolves, ever frail, whose bruised reed he will not break; and that he has no relation but of displeasure, no contact but of resistance, with our selfishness and sin. In the simple faith of the conscience it is no figure of speech to say, that God "is angry with the wicked every day," and is "of purer eyes than to behold iniquity." So long as the natural religion of the heart is undisturbed, to sin is, in the plainest and most positive sense, to set up against Heaven, and frustrate its will.

Soon, however, the understanding disturbs the tranquillity of this belief, and constructs a rival creed. The primitive conception of God is acquired, I believe, without reasoning, and emerges from the affections; it is a transcript of our own emotions,—an investiture of them with external personality and infinite magnitude. But a secondary idea of Deity arises in the intellect, from its reasonings about causation. Curiosity is felt respecting the origin of things; and the order, beauty, and mechanism of external nature are too conspicuous not to force upon the observation the conviction of a great Architect of the universe, from whose designing reason its forces and its laws mysteriously sprung. Hence the intellectual conception of God the Creator, which comes into inevitable collision with the moral notion of God the holy watch of virtue. For if the system of creation is the production of his Omniscience; if he has constituted human nature as it is, and placed it in the scene whereon it acts; if the arrangements by which happiness is allotted, and character is formed, are the contrivance of his thought and the work of his hand,—then the sufferings and the guilt of every being were objects of his original contemplation, and the productions of his own design. The deed of crime must, in this case, be as much an integral part of his Providence, as the efforts and sacrifices of virtue; and the monsters of licentiousness and tyranny, whose images deform the scenery of history, are no less truly his appointed instruments, than the martyr and the sage. And though we remain convinced that he does not make choice of evil in his government for its own sake, but only for ultimate ends worthy of his perfections, still we can no longer see how he can truly hate that which he employs for the production of good. That which is his chosen instrument cannot be sincerely regarded as his everlasting enemy; and only figuratively can he be said to repudiate a power which he continually wields. There must be some sense in which it appears, in the eye of Omniscience, to be eligible; some point of view at which its horrors vanish; and where the moral distinctions, which we feel ourselves impelled to venerate, disappear from the regards of God.

Here, then, is a fearful contradiction between the religion of conscience and the religion of the understanding; the one pronouncing evil to be the antagonist, the other to be the agent, of the Divine will. In every age has this difficulty laid a heavy weight upon the human heart; in every age has it pointed the sarcasm of the blasphemer, mingled an occasional sadness with the hopes of benevolence, and tinged the devotion of the thoughtful with a somewhat melancholy trust. The whole history of speculative religion is one prolonged effort of the human mind to destroy this contrariety; system after system has been born in the struggle to cast the oppression off,—with what result, it will be my object at present to explain. The question which we have to consider is this, "How should a Christian think of the origin and existence of evil?" I propose to advert, first, to the speculative; secondly, to the scriptural; thirdly, to the moral relations of the subject; to inquire what relief we can obtain from philosophical schemes, from biblical doctrine, and from practical Christianity.

Let us then, for final decision, consult the practical spirit of Christianity, and ascertain to what view of the origin of sin it awards the preference. Is it well for the consciences and characters of men, to consider God—either directly or through his dependant, Satan, either by his general laws or by vitiating the constitution of our first parents—as the primary source of moral evil? or, on the contrary, to regard it as in no sense whatever willed by the Supreme Mind, and absolutely inimical to his Providence? Are we most in harmony with the characteristic spirit of the Gospel when we call sin his instrument, or when we call it his enemy? For myself, I can never sit at the feet of Jesus, and yield up a reverential heart to his great lessons, without casting myself on the persuasion, that God and evil are everlasting foes; that never, and for no end, did he create it; that his will is utterly against it, nor ever touches it, but with annihilating force. Any other view appears to be injurious to the characteristic sentiments, and at variance with the distinguishing genius, of Christian morality.

(1.) Christianity is distinguished by the profound sentiment of individual responsibility which pervades it. All the arbitrary forms, and sacerdotal interpositions, and hereditary rights, through which other systems seek the Divine favor, are disowned by it. It is a religion eminently personal; establishing the most intimate and solitary dealings between God and every human soul. It is a religion eminently natural; eradicating no indigenous affection of our mind, distorting no primitive moral sentiment; but simply consecrating the obligations proper to our nature, and taking up with a divine voice the whispers, scarce articulate before, of the conscience within us. In this deep harmony with our inmost consciousness of duty resides the true power of our religion. It subdues and governs our hearts, as a wise conqueror rules the empire he has won; not by imposing a system of strange laws, but by arming with higher authority, and administering with more resolute precision, the laws already recognized and revered.

To trifle in any way with this plain and solemn principle, to invent forms of speech tending to conceal it, to apply to moral good and ill language which assimilates them to physical objects and exchangeable property, implies frivolous and irreverent ideas of sin and excellence. The whole weight of this charge evidently falls on the scheme which speaks of human guilt as an hereditary entail; a scheme which shocks and confounds our primary notion of right and wrong, and, by rendering them impersonal qualities, reduces them to empty names. No construction can be given to the system, which does not pass this insult on the conscience. In what sense do we share the guilt of our progenitor? His concession to temptation did not occur within our mind, or belong in any way to our history. And if, without participation in the act of wrong, we are to have its penalties, crimes in the planet Saturn may be expected to shower curses on the earth; for why may not justice go astray in space, as reasonably as in time? If nothing more be meant, than that from our first parents we inherit a constitution liable to intellectual error and moral transgression,—still it is evident that, until this liability takes actual effect, no sin exists, but only its possibility; and when it takes effect, there is just so much guilt, and no more, than might be committed by the individual's will: so that where there is no volition, as in infancy, cruelty only could inflict punishment; and where there is pure volition, as in many a good passage of the foulest life, equity itself could not withhold approval.

(2.) I submit as a second distinguishing feature of practical Christianity, that it makes no great, certainly no exclusive, appeal to the prudential feelings, as instruments of duty; treats them as morally incapable of so sacred a work; and relies, chiefly and characteristically, on affections of the heart, which no motives of reward and punishment can have the smallest tendency to excite.

The Gospel, indeed, like all things divine, is unsystematic and unbound by technical distinctions, and makes no metaphysical separation between the will and the affections. It is too profoundly adapted to our nature, not to address itself copiously to both. The doctrine of retribution, being a solemn truth, appears with all its native force in the teachings of Christ, and arms many of his appeals with a persuasion just and terrible. But never was there a religion (containing these motives at all) so frugal in the use of them; so able, on fit occasions, to dispense with them; so rich in those inimitable touches of moral beauty, and tones that penetrate the conscience, and generous trust in the better sympathies, which distinguish a morality of the affections. In Christ himself, where is there a trace of the obedience of pious self-interest, computing its everlasting gains, and making out a case for compensation, by submitting to infinite wisdom? In his character, which is the impersonation of his religion, we surely have a perfect image of spontaneous goodness, unhaunted by the idea of personal enjoyment, and, like that of God, unbidden but by the intuitions of conscience and the impulses of love. And what teacher less divine ever made such high and bold demands on our disinterestedness? To lend out our virtue upon interest, to "love them only who love us," he pronounced to be the sinners' morality; nor was the feeling of duty ever reached, but by those who could "do good, hoping for nothing again," except that greatest of rewards to a true and faithful heart, to be "the children of the Highest," who "is kind unto the unthankful and the evil." In the view of Jesus, all dealings between God and men were not of bargain, but of affection. We must surrender ourselves to him without terms; must be ashamed to doubt him who feeds the birds of the air, and, like the lily of the field, look up to him with a bright and loving eye; and he, for our much love, will pity and forgive us. In his own ministry, how much less did our Lord rely for disciples on the cogency of mere proof, and the inducements of hope and fear, than on the power of moral sympathy, by which every one that was of God naturally loved him and heard his words; by which the good shepherd knew his sheep, and they listened to his voice, and followed him; and without which no man could come unto him, for no spirit of the Father drew him. No condition of discipleship did Christ impose, save that of "faith in him"; absolute trust in the spirit of his mind; a desire of self-abandonment to a love and fidelity like his, without tampering with expediency, or hesitancy in peril, or shrinking from death.

There is, then, a wide variance between the genius of Christianity, and that philosophy which teaches that all men must be bought over to the side of goodness and of God, by a price suited to their particular form of selfishness and appetite for pleasure. Our religion is remarkable for the large confidence it reposes on the disinterested affections, and the vast proportion of the work of life it consigns to them. And in thus seeking to subordinate and tranquillize the prudential feelings, Christ manifested how well he knew what was in man. He recognized the truth, which all experience declares, that in these emotions is nothing great, nothing lovable, nothing powerful; that their energy is perpetually found incapable of withstanding the impetuosity of passion; and that all transcendent virtues, all that brings us to tremble or to kneel, all the enterprises and conflicts which dignify history, and have stamped any new feature on human life, have had their origin in the disinterested region of the mind,—in affections unconsciously entranced by some object sanctifying and divine. He knew, for it was his special mission to make all men feel, that it is the office of true religion to cleanse the sanctuary of the secret affections, and effect a regeneration of the heart. And this is a task which no direct nisus of the will can possibly accomplish, and to which, therefore, all offers of reward and punishment, operating only on the will, are quite inapplicable. The single function of volition is to act; over the executive part of our nature it is supreme, over the emotional it is powerless; and all the wrestlings of desire for self-cure and self-elevation, are like the struggles of a child to lift himself. He who is anxious to be a philanthropist, is admiring benevolence, instead of loving men; and whoever is laboring to warm his devotions, yearns after piety, not after God. The mind can by no spasmodic bound seize on a new height of emotion, or change the light in which objects appear before its view. Persuade the judgment, bribe the self-interests, terrify the expectations, as you will, you can neither dislodge a favorite, nor enthrone a stranger, in the heart. Show me a child that flings an affectionate arm around a parent, and lights up his eyes beneath her face, and I know that there have been no lectures there upon filial love; but that the mother, being lovable, has of necessity been loved; for to genial minds it is as impossible to withhold a pure affection, when its object is presented, as for the flower to sulk within the mould, and clasp itself tight within the bud, when the gentle force of spring invites its petals to curl out into the warm light. As you reverence all good affections of our nature, and desire to awaken them, never call them duties, though they be so; for so doing, you address yourself to the will; and by hard trying no attachment ever entered the heart. Never preach on their great desirableness and propriety; for so doing, you ask audience of the judgment; and by way of the understanding no glow of noble passion ever came. Never, above all, reckon up their balance of good and ill; for so doing, you exhort self-interest; and by that soiled way no true love will consent to pass. Nay, never talk of them, nor even gaze curiously at them; for if they be of any worth and delicacy, they will be instantly looked out of countenance and fly. Nothing worthy of human veneration will condescend to be embraced, but for its own sake: grasp it for its excellent results,—make but the faintest offer to use it as a tool, and it slips away at the very conception of such insult. The functions of a healthy body go on, not by knowledge of physiology, but by the instinctive vigor of nature; and you will no more brace the spiritual faculties to noble energy and true life by study of the uses of every feeling, than you can train an athlete for the race by lectures on every muscle of every limb. The mind is not voluntarily active in the acquisition of any great idea, any new inspiration of faith; but passive, fixed on the object which has dawned upon it, and filled it with fresh light.

If this be true, and if it be the object of practical Christianity, not only to direct our hands aright, but to inspire our hearts, then can its ends never be achieved by the mere force of reward and punishment; then no system can prove its sufficiency by showing that it retains the doctrine of retribution, and must even be held convicted of moral incompetency, if it trusts the conscience mainly to the prudential feelings, without due provision for enlisting the co-operation of many a disinterested affection.

We cannot refrain from affording those into whose hands this volume will go, the pleasure and the lofty encouragement which they must derive from the perusal of an extract on

THE TRANSMISSION OF SUPERIOR THOUGHTS.

It is a law of Providence in communities, that ideas shall be propagated downwards through the several gradations of minds. They have their origin in the suggestions of genius, and the meditations of philosophy; they are assimilated by those who can admire what is great and true, but cannot originate; and thence they are slowly infused into the popular mind. The rapidity of the process may vary in different times, with the facilities for the transmission of thought, but its order is constant. Temporary causes may shield the inferior ranks of intelligence from the influence of the superior; fanaticism may interpose for a while with success; a want of the true spirit of sympathy between the instructors and the instructed may check by a moral repulsion the natural radiation of intellect;—but, in the end, Providence will re-assert its rule; and the conceptions born in the quiet heights of contemplation will precipitate themselves on the busy multitudes below. This principle interprets history and presages futurity. It shows us in the popular feeling and traditions of one age, a reflection from the philosophy of a preceding; and from the prevailing style of sentiment and speculation among the cultivated classes now, it enables us to foresee the spirit of a coming age. Nor only to foresee it, but to exercise over it a power, in the use of which there is a grave responsibility. If we are far-sighted in our views of improvement; if we are ambitious less of immediate and superficial effects than of the final and deep-seated agency of generous and holy principles; if our love of opinions is a genuine expression of the disinterested love of truth;—we shall remember who are the teachers of futurity; we shall appeal to those, within whose closets God is already computing the destinies of remote generations,—men at once erudite and free, men who have the materials of knowledge with which to determine the great problems of morals and religion, and the genius to think and imagine and feel, without let or hinderance of hope or fear.

We linger over the pages from which the preceding selections have been made, unwilling to end our grateful task of love. But one quotation more must be the last. With it we commend these Studies of Christianity, these timely thoughts for religious thinkers, to the candid and affectionate inquirers within all sects, confident that, so far as the work obtains a fit reception, it will exert that purifying, liberalizing, and sanctifying power which is the genuine influence of Christ.

CHRISTIANITY AND SECTARIAN THEOLOGY.

The sectarian state of theology in this country cannot but be regarded as eminently unnatural. Its cold and hard ministrations are entirely alien to the wants of the popular mind, which, except under the discipline of artificial influences, is always most awake to generous impressions. Its malignant exclusiveness is a perversion of the natural veneration of the human heart, which, except where it is interfered with by narrow and selfish systems, pours itself out, not in hatred towards anything that lives, but in love to the invisible objects of trust and hope. Its disputatious trifling is an insult to the sanctity of conscience, which, except where it is betrayed into oblivion of its delicate and holy office, supplicates of religion, not a new ferocity of dogmatism, but an enlargement and refinement of its sense of right. It is the temper of sectarianism to seize on every deformity of every creed, and exhibit this caricature to the world's gaze and aversion. It is the spirit of the soul's natural piety to alight on whatever is beautiful and touching in every faith, and take there its secret draught of pure and fresh emotion. It is the passages of poetry and pathos in a system, which alone can lay a strong hold on the general mind and give them permanence; and even the wild fictions which have endeared Romanism to the hearts of so many centuries, possess their elements of tenderness and magnificence. The fundamental principle of one who would administer religion to the minds of his fellow-men should be, that all that has ever been extensively venerated must possess ingredients that are venerable. If, in the spirit of sectarianism, he sees nothing in it but absurdity, it only proves that he does not see it all; it must have an aspect, which he has not yet caught, that awes the imagination, or touches the affections, or moves the conscience; and those who receive it neither will nor should abandon it, till something is substituted, not only more consonant with the reason, but more awakening to these higher faculties of soul. Hence, a rigid accuracy and logical penetration of mind, the power of detecting and exposing error, are not the only qualities needed by the religious reformer; and in a deep and reverential sympathy with human feelings, a quick perception of the great and beautiful, a promptitude to cast himself into the minds of others, and gaze through their eyes at the objects which they love, he will find the instrument of the sublimest intellectual power. The precise logician may sit eternally in the centre of his own circle of correct ideas, and preach demonstrably the folly of the world's superstitions; yet he will never affect the thoughts of any but marble-minded beings like himself. He disregards the fine tissue of emotions that clings round the objects which he so harshly handles; and has yet to learn the art of preserving its fabric unimpaired, while he enfolds within it something more worthy for it to foster and adore.

As, then, it is to the moral and imaginative powers of the human mind that religion chiefly attaches itself, as it is by these that the want of it is most strongly felt, so is it to these that its ministrations should be, for the most part, addressed. While theologians are discussing the evidences of creeds, let teachers be conducting them to their applications. Let their respective resources of feeling and conception be unfolded before the soul of mankind; let it be tried what mental energy they can inspire, what purity of moral perception infuse, what dignity of principle erect, what toils of philanthropy sustain. Thus would arise a new criterion of judgment between differing systems; for that system must possess most truth which creates the most intelligence and virtue. Thus would the deeper devotional wants of society be no longer mocked by the privilege of choice among a few captious, verbal, and precise forms of belief. Thus, too, would the alienation which repels sect from sect give place to an incipient and growing sympathy; for when high intellect and excellence approach and stand in meek homage beneath the cross, how soon are the jarring voices of disputants hushed in the stillness of reverence! Who does not feel the refreshment, when some stream of pure poetry, like Heber's, winds into the desert of theology! when some flash of genius, like that of Chalmers, darts through its dull atmosphere! some strains of eloquence, like those of Channing, float from a distance on its heavy silence!

Such, then, are the objects which should be contemplated by those who, in the present times, aim at the reformation of religious sentiment;—first, the elevation of theology as an intellectual pursuit; secondly, the better application of religion as a moral influence. Both these objects are directly or indirectly promoted by the Association whose cause I am privileged to advocate. It aids the first, by the distribution of many a work, the production of such minds as must redeem theology from contempt. It advances the second, by establishing union and sympathy among those whose first principles are in direct contradiction to all that is sectarian, and who desire only to emancipate the understanding from all that enfeebles, and the heart from all that narrows it. The triumph of its doctrines would be, not the ascendency of one sect, but the harmony of all. Let but the diversities which separate Christians retire, and the truths which they all profess to love advance to prominence, and, whatever may become of party names, our aims are fulfilled, and our satisfaction is complete. When faith in the paternity of God shall have kindled an affectionate and lofty devotion; when the vision of immortality, imparted by Christ's resurrection, shall have created that spirit of duty which was the holiest inspiration of his life; when the sincere recognition of human brotherhood shall have supplanted all exclusive institutions, and banded society together under the vow of mutual aid and the hope of everlasting progress, our work will be done, our reward before us, and our little community of reformers lost in the wide fraternity of enlightened and benevolent men.

The day is yet distant, and can be won only by the toil of earnest and faithful minds. In the mean while, it is no light solace to see that the tendencies of Providence are towards its accelerated approach. And however dispiriting may sometimes be the variety and conflicts of human sentiment,—however remote the dissonance of controversy from that harmony of will which would seem essential to perfected society, it is through this very process that the great ends of improvement are to be attained. Hereafter it will be seen, much more clearly than we can see it now, that opinion generates knowledge. Like the ethereal waves, whose inconceivable rapidity and number are said to impart the sensation of vision, the undulations of opinion are speeding on to produce the perception of truth. They are the infinitely complex and delicate movements of that universal Human Mind, whose quiescence is darkness,—whose agitation, light.

To the fit and numerous readers whom we trust they will find, these papers are now submitted, in the earnest hope that the author will at no distant day follow them with some more systematic and rounded survey of the same great subject,—the components and developments of Christianity.

W. R. A.

[STUDIES OF CHRISTIANITY.]

[DISTINCTIVE TYPES OF CHRISTIANITY.]

If unity be the character of truth, no generation was ever so far gone in errors as our own: nor is the weariness surprising, with which statesmen and philosophers turn away from the Babel of Divinity, and, in despair of scaling the heavens, apply themselves to found and adorn the politics of this world. But the confusion of tongues is too positive and obtrusive a fact to be escaped by mere retreat: it bids defiance to polite evasion: it pursues life into every public place and private haunt; invades the home, the school, the college, the court, the legislature; and, besides the problems which it fails to solve, constitutes in itself a new one, not undeserving the closest study and reflection. To the believers in doctrinal finality, who imagine the whole sacred economy to be settled by a documentary revelation, the reopening of every question, down to the very basis of religious faith, must be an appalling phenomenon, charging either failure on the presumed designs of God or a traitorous perversity on even the most gifted and upright of men. And not a whit better is the conclusion of a conceited illuminism, which, either boldly recalling the human mind to the sciences of induction, despises all faith as false alike; or, conscious at least of its own incompetency, pleases itself with a more indulgent scepticism, and accepts them all as true. If no better revenge can be taken on pious dogmatism than by falling into the cant of an eclectic neutrality or an impious despair, there is little encouragement for any high-minded man to take part against the bigotries of the present on behalf of sickly negations in the future. The world is better left in the hands of the poorest interpreter of Paul, and most degenerate heirs of Augustine and Pascal, than transferred to the dialectic of Proclus or the materialism of the living "Fondateur de la Religion de l'Humanité."[1] There are those, however, who deny that we are left to any such alternative; who cannot conceive that human aspirations after divine reality shall for ever pine and sigh in vain; who contend that objective truth in reference to morals and religion is attainable, and has been largely attained;—and who, accordingly, despairing of neither philosophy nor Christianity, require only the free intercommunion of the two to appreciate the contradictions of the present without foregoing the hope of greater unity in the future. The controversies of the hour are but ill understood by one who remains enclosed within them, and judges them only on their own assumptions. Like a village brawl, which, with only the sound of vulgar noise, may be the ripe fruit of oppression and the germ of revolution, they have an assigned place in the unfolding of modern civilization; and not till their place is computed in the life of the human race, and the law which brings them up in our age is observed, can their real significance be apprehended, and all anger at their clamorous littleness be lost in hope of their ulterior issues. Regarded from this higher point, the surface of religious belief in England, at first sight a mere troubled fermentation of struggling elements, betrays some organic principle of order, and many salient points of promise.

We hazard no theory of religion in saying that there is a natural correspondence between the genius of a people and the form of their belief. Each mood of mind brings its own wants and aspirations, colors its own ideal, and interprets best that part of life and the universe with which it is in sympathy. John Knox would have been misplaced in Athens, and Tanler could not have lived on the moralism of Kant. No doubt the ultimate seat of human faith lies deep down below the special propensities of individuals or tribes,—in a consciousness and faculty common to the race. But ere it comes to the surface, and disengages itself in a concrete shape, its type and color will be affected by the strata of thought and feeling through which it emerges into the light. Without pretending to an exhaustive classification, we find four chief temperaments of mind expressed in the theologies and scepticisms of civilized Europe: the quest of physical order, the sense of right, the instinct of beauty, and the consciousness of tempestuous impulses carrying the will off its feet. Variously blended in the characters of average persons, these tendencies are liable to separate their intensities, and severally dominate almost alone in minds of great force and periods of special action or reaction. Were each left to itself to form its own unaided creed, the doctrine of mere Science would be atheistic; of Conscience, theistic; of Art, pantheistic; of Passion, sacrificial. The evidence of this distribution of tendencies is equally conclusive, whether we look to its rational ground or to its historical exemplification; and a few words on each head will suffice to clear and justify it.

Notwithstanding some occasional attempts to exhibit natural theology as a necessary extension of natural philosophy, it is plain that the maxims, which are ultimate for physical Science, stop short of contact with Religion; that the final appeal of the two is carried to different faculties; and that the scope and sphere of the one may be complete without borrowing any conception from the other. The assumption, for instance, that "we can know nothing but phenomena," directly excludes all permanent and eternal Being as the possible object of rational thought. And as "phenomena" are apprehensible only by the observing faculties, whatever refuses to put in an appearance in their court is nonsuited as an unreality. And again, physical knowledge has accomplished its aim, as soon as it can predict all the successions that lie within its field of time and space; and nowhere in this system of series, nor in the calculated forces which yield it to the view, does any divine Person look in upon the mind. Whoever, by the restraints of a hypothetical necessity, detains his intellect within nature, debars himself ipso facto from any faith that transcends nature, and recognizes no reserve of supernatural possibilities, hidden in a Mind of which the actual universe is but the finite expression. We do not, of course, intend to affirm that scientific culture cannot coexist with religious belief;—so preposterous an assertion would be confuted by a manifold experience;—but only that, where the canons of inductive knowledge are invested with unconditional universality, and are logically carried out as valid for all thought, they shut the door upon the sources of faith. It is the old battle, of which history supplies such abundant illustration; which brought Parmenides and Protagoras upon the lists at opposite ends on the field of philosophy; which Bacon profoundly avoided by assigning separate empires, without common boundary, to science and religion; but which his modern disciples have rashly renewed, by invading the realm left sacred by him. Uneasy relations have always subsisted in Christendom between the investigators of nature and the trustees of the faith: the men of science rarely quitting, unless for signs of unequivocal aversion, the attitude of polite indifference to the Church; and in their turn watched with the jealous eye of sacerdotal vigilance. It is no untrue instinct that has hitherto maintained them in this posture of mutual suspicion: to exchange which for a hearty and intelligent reverence for each other is an achievement reserved for a higher philosophy than we yet possess.

As Science pays homage to the force of nature, so Conscience enthrones the law of right. The conscious subject of moral obligation feels himself under a rule neither self-imposed and fictitious, nor foreign and coercive;—neither a home invention nor an outward necessity;—a rule invisible, authoritative, awful; carrying with it an alternative irreducible to the linear dynamics of the physical world; incapable of being felt but by a free mind, or of being given but by another. He is aware that his will follows a call of duty not at all as his body adapts itself to the force of gravitation; and as within him the conscientious obedience wholly differs from the corporeal, so in the universe of realities beyond him does the moral legislation differ from the natural, and express the will of a person, not a mere constitution of things. No ethical conceptions are possible at all,—except as floating shreds of unattached thought,—without a religious background; and the sense of responsibility, the agony of shame, the inner reverence for justice, first find their meaning and vindication in a supreme holiness that rules the world. Nor can any one be penetrated with the distinction between right and wrong, without recognizing it as valid for all free beings, and incapable of local or arbitrary change. His feeling insists on its permanent recognition and omnipresent sway; and this unity in the Moral Law carries him to the unity of the Divine Legislator. Theism is thus the indispensable postulate of conscience,—its objective counterpart and justification, without which its inspirations would be illusions, and its veracities themselves a lie. To adduce historical proofs of this conjunction is at once difficult and superfluous in a world whose theism is almost all of one stock. But it will not be forgotten that Socrates, in whom Greek religion culminated, avowedly based his reform on the substitution of moral for physical studies. It is undeniable too that, in spite of their fatalism, the monotheistic Mohammedans have been surpassed by few nations in their sense of truth and fidelity; and that wherever the same type of belief has been approached by Christian sects, the heresy has been said to arise from an exaggerated estimate of the moral law.

Art, we have said, is pantheistic. Its aim, often unconsciously present, is to read off the expressiveness of things, and find what it is which they would speak with their silent look. To its perceptions, form, color, sound, motion, have a soul within them whose life and activity they represent: and even language, by flinging itself into the mould of rhythm and music, acquires, beyond its logical significance, a second meaning for the affections. As if waked up and tingling beneath the artist's loving gaze, matter lies dull and dead no more; opens on him a responding eye; communes with him from its steadfast brow; and becomes instinct with grace or majesty. Instead of being the drag-weight and opposite of spiritual energies, it becomes to him their pliant medium, the docile clay for the shapes of finest thought, the brilliant palette for the spread of inmost feeling. He melts the barrier away that hides from mere sense and intellect the interior sentiment—the formative idea—of all visible things; and his glance of sympathy changes them not less than a burst of amber sunrise changes a leaden landscape and picks out the freshest smiles. Thus he finds himself in a living universe, ever striving to show him a divine beauty that lurks within and presses to the surface; and he stands before a curtain only half opaque, watching the lights and shadows thrown on it from behind by the ceaseless play of infinite thought. Not that the interpretation is by any means self-evident, or accessible except to the apprehensive instinct of sympathy. For it seems as though no form of being, no object in creation, could ever represent completely its own type: something is lost from its perfection in the realization; and the actual, falling short of the ideal, can give it only to one for whom a hint suffices. This conception of the world as an incarnate divineness does not, we are well aware, amount to pantheism, unless it become all-comprehensive, so as to take in not simply physical nature, but the human life and will; and there are numbers who are saved from this extreme, either by knowing where to draw the lines of philosophical distinction, or by the natural force of moral conviction restraining the absolutism of imagination. But so far forth as the tendency operates, it substitutes for the theistic reverence for a Holy Will the pantheistic recognition of a Creative Beauty, and presents God to the mind less as the prototype of Conscience than as the apotheosis of Genius. The spontaneity of poetic action is supposed to illustrate His procedure better than the preferential decisions of the moral sentiment; and the genesis of whatever is good and fair is referred not so much to deliberate plan as to the eternal interfusion and circulation, through the great whole, of a Divine Essence, which flings off the universe and its history as a mere natural language. That this is the religion of art, is proved by the literature of every creative period, Greek, Italian, or Teutonic; and negatively by the comparative absence of artistic feeling and production in ages and nations that have most intensified at once the Unity and the Personality of God. Beauty was the Bible of Athens; and Plato, its devoutest and most comprehensive expounder, shows everywhere, in his metaphysics, his morals, and his myths, the mould into which its faith inevitably falls.

In passionate and impulsive natures there is a self-contradiction which makes their religious tendency peculiarly difficult to describe. They are not less conscious than others of moral distinctions, and own the sacred authority of the better invitation over the worse. Indeed, when surprised into a fall, their remorse shares the vehemence of all their emotions, and from the black shadow in which they sit, the sanctity of the law which they have violated looks ineffably bright; and they speak of its holy requirements, and of the infinite purity of the Divine Legislator, in such fervid tone, that whatever else they may endanger, the perfection of God's character, you feel assured, and the obligations of human morality, are secure of reverential maintenance. Yet the truth is precisely the reverse. At the very moment that the law of duty is thus loftily extolled, it is on the point of total subversion; lifted to a height precarious and unreal, it overbalances on the other side and disappears. For the very same stormy intensity which makes these men strong to feel the claim of good, makes them weak to obey it. Their personality wants solidity; and an atmosphere of tempestuous affections sweeps over it like a hurricane on water. They can do nothing from out of their own resolves, and are for ever drawn or driven from the fortress they were not to surrender. What remains for them, solicited thus by forces which are an overmatch for their just self-reliance? Is it surprising that they no sooner confess how they ought to obey, than they declare that they cannot obey? The thing is a contradiction; but it all the better for this expresses what they are: with their centre of gravity in the wrong place, they cannot but hold the truth in unstable equilibrium. Repose on contradiction is, however, impossible; and the necessary result of these co-existent feelings of obligation and incapacity is a substitute for obedience. The resort to sacrifice which thus arose expressed no more, prior to the Christian era, than the sentiment, "Take this, O Lord, 't is all I have to give"; and afforded but a fictitious relief to the laboring spirit. It acknowledged and attested the incompetency of the will, but made no use of the excess of the emotions. It was the Pauline doctrine of faith which first turned this great power to account; and virtually said, "Are you in slavery because you cannot manage your affections? turn their trust and enthusiasm on Christ in heaven, and let them manage you, and you shall be free." The soul that falls in love with immortal goodness rises above the region of ineffectual strife, and spontaneously offers what could never be extorted from the will by the lash of self-mortifying resolve. This is the truth which underlies the sacrificial doctrine in Christian times,—the emancipating power of great trusts and high inspirations; and its very nature indicates its birth from impassioned temperaments, and its affinity with their special wants. The vicarious sacrifice is a mere plea, an ideal point of attraction, for a profound allegiance of heart; which minds of this class would hardly yield without an intense appeal to their gratitude; but which, if really awakened by a clear and tranquil moral reverence, would no less triumph over the gravitation of self. The one needful condition for the redemption of these natures is the objective presence and action upon them of a divine person to lift them clear out of themselves, and render back on the healing breath of trust the strength that only pants itself away in feverish effort. Every doctrine of sacrifice necessarily contradicts its own premises; because for guilt, which is personal and inalienable, it offers a compensation which is foreign, and meets a moral ill with an unmoral remedy. True and sound as a mere confession of weakness, it runs off from that point into mere confusion and morbidness. But add to it the doctrine of faith, and it acquires its proper complement; balances its human disclaimer with a divine resource; and instead of sending its captive through dark labyrinths of vain experiment, opens a direct way from the chambers of humiliation to the prophet's watch-tower of prayer and vision. Without this complement, the doctrine created priesthoods; with it, destroys them. Without it, men are caught up in their moments of helplessness, and handed over to ritual quackeries; with it, they are seized in their hour of inspiration, and flung into the arms of God. The susceptibility for either treatment depends on the predominance of impulse and passion over breadth of imagination and strength of will. In short, there are minds whose power is shed, if we may say so, in protension, precipitated forwards in narrow channels with impetuous torrent. There are others whose affluence is in extension, and spreads out like a still lake to drink in light from the open sky, and reflect the look of wide-encircling hills. And there are others yet again, whose character is intension, and that move on in full volume, and with steady stream of tendency, rising and falling little with the seasons, and holding to the limits within which they are to go. The faith of the first is sacrificial; of the second, pantheistic; of the third, theistic.

Of the four cardinal tendencies we have named, the scientific has never been provided for within the interior of Christianity; whose organic life and structure are complete without it. It remains, therefore, sullenly on the outside, without renouncing at present its atheistic propensions: and the part it has played, however important, has been that of external check and antagonism, in the assertion of neglected rights of knowledge, and slighted interests of mankind. This cannot possibly continue for ever; nor is it at all consistent with experience to suppose, that either of the opponent influences will obtain a victory over the other. Their reconcilement, through the mediation and within the compass of some third and more comprehensive conception, is a task remaining for the philosophy and charity of the future. We feel no doubt that it will be accomplished; and will spare us that revolutionary extermination of theology and metaphysics which is proclaimed, on behalf of positive science, by the self-appointed Committee of the "République Occidentale." The other three tendencies early worked their way into the Christian religion, and vindicated a place within its organism. Indeed, the historical genesis of the Catholic Church consists of little else, on the inner side of dogma and ethics, than the successive and successful self-assertion of each of these principles; and, on the outer side of ecclesiastical polity, than the construction of a social framework which held them in co-existence till the sixteenth century. The genius of three distinct peoples conspired to fill up the measure of the early faith; and each brought with it a separate constituent. The Hebrew believer contributed his theistic conscience; the Hellenic, his pantheistic speculation; the Romanic, his passionate appropriation of redemption by faith. The elements were, from the first, mixed and struggling together; so that the phenomena of no period, probably of no place, serve to show them disengaged from one another and insulated. But the Ebionitish period, with its rigorous monachism, its historical and human Christ, its scrupulous asceticism, its sternness against wealth, represents the ethical principle in its excess. The Logos idea, and indeed the whole development of the Trinitarian doctrine, exhibits the effort of the Greek thought to obtain recognition, and qualify the Judaic. And the Augustinian theology, pleading the wants of fervid natures, on whose surface the web of moral doctrines alights only to be shrivelled and disappear, completes the triad of agencies from whose confluence the faith of Christendom arose. In the Catholic system the three ingredients unite in one composite result; and hence the tenacity with which that system keeps possession of the most various types of human character, and, baffled by the spirit of one age, returns with the reaction of another. The ethical feeling finds satisfaction in its theory of human nature; the pantheistic, in its scheme of supernatural grace; the sacrificial, in its conditions of redemption. Through the realism of the mediæval schools, its eucharistic doctrine, which is only the theological side of that philosophical conception, becomes a direct transfusion of Hellenic influence into the Church. And its faith in perpetual inspiration, in the unbroken chain of physical miracle, in the ceaseless mingling of sacramental mystery with the very substance of this world, so far softens and diffuses the concentrated personality of the Divine Essence, as to indulge the free fancy of art. Nor can we deny the same capacity of beauty to its hierarchy of holy natures,—from the village saint, through the heavenly angels, to the Son of God,—all blended in living sympathies that cross and recross the barriers of worlds. This comprehensive adaptation to the exigencies of mankind is a reasonable object of admiration. But nothing can be more absurd than the appeal to it in proof either of preternatural guidance, or of human artifice, in the constitutive process of the Roman Church. There is nothing very surprising in the fact, that a system which is the product of three factors should contain them all. No doubt if these factors are, as we contend, primary and indestructible features of our unperverted nature, no religion can be divine and completely true which refuses to take any of them up; and this one condition of the future faith we may learn from the Christendom of the past. The condition, however, must be satisfied otherwise than by the strange congeries of profound truths and puerile fancies which is dignified by the name of "Catholic doctrine."

For, be it observed, this system has no intrinsic and necessary unity, which would hold it together when abandoned to the free action of the mind, whose requirements it is said to meet. It has something for conscience, something for art, something for passion, each in its turn; but it is not a whole that can satisfy all together. Its contents, gathered by successive experiences, cohere through the external grasp of a sacerdotal corporation; and if that hand be paralyzed or relaxed, it becomes evident at once how little they have grown together. Hence the phenomena of the sixteenth century, whose revolt was the expression, not of theological dissent, but of ecclesiastical disgust; and in which doctrine only accidentally fell to pieces, because the authority that guarded and wielded it became too rotten to be believed in. The secondary revolution, however, was incomparably more momentous than the primary. The treasured seeds that dropped from the shattered casket of the Church had to germinate again in the fresh soil of the richer European mind; and the great year of their development is still upon its round. The outward dictation of the Apostolic See being discarded, it became necessary to find another clew to divine truth; and the inner wants of the human soul and the passing age came into play, with no restraint within the ample scope of Scripture. A reconstitution of Christianity began,—on the basis, no doubt, of materials already accumulated,—more eclectic, therefore, and less creative, than in the infancy of the religion; but proceeding, nevertheless, by the same law, and commencing a similar cycle. The order of development in this second life of Christendom has not been the same as in the first; but the stages, though transposed, do not differ taken one by one. It is only this,—that whilst in the formation of the faith the dominant influences were Conscience, Art, and Passion, in its Re-formation they are Passion, Conscience, Art. At the moment when Luther shattered the fabric of pretended unity, and compelled the husk to shed its kernels, the season and the field were unfavorable to two out of the three, and they lay dormant till more genial times. The moral element had been discredited by the casuistry of the confessional, the "treasure of the Church," and the trade in meritorious works; and, decked in these vile trappings, was flung away in generous disgust. The æsthetic element had become so paganized in Italy, and was so identified with the reproduction of the very tastes and vices, the thought and style, nay, even the mythology itself, which the primitive religion had expelled as the work of demons, that the new piety shrank from it, and let it alone. In an age when episcopates were won by an ear for hexameters or a Ciceronian Latinity, when priests defended materialism in Tusculan disputations, when popes frequented the comic theatre and Plautus was acted in the Vatican, when the proceeds of a purgatorial traffic were spent in destroying ancient basilicas and raising heathenish temples over the sepulchres of saints, it was inevitable that beauty should become suspected by sanctity. There remained, yet unspoiled by the adoption of a corrupt generation, the impetuous devotion and tremendous theory of Augustine; and this, accordingly, was the direction in which the whole early Reformation advanced. It was not the accident that Luther was an Augustinian monk, which determined the character of his movement. The sickened soul of Europe could breathe no other air. Emaciated with the mockery of spiritual aliment, revolting at the chopped straw and apples of Sodom that had been given for fruit from the tree of life, it sighed for escape from this choking discipline into some region fresh with the mountain breath of faith and love, and not quite barren of "angels' food." The burdened moral sense, so long deluded and abused, reduced to self-conscious dotage by vain penances and vainer promises, flung away all belief in itself, asked leave to lay its freedom down, and went into captivity to Christ. So exclusively did the feeling of the time flow into this channel, that no doctrine which had an ethical groundwork, or attempted to soften in the least the implacable hostility of nature and grace, obtained any success; while every enthusiastic excess of the anti-catholic ideas spread like wildfire. The irreproachable innocence and piety of the Salzburg Gärtner-brüder did nothing to save them from quick martyrdom to their Ebionitish faith; while the atrocities and ravings of the Anabaptists of Münster scarcely sufficed to stop the triumph of their hideous kingdom of the saints. The movement of the brave Zwingli, earlier and more moderate than either Luther's or Calvin's, was easily restrained by them within the narrowest range, whilst the Genevan Reformer, cautious and ungenial, had but to collect his logical fuel, and kindle the terrible fire of his dogma, and it spread from the icy chambers of his own nature and wrapt whole kingdoms in its flames. That men without passion or pathos themselves, who do their work by force of intellect and will, should be successful disseminators of a doctrine that can live in no cool air, only shows how wide was the preparation of mind, and how the coming of this time fulfilled the long desire of nations.

The first stage, then, of the new development of Christianity was its Puritan period. The natural perdition of man, the radical corruption of his will, the religious indifference of all his states and actions, and the consequent worthlessness of his morality, except for civil uses and social police, constitute the fundamental assumptions of the system. From this basis of despair its doctrine of atonement comes to the rescue. The obedience of Christ is accepted in place of that which men cannot render, and his sacrifice instead of the penalty they deserve. Not, however, for all, but for those alone who may appropriate the deliverance by an act of faith, and present the merits of Christ as their offering to God, with full assurance of their sufficiency. Nothing but a divine and involuntary conversion can generate this faith, which follows no predisposition from the antecedent life, but the inscrutable decree of Heaven. Once transferred from the state of nature into that of grace, the disciple becomes, through the Holy Spirit, a new creature; is conscious of a sacred revolution in his tastes and affections; gives evidence of this by good works, which, now purified in their principle, are no longer unacceptable to God; and knows that, though he is still liable to the sins, he is redeemed from the penalties, of a son of Adam. The Church is the body of the converted, and while the Sacrament of Baptism initiates the candidate, and provisionally secures him, the Communion seals his adoption afterwards; the efficacy of both being conditional on the inner faith of the participant. The intense and unmediated antithesis of nature and grace, and the gulf, impassable except by miracle, between their two spheres, may be regarded as the most characteristic feature of this scheme. Its text-book contains the Pauline Epistles, and opens most readily at the Romans or Galatians; and its favorite writers are Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Edwards. With vast internal differences in their particular conceptions of Christian truth and of ecclesiastical government, the so-called Evangelical sects retain the impress of their common origin in the dearth of any ethical or æsthetic element in their religion.

From this alone must have resulted the fact which a plurality of causes has concurred in producing; viz. that the Reformation soon (within a century and a half) reached its apparent limit of extent, and propagated itself only internally by further evolutions of thought. It had taken up and exhausted the class of minds to which it was specially adapted; and after appropriating these, found itself arrested. Under the impulse of a newly-awakened piety men are disposed to feel that they cannot attribute too much to God; and there will always be large numbers who, from the absorbing intensity of religious sentiment, or the dominance of predestinarian theory, or the ill balance of partial cultivation, abdicate all personal power of good in favor of irreversible decrees. But as the tension relaxes or the culture enlarges, the moral instincts reassert their existence; and the monstrous distortions incident to any theory which denies their authority become too repulsive to be borne. Hence a reaction, in which the natural conscience takes the lead, and insists on obtaining that reconciliation with God which has already been conquered for the affections. Men in whom the sense of right and wrong is deep cannot divest themselves of reverence for it as authoritative and divine; nor can they truly profess that it is to them an empty voice, which, venerable as it sounds, they are never able to obey. They know what a difference it makes to them, in the whole peace and power of their being, whether they are faithful or whether they are false; that this difference belongs alike to their state of nature and their state of grace; that it is as little possible to withhold admiration from the magnanimity of the Pagan Socrates as from that of the Christian Paul; and that the sentiment which compels homage to both is the same that looks up with trust and worship to the justice and holiness of God: how, then, can they consent to draw an unreal line of impassable separation between ethical qualities before conversion and the very same qualities after, and abrogate in the one case the moral distinctions which become valid in the other? The two lives,—of earth and heaven; the two minds,—human and divine; the two states,—nature and grace; which it is the impulse of enthusiasm to contrast, it is the necessity of conscience to unite. When Luther first blew up the sacerdotal bridge which had given a path across to the steps of centuries, the boldness of the deed and the inspiration of the time lightened the feet of men, and enabled them to spring over with him on the wing of faith. But when the van had passed, and the more equable and disciplined ranks of another generation were brought to the brink, there seemed a needless rashness in the attempt, and foundations were discovered for a structure based on the rock of nature, and making one province of both worlds. Even Melancthon, long as he yielded to his leader's more powerful will, could not permanently acquiesce in the complete extinction of human responsibility; and vindicated for the soul a voluntary co-operation with divine grace. This semi-Pelagian example rapidly spread; first among the later Lutherans, especially of Brunswick and Hanover; next into the school of Leyden; and finally into the Church and universities of England. Quick to seize the reaction in the temper of the times, the Jesuits put themselves at the head of the same tendency in their own communion; defended against the Jansenists a doctrine of free-will beyond even the limits of Catholic orthodoxy; upheld Molina against Augustine, as among the Protestants Episcopius was gaining upon Calvin. Among patriotic theologians the authority of the Latin Church gave way in favor of the early Christian apologists and Greek Fathers, who knew nothing of the scheme of decrees. Divinity, under the guidance of More and Cudworth, no longer disdained to replenish her oil and revive her flame from the lamp of Athenian philosophy. And the conception of a universal natural law was elaborately worked out by Grotius. As the sixteenth century was the period of dogmatic theology, the seventeenth was that of ethical philosophy; the whole modern history of which lies mainly within that limit and half a century lower; and conclusively attests the decline of a scheme of belief incompatible with the very existence of such a science. When the Protestantism which had produced a Farel, a Beza, and a Whitgift, offered as its representatives Locke and Limborch, Tillotson and Butler, the nature of the change which had come over it declares itself. It was the revolt of moral sentiment against a doctrine that outraged it,—the re-development, under new conditions, of the ethical principle which had fallen neglected from the broken seed-vessel of the Catholic faith.

The second season of the Reformation, though treated now with unmerited disparagement, was not less worthy of admiration than the first. High-Churchmen may be ashamed of an archbishop who proposed a scheme of comprehension; Evangelicals, of a preacher who applauded the Socinians; and Coleridgians, of a theologian who was no deeper in metaphysics than the "Grotian divines"; but neither the Erastianism, the charity, nor the common sense of a Tillotson would be at all unsuitable at this moment to a church openly torn by dissensions and really held together only by dependence on the state. It has been a current opinion, perseveringly propagated by adherents of the Geneva theology, that the spread of Arminian sentiments was equivalent to a religious decline, and concurrent with the growth of a worldly laxity and selfish indifference of character. The allegation is absolutely false. In literature, in personal characteristics, and in public life, the Latitude-men and their associates in belief bear honorable comparison with their more rigorous forerunners. There is not only less of passionate intolerance, but a nobler freedom from an equivocal prudence, in the great writers of the second period, than in the Reformers of the first: and there is more to touch the springs of disinterestedness and elevation of mind in Cudworth and Clarke than in Calvin and Beza. Nor did the return of ethical theory weaken the sources of religious action. The very enterprises in which evangelical zeal most rejoices,—missions to the heathen, and the diffusion of the Scriptures,—were not only prosecuted but set on foot in new directions and with more powerful instrumentalities, in the very midst of this period, and by the very labors of its most distinguished philosophers. The Society for the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, were both born with the eighteenth century; and while the latter addressed itself to the natives and slaves of the American provinces, the former first made the Scriptures known on the Coromandel coast. It was Boyle who, of all men of his age, displayed the most generous zeal for the multiplication of the sacred writings, himself procuring their translation into four or five languages. For thirty years he was governor of a missionary corporation. Yet the complexion of his theology is sufficiently indicated by the fact that he bought up Pococke's Arabic translation of Grotius (De Veritate Christianæ Religionis), and was at the cost of its wide distribution in the East. And who that has ever read it can forget Swift's letter to the Irish viceroy (Lord Carteret), introducing Bishop Berkeley (then Dean of Derry), and his project for resigning his preferment at home in order that, on a stipend of £100 a year, he might devote himself to the conversion of the American Indians? The imperturbable patience with which the good Dean prosecuted his object, the self-devotion with which he embarked in it his property and life, the gratefulness with which he accepted from the government the promise of a grant, and the treachery which broke the promise, and after seven years compelled his return, make up a story unrivalled for its contrast of saintly simplicity and ministerial bad faith. These and similar features of the time superfluously refute the arbitrary and arrogant assumption, that no piety can be living and profound except that which disbelieves all natural religion, no gospel holy which does not renounce the moral law, no faith prolific in works unless it begins with despising them.

There was, however, still a defect in this gospel of conscience. Regarding the world and life as the object of a divine administration, and seeking to interpret them by a scheme of final causes, it was wholly occupied with the conception of God as proposing to himself certain ends, and arranging the means for their accomplishment. In this light He is a Being with moral preconceptions and an economy for bringing them to pass. Everything is for a purpose, and subsists for the sake of what is ulterior, and forms part of a mechanism working out a prescribed problem. The tendency of this way of thinking will inevitably be, to hunt for providences. These the narrow mind will place in the incidents of individual life; the comprehensive intellect, in the laws and relations of the universe; not perhaps in either case without some danger from human egotism of referring too much to the good and ill which is relative to man. The infinite perfections of God will be concentrated, so to speak, too much in the notion of His will, and the powers which subserve its designs; and will in consequence be as much misapprehended as would be our own nature by an observer assuming that we put forth all its life and phenomena on purpose. Indeed, the exclusive and unbalanced ascendency of the moral faculty tempts a man to fancy this sort of existence the only right one for himself; to suspect every flow of unwatched feeling, and call himself to account for the burst of ringing laughter, or the surprise of sudden tears, and aim at an autocratic command of his own soul. It is not wonderful that his ideal of human character should reappear in his representation of the Divine. The error deforms his faith as much as it tends to stiffen and constrict his life. Leading him always to ask what a thing is for, it hinders him from seeing what it is; in search of the motive, he misses the look; and his interest in it being transitive, he sinks into it with no sympathy on its own account. This is only to say, in other words, that his prepossession detains him from the artistic contemplation of objects and events; for while it is the business of science to inquire their origination, and of morals to follow their drift, it remains for art to appreciate their nature. To feel the type of thought which they express, to recognize the idea which they invest with form, the mind must rest upon them, not as products or as instruments, but as realities; and their significance must not be imposed upon them, but read off from them. The meaning which art detects in life and the world is not a purpose, but a sentiment; in its view the present attitudes and development of things are rather the out-coming of an inner feeling than the tools of a remoter end. To find room for this mode of conception something must be added to the ethical representation of God. He must be regarded as not always and throughout engaged in processes of intention and volition, but as having, around this moral centre, an infinite atmosphere of creative thought and affection, which, like the native inspirations of a pure and sublime human soul, spontaneously flow out in forms of beauty, and movements of rhythm, and a thousand aspects of divine expression. Religion demands the admission of this free element: and without it, will cease to speak home to men of susceptible genius and poetic nature, and must limit itself more and more to the fanatical minds that have too little regulation, and the moral that have too much. A God who offers terms of communion only to the passionate and to the conscientious, will not touch the springs of worship in perceptive and meditative men. Their prayer is less to know the published rules than to overhear the lonely whispers of the Eternal Mind, to be at one with His immediate life in the universe, and to shape or sing into articulate utterance the silent inspirations of which all existence is full. Their peculiar faculties supply them with other interests than about their sins, their salvation, and their conscience; they feel neither sufficiently guilty, nor sufficiently anxious to be good, to make a religion out of the one consciousness or the other; but if, indeed, it be God that flashes on them in so many lights of solemn beauty from the face of common things, that wipes off sometimes the steams of custom from the window of the soul, and surprises it with a presence of tenderness and mystery,—if the tension of creative thought in themselves, which can rest in nothing imperfect, yet realize nothing perfect, be an unconscious aspiration towards Him,—then there is a way of access to their inner faith, and a temple pavement on which they will consent to kneel. It is, we believe, the inability of Protestantism, in either of its previous forms, to meet this order of wants, that has reduced it to its state of weakness and discredit; and the struggle of thought, characteristic of the present century, is an unconscious attempt to supply the defect, and to vindicate, for the third element of Catholic Christianity, the possibility of development in the open air of Protestant belief. The change began, like both of the earlier ones, in Germany; and it was from Plato that Schleiermacher learned where the weakness of Christian dogma lay, and in what field of thought he might create a diversion from the disastrous assaults of French materialism, and restore the balance of the fight. An Hellenic spirit was infused into the scientific theology of the Continent, and has never ceased to prevail there, though Aristotle has long succeeded to Plato as the channel of influence. When Hegel, long the rival of Schleiermacher, triumphed over him, not only in the coteries of Berlin, but in the schools of Germany, he no doubt turned the philosophy which had been invoked to preserve the faith into a dialectic, at whose magic touch it deliquesced; and no one who has followed the application of his principles to history and dogma can be surprised at the antipathy they awaken in the Church. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the step into Pantheism was made by Hegel, and that the opposing theologians raised up by the great preacher of Berlin occupy in this respect any different ground. Since the time of Jacobi theism proper has not been heard of in Germany: the very writers who mean to defend it, surrender it in the disguise of their definition of personality; and so steeped is the whole national mind in the colors of Hellenic thought, that from Neander to Strauss can be found, in our deliberate judgment, only different shades of the same pantheistic conception. What does this denote but a universal sigh after a God, who shall be neither a Jehovah, a Judaic αυτοκρατωρ, nor a redeeming Deus ex machinâ, supervening upon the theatre of history, but a living and energizing Spirit, quickening the very heart of to-day, and whispering round the dome of Herschel's sky not less than in the third story of Paul's heaven? In some this feeling breaks out in devilish defiance, as in the unhappy Heinrich Heine's saying, "I am no child, I do not want a Heavenly Father any more": in others it breathes out, as with Novalis, in a tender mysticism, and is traceable by the reverent footfall and uncovered head with which they pace, as in a cathedral, the solemn aisles of life and nature. The expression of this tendency has passed into the literature of our own language, and every year is tinging it more and more with its characteristic hues. Emerson affords the purest and most unmixed example; but perhaps the earlier writings of Carlyle,—before the divine thirst had advanced so much into a human rabies,—and more especially his Sartor Resartus, may be taken as the real gospel of this sentiment. The intense operation of these essays, so entirely alien to the traditions of English thought and taste, is an evidence of something more than the genius of their authors: it is proof of a certain combustible state of the English mind, prepared by drought and deadness to burst into the flame of this new worship. This feeling, diffused through the very air of the time, has unmistakably evinced its essential identity with the instinct of art; in part, by a direct affluence and excellence of production unknown to the preceding age, but still more, in the wide extension of an appreciating love for the creations of artistic genius. The melancholy prophets who see in this spreading susceptibility only a morbid symptom of decadent civilization, are misled, we hope, by imperfect historical parallels. The flower, no doubt, both of Athenian and of Italian culture, was most brilliant just before it drooped. But the soil which bore it, and the elements that surrounded it, had no essential resemblance to the conditions of modern English society, in which, above all, there are the unexhausted juices of a moral faith and a strenuous habit, not stimulant perhaps of hasty growth, but giving hardihood against the open air and the natural seasons.

By the rules of technical theology, it may appear strange to reckon the turn from theism to pantheism as a third stage of the Reformation; as if it could be at all included in the interior history of Christianity, instead of being treated as a direct apostasy. And it is in reality a very serious question, whether, without unfaithfulness to its essential character, the Christian religion can domesticate within it this new action of thought, or must from the first visit it with unqualified excommunication. On the one hand, nothing can be more absurd than to suppose that a faith of Hebrew origin, a faith whose very hypothesis is sin, and whose aspiration is moral perfectness, can ever be reconciled with a thorough-going pantheism. On the other hand, nothing can be more gratuitous than to assume that the feeling which, on getting the whole mind to itself, generates a pantheistic scheme, has no legitimate exercise, and gains its indulgence altogether at the expense of Christian truth. If we mistake not, the pith of the matter lies in a small compass. Let Christian Theism keep Morals, and Pantheism may have Nature. This rule is no mere compromise or coalition of incongruous elements, but is founded, we are convinced, on distinctions real and eternal. So long as a holy will is left to God, and a power committed to man, free to sustain relations of trust and responsibility, room remains for all the conditions of Christianity, and the field beyond may be open to the range of mystic perception, and railed off for the sacrament of beauty. But whether this or any other be the just partition of territory between the two claimants, partition there must be, for the real truth of things must correspond, not to the hypothesis of any single human faculty, but to harmonized postulates of all. It is not surprising that, on its first re-birth, the gospel of nature should deny the gospel of duty, or so take it up into its own fine essence as to volatilize all its substance away. This is but the natural revenge taken for past neglect, and the needful challenge to future attention. Each one of the three developments has in its turn run out beyond the limits of the Christian faith, and yet, hitherto, each has established a place within it. The Hegelian, or Emersonian, type of the third period is but the corresponding phenomenon to the Antinomianism of the first, and the Deism of the second. And as these have passed away, after surrendering into the custody of Christendom the principles that gave them strength, so will the Pantheism of to-day, when it has provided for the safe-keeping of its charge, and seen the Church complete its triad of Faith, Holiness, and Beauty.

This question, however, will be asked: If the Reformation only repeats, with some transposition, the cycle of the primitive development, how are we the better for having thus to do our work again? Are we to end where the sixteenth century began, and to reproduce the Catholicism which was then resolved into its elements? And does some fatal necessity doom us to this wearisome periodicity? Not in the least. However little the seeds may be able to transgress the limits of species, and may remain indistinguishable from millennium to millennium, the conditions of growth are so different as practically to cancel the identity in the result. Taken even one by one, the modern forms of doctrine are far nobler than their early prototypes. The narrow Ebionitism of the original Church is not comparable, as an expression of the conscience, with the moral philosophy of Butler; and the Greek element of thought, flowing by Berlin, has entered the Church in deeper channels than when infiltrating through the theosophy of Alexandria. It is only in relation to the passionate element that the doubt can be raised, whether we have gained in truth and grandeur by passing the religion of Augustine through the minds of the modern reformers; and whether the Jansenists within the Church do not exhibit a higher phase of character than the Huguenots without it. But at any rate, the modern development, taken as a whole, is secure of an inner unity and completeness which before has been unattained. It is an obvious, yet little noticed, consequence of the invention of printing, that no one mood of feeling or school of thought can tyrannize over a generation of mankind, and sweep all before it, as of old; and then again, with change in the intellectual season, rot utterly away, and give place to a successor no less absolute. Generations and ages now live in presence of each other; the impulse of the present is restrained by the counsels of the past, and, in fighting for the throne of the human mind, finds it not only strong in living prepossession, but guarded by shadowy sentinels, encircled by a band of immortals. Hence the history of ideas can never be again so wayward and fitful as it was in the first centuries of our era; losing all interest at one period in the questions which had maddened the preceding; for a time covered all over with the pale haze of Byzantine metaphysics, and then suffused with red heats of African enthusiasm. New truth can no longer forget the old, and thrive wholly at its expense, or even make a compact with it to take turn and turn about, but must find an organic relation with it, so as to be its enlargement rather than its rival. The modern moralist already understands Augustine better than did the old Pelagians; "Evangelical" teachers begin to insist on Christian ethics; and the increasing disposition, even in heterodox persons, to dwell on the Incarnation as the central point of faith, shows how credible and welcome becomes the notion of the union of human with divine, and of the moral manifestation of God in the life and soul of man. The time, we trust, is gone, for the merely linear advancement of the European mind, with all its action and reaction propagated downwards, and wasting centuries on phenomena that might co-exist. Henceforth it may open out in all dimensions at once, and fill, as its own for ever, the whole space of true thought into which its past increments have borne it. Sects, no doubt, and schools, will continue to arise on the outskirts of the intellectual realm, possessed by partial inspirations; but the world's centre of gravity will be more and more occupied by minds that can at once balance and retain these marginal excesses, that can round off the sphere by inner force of reason, and, dispensing with the outer mould of sacerdotal compression, let the tides flow free, and the winds blow strong, without alarm for the eternal harmony. This is the form in which nature will restore, and God approve, a Catholic consent.

The idea we have endeavored to give of the genesis of Christian doctrine, and the law of its vicissitudes, is offered only as conveniently distributing the subjective sources of faith. It cannot be applied to the phenomena of particular countries apart from ample historical knowledge of the concurrent social and political conditions, without which the most accurate clews to the natural history of thought can only mislead as the interpreter of concrete events. When, for instance, we look around us at home, and seek for the English representatives of the several tendencies explained above, we may, no doubt, find them here and there, but they are so far from exhausting the facts of our time, that some of the most conspicuous parties—as the Anglicans—seem provided with no place at all. The obscurity first begins to clear away when we remember that in England Schism went before Reformation. The aim of Henry VIII. was simply to detach and nationalize the Church in his dominions; to give it insular integrity instead of provincial dependence; and could this have been done without meddling with the system of Catholic doctrine at all, the scheme of faith would have been preserved entire. While Luther and the Continental opponents of Rome were faithful to the idea of the unity of Christendom, and were calling out for a general council to restore it by a verdict on doubtful points of faith, the English monarch, undisturbed by doubt or scruple, broke off from Rome, and destroyed the traditions of centralization by taking the ecclesiastic jurisdiction into his own hands and stopping its passage of the seas. In the new movement of the time, England tended to become a petty papacy, still unreformed; Europe sought a universal church reformed. Neither aim admitted of realization. To repudiate the supreme pontiff, and substitute a civil head, involved a fatal breach in the sacerdotal system, and carried with it inevitable departures from the integrity of Catholic dogma; so that reformation was found inseparable from schism. And when no council, acknowledged as universal, was called to give authoritative settlement, arrangements ad interim became consolidated, provisional rights grew into prescriptive; with the spectacle of variety, and the taste of freedom, the idea of unity faded away, till the co-existence of two churches within one land and one Christendom passed into a necessity, and reformation proved impossible without a schism. But, notwithstanding this partial approximation of the English and the Continental movements, the traces remain indelible that their point of departure was from opposite ends. In its origin and earliest traditions, in the basis of its constitution and worship, the Church of England has nothing whatever to do with Protestantism; it is but the Westminster Catholic Church instead of the Roman Catholic Church. Authoritative doctrine, sacramental grace, sacerdotal mediation, are all retained; and throughout the whole of Henry's reign, while the new laws were working themselves into habits, the seven sacraments, the communion in one kind, the Ave Maria, the invocation of saints, with the doctrines of transubstantiation and purgatory, remained within the circle of recognized orthodoxy. The impelling and regulative idea of the whole change was that of a nationalization of Catholicism. This original ascendency of the national over the theological feeling was never lost; and though channels were more and more opened, through the sympathies of exiles and the intercourse of scholars, for the infusion of Continental notions, yet the form given to the Church rendered it not very susceptible to the new learning; whose admission, so far as it took place, was rather induced by political conception than made in the interests of universal truth. The present Anglicans represent the first type of the English schism; and the High Church in general embodies the distinguishing national sentiment of the Reformation in this country, as compared with the cosmopolitan character of the Continental religious change. Doctrine is universal, administration and jurisdiction are local. Where the former becomes the bond of sympathy, as among the Evangelic Protestants, it unites men together by ties that are irrespective of the limits of country, and subordinates special patriotisms to the interests of a more comprehensive fraternity. Where the latter become the objects of zeal, a flavor of the soil mingles itself with the sentiments of honor, and a peculiar loyalty concentrates itself on the inner circles of duty, often with the narrowest capacity of diffusion beyond. Hence the intensely English feeling which has always prevailed among the parochial—especially the rural—clergy of the Establishment, and the people who form their congregations. They constitute the very core of our insular society, and the retaining centre of our historical characteristics. Their admirations, their prejudices, their virtues, their ambitions, are all national. Their interest in dogma is not intellectually active, or provocative of any proselyting zeal, and is subservient to the practical aim of giving territorial action to the religious institutions under their charge. Their dealings are less with the individual's solitary soul, than with the several social classes in their mutual relations; and to mediate between the gentry and the poor, to keep in order the school, the workhouse, and the village charities,—not forgetting the obligation to ward off Methodists and voluntaries,[2]—constitute the approved circle of clerical duties. Their very antipathies, unlike those of Protestant zealots, are less theological than political; they hate Roman Catholics chiefly as a sort of foreigners, who have no proper business here, and Dissenters as a sort of rebels, who create disturbance with their discontents; and were old England well rid of them both, the heart of her citizenship, they believe, would be sounder. They stand, indeed, in a curious position, pledged to hold a proud Anglican isolation between two cosmopolitan interests,—the Popish theocracy and the Evangelical dogma,—refusing obedience to Rome, yet declining the alliance of foreign Protestants. Their enmity to the Papal system is quite a different sentiment from that which animates Exeter Hall; they do not deny the absolute legitimacy of the elder corporation in general, but only its relative legitimacy here; and Scottish ravings against it as "Babylon" and "Antichrist" offend them more than the confessional and the mass. Twice in their history—under the Stuarts and in our own day—have they seemed to forget their destiny, and make overtures to the Vatican; in both instances it was when Puritanism had threatened to take possession of the Church, and reduce it to a federal member of an Evangelical alliance; and if its separate integrity were in peril, they had rather fling it back into the Apostolic monarchy, than enroll it in the Genevan league. But the first real sight of danger from the Papal side has dissipated this reactionary inclination, and rekindled the instinct of local independence. Thus, in our Church, ideal interests and purely religious conceptions have held the second place to a predominating nationalism. The Church has embodied and handed down the leading sentiment of the Tudor times; and though not guiltless of share in many a Stuart treachery, and often cruel to the stiff-necked recusant, has, on the whole, been true to the English feeling, that the Pope was too great a priest, and Calvin too long a preacher.

The reason then is evident why the Church of England cannot be referred to any of the heads of classification we have given; neither coinciding with Romanism, nor exemplifying distinctively any of the tendencies springing successively out of the disintegration of Catholic dogma. It arose out of an ecclesiastical revolt; other communions, out of a theological aspiration. Its original conception involved no serious modification of belief, no invention or recovery of strange usages, but a mere separation of the island branch from the Roman stem, that it might strike root and be as a native tree of life. The first alterations in doctrine were slight, and merely incidental to this primary end: and the whole amount of change, instead of being determined by the intellectual dictatorship of a Luther or a Calvin, was the illogical result of social forces, seeking the equilibrium of practical compromise. The phenomenon therefore which we observed in the elder Church is repeated in this younger offshoot: the several elements of faith co-exist (though in greatly spoiled proportions) without unity or natural coherence; and the English Church, as the depository of a creed, occupies no place in the history of the human mind: its individual great men must be put here or there in the records of thought, without regard to the accident of their ecclesiastical position. The one real idea which has permanently inspired its clergy and supporters is that of nationalism in religion. To the time of the Restoration they attempted, since then they have pretended, to represent the nation in its faith and worship. Once, their aim appeared to be a noble possibility, struggling still and unrealized, but unrefuted. Now, thousands of Non-conformist chapels proclaim its meaning gone, and its language an affectation and an insolence. The English Church has become an outer reality without an inner idea.

In contrast with the insular feeling predominant in the English schism, we have placed the cosmopolitan zeal of the foreign Puritanism. With this, however, was combined the very opposite pole of sentiment,—a certain egoism and loneliness in religion, from which have flowed some of the most important characteristics of Protestantism. Having flung away, as miserable quackeries, the hierarchical prescriptions for souls oppressed with sin, Luther fell back upon an act of subjective faith in place of the Church's objective works. For the corporation he substituted the individual: whom he put in immediate, instead of mediate, relation with Christ and God. The Catholic's unbloody sacrifice had no efficacy, no existence, without the priest; the Lutheran's bloody sacrifice was a realized historical fact, to be appropriated separately by every believer's personal trust. It was not, therefore, the Church which, in its corporate capacity, occupied the prior place, and held the deposit of divine grace for distribution to its members; but it was the private person that constituted the sacred unit, and a plurality of believers supplied the factors of the Church. The grace which before could not reach the individual except by transit through accredited officials, now became directly accessible to each soul: and only after it had been received by a sufficient number to form a society, did the conditions of spiritual office and organization exist. This essential dependence of the whole upon the parts, instead of the parts upon the whole, is the most radical and powerful peculiarity of Protestantism. A system which raises the individual to the primary place of religious importance, places him nearest to the supernatural energy of God, and makes him the living stone without which temple and altar cannot be built, naturally draws to it minds of marked vigor, and trains men in self-subsisting habits. By giving scope to the forces of private character, it sets in action the real springs of healthy progress, and happily with such intensity as to defy the checks it often seeks to impose in later moods of repentant alarm. This emancipation of the personal life from theocratic control, at first achieved in connection with the doctrine of justification, was sure to present itself in other forms. In its spiritual application Protestant egoism assumes the shape of reliance on inner faith; in its political, of voluntaryism; in its intellectual, of free inquiry and private judgment. These several directions may be taken separately or together, but where, as in the Church of England, not one of them is unambiguously marked, the very principle of reformed Christianity is unsecured, and Protestantism is present, not by charter, but by social accident. Puritanism everywhere—conforming or nonconforming, English or Continental—exhibits the first direction; "Evangelical" Dissenters add the second; while Unitarians occupy the third,—not perhaps completely, and not altogether exclusively, but characteristically nevertheless. For it is impossible to unite the orthodox with the intellectual egoism. So long as the inner faith, which is the presumed condition of justification, includes a controverted doctrine, like the scheme of Atonement, the need of faith imposes a limit on the right of judgment: and you are only free to think till you show symptoms of thinking wrong. But when the sacrificial Christianity has passed into the ethical, and no other condition of harmony with God is laid down than purity of affection and fidelity of will, then honest thought can peril no salvation, and the devotion of the intellect to truth and the heart to grace is a divided allegiance no more.

It was for some time doubtful how far this Protestant egoism was likely to go. Luther was clear and positive that it was faith that justified; and fetching this doctrine out of a deep personal experience, he paid little respect to any one who contradicted it, and regulated by it his first choice of religious authorities. Led by this clew, he arrived at results strangely at variance with modern canons. He neither accepted as a standard the whole Bible, nor at first rejected the whole tradition of the Church; loosely attempting to reserve the Augustinian authorities, and to repudiate the Dominican. When he had renounced altogether the appeal to councils and patristic lore, it was in favor, not of the external Scriptures, unconditionally taken as the rule of faith, but of the private spirit of the Christian reader, who was himself "made king and priest," and could not only find the meaning, but pronounce upon the relative worth, of the canonical books. Accordingly, the Reformer made very free with portions of the Old Testament, and with the more Judaic elements of the New,—the Epistle to the Hebrews, that of James, and the Apocalypse; and avowedly did this because he disliked the flavor of their doctrine, and felt its variance from the Pauline gospel. He thus tampered with his court before he brought forward his cause, and incapacitated the judges whose verdict he feared. In short, the religious life of his own soul was too intense and powerful to be prevailed over by any written word: he appropriated what was congenial, and threw away the rest. Uneasy relations were thus established between the subjective rule of faith found in the believer's own mind, and the objective standard of a documentary revelation: they were soon constituted, and have ever since remained rival authorities, commanding the allegiance of different orders of minds. The vast majority of Protestants, of less profound and tumultuous inner life than Luther, and less knowing how to see their way through it, subsided into exclusive recognition of the sacred writings; denying alike the regulative authority either of church councils or of the private soul. In every branch and derivative of the Genevan Reformation, throughout the whole range of both the Puritan and the Arminian Churches, a rigorous Scripturalism prevails; and the Bible is used as a code or legislative text-book, which yields, on mere interpretation, verdicts without appeal on every subject, whether doctrine or duty, of which it speaks. But Luther's spiritual enthusiasm kindled a fire that he scarce could quench; and while he himself, flung into perpetual conflicts with opponents, was obliged more and more to refer to evidence external to his personality, others had learned from him to look upon their own souls as the theatre of conscious strife between heaven and hell, and to recognize the voice of inspiration there. Carlstadt was the first to catch the flame of his teacher's burning experience, and, touched by prophetic consciousness, to set the Spirit above the Word. Luther, so often recalled from the tendencies of his own turbulent teaching by seeing their mischiefs realized in other men, instantly turned on Carlstadt with his overwhelming scorn: "The spirit of our new prophet flies very high indeed: 't is an audacious spirit, that would eat up the Holy Ghost, feathers and all. 'The Bible?'—sneer these fellows,—'Bibel, Bubel, Babel!' And not only do they reject the Bible thus contemptuously, but they say they would reject God too, if he were not to visit them as he did his prophets." Carlstadt had got hold of a doctrine that was too much for his ill-balanced mind, and Luther easily destroyed his repute. But a principle had been started which has never been dormant since; the very principle which afterwards constituted the Society of Friends, and finds its best exposition in the writings of their admirable apologist, Barclay; and which in our times reappears in more philosophic guise, and fights its old battles again as the doctrine of religious intuition. No period of awakened faith and sentiment has been without some increasing tincture of this persuasion; and under modified forms, with more or less admixture of the ordinary Puritan elements, it has played a great part among the Quietists in France, the Moravians in Germany, and the Methodists in England. In all these, far as they are from being committed to the notion of an "inner light," spiritualism has predominated over Scripturalism, and permanent life in the Spirit has engaged the affections more than the transition into the adoption of faith.

In this endeavor to lay out the ground-plan of modern Christian development, and trace upon it the chief lines both of psychological and of historical distinction, our design is to prepare the way for a series of sketches exhibiting the sects and types of religion in England. It is scarcely possible to notice the phenomena present here and to-day without referring to their antecedents in a prior age, their counterparts in other lands, and their permanent principles in human nature; and if our chart be tolerably correct, our future course will be rendered less indeterminate by the relations and points of comparison which have been established. The age, and even the hour, is teeming with new interests and pregnant auguries in relation to the highest element of human well-being. From a desire to approach these in a temper of just and reverential appreciation, we have abstained from recording the first impression of them, and sought rather, by a preliminary discipline, to detect some criteria by which prejudices may be checked, tendencies be estimated, and criticism acquire a clew.

[CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT PRIEST AND WITHOUT RITUAL.]

"To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious; ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ."—1 Peter ii. 4, 5.

The formation of human society, and the institution of priesthood, must be referred to the same causes and the same date. The earliest communities of the world appear to have had their origin and their cement, not in any gregarious instinct, nor in mere social affections, much less in any prudential regard to the advantages of co-operation, but in a binding religious sentiment, submitting to the same guidance, and expressing itself in the same worship. As no tie can be more strong, so is none more primitive, than this agreement respecting what is holy and divine. In simple and patriarchal ages, indeed, when the feelings of veneration had not been set aside by analysis into a little corner of the character, but spread themselves over the whole of life, and mixed it up with daily wonder, this bond comprised all the forces that can suppress the selfish and disorganizing passions, and compact a multitude of men together. It was not, as at present, to have simply the same opinions (things of quite modern growth, the brood of scepticism); but to have the same fathers, the same tradition, the same speech, the same land, the same foes, the same priest, the same God. Nothing did man fear, or trust, or love, or desire, that did not belong, by some affinity, to his faith. Nor had he any book to keep the precious deposit for him; and if he had, he would never have thought of so frail a vehicle for so great a treasure. It was more natural to put it into structures hollowed in the fast mountain, or built of transplanted rocks which only a giant age could stir; and to tenant these with mighty hierarchies, who should guard their sanctity, and, by an undying memory, make their mysteries eternal. Hence, the first humanizer of men was their worship; the first leaders of nations, the sacerdotal caste; the first triumph of art, the colossal temple; the first effort to preserve an idea produced a record of something sacred; and the first civilization was, as the last will be, the birth of religion.

The primitive aim of worship undoubtedly was, to act upon the sentiments of God; at first, by such natural and intelligible means as produce favorable impressions on the mind of a fellow-man,—by presents and persuasion, and whatever is expressive of grateful and reverential affections. Abel, the first shepherd, offered the produce of his flock; Cain, the first farmer, the fruits of his land; and while devotion was so simple in its modes, every one would be his own pontiff, and have his own altar. But soon, the parent would inevitably officiate for his family; the patriarch, for his tribe. With the natural forms dictated by present feelings, traditional methods would mingle their contributions from the past; postures and times, gestures and localities, once indifferent, would become consecrated by venerable habit; and so long as their origin was unforgotten, they would add to the significance, while they lessened the simplicity, of worship. Custom, however, being the growth of time, tends to a tyrannous and bewildering complexity: forms, originally natural, then symbolical, end in being arbitrary; suggestive of nothing, except to the initiated; yet, if connected with religion, so sanctified by the association, that it appears sacrilege to desist from their employment; and when their meaning is lost, they assume their place, not among empty gesticulations, but among the mystical signs by which earth communes with heaven. The vivid picture-writing of the early worship, filled with living attitudes, and sketched in the freshest colors of emotion, explained itself to every eye, and was open to every hand. To this succeeded a piety, which expressed itself in symbolical figures, veiling it utterly from strangers, but intelligible and impressive still to the soul of national tradition. This, however, passed again into a language of arbitrary characters, in which the herd of men saw sacredness without meaning; and the use of which must be consigned to a class separated for its study. Hence the origin of the priest and his profession; the conservator of a worship no longer natural, but legendary and mystical; skilful enactor of rites that spake with silent gesticulation to the heavens; interpreter of the wants of men into the divine language of the gods. Not till the powers above had ceased to hold familiar converse with the earth, and in their distance had become deaf and dumb to the common tongue of men, did the mediating priest arise;—needed then to conduct the finger-speech of ceremony, whereby the desire of the creature took shape before the eye of the Creator.

Observe, then, the true idea of Priest and Ritual. The Priest is the representative of men before God; commissioned on behalf of human nature to intercede with the divine. He bears a message upwards, from earth to heaven; his people being below, his influence above. He takes the fears of the weak, and the cries of the perishing, and sets them with availing supplication before Him that is able to help. He takes the sins and remorse of the guilty, and leaves them with expiating tribute at the feet of the averted Deity. He guards the avenues that lead from the mortal to the immortal, and without his interposition the creature is cut off from his Creator. Without his mediation no transaction between them can take place, and the spirit of a man must live as an outlaw from the world invisible and holy. There are means of propitiation which he alone has authority to employ; powers of persuasion conceded to no other; a mystic access to the springs of divine benignity, by outward rites which his manipulation must consecrate, or forms of speech which his lips must recommend. These ceremonies are the implements of his office and the sources of his power; the magic by which he is thought to gain admission to the will above, and really wins rule over human counsels below. As they are supposed to change the relation of God to man, not by visible or natural operation, not (for example) by suggestion of new thoughts, and excitement of new dispositions in the worshipper, but by secret and mysterious agency, they are simply spells of a dignified order. Were we then to speak with severe exactitude, we should say, a Ritual is a system of consecrated charms; and the Priest, the great magician who dispenses them.

So long as any idea is retained of mystically efficacious rites, consigned solely and authoritatively to certain hands, this definition cannot be escaped. The ceremonies may have rational instruction and natural worship appended to them; and these additional elements may give them a title to true respect. The order of men appointed to administer them may have other offices and nobler duties to perform, rendering them, if faithful, worthy of a just and reverential attachment. But in so far as, by an exclusive and unnatural efficacy, they bring about a changed relation between God and man, the Ritual is an incantation, and the Priest is an enchanter.

To this sacerdotal devotion there necessarily attach certain characteristic sentiments, both moral and religious, which give it a distinctive influence on human character, and adapt it to particular stages of civilization. It clearly severs the worshippers by one remove from God. He is a Being, external to them, distant from them, personally unapproachable by them; their thought must travel to reach the Almighty; they must look afar for the Most Holy; they dwell themselves within the finite, and must ask a foreign introduction to the Infinite. He is not with them as a private guide, but in the remoter watch-towers of creation, as the public inspector of their life; not present for perpetual communion, but to be visited in absence by stated messages of form and prayer. And that God dwells in this cold and royal separation induces the feeling, that man is too mean to touch him; that a consecrated intervention is required, in order to part Deity from the defiling contact of humanity. Why else am I restricted from unlimited personal access to my Creator, and driven to another in my transactions with him? And so, in this system, our nature appears in contrast, not in alliance, with the divine, and those views of it are favored which make the opposition strong; its puny dimensions, its swift decadence, its poor self-flatteries, its degenerate virtues, its giant guilt, become familiar to the thought and lips; and life, cut off from sympathy with the godlike, falls towards the level of melancholy, or the sink of epicurism, or the abjectness of vicarious reliance on the priest. Worship, too, must have for its chief aim, to throw off the load of ill; to rid the mind of sin and shame, and the lot of hardship and sorrow; for principally to these disburdening offices do priests and rituals profess themselves adapted;—and who, indeed, could pour forth the privacy of love, and peace, and trust, through the cumbrousness of ceremonies, and the pompousness of a sacred officer? The piety of such a religion is thus a refuge for the weakness, not an outpouring of the strength, of the soul: it takes away the incubus of darkness, without shedding the light of heaven; lifts off the nightmare horrors of earth and hell, without opening the vision of angels and of God. Nay, for the spiritual bonds which connect men with the Father above, it substitutes material ties, a genealogy of sacred fires, a succession of hallowed buildings, or of priests having consecration by pedigree or by manual transmission; so that qualities belonging to the soul alone are likened to forces mechanical or chemical; sanctity becomes a physical property; divine acceptance comes by bodily catenation; regeneration is degraded into a species of electric shock, which one only method of experiment, and the links of but one conductor, can convey. And, in fine, a priestly system ever abjures all aim at any higher perfection; boasts of being immutable and unimprovable; encourages no ambition, breathes no desire. It holds the appointed methods of influencing Heaven, on which none may presume to innovate; and its functions are ever the same, to employ and preserve the ancient forms and legendary spells committed to its trust. Hence all its veneration is antiquarian, not sympathetic or prospective; it turns its back upon the living, and looks straight into departed ages, bowing the head and bending the knee; as if all objects of love and devotion were there, not here; in history, not in life; as if its God were dead, or otherwise imprisoned in the Past, and had bequeathed to its keeping such relics as might yield a perpetual benediction. Thus does the administration of religion, in proportion as it possesses a sacerdotal character, involve a distant Deity, a mean humanity, a servile worship, a physical sanctity, and a retrospective reverence.

Let no one, however, imagine that there is no other idea or administration of religion than this; that the priest is the only person among men to whom it is given to stand between heaven and earth. Even the Hebrew Scriptures introduce us to another class of quite different order; to whom, indeed, those Scriptures owe their own truth and power, and perpetuity of beauty: I mean the Prophets; whom we shall very imperfectly understand, if we suppose them mere historians, for whom God had turned time round the other way, so that they spoke of things future as if past, and grew so dizzy in their use of tenses, as greatly to incommode learned grammarians; or if we treat their writings as scrap-books of Providence, with miscellaneous contributions from various parts of duration, sketches taken indifferently from any point of view within eternity, and put together at random and without mark, on adjacent pages, for theological memories to identify; first, a picture of an Assyrian battle, next, a holy family; now, of the captives sitting by Euphrates, then, of Paul preaching to the Gentiles; here, a flight of devouring locusts, and there, the escape of the Christians from the destruction of Jerusalem; a portrait of Hezekiah, and a view of Calvary; a march through the desert, and John the Baptist by the Jordan; the day of Pentecost, and the French Revolution; Nebuchadnezzar and Mahomet; Caligula and the Pope,—following each other with picturesque neglect of every relation of time and place. No, the Prophet and his work always indeed belong to the future; but far otherwise than thus. Meanwhile, let us notice how, in Israel, as elsewhere, he takes his natural station above the priest. It was Moses the prophet who even made Aaron the priest. And who cares now for the sacerdotal books of the Old Testament, compared with the rest? Who, having the strains of David, would pore over Leviticus, or would weary himself with Chronicles, when he might catch the inspiration of Isaiah? It was no priest that wrote, "Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it; thou delightest not in burnt-offering: the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." It was no pontifical spirit that exclaimed, "Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination to me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting: your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth; they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them." "Wash you, make you clean." Whatever in these venerable Scriptures awes us by its grandeur and pierces us by its truth, comes of the prophets, not the priests; and from that part of their writings, too, in which they are not concerned with historical prediction, but with some utterance deeper and greater. I do not deny them this gift of occasional intellectual foresight of events. And doubtless it was an honor to be permitted to speak thus to a portion of the future, and of local occurrences unrevealed to seers less privileged. But it is a glory far higher to speak that which belongs to all time, and finds its interpretation in every place; to penetrate to the everlasting realities of things; to disclose, not when this or that man will appear, but how and wherefore all men appear and quickly disappear; to make it felt, not in what nook of duration such an incident will happen, but from what all-embracing eternity the images of history emerge and are swallowed up. In this highest faculty the Hebrew seers belong to a class scattered over every nation and every period; which Providence keeps ever extant for human good, and especially to furnish an administration of religion quite anti-sacerdotal. This class we must proceed to characterize.

The Prophet is the representative of God before men, commissioned from the Divine nature to sanctify the human. He bears a message downwards, from heaven to earth; his inspirer being above, his influence below. He takes of the holiness of God, enters with it into the souls of men, and heals therewith the wounds, and purifies the taint, of sin. He is charged with the peace of God, and gives from it rest to the weariness and solace to the griefs of men. Instead of carrying the foulness of life to be cleansed in heaven, he brings the purity of heaven to make life divine. Instead of interposing himself and his mediation between humanity and Deity, he destroys the whole distance between them; and only fulfils his mission, when he brings the finite mind and the infinite into immediate and thrilling contact, and leaves the creature consciously alone with the Creator. He is one to whom the primitive and everlasting relations between God and man have revealed themselves, stripped of every disguise, and bared of all that is conventional; who is possessed by their simplicity, mastered by their solemnity; who has found the secret of meeting the Holy Spirit within, rather than without; and knows, but cannot tell, how, in the strife of genuine duty, or in moments of true meditation, the Divine immensity and love have touched and filled his naked soul; and taught him by what fathomless Godhead he is folded round, and on what adamantine manhood he must take his stand. So far from separating others from the heavenly communion vouchsafed to himself, he necessarily believes that all may have the same godlike consciousness; burns to impart it to them; and by the vivid light of his own faith speedily creates it in those who feel his influence, drawing out and freshening the faded colors of the Divine image in their souls, till they too become visibly the seers and the sons of God. His instruments, like the objects of his mission, are human; not mysteries, and mummeries, and such arbitrary things, by which others may pretend to be talking with the skies; but the natural language which interprets itself at once to every genuine man, and goes direct to the living point of every heart. An earnest speech, a brave and holy life, truth of sympathy, severity of conscience, freshness and loftiness of faith,—these natural sanctities are his implements of power; and if heaven be pleased to add any other gifts, still are they weapons all,—not the mere tinsel of tradition and custom,—but forged in the inner workshop of our nature, where the fire glows beneath the breath of God, framing things of ethereal temper. Thus armed, he lays undoubting siege to the world's conscience; tears down every outwork of pretence; forces its strong-holds of delusion; humbles the vanities at its centre, and proclaims it the citadel of God. The true prophet of every age is no believer in the temple, but in the temple's Deity; trusts, not rites and institutions, but the heart and soul that fill or ought to fill them; if they speak the truth, no one so reveres them; if a lie, they meet with no contempt like his. He sees no indestructible sanctuary but the mind itself, wherein the Divine Spirit ever loves to dwell; and whence it will be sure to go forth and build such outward temple as may suit the season of Providence. He is conscious that there is no devotion like that which comes spontaneously from the secret places of our humanity, no orisons so true as those which rise from the common platform of our life. He desires only to throw himself in faith on the natural piety of the heart. Give him but that, and he will find for man an everlasting worship, and raise for God a cathedral worthy of his infinitude.

It is evident that one thoroughly possessed with this spirit could never be, and could never make, a priest; nor frame a ritual for priests already made. He is destitute of the ideas out of which alone these things can be created. His mission is in the opposite direction: he interprets and reveals God to men, instead of interceding for men with God. In this office sacerdotal rites have no function and no place. I do not say that he must necessarily disapprove and abjure them, or deny that he may directly sanction them. If he does, however, it is not in his capacity of prophet, but in conformity with feelings which his proper office has left untouched. His tendency will be against ceremonialism; and on his age and position will depend the extent to which this tendency takes effect. Usually he will construct nothing ritual, will destroy much, and leave behind great and growing ideas, destructive of much more. But ere we quit our general conception of a prophet, let us notice some characteristic sentiments, moral and religious, which naturally connect themselves with his faith; comparing them with those which belong to the sacerdotal influence.

In this faith, God is separated by nothing from his worshippers. He is not simply in contact with them, but truly in the interior of their nature; so that they may not only meet him in the outward providences of life, but bear his spirit with them, when they go to toil and conflict, and find it still, when they sit alone to think and pray. He is not the far observer, but the very present help, of the faithful will. No structure made with hands, nay, not even his own architecture of the heaven of heavens, contains and confines his presence: were there any dark recess whence these were hid, the blessed access would be without hinderance still; and the soul would discern him near as its own identity. No mean and ignoble conception can be entertained of a mind which is thus the residence of Deity;—the shrine of the Infinite must have somewhat that is infinite itself. Thus, in this system, does our nature appear in alliance with the Divine, not in contrast with it; inspired with a portion of its holiness, and free to help forward the best issues of its providence. Human life, blessed by this spirit, becomes a miniature of the work of the great Ruler: its responsibilities, its difficulties, its temptations, become dignified as the glorious theatre whereon we strive, by and with the good Spirit of God, for the mastery over evil. Worship, issuing from a nature and existence thus consecrated, is not the casting off of guilt and terror, but the glad unburdening of love, and trust, and aspiration, the simple speaking forth, as duty is the acting forth, of the divine within us; not the prostration of the slave, but the embrace of the child; not the plaint of the abject, but the anthem of the free. Is it not private, individual? And may it not by silence say what it will, and intimate the precise thing, and that only, which is at heart?—whence there grows insensibly that firm root of excellence, truth with one's own self. The priestly fancy of an hereditary or lineal sacredness can have no place here. The soul and God stand directly related, mind with mind, spirit with spirit: from our moral fidelity to this relation, from the jealousy with which we guard it from insult or neglect, does the only sanctity arise; and herein there is none to help us, or give a vicarious consecration. And, finally, the spirit of God's true prophet is earnestly prospective; more filled with the conception of what the Creator will make his world, than of what he has already made it: detecting great capacities, it glows with great hopes; knowing that God lives, and will live, it turns from the past, venerable as that may be, and reverences rather the promise of the present, and the glories of the future. It esteems nothing unimprovable, is replete with vast desires; and amid the shadows and across the wilds of existence chases, not vainly, a bright image of perfection. The golden age, which priests with their tradition put into the past, the prophet, with his faith and truth, transfers into the future; and while the former pines and muses, the latter toils and prays. Thus does the administration of religion, in proportion as it partakes of the prophetic or anti-sacerdotal character, involve the ideas of an interior Deity, a noble humanity, a loving worship, an individual holiness, and a prospective veneration.

We have found, then, two opposite views of religion: that of the Priest with his Ritual, and that of the Prophet with his Faith. I propose to show that the Church of England, in its doctrine of sacraments, coincides with the former of these, and sanctions all its objectionable sentiments; and that Christianity, in every relation, even with respect to its reputed rites, coincides with the latter.

The general conformity of the Church of England with the ritual conception of religion will not be denied by her own members. Their denial will be limited to one point: they will protest that her formulas of doctrine do not ascribe a charmed efficacy, or any operation upon God, to the two sacraments. To avoid verbal disputes, let us consider what we are to understand by a spell or charm. The name, I apprehend, denotes any material object or outward act, the possession or use of which is thought to confer safety or blessing, not by natural operation, but by occult virtues inherent in it, or mystical effects appended to it. A mere commemorative sign, therefore, is not a charm, nor need there be any superstition in its employment: it simply stands for certain ideas and memories in our minds; re-excites and freshens them, not otherwise than speech audibly records them, except that it summons them before us by sight and touch, instead of sound. The effect, whatever it may be, is purely natural, by sequence of thought on thought, till the complexion of the mind is changed, and haply suffused with a noble glow. But in truth it is not fit to speak of commemorations, as things having efficacy at all; as desirable observances, under whose action we should put ourselves, in order to get up certain good dispositions in the heart. As soon as we see them acquiesced in, with this dutiful submission to a kind of spiritual operation, we may be sure they are already empty and dead. An expedient commemoration, deliberately maintained on utilitarian principles, for the sake of warming cold affections by artificial heat, is one of the foolish conceptions of this mechanical and sceptical age. It is quite true, that such influence is found to belong to rites of remembrance; but only so long as it is not privately looked into, or greedily contemplated by the staring eye of prudence, but simply and unconsciously received. No; commemorations must be the spontaneous fruit and outburst of a love already kindled in the soul, not the factitious contrivance for forcing it into existence. They are not the lighted match applied to the fuel on an altar cold; but the shapes in which the living flame aspires, or the fretted lights thrown by that central love on the dark temple-walls of this material life.

It is not pretended that the sacraments are mere commemorative rites. And nothing, I submit, remains, but that they should be pronounced charms. It is of little purpose to urge, in denial of this, that the Church insists upon the necessity of faith on the part of the recipient, without which no benefit, but rather peril, will accrue. This only limits the use of the charm to a certain class, and establishes a prerequisite to its proper efficacy. It simply conjoins the outward form with a certain state of mind, and gives to each of these a participation in the effect. If the faith be insufficient without the ceremony, then some efficacy is due to the rite; and this, being neither the natural operation of the material elements, nor a simple suggestion of ideas and feelings to the mind, but mystical and preternatural, is no other than a charmed efficacy.

Nor will the statement, that the effect is not upon God, but upon man, bear examination. It is very true, that the ultimate benefit of these rites is a result reputed to fall upon the worshipper;—regeneration, in the case of baptism; participation in the atonement, in the case of the Lord's Supper. But by what steps do these blessings descend? Not by those of visible or perceived causation; but through an express and extraordinary volition of God, induced by the ceremonial form, or taking occasion from it. The sacerdotal economy, therefore, is so arranged, that, whenever the priest dispenses the water at the font, the Holy Spirit follows, as in instantaneous compliance with a suggestion; and whenever he spreads his hands over the elements at the communion, God immediately establishes a preternatural relation, not subsisting the moment before, between the substances on the table and the souls of the faithful communicants: so that every partaker receives, either directly or through supernatural increase of faith, some new share in the merits of the cross. Whatever subtleties of language then may be employed, it is evidently conceived that the first consequence of these forms takes place in heaven; and that on this depends whatever benediction they may bring: nor can a plain understanding frame any other idea of them than this; first, they act upwards, and suggest something to the mind of God, who then sends down an influence on the mind of the believer. From this conception no figures of speech, no ingenious analogies, can deliver us. Do you call the sacraments "pledges of grace"? A pledge means a promise; and how a voluntary act of ours, or the priest's, can be a promise made to us by the Divine Being, it is not easy to understand. Do you call them "seals of God's covenant,"—the instrument by which he engages to make over its blessings to the Christian, like the signature and completion of a deed conveying an estate? It still perplexes us to think of a service of our own as an assurance received by us from Heaven. And one would imagine that the Divine promise, once given, were enough, without this incessant binding by periodical legalities. If it be said, "The renewal of the obligation is needful for us, and not for him"; then call the rites at once and simply, our service of self-dedication, the solemn memorial of our vows. And in spite of all metaphors, the question recurs, Does the covenant stand without these seals, or are they essential to give possession of the privileges conveyed? Are they, by means preternatural, procurers of salvation? Have they a mystical action towards this end? If so, we return to the same point; they have a charmed efficacy on the human soul.

In order to establish this, nothing more is requisite than a brief reference to the language of the Articles and Liturgical services of the Church respecting Baptism and the Communion.

Baptism is regarded, throughout the Book of Common Prayer, as the instrument of regeneration: not simply as its sign, of which the actual descent of the Holy Spirit is independent; but as itself and essentially the means or indispensable occasion of the washing away of sin. That this is regarded as a mystical and magical, not a natural and spiritual effect, is evident from the alleged fact of its occurrence in infants, to whom the rite can suggest nothing, and on whom, in the course of nature, it can leave no impression. Yet it is declared of the infant, after the use of the water, "Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this child is regenerate," &c.: at the commencement of the service its aim is said to be that God may "grant to this child that thing which by nature he cannot have,"—"would wash him and sanctify him with the Holy Ghost," that he may be "delivered from God's wrath." Nothing, indeed, is so striking in this office of the national Church, as its audacious trifling with solemn names, denoting qualities of the soul and will; the ascription of spiritual and moral attributes, not only to the child in whom they can yet have no development, but even to material substances; the frivolity with which engagements with God are made by deputy, and without the consent or even existence of the engaging will. Water is said to possess sanctity, for "the mystical washing away of sin." Infants, destitute of any idea of duty or obligation to be resisted or obeyed, are said to obtain "remission of their sins";—to "renounce the Devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world"; "steadfastly to believe" in the Apostles' Creed, and to be desirous of "baptism into this faith." Belief, desire, resolve, are acts of some one's mind: the language of this service attributes them to the personality of the infant (I renounce, I believe, I desire); yet there they cannot possibly exist. If they are to be understood as affirmed by the godfathers and godmothers of themselves, the case is not improved: for how can one person's state of faith and conscience be made the condition of the regeneration of another? What intelligible meaning can be attached to these phrases of sanctity applied to an age not responsible? In what sense, and by what indication, are these children holier than others? And with what reason, if all this be Christianity, can we blame the Pope for sprinkling holy water on the horses? The service appears little better than a profane sacerdotal jugglery, by which material things are impregnated with divine virtues, moral and spiritual qualities of the mind are sported with, the holy spirit of God is turned into a physical mystery, and the solemnity of personal responsibility is insulted.

That a superstitious value is attributed to the details of the baptismal form, in the Church of England, appears from certain parts of the service for the private ministration of the rite. If a child has been baptized by any other lawful minister than the minister of the parish, strict inquiries are to be instituted by the latter respecting the correctness with which the ceremony has been performed; and should the prescribed rules have been neglected, the baptism is invalid, and must be repeated. Yet great solicitude is manifested, lest danger should be incurred by an unnecessary repetition of the sacrament: to guard against which, the minister is to give the following conditional invitation to the Holy Spirit; saying, in his address to the child, "If thou art not already baptized, I baptize thee," &c. It is worthy of remark, that the Church mentions as one of the essentials of the service, the omission of which necessitates its repetition, the use of the formula, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." By this rule, every one of the apostolic baptisms recorded in Scripture must be pronounced invalid; and the Church of England, were it possible, would perform them again: for in no instance does it appear that the Apostles employed either this or even any equivalent form of words.

That this sacrament is regarded as an indispensable channel of grace, and positively necessary to salvation, is clear from the provision of a short and private form, to be used in cases of extreme danger. The prayers, and faith, and obedience, and patient love, of parents and friends,—the dedication and heart-felt surrender of their child to God, the profound application of their anxieties and grief to their conscience and inward life,—all this, we are told, will be of no avail, without the water and the priest. Archbishop Laud says: "That baptism is necessary to the salvation of infants (in the ordinary way of the Church, without binding God to the use and means of that sacrament, to which he hath bound us), is expressed in St. John iii., 'Except a man be born of water,' &c. So, no baptism, no entrance; nor can infants creep in, any other ordinary way."[3] Bishop Bramhall says: "Wilful neglect of baptism we acknowledge to be a damnable sin; and, without repentance and God's extraordinary mercy, to exclude a man from all hope of salvation. But yet, if such a person, before his death, shall repent and deplore his neglect of the means of grace, from his heart, and desire with all his soul to be baptized, but is debarred from it invincibly, we do not, we dare not, pass sentence of condemnation upon him; not yet the Roman Catholics themselves. The question then is, whether the want of baptism, upon invincible necessity, do evermore infallibly exclude from heaven."[4] Singular struggle here, between the merciless ritual of the priest, and the relenting spirit of the man!

The office of Communion contains even stronger marks of the same sacerdotal superstitions; and, notwithstanding the Protestant horror entertained of the mass, approaches it so nearly, that no ingenuity can exhibit them in contrast. Near doctrines, however, like near neighbors, are known to quarrel most.

The idea of a physical sanctity, residing in solid and liquid substances, is encouraged by this service. The priest consecrates the elements, by laying his hand upon all the bread, and upon every flagon containing the wine about to be dispensed. If an additional quantity is required, this too must be consecrated before its distribution. And the sacredness thus imparted is represented as surviving the celebration of the Supper, and residing in the substances as a permanent quality: for in the disposal of the bread and wine that may remain at the close of the sacramental feast, a distinction is made between the consecrated and the unconsecrated portion of the elements; the former is not permitted to quit the altar, but is to be reverently consumed by the priest and the communicants; the latter is given to the curate. What the particular change may be, which the prayer and manipulation of the minister are thought to induce, it is by no means easy to determine; nor would the discovery, perhaps, reward our pains. It is certainly conceived, that they cease to be any longer mere bread and wine, and that with them thenceforth co-exist, really and substantially, the body and blood of Christ. Respecting this Real Presence with the elements, there is no dispute between the Romish and the English Church; both unequivocally maintain it: and the only question is, respecting the Real Absence of the original and culinary bread and wine; the Roman Catholic believing that these substantially vanish, and are replaced by the body and blood of Christ; the English Protestant conceiving that they remain, but are united with the latter. The Lutheran, no less than the British Reformed Church, has clung tenaciously to the doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist, Luther himself declares: "I would rather retain, with the Romanists, only the body and blood, than adopt, with the Swiss, the bread and wine, without the real body and blood of Christ." The catechism of our Church affirms that "the body and blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper." And this was not intended to be figuratively understood, of the spiritual use and appropriation to which the faith and piety of the receiver would mentally convert the elements: for although here the body of Christ is only said to be "taken" (making it the act of the communicant), yet one of the Articles speaks of it as "given" (making it the act of the officiating priest), and implying the real presence before participation. However anxious, indeed, the clergy of the "Evangelical" school may be to disguise the fact, it cannot be doubted that their Church has always maintained a supernatural change in the elements themselves, as well as in the mind of the receiver. Cosin, Bishop of Durham, says, "We own the union between the body and blood of Christ, and the elements, whose use and office we hold to be changed from what it was before"; "we confess the necessity of a supernatural and heavenly change, and that the signs cannot become sacraments but by the infinite power of God."[5]

In consistency with this preparatory change, a charmed efficacy is attributed to the subsequent participation in the elements. Even the body of the communicant is said to be under their influence: "Grant us to eat the flesh of thy dear Son, and drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean through his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood"; and the unworthy recipients are said "to provoke God to plague them with divers diseases and sundry kinds of death." Lest the worshipper, by presenting himself in an unqualified state, should "do nothing else than increase his damnation," the unquiet conscience is directed to resort to the priest, and receive the benefit of absolution before communicating. Can we deny to the Oxford divines the merit (whatever it may be) of consistency with the theology of their Church, when they applaud and recommend, as they do, the administration of the Eucharist to infants, and to persons dying and insensible? Indeed, it is difficult to discover why infant Communion should be thought more irrational than infant Baptism. If, as I have endeavored to show, the primary action of these ceremonies is conceived to be on God, not on the mind of their object, why should not the Divine blessing be induced upon the young and the unconscious, as well as on the mature and capable soul? And were any further evidence required than I have hitherto adduced, to show on whom the Communion is conceived to operate in the first instance, it would surely be afforded by this clause in the Service: by not partaking, "Consider how great an injury ye do unto God."

The only thing wanted to complete this sacerdotal system, is to obtain for a certain class of men the corporate possession, and exclusive administration, of these essential and holy mysteries. This our Church accomplishes by its doctrine of Apostolical Succession; claiming for its ministers a lineal official descent from the Apostles, which invests them, and them alone within this realm, with divine authority to pronounce absolution or excommunication, and to administer the Sacraments. They are thus the sole guardians of the channels of the Divine Spirit and its grace, and interpose themselves between a nation and its God. "Receive the Holy Ghost," says the Service for Ordination of Priests, "for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained." "They only," says the present Bishop of Exeter, "can claim to rule over the Lord's household, whom he has himself placed over it; they only are able to minister the means of grace,—above all, to present the great commemorative sacrifice,—whom Christ has appointed, and whom he has in all generations appointed in unbroken succession from those, and through those, whom he first ordained. 'Ambassadors from Christ' must, by the very force of the term, receive credentials from Christ: 'stewards of the mysteries of God' must be intrusted with those mysteries by him. Remind your people, that in the Church only is the promise of forgiveness of sins; and though, to all who truly repent, and sincerely believe, Christ mercifully grants forgiveness, yet he has, in an especial manner, empowered his ministers to declare and pronounce to his people the absolution and remission of their sins: 'Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained.' This was the awful authority given to his first ministers, and in them, and through them, to all their successors. This is the awful authority we have received, and that we must never be ashamed nor afraid to tell the people that we have received.

"Having shown to the people your commission, show to them how our own Church has framed its services in accordance with that commission. Show this to them not only in the Ordinal, but also in the Collects, in the Communion Service, in the Office of the Visitation of the Sick; show it, especially, in that which continually presents itself to their notice, but is commonly little regarded by them; show it in the very commencement of Morning and Evening Prayer, and make them understand the full blessedness of that service, in which the Church thus calls on them to join. Let them see that there the minister authoritatively pronounces God's pardon and absolution to all them that truly repent, and unfeignedly believe Christ's holy Gospel; that he does this, even as the Apostles did, with the authority and by the appointment of our Lord himself, who, in commissioning his Apostles, gave this to be the never-failing assurance of his co-operation in their ministry: 'Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world'; a promise which, of its very nature, was not to be fulfilled to the persons of those whom he addressed, but to their office, to their successors therefore in that office, 'even unto the end of the world.' Lastly, remind and warn them of the awful sanction with which our Lord accompanied his mission, even of the second order of the ministers whom he appointed: 'He that heareth you, heareth me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth me; and he that despiseth me, despiseth him that sent me.'" That this high dignity may be clearly understood to belong in this country only to the Church of England, the Bishop proposes the question, "What, then, becomes of those who are not, or continue not, members of that (visible) Church?" and replies to it by saying, that though he "judges not them that are without," yet "he who wilfully and in despite of due warning, or through recklessness and worldly-mindedness, sets at naught its ordinances, and despises its ministers, has no right to promise to himself any share in the grace which they are appointed to convey."[6] "Why," says one of the Oxford divines, who here undeniably speaks the genuine doctrine of his Church,—"Why should we talk so much of an Establishment, and so little of an Apostolic Succession? Why should we not seriously endeavor to impress our people with this plain truth, that, by separating themselves from our communion, they separate themselves not only from a decent, orderly, useful society, but from the only Church in this realm which has a right to be quite sure that she has the Lord's body to give to his people?"[7]

Of course this divine authority has been received through the Church of Rome, so abominable in the eyes of all Evangelical clergymen; and through many an unworthy link in the broken chain. The Holy Spirit, it is acknowledged, has passed through many, on whom, apparently, it was not pleased to rest; and the right to forgive sins been conferred by those who seemed themselves to need forgiveness. A writer in the Oxford Tracts observes: "Nor even though we may admit that many of those who formed the connecting links of this holy chain were themselves unworthy of the high charge reposed in them, can this furnish us with any solid ground for doubting or denying their power to exercise that legitimate authority with which they were duly invested, of transmitting the sacred gift to worthier followers."[8]

In its doctrine of Sacraments, then, and in that of ecclesiastical authority and succession, the Church of England is thoroughly imbued with the sacerdotal character. It doubtless contains far better elements and nobler conceptions than those which it has been my duty to exhibit now; and solemnly insists on faith of heart, and truth of conscience, and Christian devotedness of life, as well as on the observance of its ritual; with the external it unites the internal condition of sanctification. But insisting on the theory of a mystic efficacy in the Christian rites, it necessarily fails to reconcile these with each other: and hence the opposite parties within its pale; the one magnifying faith and personal spirituality, the other exalting the sacraments and ecclesiastical communion. They represent respectively the two constituent and clashing powers, which met at the formation of the English Church, and of which it effected the mere compromise, not the reconciliation; I mean, the priestliness of Rome, and the prophetic spirit of the Reformers. Never, since apostolic days, did Heaven bless us with truer prophet than Martin Luther. It was his mission (no modern man had ever greater) to substitute the idea of personal faith for that of sacerdotal reliance. And gloriously, with bravery and truth of soul amid a thousand hinderances, did he achieve it. But though, ever since, the priests have been down, and faith has been up, yet did the hierarchy unavoidably remain, and insisted that something should be made of it, and at least some colorable terms proposed. Hence, every reformed church exhibits a coalition between the new and the old ideas: and combined views of religion, which must ultimately prove incompatible with each other; the formal with the spiritual; the idea of worship as a means of propitiating God, with the conception of it as an expression of love in man; the notion of Church authority with that of individual freedom; the admission of a license to think, with a prohibition of thinking wrong. In our national Church the old spirit was ascendant over the new, though long forced into quiescence by the temper of modern times. Now it is attempting to reassert its power, not without strenuous resistance. Indeed, the present age seems destined to end the compromise between the two principles, from the union of which Protestantism assumed its established forms. The truce seems everywhere breaking up: a general disintegration of churches is visible; tradition is ransacking the past for claims and dignities, and canvassing present timidity for fresh authority, to withstand the wild forces born at the Reformation, and hurrying us fast into an unknown future.

Let us now turn to the primitive Christianity; which, I submit, is throughout wholly anti-sacerdotal.

Surely it must be admitted that the general spirit of our Lord's personal life and ministry was that of the Prophet, not of the Priest; tending directly to the disparagement of whatever priesthood existed in his country, without visibly preparing the substitution of anything at all analogous to it. The sacerdotal order felt it so; and, with the infallible instinct of self-preservation, they watched, they hated, they seized, they murdered him. The priest in every age has a natural antipathy to the prophet, dreads him as kings dread revolution, and is the first to detect his existence. The solemn moment and the gracious words of Christ's first preaching in Nazareth, struck with fate the temple in Jerusalem. To the old men of the village, to the neighbors who knew his childhood, and companions who had shared its rambles and its sports, he said, with the quiet flush of inspiration: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor: he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord." The Spirit of the Lord in Galilee! speaking with the peasantry, dwelling in villages, and wandering loose and where it listeth among the hills! This would never do, thought the white-robed Levites of the Holy City; it would be as a train of wildfire in the temple. And were they not right? When it was revealed that sanctity is no thing of place and time, that a way is open from earth to heaven, from every field or mountain trod by human feet, and through every roof that shelters a human head; that, amid the crowd and crush of life, each soul is in personal solitude with God, and by speech or silence (be they but true and loving) may tell its cares and find its peace; that a divine allegiance might cost nothing, but the strife of a dutiful will and the patience of a filial heart,—how could any priesthood hope to stand? See how Jesus himself, when the temple was close at hand, and the sunshine dressed it in its splendor, yet withdrew his prayers to the midnight of Mount Olivet. He entered those courts to teach, rather than to worship; and when there, he is felt to take no consecration, but to give it; to bring with him the living spirit of God, and spread it throughout all the place. When evening closes his teachings, and he returns late over the Mount to Bethany, did he not feel that there was more of God in the night-breeze on his brow, and the heaven above him, and the sad love within him, than in the place called "Holy" which he had left? And when he had knocked at the gate of Lazarus the risen and become his guest,—when, after the labors of the day, he unburdened his spirit to the affections of that family, and spake of things divine to the sisters listening at his feet,—did they not feel, as they retired at length, that the whole house was full of God, and that there is no sanctuary like the shrine, not made with hands, within us all? In childhood, he had once preferred the temple and its teachings to his parents' home: now, to his deeper experience, the temple has lost its truth; while the cottage and the walks of Nazareth, the daily voices and constant duties of this life, seem covered with the purest consecration. True, he vindicated the sanctity of the temple, when he heard within its enclosure the hum of traffic and the chink of gain, and would not have the house of prayer turned into a place of merchandise: because in this there was imposture and a lie, and Mammon and the Lord must ever dwell apart. In nothing must there be mockery and falsehood; and while the temple stands, it must be a temple true.

Our Lord's whole ministry, then, (to which we may add that of his Apostles,) was conceived in a spirit quite opposite to that of priesthood. A missionary life, without fixed locality, without form, without rites; with teaching free, occasional, and various, with sympathies ever with the people, and a strain of speech never marked by invective, except against the ruling sacerdotal influence;—all these characters proclaim him, purely and emphatically, the Prophet of the Lord. It deserves notice that, unless as the name of his enemies, the word "Priest" (ἱερευς) never occurs in either the historical or epistolary writings of the New Testament, except in the Epistle to the Hebrews. And there its application is not a little remarkable. It is applied to Christ alone; it is declared to belong to him only after his ascension; it is said that, while on earth, he neither was, nor could be, a priest; and if it is admitted that he holds the office in heaven, this is only to satisfy the demand of the Hebrew Christians for some sacerdotal ideas in their religion, and to reconcile them to having no priest on earth. The writer acknowledges one great pontiff in the world above, that the whole race may be superseded in the world below; and banishes priesthood into invisibility, that men may never see its shadow more. All the terms of office which are given to the first preachers of the Gospel and superintendents of churches,—as Deacon, Elder or Presbyter, Overseer or Bishop,—are lay terms, belonging previously, not to ecclesiastical, but to civil life; an indication, surely, that no analogy was thought to exist between the Apostolic and the Sacerdotal relations.[9] I shall, no doubt, be reminded of the words, in which our Lord is supposed to have given their commission to his first representatives: "Whatsoever ye bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven"; and shall be asked whether this does not convey to them and their successors an official authority to forgive sins, and dispense the decrees of the unseen world. I reply briefly:—

1st. That the power here granted does not relate to the dispensations of the future life, but solely to what would be termed, in modern language, the allotment of church-membership. The previous verse proves this, furnishing as it does a particular case of the general authority here assigned. It directs the Apostles under what circumstances they are to remove an offender from a Christian society, and treat him as an unconverted man, as a heathen man and a publican. Having given them their rule, he freely trusts the application of it to them: and being about to retire erelong from personal intervention in the affairs of his kingdom, he assures them that their decisions shall be his, and that he may be considered as adopting in heaven their determinations upon earth. He simply "consigns to his Apostles discretionary power to direct the affairs of his Church, and superintend the diffusion of the glad tidings: they may bind and loose, that is, open and shut the door of admission to their community, as their judgment may determine; employing or rejecting applicants for the missionary office; dissociating from their assemblies obstinate delinquents; receiving with openness, or dismissing with suspicion, each candidate for instruction, according to their estimate of his qualifications and motives."

2dly. It is to be observed, that there is no appearance of any one being in the contemplation of our Lord, beyond the persons immediately addressed. Not a word is said of any official successor or any distant age. No indication is afforded, that any idea of futurity was present to the mind of Jesus: and a title of perpetual office, an instrument creating and endowing an endless priesthood, ought, it will be admitted, to be somewhat more explicit than this. But where the power has been successfully claimed, the title is seldom difficult to prove.

The alleged ritual of Christianity, consisting of the sacraments of Baptism and the Communion, will be found no less destitute of sanction from the Scriptures. The former we shall see reason to regard as simply an initiatory form, applicable only to Christian converts, and limited therefore to adults; the latter as purely a commemoration: neither therefore having any sacramental or mystical efficacy.

For baptism it is impossible to establish any supernatural origin. It is admitted to have existed before the Christian era; and to have been employed by the Jews on the admission of proselytes to their religion. It is certain that it is not an enjoined rite in the Mosaic dispensation; and, though prevalent before the period of the New Testament, is nowhere enforced or recognized in the writings of the Old. It arose therefore in the interval between the only two systems which Christians acknowledged to be supernatural; and must be considered as of natural and human origin, invested, thus far, with no higher authority than its own appropriateness may confer. There seem to have been two modes of construing the symbol: the one founded on the cleansing effect of the water on the person of the baptized himself; the other, on the appearance of his immersion (which was complete) to the eye of a spectator. The former was an image of the heathen convert's purification from a foul idolatry, and his transition to a stainless condition under a divine and justifying law. The latter represented him, when he vanished in the stream, as interred to this world, sunk utterly from its sight; and when he reappeared, as emerging or born again to a better state; the "old man" was "buried in baptism," and when he "rose again," he had altogether "become new."[10] The ceremony then was appropriately used in any case of transition from a depressed and corrupt state of existence to a hopeful and blessed one; from a false or imperfect religion to one true and heavenly.

But it will be said, whatever the origin of baptism, it was employed and sanctioned by our Lord, who commissioned his Apostles to go and baptize all nations. True; but is there no difference between the adoption of a practice already extant,—of a practice which was as much the mere institutional dress of the Apostles' nation, as the sandals whose dust they were to shake off against the faithless were the customary clothing of the Apostles' feet,—and the authoritative appointment of a sacrament? They were going forth to make converts: and why should they not have recourse to the form familiarly associated with the act? Familiar association recommended its adoption in that age and clime; and the absence of such association elsewhere and in other times may be thought to justify its disuse. At all events, a ceremony thus taken up must be presumed to retain its acquired sense and its established extent of application: and if so, baptism must be strictly limited to the admission of proselytes from other faiths. This accords with the known practice of the Apostles, who cannot be shown to have baptized any but those whom they had personally, or by their missionaries, persuaded to become Christians. Not a single case of the use of the rite with children can be adduced from Scripture; and the only argument by which such employment of it is ever justified is this: that a household is said to have been baptized, and all nations were to receive the offer of it; and that the household may, the nations must, have contained children. It is evident that such reasoning could never have been propounded, unless the practice had existed first, and the defence had been found afterwards.

With the system of infant baptism vanish almost all the ideas which the prevalent theology has put into the rite; and it becomes as intelligible and expressive to one who believes in the good capacities of human nature, as to those who esteem it originally depraved. "How unmeaning," say our Orthodox opponents, "is this ceremony in Unitarian hands, denying, as they do, the doctrines which it represents! Of what regeneration can they possibly suppose it the symbol, if not of the washing away of that hereditary sin which they refuse to acknowledge? for when the infant is brought to the font, he can as yet have no other guilt than this." I reply, the objection has no force except against the use of infant baptism in our churches,—which I am not anxious to defend; but of course those Unitarians who employ it conceive it to be the token, not of any sentiments which they reject, but of truths and feelings which they hold dear. For myself, I believe, with our opponents, that the doctrine of original sin and the practice of infant baptism do belong to each other, and must stand or fall together; and therefore deem it a fact very significant of the Apostles' theology, that no infant can be shown ever to have been "brought to the font" by these first true missionaries of Christianity. And as to the new birth which baptism (i. e. recent and genuine discipleship to Jesus) may give to the maturely convinced Christian, he must have a great deal to learn, not only of the Hebrew conceptions and language in relation to the Messiah, but of the spirituality of the Gospel, and of the fresh creations of character which it calls up, who can be much puzzled about its meaning.

In Christian baptism, then, we have no sacrament with mystic power; but an initiatory form, possibly of consuetudinary obligation only; but if enjoined, applicable exclusively to proselytes, and misemployed in the case of infants; a sign of conversion, not a means of salvation; confided to no sacerdotal order, but open to every man fitted to give it an appropriate use.

I turn to the Lord's Supper; with design to show what it is not, and what it is. It is not a mystery, or a sacrament, any more than it is an expiatory sacrifice. To persuade us that it has a ritual character, we are first assured that it is clearly the successor in the Gospel to the Passover under the Law. Well, even if it were so, it would still be simply commemorative, and without any other efficacy than a festival, filled with great remembrances, and inspired with religious joy. Such was the Paschal Feast in Jerusalem; the annual gathering of families and kindred, a sacred carnival under the spring sky and in sight of unreaped fields, when the memory was recalled of national deliverance, and the tale was told of traditional glories, and the thoughts brought back of bondage reversed, of the desert pilgrimage ended, of the promised land possessed. The Jewish festival was no more than this; unless, with Archbishop Magee and others, we erroneously conceive it to be a proper sacrifice. So that those who would interpret the Lord's Supper by the Passover have their choice between two views: that it is a simple commemoration; or that it is an expiatory sacrifice: in the former case they quit the Church of England; in the latter, they fall into the Church of Rome.

But, in truth, there is no propriety in applying the name "Christian Passover" to the Communion. The notion rests entirely on this circumstance: that the first three Evangelists describe the last Supper as the Paschal Supper. But the institutional part of that meal was over before the cup was distributed, and the repetition of the act enjoined. Nor is there the slightest trace, either in the subsequent Scriptures, or in the earliest history of the Church, that the Communion was thought to bear relation to the Passover. The time, the frequency, the mode, of the two were altogether different. Indeed, when we observe that not one of these particulars is prescribed and determined by our Lord at all, when we notice the slight and transient manner in which he drops his wish that they would "do this in remembrance of" him, when we compare these features of the account with the elaborate precision of Moses respecting hours, and materials, and dates, and places, and modes in the establishment of the Hebrew festivals, it is scarcely possible to avoid the impression, that we are reading narrative, not law; an utterance of personal affection, rather than the legislative enactment of an everlasting institution. However this may be, no importance can be attached to the reported coincidence in the time of that meal with the day of Passover; for the Apostle John, who gives by far the fullest account of what happened at that table (yet never mentions the institution of the Supper), states that this was not the paschal meal at all, which did not occur, he says, till the following day of crucifixion.

"But," it will be said, "the Gospels are not the only parts of Scripture whence the nature of the Eucharist may be learned. Language is employed by St. Paul in reference to it, which cannot be understood of a mere memorial, and implies that awful consequences hung on the worthy or unworthy participation in the rite. Does he not even say, that a man may 'eat and drink damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body'?"

The passage whence these words are cited certainly throws great light on the institution of which we treat; but there must be a total disregard to the whole context and the general course of the Apostle's reasoning before it can be made to yield any argument for the mystical character of the rite. It would appear that the Corinthian church was in the habit of celebrating the Lord's Supper in a way which, even if it had never been disgraced by any indecorum, must have struck a modern Christian with wonder at its singularity. The members met together in one room or church, each bringing his own supper, of such quantity and quality as his opulence or poverty might allow. To this the Apostle does not object, but apparently considers it a part of the established arrangement. But these Christians were divided into factions, and had not learned the true uniting spirit of their faith; nor do they seem to have acquired that sobriety of habit and sanctity of mind which their profession ought to have induced. When they entered the place of meeting, they broke up into groups and parties, class apart from class, and rich deserting poor: each set began its separate meal, some indulging in luxury and excess, others with scarce the means of keeping the commemoration at all; and, infamous to tell, the blessed Supper of the Lord was sunk into a tavern meal. So gross and habitual had the abuse become, that the excesses had affected the health and life of these guilty and unworthy partakers. They had made no distinction between the Communion and an ordinary repast, had lost all perception of the memorial significance of their meeting, had not discriminated or "discerned the Lord's body"; and so they had eaten and drunk judgment (improperly rendered "damnation" in the English Version) to themselves; and many were weak and sickly among them, and many even slept. Well would it be, if they would look on this as a chastening of the Lord; in which case they might take warning, and escape being cast out of the Church, and driven to take their chance with the unbelieving and heathen world. "When we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world."

In order to remedy all this corruption, St. Paul reminds them, that to eat and drink under the same roof, in the church, does not constitute proper Communion; that, to this end, they must not break up into sections, and retain their property in the food, but all participate seriously together. He directs that an absolute separation shall be made between the occasions for satisfying hunger and thirst, and those for observing this commemorative rite, discriminating carefully the memorial of the Lord's body from everything else. He refers them all to the original model of the institution, the parting meal of Christ before his betrayal; and by this example, as a criterion, he would have every man examine himself, and after that pattern eat of the bread and drink of the cup. Hence it appears,—

That the unworthy partaker was the riotous Corinthian, who made no distinction between the sacred Communion and a vulgar meal:

That the judgment or damnation which such brought on themselves, was sickliness, weakness, and premature but natural death:

That the self-examination which the Apostle recommends to the communicant is a comparison of his mode of keeping the rite with the original model of the last Supper:

That in the Corinthian church there was no Priest, or officiating dispenser of the elements; and that St. Paul did not contemplate or recommend the appointment of any such person.

The Lord's Supper, then, I conclude, was and is a simple commemoration. Am I asked: "Of what? Why, according to Unitarian views, the death on the cross merits the memorial more than the remaining features of our Lord's history,—more even than the death of many a noble martyr, who has sealed his testimony to truth by like self-sacrifice"? The answer will be found at length in the Lecture on the Atonement, where the Scriptural conceptions of Christ's death are expounded in detail. Meanwhile, it is sufficient to recall an idea, which has more than once been thrown out during this course; that, if Jesus had taken up his Messianic power without death, he would have remained a Hebrew, and been limited to the people amid whom he was born. He quitted his mortal personality, he left this fleshly tabernacle of existence, and became immortal, that his nationality might be destroyed, and all men drawn in as subjects of his reign. It was the cross that opened to the nations the blessed ways of life, and put us all in relations, not of law, but of love, to him and God. Hence the memorial of his death celebrates the universality and spirituality of the Gospel; declares the brotherhood of men, the fatherhood of providence, the personal affinity of every soul with God. That is no empty rite which overflows with these conceptions.

Christianity, then, I maintain, is without Priest and without Ritual. It altogether coalesces with the prophetic idea of religion, and repudiates the sacerdotal. Christ himself was transcendently the Prophet. He brought down God to this our life, and left his spirit amid its scenes. The Apostles were prophets; they carried that spirit abroad, revealing everywhere to men the sanctity of their nature, and the proximity of their heaven. Nor am I even unwilling to admit an apostolic succession, never yet extinct, and never more to be extinguished. But then it is by no means a rectilinear regiment of incessant priests; but a broken, scattered, yet glorious race of prophets; the genealogy of great and Christian souls, through whom the primitive conceptions of Jesus have propagated themselves from age to age; mind producing mind, courage giving birth to courage, truth developing truth, and love ever nurturing love, so long as one good and noble spirit shall act upon another. Luther surely was the child of Paul; and what a noble offspring has risen to manhood from Luther's soul, whom to enumerate were to tell the best triumphs of the modern world. These are Christ's true ambassadors; and never did he mean any follower of his to be called a priest. He has his genuine messenger, wherever, in the Church or in the world, there toils any one of the real prophets of our race; any one who can create the good and great in other souls, whether by truth of word or deed, by the inspiration of genuine speech, or the better power of a life merciful and holy.

And here, my friends, with my subject might my Lecture close, were it not that we are assembled now to terminate this controversy; and that a few remarks in reference to its whole course and spirit seem to be required.

That the recent aggression upon the principles of Unitarian Christianity was prompted by no unworthy motive, individual or political, but by a zeal, Christian so far as its spirit is disinterested, and unchristian only so far as it is exclusive, has never been doubted or denied by my brother ministers or myself. That much personal consideration and courtesy have been evinced towards us during the controversy, it is so grateful to us to acknowledge, that we must only regret the theological obstructions in the way of that mutual knowledge which softens the prejudices and corrects the errors of the closet. From such errors, the lot of our fallible nature, we are deeply aware that we cannot be exempt, and profoundly wish that, by others' aid or by our own, we could discover them. Meanwhile, we do not feel that our opponents have been successful in the offer which they have made, of help towards this end. They are too little acquainted with our history and character, and have far too great a horror of us, to succeed in a design demanding rather the benevolence of sympathy and trust than that of antipathy and fear. Hence have arisen certain complaints and charges against our system and its tendencies, which, having been reiterated again and again in the Christ Church Lectures, and scarcely noticed in our own, claim a concluding observation or two now.

1. We are said to be infidels in disguise, and our system to be drifting fast towards utter unbelief. At all events, it is said we make great advances that way.

It is by no means unusual to dismiss this charge on a whirlwind of declamation, designed to send it and the infidel to the greatest possible distance. My friend who delivered the first Lecture noticed it in a far different spirit; and in a discussion where truth and wisdom had any chance, his reply would have prevented any recurrence to the statement. Let me try to imitate him in the testimony which I desire to add upon this point.

Every one, I presume, who disbelieves anything, is, with respect to that thing, an infidel. Departure from any prevalent and established ideas is inevitably an approach to infidelity; the extent of the departure, not the reasonableness or propriety of it, is the sole measure of the nearness of that approach; which, however wise and sober, when estimated by a true and independent criterion, will appear, to persons strongly possessed by the ascendant notions, nothing less than alarming, amazing, awful. In short, the average popular creed of the day is the mental standard, from which the stadia are measured off towards that invisible, remote, nay, even imaginary place, lodged somewhere within chaos, called utter unbelief. Christianity at first was blank infidelity; and disciples, being of course the atheists of their day, were thought a fit prey for the wild beasts of the amphitheatre. Every rejection of tradition, again, is unbelief with respect to it; and to those who hold its authority, it is the denial of an essential. It is too evident to need proof, that the average popular belief cannot be assumed, by any considerate person, as a standard of truth. To make it an objection against any class of men, that they depart from it, is to prove no error against them; and no one, who is not willing to call in the passions of the multitude in suffrage on the controversies of the few, will condescend to enforce the charge.

But only observe how, in the present instance, the matter stands. In the popular religion we discern, mixed up together, two constituent portions: certain peculiar doctrines which characterize the common Orthodoxy; and certain universal Christian truths remaining, when these are subtracted. The infidel throws away both of these; we throw away the former only; and thus far, no doubt, we partially agree with him. But on what grounds do we severally justify this rejection? In answer to this question, compare the views, with respect both to the authority and to the interpretation of Scripture, held by the three parties, the Trinitarian, the Unbeliever, the Unitarian. The Unbeliever does not usually find fault with the Orthodox interpretation of the Bible, but allows it to pass, as probably the real meaning of the book, only he altogether denies the divine character and authority of the whole religion; he therefore agrees with the Trinitarian respecting interpretation, disagrees with him respecting authority. The Unitarian, again, admits the divine character of Christianity, but understands it differently from the Trinitarian; he therefore reverses the former case, agrees with the Orthodox on the authority, disagrees respecting interpretation. It follows, that with the Unbeliever he agrees in neither, and is therefore farther from him than his Trinitarian accuser.

I have given this explanation from regard simply to logical truth. I have no desire to join in the outcry against even the deliberate unbeliever in the Gospel, as if he must necessarily be a fiend. Profoundly loving and trusting Christianity myself, I yet feel indignant at the persecution which theology, policy, and law inflict on the many who, with undeniable exercise of conscientiousness and patience of research, are yet unable to satisfy themselves respecting its evidence. The very word "infidel," implying not simply an intellectual judgment, but bad moral qualities, conveys an unmerited insult, and ought to be repudiated by every generous disputant. The more deeply we trust Christianity, the more should we protest against its being defended by a body-guard of passions, willing to do for it precisely the services which they might equally render to the vulgarest imposture.

2. We were recently accused, amid acknowledgments of our honesty, with want of anxiety about spiritual truth; and the following justification of the charge was offered: "The word of God has informed us, that they who seek the truth shall find it; that they who ask for holy wisdom shall receive it; but it must be a really anxious inquiry,—a heart-felt desire for the blessing. 'If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures, then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God.' Such promises are express,—they cannot be broken,—God will give the blessing to the sincere, anxious inquirer. But the two qualities must go together. A man may be sincere in his ignorance and spiritual torpor; but let the full desire for God's favor, his pardoning mercy, and his enlightening grace spring up in the heart, and we may rest assured that the desire will soon be accomplished. Admitting, then, the sincerity of Unitarians, we doubt their anxiety, for we are well persuaded from God's promises, that, if they possessed both, they would be delivered from their miserable system, and be brought to the knowledge of the truth."[11]

The praise of our "sincerity," conveyed in these bland sentences, we are anxious to decline: not that we undervalue the quality; but because we find, on near inspection, that it has all been emptied out of the word before its presentation, and the term comes to us hollow and worthless. It affords a specimen of the mode in which alone our opponents appear able to give any credit to heretics: many phrases of approbation they freely apply to us; but they take care to draw off the whole meaning first. We must reject these "Greek presents"; and we are concerned that any Christian divine can so torture and desecrate the names of virtue, as to make them instruments of disparagement and injury. This play with words, which every conscience should hold sacred, and every lip pronounce with reverence,—this careless and unmeaning application of them in discourse,—indicates a loose adhesion to the mind of the ideas denoted by them, which we regard with unfeigned astonishment and grief. What, let me ask, can be the "sincerity" of an inquirer, who is not "anxious" about the truth? How can he be "sincerely" persuaded that he sees, who voluntarily shuts his eyes? Unless this word is to be degraded into a synonyme for indolence and self-complacency, no professed seeker of truth must have the praise of sincerity, who does not abandon all worship of his own state of mind as already perfect, who is not ready to listen to every calm doubt as to the voice of heaven,—to undertake with gratitude the labor of reaching new knowledge,—to maintain his faith and his profession in scrupulous accordance with his perception of evidence; and, at any moment of awakening, to spring from his most brilliant dreams into God's own morning light, with a matin hymn upon his lips for his new birth from darkness and from sleep. The earnestness implied in this state of mind is perhaps not precisely the same as that with which our Trinitarian opponents seem to be familiar. The "anxiety" which they appear to feel for themselves is, to keep their existing state of belief: the "anxiety" which they feel for us is, that we should have it. We are to hold ourselves ready for a change; they are not to be expected to desire it. If a doubt of our opinions should occur to us, we are to foster it carefully, and follow it out as a beckoning of the Holy Spirit: if a doubt of their sentiments should occur to them, they are to crush it on the spot, as a reptile-thought sent of Satan to tempt them. "Our aim," says the concluding Lecturer again, "has been to beget a deep spirit of inquiry";[12] and so has ours, I would reply: only you and we have severally prosecuted this aim in different ways. We have personally listened, and personally inquired, and earnestly recommended all whom our influence could reach, to do the same: and few indeed will be the Unitarian libraries containing one of these series of Lectures that will not exhibit the other by its side. You have entered this controversy, evidently strange to our literature and history; and any deficiency in such reading before, has not been compensated by anxiety to listen now. Your people have been warned against us, and are taught to regard the study of our publications as blasphemy at second hand; and were they really so simple as to act upon your avowed wish "to beget a deep spirit of inquiry," and plunge into the investigation of Unitarian authors, and judge for themselves of Unitarian worship, they would speedily hear the word of recall, and discover that they were practically disappointing the whole object of this controversy.

Having said thus much respecting the unmeaning use of language in the Lecturer's disparaging estimate of Unitarian "anxiety," we may profitably direct a moment's attention to the reasoning which it involves. It presents us with the standing fallacy of intolerance, which is sufficiently rebuked by being simply exhibited. Our opponents reason thus:—

God will not permit the really anxious fatally to err:
The Unitarians do fatally err:
Therefore, The Unitarians are not really anxious.

Now it is clear that we must conceive our opponents to be no less mistaken than they suppose us to be. They are as far from us, as we from them; and from either point, taken as a standard, the measure of error must be the same. Moreover, we cannot but eagerly assent to the principle of the Lecturer's first premise, that God will never let the truly anxious fatally miss their way. So that there is nothing, in the nature of the case, to prevent our turning this same syllogism, with a change in the names of the parties, against our opponents. Yet we should shrink, with severe self-reproach, from drawing any such unfavorable conclusion respecting them, as they deduce of us. Accordingly, we manage our reasoning thus:—

God will not permit the really anxious fatally to err:
The Trinitarians show themselves to be really anxious:
Therefore, The Trinitarians do not fatally err.

Our opponents are more sure that their judgment is in the right, than that their neighbors' conscience is in earnest. They sacrifice other men's characters to their own self-confidence: we would rather distrust our self-confidence, and rely on the visible signs of a good and careful mind. We honor other men's hearts, rather than our own heads. How can it be just, to make the agreement between an opponent's opinion and our own the criterion of his proper conduct of the inquiry? Every man feels the injury the moment the rule is turned against himself; and every good man should be ashamed to direct it against his brother.

3. Our reverend opponents affect to have labored under a great disadvantage, from the absence of any recognized standard of Unitarian belief. "We give you," they say, "our Articles and Creeds, which we unanimously undertake to defend, and which expose a definite object to all heretical attacks. In return, you can furnish us with no authorized exposition of your system, but leave us to gather our knowledge of it from individual writers, for whose opinions you refuse to be responsible, and whose reasonings, when refuted by us, you can conveniently disown."

Plausible as this complaint may appear, I venture to affirm, that it is vastly easier to ascertain the common belief of Unitarians, than that of the members of the Established Church; and for this plain reason, that with us there really is such a thing as a common faith, though defined in no confession; in the Anglican Church there is not, though articles and creeds profess it. The characteristic tenets of Unitarian Christianity are so simple and unambiguous, that little scope exists for variety in their interpretation: to the propositions expressing them all their professors attach distinct and the same ideas;—so far, at least, as such accordance is possible in relation to subjects inaccessible both to demonstration and to experience. But the Trinitarian hypothesis, venturing with presumptuous analysis far into the Divine psychology, presents us with ideas confessedly inapprehensible; propounded in language which, if used in its ordinary sense, is self-contradictory, and if not, is unmeaning, and ready in its emptiness to be filled by any arbitrary interpretation;—and actually understood so variously by those who subscribe to them, that the Calvinist and the Arminian, the Tritheist and the Sabellian, unite to praise them. Indeed, in the history of the English Church, so visible is the sweep of the centre of Orthodoxy over the whole space from the confines of Romanism to the verge of Unitarianism, that our ecclesiastical chronology is measured by its oscillations. Our respected opponents know full well, that it is not necessary to search beyond the clergy of this town, or even beyond the morning and afternoon preaching in one and the same church, in order to encounter greater contrasts in theology, than could be found in a whole library of Unitarian divinity. What mockery, then, to refer us to these articles as expositions of clerical belief, when the moment we pass beyond the words, and address ourselves to the sense, every shade of contrariety appears; and no one definite conception can be adopted of such a doctrine as that of the Trinity, without some church expositor or other starting up to rebuke it as a misrepresentation! How poor the pride of uniformity, which contents itself with lip-service to the symbol, in the midst of heart-burnings about the reality!

In order to test the force of the objection to which I am referring, let us advert, in detail, to the topics which exhibit the Unitarian and Trinitarian theology in most direct opposition. It will appear that the advantage of unity lies, in this instance, on the side of heresy; and that, if multiformity be a prime characteristic of error, there is a wide difference between orthodoxy and truth. There are four great subjects comprised in the controversy between the Church and ourselves: the nature of God; of Christ; of sin; of punishment. On these several points (which, considered as involving on our part denials of previous ideas, may be regarded as containing the negative elements of our belief) all our modern writers, without material variation or exception, maintain the following doctrines:—

Now no one at all familiar with polemical literature can deny that the modes and ambiguities of doctrine comprised in this Trinitarian list are more numerous than can be detected in the parallel "heresies." I am willing, indeed, to admit an exception in respect to the last of the topics, and to allow that the belief in the finite duration of future punishment has opposed itself, in two forms, to the single doctrine of everlasting torments. But when the systems are compared at their other corresponding points, the boast of orthodox uniformity instantly vanishes. Since the primitive jealousy between the Jewish and Gentile Christianity, the rivalry between the "Monarchy" and the "Economy," the believers in the personal unity of God, though often severed by ages from each other, have held that majestic truth in one unvaried form. Never was there an idea so often lost and recovered, yet so absolutely unchanged: a sublime but occasional visitant of the human mind, assuring us of the perpetual oneness of our own nature, as well as the Divine. We can point to no unbroken continuity of our great doctrine: and if we could, we should appeal with no confidence to the evidence of so dubious a phenomenon; for if a system of ideas once gains possession of society, and attracts to itself complicated interests and feelings, many causes may suffice to insure its indefinite preservation. But we can point to a greater phenomenon: to the long and repeated extinction of our favorite belief, to its submersion beneath a dark and restless fanaticism; and its invariable resurrection, like a necessary intuition of the soul, in times of purer light, with its features still the same; stamped with imperishable identity of truth, and, like him to whom it refers, without variableness or shadow of a turning. Meanwhile, who will undertake to enumerate and define the succession of Trinities by which this doctrine has been bewildered and banished? Passing by the Aristotelian, the Platonic, the Ciceronian, the Cartesian Trinity,—quitting the stormy disputes and contradictory decisions of the early councils, shall we find among even the modern fathers of our National Church any approach to unanimity? Am I to be content with the doctrine of Bishop Bull, and subordinate the Son to the Father as the sole fountain of divinity? Or must I rise to the Tritheism of Waterland and Sherlock? or, accepting the famous decision of the University of Oxford, descend, with Archbishop Whately, to the modal Trinity of South and Wallis? Are we to understand the phrase, three persons, to mean three beings united by "perichoresis," three "mutual inexistences," three "modes," three "differences," three "contemplations," or three "somewhats"; or, being told that this is but a vain prying into a mystery, shall we be satisfied to leave the phrase without idea at all? It is to the last degree astonishing to hear from Trinitarian divines the praises of uniformity of belief; seeing that it is one of the chief labors of ecclesiastical history to record the incessant effort, vain to the present day, to give some stability of meaning to the fundamental doctrines of their faith.

The same remark applies, with little modification, to the opposite views respecting the person of the Saviour. It is true, that Unitarians, agreed respecting the singleness of nature in Christ, differ respecting the natural rank of that nature, whether his soul were human or angelic. But, for this solitary variety among these heretics, how many doctrines of the Logos and the Incarnation does Orthodox literature contain? Can any one affirm, that, when the Council of Ephesus had arbitrated between the Eutychian doctrine of absorption, and the Nestorian doctrine of separation, all doubt and ambiguity was removed by the magic phrase "hypostatic union"? Since the monophysite contest was at its height, has the Virgin Mary been left in undisputed possession of her title as "Mother of God"? Has the Eternal Generation of the Son encountered no orthodox suspicions, and the Indwelling scheme received no orthodox support? And if we ask these questions: "What respectively happened to the two natures on the cross? what has become of Christ's human soul now? is it separate from the Godhead, like any other immortal spirit, or is it added to the Deity, so as to introduce into his nature a new and fourth element?" shall we receive from the many voices of the Church but one accordant answer? Nay, do the authors of this controversy suppose that, during its short continuance, they have been able to maintain their unanimity? If they do, I believe that any reader who thinks it worth while to register the varieties of error, would be able to undeceive them. If the diversities of doctrine cannot easily and often be shown to amount to palpable inconsistencies, this must be ascribed, I believe, to the mystic and technical phraseology, the substitute rather than the expression for precise ideas,—which has become the vernacular dialect of orthodox divinity. The jargon of theology affords a field too barren to bear so vigorous a weed as an undisputed contradiction.

It is needless to dwell on the numerous forms under which the doctrine of Atonement has been held by those who subscribe the articles of our National Church; while its Unitarian opponents have taken their fixed station on the personal character and untransferable nature of sin. One writer tells us that only the human nature perished on the cross; another, that God himself expired: some say, that Christ suffered no more intensely, but only more "meritoriously," than many a martyr; others, that he endured the whole quantity of torment due to the wicked whom he redeemed: some, that it is the spotlessness of his manhood that is imputed to believers; others, that it is the holiness of his Deity. From the high doctrine of satisfaction to the very verge of Unitarian heresy, every variety of interpretation has been given to the language of the established formularies respecting Christian redemption. Nor is it yet determined whether, in the lottery of opinion, the name of Owen, Sykes, or Magee shall be drawn for the prize of orthodoxy.

And if, from those parts of our belief to which the accidents of their historical origin have given a negative character, we turn to those which are positive, not the slightest reason will appear for charging them with uncertainty and fluctuation. All Unitarian writers maintain the Moral Perfection and Fatherly Providence of the Infinite Ruler; the Messiahship of Jesus Christ, in whose person and spirit there is a Revelation of God and a Sanctification for Man; the Responsibility and Retributive Immortality of men; and the need of a pure and devout heart of Faith, as the source of all outward goodness and inward communion with God. These great and self-luminous points, bound together by natural affinity, constitute the fixed centre of our religion. And on subjects beyond this centre we have no wider divergences than are found among those who attach themselves to an opposite system. For example, the relations between Scripture and Reason, as evidences and guides in questions of doctrine, are not more unsettled among us, than are the relations between Scripture and Tradition in the Church. Nor is the perpetual authority of the "Christian rites" so much in debate among our ministers, as the efficacy of the sacraments among the clergy. In truth, our diversities of sentiment affect far less what we believe, than the question why we believe it. Different modes of reasoning, and different results of interpretation, are no doubt to be found among our several authors. We all make our appeal to the records of Christianity; but we have voted no particular commentator into the seat of authority. And is not this equally true of our opponents' Church? Their articles and creeds furnish no textual expositions of Scripture, but only results and deductions from its study. And so variously have these results been elicited from the sacred writings, that scarcely a text can be adduced in defence of the Trinitarian scheme, which some witness unexceptionably orthodox may not be summoned to prove inapplicable. In fine, we have no greater variety of critical and exegetical opinion than the divines from whom we dissent; while the system of Christianity in which our Scriptural labors have issued, has its leading characteristics better determined and more apprehensible than the scheme which the articles and creeds have vainly labored to define.

The refusal to embody our sentiments in any authoritative formula appears to strike observers as a whimsical exception to the general practice of churches. The peculiarity has had its origin in hereditary and historical associations; but it has its defence in the noblest principles of religious freedom and Christian communion. At present, it must suffice to say, that our societies are dedicated, not to theological opinions, but to religious worship; that they have maintained the unity of the spirit, without insisting on any unity of doctrine; that Christian liberty, love, and piety are their essentials in perpetuity, but their Unitarianism an accident of a few or many generations,—which has arisen, and might vanish, without the loss of their identity. We believe in the mutability of religious systems, but the imperishable character of the religious affections;—in the progressiveness of opinion within, as well as without, the limits of Christianity. Our forefathers cherished the same conviction; and so, not having been born intellectual bondsmen, we desire to leave our successors free. Convinced that uniformity of doctrine can never prevail, we seek to attain its only good—peace on earth and communion with Heaven—without it. We aim to make a true Christendom,—a commonwealth of the faithful,—by the binding force, not of ecclesiastical creeds, but of spiritual wants and Christian sympathies; and indulge the vision of a Church that "in the latter days shall arise," like "the mountain of the Lord," bearing on its ascent the blossoms of thought proper to every intellectual clime, and withal massively rooted in the deep places of our humanity, and gladly rising to meet the sunshine from on high.

And now, friends and brethren, let us say a glad farewell to the fretfulness of controversy, and retreat again, with thanksgiving, into the interior of our own venerated truth. Having come forth, at the severer call of duty, to do battle for it, with such force as God vouchsafes to the sincere, let us go in to live and worship beneath its shelter. They tell you it is not the true faith. Perhaps not; but then you think it so; and that is enough to make your duty clear, and to draw from it, as from nothing else, the very peace of God. May be, we are on our way to something better, unexistent and unseen as yet, which may penetrate our souls with nobler affection, and give a fresh spontaneity of love to God and all immortal things. Perhaps there cannot be the truest life of faith, except in scattered individuals, till this age of conflicting doubt and dogmatism shall have passed away. Dark and leaden clouds of materialism hide the heaven from us; red gleams of fanaticism pierce through, vainly striving to reveal it; and not till the weight is heaved from off the air, and the thunders roll down the horizon, will the serene light of God flow upon us, and the blue infinite embrace us again. Meanwhile we must reverently love the faith we have; to quit it for one that we have not, were to lose the breath of life and die.

[INCONSISTENCY OF THE SCHEME OF VICARIOUS REDEMPTION.]

"Neither is there salvation in any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved."—Acts iv. 12.

The scene which we have this evening to visit and explore, is separated from us by the space of eighteen centuries; yet of nothing on this earth has Providence left, within the shadows of the past, so vivid and divine an image. Gently rising above the mighty "field of the world," Calvary's mournful hill appears, covered with silence now, but distinctly showing the heavenly light that struggled there through the stormiest elements of guilt. Nor need we only gaze, as on a motionless picture that closes the vista of Christian ages. Permitting history to take us by the hand, we may pace back in pilgrimage to the hour, till its groups stand around us, and pass by us, and its voices of passion and of grief mock and wail upon our ear. As we mingle with the crowd which, amid noise and dust, follows the condemned prisoners to the place of execution, and fix our eye on the faint and panting figure of one that bears his cross, could we but whisper to the sleek priests close by, how might we startle them, by telling them the future fate of this brief tragedy,—brief in act, in blessing everlasting; that this Galilean convict shall be the world's confessed deliverer, while they that have brought him to this shall be the scorn and by-word of the nations; that that vile instrument of torture, now so abject that it makes the dying slave more servile, shall be made, by this victim and this hour, the symbol of whatever is holy and sublime; the emblem of hope and love; pressed to the lips of ages; consecrated by a veneration which makes the sceptre seem trivial as an infant's toy. Meanwhile, the sacerdotal hypocrites, unconscious of the part they play, watch to the end the public murder which they have privately suborned; stealing a phrase from Scripture, that they may mock with holy lips; and leaving to the plebeian soldiers the mutual jest and brutal laugh, that serve to beguile the hired but hated work of agony, and that draw forth from the sufferer that burst of forgiving prayer, which sunk at least into their centurion's heart. One there is, who should have been spared the hearing of these scoffs; and perhaps she heard them not; for before his nature was exhausted more, his eye detects and his voice addresses her, and twines round her the filial arm of that disciple, who had been ever the most loving as well as most beloved. She at least lost the religion of that hour in its humanity, and beheld not the prophet, but the son:—had not her own hands wrought that seamless robe for which the soldiers' lot is cast; and her own lips taught him that strain of sacred poetry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" but never had she thought to hear it thus. As the cries become fainter and fainter, scarcely do they reach Peter standing afar off. The last notice of him had been the rebuking look that sent him to weep bitterly; and now the voice that alone can tell him his forgiveness will soon be gone! Broken hardly less, though without remorse, is the youthful John, to see that head, lately resting on his bosom, drooping passively in death; and to hear the involuntary shriek of Mary, as the spear struck upon the lifeless body, moving now only as it is moved;—whence he alone, on whom she leaned, records the fact. Well might the Galilean friends stand at a distance gazing; unable to depart, yet not daring to approach; well might the multitudes that had cried "Crucify him!" in the morning, shudder at the thought of that clamor ere night; "beholding the things that had come to pass, they smote their breasts and returned."

This is the scene of which we have to seek the interpretation. Our first natural impression is, that it requires no interpretation, but speaks for itself; that it has no mystery, except that which belongs to the triumphs of deep guilt, and the sanctities of disinterested love. To raise our eye to that serene countenance, to listen to that submissive voice, to note the subjects of its utterance, would give us no idea of any mystic horror concealed behind the human features of the scene; of any invisible contortions, as from the lash of demons, in the soul of that holy victim; of any sympathetic connection of that cross with the bottomless pit on the one hand, and the highest heaven on the other; of any moral revolution throughout our portion of the universe, of which this public execution is but the outward signal. The historians drop no hint that its sufferings, its affections, its relations, were other than human,—raised indeed to distinction by miraculous accompaniments; but intrinsically, however signally, human. They mention, as if bearing some appreciable proportion to the whole series of incidents, particulars so slight, as to vanish before any other than the obvious historical view of the transaction; the thirst, the sponge, the rent clothes, the mingled drink. They ascribe no sentiment to the crucified, except such as might be expressed by one of like nature with ourselves, in the consciousness of a finished work of duty, and a fidelity never broken under the strain of heaviest trial. The narrative is clearly the production of minds filled, not with theological anticipations, but with historical recollections.

With this view of Christ's death, which is such as might be entertained by any of the primitive churches, having one of the Gospels only, without any of the Epistles, we are content. I conceive of it, then, as manifesting the last degree of moral perfection in the Holy One of God; and believe that, in thus being an expression of character, it has its primary and everlasting value. I conceive of it as the needful preliminary to his resurrection and ascension, by which the severest difficulties in the theory of Providence, life, and duty are alleviated or solved. I conceive of it as immediately procuring the universality and spirituality of the Gospel; by dissolving those corporeal ties which gave nationality to Jesus, and making him, in his heavenly and immortal form, the Messiah of humanity; blessing, sanctifying, regenerating, not a people from the centre of Jerusalem, but a world from his station in the heavens. And these views, under unimportant modifications, I submit, are the only ones of which Scripture contains a trace.

All this, however, we are assured, is the mere outside aspect of the crucifixion; and wholly insignificant compared with the invisible character and relations of the scene; which, localized only on earth, has its chief effect in hell; and, though presenting itself among the occurrences of time, is a repeal of the decretals of Eternity. The being who hangs upon that cross is not man alone; but also the everlasting God, who created and upholds all things, even the sun that now darkens its face upon him, and the murderers who are waiting for his expiring cry. The anguish he endures is not chiefly that which falls so poignantly on the eye and ear of the spectator; the injured human affections, the dreadful momentary doubt; the pulses of physical torture, doubling on him with full or broken wave, till driven back by the overwhelming power of love disinterested and divine. But he is judicially abandoned by the Infinite Father; who expends on him the immeasurable wrath due to an apostate race, gathers up into an hour the lightnings of Eternity, and lets them loose upon that bended head. It is the moment of retributive justice; the expiation of all human guilt: that open brow hides beneath it the despair of millions of men; and to the intensity of agony there, no human wail could give expression. Meanwhile, the future brightens on the elect; the tempests that hung over their horizon are spent. The vengeance of the lawgiver having had its way, the sunshine of a Father's grace breaks forth, and lights up, with hope and beauty, the earth, which had been a desert of despair and sin. According to this theory, Christ, in his death, was a proper expiatory sacrifice; he turned aside, by enduring it for them, the infinite punishment of sin from all past or future believers in this efficacy of the cross; and transferred to them the natural rewards of his own righteousness. An acceptance of this doctrine is declared to be the prime condition of the Divine forgiveness; for no one who does not see the pardon can have it. And this pardon, again, this clear score for the past, is a necessary preliminary to all sanctification; to all practical opening of a disinterested heart towards our Creator and man. Pardon, and the perception of it, are the needful preludes to that conforming love to God and men, which is the true Christian salvation.

The evidence in support of this theory is derived partly from natural appearances, partly from Scriptural announcements. Involving, as it does, statements respecting the actual condition of human nature, and the world in which we live, some appeal to experience, and to the rational interpretation of life and Providence, is inevitable; and hence certain propositions, affecting to be of a philosophical character, are laid down as fundamental by the advocates of this system. Yet it is admitted, that direct revelation only could have acquainted us, either with our lost condition, or our vicarious recovery; and that all we can expect to accomplish with nature, is to harmonize what we observe there with what we read in the written records of God's will; so that the main stress of the argument rests on the interpretation of Scripture. The principles deduced from the nature of things, and laid down as a basis for this doctrine, may be thus represented:—

That man needs a Redeemer; having obviously fallen, by some disaster, into a state of misery and guilt, from which the worst penal consequences must be apprehended; and were it not for the probability of such lapse from the condition in which it was fashioned, it would be impossible to reconcile the phenomena of the world with the justice and benevolence of its Creator.

That Deity only can redeem; since, to preserve veracity, the penalty of sin must be inflicted; and the diversion only, not the annihilation of it, is possible. To let it fall on angels would fail of the desired end; because human sin, having been directed against an Infinite Being, has incurred an infinitude of punishment; which on no created beings could be exhausted in any period short of eternity. Only a nature strictly infinite can compress within itself, in the compass of an hour, the woes distributed over the immortality of mankind. Hence, were God personally One, like man, no redemption could be effected; for there would be no Deity to suffer, except the very One who must punish. But the triplicity of the Godhead relieves all difficulty; for, while one Infinite inflicts, another Infinite endures; and resources are furnished for the atonement.

Amid a great variety of forms in which the theory of atonement exists, I have selected the foregoing; which, if I understand aright, is that which is vindicated in the present controversy. I am not aware that I have added anything to the language in which it is stated by its powerful advocate, unless it be a few phrases, leaving its essential meaning the same, but needful to render it compact and clear.

The Scriptural evidence is found principally in certain of the Apostolical Epistles; and this circumstance will render it necessary to conduct a separate search into the historical writings of the New Testament, that we may ascertain how they express the corresponding set of ideas. Taking up successively these two branches of the subject, the natural and the Biblical, I propose to show, first, that this doctrine is inconsistent with itself; secondly, that it is inconsistent with the Christian idea of salvation.

I. It is inconsistent with itself.

(1.) In its manner of treating the principles of natural religion.

Our faith in the infinite benevolence of God is represented as destitute of adequate support from the testimony of nature. It requires, we are assured, the suppression of a mass of appearances, that would scare it away in an instant, were it to venture into their presence; and is a dream of sickly and effeminate minds, whose belief is the inward growth of amiable sentimentality, rather than a genuine production from God's own facts. The appeal to the order and magnificence of creation, to the structures and relations of the inorganic, the vegetable, the animal, the spiritual forms, that fill the ascending ranks of this visible and conscious universe;—to the arrangements which make it a blessing to be born, far more than a suffering to die,—which enable us to extract the relish of life from its toils, the affections of our nature from its sufferings, the triumphs of goodness from its temptations;—to the seeming plan of general progress, which elicits truth by the self-destruction of error, and by the extinction of generations gives perpetual rejuvenescence to the world;—this appeal, which is another name for the scheme of natural religion, is dismissed with scorn; and sin and sorrow and death are flung in defiance across our path,—barriers which we must remove, ere we can reach the presence of a benignant God. Come with us, it is said, and listen to the wail of the sick infant; look into the dingy haunts where poverty moans its life away; bend down your ear to the accursed hum that strays from the busy hives of guilt; spy into the hold of the slave-ship; from the factory follow the wasted child to the gin-shop first, and then to the cellar called its home; or look even at your own tempted and sin-bound souls, and your own perishing race, snatched off into the dark by handfuls through the activity of a destroying God; and tell us, did our benevolent Creator make a creature and a world like this? A Calvinist who puts this question is playing with fire. But I answer the question explicitly: All these things we have met steadily, and face to face; in full view of them, we have taken up our faith in the goodness of God; and in full view of them we will hold fast that faith. Nor is it just or true to affirm, that our system hides these evils, or that our practice refuses to grapple with them. And if you confess that these ills of life would be too much for your natural piety, if you declare, that these rugged foundations and tempestuous elements of Providence would starve and crush your confidence in God, while ours strikes its roots in the rock, and throws out its branches to brave the storm, are you entitled to taunt us with a faith of puny growth? Meanwhile, we willingly assent to the principle which this appeal to evil is designed to establish; that, with much apparent order, there is some apparent disorder in the phenomena of the world; that from the latter, by itself, we should be unable to infer any goodness and benevolence in God; and that, were not the former clearly the predominant result of natural laws, the character of the Great Cause of all things would be involved in agonizing gloom. The mass of physical and moral evil we do not profess fully to explain; we think that in no system whatever is there any approach to an explanation; and we are accustomed to touch on that dread subject with the humility of filial trust, not with the confidence of dogmatic elucidation.

Surely the fall of our first parents, I shall be reminded, gives the requisite solution. The disaster which then befell the human race has changed the primeval constitution of things; introduced mortality and all the infirmities of which it is the result; introduced sin, and all the seeds of vile affections which it compels us to inherit; introduced also the penalties of sin, visible in part on this scene of life, and developing themselves in another in anguish everlasting. Fresh from the hand of his Creator, man was innocent, happy, and holy; and he it is, not God, who has deformed the world with guilt and grief.

Now, as a statement of fact, all this may or may not be true. Of this I say nothing. But who does not see that, as an explanation, it is inconsistent with itself, partial in its application, and leaves matters incomparably worse than it found them? It is inconsistent with itself; for Adam, perfectly pure and holy as he is reputed to have been, gave the only proof that could exist of his being neither, by succumbing to the first temptation that came in his way; and though finding no enjoyment but in the contemplation of God, gave himself up to the first advances of the Devil. Never surely was a reputation for sanctity so cheaply won. The canonizations of the Romish Calendar have been curiously bestowed on beings sufficiently remote from just ideas of excellence; but usually there is something to be affirmed of them, legendary or otherwise, which, if true, might justify a momentary admiration. But our first parent was not laid even under this necessity, to obtain a glory greater than canonization; he had simply to do nothing, except to fall, in order to be esteemed the most perfectly holy of created minds. Most partial, too, is this theory in its application; for disease and hardship, and death unmerited as the infant's, afflict the lower animal creation. Is this, too, the result of the fall? If so, it is an unredeemed effect; if not, it presses on the benevolence of the Maker, and, by the physical analogies which connect man with the inferior creatures, forces on us the impression, that his corporeal sufferings have an original source not dissimilar from theirs. And again, this explanation only serves to make matters worse than before. For how puerile is it to suppose that men will rest satisfied with tracing back their ills to Adam, and refrain from asking who was Adam's cause! And then comes upon us at once the ancient dilemma about evil; was it a mistake, or was it malignity, that created so poor a creature as our progenitor, and staked on so precarious a will the blessedness of a race and the well-being of a world? So far, this theory, falsely and injuriously ascribed to Christianity, would leave us where we were: but it carries us into deeper and gratuitous difficulties, of which natural religion knows nothing, by appending eternal consequences to Adam's transgression; a large portion of which, after the most sanguine extension of the efficacy of the atonement, must remain unredeemed. So that if, under the eye of naturalism, the world, with its generations dropping into the grave, must appear (as we heard it recently described[13]) like the populous precincts of some castle, whose governor called his servants, after a brief indulgence of liberty and peace, into a dark and inscrutable dungeon, never to return or be seen again, the only new feature which this theory introduces into the prospect is this: that the interior of that cavernous prison-house is disclosed; and while a few of the departed are seen to have emerged into a fairer light, and to be traversing greener fields, and sharing a more blessed liberty than they knew before, the vast multitude are discerned in the gripe of everlasting chains and the twist of unimaginable torture. And all this infliction is a penal consequence of a first ancestor's transgression! Singular spectacle to be offered in vindication of the character of God!

We are warned, however, not to start back from this representation, or to indulge in any rash expression at the view which it gives of the justice of the Most High; for that, beyond all doubt, parallel instances occur in the operations of nature; and that, if the system deduced from Scripture accords with that which is in action in the creation, there arises a strong presumption that both are from the same Author. The arrangement which is the prime subject of objection in the foregoing theory, viz. the vicarious transmission of consequences from acts of vice and virtue, is said to be familiar to our observation as a fact; and ought, therefore, to present no difficulties in the way of the admission of a doctrine. Is it not obvious, for example, that the guilt of a parent may entail disease and premature death on his child, or even remoter descendants? And if it be consistent with the Divine perfections that the innocent should suffer for others' sins at the distance of one generation, why not at the distance of a thousand? The guiltless victim is not more completely severed from identity with Adam, than he is from identity with his own father. My reply is brief: I admit both the fact and the analogy; but the fact is of the exceptional kind, from which, by itself, I could not infer the justice or the benevolence of the Creator; and which, were it of large and prevalent amount, I could not even reconcile with these perfections. If then you take it out of the list of exceptions and difficulties, and erect it into a cardinal rule, if you interpret by it the whole invisible portion of God's government, you turn the scale at once against the character of the Supreme, and plant creation under a tyrant's sway. And this is the fatal principle pervading all analogical arguments in defence of Trinitarian Christianity. No resemblances to the system can be found in the universe, except in those anomalies and seeming deformities which perplex the student of Providence, and which would undermine his faith, were they not lost in the vast spectacle of beauty and of good. These disorders are selected and spread out to view, as specimens of the Divine government of nature; the mysteries and horrors which offend us in the popular theology are extended by their side; the comparison is made, point by point, till the similitude is undeniably made out; and when the argument is closed it amounts to this: Do you doubt whether God could break men's limbs? You mistake his strength of character; only see how he puts out their eyes! What kind of impression this reasoning may have, seems to me doubtful even to agony. Both Trinitarian theology and nature, it is triumphantly urged, must proceed from the same Author; ay, but what sort of author is that? You have led me, in your quest after analogies, through the great infirmary of God's creation; and so haunted am I by the sights and sounds of the lazar-house, that scarce can I believe in anything but pestilence; so sick of soul have I become, that the mountain breeze has lost its scent of health; and you say, it is all the same in the other world, and wherever the same rule extends: then I know my fate, that in this universe Justice has no throne. And thus, my friends, it comes to pass, that these reasoners often gain indeed their victory; but it is known only to the Searcher of Hearts, whether it is a victory against natural religion, or in favor of revealed. For this reason I consider the "Analogy" of Bishop Butler (one of the profoundest of thinkers, and on purely moral subjects one of the justest too) as containing, with a design directly contrary, the most terrible persuasives to Atheism that have ever been produced. The essential error consists in selecting the difficulties,—which are the rare, exceptional phenomena of nature,—as the basis of analogy and argument. In the comprehensive and generous study of Providence, the mind may, indeed, already have overcome the difficulties, and, with the lights recently gained from the harmony, design, and order of creation, have made those shadows pass imperceptibly away; but when forced again into their very centre, compelled to adopt them as a fixed station and point of mental vision, they deepen round the heart again, and, instead of illustrating anything, become solid darkness themselves.

I cannot quit this topic without observing, however, that there appears to be nothing in nature and life at all analogous to the vicarious principle attributed to God in the Trinitarian scheme of Redemption. There is nowhere to be found any proper transfer or exchange, either of the qualities, or of the consequences, of vice and virtue. The good and evil acts of men do indeed affect others as well as themselves; the innocent suffer with the guilty, as in the case before adduced, of a child suffering in health by the excesses of a parent. But there is here no endurance for another, similar to Christ's alleged endurance in the place of men; the infliction on the child is not deducted from the parent; it does nothing to lighten his load, or make it less than it would have been, had he been without descendants; nor does any one suppose his guilt alleviated by the existence of this innocent fellow-sufferer. There is a nearer approach to analogy in those cases of crime, where the perpetrator seems to escape, and to leave the consequences of his act to descend on others; as when the successful cheat eludes pursuit, and from the stolen gains of neighbors constructs a life of luxury for himself; or when a spendthrift government, forgetful of its high trust, turning the professions of patriotism into a lie, is permitted to run a prosperous career for one generation, and is personally gone before the popular retribution falls, in the next, on innocent successors. Here, no doubt, the harmless suffer by the guilty, in a certain sense in the place of the guilty: but not in the sense which the analogy requires. For there is still no substitution; the distress of the unoffending party is not struck out of the offender's punishment; does not lessen, but rather aggravates, his guilt; and, instead of fitting him for pardon, tempts the natural sentiments of justice to follow him with severer condemnation. Nor does the scheme receive any better illustration from the fact, that whoever attempts the cure of misery must himself suffer; must have the shadows of ill cast upon his spirit from every sadness he alleviates; and interpose himself to stay the plague which, in a world diseased, threatens to pass to the living from the dead. The parallel fails, because there is still no transference: the appropriate sufferings of sin are not given to the philanthropist; and the noble pains of goodness in him, the glorious strife of his self-sacrifice, are no part of the penal consequences of others' guilt; they do not cancel one iota of those consequences, or make the crimes which have demanded them, in any way, more ready for forgiveness. Indeed, it is not in the good man's sufferings, considered as such, that any efficacy resides; but in his efforts, which may be made with great sacrifice or without it, as the case may be. Nor, at best, is there any proper annihilation of consequences at all accruing from his toils; the past acts of wrong which call up his resisting energies are irrevocable, the guilt incurred, the penalty indestructible; the series of effects, foreign to the mind of the perpetrator, may be abbreviated; prevention applied to new ills which threaten to arise; but by all this the personal fitness of the delinquent for forgiveness is wholly unaffected; the volition of sin has gone forth, and on it flies, as surely as sound on a vibration of the air, the verdict of judgment.

Those who are affected by slight and failing analogies like these, would do well to consider one, sufficiently obvious, which seems to throw doubt upon their scheme. The atonement is thought to be, in respect to all believers, a reversal of the fall: the effects of the fall are partly visible and temporal, partly invisible and eternal; linked, however, together as inseparable portions of the same penal system. Now it is evident, that the supposed redemption on the cross has left precisely where they were all the visible effects of the first transgression: sorrow and toil are the lot of all, as they have been from of old; the baptized infant utters a cry as sad as the unbaptized; and between the holiness of the true believer and the worth of the devout heretic, there is not discernible such a difference as there must have been between Adam pure and perfect and Adam lapsed and lost. And is it presumptuous to reason from the seen to the unseen, from the part which we experience to that which we can only conceive? If the known effects are unredeemed, the suspicion is not unnatural, that so are the unknown.

I sum up, then, this part of my subject by observing, that, besides many inconclusive appeals to nature, the advocates of the vicarious scheme are chargeable with this fundamental inconsistency. They appear to deny that the justice and benevolence of God can be reconciled with the phenomena of nature; and say that the evidence must be helped out by resort to their interpretation of Scripture. When, having heard this auxiliary system, we protest that it renders the case sadder than before, they assure us that it is all benevolent and just, because it has its parallel in creation. They renounce and adopt, in the same breath, the religious appeal to the universe of God.

(2.) Another inconsistency appears, in the view which this theory gives of the character of God.

It is assumed that, at the era of creation, the Maker of mankind had announced the infinite penalties which must follow the violation of his law; and that their amount did not exceed the measure which his abhorrence of wrong required. "And that which he saith, he would not be God if he did not perform: that which he perceived right, he would be unworthy of our trust, did he not fulfil. His veracity and justice, therefore, were pledged to adhere to the word that had gone forth; and excluded the possibility of any free and unconditional forgiveness." Now I would note, in passing, that this announcement to Adam of an eternal punishment impending over his first sin, is simply a fiction; for the warning to him is stated thus: "In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die"; from which our progenitor must have been ingenious as a theologian, to extract the idea of endless life in hell. But to say no more of this, what notions of veracity have we here? When a sentence is proclaimed against crime, is it indifferent to judicial truth upon whom it falls? Personally addressed to the guilty, may it descend without a lie upon the guiltless? Provided there is the suffering, is it no matter where? Is this the sense in which God is no respecter of persons? O what deplorable reflection of human artifice is this, that Heaven is too veracious to abandon its proclamation of menace against transgressors, yet is content to vent it on goodness the most perfect! No darker deed can be imagined, than is thus ascribed to the Source of all perfection, under the insulted names of truth and holiness. What reliance could we have on the faithfulness of such a Being? If it be consistent with his nature to punish by substitution, what security is there that he will not reward vicariously? All must be loose and unsettled, the sentiments of reverence confused, the perceptions of conscience indistinct, where the terms expressive of those great moral qualities which render God himself most venerable are thus sported with and profaned.

The same extraordinary departure from all intelligible meaning of words is apparent, when our charge of vindictiveness against the doctrine of sacrifice is repelled as a slander. If the rigorous refusal of pardon till the whole penalty has been inflicted, (when, indeed, it is no pardon at all,) be not vindictive, we may ask to be furnished with some better definition. And though it is said, that God's love was manifested to us by the gift of his Son, this does but change the object on which this quality is exercised, without removing the quality itself; putting us indeed into the sunshine of his grace, but the Saviour into the tempest of his wrath. Did we desire to sketch the most dreadful form of character, what more emphatic combination could we invent than this,—rigor in the exaction of penal suffering, and indifference as to the person on whom it falls?

But in truth this system, in its delineations of the Great Ruler of creation, bids defiance to all the analogies by which Christ and the Christian heart have delighted to illustrate his nature. A God who could accept the spontaneously returning sinner, and restore him by corrective discipline, is pronounced not worth serving, and an object of contempt.[14] If so, Jesus sketched an object of contempt when he drew the father of the prodigal son, opening his arms to the poor penitent, and needing only the sight of his misery to fall on his neck with the kiss of welcome home. Let the assertions be true, that sacrifice and satisfaction are needful preliminaries to pardon, that to pay any attention to repentance without these is mere weakness, and that it is a perilous deception to teach the doctrine of mercy apart from the atonement, and this parable of our Saviour's becomes the most pernicious instrument of delusion,—a statement, absolute and unqualified, of a feeble and sentimental heresy. Who does not see what follows from this scornful exclusion of corrective punishment? Suppose the infliction not to be corrective, that is, not to be designed for any good, what then remains as the cause of the Divine retribution? The sense of insult offered to a law. And thus we are virtually told, that God must be regarded with a mixture of contempt, unless he be susceptible of personal affront.

(3.) The last inconsistency with itself, which I shall point out in this doctrine, will be found in the view which it gives of the work of Christ. Sin, we are assured, is necessarily infinite. Its infinitude arises from its reference to an Infinite Being, and involves as a consequence the necessity of redemption by Deity himself.

The position, that guilt is to be estimated, not by its amount or its motive, but by the dignity of the being against whom it is directed, is illustrated by the case of an insubordinate soldier, whose punishment is increased according as his rebellion assails an equal or any of the many grades amongst his superiors. It is evident, however, that it is not the dignity of the person, but the magnitude of the effect, which determines the severity of the sanction by which, in such an instance, law enforces order. Insult to a monarch is more sternly treated than injury to a subject, because it incurs the risk of wider and more disastrous consequences, and superadds to the personal injury a peril to an official power which, not resting on individual superiority, but on conventional arrangement, is always precarious. It is not indeed easy to form a distinct notion of an infinite act in a finite agent; and still less is it easy to evade the inference, that, if an immoral deed against God be an infinite demerit, a moral deed towards him must be an infinite merit.

Passing by an assertion so unmeaning, and conceding it for the sake of progress in our argument, I would inquire what is intended by that other statement, that only Deity can redeem, and that by Deity the sacrifice was made? The union of the divine and human natures in Christ is said to have made his sufferings meritorious in an infinite degree. Yet we are repeatedly assured, that it was in his manhood only that he endured and died. If the divine nature in our Lord had a joint consciousness with the human, then did God suffer and perish; if not, then did the man only die, Deity being no more affected by his anguish, than by that of the malefactors on either side. In the one case the perfections of God, in the other the reality of the atonement, must be relinquished. No doubt, the popular belief is, that the Creator literally expired; the hymns in common use declare it; the language of pulpits sanctions it; the consistency of creeds requires it; but professed theologians repudiate the idea with indignation. Yet by silence or ambiguous speech, they encourage, in those whom they are bound to enlighten, this degrading humanization of Deity; which renders it impossible for common minds to avoid ascribing to him emotions and infirmities totally irreconcilable with the serene perfections of the Universal Mind. In his influence on the worshipper, He is no Spirit, who can be invoked by his agony and bloody sweat, his cross and passion. And the piety that is thus taught to bring its incense, however sincere, before the mental image of a being with convulsed features and expiring cry, has little left of that which makes Christian devotion characteristically venerable.

II. I proceed to notice the inconsistency of the doctrine under review with the Christian idea of salvation.

There is one significant Scriptural fact, which suggests to us the best mode of treating this part of our subject. It is this: that the language supposed to teach the atoning efficacy of the cross does not appear in the New Testament till the Gentile controversy commences, nor ever occurs apart from the treatment of that subject, under some of its relations. The cause of this phenomenon will presently appear; meanwhile I state it, in the place of an assertion sometimes incorrectly made, viz. that the phraseology in question is confined to the Epistles. Even this mechanical limitation of sacrificial passages is indeed nearly true, as not above three or four have strayed beyond the epistolary boundary into the Gospels and the book of Acts; but the restriction in respect of subject, which I have stated, will be found, I believe, to be absolutely exact, and to furnish the real interpretation to the whole system of language.

(1.) Let us then first test the vicarious scheme by reference to the sentiments of Scripture generally, and of our Lord and his Apostles especially, where this controversy is out of the way. Are their ideas respecting human character, the forgiveness of sin, the terms of everlasting life, accordant with the cardinal notions of a believer in the atonement? Do they, or do they not, insist on the necessity of a sacrifice for human sin, as a preliminary to pardon, to sanctification, to the love of God? Do they, or do they not, direct a marked and almost exclusive attention to the cross, as the object to which, far more than to the life and resurrection of our Lord, all faithful eyes should be directed?

(a.) Now to the fundamental assertion of the vicarious system, that the Deity cannot, without inconsistency and imperfection, pardon on simple repentance, the whole tenor of the Bible is one protracted and unequivocal contradiction. So copious is its testimony on this head, that if the passages containing it were removed, scarcely a shred of Scripture relating to the subject would remain. "Pardon, I beseech thee," said Moses, pleading for the Israelites, "the iniquity of this people, according to the greatness of thy mercy, and as thou hast forgiven this people from Egypt even until now. And the Lord said, I have pardoned according to thy word." Will it be affirmed, that this chosen people had their eyes perpetually fixed in faith on the great propitiation, which was to close their dispensation, and of which their own ceremonial was a type?—that whenever penitence and pardon are named amongst them, this reference is implied, and that as this faith was called to mind and expressed in the shedding of blood at the altar, such sacrificial offerings take the place, in Judaism, of the atoning trust in Christianity? Well, then, let us quit the chosen nation altogether, and go to a heathen people, who were aliens to their laws, their blood, their hopes, and their religion; to whom no sacrifice was appointed, and no Messiah promised. If we can discover the dealings of God with such a people, the case, I presume, must be deemed conclusive. Hear, then, what happened on the banks of the Tigris. "Jonah began to enter into the city," (Nineveh,) "and he cried and said, yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even unto the least of them." "Who can tell," (said the decree of the king ordaining the fast,) "if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not? And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that he had said he would do unto them; and he did it not." And when the prophet was offended, first at this clemency to Nineveh, and afterwards that the canker was sent to destroy his own favorite plant, beneath whose shadow he sat, what did Jehovah say? "Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night and perished in a night; and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand?"—and who are not likely, one would think, to have discerned the future merits of the Redeemer.

In truth, if even the Israelites had any such prospective views to Calvary, if their sacrifices conveyed the idea of the cross erected there, and were established for this purpose, the fact must have been privately revealed to modern theologians; for not a trace of it can be found in the Hebrew writings. It must be thought strange, that a prophetic reference so habitual should be always a secret reference; that a faith so fundamental should be so mysteriously suppressed; that the uppermost idea of a nation's mind should never have found its way to lips or pen. "But if it were not so," we are reminded, "if the Jewish ritual prefigured nothing ulterior, it was revolting, trifling, savage; its worship a butchery, and the temple courts no better than a slaughter-house." And were they not equally so, though the theory of types be true? If neither priest nor people could see at the time the very thing which the ceremonial was constructed to reveal, what advantage is it that divines can see it now? And even if the notion was conveyed to the Jewish mind, (which the whole history shows not to have been the fact,) was it necessary that hecatombs should be slain, age after age, to intimate obscurely an idea, which one brief sentence might have lucidly expressed? The idea, however, it is evident, slipped through after all; for when Messiah actually came, the one great thing which the Jews did not know and believe about him was, that he could die at all. So much for the preparatory discipline of fifteen centuries!

There is no reason, then, why anything should be supplied in our thoughts, to alter the plain meaning of the announcements of prophets and holy men, of God's unconditional forgiveness on repentance. "Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it; thou delightest not in burnt-offering; the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." "Wash you, make you clean," says the prophet Isaiah in the name of the Lord; "put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes, cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." Once more, "When I say unto the wicked, thou shalt surely die; if he turn from his sin, and do that which is lawful and right; if the wicked restore the pledge, give again that he hath robbed, walk in the statutes of life without committing iniquity; he shall surely live, he shall not die." Nor are the teachings of the Gospel at all less explicit. Our Lord treats largely and expressly on the doctrine of forgiveness in several parables, and especially that of the prodigal son; and omits all allusion to the propitiation for the past. He furnishes an express definition of the terms of eternal life: "Good master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good save one, that is God; but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments." And Jesus adds, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." This silence on the prime condition of pardon cannot be explained by the fact, that the crucifixion had not yet taken place, and could not safely be alluded to, before the course of events had brought it into prominent notice. For we have the preaching of the Apostles, after the ascension, recorded at great length, and under very various circumstances, in the book of Acts. We have the very "words whereby," according to the testimony of an angel, "Cornelius and all his house shall be saved"; these, one would think, would be worth hearing in this cause: "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost, and with power; who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the Devil, for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all things which he did, both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree. Him God raised up the third day, and showed openly; not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is he who was ordained of God to be the judge of quick and dead. To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins." Did an Evangelical missionary dare to preach in this style now, he would be immediately disowned by his employers, and dismissed as a disguised Socinian, who kept back all the "peculiar doctrines of the Gospel."

(b.) The emphatic mention of the resurrection by the Apostle Peter in this address, is only a particular instance of a system which pervades the whole preaching of the first missionaries of Christ. This, and not the cross, with its supposed effects, is the grand object to which they call the attention and the faith of their hearers. I cannot quote to you the whole book of Acts; but every reader knows, that "Jesus and the resurrection" constitutes the leading theme, the central combination of ideas in all its discourses. This truth was shed, from Peter's tongue of fire, on the multitudes that heard amazed the inspiration of the day of Pentecost. Again, it was his text, when, passing beneath the beautiful gate, he made the cripple leap for joy; and then, with the flush of this deed still fresh upon him, leaned against a pillar in Solomon's porch, and spake in explanation to the awe-struck people, thronging in at the hour of prayer. Before priests and rulers, before Sanhedrim and populace, the same tale is told again, to the utter exclusion, be it observed, of the essential doctrine of the cross. The authorities of the temple, we are told, were galled and terrified at the Apostle's preaching; "naturally enough," it will be said, "since, the real sacrifice having been offered, their vocation, which was to make the prefatory and typical oblation, was threatened with destruction." But no, this is not the reason given: "They were grieved because they preached, through Jesus, the resurrection from the dead." Paul, too, while his preaching was spontaneous and free, and until he had to argue certain controversies which have long ago become obsolete, manifested a no less remarkable predilection for this topic. Before Felix, he declares what was the grand indictment of his countrymen against him: "Touching the resurrection of the dead, I am called in question of you this day." Follow him far away from his own land; and, with foreigners, he harps upon the same subject, as if he were a man of one idea; which, indeed, according to our opponents' scheme, he ought to have been, only it should have been another idea. Seldom, however, can we meet with a more exuberant mind than Paul's; yet the resurrection obviously haunts him wherever he goes: in the synagogue of Antioch you hear him dwelling on it with all the energy of his inspiration; and, at Athens, it was this on which the scepticism of Epicureans and Stoics fastened for a scoff. In his Epistles, too, where he enlarges so much on justification by faith, when we inquire what precisely is this faith, and what the object it is to contemplate and embrace, this remarkable fact presents itself: that the one only important thing respecting Christ, which is never once mentioned as the object of justifying faith, is his death, and blood, and cross. "Faith" by itself, the "faith of Jesus Christ," "faith of the Gospel," "faith of the Son of God," are expressions of constant occurrence; and wherever this general description is replaced by a more specific account of this justifying state of mind, it is faith in the resurrection on which attention is fastened. "It is Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again." "He was delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification." "Faith shall be imputed to us for righteousness, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead." Hear, too, the Apostle's definition of saving faith: "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thy heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." The only instance in which the writings of St. Paul appear to associate the word faith with the death of Christ, is the following text: "Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood"; and in this case the Apostle's meaning would, I conceive, be more faithfully given by destroying this conjunction, and disposing the words thus: "Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation by his blood, through faith." The idea of his blood, or death, belongs to the word propitiation, not to the word faith. To this translation no Trinitarian scholar, I am persuaded, can object;[15] and when the true meaning of the writer's sacrificial language is explained, the distinction will appear to be not unimportant. At present I am concerned only with the defence of my position, that the death of Christ is never mentioned as the object of saving faith; but that his resurrection unquestionably is. This phenomenon in Scripture phraseology is so extraordinary, so utterly repugnant to everything which a hearer of orthodox preaching would expect, that I hardly expect my affirmation of it to be believed. The two ideas of faith, and of our Lord's death, are so naturally and perpetually united in the mind of every believer in the atonement, that it must appear to him incredible that they should never fall together in the writings of the Apostles. However, I have stated my fact; and it is for you to bring it to the test of Scripture.

(c.) Independently of all written testimony, moral reasons, we are assured, exist, which render an absolute remission for the past essential to a regenerated life for the future. Our human nature is said to be so constituted, that the burden of sin, on the conscience once awakened, is intolerable; our spirit cries aloud for mercy; yet is so straitened by the bands of sin, so conscious of the sad alliance lingering still, so full of hesitancy and shame when seeking the relief of prayer, so blinded by its tears when scanning the heavens for an opening of light and hope, that there is no freedom, no unrestrained and happy love to God; but a pinched and anxious mind, bereft of power, striving to work with bandaged or paralytic will, instead of trusting itself to loosened and self-oblivious affections. Hence it is thought, that the sin of the past must be cancelled, before the holiness of the future can be commenced; that it is a false order to represent repentance as leading to pardon, because to be forgiven is the prerequisite to love. We cannot forget, however, how distinctly and emphatically he who, after God, best knew what is in man, has contradicted this sentiment; for when that sinful woman, whose presence in the house shocked the sanctimonious Pharisee, stood at his feet as he reclined, washing them with her tears, and kissing them with reverential lips, Jesus turned to her and said, "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much." From him, then, we learn, what our own hearts would almost teach, that love may be the prelude to forgiveness, as well as forgiveness the preparative for love.

At the same time let me acknowledge, that this statement respecting the moral effects of conscious pardon, to which I have invoked Jesus to reply, is by no means an unmixed error. It touches upon a very profound and important truth; and I can never bring myself to regard that assurance of Divine forgiveness, which the doctrine of atonement imparts, as a demoralizing state of mind, encouraging laxity of conscience and a continuance in sin. The sense of pardon, doubtless, reaches the secret springs of gratitude, presents the soul with an object, strange before, of new and divine affection, and binds the child of redemption, by all generous and filial obligations, to serve with free and willing heart the God who hath gone forth to meet him. That the motives of self-interest are diminished in such a case, is a trifle that need occasion small anxiety. For the human heart is no laborer for hire; and, where there is opportunity afforded for true and noble love, will thrust away the proffered wages, and toil rather in a free and thankful spirit. If we are to compare, as a source of duty, the grateful with the merely prudential temper, rather may we trust the first, as not the worthier only, but the stronger too; and till we obtain emancipation from the latter,—forget the computations of hope and fear, and precipitate ourselves for better or for worse on some object of divine love and trust,—our nature will be puny and weak, our wills will turn in sickness from their duty, and our affections shrink in aversion from their heaven. But though personal gratitude is better than prudence, there is a higher service still. A more disinterested love may spring from the contemplation of what God is in himself, than from the recollection of what he has done for us; and when this mingles most largely as an element among our springs of action; when, humbled indeed by a knowledge of dangers that await us, and thankful, too, for the blessings spread around us, we yet desire chiefly to be fitting children of the everlasting Father and the holy God; when we venerate him for the graciousness, and purity, and majesty of his spirit, impersonated in Jesus, and resolve to serve him truly, before he has granted the desire of our heart, and because he is of a nature so sublime and merciful and good;—then are we in the condition of her who bent over the feet of Christ; and we are forgiven, because we have loved much.

(2.) Let us now, in conclusion, turn our attention to those portions of the New Testament which speak of the death of Christ as the means of redemption.

I have said, that these are to be found exclusively in passages of the sacred writings which treat of the Gentile controversy, or of topics immediately connected with it. This controversy arose naturally out of the design of Providence to make the narrow, exclusive, ceremonial system of Judaism give birth to the universal and spiritual religion of the Gospel; from God's method of expanding the Hebrew Messiah into the Saviour of humanity. For this the nation was not prepared; to this even the Hebrew Christians could not easily conform their faith; and in the achievement of this, or in persuading the world that it was achieved, did Paul spend his noble life, and write his astonishing Epistles. The Jews knew that the Deliverer was to be of their peculiar stock, and their royal lineage; they believed that he would gather upon himself all the singularities of their race, and be a Hebrew to intensity; that he would literally restore the kingdom to Israel; ay, and extend it too, immeasurably beyond the bounds of its former greatness; till, in fact, it swallowed up all existing principalities, and powers, and thrones, and dominions, and became coextensive with the earth. Then in Jerusalem, as the centre of the vanquished nations, before the temple, as the altar of a humbled world, did they expect the Messiah to erect his throne; and when he had taken the seat of judgment, to summon all the tribes before his tribunal, and pass on the Gentiles, excepting the few who might submit to the law, a sentence of perpetual exclusion from his realm; while his own people would be invited to the seats of honor, occupy the place of authority, and sit down with him (the greatest at his right hand and his left) at his table in his kingdom. The holy men of old were to come on earth again to see this day. And many thought that every part of the realm thus constituted, and all its inhabitants, would never die: but, like the Messiah himself, and the patriarchs whom he was to call to life, would be invested with immortality. None were to be admitted to these golden days except themselves; all else to be left in outer darkness from this region of light, and there to perish and be seen no more. The grand title to admission was conformity with the Mosaic law; the most ritually scrupulous were the most secure; and the careless Israelite, who forgot or omitted an offering, a tithe, a Sabbath duty, might incur the penalty of exclusion and death: the law prescribed such mortal punishment for the smallest offence; and no one, therefore, could feel himself ready with his claim, if he had not yielded a perfect obedience. If God were to admit him on any other plea, it would be of pure grace and goodness, and not in fulfilment of any promise.

The Jews, being scattered over the civilized world, and having synagogues in every city, came into perpetual contact with other people. Nor was it possible that the Gentiles, among whom they lived, should notice the singular purity and simplicity of the Israelitish Theism, without some of them being struck with its spirit, attracted by its sublime principles, and disposed to place themselves in religious relations with that singular people. Having been led into admiration, and even profession, of the nation's theology, they could not but desire to share their hopes; which indeed were an integral part of their religion, and, at the Christian era, the one element in it to which they were most passionately attached. But this was a stretch of charity too great for any Hebrew; or, at all events, if such admission were ever to be thought of, it must be only on condition of absolute submission to the requirements of the law. The Gentile would naturally plead, that, as God had not made him of the chosen nation, he had given him no law, except that of conscience; that, being without the law, he must be a law unto himself; and that, if he had lived according to his light, he could not be justly excluded on the ground of accidental disqualification. Possibly, in the provocation of dispute, the Gentile might sometimes become froward and insolent in his assertion of claim; and, in the pride of his heart, demand as a right that which, at most, could only be humbly hoped for as a privilege and a free gift.

Thus were the parties mutually placed to whom the Deliverer came. Thus dense and complicated was the web of prejudice which clung round the early steps of the Gospel; and which must be burst or disentangled ere the glad tidings could have free course and be glorified. How did Providence develop from such elements the divine and everlasting truth? Not by neglecting them, and speaking to mankind as if they had no such ideas; not by forbidding his messengers and teachers to have any patience with them; but, on the contrary, by using these very notions as temporary means to his everlasting ends; by touching this and that with light before the eyes of Apostles, as if to say, there are good capabilities in these; the truth may be educed from them so gently and so wisely, that the world will find itself in light, without perceiving how it has been quitting the darkness.

So long as Christ remained on earth, he necessarily confined his ministry to his nation. He would not have been the Messiah had he done otherwise. By birth, by lineage, by locality, by habit, he was altogether theirs. Whoever, then, of his own people, during his mortal life, believed in him and followed him, became a subject of the Messiah; ready, it was supposed, even by the Apostles themselves, to enter the glory of his kingdom, whenever it should please him to assume it; qualified at once, by the combination of pedigree and of belief, to enter into life, to become a member of the kingdom of God, to take a place among the elect; for by all these phrases was described the admission to the expected realm. If, then, Jesus had never suffered and died, if he had never retired from this world, but stayed to fulfil the anticipations of his first followers, his Messianic kingdom might have included all the converts of the Israelitish stock. From the exclusion which fell on others, they would have obtained salvation. Hence, it is never in connection with the first Jewish Christians that the death of Christ is mentioned.

It was otherwise, however, with the Gentiles. They could not become his followers in his mortal lifetime; and had a Messianic reign then been set up, they must have been excluded; no missionary would have been justified in addressing them with invitation; they could not, as it was said, have entered into life. The Messiah must cease to be Jewish, before he could become universal; and this implied his death, by which alone the personal relations, which made him the property of a nation, could be annihilated. To this he submitted; he disrobed himself of his corporeality, he became an immortal spirit; thereby instantly burst his religion open to the dimensions of the world; and, as he ascended to the skies, sent it forth to scatter the seeds of blessing over the field of the world, long ploughed with cares, and moist with griefs, and softened now to nourish in its bosom the tree of Life.

Now, how would the effect of this great revolution be described to the proselyte Gentiles, so long vainly praying for admission to the Israelitish hope. At once it destroyed their exclusion; put away as valueless the Jewish claims of circumcision and law; nailed the handwriting of ordinances to the cross; reconciled them that had been afar off; redeemed them to God by his blood, out of every tongue, and kindred, and people, and nation; washed them in his blood; justified them by his resurrection and ascension; an expression, I would remark, unmeaning on any other explanation.

Even during our Lord's personal ministry his approaching death is mentioned as the means of introducing the Gentiles into his Messianic kingdom. He adverts repeatedly to his cross, as designed to widen, by their admission, the extent of his sway; and, according to Scripture phrase, to yield to him "much fruit." He was already on his last fatal visit to Jerusalem, when, taking the hint from the visit of some Greeks to him, he exclaimed: "The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." He adds, in allusion to the death he should die: "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me." It is for this end that he resigns for a while his life,—that he may bring in the wanderers who are not of the commonwealth of Israel: "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold and one shepherd: therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again." Many a parable did Jesus utter, proclaiming his Father's intended mercy to the uncovenanted nations: but for himself personally he declared, "I am not sent, but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." His advent was a promise of their economy; his office, the traditionary hope of their fathers; his birth, his life, his person, were under the Law, and excluded him from relations to those who were beyond its obligations. On the cross, all the connate peculiarities of the Nazarene ceased to exist: when the seal of the sepulchre gave way, the seal of the law was broken too; the nationality of his person passed away; for how can an immortal be a Jew? This, then, was the time to open wide the scope of his mission, and to invite to God's acceptance those that fear him in every nation. Though, before, the disciple might "have known Christ after the flesh," and followed his steps as the Hebrew Messiah, "yet now henceforth was he to know him so no more"; these "old things had passed away," since he had "died for all,"—died to become universal,—to drop all exclusive relations, and "reconcile the world," the Gentile world, to God. Observe to whom this "ministry of reconciliation" is especially confided. As if to show that it is exclusively the risen Christ who belongs to all men, and that his death was the instrument of the Gentiles' admission, their great Apostle was one Paul, who had not known the Saviour in his mortal life; who never listened to his voice till it spake from heaven; who himself was the convert of his ascension; and bore to him the relation, not of subject to the person of a Hebrew king, but of spirit to spirit, unembarrassed by anything earthly, legal, or historical. Well did Paul understand the freedom and the sanctity of this relation; and around the idea of the Heavenly Messiah gathered all his conceptions of the spirituality of the Gospel, of its power over the unconscious affections, rather than a reluctant will. His believing countrymen were afraid to disregard the observances of the law, lest it should be a disloyalty to God, and disqualify them for the Messiah's welcome, when he came to take his power and reign. Paul tells them, that, while their Lord remained in this mortal state, they were right; as representative of the law, and filling an office created by the religion of Judaism, he could not but have held them then to its obligations; nor could they, without infidelity, have neglected its claims, any more than a wife can innocently separate herself from a living husband. But as the death of the man sets the woman free, and makes null the law of their union, so the decease of Christ's body emancipates his followers from all legal relations to him; and they are at liberty to wed themselves anew to the risen Christ, who dwells where no ordinance is needful, no tie permitted but of the spirit, and all are as the angels of God. Surely, then, this mode of conception explains why the death of Jesus constitutes a great date in the Christian economy, especially as expounded by the friend and Apostle of those who were not "Jews by nature, but sinners of the Gentiles." Had he never died, they must have remained aliens from his sway; the enemies against whom his power must be directed; without hope in the day of his might; strangers to God and his vicegerent.

But, while thus they "were yet without strength, Christ died for" these "ungodly"; died to put himself into connection with them, else impossible; and, rising from death, drew them after him into spiritual existence on earth, analogous to that which he passed in heaven. "You," says their Apostle, "being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him"; giving you, as "risen with him," a life above the world and its law of exclusion,—a life not "subject to ordinances," but of secret love and heavenly faith, "hid with Christ in God"; "blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and taking it out of the way, nailing it to his cross." God had never intended to perpetuate the division between Israel and the world, receiving the one as the sons, and shutting out the other as the slaves of his household. If there had been an appearance of such partiality, he had always designed to set these bondmen free, and to make them "heirs of God through Christ"; "in whom they had redemption through his blood" from their servile state, the forgiveness of disqualifying sins, according to the riches of his grace. Though the Hebrews boasted that "theirs was the adoption," and till Messiah's death had boasted truly; yet in that event God, "before the foundation of the world," had "blessed us" (Gentiles) "with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places"; "having predestinated us unto the adoption of children, by Jesus Christ, according" (not indeed to any right or promise, but) "to the good pleasure of his will," "and when we were enemies, having reconciled us, by the death of his Son"; "that in the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ"; "by whom we" (Gentiles) "have now received this atonement" (reconciliation); that he might have no partial empire, but that "in him might all fulness dwell." "Wherefore," says their Apostle, "remember that ye, Gentiles in the flesh, were in time past without Messiah, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenant of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world; but now in Christ Jesus, ye, who sometime were afar off, are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us" (not between God and man, but between Jew and Gentile); "having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments, contained in ordinances; for to make in himself, of twain, one new man, so making peace; and that he might reconcile both unto God, in one body, by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby; and came and preached peace to you who were afar off, as well as to them that were nigh. For through him we both have an access by one spirit unto the Father."

The way, then, is clear and intelligible, in which the death and ascension of the Messiah rendered him universal, by giving spirituality to his rule; and, on the simple condition of faith, added the uncovenanted nations to his dominion, so far as they were willing to receive him. This idea, and this only, will be found in almost every passage of the New Testament (excepting the Epistle to the Hebrews) usually adduced to prove the doctrine of the Atonement. Some of the strongest of these I have already quoted; and my readers must judge whether they have received a satisfactory meaning. There are others, in which the Gentiles are not so distinctly stated to be the sole objects of the redemption of the cross; but with scarcely an exception, so far as I can discover, this limitation is implied, and either creeps out through some adjacent expression in the context, or betrays itself, when we recur to the general course of the Apostle's argument, or to the character and circumstances of his correspondents. Thus Paul says, that Christ "gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time"; the next verse shows what is in his mind, when he adds, "whereunto I am ordained a preacher, and an Apostle, a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and verity"; and the whole sentiment of the context is the Universality of the Gospel, and the duty of praying for Gentile kings and people, as not abandoned to a foreign God and another Mediator; for since Messiah's death, to us all "there is but One God, and One Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus": wherefore the Apostle wills, that for all "men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting,"—without wrath at their admission, or doubt of their adoption. And wherever emphasis is laid on the vast number benefited by the cross, a contrast is implied with the few (only the Jews) who could have been his subjects had he not died: and when it is said, "he gave his life a ransom for many"; his blood was "shed for many, for the remission of sins"; "thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us by thy blood, out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation, and hast made us unto our God kings and priests, and we shall reign on the earth"; "behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world";[16]—by all these expressions is still denoted the efficacy of Christ's death in removing the Gentile disqualification, and making his dispensation spiritual as his celestial existence, and universal as the Fatherhood of God. Does Paul exhort certain of his disciples "to feed the church of the Lord, which he hath purchased with his own blood"?[17] We find that he is speaking of the Gentile church of Ephesus, whose elders he is instructing in the management of their charge, and to which he afterwards wrote the well-known Epistle, on their Gentile freedom and adoption obtained by the Messiah's death. When Peter says, "Ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation, received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot,"—we must inquire to whom he is addressing these words. If it be to the Jews, the interpretation which I have hitherto given of such language will not apply, and we must seek an explanation altogether different. But the whole manner of this Epistle, the complexion of its phraseology throughout, convinces me that it was addressed especially to the Gentile converts of Asia Minor; and that the redemption of which it speaks is no other than that which is the frequent theme of their own Apostle.

In the passage just quoted, the form of expression itself suggests the idea, that Peter is addressing a class which did not include himself: "Ye were not redeemed," &c.; farther on, in the same Epistle, the same sentiment occurs, however, without any such visible restriction. Exhorting to patient suffering for conscience' sake, he appeals to the example of Christ; "who, when he suffered, threatened not, but committed himself to Him that judgeth righteously; who, his own self, bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness": yet, with instant change in the expression, revealing his correspondents to us, the Apostle adds, "by whose stripes ye were healed. For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls." With the instinct of a gentle and generous heart, the writer, treating in plain terms of the former sins of those whom he addresses, puts himself in with them; and avoids every appearance of that spiritual pride by which the Jew constantly rendered himself offensive to the Gentile.

Again, in this letter, he recommends the duty of patient endurance, by appeal to the same consideration of Christ's disinterested self-sacrifice. "It is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well-doing than for evil-doing: for Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God." And who are these "unjust" that are thus brought to God? The Apostle instantly explains, by describing how the "Jews by nature" lost possession of Messiah by the death of his person, and "sinners of the Gentiles" gained him by the resurrection of his immortal nature; "being put to death in flesh, but quickened in spirit; and thereby he went and preached unto the spirits in prison, who formerly were without faith." This is clearly a description of the heathen world, ere it was brought into relation to the Messianic promises. Still further confirmation, however, follows. The Apostle adds: "Forasmuch, then, as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind; for the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles; when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries." If we cannot admit this to be a just description of the holy Apostle's former life, we must perceive that, writing to Pagans of whom it was all true, he beautifully withholds from his language every trace of invidious distinction, puts himself for the moment into the same class, and seems to take his share of the distressing recollection.

The habitual delicacy with which Paul, likewise, classed himself with every order of persons in turn, to whom he had anything painful to say, is known to every intelligent reader of his Epistles. Hence, in his writings too, we have often to consider with whom it is that he is holding his dialogue, and to make our interpretation dependent on the answer. When, for example, he says, that Jesus "was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification"; I ask, "For whose?—was it for everybody's?—or for the Jews', since Paul was a Hebrew?" On looking closely into the argument, I find it beyond doubt that neither of these answers is correct; and that the Apostle, in conformity with his frequent practice, is certainly identifying himself, Israelite though he was, with the Gentiles, to whom, at that moment, his reasoning applies itself. The neighboring verses have expressions which clearly enough declare this: "when we were yet without strength," and "while we were yet sinners," Christ died for us. It is to the Gentile church at Corinth, and while expatiating on their privileges and relations as such, that Paul speaks of the disqualifications and legal unholiness of the heathen, as vanishing in the death of the Messiah; as the recovered leper's uncleanness was removed, and his banishment reversed, and his exclusion from the temple ended, when the lamb without blemish, which the law prescribed as his sin-offering, bled beneath the knife, so did God provide in Jesus a lamb without blemish for the exiled and unsanctified Gentiles, to bring them from their far dwelling in the leprous haunts of this world's wilderness, and admit them to the sanctuary of spiritual health and worship: "He hath made him to be a sin-offering for us (Gentiles), who knew no sin; that we might be made the justified of God in him"; entering, under the Messiah, the community of saints. That, in this sacrificial allusion, the Gentile adoption is still the Apostle's only theme, is evident hence: that twice in this very passage he declares that he is speaking of that peculiar "reconciliation," the word and ministry of which have been committed to himself; he is dwelling on the topic most natural to one who "magnified his office," as "Apostle of the Gentiles."

To the same parties was Paul writing, when he said, "Christ, our passover, is sacrificed for us." Frequently as this sentence is cited in evidence of the doctrine of Atonement, there is hardly a verse in Scripture more utterly inapplicable; nor, if the doctrine were true, could anything be more inept than an allusion to it in this place. I do not dwell on the fact that the paschal lamb was neither sin-offering nor proper sacrifice at all: for the elucidation of the death of Jesus by sacrificial analogies is as easy and welcome as any other mode of representing it. But I turn to the whole context, and seek for its leading idea, before multiplying inferences from a subordinate illustration. I find the author treating, not of the deliverance of believers from curse or exclusion, but of their duty to keep the churches cleansed, by the expulsion of notoriously profligate members. Such persons they are to cast from them, as the Jews, at the passover, swept from their houses all the leaven they contained; and as for eight days, at that season, only pure unleavened bread was allowed for use, so the Church must keep the Gospel festival free from the ferment of malice and wickedness, and tasting nothing but sincerity and truth. This comparison is the primary sentiment of the whole passage; under cover of which the Apostle is urging the Corinthians to expel a certain licentious offender: and only because the feast of unleavened bread, on which his fancy has alighted, set in with the day of passover, does he allude to this in completion of the figure. As his correspondents were Gentiles, their Christianity commenced with the death of Christ; with him, as an immortal, their spiritual relations commenced; when he rose, they rose with him, as by a divine attraction, from an earthly to a heavenly state; their old and corrupt man had been buried together with him, and, with the human infirmities of his person, left behind for ever in his sepulchre; and it became them "to seek those things which are above," and to "yield themselves to God, as those that are alive from the dead." This period of the Lord's sequestration in the heavens Paul represents as a festival of purity to the disciples on earth, ushered in by the self-sacrifice of Christ. The time is come, he says; cast away the leaven, for the passover is slain, blessed bread of heaven to them that taste it! let nothing now be seen in all the household of the Church, but the unleavened cake of simplicity and love.

Paul again appears as the advocate of the Gentiles, when he protests that now between them and the Jews "there is no difference, since all have sinned and come short of the glory of God"; that the Hebrew has lost all claim to the Messianic adoption, and can have no hope but in that free grace of God, which has a sovereign right to embrace the heathen too; and which, in fact, has compassed the Gentiles within its redemption, by causing Jesus the Messiah to die; "by whose blood God hath set forth a propitiation, through faith; to evince his justice, while overlooking, with the forbearance of God, transgressions past;—to evince his justice in the arrangements of the present crisis; which preserve his justice (to the Israelite), yet justify on mere discipleship to Jesus." The great question which the Apostle discusses throughout this Epistle is this: "On what terms is a man now admitted as a subject to the Messiah, so as to be acknowledged by him, when he comes to erect his kingdom?" "He must be one of the circumcised, to whom alone the holy law and promises are given," says the Jew. "That is well," replies Paul; "only the promises, you remember, are conditional on obedience; and he who claims by the law must stand the judgment of the law. Can your nation abide this test, and will you stake your hopes upon the issue? Or is there on record against you a violation of every condition of your boasted covenant,—wholesale and national transgression, which your favorite code itself menaces with 'cutting off'? Have you even rejected and crucified the very Messiah, who was tendered to you in due fulfilment of the promises? Take your trial by the principles of your law, and you must be cast off, and perish, as certainly as the heathen whom you despise; and whose rebellion against the natural law, gross as it is, does not surpass your own offences against the tables of Moses. You must abandon the claim of right, the high talk of God's justice and plighted faith;—which are alike ill suited to you both. The rules of law are out of the question, and would admit nobody; and we must ascend again to the sovereign will and free mercy of Him who is the source of law; and who, to bestow a blessing which its resources cannot confer, may devise new methods of beneficence. God has violated no pledge. Messiah came to Israel, and never went beyond its bounds; the uncircumcised had no part in him; and every Hebrew who desired it was received as his subject. But when the people would not have him, and threw away their ancient title, was God either to abandon his vicegerent, or to force him on the unwilling? No: rather did it befit him to say: 'If they will reject and crucify my servant,—why, let him die, and then he is Israelite no more; I will raise him, and take him apart in his immortality; where his blood of David is lost; and the holiness of his humanity is glorified; and all shall be his, who will believe, and love him, as he there exists, spiritually and truly.'" Thus, according to Paul, does God provide a new method of adoption or justification, without violating any promises of the old. Thus he makes Faith in Jesus—a moral act, instead of a genealogical accident—the single condition of reception into the Divine kingdom upon earth. Thus, after the passage of Christ from this world to another, Jew and Gentile are on an equality in relation to the Messiah; the one gaining nothing by his past privileges; the other, not visited with exclusion for past idolatry and sins, but assured, in Messiah's death, that these are to be overlooked, and treated as if cleansed away. He finds himself invited into the very penetralia of that sanctuary of pure faith and hope, from which before he had been repelled as an unclean thing; as if its ark of mercy had been purified for ever from his unworthy touch, or he himself had been sprinkled by some sudden consecration. And all this was the inevitable and instant effect of that death on Calvary, which took Messiah from the Jews and gave him to the world.

With emphasis, not less earnest than that of Paul, does the Apostle John repudiate the notion of any claim on the Divine admission by law or righteousness; and insist on humble and unqualified acceptance of God's free grace and remission for the past, as the sole avenue of entrance to the kingdom. This avenue was open, however, to all "who confessed that Jesus the Messiah had come in the flesh"; in other words, that, during his mortal life, Jesus had been indicated as this future Prince; and that his ministry was the Messiah's preliminary visit to that earth on which shortly he would reappear to reign. The great object of that visit was to prepare the world for his real coming; for as yet it was very unfit for so great a crisis; and especially to open, by his death, a way of admission for the Gentiles, and frame, on their behalf, an act of oblivion for the past. "If," says the Apostle to them, "we walk in the light, as he is in the light" (of love and heaven), "we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin": the Israelite will embrace the Gentiles in fraternal relations, knowing that the cross has removed their past unholiness. Nor let the Hebrew rely on anything now but the Divine forbearance; to appeal to rights will serve no longer: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." Nor let any one despair of a reception, or even a restoration, because he has been an idolater and sinner: "Jesus Christ the righteous" is "an advocate with the Father" for admitting all who are willing to be his; "and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only (not merely for our small portion of Gentiles, already converted); but also for the whole world," if they will but accept him. He died to become universal; to make all his own; to spread an oblivion, wide as the earth, over all that had embarrassed the relations to the Messiah, and made men aliens, instead of Sons of God. Yet did no spontaneous movement of their good affections solicit this change. It was "not that we (Gentiles) loved God; but that he loved us, and sent his Son, the propitiation for our sins"; "he sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him." That this Epistle was addressed to Gentiles, and is therefore occupied with the same leading idea respecting the cross which pervades the writings of Paul, is rendered probable by its concluding words, which could hardly be appropriate to Jews: "Keep yourselves from idols." How little the Apostle associated any vicarious idea even with a form of phrase most constantly employed by modern theology to express it, is evident from the parallel which he draws, in the following words, between the death of our Lord and that of the Christian martyrs: "Hereby perceive we love, because Christ laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."

Are, then, the Gentiles alone beneficially affected by the death of Christ? and is no wider efficacy ever assigned to it in Scripture? The great number of passages to which I have already applied this single interpretation will show that I consider it as comprising the great leading idea of the Apostolic theology on this subject; nor do I think that there is (out of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which I shall soon notice) a single doctrinal allusion to the cross, from which this conception is wholly absent. At the same time, I am not prepared to maintain, that this is the only view of the crucifixion and resurrection ever present to the mind of the Apostles. Jews themselves, they naturally inquired, how Israel, in particular, stood affected by the unanticipated death of its Messiah; in what way its relations were changed, when the offered Prince became the executed victim; and how far matters would have been different, if, as had been expected, the Anointed had assumed his rights and taken his power at once; and, instead of making his first advent a mere preliminary and warning visit "in the flesh," had set up the kingdom forthwith, and gathered with him his few followers to "reign on the earth." Had this—instead of submission to death, removal, and delay—been his adopted course, what would have become of his own nation, who had rejected him,—who must have been tried by that law which was their boast, and under which he came,—who had long been notorious offenders against its conditions, and now brought down its final curse by despising the claims of the accredited Messiah? They must have been utterly "cut off," and cast out among the "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel," "without Messiah," "without hope," "without God"; for while "circumcision profiteth, if thou keep the law; yet if thou be a breaker of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision." Had he come then "to be glorified in his saints, and to be admired in all them that believe,"—had he then been "revealed with his mighty angels" (whom he might have summoned by "legions"),—it must have been "in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that knew not God, nor obeyed the glad tidings of the Lord Jesus Christ"; to "punish with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and the glory of his power." The sins and prospects of Israel being thus terrible, and its rejection imminent (for Messiah was already in the midst of them), he withheld his hand; refused to precipitate their just fate; and said, "Let us give them time, and wait; I will go apart into the heavens, and peradventure they will repent; only they must receive me then spiritually, and by hearty faith, not by carnal right, admitting thus the willing Gentile with themselves." And so he prepared to die and retire; he did not permit them to be cut off, but was cut off himself instead; he restrained the curse of their own law from falling on them, and rather perished himself by a foul and accursed lot, which that same law pronounces to be the vilest and most polluted of deaths. Thus says St. Paul to the Jews: "He hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us; for it is written, 'Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.'"[18] In this way, but for the death of the Messiah, Israel too must have been lost; and by that event they received time for repentance, and a way for remission of sins; found a means of reconciliation still; saw their providence, which had been lowering for judgment, opening over them in propitiation once more; the just had died for the unjust, to bring them to God. What was this delay,—this suspension of judgment,—this opportunity of return and faith,—but an instance of "the long-suffering of God," with which "he endures the vessels of wrath (Jews) fitted to destruction, and makes known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory"? If Christ had not withdrawn awhile, if his power had been taken up at once, and wielded in stern and legal justice, a deluge of judgment must have overwhelmed the earth, and swept away both Jew and Gentile, leaving but a remnant safe. But in mercy was the mortal life of Jesus turned into a preluding message of notice and warning, like the tidings which Noah received of the flood; and as the growing frame of the ark gave signal to the world of the coming calamity, afforded an interval for repentance, and made the patriarch, as he built, a constant "preacher of righteousness"; so the increasing body of the Church, since the warning retreat of Christ to heaven, proclaims the approaching "day of the Lord," admonishes that "all should come to repentance," and fly betimes to that faith and baptism which Messiah's death and resurrection have left as an ark of safety. "Once, in the days of Noah, the long-suffering of God waited while the ark was preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls, were saved by water: a representation, this, of the way in which baptism (not, of course, carnal washing, but the engagement of a good conscience with God) saves us now, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ; who is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God; angels, and authorities, and powers, being made subject to him." Yet "the time is short," and must be "redeemed"; "it is the last hour"; "the Lord," "the coming of the Lord," "the end of all things," are "at hand."

I have described one aspect, which the death of the Messiah presented to the Jews; and, in this, we have found another primary conception, explanatory of the Scriptural language respecting the cross. Of the two relations in which this event appeared (the Gentile and the Israelitish), I believe the former to be by far the most familiar to the New Testament authors, and to furnish the true interpretation of almost all their phraseology on the subject. But, as my readers may have noticed, many passages receive illustration by reference to either notion; and some may have a meaning compounded of both. I must not pause to make any minute adjustment of these claims, on the part of the two interpreting ideas: it is enough that, either separately or in union, they have now been taken round the whole circle of apostolic language respecting the cross, and detected in every difficult passage the presence of sense and truth, and the absence of all hint of vicarious atonement.

It was on the unbelieving portion of the Jewish people that the death of their Messiah conferred the national blessings and opportunities to which I have adverted. But to the converts who had been received by him during his mortal life, and who would have been heirs of his glory, had he assumed it at once, it was less easy to point out any personal benefits from the cross. That the Christ had retired from this world was but a disappointing postponement of their hopes; that he had perished as a felon was shocking to their pride, and turned their ancient boast into a present scorn; that he had become spiritual and immortal made him no longer theirs "as concerning the flesh," and, by admitting Gentiles with themselves, set aside their favorite law. So offensive to them was this unexpected slight on the institutions of Moses, immemorially reverenced as the ordinances of God, that it became important to give some turn to the death of Jesus, by which that event might be harmonized with the national system, and be shown to effect the abrogation of the law, on principles strictly legal. This was the object of the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews; who thus gives us a third idea of the relations of the cross,—bearing, indeed, an essential resemblance to St. Paul's Gentile view, but illustrated in a manner altogether different. No trace is to be observed here of Paul's noble glorying in the cross: so studiously is every allusion to the crucifixion avoided, till all the argumentative part of the Epistle has been completed, that a reader finds the conclusion already in sight, without having gained any notion of the mode of the Lord's death, whether even it was natural or violent,—a literal human sacrifice, or a voluntary self-immolation. Its ignominy and its agonies are wholly unmentioned; and his mortal infirmities and sufferings are explained, not as the spontaneous adoptions of previous compassion in him, but as God's fitting discipline for rendering him "a merciful and faithful high-priest." They are referred to in the tone of apology, not of pride; as needing rather to be reconciled with his office, than to be boldly expounded as its grand essential. The object of the author clearly is, to find a place for the death of Jesus among the Messianic functions; and he persuades the Hebrew Christians that it is (not a satisfaction for moral guilt, but) a commutation for the Mosaic Law. In order to understand his argument, we must advert for a moment to the prejudices which it was designed to conciliate and correct.

It is not easy for us to realize the feelings with which the Israelite, in the yet palmy days of the Levitical worship, would hear of an abrogation of the Law;—the anger and contempt with which the mere bigot would repudiate the suggestion;—the terror with which the new convert would make trial of his freedom;—the blank and infidel feeling with which he would look round, and find himself drifted away from his anchorage of ceremony;—the sinking heart with which he would hear the reproaches of his countrymen against his apostasy. Every authoritative ritual draws towards itself an attachment too strong for reason and the sense of right; and transfers the feeling of obligation from realities to symbols. Among the Hebrews this effect was the more marked and the more pernicious, because their ceremonies were in many instances only remotely connected with any important truth or excellent end; they were separated by several removes from any spiritual utility. Rites were enacted to sustain other rites; institution lay beneath institution, through so many successive steps, that the crowning principle at the summit easily passed out of sight. To keep alive the grand truth of the Divine Unity, there was a gorgeous temple worship; to perform this worship there was a priesthood; to support the priesthood there were (among other sources of income) dues paid in the form of sacrifice; to provide against the non-payment of dues there were penalties; to prevent an injurious pressure of these penalties, there were exemptions, as in cases of sickness; and to put a check on trivial claims of exemption, it must be purchased by submission to a fee, under name of an atonement. Wherever such a system is received as divine, and based on the same authority with the great law of duty, it will always, by its definiteness and precision, attract attention from graver moral obligations. Its materiality renders it calculable: its account with the conscience can be exactly ascertained: as it has little obvious utility to men, it appears the more directly paid to God: it is regarded as the special means of pleasing him, of placating his anger, and purchasing his promises. Hence it may often happen, that the more the offences against the spirit of duty, the more are rites multiplied in propitiation; and the harvest of ceremonies and that of crimes ripen together.

At a state not far from this had the Jews arrived when Christianity was preached. Their moral sentiments were so far perverted, that they valued nothing in themselves, in comparison with their legal exactitude, and hated all beyond themselves for their want of this. They were eagerly expecting the Deliverer's kingdom, nursing up their ambition for his triumphs; curling the lip, as the lash of oppression fell upon them, in suppressed anticipation of vengeance; satiating a temper, at once fierce and servile, with dreams of Messiah's coming judgment, when the blood of the patriarchs should be the title of the world's nobles, and the everlasting reign should begin in Jerusalem. Why was the hour delayed? they impatiently asked themselves. Was it that they had offended Jehovah, and secretly sinned against some requirement of his law? And then they set themselves to a renewed precision, a more slavish punctiliousness than before. Ascribing their continued depression to their imperfect legal obedience, they strained their ceremonialism tighter than ever; and hoped to be soon justified from their past sins, and ready for the mighty prince and the latter days.

What, then, must have been the feeling of the Hebrew, when told that all his punctualities had been thrown away,—that, at the advent, faith in Jesus, not obedience to the law, was to be the title to admission,—and that the redeemed at that day would be, not the scrupulous Pharisee, whose dead works would be of no avail, but all who, with the heart, have worthily confessed the name of the Lord Jesus? What doctrine could be more unwelcome to the haughty Israelite? it dashed his pride of ancestry to the ground. It brought to the same level with himself the polluted Gentile,—whose presence would alone render all unclean in the Messiah's kingdom. It proved his past ritual anxieties to have been all wasted. It cast aside for the future the venerated law; left it in neglect to die; and made all the apparatus of Providence for its maintenance end in absolutely nothing. Was then the Messiah to supersede, and not to vindicate, the law? How different this from the picture which prophets had drawn of his golden age, when Jerusalem was to be the pride of the earth, and her temple the praise of nations, sought by the feet of countless pilgrims, and decked with the splendor of their gifts! How could a true Hebrew be justified in a life without law? How think himself safe in a profession, which was without temple, without priest, without altar, without victim?

Not unnaturally, then, did the Hebrews regard with reluctance two of the leading features of Christianity; the death of the Messiah, and the freedom from the law. The Epistle addressed to them was designed to soothe their uneasiness, and to show that, if the Mosaic institutions were superseded, it was in conformity with principles and analogies contained within themselves. With great address, the writer links the two difficulties together, and makes the one explain the other. He finds a ready means of effecting this, in the sacrificial ideas familiar to every Hebrew; for by representing the death of Jesus as a commutation for legal observances, he is only ascribing to it an operation acknowledged to have place in the death of every lamb slain as a sin-offering at the altar. These offerings were a distinct recognition, on the part of the Levitical code, of a principle of equivalents for its ordinances; a proof that, under certain conditions, they might yield: nothing more, therefore, was necessary, than to show that the death of Christ established those conditions. And such a method of argument was attended by this advantage, that, while the practical end would be obtained of terminating all ceremonial observance, the law was yet treated as in theory perpetual; not as ignominiously abrogated, but as legitimately commuted. Just as the Israelite, in paying his offering at the altar to compensate for ritual omissions, recognized thereby the claims of the law, while he obtained impunity for its neglect; so, if Providence could be shown to have provided a legal substitute for the system, its authority was acknowledged at the moment that its abolition was secured.

Let us advert, then, to the functions of the Mosaic sin-offerings, to which the writer has recourse to illustrate his main position. They were of the nature of a mulct or acknowledgment rendered for unconscious or inevitable disregard of ceremonial liabilities, and contraction of ceremonial uncleanness. Such uncleanness might be incurred from various causes; and, while unremoved by the appointed methods of purification, disqualified from attendance at the sanctuary, and "cut off" "the guilty" "from among the congregation." To touch a dead body, to enter a tent where a corpse lay, rendered a person "unclean for seven days"; to come in contact with a forbidden animal, a bone, a grave, to be next to any one struck with sudden death, to be afflicted with certain kinds of bodily disease and infirmity, unwittingly to lay a finger on a person unclean, occasioned defilement, and necessitated a purification or an atonement. Independently of these offences, enforced upon the Israelite by the accidents of life, it was not easy for even the most cautious worshipper to keep pace with the complicated series of petty debts which the law of ordinances was always running up against him. If his offering had an invisible blemish; if he omitted a tithe, because "he wist it not"; or inadvertently fell into arrear, by a single day, with respect to a known liability; if absent from disease, he was compelled to let his ritual account accumulate; "though it be hidden from him," he must "be guilty, and bear his iniquity," and bring his victim. On the birth of a child, the mother, after the lapse of a prescribed period, made her pilgrimage to the temple, presented her sin-offering, and "the priest made atonement for her." The poor leper, long banished from the face of men, and unclean by the nature of his disease, became a debtor to the sanctuary, and on return from his tedious quarantine brought his lamb of atonement, and departed thence, clear from neglected obligations to his law. It was impossible, however, to provide by specific enactment for every case of ritual transgression and impurity, arising from inadvertence or necessity. Scarcely could it be expected that the courts of worship themselves would escape defilement, from imperfections in the offerings, or unconscious disqualification in people or in priest. To clear off the whole invisible residue of such sins, an annual "day of atonement" was appointed; the people thronged the avenues and approaches of the tabernacle; in their presence a kid was slain for their own transgressions, and for the high-priest the more dignified expiation of a heifer; charged with the blood of each successively, he sprinkled not only the exterior altar open to the sky, but, passing through the first and holy chamber into the Holy of Holies (never entered else), he touched, with finger dipped in blood, the sacred lid (the Mercy-seat) and foreground of the Ark. At that moment, while he yet lingers behind the veil, the purification is complete; on no worshipper of Israel does any legal unholiness rest; and were it possible for the high-priest to remain in that interior retreat of Jehovah, still protracting the expiatory act, so long would this national purity continue, and the debt of ordinances be effaced as it arose. But he must return; the sanctifying rite must end; the people be dismissed; the priests resume the daily ministrations; the law open its stern account afresh; and in the mixture of national exactitude and neglects, defilements multiply again till the recurring anniversary lifts off the burden once more. Every year, then, the necessity comes round of "making atonement for the holy sanctuary," "for the tabernacle," "for the altar," "for the priests, and for all the people of the congregation." Yet, though requiring periodical renewal, the rite, so far as it went, had an efficacy which no Hebrew could deny; for ceremonial sins, unconscious or inevitable (to which all atonement was limited[19]), it was accepted as an indemnity; and put it beyond doubt that Mosaic obedience was commutable.

Such was the system of ideas, by availing himself of which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews would persuade his correspondents to forsake their legal observances. "You can look without uneasiness," he suggests, "on your ritual omissions, when the blood of some victim has been presented instead, and the penetralia of your sanctuary have been sprinkled with the offering: well, on no other terms would I soothe your anxiety; precisely such equivalent sacrifice does Christianity exhibit, only of so peculiar a nature, that, for all ceremonial neglects, intentional no less than inadvertent, you may rely upon indemnity." The Jews entertained a belief respecting their temple, which enabled the writer to give a singular force and precision to his analogy. They conceived that the tabernacle of their worship was but the copy of a divine structure, devised by God himself, made by no created hand, and preserved eternally in heaven: this was "the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man"; which no mortal had beheld, except Moses in the mount, that he might "make all things according to that pattern"; within whose Holy of Holies dwelt no emblem or emanation of God's presence, but his own immediate Spirit; and the celestial furniture of which required, in proportion to its dignity, the purification of a nobler sacrifice, and the ministrations of a diviner priest, than befitted the "worldly sanctuary" below. And who then can mistake the meaning of Christ's departure from this world, or doubt what office he conducts above? He is called by his ascension to the pontificate of heaven; consecrated, "not after the law of any carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life"; he drew aside the veil of his mortality, and passed into the inmost court of God: and as he must needs "have somewhat to offer," he takes the only blood he had ever shed,—which was his own,—and, like the High-Priest before the Mercy-seat, sanctifies therewith the people that stand without, "redeeming the transgressions" which "the first covenant" of rites entailed. And he has not returned; still is he hid within that holiest place; and still the multitude he serves turn thither a silent and expectant gaze; he prolongs the purification still; and while he appears not, no other rites can be resumed, nor any legal defilement be contracted. Thus, meanwhile, ordinances cease their obligation, and the sin against them has lost its power. How different this from the offerings of Jerusalem, whose temple was but the "symbol and shadow" of that sanctuary above. In the Hebrew "sacrifices there was a remembrance again made of sins every year"; "the high-priest annually entered the holy place"; being but a mortal, he could not go in with his own blood and remain, but must take that of other creatures and return; and hence it became "not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins," for instantly they began to accumulate again. But to the very nature of Christ's offering a perpetuity of efficacy belongs; bearing no other than "his own blood," he was immortal when his ministration began, and "ever liveth to make his intercession"; he could "not offer himself often, for then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world,"—and "it is appointed unto men only once to die"; so that "once for all he entered into the holy place, and obtained a redemption that is perpetual"; "once in the end of the world hath he appeared, and by sacrificing himself hath absolutely put away sin"; "this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down on the right hand of God," "for by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." The ceremonial, then, with its periodical transgressions and atonements, is suspended; the services of the outer tabernacle cease, for the holiest of all is made manifest; one who is "priest for ever" dwells therein;—one "consecrated for evermore," "holy, harmless, undefiled, in his celestial dwelling quite separate from sinners; who needeth not daily, as those high-priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people's; for this he did once for all when he offered up himself."[20]

Nor is it in its perpetuity alone that the efficacy of the Christian sacrifice transcends the atonements of the law; it removes a higher order of ritual transgressions. It cannot be supposed, indeed, that Messiah's life is no nobler offering than that of a creature from the herd or flock, and will confer no more immunity. Accordingly, it goes beyond those "sins of ignorance," those ceremonial inadvertences, for which alone there was remission in Israel; and reaches to voluntary neglects of the sacerdotal ordinances; insuring indemnity for legal omissions, when incurred not simply by the accidents of the flesh, but even by intention of the conscience. This is no greater boon than the dignity of the sacrifice requires; and does but give to his people below that living relation of soul to God which he himself sustains above. "If the blood of bulls and of goats ... sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purify (even) your conscience from dead works (ritual observances) to serve the living God!" Let then the ordinances go, and the Lord "put his laws into the mind, and write them in the heart"; and let all have "boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by this new and living way which he hath consecrated for us"; "provoking each other to love and to good works."

See, then, in brief, the objection of the Hebrews to the Gospel; and the reply of their instructor. They said: "What a blank is this; you have no temple, no priest, no ritual! How is it that, in his ancient covenant, God is so strict about ceremonial service, and permits no neglect, however incidental, without atonement; yet in this new economy throws the whole system away, letting us run up an everlasting debt to a law confessedly unrepealed, without redemption of it or atonement for it?"

"Not without redemption and atonement," replies their evangelical teacher; "temple, sacrifice, priest, remain to us also, only glorified into proportions worthy of a heavenly dispensation; our temple, in the skies; our sacrifice, Messiah's mortal person; our priest, his ever-living spirit. How poor the efficacy of your former offerings! year after year, your ritual debt began again: for the blood dried and vanished from the tabernacle which it purified; the priest returned from the inner shrine; and when there, he stood, with the interceding blood, before the emblem, not the reality, of God. But Christ, not at the end of a year, but at the end of the great world-era of the Lord, has come to offer up himself,—no lamb so unblemished as he; his voluntary and immortal spirit, than which was nothing ever more divinely consecrate, becomes officiating priest, and strikes his own person with immolating blow; it falls and bleeds on earth, as on the outer altar, standing on the threshold of the sanctuary of heaven: thither he ascends with the memorials of his death, vanishes into the Holy of Holies of the skies, presents himself before the very living God, and sanctifies the temple there and worshippers here; saying to us, 'Drop now for ever the legal burdens that weigh you down; doubt not that you are free, as my glorified spirit here, from the defilements you are wont to dread; I stay behind this veil of visible things, to clear you of all such taint, and put away such sin eternally. Trust, then, in me, and take up the freedom of your souls: burst the dead works, that cling round your conscience like cerements of the grave; and rise to me, by the living power of duty, and a loving allegiance to God.'"

So far, then, as the death of Christ is treated in Scripture dogmatically, rather than historically, its effects are viewed in contrast with the different order of things which must have been expected, had he, as Messiah, not died. And thus regarded, it presented itself to the minds of the Apostles in three relations:—

First, to the Gentiles, whom it drew in to be subjects of the Messiah, by breaking down the barriers of his Hebrew personality, and rendering him spiritual as well as immortal.

Secondly, to the unbelieving Jews; whom his retirement from this world delivered from the judgment due to them, on the principles of their own law, both for their general violation of the conditions of their covenant, and for their positive rejection of him. His absence reopened their opportunities; and to tender them this act of long-suffering, he took on himself the death which had been incurred by them.

Thirdly, to the believing Jews; the terms of whose discipleship the Messiah's death had changed, destroying all the benefits of their lineage, and substituting an act of the mind, the simpler claim of faith. It was therefore a commutation for the Ritual Law, and gave them impunity and atonement for all its violations.

With the last two of these relations, beyond their remarkable historical interest, we have no personal concern. The first remains, and ever will remain, worthy of the glorious joy with which Paul regarded and expounded it. God has committed the rule of this world to no exclusive prince, and no sacerdotal power, and no earthly majesty; but to one whose spirit, too divine to be limited to place and time, broke through clouds of sorrow into the clearest heaven; and thither has since been drawing our human love, though for ages now he has been unseen and immortal. An impartial God, a holy and spiritual law, an infinite hope for all men, are given to us by that generous cross.

It is evident that all three of the relations which I have described belonged to the death of Jesus, in his capacity of Messiah; and could have had no existence if he had not borne this character, but had been simply a private martyr to his convictions. The foregoing exposition gives a direct answer to the inquiry, pressed without the slightest pertinence upon the Unitarian, why the phraseology of the cross is never found applied to Paul or Peter, or any other noble confessor, who died in attestation of the truth; why "no record is given that we are justified by the blood of Stephen; or that he bare our sins in his own body, and made reconciliation for us."[22] I know not why such a question should be submitted to us; we have assuredly no concern with it; having never dreamt that the Apostles could have written as they did respecting the death on Calvary, if they had thought of it only as a scene of martyrdom. We have passed under review the whole language of the New Testament on this subject; and in the interpretation of it have not even once had recourse to this, which is said to be our only view of the cross. We have seen the Apostles justly announcing their Lord's death as a proper propitiation; because it placed whole classes of men, without any meritorious change in their character, in saving relations: declaring it a strict substitute for others' punishment; on the ground that there were those who must have perished, if he had not; and that he died and retired, that they might remain and live: describing it as a sacrifice which put away sin; because it did that for ever, which the Levitical atonements achieved for a day: but we have not found them ever appealing to it either as a satisfaction to the justice of God, or an example of martyrdom to men. The Trinitarians have one idea of this event themselves; and their fancy provides their opponents with one idea of it; of the former not a trace exists, on any page of Scripture; and of the latter the Unitarian need not avail himself at all, in explaining the language whereof it is said to be his solitary key.

Nowhere, then, in Scripture do we meet with anything corresponding with the prevailing notions of vicarious redemption; everywhere, and most emphatically in the personal instructions of our Lord, do we find a doctrine of forgiveness, and an idea of salvation, utterly inconsistent with it. He spake often of the unqualified clemency of God to his returning children; never once of the satisfaction demanded by his justice. He spake of the joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth; but was silent on the sacrificial faith, without which penitence is said to be unavailing. Nor did he, like his modern disciples, teach that there are two separate salvations, which must follow each other in a fixed order: first, redemption from the penalty, secondly, from the spirit, of sin; pardon for the past, before sanctification in the present; a removal of the "hinderance in God," previous to its annihilation in ourselves. If indeed there were in Christianity two deliverances, discriminated and successive, it would be more in accordance with its spirit to invert this order;—to recall from alienation first, and announce forgiveness afterwards; to restore from guilt, before cancelling the penalty; and permit the healing to anticipate the pardoning love. At least, there would seem, in such arrangement, to be a greater jealousy for the holiness of the divine law, a severer reservation of God's complacency for those who have broken from the service of sin, than in the system which proclaims impunity to the rebel will, ere yet its estrangement is renounced. If the outward remission precedes the inward sanctification, then does God admit to favor the yet unsanctified; guilt keeps us in no exile from him: and though the Holy Spirit is to follow afterwards, it becomes the peculiar office of the cross to lift us as we are, with every stain upon the soul and every vile habit unretraced, from the brink of perdition to the assurance of glory: the divine lot is given to us, before the divine love is awakened in us; and the heirs of heaven have yet to become the children of holiness. With what consistency can the advocates of such an economy accuse its opponents of dealing lightly with sin, of deluding men into a false trust, and administering seductive flatteries to human nature?[23] What! shall we, who plant in every soul of sin a hell, whence no foreign force, no external God, can pluck us, any more than they can tear us from our identity,—we, who hide the fires of torment in no viewless gulf, but make them ubiquitous as guilt,—we, who suffer no outward agent from Eden, or the Abyss, or Calvary, to encroach upon the solitude of man's responsibility, and confuse the simplicity of conscience,—we, who teach that God will not, and even cannot, spare the froward, till they be froward no more, but must permit the burning lash to fall, till they cry aloud for mercy, and throw themselves freely into his embrace;—shall we be rebuked for a lax administration of peace, by those who think that a moment may turn the alien into the elect? It is no flattery of our nature, to reverence deeply its moral capacities: we only discern in them the more solemn trust, and see in their abuse the fouler shame. And it is not of what men are, but of what they might be, that we encourage noble and cheerful thoughts. Doubtless, we think exaggeration possible (which our opponents apparently do not) even in the portraiture of their actual character: and perhaps we are not the less likely to awaken true convictions of sin, that we strive to speak of it with the voice of discriminative justice, instead of the monotonous thunders of vengeance; and to draw its image in the natural tints provided by the conscience, rather than in the preternatural flame-color mingled in the crucibles of hell.

In making penal redemption and moral redemption separate and successive, the vicarious scheme, we submit, is inconsistent with the Christian idea of salvation. Not that we take the second, and reject the first, as our Trinitarian friends imagine; nor that we invert their order. We accept them both; putting them, however, not in succession, but in super-position, so that they coalesce. The power and the punishment of sin perish together; and together begin the holiness and the bliss of heaven. Whatever extracts the poison cools the sting: nor can the divine vigor of spiritual health enter, without its freedom and its joy. That there can be any separate dealings with our past guilt and with our present character, is not a truth of God, but a fiction of the schools. The sanctification of the one is the redemption of the other. The mind given up to passion, or chained to self, or anyhow alienated from the love and life divine, dwells, whatever be its faith, in the dark and terrible abyss; while he, and he only, that, in the freedom and tranquillity of great affections, communes with God and toils for men, understands the meaning, and wins the promises, of heaven. Am I asked: "What, then, is to persuade the sinful heart thus to draw near to God;—what, but a proclamation of absolute pardon, can break down the secret distrust, which keeps our nature back, wrapped in the reserve of conscious guilt?" I reply; however much these fears and hesitations might cling round us, and restrain us from the mystic Deity of Nature, they can have no place in our intercourse with the Father whom Jesus represents. It needs only that Christ be truly his image, to know "that the hinderance is not with him, but entirely in ourselves";[24] to see that there is no anger in his look; to feel that he invites us to unreserved confession, and accepts our self-abandonment to him,—that he lifts the repentant, prostrate at his feet, and speaks the words of severe, but truest hope. Am I told, "that only the gratitude excited by personal rescue from tremendous danger, by an unconditional and entire deliverance, is capable of winning our reluctant nature, of opening the soul to the access of the Divine Spirit, and bringing it to the service of the Everlasting Will"? I rejoice to acknowledge, that some such disinterested power must be awakened, some mighty forces of the heart be called out, ere the regeneration can take place that renders us children of the Highest; ere we can break, with true new birth, from the shell of self, and try and train our wings in the atmosphere of God. The permanent work of duty must be wrought by the affections; not by the constraint, however solemn, of hope and fear; no self-perfectionating process, elaborated by an anxious will, has warmth enough to ripen the soul's diviner fruits; the walks of outward morality, and the slopes of deliberate meditation, it may keep smooth and trim; but cannot make the true life-blossoms set, as in a garden of the Lord, and the foliage wave as with the voice of God among the trees. I gladly admit that, to a believer in the vicarious sacrifice, the sense of pardon, the love of the Great Deliverer, may well fulfil this blessed office, of carrying him out of himself in genuine allegiance to a being most benign and holy. And perceiving that, if this doctrine were removed, there is not, in the system of which it forms a part, and which else would be all terror, anything that could perform the same generous part, I can understand why it seems to its advocates an essential power in the renovation of the character. But great as it may be, within the limits of its own narrow scheme, ideas possessed of higher moral efficacy are not wanting, when we pass into a region of nobler and more Christian thought. Shall we say that the view of the Infinite Ruler, given in the spoken wisdom or the living spirit of Christ, has no sanctifying power? Yet where is there any trace in it of the satisfactionist's redemption? When we sit at Messiah's feet, that transforming gratitude for an extinguished penalty, on which the prevailing theology insists, as its central emotion, becomes replaced by a similar and profounder sentiment towards the Eternal Father. If to rescue men from a dreadful fate in the future be a just title to our reverence, never to have designed that fate claims an affection yet more devoted; if there be a divine mercy in annihilating an awful curse, in shedding only blessing there is surely a diviner still. Shall the love restored to us after long delay, and in consideration of an equivalent, work mightily on the heart,—and shall that which asked no purchase, which has been veiled by no cloud, which has enfolded us always in its tranquillity, nor can ever quit the soul opened to receive it, fail to penetrate the conscience, and dissolve the frosts of our self-love by some holier flame? Never shall it be found true, that God must threaten us with vengeance, ere we can feel the shelter of his grace!

In truth, the Christian idea of salvation cannot be better illustrated, than by the doubt which has been entertained respecting the proper translation of my text. Some, referring it to spiritual redemption, adhere to the common version; others, seeing that the Apostle Peter is explaining "by what power or by what name" he had cured the lame man at the temple gate, refer the words to this miracle of deliverance, and render them thus: "Neither is there healing in any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we can be healed." It matters little which it is; for whether we speak of body or of mind, Jesus "saves" us by "making us whole"; by putting forth upon us a divine and healing power, by which past suffering and present decrepitude disappear together; which supplies the defective elements of our nature, cools the burning of inward fever, or calls into being new senses and perceptions, opening a diviner universe to our experience. The deformed and crooked will, bowed by Satan, lo! these many years, and nowise able to lift up itself, he loosens and makes straight in uprightness. The moral paralytic, collapsed and prostrate amid the stir of life, and incapably gazing on the moving waters in which others find their health, has often started up at the summons of that voice, though perchance "he wist not who it was"; and, going his way, has found it to be "the sabbath," and owned the "work" of one who is in the spirit of "the Father." From the eye long dark and blind to duty and to God, he has caused the film to pass away; and shown the solemn look of life beneath a heaven so tranquil and sublime. Even the dead of soul, close wrapped in bandages of selfishness,—that greediest of graves,—have been quickened by his piercing call, and have come forth, to learn, "when risen," that only in the meekness that can obey is there the power to command, only in the love that serves is there the life of heart-felt liberty. To call, then, on the name and trust in the spirit of Christ, is to invoke the restoring power of God; to give symmetry and speed to our lame affections, and the vigor of an athlete to our limping wills. There is not any Christian salvation that is not thus identical with Christian perfection: "nor any other name under heaven given among men, whereby we may be (thus) made whole." Let all that would "be perfect be thus minded"; seek "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ"; and they shall find in him a "power to become the sons of God."