Studies of Christianity; Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers Part 12

_Not all_ the divine sentiment, however, is embodied in the physical consequences. Besides this determinate expression of his thought, written out on the finite world, there is an unexpressed element remaining behind, in his infinite nature: on the visible side of the veil is the suggestive manifestation; on the invisible, is the very affection manifested. There is a personal alienation, a forfeiture of approach and sympathy, which would survive though creation were to perish and carry its punishments away; and would still cast its black shadow into empty s.p.a.ce. This reserved sentiment, and this alone, is affected by repentance. But it is no small thing for the heart of shame to know this. The estrangement lasts no longer than the guilty temper and the unsoftened conscience; and when, through its sorrow, the mind is clear and pure, the suns.h.i.+ne of divine affection will burst it again. In this the free Spirit of G.o.d is different from his bound action in nature. Long after he himself has forgiven and embraced again, necessity--the creature of his legislation--will continue to wield the lash, and measure out with no relenting the remainder of the penalty incurred; and he that yet drags his burden and visibly limps upon his sin, may all the while have a heart at rest with G.o.d. And thus is retribution--the reaping as we have sown--in no contradiction with forgiveness,--the personal restoration.

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

If some of the elements in the early Christianity are too hastily cancelled by our author, there is one sentiment whose inapplicability to the present day he exposes with an irresistible force;--that depreciating estimate of life which, however natural to Apostles "impressed with the conviction that the world was falling to pieces,"

is wholly misplaced among those for whose office and work this earthly scene is the appointed place. The exhortations of the Apostles, "granting the premises, were natural and wise."

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

With all that is admirable in our author's book, he contemplates the whole subject from a point of view which exhibits it in very imperfect lights. He professes to treat of "The Creed of Christendom." Yet, in examining only the canonical Scriptures and the primitive belief, he totally ignores the "Creed" of the greater part of "Christendom,"

namely, of the Catholic Church. For it is only Protestants that identify Christianity with the letter of the New Testament, and settle everything by appeal to its contents. According to the older doctrine, Christianity is not a Divine Philosophy recorded in certain books, but a Divine Inst.i.tution committed to certain men. The Christian Scriptures are not its _source_, but its first _product_; not its charter and definition, but its earliest act and the expression of its incipient thought. They exhibit the young attempts of the new agency, as it was getting to work upon the minds of men and trying to penetrate the resisting ma.s.s of terrestrial affairs. They are thus but the beginning of a record which is prolonged through all subsequent times, the opening page in the proceedings of a Church in perpetuity; and are not separated from the continuous sacred literature of Christendom, as insulated fragments of Divine authority.

The supernatural element which they contain did not die out with their generation, but has never ceased to flow through succeeding centuries.

Nor did the heavenly purpose--precipitated upon earthly materials and media--disclose itself most conspicuously at first; but rather cleared itself as it advanced and enriched its energy with better instruments.

The sublimest things would even lie secreted in the unconscious heart of the new influence, and only with the slowness of n.o.ble growths push towards the light; for the noise and obtrusiveness of the human is ever apt to overwhelm the retiring silence of the divine. The disciples, who, when events were before their eyes, and great words fell upon their ears, "understood not these things at the time," are types of all men and all ages; whose religion, coming out in the event, is known to others better than to themselves. A faith, therefore, should be judged less by its first form than by its last; and at all events be studied, not as it _once_ appeared, but in the entire retrospect of its existence.

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

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

In seeking, therefore, for the _divine element_ in older dispensations, the Apostle would a.s.suredly _not_ consult the projects and beliefs of their founders and ministers. In his view, the very scheme of G.o.d was to work through these without their knowing what they were about; to let them aim at one thing while he was directing them to another; to pour through their life and soul an energy which should indeed fire their will and flow from their lips in _their own_ best purposes, but steal quietly behind them for _his_; so that what was primary with them was perhaps evanescent with him; while that which was incidental, and dropped from them unawares, was the seed of an eternal good. What Moses planned, what David sung, what Isaiah led the people to expect, was not what Heaven had at heart to execute.

Even in quest of G.o.d's thought in the _Christian_ dispensation, Paul does not refer to the doctrines, the precepts, the miracles of Jesus during his ministry in Palestine,--to the memorials of his life, or the testimony of his companions. He a.s.sumes that, at so early a date, the time had not yet come for the truth to appear, and that it was vain to look for it in the preconceptions of the uncrucified and unexalted Christ; who was the religion, not in revelation, but in disguise. If, therefore, any one had argued against the Apostle thus: "Why tell us to discard the law? your Master said he came to fulfil it. How do you venture to preach to the Gentiles, when Jesus declared his mission limited to the lost sheep of the house of Israel? No vestiges of your doctrine of free grace can be found in the parables, or of redeeming faith in the Sermon on the Mount";--he would have boldly replied, that this proves nothing against truths that are newer than the life, because expounded by the death, of Christ; that G.o.d reveals by action, not by teaching; that no servant of his can understand his own office till it is past; and that only those who look back upon it through the interpretation of events, can read aright the divine idea which it enfolds.

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

It is not peculiar to Mr. Greg that, in estimating Christianity, he has neglected, and even reversed, this principle. All who have treated of it from the Protestant point of view have done the same. They have a.s.sumed that the religion was to be most clearly discerned at its commencement; that the divine thought it contained would be, not evolved, but obscured by time, and might be better detected in ideal shape at the beginning of the ages, than realized at the end; that its agents and inaugurators must have been fully cognizant of its whole scope and contents, and set them in the open ground of their speech and practical career. In the minds of all Protestants the Christian religion is identified exclusively with the ideas of the first century, with the creed of the Apostles, with the teachings of Christ. The New Testament is its sole depository, in whose books there is nothing for which it is not answerable. The consequence is a perpetual struggle between untenable dogma and unprofitable scepticism. The whole structure of faith becomes precarious. If Luke and Matthew should disagree about a date or a pedigree; if Mark should report a questionable miracle; if John should mingle with his tenderness and depth some words of pa.s.sionate intolerance; if Peter should misapply a psalm, and Paul indite mistaken prophecies; above all, if Jesus should appear to believe in demonology, and not to have foreseen the futurities of his Church,--these detected specks are felt like a total eclipse; affrighted faith hides its face from them and shrieks; and he who points them out, though only to show how pure the orb that spreads behind, is denounced as a prophet of evil.

The peaceful and holy centre of religion is shaken by storms of angry erudition. Devout ingenuity or indevout acuteness spend themselves in vitiating the impartial course of historical criticism; neither of them reflecting, that, if the topics in dispute are open to reasonable doubt, they cannot be matter of _revelation_, and may be calmly looked at as objects of natural thought. It is a thing alike dangerous and unbecoming that religion should be narrowed to a miserable literary partisans.h.i.+p, bound up with a disputed set of critical conclusions, unable to deliver its t.i.tle-deeds from a court of perpetual chancery, whose decisions are never final. The time seems to have arrived for freeing the Protestant Christianity from its superst.i.tious adhesion to the mere _letter_ of the Gospel, and trusting more generously to that permanent inspiration, those ever-living sources of truth within the soul, of which Gospel and Epistle, the speeches of Apostles and the insight of Christ, are the pre-eminent, rather than the lonely, examples. The _primitive_ Gospel is not in its form, but only in its spirit, the _everlasting_ Gospel. It is concerned, and, if we look to _quant.i.ty_ alone, _chiefly_ concerned, with questions that have ceased to exist, and interests that no longer agitate. It often reasons from principles we do not own, and is tinged with feelings which we cannot share. Often do the most docile and open hearts resort to it with reverent hopes which it does not realize, and close it with a sigh of self-reproach or disappointment. With the deep secrets of the conscience, the sublime hopes, the tender fears, the infinite wonderings of the religious life, it deals less altogether than had been desired; and in touching them does not always glorify and satisfy the heart. We are apt to long for some nearer reflection, some more immediate help, of our existence in this present hour and this English land, where our enemies are not Pharisees and Sadducees, or our controversies about Beelzebub and his demons; but where we would fain know how to train our children, to subdue our sins, to enn.o.ble our lot, to think truly of our dead. The merchant, the scholar, the statesman, the heads of a family, the owner of an estate, occupy a moral sphere, the problems and anxieties of which, it must be owned, Evangelists and Apostles do not approach. Scarcely can it be said that general rules are given, which include these particular cases. For the Christian Scriptures are singularly sparing of general rules. They are eminently personal, national, local. They tell us of Martha and Mary, of Nicodemus and Nathaniel, but give few maxims of human nature, or large formulas of human life: so that their spiritual guidance first becomes available when its essence has been translated from the special to the universal, and again brought down from the universal to the modern application.

They are felt to be an inadequate measure of our living Christianity, and to leave untouched many earnest thoughts that aspire and pray within the mind. One divine gift, indeed, they impart to us,--the gracious and holy image of Christ himself. Yet, somehow, even that sacred form appears with more disenc.u.mbered beauty, and in clearer light, when regarded at a little distance in the pure s.p.a.ces of our thought, than when seen close at hand on the historic canvas. It is not that the ideal figure is a subjective fiction of our own, more perfect than the real.

Every lineament, every gesture, all the simple majesty, all the deep expressiveness, we conceive to be justified and demanded by the actual portraiture: our least hesitating veneration sees nothing that is not there. But the original artists' sympathy we feel to have been somewhat different from ours. They have labored to exhibit aspects that move us little; and only faintly marked the traces that to us are most divine.

The view is often broken, the official dress turned into a disguise. The local groups are in the way; the possessed and the perverse obtrude themselves in front with too much noise; and the refracting cloud of prophecy and tradition is continually thrown between. So that the image has a distincter glory to the meditating mind than to the reading eye.

All this, oftener perhaps felt than confessed, is perfectly natural and innocent. It betrays the instinctive a.n.a.lysis by which our own affections separate the divine from the human. Paul was right in his principle, that in history _the divine element lies hid_; is missed at the time, even by those who are its vehicle; and does not parade itself in what they consciously design, but lurks in what they unconsciously execute. It comes forth at "the end of the ages,"--the retrospect of fifty generations instead of the foresight of one. This doctrine is true of individuals, in proportion as they are great and good. They labor at what is most difficult to them, and make it their end; but their appointed power lies in what is easiest. They chiefly prize the beliefs and the virtues most painfully won; but their highest truth dwells in the trusts they cannot help, and their purest influence in the graces they never willed, or knew to be their own.

And it is true in history; Paul himself signally ill.u.s.trating the rule which he had applied to earlier times. He had found, as he supposed, the Providence of the Past, which all had missed, from Moses to Christ; but in his turn he missed, as we perceive, the Providence of the Future, from himself to us. The kind of agency which he antic.i.p.ated for Christ bears no resemblance to that which his religion has actually exercised. The only fault we can find with Mr. Thom's admirable exposition is, that he attributes to the Apostle too distinct an apprehension of Christ as an impersonation of _moral perfection_; and supposes the purpose of the Pauline Christianity to have been the establishment, as sole condition of disciples.h.i.+p, of reverential sympathy with the type of character realized in the Galilean life of Jesus. He says:--

"In contrast with such teachers" (the Ritual and the Dogmatic), "St.

Paul, in our present chapter (1 Corinthians ii.), refers both to the _matter_ and the _manner_ of his own ministration of the Gospel. He did not teach it as a _Rhetorician_, to attract admiration to himself, and give more lively impressions of Paul the Orator than of Christ the Redeemer from sin, nor as a _Philosopher_, to raise doubtful questions on metaphysical subjects, and become the leader of a speculative school; but as the Apostle of Jesus Christ, he proclaimed to the hearts of men the practical and life-giving Gospel, that 'G.o.d was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself'; that by the universal Saviour all distinctions were for ever destroyed, and the whole family of G.o.d to grow into the common likeness of that well-beloved Son,--for that now neither circ.u.mcision availeth anything, nor uncirc.u.mcision, but the renewal of the affections after the image of the Lord. Where could an entrance be found for party divisions in a doctrine that professed nothing, that aimed at nothing, except to awaken the consciousness of sin within the heart, and, through trust in the G.o.d of holiness and love revealed in Jesus, to lead it to repentance and life? All who felt this love of Christ constraining them, cleansing their souls by the divine image that had taken possession of their affections, and, through the mercy it proclaimed, encouraging their penitence to look for pardon from their G.o.d, must, of necessity, be one communion; for this Gospel sentiment and hope could create no divisions amongst those who had it,--and those who had it not were outside the Christian pale, and, so far, could make no schisms within it. Now, whence comes this Gospel sentiment, this new principle of life? Were there any who had the exclusive power of communicating it?

Did it require to be introduced by any intricate reasonings, by any subtle dialectics, which only the Masters in philosophy had at their command? Not so, says St. Paul;--it is a spiritual feeling, excited by moral sympathy, as soon as Christ is offered to the hearts that are susceptible of the sentiment;--and in whatever bosom there is not enough of the Spirit of G.o.d to cause that moral attraction to take place, neither philosophy nor outward forms, nor aught else but the divine image of goodness kept before the heart, can awaken the slumbering sensibilities which are the very faculties of spiritual apprehension, and which, as soon as they are alive, behold in Christ the solution of their own struggling and imperfect existence, their ideal and their rest. In regard to a sentiment so spiritual, a sympathy with the image of G.o.d, where is the possibility of introducing party divisions, and violating Christian unity? There can be but two parties,--those that _have_ the sentiment, and those that have it not. All Christians const.i.tute the one,--and as for the other, in relation to Christian unity, they are not in question. Such is the argument of St. Paul in this second chapter."--p. 30.

It may be quite true that the essential power of Christianity resides in the image, ever present to the heart of Christendom, of a G.o.d resembling Christ, and loving those who aspire to approach him through the same resemblance. But we cannot find any traces of such a conception in the writings of Paul. The "faith" on which he exclusively insisted would be very incorrectly defined, we conceive, as a reverence of Christ's character as morally like G.o.d. If we may judge from the negative evidence of his letters, he appears to have had no insight into the interior of his Master's earthly life, and no great concern about it. There is an entire absence of any _moral_ picture of Jesus, who is presented in the Apostolic writings as an object, not of retrospective veneration, but of expectant reliance; not of admiring trust for personal qualities realized in a past career, but of hope grounded on his official destiny in the future.

_One_ beauty of his character is, indeed, appealed to in the Pauline writings, viz. his humility and self-renunciation;[54] but even this is recognized, not on historical, but on theocratic grounds; it is ill.u.s.trated, not by anything in his life, but by the fact of his death, conceived as a voluntary postponement of his theocratic prerogatives, and an abrogation of his exclusive nationality. He was a "spiritual" object to the Apostle of the Gentiles, not from perception of the inner marks and graces of his spirit, but from his being invisible and immortal, reserved in heaven under external escape from the conditions of earthly life. Mr. Thom's doctrine is a happy development of modern truth from ancient error; but regarded as a mere interpretation, it perhaps sets down to the Apostle's account a just moral appreciation of the past, instead of an erroneous conception of the Providence of the future. The religion of Christ has a.s.suredly turned out a very different phenomenon from anything that was antic.i.p.ated at its origin. It was announced as a Kingdom; as the king did not come, it became a Republic. It was conceived as a State; it grew up into a Faith. It was proclaimed as the world's end; it proved to be a fresh beginning. It was to consummate the Law and the Prophets; and it confounded both. It was to cover Pagan nations with shame and destruction; it embalmed their literature, and was transformed by their philosophy. It was to deliver over the earth to the pure and severe Monotheism of the Hebrews; which, however, it so relaxed as to provoke Islam into existence to proclaim again the monarchy of G.o.d. Its subjects were to be gathered from the Jews and half-castes of the Eastern Synagogue; and its most signal glories have been among the Teutonic nations, and the then unsuspected continents of the West. In every element of its internal power, in every direction of its external action, it has burst all the proportions, left behind all the expectations, with which it was born; and how can we continue to try it by the standard of its origin? Are we to say, that, having promised one thing and become another, it is not of G.o.d?

That might be well, if it had _fallen short_ of its own professions,--disappointed us of dreams it had awakened of glory and delight. But if it has been _far better than its word_; if, instead of winding up the world's affairs, it has given them a new career; if for Messiah's tame millennium we have the grand and struggling life of Christendom, and for his closed books of judgment the yet open page of human history; if for the earthly throne and sceptre of Christ, sweeping away the treasures of past civilization, we have his heavenly image and spirit, presiding over the re-birth of art, the awakening of thought, the direction of law, and the organism of nations; if from the dignity of outward sovereignty he has been raised to that of Lord of the living conscience, not superseding the soul, but exercising it with sorrow and aspiration; then, surely, in so outstripping itself, the religion should win a more exceeding measure of trust and affection. Had it only realized its first a.s.surances, we should have thought it divine; since it has so much surpa.s.sed them, we must esteem it diviner. There is no reason for the common a.s.sumption that a religion must be purest in its infancy. It is no less surrounded then, than at each subsequent time, with human conditions, and transmitted through human faculties; and when delivered to the world, embodied in action or in speech, necessarily presents itself as a mixed product of divine insight and of human thought,--of the living present and the decaying past; a flash of heavenly fire on the outspread fuel upon the altar of tradition. So it is with the Scriptures of the New Testament; which are not the heavenly source, but the first earthly result and expression of Christianity, and which present the perishable conditions as well as the indestructible life of the religion. Only by the course of time and Providence can these be disengaged from one another, and the accidents of place and nation fall away. If there dwell in the midst a divine productive element, the further it pa.s.ses from the moment of its nativity, the clearer and more august will it appear. It is like the seed dropped at first on an unprepared and unexpectant ground; which in its earliest development yields but a struggling and scanty growth, but each season, as another generation of leaves falls from the boughs, becomes the source, through richer nutriment, of fuller forms; till at length, when it has spread the foliage of ages, making its own soil, and deepening the luxuriance of its own roots, a forest in all its glory covers the land, and waves in magnificence over continents once bare of life and beauty. So is it with the germ of divine truth cast upon the inhospitable conditions of history; it is small and feeble in its earlier day; but when it has provided the aliment of its own growth, and shed its reproductive treasures on the congenial mind of generations and races, it starts into the proportions of a Christendom, and becomes the shade and shelter of a world.

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

FOOTNOTE:

[54] See Philippians ii. 5-11.

THE ETHICS OF CHRISTENDOM.

_The Temporal Benefits of Christianity exemplified in its Influence on the Social, Intellectual, Civil, and Political Condition of Mankind, from its first Promulgation to the present Day._ By ROBERT BLAKEY. London. 1849.

_Small Books on Great Subjects._ Edited by a few Well-Wishers to Knowledge. No. 19. _On the State of Man subsequent to the Promulgation of Christianity._ London. 1851.

_The Connection of Morality with Religion; a Sermon, preached in the Cathedral of St. Patrick, at an Ordination held by the Lord Archbishop of Dublin, Sunday, September 21, 1851._ By WILLIAM FITZGERALD, A.M., Vicar of St. Ann's, and Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Dublin. London. 1851.

Of these works, the third treats theoretically, the others practically, of the relation of Christianity to human nature. The preacher seeks in the natural conscience for the moral ground and receptacle of revelation; while the historians trace its moral operation in society and life. Were both tasks perfectly performed, we should be furnished with a complete image of the religion at once in its idea and its expression; should be able definitely to compare its promise with its achievements and to submit it, as a whole, to philosophical appreciation. But the two halves of the subject are exhibited with very unequal success. It is much easier to show the intended than the actual influence of the Christian faith upon the character of its disciples,--to determine by _a priori_ methods what it _must be_, than by an _a posteriori_ induction to estimate what it _has been_, and is.

Mr. Fitzgerald, as becomes a professor of ethical science, has well contended that the religion which he recommends from the pulpit is neither indifferent nor supercilious towards the morals which he teaches from the University chair,--but a.s.sumes their obligation, appeals to their authority, and, in its mode of reconciling the human will with the Divine, raises them into eternal sanct.i.ties. It addresses itself to man as a being already conscious of responsibility; and simply proposes to restore reason and conscience to that supremacy _in fact_ which _of right_ they can never lose. How far has this aim been visibly realized?

Are the traces of a Divine renovation clear upon the face of Christendom? Is there the difference between ancient Greece and modern England, or between the empire and the papacy of Rome, which might be expected between an unregenerate world and a regenerate? The historical answer to these questions is attempted by Mr. Blakey, with perhaps adequate resources of knowledge, but with so imperfect an apprehension of the requisites of his argument, that his book, though often instructive in detail, is altogether ineffective as a whole. He is content to select and enumerate the most salient and favorable points in the transition from ancient to modern civilization, and to set them down to the credit of Christianity; without care to disengage the action of concurrent causes, or to balance the account by reference to more questionable effects. A much finer a.n.a.lysis is needed, in order to draw from history its real testimony on this great matter; and nothing can well be more arbitrary, than to stroll through some fifteen centuries, and, gathering up none but the most picturesque and beneficent phenomena, weave them into a glory to crown the faith with which they co-exist. In Christendom, all the great and good things that are done at all will of course be done by Christians, and will contain such share of the religious element as may belong to the character of the actor or the age; but before you can avail yourself of them in Christian Apologetics, it must be shown that, under any other faith, no social causes would have remained adequate either to produce them or to provide any worthy equivalent. Because Charlemagne, after baptizing the Saxons in their own blood, displayed a better zeal by establis.h.i.+ng cathedral and conventual schools, _therefore_ to put the horn-book of the liberal arts into the hand of his religion, while leaving the wet sword to stain his own; because chivalry blended in its vow "_fear of G.o.d_" with "love of the ladies," _therefore_ to trace all loyalty and courtesy to the doctrine of the Church; because the mediaeval schoolmen imported into every science the canons of Divinity, and decided between Realism and Nominalism on eucharistic principles, _therefore_ to give the priesthood all the honors of modern philosophy and intellectual liberty,--is, to say the least, very vulnerable logic and very superficial history. Of a far superior order is the little book "On the State of Man subsequent to the Promulgation of Christianity." In a previous treatise, "On the State of Man _before_ the Promulgation of Christianity," the author had pa.s.sed under rapid review the ancient systems of civilization,--stationary, progressive, aggressive; and having seized on their characteristic features, he now brings with him determinate points of comparison into his survey of the post-Apostolic times. The view which he spreads beneath your eye of the world, as it lay ready to afford a channel for the Christian faith, is remarkable for breadth and truth. Conducting you, with the wide picture in your mind, to the pure head-spring in Galilee, and keeping close to the stream as it descends and opens from these sequestered heights, he enables you to see, reach by reach, where it fertilizes and where it destroys; the new fields of life it enters, the old landmarks of habit it overwhelms. The author is not more familiar with the Christian Apologists and Fathers, than with the later Latin and revived Greek literature from Trajan to Aurelian; and by skilfully noting the moments when Pagan and Christian life not only stood in silent co-presence, but came into active contact, he brings out into clear relief the new type of character which formed itself within the communities of disciples. That type is so strikingly original, its features so conspicuously express an order of pa.s.sions and ideas strange alike to the h.e.l.lenic and the Italian races, as to betray the creative action of some vast moral power unborrowed from the established civilization. When the free Roman breaks the bread of communion with slaves,--when the slippery Syrian forswears lying and theft,--when the heedless Greek changes his eagerness of the moment into a living for eternity,--when a people ignorant of Stoic maxims display a contempt of torture and death sublimer than the ideal of the Porch,--an influence is plainly at work which has penetrated to hitherto unawakened depths of the human soul. The phenomenon is the more impressive, when regard is had to the materials from which the early Christian communities were gathered. It cannot be imagined that they were composed of elements particularly choice; and, indeed, amid the universal corruption of morals and exhaustion of wholesome life, it is difficult to conceive how, if the Christian doctrine had enforced a rigorous selection, instead of indiscriminately inviting innocence and guilt, any decent elements could have been collected. Without adopting Gibbon's contemptuous estimate of the body of primitive believers, we cannot doubt that it comprised very mixed ingredients; we know that it contained great numbers of the servile cla.s.s, and very few whose station and culture gave them access to the higher ideas familiar to the schools of philosophy: yet from these unpromising sources arose a society, which, in severity of morals, in intensity of affection, in heroism of endurance, reversed the habits of the world to which they belonged. It seems to us an idle question for sceptical criticism to raise, whether the religion of Christ comprised in its teachings any ethical element absolutely new. If genius had conceived it all before, life had not produced it till now; and the more you affirm the philosophers'

competency to think it, the more do you convict them of inability to realize it. But in morals scarcely _can_ there be clear intellectual conception of principles not yet embodied in living character. As in the highest works of art, the thing seen is far other than the thing imagined and described; not doctrines, but persons, are here the only expression of the truth; and till they appear, ethical forms are but as the human clay without the vital fire. In the _statement_ of thought, the early Christians, not excepting the Scripture writers, are rude and unskilled; and a taste formed from the study of Plato and Seneca may be offended by the rusticity of Mark, and the abruptness of Paul. But whoever can rise above the level of a merely intellectual critique, and embrace, with our anonymous author, the _whole_ phenomenon of the first centuries of our era, will see a glow of self-denying faith, and a deep movement of conscience, affording manifest announcement of a new edition of human nature.

That edition has now been extant for many centuries; and is variously legible in the literature, the inst.i.tutions, the private manners of Christendom. The Christian ideal of human life lies as an open book before us; yet as a book so various in its versions, and so overlaid with comments, that the fresh flavor of its language, and even the finer essence of its thought, are in danger of being lost. The actual Christianity of each successive age, and each contemporary nation, is the express result, not only in its dogma, but in its life, of two component terms,--a given _matter_, and a given _faculty_ of faith.

However full and constant the former may be in itself, the latter is perpetually variable with the knowledge and pa.s.sions of the time, and the special genius of individual leaders; nor can this variation of insight in the mind fail to neutralize some portion of truth, and to give disproportionate magnitude to others. The data supplied by inspiration itself form no exception to this rule. Delivered into the charge of the human soul, they fall into the moulds of its recipient nature, take their immediate form from the laws of its life, and are reacted on from its independent activity. The _immutable_ custody of anything by a finite thinking subject, involves the most evident contradiction; the very contact with human intelligence reduces universal truth to partial, the permanent to the variable, the secure to the contingent. It is only in the essential Unity of Reason and Conscience in every age, that we find the means of correcting the aberrations and verifying the insight of all particular men. Not that we are to conceive of the human race collectively as one large person, of which individual minds are vital organs, and which has a necessary growth and development, ent.i.tling each century to boast of advance beyond its predecessors. We know of no spiritual units, of no personalities, except each single and separate will; nor do we find anything in their mutual relation which necessarily determines them to uninterrupted improvement, and excludes the encroachment of degeneracy and falsehood. Indeed, no sorrier product is there of human conceit and ignorance than the cant of "progress," which a.s.sumes that every newest phase of thought is wisest. But if all men are endowed with radically the same faculties, however various in their intensities and proportions, there is a court of appeal in permanent sitting, where the normal laws of intellectual and moral apprehension are administered against all provincial prejudices and transient verdicts of error. In the long run, the healthy perceptions of good eyes will outvote the discoloring effects of all ophthalmic epidemics, how obstinate and wide soever they may be. And the moral vision of mankind will no less vindicate its natural rights, by returning again and again into clear discernments, and settled admirations, and discharging the illusory forms and false tints of each separate age. To deny the ethical competency of the mind for this office,--to say that there is no power given for deciding what, among the claimants on reverence, is really n.o.ble, true, and good,--is, with all its pietistic pretences, an act of the profoundest scepticism, was.h.i.+ng away, as a quicksand, the only rock on which any faith can be built. It is to treat the durable source of truth as evanescent and uncertain, and shut out the possibility of all religion. On the other hand, to set up and idolize the life and thought of any one time as an unquestionable rule for all times, and stereotype it for unmodified reproduction, is to treat the evanescent as the durable, and build on whatever stands above the water, heedless whether it be the quicksand or the rock. Yet, strange to say, this particular superst.i.tion, and that general unbelief,--an apparent ant.i.thesis of error,--usually meet in the same mind, and const.i.tute together the chief theology of most visible churches. Having deposed and insulted the eternal sanct.i.ties, they coax and flatter the letter of Scripture to accept the vacant throne, and exchange the holy modesty of its administration for a universal empire of pretence. They drain off the springs of inspiration at their fountain-head, and turn all history into a plain of sand, that they may magnify their Hebrew reservoir as the world's sole supply; forgetting that, when cut off from the running waters, the choicest store loses its fresh virtues, and the fairest lake, shut up without exit, turns into a Dead Sea. In contradiction of both errors, we shall a.s.sume that transitory elements cannot fail to mix themselves with the expression of the purest inspiration,--the horizon of human relations and expressible things around even the divinest soul being limited; and that, as the inspiration tries itself upon age after age, bringing into distinct consciousness now one side of truth and now another, it becomes more and more possible to find its essence and eliminate its accidents, to save its catholic beauties apart from its sectional distortions. The Christian ideal of life is not to be looked for in what is special to the Crusader or the Quaker,--to Puritan or Cavalier,--to Platonists of the second century or Aristotelians of the twelfth,--to Aquinas or Luther,--to John or Paul; but in such sentiment as was common to them all, and attached to them as citizens of Christendom. When this element is disengaged from all that enc.u.mbers it, it will be found pervading and animating still whatever is n.o.blest in our modern life; while all that is narrow, and weak, and unworthy in the moral doctrine of our age, springs from a forced attempt to perpetuate the accidental modes of the Apostolic period.

Every one is sensible of a change in the whole climate of thought and feeling, the moment he crosses any part of the boundary which divides Christian civilization from Heathendom; yet of nothing is it more difficult to render any compendious account. It is easy to enumerate in detail the phenomena which are modified or disappear; just as on entering a new physical region the travelling naturalist may register the new species of plants and animals, that, one after another, present themselves to his research. But these do not paint the scene before even the learned eye; they are the separate out-comings of a great life-thrill, into whose current their roots penetrate; the landscape, as a whole, speaks differently to the mind, and the whole heaven and earth seem pregnant with a thought unfelt before. To read off that thought, requires an apprehension the converse of the a.n.a.lytic vision of science.

The same difficulty occurs when we endeavor to seize the latent principle of a natural realm of history. Such principle, however, there must be. Beneath all the moving tides of Christian thought there lie still depths that supply them all, and a centre of equilibrium around which they sweep. We believe that the fundamental idea of Christendom may be described to be _the ascent through Conscience into communion with G.o.d_. Other religions have lent their sanctions to morality, and announced the Divine commands to the human will; but only as the laws of an outward monarch within whose sovereignty we lie, and who, ruling in virtue of his almightiness, has a right to obedience, ordain as he will.

Other religions, again, have aimed at a union with G.o.d. But the conditions of this union, dictated by misleading conceptions of the Divine nature, have missed on every side the true level of human dignity and peace. Manichaeism, deifying the ant.i.thesis of matter, takes the path of ascetic suppression of the body. The Indian Pantheist, imagining the Divine Abyss as the realm of night and infinite negation, strives to hold in the breath and sink into self-annulment. Plato, seeing in G.o.d the essence of thought, demands science and beauty, not less than goodness, as the needful notes of harmony with him, and appoints the approach to heaven by academic ways. The modern Quietists, wors.h.i.+pping a Being too much the reflection of their own tenderness, have lost themselves in soft affections, relaxing to the nerves of duty, and unseemly in the face of eternal law. Christianity alone has neither crushed the soul by mere submission, like Mohammedanism; nor melted it away in the tides of infinite being, like Pantheistic faiths; but has saved the good of both, by establis.h.i.+ng the union with G.o.d through a free act of the individual soul. a.s.signing to him a transcendent moral nature, sensitive to the same distinctions, conservative of the same solemnities, which awe and kindle us, it singles out the conscience as the field where we are to meet him,--where the bridge will be found of transit between the human and the divine. No fear or servility remains with an obedience consisting, not in mystic acts and artificial habits, but in the free play of natural goodness; and rendered, not in homage to a Supreme Autocrat, but in sympathy with a Mind itself the infinite impersonation of all the sanct.i.ties. Nor are any dizzy and perilous flights incurred by a devotion which meets its great Inspirer in no foreign heaven, but in the higher walks of this home life, and misses him only in what is mean and low. The place a.s.signed in Christianity to the _moral_ sentiments and affections has no parallel in any other religion. The whole faith is as an unutterable sigh after an ideal perfection. Holiness eternal in heaven, incarnate on earth, and to be realized in men,--this is the circle of conceptions in which it moves.

Its very name for the Inspiration which mediates all its work, expresses the same thing. It is not simply an e????s?as??,--not a??a,--not a??e?a,--but the p?e?a ?????. The Daemon of Socrates--the least heathenish of heathen men--was but an intellectual guide, and checked his erring judgment; the Holy Spirit guards the vigils of duty, and succors the disciple's tempted will. This profound sense of interior amity with G.o.d through faithfulness to our highest possibility, appears in the Christian Scriptures under two forms,--the positive and the negative,--each the complement of the other. In the Gospel, Jesus himself, as befits the saintly mind lifted above the strife of pa.s.sion, describes the _aspiration after goodness_ as the native guidance of the soul to her source and refuge. In the Epistles, Paul, pouring forth the confessions of a fiery nature, proclaims the _sense of sin_ to be the contracted hinderance that bars the ascent, and against which the wings of the struggling will beat only to grow faint. These representations are evidently but the two sides of the same doctrine seen from the heavenly and from the earthly position. Whether we are told what the good heart will find, or what the guilty must lose, the lesson equally recognizes the Divine authority of conscience. The benediction and the curse are but the bright and the dark hemisphere of one perfect truth.

The Apostle, standing in the shadow of the world's night, and regarding its averted face, dwells on the gloom of alienation,--the "foolish heart that is darkened,"--the "reprobate mind" from which G.o.d is hid. Christ, conscious of the holy light, and knowing how it penetrates the folds of willing natures, and wakes what else would sleep, speaks rather of the glory that is not denied, and utters that deepest of blessings,--"The pure in heart shall see G.o.d." To this bright side also the Pauline view in the end comes round. For though in him we miss that recognition of a natural human goodness which gives such grace and sweetness to many of the parables; though in his scheme the human will has not only betrayed its trust, but hopelessly crippled its powers; yet he does not leave it in the collapse of paralysis, with the hard saying that it can in no wise lift up itself, but points to a hope that bends over it from above.

The soul that is too far gone to act, may still be capable of love; if unable to trust itself, it may trust another; if it cannot command its volitions, it may surrender its affections; can reverence, can aspire, can yield its hand, like a child, to an angel of deliverance. Beyond the precincts of this world is an Image of divine excellence and beauty,--one recently withdrawn from human history, and soon to have a more august return. It is but to turn the eye and give the heart to that ideal and immortal perfection, and in the light of so pure a love, the clouds will clear from the conscience, and lift themselves as a nightmare away; the lame will, forgetting its infirmities, will spring up and walk; and the restoration, impossible by flight from deformity and ill, will come through the attraction of a Divine sanct.i.ty and goodness. Thus does the Apostle s.n.a.t.c.h the disciple at last into the right perceptions which Christ a.s.sumes to be possible at first; and in both its primitive developments the Christian religion implies the communion of man with G.o.d through purity of heart.

To this sentiment, conveyed with living realization in the person of Jesus Christ, may be referred whatever is distinctively great in Christian ethics. Proposing, as an end within their reach, the ascent of the soul to a divine life, and as the means, a simple surrender to its own highest intimations, they have melted away the interval between earthly and heavenly natures,--not by humanizing G.o.d, but by consecrating man. In treating the lower desires of sense and self as the steams that intercept, the tender reverences as the clear air that transmits, the light of lights, they have struck the deepest truth of human consciousness. Hence the temper of aspiration,--the earnest ideality,--the sense of infinite want, with faith in infinite possibilities,--the sorrowful unrest in the present, with irrepressible struggle for a better future,--which are impressed on the poetry, the art, the social life of Christendom. Unlike the expression of the h.e.l.lenic mind, they are rather a prayer for what might be, than a joy in what is. Hence, too, the predominance of the psychological and subjective element in the philosophy of modern times, and the conversion of the ancient "metaphysics" into the form of "mental science." Man would never have ceased to be merged in nature, and registered merely as a part of its contents; his self-knowledge would not have vindicated its independent rights; his mind would not have been recognized as the court of record for the moral legislation of the universe,--had not his religion taken him deep into himself, and from a new point shown him his relation to all else; kindling his own consciousness to a point of intense brilliancy, in correspondence with a divine centre, which must be sought on the same axis of being,--like the two determining foci of an infinite curve, that find each other out, while the realm of determined nature lies around, as the configured area, or the bounding curve. Of the external world, indeed, _too_ little account has been made in the faith of Christians. They have not cared to recognize it as the shrine of immanent Deity;--have stood in uneasy relations to it; often inimical to it; sometimes trying to get rid of it as an illusion; usually regarding it as a foreign object, like a great statue on the stage of being, with only stony eyes and ears for the real play of pa.s.sions that whirl around. Existence, in its essence, has been felt as an interview between man and G.o.d, at which s.p.a.ce and nature have been collaterally present, but in which it was not apparent what they had to do. Physical science and the plastic arts may have reason to complain of the depressing influence of this imperfect view, and of the hard necessity under which it places them of pursuing their ends with only scanty and grudging recognition from religion. But, for the philosophic knowledge of human nature, and the practical regulation of human society, this isolation of the soul within its own consciousness,--this concentrated personality,--this vivid interchange of life with G.o.d without diffusion through benumbing media,--must be held eminently enn.o.bling.

If, from the fundamental Christian sentiment, we descend to the scheme of _Applied Morals_ which it organized and inspired, the principle still vindicates itself in its results. The great problems of life are supplied from two sources,--the _Persons_ that may engage our affections, and the _Pursuits_ that may invite our will. The light in which the _personal_ relations are presented before the eye of Christendom is undeniably benign and true. It has never been obscured without the social spread of injustice and discontent; nor ever cleared again, but as the precursor of reformation. That every human soul has its sacred concerns and its divine communion, is the simplest of thoughts; but so deep and moving, that, where it is received and acknowledged, it calls up angelic virtues; where it is insulted and denied, it lets slip avenging fiends. Wherever it is sincerely held, it secures that reverential feeling towards others, beneath whose spell the selfish pa.s.sions sleep, and without which the precept of courtesy and the definition of rights are an ineffectual form. Power loses its insolence, and dependence its sting, where their mutual relation does not carry the whole individuality with it, but stops with the limits of social and political convenience, and lies under the restraining protection of a supreme equality before G.o.d. The "Fraternity" that is the offspring of political theories, and aims to neutralize by fellow-citizens.h.i.+p the diversities and antipathies of nature, is often the watchword of envy and egotism, shouted by the voice of hatred, and announcing the deed of violence. It is for want of faith in that highest brotherhood of wors.h.i.+p and responsibility which Christianity a.s.sumes, that impatient schemes are formed for artificially equalizing the weak and the strong, and abolis.h.i.+ng the relations of necessary dependence. Nor, where that faith is absent, can they ever be answered so as to satisfy the _feeling_ from which they spring. They may be shown to be impracticable, and crushed by the relentless argument of fact; but the fact will be protested against as unnatural, and the impossibility will seem a cruelty. How differently is this topic handled by the logic of science and the sentiment of religion! How much less justly does the former draw the line between natural subordination among men and tyrannous oppression, than the latter! Aristotle undertakes the defence of slavery on grounds both of philosophy and of experience. Nature, he contends, pursuing a definite end in every act of creation, a.s.signs to some things, from their very origin, a destiny to rule, while imposing on others a necessity of being ruled. Wherever a plurality of parts concur to form a general whole, dominant and subordinate elements present themselves. Even within the inanimate realm this is apparent, as in the case of harmony in music. But it is chiefly conspicuous in the sphere of animal existence; the body being, by nature, servitor, of which the soul is lord. In the highest stage of animate being, the const.i.tution of well-organized men, this law comes into the clearest light; for here the soul sways the body with absolute command, while reason exercises over the pa.s.sions the prerogatives of a royal and const.i.tutional power; and were equality to be subst.i.tuted for these modes of subjection, mischief would ensue on all sides. Not less evidently does Nature announce the dependence of inferior on superior in the rank allotted to the brutes in relation to man; and again, in the case of the two s.e.xes, of which the male, as the more distinguished, is rendered dominant. The same necessary law adjusts the positions of mankind _inter se_. All those who are as intrinsically inferior to their neighbors as the body to the soul, or the brute to the man,--(and this is precisely the case of the mere manual laborer,)--are slaves by nature; and for them, as for the body and the brute