Studies of Christianity; Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers Part 13

The evidence on this point is so positive and overwhelming, that critics such as Olshausen, whose testimony is undoubtedly reluctant, no longer think of resisting it. Nothing, indeed, can be opposed to it but a kind of interpretation which is the opprobrium of English theology; and whose problem is, not simply to gather an author's thought from his words, but from among all _true_ thoughts to find the one that will sit the least uneasily under his words. Thus "the end of all things" is explained away into the founding of the Christian Church; the "coming of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven," into the Jewish war under t.i.tus; the last judgment, which "rewards every man according to his works," into the escape of the Christians and the slaughter of the Jewish zealots at the destruction of Jerusalem. No doubt, many good and well-instructed men have persuaded themselves that by such exegetical sleight of hand they could save Apostolic and other infallibility. We can only say, that when piety supplies the motive, and learning the means, for bewildering veracity of apprehension, two rich and n.o.ble endowments are spent in corrupting a n.o.bler, which is the life of them both.

To the moral _sentiments_ which should occupy the soul, it may make little difference how long the world is to last. But to the course of _action_ which should engage the hand, it is a matter of primary moment. All human occupations rest on the a.s.sumption of permanence in the const.i.tution of things; nor is it less true of a planet than of a farm, that mere tenants at will, unsecured by lease and even served already with notice to quit, will undertake no improvements, and will suffer the culture to decline to the lowest point. What profession could remain respectable if society had no future? What interest would attach to the administration of law, on behalf of property which was not worth six months' purchase, and life which, stripped of survivors.h.i.+p, had lost all sacredness to the affections? Who would sit down to study the Pharmacopia on board a sinking s.h.i.+p? What zeal could be felt by the statesman or general in repelling from his country an injury that could never be repeated, or removing a grievance on the point of supernatural death? The fields would scarce be tilled which the angels with flaming sword might come to reap; or the vineyards be dressed in sight of him "who treadeth the wine-press alone." All the crafts of industry, all the adventures of commerce, are held together by a given element of _time_; and, when deprived of this, fall away into inanity. No one would build a house on ice melting with hidden fires; or freight s.h.i.+ps over an ocean which earthquakes were to drain away; or fabricate silks and patent-leather for appearance at the last tribunal. And the loosened hold of these pursuits upon human zeal, so far from implying their exchange for anything higher and more spiritual, involves the direct reverse. They cannot be abandoned; the stern punctuality of hunger, the peremptoriness of instinctive or habitual want, compel their continuance; and Paul himself made sail-cloth for a world on its last voyage. But they are kept up only because there is no help for it; they sink into mere bread-trades; and are thrown back many stages from the tranquil human towards the grim cannibal level. All work in this world, no doubt, rests at bottom on the elementary animal requirements of our nature; but it is then most worthily performed, not when these requirements are most obtrusive, but when they are most withdrawn. It is the specific moral benefit which social organization confers upon man, that it enables him to retreat from the constant presence of sheer necessity, and stand at a sufficient distance from it to allow other and higher feelings to connect themselves with his industry. It is a lower thing to consult for the natural wants of primitive appet.i.te, than for the artificial love of order, neatness, security, and beauty; and a craftsman works in a better spirit when earning some _unnecessary_ gift for his wife or child, than when toiling for the bitter loaf that staves off starvation. An art prosecuted without pride in its ingenuity, without intellectual enlistment in its methods of skill, is degraded from an instrument of discipline into a prowling for food,--from a mode of life into a makes.h.i.+ft against death. To take away the future, therefore, from secular pursuits, is simply to draw off from them whatever redeems them from meanness; to plant them in greedy isolation, as mere personal necessities; and cut them off from the great human system which lends to them a color of n.o.bleness and dignity. Among the early Christians this tendency was greatly checked by the fresh aims and employments which their religion created; and in devotion to which the more enthusiastic spirits found ample scope for their affections. The Church, subsisting like an intrenched camp in a hostile land, had to make sallies in all directions for rescue of the wandering, and for captives to the faith. An aggressive activity of compa.s.sion and conviction found tasks for the energies disengaged from secular pursuits; and the new relations into which their religious profession threw them towards the synagogue, the magistrate, the Pagan wors.h.i.+pper, supplied them with continual problems of conscience, severe, but wholesome to the mind. So peculiar, indeed, was their position, that, even if they had reckoned on a continuance of human affairs, they could hardly, perhaps, have mingled much with a world that drew them with such slender sympathies. Separated in ideas and affections, they must in any case have created a new and detached centre of social life. Still it is undeniable that their isolation was favored and exaggerated by their faith in an approaching end of all things; and that they withdrew from human interests, not simply because honorable contact with them was impossible, but because they were taught entire indifference to them as elements of a peris.h.i.+ng system. Not only is no recognition given to the pursuit of art and letters, and the citizen's duty presented only on the pa.s.sive side; but even the relations of domestic life are discouraged, and the slave is dissuaded from care about his liberty, on the express ground that it is not worth while, on the brink of a great catastrophe, to a.s.sume any new position, or commit the heart by new ties. The time is too short, the crisis too near, for the career of a free life, or the building of a human home. It is better for every one to continue as he is; and instead of waiting to have the world perish from him, to regard himself as already dead to the world. To stand impa.s.sive and alone, neutral to joy or sorrow, with soul intent on the future, and disengaged from impediments of the past, earnest to keep bright on its watch-tower the beacon of faith, but resolute to descend no more into the plain below, appeared to the Apostle Paul the highest wisdom. And how could it be otherwise? Seen from his point of view, all temporal claims sank into negation. The const.i.tutions, the arts, the culture, of civilized nations were about to be superseded; and the Christians who had already retired from them needed no new ones to take their place, except such provisional arrangements as might serve during the world's brief respite. Equally natural and suitable to their conceived position were the non-resistance principles of the early disciples.

What right could be worth contending for on the dawn of a great day of redress, when every wrong would be brought to its account? Who would carry a cause before Dikast or Proconsul to-day, when Eternal Justice was pledged to hear it to-morrow? Who refuse to resign to human coercion what a retributive Omnipotence would soon restore? When the great a.s.sizes of the universe are about to be opened, it were a poor thing for the suitors to begin fighting in the vestibule. In all these respects the practical code of the Apostolic age was inevitably influenced by the mistaken world-view prevalent in the Church. For the plaintiff, the hour was fixed when his suit would be called; for the slave, the emanc.i.p.ation-day was declared; and from him that bound himself in heart to the past, the past was about to be s.n.a.t.c.hed away.

The rules of action dictated by these notions are mere accidents of the first age,--correct deductions from a misconceived system of external relations. They are wholly dependent on this misconception, and have no necessary connection with the interior spirit, the characteristic sentiments and affections which distinguish Christianity as a religion. If the Apostles had lived on till their mistake had worn itself out, and they had discovered the permanence of the world,--had they postponed all writing of Scripture till this lesson of experience had been learned,--we apprehend that their scheme of applied morals would have been very different; a more genial recognition would have been given to natural human relations; the social facts of property and government, the private concerns of education and self-culture, the personal responsibilities of genius and intellect, would have been less slightingly dismissed, and reduced to clear moral order; and the sentences would have been greatly modified which now support the delusions of the improvident, the ascetic, the exclusive, and the non-resisting. Unhappily, Apostles do not live for ever, so that we are denied that chance; and _successors_ of Apostles, though seldom scarce, are not a helpful race, being chiefly marks of an absent inspiration. The task, therefore, of applying the essential Christian sentiments to a permanent world,--though avowedly undertaken by the Roman Catholic Church,--remains unperformed; and instead of it we have, in the common Protestantism, a violent misapplication to human nature and all time of the accidents and errors of the first age, resulting, we fear, in a caricature injurious alike to that first age itself, and to all true apprehension of the nature and proportions of human duty.

Expressions abound in the literature of modern Christendom implying an ant.i.thesis between temporal and spiritual things, between morality and religion, between the world and G.o.d. No one can fail to observe that this ant.i.thesis, whether founded in reality or not, has become a social fact. There are two standards of judgment extant for the estimate of character and life; one set up in the pulpit, the other recognized in the forum and the street. The former gives the order in which we pretend, and perhaps ineffectually try, to admire men and things; the latter, that in which we do admire them. Under the influence of the one, the merchant or the country gentleman is professedly in love with the innocent improvidence of the ravens and the lilies; relapsing into the other, he sells all his cotton in expectation of a fall, or drains his farms for a rise of rent. On the Sunday, he applauds it as a saintly thing to present the patient cheek to the smiter; on the Monday, he listens with rapture to Kossuth's curse upon the house of Hapsburg, and the Magyar vow of resistance to the death. He a.s.sents when the Apostle John is held up to his veneration as the beloved disciple, but, if the truth were known, the Duke of Wellington is rather more to his mind.

Supposing it all true that is said about the vanity of earthly pleasures and ostentations, he nevertheless lets his daughters send out next day invitations to a grand ball, and makes his house busy with dress-makers and cooks. He is accustomed to confess that in him there is no good thing, and that all his thoughts and works are only evil continually; yet he is pleased with himself that he has provided for the family of his gardener who was killed on the railway last week. In these and a thousand other forms may be noticed the compet.i.tion between two coexisting and unreconciled standards, the relations between which are altogether confused and uneasy. Whoever is interested in following up the genealogy of ideas, and would search for the origin of this mixed and mischievous state of mind, must look first to the influence of Luther, and thence to the Pauline doctrine, which he improperly generalized and exaggerated. We will endeavor to trace the development of the sentiment in the opposite direction, from the ancient germ to the modern fruit.

Paul the Apostle proclaimed _Faith_ to be the condition of regeneration and acceptance. To appreciate this message of his, we must remember two things;--namely, (1.) what it was from which men were to be rescued on these terms; (2.) what other conditions had been elsewhere insisted on instead of this, and were put aside by Paul in favor of this. Now enough has been said to show that what he feared for the world which he labored to convert was, primarily, exclusion from the theocratic empire which Messiah would return to erect; nor is it clear what ulterior consequences, if any, he conceived this exclusion to carry with it. This banishment was the negative of that "salvation" to which the disciples were called; and which consisted in their registration as qualified citizens of the kingdom for which the earth was about to be claimed. The picture before his mind was so far altogether Jewish; not at all the modern idea of heaven and h.e.l.l,--spiritual regions to which individuals, one by one, pa.s.s after death for moral retribution; but a terrestrial scene, the winding up of history, affecting men in ma.s.ses, and completing the purpose for which G.o.d had created this world. While, however, the thought of the Apostle's mind was national, the compa.s.s of his heart was human; and as the hour drew nigh, he felt that the future could not be closed upon the great Gentile world; that his own people were not so sublime a race as to have the issues of Providence all to themselves; that he must get rid of their conceited pedigrees, and let the Divine plan, which for a while had narrowed its original universality within the current of Hebrew history, flow out at its end into the full breadth of its first scope. But if so, a new qualification must be found; one open alike to Hebrew and to alien, yet nursing the pride of neither.

These requisites are fulfilled in simple Faith, which, as a catholic possibility of every human heart, Paul subst.i.tutes for prescriptive rights and untenable merits. It was the only condition which there was time to realize. To insist instead on a mere moral fitness, on a character of mind suitable to meet the eye of infinite purity, would be a mockery in a state of society at once decrepit and corrupt. The hour pressed: it was not the case of a young and fresh generation, that might be brought back, by heedful training, to the sanct.i.ties of nature and conscience; but an old and callous world, that could do little for itself, had to be got ready in hot haste. A kindled enthusiasm, a new allegiance, a resurrection of sleeping reverences, is the only hope. Once fix the gaze of faith, the simplicity of trust, on the Divine Human Being, who, having been clad in the sorrows of this earth, waits to bring in its everlasting peace; and this affection alone, comprehending in it every lesser purity, will soften even arid natures, and enrich them with forgotten fertility and grace.

Preach your moral gymnastics to a school of young heroes, whose soul is n.o.ble and whose limbs are free; but at the baths of Baiae, amid paralytics that drag the foot, and cripples with worn-out bodies and halting wills, if you cannot touch the spring of faith, you may spare your pedantic rules of exercise. Thus the Apostle's demand of faith was a generous stimulant of hope and recovery to an invalided world, whose natural forces were broken, and which had but little time for restoration. It was a provision for pouring a mountain-breath of healing reverence upon the sickly souls and languid levels of this world. It was an attempt to meet a quick emergency, and, by an intense action, condense the powers of preparation. It was therefore an expression, not of the narrowness, but of the universality of the Gospel. It shows the great heart of the religion bursting bounds, and the strong hand of its n.o.blest servant tugging at the gates to get them open, grinding off the rust of tradition and crus.h.i.+ng the scrupulous gravel of obstruction.

The doctrine, however, a.s.sumes quite a different significance when s.n.a.t.c.hed by Luther out of its historical connection, and held valid as a sufficient theory of human nature, and its only possibility of religion. The palsy of will, the incapacity of self-cure, the hopeless moral prostration into which long corruption had brought the world, as it lay beneath the eye of Paul, Luther a.s.sumes as the normal condition of the soul, and treats as a congenital incompetency of faculty, instead of a contracted depravity of state. Not that he disowns the human will as an executive power, or denies it a sphere of operation.

It can go forth variously into action,--can do what, in the view of mankind, is better or worse,--can commit a murder or can rescue from it; but in these outward doings, however differently they affect men, there is no real good or evil; in the supreme view they are neutral automatic exhibitions, simply physical as a flash of lightning or a fall of rain; their real character all lies in the inner spiritual springs from which they issue in the soul: on these alone is the infinite gaze fixed; and these are turbid all through, and all alike, with the taint and poison of a ruined nature. As all natural actions derive an equal guilt from the impurity of their source, so, when the source is purified, is the guilt equally removed from all; whilst nothing which the unconverted may do can please G.o.d, nothing that is performed in faith can come amiss to him. Be it what men call crime or what they praise as virtue, it makes no difference if only it be done in faith. Furnished with this supernatural charm, the believer may pa.s.s through any mire and come out clean.

"A Christian cannot, if he will, lose his salvation by any mult.i.tude or magnitude of sins, unless he ceases to believe. For no sins can d.a.m.n him, but unbelief alone. Everything else, provided his faith returns or stands fast in the Divine promise given in baptism, is absorbed in a moment by that faith."[55]

Here is a conception of faith altogether distinct from Paul's. It is here no act of reverential enthusiasm and affection, no kindred movement of the soul towards an object beautiful and holy, but a mere willingness to trust a verbal a.s.surance of atonement,--a willingness, moreover, itself foreign to the mind, and superinduced as an unnatural state by special gift. Nor is its efficacy to be sought in its transforming power on man, but in its persuasiveness with G.o.d. It does not enn.o.ble anything that is the wors.h.i.+pper's own, but simply hangs on to it externally the compensating sanct.i.ty of another; it is, indeed, described by Luther as the mere vessel put into the hands of the believer, and charged with the treasures of Christ's obedience,--treasures so acceptable that they charm away the foulness, and prevent the rejection, of anything that accompanies them. Thus the effect of faith on the disciple is not to inspire him with a G.o.d-like mind, but to prevent his corruptions being any damage to him. By this strange theory, both sin and sanct.i.ty are made entirely _impersonal_ to man; sin, by being a transmitted inability; sanct.i.ty, by being a foreign donation; and his individual character sits in the midst, at a point of spiritual indifference, neither chargeable with the dark hue native to its complexion, nor etherealized by the veil of borrowed light which it wears as a robe. No room is found, either in the child of Adam, or in the redeemed of Christ, for any responsibility, any personal guilt or goodness whatsoever. The misery and deformity in which the Gospel finds him is un-moral,--the mere scrofula of inheritance; the redemption into which it lifts him is un-moral,--the mere usufruct of an alien purity: and thus the whole business of religion begins and ends without approaching, and without improving, any law of conscience at all; morality remains absolutely cut off from its contact, unaffected by it except in being disowned and degraded, and losing the prestige of a Divine authority. This consequence of his doctrine is not in the least disguised by Luther, whose impetuous audacity never tires of forging phrases of opposite stamp, by which he may put the brand of insult upon Morals, and burn characters of glory into the brow of Religion. The latter, he again and again insists, is to be set in the heavenly realm; the former, on the other hand, detained upon the ground; the two being kept as absolutely apart as the sky from the earth, regarded as not less incapable of a common function than light and darkness, day and night.

Do we speak of faith and our relations to G.o.d? then we have nothing to do with morals, and must leave them behind lying on the earth. Do we speak of conduct and our relations with men? then we stop upon the ground, and get no nearer to heaven and its lights. The protests of our better nature against our own shortcomings, the sadness of repentance, and the alarms of guilt, so far from being confirmed by true religion, are shown to be mere delusion and idle self-torture; and the conscience that can feel such compunctions is a stupid a.s.s struggling in the dust and flats of this world beneath a servile burden it need never bear. To trouble the heart with any moral anxieties or aspirations is the most fatal act of unbelief,--a downright plunge from heaven over the precipice of h.e.l.l. The moral law may rule the body and its members, but has no right to any allegiance from the soul.[56] In any personal and historical estimate of Luther there would be much to say in palliation of these monstrous positions; it would be easy to show their connection with some of the n.o.blest characteristics of his genius, and their antagonism to some of the worst features of his times. But regarded in their influence on Christendom, when detached from their living origin, and made the ground of a theory for the governance of life, they can only be lamented as an explosion of mischievous extravagance. For in what light do they present Morality to us, after stripping it of all sacredness? What ground is left on which its obligation may repose, and what end is given for its aim? It exists, as Luther himself declares, only as a _provision for social order and external peace_. It is not concerned with the perfection of the individual, but with the organization of the world; and is nothing but the system of rules and customs requisite for the safe coexistence of many persons on the same field. It is thus reduced from an inspiration of conscience to an affair of police; the private sentiment of duty, operating in the hidden recess of life, keeping vigils over the temper of the mind and habits of the home, is a mere subst.i.tute for public opinion, and no representative of the eye of G.o.d. In this way, moral usages are first voted into existence as matters of convenience, and imposed by the general voice, yielding as their product in the individual an artificial sense of obligation; and it is a delusion to invert this order, and say that the natural sense of obligation, inherent in each individual, creates by sympathy and concurrence the moral usages of mankind. This extreme secularization of morals places Luther in curious company with Hobbes; and the followers of both have not been altogether unfaithful to the original affinity of their ethical ideas. Both schools have withheld from their conception of morality any touch and color of religion; both have been jealous of its mingling itself much with sentiment and feeling; both have applied to it purely objective criteria, and regarded it as a statutory affair, susceptible of codification, and then needing only a logical interpreter. This singular alliance between sects regarding each other with the greatest antipathy, exhibits the irresistible tendency of a wholly _super_-natural religion to produce an _infra_-natural morality.

The result of this sharp separation of the ethical from the spiritual province of life is, that both are deprived of elements indispensable to their proper culture. Our devout people are not remarkable for either clear notions or nice feelings on moral questions; while the conscientious cla.s.s are apt to be dry and cold precisians, truthful, trustworthy, and humane, but so little genial, so devoid of ideality and depth, that poet or prophet is struck dumb before their face. Till the two cla.s.ses had discovered their mutual alienation and collected themselves round distinct standards,--evangelical and worldly,--the evil was inconspicuous. For some time after the Reformation, both coexisted, without articulate repulsion, in every church, and each silently qualified the other extreme. Besides, in spite of Lutheran or other dogma, deep personal faith, grateful trust in such a one as Christ, could not be awakened in a people into whom G.o.d, whatever they might say of themselves, had actually put a conscience, without carrying the moralities with it. It might take the liberty of calling them "stupid a.s.s," but would nevertheless object to have the a.s.s abused. In truth, no sooner was the law of Duty driven from Christianity, than the claim of Honor was invoked to take its place; and the believer was exhorted not to take unworthy advantage of his redemption from legal liability, but to render in thank-offering the service exacted by penalty no more; worthless as it was, it was all he had to give. Such appeal touches a spring powerful in n.o.ble hearts, and is, in fact, only the awakening of _a higher order_ of moral feelings than before,--a fetching back, under the disguise of transfiguration, of that very sense of duty which had been professedly expelled. In the first enthusiasm of faith, while men's souls, having just flung off the sacerdotal incubus of centuries, were burning to breathe freely, and felt the healthy throb of a new joy, this appeal would meet a full response. The doctrine of faith was but the appointed way of bursting through the miserable scrupulosities, the life of petty debts and casuistic book-keeping, by which a priesthood had maintained a balance against the world,--of seizing a Divine indemnity and recovering the wholesome existence of devout instinct.

If the inspiration of the sixteenth century could be permanently maintained, if all men were equally susceptible of being s.n.a.t.c.hed up by a whirlwind of heavenward affection, if the surprise at finding that the soul had wings of its own could last for ever, the principle of grat.i.tude and pious honor might answer every end, and human duty be all the better done by taking no security for it; for you may hurl as a missile, in hot blood, a weight which otherwise you will scarce drag upon the ground. But the fire of an age of Reformation cannot be permanent; nor is grat.i.tude an affection on whose tension life can be securely built;--you cannot educate people by the force of perpetual surprise. There is a large natural order of minds, little susceptible of a self-abandoning fervor, for whom you vainly bring the chariot of fire and horses of fire by which prophets fly to heaven, and who are content with the humble mantle of the humanities thrown aside by more daring spirits in their ascent. Quiet, reflective, self-balanced persons are not to be taken by storm, and brought to betray the solid citadel of this world, and say ugly things of the moralities with which they have lived in friendly neighborhood. They are capable of being led by reverence for what is _better_, but not of being kindled by the rays of what is _intenser_. If they are ever to be lifted into a life _beyond_ conscience, where reluctance and resistance are felt no more, and the instincts of affection may flow of their own pure will, it must be by beginning at the other end,--by the _religious discipline of conscience_, by pious consecration of this earth and its instant work, by faithful and frugal care of the smaller elements of duty, as of the sacred crumbs of eucharistic bread, not without a Real Presence in them. This cla.s.s, whose religion, by a decree of their nature, can only exist under ethical conditions, are wholly unprovided for in the Protestant system. In the Lutheran view they belong to the school of worldly unbelief; and though their number, as must be the case in quiet times, has been increasing for a century and a half, and const.i.tutes the vast majority of educated people in this country, they are without any recognized religion; either veraciously disbelieving and waiting for something n.o.bly credible, or uneasily subsisting, suspected by clergymen, in the midst of churches whose theory of life has ceased to be a reality to them. With a faith traditionally shy of morals, and morals not yet elevated into faith, we have two separate codes of life standing in presence of each other,--one religious, the other secular,--and neither of them with any true foundation in human nature as a whole; the secular, an accidental congeries of mixed customs and inherited opinions; the religious, the product of an arbitrary spiritualism, lax and ascetic by turns.

It is the peculiarity of modern Christianity that these two codes coexist within the same social body, and even rule over different parts of each individual. The Pauline ant.i.thesis between the world and the Church was not less sharp than ours; but it was a distinction of persons and cla.s.ses, and n.o.body could occupy both the opposite ends of it. Once within a society of disciples, he was out of the world, and belonged to "the a.s.sembly of the saints"; and the whole realm of heathendom beyond const.i.tuted the contrasted term. He did not stand and move with one leg on holy ground and the other on the common earth; whatever were the principles of the community he had joined, they served him all through, and did no violence to the unity of his nature. Praying or dining, weeping or laughing, in the workshop or the prison, he was the same man in the same sphere. As the circle of the Church enlarged, we should therefore expect the world to be driven to a distance, till it was absent from whole countries and continents. But a new "world" has been discovered, not only within the Church, but within the person of every disciple; his body and limbs, his business and pleasures, being under the law of a morality quite secular; his soul and its eternal affairs sitting apart in a love quite spiritual. Who shall draw the line between the provinces, and know practically, hour by hour, where he stands?

Living confusedly in both, a man is apt to acquire a sort of double consciousness, and fluctuate distractedly between Caesar and G.o.d. He believes, perhaps, that the kingdoms of nature and of grace are destined always to remain side by side, neither absorbing the other till the day of doom. In that case, he will let other men create all the secular usages, the moralities of trade, the maxims of politics; standing aloof from them as not belonging to _his_ realm, and falling in with them freely in his own case. They may be of questionable veracity and justice; but they belong to the Devil's world, and are as good rules as can be expected from legislators sitting in the synagogue of Satan. Why should he decline to profit by them, now that they are there? When Eve has plucked the apple, it is too late for Adam not to taste the fruit.

The pious broker comes on 'Change as into a foreign world, on which he is pushed by humiliating necessities, and in which he feels an interest derived from them alone: he has his citizens.h.i.+p elsewhere; he disdains naturalization; he is but a temporary settler; he wants no vote about the laws; but, taking them as they are, cuts his crop and retires. The coolness with which people who live above the world sometimes avail themselves of its lowest verge of usage is truly amazing. An affluent gentleman of high religious profession, subscriber to Gospel schools, believer in prevenient grace, and otherwise the pride of the Evangelical heart, found himself not insensible to the approaches of the Hudson mania, speculated far beyond the resources of his fortune, declined to take up his bad bargains, and thus, at the expense of utter ruin to his agent, escaped with comparatively easy loss to himself. The agent, being but an honorable sinner of the worldly cla.s.s, was struck down by the blow into great depression. His employer was enabled to take a more cheerful view, and, on meeting his poor victim, rallied him on his dejected looks and hopeless thoughts, so different from his own resigned and comfortable state of mind:--"But ah! I forgot," he added with a sigh, "you are not blessed with my religious consolations!" Where no such positively odious results as these are produced, there is still often observable the negative selfishness of indifference to political welfare and political morals,--an affected withdrawal from temporal interests in the neighborhood or the State, and an insensibility to public injustice strangely disproportioned to the zeal displayed against innocent amus.e.m.e.nts and the nervousness on behalf of invisible subtilties of creed.

The false opposition, however, between the world and the Church is not always thus pa.s.sive and quiescent. It is not always recognized by those who hold it, as being a permanent fact to be merely sighed over and let alone. Many men are too earnest and truthful to settle down and pitch their tent upon a ground rocking with contradiction; to live two lives wholly unreconciled, one in the shame of nature, the other in the confidence of grace; or to belong to two societies,--one political, the other spiritual,--conducted on principles at incurable variance with each other. That a rule of action should be secularly good and religiously hateful,--that a sentiment should be fitly applauded in Parliament and groaned over in the conventicle,--is to them an intolerable unreality, like the celebrated verdict of the University of Paris, that a doctrine might be true in philosophy and false in theology. In their hands, accordingly, the ant.i.thesis between the human and the divine is not a quiescent, but a conflicting dualism, in which their religious ideas become aggressive, and a.s.sume a commission to drive back and humble the world. They claim the earth for G.o.d, and think the surrender incomplete while anything natural remains;--while any instinct is uncrushed, any laughter unstifled, any genius, however pure, a law unto itself. The crusade against temporal interests and pursuits, consequent upon this state of mind, changes its form with the culture and habits of the age. In the early years of the Reformation, when the whole Bible was spread open beneath the thirsting eye of an undistinguis.h.i.+ng enthusiasm, the effect threatened at one time to be more terrible than glorious. The full thunder-cloud of the Hebrew prophets, stealing over a world in negative stagnation, waked the sleeping lightnings of the soul, and for a while streaked the atmosphere of history with fearful portents. Everything that had been written of the chosen people, their exodus, their law, their poetry, their pa.s.sions,--everything except the relentings of their nature and the unsteadiness of their faith,--became consecrated alike.

The military clang of their early history, the harp of their sweet singer, the choral pomp of their priestly rule, the mystic voices of their lonely men of G.o.d,--all were Divine music alike, often more exciting than the Sermon on the Mount, and not less piercing than the anguish in Gethsemane. Such was the sequence and connection of the Divine dispensations supposed to be, that Christianity was simply the Jewish theocracy, only let loose out of Palestine to make a promised land of the whole world. The downtrodden serfs of Franconia had not long heard the glad tidings from Wittenberg, ere they began to draw parallels between themselves and the old Israel when the desert had been pa.s.sed. They had been brought to the brink of new hope, and looked, as across Jordan, to an inheritance verdant and tempting to their eye. The earth was the Lord's, and the army of the saints was come to take it; the bannered princes, the unG.o.dly priests, the "men with spurs upon their heels," all the carnal who peopled this Canaan and perched their "eagle's nests" on every height, must be smitten and cleared off. The time of jubilee was come, when every believer should have his field of heritage; nay, the birds in the forest, the fish in the stream, the fruits of the ground, whatever has the sacred seal of G.o.d's creative power, should be free to all, and the n.o.ble should eat the peasant's bread or die. The lawyers should take their heathenish courts away, and men of G.o.d should sit and judge the people, according to the spirit and the word. The harvest was ripe, when the tares must be burned in the fire and the pure wheat be garnered for the Lord.

These were the ideas which thousands of armed men, with a clouted shoe and a cart-wheel for their standards, and a leader who signed himself "the sword of Gideon," preached as their Gospel through the forests of Thuringia and beneath the citadel of Wurzburg. Nor was the ripest learning, much less the most generous spirit of the time, any security against the adoption of their doctrine. It was not Munzer alone who breathed the fierce inspiration, exhorting his swarthy miners to "lay Nimrod on the anvil, and let it ring bravely with their strokes"; but the honest Carlstadt, too, scholar, preacher, dialectician as he is, lays aside his broadcloth, and appears in white felt hat and rustic coat at the cross of Rothenburg, to preach encouragement to the people and bring fresh sorrow on himself. Throughout the great movement which in the third decade of the sixteenth century spread insurrection from the Breisgau to Saxony, the peasants were animated with the belief that the Gospel, armed with the sword of Joshua, was to subjugate the world, and that all the conditions of property, of law, of civil administration, under which secular communities exist, were to be superseded by inst.i.tutions conformed to a divine model. The leading Reformers, terrified by the religious socialism which they had raised, were ready enough to denounce and crush it. But in truth their own idea differed from this insurgent faith more in form than in essence; lodging the power in different hands, and prescribing to it a different method, but a.s.signing to it a similar trust for the same ultimate ends. The kingdoms of this world were to be made the kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ; and the temporal power was everywhere to a.s.sume a spiritual function, and make aggression on whatever opposed itself to the severity and sanct.i.ty of the Divine Word. The converts of Knox, the troopers of Cromwell, the town-councillors of Geneva, acting on this doctrine, claimed the whole of human life as their domain, and pushed the inquisitions of police into private habits, and even the secret inclinations of personal belief.

Playing-cards and song-books were denounced and seized, as if they came from the Devil's printing-press; dancing prohibited, as a profane escape of the natural members into mirthful agitation; concerts silenced, as enslaving immortal souls to the delusive sweetness of strings and wind; the caps of women and the coats of men shaped to evangelic type; and, as if the world were a great school, the gates of cities, and even the doors of houses, were closed at temperate hours by vesper bell or signal gun. Asceticism grasped the sceptre and the sword, and demanded the capitulation of the world. How vain and dangerous this tyrannous repression of nature is, the reaction during the seventeenth century into reckless and fatal license emphatically declares; and the contrast shows the necessity of finding some mediating term, some reconciling wisdom, by which the antagonism may cease between the world and heaven, between natural morals and Christian aspiration. Yet under a change of form the struggle is still continued; and with those who most prominently a.s.sume to represent the aims of Christianity, the present life, the temporal world, has no adequate recognition of its rights. They have no trust in human nature as divinely const.i.tuted, and as having no part or pa.s.sion without some fitting range. They dare not leave it out of sight for an instant: they must draw up a dietary for it, of sufficing vegetables and water; they must watch its temper, and see that it behaves with winning sweetness to all rascality; they must guard its purse, and teach it that to live cheaply, spending nothing for ornament and beauty, nothing for honor and right, but only for subsistence and charity, is the great wisdom of man; they must stifle its indignations, lest it should cease to hold out its cheek to Russia, and, having gone one shameful mile with "the nephew of my uncle," should refuse to go with him another. Both the ascetic doctrine and the extreme peace principles of the present day, as well as its tendency to renounce all retributory punishment, betray, in our opinion, a morbidly scrupulous apprehension of evil, quite blinding to the healthy eye for good,--a crouching of moral fear, singularly at variance with the free and n.o.ble bearing of the Apostle, who found that "to the pure all things are pure." As for the non-resistance principle, we have shown that it meant no more in the early Church than that the disciples were not to antic.i.p.ate the hour, fast approaching, of Messiah's descent to claim his throne. But when that hour struck, there was to be no want of "physical force," no shrinking from retribution as either unjust or undivine. The "flaming fire," the "sudden destruction," the "mighty angels," the "tribulation and anguish," were to form the retinue of Christ and the pioneers of the kingdom of G.o.d. It was not that coercion was deemed unholy, and regarded as the agency appropriate to lower natures and left behind in ascending towards heaven; it was simply that natural coercion was not to fritter itself away, but leave the field open for the supernatural. The new reign was to come _with force_; and on nothing else, in the last resort, was there any reliance; only the army was to arrive from heaven before the earthly recruits were taken up. Nothing, indeed, can well be further from the sentiment of Scripture than the extreme horror of force, as a penal and disciplinary instrument, which is inculcated in modern times. "My kingdom," said Jesus, "is not of this world; else would my servants fight";--an expression which implies that no kingdom of this world can dispense with arms, and that he himself, were he the head of a human polity, would not forbid the sword; but while "legions of angels"

stood ready for his word, and only waited till the Scripture was fulfilled and the hour of darkness was pa.s.sed, to obey the signal of heavenly invasion, the weapon of earthly temper might remain within the sheath. The infant Church, subsisting in the heart of a military empire, and expecting from on high a military rescue, was not itself to fight; not, however, because force was in all cases "brutal" and "heathenish," but because, in this case, it was to be angelic and celestial. It is evident that precepts given under the influence of these ideas can have no just application to the actual duties of citizens and states, whose problems of conduct, whose very existence, they never contemplated; and that to urge them upon modern society as political canons is to introduce a doctrine which, under cover of their form, violently outrages their spirit.

The mistaken ant.i.thesis between temporal and spiritual things runs into the greatest excess, wherever the inherent pravity of human nature is most exaggerated. There are churches, however,--the Catholic and the Arminian,--in whose doctrines the natural condition of man is painted in colors far removed from the deepest shade; and which deem him not so much incapable of right moral discernment, as weakened for faithful moral execution. In this view, the function of Christianity is not to supersede and cancel, but to supplement and guide, the native energies of the soul; not to raise it from a mad trance, in which all thought and feeling are themselves but a false glare, but to apply a tonic and healing power, enabling it to do the right which it has already light enough to see. Professor Fitzgerald is an adherent to this doctrine, and justly contends that no lower estimate of human nature can consist with responsibility at all.

"I am not to be ranked," he says, "amongst those who a.s.sume that human corruption has not _affected_ the natural power of the moral sense. I think it has. No doubt sinful depravity, wherever it is indulged, is, as Aristotle long ago remarked, f?a?t??? t?? a????,--it tends to weaken or deprave the sentiment of moral censure, and to blunt the perception of moral evil.

"An eloquent but superficial French moralist has compared the conscience to a table-rock in the ocean, its surface, just above the ripple, bearing an inscription graven in the stone, which a genius, hovering over it, reads aloud. At times the waves arise and sweep over the tablet, concealing the mystic characters. Then the reader is compelled to pause. But after a while the wind is lulled, the waves sink back to their accustomed level, the inscription stands out clear and legible, and the genius resumes his interrupted task.

"This comparison might gain something in correctness if we imagine the inscription traced upon a softer substance. For the stormy waves of pa.s.sion not only conceal, while they prevail, the sacred characters of virtue, but, as billow after billow pa.s.ses over the tablet, they tend to obliterate the lines.

"But in making these large concessions, (which I do very willingly,) I do not feel that I am surrendering the cause. It is one thing to say that the discriminating power of the moral judgment is _affected_ and impaired by human corruption, and quite another to say that it is destroyed. It is one thing to say that it sometimes goes wrong, and another that we can _never_ depend on its decisions. Most men's experience has often brought them acquainted with persons who had impaired, in some way or other, their natural powers of perceiving truth or excellence in some respects, without losing either sound principles of reason or sound principles of honesty in others. And the way to correct such obliquities of intellectual or moral judgment is, not to tell men that they should distrust their natural faculties altogether, but to avail ourselves of so much as remains sound to discover the mistake or imperfection which we seek to remedy or supply. The appeal, in such cases, is from the reason or conscience perverted or impaired, to the same faculties in what physicians would call their _normal state_. When the effaced portions of the inscription are to be restored, the evidence of the correction results from its harmonizing with the part which has not been obliterated; and an interpolation may be detected by its disturbing the coherence of the context,--an omission by leaving it imperfect or unintelligible."--p. 26.

On this principle alone, unhappily but little congenial with the spirit and traditions of Protestant churches, can Christianity coexist with natural ethics. Faith adopts morals, purifies and sublimes them, and especially changes the character of their force;--for a law of compulsion from below, subst.i.tuting a love of G.o.d above. The enmity ceases between the world and heaven; the physical earth is not more certainly afloat in s.p.a.ce, and on the muster-roll of stars, than the present life is plunged in eternity, and not behind its chiefest sanct.i.ties. There is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be slurred over as an unmanageable necessity, in the natural const.i.tution and relations of men; whatever acts they prescribe, whatever combinations they require, are within the scope and consecration of religion. The whole compa.s.s of the world and its affairs, all the gifts and activities of men, are brought within moral jurisdiction, and included in the embrace of a genial reverence. No narrow interpretation is longer possible of the province of human piety, and the true type of a n.o.ble goodness; as though they demanded a definite set of actions, rather than a certain style of soul, and denied a place to any affection or pursuit which can adorn and glorify existence. Divine things are not put away into foreign realms of being, and future reaches of time, attainable by no path of toil, no spring of effort, only by miraculous transport; but are met with every day, s.h.i.+ning through the substance of life and hid amid its hours. Whatever original endowments, whatever acquired virtues, enrich and elevate our immediate sphere,--the Thought which finds its truth, the Genius that evolves its beauty, the Honor that guards its n.o.bleness, the Love which lightens the burden of its sorrows,--are not mere temporal embellishments indifferent to its sacredness, but attributes that bring men nearer to the sympathy and similitude of G.o.d. Art, literature, politics, employing the highest human activities, and const.i.tuting the very blossom and fruit of all our culture, are recognized as having an earnest root, and not being the light growth of secular gayety and selfishness. We have no sympathy with the sentimental and immoral propensity, which corrupts the newest Continental philosophy, to recognize whatever comes into existence as _ipso facto_ divine. But we do believe that the great change for which the secret religiousness of this age pines, and which it is sorely straitened till it can accomplish, is the deliberate adoption into "heavenly places" of this world, its faculties and affairs, just as G.o.d has made them, and man's unfaithfulness has not yet spoiled them.

The products of human baseness, hypocrisy, and ambition,--let _them_ remain hateful, eternally contrary to G.o.d, things scarce safe to pity; but believe not that they have got this planet entirely to themselves, and have s.n.a.t.c.hed it as their _peculium_ quite out of the Supreme Hand. Men are tired of straining their thought along the diameter of the universe to seek for a Holy of Holies in whatever is opposite to their life; they find a wors.h.i.+p possible, even irresistible, at home, and on the road-side a place as fit to kneel as on the pavement of the Milky Way. The old antagonism between the world that now is, and any other that has been or is to come, has been modified for them, or has even entirely ceased. The earth is no place of diabolic exile, which the "prince of the power of the air" ever fans and darkens with his wing; and were it even, as was once believed, appointed to perish, this would be not because its failure was complete, but because its task was done. No vengeance burns in the suns.h.i.+ne which mellows its fruits and paints its gra.s.s; no threatenings flash from the starry eyes that watch over it by night. It is not only the home of each man's personal affections, but the native country of his very soul; where first he found in what a life he lives, and to what heaven he tends; where he has met the touch of spirits higher than his own, and of Him that is highest of all. It is the abode of every enn.o.bling relation, the scene of every worthy toil;--the altar of his vows, the observatory of his knowledge, the temple of his wors.h.i.+p. Whatever succeeds to it will be its sequel, not its opposite, will resume the tale wherever silence overtakes it, and be blended into one life by sameness of persons and continuity of plan. He is set here to live, not as an alien, pa.s.sing in disguise through an enemy's camp, where no allegiance is due, and no worthy love is possible, but as a citizen fixed on an historic soil, pledged by honorable memories to nurse yet n.o.bler hopes. _Here_ is the spot, _now_ is the time, for the most devoted service of G.o.d. No strains of heaven will wake him into prayer, if the common music of humanity stirs him not. The saintly company of spirits will throng around him in vain, if he finds no angels of duty and affection in his children, neighbors, and friends.

If no heavenly voices wander around him in the present, the future will be but the dumb change of the shadow on the dial. In short, higher stages of existence are not the refuge from this, but the complement to it; and it is the proper wisdom of the affections, not to escape the one in order to seek the other, but to flow forth in purifying copiousness on both.

We have said that men are tired of having their earthly and their heavenly relations set up in sharp opposition to each other, and are eager to live here in a consecrated world. This tendency has already found expression in two remarkable and apparently dissimilar phenomena,--the partial success of the Anglican and Catholic reaction, and the vast influence on English society of the late Dr. Arnold's character. Both were virtual protests against that removal of G.o.d out of the common human life, that unreconciled condition of Law and Gospel, which had made the evangelical theology sickening and unreal.

A path had to be opened for the re-introduction of a divine presence into the sphere of temporal things. Newman resorted to the supernatural channel of Church miracle; Arnold to the natural course of human affairs, and the permanent sacredness of human obligation.

Both restored to us a solemn mystery of immediate Incarnation; the one putting life, in order to its consecration, into contact with the sacraments; the other spreading a sacramental veneration over the whole of life. Arnold, especially, saw the great moral evils which have arisen from the evangelical depreciation of the "profane" world.

The secular, he was well aware, has become _too_ secular, the spiritual too _merely_ spiritual. Human nature is permitted to have play with unchecked wilfulness in the one, and is allowed no place at all in the other. The obligations of natural law are held in light esteem, as if, in being social, they fell short of being sacred. The exercises of intellect, in the survey of nature or the interpretation of history, are often stigmatized as a mere earthly curiosity, permissible to reason, but neutral to the soul. The worst of it is, that these notions, once become habitual, fulfil their own predictions. As there is nothing which the heart cannot sanctify, so is there nothing which it may not secularize. Tell men that in their natural affections there is nothing holy, and their homes will soon be nests of common instinct. a.s.sure them that in their business it is the unregenerate will, and the animal necessity, that labor for the bread which perisheth, and soon enough will an irreverent greediness and a cankered anxiety usurp the place. Persuade them that to study the order of creation or the records of past ages is but a "carnal"

pursuit, and the student's prayer for light will become a mere ambition for distinction, the meditations of wonder be stifled in the dust of mental day-labor, and the tears of admiration drop no more on the page of ancient wisdom. This was what Arnold could not abide; to see religion flying off on wings of pompous pretence to other worlds, and leaving no heavenly glory upon the earth, but letting her very fields be paved into a street. There was no attempt to save a spot for any earnest reality, except the poor little enclosure behind the altar rail. The Church will consecrate a graveyard for the dead, but leaves the market of the living still unblessed: you may dissolve away in benediction, when your years are over of toil and sweat beneath the curse. To one who acknowledges a natural conscience and a natural element in faith, there is a _religion in little_ in every part of life; it gives at least a note in the chords and melody of wors.h.i.+p.

Hence Arnold's curious doctrine of the Church as covering all human relations whatsoever, and including the whole organism of the State.

He would have nothing which the laws of this universe imposed on the will of man done without a clear and pious recognition; it was not to be illicitly smuggled in, as if run ash.o.r.e in a gale of confusion that could not be helped, but must be steadily accounted for and stored in open day. _Ethically_, this doctrine, though, from its adaptation to a permanent world, it is the least Apostolic in appearance, is, of all interpretations of Christianity, the most true; and if it were not for clinging ideas of extra-moral dogma and special priesthood, as limiting the conception of "the Church," would go far to repeat for our age the work of Socrates for his, and bring down our divine philosophy from heaven to earth. It gets rid entirely of the false spiritualism which has either withheld religious men from political affairs, or induced them to urge on statesmen rules applicable only where government can be dispensed with altogether. It rescues Christianity from the degradation of being hypocritically flattered as the great persuasive to peace by rulers whom it does not restrain from going to war, and relieves it of an oppressive weight of false expectation, as though it broke its promise to the world every time a new case of strife appeared. Nothing can well be more damaging to a religion, than to commit it to unqualified disapprobation of anything which must exist while human nature lasts, and to set it frowning with ineffectual sublimity on the pa.s.sions and events which determine the whole course of history. The amiable enthusiasts who propose to conduct the affairs of nations on principles of brotherly love, and who, till that consummation is reached, can only stand by and protest, do but weaken their country for purposes of justice and bring their faith into merited commiseration. It is commonly said that they are a harmless cla.s.s, who may even form a useful counterpoise to the warlike susceptibilities of less scrupulous men. We have no belief, however, in the efficacy of falsehood and exaggeration, or in the attainment of truth and moderation by the neutralizing action of opposite extravagances. The reverence for human life is carried to an immoral idolatry, when it is held more sacred than justice and right, and when the spectacle of blood becomes more horrible than the sight of desolating tyrannies and triumphant hypocrisies. Life, indeed, is just the one thing--the reserved capital, the rest, the ultimate security--on whose disposability in the last resort, and on the free control over which, the very existence of society depends. The first and highest social bond is no doubt to be found in a _religious_ sentiment, a common veneration for the same things as right and intrinsically binding on men that live side by side; and the wors.h.i.+p, with its inst.i.tutions, of every community, is its instinctive attempt to get these things spontaneously done by the force of _reverence_.

Could this point be really carried, nothing would remain to be accomplished; religion would complete and perfect the incorporation of mutual loyalty which it had begun. But there are some in whom the sentiment of common reverence fails, and for whose fidelity to the moral ends of the social union there is therefore no natural guaranty.

To reach these cases, society has no resource but coercive methods, actual or threatened; the threat is _Law_; the actuality is _Punishment_; the power to which both are committed is a _Government_; the commonwealth on whose behalf they exist is a _State_. The very const.i.tution of a state thus presupposes the _possible violation of moral right_, the partial failure of religion to secure its observance, and the determination to _enforce_ on the reluctant an obedience refused of free will. Force, however, is applicable only to men's bodies; it is a restraint and pressure on the functions of their life; and if that life be sacred from infringement, the political existence of nations is itself an offence against the law of G.o.d. All law, all polity, is a proclamation that justice is better than life, and, if need be, shall override it and all the possessions it includes; and nothing can be weaker or more suicidal than for men who are citizens of a commonwealth to announce, that, for their part, they mean to hold life in higher esteem than justice. Moreover, there is a low-minded egotism often disguised in this doctrine of pa.s.sive meekness. As an inducement to quiet endurance of wrong, we are reminded of the duty of "mutual forgiveness." Is all the wickedness, then, that I am doomed to witness, nothing but a _personal affront_?

When a rascal threatens to blow out my neighbor's brains, or to blast his character by infamous accusations, am _I_ in a position to forbear and pardon? Must I not own myself under a solemn trust, to see the right done and the guilty punished? Nay, would not the injured man himself greatly mistake the nature of the crime, and measure it by a paltry standard, if he took it for a mere private offence which it was his prerogative to punish or to overlook? "Who is this that forgiveth sins also?" The eternal laws of justice are not of our enacting; and no will of ours has t.i.tle to suspend or to repeal them. The real and only demand of Christian magnanimity is, that we visit them with no vengeance, but merely with moral retribution;--_that_ is, with no more severity when directed against ourselves, than when we see them at an impersonal distance. But to regard and treat the guilty as if he were an innocent,--that is given to no man, and is even inconceivable of G.o.d. Rulers, at all events, as trustees of rights other than their own,--and each generation of a people, as charged with the interests of successors in perpetuity,--have but a limited privilege of forbearance; the meekness of the saint would in them be treason to the world. Even in international disputes, where each party may have a conviction of right, the controversy, but for the possibility of force, could have no end. It is a delusion to rely on courts as a subst.i.tute for armies, and to suppose that judicial decision can supersede military. The judge would be of small avail without the constable; and the arbitrator between nations would need a European army to enforce his decrees. Where the stake is large and the feeling strong, it is notorious that the private disputant rarely acquiesces in an arbitration that goes against him; but carries his case to the last appeal, where it is stopped by a barrier of impa.s.sable force. You might as well pull down your jails in preparation for the a.s.sizes, as destroy your fleets and a.r.s.enals in quest of international arbitration. We speak only of the ultimate theory of this matter, and simply affirm, that wherever law and government exist, somewhere in the background force must lurk. It may, no doubt, be provided in excess, and paraded without need; and with the progress of a civilized order, the circle may be ever widened within which the _idea_ of coercion, with the habits it creates, may be subst.i.tuted for the obtrusive reality; till possibly a family of nations may be gathered, like a group of counties, into a common jurisdiction. But this only s.h.i.+fts the camp without disbanding it; and, after all, the tipstaffs of your supreme court could be no other than the legions of a grand army. We have, therefore, no more doubt that a war may be right, than that a policeman may be a security for justice, and we object to a fortress as little as to a handcuff. A religion which does not include the whole moral law; a moral law which does not embrace all the problems of a commonwealth; a commonwealth which regards the life of man more than the equities of G.o.d,--appear to us unfaithful to their functions, and unworthy interpreters of the divine scheme of the world. Quaker histories, written with omission of all the wars, are not less morbid as moral mistakes, than a doctrine of Providence, leaving out the whole realm of heathendom, is narrow as a religious theory; and the misuse of Scripture which has led to both, is most dangerous to its authority in an age remarkable for the breadth of its historical survey and the variety of its ethnological sympathies.

In other ways than those which we have indicated has a mischievous direction been given to modern thought and feeling, by perverting the accidental and transient form of the primitive Christianity into essential and permanent doctrine. But our exposition must proceed no further. The alternation of ascetic spiritualism and worldly laxity, the indifference to natural affections and relations, the exclusiveness at once devout and selfish, the jealous denial of their rights to intellect and art, the false apprehension of the true dignity of law and true life of states, have been the mo