Studies of Christianity; Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers Part 2

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

CHRISTIANITY AND SECTARIAN THEOLOGY.

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

As, then, it is to the moral and imaginative powers of the human mind that religion chiefly attaches itself, as it is by these that the want of it is most strongly felt, so is it to these that its ministrations should be, for the most part, addressed. While theologians are discussing the evidences of creeds, let teachers be conducting them to their applications. Let their respective resources of feeling and conception be unfolded before the soul of mankind; let it be tried what mental energy they can inspire, what purity of moral perception infuse, what dignity of principle erect, what toils of philanthropy sustain. Thus would arise a new criterion of judgment between differing systems; for that system must possess most truth which creates the most intelligence and virtue. Thus would the deeper devotional wants of society be no longer mocked by the privilege of choice among a few captious, verbal, and precise forms of belief.

Thus, too, would the alienation which repels sect from sect give place to an incipient and growing sympathy; for when high intellect and excellence approach and stand in meek homage beneath the cross, how soon are the jarring voices of disputants hushed in the stillness of reverence! Who does not feel the refreshment, when some stream of pure poetry, like Heber's, winds into the desert of theology! when some flash of genius, like that of Chalmers, darts through its dull atmosphere! some strains of eloquence, like those of Channing, float from a distance on its heavy silence!

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

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

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

W. R. A.

STUDIES OF CHRISTIANITY.

DISTINCTIVE TYPES OF CHRISTIANITY.

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

Regarded from this higher point, the surface of religious belief in England, at first sight a mere troubled fermentation of struggling elements, betrays some organic principle of order, and many salient points of promise.

We hazard no theory of religion in saying that there is a natural correspondence between the genius of a people and the form of their belief. Each mood of mind brings its own wants and aspirations, colors its own ideal, and interprets best that part of life and the universe with which it is in sympathy. John Knox would have been misplaced in Athens, and Tanler could not have lived on the moralism of Kant. No doubt the ultimate seat of human faith lies deep down below the special propensities of individuals or tribes,--in a consciousness and faculty common to the race. But ere it comes to the surface, and disengages itself in a concrete shape, its type and color will be affected by the strata of thought and feeling through which it emerges into the light.

Without pretending to an exhaustive cla.s.sification, we find four chief temperaments of mind expressed in the theologies and scepticisms of civilized Europe: the quest of physical _order_, the sense of _right_, the instinct of _beauty_, and the consciousness of tempestuous _impulses_ carrying the will off its feet. Variously blended in the characters of average persons, these tendencies are liable to separate their intensities, and severally dominate almost alone in minds of great force and periods of special action or reaction. Were each left to itself to form its own unaided creed, the doctrine of mere Science would be _atheistic_; of Conscience, _theistic_; of Art, _pantheistic_; of Pa.s.sion, _sacrificial_. The evidence of this distribution of tendencies is equally conclusive, whether we look to its rational ground or to its historical exemplification; and a few words on each head will suffice to clear and justify it.

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

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

Art, we have said, is _pantheistic_. Its aim, often unconsciously present, is to read off the _expressiveness_ of things, and find what it is which they would speak with their silent look. To its perceptions, form, color, sound, motion, have a soul within them whose life and activity they represent: and even language, by flinging itself into the mould of rhythm and music, acquires, beyond its logical significance, a second meaning for the affections. As if waked up and tingling beneath the artist's loving gaze, matter lies dull and dead no more; opens on him a responding eye; communes with him from its steadfast brow; and becomes instinct with grace or majesty.

Instead of being the drag-weight and opposite of spiritual energies, it becomes to him their pliant medium, the docile clay for the shapes of finest thought, the brilliant palette for the spread of inmost feeling. He melts the barrier away that hides from mere sense and intellect the interior sentiment--the formative idea--of all visible things; and his glance of sympathy changes them not less than a burst of amber sunrise changes a leaden landscape and picks out the freshest smiles. Thus he finds himself in a _living_ universe, ever striving to show him a divine beauty that lurks within and presses to the surface; and he stands before a curtain only half opaque, watching the lights and shadows thrown on it from behind by the ceaseless play of infinite thought. Not that the interpretation is by any means self-evident, or accessible except to the apprehensive instinct of sympathy. For it seems as though no form of being, no object in creation, could ever represent completely its own type: something is lost from its perfection in the realization; and the actual, falling short of the ideal, can give it only to one for whom a hint suffices. This conception of the world as an incarnate divineness does not, we are well aware, amount to pantheism, unless it become all-comprehensive, so as to take in not simply physical nature, but the human life and will; and there are numbers who are saved from this extreme, either by knowing where to draw the lines of philosophical distinction, or by the natural force of _moral_ conviction restraining the absolutism of imagination. But so far forth as the tendency operates, it subst.i.tutes for the theistic reverence for a Holy _Will_ the pantheistic recognition of a Creative _Beauty_, and presents G.o.d to the mind less as the prototype of Conscience than as the apotheosis of Genius. The spontaneity of poetic action is supposed to ill.u.s.trate His procedure better than the preferential decisions of the moral sentiment; and the genesis of whatever is good and fair is referred not so much to deliberate plan as to the eternal interfusion and circulation, through the great whole, of a Divine Essence, which flings off the universe and its history as a mere natural language. That this is the religion of art, is proved by the literature of every creative period, Greek, Italian, or Teutonic; and negatively by the comparative absence of artistic feeling and production in ages and nations that have most intensified at once the Unity and the Personality of G.o.d. Beauty was the Bible of Athens; and Plato, its devoutest and most comprehensive expounder, shows everywhere, in his metaphysics, his morals, and his myths, the mould into which its faith inevitably falls.

In _pa.s.sionate and impulsive_ natures there is a self-contradiction which makes their religious tendency peculiarly difficult to describe.

They are not less conscious than others of moral distinctions, and own the sacred authority of the better invitation over the worse. Indeed, when surprised into a fall, their remorse shares the vehemence of all their emotions, and from the black shadow in which they sit, the sanct.i.ty of the law which they have violated looks ineffably bright; and they speak of its holy requirements, and of the infinite purity of the Divine Legislator, in such fervid tone, that whatever else they may endanger, the perfection of G.o.d's character, you feel a.s.sured, and the obligations of human morality, are secure of reverential maintenance. Yet the truth is precisely the reverse. At the very moment that the law of duty is thus loftily extolled, it is on the point of total subversion; lifted to a height precarious and unreal, it overbalances on the other side and disappears. For the very same stormy intensity which makes these men strong to feel the claim of good, makes them weak to obey it. Their personality wants solidity; and an atmosphere of tempestuous affections sweeps over it like a hurricane on water. They can do nothing from out of their own resolves, and are for ever drawn or driven from the fortress they were not to surrender. What remains for them, solicited thus by forces which are an overmatch for their just self-reliance? Is it surprising that they no sooner confess how they _ought_ to obey, than they declare that they _cannot_ obey? The thing is a contradiction; but it all the better for this expresses what _they_ are: with their centre of gravity in the wrong place, they cannot but hold the truth in unstable equilibrium. Repose on contradiction is, however, impossible; and the necessary result of these co-existent feelings of obligation and incapacity is a _subst.i.tute_ for obedience. The resort to _sacrifice_ which thus arose expressed no more, prior to the Christian era, than the sentiment, "Take this, O Lord, 't is all I have to give"; and afforded but a fict.i.tious relief to the laboring spirit. It acknowledged and attested the incompetency of the will, but made no use of the excess of the emotions. It was the Pauline doctrine of faith which first turned this great power to account; and virtually said, "Are you in slavery because you cannot manage your affections?

turn their trust and enthusiasm on Christ in heaven, and let them _manage_ you, and you shall be free." The soul that falls in love with immortal goodness rises above the region of ineffectual strife, and spontaneously offers what could never be extorted from the will by the lash of self-mortifying resolve. This is the truth which underlies the sacrificial doctrine in Christian times,--_the emanc.i.p.ating power of great trusts and high inspirations_; and its very nature indicates its birth from impa.s.sioned temperaments, and its affinity with their special wants. The vicarious sacrifice is a mere plea, an ideal point of attraction, for a profound allegiance of heart; which minds of this cla.s.s would hardly yield without an intense appeal to their _grat.i.tude_; but which, if really awakened by a clear and tranquil moral reverence, would no less triumph over the gravitation of self.

The one needful condition for the redemption of these natures is the objective presence and action upon them of a divine person to lift them clear out of themselves, and render back on the healing breath of trust the strength that only pants itself away in feverish effort.

Every doctrine of sacrifice necessarily contradicts its own premises; because for guilt, which is personal and inalienable, it offers a compensation which is foreign, and meets a moral ill with an unmoral remedy. True and sound as a mere confession of weakness, it runs off from that point into mere confusion and morbidness. But add to it the doctrine of faith, and it acquires its proper complement; balances its human disclaimer with a divine resource; and instead of sending its captive through dark labyrinths of vain experiment, opens a direct way from the chambers of humiliation to the prophet's watch-tower of prayer and vision. Without this complement, the doctrine created priesthoods; with it, destroys them. Without it, men are caught up in their moments of helplessness, and handed over to ritual quackeries; with it, they are seized in their hour of inspiration, and flung into the arms of G.o.d. The susceptibility for either treatment depends on the predominance of impulse and pa.s.sion over breadth of imagination and strength of will. In short, there are minds whose power is shed, if we may say so, in _pro_tension, precipitated forwards in narrow channels with impetuous torrent. There are others whose affluence is in _ex_tension, and spreads out like a still lake to drink in light from the open sky, and reflect the look of wide-encircling hills. And there are others yet again, whose character is _in_tension, and that move on in full volume, and with steady stream of tendency, rising and falling little with the seasons, and holding to the limits within which they are to go. The faith of the first is _sacrificial_; of the second, _pantheistic_; of the third, _theistic_.

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

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

The first stage, then, of the new development of Christianity was its _Puritan_ period. The natural perdition of man, the radical corruption of his will, the religious indifference of all his states and actions, and the consequent worthlessness of his morality, except for civil uses and social police, const.i.tute the fundamental a.s.sumptions of the system. From this basis of despair its doctrine of atonement comes to the rescue. The obedience of Christ is accepted in place of that which men cannot render, and his sacrifice instead of the penalty they deserve. Not, however, for all, but for those alone who may appropriate the deliverance by an act of faith, and present the merits of Christ as their offering to G.o.d, with full a.s.surance of their sufficiency. Nothing but a divine and involuntary conversion can generate this faith, which follows no predisposition from the antecedent life, but the inscrutable decree of Heaven. Once transferred from the state of nature into that of grace, the disciple becomes, through the Holy Spirit, a new creature; is conscious of a sacred revolution in his tastes and affections; gives evidence of this by good works, which, now purified in their principle, are no longer unacceptable to G.o.d; and knows that, though he is still liable to the sins, he is redeemed from the penalties, of a son of Adam. The Church is the body of the converted, and while the Sacrament of Baptism initiates the candidate, and provisionally secures him, the Communion seals his adoption afterwards; the efficacy of both being conditional on the inner faith of the partic.i.p.ant. The intense and unmediated ant.i.thesis of nature and grace, and the gulf, impa.s.sable except by miracle, between their two spheres, may be regarded as the most characteristic feature of this scheme. Its text-book contains the Pauline Epistles, and opens most readily at the Romans or Galatians; and its favorite writers are Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Edwards.

With vast internal differences in their particular conceptions of Christian truth and of ecclesiastical government, the so-called Evangelical sects retain the impress of their common origin in the dearth of any ethical or aesthetic element in their religion.

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

The second season of the Reformation, though treated now with unmerited disparagement, was not less worthy of admiration than the first. High-Churchmen may be ashamed of an archbishop who proposed a scheme of comprehension; Evangelicals, of a preacher who applauded the Socinians; and Coleridgians, of a theologian who was no deeper in metaphysics than the "Grotian divines"; but neither the Erastianism, the charity, nor the common sense of a Tillotson would be at all unsuitable at this moment to a church openly torn by dissensions and really held together only by dependence on the state. It has been a current opinion, perseveringly propagated by adherents of the Geneva theology, that the spread of Arminian sentiments was equivalent to a religious decline, and concurrent with the growth of a worldly laxity and selfish indifference of character. The allegation is absolutely false. In literature, in personal characteristics, and in public life, the Lat.i.tude-men and their a.s.sociates in belief bear honorable comparison with their more rigorous forerunners. There is not only less of pa.s.sionate intolerance, but a n.o.bler freedom from an equivocal prudence, in the great writers of the second period, than in the Reformers of the first: and there is more to touch the springs of disinterestedness and elevation of mind in Cudworth and Clarke than in Calvin and Beza. Nor did the return of ethical theory weaken the sources of religious action. The very enterprises in which evangelical zeal most rejoices,--missions to the heathen, and the diffusion of the Scriptures,--were not only prosecuted but set on foot in new directions and with more powerful instrumentalities, in the very midst of this period, and by the very labors of its most distinguished philosophers. The Society for the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, were both born with the eighteenth century; and while the latter addressed itself to the natives and slaves of the American provinces, the former first made the Scriptures known on the Coromandel coast. It was Boyle who, of all men of his age, displayed the most generous zeal for the multiplication of the sacred writings, himself procuring their translation into four or five languages. For thirty years he was governor of a missionary corporation. Yet the complexion of his theology is sufficiently indicated by the fact that he bought up Poc.o.c.ke's Arabic translation of Grotius (De Veritate Christianae Religionis), and was at the cost of its wide distribution in the East.

And who that has ever read it can forget Swift's letter to the Irish viceroy (Lord Carteret), introducing Bishop Berkeley (then Dean of Derry), and his project for resigning his preferment at home in order that, on a stipend of 100 a year, he might devote himself to the conversion of the American Indians? The imperturbable patience with which the good Dean prosecuted his object, the self-devotion with which he embarked in it his property and life, the gratefulness with which he accepted from the government the promise of a grant, and the treachery which broke the promise, and after seven years compelled his return, make up a story unrivalled for its contrast of saintly simplicity and ministerial bad faith. These and similar features of the time superfluously refute the arbitrary and arrogant a.s.sumption, that no piety can be living and profound except that which disbelieves all natural religion, no gospel holy which does not renounce the moral law, no faith prolific in works unless it begins with despising them.

There was, however, still a defect in this gospel of conscience.

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

By the rules of technical theology, it may appear strange to reckon the turn from theism to pantheism as a _third stage of the Reformation_; as if it could be at all included in the interior history of Christianity, instead of being treated as a direct apostasy. And it is in reality a very serious question, whether, without unfaithfulness to its essential character, the Christian religion can domesticate within it this new action of thought, or must from the first visit it with unqualified excommunication. On the one hand, nothing can be more absurd than to suppose that a faith of Hebrew origin, a faith whose very hypothesis is sin, and whose aspiration is moral perfectness, can ever be reconciled with a thorough-going pantheism. On the other hand, nothing can be more gratuitous than to a.s.sume that the feeling which, on getting the whole mind to itself, generates a pantheistic scheme, has _no_ legitimate exercise, and gains its indulgence altogether at the expense of Christian truth. If we mistake not, the pith of the matter lies in a small compa.s.s. _Let Christian Theism keep Morals, and Pantheism may have Nature._ This rule is no mere compromise or coalition of incongruous elements, but is founded, we are convinced, on distinctions real and eternal. So long as a holy will is left to G.o.d, and a power committed to man, free to sustain relations of trust and responsibility, room remains for all the conditions of Christianity, and the field beyond may be open to the range of mystic perception, and railed off for the sacrament of beauty. But whether this or any other be the just part.i.tion of territory between the two claimants, part.i.tion there must be, for the real truth of things must correspond, not to the hypothesis of any single human faculty, but to harmonized postulates of all. It is not surprising that, on its first re-birth, the gospel of nature should deny the gospel of duty, or so take it up into its own fine essence as to volatilize all its substance away.

This is but the natural revenge taken for past neglect, and the needful challenge to future attention. Each one of the three developments has in its turn run out beyond the limits of the Christian faith, and yet, hitherto, each has established a place within it. The Hegelian, or Emersonian, type of the third period is but the corresponding phenomenon to the Antinomianism of the first, and the Deism of the second. And as these have pa.s.sed away, after surrendering into the custody of Christendom the principles that gave them strength, so will the Pantheism of to-day, when it has provided for the safe-keeping of its charge, and seen the Church complete its triad of Faith, Holiness, and Beauty.

This question, however, will be asked: If the Reformation only repeats, with some transposition, the cycle of the primitive development, how are we the better for having thus to do our work again? Are we to end where the sixteenth century began, and to reproduce the Catholicism which was then resolved into its elements?

And does some fatal necessity doom us to this wearisome periodicity?

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

The idea we have endeavored to give of the genesis of Christian doctrine, and the law of its vicissitudes, is offered only as conveniently distributing the subjective sources of faith. It cannot be applied to the phenomena of particular countries apart from ample historical knowledge of the concurrent social and political conditions, without which the most accurate clews to the natural history of _thought_ can only mislead as the interpreter of concrete _events_. When, for instance, we look around us at home, and seek for the English representatives of the several tendencies explained above, we may, no doubt, find them here and there, but they are so far from exhausting the facts of our time, that some of the most conspicuous parties--as the Anglicans--seem provided with no place at all. The obscurity first begins to clear away when we remember that in England _Schism went before Reformation_. The aim of Henry VIII. was simply to detach and nationalize the Church in his dominions; to give it insular integrity instead of provincial dependence; and could this have been done without meddling with the system of Catholic doctrine at all, the scheme of faith would have been preserved entire. While Luther and the Continental opponents of Rome were faithful to the idea of the unity of Christendom, and were calling out for a general council to restore it by a verdict on doubtful points of faith, the English monarch, undisturbed by doubt or scruple, broke off from Rome, and destroyed the traditions of centralization by taking the ecclesiastic jurisdiction into his own hands and stopping its pa.s.sage of the seas.

In the new movement of the time, England tended to become a petty papacy, still unreformed; Europe sought a universal church reformed.

Neither aim admitted of realization. To repudiate the supreme pontiff, and subst.i.tute a civil head, involved a fatal breach in the sacerdotal system, and carried with it inevitable departures from the integrity of Catholic dogma; so that reformation was found inseparable from schism. And when no council, acknowledged as universal, was called to give authoritative settlement, arrangements _ad interim_ became consolidated, provisional rights grew i