Part 25

I must here consider for a moment one of the gravest questions which arises in many minds about the progress of Christianity. Granted that its speed was rapid at the first, why has it ever stagnated since? If it be the great remedy for human woes, and the great prompter of human virtue and morality, why did not its Divine Author, if Divine He be, ordain that it should at once find its way everywhere, and should never fail anywhere? I am ready to admit the gravity of the question. I doubt if there be any greater mystery connected with the faith of Christ. It was objected to that faith by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, perhaps the most eminent of the deists of the last century, and it has tried many a believing, as well as many a doubting spirit, since. We naturally feel, that a religion meant to save all men ought to be made known to all men. In the few words I can say on it now, I do not pretend to clear up all the mystery. I cannot clear up all the mystery of God's actions or of God's will. I would only remind you first, that this is at all events but one specimen of the working of that general law, which seems to rule in creation, in Providence, and in grace. The analogy between the development of nature and the development of revelation was ably traced in the lecture of one who preceded me some fortnight or three weeks back. It certainly seems the principle of the Divine action, that all things should rise up into maturity by steady gradual progress and growth. So the infancy of mankind was left in the glimmer of twilight; then there was a dawning light in the ages of the patriarchs and the prophets, till the day broke full upon the world in the coming into it of Jesus Christ. By the same kind of gradual working, that day-spring from on high has extended its brightness first to one land and then to another. It is no more marvellous that China and India and Central Africa should not yet have seen it all, than that for thousands of years of man's past history, the whole human race, except at most a very small portion of it, should have known nothing of Christ or even of God. There has been an infancy of man, as there has been an infancy of the Universe; and we may well believe, that there may have been a preparation for Christ's coming, and elsewhere a preparation for the knowledge of His coming, corresponding with the preparation through countless ages past for the habitation of man upon the earth.

And as to the imperfect reception of Christianity in some places and times, and its actual retrogression, as from the Mohammedan conquest, in others; is it not plain that we have to expect Christianity to advance by moral means and not by mechanical? Christ left a leaven in the world, that it might work and leaven mankind. We are apt to expect that it should work by magic, and not by its own moral influence. Now, our Lord never so worked on earth. If He worked in His miracles by a mechanical force on nature, He never applied such a force to human wills, nor does His Gospel work so now in the world. He called His church the salt of the earth; but He warned it that the salt might lose its savour. He said it was a grain of mustard seed, which should grow into a tree and fill the earth; but He never said that there should be no blights, no frosts, no tempests which might check its growth, or nip its leaves or rend off its branches. The apostles themselves knew that they had the Gospel treasure in earthen vessels, and when the vessel was injured the treasure could not be safely conveyed by it. It is very natural to expect that a potent remedy should produce an instantaneous cure. But we are constantly taught by experience that maladies are too deep-seated, or constitutions too sickly, for rapid or perfect restoration. We naturally expect every man under the true influence of Christianity to become perfect: we expect Christianized society to exhibit no defects. But, in reality, we only find that both the man and the people have a new principle, which gradually raises them, that they become instinct with a new life, which shows itself sometimes indeed by vigorous action, but which sometimes, too, becomes languid and feeble. If we make these allowances, there will be nothing to stagger our faith in the slow progress of the Gospel through the world. In the beginning, Christianity was thrown into mortal conflict with heathenism. That heathenism it steadily extirpated, whilst the sounder philosophy which had lived in the midst of heathenism it adopted for its own. In the midst of this there came too often an attempt at compromise. There sprang up a fusion between Christian verity and philosophy, and philosophy, too, of the corrupter heathen type, not of the purest or most divine type. Hence the strange forms of heresy which meet us in the earlier centuries. After the barbarian conquests, Christendom indeed took its fierce captors captive. They who had trod down imperial Rome, bowed lowly before Him whom Roman governors had crucified and Roman emperors had persecuted. Then came a struggle between barbarism and faith, the faith gradually subduing the barbarism, but the barbarism still clouding the faith. And I think we do not enough remember how through the Middle Ages, on which we often look so contemptuously back, there was ever going on a great mission work of the church and of the Gospel, the fierce barons and the rude churls being as hard to win to the obedience of faith as the heathens with whom the apostles pleaded in the early ages of the faith.

On the whole there has been a constant progress, greatest certainly at first, but never seriously slackened, till Mohammed devised a great Christian heresy (for a Christian heresy it was, as much as that of the Gnostics, or that of the Manichees before him,) thereby blighting the growth of the Eastern Church for centuries; still, however, there was progress again in the west, among Germans, and Slaves and Scandinavians; stagnation for a time from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, as far at least as visible increase was concerned; and now, again, progress, through the over-spreading of new continents by Christian colonists, and the bringing in of newly-known heathen tribes to the faith of the Church. Unless we insist that the world should be won by miracle, I do not see that we can ask more evidence to the winning power of the teaching of Christ.

V. And now for its effect on those taught by it, and on the world at large through them. I have argued that philosophy failed; has Christianity succeeded? With the allowances which must be made for the matter on which it has to work, and with the premised condition that it was not intended so to act as a spell that man's will would simply be enslaved by it, his moral responsibility lost, and his state of probation done away with; then I assert that it has succeeded incomparably beyond anything else that has ever been devised, or ever attempted by man.

Let us take great and acknowledged facts. It is confessed that under the influence of Christianity gladiatorial shows, and the throwing of prisoners to wild beasts, were given up and done away with. It is impossible to deny that the worst forms of licentiousness, which were not only tolerated in Greece and Rome, but indulged in openly by their heroes, attributed to their deities, and celebrated in verse by their poets, have been universally reprobated in Christendom, and dare not now show their heads abroad even in the most corrupted centres of modern society. The respect paid to woman is due before any other cause to the honour with which the Great Founder of our faith treated those women who waited on Him, and to His filial reverence for the mother that bare Him. The laws of marriage which now rule in Europe are not heathen, not even Jewish, but pre-eminently Christian. What Christ spoke concerning marriage and divorce regulated the principles of the Church, and the first Christian rulers incorporated those principles into the laws of the empire. Our domestic morals have thus been governed by a few sentences from the lips of one Man. The existence of hospitals for the sick and wounded is entirely due to the charity of the early Christian Church. The softening of the horrors of war, and the better treatment of prisoners, are equally the result of Christian influence. Contrast, for instance, the conduct of the most humane of heathen conquerors with the conduct of any great Christian general. No one among the ancients is more celebrated for his humanity than Titus; yet when Titus had taken Jerusalem, he crucified by thousands its undoubtedly brave defenders, and the historian tells us that "there lacked crosses for the bodies and room for erecting the crosses." When Gustavus Adolphus took a city, he so guarded the lives of its inhabitants, that it is said that no injury passed upon the head of one of them. In the war we have just witnessed, the German army marched into Paris, after fierce fights and long sieges, yet the first care of the invaders was not to slay or torture, but to feed the famished inhabitants of the city they had taken, the conquering army even giving up its rations to supply food to their enemies, who might else have perished for hunger. And as for the prisoners in modern warfare, the wounded and the sick are tended by the surgeons, and nursed in the hospitals of those against whom they have been fighting, and against whom it is possible they may yet live to fight.[146] This regard for human life is justly regarded by philanthropists as the truest test of a high civilization; and I confidently ask whether it has ever come but from the influence of Christian teaching and the effect of Christian sympathy.

Let us turn to the question of slavery. It is objected by some that there is no direct denunciation of slavery in the Scriptures. I am not now concerned with the Old Testament; but I may yet, in passing, say, that whilst Moses could hardly refuse to recognise slavery as a prevailing institution, he still gave laws concerning it which mitigated its horrors to the utmost, and placed the Jewish slave in a condition, moral, social, and spiritual, utterly unlike to his condition in any heathen state. As regards the Gospel, we must remember, once more, that Christ was not a political reformer, not professedly a social reformer, not even primarily a moral reformer. His mission was to elevate men's whole spiritual nature; and this He did by the infusion into society of a new religious or spiritual principle. It did not fall in with the purposes of that mission to descend to every detail of social life, still less to regulate political institutions. So, He never denounces war, nor imperial tyranny, nor even the political factions of the Jews. It is scarcely a question that sudden emancipation of a great slave population is never desirable. And if the first Christians had preached against a deeply-rooted social institution, they might easily have produced great political convulsions, and have ultimately rendered less tolerable than ever the conditions of those whom they desired to befriend. But the principles of Christ's teaching are directly adverse to slavery, and their progress has invariably tended to mitigate, and at length to eradicate it. The principle of the brotherhood of all men, of their common interest in God, of their common humanity with Christ; the principle that there was neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, neither bond nor free, in the great Christian commonwealth, but that all were one in Christ--this principle cannot be worked out without destroying the abject servitude of one man to another. And, as a matter of fact, this is what it has done. "The change brought about was gradual, but it was sure. At first monks, especially eastern monks, refused to be waited on by slaves. Then missionaries never lost an opportunity of redeeming slaves.... Ecclesiastical legislation declared the slave to be a _man_, and not a _thing_, or _chattel_; laid it down as a rule that his life was his own, and could not be taken without public trial; enforced on a master guilty of involuntary murder of his slave penance and exclusion from the communion; opened asylums to those who fled from their master's cruelty; declared the enfranchisement of the serf a work acceptable to God. The abolition of domestic slavery was one of the most important duties incumbent on the missionary energies of the mediæval Church."[149] It is sad, indeed, to think how the plague of slavery again broke out on the discovery of the West Indies and of America--slavery, too, in one of its most revolting and debasing forms; but it still is true that Christianity and Christian missions have struggled with it from the first, and that now, at length, it seems to be yielding, and there is good hope that it may ere long be utterly subdued.

In every way Christianity has been the pioneer of civilization, and the giver of social comfort and peace. Very truly, many colonists from Christian lands have given to the colonies which they founded not comfort, nor peace, nor civilization; but it has been because they have left Christian lands and not carried their Christianity out along with them. Often, indeed, they have only laid waste heathen lands and oppressed heathen races; and Christianity following after them, has had to undo the evil, which apostate Christians had inflicted. Still we may challenge any one to show a single instance, in which civilization in modern times has spread to any place to which Christianity has not first found its way. We may challenge any one to deny, that, where Christianity has been forsaken or neglected, there have sprung up, instead of it, as in revolutionary France, cruelty, licentiousness, and social degradation.

Christianity, once more, has been favourable at least to the development of mind, the cultivation of letters, the advancement of science. It is easy, of course, to say that there have often been efforts among Christians to check the progress of science, still more frequently panic terrors as to its unexpected discoveries. It is easy to point to Galileo, easy to speak of the fate of geology in the earlier days of the present century, of the reception of Mr. Darwin's theory now. As to Galileo, we may at once disown the Inquisition as representing the Christian faith. But it is unnecessary to deny that an appearance of antagonism between faith and science, or faith and literary criticism, will alarm timid believers, and so may lead to temporary misunderstandings between Christians and men of science or of literature. Yet look at past history and say, first, whether science and philosophy and literature did not for centuries find their only shelter in the Church, even under the deepest shadows of its cathedrals and monasteries. When all the world besides was unlettered and ignorant, learning flourished among the schoolmen, philosophy and even physical science were pursued, as far as they then could be pursued, by ecclesiastics and divines. The name of Roger Bacon stands out conspicuously as one who, in the cell of a convent and under the garb of a friar, carried inquiries into physical truth to a height which, considering his date and his difficulties, may compare even with the great and rapid discoveries of the present day. In short, it may be said truly and fearlessly, that whilst the only other religious systems in the world, which deserve consideration, Mohammedanism, Brahminism, and Buddhism, have either stifled, or at the best stunted science and made stagnant civilization; Christianity has fostered learning of all kinds, and has been in itself the highest civilization ever known.

I have naturally dwelt upon the external development of the religious life of Christians, not upon its inner being. A lecture on evidence, must of necessity appeal to that which can be known and read of all men. Yet I might, if there were time, point to the characters of individual Christians as proof of the elevating, ennobling, purifying, sanctifying power of the teaching of Christ, of the contemplation of Christ, and of the love of Christ. I will content myself with quoting words which many here have read, and read with interest, long ago. The author of "Ecce Homo" writes: "That Christ's method, when rightly applied, is really of mighty force, may be shown by an argument which the severest censor of Christians will hardly refuse to admit. Compare the ancient with the modern world. 'Look on this picture and on that.' One broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself into prominence. Among all men of the ancient heathen world, there were scarcely one or two to whom we may venture to apply the epithet 'holy.' In other words, there were not more than one or two, if any, who, besides being virtuous in their actions, were possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides abstaining from vice, regarded even a vicious thought with horror. Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed. Few will maintain that it is exceedingly rare. Perhaps the truth is, that there has been scarcely a town in any Christian country since the time of Christ, where a century has passed without exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at times like the presence of God Himself. And if this be so, has Christ failed? or can Christianity die?"[150]

Let us apply this test to one or two of the greatest and best of the heathen philosophers. Take Socrates first. Is it possible to imagine an apostle of Christ joining, as we know that Socrates joined, in drinking bouts where many were intoxicated, not himself drinking willingly, but when pressed making deeper potations than any one besides, yet never exhibiting symptoms of drunkenness?[151] It cannot be conceived that the unutterable licentiousness of Alcibiades, manifested during one of those drinking bouts, could have been so manifested, I will not say in the presence of St. Paul or St. John, or in the presence of any Christian clergyman since them, but even in the lowest assembly of English drunkards.

Take Marcus Aurelius: Mr. Lecky, the eloquent and able writer on "European Morals," has held him up as an example of what pure philosophy can do, and has challenged comparison between him and the most exalted and sanctified of the followers of Christ. We may well acknowledge the nobleness, the disinterestedness, the simplicity, and the elevation of his character. No absolute and irresponsible governor of men has ever been more "clear in his high office." Yet the concessions, which his panegyrist has made concerning him, separate him off by a broad line of demarcation from the highest types of Christian holiness. When his wife died, for his children's sake he would not contract a second marriage; but he preferred the society of a mistress. When he persecuted the Christians, an act which we may perhaps attribute to mistaken conscientiousness, he not only persecuted them, but he derided their sufferings. Could we in these days even call a man Christian who could so err? Professed Christians, no doubt, fall into licentiousness, but then they know they are in act repudiating their Christianity. Christians, alas! have persecuted those whom they regarded as heretics. But we must look fairly at the sad history of persecution before we simply say that Roman emperors did no more. In the first place, persecution was not inconsistent with the principles of heathenism, nor is it inconsistent with the principles, if such there be, of atheism or of atheistic philosophy; but it is wholly inconsistent with the principles taught by Christ, and can only have been tolerated when those principles had been perverted or obscured. In the next place, Christian persecutors, believing that their own form of Christianity was the only faith that could save mankind, esteeming therefore those who defiled that faith as more dangerous to mankind than any robbers or murderers, thought consistently, though erroneously, that they were bound to stamp out heresy as they would stamp out pestilence in their cattle sheds, or moral pestilence in their homes and villages. In the third place, though deeds of violence always harden the hearts of those that do them, it is well known that even inquisitors, so far from ridiculing the sufferings of their victims, often decreed those sufferings with trembling hands and broken accents, and eyes filled with tears. Persecutors are no types of Christian excellence; the truest Christianity utterly repudiates them; but even persecutors have generally been so, not from love of persecution, but from a deep and painful conviction that persecution was a duty and a necessity.

It will be replied, and very truly, that for all this, Socrates and Marcus Aurelius were grand specimens of humanity, rising to a noble height of moral greatness in an age of cruelty and licentiousness, and that we cannot expect them to have been all that we should expect from a Christian apostle or from a Christian king. Granted most heartily this. It only proves that Christianity has raised our standard of excellence and has raised the characters of those who embrace and follow it immeasurably above the highest standard and the noblest characters of the world, which had never heard of Christ.

I must bring my words, my most feeble and imperfect words in this high argument, to a close. I have tried to show that the life of Christ, and the teaching of Christ, as we have them recorded in the most unsuspicious records,--records which could not possibly have been the gradual concoctions and concretions of subsequent times, the careful afterthoughts of enthusiasts or impostors; that the life and teaching of Christ were original in the highest degree, not calculated to attract from any pandering to prejudice or to passion, that they exhibit the most marvellous ideal of simple grandeur or grand simplicity; that the power which they exercise is from no apparent effort--not even from reasoning and argumentation,--but from the strength of truth, and from their satisfaction to human want; that the power which they exercised, and yet exercise, is the greatest moral power ever tried upon man; that they have raised, and yet do raise, men and nations to a greater height of civilization, humanity, and purity, than anything has ever raised them before. And I ask, How can we account for the fact that all this has been done by the teaching of one unlettered Peasant in the most despised corner of a despised land? Is there any phenomenon in moral science, or in physical science, which demands a patient and honest investigation more seriously than this?

There are those who think the influence of Christianity is on the wane. I confess I can see no sign of this; though, without doubt, its enemies are many, and the wish is father to the thought. But I will just put my case in one other shape, which will more or less deal with this question of decay, and then I will end.