Part 12

The Christian philanthropist, if well instructed, dares not affect indifference to the promised reward, or pretend to be more disinterested than were the Apostles, who labored, "knowing that in due time they should reap." He cannot think himself free to overlook a motive distinctly held out before him in the Scriptures: to do so were an impious arrogance. And yet, if he does accept the promise of recompense, and takes it up as an inducement to diligence, he is compelled by a sense of the manifold imperfections of his services, to fall back constantly upon the divine mercies as they are assured to transgressors in Christ. These humbling sentiments utterly refuse to cohere with the complacencies of a selfish and vain-glorious philanthropy, and necessitate a subdued tone of feeling. Thus the very height and expansion of the Christian's hopes send the root of humility deep and wide; the more his bosom heaves with the hope of "the exceeding great reward," the more is it quelled by the consciousness of demerit. The counterpoise of opposing sentiments is so managed, that elevation cannot take place on the one side without an equal depression on the other; and by the counteraction of antagonist principles the emotions of zeal may reach the highest possible point, while full provision is made for correcting the vertigo of enthusiasm.

If, in the early ages of the Church, the expectation of future reward was abused, to the damage of fundamental principles, in modern times an ill-judged zeal for the integrity of those principles has produced an almost avowed jealousy towards many explicit declarations of Scripture: thus, the nerves of labor are either relaxed by the withdrawment of proper stimulants, or are absolutely severed by the bold hand of antinomian delusion.

Moreover, a course of Christian beneficence is one peculiarly exposed to reverses, to obstructions, and often to active hostility; and if the zeal of the philanthropist be in any considerable degree alloyed with the sinister motives of personal vanity, or be inflamed with enthusiasm, these reverses produce despondency; or opposition and hostility kindle corrupt zeal into fanatical virulence. The injection of a chemical test does not more surely bring out the element with which it has affinity, than does opposition, in an attempt to do good, make conspicuous the presence of unsound motives, if any such have existed. Has it not happened that when benevolent enterprises have consisted in a direct attack upon systems of cruel or fraudulent oppression, the quality of the zeal by which some were actuated in lending their clamors to the champions of humanity, has become manifest whenever the issue seemed doubtful, or the machinations of diabolical knavery gained a momentary triumph? Then, the partisans of truth and mercy, forgetful, alas! of their principles, have broke out almost into the violence of political faction, and have hardly scrupled to employ the dark methods which faction loves.

But there is a delicacy, a reserve, a sobriety, an humbleness of heart, belonging to the hope of heavenly recompense, which powerfully repels all such malign emotions. Who can imagine the circumstances and feelings of the great day of final reward, and think of hearing the approving voice of him who "searches the heart," and at the same time be told by conscience that the zeal which gives life to his labors in the cause of the oppressed ferments with the gall and acrimony of worldly animosity, that this zeal prompts him to indulge in exaggerations, if not to propagate calumnies; and exults much more in the overthrow of the oppressor, than in the redemption of the captive? If the greatness of the future reward proves that it must be altogether "of grace, not of debt," then, unquestionably, must it demand in the recipient a temper purified from the leaven of malice and hatred. Thus does the Christian doctrine of future reward correct the evil passions that are incident to a course of benevolence.

* * * * *

IV. Christian beneficence is only the subordinate instrument of a higher and efficient agency. "Neither is he that planteth anything, nor he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase." Such, on the scriptural plan, are the conditions of all labor, undertaken from motives of religious benevolence. But the besetting sin of natural benevolence is self-complacency and presumption. It is perhaps as hard to find sanctimoniousness apart from hypocrisy, or bashfulness without pride, as to meet with active and enterprising philanthropy not tainted by the spirit of overweening vanity. The kind-hearted schemer, fertile in devices for beguiling mankind into virtue, and rich in petty ingenuities, always well-intended, and seldom well-imagined, verily believes that his machineries of instruction or reform require only to be put fairly in play, and they will bring heaven upon earth.

But Christianity, if it does not sternly frown upon these novelties, does not encourage them; and while it depicts the evils that destroy the happiness of man as of much deeper and more inveterate malignity than that they should be remedied by this or that specious method, devised yesterday, tried to-day, and abandoned to-morrow, most explicitly confines the hope of success to those who possess the temper of mind proper to a dependent and subordinate agent. All presumptuous confidence in the efficiency of second causes is utterly repugnant to the spirit that should actuate a Christian philanthropist; and the more so when the good which he strives to achieve is of the highest kind.

* * * * *

V. Lastly, Christian beneficence is the expression of grateful love. The importance attributed throughout the New Testament to active charity is not more remarkable than is this peculiarity which merges the natural and spontaneous sentiments of good-will and compassion towards our fellows, in an emotion of a deeper kind, and virtually denies merit and genuineness to every feeling, how amiable soever it may appear, if it does not thus fall into subordination to that devout affection which we owe to him who redeemed us by his sufferings and death. The reasons of this remarkable constitution of motives it is not difficult to perceive. For, in the first place, it is evident that the love of the Supreme Being can exist in the heart only as a dominant sentiment, drawing every other affection into its wake. Even the softest and purest tendernesses of our nature must yield precedence to the higher attachment of the soul; for he who does not love Christ more than "father and mother, wife and children," loves him not. Much more, then, must the sentiment of general benevolence own the same subordination. Again; as the promise of future recompense, and the doctrine of dependence upon divine agency, elevate the motives of benevolence from the level of earth to that of heaven, they would presently assume a character of dry and visionary abstraction, unless animated by an emotion of love, belonging to the same sphere. Zeal without love were a preposterous and dangerous passion: but Christian zeal must be warmed by no other love than that of him who, "for our sakes became poor, that we through his poverty might be made rich."

It has already been said that religious enthusiasm takes its commencement from the point where the emotions of the heart are transmuted into mere pleasures of the imagination; and assuredly the excitements incident to a course of beneficence are very likely to furnish occasions to such a transmutation. But the capital motive of grateful affection to him who has redeemed us from sin and sorrow, prevents, so far as it is in active operation, this deadening of the heart, and consequent quickening of the imagination. The poor and the wretched are the Lord's representatives on earth; and in doing them good we cherish and express feelings which otherwise must lie latent, or become vague, seeing that he to whom they relate is remote from our senses.

This motive of affection to the Lord makes provision, moreover, against the despondences that attend a want of success; for although a servant of Christ may, to his life's end, labor in vain, although the objects of his disinterested kindness should "turn and rend him;" yet, not the less, has he approved his loyalty and love; approved it even more conspicuously than those can have done whose labors are continually cheered and rewarded by prosperous results. Affection, in such cases, has sustained the trial, not merely of toil, but of fruitless toil, than which none can be more severe to a zealous and devoted heart.

* * * * *

It appears, then, that Christian benevolence contains within itself a balancing of motives, such as to leave room for the utmost imaginable enhancement of zeal without hazard of extravagance. In truth, it is easy to perceive that the religion of the Bible has in reserve a spring of movement, a store of intrinsic vigor, ready to be developed in a manner greatly surpassing what has hitherto been seen. Such a day of development shall ere long arrive, the time of the triumph of divine principles shall come, and a style of true heroism be displayed, of which the seeds have been long sown; of which some samples have already been furnished; and which waits only the promised refreshment from above to appear, not in rare instances only, but as the common produce of Christianity.

In the present state of the world and of the Church, when communications are so instantaneous, and when attention is so much alive to whatever concerns the welfare of mankind, if it might be imagined that a great and sudden extension of Christianity should take place in the regions of superstition and polytheism; and that yet no corresponding improvement of piety, no purifying, no refreshment, no enhancement of motives, should occur in the home of Christianity, there is reason to believe that the influx of excitement might generate a blaze of destructive enthusiasm. If every day had its tidings of wonder—the fall of popery in the neighboring nations—the abandonment of the Mohammedan delusion by people after people in Asia—the rejection of idols by China and India; and if these surprising changes, instead of producing the cordial joy of gladdened faith, were gazed at merely with an unholy and prurient curiosity, and were thundered forth from platforms by heartless declaimers, and were grasped at by visionary interpreters of futurity; then, from so much agitation, uncorrected by a proportionate increase of genuine piety, new prodigies of error would presently start up, new sects break away from the body, new hatreds be kindled: and nothing scarcely be left in the place of Christianity, but dogmas and contentions. Thus the cradle of religion in modern times would become its grave.

But a far happier anticipation is with reason indulged; for it may well be believed that the same Benignant Influence which is to remove the covering of gross ignorance from the nations, shall, at the same moment, scatter the dimness that still hovers over the Church in its most favored home; and then, and under that influence, the fervors of Christian zeal may reach the height even of a seraphic energy, and yet without enthusiasm.

SECTION VIII.

SKETCH OF THE ENTHUSIASM OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH.

An intelligent Christian, fraught with scriptural principles in their simplicity and purity, but hitherto uninformed of Church history, who should peruse discursively the ecclesiastical writers of the age of Jerom, Ambrose, and Basil, would presently recoil with an emotion of disappointment, perplexity, and alarm. That within a period which does not exceed the reach of oral tradition, the religion of the apostles should have so much changed its character, and so much have lost its beauty, he could not have supposed possible. He has heard indeed of the corruptions of popery, and of the enormous abuses prevalent in "the dark ages;" and he has been told too, by those who had a special argument to prop, that the era of the secular prosperity of the church was that also of the incipient corruption of religion. But he finds in fact that there is scarcely an error of doctrine, or an absurdity of practice, ordinarily attributed to the popes and councils of later times, and commonly included in the indictment against Rome, which may not, in its elements, or even in a developed form, be traced to the writings of those whose ancestors, at the third or fourth remove only, were the hearers of Paul and John.

But after the first shock of such an unprepared perusal of the fathers has passed, and when calm reflection has returned, and especially when, by taking up these early writers from the commencement, the progression of decay and perversion has been gradually and distinctly contemplated, then, though the disappointment will in great part remain, the appalling surmises at first engendered in the modern reader's mind, will be dispelled, and he will even be able to pursue his course of reading with pleasure, and to derive from it much solid instruction. Considerations such as the following will naturally present themselves to him in mitigation of his first painful impressions.

While contemplating in their infant state those notions and practices (of the third century, for example) which afterwards swelled into enormous evils, it is difficult not to view them as if they were loaded with the blame of their after issues; and then it is hard not to attribute to their originators and promoters the accumulated criminality that should be shared in small portions by the men of many following generations. But the individuals thus unfairly dealt by, far from forecasting the consequences of the sentiments and usages they favored, far from viewing them, as we do, darkened by the cloud of mischiefs that was heaped upon them in after times, saw the same objects bright and fair in the recommendatory gleam of a pure and a venerated age. The very abuses which make the twelfth century abhorrent on the page of history, were, in the fourth, fragrant with the practice and suffrage of a blessed company of primitive confessors. The remembered saints, who had given their bodies to the flames, had also lent their voice and example to those unwise excesses which at length drove true religion from the earth. Untaught by experience, the ancient church surmised not of the occult tendencies of the course it pursued, nor should be loaded with consequences which human sagacity could not well have foreseen.

Each of the great corruptions of later ages took its rise, in the first, second, or third century, in a manner which it would be harsh to say was deserving of strong reprehension. Thus the secular domination exercised by the bishops, and at length supremely by the bishops of Rome, may be traced very distinctly to the proper respect paid by the people, even in the apostolic age, to the disinterested wisdom of their bishops in deciding their worldly differences. The worship of images, the invocation of saints, and the superstition of relics, were but expansions of the natural feeling of veneration and affection cherished towards the memory of those who had suffered and died for the truth. And thus, in like manner, the errors and abuses of monkery all sprang, by imperceptible augmentations, from sentiments perfectly natural to the sincere and devout Christian in times of persecution, disorder, and general corruption of morals.

Again: human nature, which is far more uniform than may be imagined, when suddenly it is beheld under some new aspect of time and country, is also susceptible of much greater diversities of habit and feeling than those are willing to believe who have seen it on no side but one. This double lesson, taught by history and travel, should be well learned by every one who undertakes to estimate the merits of men that have lived in remote times, and under other skies.

A caution against the influence of narrow prejudice is obviously more needful in relation to the persons and practices of ancient Christianity, than when common history is the subject of inquiry; for in whatever relates to religion, every one carries with him, not merely the ordinary prepossessions of time and country, but an unbending standard of conduct and temper, which he is forward to compare, in his particular manner, with whatever offends his notions of right. But though the rule of Scripture morals is unchangeable, and must be applied with uncompromising impartiality to human nature under every variety of circumstance, yet is it impractible, at the distance of upwards of a thousand years, so fully to calculate those circumstances, and so to perceive the motives of conduct, as is necessary for estimating fairly the innocence or the criminality of particular actions or habits of life. The question of abstract fitness, and that of personal blameworthiness, should ever be kept apart: at least they should be kept apart when it is asked—and we are often tempted to ask it in the perusal of church history—May such men be deemed Christians, who acted and wrote thus and thus? Before a doubt of this kind could be solved satisfactorily, we must know—what can never be known till the day of universal discovery—how much of imperfection and obliquity may consist with the genuineness of real piety; and again, how much of real obliquity there might be, under the actual circumstances of the case, in the conduct in question. Who can doubt that if the memorials of the present times, copious, and yet inadequate as they must be, shall remain to a distant age, they will offer similar perplexities to the future reader, who, amidst his frequent admiration or approval, will be compelled to exclaim—But how may we think these men to have been Christians? Christianity is in gradual process of reforming the principles and practices of mankind, and when the sanative operation shall have advanced some several stages beyond its present point, the notions and usages of our day, compared with the commands of Christ, as then understood, will, no doubt, seem incredibly defective.

Perhaps it may be said, that in all matters of sentiment, depending on physical temperament, and modes of life, the people of the British islands are less qualified to appreciate the merits of the nations of antiquity than almost any other people of Christendom; and perhaps, also, by national arrogance and pertinacity of taste, we are less ready to bend indulgently to usages unlike our own than any other people. Stiff in the resoluteness of an exaggerated notion of the right of private judgment, we bring all things unsparingly to the one standard of belief and practice; or rather to our particular pattern of that standard; and do not, until our better nature prevails, own brotherhood with Christians of another complexion and costume. A somewhat austere good sense, belonging, first, to the haughtiness and energy of the English character, then to the liberality of our political institutions, and lastly, but not least, to the all-pervading spirit and habits of trade, renders the style of the early Christian writers much more distasteful to us than it has proved to Christians of other countries. Moreover, recent enhancements of the national character, resulting from the diffusion of the physical sciences, and from the more extended prevalence of commercial feelings, have placed those writers at a point much further removed from our predilections than that at which they stood a century ago.

* * * * *

But again: in abatement of the chagrin which a well-instructed Christian must feel in first opening the remains of ecclesiastical literature, it must be remembered, that these works offer a very defective image of the state of religion at the era of their production; that is to say, of religion in its _recesses_, which are truly the homes of Christianity. Those who _write_ are by no means always those among the ministers of religion whom it would be judicious to select as the best samples of the spirit of their times. Moreover, it is the taste of a following age that has determined which among the writers of the preceding period should be transmitted to posterity; and in many instances, it is manifest, that a depraved preference has given literary canonization to authors whose ambition was much rather to shine as masters of a florid eloquence, than to feed the flock of Christ. It was therefore an egregious error to suppose that the spiritual character of the Church lies broadly on the surface of its extant literature: on the contrary, charity may easily find large room for pleasing conjectures relative to obscure piety, of which no traces are to be found on the pages of saints and bishops. The record of the spiritual church is "on high,"—not in the tomes that make our libraries proud.

These, and other considerations, which will present themselves to a candid and intelligent mind, cannot but remove much of the embarrassment and disrelish that are likely to attend a first converse with ancient divinity. And the pious reader will proceed with heartfelt satisfaction to collect evidence of the fact, which some modern sophists have so much labored to obscure, that the rudiments, at least, of revealed religion, as now understood by the mass of Christians, were then firmly held by the body of the Church. And he will rejoice also to meet with not less satisfactory proofs of the energy and intenseness of practical Christianity among a large number of those who made profession of the name.

Nevertheless, after every fair allowance has been made, and every indulgence given to diversity of circumstance, and after the errors and disgraces of our own times have been placed in counterpoise to those of the ancient church, there will remain glaring indications of a deep-seated corruption of religious sentiment, leaving hardly a single feeling proper to the Christian life in its purity and simplicity. It is not heresy, it is not the denial of the principal scriptural doctrines, that is to be charged on the ancient church; the body of divinity held its integrity. Nor is it the want of heroic virtue that we lament. But a transmutation of the objects of the devout affections into objects of _imaginative delectation_ had taken place, had rendered the piety of a numerous class purely fictitious, had tinged, more or less, with idealism, the religious sentiments of all but a few, and had opened the way by which entered at length, the dense and fatal delusions of a superstition so gross as hardly to retain a redeeming quality.

Not a few of the Christians of the third century, and multitudes in the fourth and fifth, especially among the recluses, having lost the forcible and genuine feeling of guilt and danger, proper to those who confess themselves transgressors of the divine law, and in consequence become blind to the real purport of the Gospel, fixed their gaze upon the ideal splendors of Christianity, were smitten with the phase it presents, of beauty, of sublimity, of infinitude, of intellectual elevation, were charmed with its supposed doctrine of abstraction from mundane agitations; and found within the sphere of its revelations unfathomable depths, where vague meditation might plunge and plunge with endless descents. Fascinated, deluded, and still blinded more by the deepening shades of error, they forgot almost entirely the emotions of a true repentance, and of a cordial faith, and of a cheerful obedience; and in the rugged path of gratuitous afflictions, and unnatural mortifications, pursued a spectral resemblance of piety, unsubstantial and cold as the mists of night.