Part 22

"That we may fully realize what manner of equivalent to the dishonor done to the law and name of God by sin an adequate repentance and sorrow for sin must be, and how far more truly than any penal infliction such repentance and confession must satisfy Divine justice, let us suppose that all the sin of humanity has been committed by one human spirit, on whom is accumulated this immeasurable amount of guilt; and let us suppose this spirit, loaded with all this guilt, to pass out of sin into holiness, and to become filled with the light of God, becoming perfectly righteous with God's own righteousness,--such a change, were such a change possible, would imply in the spirit so changed a perfect condemnation of the past of its own existence, and an absolute and perfect repentance, a confession of its sin commensurate with its evil. If the sense of personal identity remained, it must be so. Now, let us contemplate this repentance with reference to the guilt of such a spirit, and the question of pardon for its past sin and admission now to the light of God's favor. Shall this repentance be accepted as an atonement, and, the past sin being thus confessed, shall the Divine favor flow out on that present perfect righteousness which thus condemns the past, or shall that repentance be declared inadequate? Shall the present perfect righteousness be rejected on account of the past sin, so absolutely and perfectly repented of? and shall Divine justice still demand adequate punishment for the past sin, and refuse to the present righteousness adequate acknowledgment,--the favor which, in respect of its own nature, belongs to it? It appears to me impossible to give any but one answer to these questions. We feel that such a repentance as we are supposing would, in such a case, be the true and proper satisfaction to offended justice. Now, with the difference of personal identity, the case I have supposed is the actual case of Christ, the holy one of God, bearing the sins of all men on his spirit,--in Luther's words, 'the one sinner,'--and meeting the cry of these sins for judgment, and the wrath due to them, absorbing and exhausting that Divine wrath in that adequate confession and perfect response on the part of man which was possible only to the infinite and eternal righteousness in humanity."--p. 143.

The case which our author here presents as an aid to the imagination was to Luther the literal reality; to whom, accordingly, Christ was "the one sinner," _without_ "the difference of personal identity," which is here so innocently slipped in, as if it were of no consequence. Christ, in the Reformer's view, _was_ humanity, _our_ humanity; and the grand function and triumph of faith is to feel ourselves included in him, to merge our individuality, sins and all, in his comprehending manhood and atoning obedience. Hence the stress which Luther lays on "the well-applying the pronoun" _our_, in the phrase, "who gave himself for our sins"; "that this one syllable being believed may swallow up all thy sins." The effect of this realism on the theology of Luther has not been sufficiently remarked. We believe it to be the key to much that is obscure in his writings, and the secret source of his antipathy to the Calvinistic type of the Reformation. Absorption of Manhood into Christ,--distribution of Godhead into humanity,--these were the correlative parts of his objective belief,--Atonement and Eucharistic Real Presence: and neither in themselves nor in their correspondence can they be appreciated, without standing with him at the point of view which we have endeavored to indicate.

Whether mediatorial religion shall continue to include in its scheme some provision for _dealing with God on behalf of men_, will mainly depend on the successful revival or the final abandonment of the old realistic modes of thought. Mr. Campbell's compromise with them, taking refuge with them for illustration while disowning them in substance, answers no logical or theological purpose at all. If he follows out the natural tendencies and affinities of his faith, he must rest exclusively at last in the other half of the doctrine, which exhibits the _dealing with man on behalf of God_. In this best sense mediatorial religion is imperishable, and imperishably identified with Christianity. The Son of God, at once above our life and in our life, morally divine and circumstantially human, mediates for us between the self so hard to escape, and the Infinite so hopeless to reach; and draws us out of our mournful darkness without losing us in excess of light. He opens to us the moral and spiritual mysteries of our existence, appealing to a consciousness in us that was asleep before. And though he leaves whole worlds of thought approachable only by silent wonder, yet his own walk of heavenly communion, his words of grace and works of power, his strife of divine sorrow, his cross of self-sacrifice, his reappearance behind the veil of life eternal, fix on him such holy trust and love, that, where we are denied the assurance of knowledge, we attain the repose of faith.

FIVE POINTS OF CHRISTIAN FAITH.

It is at all times difficult, even for the wisest, to describe aright the tendencies of the age in which they live, and lay down its bearings on the great chart of human affairs. Our own sensations can give us no notice whither we are going; and the infinite life-stream on which we ride, restless as it is with the surface-waves of innumerable events, reports nothing of the mighty current that sweeps us on, except by faint and silent intimations legible only to the skilled interpreter of heaven. It is something, however, to have the feeling _that we are moving_, and to be awake and looking out; and perhaps there never was a period in which this consciousness was more diffused throughout society than in our own. No one can look up and around at the religious and social phenomena of Christendom, without the persuasion that we are entering a new hemisphere of the world's history,--a persuasion corroborated even by those who disclaim it, and who insist on still steering by lights of tradition now sinking into the mists of the receding horizon. Wherever we turn our eye, we discover some symptom of an impending revolution in the forms of Christian faith. The gross materialism and absolute unbelief diffused for the first time among vast masses of our population; the fast-spreading (and, as it appears to us, morbid) dislike to look steadily at anything miraculous; the extensive renunciation, even among the religious classes on the Continent, of historical Christianity; the schisms and ever-new peculiarities which are weakening all sects, and, like seedlings of the Reformation, are obscuring the species, by multiplying the varieties, of opinion; the revived controversies, penetrating all the great political questions of the age, between the ecclesiastical and civil powers,--are not the only indications of approaching theological change. That very conservatism and recoil upon the high doctrine of an elder time, which is manifest in every section of the Christian world, is a confession by contrast of the same thing. For opinion does not turn round and retreat into the past, till it has lost its natural shelter in the present, and dreads some merciless storm in the future. The outward strength which the older churches of our country seem to be acquiring arises from the rallying of alarm and the herding together of trembling sympathies; and though fear may unite men against external assaults upon institutions, it cannot stop the decay of inward doubt. It would seem as if Christianity was threatened by the mental activity which it has itself created; as if the intellectual weapons which have been forged and tempered by its skill were treacherously turned against its life. It is vain, however, to strike a power that is immortal; nothing will fall but the bodily form cast for a season around the imperishable spirit.

Protestantism, with all its blessings, has after all greatly disfigured Christianity, by constructing it into a rigid metaphysical form, and setting it up on a narrow pedestal of antiquarian proof;--by destroying its infinite character through definitions, and developing it dogmatically rather than spiritually;--by treating it, not as an ideal glory around the life of man, but a logical incision into the psychology of God. The wreck of systems framed under this false conception will but leave the pure spirit of our religion in the enjoyment of a more sacred homage;--you may dash the image, but you cannot touch the god.

In the following remarks we shall seek to make this evident;--to show what principles of religion in general, and of Christianity in particular, may be pronounced safe from the shocks of doubt. In times of consternation and uncertainty, it behooves each one to look within him for the heart of courage, and around him for the place of shelter, and to single out, amid countless points of danger, some refuge immutable and eternal. With this view, we propose to trace an outline of Christian truths which we consider secure and durable as our very nature;--a chain of granite points rising, like the rock of ages, above the shifting seas of human opinion. In doing so, we shall be simply delineating Unitarian Christianity, according to our conception of it;--expounding it, not as a barren negation, but as a scheme of positive religion; exhibiting both its characteristic faiths, and something of the modes of thought by which they are reached.

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I. In the _first_ place, WE HAVE FAITH in the _Moral Perceptions of Man_. The conscience with which he is endowed enables him to appreciate the distinction between right and wrong; to understand the meaning of "_ought_," and "_ought not_"; to love and revere whatever is great and excellent in character, to abhor the mean and base; and to feel that in the contrast between these we have the highest order of differences by which mind can be separated from mind. And on this consciousness,--the basis of our whole responsible existence,--no suspicion is to be cast; no lamentation over its fallibility, no hint of possible delusion, is to pass unrebuked; it is worthy of absolute reliance as the authoritative oracle of our nature, supreme over all its faculties,--entitled to use sense, memory, understanding, to register its decrees, without a moment's license to dispute them. That Justice, Mercy, and Truth are good and venerable, is no matter of doubtful opinion, in which peradventure an error may be hid;--is not even a thing of certain inference, recommended to us by the force of evidence;--is not an empirical judgment, depending on the pleasurableness of these qualities, and capable of reversal, if, under some tyrant sway, they were to be rendered sources of misery. The approval which we award to them is quite distinct from assent to a scientific probability; the excellence which we ascribe to them is not identical with their command of happiness, but altogether transcends this, precedes it, and survives it; the obligation they lay upon us is not the consequence of positive law, human or divine, or in any way the creature of superior will; for all free-will must itself possess a moral quality,--can never stir without exercising it,--and cannot therefore give rise to that which is a prior condition of its own activity. And if (to pursue the thought suggested above) we could be snatched away to some distant world, some out-province of the universe, abandoned by God's blessed sway to the absolutism of demons, where selfishness and sensuality, and hate and falsehood, were protected and enjoined by public law, it is clear that, by such emigration, our interests only, and not our duties, would be reversed; and that to rebel and perish were nobler than to comply and live. The discernment of moral distinctions, then, belongs to the very highest order of certainties; it has its seat in our deepest reason, among the primitive strata of thought, on which the depositions of knowledge, and the accumulations of judgment, and the surface growths of opinion, all repose. As experience in the past has not taught it, experience in the future cannot _unteach_ it. The difference between good and evil we cannot conceive to be merely relative, and incidental to our point of view,--variable with the locality and the class in which a being happens to rest,--an optical caprice of the atmosphere in which we live;--but rather a property of the very light itself, found everywhere out of the region of absolute night; or, at least, a natural impression, belonging to that perceptive eye of the soul, through which alone we can look out, as through a glass, upon all beings and all worlds; and if any one will say that the glass is colored, it is, at all events, the tint of nature, shed on it by the ineffaceable art of the Creator. The modes in which we think of moral qualities are not terrestrial peculiarities of idea, like foreign prejudices; the terms in which we speak of them are not untranslatable provincial idioms, vulgarities of our planetary dialect, but are familiar, like the symbols of a divine science, to every tribe of souls, belonging to the language of the universe, and standing defined in the vocabulary of God. The laws of right are more necessarily universal than the physical laws of force; and if the same agency of gravitation that governs the rain-drop determines the evolutions of the sky, and the Principia of Newton would be no less intelligible and true on the ring of Saturn than in the libraries of this earth,--yet more certain is it that the principles of moral excellence, truly expounded for the smallest sphere of responsibility, hold good, by mere extension, for the largest, and that those sentiments of conscience which may give order and beauty to the life of a child, constitute the blessedness of immortals, and penetrate the administration of God. This is what we intend, when we insist on implicit faith in the moral perceptions of man. They are to be assumed by us as the fixed station, the grand heliocentric position, whence our survey of the spiritual universe must be made, and our system of religion constructed. Whatever else may move, here, as in creation's centre of gravity, we take our everlasting stand. Whatever else be doubtful, these are to be simply trusted. The force of certainty by which nature and God give them to the conscience exceeds any by which, either through the understanding or through external supernatural communication, they might _seem_ to be drawn away. No revelation could persuade me that what I revere as just, and good, and holy, is _not venerable_, any more than it could convince me that the midnight heavens are not sublime.

There is nothing to move us from this position, in the objection, that different men have different ideas of right and wrong, and that the heroic deeds of one latitude are regarded as the crimes of another. This moral discrepancy is, in the first place, infinitely small in proportion to the moral agreement of mankind, so that it is even difficult to find many striking examples of it; and when the subject is mentioned, everybody expects to hear the self-immolation of the Indian widow, and other superstitions of the Ganges, adduced as the standing illustrations. What, after all, are these eccentricities of the moral sense, compared with the scale of its common consent? As well might you deny the existence of an atmosphere, because you have found the air exhausted from a pump! Where is the nation or the individual, without the rudiments, however imperfectly unfolded, of the same great ideas of duty which we possess ourselves?--where the language, in which there are no terms to denote good and evil,--the just, the brave, the merciful?--where the tribe so barbarous as not to listen, with earnest eye, to the story of the good Samaritan? And if such there were, should we not call them a people but little human (_inhuman_), and deem them, not the specimens, but the outlaws of our nature? Moreover, the variances of moral judgment are usually only apparent and external. The action which one man pronounces wrong and another right, is not the same, except upon the lips: enter the minds of the two disputants, and you will find that it is only half taken into the view of each, and presents to them its opposite hemispheres; no wonder that it shows the darkness of guilt to the one, and the sunshine of virtue to the other. And accordingly, these differences actually vanish as the faculty of conscience unfolds itself, and the scope of the mind is enlarged. Like the discrepancies in the ideas which men have of beauty, they exist principally between the uncultivated and the refined: and the well-developed perceptions of the best in all ages and countries visibly agree. Nay, while yet the discordance lasts, it introduces no real doubt: for heaven has established a moral subordination among men, which reveals the real truth of our own nature. Do we not always see, that the lower conscience bows before the higher;--that the heart, without light or heat itself, may be pierced, as with a flash, by a sentiment darted from a loftier soul, and own it to be from above;--that, simply by this natural allegiance of the lesser to the nobler, classes and nations and sects are raised in dignity and moral greatness;--that they, and they only, have had any grand and sublime existence in the history of the world, who have been gifted with power to create a new religion,--a fresh development of what is holy and divine;--and that every one so endowed has always gathered around him the multitudes ever praying to be lifted above the level of their life, and blessing the benefactor who wakes up the consciousness of their higher nature? And if so, the general _direction_ of the moral sentiment is the same, however its intensity may vary: and the irregular indications which it gives are not due to any inherent vacillation, but to the disturbing causes which deflect it from the celestial line of simplicity and truth.

We keep our foot, then, on this primitive foundation,--faith in the moral perceptions of man. We say, that we know what we mean, when we affirm that a being is just, pure, disinterested, merciful; that these terms describe one particular kind of character, and one only; that they have the same sense to whomsoever they are applied, and are not to be juggled with, so as to denote quite opposite forms of action and disposition, according as our discourse may be of heaven or of earth; that whenever they lose their ordinary and intelligible signification, they become senseless; and that what would be wrong and odious in any one moral agent, can be, under similar relations, right and lovely in no other. These positions, which we take to be fundamental, are in direct contradiction to the theological maxims with which most churches begin;--viz. that human nature is so depraved that its conscience has lost its discernment, sees everything through a corrupted medium, and deserves no trust; that it may surrender its convictions to anything which can bring fair historical evidence of its being a revelation;--in other words, that it may be right to throw away our ideas of right, and, in obedience to antiquarian witnesses, suppose it holy in God to design and execute a scheme which it would be a crime in man to imitate. These principles are defended by the assertion, that the relations of the Divine and the human being are so different as to destroy all the analogies of character between them. The only tendency, both of this defence and of the principles themselves, is to absolute scepticism;--to _atheistical scepticism_, inasmuch as our propositions respecting God, if not true in the plain human sense, are to us true in no other, and represent _nothing_; to _moral scepticism_, inasmuch as, the sentiments of conscience being exposed to distrust, and all its language rendered unsettled, the very ground on which human character must plant itself is loosened; the rock of duty melts into water beneath our feet, and we are cast into the waves of impulse and caprice.

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II. We have Faith in the _Moral Perfection of God_. This indeed is a plain consequence of our reliance on the natural sentiments of duty. For it is not, we apprehend, by our logical, but by our moral faculty, that we have our knowledge of God; and he who most confides in the instructor will learn the sacred lesson best. That one whom we may call the Holiest rules the universe, is no discovery made by the intellect in its excursions, but a revelation found by the conscience on retiring into itself; and though we may reason in defence of this great truth, and these reasonings, when constructed, may look convincing enough, they are not, we conceive, the source, but rather the effect, of our belief,--not the forethought which actually precedes and introduces the Faith, but the afterthought by which Faith seeks to make a friend and an intimate of the understanding. Does any one hesitate to admit this, and think that our conceptions of the Divine character are inferences regularly drawn from observation,--not indeed observation on the mere physical arrangements, but on the moral phenomena, of our world,--from the traces of a regard to character in the administration of human life? We will not at present dispute the conclusion; but, observing that the premises which furnish it are certain _moral_ experiences, we remark that the very power of receiving and appreciating these, of knowing what they are worth, belongs not to our scientific faculty, but to our sense of justice and of right. On a being destitute of this they would make no impression; and in precise proportion to the intensity of this feeling will be the vividness and force of their persuasion. And is it not plain _in fact_, that it is far from being the clear and acute intellect, but rather the pure and transparent heart, that best discerns God? How many strong and sagacious judgments, of coolest capacity for the just estimate of argument, never attain to any deep conviction of a perfect Deity! Nay, how much does scepticism on this great matter seem to be proportioned, not to the obtuseness, but rather to the subtlety and searchingness of the mere understanding? But when was it ever known that the singularly pure and simple heart, the earnest and aspiring conscience, the lofty and disinterested soul, had no faith in the "First fair and the First good"? Philosophy at its ease, apart from the real responsibilities and strong battle of life, loses its diviner sympathies, and lapses into the scrupulosity of doubt, and from the centre of comfort weeps over the miseries of earth, and the questionable benevolence of heaven; while the practically tried and struggling, with moral force growing beneath the pressure of crushing toil, look up with a refreshing trust, and with worn and bleeding feet pant happily along to the abodes of everlasting love. The moral victor, flushed with triumph over temptation, feels that God is on his side, and that the spirit of the universe is in sympathy with his joy. Never did any one spend himself in the service of man, and yet despair of the benignity of God. Our faith, then, in the Divine perfection, forms and disengages itself from the deeps of conscience: and the Holiest that broods over us solemnly rises--the awful spirit of eternity--from the ocean of our moral nature.