Part 23

It is in conformity with this doctrine of the _moral_ origin of our belief in the first principles of religion, that to every man his God is _his best and highest_, the embodiment of that which the believer himself conceives to be the greatest. The image which he forms of that Being may indeed be gross and terrible; and others may be shocked, and exclaim that he trusts, not in a Divinity, but in a Fiend: but will the worshipper himself perceive and acknowledge this?--will he not indignantly deny it?--will he not eagerly vindicate the perfection of the Deity he serves? He can do no otherwise; for he discerns nothing more sublime, and cannot be convinced that _that_ is low which stands at the summit of his thoughts. This uniform phenomenon in the history of religion could not exist, if human faith were an inference of intellectual origin. There would be nothing _then_ to prevent some men, in their reasonings on the probable character of God, from assigning to that character a place _beneath_ their own conceptions of what is most excellent; and amid the infinite varieties of speculation, many forms of this opinion would undoubtedly arise. Let any one, then, who dissents from the account which we have given, ask himself this question: Why is it, that to discover a blemish in a divinity is the same thing as to renounce faith in him; and that, even in pagan times, to _assail the character_ of the gods was the constant mark of an _unbelieving_ age? Is it not clear that, by a constraining necessity of our being, we are compelled to regard the godlike and the perfect as identical, and to look to heaven through the eye of our moral nature? The Intellect alone, like the telescope waiting for an observer, is quite blind to the celestial things above it,--a dead mechanism dipped in night,--ready to serve as the dioptric glass, spreading the images of light from the Infinite on the tender and living retina of Conscience.

If, then, there is no discernment of Deity except through our moral sense, the importance of confiding in the perceptions of that sense,--of rendering our consciousness of them vivid and distinct,--and the corresponding mischief of distrusting and repudiating these our appointed instructors,--become evident. Faith in the human conscience is necessary to faith in the Divine perfection: and _this_ again is the needful prelude to the belief in any special revelation. For, unless we are first assured of the truth and excellence of God, we cannot tell that his communications may not deceive us, giving us false notices of things, and agitating us with illusory hopes and fears. This might be apprehended from a Being of undetermined benevolence and integrity: and that this idea of a _mendacious revelation_ has never seriously entered the minds of men, is a strong proof of their natural and necessary faith in the rectitude and goodness of the Divine Administrator of creation. This Moral Perfection of God being assumed as a postulate in the very idea of a Revelation, no system of religion which contradicts it can be admitted as credible _on any terms_.

Now the whole scheme of Redemption, as it is represented in the popular theology, appears to us to fall under this condemnation. Under the _names_ of Justice, Sanctity, Mercy, it ascribes to the All-perfect a course of sentiment and of practice which--it is undeniable--no other moral agent, placed in analogous relations, could adopt without the deepest guilt. The Holiness of God, so often adduced to justify the severities of this scheme, we would yield to no one in earnestly maintaining; believing, as we do, that his abhorrence of moral evil is absolute and everlasting, his resistance to it real and true, and his love of excellence simply infinite as his nature. But purity of mind does not express itself by implacable vengeance against the impure, or oblige its possessor to engage himself in physically smiting them,--much less limit him through all eternity to this mode of administration. Rather does it incline away from a treatment which too often adds only torment, and removes no guilt,--which makes no advance towards the blessed dispositions it loves,--which fevers and parches instead of cooling and melting the passions of a culprit nature. It is a coarse and wretched error to suppose that anguish is a specific for sin, to the incessant infliction of which the Sinless is bound. God never departs indeed from his devotion to the laws of goodness, and his design of calling wider and wider virtue into existence: but he pursues them with the fertility of his infinite free-will;--now by the severities of his displeasure,--now by the openness of his forgiveness,--now by the solicitations of his love. His purpose, as one whose perfection is not merely spotless, but active and productive, cannot be, as some Christians seem to say, the penal publication of his personal offence against the insulters of his law, but the spread and cultivation throughout his spiritual universe of pure and high affections: and whenever the new germs of these appear in the garden of the Lord, no vernal sunshine or summer dews can more gently cherish the bursting flower, than does his mercy foster the fair and early growth. The assertion that God cannot pardon and recall to goodness till he has expended his tortures upon the evil, seems to us a plain denial of his moral excellence. Theologians speak as if there were some crime, or at least some weakness, in the clemency which freely receives a repentant creature into favor; as if the mercy which exacts no penalty, when penalty is no longer needed, were an amiable imbecility of human nature, which only a loose-principled and unholy being can exercise! as if absolute unforgiveness were the perfection of sanctity! True, this is disclaimed in words; and the Eternal Father is called merciful, for remitting the sinner's doom and transferring the burden of his guilt to a victim divine and pure. But surely this disclaimer is more insulting to our moral sense than the accusation. For, either this transference of righteousness and guilt is a mere figure of speech, denoting only that, from the death on Calvary, God took chronological occasion to pass his own spontaneous pardon, and set up the cross to _mark the date_ of his volition; or else, if the vicariousness be not this mere pretence, it describes an outrage upon the first principles of rectitude, a reckless disregard of all moral considerations, from the thought of which we are astonished that all good men do not recoil.

We press once more the question which has never been answered: How is the alleged immorality of letting off the sinner mended by the added crime of penally crushing the Sinless? Of what man--of what angel--could such a thing be reported, without raising a cry of indignant shame from the universal human heart? What should we think of a judge who should discharge the felons from the prisons of a city, because some noble and generous citizen offered himself to the executioner instead? And if this would be barbarity below, it cannot be holiness above. Moral excellence and beauty, we repeat, are no local growths, changing their species with every clime; nor are the poisonous weeds of this outer region the chosen adornments of paradise. The principles of Justice and Right embrace all beings and all times, and, like the indestructible conception of space, attach themselves to our contemplation of objects within the remotest infinitude. It is no more possible that what would be evil in man should be good in God, than that a circle on earth should be a square in heaven. Having faith, then, in the absolute perfection of our Creator, we dare ascribe to Him nothing which revolts the secret conscience He has given us.

* * * * *

III. The relation which thus subsists between the human conscience and the Divine excellence leads us to avow, in the next place, a FAITH in the _strictly Divine and Inspired Character of our own highest Desires and best Affections_. We do not mean by this, that these affections are of miraculous origin; that their appearance breaks through any regular law; or that they do not belong to our own nature so as to form an integrant part of its history; or that they do not arise spontaneously within it, but require to be precipitated upon it from without. They are as much properties of our own minds, as our selfishness and sin: we are _conscious_ of them, and so they cannot but be parts of our personality.[25] But in admitting them to be _human_, I do not deny that they are _divine_: in regarding them as indigenous to our created spirit, I do not treat them as foreign to the Creator's; nor is there any inconsistency in believing them to be simultaneously domesticated with both. That which is _included within_ the mind of man, is not _therefore excluded from_ the mind of _God_; much less is it true that occurrences agreeable to the order of nature are, by that circumstance, disqualified from being held the immediate products of the Heavenly Will. The Supreme Cause, so far from being shut out by his own secondary causes and natural laws, has now at least no residence, no activity, no existence, except within them; He covers, penetrates, fills them; thinks, speaks, executes, through them, as the media of his volition: and _His_ energy and _theirs_ not only _may coincide_, but even _must coalesce_. He is not to be brought down from his universal dominion to the rank of _one of_ the physical causes active in creation, doing that only which the others have left undone. Will any one stand with me by the midnight sea, and, because the tides in the deep below hang upon the moon in the heavens above, forbid me to hear in their sweep the very voice of God, and tell me that, while they roll untired on, He sleeps through the silent vault around me? It is by the law of gravitation that the planets find an unerring track in the desert space; and is it false, then, that He "leadeth them forth with his finger," and bids us note, in pledge of his punctuality, that "not one faileth"? Is there any error in ascribing the very same event at one time to gravitation, at another to God? Certainly not; for this is but one of the forms of his personal activity. And it is the same in the world of Mind; its natural laws do not exclude, but, on the contrary, include, the direct Divine agency: and though _my_ thought, or hope, or love, cannot be _yours_, they may yet be God's; not emanations from the God without us, but inspirations of the God within. Why should we start to think that there is a part of us which is divine?--why image to ourselves a distant, external, contemplative God, seeing all things and touching nothing, gazing on the unconscious evolutions of things, as the retired Mechanist of nature?--why enthrone Him in the inertness of dead space, without even a sacred function there, and exclude Him from the tried, and tempted, and ever-trembling soul of Man? If we found Him not at home in the secret places of strife and sorrow, vainly should we wander to seek Him in the colder regions of nature abroad. We have no sympathy with any system which denies the doctrine of a Holy Spirit; which discerns nothing divine in the higher experiences of human nature; which owns no black abyss and no heavenly heights in the soul of man, but only a flat, common, midway region, neither very foul nor very fair,--well enough for the streets of traffic, but without a mount of vision and of prayer. Nothing noble, nothing great, has ever come from a faith which did not deeply reverence the soul, and stand in awe of it as the seat of God's own dwelling, the presence-chamber of his sanctity,--the focus of that infinite whispering-gallery which the universe spreads around us.

Nor can we doubt at what point of our own nature we must stand, in order to hear the voice and feel the inspiration of the Eternal. The pure in heart--each in proportion to his purity--see Him. Our Conscience, our Moral Perceptions, as we have seen, are our only revealers of God. In proportion to their clearness do we discern Him; and behind the clouds that obscure them, He becomes dim, and vanishes away. The aspirations of duty, the love of excellence, the disinterested and holy affections, of which every good heart is conscious, constitute our affinity with Him,--by which we know Him, as like knows like: they are the expression of his mind, the pencil of rays by which He paints his image on our spiritual nature. God is related to our soul, like the sun in a stormy sky to the windowed cells in which mortals live; and as we sit at our work in the chamber of conscience or of love, the burst of brilliancy or the sudden gloom within reports to us the clear-shining or the cloud of the heaven without. Nor can any philosophy, falsely so called, permanently expel this conviction from the Christian heart. Every devout and earnest mind naturally feels that its selfishness and sin are of the earth, earthy,--the most offensive of all attitudes to God,--the infatuated turning of the back to Him: and, on the other hand, welcomes the fresh glow of pure Resolve, the heart-felt sob of Penitence, the glorious Courage that slays Temptation at his feet,--each as the gracious gift of a divine strength, and the authentic voice of the Inspirer, God. By this natural faith (natural, however, only to the Christian mind) we are prepared to abide; and, with the Apostle Paul, to own ourselves, not without deep awe, the very temple of the Holiest.

* * * * *

IV. We have said, that in the Conscience and Moral Affections we have our _only_ revealers of God. Let it be understood that we mean our only _internal_ revealers of Him; the only faculty of our nature capable of furnishing us with the idea and belief of Him, with any perception of his character, and allegiance to his will. We mean to state that, without this faculty, the bare intellect, the mere scientific and reasoning power, could make no way towards the knowledge of divine realities; could never, by any system of helps whatsoever, be trained or guided into this knowledge, any more than, in the absence of the proper sense, the _ear_ of the blind can be taught _to see_; and that nature, life, history, miracle, notwithstanding their most sedulous discipline, would leave us utterly in the dark about religion, except so far as they addressed themselves to our consciousness of what is holy, just, beautiful, and great. But we do _not_ mean to state that the Moral Sense can stand alone, dispense with all outward instruction, and supply a man with a natural religion ready made. Nor do we mean that the every-day experience of man, and the ordinary providence of God, are enough, without special revelation, to lead us to heavenly truth. And we are therefore prepared to advance another step, and to say, that, while regarding the human conscience as the only inward revealer of God, we have FAITH in CHRIST as _his perfect and transcendent outward revelation_. We conceive that Jesus of Nazareth lived and died, not to _persuade_ the Father, not to _appease_ the Father, not to make a sanguinary _purchase_ from the Father, but simply to "_show_ us the Father"; to leave upon the human heart a new, deep, vivid impression of what God is in himself, and of what he designs for his creature, man; to become, in short, the accepted interpreter of heaven and life. And this he achieved, in the only way of which we can conceive as practicable, by a new disclosure in his own person of all that is holy and godlike in character,--startling the human soul with the sudden apparition of a being diviner far than it had yet beheld, and lifting its faith at once into quite another and purer region. If it be true, as we have ventured to affirm, that to every man his God is his _best_, you can by no means give to his faith a _higher God_, till you have given to his heart a _better best_,--till you have touched him with a profounder sense of sanctity and excellence, and purified and enlarged the perceptions of his conscience. Nor can you do _this_, except by presenting him with nobler models, with the living form of a fairer and sublimer goodness, visibly transcending every object of his previous reverence. No verbal teaching, no didactic rules, can transform any man's moral taste, and place before his mental view a lovelier and truer image of perfection: as well might you hope, by definition, and precept, and book-wisdom, to train an artist with a soul like Raffaelle, or an eye like Claude. But only give the glorious model to the mind, _produce_ the most finished excellence and harmony, and our instinctive sympathy with goodness feels and discerns it instantly, and, though unable to conceive it inventively beforehand, recognizes it reverently afterwards. And so Christ, standing in solitary greatness, and invested with unapproachable sanctity, opens at once the eye of conscience to perceive and know the pure and holy God, the Father that dwelt in him and made him so full of truth and grace. Him that rules in heaven we can in no wise believe to be _less perfect_ than that which is most divine on earth; of anything _more perfect_ than the meek yet majestic Jesus, no heart can ever dream. And, accordingly, ever since he visited our earth with blessing, the soul of Christendom has worshipped a God resembling him,--a God of whom he was the image and impersonation;--and, _therefore, not_ the God of which philosophy dreams,--a mere Infinite physical Force, without spirituality, without love, chiefly engaged in whirling the fly-wheel of nature, and sustaining the material order of the heavens, and weaving in the secret workshop of creation new textures of life and beauty; _not_ the God of which natural theology speaks, the mere chief of ingenious mechanicians, more optical, and dynamical, and architectural, than our most skilful engineers,--a cold intellectual Being, in the severe immensity and immutability of whose mind all warm emotions are absorbed and dissolved; _not_ the God of Calvinism, creating a race with certain foresight of the eternal damnation of the many, and against the few refusing to relax his frown except at the spectacle of blood;--but the Infinite Spirit, so holy, so affectionate, so pitiful, whom Jesus felt to be in him as his Inspirer; who passes by no wounds of sin or sorrow; who stills the winds and waves of terror, to the perishing that call on him in faith; who stops the procession of our grief, and bids bereaved affection weep no more, but wait upon the voice that even the dead obey; who scathes the hypocrite with the lightning of conviction, and permits the penitent to wash his feet with tears; who reckons most his own the gentlest follower, that rests the head and turns up the trustful eye on him; and bends that look of piercing love upon the guilty which best rebukes the guilt. Jesus has given us a faith never held before, and still too much obscured, in the _affectionateness_ of the Great Ruler; has made Him our own domestic God, whose ample home encircles all, leaving not the solitary, the sinner, or the sad without a place in the mansions of his house; has wrapped us in the Divine immensity without fear, and bid us claim the warm sun in heaven as our Paternal hearth, and the vault of the pure sky as our protecting roof.

We have spoken of Christ's personal representation, in his own character and practical life, of the spirit of the Divine Mind, and have explained how in this way we believe that he has "shown us the Father." This, however, is not all. His _direct teachings_, perfectly in harmony with his life, confirm and extend its lessons; and we listen, with venerating faith, to his inimitable exposition of all divine truth. Purity of soul makes the most wonderful discoveries in heavenly things, and is indeed the pellucid atmosphere through which the remoter lights of God are "spiritually discerned." As we have said, the knowledge of him which any mind (be it of man or of angel) may possess, is just proportioned to its sanctity: and our Messiah, having the very highest sanctity, was enabled to speak with the highest and most authoritative knowledge, and was inspired to be our infallible guide, not perhaps in trivial questions of literary interpretation, or scientific fact, or historical expectation, but in all the deep and solemn relations on which our sanctification and immortal blessedness depend. And both to his person and to his teachings do the miracles of his life, the tragedy of his crucifixion, and the glory of his resurrection, articulately call the attention of all ages, as with the voice of God. In every way we discern in Christ the transcendent revelation of the Most High. We are told, that this is to _dishonor Christ_. We think it, however, a more glorious honor to him, to be thus indissolubly folded within the intimacy of the Father's love, than to be blasted by the tempest of his wrath; nor could we ever trust and venerate a God who--like the barbarians in the judgment-hall--could smite that meek lamb of heaven with one rude blow of vengeance.

* * * * *