Part 24

V. But we hasten to observe, finally, that WE HAVE FAITH in HUMAN IMMORTALITY, as exemplified in the heavenly life to which Jesus ascended. To assure us of this great truth, it were enough that Jesus assumed and taught it; that it was his great postulate, essential to the development of his own character, and to all his views of the purposes of life,--an integrant part of his insight into human responsibility and his version of human duty. For if _he_ did not teach the reality of God in this matter, sure we are that none else has ever done so; and most of all, that the sceptics who doubt the heavenly futurity have no claim to take his place as our instructors. For if this hope were a delusion, _who_ would the mistaken be? Will any one tell me, that the voluptuary, who, from abandonment to the body, cannot imagine the perpetuity of the spirit;--that the selfish, who, looking at the meanness of his own nature, sees nothing worth immortalizing;--that the contented Epicurean, who, in prudent quietude of sense and sympathy, finds adequate satisfaction in this mortal life;--that the cold speculator, who looks at the fouler side of human nature, and, showing us on its features the pallor of sensualism or the hard lines of guilt, deems it less fit for the duration of the angel than for the extinction of the brute;--that these men are _right_; while Christ, who walked without despair through the deepest haunts of sin, with faith that succumbed not to wretchedness and wrong, but stood up and conquered them; who embraced our whole nature in his love, and displayed it in its perfectness; who lived and died in its utmost service, with prayers and tears and blood; to whom our most binding affections cling almost with worship as the holiest glory of our world;--that _he_ could be under a delusion _here_?--that when, sinking in trustful death, he laid his meek head to rest on the bosom of the Father, he was cast off, and dropped on the cold clod?--that he sobbed into the Infinite by night with a vain love that met no answer?--that God rather takes part in his providence with the mean-souled, the cynic, the morbid, the selfish? There _is_ no greater impossibility than this, on which evidence can fall back. Nay, we confess that, even apart from his doctrine, the mere mortal history of Christ would have settled with us the question of futurity. For the great essential to this belief is a sufficiently elevated estimate of human nature: no man will ever deny its immortality who has a deep impression of its capacity for so great a destiny. And this impression is so vividly given by the life of Jesus,--he presents an image of the soul so grand, so divine,--as utterly to dwarf all the dimensions of its present career, and to necessitate a heaven for its reception. At all events, it is allowable to feel this, when we see that this natural sequel was actually and perceptibly appended; that this "Holy One of God could not see corruption," but rose, above the reach of mortal ill, to the world where now he welcomes the souls of the sainted dead. That other life we take to be a scene for the mind's ampler and ampler development, apart from those animal and selfish elements which now deform and degrade it by their excess. And this alone, if there were nothing else, would render it a life of awful retribution. For to the wicked, what is this loss of "the natural man," but total bereavement and utter death of joy?--what to the good, but a glad and sacred birth?--to the one, a Promethean exile on a mid-rock in the ocean of night, under the bite of a remorse that gnaws impalpably, felt always, but never seen,--to the other, a welcome to the loving homes of the blest, amid the sunshine of the everlasting hills? Yet precisely because we believe in Retribution, do we trust in Restoration. The very abhorrence with which a man's better mind ever looks upon his worse, while it inflicts his punishment, begins his cure: and we can never allow that God will suspend this natural law impressed by himself on our spiritual constitution, merely in order to stop the process of moral recovery, and specially enable him to maintain the eternity of torment and of sin. And so, beyond the dark close of life rise before us the awful contrasts of retribution; and in the farther distance, the dim but glorious vision of a purified, redeemed, and progressive universe of souls.

* * * * *

Here, then, are our Five Points of Christianity, considered as a system of positive religious doctrine, viz.:--1st. The truth of the Moral Perceptions in man,--not, as the degenerate churches of our day teach, their pravity and blindness; 2dly. The Moral Perfection of the character of God,--in opposition to the doctrine of his Arbitrary Decrees and Absolute Self-will; 3dly. The Natural awakening of the Divine Spirit within us,--rather than its Preternatural communication from without; 4thly. Christ, the pure Image and highest Revelation of the Eternal Father,--not his Victim and his Contrast; 5thly. A universal Immortality after the model of Christ's heavenly life; an immortality not of capricious and select salvation, with unimaginable torment as the general lot, but, for all, a life of spiritual development, of retribution, of restoration.

To the _Moral_ doctrine which, in our view, the Gospel conjoins with this religious system, it is impossible for us at present to advert. Suffice to say that, with Paul, we exclaim, "not _Law_, but _Love_":--love to God, to Christ, not simply for what they have done for us, but chiefly for what they are in themselves;--nothing like the narrow-hearted gratitude for an exclusive salvation, but a _moral_ affection awakened by their holiness, rectitude, truth, and mercy,--by the sublimity and spirituality of their designs, and the sanctity and fidelity of their execution: love also to man, looking to him not merely as a sentient being who is to be made _happy_, but as a child of God, who is to be raised into some likeness to the Divine image; as a brother spirit, noble in nature, even though sinful in fact, glorious as an immortal in the eye of God, though disfigured by this world's hardship or contempt.

Does any one ask, _where we get_ our system of faith and morals? What are the principles of reasoning which we apply to nature and Scripture to extract it thence? The reply would require a volume of exposition. Suffice it to say, that we think we have full warrant for this belief from the Scriptures of the New Testament, with which alone we conceive that Christians have any practical concern; that, in interpreting these Scriptures, we follow the same rules which we should apply to any other books; that not even could their instructions make us false to that sense of right and wrong which God has breathed into us; that if they taught respecting him anything unjust or unholy, we should not accept _it_, but reject _them_; and that, as to the points of faith on which we have dwelt, some receive these truths because they were taught by Christ; others receive Christ because he taught these truths.

On this faith we desire to take our stand, with the firmness, but without the ferocity, of the first Reformers. Opposing churches tell us, we "are so frigid"! Why, it is the very thing our own hearts had often said to us; for there is nothing that so promptly rebukes the coldness of our nature as the warmth of our faith. We do not, however, much admire this mutual criticism of each other's temperature; and strongly suspect the reality of that earnestness which prides itself on its own intensity. We must not propose to assume any artificial heats, in order to spite and disprove this frequent accusation; but be resolved, in an age diseased with pretence, to remain realities, to profess nothing which we do not believe, to withhold nothing whereon we doubt, to affect nothing which we do not feel, to promise nothing which we will not do; holding, with Paul, that simplicity and sincerity are truly the godliest of things. With Heaven's good help, may we bear our testimony thus; deeming it a small thing to be judged by man's judgment; and, with such light and heat as God shall put into our hearts, delivering over our portion of truth to generations that will give it a more genial welcome. There is greatness in a faith, when it can win a wide success or make rapid conquest over submissive minds. There is a higher greatness in a faith that, when God ordains, can stand up and do without success;--unmoved amid the pitiless storms of a fanatic age; with foot upon the rock of its own fidelity, and heart in the serene Infinite above the canopy of cloud and tempest.

FOOTNOTE:

[25] Perhaps we should rather say, "they cannot be alien to our nature." The word _personality_ is used by philosophical writers to denote that which is _peculiar_, as well as essential, to our individual self. In this strict sense the moral and spiritual affections are _impersonal_, according to the doctrine of the context, which treats them as constituting a participation in the Divine nature. The metaphysical reader will perhaps perceive here a resemblance to the theory of Victor Cousin, who maintains that the _will--the free and voluntary activity_--of the human being is the specific faculty in which alone consists his _personality_; and that the intuitive reason by which we have knowledge of the unlimited and absolute Cause, as well as of ourselves and the universe as related effects, is independent and impersonal,--a faculty not peculiar to the subject, but "from the bosom of consciousness extending to the Infinite, and reaching to the Being of beings." "Reason," observes this philosopher, "is intimately connected with personality and sensibility, but it is neither the one nor the other: and precisely because it is neither the one nor the other, because it is in us without being ourselves, does it reveal to us that which is not ourselves,--objects beside the subject itself, and which lie beyond its sphere." At the opposite pole to this doctrine, which makes the perceptions of "Reason" a part of the activity of God, lies the system of Kant and Fichte, which represents God as an ideal formation,--it may be, therefore, a _fiction_,--arising from the activity of the "Reason." This faculty is treated by these German philosophers as merely _subjective and personal_; its perceptions, even when they seem to go beyond itself, are known only as internal conditions and results of self-activity; its beliefs, though inevitable to itself, are simply relative, and have no objective validity. The faiths and affections which this system regards as purely human, are considered by the other as divine. The doctrine maintained above, though resembling that of Kant in one or two of its phrases, far more nearly approaches that of Cousin in its spirit. It is scarcely necessary to observe that, in this note, the word "Reason" is used, not as equivalent to "Understanding," but in the German sense so long rendered familiar to the English reader by the writings of Mr. Coleridge. It includes, therefore, (in its two senses of "_Speculative_" and "_Practical_,") the "Moral Perceptions" and "Primitive Faiths of the Conscience," spoken of in the text.

CREED AND HERESIES OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY.

1. Ωριγενους Φιλοσοφουμενα η κατα πασων αιρεσεων ελεγχος. _Origenis Philosophumena sive omnium hæresium refutatio. E codice Parisino nunc primum edidit_ Emmanuel Miller. Oxonii: e Typographeo Academico. 1851.

2. _Hippolytus and his Age; or the Doctrine and Practice of the Church of Rome under Commodus and Alexander Severus; and Ancient and Modern Christianity and Divinity compared._ By CHRISTIAN CHARLES JOSIAS BUNSEN, D.C.L. In Four Volumes. London. 1852.

When a stranger knocks at the gate of the Clarendon Printing-house, and presents his petition for aid, the University of Oxford maintains its national character for good-natured opulence,--gives its money and signs its name, without very close inquiry into the case. The documents are really so respectable that there cannot be much amiss; and a venerable institution, well known to be fond of the house, cannot be expected to go trudging through the back-lanes of history, and exposing its nostrils in the purlieus of heresy, in order to identify a literary petitioner, evidently above all common imposture. So it supplies all his wants upon the spot, dresses him handsomely, and sends him out into the world as its worthy (though eccentric) friend, the catechist of Alexandria. The introduction, being left at the Prussian Legation, falls into the hands of no stay-at-home benefactor, but of one who knows the by-ways of human life, and has an ear for the dialects of many a place. M. Bunsen--as Oxford might have remembered--is not unacquainted with Egypt; and no sooner does he raise his eyes from the credentials to the person of the stranger, than he discovers him to be no disciple of the Alexandrine Clement; recognizes the accent of the West; is reminded of the voice of Irenæus; and, finally, being even more familiar with the Tiber than the Nile, detects a Roman beneath the mask of Origen. We do not in the least grudge the friend of Niebuhr the honor of a discovery which no one could turn to more effectual account; but every English scholar must feel mortified that the _Imprimatur_ of our great Ecclesiastical University should appear on a title-page manifestly false; that the first reader should see at a glance what the learned proprietors had missed; and that their _Editio Princeps_ of a recovered monument of Church antiquity should be superseded within a year or two of its publication. They are not principals, it is true, but only secondaries to the Editor, in the commission of this error: still, a lay bibliographer might reasonably expect, in resorting for aid to so renowned and reverend a body, that his own judgment would be kept in check; and their very consent to issue the work implies _some_ critical opinion of its value, as derived from age and authorship. Whether they are called upon to adopt at once M. Bunsen's proposed title-page, and substitute the name of Hippolytus for that of Origen, we will not say; but that the present title gives the book to the wrong author, seems placed beyond the reach of doubt.

M. Emmanuel Miller, one of the curators of the National Library in Paris, was the first to make himself acquainted with the contents of this work, and to appreciate their importance. Among the manuscripts under his care was one on cotton paper of the fourteenth century, which had been brought from Mount Athos in 1842, by M. Mynoïdes Mynas, a Greek agent employed by the French government to search the neglected treasures of that celebrated spot. The superscription, "On all Heresies," was not inviting; but on turning over the leaves, some lines, unknown before, of Pindar and of another lyric poet, were found and copied; and the value of these excerpts being ascertained, M. Miller's attention was directed to the body of the treatise containing them. The treatise had already been described, in the _Moniteur_ of the 5th of January, 1844, as a Refutation of all Heresies, in ten books, but with the first three missing, as well as the conclusion of the whole; and he soon became aware, that, of the three missing books, the first already existed, and had been printed under the name of "Philosophumena," in the editions of Origen's works. Its very title is found in the manuscript at the end of the fourth book, and denotes that the portion of the work there concluded completes the sketch of philosophical systems, which the author prefixes to his account of ecclesiastical aberrations; and there are mutual references, backwards and forwards, between the printed book and the manuscript, which leave no doubt that the latter is a sequel to the former. The Editor, therefore, has very properly reprinted the "Philosophumena" as the commencement of the newly recovered work; which thus exhibits a regular plan, and consists of two parts, viz.: first, four books,--of which the second and third are lost,--expounding the Pagan philosophies, especially the Greek, from which, the author contends, the various heresies of Christendom are mere plagiarisms; then six books, containing an account, in an order prevailingly historical, of thirty or thirty-two heresies, supported by extracts from their standard writings, and wound up in the recapitulary book at the end by the writer's own profession of faith. Now who is the author?

Not Origen; for, as Huet had already remarked respecting the "Philosophumena," the writer speaks of himself in terms implying an episcopal position; and, in the ninth book, he gives an account of transactions in Rome, extending over many years, in which he was evidently an eyewitness and an actor. While the scene is thus laid at a distance from Origen's sphere, and the date also of the personal matter runs back into his boyhood, the cast of the theological doctrine is wholly different from his; for instance, in a certain "Treatise on the Universe," to which the author refers as his own, and of which a fragment is preserved, the penal condition of the wicked after death is said to be immutable;[26] but Origen, it is well known, taught a doctrine of final restoration. Add to this, that no such work as the present is attributed to Origen by any ancient witness, and the case against his name may be regarded as complete.

The evidence which disappoints this claim narrows also our choice of others. The personal transactions to which we have referred took place at Rome, while Zephyrinus and his successor, Callistus, presided over the Christian community there, that is, during the first twenty years of the third century. We must, therefore, look for our author among the metropolitan clergymen of that period. Still closer is the circle drawn by the fact, that the writer largely borrows from the treatise of Irenæus on the same subject; and, though vastly improving on that foolish production, and copiously contributing fresh materials, betrays the general affinity of thought which unites the stronger disciple with the feebler master.