Part 27

The Protestant, of the approved English type, arrives, under guidance of a different thought, at the same flat and indifferent result. Though he gives a more subjective character to divine truth than the Roman Catholic, and brings both the want and the supply of it more within the attestation of consciousness, he puts its discovery equally beyond the reach of our ruined faculties, and equally cuts it off from all relation to philosophy and the natural living exercise of reason and conscience. He further agrees that his foreign gift of revelation was imported all at once, and all complete, into our world, within the Apostolic age; that the conceptions of that time are an authoritative rule for all succeeding centuries; and that every newer doctrine is to be regarded as a false accretion, to be flung off into the incompetent and barren spaces of human speculation. He denies, however, the twofold vehicle of this precious gift; and, cancelling altogether the oral tradition and indeterminate Christian consciousness of the early Church, shuts up the whole contents of religion within the canonical Scriptures. The guardianship of unwritten tradition being abolished, and the canon requiring no guardianship at all, the trust deposited with the hierarchy disappears; and no permanent inspiration, no authoritative judicial function, in matters of faith, remains. Whatever Holy Spirit continues in the Church is not a progressively teaching spirit, which can ever impart thoughts or experiences unknown to the first believers; but a personally comforting and animating spirit, whose highest climax of enlightenment is the exact reproduction of the primitive state of mind. The apprehension of Divine truth is thus reduced to an affair of verbal interpretation of documents; and though in this process there is room for the largest play of subjective feeling, so that different minds, different nations, different ages, will unconsciously evolve very various results; these are not to be regarded as possible Divine enrichments of the faith, but to be brought rigidly to the standard of the earliest Church, and disowned wherever they include what was absent there. This view is less mischievous than the Roman Catholic, only because it is more inconsequent and confused. The canon which you take as sacred was selected and set in authority by the unwritten consciousness and tradition which you reject as profane. The Church existed before its records; expressed its life in ways spreading indefinitely beyond them; and neither was exempt from human elements till they were finished, nor lost the Divine spirit when they were done. So arbitrary a doctrine corrupts the beauty of Scripture, and deadens the noblest interest of history. If the New Testament is to serve as an infallible standard, it is thus committed to perfect unity and self-consistency; and you are obliged to contend that the various types of doctrine found within its compass--the Messianic conceptions of Matthew and John, the "Faith" of Paul and James, the eucharistic conceptions of the first Evangelists and the last, the eschatology of the Apocalypse and the Epistles--are only different sides of one and the same belief, colored with the tints and shadings of several minds. How utterly inadequate such an hypothesis is to the explanation of the Scriptural phenomena, what a distorted and absurd representation it gives of the sacred writers, and their mode of thought, is best known to those who have honestly tried to deal with the fourth Gospel, for instance, as historically the supplement of the others, and dogmatically of the Book of Revelation; to suppose the Logos-doctrine tacitly present in the speeches of Peter; to detect the pre-existence in Mark, or remove it from John; or to identify the Paraclete with the gifts of Pentecost. All feeling of living reality is lost from our picture of the Apostolic time, when its outlines are thus blurred, its contrasts destroyed, its grouped figures effaced, and the whole melted away by the persevering drizzle of a watery criticism into a muddy glory round the place where Christ should be. If, moreover, we are to find everything in the first age, then the second, and the third, and all others, must be worse, just in so far as they differ from it; and the whole course of succeeding thought, the widening and deepening of the Christian faith and feeling, the swelling of its stream by the lapse into it of Oriental Gnosis and Hellenic Platonism and the Western Conscience, must be a ceaseless degeneracy. Thus to the Bibliolater as to the Romanist, Divine truth _has no history among men_, unless it be the history of decline, or of recovery purchased by decline. He also will accordingly care nothing about what the people of Caius or Hippolytus thought. Is it in the Bible? If so, he knew it before. Is it not in the Bible? Then he has nothing to do with it but throw it away. By a fitting retribution, this moping worship of the letter of a book and the creed of a generation brings it to pass that both are lost to the mind in a dismal haze of ignorance and misconception; and if the "Evangelical" believer could be transported suddenly from Exeter Hall into the company of the twelve in Jerusalem, or the Proseucha which Paul enters on the banks of the Strymon, or the room where the Agape is prepared at Rome, we are persuaded that he would find a scene newer to his expectations than by any other migration into a known time and place.

But now let us abolish this isolation from the rest of human existence of the _incunabula_ of our faith, and throw open that time to free relation with the whole providence of humanity. Suppose Christianity to be the influence upon the world of a Divine Person,--in quality divine, in quantity human,--whose Epiphany was determined at a crisis of ripe conditions for the rescue, the evolution, the spread of holy and sanctifying truth. What are those conditions? They consist mainly in the co-presence, within the embrace of one vast state, of two opposite races or types of men, both having a partial gift of divine apprehension, and holding in charge an indispensable element of truth; both with their spiritual life verging to exhaustion and capable of no separate effort more; and each unconsciously pining away for want of the complement of thought which the other only could supply. The _Hebrew_ brought his intense feeling of the Personality of God; conceiving this in so concentrated a form as to exclude the proper notion of infinitude, and render Him only the most powerful Being in the Universe, its Monarch,--wielding the creatures as his puppets,--acting historically upon its scenes as objective to Him, and by the annals of his past agency supplying to the Abrahamic family a religion of archives and documents. The sovereignty of Jehovah raised him to an immeasurable height above his creation; dwarfed all other existence; placed him by _nature_ at a distance from men, and only by _condescension_ allowing of approximation. And hence his worshippers, in proportion as they adored his greatness, felt the littleness of all else; acquired a temper towards their fellow-men, if not severe and scornful, at least not reverent and tender; and regarded them as separate in kind from Him, mere dust on the balance or locusts in the field. The religion of the _Hellenic_ race began at the other end,--from the midst of human life, its mysteries, its struggles, its nobleness, its mixture of heroic Free-will and awful Destiny; and their deepest reverence, their quickest recognition of the Divine, was directed towards the soul of a man vindicating its grandeur, though it should be against superhuman powers. In proportion as men were great, beautiful, and good, did they appear to be as lesser gods, and earth and heaven to be filled with the same race. Thought, conscience, admiration in the human mind were not personal accidents separately originating in each individual; but the sympathetic response of our common intellect, standing in front of Nature, to the kindred life of the Divine intellect behind Nature, and ever passing into expression through it. When this feeling of the Hellenic race became reflective, and organized itself into philosophy, it represented the universe as the eternal assumption of form by the Divine thought, which we were enabled to read off by our essential identity of nature. Hence a whole series of conceptions quite different from the Hebrew representations; instead of Creation, Evolution of being; instead of Interposition from without, Incarnation operating from within; instead of Omnipotent Will, Universal Thought; assigning as the ideal of man's perfection, not so much obedience to Law, as similitude of Mind to God; and tending predominantly not to strength in Morals, but to beauty in Art. These two opposite tendencies had run their separate course, and expended their proper history; and were talking wildly, as in the approaching delirium of death. But they are the two factors of all religious truth: and to fuse them together, to make it impossible that either should perish or should remain alone, the Christ was given to the world, so singularly balanced between them, that neither could resist his power, but both were drawn into it for the regeneration of mankind. In the accidents of his lot given to the one race, and only baffling the visions of prophets to transcend them; in the essence of his nature, so august and attractive to the other that the faith in Incarnation was irresistible; presented to the Hebrews by his mortal birth, and snatched from them by his immortal; stopping by his holiness the mouth of Law, and carrying it up into the higher region of Faith and Love; in the Temple wishing the Temple gone, that there might be open communion, Spirit with Spirit; translating sacrifice into self-sacrifice;--he had every requisite for conciliating and blending the separated elements of truth which, for so many ages, had been converging towards him. But if this was the function providentially assigned to him, and for which the divine and human were so blended in him, it is a function which could not be accomplished in a moment, in a generation, in a century. It is an _historical_ function, freely demanding time for its theatre; and as the separate factors had occupied ages in attaining their ripeness for combination, so must their fusion consume many a lifetime of effervescing thought, ere the homogeneous truth appeared. The words of Christ are not in this view the end in which Revelation terminates; but the means given to us of knowing himself, contributions to the picture we form of his personality. Nor are the sentiments of his immediate followers about his office and position in the scheme of Providence anything more authoritative to us than the incipient attempts made, when his influence was fresh, to grasp the whole of his relations while only a part was to be seen. The records of the great crisis are no doubt of superlative value, as the vehicles by which alone we understand and feel its power; but their value is lost if they are to dictate truth to our passive acceptance, instead of quickening our reason and conscience to find it: they stop in this way the very development which they were to lead, and disappoint Christ of the very work he came to achieve. Human elements were inevitably and fully present in the first age and its Scriptures, as in every other; and the transitory ingredients they have left, it is a duty to detach from the eternal truth. And as conditions of finite imperfection cannot be banished from the central era, neither can the guidance of the Infinite Spirit be denied, whether among the Hebrew, the Hellenic, or the Christian people, in the ages before and after. In that new development of human consciousness and knowledge in regard to God, which we call Christianity, _all_ the requisite conditions--viz. the factors taken up, the Person who blends them, and the continuous product they evolve--include Divine Inspiration as well as Human Reflection,--the living presence and communion of the Eternal with the Transitory Mind, of the perfectly Good with the good in the Imperfect. To disengage the one from the other, to treasure up the true and holy that is born of God, and let fall the false and wrong that is infused by man, is possible only to Reason and Conscience, is indeed the perpetual work in which they live; the denial of which is not merely Atheism, but Devil-worship,--not the bare negation, but the positive reversal, of religion,--the virtual affirmation that God indeed _exists_, but exists as _Un_-reason and _Un_-good. No mechanical, no chronological separation can be effected of the Divine from the Human, the Revealed from the Unrevealed, in faith; there is no person, no book, no age, no Church, in which both do not meet, and require to be disentangled the one from the other; but the perseverance of God's living and self-harmonious Spirit throughout the discordant errors of dying generations enables the men most apt and faithful to his voice to know more and more what his reality is, and drop the semblances by which it is disguised. The effect of this view on our estimate of ecclesiastical literature is evident. As, according to it, the Apostolic period is not exempted from critical judgment, so neither are succeeding times to be without their claim on religious reverence. The canonical books of the New Testament fall back into the general mass of literature recording the earliest knowledge and consciousness of the disciples, neither detached, as a mysterious whole, from other productions of their time, nor excluding the greatest diversities of value among themselves. They exhibit the first struggling efforts--not always concurrent in their direction--of an awakening spiritual life, to interpret a recent Divine manifestation, and to solve by it the problem of the world's Providence. Their very freshness and proximity to the great figure of Christ was by no means an unmixed advantage to these efforts; and they were not so complete and successful as to supersede their continuance in the next and following generations, which lay under no incompetency for their prosecution, and are as likely, so far as antecedent probability goes, to have enriched and improved, as to have impoverished and spoiled, the earlier doctrine of Christ's relation to God and to mankind. The chasm thus disappears between the Apostolic age and its successor; the products of the first are not to be accepted simply because they are there, nor those of the second rejected because they are absent from the first; nor is everything to be admitted on showing that it stands in both, and even had a tenure long enough to become the prescriptive occupant of the Church. The Catholic is right in clinging to the continuous thread of Divine Inspiration binding the centuries of Christendom together; and in maintaining that the expression of true doctrine grows fuller with time. He is wrong in making the Spirit over to an hierarchical corporation; and in treating the ostensible growth of doctrine as the mere negation of heresies. The Protestant is right in rescuing from the haze of uncertain tradition the real historical ground of his religion, and setting it in the focus of an intense reverence; and in rejecting whatever cannot be adjusted with the clear facts and essential Spirit of that primitive Gospel. He is wrong in his insulation of that time as a sole authoritative age of golden days, in which the faith had neither error nor defect, and from which it must be copied, with daguerreotype exactitude, into every disciple's mind. Keep the positive elements, destroy the negative limitations of both these systems, and the true conception of Christianity emerges. As a system of self-conscious doctrine, it is a religious Philosophy, starting from the historical appearance of Christ as an expression of God in human life, and always detained around this one object as its centre; and in its development consulting not the idiosyncrasies and conceits of private and personal reflection, but the devout consciousness and spiritual _consensus_ of all Christian ages and all holy men. All religion is the product of an action of the Infinite mind upon the finite: in the _Christian_ religion that action takes place upon souls engaged in the contemplation of Christ as the manifestation of God's moral nature. This given object remaining the same, there is room for indefinite expansion and variety; and every developed form is to be tried, not by its date, but by the tests of truth relevant to religious philosophy.

How far M. Bunsen would recognize his own doctrine in this exposition we cannot say; but without intending in the least to make him responsible for it, we think it does not essentially deviate from his scheme of thought. The philosophical aphorisms in which he has embodied his speculative faith follow an order which we should have spoiled, had we, for our present purpose, so brought them together as to make them speak for themselves. And though they display the same astonishing command of our language, in which the author never fails, the cast of the thoughts is so Teutonic, that few English readers, it is to be feared, will appreciate their depth and richness. The complaint, which we have heard and seen, that they are wholly unintelligible, is indeed purely ridiculous, except that it sadly illustrates the extent to which reflection, and even feeling, on such subjects has ceased in England. M. Bunsen, we can assure our readers, knows what he means, and lucidly states what he means; and those who miss his meaning have for the most part no slight loss. The following sentences, which the greatest sufferer from philosophobia may drink in without convulsions, will explain his idea of Revelation, in its bearing upon the use of written records. The mere "Natural Religion" of the Deist, he observes, was--

"The negative reaction against the equally untenable, unphilosophical, and irrational notion, that revelation was nothing but an external historical act. Such a notion entirely loses sight of the infinite or eternal factor of revelation, founded both in the nature of the infinite and that of the finite mind, of God and man.

"This heterodox notion became still more obnoxious, by its imagining something higher in the manifestation of God's will and being than the human mind, which is the divinely-appointed organ of divine manifestation, and in a double manner; ideally in mankind, as object, historically in the individual man, as instrument.

"The notion of a merely historical revelation by written records is as unhistorical as it is unintellectual and materialistic. It necessarily leads to untruth in philosophy, to unreality in religious thought, and to Fetichism in worship. It misunderstands the process necessarily implied in every historical representation. The form of expressing the manifestation of God in the mind, as if God was himself using human speech to man, and was thus himself finite and a man, is a form inherent in the nature of human thought as embodied in language, its own rational expression. It was originally never meant to be understood materialistically, because the religious consciousness which produced it was essentially spiritual; and, indeed, it can only be thus misunderstood by those who make it a rule and criterion of faith, never to connect any thought whatever with what they are expected to believe as divinely true.

"Every religion is positive. It is, therefore, justly called a religion '_made manifest_' (offenbart), or, as the English term has it, _revealed_; that is to say, it supposes an action of the infinite mind, or God, upon the finite mind, or man, by which God, in his relation to man, becomes manifest or visible. This can be mediate, through the manifestation of God in the Universe of Nature; or a direct, immediate action, through the religious consciousness.

"This second action is called _revealed_, in the strictest sense. The more a religion manifests of the real substance and nature of God, and of his relation to the universe and to man, the more it deserves the name of a divine manifestation, or of Revelation. But no religion which exists could exist without something of truth, revealed to man, through the creation, and through his mind.

"Such a direct communication of the Divine mind as is called Revelation has necessarily two factors, which are unitedly working in producing it. The one is the infinite factor, or the direct manifestation of eternal truth to the mind, by the power which that mind has of perceiving it; for human perception is the correlate of divine manifestation. There could be no revelation of God if there was not the corresponding faculty in the human mind to receive it, as there is no manifestation of light where there is no eye to see it.

"This infinite factor is, of course, not historical; it is inherent in every individual soul, only with an immense difference in the degree.

"The action of the Infinite upon the mind, is _the_ miracle of history and of religion, equal to the miracle of creation.

"Miracle, in its highest sense, is therefore essentially and undoubtedly an operation of the Divine mind upon the human mind. By that action the human mind becomes inspired with a new life, which cannot be explained by any precedent of the selfish (natural) life, but is its absolute contrary. This miracle requires no proof; the existence and action of religious life is its proof, as the world is the proof of creation.

"The second factor of revelation is the finite or external. This means of divine manifestation is, in the first place, a universal one, the Universe or Nature. But, in a more special sense, it is a historical manifestation of divine truth through the life and teaching of higher minds among men. These men of God are eminent individuals, who communicate something of eternal truth to their brethren; and, as far as they themselves are true, they have in them the conviction, that what they say and teach of things divine is an objective truth. They therefore firmly believe that it is independent of their individual personal opinion and impression, and will last, and not perish, as their personal existence upon earth must.

"The difference between Christ and other men of God is analogous to that between the manifestation of a part, and of the totality and substance, of the divine mind."--Vol. II. p. 60, _seq._