Part 33

With all that is admirable in our author's book, he contemplates the whole subject from a point of view which exhibits it in very imperfect lights. He professes to treat of "The Creed of Christendom." Yet, in examining only the canonical Scriptures and the primitive belief, he totally ignores the "Creed" of the greater part of "Christendom," namely, of the Catholic Church. For it is only Protestants that identify Christianity with the letter of the New Testament, and settle everything by appeal to its contents. According to the older doctrine, Christianity is not a Divine Philosophy recorded in certain books, but a Divine Institution committed to certain men. The Christian Scriptures are not its _source_, but its first _product_; not its charter and definition, but its earliest act and the expression of its incipient thought. They exhibit the young attempts of the new agency, as it was getting to work upon the minds of men and trying to penetrate the resisting mass of terrestrial affairs. They are thus but the beginning of a record which is prolonged through all subsequent times, the opening page in the proceedings of a Church in perpetuity; and are not separated from the continuous sacred literature of Christendom, as insulated fragments of Divine authority. The supernatural element which they contain did not die out with their generation, but has never ceased to flow through succeeding centuries. Nor did the heavenly purpose--precipitated upon earthly materials and media--disclose itself most conspicuously at first; but rather cleared itself as it advanced and enriched its energy with better instruments. The sublimest things would even lie secreted in the unconscious heart of the new influence, and only with the slowness of noble growths push towards the light; for the noise and obtrusiveness of the human is ever apt to overwhelm the retiring silence of the divine. The disciples, who, when events were before their eyes, and great words fell upon their ears, "understood not these things at the time," are types of all men and all ages; whose religion, coming out in the event, is known to others better than to themselves. A faith, therefore, should be judged less by its first form than by its last; and at all events be studied, not as it _once_ appeared, but in the entire retrospect of its existence.

No doubt this doctrine of development is made subservient, in the Romish system, to monstrous sacerdotal claims. A priestly hierarchy pretends to the exclusive custody, and the gradual unfolding, of God's sacred gift. But sweep away this holy corporation; throw its treasury open, and let its vested right, of paying out the truth, be flung into the free air of history; gather together no Sacred College but the collected ages; appeal to no high Pontiff but the Providence of God;--and there remains a far juster and sublimer view of the place and function of a pure Gospel in the world, than the narrow Protestant conception. Christianity becomes thus, not the Creed of its Founders, but the Religion of Christendom, to be estimated only in comparison with the faiths of other groups of the great human family; and the superhuman in it will consist in this,--the providential introduction among the affairs of this world of a divine influence, which shall gradually reach to untried depths in the hearts of men, and become the organizing centre of a new moral and spiritual life. It is a power appointed--an inspiration given--to fetch by reverence a true religion out of man, and not, by dictation, to put one into him.

For this end, it would not even be necessary that the bearers of the divine element should be personally initiated into the counsels whose ministers they are. _Philosophy_ must know what it teaches; but _Inspiration_, in giving the intensest light to others, may have a dark side turned towards itself. There is no irreverence in saying this, and no novelty: on the contrary, the idea has ever been familiar to the most fervent men and ages, of Prophets who prepared a future veiled from their own eyes, and saintly servants of heaven, who drew to themselves a trust, and wielded a power, which their ever-upward look never permitted them to guess. Nay, to no one was this conception less strange, than to the very man who, in his turn, must now have it applied to himself. With the Apostle Paul it was a favorite notion, that the entire plan of the Divine government had been a profound secret during the ages of its progress, and was opening into clear view only at the hour of its catastrophe. Not only was there _more in it_ than had been surmised, but something utterly _at variance_ with all expectation. Its whole conception had remained unsuspected from first to last; undiscerned by the vision of seers, and unapproached by the guesses of the wise. Never absent from the mind of God, and never pausing in its course of execution, it had yet evaded the notice of all observers; and winding its way through the throng of nations and the labyrinth of centuries, the great Thought had passed in disguise, using all men and known of none. Nor was it only the pagan eye that, for want of special revelation, had been detained in darkness, or beguiled with the scenery of dreams. The very people whose life was the main channel of the Divine purpose did not feel the tide of tendency which they conveyed; the patriarchs who fed their flocks near its fountains, the lawgiver who founded a state upon its banks, the priests whose temple poured blood into its waters, and the prophets at whose prayer the clouds of heaven dropped fresh purity into the stream,--all were unconscious of its course; assigning it to regions it should never visit, and missing the point where it should be lost in the sea. Nay, Paul seems to bring down this edge of darkness to a later time; to include within it even the ministry of Christ and the Galilean Apostles; to imply that even they were unconscious instruments of a scheme beyond the range of their immediate thought; and that not till Jesus had passed into the light of heaven did the time come for revealing, through the man of Tarsus, the significance of Messiah's earthly visit, and its place in the great scheme of things. Paul, in claiming this as his own special function, certainly implies that, previous to his call, no one was in condition to interpret the secret counsels of God in the historic development of his providence. He feels this to be no reflection on his predecessors, no cause of elevation in himself; steward as he is of a mighty mystery, he is less than the least of all saints. He simply stands at the crisis when a conception is permitted to the world, which even "the angels have vainly desired to look into"; and though he may _see_ more, he _is_ infinitely less than the Prophets and the Messiah whose place it is given him to explain. He is but the interpreter, they are the grand agencies interpreted. He is but the discerning eye, they are the glorious objects on which it is fixed.

In seeking, therefore, for the _divine element_ in older dispensations, the Apostle would assuredly _not_ consult the projects and beliefs of their founders and ministers. In his view, the very scheme of God was to work through these without their knowing what they were about; to let them aim at one thing while he was directing them to another; to pour through their life and soul an energy which should indeed fire their will and flow from their lips in _their own_ best purposes, but steal quietly behind them for _his_; so that what was primary with them was perhaps evanescent with him; while that which was incidental, and dropped from them unawares, was the seed of an eternal good. What Moses planned, what David sung, what Isaiah led the people to expect, was not what Heaven had at heart to execute. Even in quest of God's thought in the _Christian_ dispensation, Paul does not refer to the doctrines, the precepts, the miracles of Jesus during his ministry in Palestine,--to the memorials of his life, or the testimony of his companions. He assumes that, at so early a date, the time had not yet come for the truth to appear, and that it was vain to look for it in the preconceptions of the uncrucified and unexalted Christ; who was the religion, not in revelation, but in disguise. If, therefore, any one had argued against the Apostle thus: "Why tell us to discard the law? your Master said he came to fulfil it. How do you venture to preach to the Gentiles, when Jesus declared his mission limited to the lost sheep of the house of Israel? No vestiges of your doctrine of free grace can be found in the parables, or of redeeming faith in the Sermon on the Mount";--he would have boldly replied, that this proves nothing against truths that are newer than the life, because expounded by the death, of Christ; that God reveals by action, not by teaching; that no servant of his can understand his own office till it is past; and that only those who look back upon it through the interpretation of events, can read aright the divine idea which it enfolds.

This view it was that made the Apostle so bold an innovator, and filled his Epistles with a system so different from that of the synoptical Gospels as almost to constitute a different religion. He had seized the profound and sublime idea that, when men are inspired, the inspiration occupies, not their conscious thought and will, but their unconscious nature; laying a silent beauty on their affections, secreting a holy wisdom in their life, and, through the sorrows of faithfulness, tempting their steps to some surprise of glory. That which they deliberately think, that which they anxiously elaborate, that which they propose to do, is ever the product of their human reason and volition, and cannot escape the admixture of personal fallibility. But their free spontaneous nature speaks unawares, like a sweet murmuring from angels' dreams. What they think without knowing it, what they say without thinking it, what they do without saying it, all the native pressures of their love and aspiration, these are the hiding-place of God, wherein abiding, he leaves their simplicity pure and their liberty untouched. The current of their reasoning and action is determined by human conditions and material resistances; but the fountain in the living rock has waters that are divine. If this be true, then must we search for the heavenly element in the latencies rather than the prominencies of their life; in what they _were_, rather than in what they _thought to do_; in the beliefs they felt without announcing; in the objects they accomplished, but never planned. We must wait for their agency in history, and from the fruit return to find the seed.

It is not peculiar to Mr. Greg that, in estimating Christianity, he has neglected, and even reversed, this principle. All who have treated of it from the Protestant point of view have done the same. They have assumed that the religion was to be most clearly discerned at its commencement; that the divine thought it contained would be, not evolved, but obscured by time, and might be better detected in ideal shape at the beginning of the ages, than realized at the end; that its agents and inaugurators must have been fully cognizant of its whole scope and contents, and set them in the open ground of their speech and practical career. In the minds of all Protestants the Christian religion is identified exclusively with the ideas of the first century, with the creed of the Apostles, with the teachings of Christ. The New Testament is its sole depository, in whose books there is nothing for which it is not answerable. The consequence is a perpetual struggle between untenable dogma and unprofitable scepticism. The whole structure of faith becomes precarious. If Luke and Matthew should disagree about a date or a pedigree; if Mark should report a questionable miracle; if John should mingle with his tenderness and depth some words of passionate intolerance; if Peter should misapply a psalm, and Paul indite mistaken prophecies; above all, if Jesus should appear to believe in demonology, and not to have foreseen the futurities of his Church,--these detected specks are felt like a total eclipse; affrighted faith hides its face from them and shrieks; and he who points them out, though only to show how pure the orb that spreads behind, is denounced as a prophet of evil. The peaceful and holy centre of religion is shaken by storms of angry erudition. Devout ingenuity or indevout acuteness spend themselves in vitiating the impartial course of historical criticism; neither of them reflecting, that, if the topics in dispute are open to reasonable doubt, they cannot be matter of _revelation_, and may be calmly looked at as objects of natural thought. It is a thing alike dangerous and unbecoming that religion should be narrowed to a miserable literary partisanship, bound up with a disputed set of critical conclusions, unable to deliver its title-deeds from a court of perpetual chancery, whose decisions are never final. The time seems to have arrived for freeing the Protestant Christianity from its superstitious adhesion to the mere _letter_ of the Gospel, and trusting more generously to that permanent inspiration, those ever-living sources of truth within the soul, of which Gospel and Epistle, the speeches of Apostles and the insight of Christ, are the pre-eminent, rather than the lonely, examples. The _primitive_ Gospel is not in its form, but only in its spirit, the _everlasting_ Gospel. It is concerned, and, if we look to _quantity_ alone, _chiefly_ concerned, with questions that have ceased to exist, and interests that no longer agitate. It often reasons from principles we do not own, and is tinged with feelings which we cannot share. Often do the most docile and open hearts resort to it with reverent hopes which it does not realize, and close it with a sigh of self-reproach or disappointment. With the deep secrets of the conscience, the sublime hopes, the tender fears, the infinite wonderings of the religious life, it deals less altogether than had been desired; and in touching them does not always glorify and satisfy the heart. We are apt to long for some nearer reflection, some more immediate help, of our existence in this present hour and this English land, where our enemies are not Pharisees and Sadducees, or our controversies about Beelzebub and his demons; but where we would fain know how to train our children, to subdue our sins, to ennoble our lot, to think truly of our dead. The merchant, the scholar, the statesman, the heads of a family, the owner of an estate, occupy a moral sphere, the problems and anxieties of which, it must be owned, Evangelists and Apostles do not approach. Scarcely can it be said that general rules are given, which include these particular cases. For the Christian Scriptures are singularly sparing of general rules. They are eminently personal, national, local. They tell us of Martha and Mary, of Nicodemus and Nathaniel, but give few maxims of human nature, or large formulas of human life: so that their spiritual guidance first becomes available when its essence has been translated from the special to the universal, and again brought down from the universal to the modern application. They are felt to be an inadequate measure of our living Christianity, and to leave untouched many earnest thoughts that aspire and pray within the mind. One divine gift, indeed, they impart to us,--the gracious and holy image of Christ himself. Yet, somehow, even that sacred form appears with more disencumbered beauty, and in clearer light, when regarded at a little distance in the pure spaces of our thought, than when seen close at hand on the historic canvas. It is not that the ideal figure is a subjective fiction of our own, more perfect than the real. Every lineament, every gesture, all the simple majesty, all the deep expressiveness, we conceive to be justified and demanded by the actual portraiture: our least hesitating veneration sees nothing that is not there. But the original artists' sympathy we feel to have been somewhat different from ours. They have labored to exhibit aspects that move us little; and only faintly marked the traces that to us are most divine. The view is often broken, the official dress turned into a disguise. The local groups are in the way; the possessed and the perverse obtrude themselves in front with too much noise; and the refracting cloud of prophecy and tradition is continually thrown between. So that the image has a distincter glory to the meditating mind than to the reading eye.

All this, oftener perhaps felt than confessed, is perfectly natural and innocent. It betrays the instinctive analysis by which our own affections separate the divine from the human. Paul was right in his principle, that in history _the divine element lies hid_; is missed at the time, even by those who are its vehicle; and does not parade itself in what they consciously design, but lurks in what they unconsciously execute. It comes forth at "the end of the ages,"--the retrospect of fifty generations instead of the foresight of one. This doctrine is true of individuals, in proportion as they are great and good. They labor at what is most difficult to them, and make it their end; but their appointed power lies in what is easiest. They chiefly prize the beliefs and the virtues most painfully won; but their highest truth dwells in the trusts they cannot help, and their purest influence in the graces they never willed, or knew to be their own. And it is true in history; Paul himself signally illustrating the rule which he had applied to earlier times. He had found, as he supposed, the Providence of the Past, which all had missed, from Moses to Christ; but in his turn he missed, as we perceive, the Providence of the Future, from himself to us. The kind of agency which he anticipated for Christ bears no resemblance to that which his religion has actually exercised. The only fault we can find with Mr. Thom's admirable exposition is, that he attributes to the Apostle too distinct an apprehension of Christ as an impersonation of _moral perfection_; and supposes the purpose of the Pauline Christianity to have been the establishment, as sole condition of discipleship, of reverential sympathy with the type of character realized in the Galilean life of Jesus. He says:--

"In contrast with such teachers" (the Ritual and the Dogmatic), "St. Paul, in our present chapter (1 Corinthians ii.), refers both to the _matter_ and the _manner_ of his own ministration of the Gospel. He did not teach it as a _Rhetorician_, to attract admiration to himself, and give more lively impressions of Paul the Orator than of Christ the Redeemer from sin, nor as a _Philosopher_, to raise doubtful questions on metaphysical subjects, and become the leader of a speculative school; but as the Apostle of Jesus Christ, he proclaimed to the hearts of men the practical and life-giving Gospel, that 'God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself'; that by the universal Saviour all distinctions were for ever destroyed, and the whole family of God to grow into the common likeness of that well-beloved Son,--for that now neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but the renewal of the affections after the image of the Lord. Where could an entrance be found for party divisions in a doctrine that professed nothing, that aimed at nothing, except to awaken the consciousness of sin within the heart, and, through trust in the God of holiness and love revealed in Jesus, to lead it to repentance and life? All who felt this love of Christ constraining them, cleansing their souls by the divine image that had taken possession of their affections, and, through the mercy it proclaimed, encouraging their penitence to look for pardon from their God, must, of necessity, be one communion; for this Gospel sentiment and hope could create no divisions amongst those who had it,--and those who had it not were outside the Christian pale, and, so far, could make no schisms within it. Now, whence comes this Gospel sentiment, this new principle of life? Were there any who had the exclusive power of communicating it? Did it require to be introduced by any intricate reasonings, by any subtle dialectics, which only the Masters in philosophy had at their command? Not so, says St. Paul;--it is a spiritual feeling, excited by moral sympathy, as soon as Christ is offered to the hearts that are susceptible of the sentiment;--and in whatever bosom there is not enough of the Spirit of God to cause that moral attraction to take place, neither philosophy nor outward forms, nor aught else but the divine image of goodness kept before the heart, can awaken the slumbering sensibilities which are the very faculties of spiritual apprehension, and which, as soon as they are alive, behold in Christ the solution of their own struggling and imperfect existence, their ideal and their rest. In regard to a sentiment so spiritual, a sympathy with the image of God, where is the possibility of introducing party divisions, and violating Christian unity? There can be but two parties,--those that _have_ the sentiment, and those that have it not. All Christians constitute the one,--and as for the other, in relation to Christian unity, they are not in question. Such is the argument of St. Paul in this second chapter."--p. 30.