Part 36

"The plague made its appearance with tremendous violence, and desolated the city, so that, as Dionysius, the Christian bishop, writes, there were not so many inhabitants left of all ages, as heretofore could be numbered between forty and seventy. In this emergency the persecuted Christians forgot all but their Lord's precept, and were unwearied in their attendance on the sick; many perishing in the performance of this duty by taking the infection. 'In this way,' says the bishop, with touching simplicity, 'the best of the brethren departed this life; some ministers, and some deacons,' the heathens having abandoned their friends and relations to the care of the very persons whom they had been accustomed to call 'Men-haters.' A like noble self-devotion was shown at Carthage when the pestilence which had desolated Alexandria made its appearance in that city, and, I quote the words of a contemporary, 'All fled in horror from the contagion, abandoning their relations and friends as if they thought that by avoiding the plague any one might also exclude death altogether. Meanwhile the city was strewed with the bodies, or rather carcasses of the dead, which seemed to call for pity from the passers-by, who might themselves so soon share the same fate; but no one cared for anything but miserable pelf; no one trembled at the consideration of what might so soon befall him in his turn; no one did for another what he would have wished others to do for him. The bishop hereupon called together his flock, and setting before them the example and teaching of their Lord, called on them to act up to it. He said, that if they took care only of their own people, they did but what the commonest feeling would dictate; the servant of Christ must do more; he must love his enemies, and pray for his persecutors; for God made his sun to rise and his rain to fall on all alike, and he who would be the child of God must imitate his Father.' The people responded to his appeal; they formed themselves into classes, and those whose poverty prevented them from doing more gave their personal attendance, while those who had property aided yet further. No one quitted his post but with his life."--p. 162.

This self-devotion in times of distress, strangely contrasting with habits and temper apparently unsocial, has too steadily reappeared in every earnest church not to be accepted as a Christian characteristic. During the fatal famine and epidemic which desolated Antioch in the third century, the Pagan governor, when urged by the inhabitants to make authoritative arrangements for relieving the sufferings of a perishing populace, replied that "The gods hated the poor"; while the Christians, prevailingly poor themselves, plunged into the centre of the danger, and carried into the recesses of fever and despair the quiet presence of help and hope. If disciples have thus freely rendered to "those without" services which Pagans refused to one another, it is not simply in stiff obedience to a precept of love to their enemies, but from a heart-felt sentiment of honor for human nature and consequent tenderness of human life. There was no man who, though he might be a persecutor to-day, might not be a comrade to-morrow; he had a soul susceptible of consecration; and day and night the gates of the Church were ready to fly open to the touch of penitence; and whether he throws off the mask of delusion or not, he must be treated as a brother in disguise. Only by reference to this conception of all men as possible subjects of sanctifying change, can the fact be explained, that even where the creed has opened an infinite gulf between believer and unbeliever, the active charities have detained in lingering embrace the persons whom the theoretic fancy has flung into the ultimate horrors. A religion that is superior to the external distinctions of lineage and class, and draws its lines only by the invisible coloring of souls, must ever be a religion open to hope, and therefore apt to love. Even where the severest doctrine of exclusion has prevailed, the fundamental sentiment of Christian faith has saved the heart from the most withering of all passions,--the blight of _scorn_. Human nature may appear beneath the eye of an austere believer in an _awful_, but never in a _contemptible_ light. The very crisis in which it is suspended can belong to no mean existence. What it has lost is too great a glory, what it has incurred is too deep a terror, to be conceivable except of a being on a grand scale. _He_ is no worm for whom the eternal abysses are built as a dungeon and the lightnings are brandished as a scourge. Accordingly, the very alienations of intolerance itself have acquired a higher and more respectful character than in ancient faiths. The sort of feeling with which the Jew spurned "the Gentile dog" is sanctioned by piety no more. The Oriental curl of the lip is scarcely traceable on the features of Christendom; and is replaced by an expression of tragic sorrow and earnestness, where lights of admiring pity flash through the darkest clouds.

It seems, then, that the essential sentiment of all Christian faith--the communion through conscience with God--carries with it, not only noble personal aspirations, but also, towards others, affections of singular generosity and depth; affections which demand for every man a position in which he may work out the moral problem of life, which dignify every lot where this is possible, and which soften even actual alienations with possible reverence and hope. The sphere of action which these feelings may shape for themselves, the particular enterprises they may undertake, the external pursuits they may assume, will necessarily depend on many foreign and accidental conditions. The work which it would fall to the hands of the same faithful man to do, if he lived on through the changes of the world, would greatly vary from age to age. The work which contemporary men, of equal and similar fidelity, will set themselves to accomplish, will vary with their several positions. The same act, or even habit, which is innocent (though possibly not innocuous) in one place, may assume quite an altered significance in another. It would be absurd, for instance, to set down the double marriages of patriarchal times in the same moral rank with modern cases of bigamy. And the doctrine of Plato's Republic respecting marriage, startling as a comment on the manners of his age, by no means expresses the odious state of mind which would be implied in its substitution now for the sanctities of private life. The devotion to studious and peaceful acts which may usually be either blameless or laudable, may become a guilt like treason in an hour when the interests of public liberty claim every citizen for the council or the field. Indeed, the conduct in such contrasted instances is in no proper sense _the same_; it has only an external identity; it is a physical self-repetition, with a moral contrariety; and unless, in speaking of a human _action_, we mean to shut out the soul which makes it human, and to denote only the muscular flourish and spasm of limb, the sameness is but a semblance with a reality of difference. The moral values of actions, taken in this narrowest sense, are inevitably variable; and any code that should present a list of them as obligatory in perpetuity, without regard to the changes of their meaning to the mind, would mistake the very nature of human duty. Not that we deny the existence of permanent grounds for the adoption of some habits and the avoidance of others. There are reasons, unchangeable as the corporeal frame of man, why opium should not be taken as an article of food, and why cousins should not intermarry. But the grounds of prohibition in these cases are _rational_, not _moral_; they are found in the outward effects, not in the inward sources, of conduct; and only when its outward effects are _known_ to the agent, so as to enter among its inward sources and modify its meaning, does he pass from _unwise_ to _immoral_. External action, in short, stands as an _indifferent_ phenomenon, between the mind that issues it and the world into which it goes. The thought and affection whence it springs in the former give its _moral_, the results to which it tends in the latter its _rational_ value. Whoever makes a correct estimate of the several affections and impulses which stir the will, and throughout their scale reveres the better and disapproves the worse, possesses _moral_ truth. Whoever perceives and computes the real consequences of voluntary conduct, possesses _rational_ discernment in human affairs. The former--an interpretation of the conscience and its sacred contents--is the permanent essence of ethical and root of religious wisdom. The latter--an apprehension of physical laws and historical tendencies--is conditioned by the progress of science and the facilities for social vaticination. Errors in _this_ are inevitable to the limitations of human intellect. Perfection in _that_ is possible only to the highest divine insight in the soul. The fallible judgment respecting outward relations affects only the accidents of morals, though the essence of scientific truth. Where the inner apprehension is deep and true, the outward judgment contains a principle of self-correction; the miscalculation of one age is checked by that of a succeeding; opposite errors cancel each other; and the spirit of a pure faith, like a just feeling of beauty and greatness in art, works itself clear of the false data of usage amid which its inspiration arose, and transmigrates into ever-improving forms. If, however, the reverence due to the inspiration should become a traditional affair, losing its living eye and spiritual tact, it will extend itself as a moping idolatry to the imperfect media and rude materials through which the new glory first gleamed; an incapable era of _renaissance_ will appear; the very works which were given as the spring of ever-fresh creation will be used to stifle it; in servile imitation of an original period, its whole character will be lost, and the moment of exactest reproduction will be that of intensest contrast.

This is precisely the way in which the spiritual life of the primitive Christians has been dealt with. The thought and meaning that lay at its heart are little apprehended; its applied morals, in which these are mixed up with the errors incident to their point of view, are distorted into a rigid code of obligation, in which the original idea is often entirely reversed. If it be really true that the Apostolic age was impressed with the belief of a speedy end of the world, such an outlook must undeniably have affected the disciples' whole estimate of the value of human pursuits. The plan of life commendable in a passage-ship may be questionable in a settled home; and the proceedings of an army on the eve of battle are not like the habits of the same people tilling their fields and sitting at their hearths. To apply to a permanently constituted planet the rules promulgated to preserve discipline amid a general breaking-up, is surely an eccentric kind of legislation. Yet by just such a process have modern churches derived a number of ethical extravagances offensive to the eye of chastened conscience, and condemned by their impracticability to the insincere existence of perpetual talk. The manner in which English divines conduct themselves towards this error of the first century appears to us not simple and ingenuous. Some still affect to deny it, and to treat its reiterated assertion as a mere perverseness and impudence of heresy; yet they leave the statement without serious refutation, though well aware that the weight of critical authority is altogether in its favor, and though avowing their own theory of revelation absolutely to require that it be false. Others incidentally and grudgingly admit it, and then pass on as if nothing had happened; immediately relapsing into the same authoritative appeal to Scripture, the same direct and mechanical use of its precepts, the same assumption of it as an instrument yielding on interpretation nothing but truth, which had been habitual with them before their eyes were opened. Now, if anything be certain on such a matter, it is that to suppose one's self in the world's last year,--the admission paid to the panorama of judgment and the spectacle only waiting to begin,--is no small and sleepy idea, which might ineffectually turn up now and then, and sink back below the surface without further trace. A man who could live in presence of such a vision, and not carry its crimsoned light upon every object that fixed his eye, could be no apostle of truth or preacher of earnestness; nor do we know that anything more contemptuous could be said of him than that, no doubt, he held such an expectation, but it was of no consequence. To convert the author of the Pauline Epistles into a dilettante believer of the pattern of the nineteenth century, and say of his most tremendous gleams of thought that they were but transitory fireworks which meant nothing, is no less an offence against his character than a misunderstanding of his writings; and we conceive that, in affirming the deep penetration of his mistaken world-view into the substance of his monitory teaching, we shall be vindicating the fundamental veracity and noble clearness of his soul.

To exhibit the Christology of the Apostles with the fulness necessary for tracing pseudo-Christian morality to its origin, would require a volume. We can only advert to one or two points, indicating the direction which such an inquiry would take. It is admitted on all hands, that a second advent of Christ is announced in almost every book of the New Testament; that, if we except the Gospel of John, it is spoken of invariably as a real, personal return, an objective and scenic event, to be seen, heard, and felt; and cannot be explained away into a spiritual access to the world, or a subjective drama in the soul of disciples. It is further admitted, that with this advent are integrally connected many incidents which, however difficult to group into a complete picture, constitute, under every variety of possible arrangement, a final consummation of human affairs. Indeed, the article in the Creed which declares that Christ "shall come to judge the quick and the dead, and at his coming all men shall rise again with their bodies and shall give account for their own works," shows how the Church understands the doctrine, and conjoins the end of the world with the advent. The _nature_ of the event being so far undisputed, the question which separates the mass of scientific interpreters from the popular expounder, refers only to its _date_. The Apostle Paul, it is urged by the critics, writes to his Thessalonian converts, in answer to a distressing doubt which could have no existence but in minds on the watch for the return of Christ; and his answer, far from checking this outlook, raised it to such intensity that, to soothe their excitement, he wrote to them again to remove the event from the immediate foreground of their imagination; yet even then detained it quite within the limits of their natural lives, and, simply interposing one or two signals of its approach that had not yet appeared, counselled them not to lose their composure, but maintain a "patient waiting for Christ." The original doubt which had disturbed them seems to have been one instructively characteristic of the early theocratic faith. Some member of the community had died; his friends, in addition to their natural sorrow, were apparently taken by surprise, that, after enrolment among the citizens of the approaching kingdom, he was taken from their side, and would not be with them when they hailed the arrival of Christ. What would become of him? They thought he would have to remain in his sleep till Messiah should exercise his function of raising the dead, which was not to be at first; and so, during the great crisis, and for an uncertain continuance beyond, he would linger behind the privilege which they enjoyed. This seems, at first sight, a strange subject of distress. That the second advent should take place in the presence of the living only, and should leave the dead without part or lot in the matter, is so completely at variance with the picture which has become fixed in the common Christian imagination, that scruples may readily be felt about attributing so mutilated a conception to the Thessalonian church. The commonly received picture, however, is made up of elements incongruously brought together from several Scripture writers, to whom the expected event presented itself under different aspects; and nowhere can they be found combined into such a whole as the ecclesiastical faith represents. To understand and account for the Thessalonian state of mind, we have only to read over the 24th and 25th chapters of St. Matthew, and to surrender ourselves to the images there presented, without adding anything of our own. These chapters contain the fullest description of the advent, the last judgment, and the end of the world, that can be found in Scripture; yet _the dead are not brought upon the scene at all, nor is any resurrection found among its elements_. The whole idea is evidently of a return of the Son of Man, within the limits of a generation, to take account, in his theocratic capacity, of the very persons who had known him in his Galilean humiliation and disguise,--of those who, having joined him in his days of trial, had been intrusted by him with the administration in the interval of his heavenly absence,--and of those who, after rejecting him personally, had hardened themselves no less against the preaching and overtures of his subsequent ambassadors. The nations gathered before him are furnished from the surviving population of the earth; and the ground of their admittance or rejection is the reception they have given to Messiah in the persons of his missionaries and representatives. In supposing the dead to have lost their chance of participating in this scene, the Thessalonians did but paint it to themselves as Christ, according to the first Gospel, had described it to his hearers. Their misgiving plainly assumes that the advent was sure for the living and was lost for the dead. The Apostle answers by denying the distinction, and putting both classes into the same condition ere the great hour strikes: but _what_ condition? Does he say that the living will die first? No; but that the dead will live first: so that the departed companion will come back at the right moment for mingling with the troop of friends that shall go "to meet the Lord in the air." The same order of events is given in the sublime, but little understood, chapter on the resurrection in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, where the Apostle places _himself_, at the advent, not among "the dead" that "shall be raised incorruptible," but among the survivors that "shall be changed" into immortals without ever quitting life. It is a topic of praise to the disciples at Corinth that they are "waiting for the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ." He assures his Philippian friends that "the Lord is at hand," and prays that they may "be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ." Having come out safe from his examination and hearing at Rome, he avows his persuasion that he will be similarly delivered "from every evil work," and preserved unto Christ's heavenly kingdom. Though amid his toils and weariness he earnestly desired to be endowed with his immortal frame,--to be invested, as he expresses it, with his house from above; yet he was unwilling to put off the corruptible, till he could put on the incorruptible; he would have his mortality "swallowed up of life"; he did not wish the great hour to find him naked, but clothed, not, that is, a disembodied spirit, but a living man. He stands at the era on which "the end of the world has come"; and begs his correspondents to let certain existing disputes lie over, and to "judge nothing before the time until the Lord come." Not less explicit evidence is afforded in the writings of other Apostles. James says, "The coming of the Lord draweth nigh; ... behold, the Judge standeth before the door." Peter, "The end of all things is at hand." John, "Children, it is the last time; and as ye have heard that Antichrist shall come, even now are there many Antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time." If the author of Christianity did not himself entertain the same expectation of an early return to assume his Messianic prerogatives, he has been greatly misrepresented by his biographers. For though one of them represents him as disclaiming a knowledge of the specific "_day_ and _hour_" appointed for his "coming in the clouds with great power and glory," the disclaimer follows immediately on his announcement, that at all events it will take place within the existing generation. Does any reader doubt whether this "coming in the clouds" really describes the judgment? or whether "this generation" denotes the natural term of human life? Both questions are answered at once in Matthew's report of a single sentence, which simultaneously defines the event and its date: "For the Son of Man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his angels; and _then he shall reward every man according to his works_. Verily I say unto you, there be _some standing here which shall not taste of death_, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." It is certainly possible enough that the discourses in which these expressions occur may be incorrectly reported, and have acquired from the writer's state of mind a definiteness not belonging to the original production. But, at any rate, they reveal the historian's conception of what was in Jesus's thought; and the false coloring of expectation which they threw over his prophecies could not fail to extend in their reports to his preceptive discourses, and thus to have almost the same influence on the recorded Christian ethics, as if the error were his as well as theirs.

The evidence on this point is so positive and overwhelming, that critics such as Olshausen, whose testimony is undoubtedly reluctant, no longer think of resisting it. Nothing, indeed, can be opposed to it but a kind of interpretation which is the opprobrium of English theology; and whose problem is, not simply to gather an author's thought from his words, but from among all _true_ thoughts to find the one that will sit the least uneasily under his words. Thus "the end of all things" is explained away into the founding of the Christian Church; the "coming of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven," into the Jewish war under Titus; the last judgment, which "rewards every man according to his works," into the escape of the Christians and the slaughter of the Jewish zealots at the destruction of Jerusalem. No doubt, many good and well-instructed men have persuaded themselves that by such exegetical sleight of hand they could save Apostolic and other infallibility. We can only say, that when piety supplies the motive, and learning the means, for bewildering veracity of apprehension, two rich and noble endowments are spent in corrupting a nobler, which is the life of them both.