Part 41

Our author cannot then change the _venue_ of the great Christian cause from the first century to the third, and, on the evidence present there, give even preliminary judgment. The conflict between the new religion and the old which characterized that period, he paints with striking and truthful effect; and, contrasting the severe and holy veracity of martyred disciples with the careless indifference of Paganism to religious truth, he rightly refers the superiority of the Christians to their faith in a _Person_, instead of mere assent to an _Opinion_. Is it, however, correct to regard this as original and exclusive to the Gospel, and to set it on the forehead of the Church as the very mark of her distinctive divinity? We think not. The same feature is manifest in Judaism, to which again it belongs, not as a peculiarity, but in common with every faith whose Only God is the apotheosis of humanity. It is the one grand moral characteristic of genuine Theism, as opposed to Pantheism; rendering it more than the enthusiasm of poetry, the earnestness of philosophy, the inspiration of genius, and constituting it, in the deepest sense, Religion. Nor is the ground of the distinction far to seek. Religion, in its ultimate essence, is a sentiment of Reverence for a Higher than ourselves. Higher than ourselves, however, can none be, that have not what is most august among our endowments; none, therefore, by reason of size, of strength, of duration; none simply by beauty or by skill; none even by largeness of discerning thought, but only by free and realizing preference of the most Just and Good. A Being of living Will can alone be nobler than myself, lift me above the level of my actual mind by looking at my latent nature, and emancipate me into the captivity of worship. In other words, reverence can attach itself exclusively to a _Person_; it cannot direct itself on what is _im_personal,--on physical facts, on unconscious laws, on necessary forces, on inanimate objects and their relations, on space, though it be infinite, on duration, though it be eternal. These all, even when they rule us, are _lower_ than ourselves; they may evade our knowledge, defy our power, overwhelm our imagination, but never rise to be our equals, or conspire to furnish even the symbol of our God. The mere deification of Nature, the recognition of oneness pervading her variety, the sense of an absolute ground abiding behind her transient phenomena, may supply a faith adequate to the awakening of wonder and the apprehension of ideal beauty, but not to the practical consecration of life; glorifying the universe as a temple of Art, but railing off within it no oratory of Conscience. In order to extract anything like a religion of _conduct_ from this type of belief, its hierophants are obliged to approach as near as they can to the language of proper Theism, and not even despise typographical aid for pushing personification to the verge of personality; uttering various warnings not to neglect the "_intentions_ of Nature," or insult the "Relentless Veracities," and inviting sundry offenders to _blush_ before "the Eternal Powers." The whole force of such expressions is evidently due to the false semblance of living thought and will with which they clothe the conceptions of mere abstract relations or physical tendencies. These rich tints are no self-color, but a borrowed light reflected from a grander Presence studiously withdrawn from view; and when their gloss is gone, no positive residuum is found, but a doctrine of hope and fear, without any element of Duty. It were a mockery, an inanity, to bid a man spend his affections on hypostatized laws that neither know nor answer him. In his crimes, it is not the heavy irons of his prison, but the deep eye of his judge, from which he shrinks; and in his repentance he weeps, not upon the lap of Nature, but at the feet of God. In his allegiance, his vow is made, not to the certainty of facts, but to the majesty of Right, and the authority of an Infinitely Just; and his acts of trust are directed by no means to the steadiness of creation's ways, but to the faithfulness of a perfect Mind. In short, all the sentiments characteristic of religion presuppose a Personal Object, and assert their power only where Manhood is the type of Godhead. This condition was imported, or rather continued, from the Hebrew to the Christian system; and brought with it the devout loyalty of heart, the singleness of service, the incorruptible heroism of endurance, which had encountered Antiochus Epiphanes at Jerusalem, as it now met Pliny in Bithynia, and Quadratus at Smyrna. The Paganism of the Empire, on the other hand, failed entirely of this condition. It was a mere nature-worship, expressive of the political dynamics by which, through the award of a mysterious necessity, Rome had become the centre of the world. If, among the deities whose congress was now assembled on the Tiber, there were any which once, in their indigenous seats, had commanded the full moral faith, and touched the true theistic devotion, of a people, that time had passed; and the conquered tribes suffered a more fatal loss when the victorious city adopted their religion, than when she crushed their liberty. Removed to Rome, the rites of a provincial worship expressed nothing except that its gods were gods no more, but had descended from divine monarchic rights to a place among a pensioned hierarchy. Vanquished divinities inevitably become delegated powers of nature, and resign their sceptre to the sovereign they are compelled to own. As the administration of the Empire embraced a congeries of checked nationalities, so did its pantheon include a collection of extinguished religions. While as Imperator the head of the state was the embodiment of its unity by natural force, as Divus he represented its unity by preternatural sanction; and the divine honors paid to him were the acknowledgment of a necessity more than human in the culminating majesty of Rome. These honors would be freely rendered to him by those who looked on all realized existence, on everything charged with force enough to come up and be, as equally decreed by "the Eternal Powers,"--equally divine. Such homage would appear to them the mere expression of a fact, and a graceful owning of mysterious fates in its production; and no scruple could withhold them from an act which contradicted nothing in their mind, and did but fling a breath of pious incense around the thing that veritably was. It were absurd to expect the protest of a martyr from a man whose religion you cannot contradict; who will see a God wherever you ask him; and whose worship asserts nothing but that, a phenomenon being there, an occult power is behind it. A faith of this sort is deficient, as an Hegelian would say, "in the moment of _negation_"; it is all unobstructed affirmation, and can strike no light because it thus finds nothing to dash itself against. But let the divine element in the universe cease to be impersonal and impartially coalescent with the whole, let it live an Individual Mind, and the requisite antagonism immediately appears. To the Jew, the worship of Cæsar would be no other than high treason to Jehovah, whose tool, whose whip of lightning, and whose cup of consolation the Pagan Emperor might become; but whose emblem and incarnation he could so little be, that he rather stood defiantly at the head of the opposing realm, and, even when forced to be the organ, did not cease to be the competitor of God. For _opposing realm_ there must be, wherever proper Theism exists. Man feels that his personal attributes, his will, his character, his conscience, demand conflict for their condition, and without the possibility of ill could never be; and when he carries them out into the infinite region, to serve as his image of the Highest, they bear with them the inseparable shadow of evil, and give it place in the universe, as the darkness in whose absence light would want its distinction, the privative without which the beauty of holiness were nothing positive. Hence, expressed or unexpressed, a dualism mingles with all genuine theistic faith. All is not divine for it. It has a devil's province somewhere. Face to face, as Ebal to Gerizim, the frown of blighted rock to the smile of verdant heights,--hostile as the priest of falsehood to the true prophet,--there stand contrasted in this creed two domains of the world,--one surrendered to insurgent powers, the other reserved as the nursing ground from which right and truth shall be spread. To the Hebrew, the Pagan world was given over to a false allegiance, and inspired with diabolical delusions. For him to sacrifice to the genius of Cæsar, would have been, therefore, a desertion to the enemies of God, forbidden by every claim of faithfulness and veracity. Thus we conceive that the moral conditions of the martyrs' protest against idol-worships were complete within the limits of Judaism before the mission of Christ; and that the essence of it lies, not in the exclusive characteristics of the Gospel, but in the difference between Theistic reverence for a Personal Being, and the Pantheistic acknowledgment of an impersonal divineness. The peculiar function of Christianity in this respect was to become missionary to the world of this heroic fidelity transmitted from the parent faith, and hitherto bounded by its limits; and to find a place in the universal conscience of civilized nations for the duty of bearing testimony, though with tortures and death, to the pricelessness of truth and the sanctity of conviction. True it is that the Gospel was qualified for this office by directing human faith upon a _Person_; and would have exercised no such power, had it been a mere philosophy presenting propositions for assent, instead of a Living Mind for trust and reverence. But this condition would have been attained by the simple extension of the Jewish Theism. The Personality, which is needed as a centre of intense fealty and affection, is found in the God of Hebrew tradition, and, for its effects in kindling a martyr courage and constancy, did not require to be sought in the historical Jesus of Nazareth. He, no doubt, as the mediate expression of the Supreme Will, as the Being with whom the Church stood in direct contact, as the presence of the Divine in the Human, _was_ the object of the disciples' actual allegiance. We do not in the least question this as a _fact_, but only as a _necessity_, ere we can account for the moral features of a martyr age.

In singling out, as one of the grandest practical results of Christianity, the recognition it has obtained for the _obligations of religious truth_, our author has rightly seized a characteristic distinction of modern from ancient society. The principle is a real agency of the first order in history; we do not accuse him of overrating its importance, but of mistaking its genealogy. And now we must add, that if we differ from him as to the source whence it comes, we differ still more as to the issues whither it conducts. So inconsiderately does he allow himself to be borne away by his evangelical zeal, that he claims for the Gospel, not only the glory of first revealing, but the exclusive right of ever practising, the duties of religious veracity. None but historical believers have the least title to attach any sacredness to their convictions, or to feel any hesitation about denying them. What business have the authors of the "Phases of Faith," and the "Creed of Christendom," to any better morality of belief than Gallio or Lucian? If they have not fallen back into the Pagan indifferentism, they _ought_ to have done so, and our author will continue very indignant till they do. He is offended with Mr. Newman for asking judgment on his "argument and himself, as before the bar of God"; and with Mr. Greg for saying that, in the process of changing cherished beliefs, "the pursuit of truth is a daily martyrdom," and for giving "honor to those who encounter it, saddened, weeping, trembling, but unflinching still!" And he is not ashamed to declare that the guileless veracity which in himself would be a martyr's constancy, would be in another an overweening conceit. So astonishing, logically and ethically, are his statements on this subject, and so curiously do they determine his intellectual position, that we must present them in his own words:--

"We Christian men of this age, along with our venerated martyr brethren of the ancient Church, in making this profession,--that we may not lie to God, nor deny before men our inward conviction in matters of religion; we (as they did) affirm that which is consistent within itself, and which, in the whole extent of its meaning, is certain and is reasonable, grant us only our initial postulate, that Christianity is from heaven.

"But how is it, when this same solemn averment comes from the lips of those who deny that postulate, and who scorn to recognize the voice of God in the BOOK? It is just thus; and those whom it concerns so to do, owe it to the world and to themselves to make the ingenuous avowal.

"In the first place, the style and the very terms employed by these writers in enouncing the fact of the martyrdom they are undergoing, are all a flagrant plagiarism, and nothing better! A claim, in behalf of the Gospel, must be made of what is its own, and which these writers, without leave asked, have appropriated. As to every word and phrase upon which the significance of this their profession turns, it must be given up, leaving them in possession of so much only of the meaning of such phrases as would have been intelligible to PLUTARCH, to PORPHYRY, and to M. AURELIUS. A surrender must be made of the words CONSCIENCE, and TRUTH, and RIGHTEOUSNESS, and SIN; and, alas! modern unbelievers must be challenged to give me back that ONE awe-fraught NAME which they (must I not plainly say so?) have stolen out of the BOOK; when they have frankly made this large surrender, we may return to them the το θειον of classical antiquity.

"Yet this plagiarism, as to terms, is the smaller part of that invasion of rights with which the same persons are chargeable. It is reasonable, and it is what a good man _must_ do, to suffer anything rather than deny a persuasion, which is such that he could not, if he would, cast it off. So it was with the early Christian martyrs; their persuasion of the truth of the Gospel had become part of themselves; it was faith absolute, in the fullest sense of the word. The same degree of irresistible persuasion attaches to the conclusions of mathematical or physical science; but it can never belong to an opinion, or to an undefined abstract belief. A man may indeed choose to die rather than contradict his personal persuasion of the truth of an opinion; but in doing so he has no right to take to himself the martyr's style. So to speak is to exhibit, not constancy, but opinionativeness, or an overweening confidence in his own reasoning faculty.

"Polycarp could not have refused to die when the only alternative was to blaspheme CHRIST, his Lord; but Plutarch could not have been required to suffer in attestation of his opinion,--good as it was,--that the poets have done ill in attributing the passions and the perturbations of human nature to the immortal gods; nor Seneca, in behalf of those astronomical and meteorological theories with which he entertains himself and his friend Lucilius.

"When those who, after rejecting Christianity, talk of suffering for the 'truth of God,' and speak as if they were conscience-bound 'toward God,' they must know that they not only borrow a language which they are not entitled to avail themselves of, but that they invade a ground of religious belief whereon they can establish for themselves no right of standing. They may indeed profess what _opinion_ they please as to the Divine attributes; but they cannot need to be told that which the misgivings of their own hearts so often whisper to them, that all such opinions are, at the very best, open to debate, and must always be indeterminate, and that at this time their own possession of the opinion which just now they happen to cling to, is, in the last degree, precarious. How then can martyrdom be transacted among those whose treading is upon the fleecy clouds of undemonstrable religious feeling?"--pp. 92-94

If, being orthodox, you die at the stake, you are a martyr; if, being heretic,--why, then you are a man burnt;--a doctrine which Robert Hall compressed within the narrowest compass, when he said, "It is the saint which makes the martyr, not the martyr the saint." This is the very Gospel of intolerance; and whoever preaches it may feel assured that he can lend no help in any worthy "Restoration of Belief"; for he is himself infected with the most profound and penetrating of scepticisms,--scepticisms of moral realities. The rule, "that we may not lie to God, nor deny before men our inward conviction in matters of religion," is, in our author's view, the gift and glory of Christianity. Be it so. This rule either holds for all men at all times, or it does _not_; if there be persons who, notwithstanding it, _may_ lie to God, and deny their inward conviction, then the Scriptures, in communicating it, have revealed no universal principle of duty, no obligation having its seat in the nature of things and the constitution of the human soul, but a mere sectional by-law, an arbitrary precept for the security and good ordering of one exclusive community. Then must we talk of it no more so exceedingly proudly, as if it were a hidden truth revealed, a latent beauty opened; it is no part of the holy legislation of the universe, but a statutory enactment under which we fall, or from which we escape, as we pass in or out at the door of a certain historical belief. Need we say that this side of the alternative strips Christianity of every pretension to be a moral revelation at all? If, to take the other side, the rule in question _does_ hold for all men, then it is no less binding on Mr. Newman and Mr. Greg than on our author; and in bowing to its authority and owning its sanctity, they render a homage as devoutly true as his, only different in this, that, while they feel no disturbance from his kneeling in the sanctuary at their side, he cannot be at peace till he has sprung to his feet and hurled them from the place. They are guilty of "plagiarism" forsooth! And in what? In knowing their duty, without knowing where they learned it! O shame upon this greediness, that would turn moral truth itself, and struggling aspiration, into a property! As if Christ were one to stand upon the copyright of revelation, and, unless his name were in the title-page, would suffer neither thought nor prayer to dedicate itself to God! Our author, as public prosecutor in the Supreme Court, demands that the defendants shall empty themselves out of every earnest sentiment, and surrender back the words CONSCIENCE, and TRUTH, and RIGHTEOUSNESS, and SIN, and GOD, "as _stolen_ from the BOOK"! What then was "the Book" given for, but that it might freely furnish these?--and how better can it fulfil its end, than by opening for them a sacred welcome wherever the _things_ are which they disclose? Let their spirit breathe where it listeth; it will not be less a Holy Spirit that we know not "whence it cometh": nor let it be forgot how old a feature of evangelic blessing it is, that "he that was healed _wist not who it was_." As "the Book" does not, by its presence, _create_ the facts which it reveals, so neither does its absence or rejection _destroy_ them. Conscience, as an element of human nature, does not come or go,--God, as reality in the universe, does not live or perish,--according as the Bible is kept in the pocket or laid upon the shelf; even if their first _witness_ were in Scripture, _they themselves_ are in the world,--as active, as near, as certain, in the transactions of to-day, as in the affairs of distant history. Scientific truth, once well ascertained, can take care of itself, without being everywhere attended by the report of its first discovery; it is in the safe keeping of the objects on which it writes a new meaning, and the phenomena amid which it introduces a fresh symmetry. And moral truth, when once embodied and revealed, is not less independent of its earliest expression; it finds its response in human consciousness, its reflection from human life, and weaves itself up into the very fabric of many souls, whose pattern bears no motto of its origin. Thus "revelation"--just in proportion as it is revelation, and tells us what is cognate to ourselves, and bound up with the realities around us--passes of necessity into "natural religion"; and precisely according to the measure in which it does so, will it acquire strength and permanence, and dispense with evidence by merging into self-evidence. Did it awaken in us _no_ confirming experience, did it _nowhere_ link itself with the visible system of things,--then, solving nothing, glorifying nothing, missed by all the moving indices of nature and Providence, it would sit apart, and become incredible. That could hardly be a truth at all, which, after roaming the world and searching the soul for eighteen centuries, has found no _natural_ ground on which to rest, and must wander as an _ipse dixit_ still. And if natural ground it has acquired, _that_ is surely a proper basis for its present support; it may innocently cease to be held on mere authority; the very "plagiarism" so vehemently denounced is rather the fulfilment than the destruction of the faith, for it is only that men no longer resort to an oracle for things which the oracle has enabled them to see for themselves.