Part 48

Neither, then, from his own direct assertion, nor from comparison of his several writings, _inter se_, do we learn anything of the alleged _development_ of the Apostle's doctrine. There is no element in it, that, from inability to co-exist with the rest, requires to be assigned to a date of its own. The breach with Judaism, especially, we conceive to have been complete from the first, and unsusceptible of degrees; nay, to have been the initial principle of his conversion, the secretly prepared condition or tendency of mind that rendered him accessible to the Divine call, and open to sudden change in the direction of his character. When first released from the formulas of a Jewish Christology, and communing in spirit with a heavenly and universal Lord, his mind would doubtless be met by a multitude of new problems, and would work freely towards their resolution, with the quickening consciousness of new light streaming in, and a grander landscape of Providence opening before him. The very intensity of this inward action, however,--the thirst it sustains for its own completion,--forbids us to attribute to it a life-long duration; ere fifteen years were passed, its force would be spent by having realized its work, and attained the equilibrium of a holy peace. Whatever subsequent changes occurred would be of a different nature, enforced by the turn of the world's affairs; a mere remoulding or reproportioning of inward faiths, in adaptation to the altered pressures of the hour. Of such modifications, such retreat towards the background of once favorite ideas, and advance of dim suggestions into strong light, there are doubtless examples in St. Paul. The expectation of Christ's speedy coming to close the world's affairs, and realize "the kingdom," could not but dominate at first, and pale every other interest and belief by the terror and glory of its light. But there is a limit beyond which the strain of longing cannot be sustained; as it subsides, the present and actual recovers power, and pushes its problems forward, and gains once more the eye that had looked beyond them. And so, after a while, spring up questions of Christian order that will not bear to be put off;--how to live in a world that, however near its doom, entangles the disciple still in a web of difficult relations; how to touch the skirt of its idolatries, and not be tainted; how to behave to wife and child in this last generation of human affairs; how to seal up the passions that _ought to die_ within the saints, but were not dead; how to prevent the gifts of the Spirit from overbalancing themselves, on the heights of a dizzied mind, into outrages on nature; how to preserve to the woman and the slave, in their exulting reaction from degraded life, the sense of modest reverence, and the appreciation of faithful service. Day by day questions of this kind insisted on attention, and brought out a fresh type of sentiments proper for their determination, and offering to view a new side of the Christian thought and life. Nor, again, could many years elapse, before the Jew and Gentile difficulty changed its whole aspect, and expanded, from a petty scruple compromised at Jerusalem, into a world-wide theology, regulative of all future history. When it became evident that it was no question about a small sprinkling of ethnic converts,--mere hangers-on of Hebrew families and synagogues; when the delay of Messiah, and the energy of Paul, gave occasion for thousands to pour in; when it seemed imminent that Palestine should be outvoted and overpowered by the growth of the foreign Gospel, the alarm of the Judaic Christians became great. They tracked Paul's steps; their emissaries were everywhere; their arguments and doctrine became more constricted, and his more wide and free; and as the clouds visibly lowered over Israel, touching him as well as them with gloom, all the more did he see the sunshine flood the lands beyond; and his national trust assumed this form,--that, maybe, the outlying heavenly light may creep back as the dark hour passes, and again set the shadows moving on the hills it has so long glorified. The Apostle died before the question settled itself by the mere force of the facts,--by the utter breaking up of the Jewish nation, and the inpouring Gentile numbers. Others waited to be driven into catholicity by events; it is his glory to have surrendered himself to the inspiration that implanted in him its principle from the first. He lived, however, to see a mighty growth, though not the final fruit; and the grand scale on which he conducts the controversy, in his Epistle to the Romans, by converging reasonings fetched from afar out of history, and aloft out of the perfections of God, and deep out of human nature, shows how his thought expands with the exigencies of experience, and advances to fill the whole greatness of his opportunities.

There can be no doubt that the earliest Apostolic Christianity consisted mainly in the faith of Christ's coming again, "to-day, or to-morrow, or the third day." This event, with its effect on the living, was _the one only point_, Mr. Stanley conceives, on which St. Paul, in his great chapter on the Resurrection, professed to have a distinct revelation:--

"On one point only he professes to have a distinct revelation, and that not with regard to the dead, but to the living. So firmly was the first generation of Christians possessed of the belief that they should live to see the second coming, that it is here assumed as a matter of course; and their fate, as near and immediate, is used to illustrate the darker and more mysterious subject of the fate of those already dead. That vision of 'the last man,' which now seems so remote as to live only in poetic fiction, was to the Apostle an awful reality; but it is brought forward only to express the certainty that, even here, a change must take place, the greatest that imagination can conceive."--Vol. I. p. 398.

That this belief, where held at all, should be paramount and absorbing, follows from its very nature. Accordingly, St. Paul, as Mr. Jowett remarks, makes even the essence of the Gospel to consist in it:--

"It appears remarkable, that St. Paul should make the essence of the Gospel consist, not in the belief in Christ, or in taking up the cross of Christ, but in the hope of his coming again. Such, however, was the faith of the Thessalonian Church; such is the tone and spirit of the Epistle. Neither in the Apostolic times, nor in our own, can we reduce all to the same type. One aspect of the Gospel is more outward, another more inward; one seems to connect with the life of Christ, another with his death; one with his birth into the world, another with his coming again. If we will not insist on determining the times and the seasons, or on knowing the manner how, all these different ways may lead us within the veil. The faith of modern times embraces many parts and truths; yet we allow men, according to their individual character, to dwell on this truth or that, as more peculiarly appropriate to their nature. The faith of the early Church was simpler and more progressive, pausing in the same way on a particular truth, which the circumstances of the world or the Church brought before them."--Vol. I. p. 46.

Only it is not on "a particular _truth_," but on a particular _error_, that the "pause" of faith was here made;--an error found or implied, as our author observes, "in almost every book of the New Testament; in the discourses of our Lord himself, as well as in the Acts of the Apostles; in the Epistles of St. Paul, no less than in the Book of the Revelation." Mr. Jowett does not evade the difficulty. In an admirable essay on this special subject, he frankly states the facts, traces their influence on the early Church, accepts them as among the limits which human conditions impose on Divine revelation, and shows from them, how, even in God's highest teachings, he leaves much truth to be drawn forth from time and experience.

"It is a subject," he says, "from which the interpreter of Scripture would gladly turn aside. For it seems as if he were compelled to say at the outset, 'that St. Paul was mistaken, and that in support of his mistake he could appeal to the words of Christ himself.' Nothing can be plainer than the meaning of those words, and yet they seem to be contradicted by the very fact, that, after eighteen centuries, the world is as it was. In the words which are attributed, in the Epistle of St. Peter, to the unbelievers of that day, we might truly say that, since the fathers have fallen asleep, all things remain the same from the beginning. Not only do 'all things remain the same,' but the very belief itself (in the sense in which it was held by the first Christians) has been ready to vanish away."--Vol. I. p. 96.

It is the infirmity of human nature--an infirmity irremovable by inspiration--to translate eternal truth into forms of time, to throw color into the invisible till it can be seen, and look into any given infinity till finite shapes appear within it, and it is felt as infinite no more. The soul tries, as it were, every apparent path, from spiritual apprehension to scientific knowledge, from deep insight to clear foresight, from perception of what God _is_ to vaticination of what he _does_; and abides alone with the Holy Presence, that will not tell His counsels, but is ever there himself. From the world of Divine reality into that of transient phenomena, there is no bridge found as yet; and only He, whose footsteps need no ground, can pass across. We know somewhat on both sides; but the chasm between vindicates its perpetuity against all invasion. _Vision_ for faith; _prevision_ for science:--this seems to be the inviolable allotment of gifts by the Father of lights. And whoever overlooks this rule, and, inspired with discernment of what absolutely is, ventures to pronounce what relatively will be, embodies his truth in a form whence it must again be disengaged. The deepest spiritual insight is ineffectual to teach _past_ history; it is equally so to teach _future_ history. The moment you lose sight of this fact, and expect the sons of God to _predict_ for you, you confound inspiration with divination, and will pay the double penalty of missing the truth they have, and being disappointed at that which they have not. It is not always much otherwise with themselves; the light which they _are_, they do not _see_; and that which shapes itself before them, and becomes the _object_ of their minds, is but the shadow of human things, deepened and sharpened, perhaps also misplaced, by the preternatural intensity. By its very inwardness and closeness to the soul's centre, God's Spirit may express itself chiefly in the unconscious attitudes and manifestations of the mind; especially as it is these that often leave the most ineffaceable impressions of character upon others, and may, therefore, be the vehicle of a more life-giving power than any purposed teaching or more conscious authority. The disappointment of an avowed prediction, or the error of an elaborated doctrine, no more affects the Divine inspiration at the heart of Christianity, than the miscalculations and failure of the Crusades disprove their Providential function in the historical education of mankind. Mr. Jowett takes up the question from another side, and shows how the faith in a future life, though not directly _given_, necessarily disengaged itself in the end from the expectation of the coming of Christ.

"We naturally ask, why a future life, as distinct from this, was not made a part of the first preaching of the Gospel?--why, in other words, the faith of the first Christians did not exactly coincide with our own? There are many ways in which the answer to this question may be expressed. The philosopher will say, that the difference in the mode of thought of that age and our own rendered it impossible, humanly speaking, that the veil of sense should be altogether removed. The theologian will admit that Providence does not teach men that which they can teach themselves. While there are lessons which it immediately communicates, there is much which it leaves to be drawn forth by time and events. Experience may often enlarge faith; it may also correct it. No one can doubt that the faith and practice of the early Church, respecting the admission of the Gentiles, were greatly altered by the fact that the Gentiles themselves flocked in; 'the kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by force.' In like manner, the faith respecting the coming of Christ was modified by the continuance of the world itself. Common sense suggests that those who were in the first ecstasy of conversion, and those who after the lapse of years saw the world unchanged and the fabric of the Church on earth rising around them, could not regard the day of the Lord with the same feeling. While to the one it seemed near and present, at any moment ready to burst forth, to the other it was a long way off, separated by time, and as it were by place, a world beyond the stars, yet, strangely enough, also having its dwelling in the heart of man, as it were the atmosphere in which he lived, the mental world by which he was surrounded. Not at once, but gradually, did the cloud clear up, and the one mode of faith take the place of the other. Apart from the prophets, though then beyond them, springing up in a new and living way in the soul of man, corrected by long experience, as the 'fathers one by one fell asleep,' as the hopes of the Jewish race declined, as ecstatic gifts ceased, as a regular hierarchy was established in the Church, the belief in the coming of Christ was transformed from being outward to becoming inward, from being national to becoming individual and universal,--from being Jewish to becoming Christian."--Vol. I. p. 99.

With the Apostle Paul, however, the "coming of Christ" occupies the place of our "future life"; the _living_ mass of disciples, waiting till then for the "redemption of their bodies," fill the foreground and largest space in the scene; the rising of the dead is the subsidiary fact, needful to the completeness of the gift of life in Christ. On this crisis, supposed to be so near, his eye was exclusively fixed whenever he spoke of the Christian's "salvation"; and could he have been told that no such crisis would come, that, for fifty generations, the present order of the world would vindicate its stability, we cannot imagine what shape his faith would have assumed; whether he would have made light of all these centuries, said that with the Eternal "a thousand years are but as one day," and still opposed to one another the αιων ουτος and the αιων μελλων; or whether he would have found that the distinction was evanescent, and the kingdom of God was to be not sent hither, but to be created here; or how, in either case, he would have represented to himself the state of the innumerable dead. These are questions which did not arise for him; and it were vain to conjecture his solution. He is engaged with other problems;--all, indeed, having reference to that never doubted crisis, and arising out of its manifold relations, yet so treated by him as to detach them unawares from their origin, and give them a permanent place in the religious consciousness of men. _Who_ were to be the subjects of that salvation? How were they _qualified_? By what act of God's, and what temper of their own, to reach the blessing? What present _assurance_ had they of this approaching good? It is in dealing with these questions that St. Paul darts from his objective theology into the deepest recesses of human experience, and fetches into expression spiritual truths that transcend their incidental occasion, and will remain valid while there is a soul in man.