Part 7

There was, however, still a defect in this gospel of conscience. Regarding the world and life as the object of a divine administration, and seeking to interpret them by a scheme of final causes, it was wholly occupied with the conception of God as proposing to himself certain ends, and arranging the means for their accomplishment. In this light He is a Being with moral preconceptions and an economy for bringing them to pass. Everything is for a purpose, and subsists for the sake of what is ulterior, and forms part of a mechanism working out a prescribed problem. The tendency of this way of thinking will inevitably be, to hunt for providences. These the narrow mind will place in the incidents of individual life; the comprehensive intellect, in the laws and relations of the universe; not perhaps in either case without some danger from human egotism of referring too much to the good and ill which is relative to man. The infinite perfections of God will be concentrated, so to speak, too much in the notion of His WILL, and the powers which subserve its designs; and will in consequence be as much misapprehended as would be our own nature by an observer assuming that we put forth all its life and phenomena _on purpose_. Indeed, the exclusive and unbalanced ascendency of the moral faculty tempts a man to fancy this sort of existence the only right one for himself; to suspect every flow of unwatched feeling, and call himself to account for the burst of ringing laughter, or the surprise of sudden tears, and aim at an autocratic command of his own soul. It is not wonderful that his ideal of human character should reappear in his representation of the Divine. The error deforms his faith as much as it tends to stiffen and constrict his life. Leading him always to ask what a thing is _for_, it hinders him from seeing what it _is_; in search of the _motive_, he misses the _look_; and his interest in it being transitive, he sinks into it with no sympathy on its own account. This is only to say, in other words, that his prepossession detains him from the _artistic_ contemplation of objects and events; for while it is the business of science to inquire their _origination_, and of morals to follow their _drift_, it remains for art to appreciate their _nature_. To feel the type of thought which they express, to recognize the idea which they invest with form, the mind must rest upon them, not as products or as instruments, but as realities; and their significance must not be imposed upon them, but read off from them. The meaning which art detects in life and the world is not a purpose, but a sentiment; in its view the present attitudes and development of things are rather the out-coming of an inner feeling than the tools of a remoter end. To find room for this mode of conception something must be added to the ethical representation of God. He must be regarded as not always and throughout engaged in processes of intention and volition, but as having, around this moral centre, an infinite atmosphere of creative thought and affection, which, like the native inspirations of a pure and sublime human soul, spontaneously flow out in forms of beauty, and movements of rhythm, and a thousand aspects of divine expression. Religion demands the admission of this free element: and without it, will cease to speak home to men of susceptible genius and poetic nature, and must limit itself more and more to the fanatical minds that have too little regulation, and the moral that have too much. A God who offers terms of communion only to the passionate and to the conscientious, will not touch the springs of worship in perceptive and meditative men. _Their_ prayer is less to know the published rules than to overhear the lonely whispers of the Eternal Mind, to be at one with His immediate life in the universe, and to shape or sing into articulate utterance the silent inspirations of which all existence is full. Their peculiar faculties supply them with other interests than about their sins, their salvation, and their conscience; they feel neither sufficiently guilty, nor sufficiently anxious to be good, to make a religion out of the one consciousness or the other; but if, indeed, it be God that flashes on them in so many lights of solemn beauty from the face of common things, that wipes off sometimes the steams of custom from the window of the soul, and surprises it with a presence of tenderness and mystery,--if the tension of creative thought in themselves, which can rest in nothing imperfect, yet realize nothing perfect, be an unconscious aspiration towards Him,--then there is a way of access to their inner faith, and a temple pavement on which they will consent to kneel. It is, we believe, the inability of Protestantism, in either of its previous forms, to meet this order of wants, that has reduced it to its state of weakness and discredit; and the struggle of thought, characteristic of the present century, is an unconscious attempt to supply the defect, and to vindicate, for the third element of Catholic Christianity, the possibility of development in the open air of Protestant belief. The change began, like both of the earlier ones, in Germany; and it was from Plato that Schleiermacher learned where the weakness of Christian dogma lay, and in what field of thought he might create a diversion from the disastrous assaults of French materialism, and restore the balance of the fight. An Hellenic spirit was infused into the scientific theology of the Continent, and has never ceased to prevail there, though Aristotle has long succeeded to Plato as the channel of influence. When Hegel, long the rival of Schleiermacher, triumphed over him, not only in the coteries of Berlin, but in the schools of Germany, he no doubt turned the philosophy which had been invoked to preserve the faith into a dialectic, at whose magic touch it deliquesced; and no one who has followed the application of his principles to history and dogma can be surprised at the antipathy they awaken in the Church. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the step into Pantheism was made by Hegel, and that the opposing theologians raised up by the great preacher of Berlin occupy in this respect any different ground. Since the time of Jacobi theism proper has not been heard of in Germany: the very writers who _mean_ to defend it, surrender it in the disguise of their definition of personality; and so steeped is the whole national mind in the colors of Hellenic thought, that from Neander to Strauss can be found, in our deliberate judgment, only different shades of the same pantheistic conception. What does this denote but a universal sigh after a God, who shall be neither a Jehovah, a Judaic αυτοκρατωρ, nor a redeeming _Deus ex machinâ_, supervening upon the theatre of history, but a living and energizing Spirit, quickening the very heart of to-day, and whispering round the dome of Herschel's sky not less than in the third story of Paul's heaven? In some this feeling breaks out in devilish defiance, as in the unhappy Heinrich Heine's saying, "I am no child, I do not want a Heavenly Father any more": in others it breathes out, as with Novalis, in a tender mysticism, and is traceable by the reverent footfall and uncovered head with which they pace, as in a cathedral, the solemn aisles of life and nature. The expression of this tendency has passed into the literature of our own language, and every year is tinging it more and more with its characteristic hues. Emerson affords the purest and most unmixed example; but perhaps the earlier writings of Carlyle,--before the divine thirst had advanced so much into a human _rabies_,--and more especially his _Sartor Resartus_, may be taken as the real gospel of this sentiment. The intense operation of these essays, so entirely alien to the traditions of English thought and taste, is an evidence of something more than the genius of their authors: it is proof of a certain combustible state of the English mind, prepared by drought and deadness to burst into the flame of this new worship. This feeling, diffused through the very air of the time, has unmistakably evinced its essential identity with the instinct of art; in part, by a direct affluence and excellence of production unknown to the preceding age, but still more, in the wide extension of an appreciating love for the creations of artistic genius. The melancholy prophets who see in this spreading susceptibility only a morbid symptom of decadent civilization, are misled, we hope, by imperfect historical parallels. The flower, no doubt, both of Athenian and of Italian culture, was most brilliant just before it drooped. But the soil which bore it, and the elements that surrounded it, had no essential resemblance to the conditions of modern English society, in which, above all, there are the unexhausted juices of a moral faith and a strenuous habit, not stimulant perhaps of hasty growth, but giving hardihood against the open air and the natural seasons.

By the rules of technical theology, it may appear strange to reckon the turn from theism to pantheism as a _third stage of the Reformation_; as if it could be at all included in the interior history of Christianity, instead of being treated as a direct apostasy. And it is in reality a very serious question, whether, without unfaithfulness to its essential character, the Christian religion can domesticate within it this new action of thought, or must from the first visit it with unqualified excommunication. On the one hand, nothing can be more absurd than to suppose that a faith of Hebrew origin, a faith whose very hypothesis is sin, and whose aspiration is moral perfectness, can ever be reconciled with a thorough-going pantheism. On the other hand, nothing can be more gratuitous than to assume that the feeling which, on getting the whole mind to itself, generates a pantheistic scheme, has _no_ legitimate exercise, and gains its indulgence altogether at the expense of Christian truth. If we mistake not, the pith of the matter lies in a small compass. _Let Christian Theism keep Morals, and Pantheism may have Nature._ This rule is no mere compromise or coalition of incongruous elements, but is founded, we are convinced, on distinctions real and eternal. So long as a holy will is left to God, and a power committed to man, free to sustain relations of trust and responsibility, room remains for all the conditions of Christianity, and the field beyond may be open to the range of mystic perception, and railed off for the sacrament of beauty. But whether this or any other be the just partition of territory between the two claimants, partition there must be, for the real truth of things must correspond, not to the hypothesis of any single human faculty, but to harmonized postulates of all. It is not surprising that, on its first re-birth, the gospel of nature should deny the gospel of duty, or so take it up into its own fine essence as to volatilize all its substance away. This is but the natural revenge taken for past neglect, and the needful challenge to future attention. Each one of the three developments has in its turn run out beyond the limits of the Christian faith, and yet, hitherto, each has established a place within it. The Hegelian, or Emersonian, type of the third period is but the corresponding phenomenon to the Antinomianism of the first, and the Deism of the second. And as these have passed away, after surrendering into the custody of Christendom the principles that gave them strength, so will the Pantheism of to-day, when it has provided for the safe-keeping of its charge, and seen the Church complete its triad of Faith, Holiness, and Beauty.

This question, however, will be asked: If the Reformation only repeats, with some transposition, the cycle of the primitive development, how are we the better for having thus to do our work again? Are we to end where the sixteenth century began, and to reproduce the Catholicism which was then resolved into its elements? And does some fatal necessity doom us to this wearisome periodicity? Not in the least. However little the seeds may be able to transgress the limits of species, and may remain indistinguishable from millennium to millennium, the conditions of growth are so different as practically to cancel the identity in the result. Taken even one by one, the modern forms of doctrine are far nobler than their early prototypes. The narrow Ebionitism of the original Church is not comparable, as an expression of the conscience, with the moral philosophy of Butler; and the Greek element of thought, flowing by Berlin, has entered the Church in deeper channels than when infiltrating through the theosophy of Alexandria. It is only in relation to the passionate element that the doubt can be raised, whether we have gained in truth and grandeur by passing the religion of Augustine through the minds of the modern reformers; and whether the Jansenists within the Church do not exhibit a higher phase of character than the Huguenots without it. But at any rate, the modern development, taken as a whole, is secure of an inner unity and completeness which before has been unattained. It is an obvious, yet little noticed, consequence of the invention of printing, that no one mood of feeling or school of thought can tyrannize over a generation of mankind, and sweep all before it, as of old; and then again, with change in the intellectual season, rot utterly away, and give place to a successor no less absolute. Generations and ages now live in presence of each other; the impulse of the present is restrained by the counsels of the past, and, in fighting for the throne of the human mind, finds it not only strong in living prepossession, but guarded by shadowy sentinels, encircled by a band of immortals. Hence the history of ideas can never be again so wayward and fitful as it was in the first centuries of our era; losing all interest at one period in the questions which had maddened the preceding; for a time covered all over with the pale haze of Byzantine metaphysics, and then suffused with red heats of African enthusiasm. New truth can no longer forget the old, and thrive wholly at its expense, or even make a compact with it to take turn and turn about, but must find an organic relation with it, so as to be its enlargement rather than its rival. The modern moralist already understands Augustine better than did the old Pelagians; "Evangelical" teachers begin to insist on Christian ethics; and the increasing disposition, even in heterodox persons, to dwell on the Incarnation as the central point of faith, shows how credible and welcome becomes the notion of the union of human with divine, and of the moral manifestation of God in the life and soul of man. The time, we trust, is gone, for the merely linear advancement of the European mind, with all its action and reaction propagated downwards, and wasting centuries on phenomena that might co-exist. Henceforth it may open out in all dimensions at once, and fill, as its own for ever, the whole space of true thought into which its past increments have borne it. Sects, no doubt, and schools, will continue to arise on the outskirts of the intellectual realm, possessed by partial inspirations; but the world's centre of gravity will be more and more occupied by minds that can at once balance and retain these marginal excesses, that can round off the sphere by inner force of reason, and, dispensing with the outer mould of sacerdotal compression, let the tides flow free, and the winds blow strong, without alarm for the eternal harmony. This is the form in which nature will restore, and God approve, a Catholic consent.

The idea we have endeavored to give of the genesis of Christian doctrine, and the law of its vicissitudes, is offered only as conveniently distributing the subjective sources of faith. It cannot be applied to the phenomena of particular countries apart from ample historical knowledge of the concurrent social and political conditions, without which the most accurate clews to the natural history of _thought_ can only mislead as the interpreter of concrete _events_. When, for instance, we look around us at home, and seek for the English representatives of the several tendencies explained above, we may, no doubt, find them here and there, but they are so far from exhausting the facts of our time, that some of the most conspicuous parties--as the Anglicans--seem provided with no place at all. The obscurity first begins to clear away when we remember that in England _Schism went before Reformation_. The aim of Henry VIII. was simply to detach and nationalize the Church in his dominions; to give it insular integrity instead of provincial dependence; and could this have been done without meddling with the system of Catholic doctrine at all, the scheme of faith would have been preserved entire. While Luther and the Continental opponents of Rome were faithful to the idea of the unity of Christendom, and were calling out for a general council to restore it by a verdict on doubtful points of faith, the English monarch, undisturbed by doubt or scruple, broke off from Rome, and destroyed the traditions of centralization by taking the ecclesiastic jurisdiction into his own hands and stopping its passage of the seas. In the new movement of the time, England tended to become a petty papacy, still unreformed; Europe sought a universal church reformed. Neither aim admitted of realization. To repudiate the supreme pontiff, and substitute a civil head, involved a fatal breach in the sacerdotal system, and carried with it inevitable departures from the integrity of Catholic dogma; so that reformation was found inseparable from schism. And when no council, acknowledged as universal, was called to give authoritative settlement, arrangements _ad interim_ became consolidated, provisional rights grew into prescriptive; with the spectacle of variety, and the taste of freedom, the idea of unity faded away, till the co-existence of two churches within one land and one Christendom passed into a necessity, and reformation proved impossible without a schism. But, notwithstanding this partial approximation of the English and the Continental movements, the traces remain indelible that their point of departure was from opposite ends. In its origin and earliest traditions, in the basis of its constitution and worship, the Church of England has nothing whatever to do with Protestantism; it is but the Westminster Catholic Church instead of the Roman Catholic Church. Authoritative doctrine, sacramental grace, sacerdotal mediation, are all retained; and throughout the whole of Henry's reign, while the new laws were working themselves into habits, the seven sacraments, the communion in one kind, the Ave Maria, the invocation of saints, with the doctrines of transubstantiation and purgatory, remained within the circle of recognized orthodoxy. The impelling and regulative idea of the whole change was that of a nationalization of Catholicism. This original ascendency of the national over the theological feeling was never lost; and though channels were more and more opened, through the sympathies of exiles and the intercourse of scholars, for the infusion of Continental notions, yet the form given to the Church rendered it not very susceptible to the new learning; whose admission, so far as it took place, was rather induced by political conception than made in the interests of universal truth. The present Anglicans represent the first type of the English _schism_; and the High Church in general embodies the distinguishing _national_ sentiment of the Reformation in this country, as compared with the _cosmopolitan_ character of the Continental religious change. Doctrine is universal, administration and jurisdiction are local. Where the former becomes the bond of sympathy, as among the Evangelic Protestants, it unites men together by ties that are irrespective of the limits of country, and subordinates special patriotisms to the interests of a more comprehensive fraternity. Where the latter become the objects of zeal, a flavor of the soil mingles itself with the sentiments of honor, and a peculiar loyalty concentrates itself on the inner circles of duty, often with the narrowest capacity of diffusion beyond. Hence the intensely _English_ feeling which has always prevailed among the parochial--especially the rural--clergy of the Establishment, and the people who form their congregations. They constitute the very core of our insular society, and the retaining centre of our historical characteristics. Their admirations, their prejudices, their virtues, their ambitions, are all national. Their interest in dogma is not intellectually active, or provocative of any proselyting zeal, and is subservient to the practical aim of giving territorial action to the religious institutions under their charge. Their dealings are less with the individual's solitary soul, than with the several social classes in their mutual relations; and to mediate between the gentry and the poor, to keep in order the school, the workhouse, and the village charities,--not forgetting the obligation to ward off Methodists and voluntaries,[2]--constitute the approved circle of clerical duties. Their very antipathies, unlike those of Protestant zealots, are less theological than political; they hate Roman Catholics chiefly as a sort of _foreigners_, who have no proper business here, and Dissenters as a sort of _rebels_, who create disturbance with their discontents; and were old England well rid of them both, the heart of her citizenship, they believe, would be sounder. They stand, indeed, in a curious position, pledged to hold a proud Anglican isolation between two cosmopolitan interests,--the Popish theocracy and the Evangelical dogma,--refusing obedience to Rome, yet declining the alliance of foreign Protestants. Their enmity to the Papal system is quite a different sentiment from that which animates Exeter Hall; they do not deny the absolute legitimacy of the elder corporation in general, but only its relative legitimacy _here_; and Scottish ravings against it as "Babylon" and "Antichrist" offend them more than the confessional and the mass. Twice in their history--under the Stuarts and in our own day--have they seemed to forget their destiny, and make overtures to the Vatican; in both instances it was when Puritanism had threatened to take possession of the Church, and reduce it to a federal member of an Evangelical alliance; and if its separate integrity were in peril, they had rather fling it back into the Apostolic monarchy, than enroll it in the Genevan league. But the first real sight of danger from the Papal side has dissipated this reactionary inclination, and rekindled the instinct of local independence. Thus, in our Church, ideal interests and purely religious conceptions have held the second place to a predominating nationalism. The Church has embodied and handed down the leading sentiment of the Tudor times; and though not guiltless of share in many a Stuart treachery, and often cruel to the stiff-necked recusant, has, on the whole, been true to the English feeling, that the Pope was too great a priest, and Calvin too long a preacher.