§ 2. Progress requires that we should look back as well as forward.
Such a study as this may be undertaken in the interest of true progress, as well as that of honest inquiry. For what so frequently checks progress, causes its advocates to falter, and produces what we call a reaction towards the old doctrines, as something shallow in the reform itself? Christians have relapsed into Judaism, Protestants into Romanism, Unitarians into Orthodoxy—because something true and good in the old system had dropped out of the new, and attracted the converts back to their old home. All true progress is expressed in the saying of Jesus, “I have not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” The old system cannot pass away until all its truths are fulfilled, by being taken up into the new system in a higher form. Judaism will not pass away till it is fulfilled in Christianity—the Roman Catholic Church will not pass away till it is fulfilled in Protestantism—Orthodoxy will not pass away till it is fulfilled by Rational Christianity. Judaism continues as a standing protest, on behalf of the unity of God, against Trinitarianism.
And yet we believe that, in the religious progress of the race, Christianity is an advance on Judaism, Protestant Christianity an advance on Roman Catholic Christianity, and Liberal and Rational Christianity an advance on Church Orthodoxy. But all such advances are subject to reaction and relapse. Reaction differs from relapse in this, that it is an oscillation, not a fall. Reaction is the backward swing of the wave, which will presently return, going farther forward than before. Relapse is the fall of the tide, which leaves the ships aground, and the beach uncovered. Reaction is going back to recover some substantial truth, left behind in a too hasty advance. Relapse is falling back into [pg 004] the old forms, an entire apostasy from the higher stand-point to the lower, from want of strength to maintain one's self in the advance.
The Epistle to the Hebrews deserves especial study by those who desire to understand the philosophy of intellectual and spiritual progress. It was written to counteract a tendency among the Jewish Christians to relapse into Judaism. These Christians missed the antiquity, the ceremony, the authority of the old ritual. Their state of mind resembled that of the extreme High Church party in the Church of England, who are usually called Puseyites. They were not apostates or renegades, but backsliders. They were always lamenting the inferiority of Christianity to Judaism, in the absence of a priesthood, festival, sacrifices. It hardly seemed to them a church at all. The Galatians, to whom Paul wrote, had actually gone over and accepted Jewish Christianity in the place of Christianity in its simplicity and purity. The Hebrews had not gone over, but were looking that way. Therefore the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews endeavors to show them that all which was really good in the Jewish priesthood, temple, ritual, was represented in Christianity in a higher form. It had been fulfilled in the New Covenant. Nothing real and good can pass away till it is fulfilled in something better. Thus the Roman Catholic Church stands, as a constant proof that Protestant Christianity yet lacks some important Christian element which Romanism possesses. Orthodoxy, confuted, as we suppose, over and over again, by the most logical arguments, stands firm, and goes forward.
Let us, then, reëxamine the positions of our antagonists—not now merely in order to find the weak places in their line of battle, but to discover the strong ones. Let us see if there be any essential, substantial truth in this venerable system, to which we have as yet not done justice. If there be, justice and progress will both be served by finding and declaring it.
We ask, What are the substantial truths, and what the formal errors, of Orthodoxy? But what do we mean by these terms?