Unitarianism Defended / A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of Liverpool

by John Hamilton Thom; Henry Giles; James Martineau

Footnotes for Lecture VII.

[453]. Locke.

[454]. Mr. James’s Lecture, p. 410.

[455]. Spoken, not printed.

[456]. Milman’s Edition, vol. iii. p. 311.

[457]. “That this Trinity (Monad or Good, Wisdom, Spirit or Energy) was not first of all a mere invention of Plato’s, but much ancienter than him, is plainly affirmed by Plotinus in these words,—‘That these doctrines are not new nor of yesterday, but have been very anciently delivered, though obscurely (the discourses now extant being but Explications of them) appears from Plato’s own writings; Parmenides before having insisted on them.’” Cudworth. Intel. Syst. p. 546.—See also Bishop Berkeley’s Siris, sections 341-365.

[458]. “The principle of every thing is more simple than the thing itself. Wherefore the sensible world was made from Intellect, or the intelligible; and before this must there needs be something more simple still. For many did not proceed from many, but this multiform thing Intellect proceeded from that which is not multiform but simple; as Number from Unity. If that which understands be many, or contain multitude in it, then that which contains no multitude, does not properly understand; and this is the first thing;—to understand is not the First; neither in Essence nor in Dignity; but the Second; a thing in order of nature, after the First Good, and springing up from thence, as that which is moved with desire towards it.”—Plotinus. Cudworth, p. 584.

[459]. “The First is above all manner of action: neither is it fit to attribute the architecture of the world to the First God, but rather to account him the Father of that God, who is the Artificer. The Second, to whom the energy of Intellection is attributed, is therefore properly called the Demiurgus, as the contriving Architect, in whom the Archetypal World is contained, and the First Pattern, or Paradigm of the Whole Universe. The Third is that which moveth about Mind or Intellect, the Light or Effulgency thereof, and its Print or Signature, which always dependeth upon it, and acteth according to it. This is that which reduces both the Fecundity of the First Simple Good, and the Architectonick Contrivance of the Second into Act and Energy. This is the Immediate and as it were Manuary Opificer of the whole world, that which actually Governs, Rules, and Presideth over all.”—Plotinus. ap. Cudw. p. 583.

[460]. “Since the introduction of the Greek or Chaldean Philosophy, the Jews were persuaded of the pre-existence, transmigration, and immortality of souls; and Providence was justified by a supposition, that they were confined in their earthly prisons to expiate the stains which they had contracted in a former state. But the degrees of purity and corruption are almost immeasurable. It might be fairly presumed that the most sublime and virtuous of human spirits was infused into the offspring of Mary and the Holy Ghost; that his abasement was the result of his voluntary choice; and that the object of his mission was to purify, not his own, but the sins of the world. On his return to his native skies he received the immense reward of his obedience; the everlasting kingdom of the Messiah, which had been darkly foretold by the prophets, under the carnal images of peace, of conquest, and of dominion. Omnipotence could enlarge the human faculties of Christ to the extent of his celestial office. In the language of antiquity, the title of God has not been severely confined to the first parent; and his incomparable minister, his only begotten son, might claim, without presumption, the religious, though secondary worship of a subject world.

“The seeds of the faith, which had slowly arisen in the rocky and ungrateful soil of Judea, were transplanted, in full maturity, to the happier climes of the Gentiles; and the strangers of Rome or Asia, who never beheld the manhood, were the more readily disposed to embrace the divinity of Christ. The polytheist and the philosopher, the Greek and the Barbarian, were alike accustomed to conceive a long succession, an infinite chain of angels or dæmons, or deities, or æons, or emanations, issuing from the throne of light. Nor could it seem strange or incredible, that the first of these æons, the Logos, or word of God, of the same substance with the Father, should descend upon earth, to deliver the human race from vice and error, and to conduct them in the path of life and immortality.”—Gibbon, vol. viii. p. 271.

[461]. Philo de Abrahamo. Le Clerc’s Supplement to Hammond, p. 168.

[462]. Cudworth, p. 590.

[463]. “It was in this mode of apprehending the Divine Being that the doctrine of the Trinity had its origin. The Logos of the first four centuries was in the view of the Fathers both an attribute or attributes of God, and a proper person. Their philosophy was, in general, that of the later Platonists, and they transferred from it into Christianity this mode of Conception. In treating of this fact, so strange, and one which will be so new to many of my readers, I will first quote a passage from Origen, the coincidence of which with the conceptions of Philo and the later Platonists is apparent. ‘Nor must we omit, that Christ is properly the Wisdom of God; and is therefore so denominated. For the wisdom of the God and Father of All has not its being in bare conceptions, analogous to the conceptions in human minds. But if any one be capable of forming an idea of an incorporeal being of diverse forms of thought, which comprehend the Logoi [the archetypal forms] of all things, a being indued with life, and having as it were a soul, he will know that the Wisdom of God, who is above every creature, pronounced rightly concerning herself; The Lord created me, the beginning, his way to his works.’”—Origen, Opp. iv. 39, 40,—quoted by Norton on the Trinity, p. 271-2.

[464]. Milman’s Gibbon, vol. iii. p. 313.

[465]. See Cudworth, p. 603, 4.

[466]. “The creed which was first adopted, and that perhaps in the very earliest age, by the Church of Rome, was that which is now called the Apostles’ Creed, and it was the general opinion, from the fourth century downwards, that it was actually the production of those blessed persons assembled for that purpose. Our evidence is not sufficient to establish that fact, and some writers very confidently reject it. But there is reasonable ground for our assurance that the form of faith which we still repeat and inculcate was in use and honour in the very early propagation of our religion.”—Waddington’s History of the Church, p. 27.

[467]. “Ignatius, Justin, and Irenæus make no mention of it, but they occasionally repeat some words contained in it, which is held as proof that they knew it by heart.”—Waddington.

[468]. Jortin, Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. p. 180.

[469]. Comment. in Johan. vol. ii. p. 5.

[470]. Hist. lib. iii. c. 24.

[471]. Chrys. Op. vol. vi. p. 171; viii. p. 2.

[472]. Comm. in Matt. sec. 161.

[473]. In Celsum. lib. ii. p. 56.

[474]. Professor Burton gives some instances of the use of the word God by Ignatius, A. D. 107, in connection with Christ. Nothing can be more slender and insufficient than his other evidences of the recognition of these doctrines by the Apostolical Fathers.

[475]. Dial. cum Tryph. p. 252.

[476]. Lib. i. cap. 19; ii. cap. 3.

[477]. Strom. lib. vi. p. 644. Priestley’s Hist. Early Opinions.

[478]. Advers. Prax. c. 13.

[479]. Comment. vol. ii. p. 47.

[480]. Cap. ii. p. 84.

[481]. Lib. iv. sec. 14.

[482]. Orat. iii. con. Arian.

[483]. Cudworth. Intel. Sys. p. 599.

[484]. Inattention to this distinction vitiates the whole reasonings of Dr. Burton’s learned work on the Anti-Nicene Fathers. There is no doubt that the deity of the Son and even of the Holy Ghost is spoken of before the Council of Nice, but always in the Platonic or derived sense, never in the present orthodox sense of co-equal and independent. The word con-substantial proves nothing to the contrary, for a Platonist would not have objected to the application of the word to the second and third persons in his Trinity, as partaking of, or derived from the Essence of the one Supreme. See Cudworth’s argument to this effect (Intel. Sys. p. 597), who contends that by co-essential and consubstantial, the Nicene Council meant nothing more than that the Son was generically God, of the same nature, but numerically different, having his own distinct Essence. See also Dr. Burton on a passage similar to one from Tertullian already quoted, where he is misled by not attending to this distinction.—Theol. Works, vol. ii. p. 89.

[485]. Cudworth. Intell. Sys. p. 595.

[486]. “It had been the vice of the Christians of the third century, to involve themselves, ‘in certain metaphysical questions which if considered in one light, are too sublime to become the subject of human wit; if in another too trifling to gain the attention of reasonable men.’ (Warburton.) The rage for such disputations had been communicated to religion by the contagion of philosophy; but the manner in which it operated on the one and on the other was essentially different. With the philosopher such questions were objects of the understanding only, subjects of comparatively dispassionate speculation, whereon the versatile ingenuity of a minute mind might employ or waste itself. But with the Christian they were matters of truth or falsehood, of belief or disbelief. Hence arose an intense anxiety respecting the result, and thus the passions were awakened, and presently broke loose and proceeded to every excess. From the moment that the solution of these questions was attempted by any other method than the fair interpretation of the words of Scripture; as soon as the copious language of Greece was eagerly applied to the definition of spiritual things, and the explanation of heavenly mysteries, the field of contention seemed to be removed from earth to air—where the foot found nothing stable to rest upon; where arguments were easily eluded, and where the space to fly and to rally was infinite; so that the contest grew more noisy as it was less decisive, and more angry as it became more prolonged and complicated. Add to this the nature and genius of the disputants: for the origin of these disputes may be traced without any exception to the restless imaginations of the East.” * * *

“We must also mention the loose and unsettled principles of that age, which had prevailed before the appearance of Christianity, and had been to a certain extent adopted by its professors—those, for instance, which justified the means by the end, and admitted fraud and forgery into the service of religion.”—Waddington, Church Hist. p. 89.

[487]. ὑπὲρ μικρῶν καὶ λίαν ἐλαχίστων.

[488]. “Let us imagine, then, a council called by a Christian Emperor, by a Constantine, a Constantius, a Theodosius, a Justinian, and three, or four, or five hundred prelates, assembled from all quarters, to decide a theological debate.”

“Let us consider a little by what various motives these various men may be influenced, as by reverence to the emperor, or to his councillors and favourites, his slaves and eunuchs; by fear of offending some great prelate, as a Bishop of Rome or of Alexandria, who had it in his power to insult, vex, and plague all the bishops within and without his jurisdiction; by the dread of passing for heretics, and of being calumniated, reviled, hated, anathematized, excommunicated, imprisoned, banished, fined, beggared, starved, if they refused to submit; by compliance with some active, leading, and imperious spirits, by a deference to a majority, by a love dictating and domineering, of applause and respect, by vanity and ambition, by a total ignorance of the question in debate, or a total indifference about it, by private friendships, by enmity and resentment, by old prejudices, by hopes of gain, by an indolent disposition, by good nature, by the fatigue of attending, and a desire to be at home, by the love of peace and quiet, and a hatred of contention, &c.

“Whosoever takes these things into due consideration, will not be disposed to pay a blind deference to the authority of general Councils, and will rather be inclined to judge that ‘the Council held by the Apostles was the first and the last in which the Holy Spirit may be affirmed to have presided.’

“Thus far we may safely go, and submit to an Apostolical Synod; but if once we proceed one step beyond this, we go we know not whither. If we admit the infallibility of one General Council, why not of another? And where shall we stop? At the first Nicene Council, A. D. 325, or at the second Nicene Council, A. D. 787? They who disclaim private judgment, and believe the infallibility of the Church, act consistently in holding the infallibility of Councils; but they who take their faith from the Scriptures, and not from the Church, should be careful not to require nor to yield too much regard to such assemblies, how numerous soever. Numbers, in this case, go for little, and to them the old Proverb may be applied;—

‘Est turba semper argumentum pessimi.’

“If such Councils make righteous decrees, it must have been by strange good luck.”—Jortin, Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. p. 183-4.

[489]. Milman’s Ed. vol. iii. p. 331.

[490]. Waddington, Church Hist. p. 93.

[491]. Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. p. 210.

[492]. “The Christian Religion, which in itself is plain and simple, he (Constantius) confounded by the dotage of superstition. Instead of reconciling the parties by the weight of his authority, he cherished and propagated, by verbal disputes, the differences which his vain curiosity had excited. The highways were covered with troops of bishops, galloping from every side to the Assemblies, which they call synods; and while they laboured to reduce the whole sect to their own particular opinions, the public establishment of the posts was almost ruined by their hasty and repeated journeys.”—Ammianus, as quoted by Gibbon, vol. iii. p. 347.

[493]. “Constantine’s conduct was variable afterwards, for he certainly understood not this perplexed and obscure controversy, and he acted as he was influenced at different times by the ecclesiastics of each party, who accused one another, not only of heterodoxy, but of being enemies to the Emperor, and of other faults and misdemeanors.”—Jortin.

[494]. “Notwithstanding all which it must be granted, that though this co-essentiality of the three persons in the Trinity does imply them to be all God, yet does it not follow from thence of necessity that they are therefore One God.”—Cudworth, p. 596.

[495]. “That little is said concerning the separate divinity of the Spirit of God in the Scripture is evident to every body; but the reason that Epiphanius gives for it, will not be easily imagined. In order to account for the Apostles saying so little concerning the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and omitting the mention of him after that of the Father and the Son, (as when Paul says, ‘there is one God and Father of all, of whom are all things, and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things,’) he says that ‘the Apostles writing by the inspiration of the Spirit, He did not choose to introduce much commendation of Himself, lest it should give us an example of commending ourselves.’”—Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity, p. 60.

[496]. “The Holy Spirit, if he be God, as the objection is stated by Basil, must either be begotten or unbegotten. If he be unbegotten, he is the Father; if begotten, the Son; and if he is neither begotten nor unbegotten, he is a creature.”—Priestley’s Hist. Early Opinions, vol. ii. 331.

This is the least offensive specimen I could find of the common objections made to the separate deity of the Holy Ghost at the time the doctrine was first proposed. The plainer and coarser forms of the objection, unhesitatingly handled by the Fathers, I withhold from reverence. But let the reader consult the Ecclesiastical History of the Period. The difficulty stated by Athanasius, Basil, and others, was overcome by establishing a certain mysterious or rather no-meaning difference between begotten and proceeding. Such is always the easy refuge of mystics. The line is a faint one between unintelligible ideas and no ideas at all. “The nativity of the Son,” says Austin, “differs from the procession of the Spirit, otherwise they would be brothers.” I doubt whether it is right to disclose to all eyes the morbid anatomy of Theology; but I assure my readers that I am reverentially forbearing.

[497]. “In the age of religious freedom, which was determined by the Council of Nice, the dignity of Christ was measured by private judgment, according to the indefinite rule of Scripture, or reason, or tradition. But when his pure and proper divinity had been established on the ruins of Arianism, the faith of the Catholics trembled on the edge of a precipice, where it was impossible to recede, dangerous to stand, dreadful to fall; and the manifold inconveniences of this creed were aggravated by the sublime character of their theology. They hesitated to pronounce; that God himself, the second person of an equal and consubstantial Trinity, was manifested in the flesh; that a being who pervades the universe, had been confined in the womb of Mary; that his eternal duration had been marked by the days, and months, and years of human existence; that the Almighty had been scourged and crucified; that his impassible essence had felt pain and anguish; that his omniscience was not exempt from ignorance; and that the source of life and immortality expired on Mount Calvary. These alarming consequences were affirmed with unblushing simplicity by Apollinaris, bishop of Laodicea, and one of the luminaries of the church. The son of a learned grammarian, he was skilled in all the sciences of Greece; eloquence, erudition, and philosophy, conspicuous in the volumes of Apollinaris, were humbly devoted to the service of religion. The worthy friend of Athanasius, the worthy antagonist of Julian, he bravely wrestled with the Arians and Polytheists, and though he affected the rigour of geometrical demonstration, his Commentaries revealed the literal and allegorical sense of the Scriptures. A mystery which had long floated in the looseness of popular belief, was defined by his perverse diligence in a technical form; and he first proclaimed the memorable words, “One incarnate nature of Christ,” which are still re-echoed with hostile clamours in the churches of Asia, Egypt, and Æthiopia. He taught that the Godhead was united or mingled with the body of a man; and that the Logos, the eternal wisdom, supplied in the flesh the place and office of a human soul.”—Gibbon, vol. viii. p. 279.

[498]. Waddington, Hist. of the Church, p. 182.

[499]. Jortin, vol. iii. p. 116.

[500]. Norton on the Trinity.

[501]. “Hence many questions arose, which gave rise to as many controversies. For example, it was debated, Whether the two natures in Christ were so united as to become one; or whether they remained distinct? Whether, since Christ was born, and died, and rose again, it could be said that God was born and died, and rose again?

“Whether the Virgin Mary, who was the Mother of Christ, could be called the Mother of God?

“Whether Christ were two persons, or only one?

“Whether Christ was everywhere present, in his human, as in his divine nature?

“Whether one person of the Trinity could be said to suffer for us?

“Whether the whole Trinity could be said to suffer for us?

“Whether in Christ there were three substances, or only two?

“These questions produced altercation and strife, and then anathematisms, and then fightings and murders.”—Jortin, vol. iii. p. 117.

To these might be added the question proposed by the Emperor Heraclius, A.D. 629, to his Bishops—“Whether Christ, of one person but two natures, was actuated by a single or a double will?” This gave rise to what was called the Monothelite (one will) Controversy, as that respecting the single nature was called the Monophysite (one nature) Controversy.

[502]. Jortin, vol. iii. p. 124.

[503]. Milman’s Edit. vol. viii. p. 312.

[504]. Norton on the Trinity, p. 78.

[505]. “Vigilius Tapsensis hath been supposed, by many, to have been the Maker of the Athanasian Creed about this time (the close of the fifth century). Others are of a different opinion. But it matters little by whom, or where, or when it was composed.”—Jortin, Eccles. Hist. vol. iii. p. 131.

[506]. “The opinions of some of our own Churchmen on this subject are collected by Clarke in his book on the Trinity. The expression of Bishop Tomline cannot be too generally known. ‘We know,’ he says, ‘that different persons have deduced different, and even opposite doctrines from the words of Scripture, and consequently there must be many errors among Christians; but since the Gospel no where informs us what degree of error will exclude from eternal happiness, I am ready to acknowledge that in my judgment, notwithstanding the authority of former times, our church would have acted more wisely and more consistently with its general principles of mildness and toleration, if it had not adopted the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed. Though I firmly believe that the doctrines themselves of this creed are all founded in Scripture, I cannot but conceive it both unnecessary and presumptuous to say, that except every one do keep them whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.’”—Exposition, part iii. art. viii.

[507]. Church History, p. 220.

[508]. Intel. Sys. p. 602, 4.

[509]. “It must be acknowledged that the first converts from the Platonic school took advantage of the resemblance between Evangelic and Platonic doctrine on the subject of the Godhead, to apply the principles of their old philosophy to the explication and confirmation of the articles of their faith. They defended it by arguments drawn from Platonic principles, and even propounded it in Platonic language.”—Bishop Horsley.

[510]. See the Rev. D. James’s acknowledgment of the Subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the Father—of their official inferiority: and the illustrations of the King and the Duke of Wellington, which Trinitarian Theology thinks apposite.

[511]. We were told, indeed, in Christ Church, by the Rev. D. James, that there might exist any number of persons in the divine Essence, three thousand as well as three, and that only because Scripture had revealed no more had Christians fixed upon that number as making up the divine Unity. And this is so clear a consequence of the principles of Trinitarian Theology, that the view must be ascribed to all Trinitarians. Scripture, however, though it has only revealed three, has not declared that there are no more persons in the Godhead—so that it is being wise above what is written to limit the divine Monarchy to the Economy of three Persons.

But farther than this it was declared by the Rev. D. James that nature contained no evidence of One God, not even in the Trinitarian sense of Oneness, for that many Gods might unite to build the world, as many men had united to build the Liverpool Custom House. What would the Architect of that building say to this invasion of the unity of his designing mind? Mr. James repeatedly informed his audience that he always appealed to reason! Such is Trinitarianism when it reasons. But I suppose this view must be considered as a peculiarity of the individual preacher.

[512]. Who are the competent Critics, of whom Mr. Byrth speaks as retaining the text of the three Heavenly Witnesses? The Bishop of Salisbury, I suppose. If this had been Unitarian Criticism, Mr. Byrth would have called it defective Scholarship or dishonesty. He can discriminate in favour of those who err upon his own side. See a curious statement of the external evidence affecting this text, 1 John v. 7, in the second volume of Burton’s Theological Works, p. 114, 2nd part.

[513]. “It is reasonable to expect, that those doctrines, which form the leading articles of any system, should be plainly stated in the book which professes to make that system known.”—Wardlaw.

[514]. “‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’ That is, ‘Go ye therefore into all the world, and teach or disciple all nations, baptizing them into the profession of faith in, and an obligation to obey the doctrine taught by Christ, with authority from God the Father, and confirmed by the Holy Ghost.’”—Lardner.

[515]. John x. 34.

[516]. John xvii. 20, 23.

[517]. Rom. ix. 5.

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LECTURE VIII.
MAN, THE IMAGE OF GOD.
BY REV. HENRY GILES.

“FOR A MAN INDEED OUGHT NOT TO COVER HIS HEAD, FORASMUCH AS HE IS THE IMAGE AND GLORY OF GOD.”—1 Cor. xi. 7.

“AND WHEN HE CAME TO HIMSELF, HE SAID—HOW MANY HIRED SERVANTS OF MY FATHER’S HAVE BREAD ENOUGH AND TO SPARE, AND I PERISH WITH HUNGER. I WILL ARISE, AND GO TO MY FATHER, AND WILL SAY UNTO HIM,—FATHER, I HAVE SINNED AGAINST HEAVEN AND BEFORE THEE, AND AM NO MORE WORTHY TO BE CALLED THY SON; MAKE ME AS ONE OF THY HIRED SERVANTS.”—Luke xv. 17-19.

We are often told that man was originally created in the image of his Maker; and, in the same connection, we are told that, in his fall, he lost it. If this be true, we might expect that Scripture writers, in alluding to fallen man, would never ascribe to him so holy a resemblance. Paul, however, does it in one of the texts I have quoted; and Paul is not alone in this ascription. In an ordinance to Noah, immediately after the deluge, we find the same truth made the foundation of a most solemn injunction. “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.”[^[518]] Had the resemblance of God been effaced from the soul of man in the fall of Adam, there had been in this ordinance neither meaning nor solemnity. Since, therefore, the sacred writer uses the fact of man’s likeness to God to stamp deeper guilt on the crime of murder; since, moreover, that fact is alleged after the narration of the fall,—we are justified by Scripture in claiming this high and glorious distinction for our universal nature.

I have quoted the second text, because the principle implied in it is identical with that which I stand here to maintain, namely, that sin is not of our nature, but against it; that it is not consistent with it, but contradictory to it; that to be sinful, is not to be natural, but unnatural. Sin, properly speaking, is moral delirium; and the progress towards that last paroxysm which, by revulsion, arouses the soul from its madness, is eloquently symbolised in the parable from which my second text is taken. Having tried all that sin could offer him; having sunk to the very husks of carnal appetites, and vainly sought thus to satisfy the hunger of an immortal soul, wearied, disappointed, and disgusted; satiated, but not satisfied, the prodigal arises from his torpor; he awakens from his wildering dream; the delirium that so long beset him is dispersed; with a calm and clear brain he finds himself in open day-light, and discerns the empty and unsubstantial vanities for which, in a false hope, he spent his labour and his strength, to reap at last, in the bitterness of a repentant heart, nothing but grief, tribulation, and anguish.

Sin is not a following of nature, but a violence on it; not conformity, but contradiction to it. And so, as when returning life beats in the palsied heart, or the dawn of reason bursts again on the madman’s brain, the prodigal is said “to come to himself;” when the spirit of moral renovation opens on him with compunctuous visitings of nature, and reveals to him a full sense of his condition. In his guilt he was at variance with all the moral instincts of humanity; and, in the sorrow of repentance, he needed as much to be at peace with himself as with his father. It is universally thus. God has established a certain order and harmony in our nature, appointed to each faculty a place and a purpose; and, in disturbing this arrangement, we become transgressors. We cannot sin against God without also sinning against our own souls, for in them is the primitive revelation of God; and in thus sinning against our own souls, we may practically resist all the divine attributes of which our weak faculties are the dim reflection; God’s wisdom in the abuse of our intellect; his greatness in the loss of our moral dignity; his goodness in the destruction of our charities; his purity in the corruption of our hearts. Unitarians are accused of making sin a light matter. We protest against the justice of the accusation. We hold sin to be the greatest of evils, and the most dire of miseries. We hold it not as a mere social impropriety, but we regard it as a dark disloyalty against conscience and against God. Much suffering, we know, it inflicts on society; but slight, indeed, is it compared with the ruin and devastation it works in our own souls. Here, at first, God impressed his image; here, at last, he fixes his tribunal: it is here his voice was heard in kindness, it is here it shall be also heard in judgment. God’s government is, like himself, spiritual. Man rules by outward power, God by inward inspiration; and it is the peculiarity of the divine legislation that, in the same individual, it attaches the condemnation to the crime; forces transgression, to pronounce its own sentence, and to inflict its own punishment. Human society has set up various bulwarks to guard its security; human law-givers have accompanied their enactments with fiercest penalties; and before Draco, and since, millions upon millions of God’s erring creatures have been offered, a sanguinary sacrifice to justice: superstition has personified all hideous evil in Satan,—the mighty sinner of creation,—the minister of eternal vengeance,—the great executioner of the universe; superstition has spread the limitless prisons of hell, and filled them with tortures, and lit those flames which it asserts are kept burning by the breath of an angry God, and are never to be quenched during his everlasting existence; but we assert, there is no scorn of society, there is no torture of most cruel laws, there is no hell of superstition, deep, burning, and eternal as it may be, that can equal the agonies which man’s own sense of wrong and degradation heap upon his overwhelmed and sunken spirit. The glory of an immortal soul is beyond all outward glories; the majesty of empires and crowns, the splendour of the sun, the beauty of the firmament, the riches of the universe, are nothing in comparison. We say to those to whom it is our privilege to minister, though you were stripped of all that constitute your frail and present happiness; though saddest reverses became your lot; though God laid his hand heavily upon you and your family, tore you from that rank and station that now make your glory; though your children and friends were one by one snatched from you, until you stood in the world-wilderness like a branchless and a blasted tree; though all illness of body and grief of mind were yours,—having an upright soul, it is but a light affliction compared with a guilty conscience, which could wield over earth a universal sceptre. The wages of sin is death,—death in the most tremendous meaning of that tremendous word,—death of purity, death of holy confidence, death of self-respect, death of inward and outward peace. Sin is misery, and the worst of miseries,—one that carries with it its own vengeance, is self-punished and self-cursed. True, we recognize no omnipresent and invisible tempter; true, we hold no gross and eternal punishment; we preach no original malediction, and no inherent depravity; we proclaim no sin which blots out all light and hope around the mercy-seat of God, and scathes the heart of man with everlasting despair. True, we show you no maniac penitents, bewildered in the madness of remorse, shrieking on the death-bed which conscience peoples with furies. We announce no deity coming from heaven, putting on the frail existence of humanity, and expiating on the cross the sin which had closed all access to peace. We cannot, and if we could we would not, freeze your hearts with ideas of torture, nor appal you with threatenings, nor echo on your ears the groans that never cease, the weepings, the wailings, the knashing of teeth, the sighs and hopeless complainings that swell for ever and ever a thickening smoke of torment. Independently of these things, there are other considerations more solemn,—more solemn, because more true,—there is our conscience; there is our peace; there is the dignity of our whole spiritual nature; there is reverence for duty; there is the power to enjoy what is pure and beautiful; there is fitness for communion with God, with all the righteous and the excellent,—these may be lost, or clouded by sin; and they may be so lost as never fully to be recovered. We count sin no slight evil, either as to its inward spirit or outward influence: as I have stated, so we preach. And here, once for all, I enter my protest against the impeachment which charges us with stripping guilt of its danger and its awfulness.

I. Human nature, according to the point from which we regard it, has a good or an evil aspect, each perfectly distinct, and each perfectly true. The whole truth is then in neither separately, but in both conjointly. Fixing too intently on either, and carrying our ideas to extremes, we may, on the one side, flatter human nature above its merits; or, on the other, be guilty towards it of injustice: on the one side see in it all possible good, and on the other nothing but incorrigible evil: on the one side soar into Utopianism, and on the other descend into Calvinism. The Calvinistic view we hold to be false, the Utopian impossible. We have no idea of any perfect goodness or perfect happiness in this world, either possessed or to be attained. Whilst we pace our way in this earthly pilgrimage, sin and suffering must more or less track our steps; the prodigal’s confession, and the publican’s prayer, must still be ours; the most favoured of God’s children have to meet, and bear their allotted griefs,—to see their glory grow dim, the desire of their eyes vanish, and to look onward and backward through the mist of tears. Sufficient of stern realities press upon us to crush at once the vision of a painless and sinless beatitude. Physical wants and sufferings, the inevitable condition of our mortal nature, were there no other, are of themselves equal to the purpose. While an hospital exists among men, breathing with groans and sickly in its very look; while a death-bed is found, steeped in the weepings of affliction; whilst a stone marks and commemorates a spot where the dust is sacred to affection and to sorrow; the wildest dreamer has enough to rebuke his enthusiasm, and to cool it into soberness. And extreme or exaggerated expectations of our nature, are in still stronger contradiction to our moral constitution than our physical. In every individual, however humble his grade, and however sluggish his faculties, there is abundance to make him aware that perfection here is neither his condition nor his destiny,—numberless desires, passions, hopes, fears, expectancies; and no one imagines that all his desires are to be gratified, all his passions fulfilled, all his hopes accomplished, all his fears removed, all his expectancies realized. Want and wish pursue their strife to the end. As it is with the individual, so is it with society: for as society is an aggregate of individual persons, social character is an aggregate of individual characters. Evils, sins, and sorrows, must always, we fear, exist, both in the depths and on the surface of the great community: we look for no period in future time, when those antagonist passions and rivalries shall be extinct—which place man into resisting contact to man, when riches, and fame, and power, shall not be sought for with avidity and strife, and create the throng of passions which spring from their desire and their abuse: we look for no period when the strong universally will use their strength in righteousness and mercy, when the poor and the weak shall cease to be victims, and have full justice done to them: we dare scarcely hope for a period when the massive throne of tyranny, whether political or sacerdotal, should be swept away upon the flood of emancipated progression; and, with equal fear, we think of the tyrannies of caste and creed, not less dark or obstinate; and although not entirely in despair, we look forward with timid anticipation to a time when the war of opinion shall be changed for Christian peace, and the fierce cry of bigotry give place to the hymn with which the angels sung our Saviour’s birth. We see no prospect that men shall lay aside their selfishness, and act in the spirit of universal charity, or that they shall so curb it as to harmonize it with the good of others! that they shall become universally disinterested, forbearing, candid, and generous; that the proud man will put off his scorn, and the oppressor break or throw away his sceptre. Moral and social evils will unquestionably be mitigated, but the sources of them lie too deep for extinction,—were extinction desirable, which it is not: for these elements of our nature are wrong only accidentally; while, essentially, they are right. Knowing that an argument gains nothing by concealing the objections to it, I have thus far been liberal in admissions: I will make one admission more. I acknowledge that an over-estimate of the actual condition and prospects of human nature, as well as their undue depreciation, is likely to have injurious consequences. One of the worst is this: that, creating vivid and unreal hopes, they rebound with harsh and cruel disappointments; the fervour of expectation turns into despair; the glow of generous, but blasted enthusiasm, cools down into apathy, if it does not wither into cynicism; exstacy that was too intense to last, and too extravagant to be well founded, either renounces altogether its early faith, or, casting away its hope, complains through life in grief and despondency. Desires, bright and beautiful, are broken, and their light scattered in the dust. Aspirations, once too big for utterance, turn back to the bosom that nourished them,—hitherto their palace, now their prison,—and there waste away in hopeless thinking, or die in the echoes of unavailing murmurs. Such mistakes are to be lamented, but not to be scorned; for that suffering is not to be despised which has its foundation in profound and extensive sympathy. And it is not in the power of minds more obtuse and slow to measure or conceive the pain of those who, with a moral imagination that goes out to the very limits of humanity, and a piercing sensibility that enters into the hidden places where suffering weeps unnoted, and sin lies down unredeemed, that in the spirit of unselfish love feels the woe and guilt of a race, as though they were personal afflictions, it is not easy, I say, to estimate the pain such men undergo: when some conjuncture of events, which seemed the dawn of virtue, of liberty, of peace, of brotherhood, turns out a mockery and a contradiction; when they live to see that their noblest aspirings were but as the babblings of vanity; that the circumstances of which they augured most hopefully, proved as empty as shapes of vapour painted by the rising sun; that changes, of which they prophesied in most exulting strains, reversed all their calculations. This is no vague speculation; there have been many instances in fact, and we can imagine many more. Had Luther been defeated in his attempt for religious reformation; had Howard departed to his rest with the sorrowful conviction that he left cells as dark, and prisoners as hopeless, as he found them; had Wilberforce closed his life in despair of all redemption for the slave; had Washington fought in vain the fight for independence, seeing no prospect for his country, but submissively to bear the yoke for ever; we have no doubt that each would have experienced a more oppressive anguish than from the keenest of personal afflictions. In such cases there were, of course, the soundness of conception and wisdom of execution which ensure success; but in others, it often happens that the disappointment is not the less bitter because the expectations were baseless.

Opposed to this scheme is that of rigid Calvinism. By the latter system the whole nature is described as hopelessly corrupt, and language affords no colouring which can give shades deep enough for the theological picture. Minutest analysis is used to prove man such a being, that when considered you find him to be a compound of fiend and brute—such a being that you wonder God would allow him to disgrace existence, to pollute creation, and not annihilate, and blot him out from the universe, such a being that if correctly described the very continuance of society becomes a miracle and a marvel. His intellect, we are told, is utterly and spiritually darkened, his will the slave of sin, set to work iniquity greedily, his imagination corrupt, his passions rebellious, his affections perverted, incapable of good in thought, word, or deed, and completely devoted to evil. Taking this view as correct, we might suppose the prime use of man’s understanding was to devise wickedness, of his memory to prolong the thoughts of it, of his will to form only guilty resolves, and of his passions to riot in all that is vile and ungodly. We have thus the whole spiritual and moral man steeped in black and hateful infamy. To sustain these assertions, appeal is made to experience; and proof is found of entire and universal depravity in history, laws, and literature. Any conclusion drawn from these goes but to testify what we are ready to concede, that man is an imperfect being, and that the evidence of his imperfection is stamped upon most of his actions and productions. But the testimony is partially and unjustly quoted. Another estimate of the same evidence would argue as strongly, and even more so, for the inherent goodness of man. If we take the instance of human laws it will at once illustrate and confirm my assertion. If laws prove the existence and universality of crime, they prove also the existence and universality of the sense of justice, for laws, so far as they embody general principles, are the expression of common and collective sentiments. Indirectly, they prove yet more: for, after all, the great mass of truth and rectitude exists independently of laws, is such as no law could reach, is in fact such that without it no laws could have a moment’s force. In the effort to make good an indictment against human nature, an industry and labour are expended, as perverse as they are pertinacious; the lowest purlieus of depravity are raked, the deepest mines of wickedness are worked with a zeal as ardent as the veriest miser would seek for hidden treasure, the blackest evils of the worst times are adduced, the pages of history that are the most darkly stained, are torn out and severed from the context; and for what purpose is all this? Why, to make the noblest work of God odious; to vilify that nature which was glorified in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. If human nature is so thoroughly depraved and vile, as so frequently asserted, the scheme of orthodoxy is most improbable, and a fallen humanity, as it paints humanity, instead of giving Christianity consistency, renders it the most perplexing of paradoxes. For if man be thus naturally vile and depraved—corrupted in every faculty, whence these high counsels in heaven concerning him; whence the union of three infinite and co-eternal persons to save a wretch, the extinction of whom would have been mercy to the universe; whence the counsels of the Father, the incarnation of the Son, and that death of a God-man on Calvary, at which we are told the angels trembled and creation stood aghast; along with all, the constant and supernatural agency of the Holy Spirit? If man be really as worthless and as wicked as we are often told he is, all this, (with reverence I speak it,) seems a want of wisdom and a waste of strength. Though it may be considered over bold I will go a step further. If the one sin of Adam was to work such complete ruin in all his countless posterity; if it was to be the source of such an irremediable wickedness, and unrelieved misery, if notwithstanding the united work of three infinite agents, there was still to be a bottomless pit and an everlasting smoke of torment, a black and boundless ocean of guilt and pain, swelled by gloomy streams ever and ever flowing in from earth, for which infants were sealed in their birth, to which the lost are consigned in their death—if this be the lot to which the great mass of our species is destined—of which the first tear is a symbol, and the last sigh a passport,—if hell still is more peopled than heaven, then the infinite agencies of redemption might have been spared, this hopeless and illimitable anguish might have been extinguished, and the annihilation of our first parents would have been the greater mercy and the greater salvation.

Appeal is made to scripture with still greater confidence than to experience. There is one to whom reference is never made for testimony to this doctrine, and that is our Lord Jesus Christ; and if such doctrine were true, it is strange that he who needeth not that any should testify of man, because he knew what was in man, did not reveal it, and stamp it with all the solemnity of his authority. It may with confidence be asserted that such a dogma as the inherent and universal corruption of human nature is neither asserted nor justified by any Scripture from Genesis to Revelations. The Bible, I admit to be a moral, and also a providential history; and in this relation, I admit also, that it contains many strong statements of human wickedness; but they all refer to periods of peculiar degeneracy, and a fair study of the context will plainly show they have defined limitations. In the appendix to this lecture I will subjoin a list of texts usually pleaded for this doctrine, the mere exhibition of which is sufficient to expose its utter want of a Scriptural foundation.[^[519]] On the present occasion I shall confine my remarks to the proofs alleged from Paul to the Romans. Stripping the subject of all the mysticism with which it has been encumbered, and identifying ourselves with the mind and times of the apostle, let us clearly see what was his object, and then we shall truly apprehend the nature of his argument. Paul’s object was twofold: first, to show that the Gospel was universal. This was opposed to the circumscribed nationality of Judaism. Secondly, that it was inward and spiritual. This was again opposed to the ritual and legal exactitude of Judaism. The General course, therefore, of the argument is directed against Jewish thoughts and Jewish prejudices, and to maintain the admissibility of the Gentiles to the Christian church. He has then to make good two propositions:—namely, “that God is impartially and equally the God of all men; and that fidelity of heart is the essence of all true religion.” We might sum up the whole system of the Apostle in two simple sentences of his letter: “Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also.” The other assertion is, that “with the heart man believeth unto righteousness.” Proving these two principles, he utterly demolishes all Jewish claims. The Apostle proceeds to open the new aspect which Jesus presented of the character of God—that of grace or mercy. Moses proclaimed Jehovah as a God of law, Jesus revealed him as a God of grace. Paul cautiously, but with power, argues most convincingly that in this relation only can men confidently approach him, but in this relation there is free access for all. None have a claim from merit, for all are guilty. With remarkable prudence, he takes, first, the case of the Gentile, and the state of the world in his own time supplied him examples in melancholy abundance. There was, therefore, no ground for Gentile exultation or Jewish jealousy, for the gospel was offered to the Heathens, not as a thing of merit but of favour, not as reward for their holiness, but as a remedy for their sin. To the Jews, who looked with bitter contempt on all men but themselves, who imagined every spiritual advantage was for them alone, this would be most offensive. The next question which thence arose was this:—As the Gentiles obviously were accepted before God, only on the ground of his mercy, whether the Jews could claim acceptance on any other ground? The Apostle had most convincingly shown that the Gentiles had violated the sense of duty inscribed upon their hearts, with equal force of reasoning he proves that the Jews had violated the precepts written in their law; one, therefore, had no right to accuse the other—both were guilty in the sight of God, and both had equal need of his mercy.—But, the Jews were not only wrong in their ideas on the extent of the Creator’s goodness, but also on the true nature of human virtue. As they considered his special providence confined to themselves, so they imagined the only acceptable obedience was in the rigid observance of their own minute precepts and ceremonies. In opposition to this Paul contends that justification is by faith, and not by the works of the law—not a faith which implies a mere assent to a series of scholastic propositions, but a faith which consists in a trusting and confiding spirit. The Apostle places saving holiness, not in outward and measured precepts, but in living and inward principles—in allegiance to God and Christ, in the loyalty of a true and pure heart—in the spirit that makes obedience more a life than a law. To say then that God holds man sternly to a code of inevitable condemnation, to say that any one transgression, however slight, sets at naught the whole tendency of the character and life, not only leaves Paul’s reasoning without force, but subverts the gospel to its very foundations. Our Lord in the parable represents a master as thus addressing his unforgiving servant, “O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt because thou desiredst me—shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant, even as I had pity on thee?” The character of God as described by orthodoxy is the contradictory of this. But we are informed that God is a Judge, and, analogous to human judges, on the tribunal of the universe, lays aside all private considerations. The assimilation is at once low and false. God has no evidence to examine, no probabilities to balance, no decision to arrive at, no formal sentence to pronounce—there is no distinction in the case between God and man, analogous to that between an earthly judge, and his accused fellow-mortal; there is no such distinction with God as a personal relation and a public one, for God is the same in all relations. His dominion is in the spirit; there he rewards, and there he punishes; there is no reward separate from the direct results of righteousness itself issuing in blessedness, and no penalty separate from the results of sin itself issuing suffering, and each in the proportion in which the character is sanctified or depraved. Forgiveness of sin then, is peace of conscience, springing from a regenerated heart, and when man with a thoughtful and enlightened spirit can forgive himself, God forgives him. We, at least those of us personally engaged in this controversy, maintain no such doctrine as the pardon of sin on condition of repentance—as if repentance were something offered and remission an equivalent received instead. On the contrary, we see in repentance but the painful revulsion of a soul from a moral state found by sad experience to be unworthy of it: a struggle upward in many sighs and fears to the high estate from which it has fallen, in repentance itself we see but an additional instance of the anguish which sin never fails to entail. We regard it not as a merit, but a penalty. We grant the universality of sin, as fully as any can assert it. We know it is written, “all men have sinned and come short of the glory of God”—and we admit the truth of the assertion. Wherever man is, there will be sin, for we expect in no place—no, not in heaven itself—to find in man the perfection of a deity. It has been asserted, that every man has an ideal in his soul above his actual conduct. This has been used for condemnation of our nature, we take it as the glory of it—as an evidence that the spirit of God is extinguished in no man. We are ready to concede, not that the open transgressor comes short of the glory of God, but the best men come far short of the glory of their own ideal, and the sense of that short coming is acute, in the degree that their apprehensions of moral loveliness are clear and purified. Every man with his conscience in a right state laments with more heart-felt sorrow the sins which are inward than those which are outward, not those which have been exposed to the world, but those which only God has seen. We desire in no sense to mitigate the deep injury of sinfulness; but when we are told, that God, in vindication of his holy law, must subject man to an unsparing standard of judgment, orthodoxy to be consistent should have the unmitigated penalty inflicted on every personal transgressor. We are unable to conceive how the righteousness of any law can be vindicated by contriving an escape for the guilty by the suffering of the innocent. We do not make void the law—nay, we establish it, for we hold, and we preach it also, that transgression vindicates in the person of the sinner the claims of holiness, righteously and completely, in anguish and tribulation. I here close the polemical division of this lecture, and now for the remaining time I shall dwell on views more positive.

II. Having elucidated two extreme and false systems of human nature, I shall now adduce some of these essentials which properly entitle it to be considered in the likeness of God. I shall pass over the faculties of mere intellect and taste, for these are not denied. I do this for the sake of brevity, for it would be easy to prove that without sense of moral beauty in the soul, even these could have no high developement, philosophy would lose its wisdom, science its uses, painting its glow, architecture its majesty, sculpture its grace, poetry and eloquence their inspiration. It would be easy, I maintain, to show, that without conceptions of the divine, the true, the right, and the beautiful, there would be neither power nor materials in human nature from which to create a single great work of mind, nothing to evince the might of genius or the immortality of thought. I shall, however, in all my subsequent remarks, confine myself to what without dispute is strictly moral. We contend not for an infallibility in man’s reason, neither do we assert impeccability in his will; as we admit error in the one, we can admit sin in the other. But when we speak of the moral nature of man, we regard it not partially, but as a whole, not in its accidental exceptions, but in its essential constitution. Of this constitution we assert that virtue and goodness are the true and native attributes. For the position that sin is not natural but unnatural, not in accordance with humanity but contrary to it, we have the testimony of the great bishop Butler.[^[520]]—“Every work,” he says, “of nature and art is a system; and as every particular thing, both natural and artificial, is for some use or purpose, out of or beyond itself, one may add to what has already been brought into the true idea of a system, its conduciveness to this or more ends. Let us instance in a watch: Suppose the several parts taken to pieces and placed apart from each other; let a man have ever so exact a notion of these several parts, unless he considers the respect and relations which they have to each other, he will not have any thing like the idea of a watch. Suppose these several parts brought together, and any how united, neither will he yet, be the union ever so close, have an idea which will bear any resemblance to that of a watch. But let him view these several parts put together, or consider them as to be put together in the manner of a watch—let him form a notion of the relation which these several parts have to each other, all conducive in their several ways to this purpose, showing the hour of the day,—and then he has the idea of a watch. Thus it is with the inward nature of man. Appetites, passions, affections, and the principle of reflection, conscience, considered severally as the inward parts of our inward nature, do not at all give us an idea of the system of this nature. And this our nature is adapted to virtue, as from the idea of a watch it appears, that its nature, that is, constitution or system, is adapted to measure time. What in fact commonly happens is nothing to the question. Every work of art is apt to be out of order: but this is so far from being according to its system, that let the disorder increase, and it will destroy it.” The author then goes on to say, that—“Nothing can possibly be more contrary to our nature than vice, meaning by nature not only the several parts of our internal frame, but also the constitution of it. Poverty and disgrace, tortures and death, are not so contrary to it. Misery and injustice are indeed equally contrary to some different parts of our nature taken singly, but injustice is moreover contrary to the whole constitution of the nature.” And here I will repeat a fine remark from the same noble thinker, used already, in a note by one of my fellow-labourers in this discussion.—“We should learn,” says the philosophical prelate, “to be cautious lest we charge God foolishly, by ascribing that to him, or the nature he has given us, which is wholly owing to its abuse. Men may speak of the degeneracy and corruption of the world, according to the experience they have had of it, but human nature considered as the divine workmanship should, methinks, be treated as sacred: for in the image of God made he man.”[^[521]]

In human nature, under all its forms, we recognize two eternal moral elements; which, though frequently perverted, can never be destroyed. I mean sympathy and conscience, the feeling of a common nature, and the sense of right and wrong. If we consider the truth, the power, and extent of sympathy, though nothing else remained in man, this alone would prove his assimilation to God; would prove, to use the language of the Apostle, that he was still a partaker of the divine nature. In what numberless forms is it manifested!—rising from instinct to godliness. We see it in family affections. Wherever we meet a home, however rude the beings that it shelters, whether it be scooped in the snow, or be a tent on the desert, wherever the loves of parents and children, of brothers and sisters, are interchanged within the sphere of its operation, we have the spirit of a common heart. We see it also in love of country. From those who surround him in his dwelling, man enlarges the compass of his affections, until they embrace those who, with himself, tread the same soil, and speak the same tongue. The general glory, honour, and prosperity of his country, become dear to him; and from habits of loving association, there, more than any where else, the heavens have a brighter smile, and nature wears a kinder face. Every nation has had its patriots; and, whether successful or not, whether victorious in the field or bleeding on the scaffold, they evince the power with which the sentiment of common good can overcome the force of selfish interests. We see the strength of sympathy in the love of man generally, and especially in that species of it which assumes the form of compassion. Whence else the mass of goodness which proves that humanity, with all its evils and its errors, is a most merciful nature. Misery, in any form, is an appeal that is rarely disregarded. The stranger, whose face we never saw before, if it be seamed and marred by suffering, in his misfortune becomes a brother; and what is yet harder, our foe, in his sorrow, seems once more a friend. Men find it hard to pardon a prosperous enemy; but there are few so callous whom a fallen one would not disarm of hatred. Hunger, thirst, cold, nakedness, desertion, orphanage, imprisonment, sickness—every want that afflict the wretched—have their provision in human mercy, not only from individual hands, but from collective hearts. When man is maligned as utterly corrupt—as at enmity with God and his kind, we may point to thousands occupied in works of beneficence, and to refugees for misery in every land, and claim as witnesses against the accusers. And we stop not with the woes that fall directly under the senses;—sufferers who wasted their sighs and their tears in darkness, have been thought of with grief by those whom they knew not, and visited with glad tidings when they least expected. The piercing supplication of wretchedness has been sometimes wafted across continents and oceans without failing, or being weakened by the distance; and the cry of anguish, uttered at one extreme of earth, has fallen with power on human hearts at the other. We speak not of bodily wants alone, but equally of the soul’s wants. The ignorant have those who feel and work for them, and there are some who do not scorn the most guilty; there are many pure souls who never themselves knew contamination, who can turn with mercy to the despised, and bleed with sorrow that the work of God should lie so deep in ruin. And, whether with right or wrong principles, whether by right or wrong agencies, whether in right or wrong methods, this sentiment can have no illustration so sublime as the various exertions here, and throughout the globe, for the religious regeneration of mankind. Is there, then, nothing godlike in the spirit which gives unity and love to home; nothing godlike in the spirit which, with unselfish devotion, causes a man to sacrifice his own interests in his nation’s good; nothing godlike in the spirit which makes the sufferer a brother, whether stranger or enemy; which can pierce the haunts of loathsome want; which can feel for the body and the soul, and draw near, in generous pity, both to distress and crime; which dreams, with tortured imagination, of the unseen tribulation of the dungeon, and rests not until the fresh breeze is on the prisoner’s brow, and the bright and cheerful sunshine on his eye; which stretches forth its ample charity to the utmost regions of earth; and, wherever there is a complaint of physical or spiritual need, admits it is a brother’s cry, and hears it not in vain?

The very passions, which might seemingly be urged against this reasoning, are but so many confirmations of it. Men have sometimes tried to be independent of others; they failed. Men have tried to live apart from others, and to dispense with the general affections of life; they failed. Men have tried to set opinion at defiance, and to disregard esteem; they also failed. And, in the few rare and extreme cases in which men have been more than usually sordid, selfish, and anti-social, the isolation to which they have been abandoned evinced their conduct to be averse to nature; and, whilst it proved their folly, inflicted their chastisement. Emulation, envy, jealousy, vanity, ambition, and various other passions, afford evidence to the same purpose: for, what is emulation, but the struggle for the greatest share of appreciation; and envy, but the malignity of disappointment; and jealousy, but the suspicion of not possessing it,—perchance, of not deserving it; and vanity, but the puny desire to attain, or the timid hope that it already has it; and ambition, but the strong effort of a strong nature to have a lasting life in the admiration and memory of men: all, in their several ways, converging in evidence of one truth, namely, that community of feeling is amongst the greatest distinctions of our nature. In truth, it is only by this that man understands man. It is this that opens to man the heart of man; that, from the first human being to the last, forms a chain of common emotion, which indissolubly links mankind of all generations into one brotherhood. Without this, history would be a dead letter; laws and customs, but puzzles; arts, confused and shapeless; past languages and literature, but empty babble; and by-gone religions and philosophy, but unintelligible names. This common sympathy is that by which we know the meaning of history; by which we know the force of laws and customs; by which we know the beauty and immortality of art; by which we are enabled to interpret language, literature, philosophy, and religion; by which we are made one with our race, and identified in kindred with all that have ever ennobled or adorned it.

A second characteristic I have mentioned, in man, is the sense of duty, the sense of right and wrong. In this more than in any other quality he bears the impress of his divine original. The sense of duty is an essential part of human nature. A man might as well endeavour to lay aside the consciousness of his rational existence as to get rid of the idea of an immoveable distinction between good and evil, between virtue and vice. I know that, in the operations of the moral sense, there have been apparent contradictions; but if we were to deny it on this ground, we should deny the existence even of reason itself, for many of its conclusions are apparently contradictory. We assert the reality of the rational faculty, but not its infallibility; in like manner, we assert the reality of the moral faculty, but not its infallibility. I know that it seems various in its operation, not only from national and religious differences, but also from individual sophistries. Men pronounce just judgment on the sins of others; but when they come to pass sentence on their own, they invent a thousand excuses for justification or leniency: but these excuses do not satisfy themselves. And when they are alone with their own hearts, in silent and sober thought, the deception will not bear to be scrutinized, and truth is justified by conscience. The sense of duty is universal. Wherever we meet man, we meet one who, in some way or other, is the creature of moral feeling; and although the moral sentiment may be superstitiously or fanatically directed, there are essential ideas in which it never changes. Wild actions and awful evils may, I know, be perpetrated under a mistaken sense of duty, and done with the fiercer zeal because they are considered to be duty. Under its influence, men can not only sacrifice others but themselves: in one age or country, a man can lacerate himself before an image or an idol, or look calmly on the rack on which a tortured fellow creature shivers, or he can come from his retreat of self-infliction to the place where he persecutes; and, if the case compelled, he could go himself from that to the stake of martyrdom. The sentiment is true to itself, and the misdirection of it lies in other sources: yet with all its diversities, justice, mercy, and truth, have ever the instinctive approval of conscience, whilst wrong, cruelty, and falsehood, under whatever forms disguised, are abhorrent to it. The sense of duty presents man to us in the most glorious aspects of his nature; and that sentiment is not always misdirected. By its power in the soul, we observe appetites governed, passions subjected, and temptation overcome; by its inspiration, when necessity calls, we observe men devoting themselves in the spirit of martyrdom to truth and right, casting pleasure aside, forsaking whatever was dear to them, and despising life itself. Whatever change for good has occurred in the history of man, is a witness for the force of duty, for it has been worked out in much travail and self-denial; whatever we have most precious in our spiritual or social blessings, whether our liberties or our religion, we owe to the spirit of duty; it is enshrined in the memory of all our benefactors; it is consecrated in the blood of martyrs. Signal instances of this kind may strike more forcibly from their distinctness and saliency; but the mightiest energy of duty is in the economy of general life. Go into the open mart of the world, and, in all the astonishing complexities that are spread over that wide scene, consider to what an extent man trusts man, and is trusted in return, mutual confidence forming the immutable foundation of the vast social structure. It is base injustice to human nature to assert that all this is the effect of interest or fear; without pervading conscience, mere interest or fear would be as powerless to sustain society as the arm of man to move the orbs of heaven; without conscience, human laws could either have no existence or no power,—mere ropes of sand, that a touch could sever; passion would have no scruple, desire no limit, but power; and selfishness no control, but a superior opposing force: the strong would prostrate the weak by violence, and the weak would in turn overreach the strong by guile, deceit, and fraud.

I am willing to admit, as I have before admitted, that social man is encompassed with many injurious influences, and I know that he does not always escape guiltless: I know that many vices are generated in society, and nourished by its corruptions; that pride, both worldly and religious, walks through life with anti-social heart and clouded brow, wrapped up in its own miserable importance, exulting in vanities, self-worshipping and self-enslaved; that covetousness, surfeited with acquisition, still works on, and still cries “more;” that licentiousness goes its way in darkness, and leaves destruction in its path; that envy broods over its own solitary and unacknowledged malice, sickens at the pleasure or the fame it cannot reach; that gospel charity is often slain in the collision of creeds and passions, and Christian zeal heated into bigotry; but these, I repeat again, are not our nature, and judgment against it on such grounds is quite as unjust, as if we should seek out the hospitals to test the health of a community, visit but prisons to decide on its morals, and pass only through asylums for lunatics to form an opinion of its intelligence. But even in its sins, humanity loses not the evidence of its divine relationship. The image of God may be darkened, but the impress is deep as ever. The capacity of sin equally implies the capacity of holiness; transgression implies the knowledge of a law, inspired or revealed; the violation, therefore, of moral injunctions includes the high capability of moral perception. Whence but from the greatness of our nature is the deep misery of sin—whence, I might say, but from its holiness?—whence but from its adaptation to goodness, are the ruin and the dislocation which guilt can work in our whole inward frame and constitution? Thence it is, that it is that the conscience, dethroned and humiliated, is torn by remorse, worse incomparably than bodily torture: thence it is, that the affections either become a total and disorganized wreck, or, wounded by a sense of shame and lost dignity, bow down with sorrow or wither in despair. Thence it is, that the good and pure are shunned, and the evil sought, for the one cause a feeling of contrast too painful to be borne, the other afford a refuge by their moral assimilation, and the spirit needs support wherever it can be found. Thence it is, that when the guilty have utterly lost their own respect, and the approbation of the virtuous, that crime becomes desperation and remorse madness,—that conscience is silenced in delirious self-defence, and that plunge after plunge sinks them lower and lower in the gulf of spiritual perdition. And yet human character is rarely ever such a wreck as not to have some remnant to justify its origin and parentage; some embers of the sacred fire smouldering in the sanctuary,—some gleams of affection,—some dawnings of memory, that open to the weary spirit the quiet and happiness of better days,—some touches of mercy that has yet a sigh for wretchedness,—some visitings of compunction,—some unconscious desires to be good once more,—some timid hopes of pardon,—some secret prayers to be made better. The human soul is a great mystery, and so indeed is human life; we observe a few palpable and external manifestations, but how little know we of the secret and unseen workings! That the good in every human being, even such as strikes us as the worst, preponderates over the evil, is, I am persuaded, not the imagination of a fanciful charity, but a fact and a reality.

But though more crime existed in actual life than has ever been alleged, our doctrine would yet be true. We enter on no defence of man in the whole of his conduct. We contend for his inherent capacities, and in arguing for these, we are entitled to select our illustrations from the highest specimens of nature, and not from the lowest. We contend for its capacity to subjugate passion to principle—to sacrifice present desires to progressive good—to resign selfish interests to human ones—to give the spiritual and eternal a predominance over the sensual and the temporal: and we contend for this, not as a thing possible, but a thing proved: we contend for what has its evidence in abundance of examples. If we could point to one patriot, to one philanthropist, to one martyr, to one holy man, in each of these the fact would have sufficient attestation: but humanity has its armies of patriots, and philanthropists, and martyrs, and saints. With these the lowest of us are united in a kindred nature, and dignified by a common brotherhood. But passing from characters of this magnitude, come we to the ordinary existence that is common to us all. Every life, from the palace to the cottage, is one more or less of self-denial and labour—one in which we must continually defer to others and work for them. Cast your imagination over the vast throng of this busy world: consider the countless modes in which they are all toiling with head and hand, from the man of genius to the labourer of field or factory,—from the proudest merchant to his meanest servant,—scarcely a movement in it all that has not a reference to others beyond the agent,—scarcely a movement that has not some connection with a human love or a human duty. Retire from the crowd to their dwellings, and, except in cases of last degradation, they are, on the whole, retreats of mutual kindness. If there be grief, there is compassion,—if there be illness, there is unwearied tenderness,—if there be death, there is sorrow. It will perhaps be said, that all this may very well consist with a reprobate state. If so, it only proves that no state is so reprobate, as not to be consistent with a great mass of excellence. If to confer happiness and show mercy be not goodness, we are at a loss to explain the goodness of God or of Christ. And as we descend in the scale of society, we discover human nature with peculiar trials, and also with peculiar virtues. Amongst the poor and laborious classes we may find some grossness, but we find much goodness; and to a considerate mind the wonder will be, that their grossness is not more, and their goodness less. We behold them often patient under manifold oppressions, forbearing against many wrongs; uncomplaining in the midst of afflictions, toiling on from youth to age in the same routine of laborious monotony; resigned in illness, though it takes that strength from them which is their only refuge, merciful to each other, giving aid to want out of want; all divine evidence that there is in humanity a godlike spirit, which nothing can suppress, not sin, ignorance, poverty, nor any ill of life.

I have spoken of our divine affinity chiefly in the goodness that unites us to our species, but there is a tendency towards God himself in which that affinity is still more clearly seen. It is made manifest in our capacity to know God. God is a spirit, and must be spiritually apprehended. We must therefore have some attributes in common. If there be not some qualities in our souls corresponding to the nature of God, he would be to us a nonentity, and we could neither know him nor love him. The knowledge of God is a spiritual revelation, and by that which is within us we interpret the revelation and give to it a meaning—his power in the movement of our will—his intelligence in the rectitude of our reason—his goodness in the sympathies of our affections—his holiness in the law of our conscience. It is made manifest in our capacity to imitate God. The apostle says, “Be ye followers of God as dear children;” and our Saviour himself exhorts us to “be merciful even as he is merciful,” and to be “perfect even as he is perfect.” To imitate any being with whom we had no assimilation of nature, it requires no argument to prove an utter impossibility. But this principle has a moral value far beyond its theological import—in breaking down the distance which we usually place between our hearts and God; in drawing him within the circle of our nearest affections; in uniting us to him in a more filial trust, in taking fear from our love and inspiring life in our obedience—proving to us that God is verily and indeed our Father, as Christ is our brother; that God our Father is imitable by his children; that Christ our brother by a perfect conformity to his will has revealed and proved its truth. That we have affinity with God is further made manifest by our need of him. Consciously or unconsciously every man is seeking after God, or after what God alone can give him. Whether blindly or otherwise, we all feel the want of him in our souls, for in whatever direction we turn our desires, we are yearning after the perfect and the infinite: we have the proof of it in our disgust, our dissatisfactions, and discontents. Who does not hear of the insufficiency of the world? And what does that mean? The vanity of pleasure. But why is pleasure vain? why does he who tries it in all its enchantments, weary at last even to repugnance? The vexations of wealth? But why are riches vexatious? Why do they disappoint the hope that longed so deeply for them, and leave complaints still in all the fullness of success? The fatigues of power? But, why again is power fatiguing, when no sacrifices were too painful, and no toils too harrassing in the career for its attainment? It is simply because pleasure, wealth, or power, can never fully occupy the human soul, unlimited in capacity and desire, perishable things bring it only chagrin, when in lavish expectation it looks for complete fruition. Nor is it alone that we call the world, which proves insufficient, but still higher, the pursuits of knowledge, and the creations of genius; the greatest sage feels himself at last a child, and the most inspired poet wishes for things more beautiful than he has ever conceived, and scenes brighter than he has ever imagined. Even in truest religion this sentiment may be discerned in operation, in alternations between fear and faith, between despondency and hope. A longing for the invisible and the boundless may be traced in all the higher forms of superstition—in every effort to overcome the thraldom of the body and to achieve the spiritual emancipation, from the ascetics that in the first centuries peopled the deserts of Asia to the flagellants that in the middle centuries overran the continent of Europe; from the penitent that scorches himself on an Indian plain, to the monk that lashes himself in a Spanish cloister. Now to what do all these, some true and some mistaken, refer, to what do they point? Evidently to something which the soul cannot find on earth, to God, perfect and infinite, in whom at last it will attain repose and fullness. And thus we have two great truths intimated at the same time; for the conscious want that tells us of our need of God reveals also our immortality, and the one is the glory of the other.

Now, in conclusion, let me ask to what purpose is all this blackening of human nature? It cannot promote humility; for to be humble is not to be degraded. If a sense of degradation corresponded with humility, we should be more humble as we descended to the level of the brutes. It cannot inspire a poignant sense of guilt, nor a true feeling of confession, for as it takes away natural dignity it leaves nothing from which a man can fall; and as it denies personal capacity, it must in the same degree weaken the feeling of personal accountability. He whose moral sorrow will ever lie most profoundly is one that has the consciousness of having abused high and great capacities; of having, by his own sins, become unworthy of his nature; of having done despite to the spirit of God within him, the light that lighteneth every man that cometh into the world; of having apostatised from his godlike destiny. But to tell a man, as orthodoxy does, first that he is morally imbecile, and then that he is personally guilty, is an absolute derangement and confusion of all our moral ideas. It is well that essentially the sources of our conduct in general, are beyond the reach of theology; or doctrines like these, would stop all motives to exertion, would destroy the hopes of the good, and strike dead the efforts of the penitent. As it is they are not without great and serious evils. They take from virtue that which is its most noble distinction. when rightly understood, a sense of individual and independent action:—they attach a slavish spirit to religion, which, to a great extent, stifles the free and voluntary service of the heart. Yet worse still, to maintain an extreme theory, men are driven to malign their nature, and to seek for all manner of blame against it—to deny the excellence and reality of virtues—of which an unsophisticated observer could not entertain a doubt, to invent all motives for goodness but the true ones. It is a sad necessity in which men place themselves when they are compelled to violence to their own hearts, and injustice to those of others, when their system forces them to repress their rising pleasure in the beauty of virtue, and to change their unbidden admiration into qualified condemnation. If the man called heretical, or one called unregenerate, visit the sick, clothe the naked, do in fact every work of mercy, have a heart of love and a hand of bounty—revere his God in all sincerity, and worship him in truth, the evangelical moralist must assert, that it is all worthless, and is, in fact, of the nature of sin. Though one who is called regenerate should do no more, and to all evidence, not in a better spirit, he is esteemed a most godly and pious Christian. The man who cannot believe as the creeds or a party require, may do every work which Christ will judge him by, and be refused his name; but if he has the blessing of his master in heaven, he may care little for the anathema of men upon earth. If Unitarianism delivered us from nothing else than this spiritual injustice, it is a great redemption.

If I am asked, in turn, why I maintain the doctrine of human dignity, I answer, first, because it raises my homage to God. I understand him no otherwise than as he is emblemed in the human soul, exalted and purified: without this creation is a blank to me, and the scripture a dead letter. Regarding it also as his work, I revere him through his work, the more profoundly, the more I believe it worthy of him. I cannot conceive it an honour to God, that the only being here who has capacity to know him, the only being who reflects his attributes, the only being who admires his universe and discerns him in it, should be wholly corrupt: I cannot think that such a doctrine gives him glory. I answer secondly—because it teaches me to hope for man; teaches me to hope for him in this world and the next: while I have faith in the capacity, I can never lose hope in the developement, but if man be powerless as well as depressed, I have no proper ground for expectation, and the difficulties of the present are softened by no light from the future. But as it is, believing that man has great inherent capabilities, for knowledge, for liberty, for virtue, and for happiness—I lose not my confidence, I observe him as in the struggle of discipline, and in preparation for the period of redemption; and wherever I see ignorance, or slavery, or vice, or misery, I do not despair of a time, when these heavenly faculties shall have achieved their emancipation. I answer, lastly, I maintain the doctrine because it teaches me to honour man. I feel how necessary it is for us in this world of outward show, and where outward show has so much power, that we should have some strong sentiment by which to give our appreciation to those who have no external dazzle with which to attach us: in this world of grades and inequalities, where rank and wealth, and genius, so continually throw their enchantments about us, we need a sentiment before which rank and wealth and genius are nothing, in regarding those who have them not, and also those who have: and no sentiment can be more powerful, more holy, or more sublime than this, that they are the immortal children of God, destined for his presence, and made after his likeness. Having this faith, then, ignorance, sin, poverty, may come safely before us, without any fear of that infidel contempt with which they are too often treated. Show me then a man, and no matter what his condition, if I be true to this faith, you point me to an object of most solemn interest. Show me the red man of the American forests, or the black man of tropical deserts, and untame and ferocious though he be, he has within him an indelible title to my reverence. His rude and unclothed form enshrines a soul in the image of God, as well as the most polished of his civilized brethren. Show me the veriest serf or slave who seems chained to the soil—the gospel which is equal to bond and free, tells me to behold in him the heir of a glorious inheritance; his title is his nature; it burns in his blood, and it is stamped upon his brow, its appeal is in the fire or moisture of his eye—no power can efface it, for the hand of God has impressed it:—show me even the criminal who seems all but lost to every sense of duty, I am not justified in despairing, much less have I any title to scorn. We dare not despise in the lowest state the child whom God regards—we dare not cast off whom Christ has not rejected, nor disown the brother for whom he died. If we be right-minded, and have any sympathy with the spirit of Jesus, his moral wretchedness should be his most eloquent appeal. We never know the whole power of Christianity until we have interest in man as the child of God, and revere him as God’s image, until we behold the throng around us in relation to their mighty and improvable capacities—until we see in the lowest and the worst, objects of hope and moral influence, with undying souls which no vice or passion should conceal. In this faith the messenger of God may go with confidence to guilt and suffering, and bring with him no mocking offers of blessedness and peace: then may he call on souls to rejoice which were ready to perish in despair, pour the dews of heaven on many a closing hour, and silence the doubts of many a fearing spirit. Thus, believing we should have trust unshaken, look forward to the consummation, when that humanity which here has only its trials, shall be hallowed with the infinity and eternity of its maker.