St. Paul and Protestantism, with an Essay on Puritanism and the Church of England

by Matthew Arnold

II.

We have seen how Puritanism seems to come by its religion in the first instance theologically and from authority; Paul by his, on the other hand, psychologically and from experience. Even the points, therefore, in which they both meet, they have not reached in the same order or by the same road. The miserable sense of sin from unrighteousness, the joyful witness of a good conscience from righteousness, these are points in which Puritanism and St. Paul meet. They are facts of human nature and can be verified by science. But whereas Puritanism, so far as science is concerned, ends with these facts, and rests the whole weight of its antecedent theurgy upon the witness to it they offer, Paul begins with these facts, and has not yet, so far as we have followed him, called upon them to prove anything but themselves. The scientific difference, as we have already remarked, which this establishes between Paul and Puritanism is immense, and is all in Paul's favour. Sin and righteousness, together with their eternal accompaniments of fear and hope, misery and happiness, can prove themselves; but they can by no means prove, also, Puritanism's history of original sin, election and justification.

Puritanism is fond of maintaining, indeed, that Paul's doctrines derive their sanction, not from any agreement with science and experience, but from his miraculous conversion, and that this conversion it was which in his own judgment gave to them their authority. But whatever sanction the miracle of his conversion may in his own eyes have lent to the doctrines afterwards propounded by Paul, it is clear that, for science, his conversion adds to his doctrines no force at all which they do not already possess in themselves. Paul's conversion is for science an event of precisely the same nature as the conversions of which the history of Methodism relates so many; events described, for the most part, just as the event of Paul's conversion is described, with perfect good faith, and which we may perfectly admit to have happened just in the manner related, without on that account attributing to those who underwent them any source of certitude for a scheme of doctrine which this doctrine does not on other and better grounds possess.

Surely this proposition has only to be clearly stated in order to be self-evident. The conversion of Paul is in itself an incident of precisely the same order as the conversion of Sampson Staniforth, a Methodist soldier in the campaign of Fontenoy. Staniforth himself relates his conversion as follows, in words which bear plainly marked on them the very stamp of good faith:—

'From twelve at night till two it was my turn to stand sentinel at a dangerous post. I had a fellow-sentinel, but I desired him to go away, which he willingly did. As soon as I was alone, I knelt down and determined not to rise, but to continue crying and wrestling with God till he had mercy on me. How long I was in that agony I cannot tell; but as I looked up to heaven I saw the clouds open exceeding bright, and I saw Jesus hanging on the cross. At the same moment these words were applied to my heart: "Thy sins are forgiven thee." All guilt was gone, and my soul was filled with unutterable peace: the fear of death and hell was vanished away. I was filled with wonder and astonishment. I closed my eyes, but the impression was still the same; and for about ten weeks, while I was awake, let me be where I would, the same appearance was still before my eyes, and the same impression upon my heart, Thy sins are forgiven thee.'

Not the narrative, in the Acts, of Paul's journey to Damascus, could more convince us, as we have said, of its own honesty. But this honesty makes nothing, as every one will admit, for the scientific truth of any scheme of doctrine propounded by Sampson Staniforth, which must prove itself and its own scientific value before science can admit it. Precisely the same is it with Paul's doctrine; and we repeat, therefore, that he and his doctrine have herein a great advantage over Puritanism, in that, so far as we have yet followed them, they, unlike Puritanism, rely on facts of experience and assert nothing which science cannot verify.

We have now to see whether Paul, in passing from the undoubted facts of experience, with which he begins, to his religion properly so called, abandons in any essential points of his teaching the advantage with which he started, and ends, as Puritanism commences, with a batch of arbitrary and unscientific assumptions.

We left Paul in collision with a fact of human nature, but in itself a sterile fact, a fact on which it is possible to dwell too long, although Puritanism, thinking this impossible, has remained intensely absorbed in the contemplation of it, and indeed has never properly got beyond it,—the sense of sin. Sin is not a monster to be mused on, but an impotence to be got rid of. All thinking about it, beyond what is indispensable for the firm effort to get rid of it, is waste of energy and waste of time. We then enter that element of morbid and subjective brooding, in which so many have perished. This sense of sin, however, it is also possible to have not strongly enough to beget the firm effort to get rid of it, and the Greeks, with all their great gifts, had this sense not strongly enough; its strength in the Hebrew people is one of this people's mainsprings. And no Hebrew prophet or psalmist felt what sin was more powerfully than Paul. 'Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of mine head; therefore my heart faileth me.'[36] They are more than the hairs of mine head. The motions of what Paul calls 'the law in our members' are indeed a hydrabrood; when we are working against one fault, a dozen others crop up without our expecting it; and this it is which drives the man who deals seriously with himself to difficulty, nay to despair. Paul did not need James to tell him that whoever offends on one point is, so far at least as his own conscience and inward satisfaction are concerned, guilty of all;[37] he knew it himself, and the unrest this knowledge gave him was his very starting-point. He knew, too, that nothing outward, no satisfaction of all the requirements men may make of us, no privileges of any sort, can give peace of conscience;—of conscience, 'whose praise is not of men but of God.'[38] He knew, also, that the law of the moral order stretches beyond us and our private conscience, is independent of our sense of having kept it, and stands absolute and what in itself it is; even, therefore, though I may know nothing against myself, yet this is not enough, I may still not be just.[39] Finally, Paul knew that merely to know all this and say it, is of no use, advances us nothing; 'the kingdom of God is not in word but in power.'[40]

We have several times said that the Hebrew race apprehended God,—the universal order by which all things fulfil the law of their being,—chiefly as the moral order in human nature, and that it was their greatness that they apprehended him as this so distinctly and powerfully. But it is also characteristic of them, and perhaps it is what mainly distinguishes their spirit from the spirit of mediæval Christianity, that they constantly thought, too, of God as the source of life and breath and all things, and of what they called 'fulness of life' in all things. This way of thinking was common to them with the Greeks; although, whereas the Greeks threw more delicacy and imagination into it, the Hebrews threw more energy and vital warmth. But to the Hebrew, as to the Greek, the gift of life, and health, and the world, was divine, as well as the gift of morals. 'God's righteousness,' indeed, 'standeth like the strong mountains, his judgments are like the great deep; he is a righteous judge, strong and patient, who is provoked every day.'[41] This is the Hebrew's first and deepest conception of God,—as the source of the moral order. But God is also, to the Hebrew, 'our rock, which is higher than we,' the power by which we have been 'upholden ever since we were born,' that has 'fashioned us and laid his hand upon us' and envelops us on every side, that has 'made us fearfully and wonderfully,' and whose 'mercy is over all his works.'[42] He is the power that 'saves both man and beast, gives them drink of his pleasures as out of the river,' and with whom is 'the well of life.'[43] In his speech at Athens, Paul shows how full he, too, was of this feeling; and in the famous passage in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, where he asserts the existence of the natural moral law, the source he assigns to this law is not merely God in conscience, the righteous judge, but God in the world and the workings of the world, the eternal and divine power from which all life and wholesome energy proceed.[44]

This element in which we live and move and have our being, which stretches around and beyond the strictly moral element in us, around and beyond the finite sphere of what is originated, measured, and controlled by our own understanding and will,—this infinite element is very present to Paul's thoughts, and makes a profound impression on them. By this element we are receptive and influenced, not originative and influencing; now, we all of us receive far more than we originate. Our pleasure from a spring day we do not make; our pleasure, even, from an approving conscience we do not make. And yet we feel that both the one pleasure and the other can, and often do, work with us in a wonderful way for our good. So we get the thought of an impulsion outside ourselves which is at once awful and beneficent. 'No man,' as the Hebrew psalm says, 'hath quickened his own soul.'[45] 'I know,' says Jeremiah, 'that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.'[46] Most true and natural is this feeling; and the greater men are, the more natural is this feeling to them. Great men like Sylla and Napoleon have loved to attribute their success to their fortune, their star; religious great men have loved to say that their sufficiency was of God.[47] But through every great spirit runs a train of feeling of this sort; and the power and depth which there undoubtedly is in Calvinism, comes from Calvinism's being overwhelmed by it. Paul is not, like Calvinism, overwhelmed by it; but it is always before his mind and strongly agitates his thoughts. The voluntary, rational, and human world, of righteousness, moral choice, effort, filled the first place in his spirit. But the necessary, mystical, and divine world, of influence, sympathy, emotion, filled the second; and he could pass naturally from the one world to the other. The presence in Paul of this twofold feeling acted irresistibly upon his doctrine. What he calls 'the power that worketh in us,'[48] and that produces results transcending all our expectations and calculations, he instinctively sought to combine with our personal agencies of reason and conscience.

Of such a mysterious power and its operation some clear notion may be got by anybody who has ever had any overpowering attachment, or has been, according to the common expression, in love. Every one knows how being in love changes for the time a man's spiritual atmosphere, and makes animation and buoyancy where before there was flatness and dulness. One may even say that this is the reason why being in love is so popular with the whole human race,—because it relieves in so irresistible and delightful a manner the tedium or depression of common-place human life. And not only does it change the atmosphere of our spirits, making air, light, and movement where before was stagnation and gloom, but it also sensibly and powerfully increases our faculties of action. It is matter of the commonest remark how a timid man who is in love will show courage, or an indolent man will show diligence. Nay, a timid man who would be only the more paralysed in a moment of danger by being told that it is his bounden duty as a man to show firmness, and that he must be ruined and disgraced for ever if he does not, will show firmness quite easily from being in love. An indolent man who shrinks back from vigorous effort only the more because he is told and knows that it is a man's business to show energy, and that it is shameful in him if he does not, will show energy quite easily from being in love. This, I say, we learn from the analogy of the most everyday experience;—that a powerful attachment will give a man spirits and confidence which he could by no means call up or command of himself; and that in this mood he can do wonders which would not be possible to him without it.

We have seen how Paul felt himself to be for the sake of righteousness apprehended, to use his own expression, by Christ. 'I seek,' he says, 'to apprehend that for which also I am apprehended by Christ.'[49] This for which he is thus apprehended is,—still to use his own words,—the righteousness of God; not an incomplete and maimed righteousness, not a partial and unsatisfying establishment of the law of the spirit, dominant to-day, deposed to-morrow, effective at one or two points, failing in a hundred; no, but an entire conformity at all points with the divine moral order, the will of God, and, in consequence, a sense of harmony with this order, of acceptance with God.

In some points Paul had always served this order with a clear conscience. He did not steal, he did not commit adultery. But he was at the same time, he says himself, 'a blasphemer and a persecutor and an insulter,'[50] and the contemplation of Jesus Christ made him see this, impressed it forcibly upon his mind. Here was his greatness, and the worth of his way of appropriating Christ. We have seen how Calvinism, too,—Calvinism which has built itself upon St. Paul,—is a blasphemer, when it speaks of good works done by those who do not hold the Calvinist doctrine. There would need no great sensitiveness of conscience, one would think, to show that Calvinism has often been, also, a persecutor, and an insulter. Calvinism, as well as Paul, professes to study Jesus Christ. But the difference between Paul's study of Christ and Calvinism's is this: that Paul by studying Christ got to know himself clearly, and to transform his narrow conception of righteousness; while Calvinism studies both Christ and Paul after him to no such good purpose.

These, however, are but the veriest rudiments of the history of Paul's gain from Jesus Christ, as the particular impression mentioned is but the veriest fragment of the total impression produced by the contemplation of Christ upon him. The sum and substance of that total impression may best be conveyed by two words,—without sin.

We must here revert to what we have already said of the importance, for sound criticism of a man's ideas, of the order in which his ideas come. For us, who approach Christianity through a scholastic theology, it is Christ's divinity which establishes his being without sin. For Paul, who approached Christianity through his personal experience, it was Jesus Christ's being without sin which establishes his divinity. The large and complete conception of righteousness to which he himself had slowly and late, and only by Jesus Christ's help, awakened, in Jesus he seemed to see existing absolutely and naturally. The devotion to this conception which made it meat and drink to carry it into effect, a devotion of which he himself was strongly and deeply conscious, he saw in Jesus still stronger, by far, and deeper than in himself. But for attaining the righteousness of God, for reaching an absolute conformity with the moral order and with God's will, he saw no such impotence existing in Jesus Christ's case as in his own. For Jesus, the uncertain conflict between the law in our members and the law of the spirit did not appear to exist. Those eternal vicissitudes of victory and defeat, which drove Paul to despair, in Jesus were absent. Smoothly and inevitably he followed the real and eternal order, in preference to the momentary and apparent order. Obstacles outside him there were plenty, but obstacles within him there were none. He was led by the spirit of God; he was dead to sin, he lived to God; and in this life to God he persevered even to the cruel bodily death of the cross. As many as are led by the spirit of God, says Paul, are the sons of God.[51] If this is so with even us, who live to God so feebly and who render such an imperfect obedience, how much more is he who lives to God entirely and who renders an unalterable obedience, the unique and only Son of God?

This is undoubtedly the main line of movement which Paul's ideas respecting Jesus Christ follow. He had been trained, however, in the scholastic theology of Judaism, just as we are trained in the scholastic theology of Christianity; would that we were as little embarrassed with our training as he was with his! The Jewish theological doctrine respecting the eternal word or wisdom of God, which was with God from the beginning before the oldest of his works, and through which the world was created, this doctrine, which appears in the Book of Proverbs and again in the Book of Wisdom,[52] Paul applied to Jesus Christ, and in the Epistle to the Colossians there is a remarkable passage[53] with clear signs of his thus applying it. But then this metaphysical and theological basis to the historic being of Jesus is something added by Paul from outside to his own essential ideas concerning him, something which fitted them and was naturally taken on to them; it is secondary, it is not an original part of his system, much less the ground of it. It fills a very different place in his system from the place which it fills in the system of the author of the Fourth Gospel, who takes his starting-point from it. Paul's starting-point, it cannot be too often repeated, is the idea of righteousness; and his concern with Jesus is as the clue to righteousness, not as the clue to transcendental ontology. Speculations in this region had no overpowering attraction for Paul, notwithstanding the traces of an acquaintance with them which we find in his writings, and notwithstanding the great activity of his intellect. This activity threw itself with an unerring instinct into a sphere where, with whatever travail and through whatever impediments to clear expression, directly practical religious results might yet be won, and not into any sphere of abstract speculation.

Much more visible and important than his identification of Jesus with the divine hypostasis known as the Logos, is Paul's identification of him with the Messiah. Ever present is his recognition of him as the Messiah to whom all the law and prophets pointed, of whom the heart of the Jewish race was full, and on whom the Jewish instructors of Paul's youth had dwelt abundantly. The Jewish language and ideas respecting the end of the world and the Messiah's kingdom, his day, his presence, his appearing, his glory, Paul applied to Jesus, and constantly used. Of the force and reality which these ideas and expressions had for him there can be no question; as to his use of them, only two remarks are needed. One is, that in him these Jewish ideas,—as any one will feel who calls to mind a genuine display of them like that in the Apocalypse,—are spiritualised; and as he advances in his course they are spiritualised increasingly. The other remark is, that important as these ideas are in Paul, of them, too, the importance is only secondary, compared with that of the great central matter of his thoughts: the righteousness of God, the non-fulfilment of it by man, the fulfilment of it by Christ.

Once more we are led to a result favourable to the scientific value of Paul's teaching. That Jesus Christ was the divine Logos, the second person of the Trinity, science can neither deny nor affirm. That he was the Jewish Messiah, who will some day appear in the sky with the sound of trumpets, to put an end to the actual kingdoms of the world and to establish his own kingdom, science can neither deny nor affirm. The very terms of which these propositions are composed are such as science is unable to handle. But that the Jesus of the Bible follows the universal moral order and the will of God, without being let and hindered as we are by the motions of private passion and by self-will, this is evident to whoever can read the Bible with open eyes. It is just what any criticism of the Gospel-history, which sees that history as it really is, tells us; it is the scientific result of that history. And this is the result which pre-eminently occupies Paul. Of Christ's life and death, the all-importance for us, according to Paul, is that by means of them, 'denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly;' should be enabled to 'bear fruit to God' in 'love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.'[54] Of Christ's life and death the scope was 'to redeem us from all iniquity, and make us purely zealous for good works.'[55] Paul says by way of preface, that we are to live thus in the actual world which now is, 'with the expectation of the appearing of the glory of God and Christ.'[56] By nature and habit, and with his full belief that the end of the world was nigh at hand, Paul used these words to mean a Messianic coming and kingdom. Later Christianity has transferred them, as it has transferred so much else of Paul's, to a life beyond the grave, but it has by no means spiritualised them. Paul, as his spiritual growth advanced, spiritualised them more and more; he came to think, in using them, more and more of a gradual inward transformation of the world by a conformity like Christ's to the will of God, than of a Messianic advent. Yet even then they are always second with him, and not first; the essence of saving grace is always to make us righteous, to bring us into conformity with the divine law, to enable us to 'bear fruit to God.'

'Jesus Christ gave himself for us that he might redeem us from iniquity.' First of all, he rendered an unbroken obedience to the law of the spirit; he served the spirit of God; he came, not to do his own will, but the will of God. Now, the law of the spirit makes men one; it is only by the law in our members that we are many. Secondly, therefore, Jesus Christ had an unfailing sense of what we have called, using an expressive modern term, the solidarity of men: that it was not God's will that one of his human creatures should perish. Thirdly, Jesus Christ persevered in this uninterrupted obedience to the law of the spirit, in this unfailing sense of human solidarity, even to the death; though everything befell him which might break the one or tire out the other. Lastly, he had in himself, in all he said and did, that ineffable force of attraction which doubled the virtue of everything said or done by him.

If ever there was a case in which the wonder-working power of attachment, in a man for whom the moral sympathies and the desire of righteousness were all-powerful, might employ itself and work its wonders, it was here. Paul felt this power penetrate him; and he felt, also, how by perfectly identifying himself through it with Jesus, and in no other way, could he ever get the confidence and the force to do as Jesus did. He thus found a point in which the mighty world outside man, and the weak world inside him, seemed to combine for his salvation. The struggling stream of duty, which had not volume enough to bear him to his goal, was suddenly reinforced by the immense tidal wave of sympathy and emotion.

To this new and potent influence Paul gave the name of faith. More fully he calls it: 'Faith that worketh through love.'[57] The word faith points, no doubt, to 'coming by hearing,' and has possibly a reminiscence, for Paul, of his not having with his own waking eyes, like the original disciples, seen Jesus, and of his special mission being to Gentiles who had not seen Jesus either. But the essential meaning of the word is 'power of holding on to the unseen,' 'fidelity.' Other attachments demand fidelity in absence to an object which, at some time or other, nevertheless, has been seen; this attachment demands fidelity to an object which both is absent and has never been seen by us. It is therefore rightly called not constancy, but faith; a power, pre-eminently, of holding fast to an unseen power of goodness. Identifying ourselves with Jesus Christ through this attachment we become as he was. We live with his thoughts and feelings, and we participate, therefore, in his freedom from the ruinous law in our members, in his obedience to the saving law of the spirit, in his conformity to the eternal order, in the joy and peace of his life to God. 'The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus,' says Paul, 'freed me from the law of sin and death.'[58] This is what is done for us by faith.

It is evident that some difficulty arises out of Paul's adding to the general sense of the word faith,—a holding fast to an unseen power of goodness,—a particular sense of his own,—identification with Christ. It will at once appear that this faith of Paul's is in truth a specific form of holding fast to an unseen power of goodness; and that while it can properly be said of Abraham, for instance, that he was justified by faith, if we take faith in its plain sense of holding fast to an unseen power of goodness, yet it cannot without difficulty and recourse to a strained figure be said of him, if we take faith in Paul's specific sense of identification with Christ. Paul however, undoubtedly, having conveyed his new specific sense into the word faith, still uses the word in all cases where, without this specific sense, it was before applicable and usual; and in this way he often creates ambiguity. Why, it may be asked, does Paul, instead of employing a special term to denote his special meaning, still thus employ the general term faith? We are inclined to think it was from that desire to get for his words and thoughts not only the real but also the apparent sanction and consecration of the Hebrew Scriptures, which we have called his tendency to Judaise. It was written of the founder of Israel, Abraham, that he believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. The prophet Habakkuk had the famous text: 'The just shall live by faith.'[59] Jesus, too, had used and sanctioned the use of the word faith to signify cleaving to the unseen God's power of goodness as shown in Christ.[60] Peter and John and the other apostles habitually used the word in the same sense, with the modification introduced by Christ's departure. This was enough to make Paul retain for that vital operation, which was the heart of his whole religious system, the name of faith, though he had considerably developed and enlarged the name's usual meaning. Fraught with this new and developed sense, the term does not always quite well suit the cases to which it was in its old sense, with perfect propriety, applied; this, however, Paul did not regard. The term applied with undeniable truth, though not with perfect adequacy, to the great spiritual operation whereto he affixed it; and it was at the same time the name given to the crowning grace of the great father of the Jewish nation, Abraham; it was the prophet Habakkuk's talismanic and consecrated term, faith.

In this word faith, as used by St. Paul,[61] we reach a point round which the ceaseless stream of religious exposition and discussion has for ages circled. Even for those who misconceive Paul's line of ideas most completely, faith is so evidently the central point in his system that their thoughts cannot but centre upon it. Puritanism, as is well known, has talked of little else but faith. And the word is of such a nature, that, the true clue once lost which Paul has given us to its meaning, every man may put into it almost anything he likes, all the fancies of his superstition or of his fanaticism. To say, therefore, that to have faith in Christ means to be attached to Christ, to embrace Christ, to be identified with Christ, is not enough; the question is, to be attached to him how, to embrace him how?

A favourite expression of popular theology conveys perfectly the popular definition of faith: to rest in the finished work of the Saviour. In the scientific language of Protestant theology, to embrace Christ, to have saving faith, is 'to give our consent heartily to the covenant of grace, and so to receive the benefit of justification, whereby God pardons all our sins and accepts us as righteous for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us.' This is mere theurgy, in which, so far as we have yet gone, we have not found Paul dealing. Wesley, with his genius for godliness, struggled all his life for some deeper and more edifying account of that faith, which he felt working wonders in his own soul, than that it was a hearty consent to the covenant of grace and an acceptance of the benefit of Christ's imputed righteousness. Yet this amiable and gracious spirit, but intellectually slight and shallow compared to Paul, beat his wings in vain. Paul, nevertheless, had solved the problem for him, if only he could have had eyes to see Paul's solution.

'He that believes in Christ,' says Wesley, 'discerns spiritual things: he is enabled to taste, see, hear, and feel God.' There is nothing practical and solid here. A company of Cornish revivalists will have no difficulty in tasting, seeing, hearing, and feeling God, twenty times over, to-night, and yet may be none the better for it to-morrow morning. When Paul said, In Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but faith that worketh through love; Have faith in Christ! these words did not mean for him: 'Give your hearty belief and consent to the covenant of grace; Accept the offered benefit of justification through Christ's imputed righteousness.' They did not mean: 'Try and discern spiritual things, try and taste, see, hear, and feel God.' They did not mean: 'Rest in the finished work of Christ the Saviour.' No, they meant: Die with him!

The object of this treatise is not religious edification, but the true criticism of a great and misunderstood author. Yet it is impossible to be in presence of this Pauline conception of faith without remarking on the incomparable power of edification which it contains. It is indeed a crowning evidence of that piercing practical religious sense which we have attributed to Paul. It is at once mystical and rational; and it enlists in its service the best forces of both worlds,—the world of reason and morals, and the world of sympathy and emotion. The world of reason and duty has an excellent clue to action, but wants motive-power; the world of sympathy and influence has an irresistible force of motive-power, but wants a clue for directing its exertion. The danger of the one world is weariness in well-doing; the danger of the other is sterile raptures and immoral fanaticism. Paul takes from both worlds what can help him, and leaves what cannot. The elemental power of sympathy and emotion in us, a power which extends beyond the limits of our own will and conscious activity, which we cannot measure and control, and which in each of us differs immensely in force, volume, and mode of manifestation, he calls into full play, and sets it to work with all its strength and in all its variety. But one unalterable object is assigned by him to this power: to die with Christ to the law of the flesh, to live with Christ to the law of the mind.

This is the doctrine of the necrosis,[62]—Paul's central doctrine, and the doctrine which makes his profoundness and originality. His repeated and minute lists of practices and feelings to be followed or suppressed, now take a heightened significance. They were the matter by which his faith tried itself and knew itself. Those multitudinous motions of appetite and self-will which reason and conscience disapproved, reason and conscience could yet not govern, and had to yield to them. This, as we have seen, is what drove Paul almost to despair. Well, then, how did Paul's faith, working through love, help him here? It enabled him to reinforce duty by affection. In the central need of his nature, the desire to govern these motions of unrighteousness, it enabled him to say: Die to them! Christ did. If any man be in Christ, said Paul—that is, if any man identifies himself with Christ by attachment so that he enters into his feelings and lives with his life,—he is a new creature;[63] he can do, and does, what Christ did. First, he suffers with him. Christ throughout his life and in his death presented his body a living sacrifice to God; every self-willed impulse blindly trying to assert itself without respect of the universal order, he died to. You, says Paul to his disciple, are to do the same. Never mind how various and multitudinous the impulses are; impulses to intemperance, concupiscence, covetousness, pride, sloth, envy, malignity, anger, clamour, bitterness, harshness, unmercifulness. Die to them all, and to each as it comes! Christ did. If you cannot, your attachment, your faith, must be one that goes but a very little way. In an ordinary human attachment, out of love to a woman, out of love to a friend, out of love to a child, you can suppress quite easily, because by sympathy you enter into their feelings, this or that impulse of selfishness which happens to conflict with them, and which hitherto you have obeyed. All impulses of selfishness conflict with Christ's feelings, he showed it by dying to them all; if you are one with him by faith and sympathy, you can die to them also. Then, secondly, if you thus die with him, you become transformed by the renewing of your mind, and rise with him. The law of the spirit of life which is in Christ becomes the law of your life also, and frees you from the law of sin and death. You rise with him to that harmonious conformity with the real and eternal order, that sense of pleasing God who trieth the hearts, which is life and peace, and which grows more and more till it becomes glory. If you suffer with him, therefore, you shall also be glorified with him.

The real worth of this mystical conception depends on the fitness of the character and history of Jesus Christ for inspiring such an enthusiasm of attachment and devotion as that which Paul's notion of faith implies. If the character and history are eminently such as to inspire it, then Paul has no doubt found a mighty aid towards the attainment of that righteousness of which Jesus Christ's life afforded the admirable pattern. A great solicitude is always shown by popular Christianity to establish a radical difference between Jesus and a teacher, like Socrates. Ordinary theologians establish this difference by transcendental distinctions into which science cannot follow them. But what makes for science the radical difference between Jesus and Socrates, is that such a conception as Paul's would, if applied to Socrates, be out of place and ineffective. Socrates inspired boundless friendship and esteem; but the inspiration of reason and conscience is the one inspiration which comes from him, and which impels us to live righteously as he did. A penetrating enthusiasm of love, sympathy, pity, adoration, reinforcing the inspiration of reason and duty, does not belong to Socrates. With Jesus it is different. On this point it is needless to argue; history has proved. In the midst of errors the most prosaic, the most immoral, the most unscriptural, concerning God, Christ, and righteousness, the immense emotion of love and sympathy inspired by the person and character of Jesus has had to work almost by itself alone for righteousness; and it has worked wonders. The surpassing religious grandeur of Paul's conception of faith is that it seizes a real salutary emotional force of incalculable magnitude, and reinforces moral effort with it.

Paul's mystical conception is not complete without its relation of us to our fellow-men, as well as its relation of us to Jesus Christ. Whoever identifies himself with Christ, identifies himself with Christ's idea of the solidarity of men. The whole race is conceived as one body, having to die and rise with Christ, and forming by the joint action of its regenerate members the mystical body of Christ. Hence the truth of that which Bishop Wilson says: 'It is not so much our neighbour's interest as our own that we love him.' Jesus Christ's life, with which we by faith identify ourselves, is not complete, his aspiration after the eternal order is not satisfied, so long as only Jesus himself follows this order, or only this or that individual amongst us men follows it. The same law of emotion and sympathy, therefore, which prevails in our inward self-discipline, is to prevail in our dealings with others. The motions of sin in ourselves we succeed in mortifying, not by saying to ourselves that they are sinful, but by sympathy with Christ in his mortification of them. In like manner, our duties towards our neighbour we perform, not in deference to external commands and prohibitions, but through identifying ourselves with him by sympathy with Christ who identified himself with him. Therefore, we owe no man anything but to love one another; and he who loves his neighbour fulfils the law towards him, because he seeks to do him good and forbears to do him harm just as if he was himself.

Mr. Lecky cannot see that the command to speak the truth to one's neighbour is a command which has a natural sanction. But according to these Pauline ideas it has a clear natural sanction. For, if my neighbour is merely an extension of myself, deceiving my neighbour is the same as deceiving myself; and than self-deceit there is nothing by nature more baneful. And on this ground Paul puts the injunction. He says: 'Speak every man truth to his neighbour, for we are members one of another.'[64] This direction to identify ourselves in Jesus Christ with our neighbours is hard and startling, no doubt, like the direction to identify ourselves with Jesus and die with him. But it is also, like that direction, inspiring; and not, like a set of mere mechanical commands and prohibitions, lifeless and unaiding. It shows a profound practical religious sense, and rests upon facts of human nature which experience can follow and appreciate.

The three essential terms of Pauline theology are not, therefore, as popular theology makes them: calling, justification, sanctification. They are rather these: dying with Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into Christ.[65] The order in which these terms are placed indicates, what we have already pointed out elsewhere, the true Pauline sense of the expression, resurrection from the dead. In Paul's ideas the expression has no essential connexion with physical death. It is true, popular theology connects it with this almost exclusively, and regards any other use of it as purely figurative and secondary. For popular theology, Christ's resurrection is his bodily resurrection on earth after his physical death on the cross; the believer's resurrection is his bodily resurrection in a future world, the golden city of our hymns and of the Apocalypse. For this theology, the force of Christ's resurrection is that it is a miracle which guarantees the promised future miracle of our own resurrection. It is a common remark with Biblical critics, even with able and candid Biblical critics, that Christ's resurrection, in this sense of a physical miracle, is the central object of Paul's thoughts and the foundation of all his theology. Nay, the preoccupation with this idea has altered the very text of our documents; so that whereas Paul wrote, 'Christ died and lived,' we read, 'Christ died and rose again and revived.'[66] But whoever has carefully followed Paul's line of thought as we have endeavoured to trace it, will see that in his mature theology, as the Epistle to the Romans exhibits it, it cannot be this physical and miraculous aspect of the resurrection which holds the first place in his mind; for under this aspect the resurrection does not fit in with the ideas which he is developing.

Not for a moment do we deny that in Paul's earlier theology, and notably in the Epistles to the Thessalonians and Corinthians, the physical and miraculous aspect of the resurrection, both Christ's and the believer's, is primary and predominant. Not for a moment do we deny that to the very end of his life, after the Epistle to the Romans, after the Epistle to the Philippians, if he had been asked whether he held the doctrine of the resurrection in the physical and miraculous sense, as well as in his own spiritual and mystical sense, he would have replied with entire conviction that he did. Very likely it would have been impossible to him to imagine his theology without it. But:—

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light, Of what we say we feel—below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel—there flows With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed;

and by this alone are we truly characterised. Paul's originality lies in the effort to find a moral side and significance for all the processes, however mystical, of the religious life, with a view of strengthening, in this way, their hold upon us and their command of all our nature. Sooner or later he was sure to be drawn to treat the process of resurrection with this endeavour. He did so treat it; and what is original and essential in him is his doing so.

Paul's conception of life and death inevitably came to govern his conception of resurrection. What indeed, as we have seen, is for Paul life, and what is death? Not the ordinary physical life and death. Death, for him, is living after the flesh, obedience to sin; life is mortifying by the spirit the deeds of the flesh, obedience to righteousness. Resurrection, in its essential sense, is therefore for Paul, the rising, within the sphere of our visible earthly existence, from death in this sense to life in this sense. It is indubitable that, so far as the human believer's resurrection is concerned, this is so. Else, how could Paul say to the Colossians (to take only one out of a hundred clear texts showing the same thing): 'If ye then be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above.'[67] But when Paul repeats again and again, in the Epistle to the Romans, that the matter of our faith is 'that God raised Jesus from the dead,' the essential meaning of this resurrection, also, is just the same. Real life for Paul, begins with the mystical death which frees us from the dominion of the external shalls and shall nots of the law.[68] From the moment, therefore, that Jesus Christ was content to do God's will, he died. Paul's point is, that Jesus Christ in his earthly existence obeyed the law of the spirit and bore fruit to God; and that the believer should, in his earthly existence, do the same. That Christ 'died to sin,' that he 'pleased not himself,' and that, consequently, through all his life here, he was risen and living to God, is what occupies Paul. Christ's physical resurrection after he was crucified is neither in point of time nor in point of character the resurrection on which Paul, following his essential line of thought, wanted to fix the believer's mind. The resurrection Paul was striving after for himself and others was a resurrection now, and a resurrection to righteousness.[69]

But Jesus Christ's obeying God and not pleasing himself culminated in his death on the cross. All through his career, indeed, Jesus Christ pleased not himself and died to sin. But so smoothly and so inevitably, as we have before said, did he always appear to follow that law of the moral order, which to us it costs such effort to obey, that only in the very wrench and pressure of his violent death did any pain of dying, any conflict between the law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, in Christ become visible. But the Christian needs to find in Christ's dying to sin a fellowship of suffering and a conformity of death. Well, then, the point of Christ's trial and crucifixion is the only point in his career where the Christian can palpably touch what he seeks. In all dying there is struggle and weakness; in our dying to sin there is great struggle and weakness. But only in his crucifixion can we see, in Jesus Christ, a place for struggle and weakness.[70] That self-sacrificing obedience of Jesus Christ's whole life, which was summed up in this great, final act of his crucifixion, and which is palpable as sacrifice, obedience, dolorous effort, only there, is, therefore, constantly regarded by Paul under the figure of this final act, as is also the believer's conformity to Christ's obedience. The believer is crucified with Christ when he mortifies by the spirit the deeds of unrighteousness; Christ was crucified when he pleased not himself, and came to do not his own will but God's.

It is the same with life as with death; it turns on no physical event, but on that central concern of Paul's thoughts, righteousness. If we have the spirit of Christ, we live, as he did, by the spirit, 'serve the spirit of God,'[71] and follow the eternal order. The spirit of God, the spirit of Christ is the same,—the one eternal moral order. If we are led by the spirit of God we are the sons of God, and share with Christ the heritage of the sons of God,—eternal life, peace, felicity, glory. The spirit, therefore, is life because of righteousness. And when, through identifying ourselves with Christ, we reach Christ's righteousness, then eternal life begins for us;—a continuous and ascending life, for the eternal order never dies, and the more we transform ourselves into servants of righteousness and organs of the eternal order, the more we are and desire to be this eternal order and nothing else. Even in this life we are 'seated in heavenly places,'[72] as Christ is; so entirely, for Paul, is righteousness the true life and the true heaven. But the transformation cannot be completed here; the physical death is regarded by Paul as a stage at which it ceases to be impeded. However, at this stage we quit, as he himself says, the ground of experience and enter upon the ground of hope. But, by a sublime analogy, he fetches from the travail of the whole universe proof of the necessity and beneficence of the law of transformation. Jesus Christ entered into his glory when he had made his physical death itself a crowning witness to his obedience to righteousness; we, in like manner, within the limits of this earthly life and before we have yet persevered to the end, must not look for full adoption, for the glorious revelation in us of the sons of God.[73]

That Paul, as we have said, accepted the physical miracle of Christ's resurrection and ascension as a part of the signs and wonders which accompanied Christianity, there can be no doubt. Just in the same manner he accepted the eschatology, as it is called, of his nation,—their doctrine of the final things and of the summons by a trumpet in the sky to judgment; he accepted Satan, hierarchies of angels, and an approaching end of the world. What we deny is, that his acceptance of the former gives to his teaching its essential characters, any more than his acceptance of the latter. We should but be continuing, with strict logical development, Paul's essential line of thought, if we said that the true ascension and glorified reign of Christ was the triumph and reign of his spirit, of his real life, far more operative after his death on the cross than before it; and that in this sense, most truly, he and all who persevere to the end as he did are 'sown in weakness but raised in power.' Paul himself, however, did not distinctly continue his thought thus, and neither will we do so for him. How far Paul himself knew that he had gone in his irresistible bent to find, for each of the data of his religion, that side of moral and spiritual significance which, as a mere sign and wonder, it had not and could not have,—what data he himself was conscious of having transferred, through following this bent, from the first rank in importance to the second,—we cannot know with any certainty. That the bent existed, that Paul felt it existed, and that it establishes a wide difference between the earliest epistles and the latest, is beyond question. Already, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, he declares that, 'though he had known Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth he knew him so no more;'[74] and in the Epistle to the Romans, shortly afterwards, he rejects the notion of dwelling on the miraculous Christ, on the descent into hell and on the ascent into heaven, and fixes the believer's attention solely on the faith of Christ and on the effects produced by an acquaintance with it.[75] In the same Epistle, in like manner, the kingdom of God, of which to the Thessalonians he described the advent in such materialising and popularly Judaic language, has become 'righteousness, and peace, and joy in the holy spirit.'[76]

These ideas, we repeat, may never have excluded others, which absorbed the most part of Paul's contemporaries as they absorb popular religion at this day. To popular religion, the real kingdom of God is the New Jerusalem with its jaspers and emeralds; righteousness and peace and joy are only the kingdom of God figuratively. The real sitting in heavenly places is the sitting on thrones in a land of pure delight after we are dead; serving the spirit of God is only sitting in heavenly places figuratively. Science exactly reverses this process. For science, the spiritual notion is the real one, the material notion is figurative. The astonishing greatness of Paul is, that, coming when and where and whence he did, he yet grasped the spiritual notion, if not exclusively and fully, yet firmly and predominantly; more and more predominantly through all the last years of his life. And what makes him original and himself, is not what he shares with his contemporaries and with modern popular religion, but this which he develops of his own; and this which he develops of his own is just of a nature to make his religion a theology instead of a theurgy, and at bottom a scientific instead of a non-scientific structure. 'Die and come to life!' says Goethe,—an unsuspected witness, assuredly, to the psychological and scientific profoundness of Paul's conception of life and death:—'Die and come to life! for, so long as this is not accomplished, thou art but a troubled guest upon an earth of gloom.'[77]

The three cardinal points in Paul's theology are not therefore, we repeat, those commonly assigned by Puritanism, calling, justification, sanctification; but they are these: dying with Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into Christ. And we will venture, moreover, to affirm that the more the Epistle to the Romans is read and re-read with a clear mind, the more will the conviction strengthen, that the sense indicated by the order in which we here class the second main term of Paul's conception, is the essential sense which Paul himself attaches to this term, in every single place where in that Epistle he has used it. Not tradition and not theory, but a simple impartial study of the development of Paul's central line of thought, brings us to the conclusion, that from the very outset of the Epistle, where Paul speaks of Christ as 'declared to be the son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead,'[78] to the very end, the essential sense in which Paul uses the term resurrection is that of a rising, in this visible earthly existence, from the death of obedience to blind selfish impulse, to the life of obedience to the eternal moral order;—in Christ's case first, as the pattern for us to follow; in the believer's case afterwards, as following Christ's pattern through identifying himself with him.

We have thus reached Paul's fundamental conception without even a glimpse of the fundamental conceptions of Puritanism, which, nevertheless, professes to have learnt its doctrine from St. Paul and from his Epistle to the Romans. Once, for a moment, the term faith brought us in contact with the doctrine of Puritanism, but only to see that the essential sense given to this word by Paul Puritanism had missed entirely. Other parts, then, of the Epistle to the Romans than those by which we have been occupied must have chiefly fixed the attention of Puritanism. And so it has in truth been. Yet the parts of the Epistle to the Romans that have occupied us are undoubtedly the parts which not our own theories and inclinations,—for we have approached the matter without any,—but an impartial criticism of Paul's real line of thought, must elevate as the most important. If a somewhat pedantic form of expression may be forgiven for the sake of clearness, we may say that of the eleven first chapters of the Epistle to the Romans,—the chapters which convey Paul's theology, though not, as we have seen, with any scholastic purpose or in any formal scientific mode of exposition,—of these eleven chapters, the first, second, and third are, in a scale of importance fixed by a scientific criticism of Paul's line of thought, sub-primary; the fourth and fifth are secondary; the sixth and eighth are primary; the seventh chapter is sub-primary; the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters are secondary. Furthermore, to the contents of the separate chapters themselves this scale must be carried on, so far as to mark that of the two great primary chapters, the sixth and the eighth, the eighth is primary down only to the end of the twenty-eighth verse; from thence to the end it is, however eloquent, yet for the purpose of a scientific criticism of Paul's essential theology, only secondary.

The first chapter is to the Gentiles. Its purport is: You have not righteousness. The second is to the Jews; and its purport is: No more have you, though you think you have. The third chapter announces faith in Christ as the one source of righteousness for all men. The fourth chapter gives to the notion of righteousness through faith the sanction of the Old Testament and of the history of Abraham. The fifth insists on the causes for thankfulness and exultation in the boon of righteousness through faith in Christ; and applies illustratively, with this design, the history of Adam. The sixth chapter comes to the all-important question: 'What is that faith in Christ which I, Paul, mean?'—and answers it. The seventh illustrates and explains the answer. But the eighth, down to the end of the twenty-eighth verse, develops and completes the answer. The rest of the eighth chapter expresses the sense of safety and gratitude which the solution is fitted to inspire. The ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters uphold the second chapter's thesis,—so hard to a Jew, so easy to us,—that righteousness is not by the Jewish law; but dwell with hope and joy on a final result of things which is to be favourable to Israel.

We shall be pardoned this somewhat formal analysis in consideration of the clearness with which it enables us to survey the Puritan scheme of original sin, predestination, and justification. The historical transgression of Adam occupies, it will be observed, in Paul's ideas by no means the primary, fundamental, all-important place which it holds in the ideas of Puritanism. 'This' (the transgression of Adam) 'is our original sin, the bitter root of all our actual transgressions in thought, word, and deed.' Ah, no! Paul did not go to the Book of Genesis to get the real testimony about sin. He went to experience for it. 'I see,' he says, 'a law in my members fighting against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity.'[79] This is the essential testimony respecting the rise of sin to Paul,—this rise of it in his own heart and in the heart of all the men who hear him. At quite a later stage in his conception of the religious life, in quite a subordinate capacity, and for the mere purpose of illustration, comes in the allusion to Adam and to what is called original sin. Paul's desire for righteousness has carried him to Christ and to the conception of the righteousness which is of God by faith, and he is expressing his gratitude, delight, wonder, at the boon he has discovered. For the purpose of exalting it he reverts to the well-known story of Adam. It cannot even be said that Paul Judaises in his use here of this story; so entirely does he subordinate it to his purpose of illustration, using it just as he might have used it had he believed, which undoubtedly he did not, that it was merely a symbolical legend, having the advantage of being perfectly familiar to himself and his hearers. 'Think,' he says, 'how in Adam's fall one man's one transgression involved all men in punishment; then estimate the blessedness of our boon in Christ, where one man's one righteousness involves a world of transgressors in blessing![80] This is not a scientific doctrine of corruption inherited through Adam's fall; it is a rhetorical use of Adam's fall in a passing allusion to it.

We come to predestination. We have seen how strong was Paul's consciousness of that power, not ourselves, in which we live and move and have our being. The sense of life, peace, and joy, which comes through identification with Christ, brings with it a deep and grateful consciousness that this sense is none of our own getting and making. No, it is grace, it is the free gift of God, who gives abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, and calls things that are not as though they were. 'It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy.'[81] As moral agents, for whom alone exist all the predicaments of merit and demerit, praise and blame, effort and failure, vice and virtue, we are impotent and lost;—we are saved through that in us which is passive and involuntary; we are saved through our affections, it is as beings acted upon and influenced that we are saved! Well might Paul cry out, as this mystical but profound and beneficent conception filled his soul: 'All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.'[82] Well might he say, in the gratitude which cannot find words enough to express its sense of boundless favour, that those who reached peace with God through identification with Christ were vessels of mercy, marked from endless ages; that they had been foreknown, predestinated, called, justified, glorified.

It may be regretted, for the sake of the clear understanding of his essential doctrine, that Paul did not stop here. It might seem as if the word 'prothesis,' purpose, lured him on into speculative mazes, and involved him, at last, in an embarrassment, from which he impatiently tore himself by the harsh and unedifying image of the clay and the potter. But this is not so. These allurements of speculation, which have been fatal to so many of his interpreters, never mastered Paul. He was led into difficulty by the tendency which we have already noticed as making his real imperfection both as a thinker and as a writer,—the tendency to Judaise.

Already, in the fourth chapter, this tendency had led him to seem to rest his doctrine of justification by faith upon the case of Abraham, whereas, in truth, it needs all the good will in the world, and some effort of ingenuity, even to bring the case of Abraham within the operation of this doctrine. That righteousness is life, that all men by themselves fail of righteousness, that only through identification with Jesus Christ can they reach it,—these propositions, for us at any rate, prove themselves much better than they are proved by the thesis that Abraham in old age believed God's promise that his seed should yet be as the stars for multitude, and that this was counted to him for righteousness. The sanction thus apparently given to the idea that faith is a mere belief, or opinion of the mind, has put thousands of Paul's readers on a false track.

But Paul's Judaising did not end here. To establish his doctrine of righteousness by faith, he had to eradicate the notion that his people were specially privileged, and that, having the Mosaic law, they did not need anything farther. For us, this one verse of the tenth chapter: There is no difference between Jew and Greek, for it is the same Lord of all, who is rich to all that call upon him,—and these four words of another verse: For righteousness, heart-faith necessary!—effect far more for Paul's object than his three chapters bristling with Old Testament quotations. By quotation, however, he was to proceed, in order to invest his doctrine with the talismanic virtues of a verbal sanction from the law and the prophets. He shows, therefore, that the law and the prophets had said that only a remnant, an elect remnant, of Israel should be saved, and that the rest should be blinded. But to say that peace with God through Jesus Christ inspires such an abounding sense of gratitude, and of its not being our work, that we can only speak of ourselves as called and chosen to it, is one thing; in so speaking, we are on the ground of personal experience. To say, on the other hand, that God has blinded and reprobated other men, so that they shall not reach this blessing, is to quit the ground of personal experience, and to begin employing the magnified and non-natural man in the next street. We then require, in order to account for his proceedings, such an analogy as that of the clay and the potter.

This is Calvinism, and St. Paul undoubtedly falls into it. But the important thing to remark is, that this Calvinism, which with the Calvinist is primary, is with Paul secondary, or even less than secondary. What with Calvinists is their fundamental idea, the centre of their theology, is for Paul an idea added to his central ideas, and extraneous to them; brought in incidentally, and due to the necessities of a bad mode of recommending and enforcing his thesis. It is as if Newton had introduced into his exposition of the law of gravitation an incidental remark, perhaps erroneous, about light or colours; and we were then to make this remark the head and front of Newton's law. The theological idea of reprobation was an idea of Jewish theology as of ours, an idea familiar to Paul and a part of his training, an idea which probably he never consciously abandoned. But its complete secondariness in him is clearly established by other considerations than those which we have drawn from the place and manner of his introduction of it. The very phrase about the clay and the potter is not Paul's own; he does but repeat a stock theological figure. Isaiah had said: 'O Lord, we are the clay, and thou our potter, and we are all the work of thy hand.'[83] Jeremiah had said, in the Lord's name, to Israel: 'Behold, as the clay in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.'[84] And the son of Sirach comes yet nearer to Paul's very words: 'As the clay is in the potter's hand to fashion it at his pleasure, so man is in the hand of him that made him, to render to them as liketh him best.'[85] Is an original man's essential, characteristic idea, that which he adopts thus bodily from some one else? But take Paul's truly essential idea. 'We are buried with Christ through baptism into death, that like as he was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also shall walk in newness of life.'[86] Did Jeremiah say that? Is any one the author of it except Paul? Then there should Calvinism have looked for Paul's secret, and not in the commonplace about the potter and the vessels of wrath. A commonplace which is so entirely a commonplace to him, that he contradicts it even while he is Judaising; for in the very batch of chapters we are discussing he says: 'Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.'[87] Still more clear is, on this point, his real mind, when he is not Judaising: 'God is the saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.'[88] And anything, finally, which might seem dangerous in the grateful sense of a calling, choosing, and leading by eternal goodness,—a notion as natural as the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination is monstrous,—Paul abundantly supplies in more than one striking passage; as, for instance, in that incomparable third chapter of the Philippians (from which, and from the sixth and eighth chapters of the Romans, Paul's whole theology, if all his other writings were lost, might be reconstructed), where he expresses his humble consciousness that the mystical resurrection which is his aim, glory, and salvation, he does not yet, and cannot, completely attain.

The grand doctrine, then, which Calvinistic Puritanism has gathered from Paul, turns out to be a secondary notion of his, which he himself, too, has contradicted or corrected. But, at any rate, 'Christ meritoriously obtained eternal redemption for us.' 'If there be anything,' the quarterly organ of Puritanism has lately told us in its hundredth number, 'that human experience has made certain, it is that man can never outgrow his necessity for the great truths and provisions of the Incarnation and the sacrificial Atonement of the Divine Son of God.' God, his justice being satisfied by Christ's bearing according to compact our guilt and dying in our stead, is appeased and set free to exercise towards us his mercy, and to justify and sanctify us in consideration of Christ's righteousness imputed to us, if we give our hearty belief and consent to the satisfaction thus made. This hearty belief being given, 'we rest,' to use the consecrated expression already quoted, 'in the finished work of a Saviour.' This doctrine of imputed righteousness is now, as predestination formerly was, the favourite thesis of popular Protestant theology. And, like the doctrine of predestination, it professes to be specially derived from St. Paul.

But whoever has followed attentively the main line of St. Paul's theology, as we have tried to show it, will see at once that in St. Paul's essential ideas this popular notion of a substitution, and appeasement, and imputation of alien merit, has no place. Paul knows nothing of a sacrificial atonement; what Paul knows of is a reconciling sacrifice. The true substitution, for Paul, is not the substitution of Jesus Christ in men's stead as victim on the cross to God's offended justice; it is the substitution by which the believer, in his own person, repeats Jesus Christ's dying to sin. Paul says, in real truth, to our Puritans with their magical and mechanical salvation, just what he said to the men of circumcision: 'If I preach resting in the finished work of a Saviour, why am I yet persecuted? why do I die daily? then is the stumbling-block of the cross annulled.'[89] That hard, that well-nigh impossible doctrine, that our whole course must be a crucifixion and a resurrection, even as Christ's whole course was a crucifixion and a resurrection, becomes superfluous. Yet this is my central doctrine.'

The notion of God as a magnified and non-natural man, appeased by a sacrifice and remitting in consideration of it his wrath against those who had offended him,—this notion of God, which science repels, was equally repelled, in spite of all that his nation, time, and training had in them to favour it, by the profound religious sense of Paul. In none of his epistles is the reconciling work of Christ really presented under this aspect. One great epistle there is, however, which does apparently present it under this aspect,—the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Paul's phraseology, and even the central idea which he conveys in that phraseology, were evidently well known to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Nay, if we merely sought to prove a thesis, rather than to ascertain the real bearing of the documents we canvass, we should have no difficulty in making it appear, by texts taken from the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the doctrine of this epistle, no less than the doctrine of the Epistle to the Romans, differs entirely from the common doctrine of Puritanism. This, however, we shall by no means do; because it is our honest opinion that the popular doctrine of 'the sacrificial Atonement of the Divine Son of God' derives, if not a real, yet at any rate a strong apparent sanction from the Epistle to the Hebrews. Even supposing, what is probably true, that the popular doctrine is really the doctrine neither of the one epistle nor of the other, yet it must be confessed that while it is the reader's fault,—a fault due to his fixed prepossessions, and to his own want of penetration,—if he gets the popular doctrine out of the Epistle to the Romans, it is on the other hand the writer's fault and no longer the reader's, if out of the Epistle to the Hebrews he gets the popular doctrine. For the author of that epistle is, if not subjugated, yet at least preponderantly occupied by the idea of the Jewish system of sacrifices, and of the analogies to Christ's sacrifice which are furnished by that system.

If other proof were wanting, this alone would make it impossible that the Epistle to the Hebrews should be Paul's; and indeed of all the epistles which bear his name, it is the only one which we may not, perhaps, in spite of the hesitation caused by grave difficulties, be finally content to leave in considerable part to him.[90] Luther's conjecture, which ascribes to Apollos the Epistle to the Hebrews, derives corroboration from the one account of Apollos which we have; that 'he was an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures.' The Epistle to the Hebrews is just such a performance as might naturally have come from an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures; in whom the intelligence, and the powers of combining, type-finding, and expounding, somewhat dominated the religious perceptions. The Epistle to the Hebrews is full of beauty and power; and what may be called the exterior conduct of its argument is as able and satisfying as Paul's exterior conduct of his argument is generally embarrassed. Its details are full of what is edifying; but its apparent central conception of Christ's death, as a perfect sacrifice which consummated the imperfect sacrifices of the Jewish law, is a mere notion of the understanding, and is not a religious idea. Turn it which way we will, the notion of appeasement of an offended God by vicarious sacrifice, which the Epistle to the Hebrews apparently sanctions, will never truly speak to the religious sense, or bear fruit for true religion. It is no blame to Apollos if he was somewhat overpowered by this notion, for the whole world was full of it, up to his time, in his time, and since his time; and it has driven theologians before it like sheep. The wonder is, not that Apollos should have adopted it, but that Paul should have been enabled, through the incomparable power and energy of religious perception informing his intellectual perception, in reality to put it aside. Figures drawn from the dominant notion of sacrificial appeasement he used, for the notion has so saturated the imagination and language of humanity that its figures pass naturally and irresistibly into all our speech. Popular Puritanism consists of the apparent doctrine from the Epistle to the Hebrews, set forth with Paul's figures. But the doctrine itself Paul had really put aside, and had substituted for it a better.

The term sacrifice, in men's natural use of it, contains three notions: the notion of winning the favour or buying off the wrath of a powerful being by giving him something precious; the notion of parting with something naturally precious; and the notion of expiation, not now in the sense of buying off wrath or satisfying a claim, but of suffering in that wherein we have sinned. The first notion is, at bottom, merely superstitious, and belongs to the ignorant and fear-ridden childhood of humanity; it is the main element, however, in the Puritan conception of justification. The second notion explains itself; it is the main element in the Pauline conception of justification. Jesus parted with what, to men in general, is the most precious of things,—individual self and selfishness; he pleased not himself, obeyed the spirit of God, died to sin and to the law in our members, consummated upon the cross this death; here is Paul's essential notion of Christ's sacrifice.

The third notion may easily be misdealt with, but it has a profound truth; in Paul's conception of justification there is much of it. In some way or other, he who would 'cease from sin' must nearly always 'suffer in the flesh.' It is found to be true, that 'without shedding of blood is no remission.' 'If you can be good with pleasure,' says Bishop Wilson with his genius of practical religious sense, 'God does not envy you your joy; but such is our corruption, that every man cannot be so.' The substantial basis of the notion of expiation, so far as we ourselves are concerned, is the bitter experience that the habit of wrong, of blindly obeying selfish impulse, so affects our temper and powers, that to withstand selfish impulse, to do right, when the sense of right awakens in us, requires an effort out of all proportion to the actual present emergency. We have not only the difficulty of the present act in itself, we have the resistance of all our past; fire and the knife, cautery and amputation, are often necessary in order to induce a vital action, which, if it were not for our corrupting past, we might have obtained from the natural healthful vigour of our moral organs. This is the real basis of our personal sense of the need of expiating, and thus it is that man expiates.

Not so the just, who is man's ideal. He has no indurated habit of wrong, no perverse temper, no enfeebled powers, no resisting past, no spiritual organs gangrened, no need of the knife and fire; smoothly and inevitably he follows the eternal order, and hereto belongs happiness. What sins, then, has the just to expiate?—ours. In truth, men's habitual unrighteousness, their hard and careless breaking of the moral law, do so tend to reduce and impair the standard of goodness, that, in order to keep this standard pure and unimpaired, the righteous must actually labour and suffer far more than would be necessary if men were better. In the first place, he has to undergo our hatred and persecution for his justice. In the second place, he has to make up for the harm caused by our continual shortcomings, to step between us foolish transgressors and the destructive natural consequences of our transgression, and, by a superhuman example, a spending himself without stint, a more than mortal scale of justice and purity, to save the ideal of human life and conduct from the deterioration with which men's ordinary practice threatens it. In this way Jesus Christ truly 'became for our sakes poor, though he was rich,' he was truly 'bruised for our iniquities,' he 'suffered in our behoof,' 'bare the sin of many,' and 'made intercession for the transgressors.'[91] In this way, truly, 'he was sacrificed as a blameless lamb to redeem us from the vain conversation which had become our second nature;'[92] in this way, 'he was made to be sin for us, who knew no sin.'[93] Such, according to that true and profound perception of the import of Christ's sufferings, which, in all St. Paul's writings, and in the inestimable First Epistle of St. Peter, is presented to us, is the expiation of Christ.

The notion, therefore, of satisfying and appeasing an angry God's wrath, does not come into Paul's real conception of Jesus Christ's sacrifice. Paul's foremost notion of this sacrifice is, that by it Jesus died to the law of selfish impulse, parted with what to men in general is most precious and near. Paul's second notion is, that whereas Jesus suffered in doing this, his suffering was not his fault, but ours; not for his good, but for ours. In the first aspect, Jesus is the martyrion,—the testimony in his life and in his death, to righteousness, to the power and goodness of God. In the second aspect he is the antilytron or ransom. But, in either aspect, Jesus Christ's solemn and dolorous condemnation of sin does actually loosen sin's hold and attraction upon us who regard it,—makes it easier for us to understand and love goodness, to rise above self, to die to sin.

Christ's sacrifice, however, and the condemnation of sin it contained, was made for us while we were yet sinners; it was made irrespectively of our power or inclination to sympathise with it and appreciate it. Yet, even thus, in Paul's view, the sacrifice reconciled us to God, to the eternal order; for it contained the means, the only possible means, of our being brought into harmony with this order. Jesus Christ, nevertheless, was delivered for our sins while we were yet sinners,[94] and before we could yet appreciate what he did. But presently there comes a change. Grace, the goodness of God, the spirit,—as Paul loved to call that awful and beneficent impulsion of things within us and without us, which we can concur with, indeed, but cannot create,—leads us to repentance towards God,[95] a change of the inner man in regard to the moral order, duty, righteousness. And now, to help our impulse towards righteousness, we have a power enabling us to turn this impulse to full account. Now the spirit does its greatest work in us; now, for the first time, the influence of Jesus Christ's pregnant act really gains us. For now awakens the sympathy for the act and the appreciation of it, which its doer dispensed with or was too benign to wait for; faith working through love towards Christ[96] enters into us, masters us. We identify ourselves,—this is the line of Paul's thought,—with Christ; we repeat, through the power of this identification, Christ's death to the law of the flesh and self-pleasing, his condemnation of sin in the flesh; the death how imperfectly, the condemnation how remorsefully! But we rise with him, Paul continues, to life, the only true life, of imitation of God, of putting on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness,[97] of following the eternal law of the moral order which by ourselves we could not follow. Then God justifies us. We have the righteousness of God and the sense of having it; we are freed from the oppressing sense of eternal order guiltily outraged and sternly retributive; we act in joyful conformity with God's will, instead of in miserable rebellion to it; we are in harmony with the universal order, and feel that we are in harmony with it. If, then, Christ was delivered for our sins, he was raised for our justification. If by Christ's death, says Paul, we were reconciled to God, by the means being thus provided for our else impossible access to God, much more, when we have availed ourselves of these means and died with him, are we saved by his life which we partake.[98] Henceforward we are not only justified but sanctified; not only in harmony with the eternal order and at peace with God, but consecrated[99] and unalterably devoted to them; and from this devotion comes an ever-growing union with God in Christ, an advance, as St. Paul says, from glory to glory.[100]

This is Paul's conception of Christ's sacrifice. His figures of ransom, redemption, propitiation, blood, offering, all subordinate themselves to his central idea of identification with Christ through dying with him, and are strictly subservient to it. The figured speech of Paul has its own beauty and propriety. His language is, much of it, eastern language, imaginative language; there is no need for turning it, as Puritanism has done, into the methodical language of the schools. But if it is to be turned into methodical language, then it is the language into which we have translated it that translates it truly.

We have before seen how it fares with one of the two great tenets which Puritanism has extracted from St. Paul, the tenet of predestination. We now see how it fares with the other, the tenet of justification. Paul's figures our Puritans have taken literally, while for his central idea they have substituted another which is not his. And his central idea they have turned into a figure, and have let it almost disappear out of their mind. His essential idea lost, his figures misused, an idea essentially not his substituted for his,—the unedifying patchwork thus made, Puritanism has stamped with Paul's name, and called the gospel. It thunders at Romanism for not preaching it, it casts off Anglicanism for not setting it forth alone and unreservedly, it founds organisations of its own to give full effect to it; these organisations guide politics, govern statesmen, destroy institutions;—and they are based upon a blunder!

It is to Protestantism, and this its Puritan gospel, that the reproaches thrown on St. Paul, for sophisticating religion of the heart into theories of the head about election and justification, rightly attach. St. Paul himself, as we have seen, begins with seeking righteousness and ends with finding it; from first to last, the practical religious sense never deserts him. If he could have seen and heard our preachers of predestination and justification, they are just the people he would have called 'diseased about questions and word-battlings.'[101] He would have told Puritanism that every Sunday, when in all its countless chapels it reads him and preaches from him, the veil is upon its heart. The moment it reads him right, a veil will seem to be taken away from its heart;[102] it will feel as though scales were fallen from its eyes.

And now, leaving Puritanism and its errors, let us turn again for a moment, before we end, to the glorious apostle who has occupied us so long. He died, and men's familiar fancies of bargain and appeasement, from which, by a prodigy of religious insight, Paul had been able to disengage the death of Jesus, fastened on it and made it their own. Back rolled over the human soul the mist which the fires of Paul's spiritual genius had dispersed for a few short years. The mind of the whole world was imbrued in the idea of blood, and only through the false idea of sacrifice did men reach Paul's true one. Paul's idea of dying with Christ the Imitation elevates more conspicuously than any Protestant treatise elevates it; but it elevates it environed and dominated by the idea of appeasement;—of the magnified and non-natural man in Heaven, wrath-filled and blood-exacting; of the human victim adding his piacular sufferings to those of the divine. Meanwhile another danger was preparing. Gifted men had brought to the study of St. Paul the habits of the Greek and Roman schools, and philosophised where Paul Orientalised. Augustine, a great genius, who can doubt it?—nay, a great religious genius, but unlike Paul in this, and inferior to him, that he confused the boundaries of metaphysics and religion, which Paul never did,—Augustine set the example of finding in Paul's eastern speech, just as it stood, the formal propositions of western dialectics. Last came the interpreter in whose slowly relaxing grasp we still lie,—the heavy-handed Protestant Philistine. Sincere, gross of perception, prosaic, he saw in Paul's mystical idea of man's investiture with the righteousness of God nothing but a strict legal transaction, and reserved all his imagination for Hell and the New Jerusalem and his foretaste of them. A so-called Pauline doctrine was in all men's mouths, but the ideas of the true Paul lay lost and buried.

Every one who has been at Rome has been taken to see the Church of St. Paul, rebuilt after a destruction by fire forty years ago. The church stands a mile or two out of the city, on the way to Ostia and the desert. The interior has all the costly magnificence of Italian churches; oh the ceiling is written in gilded letters: 'Doctor Gentium.' Gold glitters and marbles gleam, but man and his movement are not there. The traveller has left at a distance the fumum et opes strepitumque Romæ; around him reigns solitude. There is Paul, with the mystery which was hidden from ages and from generations, which was uncovered by him for some half score years, and which then was buried with him in his grave! Not in our day will he relive, with his incessant effort to find a moral side for miracle, with his incessant effort to make the intellect follow and secure all the workings of the religious perception. Of those who care for religion, the multitude of us want the materialism of the Apocalypse; the few want a vague religiosity. Science, which more and more teaches us to find in the unapparent the real, will gradually serve to conquer the materialism of popular religion. The friends of vague religiosity, on the other hand, will be more and more taught by experience that a theology, a scientific appreciation of the facts of religion, is wanted for religion; but a theology which is a true theology, not a false. Both these influences will work for Paul's re-emergence. The doctrine of Paul will arise out of the tomb where for centuries it has lain buried. It will edify the church of the future; it will have the consent of happier generations, the applause of less superstitious ages. All will be too little to pay half the debt which the church of God owes to this 'least of the apostles, who was not fit to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the church of God.'[103]

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PURITANISM
AND THE
CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

In the foregoing treatise we have spoken of Protestantism, and have tried to show, how, with its three notable tenets of predestination, original sin, and justification, it has been pounding away for three centuries at St. Paul's wrong words, and missing his essential doctrine. And we took Puritanism to stand for Protestantism, and addressed ourselves directly to the Puritans; for the Puritan Churches, we said, seem to exist specially for the sake of these doctrines, one or more of them. It is true, many Puritans now profess also the doctrine that it is wicked to have a church connected with the State; but this is a later invention,[104] designed to strengthen a separation previously made. It requires to be noticed in due course; but meanwhile, we say that the aim of setting forth certain Protestant doctrines purely and integrally is the main title on which Puritan Churches rest their right of existing. With historic Churches, like those of England or Rome, it is otherwise; these doctrines may be in them, may be a part of their traditions, their theological stock; but certainly no one will say that either of these Churches was made for the express purpose of upholding these three theological doctrines, jointly or severally. A little consideration will show quite clearly the difference in this respect between the historic Churches and the churches of separatists.

People are not necessarily monarchists or republicans because they are born and live under a monarchy or republic. They avail themselves of the established government for those general purposes for which governments and politics exist, but they do not, for the most part, trouble their heads much about particular theoretical principles of government. Nay, it may well happen that a man who lives and thrives under a monarchy shall yet theoretically disapprove the principle of monarchy, or a man who lives and thrives under a republic, the principle of republicanism. But a man, or body of men, who have gone out of an established polity from zeal for the principle of monarchy or republicanism, and have set up a polity of their own for the very purpose of giving satisfaction to this zeal, are in a false position whenever it shall appear that the principle, from zeal for which they have constituted their separate existence, is unsound. So predestinarianism and solifidianism, Calvinism and Lutherism, may appear in the theology of a national or historic Church, charged ever since the rise of Christianity with the task of developing the immense and complex store of ideas contained in Christianity; and when the stage of development has been reached at which the unsoundness of predestinarian and solifidian dogmas becomes manifest, they will be dropped out of the Church's theology, and she and her task will remain what they were before. But when people from zeal for these dogmas find their historic Church not predestinarian or solifidian enough for them, and make new associations of their own, which shall be predestinarian or solifidian absolutely, then, when the dogmas are undermined, the associations are undermined too, and have either to own themselves without a reason for existing, or to discover some new reason in place of the old. Now, nothing which exists likes to be driven to a strait of this kind; so every association which exists because of zeal for the dogmas of election or justification, will naturally cling to these dogmas longer and harder than other people. Therefore we have treated the Puritan bodies in this country as the great stronghold here of these doctrines; and in showing what a perversion of Paul's real ideas these doctrines commonly called Pauline are, we have addressed ourselves to the Puritans.

But those who speak in the Puritans' name say that we charge upon Puritanism, as a sectarian peculiarity, doctrine which is not only the inevitable result of an honest interpretation of the writings of St. Paul, but which is, besides, the creed held in common by Puritans and by all the churches in Christendom, with one insignificant exception. Nay, they even declare that 'no man in his senses can deny that the Church of England was meant to be a thoroughly Protestant and Evangelical, and it may be said Calvinistic Church.' To saddle Puritanism in special with the doctrines we have called Puritan is, they say, a piece of unfairness which has its motive in mere ill-will to Puritanism, a device which can injure nobody but its author.

Now, we have tried to show that the Puritans are quite wrong in imagining their doctrine to be the inevitable result of an honest interpretation of St. Paul's writings. That they are wrong we think is certain; but so far are we from being moved, in anything that we do or say in this matter, by ill-will to Puritanism and the Puritans, that it is, on the contrary, just because of our hearty respect for them, and from our strong sense of their value, that we speak as we do. Certainly we consider them to be in the main, at present, an obstacle to progress and to true civilisation. But this is because their worth is, in our opinion, such that not only must one for their own sakes wish to see it turned to more advantage, but others, from whom they are now separated, would greatly gain by conjunction with them, and our whole collective force of growth and progress be thereby immeasurably increased. In short, our one feeling when we regard them, is a feeling, not of ill-will, but of regret at waste of power; our one desire is a desire of comprehension.

But the waste of power must continue, and the comprehension is impossible, so long as Puritanism imagines itself to possess, in its two or three signal doctrines, what it calls the gospel; so long as it constitutes itself separately on the plea of setting forth purely the gospel, which it thus imagines itself to have seized; so long as it judges others as not holding the gospel, or as holding additions to it and variations from it. This fatal self-righteousness, grounded on a false conceit of knowledge, makes comprehension impossible; because it takes for granted the possession of the truth, and the power of deciding how others violate it; and this is a position of superiority, and suits conquest rather than comprehension.

The good of comprehension in a national Church is, that the larger and more various the body of members, the more elements of power and life the Church will contain, the more points will there be of contact, the more mutual support and stimulus, the more growth in perfection both of thought and practice. The waste of power from not comprehending the Puritans in the national Church is measured by the number and value of elements which Puritanism could supply towards the collective growth of the whole body. The national Church would grow more vigorously towards a higher stage of insight into religious truth, and consequently towards a greater perfection of practice, if it had these elements; and this is why we wish for the Puritans in the Church. But, meanwhile, Puritanism will not contribute to the common growth, mainly because it believes that a certain set of opinions or scheme of theological doctrine is the gospel; that it is possible and profitable to extract this, and that Puritans have done so; and that it is the duty of men, who like themselves have extracted it, to separate themselves from those who have not, and to set themselves apart that they may profess it purely.

To disabuse them of this error, which, by preventing collective life, prevents also collective growth, it is necessary to show them that their extracted scheme of theological doctrine is not really the gospel; and that at any rate, therefore, it is not worth their while to separate themselves, and to frustrate the hope of growth in common, merely for this scheme's sake. And even if it were true, as they allege, that the national and historic Churches of Christendom do equally with Puritanism hold this scheme, or main parts of it, still it would be to Puritanism, and not to the historic Churches, that in showing the invalidity and unscripturalness of this scheme we should address ourselves, because the Puritan Churches found their very existence on it, and the historic Churches do not. And not founding their existence on it, nor falling into separatism for it, the historic Churches have a collective life which is very considerable, and a power of growth, even in respect of the very scheme of doctrine in question, supposing them to hold it, far greater than any which the Puritan Churches show, but which would be yet greater and more fruitful still, if the historic Churches combined the large and admirable contingent of Puritanism with their own forces. Therefore, as we have said, it is out of no sort of malice or ill-will, but from esteem for their fine qualities and from desire for their help, that we have addressed ourselves to the Puritans. We propose to complete now our dealings with this subject by showing how, as a matter of fact, the Church of England (which is the historic Church practically in question so far as Puritanism is concerned) seems to us to have displayed with respect to those very tenets which we have criticised, and for which we are said to have unfairly made Puritanism alone responsible, a continual power of growth which has been wanting to the Puritan congregations. This we propose to show first; and we will show secondly, how, from the very theory of a historic or national Church, the probability of this greater power of growth seems to follow, that we may try and commend that theory a little more to the thoughts and favour of our Puritan friends.

The two great Puritan doctrines which we have criticised at such length are the doctrines of predestination and justification. Of the aggressive and militant Puritanism of our people, predestination has, almost up to the present day, been the favourite and distinguishing doctrine; it was the doctrine which Puritan flocks greedily sought, which Puritan ministers powerfully preached, and called others carnal gospellers for not preaching. This Geneva doctrine accompanied the Geneva discipline. Puritanism's first great wish and endeavour was to establish both the one and the other absolutely in the Church of England, and it became nonconforming because it failed. Now, it is well known that the High Church divines of the seventeenth century were Arminian, that the Church of England was the stronghold of Arminianism, and that Arminianism is, as we have said, an effort of man's practical good sense to get rid of what is shocking to it in Calvinism. But what is not so well known, and what is eminently worthy of remark, is the constant pressure applied by Puritanism upon the Church of England, to put the Calvinistic doctrine more distinctly into her formularies, and to tie her up more strictly to this doctrine; the constant resistance offered by the Church of England, and the large degree in which Nonconformity is really due to this cause.

Everybody knows how far Nonconformity is due to the Church of England's rigour in imposing an explicit declaration of adherence to her formularies. But only a few, who have searched out the matter, know how far Nonconformity is due, also, to the Church of England's invincible reluctance to narrow her large and loose formularies to the strict Calvinistic sense dear to Puritanism. Yet this is what the record of conferences shows at least as signally as it shows the domineering spirit of the High Church clergy; but our current political histories, written always with an anti-ecclesiastical bias, which is natural enough, inasmuch as the Church party was not the party of civil liberty, leaves this singularly out of sight. Yet there is a very catena of testimonies to prove it; to show us, from Elizabeth's reign to Charles the Second's, Calvinism, as a power both within and without the Church of England, trying to get decisive command of her formularies; and the Church of England, with the instinct of a body meant to live and grow, and averse to fetter and engage its future, steadily resisting.

The Lambeth Articles of 1595 exhibit Calvinism potent in the Church of England herself, and among the bishops of the Church. True; but could it establish itself there? No; the Lambeth Articles were recalled and suppressed, and Archbishop Whitgift was threatened with the penalties of a præmunire for having published them. Again, it was usual from 1552 onwards to print in the English Bibles a catechism asserting the Calvinistic doctrine of absolute election and reprobation. In the first Bibles of the authorised version this catechism appeared; but it was removed in 1615. Yet the Puritans had met James the First, at his accession in 1603, with the petition that there may be an uniformity of doctrine prescribed; meaning an uniformity in this sense of strict Calvinism. Thus from the very commencement the Church, as regards doctrine, was for opening; Puritanism was for narrowing.

Then came, in 1604, the Hampton Court Conference. Here, as usual, political historians reproach the Church with having conceded so little. These historians, as we have said, think solely of the Puritans as the religious party favourable to civil liberty, and on that account desire the preponderance of Puritanism in its disputes with the Church. But, as regards freedom of thought and truth of ideas, what was it that the Church was pressed by Puritanism to concede, and what was the character and tendency of the Church's refusal? The first Puritan petition at this Conference was 'that the doctrine of the Church might be preserved in purity according to God's Word.' That is, according to the Calvinistic interpretation put upon God's Word by Calvin and the Puritans after him; an interpretation which we have shown to be erroneous and unscriptural. This Calvinistic doctrine of predestination the Puritans wanted to plant hard and fast in the Church's formularies, and the Church resisted. The Puritan foreman complained of the loose wording of the Thirty-nine Articles because it allowed an escape from the strict doctrine of Calvinism, and moved that the Lambeth Articles, strictly Calvinistic, might be inserted into the Book of Articles. The Bishops resisted, and here are the words of their spokesman, the Bishop of London. 'The Bishop of London answered, that too many in those days, neglecting holiness of life, laid all their religion upon predestination,—"If I shall be saved, I shall be saved," which he termed a desperate doctrine, showing it to be contrary to good divinity, which teaches us to reason rather ascendendo than descendendo, thus: "I live in obedience to God, in love with my neighbour, I follow my vocation, &c., therefore I trust that God hath elected me and predestinated me to salvation;" not thus, which is the usual course of argument: "God hath predestinated and chosen me to life, therefore, though I sin never so grievously, I shall not be damned, for whom he once loveth he loveth to the end."' Who will deny that this resistance of the Church to the Puritans, who, laying all their religion upon predestination, wanted to make the Church do the same, was as favourable to growth of thought and to sound philosophy, as it was consonant to good sense?

We have already, in the foregoing treatise, quoted from the complaints against the Church by the Committee of Divines appointed by the House of Lords in 1641, when Puritanism was strongly in the ascendent. Some in the Church teach, say the Puritan complainers, 'that good works are concauses with faith in the act of justification; some have oppugned the certitude of salvation; some have maintained that the Lord's day is kept merely by ecclesiastical constitution; some have defended the whole gross substance of Arminianism, that the act of conversion depends upon the concurrence of men's free will; some have denied original sin; some have broached out of Socinus a most uncomfortable and desperate doctrine, that late repentance,—that is, upon the last bed of sickness,—is unfruitful, at least, to reconcile the penitent to God.' What we insist upon is, that the growth and movement of thought, on religious matters, are here shown to be in the Church; and that on these two cardinal doctrines of predestination and justification, with which we are accused of unfairly saddling Puritanism alone, Puritanism did really want to make the national religion hinge, while the Church did not, but resisted.

The resistance of the Church was at that time vanquished, not by importing strict Calvinism into the Prayer Book, but by casting out the Prayer Book altogether. By ordinance in 1645, the use of the Prayer Book, which for churches had already been forbidden, was forbidden also for all private places and families; all copies to be found in churches were to be delivered up, and heavy penalties were imposed on persons retaining them.

We come to the occasion where the Church is thought to have most decisively shown her unyieldingness,—the Savoy Conference in 1661, after King Charles the Second's restoration. The question was, what alterations were to be made in the Prayer Book, so as to enable the Puritans to use it as well as the Church party. Having in view doctrine and free development of thought, we say again it was the Puritans who were for narrowing, it was the Churchmen who were for keeping open. Their heads full of these tenets of predestination, original sin, and justification, which we are accused of charging upon them exclusively and unfairly, the Puritans complain that the Church Liturgy seems very defective,—why? Because 'the systems of doctrine of a church should summarily comprehend all such doctrines as are necessary to be believed,' and the liturgy does not set down these explicitly enough. For instance, 'the Confession,' they say, 'is very defective, not clearly expressing original sin. The Catechism is defective as to many necessary doctrines of our religion, some even of the essentials of Christianity not being mentioned except in the Creed, and there not so explicit as ought to be in a catechism.' And what is the answer of the bishops? It is the answer of people with an instinct that this definition and explicitness demanded by the Puritans are incompatible with the conditions of life of a historic church. 'The Church,' they say, 'hath been careful to put nothing into the Liturgy but that which is either evidently the Word of God, or what hath been generally received in the Catholic Church. The Catechism is not intended as a whole body of divinity.' The Puritans had requested that 'the Church prayers might contain nothing questioned by pious, learned, and orthodox persons.' Seizing on this expression, wherein is contained the ground of that separatism for opinions which we hold to be so fatal not only to Church life but also to the natural growth of religious thought, the bishops ask, and in the very language of good sense: 'Who are pious, learned, and orthodox persons? Are we to take for such all who shall confidently affirm themselves to be such? If by orthodox be meant those who adhere to Scripture and the Catholic consent of antiquity, we do not yet know that any part of our Liturgy has been questioned by such. It was the wisdom of our reformers to draw up such a liturgy as neither Romanist nor Protestant could justly except against. Persons want the book to be altered for their own satisfaction.'

This allegation respecting the character of the Liturgy is undoubtedly true, for the Puritans themselves expressly admitted its truth, and urged this as a reason for altering the Liturgy. It is in consonance with what is so often said, and truly said, of the Thirty-nine Articles, that they are articles of peace. This, indeed, makes the Articles scientifically worthless. Metaphysical propositions, such as they in the main are, drawn up with a studied design for their being vague and loose, can have no metaphysical value. But no one then thought of doing without metaphysical articles; so to make them articles of peace showed a true conception of the conditions of life and growth in a church. The readiness to put a lax sense on subscription is a proof of the same disposition of mind. Chillingworth's judgment about the meaning of subscription is well known. 'For the Church of England, I am persuaded that the constant doctrine of it is so pure and orthodox, that whosoever believes it and lives according to it, undoubtedly he shall be saved; and that there is no error in it which may necessitate or warrant any man to disturb the peace or renounce the communion of it. This, in my opinion, is all that is intended by subscription.' And Laud, a very different man from Chillingworth, held on this point a like opinion with him.

Certainly the Church of England was in no humour, at the time of the Savoy Conference, to deal tenderly with the Puritans. It was too much disposed to show to the Puritans the same sort of tenderness which the Puritans had shown to the Church. The nation, moreover, was nearly as ill-disposed as the Church to the Puritans; and this proves well what the narrowness and tyrannousness of Puritanism dominant had really been. But the Church undoubtedly said and did to Puritanism after the Restoration much that was harsh and bitter, and therefore inexcusable in a Christian church. Examples of Churchmen so speaking and dealing may be found in the transactions of 1661; but perhaps the most offensive example of a Churchman of this kind, and who deserves therefore to be studied, is a certain Dr. Jane, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford and Dean of Gloucester, who was put forward to thwart Tillotson's projects of comprehension in 1689. A certain number of Dr. Janes there have always been in the Church. There are a certain number of them in the Church now, and there always will be a certain number of them. No Church could exist with many of them; but one should have a sample or two of them always before one's mind, and remember how to the excluded party a few, and those the worst, of their excluders, are always apt to stand for the whole, in order to comprehend the full bitterness and resentment of Puritanism against the Church of England. Else one would be inclined to say, after attentively and impartially observing the two parties, that the persistence of the Church in pressing for conformity arose, not as the political historians would have it, from the lust of haughty ecclesiastics for dominion and for imposing their law on the vanquished, but from a real sense that their formularies were made so large and open, and the sense put upon subscription to them was so indulgent, that any reasonable man could honestly conform; and that it was perverseness and determination to impose their special ideas on the Church, and to narrow the Church's latitude, which made the Puritans stand out.

Nay, and it was with the diction of the Prayer Book, as it was with its doctrine; the Church took the side which most commands the sympathy of liberal-minded men. Baxter had his rival Prayer Book which he proposed to substitute for the old one. And this is how the 'Reformed Liturgy' was to begin: 'Eternal, incomprehensible and invisible God, infinite in power, wisdom and goodness, dwelling in the light which no man can approach, where thousand thousands minister unto thee, and ten thousand times ten thousand stand before thee,' &c. This, I say, was to have taken the place of our old friend, Dearly beloved brethren; and here, again, we can hardly refuse approval to the Church's resistance to Puritan innovations. We could wish, indeed, the Church had shown the same largeness in consenting to relax ceremonies, which she showed in refusing to tighten dogma, or to spoil diction. Worse still, the angry wish to drive by violence, when the other party will not move by reason, finally no doubt appears; and the Church has much to blame herself for in the Act of Uniformity. Blame she deserves, and she has had it plentifully; but what has not been enough perceived is, that really the conviction of her own moderation, openness, and latitude, as far as regards doctrine, seems to have filled her mind during her dealings with the Puritans; and that her impatience with them was in great measure impatience at seeing these so ill-appreciated by them. Very ill-appreciated by them they certainly were; and, as far as doctrine is concerned, the quarrel between the Church and Puritanism undoubtedly was, that for the doctrines of predestination, original sin, and justification, Puritanism wanted more exclusive prominence, more dogmatic definition, more bar to future escape and development; while the Church resisted.

And as the instinct of the Church always made her avoid, on these three favourite tenets of Puritanism, the stringency of definition which Puritanism tried to force upon her, always made her leave herself room for growth in regard to them,—so, if we look for the positive beginnings and first signs of growth, of disengagement from the stock notions of popular theology about predestination, original sin, and justification, it is among Churchmen, and not among Puritans, that we shall find them. Few will deny that as to the doctrines of predestination and original sin, at any rate, the mind of religious men is no longer what it was in the seventeenth century or in the eighteenth. There has been evident growth and emancipation; Puritanism itself no longer holds these doctrines in the rigid way it once did. To whom is this change owing? who were the beginners of it? They were men using that comparative openness of mind and accessibility to ideas which was fostered by the Church. The very complaints which we have quoted from the Puritan divines prove that this was so. Henry More, saying in the heat of the Calvinistic controversy, what it needed insight to say then, but what almost every one's common sense says now, that 'it were to be wished the Quinquarticular points were all reduced to this one, namely, That none shall be saved without sincere obedience;' Jeremy Taylor saying in the teeth of the superstitious popular doctrine of original sin: 'Original sin, as it is at this day commonly explicated, was not the doctrine of the primitive church; but when Pelagius had puddled the stream, St. Austin was so angry that he stamped and puddled it more,'—this sort of utterance from Churchmen it was, that first introduced into our religious world the current of more independent thought concerning the doctrines of predestination and original sin, which has now made its way even amidst Puritans themselves.

Here the emancipation has reached the Puritans; but it proceeded from the Church. That Puritanism is yet emancipated from the popular doctrine of justification cannot be asserted. On the contrary, the more it loosens its hold on the doctrine of predestination the more it tightens it on that of justification. We shall have occasion by and by to discuss Wesley's words: 'Plead thou solely the blood of the Covenant, the ransom paid for thy proud stubborn soul!' and to show how modern Methodism glories in holding aloft as its standard this teaching of Wesley's, and this teaching above all. The many tracts which have lately been sent me in reference to this subject go all the same way. Like Luther, they hold that 'all heretics have continually failed in this one point, that they do not rightly understand or know the article of justification:' 'do not see' (to continue to use Luther's words,) 'that by none other sacrifice or offering could God's fierce anger be appeased, but by the precious blood of the Son of God.' That this doctrine is founded upon an entire misunderstanding of St. Paul's writings we have shown; that there is very visible a tendency in the minds of religious people to outgrow it, is true, but where alone does this tendency manifest itself with any steadiness or power? In the Church. The inevitable movement of growth will in time extend itself to Puritanism also. Let it be remembered in that day that not only does the movement come to Puritanism from the Church, but it comes to Churchmen of our century from a seed of growth and development inherent in the Church, and which was manifest in the Church long ago!

That the accompaniments of the doctrine of justification, the tenets of conversion, instantaneous sanctification, assurance, and sinless perfection,—tenets which are not the essence of Wesley, but which are the essence of Wesleyan Methodism, and which have in them so much that is delusive and dangerous,—that these should have been discerningly judged by that mixture of piety and sobriety which marks Anglicans of the best type, such as Bishop Wilson,[105] will surprise no one. But years before Wesley was born, the fontal doctrine itself,—Wesley's 'Plead thou solely the blood of the Covenant!'—had been criticised by Hammond thus, and the signal of deliverance from the Lutheran doctrine of justification given: 'The solifidian looks upon his faith as the utmost accomplishment and end, and not only as the first elements of his task, which is,—the superstructing of good life. The solifidian believes himself to have the only sanctified necessary doctrines, that having them renders his condition safe, and every man who believes them a pure Christian professor. In respect of solifidianism it is worth remembering what Epiphanius observes of the primitive times, that wickedness was the only heresy, that impious and pious living divided the whole Christian world into erroneous and orthodox.'

In point of fact, therefore, the historic Church in England, not existing for special opinions, but proceeding by development, has shown much greater freedom of mind as regards the doctrines of election, original sin, and justification, than the Nonconformists have; and has refused, in spite of Puritan pressure, to tie herself too strictly to these doctrines, to make them all in all. She thus both has been and is more serviceable than Puritanism to religious progress; because the separating for opinions, which is proper to Puritanism, rivets the separatist to those opinions, and is thus opposed to that development and gradual exhibiting of the full sense of the Bible and Christianity, which is essential to religious progress. To separate for the doctrine of predestination, of justification, of scriptural church-discipline, is to be false to the idea of development, to imagine that you can seize the absolute sense of Scripture from your own present point of view, and to cut yourself off from growth and gradual illumination. That a comparison between the course things have taken in Puritanism and in the Church goes to prove the truth of this as a matter of fact, is what I have been trying to show hitherto; in what remains I purpose to show how, as a matter of theory and antecedent likelihood, it seems probable and natural that so this should be.

A historic Church cannot choose but allow the principle of development, for it is written in its institutions and history. An admirable writer, in a book which is one of his least known works, but which contains, perhaps, even a greater number of profound and valuable ideas than any other one of them, has set forth, both persuasively and truly, the impression of this sort which Church-history cannot but convey. 'We have to account,' says Dr. Newman, in his Essay on Development, 'for that apparent variation and growth of doctrine which embarrasses us when we would consult history for the true idea of Christianity. The increase and expansion of the Christian creed and ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended dominion. From the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas. The highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients; but, as admitted and transmitted by minds not inspired, and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation.' And again: 'Ideas may remain when the expression of them is indefinitely varied. Nay, one cause of corruption in religion is the refusal to follow the course of doctrine as it moves on, and an obstinacy in the notions of the past. So our Lord found his people precisians in their obedience to the letter; he condemned them for not being led on to its spirit,—that is, its development. The Gospel is the development of the Law; yet what difference seems wider than that which separates the unbending rule of Moses from the grace and truth which came by Jesus Christ? The more claim an idea has to be considered living, the more various will be its aspects; and the more social and political is its nature, the more complicated and subtle will be its developments, and the longer and more eventful will be its course. Such is Christianity.' And yet once more: 'It may be objected that inspired documents, such as the Holy Scriptures, at once determine doctrine without further trouble. But they were intended to create an idea, and that idea is not in the sacred text, but in the mind of the reader; and the question is, whether that idea is communicated to him in its completeness and minute accuracy on its first apprehension, or expands in his heart and intellect, and comes to perfection in the course of time. If it is said that inspiration supplied the place of this development in the first recipients of Christianity, still the time at length came when its recipients ceased to be inspired; and on these recipients the revealed truths would fall as in other cases, at first vaguely and generally, and would afterwards be completed by developments.'

The notion thus admirably expounded of a gradual understanding of the Bible, a progressive development of Christianity, is the same which was in Bishop Butler's mind when he laid down in his Analogy that 'the Bible contains many truths as yet undiscovered.' 'And as,' he says, 'the whole scheme of Scripture is not yet understood, so, if it ever comes to be understood, before the restitution of all things and without miraculous interpositions, it must be in the same way as natural knowledge is come at,—by the continuance and progress of learning and of liberty, and by particular persons attending to, comparing, and pursuing intimations scattered up and down it, which are overlooked and disregarded by the generality of the world. For this is the way in which all improvements are made; by thoughtful men's tracing on obscure hints, as it were, dropped as by nature accidentally, or which seem to come into our minds by chance.' And again: 'Our existence is not only successive, as it must be of necessity, but one state of our life and being is appointed by God to be a preparation for another, and that to be the means of attaining to another succeeding one; infancy to childhood, childhood to youth, youth to mature age. Men are impatient and for precipitating things; but the author of nature appears deliberate throughout his operations, accomplishing his natural ends by slow successive steps. Thus, in the daily course of natural providence, God operates in the very same manner as in the dispensation of Christianity; making one thing subservient to another, this to somewhat further; and so on, through a progressive series of means which extend both backward and forward, beyond our utmost view. Of this manner of operation everything we see in the course of nature is as much an instance as any part of the Christian dispensation.'

All this is indeed incomparably well said; and with Dr. Newman we may, on the strength of it all, beyond any doubt, 'fairly conclude that Christian doctrine admits of formal, legitimate, and true developments;' that 'the whole Bible is written on the principle of development.'

Dr. Newman, indeed, uses this idea in a manner which seems to us arbitrary and condemned by the idea itself. He uses it in support of the pretensions of the Church of Rome to an infallible authority on points of doctrine. He says, with much ingenuity, to Protestants: The doctrines you receive are no more on the face of the Bible, or in the plain teaching of the ante-Nicene Church, which alone you consider pure, than the doctrines you reject. The doctrine of the Trinity is a development, as much as the doctrine of Purgatory. Both of them are developments made by the Church, by the post-Nicene Church. The determination of the Canon of Scripture, a thing of vital importance to you who acknowledge no authority but Scripture, is a development due to the post-Nicene Church.—And thus Dr. Newman would compel Protestants to admit that which is, he declares, in itself reasonable,—namely, 'the probability of the appointment in Christianity of an external authority to decide upon the true developments of doctrine and practice in it, thereby separating them from the mass of mere human speculation, extravagance, corruption, and error, in and out of which they grow. This is the doctrine of the infallibility of the Church, of faith and obedience towards the Church, founded on the probability of its never erring in its declarations or commands.'

Now, asserted in this absolute way, and extended to doctrine as well as discipline, to speculative thought as well as to Christian practice, Dr. Newman's conclusion seems at variance with his own theory of development, and to be something like an instance of what Bishop Butler criticises when he says: 'Men are impatient, and for precipitating things.' But Dr. Newman has himself supplied us with a sort of commentary on these words of Butler's which is worth quoting, because it throws more light on our point than Butler's few words can throw on it by themselves. Dr. Newman says: 'Development is not an effect of wishing and resolving, or of forced enthusiasm, or of any mechanism of reasoning, or of any mere subtlety of intellect; but comes of its own innate power of expansion within the mind in its season, though with the use of reflection and argument and original thought, more or less as it may happen, with a dependence on the ethical growth of the mind itself, and with a reflex influence upon it.'

It is impossible to point out more sagaciously and expressively the natural, spontaneous, free character of true development; how such a development must follow laws of its own, may often require vast periods of time, cannot be hurried, cannot be stopped. And so far as Christianity deals,—as, in its metaphysical theology, it does abundantly deal,—with thought and speculation, it must surely be admitted that for its true and ultimate development in this line more time is required, and other conditions have to be fulfilled, than we have had already. So far as Christian doctrine contains speculative philosophical ideas, never since its origin have the conditions been present for determining these adequately; certainly not in the mediæval Church, which so dauntlessly strove to determine them. And therefore on every Creed and Council is judgment passed in Bishop Butler's sentence: 'The Bible contains many truths as yet undiscovered.'

The Christian religion has practice for its great end and aim; but it raises, as anyone can see, and as Church-history proves, numerous and great questions of philosophy and of scientific criticism. Well, for the true elucidation of such questions, and for their final solution, time and favourable developing conditions are confessedly necessary. From the end of the apostolic age and of the great fontal burst of Christianity, down to the present time, have such conditions ever existed in the Christian communities, for determining adequately the questions of philosophy and scientific criticism which the Christian religion starts? God, creation, will, evil, propitiation, immortality,—these terms and many more of the same kind, however much they might in the Bible be used in a concrete and practical manner, yet plainly had in themselves a provocation to abstract thought, carried with them the occasions of a criticism and a philosophy, which must sooner or later make its appearance in the Church. It did make its appearance, and the question is whether it has ever yet appeared there under conditions favourable to its true development. Surely this is best elucidated by considering whether questions of criticism and philosophy in general ever had one of their happy moments, their times for successful development, in the early and middle ages of Christendom at all, or have had one of them in the Christian churches, as such, since. All these questions hang together, and the time that is improper for solving one sort of them truly, is improper for solving the others.

Well, surely, historic criticism, criticism of style, criticism of nature, no one would go to the early or middle ages of the Church for illumination on these matters. How then should those ages develop successfully a philosophy of theology, or in other words, a criticism of physics and metaphysics, which involves the three other criticisms and more besides? Church-theology is an elaborate attempt at a philosophy of theology, at a philosophical criticism. In Greece, before Christianity appeared, there had been a favouring period for the development of such a criticism; a considerable movement of it took place, and considerable results were reached. When Christianity began, this movement was in decadence; it declined more and more till it died quite out; it revived very slowly, and as it waxed, the mediæval Church waned. The doctrine of universals is a question of philosophy discussed in Greece, and re-discussed in the middle ages. Whatever light this doctrine receives from Plato's treatment of it, or Aristotle's, in whatever state they left it, will anyone say that the Nominalists and Realists brought any more light to it, that they developed it in any way, or could develop it? For the same reason, St. Augustine's criticism of God's eternal decrees, original sin, and justification, the criticism of St. Thomas Aquinas on them, the decisions of the Church on them, are of necessity, and from the very nature of things, inadequate, because, being philosophical developments, they are made in an age when the forces for true philosophical development are waning or wanting.

So when Hooker says most truly: 'Our belief in the Trinity, the co-eternity of the Son of God with his Father, the proceeding of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, with other principal points the necessity whereof is by none denied, are notwithstanding in Scripture nowhere to be found by express literal mention, only deduced they are out of Scripture by collection;'—when Hooker thus points, out, what is undoubtedly the truth, that these Church-doctrines are developments, we may add this other truth equally undoubted,—that being philosophical developments, they are developments of a kind which the Church has never yet had the right conditions for making adequately, any more than it has had the conditions for developing out of what is said in the Book of Genesis a true philosophy of nature, or out of what is said in the Book of Daniel, a true philosophy of history. It matters nothing whether the scientific truth was there, and the problem was to extract it; or not there, and the problem was to understand why it was not there, and the relation borne by what was there to the scientific truth. The Church had no means of solving either the one problem or the other. And this from no fault at all of the Church, but for the same reason that she was unfitted to solve a difficulty in Aristotle's Physics or Plato's Timæus, and to determine the historical value of Herodotus or Livy; simply from the natural operation of the law of development, which for success in philosophy and criticism requires certain conditions, which in the early and mediæval Church were not to be found.

And when the movement of philosophy and criticism came with the Renascence, this movement was almost entirely outside the Churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, and not inside them. It worked in men like Descartes and Bacon, and not in men like Luther and Calvin; so that the doctrine of these two eminent personages, Luther and Calvin, so far as it was a philosophical and critical development from Scripture, had no more likelihood of being an adequate development than the doctrine of the Council of Trent. And so it has gone on to this day. Philosophy and criticism have become a great power in the world, and inevitably tend to alter and develop Church-doctrine, so far as this doctrine is, as to a great extent it is, philosophical and critical. Yet the seat of the developing force is not in the Church itself, but elsewhere; its influences filter strugglingly into the Church, and the Church slowly absorbs and incorporates them. And whatever hinders their filtering in and becoming incorporated, hinders truth and the natural progress of things.

While, therefore, we entirely agree with Dr. Newman and with the great Anglican divines that the whole Bible is written on the principle of development, and that Christianity in its doctrine and discipline is and must be a development of the Bible, we yet cannot agree that for the adequate development of Christian doctrine, so far as theology exhibits this metaphysically and scientifically, the Church, whether ante-Nicene or post-Nicene, has ever yet furnished a channel. Thought and science follow their own law of development, they are slowly elaborated in the growth and forward pressure of humanity, in what Shakspeare calls,—

. . . . . the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come;

and their ripeness and unripeness, as Dr. Newman most truly says, are not an effect of our wishing or resolving. Rather do they seem brought about by a power such as Goethe figures by the Zeit-Geist or Time-Spirit, and St. Paul describes as a divine power revealing additions to what we possess already.

But sects of men are apt to be shut up in sectarian ideas of their own, and to be less open to new general ideas than the main body of men; therefore St. Paul in the same breath exhorts to unity. What may justly be conceded to the Catholic Church is, that in her idea of a continuous developing power in united Christendom to work upon the data furnished by the Bible, and produce new combinations from them as the growth of time required it, she followed a true instinct. But the right philosophical developments she vainly imagined herself to have had the power to produce, and her attempts in this direction were at most but a prophecy of this power, as alchemy is said to have been a prophecy of chemistry.

With developments of discipline and church-order it is very different. The Bible raises, as we have seen, many and great questions of philosophy and criticism; still, essentially the Church was not a corporation for speculative purposes, but a corporation for purposes of moral growth and of practice. Terms like God, creation, will, evil, propitiation, immortality, evoke, as we have said, and must evoke, sooner or later, a philosophy; but to evoke this was the accident and not the essence of Christianity. What, then, was the essence?

An ingenious writer, as unlike Dr. Newman as it is possible to conceive, has lately told us. In an article in Fraser's Magazine,—an article written with great vigour and acuteness,—this writer advises us to return to Paley, whom we were beginning to neglect, because the real important essence of Christianity, or rather, to quote quite literally, 'the only form of Christianity which is worthy of the serious consideration of rational men, is Protestantism as stated by Paley and his school.' And why? 'Because this Protestantism enables the saint to prove to the worldly man that Christ threatened him with hell-fire, and proved his power to threaten by rising from the dead and ascending into heaven; and these allegations are the fundamental assertions of Christianity.'

Now it may be said that this is a somewhat contracted view of 'the unsearchable riches of Christ;' but we will not quarrel with it. And this for several reasons. In the first place, it is the view often taken by popular theology. In the second place, it is the view best fitted to serve its Benthamite author's object, which is to get Christianity out of the way altogether. In the third place, its shortness gives us courage to try and do what is the hardest thing in the world, namely, to pack a statement of the main drift of Christianity into a few lines of nearly as short compass.

What then was, in brief, the Christian gospel, or 'good news'? It was this: The kingdom of God is come unto you. The power of Jesus upon the multitudes who heard him gladly, was not that by rising from the dead and ascending into heaven he enabled the saint to prove to the worldly man the certainty of hell-fire (for he had not yet done so); but that he talked to them about the kingdom of God.[106] And what is the kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven? It is this: God's will done, as in heaven so on earth. And how was this come to mankind? Because Jesus is come to save his people from their sins. And what is being saved from our sins? This: Entering into the kingdom of heaven by doing the will of our Father which is in heaven. And how does Christ enable us to do this? By teaching us to take his yoke upon us, and learn of him to deny ourselves and take up our cross daily and follow him, and to lose our life for the purpose of saving it. So that St. Paul might say most truly that the seal of the sure foundation of God in Christianity was this: Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity: or, as he elsewhere expands it: Let him bring forth the fruits of the Spirit,—love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.[107]

On this foundation arose the Christian Church, and not on any foundation of speculative metaphysics. It was inevitable that the speculative metaphysics should come, but they were not the foundation. When they came, the danger of the Christian Church was that she should take them for the foundation. The people who were built on the real foundation, who were united in the joy of Christ's good news, naturally, as they came to know of one another's existence, as their relations with one another multiplied, as the sense of sympathy in the possession of a common treasure deepened,—naturally, I say, drew together in one body, with an organisation growing out of the needs of a growing body. It is quite clear that the more strongly Christians felt their common business in setting forward upon earth, through Christ's spirit, the kingdom of God, the more they would be drawn to coalesce into one society for this business, with the natural and true notion that the acting together in this way offers to men greater helps for reaching their aim, presents fewer distractions, and above all, supplies a more animating force of sympathy and mutual assurance, than the acting separately. Only the sense of differences greater than the sense of sympathy could defeat this tendency.

Dr. Newman has told us what an impression was once made upon his mind by the sentence: Securus judicat orbis terrarum. We have shown how, for matters of philosophical judgment, not yet settled but requiring development to clear them, the consent of the world, at a time when this clearing development cannot have happened, seems to carry little or no weight at all; indeed, as to judgment on these points, we should rather be inclined to lay down the very contrary of Dr. Newman's affirmation, and to say: Securus delirat orbis terrarum. But points of speculative theology being out of the question, and the practical ground and purpose of man's religion being broadly and plainly fixed, we should be quite disposed to concede to Dr. Newman, that securus colit orbis terrarum;—those pursue this purpose best who pursue it together. For unless prevented by extraneous causes, they manifestly tend, as the history of the Church's growth shows, to pursue it together.

Nonconformists are fond of talking of the unity which may co-exist with separation, and they say: 'There are four evangelists, yet one gospel; why should there not be many separate religious bodies, yet one Church?' But their theory of unity in separation is a theory palpably invented to cover existing facts, and their argument from the evangelists is a paralogism. For the Four Gospels arose out of no thought of divergency; they were not designed as corrections of one prior gospel, or of one another; they were concurring testimonies borne to the same fact. But the several religious bodies of Christendom plainly grew out of an intention of divergency; clearly they were designed to correct the imperfections of one prior church and of each other; and to say of things sprung out of discord that they may make one, because things sprung out of concord may make one, is like saying that because several agreements may make a peace, therefore several wars may make a peace too. No; without some strong motive to the contrary, men united by the pursuit of a clearly defined common aim of irresistible attractiveness naturally coalesce; and since they coalesce naturally, they are clearly right in coalescing and find their advantage in it.

All that Dr. Newman has so excellently said about development applies here legitimately and fully. Existence justifies additions and stages in existence. The living edifice planted on the foundation, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity, could not but grow, if it lived at all. If it grew, it could not but make developments, and all developments not inconsistent with the aim of its original foundation, and not extending beyond the moral and practical sphere which was the sphere of its original foundation, are legitimated by the very fact of the Church having in the natural evolution of its life and growth made them. A boy does not wear the clothes or follow the ways of an infant, nor a man those of a boy; yet they are all engaged in the one same business of developing their growing life, and to the clothes to be worn and the ways to be followed for the purpose of doing this, nature will, in general, direct them safely. The several scattered congregations of the first age of Christianity coalesced into one community, just as the several scattered Christians had earlier still coalesced into congregations. Why?—because such was the natural course of things. It had nothing inconsistent with the fundamental ground of Christians, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity; and it was approved by their growing and enlarging in it. They developed a church-discipline with a hierarchy of bishops and archbishops, which was not that of the first times; they developed church-usages, such as the practice of infant baptism, which were not those of the first times; they developed a church-ritual with ceremonies which were not those of the first times;—they developed all these, just as they developed a church-architecture which was not that of the first times, because they were no longer in the first times, and required for their expanding growth what suited their own times. They coalesced with the State because they grew by doing so. They called the faith they possessed in common the Catholic, that is, the general or universal faith. They developed, also, as we have seen, dogma or a theological philosophy. Both dogma and discipline became a part of the Catholic faith, or profession of the general body of Christians.

Now to develop a discipline, or form of outward life for itself, the Church, as has been said, had necessarily, like every other living thing, the requisite qualifications; to develop scientific dogma it had not. But even of the dogma which the Church developed it may be said, that, from the very nature of things, it was probably, as compared with the opposing dogma over which it prevailed, the more suited to the actual condition of the Church's life, and to the due progress of the divine work for which she existed. For instance, whatever may be scientifically the rights of the question about grace and free-will, it is evident that, for the Church of the fifth century, Pelagianism was the less inspiring and edifying doctrine, and the sense of being in the divine hand was the feeling which it was good for Christians to be filled with. Whatever may be scientifically the merits of the dispute between Arius and Athanasius, for the Church of their time whatever most exalted or seemed to exalt Jesus Christ was clearly the profitable doctrine, the doctrine most helpful to that moral life which was the true life of the Church.

People, however, there were in abundance who differed on points both of discipline and of dogma from the rule which obtained in the Church, and who separated from her on account of that difference. These were the heretics: separatists, as the name implies, for the sake of opinions. And the very name, therefore, implies that they were wrong in separating, and that the body which held together was right; because the Church exists, not for the sake of opinions, but for the sake of moral practice, and a united endeavour after this is stronger than a broken one. Valentinians, Marcionites, Montanists, Donatists, Manichæans, Novatians, Eutychians, Apollinarians, Nestorians, Arians, Pelagians,—if they separated on points of discipline they were wrong, because for developing its own fit outward conditions of life the body of a community has, as we have seen, a real natural power, and individuals are bound to sacrifice their fancies to it; if they separated on points of dogma they were wrong also, because, while neither they nor the Church had the means of determining such points adequately, the true instinct lay in those who, instead of separating for such points, conceded them as the Church settled them, and found their bond of union, where it in truth really was, not in notions about the co-eternity of the Son, but in the principle: Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.

Does any one imagine that all the Church shared Augustine's speculative opinions about grace and predestination? that many members of it did not rather incline, as a matter of speculative opinion, to the notions of Pelagius? Does any one imagine that all who stood with the Church and did not join themselves to the Arians, were speculatively Athanasians? It was not so; but they had a true feeling for what purpose the Gospel and the Church were given them, and for what they were not given them; they could see that 'impious and pious living,' according to that sentence of Epiphanius we have quoted from Hammond, 'divided the whole Christian world into erroneous and orthodox;' and that it was not worth while to suffer themselves to be divided for anything else.

And though it will be said that separatists for opinions on points of discipline and dogma have often asserted, and sometimes believed, that piety and impiety were vitally concerned in these points; yet here again the true religious instinct is that which discerns,—what is seldom so very obscure,—whether they are in truth thus vitally concerned or not; and, if they are not, cannot be perverted into fancying them concerned and breaking unity for them. This, I say, is the true religious instinct, the instinct which most clearly seizes the essence and aim of the Christian Gospel and of the Christian Church. But fidelity to it leaves, also, the way least closed to the admission of true developments of speculative thought, when the time is come for them, and to the incorporation of these true developments with the ideas and practice of Christians.

Is there not, then, any separation which is right and reasonable? Yes, separation on plain points of morals. For these involve the very essence of the Christian Gospel, and the very ground on which the Christian Church is built. The sale of indulgences, if deliberately instituted and persisted in by the main body of the Church, afforded a valid reason for breaking unity; the doctrine of purgatory, or of the real presence, did not.

However, a cosmopolitan church-order, commenced when the political organisation of Christians was also cosmopolitan,—when, that is, the nations of Europe were politically one in the unity of the Roman Empire,—might well occasion difficulties as the nations solidified into independent states with a keen sense of their independent life; so that, the cosmopolitan type disappearing for civil affairs, and being replaced by the national type, the same disappearance and replacement tended to prevail in ecclesiastical affairs also. But this was a political difficulty, not a religious one, and it raised no insuperable bar to continued religious union. A Church with Anglican liberties might very well, the English national spirit being what it is, have been in religious communion with Rome, and yet have been safely trusted to maintain and develop its national liberties to any extent required.

The moral corruptions of Rome, on the other hand, were a real ground for separation. On their account, and solely on their account, if they could not be got rid of, was separation not only lawful but necessary. It has always been the averment of the Church of England, that the change made in her at the Reformation was the very least change which was absolutely necessary. No doubt she used the opportunity of her breach with Rome to get rid of several doctrines which the human mind had outgrown; but it was the immoral practice of Rome that really moved her to separation. And she maintained that she merely got rid of Roman corruptions which were immoral and intolerable, and remained the old, historic, Catholic Church of England still.

The right to this title of Catholic is a favourite matter of contention between bodies of Christians. But let us use names in their customary and natural senses. To us it seems that unless one chooses to fight about words, and fancifully to put into the word Catholic some occult quality, one must allow that the changes made in the Church of England at the Reformation impaired its Catholicity. The word Catholic was meant to describe the common or general profession and worship of Christendom at the time when the word arose. Undoubtedly this general profession and worship had not a strict uniformity everywhere, but it had a clearly-marked common character; and this well-known type Bede, or Anselm, or Wiclif himself, would to this day easily recognise in a Roman Catholic religious service, but hardly in an Anglican; while, on the other hand, in a Roman Catholic religious service an ordinary Anglican finds himself as much in a strange world and out of his usual course, as in a Nonconformist meeting-house. Something precious was no doubt lost in losing this common profession and worship; but the loss was, as we Protestants maintain, incurred for the sake of something yet more precious still,—the purity of that moral practice which was the very cause for which the common profession and worship existed. Now, it seems captious to incur voluntarily a loss for a great and worthy object, and at the same time, by a conjuring with words, to try and make it appear that we have not suffered the loss at all. So on the word Catholic we will not insist too jealously; but thus much, at any rate, must be allowed to the Church of England,—that she kept enough of the past to preserve, as far as this nation was concerned, her continuity, to be still the historic Church of England; and that she avoided the error, to which there was so much to draw her, and into which all the other reformed Churches fell, of making improved speculative doctrinal opinions the main ground of her separation.

A Nonconformist newspaper, it is true, reproaching the Church with what is, in our opinion, her greatest praise, namely, that on points of doctrinal theology she is 'a Church that does not know her own mind,' roundly asserts, as we have already mentioned, that 'no man in his senses can deny that the Church of England was meant to be a thoroughly Protestant and Evangelical, and it may be said Calvinistic Church.' But not only does the whole course of Church-history disprove such an assertion, and show that this is what the Puritans always wanted to make the Church, and what the Church would never be made, but we can disprove it, too, out of the mouths of the very Puritans themselves. At the Savoy Conference the Puritans urged that 'our first reformers out of their great wisdom did at that time (of the Reformation) so compose the Liturgy, as to win upon the Papists, and to draw them into their Church communion by varying as little as they could from the Romish forms before in use;' and this they alleged as their great plea for purging the Liturgy. And the Bishops resisted, and upheld the proceeding of the reformers as the essential policy of the Church of England; as indeed it was, and till this day has continued to be. No; the Church of England did not give her energies to inventing a new church-order for herself and fighting for it; to singling out two or three speculative dogmas as the essence of Christianity, and fighting for them. She set herself to carry forward, and as much as possible on the old lines, the old practical work and proper design of the Christian Church; and this is what left her mind comparatively open, as we have seen, for the admission of philosophy and criticism, as they slowly developed themselves outside the Church and filtered into her; an admission which confessedly proves just now of capital importance.

This openness of mind the Puritans have not shared with the Church, and how should they have shared it? They are founded on the negation of that idea of development which plays so important a part in the life of the Church; on the assumption that there is a divinely appointed church-order fixed once for all in the Bible, and that they have adopted it; that there is a doctrinal scheme of faith, justification, and imputed righteousness, which is the test of a standing or falling church and the essence of the gospel, and that they have extracted it. These are assumptions which, as they make union impossible, so also make growth impossible. The Church makes church-order a matter of ecclesiastical constitution, is founded on moral practice, and though she develops speculative dogma, does not allow that this or that dogma is the essence of Christianity.

'Congregational Nonconformists,' say the Independents, 'can never be incorporated into an organic union with Anglican Episcopacy, because there is not even the shadow of an outline of it in the New Testament, and it is our assertion and profound belief that Christ and the Apostles have given us all the laws that are necessary for the constitution and government of the Church.'[108] 'Whatever may come,' says the President of the Wesleyan Conference, 'we are determined to be simple, earnest preachers of the gospel. Whatever may come, we are determined to be true to Scriptural Protestantism. We would be friendly with all evangelical churches, but we will have no fellowship with the man of sin. We will give up life itself rather than be unfaithful to the truth. It is ours to cry everywhere: "Come, sinners, to the gospel-feast!"' And this gospel, this Scriptural Protestantism, this truth, is the doctrine of justification by 'pleading solely the blood of the covenant,' of which we have said so much. Methodists cannot unite with a church which does not found itself on this doctrine of justification, but which holds the doctrine of priestly absolution, of the real presence, and other doctrines of like stamp; Congregationalists cannot unite with a church which, besides not resting on the doctrine of justification, has a church-order not prescribed in the New Testament.

Now as Hooker truly says of those who 'desire to draw all things unto the determination of bare and naked Scripture,' as Dr. Newman, too, has said, and as many others have said, the Bible does not exhibit, drawn out in black and white, the precise tenets and usages of any Christian society; some inference and criticism must be employed to get at them. 'For the most part, even such as are readiest to cite for one thing five hundred sentences of Scripture, what warrant have they that any one of them doth mean the thing for which it is alleged?' Nay, 'it is not the word of God itself which doth, or possibly can, assure us that we do well to think it his word.' So says Hooker, and what he says is perfectly true. A process of reasoning and collection is necessary to get at the Scriptural church-discipline and the Scriptural Protestantism of the Puritans; in short, this discipline and this doctrine are developments. And the first is an unsound development, in a line where there was a power of making a true development, and where the Church made it; the second is an unsound development in a line where neither the Church nor Puritanism had the power of making true developments. But as it is the truth of its Scriptural Protestantism which in Puritanism's eyes especially proves the truth of its Scriptural church-order which has this Protestantism, and the falsehood of the Anglican church-order which has much less of it, to abate the confidence of the Puritans in their Scriptural Protestantism is the first step towards their union, so much to be desired, with the national Church.

We say, therefore, that the doctrine: 'It is agreed between God and the mediator Jesus Christ the Son of God, surety for the redeemed, as parties-contractors, that the sins of the redeemed should be imputed to innocent Christ, and he both condemned and put to death for them upon this very condition, that whosoever heartily consents unto the covenant of reconciliation offered through Christ shall, by the imputation of his obedience unto them, be justified and holden righteous before God,'—we say that this doctrine is as much a human development from the text, 'Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,' as the doctrine of priestly absolution is a human development from the text, 'Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them,' or the doctrine of the real presence from the text, 'Take, eat, this is my body.' In our treatise on St. Paul we have shown at length that the received doctrine of justification is an unsound development. It may be said that the doctrine of priestly absolution and of the real presence are unsound developments also. True, in our opinion they are so; they are, like the doctrine of justification, developments made under conditions which precluded the possibility of sound developments in this line. But the difference is here: the Church of England does not identify Christianity with these unsound developments; she does not call either of them Scriptural Protestantism, or truth, or the gospel; she does not insist that all who are in communion with her should hold them; she does not repel from her communion those who hold doctrines at variance with them. She treats them as she does the received doctrine of justification, to which she does not tie herself up, but leaves people to hold it if they please. She thus provides room for growth and further change in these very doctrines themselves. But to the doctrine of justification Puritanism ties itself up, just as it tied itself up formerly to the doctrine of predestination; it calls it Scriptural Protestantism, truth, the gospel; it will have communion with none who do not hold it; it repels communion with any who hold the doctrines of priestly absolution and the real presence, because they seem to interfere with it. Yet it is really itself no better than they. But how can growth possibly find place in this doctrine, while it is held in such a fashion?

Every one who perceives and values the power contained in Christianity, must be struck to see how, at the present moment, the progress of this power seems to depend upon its being able to disengage itself from speculative accretions that encumber it. A considerable movement to this end is visible in the Church of England. The most nakedly speculative, and therefore the most inevitably defective, parts of the Prayer Book,—the Athanasian Creed and the Thirty-nine Articles,—our generation will not improbably see the Prayer Book rid of. But the larger the body in which this movement works, the greater is the power of the movement. If the Church of England were disestablished to-day it would be desirable to re-establish her to-morrow, if only because of the immense power for development which a national body possesses. It is because we know something of the Nonconformist ministers, and what eminent force and faculty many of them have for contributing to the work of development now before the Church, that we cannot bear to see the waste of power caused by their separatism and battling with the Establishment, which absorb their energies too much to suffer them to carry forward the work of development themselves, and cut them off from aiding those in the Church who carry it forward.

The political dissent of the Nonconformists, based on their condemnation of the Anglican church-order as unscriptural, is just one of those speculative accretions which we have spoken of as encumbering religion. Politics are a good thing, and religion is a good thing; but they make a fractious mixture. 'The Nonconformity of England, and the Nonconformity alone, has been the salvation of England from Papal tyranny and kingly misrule and despotism.'[109] This is the favourite boast, the familiar strain; but this is really politics, and not religion at all. But righteousness is religion; and the Nonconformists say: 'Who have done so much for righteousness as we?' For as much righteousness as will go with politics, no one; for the sterner virtues, for the virtues of the Jews of the Old Testament; but these are only half of righteousness and not the essentially Christian half. We have seen how St. Paul tore himself in two, rent his life in the middle and began it again, because he was so dissatisfied with a righteousness which was, after all, in its main features, Puritan. And surely it can hardly be denied that the more eminently and exactly Christian type of righteousness is the type exhibited by Church worthies like Herbert, Ken, and Wilson, rather than that exhibited by the worthies of Puritanism; the cause being that these last mixed politics with religion so much more than did the first.

Paul, too, be it remembered, condemned disunion in the society of Christians as much as he declined politics. This does not, we freely own, make against the Puritans' refusal to take the law from their adversaries, but it does make against their allegation that it does not matter whether the society of Christians is united or not, and that there are even great advantages in separatism. If Anglicans maintained that their church-order was written in Scripture and a matter of divine command, then, Congregationalists maintaining the same thing, to the controversy between them there could be no end. But now, Anglicans maintaining no such thing, but that their church-order is a matter of historic development and natural expediency, that it has grown,—which is evident enough,—and that the essence of Christianity is in no-wise concerned with such matters, why should not the Nonconformists adopt this moderate view of the case, which constrains them to no admission of inferiority, but only to the renouncing an imagined divine superiority and to the recognition of an existing fact, and allow Church bishops as a development of Catholic antiquity, just as they have allowed Church music and Church architecture, which are developments of the same? Then might there arise a mighty and undistracted power of joint life, which would transform, indeed, the doctrines of priestly absolution and the real presence, but which would transform, equally, the so-called Scriptural Protestantism of imputed righteousness, and which would do more for real righteousness and for Christianity than has ever been done yet.

Tillotson's proposals for comprehension, drawn up in 1689, cannot be too much studied at the present juncture. These proposals, with which his name and that of Stillingfleet, two of the most estimable names in the English Church, are specially associated, humiliate no one, refute no one; they take the basis of existing facts, and endeavour to build on it a solid union. They are worth quoting entire, and I conclude with them. Their details our present circumstances would modify; their spirit any sound plan of Church-reform must take as its rule.

1. That the ceremonies enjoined or recommended in the Liturgy or Canons be left indifferent.
2. That the Liturgy be carefully reviewed, and such alterations and changes be therein made as may supply the defects and remove as much as possible all ground of exception to any part of it, by leaving out the apocryphal lessons and correcting the translation of the psalms used in the public service where there is need of it, and in many other particulars.
3. That instead of all former declarations and subscriptions to be made by ministers, it shall be sufficient for them that are admitted to the exercise of their ministry in the Church of England to subscribe one general declaration and promise to this purpose, viz.: That we do submit to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Church of England as it shall be established by law, and promise to teach and practise accordingly.
4. That a new body of ecclesiastical Canons be made, particularly with a regard to a more effectual provision for the reformation of manners both in ministers and people.
5. That there be an effectual regulation of ecclesiastical courts to remedy the great abuses and inconveniences which by degrees and length of time have crept into them; and particularly that the power of excommunication be taken out of the hands of lay officers and placed in the bishop, and not to be exercised for trivial matters, but upon great and weighty occasions.
6. That for the future those who have been ordained in any of the foreign churches be not required to be re-ordained here, to render them capable of preferment in the Church.
7. That for the future none be capable of any ecclesiastical benefice or preferment in the Church of England that shall be ordained in England otherwise than by bishops; and that those who have been ordained only by presbyters shall not be compelled to renounce their former ordination. But because many have and do still doubt of the validity of such ordination, where episcopal ordination may be had, and is by law required, it shall be sufficient for such persons to receive ordination from a bishop in this or the like form: "If thou art not already ordained, I ordain thee," &c.; as in case a doubt be made of any one's baptism, it is appointed by the Liturgy that he be baptized in this form: "If thou art not baptized, I baptize thee."'

These are proposals 'to be made by the Church of England for the union of Protestants.' Who cannot see that the power of joint life already spoken of would be far greater and stronger if it comprehended Roman Catholics too. And who cannot see, also, that in the churches of the most strong and living Roman Catholic countries,—in France and Germany,—a movement is in progress which may one day make a general union of Christendom possible? But this will not be in our day, nor is it business which the England of this generation is set to do. What may be done in our day, what our generation has the call and the means, if only it has the resolution, to bring about, is the union of Protestants. But this union will never be on the basis of the actual Scriptural Protestantism of our Puritans; and because, so long as they take this for the gospel or good news of Christ, they cannot possibly unite on any other basis, the first step towards union is showing them that this is not the gospel. If we have succeeded in doing even so much towards union as to convince one of them of this, we have not written in vain.