An Appeal to the People in Behalf of Their Rights as Authorized Interpreters of the Bible

by Catharine Esther Beecher

The mind of the Creator existing from all eternity, independently of his own will, is the pattern of perfectness in the construction of mind. He has formed and sustains a system fitted to his own perfections. The chief end of this system is happiness-making on the greatest possible scale. In order to this, his laws, by which the most possible good with the least possible evil will be secured, must be discovered and obeyed.

Accordingly, all that tends to secure happiness without evil is right, and all that needlessly lessens or destroys happiness is wrong. Every effort to discover the laws of God and to obey them is right and [pg 290] pleasing to him as promoting his chief desire and great end. This view furnishes a foundation for clear conceptions in every practical question of right and wrong. What is for the best as discovered by reason and experience? This is the great question, when we have no direct revelation from God. And even when revelation intervenes, it must be only in regard to general rules, leaving it still a matter of experience and discussion in applying these rules to the multitudes of varying cases in human experience. Thus, for example, a command to be honest toward all, leaves innumerable questions to be settled as to what is honest and fair in the multiplied cases arising between man and man.

But we always have the great principle of common sense to guide us, that whatever is for the best is right, leaving it for reason and experience to settle what is and what is not for the best.

But in contrast the Augustinian system, in many ways, tends to becloud the mind in regard to practical questions of right and wrong.

Thus the assumption that there are no principles in the human mind that enable us to judge of the character and conduct of God; that we have no means of learning what is the object or end for which all things are made; that man is so depraved as to be disqualified to know what is right and wrong, except as taught by revelations from God; and at the same time disqualified to interpret such revelations until regenerated, or by the help of a priesthood; all this tends to create the feeling of incertitude as to any question of right and wrong, while the abuses of priestly interpretations have so often set the Bible in [pg 291] opposition to our moral sense and common sense as greatly to increase the evil.

Add to this, the assumption that there is no true virtue in any acts of the unregenerate, but that all their moral deeds are sin, and only sin, and the perplexity is increased as to what is right and what is wrong moral action.

Again, the fact that salvation from eternal misery is possible only to those who have gained a new “nature,” while it is often seen that some of those received into churches as having this new nature, are not so charitable, amiable, just or honest, as many who are not thus admitted, and the mind is still more beclouded as to the real nature of right and wrong in practical conduct.

Again, the manner in which this new nature is recognized by those appointed to decide who are regenerated and who are not, in order to admit to or exclude from churches, still farther increases the difficulty. The questions often propounded on such occasions relate mainly to certain states of feeling toward God or Christ, or to certain doctrines involved in the Augustinian theory. If replies to these are satisfactory, the candidate is pronounced regenerated and received to the church.

Meantime, ever since the days of Luther, the doctrine of “justification by faith,” in opposition to “salvation by works,” has been assumed to be the foundation principle, both of Protestantism and of true piety, while there has been great indistinctness of conception as to the true meaning of these terms. At the time of the great conflict between Romanism and the Reformers, the grand evil to be combated was a reliance [pg 292] for salvation on the prescribed outward rites and forms of the church without any reference to an internal spiritual principle. The attempt of the Reformers was to substitute for these outward forms that spiritual principle which consists in a ruling purpose to discover and to obey the will of God according to the teachings of Christ, whom they regarded as “God manifest in the flesh.” They recognized the fact that no man ever did or ever could live without some violations of the laws of God, so that no man could be saved on the ground of perfect obedience to law. Instead of this they assumed that man could gain eternal life by “becoming a new creature in Christ Jesus,” meaning by this that “new life” which consists in ceasing to live to please self, and living to please God in Christ as the chief end of life, by earnest conformity to his will as learned either by reason and experience or by the Bible.

This is what they intended by faith in Jesus Christ. And the opposite doctrine of “salvation by works” was that which the Romish church was urging, viz., conformity to her outward rites and forms.