[March 11.]
THREE DISPENSATIONS IN HISTORY AND IN THE SOUL.[G]
By Bishop F. D. HUNTINGTON, D.D.
The spiritual growth of mankind has proceeded through three great stages. Each of these has been marked by the evolution of one predominating element, or salient principle of religious action. On examination, we shall be able to discover an impressive correspondence between these successive epochs in the history of humanity at large, and the process of life in a well-disciplined, Christianized individual. This analogy is so thickly set with points of interest, as well as so fruitful of practical suggestions touching right religious ideas, and right living, that I shall let it fix the form, and be the subject of the discourse. That subject is: The threefold discipline of our spiritual experience, as compared with the threefold order in the expanding nurture of the human family.
The three Biblical dispensations are types of three great principles of conduct, or rather three schools of religious culture, under which we must pass as persons, just as the race has passed in history, before we can be built up into the symmetrical stature of a Christian maturity.
I. First, was the dispensation of natural religious feeling. The race was in childhood. It acted from impulse. It obeyed no written code of moral regulations, but, so far as its life was right, it either followed some free religious instincts, or else depended on direct intimations from the Deity, directing or forbidding each specific deed. The man chosen as the representative of this period was Abraham. The record of it is the book of Genesis. That writing is the first grand chapter in the biography of man; and its very literary structure—so dramatic in contents, and so lyrical in expression, so careless of the rules of art, so abounding in personal details, and graphic groupings of incident; so like a child’s story in its sublime simplicity—answers to the spontaneous period it pictures. “The patriarchal age” we call it. The term itself intimates rude, unorganized politics; the head of each family being the legislator for his tribe. But, in the absence of systematic statutes, every man, by a liberty so large as to burst often into license, was likely to do very much what was right in his own eyes. If he had strong passions, he would be a sensualist, like Shechem, or a petty tyrant, like Laban. If he were constitutionally gentle, he would be an inoffensive shepherd, like Lot. Such were the first two brothers. Cain’s jealousy made him a murderer; Abel was peaceable, kept sheep, and the only voice he lifted up against outrage, was when his blood cried from the ground. Some of these nomadic people, having devout temperaments, “called upon the name of the Lord,” we are told, like Enoch and Noah. Others were bloated giants, mighty men in animal propensities, gross and licentious, given to promiscuous marriages; so that presently God saw that the wickedness was so great, and the imaginations of men’s hearts were so evil, that he must wash the unclean earth with a deluge. But there was no permanent restraining power; no fixed standard of judicial command; and so, when the flood dried, the tide of sin set in again, streaked only with some veins of nobleness. On the plains of Shinar pride fancied that it could build a tower that should overtop the All-seeing Providence; and it had to be humbled by a confusion of tongues, scattering the builders. Even Noah, a just man for his times, so pure in that comparison, that he was carried over on the waves from a drowned generation, to install a new one, had scarcely seen the many-colored splendors of the promise in the rainbow, before he was drunken of overmuch wine. Abraham himself, so full of trust that his trust finally saved him; strong enough in the power of it to lay his son on an altar; at an earlier age stained his tongue with a cowardly falsehood, calling his wife his sister for safety’s sake—first pattern of politicians of mere expediency—and was rebuked for it by a Pharaoh, who had seen less of the heavenly visions than he. Sodom, with its indescribable pollutions, was not far from Beth-el—house of God. Jacob received a revelation from opened heavens; yet he over-reached his brother to appropriate the family blessing, and defraud his father-in-law.
Throughout the whole of this patriarchal era, reaching from Adam to Joseph, and covering, by the common computation, twenty-three hundred years, there were beautiful virtues, flowering into the light by the spontaneous energy of nature, but poisoned in many spots by the slime of sensuality. The human stock threw out its forms of life with a certain negligence, as the prodigal force of nature does her forests—as a boy swings his limbs in the open air. There were heroic acts; but they were dispersed over intervals, with dismal contrasts of meanness and cowardice between. There were ardent prayers; but foul passions often met and put to flight the descending hosts of the angels of God. Character needed a staunch vertebral column to secure its uprightness. No permanent sanction lent impregnability to good impulses. Even the saint, whose spirit rose nearest to heaven, walked on the verge of some abyss of shame. For though Abraham believed, Moses had not yet legislated, nor Christ died.
Corresponding, now, to this impulsive religious age of the race, is the natural state of the individual. It is the condition we are born into, and the multitudes never pass beyond it, because they are never renewed, or made Christian. Morally they are children all their lives. Bad dispositions mix with good; one moment holy aspirations; the next a flagrant immorality. What is wanting is a second birth of spiritual conviction. Conduct is not brought to the bar of a governmental examination, and judged by an unbending principle. Temptation is too much for this feeble, capricious piety. Nature, true enough, is always interesting; and spontaneous products may be beautiful. But man, with his free agency, beset before and behind by evil, is not like a lily growing under God’s sun and dew, with no sin to deform its grace or stain its coloring; he is not like the innocent architecture of a cloud, shaped by the fantastic caprices of the summer wind; nor yet like the aimless statuary of the sea-shore, sculptured by the pliant chisel of the wave. He has to contend, struggle, resist. He is tried, enticed, besieged. Satan creeps anew with every new-born child into the Eden of the heart, and flaming swords are presently planted on its gates, proclaiming—no return that way to innocence. The natural religion, of which modern mystics are so fond, and modern peripatetics prattle, is not enough for him. It might possibly answer in the woods, unless this feeble pantheism would substitute artistic ecstacy for worship, and moonlight for the sun, that flashes down the glories of revelations; or in some solitary cell, though even there monk and hermit have often found the snare of impure imaginations spread too cunningly for it. But let the boy go to the shop, and the girl to school; let the young man travel to the city, and the young woman lend her ears to the flatteries of that silver-tongued sorceress, Society; and all this natural piety is like a silken thread held over a blazing furnace. We may put ourselves at ease, fancy we shall fare well enough under so kind a Father; come out comfortably at last; there is such tender pity in the skies. But the dispelling of that delusion will be the sharp word out of the throne of judgment—“Depart from me, I never knew you.” No Babel of refuge will be built to the top. No friendly intervention will avert the perdition of the Sodom in the heart. No Tamar of custom will cajole with her coquetry the ancient and everlasting justice. No thrifty leagues of a low commercial instinct, postponing conscience to the arithmetic of traffic—no corrupt political majorities, subscribing patriotic manifestoes as stock for party or private dividends, though they be as eleven against one, and though they piously profess to be sons of Israel by church subscriptions, shall buy national prosperity by their brother Joseph’s blood.
There is often a vague assumption that certain principles of natural right, evolved and compacted by ethical science, might save our social state. But, remember that society, without Christ, in its philosophy, its literature, its art, its morals, obeyed a law of deterioration and decay. Without him, it would have been sinking still. Instead of the Christian justice that hangs its balances over our seats of lawful trade to-day, we should have not even Punic faith; but something more treacherous than that—not even the hesitating Roman honesty, but a zone of restraint more dissolute than the Corinthian, and principles looser than the Spartan’s. Instead of a respected merchant, or a steady mechanic, going out to his business to-morrow, amid a public order that Christ has organized, might have been seen a barbarian, with the concentrated falsity of a hundred Arabs, waking into a world convulsed with perpetual anarchy, or skulking away to transact his base affairs in a worse than Circassian mart. We may baptize the interesting displays of our intermittent virtue with a Christian name; but they may yet contain no quality of Christ’s peculiar sanctity. They may leave human life quite untouched by that unrivaled glory, however bright their transient beam. They are not redolent of the New Testament. Their uprightness does not bear the sanction of the Sermon on the Mount. Their slender rectitude is not the principle that treats men justly because they are God’s children, which was the law of Christ’s great honesty. Their kindness is not the sweet charity of the beatitudes. Their moderation is not guarded by those majestic warders, reverence for God, and a Savior’s love. Nor is their worship, if they adore at all, fervent with the prayers of Olivet and Gethsemane.