[Footnote 6: Matthew x. 28.]
[Footnote 7: Mark xvi. 15.]
The dominant idea in the Gospels is the infinite worth of the human soul, of every human soul. Jesus came to influence and to save souls, all souls without exception,—souls of the powerful and of the obscure, of the rich and poor, learned and ignorant, happy or afflicted. The condition and the salvation of souls is the foundation of the Christian Religion.
The human soul is no mere word, no mere abstraction, no mere hypothesis; the soul is the human being himself, the individual being who feels and thinks, enjoys and suffers, wills and acts, who observes and knows himself, in the complexity of his actual condition, and to whom his destiny in remote futurity is an object of present solicitude. To those who confound soul and body, and see in man only a product, an ephemeral form of matter, I have nothing to say. What have they to do with the words of the Gospel—with the immense value attached to a fugitive shadow, deceived according to them as to its own reality, and only appearing to lose itself forthwith in nonentity? It is Spiritualists and Christians who speak with propriety when they discourse in grand and elevated tones of the human soul; and if they so discourse it is because they see in every human soul a true being, a real and individual man, with the grandeur of man's nature and of man's destiny. What constitutes the essential worth of the human being, of every human being, is, that he is free to act or not to act, and that he is morally responsible how he acts. Man believes essentially in the distinction of moral good and evil and in the obligation which this entails; he believes that he is at liberty to act up to it or not as he pleases, that he is responsible for the use which he makes of his liberty. It is because such is the nature of man, whether his own conduct is in conformity to it or not, that the Gospel exalts man so nigh, and accords to him so sublime a destiny. Philosophers, Christian and anti-Christian too, have made great efforts, in my opinion ill-judged efforts, to solve the problem of man's liberty in relation to God's prescience; the Gospel recognises and proclaims human liberty without troubling itself about the problem of philosophy. The Christian Religion entirely rests upon the fact which it assumes, that man is a free and responsible being. Man's liberty is the point from which Christianity starts in all that she says to humanity, and in every command that she gives to humanity.
Christianity, then, is essentially liberal, in favour of all men, and of them as men; by her elementary and fundamental idea of man's nature, she founds his liberty upon the most solid basis and the broadest right that human thought can conceive. The most daring of the writers on public law never carried to so high a point as the Gospel has done either the native universal dignity of man's nature or the consequences derivable from this fact.
Christianity does not confine itself to this;—after having laid down the principle of Liberty, it gives to it the practical sanction which Liberty requires: it establishes the right of resistance to oppression. The priests and the chiefs of the synagogue at Jerusalem "commanded them (Peter and John) not to speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus;" but Peter and John answered them and said unto them, "Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye." [Footnote 8]
[Footnote 8: Acts iv. 18,19.]
Having been again summoned before the high priest, who says to them, "Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach in this name?" Peter replies, "We ought to obey God rather than men." [Footnote 9]
[Footnote 9: Acts v. 28, 29.]
The multitude joins its acts of violence to the injunctions of the authorities. Stephen, the first Christian Deacon, avows his faith before the multitude, and falls the first martyr to the principle of Christian resistance. [Footnote 10]