Every one is sensible of a change in the whole climate of thought and feeling, the moment he crosses any part of the boundary which divides Christian civilization from Heathendom; yet of nothing is it more difficult to render any compendious account. It is easy to enumerate in detail the phenomena which are modified or disappear; just as on entering a new physical region the travelling naturalist may register the new species of plants and animals, that, one after another, present themselves to his research. But these do not paint the scene before even the learned eye; they are the separate out-comings of a great life-thrill, into whose current their roots penetrate; the landscape, as a whole, speaks differently to the mind, and the whole heaven and earth seem pregnant with a thought unfelt before. To read off that thought, requires an apprehension the converse of the analytic vision of science. The same difficulty occurs when we endeavor to seize the latent principle of a natural realm of history. Such principle, however, there must be. Beneath all the moving tides of Christian thought there lie still depths that supply them all, and a centre of equilibrium around which they sweep. We believe that the fundamental idea of Christendom may be described to be the ascent through Conscience into communion with God. Other religions have lent their sanctions to morality, and announced the Divine commands to the human will; but only as the laws of an outward monarch within whose sovereignty we lie, and who, ruling in virtue of his almightiness, has a right to obedience, ordain as he will. Other religions, again, have aimed at a union with God. But the conditions of this union, dictated by misleading conceptions of the Divine nature, have missed on every side the true level of human dignity and peace. Manichæism, deifying the antithesis of matter, takes the path of ascetic suppression of the body. The Indian Pantheist, imagining the Divine Abyss as the realm of night and infinite negation, strives to hold in the breath and sink into self-annulment. Plato, seeing in God the essence of thought, demands science and beauty, not less than goodness, as the needful notes of harmony with him, and appoints the approach to heaven by academic ways. The modern Quietists, worshipping a Being too much the reflection of their own tenderness, have lost themselves in soft affections, relaxing to the nerves of duty, and unseemly in the face of eternal law. Christianity alone has neither crushed the soul by mere submission, like Mohammedanism; nor melted it away in the tides of infinite being, like Pantheistic faiths; but has saved the good of both, by establishing the union with God through a free act of the individual soul. Assigning to him a transcendent moral nature, sensitive to the same distinctions, conservative of the same solemnities, which awe and kindle us, it singles out the conscience as the field where we are to meet him,—where the bridge will be found of transit between the human and the divine. No fear or servility remains with an obedience consisting, not in mystic acts and artificial habits, but in the free play of natural goodness; and rendered, not in homage to a Supreme Autocrat, but in sympathy with a Mind itself the infinite impersonation of all the sanctities. Nor are any dizzy and perilous flights incurred by a devotion which meets its great Inspirer in no foreign heaven, but in the higher walks of this home life, and misses him only in what is mean and low. The place assigned in Christianity to the moral sentiments and affections has no parallel in any other religion. The whole faith is as an unutterable sigh after an ideal perfection. Holiness eternal in heaven, incarnate on earth, and to be realized in men,—this is the circle of conceptions in which it moves. Its very name for the Inspiration which mediates all its work, expresses the same thing. It is not simply an ενθουσιασμος,—not μανια,—not βακχεια,—but the πνευμα ἁγιον. The Dæmon of Socrates—the least heathenish of heathen men—was but an intellectual guide, and checked his erring judgment; the Holy Spirit guards the vigils of duty, and succors the disciple's tempted will. This profound sense of interior amity with God through faithfulness to our highest possibility, appears in the Christian Scriptures under two forms,—the positive and the negative,—each the complement of the other. In the Gospel, Jesus himself, as befits the saintly mind lifted above the strife of passion, describes the aspiration after goodness as the native guidance of the soul to her source and refuge. In the Epistles, Paul, pouring forth the confessions of a fiery nature, proclaims the sense of sin to be the contracted hinderance that bars the ascent, and against which the wings of the struggling will beat only to grow faint. These representations are evidently but the two sides of the same doctrine seen from the heavenly and from the earthly position. Whether we are told what the good heart will find, or what the guilty must lose, the lesson equally recognizes the Divine authority of conscience. The benediction and the curse are but the bright and the dark hemisphere of one perfect truth. The Apostle, standing in the shadow of the world's night, and regarding its averted face, dwells on the gloom of alienation,—the "foolish heart that is darkened,"—the "reprobate mind" from which God is hid. Christ, conscious of the holy light, and knowing how it penetrates the folds of willing natures, and wakes what else would sleep, speaks rather of the glory that is not denied, and utters that deepest of blessings,—"The pure in heart shall see God." To this bright side also the Pauline view in the end comes round. For though in him we miss that recognition of a natural human goodness which gives such grace and sweetness to many of the parables; though in his scheme the human will has not only betrayed its trust, but hopelessly crippled its powers; yet he does not leave it in the collapse of paralysis, with the hard saying that it can in no wise lift up itself, but points to a hope that bends over it from above. The soul that is too far gone to act, may still be capable of love; if unable to trust itself, it may trust another; if it cannot command its volitions, it may surrender its affections; can reverence, can aspire, can yield its hand, like a child, to an angel of deliverance. Beyond the precincts of this world is an Image of divine excellence and beauty,—one recently withdrawn from human history, and soon to have a more august return. It is but to turn the eye and give the heart to that ideal and immortal perfection, and in the light of so pure a love, the clouds will clear from the conscience, and lift themselves as a nightmare away; the lame will, forgetting its infirmities, will spring up and walk; and the restoration, impossible by flight from deformity and ill, will come through the attraction of a Divine sanctity and goodness. Thus does the Apostle snatch the disciple at last into the right perceptions which Christ assumes to be possible at first; and in both its primitive developments the Christian religion implies the communion of man with God through purity of heart.
To this sentiment, conveyed with living realization in the person of Jesus Christ, may be referred whatever is distinctively great in Christian ethics. Proposing, as an end within their reach, the ascent of the soul to a divine life, and as the means, a simple surrender to its own highest intimations, they have melted away the interval between earthly and heavenly natures,—not by humanizing God, but by consecrating man. In treating the lower desires of sense and self as the steams that intercept, the tender reverences as the clear air that transmits, the light of lights, they have struck the deepest truth of human consciousness. Hence the temper of aspiration,—the earnest ideality,—the sense of infinite want, with faith in infinite possibilities,—the sorrowful unrest in the present, with irrepressible struggle for a better future,—which are impressed on the poetry, the art, the social life of Christendom. Unlike the expression of the Hellenic mind, they are rather a prayer for what might be, than a joy in what is. Hence, too, the predominance of the psychological and subjective element in the philosophy of modern times, and the conversion of the ancient "metaphysics" into the form of "mental science." Man would never have ceased to be merged in nature, and registered merely as a part of its contents; his self-knowledge would not have vindicated its independent rights; his mind would not have been recognized as the court of record for the moral legislation of the universe,—had not his religion taken him deep into himself, and from a new point shown him his relation to all else; kindling his own consciousness to a point of intense brilliancy, in correspondence with a divine centre, which must be sought on the same axis of being,—like the two determining foci of an infinite curve, that find each other out, while the realm of determined nature lies around, as the configured area, or the bounding curve. Of the external world, indeed, too little account has been made in the faith of Christians. They have not cared to recognize it as the shrine of immanent Deity;—have stood in uneasy relations to it; often inimical to it; sometimes trying to get rid of it as an illusion; usually regarding it as a foreign object, like a great statue on the stage of being, with only stony eyes and ears for the real play of passions that whirl around. Existence, in its essence, has been felt as an interview between man and God, at which space and nature have been collaterally present, but in which it was not apparent what they had to do. Physical science and the plastic arts may have reason to complain of the depressing influence of this imperfect view, and of the hard necessity under which it places them of pursuing their ends with only scanty and grudging recognition from religion. But, for the philosophic knowledge of human nature, and the practical regulation of human society, this isolation of the soul within its own consciousness,—this concentrated personality,—this vivid interchange of life with God without diffusion through benumbing media,—must be held eminently ennobling.
If, from the fundamental Christian sentiment, we descend to the scheme of Applied Morals which it organized and inspired, the principle still vindicates itself in its results. The great problems of life are supplied from two sources,—the Persons that may engage our affections, and the Pursuits that may invite our will. The light in which the personal relations are presented before the eye of Christendom is undeniably benign and true. It has never been obscured without the social spread of injustice and discontent; nor ever cleared again, but as the precursor of reformation. That every human soul has its sacred concerns and its divine communion, is the simplest of thoughts; but so deep and moving, that, where it is received and acknowledged, it calls up angelic virtues; where it is insulted and denied, it lets slip avenging fiends. Wherever it is sincerely held, it secures that reverential feeling towards others, beneath whose spell the selfish passions sleep, and without which the precept of courtesy and the definition of rights are an ineffectual form. Power loses its insolence, and dependence its sting, where their mutual relation does not carry the whole individuality with it, but stops with the limits of social and political convenience, and lies under the restraining protection of a supreme equality before God. The "Fraternity" that is the offspring of political theories, and aims to neutralize by fellow-citizenship the diversities and antipathies of nature, is often the watchword of envy and egotism, shouted by the voice of hatred, and announcing the deed of violence. It is for want of faith in that highest brotherhood of worship and responsibility which Christianity assumes, that impatient schemes are formed for artificially equalizing the weak and the strong, and abolishing the relations of necessary dependence. Nor, where that faith is absent, can they ever be answered so as to satisfy the feeling from which they spring. They may be shown to be impracticable, and crushed by the relentless argument of fact; but the fact will be protested against as unnatural, and the impossibility will seem a cruelty. How differently is this topic handled by the logic of science and the sentiment of religion! How much less justly does the former draw the line between natural subordination among men and tyrannous oppression, than the latter! Aristotle undertakes the defence of slavery on grounds both of philosophy and of experience. Nature, he contends, pursuing a definite end in every act of creation, assigns to some things, from their very origin, a destiny to rule, while imposing on others a necessity of being ruled. Wherever a plurality of parts concur to form a general whole, dominant and subordinate elements present themselves. Even within the inanimate realm this is apparent, as in the case of harmony in music. But it is chiefly conspicuous in the sphere of animal existence; the body being, by nature, servitor, of which the soul is lord. In the highest stage of animate being, the constitution of well-organized men, this law comes into the clearest light; for here the soul sways the body with absolute command, while reason exercises over the passions the prerogatives of a royal and constitutional power; and were equality to be substituted for these modes of subjection, mischief would ensue on all sides. Not less evidently does Nature announce the dependence of inferior on superior in the rank allotted to the brutes in relation to man; and again, in the case of the two sexes, of which the male, as the more distinguished, is rendered dominant. The same necessary law adjusts the positions of mankind inter se. All those who are as intrinsically inferior to their neighbors as the body to the soul, or the brute to the man,—(and this is precisely the case of the mere manual laborer,)—are slaves by nature; and for them, as for the body and the brutes, it is better to be servile than to be free. Any man who can be made property of by another, and who is competent to understand a master's intelligence without a spontaneous stock of his own, is naturally a slave. Such a one performs functions in the world not essentially distinguished from those of the domestic animals; the destiny of both is to contribute their corporeal energies to the service of society; and creatures fit for this alone are brought into the slave-market by Nature herself. Consistently with this conception of the laborer as a living tool (δουλος εμψυχον οργανον), Aristotle lays it down that the relation of master and slave admits no rights, and excludes friendship. To our modern worshippers of strength, this will appear commendable doctrine, very much because they have themselves relapsed into the old Hellenic way of studying the problems of the universe; descending, in the Pantheistic method, from the whole upon the parts; fetching rules from the wider sphere (therefore the lower) to import into the narrower; entering the human world from the physical,—the οικουμενη from the κοσμος; approaching society as a specialty superinduced on a groundwork of nomadic barbarism; and determining the functions of the individual as member of the vital organism of the state. So long as this logical strategy is allowed, the Titans will always conquer the gods; the ground-forces of the lowest nature will propagate themselves, pulse after pulse, from the abysses to the skies; and right will exist only on sufferance from might. But there is a heaven, after all, which the most trenchant giant cannot storm, and where justice and sanctity reserve a quiet throne. Without disputing the inequality of gifts and consequent law of natural ranks, religion qualifies it by an addition which overarches and absorbs it. Were man only the choicest, most intelligent, most gregarious of the mammalia,—were the theory of his affairs a mere extension of natural history,—we might reasonably discuss, in Aristotle's way, the conditions under which he may fitly be put in harness. But there is in him an element that takes him beyond the range of a Pliny or a Cuvier, that lifts him out of the kingdom of nature and gives him kindred with the preternatural and divine. He is not simply an instrument for achieving a given fraction of a universal end, but has a sacred trust which, on its own account, he is empowered and commissioned to discharge. He is watched by the eyes of infinite Pity and Affection, braced for his faithful work, succored in his fierce temptations. The conditions of dutiful, loving, noble life must be preserved to him. Let his task, indeed, be suited to his powers; and if he cannot rule, by all means let him serve; but still with a margin and play of spiritual freedom secure from encroachment and contempt. Those on whom Heaven lays the burden of duty no power on earth may strip of rights. The conscience with which the Highest can commune, the spirit which is not too mean for His abode, can be no object of slight and scorn from men. By law and usage you may have the disposal of another's lot and labor; but in the reality of things the lord of a province may be less than the conqueror of a temptation. You may be Greek, and he barbarian; but in the heraldry of the universe, the blood of Agamemnon is less noble than the spirit of a saint. In thus snatching the individual, as bearer of a holy trust, from the crush of nature and the world, Christianity became the first human religion,—that absolutely took no notice of race and sex and class. It created a new order of inalienable rights, neither the heritage of birth, nor the franchise of a state, but inherent in the moral capabilities of a man. The free opening of sanctity and immortality to every willing heart could not fail to exercise an intense influence on the better portion of a world, like the declining empire of Rome, sickened with corruption and confused with unmanageable oppressions. That it did so, is proved by the whole tenor of the early Christian literature; and the effect is well described and accounted for by the writer "On the State of Man subsequent to the Promulgation of Christianity."
"The mockery of adoring as gods the licentious tyrants who had occupied the imperial throne, seems to have put an end to everything like religious feeling among the nations under the sway of Rome. The free satire of Lucianus shows how completely it had faded away, for it introduces the gods of Olympus complaining that they were starving for lack of offerings; not altogether because Christian or philosophic doctrines prevailed widely, but rather on account of the total indifference of the people to their ancient mythology; for even if it ever had symbolized the truth, its meaning was now forgotten; and, even so far back as the time of Cicero, had become totally unintelligible to the learned, as well as to the multitude. It was useless, therefore, and wanted but a slight impulse from without to overthrow it. But to the philosopher who was in earnest in his pursuit of this truth, buried under the rubbish of time, the doctrine of Christ afforded it; there he found all that the master minds whom he honored had taught and hoped; but he found it simplified, purified, and confirmed by sanctions such as Plato had wished for, but scarcely dared to expect;—to the Roman patrician, if any there were who still looked back with fond memory to the purer morals and stern courage of his forefathers, the Christian simplicity of manners and firm endurance of torture and death was the realization of what he had heard of and admired, but scarcely seen till then;—to the slave, sighing under oppression and condemned to homeless bondage, the doctrine of the Gospel gave all that was valuable in life; the Christian slave was the friend of his Christian master, partook of the same holy feast, shared the same painful but glorious martyrdom; he was raised at once to all his intellectual rank, found freedom beyond the grave, and lived already in a happy immortality;—to the woman, degraded in her own eyes no less than in those of the tyrant to whose lusts she was the slave, it offered a restoration to all that is most dear to the human race; it offered intellectual dignity, equality before God, purity, holiness. The Christian woman could die; she could not, therefore, unless consenting to it, be again enslaved to the vile passions of men; before God she was free, and with Him she trusted to find shelter when the hard world left her none. Can we wonder, then, that Christianity found votaries wherever a mind existed that sighed after better things? for the preacher of Nazareth had at last expressed the thought which had been brooding in the minds of so many, who had found themselves unable to give it utterance."—p. 55.
Nor was it merely within the pale of the Christian fraternity that relations of mutual reverence and tenderness attested the power of an ennobling faith. Intensity of internal combination is often balanced, in religious brotherhoods, by vehemence of external repugnance; and were we to accept the fiery declamation of Tertullian as fairly expressing the spirit of his fellow-believers, we could ill defend them from the charge of fierce antipathy to the persons as well as the creed of their Pagan neighbors. But many silent mercies appear which contradict this loud intolerance. When the Decian persecution and its attendant tumultuary movements had filled Alexandria with such slaughter as to breed pestilence from the bodies of the dead, the Christians, instead of sullenly permitting the physical calamity to avenge their cause, assumed the duties of public nurses, and performed the loathsome tasks from which priests and magistrates had fled. Referring to this occasion, the author just cited says:—
"The plague made its appearance with tremendous violence, and desolated the city, so that, as Dionysius, the Christian bishop, writes, there were not so many inhabitants left of all ages, as heretofore could be numbered between forty and seventy. In this emergency the persecuted Christians forgot all but their Lord's precept, and were unwearied in their attendance on the sick; many perishing in the performance of this duty by taking the infection. 'In this way,' says the bishop, with touching simplicity, 'the best of the brethren departed this life; some ministers, and some deacons,' the heathens having abandoned their friends and relations to the care of the very persons whom they had been accustomed to call 'Men-haters.' A like noble self-devotion was shown at Carthage when the pestilence which had desolated Alexandria made its appearance in that city, and, I quote the words of a contemporary, 'All fled in horror from the contagion, abandoning their relations and friends as if they thought that by avoiding the plague any one might also exclude death altogether. Meanwhile the city was strewed with the bodies, or rather carcasses of the dead, which seemed to call for pity from the passers-by, who might themselves so soon share the same fate; but no one cared for anything but miserable pelf; no one trembled at the consideration of what might so soon befall him in his turn; no one did for another what he would have wished others to do for him. The bishop hereupon called together his flock, and setting before them the example and teaching of their Lord, called on them to act up to it. He said, that if they took care only of their own people, they did but what the commonest feeling would dictate; the servant of Christ must do more; he must love his enemies, and pray for his persecutors; for God made his sun to rise and his rain to fall on all alike, and he who would be the child of God must imitate his Father.' The people responded to his appeal; they formed themselves into classes, and those whose poverty prevented them from doing more gave their personal attendance, while those who had property aided yet further. No one quitted his post but with his life."—p. 162.
This self-devotion in times of distress, strangely contrasting with habits and temper apparently unsocial, has too steadily reappeared in every earnest church not to be accepted as a Christian characteristic. During the fatal famine and epidemic which desolated Antioch in the third century, the Pagan governor, when urged by the inhabitants to make authoritative arrangements for relieving the sufferings of a perishing populace, replied that "The gods hated the poor"; while the Christians, prevailingly poor themselves, plunged into the centre of the danger, and carried into the recesses of fever and despair the quiet presence of help and hope. If disciples have thus freely rendered to "those without" services which Pagans refused to one another, it is not simply in stiff obedience to a precept of love to their enemies, but from a heart-felt sentiment of honor for human nature and consequent tenderness of human life. There was no man who, though he might be a persecutor to-day, might not be a comrade to-morrow; he had a soul susceptible of consecration; and day and night the gates of the Church were ready to fly open to the touch of penitence; and whether he throws off the mask of delusion or not, he must be treated as a brother in disguise. Only by reference to this conception of all men as possible subjects of sanctifying change, can the fact be explained, that even where the creed has opened an infinite gulf between believer and unbeliever, the active charities have detained in lingering embrace the persons whom the theoretic fancy has flung into the ultimate horrors. A religion that is superior to the external distinctions of lineage and class, and draws its lines only by the invisible coloring of souls, must ever be a religion open to hope, and therefore apt to love. Even where the severest doctrine of exclusion has prevailed, the fundamental sentiment of Christian faith has saved the heart from the most withering of all passions,—the blight of scorn. Human nature may appear beneath the eye of an austere believer in an awful, but never in a contemptible light. The very crisis in which it is suspended can belong to no mean existence. What it has lost is too great a glory, what it has incurred is too deep a terror, to be conceivable except of a being on a grand scale. He is no worm for whom the eternal abysses are built as a dungeon and the lightnings are brandished as a scourge. Accordingly, the very alienations of intolerance itself have acquired a higher and more respectful character than in ancient faiths. The sort of feeling with which the Jew spurned "the Gentile dog" is sanctioned by piety no more. The Oriental curl of the lip is scarcely traceable on the features of Christendom; and is replaced by an expression of tragic sorrow and earnestness, where lights of admiring pity flash through the darkest clouds.
It seems, then, that the essential sentiment of all Christian faith—the communion through conscience with God—carries with it, not only noble personal aspirations, but also, towards others, affections of singular generosity and depth; affections which demand for every man a position in which he may work out the moral problem of life, which dignify every lot where this is possible, and which soften even actual alienations with possible reverence and hope. The sphere of action which these feelings may shape for themselves, the particular enterprises they may undertake, the external pursuits they may assume, will necessarily depend on many foreign and accidental conditions. The work which it would fall to the hands of the same faithful man to do, if he lived on through the changes of the world, would greatly vary from age to age. The work which contemporary men, of equal and similar fidelity, will set themselves to accomplish, will vary with their several positions. The same act, or even habit, which is innocent (though possibly not innocuous) in one place, may assume quite an altered significance in another. It would be absurd, for instance, to set down the double marriages of patriarchal times in the same moral rank with modern cases of bigamy. And the doctrine of Plato's Republic respecting marriage, startling as a comment on the manners of his age, by no means expresses the odious state of mind which would be implied in its substitution now for the sanctities of private life. The devotion to studious and peaceful acts which may usually be either blameless or laudable, may become a guilt like treason in an hour when the interests of public liberty claim every citizen for the council or the field. Indeed, the conduct in such contrasted instances is in no proper sense the same; it has only an external identity; it is a physical self-repetition, with a moral contrariety; and unless, in speaking of a human action, we mean to shut out the soul which makes it human, and to denote only the muscular flourish and spasm of limb, the sameness is but a semblance with a reality of difference. The moral values of actions, taken in this narrowest sense, are inevitably variable; and any code that should present a list of them as obligatory in perpetuity, without regard to the changes of their meaning to the mind, would mistake the very nature of human duty. Not that we deny the existence of permanent grounds for the adoption of some habits and the avoidance of others. There are reasons, unchangeable as the corporeal frame of man, why opium should not be taken as an article of food, and why cousins should not intermarry. But the grounds of prohibition in these cases are rational, not moral; they are found in the outward effects, not in the inward sources, of conduct; and only when its outward effects are known to the agent, so as to enter among its inward sources and modify its meaning, does he pass from unwise to immoral. External action, in short, stands as an indifferent phenomenon, between the mind that issues it and the world into which it goes. The thought and affection whence it springs in the former give its moral, the results to which it tends in the latter its rational value. Whoever makes a correct estimate of the several affections and impulses which stir the will, and throughout their scale reveres the better and disapproves the worse, possesses moral truth. Whoever perceives and computes the real consequences of voluntary conduct, possesses rational discernment in human affairs. The former—an interpretation of the conscience and its sacred contents—is the permanent essence of ethical and root of religious wisdom. The latter—an apprehension of physical laws and historical tendencies—is conditioned by the progress of science and the facilities for social vaticination. Errors in this are inevitable to the limitations of human intellect. Perfection in that is possible only to the highest divine insight in the soul. The fallible judgment respecting outward relations affects only the accidents of morals, though the essence of scientific truth. Where the inner apprehension is deep and true, the outward judgment contains a principle of self-correction; the miscalculation of one age is checked by that of a succeeding; opposite errors cancel each other; and the spirit of a pure faith, like a just feeling of beauty and greatness in art, works itself clear of the false data of usage amid which its inspiration arose, and transmigrates into ever-improving forms. If, however, the reverence due to the inspiration should become a traditional affair, losing its living eye and spiritual tact, it will extend itself as a moping idolatry to the imperfect media and rude materials through which the new glory first gleamed; an incapable era of renaissance will appear; the very works which were given as the spring of ever-fresh creation will be used to stifle it; in servile imitation of an original period, its whole character will be lost, and the moment of exactest reproduction will be that of intensest contrast.
This is precisely the way in which the spiritual life of the primitive Christians has been dealt with. The thought and meaning that lay at its heart are little apprehended; its applied morals, in which these are mixed up with the errors incident to their point of view, are distorted into a rigid code of obligation, in which the original idea is often entirely reversed. If it be really true that the Apostolic age was impressed with the belief of a speedy end of the world, such an outlook must undeniably have affected the disciples' whole estimate of the value of human pursuits. The plan of life commendable in a passage-ship may be questionable in a settled home; and the proceedings of an army on the eve of battle are not like the habits of the same people tilling their fields and sitting at their hearths. To apply to a permanently constituted planet the rules promulgated to preserve discipline amid a general breaking-up, is surely an eccentric kind of legislation. Yet by just such a process have modern churches derived a number of ethical extravagances offensive to the eye of chastened conscience, and condemned by their impracticability to the insincere existence of perpetual talk. The manner in which English divines conduct themselves towards this error of the first century appears to us not simple and ingenuous. Some still affect to deny it, and to treat its reiterated assertion as a mere perverseness and impudence of heresy; yet they leave the statement without serious refutation, though well aware that the weight of critical authority is altogether in its favor, and though avowing their own theory of revelation absolutely to require that it be false. Others incidentally and grudgingly admit it, and then pass on as if nothing had happened; immediately relapsing into the same authoritative appeal to Scripture, the same direct and mechanical use of its precepts, the same assumption of it as an instrument yielding on interpretation nothing but truth, which had been habitual with them before their eyes were opened. Now, if anything be certain on such a matter, it is that to suppose one's self in the world's last year,—the admission paid to the panorama of judgment and the spectacle only waiting to begin,—is no small and sleepy idea, which might ineffectually turn up now and then, and sink back below the surface without further trace. A man who could live in presence of such a vision, and not carry its crimsoned light upon every object that fixed his eye, could be no apostle of truth or preacher of earnestness; nor do we know that anything more contemptuous could be said of him than that, no doubt, he held such an expectation, but it was of no consequence. To convert the author of the Pauline Epistles into a dilettante believer of the pattern of the nineteenth century, and say of his most tremendous gleams of thought that they were but transitory fireworks which meant nothing, is no less an offence against his character than a misunderstanding of his writings; and we conceive that, in affirming the deep penetration of his mistaken world-view into the substance of his monitory teaching, we shall be vindicating the fundamental veracity and noble clearness of his soul.
To exhibit the Christology of the Apostles with the fulness necessary for tracing pseudo-Christian morality to its origin, would require a volume. We can only advert to one or two points, indicating the direction which such an inquiry would take. It is admitted on all hands, that a second advent of Christ is announced in almost every book of the New Testament; that, if we except the Gospel of John, it is spoken of invariably as a real, personal return, an objective and scenic event, to be seen, heard, and felt; and cannot be explained away into a spiritual access to the world, or a subjective drama in the soul of disciples. It is further admitted, that with this advent are integrally connected many incidents which, however difficult to group into a complete picture, constitute, under every variety of possible arrangement, a final consummation of human affairs. Indeed, the article in the Creed which declares that Christ "shall come to judge the quick and the dead, and at his coming all men shall rise again with their bodies and shall give account for their own works," shows how the Church understands the doctrine, and conjoins the end of the world with the advent. The nature of the event being so far undisputed, the question which separates the mass of scientific interpreters from the popular expounder, refers only to its date. The Apostle Paul, it is urged by the critics, writes to his Thessalonian converts, in answer to a distressing doubt which could have no existence but in minds on the watch for the return of Christ; and his answer, far from checking this outlook, raised it to such intensity that, to soothe their excitement, he wrote to them again to remove the event from the immediate foreground of their imagination; yet even then detained it quite within the limits of their natural lives, and, simply interposing one or two signals of its approach that had not yet appeared, counselled them not to lose their composure, but maintain a "patient waiting for Christ." The original doubt which had disturbed them seems to have been one instructively characteristic of the early theocratic faith. Some member of the community had died; his friends, in addition to their natural sorrow, were apparently taken by surprise, that, after enrolment among the citizens of the approaching kingdom, he was taken from their side, and would not be with them when they hailed the arrival of Christ. What would become of him? They thought he would have to remain in his sleep till Messiah should exercise his function of raising the dead, which was not to be at first; and so, during the great crisis, and for an uncertain continuance beyond, he would linger behind the privilege which they enjoyed. This seems, at first sight, a strange subject of distress. That the second advent should take place in the presence of the living only, and should leave the dead without part or lot in the matter, is so completely at variance with the picture which has become fixed in the common Christian imagination, that scruples may readily be felt about attributing so mutilated a conception to the Thessalonian church. The commonly received picture, however, is made up of elements incongruously brought together from several Scripture writers, to whom the expected event presented itself under different aspects; and nowhere can they be found combined into such a whole as the ecclesiastical faith represents. To understand and account for the Thessalonian state of mind, we have only to read over the 24th and 25th chapters of St. Matthew, and to surrender ourselves to the images there presented, without adding anything of our own. These chapters contain the fullest description of the advent, the last judgment, and the end of the world, that can be found in Scripture; yet the dead are not brought upon the scene at all, nor is any resurrection found among its elements. The whole idea is evidently of a return of the Son of Man, within the limits of a generation, to take account, in his theocratic capacity, of the very persons who had known him in his Galilean humiliation and disguise,—of those who, having joined him in his days of trial, had been intrusted by him with the administration in the interval of his heavenly absence,—and of those who, after rejecting him personally, had hardened themselves no less against the preaching and overtures of his subsequent ambassadors. The nations gathered before him are furnished from the surviving population of the earth; and the ground of their admittance or rejection is the reception they have given to Messiah in the persons of his missionaries and representatives. In supposing the dead to have lost their chance of participating in this scene, the Thessalonians did but paint it to themselves as Christ, according to the first Gospel, had described it to his hearers. Their misgiving plainly assumes that the advent was sure for the living and was lost for the dead. The Apostle answers by denying the distinction, and putting both classes into the same condition ere the great hour strikes: but what condition? Does he say that the living will die first? No; but that the dead will live first: so that the departed companion will come back at the right moment for mingling with the troop of friends that shall go "to meet the Lord in the air." The same order of events is given in the sublime, but little understood, chapter on the resurrection in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, where the Apostle places himself, at the advent, not among "the dead" that "shall be raised incorruptible," but among the survivors that "shall be changed" into immortals without ever quitting life. It is a topic of praise to the disciples at Corinth that they are "waiting for the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ." He assures his Philippian friends that "the Lord is at hand," and prays that they may "be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ." Having come out safe from his examination and hearing at Rome, he avows his persuasion that he will be similarly delivered "from every evil work," and preserved unto Christ's heavenly kingdom. Though amid his toils and weariness he earnestly desired to be endowed with his immortal frame,—to be invested, as he expresses it, with his house from above; yet he was unwilling to put off the corruptible, till he could put on the incorruptible; he would have his mortality "swallowed up of life"; he did not wish the great hour to find him naked, but clothed, not, that is, a disembodied spirit, but a living man. He stands at the era on which "the end of the world has come"; and begs his correspondents to let certain existing disputes lie over, and to "judge nothing before the time until the Lord come." Not less explicit evidence is afforded in the writings of other Apostles. James says, "The coming of the Lord draweth nigh; ... behold, the Judge standeth before the door." Peter, "The end of all things is at hand." John, "Children, it is the last time; and as ye have heard that Antichrist shall come, even now are there many Antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time." If the author of Christianity did not himself entertain the same expectation of an early return to assume his Messianic prerogatives, he has been greatly misrepresented by his biographers. For though one of them represents him as disclaiming a knowledge of the specific "day and hour" appointed for his "coming in the clouds with great power and glory," the disclaimer follows immediately on his announcement, that at all events it will take place within the existing generation. Does any reader doubt whether this "coming in the clouds" really describes the judgment? or whether "this generation" denotes the natural term of human life? Both questions are answered at once in Matthew's report of a single sentence, which simultaneously defines the event and its date: "For the Son of Man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." It is certainly possible enough that the discourses in which these expressions occur may be incorrectly reported, and have acquired from the writer's state of mind a definiteness not belonging to the original production. But, at any rate, they reveal the historian's conception of what was in Jesus's thought; and the false coloring of expectation which they threw over his prophecies could not fail to extend in their reports to his preceptive discourses, and thus to have almost the same influence on the recorded Christian ethics, as if the error were his as well as theirs.