Studies of Christianity; Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers

by James Martineau

The evidence on this point is so positive and overwhelming, that critics such as Olshausen, whose testimony is undoubtedly reluctant, no longer think of resisting it. Nothing, indeed, can be opposed to it but a kind of interpretation which is the opprobrium of English theology; and whose problem is, not simply to gather an author's thought from his words, but from among all true thoughts to find the one that will sit the least uneasily under his words. Thus "the end of all things" is explained away into the founding of the Christian Church; the "coming of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven," into the Jewish war under Titus; the last judgment, which "rewards every man according to his works," into the escape of the Christians and the slaughter of the Jewish zealots at the destruction of Jerusalem. No doubt, many good and well-instructed men have persuaded themselves that by such exegetical sleight of hand they could save Apostolic and other infallibility. We can only say, that when piety supplies the motive, and learning the means, for bewildering veracity of apprehension, two rich and noble endowments are spent in corrupting a nobler, which is the life of them both.

To the moral sentiments which should occupy the soul, it may make little difference how long the world is to last. But to the course of action which should engage the hand, it is a matter of primary moment. All human occupations rest on the assumption of permanence in the constitution of things; nor is it less true of a planet than of a farm, that mere tenants at will, unsecured by lease and even served already with notice to quit, will undertake no improvements, and will suffer the culture to decline to the lowest point. What profession could remain respectable if society had no future? What interest would attach to the administration of law, on behalf of property which was not worth six months' purchase, and life which, stripped of survivorship, had lost all sacredness to the affections? Who would sit down to study the Pharmacopœia on board a sinking ship? What zeal could be felt by the statesman or general in repelling from his country an injury that could never be repeated, or removing a grievance on the point of supernatural death? The fields would scarce be tilled which the angels with flaming sword might come to reap; or the vineyards be dressed in sight of him "who treadeth the wine-press alone." All the crafts of industry, all the adventures of commerce, are held together by a given element of time; and, when deprived of this, fall away into inanity. No one would build a house on ice melting with hidden fires; or freight ships over an ocean which earthquakes were to drain away; or fabricate silks and patent-leather for appearance at the last tribunal. And the loosened hold of these pursuits upon human zeal, so far from implying their exchange for anything higher and more spiritual, involves the direct reverse. They cannot be abandoned; the stern punctuality of hunger, the peremptoriness of instinctive or habitual want, compel their continuance; and Paul himself made sail-cloth for a world on its last voyage. But they are kept up only because there is no help for it; they sink into mere bread-trades; and are thrown back many stages from the tranquil human towards the grim cannibal level. All work in this world, no doubt, rests at bottom on the elementary animal requirements of our nature; but it is then most worthily performed, not when these requirements are most obtrusive, but when they are most withdrawn. It is the specific moral benefit which social organization confers upon man, that it enables him to retreat from the constant presence of sheer necessity, and stand at a sufficient distance from it to allow other and higher feelings to connect themselves with his industry. It is a lower thing to consult for the natural wants of primitive appetite, than for the artificial love of order, neatness, security, and beauty; and a craftsman works in a better spirit when earning some unnecessary gift for his wife or child, than when toiling for the bitter loaf that staves off starvation. An art prosecuted without pride in its ingenuity, without intellectual enlistment in its methods of skill, is degraded from an instrument of discipline into a prowling for food,—from a mode of life into a makeshift against death. To take away the future, therefore, from secular pursuits, is simply to draw off from them whatever redeems them from meanness; to plant them in greedy isolation, as mere personal necessities; and cut them off from the great human system which lends to them a color of nobleness and dignity. Among the early Christians this tendency was greatly checked by the fresh aims and employments which their religion created; and in devotion to which the more enthusiastic spirits found ample scope for their affections. The Church, subsisting like an intrenched camp in a hostile land, had to make sallies in all directions for rescue of the wandering, and for captives to the faith. An aggressive activity of compassion and conviction found tasks for the energies disengaged from secular pursuits; and the new relations into which their religious profession threw them towards the synagogue, the magistrate, the Pagan worshipper, supplied them with continual problems of conscience, severe, but wholesome to the mind. So peculiar, indeed, was their position, that, even if they had reckoned on a continuance of human affairs, they could hardly, perhaps, have mingled much with a world that drew them with such slender sympathies. Separated in ideas and affections, they must in any case have created a new and detached centre of social life. Still it is undeniable that their isolation was favored and exaggerated by their faith in an approaching end of all things; and that they withdrew from human interests, not simply because honorable contact with them was impossible, but because they were taught entire indifference to them as elements of a perishing system. Not only is no recognition given to the pursuit of art and letters, and the citizen's duty presented only on the passive side; but even the relations of domestic life are discouraged, and the slave is dissuaded from care about his liberty, on the express ground that it is not worth while, on the brink of a great catastrophe, to assume any new position, or commit the heart by new ties. The time is too short, the crisis too near, for the career of a free life, or the building of a human home. It is better for every one to continue as he is; and instead of waiting to have the world perish from him, to regard himself as already dead to the world. To stand impassive and alone, neutral to joy or sorrow, with soul intent on the future, and disengaged from impediments of the past, earnest to keep bright on its watch-tower the beacon of faith, but resolute to descend no more into the plain below, appeared to the Apostle Paul the highest wisdom. And how could it be otherwise? Seen from his point of view, all temporal claims sank into negation. The constitutions, the arts, the culture, of civilized nations were about to be superseded; and the Christians who had already retired from them needed no new ones to take their place, except such provisional arrangements as might serve during the world's brief respite. Equally natural and suitable to their conceived position were the non-resistance principles of the early disciples. What right could be worth contending for on the dawn of a great day of redress, when every wrong would be brought to its account? Who would carry a cause before Dikast or Proconsul to-day, when Eternal Justice was pledged to hear it to-morrow? Who refuse to resign to human coercion what a retributive Omnipotence would soon restore? When the great assizes of the universe are about to be opened, it were a poor thing for the suitors to begin fighting in the vestibule. In all these respects the practical code of the Apostolic age was inevitably influenced by the mistaken world-view prevalent in the Church. For the plaintiff, the hour was fixed when his suit would be called; for the slave, the emancipation-day was declared; and from him that bound himself in heart to the past, the past was about to be snatched away. The rules of action dictated by these notions are mere accidents of the first age,—correct deductions from a misconceived system of external relations. They are wholly dependent on this misconception, and have no necessary connection with the interior spirit, the characteristic sentiments and affections which distinguish Christianity as a religion. If the Apostles had lived on till their mistake had worn itself out, and they had discovered the permanence of the world,—had they postponed all writing of Scripture till this lesson of experience had been learned,—we apprehend that their scheme of applied morals would have been very different; a more genial recognition would have been given to natural human relations; the social facts of property and government, the private concerns of education and self-culture, the personal responsibilities of genius and intellect, would have been less slightingly dismissed, and reduced to clear moral order; and the sentences would have been greatly modified which now support the delusions of the improvident, the ascetic, the exclusive, and the non-resisting. Unhappily, Apostles do not live for ever, so that we are denied that chance; and successors of Apostles, though seldom scarce, are not a helpful race, being chiefly marks of an absent inspiration. The task, therefore, of applying the essential Christian sentiments to a permanent world,—though avowedly undertaken by the Roman Catholic Church,—remains unperformed; and instead of it we have, in the common Protestantism, a violent misapplication to human nature and all time of the accidents and errors of the first age, resulting, we fear, in a caricature injurious alike to that first age itself, and to all true apprehension of the nature and proportions of human duty.

Expressions abound in the literature of modern Christendom implying an antithesis between temporal and spiritual things, between morality and religion, between the world and God. No one can fail to observe that this antithesis, whether founded in reality or not, has become a social fact. There are two standards of judgment extant for the estimate of character and life; one set up in the pulpit, the other recognized in the forum and the street. The former gives the order in which we pretend, and perhaps ineffectually try, to admire men and things; the latter, that in which we do admire them. Under the influence of the one, the merchant or the country gentleman is professedly in love with the innocent improvidence of the ravens and the lilies; relapsing into the other, he sells all his cotton in expectation of a fall, or drains his farms for a rise of rent. On the Sunday, he applauds it as a saintly thing to present the patient cheek to the smiter; on the Monday, he listens with rapture to Kossuth's curse upon the house of Hapsburg, and the Magyar vow of resistance to the death. He assents when the Apostle John is held up to his veneration as the beloved disciple, but, if the truth were known, the Duke of Wellington is rather more to his mind. Supposing it all true that is said about the vanity of earthly pleasures and ostentations, he nevertheless lets his daughters send out next day invitations to a grand ball, and makes his house busy with dress-makers and cooks. He is accustomed to confess that in him there is no good thing, and that all his thoughts and works are only evil continually; yet he is pleased with himself that he has provided for the family of his gardener who was killed on the railway last week. In these and a thousand other forms may be noticed the competition between two coexisting and unreconciled standards, the relations between which are altogether confused and uneasy. Whoever is interested in following up the genealogy of ideas, and would search for the origin of this mixed and mischievous state of mind, must look first to the influence of Luther, and thence to the Pauline doctrine, which he improperly generalized and exaggerated. We will endeavor to trace the development of the sentiment in the opposite direction, from the ancient germ to the modern fruit.

Paul the Apostle proclaimed Faith to be the condition of regeneration and acceptance. To appreciate this message of his, we must remember two things;—namely, (1.) what it was from which men were to be rescued on these terms; (2.) what other conditions had been elsewhere insisted on instead of this, and were put aside by Paul in favor of this. Now enough has been said to show that what he feared for the world which he labored to convert was, primarily, exclusion from the theocratic empire which Messiah would return to erect; nor is it clear what ulterior consequences, if any, he conceived this exclusion to carry with it. This banishment was the negative of that "salvation" to which the disciples were called; and which consisted in their registration as qualified citizens of the kingdom for which the earth was about to be claimed. The picture before his mind was so far altogether Jewish; not at all the modern idea of heaven and hell,—spiritual regions to which individuals, one by one, pass after death for moral retribution; but a terrestrial scene, the winding up of history, affecting men in masses, and completing the purpose for which God had created this world. While, however, the thought of the Apostle's mind was national, the compass of his heart was human; and as the hour drew nigh, he felt that the future could not be closed upon the great Gentile world; that his own people were not so sublime a race as to have the issues of Providence all to themselves; that he must get rid of their conceited pedigrees, and let the Divine plan, which for a while had narrowed its original universality within the current of Hebrew history, flow out at its end into the full breadth of its first scope. But if so, a new qualification must be found; one open alike to Hebrew and to alien, yet nursing the pride of neither. These requisites are fulfilled in simple Faith, which, as a catholic possibility of every human heart, Paul substitutes for prescriptive rights and untenable merits. It was the only condition which there was time to realize. To insist instead on a mere moral fitness, on a character of mind suitable to meet the eye of infinite purity, would be a mockery in a state of society at once decrepit and corrupt. The hour pressed: it was not the case of a young and fresh generation, that might be brought back, by heedful training, to the sanctities of nature and conscience; but an old and callous world, that could do little for itself, had to be got ready in hot haste. A kindled enthusiasm, a new allegiance, a resurrection of sleeping reverences, is the only hope. Once fix the gaze of faith, the simplicity of trust, on the Divine Human Being, who, having been clad in the sorrows of this earth, waits to bring in its everlasting peace; and this affection alone, comprehending in it every lesser purity, will soften even arid natures, and enrich them with forgotten fertility and grace. Preach your moral gymnastics to a school of young heroes, whose soul is noble and whose limbs are free; but at the baths of Baiæ, amid paralytics that drag the foot, and cripples with worn-out bodies and halting wills, if you cannot touch the spring of faith, you may spare your pedantic rules of exercise. Thus the Apostle's demand of faith was a generous stimulant of hope and recovery to an invalided world, whose natural forces were broken, and which had but little time for restoration. It was a provision for pouring a mountain-breath of healing reverence upon the sickly souls and languid levels of this world. It was an attempt to meet a quick emergency, and, by an intense action, condense the powers of preparation. It was therefore an expression, not of the narrowness, but of the universality of the Gospel. It shows the great heart of the religion bursting bounds, and the strong hand of its noblest servant tugging at the gates to get them open, grinding off the rust of tradition and crushing the scrupulous gravel of obstruction.

The doctrine, however, assumes quite a different significance when snatched by Luther out of its historical connection, and held valid as a sufficient theory of human nature, and its only possibility of religion. The palsy of will, the incapacity of self-cure, the hopeless moral prostration into which long corruption had brought the world, as it lay beneath the eye of Paul, Luther assumes as the normal condition of the soul, and treats as a congenital incompetency of faculty, instead of a contracted depravity of state. Not that he disowns the human will as an executive power, or denies it a sphere of operation. It can go forth variously into action,—can do what, in the view of mankind, is better or worse,—can commit a murder or can rescue from it; but in these outward doings, however differently they affect men, there is no real good or evil; in the supreme view they are neutral automatic exhibitions, simply physical as a flash of lightning or a fall of rain; their real character all lies in the inner spiritual springs from which they issue in the soul: on these alone is the infinite gaze fixed; and these are turbid all through, and all alike, with the taint and poison of a ruined nature. As all natural actions derive an equal guilt from the impurity of their source, so, when the source is purified, is the guilt equally removed from all; whilst nothing which the unconverted may do can please God, nothing that is performed in faith can come amiss to him. Be it what men call crime or what they praise as virtue, it makes no difference if only it be done in faith. Furnished with this supernatural charm, the believer may pass through any mire and come out clean.

"A Christian cannot, if he will, lose his salvation by any multitude or magnitude of sins, unless he ceases to believe. For no sins can damn him, but unbelief alone. Everything else, provided his faith returns or stands fast in the Divine promise given in baptism, is absorbed in a moment by that faith."[55]

Here is a conception of faith altogether distinct from Paul's. It is here no act of reverential enthusiasm and affection, no kindred movement of the soul towards an object beautiful and holy, but a mere willingness to trust a verbal assurance of atonement,—a willingness, moreover, itself foreign to the mind, and superinduced as an unnatural state by special gift. Nor is its efficacy to be sought in its transforming power on man, but in its persuasiveness with God. It does not ennoble anything that is the worshipper's own, but simply hangs on to it externally the compensating sanctity of another; it is, indeed, described by Luther as the mere vessel put into the hands of the believer, and charged with the treasures of Christ's obedience,—treasures so acceptable that they charm away the foulness, and prevent the rejection, of anything that accompanies them. Thus the effect of faith on the disciple is not to inspire him with a God-like mind, but to prevent his corruptions being any damage to him. By this strange theory, both sin and sanctity are made entirely impersonal to man; sin, by being a transmitted inability; sanctity, by being a foreign donation; and his individual character sits in the midst, at a point of spiritual indifference, neither chargeable with the dark hue native to its complexion, nor etherealized by the veil of borrowed light which it wears as a robe. No room is found, either in the child of Adam, or in the redeemed of Christ, for any responsibility, any personal guilt or goodness whatsoever. The misery and deformity in which the Gospel finds him is un-moral,—the mere scrofula of inheritance; the redemption into which it lifts him is un-moral,—the mere usufruct of an alien purity: and thus the whole business of religion begins and ends without approaching, and without improving, any law of conscience at all; morality remains absolutely cut off from its contact, unaffected by it except in being disowned and degraded, and losing the prestige of a Divine authority. This consequence of his doctrine is not in the least disguised by Luther, whose impetuous audacity never tires of forging phrases of opposite stamp, by which he may put the brand of insult upon Morals, and burn characters of glory into the brow of Religion. The latter, he again and again insists, is to be set in the heavenly realm; the former, on the other hand, detained upon the ground; the two being kept as absolutely apart as the sky from the earth, regarded as not less incapable of a common function than light and darkness, day and night. Do we speak of faith and our relations to God? then we have nothing to do with morals, and must leave them behind lying on the earth. Do we speak of conduct and our relations with men? then we stop upon the ground, and get no nearer to heaven and its lights. The protests of our better nature against our own shortcomings, the sadness of repentance, and the alarms of guilt, so far from being confirmed by true religion, are shown to be mere delusion and idle self-torture; and the conscience that can feel such compunctions is a stupid ass struggling in the dust and flats of this world beneath a servile burden it need never bear. To trouble the heart with any moral anxieties or aspirations is the most fatal act of unbelief,—a downright plunge from heaven over the precipice of hell. The moral law may rule the body and its members, but has no right to any allegiance from the soul.[56] In any personal and historical estimate of Luther there would be much to say in palliation of these monstrous positions; it would be easy to show their connection with some of the noblest characteristics of his genius, and their antagonism to some of the worst features of his times. But regarded in their influence on Christendom, when detached from their living origin, and made the ground of a theory for the governance of life, they can only be lamented as an explosion of mischievous extravagance. For in what light do they present Morality to us, after stripping it of all sacredness? What ground is left on which its obligation may repose, and what end is given for its aim? It exists, as Luther himself declares, only as a provision for social order and external peace. It is not concerned with the perfection of the individual, but with the organization of the world; and is nothing but the system of rules and customs requisite for the safe coexistence of many persons on the same field. It is thus reduced from an inspiration of conscience to an affair of police; the private sentiment of duty, operating in the hidden recess of life, keeping vigils over the temper of the mind and habits of the home, is a mere substitute for public opinion, and no representative of the eye of God. In this way, moral usages are first voted into existence as matters of convenience, and imposed by the general voice, yielding as their product in the individual an artificial sense of obligation; and it is a delusion to invert this order, and say that the natural sense of obligation, inherent in each individual, creates by sympathy and concurrence the moral usages of mankind. This extreme secularization of morals places Luther in curious company with Hobbes; and the followers of both have not been altogether unfaithful to the original affinity of their ethical ideas. Both schools have withheld from their conception of morality any touch and color of religion; both have been jealous of its mingling itself much with sentiment and feeling; both have applied to it purely objective criteria, and regarded it as a statutory affair, susceptible of codification, and then needing only a logical interpreter. This singular alliance between sects regarding each other with the greatest antipathy, exhibits the irresistible tendency of a wholly super-natural religion to produce an infra-natural morality.

The result of this sharp separation of the ethical from the spiritual province of life is, that both are deprived of elements indispensable to their proper culture. Our devout people are not remarkable for either clear notions or nice feelings on moral questions; while the conscientious class are apt to be dry and cold precisians, truthful, trustworthy, and humane, but so little genial, so devoid of ideality and depth, that poet or prophet is struck dumb before their face. Till the two classes had discovered their mutual alienation and collected themselves round distinct standards,—evangelical and worldly,—the evil was inconspicuous. For some time after the Reformation, both coexisted, without articulate repulsion, in every church, and each silently qualified the other extreme. Besides, in spite of Lutheran or other dogma, deep personal faith, grateful trust in such a one as Christ, could not be awakened in a people into whom God, whatever they might say of themselves, had actually put a conscience, without carrying the moralities with it. It might take the liberty of calling them "stupid ass," but would nevertheless object to have the ass abused. In truth, no sooner was the law of Duty driven from Christianity, than the claim of Honor was invoked to take its place; and the believer was exhorted not to take unworthy advantage of his redemption from legal liability, but to render in thank-offering the service exacted by penalty no more; worthless as it was, it was all he had to give. Such appeal touches a spring powerful in noble hearts, and is, in fact, only the awakening of a higher order of moral feelings than before,—a fetching back, under the disguise of transfiguration, of that very sense of duty which had been professedly expelled. In the first enthusiasm of faith, while men's souls, having just flung off the sacerdotal incubus of centuries, were burning to breathe freely, and felt the healthy throb of a new joy, this appeal would meet a full response. The doctrine of faith was but the appointed way of bursting through the miserable scrupulosities, the life of petty debts and casuistic book-keeping, by which a priesthood had maintained a balance against the world,—of seizing a Divine indemnity and recovering the wholesome existence of devout instinct. If the inspiration of the sixteenth century could be permanently maintained, if all men were equally susceptible of being snatched up by a whirlwind of heavenward affection, if the surprise at finding that the soul had wings of its own could last for ever, the principle of gratitude and pious honor might answer every end, and human duty be all the better done by taking no security for it; for you may hurl as a missile, in hot blood, a weight which otherwise you will scarce drag upon the ground. But the fire of an age of Reformation cannot be permanent; nor is gratitude an affection on whose tension life can be securely built;—you cannot educate people by the force of perpetual surprise. There is a large natural order of minds, little susceptible of a self-abandoning fervor, for whom you vainly bring the chariot of fire and horses of fire by which prophets fly to heaven, and who are content with the humble mantle of the humanities thrown aside by more daring spirits in their ascent. Quiet, reflective, self-balanced persons are not to be taken by storm, and brought to betray the solid citadel of this world, and say ugly things of the moralities with which they have lived in friendly neighborhood. They are capable of being led by reverence for what is better, but not of being kindled by the rays of what is intenser. If they are ever to be lifted into a life beyond conscience, where reluctance and resistance are felt no more, and the instincts of affection may flow of their own pure will, it must be by beginning at the other end,—by the religious discipline of conscience, by pious consecration of this earth and its instant work, by faithful and frugal care of the smaller elements of duty, as of the sacred crumbs of eucharistic bread, not without a Real Presence in them. This class, whose religion, by a decree of their nature, can only exist under ethical conditions, are wholly unprovided for in the Protestant system. In the Lutheran view they belong to the school of worldly unbelief; and though their number, as must be the case in quiet times, has been increasing for a century and a half, and constitutes the vast majority of educated people in this country, they are without any recognized religion; either veraciously disbelieving and waiting for something nobly credible, or uneasily subsisting, suspected by clergymen, in the midst of churches whose theory of life has ceased to be a reality to them. With a faith traditionally shy of morals, and morals not yet elevated into faith, we have two separate codes of life standing in presence of each other,—one religious, the other secular,—and neither of them with any true foundation in human nature as a whole; the secular, an accidental congeries of mixed customs and inherited opinions; the religious, the product of an arbitrary spiritualism, lax and ascetic by turns.

It is the peculiarity of modern Christianity that these two codes coexist within the same social body, and even rule over different parts of each individual. The Pauline antithesis between the world and the Church was not less sharp than ours; but it was a distinction of persons and classes, and nobody could occupy both the opposite ends of it. Once within a society of disciples, he was out of the world, and belonged to "the assembly of the saints"; and the whole realm of heathendom beyond constituted the contrasted term. He did not stand and move with one leg on holy ground and the other on the common earth; whatever were the principles of the community he had joined, they served him all through, and did no violence to the unity of his nature. Praying or dining, weeping or laughing, in the workshop or the prison, he was the same man in the same sphere. As the circle of the Church enlarged, we should therefore expect the world to be driven to a distance, till it was absent from whole countries and continents. But a new "world" has been discovered, not only within the Church, but within the person of every disciple; his body and limbs, his business and pleasures, being under the law of a morality quite secular; his soul and its eternal affairs sitting apart in a love quite spiritual. Who shall draw the line between the provinces, and know practically, hour by hour, where he stands? Living confusedly in both, a man is apt to acquire a sort of double consciousness, and fluctuate distractedly between Cæsar and God. He believes, perhaps, that the kingdoms of nature and of grace are destined always to remain side by side, neither absorbing the other till the day of doom. In that case, he will let other men create all the secular usages, the moralities of trade, the maxims of politics; standing aloof from them as not belonging to his realm, and falling in with them freely in his own case. They may be of questionable veracity and justice; but they belong to the Devil's world, and are as good rules as can be expected from legislators sitting in the synagogue of Satan. Why should he decline to profit by them, now that they are there? When Eve has plucked the apple, it is too late for Adam not to taste the fruit. The pious broker comes on 'Change as into a foreign world, on which he is pushed by humiliating necessities, and in which he feels an interest derived from them alone: he has his citizenship elsewhere; he disdains naturalization; he is but a temporary settler; he wants no vote about the laws; but, taking them as they are, cuts his crop and retires. The coolness with which people who live above the world sometimes avail themselves of its lowest verge of usage is truly amazing. An affluent gentleman of high religious profession, subscriber to Gospel schools, believer in prevenient grace, and otherwise the pride of the Evangelical heart, found himself not insensible to the approaches of the Hudson mania, speculated far beyond the resources of his fortune, declined to take up his bad bargains, and thus, at the expense of utter ruin to his agent, escaped with comparatively easy loss to himself. The agent, being but an honorable sinner of the worldly class, was struck down by the blow into great depression. His employer was enabled to take a more cheerful view, and, on meeting his poor victim, rallied him on his dejected looks and hopeless thoughts, so different from his own resigned and comfortable state of mind:—"But ah! I forgot," he added with a sigh, "you are not blessed with my religious consolations!" Where no such positively odious results as these are produced, there is still often observable the negative selfishness of indifference to political welfare and political morals,—an affected withdrawal from temporal interests in the neighborhood or the State, and an insensibility to public injustice strangely disproportioned to the zeal displayed against innocent amusements and the nervousness on behalf of invisible subtilties of creed.

The false opposition, however, between the world and the Church is not always thus passive and quiescent. It is not always recognized by those who hold it, as being a permanent fact to be merely sighed over and let alone. Many men are too earnest and truthful to settle down and pitch their tent upon a ground rocking with contradiction; to live two lives wholly unreconciled, one in the shame of nature, the other in the confidence of grace; or to belong to two societies,—one political, the other spiritual,—conducted on principles at incurable variance with each other. That a rule of action should be secularly good and religiously hateful,—that a sentiment should be fitly applauded in Parliament and groaned over in the conventicle,—is to them an intolerable unreality, like the celebrated verdict of the University of Paris, that a doctrine might be true in philosophy and false in theology. In their hands, accordingly, the antithesis between the human and the divine is not a quiescent, but a conflicting dualism, in which their religious ideas become aggressive, and assume a commission to drive back and humble the world. They claim the earth for God, and think the surrender incomplete while anything natural remains;—while any instinct is uncrushed, any laughter unstifled, any genius, however pure, a law unto itself. The crusade against temporal interests and pursuits, consequent upon this state of mind, changes its form with the culture and habits of the age. In the early years of the Reformation, when the whole Bible was spread open beneath the thirsting eye of an undistinguishing enthusiasm, the effect threatened at one time to be more terrible than glorious. The full thunder-cloud of the Hebrew prophets, stealing over a world in negative stagnation, waked the sleeping lightnings of the soul, and for a while streaked the atmosphere of history with fearful portents. Everything that had been written of the chosen people, their exodus, their law, their poetry, their passions,—everything except the relentings of their nature and the unsteadiness of their faith,—became consecrated alike. The military clang of their early history, the harp of their sweet singer, the choral pomp of their priestly rule, the mystic voices of their lonely men of God,—all were Divine music alike, often more exciting than the Sermon on the Mount, and not less piercing than the anguish in Gethsemane. Such was the sequence and connection of the Divine dispensations supposed to be, that Christianity was simply the Jewish theocracy, only let loose out of Palestine to make a promised land of the whole world. The downtrodden serfs of Franconia had not long heard the glad tidings from Wittenberg, ere they began to draw parallels between themselves and the old Israel when the desert had been passed. They had been brought to the brink of new hope, and looked, as across Jordan, to an inheritance verdant and tempting to their eye. The earth was the Lord's, and the army of the saints was come to take it; the bannered princes, the ungodly priests, the "men with spurs upon their heels," all the carnal who peopled this Canaan and perched their "eagle's nests" on every height, must be smitten and cleared off. The time of jubilee was come, when every believer should have his field of heritage; nay, the birds in the forest, the fish in the stream, the fruits of the ground, whatever has the sacred seal of God's creative power, should be free to all, and the noble should eat the peasant's bread or die. The lawyers should take their heathenish courts away, and men of God should sit and judge the people, according to the spirit and the word. The harvest was ripe, when the tares must be burned in the fire and the pure wheat be garnered for the Lord. These were the ideas which thousands of armed men, with a clouted shoe and a cart-wheel for their standards, and a leader who signed himself "the sword of Gideon," preached as their Gospel through the forests of Thuringia and beneath the citadel of Würzburg. Nor was the ripest learning, much less the most generous spirit of the time, any security against the adoption of their doctrine. It was not Münzer alone who breathed the fierce inspiration, exhorting his swarthy miners to "lay Nimrod on the anvil, and let it ring bravely with their strokes"; but the honest Carlstadt, too, scholar, preacher, dialectician as he is, lays aside his broadcloth, and appears in white felt hat and rustic coat at the cross of Rothenburg, to preach encouragement to the people and bring fresh sorrow on himself. Throughout the great movement which in the third decade of the sixteenth century spread insurrection from the Breisgau to Saxony, the peasants were animated with the belief that the Gospel, armed with the sword of Joshua, was to subjugate the world, and that all the conditions of property, of law, of civil administration, under which secular communities exist, were to be superseded by institutions conformed to a divine model. The leading Reformers, terrified by the religious socialism which they had raised, were ready enough to denounce and crush it. But in truth their own idea differed from this insurgent faith more in form than in essence; lodging the power in different hands, and prescribing to it a different method, but assigning to it a similar trust for the same ultimate ends. The kingdoms of this world were to be made the kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ; and the temporal power was everywhere to assume a spiritual function, and make aggression on whatever opposed itself to the severity and sanctity of the Divine Word. The converts of Knox, the troopers of Cromwell, the town-councillors of Geneva, acting on this doctrine, claimed the whole of human life as their domain, and pushed the inquisitions of police into private habits, and even the secret inclinations of personal belief. Playing-cards and song-books were denounced and seized, as if they came from the Devil's printing-press; dancing prohibited, as a profane escape of the natural members into mirthful agitation; concerts silenced, as enslaving immortal souls to the delusive sweetness of strings and wind; the caps of women and the coats of men shaped to evangelic type; and, as if the world were a great school, the gates of cities, and even the doors of houses, were closed at temperate hours by vesper bell or signal gun. Asceticism grasped the sceptre and the sword, and demanded the capitulation of the world. How vain and dangerous this tyrannous repression of nature is, the reaction during the seventeenth century into reckless and fatal license emphatically declares; and the contrast shows the necessity of finding some mediating term, some reconciling wisdom, by which the antagonism may cease between the world and heaven, between natural morals and Christian aspiration. Yet under a change of form the struggle is still continued; and with those who most prominently assume to represent the aims of Christianity, the present life, the temporal world, has no adequate recognition of its rights. They have no trust in human nature as divinely constituted, and as having no part or passion without some fitting range. They dare not leave it out of sight for an instant: they must draw up a dietary for it, of sufficing vegetables and water; they must watch its temper, and see that it behaves with winning sweetness to all rascality; they must guard its purse, and teach it that to live cheaply, spending nothing for ornament and beauty, nothing for honor and right, but only for subsistence and charity, is the great wisdom of man; they must stifle its indignations, lest it should cease to hold out its cheek to Russia, and, having gone one shameful mile with "the nephew of my uncle," should refuse to go with him another. Both the ascetic doctrine and the extreme peace principles of the present day, as well as its tendency to renounce all retributory punishment, betray, in our opinion, a morbidly scrupulous apprehension of evil, quite blinding to the healthy eye for good,—a crouching of moral fear, singularly at variance with the free and noble bearing of the Apostle, who found that "to the pure all things are pure." As for the non-resistance principle, we have shown that it meant no more in the early Church than that the disciples were not to anticipate the hour, fast approaching, of Messiah's descent to claim his throne. But when that hour struck, there was to be no want of "physical force," no shrinking from retribution as either unjust or undivine. The "flaming fire," the "sudden destruction," the "mighty angels," the "tribulation and anguish," were to form the retinue of Christ and the pioneers of the kingdom of God. It was not that coercion was deemed unholy, and regarded as the agency appropriate to lower natures and left behind in ascending towards heaven; it was simply that natural coercion was not to fritter itself away, but leave the field open for the supernatural. The new reign was to come with force; and on nothing else, in the last resort, was there any reliance; only the army was to arrive from heaven before the earthly recruits were taken up. Nothing, indeed, can well be further from the sentiment of Scripture than the extreme horror of force, as a penal and disciplinary instrument, which is inculcated in modern times. "My kingdom," said Jesus, "is not of this world; else would my servants fight";—an expression which implies that no kingdom of this world can dispense with arms, and that he himself, were he the head of a human polity, would not forbid the sword; but while "legions of angels" stood ready for his word, and only waited till the Scripture was fulfilled and the hour of darkness was passed, to obey the signal of heavenly invasion, the weapon of earthly temper might remain within the sheath. The infant Church, subsisting in the heart of a military empire, and expecting from on high a military rescue, was not itself to fight; not, however, because force was in all cases "brutal" and "heathenish," but because, in this case, it was to be angelic and celestial. It is evident that precepts given under the influence of these ideas can have no just application to the actual duties of citizens and states, whose problems of conduct, whose very existence, they never contemplated; and that to urge them upon modern society as political canons is to introduce a doctrine which, under cover of their form, violently outrages their spirit.