(3.) The Spiritual. God is a Spirit; man has a spirit; both, Now; both, Here; and shall they never meet? shall they remain without exchange of looks? shall nothing break the seal of eternal silence? is there really love between them, and thought, and purpose, and yet all recognition dumb? Why tell us of God's Omniscience, if it only sleeps around us like dead space, or at most lies watching, like a sentinel of the universe, not free to stir? Who could ever pray to this motionless Immensity? who weep his griefs to rest on a Pity so secret and reserved? Surely if He is a Living Mind, he not merely remains over from a Divine Past to appear again in a Divine Future, but moves through the immediate hours, and awakens a thousand sanctities to-day. Urged by such questionings as these, men of meditative piety have thirsted for conscious communion with the All-holy;—communion both ways: appeal and response; a crossing line of light from eye to eye; a quiet walk with God, where all the dust of life turns, at his approach, into the green meadow, and its flat pools into the gliding waters. They have retired within to meet him; have believed that all is not ours that it is ours to feel; that there is Grace of his mingling with the inner fibres of our nature, and flinging in, across the constant warp of our personality, flying tints of deeper beauty, and hints of a pattern more divine. And all have agreed, that, in order to reach this Holy Spirit, and through its vivifying touch be born again, the one thing needful is a stripping off of self, an abandonment of personal desire and will, a return to simplicity, and a docile listening to the whispers spontaneous from God. They find all sin to be a rising up of self; all return to holiness and peace a sinking down from self, a free surrender of the soul,—that asks nothing, possesses nothing, that relaxes every rigid strain, and is pliant to go whither the highest Will may lead. Nature, of her own foolishness, ever goes astray in her quest of divine things; wandering away in flights of laboring Reason to find her God; panting with over-plied resolve to do her work; scheming rules, and artifices, and bonds of union for forming her individuals into a Church. Reverse all this, and fall back on the centre of the Spirit, instead of pressing out in all radii of your own. Let Intellect droop her ambitious wing, and come home; there, in the inmost room of conscience, God seeks you all the while. Lash your wearied strength no more; sit low and weak upon the ground, with loving readiness hitherward or thitherward, and you shall be taken through your work with a sevenfold strength that has no effort in it. Leave yourself awhile in utter solitude, shut out all thoughts of other men, yield up whatever intervenes, though it be the thinnest film, between your soul and God; and in this absolute loneliness, the germ of a holy society will of itself appear, a temper of sympathy and mercy, trustful and gentle, suffuses itself through the whole mind: though you have seen no one, you have met all; and are girt for any errand of service that love may find. So then, if there were twenty or a thousand in this case, their wills would flow together of their own accord, and find themselves in brotherhood without a plan at all.
So speaks this doctrine of the Spirit. It matters not now under which of its many theologic forms we conceive it; simplest perhaps, that the Indwelling God, who in Christ was the Word, is in us the Comforter. But surely, this also is not altogether a false Gospel. It rescues the conception of direct communion between the human spirit and the Divine,—a conception essential to the Christian life,—which an Ethical Gospel does not adequately secure: for communion must be between like and like, while obedience may be from slave to lord, nay, in some sense, from machine to maker. Nor is it a slight thing to take the scales from our eyes that hide from us the sanctities of our immediate life; to abolish the postponement of eternity; and, wayfarers as we are, make us feel, as we rise from our stony pillow and pass on, that here is the abode of God, and here does the angel-ladder touch the ground! Yet this too is not the whole Gospel. It absorbs too much in God. It scarcely saves human personality and responsibility. It does no justice to nature, which it regards as the negative of God. It melts away Law in Love, and hides the rocky structure of this moral world in a sunny haze that confuses earth and air.
What, then, shall we say of these three types of Christian faith? Do you doubt their reality? It is demonstrated within the century which we close this day. For while our forefathers were dedicating this house of prayer to the first, the Gospel of Christian Duty, Wesley had already become the prophet of the last,—the new birth of the Spirit; and erelong Evangelicism started up, and proclaimed the second,—the Salvation by Faith. Do you doubt their durability and permanence? It is proved by eighteen centuries' experience, for the New Testament is not older. There, within the group of sacred books themselves, do they all lie; the Jewish Gospels represent the first; the Gentile Apostle's letters, the second; the writings of the beloved disciple, the third. Matthew, as every reader must remark, is for the Law; Paul, for Faith; and John, for the Spirit. And, in every age, the great mass of Christian tendencies break themselves into these three forms:—Ebionite, Pauline, and contemplative Gnostic; Pelagian, Augustinian, and Mystic; Jesuit, Jansenist, and Quietist; Arminian, Lutheran, and Quaker; all proclaim the perseverance of the same essential types, wherever the spirit of Christ alights upon the various heart of man.
Is Christ then divided? Is he not equal to the whole of our humanity? Rather let us say, that we are small and weak for the measure of his heavenly wisdom. Doubtless, if we take what we can hold, and put it to faithful application, we have grace enough for every personal exigency. But there is, surely, an evil inseparable from all partial developments of religion, which only satisfy the immediate cravings of the mind, and leave parts of our nature—asleep perhaps at the moment—liable to wake and thirst again. Such separate growths run out their resources and exhaust themselves in a few generations. At first, they answer to some felt want; they collect a congenial multitude, and open to them a spiritual refuge that ends their wanderings. But the sentiment, once brought into a contented state, ceases to be importunate and prominent; and by its abatement gives opportunity for other feelings to vindicate their existence. When the wound is bound up and has lost its smart, the natural hunger begins to tell. The children grow up other than the fathers, perhaps quite as limited, only in different ways,—with affections pressing into just the vacant places of an earlier age. Meanwhile, the imperfection of the original basis has provoked reactions equally of narrow scope,—equally incapable of permanently filling the capacities of the Christian mind. Hence the danger, if the separate veins of thought be still worked on as they thin away, that the sects should degenerate into poor theological egotisms, and wear themselves insensibly out. It cannot be denied that all the three religious movements of the last century—represented by Taylor, by Wesley, by Cowper—exhibit the symptoms of spent strength, and are little likely to play again the part they have played before.
Yet every one of their Gospels is true at heart; and the tree that holds that pith is a tree of life, which the Eternal husbandman hath planted; and if he prune it, it is only that it may bear more fruit. The weakness of these faiths is in their isolation; and if their sap could but mingle, if no element were lost which they can draw from the root of the vine, a young frondescent life would show itself again. Those who think that the future can only repeat the past, will deem this impossible; though least of all should it appear so to us who profess ourselves "Christians and only Christians," pledged to nothing but to lie open to all God's truth. For myself I indulge a joyful hope that the next century of Christendom will be nobler than the last; that the great Faiths which have struggled separately into the light of the one, will flow together on the broader and less broken surface of the other. If, however, this is to be, it will arise from no mere intellectual scrutiny, whose function will ever be to distinguish, and not to unite, and, in proportion as it dominates alone, to trace ever-new lines of critical divergency. When the problem of Christendom is, to deliver the individual mind from the operation of an overwhelming social power, then it is seasonable to insist on the principle of free inquiry; because then you have a dead mass to disintegrate, ere any young and living force can urge its way. But when you have won this victory, and when individualism ceases to be devout and tends to party self-will, the hour comes to proclaim the converse lesson, and break up the vain reliance on mere liberty of thought. Depend upon it, Unity lies in profounder strata of our nature than any tillage of the mere intellect can reach. Sink deeply into the inmost life of any Christian faith, and you will touch the ground of all. Did we do nothing with our religion except live by it; did we forget the presence of doubt and contradiction; did it cease to be a creed about God and become simply an existence in God; did we exchange self-assertion before men for self-surrender to him;—we should find ourselves side by side with unexpected friends, should be astonished at our petulant divisions, and replace the poor charity of mutual forbearance by the free consciousness of inward sympathy. For us especially, who feel the temptations of an exceptional position, is it the prime duty to live and move and have our being in the divine sanctities that hold us, in that which we have not been obliged to throw away; else might our Gospel be no fruit-bearing branch, drinking from the root of the vine, but a dead residuum, withered and hopeless. Remember that, if Sin be not original, all the more must it be actual, and the deeper should its shadow lie upon the Conscience, and touch us with the mood of faithfulness and prayer. If, in reconciling man with God, there is no vicarious sacrifice possible, so much the more remains over for self-sacrifice, as the only path of communion and peace. If you will have it that Christ is only human, so much the more Divine is your humanity to be; you cannot assume that as the type of your nature, without at least owning that its essence lies, and its glory is found, not in the natural man, but in the spiritual man; and by this very confession, you renounce the low aims of the worldly mind, and take on yourself the vows of the saintly. Let believers only be true to the grace they have, and more will be given; and enter where they may the many-gated sanctuary of the Christian life, they will tend ever inwards to the same centre, and meet at last in the holiest of all. Keeping a reverent eye fixed on the person and spirit of Christ, they cannot but find their partial apprehensions corrected and enlarged; for his divine image is complete in its revelation, and rebukes every narrower Gospel. Moral perfectness, divine communion, free self-sacrifice,—all blend in him,—indistinguishable elements of one expression. In that august and holy presence, our divisions sink abashed, and hear, as of old, the word of recall, "Ye know not what spirit ye are of." Or if, through our infirmities, that gracious form, appearing in the midst as we discourse among ourselves and are perplexed and sad, do not suffice to open our eyes and make us less slow of heart to one another and to him, at least in that higher world, whither our forerunners are gone, his living look will perfect the communion of saints. There at length the guests of his bounty will find that, though at separate tables, they have all been fed by the same bread of life, and touched their lips with the same wine of remembrance: there, the voices of the wise, often discordant here,—of Taylor and Wesley, of Enfield and Cowper, of Heber and Channing,—will blend in harmony;—and the notes of the last age will not be the least in that mighty chorus which crowds the steps of eighteen centuries, and, converging to their immortal Head, sings the solemn strain, "Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty! Just and true are all thy ways, thou King of Saints!"
[ST. PAUL AND HIS MODERN STUDENTS.]
The Life and Epistles of St. Paul. By the Rev. W. J. Conybeare, M.A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Rev. J. S. Howson, M.A., Principal of the Collegiate Institution, Liverpool. 2 vols. 4to. Longmans. 1852.
The Epistles of St. Paul to the Corinthians: with Critical Notes and Dissertations. By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, M.A., Canon of Canterbury, late Fellow and Tutor of University College, Oxford, &c. 2 vols. 8vo. Murray. 1855.
The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans: with Critical Notes and Dissertations. By Benjamin Jowett, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford. 2 vols. 8vo. Murray. 1855.
These treatises, bearing on their title-pages the names of our two ecclesiastical Universities, give happy signs of a new era in English theology. They show how effectually we have escaped from the morbid religious phenomena represented by Simeon at Cambridge, and the counter-irritants applied by John Henry Newman at Oxford; and come as the returning breath of nature to those who have witnessed the fevers of "Evangelical" conversion or the consumptive asceticism of "Anglican" piety. On looking back, from the position now attained, it seems wonderful that we could ever, with St. Paul's writings in our hands, have been betrayed into either of these opposite extravagances: for anything more absolutely foreign to his breadth and universality than the Genevan dogma, or more at variance with his free spirituality than the sacramental system, it is impossible to conceive. But it is the peculiar fate of sacred writings, that the last thing elicited from them is their own real meaning. The very greatness of their authority puts the reader's faculties into a false attitude; creates an eagerness,—an inflexible intensity,—that defeats its own end; and, in particular, gives undue ascendency to the uppermost want and feeling that may be craving satisfaction. Hence the tendency of Scriptural interpretation to proceed by action and reaction; an easy ethical Arminianism being succeeded by a severe Calvinism, and the reliance on individual grace giving way before the advance of sacerdotal and Church ideas. When the opposite errors have spent themselves, the requisite repose of mind will be recovered for reading just the thought that lies upon the page: here and there an eye will be found, neither strained with pre-occupying visions, not scared by sceptic shadows, but clear for the apprehension of reality, as God has shaped it for our perception. At length we have reached this crisis of promise; and critics are found who, instead of interrogating St. Paul on all sorts of modern questions, listen to him on his own; and draw from him, not a fancied verdict on the sixteenth century, but a faithful picture of the first.