Again, whoever teaches that men are, through and through, the creatures of circumstance, with no more voice as to their character than as to their birth, but are the predestined products of nature, working partly within them and partly without,—no less surely insults all moral convictions, and denies the reality of duty. For he abolishes entirely the distinction between a person and a thing; and conceives of every man as a mere growth or development from the physiology of the universe, no more responsible for his place in the scale of excellence, than the plant which, according to its seed and soil, becomes the hyssop of the wall, the lily of the field, or the stately cedar of Lebanon. All moral ideas vanish instantly at the touch of this doctrine; and the solemn language on which Law and Conscience have stamped their venerable impress, and ruled among the nations "by the grace of God," is defaced in the revolutionary mint of fatalism, and made current with the superscription of a pretended equality where all are low, and liberty where none is free. It is quite clear, that, if the soul has no originating causality, but in every step she takes is simply disposed of and bespoken by agencies provided and set in train, without any question asked of her, she can have no duties, she can win no deserts; she can incur no guilt, merit no punishment; she is deluded in her remorse, and suffers a vain torture in esteeming herself an alien from God. All that remains is this: that by natural laws there may be pain consequent, and known to be consequent, on some of the directions which we may take; and it is at our peril that we enter on these paths. But so is it at our peril if we go up in a balloon, or put to sea in a small boat to save a drowning crew. You can get nothing out of this consideration but more or less of Prudence; hope of happiness, fear of suffering, can consecrate nothing as a Duty, but only present it as interest; and if a man chooses to disregard his interest and risk the result, I know not who, in heaven or earth, can tell him with authority that he has no right to do it, or can say more to him than that he is a fool in his folly. Who on these terms could cast himself, in tears of penitence, upon the bosom of Infinite Mercy, and sob out his prayer that he might be reconciled to God? Who would ever tremble beneath the lash of a fiery reproach, and own, as it quivered over him, that there was justice in the terror of its look? Rather must the sinner feel himself the victim of a cruel doom; whom it is as little suitable to punish, as to chastise the patient in fever, or torture the cripple in the street. A doctrine which reduces duty to interest, retribution to discipline, guilt to disease, holiness to symmetry and good health, and God to the neutral source of all things good and ill;—which frightens us with fears we may defy, but awes us with no authority we can revere; which pities iniquity and smiles on goodness, but only in order to patronize enjoyment;—whose faith in human nature is a reliance on the ultimate docility of the wild animal man; and whose worship of God is taken, like a morning walk, for the sake of exercise;—is so alien from the whole spirit of religion, and such an affront to the first instincts of conscience, that it can only escape indignant condemnation by withdrawing altogether into the sphere of natural history, and quitting as a foreign province the domain—whose language it corrupts—of Morals and of Faith.
Finally, those who teach that guilt and merit, with their penalties and rewards, can be transferred, deny in the directest way the personal nature of Sin. That men should find a foreign remedy for their perpetrated wickedness, is not less shocking than that they should trace it to a foreign source. If they know what it is at all, they feel it to be inalienably their own; which none could give them and which none can take away. And nothing is more amazing than that good Christians, who seem truly cast down in humiliation, oppressed with the sense of their short-comings, penetrated with the sadness of baffled aspiration,—and who therefore, one would think, must really have a consciousness of the personality of sin, and know how it is chargeable only on their individual will,—can yet obtain relief by flying, as it is said, to the cross, and persuading themselves that the evil has been stayed and cured by transactions wholly outside themselves, and belonging to the history of another being. What can possibly be meant by the statement that Christ has borne the punishment, some eighteen hundred years ago, of your sins and mine,—of people non-existent then, and therefore non-sinful? Can the punishment precede the sin? Can it be inflicted and gone through before it is even determined whether the sin will be perpetrated at all? Or can merely potential sin, which may never become actual, be dealt with at ages distant, and its accounts be settled ere it arise? If so, what is the death of Christ but the provisory accumulation of a fund beforehand, ready to be drawn upon as the everlasting "treasure of the Church," for the free discharge of guilty debts and the release of divine obligations? And in what respect does this differ from the Roman Catholic doctrine,—except that the treasure is at the discretion of no chartered sacerdotal company, but is open on more popular and looser terms?
Moral relations, by their very nature, exclude all vicarious agency; you cannot fall, you cannot recover, by deputy: the ill that haunts you is the insult you have put on the divine spirit in your heart, and it is as if you were alone with God. An interposing medium can as little divert the retribution, as it can intercept the complacency of the Infinite and Holy Mind. What more fearful charge could you bring against any government, than to say that its penalties may be bought off? A judge who accepts the voluntary sufferings of innocence in acquittance of the liabilities of guilt, shocks every sentiment of justice, and does that which the worst judicial caprice would never dare to imitate. A law that does not care whether the right persons feel its retribution, provided it gets an equivalent suffering elsewhere, is an affront to the most elementary notions of right. And an offender who can welcome his escape by such device, permits his moral perceptions to be blinded by personal gratitude, and is content to profit by a transaction which it would fill him with remorse to repeat upon his own children.
A Mediator may do much indeed to reconcile my alienated mind to God. He may personally rise before me with a purity and greatness so unique as to give me faith in diviner things than I had known before, and by his higher image turn my eye towards the Highest of all. He may show me how, in the sublimest natures, sanctity and tenderness ever blend, and so touch the springs of inward reverence that, in my returning sympathy with goodness, all abject and deterring fears are swept away. He may direct upon me, from the hall of trial or the cross of self-sacrifice, the loving look that prostrates the impulses of passion and the power of self, and awakens the repentant enthusiasm of nobler affections. He may renew my future; but he cannot change my past. He may sprinkle my immediate soul with the wave of regeneration; but he cannot drown the deeds that are gone. From present sinfulness he may recover me; but the perpetrated sins—though he be God himself in power, unless he be other than God in holiness—he cannot redeem. These have become realized facts; and none can cut off the entail of their consequences: whatever the Divine Law has avowedly annexed to them will develop itself from them with infallible certainty. The outward sufferings by which God has stamped into the nature of things his disapprobation of sin, and made it grievous here and hereafter, stand irrevocably fast, clinging to guilt as shadow to body, as effect to cause. This debt of natural penalty is one which must be paid to the utmost farthing; by penitent and impenitent, by the reconciled and the unreconciled alike: miracle cannot cancel, nor mediator discharge it. In this sense,—of rescue from the penal laws of God,—I know of no remission of sins; nor would Christians have retained so heathenish a notion, had they not frightfully exaggerated, in the first instance, the retributions of God by making them an eternal vengeance; and so created a necessity for again rescinding the fierce enactments of their fancy, that hope and return might not be quite shut out. It is only in man, however, and not in God, thus to do and undo. His word, whether of warning or of promise, is Yea and Amen; and his great realities will march serenely on, and, heedless of our passionate deprecations and fictitious triumphs, rebuke our unbelief of their veracity.
But while the past can never be as though it were not, the present may lie in the shelter of reconciliation, and the future in the light of boundless hope. The outer burden we have incurred we may still have to bear; but once brought by Divine conversion to an inner sympathy with God, and seeing by his light rather than our own, we can suffer our wounds with a patient shame, and scarcely feel their anguish more. The averted face of the Infinite has turned round upon us again; and the pure eyes look into us with a mild and loving gaze, which we can meet with answering glance, and feel that we are at one with the universe and reconciled with God.
[PEACE IN DIVISION: THE DUTIES OF CHRISTIANS IN AN AGE OF CONTROVERSY.]
"Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, nay, but
rather division."—Luke xii. 51.
Such was the account which the Saviour himself gave of a religion whose promise was hailed by angels as an occasion, not only of "glory to God in the highest," but of "peace on earth, and good-will to men." The contradiction between the two passages is so obviously merely of a verbal nature, that it can perplex only the blind interpreter who penetrates no further than the letter of the sacred volume. I should only be giving utterance to your own spontaneous reflections, my friends, were I to tell you that my text speaks, not of the design, but of the consequence, of the dissemination of the Gospel; and that it indicates no more than a prophetic knowledge on the part of Christ of the diversities of sentiment and feeling which would spring from the diffusion of his religion. This prophetic knowledge, however, it does clearly indicate; and this is a fact of no mean importance. The unbeliever objects to Christianity, and the Roman Catholic to Protestantism, the endless catalogue of discordant opinions which have resulted from their prevalence; and to both we are furnished with one reply. This infinite diversity indicates no failure in our system; it is not an unexpected effect which startles and alarms us; it was foreseen by the Author of our religion, and announced by him as the necessary consequence of the genuine preaching of his Apostles. And though he had this evil (if such it be) full in view, he did not retreat from the office he had assumed, nor feel it at variance with his deep and tender philanthropy, to implant among mankind a faith that should break up their united mass into a thousand repulsive groups.