The Gospel, indeed, like all things divine, is unsystematic and unbound by technical distinctions, and makes no metaphysical separation between the will and the affections. It is too profoundly adapted to our nature, not to address itself copiously to both. The doctrine of retribution being a solemn truth, appears with all its native force in the teachings of Christ, and arms many of his appeals with a persuasion just and terrible. But never was there a religion (containing these motives at all) so frugal in the use of them; so able, on fit occasions, to dispense with them: so rich in those inimitable touches of moral beauty, and tones that penetrate the conscience, and generous trust in the better sympathies, which distinguish a morality of the affections. In Christ himself, where is there a trace of the obedience of pious self-interest, computing its everlasting gains, and making out a case for compensation, by submitting to infinite wisdom? In his character, which is the impersonation of his religion, we surely have a perfect image of spontaneous goodness, unhaunted by the idea of personal enjoyment, and, like that of God, unbidden but by the intuitions of conscience, and the impulses of love. And what teacher less divine ever made such high and bold demands on our disinterestedness? To lend out our virtue upon interest,—to “love them only who love us” he pronounced to be the sinners’ morality; nor was the feeling of duty ever reached, but by those who could “do good, hoping for nothing again,” except that greatest of rewards to a true and faithful heart, to be “the children of the Highest” who “is kind unto the unthankful and the evil.” In the view of Jesus, all dealings between God and men were not of bargain, but of affection. We must surrender ourselves to him without terms; must be ashamed to doubt him who feeds the birds of the air, and, like the lily of the field, look up to him with a bright and loving eye; and he, for our much love, will pity and forgive us. In his own ministry, how much less did our Lord rely for disciples on the cogency of mere proof, and the inducements of hope and fear, than on the power of moral sympathy, by which every one that was of God naturally loved him and heard his words;[[568]] by which the good shepherd knew his sheep, and they listened to his voice, and followed him;[[569]] and without which no man could come unto him, for no spirit of the Father drew him.[[570]] No condition of discipleship did Christ impose, save that of “faith in him;” absolute trust in the spirit of his mind; a desire of self-abandonment to a love and fidelity like his, without tampering with expediency, or hesitancy in peril, or shrinking from death.
There is, then, a wide variance between the genius of Christianity, and that philosophy which teaches, that all men must be bought over to the side of goodness and of God, by a price suited to their particular form of selfishness and appetite for pleasure. Our religion is remarkable for the large confidence it reposes on the disinterested affections, and the vast proportion of the work of life it consigns to them. And in thus seeking to subordinate and tranquillize the prudential feelings, Christ manifested how well he knew what was in man. He recognized the truth, which all experience declares, that in these emotions is nothing great, nothing loveable, nothing powerful; that their energy is perpetually found incapable of withstanding the impetuosity of passion; and that all transcendant virtues, all that brings us to tremble or to kneel, all the enterprises and conflicts which dignify history, and have stamped any new feature on human life, have had their origin in the disinterested region of the mind; in affections, unconsciously entranced by some object sanctifying and divine. He knew, for it was his special mission to make all men feel, that it is the office of true religion to cleanse the sanctuary of the secret affections, and effect a regeneration of the heart. And this is a task which no direct nisus of the will can possibly accomplish, and to which, therefore, all offers of reward and punishment, operating only on the will, are quite inapplicable. The single function of volition is to act; over the executive part of our nature it is supreme; over the emotional it is powerless; and all the wrestlings of desire for self-cure and self-elevation, are like the struggles of a child to lift himself. He who is anxious to be a philanthropist, is admiring benevolence, instead of loving men; and whoever is labouring to warm his devotion, yearns after piety, not after God. The mind can by no spasmodic bound seize on a new height of emotion, or change the light in which objects appear before its view. Persuade the judgment, bribe the self-interests, terrify the expectations, as you will, you can neither dislodge a favourite, nor enthrone a stranger, in the heart. Show me a child that flings an affectionate arm around a parent, and lights up his eyes beneath her face, and I know that there have been no lectures there upon filial love; but that the mother, being loveable, has of necessity been loved; for to genial minds it is as impossible to withhold a pure affection, when its object is presented, as for the flower to sulk within the mould, and clasp itself tight within the bud, when the gentle force of spring invites its petals to curl out into the warm light. As you reverence all good affections of our nature, and desire to awaken them, never call them duties, though they be so; for so doing, you address yourself to the will; and by hard trying no attachment ever entered the heart. Never preach on their great desirableness and propriety; for so doing, you ask audience of the judgment; and by way of the understanding no glow of noble passion ever came. Never, above all, reckon up their balance of good and ill; for so doing, you exhort self-interest; and by that soiled way no true love will consent to pass. Nay, never talk of them, nor even gaze curiously at them; for if they be of any worth and delicacy, they will be instantly looked out of countenance and fly. Nothing worthy of human veneration will condescend to be embraced, but for its own sake: grasp it for its excellent results,—make but the faintest offer to use it as a tool, and it slips away at the very conception of such insult. The functions of a healthy body go on, not by knowledge of physiology, but by the instinctive vigour of nature; and you will no more brace the spiritual faculties to noble energy and true life, by study of the uses of every feeling, than you can train an athlete for the race, by lectures on every muscle of every limb. The mind is not voluntarily active in the acquisition of any great idea, any new inspiration of faith; but passive, fixed on the object which has dawned upon it, and filled it with fresh light.
If this be true, and if it be the object of practical Christianity, not only to direct our hands aright, but to inspire our hearts; then can its ends never be achieved by the mere force of reward and punishment; then no system can prove its sufficiency, by showing that it retains the doctrine of retribution, and must even be held convicted of moral incompetency, if it trusts the conscience mainly to the prudential feelings, without due provision for enlisting the co-operation of many a disinterested affection.
To this objection must any scheme be liable, which represents the Creator as having made choice of the instrumentality of evil. I freely admit, that no one urges the personal motives to duty with more closeness and force than the Necessarian. Maintaining, with the utmost strictness, the connexion of moral cause and effect, teaching the alliance of happiness with excellence, and of misery with vice, by a law inexorable as fate, he convinces us, that every concession to temptation, every relaxation of conscientious effort, is an addition of wretchedness to our future lot; that when the evil volition has once passed, no fortuity can provide evasion, nor any mercy give us shelter; that on the decisions of our will is suspended whatever can make our everlasting destination blessed. But his doctrine goes on to assure us, that it is only to ourselves that our sins create any clear increase of suffering; they are a part of the best possible system, designed for the general good; and shown, by their occurrence, to be clear benefits to the world. No love of our fellow-man, then, can be engaged in behalf of duty; let conscience say what it will, we hold no power, and incur no risk, of creating injury to others; and our sympathies with them cannot reasonably determine any moral choice. No love of God can tender help to our feeble virtue: for he is not “grieved in our sins;” and whether, in our conflicts, we succumb or conquer, the issue is well-pleasing in his sight. He appears to sustain a relation, not of concern, but of indifference, to our choice; and the idea of him, as spectator of the strife, inspires no courage, and brings no victory. If it be urged, that these considerations are of too high and abstract a kind to influence us in practice, and that to us our misconduct must always appear injurious to men, and offensive to God; what is this but to allow the unfitness of the doctrine to our minds, and to say, that it is harmless, in proportion as it remains unrealized? It is a poor plea for the value of a system to exclaim, “Never mind its threatened mischiefs, conscience is too strong for them.” The point at which the present argument rests is this, that in so far as the doctrine operates, it dismisses all but the prudential feelings from the service of duty.
Our conclusion is evident. The spirit of practical Christianity gives a double suffrage against the scheme which makes moral evil the instrument of God; and bids us regard it as his enemy. Revelation allies itself with the primitive religion of the conscience.
To the theoretic question, still urged by our wonder and solicitude, “But whence this foe?” it has been already said, that no answer can be given. All the ingenuities of logic and of language, leave it a mystery still: and it is better to stand within the darkness in the quietude of faith, than vainly to search for its margin in the restlessness of knowledge. Were we compelled, for relief of mind, to select some definite method of representing the case to our apprehensions, I know not any simpler or better conception than that of the ancient Platonists;—that the process of creation consisted, not in the origination of matter itself out of nothing, but in the production of form, order, beauty, organization, life, sentiency, out of matter,—in making it the residence of mind, the receptacle of experience, and the servitor of souls: that the Divine hand has manifested illimitable skill, and the Divine love infinite versatility, in the use and application of the original material; but that, as it is the negative opposite to his positive perfections, its unsusceptibility of life and spirit has occasioned the portion of evil which deforms the universe, and which, however varied and reduced, and, in the higher gradations of being, attenuated to the verge of extinction, cannot be utterly annihilated. From the large proportion of visible evil, natural and moral, that is traceable to disorganization and its related changes, this view is easily apprehended, and may indeed be detected, in many common forms of thought and speech. If it be not true, no better substitute for the truth is within our reach. It limits the power of God no more than the rival scheme: for were we to say, that he became the author of evil, as the unavoidable means of ulterior benefits, we should admit, that only on these terms was the contemplated good producible, even by him whom, in relation to all our measures of force, we justly call Omnipotent. It is impossible to escape, and therefore better to confront, the idea of a NECESSITY, restricting the conditions within which the Divine goodness operates;—a necessity, mysterious, but not dreadful; not great enough to be subversive of faith, nor trivial enough to be reasoned out of sight. I know not why our thoughts should not find a residence for this necessity, rather in the materials awaiting the Creative hand, than in any immaterial laws, under the mystic title of “the Nature of things,” or (in other words,) any dark Fate behind the throne. But in saying this, I only propose to state the problem in the most salutary form, and by no means to offer a solution: mere pretension to ideas, where truly we have none, only excludes us from the benefits (which are many) of our allotted portion of ignorance. I have no sympathy with the confident and dogmatic spirit, which exclaims, “Let the counsel of the Holy One draw nigh, that we may know it;” and would only protest against systems that “call evil good, and good evil,” that “put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.”
Sin, then, in the sight of God and all good men, is to be esteemed an evil, absolutely and everlastingly. We may rally the whole power of our nature against it: for it destroys our personal security; it irremediably wounds our brother; and it puts us in dreary alienation from our Father and our Judge. We may let loose our aversion to all that offends the conscience, and without metaphysical hesitancy, visit it with uncompromising hate; for so doing, we are indignant with no instrument of Deity; nor do we fall into any sentiment at variance with his. We may yield, with entire self-precipitation, to the love of whatever things are pure and true and good; never fearing that our affections will become too exclusive for the enlightened children of the Highest. When we look into the darker chambers of our soul, and discern, asleep or awake, the powers of selfishness, malice, jealousy,—we see therein no nursery of discipline, where God presides to train us ultimately well; but the dreadful dwelling of our familiar fiend who wrestles in apostacy with God;—the palace of the penal furies that at once tempt and torture us, a place severed by a whole universe from Heaven;—the inner Hell of our immortal nature, so plenteous in solitary agonies, that the addition of outward flames populous with tormented beings would only refresh us with pity for their woes. The fever of desire, the fires of revenge, the gnawing of remorse, still busy in our immortality; the shame of resuscitated memories; the passionate yearning after strength with the prostrate consciousness of weakness; the strangeness and desolation of empty minds and heated appetites carried to the assemblage of the skies, and gazed on by the pitying eye of a Divine but alienated purity,—Oh! what flames can burn into tenderer seats of anguish than these? And so far from planning and willing the lapse of any into such guilt and suffering, the Great Ruler never ceases to resist to the last, all such delay of his benediction and frustration of his desire. He dwells absolutely apart from all creative contact with the evil which we are bound to abhor: he comes before us as a being unambiguously Holy; not in any ultimate and scarce intelligible way, but in our plain human sense. His name must be reserved as the exclusive receptacle of all the excellence and beauty, the majesty and tenderness, the purity and justice, of which our minds can gather together the ideas. It is no figure of speech, that there is joy in heaven over the sinner that repenteth: that part at least of heaven that dwells below and hides itself within our hearts, that portion of God that expresses itself through the sanctities of our nature, yields to our moral restoration not only a ready welcome, but a mysterious help. When fear has performed its proper and only function on a responsible being,—which is, not to create holiness, but to arrest guilt; when it has summoned us, like the prodigal, to ourselves again; when it has brought the mad career to halt, and left us weeping, humbled, prostrate in the dust, crying, “Lord, help us, we perish;”—then the Divine Spirit dawns on the gloom of our self-abasement, and refreshes us with the delicious light of a new and purer love: instead of the vain strivings of an enervated will, the restless beating of mere prudence against the iron bars of corrupt desire, the gates of the soul are burst silently open by some angel affection, and we are free! And shall we not, with most devout allegiance, follow our Divine Emancipator? The great work, which his holy energy is thus ready to carry on within us, he may be discerned conducting every where without us. On the theatre of the universe he is himself engaged to grapple eternally with Evil, and hurl it from the higher portion of his abode. And so, he waits, with his inspiring sympathy, to hail every victory of our free-will: and by all the filial love we bear him, by the generous fear of estrangement from his spirit, by the hope of growth in his similitude, we are summoned to enter the field of moral conflict,—to stir up the noble courage of our hearts, and in the Lord’s own might, do battle with the confederate fiends of guilt and woe. There is not elsewhere a combat so glorious, or a trophy so divine.