With Channing, Samuell Gorton also taught the essential divinity of human nature—the equal nearness of the divine spirit to the sinner and to the saint. He recognizes a divine spark in every human soul, and to this he made his appeal.[[75]] He also, however, accepted the eternal antagonism of good and evil as an unquestionable fact both in scriptural teaching and in human experience. The tendency of the one is to eternal life; of the other to eternal death. He therefore taught a conditional immortality, wholly dependent upon the character of the individual. “Neither can any salvation hold proportion with the son of God,” he says, “but freedome from sin.” This saved him from the errors of Antinomianism.[[76]] The doctrine of imputed sin and imputed righteousness he denounces as unworthy of the divine character. “God was in Christ reconciling men unto him selfe, not imputing their sins.” Nor is this work of reconciliation limited to any historical period. “God is eternally a creator, eternally a redeemer, eternally a conservator of peace.”
The substance of his teaching is that righteousness is life eternal; sin is eternal death. This is no arbitrary penalty inflicted at the close of man’s earthly career, or on some future day of judgment; it is the intrinsic and natural result of evil action. The popular distinction between a man and his actions is delusive and unreal. He could not hate the sin and love the sinner. The actions are the man. If the actions are predominantly evil there is nothing left to save. The divine work of regeneration is at one and the same time the salvation of the good and the destruction of the evil. Both results are effected by one and the same natural operation of the divine power. “The righteousness of God is of eternal worth and duration; But the one and the other [course of life] being wrought into a change at one and the same time, thence comes the capacity of an eternall life, and of an eternall destruction.”
Mr. Gorton distinguishes four distinct stages in the historical development of religious ideas: the family, the national, the apostolic, and the spiritual or universal.[[77]] Considering the period in which he wrote, and the fact that the Bible seems to have been almost his only text-book, his conclusions are remarkably consistent with those of modern students of sociology and comparative religion.
The temptation is great to continue this line of exposition and quotation, but I must bring it to a close with one or two additional passages further illustrative of the ethical quality of his thought. All virtue, he taught, even the goodness of God, consists wholly in the service of others. “The goodnesse of God’s nature is such,” he says, “that it cannot subsiste or bee without communicating it selfe with another, otherwise his goodnesse should bee uselesse, which can not bee admitted for one moment of time, for there is an impossibility thereof; The naturall temporary or tipicall goodnesse of any creature is uselesse unlesse it bee communicated with another; God never made any creature in heaven or in earth simply for it selfe, but for the use of another; how infinitely more is this true of God, who hath made him selfe in Christ to bee the goodnesse of the world.”
Heaven, Samuell Gorton taught, is not to be sought in a future life or in some distant part of the universe. The soul is even now in eternity. Heaven is a condition of the soul. It may exist here and now. “Such doctrine,” he says, “as sets forth a time to come, of more worth and glory than either is, or hath been, keeps the manna for tomorrow, to the breeding of worms in it.” With Theodore Parker, he taught that the divine nature is both masculine and feminine;[[78]] and in one of the most striking and eloquent passages in his Commentary on the Lord’s Prayer he argues for the equal recognition of woman in the Church, and as a teacher of religion.
In philosophy, Samuell Gorton was an original thinker rather than a student of past systems. In theology, he was far in advance of the prevailing thought of his time. Only a few of the minor sects of our own day have yet approximated to his views as to the equal position of woman in the pulpit and the church; only an occasional strong and independent mind has reached his conception of religion as a birthright of the individual soul, to which belongs the unalienable privilege of investigation and interpretation, free from priestly mediation and sectarian bias.
IX
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, what shall we say were the peculiar and distinctive contributions of Samuell Gorton to the Commonwealth which he helped to found, and the life of our later day? I answer, first, to him more than to any other we are indebted for the recognition and establishment of the principle that English law and the rights of English citizenship are coextensive with English supremacy; and that to secure these rights in the Colonies, together with the privileges of local administration, a charter from the Home Government was necessary. This principle had been ignored or denied by Roger Williams,[[79]] and violated by the governments of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Samuell Gorton affirmed it in season and out of season; in its defence suffered imprisonment and stripes, and did not rest until by the aid of Roger Williams at last convinced by his insistency and by the stern logic of events, it was accepted by the Commonwealth, affirmed in its Charter, and embodied in its legislation.
So firmly was this principle subsequently engrafted on our Colonial system, that it became our strongest defence against the encroachments of the Mother Country during the Revolutionary struggle and gave us an effective pou sto for the Declaration of Independence. Nor did the severing of the relations with the government of England rupture this thread of law and equity which bound us to our historic past. Ours became the heritage of English Common Law: ours as well as England’s those historic rights and privileges of citizenship handed down from Magna Charta.
I answer, secondly, to Samuell Gorton more than to any other, all generations of Americans will owe the insistent affirmation and consistent illustration of the principle of religious individualism which is the logical outcome of the Protestant idea—the principle which strips off the conventional reliance on ritual and organization, and places the individual soul face to face with the problems of life and duty. In our own generation, Ralph Waldo Emerson has been the clearest exponent of this principle. Gorton was the premature John the Baptist of New England Transcendentalism.