And as the Mind, so the Body with which it is to be clothed! as the Indweller, so the House in which it is to be the Abiding-place![130] There is but one wedding-garment, in which we can sit down at the marriage-feast of Heaven: and that is the Bridegroom's own gift, when [{212}] he gave himself for us that we might live in him and he in us. There is but one robe of Righteousnes, even the Spiritual Body, formed by the assimilative power of faith for whoever eateth the flesh of the Son of Man and drinketh his blood. Did Christ come from Heaven, did the Son of God leave the glory which he had with his Father before the world began, only to show us a way to life, to teach truths, to tell us of a resurrection? Or saith he not, I am the way—I am the truth—I am the Resurrection and the Life?
[128] God manifested in the flesh is Eternity in the form of Time. But Eternity in relation to Time is the absolute to the conditional, or the real to the apparent, and Redemption must partake of both;—always perfected, for it is a Fiat of the Eternal;—continuous, for it is a process in relation to man; the former, the alone objectively, and therefore universally, true. That Redemption in an opus perfectum, a finished work, the claim to which is conferred in Baptism; that a Christian cannot speak or think as if his Redemption by the blood, and his Justification by the Righteousness of Christ alone, were future or contingent events, but must both say and think, I have been redeemed, I am justified; lastly, that for as many as are received into his Church by baptism, Christ has condemned sin in the flesh, has made it dead in law, that is, no longer imputable as guilt, has destroyed the objective reality of sin:—these are truths, which all the Reformed Churches, Swedish, Danish, Evangelical, (or Lutheran,) the Reformed (the Calvinistic in mid-Germany, France, and Geneva, so called,) lastly, the Church of England, and the Church of Scotland—nay, the best and most learned divines of the Roman Catholic Church have united in upholding as most certain and necessary articles of faith, and the effectual preaching of which Luther declares to be the appropriate criterion, stantis vel cadentis Ecclesiæ. The Church is standing or falling, according as this doctrine is supported, or overlooked, or countervened. Nor has the contrary doctrine, according to which the baptized are yet, each individually, to be called, converted, and chosen, with all the corollaries from this assumption, the watching for signs and sensible assurances, "the frames," and "the states," and "the feelings," and "the sudden conversions," the contagious fever-boils, of the (most unfitly, so called) Evangelicals, and Arminian Methodists of the day, been in any age taught or countenanced by any known and accredited Christian Church, or by any body and succession of learned divines. On the other hand it has rarely happened, that the Church has not been troubled by pharisaic and fanatical individuals, who have sought, by working on the fears and feelings of the weak and unsteady that celebrity, which they could not obtain by learning and orthodoxy: and alas! so subtle is the poison, and so malignant in its operation, that it is almost hopeless to attempt the cure of any person, once infected, more particularly when, as most often happens, the patient is a woman. Nor does Luther in his numerous and admirable discourses on this point, conceal or palliate the difficulties, which the carnal mind, that works under many and different disguises, throws in the way to prevent the laying firm hold of the truth. One most mischievous and very popular mis-belief must be cleared away in the first instance—the presumption, I mean, that whatever is not quite simple, and what any plain body can understand at the first hearing, cannot be of necessary belief, or among the fundamental articles or essentials of Christian faith. A docile, child-like mind, a deference to the authority of the Churches, a presumption of the truth of doctrines that have been received and taught as true by the whole Church in all times; reliance on the positive declarations of the Apostle—in short, all the convictions of the truth of a doctrine that are previous to a perfect insight into its truth, because these convictions, with the affections and dispositions accompanying them, are the very means and conditions of attaining to that insight—and study of, and quiet meditation on, them, with a gradual growth of spiritual knowledge, and earnest prayer for its increase; all these, to each and all of which the young Christian is so repeatedly and fervently exhorted by St. Paul, are to be superseded, because, forsooth, truths needful for all men, must be quite simple and easy, and adapted to the capacity of all, even of the plainest and dullest understanding! What cannot be poured all at once on a man, can only be supererogatory drops from the emptied shower-bath of religious instruction! But surely, the more rational inference would be, that the faith, which is to save the whole man, must have its roots and justifying grounds in the very depths of our being. And he who can read the Writings of the Apostles, John and Paul, without finding in almost every page a confirmation of this, must have looked at them, as at the sun in an eclipse, through blackened glasses.
[129] Job. iv. 18.—Ed.
[130] St. Paul blends both forms of expression, and asserts the same doctrine when speaking of the celestial body provided for the new man in the spiritual flesh and blood, (that is, the informing power and vivific life of the incarnate Word: for the Blood is the Life, and the Flesh the Power)—when speaking, I say, of this celestial body, as a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, yet brought down to us, made appropriable by faith, and ours—he adds, for in this earthly house (that is, this mortal life, as the inward principle or energy of our Tabernacle, or outward and sensible body) we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: not that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life. 2 Cor. v. 1-4.
The four last words of the first verse (eternal in the heavens) compared with the conclusion of v. 2, (which is from heaven) present a coincidence with John iii. 13, "And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, which is in heaven." [Would not the coincidence be more apparent, if the words of John had been rendered word for word, even to a disregard of the English idiom, and with what would be servile and superstitious fidelity in the translation of a common classic? I can see no reason why the ουδεις, so frequent in St. John, should not be rendered literally, no one; and there may be a reason why it should. I have some doubt likewise respecting the omission of the definite articles τον, του, τω—and a greater, as to the ὁ ων, both in this place and in John i. 18, being adequately rendered by our which is. What sense some of the Greek Fathers attached to, or inferred from, St. Paul's in the Heavens, the theological student (and to theologians is this note principally addressed) may find in Waterland's Letters to a Country Clergyman—a divine, whose judgment and strong sound sense are as unquestionable as his learning and orthodoxy. A clergyman in full orders, who has never read the works of Bull and Waterland, has a duty yet to perform.]
Let it not be objected, that, forgetful of my own professed aversion to allegorical interpretations, I have, in this note, fallen into "the fond humour of the mystic divines, and allegorizers of Holy Writ."[131] There is, believe me, a wide difference between symbolical and allegorical. If I say that the flesh and blood (corpus noumenon) of the Incarnate Word are power and life, I say likewise that this mysterious power and life are verily and actually the flesh and blood of Christ. They are the allegorizers, who turn the 6th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John,—the hard saying,—who can hear it?—after which time many of Christ's disciples, who had been eye-witnesses of his mighty miracles, who had heard the sublime morality of his Sermon on the Mount, had glorified God for the wisdom which they had heard, and had been prepared to acknowledge, This is indeed the Christ,—went back and walked no more with him!—the hard sayings, which even the Twelve were not yet competent to understand farther than that they were to be spiritually understood; and which the chief of the Apostles was content to receive with an implicit and anticipative faith!—they, I repeat, are the allegorizers who moralize these hard sayings, these high words of mystery, into a hyperbolical metaphor per catachresin, which only means a belief of the doctrine which Paul believed, an obedience to the law, respecting which Paul was blameless, before the voice called him on the road to Damascus! What every parent, every humane preceptor, would do when a child had misunderstood a metaphor or apologue in a literal sense, we all know. But the meek and merciful Jesus suffered many of his disciples to fall off from eternal life, when, to retain them, he had only to say,—O ye simple-ones! why are ye offended? My words, indeed, sound strange; but I mean no more than what you have often and often heard from me before, with delight and entire acquiescence!—Credat Judæus! Non ego. It is sufficient for me to know that I have used the language of Paul and John, as it was understood and interpreted by Justin Martyr. Tertullian, Irenæus, and (if he does not err) by the whole Christian Church then existing.
[131] See Introductory Aphorisms, xxix., p. 19.—Ed.
APHORISM XIX.
Field.
The Romanists teach that sins committed after baptism (that is, for the immense majority of Christians having Christian parents, all their sins from the cradle to the grave) are not so remitted for Christ's sake, but that we must suffer that extremity of punishment which they deserve: and therefore either we must afflict ourselves in such sort and degree of extremity as may answer the demerit of our sins, or be punished by God, here or in the world to come, in such degree and sort that his Justice may be satisfied. [As the encysted venom, or poison-bag, beneath the Adder's fang, so does this doctrine lie beneath the tremendous power of the Romish Hierarchy. The demoralizing influence of this dogma, and that it curdled the very life-blood in the veins of Christendom, it was given to Luther beyond all men since Paul to see, feel, and promulgate. And yet in his large Treatise on Repentance, how near to the spirit of this doctrine—even to the very walls and gates of Babylon—was Jeremy Taylor driven, in recoiling from the fanatical extremes of the opposite error!] But they that are orthodox, teach that it is injustice to require the payment of one debt twice. * * * It is no less absurd to say, as the Papists do, that our satisfaction is required as a condition, without which Christ's satisfaction is not applicable unto us, than to say, Peter hath paid the debt of John, and He, to whom it was due, accepteth of the same payment on the condition that John pay it himself also. * * * The satisfaction of Christ is communicated and applied unto us without suffering the punishment that sin deserveth, [and essentially involveth,] upon the condition of our faith and repentance. [To which I would add: Without faith there is no power of repentance: without a commencing repentance no power to faith: and that it is in the power of the will either to repent or to have faith in the Gospel sense of the words, is itself a consequence of the redemption of mankind, a free gift of the Redeemer: the guilt of its rejection, the refusing to avail ourselves of the power, being all that we can consider as exclusively attributable to our own act.][132]