I.
Universal Theism.
In the first place, there would be, everywhere,—in all lands and in all hearts,—the belief and acknowledgment of the one living and true God. All doubt, denial, and error, respecting this cardinal and central truth, would have passed away. There would be no Atheism,—the rejection and repudiation of a personal God; no Pantheism,—which is only Atheism under another name; no Scepticism,—professed uncertainty as to whether there is really a God or not; and no Polytheism—the belief of a mere rabble of divinities. All these forms of thought would cease and determine, and give place to the universal admission of the great fact of the Divine existence. No human being would be to be found, who could look over the earth with all its wonders, and survey the heaven with its sun and stars,—and see no proof or probability in either, of the existence anywhere of a being or a personality greater than himself! This is the amount of the Atheistic creed,—if creed it can be called, that consists only in denials and negations. The universe is a thing,—wonderful indeed, but nothing more,—having no consciousness, no capacity for voluntary action, nothing about it of personal properties; and, if there be no independent personal God, then, the greatest being that is known to exist in the whole universe,—the only one that can be spoken of as a person, is man himself!—a somewhat lame and impotent conclusion!—a poor summit to the infinitude of things! There are those who say that they believe this;—there will be none to say it, when it comes to be a universally admitted truth, that “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” In the same way, there will be no thinkers, or professed thinkers, whose minds, repelled by the gross darkness of positive denial, but not drawn into the light of positive belief, wander in the fogs and mists of uncertainty, and “reason downwards till they doubt of God.” And in the same way, the myriads of gods, which the Asiatic nations conceive to be filling the heavens and the earth,—large and small,—great and little, but most of them debased,—will all disappear, like the more elegant system of the Greeks, that once divided the domain of nature, and parcelled it out among its subordinate divinities. Cleared and cleansed from all these various forms of error, the large heart of universal humanity will be open to the air and the sunlight of true thought, and will reflect, as from a mirror, the image of Him, who has “set his glory above the heavens,” and of whom it is said, that “the knowledge of him” is abroad “in all the earth,” since, “from the creation of the world,” he hath made manifest, “by the works of his hands,” “even his eternal power and Godhead.”
II.
Universality of Christian Worship.
In the second place, there will be added to this universal acknowledgment of God, as the object of belief, a further recognition of him as the object of worship. All men would be worshippers of God, if, throughout the world, there should be not only the prevalence of the belief of that God is, but the working out of the results of that belief,—that because he is, he is “the hearer of prayer,” and that “to him,” therefore, “all flesh should come.” Taking this subject, however, in connexion with all the explanatory illustrations which we have already advanced, it is easy to see that it is of wide compass, and will include far more than might at first be apparent.
The God, whom we suppose to be acknowledged, is the God of the Bible, and the worship by which we suppose him to be approached, would be worship conducted on the principle which pervades it, and regulated by all that its spirit and precepts concur to prescribe. The Being referred to in the Scriptural expression,—“The earth is the Lord’s,”—is not one whose existence and character are demonstrated by philosophy, and who may thus be considered as a sort of hypothesis;—it is, as we have said, the God of the Bible,—the God who has made himself known by supernatural facts and verbal revelation, and whose discovery of himself in the works of his power, and in the constant displays of his wisdom and beneficence, is to be supplemented and enlarged by the whole of the utterances of his grace and mercy. On this principle it was, that we took the expression, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof;” not as an independent and isolated sentence,—not as a thing to be looked at by itself,—but in connexion with the contents of the entire volume of which it is a part: and we saw, when we did so, that it brought out, into great prominence, such a view of the teaching of Scripture in respect to the relations of God and man, as necessarily affected, very materially, the whole theory and practice of worship. But it is this view of the meaning of the passage, that we are supposing to be learned and acknowledged by the nations, and therefore the worship, in which we are further supposing them to unite, would of course be that which the whole of our exposition would inculcate or explain.
It is remarkable, too, that philosophical Deism never leads to worship in its disciples,—at least not to anything in the form of regular social or public acts. It is possible for a simple Theist consistently to pray, or to extol and adore the Deity he acknowledges; and it may be, that some Theists privately do so,—though all probabilities,—it may by no means uncandidly, be said,—are rather against it. What would be possible and consistent, however, in a Deist by himself, would be equally so in a company of such. On the principle of their believing in a personal God, they might meet together for public worship. But they never do. The mere admission of the one principle that God is, would seem not to be sufficient to lead men to worship;—it needs to be connected with another principle—that which affirms that “God has spoken,” or that, by some means, he has supernaturally made himself known, revealed his interest in human nature, and drawn near,—or draws near,—to the human race. All religions, always and everywhere, have pre-supposed something of supernatural intercourse between God and man;—they have had, or have, their traditionary belief of divine appearances,—their notions of a priesthood peculiarly favoured or filled by the divinity, through which, and through whose acts, the people could acceptably approach and pray. The believers in the Bible believe, of course, in supernatural manifestations of the Divine Being, made to them in the records, and embodied in many of the facts, of the book; and it is this belief that makes them worshippers. For the habit of worship, then, facts everywhere and abundantly demonstrate, you must have a religion; and for the existence of religion, you must have the belief of supernatural discoveries of God to man, in addition to the display of himself in his works. Deism is not a religion, but a philosophy; it has a God, but it does not worship; and it does not worship, because God, according to its conception of him, has never broken the silence of nature, or narrowed the distance between him and his creatures by passing over the limits of fixed law. All men who worship, whether their worship be pure or corrupt, do so, we repeat, because they have a religion, and they have a religion, because they believe in something supernatural as to their knowledge of God; something which makes their belief of him faith in what is demonstrated by miraculous fact or divine statement; and not merely opinion, as the logical conclusion of a speculative philosophy.
These principles and reasonings being apprehended, will clear the way to the intelligent perception of the variety of things that must be understood as included in the idea of all the world becoming worshippers of God, as the result of their perception of what we, as a nation, are supposed to teach. For men to be worshippers, their knowledge of God must be religious, not philosophic; for it to be religious, it must be founded on belief in a supernatural revelation; it will be this, when they acknowledge that “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof,” in words taken from the Jewish Scriptures, and regarded as an utterance of, the Divine voice. By such an acknowledgment they will recognise the whole of those Scriptures, as “given by inspiration of God,” or, as written by men who wrote “as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” But the admission of this, will draw with it the admission of the second series of writings, and the acknowledgment of their intimate connexion with the first, as the perfect development of what the first foreshadowed, and the record of the fulfilment of what they foretold. The faith of the men, therefore, who begin with the confession that “the earth is the Lord’s,” and who profess it in the words of a Divine saying, and as such, must go on till it takes in what the Hebrew institute taught in type, and the Hebrew prophets uttered in words, when they “spake beforehand of the sufferings of Christ, and of the glory that should follow;” and it must still go on, and can only be rationally and consistently complete, when it receives the whole of the evangelical discoveries of the New Testament respecting the redemption of the Christ of God. This, then, would be the faith of future society, the world over; and by this faith its worship would be regulated, if, as we are supposing, the nations should learn from us our religious belief in all its extent, and should follow it out in all its obligations.
The worship of the world, then, would be Christian worship. Men would be worshippers, because they would be religious; they would be religious, because they would have a religion, not a philosophy; and that religion, would be the one taught in the Christian Scriptures, and founded on the facts of the Christian revelation. All that we shall say of the consequence of this, at present, is, that, just as the admission of a personal God puts aside all forms of denial or error upon that point, so, the admission of a particular form of Divine discovery, and the establishment of worship according to the principles of a specific revelation, will put aside all other systems of worship, and overturn the pretensions of all other supernatural beliefs. Mohammedanism and idolatry would alike die under the predominance of the Christian sentiment;—the one as including too little, in not adding to the knowledge of God the knowledge of the redemptive act of the Christ; and the other as including too much, in having “gods many and lords many,” and worshipping these through visible objects, or regarding the visible objects as Divine; thus “falling down to the work of their hands,” and “turning the truth of God into a lie.” When Christian worship shall be universal in the earth, the gods, and priests, and altars and temples of all other religions will have departed; everything gross, cruel, and obscene will have passed away, and have given place to the practical knowledge of the one living and true God,—to Him, “who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity,” and who requires to be worshipped by men of “clean hands” and of “pure hearts.” Then will be brought to pass many of the sayings that are written in the Book which often portrays, in prophetic song, visions of the triumph of religion and righteousness, and of that FUTURE, which it sees, and celebrates, and it is to make for humanity. “The Lord will famish all the gods of the earth.” “The idols he will utterly abolish.” “It shall come to pass, that the gods which have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from underneath these heavens.” “So men shall fear the name of the Lord from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun.” “For, from the rising of the sun even to the going down of the same, his name shall be great among the Gentiles; and, in every place incense shall be offered unto him, and a pure offering.” “Behold the days come, saith the Lord, when they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for all shall know me from the least even unto the greatest.” “In that day, shall there be one Lord and his name one.” For “the kingdoms of the world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.”
III.
The Scriptures will purify and restore the Church.
But in the third place, as we are supposing the nations of the world to be intelligently led from the simple sentence,—“the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof,” to the admission of the contents of the entire book, and the full understanding of the whole system of mercy and mediation, as developed in shadow, in the Hebrew ritual, and given, in substance, in the work of Christ; and as we are supposing, that, because of the fact of their knowledge, their worship will be Christian;—we wish it further to be observed, that, because of the mode of their acquiring that knowledge, and on account of the accuracy and extent of it, their worship will not only be Christian as to its general character, but it will come to be of a kind distinguished by certain specific peculiarities.