Video meliora proboque,
Deteriora sequor.
Philosophers have from time to time attempted to explain this dark experience away, and here and there men of happy temperament, living among calm surroundings, have been comparatively unconscious of the evil in the world. But the common conscience is alike unaffected by the ingenuity of the one class, or the apathy of the other; while it thrills to the voices of men like S. Paul or S. Augustine, Dante or John Bunyan, Loyola or Luther; recognising in their sighs and tears and lamentations, the echo of its own unutterable sorrow made articulate. Nor is sin confined to one department of our being. It poisons the very springs of life, and taints its every action. It corrupts art; it hampers science; it paralyses the efforts of the politician and the patriot; and diseased bodies, and broken hearts, and mental and spiritual agony, are amongst its daily, its hourly results. It would seem indeed superfluous to insist upon these things, if their importance were not so often ignored in the course of anti-Christian argument. But when we are met by an appeal to experience, it is necessary to insist that no element of experience be left out.
And moral evil, independently of any theory of its nature or its origin, is a plain palpable fact, and a fact of such stupendous magnitude as to constitute by far the most serious problem of our life.
Now it is also a fact of present experience that there are scattered throughout Christendom, men of every age, temperament, character, and antecedents, for whom this problem is practically solved: men who have a personal conviction that their own past sins are done away with, and the whole grasp of evil upon them loosened, and who in consequence rise to heights of character and conduct, which they know that they would never have otherwise attained. And all this they agree to attribute, in however varying phrases, to the personal influence upon them of Jesus Christ. Further, these men had a spiritual ancestry. Others in the last generation believed and felt, and acted as they now act and feel and believe. And so their lineage can be traced backward, age by age, swelling into a great multitude whom no man can number, till we come to the historic records of Him whom they all look back to, and find that He claimed the power on earth to forgive sins. And there the phenomenon ceases. Pre-Christian antiquity contains nothing analogous to it. Consciousness of sin, and prayers for pardon, and purgatorial penances, and sacrifices, and incantations, and magic formulae are there in abundance; and hopes, among certain races, of the coming of a great deliverer. But never the same sense of sin forgiven, nor the consequent rebound of the enfranchised soul. Yet neither a code of morality which was not essentially new, nor the example of a life receding with every age into a dimmer past, would have been adequate to produce this result. It has all the appearance of being, what it historically has claimed to be, the entrance of an essentially new life into the world, quickening its palsied energies, as with an electric touch. And the more we realize in the bitterness of our own experience, or that of others, the essential malignity of moral evil, the more strictly supernatural does this energy appear. When, therefore, we are told that miracles contradict experience, we point to the daily occurrence of this spiritual miracle and ask 'whether is it easier to say thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say arise and walk?' We meet experience with experience, the negative experience that miracles have not happened with the positive experience that they are happening now: an old argument, which so far from weakening, modern science has immensely strengthened, by its insistence on the intimate union between material and spiritual things. For spirit and matter, as we call them, are now known to intermingle, and blend, and fringe off, and fade into each other, in a way that daily justifies us more in our belief that the possessor of the key to one must be the possessor of the key to both, and that He who can save the soul can raise the dead.
Here then is our answer to the negative criticism, or rather to the negative hypothesis, by which many critics are misled. Of course we do not expect for it unanimous assent. It is founded on a specific experience; and strangers to that experience are naturally unable to appreciate its force. But neither should they claim to judge it. For the critic of an experience must be its expert. And the accumulated verdict of the spiritual experts of all ages, should at least meet with grave respect from the very men who are most familiar with the importance of the maxim, 'Cuique in sua arte credendum.' Christianity distinctly declines to be proved first, and practised afterwards. Its practice and its proof go hand in hand. And its real evidence is its power.
We now see why the Atonement has often assumed such exclusive prominence in the minds of Christian men. They have felt that it was the secret of their own regenerate life, their best intellectual apology, their most attractive missionary appeal; and so have come to think that the other aspects of the Incarnation might be banished from the pulpit and the market-place, to the seclusion of the schools. But this has proved to be a fatal mistake. Truth cannot be mutilated with impunity. And this gradual substitution of a detached doctrine for a catholic creed, has led directly to the charge which is now so common, that Christianity is inadequate to life; with no message to ordinary men, in their ordinary moments, no bearing upon the aims, occupations, interests, enthusiasms, amusements, which are human nature's daily food.
But we have already seen what a misconception this implies of the Incarnation. The Incarnation opened heaven, for it was the revelation of the Word; but it also reconsecrated earth, for the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us. And it is impossible to read history without feeling how profoundly the religion of the Incarnation has been a religion of humanity. The human body itself, which heathendom had so degraded, that noble minds could only view it as the enemy and prison of the soul, acquired a new meaning, exhibited new graces, shone with a new lustre in the light of the Word made Flesh; and thence, in widening circles, the family, society, the state, felt in their turn the impulse of the Christian spirit, with its
touches of things common,
Till they rose to touch the spheres.