The reverse sense of the statement of the Rev. Edward E. Hale on this point contains the truth. The Catholic Church welcomes all nations and races to her fold, and reintegrates the scattered truths contained in every religious system, not by way of reunion or composition, but by simplicity and unity in a divine synthesis; and as the ancient Egyptians, and the Greeks,
and the Romans, so also the modern Franks and Celts, have served by their characteristic gifts to the development and progress of Christian truth. In like manner the Saxons, with their peculiar genius and instincts, will serve, to their own greater glory, in due season, in the same great cause, perhaps, by giving a greater development and a more scientific expression to the mystic life of the church, and by completing, viewed from intrinsic grounds, the demonstration of the truth of her divine mission.
Leaving aside other misstatements and errors contained in the first part of this sermon from want of space, we pass on to what may be termed its pith. Mr. Hale starts with the hazardous question, “What is the Unitarian Church for?” As far as we can make out from repeated reading of the main portion of the sermon—for there reigns a great confusion and incoherence in his ideas—the Unitarian Church has for its mission to certify anew and proclaim the truth that “God is in man.” “God in man,” he says, “is in itself the basis of the whole Gospel.” Undoubtedly “God is in man,” and God is in the brute, and God is in every grain of sand, and God is in all things. God is in all things by his immensity—that is, by his essence, and power, and presence. But this is a truth known by the light of human reason, and taught by all sound philosophers, heathen and Christian. There was no need of the Gospel, nor of that “fearlessness” which, he tells us, “was in the Puritan blood,” nor of the Unitarian Church, to teach this evident and common truth to mankind.
The Gospel message means more than that, and the Rev. Mr. Hale has some idea that it does mean
more. He adds: “Every man is God’s child, and God’s Spirit is in every life.” Again: “Men are the children of God really and not figuratively”; “The life of God is their life by real inheritance.” After having made these statements, he attempts to give the basis and genesis of this relation of God as father to man as child, as follows:
“That the force which moves all nature is one force, and not many, appears to all men, as they study it, more and more. That this force is conscious of its own existence, that it is conscious of its own work, that it is therefore what men call spirit, that this spirit has inspired and still inspires us, that we are therefore not creatures of dumb power, but children of a Father’s love—this is the certainty which unfolds itself or reveals itself, or is unfolded or is revealed, as higher and higher man ascends in his knowledge of what IS.”
That man, by the light of his reason, can, by the study of nature, attain to this idea of God and his principal attributes, as Spirit, as Creator, upholder of the universe, and as Providence, is no doubt true; but that, by the study of “the force which moves all nature,” our own consciousness included, we can learn that we are the “children of a Father’s love,” does not follow, and is quite another thing. It is precisely here that Unitarianism as a consistent, intelligible religious system crumbles into pieces. Nor can Unitarians afford to follow the Rev. Edward E. Hale in his attempt to escape this difficulty by concealing his head, ostrich-like, under the sand of a spurious mysticism, and virtually repudiating the rational element in religion by saying: “The mystic knows that God is here now. He has no chain of posts between child and Father. He relies on no long, logical system of communication,” etc. The genuine mystic, indeed,
“knows God is here,” but he knows also that God is not the author of confusion, and to approach God he does not require of man to put out the light of his reason. He will tell us that the relation of God to all things as created being, and the relation of God to man as rational being, and the relation of God to man as father to child, are not one and the same thing, and ought not, therefore, to be confounded. The true mystic will further inform us that the first relation, by way of immanence, is common to all created things, man included; the second, by way of rationality, is common to the human race; the third, by way of filiation, is common to those who are united to God through the grace of Christ. The first and second are communicated to man by the creative act of God, and are therefore ours by right of natural inheritance through Adam. The third relation is communicated to us by way of adoption through the grace of the new Adam, Christ, who is “the only-begotten Son of God.” This relation is not, therefore, ours by inheritance. We “have received from Christ,” says St. Paul to the Romans, “the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry: Abba, Father.”[96] “By whom also we have access through faith into this grace, wherein we stand, and glory in the hope of the glory of the sons of God.”[97] It is proper to remark here that it is an error very common among radicals, rationalists, and a certain class of Unitarians to suppose that the relation of the soul to God by way of filiation, due to Christ, is intended as a substitute for our natural relations to God by way of immanence and rationality; whereas
Christianity presupposes these, reaffirms, continues, completes, and perfects them, by this very gift of filiation with God. For it is a maxim common to all Catholic theologians that gratia supponit et perficit naturam.
Our intelligent mystic would not stop here. Proceeding further, he would say that to be really and truly children of God by inheritance implies our being born with the same identical nature as God. For the nature of a child is not a resemblance to, or an image of, that of his father, but consists in his possessing the same identical essence and nature as his father. If the son is equal to his father by nature, then he is also equal to his father in his capacities as such. Now, if every man, by nature, has the right to call God father, as the Rev. Mr. Hale and his co-religionists pretend, then all men by nature are equal to God, both in essence and attributes! Is this what Unitarians mean by “the divinity of human nature”? The Rev. E. E. Hale appears to say so when he tells us: “What we are struggling for, and what, if words did not fail us, we would fain express, is what Dr. James Walker called ‘the identity of essence of all spiritual being and all spiritual life.’” All, then, that the believers in the divinity of Christ claim exclusively for him is claimed by Unitarians equally for every individual of the human race. But the belief in the divinity of Christ is “the latest and least objectionable form of idolatry”—so the Rev. H. W. Bellows informs us in his volume entitled Phases of Faith. The Unitarian cure, then, for the evil of idolatry is by substituting an indefinite multitude of idols for one single object of idolatrous worship.