There are, no doubt, times when an old political order, as in Rome after Marius and Sulla, has become effete, and can no longer fulfil the duties or discharge the offices of a government, in which a revolution, like that effected under the lead of Julius an Augustus Caesar, may be desirable and advantageous, for it establishes a practicable and a real government in the place of a government that can no longer discharge the functions of government, and is virtually no government at all. The empire was a great advance on the republic, which was incapable of being restored. But revolutions properly so-called, undertaken for the subversion of an existing order and the introduction of another held to be theoretically more perfect, have never, so far as history records, been productive of good. No doubt England is to-day in advance of what she was under the Stuarts, but who dares say that she is in advance of [{441}] what she would have been had she not expelled them, or that she has become greater under the Whig nobility than she might have been under the Tory squirarchy?
There has been, I readily concede, a real progress in modern society, at least dating from the fifth century of our era; but, as I read history, the progress has been interrupted or retarded by modern socialistic or political revolutions, and has in no case been accelerated by philanthropy as distinguished from Christian charity. Moreover, in no state of Christendom has charity ever been wholly wanting. Nations have cast off the authority of the church, and have greatly suffered in consequence; but in none has divine charity been totally wanting, and the influence of Christianity on civilization, even in heretical and schismatic nations, is not to be counted as nothing. I am far from believing that the nations that broke away from the church are not better than they would have been if they had not had the benefit of the habits formed under her teaching and discipline. I know that extra ecclesiam nulla sit salus; but I know also that the church is as a city set on a hill, and that rays from the light within her may and do extend beyond her walls, and relieve in some degree the darkness of those who are outside of them. How much the church continues to influence nations once within her communion, but now severed from it, nobody is competent to determine, nor can any one but God himself say how many, in all these nations, though not formally united to the body of the church, are yet not wholly severed from her soul. The Russian Church retains the Orthodox faith and the sacraments, and is officially under no sentence of excommunication from the body of Christ, and only those who are individually and voluntarily schismatic, are guilty of the sin of schism; and in other communions, though undoubtedly heretical, there may be large numbers of baptized persons who do really act on Christian principles, and from purely Christian motives. All I mean to deny is, that society or humanity ever gains anything from violent or sentimental revolutions.
The impotence of philanthropy without charity, or pure humanism, is demonstrable à priori, and should have been foreseen. It is opposed to the nature of things, and implies the absurdity that nothing is something, and that what is not can act. It is an attempt to found religion, morals, society, and the state without God; when without God there is and can be nothing, and consequently nothing for them to stand on. It assumes that man is an independent being, and suffices for himself; which, whether we mean by man the individual or humanity, "the universal man," "the one man" of the Transcendentalists, or "the grand collective Being" of the Positivists, we all feel and know to be not the fact. Man in either sense is a creature, and depends absolutely on the creative act of God for his existence; and let God suspend that act, and he sinks into the nothing he was before he was created. Therefore it is in God mediante his creative act he lives and moves and has his being. Hence it is, whether we know it or not, that we assert the existence of God as our creator in every act we perform, every thought we think, every resolution we take, every sentiment we experience, and every breath we draw, for no human operation—physical, intellectual, or moral—is possible without the divine creative act and concurrence.
Philanthropy, or the love of man, separated from charity, or the love of God and of man in God, is therefore simply nothing, a mere negation, for it supposes man separated from God is something, and separated from God he is nothing. Hence St. Paul, in his first epistle to the Corinthians, says: "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries, and have [{442}] all knowledge, and have all faith, so I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and should give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." This is so not by virtue of any arbitrary decree or appointment of the Almighty, even if such decree or appointment is possible, but in the very, nature of things, and God himself cannot make it otherwise. God is free to create or not to create, and free to create such existences as he pleases; but he cannot create an independent self-sufficing being, for he cannot create anything between which and himself there should not be the relation of creator and creature. The creature depends wholly, in all respects whatever, on the creator, and without him is and can be nothing. The creature depends absolutely on the creator in relation to all his acts, thoughts, and affections, as well as for mere existence itself. God could not, even if it were possible that he would, dispense with charity and count the love of man as independent of God, as something, because he is truth, and it is impossible for him to lie, and lie he would were he to count such supposed love something, for independent of him there is no man to love or to be loved. Man can love or be loved only where he exists; and as he exists in God, so only in God can we possibly love him, that is, we can love our neighbor only in loving God. The humanitarian love or morality is, therefore, a pure negation, simply nothing.
Man is, indeed, a free moral agent, and he would not be capable of virtue or a moral action, if he were not; but he can act, notwithstanding his moral freedom, only according to the conditions of his existence. He exists and can exist only by virtue of a supernatural principle, medium, and end. He exists only by the direct, immediate creative act of God, and God in himself and in his direct immediate acts, always and everywhere, is supernatural, above nature, because its creator, and, as its creator, its proprietor. The maker has a sovereign right to the thing made. The creature can no more be its own end than its own principle or cause. Man cannot take himself self as his own end, because he is not his own, but is his creator's, and because independent of God who he is nothing. So God is both his principle and end. But the end is not possible without a medium that places it in relation with the principle, as theologians demonstrate in their dissertations on the mystery of the ever blessed Trinity, and as common sense itself teaches. As the principle and end are supernatural, so the medium must be supernatural, for the medium must be on the plane of the principle and end between which is the medium. The medium, in the moral or spiritual order, the gospel teaches us, is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, which infused by the Holy Ghost into the soul elevates her to the plane of her supernatural destiny, and strengthens her to gain or fulfil it. Hence, as says the apostle, Ex ipso, et per ipsum, et in ipso sunt omnia—things are from him, and by him, and to or in him. These are the essential conditions of all life, alike in the natural or physical order, and in the moral or spiritual. In all orders God is the principle, medium, and end of all existence, of all action.
In the moral or spiritual order, not in the natural or physical order, man is a free agent, and acts from free will, as Pope sings:
"God, binding nature fast in fate,
Leaves free the human will."
Grace assisting, man can conform to the essential conditions of his existence—conditions determined and unalterably fixed by his relation to God as his creator—by the free act of his own will; and by doing so he lives morally, or has moral life. He can also, by virtue of his liberty or freedom, refuse to conform, or in theological language, to obey God, but he cannot so refuse and live in the moral order. This refusal is not a living act, it is simply [{443}] the negation of moral life, and therefore is moral death, as the Scriptures call it. He does not necessarily cease to exist in the natural or physical order, for in that order he cannot sever himself from God, even if he would; he may kill his body, but not the physical life of the soul, immortal, except by the will of its creator. But he can extinguish his moral life, or refuse to live a moral life, which is moral or spiritual death; and death is not a positive existence, but the negation of existence, and therefore, nothing. Hence life and death in the moral order are set before us, and we are free to choose which we will. To choose, grace assisting, life, and freely of our own will to conform to the conditions of life, to God as our principle, medium, and and, is precisely what is meant by Christian charity, a virtue that fulfils all the conditions imposed by our relation to God as his creatures, the whole law of our existence, and unites our will with the will of God, and by so doing makes us morally or spiritually one with God. He who refuses charity, or has it not, voluntarily renounces God, separates himself morally, and so far as his own will goes even physically, from God; and as severed from God he exists not at all; and therefore says the apostle, "Without charity I am nothing." He only declares what is real, what is true in the nature of things, and which God himself cannot alter.
Philanthropy is, therefore, necessarily impotent, for it tends to death, not life; and as there is no action, physical or moral, that does not tend to a real end, it is not action, but a negation of action, and is therefore in itself nothing positive. All the sentiments for this reason are negative, simple wants of the soul. The soul may exert her powers to satisfy them, or to fill up the void in her being, which they all indicate, but they are in themselves nothing. They indicate not what the soul has, but what she wants or needs to complete herself; and that can never the obtained from the creature save in God, for the creature out of God, separated or turned away from God, is nothing; it is something only in God. Any morality, then, built on the sentiments is as unsubstantial as castles in the air, and as unreal as "the baseless fabric of a vision." The sentiments being wants, negative, with nothing positive in themselves, are necessarily impotent. They are unsatisfied wants, and incapable of attaining to anything that can satisfy them. They are a hungering and thirsting of the soul for what it is not and has not. Here is the explanation of the misery and wretchedness of a sentimental age, why it is so ill-at-ease, so restless, so discontented in the midst of material progress, and the accumulations of sensible goods. It explains, too, why the damned, or those who fail in their destiny, must suffer for ever. Death and hell are not positive existences or positive creations of God, but are the want of spiritual life, are the unsatisfied wants, the endless cravings of the soul for what can be had only in God, and the lost have turned their backs on God.
Charity is not negative, not a want, but a power; and it is easy, therefore, to understand that while philanthropy is impotent it is effective. Charity grasps, as do all the rational affections, her object, and is effective because she is positive not negative, living not dead; and living, because she conforms to the real conditions of life, and participates, through his creative act, in the life of him who is life himself. She is less pretentious and more modest in her proceedings and promises than philanthropy, but makes up for it in the richness and magnificence of the results she obtains. She works slowly and with patience, for she works for eternity, not time—without pomp or parade, in obscurity and silence, for she seeks the praise of God, not the praise of men. To the onlooker she seems not to move, any more than the sun in the heavens; but after a while we find that she has moved, and has transformed the world. [{444}] Broad in her love and expansive as the universe, and embracing all ages and nations in her affections, she yet wastes not her strength in vague generalities, nor in manifold projects of reform or progress of the race in general, from which no one in particular has anything to expect; but takes men in the concrete as she finds them, does the work nearest at hand and most pressing to be done, and proceeding quietly from the individual to the family, from the family to society and the state, she works out the regeneration of all in working out the regeneration of each. She works as God works, without straining or effort, for her power is great and never fails. Power needs make no effort; it speaks and it is done, commands and it stands fast. Let there be light, and there is light. It is weakness that must strain and tug, as we see in the feeble literature of the day, and philanthropy seems to the observer to be always more in earnest and far harder at work than charity, and attracts far more attention; but while she fills the world with her hollow sounds, charity, unheeded and unheard, fills it with her deeds.