We have said the assertion of our author is not only incorrect in its form, but dangerous in its tendency. That tendency, with all respect to Prof. Müller’s expressed opinions, is latitudinarian; it would lead one to think that, after all, the heathen and all professing a false religion are in a comparatively safe state. If this be so, why do we find the apostle assaulting those systems so uncompromisingly, and asserting that the heathen are inexcusable? And how do we reconcile with this theory the words of the Gospel, “Unless ye be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven”? True, there is the baptisma flaminis, the resource of those who have not the blessing of the actual sacrament; but even this requires a rejection, absolute or implied, of the false system, and the act of faith in the true God, accompanied by a firm will of doing whatever it may be known he asks of a sincere soul. The language of the great theologians is certainly not in any way favorable to the safety of those who follow a false religion. They tell us that those who among the pagans of old were saved, were justified by their faith in a true God and in the Redeemer to come. The doctor of grace, the great St. Augustine, whose intellect was one of the most remarkable of any age, says in Serm. 3 on the 36th Ps., “All who were just, from the beginning of the world, have Christ as their head. For they believed he was to come, whom we believe to have come already; by faith in him they were saved, as we are.” Then, in the Comm. on the 128th Ps., he writes: “Has the church only existed now? The church is of old; from the time the saints were called the church is on earth. Once it existed only in Abel, and was warred against by a wicked and perfidious brother, Cain. Once the church was only in Enoch, and he was taken away from the wicked. Once the church was only in Noah’s house, and it suffered from all those who perished by the flood, and only the ark floated on the waters and escaped to the dry land. Once the church was only in Abraham, and we know how much he suffered from the wicked. The church existed only in Lot, and in his house in Sodom, and he bore with the iniquity and perversity of the Sodomites, until the Lord freed him from them. The church began to exist in the people of Israel, and it suffered at the hands of Pharaoh and the Egyptians. And in the very church itself, amid the people of Israel, there began to flourish a number of holy souls: Moses and other saints suffered from the wicked Jews. We come at last to our Lord Jesus Christ; the Gospel has been preached, and he has said in the Psalms: ‘I have brought the tidings, and I have spoken, and they are multiplied beyond number.’” (See also the writings of the same father against the Donatists.) The same idea of the necessity of faith in Christ is found constantly in the teaching of the church and in the writings of the fathers.
We ask after this, who deserve most credit as exponents of the essential requisites of salvation—the early fathers of the church, who explain the words of the apostle, “Without faith it is impossible to please God,” in the sense we have here in St. Augustine, and which too is had in the ancient Athanasian Creed; or gentlemen like our author, whose ideas of Christianity, even when they express them clearly, differ so widely from what was once held as revealed truth, and who moreover cannot come to an understanding among themselves as to what the truth of Christ is? And if we must give the preference to the former, what are we to say of an opinion that serves to lull people into a false security regarding that which is, of all things, the most vital in its importance and consequences?
Prof. Müller rightly says that the knowledge of the false religions of the world makes us appreciate more the Christian religion. Had he taken the view we have given, he would have had a vastly greater appreciation of it. He would not have put it in comparison with other religions, as differing from them by a superior degree of excellence, but would have shown that they differed essentially, as right differs from wrong, as truth from error, and therefore he would, while speaking charitably of individuals and leaving them to the judgment of God, infinitely just, have condemned and rejected these false systems of worship as the curse of the unhappy race of Adam. As we have said before, we are not inclined to charge Prof. Müller with the full consequences of his assertions, since in several places of his work he gives his unqualified acknowledgment of the claims of Christianity. Still we cannot but look on his loose assertions as the result of the rationalistic spirit that has begun so rapidly to pervade the most conservative of English universities. Only a few years ago, when called to give his testimony before the Board of Inquiry of the House of Lords regarding the state of the universities, Canon Liddon said that this tendency to rationalism had come in with the change in the system of studies and the introduction of the higher philosophical branches, and that it was making headway among the students in a marked manner. Nor, when we see those at the head of the university decide, as they did lately, that the Thirty-nine Articles are not to be insisted on for examination except in case of those who are candidates for the honorary degrees, and when we hear in our own country a board of Anglican bishops declare that the word “regeneration” in the formula of infant baptism does not imply any moral change in the one baptized—it does not seem to us that we are doing Prof. Müller injustice in thinking that he, a lay professor in the university directed by the Anglican Church, has, it may be unconsciously, taken in not a little of the leaven of rationalism.
To this may be referred his translation of the text of St. Justin, Ap. i., § 46, when he makes this Christian philosopher say, “Christ is the first begotten of God, and we have already proved him to be the very Logos (or universal Reason) of which mankind are all partakers.” In the Edit. of the Congr. of St. Maurus of the Works of St. Justin, this word universal does not occur; the Greek text has simply the accusative “Logon,” and the Latin simply “Rationem.” Certainly all Catholic theologians hold this doctrine of St. Justin, and teach that the Logos or Verbum or Ratio is the definite wisdom of the Godhead, by which God understands himself and all things in himself, and that all created wisdom or reason is but a participation of that Infinite Reason or Word. But in these days, when the locutions, universal soul, universal intellect, universal being, are used so much in a pantheistical sense, we think an author can hardly find fault with those who very probably misunderstand him when he uses expressions so liable to be misinterpreted, and charge him with some tendency which he seems in other places to disclaim. It seems to us the learned professor should have taken all the greater care in his translation, as St. Justin (in his Ap. ii. § 7) disclaims expressly all pantheistic teaching, which he declares to be “foreign to all sound thought, reason and mind.”
To show we do not wish to be unfair to this distinguished scholar, we will do him the justice to cite his condemnation of the pantheistic spirit of the times. He is speaking of Barthélemy St. Hilaire’s History of Buddhism, and he quotes the words of the preface of that writer:
“This book may offer one other advantage, and I regret to say that at present it may seem to come opportunely. It is the misfortune of our times that the same doctrines which form the foundation of Buddhism meet at the hands of some of our philosophers with a favor which they ill deserve. For some years we have seen systems arising in which metempsychosis and transmigration are highly spoken of, and attempts are made to explain the world and man without either a God or a Providence, exactly as Buddha did. A future life is refused to the yearnings of mankind, and the immortality of the soul is replaced by the immortality of works. God is dethroned, and in his place they substitute man, the only being, we are told, in which the Infinite becomes conscious of itself. These theories are recommended to us sometimes in the name of science, or of history, or philology, or even of metaphysics; and though they are neither new nor very original, yet they can do much injury to feeble hearts.”
And a few lines further on:
“It would be useful, however, if the authors of these modern systems would just cast a glance at the theories and destinies of Buddhism. It is not philosophy in the sense in which we understand this great name, nor is it religion in the sense of ancient paganism, of Christianity, or of Mohammedanism; but it contains elements of all worked up into a perfectly independent doctrine; acknowledges nothing in the universe but man, and obstinately refuses to recognize anything else, though confounding man with nature in the midst of which he lives. Hence all those aberrations of Buddhism, which ought to be a warning to others.” (P. 203, vol. i.)
We have one other charge against the learned professor for what, though savoring a little of rationalism, more particularly regards the Catholic Church. He says that “as the Oriental creeds degenerated into grosser forms, so Christianity degenerates into Jesuitism and Mormonism” (p. 185). We grant that the author is striving to be fair to the pagans, and shows an unwillingness to condemn them as a whole on account of the corrupt practices of a portion of them. But in doing so he has shown himself most unjust to a distinguished Order in the Catholic Church, whose piety, virtue, and learning claim for them everywhere from Christians a tribute of respect and gratitude, and nowhere more so than in our own free land. It is really lamentable to see what we must call a total want of knowledge in a person of such extensive information and real ability as Prof. Müller. ’Tis strange that it did not occur to him that there was a great incongruity in coupling the Society of Jesus with the corrupt and sensual community of the Mormons, and it is only another lesson to put us on our guard against prejudice, which has so wonderful a power in perverting the judgments of men so worthy of respect for their zeal in the cause of truth.