In the six centuries immediately preceding Christ the preparation and convergence of events become more distinct and manifest; the features of human evolution are more marked; the progress and tendency of the universal movement are apparently accelerated in the direction of the common point of convergence; all human affairs, the objects of history, seem to rise out of its dim horizon, looming up in increasing magnitude, like the great ships of a squadron hastening from all points of the compass over a broad sea to their rendezvous. Before this period the expanse of time is to our eye almost like the waste solitudes of ocean. Confucius collected some remnants of Chinese historical documents going back to the ninth century b.c. Some imperfect records of Hindoo antiquity have been brought to light in modern researches. Hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions, like traces of a caravan on the sand, present to the curious modern eye vestiges of a remote past. Berosus wrote in the reign of Seleucus Nicator, Manetho in that of Ptolemy Philadelphus, Herodotus four centuries and a half before Christ. Varro, the most learned of the Romans, dates the beginning of authentic Roman history from the first Olympiad, B.C. 776. Authentic written history does not go back as far as Solomon, except as we find it in the sacred writings of the Old Testament. These priceless documents are the family records of the house of Nazareth, the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the history of his predecessors and precursors; of inchoate Christianity, of the prophecy and providence, the promises and laws, the typical rites and preliminary covenants, the elementary revelations and the other preludes, by which, in divers places, times, and manners, the Word of God prepared the way for his coming upon earth to fulfil all prophecy and accomplish the expectation of all nations.
About five centuries and a half before Christ the prophet Daniel made his celebrated prediction of the great period of seventy weeks—i.e., four hundred and ninety years—from the rebuilding of the temple and city of Jerusalem to the Messias. This period is marked as the one of immediate expectation and preparation. As the time of the great Prophet drew near the succession of the minor prophets in Judea ceased. The Jewish people became less exclusively isolated, and came into relations with other nations which were quite new and marked with a transitional tendency. The Greek Scriptures of the second canon, like the writings of St. Paul in the New Testament, are more like the classic works of other nations than those of the first canon, which are marked with the peculiar Hebrew characteristics. A diffusion of the Jews, of their books and ideas; a general dissemination of the Greek language and literature, a world-wide unification of civilized, and in part of barbarous peoples under the Roman polity; a remarkable advancement of the human mind in the great works of philosophy, poetry, literature, art, and every species of civilization; are the principal second and concurrent causes directed by divine Providence to fulfil a purpose, analogous to the mission of St. John the Baptist, among the nations predestined to a Christian vocation.
There is nothing in this view which favors rationalism. Grace supposes nature, and God is the author of both. Natural and supernatural providence are distinct but not separate. Rational science and revealed doctrine are portions of the universal truth which has its measure in the divine intelligence and its primal origin in the divine essence. It is, moreover, characteristic of the divine operation to act on the rule of parsimony in the use of means. Where second causes are sufficient the first cause does not immediately intervene and supersede their action; where natural forces are sufficient they are not supplanted by those which are supernatural. What a long period elapsed before the earliest of the inspired books was written! How few have been the prophets, how comparatively few and rare miracles of the first order! In the beginning, religion, the church, the whole spiritual order, was identified with the common social and civil order. The special intervention of God in the calling of Abraham, the legation of Moses, the entire Jewish system, was a renovation of the more ancient and universal dispensation, confined within the limits of one nation, protected by special legislation, sanctioned by miracles, manifested in revelations through inspired men and prophets. As the time draws near when the church and religion were to become once more and finally Catholic, the supernatural providence of God over the Jewish people becomes less extraordinary, and his natural providence over the other nations more conspicuous. The great Prophet himself, the Messias, the Son of God in human form, performs miracles and appeals to them, as it were, with reserve and reluctance, hides his wisdom and power from men, refuses to exert his dominion over men and nature in defence of his own life, discloses himself after his resurrection to a few only, and departs, so to speak, incognito from the earth to return to his heavenly abode with the Father. The gift of inspiration, by virtue of which the written documents of revelation are completed, is imparted to a small number only; their writings fill but a small compass; within fifty years from the opening of the New Testament canon by the first Gospel it is closed by the last book of the last of the apostles, St. John. No new David, or Isaias, or Daniel, or Paul, or John is henceforth to appear in the church. All this shows the purpose of God not to oppress the human by the divine in the deification of humanity, not to supersede the natural by the supernatural, or to supplant the activity of the human intelligence and will by an overbearing divine power. The Spirit of God brooded over the face of chaos in the beginning, gradually bringing it into form and order, and the same Spirit has been waving his wings[[91]] over the waters of human history during the entire period of the explication of God’s creative act in time and space through human actions and events. Where creative power is required—i.e., where it is the will of God to give being to a term educed from non-existence and from no pre-existing subject—God acts alone and immediately as first cause with no concurrent cause. He has created and continues to create all simple substances. Where supernatural power is required to bring from created substances certain results which presuppose a new form of being in them above their intrinsic substantial actuality, or some other augmentation of their natural force by an immediate divine act, God intervenes directly as the efficient cause of the effect produced. He is the author of second causes and principles, of the first germs of evolution, of generative powers, of all origin, and of all that is called in the German language Urwesen. He preserves everything, concurs with everything, directs everything toward proximate, remote, and final ends, bringing the creation which proceeded from him as first cause back to himself as final cause. And therefore, whenever there is a sufficient reason, he intervenes directly to overrule the order of second causes and the natural laws he has himself established. The especial reason for this is to prevent the thwarting of the legitimate action of beings endowed with con-creative power, through the illegitimate interference of other beings endowed with the same power. All spiritual beings have this con-creative power by virtue of intelligence and free-will. They may fail to exercise it when they should; they may be hindered from exercising it by equal or superior force. The order of moral probation requires that great freedom of movement should be allowed to these forces in voluntary efforts and in conflicts. But the final cause of this probation also exacts that the predetermined plans of God shall be infallibly executed, and that he shall overrule the wills both of men and angels for the fulfilment of his own sovereign will.
The natural and the supernatural are, therefore, not separate, much less disconnected, least of all hostile, in the order of divine providence, although they are distinct and placed in logical opposition to one another. Sacred and secular history, religion and civilization, theology and science, the eternal and temporal interests of mankind, cannot be separated from each other and relegated to mutually distant or hostile kingdoms, like the kingdoms of light and darkness in the system of the Manicheans. Any view which considers mankind as separated into two divisions of the elect and the reprobate by an antecedent decree, is false. The doctrine that the nature of man has become totally depraved, and that his entire rational and physical activity develops only sin which tends fatally to perdition, is utterly unchristian as well as unphilosophical. It is only from this doctrine that we could deduce a theory by which the society of the elect would be considered as a separated, isolated tribe, a small invisible church, without any real relation through a spiritual bond with the mass of mankind. The Catholic doctrine is expressed by the author of the Book of Wisdom in these beautiful words: “God created all things that they might be: and he made the nations of the earth for health: and there is no poison of destruction in them, nor kingdom of hell upon the earth. For justice is perpetual and immortal.”[[92]]
The true philosophy of Christianity must, therefore, take into view the providence of God over the Gentiles, their history, philosophy, polity, and civilization, in order to appreciate the period of preparation for the Messias who was the expected of the nations. The philosophy of history, also, must take into view the whole cycle of special acts of divine providence recorded in the books of the Old Testament, and fulfilled between the epochs of the calling of Abraham and the appearance of the Messias in the history of the peculiar people of God. Mr. Formby, with his peculiar originality and vigor of thought, has brought out into more striking relief than any other author we know of the idea common to several excellent modern writers respecting the position of the two cities, Jerusalem and Rome, in the historical order of divine Providence. They are, as it were, the two great citadels of God, the two great capitals of the universal kingdom of Christ. During the thousand years immediately before the Incarnation the city of David, the seat of the royal ancestors of Jesus Christ our Lord, was the citadel of all the highest interests of humanity. All the hopes, the whole future destiny, of mankind were in David’s royal line, the sweet psalmist, the prophet, the king of Israel. For seven centuries God was preparing Rome, first the ally, then the arbiter, and finally the conqueror of Judea, to take the place of Jerusalem, and by its world-wide polity to serve as a medium for the promulgation and extension of the divine religion throughout the whole earth.
The true philosophy of history sets aside all theories which are exclusive on the one side or on the other—those which exclude the ordinary providence of God over all mankind under the natural law, and those which exclude his extraordinary providence over the church under the supernatural law—and includes both under one synthesis. The one exclusive view proceeds from an à priori theological principle resulting in a conclusion with which a logical induction from facts cannot be reconciled, and therefore denies or misrepresents the facts. The other proceeds from an à priori metaphysical principle with a similar result. The one is a pseudo-supernaturalism, the other a pseudo-naturalism. The first pretends to be the genuine spiritual religion, or pure Christianity; the second professes to be the genuine rational philosophy, or pure science. Both are counterfeits of the truth. The best corrective of these theoretical tendencies is to be found in the correct knowledge and exposition of history. Lacordaire has well said: “On ne brûle pas les faits.” Facts are incombustible; they cannot be made to evaporate in the gaseous elements of transcendental metaphysics, or vanish in clouds of smoke from the pipes of German neologists. Each of these make their gas or blow their clouds from products of their own imagination adroitly substituted for facts. Facts resist with an invincible inertia every combination with false theories of supernatural religion. In all branches of science pure reasoning and the investigation of facts must go together in harmony and mutually complete each other. Even in divine revelation God is careful to present facts with their evidence in connection with doctrine, and a large portion of the Bible is made up of historical records. The divine legation of Moses and the divine mission of Jesus Christ are great historical facts, and they are in synthetical connection with all the great events and epochs of human universal history. In this concurrence and harmony we find the most evident and tangible proof and corroboration in the order of natural reason of the truth revealed by God in Jesus Christ, which is the object of divine faith, and the soul of the complete substance of Christianity.
Jesus Christ came on the earth at the very juncture of the ages, at the moment for crystallization, at the epoch of crisis in human affairs, when Judaism, Grecian culture, and Roman jurisprudence combined with Roman valor, were ready to blend in a new combination; when the three strands spun by no blind fate, but by all-seeing Providence, were ready to be intertwined: the pure tradition of the patriarchs, the philosophy of the heathen sages, the organic polity of the imperial legislators—an electric cable to bind the earth and transmit the new movement of divine impulse. The Jews preserved and handed down the pure doctrine of monotheism, the promise of redemption, and the moral law—the germ of revealed doctrine and ethics, which, in the state of development, is the faith and law of Christianity. The Greeks furnished the intellectual human culture in philosophy, poetry, and art, of which the Christian religion availed itself, as of a precious vase in which to detain its subtle and sublime essence—an ideal atmosphere for the communication of its influence to the minds and imaginations of men in all ages and countries. Rome opened the way for diffusion and unification. Immobility in tradition, mobility in intelligence, motive power in organization, are the characters of Jewish, Greek, and Roman civilization, which were united in Christianity under a higher and controlling vital force.
They were each and all temporary and insufficient, subject to a law of internal decay, evanescent in their nature, and about vanishing when Jesus Christ came on the earth. That he came just in time to supersede them and to begin the universal regeneration of mankind; that he really did so without any purely human and natural means which were sufficient causes of the effects produced; is a proof that the God whose providence rules the world sent him to fulfil this mission, and that his work was a divine operation. God’s hand alone could spin and twine the threads of human destiny and make Time’s noiseless, incessant shuttle weave the woof and web into the successive figures of historical embroidery.
The miracles and resurrection of Jesus Christ, historically proved as certain, indubitable facts, authenticate his divine mission; they stamp a divine seal on his credentials as the Messias promised from the beginning of the world. This divine legation gives divine authority to his word and precepts. Whatever he teaches in the name of God is a divine revelation, and whatever he commands is a divine law. The authentic record of these miracles, the record of what Jesus said and did; the authentic account of his teaching respecting his own person, plan, doctrine, and law—that is, of the principles and the foundation of the Christian religion—is historical; it is an authentic testimony respecting facts. The authentic record of the actual founding of Christianity on the principles and plan of the Master, by the disciples to whom he entrusted the work of carrying his design into effect, is historical. This divine design necessarily embracing all that is contained in the idea of a continuity and development of divine providence over human affairs and destinies from the beginning to the end of the world, its actual carrying out through successive ages becomes matter of history for the time present in respect to times past. Its principles of continuity and development, in connection with the order of providence anterior to Christ, and with the progress of its movement from the apostolic age through the ages following, are to be sought for in its history, not to the exclusion of reasoning from abstract principles, but in connection with it. The historical documents of the New Testament, considered merely as credible testimony and apart from their inspiration, are of paramount importance in respect to the inquiry into the nature of the genuine, authentic Christianity promulgated and established as a world-religion by its Founder and his apostles. After these come all other documents containing historical record or indirect evidence respecting the earliest age of the Christian religion. In this aspect the study of dogmas of faith, of laws and rites, of the spirit and the organization of Christianity, is directed toward an historical term. The object of the inquiry is to ascertain what is Christianity, what was its legitimate development, where is to be found through all ages the real continuation, uninterrupted succession, perpetual life, and progressive expansion which connote the identity of its essence and its specific unity in all its distinct moments, as it proceeds from its beginning towards its end. Although its intrinsic truth and authority are established simultaneously with the exposition of its historical character, the argument is nevertheless distinct, in respect to its conclusive force in this direction, from the pure manifestation of the real essence and nature of the religion. The question as to its essential constituents and their logical connection is logically distinct from the question as to its material truth, although they are metaphysically one by an inseparable composition. Christ, manifesting himself in history, is a revelation of the infinite wisdom, power, and goodness of God in his divine works, which transcend the reach of all created and dependent forces. It is the Eternal Word speaking efficiently, as when he said: “Let there be light: and there was light.” If we can only see all objects by this light, through a pure medium, we cannot fail to be enlightened by the knowledge of the truth.
The able work of Dr. Fisher, the title of which is prefixed to this article, and which was briefly noticed in our last number, is based on the idea we have set forth in these preliminary remarks, although we do not profess to have given an exposition of the learned author’s precise thesis, or ascribe to him a view identical in all particulars with the one we have presented. We will employ his own language for this purpose, of showing his own individual conception of the historical environment of Christianity, and the conclusions to which investigation and reflection on the great facts and events connected with its beginnings have led him.