The regeneration of humanity must, therefore, take its character from the supernatural destiny of man, his complex nature, and the relations in which it places him to the complex plan of God which takes in all the parts of the universe, from the lowest to the highest, and gives the utmost possible play to the action of created causality. Its chief end is to prepare human souls, through the grace and fellowship of Christ, to share with the other sons of God, the holy angels, in the glory and beatitude of the Incarnate Word in the kingdom of heaven. Included in this end of beatification in God, which is essentially the same for all spiritual beings who attain it, are the distinctive grades of glory, gained through grace and personal merit, in an ascending scale from the souls of infants to the soul of Jesus Christ, by which the celestial firmament is decorated. This beatitude in the vision of God certainly does not exclude the secondary and natural beatitude arising from the knowledge and enjoyment of the creatures of God, and this must therefore be a secondary and subordinate end in the divine plan. Intellectual cognition and volition are not organic acts of human nature; and, therefore, if we believe in the bodily resurrection of our Lord and of the saints to a glorified corporeal life, we must admit the existence in the divine plan of some subordinate end, in view of which man was created as a composite being, and in view of which, also, the Word assumed the composite human nature, which is complete only by the union of the spiritual and material substances. The glorified body no doubt receives a reflected lustre from the glorification of the soul. But its glorified senses cannot be the organs of anything more than an elevated and sublimated sensitive cognition and enjoyment. The term of their action is the physical, visible creation to which human nature partially belongs; and therefore the final end of man is partially identified with the final cause for which the vast and everlasting visible universe was created. The Incarnate Word touches this visible, material realm of his creation by the bodily part of his human nature. The what and the wherefore of this almost infinite realm of nature we do not pretend to understand. It is certainly not a mere jeu d’esprit of Omnipotence, a causeless or transitory spectacle to excite the babyish wonder of the human race not yet out of its nursery. It belongs to the great sphere of the divine plan, a segment of one of whose great circles is human history on this earthly planet. As we cannot demonstrate the problem of this sphere and its great circles, we cannot completely solve the problem of man’s destiny on the earth. It is an enigma, a mystery. And, above all, the question Cur Deus Homo? the what and the wherefore of the Incarnation, is an enigma, a mystery for human reason, only obscurely manifested to faith. Christ in history, universal history as having its mot d’enigme in Christ, must consequently present to the believing and enlightened mind of the Christian student an object of investigation and thought which he cannot hope to understand and know adequately, much less to comprehend. Whatever we can know must be learned by the manifestation which God makes of his wise intentions through his word and his works, the instruction which he deigns to give us by experience, reason, and divine faith.
For what is man being educated on the earth, and what did his Creator intend to bring him to when he came down in person, after a long series of precursors had prepared the way before him, to teach and to do that which could be entrusted to no mere creature, whether man or angel? The manifestation of Christ in the history of mankind on the earth will make known the answer to this question to all intelligent beings when this history is completed. But this will be only at the day of universal resurrection and final judgment. Until that day arrives there can only be a gradual and incomplete disclosure and justification of the ways of God to men, which are unsearchable and past finding out by human wisdom. The Eternal Word, who created all things, and directed all nations on the earth by his providence before he assumed human nature and died on the cross for their salvation, has not ceased, since his Incarnation, to carry on his work, or confined his care to a small number elected out of the mass of mankind. Nature has not been substantially or totally depraved by the fall, or become the property of Satan. The Incarnation is not a mere device and contrivance, to which God was forced to resort because he could not otherwise pardon the elect, and substitute for the eternal punishment which was due to them an eternal reward due to Christ, and transferred to them without any personal merit of congruity or condignity. The plan of God for salvation through Christ is not a mere segregation of a certain number of individuals from the world, that they may devote themselves exclusively to their sanctification by purely interior, spiritual acts—waiting until death shall release their souls from a bodily existence which is a mere degradation, and a world which is utterly accursed and given over to the dominion of the devil. Such ideas are exaggerations and perversions of Christian doctrine. They necessarily provoked a reaction and revolt in the minds and hearts of men whenever they were taught; and there has been, consequently, a perpetual effort, among Protestants who were not willing to abandon Christianity altogether, to find some kind of rational religion which can plausibly assume to be the pure, original Christianity of Christ. But by eliminating or altering and diminishing the mysteries and supernatural elements of Christianity, they change its nature and reduce it to something so ordinary and commonplace that its divinity is lost. The ideal Christianity becomes a sort of peaceable, orderly, moral, well-educated society, in which as nearly as possible all men enjoy the comfortable and respectable mode of life belonging to the gentry of England, and the poorest class are as well off as the ordinary inhabitants of a pleasant, old-fashioned New England village. That there is something attractive about this picture we will not deny. But we cannot think that the production of a state of merely natural well-being in society, of commonplace human happiness, even supposing it founded upon religion, sanctified by piety, and tending toward a more perfect happiness in the future life, was the real, ultimate end which our Lord had in view when he founded the church. The old idea of a millennium which used to prevail among the Puritans of New England had something in it very beautiful; but it was only a beautiful dream, never destined to be realized in this world. The philosophical dream of a golden age, to be attained by progress in science, civilization, political and social reform, is still more futile. The doleful and terrible wail of the pessimist philosophers and poets of Germany, which begins to find an echo over all the civilized world, would be the outcry of a despair justified by the whole history of mankind, were it not for the light which faith casts across the gloom, and the solution of the dark enigma of life which is given by the cross on which Jesus died, exclaiming, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The drama of human history is grand and terrible and tragic. It has scenes and episodes which have a character of quiet, delightful, and joyous comedy, but it is a tragedy; it has been so from the first, and will be the same to the end. The Son of God came on the earth in the very crisis of human history, and his human life was a tragedy, ending in a sublime triumph, but a triumph won by sorrow, conflict, and conquest. All that was tragic in previous history culminated in him, and subsequent history can be nothing else than the last act of the tragedy hastening to the dénoûment, and preparing the way for the second coming of the Son of Man in the clouds of heaven, with great glory, to achieve his final triumph. The Apocalypse of St. John, in which all things that were to come to pass in the last age of the world passed before his entranced spirit in a series of sublime and awful pictures, shows that this horoscope is true. What for him was a vaticination is for us in great part a retrospect, by which it is historically verified, so far as the scroll of time has unrolled itself, and by which the similar character of that part which is still in prospect is surely foreboded.
Christianity is an historical religion. It is the outcome of all previous history, and its inspired documents alone, in which the genealogy of its founder is traced back to Adam, and the record of the origin of the human race preserved, give us authentic history of the most important facts which underlie all the great events and movements of the world. This history connects the beginning of human destinies with the earlier and higher sphere, where the history of the intelligent creation begins—with those great events, the trial of the angels, the rebellion of Lucifer, and the commencement of the warfare whose seat was transferred to the earth by the successful ruse of the serpent in the temptation of Eve. In the expulsion of our weeping parents from Eden into the outside world, humanity was led by a counter strategic movement upon the new battle-field, where Satan was to be vanquished in fair and open war. All the demons, reinforced by all the traitors and deserters they could gain from among men, were allowed to pit themselves against the sons of God and the holy angels, and against the First-begotten Son himself when he came in the infirmity of human nature, as the captain of salvation, to become perfect through sufferings and to lead his brethren by the same arduous road to glory. Redemption and salvation consist essentially in liberation from the servitude of Satan; victory in the combat against that mass of false maxims, evil principles, and wicked men called the world, those low and vicious propensities called the flesh, and the seducing spirits sent forth by Satan to draw men into his rebellion against God. Human society was organized under the law of redemption, in the family, in the social, and in the political community, in religious communion, in order to reconstruct fallen humanity; to repair the ruin effected by the devil; to oppose a barrier against his further aggressions; to consolidate a perpetual force of resistance and warfare against him; and to be the instrument of the Son of God, the creator and redeemer of mankind, in effecting the final subjugation of the rebellion inaugurated and carried on by Lucifer. The division of nations, the colonization of the earth, the foundation of states, of industry and commerce, of art and science, of culture and civilization, is a divine work. Everything good in humanity is from the Word, the predestined Son of Man. The Book of Wisdom says that it was the delight of the eternal wisdom to be with the sons of men, and the early Fathers dilate on what is expressed in the German word Menschenfreundlichkeit, better than in any equivalent English term, as an attribute of the Logos. That admirable sentiment of the Latin poet, Homo sum, et nihil humani alienum a me puto, may be most appropriately ascribed to the divine Person who joined the human nature to his uncreated essence in an indissoluble marriage. The devil is the author of nothing on the earth which has real being and life, but only of error and sin with their logical consequences—that is, of intellectual and moral perversion, of ruin, decay, and death. His kingdom is a graveyard and a realm of darkness beneath it. The kingdom of the living is the kingdom of Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Life-giver, who proceeds from the Father through the Son. The power of Satan on the earth is gained by the invasion and treasonable surrender of the cities and fortresses founded by the rightful King of men, and consists in the influence which he usurps in the affairs of men, in the schism and heresy by which he breaks the unity of human brotherhood in Christ. The apostasy, the false religions, the corrupted ethics, the degenerate institutions of the old heathen world were schisms and heresies against the primitive revelation and the patriarchal unity of mankind in one true doctrine, worship, and discipline. The foundation of Judaism was a measure which the Lord adopted to oppose a bulwark against universal apostasy, to preserve the treasure of revelation and grace, and to prepare the way for a more perfect organization of the universal religion. Without abandoning the other nations, he concentrated his special providence upon Israel. And even here the history of his own special kingdom and peculiar people is altogether different from what our human reason and sentiments would expect and wish for, and especially so in reference to the epoch when the Messias appeared. We cannot understand it, unless we recognize the universal law pervading the divine plan, by which almost unlimited play is given to free-will; the conflict of the powers of good and evil permitted to run its course; victory and salvation are achieved by labor, combat, and suffering; the world and humanity are set apart as a battle-field, between the Son of God, with his brethren by adoption among angels and men, on one side, Lucifer, with his army of apostate angels and men, on the other—a battle-field on which the everlasting destinies of the universe are decided for eternity.
After this long and circuitous digression we may direct our attention now on the specific nature of Christianity as an historical religion, and consider what organization Jesus Christ gave redeemed humanity in the universal church, how he embodied the absolute, universal religion, what means he adopted for achieving the work of the moral regeneration and eternal salvation of mankind.
The work undertaken by the Incarnate Word in person is evidently the continuation of that which he began through his ministering angels, his prophets, and his other human agents, and by far the most difficult and important part of the entire plan of God. Passing over his principal theandric work of redemption, we must affirm the same with equal emphasis and certainty of that which is supplementary to it, and by which it is extended to its term. In assuming human nature the Son of God assumed all its temporal and eternal relations; he grasped and drew into himself universal humanity and the whole creation. His first and direct object was the glorification and beatification of human souls in God, but his action toward this end drew into its current and impelled by its energy all things connected with and subordinate to this highest and purely spiritual sphere of his creative wisdom. The action of Christ in history after his resurrection is necessarily more complex, more far-reaching and universal, more manifest and immediate, more obviously dominant and victorious, more evidently bearing on the final and eternal consummation of the divine plan in the universe through the destinies of man and the earth, than it could have been before that glorious and decisive event. Christianity, as an historical religion, must have more comprehension in its actual development than in its inchoate state before Christ. While it remains true that it is characteristic of the pure and perfect religion taught by the mouth of its divine Author to lead men to an interior, spiritual life, to the contemplation and love of God, to a paramount desire and effort for the salvation of the soul, and to bring this way of union with God in loving, spiritual brotherhood among men down to the level of the lowly and the poor in all natural goods, this idea does not require an exclusion of other and different aspects of the same religion. The specific good proposed and placed within reach is salvation, and not science, art, civilization, political order, social well-being, national development, the natural progress of mankind, the production of a brilliant series of great men, extraordinary works and events in the temporal order. The empires and cities, the grand monuments, the intellectual masterpieces, the entire array of results produced by human activity, and all the splendor and felicity of the men who in outward seeming are the most favored and fortunate, are transient; they return to the nothingness from which they came. Nevertheless, they may be made tributary to something higher and more durable, and what is substantial and indestructible in and under these evanescent forms may survive and reappear, like the mortal part of human nature, by a future resurrection. There is no reason, therefore, why Christ, the Incarnate Word, in effecting the regeneration of the human race by means and instruments which are natural and human, yet not purely natural and human, or standing alone in their nude and finite essence, should not take hold of all human things and relations and subject them to his own special service. There is no reason why he should not have secondary and subordinate ends indirectly connected with his one principal and ultimate object. There is no reason why Christianity, though not identified with and merged in human affairs, should not be in intimate relations with them all. In fact, there is every kind of reason to the contrary, and as an historical religion it cannot be regarded in any other light. It must be in continuity with its own past on the same lines. The same constructive principles must pervade religion in all ages. The same law of curvature must be verified in every segment of the circle, and all the diameters must be equal. Unity is essential to universality. The superior courses of stone in the building must correspond to the inferior, and rest upon them and upon the foundation. Christianity as an historical religion must be of equal dimensions and similar structure to the substratum furnished by the pre-Christian universal history, where, so to speak, its sub-cellar, crypts, and basement are covered, and in great measure buried in inexplorable obscurity, beneath the walls of its colossal architecture.
When we consider Christianity as a religion in the precise and restricted sense, and the church as a strictly religious society, we cannot identify the Christian Church and religion so completely with Christianity in the wider sense as to confound the central nucleus with its environment and atmosphere. We must distinguish, accurately and carefully, those things which are really distinct, though not disunited and separate from one another. Religion is well defined by Mr. Baring-Gould as consisting essentially in dogma, worship, and discipline. The church is its organic embodiment. The absolute and universal religion must of course throw off what was proper only to a state of inchoate and imperfect development, and the church must be freed from what was proper only to a partial and national organic constitution. This is a doctrinal certitude with an actual verification in history. It is needless to prove that our Lord never thought of making Christianity a mere extension of Judaism, and of founding a universal kingdom which should be an enlargement, co-extensive with the world, of David’s monarchy, with the institutes of Moses and the religious ceremonial of Solomon’s temple as the model of its civil and ecclesiastical polity and its ritual of worship. It is equally unnecessary to prove that the divine Master thought as little of going back to the more ancient and simple dispensation of patriarchal religion. This would have been a regression instead of a progression; a dwindling and dwarfing of humanity into a second infancy instead of its expansion into adult proportions, similar to the absurd imagination of Nicodemus in respect to the process of regeneration. The absolute, universal religion, by virtue of the law of continuity in growth, must necessarily retain all that which pertained to the essence and properties of religion as such—that is, of religion generically and specifically considered in respect to human nature in a state of probation; a lapsed condition; and in the way of restoration, through the redemption with its law of grace, as revealed by God from the beginning. All pertaining to its integrity and to its accidents, in so far as any such appurtenance is suited to human nature in all ages and nations—giving greater perfection, adaptation to its end, and power in its operation to religion—must also be considered as permanent for a sufficient reason, viz., that its cause and motive are general and persistent, though it may undergo modification and be subject to variation. Natural religion is preserved in revealed religion, the patriarchal in the Mosaic, and all these in the Christian religion. Precisely how much has been preserved, how much modified or altered, and in what way, how much dropped as obsolete in Christianity considered as an historical religion, must be determined historically. We know, however, before we examine the historical documents of Christianity, that, unless God manifests in his actual providence a determination to derogate from constant and general laws by introducing an entirely miraculous dispensation, we shall surely find in historical Christianity certain features absolutely requisite in a human religion. There are such features or characteristics which in their generic ratio are known with certainty, prescinding from any information given by the actual, objective manifestation which Christianity presents in its history. It must be adapted to human nature—that is, it must be a religion suitable to a being who is not a pure spirit, or one united to a body by accidental, extrinsic, and temporary relations, but who is composed of soul and body in his specific and permanent essence. It must be adapted to the conditions in which human nature exists in its earthly stage of progress toward perfection—that is, suitable to men who are in multifarious relations with one another in the family, in society, in the state; relations both amicable and hostile, relations of similarity and of opposition, relations of great complexity and variability. It must be adapted to the character of the divine Person from whom it proceeds; as the Son of God and the Son of Man, united with the Father in one essence by the Holy Spirit; hypostatically united within his proper personality subsisting in two distinct natures, by the same Spirit; sanctified in soul and body by this life-giving Spirit; and by the same Spirit sanctifying, and uniting in himself to the Godhead, redeemed humanity. It must be adapted to the temporal and eternal end for which it is intended—that is, suitable for the instruction, sanctification, unification, temporal and eternal salvation of all mankind, in all nations and ages; for the work of regeneration, individual, social, political, intellectual, moral, and physical, as an absolute, universal, world-conquering power.
In order to meet these requisitions, its spirit and body must be essentially and indissolubly united; it must be organized in a perfect and unequal society of universal extension, sovereign independence, complex and irresistible forces. It must have both divine and human attributes, and be vivified by the divine Spirit. It must be inseparably united with its head and throughout its members, indefectible, immutable, and endowed with the plenitude of graces, gifts, and powers merited by Jesus Christ for mankind and sufficient for the production of the highest degrees of human virtue in the greatest possible variety. It must be supreme, and have all things subordinated to its own end, controlled by its influence, subservient to its purposes as instrumentalities of its dynamical action.
As the absolute world-religion, its dogma, worship, and discipline must vastly transcend the initial revelation, elementary ritual, and propædeutic order of Judaism. There is a kind of foreshadowing of all these features of the kingdom of Christ in universal history, and there are abundant types and prophecies of it in the history and inspired documents of the patriarchal and Judaic dispensations. We need only to confront the idea of Christianity, derived à priori from the consideration of the plan of God manifested in his works and word before the time of Christ, with the actual, historical Christianity, in order to give this idea distinctness, and to add the last complement of certitude to our judgment that it truly represents the reality. Wherever we find existing as a concrete, historical fact that which realizes in the fullest and the highest sense the predictions of the prophets; that which fulfils in the most perfect manner the anticipations of history; that which is the most worthy of the stupendous miracles culminating in the resurrection; that which corresponds in magnitude and grandeur to all the great works of God; that which gives the most sublime significance to the destiny of man; that which magnifies in the most wonderful way the power and love of God and the object of the Incarnation—there we behold, with all the evidence which moral demonstration can furnish, the genuine, absolute religion, manifest before our eyes as historical Christianity. Facts interpret prophecy, confirm and consolidate the conclusions of reason, determine the sense of much that is ambiguous in the disclosures of revelation. The test of history is therefore safe and conclusive in respect to the genuine essence and nature of Christianity.
The application of this test shows that Catholic Christianity, which alone can claim unbroken, unaltered historical continuity and universality from the apostolic age, is the genuine and absolute religion of Christ. Any other species is unknown to history as an historical religion. The Catholic faith, worship, and discipline manifest themselves in the church of apostolic succession at the earliest period in which this church is clearly and distinctly visible through the medium of historical testimony. There is no resource for those who call in question the identity of Nicene Christianity with the apostolic religion, except in the obscurity of the century immediately following the death of St. John, and in the indistinct, incomplete, and, as considered separately from the traditional supplement and commentary, partly ambiguous records, allusions, and testimonies, in respect to some parts of Christian doctrine, worship, and discipline, of the New Testament. The nobler class of modern Protestant writers admit in a general sense the historical continuity of the essence of Christianity in the Catholic Church, placing their own restrictions on the definition of that which is essential as distinguished from the non-essential, as well as from abnormal modifications. Those who are not of the semi-Catholic school are obliged to seek for some tenable ground on which to maintain their claim of fellowship in essentials with the universal church, in a theory of transition from apostolical to ecclesiastical Christianity during the period lying between the close of the first and the end of the second centuries. The hinge of the question is the institution of the episcopate, as a distinct and superior grade of the Christian presbyterate, with hierarchical authority. We do not propose to discuss the proofs from Scripture and the most ancient historical records of the apostolic institution of the episcopate, and of what is called the apostolic succession of bishops, as a principal and immutable part of organic Christianity. This controversy has been exhausted by the able writers of the high-church school. Professor Fisher presents but little in addition to what has been urged by the advocates of parity, and fully answered in several works easily accessible to English readers, though his manner of presenting his case is such as to make the most of it, and shows both critical ability and a candid spirit. A rejoinder ought to be minute and critical like the argument itself. As we have not at present time and space for this, we prefer to pass it over altogether. Our line of argument leads us to consider some deeper and more universal and at the same time more obvious and easily apprehended principles of bringing the Catholic and Protestant theories of Christianity to an historical issue.
The essential nature of Christianity as represented by one of these theories is specifically different from what it is as represented by the other. According to the latter theory, the essence of the Christian religion is something exclusively spiritual and individual. The exterior organization is not in vital and substantial unity with it, but is an habiliment, an extrinsic instrument, a vehicle, or a separate medium. One who considers that faith, the way of salvation, spiritual union with God in Christ, are in a separate and independent sphere, very naturally and logically considers that questions of ecclesiastical organization and government are of inferior moment; that symbols of doctrine, forms of worship, and modes of discipline are not matters of perpetual and universal obligation as founded on divine right and law. Such a question as that of episcopacy must, therefore, appear to him as among the non-essentials; and even supposing that he admits the certainty or probability that it is the apostolic form, he will see no reason why it should be necessary to the being of the church, or even to its well-being, or why Christians should be divided in fellowship on account of matters merely belonging to exterior order and indifferent forms.