The fourth scheme of Christian salvation is that which predicates the power of insuring souls from hell solely of the Church. This is the sacramental theory. It is assumed that, in the state of nature subsequent to the transgression and fall of Adam, all men are alienated from God, and by the universal original sin universally exposed to damnation, indeed, the helpless victims of eternal misery. In the fulness of time, Christ appeared, and offered himself to suffer in their stead to secure their deliverance. His death cancelled the whole sum of
8 Bretschneider, Entwickelung der Dogmatik, sect. 112, Nos. 37 50.
9 So affirmed by the Council of Carthage, Canon II.
10 The violence done to moral reason by these views is powerfully exposed in Bushnell's Discourse on the Atonement: God in Christ, pp. 193-202.
original sin, and only that, thus taking away the absolute impossibility of salvation, and leaving every man in the world free to stand or fall, incur hell or win heaven, by his personal merits. From that time any person who lived a perfectly holy life which no man could find practically possible thereby secured eternal blessedness; but the moment he fell into a single sin, however trivial, he sealed his condemnation: Christ's sacrifice, as was just said, merely removed the transmitted burden of original sin from all mankind, but made no provision for their personal sins, so that practically, all men being voluntary as well as hereditary sinners, their condition was as bad as before: they were surely lost. To meet this state of the case, the Church, whose priests, it is claimed, are the representatives of Christ, and whose head is the vicegerent of God on earth, was empowered by the celebration of the mass to re enact, as often as it pleased, the tragedy of the crucifixion. In this service Christ is supposed literally to be put to death afresh, and the merit of his substitutional sufferings is supposed to be placed to the account of the Church.11 As Sir Henry Wotton says, "One rosy drop from Jesus' heart Was worlds of seas to quench God's ire."
In one of the Decretals of Clement VI., called "Extravagants," it is asserted that "one drop of Christ's blood [una guttula sanguinis] being sufficient to redeem the whole human race, the remaining quantity which was shed in the garden and on the cross was left as a legacy to the Church, to be a treasure whence indulgences were to be drawn and administered by the Roman pontiffs." Furthermore, saints and martyrs, by their constant self denial, voluntary sufferings, penances, and prayers, like Christ, do more good works than are necessary for their own salvation; and the balance of merit the works of supererogation is likewise accredited to the Church. In this way a great reserved fund of merits is placed at the disposal of the priests. At their pleasure they can draw upon this vicarious treasure and substitute it in place of the deserved penalties of the guilty, and thus absolve them and effect the salvation of their souls. All this dread machinery is in the sole power of the Church. Outside of her pale, heretics, heathen, all alike, are unalterably doomed to hell. But whoso will acknowledge her authority, confess his sins, receive the sacrament of baptism, partake of the eucharist, obey the priests, shall be infallibly saved. The Church declares that those who neglect to submit to her power and observe her rites are lost, by excommunicating such every year just before Easter, thereby typifying that they shall have no part in the resurrection and ascension. The scheme of salvation just exhibited we reject as alike unwarranted by the Scriptures, absurd to reason, absurd to conscience, fraught with evil practices, and traceable in history through the gradual and corrupt growths of the dogmatic policy of an interested body. There is not one text in the Bible which affords real argument, credit, or countenance to the haughty pretensions of a Church to retain or absolve guilt, to have the exclusive control of the tangible keys of heaven and hell. It is incredible to a free and intelligent mind that the opposing fates forever of hundreds of millions of men should turn on a mere accident of time
11 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, Suppl. pars iii. qu. 25, art. 1.
and place, or at best on the moral contingence of their acknowledging or denying the doubtful authority of a tyrannical hierarchy, a mere matter of form and profession, independent of their lives and characters, and of no spiritual worth at all. One is here reminded of a passage in Plutarch's Essay "How a Young Man ought to hear Poems." The lines in Sophocles which declare that the initiates in the Mysteries shall be happy in the future life, but that all others shall be wretched, having been read to Diogenes, he exclaimed, "What! Shall the condition of Pantacion, the notorious robber, be better after death than that of Epaminondas, merely because he was initiated in the Mysteries?" It is also a shocking violence to common sense, and to all proper appreciation of spiritual realities, to imagine the gross mechanical transference of blame and merit mutually between the bad and the good, as if moral qualities were not personal, but might be shifted about at will by pecuniary considerations, as the accounts in the debt and credit columns of a ledger. The theoretic falsities of such a scheme are as numerous and evident as its practical abuses have been enormous and notorious. How ridiculous this ritual fetch to snatch souls from perdition appears as stated by Julian against Augustine! "God and the devil, then, have entered into a covenant, that what is born the devil shall have, and what is baptized God shall have!"12 We hesitate not to stake the argument on one question. If there be no salvation save by believing and accepting the sacraments with the authority of the Romanist or the Episcopalian Church, then less than one in a hundred thousand of the world's population thus far can be saved. Death steadily showers into hell, age after age, an overwhelming proportion of the souls of all mankind, a rain storm of agonized drops of immortality to feed and freshen the quenchless fires of damnation. Who can believe it, knowing what it is that he believes?
We advance next to a system of Christian salvation as remarkable for its simplicity, boldness, and instinctive benevolence as those we have previously examined are for complexity, unnaturalness, and severity. The theory referred to promises the natural and inevitable salvation of every created soul. It bases itself on two positions, the denial that men are ever lost, except partially and temporarily, and the exhibition of the irresistible power, perfect wisdom, and infinite goodness of God. The advocates of this doctrine point first to observation and experience, and declare that no person is totally reprobate, that every one is salvable; those most corrupt and abandoned to wickedness, unbelief, and hardness, have yet a spark that may be kindled, a fount that may be made to gush, unto the illumination and purification of the whole being. A stray word, an unknown influence, a breath of the Spirit, is continually effecting such changes, such salvations. True, there are many fettered by vices, torn by sins, ploughed by the caustic shares of remorse, lost to peaceful freedom, lost to spiritual joys, lost to the sweet, calm raptures of religious belief and love, and, in that sense, plunged in damnation. But this, they say, is the only hell there is. At the longest, it can endure but for the night of this life: deliverance and blessedness come with the morning dawn of a better world. Exact retributions are awarded to all iniquity here; so
12 Julian, lib. vi. ix.