- .; BOUGHT WltH THE INCOME • * FROM THE .-SAQE ENDOWMENT FUND ' " ' THE GIFT OF "" ^ . ^ . — ^ — ^" -y' / rg^i: £2.^./.^ -■■■■,...l,.^.g2^-^-. CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 924 102 088 683 P B Cornell University iJ hi) Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924102088683 THE SEAT OF AUTHORITY IN RELIGION. THE SEAT OF AUTHORITY RELIGION JAMES MARTINEAU Hon. LLD. Harv. : S.T.D. Lugd. Bat. D.D. Edin. : D.C.L. Oxon. THIRD EDITION REVISED LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO, AND NEW YORK: 15, EAST i6th STREET 1891 \_$ll rights reserved. \ PEEFACE. The critical reader may possibly discover that this book has not taken shape at once aus einem Gusse ,- and he will at least excuse a few words in explanation of its origin and formation. At the request of a literary friend in New England, editiug a monthly periodical, I wrote, between 1872 and 1875, a series of theological papers which were designed, when complete, to present a compendious survey of the ground both of Natural and Historical religion as accepted in Christendom. Before the plan had been half worked out (i.e., after the appearance of fourteen papers), the periodical came to an end ; and in the absence of the motive of a fixed engagement, the further materials which I had collected were thrown aside, to free me for the studies in another field which have occupied me since. But the forlorn rudiment of an intended structure, with its scaffolding still standing and its roof rotting on the ground, never ceased to haunt and reproach me ; and when released from preoccupation with philosophy two years ago, I at once rushed to the fair field which I had uselessly deformed, and, with no little dismay, appraised the tumbled bricks and unhewn stone so long abandoned by the builder. Crumbling and Tyeatherstained, they could no longer be trusted or wrought ; and nothing remained but to mould and quarry as well as build anew, accepting only the working plans from the past. So great in the interval had been the gains of historical re- search, in regard especially to the growth of the Church in the first two centuries, that it was impossible to resume my task till I had overtaken the movement in advance by follow- vi PREFACE, ing the footsteps which led to the higher point of view. This recovery of a true position is now rendered comparatively easy by the striking improvement, in condensation, critical fairness, and literary form, of modern theological authorship : so that, under such guidance as that of Scholten, Hatch, Pfleiderer, Holtzmann, Harnack, and Weizsacker, even a veteran student may find it possible, with no very wide reading, to readjust his judgments to the altered conditions of the time. To a fresh study of the early Christian writings in or out of the canon, under the lights of this newer literature, are due the third, fourth, and fifth books of the present volume, and a great part of the second chapter of Book II. All that precedes is, in the main, a reproduction of the American papers. That this part contains a summary of the same ethical doctrine as that which is more fully developed in the " Types of Ethical Theory " will not, I hope, be regarded as an inexcusable itera- tion. In its distinctive characteristic I find, in truth, the very " Seat of Authority " of which I was in search : so that there was no help for it, unless I were content with the mere ex- posure of illusory authorities unrelieved by the indication of any that is real. I am prepared to hear that, after dispensing with miracles and infallible persons, I have no right to speak of " authority " at all, the intuitional assurance which I substitute for it being nothing but confidence in my own reason. If to rest on authority is to mean an acceptance of what, as foreign to my faculty, I cannot know, in mere reliance on the testimony of one who can and does, I certainly find no such basis for religion ; inasmuch as second-hand belief, assented to at the dictation of an initiated expert, without personal response of thought and reverence in myself, has no more tincture of religion in it than any other lesson learned by rote. The mere resort to testimony for information beyond our province does not fill the meaning of ' authority ' ; which we never acknowledge till that which speaks to us from another and a higher strikes home and -wakes the echoes in ourselves, and is thereby PREFACE. vii instantly transferred from external attestation to self-evidence. And this response it is which makes the moral intuitions, started by outward appeal, reflected back by inward venera- tion, more than egoistic phenomena, and turning them into correspondency between the universal and the individual mind, invests them with true ' authority.' We trust in them, not with any rationalist arrogance because they are our own, but precisely because they are not our own, with awe and aspira- tion. The consciousness of authority is doubtless human ; but conditional on the source being divine. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. Since the issue of the second edition of this book, numer- ous reviews of it have appeared which I cannot treat with silence, as if they gave me nothing to learn. Such of them indeed as simply pronoimce, ex cathedra, the critic's judgment of approval or condemnation, after a fair report of its con- tents, may well be left to speak for themselves ; they give legitimate guidance to readers who see reason to trust them. Others which, under the influence of theological antipathy, do but travesty the book, or pick out from its contents such phrases or thoughts ad invidiam, as may best repel the reader, _ spring from a state of mind inaccessible to words of mine. But there remain a few to which I owe an insight into the defects or weak points of my own exposition, and by negotia- tion with which a possibility seems open of essential concur- rence on the theory of Authority. I hope it will not shock my critic in the Spectator, or Dr. Dale in the Contemporary, if I say that, on this fundamental point, I see my way to substantial agreement with all that they press upon my attention. Through a common inadvertence, these reviewers address themselves to a different question from that with which this book attempts to deal. By the terms of the title I limit myself to the treatment of " Authority m Religion." They have pushed the discussion beyond these bounds, and answered me by fetching in from alien territory examples of authority which do not come within my definition. Were I to admit all that is said about them, no position taken up in X PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. the opening chapters of this volume would be affected in the least. The Spectator mistakes me in saying that I " repudi- ate and almost deride the notion of any kind of authority except that -,vhich the conscience enforces on the nature of man."* On the contrary, I expressly distinguish two kinds of authority, one of which has nothing to do with the con- science ; viz., authority for intellectual assent to whe,t I learn from persons better informed ; and authority for reverence and devotion to the claims of higher character and diviner life : the one, authority over the understanding ; the other, over the will. I do not disparage the former as an adequate ground of new knowledge ; I only contend that it has no tincture of religion in it ; it justifies a belief to the reason ; it originates and demands no worship in the heart. When a judge upon the bench accepts information elicited from a copapetent witness, he performs a rational act, and nothing more. And so do readers at home, when they assure themselves of the existence . of foreign countries on the report of travellers who have visited them. And could messengers pass from world to world and bring with them means of accrediting their story of things invisible, no less reasonable would it be to welcome the extended knowledge, but also no more religious. Far from thinking that " we should no more lean upon the word " of such a visitor " than upon the word of a dreamer or the guess of an historian," I should say. When once satisfied that the reporter is such a messenger, we should be fools, did we not accept his tidings ; to do so would be an act of mere common sense ; not, I submit, of religion. The gain is simply tantamount to a fiUing-in of the cosmic map and the human history, with similar significance (of mere pheno- menal knowledge) to the men of science and to -the saints. Touching no springs of spiritual life, and susceptible of no inward verification, it lifts no soul into nearer union with God. The second-hand belief which I take up from a witnebs who * Aug. 23rd, 1890. PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. xi knows what is incognizable to myself you cannot draw into the essence of religion. But the primary homage which reveals to me my relation to the beauty of holiness and the mandate of the highest Will, you can never part by one hair's breadth from the essence of religion. Is then religious authority a mere " subjective " rule, " which conscience enforces on the nature of man " ? A power which can " enforce something on the nature of man " must be above that nature and not a piece of it : and if conscience be taken in this sense, as an authority over humanity, felt within but with appeal descending from beyond, it passes into a Divine reality, communing with us as person with person, seeking the assimilation of spirit with spirit. And this is precisely the relation which opens upon our view when the moral intuitions spread forth their contents in articulate consciousness. If therefore by " subjective " be meant an affection limited to the human subject, the epithet marks precisely what this experience rejects : the authority felt to be over us is eo ipso objective ; alighting upon conscious- ness, but from an illuminating source known only as Divine. This is not exclusively " subjective," unless all inspiration is so; if this word is to be applied, by way of reproach, to all that is given us in consciousness, how can you exempt the greatest prophet from it ? Does not his inspiration arrive at him in the shape of thought and feeling ? and if in his case thought and feeling can carry in it an immediate report of its Divine source, what is to hinder the moral experiences of humanity from bringing with them the same light ? I own that this style of criticism deeply humbles me, not by its efeciency, but by its inappositeness, showing as it does how absolutely I have failed to put even the best class of readers in possession of my meaning. The whole purpose of the first Book in this volume is to show that religious authority is necessarily objective and supernatural : and my critics charge me with contending that it is purely subjective and natural. xii PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. The relation of a child to his parents, far from embarrass- ing the doctrine for which I plead, very happily combines and illufitrates the two types of " authority ; " the rational, wielded by those who know more, and the religious, vested in the higher and larger personality. In both instances we may speak of the attitude of the dependent nature as one of " trust " ; but the word will cover quite a different state of mind in the two cases : in the first, the mere contentment with a witness's report in the absence of first-hand vision ; in the second, the waking echo of the heart to the mandates of the riper soul, with the uplooking love inseparable from such secret sympathy. It is the latter only which has a sacred character ; and if once obedience begins to be demanded to what is felt to be unjust or base, the inner piety instantly turns round, and makes a rebel even of the child. For want of the inner verification, the sanctity of the act is gone ; and if the will complies, it is imder protest and with self-contempt. Without the element of personal trust based on moral veneration within the scale of a common righteousness, character and life remain outside the sphere of religion. Dr. Dale is so far from disapproving the stress which I have laid on the " inner witness of the spirit," that he rather censures me for overlooking the great part assigned to it by Calvin, Owen, and other reformers of the Puritan type.* There is justice in this complaint ; the more so as the fact to which he calls attention was familiar to me and had much to do with the attraction I have always felt, in spite of doc- trinal divergence, towards the divines of that school. But writing with a view to contemporary wants I naturally repre- sented Protestantism to myself as exhibited in its literature since the time of Locke : and that alone must be taken as embraced in the scope of my argument. " The inward witness," without which the authority of no sacred text is brought home to us, Dr. Dale would fain render valid for more than it attests. By an inference from analogy ' Contemporary Beview, Sept. 1890, p. 407. PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION, xiii he stretches it as an elastic shield over an indefinite expanse of scripture which has it not : "the real power of the New Testament," he says, — " its authority for myself, — must come from those parts of it in which I find God and God finds me ; but it does not follow that I am free to say that only in those parts is there any divine light and power " : " parts of our Lord's teaching, and parts of the teaching of the apostles, which have not ' found us yet may find us some day.' " * Then, when that day comes, they will acquire religious authority : meanwhile, they remain without it. And, while awaiting their chance, are they to be treasured as enigmatical oracles that must be left to declare themselves ? If not, are they not exposed to equal possibiHties of rising into the Divine, or sinking into the ignobly human ? Am I to hang in suspense till the injunction, for instance, " Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither throw your pearls before swine, lest haply they trample them under their feet and turn and rend you," " finds " me as a word of light and love ? Something remains to be said in order to relieve the critical portion of this volume from certain imputations to which it has been mistakenly exposed. Without either re-opening the many controverted questions with which it deals, or resenting the many hard words which I feel to have done me wrong^ I win simply clear away such misapprehensions as may be removed by a bare recital of facts. In my former Preface I described the origin of this book as an intended summary of the results of theological study up to the year 1875 ; the sus- pension of the design and the diversion of my chief attention to philosophy, till 1887-8 ; and my devotion of two years to reading myself into such new literature as brought fresh evidence into the questions on which I had previously pro- nounced. In speaking of this batch of supplementary study I unfortunately expressed my gratitude for the vastly improved structure of German theological writings, and for the saving * P. 410. xiv PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. of the student's time through such excellent literary work- manship, mentioning half a dozen authors by way of example. Taking advantagiB of this passage, more than one of my critics have treated it as a complete map of my travels on theological ground, and have rebuked the arrogant levity of such ill- secured judgment. As " a disciple of that grossly one-sided book ' Supernatural religion ' " I am said simply to " repro- duce the exploded absurdities of the Tubingen school " : * and, according to Professor Sanday, I think it enough, in dealing with " the most perplexing of human problems,'' " to go to a few of the latest German writers, not to weigh and test their hypotheses, and explore all round their data, but simply to take their conclusions ready made, translate them into English, and spread them broadcast as a new Gos- pel." t And it is Considered a sufficient proof of one-sidedness that I do not quote Bishops -Lightfoot and Westcott, Ezra Abbot , Schiirer, or Professor Eamsay. 1 Whether this attempt to discredit a writer whom you think " better left unread " § is less or more of a wrong than the omission to quote one from' whom you regretfully dissent, I do not pretend to decide. My answer shall be a mere tran- script from my memory. The critical contents of this volume result from the direct study, seldom intermitted through more than sixty years, of the Scriptures themselves and the cognate literature affecting the early Christian Church ; and are not got up at second hand from "the ready made con- clusions" of any theological school, though deeply indebted to the insight gained by the labours of several. The book on "Supernatural religion" I have never seen, and know only from Bishop Lightfobt's answer to it. Westcott, Ezra Abbot, and Schiirer I have read with much warm appreciation, but without altered conviction ; and the last of them with the irresistible inference that scholarly judgment is- verging * Baptist Magazine, June 1890. - +. Expository, Times, Sept. 1890, pp. 283, 284. . . : X lb. p. 284. a. § lb. p. 284. b. PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. xv more and more towards a negative verdict on the Johan- nine question. During the growth of the Tiibingen school, I was guarded against any unquestioning surrender to the influence of Baur by habitual reading of Ewald's " Jahrbiicher der biblischen Wissenschaft,* so far as the enthusiasm of one man of genius can countervail the intellectual grasp of another. All this, I am well aware, amounts to just nothing at all when compared with the resources of some of my learned critics ; but however small it may be, I Submit that it is not the reading of a partisan, but is fairly divided between the opposite sides of the chief questions on which I have touched. If I have not quoted this or that opponent of my case, it is not for want of attention to his plea, but simply because the line of reasoning I was following could apparently afford to let it alone ; and in the instance of the late Bishop Lightfoot, because his chief controversial work leaves on me the same impression which Pfleiderer has put on record as his own.* In his strictures on my view of the Fourth Gospel and the Ephesian traditions respecting the apostle John, Dr. Dale, at the word of Irenaeus, accepts Polycarp as a personal disciple of the apostle ; and, not content with assailing my doubts on the subject with legitimate arguments, suggests in the following sentences that, in support of my opinion, I manipulate the evidences unfairly by omission of important texts: "As Dr. Martineau satisfied himself that Irenaeus made a mistake in supposing that Polycarp was a disciple of the apostle, he naturally omits all reference to the letter of Irenaeus to Victor, bishop of Eome (a.d. 190-198 or 199), in reference to the Paschal Controversy, in which he says that Anicetus, a previous Eoman bishop, was unable to persuade Polycarp to give up the Asiatic custom of keeping Easter, ' because he had always observed it with John, the disciple of our Lord, and the rest of the apostles with whom he was associated.' And it is also natural that he should omit to * " The Development of theology in Germany since Kant, and its progress in Great Britain since 1825." p. 397. xvi PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. notice the passages in Irenseus's great work ' against Heresies ' (about A.D. 185), in which he refers to John's residence at Ephesus. But the letter of Polycrates, who was bishop of Ephesus at the end of the second century, to Victor, in de- fence of the Asiatic observance of Easter, ought, I think, to have been mentioned. Polycrates says, ' For in Asia great lights have fallen asleep which shall rise again in the day of the Lord's appearing ; Philip, one of the twelve apostles, who sleeps in Hierapolis ; moreover, John, who rested upon the bosom of the Lord and bore the sacerdotal plate, both a martyr and teacher ; he is buried in Ephesus.' This testi- mony is very important." * The reader may estimate the justice of this rebuke . if he will turn to p. 235 of this volume, where he will find the passages which it was 'natural for me to omit,' from the letter of Irenseus to Victor, and from that of Polycrates to Victor ; and to p. 192, where he will find quoted from Irenseus ' against Heresies ' the other missing reference to John's resi- dence at Ephesus. * Contemjporary Beview, Sept. 1890, pp. 399, 400. CONTENTS. BOOK I. AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. CHAPTEB I. God IK Nature PAGE 1 CHAPTEB II. God in Humanity . 37 CHAPTEB III. Utilitabian Substitute for Authority . , . 76 CHAPTEB IV. '4 I, God in History ... IGl BOOK n. AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. CHAPTEB L The CathjOucs and the Church ....,.• 127 b xviii CONTENTS. CHAPTER II. PAGE The Peotestants and the Scriptures 169 § 1. The Synoptical Gospels 181 § 2. The Fourth Gospel 189 A. External Testimony 190 B. Internal Character ...... 208 C. Relation to the Apocalypse 217 D. Relation to the Paschal Controversy . . . 227 E. Marks of Time 236 § 3. Acts of the Apostles 243 A. Relation to Luke's Gospel ..... 244 B. Relation to Paul's Epistles 258 BOOK III. DIVINE AUTHORITY INTERMIXED WITH HUMAN THINGS. CHAPTER I. The Human and the Divine in History .... 287 CHAPTER II. What are 'Natural' and 'Revealed Religion'? . . . 300 BOOK rv, SEVERANCE OP UNDIVINE ELEMENTS EEOM CHRISTENDOM. CHAPTER I. Revealed Religion and Apocalyptic Religion .... 315. CONTENTS. xix CHAPTER II. FAQE Theories of the Person of Jesus 326 § 1. As Messiah 326 § 2. As Eisen from the Dead 358 § 3. As the Spiritual Adam 378 § 4. As ' the Word ' 399 A. The Alexandrine Logos 399 B. The Word ' made Flesh ' 422 CHAPTEK III. Theories of the Work of Jesus . .^ 450 5 1. The Sense of Sin in Christendom ... . 450 § 2. The ApostoKo Doctrine of Redemption , • 461 § 3. The Work of the Incarnate Logos ... .490 CHAPTER IV. Theories of Union with God 513 § 1. Present Media of Grace 513 § 2. Future Crown of Life 546 BOOK V. THE DIVINE IN THE HUMAN. CHAPTER I. The Veil taken away ... 573 CHAPTER II. The Christian Relkiiqn personally realized .... 602 BOOK I. AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN EELIGION. CHAPTEE I. GOD IN NATURE. If we ask ourselves what was the earliest impression pro- duced by the spectacle of the universe on the mind of man, we can no longer, like Milton, imagine him standing alone upon the grass of Eden, and answering with adoriug thoughts the gaze of the vaulted sky. The solemn tones of the Puri- tan poet give forth quite another music from any that really lay at heart in the childhood of the world. Yet it is admitted on all hands,-r-not less by those who ridicule than by those who revere the tendency, — that, to the eye of primitive wonder, the visible scene around would at first seem to be alive ; day and night to have in them the lights and shades of thought ; summer and winter to be pulsations of a hidden joy and grief ; the eager stream to be charged with some hasting errand ; and the soft wind to whisper secrets to the forest leaves. This sympathy with the action of Nature, — this ideal interpretation of the world, — which looks through the physical picture of things, and is touched by more than their physical effect, is, moreover, a specially human charac- teristic, confessedly due, not to the endowments which we share with the other animal races, but to the higher gifts of a constitution in advance of theirs. It is, therefore, an enriching faculty, and not a deluding incapacity from which the happier brutes are free. Say what you will of the super- stitions to which it may lay us open, who can contemplate its 2 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. primitive manifestations without a profound, though it be now a compassionate sympathy? And when, among the prehistoric vestiges of man upon this earth, we find already a grotto for his dead,* where, after the farewell funeral feast, he shuts them in, with their weapons by their side and their provisions for their journey into unknown fields, who does not feel in these simple memorials a pathetic dignity which other natures do not approach ? In the apprehension, then, of the human observer, using his most human faculty, this visible world is folded round and steeped in a sea of life, whence enters all that rises, and whither return the generations that pass away. This is religion in its native simplicity, so far as it flows in from the aspect of the physical scene around, and ere it has quitted its indeterminate condition of poetic feeling, to set into any of the definite forms of thought which philosophers have named. Doubtless, it is an ascription to Nature, on the part of the observer, of a life like his own : in the boundless mirror of the earth and sky, he sees, as the figures of events flit by, the reflected image of himself. But for his living spirit, he could not move ; and but for a living spirit, they could not move. Just as when, standing face to face with his fellows, he reads the glance of the eye, the sudden start, or the wringing of the hands, and refers them home to their source within the viewless soul of another ; so with dimmer and more wondering suspicion, does he discern, behind the looks and movements of nature, a Mind, that is the seat of power and the spring of every change. You may laugh at so simple a philosophy ; but how else would you have him pro- ceed ? Does he not, for this explanation, go straight to the only Cause which he knows ? He is familiar with power in him- self alone ; and in himself it is Will ; and he has no other element than will to be charged with the power of the world. Is it said to be childish thus to see his own life repeated in the sphere that lies around him, and to conceive of a God in the image of humanity? to project, as it were, his own shadow upon the space without, and then render to it the * At Aurignac in Haute Garonne. See Lyell's Antiquity of Man, ch. x. pp. 192-3. Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 3 homage of his faith ?* The ohjection might naturally- enough be urged by a disciple of Schelling or Cousin, who supposed himself able to transcend his personal limits, and "take immediate cognizance of the Infinite and Absolute. But surely it comes ill from those who have carried to its •extreme length the Protagorean maxim, that "man is the measure of all things ; " who have laid it down as a rule that we fcaow nothing but our own feelings and ideas ; and who have construed back even the material world into an ideal reflex of the order and permanence of our sensations.! The objection, however, is as little considerate as it is con- sistent. For if we are to conceive of mind at all, elsewhere than at home, where are we to find the base of our concep- tion, the meaning of the words we use, if not in our own mental consciousness? Not in religion only, but in every sphere of understanding, self-knowledge is the condition and .the limit of other knowledge; and if there were laws of intellect, or affections of goodness, other than our own, they must remain forever foreign to our apprehension, and ■could be no objects of intelligent speech. Be it an order of thought of which we see traces beyond us, or a purpose of righteousness, or an expression of power, we have no means •of imagining it at all, except as homogeneous with our own. Either, therefore, the very structure of our highest faculties is unsound, and the constitution of our reason itself con- ■demns us to unreason ; or else the likeness we see between the world within and the world without, in its idea and its causality, reports a real correspondence, the answering face of the Divine and the human, communing through the glorious symbolism between. It is, at all events, acknowledged as a fact, that this religious interpretation of the world is natural to man, and therefore holds him, till it is dispossessed by some superior claimant, with a certain right of pre-occupation. Next, it must also be admitted, that, simply as an hypothesis, it is adequate to its purpose; i.e., that, if tried through the whole range of the phenomena, it provides a sufficient cause * Mill's Logic, book iii. ch. v. 8, 9. t Mill's Examination of Hamilton, ch. ii. xi. Grote's Plato, ch. xxvi. B 2 4 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book i: for all. It may be open to an objector to say that an infinite Divine Will, eternally acting through the universe, is more than we want, to give account of what we find ; but he can- not say, that it is less. It supplies an inexhaustible fund of causality, equal to every exigency, and incapable of being thrown upon engagements which it cannot meet. It is only when you add on to it superfluous explanations of your own ; when you affect to know, not only the power wherein, but also the reason why ; when you presume to read the particu- lar motives whence this or that has sprung ; when you charge the lightning flash with vengeance, or treat a blighted harvest as a judgment upon sin ; when you discuss the course of a comet, or a trembling equilibrium of the planets, as a pre- paration for the judgment day ; when, in short, you fill the fields of space with the fictions of your spiritual geography, and pledge them, without leave, to act out the situations of your drama, that you are sure to be brought to shame, and turned into the outer darkness prepared for the astrologers. But keep to the modesty of simple religious faith, which, however sure of the ground and essence of things, knows nothing of the phenomena, and lets science sort them as it will ; say humbly, " How this and that may be, I cannot tell, nor am I in the secret why it is not other ; I only know it is from Him who shines in the whole and hides in the parts ; " and, stand where you may in time or place, you hold the key of an eternal temple, on which none can put a lock you can- not open. If, then, the recognition of divine causality is admitted to be primary and natural to man, to be dictated by just the faculties that lift him above other tribes, and to be adequate to the whole field it proposes to embrace, how is it that in many a mind it is weakened by the spirit of modern know- ledge, and meets there with beliefs and tastes which seem to be ill at ease with it, and by supercilious looks to take repose and courage out of it ? Has anything really been found out to disprove it? Has any chamber been opened and found empty, where it was thought God was sure to be ? Has any analysis reached the hiding-place of his power, and entered its factors on the list of chemical equivalents ? Has any Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 5 geologist succeeded, not only in laying out the order of phe- nomena into well-reasoned succession, but in passing behind phenomena altogether, so as to attest a vacuity in the sphere of real being ; and, after his long retreat through the ages, has he slipped out at the back door of time, right into the eternal, and brought word that there is no Mind there ? Let us calmly review, one by one, the characteristic achievements and auguries of recent science, so far as they are supposed to affect rehgious conceptions, and estimate what they have done to disturb the theistic interpretation of the world. The first grand discovery of modern times is the immense extension of the universe in space. Compared with the fields from which our stars fling us their light, the Cosmos of the ancient world was but as a cabinet of brilliants, or rather a little jewelled cup found ia the ocean or the wilderness. Won- derful as were the achievements, and sagacious as were the guesses, of the Greek astronomers, they little suspected what they were registering when they drew up their catalogues of stars : skilfully as they often read the relative motions and positions of the wandering Hghts of heaven, so as to compute and predict the eclipse, their line of measurement fell short even of this first solar chamber of nature ; and, for want of the telescope, their speculative imagination soon lost itself in childish fancies beyond. The concentric crystal spheres, the adamantine axis turning in the lap of Necessity, the bands that held the heaven together like a girth that clasps a ship, the shaft which led from earth to sky, and which was paced by the soul in a thousand years, except when the time was come for her to be snatched, in the twinkling of an eye, to the mortal birth, — these things, presented in one of the most solemn and iigh-wrought passages of ancient literature,* give us the standard of the Greek cosmical conception in its sublimest dreams. That Plato should deem that fair but miniature structure not too great for some sort of personal management ; that he should provide a soul to fill it, ever-living and self- sufficing, thinking out its order, and gleaming through all its beauty, and making it an image of eternal good, — this, it is said, is not wonderful ; the theory was not wholly dispropor- * Plato, de Kepubl., X., 614 C-621 B. 6 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. Book I. tioned to the scale of the phenomenon. But what has now become of that night-canopy of his, and all that it contained ? It has shrunk into a toy ; and with it, we are told, its doctrine must go too. That which he deemed a millennial journey for a human traveller has been measured for us by a messenger swifter than the flash of Plato's thought, — a messenger that could run round the earth eight times in a second.* What would the philosopher have said, had he known that the beama flung from the pole-star when, as a youth of thirty, he was detained in his sick room from the last hours of Socrates, could only just reach his own eye,t when, at fourscore, he was about to close it in death ? As for the paler rays of the milky- way which he describes, many a one that started in the hour when Plato was born, we are too soon to see ; for they are not yet half-way. Is this stupendous scene, we are asked, inhabited and wielded by One Sole Will ? Can we stretch the conception of personality, till it is commensurate with the dimensions of such a world ? Must not the problem be flung in despair into the shadows of fate, to be scrambled for by the rude and name- less forces which can do we know not what ? To this vague apprehension, which seems to oppress many minds, thus much must be conceded : that a compact little^ universe, every part of which our thought can visit with easy excursions, and which can lie within our conception as a whole, is better fitted to the scale of our capacities, and less strains, the efforts of religious imagination, than the baffling infinitude which has burst open before us. But ease of fancy is no test. of truth ; and the mere inability of panting thought to over- take the opening way is no reason for retracing the steps already made. To let our own incapacity cast its negative shadow on. the universe, and blot out the divineness because it is too great, is a mere wild and puerile waywardness. How does the size of things affect their relation to a Cause already infinite ? The miniature Cosmos which we owned to be divine is still there,, with all its beauty and its good, only embosomed in far- stretching fields of similar beauty and repeated good. It is not pretended that the vast quantities with which we deal in.- * The speed of light equals 192,000 miles per second, t Plat., Phaedo, 59 B. Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 7 troduce us to a different quality of things ; that they take us into lawless regions, and turn us out from a Cosmos into a chaos. On the contrary, the same simple but sublime physical geometry which interprets the path of the projectile, the phases of Venus, and the sweep of the comet which has no return, is still available in the most distant heavens to which the tele- scope can pierce ; and the star-traced diagrams of remotest space are embodied reasonings of the same science which works its problems on the black board of every school. Nay, the very light that brings us report from that inconceivable abyss is as a filament that binds into one system the extremes of the Cosmos there and here ; for, when it reaches the telescope, it is reflected by the same law as the beams of this morning's sun ; the prism breaks it into the same colours, and bends them in the same degrees. So confident do we feel that there is not one truth here and another there, that no sooner does a luminous ray out of the sky reproduce in its spectrum the same adjustment of lines and colours which our incandescent chemicals have been made to paint upon the wall, than we pronounce at once upon the materials supplying the solar and stellar fires. Nor do the nebulae, composed of gaseous matter of various density, with brilliant nucleus and fainter margin, leave it doubtful that the laws of heat and expansion, which have been ascertained by us here, carry their formulas into those vast depths. It is plain, therefore, that, in being thrust out beyond the ancient bounds, we are not driven as exiles into a trackless wilderness, where that which we had owned to be divine is exchanged for the undivine ; the clew, familiar to our hand, lengthens as we go, and never breaks ; and, with whatever shudder Imagination may look round, Eeason can find its way hither and thither precisely as before. What, indeed, have we found, by moving out along all radii into the infinite? that the whole is woven together in one sublime tissue of intellectual relations, geometrical and physical, the realized original of which all our science does but partially copy. That science is the crowning product and supreme ex- pression of human reason ; what, then, is the organism which it interprets, and renders visible on the reduced scale of our understanding ? Can the photograph exhibit the symmetry of S AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. "beauty and the expressive lines of thought, if no mind speaks through the original ? Can the dead looks of matter and force fling upon the plate the portrait, alive with genius, and serene -with intellect ? Unless, therefore, it takes more mental faculty to construe a universe than to cause it, to read the book of nature than to write it, we must more than ever look upon its solemn face as the living appeal of thought to thought, the medium through which the eye of the Infinite Eeason gazes into ours, and wakes it to meet him on the way. The Cosmos- tracks all have the same termini ; and whoever moves upon them passes from mind to mind ; God, thmking out his eternal thoughts on lines that descend to us, from cause to law, from law to fact, from fact to sense ; and we, counting our way back with labouring steps, from what we feel to what we see, and from what is to what must be, till we meet him in the eternal fields, where all minds live on the same aliment of the ever true and ever good. Whether, in the movements of reason, he descends to us, or we ascend to him, it is by the path of law which stretches across the spaces of the world, and which is in one direction the wayfarer's track, and in the other the highway for our God. Is it not childish, then, to be terrified out of our reli- gion by the mere scale of things, and, because the little Mosaic firmament is broken in pieces, to ask whether its divine Euler is not also gone ? Do you fear, because the «arth has dwindled to a sand-grain ? So much the more glorious is the field in which it lies ; so much the more numerous the sentinels of eternal equilibrium, the brilliant witnesses of order, rank upon rank, that pass always the same "word, " There is no chaos here." Do you pretend that the dimensions are beyond the compass of a personal and living Mind ? How, then, has your own mind, as learner, managed to measure and to know it, at least enough to think it some- thing beyond thought ? Cannot the Creative Intellect occupy and dispose beforehand any scene of which your science can take possession afterwards ? And if it is too much for the Tesources of mind, — which, at any rate, is supreme among the things we know, — how can it fail to be, in higher measure, beyond the grasp of anything else ? Does the order Chap. I.] QOD IN NATURE. g of one solar system tell us that we are in the domain ' of intelligence, but the balance and harmony of ten thousand cancel the security, and hand us over to blind material force ? Shall a single canto from the epic of the world breathe the tones of a genius divine ; yet the sequel, which clears the meaning and multiplies the beauty, take from the poem its insph-ation of thought, and reduce it to a mechanical crystal- lization of words? Does reason turn into unreason, as it fills auguster fields, and nears the Infinite ? Such a fear is self-convicted, and cannot shape itself into consistent speech : it is the mere panic of incompetent imagination, which the steadfast heart will tranquillize, and the large mind transcend. We are not lost, then, in our modern immensity of space ; but may still rest, with the wise of every age, in the faith that a realm of intellectual order and purest purpose environs us, and that the unity of nature is but the unity of the all-perfect Will. The second great discovery of modern science is the immense extension of the universe in time. This also dis- turbs the hearts of men, by the dissolving of many a vener- able dream, and forces on them unwonted and unwelcome conceptions, the significance of which we must try to esti- mate. If for this purpose we deign to consult the witness of his- tory, and listen to other men's thought ere we venture to work out our own, we encounter at once a singular rebuke to the precipitancy of theologic fear. As if to evince the persever- ance of religious faith, and its ready adaptation to the intel- lectual varieties of mankind, a conspfcuous proof presents itself on this very field, that one age may consecrate a belief which to another may appear simply impious. The imagina- tion of Christendom has selected and drawn out from eternity two limiting epochs as supremely sacred, — the crea- tion and the dissolution of the world. These two — the opening scene of the divine drama of all things, and its catastrophe — have enclosed for us the whole terra firma of humanity, nay, of physical nature itself, between opposite seas of awe and mystery. All the beauty and horror, the tenderness and wrath, the pity and hope, which piety can lo AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. ■wring from the soul of genius, have been shed upon these^ moments, to make them real by their intensity. The imagery of ancient hymns — the "Lucis Creator Optime," and the- " Dies irse, dies ilia ; " the masterpieces of art in the cathe- drals of cities, and still more, perhaps, the plebeian pictures by the road-side oratory ; the majestic epics of Dante and Milton ; the glorious music with which Haydn ushers in the light of the first day, and Spohr draws down the shadows of the last, — ^have deeply fixed those supernatural boundaries in the fancy and feeling of Christendom. Yet these very con- ceptions, that the universe had come into existence, and that, it would pass out of it, are pronounced by Aristotle totally inadmissible, as at variance with the diviae perfection ;* and so strong was the reverent feeling of the ancient philosophy against them, that even Philo the Jew, in the face of his own Scriptures, was carried away by it, and wrote a special treatise- to prove the indestructibility of the world. Far from begin- ning with a genesis and ending with a destruction of the heavens and the earth, both of them sudden alike, the Greek philosophical piety shrank distressed from paroxysms of change, and never felt itself in the Divine Presence except where the evolution was smooth and the order eternal.! The more it retired from phenomena to their ground, and, while- among phenomena, the more it dwelt with regular recurrences- which might go on forever, the nearer did it believe itself to- the Supreme Mind. Its favourite symbols and abodes of the- godlike were not the earthquake, and the smoking moimtain, with its "blackness and darkness and tempest and voice of a trumpet and sound of words ; " but the sphere, most perfect- of forms, because like itself all round ; and the rotatory move- ment of the fixed stars, because self-suflacing and complete, without the varying speed and even reversed direction of the^ less sacred planetary lights; and the symmetry of propor- tionate numbers, and the rhythm of music, and the secure steps of geometrical deduction; whatever is serene and balanced and changeless, and seems to ask least from causes * Aristot., de Ccelo, I. 3, II. 1. Met. xi. 1074, a. b. Conf. PhUo, de- Inoorruptibilitate Mundi, 3. ■\ 66oC Se evipycia adavaa-ia. tovto 8' ecrrX (afj diSios. Aristot., de CcbIo, II. 3.. Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 1 1 beyond itself, — is the chosen retreat of the Hellenic type of devout contemplation. The peculiarity has its origin in this, that while the Hebrew traced the footsteps of God in time and history, the Greek looked round for him in space and its cosmic order : so that the one met the sacred fire flashing and fading in the free movements of humanity, the other saw it fixed in the imwasting Ught of the eternal stars. It would seem possible, then, for the universe still to remain the abode of God, even though it should never, as a whole, have come into existence, but should have been always there ; and that actually, under this very aspect, it has put on its divinest look to some of the greatest intellects of the human race. This may well re-assure us if, for the doctrine of absolute creation, we are called to substitute entirely new conceptions of the genesis of things. A century ago, all the lines of research which pushed their exploration into the past bound themselves to meet at a starting-point about six thousand years away. Intent upon this convergence, they virtually predetermined their own track in conformity with it. One after another, as they followed the trail of their own facts, they found that they were likely to overshoot their rendezvous, and must either twist the indications of direction from their natural sweep, or else demand a longer run. Even for the mere human phenomena, the allowance of history wa& evidently too small. Along the great rivers, which were the earliest seats of civilization, were found memorials of ancient dynasties which could not be compressed within so narrow a chronology. Eemains of art, disinterred from surprising; depths, beneath annual sand-drifts and fluviatile deposits,, measured themselves back thousands of years too far. The genealogy and rate of change in languages asked for more room to work. And the races of mankind, especially if they were to claim a common ancestry, could not make out their family tree, unless it were a more venerable stock, with roots in the soil of an older world. Meanwhile, the naturalisti hitherto content to classify and describe the forms of Hfe now upon the earth and in the waters, was introduced by his- brother, who had been taking notes among the rocks, to an entirely new realm of plants and animals, — a realm which. 12 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. compelled him to arrange its kinds by a rule of succession, one after its forerunner, as well as by a rule of analogy, one like its neighbour ; and hardly had organic nature, instead of remaining a mere picture of what is, become also a history of what has been, than, even before any attempt at measuring the intervals, the beads of the chain declared themselves in numbers far too great for the thread on which they were to hang. A less ' indefinite reckoning, however, was not far off. The geologist, by patient and irresistible induction, established a series of sedimentary rocks ; and showed that the crust of the earth, to a depth far exceeding the measure of our highest mountain-chains, has been formed and re-formed ; its conti- nents depressed and elevated, its valleys scooped out, its sea- lines changed ; nay, even its oceans filled, its climates turned from tropical to glacial,, by the agencies which are at work around us now, but which are so slow that a single generation can scarcely see them stir. Within the, millions of years which are thus gained, the physiologist finds scope to move, and thinks better of the small causes of change at his com- ■ mand, for deriving kind from kind, and bridging the chasms which seem to keep the families of creatures distinct. And he suggests a law, gathered from the art of man in modifying plants and animals, and legible enough in many natural samples, at the touch of which the barriers between species give way ; the separating intervals become derivative ; and a provisional character is assumed by even the broadest dis- tinctions, not excepting (some will tell us) that which parts the organic from the inorganic world. To complete this con- version of the Cosmos born in a week, into a growth through immeasurable ages, enters the hypothesis, that the whole solar system was once an incandescent nebulous mass, whose rotation, as it cools, has flung off in succession its outer rings, and left them to condense in their orbits into the planetary spheres ; each, in its turn, to solidify round its molten centre into a habitable world, till the sun alone retains its self- luminous glow. There is nothing to hinder speculative science from pushing the same analogies into the remotest stellar fields ; and the resulting picture would be, of an eternal Cosmogony, by uninterrupted development, with no starts Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 13 from nonentity into existence, no leap from stage to stage of being, but with perpetuity of the same methods and the same rates of evoUition which have their play around us now. For our present purpose it is superfluous to draw any line between what is established certainty, and what is conjectural vaticination in this pitSCure. Suppose it to be all true ; and consider what difference it makes to our religious conceptions. The essence of the difference between the older and the newer doctrine lies in this : that the causality which the former con- centrates, the latter distributes ; the fiat of a moment bursts open, and spreads itself along the path of perpetuity. Which- ever way it acts, it is plain that the sum of its work is still the same, and demands neither more nor less in the one case than in the other. The element of time is totally indifferent to the character of the products it turns up ; and it takes as much power to grow a tree in a century as to create it in a night. Neither the magnitude nor the quality of the universe is altered by the discovery how old it is : whatever beauty, whatever intellectual relations, whatever good, gleamed from it and reported its divine inhabitant to those who deemed it a thing of yesterday, are still there, only with glory more pro- longed, for us who know it to be a less recent and a less perishable thing. It is not degraded by having lasted so long, that we should set it down to a meaner source; it is not dwindled or reduced, that we should give it to a minor power. We want, in order to render account of it, precisely what was wanted before ; and the only change is not in the cause, but in the date and manner of the effects ; in the substitution, for fits and paroxysms of volition, of the perennial flow of thought along the path of law, — a method which surely more accords with the serenity of perfect Mind. So long as we arrive at last at the symmetry, the balance, the happy adaptations, of the higher organisms, — at the constitution of the eye for vision, and the hand for a designer's work, and the instincts that move blindly into partnership of harmony, — there is not less to admire and esteem divine, for its having been forever growing richer and grander, and so having been long upon the way. If you suppose that the less can produce the greater, 14 A UTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. you leave the excess of the latter above the former without a cause ; if you admit that it cannot, then, whatever you would require as adequate to the last term must already be present in the first. This brings me to notice a singular logical illusion which seems to haunt the expounders of the modern doctrine of natural development. They apparently assume that growth dispenses with causation ; so that if they can only set something growing, they may begin upon the edge of zero, and, by simply giving it time, find it on their return a universe ■complete. Grant them only some tiniest cellule to hold a force not worth mentioning ; grant them, further, a tendency in this one to become two, and to improve its habits a little as it goes, — and, in an infinite series, there is no limit to the magnitude and splendour of the terms they will turn out. Ey brooding long enough on an egg that is next to nothing, they can, in this way, hatch any universe, actual or possible. Is it not evident that this is a mere trick of imagination, con- cealing its thefts of causation by committing them little by little, and taking the heap from the divine storehouse grain by grain ? You draw upon the fund of infinite resource to just the same amount, whether you call for it all at a stroke, or sow it sparse, as an invisible gold-dust, along the mountain- range of ages. Handle the terms as you may, you cannot make an equation with an infinitesimal on one side, and an infinite upon the other, though you spread an eternity be- tween. You are asking, in fact, for something other than time ; since this, of itself, can never do more than hand on what there is from point to point, and can by no means help the lower to create the higher. Time is of no use to your doctrine, except to thin and hide the little increments of adapting and improving power which you purloin. Mental causation is not, then, reduced to physical by diluting it with duration ; and if you show me ever so trivial a seed, from which have come, you say, the teeming world, and the embracing heavens, and the soul of man which interprets them in thought, my infer- ence will be, not that they have no more divineness than that rudimentary tissue, but that it had no less divineness than they have spread abroad. It is a common feature of every doctrine of development in ■Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 15 time, that the course has been from ruder elements to more refined combinations, from comparative chaos to the Cosmos we behold. That a solar system should succeed to a cloud on fire ; that a red-hot earth should put on a decent crust, and get the waters into its hollows, and the residuary atmosphere cool and pure ; that the history of its life should begin with the hchens, the mosses and the ferns, and should reach to man, — constitutes a clear progression, and compels us to report, of our portion of the universe, that it is forever looking up. If this discovery had been opened to Plato and Aristotle, would it have added to their religion, or subtracted from it ? Which terminus of the progression would their thought have seized, as the seat of the new light? Assuredly on the latest point -of the ascent. As it was not in the raw material, but in the realized order of the world, that they read the expression of ■divine reason, as the end in view can only come out at the last, thither it is that the eye of their philosophy would have turned ; and they would have accepted the law of progression as enhancing the sacredness of the great whole, as intimating ideal ends beyond what they had found, as the sign of even more and better thought at the heart of things than they had dared to dream. "Did we not say," they would have • asked, " that this Cosmos was full of Mind, shaping it to such beauty as was possible, and directing it to the best attainable ends? And see here the very pressure and movement of this inner mind ; for the beauty rises in glory, and the ends are stepping on to more perfection." No one, probably, who is familiar with their modes of reasoning, will ■doubt that this is the kind of impression which would have been made upon those philosophers by the modern law of progression. But how do its popular expounders deal with it ? By a singular inversion of attention and interest, they fix their eye on the other end of the succession, the crude fermentation of the earth's seething mass,' and virtually say, " You think yourself the child of God ; come and see the slime of which you are the spawn." Need I insist that the .antithesis is as false as the insinuated inference is mean, inasmuch as no secondary causation excludes the primary. i6 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. but only traces its method and order ? It is quite right to complete, if you can, your natural history from first to last. But if you would estimate the type or project of a growing nature, with a view to see whether it carries anything Avhich you can suppose to be divine, is it the more reasonable to look at the stuff it is made of, or at the perfection it attains to ? If it ivere the work of God, which of these two would bear the stamp of his intent ? There is no wonder that you miss the end in view, if you will look only at the beginning ; and that the intellectual character of the finished product is not apparent ia the lower workshops of Nature, where its constituents are mixed. As well might you expect to find the . genius of a poem in the vessel where the pulp of its paper is prepared. Causation must be measured by its supreme and perfect effects ; and it is a philosophical ingratitude to construe the glorious outburst to which its crescendo mounts by the faint beginnings of its scale. Would you think the aspect of things to be more divine if the law were reversed, and creation slipped downwards on a course of perpetual declension? Would you turn your present conclusion round, and say, " See how the higher creates the lower, and all must begin from God " ? on the contrary, you would justly take alarm, and cry, " There, is no heavenly government here ; the tendency is through perpetual loss to chaos in the end; and, if there were ever an idea within the aggregate of things, it is a baffled thought, impotent to stop confusion." Nowhere, surely, would atheism be more excused than in a world that runs to ruin. Would you, then, prefer, so far as piety is concerned, that the universe should be a system of stationary good, either without a tide at all in its affairs, or with periodic ebb and flow, rising forever with a flood of promise, and forever sinking with disappointing retreat ? Does the movement of Hving Mind speak to you with power in this oscillating pendulum, or this perpetuity of rest ? Or would they not rather throw upon you the silent shadow of an eternal Fate ? May we not say, then, that, of the three possibilities conceivable in the course of Nature, that law of progression Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 17 ■which is now registered amoilg the strong probabilities of science is the most accordant with the divine interpretation of the world ? I conclude, then, that neither of these two modern dis- coveries, namely, the immense extension of the universe in space, and its unlimited development in time, has any effect on the theistic faith, except to glorify it. A tissue of intellectual order infinitely wide, a history of ascending growth immeasurably prolonged, surely open to the human mind which can read them both, everything that can be asked for a spectacle entirely divine. No one, indeed, could ever have supposed that religion was hurt by these discoveries, had not Christendom unhappily bound up its religion with the physics of Moses and of Paul. Setting aside any question of authority, and looking with fresh eyes at the reality itself, who would not own that we live in a more glorious universe than they? Who would go to a Herschel and say, "Eoof over your stellar infinitudes, and give me back the solid firmament, with its waters above and its clouds beneath ; find me again the third story of the heavens, where the apostle heard the ineffable words ? " Who would demand of a Darwin, " Blot out your geologic time, and take me home again to the easy limits of six thousand years ? " Who, I say, not in the interests of science, but in the very hour of his midnight prayer, would wish to look into skies less deep, or to be near a God whose presence was the living chain of fewer ages ? It .cannot be denied that the architects of science have raised over us a nobler temple, and the hierophants of Nature introduced us to a sublimer worship. I do not say that they alone could ever find for us, if else we knew it not. Who it is that fills that temple, and what is the inner n^eaning of its sacred things ; for it is not, I beheve, through any physical aspect of things, if that were all, but through the human experiences of the conscience and affections, that the living God comes to apprehension and communion with us. But, when once he has been found of us, — or rather, we of him, — it is of no small moment that in our mental picture of the universe, an abode should be prepared worthy of a Presence so dear and so august. And 1 8 A UTHORITY I IMPLIED IN RELIGION. ' |B<5ok I. never, prior to our day, did "the heavens" more "declare his glory," or the world present a fitter temple for " Him who inhabiteth eternity." • if God cannot be distinguished from the universe except by being placed outside, the loss, from modern scientific concep- tions, of empty time and empty space, is the loss of him. To the childish imagination, to distinguish is literally to set apart ; and objects of thought, from which you abolish all quantita- tive interval, become confounded. Hence the prevailing terror lest what we had taken to be two should prove to be only one, and the doubt whether that one must be called All-Nature or All-God. So long as the world was supposed to be only ten- score generations old, it was easy enough to separate the provinces of God and Nature. There was a definite date imagined at which its powers were set to work and put in charge of the order of things, and, prior to that date, nothing in existence but his lonely infinitude. . Different domains of time were thus marked off as receptacles of supern'atural and of natural existence ; and, though the Divine Life continued all through, its activities were regarded as delegated since the creative hour ; and human piety, in order to stand face to face with its supreme object, had to fliiig itself back into the abyss of duration " before the mountains were brought forth, or ever he had formed the earth and the world." . His proper realm was above the firmament and before the origin of things ; and as soon as the heavens had been spread, and the land and sea stocked with the creatures of his hand, he rested from his work, and entered on a sabbath, which would only cease when ■& new heaven and a new earth should be called into being. No doubt, during this long sabbath, he was not supposed to be entirely without part in this scene of things ; but it was chiefly in human, or, if in physical, in exceptional affairs, that any agency of his was traced : and the very phrases used to de- scribe it, implying always some intervention of righteousness or mercy, assume a certain natural order, which would els6 take its own course to other ends ; for whoever overrules steps upon a field beyond his ordinary rule. Setting aside such interpositions, we may say that the courses of the universe, so ■far as they proceed by regular law, were conceived, to be the Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 19 result of secondary powers or forces of nature, distinct from the Divine "Will during their term of agency, and in contact with it only at their first adjustment. He was the first term of causation ; they were the second. The natural was theirs ; the supernatural was his. Whatever was assigned to them was taken one remove from him ; whatever was reserved for him was kept at one remove from them. So that the larger their domain became, the more did his retire into the residuary space beyond the boundaries of knowledge, a space which, though it is forever infinite, is also forever blank. By this treaty of partition between science and religion, natural forces were installed in full possession of the cosmos in time, and the Divine Will was prefixed to it to be its origin. When, therefore, it appeared that no commencement could be found ; that cosmical time goes back through all that had been called eternity ; that for the prefix of an almighty fiat no vacancy could be shown, the natural forces seemed to have secured the system of things all to themselves, and to leave no room for their first appearance in succession to an earlier power. Faith, terrified at the prospect, vowed for a while still to search somewhere for the crisis of their birth ; and, while inexorable Discovery penetrated the past, taking the centuries by thousands at a stride, she kept beside upon the wing, watching with anxious eye for the terminal edge which looked into the deep of God ; till at last, weary and drooping, she could sustain the flight no more, and, to escape falling into the fathomless darkness, took refuge in the bosom of her guide, not to be repelled or crushed, as she had feared, but, as we shall see, to be cherished and revived. For though the natural forces have lost their birthday, and seem to be old enough for anything, they gain no higher character by their extension of time ; and do not, by losing their sequence of date, lose their dependence of nature. They are no more entitled, by mere longevity, to serve an ejectment on the divine element, than is the divine element to claim everything from them. The reasons for recognizing the Infinite Mind as supreme cause are in no way superseded by the age of this or any other globe. It was not because the world was new that we had resorted to the, thought of God ; c 2 ■zo AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I, not because having, in the course of our researches, alighted upon a chaos at one date, and a cosmos at another, we wanted a means of bridging the chasm between them ; but because the world was orderly and beautiful, — an organism of intellect tual relations, the original of all . our science and art, which tells its story only to the interpretation of thought and the divmations of genius. And this it still is, and by its very antiquity is shown, so far as we can tell, to have forever been. The added duration extends the claims of both agencies alike, the natural and the divine ; it enables neither to extrude the other ; but it obliges us to revise the relation in which we had placed them to one another. They can no longer be treated as successive in time. Are, then, the natural and the divine to be regarded as both of them present on the scene ? and, if so, how do they make partition of the phenomena between them ? We are thus led at once to the third great character- istic of modern science,^ts doctrine of the correlation and conservation of forces. Let us look at it in itself and in its religious bearing. So long as each science pursued its way, without regard to its neighbours, the force with which it had to deal was simply taken up at its entrance on that particular field, and escorted to its exit ; and hence was apparently treated (perhaps only apparently) as though there it were born and there it perishesd, coming nowhence and going nowhither. If a flash of light- ning struck a tree,, the electricity was traced to the cloud, and spoken of as if it were original there. If two bodies of equal mass and velocity met from opposite directions and brought each other to rest, the impinging forces . were taken as (mechanically) destroyed. If this idea of force coming out of nothing and going into nothing were really ever enter-^ tained, it had to give way as soon as the sciences lost their isolation and were contemplated together. "When applications of heat were found to evolve electricity, the flash of lightning, ceasing to be spontaneous, fell back into questions about the temperature of the clouds ; and from the shock of solid bodies both heat and electricity were developed : so that the masses whose motion was cancelled to mechanical measurement only handed over their history to inquirers in another field,; Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 21 Attention once being drawn to this migration of phenomena in their natural series from one science to another, instances crowded in so fast that the rule soon acquired a wide gene- rality. There is not, in fact, a process in art or nature which ■does not illustrate it. The combustion of ordinary fuel is an example of chemical action, resulting on the one hand in light, on the other in heat : the heat, when applied to water, first simply raises its temperature ; then, ceasing to ■do this, spends itself in producing vapour, and metamorphoses itself into elasticity, and becomes available to the inquirer as a store of mechanical power. Every railway telegraph that rings a bell has its electric current generated by magnetic or by chemical arrangements, and resulting in mechanical motion and in sound ; while, in every photograph, we have light at the first point, and chemical change at the last. Need I say how this transmutation of power claims to cross the boundary from the inorganic to the living world ? how the solar rays, •actiag on the ingredients of the soil, deliver them into the vital structure of the plant, and build it up into maturity ? -how the plant again becomes the nutriment of the animal, and the senses of the animal respond to the light and sound •of the outer world, and pass on into the elaborations of thought, and enter into the determinations of will? And, in all this transmigration, the movement is in no single irre- versible direction, but is strictly reciprocal : as heat will earn for you mechanical power, so will mechanical action, as is :shown in the friction of every machine, develop heat ; as you may make magnets of electricity, so will moving magnets give you your electricity again. These efi'ects have not only been ascertained over a field of vast extent, but, in numerous instances, been measured, so as to justify the statement that the quantity of force which van^ ishes in one form is identical with that which consecutively re-appears in another. The general inference is, that the distinction of forces into various kinds is only apparent, not real ; depending on the medium of their manifestation, not upon anything in their intrinsic nature : that all the force behind the changes of the world is One, whether it assumes the mask of this or that order of phenomena ;- that nothing is 22 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. ever. added to it, nothing taken from it; that it circulates reciprocally from form to form of manifestation, being al-vyays capable of returniag by any steps which its laws may enable it to take. This conception of force is the more readily em- braced, because motion, which is its perceptible effect, has at the same time been similarly simplifying its varieties of kind : heat, colour, sound, chemical, electric, and magnetic action, being all resolvable into motory vibrations of different and even assignable velocities. Here, then, we have Science abolishing her own plurality of natural powers, and, as her latest act, delivering the universe to the disposal of One alone ; various in its phases, but in its essence homogeneous. It is impossible not to press the inquiry. How are we to conceive of that essence ? Which of its phases represents it most truly ? Does it more resemble a. universal elasticity, like steara ? or a universal quivering, like light ? or a universal conscious mind, like thought in man ? or must we say that probably it is like none of these,, and that, all its phases jwisrepresent it ? To answer these questions we must resort to the fountain-head, wherever it be, whence Science drew what she has to say about this hidden power. "Where did she learn to think about it, aoid to believe, in it? Not, it is confessed, in her own proper field of observation, and induction. Nothing comes before us there except what speaks to our perceiving and comparing faculties. Phenomena, one after another in time ; side by side with one another in. space ; like or unlike one another in aspect ; these are all that,, with such resources, we can ever hope to find. The things, that happen being visible or audible or tangible, you can see or hear or touch ; and you can write down the order in which they occur, so as to know in future what you are to expect- But the power behind, that turns them out on to the open theatre for us to look at, — call it chemical, electric, vital, as. you may, that does not come into the court of eye or ear, and could never cross your thought, had you no faculty but such as these. So little disputable is this, that philosophers of the newest school forbid us, on the strength of it, to ask about causes at all, as lying beyond the range of the. Chap. I J :, GOB IN NATURE. 23 human faculties ; and would limit us rigorously to the study of phenomena in their groupings and their series.^ The restriction, however, is too severe for even their own observance ; and, in spite of themselves, words denoting; not simply sequencies but energies continually occur in their writings. Indeed, as I have elsewhere observed,* " the whole literature of scieiice is pervaded by language and conceptions strictly dynamical ; and if an index expurgatorius were drawn up, pro- hibiting all pretensions that went beyond 'laws of uniformity,' it would make a clean sweep of every treatise, physical or metaphysical, from the time of Thales to our own. Comte himself speaks of ' the mutual action of different solar systems,' and of ' the action of the sun upon the planets : ' he says that ' the mathematical study . of astronomical movements indispensably requires the conception of a single force : ' he speaks of the ' thermological actions of a system mutually destroying each other ; ' and of a ' character special to the electrical forces which presents more difificulty than the molecular gravitations.'t And Mr. Mill tells us that the ' con- tiguous influence of chemical action is not a powerful force ; ' that ' electricity is now recognized as one of the most universal of natural agencies : ' he speaks of ' a force growing greater ' and ' growing less ; ' of the ' action of the central forces ; ' of the ' propagation of influences of all kinds ; ' and dis- tinguishes 'motions, forces, and other influences : ' and 'the motion with which the earth tends to advance in a direct line through space' he calls 'a cause.' 1 "Whence this perpetual resort to an idea which lies out beyond that "simple ' order of phenomena'' of which alone, it is said, we are competent to speak ?" Bain is apparently conscious of the inconsistency in which such use of dynamical language involves the disciples of his school'; for he rebukes it thus : " To 'express causation we need only name one thing, the antecedent or cause, and another thing, the effect ; a flying cannon-ghot is a cause, the * study of EeUgion, B, 11. oh. i. pp. 162-164 (1st Edn.). t PhUos. Pos. ir. pp. 254, 250, 360, 708. t System of Logic .(3j:d Ed.)- Vol.i. pp. 499, 501. 'Vol. ii. pp. 33, 34. Vol. i. pp. 335, 352. . _ : v 24 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. tumbling down of a wall is the effect. But people sometimes allow themselves the use of the additional word^ower to com- plete, as they suppose, the statement; the cannon-ball in motion has the power to batter walls ; a pure expletive or pleonasm, whose tendency is to create a ihystical or fictitious agency, in addition to the real agent, the moving ball. "* If the author of this criticism would try the effect of it upon an officer of engineers, he would find that the "expletive" which he derides was not without a meaning to persons acquainted with cannon-balls, and that the " mystical " element was actually reducible to figures, and the object of innumerable problems, far from being insoluble and still further from being fictitious. Nay, the very language which he criticises he, too, is. unable to avoid : he tells us of " moving power expended ; " of " primal sources of energy ; " " gravity," he says, " is an attractive force ; and another great attractive force is cohesion, or the force that binds together the atoms of solid matter." t No struggles of ingenuity avail to prevent these self -variations : the theory of these writers is refuted by their vocabulary. With more consistency, and surely with deeper insight, the authors of the doctrine of conservation which we are review- ing have said in effect, "We grant you, force is not a phenomenon which can 'be observed ; but it is indispensable for the conception of all phenomena ; and, quarrel with it as we may, it will always be supplied in thought : it is as much their intuitive background of origination, as space of their position, and time of their succession, and has no less good a right than these to a place among the assumptions of science. Its justification is in its own necessity ; its guarantee is in the very structure of our faculties ; before which you can never present a change without awakening belief, in a power which issues it." Thus it is admitted' that our own mind carries us behind the phenomenon as seen, and^ supplementing it by an act of necessary thought, precludes us from conceiving it at aU except as dealt out by a power. We believe this dynamical axiom on its own account, precisely as we believe, though we ■ - .. * Mental and Moral Seience, p. 406. t Inductive Logic, pp. 35, 33, 121, • - ■ _ . Ghap. I.] COD IN NATURE. 2f never experience, many things besides "our own trains of sen^ sation and inward change ; precisely as we believe " in the presence of an external world, in the infinity of space, in the immensity of duration, — all of them lying around, and not within the sphere of our personality, and all therefore out of reach, if we know only what turns up within ourselves. But if we accept the idea of power because it is given us in necessary thought, we naust accept it also as it is given us in thought : there is no other rule by which to fix and clear it. What, then, is that idea of causality which mingles for us with all our impressions of this moving world ? What kind of haunting presence is it which, under this name, our intui- tion spreads behind the scene ? And what part of our nature, what function of our reason, is it, which sets it there ? The answer is neither doubtful nor indistinct. There is but one source which can tell us anything of causality at all, viz., our own exercise of voluntary activity ; and there it is that we learn what it is to put forth power, to meet resistance, to produce effects. Were we merely passive ; were eye and ear only beaten upon by the pulsating elements, so as to have vision and sound, but not to look and listen ; did we only lie still to- feel, and never start up to act, all that fell upon us would stream through us like the images of a dream ; and, though we should be forever suffering effects, we should never ask about a cause. And this is approximately the case of creatures that are meant to feel and live, but not to know. But add on the other half of our nature ; let the lines of energy go forth from it, as well as flow in upon it ; above all, set its organs and movements at the disposal of a free and reasonable will ; and with the active the cognitive faculties will rise to their completeness : the causality within will apprehend the causality without ; and a power will be mvisibly interfused behind the visible incidents of the world, the counterpart of that which we wield ourselves. This personal tension by which we pass from the centre to the circumference of our field, and institute a movement, a look, an attention, is power : if with attainment of ends, successful power ; if otherwise, still power, though frustrated. Nothing is so intimately and directly familiar to us- as this : it is coincident 26 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book l.> with the spontaneous side of our life, as distiaguished from the recipient: it is at no distance from our essMice, and defines and constitutes our proper self. It is the point where the interval is lost between our being and our knowing : only in putting out force am I, in fact and thought, myself. True it is, I do not become aware of it, even in exercising it ; i.e., I do not make it an object of reflection, except in presence of the opposite phenomenon of passive sensation, especially of impediment or arrested movement. But, in thus waking up to what I have been about, the apprehension of energy issued is no inference from data, no hypothesis of thought which might be erroneous and deals with the unknown, but an immediate iatuition of a reality supremely certain. Here at home, we have first-hand acquaintance with power ; and no- where else can this experience repeat itself. Even in the re- action of objects upon us, we do not know how they deal with us, on quite the same terms on which we know how to deal with them ; but we are aware that their action is opposite : and on the principle Trspl twv dyriKiifxivwv ti]v airijv ilvai cirjffTij/ujv, we extend to them the same attribute by which we have moved upon them. So that, in owning their causality, we proceed on a different guarantee from that which assures us of our own, and apply to them a category of thought which is, indeed, the only one possible, and which covers them by a necessary act of the intellect, but which is not identical with the central consciousness of egoistic power. Still less is there any first-hand access to the idea of force in the action of one external body upon another. As witnesses of such pheno- mena alone, we could never pass beyond the law of succes- sion ; and whatever we think further is an element intuitively imported from our own dynamical experience. Were we only observers, therefore, we should not, I repeat, have the idea of power ; for it is beyond the reach of sight and of every other perception. Were we only patients, it would be inaccessible ; for then, in the absence of anything distinct from them, we should not have sensations, but only be sensations ; and could not escape from them to ask about their, " whence." It is as agents that we get behind phenomena, instead of looking at them, and learn, the secret, of thei:: origin ; and. the causal Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 27 idea which by an intellectual law we then apply to all observed phenomena is wholly supplied from this known fund of per- sonal efficiency. In other words, by power we mean will; neither more nor yet less : the word has no other possible signification; there is no source which can add any new element to this primitive type of the conception ; and if any- thing be taken away, it can only be the accessories which distinguish this from that variety of will, leaving untouched the central idea of living agency. The same law of thought; therefore, which guarantees to us our action of power, inter- prets that power into will, and fixes on the highest phase of force as that into which all others are to be resolved. And so this last and most refined generalization of science justifies the sublime faith, that the sole power in the phenomenal universe is the Divine Intellect and WUl, eternally transmuting itself into the cosmical order, and assuming the phases of natural force as modes of manifestation and paths of progression to ends of beauty and of good. The same conclusion arises from another aspect of the same law. I have said that the convertible forces may often be submitted to the test of actual measurement ; and that the amounts prove to be identical before and after the metamor- phosis. This would seem to imply that it was a matter of indifference to which side of the equation we looked. for the principal and representative term ; that the movement could be read equally well either way, and that the two sides were absolutely interchangeable for all purposes. Yet it is not so. In comparing the several forms of power, there are two dimensions of value which you have to estimate ; not their quantity only, but their quality too; and of the latter no system of equivalents, no gauge of " foot-pounds," or other standard, takes any notice or gives any account. Having measured, e.g., the dose of light and heat expended in growing a definite portion of your food, suppose that you could further find the equivalent chemic£|,l action which reduced that food into the material of blood ; and then the measure of vital force for assimilating the blood, and turning, some of it into brain ; and finally the store ^f nervous power laid out thence in the service of thought ; these quantities, by the rule, musfe 28 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. be all equal in amount ; but they leave the several stages, iii their other dimension of quality, wholly incommensurable and inconvertible. What degree of the thermometer can be the equivalent of a stanza of "In Memoriam," or of a happy stroke of philosophical genius ? What photometric scale can give the value of a moral act of self-denial, or a glad sacrifice of love ? How many grains of the protoids or the fats are tantamount to a penitential psalm, or to the agony of Geth- semane ? Among your forces, then, equate and proportionate them as you may, there remains, besides the measure of their material media, an indestructible difference of dignity, which ranges them on an ascending scale, and forbids you to read them indifferently backwards or forwards, though their scientific numbers may be equivalent. Now, when we bring the One force into which all are resolved before the face of this ascend- ing scale, on lohidi step shall we find the term which coincides with it in character ? Where is the type of power which, not in amount only, but in kind too,, is all-comprehending, and omits no requisite for exchange with all the rest ? Is it not obvious, that, as in quantity the less can never match .the greater, so in quality the inferior can never, out of its own resources, convert itself into the superior ? while the higher, containing more than all that is wanted for the lower, can take the descending place by merely suspending what is superfluously good ? You cannot deny the prerogative of will to reduce it- self to lower phases ; to forego its own freedom, for determinate law ; to pass, therefore, by descending transmigration, into the form of force, vital, chemical, mechanical : for it would indeed be perverse to insist that dead and blind power can transmute itself into living intellectual energy, yet deny that mind can divest itself of its voluntary alternatives, and pledge itself to the lines of lower rules. The conclusion, then, is again, on this ground, irresistible, that the One Power which appears under guise so various must, in order to be adequate to its highest demaiids, include all that its supreme phases display, and must be thought of, not as the gravitation that answers to our weight, hot as the undulation which reaches us in the form of heat, not even as the vital current of our life, but as the soul of our soul, the fountain and.prototype Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 29 of our thought and conscience, with whom our relation rises at once from convertibihty of force into communion of spirit. What, then, has become of the secondary causes supposed to be set up at the creation as delegated administrators of this universe ? They are merged in the primary will, which, in- stead of planting them as vicegerents outside itself, holds them as modes and rules of its own permanent action. Am I asked whether this is not pantheism, — this identification of the dynamical life of the universe with God ? I reply, it cer- tainly would be so, if we also turned the proposition round, and identified God with no more than the life of the universe, and treated the two terms as for all purposes interchangeable. If, in affirming the divine immanency in nature, we mean to deny the divine transcendency beyond nature, and to pay our worship to the aggregate of all its powers, the law of its laws, the unity of its organism ; if we merely sum up in one expres- sion its interior modes of movement, in anticipation of some unknown formula whence they may be all deduced, then, un- doubtedly, we do but pass from part to whole, and rest in a dream of future science, instead of emerging into immediate religion. But, if this were our thought, we should choose some other phrase than will to denote the inner principle of the world : for it implies intellect and purpose ; and of these, as- suredly, the winds and waves, the light and heat, the curving projectile, the oxidizing metal, the crystallizing fluid, the growing plant, are not conscious ; so that, in resolving their forces into will, we mean to affirm more than belongs to them 'per se, and to put their blind phenomena in relation to a con- sciousness beyond them which knows and wields them. It is precisely to mark this transcendent element, this presence of a livmg idea in objects that are not alive, that we avail our- selves of the word " will ; " and, but for this, we should else, with Spinoza, be careful to ward off the ascription of under- standing and will from the immanent Cause. Schopenhauer, it is true, has tried to divest the word " will " of the intellectual part of its meaning ; to discharge from it all idea of thought or purpose, and thin it down to the significance of blind power from within. He has substituted it for the word farce ; not that it may carry a larger sense, and suggest the notion of 3D AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. intentional aim ; but simply to mark the point of personal ex- perience, the exercise of living activity, which gives us the dynamic idea. But he cannot go thither for his word, yet fetch it away in that starved and blind condition : expel from will all consciousness, all light, all direction upon an end, and it is will no more ; nor will men evdr consent to embrace within the language of volition the physical and the moral phenomena of the world, — the dash of the torrent and the struggle of human resolve, — unless it be to infuse an ethical character into nature, instead of driving it off from the chief faculty of man. In identifying, then, the natural forces with will, we mean, not that it is essentially no more than they, but that they are essentially no less than it ; that their action is attended, therefore, by a living consciousness, and intellectual conformity with a given drift and law ; and since these con- comitants are not intrinsic to the several objects (which are the seat of action, without feeling their own phenomena), they are present with a mind abiding in the midst, and supplying the ideal to what else were but material. Instead, therefore, of cutting down the conception of God to the measure of natural objects, and leaving it only as the sum total of their attributes, we elevate them to his standard, and supplement their sensible qualities by relations with invisible thought and conscious knowledge. Thus, he is not the equivalent of the All, but its directing mind ; conscious where it is unconscious ; seeing where it is blind ; intending the future, where it only issues from the past. Here, then, is one way in which, if the expression may be allowed, God and the world part company : at the lower end of the scale of being there are natures included in his Sivafiig, whose phenomena, unfelt by themselves, are under cognizance by him ; at the upper end of the scale, the distinction is again effected, from an opposite cause. There are natures individually sentient, rational, moral, whose phenomena, felt by themselves, are unfelt by him. The hunger or the rage of the wild quad- ruped, the pain of the wounded bird, the perplexity of human thought, the rapture of relieved anxiety, the remorse of insulted conscience, — these are experiences not predicable of him ; they are objects of his cognition ; but the only subjects of them are .Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. ji some members or other of the hierarchy of creatures, Her^, therefore, we alight in the universe on something which is not included in his personal being ; something which must be treated as objective to him ; something which, as universal power, he causes ; which, as omniscient intellect, he knows ; but which, as infinite perfection, he cannot feel. As, before, . he was more than the *' All," here he would seem to be less than the All ; and the identity between God and nature, in which pantheism consists, is again disturbed, and the two schemes of thought are further distinguished. I need hardly add that he is " less than the All," not as inadequate to its comprehension and control, but as having immunity from some of its phenomena ; only as the life of the saintly and the wise is " less than " that of guilty folly by exemption from its com- punctions and unrest. It is of the very essence of the perfect nature to iniss such experiences as these. And it is the fatal necessity of pantheism^ that by making the consciousness of God identical with that of all sentient creatures, by treating them as but the leaves, and him as the sap, of the great life- tree, it has to predicate of him every error and weakness be- longing to them ; and make him, not cause alone, but subject, of all the sorrows and falsehoods of the world. We may present the distinction between the two theories in another light. It is the peculiarity of pantheism to admit of nothing objective to God. In his causal relation, he is the inner side of nature, its principle of spontaneous development, the natura naturans which is forever emerging in the natura naturata; and for that Infinite Being there is no "beyond" on to which any transitive action can pass ; no self-escape in order to deal with what is other; but only an eternal weaving of the tissue of phenomena from some focus jwithin towards some circumference that is not without. But when we adopt the idea of will to mark the essence of God, we do exactly the reverse of this : we thereby claim something objective to him, on to which his thought, his purpose, his power, may pass ; for it is the characteristic of will to stand face to face with an end in view : to distinguish itself from what is other than self, and look forth on things and persons around as the scene given for its activity. In merging, therefore,, the 32 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. forces of nature in the will of God, we expressly guard ourselves against drowning the objective field under the overwhelming flood of the divine ; and stipulate that, in some way or other, be it by space and matter given, or by lending out and fixing at certain centres stores of delegated power, there shall be reserved a theatre and objects of possible action for an intending and effectuating mind. Whether or not the theory can be worked out, its idea and purpose evidently are to negative the first principles of pantheism. But how are we to carry out this purpose, and provide a ■domain that shall be objective to God? Must we assume such a thing to have been already always there, — a primitive datum, eternal as himself? or must he be regarded as furnishing himself with objects, and causing the very field of his own causality? The problem lies on the ultimate confines of human th'ought ; but, if I read it aright, neither of these assumptions is adequate to its solution, without the other ; and we must use theni both, in order to conceive without mutilating the divine relations to the universe. To raise the question whether a pure subjectivity can give rise to its own objects is to propose an empty riddle. Its sense is zero ; and the answer can only be its echo. An " absolute subject " is no less a contradiction in thought than a single-terined equation, or an uncaused effect. To be a •' subject" is to have an " object," and hold an existence, not " absolute," but relative ; and the moment we conceive of mind at all, or any operation of mind, we must concurrently conceive of something other than it as engaging its activity. This thing which occupies it, or that, — empirical particulars without number, may be later than the mind, and arise ia the course of its history. But, when these are all withdrawn^ there must still remain, coeval with itself and inseparable from itself, some field of possible experience to carry the requisites indispensable for thought in any form. God, therefore, cannot stand for us as the sole and exhaustive term in the realm of uncreated being: as early and as long as he is, must also be somewhat objective to him. To the primordial condition we are helped by our intuitive apprehen- sion of the infinitude of Space, supplying a field already Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 33 there for the most ancient movement of thought out of itself. Space, however, is not itself an object, but only the oppor- tunity for objects; so that there is, perhaps, still need of another datum; viz., matter occupying finite place. It is quite possible, indeed, to refine upon this word and reduce it to " solidified extension ; " to resolve solidity into resistance ; and to conceive of points of space hardened by becoming the depositories of a repelling force, forbidding all else to enter ; and in this way to construe the material element back into the play of omnipotence in space. But for those who find it difficult to work out this last simplification, we may concede matter also, or extended solidity, in addition to space, as a datum of the problem, and as the rudimentary object for the intellectual and dynamic action of the supreme subject. Here at once is presented a field comprising an immense tissue of relations ; all that can be evolved by the sciences of measure and of number, or deduced among the primary quaUties of body ; and in thinking out the universe under these conditions, the Divine Intellect moves in steps of pure deduction on an eternal ground, and justifies the saying of Plato, that God is the great Geometer, But on this field of necessary truth there is no scope for the alternatives of will, or the inventive exercise of creative reason. These enter, however, at the next stage ; for when the remaining attributes of body are filled in, it must be by pure origination; for no links of demonstrative thought connect them with the prior group, nor can the keenest insight discover that they might not have been otherwise. When the circle is given, all the properties of its intersecting chords, the relations of their tangents, the comparative size of an arc's central and peripheral angles, are unalterably determined. But why undulations in one medium should produce sound, and in another light; why one speed of vibration should give red colour and another blue, can be explained by no reason of necessity. These things we must attribute to that which alone can determine ths indeter- minate; viz., a selecting will, making for itself rules of uniformity, and betaking itself here to this order, there to that. In thus formulating his power, and distributing it D 34 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. through the material datum, God makes it objective in two senses. He puts it into that which is other than himself, and he parts with other use of it, by pre-engagement to an end. This is all that is required for the setting up of other natures, which are thenceforth a guaranteed presence on the field, secure of their own distinctive history. But the power lodged in them for the conduct of that history remains, in one sense, subjective to God. He is its eternal supply, the continuous source of its regulated ebb and flow in every inlet and channel of being; apart from whom the universal organism would cease its pulsations and collapse. To say thus much of his agency in nature is only to re-assert the ancient claim of a perpetual upholding or perpetual creation of the universal order by divine power. " In him we live and move and have our being." It must be admitted, however, that this conception will not work satisfactorily except in the lower departments of creation, ere we have entered upon the stage which we occupy ourselves. The vast system of cosmical mechanics and chemistry, the struc- ture of the solar and the stellar worlds, we readily contemplate as a whole, pervaded by universal modes of power, and sub- sisting as the organ of God's legislated will. But when we look at the other end of the hierarchy of originated being, especially at ourselves, of whom our knowledge is most intimate, it is no longer possible to retain this close interfusion of the divine a,nd the created natures. Whatever not only lives, but feels and consciously acts, must have something of its own ; must appropriate the impressions it receives, and have the credit of the energies it puts forth, and cannot be regarded as the mere organ through which flows a foreign power. If my thoughts were passed through me by another ; if my desires, affections, resolves, were phenomena of a force upon its travels that chose to come my way; if, further, the whole genius and knowledge of the human race, the moral struggles of its heroes, the literature, philosophy, and art of its cultivated nations, were but the ripplings of the Divine Eeason upon a world itself the aggregate of divine powers, — 'there would, in fact, be only One Person in the universe, and the whole drama of our life and history would dissolve into an illusion. To provide for Chap. I.] GOD IN NATURE. 35 this higher class of cases which culminates in personality, we must recognize a further stage of detachment of power from its source than we have hitherto mentioned, and admit the conception of delegated force, lent out for a term, in order to work the conditions of a distinct existence, and relapsing when the term is over. Of the so-called " natural forces," each one in the ascending scale is more special and specializing than the preceding, more characteristic of particular natures, and gathered around centres of individuality, till, at the furthest distance from universal gravitation, we emerge into the con- scious Ego of intellectual existence which finally sets up another person. This planting-out of power, and storing it at single foci, to be disposed of from within under given rules of life, breaks no allegiance to its sole Fountain-head, and estab- lishes no second source for it, but merely determines that, on touching the conditions of living beings, it shall have a con- sciousness which is not God's, though known to him, and to which its further course of administration shall be for a while consigned. Even then within the realm of undisputed physical law, and without emerging beyond the region of natural history, we meet with provinces of reality objective to God in various degrees, without prejudice to the identification of all power with his will. But the full security against the dissolving mists of pantheism is first obtained when we quit the simply natural field in which nothing is possible but in linear links of succes- sion, and stand in presence of the supernatural in man, to whom an alternative is given, and in whom is a real mind, or miniature of God, consciously acting from a selected end iii view. Here it is that we first learn the solemn difference in ourselves between what is and what might be ; and, carrying the lesson abroad, discover how faint a symbol is visible nature of its ideal essence and Divine Cause. Here it is, that, after long detention in our prison of facts, the walls become transparent, and let us see the fields more than elysian beyond. The Eternal is more than all that he has done. And if the universe, with all its vastness, is only the single actuality which shapes itself out of a sea of possibilities; if its laws are but one function of thought in a Mihd that transcends them every D 2 36 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. way ; then, in being the indwelling beauty and power of the world, he does not cease to be the living God above the world and though the world were gone. Still more, if, within the local realm of his administration, there is an enclosure which he has chosen to rail off as sacred for a minor divineness like his own, for a free and spiritual life, having play enough from the thraldom of natural laws for responsible movements of its own ; then, however resistless the sweep of his power elsewhere, here, at the threshold of this shrine of conflict and of prayer, he gently pauses in his almightiness, and lets only his love and righteousness enter in. Here is a holy place reserved for genuine moral relations and personal affections, for infinite pity and finite sacrifice, for tears of compunction and the embrace of forgiveness, and all the hidden life by which the soul ascends to God. Here, however, we are carried on to ground which no natural philosopher can survey for us. Looking back on the path which has led us thus far, we meet, in the three great modern discoveries, respecting the space, the duration, the forces, of the cosmos, with nothing to disturb, and with much to elevate and glorify, the religious interpretation of Nature ; and^ through the falling away of puerile conceptions, at once to justify and to harmonize the impressions of devout minds in every age. The outward world, nevertheless, is not the school of the purest and deepest. It is not God's characteristic sphere of self-expression. Bather is it his eternal act of self-limitation ; of abstinence from the movements of free affection moment by moment, for the sake of a constancy that shall never falter or deceive. The finite universe is thus the stooping of the Infinite Will to an everlasting self-sacrifice ; the assumption of a patient silence by the Fountain-head of boundless thought. The silence is first broken, the self-expression comes forth, in the moral phenomena of our life, where at last Spirit speaks, with spirit, and the passage is made from the measured steps of material usage to the free flight of spiritual affection. The world reports the power, reflects the beauty, spreads abroad the majesty, of the Supreme Cause ; but we cannot speak of higher attributes, and apprehend the positive grounds of trust and love, without entering the precincts of humanity. 37 CHAPTEE II. GOD IN HUMANITY. When we wish to speak of the world as a system of established order, we borrow a word from the methods of human society, and say that it is a realm of law. The term very accurately describes movement or action in conformity with rule, and restrained within definite and assignable conditions ; and this, its essential meaning, never leaves it through the whole range of its application. It is curious, however, to observe how this fundamental idea, as it passes from province to province of the universe, takes on new elements, and embodies itself in richer forms. Under its lowest aspect, we find it in the inorganic and insentient world, which is simply the unconscious theatre of its presence. The water, in its cycle from sea to cloud, from cloud to snow, from snow to stream, that finds the sea again ; the foliage, that drops in winter, and is re-born in spring ; the flower, that throws its stamens open to the sun, and folds them from the chills of night ; the curving light, that shows us the sun before he has risen, and after he has set, and softens the night at either end ; the gulf-stream, that warms the higher latitudes, and cools the tropic seas, — all these constitute an order which they do not feel, and weave a web of relations among things that do not see each other, and are disposed of by a power that uses them all without reporting itself to any. They follow a law which is made for them, and which, without consent or recognition of theirs, holds them in unswerving obedience. The mind in which their order is original does not enter them except as force, and wields them only as the diagrams and apparatus of its own thought. When law takes possession of Animal Life, it plants a power of higher type within, and establishes a fuller system of relations. Instinct, everywhere adaptive, seems to take 38 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. the adjusting activity into its own hands, and to manage its business for itself ; yet, with curious partition of the work, selects the means without preconception of the end. The moth, which deposits its eggs on the only plant which will feed the future caterpillar, or, itself vegetarian, stores around them the kind of chrysalis which its larva will require ; the salmon, which punctually ascends the stream, and intrusts its. progeny to the fresh waters in which itself was born ; the bird, that builds and hides its nest on the ground, or under the eaves, or pendent from the bough, and seems to get ready for its dangers and its time ; the mother-ostriches, that club together to put all their eggs of yesterday into one nest, under charge of a male bird, and all those of to-morrow into another; the new-fledged fly-catcher, which at once snaps, without missing, at its prey, with true measure of the distance, and selection of the kind ; the constructive beaver, the civic ant, the co-operative bee, — all are engaged in building up a balanced organism of relations, a beneficent interdependence, every part of which, even that which they directly serve, is wholly beyond their cognizance. They are not left, however, like the planet in its orbit, or the tidal wave, wholly outside, ias merely vehicles of the order they display : their conscious life is drawn into it ; they serve it with their feeling, they advance it with their strength, though it is absent from their thought. With a kind of incipient partnership in the economy of the world, they are admitted to its administration, but not to its counsels ; and are the eager executants of purposes to which they are blind. Are these ends absent, are they non- existent, because unknown to the creatures of which they dispose ? No : they are assembled elsewhere ; and, from the perfection of the divine thought, work themselves out into reaHzation, through the pressure of countless feelings, con- vergmg upon a final equilibrium of beauty and of good. This form of law does not cease with the tribes below us ; it rises into our nature, and occupies in it all the functions which our life has in common with theirs. The attempt of philosophy to invest us with a constitution violently different from theirs; to make everything derivative in us which is original in them ; to substitute in us, for their spontaneous Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. ^g passions, the trained results of experience, and build us up out'of'aBSOciated "pains and pleasures with next to nothing ready-made, is a wasted artifice of ingenuity, which forces, stronger than argument, will forever confute. The propen- sions which are the common stock of all animal existence ; the passions which fence it from its foes ; the affections which knit it to its kind, plainly enter our life on the same terms which are assigned to them elsewhere, and equally bear upon them the stamp of instinctive impulse driving blindly to its end. Who that has seen and laughed at the passionate boy, venting disappointment on his hoop or top, as well as on his playmates, can fail to recognize the same signs which appear in every provoked creature, of that resentment which springs against sudden harm, and, in the moment of danger, invests weakness with preternatural strength ? And shall we admire, as pro- visions of instinct, the maternal cares of the swallow or the hen, and break the analogy when the same conditions Ught up a human life with joy and love and patient sacrifice ? Nay, even when we take account of tendencies more special to man, the impulsive and spontaneous character which distinguishes instinct from reflection does not disappear. What more sudden flash can burst unbidden into the soul than the kindling of pity at the spectacle of woe ? It is but an appeal- ing look ; and in the twinkling of an eye the seals are melted from the source of tears, and the hand is seized as with a spasm of succouring strength. It is the instant remedy for instant anguish; and as the sorrows of this world often cannot afford to wait, so is there ready in the soul a balm swifter than reason, and more healing than any skill. The difference between man and his companion-creatures on this earth is not that his instinctive life is less than theirs, for, in truth, it goes far beyond them ; but that in him it acts in the presence, and under the eye, of other powers, which trans- form it, and, by giving to it vision as well as light, take its blindness away. He is let into his own secrets ; though he too is snatched forward toward objects given to his nature, not found by either accident or art, yet he has this distinc- tion : that he marks and remembers what they do to him ; and when they offer themselves again, he now knows, in his 40 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book i. movement towards them, whither he is going; and what before was a drifting in the dark, becomes a passage to an end foreseen. It is this change of theatre for the natural instincts, this removal of their life on to an illuminated stage, where they have to act their parts in the presence of higher direction, — this it is which adds a new character to law, when it takes possession of the human activities, and which lifts it at once from natural to moral. Other beings it sways, but does not consult. Man it takes into complete partnership with it and treats as its confidant. Its force was on the planet ; its feeling in the animal ; its thought is in man. Passing thus from physical to ideal, and asking, not the obedience of matter, but the assent of mind, it drops its coercive aspect, reports itself as duty, without the enforcement of necessity, and simply leaves with the soul a trust of power adequate to execute its own idea. And so man becomes " a law unto himself ; " not that he makes the law or can repeal it, but that he has within himself the resources for recogniz- ing it and for obeying it, and may consciously and freely co- operate with that appointed order by which other natures are swept along without their leave. Now, how is this change in the character of law brought about on its transplantation into our nature ? What is the provision for replacing the rectiUnear sequences of natural law by the alternative possibilities of moral law ? In what form is our consent asked to the right, and the warning given against the wrong ? And by what constitution of mind are we qualified to give the true response ? Has each one of us, like Socrates, his good genius attending him, with voice ever ready to check the incipient aberration ? Or have we a certain special sense for detecting in all actions, when they come before us, some quality, otherwise occult, that distinguishes the right from the wrong ? Or is the quality not occult at all, but just the superior pleasure to ourselves or others of the miction rightfully preferred, and do we approve by admeasure- ment of happy results ? These are the chief doctrines preva- lent about the ultimate ground of our moral sentiments. The comparative criticism of them is the business of the syste- matic moral philosopher, and is full of interest, both historical Chap. II.j . GOD IN HUMANITY. 41 and psychological. But it would take us to our end by a needless circuit. It will be better for us to enter for ourselves the field of ethical phenomena, regardless of all its preoccu- pation, to consult afresh the nature on which we have to report, and simply register what there appears. The facts which we may find will incidentally controvert the fictions which we must exclude, and furnish; a criticism while dispens- ing with the critic. "Where, then, is the exact incidence, and what are the characteristics, of all moral judgment ? 1. "Whenever we pass a moral judgment, it is always upon a person, and not upon a thing. Both of these may affect us agreeably or disagreeably, may be received with welcome, or rejected with dislike ; but the admiration or aversion awakened by mere things, by the form of a tree, the plumage of a bird, by disproportion in a house, or discord in a song, are totally distinct from moral approval and disapproval. Be the annoy- ance ever so great which we suffer from these impersonal objects, be the tree such as drew down the humorous impreca- tions of Horace, or the house such as it has cost us dear to mend, we are simply hurt by them, not angry at them. And the very same disasters affect us differently according as they are or are not believed to have a personal origin ; the tile that falls and wounds us as we walk brings us only harm from the wind of accident ; but injury, to be felt as such, must come from the hand of mischief. Nay, so true is this, that, even in the case of acts distinctly human, it is not the tlwig done, but the person doing, not the product, but the cause, that we are impelled to judge. The same deed of crime may issue from a dark, neglected nature, and from one luminous and rich with the discipline of Christian opportunity ; but our feeling will verge towards pity in the one case, and burn with indignation in the other. And so when some sacrifice of love, — the tending of the sick, the support of the orphan, — is made by the poor, whose own need is scarcely less severe, and whose struggle might be Jield to excuse from such devotedness, we yield to it a homage which it would win in very different degree if it came from the strong, stooping easily to help the weak. For us, it is invariably, not the act, but the agent, that is mean or noble : him it is that we despise or honour ; 43 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book r. apart from him, and looked at as an object in itself, the act offers to no sense or faculty of ours any moral quality to cast the vote of our approbation. It may give pain or pleasure ; it may be beautiful or ugly ; it may be prolific or sterile ; but cut off from its author, and treated as an external phenome- non, it takes its place, like health or disease, among natural facts, to which no ethical emotion is due. Instances, indeed, are adduced, in which, we seem to estimata outward objects in terms of moral appreciation. For example, we may " approve " the tone of a picture, the proportion of a sculpture, the decorations of a. room ; we may " despise " a. mincing speech or a tawdry costume ; and the surveyor may "condemn" a fortress or a frigate. But it is obvious that here we have only a figurative transfer of ethical language to- judgments of taste and utility ; and that the feelings expressed are purely aesthetic or technical, without the characteristics of moral sentiment. And the cause of this transference is not difficult to find. It is limited, to cases where an end is aimed at, and a choice is made ; and is never applied to the given objects of nature, which lie beyond conceivable variation. Works of fine art, and structures of mechanical skill, are pro- ducts of will, involving alternative possibilities, and resembling moral action in carrying a better and a worse ; and hence they draw upon them the same preferential language, though the thing preferred is not a greater righteousness, but a greater beauty or a greater use. The personal habits and creations,, to which above all we apply this phraseology, are, moreover,, the symbols of inward , character ; and, though betraying: primarily no more than its cast of imagination, suggest by implication the probable presence of a corresponding type of ethical preference. It is still, therefore, not upon the phe- nomenon itself, but upon the personal source, that the sentence of our feeling is passed. 2. We must then enter the precincts of the agent's person- ality in order to scrutinize more nearly the precise point on which our moral appreciation settles. His action we may resolve into the three main elements of its history ; viz., the impulse whence it starts, the movements which execute it, and the effects that follow it. No one can let his attention Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. 43 rest for a moment on each of these, without confessing that it IS the first alone which we approve or condemn, and which we accept as an expression of character. So long as this remains, and the spring of action has not changed its decree, our praise or blame will stand ; though, by some arrest of execution, the intention is frustrated at its birth, or, by a change of. outward conditions, the consequences are reversed. The holy purpose, broken off by paralysis of limb, or inter- rupted by sudden death, kindles our reverence as much as the highest triumphs of successful will ; and those whose designs of love are blotted out in the darkness of some Calvary are none the less venerated as saviours by the world. And who does not own the defence of Demosthenes to be just, that the patriot and statesman is not to be judged by the event, but. may yet have his claim on gratitude from a ruined country, and amid the wreck of baffled plans? Take away, on the other hand, the initial term, and suppose the same succession of events to complete itself by other means than the origi- nating purpose ; and the phenomenon, thus mechanically accomphshed, slips at once from ethical into natural history ; and, bring what it may of good or ill, it commands no love,. and justifies no indignation. Without its prefix of impelling affection, the executive activities are but a muscular spasm ; and, though they were to conjure up all imaginable felicities, would be as little praiseworthy as the sunshine and the rain. We conclude, then, that the moral quality lies exclusively in the inner spring, of which the act is born. 3. Yet, if there were only one such spring of action implanted in om* nature, or allowed scope in our opportuni- ties, it would be no object of ethical judgment. Who, for instance, could condemn any fury of resentment, if that passion had the soul entirely to itself, and there were no opposing pleadings pressing to be heard ? or any voracity of appetite, if all consciousness were swallowed up m hunger ? The creatures below us are. apparently not far from this condition : they seem to be actually taken up by instinct after instinct, each in its turn, as if there were no other. They have, therefore, no problem ; and nothing is possible to them but to become the organs of each present affection, and 44 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. {Book I. let it hand them over to the next. It is precisely because this is not the condition of our world, because no man is ever noble without the opportunity of being base, or the slave of a false service without the offer of a true, that we look on human character as on an eventful drama, full of crises of suspense, and, as we watch the stage, have our hearts ever charged with a sacred anger or a thankful joy. When, therefore, on seeing a human impulse break into life and claim the field, we clap our hands, and cry, " Well done ! " we always see a rival near ; and, knowiog what conflict there may have been behind the scenes, welcome the victor as from a battle won. 4. If this be so, if it be on these conditions that our moral judgments are passed, one weighty controversy may be at once discharged. Where, it has been asked, is the birth- place, where the earliest school, of our moral sentiments ? Do we gather them from the influence of our fellow-men ? Are they the infection of education, the copy of social opinion ? Are they imposed upon us by the will of prede- cessors and companions, mere rules, made in their interest, and enforced by the sanction of their power ? Or are they native to our own mind, and a true home-growth upon the personal field? In other words, are the primary verdicts passed upon our fellows, or upon ourselves? One simple test would seem to decide this question. If the moral criti- cism express the view we take of others' conduct, if it is from this as a beginning that our sentiments of right build them- selves up, they must fasten their approval or contempt upon what an observer can see and feel of the action which they judge, — upon its visible characteristics of good and ill. Not till it has quitted the agent's personality, and has gone abroad into the hght, charged with benefit or injury, will it be qualified to earn our praise or reprobation. We have seen, however, that it is by no means to these outwardly perceptible features of its history, but exclusively to its hidden springs within, that our sentence addresses itself: there alone it is that we discern the clean and unclean, the worthy and the base. Where, then, do we learn these appre- ciations ? What should we know of these viewless seats of Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY, 45 character if we could only look out of our eyes at the move- ments of other men? How could we ever interpret the moral meaning of these signs, any more than a bird could understand the tears of compunction, or the uplifted look of prayer, if the key were not within us, in the motive affections of our own hearts ? It is on the home enclosure, within the private plot of our own consciousness, that we make acquaint- ance with the springs of action, and are forced to see them as they are ; and if here it is that we discern the sacredness and the sin, our primary school of morals lies within ourselves, and we may dismiss, as a play of ingenious fiction, all attempts to explain our own conscience as a reflection of other men's looks, and to elaborate the dehcate sanctities of private duty out of the coarse fibre of public self-interest. That our fellows make demands upon us, that they expect us to be just and true and merciful, is a secondary phenomenon, which could have no place did they not presume us first to make the demand upon ourselves ; and their suffrages, how- ever coercive, would speak to us with no inward weight did they, not issue from a moral apprehension like our own, and reproduce from kindred witnesses the verdict, or the surmises, of our hearts. The theory is not only an opprobrium to- philosophy, but a poison to the world, which assumes that, to begin with, men know nothing but the sentient difference between pleasure and pain ; and set themselves, in default of distinctions more august, to work it up by artifice into sem- blance of a thing divine, virtually saying to each other, " See ! there is no conscience here. Come, let us make an image in its likeness, and build it of the clay of our own wishes, and gild it over as a god; and we will set it on the plain, where all men shall see it, and at the sound of our trumpet they shall bow down and worship it." "When such illusions have come to the end awaiting all idolatries, we shall return to the simpler speech of less ingenious times ; " Brothers, we have all one conscience here. Come, let us confess together what it would have from us ; and, to help its weakness in each, let us declare its claims on all, and gather the divine voices, scattered as they are, into a chorus of right for our community." Society, once tempted by flattery to 45 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. believe itself the source, of moral law, is ever sliding towards dissolution ; but, while reverently living as its product and its organ, becomes ever firmer and more glorious. 5. If it be the inner spring of action to which all ethical quality attaches, — and even then, only on condition that it is not there alone, — our moral constitution reduces itself to the simplest form : it stands clear at once of every mystery, and of every arbitrary pretension supposed to be chargeable on the doctrine of a moral faculty. It is all contained in this : that, as the instinctive impulses turn up within us, one after another, and two or more come into presence of each other, they report to us their relative worth ; and we intuitively Imow the better from the worse. The hungry child, who is ready to satisfy his appetite without a restraining thought, no sooner falls in with some Lazarus, fainting with starvation, than he feels in a moment the higher claim of pity, and either parts with the untasted meal, or, if not, finds it made bitter by compunction. An irascible mother, fretted with her cares, and venting herself upon the nearest vexation, strikes her idiot boy, and he falls beneath the unintelligible wound. With what instant anguish does she know how much meaner is the anger she has indulged than the compassion she has forgot ! Such examples are types of all our native self-judg- ments. And the consciousness we have of the relative excellence of the several instincts and affections which compete for our will — a consciousness inseparable from the experience of each as it comes into comparison with another, but incomplete till we have rung the changes on them all — is neither more nor less than conscience. The moral faculty, therefore, is not any apprehension of invisible qualities in external actions, not any partition of them into the absolutely good and absolutely evil, not any intellectual testing of them by rules of congruity, or balances of utility, but a recognition, at their very source, of a scale of relative values lying within ourselves, and introducing a "preferential character throughout the countless combinations of our pos- sible activity. I will presently consider what is the nature, and what the religious significance, of that moral authority which thus opens upon us. But, before proceeding to this Chap. II.] ■ GOD IN HUMANITY. 47 uOpic, I -would pause for a moment on a single aspect of our ■exposition. From the constitution of the human mind which we have "traced, we see how it is that all great moral natures instinc- "ti\ely turn inwards ; and by their native thirst for divine knowledge are carried to the fountains of self-knowledge. There it is, in the secret glades of thought and motive, that ■the springs of life arise, and the distinctive lights and shadows of good and ill are seen to play ; and thither is the soul invariably led by the genius of duty. Even amid the brilliant distractions of Athens, it was to this centre that Socrates retreated from the speculations of science, and the dazzling ambitions of men, and disciplined himself to be the martyr of ■the first ethical philosophy, and the father of all others. Under the weight of empire, it was the chief care of Marcus AureUus to commmie with his own heart ; and from that silent converse he brought a strength and harmony of virtue "which shames the whole calendar of saints. As soon as the religion of Christ had had time to make itself felt, and to fix its spirit legibly in the hymn, the prayer, the Hterature, of the faith, the unsuspected contents of the human soul seemed to pour themselves forth in a flood of pathetic confession, and to open resources for a new and deeper drama of life. And, compare where we will the expression of ancient and of modern civilization, in their epics, their tragedies, their art, or their philosophy, the relative interest of the outward world pales in the later ages before the inner mysteries of our own nature. The broad canvas of history fascinates us less than the cabinet portrait of biography with its silent lips and meaning eyes ; and, through the pomp of statesmanship and the din of revolution, we pierce with eager search to the play of indi-iddual passion and the conflict of personal character. This reflective tendency, this retkement within, is due to the hidden sense rather than the open discovery that here is the true seat of law, — the place of judgment, whence there is no appeal. And hence it is never in light mood, with noisy and jaunty step, but with hushed breath, and on the tiptoe of silence, that we draw near to look into these inner circles of the soul. Elsewhere, we can go familiarly in and out, and 48 AUTHORITY IMPLIED hX RELIGION. [Book I. take our notes of what we find, without disturbance to the humour of the hour : but there we know there is a sanctuary ,- and ere we reach it, an invisible incense breathes upon our hearts, and subdues us into involuntary worship. While the mere external study of men, the scrutiny of them by intel- lectual eye-sight, is the constant source of cynical illusion, meditative self-knowledge is the true school of reverence, oi sympathy, of hope, of immovable humility ; for there we see, side by side, what we are and what we ought to be ; — and of unquenchable aspiration ; for there too we meet, spirit to spirit, the almighty Holiness that lifts us to himself. It is true, however, that the self-knowledge which is the special prerogative of man is his latest, as it is his highest, gain. And hence the simple program of his moral nature, though living in him in lines of light, remains unread ,- and its very existence is as much disputed as if it were invisible. There is nothing surprising in this. The truth is too near for the average eye to see it ; and the vision, accommodated to outward things, overlooks what presses more closely on itself. If men could be quietly consulted one by one, taken into the closet of some Socratic qaestioner, schooled in reaching the confessional of thought, they would readily be made aware of their inward discernment of ethical differences among their incentives, and would own a law of God written on the heart. Were there only this private witness of personal consciousness, the evidence would seem to be all one way. But they go out into the public streets, and watch the variegated stream of population intent on different ends ; they frequent the courts, and Usten to the contending pleas for a right suspended between two suitors ; they observe a nation, whose noblest citizens confront each other under the opposite banners of law and revolution ; they scrutinize history, and find the sanc- tioned usages of one age become the crimes of another ; and, amid the din of this distracted field, the authority which looked so clear within seems lost in lawlessness without : all uniformity of rule is broken up, and of any consentaneous moral faculty scarce a trace remains. The throng of con- flicting phenomena gives noisy answer to the silent inward pleadings ; and the secret conviction of a divine order, known Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. 49 to all, is beaten down by the confusion of the world. Where, it is asked, is the pretended intuition of the right in a race which, by turns, has consecrated every wrong ? What is the use of a moral faculty which, if it can sleep while a Caligula or a Borgia triumphs, and saints are hunted down by inquisitors, and superstition plays off its pitiless cruelties, is no better than a moral incapacity ? Who would trust himself to the conscience of an African savage or a Mexican chief ? Is it not plain that a standard which is constant for no two places or times must be the arbitrary creation of social necessity, the crystallization of traditional prejudice and usage, passing from the public fashion into the private feeling, and calling itself indigenous there, because not knowing whence it is ? These considerations would have great weight against any doctrine of conscience which set it up as an infalUble oracle, able to pronounce at sight on the ethical character of external actions. Men, under such guidance, would have their moral perceptions perfect at once, and uniform everywhere, and could add nothing by way of growth or history, except so far as, with changing conditions, new lines of possible action came before them. But if conscience is withdrawn altogether from the criticism of outward action, if it be taken simply for the sense we have of a better and worse among our inward springs of conduct, not only is its existence compatible with the conflicting judgments of mankind and the cross-Hghts on the field of history, but it affords the simplest key to these, showing precisely how they arise, and exhibiting them as the direct and inevitable consequence of the very plan of our mental constitution. For instance : — 1. The limited range of conscience among barbarous tribes and people everywhere of immature humanity is precisely what we should expect, when we remember how few are the influences which have play in their hfe; and how scanty, therefore, is the set of moral differences to which their feeling has yet been introduced. Our nature opens and turns out its forces only by degrees. There is an infancy for the race as well as for the individual ; and, as nearly one-third of life must pass ere the child succeeds to the passions and problems B So AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. of the man, so, in the first attempt at society, and in its more retired parts, a large proportion of the human dynamics sleep. A small number of private instincts and affections appear upon the stage, and conduct the action of the piece ; and since, even of these, one is usually off before another is on, the inner life is rather a succession than a conflict of powers ; and there is little of that comparison and strife of incentives from which the motal self-consciousness is born. The Indian who, in a fit of suspicion, takes the life of his faithful wife or son, discovers with remorse how much nobler is the affection he has insulted than the fear he has obeyed. Or, perhaps, in the hot blood of victory, he tortures his captive till some look of piteous agony pierces to the seat of pity in his heart, and he finds something to which revenge itself must yield. But among these rudiments of a moral life, his years of simple experience pass away, and all the higher terms on the scale of human incentive remain undiscovered overhead, so that the very materials are invisible of the problems which they present ; and to seek a verdict on them from his moral sense would be like carrying into the nursery questions of political libel or international law. Within the narrow circle of his existence, so far as it has emerged from the dominion of successive instincts, and fallen under the rules of a comparing consciousness, I do not think it can be shown that he mistakes or inverts the claims of his few natural affections. 2. The apparent discrepancies of ethical judgment by which, in different societies, the hero and the criminal change places, are also the necessary result of the unequal development of a uniform moral consciousness. To convince ourselves of this, we have only to remember that every verdict of approval is passed, not upon the action, but on its spring ; and is, more- over, not absolute, but simply relative and preferential. When- ever, therefore, you try to settle the worth of any case of conduct, your eye fastens at once upon the feeling whence it has obviously sprung ; and this, for the purposes of estimate, you set side by side with that other feeling which you. take to be its alternative, sure to have the field if its competitor with- draws. Our sentence of approval, then, though it bears an absolute look, and only says, " The thing is right," really Chap, iij GOD IN HUMANITY. SI means no more than the comparative decision, " This is better than that." Suppose that, meanwhile, I have been pondering the same case ; that I have referred it, like yourself, to its true incentive ; but that I have imagined a different alterna- tive, and therefore instituted a different comparison, not, as in your deliberations, with the term immediately below, but with the term immediately above : is it any wonder that I contradict you, and say, " The thing is wrong "? And is it not plain that, flat as the contradiction seems, it is not real ? since my assertion that B. is worse than C. is no reply to yours, that B. is better than A. To both of us, by the very constitution of our nature, a suppressed term of comparison is indispensable ; and if that term should be not the same for you and for me, our minds will never meet, and we shall dehver judgments on different problems, though in form the one decree affirms precisely what the other denies. I know of no seeming discordances of ethical opinion which do not readily resolve themselves under the applicatioi^ of this formula. Nothing is more revolting to us in the Greek civilization than the sacrifice of the weakly and infirm by the exposure of infants and the cutting off of the old. We treat it as sheer inhumanity and irreverence, selfishly inflicted on helpless victims in riddance of a burden of troublesome but sacred cares. We carry to it our Christian estimate of the individual soul and its trust of life, — a trust which no maimed conditions, no sorrowful lot, no waiting for release, can ever cancel or disappoint : we think how large a part of social duty is constituted by the humanities which shelter the weak and nurse the sick and care for them that have none to help ; and that all this should be cast away in order that the strong may be stronger, and lives too brilliant should lose their shadows, fills us with indignant horror. But in this we proceed upon comparisons which were impossible to the Greek ; whilst he acted on a view of the world impossible to us. Life, death, the world, the individual, stood before him in relations which have passed from our sympathy, — almost from our apprehension. He inverted our order of reverence. The State was to embody for him the divine perfection of the cosmos, and its single .components were to be used like the seed-corn, or burned like B 2 52 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. the weeds, according as they could adorn it with the beauty of their growth, or cleanse it by their swift decay. He recog- nized no rights in the personal life which could stand up against the wholesomeness of the community ; and no duties, except to yield itself unreservedly as the organ, or remove itself as the obstruction, of the public good. For one who was dis- abled from serving the commonwealth, there was no trust, no sacredness, no business, here : he could remain only to discover himself a cumberer of the ground ; and it was not only per- mitted, but required, whether from himself or from others, as guardians of the perfection of the world, that he should quit the scene which he deformed. In this view the sacrifice was made, not to self and private ease, but to an ideal of public good and divine order ; and the thing sacrificed was not that solemn opportunity, that inalienable trust, which to us the^ probationary plot must ever be of even the poorest cottiers in this husbandry of God, but a mere shipwrecked position on barren sands, where not a green thing would grow, and the circling sea cut off the continents of hope and love. The^ terms of the comparison, and the conditions of the problem in the ancient and the modern mind being thus different, it is no- wonder that answers seemingly conflicting are given to ques- tions really difi'erent. In truth, it is only by thus retiring inward to the precon- ceptions and sentiments from which action is assumed to- spring ; only, therefore, by consulting the moral consciousness- itself, that these startling contrarieties of judgment can at all be understood. If we went by the external effects of action alone, approving of what did good, condemning what did harm, it would be much more difficult to explain the violent revolutions of ethical opinion. For the outward consequences do not, like the inner springs, change their adjustment and relation from age to age : they are palpable and measurable alike to the ancient and the modern, to Aristotle and to Mill ; and if the materials and the method of solution were thus impartially present to all observers, the opposite answers would hopelessly perplex us, and would but hand over the imputation against the consistency of conscience to stand as- a charge against the uniformity of reason. Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. 53 8. The gradual groivth of moral discernment, and the mode in which it takes place, are also what we should expect from the preferential character ascribed to it. Till a spring of action appears upon the field and disputes possession of us with another, it has no place in our estimate at all ; and when it has begun to visit us, it has to pass through its circle of com- parisons with prior occupants before it can fall into order with the rest. We are far on in our career before the whole of even the primitive series of impulses, e. g., the parental affec- tion, can have found us out. And, by various partnerships among these, as well as by conversion, through our self-con- sciousness, of the instinctive into the prudential, new and mixed incentives (e. g., the love of power, the sense of veracity, devotion to our country) are perpetually added, so as tb enrich the contents of our nature and enlarge the scope of our moral existence. And what is it that quickens these elements into Hfe ? Is it in solitude that, like bubbles set free from the bottom of some sleeping pool, they one by one rise to the surface ? No : it is in the eddy and the flow of life, as it chafes in its channel, and is turned by the rock, and ventures its leap, that all the force and the effervescence come out. We find our proper personality only in society ; and it is by exposure to the light of other consciences that the colours of our own steal forth. Especially is it the play of inequality in the characters around us, the repulsion of those below, the attraction of those above, our level, that wakes up the forces of our proper nature, and, by compelling us to define our aspirations, turns the bhnd tracks of habit into the luminous path of a spiritual career. Am I thrown among associates who breathe a lower atmosphere, and who appeal to incentives which in my heart I cannot honour as the best ? My secret ideal stands before me as it never did before ; and, in my compunction if I am weak, in my resolution if I am strong, its authority looks down upon me with living eyes of pity or of help. Am I admitted into the company of greater and purer men, who move among the upper springs of life ; who aim at what had scarcely visited my dreams ; who hold them- selves, with freest sacrifice, at the disposal of affections known to me only by momentary flash ; who rise above the fears that ;54 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. darken me, and do the duties that shame me, and bear the sorrows that break me down ? The whole secret and sanctity of life seem to burst upon me at once ; and I find how near the ground is the highest I have touched, and, how the steps of possibihty ascend, and pass away, and lose themselves in heaven. This is the disciplme, this the divine school, for the unfoldmg of our moral nature, — the appeal of character with- out to character within. The sacred poem of our own hearts, with its passionate hymns, its quiet prayers, is writ in invisible ink ; and only when the lamp of other Uves brings its warm light near do the lines steal out, and give their music to the voice, then- solemn meaning to the soul. In this sense of interdependence we do, undoubtedly, owe our moral sentiment largely to others ; but only because they, too, bear tliat about them which we revere or abhor, and their character serves as the mirror of our own. In a world morally constituted, where ihe authority of conscience has at least its implicit presence in every mind, the ethical action and re-action of men upon each other will be infinite, and will so far prevail over the solitary force of the individual nature, that no one, however exceptionally great, will escape all relation to the general level of his time. The dependence, then, of the moral consciousness for its growth upon society is incident to its very nature. But to suppose, jon this account, that, if it were not there at all, society could generate it, and, by skilful financing with the exchanges of pleasure and pain, could turn a sentient world into a moral one, will never cease to be an insolvent theory, which makes provision for no obligation : never, so long as it is true that out of nothing nothing comes. 4. As the growth of conscience, so its decline takes place in the manner we should expect, if it be a natural valuation of our springs of action as they arise. "When some affection bigher than your wont has dawned upon you, and claimed you with its divine appeal, if you simply recognize the call, and, cost what it may, go whither it may lead, though the feet may bleed and the strength may droop, your mind is clear with a new serenity and repose. The tension of anxiety is gone, the care for opinion dies away, and, by this step of elevation, you pass into harmony with the very heart of things, If, on the Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. ^55 other hand, you stifle or defy the appeal, and cling to the ease of your low level, you are torn with keen misery, while the angel and the fiend are contending for you, and then sickened with self-contempt, when the strife is over, and you have sent the sacred messenger back to heaven. The divine importunity will not return, or, at least, can never speak again in that warning voice, without reproach which you could scarce refuse to hear ; and, in its absence your shame and compunction will tire themselves out : the organs of your moral life, impaired by the shock, protect themselves from future pain by becoming benumbed, and refusing to give such delicate response again ; and, while your cheerfulness comes back at one entrance, your nobler hope goes out at the other. With disuse and rejection, the higher springs retire and vanish out of sight, not only abandoning us to our poor performance, but lowering the range of our very problems, and leaving us with a sinking standard for our thought as well as an enfeebled vigour in our will. While your face is turned upwards, and, on the angel-ladder, you are climbing nearer heaven, tbere are, even at midnight, lights on the steps above to show the way ; but once look downwards, and mingle with the descending troop, and one by one the lights go out aloft, and there is darkness overhead ; and, by mere invitation of rela- tive brightness, you reverse the direction of your eye, and your foot is drawn to the step below. A moving nature, with its attractions set upon an ascending scale, must either rise or sink : nor, in such a constitution of things, is there any fact more natural and more awful than the " blindness in part " which is incurred by all unfaithfulness : so that as our actual becomes meaner, our possibiUty itself contracts ; and our debt of responsibility is ever growing, not only by the sin which we consciously commit, but by the lost sanctities which we have driven into the wastes of the unconscious and invisible. On the whole, then, the moral phenomena of life, including those which are thought least reconcilable with an intuitive discernment of ethical differences, receive from it a fair interpretation. Its objective meaning, the religious signifi- cance of its felt authority, must still be reserved for separate. 56 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. treatment. Meanwhile, I take leave of the present part of my subject with one comment more : that each spring of action should bring with it, on its first encounter with another in our mind, a report, there and then, of its relative authority, is suitable, nay, indispensable, to our position as responsible beings. Unless and until I know the right, you cannot call me to account for the wrong. If I am to pilot my ship through waters I have never traversed, you must spread the chart before me, and forewarn me of the shallows and the reefs. It will not do to let me learn my lesson from experi- ence, and fling me upon observation of the stars, and sound- ings of the ship, beneath, perhaps, the blackened heavens, and on the wildest sea : unless you would have me ship- wrecked into skill, I must be taught the coast, and have my insight, ere I step on board. The foresight of prudence may wait for experience, and gather its breadth and refinement by degrees ; for, during the process, we can but smart for our blunders, and are involved in no sin ; and often enough we learn best when we are pupils of our own mistakes. But, while intelligence comes out at the end of action, moral dis- cernment must be ready at its beginning, and be beforehand with the earliest problem that can arise ; nor can it be that the wisdom needed for the first occasions of ethical experience is itself left to be the product of experience. On a journey so momentous, which can never be retraced, and on which the soul has its one chance of ascending to the high fountains of humanity and surmounting the Alpine glories of the world, it were a poor consolation for missing the passes, and being lost amid the swamps, that, at the end of her wanderings, she had learnt the way. No : skill and prudence are found ; but conscience is given. And, accordingly, it is (within its range) the clearest and the tenderest in the dawn of life, while, as yet, the haze of unfaithfulness is thin, and no gathering clouds of guilt taint and intercept the purity of its light. And it is a sad substitute when, in later years, the native insight is replaced by the sharp foresight, and we compute, with wisdom, the way which we should take in love. Are we never to blend the fresh heart of childhood and the large mind of age, and so recover the lost harmonies of life ? Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. 57 If a true account has been given of the fundamental facts of our moral psychology, they cannot be left standing as inde- pendent and perfect in themselves. They do not fulfil the conditions of a self-sufficing system, but, like a truncated geometrical solid, compel us to look for a completion beyond their own boundary, — to ask, what would their form be if their idea were visibly carried out, and to what constitution of the world they are intrinsically fitted. Hitherto we have examined them simply or chiefly as parts of our inner experience. But one element is comprised in them which seems to be more than a mere feeling in ourselves, and to constitute a link attaching us to a scheme of things beyond : I mean the authority belonging to every better impulse of our nature as against the worse. For, wherever authority is exercised or felt, a relation subsists which it takes two members to consti- tute. Submission demanded from one implies rule imposed by another : parent and child, master and servant, teacher and taught, lawgiver and subject, exemplify the pairs formed under such relation, in which a higher directs a lower, and a lower looks up to a higher. Now, we have seen that the moral structure of the human mind carries in it, as its deepest essence, the consciousness of a binding authority, claiming our preference for the better incentive over the worse. It is based, therefore, on just such a dual relation, and compels us to ask, "Where are the two required terms ? One of them, it is plain, is our own will, on which the demand for right choice is made, and which, conscious of the appeal, is ennobled by yielding to it, or degraded by defying it ; and which, in pro- portion to its fidelity, is admitted to a more elevated discipline. But where is the other, which prefers the demand, and admin- isters the discipline? How are we to find and name this power, felt within, invisible without, which plays the part of a superior, and, in speaking to our will as bound to serve, wins assent from our heart of hearts? To this question, "What is the ultimate authority which commands us ? there are several possible answers. These we may pass under a brief review. 1. This authority is often resolved into the persuasive power of superior pleasure, or exemption from pain. No one incen- 58 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. tive, it is said, can claim any advantage over another, except on the score of happier effects. " Nature," says Bentham, " has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, ■pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne."* " There is in reality," says Mr. J. S. Mill, " nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the conscious- ness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both reasons united ; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost always together, the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in not having attained more." " Happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promo- tion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct."! The ethical adequacy of this doctrine will be considered here- after. Psychologically, it seems to me incorrect in assuming that we never act but for pleasure as an end ; for this descrip- tion misses the whole of the instinctive life, during which we are propelled by blind impulse, and have to choose between our incentives, without as yet knowing what they will do to us. Pleasure is, in fact, the fruit, and not the germ, of the several types of natural activity : it is simply the satisfaction of reachiug their various ends, and, but for their existence first, could never itseK arise afterwards. No one, for instance, exercises resentment because he enjoys the pain of others : he enjoys that pain only because he is resentful. And, if you pity suffering, it is not in order to win the pleasures of relief : to your compassion you are indebted for its bringing a plea- sure to you at all. " It is by no means true," says Aristotle, " that the virtues * Bentham's Introduction to tlie Principles of Morals and Legislation, chap. i. § i. p. 1. + Utilitarianism, chap. iv. pp. 56, 57. Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. 59 have universally any other pleasure in their action than that which is incident to the attainment of their proper ends."* If your nature is the seat of twenty primitive affections, each in love with its own distinct object, there is not one of them which will not be happy in its success : but shall we say, on that account, that they are not twenty, but only one ? and that happiness is yovu: only aim, and absolute ruler ? You will justly protest that it is not the happiness that supplies the aim, but the aim that supplies the happiness. When some propension in us, and some external thing which suits it, find each other out, a satisfaction arises. But this plea- sure which results from the completed relation, and is pre- viously undiscovered, cannot be the source of the initial activity. To call it so is to make condition and consequent change places. As we emerge, however, from the conflicts of impulse, and having learned their lesson, begin to look forward and com- pute our way, a balance of pleasure, or of exemption from pain, certainly becomes a just object of preference, and often decides our course. But, where it does so, it produces simply an act of prudence, such as might appear in a merely rational world able to economize its resources wisely, without any sense of moral distinctions at all. This is the impassable limit, beyond which the motive said to be omnipotent can never be carried ; and unless all human excellence is resolved into prudence, worldly or other-worldly, unless character is really without any higher region where self-regards can breathe no more, the sceptre of pleasure meets here the frontier of its sway, and carries no prerogative into the proper territory of duty. In order to explain away the felt authority of right, it has always been found necessary practically to abolish the distinction be- tween prudential and moral action ; leaving them no other difference than that of the narrower and nearer, from the more comprehensive and far-sighted, economy of happiness. Both Bentham and Paley identify "authority" with the power oifear. With the former it is the fear of other men : wi-th the latter it is the fear of hell. And, apart from these, there is, we are assured, no awful ground of choice between * Eth. Nioom, III. ix. 5. 6o AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. the possibilities before us. When you want to thrust your likings upon me, says Bentham, and to tyrannize over me ■with your tastes and fancies, you dress them up as a moral faculty, which advances upon me with a grand air, and pre- tends to have rights over me too royal for your private impu- dence to assume ; and, if I am as impressible by hobgoblins as the majority of men, your device may easily secure my obedience.* Were this account correct, and were the procla- mation of right no more than an arrogant " ipse-dixitism," it is conceivable that I might manage to browbeat another man, and frighten him into submission to my sentiment. But how could I do so to myself 7 How could I make one desire threaten another with the police ? for the police being also my own, and overhearing the whole game, will be apt to wink at both parties to the sham, and " make things pleasant " all round. At all events, it is obvious, that, if this history were true, the personal sentiments of conscience would be an ulterior superstition, by which, having imposed on others, we at last imposed upon ourselves : they would be an illusion of the second degree, impossible till the first had an integral and definite existence. Yet we have seen that the inverse order is a fundamental fact in our moral nature, and that self- judgment is the prior condition of all judgment of others. To this prior stage Bentham's analysis is ludicrously inappli- cable. Nor is Paley's account, though in the spirit of a sermon rather than a satire, one whit more satisfactory. It is given in answer to a different question : not, " "Why should I care for: your moral sense?" but, "Why should I care for my civn ? "—" Only," he replies, " because heaven and hell lie behind it." Take away the assurance of reward and punish- ment hereafter, and with these saiictions its authority vanishes : I may do as I like, and put up with the sentimental discomfort of my own remorse, t A more thorough-going misinterpretation of the elements of " authority " it is im- possible to imagine, — dispensing with its essence, and insist- * Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. ii. § 14, note, t Moral and Politij3al PhUosophy ; chapter on the Moral Sense, last paragraphs. Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. 6l ing on its appendages. Are we, then, to say, that if there were no pains of hell, and joys of heaven, there would be no duty binding upon men ? and that, while the call and the compunctions of conscience remain, duty can cease to be? On the contrary, it is the external sufferings, wherever placed in time, which it rests with us, in simple prudence or im- prudence, to meet or to decline ; and it is the internal appeal for preference, and remorse for rejection, which it may be in our power, but is never in our right, to tamper with by likings of our own. Whatever impressiveness there is in the prospective retribution belongs to it, not as a sentient expectation, but as a moral award. Strip it of its ethical significance, and reduce it to a naked affection of the sensitive nature ; turn it from an emblem of justice to an arbitrary, though calculable, physical experience, — and all its solemnity is gone : if it commands our will, it is of power, and not of right ; and if its strength is tested side by side with any deep conviction of right, its emptiness of all authority will instantly appear. Bring Paley face to face with a congregation of the Cornish miners of his time to try his ultimate appeal ; let him urge, with his tersest good sense, his plea of long-visioned prudence, " You had better take care, or you will go to hell ; " and, if this were his last word (and he confesses that he has " no more to say"), is there a passion which his message would quell, or a heart which it would subdue ? Or would the list- less hearers stroll into tomorrow, unaltered from to-day ? But let a "Wesley stand up before them, and press home upon them the " conviction of sin," dwelling not so much on the future anguish as on the present ruin of the soul, interpreting the secret shame and self-contempt of its daily recklessness, re- calling its memory of better life, appealing to its inward long- ing for higher things, and ineffaceable kindred with a holy God, and we know by experience into what deeps such a voice may penetrate ; how it reaches the dryest fountain of tears ; how it casts the strong man to the ground ; how it bends the stiff neck of pride, and makes the frozen heart flow down ; how it may shake and convulse the habits of a life, and, driving their evil spirit out, bring them to a composed and wakeful order under the heavenly eye. 62 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. No such conquests are possible to the mere estimate of happiness, — to any prudence, temporal or eternal. Having no executive but the police of self-interest, it cannot pass into a province where interest has to be summoned, not to parley, but to surrender without terms. It may induce, but cannot command : it is invested with no authority ; it is the source of no obligation. It may warn us against a blunder : it can- not awe us out of any sin. It has no voices to tell its bidding that can speak to us from above : they come to us on our own level, and bargain with us in our own coin. They cannot, therefore, lift us out of our own disposal to serve a higher law ; for, say what you will, we shall never cease to feel, that, with our own pleasures and pains, if these be your ultimate resource, we may do as we like, and you can estabhsh no right in them against us ; and shall still applaud the noble incon- sistency of. our great utilitarian in declaring that " to hell he will go," rather than pay a lying worship to a tyrant God.* If he is right, as assuredly he is, then there is a claim upon us in veracity, an appeal to us in righteousness, which no extremity of consequences can cancel, but which will stand fast in the face of an infinitude of agony taken in place of a forfeited infinitude of joy. In the presence of, that solemn claim we lose our personal rights, and have no liberty to twist the lips to falsehood, and bend the knee in hypocrisy : the remorse for such baseness is more than suffering, and has in it that which we are not free to incur. Though you show us the happy slopes of paradise on one side, and on the other take * Mill's Examination of Hamilton, oh. vii. pp. 102-3. " If, instead of the ' glad tidings ' that there exists a Being In whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a Being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that ' the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving ' does not sanction them, — convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this Being by the names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. Whatever power such a Being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do,^-he shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no Being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow- creatures ; and, if such a Being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go." Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. 6^ US through boundless torture-halls, the walls hung round with excruciatmg instruments, and the pavement thronged with fiends, none can challenge our title to defy the difference, and take the lot of proffered misery. It is not, then, m ^ this sentient element that we meet with the authority beyond us. 2. Can we find it, then, by dividmg our own nature into two, and saying that there is a certam better part o/seZ/ which has right of command over the rest ? In one sense, such a state- ment is no doubt true. It is within the arena of our conscious mind that both sides of the moral fact — the announcement of the claim upon us, and the acceptance of the claim by us— present themselves : both are known to us by our own feeling, and form part of our own inner history. But, though the authority of the higher incentive is self-known, it cannot be self-created ; for, while it is in me, it is above me. Its tones thrill through my chamber where I sit alone : but it was not my voice that uttered them : they came to me, but not from me. They find me out in my sin when 1 would fain be let alone ; they reproach me till I go out to hide my tears, though I do not want to leave the mirth and song ; they make a coward of me, and shake me in my shoes, though I am for setting my face as flint, and hardening my joints as iron. I resist the claims of the right ; I wrestle with them ; I am beaten by them : or, I surrender to them ; I follow them ; I triumph with them : and how, then, can you say that they are but the shadow of myself ? The authority which I set up I am able also to take down ; yet, do what I may, I cannot dis- charge my compunctions, and shut the door on them as on troublesome creditors who have nothing to show against me, and depend upon my will for any claim they have. No act of repeal on my part avails to release me from the obligations which turn up within my consciousness ; nor, by any edict of clemency to my own moral bankruptcy, can I say to myself, "I forgive thee all that debt." Nay, the very effort at oblivion only darkens the shade of guilt ; and he who stifles his self-upbraidiags, and drowns his remorse, and tries to treat his transgressions as all his own affair, sinks doubly deep in immediate offence, and prepares the seed-plot for every future sin. Besides, if there is to be partition of 64 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. the human self between the functions of command and of obedience, what will our analysis give us for subject, and what for Lord? The former we know; but where is the latter ? It is we ourselves, our will, our personality, the whole of our voluntary nature, that must be owned as under higher orders ; that is, precisely our supreme characteristics, — those which distinguish us from mere creatures, and set us " a little lower than the angels." And, if these constitute the subject- term, within us, nothing is left for the seat of lordship — if it is, indeed, but an element of ourselves — except the impersonal, the involuntary, the unreasoning affections which surround the will, and beset it with importunities they neither hear nor overhear. To a responsible will, nothing that is less than will can issue orders, and commit a trust ; and, if we are really taught the lessons of conscience, assuredly we are not self- taught. Moreover, if the authority which claims us were of this merely subjective nature, if it were the aspect which one part of self bore towards another, it would lie within the interior relations of the individual : and so it would belong to him, though he were in solitude ; and, though he were in society, it would be valid for him alone. But neither of these things is true. Though the essence of our nature, as responsible and religious beings, is in the shrine of its self-conscious and reflective powers, it does not wake up there spontaneously to pay its secret worship ; but, if left alone in silence, will fall back into the sleep of animal existence. It needs the school of sympathy and society, the appeal of objective character, the play of the like and the different, to fling into the soul the sweeping winds at which its chords speak out. We learn ourselves and others together; it is the reciprocities of life that deepen and enrich its solitudes ; and in every age the ferment of the city has rolled around the closet of sublimest prayer. The acted drama of life, unless witnessed with mere callous criticism, reaches the springs of secret poetry in the heart, and the real startles the ideal from its repose. The: moment we see a nobleness which is above us, we recognize it and own its claim, and are fired with possibilities we never guessed before. What does this bespeak, — this flashing of Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. 65 conscience from mind to mind, this consent of each to the moral life of all, this answering look of the outward and the inward, — but that the authority which claims us, whatever it be, is something far beyond the personal nature, wide as the compass of humanity, embracing us all in one moral organism, — a universal righteousness which reaches through time, and suffers no individual to escape? Surely it is a fantastic scepticism or a superfluous modesty which would treat all moral authority as a personal idiosyncrasy, and decline to apply it to others : saying, for instance, " It may be better for you to die for your country than to betray it and escape ; but how can you tell that it is so for your comrades ? it may be a peculiarity of your mental constitution not extending to theirs." If such a limitation is good in morals, it is equally justified in regard to intellectual truth which my nature con- strains me to accept ; and it would be only a proper self- restraint to say, " For my part, I think of space as having three dimensions ; and I cannot think of two times as being together : but I speak only for myself, and have no right to expect assent from any one else." A late distinguished mathematician and logician (Prof. De Morgan) actually carried his intellectual modesty to this extreme ; asserting that, of the infinite extension between the directions of two divergent straight lines, he certainly had a positive idea : but that other people might very possibly be without it ; for that there was no telling whether all minds were made alike. But, of the two, which is the more legitimate postulate, — to assume a universal diversity of reason in different persons until con- currence is proved, and so far forth as it remains unproved ? or to assume a universal sameness of mental constitution in mankind until we are obliged to allow for a certain range of difference ? On the latter, it cannot be denied, all language is founded, all interchange of thought and feeling, all perma- nent literature, all progressive science ; and were each mind that appeared upon the scene treated as a nature new and strange till it had made good its similarities, one by one, there could be no social organism, no spiritual culture, no historical life. Moreover,. the differential authority of one inward spring of 65 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. action as against another we cannot believe at all, without believing it to attach to these principles themselves in their mutual relation, and to cling to them, wherever and whatever the mind be in which they appear. It is owned as a function inherent in them on every field which gives them scope to act, and not appended to them by the variable peculiarities of the individual agent. Accordingly, we make it the foundation of an undoubting claim upon others : nor, on behalf of any sane wrong-doer, should we for a moment listen to the plea that he has a moral constitution special to himself, for which ours is no rule ; though we are quite familiar with just such exceptional conditions in the case of colour-blindness and similar infirmities of perception. Par from being valid for you, and not for me, this moral authority invariably gives the ideas of duty and of rights together ; duties for me which are rights to you, duties for you which are rights to me. And the reciprocal claim is readily responded to : it takes no man by surprise : each one owns the title of our expectations from him, and, under the name of Justice, falls under the obliga- tions we impose upon him. Unsupported by this inward acknowledgment ever ready in the mind, we should be unable, by the mere grinding of coercion, to command the sacrifices and abstinences which are now spontaneously submitted to. The common sentiment of conscience is the very ground of public law, the assumption of private honour ; and weaves us all into one texture of moral relations, which has neither continuous strength, nor pattern of beauty, till the single threads disappear in the whole, and take the order of the disposing will. 3. Though, however, authority cannot be administered by one part of self over the rest, though it must be acknowledged as a relation of person to person complete, still, since we are so dependent for our consciousness of it upon society, is it, perhaps, a thing imposed upon us by our fellow-men ? May it not be the dominating influence of the whole over the part, nke the discipline of the camp over the conduct of the private soldier ? It is dif&cult to free these questions from ambiguity : but in no sense do they seem to me to suggest more than very partial truth ; and, in any sense which substitutes social Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. 67 power for the personal consciousness of moral differences, they suggest nothing that is true at all. What do you mean by the " whole " which environs the individual ? How do you think of the throng of his " fellow-men," of the " society " around him ? With what sort of nature do you charge it ? with what faculties and affections endow it ? Is it conceived of by you as an aggregate of separate persons, taken one by one, without any consciousness of moral distinctions, and combined simply for the greater strength of associated will, and intent only on voting into existence convenient rules which the reluctant shall be constrained to obey ? If so, then, in your dominance of the " whole over the part," you give me only the relation of force to weakness, which has nothing whatever to do with the relation of right to wrong. Mere magnitude of scale carries no moral quality ; nor could a whole population of devils, by unanimous ballot, confer righteousness upon their will, and make it binding on a single Abdiel. Such as the natures are, separately taken, such will be the collective sum : no crowd of pigmies can add them^ selves up into a God ; and self-love multiphed by self-love will only become self-love of higher power. Nor will accumu- lation in time serve you any better than aggregation in mass. The highest capital of human wishes, paid up through all the ages, although it may ruin the small dealer in such wares, and drive his venture from the field, can make nothing just that was not just before. At best, it can only enforce obligations already there, — obligations which it cannot cancel, and did jQot create. If, however, you will take " society " to mean the af&hated multitude of consciences, the common council of responsible men, then it is most true that the moral authority which we acknowledge is brought to an intense focus in our minds by the reflected lights of theirs; and we should but dimly own it, did they not own it too. But how is it that they thus work upon us, and mould us to a new docility ? Is it that they are principals in command, and we subordinates in service, that, accepting their will as sovereign, we are content to do their bidding? No: their function in this matter is, not to fill the post of authority, but to join us on the steps of submission below it ; to confess their fellow-feeling with F 2 68 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. US, and accept their partnership under the same law. Instead of being our masters, they are but bondsmen, with us, of a higher righteousness, which opens its oracles and seeks its organs in us all. And so, following out the moral authority from my solitary nature to human-kind, I only widen, and do not elevate, my position ; I gain a larger view of its range, but no higher insight into its source : I still am at the lower term of this mysterious relation ; and must yet look up, if perchance from the form of the other the cloud may pass away. 4. And may we not say that the cloud already grows trans- parent, and gives promise of clearing away ? The authority to which conscience introduces me has its station, we have seen, beyond the limits of my own personality ; with equal certainty, beyond that of my neighbour, in whom my experi- ence is simply repeated ; and, similarly, beyond that of any and every man. Though emerging in consciousness, often with the sharpest surprise of feeling, it is objective to us all ; and is necessarily referred by us to the nature of things, irrespective of the accidents of our mental constitution. It is with us as a holy presence, and guaranteed to us by all the marks which distinguish existence from illusion. It is not dependent on us, as an invention or dream, but independent, as a thing given us to apprehend. Like any other reality open to our cognizance, it dominates as known over our faculty as knowing; and, by its persistency, baffles the subtleties and survives the mutabilities of our subjective conditions. If we pretend not to see it, it still makes itself felt, like the sunshine, through the closed lids ; and we know that the blaze is there without a cloud. If we set ourselves to contend against it, and pass on without giving it heed, it soon brings to us its legitimate mastery, and spoils our usurped freedom by timely prohibition and late reproach. If we try to silence it, it must be, not by refuting, but by insulting it ; and the sense of shame it leaves as it turns away carries a constant echo of the very sound we would fain escape. Should we be reso- lutely intent on breaking the spell and ridding ourselves of the haunting voice, the only possible way is to act, not upon it, but upon ourselves ; to render our own organ of perception Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. 69 too callous to hear it. ^ But not even then is the witness securely dead. Some shock of self-knowledge, some pathetic breath of sorrow, some returning wave of retreating affection, may visit us with recovery, be it only for an hour or a day, from our moral deafness ; and instantly the forgotten tones flow in again, bringing a contrition all the more passionate for its arrears, and so giving evidence that it is not tkey which have ever perished from the atmosphere, but we who have been asleep to music such as theirs. These are the charac- teristic notes of permanent objective existence, — the same that assure us of a world perceived beyond the range of our percipient nature ; and from the conclusion to which they point there is no legitimate escape. All minds born into the universe are ushered into the presence of a real righteousness as surely as into a scene of actual space. And whatever certainty we feel that that space is unoriginated and infinite, and that, wherever a circle is, its intersecting chords supply equal rectangles, the same certainty must we feel, that, wher- ever character is, there must pity be rightful superior to selfishness, and honour to perfidy ; and that, whatever may be our own stage of ethical attainment, we look into unmeasured heights beyond. 5. But in what kind of world must we be, if this apparent certamty is not to be completely illusory ? Suppose a human being to be standing, amid the tribes of natural history, and with a companion or two of his own race, in an atheistic universe, — dead space around him, blind matter before him, and a few equals near him, forming, with himself, the supreme term of the whole. Suppose further,— that we may begrudge nothing to the unconscious genius of " Nature,"— that, through some happy correspondences in the organic chemistry which set him up and made him what he is, his faculties and appre- hensions have got correctly adjusted to the theatre on which he is planted, and bring to him only faithful reports of what is there. How, on such a stage, can he possibly have cogni- zance of an objective authority of righteousness higher than himself? For, actually, no higher would he there. His fellows are on his level, known to him only as himself over again. Other forms of life are below him, as his servants or 70 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGTON: [Book I. his foes. The earth is his bed, and the sky his ;roof. Often enough, no doubt, may these surroundings press, severely upon him, and extort the cry of conscious weakness. But, what- ever his physical dependence, he is without spiritual superior to give law to him : there is no one who has any title to dictate to his will : he is himself the supreme being in the known universe. If, therefore, he feels, as we do, a real and rightful authority over him ; if, face to face with him, there seems to stand a justice and sanctity that claims him,^his feeling is adjusted to the wrong world, and is out of place among things as they are. How should he recognize a better, and aspire ? It is only the uneasy dreamer, who, stationed on the highest peak, still strains to climb, and finds no foothold on the yielding air. "Why should he look up, when all is blank above, — darkness, and no stars ? why kneel before nothing, fling out imploring arms into a vacancy, and sob forth his contrition into a silence deaf and dumb ? A being placed amid such conditions must either be without moral intuition, and therefore something less than human, or, in having it, lie at the mercy of a brilliant but hopeless deception ,; as if, by a strange mistake, there had strayed into him an appre- hension visionary here, but proper to some divine realm, where a real government prevailed, of Spirit over spirits, and One perfectly holy communicated himself to minor natures, and empowered their answering consciousness to report back of him. No suspicion of illusion, however, against our primary faculties, can be entertained ; for we have access to no world but that which they present to us, and the account we cannot check it is our wisdom to take on trust. The moral intuition exists ; and the atheistic universe vanishes before its face. We know ourselves to be living under command, and with freedom to give or withhold obedience ; and this lifts us at once into divine relations, and connects us with One supreme in the distinguishing glories of personal existence, wisdom, justice, holiness. We have only to open and read the creden- tials of conscience, and this discovery bursts upon us at once. That sense of authority which pervades our moral nature, and tempers it with a silent reverence, places us under, that Chap. IT.] . GOD IN HUMANITY. 71 which is higher than we, which has claims on our personality, and hovers over it, and keeps near its problems with tran- scendent presence. But the world of nature and outward phenomena has in it nothing that is thus superhuman; nor can matter and force, with their linear necessities and predetermined tracks of successive effects, give the free spirit its alternative law. And the world of humanity, however rich in saints and heroes who are above you and me, and may well discipline our hearts to homage, is here all in the same case with us, and bends low before the same vision. Seeing, then, that the' impersonal cannot morally rule the personal, and that over living spirit nothing short of living spirit greater in elevation can wield authority, what remains but that we recognize the communion of a divine Visitant, and accept the light of conscience as no longer an unmeaning phosphorescence of our own nature, but as the revealing and appealing look of God? The wise and good of every age have variously struggled to express in adequate terms the solemnity of human obligation ; but aU the strivings of their thought have culminated in this : " The word of conscience is the voice of God." To this, indeed, all the indications lead. The law that is over us, we cannot fail to observe, is a selective law : it looks, as we have shown, at the springs of action together, announces a comparison between them, and tells the result : " This is worthier than that." Such a selec- tive law can issue from nothing but a preferential will. In the realm of nature and necessity the forces move right on to their determinate end ; compare nothing, and prefer nothing ; and turn up, without pause or scruple, the sole possibility given them to execute. And this selective law speaks direct to a selective power in us : exalting this above that, it requires that we should do so too. It is the appeal of will to will : " This is my choice : be it yours also." And so it is nothing less than the bending of the divine holiness to train the human ; the overflowing sanctity of the Supreme Mind, shed forth to elicit by free sympathy the secret possibilities of ours. But for this objective contact between his Spirit and ours, — between the divine life reporting itself to an apprehensive faculty in iis, — it would be hard to understand how it is that 72 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. the human mind can rapidly pass to moral levels unreached before; and that, at some epochs of its history, it seems to seize at a bound heights never sought, because never imagined. The philosophers who undertake to expound the dynamics of society are fond of telling us that the character of each period is the inevitable result and vital development of its predecessor, and might be predicted from an adequate survey of the prior phenomena. And doubtless vast lines of historical causation may be successfully traced through some of the levels of human life, linking differing centuries into a continuous system. But, in the spiritual experience of nations and of races there are mighty paroxysms which break through the restraints of this law, when, as at the Christian era, a new type of mind and character, a fresh creation of moral beauty, bursts into blossom in an ungenial time, like a delicate flower from a rotting soil ; or when, as in the seventh century, a people scarcely reckoned in the statistics of civilization starts into organized existence, and with fiery magnanimity sweeps over half the world as the missionary of a perishing truth ; or when, as at the minor crises which have given birth to Protestant sects, whole populations have been carried off their feet by affections never felt before, and as truly remod- elled, in habit, thought, and aspect, as if they had risen from the dead. No study of the antecedent aggregate of con- ditions enables you to give accoimt of these leaps of trans- formation ; else why are they not foreseen by some philoso- pher's appreciative eye ? The utmost that your scrutiny can effect is to point to some predisposing influences which might affect the temper of the time, and warm many a mind into the ready fuel of reaction. This, however, goes but a very little way to meet the facts before us. Eeaction is a swing back into the old ; and here we have a seizure of the new, — a spring to loftier levels of original character, where speech has tones, and action, attitudes, and art, varieties of form, quite strange before. And whence the kindling power, the lightning flash of genius or inspiration, to pierce the passive fuel, and compel it into a blaze ? Is this, too, — this living force without which a world ever so " predisposed " lies dead, Chap. II.] GOD IN HUMANITY. 73 and refuses to " react," — the necessary product of the pre- ceding age? and will you father the new ideals upon old, worn-out deformities ? Is it from the Jewish rigour and self- assertion that you deduce the meekness and self-sacrifice of Christ, or from the Pagan dissoluteness that you explain the Christian purity ? If so, why does not every odious form of character bring its own redemption, and corruption arrest itself, instead of spread? Thus to treat the contagion of vice as the seed-plot of holiness is indeed to seek " grapes from thorns, and figs from thistles." It must needs be that the redeemers of mankind arise in times which require redemption ; but to assign this concurrence as an adequate account of their existence and characteristics is to overlook the Uving cause in the circumstantial condition. It is not merely with a stand against declension, with a tenacity of right habit in resistance to decay, with a protest of unspoiled feeling against sinking life, that we have here to deal ; this, perhaps, the inertia of lingering goodness already there might sufficiently explain : but it is the positive creation of fresh images of perfection, a recoil from the lower which already carries in it dreams of the higher, an expostulation with the present, which, not content with seeing the better past, presses into a previously unimagined future. This dawning of unsuspected lights within rare and exceptional natures is no mere human phenomenon, explicable by our reciprocal mental action : it betrays the overarching presence of brighter skies. Among the societies of men, it is ever the greater spirits that morally sustain the less ; and, as the scale of reaUzed excellence ascends, the conscience of us all is ashamed to linger, and eventually rises too. We are lifted by the souls of mightier wing, and are set where otherwise our feet would not have climbed : and, were we without this hierarchy of moral ranks, there would be nothing ennobling in our interdependence ; and no healing would flow down, no reverence pass up, from link to link. Once upon the flat, upon the flat we stay. But what, then, is it that sustains the summit-minds'} that kindles them with light they cannot borrow, and fires them with strength that no man can lend ? Have they escaped the law of dependence, and become 74 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. original springs, first inventors, of a non-existent righteous- ness ? Go to them, and judge from the manner of their life and the temper of their affections whether it be so. Do they stand upon the earth as creative gods, with lordly mien, and will that is all their own ? Do they know their height to be supreme, and stoop with the pity of a superior to the subject crowd beneath ? Or do you see them with still uplifted face, and bending low before a Holiest of all ? nay, with the very light that most transfigures them glistening through the streaming tears of a tender penitence ? Is not their calm, their strength, their fearlessness, more than any man's, free from self-assertion, and an expression of pure dependence and perfect trust ? And the tender mercy which flows from voice and hand as they mingle with mankind — is it theirs alone, without a partner in it, and with only autocratic look towards the sorrows it relieves ? Or is it rather a divine compassion, that moves through them as its organ, and glorifies with sympathy a created spirit as it goes ? No : they feel, not less, but far more, than others, the law of objective contact with higher mind as the condition of moral insight and spiritual power ; and unless we charge our highest witnesses with illusions in that which is especially their own, and so reject whatever we have that is supremely trustworthy, we must carry that law beyond our mutual relations, and recog- nize the fires of God in the glow which kindles the summits of this world. This new and spiritual function ascribed to God is but the just sequel, as we ascend the gradations of being, to his prior indwelling in the world. As the forces of Nature are his causality, and the instincts of the creature his seeing guidance of the blind ; so the alternative apprehensions of conscience are the preferential lights of his moral nature, the first reporting his power, the second his wisdom, the third his righteousness. That it is the same one life which is the ground of all is plain from the intertexture of the whole : for it is amongst the instinctive impulses of the animated world that the problems of ethical experience first arise ; and it is through the physical constitution of nature, and of our own organism in particular, that many of the penalties- of the Chap. II.] GOD IN ilUMANlTY. 75 moral law make themselves felt. The causality of the world, therefore, is at the disposal of the all-holy Will ; and whether within us or without us, in the distant stellar spaces or in the self-conscious life of the tempted or aspiring mind, we are in one divine embrace,^" God over all, blessed for ever." Here, too, we reach' the precise point of transition from morals to religion, and step across the boundary from Pagan nobleness to Christian sanctity. Divine guidance has never and nowhere failed to men ; nor has it ever, in the most essential things, largely differed amongst them : but it haS not always been recognized as divine, much less as the living contact of Spirit with spirit, — the communion of affection between God and man. While conscience remained an impersonal laiv, stern and silent, with only a jealous Nemesis behind, man had to stand up alone, and work out for himself his independent magnanimity; and he could only be the pagan hero. When conscience was found to be inseparably blended with the Holy Spirit, and to speak in tones immedi- ately divine, it became the very shrine of worship : its strife, its repentance, its aspirations, passed into the incidents of a living drama, with its crises of alienation and reconcilement ; and the cold obedience to a mysterious necessity was exchanged for the allegiance of personal affection. And this is the true emergence from the darkness of ethical law to the tender light of the life divine. The veil falls from the shadowed face of moral authority, and the directing love of the all-holy God shines forth. 76 CHAPTEE III. UTILITARIAN SUBSTITUTE FOR AUTHORITY. The sketch which m preceding chapters has been given of our human nature, has been drawn wholly from the interior ; and how far it is true, how far a fancy picture, must be deter- mined by each one's reflective self-knowledge. The facts to which it refers, and on which it rests its appeal, are not palpable and visible upon the stage of overt action, but lie behind the scenes, and can be af&rmed or denied only by those who will carry then- scrutiny thither. They are simply these. We are sent into the world, charged with a number of in- stiucts, each, when alone, darkly urging us towards its own object ; but all, when thrown into various competitions to- gether, lighted up with intuitive knowledge of their own relative worth and rights ; so that we are never left in doubt which of two simultaneous impulses has the nobler claim upon us. This natural estimate is what we mean by conscience. It has nothing to do with the values of external actions, but only with the comparative authority of their inward springs ; it gives no foresight of effects, but only insight into obligation at its source. But this it does with revelation so clear, so solemn, so consentaneous for all men, that those who will not own it to be divine can never find a voice of which it is the echo in our humanity. The problems of human conduct, however, may be approached from the other end. They may be looked at from the outside, and traced through their sphere of visible opera- tion, in the hope of separating, by some serviceable rule, the actions which work well from those which work ill. Whoever moves along this path in order to take his measurements of human character, exercises a different order of sagacious habit, and naturally objects to every form of intuitive doctrine as " sentimental " or " mystical." The inward facts on which Chap. III.] UTILITARIAN SUBSTITUTE FOR AUTHORITY. 77 it rests are seen by a kind of light to which his eye does not readily adapt itself; and even if he recognizes them as there at all, he cannot beheve them to be really indigenous to that mdistinct and barren interior, and traces them to some wmged seeds of accident blown over the fence by the winds of circumstance from the sunny fields of his favourite outer world. For him, the values of action are found, not up among its springs, but down in its issues ; nor is one affec- tion better than another, except as it bids fair to be more fruitful of beneficent deeds ; so that all moral judgment is turned upside down, if we estimate the act by its incentive, instead of the incentive by its act. Once allow this inversion, and you provide, as he protests, an excuse for every well- meant enormity; for the mischievous asceticism and mon- strous license between which superstition oscillates ; for the bad faith deliberately shown to heretics ; for the cruel per- secutions against which the tender mercies of conscience have afforded no guarantee. This judgment by sentiment it is that hinders all rational agreement about the relative worth of actions, and leaves men to fling about their approbation at random, elevating into a virtue in one age what is punished as a crime in another. Not, he insists, till we turn them from the mutabilities of feeling to the appreciation of steady facts, and teach them to consult the external operation of conduct as the sole definite rule of admeasurement, will their chaos of contradictions fall into order, and the exactitude of science silence the wranglings of conflicting morals. Nor is it doubt- ful what the standard of valuation must be ; for there is but one end given to our nature, viz. happiness ; that is, the attainment of pleasure in its various kinds, and the avoidance of pain ; and only as a means to this, or as a part of it, can anything else have place as a secondary end. This proposi- tion, though never stated except for a controversial purpose, and in the face of those who deny it, has always been com- mended to its own self-evidence, as if it could dispense with the support of proof. Epicurus thought it enough to predicate of pleasure that it was the beginning and the end of desirable life, our primary and natural good, the source of every preference and rejection, the rule by which we estimate all ■78 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. -[Book I. else at which we aim.* That it held this supreme position was a first-hand certainty, as little needing or admitting corroboration as the statement that fire is hot and snow is white.f " Pleasm-e and pain," says Bentham, " govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think : every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will but serve to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire ; but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law."+ " A man acts," says James Mill, " for the sake of something agreeable to him, either proximately or remotely. But agreeable to, and pleasant to ; agreeableness and pleasantness are only different names for the same thing ; the pleasantness of a thing is the pleasure it gives. So that pleasure in a general way, or speaking generically, that is, in a way to include all the specimens of pleasure and also the abatements of pain, is the end of action."§ " The creed," says Mr. J. S. Mill, " which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happi- ness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain ; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure." And he states as " the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded, — that pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends, and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in * Epicurus ap. Diog. Laert. 128, 129. T^v rjSovr/u, apxqv koI rkXos Xiyojiev (ivai Tov fuiKapias ^v. TavTr)V yap ayaBov nparou Kal avyyeviKov iyvanev, Koi OTTO TavTTjs KaTap)^6jii6a Traarji aipitreas Koi (ftvyrji, Kai ijrl touttjv KaTavTafiev, i>s Kavovi t^ nddei irau dyadltv KplvovTfs. t Cicero de Finibus, I. 9. Negat opus esse ratione ueque disputatione, quamobrem voluptas expetenda, fugiendus dolor sit. Sentlri boo putat, ut calere ignem, nivem esse albam, dulce mel, quorum nihil oportere exquisitis rationibus confirmare ; tantum satis admonere. t Principles of Morals and Legislation, chap. i. § 1, § Fragment on Mackintosh, Appendix A, p. 389. Chap. III.] UTILITARIAN SUBSTITUTE FOR AUTHORITY. 7^ themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain."* As this is the sole possible object of desire,, so is it at once the solitary means of influence, the exclusive source of obligation, and the invariable standard of all good : and human actions must be approved in proportion as they apparently tend to increase human pleasures or abate human pains. " According to the Greatest Happiness prin- ciple," says Mr. J. S. Mill, " the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable (whether we are considering our own good or that of other people), is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both, in point of quantity and quahty." " This being, according to the UtiUtarian opinion, the end of human action, is necessarily also the standard of morality; which may accordingly be defined, the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which an existence such as has been described might be, to the greatest extent possible, secured to all man- kind ; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient creation."t To guard us against any partial or selfish apphcation of this rule, it is added, that, in making our estimate, we must ^ive no superior weight to our own share, but impartially remember that others' happiness is worth as much as our own ; and take care that " everybody shall count for one, and nobody for more than one."t Such are the two chief types of ethical doctrine : of which the one betakes itself to the inward impulses, and finds an order of natural ranks among them ; while the other resorts to the outward products in conduct, and apphes a calculus of happiness for their admeasurement. Notwithstanding their seeming opposition, each doctrine speaks with a telling voice to some ; part or other of our nature : the one in tones of deeper harmony to the whispers of the meditative mind ; the other, in the sharper language of the com-ts and of the street. And each, too, it must be confessed, seems to leave us with a want unsatisfied. The one, fond of lingering aloft to breathe * utilitarianism, pp. 9, 10. t Ibid. p. 17. X Ibid. p. 91. 8o AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. a religious atmosphere, is too apt to miss its way and stumble, when held down in the tangle of human relations and engaged with the concrete problems of the hour. The other, while skilfully balancing the merits of social usage and personal habit, seems to strain itself out of character when it assumes the higher language of Duty, and can hardly fall into tune with the plaint of human confession, or the pathos of a saiatly joy. Can we then distribute to each its proper part ? Or must they treat one another as irreconcilable enemies, and fight it out till the sole empire has been awarded by the reason of mankind ? I. Let it be admitted at once, that the doctrine of Conscience cannot do the work which the doctrine of Utility accomplishes. 1. This becomes clear, the moment we ask what it is that these two lights profess to show us. The one is set up among the springs of action ; the other is set down among its effects. The one tells us what present incentive is noblest ;, the other, what future results will be happiest ; and though we must start by the incentive light of the former, we must arrive by the calculated signals of the latter. When we have flung our tempters aside, and given ourselves up to the right in- centive, it may well be that only the first stage of our problem has been solved ; for, with that one incentive many lines of action may be compatible ; and among these it will yet remain for us to make our choice. Am I conscious, for instance, of a wrong against my brother ? And have I conquered my pride, and resolved to make reparation ? The question immediately rises, in what form shall I render satisfaction to his claims ? Shall I make public confession ? Or shall I go to his house and humble myself before him? Or, lest bitter memories should there prolong themselves with words, shall I repent in self-sacrificing and expressive action ? Or, again : have I become ashamed of too self-indulgent a life amid the miseries of men, and determined to deny myself largely on their be- half ? It is well ; for Conscience requires no less. But what direction shall my purpose take ? Shall I go into a monastery and give up my goods ? Shall I found a hospital ? Shall I organize and manage a reformatory? Shall"! take pity on Chap. III.] UTILITARIAN SUBSTITUTE FOR AUTHORITY. 8i the west-country labourers, and create there a model estate? These ulterior questions it would be absurd, and, except to a fanatic, impossible, to settle by any pretended intuitive hght ; they can be resolved only by careful study of each scheme in its natural working on the well-being of all whom it affects. If Conscience selects the right affection, Utility determines the fitting action ; nor, without consulting it, is there any guarantee against the perpetration of well-' intended mischiefs, which may brmg the purest impulses into contempt. Viewed in this relation, the second doctrine supplements the first, and steps in to remedy its imperfect competency. Only, it must not enter before its time : not till Conscience has spoken, is Utility to be taken into counsel ; it has a diploma for the executive Art of Ethics ; but is an impostor in the primary Science. 2. In truth, the rule which it supplies, however indispen- sable for giving effect to our highest aims, is not really Moral at all, distinguishing right from wrong ; but simply Eational, distinguishing wise from fooKsh. You condemn, on grounds of UtiHty, the institution of foundling hospitals, or the CathoHc latitude of alms-giving, and prefer to spend your resources in lifting, by education and sympathy, some de- pressed class into permanent self-help ? What is the differ- ence between you and your mediaeval-minded neighbour? Are you more charitable, or only more sensible, than he ? Is it a distinction of character, or one of judgment, that separates you ? Do you regret that he is not a better man, or only that he is not a wiser? If the benevolence of both arises under the same iaward conditions, and from conquest of the same temptations, you assuredly stand upon the same moral level, and the interval between you is simply intellectual. You merit the same approval; of neither can we say, that he stands nearer to the love of God. And did we propose to convert your neighbour to your state of mind, it must be, not by the machinery of moral correction, but by methods of intellectual persuasion. Supposing our appeal to him success- ful, we shall save him in future from- a blunder only, and not from a sin. Am I charged with confounding the morality of the agent and the morality of the act, and told that, though 82 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. the alms-giver may be a good man, his alms-giving is a bad act ? I do not blindly confound them, but openly identify them, and unhesitatingly say that I know of no morahty in an act except the morality of its Agent ; nor can I approve of him as its doer, yet disapprove of it as his deed. Bad indeed, in another and immoral sense, the act may be ; it may be injudicious, may miss its end, and work harm instead; but bad it cannot be, iu the sense in which he is good. Since^ indeed, the moral quality attaches exclusively to the inner springs of affection, apart from which the most beneficent activities would be but the munificence of nature, and not products of character, an act, once issued from its source, has already got its ethical complexion, which cannot be altered by its later history. The unqualified terms which I have here used in ethically excusing nobly-prQmpted acts of mistake are deliberately chosen, in order to bring into the strongest light the essential pontrast between the two theories which we are comparing. " The Utilitarian moralists," as Mr. J. S. Mill very truly says, " l;iave gone beyond almost all others in affirming that the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action."* Bentham habitually insists that the words of praise or dis- praise which express our moral judgments have no application to motives; that the epithets' good and had, virtvx)us and vicious, which properly belong to actions, and their conse- quences actual or contemplated, cannot be attached to the springs of action, without giving rise to " practical errors of the very first importance." The "Motive," he says, "is always some pleasure, or some pain ; some pleasure, which the act is expected to be the means of continuing or producing; some pain, which it is expected to be the means of discontinu- ing or preventing. A motive is substantially nothing more than this pleasure or pain, operating in a certain manner. Now pleasure is in itself a good ; nay even, setting aside immunity from pain, the only gdod : pain is in itself an evil ; and indeed, without exception, the only, evil ; or else the words good and evil have no meaning. And this is aUke true of eyra:y. sort of pain, and of every sort of pleasure. It follows, . . , ... * ;Utilitarianisrfl, p. 26. , - Ghap. III.] UTILITARIAN SUBSTITUTE FOR AUTHORITY. 83 therefore, necessarily and incontestably, that " there is no such iking as any sort of motive that is in itself a bad one."* And a more explicit argument to the same effect he introduces with the following proposition : " As there is not any sort of pleasure, the enjoyment of which, if taken by itself, is not a good (taken by itself, that is, on the supposition that it is not preventive of a more than equivalent pleasure, or productive of more than equivalent pain) ; nor any sort of pain, from which, taken in like manner by itself, the exemption is not a good : .' . . in a word, as there is not any sort of pleasure that is not in itself a good, nor any sort of pain the exemption from which is not a good ; and as nothing but the expectation of the eventual enjoyment of pleasure in some shape, or of' exemption from pain in some shape, can operate in the character of a motive : — a necessary consequence is that, if by motive be meant sort of motive, there is not any such thing as a had motive ; no, :nor any such thing as a motive which, to the exclusion of any other, can with propriety be termed a good motive." t Later Utilitarians have not been quite faithful to this para- doxical rule, that only Acts and not Motives are objects of moral appreciation. " Vietue," we learn from James Mill, " is the name of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Beneficence, all taken together ; it is also, like the name of each of the species included under it, at once the name of the Affection, the Motive, and the Disposition."! And the statement is repeated with an addition : " Virtue, as we have seen, is a name which is given to each of the three, the Affection, the - Motive, and the Disposition ; Morality is a name which is applied with similar latitude. "§ With this account, so curi- ously at variance with Bentham's, the author's own practice is in harmony. When he speaks of '" the man who takes the virtuous course, i/ia« is, oUys the virtuous motive," \\ he not only allows a moral iquality to the motive, but identifies the • Principles of Motals and Legislation, ch. x. g§ ix. x. p. 169. f Table of the Springs of Action, II. § i. Works, Part I. pp. 214, 215. t Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, oh. xxiii. vol. ii. p. 288. J. S. Mill's edition. § Ibid. p. 302. II Ibid. p. 270. , G 2 84 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. morality of the act with it ; and when he more than once deplores the " feeble operation " of particular " motives," social, 'domestic, patriotic, philanthropic, and refers to the higher associations which form them as among the " most ennobling of all states of human consciousness,"* we see how the artificial lines of system melt away at the first fervent touch of moral enthusiasm. Not less distinct is Mr. J. S. Mill's admission that " with the worth of the agent," though not " with the morality of the act," the motive has " much to do,"t and that, as a right action (by the Utilitarian standard) "does not necessarily indicate a virtuous character," so " actions which are blamable often proceed from qualities entitled to praise. When this is apparent," he says, "it modifies our estimation, not certainly of the act, but of the agent."]: Here, though the outward act is reserved for ethical valuation on its own account, its inward spring is also allowed to be a proper object of moral estimate ; and the treatment of motives as lying wholly beyond the sphere of approbation or censure is plainly abandoned. To complete the history of this surrender, the need of it has been still more explicitly avowed by Mr. John Morley; who, not content with the qualified concession just cited, urges that, in measuring the morality of an act, it is impossible to omit its motive from the account. "Might it not be said," he asks, "with all deference to the thinker who has done so much to reconstruct and perfect the Utilitarian system, that as the morality of action depends on the happiness of all persons affected by it, there can be no reason for excluding the agent from the number of those persons; that his motive reacts with full power upon his character, strengthening or weakening this or that disposition or habit ; and therefore that the effect of the motive ought to be taken into account in computing the total of the consequences of the act ? " "At any rate, there is nothing to hinder us, on Utilitarian principles, from praising and blaming motives. We may judge motive and act apart, * Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, vol, ii. pp. 272, 273, 27e, 278. - J. S. Mill's edition. + Utilitarianism, p. 26. t Ihid. pp. 27, 28. Chap. III.] UTILITARIAN SUBSTITUTE FOR AUTHORITY. Sj but the motive is judged equally."* These three writers then take off the interdict imposed by their predecessor, and allow the motive spring of action to come into court for judgment. In passing sentence on it, however, and in assigning their relative worth to the several kinds of motive, they merely extend to the inward fact the same rule by which they appre- ciate the outward deed ; they estimate it by its consequences of pleasure and pain, and regard as groundless every verdict of approval or censure which does not, in the last resort, rest upon this basis. No intrinsic value is attributed to any in- centive ; no inherent relative authority, which imparts a moral character to resulting action ; but only a greater or less power of producing or preventing happiness. Nay, more : this power chiefly consists in the tendency to create repeated acts of the same kind, whether of benefit or mischief ; and such fruitful- ness in homogeneous consequences affords the main reason for praising or blaming a given motive. So that it is only in a derivative way that the spring of conduct is admitted at all to ethical valuation ; it simply borrows a moral character from the overt acts to which it leads ; and they remain, after all, the sole primary object-matter with which the moralist has to deal ; keeping an ethical complexion constant and defined through all possible changes of the inward impulse which may issue them. In direct contradiction to this order of dependence, I submit that actions, apart from their motive source, possess no moral <5haractOT whatsoever ; that the hedonistic estimate and classi- fication of them imder this condition is a purely rational affair, which might take place in a world and among races wholly Mwmoral; that the differences which constitute duty, and introduce us to the shades of right and wrong, lie up among the mental incentives to volition ; and that thence alone is any ethical complexion or obligatory aspect contributed to the external actions which we put forth. Among the springs of action are found, no doubt, both self-regarding and social affections, which, in their proper place, make binding upon us a consideration of others' happiness and of our own : but the pleasures thus drawn within the horizon of duty do not on * Fortnightly Beview, May, 1869, p. 532. 86 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. that account constitute arid define It- ; nor" is a disturbed vision or a false reckoning' of them to be condemned as ^.n immorality, but only deplored as an illusion. The calculus of consequences is an indispensable instrument for giving the best effect to the rightly-adjusted forces of character ; only, to wield and apply it wiell is the function, not of goodness, but of sagacity. While therefore it is perfectly true that our proper business in life cannot be done by Conscience alone, but needs to be supplemented by the rule of Utility, the functions of the two are nevertheless successive and distinct ; the one supplies the inner guidance of Obligation, the other the outer guidance of Keason ; the latter is needed to give Duty a rational direction ; the former, to give Eeason a moral inspiration): but neither is entitled to usurp the language of the other, or to work what ought to be an amicable, partnership as a means for plotting mutual ejectment. II. The Utihtarian, however, is by no- means satisfied with the place thus conceded to his doctrine. ' He claims for it a competency to the whole business of a moral theory ; and declines any services from Conscience, unless he may himself have the credit of first calling it into existence by the power of his favourite principle, the universal desire of happiness. Let us, then," assume that man has no other end, no other possible spring of action, no other ground of obligation, than , the attainment of pleasure (including thfe avoidance of pain) ; and consider whether such a constitution of his nature as ah . agent, planted in the riiidst of his rational faculties, is Com- . petent to supply him with a moral ' rule, and to explairi his moral affections. 1. At first sight it would seem that, if pleasure is the sole ; possible end of action, I have only to do as I like, and the law of my life receives its fulfilment ; and the very" idea of any guide but inclination appears ' to vanish. But, to save us from so hasty a conclusion, we are first' reminded that the inclination of the moment may clash with interests of wider scope ; and unless I deny myself to-day's indulgence, I may only be preparing to-morrow's loss.* True enough, but this ■* Ov isaaav ,i\hovT\v alpovfieda, dW fv Chap. III.] UTILITARIAN SUBSTITUTE FOR AUTHORITY. %f merely warns us to do as we like in a discreeter way, and' avoid the bankruptcy of the spendthrift by careful balancing^ of our accounts. The differences of human conduct rise to no higher level than varieties of prudence ; and we are still no nearer to any conception of duty or of authority over us. The next device for carrying us a step in that direction deserves and requires a fuller notice. We are told that plea- sm-es differ, not only in qi^antity, so as to be reckoned by a Calculus of amounts, but in quality too ; so that, apart froni their magnitude, some are more desirable than others, as being of a higher kind ; and unless we subordinate the life of Sense to that of the Intellect and the Affections, we have not worked out the Philosophy of Utility to its last refinements; " It is quite compatible with the principle- of Utility," says Mr. J. S. Mill, "to recognize the fact that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone. ■ If I am asked what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures^ or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference irrespective of any feeling of moral obligaJ tion to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even -though knowing it to be attended with: a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality xpeLTTovs vofilConev, tjrjiSav /leifav viuy fjBov^ TrapaxoXovfi? ifoKiiv xpo""" {mo,i€iva. note, p, 38. _ , Chap. III.] UTILITARIAN SUBSTITUTE FOR AUTHORfTir. 91 of a relative rank in the impulses and ends of life. Given that felt hierarchy of claims, and undoubtedly it must tell; upon our sensitive experience ; to defy it, and live the life of a beast with the powers of a man, or of a selfish wretch amid the pleadings of suffering affection, involves a self-contempt and humiliation worse than death. But this is the anguish; of a morally constituted nature ; the pursuing shadow of conscience in its unfaithful flight. Take away that prior sense "of relative authority; let there be no shame in self- surrender to the appetites, no consciousness of any call to intellectual aims as a worthier possibility, no constraining demand of duty from the social relations; let all these springs of activity be there, but not inherently distinguished as better and worse ; let them bring their several ends before us, as candidates, with no other recommendation than the pleasurable experiences they may convey into an unmoral nature ; and I know not on what ground we could longer say> " It is better to be a human "being dissatisfied, than a pig satisfied ; better to be Socrates dissatisfied, than a fool satisfied."* The one of these is "better" than the other,— r the dissatisfied than the satisfied, — only when you refuse to try the case by the test of satisfaction, — that is of pleasure. The element of " superiority " which Mr. Mill's correct feeling recognizes can never be designated in the "descriptive dialect of happiness. Who could rationally speak of the superior happiness of those who, for noble ends, or from honour that cannot stoop, have sacrificed their portion of life's immunities and enjoyments? of one, for instance, who has goiie into slavery in order to redeem another, or of the martyr wh^ cannot lie ? Suppose, however, these objections waived, and the distinc- tion between quantity and quality admitted' as an adequate account of the . motives operative on the human will. L§t happiness, if you please, be computed in two dimensions, ntft degree only, but rank as weU ; yet so long as I am 0ng&,ged in selecting and arranging my own pleasures, and only taking care, that, among the plainer viands, my table is duly' served with provisions of a more delicate cuisine, no moral phfenome- , ,. , ■ ■'.■ * utilitarianism, p. 14. . _: ,. . '' 92 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. non is reached, and the mark of the mere epicure is on me stni. Nay, its stamp is deeper and more ineffaceable than it' was before ; for when the proper object of the reason, truth in all its breadth, the object of the imagination, beauty in its depth, the object of the affections, the living groups around, are set before me only as so many different varieties of plea- sure, and I am drawn to them, not for themselves, but to gratify my own intellectual taste and sympathetic sensibilities, I push the claims of Self into shameless and desolating usm-- pation ; subordinating to them, not simply the lower elements of life of which I am rightful master, but those higher ends which I am bound to serve with reverence. Could I even seize these angels of the way and detain them as my menials, they would only become incarnate, and lose whatever is divine. Self-culture, however balanced and comprehensive, not only has no tincture of duty in it, but must be quitted ere a duty can be done. Nor is there a more subtle impostor in the world than the sham self-sacrifice which you make in the interest of your own perfection, or for which you stand ready in that " imcon- scious ability to do without happiness," which Mr. Mill says "gives the best prospect of realizing such happiness as is attainable."* It may be true that " nothing except that con- sciousness can raise a person above the chances of life, by making him feel, that, let fate or fortune do their work, they have not power to subdue him ; which, once felt, frees him from excess of anxiety concerning the evils of life, and enables him, like many a stoic in the worst times of the Eoman empire, to cultivate in tranquUlity the sources of satisfaction accessible to him, without concerning himself about the un- certainty of their duration, any more than about their inevitable end."t But this invulnerable Stoic, who, under the ban of fortune, tranquilly resorts to the virtues and humanities as "accessible sources of satisfaction," lingers still at the propylaeum of the temple of Duty without real worship of what is divine within. And his modern admirers, who, in expressing their ideal of excellence, speak so often of "cultivating their sympathies," "cultivating their moral * utilitarianism, p. 24, f Ibid. p. 24. Chap. III.] UTILITARIAN SUBSTITUTE FOR AUTHORITY. 93 feelings," " cultivating nobleness of character," do but foster self-homage, even when sounding the praises of self-abnega- tion. Elevate it as you may, we are called to something else than this. We are placed here, not to remain at home, dressing up our own personaUty to the last spiritual refine- ment, but to be carried out and borne away by the glories and sorrows of the world ; to be the organs of a truth that may bring us only scorn, of a love of right that may meet no response, of a pity that sees nothing but the griefs it heals. And from this service of ends above us we are fatally removed by a theory which brings everything to the ultimate test of personal sensibility, and labels it as a kind or degree of plea- sure. The animating genius of such a doctrine cannot be doubtful, and cannot be changed ; there is but one possible habitant that can be owned as its resident Spirit ; however dressed up with the borrowed characteristics of genuine Duty, still, under the cloak of heroism, or behind the mask of saint- liness, and with the praises of martyrdom upon his lips, it is after all the figure of Prudence that looks out of the window, and tries to personate the supreme graces of humanity. 2. This, however, I shall be reminded, would hold only if the Utilitarian took for his rule the happiness of the individual agent ; whereas he includes in the account the happiness of every one concerned. In the reckoning between my own happiness and that of others, he insists on my maintaining " the strict impartiality of a disinterested and benevolent spectator," and forbids me m the least to favour myself; and so appropriates the Christian injunction, "As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise."* Now, it is perfectly true that the teachers of this doctrine, after grounding it on each man's necessary pursuit of his own plea- sures, and affirming that this invariable " end of human action " is also " the standard of morality," f do slip away from the rule of personal happiness which alone comes legitimately out of their reasoning, and announce instead the criterion of public happiness. The fact is honourable to themselves, but fatal to the logical structure of their system. For, what right have they to demand from me an " impartial " standing between • utilitarianism,. p. 24, t Ibid. p. 17. 94 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. the pleasures of another and my own? Have they not told me that I am by nature incapable of desiring anything but -happiness ? And to move my own desire, is it not my' own Jiappiaess that they m«an ? How, then, can they turn round , •and say, "But, mind, it is to make no difference to you whether the happiness is yours or somebody else's. It is the pleasure of quilibet, and of e^ual value, as swum or tiium, abroad or at home." Surely I may reply, " Another's happi- ness is no doubt worth as much to him as mine to me ; and you, who are outside us both, may be neutral between us : but to ask me to be indifferent about the ownership, provided somebody, it may be in China or the planet Jupiter, gets the pleasure which I miss, is to contradict your own agseftion, that my only end is the gain of happiness." ' The inconsistency here indicated appears in the strongest form in the writings of Bentham ; but I am not aware that it has ever been relieved. What can be 'more startling than tq find the same writer who demands from me perfect impartiality between my own happiness and that of others, — who insists that " everybody is to count for one, nobody for more than one," also giving the following sketch of the nature to which he appeals, and of his business with it as a Moralist ? " Dream not that men will move their little finger to serve you, unless their advantage in so doing be obvious to them. Men never did so, and never will, while human nature is made of its present materials." " But they will desire to serve you when, by so doing, they can serve themselves ; and the occa- sions on which they can serve themselves by serving you are multitudinous."* " To prove that an immoral action is a miscalculation of self-interest, to show how erroneous an estimate the vicious man makes of pains and pleasures, is the purpose of the intelligent moralist; Unless he can do this he does nothing ; for, as has been stated above, for a man not to pursue what he deems likely to produce to him the greatest sum of enjoyment, is in the very nature of things impos-" sible."t ' If his only possible rule is " the greatest sum of enjoyment' to him," what is the use of giving him another, that he must' * Deontology, vol. 11. p. 132. ' t Ibid, vol, i. p, 13. <:hap. III.] UTILITARIAN SUBSTITUTE FOR Authority. 95 give equal weight to enjoyment not for him ? And if, as an " intelligent moralist," you can ask him to sacrifice the less to the greater happiness only when both are his own, why renew the demand when against his lighter treasure the pre- ponderance lies in the scale of another life ? In short, for a mind sent into this world with one supreme impulse of self- love, from which all others are secondary out-growths, it is impossible to establish any obligation to self-sacrifice, any call to the path of pain and the acceptance of Death to save a blessing for happier survivors. What cannot be iTrudentially established, cannot be established at all. Wliy should he incur the privation, when it conflicts with the only good at whose disposal you place him ? By what persuasion are you to move him to throw away his all ? Either you must tell him that the high consciousness condensed into an hour of self-immolation will transcend all the possibilities he foregoes ; in which case you bid him consult for himself under pretence of martyrdom for others. Or else you must speak to him in quite another tone ; must remind him that he is not his own, and can ask nothing for himself; that he is to be at the disposal of an authority higher than he, against which he has no rights to plead ; that, when he knows the true, when he sees the just, when he is haunted by the appeal for mercy, a con^ straint which he cannot question is put upon him to be their witness, however long their dolorous way, however agonizing their Calvary. And speaking thus, you altogether change your voice, and from casting up the account-book of greater happi- ness are caught and carried away into the hymn of all the Prophets. "Whence this evasive oscillation in the maxims of the Utilitarian philosophy, — this unsteady shifting of the weight of obligation from one leg to the other, — ^planting it now on the footing of the agent's interests, then on that of the public good ? It probably has its origin, not in any deep-seated philosophical fallacy, but in a superficial accident in the literary history of the modern school. Its first -apostle, Bentham, was a jurist, rather than a philosopher, eager for the banishment of fiction, barbarism, and disorder from the -intellectual system and practical procedure of English law.' 96 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. At the substructure of all well-ordered human life he laboured no further than was indispensable for his ulterior end ; and was content to assume, or to treat with; scant, analysis, the few undisputed conceptions in his work. Instead of working out, like Hobbes, an explicit theory of the origin of Society, he throws the light and force of his thought upon a later stage ; and instead of looking about to find out how the Law- giver came there, recognizes him as having been there so long as already to have grown blind to his proper functions and stiff with stereotyped habits. The great Utilitarian never loses sight of him, and keeps him always at his side for pur- poses of discipline ; boxes his ears pretty freely ; strips off his phylacteries, cuts through fold after fold of the texture of maxims which impede his movements ; and trains him to a freer skill and a more natural step. Now it is to him, — the Lawgiver over others, — and not to the subjects themselves^ that Bentham prescribes the rule, " Everybody to count for one, and nobody for more than one." It. is the Legislator's true guide. From his height above the field he is to look im- partially on and insist on fair play among the various candi- dates for their own maximum of attainable pleasure ; by restraining and moderating each, he is to maintain the equilibrium most favourable to the collective sum. Plainly, however, this of&ce of his implies that no one else is expected to be impartial, or to care except for himself ; it is simply to provide against the effects of an assumed universal self-love that the Lawgiver is there. In other words, Law and Eight are the indispensable antagonists, instead of the products and exponents, of Self-love ; and have a rule to follow quite opposite to any which " individual interest can ever supply. To reach that rule, there must be a Superior lifted above the scene, apart from its impulses, and wielding Authority over it ; and but for this august presiding nature, capable of in- spiring awe, the competing haste of beings surrendered to their own pleasures and pains would lead only t& a lawless carnival. "Where, then, and what, is this abstract Lawgiver, with whom even Bentham cannot dispense, and whom he supplies with a rule not valid for a race at the disposal of iiheir own visible advantage alone ? It is simply Conscience Chap. III.] UTILITARIAN SUBSTITUTE FOR AUTHORITY. 97 under a disguise, the inward Sense, inseparable from our nature, of an orderly authority amongst our springs of action ; or, to chase it into the last retreat of truth, it is the Lord of Conscience, the Legislator of life, whose revelations of Eight make themselves felt, with or without recognition, in every effort to clear the thought and purify the practice of human justice. But for such a power, it seems to be admitted in the very assumption of it, pleasure, as our sole end, would send us all astray. The Utilitarian inconsistency has arisen from transferring to the governed subjects a rule of im- partiality originally meant for the guidance of their governor alone. The Utilitarian doctrine has usually been connected with the opinion that pleasure, or exemption from pain, constitutes the only possible end of action. But it is capable of being held in conjunction with a different view of the sources of volition. There is nothing in it to prevent its disciples from accepting, as original in us, other affections than the desire of happiness for ourselves ; and it is natural to ask, whether the doctrine gains in validity by this psychological change. Suppose, then, that you amend your program of human nature, and allow to it, in addition to its fundamental self-love, an original and equal love of others ; and compute the effect upon our problem of this new condition. It certainly gives a good account of the facts that personal interest frequently gives way to social ; that the happiness of neighbours becomes an essential element in our own ; that therefore there is an ap- proximate coincidence, in their practical working, between the rules of Prudence and those of Benevolence, and that where they conflict, the disinterested impulse has as fair a chance of ascendency as the selfish. Of the two affections at the dis- posal of which human life is placed, now one, and now the other, will be driven from the field, and the movement will sway and oscillate between the extremes of egoism and generosity. And so, if instead of two primitive forces of affec- tion we admit ten, we should furnish the conditions of a corresponding variety of result. Turn ever so many impulses into the mind to have their play there, and it is certain that each will, some time or other, lead the game. But in such H 98 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. acts there is absolutely no moral phenomenon at all. They are actually, though partially, presented in the irresponsible creatures below us ; ia whose nature several instinctive affec- tions are co-present on terms of equality, taking them by turns in each direction embraced within the compass of their being. The question to which we require an answer is not, Why self- love often does give way, but how, under certain conditions, all men know that it ought to give way. And this sense of Duty, — this consciousness of an obligatory order, this moral right of one incentive over another, is something totally dis- tinct from the existence of the affections themselves and their assemblage on the arena of the same consciousness. If we are fitted up only with personal interests and various loves, without the revelation of any natural ranks of authority among them, there is no rational ground for the characteristic ex- periences of the Conscience; for that flush and glory of approval with which we look upon a victory of Eight ; for the shame of forgotten vows, and the remorse of irrevocable guilt ; and for that pathetic play between the shadows of sin and the conquering lights of a divine trust, which fills the whole atmosphere of Christendom with the gleams and glooms of a stormy day. The assumption, then, of an original social as well as self- regarding tendency does not convert the Utilitarian doctrine into an adequate theory of duty. Yet another alteration must be made in its draft of human nature, before its ethical and its psychological aspects are brought into harmony. If we were naturally endowed, not only with sympathy for others, but also with a knowledge that we were bound to consult for their happiness as for our own, then indeed we should be made upon the right pattern for the Utilitarian philosophy, and its method would work without a check from any part of human life. Such an account of the factors of our moral being, re- ducing them to self-regard, sympathy, and obligation, though too complex for the school which would gain by it, would indeed, as I believe, be an utterly illusory simplification; omitting or distorting the greater part of the incentives which urge the will and constitute the character. But it would at least lay the real foundation for duty ; and the remaining con- Chap. III.] UTILITARIAN SUBSTITUTE FOR AUTHORITY. 99 troversy would lie wholly in the field of menta^l history and analysis. That something must be conceded to the intuitive doctrine, and that the fabrication of the mature perceptions, intellectual and moral, from the elements of early sensation, has not proved a very manageable problem, seems now to be con- sciously or unconsciouslj) confessed. For no otherwise can we explain the eagerness with which the experience-philoso- phers have seized upon Mr. Herbert Spencer's suggestion that ■our seeming axioms are not personal acquisitions, but an in- heritance transmitted from the habits of our forefathers, and formed in them by an incalculably slow accumulation of personal experiments. If the so-called intuitions had already been satisfactorily resolved, if their analysis was as exhaustive as it professed to be, if there was no residuary function in them which, however often dissipated, insisted on coming back, there would have been no room for a new explanation ; .and a theory which overleaped the boundaries of the indi- vidual life, and flung itself upon the illimitable resources of antecedent generations, would have been resented as a reflec- tion upon the adequacy of prior expositions designed to be •complete. Instead of this, Mr. Spencer's ingenious and fruit- ful hint has been welcomed with a zest which shows how much his help was needed. To estimate the amount of its evidence, and the range of its value, as it is beyond my competency, is happily not within the scope of my design. For one remark only do the exigencies of my subject seem to call. The doc- trine of cumulation by inheritance can never help us to any genesis of moral faculty out of data that are unmoral. The transmission of improving aptitudes may render rapid and easy, processes which were slow and difficult ; rich and intense, feelings that were poor and faint ; immediate, perceptions that were mediate ; abstract, cognitions that were concrete. But it cannot give what it does not contain ; no induction, how- ■ ever wide and long, can yield us predicates never found in its particulars ; and from an experience, be it of one generation -or of a million, into which at one end only the sentient ele- ment enters, at the other nothing that is moral will come . out. To deduce the authority of Duty, and the disclosures of H 2 loo AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. Conscience, from " consolidated experiences of utility," is to violate the ancient rule, Oiik tanv «£ aXXou jivov^ /itraBavra SiT^ai ; * and to assign a cause which, when relinquished as inadequate in the individual life, cannot be shown to gain by- extension any better relation to the effect. The facts, then, of our Moral nature retain, as it appears to me, the character and significance ascribed to them in the previous expositions. In order to give them another aspect, the philosophy of Utility has to explain them away into some- thing else from which their essence has departed ; treats their central thought as an illusion, whilst still appealing to it as a power ; and raises their external function into an authorita- tive importance to the claims of which the Conscience never will respond. It fails to take possession of Morals at their source, not less than the Intuitive doctrine to conduct them to their application ; and will never occupy its true place, till it is content to take up the Will already right in Duty, and guide it to an issue equally right in Eeason. * Aristot. Anal. Post. 75. a. 38. lOI CHAPTEE IV. GOD IN HISTOBY. All that has happened among mankind has arisen from the mutual play of the forces around them and the forces within them. The drama of ages has had this world for its stage, and our race for its actors, and could not have remained the same, had either been different. Suppose, for instance, the distribution of sea and land other than it has been within attested time, giving a new massing to the ice, and new currents to the ocean ; or change the lines on which the mountain-ranges rise, so that the great rivers, whose reeds hide the cradle of all civilization, shall have a different flow ; bury the old forests a little deeper ; put the mineral veins out of reach ; or take the cotton and the flax from the flora of the earth : and, by this modification of terrestrial conditions, you turn back all our actual past into the impossible. And in the same way, had man been constituted otherwise than a.s he is ; had his appetites been less exigent, or his resentment less keen, or his affections less capable of ideal direction, or his faculty of speech no greater than a dog's, — ^then, also, an observer of the world must have witnessed quite another change of scenes. Nay, there are crises in human affairs at which the whole movement of the future seems to hinge on a single act of a single agent. Had Judas Iscariot spurned at first, instead of returning at last, the thirty pieces of silver, who can measure the change from that dropped Imk in the sequence of events? Had Mohammed broken the cobweb which was flung across his cave of concealment, and which seemed to tell his pursuers he was not there, the vehement hfe which Islam has breathed into so many nations would have been lost to the pulses of the world. Had the monastery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Eome, or had Leo X. sent a less scandalous 102 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book r. agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Eeformation might have fallen by the wayside, where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind have taken another date and another form. And so it would seem as if the many-coloured web of history were all woven by the threads of our volition, shot through the continuous warp of natural law without us. Is there, then, it will be asked, no part left free for a Divine Agent? Is the story all told, when the scene has been physically described, and the actors have revealed their purposes, and played out their game ? Or is there a deeper plot, which wields their conscious aims, and combines them for unconscious ends, and works out a catastrophe dissipating and transcending all personal dreams ? How far there is scope for a divine education of mankind, without disturbing either factor of their history, and on what lines of change we are to seek its vestiges, will be evident by simply following out the principles which we have already gained. If, indeed, the only way in which God could find entrance among the phenomena were as a third, factor, over and above the theatre of nature, and the life of man ; if the question were, whether, when these two had done their utmost, there yet remained some unexplained effects for which he must be invoked, — we might well despair of finding room for any causality of his ; for it is obvious that the other two groups — the agency without, and the agency within — constitute a pair logically exhaustive, and absolutely close their ranks against any new partner on the field. Those who insist that nature and humanity suffice to account for everything, and need no tertium quid to complete the tale, tell us not simply a truth, but a truism, serviceable onlyas betraying their total misconception of the problem. Their tacit assumptions, that nature is a reservoir of atheistic powers, and that man is an insulated personality, — the product and reagent of those powers, — and that, till we discover some other realm, we may deny all other mind than his, are simply a prejudgment of the question by false definition and inaccurate division. There is no need of any outlying domain, beyond the scope of the phenomena we see and feel, to serve for us as the receptacle of God. Infinitely Chap. IV.] QOD IN HISTORY. 103 as his being may transcend the whole sphere of our cognition, it is not beyond nature, but within it, that we must find the action of his power : it is not beyond the human mind, but within it, that we must be conscious of his hving spirit. We shall have, therefore, to break up the two factors of history in order to draw forth from them, and exhibit apart, such elements ia them as may be divine. This world, which is the outward theatre of history, is part of the great cosmos, all whose forces, as we have seen, find their unity in God, and whose laws are but the modes and order of his thought. In that field, he is not simply First Cause, but Sole Cause ; all force being one, and no force other than his. Whenever, in accommodation to the vocabulary of science, we speak of a plurality of powers, we refer in reality only to several distinct orders of phenomena which are wrought out by the universal power, and which, by their different aspects, cover its identity with variable masks. Though this disguise is often used as a philosophic trap, and the laws of things are tricked out in the drapery of causality, it can impose on no one who follows the meanings of his words to their ultimate seats, and knows thought from thought under every dress. Thus the first factor, nature, falls back entirely to the account of the highest Will. And to this term, we must remember, belongs man himself, so far as he is simply a living thing, — a mammal in the museum of nature. He, too, is subject, like the clouds and trees and waves, to rules in which he has no voice : and within these limits he is merely a natural object, the seat of natural phenomena ; and the Divine Cause is operative in him in the same purely dynamic way in which he grows the forests, and moulds the haU. So far, therefore, as the birthday of our race upon this earth, the distribution and movement of population, the genius and habits of nations, the shifting centres of power, have been determined by the natural constitution of the globe itself, they fall directly under divine causation, and are included in the organism of the divine scheme. By referring these things to the soil and the sun, to the fruits and hunting- grounds, to the wood and metals, of the world, we do not take them out of the Supreme Hand, but, on the contrary, leave I04 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. them unconditionally there; for, though the Creator goes beyond nature, nature lies and lives entirely in him. This physical agency of God, spreading alike through persons and things, through organic and inorganic being, can take no separate notice of human life and character, nor of the differ- ences which distinguish us from each other in our lot and in our mind; but pledges itself to steadiness and consistency throughout a whole cosmical system, to the balanced good of which it is directed. So severe does this unbending uniformity sometimes appear, that it wrings from us passionate depreca- tions of pity and alarm ; as when some rude force crushes, or some unearned malady tortures and prostrates, a noble and lovely Ufe, the centre of a thousand hopes. But we must not be tempted to demand that the whole of Omnipotence should stand at the disposal of human ends. We must beware of saying that the physical conditions which influence the course of humanity are meant for these alone, and should be measured by the standard of our needs.. They are only a local application to one planet (which, moreover, has other inhabitants besides ourselves) of laws embracing other worlds, and affecting, it may be, innumerable other things ; and all that we can ask is, that, in their universal sweep, their operation here should have its estimated place. To us, side by side with the moral government of God, which goes by the characters of men, there must ever appear to be a yet vaster administration, which, still intellectual, is immoral, and carries its inexorable order through, and never turns aside, though it crushes life and hope, and even gives occasion to guilt and abasement. Probably enough, this is only an illusion of ours ; and, could we follow from world to world those laws which look so sad and stern below, we might find them working out elsewhere the spiritual ends which here they seem to disappoint ; and might discover that the training of minds into the likeness of himself is not only supreme, but sole, among the designs of God. But, so long as we are con- fined to our provincial position in this universe, and can see no moral ends beyond the limits of mankind, there will remain outside these limits a simply natural divine order, which, so far as it educates us, does so only in passing on to other ends. Chap. IV,] GOD IN HISTORY. 105 But, as we have seen, God is not only in nature, which spreads the scene of history, and in mankind, as natural objects belonging to the furniture of that scene ; he is also in those higher endowments of our humanity which transcend the zoologic limits, and enable us to become the actors in history, and to perform the parts. He has not only planted within us the train of passions and affections which carry us hither and thither as they take their turn at the helm, but has disposed them in a hierarchy of ranks, and by his own Living Spirit in the midst interpreted their relative authority, and made it felt. So that over us, as moral beings, are set other laws than those which are embodied in our animal organism, and in virtue of which we eat and drink, and sleep and wake, and laugh and weep, and fear and fight, and herd together in gregarious masses ; viz., laws to which our assent is asked, and to which we render, if at all, an elective obedi- ence. We are committed to the disposal of no imperious and overmastering spontaneity of force, but of a clear conscious- ness of relative worth among the claims that bid for us ; and this revelation of authority, this knowledge of the better, this inward conscience, this moral ideality, — call it what you will, — is the presence of God in man. Twice over, therefore, does his life meet with ours, — his physical agency in the forces which he lends to our organic nature ; his spiritual, in the apprehension which he gives us of the gradations of character and the supremacy of duty. Do we thus admit into our being too much that is divine ? Within so narrow an enclosure, must we fear that it will demand the whole space, and leave nothing for ourselves ? It is a groundless fear. Far from encroaching on our proper personahty, the second or spiritual divine element addresses itself to minds alone, and presupposes the co-presence with it of our will as a responsible subject and an effective power. Without this, it would have no function in us any more than in a sheep ; to this only can it address its appeal, and offer free suggestion for free adoption. Its voice is not less strictly relative to the problems of character in us, than it is distinctly expressive of character in God. There cannot be one to command, unless, also, there is one to obey. Three orders of io6 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. .[Book I. power, therefore, meet within the human being, — a physical,, a spiritual, and a personal ; the first conditioning his life as- a creature or hving thing, the other two as a moral nature ; the former diviaely presenting, the latter humanly answering,, the responsible appeal. This personal will, which is thus saved as the third con- stituent power m our nature, may concur, or may conflict, with either of the other two. It may resist, or strive to evade, the dynamic order of the world ; as when we vainly defy the physical laws of health, or attempt enterprises with resources inadequate to their success. In all such cases of frustrated aim, — when, for instance, we are detained by storms from reaching the death-bed of. a friend . across the sea, — it is we in our personal life that are baffled by the divine order of the world. Our will, again, may resist, or it may adopt, the im- perative intimations of conscience ; either betraying the right to save a life of tainted ease, or meeting self-sacrifice, rather than incur the sin of unfaithfulness. And here the casting vote is ours ; and, if the wrong is done, it is the divine agency, in its spiritual function, that is " grieved " and driven away. In this way are clearly distinguished the relative parts which the two agents, the divine and the human, play in the respective spheres of necessary law and of moral law. As in the former, in the outward field of nature, we often say that " Man proposes, but God disposes," so in the latter, in the inner sphere of conscience, we may reverse the rule, and say that " God proposes, but man disposes." God's part is done, when, having made us free, he shows to us our best : ours now remains to pass on from illumination of the con- science to surrender of the will. And thus we obtam at once the separating line between the divine and the human in that moral and spiritual life which involves the communion of both : the initiative of all higher good is with God ; while it rests with man to be the organ of its realization, or its loss. If, as there dawn upon us purer lights, be it of truth or of duty, which promise to dissipate the lazy mists that fold us round, we refuse to lay ourselves open to them, and to take the path illumined by them alone ; if, still worse, we try to appropriate their glory without accepting their obligations, and thus turn C^hap. IV.] GOD IN HISTORY. 107- them into richer ornaments of self,— we do all that we can to be " without God in the world," and to reduce whatever is divine into the mere food of appetite or convenience. If, on the other hand, we freely give ourselves away to the true, the beautiful, the right, and reverence them as above us, and en- titled to the sacrifice, then, whether we know it or not, we place ourselves at God's disposal, and become fellow- workers with him. Hence, all dying out of moral good is a human phenomenon, due to some canker of unfaithfulness ; while all the new births of good are divine in their source, though human, also, in their accomplishment. It is a true saying, however hard to a stoic's self-reliance, that it is beyond the power of man to lift himself : he can only prevent himself from sinking. It is not we that set the lights before us at which we aim : they gleam upon us from beyond us, if not by the immediate gift of God ; and our part is complete if we keep our eye latent to see them, and our foot resolute to cUmb whither they show us the way. The beacon aloft is given ; the path to reach it alone is found. But there is another saying, not less true, needful to complete the story, — that whoever is faithful to a first grace that opens on him shall have a second in advance of it ; and, if still he follows the messenger of God, angels ever brighter shall go before his way. Every duty done leaves the eye more clear, and enables gentler whispers to reach the ear ; every brave sacrifice incurred lightens the weight of the clinging self which holds us back; every storm of passion swept away leaves the air of the miud transparent for more distant visions : and thus, by a happy concord of spiritual attractions, the helping gi'aces of Heaven descend, and meet the soul intent to rise. Though, therefore, it is not ours to elevate ourselves, we shall assuredly be sent for, if we will only go. But, then, this growing scale, this more and ever more of opportunity, must be referred to God ; and it gives us a mark by which we may track the lines of Providence in life. It is from personal self-reflection that we learn this consti- tution of our nature, and find in it the boundary between the human and the divine. But its discovery would be impossible, and its effects reduced to zero, in an insulated life ; as it is lo8 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. only in the presence of other minds similarly formed and affected, only in the visible play of passion and character around, under the appeal of the nobler and the shock of the baser, that the moral capacities can find development so as adequately to he : so, even if regarded as potentially there, they could not he known to us, but for the objective image of our own inner history in the living drama around us. The reciprocal action of a common nature in each and all not only multiplies, but absolutely conditions, its manifestation in any ; and the divine relation to the conscience, being social not less than individual, may be followed out in the character of nations over the surface of the world, and will give traces everywhere of a common moral government. These traces will be found a homogeneous extension of individual experience. Humanity, however, is not only a many-lived organ ; it is also a long-lived organ of God : and its phenomena, besides enlarging themselves from the personal scale to that of collective society, acquire a certain cumulative power and volume from generation to generation, yielding results, which, being beyond the intentions of all the human agents in their production, must be referred to the divine administration of the earth. The aims of man, taken one by one, and then added up into a whole, are no adequate measure of the effects achieved by them as tenants of the globe ; and its surface is rich in memorials which have been left as a heritage for the race, but would astonish no one more than the private agents in their creation. Who can think, without wonder, of the operation, in the long run, of a very simple and inconspicuous cause ; viz., man's need of fresh ivater to relieve his periodic thirst ? This it is which has led him to the banks of rivers for his first settlements ; which has selected the site of mighty cities, and woven the network of the early civilizations ; which has loaded the margins of the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Ganges with monuments of ancient art and more ancient piety ; and, in short, traced the whole contour of his- torical geography. "When men saw the marvellous product, and, under the shadow of palaces and temples, speculated on the origin of so proud a scene, it is not surprising if they fancied that it must have been fore-announced by the fates, Chap. IV.] GOD IN HISTORY. log and that the founders, well Imowmg what was given them to do, were all heroes and divine. But the naked Britons, who, before Caesar's time, were encamped on the brink of the Thames, were placed there by the rudest exigencies of barbarian nature, without foresight of the modern London ; and just as little was it any historic vision of the " Eternal City " that floated before the mind of Eomulus and his band. Each increment on these small beginnings has been similarly made by the working of petty and temporary aims, yet with an aggregate result as much grander than its rudiments as the history of human society transcends the pettiness of retail trade. Nor is it only the material capital of civilization which thus outstrips the conception of its several contributors. The whole structure of human law — that august expression of the moral organization of our collective life — has its ground in the simplest of psychological facts ; viz., the inequality of the resentment, in case of wrong, felt by the injured and by the bystanders ; inducing the latter, who cannot be worked up to the rage of the former, to interpose, and enforce their own more mitigated anger. But how little could they who first rushed in to stay the uplifted arm of vengeance dream of the Pandects, whose initial word they wrote, or imagine that mighty system of rights and obligations, of restraints and sanctions, of mutual service required and common protection guaranteed, which, expressing the formed and educating the unformed conscience of communities, secures their moral tissue by fibres ever firm and ever growing ! The New-Zealander, who, when brought to London, wondered how, without flocks and herds in sight, or fields loaded with the fruits of tillage, the swarming city was fed day by day, yielded to a just surprise; the countless springs of private interest which easily effect so gigantic a result being inconspicuous, and unconsciously adjusting an equilibrium never before the agents' thought. But far more marvellous is the peaceful co-presence and orderly co-operation of milHons of human beings, each charged with forces of passion and desire distinct from the rest and unheeding, for the most part, the unity of the whole. This new order of phenomena, beyond the range of our personal aim, sets us on the vestiges of God in history; and, by following out the no AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. individual moral constitution into its social manifestations, we shall trace an intelligible line between the divine and human agency in the vicissitudes of the world. Let it be observed that the partnership which we have here to define subsists entirely between the personal and the spiritual constituents already discriminated ; and that with the physical agency, which God shares with none, our problem has no con- cern. As man has no part in it, except to be more or less subject to it, it cannot enter iato any estimate of his claims. I do not forget, in striking out this element, that, according to the disciples of Mr. Buckle, I fling everything away, and leave only the effects and products of what I have cancelled. In his view, individual and personal forces, even when set up and consolidated, are as nothing in presence of the great system of natural law which builds about them the conditions of their action ; and are themselves, at one remove, the off- spring of that system. That " one remove," however, would carry us at a stride into the darkiless which surrounds the origin of man, and hides his cradle in the reeds of unknown rivers, or the caves of nameless shores : and whether the germ of a new living form that lay there had every fibre still woven into the tissue of nature, and, if so, at what later epoch an untransmitted power was lent to its heirs to be their own, are questions of prehistoric speculation, on which it is irrelevant to pronounce. It is sufficient, that, within the limits of history, man has been agent as well as patient, and, however restrained by the conditions of the scene in which he stands, has himself variously modified its possibilities, and asserted his own causality against a thousand pressures of both material and moral resistance. That by variations in climate and soil, in distribution of land and water, in the relation of island and continent, and in the flora and fauna of both, the bodies and the dispositions of men must be affected, their numbers modified, their employments cast into different moulds, ,and their polities tend to divergent lines of development, is .admitted, on all hands, and has been frequently insisted on by writers who have treated of the sciences subsidiary to history. But to represent such external influences as all in all, and .reduce history to a mere study of man as shaped by them, is Chap, iv.l GOD IN HISTORY. m surely no less an exaggeration than that opposite extreme of liero- worship which resolves it into a series of biographies. However difficult it may be, in accounting for events, to measure the respective shares of great personalities on the one hand, and circumstantial pressures on the other, both causes are alive upon the field ; and neither of them has any pretension to silence the other, and claim to tell the whole tale itself. Will you assure me that Christianity must have turned up in no very different form without Jesus of Nazareth, and the Eeformation without the reformers, and the great inventions of printing, of the mariner's compass, of the steam- engine, without their particular inventors ? I excuse myself from listening to so paradoxical a slight passed on the original inspirations and intense will of exceptional persons of past ages. Are you so captivated, on the other hand, by the brilliant genius, or the marvellous wisdom, of some favourite whom you admire, or some master whom you revere, as to hft him into free air above all earthly contact with his time, and forget that he was born in a local home, hemmed in by ;social habitudes, and able to drink only of the stream of thought from earlier times, and breathe only the air of his own ? and do you resent the suggestion that his individuality was not the solitary cause of the new epoch dated from his life? I can only wonder at so strange a disregard of the restraining conditions against which even the intensest human ■energy matches itself in vain. Eecognition must be given to both sets of causes ; and the reason for excluding the physical from our present reckoning is not that it is disowned, and treated as absent, but that it is neutral in the account which it aims to settle. That account lies between our personal humanity and God's spiritual agency in us, not his physical agency in nature ; and we carry our scrutiny into history only in so far as its character springs from the moral alternatives of our voluntary life and the divine relation with them. All else, even though happening to man, belongs to the theme of " God in nature ; " this alone remains for the quest of " God in history." What, then, is the kind of test by which, on this crowded stage, the two wills may be distinguished ? Exactly the same 112 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. as that which serves us within the inclosure of the individual mind. There, as we have found, it is God that inspires for man to realize. The ideals are his : the actuals that come out of them, or that fail to come out of them, are ours. We feel his authority, we know his look, in whatever stands before our thought as higher, and claims us as its own. We are conscious of unfaithfulness, we pass under ecUpse of divine light, in refusing to rise to the appeal, and staying to do our own work upon the levels of ease. It is no otherwise on the large scale of history. Nations, as well as private persons, have their impulses and opportunities, their gleams of a better, their temptations to a worse : and here, also, to give the higher initiative is the divine part ; to fling it away and forget it, or to follow it up the glorious ascent, is the human. Hence, on the principle that man cannot lift himself, but can freely give himself to be lifted, a simple rule emerges from tracking the steps of Providence through the ages. Where there is nothing to be seen but bare conservation of what good there is, or, at best, only a local extension of it to classes or regions not brought up to its level, the human will is the chief agent, working on its own prosaic and unaspiring flat, and content to stand alone. Where there is continuous growth, and advance to loftier stages of life and character, and the men of each generation leave the world better than they found it, there we are on the vestiges of the divine Agent, and trace his moral government in history. It is not, therefore, in the great stationary civilizations of Egypt or Eastern Asia, where reverence spends itself in locking up stores of truth and art, of faith and character, and guarding them as much from increase as from waste, and worshipping the golden key which shuts them from the air of heaven, that we can study the path of Providence through the ages. They are, indeed, wonderful witnesses of a certain stage in the education of mankind, which, but for their longevity, would have been lost to our knowledge, and impossible to our belief ; but it is in the relations which link them to what is prior and posterior, and not in any history within themselves, that they claim a section in the divine scheme of the world. If we would recognize the living course of God's discipline for Chap. IV.] GOD IN HISTORY. 113 our nature, we must look to progressive civilizations which have not survived their function, and then been content to petrify into solemn mausoleums of dead ages, but which have had an influence far outliving themselves, mingling and throbbing in the very life-blood of the world, and tincturing in after-ages even the very minds that know them least. The few nations which have been capable of this creative and impelling action, have been made the depositories of successive divine trusts, each carrying our nature along some line of advance it had never tried before ; and all their movements have at times been brought by converging dispositions to meet and melt, and give a nobler volume to our humanity. There is, however, a theological prepossession, which we must beware of taking with us into the study of the world. It is common, and it is natural, to imagine that God is most intimately present to those who know him, and least to those who know him not : so that true or false belief respecting divine things may be taken as marks to show where in history his vestiges are to be found, and where they are not. In conformity with this view, the Jew has been habitually treated as within the sacred circle, — a subject of the kingdom of God ; the Gentile as beyond it, — an exile in the domain of the Prince of darkness : and nations have been regarded as favoured with divine light, according as they stood nearer the monotheism of the one, or were farther astray in the polytheism of the other. The history of men's thoughts about God would thus be identical with the history of God's own dealings with them ; and to follow out the religions of the world would be to survey the track of his living communion with the human mind. How utterly such a rule would mis- lead us must be evident to any one who lays his heart open to the nobleness of Pagan virtue, and who is not afraid to see the meanness and cruelties compatible with Orthodox belief. It is plain, that, where (to judge by the Regula Fidei) God may seem to be best known, he often leaves no living sign, and the dry ground yields no tender grass and flowers to mark where his fertilizing dews descend ; and that, to minds from whose creed he appears quite hid, he no less often goes in the dark, and kindling before them the lamp of honour, or 114 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. the star of truth, draws them, they know not whither, except that it is to a higher than themselves. No doubt, all religions in their primitive life do really express what commands the supreme veneration of the mind, and are then coincident with the divinest lesson that has yet been given ; and if their types of thought were as expansive as our nature, and content to take up and consecrate every rising growth of pure rever- ence and noble admiration so as really to embody whatever speaks to wonder and conscience, and to drop whatever has withered from the heart, then, certainly, would their history coincide with the history of God's spiritual education of our race. But since they soon set into mythologies, .and crystal- lize into forms of speech and habits of worship little suscep- tible of change, they lose their power of taking up new thought and love, and turn to stone. The tide of living reverence flows by with a sweep of deviation, and, taking fresh channels, leaves the ancient temple stranded on the delta of the past, — ^monuments of an earlier humanity, but not sheltering the sanctities of to-day. As religion is the germ, and spiritual culture the ripest fruit, of society, their characteristic pro- ducts are widely separated in time ; and it is inevitable that traditional faiths and maturer pieties should part company, and that the highest elements of mind and character should at last be found, not in the theology, but in the civilization. If, however, theology is too narrow an enclosure to exhibit the divine vestiges in history, we should go too far a-field did we seek them indiscriminately over the whole area and through all the tracks of thought and art. In his zeal to set free the idea of inspiration from the limits, imposed upon it by divines, Theodore Parker has left it inadequately distin- guished from the ordinary exercise of the human intellect and will, and almost fused into one the physical action of God in nature and the spiritual in man. Thus he says, that " through reason, conscience, and the religious sentiments," and " by means of a law, certain, regular, and universal as gravitation, God inspires men, makes revelation of truth ; for is not truth as much a phenomenon of God as motion of matter ? " And, as if still more completely to erase the distinction, he suggests, that " God's action on matter and on Chap. IV.] GOD IN HISTORY. jjj inan is perhaps the same thing to him, though it appear differently modified to us."* To press this alleged analogy between the dynamics of nature and the iaspiration of man is to fling the human personality away. God's ," action on matter" exhausts the tvhole action there is, and is identical with the very constitution of the material world itself: so that, without it, matter, if existing at all, is no more than the passive nidus, or objective medium, present as lihe condition of the divine energy. If the case of man is the same, he, too, is reduced to virtual nonentity, and, without agency possible to himself, becomes the mere vessel of the divine. The laws of his several facul- ties, that is, the orderly connection and consecution of their phenomena, being the movement and march of God within the mind, nothing remains which can be predicated of the human self; for it is nothing short of the whole of his personal history which is thus conve^^ed over into the life of God. The more this doctrine is carried out into illustrative examples, the more serious does this difficulty become. The " Principia " of Newton, for instance, we are desired to regard as the product of inspiration ; and the measure of inspiration is said to be the amount of " natural ability evinced in the achievement of each work." But the " Principia " is a book of deductive reasoning, in which each step involves or necessitates the next, and lays the track of one continuous intellectual movement, the partition of which through its whole length between two minds is surely inconceivable. Who, then, is the reasoner answerable for the processes of demonstration ? Is it Newton ? Then are they activities of his personality, and are not to be looked for ah extra, in the operation of another life. Is it God ? Then the intellect of Newton is rendered otiose, with only the residuary function, at best, of a receptive and recording obediehcie. Moreover, if the movement and force of the natural faculties are to be deemed an inspiration from a superhuman source, we shall have to recognize as divine, not only the truth, beauty, and goodness to which they lead, but the false, the ugly, and the evil issues into which they go astray ; for these are results • Discourse of Matters peitaining to Religion. Bk. ii. ch. viii. I 2 Ii6 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. of the same faculties, often in the same men, and interspersed among the tentatives of the same effort of genius. The individual mind is thus lost in God ; and God is no longer clear of the imperfections of the human mind. In order, then, to save the personal power in man, and to leave him any real partnership in history, we must concede to him a mental constitution of his own, — a trust of both intellectual faculty and moral will ; and must limit the divine j)art to the intuitive data, from which every activity of our inner nature must start. Each power of the soul has its own appropriate object towards which it feels its way, — reason to truth, imagination to beauty, conscience to right. The pre- sentation of these to us is not our own doing ; the regular pursuit of them is. If we say that all these ideals uncon- sciously directing us are divine, we remove the limitations from the theological conception of inspiration, without flinging the human causality into the mists of the pantheistic abyss. In trying to trace the divine initiative here and there in the education of the human race, we must throw out of the account the earlier and remoter portions of mankind, and take up only the threads which are visibly twined into the present. There is but one influence in the world that has transcended in beneficent power the genius of ancient Greece ; and the spiritual providence of God in the historical education of our race has di'awn on it as largely to nourish the intellect of the later ages, as his natural providence has drawn on the atmo- sphere to feed the fires of animal life. It is not, however, from the gods, but from the men, of Athens that an exhaust- less and refining light has penetrated the whole organism of human thought... If the temples. speak to us still, it is not of Athena, but of Phidias ;, not by their rites and sacrifices, but by their proportions and their sculptures. Scarcely does Homer himself make their Olympus endurable; nay, it had ah'eady become revolting to Plato ; and our patience with it has returned only because it is so far from us : and, after all, we are ever glad to descend with the old poet to the plain of Troy, and make him sing rather of the defiance of chiefs, and Chap. IV. J GOD IN HISTORY. 117 the talk and tears of women. It is the literature, the art, the political hfe, of Greece, that constitute its significance for the world, and form its contribution to the providential education of mankind. No more striking evidence could we have that the divine initiative may take other forms than that of theo- logic truth, and may lurk in the unconscious tendencies of a people's mind, rather than come to the front in their defined beliefs and external worship. If, in this instance, we lift the veil of their visible life, and, passing behind, interpret for them the inspiration of which they were the subjects imawares, we shall find it in a haunting feeling of an inchuelling divine- ness embodied in the cosmos, and interfused through all its parts, including man as one of them ; for, to the Greek, the universe and human Ufe never appeared as in their essence antithetic to the divine, but rather as clothing and manifesting it, and moulded by its inner thought. To him the brilliancy of the heavens and the beauty of the earth were no dead picture, asleep on this or that stretched canvas of dimension, but were alive, and looked at him through waking eyes expecting their response. Through all the products of his genius, from the early mythology to the philosophy which destroyed it, this feeling of a background of gods behind all that appears is traceable as their creative inspiration. In one view, his very polytheism is due to the tenacity of this implicit religion ; for it consisted, in its origin, rather of a succession than of a copartnership of gods : and, if an original unity passed into a later multiplicity, it was because the power first conceived was too dark and rude, too convulsive and gigantesque, — adequate, perhaps, to the period of primeval night, and half separated elements, but no more fit for the elaboration and the rule of the finished cosmos than a hyperborean barbarian to be Archon at Athens. Hence, as the theogony descends from Chaos, Ouranos, and Gaia, through Zeus and Metis, to Prometheus and Athena, a progress is evident from the more material, indeterminate, and violent to the more intellectual, orderly, and fair, culminating at last in the reason, the arts, and the civic union of mankind. As the universe fell into intelligible order and clearer beauty before his eye, the Greek resorted to more gods, because he wanted better gods, yet li8 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I., could not let the old ones go. Nor does anything more finely express his faith in the ascendency of mind and order everywhere, than the Oresteia of iEschylus, with its conflict between the elder Erianues and the younger divinities of Light and Thought, ending in the recognized authority of civic justice, and the removal of wild vengeance to hide itself in a grove beyond the walls. Human society itself thus comes to be regarded as the diviiie, set up on earth ; and its laws, its rights, its culture, and its harmonies, are the tenta- tive miniature copies of a real but unapproachable perfection. And what was only felt in the mythology advanced into distinct theory in the philosophy. The whole language, not of Plato only, but of Aristotle, is pervaded by the assump- tion of the inherence of thought in things, and of the corre- spondence between the steps of natural evolution from generic conception to individualization, and the inverse steps of our mind from phenomenon to law in ascending grades : so that all our knowledge is a communion of intellect within us, and intellect without us, — a thought on our part respect- ing what itself is also thought. The same word truth served to express what was real and imperishable in the world, and the apprehension of it by us ; and the word is the same, because no difference was felt in the things. This dominant peculiarity of the Greek, while it is the key to his own intellectual development, has transmitted a thrill of power through the mental culture of the world. Engaged on the beauty of the cosmos, and its claim to be reflected in human life, the Athenian genius, shedding its subtlety and vividness and strength through a marvellous language moulded to its ends, has touched the most delicate sprmgs of thought, and at once brightened the finite margin of things with images of loveliness, and deepened the background with infinite prob- lems. Scarcely greater has been the enlargement of the physical universe by the brilliant discoveries of modern times, than the gain of intellectual space and light by the Hellenic race ; and while its own theology has perished, and its temples have crumbled away, it has imparted to the religion of succeeding times that sense of an immanent divineness in the world, of a mingling of thought with the Chap. IV.] GOD IN HISTORY. lig very substance of things, which has forever made the visible beauty, truth, and good a symbol of the invisible. Different in every way, and ethically far higher, has been the function intrusted to the Hebrew race ; viz., to live upon the earth for thousands of years, whether in society or in long exile, as subjects of an immutable justice and mercy, and bear an unswerving witness to the moral government of the ivorld. As the Greek interfused the divine essence through the cosmic space, so did the Jew follow the divine footsteps down the tracks of historic time, and make the course of history a highway for his God. True, he also owned the power of God in the heavens and the earth, as their Creator and the Lord of all ; but they stood in a differ- ent relation to their Author. Their life was not his life ; they were not the organism of his manifested being, and he the soul of their rhythm and beauty, so that both together were but the outer and the inner side of the same divine- ness, — its transient glance and its eternal rest. He was separate from them, and looked down upon them from a heaven above the heavens. He set them up as the decora- tions and furniture of his universe ; he worked them as his instruments. He sent the elements upon his errands, turned them hither and thither as blind executants of his momentary will, and would in the end fling them and all nature aside as the worn-out implements of an imperishable perfection which needs them not. They are his works, — ^monuments of his acts of skill and power in the past, — but are not what can tell the story of his thought in the present. Once for all, the Almighty had spread the firmament, and hung up the stars, and upheaved the mountains, and set bounds to the deep. He spake, and they stood fast. But his life was with the sons of men, to give them truth, to guide them right, to weed out the worthless, to organize the faithful, and make all things work together towards an everlasting righteousness. The architecture of the universe doubtless spake his glory ; but it was only the scenery of a drama, whose plan disposed of all the nations, and unfolded itself through all the ages. The first conception of that drama, formed by the Jewish mind, was certainly small enough, — a simple tissue of family I20 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. ■ [Book I. vicissitudes, gradually widening into a larger design, embrac- ing the providences of a group of federated tribes. But the faith in justice, the vision of a righteous plan, once given, sufficed for all the exigencies of an expanding life, and drew into it province after province of the spreading world which captivity or colonization opened to Jewish experience. The area of the divine stage seemed to become broader with every age, the actors more numerous, the plot more vast. Damas- cus and Tyre, Nineveh and Babylon, Antioch and Alexandria, appeared upon the stage which once stretched only from Dan to Beersheba ; and the domestic piety traditional in the family of the Oriental sheik opened its heart to take the world into the embrace of its providence. The perseverance and the progress of the fundamental conception may be traced through the post-Maccabean literature, till at last, in the Book of Enoch, the whole known history of mankind — distributed into ten periods, like a poem in ten cantos — is presented as a divine epic, realizing at the end, by extinction of all that hurts and defiles, that civitas Dei which had been in contemplation from the beginning. It must be owned that this widening thought was long in bringing wider sympathies. The hard line between the Jew ordained for glory, the Gentile for perdition, only wavers and softens a little, remaining, though obscurely, pitilessly there. But at length the broader piety subdues the heart to a broader humanity. In the Apocalypse of Ezra, the scanty limits of salvation haunt the very soul of the author : he bewails them in pathetic tones ; and, though he tries to banish the complaint, he evidently feels, that, at the cost of so sweeping a retribution, the king- dom of God is too dearly purchased. With this fruitless touch of pity, however, he leaves the problem where it was. But how tenaciously the gi-eat idea of continuous historical development was held as the key to the providential plan, is evident from the comparisons by which he illustrates the course of humanity on our earth. It is like the order of the seasons, which cannot be inverted, but must pass through its regulated round ; or like the successive births of child after child to the same mother, till the family is complete, and the organism of relations constitutes a moral Chap. IV.] GOD IN HISTORY. 121 tyhole. Who can deny that this theory, fairly carried out, must foster a temper at once prospective and humane? With the hving God to lead them on, the centuries must brighten as they roll, or, if a darkness broods over them, must burst into richer sunshine after the passing storm. The golden time, the perfection of society, the purity and beauty of humanity, lie in the future, not in the past ; and life is to be spent, not in sighs of regret, but in the joy of hope and the power of faith. By this grand and profound conception, the unity of God descends upon the fragments of the world, and passes through the conflicts of time, flinging its embrace around alienated men, and fastening the sepa- rated links of history. Whatever mistaken interpretations of concrete events may have marked the course of this belief, it has brought home to us the moral oneness of our humanity, and has no less bound into a system the phenomena of historic time than the law of gravitation the bodies of external space. The mind of both Greek and Jew had a prevailing tendency outward, — upon the spectacle of natm'e, and the spectacle of man. The instinct of the one was to set the universe before it in an order of beauty and of thought ; that of the other to set the fates of nations before it in an order of divine justice. The one gave a cosmical, the other a social and political faith. The effect of this objective tendency is apparent through all the differences which separate their conceptions of the best life. Then: ideal of human perfection is, in both instances, thrown into the form of a state : it is planted out and em- bodied in a social organism ruled and pervaded by reason in the one case, by righteousness in the other. When Plato says, " Unless philosophers obtain the government of states, or kings and rulers become philosophers, there can be no hope of any end to the evils of commonwealths, or, as I believe, to the Bufferings of humanity,"* he truly paints the Hellenic dream of an intellectually harmonized society. When the Hebrew prophet says, " The dominion shall be given to the Saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,"t he is intent upon that vision of a divine common- » EepuWic, 473. C. t Dan. vii. 27. 122 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION [Book I. wealth, which, for the Christian, has passed into the heaven above, with its shadow only in the Church below. In neither case was the individual regarded as in himself a whole, competent to have ends of his own investing him with inalienable rights, and imposing on him duties with which none could inter- meddle. He was to serve only as material for building up a structure of composite grace and statelier proportions, — a plinth of the palace, a "living stone" of the temple, an element lost in the collective beauty, or a support invisibly present in the edifice of holiness. He had no claims apart from the civic or sacred social unity to which he belonged, which alone redeemed him from his solitary insignificance, and conferred upon him whatever importance or dignity he had, and which had an absolute title to dispose of him, through all the factors of his being, in the interest of its own perfection. The immense power of this preconception is evi- denced by the strange centralization and the revolting com- munism of Plato's Eepublic, leaving nothing to private life except in the lowest stratum of the community, and ordering, without scruple, the affairs of birth and death, the number of permitted lives, the diet, the occupations, the training, the abode, the possessions, of every citizen. It is but a modifica- tion of the same fundamental assumption, that, for his rela- tion to God, the Jew was dependent on his nationality. His religion was an ethnological distinction. It was not he, it was his tribe, that held a place in the regards and purposes of the most High ; and, if he forfeited his place in the sacred caste, he fell under divine as well as human excommunication. His piety, therefore, was mainly patriotic and domestic, — a martyr's faithfulness to the guardian of his people, an in- herited worship of the God of his fathers ; and all its more private applications were but inner circles of derivative affec- tion embraced by this wider circumference. Need I say that there yet remains a vein of character unopened by these workings of thought, penetrating and powerful as they are ? To check the tyranny of the social idea, there is needed a third inspiration, — a sense of the claims and the possibility of individual perfection as a supreme end, entitled to hold its ground even against the pretensions Chap. IV.] GOD IN HISTORY. 125 of apparent social good. Under its first rude form of self- subsisting courage and manly independence, Plato already- recognized at a distance this type of character as special to the northern barbarians ; and, for ages after, it vindicated and secured its place in history by stormy heavings of a freedom seemingly wild, yet not without secret centres and invisible lines of loyalty and obedience, pouring them in desolating floods over the lands of the enervated Latin populations. When their rough work was done, it became clear that their characteristic feeling of inward freedom carried in it nothing lawless and ungenerous, no senseless defiance of things right and sacred. On the contrary, it was a fresh fountain of affection and devotion, hitherto but little known, where the reverence which tinges life issues direct from the personal consciousness as its spring, and spreads thence to the nearest homefields of life, and onward till it freshens and fertilizes the landscape fading in the horizon. The Teutonic independence, in its aspect towards divine things, becomes that sense of personal relation between the single soul and the Spirit of God, which is the mainspring of the private sanctities, and releases the heart from the constraint of law into the freedom of love. The Germanic piety, in all its native movements, has been marked by a peculiar inwardness and spiritual depth, strongly contrasting with the more objective faith and casuis- tical self-scrutiny of the Latin churches. The mystic devotion of Eckart, of Tauler, of the Theologia Germanica, finding its way at last into Luther's doctrine of "justification by faith," expresses that self-abandonment of the soul, that merging of it in the life of God, which, though breathing the most passionate humility, can spring only from the sense of essential and ultimate affinity with him. In claiming this subjective and solitary religion as the special Teutonic inspiration, I do not forget its occasional and striking manifestations elsewhere. Here and there, in all ages, an inward and meditative piety has possessed the intenser natures. It dictated many a tender phrase of the Hebrew poets. It was so perfectly embodied in Jesus Christ, that it shapes his very lineaments in our imagination. Its pathetic tones and sweet quietude return upon us in the lives and words 124 AUTHORITY IMPLIED IN RELIGION. [Book I. of the older Christian mystics. But these are exceptional and scattered phenomena ; and not even the authoritative image of the Son of God availed to give large extension to this kind of devotion, till its appeal fell upon a nation just ready to find its native genius, and to rebel against the externality of sacer- dotal Christendom. From the time when Luther gave voice to the passionate struggles of his heart and conscience, and told how he found the perfect peace of a surrendered nature, there has been 'a deep and wide response among his people, and thence throughout the world, to his gospel of faith and communion of the Spirit ; and the lonely pieties which need no priest, and which, in humbling the soul before God, set it erect before man, have passed from the rare recluse to form the habits of multitudes and the ideal of churches. Nay, this inwardness and reflectiveness of mind has spread far beyond the bounds of religion : it has found its way into philosophy, into poetry, into art, and deepened the whole spirit of our western civilization. Our modern religion is a triple cord into which are twined, as strands once separate, the Greek, the Jewish, the German elements of thought and feeling, and which, where it is per- fectly woven, combines the strength of all. To fabricate such a texture is the work of countless hands through many ages. The genius of each progressive nation unfolds itself at first in isolation or in opposition. The culture of the Greek was in- digenous, of the Jew was separatist, of the German bom in conflict. And the distribution of the several factors of the higher civilization has been effected by other nations than those in which they were original ; the Eomans becoming for the world the purveyors of the Hellenic and Jewish ideals, and the Anglo-Saxon race of the Teutonic. But, when the various agencies have played their part, the dividing barriers which rendered each source provincial finally disappear ; and a field is opened by the providence of God in which the distinct • streams pass into confluence and swell into mightier volume, and flow on with more fertilizing power. Not, indeed, that any of the tributary fountains of civilization can come down to us untainted, — the limpid vehicles of perfect truth. All 'bring with them elements both pure and impure ; and it must Chap. IV.] GOD IN HTSTORY. 125 still be the problem of our wisdom to precipitate the latter, and lead the former to nomish the roots of whatever is fair and fruit-bearing. It yet remaias, therefore, for us to con- sider how to fling down the evil, and reserve the good, and recognize whatever has divine claims upon us in our historical inheritance of religion. BOOK 11. AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. CHAPTEE I. THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. The present, it has often been said, virtually contains •within it the whole past. The products of art, of literature, -of law, may largely perish, and leave many a former age with scanty monuments to bear witness of its genius ; but its character and ideas, mingling with the life of the succeeding generation, tincture that newer time, and, however traceless ia the fresh colour of the immediate hour, could not be with- drawn thence without changing its hue throughout. We ■cannot say that this law of transmission has any selective power to swallow up the evil, and hand down only the good ; rand, if the stream of history grows clearer as it flows, it is not that the current will not carry down both alike, but that the purifying interposition of reason and conscience arrests the turbid elements, and tries to let only the sweet waters through. In proportion as this interposition fails, the foun- tains of life and the marshes of death send down their contents together. Prejudices pass with truths ; the seeds of vices are entangled in the same eddy that bears the virtues ; •and, rich as the crop may be in the fields below, there will ;still be tares appearing between. Every later civilization is of necessity a mixed product, large with the accessions, but tainted with the impurities, of earlier experience ; and, what- ever treasures it has taken up into it from the faiths and philosophies of nations variously endowed, it cannot escape 128 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. its heritage also of human imperfection, or be spared the duty of severing the good from the evil. Our historical inherit- ance of religion is richer in the elements of tr,uth and the sources of moral power than any ever intrusted to any previous age. We live environed with a sublimer nature, we are conscious of a more sacred humanity, we own a wider providence in history, than was opened to our forefathers. The cosmic intellect was less august for Plato, the communion of the Spirit less deep for Tauler, the moral drama of the world less grand for Isaiah and for Paul, than for us. But along with this progressive truth are many lingering errors, grown worse from their misplacement m a larger scene. The ampler our horizon, the more does the clinging mist around us hide from view ; and we are but lost in the expanded universe, if we apply to it only the rude and petty measures hung up in the monkish cell. In the courses of history, be it remembered, there are two agencies ever at work, — the perfection of God, and the imperfection of man ; and the present in which we live is the result of both. How, then, shall we separate the divine from the undivine ? How dis- charge the perishable fancy, and hold fast only to the eternal reality ? What sacred authority shall stand for us in the field of thought, and divide between the living and the dead ? To answer this question properly, we must ask another: The two elements in our religious inheritance, the divine and the human — are they likely to be blended and interfused throughout, so that the criterion which shall sunder them is needed everywhere ? or do they sit apart, though on the same field, — the one railed off within some sacred enclosure ; the other poured around it, and hiding it fi"om view, and here and there assuming its likeness, but never mingling with its living power. Surely we should naturally expect that whatever divine influences have been shed upon the world must freely spread through the recipient capacity of our humanity, act iii its functions, and share its risks. In nature there is no force but God's ; in conscience yet unspoiled, there is no light save his ; but it is the specialty of history, that there he concedes to man a partnership with himself, and lets everything arise from the confluence or the conflict of both wills. It seems. Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 129 therefore, hardly conceivable that an historical revelation should be pure and simple, even for an hour. Mingling with human faculties in the first soul it enters, taking the vehicle of human language in passing from mind to mind, committed to the custody of human tradition in surviving from age to age, drawn into the intensest ferment of human thought, and struggling through the seething deep of human passion, and guarded from change, if at all, only by the crystallized im- perfection of human institutions, it becomes more closely in- terwoven with the liabilities of our life at every point, till you can no more withdraw the supernatural from the natural than you can distinguish in the tree the cells formed in a spring shower a hundred years ago. If it be so ; if, to borrow the Scripture image, the sacred leaven diffuses itself thus through the whole mass of our humanity, and in quickening our nature is dissolved into it, — then there remains no rule for separating what is divine and authoritative, except the tests by which, in moral and spiritual things, we know the true from the false, the holy from the unholy. External criteria, — that is, un- moral rules for finding moral things, physical rules for finding spiritual things, — there can be none. Eeason for the rational, conscience for the right — these are the sole organs for appre- ciating the last claims upon us, the courts of ultimate appeal, whose verdict it is not only weakness, but treason to resist. This close intertexture, however, of the human and the divine in our historical inheritance of religion is by no means admitted by its chief trustees. They are possessed with the idea that they have actually got divine truth enclosed within a ring-fence, still pure and integral after all these ages, — a paradise of God, where his voice is heard, and his presence is felt, planted amid the profane wilds around. Two claims are preferred to this exceptional position, — one by Catholics on behalf of " the Church ; " the other by Protestants, on behalf of " the Bible." They agree in assigning to something out- ward an authority before which the inward protest of even our highest faculties must sink in silence : they differ in attri- buting this authority to a corporation in the one case, to a literature in the other. In the latter case, the Holy Spirit, having once created the books of Scripture, remains, as it K I30 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. were, stereotyped there, and liable to all the disadvantages which Plato charges upon written language, — that, though you would think the page alive with the thoughts it has, it looks up at you always with the same face ; is dumb to the ques- tions you ask ; and, if tossed about in contumely or mistake, cannot defend itself, but needs its father to help it.* In the former case, the Holy Spirit perpetuates its work by taking for its organ an ever-living hierarchy, which is there to speak in every age, to interpret and supplement the dubious text, to correct the aberrations of reason, and relieve the perplexities of conscience. To this Catholic theory let us first turn ; the more so, because, to punish our imperfect exorcism of evil spirits at the Eeformation, it is fast returning from the dry places of controversy in which it could never rest, and, finding in many minds the medieval chamber swept and garnished, enters in to resume possession. The Church then is, in this view, not simply a divine establishment historically continued in the administration of certain original trusts, but a living body, permanently and for ever animated by the Third Person in the Trinity, who, since the day of Pentecost, has occupied this organism, just as the Second Person was united with the humanity of Jesus. And if, in this case too, we do not speak, as in his, of an in- carnation, it is not because the divine embodiment is less assured, but because the human persons are many and suc- cessive, and the body is corporate. The Holy Spirit had in all times, and even in heathen nations, been the secret source of natural grace, and rational apprehension of divine things ; and has enabled men to know God as the Author of Nature, to feel him in the suspicions of conscience, and to knit society together by his laws. All this, however, was but an invisible and scattered influence, present everywhere, instituted no- where. But now, having created on earth the mystical body of the Christ in heaven, the Holy Spirit has opened a special abode, and established an organized and visible agency for distributing a higher and supernatural order of grace. His presence, no longer contingent on individual fidelity, has be- come unconditional and constant, and — whether by diffusing * Phsedrus, 275 ad fin. Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 131 the light of the incarnation, or by the consecrating power ol the seven sacraments, or by gifts of vision, prophecy, or miracle, or by the efficacy of preaching — continues the cha- racteristics of the first age, undiminished to the last. If you ask how you are to know, when you see it, this field of sacred wonders, crowded with daily miracles, a perfectly definite answer is immediately given, — there are four divine marks, or " notes" which make any mistake of the true Church of God impossible ; viz., its Unity, or identity in all times ; its Sanctity, as the one home of holy men ; its Universality, or identity in all places ; and its Apostolicity, or exact reproduc- tion of the first and model age. Visibly bearing these char- acteristics, the Catholic Church claims to be the exclusive trustee of revelation, the sole channel of supernatural grace, the infallible witness and interpreter of divine truth. That so stupendous a claim should appeal to tests so in- adequate would be impossible, were it not that it has had to confront nothing but pretension weaker than itself, and already pledged to its most vulnerable premisses. If we take for granted, that, somewhere upon earth, there must be a divine institute, and only one, for the distribution of grace and the organization of true dogma ; and if the only question be, whether what we find at Lambeth, at Geneva, or at Eome, looks most like this long-lived and world-wide establishment, • — these " notes " serve readily enough to pick out the Catholic Church ; being, in fact, invented for this very purpose. As between different pretenders to the same ideal, they may be conclusive. But if we dismiss that ideal assumption, and look first at what is real ; if we relieve the Church of her rivals, and ask her to begin at the beginning, and speak to us from the primitive ground of humanity alone, — then we shall need other marks than these to convince us that there is nothing diviner upon earth than a spiritual corporation which can have a Borgia for its head, the councils of Ephesus and Constance for boards of justice, and the index and encyclicals as its expressions of pastoral wisdom. Nor is it difficult to say what the other tests should be to which the issue should be brought. In reasoning with the Catholic, we have always ibis advantage, that he admits a natural reason, a natural K 2 132 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. conscience, a natural religion ; nay, that the light which we have through them is a grace of the same Holy Spirit which makes his Church the depository of higher, but homogeneous gifts. When, then, from my prior ground of Nature, I approach the reputed enclosure of supernatural grace, what vestiges of its divine character shall I inevitably seek ? None other than I have learned already, and seen gleaming through the minds and characters of noble personalities, and from the answer of conscience known to be given me from above,, truth, justice, pity, purity, and self-sacrifice; and, in the reputed supernatural order, I can acknowledge nothing which contradicts these revelations of the natural order. If one and the same spirit is the living breath of both fields, there can be no change of moral atmosphere on crossing the boundary ; the light must be akin in both, refracted by the same media, and flinging the same tender tints, and differing only in clearness and intensity. By this criterion, then, of moral reason and conscience, let us try the validity of these " notes " of a divine institute, secured from human contami- nation. 1. The UNITY of the Church throughout all time owes its effect on the imagination to the contrast it seems to present with the endless variations of human opinion, especially in the regions of higher speculation. While the ambitious intellect has been visited by a thousand perishable dreams, and has constructed worlds out of the frostwork on its windows till the next sunshine melted them away; while philosophies and heresies without number have put forth their gaudy blossom in the morning, and withered before night, — the one thing that has been patient through it all,, and unchanged alike by fancy or by force, has been, it is said, the teaching and worship of the Church. The very creeds that are on the lips today, the very prayers that take up the yearnings of the heart, have been charged with the faith and piety of Ambrose and Chrysostom, of Benedict and St. Francis, of Alcuin and Bernard. This persistency, it is urged, belongs to the immutabihty of God, and shows that we are here within the compass of the divine thought, which has no shadow of turning ; not of the human, which is as the passing Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 133 cloud. "In the unity of the Church's doctrines," says Balmez, " pervading as it does all her instructions, and the number of great minds which this unity has always enclosed within her bosom, we find a phenomenon so extraordinary, that its equal cannot be found elsewhere, and that no effort of reason can explain it according to the natural order of human things. It is certainly not new in the history of the human mind for a doctrine, more or less reasonable, for a time to be professed by a certain number of learned and enhghtened men : this has been shown in schools of philosophy both ancient and modern. But for a creed to maintain itself for many ages by preserving the adhesion of men of learning of aU times and of all countries — of minds differing amongst each other on other points ; of men opposed in interests and divided by rivalries — is a phenomenon new, unique, and not to be found anywhere but in the Catholic Church. It has always been and still is the practice of the Church, while one in faith and doctrine, to teach unceasingly ; to excite discussion on all subjects ; to promote the study and examination of the foundations on which faith itself reposes; to scrutinize for this purpose the ancient languages, the monuments of the remotest times, the documents of history, the discoveries of scientific observation, the lessons of the highest and most analytical sciences ; and to present herself with a generous confidence in the great lyceums, where men replete with talents and knowledge concentrate, as in a focus, all that they have learned from their predecessors, and all that they themselves have collected : and nevertheless we see her always persevere with firmness in her faith and the unity of her doctrines ; we see her always surrounded by illustrious men, who, with their brows crowned with the laurels of a hundred literary contests, humble themselves, tranquil and serene, before her, without fear of dimming the brightness of the glory which surrounds their heads."* Before accepting the challenge to account for this magnifi- cent prodigy, we must first assure ourselves of its reality, * Protestantism and Catholicity compared. Written in Spanish by J. Balmez. Translated from the French by C. J. Hanford and E. Kershaw. iondon : 1819. P. 13. 1 34 A UTHORITY A R TIFICIA LL V MISPLA CED. [Book 1 1. and, if it exists, must measure its amount. That through the life of the Church there has persisted a certain common essence of sentiment, never lost amid secondary changes, and that to this common essence is due the allegiance of great and good minds to Christianity, is beyond doubt ; but with this central genius of the religion to identify the characteristics of the Eomish Church, as if they were its equivalent in perma- nence and power, is to contradict the whole course of Christian history. If Clement of Eome could be called to the scene of his labours, and placed before the high altar of St. Peter's to-day, do you think he would find himself at home, and know when to kneel, and when to bow, or even dimly guess the meaning of it all ? Or if, before Clement of Alexandria you could lay the Tridentine Decrees, would they so speak to his habitual thought and faith, that you could count on his signing them with joyful assent ? Notoriously there is neither dogma nor rite in the system of the Church, which has not a long history to tell of its growth into settled form. It took two centuries and a half to determine the relation of the Son of God to the Father ; nor will any one who is even slightly acquainted with the ante-Nicene literature affirm that Athanasius would have been content with the doctrinal professions of Justin Martyr, Irenseus, and TertuUian ; all of whom, in their " economy " of the divine nature, distinctly subordinated the Second Member of the Trinity to the First. For three centuries more, it remained unsettled whether Christ had more than one nature and one will ; the forces of opinion swaying to and fro for generations before a predomi- nance was won, and opposition driven from the field. How little concord had been reached respecting the Third Person of the Trinity, more than fifty years after the Council of Nicaea, Gregory Nazianzen tells us in these words : " Of our thoughtful men, some regard the Holy Spirit as an operation, some as a creature, some as God ; while others are at a loss to decide, seeing that Scripture determines nothing on the subject."* A year later, the bare phrase of the original Nicene Creed, " I believe in the Holy Ghost," was enriched at the Council of Constantinople by the added attributes, "the Lord, * Oratio 38 : De Spiritu Sancto. Gr. : 1555 (written about a.d. 380). Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 135 the Giver of life, that proceedeth from the Father ; that with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified ; that spake by the prophets ; " and not till the year 589,* and then only in Spain, was the recital introduced, that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Son as well as from the Father. Similarly, only for a far longer time, did the conception of Christ's redemption remain indeterminate and variable ; so that, even as late as the time of Anselm (who died 1109), it entered upon a new stadium of its history, and lost the characteristic features of its patristic prototype. In both doctrines, indeed, it was taught that Christ had paid the ransom which rescued men from the powers of hell ; but, when we ask io whom he had paid it, IrensBus and Origen, Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa, reply, that it was paid to the Devil, who, by his successful offer of temptations, had become absolute proprietor of men, but who forfeited his right by being himself tempted to put to death the sinless Son of God, and, having fallen into this trap, was obliged to sur- render his spoil, t * At the third synod of Toledo, held on the conversion of the Visigoth King Eecared from the Arian to the Catholic Church. Cone. omn. Coll., torn. xiii. p. 106, seq. t Irenaeus adversus Hser., V. xxi. 3. Grabe, 1702, p. 433. " Quoniam in initio homini suasit (i.e., Apostata) transgredi prseceptum Paotoris, ideo eum habuit in sua potestate." Comp. V. i. 1, p. 393. " Potens in omnibus Dei Verbum et non deficiens in sua, justitia, juste etiam adversus ipsam conversus est apostasiam, ea quse sunt sua redimens ab ea, non cum vi, quemadmodum ilia initio dominabatur nostri, ea quse non erant sua insatiabiliter rapiens. Bed secundum suadelam, quemadmodum decebat Deum suadentem et non vim inferentem, aecipere quae vellet, ut neque quod est justum confringeretur, neque antiqua plasmatic Dei deperiret." Orig. in Epist. ad Bom. ii. 13. Lommetzsch, torn. vi. p. 139. " ' Bedempti sumus non corruptibili pretio argenti et auro, sed pretioso sanguine ' Uni- geniti. Si ergo ' pretio empti ' sumus, ut etiam Paulus adstipulatur, ab aliquo sine dubio empti sumus cujus eramus servi, qui et pretium poposcit quod voluit, ut de potestate dimitteret quos tenebat. Tenebat autem nos Diabolus, cui distracti fueramus peccatis nostris. Poposcit ergo pretium nostrum sanguinem Christi, . . . qui tam pretiosus fuit ut solus pro omnium redemptione sufficeret." When the transaction is thus conceived as a recovery from Satan of a pos- , session to which he had a legal right, it is easy to understand the stress vfhich is laid on God's having managed it without "violation of justice; " i.e., in- stead of arbitrarily using the power of a superior, he proceeds juridically, and, keeping within the terms of the contract, did the Devil no wrong, taking no sinner out of his hands tUl he himself had gone beyond his bargain, and 136 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book li. Anselm, on the other hand, denying the Devil's claim altogether, transfers the debt to the righteousness of God, to which, he contends, the sacrifice of Calvary renders more than an equivalent for the sins of men.* While the later doctrine superseded the earlier, it could not secure its own position, but served as the starting-point of a new polemic, in which Abelard, Duns Scotus, and Thomas Aquinas appear on opposite sides. No part of the Church system carries more definite pre- tensions to a supernatural character than its group of sacra- ments. They are its instituted vehicles of grace, or securities from sin, intrusted to the charge of its consecrated ministers, and withheld from the people only at the peril of their salva- tion. Yet their number, their mode of administration, nay, their very idea, remained undetermined for more than a millennium ; and first attain to some exactitude in the hands of Peter Lombard. Even in the case of the earliest and least disputed of the Christian rites, a different construction was put upon its very essence after eight centuries of usage. made the mistake of passing death, upon the sinless. What these theolo- gians admire is, that, even to the Devil, God was just, and observed fair play, — a position very difierent from the modern thesis, that, in the incidence of penalty on the innocent in place of the guilty, there is no infringement of ideal justice. August, de lib. arbitr. iii. 10, ad init. " Servata est in peccato justitia Dei punientis. Nam et Ulud appensum est sequitatis examine, ut nee ipsius diaboli potestati negaretur homo, quern sibi male suadendo sub- jecerat. Iniqumn enim erat ut ei quern ceperat non dominaretur. Nee fieri uUo modo potest, ut Dei summi et veri perfecta justitia, quae usquequaque pertenditur, deserat etiam ordinandas ruinas peccantium. , . . Verbum Dei, Unicus Deifilius, Diabolum, — quem semper sub legibus suis habuit,— homine indutus etiam homini subjugavit, nihil ei extorquens violento dominatu, sed superaus eum lege justitise." The device by which Satan was caught, viz., the disguise of a divine and sinless nature under human form, is praised as a successful stratagem or trick. " ^Anararai Koi airos t& toO dvBparirov TrpoffKrujum," says Gregory of Nyssa, " 6 irpoanaTjjiras tov avBpajTou tu t^s ^Sof^s ScXeacr/iaTi." Orat. Catech. c. 26. Tom. iv. p. 84. Paris: Motell. 1638. "Oportuit hanc fraudem Diabolo fieri, ut susciperet corpus Dominus Jesus," says Ambrose, Expos, in Evang. Luc. lib. iv. ad Luke iv. 1. * Our Deus homo, ii. 20. " Quid misericordius intelligi valet, quam cum peocatori tormentis seternis damnato et unde se redimat non habenti Deus pater dicit, Accipe Unigenitum meum et da pro te ; et ipse filius, ToUe me et redime te ? Quid justius, quam ut ille cui datur pretiimi majus omni debito, si debito datur affectu, dimittat omne debitum ? " Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 137 Pope Zachary had declared (about 742) an invocation of the Trinity essential to its validity.* But, when the difficult task of converting and baptizing the Bulgarians had to be accom- plished, Pope Nicolas I. (a.d. 858-867) waived this condition, and pronounced baptism in the name of Christ to be sufficient.f In John of Damascus (in the first half of the eighth century) we find but the two Protestant sacraments ; in the Dionysian books, probably belonging to the same century, there are sis ; and in a similar enumeration a little later, Theodore Studita gives a sacramental place to monkish vows. These facts are but samples of endless variations, consti- tuting in their succession the very substance of ecclesiastical history. So undeniable are they, that, to cover them and take them up into its adoption, the Church has invented its theory of " development," according to which the ever-living oracle reserves its judgment upon a doctrine till the contra- dictions and controversies of men require that the truth should be rescued from peril, and planted among sacred things : so that there is, for each dogma, a period when it is emerging from its germ, and throwing out its life in tentative forms. And only when, at last, it has struggled into the explicit thought of Christendom, does the divine interpreter define the form in which it is to set. Thenceforth nothing but unity is found. If this be so, then the life of each doctrine is sharply divided into two periods by the verdict of the Church, lying freely open to doubt and variation prior to that verdict, but, from the moment when the judge has spoken, closed against the interrogating intellect, and registered among the conditions of salvation. Living in the former period, you may go wrong without offence; living in the latter, your heterodoxy is perdition : under the very same conditions of thought, your relations to God are inverted. The definitions * " Quicumque sine invocatione Trinitatis lotus fuisset saoramentum re- generationis non haberet. Quod omnibus verum est," etc. Epist. x. Concil. omn. CoUectio Regia. Paris : 1643. Tom. 17, p. 393. t " Hi profecto si in nomine sanotae Trinitatis, vel tantum in nomine Christi, sicut in Act. Apost. egimus, baptizati sunt (unum quippe idemque est, ut sanctus exponit Ambrosius) constat eos non esse denuo baptizandos." Responsa ad oonsulta Bulgar., c. 104. Sacros. Concil. Labb^., torn, viii, p. 548. 138 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. of the Church have thus the effect, not of simply declaring, but of constantly altering, the terms of acceptance with God : and if, being in error, you die the day before a Vatican decree, you may pass to the seats of the blessed ; if the day after, you join the Devil and his angels. And what becomes of the imposing unity of the faith, when thus interpreted? It is limited to the second and post- decretal period of every doctrine. It is not the permanent fact pervading the religious thought of the faithful, but only the ultimate ratio in which their divergences resolve them- selves ; not the continuous life of their waking mind, but the terminus ad quern they work and tend, and where at last they rest and sleep. It has been sometimes objected to the political economists, that they are so engaged in tracing to the last results the laws which they investigate, as to forget how long is the road thither, and how brief the pause there. They point to certain movements of profits towards the same level, to the equalization of wages by free distribution of labour, to the benefits of machinery in cheapening produc- tion, and enlarging the employment-fund, but, in contem- plating these futurities, hardly remember that they are in "no man's land;" that the actual life of generation after generation is spent in approximating towards them ; and that meanwhile the mixed conditions of a process of transi- tion may fill the present with struggle and suffering. A similar remark may be appUed to the Catholic Unity : it is an ideal tendency forever approached, but in no full sense historically reached. However many theological points have been professedly settled, every age that was not dead asleep has teemed with controversy ; and all that is intellectually great and morally noble in the past life of Christendom — its richest literature, its finest humanity, its truest saints — will be found in connection with the growth rather than the definition of faith ; not in the stationary, but in the moving periods. Still it will be saiid, " The post-decretal unity seems indis- putable : however energetic the previous strife, it sinks to perfect peace when judgment has once been given." This assertion it was difficult to test so long as the precise seat of Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 139 judicial authority in matters of doctrine was undefined ; for it was easy to discover that there were flaws in every decree which failed to bring the required unanimity, and to disavow it as not duly ratified. Now that the once floating and dis- tributed infallibility is concentrated on the popes, as their personal and official attribute, we have to look no farther for the divine unity of the Church than to their decisions, form- ally pronounced in the exercise of their teaching and magis- terial functions ; and the phenomenon which is claimed is neither more nor less than an entire consistency, pervading the whole series of Papal edicts on matters of faith and morals. That this claim is totally inadmissible will appear from a recital of a few well-attested facts. During the reign of Justinian (a.d. 527-565), both the Court and the Church were violently agitated by disputes respecting the union and the distinction of the divine and the human constituents in the person of Christ. The extremes were marked, on the one hand, by the name of ApoUinaris (Bishop of Laodicsea, about a.d. 362), who so intimately blended the two as to suppose them eternally one, and to believe that the Son of God, instead of being incarnate first on earth, already brought his humanity with him frora heaven ; and, on the other hand, by the name of Nestorius (Patriarch of Constantinople, a.d. 428), who so discriminated the two as to hold them in co-existence without sharing the same predicates, and, in particular, to deny that Mary could properly be called the mother of God (S'EOTOKbe). The opposite opinions not only separated individual Christians, but gave a party-colouring to the very map of the empire ; the Egyp- tians and their Palestinian neighbours, where chiefly the mystic and eremite life was fostered, inclining to the former, i.e., the monophysite doctrine ; while the patriarchate of Antioch in the East, and the greater part of the West, though not shrinking from the phrase "mother of God," sharply distinguished the two natures united in Christ. Through the usual tendency of such subtle disputes to win for themselves some human interest by concentrating the quarrel on personal representatives, the monophysites in Justinian's time set their hearts on condemning by authoritative anathema three HO AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Bookil. Syrian theologians, — Theodore of Mopsuestia, who had been the teacher of Nestorius ; Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrus, who had written against Cyril, the great champion of the other side ; and Ibas, presbyter in Edessa, who also had censured the doctrine, and questioned the consistency, of Cyril. It so happened, however, that, in the minutes of the fourth ecumenical council at Chalcedon (a.d. 451), there were resolu- tions on three articles (capitula)* recognizing the orthodoxy of those writers, and reinstating the two survivors of them in their ecclesiastical offices ; so that the proposal to condemn them was a proposal to rescind the acts of an authority regarded as supreme. In this controversy of the " three chapters," as it was called. Pope Vigilius was exposed, on the human side, to con- flicting influences. He owed his primacy to the Empress Theodora, and was pledged to her monophysite fanaticism. He was at the head of a clergy resolute to uphold the Council of Chalcedon, and was himself in sympathy with their zeal. He was in the power, and for six years was virtually the prisoner, at Constantinople, of the emperor, intent on repeal- ing the three articles without further disturbance to the authority of the council. Whether he had guidance enough, on the divine side, to steady him amid these deflecting forces, and hold him to the simple line of truth, we may estimate by the following facts. In the autumn of a.d. 540, he professed his adherence to the fourth as to the previous councils, and his concurrence in the anathema of the Eastern patriarch against the monophysites.t In a letter to the empress, written in 544, he avows himself a monophysite. t But when an imperial edict, in the same year, condemned the three articles of Chalcedon, and Vigilius was summoned to Con- stantinople to give it his support, he abides by his first pro- fession, and through 547 persists in his refusal. § Next year, however, he formally pronounces against them in a document, — his " Judicatum," — signed by himself and several bishops * Coucil. Gener. Ecel. Cath., torn. ii. Eom. : 1628. Act 8, 9, 10, p. 344, seqq. t Epp. 4, 5. Conoil. oran. Coll., torn. xi. p. 514, seqq. J Breviarium Liberati, cxxii. Conoil. omn. Coll., torn. xii. p. 490. § Sacrosanota Conoil. Labb^., torn. v. p. 323. Nota Sev. Bin. Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 141 assembled at Constantinople.* The obedience of the West being still unsecured, Justinian issued in 551 a second edict, renewing the condemnation of the three articles.! Vigilius now declines once more to join in the condemnation, not only when it proceeds from the emperor alone, but also when, in 553, it is confirmed by the fifth ecumenical council at Con- stantinople. Nay, he defends the capitula in a special mani- festo, his " Constitutum ad Imperatorem," bearing with his own the signatures of sixteen Western bishops, t Even this was not his last word. In the following year, he addressed to Eutychius, patriarch of Constantinople, a formal retractation,, declaring that he has been the instrument of Satanic delu- sion, but that now, delivered by Christ from all confusion of mind, he subscribes to the anathema he had so often resisted. § Whether it was the function of his infallibiUty to discover his delusion, or of his delusion to be sure of his infalUbility at last, the sequel does not help us to determine. No time was allowed him for further tergiversation ; released from Con- stantinople by his submission, he died on his journey back to Eome. Such variance from himself in a supreme spiritual guide is too startling to be often repeated in history. But variance of the popes from each other is a more frequent phenomenon,, and is equally fatal to claims of unity ; for, where a uniform infallibility is asserted of a perpetual dynasty of rulers, they virtually become a single undying personality, and it matters not whether the official acts which we compare proceed from many members or from one. The further progress of the controversy about the person of Christ soon made it apparent, that Eoman prelates might contradict and anathematize their predecessors. The decision that there were in Christ two natures, left out — disaffected and in the cold — large bodies of Oriental Christians whom the emperor wished to conciliate, and restore into Catholic communion; and, to meet their demand for a less divided Christ, it was suggested by the Emperor Heraclius, with approval on the part of the patriarchs. * Sacrosaneta Concil. Labbd., torn. v. p. 328, sejj. + Ibid. p. 683, seqq. t Ibid- P- 337. § Conoil. omn. Coll., torn, xii, p. 21, seqq. 142 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. of Constantinople (Sergius) and of Alexandria (Cyrus), that, if the two natures were placed at the disposal of one active principle, or will (ivitJjEta SimvSpiKri) , this dominant unity would satisfy the scruples of the alienated party, without compromising the decisions of the Catholics.* But the chasm opened hy nearly two centuries of controversy was too deep and wide to be bridged by a phrase ; and the proposal made in the interests of peace proved but the beginning of a fresh strife. It was in vain that an emperor and tvi^o patriarchs sustained it. A poor monk, Sophronius from Palestine, sufficed to upset it : he had only to raise the cry that the one luill was but one nature come back again, and the flame was soon rekindled which had driven the monophysites beyond the confines of the Church. True, he was kept silent for a while ; but, having become patriarch of Jerusalem in 634, he deemed it his duty to sound the note of alarm, and watch over the purity of doctrine given him to guard.f He addressed himself to Pope Honorius, in the hope of a judgment at once more authoritative and more favourable than Alexandria or Constantinople had yielded. But Honorius, while regretting the importation of a new ambiguity into an old dispute, gave the same verdict which the other metropolitans had given, and insisted that there could be only one will in Christ ; else there would be room for conflict between the wills divine and human. Twice were imperial edicts issued in this " monothelite " sense, —first by Heraclius in 638 ;} then by Constans, ten years . later, threatening terrible punishment against all the dis- obedient. Meanwhile, however, the temper of Eome was changed. The turn of the tide was just traceable in the im- mediate successor of Honorius ; but John the Fourth, who followed, pronounced his anathema against the doctrine of one will I in a synod of a.d. 641 ; and at the first Lateran Council, held by Martin the First in 649, the imperial edicts, and the patriarchs who had supported them, were solemnly condemned, and the doctrine of two wills decreed to be orthodox. II Such bold defiance of the civil power exposed * Conoil. omn. Coll., torn. xlv. p. 588. f Ibid. torn. xv. p. 86. ♦ Ibid. torn. xiv. p. 564 ; xv. p. 152 ; § Ibid. torn. xiv. p. 569, sejj., epist, 2, II Ibid. torn. XV. p, 260, segj. Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 143 this heroic ecclesiastic and his supporters to cruel sufferings, but with so little effect, that, in 680, a sixth ecumenical council had to be held at Constantinople for further delibera- tion ; and, under the guidance of Pope Agatho, the doctrine of two wills was defined and adopted ; the only resisting bishop was deposed ; and, among the past upholders of the opposite opinion, the Pope Honorius was anathematized by- name.* This denunciation of the Vicar of Christ was for- mally communicated by Leo the Second, who had succeeded to the Papacy ere the council closed, to the bishops of Spain ; \ and, in a letter to the Emperor Constantine, he speaks of Honoi-ius as one, " qui banc apostolicam ecclesiam non apostolicse traditionis doctrina lustravit, sed profana proditione immaculatam subvertere conatus est." 1 Yet Leo and Honorius were both infallible, and represented on earth the unbroken unity of divine truth. The questions of sin and grace, in which the genius of Augustine and the moral strength of Pelagius came into con- flict, had the effect, no less than the early Christology, of entangling the Church in contradictory decisions. Two African synods — held in a.d. 416 at Carthage and at Mileve, under the overshadowing influence of the Bishop of Hippo — decided that Pelagius, by allowing to man free power to do the will of God, infringed upon the province of divine grace, and rendered infant baptism superfluous ; and they memo- rialized Kome to put down such errors. § Innocent the First at once acceded to their request, and, in virtue of his apostolic authority, excommimicated Pelagius, his friend Caelestius, and all adherents to their doctrine. || This was one of the last acts of a pope who eminently represented the spirit of the Western Church. His successor, Zosimus, was a Greek ; and when, in a.d. 417, the well-reasoned counter-statement of the accused came up for examination, it impressed him so favourably, and so distinctly disclaimed the consequences fastened upon their teaching, that he declared himself satisfied, reported to the African Church in favour of their * Ooncil. omn. Coll., torn. xvi. p. 509. t Ibid. torn. xvli. p. G. X Ibid. torn. xvi. p. 586. § Ibid. torn. iv. pp. 357, 364, 375. II Ibid. torn. iv. pp. 60, 65. 144 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. orthodoxy, and added a warning against giving ear to the calumnies of ill-disposed men.* It was not to be expected that a keenly-agitated question should be set at rest by two conflicting Papal verdicts delivered within a few months of each other. The African party convened a new synod at Carthage, in 418, and carried nine articles of condemnation against their opponents ; and, not disdaining a more effective weapon, drew from the joint emperors, Honorius and Theo- dosius, an edict, visiting with exile and confiscation of goods, all adherents of the Pelagian heresy. Zosimus recoiled before this display of determination. He not only ceased to shield, the accused; he cut them off from the communion of the Church, anathematized their doctrines, and addressed a circular letter to all bishops, visiting Pelagianism with an express condemnation, which they were required to sign.f Perhaps, however, though at the cost of temporary incon- sistency, the Church struggled into unity on this matter at last ? On the contrary, eleven and twelve centuries later, the very same strife broke out anew in the University of Louvaui, and so divided, first the Augustinians and the Molinists, next the Jansenists and the Jesuits, that repeated appeal had to be made to Kome, fresh heresies to be created, fresh subscription enforced, without, after all, setting the dispute at rest. The history of ecclesiastical legislation with regard to the exercise of diabolical arts affords a striking practical refuta- tion of the pretension to persistent unity. If it affords, indeed, an argument less formally complete than the contra- dictory edicts hitherto cited, this is only because no Papal decree, so far as I am aware, has yet frankly repudiated the old demonology ; and though it has silently disappeared from the language of faith, and the processes which assumed it have passed into desuetude, the canons which treat of it are unrepealed ; so that, judged by its statutes, the infallible Church may be taken as still upholding the reality of sorcery. But in effect it has outlived that monstrous superstition, and,, through the lips of its scholars and intellectual guides, * Concil. omn. Coll., torn. iv. p. 394. t Ibid. p. 418, with passages there referred to. Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 145 speaks, like the rest of the world, with shame and compassion of the miseries which so poor a delusion inflicted on mankind. This is an entirely new state of mind ; and, if it bd right, it condemns as wrong a series of church-edicts extending over seven hundred years. The " Old Catholics," indeed, would persuade us that this modern spirit is only a return to the early doctrine of their communion. " For many centuries," they say, " the popular notions about diabolical agency, nocturnal meetings with demons, enchantments, and witch- craft, were viewed and treated as a folly inconsistent with Christian belief. Many councils directed that penance should be imposed on women addicted to this delusion."* They appeal, in proof, to an old canon found in the collection of Eegino, Abbot of Priim, at the beginning of the tenth century, and known by the mistaken name of the canon of Ancyra.t This document (which probably speaks the sentiment of the seventh century) certainly treats the popular belief in the arts of the magician and the diviner as a heathen superstition, which the servants of the Church are bound to root out from their diocese ; and requires them in their preaching to deliver the people from their delusion. But, unfortunately, this is not all. Far from teaching " the nonentity of witchcraft," the edict distinctly recognizes its reality and its supernatural character, only treats it as a devilish instrument of delusion, instead of a divine endowment of knowledge and power. * The Pope and 'the CoTinoil. By Janus : authorized translation from the German. P. 249. t libri duo de causis synodalibus et disoiplinis eoclesiasticis. C. 371. Wassersehleben : 1840. Bishop Burohard (who died in 1025) first gave the credit of this decree to the ante-Nicene synod held at Anoyra, in Galatia, A.D. 315, in his Magnum Decretorum Volumen, book x., where it is re- produced. The twenty-fourth canon of Ancyra, however, though on the same subject, is very different, simply enacting that " those who, in conformity with Gentile usages, resort to divination, or introduce persons into their houses with a view to devise incantations or means of expiation," are to incur certain penances ; and entering in no way into the doctrinal grounds of this prohibition. See Eouth's Eeliotuise Saorae, vol. iv. p. 126, for the original text. In the Acts of Pope Damasus, a decree of a Boman council (a.d. 382) is cited thus : " Omnes maleficos, saorilegos, augures, aliisve super- stitionibus vaoantes, excommunicandos esse. Peminas illas, quae a daemone illusse putant se noctu super animalia ferri, atque cum Herodiade ciroum- vagari, eadem sententia plectendas esse."— Concil. omn. Coll., torn. iii. p. 421. Ii 145 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. Some women, it says, having turned to Satan, have been misled by his deceptions, and pretend to have ridden on certain animals by night, in company with Holda and a number of women, over a great part of the earth, and to have been called away to their service. Unhappily they, have not been the only victims of superstition ; but countless numbers have been led by them to accept this delusion as reality, and to fall into the Pagan error of supposing that there is some other divine nature besides God. The clergy, therefore, must emphatically preach to their parishioners that all this is a false show, put into men's minds not by a divine being, but by an evil spirit ; viz., the Devil, who assumes the form of an angel of light. As soon as he has made himself master of Some woman by the force of superstition, he changes himself into forms of disguise, and occupies the soul he has captured with visions or dreams — now bright, now sad — of persons known or unknown, causing , all sorts of aberration ; the victim believing that all this is material fact, instead of mental phantasm. Hence it is to be publicly proclaimed that whoever beheves things of this kind loses the faith; and that whoever has not the right faith of God is none of his, but belongs to the Devil, in whom he beheves.* We have here, not a denial of the sorcerer's phenomena, but simply a transference of them (1) from the objective to the subjective field ; (2) from divine to diaboHc power. The doctrine is in harmony with the idea traditional in the Church through' all its previous centuries, — that the outside world of the unbaptized, the unconverted, the heathen, was under the dominion of Satan, from which the Christian theocracy alone afforded an ark of refuge. And, in the struggle between the two realms, the Pagan divinities and oracles and usages were regarded as the great hiding-places of disguise for the evil spirits, whence they put forth their superhuman power to beguile the souls of men. Against these snares there was no protection but the true faith, which enhsted omnipotence on the believer's side. " Dcemones fides fugat," it Vf&a said; and in every act of faith, like prayer to God, nay, in every symbol * Gratian : Decxet., p. ii. Caus. szvi. qu. v. c. 12. Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 147 of il, like the sign of the cross, or the uttered name of Christj there was power to drive the fiends away. Of every baptism, -exorcism of evil spirits formed a part, the response to which, on the part of the baptized, the abrenunciatio Diaboli ("I renounce the Devil and all his works "), remains to this day. Inasmuch as the polemic against Paganism consisted, not in denying the preternatural facts, incantations, oracles, possessions, atmospheric changes, and anomalies of animal life, nor in claiming them for the providence of God, but in snatching them from the pretended divinities, and making them over to the Devil and his tribe, the effect of this enlarge- ment of his domain inevitably was to intensify the popular belief in his agency, and horror at his manifestations. It is no wonder, therefore, that, in the thirteenth century, we find this belief so extended and confirmed, as not only to render an ignorant population excitable to frenzy, but to corrupt the very fountains of authority, and fill even Papal edicts with contemptible hallucinations. Yielding to a report from his inquisitors in Germany, Gregory IX. describes in a bull of the year 1233 the ceremony of initiation practised by certain heretics, on whose speedy punishment he insists. With evident good faith he relates how the novice pays the homage of a kiss on the hind-quarters to the Devil in the shape of a toad as large as a goose, a duck, or an oven, or of a black tom-cat lifting his tail for the salutation ; how, at certain stages of the proceeding, there appears, in place of these incarnations, a pallid man of mere skin and bone, with jet black eyes, whose kiss, cold as ice, drives the Catholic faith clear out of mind ; and, again, a figure, shaggy below, but, above the hips, brilliant as the sun ; how to this per- sonage the disciple is introduced by the president, as a devotee, a shred of his coat being offered in pledge, and, being accepted, is handed back to the charge of the master ; and how, by horrid rites,- these miscreants carry out their doctrine that the Devil will prove in the end to be the true God, and change places with his rival.* The proceedings of the * Epist. Greg. IX. Th. BipoU, Bullarium ord. Predicat. i. 52. The ooba- $^on of this letter is described by Labb^, Sacros. Concilia, torn. xi. pp. 478, 479. X, 2 148 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. inquisitor, Conrad of Marburg, founded on this bull, bear witness to the terrible earnest in which these statements were made. To each of the accused the alternative was offered, — to confess his kiss to the toad, the cat, and the pale man, and save his life ; or to protest his innocence, and be burned alive.* Neither scruples of humanity, nor the dawning light of a returning intellectual civilization, disturbed the resolute persistency of the Church in this superstition. Murmurs, indeed, were heard against the intrusion of Papal officers, selected from the regular orders, on the judicial functions of a foreign episcopacy, and on the national rights of French and German subjects ; but the pope, who could bear down such constitutional resistance, had no theological contradiction to expect. This is evident from the celebrated bull of Inno- cent YIII., issued at the end of a.d. 1484, for the express purpose of ratifying the authority of his inquisitors over places not expressly named in their first credentials, and giving them paramount jurisdiction over every place in Germany where they chose to open their court. The whole tension of the edict is directed against a local and political obstacle ; and, in its definition of the crime which the com- mission is appointed to try, there is still the quiet assumption of its reality, which could only be made in the face of its universal recognition. It complains of the extensive preva- lence of diabolical arts, which are employed to blight the fields and orchards, to prevent the increase of flocks and herds, and even the human race, to afflict life with strange maladies, to draw men into apostasy, and induce unheard-of crimes ; it attributes these to the direct agency of Satan ; it empowers the bearers of the pope's apostolic letters to visit such offences with fine, imprisonment, and other punishment ; and threatens all who obstruct them with the wrath of Almighty God and his blessed apostles Peter and Paul.f To aid in carrying out " See the Letter of the Archbishop of Mainz to the Pope, in Alberioi Chron. ann. 1233. t The bull, " Summis desiderantes affeotibus," is given in Hauber's Biblio- theoa, acta et scripta magiqa : 36 Stuck 1739-1745. St. I., p. 1, seq(i. See, also, Gustav Boskoff's ©esohichte des Teufels : book ii. p. 222. Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 149 this edict, the inquisitors, Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, published in 1487 their " Malleus Maleiicarum," or "Witches' Hammer," under the patent of the Emperor Maximilian and the sanction of the pope, — a complete hand- book of sorcery, which for upwards of two centuries guided the proceedings in such cases, and had almost the force of law. It affirms the reality of magic, and the origin of its power in a personal compact with the Devil, of monstrous progeny from licentious relations with demons, of an influence of the heavenly bodies on the moral actions of men, of the magician's ability to bewitch people with preternatural hate or love. Betraying a singular scruple against the infliction of capital punishment without confession of the crime, it gives instructions for extorting confession on the rack ; previous to which, however, it is desirable to get a holy angel to cancel the Devil's control over his 'wctim, otherwise he will make her insensible to pain : and no terror you can apply will make her speak. The decree which called this manual into existence, and appears as its preface, applied to Upper Ger- many alone ; but succeeding popes, Julius 11., Alexander VI., Leo X., Adrian V.,* by the issue of similar edicts, drew land after land within the " magic circle," with such effect, that in the diocese of Como alone, there were, during the earUer part of the sixteenth century, no fewer, on an average, than a thousand trials, and a hundred executions at the stake, t So far, it must be confessed, the Church, in its teaching and discipline on this matter, had not forfeited its unity ; nor can we say that there is more than a difference of degree between the earliest doctrine of demoniacal possession, and the epidemic superstition which lighted up the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries with fires of human sacrifice. But how is it that no voice is longer raised on behalf of the infallible edicts which scattered over Europe the torches to kindle those fires ? that the only plea for them now urged is, that the barbarism of the. age, not the rule of the Church, is * This last, a fair sample of the whole, may be seen in Coneil. onm. Coll., torn, xxxiv. p. 588. + Barthol. de Spina, de Strigibus, c. 12. I so A UTHORITY ARTIFICIALL Y ■ MISPLA CED. [Bppk lU responsible for them, and created the same results in the. communities born of the Eeformation? Such a defence is- simply an echo of the indictment, surrendering the Church to- the pressure of barbarism, and the illusions of idolatry, ■within the very province which it claims for legislation, and so far waiving its pretensions to supernatural insight. Yet no higher ground of justification can be taken in consistency with recent history. Not only have the prosecutions for sorcery gradually disappeared, — a fact which might be ex- plained by the resistance of princes, and the " usurpations " of the civil courts, — ^but from the Inquisition itself we have a. memorable confession, bearing date 1657, that its commis- sioned judges had long been guilty of irregular procedure and unwarrantable use of the torture-chamber, to the sacrifice of many innocent lives. The murdered victims of the authority which cannot err were beyond the reach of this apology ; but. it introduced restraints and alleviations, which, enforced as they were by the altered spirit of the times, rapidly rendered harmless the tribunals so long the terror of Europe. Catholic theologians now speak, like other men, with habitual con- tempt of the belief in sorcery. The perplexing question is how this state of mind can be pieced on to the decrees of Gregory and Innocent, so as to leave unharmed the sublime " unity " of the faith in all ages ? In the year 1616 Pope Paul V., with the Congregation of the Index, condemned as " false, and totally opposed to the Divine Scriptures," the work of Copernicus, " De Eevolution- ibus Orbium," which achieved for all time the miracle of Joshua, " Sun, stand thou still ! " In 1818 Pope Pius VII., in full consistory, repealed the condemnation. In the interval, the Holy Office prosecuted and sentenced Gahleo, in 1633, for suspected adherence to the Copernican heresy ; and in 1741 the Catholic editors of Newton's "Principia" apologized for that work in these words : " Newton, in this book, assumes- the hypothesis of the motion of the earth ; and the author's system could not be expounded except on the same hypothesis. Hence we have been obliged to assume a character other than our own ; biit we declare our obedienise to the decree of the supreme pontiffs against the motion of the earth." In the-- Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 151 present day, Catholics are Copernicans, like other people ; and what was heresy once is heresy no more. How to embrace both judgments within the limits of infallibility, and resolve the contradiction into a higher unity, might puzzle even a Hegelian, but has not proved, till very lately, beyond the resources of Ultramontane advocacy. The divine exemption from error affects only decisions ex caihed/ra; and though these are not necessarily bulls issued directly by the Pope, but may be resolutions of a Eoman " congregation," they must, in that case, fulfil two conditions, — they must receive the approval of the Holy Father ; and they must be published by his express desire. Now, the second of these conditions, we are assured, fails in the decrees of 1616 and 1633 ; and the latter cannot be shown to satisfy either condition.* -Under permission of this ingenious but precarious argunient, the condemnation of Galileo was set down in 1866 among the human mistakes of a pontifical congregation. But in 1867, fresh extracts from the minutes of Galileo's trial, preserved in the archives of the Inquisition, were published by M. Henri de I'Epinois, which distinctly show, both that the proceedings simply carried out the instructions of the Pope, and that, bj- his direct command, copies of the sentence were forwarded^ " that these things may become universally known " to all apostolic nuncios, and all inquisitors into heretical pravity, to be publicly read in solemn assembly, in presence of the prin- cipal professors of the mathematical art.-f* Thus the human mistake is at once metamorphosed into a divine decree ; and, treated as a pretender yesterday, is on the throne of supreme authority to-day. As the unity of the Church cannot be restored by sacrificing the inquisitors of Paul V., perhaps some flaw may be looked up in the repealing act of Pius VII. ; and everything may be set right by putting the sun in motion again, and re-enacting the Ptolemaic system.. Neither, then, in the stability of her doctrines, nor in the * See the Authority of Doctrinal Decisions, which are not Definitions of Faith. By WUliain George Ward, D.Ph. Essay viii., the Case of Galileo, 1866. t See, for an interesting aoooimt of this recent and important discovery, Mr. Sedley Taylor's paper in MacmiUan's Magazine, December, 1873 : Galileo and Papal Infallibility. The statements in the text are from this essay. 152 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. consistency of her tribunals, does the Church give evidence of any immunity from the laws of ordinary growth and change. Nor, even if we could shut our eyes to the fluctuations of opinion, and look only at the cluster of beliefs which her artificers have held together by screws and holdfasts, till little else but the rivets remain, should we see in this residuary orthodoxy anything persuasively divine either in its source or in its character. How has it arisen ? Have we here a real unity among minds free to act, and yet restrained from aber- ration by the inner strength of divine conviction ? Or is it an illusory unity, produced by the simple process of expelling all variety ? It is notorious that the whole history of Christ- endom is darkened by controversies, at once fierce and tedious, ending always in cutting off the outvoted minority as a withered branch, and proclaiming the triumphant majority, which was left in possession, to be the only true Church. Even, therefore, if this invariability held good (and no perver- sion of history can carry it back into the first two centuries), it would bear witness, not to the immanent action of the Divine Spirit, but to the oppressive weight of human tyranny. What, indeed, is it but that very attribute of stationariness, which, in all other historical fields, we treat as the sure mark of a kingdom of darkness, not of a realm of supernatural light ? Everywhere else, in China, for example, or in ancient Egypt (as it has been erroneously imagined), the fact that centuries teach nothing, and change nothing ; that thought and belief at the end of fifty generations are just where they were at the beginning ; that they have no more to say to God or man in an old world than in a new, — -is justly regarded as an oppro- brium and sign of inward poverty ; the proof of a dead con- servatism, that wraps in a napkin the mere shrivelled form of a divine life, and confounds the perpetuity of its mummy with immortal being. Why should we attribute the highest divinity to a crystallized church, and the lowest humanity to a crystallized civUizatiori ? 2. No one can desire to deny the claim of sanctity for the Catholic Church, if he have studied its influence through dark and troubled ages, and on a long train of devout and devoted minds. That Church has proved its capacity to defy every Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 153 injustice except its own, to pity every suffering needless to itself, to banish every darkness deeper than the cloister-shade. It has worked out an ideal of character — and approached it in many high examples — truly original as compared with the standard of Pagan times, and marked, without sacrifice of force, by a depth and sweetness and patience of self-surrender never known before. But these are Catholic phenomena only because they are Christian. They have reappeared in all the great sections of divided Christendom : they are a growth from the new piety and tender humanity which have been the response of the heart, wherever the eye of Christ has fixed its look. "Who dares to claim these as marking an ecclesiastical monopoly of supernatural grace ? To make good his case, he must prove that they specially pervade the whole organism, and present the proportions of the holy and the unholy far otherwise than we find them in the world without. This surely is the least that can be looked for in that " mystical body " which is " permanently united with the Holy Ghost, the Sanctifier." Yet who can say that the Church has less to deplore within her pale that is offensive to her saints than in society around ? License has seldom been carried farther than by some of the " holy fathers " on the throne of Peter. If by sanctity be meant some occult quality which magically appeals to the favour of God, it is of no avail in evidence, being itself out of sight. A "note " that is invisible is a con- tradiction and a nonentity. If the word denote self-dedication to a perfect Moral Will, this interior state of mind will manifest itself in an habitual elevation of aim, purity of life, disinterestedness of work, quickness of compassion, and balanced loyalty to truth and love, legible to every eye familiar with the language of character. When I pass through Church historjr in search of these, I doubtless find them, but in such sparse and partial gleams from a wilderness of passion and of wrong, that secular history itself, though less inspiring in its supreme heights, is less dreary on its ordinary levels, and less dreadful in its darker depths. There has been no exemption within the sacred precincts from the vices and crimes which deform all human society. For ages, Pagan and Christian, it seemed the fate of Eome to 1 54 A UTHORITY AR TTFICIALL Y M ISP LA CED. [Book 1 1. be the tragic theatre of the world ; but the darkest sins of the decHning empire are paralleled by the revolting crimes of an ascendant Papacy. Though the Holy Father, Eodrigo Borgia,, and his son Csesar, the cardinal, were fortunate enough to have no Tacitus to tell their story, the disgust and horror of man- kind have done the work of history, and saved from oblivion a picture of flagitiousness, treachery, rapine, and murder, un- surpassed in the records of guilt. A pope who gained the apostolic succession by bribery, and who quitted it by the poison-cup which he had mingled for another ; who dissolved his daughter's marriage that he might wed her to a prince ; who made his son a cardinal in boyhood, and, to do so, fathered him on the husband he had wronged ; who allied that son with the Orsini faction, and, when the end was gained; screened him in the betrayal and murder of its chief ; who, while preaching a crusade against Bajazet the Turk, bargained with him to murder his rival brother Djem, then prisoner at Eome, and won the poisoner's price, — ^is certainly a singular abode of the Holy Ghost, likely to radiate sbmething other than the beauty of " sanctity " upon an obedient world. The orgies of the palace, the assassinations in the street, the swarm of flourishing informers, the sale of justice, of divorce, of spiritual offices and honours, turned the holy seat into an asylum of concupiscence and passion, and startled men into the belief that Antichrist was come. " Eoma, gentium refu- gium, et arx populorum omnibus saeculis, nobilis jam carnifi- cina erat." " In urbe gladiatofum nunquam licentia major, nunquam populo Eomano libertas minor."* Can we say that this corruption was new and rare, — a transient stain on the white robe of a saintly Church ? Alas, the long-estabhshed " nepotism " of the popes ; the legislation of the coimcils of the previous centuries in restraint of a dissolute priesthood; the denunciations of Wicliff ; the confessions of iEneas Silviu«, himself a vicar of Christ, who openly treats the most ordinary rules of chastity as counsels of perfection, meant only for exceptional men jt the popular satires of a dawning literature, * Eaphaelis Maffsei Volaterrani Commentaria Urbana : Anthropologia, lib. xxii. Eom. : 1506. t See his letter to his father, announcing the birth of a natural son, quoted by Gieseler, Eool. Hist. div. v. c. 2, § 138, note 9. Cbap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 155 —all bear terrible witness to a protracted and deep-seated moral putrefaction. Can we say tbat it was local, a lingering curse on the ancient capital of Paganism, still doomed to be the colluvies gentium ? More than a century before, the experi- ment of removal had been enforced by political conflict ; and of the new court at Avignon we have, in Petrarch's Letters, the report of an eye-witness, who calls it the third Babylon, the shameless abode of cruelty, avarice/ and lust,* where honour, innocence, and piety are of no avail against gold ; and heaven and Christ themselves are put up to sale. Is a distinction drawn between the private character and the official functions of the successors of Peter ? " Sanctity " is an attribute which admits of no such distinction : it belongs to the indivisible will or personality ; it is a tincture of reverence in the con- science, of sweetness in the affections, of quietude in the sacrifice of self ; and to say that a man who is licentious in conduct, and perfidious in human engagements, can be holy in all public relations, is an insult to the primary apprehen- sions of right. Besides, draw the line where you will, it will not serve you here. If, as there is reason to believe, John XXIII. poisoned his predecessor, Alexander V., to secure his apostolic chair ; and, as is well known, Paul II. and Alexander VI. granted dispensations for robbery and fraud, on payment of money to a crusade ; and Clement V. gave to King John of France and his queen absolution, through their confessor, for the breach of any oaths and engagements, past and future, which it might not be convenient to them to keep ; and Innocent III. declared worthy of death all who had a scruple against taking an oath ; and Boniface IX., as though he re- presented Simon Magus, instead of Peter, established the sale of benefices into an organized rapacity, and took money from all candidates alike, the rejected as well as the admitted, — are these violations of the most sacred human obligations, com- mitted on the steps, or from the very seat, of the Papal throne,, private or public ? Do they still leave the epithet " holy " applicable, without profanation, to their perpetrators ? If not, and if, for several centuries, examples like these infected the Church through Western Christendom with revolting moral * See the Liber sine Titulo, Epist. 10. iS6 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. disease, how can any instructed man prefer, without a blush, the claim of " sanctity " for an institution marked by such experience ? If we are asked to try the case, not at the headquarters of the system, but by reference to the moral ideal which, in her most characteristic and highest examples, the Church has offered to mankind, we can admit the claim only under weighty reservations. The Catholic training has certainly fixed in the mind of Europe a conception of perfect character in many respects purer, larger, deeper, than was present to the ancient world ; has elevated duty and affection by making them part of the confidence between the soul and God ; and, for hardi- hood of resolve against the ills of life, has substituted a patience, sympathy, and trust, inwardly quieter, but infinitely stronger. But then, all ecclesiastical honour for this type of character is contingent on its co-existence with orthodox belief, in the suspected absence of which the attitude is reversed at once, and the half-canonized disciple becomes the excommuni- cated. The Church has made many saints, but has also murdered not a few. Do you say that she is sacred for making so pure an ideal, and deny that she is profane for marring it ? In his eighteen years of of&ce. Cardinal Thomas de Torquemada had burned alive, it is computed, eighty-eight hundred victims, and punished ninety thousand in various ways,* not for offences against the moral law, or crimes against society, but for thoughts of their own about religion, which only God, and not the pope, had allowed ; or for being Jews that would not be apostates ; or for refusing on the rack to confess what they had never done. "When this man had carried in Spain his terrible resolve to clear the land of infidels, and procured a royal edict requiring the whole Jewish popu- lation (not less than three hundred thousand) to vacate the country within four months, leaving all their gold and silver behind, Isaak Abarbanel, gainmg audience of Ferdinand and Isabella, pleaded for his people with expostulation so pathetic, and offers so profuse, that the royal will, softened by compas- * See, for tlie grounds of this statement, Histoire Critique de I'lnquisition d'Espagne. Par D. Jean Antoine Plorente. Paris, 1818. Tom. iv. pp. 251, 252. Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 157 sion and cupidity, was on the point of giving way ; but, with his usual instinct for critical moments, the great inquisitor appeared, and with lifted crucifix exclaimed, " Judas of old, for thirty pieces of silver, betrayed his Lord ; and now, again, your majesties are ready to sell him for thirty thousand pieces of gold. Here he is ! take him, and sell him quickly ! " That voice, touching the springs of a true shame, brought the false fanaticism back. The bribe was flung away, and with it the relenting pity too ; and, ere the summer was over, Spain had lost the best element of her population, and added new tradi- tions of heroism and hatred to the life of a people whose history is little else than a memory of exiles.* In estimating the ecclesiastical ethics, are we to give credit for the saints, without deduction for the inquisitors ? Shall we celebrate the graces of humility, tenderness, and self-devotion in the one, and not recoil from the pride, the iojustice, the iuhumanity, of the other ? It is vain to tell me how conscientious these persecutors were. There lies the very charge I make against the Church, — that it has put into the conscience what has no business to be there ; has treated error of thought as if it were unfaithfulness of will ; and misguided the affections of men by rendering it possible for them to hate what is most lovable, and honour, if not love, what is most hateful. The whole conception of an " orthodoxy " indispensable to the security of men's divine relations — a conception which has had a regulative influence through all ecclesiastical history — is an ethical monstrosity, in the presence of which no philosophy of duty is possible, and every moral ideal must be dwarfed or deformed. Under its oppressive tyranny, the intellectual virtues, -which have their exercise in the effort to see and say things as they are, — candour, sincerity, openness to light, — have withered away ; and in their place has been formed that peculiar temper — dogmatic in assertion, unjust in criticism, evasive in reply — which has always clung to the clerical order, and left the simple love of truth as the adornment, almost ex- clusively, of lay life. Nay, this desolating notion has poisoned the social affections of men with rankling suspicions, and * See I. M. host's Oeschichte der Israeliteu seit der Zeit der Maccabaer. Th. vii. c. X. Berlin, 1827. iS8 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book ii. spread through their communities a system of espionage. Even in ages when heresy was visited with torture and death, the edicts of councils and popes have invited children to detect and report the swerving faith of their parents, sisters to lay traps for brothers, and friend to betray friend. The " robe of righteousness " falls of ijielf from the form, however stately, of a Power which can thus consecrate the most odious crimes as favourite varieties of goodness. The creation of artificial sins does not stop with the guardianship of doctrine, but extends to the field of practical concerns. The rising commerce of Southern Europe, espec- ially of Genoa and Venice, with the consequent extension of monetary transactions, in the twelfth and following centuries, brought up for settlement new problems of contract and ■exchange, which the supernatural guides of . morals were ex- pected to solve. All their decisions proceeded on the assump- tion that it was contrary to the divine law to charge or to pay anything for the use of money ; and that, unless a loan as returned was identical in amount with the loan as received, there was robbery or fraud in the transaction. Again and again,* by Alexander III., by Urban III., by Innocent III., was this doctrine laid down; and violations of it in practice threatened with excommunication ; and in the sixteenth cen- tury it was made the plea for prohibiting all mercantile partnerships which guaranteed to the member of a firm any fixed return upon his capital, and all negotiation of bills of ■exchange, except the final presentation for payment to the house addressed. The principle was reaffirmed and explicitly ■defined by Benedict XIV., in five canons, proruulgated in 1745 ; and in 1793 the Bishop of Quebec was advised by the Propa- ganda, that guardians of children must not put out to loan, * As early even as the Coimoil of Illibeiis, in Spain, held before the Council ■oi Nice, we find legislation against "usury." The t'wentieth resolution of that Council, while visiting the offence with excommunication, treats it more sharply in a clergyman than in a layman : "Si quis clericorum detectus fuerit usuras accipere, placuit eum degradari, et abstineri. Si quis etiam laious accepisse probatur usuras; et promiserit, cprreotus jam, se cessaturum, nee ulterius exaoturum ; placuit ei veniam tribui. Si vero in ea iniquitate duraverit, ab ecclesia esse projiciendUm."— Eduth's Belig. Sao. vol. iv. p. 263. .... Chap. I.] ■ THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 159 with interest, the trust fund committed to their charge.* A rule which made all banking business a breach of " commuta- tive justice " and " the divine law " could not be expected to keep its ground in the economy of modern Europe ; and, since the beginning of the present century, the Eoman authorities, with more prudence than candour, have evaded the problems of this nature which have been submitted to them ; contenting themselves with a simple reference to! the existing canons, or recommending that conscience should not be disturbed. Nay, through the whole period of this prohibitory legislation, no royal or mercantile house was more deeply implicated than the Papacy itself in money-dealings with the capitalists of Italy, who certainly did not come to the rehef of the Eoman indebtedness, or the support of the Eoman profusion, without security for adequate returns. Brokers and lenders, who else- where fell under malediction as the " mammon of unrighteous- ness," brought their treasure and their transactions to Eome or Avignon, and found themselves in a paradise of privilege and peace. Were we permitted to treat these errors and defects as parts of a simply human history, they would take their natural place in the gradual ascent of European society into clearer light and higher conscience, and would bear favourable witness to a religion that could work itself free of them, and join in the sentence which condemns them ; but when they appear as attributes of a divine institute, included in the unchangeable teachings of the Holy Ghost, as a deliverance of the inspired custodian of faith and morals, they so wrap up Christianity in •obscurantism, and weight it with wrong, that its beauty is hid, its progressive hfe impeded, and its claim to supernatural sanctity rendered totally inadmissible. Even in " The Lives of the Saints " as personal portraits alone, judged without any reference to doctrinal mistake, we have little more than a great conception spoiled, a noble instrument of moral educa- tion applied to the nurture of childish tastes and feeble super- stitions, instead of to the culture of a manly reverence and a t See, for a good summary of the facts, Papal Infallibility and Perseou- Jtion, Papal Infallibility and Usury. By an English Catholic. London,'. 1870. ,,.... i6o AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. guiding love. " Consider," says a distinguished Ultramontane, " the saints of the Church. How singularly like to each other ! how singularly unlike to all besides ! It is a part of Catholic doctrine, that the Church is actually infallible in proposing these holy beings to the love and reverence of the faithful. Moreover, the practice is earnestly inculcated on every Catholic, of studying carefully their acts and lives, as the one highest and truest exhibition of Christianity, as presenting the one type of character most acceptable to God, — ^the type of character by approximating to which, and in no other way, can men become better Christians."* No more winning hope can be held out to a devout mind than that of being thus drawn towards God through the example and com- munion of those who are nearest to him; but, among the many collapses that await a high-wrought religious imagina- tion, there is hardly a greater descent than from the saint of pure thought to the saint of the calendar. The loss of clear biographical interest in a legendary tissue of trivial miracles and visions, the stiff and narrow conception of character, the exaggeration of ascetic severities and spiritual contemplations, the strained opposition between the secular aijd the divine life, produce an indescribable disappointment in the reader of the Catholic hagiology, giving him no living friend to his spirit, but leaving him in the presence of something between the doll and the idol. So, at least, it is with the mass of such literature. And when we turn to the greater figures of authentic history, now glorified with the beatific crown, we might feel many a doubt, were not the award infallible, whether it sits well on the head that wears it, and would not now and then be more becoming on modest but heretic brows, which the canonized persecutor bound with thorns of agony. If, in our dreams of a perfection truly holy, we might follow the Christlike image, we might, perhaps, desire for the historical niches of our sanctuary a series of saints less ill- humoured than Jerome, less ferocious than Cyril, less arro- gant than Becket, less jealous than Bernard. Many an unpretending human biography, telling its story in the dialect * The Authority o£ "Doctrinal Decisions which are not Definitions. By William George Ward, D.Ph., 1866. P. 100. Chap. I.] THE CA THOLICS AND THE CHURCH. i6i of nature, rather than of grace, has spoken to the heart of higher things, and stirred the conscience to nobler aims, than the wonderful tales of monks and martyrs, whose very dust and reUcs are said to dispel the powers of Ul. These many vestiges of moral imperfection compel ' us to feel that we here stand in a mixed and human scene ; nor can we find, as we look round, any simply' divine enclosure, that we should take the sandals from our feet, and say, " This is the house of God : this is the very gate of heaven." 3. By the catholicity, or universality, of the Church is meant, "not mere extension, but also identity in all places."* It is therefore the same character, relatively to a wide area, which is expressed by the word unity, relatively to long dura- tion, and must be estimated by similar methods. The grand rule of Consensus — ■" Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus" — is divided by these two notes; the "semper" constituting unity; the "ubique," Catholicity; the "ab ©mhibus," resuming both. What is this, we are asked, which in every latitude, and all round the world, has a persistency attaching to nothing human, — not even to the features and colour of men's bodies, much less to the expression of their inner nature ? No language, no polity, no code, no schemes of thought, no rules of art, can bear travelling and coloniza- tion without rapid change of type. Nor among the elements of civilization does rehgion in itself enjoy any immunity from this general rule. But here is a system, which, from Scandi- navia to the Cape, from the St. Lawrence to the Colorado, preserves its character intact, — which is steady through vary- ing nationalities, — which neither freezes in arctic snows, nor dissolves in tropic heats, — which, through the Babel of human tongues, speaks ever the same venerable words, and holds forth the same visible symbols, embodying an unalterable faith, and enforcing on the conscience an inflexible moral law ; so that the miracle of Pentecost might any day virtually repeat itself ; and visitors from every clime, meeting under any sacred roof, would find themselves in no strange sanctuary, but would hear proclaimed, in tones they can interpret as their * The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost. By Henry Edward, Arch- bishop of Westminster (Cardinal Maiming). 2nd ed., 1866. P. 69. M i62 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. own, " the wonderful works of God." Whence can this marvel of steadfastness proceed, but from the presence of objective truth, and the guardianship of the divine Spirit ? Whatever of argument there may be in this appeal to the imagination admits of a very simple reply. The truth of God, it is urged, is self-consistent and uniform. Yes. But not everything which is self-consistent and uniform can claim to be the truth of God ; other causes than the presence of the divine element may arrest the growth of variations. There is a monotony in blindness, as well as in perfect sight ; where the sun never rises, as where it never sets : and whether the sameness is that of abiding datrkness, or of certain light, can be judged only by the conditions which attend it. If it is found among minds and wills freely played upon by the influences which modify thought and character, their con- currence affords a fair presumption of their having fallen into harmony with the reality of things ; but if it appear only within a fence of severe restraints, where an audacious spiritual power has secured a universal abjectness, the sub- jective uniformity stands in no relation to objective truth. When observers East and West, gazing through perfect instruments on both hemispheres, bring in the same report of successive constellations seen at differing hours, it is because one movement carries, and one heaven overarches all ; but when blindfolded men are led about by a skilled practitioner, and made to tell the visions they behold, their agreement only proves that they stand in the same relation to their prompter, and, because they see nothing, can see anything that he desires. Error, you say, is various, while truth is one. Yes ; but passive obedience is something short of either, and keeps men standing, where, if they do not wander, it is only because they cannot move. You must first let them be free to lose themselves on the open plain, and seek the infinite horizon v/herever any heavenly glow may seem to call ; and if then you find them all moving along the same radius, with eye intent on the same meridian, and face ashine with the same beams, you may well be sure that the light of some divine reality is there, and intersects the trackless wilds with a true pilgrim'? road. But, till then, cease to " talk so exceeding Chap. 1.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 163 proudly " of a feature, ■which, with equal reason, every Buddh- ist and even every Freemason may make his boast. It would affect us strangely did we find a vast and scattered society, consisting wholly of one-eyed people ; but the wonder would vanish, if we learned that it was a rule to put out the other eye during the novitiate, and to remove out of the way all who objected to the operation. Such a monocular pheno- menon is the orthodoxy of the Church. It has got its one old picture of divine things, as seen through a single highly chro- matic lens, and represented by the hand of a rude ^rt ; and resolutely refusing to reproduce it with the slightest variation, or to look through a second organ, it simply drives off all persons who are endowed with stereoscopic vision, and have gained a little insight into the deeper perspective of things. In a result thus brought about, there is nothing wonderful, except the infatuation which prodiices and adinires it. That "there are none but true sheep under the chief Shepherd means only that every goat is turned out of the fold. In the uniformity which is claimed, there would be some- ihing of diviner look, had it been effected by prevention, instead of by penalty and expulsion. Had the Apostolate at Eome been able to say, " See the concord that reigns and ■ever has reigned within the circuit of my charge ; no disturb- ing doubts, no conflicting thoughts, no insurgent wills, awaken any trouble here : the certainty my children need, I am able "to afford ; the truth for which they begin to sigh, I administer betimes ; the usages and discipline their wants demand, I prescribe in season, ere a cry is raised," — this indeed would well become an organ of spiritual wisdom, intrusted with the ■spiritual guidance of mankind. Instead of this, the Church has never succeeded in maintaining peace and concurrence within her precincts. Hei: discipline has been exercised, not in warding off, but in punishing and cutting out, variations. The initiative has always been taken, not by herself, but by •errors and heresies within her bounds that compelled her to speak ; and it is not too much to say that every council has been called, every Papal edict issued, because Catholicity had Already, been lost. And the remedy was always the same, — a long struggle of parties for ascendency, ending in a short and M 2 I64 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. sharp amputation of the weaker. So frequently has this process been renewed,' and so brief have been the intervening terms of rest, that, prior to the last century, scarcely can a half-century be named during which the Church has not had a divided hfe on some question ultimately settled by authori- tative definition. To give instances is little else than to set down the heads of all ecclesiastical history, from the quarto- deciman controversy of Polycarp and Anicetus at Eome, a.d. 160, which left Asia Minor and Italy with different Easter- usages, to the condemnation of Fenelon's " Maximes des Saints," in 1699. Heresy, it must be remembered, is a pro- duct of the Church, and, ere it could be excommunicated, has been in communion, often with such tenacity as to leave it doubtful for a whole generation what hand would carry off the banner of orthodoxy. The great ecclesiastical heroes won all their victories over fellow-disciples, — Tertullian over Praxias, Athanasius over Arius, Augustine over Pelagius, Cyril over Nestorius, Hincmar over Gottschalk : the battle-ground was within the sacred enclosure, and its discordant din mingled with the hymns of worshippers. A visitor to Phrygia in the latter half of the second century would hear nothing but of the Paraclete and the millennium ; returning to Eome, he finds that type of Christianity condemned. Crossing to the schools of Alexandria, he listens to a mystic doctrine of Christ's divine nature, in which his human history seems to melt into a bright cloud ; removing to Antioch, he recovers the humanity again, and hears the clearest lessons drawn from the sacred life in Palestine ; but is put off with only a poor account of the higher essence of the Son of God. A lapsed Christian of the third century, who in Spain would be driven from ' the church-door, had only to talie ship for Italy to find entrance into communion again. The long strife between the Latin and the Gothic theology ; the yet longer between Eome and Constantinople ; the swaying to and fro of the eucharistic doctrine for two centuries, till, by the condemnation of Berengar in 1050, transubstantiation won its place; the Albigensian crusade ; the rival schools of Scotus and Aquinas ; the polemic passages about the immaculate conception, about, indulgences for the dead, about the seat of supreme ecclesiastic Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 165 power ; the divisions on grace and free will, first between Dominicans and Molinists, then between Jesuits and ■ Jansen- ists, — all these things must be forgotten before the claim of Catholic concurrence can be pressed with any avail in evidence of an internal peace supernaturally secured. Nay, what more do we require for the just estimate of this claim than the spectacle of the ancient Church in Europe since the Vatican council of 1870 ? Whither must we go to hear the veritable voice of the traditional consensus ? Must we mingle with the Genevan Catholics, and listen at the feet of Father Hya- cinthe ? Or kneel before the altar of some " Old Catholic " church, and give om'selves to the word of DoUinger or Ehein- kens ? Or mingle with the acquiescent multitude, that will swear to any words, contradict any history, betray any inherited trust, so long as they are covered by the dome of St. Peter's ? The illusory nature of a " universality " that breaks in pieces, and then allows a fragment to label itself as the whole, in virtue, not of identical essence, but of greater size, is in our time laid bare before the eyes of all the living. 4. Finally, for the last " note " of divine authority we are referred to the " apostolioity " of the Church. If this word were meant only to mark the historical origin of the Church from the labours' of its first missionaries, it would express no more than an indisputable fact ; but it is intended to' denote " conformity with its original power, the mission and institu- tion of the apostles,"* and to claim the sanction of apostolic example for the creed and cultus, the constitution and ad- ministration, of the Church. For persons of historical culture to put forth such a claim for the first time in an historical age would exceed the measure even of ecclesiastical courage, so utterly fictitious is the picture of Christian antiquity, and so uncritical the reading of the early Christian memorials which it implies. It is a formula which lingers on, like an inherited casket emptied of treasures, from a time when so much only of Scripture and history were quoted as might seem to give some colour to orthodoxy, and some support to a theocracy. Hardly can a more pervading contrast be * The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost. By Henry Edward, Arch- bishop of Westminster. P. 69. ■ ■ ■■ l66 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. found than between the primitive and the mediaeval Chris- tianity which are here identified. I do not refer to the accidents of time and person alone, striking as these will ever be to the popular imagination, — to the poverty of apostles and the princely magnificence of pontiffs, — to the simple prayer-ineetings of the upper chamber at Jerusalem or the proseucha at Philippi, compared with the splendid scenery and pompous offices of the Eoman basilicas,— to the fraternal simplicity of the scriptural lessons, so unlike the Papal bulls, in which an over-acted humility transparently covers an assumption more than royal. These differences, and more than these, may be conceded to the transition from an incip- ient to a reigning Church. But far deeper than these, in the fundamental conceptions of the religion itself, and in the whole spirit and tendency of its administration, there is an essential opposition between its first and its last stages. The early gospel was the escape — gradual in the Petrine circle, taken at a bound in the Pauline — of the free prophetic spirit from ritual and sacerdotal restraints : the Catholic Church is the re-enthronement of a priesthood over the world. The former accepted no mediator except One who came to abolish mediation, and himself withdrew to heaven, that there might be no distraction from the divinest Presence: the latter appropriated the open treasury of grace, and kept the key, and set itself up as sole agent in divine affairs. The one proclaimed, that, as instruments of peace with God, oblations and atonements had vanished from the earth, snatched away by the ascending Christ ; and that, with him, humanity itself had passed into the Holy of holies: the other rebuilt the altar, invented a new offering, arranged the sacramental train, and restored the daily sacrifice. The one rent away the veil of untrustful fear that interposed between the private soul and God, and sent the conscience charged with sin to breathe its prayer, and shed its tears, within the Divine embrace itself; the other established the confessor's box in every temple, and enjoined its occupant to find its way into every home. Who will tell me that the apostle Paul was a pontiff? that he confessed Aquila and Priscilla ? that he elevated the host at the Corinthian supper, and withheld th^ Chap. I.] THE CATHOLICS AND THE CHURCH. 167 cup from the profane ? It is no wonder that to his Galatian and Eoman Epistles the mind of Luther, in its first revolt from the existing system, flew for refuge, and that there he found an indomitable strength; for, within the whole com- pass of thought and feeling on divine things, there is hardly to be found a more precise and radical contrariety than between the spiritual gospel of their author and the priestly system that takes his name in vain. Even without pressing this extreme contrast, we find no evidence, in either the memorials of other apostles, or the Ajvritings of the next age, of any likeness between the Papal Church and its presumed prototype. Besides Paul's striking sketch of the mode of celebrating the communion at Corinth,* we have other notices of the Christian usages in their re- ligious assemblies, carrying us forward into the next century. Let any one read Pliny's letter to Trajan,! and fix in his mind the image of the simple meeting there described, of the alter- nate hymn to Christ at daybreak, of the mutual engagement to innocent and holy life, of the common meal in pledge of brotherhood ; let him turn to the later and fuller picture, drawn by Justin Martyr,! of the baptismal or the Sunday assembly, the reading, the exhortation from the presiding brother, the prayer, the distribution of bread and wine, the alms, and the visit to the poor and solitary ; and, with these scenes in his mind, place him in view of the altar of St. Peter's at the celebration of high mass. Will he see in the drama before him — in its vestments, its incense, its genu- flections, its signal-bell, its wafer for the chm-ch and its cup for the altar — a reproduction of that early coijimunion ? Will the gorgeous symbols tell their tale, and speak to his heart the things that he knows, and seem only to glorify the genius of his religion ? Or wiU they look like the language of quite another story, in which those Bithynian and Ephesian disciples could play no part, and the apostles who established their usages would be strangely out of place? Perhaps it must always be the fate of a new spiritual life, infused from purer heights of inspiration, to droop into lower levels when * 1 Cor. xi. 20-33. t C. Plinius Traj. Imp. Lib. x. Ep. 96. X Just. Phil, et Mart. Apologia, i. oh. 65-67. i68 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. the first diviiie impulse ceases to sustain it, and it passes into the custody of a less responsible humanity. But, in the genealogy of degenerating ideas, there is nothing more mar- vellous and more humiliating than that Christ and his first missionary band should be held responsible for the vastest hierarchy, the most theocratic absolutism, the completest sacramental system, that the world has ever seen. That which they chiefly lived to destroy has found its way back into existence, and flaunts their names upon its banner as the sanction of its boldest claims. It is needless, at present, to ask whether, if the pretension to apostolicity were made out, the model on which the Church had framed itself could claim, on that accomit, to be alto- gether divine. That is a question still in reserve ; and without reference to it the proof appears to me complete, that the Church is no exception to the rule of mixed agency — divine and human — which runs through aU his- tory ; that within its enclosure, as without, truth and error, holiness and guilt, the spirit of God and the passions of men, are blended into one tissue, and spread out together the pattern of the ages. To separate these opposites, it is vain to make mechanical divisions, and draw boundary lines in time or space, and say to those who are seeking con- secrated ground, " Lo, here ! and Lo, there !" as if you could turn them into a fold secured by a patent of inviolable sanctity. Other tests are needed, — to apply which is no surveyor's task, but a work of inward apprehension, of moral analysis, and spiritual discrimination. There are always plenty of people ready to take this trouble off your hands ; and you can escape it, if you are so minded, but only with this result : if the insight of conscience is dispensed from determining your religion, your religion ceases to be security for your conscience. i69 CHAPTER II. THE PROTESTANTS AND TflE SCEIPTURES. If, somewhere among the communities of Christendom, there is a sbvereign prescription for secm'ing " salvation," the Eoman CathoUc Church has obvious advantages over . its competing claimants for possession of the secret. Eegarded merely as an agent for the transmission of an historical treasure, she has at least a ready ansjver for all her Western rivals, and a prima facie case of her own. They have, to all appearance, quite a recent genesis, their whole tradition and literature lying within the last three centuries and a half ; and, in order to make good their title-deed as servitors of Christ, they must carry it over a period four times as long, during which it was lost, and identify it at the other end with the original instrument of bequest. Her plea, on the other hand, is, that she has been there all through ; that there has been no suspension of her life, no break in her history, no term of silence in her teaching ; that, having been always in possession, she is the vehicle of every claim, and must be presumed, till conclusive evidence of forfeiture is produced, to be the rightful holder of what has rested in her custody. If you would trace a divine legacy from the age of the Csesars, would you set out to meet it on the Protestant tracks, which soon lose themselves in the forests of Germany, or the Alps of Switzerland ? or, on the great Eoman road of history, which runs through all the centuries, and sets you down in Greece or Asia Minor, at the very doors of the churches to which apostles wrote ? But it is not only to its superiority as the human carrier of a divine tradition, that Catholicism successfully appeals. It is not content to hide away its signs and wonders in the past, and merely tell them to the present, but will take you to see them now and here. It speaks to you, not as the repeater of an old message but as the bearer of a living inspiration ; not I70 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [BookiL as the archaeological rebuilder of a vanished sacred scene, but as an apostolic age prolonged with unabated powers. It tells you, indeed, whence it comes ; but, for evidence even of this, it chiefly asks you to look at what it is, and undertakes to show you, as you pass through its interior, all the divine marks, be they miraculous gifts or heavenly graces, by which the primitive Church was distinguished from the unconsecrated world. This quiet confidence in its own divine commission and interior sanctity simplifies the problem which it presents to ■ inquirers, and, dispensing with the precarious pleas of learning, carries it into the court of sentiment and conscience, addressing to each candidate for discipleship only such pre- liminaries as Peter or PhiHp might have addressed to their converts, — as if there had been no history between. No Protestant can assume this position ; yet he can hardly assail the Eoman Catholic without resorting to weapons of argument which may wound himself. Does he slight and deny the supernatural pretensions of today, — the visions, the heaUngs, the saintly gifts of insight and guidance more than human ? It is difficult to do so except on grounds more or less applicable to the primitive reports of like phenomena in the first age. Does he insist on the evident growth, age after age, of Catholic dogma, as evidence of human corruption tainting the divine inheritance of truth ? The rule tells with equal force against the scheme of belief retained by the churches of the Eeformation : there is a history, not less explicit and pro- longed, of the doctrine of the Trinity and the Atone- ment, than of the belief in Purgatory and Transubstantiation. Does he show that there are missing links in the chain of church tradition, especially at its upper end, where verification ceases to be possible ? He destroys his own credentials along with his opponents' ; for his criticism touches the very sources of Christian history. The answer of the Catholic Church to the question, " Where is the holy ground of the world ? "Where is the real presence of the living God?" — "Here, within my precincts, here alone," — has at least the merit of simplicity, and is easier to test than the Protestant reply, which points to a field of divine revelation, discoverable only by the telescope, half-way towards Chap. II.]. PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 171 the horizon of history. It has no absolute need to make its title good by links of testimony running back to far-off sources of prerogative ; no age of miracles to reach and historically prove, as a condition of its rights today. It carries its supernatural character within it ; it has brought its authority down with it through time ; it is the living organism of the Holy Spirit, the Pentecostal dispensation among us still ; and, if you ask about its evidence, it offers the spectacle of itself. Though it is the oldest of churches, it asks recognition by credentials of the passing hour. Though it alone has lived through all Christian history, it least affects an antiquarian pomp, knowing no difference between what has been and what is, and in its retreat from the movement of the world being hardly conscious of the lapse of time. Itself the sacred enclosure of whatever is divine and supernatural on earth, it has no problems to solve, no legitimacy to make out, no doctrine to prove, but simply to live on, and witness of the grace it bears. To the Protestant, on the other hand, there is no spot railed off from modern life as absolutely sacred, no continuous vehicle of inspiration, no personal or corporate authority for the supernatural guidance of mankind. To him, revelation is an inheritance. During one privileged generation it flowed from living lips ; but afterwards, passing into a mere record that could never grow, it became more and more deeply buried amid the natural products of historical experience. Thus, for him, the divine and human are everywhere mixed, and need the application of thought and conscience to sever them. He finds himself, with his reHgion, in the eddying currents of the recent ages, and feels their conflicting forces meeting in his mind. He has been borne along by them tp points so little suspected, that he looks round to discover where he is, and, according to his mood, is sometimes enamoured, sometimes frightened, by the aspect of a position so new. How does he stand with regard to the old land- marks ? or, if they are gone out of sight, can he still find his way ? Is he to seek . guidance by going to the standards half effaced, or by looking round for himself upon the present, and choosing the path of clearest promise ? No one who 172 -AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. measures the changes of the world can be surprised at this IDerplexity. The faith of Christendom, essentially historical, has inherited its clearest memories from its primitive times, and turned towards them a gaze of regretful homage; but thrown into the contests of the passing hour, and co-existing since the Eeformation with an unexampled progress of dis- covery, it could not remain purely retrospective, the passive trustee of departed sanctities. It was impelled to learn the language of a new time, and show its unexhausted fitness for the human soul, if it would vindicate its place in a universe so changed. This self-adaptation to the wants of a later culture created the whole religious literature, and much of the speculative philosophy, of modern Europe. Natural science, crowned with dazzling triumphs, affected every department of thought with admiration of her precise method and her favourite evidence of sense ; and religion became fascinated, and undertook to shape itself into logical and objective form. The increase of social liberty gave a wider scope to every man's free will, and a deeper experience of responsibility ; and no appeal on behalf of religion became so effective as that which spoke of its adaptation to the wants of tempted and aspiring men. In thus availing itself of modern auxiliaries, Christianity receded from the high ground of ancient authority, and descended into the field of intellec- tual conflict. Eationalistic tests were applied to its whole structure and contents. Believers being encouraged to pass judgment on their beliefs, doubters could be denied the privi- lege no longer : hence the two contrasted tendencies observable in the religious feeling of our day, in answer to the question, " Forwards, or backwards ? " All churches that by the toil of venerable men have got together a body of established doctrine show symptoms of apprehension ; all of them refus- ing to advance ; some insisting on the one impossible attitude of standing still ; and others, like men weakened by the fear of death, terrified into open repentance, and vowing, if they may only be spared, to retrace their steps, and yield to the temptation of thought no more. These last plainly disown the Eeformation ; would put back the clock to the night of Luther's birth, and reconvert the Bible into a sacerdotal trust, Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 173 thinking it easier to root out the whole produce of that great era than to leave it growing, yet prevent its spreading. In its feebler forms, the same reaction, without the support of any consistent theory, simply appeals to taste, and avails itself of the resources of ecclesiastical symbolism. Men who cannot find sufficient assurance to play the priest, or forget themselves enough to cast out Satan, can sigh over " neology," warn off human reason from the sanctuary as if it was some destructive maniac, and invoke historical veneration to seize and manacle the fiend. It is the dream of these archaeologi- cal Christians to restore some golden period of the Church, and by reproducing the forms, to tempt back the thought and characteristics of " the good old times ; " and doctrines and practices are judged, not by their truth and worth to the living, but by the standard perceptions of dead men centuries out of reach. The present is looked upon as degenerate and profane; and, to correct its tendencies, old literature is republished, early art revived, and traditional models of life are re-animated, as if the stone figures upon the tombs opened their folded hands, rose up, and walked. "Whatever is beautiful, magnificent, and tender in the worship, the architec- ture, the sacred biography, of the mediaeval church, whatever was benign and picturesque in the sway of a mild priiesthood controlling a barbarous nobility, whatever is captivating m the idea of a peasantry surrendered to the guidance of a beneficent and cultivated clergy, is brought so persuasively ta view, that we feel as if, in passing from our forefathers' time into our own, we stepped froru the cool silence of a cathedral to the hot chaffering of the street. In short, everything is done to incline us to trust in the past, and distrust the present. And thus has been provoked into activity the oppo- site disposition, to repudiate as obsolete our spiritual heritage from the past ; to begin afresh, and live today as if it ^ere alone in time ; to breathe the morning air as if it were new- bom, instead of sweeping down the Alpine valleys, and across the purifying seas, of fiflother zone, We are asked to set aside the divinest influences transmitted to lis by history, aS' impertinent obtrusions between the soul and God, and retird wholly to the oracle, within, for private audience with God. 174 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. Both these tendencies, as often happens with extremes, are, I should say, right in their love, wrong in their hate ; their negative spirit, false ; their affirmative, true. The historic God and the living God are alike realities, the same Eternal, there and here ; and only when his recognition in one aspect is interpreted into denial of the other, does his oracle become apocryphal, and his worship an idolatry. This artificial con- trariety, however, has been established by the narrowness of men ; and imposes on us the inquiry, whether, in the drama of the past, we meet with any episode purely divine, and step iipon absolutely consecrated ground ; whether especially the apostolic age, with its productions, really merits the pedestal of exceptional infallibility, whence it is made to pour rebuke on the profane tendencies of modern life. According to the Protestant's theory, divine revelation is permanent only in its effects. In itself it is a past transac- tion, supernaturally interpolated in the history of mankind, and completed in the first century of our era. From that era, the source for him of all divine authority, he is now separated by threescore generations ; and whatever is true in heavenly things, whatever is holy, must cross that interval ere its tones can reach him. For his knowledge of it, he is de- pendent on its records, created by the first actors or observers on that sacred stage, and handed down by successive witnesses of their identity : and it is only as native to that age, and stereotyping its inspired voice, that the Christian Scriptures speak to him as " the word of God." Could he suppose them to have been born outside that circle of special revelation in place or time, to be the production only of impersonal rumour, or a secondary age, his reliance on them would be gone, and they would descend from their consecrated height to mingle with the mass of human literature. His first essential, there- fore, is to trace them clearly home to that exceptional period, and to the body of first disciples within it. If this be once secured, all else appears to him readily to follow. Does the New Testament which we read today really come from the group of apostolic men who turned the death of Christ into the birth of Christendom ? Then is it a faithful record ; for its authors have every title to be believed, which ample oppor- Chap. II.] . PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 175 tunity and disinterested sacrifice can win. But further : if it is faithful in its account of facts, it is authoritative in its statement of doctrines ; for among the facts are various miracles, imparting a superhuman character to the chief figure of the story, and specially a direct descent of inspiration on his first missionaries, which made them vehicles of a testi- mony higher than their own, and which guarantees the truth,, not of their narrative alone, but of their whole course of religious thought and teaching. And so is forged a three-linked argu- ment which joins divine and human things : if the facts are real, the doctrines are certain ; if the books are authentic, the facts are real; thatthe books areauthentic, adequate testimony proves. There may, perhaps, be logical devotees whose enthusiasm loves to reach their God by long and painful pilgrimages of thought ; but it would not be a happy thing for natures of more direct and impatient affection to be left thus dependent for knowledge of divine things on literary, antiquarian, philo- logical evidence, judicially balanced, analogous to that which ■scholars cite in discussing the Homeric poems, or the Letters of Phalaris. We are not permitted, it would seem, to take our sacred Hterature as it is, to let what is divine in it find us out, while the rest says nothing to us, and lies dead : all such •selection by internal affinity is denied us as a self-willed unbelief, a subjection, not of ourselves to Scripture, but of Scripture to ourselves. We are required to accept the whole ■on the external warrant of its divine authority, which equally applies to it all ; to believe whatever is affirmed in the New Testament, and practise whatever is enjoined. In escaping by this path from the Catholic Church, we are merely handed •over from an ever-living dictator and judge to an ancient legislation and guidance, still with the same idea of some- where disengaging ourselves from human admixtures, and finding some reserved seat of the purely and absolutely divine. Neatly as the Protestant argument is compacted, it will not bear the strain which is put upon it. Each of its links is in fact unsound. And, even though no flaw were visible in them, still the conclusion is demonstrably false. How far have we, in the Christian Scriptures, the testimony ■of eye-witnesses to the events and teachings which they relate ? :i76 AUTHORITY. ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. If direct and rigorous proof were required, it would be impossible ever to trace a book on our shelves today to the hand of a specified man in ancient Athens, or Eome, or Jerusalem. Even productions prepared for immediate public recital by their authors, like the Histories of Herodotus, the Odes of Pindar, the Orations of Cicero, speak to us out of darkness and silence ; and the multitudes that heard them at the games, or in the forum, have vanished without a vestige left ; and there is no voice among them all to vouch for the identity. Still less can we expect that writings published only by the copyist should be attended from the first by their own credentials; with the Dialogues of Plato, the Treatises of Aristotle, the Annals of Tacitus, we look for the signature of no witnesses, the seal of no notary. Far less than this suf&ces, in all ordinary cases, to make us as sure of our author as if we bought the book from his own advertisement. If it is mentioned and cited as his, while he still lives to own or to disclaim it; if its influence is visible in the immediately succeeding literature, like that of Lucretius, or Catullus, or Virgil, though without notice of his name ; if, from his own time onwards, it passes for his without question in the presence of a critical age, — we accept the confidence of others as a ground for our own. The presumption is in favour of a book being in its authorship what it professes to be ; and whoever would deprive it of the benefit of this rule must produce some counter-evidence, from its history or from its contents, at variance with its pretensions. In the vast majority of instances we proceed wholly on this presumption, and unhesitatingly repeat in our libraries the labels which have come down to us unchallenged ; and, however puzzled we might be to prove our accuracy in any particular case, e.g., to establish off-hand the literary rights of Erasmus or Montaigne, our general habit is undoubtedly justified by a prevailing experience, which it sums up and applies. Yet an indolent confidence in such a rule may leave openings for mischievous and long-enduring mistakes, not only in ages when printing was unknown and men of letters were few, but in the full day- light of modern intellectual intercourse. A curious example of this is furnished in connection with Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. * 177 Lord Bacon's name. In 1648,— thirteen years after his death, — appeared a volume of "Eemains of Francis, Lord Verulam, some time Lord Chancellor of England," including, among essays and letters previously unpublished, a tract entitled " The Character of a Christian, set forth in Paradoxes and seeming Contradictions." In 1730, Archbishop Bancroft revised this essay for Blackburn's edition of Bacon's collected works ; and it has ever since kept its place among his writings, though not without hesitation on the part of some of his editors, — ^Montagu, Bouillet, and Spedding. Except in the last instance, the doubt was not any divination of literary criticism, but arose from arbitrary preconceptions of Bacon's theological position. The piece opens thus : " A Christian is one who believes things which his reason cannot compre- hend, who hopes for that which neither he nor any man alive ever saw, who labours for that which he knows he can never attain ; yet in the issue his belief appears not to have been false, his hopes make him not ashamed, his labour is not in vain. He believes three to, be one, and one to be three ; a Father not to be older than his Son, and the Son to be equal with his Father ; and One proceeding from both to be fully equal to both." To the eighteenth-century imagination it was inconceivable that startling contradictions like these could be the grave expression of sincere religious faith ; and it is no wonder that Bayle, Cabanis, and others of the French philo- sophers, as well as the Eomanist, Joseph de Maistre,* should appeal to them as an evidence that Bacon was an Atheist, veiling his contempt for " believing Christians " under a colourable exposition of their creed. With less excuse have ■ writers of our own time reproduced the same construction ; Heinrich Eitter treating the essay (which he pronounces au- thentic) as the " effusion of a scepticism afterwards suppres- sed," t and Mr. Atkinson seeing only irony in " the ridiculous light in which he has placed Christian dogma in his para- doxes," and adding, that " it seems equally vain to argue that * In his Ezamen de la Philosophie de Bacon, 2 vols, Paris : 1836. (Posthumous.) + Gesohiohte der Philosophie, book x. p. 318, 1851. N 178* AUTHORITY. ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. they were not his writings, or done only as an exercise of his wit.* The allusion in this last clause is to Dr. Parr's judgment, that " these fragments were written by Bacon, and intended only as a trial of his skill in putting together propositions which appear irreconcilable." t Here, then, we find a book passing current through two hundred and twenty years of the most recent history, under the name of a renowned philosopher, popularly read, criticized by literary men, argued on by meta- physicians and the chiefs of science throughout Europe, and regularly admitted as an important datum in the history of opinion : yet, all the while, this essay, which is not Bacon's at all, existed in numerous printed editions, with the name of the real author, Herbert Palmer, B.D., Master of Queen's College, Cambridge, and a parliamentary member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. He gave it to the world July 25, 1645, as a second part of his " Memorials of Godli- ness and Christianity," with a protest against a surreptitious and imperfect edition which had by some means been anony- mously issued the day before ; so that it had been in circula- tion for three years before the appearance of Bacon's " Ee- mains ; " and afterwards new editions continued to follow, without availing to detect the mistake. Had Palmer himself been on the stage when his literary offspring stepped forth in philosopher's .garb, doubtless be would have stripped off the borrowed cloak, and shown the plain Puritan beneath. But he had passed away in 1647 ; and few of his readers, it is probable, ever looked into the pages of the founder of the In- ductive Method. And so the re-discovery of the true author- ship was reserved for the curious and admirable researches of Dr. Grosart within our own times. X The tenacity of a literary illusion is increased, whenever, in addition to the ordinary sources of error, any romantic or reverential feeling is enhsted on its side. Of this we have a * Letters on Man's Nature and Development, p. 174. + Basil Montagu's Bacon, vol. vii. pp. xxvi.-xxviii. ■ J For a full 'account of this discovery, see his (privately printed) lord Bacon not the Author of the Christian Paradoxes ; being a Reprint of Me- . morials of Godliness andChristianity by Herbert Palmer, B.D. 1865. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 179 memorable example pertinently cited by Toland at the end of the seventeenth centmy, in the Eikoiv ^amXiKxi, or " Image of a King," a book professedly written in his own defence, by Charles I., during his imprisonment, and published in 1649, shortly after his execution. Its seasonable appearance, its stately manner, its rhetorical outpouring of pathetic senti- ment, raised it somewhat above the level of a party manifesto, and gave it a strong hold upon public feeling. And, though its authenticity was immediately called in question by Milton, its almost imiversal reception was not arrested, and carried it rapidly through nearly fifty editions ; and to its influence is to be attributed, in no small measure, the High-Church con- ception of the " Eoyal Martyr." After the Eestoration, the spell of mystery was rudely broken ; and Dr. Gauden, Bishop of Exeter, avowed himself the author. But to have the in- terest of its story thus reduced to fiction was more than loyal admirers could be expected to bear : and, refusing to believe the bishop, they insisted on still having the autobiography of a king. And hence, when, in 1699, Toland, in his " Life of Milton," reproduced and corroborated the poet's critical judgment, he added, not without reason, this reflection : that if forty years of modern daylight, when criticism is awake and keen, and conflicting parties an the state are intently watching one another, suffice for the establishment of such a fictitious claim, it cannot surprise us, that, in the early Christian times, many spurious productions found their way into circulation under the names of Christ and his apostles. When Blackall, replying to this remark in a sermon before the House of Com- mons, defended in the same breath, as alike authjentic, the Christian Scriptures and the Eikwv Ba(TtX«K»},theapp;ositeness of Toland's historical parallel seemed to be, admitted by both parties ; and the earlier era could be protected from th^ sus- picion of mistaken authenticity only by the process, no longer possible, of excluding it from the later. In order to fall, with whatever restrictions, under the rule that, in the absence of counter-evidence, a book may be as- signed to the author from whom it professes to come, it must carry in itself Buch profession, and must hot merely have attached to it, byway of external heading or descriptioil, some N 2 ' i8o AUTHORTTY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. repute of authorship, coming we know not whence. To writings intrinsically anonymous no unaccredited rumour, however current in the course of years, can lend the weight of personal authority ; and rarely can we hope, if they have pre- served their incognito through one generation, ever to recover the story of their origin, and identify the pen that wrote them. In their case, we are thrown entirely upon the evidence of age ; and, as the most accurate determination of date would still leave us unacquainted with the witness whose statements are before us, it cannot secure the correctness of his testimony, but only exclude the appendix of errors which tradition annexes with growing time. To know the birthday of a book is still a long way from a settlement of its parentage. Of the New Testament writings, six letters of Paul, viz., 1 Thes- salonians, Galatians, Eomans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Philippians, must have the full benefit of the presumption which accepts a book on its own word. Here and there, no doubt, as at the conclusion of the letter to the Eomans, a passage may be found with possible traces of a later editorial hand ; but, in general, the contents are in perfect accordance with the reputed author's position and character, so far as these are known. Consider- able as the differences are between the earlier and the later Pauline letters, they all find a natural place in the history of a growing mind, and give even a stronger impression of personal unity than the most constant reiteration of doctrine and illustration. This impression from within is corroborated, by such external testimony as we have. True it is, more than a generation elapses, before we find an allusion, in Clement of Eome, to the first Corinthian epistle as Paul's. But this testi- mony, late as it is, is the earliest which the scanty Christian literature of the time permits us to expect, and, being unop- posed, suffices to assure us, that, in this first group of writings, we are really in contact with the primitive expression of the new faith. The other epistolary writings, which set themselves forth under an apostolic name, remain unattested till the fourth generation from the death of Christ, and in nearly all of them there are such evident traces of a post-apostolic time, so many thoughts unsuited to the personality of the reputed author. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. i8i that the ordinary favourable presumption is broken down ; and, however excellent the lessons which they contain, we must confess, as we receive them, that we listen to an unknown voice. The remaining constituents of the New Testament, the Apocalypse and the whole of the historical books, are, in spite of their traditional titles, practically anonymous. They offer us no personal warrant for the accuracy of their contents ; and we are left to find out for ourselves the probable story of their origin, and the value of their materials. This in itself is surely a startling fact, utterly fatal to the claim of infallible authority constantly set up on behalf of Holy Writ. How is it possible to prove a divine right to be believed respecting a book that comes out of the dark, with no competent witnesses to vouch for it, and no self-confession of the hand that wrote it? On what ground can we attach a superhuman weight to the testimony of a masked and veiled witness, who does not even tell his name, or say how near he stands to the things which he relates ? The evidence which he gives may have more or less of credibility, according to its degree of self-consistency, of verisimilitude, of apparent originaUty, and of agreement with parallel reports ; but it can never acquire personal authority, or rise above the level of current tradition. The historical value of this tradition, variable from section to section of each book, has broader differences in the three synoptics, in the fourth Gospel, and m the Acts of the Apostles, as will be readily seen from a brief summary of the facts of each case. \1. The Synoptical Gospels. In gathering up the most ancient vestiges of our Gospels, we find the evidence respecting them fall natm-ally into two stages. In the last quarter of the second century, the notices of them are accompanied by their names, which are absent from all prior citations of words now extant in them. This significant fact comes out forcibly, on comparison of Irenseus (who flourished, says Jerome, chiefly in the reign of Commodus, i.e., A.D. 180 to 193) and Justin Martyr, whose extant writings 1 82 AUTHORITY. ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Bookll. were probably produced between a.d. 147 and 155.* The former quotes the Gospels under then- present titles, and gives amusing reasons why they can be neither more nor fewer than four ; and why those Christians who use only one must be in the wrong : " Since there are four quarters of the world in which we are, and four chief winds, the Gospels, which are to be co-extensive with the world, and to be the breath of life, blowing incorruptibility on men, and vivifying them, must be four." Besides, the gospel is given by Him who sits above the cherubim, which is . a fourfold figure ; and it answers to the Beasts in Eev. iv., which are four ; and it must correspond with God's covenants through Adam, Noah, Moses, and Christ, which are four. " These things being so, they are all vain and ignorant and rash men, who spoil the beauty of the gospel, and decide on either more or fewer forms of it than have been men- tioned ; some, to take credit for finding more than the real number ; others, to reject the ordinations of men." t Irenseus was not a wise man ; but he would not have resorted to this fantastic reasoning, if he had been in possession of real his- torical grounds for the statements he wished to support. It is clear that he had nothmg to tell, except that, by that time, the Gospels which we now have were prevailingly accepted, under the titles which they have borne ever since, but that there were Christians who held by some one of them alone, and others who did not restrict themselves to four. Stepping back a generation, we find in Justin Martyr traces of a different state of things. In his pages there are copious citations both from the Old Testament and from certain Christian " memoirs " evidently embodying the gospel history ; and, in the latter case, there is no difficulty in finding the corresponding passages in our synoptical Gospels. But whether it was precisely these that he had before him, is * It is usual to refer the First Apology to the beginning of a.d. 139, the Trypho to the same year, the Second Apology to 162 or 163 ; but Prof. Volk- mar appears to have made out his case for correcting this chronology, and treating the Second Apology as a mere appendix to the first. The whole of Justin's extant writings would thus be subsequent to the time when M. Aure- lius was raised to the proconsular power, and associated with Antoninus Pius. Theologische JahrhUcher, von Baur und Zeller, 1855, S. 227 and 412. (Die Zeit Justin's des Martyrers kritisch untersucht.) t Irenseus, Haer. iii. 11. Chap. II.]- PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 183 rendered doubtful by two peculiarities. 1. He never names, never alludes to, their authors or their number, but quotes as if from a single anonymous production. 2. There is a want of verbal agreement with our texts, so nearly invariable, that, out of a vast number of passages, only five are exactly true to Matthew or Luke. The contingencies of memoriter citation will not explain this singular phenomenon; for the same differences are constant through repeated quotations of the same passage : they resemble remarkably the variations observed in the Scripture texts of the Clementine Homilies, a production of the same period ; and they differ, both in frequency and in character, from concomitant inaccuracies in citing the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, where the memory alone is answerable. These facts imply that Justin drew his quotations from some source textually different from our Gospels, — an inference confirmed by the further fact that he adduces, from the same memoirs, matter which is not found in our Gospel narratives; e.g., ""Wherefore the Lord Jesus has said, ' In whatever ways I shall find you, in the same also I will judge you;'"* and again: " When Jesus came to the river Jordan, where John was baptizing, as Jesus descended into the water, a fire also was kindled in Jordan ; and, when he came up out of the water, the apostles of this our Christ have written that the Holy Spirit lighted upon him as a dove."t Comparing these phenoniena with the citations of Irenseus, we seem to be in contact, at the earlier date, with the unfashioned materials of Christian tradition, ere yet they had set into their final form, with some elements still present which were ultimately to be discarded, and others not yet incorporated, which could not have been absent, had the author been acquainted with them. Does, then, the external evidence conduct us to the person of a known eye-witness, and enable us to say who it is that vouches for this statement, and who for that ? On the con- trary, it carries us back out of the period of definite names ■into one of indefinite floating tradition,— tradition called indeed " apostolic," but by the vagueness of that very phrase betraying its impersonal and unaccredited character. His- • Dial. i3um Tryph. 0. 47, 19.- t Ibid. c. 88, 7, 8. i84 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. torical memorials which are to depend for their authority on the personality of their writer cannot afford to wait for a century ere his name comes out of the silence. The remain- ing records of the ministry of Christ have an origin so ohscure, that it is impossible to say who is answerable for any part of them. If, in default of outward testimony, we closely scrutinize the internal structure of the synoptical Gospels, we are met by a series of phenomena which virtually reduce them to a single som'ce, and show that we are not in contact with three independent reporters. The same recitals are repeated in either two, or all of them, with such resemblance in substance, in arrangement, and even in language, as totally to exclude the possibility of original and separate authorship. In the fourth Gospel, which is really the production of a single hand, we fortunately have a measure of the amount of common matter which may be expected to appear in two or more independent accounts of the ministry of Christ. Two-thirds of its matter is peculiar to it ; and the rest, though dealing with incidents related elsewhere, presents them under aspects so new, that the identity is often difficult to trace, or is even open to doubt. But if the whole text of the synoptics is broken up, as it may naturally be, into one hundred and seventy-four sections, fifty-eight of these will be found common to all three: twenty-six, besides, to Matthew and Mark ; seventeen to Mark and Luke ; thirty-two to Matthew and Luke ; leaving only forty-one unshared elements, of which thirty-one are found in Luke ; seven in Matthew ; three in Mark, comprised within the compass of twenty-four verses. The agree- ments in the parallel narratives are not so complete as to ex- clude diversities in the accessory circumstances : they are greatest in the parables and other discourses of Christ, and in the marking epochs of the story, the calling of the apostles, and the transfiguration ; though, in the most momentous of all, — the last Passion, — the deviations are considerable. Is it said, that the fourth Gospel, being supplemental, purposely avoids what has been already adequately told; while the other three, written on the same subject, viz., the Galilean and the final stages of the life of Christ, necessarily Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 185 reproduce the same incidents? Even if we could admit this untenable view of the fourth Gospel, no mere similarity of design will explain the accordance of the others. The synoptists deal with the events of fifteen months, of which more than fourteen are assigned to Galilee ; and the whole are supposed to have been spent by them, or their informants, in attendance upon the steps of Jesus. But we hardly realize to ourselves how Uttle of this story is really told. Of the four hundred and fifty days comprised within it, there are notices of no more than about thirty-five ; while whole months together — now three, now two — are dropped in total silence. The evangelists, when they speak, know how to recite with suf&cient fulness. The day in the cornfield (Matt, xii. 1-xiii. 52) occupies one-tenth of Matthew's history of Christ's ministry ; the day of the Sermon on the Mount, one- eighth (v. l.-viii. 17) ; a day in the Temple, nearly one-fifth (xxi. 18-xxvi. 2). The day of the blighted fig-tree occupies more than one-seventh of Mark's Gospel (xi. 20-xiii. 37). And five days claim, in Luke (xx. 1, to the end), more than one-fourth of his narrative (excluding the legends of the birth and infancy). It appears, therefore, that twelve-thirteenths of the ministry which they describe is left without a record ; and that the three Gospels move within the limits of the remaining one-thirteenth. How could this possibly be, if they came, whether at first or second hand, from personal attendants of Jesus, cognizant of the whole period alike, or, if absent at all, not all absent together ? Even if they were independent selections from a mass of contemporary memorials, preserving fragments only of the life of Christ, they could not all alight upon materials lying within such narrow range ; for the flying leaves, scattered by the winds of tradition, would be impartially dropped from the whole organism of that sacred history, and, when clustered by three disposing hands, could never turn out to be all from the same branch. The vast amount of blank spaces in which they all have to acquiesce betrays a time when the sources of knowledge were irrecoverably gone ; and their large agreement in What remains, that they were only knitting up into tissues, slightly varied, the scanty materials which came almost alike to all. ^ i86 -AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. Still more evident is the derivative character of our Gospels when we study their verbal coincidences and differences. No two witnesses, however perfect their substantive agreement, will tell any part of their story in identical words ; and did their recitals contain even a single sentence, other than a quotation, cast in the same mould, we should infer that their statement had been dictated, or artificially got up. Even of the remembered words of another, unless brief and incisive, they will give divergent reports, meeting only here and there upon some striking phrase, but moving in the intervals with- out contact in terms, though parallel in drift. Most of all is this diversity inevitable, where the words remembered were spoken in one language, and the witnesses deliver their report in another. That they should hit upon concurrent translations, no one will regard as possible ; yet in our synop- tical Gospels, there are from three hundred and thirty to three hundred and seventy verses common to all ; and, besides these, from one hundred and seventy to one hundred and eighty common to Matthew and Mark ; from two hundred and thirty to two hundred and forty to Matthew and Luke ; and fifty to Mark and Luke. Comparing with this range of partnership the amount of individuality in each, we find that the first Gospel has three hundred and thirty verses of its own ; the second, sixty-eight ; the third, five hundred and forty-one.* Some of the coincidences occur in common cita- tions from the Old Testament, where all the narrators deviate from the Greek of the Septuagint, without betraying, by closeness of rendering, any controlling influence from the Hebrew. While these facts certainly reduce our evangelists to mere editors of previous materials, room is still left for a consider- able play of variety, either in their selection or in their treat- ment of these materials. Even in the midst of prevailing agreement, both substantive and verbal, striking discrepancies emerge in the telling of the same story. The first Gospel * See Eeuss: Geschichte der lieiligen Schriften neuen Test. § 179. In the different Gospels the same words are often differently divided into verses. In Mark especially the verses are shorter. Hence the margin of variation in counting the agreements by verses. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES, 187 supplies a series of such cases by its curious tendency, as by some defect of binocular vision, to see its objects cwice over ; as in the cure of two Gadarene demoniacs,* the restoration of eight to two blind men near Jericho, t the combination of the ass with the colt at the entry into Jerusalem, { the reviling of Jesus on the cross by hoth robbers, instead of by one.§ The Jericho miracle was wrought, according to one account, || on going into the town ; according to the others, on going out of it. When the twelve are sent upon their Galilean mission, they are ordered, in two reports, to take no staff ; in the third, to take nothing but a staff, — a difference trifling in itself, but noticeable in its relation to the early handling of Christian tradition. At times we can scarcely fail to see that the same story, in different versions, has been inserted twice, as if it related successive incidents ; as, in the case of the miraculous feeding of the multitude, counted now as five thousand, and now as four thousand,! of the Pharisees' demand of a sign,** and of their reproach of exorcism by Beelzebub.ft Through how many recensions the Christian tradition passed before it set into the form under which our Gospels present it, it is beyond the resources of criticism to decide. But the traces of successive additions as well as of composite structure are sufficiently distinct, not merely in the finer phenomena of language, but in the broad veins of thought and sentiment. Mingled with the genuine teachings of Jesus, and often obtruding a rude interruption upon their purity and depth, appear sentences manifestly thrown up by the controversies and pretensions of the apostolic and even the post-apostolic age. The whole theory of his person, — that he was Messiah, what was the meaning of his death, what the range of his kingdom, and when would be the time of his return to take it up, — was a posthumous and retrospective product, worked out by disciples who could not bid adieu to so divine an influence, * Matt. viii. 28. Comp. Mark v. 2. t Matt. XX. 30. Comp. Luke xviii. 35. i Matt. xxi. 2, 7. Comp. Mark xi. 2, i, Luke xix. 80, 33. § Matt, xxvii. 44. Comp. Liike xxiii. 39 ; here, however, Mark agrees with Matthew. II Luke xviii. 35. t Matt. xiv. 15, xv. 32. *• Matt. xii. 38, xvi. 1. tt Matt. xi. 34, xii. 24. i88 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. and who, in delivering it over to the world, made their own conceptions its vehicle, and fused into one his supposed future and his real past. Eager to attribute to him beforehand all that they thought about him afterwards, they will have it that he claimed the Messiahship, yet would not let it be mentioned ; that he contemplated and fore-announced his death and resur- rection, yet without succeeding in preparing them for the event ; that he authorized their look-out for his return from heaven, yet without ever naming himself as coming hack, but only a third person, the mythologic " Son of man," as " coming," to wind up the drama of human things ; that he sided with the Jewish Christians, and wished only Israelites to belong to him ; that, on the contrary, he foresaw how the Jewish appeal would comparatively fail, and the gospel must be preached to all nations ; that he provided for the long con- flict between the Petrine and the Pauline gospel, and gave the headship and the keys to Peter ; that he entered into the far distant question whether converts should be baptized as at first, into his name, or, as in the second century, into the name of " the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit," and gave his voice for the Trinitarian formula. In all these cases, and they are but samples, the anachronism must be felt by every one who has closely studied the infancy of the Christian Church ; and of the two or three strata of unhistorical material which overlie the primitive and unvitiated tradition, the newest can scarcely have been deposited before the third or fourth decade of the second century. Out of writings thus constituted, how is it possible to make an authoritative " rule of faith and practice " ? Composed of mixed materials, aggregating themselves through three or four generations, they report no authorship in any case ; and no date, except of their unhistorical accretions. Imbedded even in these, there is doubtless many a gem of original truth preserved ; and in the residuary portions which are the nucleus of these, we approach, no doubt, the central charac- teristics of the teaching and the life of Christ. But the evidence of this is wholly internal, and has nothing to authenticate it except our sense of the inimitable beauty, the inexhaustible depth, the penetrating truth, of the living Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 189 words they preserve and the Uving form they present. Of our witnesses we know nothing, except that, in such cases, what they tell as reality, it was plainly beyond them to construct as fiction. If our points of contact are thus few, and are rather felt than seen, with the ministry of Christ, what can we say of the Krth and infancy, which lie stUl thirty years behind ? Even were it true that apostles were our reporters, it would be strange that precisely the evangelist who, as the " beloved disciple," was nearest to Jesus while on earth, and gave a home to Mary ever after, should be silent of what she alone could tell, and should thus drop the only link that could save our connection with that remoter time. But left as we are, in the absence of all apostolic guarantee, to the mere verisimili- tude of unaccredited tradition, we have no outward support against the false chronology, the irreconcilable contradictions, the historical prodigies, and the fabulous mode of conception, presented by the two stories of the Nativity. They do not belong to the kind of record that can commend itself by self-evidence ; and other evidence they have none. Yet every Christmas celebration attests how large and fundamental a place in the faith of Christendom is held by the incidents of that poetical mythology. § 2. The Fourth Gospel. There remains, however, yet another Gospel, which, if the tradition of its origin be true, takes us out of all obscuring mists, and brings us into clear historical light. Whether or not it rightly bears the name of the apostle John, it is, at all events, free from the doubts and comphcations arising from the process of growth out of prior materials of different dates : it needs no analysis into component elements ; it is plainly a whole, the production of a single mind,— a mind imbued with a conception of its subject consistent and complete, and not less distinct for being mystical and of rare spiritual depth; It is no wonder that the strife of opinion in regard to the origin of Christianity concentrates itself upon this point ; for- while the problem is simple in its form,— was the hand which igo AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book li. wrote this book that of John ? — an affirmative answer to it wins everything at once, an original portraiture of the person of Jesus, an authentic account of the duration and plan of his public mission, and a measure of his divine claims. So long as the synoptical Gospels retained their position as original and independent witnesses, doubts respecting the fourth Gospel touched only that higher estimate of Christ's nature to which it gave the chief sanction ; and, even if they prevailed, there was still the triple history of his life in its more human aspect to fall back upon for solid though less sublime assur- ance. With better understanding of the work of the earlier evangelists, the Johannine question has become more vital, and is discussed with a passionate eagerness, which, however natural, and even pathetic as the mark of religious anxiety, is apt to discolour the evidence, and distort its proportions before the eye. While confessing the strongest drawing of sympathy towards the characteristics of this Gospel, I will endeavour to give an impartial summary of the facts. A. External Testimony. In one of the most masterly defences of the authenticity of the fourth Gospel, it is said, " No one who knows the state of the external testimony to the authorship of the Apocalypse and Gospel will hold that it adds much, in any way, to the decision of the question. Neither of them receives any explicit testimony till the time of Justin Martyr, about the middle- of the second century ; when the two Johns; having been both disciples of Christ, probably enough were already confused. Within ten years both are explicitly acknowledged."* This disparaging comment on, the external testimony seems to imply that, even if it were better than it is, it would only come in by way of confirmation to a decision resting on other grounds ; but that, as it is, the confirmation goes for Httle. Prior, however, to the external evidence, or in its absence, what case could there possibly be, — I. do not say admitting of "decision," but presented for "decision" at all? Let there be no history of a book, let it come into our hands * National Review, July, ISSV, p. 112. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 191 without a record of its source, and by what scrutiny of its literary characteristics, by what marks of individuality, shall we refer it home to some one among the myriad shadowy hands that crowd the darkness of the past ? No such divina- tion is possible ; and wherever a critic pretends, by the mere keenness of his unaided eye, to have detected the writer in some unheard-of quarter, — hke the Ziirich scholar who made out that this very Gospel was certainly the production of ApoUos,* — we justly look on the pretension as audacious, and its proofs as a waste of ingenuity. We are absolutely depen- dent, for the first suggestion of an author's name, on the witnesses who speak of it ; and any disabilities attaching to these witnesses must .seriously affect our rehance on their report, and throw a greater burden on the internal confirma- tory proofs. The primary and substantive evidence is testimonial ; which, once given, may gain weight by various congruities, or lose it by incongruities in the writing itself ; but which, if not given, can be replaced by neither. The fourth Gospel does not materially differ from the others in the date of its earliest citation with the reputed author's name. Theophilus, a convert from heathenism, elected in 176, A.D., to the see of Antioch, addressed to his Pagan friend, Autolycus, a defence of Christianity, in three books, which is still extant, and which approximately reveals its date by a list of the Eoman emperors carried to the death of Marcus Aurehus, a.d. 180. In the second .book we meet with a passage beginning thus : " Wherefore the sacred Scriptures teach us, and all that have the Spirit (n-vtujuar^yopoi) ; of whom John says, ' In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God ; ' showing that at first God was alone, and in him was the word, "t Here, near the end of the third generation from his death, we are introduced for the first time to the writer of the fourth Gospel ; still without any distinc- tive epithet identifyiag him as one of the Twelve; for in classing him with prophets and partakers of the Spirit, he does but place him in the same line with the Sibylline versifier, from whom he gives copious extracts similarly * Die Evangelienfrage. Denkschrift. Zurich. 1858. t Ad Autolycum, ii. 22. 192 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. recommended.* For the complete designation of the author, we have to wait for IrensBus, who says, " Next, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also lay on his breast, himself put forth the Gospel, while staying at Ephesus in Asia;"t and his frequent quotations abundantly prove that the book which bore his name was no other than our fourth Gospel. The lateness of this testimony is thought to be compensated by the peculiar opportunities with which the witness was favoured ; for in childhood he had seen the aged Polycarp of Smyrna, the disciple of John ; and he still retained the memory of the old man's look and gait and speech. And though Irenseus' place was in the Western Church, he never lost his interest in the affairs of the Asiatic Christians, and freely appeals in controversy to the local traditions handed down through the successors of Polycarp to his own time. So great was the advantage which he thus enjoyed, that we should expect him, in any encounter with persons who did not acknowledge the fourth Gospel, to confute their doubts by direct information drawn from Polycarp and the Johannine churches. Yet what is the fact ? He actually does engage in controversy with just such persons, — with " Some who of late do not admit the form of tradition which is according to the Gospel of John."l But instead of establishing the authority of that Gospel by simply stating what he knew about its apostolic origin, on the testi- mony of personal disciples of John, he resorts to the absurd arguments already noticed, that there must be four Gospels because there are four winds. Not only does he thus dis- appoint us of his early memories, when we should be glad to have them : but, when at last we get them, they do not prove particularly trustworthy ; for he assures us, on the authority " of the Gospel," and of all the old men who in Asia had known John, the Lord's disciple, and of those who had known other apostles besides, that Jesus Hved to be more than fifty years of age ! § In estimating the value of Irenseus' evidence, it is necessary to distinguish between what he believed and what he knew. He doubtless believed that the Apostle John, after banishment • Ad Autolyomn, ii. 9, 36, iii. p. 129. f Adv. Hser. iii. 1. t Ibid. iii. 11. § Ibid. ii. 39. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 193 to Patmos in the persecution under Domitian, lived at Ephesus till the time of Trajan (a.d. 98-117), and there wrote the fourth Gospel. He knew by memories treasured through some forty years what Polycarp had in his youth heard tell about the life of Jesus from surviving eye-witnesses of it, including John. Had Irenseus reported the contents of Polycarp's recitals, he might have saved for us some missing element of tradition respectuig the ministry of Christ ; and we should have known as fact, that it was current at the close of the apostoUc age. But his silence leaves us none the wiser for his contact with the martyr : from whom we have no reason to suppose that he learned anything about the composition of the fourth Gospel or the other Johannine writings. For his beliefs on such matters he was, so far as we know, not less dependent than others on the common Christian tradition of his time, and was in no position of authority, enabling him to confirm or to correct it. The current assumptions cannot claim exemption from criticism, in virtue of his assent to them. Yet, surely the bare fact of the young Polycarp's resort to " the Lord's disciple John," settles one important point, — viz., the actual i-esidence of the apostle in Asia Minor ; and so far favours the ascription to him of a Gospel having its probable origin there. So we should say, if Polycarp had gone alone in his visits to the aged " disciple." But we hear of them also from one who went with him, and who, in doing so, introduces us, as Eusebius remarks, to a different John, viz. "the Presbyter." This fellow-learner (and afterwards forerunner in martyrdom) is Papias, " the ancient man, companion of Polycarp," who also collected the reported sayings of Christ, and had recourse, in verifying his materials, to two of " the Lord's disciples," John the Presbyter and Aristion. Since, in their joint search for the same thing, Papias depended on the " Presbyter," and Polycarp on the " Apostle," it is natural to ask whether both do not rest on the same personal authority, under different designations ; and whether, in that case, as Papias speaks for himself, Polycarp only through the memory of another, the real historical person is not the Presbyter John, mistaken by Irenseus for the Apostle. The conjecture receives 194 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book ii, some negative confirmation from the extant epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians; in which no mention is made of the Apostle John, though the writer assails the same heretics with whom, according to tradition, the apostle had contended at Ephesus, and against whom the Johannine letters are directed. On the other side may be set the positive mention by Papias of hoth Johns at Ephesus, though his personal relation was with the Presbyter. He has no weight, however, as an historical authority for matters beyond his own experience ; and would be as liable as any of his neighbours to take up with the current Christian belief, in the latter part of the second century, that the closing years of the Apostle John's life had been spent at Ephesus. Unless, therefore, we know the basis of that belief, its recognition by Papias tells us nothing. There need be no mystery about its origin. It came from the assumption, popularly made then, as it is now, that the Book of Eevelation is from the pen of the Apostle John. The Seer and writer makes no such profession : he calls himself only " servant " of Jesus Christ, and " brother and fellow " of his readers (i. 9) ; his angelic guide calls him one of the fraternity of "prophets" (xxii. 6), who, in the early Church are always secondary to the Apostles (1 Cor. xii. 28) : and when, in the crystal light of the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven, he sees the names of the twelve Apostles in- scribed on her twelve foundation stones (xxi. 14), no one can suppose that he reads there his own. These indications were easily overlooked in an uncritical age. And when once the John of the Apocalypse had been identified with the Apostle, the tradition found in the book itself all that was needed for its completion. The author was in " tribulation," doubtless as an exile, in Patmos " for the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus " (i. 9). This could only be in Domitian's persecution, a.d. 95, to which indeed allusions are to be found in xvii. 6, 11, 14. The messages with which the Seer is charged to the seven churches (ii. iii.) imply his relation to them collectively as habitual apostolic agent. And that the first letter is addressed to Ephesus indicates that city as his place of residence. If, as is probable, it was from that Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 195 centre that both the Apocalypse and the fourth Gospel, though at different times and from different hands, passed into cir- culation, this local coincidence would extend the Apostle's name from the one to the other, and complete the tradition that, after his release from banishment, he lived and still wrote at Ephesus into or beyond the first decade of the second century. The story then which, towards the end of that century, emerges in the writings of Irenseus, .of the Apostle John's removal to lesser Asia and residence at Ephesus, has no support from external testimony, but is itself built up by false inferences from the very books which it is supposed to authenticate. Not only does its late date indicate this, but the silly fables mixed up with it when it does appear ; e.g. the caldron of boiling oil which only served to the apostle for a harmless bath, and his orthodox flight from the water in which he saw the heretic Cerinthus bathing, lest the roof should fall. When, from such fictions of later tradition, we turn to the Christian literature of the first quarter of the second century, in which, as mainly the produce of Asia Minor, we may fairly look for witnesses to the Apostle if he were there, — to Luke's two histories, the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, the 1 Timothy, the Ignatian letter to the Ephesians, we find an absence of Johannine characteristics, and a silence in regard to the Ephesian tradition, more significant than the credulous statements of Irenseus. When we enter upon the series of anonymous citations, the limits within which we can appeal to them in evidence of the existence! of the book are by no means easy to determine. Two principal causes of doubt hold the problem in suspense : we cannot with any certainty date the quotations; and we cannot be sure that they are quotations at all, and not rather, — inversely, — an earlier expression of • some thought pervading the theology of the age or school, and ultimately fixed in the language of the fourth Gospel. The first of these causes comes into play when we alight upon the book in the Gnostic circles of the second century ; the other, when we pass farther back to the Epistle of Barnabas. Among the heresiarchs who threatened to absorb Christianity 2 196 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. by planting its founder and its God among their seons, there was no greater figure than that of Valentinus : whose influence is attested by the eagerness of ecclesiastical opposition, especially as represented by Irenseus and Hippolytus. As he is known to have gone to Eome about a.d. 140, and not to have lived beyond about a.d. 160, his use of the fourth Gospel, if it could be proved, would add nearly forty years to its ascertained term of existence. That it was used by his disciples in the next generation is indisputable ; for one of them, Ptolemseus, addressed a letter to the Lady Flora, — a member of the school,^ — which has been preserved by Epi- phanius ; wherein he says, " Besides, the Saviour claims the creation of the cosmos as his own, inasmuch as all things were made by him, and without him was nothing made." And another — Herakleon — wrote comments on the Gospel, some passages of which have been handed down by Origen. Yet, while they used the book, it is surprising how little its historical authority seems to have weighed with them ; for, in the face of its obvious chronology and plainest narrative, they attributed to the ministry of Jesus a duration of only a year, and taught that he lived on earth eighteen months after his. resurrection.* That Valentinus himself had in his hand the Gospel which became such a favourite with his followers there was no ground for supposing, till the discovery of the long lost. Philosophumena attributed to Hippolytus : for in the account of his system by IrensBus,! and of the passages of scripture adduced in its support, we find only texts from the Old Testa- ment, from the synoptics, from Paul, tortured into applications, which they will not bear ; while not a single Johannine text presents itself, though to every reader the most apposite quotations must occur, as lying right in the way, as at once^ supplying a good argument and sparing a bad one. Thus, in support of the position that before Christ no man had known, the supreme God, the irresistible appeal is not made to John i. 18, "No man has seen God at any time ; the only-begotten. Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has revealed him." This silence becomes the more striking, when we turn to an appendix in which Irenseus reports the later Valentinian. * Epiphanius : Hser. xxxiii. 3. f Adv. Hsr. i. 8, 1-4. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 197 expositions given by Ptolemseus ; for here, at last, we meet with the Johannine texts which we so strangely miss in a system which moves among teons named "Logos," "Only- begotten," "Life," "Grace," and "Truth." The natural inference would be that the master had not yet seen the book in which the disciple found a welcome ally. But Hippolytus, we are assured, with the treatise of Valen- tinus lying open before him, actually produces from it pas- sages out of the fourth Gospel, and so corrects this negative inference. His account of the Valentinian Gnosis is intro- duced by these words : " Valentinus and Heracleon and Ptolemaeus, and all their school, disciples of Pythagoras and Plato, following the principle recited, established their own numerical scheme ; " — " The above-mentioned monad is called 62/ i^eni, Father ; " — "The Father, says ]ie, was alone unbe- gotten."* Who is the "he" that says this ? How are we to identify him within the previous plural " them" whence he emerges ? We can only reply, he is that one of them whose book was before Hippolytus as he wrote ; but which of them fulfils this condition we cannot tell. When therefore, farther on, the writer similarly states, " Hence, says he, the Saviour's words, ' All they that came before me are thieves and robbers,' " (John x. 10,)+ it is quite arbitrary to fasten this quotation from the fourth Gospel upon Valentinus in particular, as distinguished from Heracleon and Ptolemaeus. Come the citation from whichsoever of them it may, the words of Hippolytus would stand exactly as they are. There is nothing, therefore, here to disturb the indications given by Irenseus, that the fourth Gospel first came mto the hands of the Valentinians in the second generation of their sect. Exact dates cannot be confidently given ; but the most recent and probable conclusion assigns Ptolemseus to about a.d. 180, and Herakleon to a time ten years later, t * Hippol. Philosophumena, vi. 26. t Ibid. vi. 35. J The case of Basileides and his alleged citations labours under precisely the same defect of proof as that of Valentinus, and requires no separate notice. He also is mentioned in the same breath -with his later followers ; from any one of whom the quotations adduced may have proceeded; the plural subject being followed by the verb in the singular,— "Basileides and Isidorus, and the whole xopos of tl^ese men falsely allege (Kon-ayjffvdeTai) " igS AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. Equally unsuccessful is the appeal to Marcion as a witness to the existence of the fourth Gospel. That he made no use of it, but in constructing his system resorted only to Luke and ten of Paul's Epistles, is admitted on all hands. This selection, however, was due, we are told, not to unacquaintance with the Johannine writings, but to deliberate rejection of them, as unsuitable to his purpose; and there is certainly some passionate language of TertuUian which gives a colour- able aspect to this assertion. Marcion was induced, says this vehement controversialist, by the second chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, " to destroy the standing of those Gospels which are published under the names of apostles and apostolic men, and, by taking away reliance on them, transfer it to his own."* And again he says, " Had you (Marcion) not purposely rejected some of the scriptures that oppose your opinions, and corrupted others, the Gospel of -John would have confuted you."t Here, no doubt, the exclusive use by Marcion of a few writings arbitrarily detached from their usual companions is treated as a repudiation of the rest ; and since, at the time when TertuUian wrote, the canon was made up, and all its parts would be alike to him, it is not wonderful that the fourth Gospel, being absent from the Heresiarch's list, is classed among his rejected books. To infer from this loose language that TertuUian knew Marcion to have been in possession of the Johannine Gospel would be unwarrant- able. He probably knew nothing about it; but, presuming that what was scripture now had been scripture then, resented, with all the heat of his African rhetoric, the dishonour in- flicted on the Church by so fastidious an anthology of the Bible. It is the less likely that Marcion's disregard of the fourth Gospel was intentional, because from Hippolytus we learn that his follower Apelles already used it,| and from Origen that passages of it were cited by later Marcionites. And who can believe, that, with his anti-Judaic design to construe Christianity into a universal religion, Marcion would &o., vii. 20. As the sect still existed in the third century, such passages supply no determinate chronology. * Adv. Marc. iv. 4. + De Came Christi. o. 3. X Hippol. Philos. yii. 38. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 199 have taken Luke as his text-book, if the next Gospel had been ready to his hand ? It would have saved him a large pro- portion of the trouble and odium he incurred in making a synoptic speak sufficiently like Paul, and supplied him with many a formula weightier than his own for the expression of some favourite ideas. In the case, therefore, of both these sects, the evidence points to the same conclusion, — that the Gospel was known to their second generation, but unknown to their first. If so, it passed into circulation between a.d. 140 and a.d. 170.* This inference is supported by another witness, producible from the same age. A controversy began at Laodicea in the year 170, on the question whether Christians ought to keep, or not to keep, the paschal feast according to the Jewish rule ; one party maintaining that, as Jesus kept it with the twelve before he suffered, so should his followers, and appealing to Matthew's Gospel in support of their opinion ; the other insisting that Jesus in his death was himself the true passover, and closed forever the typical celebration ; resting their case on the fourth Gospel. This latter doctrine found a zealous advocate in Claudius Apollinaris, bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia ; and in a fragment of his, preserved in the Paschal Chronicle, occurs the following distinct reference to the narrative in John xix. 34 : " He who was pierced in his holy side, who poured out of his side the two purifiers, water and blood, word and sphit, and who was buried on the paschal day, having been put into a sepulchre of stone." It is singular that, though this is cited as a set-off against the authority of Matthew, on which the opponents rely, it is not put forth under the name of John, so as to make apostle answer apostle. In the anonymous charac- ter of its citation, as well as in its date (between a.d. 170 and A.D. 180), it agrees with the Valentinian and Marcionite evidence. Till within a few years, the citations which we have passed under review afforded the only clear vestiges of the fourth • This chronological conclusion from the history of the Valentinian Gnos- ticism coincides exactly with that which Pfleiderer deduces from the internal development of Christian doctrine in his admirable work, Das . Urohristen- thum, seine Schriften und Lehren, S. 778. 20O AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. Gospel before the later decades of the second century. There was especial reason for surprise that no notice of it appeared in the Clementine Homilies, a Jewish Christian production (probably produced at Kome about a.d. 160-170), pervaded by an intense hostility to the Pauline Christianity and the doctrine of the godhead of Christ, and not likely therefore to be sparing of criticism on a Gospel which carries that doctrine on its front, and goes far beyond Paul in its revolt from Judaism. But throughout the eighteen and a half homilies contained in the solitary Paris codex, only two phrases which might be, yet need not be, Johannine could be detected. In 1838, however, Dressel found in the Vatican Library a second MS., containing the missing close of the book; and in 1853 published the whole twenty Homilies. In XIX. 22 we meet with the following unquestionable reference to the narrative in John ix. 1-3 : " Hence, too, our Teacher replies to those who asked him, about the man blind from birth and endowed by him with vision, whether he sinned or his parents, that he was born blind, — ' neither did this man commit sin nor his parents ; but that by means of him the power of God might be made manifest, healing the sins of ignorance '."* Yet here, two remarkable features are to be observed : (1) The citation is not word for word in agreement with the Gospel ; and the princi- pal deviation of phrase is found also twice in Justin Martyr ;t (2) the doctrine which the passage elicits from the man's congenital blindness, is entirely at variance with that of the fourth Gospel ; the Bbionite writer deducing the blindness retrospectively from some " sin of ignorance," some uncon- scious disregard of the Mosaic law on the parents' part ; the author of the gospel explaiaing it prospectively, as the condition provided for the hght-giving " works of God." Both these features may be due to the writer of the Homilies, who, in borrowing from the Gospel, may have made his own * Oaev Koi StdacTKaXos tjimv Ttepl Tov ek yepeTrjs Trripov (John tv(^Xoi/) koL dva^TiLfi^avTos Trap avTOV f^erd [(ovcrtv Koi iparSxriv] el ovtos rjp.apTev rj ot yovcis auroC tva TV(ji\6s ycvvtjB^, aneKpivaro ' ovre oStos ti rjp.apTcu, ovTf ol yoveis avTov • dXX' iva SI avTov (pavepmd^ ^ Siva/us tov ©foC, T^r dyvoias lafievri rd dfiapTrnwra. XIX. 22. t Apol. I. 22. nrjpol €K yeveTTJs. Dial. u. Tryph. 69. ck yevirfis Tnjpol Koi Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 201 alterations in language and in thought. But the evangelical citations in the Clementine Homilies have a peculiar complex- ion, which suggests another explanation ; not one of them is found in Mark ; only four could come from Luke ; more than a hundred present themselves, only not verbatim, in Matthew; and eight are in no canonical Gospel. These phenomena indicate the use, by this writer, of some source unknown to us, — a source which might also be resorted to by the author of the fourth Gospel. An evangelist, writing in the post- apostolic age, and wishing to give a fresh version of the ministry of Christ, would not break with the historic past, and draw on his own invention for his biographical construc- tion ; but searching among the traditions, fixed or floating, of Christ's acts and words, would work up what best suited his new design. These same materials would be equally available for other writers, and might therefore reappear in several forms. Some of them actually do so appear in our synoptical Gospels ; and others, in the second century, may no less have repeated themselves, with similar varieties, in the less histori- cal pages of Christian compilers and advocates of that age. We cannot-, therefore, safely infer, from the agreement of an anonymous citation with a passage in one of our evangelists, that it is taken from his Gospel, and proves its contemporary existence. Were we, however, to admit the inference in the present instance, it would still leave our previous chronological conclusion undisturbed. The farther we go back, the more do we encounter this strange phenomenon, — of seeming citation fading into mere resemblance, which might be accidental, and which memory would hardly leave so incomplete. Often as a passing phrase of Justin Martyr seems to have in it something of the Johannine ring, the sound dies away, and changes too soon to come from that full-toned source ; and there is but one passage on which any stress can be laid as a probable quota- tion. It runs thus : " For Christ said, ' Unless ye be born again, ye will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.' But that it is impossible for those who have once been born to enter the wombs of those that bare them, is plain to all."* * Apol. i. 61. 202 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. On reading this we turn at once to John iii. 3, 4, as its Scripture source : " Jesus answered and said to him, Verily, verily, I say to thee, unless a man be born from above " (for that is the true reading), "he cannot see the kingdom of God." Nicodemus saith to him, " How can a man be born, being old ? Can he enter again his mother's womb and be born ? " [Jesus answered] " Verily, verily, I say unto thee. Unless a man be born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." Among the differences between the two passages we may especially notice, (1) That Christ addresses in the Gospel one person only; in Justin, a plurality. (2). The regeneration in Justin is only a being " born again ,- " in the Gospel a birth "from above." (3) Justin says, "Ye will not enter ; " the Gospel, " He cannot enter." (4) The Gospel speaks of the " kingdom of God ; " Justin uses Matthew's phrase, " the kingdom of heaven." All these differences might arise from the looseness of memoriter quotation, intent upon the sense rather than the words. But in that case they are personal to Justin, and, as accidents of his literary mood, will not appear again. It so happens, however, that in Eufinus's version of the Clementine Kecognitions we find the same passage, with all these four differences reproduced : " Verily, I say to you [plural] , Unless a man shall have been born aver again of water, he will not enter into the kingdom of heaven."* This concurrence of two independent writers in a set of variations on the same text must be due to some common cause ; and what else can it be than the use by both of them of a source deviating from the fourth Gospel in these points. Nor can we well doubt that that source embodied an earlier tradition, on which the Johannine version afterwards refined ; for the re-birth, which in the former is boldly identified with baptism, and amounts only to the entrance on a new life, is elevated in the latter into a fresh creation by " the Spirit," the initiation from above into a divine life. That this higher doctrine is a later emergence from the other, must be evident to any one who has studied the history of reUgious ideas. It * Amen dice vobis, " Nisi quis denuo renatus fuerit ex aqua, non introibit in regna coelorum," vi. 9. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 203 is probable, as Volkmar has shown,* that the Johannine passage, with its doctrine of new birth, is only the divine saying of Christ, in its last stage of metamorphosis, — " unless ye turn," and become as little children, ye will not enter the kingdom of heaven (Mat. xviii. 3). The absence of distinct Johannine quotations in Justin Martyr is the more remarkable, because he was obviously influenced, as might be expected from a Platonist, by the Gnostic conceptions which were afloat in his time, and which embodied themselves in many of the phrases characteristic of the fourth Gospel, — \6yog, /xovoyevi^g, aap%, irvtv/xa, aproe Srcov. His mind was drawn into the same current which sweeps so broad and strong through the work of the evangelist, but only at its first and feeble drift ; and his tentative and wavering movements in its direction would have been not less impossi- ble, had its full tide set in, than it would have been for Plato, had he known the Newtonian physics, to explain as he does the equilibration of the earth in space.f The Logos doctrine, especially, he presents in a far less determinate and developed form than it assumes in the Gospel, — in a form that might naturally come after Philo, but could only precede the evan- gelist. The recovery of the Greek text of the Epistle of Barnabas, and the natural affection of Tischendorf for everything con- tained in his Sinaitic Codex, have revived the interest of theo- logians in that production, and, for a while, given it a weight greater than justly belongs to it in the decision of the Johannine controversy. If it could be assigned, as Weizsacker J supposes, to so early a date as a.d. 80, or even to the reign of Nerva (about A.D. 97), as Hilgenfeld contends ; § and if, further, Keim were right in affirming the author's evident acquaintance with the fourth Gospel, |i this piece, intrinsically of no great signifi- cance, would solve the most important problem in sacred criticism. An impartial judgment will hardly find in it materials for winning so considerable a result. The dates • Ueber Justin den Martyrer, c. iii. Zurich, 1853, + Phffidon, 108, E, 109, A. t Zur Kritik d. Bamabasbriefes : S. 21, sec[q. 1863. § Nov. Test, extra Canonem Beceptmn : Barn. Epist, Prol. xi. seffj. II Gesohiclite Jesu von Nazara : B. i. p. 141-U3. 204 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. suggested for its composition ^re recommended by evidence so slender as to remain simply conjectural ; and they are rendered improbable, by some indications, which can hardly mislead us, of a later time. A passage, for instance, in Matthew's Gospel is quoted with the formula, " As it is written," — a phrase never employed but of the Old Testament books, which were read as sacred scriptures; and the Christian books were not placed upon that level till some way into the second century.* The whole cast of thought and sentiment is in harmony with this indication : Judaism is left behind, except as furnishing a fund of types of Christian incidents. The Pauline period and manner are in the past, with the controversies that formed their characteristics ; the Alexandrine theology is in the ascendant, turning the literature of religion into a frost-work of precarious imagery and correspondences, yet still with a lingering play about biblical texts and histories, and not yet elevated into a speculative gnosis, aspiring to be philosophical and spiritual at once. These are the featm-es which mark the first quarter of the second century. By the aid of a passage in the six- teenth chapter, the date may perhaps be more precisely fixed. Contrasting the local and legal worship of Jews with the spiritual temple of the Christians, the writer appeals to the Jews' own Scriptures : " The Lord saith, ' Heaven is my throne, and the earth my footstool. "What house will ye build for me, or where is the place of my rest ? ' Know that their hope is vain. And again he saith, ' They that have destroyed this temple themselves shall build it up.' It is coming to pass : for through their going to war it has been destroyed by the enemy ; and now they themselves, as servants of their enemies, will have to rebuild it." The reference here, there can be little doubt, is to a contemporary event of the second Jewish war under Hadrian, occasioned by the rebellion of Barchocbarr, a.d. 132-135, when the temple was utterly destroyed and its platform levelled. The Jews, even then hoping and entreating that it might rise again, were permitted to commence a reconstruction. But, when the work was finished, the temple was dedicated to Jupiter Capitolinus. See Barnabas und Johannes, von H. Holzmann : Zeitschrift fiir wis- sensch. Theologie. 1871. p. 350. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 205 This was what was "coming to pass," and proving that " their hope was vain." * If, in reading the Epistle of Barnabas, we assumed that all the elements of Christology which transcend the synoptical Gospels must be drawn from the fourth, we should certainly pronounce it dependent upon both. The pre-existence of " the Son of God," his superhuman nature, his " manifestation in the flesh," are dwelt upon in a way foreign to the earlier evangelists. But so are they even in the imdoubted Pauline writings, and more emphatically in the epistles to the Hebrews, the Colossians, and the Ephesians; the growth of doctrine continually receding from the first Messianic form, and passing through many stadia to the ultimate definitions of the creeds. Two of these stadia are represented by the epistle of Barnabas and the Johannine Gospel respectively ; and our immediate question is. Which occupies the earlier place? The chief indications of precedence in the Gospel are two. Barnabas represents the death and the resurrection of Christ as acts of liis own, in conformity with a command of his Father, f just as the evangelist does (John x. 18) ; and he takes the brazen serpent as a type of Christ,J like John iii. 14. But neither of these representations is so peculiar as to have no possible source but the fourth Gospel. Paul (Phil. ii. 5-8) treats the humiliation and sacrifice of Christ as voluntary ; and though he ascribes to God the raising him from death to heavenly life, the post-apostolic age was not content without carrying the Saviour's agency through the whole economy of redemption, and making it all the execution of a predicted and intended plan. We find, accordingly, this same idea in other writings of the period; e.g., the Sibylline oracles and the Ignatian letters.§ There is no reason to suppose that any one of these writers borrowed the conception from another : it lived in the Christian imagination of their time, and, drawn thence by all, was originally applied by each. As for the brazen serpent, it is cmly by singling it out from the forest of types by which it is * Cf. Pfleiderer, Das Urohristenthiim : S. 667. + C. 5. ^ tC. 12. § Orac. Sib. viii. 313. koi Tor'aTri 6 phrase iv t^ KvgiuKy nuipq, an ecclesiastical natme for Sunday which, like the term koS'oXik;!/ sKKXjjcrta, occurs. for, the first time. in the Ignatian Epistles ;t and. carries us: ipto the' middle of the second century. Elsewhere in the N. T. the ; day is known as "the first day of the week";! in thie Epistle of * See this interpretation extended to other parts of the same- chapter in Die Entstehung der Apokaljgpse, v. Dr. Daniel Voelter, 2t« Aufl. pp. 58,, 59.- - + Magnes. ix. + Acts xx. 7. 1 Cor. xvi. 2. Chajs. II.] PROTESTANTS'AND THE . SCRIPTURES, 223. Barnabas,* and the \^itings of Justin Martyr, as "th6i dghth day," or, as "the so-called day of the Sun."t That, when once introduced, it passed into rapid currency is, elvident from the disappearance in it of the Vord ii/ucpa, and the retention <)i Kvpiaict) alone as a noun, £ts in the " Teaching of _ the Twelve A^postles," and later writings of the second century* Nor can the attentive reader fail to notice an extension of the familiar predicates of Messiah introduced with ah air of mystery betokening something both unexpected and signifi- cant. The secret is but hinted at in the message to the church at Pergamum.t " To him that overcometh will I give, of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and upon the stone a new name written which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it,!" For the symbol of this esoteric wisdom we have to wait till " the Faithful and True," who sends the message, appears on "^a white horse," followed by "the armies which are in heaven, upon white horses, and clothed in fine linen, white and pure." " He hath a name written which no one knoweth but he himself." Yet the Seer is an •exception ; for he adds, " His name is called the Word of GoD."§ The writer of these passages obviously stands at the initial stage of an -expanding Christology, nutritive perhaps as "bread from heaven," but not yet palatable except to a few who had felt its power to stay their spiritual , hunger. That Christ is here called " the Word of God," in the full sense of the Logos doctrine, I do not affirm. The phapeB of that doctrine, in. the Book of Wisdom, in Philo, and in the Hellenized Christianity of the Alexandrine school, are variouft and progressive. But the appropriation of its characteristic predicate to the Christ of the Apocalypse certainly assigns the writer to the post-apostolic period in which the conceptioila of the school, first gained a hold in Asia Minor. Nor can we find, the heresies which are deh6uriced, any niore than .the Christology which is implied, at an earlier date than the fourth 4ecade of the second century.; The letters to the seven churches contain warnings against several varie- ties of pernicious error. However difficult it may be to fit * XV. ddfln. + Apol. 67, Tryph. 24, 41. t ii. 17.. . § xix. 11-13. 224 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. each descriptive term — " Nicolaitans," "the teaching of Balaam", "the woman Jezebel who calleth herself a prophetess " , "the synagogue of Satan ", to precisely its intended personage or type, the characteristics condemned, the lapse from self-denying faith, the ungodly carelessness, the concessions to heathen dissoluteness (even to "the ex- ploring of the depths of Satan "), the inward alienation from the spirit of Him that is Holy and True, — all point to the gnosticism of Carpocrates and Basilides, with its orgiastic variations in the usages of Phrygia. The Pauline antithesis of Law and Gospel pressed to its extreme and unintended consequences, assumed with them the form of absolute anti- nomianism, treating all moral distinctions as illusory, and resolving the ideal life into unrestricted freedom. Christianity, instead of being the development and fulfilment of the Jewish religion, involved a total breach with its fundamental principle of Righteousness. The Old Testament system was the Eevela- tion of a lower or demiurgic nature ; while the Christian worship is directed to the Highest God, who is above the distinction of good and evil, and is best served by those to whom " all things are pure." Marcion, like Paul, saved his protest against legalism from giving any excuse for licence. But in the schools most prevalent in Asia Minor, about a.d. 130-140, the antinomian theory of indifference undoubtedly led to the practical libertinism which is so vividly painted in the letters to the churches. Combining these several marks of time, we find in the Apocalypse passages which cannot have been later than the seventh decade of the first century, and others that cannot have been earlier than the fourth decade of the second century. The irresistible inference, viz., that the book is a composite product, made up of contributions from several hands, moulded by a final editor, was announced.in 1882, and supported with remarkable critical skill, by Dr. Daniel Voelter, a Privat- docent in Tiibingen, in a Treatise* which, though destined to be superseded, will always mark an epoch in the true inter- pretation of the Apocalypse. On one point only Voelter adheres to the older criticism : all the components of the book * Die Entstehung der Apokalypse : 2t' Aufl. 1885. Chap. 11.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SQRIPTURES. 225 are " Jewish-Christian " ; and it is just here that his position is already shaken, and that by the independent labours of a still younger theologian. This ulterior movement cannot be better described than by the distinguished Professor, Adolf Harnack, its first witness and generous reporter. In com- ■ mending to the reader the Essay by his pupil, Eberhard Vischer, of which the title is given below,* he says : — " In June last year, the author of the foregoing treatise, then a student in Theology at our University, came and told me that in working at the theme prescribed . for his department, ' On the theological point of view of the Apocalypse of John,' he had found no way through the problem but by explaining the book as a Jewish Apocalypse with Christian interpolations, set in a Christian frame. At first he met with no very gracious reception from me. I had at hand a carefully prepared Lecture Heft, the result of repeated study of the enigmatic book, registering the opinions of a host of interpreters from Irenaeus downwards : but no such hypothesis was to be found among them : and now it came upon me from a very young student, who as yet had made himself master of no commentary, but had only carefully read the book itself. Hence my scepticism was intelligible : but the very first arguments, advanced with all modesty, were enough to startle me; and I begged my young friend to come back in a few days and go more thoroughly with me into his hypothesis. I began to read the Apocalypse with care from the newly-gained point of view ; and it was — I can say no less — as if scales fell from my eyes. After the too familiar labours of interpreters on the riddle of the book, the proffered solution came upon me as the egg of Columbus. One difficulty after another vanished, the farther I read ; the darkest passages caught a sudden light ; all the hypotheses of perplexed interpreters — of 'proleptic visions,' ' historical perspectives,' ' recapitulating method,' ' resting stations,' ' recreative points,' ' imconscious relapse into purely Jewish ideas,' melted away at once; the complex Christology of the book, hitherto a veritable crux for every historical critic, resolved itself into simple elements, and the * Die OfEenbarung Johannis eine Judische Apokalypse in Christioher Bearbeitung ; mit einem Nachwort von A. Harnack. 1886. Q 226 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. sections, XI. XII., by far the most difficult of all, at once became plain and intelligible. But, above all, the severance of a Jewish original text from a Christian redaction resolved the main problem of the Apocalypse of John, viz., the pecu- liarity of the author's Christianity. What pains have been spent upon this question for the last ten years ! What argu- - ments of high repute lent support to those who held the book to be strictly Jewish- Christian, and therefore anti-Pauline, and yet how easily were they refuted by other proofs drawn from the book itself ! How plainly might the author's Chris- tian universalism be proved ; and what insuperable considera- tions presented themselves against it ! Vischer's hypothesis removed these difficulties at a stroke. There can be no further question of a Jewish Christianity. We have before us, as the basis of the work, a purely Jewish document, clearly traceable in its outlines and the mass of its details, supplemented and revised by a Christian, who has nothing whatever to do with the 'ItrparJX Kara adpKa, but thinks only of the Gentile world, out of which the Lamb has purchased with his blood a count- less multitude."* In this generous tribute to his pupil, Harnaek does not, in my judgment, overestimate the convincing effect of his analysis. After indicating the lines of cleavage between the original text and the recension throughout the book, and accounting for each interpolation, Vischer exhibits the results in a reprint of the entire Jewish part, extending from iv. 1 to. xxii. 5, with the Christian insertions rendered conspicuous by different type : followed by an Appendix, containing the first three chapters and the Epilogue xxii. 6-21, which form the Christian framework of the whole. The effect of this recast of the composition is most striking. For a reader who is at all conversant with the Jewish apocalyptic literature the im- pression can scarcely fail to be irresistible, that the prophetic oracle which has darkened so much has at last revealed its own origin. It does not follow, from the mixture of the two elements, that the work is due to only two contributors, and referable only to two times. From the second century b.c. the Jewish * Vischer's Offenb. Joh. Naohwort, S. 126, 127. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 227 eschatology was ever producing fresh varieties of vision ; and the play of Christian fancy upon them fitted them with new meanings for new times. Eeasons which it would need a complete commentary to set forth warrant the conclusion that the Judaic groundwork owes part of its text to the zealot period of the first Jewish war, a.d., 66-70, and part to a time about eight years later ; and that the Christianized recension shows the hand of two editors, one, in Domitian's time, re- sponsible for all the twenty-nine passages speaking of " The Laynb," the other, belonging to Hadrian's reign, answerable for the letters to the churches, as well as for the introduction and conclusion of the whole work. It cannot therefore have been issued before a.d. 136, and is altogether post-apostolic. How strange that we should ever have thought it possible for a personal attendant on the ministry of Jesus to write or edit a book mixing up fierce Messianic conflicts, in which, with the sword, the gory garment, the blasting flame, the rod of iron, as his emblems, he leads the war-march, and treads the wine- press of the wrath of God till the deluge of blood rises to the horses' bits, with the speculative Christology of the second century, without a memory of his life, a feature of his look, a word from his voice, or a glance back at the hillsides of Galilee, the courts of Jerusalem, the road to Bethany, on which his image must be for ever seen ! What then is the effect of the new discovery (if such it be) respecting the Apocalypse on the question of authorship for the fourth Gospel ? Simply this : the Apocalypse is put out of court altogether as a witness in the case. Stripped of its own apostolic pretension, it has nothing to say either for or against that of the Gospel : and the old argument against either from its violent contrast with the other can no longer be pressed. Deprived of this source of comparison, we return to the purely internal features of the Gospel, so far as they bear on the probable authorship. D. Relation to the Paschal Controversy. Among the peculiarities of the fourth Gospel there is one -which seems to displace the author both from the list of Apostles, Q 2 228 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. and from his traditional residence and authority at Ephesus. His reports of events in the Passion week is inconsistent with the Synoptic narrative, whose source must be regarded as apostohc. And his interpretation of their meaning is at variance with their memorial celebration in the churches of Asia Minor. It will be -simpler to' take the latter discrepancy first. To render it clear, some account must he given of the controversy about Easter, which preceded the establishment of the present church calendar. There is no reason to believe that in the earlier half of the second century the "Western Christians observed any annual festival at all. Justin Martyr, writing in Eome, and pro- fessing to give to the Emperor a complete account of the Christian usages,* mentions only baptism, the eucharist, the Sunday assembly ; and is silent about any Christmas, Easter, or Whitsuntide. Their commemorations went by the week, not by the year; and within the week, Wednesday and Friday (the latter especially) were kept as fast-days (sta^ tio7ies),i in memory of the sufferings of Christ ; but, above all, Sunday, as the festival of the resurrection. The attitude of the early Christians was altogether prospective, on the watch for the return of Christ and the last act in the drama of human things ; and the tension of this amazing expectation was inconsistent with the commemorative mood, which sees its brightest glories in retrospect, and repeats them as beacon- lights to intersect the routine of future years. But when the world had sufficiently vindicated its permanence, and it seemed settled that Christ was to remain in heaven, and his church to organize itself below, disappointed prophecy with- drew, and historical veneration came to the front, eager to save the Christ of the past, in proportion as the form dis- solved away of Christ in the near future ; and the same portion of the second century which discredited Chiliasm, and threw it into the shade, concentrated interest upon the earthly life of Christ, and created the anniversaries which celebrated its main epochs. Especially was the desire felt to emphasize that one of the weekly, resurrection days which fell nearest * Apol. i. c. 65 seqq. i Hermee Pastor, Simil. v. ; and Tertull. de Jejun. ii. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 229 in season to the original event ; and how to hit upon this with the requisite precision became a question. In the history, that week was picked out from all the weeks of the year, by the occurrence of the passover ; and the passover was a spring festival, determined in date by the equinoctial full moon, which marked the mid point (or fourteenth day) of the first Jewish (lunar) month, Nisan. Here, then, without consulting any rabbi or submitting to his law, was a con- spicuous astronomical event which detected the right week ; and the rule emerged, that the Sunday next after that par- ticular full moon should be Easter Sunday. This was the regulative day : from this, the reckoning was taken backward to the previous Friday, in order to alight upon the memorial day of the crucifixion ; which was chiefly kept by intensifying the usual weekly fast, prolonging it through the time when Christ was in the sepulchre, and terminating it only with Easter morning communion. Thus the Western usage established an anniversary week, rather than an anniversary day, and, when the full moon came, paid no attention to it, but waited for the following Sunday ; refusing to disturb the incidence of the passion and the resurrection on the original week-days which witnessed them, although if they had been brought on at the passover of some earlier or later year, they would have fallen on other days than the sixth and the first. In Lesser Asia, the consuetudinary rule had formed itself in a different way. The Christians there had never, from the, first, been without an annual festival ; nor had they to find for themselves the right date on which to hold it ; for what they meant to keep was just the passover which, according to the synoptists, their Master had kept with his apostles ; and that must be found, as he had found it, by the Jewish rule, and always fall upon the 14th of the spring lunar month. As the moon in her fulness pays no regard to the days of the week, but in a series of years looks down, on every one, the paschal observance shifted through them all, and had no preference for one above the rest. Hence it might happen that in Asia Minor the commemorative season was over before it had begun in Italy ; and, while the West was bending in the most solemn worship of the year, the chur'ches. . across the 230 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. vEgean had resumed their routine agaia. Thus there was no Good Friday among these Eastern Christians, no Easter Sunday ; nor was the primary object of their commemoration either the crucifixion or the resurrection, — to which these were respectively dedicated, — but the Last Supper, which was their prelude, and stood for the disciples as the dividing mark between the earthly ministry and the heavenly retirement of their Master. And upon this feature depends another differ- ence between the West and the East. That paschal supper, which was the uppermost thought with the latber, was a feast of thankfulness and joy ; and, as soon as its celebration came, the fast which preceded it was ended, and the regimen of austerity was dismissed, just at the time when the former, contemplating only the dark hours of the cross and the sepulchre, imposed a rigorous self-denial, and filled the churches with plaintive prayer, refusing to dissolve the fast till the resurrection morning broke. Thus the Asiatics simply con- tinued the Jewish usage, importing into it Christian memories and ideas ; not of course unmindful of the Master's death and resurrection, but concentrating the remembrance of them into one commemoration copied from the night of forecast and of parting, when the catastrophe waited only for the morrow, and its reversal for the next sabbath's close. With what observances these Christians celebrated their paschal days ; whether they actually imitated the Jewish rite and partook together of the lamb, or merely administered the eucharist with some special solemnities, there is no distinct evidence to show. Certain it is that in some Eastern Churches the former practice prevailed for many centuries ; but a usage so strongly at variance with the customs of the West could hardly have escaped mention and protest in the controversies of the time, had the Eomans been able to charge it upon their opponents. Probably, therefore, there was only a communion service of exceptional sanctity. Divested of its accessories, the question in dispute fell into this form. Are we to celebrate the passover which Jesus kept with his disciples the day before he suffered, or his sufferings which followed? And, if the latter, what paschal character has our celebration? Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 231 Of this dispute vestiges remain to us from three of its stages; in which the opposite sides were represented, first by Polycarp of Smyrna, and Anicetus, Bishop of Kome (about A.D. 160) ; next by Melito of Sardes, and Apollinaris of Hierapolis (about a.d. 170) ; and lastly, by Polycrates of Ephesus, and Yictor, Bishop of Eome (about a.d. 190). Of these, Apollinaris alone gives us any clear insight into the pleas, other than of example and authority, urged on either side. Notwithstanding his geographical position, he supported the Western usage, adducing on its behalf a consideration which, repeated as it is by Clement of Alexandria and Hippolytus, was evidently the stock-argument of the Eoman party. It takes us at once to the point where the kernel of the problem lies. The contention of his opponents, he tells us, is that " on the 14th of Nisan the Lord ate the lamb with his disciples, and on the next day, the great day of unleavened bread, himself suffered," and they appealed to Matthew in proof. Against this he advances his own position, that " the genuine passover, the great sacrifice, is the Son of God instead of the lamb, the bound captive who binds the strong one, the judge who judges quick and dead, — from whose pierced side flow the two purifiers, water and blood, and who was entombed on the paschal day."* Hippolytus places the two opinions in still stronger antithesis. The Christian of Asia Minor, he tells us, puts his case thus : " Christ kept the passover, and then next day he suffered : therefore it is my duty to do as the Lord did." To which Hippolytus replies, "He is mistaken, being unaware that, at the season of his passion, Christ did not eat the legal passover, being himself the passover of pro- mise that fulfilled itself on the prescribed day." Again, " He partook indeed of a supper before the passover; but the passover he did not eat: instead of this he suffered. Not even was it the time for eating it."t Nothing can be clearer than that the two parties here represented were at issue upon a question of historical fact, — the Quartodecimans af&rming, the Westerns denying, that * Chron. Pasoh. p. 14. Ed. Bonn : more fully cited ap. Hilgenfeld'e Pasoha- Streit der alten. Kirche, p. 256, t Chron. Pasch. p. 12. 232 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book I L Jesus kept the last passover with his disciples : both appealing to the " Gospel ; " the former, by name, to Matthew ; the latter, by citation and allusion (observe the pierced side, the blood and water, the entombment on the paschal day, the supper hefore the passover, the time for eating it not having come, the passion on the paschal day and as the fulfilment of the typical rite), to the fourth evangelist; thus establish- ing, as Apollinaris himself remarks, a variance between the Gospels.* That variance is no perverse invention of either party. It plainly exists, and survives all the good offices of indefatigable harmonists. The case stands thus. The Gospels all agree in their hebdomadal chronology of the passion ; that Jesus was crucified on the Friday ; that he held a last supper with his disciples on the Thursday ; that he rose from the dead on the following Sunday : nor have any critics with whom we are here concerned ever doubted their unanimity in this pro- gram, t But to these dates the synoptists fit the numerical days of the month differently from the fourth evangelist ; letting the 14th (with its passover in the evening), which he identifies with the Friday, fall already upon the Thursday. The evidence of this discrepancy is of the simplest and most conspicuous kind : the paschal meal is declared by the synop- tists to be the Thursday's supper, and to be over, therefore, before the crucifixion ; by the fourth evangelist to be due on the Friday evening, and therefore to be still to come at the hour of Christ's passion. When the day came (says Luke) for the passover to be killed, Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, " Go and make ready for us the passover, that we may eat it " : these disciples having carried out their instructions, and "made ready the passover," he placed himself at table, when the hour came, with the twelve apostles, and said, " I have earnestly desired to eat this passover with you before I ' araa-id^eiv SokcI kot' airois to. eiayyeXia. Chron. Pasch. p. 14. t Dr. Sears attributes to the " Tiibingeu critics " the opinion that the fourth evangelist " places the crucifixion on Thursday," and the supper on Wednesday. This misapprehension runs through his whole Appendix on the Easter Controversy, and renders its reasoning a.labour in vain. " The fourth Gospel," &c., p. 537. Chap. II.1 PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 233 suffer." * This, at all events, is unambiguous.' The fourth evangelist, on the other hand, in citing the symbolic proof of love, — ^the washing the disciples' feet, — which Jesus gives at the last supper, places it still before the feast of the passover.t "When Jesus, still at table, addressed a few words to Judas Iscariot, after giving him the sop, he was supposed, by some of the twelve, to be ordering the purchase " of things needful for the feast." X In the early morning following, Jesus being brought up for examination before Pilate, his Jewish accusers will not enter the praetorium, lest they should disqualify them- selves for eating the impending jpassover.% At noon, when Jesus is delivered up to be crucified, the day is again defined as the " 'preparation day for the passover." \\ Again, in the afternoon, provision is made for removing the bodies before sunset, that they might be out of the way before the Sabbath began : for " that sabbath was a great day; " why? because it was not only an ordinary sabbath, but the first day of the feast, the paschal day, which had a special sanctity. And why does the evangelist lay solemn emphasis on the fact that the crurifra- gium was not applied to Jesus ? Because in him is thus literally fulfilled the law of the passover that "not a bone shall be broken"; and he became in this, as in the hours of his doom to death and of his execution, the Lamb of God, the fulfilment of all passover s. IT And here comes out, unmistak- ably, the doctrinal conception which underlies the writer's historical variation from his predecessors. He is possessed all through with the idea that Jesus was the true paschal lamb ; and that the story of his life and death must be so presented as, by its mystical conformity with the paschal ritual, to declare him the corresponding antitype. In this interest it is that he fixes the anointing of Jesus by the woman of Bethany * Luke ixii. 7-14. Compare Matt. xxvi. 17-20 ; Mark xiv. 12-17. + In spite of the tangled construction, which would allow irpb r^r eofyrrjs to he attached as a date to any one of several nearer words, the meaning of the whole passage evidently requires this initial phrase to he held on till the action of taking the towel and hasin is reached (xiii. 4, 5 ; 1-^). J John xiii. 29. § John xviii, 28. II John xix. 14. The attempt to make out that irapatrxcvi; means Friday, and irdirxa Easter week, is a mere subterfuge. 1 John xix. 36. . . : 234 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. ' — ^her dedication of him " against the day of his entombment " — " six days before the passover," * i.e., on the 10th of the month, when the Jew was to provide himself with " a lamb without blemish," to be reserved for the paschal day : and perhaps also, that he introduces the mention of " the tenth hour " in connection with the Baptist's words of testimony, " Behold the Lamb of God ! " and the visit of the two disciples to see where he dwelt-; t for that was the time when the lamb was slain, and became the passover, and the door-posts of the house were sprinkled with its sacred blood. A minor feature in this discrepancy between the narratives deserves a passing remark. The fourth evangelist will not allow the last supper to have been the passover, which, he tells us, was not due till next day. And who was this fourth evangelist? That very John, we are told, who, with Peter, was charged by his Master with the preparation of that supper as the passover, and who did prepare it accordingly. % Those assiduities of the apostle in the guest-chamber it is the main business of the evangelist to undo and remove out of the way : how, then, can these two be the same person ? We find, then, exactly the same variance between the synop- tists and the writer of the fourth Gospel which divided the churches of Lesser Asia from the Western Christians in the paschal controversy. And how did they share the evangelical authority between them ? The Asiatics had Matthew and his companions on their side : the Europeans were in accord with • both the facts and the doctrine of the last evangelist ; and his Gospel, though not at first put forward by them as their authority, is an unanswerable manifesto in their favour. Yet, if we believe the Lrensean tradition, the author of that Gospel was the very John who had lived and died among the Ionian Christians : whose tomb was at Ephesus ; whose name was a sacred word to old and young ; and whose mode of life, * John xii. 1-8. As, in the account of the resurrection, Sunday is called ^he " third day," or " three days " after Friday (Matt, xxvii. 63 ; Mark viii. 31) ; so, inversely, would Friday be described as three days before Sunday. Simi- larly, three days before the 15th would be the 13th ; four days, the 12th ; five days the 11th ; six days the 10th, when the lamb was set apart for its sacred purpose. t John i. 37-39 ; Ex. xii. 3-7. t Luke xxii. 8. Ghap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 235 outward look, and casual sayings were the subject of reverential remembrance. Nowhere was he so well known; and the churches of that region declared that they had nothing which they did not owe to him. And, strange to say, they persistently affirmed, at every stage of this controversy, that their paschal usage was what he had taught them, and what he himself had always practised. In a friendly conference at Eome, about A.r). 160, " Anicetus could not induce Polycarp to forego his observance, to which he had always adhered along with John, the Lord's disciple, and the other apostles with whom he had associated ; nor could Polycarp persuade Anicetus to the observance, bound as he declared himself to be by the usages of his predecessors." * In reply to the same Victor's attempt to enforce a uniform observance of the Western practice, Poly- crates vigorously defends his Ephesian Church and its neigh- bours, by appeal to the authority of their martyrs and spiritual guides. This roll of honour included seven bishops (relations of his own), Melito of Sardes, Polycarp of Smyrna, the apostle Philip in Hierapolis, and his daughters, and "John, who lay on the Lord's breast, who became priest, and wore the Petalon " : " all these kept the paschal fourteenth day, according to the Gospel." + Here, then, is the whole authority of the Apostle John, his personal habit, and the usage which formed itself under his influence, brought to bear against the historical statement and doctrinal conception of the fourth Gospel. How could this be, if at Smyrna, at Ephesus, and throughout the region where his name was a power, that Gospel had been current as his legacy, and its representation of the last earthly days of Christ had been received as accredited by him ? The features of his life and thought which these traditions preserve are precisely what this Gospel resists and banishes. They give us the seer, and not the evangelist : he is the Chiliast, the Quartodeciman, nay, the priest who wears the sacerdotal headgear, — all of them characters of lingering Judaism, detaining him still among the sacred Xao'c, and totally at variance with that spiritual humanism, that dislike of " the * Letter of Irenseus to Victor, ap. Eus. Hist. Ecol. V. xxiv. 16. + Letter of Polycrates to Victor, ap. Eus. Hist. Eocl. V. xxiv. 2-7. 236 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. Jews" and leaning to " the Greeks," which pervade the last Gospel. E. Marks of Time. Not only is the evangelist other than the apostle, and other than the Ephesian John of the Apocalypse : he plainly belongs to another age. He uses a dialect, and speaks in tones, to which the first century was strange, and which were never heard till a generation born in the second was in mid-life. True it is, that period of Christian develop- ment is shrouded in impenetrable darkness, and can be inter- preted only by a kind of historical divination, comparing its resulting faith with its initial, and supplying the silent and invisible links that must lie between. Were an unexpected sunshine to be shed upon that time of struggling religions and dissolving philosophies, one of the "most curious passages of human experience would doubtless be laid open to us. A craving in the Jewish mind to escape the limited service of a national and historic God, and find room for some sacred relations within the wide realm of men and nature ; a craving in the heathen mind to bring the too spacious divineness of the universe nearer home, and see and feel it in contact with human life, — led to their approximation from opposite directions, till, in fields of thought not far apart, they alighted on some mediating conceptions helpful to the desire of both, expanding the religion of the one, concentrating that of the other. Among a host of these abstractions, — (jof/jia, ^wc, dXii^Eta, x^'P'O TriuTig Z<^rj, dvvafiig, taTwg, TrapaicXjjroe, wXrjpcjfia, — many were tried, and after playing a brief part, fell into silence, and disappeared ; but there were two which so served the common want as to hold their ground, and give final form to the universality of the Christian faith. The first of these — trvivfia — came from the Jewish side, and was especially the vehicle of Paul's ascent from the level of his holy land till his horizon embraced the " circle of the earth ; " and whoever has accompanied the movement of his thought knows how he steers and commands this " chariot of fire," to show him all the abodes of men in the light of comprehensive merey beneath him. The. second,— X070C— came from the Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 237 heathen side, and suppMed a common term and link of union between the divine and the human nature ; first appUed by Philo to all the media, whether in the cosmos, in history, or in the individual soul, through which God passes from being into manifestation ; then incarnated by the Christians in the person of Jesus during the annus mirabilis of his ministry on earth. In this form it did not come upon the stage till the middle of the second century ; when Christianity, released from its first enemy by the destruction of the Jewish State, turned round to face and to persuade its Pagan despisers, and searched the philosophic armoury for weapons of effective defence ; and most of all when converts from heathenism, as Justin Martyr and Athenagoras, addressed themselves on behalf of their adopted faith to those whom they had left behind. From the apostolic age this conception was entirely absent : not a trace of it is to be found in the Pauline letters, which work their way to similar issues by other tracks of thought ; and not till we listen to the Apologists in the time of the Antonines does this new language fall upon the ear. It was borrowed from the Greek yvuxnc;, so fruitful of speculative systems in that age pf peace and letters, and was compelled to take up into its meaning the Christian facts and beliefs. The fourth Gospel breathes the very air of that time : it weds together the ideal abstractions of the Gnostic philosophy, and the personal history of Jesus Christ ; and could never have been written till both of them had appeared upon the scene. It is, indeed, itself a Gnosticism, only baptized and regener- ate ; no longer lingering aloft with the divine emanation in a fanciful sphere of aeons and syzygies, but descending with it into a human life transcendent with holy light, and going home into immortality. This internal character assigns the Gospel to the same time which is indicated by the external evidence, — about the fifth decade of the second century. The distance of this Gospel from the events of which it speaks admits of illustration, and of some approximate measurement, from another point of view. The doctrine respecting the person of Christ passed through three centuries before it reached its acme, and found its definition; the tendency throughout being to invest him with new predicates 238 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. of the Godhead, till the deification was complete. Of the several stages into which this history divides itself, three at least fall within the limits of our Gospels, and of the literary fragments which stand on the same line with them. They may all of them be regarded as interpretations suc- cessively put upon the phrase " Son of God," applied to Jesus by his disciples from the moment when they recognized him as the Messiah of prophecy. What was the meaning of this metaphor? of what reality was it the symbol? It plainly attributed a divine element to the nature of Jesus. When did it enter ?— and how adjust itself into partnership with his humanity? These were questions irresistibly thrown up by the phrase; never contemplated, indeed, by those who first used it in its stereotyped Jewish sense, but sure to be started as soon as it came with the surprise of freshness upon hearers who had to construe it for themselves. The oldest type of answer to these questions is embodied in the account of the baptism of Jesus ; but, in order to see it in its purest form, we must pass behind the synoptists, and consult the " Gospel according to the Hebrews," a fragment of which preserves probably an earlier tradition. There, as in Justin Martyr and in the Acts of Peter and Paul, the heavenly voice addresses Jesus in the Psalmist's words, " Thou art my Son ; this day have I begotten thee." For this declaration it is that the heavens are opened, the Spirit descends, and the supernatural light shines upon Jordan.* According to this primitive representation, the investiture with the attribute of sonship was reserved for the day of baptism ; then it was that, with the descent of the Spirit, the divine element entered its human tabernacle, and the heavenly adoption was proclaimed. And this belief long lingered among the Ebionites, who, through the changes of the second and third centuries, still * See Hilgenfeld, Novum Testamentiun extra Canonem receptum : Lib- rormn deperditorum Pragmenta, pp. 15, 33. Compare Adnott. Among the several versions of the heavenly voice, the presumption is strongly in favour of the direct citation of prophecy, as the original form of the tradition. And though Epiphanius had got hold of a. later edition of the Ebionite Gospel (for, to omit nothing traditional, it makes the voice say two things), this does not impair the probability that it contains a representation older than that of Matthew. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 239 represented the faith of the first, and held the simple humanity of Jesus to have been in no way distinguished from that of other men till the act of divine selection and conse- cration on the banks of Jordan. And whoever opens the Gospel of Mark, and finds that the baptism is with him " the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God," can to this day receive no other impression. Nor can anything be plainer than that the genealogies which give the pedigree of Joseph, and are intended through him to link Jesus with the house of David, must have been drawn up under the influence of this belief as to the conditions that were to meet in Messiah, — an earthly lineage and a heavenly investiture. They supply the human element, to which the events at the baptism add the divine. Not till the second condition followed did the " Son of David " become the " Son of God." To this change the Apostle Paul, who knows nothing of the baptism, and whose faith in Jesus starts from the other end of his career, assigns a different date '. with him, it is the resurrection which constitutes the heavenly fiUation, and in which the Holy Spirit bears its testimony : " Jesus Christ was born of the seed of David according to the flesh ; and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by his resurrection from the dead."* So long as the new faith remained only an inner variety of domestic Judaism, and addressed chiefly those whose thought flowed freely into Hebrew moulds, this title " Son of God " would suggest no attribute or function except such as might be conferred at any selected moment of initiation. The national poetry rendered the term familiar in figurative appli- cations, and left no temptation to scrutinize it closely for the detection of lurking mysteries. But, when it fell freshly upon minds less touched by Hebrew custom, it naturally spoke with a different power, and seemed to hint at some divine relation more than official, and beyond the range of conferred credentials. How could " sonship " be taken up and laid down ? — how be given to one who had it not before ? Did it not belong to the personal identity itself, and determine the very nature from the first ? If a Son of God has lived • Eom. i. 3, i. 240 -AUTHORITY. ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. and moved upon this earth, it could only be from dull eyes that the sacred lineaments have been entirely hid : to a deeper and discerning gaze some exceptional divineness would distinguish him from the common crowd of contemporaries — some visible converse with the invisible, some grace of child- hood, some marvel in his nativity. The working of thoughts like these caimot appear unnatural to any who have studied the history of religion among men; and will readily explain how the original date of Christ's divine filiation was pushed back from his baptism to his birth, and the story arose of his infancy and nativity. In this second type of Christology, the divine and the human are already woven together in the very personality, the divine instead of the manly, and the human of feminine origin ; and fore-shadowings of the future mission appear in the premonitions and dropped words of boyhood. Among the " Gospels of the Infancy" which were thus brought into existence, the prefatory chapters of Matthew and Luke are perhaps the most ancient. They could not be pre- fixed, however, to the original baptismal scene without an obvi- ous discordance : if the sonship dated from the nativity, it could not at the baptism be announced as begimiing "this day:" and so the phrase from the Messianic Psalm was removed ; and in its place the prophetic Spirit supplied the fitter words, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."* But the exigencies of reverential feeling, when once they are allowed to shape history, find no natural point of rest. It was not enough that the divine element in Christ was drawn- back from the opening of his ministry to the opening of his life. The story of the miraculous birth is, after all, but a drama, though a sacred one, of human history: its scene is laid entirely in this world, and may be found upon the map ; and he who thus commences his providential career is, with all the wonders of his infancy, not less a new being, fresh to existence, and having to learn all its ways, than * Evidently an adapted citation from Isa. xlii. 1, " Behold my servant, whom I uphold ; my chosen, in whom my soul delighteth ; I lay my spirit upon him,"— a passage which the same Gospel applies to Jesus (Matt. xii. 17). In the baptismal scene ttoIs becomes vios, to give expression to the sonship as a permanent fact. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 24:1 any of his village kinJred. For the human side of him this conception would serve ; but can the divine he horn ? and shall he whose nature it takes up have no advantage, in his range of being, over the usual measure, — Oiij 7r«p (jJvKKav yeveri, rot^Se (cai dvSpav f This could never satisfy a mind trained, directly or indirectly, in the Greek schools, where the distinction between the divine and the undivine is tantamount to that between what ever is, and what comes and goes; and every higher essence that becomes incarnate is in itself eternal, and though entering and quitting the phenomenal field, neither begins nor ceases to be. It was inevitable, that, under the influence of this mode of thought, the sonship to God should yet retreat back another step beyond all temporal limits, and become pre- existent to the whole humanity of Jesus ; so that nothing in him should be new to this world, except the corporeal frame and mortal conditions which were needful to his relations with men. Thus there arises, for the transcendent element in Christ, a history prior to its personal manifestation in Palestine ; a ■' glory before the world was ; " an eternity " in the bosom of the Father ; " a subsistence blended in intimate union with God. And when this transcendent perfection " became flesh," and " dwelt among us, full of grace and truth," it was not to give a mere refinement to a human organism and elevation to a human character, but to mani- fest, under the disguise and amid the shadows of a life like ours, the light of a divine nature belonging to the eternal world ; so that, as he moved along the ways of men, when- ever the winds of change and circumstance stirred the folds and parted the garb of his humanity, there was a flash of mystic splendours which kindled the face of disciples, and drove the guilty from his sight. Such is the being presented to us in the fourth evangelist's figure of Christ, not only in the memorable proem which gives his attributes " before all worlds " and in the origination of all worlds, but in the whole construction of the Gospel where it tells of his sojourn among men. In - what it narrates, in what it utters, in what it suppresses, in the order of its incidents and the tone of its R 242 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. discourses, in its selection of miracles, in its interpretation of the cross and of the resurrection, — the one pervading purpose of the author is to illustrate this loftier theory of the " Son of God." There is no baptismal adoption, only a sign sent for the information of the Baptist. There is no miraculous nativity, as if the heavenly and earthly in him were con- nate. For the origin of the divine element, we are carried past the banks of Jordan, past the cradle in Nazareth, or the manger at Bethlehem, to " the beginning," which in itself is eternal, and has no beginning. It is surely not a small interval that separates this third stadium from its antecedents. But, waiving all attempt at nicer measurement, I am content to say, it is at all events greater than could be traversed by a single mind. Who that appreciates the tenacity of religious conceptions can believe that one and the same person could not only live through the genesis of these three successive types of opinion, but himself adopt them all ? Yet, if the son of Zebedee were the writer of the Logos Gospel, no less than this would be demanded of our credulity. If this is inadmissible, we must fall back on the real probability, that these three doctrines span no fewer than four generations ; and that even the second of them is altogether post-apostolic. From all quarters, then, does evidence flow in, that the only Gospel which is composed and not merely compiled and edited, and for which, therefore, a single writer is responsible, has its birthday in the middle of the second century, and is not the work of a witness at all. Nor, in the moulding of it, does the author proceed under the control of an historical purpose, — to tell objective facts in the order and the form of the best accredited tradition. His animating motive is doctrinal, as he himself declares,* — to convince his readers that Jesus is " the Son of God," in the transcendent sense which this phrase bore to his own thought ; and he had so long looked at the evangelical biographies through the glorifying haze of that idea, that whatever would not take its richer light dropped into the shade and disappeared, and those elements alone stood out on which the heavenly tints would * John XX. 31. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 243 lie. As the story had transfigured itself to him, so did he present it transfigured to his readers ; in a form true, as he held, with a deeper truth than that of outward circumstance ; rendering, if not the very words as they were heard, the inner meaning that they carried ; and comprising nothing but that which might have been, and the equivalent of which could hardly fail to be, when such a nature was moving on such a scene. This kind of historical drama is full of interest as an exponent of its own time, but is not a new witness for the time of which it speaks. For our knowledge, then, of the life of Jesus, except so far as certain features of it are assumed in some of the Epistles and the Apocalypse, we are thrown upon the remains of popular tradition collected by our synoptists, — remains which are doubtless rich in fragments original and true, but which are assuredly of mixed character and worth, and cannot pretend to carry the guarantee of known and nameable eye- witnesses. Priceless as sources of probable history, they are unserviceable for a theory of documentary authority. § 3. The Acts of the Apostles, The life of Jesus does not exhaust the Protestant sources of authority. Beyond the tragic catastrophe on Calvary, beyond "the day of ascension, the divine drama still runs on, and enters upon new acts, with ever widening stage, and scenery more ■quick to vary. The holy visitant was personally withdrawn ; but from his changed abode he still held communion with the " little flock " he had left behind, and sent a guiding inspira- tion to replace the presence they had lost, to interpret the past they had so little understood, to reveal the future which they were entitled to promise, and "lead them into all truth " related to their immediate needs. This second «tadium of supernatural history had for its object the formation of the Christian Church : it crystallized in a sacred society and permanent institution the consecrating influence which for a season had dwelt among mankind, and, by -warding off for a while the intrusion of error and infirmity, B 2 244 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. secured an interior space within which the pure model might compact itself and grow, and leave its image and its record as an ideal for all times. If the claim of authority is thus to be extended over the apostolic age, so must its credentials ; and, for the miraculous phenomena on which it rests, we must repeat the demand for appreciable and unexceptionable testimony, which has already beeii preferred in the case of the Gospels. Our only historical sketch of Christian affairs in the years succeeding the personal ministry of Jesus is found in the Acts of the Apostles ; and on the value of the recitals in that book it depends whether we recognize in the teachings and methods of the primitive church the expression of authoritative inspiration. Who is it, then, that here tells the story of a nascent Christendom? Does he report his name ? and, if so, does it guarantee the adequacy of his knowledge, and the trustworthiness of his narrative ? Or, if we know not who he is, have we the means of checking and testing any of his statements, so as to gain an approximate measure of the credibility of the rest ? Fortunately, the Book of Acts, from various causes, admits of historical appreciation more readily than the narratives to which it gives the sequel. It is not entirely insulated. It stands in literary relation with the third Gospel, professing to proceed from the same hand, and to continue the same story. It stands in substantive relation to the Pauline letters, telling over again biographical incidents of which the apostle has given his own account, and drawing of him a portraiture which we may compare with his self -presentation . It furnishes a picture of the early Christian community, with the interior life of which every page of the apostle's writings ferments : so that, apart from its occasional points of contact with external secular history, we have resources within the New Testament itself for- critically estimating the contents of the book. A. Helation to Luke's Gospel. The preamble of the work, which addresses it, like the third Gospel, to a certain Theophilus, and refers to his previous reception of just such an account of the ministry of Christ, has Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 245 naturally linked together the two writings as successive chapters, from the same hand, of one continuous history. The reality of this relation between them has recently, it is true, been called in question by Scholten, who, finding in the Gospel a tone of hostility to Jewish Christianity, which has died away in the Book of Acts, refers them to different sources; and will allow to the author of the latter no hand in the former, except as editor and interpolator.* This conclusion, however, seems to overstrain the difference of tendency in the two writings. It is founded on the idea, that, in the early struggle between the Pauline and the Petrine Christianity, the evangelist takes sides with the former, while the author of the Book of Acts balances and reconciles the two. But in fact all that the writer cares about, in either case, is the universality of the Gospel: he will not have it limited to Israel, but accessible to the Samaritan and the heathen. Only so far as they infringe this principle, does he disparage the Jewish disciples : only so far as they represent it, does he favour the Pauline school. The Catholicity of the third Gospel seeks no support from the special theology of the apostle of the Gentiles; and that of the Book of Acts is worked out by his predecessors and opponents. The characteristics of both parties are washed out, and a comprehensive unity is sought by condemning or ignoring them as exceptional extremes. , No doubt this common preconception works to a different end in the two -yy^itings, — in the Gospel, to vindicate the universality of the religion against those who would narrow it; in the Book of Acts, to claim the credit of this universality for both the parties alike, that entered as constituents into the early Church. There is nothing in this difference to require the hypothesis of separate authorship; while the literary evidence, from the complexion of the language, and organism of the style, clearly indicates the action of the same mind and hand. Admitting, then, on behalf of the Book of Acts, a complete community of interest with the third GoSpel, i.e., that' it is a * Is der derde Evangelist de Sokryver van het boek der Handelingen? Critisch Onderzoek. J. H. Scholten: Leiden, 1873. I have only a second- hand knowledge of this treatise, through German reviews. An abstract of it is given by Hilgenfeld in his Zeitsohrift fiir wissenschaftliohe Theologie; 17 Jahrgang. Heft 3, p. Ail seqq. '. , ". '' 246 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. sequel furnished by the same writer, in further prosecution of the same object, and with no very important interval of time, we may apply to its case some of the conclusions already reached in tracing the history of its companion. The external testimony which shows us the text of the evangelist iu Mar- cion's hand gives, also, the lower limit to our search for the later treatise ; and the date, which, on internal grounds, we have assigned to the Gospel, will approximately serve for its sequel; unless, indeed, its own contents should carry in them fresh marks of time which oblige us to correct our former cal- culation in favour of an earlier time. Such mark of time, though only of a negative character, some critics have detected in the entire silence of the book respecting the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus. No reader could suspect that the city, with its temple and its local hierarchy, which supplied the scene of so many incidents, no longer existed ; and, had they already perished, this calm presentation of them, as though nothing had happened to them, would have been impossible, it is said, to the Christian historian. On this ground we are asked to fix the publication! of his work as early as the year a.d. 69.* This argument would apply with some force to a writer in the reign of Titus, while the fall of Judssa was still fresh, and, perhaps, to a Jewish Christian writer till the end of the century. But the impression of even national disasters, still more of foreign ones, does not long remain intense; and in the second generation a Gentile writer might draw scenes from the life of the sacred city, without thinking of the siege which it had suffered in the days of his grandfathers. Historical silence about particular events is in itself but poor evidence of literary chronology; for it may exist either because they have not yet happened, or because they have happened long enough to be occasionally forgotten. In the present instance, the latter is plainly the operative cause. In the author's earlier production, clear traces appear that he is already looking back on the destruction of Jerusalem ; for no one who compares the definite words (Luke xxi. 20-24) about Jerusalem being compassed with armies, and trodden down by the Gentiles, and her people falling by the edge of * Sohneokenburger, Ueber den Zweck der Apostelgesohichte, p. 231. Chap. II.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES. 247 the sword, and being dispersed among all nations, with the indefinite description of the future Parusia in which they are imbedded, can fail to see in them a vaticinium post eventuni. It is, indeed, one of the characteristic features of the third Gospel, that, throughout its alleged prophecies of the latter days, " the coming of the Son of man " is disengaged from its immediate connection with the Eoman war, and thrown vaguely forward, as the thing signified is separated from the sign ; and, though it is still promised within the lifetime of some who had been present at its preaching in Galilee, it is mentioned with an anxious sense of disappointed waiting and delay. It is illustrated by the story of the lord of the vine- yard, who will indeed return, but not till after he has dwelt in a far country "for a long time." * God will assuredly avenge his own elect; but ah! not till he has "borne long with them," — so long as to weary out what faith there is upon the earth, t The disciples must gird themselves up for a patient vigil, and not look for the Deliverer at the opening of the night. The second watch may pass, for aught they know ; nay, even the third, ere the sound of his approach is heaird ; and their blessing lies in their being awake to meet him, how- ever near the morning. J It is not to make immediate way for him that Jerusalem is to be trodden down ; it is to be handed to Gentiles first : and not till their history is worked out, and their " times fulfilled," will it become the city of the great King.§ This language unmistakably speaks the feeling of almost exhausted patience which marked the years near the border of the two centuries, and refers even the first of our author's productions to the period rather of Trajan than of Titus. * Luke XX. 9 ; comp. Matt. xxi. 33, where this expression of delay is absent. t Luke xviii. 7, 8. X Luke xii. 38. How late must be the date which would oppress the writer with the sense of delay we cannot, perhaps, safely infer from his language. But if the term which he thus divides is taken to be the possible lifetime of one of the children whom Jesus blessed (using the measure given in Luke ix. 27), and estimated at eighty remaining years, each of the " watches " (which are quarters) will be twenty ; and three of them, reckoned from the death of Christ, would bring us to about a.d. 95 ; and the fourth would not expire till about A.D. 115. The expression about the watches is not found in Matt, xxiv. 43. . § Luke xxi. 24. 248 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book II. Nor is the Book of Acts itself entirely without indications of age which accord with this estimate. The witnesses against Stephen are made to charge him with ominous prophecies against " the holy place," — that this Jesus of Nazareth should destroy it, and change the Mosaic customs.* The author, who wished to exhibit Stephen as a true prophet, even when misunderstood, would not have ventured on this representation till history had verified the word.t There are also traces of an ecclesiastical constitution, and hierarchical ideas, quite out of character with the apostolic age, and belonging to a more advanced rehgious organization. The imparting of the Holy Spirit is reserved as the exclusive prerogative of the apostles, and cannot take place in Samaria * Acts vi. 13, 14. ' ■)- It is a difficult question what the author could mean in calling these witnesses "false" ; but certainly he did not intend to disclaim for Stephen ■words of slight and disparagement with regard to the temple ; for the very speech which follows, in reply to the charge, condemns the building of the temple, and contrasts it as the gratuitous attempt of Solomon (vii. 47) to localize the abode of God (oikos tov 6eov) with the construction, after a divine pattern (vii. 44), of the shifting tabernacle which symbolized the presence of God on every spot ((TKrjvrj tov fiaprvplov). Instead of denying his alleged threats against the temple, the speaker inveighs against its existence as an example of th? perversity and violation of covenant which ran through the whole national history. This is virtually to own the charge, and not to refute it. How, then, are the witnesses "false " ? In two ways : — 1. They represented Stephen as denotmcing not only the temple, but the law (vi. 13) : whereas he treats it as divinely given (vii. 53) " by the minis- tration of angels"; and rests his whole case against the Jevdsh people on this, that they have never kept the law ; but while God has always done, and more than done, his part, they have never been true to theirs. 2. The witnesses, in reporting Stephen's words about the temple, made its threatened destruction the direct act of Jesus of Nazareth, as if it were to proceed from some vengeance of his, and he were personally answerable for it. So far, however, is this from being true, in the vrater's estimate, that it is the Jews themselves who are responsible for the inevitable disaster. By their attempt to appropriate God, whose essence escapes aU exclusive rela- tions, they have rendered it necessary to destroy the stronghold of their unrighteous monopoly, and to carry the divine meaning of the law and the prophets direct to the Gentiles, instead of trusting any longer to the media- tion of Israel. The disposition to distinguish between the Old Testament dispensation and the temple, to condemn the latter as a human limitation, but develop from the former the principles of universal religion, is in har- mony with the whole theology of the Acts of the Apostles. The phrase " false witnesses," in Matt. xxvi. 60, 61, raises a similar difficulty, which must there be met in a different way. Chap, n.] PROTESTANTS AND THE SCRIPTURES,. 249 till Peter or John has gone down to put hands on the baptized.* The Ephesian disciples are " a flock " under the pastoral charge of "elders," duly appointed by the Holy Spirit; and these "overseers" are regarded, not simply as locar administrators, but as of&ce-bearers in a general " church of the Lord, which he has purchased with his own blood." + This conception of a catholic body, under governance of a sacred order, and the appUcation to it of the doctrine of redemption, betrays modes of thought prevailing not before the end of the first century. The language, also, in which Paul is made to speak of the theological dissensions which will break out among the Christians of Asia,: — " of grievous wolves" that will enter the fold, and even rise up from among themselves, drawing after them a train of followers by their perverse teachings, 1 — suits nothing so well as the out- break of the Gnostic sects, which so agitated the Church of the second century. If these are instances of anachronism, they invalidate, no doubt, the authenticity of the speeches and narratives in which they are contained. But for this we are prepared by so conspicuous an example of invention, that the unwelcome character of the inference cannot excuse any apologetic colouring of the facts. In the deliberations of the Sanhedrim on the defiant attitude of Peter and the other preaching apostles, § Gamaliel counsels non-interference, and a surrender of the cause to the judgment of results. He supports his advice by appeal to two analogous cases which may serve for precedents ; viz., that of the pretender Theudas, who set up for a prophet, and drew a multitude after him, with no result but death to himself, and dispersion to his people ; and, " after this," of Judas Of Galilee, who raised an insurrection against ihe Eoman assessment under Quirinus, only to perish, and bring his followers to a ruinous break-up. Now, these instances, which are expressly cited as consecutive, occurred in just the opposite order; and that of Theudas took place under the procurator Cuspius Fadus, in the reign of Caligula, ten or twelve years after the date of * Acts viii. 14-17. t Acts xx. ,17-28. J Acts XX. 29, 30. ■ § Acts v. 33-40. 250 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book 11. Gamaliel's reported speech.* This positive proof that the address is fictitious cannot but make us less reluctant to accept elsewhere at their proper value slighter indications of the same freedom of invention. So far, then, there is nothing to prevent the date assigned to the third Gospel serving also approximately for the Book, of Acts. But, as the one is a sequel to the other, some interest attaches to the probable interval between them. To guide our judgment here, we have only one uncertain clew. The earlier book closes with a notice of the ascension of Jesus : the later one opens with a more explicit account of the same event. So far as they are in accordance, they might have been written on successive days ; but, if they materially differ, time must be allowed for the first type of tradition to be replaced by another ; and it is reasonable to say, that, the larger the difference, the longer the time. The concluding chapter of the Gospel comprises within the compass of a single day everything subsequent to the entomb- ment of Jesus ; the resurrection opening the morning, the ascension closing the evening.! The Book of Acts expands this one day into forty, and, for two meetings of the disciples with their risen Master, substitutes an indefinite number of such "infallible proofs" by living intercourse.!: In the Gospel the ascension is despatched in a phrase (" was taken up into heaven "), supposed by Scholten to be an editorial addition to the original text : § in the Acts, it is presented with descriptive detail, — the uplifted form, the receiving cloud, the gazing disciples, the white-apparelled angels and their message. || , The place also, which, in the earlier account, is at Bethany, fifteen furlongs from the' city, is shifted to the Mount of Olives, one-third of that distance from Jerusalem.!! * For Theudas, see Josephus, Ant. XX. \. 1 ; for Judas, Ant. XVIII. i. 1, 6, XX. V. 2 ; B. Jud. II. viii. 1. In one of these passages, Josephus happens to mention Judas just after Theudas : is this the source of our author's mis- take? It is not the only indication of an apparent acquaintance with Josephus. t xxiv. 1, 13, 33, 36, 50, 51. J i. 3. § xxiv. 51. || i. 9-11. II Luke xxiv. 50 ; Acts i. 12. It has been said that, Bethany being on the Mount of Olives, the two terms may be used of the same spot. But the additional definition in Acts i. 12 (" distant from Jerusalem a sabbath day's Chap. II.] . PROTESTANTS AND THE SCJilPTURES. 251 In both narratives, but more fully in the latter, Jesus enjoins his apostles to await in Jerusalem the descent of the Holy Spirit upon them : and the only new feature in the second recital is this, — that when pressed to say whether, with the descent of the Spirit, will come also his Messianic restoration of the kingdom to Israel, he gives a twofold answer : as for the season of the Idngdom, he desires them to leave it to God ; as for its range, he bids them preach it not to " Israel " alone, but to the ends of the earth. Need we say that the historian who thus writes is sure of the universality of the "kingdom," but has had to put its date into the indefinite ? No usages of regular literature enable us to conceive how a writer could ever give two such reports of the same incident with apparent indifference to their discrepancy. Had his mind been simply occupied with the historian's proper end, wholly intent on seeing things as they really lie in the past, the phenomenon would have been impossible. But where an author writes with an object, or under the pre-engagement of a dominant feeling or idea, it is surprising how historical materials, now reduced to a secondary and instrumental place, — still more how tradition that has never firmly set, — may become soft under the pressure of his hand, and mould itself to the shape of his own thought ; and if twice, with different purpose, he should have to work up the same elements to the needful symmetry, they will insensibly take incompatible forms, which he will not care to bring to coalescence. He cannot, however, be supposed to produce the two representations at once, or close together : there must be time for the impression of the one to grow faint before he can set himself to create the other, — time for a second interest, or drift of feeling, to suc- ceed to the first, and throw itself on some new problem. In the present case, there is both this inward necessity for time between our author's two works, and also an outward neces- sity, founded on the modification of the materials with which he had to deal. Early Christian tradition held together, as two phases of the same event attached to the same day, the resurrection journey," equal to two thousand paces, or between five and six furlongs), takes us only to the top of the hill, twice as far from Bethany as from Jerusalem. 2S2 AUTHORITY ARTIFICIALLY MISPLACED. [Book I r. and the ascension of Christ ; and in this form it still appears, as we have seen in the Epistle of Barnabas. So long as this was the case, the reports of appearances on the part of the risen Christ must have been extremely few : accordingly, in Mark there is actually not one ; * in Matthew, who, with John, knows nothing of the ascension, only two,, of which one is subordinate to the other ; and, in Luke, only two, on the same day. But as reports accumulated of interviews with Jesus, or visions of him, as far apart as Galilee from Jeru- salem, room had to be found for the growing series ; and his departure from the world was separated from his resurrection and variously postponed, — eight days for the conversion of Thomas, t indefinitely for the scene at the Sea of Tiberias (declared to be the third appearance), J forty days for the " many infallible proofs," and the instructions " respecting the kingdom," which completed the apostles' preparation to become organs of the Holy Spirit. Other causes concurred to throw the ascension forward into a time of its own, and give it prominence as an independent event. In the oldest accounts of the manifestations of Jesus after death, beginning with those of Paul, he is presented in an impalpable or phantasmic form, now as an inward revelation,§ now as a vision, |] or a voice ; H and, again, as something that might be mistaken for " a spirit," or open to a doubt ; ** as able to vainish in an in- stant ; + f as coming through shut doors. 1 1 This representation seemed to lie too near the borders of possible subjective illu- sion ; it left the means of personal identification obscure or inadequate ; and, even apart from the question of evidence, it favoured a Docetic view of the person of Christ,— that the divine nature, which lived on earth, and passed into heaven, was other than the man Jesus who died upon the cross, and separated from him on Calvary. In reaction from these dangers, stress would naturally be laid on all reported appear- ances which carried in them local and personal features, anYi vading is their presence throughout the evangelic narrative, from the Star in the East to the Apostles' parting question, " Lord, dost thou at this time restore the Kingdom to Israel? " how they seem to form a common ground of reasoning and ultimate appeal in every difference between Jesus and his opponents, so that he tests them by their own standards, and declares that " not one jot or tittle of the law shall fail :" how it is said that he too expects, on his speedy return, to reign over an elect people and a subject world, and promises to place his apostles on " twelve thrones to judge the twelve tribes of Israel ;" is well known, not perhaps without sorrowful regrets, by every reader of the synoptic gospels. Not that any one can now-a-days suppose these things to form any part of the Divine message of Jesus to the world ; for with him, at all events, they are not original : if he is responsible mth regard to them at all, it is only for letting them alone. The whole mind of the Palestinian Jews had become saturated with the high colouring of a rude apocalyptic literature which, in imitating the Book of Daniel (b.c. 167-164), had put new meanings into its symbols, widened the horizon of its historic survey, filled in its blank futurities with fresh visions, and found scenery and incident for the whole sacred drama to its consummation. In the Jewish production which forms the fundamental text of the Book of Eevelation* we see how definite had become the stages in the mythology, the actors of its parts, even the date of its catastrophe, and the splendour of its issue. Of that writing we cannot positively say that it was prior to our era. But it can no longer be reasonably doubted that the nucleus of the Sibylline oraclest and the main part of the Book of Enoch t are productions from the second half of the second century b.c, and faithfully reflect * See above, pp. 225-227. t For an account of this production, see a paper in the National Review, No. XXXn., for April, 1863, p. 466, on. " The Early History of Messianic Ideas." X Of this book an account is given in a second paper under the same title, National Beview, No. XXXVI., April, 1864, p. 554. For a thorough and masterly treatment of the whole literature bearing on this subject, see The Jewish Messiah : a critical history of the Messianic idea among the Jew's, from the rise of the Maccabees to the closing of the Talmud, by Eev. James Drummond, LL.D., 1877. 328 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. the pictures acceptable to the prophetic imagination of the people who heard the word of Jesus and wondered who he was. From these sources we know for certain that it was not Ue who filled with its meaning their question, " Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?" — who drew in their fancy their picture of the " Son of David " : who intro- duced them to the expectation of his Advent with an angelic host, to make an end of all that opposes, to open the last assize, and reign for centuries in the new Jerusalem ; and who named for them the harbingers of these last things, the wars and rumours of wars, the convulsions of nature and distress of nations, and mustering of Gentile armies against the elect. The whole drama had already been written, and photographed in thought, and might haunt the believer's conscience by day, and startle him in dreams and visions of the night. And if Jesus spake of it, it was as of something given, and not of what he brought. But though the pre-existence of the Messianic idea relieves Jesus of responsibility for its contents, it leaves the question open how far he shared it with his contemporaries, and carried its influence into his ministry. At a time when all the "just and devout " in the land were, like Simeon, " waiting for the consolation of Israel," the home at Nazareth could not fail to be imbued with the common hope, to read it into the prophets, to hear of it in the synagogue, to breathe it into many a prayer, and throw its prospective look into the whole attitude of life. Nor is it possible to put any other interpretation upon the self- dedication of Jesus to his missionary labours than that he had a message to deliver, " The' Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." This sense of a divine crisis and new spiritual birth is more than the subject of a parable here, and a denunciation or a blessing there; it is, throughout, the very spring of conviction that disposes of his will, and shines through all his public compassions and lonely devotions. It is one thing, however, to admit his belief in a reign of truth and righteousness as a promise made " to the Fathers," and now approaching its fulfilment; it is quite another to af&rm that in his own person he claimed to realize it as its Prince and Head. That this also is universally assumed is Chap. H.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 329 not surprising, seeing that the synoptists assure us that it was so, and tell it as if it were an attested fact and not a later inference. Yet they add (what surely is not without significance), "He strictly charged his disciples and com- manded them to tell no man that he was the Christ."* If the disciples had only kept that injunction instead of spending their lives in reversing it, Christendom, I am tempted to think, might have possessed a purer record of genuine revela- tion, instead of a mixed text of divine truth and false apocalypse. For, the first deforming mask, the first robe of hopeless dis- guise, under which the real personality of Jesus of Nazareth disappeared from sight, were placed upon him by this very doc- trine which was not to go forth, — that he was the Messiah. It has corrupted the interjjretation of the Old Testament, and degraded the sublimest religious literature of the ancient world into a book of magic and a tissue of riddles. It has spoiled the very composition of the New Testament, and, both in its letters and its narratives, has made the highest influ- ence ever shed upon humanity subservient to the proof of untenable positions and the establishment of unreal relations. Knowing as we do, that Messiah was but the figure of an Israelitish dream, what matters it to us English Gentiles to- day whether its shadowy features were more or less recalled to mind by acts and words of the Galilean prophet ? Tell us only, we are apt to cry, the things he really said and did : and how far they fitted in with your lost ideal may be left untold, as belonging to your life and not to his. Yet, how- ever natural this thought may be to us, when we grow impatient of the strange evidence which the demons and the prophets are said to give to his Messiahship, it is hasty and inconsiderate. For, had it not been for this Jewish con- ception of him, we should probably have had no life of him at all. It is chiefly in this primitive school of disciples, gathered in the upper chamber at Jerusalem, that the interest felt in him was essentially personal, and hung around his image in the past, and watched his steps, and listened for the echoes of his words, to detect under his disguise the traces of what he was and was to be. In the larger gospel of Paul, * Luke ix. 21. Matt. xvi. 20. 330 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. which swept over the Gentile world and ultimately reduced the original community to the position of a sect, the biography of Jesus, the traits of his mind, the story of his ministry, play no part at all : it is from heaven, after he has done with the hills of Galilee and the courts of the temple, that he begins with his last apostle ; and it is in heaven alone that that apostle knows anything of him, — in his glorified state and immortal function, and not in the simple humanity and prefatory affections of his career below. The Pauline gospel therefore opens where the others cease. And had their nar- rative not pre-existed, the fourth gospel could scarcely have been ; for it does but spiritualize and reconstruct, with change of scene and interweaving of new incidents, a portion of their historical material ; working it up into the service of a later and more transcendental doctrine. That we have memoirs of Jesus at all we owe therefore to the very theory about him which has so much coloured and distorted them; and we must accept the inevitable human condition, and patiently strip off the disfiguring folds of contemporary thought, and gain what glimpses we can of the pure reality within. Those to whom the personal figure of Jesus still appears beautiful and sacred are often said to substitute for the reality an ideal of their own ; because they rely on a small selection of the deepest sayings and the most pathetic in- cidents, as if these were all, and refuse to balance against them the countervailing mass of questionable pretension and false prediction and habitual exorcism which the narrative presents. The charge would be unanswerable, if the story were all upon one level, and the credibility were equal of the part that is taken and the part that is left. But this could only be the case if the gospels were the products of pure history, with the risks of error impartially distributed over their whole surface. What however is the fact respecting (let us say) the first of them ? (in the order, that is, not of time, but of place in the canon.) It is compiled throughout in a dogmatic interest, and is historical in the same way as the recital of an advocate shaped for the support of the case he undertakes .to plead. The position which it aims to estab- lish, viz., that the life it relates is that of the future Messiah, Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 331 is present everywhere: it supplies the principle of selection -with which the writer passes through the traditions and records ready to his hand : he drops as irrelevant whatever does not help his thesis : he weaves together exclusively the incidents and sayings which admit of being turned to its support. And when we remember that ere the Aramaic copy of the Gospel was put together, forty years separated the (writer from the latest event which he records, and that our vkrreek edition is in parts a generation later still ; and that during all that time the same Messianic belief had been busy among the memorials floating in the air, sifting the very leaves that drifted to the compiler's feet, the only wonder is that, with so strong a set of the wind, any shred of history should have slipped beyond the margin and be found upon the field outside. If here and there, in the intervals of the compiler's logical vigilance, words that transcend his theory or incidents that contradict it lie embedded in his story, the truth is betrayed by the only signs of which the case admits ; and such rare instances, like the solitary organic form de- tected in rocks that never showed such traces before, may tell a story of the past significant out of all proportion to their size. It is only by reasoning from such internal marks, that we can ever hope to recover the simple outline, of the truth : for our gospels, instead of securing to us, as commonly sup- posed, the personal testimony of reliable eye-witnesses, are really (as in part akeady shown) of unknown source, of mixed material, and to no small extent of gradual growth. They are essentially anonymous compilations, without re- sponsible authorship ; and do but collect into a focus the best elements of popular tradition respecting the author of Chris- tianity current in the second and third generation of his disciples. If we want an earlier word than this, we have it in the letters of Paul ; but there, Christ is already in heaven, and we learn nothing of his ministry on earth. That the Messianic theory of the person of Jesus was made for him, and palmed upon him by his followers, and was not his own, appears to me a reasonable inference from several slight but speaking iadications. The difficulty, however, of penetrating to the truth, on this matter is so considerable that 332 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book TV. the prevailing critical verdict on the other side is by no means surprising.* Our only sources of evidence are the synoptical gospels, proceeding, even in their oldest constituents, from dis- ciples who had long convinced themselves, not only that Jesus was the appointed Messiah, but that he knew himself to be so, and gave sufficient signs of his authority as such. Looking back on his earthly ministry through this posterior conviction, they viewed all things in its light ; it served as the interpreting medium to all the historical elements of the current tradition, assimilating its pictures of the past to the later version of their meaning. When once they had learned to explain away the disheartening features of his life and thought, his fatal failure and unresisted death, and found in them just what ought to have happened in order to prove what they seemed to disprove, the whole story would assume a new aspect; and whatever they missed in it, or found to disappoint and shock them, would appear but as part of an intended scheme, con- sciously carried out in obedience to the divine will. No doubt would longer be entertained that Jesus saw everything and chose everything that met him on the way ; and no hesitation be felt about making him speak out what he really was, and reading into his occasional words of pathetic foreboding defi- nite predictions of the tragedy on Calvary. Were the gospels uniformly suffused with the colouring of a later time, as they would be were they the production of that time alone, it would be impossible to withdraw the veil that dimmed the historic truth. Since, however, they are composite works, not only with their several characteristics, but each put together from successive layers of tradition, the more recent overlying the oldest, they admit of being dealt with like a palimpsest MS., on which the underwritten characters are indelible by the process which washes out the superficial text. There is a corresponding critical chemistry which is not without re- sources for recovering at least some fragments of the first faithful record. * Hamack, for instance, says, " Dass Jesus sioli selbst als den Messias bezeichnet hat, ist von einigen Kritikem — jiingst noch von Havet Le Chris- tianisme et ses Origines, T. iv.l884, 15 fi — in Abrede gestellt worden. AUein dieses Stiiek der evangelischen Ueberlieferung soheint mir auoh die scharfste Priifung auszuhalten." Lehrbuch d. Dogmengesohiohte, I. 57, 58, note. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 333 It is usual to assume that the several titles Son of Man, Son of David, Son of God, are interchangeable as names of the Messiah, and that each, when appropriated, carries in it precisely the same ofi&cial claim as the others. And this is true, when we are speaking of the apostolic age, and the usage of its missionaries and churches ; true therefore of the mean- ing attached to these phrases by the writers or editors of the synoptical gospels. But that it is not unconditionally true of the prior age of which they tell the story they unconsciously betray by an unequal use of the terms that is plainly not accidental. Thus, the phrase ' Son of God ' received its Messianic significance from the Christians themselves; neither in the true text of the anterior apocalyptic literature, nor in the Hebrew Scriptures, does it ever appear in that sense ; and in the oldest gospel (Mark), it is a title which only beings of superhuman insight — the demons he cast out,* and the Satan who tempted him,t are described as applying to Jesus. One exception indeed is reported in the High Priest's question to Jesus, " Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed ? " and the affirmative reply. I It is hard to reconcile this public avowal with the repeated shrinking from this claim, and absolute prohibition to make it on his behalf. And when we realize the conditions under which the High Priest's examina- tion took place, that no friendly witness was present but Peter, who was not within hearing ; when further we remember that, ere it could be set down as matter of history, it had become the equal wish of Jewish accusers and of Christian disciples to fasten upon the crucified the highest Messianic pretensions, the one as proof of imposture, the other as a warrant for their faith ; it may be reasonably doubted whether dependence can be placed upon the accuracy of an exceptional detail. The total absence from the fourth Gospel's report, of any question about the Messiahship (on which, in the synoptists, the whole judicial sentence hangs) shows how great maybe the influence of an evangelist's preconception on the colouring of his nar- rative. It is hardly necessary to remark that in the only other instance of the phrase, viz., the centurion's exclamation be- • Mark iii. 11. t Matt. iv. 3, 6. J Mark xlv. 61, 62. 334 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. neath the cross, " Surely this was a Son of God," * the Eoman speaker can have had no Messianic meaning, but only one compatible with his heathen conception of divine things. In truth, the name " Son of God " became appropriate to Jesus in virtue, not of the Messianic ofi&ce, but of the heavenly nature, discovered in his person: and was, therefore, first freely given to him by his disciples after his passage to im- mortal life. This is strongly marked by the Apostle Paul's distinction,— that he was " born of the seed of David according to the flesh, but declared to be the Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead." t It was the spiritual constitution of beings more than human which was conceived to bring their nature into antithesis with the animal life and affinity with the essence of God, — an affinity that might be abused by fallen spirits to their perdition, or with the faithful turn to undying blessed- ness. When the author of the Book of Daniel describes the fourth angelic figure seen in the fiery furnace with the three intended martyrs, he says that " his aspect is like a Son of God." t If the plan of the Messiahship had been different, and had fulfilled itself on earth alone, in the person and the career of another David, only with wider dominion and more glorious reign, he would hardly have received the title " Son of God." It is specifically due to the Christ in heaven; in- vested now with some glorious form of light, and capable of being revealed in inward vision to the spiritualized minds of men. This title, therefore, by its very nature, posthumously gained its place among the predicates of Jesus. When once " the heavens had received him," and revealed his higher nature, the question could not fail to present itself, when did this divine affinity, this enrolment in the ranks of spiritual life, take its origin ? for it is not said, and it was not thought, that by his resurrection he became, but only that he was ' declared ' the ' Son of God ' ; and if the fact were already there, it was impossible to repress the inquiry, ' how did it arise ' ? at what date did the Divine element take possession of that transient human personality ? and where * Mark xv. 39. t Bom. i. i. J Daniel iii. 25. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 335 was it before ? The earliest reply undoubtedly was, the Spirit of God descended and united itself with him at his baptism ; the tradition assumed the form preserved in the Ebionite gospel,* and twice quoted by Justin Martyr,t that as the Spirit alighted on him, a voice from heaven said, ' Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee.' The filiation consists in the communication of the Divine spirit, and is synchronous with it. This Messianic application of Psalm ii. is, I believe, a purely Christian invention ; and had probably the effect, when the accounts of the baptism came to be written, of carrying back the title ' Son of God ' from the heavenly to the earthly life of Jesus. The secret of this godlike essence in him was supposed to be instinctively read by the superhuman intelligence of the evil spirits exorcised by him ; so that they could cry out in their dismay, ' Art thou come to destroy us ? I know thee, who thou art, the holy one of God.'j ' What have I to do with thee, thou Son of the most High God ?' § ' Thou art the Son of God.' II But from his sane countrymen we do not hear this mode of address : it is as the ' Son of David ' that they own his Messiahship, and appeal to his compassion. The blind who follow him on the way, till he stops and touches their eyes ;1T the Canaanitish woman, who, for her suffering child, prays for the crumbs of mercy that may fall from Israel's table ;** the multitudes, astounded when the blind mute both spake and saw ;tt or descending the hill to Jeru- salem with cries of Hosanna -.11 all, in short, who represent the vernacular speech of the time and place, address their prayers and their enthusiasm to him as the ' Son of David.' This phrase is undoubtedly the nucleus of the popular pre- Christian Messianic faith. In speaking of himself Jesus habitually employs the remaining expression ' Son of Man ' : and on its meaning, when thus ^.ppropriated, depends the question as to the range • See Hilgenfeld's Nov. Test, extra Canonem Eeoeptum. Evang. see. Hebraeos, &c. II. Ebion. Evang. pp. 34, 36. t Dial, cum Tryph. C. 88, 316 D. and 103, 331 B. t Mark. i. 24. § Mark v. 7. || Luke iv. 41. 1 Matt. ix. 27. ** Matt. XV. 22, tt Matt. xii. 22. $J Matt. xxi. 9. 336 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. and character of his self-conscious mission. That for the evangelists themselves it had settled into its Messianic sense, and that they attributed the same to him is not disputed. The point to be determined is whether this is historically true, or is a Christian afterthought thrown back upon the personal ministry of Jesus. The previous history of this phrase cer- tainly gave it sufficient elasticity to leave room for reasonable doubt. The use of it as the name of a personal Messiah was supposed to be sanctioned by the pseudo-prophecies of Daniel, but was drawn thence only by a misinterpretation of the author's symbols. As the Seer has described successive heathen empires — Babylonian, Median, Persian, Macedonian, — under the image of brute forms, the lion, the bear, the ram, the goat, — so does he contrast with them the hoped-for kingdom of righteousness reserved for " the saints of the Most High," under the superior image of Hmnanity embodied in the " likeness of a Son of Man : "* of a personal Agent he no more speaks in this symbol than in the previous cases of representative animals. And where, as in the vision by the river Ulai;t and in that by the Tigris, J an individual figure is introduced instead of a generic type, it is not any Messiah, but, in the one case, God himself, who speaks — in the other, the archangel Gabriel, Michael's irpwraywvtirrjic in the wars of the upper world. § Whether the misinterpretation of these ^asions which appropriated the phrase ' Son of Man ' to a supposed personal Head of the future theocracy was prechristian, and furnished the disciples in Palestine with a famihar Messianic title, cannot be conclusively determined. In the Book of Enoch it is similarly applied : " Beside the Ancient of Days there sits another, whose countenance is as the face of a man, full of grace, like one of the heavenly angels : this is the Son of Man : "|| "the Son of Man was named by the Ancient of Days before the world was."1[ But there is much reason to suspect that the section in which this language occurs is a Christian addition to the original work ; and the text, when * Dan. vii. 13, 18, 22, 27. + Dan. viii. + Dan. x., xi. § For fuller exposition see Early History of Messianic Ideas. National Review, April, 1863, pp. 471-476 : and more at large Drummond's Jewish Messiah. B. II. ch. vii. il xlv. Das Buoh. Henoch. Dillmann. •[ xlviii. 1, seqq. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESU^. 337 critically sifted, becomes divested of the characteristic evangelic phraseology. The known Jewish literature prior to our era, whether within or without the canonical Hebrew scriptures, throws no satisfactory light on the Messianic use of the term " Son of Man." Two other applications of the phrase, however, are perfectly clear. It is used as a common noun, to denote any member of the human race ; and it is given to a selected individual, employed as the herald of a Divine message. In the former sense the Psalmist says, "What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him? "* and the answer of Job, " the stars are not pure in his sight ; how much less man that is a worm, and the son of man that is a worm? "t Constant familiarity with this generic sense so completely obliterated, in the minds of- those who used it, all separate reference to the component elements of the phrase that in the Syriac version of St. Paul's 1 Cor. xv. 45, the curious render- ing occurs, "Adam, the first son of man, became a living soul ! " In this application the phrase passes into the gospels also ; else, from the answer " the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath," the inference could not be drawn, " therefore the son of man is lord even of the sabbath." t The individualized use of the phrase in prechristian litera- ture occurs exclusively in Ezekiel ; where the prophet, in I'eceiving a commission, is invariably accosted by Jehovah, " thou son of Man." It is no doubt possible to construe this address also into the mere equivalent of " man ! " but in- variably connected as it is with the initiative of a special prophetic function, it can hardly fail to carry in it some ad- ditional connotation relative to the Seer's office : especially as it is so uniformly adhered to that it occurs eighty-nine times in this single book, while there are but eleven instances of the phrase in its general sense throughout the previous Hebrew scriptures. The supplementary idea is probably no more than an intensification, in the awful presence and com- munion of the Most High, of the conscious weakness, un- worthiness, nothingness, of the human agent, when called to * viii. i. t XXV. 6, ± Mark ii. 27, 28. Cf. Matt. xii. 8, Luke vi. 5, 338 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV.- be the organ of a Divine intent : that so feehle a voice should be charged with the mighty word of God could but cast the prophet down in utter dependence, save that it also snatched him- upwards into an unfailing trust. As the human figure, brought by the pseudo-Daniel into comparison with the lower animal forms, serves for the symbol of rational and moral majesty, so, when placed in the person of Ezekiel, face to face with the infinite perfection, is it emptied of all its sem- blance of dignity, and "talking no more so exceeding proudly," can only yield itself to be disposed of by the hand of God, and move with lowly and equal sympathy among the brotherhood of mankind. This is probably the thought which commended the term " Son of Man " to the preference of Jesus ; and as it thus comes from his lips, it exactly expresses the trustful self-surrender, the blended fearlessness and tenderness before men, the shrinking from words of praise, " Why callest thou me good ? ", the pathetic calmness of the uplooking and up- lifting life, which speak in all the features of his portraiture. In adopting this name he takes the level, not of the Messianic grandeur, with its political trimnphs and earthly glories, not of the heir of David destined to crown and render millennial the splendour of his reign, but of simple Humanity in its essence and without its trappings, endowed and called to be the child of God, but through the discipline of many a need and sorrow and temptation. It is in harmony with this attitude of character and conception of his mission, that he discouraged from following him all those who were not pre- pared to move with him on the same level of the common lot, and find the beauty and sanctity of life in its inner affections and possibilities, and not in its outward possessions ; neither the rich who could not forego his treasures, nor the poor who could not face further privation, would he have in his train, " The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." * ' The prophet, who has only to bear the message of heaven to his followers, must live as a man among men, taking no more account than God himself of any one's lot or of his own : and if you would * Matt. viii. 20. See an interesting essay by Ferd. Chr. Baur, in Hilgen- leld's Zeitschrift fur wissenschaftliche Theblogie. 1860: pp. 274, sc22' Ghap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESU?. 339 share his work; you must, with him, be ready to dispense with even the shelter and security of the creatures of the field and air.' This sympathetic self-identification with the loypliest conditions of human life, in the service of its divine ends, appears to me truer both to the connection of the passage tand the characteristics of Jesus, than the evangelist's own apparent construction, viz., that Jesus, in words of touching lament, was here contrasting the protected lot of the lower creation with the homeless exposure and prospective sufferings of the King of glory in his disguise. If, then, Jesus occasionally spoke of himself as the " Son of Man," it by no means implied apy Messianic claim. It might, on the contrary, be iptended to emphasize the very features of his life and love which are least congenial with the national ideal. That in the days of his Galilean ministry it had not passed into a Messianic title is proved by the startling effect of Peter's first recognition of him as " the Christ;; " or, as Luke. has it, "the Christ of God;" or, as Matthew has it, "the Christ, the son of the living God."* The apostle's out- spoken declaration is in answer to the questions, "Who do men say that I am ? " and " Whom say ye that I am ? " or, as Matthew puts the former, " Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am ? " Now, if the term " Son of Man," was only a synonym for "the Christ," and JesUs had been habitually applying it to himself through the previous year or years, there is no room for his question addressed to them, and their answer was a mere tautology ; and if he actually framed the question in Matthew's words : " I, the Son of Man," he dictated the very answer which, when uttered, pro- duced BO intense a sensation, and was ordered to be suppressed and told to tio man. His appropriation of the phrasfe, in public address and in private converse, had left the way open to various interpretations of the character in which he ap- peared : and needed the supplementary influence of his per- sonality on his constant attendants to lift them into the hope to which Peter had given voice. To this memorable turning-point in the life of Jesus J shall have to return for another purpose : at present I draw * Mark viii. 29 ; Luke ix. 20; Matt. xvi. 16. z 2 340 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. only the inference that at that date the phrase " Son of Man " was not tantamount to "the Messiah." Yet, on the other hand, in numerous discourses attributed to Jesus by the evangehsts the term is undoubtedly restricted to this mean- ing : the " Son of Man shall send forth his angels : " * then shall they see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory : " t " him shall the Son of Man confess before the angels of God." % To such passages as these it is impossible to apply Holtzmann's remark that the phrase " Son of Man" is a verhullender Name,^ covering one knows not what tender and mystical significance : it is distinctly Messianic, referring, moreover, to the least spiritual eschato- logical features of the Jewish expectation. What then are we •to say? could this meaning be absent from the phrase during the first part of the ministry of Jesus, yet get exclusive possession of it before the close ? Not so : for it is found in discourses on both sides of Peter's confession, and, if you follow Matthew rather than Mark, equally all through. To- allow of such a change in the use of a current term, a greater interval is needed than between the stages of a fifteen months' ministry. And the interval will be found between the date of Jesus' living voice, and the period from forty to seventy yearS' later, during which our synoptic gospels were compiled. In that interval the first disciples and their Palestinian converts had wrought out their doctrine, that Jesus, now reserved in heaven, was to be Messiah, and that the kmgdom of God which his earthly life had been spent in fore-announcing, was to be realized in his person. And at the same time, and through the century, the deepening darkness and confusion and ultimate ruin that fell upon the Jewish state, mustered all the wild forces of fanaticism in Israel, arid threw insurrections into- the hands of zealots, and left religion at the mercy of vision- ary seers. How prolific the time was in apocalyptic dreams, dazzling with glory or lurid with horrors, the Book of Eevelation, as now understood, may suffice to convince us.: The strong resemblance between the national sufferings in the- * Matt. xiii. 41. t Mark xiii. 26. t Luie xii. 8. § Lehrbuch der EinleituDg in das Neue Testament, 2" Aufl., 1886, S. 369. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 341 Jewish wars with Eome, and the tragic experiences under Antiochus Epiphanes, would naturally place the Book of Daniel in an intenser light, and lead men to seek oracles there, and find relief from an afflicting present in its promise of deliverance for the faithful people, when " the wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever." Nor is it any wonder if, " under the likeness of a Son of Man," they saw, not simply the predicted sway of a true Humanity, but a personal Head to the saints on earth, as Michael was leader of the loyal angels in the conflicts of heaven. It was during this period then, — I conceive,— between the ministry of Jesus and the fall of the Jewish State, — that the term " Son of Man " came to be used as a Messianic title ; and this new sense, having once usurped the phrase, affected the composition of the Gospels in two ways. The evangelists, themselves possessed by it, and unconscious of any perversion, threw it back upon the name as it passed from the lips of Jesus. And, being unaware that it was a characteristic expression of his, by which he loved to designate himself, they too readily fitted to him whatever any prophetic writing said that the Messianic Son of Man would be and do ; and hence were tempted to patch his discourses with : shreds of Jewish apocalypse, and even to attribute to him, as what he must have meant and might have said, whole masses of eschatology, borrowed from Israel, in which the signs of the " Son of Man," on his coming to conquer, to judge and to reign, are unveiled in their succession, and identified in their commencement with the events passing before the writer's and the reader's eye. That the expositions of " last things " in the synoptical gospels are just as much Christianized Jewish apocalypse, as the Book of Kevelation, it is hardly possible to doubt ; though the written leaves which have furnished the excerpts have fallen upon the stream of time, and been swept away without a name. Yet not entirely without a trace. Every reader who, in his study of the life of Jesus, has freed himself from the un- •342 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV, historical chronology of the fourth Gospel, and followed the steps of his ministry under the guidance of the synoptists, must have been as much struck by the inopportuneness as touched by the pathos of the lament over Jerusalem, whether uttered, as Luke reports,* while Jesus was still in Herod's territory on the eve of departure for Judsea, or, as Matthew states, t in the Temple courts, on the first day of his arrival at Jerusalem. In the former case, it is spoken in the Northern province, while as yet his voice has never been heard in the city : in the latter, it winds up his first day's teaching there. And yet in both its burden is "How often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings ; and ye would not ! " Such a reproach, whether flung from a distance by a stranger, or coming from a visitor within his first twenty-four hours, would be simply inane, and can be rendered credible by no evangelist's authority. By a comparison, however, of the two evangelists, the passage is saved, and its enigma resolved. In Matthew, the apostrophe to Jerusalem is introduced by the words, " I send unto you prophets and wise men and scribes : some of them ye will kill and crucify : and some of them ye will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city ; that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of Abel the righteous unto the blood of Zachariah, son of Barachiah, whom ye slew between the sanctuary and the altar. Verily, I say unto you, all these things shall come upon this generation." In Luke, this passage, with change of only a word or two, has been already worked up into an earlier discourse at a Pharisee's dinner table in Galilee ;t and there it is introduced, not as spoken by Jesus in propria persona, but as a quotation of Another's words, — evidently God's : " Therefore said the Wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets," &c. The speaker, therefore, who has so often appealed to the Holy city and its perverse people is the God of their fathers, their providential guide through all their history. The only question is what is denoted by that " "Wisdom of God " from which the words are » xiu. 31-35. Cf. xi. 37-52 and xix. 41-44. t xxiii. 29-39. J xi. 49-51. .Chap. II.] . THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 343 cited. Not surely the canonical Hebrew scriptures, which are never quoted under such a title, and which do not contain the passage here adduced. The phrase, moreover, must cover a much more recent production : for in the reproach which it utters it includes as its last term, the murder " between the temple and the altar " (i.e., in the court of priests) of Zachariah, the son of Baruch, — an act perpetrated, as Josephus tells us, " in the midst of the temple " by two of the zealots shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus.* The disastrous events of that time, interpreted as judgments on the past and omens of a redeeming futm-e, were fruitful ia homilies of denunciation and oracles of prophecy, — fugitive fires discharged in the collision of despair and faith, and kindling both wherever they touched. That one of these, or a collection of them, should receive the title " The Wisdom of God," is accordant with the taste and style of apocalyptic authorship. That the impulse to produce them or turn them to account would operate alike on all who are imbued with the Messianic faith, whether simply Jews or Jewish Christians, is obvious : the difference would only be that the one would ignore, the other would accept,, the historic episode of Jesus' life, as the key to the downfall of Jerusalem. That the first evangelist already looked back upon that downfall is plain from the words, "Behold, your house is left unto you desolate."! "We have here, therefore, an example of quotation by evangelists from an apocalyptic writing, called the " Wisdom of God," Jewish in essence. Christian in application, so in- corporated with their biographical narrative as to be thrown back some thirty-nine years before its origin, and appear as a vaticinium ante eventum. The upbraiding of Jerusalem being thus transferred from Jesus who is supposed to cite it, to God with whom it sums up the long history of Israel, is no longer out of character in its manifold indictment of unfaithfulness. * Jewish Wars. B. IV.. v. 4. + Luke, feeling the impossibility of attributing this sentence to Jesus, more than a, generation before, has dropiped the word eptjfios ; escaping the incongruity, but leaving the sentence empty. On this whole passage, see an excellent paper by Strauss in Hilgenfeld's Zeitsohrift fiir wisssnsohaftliohe Theologie. 1863 : p. 84, seqg. 344 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS, [Book IV. This particular citation proves no more than that the troubles of the perishing Jewish State in the apostolic and post-" apostolic age did actually produce more Messianic literature than has come down to us by name. It does not throw light upon the part which the phrase " Son of Man " plays ia such writings. But it provides a fund from which a reason- able explanation may be drawn of the remarkable fact, that this phrase, as applied by Jesus to himself,' had still its non- Messianic sense, while in the eschatological discourses which worked themselves into the traditions of his life during a half century of Jewish Christianity, the Messianic meaning is in full possession. I believe it to be entirely posthumous. But as we have no contemporary record, and are dependent on writers with whom everything was fused down into a Messianic faith, who could neither speak nor let speak in any other sense, the evidence can only be indirect and reached by critical combinations. Our earliest Christian withess,^ the apostle Paul, though himself imbued with the Messianic belief, even to its doctrine of " last things," never once uses the phrase " Son of Man." By the synoptic evangelists it is put into the mouth of Jesus on about thirty-two occasions. Out of these it is used fifteen times not of himself, but as of a third person. In all the remaining instances it is given as applied to himself, seven times in a Messianic sense, ten times in a non-Messianic. And, on comparing the parallel passages in the three gospels,' it will be found that the Messianic pro- fession is at its minimum, or has its most modest expression in the oldest, Mark's. Thus, Peter's confession he gives in the words " thou art the Christ ; " Matthew adds " the Christ the Son of the living God ; " Luke, " the Christ of God." Arid in the account of the entry into Jerusalem, the popular cry, as given by Mark, is " Hosanna, blessed is he, who cometh in the name of the Lord," and " Blessed is the hing- dom that cometh, — of our father David ; " words which imply no more than the announcement by a prophet oi the coming kingdom ; while Matthew has it " Hosanna to the Son of David ; " and Luke, " blessed is the King that cometh in the name of the Lord : " plainly marking the growth in the tradition. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 345 The gradual loss by the term " Son of Man," of the \uman meaning in the Messianic, is indicated by this further peculi- arity of the oldest gospel : that in it Peter's confession forms a dividing line between the two meanings, starting the Messianic conception and quitting that of Jesus himself. Whereas in Matthew and Luke the official sense is given to the phrase before as well as after that date, and distributed equally all through the ministry.* * Mark ii. 10, may seem not to fall under this rule. When Jesus, intend- ing to cure the palsied man, tells him " Thy sins are forgiven thee," tho scribes ask " Who is this that speaketh blasphemy? who can forgive sins but God alone?" Jesus replies, ' Why this reasoning ? what difference does it make whether I say ' Thy sins are forgiven,' or ' Arise, take up thy bed and walk' ? but that ye may know that the ' Son of Man ' hath power on earth to forgive sins, I say unto thee ' Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.' ' It is usually supposed that Jesus here justifies his act of forgive- ness by asserting his Messianic rank, to which it would admittedly be appro- priate, and, as proof of his competency, offers the man's discharge from his physical penalty. In this view, his objectors then were not aware, — as indeed their question Who is this ? implies, — that he spoke as Messiah ; else they would never have questioned the fitness of his words to his assumed character. His answer, therefore, consists simply in telling them who he is : he virtually says, ' Do you not know that I am the Christ ? ' giving them the information under the name " the Son of Man." This, however, is not the way in which Jesus treats their doubt. If it were, he would have to offer proof that he was "the Sou of Man." Instead of this, he proposes to prove that it is within the competency of " the Son of Man " " to forgive sins on earth," a point undisputed and in no way relevant, if " Son of Man " means Messiah, to whose of&ce the judicial fimction primarily belonged. The scribes' objec- tion was founded upon precisely the opposite assumption, viz., that the unpretending character of " Son of Man " under which, like EzeMel, he moved among his people, carried in it no authority to forgive sins. How does he answer the objection ? Sins in heaven (i.e., in their spiritual aspect) whose moral heinousness, relative to the secret conscience, is measurable only to the Searcher of hearts, are certainly reserved for the mercy of God alone. But sins on earth, in their temporal expression by visitations of incapacity and suffering, he has from of old permitted his human prophets to remit, and when such a ^on of man takes pity on a stricken brother, what matters it whether he goes up to the sentence and pronounces it thus far reduced, saying, ' Herein, the sin is forgiven,' or whether he goes down to the prison doors, and opening them, bids the captive ' Arise and go to his house ' ? Thus understood, Jesus simply tells his hearers, ' I speak in conformity with your preconception, viz., that at the back of all physical evil there lies some moral cause of which it is the outward mark and record.' How far he was himself from sharing this misconception, how ready, on fitting occasions, to protest against it, is attested by his comments on the fall of the tower of Siloam (Luke xiii. 1, seq^.). He repudiates the idea that the victims crushed by it were suffering execution for their sins : he warns his hearers against , judging either others or themselves by what happens to them : they have the 346 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. Thus much respecting the history and contents of the current Messianic terms it was necessary to premise, ere we attempt to determine for how much of the claim which they seem to imply Jesus himself can be deemed responsible. The materials for a true judgment must be sought in the synoptical gospels ; and yet are so largely moulded by conceptions first blended with these terms in and after the apostolic age, that they can be used only under great restrictions, if they are to lead us up to the historical figure of Jesus. The foregoing account of the phrase " Son of Man," has against it the serious weight of Hamack's authority, who categorically affirms that the term means "nothing else than Messiah."*- If this be so, it is certain that Jesus, who indis- putably assumed it from the first, gave himself out for> "the Christ " with uniform emphasis from the baptism to the crucifixion ; and yet Harnack himself says, in a note imme- diately preceding, " From the Gospels we know for certain that Jesus did not come forward with the announcement. Believe on me, for I am Messiah, "t He attached himself to the mission of John the Baptist, and only slowly and with reserve prepared his adherents for anything more than the repentance in expectation of the kingdom. To escape from the contradiction between these two positions, by differencing his conception of the Messiahship from the popular one, is to put into the name " Son of Man " something else than Messiah, and so to retract the first proposition. The theory, however, of a gradual disclosure and advance of Messianic pretension has a plausibility which secures it an increasing amount of critical approval ; and in particular has its evidence very inward power to " know even of themselves what is right " : to this let them look, and see what they are, and not mind Jww they fare, and then they will never mistake calamities for judgments. Baur gives a different turn to the dialogue about the palsied man, founded on the closing words of Matthew's parallel passage (ix. 8), " the multitude glorified God, who had given such authority unto men." Taking the phrase son of man as simply equivalent to man without any special reference to Jesus in particular, he understood the lesson inculcated to be that the pure human consciousness places man in such a relation to God as to give him a well-grounded trust in the Divine forgiveness of sins. Hilgenfeld's Zeitsoh. 1860. 282, 283. • Lehrb.d. Dogmengeschichte, p. 58, note 2. f Ibid, note 1. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 347 skilfully presented by Holtzmann in his comparison of the gospels of Matthew and Mark.* Its plausibility is not sur- prising ; for it is in truth the very theory of the evangelists themselves, — at least, of the common tradition at the base of their work; and it is easy to draw out of their tex.t the speculative thread on which they have constructed it. But the question still lies behind, whether the assigned series of phenomena, from the impersonal message " the Kingdom of heaven is at hand," to the climax of personal faith in the messenger as himself the coming King, represents a progres- sive claim asserted by him, or a growth of behef naturally matured in them and retrospectively read back between the lines of his reported life. To determine which of these explanations is the more satisfactory we must recur to the chief landing-place in the ministry of Jesus, the scene of Peter's confession near Cesarsea Philippi. The scene of his ministry opened in Galilee, and closed in Jerusalem ; all but a few weeks of it being spent in his native province, in the fields and villages aroimd Capernaum, or on the hills that overlook the sea of Gennesaret. Between these two unequal periods a memorable week of transition is inter- posed, — the farewell to Galilee,^— the venture upon the city of the priests. It could in no case be an ordinary week that had so critical a place ; but a time of pause, to gaze back upon a past which could never be repeated ; and a time of misgiving, to look into the mists of a future which he could not pierce. In brief, three things are said to mark this week : (a.) he asks his disciples the popular opinion of his person, and receives from Peter the confession that he is the Christ ; (b.) in the same breath he declares to them his impending death afc Jerusalem ; and (c.) six days after, the immortal prophets of the old time meet him' on the mount of transfiguration and put a glory into that death by speaking to him of it. What- ever mythical materials may be embodied in this report of a memorable week, there are certain historical elements which must be admitted as the necessary base of its very existence. It is clear that (1.) up to that date, i.e., through the whole of his career except seventeen days, no word had been ever * Lehrbuoh d. Einleitung in das N. T. 368, 369. 348 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. breathed about his Messiahship ; for not only does popular rumour limit itself to explanations short of this, but even ■within the inner circle of his personal attendants it is only now that Peter's boldness itself ventures on the startling claim. That we may rely on this I conclude, because it is the story told by the oldest evangelist alone, while it has vanished from the others, who write under the conception that Jesus acted and was confessed as the Christ all through. The later version must yield, as unhistorical, if only through its uncon- scious inconsistency; and Jesus must be relieved, for the whole period, of a pretension uncongenial with his spiritual character, and the source of all that is perishable in the reUgion which bears his name. Nor does this affect our estimate of himself alone ; for the claim having not been made by his disciples for him, any more than by him, we do them wrong if we suppose them to have become followers in his train through hope of some great thing in the " Kingdom of our father David ; " he was but the human herald of a Divine event ; and they were but the herald's servants. They were drawn to him and held fast by the power of a penetrat- ing and subduing personality, the effect of which was a mystery to themselves, and their vain attempts to solve the mystery have left us the unfortunate legacy of a Christian mythology. (2.) From the same date, i.e., on ".setting his face to go to Jerusalem," Jesus himself experienced forebodings of danger and public death, sometimes openly expressed to his disciples, oftener perhaps overheard in the wrestlings and quieted in the composure of prayer. These deepening apprehensions needed for their source no changed intention, ho heightened claims, no more aggressive calls to repentance, on his part i it was enough that the same message, ' The judge is at hand,' was to be flung upon a new scene, addressed not to listening ears and simple hearts, but to the threatened interests of blind guides and traffickers in spurious righteousness. Even in Galilee he had come across scribes and Pharisees enough to know that it was one thing to speak in the village synagogue or on the hill-side to a people " looking for the consolation, of Israel," and quite another to lift the prophet's voice in the Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 349 temple of the priests, who dreaded all reform, who wanted no purification but such as they could administer with hyssop or with blood, and thought less of mercy than of sacrifice. For him therefore it was a declining path that led from the sunny uplands of his home to the strange and stately city, in whose shadows the outlines of possibility were hid. All that he knew was that already the very message with which he was charged had been fatal to John the Baptist, though " all the people held him for a prophet," and only " the Pharisees and lawyers rejected for themselves the counsel of God." (3.) At the very time then when the disciples, fresh from the Crowds and the enthusiasm that for above fourteen months had followed his steps in Galilee, were at last approaching, as they thought, the crowning joy of conveying his glad tidings to the centre of the nation's life, their exaltation of spirit, instead of meeting response from him, seemed to sink him into a more pathetic silence, or even to force from him a look of compassion or a word of remonstrance. It was precisely this contrast of moods that was sure to elicit from him, in check of their exuberant confidence, prophetic hints of impending ignominy and sudden sorrow. And this close combination is the most striking feature in the scene of Peter's confession, and the most helpful for its right interpretation. If we look beneath the surface -of that scene, removing the films with which the touches of after-thought have painted it over, nothing can be more simple and true to character, as tested by the foregoing historical assumptions. The impetuous apostle breaks out, 'Thou- art the Messiah.' Does Jesus accept the part ? His answer is peremptory. ' Silence ! to- not a creature are you to say such a thing again!' and he instantly adds that at Jerusalem he expects the cross and not the crown. That Peter takes this for a disclaimer and contradiction of the pretension just proclaimed on his behalf is evident from his drawing his Master aside and privately rebuking him for his melancholy prophecy, and pressing him' to a bolder use of his opportunities. Does Jesus set himj right by tellin^g him that there is no contradiction, the glory and the shame being blended in the same part? On the contrary, he goes with Peter in accepting them- as alternative, 350 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. and treats him as a tempting Satan, counselling the easier and the worse of two open possibilities : " Thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men." The state of mind implied in both the speakers of this dialogue is exactly what would exist if the one had heard and the other inwardly Been nothing beyond the tragic issue at Jerusalem. If Peter had just been told not only of the cross but of the resurrection, could he have deprecated the death and taken no notice oi the immortal glory to which it was but the prelude and condition ? His remonstrance is plainly occupied with a humiliation pure and simple, and relieved by no reversal. And if Jesus knew and had just said that he should " lay down his life that he might take it again," if, having explained that this was the Divine gateway to the Messiahship, he was going to Jerusalem on purpose to pass through it, how is it possible that he should meet the apostle's suggestion as an alternative, and thrust it away as a temptation ? It is only in the deep darkness of the soul, where nothing is clear but the nearest duty and its instant anguish, and the issue is shut out by the midnight between, that any Satan can slink in with pleas of ease and evasion. I infer therefore from the relation described, with all the internal marks • of truth, between the disciple and the Master, that Peter felt his assertion of the Messiahship to be repudiated, not accepted, in the reply of Jesus ; that his reply included no mention of a resurrection, but received this addition after the Messianic theory had been fitted to the facts and had modified the traditions of his life ; and that even of his death it did not amount to the present definite and detailed prediction, but only to such prognostication as the fate of John the Baptist and the temper of the city sects and hierarchy too clearly warranted. If he had really set himself " to teach them .that, the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by . the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again :"* if, a few days after, he had charged them to say nothing of the transfiguration vision " till the Son of Man should arise from the dead : "t if, by two special acts of later teaching, once while still in Galilee,! and • • Mark viii. 31. + lb. ix. 9. + ib. ii, 31. j Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 3SF once on the road to Jerusalem, "he took the twelve, and began to tell them the things that were to happen unto him, saying, behold we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man shall be delivered unto the chief priests and the scribes ; and they shall condemn him to death and shall deliver him unto the Gentiles ; and they shall mock him and shall spit upon him, and shall scourge him and shall kill him; and after three days he shall rise again ; "* what can we possibly make of the strange statement that " they questioned among themselves what the rising again from the dead should mean;"t and that "they understood not the saying, and were afraid to ask him?"| Was then the idea of "rising from the dead " foreign to the Israelite of that day ? Was it not the very matter in dispute between the Pharisee and Sadducee, and, as such, discussed before these very disciples by Jesus himself ? Had they not reported, as one of the popular notions about Jesus, that he was " one of the old prophets risen from the dead ? "§ Is there any obscm-ity in these "teachings" of Jesus, that a child could mistake them? Something far more dim it must have been, some ominous surmise quite other than these lists of clear details, that left the little band so utterly unprepared for the events from the Passover eve to the Easter morn, and scattered them in dismay. Every feature of the tragedy, as it occurred, took them by surprise ; and not till they afterwards discovered that just these things " the Christ ought to suffer and to enter into his glory," did they feel sure that he must have known and voluntarily met it all, and have said enough to let them know it too, had they not been " slow of heart to believe what the prophets had spoken." || If we suppose Jesus to accept Peter's confession, and, a"i * Mark x. 32-34. t lb. ix. 10. X lb. ix. 32. § Luke ix. 19. II The ;post eventum discovery by the apostles of the need and fore-announce- ment of the resurrection must have been notorious, for as late a writer as the fourth evangelist to say of Simon Peter and "the other disciple," even after they had gone into the tomb and found it empty, that " as yet they knew not the Scripture, that he must rise again from the dead." (XX. 9.) If they must " know the scripture," before they could, interpret the empty grave, they could hardly have had the key to it which Christ's alleged and distinct prestatement placed in their hands. 3S2 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. least from that moment, to regard himself as Messiah, what are we to make of the instant injunction, renewed again and again, of absolute secrecy, sometimes unconditional, — "to tell no man," at others provisional, — " till the Son of Man should have risen again from the dead " ? Was then the Messiah- ship a private prerogative, which could be clandestinely held ? Was it not rather the ultimate national test which he was bound to offer for the judgment of Israel ? Might not his unbelieving " brethren " have reason for urging him to declare himself on the public theatre of his country — " No man doeth anything in secret and himself seeketh to be known openly. If thou doest these things, manifest thyself to the world " ? * If he knew himself to be offered to the faith of his people, as their predicted Prince of Eighteousness ; if he saw in their rejection of him 'the ruin which drew forth his tears ; if his own death was to be incurred by the rejected witness he had to bear to his own Messiahship, how was it possible to tell no one he was the Christ ? Why, it was the very message of God with which they were all charged ; the touchstone of Jerusalem ; the hinge of perdition or salvation ; and to keep it out of sight, not to press it passionately and always upon the nation at an hour so critical, were simple betrayal of the divinest trust. The injunction to conceal the claim is inconsistent with his having made or sanctioned it,* and the evangelist, we may be sure, would never thus have provided for its secrecy had it not notoriously been publicly unheard of at the time, and waited to be posthumously dis- covered. It is not impossible, indeed, that we have here some remaining trace of a fatal difference between the disciples and the Master : that, as soon as their faces were turned towards Jerusalem, their excitement could restrain itself no more, and when the beauty of Zion rose before their eye the sunshine on it seemed a prophecy of joy, and they more than suspected him to be the hope of Israel, and the long-sleeping hosannas burst from their hearts. It was in vain now that he had for- bidden that they should commit him to it. Had he been able, in doing so, to tell them, in some stereotyped formula who he was, and to say outright that he was Elijah or Jere- * John vii. i. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 353 miah, they might perhaps have obeyed him. But as they must have some story to 'tell, they slipped through the too modest prohibition, and told their own tale ; and, when out of hearing, whispered that he could be no other than the King that was to come. When by thus setting up a dangerous popular rumour at the passover, they had actually brought their Master to the cross, they would long to discover that the thought on which they had acted he had secretly cherished himself ; they would search among the deep mysterious words that lingered in their memory for the needful signs of the Messianic consciousness ; and to reconcile them with the foreboding and the fact of death, they worked out from the old prophets the theory of the suffering Messiah, and put it back into his history as if it were his own. And so have come together, as three ingredients of one incident, the prohibition to say that he was Christ ; the acknowledgment that he is so ; and the announcement of his death as if inseparable from the character. The combination is historically impossible ; but it is explained by the retrospective anxiety of tradition to force upon him a theory of his person of which first himself and then his religion has been the victim. But nothing perhaps has left so strong an impression of the Messianic self-announcement of Jesus as the eschatological discourse in which he answers the apostles' question about the " sign of his coming and of the end of the world." * The question arose at the end of his first day's teaching in the temple, when on leaving he met the disciples' admiration of the great buildings by the startling prediction, " There shall not be left here one stone upon another which shall not be thrown down." Seizing on this as the date of his coming, they draw from him, it is said, an account of its precursory symptoms, with the addition, in Matthew, of its issues in the judgment of nations and the eternal severance of righteous and accursed.f Since the writers of the Gospels certainly intended to present all these things as announced by Jesus respecting himself, the reader, in so taking them, understands the evangelists aright : but that in doing so he understands Jesus wrong, two slight * Matt. xxiv. 3. Mark xiii. 4. Luke xxi. 7. t xxv. 31-46. A A 354 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. but significant indications enable us, without detailed analysis, to render more than probable. 1. Throughout the prophecy, said to have been privately given to his disciples, of the fall of Jerusalem, of the world's last throes, leading up to the arrival of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven to part the sheep from the goats, and gather his elect into their divine inheritaiice, and similarly in all the parables about the kingdom of heaven and the harvest of which the reapers are the angels, never once does an evangelist venture to make him speak of that drama as belonging to hiviself. The inquiry addressed to him in the second person, " What will be the sign of thy coming? " is answered not in the first person, " After the tribulation of those days, ye shall see the sign of viy coming with power and great glory," but in the third, the sign of the Son of Man, " and of his coming on the clouds of heaven." Nor, in the account of the judgment, does he place himself on the throne and declare, " Before me shall be gathered all nations " ; it is again " the Son of Man " who has his escort of angels, and takes the seat of his glory, with the nations summoned to his bar. In explaining the parable of the sower he does not say, "It is I that sow the good seed," and " I will gather out of my kingdom all things that offend, and them that do iniquity, and will cast them into the furnace of fire " ; these things are still given as predicates of the indeterminate " Son of Man." Not even is it otherwise when he says, " Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man shall be ashamed of him when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels." This also might have been uttered by John the Baptist, or any prophet of any unknown Messiah, for whom he was commissioned to sound the note of warning and prepare a purified people ; ' he that found it too low a thing for him to be seen in the track of the ascetic of the desert and his pool of baptism, would meet with the penalty due to a divine message despised.' This constant avoidance by the biographers of any self-identification on the part of Jesus with the eschatological functions of Messiah, explains itself at once if we assume that, in an age which had become convinced of his investiture with these functions, memorialists of his Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 355 earthly ministry would not hesitate to interweave with the floating traditions of his acts and words apposite fragments of Jewish apocalypse filling in the picture and completing the drama of his work. The matter of these supplementary ele- ments would be in the third person ; the historical colloquies in the first and second ; and where the literary art of the com- piler has not effaced the difference, the phenomenon which I have pointed out would result. 2. If Jesus, speaking in his Messianic capacity, fore- announced to his disciples all the particulars of his Parusia, he certainly would describe it, not as a " coming of the Son of Man," but as his return. Was he not there, present with them now ? Had he not said that the Son of Man was going to be betrayed and put to death, and to rise again, and go forth into a " far country " (" even a heavenly ") and " to return f " "Why then does the revisiting phenomenon so habitually introduce itself as an unprecedented arrival of a personage known only to prophecy ? Why caution the companions who know him so well, not to run after false Christs, whose " great signs and wonders " will be such as, if possible, to deceive even the elect ? — as if it would be nothing, to them and to him, to meet again while all is fulfilled. This peculiarity of language and conception (which is not, however, found in the parables, but only in the literal apocalyptic statements) appears to me a clear indication of the unhistorical character and secondary source of the eschatological passages affected by it. The identification then of Jesus with the Messianic figure is the first act of Christian mythology, withdrawing man from his own religion to a religion about him. What has been its effect ? I do not deny that it may have been the needful vehicle for carrying into the mind ajid heart of the early converts influences too spiritual to live at first without it. Nor do I forget that it has saved the Hebrew Scriptures for religious use in the Christian Church instead of leaving them no home but the Jewish synagogue. But the moment the conception is seen to be false and unreal, this secondary plea disappears, and the whole system of images and terms that hang around the primary fiction and have no life besides, A A 2 356 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. require revision. It does not escape me how wide is the sweep of this rule, and how the very scenery of the traditional drama of faith, the pictures with which Art and Poetry have rendered the invisible world beautiful and terrible, nay, much of the symbolism consecrated by the hymns and prayers of centuries, must shrivel at its touch, roll up and pass away ; only, how- ever, to leave us alone with God in a universe imperishable. If its magic should dissolve the theatre in which we sit, and the stage lights go out, we should but find ourselves beneath the stars. Must we not own that, purely in his character of Messiah coming shortly with his saints to reign, was he called Lord ; or only as presiding at the great assize which was to open his reign, was he called Judge ; and because in that hour his verdict would reserve from the sentence which swept the, rest away all those who knew him and bore his name, he was, called their Saviour ? And can we pretend that, when that advent-scene has been turned into a dream, its language can remain a sincere reality ? For those who, instead of letting; the Messianic vision break up as an Israehtish illusion, per- petuate it as a Christian apocalypse ; for those who believe that Jesus of Nazareth will send forth his angels and gather his elect, and set up his throne and divide the affrighted world with a " Come, ye blessed," and a " Depart, ye cursed," these titles of sovereignty, of judicial award, of rescue from perdi- tion, have still an exact and natural meaning, as the symbols, of a definite though monstrous mythology. But, when once our relation to him has become simply spiritual, — a relation of personal reverence and historical recognition,^a looking- up to him as the supreme type of moral communion between man and God, — ^must we not own that these terms not only cease to represent any reality, but become either empty or misleading as imagery? Between soul and soul, even the. greatest and the least, there can be, in the things of righteous- ness and love, no lordship and servitude, but the sublime sympathy of a joint worship on the several steps of a never- ending ascent. The language which marks external differences of rank and function can no more enter into the fellowship of the spirit, than robes of office and patents of nobility can go to heaven : the august presence of the Divine -reality shames- Ghap. Il.l THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 357 these things away. With the throne and the glory, and the chariot of clouds, and the retinue of saints in the air and the trumpet of the herald and the voice of the archangel, must disappear the lordship too ; and God alone, as Euler of Nature, as well as Light of Souls, and so, disposing of us where we have no disposal of ourselves, must be owned as the Sovereign whom we unconditionally serve. To no other being (the political organism apart) do we stand under this two-fold relation, — of outward dependence in the sphere of physical power, and of inward communion in the sphere of spiritual good : and nowhere else can the double attitude and the mixed language befit us, of natural surrender and of moral aspiration. There alone the theocratic terms remain at home, and keep a meaning pure and firm. If you strain them thence, and carry them over to the realm of conscience and affections, you confuse the region whence you take them, and vulgarize that to which you apply them. For mere figurative speech indeed, which flings a transitory light and passes on, which settles into no formula but moves with flitting gleams, the old Hebrew and apostoHc types of conception remain as open and as rich as any other store : and of the " promised land," the " heavenly Jerusalem," the " Kingdom of heaven," the " City of our God," the " holy place behind the veil," we shall never cease to speak, so long as there is a divine love and hope in the human heart, and a faith in everlasting Eighteousness. But it is precisely where there is no flash of poetry and no glow of fervour, in the most literal and well-weighed speech, in professions of belief, in definitions of doctrine, in forms of prayer, that the Messianic language has settled with the most tenacious hold ; and, unless it be loosened thence, our religion will perish in its grasp. Are we quitting an ancient sanctity in doing so ? it is to enter on a truer and a higher. It is time to ascend to a more enduring order of spiritual relations, binding us to a larger world of sympathy, while infinitely deepening the long familiar ties. Let us take courage to be true, and make no reserves in our acceptance of the inward promptings of our ever-living Guide. 358 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. § 2. As Risen from the Dead. The Christian Eeligion, at its fountain-head, and in its imperishable essence, is the reHgion of Jesus. Not that it includes the luhole even of his thought about divine and human things : for he too, born in time and place, had his heritage from the past as well as his power over the future ; and the new life in him wrought amid old materials of habit and idea, and struck out its light in dealing with many a problem tra- ditional then and obsolete now. From the mere scenery thus given for his agency we must still retire within, till we reach its hidden springs in his own individuality ; and there at last, in the characteristics of his spirit, in its attitude towards the Heavenly Father and the earthly brother, in the secret faiths which shaped these tender and expressive lines, we look upon the pure source itself, the crystal waters as they lie among the hills in their basin of living rock. The more the type of mind thus coming into view approaches the unique, the more diffi- cult it is to define its lineaments in analytic words. An impersonated religion can have no equivalent in propositions. They may enumerate some indispensable conditions ; but the inner unity, the tempering power, the delicate harmonies, which blend and proportion them, evade the resources of language. Every enumeration must be false which gives in succession elements which can only live together. But, if we must try to state in words the religion embodied in the person of the Christian Founder, we may perhaps resolve it into an intimate sense of filial, spiritual, responsible relation to a God of righteousness and love ; an unreserved recognition of moral fraternity among men ; and a reverent estimate of humanity, compelling the faith that " the dead live." This is the com- bination of which his person is the living expression ; and he in whom they reappear is at one with Christianity ; con- sciously, if recognizing their representation in him; uncon- sciously, if repeating them apart from him. From this primary Eeligion of Christ, which simply speaks out the native trusts and unspoiled reverence of the human soul, which lies hid in all its justice, breathes in its pity and Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 359 its prayer, and inwardly hears a pathetic poetry as the under- tone of life, transfer yourself suddenly to the Christendom of today : watch the worship ; listen to the creeds ; mark the picture of the universe and the theory of existence that per- vade it, — the assumption of ruin, sin and hell as the universal ground of all, the eager seizure of an exceptional escape into a select and scanty heaven : see how he who threw open the living communion between the Divine and human spirit is set to stop the way and insist that no suppliant cry shall pass except through him ; and what can be more astounding than the contrast between that pure spring in the uplands of history and this dismal stream of horrors ? Who could imagine that the one has flowed from the other ? that the candle-and- posture question comes from that scene at table in the upper chamber at Jerusalem? that he whom litanies and hymns without number implore today, is the same whom we see on the mountain all night in prayer, and prostrate and broken in Gethsemane ? It would be inexplicable, were it not that all ideal truth must apparently, build a mythology around it, in order to realize its power ; and then, hiding itself among the current ideas and inherited affections of men, disappears from the foreground, and is replaced by secondary opinions about it, — whence it comes, and whither it would go. And so it has happened that for the religion of Christ has been substituted, all through the ages, a theory about him, — what he was in nature, what he did by coming into the world, what he left behind when he quitted it. These are the matters of which chiefly confessions and churches speak ; and, by doing so, they make him into the ohject, instead of the vehicle and source of their religion ; they change him from the " author," because supreme example, into the end, of faith ; and thus turn him, whose very function it was to leave us alone with God, into the idol and the incense which interpose to hide him. If his work is not to be utterly frustrated in the world, the whole of this mythology must be taken down as it was built up : if once it was needed to conciliate the weakness of mankind, it now alienates their strength: if to Jew or Greek it made some elements of his religion credible, with us it runs the risk of rendering it all incredible : if ever it helped to give to Chris- 36o SEVERANCE OF UN DIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. tianity the lead of human intelligence, to secure for it mastership in the schools, authority in the court, and the front rank in the advance of civilization, it now reverses these effects, irritating and harassing the pioneers of knowledge, compelling reformers to disregard or defy it, and leaving theological thought upon so low a plane that minds of a high level must sink to touch it, and great statesmen and grave judges and refined scholars are no sooner in contact with it and holding forth upon it, than all robustness seems to desert their intellect, and they drift into pitiable weakness. It would be much easier to untwine the mythological attri- butes from the person of Jesus, were it not that the process of investing him with them had begun long before our New Testament books assumed their form. No one takes it amiss if we ascribe a fancy to Barnabas or ApoUos, a superstition to Papias, a theory to Justin Martyr, a blunder tolrenseus. But the moment we stand among the canonical writings, it is thought shocking to say, " This was Paul's speculation ;" "That was Matthew's mistake;" "Here the fourth gospel is at variance with the rest ;" and " There the Galatians and Acts cannot both be true : " as if the writers were lifted above opinions and were not allowed to think. Yet, except that it contains (not however without exception) an earlier Christian Uterature, and in the case of the Pauline letters productions of the first age itself, the New Testament does not differ, in the conditions of its origin, from the mass of writings whence it was selected ; and its living interest, as best reporter of facts and traditions of the first century from the baptism of Jesus, is lost in a haze of illusory uniformity, unless we may trace through it the evident growth of doctrine from the baldest Jewish Chiliasm to the confines of a Trini- tarian theology; a growth conspicuous even in the single mind of Paul himself, and vastly broader when he is com- pared with the preceding stage in the second gospel, and the succeeding in the last. The growth of the Christian mythology which has taken the place of the Christian religion was continuous through six centuries, and received, at intervals, some important additions afterwards. Within the limits of the New Testament, we Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 361 can follow it for nearly a century and a half ; and we find there the vestiges of three successive theories respecting the person of Jesus. He was construed into (1.) the Jewish ideal, or Messiah ; (2.) the Human ideal, or second and spiritual Adam ; (3.) a divine Incarnation, whose celestial glory gleamed through the disguise of his earthly ministry. The personal attendants on Jesus worked out the first ; the apostle of the Gentiles, the second; the school whence the fourth gospel proceeded, the third. They were not mere interpretations of his historical mission and past life in Palestine. They all demanded room for him beyond the term between the birth and the sepulchre ; one of them at least required his pre- existence ; and all, his post-existence. If he were Messiah, he had yet his work on earth to do ; if he were the second Adam, the ideal of humanity, he was the head of an immortal race, and must be the first-fruits himself; if he were the divine Logos in the form of Man, he must return whence he came, and reassume his place with God. Of these three theories, the first alone was already formed during the later days of his ministry. It possessed the minds of his companions from Galilee to Judaea, without (as I have endeavoured to show) any sanction or adoption by him. It kindled them with excitement as the towers of Jerusalem came in sight : it broke out in Hosannas as the procession descended to the gates : it was ever present in their minds as he taught in the temple, and gathered the people, and shamed the ofiBcers away : it suggested the conversations of the evening walk across the hill to Bethany : it came to a crisis on the last night, when Judas at all events would wait no more, but would drive him from his ideal pieties to assert his real character and assume his place. They all probably shared the feeling of impatience at delay which in the betrayer had taken its extreme and fatal expression : they had all more or less committed themselves to the Messianic claim for their Master, and contributed by it to bring him to the cross. Struck down with dismay at the issue of their own dream, tossed between compunctions which they dare not meet and a love for him which they would not let go for over, " scattered abroad like sheep when the shepherd is 362 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. smitten,"* and flung back into Galilee, to hide from danger, brood in solitude, or whisper their grief and wonder in twos and threes, could they discern no light through all that gloom ? Must they say that the divinest vision of their life was an illusion? that the priests were right, and Calvary was just ? No, it was impossible ; if he was not what they had thought, he was something higher, and not lower: if he had refused their way, it was because it was not pure enough for him, and through sorrow and death he could find a better. Had they not read the Prophets with eyes only half awake and been dazzled by brilliant colours of Messiah's glory ? ' For see here, — is he not " led as a lamb , to the slaughter ? " seemingly " smitten of God and afSicted ?" " despised and rejected of men ? " And yet, " because he had poured out his spirit unto death," is it not said that he shall still " prolong his days " and " divide the spoil with the strong," and that " the design of the Lord shall prosper in his hand?" + Is it not this that we have unwittingly ful- filled, — the humiliation of Messiah which must go before his glory? — of which glory his father David spake for him in the Spirit, when he said, " Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades ; and, Thou wilt not suffer thy holy one to see corrup- tion ; Thou wilt show me the path of life."| Nor would such deductions from Scripture have been without some support from the disciples' own memory of the recent weeks. Could they forget the pathetic shadow that seemed to fall upon their Master's face, as soon as it was set towards Jerusalem ? — or the hints of suffering and wrong with which he had met Peter's exulting zeal ? Was not his whole mood, from that moment, a preparation for self-sacrifice rather than for triumph ? Was he then perhaps first learning the will of the Father concerning him, that not on this side of death was he, any more than the Baptist, to see the Kingdom which he had to announce ? It was called the " kingdom of heaven : " what wonder then that from heaven it should come, and that to heaven he should go to bring it ? For there surely, and not in Hades, must he be, — this Son of God more beloved * Mark xiv. 27. + Isaiah liii. 3-12. i Psalm xvi. 10, 11. Acts ii. 27, xiii. 35-37. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 363 than Moses, more august than Elijah ; and as they, his two witnesses and fore-runners, chiefs of Israel's Law and Israel's prophets, were already there among the angels, where else should he be on whom they are both to attend at his coming ? ' Nay, what is it that I half remember,' might Peter say to James and John, ' of that night upon the mount, made up of dream and waking, of cloud and light, when we overheard the prayer go forth from the darkness of his soul and beheld it return in a divine glory on the " fashion of his counte- nance," and words escaped him as if communing with the earlier messengers of God? Was it perhaps in that very hour that he learned that the will of God was by the way of the cross? "Who could be so fitly sent to tell him, as just those two who were to "go before" and "prepare the way for him " to tread ? Our eyes " were heavy with sleep ; " I was beside myself with joy and fear, and " knew not what I said ; " but now there comes from that memory the one clear voice, " This is my beloved Son, my chosen ; hear ye him." ' If the Messianic doctrine of the time did not directly invent, it would at least admit, such trains of thought as these ; for, like all ideal pictures, it had but wavering outlines and colours that changed with the glow or chill from the breath of circum- stances. The enthusiasm of trust and love, beaten back by the tragedy of Calvary, was sure to reassert its elasticity ; nor could anything sooner bring the reaction than the return to Galilee, where every familiar scene recalled his image and his voice, and the-villagers and Children who gathered round to hear the story to its end, bore witness to him by their dismay and tears. It was impossible to tell the tale without the intensest assurance that never had he been truer and dearer to God than in those last days, which were but as an offering himself up to a diviner will, and a passing through into more heavenly life ; so that there was something in them which neutralized the shock of the Cross itself. To this state of mind it would cease to be a thing incredible that Messiah should be " cut off frorn the land of the living : " it was only that "the heaven should receive him until the time for the restoration of all things." Thus far then, that is, to the belief that Jesus, the crucified, 364 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. Still lives, and only waits the Father's time to fulfil the pro- mises, an intelligible process might well bring the disciples ; and this is the faith in his resurrection. The conviction de- pended, in its two parts, on different sources : that the cross, instead of forfeiting, realized the Messianic character, rests, for its evidence, on the prophetic writings ; that JesuS, on yielding up his earthly life, passed, not, like other men, into the storehouse of souls in the underworld, but, like the two or three great spirits that had "walked with God," into the abodes of the immortals, where even they that have been human are "as the angels of heaven," — this faith was only what was already held by contemporary Israel respecting their own Lawgiver, and was not conditional on any supposed resuscitation of the earthly corpse ; as may be seen from a curious fragment of a Jewish Apocalypse, called the'AvdXiji/'/e MwvtTfoJc, the Assuviption of Moses, and quoted in the letter of Jude.* When Moses ascended Pisgah to look down on the promised land, and die, it is said, the Lord buried him.t But his successor, Joshua, the "Assumption " tells us, being carried in vision to the spot at the moment of decease, beheld a double Moses, one dropped into the grave, as belonging to the earth, the other mingling with the angels, t This ex- ceptional assignment to the ranks of the blessed is the instinctive award of reverence and gratitude to the diviner lights of the world ; and in the case of the disciples attests the transcendent power of the personality of him to whom their very souls had clung, and from whom neither wrongs from men nor the fate of death could part them. Whatever momentary cry the parting anguish might wring from his lips or theirs, they now knew him to be taken away, not as the forsaken, but as the beloved of God, elected to be the Prince of Life to all who grew like him by seeing him as he is. This dependence of their faith in immortality on the irresistible suasion of a single supreme and winning personality explains the order of their inference, from the one to the many, " because he lives, we shall live also ; " whereas tve should • Verse 9. t Deut. xxxiv. 6. J xiv. ap. Hilgenfeld, Messias Judasorum, p. 459. Drummond's Jewish Messiah, p. 77. Chap. H.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 365 more naturally say, " because man is immortal, he is in heaven, a chief among souls," seeming to reason from the many to the one. Yet I know not whether, so far as there is difference, theirs be not deeper truth. For surely with all of us it holds good, that only through the presence of spirits akin to his, does any diviner world of human possibility, any inward demand on life eternal, open upon us and plead in our prayers. All our higher faith enters as we stand before those saintly and commanding natures to which perishable attributes refuse to cleave, and fall off, like the moss and mould from the finest marble, leaving the form clear against the stainless sky. As their silent appeal finds the spiritual deeps within us, it is from them that we draw the faith in immortality, and learn to deem nothing too august for a soul of such high vocation. Thus far we move on the same line with the first disciples. If at this point we diverge, it is that they could not yet assume, as we now do, that all human souls have the same high vocation, but treated it as a particular calling, condi- tional on something else than the common humanity. They had not yet fully emerged from the religion of an " elect people " into the universalism of Christianity, though the key to it had been given by Jesus himself in his great saying that " AU live unto God." Nobly and beneficently has the conviction worked, that God would have " all men to be saved," and has endowed all alike with the conditions of probation and the potentiality of holiness. It has softened the antipathies of race, and shamed the excesses of power ; has precipitated the higher consciousness of the world in labours of missionary mercy upon the lower ; has length- ened the arm and multiplied the appliances of compassion ,- and has been the palladium, guarding every threatened sanctuary of hope. Unavoidably, however, what is gained in diffusion is more or less lost in intensity; and the ideal which is practically believable for all men, and is therefore measured by the standard of the lowest, cannot inspire the devotion and love with which Mary sat at Jesus' feet, and Peter exclaimed, " Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life." We may well admit then that there was a concentrated power in the disciples' direct, 366 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. personal limitation of the immortal life to the case before them. They had simply gained the assurance that on Calvary Jesus had finished nothing but his sorrows, and had passed to a divme retreat till the hour should strike for him to open the kingdom of God upon the earth ; his heavenly life, in its human relations, remaining solitary and excep- tional ; in the presence, no doubt, of angels and of God ; but with no human society, except the two or three favoured prophets who had mysteriously vanished from their " walk with God," or in the clouds of Nebo, or on the chariot of fire. Supported at least, but not induced by influences like these, the belief that their Master lived in a higher world was certainly iatensely held by his personal disciples, and in the course of a few years (viz., four) it started up afresh, from some marvellous cause, in a mind of very different order, — the very enemy in whom it might least be expected to appear. It is impossible to doubt that all alike, — the new convert and the prior apostles, — flung themselves with unreserved confidence on the faith that Jesus was in heaven, to die no more, and accepted it as their mission to spread this faith among their nation, and beyond. In carrying out this mission, they affirmed something more than their faith in the resurrection of Christ : they declared that they had seen the risen Christ ; and had they not been able to do so, they could hardly have conveyed to others the profound assurance of his heavenly life which, in their own minds, so largely depended on the impressions of their personal experience. It is no wonder then, that, in the traditional accounts of their life-work, and in the autobio- graphical passages of the Pauline letters, Christophanies play an important part, and come to the front as the credentials of their gospel. In fixing attention on these, the chief point to be determined must be, whether they were the cause or the effect of the faith in the immortal Christ. In order to ap- proach this question to the best advantage, we must take up the documentary testimonies in the order of their production, and not in the historical order of appearances which they relate. Under the hand of one writer alone, the Apostle of the Gentiles, have we any contemporary report of the Christo- Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 367 phanies ; of those which he enumerates, one only, and that the last, occurred in his own experience ; and his earliest mention of it dates nineteen years after its occurrence. This single personal testimony naturally becomes, in our endeavours to penetrate to the ultimate historical truth, the clew to the rest ; and the terms in which it is given have an important significance in what they express, and what they exclude. The apostle, referring to his conversion, says, at a pre- determined time, it " was the good pleasm-e of God to reveal his Son in me " ; and, as to the gospel thus given, " It is not after man ; for neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ."* The two facts here asserted, that for the contents of his gospel he wanted and received no human testimony, and that the revealing of Christ to him was internal, are in harmony only with a process of ideal change occurring in his spiritual history, and are announced in terms wholly inappli- cable to the flash of physical miracle upon the senses, or the visit of an unknown person walking and talking in the space around. The -language would have its natural meaning completely satisfied by a sudden discovery of thought, throw- ing a new light upon some painful problem, or setting free from pressure a struggling will ; and could be appropriated by many of the impassioned souls that have had a story to tell of religious conversion. True it is, that Paul comes nearer to the language of perception, when he says, "Ami not free? Am I not an apostle ? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? "t In all language, however, it is usual to extend the terms of visual perception to acts of mental apprehension ; and here there is a particular reason for using the same word to cover both ; for the writer's argument is, that the apostleship of the twelve, which rests upon the former, is no better than his own, which rests upon the latter : the qualifying knowledge in either case is adequate, as is shown in the resulting fruits. But Paul's testimony does not stop short with the "revelation of Jesus Christ" at his own conversion. He also ranges this in line with the whole series of Christophanies known to the first Christians : he tells the Corinthians, " I * Gal. i. 12-16. t 1 Cor. ix. 1. 368 SEVERANCE OF UN DIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and was huried ; and that he has been raised on the third day accord- ing to the scriptures ; and that he appeared to Cephas ; then to the twelve ; then he appeared to above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain until now, but some are fallen asleep : then he appeared to James ; then to all the apostles ; and last of all, as unto one born out of due time, he appeared to me also."* The whole of these facts he "received,; " but from two different sources which he is careful to dis- tinguish; the first half, including the resurrection on the third day, were " accredited by the scriptures ; " the second half, consisting of the Christophanies, were personal experiences related to him by others, or felt in himself. These are presented in the list as if they were perfectly homogeneous, his own case being distinguished by nothing except its occurrence after an interval and at the end. Beyond this relative position, no date is given for any of them ; nor is any locality assigned ; provided the order were not disturbed, there is no one of them that might not be on the third day or on the three-hundredth, — in Jerusalem, — at Bethany, or on the hills of Galilee. This inclusion of all under the same category could hardly be, if the writer were conscious that his own experience, as inward and spiritual, was strongly contrasted with that of the others, as a return of the earthly body from the grave, to walk upon the roads, and partake of meals, and be handled by testing fingers, and recognized by characteristic marks. If the same word (w^S'ij) is to mean the same thing, the " appearance " to Peter and James and the twelve was no other than the " appearance " to Paul, and may be construed by what he predicates of him- self, and by the conceptions which we know him to have had of Christ's " spiritual body." By his resurrection, Jesus, we are told, became the " first-fruits,"t — the preluding sample of them that sleep : their change, on emerging from death, is simply into the likeness of their forerunner ; and is described by the apostle in terms which, on the one hand, negative all the properties of mere aap% and ^vx^, and, on the other, • 1 Cor. XV. 3-8. t Ibid. 23. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 369 affirm those of trvtvfia, — incorruptibility, immortality, and, as manifested, a brilliancy as of a glorious light.* This ideal of the heavenly nature as conformed to Christ's " body of glory," is repeated in the letter to the Philippians ;t and by its aid we must interpret not only the apostle's own appealing and subduing vision of the Christ he had been persecuting, but the earlier Christophanies of which he had only heard from others. After what has been said in the section upon the Acts of the Apostles, it is needless to explain why we cannot accept from this book, with its three inconsistent accounts of the apostle Paul's conversion, any correction of the inferences warranted by his own letters. It appears then, that, up to a quarter of a century after the event, the apostle of the Gentiles had no other idea of the resurrection of Jesus than of his exchanging the earthly organism for the investiture with the spiritual essence of heavenly life ; and no conception of a Christophany but as a manifestation of this life to the spirit or inward vision of the believer. As the eye of spiritual apprehension is different in different men, and the outward senses alone are common to all, it was natural for the Jew or the Pagan to demand from the disciples something other than their own subjective vision in proof that " Christ lives " ; and to beg that the appeal might be carried from the inner experience to the outer perceptions :" and it is not surprising that the traditions were so moulded as to answer this demand. For, where a number of persons are thrown into the same attitude of mind, pre- occupied by one intense image, eager with a fixed expectation, fired by a sympathetic enthusiasm, the common affection answers the same end as the identical constitution of the eye and ear in all of them. A movement of thought, a glow of feeling, a turn of will, beginning in one, will run through all, and induce a common impulse of belief and act, precisely similar to the effect of the same objective experience. The two sources of common conviction are easily confounded ; and the Christian missionary who, in his contact with unbelieving auditors, felt the want of support from the former, was under • 1 Cor. XV. 42-50. + iii. 21. B B 370 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV, constant temptation to imagine and substitute the latter. There were also current, as we know, grosser ideas than the Pauline of what was meant by the resurrection from the dead, ideas involving no more than a reinstatement in the old conditions of the earthly life ; as when it wastimagined that Jesus was " John the Baptist," or " one of the ancient prophets risen again."* Among persons under the influence of such preconceptions, there would be a persistent desire for more palpable evidence, and a stream of questions about the empty grave, and, if they were unbelievers, about the disposal of the body, or, if believers, about the witnesses' interviews with their risen Master, the signs of identity by which they knew him, and the time, place, and mode of his final parting from them. Ten years later, these questions, which are without meaning for the Pauline Christian, but in Judaic circles had probably long been stirred, had come to the front and almost displaced the earlier type of faith ; so that in Mark's gospel, which had no Christophany at all,t but only gives notice, at the sepulchre, of the distant theatre of their occurrence, it is the surprise of the stone rolled away and the tomb without the corpse, that is superfluously offered as the plea for this notice. To Paul and his believers it would have made no difference, if the Jewish authorities had rifled the tomb and publicly replaced the body upon the uplifted cross ; this would no more prevent the spirit he had committed into the Father's hand from putting on its garment of heavenly light, than the contest between Michael and Satan for the body of Moses could detain the Lawgiver from his welcome by the angels. This hovering of interest about the tomb, natural as a tribute of retrospective memory, is out of place when turned into the supposed condition and sign of the visible realization of the immortal hope, and implies an incipient materializing of the first faith. In Mark, it-enters into its mere slight beginning, not yet touching the chief figure, but presenting only a white-robed messenger to tell where he will show himself to those who seek him. The • Luke ix. 7, 8. t The proper close of the Gospel, I need hardly say, is with chap. xvi. 8 ; the Appendix which foUows being a summary, by a later hand, of current traditions respecting the appearances of the risen Christ. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 371 women who receive the message are to send " the disciples ounA Peter " forthwith "into Gahlee ; there they will see him, as he had said to them." This allusion is to the last of his alleged prophecies, given on the way to Gethsemane, of his passion and resurrection, " Howbeit, after I am raised up, I will go before you into Galilee."* From this narrative it is clear (1) that the evangelist knew of no Christophany on the third day, either near the sepulchre or at Jerusalem ; (2) that he regarded Galilee as the theatre of the first appearances of the risen Christ ; (3) that apparently he knew of no other ; (4) that in these Galilean appearances Peter's experience took the lead, in agreement with the order of Paul's enumeration. According to this conception, the events conformed themselves to the anticipation attributed to Jesus ; " the shepherd being sinitten, the sheep were scattered abroad : "t by the disciples' flight the scene was at once trans- ferred to Galilee, and was there re-opened, when, amid the quiet hUls or by the lapping waters of the beach, the inefface- able impression of his life stole over their dismay at his death, and in spite of themselves breathed into their sorrow the reviving faith which had so often subdued his own. There, where the tones of his voice had scarcely died away, but were still heard in the memory of his beatitudes, his parables, his prayers, and they could now see how, in its divine calm, hid form stood out against the city throng of carping scribes, and angry priests, and noisy traders, he would more than ever appear as the "holy one of God," to whom by the very way of death, "He will show the path of life," — whom "after two days," as the Scripture saith, "He will revive," and "raise up on the third day to live before Him."t Of the Galilean Christophanies which responded to this natural reaction of thought tradition has preserved two doubtful traces, both of them introduced at the latest evan- gelistic date, and both misplaced at the end instead of the beginning of the resurrection story. One of them closes Matthew's gospel with an appearance thus described : " The eleven disciples went into Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had appointed them ; and when they saw him, they worshipped * Mark xiv. 28. t xiv. 27. J Hosea vi. 2. B B 2 372 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. him ; but some doubted."* This expression of objective un^ certainty favours the idea of something visionary in the manifestation, or some affection of consciousness which was not common or equal to all. The other instance constitutes the appendix to the fourth gospel ;t in which is described an appearance of the risen Jesus to seven disciples at the sea of Tiberias, terminating with the well-known prophecy of Peter's martyrdom, compared with John's indeterminate con- tinuance in life. Notwithstanding the obviously mythical character of this narrative, it is still of historical interest, as retaining the connection of the resurrection tradition with the Galilean localities. If the faith and evidence that " Christ has risen " and lives in heaven arose and regathered his scattered " little flock " in the seats of his chief ministry, the time usually allowed for the consolidation of this belief must be considerably extended. The return to the homes in Galilee,— a walk of 100 miles, — would need the interval between one Sabbath day's jour- ney and another ; nor can we treat the occurrence of the first spiritual communion between the forsaken disciples and their rediscovered Lord, depending as it did on the inward chro- nometry of their souls, as an appointment that could be punc- tually and uniformly kept. Nothing forbids us to allow what- ever time may be required. The fancied necessity of forcing the whole process through within a few days, is imposed only by the later conception of a bodily resuscitation while the organism could still resume its suspended functions; and belongs to the materialistic forms of tradition so curiously blended, in the Evangelists, with the primitive and, Pauline mode of thought. When, with an obvious awe, they transport the risen Jesus mysteriously from place to place, making him vanish from table, t and enter through closed doors, § and ap- pear now in one form and now in another, || so as not always to be recognizal?le even through long conversations, IT by dis- ciples familiar with his person, they seem intent on showing that he is invested with the attributes of immortal spirits. Yet, on one of these very occasions, he is made to say, " See * Matt, xxviii. 16. f Johc xxi. % Luke xxiv. 31. § John XX. 19-26. || Mark xvi. 12. 1 Luke xxiv. 14-31. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 373 my hands and my feet ; handle me and see : for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me have." * And, in dis- proof of this same incorporeality, stress is repeatedly laid on the palpable signs of identity, — the eating of broiled fish,t the print of the nails, the scar in the side. X It is the second of these two layers of tradition that has both shifted the scene of the Christophanies to Jerusalem as the place of interment, and thrown back the time of the occurrence upon the third day (the date, probably, at which the human soul was con- ceived to be released for its descent into Hades) and the few more that could be spared from the waiting life in heaven. The extreme case of this scant allowance of time is in Luke's gospel, where the last chapter brings all the appearances of the risen Jesus within the resurrection-day, on the evening of which " he was parted from them " over against Bethany, and " carried up into heaven." Yet so regardless is the author of consistency, that, at the opening of the second part of his history (the Acts of the Apostles) he expands his one day into forty, during which Jesus had many interviews with the dis- ciples, and at the end of which he gave them their commission as witnesses of him, and visibly ascended through the clouds into heaven.§ Nor is Luke's contradiction of the Galilean tra- dition less direct in regard to place than in regard to time ; for he definitely detains the whole of the apostles at Jerusalem, by an express order from Jesus not to leave it till the day of Pente- cost shall have armed them with their divine credentials. We • Luke xxiv. 39. t . Ibid. xxiv. 42. J John xx. 27, 28. § Hamack remark^ on the wavering character of the traditions about the Ascension : " Paul has as yet no knowledge of it ; nor is it mentioned by Clement, Ignatius, Hennas or Polyoarp. It had no place in the oldest pro- mulgation of the gospel. The formulas often combine the Resurrection and Sitting at the right-hand of God (Eph. i. 20 and Acts ii. 32, seqe Gigant. 11. X De Cherubim, II. 28 § Quod deterior potiori insid. soleat» y De somuiis, I. 23., f De posterltatq Caini, 43. *• Ibid. 41. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 407 we may attain to ever higher degrees ; for as the fountain is perennial, it can never fail our thirst ; * as its amplitude is illimitable, our spiritual growth may be without end.* Some men are born of the earth, and never seem to escape slavery to the pleasures and interests of sense ; others are born of heaven, and live in the pursuit of scientific culture ; others, again, are horn of God, and are the true priests and prophets of mankind, denizens not of this or that visible por- tion of the world, but of the spiritual whole of this universe. + It is an easy thing to God thus to make the human mind his own ; for if the strong winds of nature, sweeping over earth and sea, can lift the waves, and snatch up objects that of themselves gravitate downwards, much more can the Divine Spirit carry off the soul and take it aloft into a region of thought truly kindred with itself.J In all such living inspiration there is a glorious contagiousness. No mind that gives it loses what it gives ; rather does it more intensely kindle as it spreads ; and just as one torch suffices to light a thousand and multiply the flames, so does the touch of the Divine Spirit pass from soul to soul, and the holy fire become brighter as it flies. § Nay, so far does Philo press this con- ception of the converse of essence between the source and the recipient of divine light, as to say that he who is truly inspired " may with good reason be called God." || The higher mind, indeed, is no individual or personal possession ; rather is it a common spiritual element pervading both natures, God's and our own, the medium of spiritual understanding and harmony.1T The true prayer therefore for every pious man will be, that he may have the Supreme Euler as a guest within, to raise the little tenement of the mind in which he dwells to a great height above the earth, and ally it with the heaven.** It is only, however, to the truly initiated,— the souls " born of God" and visited by him, that this immediate contact with his essence is possible ; they alone go beyond the shadow • De posteritate Caini, 44. t De Gigantibus, 131. J De plant. Noe. 6. § ^'>. ^'gant. 6. II De nom. mutat. 22. ^ Ilj"!- •* De sobrietate, 13. 4o8 ■ SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. to the abiding substance, and bring its inmost meaning as the key to the knowledge of created things. Ordinary men, by an inverse process, receive a humbler gift, the constructive interpretation of God by the issues of his living power, whether in self-conscious natures that reflect the direction of his thought, or in physical laws and tribes of creatures that render that thought explicit in a visible world. It is in deal- ing with these mediating steps of divine knowledge, whether as the track of diluting light that softens our darkness, or that of progressive illumination that draws us to the intenser borders of heaven, that Philo's language assumes its most marked characteristics. He introduces us to a hierarchy of mediating agencies, at one time appearing as abstract quali- ties, at others decked out with the features and dress of prosopopeia so strong that but for the rapid change of imagery, it would be taken for a mythology. The term " Father " is appropriated to God in his absolute Unity, with the connotation, of course, of a derivative plurality; the Oneness means, says Philo, "not that he exists in unity, but that unity subsists in him ; "* i.e., the universe is a coherent single reality as his idea. This phrase- ology is curiously strained in more than one connection which might have tempted Philo to relinquish it. Thus, the world being treated as the father of Time because supplying measures to its lapse, God as Father of the world is pro- nounced to be the Grandfather of Time ; the Divine life itself presenting no time> but only the beautiful archetype of time, viz.. Eternity ; in which nothing is past and nothing is future, but everything present only.-f- This play upon the family relations is allowed to run a step further ; the Father's creative efficiency has its partner in his ao(pia (wisdom), which, as feminine, may be called the Mother of the world ; who, wheii her time of travail was due, brought forth the only and beloved Son perceptible by sense, viz., this universe. I So little does Philo shrink from this idea that he more than once recurs to it and calls ao(^ia the wife, the virgin wife, of God, Source especially of the virtues of pure souls. § In this * Leg. Alleg. III. 1. Quis rerum divin. h£Er. 38. + .Quod Deus sit immut. 6. t De ebrietate, 8. § Re Cherubim, 14. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 409 connection, however, he suggests that the wftrd " Father " ■would be more appropriate from its higher dignity ; and he says that doubtless ao^ia is feminine towards God, as secon- dary to him, and masculine towards men as having precedence over them.* The Wisdom which is ancillary to God has rightful lordship over mankind. The relation of Fatherhood involves in it the two ideas of new existence, and of continued essence. In the former aspect alone, as a derivative product, the universe would never have been called by Philo " the only and beloved Son of God ; " the phrase befits it in virtue of the second mark, as embodying in its constitution the essential order of the Divine perfections, so far as things visible can express their significance. Not as a perceptible creature offered to Sense, but as an ideal system, the Hving projection of the Infinite Spirit, can this supreme filiation be claimed for it. Hence it is that, for the sake of more exact expression, the Sonship is sometimes limited to the intellectual ground-plan or inner meaning of the cosmos in the Divine consciousness, as dis- tinguished from its material presence to human perception : the Xoyoe (6 to-w Xoyo?) of the universe, — its idea, — is separ- ated, as a prior step, from its 'ipya, or concrete objects ; and is called the firstborn Son (Trpwro'yovoe wtoc)t of God. The theory or Divine program of the world, as the condition of its genesis, lies nearer, by one remove, to the essence of the Creator, than the visible heaven and earth ; and so intercepts and appropriates their title to be called his Son by primo- geniture. Having once interposed this intellectual term between the absolute source and the cosmical phenomena, Philo might be expected to repeat at the second step the language selected for the first, and to claim the universe as Son of the Logos, now, that the Logos .occupied the place of Son of God. By parity of expression he had called Time the grandson of God, because determined into being by His " world." ' And this might the more be expected because, of the two elements in the meaning of the word \6yo^, — thoughts and speech, — ^he emphasizes the first as the living source of the second ; it is * De profugis, 9. + DeAgrioultuta, 12. 4IO SEVERANCE OF VNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IV.. the fountain whence by nature the channels of uttered speech receive and are filled ; and the fountain is mind.* Logos, both in the universe and in man's nature is twofold ; in the universe there is that which has to do with the incorporeal, idea whence the world was constituted a thought- system, and that which has to do with the visible objects which are representations and copies of these ideas, and of which this perceptible world was composed. In man, again, logos is on the one hand conceptual (IvSta'S'EToe), and on the other express- (n-po^opiKo'e) : the former a fount, as it were ; the latter, flow- ing from it aloud ; the former having its seat at headquarters, (ro iiyrjjuovticov) ; the latter and express, in tongue and mouth and other organs.f This analogy, — that as speech is to thought in man, so is the visible creation to its intellectual ground-plan, — is the key to much of Philo's doctrine ; and the only difference which he points out as crossing the analogy is. this, that while the human voice is made to be heard, that of God is literally to be seen ; for whatever God says consists not- in words {prifiaTa), but in works (ipya), appreciated by eye rather than by ear. J It would be only consistent in Philo to treat the visible cosmos as no less an offspring of the Divine Logos than is the speech and literature of mankind the off- spring of the human logos. Why does he never claim for the- world the title " Son of the Logos ? " Because, I imagine, he reserves this relation exclusively . for that which comes straight out of the essence of a spiritual nature, and will not extend it to what issues from an attribute, like Logos, itself, subsisting in the essence. Another anomaly in this language of Philo has some signifi- cance for his interpreters. In spite of his comparison of the- universe with speech in man {explicit logos), he never, I believe, directly applies the word Logos to the visible world, but only to the thought that lies behind. The universe, he tells us, is " the only Son of God ; " and so is the Logos ; "the /Son" therefore is one object with two Synonyms; and- yet the Synonyms are not interchangeable ! The reason i» the same as in the previous anomaly. So far forth as each, * Quod deter, potior! insid. soleat. 25. t Vita Mos. III. 13. J De degem orac. 11, Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 411 (the world and the Logos) is " Son of God," both must be immediately from the Divine essence, and have their filiation only in that which such proximate position makes common to both, i.e., in the ideal ground and meaning immanent in the cosmos, and connoted in Logos as a name for thought, to the exclusion of the word's other sense, of spoken words. The universe, when treated as "only Son of God," is regarded as itself the thinking out of the Divine idea, and not as a second step of physical utterance, the outcome of a prior plan, and falls into coincidence with only the intellectual meaning of Logos, severed from the vocal. Nor does it cover the whole, even of this ; for Philo's cosmos did not exhaust the resources of God's infinite reason, so as to leave his Logos no more that it is possible to do ; transcendent as well as immanent, the scope of thought-construction thus far realized is no measure of its unknown reserves ; so that even in giving the universe, the Logos does not give the whole of itself. The relations ai'e difficult to adjust : if the two are made successive, the universe loses its sonship ; if they are identified, the Logos is shorn of its infinitude. Though, however, Philo's Logos winds a changeful way through his fantastic imagery, and now Immanent, is scarcely distinguishable from the world as a realized divine order, and now Transcendent, lapses into God's own essence ; yet, on the whole, the attentive reader will find its middle place obviously intended and fairly preserved : and at the upper end, especially, its distinction is unmistakably marked from God as its prior no less than its superior term. The Logos is his creative and administrative instrument ; he needs no material media for action : in dispensing his gifts. Logos is his minister, by which also he fabricated the universe.* The precise relation of this deputed to the original agent is distinctly indicated when it is said respecting the universe, " The cause of it you will find to be God, by whom (i»0' ov) it comes into being : the matter of it, the four elements of which it is composed : the instrwnwnt of it, the Logos of God, by whose means (81 ov) it was constituted : and the motive source {aniav) of its constitution, the goodness of the maker."! This Logos * Quod Deus immut. 12. t Pe Cherubim, 35. 412 > SEVERANCE OF UNDIVINE ELEMENTS. [Book IVi of God, which he used as his instrument in forming the cosmos is the shadow of himself ; and this shadow or model is the archetype of all else ; for as God is the pattern of his image or shadow, So does this again become the pattern of other things.* This favourite image, of the model and the copy, suits well enough the analogy between the Divine preconception and the cosmical presentation of the scheme of things ; but is an inadequate rendering of the author's entire doctrine. Pattern and copy are both of them objects contemplated by a com- paring artist distinct from both ; and would naturally occur as illustrations to Philo the Jew, already familiar with the translation of the visionary "tabernacle on the mount " into its miniature below. But Philo the Platonist had more to say than that two separate things were made like to a third which was different from both. He meant to affirm that the dSog of the first was present in the second as its objective essence, and in the third as its subjective perception of resemblance and clew to imitation. One and the same Logos, the base of a common understanding, did it all, constituting a unity rather than an analogy ; subsisting in the order of the universe and living in the consciousness of man, it carries into his nature as intelligent the attributes and epithets it has already attached to the world as intelligible, unifying the categories of thought, thinking, thinkable. The human soul is made after the image of God ; is stamped with his seal ; is the abode of his Word, his interpreter, his son. To the soul God gives a seal, — a glorious gift, — to teach it that on the indeterminateness of all things he impressed a determinate essence, and shaped the shapeless, and defined the character- less, and, in perfecting the whole, stamped the universe with an image and idea, viz. his own Logos.f The soul of man was a copy taken from the archetypal Logos of the Supreme cause. I Hence the attraction to him of those who are drawn iipwards;§ their love of retirement, and longing to attend alone on God;j| for the soul is, in man, what heaven is in ♦ Leg. AU. III. 31. t De somniis, 11. 6, Cf. De prof. 2. J De plant. Noe, 5. Cf. De mundo, 3. § De plant. Noe, 6. . II Quis rerum divin. haeres, 48. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 413 the universe. The two natures, that of reason in us and of the divine Logos above us, — the mind in us and the mind above us,— are indivisible and correspondent ; each engaged similarly and in sympathy with divine things by essence and kind, one in the world of being, the other in the world of thought.* Eeasoning indeed is but a fragment from the soul of the universe, or, in Mosaic language, an answering impress of a divine image.! These various attempts to establish the homogeneity of the Logos in" God, in Nature, and in Man, would seem to rank Philo amongst those Jewish writers to whom Spinoza attributed a hazy apprehension of the truth that God, God's understanding, and the things understood thereby, are one and the same.I Yet the " indivisibility " of " the mind within us " is so constantly crossed by the insertion of a mediation between these terms that an explanation is needed of the apparent contradiction. A conflicting tendency is evidently at work, and presses the author's thought into a deviation. It is found in his estimate of matter as undivine and antithetic to the intellectual and spiritual life of the natures burdened with it. From a confusion of the two senses of the word "corruption," to denote organic dissolution and moral depravation, it was deemed necessary to keep the immaculate Holiness of God clear of all responsibility for the constitution of perishable things, and to hand over the story of their vicissitudes to secondary agencies. Pure and original good he himself may give ; but even the remedies for ill must come through commissioned instruments, and especially his Logos, the physician of human maladies. § Well may he be compared with the Sun, if Sun there be that casts no shadow; "He is light, and in him is no darkness at all." II Yet even this is but a symbol: he is not only light, but the archetype of all light besides ; or rather, older than the archetype and prior, containing the intellectual essence (Xo'yov) of the model: for his own Logos in its plenitude was the model ; light, it may be called; but he himself cannot be compared with things that come to be.1" . • Quia rerum divin. hseres, 48. + De mut. nom. 39. -. + Ethica. IL vU. Sehol.^ § Leg. AU. III. 62. 11 1 John i. 5. If I^e somniis, 1. 13. . - 414 SEVERANCE OF UNDIVJNE ELEMENTS. [Book IV. The cosmos, as an assemblage of mixed natures, subjected for the most part to change and death, did not, in consistency •with this principle, owe its genesis to the immediate fiat of the Most High : hence it is that, to alight on the creative Agent and procedure, Philo descends one step, and finds the work committed to the most ancient Logos, neither created nor uncreate, and thenceforth administered by him : for it is not Ood himself who is the indwelling principle, invisible and inappreciable except to the soul ; but no other than the Logos which is older than originated things, by hold of which, as by a helm, the Pilot of all steers the system, and by use of which, as an instrument, when he was forming the world, he accomplished the faultless constitution of his work.* Li this withholding of the world from immediate relation to God in Mmself, man also is involved, as may be gathered from the tm-n of expression in the account of his creation ; for observe, lie is made, not " an. image," but "after the image," oi God, i.e. in the likeness of his primary reflection, viz, the Logos.t Nay, a deeper look into this language discloses an authority for even deifying the Logos. " Why," asks Philo, " is it not simply said, ' God created man in his own image ? ' Why does the scripture say rather ' God created him in the image of God,' as if, besides the Creator who made, there were another God "who served as a pattern in the making? Most beautifully (he replies) is this oracle expressed: for no mortal nature ■could be formed in the immediate image of the Supreme Father of all, but only in that of the second God, which is his Logos. For the type of thought in the soul of man must needs take its impress from the divine Logos, since the God prior to the Logos is superior to every thinking nature ; and it was not permissible for any creature to be made like the God who is above the Logos in a type of being uniquely best and subsisting alone."t The distinction, in Philo's theology, between the inaccessible perfection and the express thought and life of God repeats itself in his anthropology : the man whose creation is described * De migratione Abrahami, 1. t Quia rer. div. hser. 48. t Fragm. ex Euaeb. Prspar. Evang. Lib. VII. xiii. Cf. Qusest. et Solut. in Gen. ii. 62. Chap. II.] THEORIES OF THE PERSON OF JESUS. 415 in the first chapter of Genesis heingthe generic type of ideal humanity modelled after the divine Logos ; while the Adam of the second chapter is the concrete individual, in whom the bodily features reflect, and are made to express, that generic type, under the conditions of the particular instance. " The latter is the visible man, in his likeness to the conceptual model : the former is the incorporeal and spiritual man, in the likeness of the archetype, and so representing a higher charac- ter, the divine Logos, the first principle, the prototype, the ■original measure, of all nature."*- In vii-tue of the analogy, in their divine origin, of the out- ward and the human world, God may be said " to have two temples," in which he is concurrently, yet differently served : viz. (1.) the Universe, where his own primary Logos is itself permanent High Priest as well as constructive architect, and is the source and security of unswerving law, the bond of all things, clothed with the world like the soul with the body ; (2.) self-conscious creaturely Eeason (XoytK?} i/'ux'f) whose Priest is Man in his true essence (6 tcqoq dki^^eiav avSpwrroc), the ideal mind and will, clad with the virtues.! Here, the administration of the sacred Logos deals, not with necessary nature which cannot go astray, but with free spirits which may cut themselves off from its guidance and get lost in the wilds. Its function, therefore, becomes not simply intellectual as the "interpreter of God,"t "the true and genuine philosophy,"§ " the heavenly manna," " the bread of God," "the dew of the soul," the "pupil of the inner eye ;"|| but moral, as the " frost " that lays a congealing hand on the current of earthly desires, H " the honey-bearing rock,** "the convicting conscience, tt which gives the knowledge and with it the reality of sin,t t and at once humbles and heals us with a correcting shame. §§ How completely, in this moral relation, it answers to the conception of " the Holy Spirit " may be seen from a single * Quaest. et solut. in Gen. i. i. t De somniis, p. 37. i Quod Deus immut. 29. § De poster. Caini, 30. (I Leg. AUeg. in. 59. H Ibid. 60. *• Quod det. pot. insid. 31. t+ Quod Deus immut. 37. ■^■^■ ibi^, 28. §§ Qio