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 BR 45 .B63 1883 
 
 Allen, Alexander V. G. 1841- 
 
 1908. 
 The continuity of Christian 
 
 thought 
 
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THE CONTINUITY OF CHRISTIAN 
 
 THOUGHT: A STUDY OF MODERN 
 
 THEOLOGY IN THE LIGHT 
 
 OF ITS HISTORY 
 
 BY 
 
 v/ 
 
 ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN 
 
 PROFESSOR IN THE EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL, 
 IN CAMBRIDGE 
 
 
 __tl : • 
 
 BOSTON 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street 
 
 &fc tf toer?i&e $res& Camferi&ae 
 
 1884 
 
Copyright, 1884, 
 By ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge: 
 Electrotyped and Printed by II. 0. Houghton & Co- 
 
To 
 DOCTOR PHILLIPS BROOKS 
 
 ®W Fcrtume # 3!n£"crifceb 
 
 BY 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
> ^ _ «<> 
 
 % JAN £3 
 
 ^ . < 
 
 THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP. 
 
 John Bohlen, who died in this city on the twenty-sixth day of April, 
 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund of One Hundred Thousand Dollars, to 
 be distributed to religious and charitable objects in accordance with the 
 well-known wishes of the testator. 
 
 By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the trustees, under the will 
 of Mr. Bohlen, transferred and paid over to "The Rector, Church Ward- 
 ens, and Vestrymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia," in 
 trust, a sum of money for certain designated purposes, out of which fund 
 the sum of Ten Thousand Dollars was set apart for the endowment of 
 The John Bohlen Lectureship, upon the following terms and con- 
 ditions : — 
 
 " The money shall be invested in good, substantial, and safe securities, and 
 held in trust for a fund to be called The John Bohlen Lectureship ; and the 
 income shall be applied annually to the payment of a qualified person, whether 
 clergyman or layman, for the delivery and publication of at least one hundred 
 copies of two or more lecture sermons. These lectures shall be delivered at such 
 time and place, in the city of Philadelphia, as the persons nominated to appoint 
 the lecturer shall from time to time determine, giving at least six months* notice 
 to the person appointed to deliver the same, when the same may conveniently be 
 done, and in no case selecting the same person as lecturer a second time within a 
 period of five years. The payment shall be made to said lecturer, after the lectures 
 have been printed, and received by the trustees, of all the income for the year 
 derived from said fund, after defraying the expense of printing the lectures, and 
 the other incidental expenses attending the same. 
 
 " The subject of such lectures shall be such as is within the terms set forth in 
 the will of the Rev. John Bampton, for the delivery of what are known as the 
 'Bampton Lectures,' at Oxford, or any other subject distinctively connected with 
 or relating to the Christian Religion. 
 
 " The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month of May, or as soon 
 thereafter as can conveniently be done, by the persons who for the time being 
 shall hold the offices of Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese 
 in which is the Church of the Holy Trinity ; the Rector of said Church ; the Pro- 
 fessor of Biblical Learning, the Professor of Systematic Divinity, and the Pro- 
 fessor of Ecclesiastical History, in the Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal 
 Church in Philadelphia. 
 
 " In case either of said offices are vacant, the others may nominate the lec- 
 turer." 
 
 Under this trust the Reverend A. V. G. Allen, D. D., Professor in the 
 Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, was appointed to deliver the 
 lectures for the year 1883. 
 
 Philadelphia, Easter, 1883. 
 
iEterna Sapientia, sese in omnibus rebus, 
 maxime in humana mente, omnium maximb 
 in Christu Jesu manifestavit. 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 This treatise owes its shape to the circumstance 
 of its having been written as a course of lectures 
 which were delivered in Philadelphia on the foun- 
 dation of the late John Bohlen. The lectures be- 
 ing six in number required what may seem a some- 
 what artificial division of the subject-matter. But 
 the grouping of topics, which I was in consequence 
 constrained to make, will not, I think, be found an 
 unnatural one. The lectures have been as carefully 
 revised as my engagements would allow ; they are 
 published substantially as they were spoken, with the 
 exception of several portions omitted in the delivery 
 for the sake of brevity. 
 
 It is too much to hope that, in a treatise like this 
 which criticises so freely the various phases of relig- 
 ious belief in their historical development, I may 
 not be regarded as having written for a controversial 
 end against opinions as they are still held to-day. I 
 should like, however, to disclaim such an intention. I 
 have tried to deal with the subject after the historical 
 method. My main endeavor has been to show that a 
 purpose runs through the whole history of Christian 
 thought, despite the apparent confusion which is to 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 many its predominant characteristic. I have not writ- 
 ten as if the history of theology were a panorama of 
 dissolving views. It is the record of a development 
 moving onward, in accordance with a divine law, to 
 some remoter consummation. It is because such a 
 law is being divinely revealed to us that we are able 
 to recognize the place which we occupy in history. 
 
 I am afraid it may seem to some as if I had under- 
 taken too large a task for the compass of one small 
 volume. It would have been much easier to have ex- 
 panded than it has been to condense. I regret that 
 time has not allowed me to condense more than I 
 have done. A history of religious thought, it must 
 be remembered, deals only with a few fundamental 
 principles easily traced, to which all our differences 
 in opinion can be referred. 
 
 I have sought to confine myself to the immediate 
 task which I proposed to pursue ; namely, to follow 
 the course of Christian thought. It has not been 
 possible, however, to avoid the contiguous depart- 
 ments of Christian life, or the history of the church 
 as an institution. They are often so closely con- 
 nected with Christian thought, that to separate them 
 is as impossible as it is undesirable. Some may feel 
 that sufficient prominence has not been given to 
 names which have long been held in honor by the 
 church. I confess it has not been always easy to 
 decide upon the relative degree of importance to be 
 assigned to individuals, so far as their influence 
 upon Christian thought is concerned. But as it has 
 
PREFACE. ix 
 
 not been my object to merely chronicle the opinions 
 of every one entitled to a place in the history of 
 theology, I have dwelt only upon those names that 
 mark changes or transitions in its progress, and have 
 been content to pass over others, however great their 
 prominence or usefulness in the institutional life of 
 the church or as saintly examples of Christian char- 
 acter. I should like to say, however, that if I were 
 revising my book I should try to enforce more than 
 I have done the importance of the work of Origen. 
 He was a true specimen of a great theologian, the 
 study of whose life is of special value to-day, as a 
 corrective against that tendency to underrate dogma 
 in our reaction from outgrown dogmas, or the dispo- 
 sition to treat the feelings and instincts of our na- 
 ture as if they were a final refuge from the reason, 
 instead of a means to a larger use of the reason, — 
 a process which, it is to be feared, in many is closely 
 allied in its spirit with the temper which leads men to 
 seek shelter in an infallible church. 
 
 Because I believe that the history of theology is of 
 the most absorbing interest as well as of the highest 
 importance, that it concerns those called the laity as 
 well as the clergy, I have sought to divest the sub- 
 ject, as far as I could, from the unnecessary techni- 
 calities of theological language, whose use often serves 
 only to conceal thought or to deaden its activity. I 
 wish that I might have devoted more attention to the 
 course of philosophical speculation in its relations to 
 theology. But while the connection is a close and 
 
X PRE FA CE. 
 
 important one, it also involves issues which have not 
 been yet determined. I have therefore alluded to 
 philosophy when its connection with Christian thought 
 could not be avoided, and for the rest have passed 
 it reluctantly by. 
 
 I have not felt it necessary to fortify every state- 
 ment by the quotation of authorities in foot-notes, or 
 even by references to them, since, for the most part, 
 I have been traveling over ground which has been 
 rendered familiar to the students of theology by the 
 labors of many eminent historical scholars. In those 
 cases where I have done so, it has been in order to 
 assist the general reader, who may not be acquainted 
 with theological literature. Much has passed from 
 the minds of others into my own thought which it 
 would be no longer possible to trace. Those who 
 are acquainted with the work of a teacher will know 
 how easy it is to appropriate and use ideas till, by 
 force of repetition, they become inseparable from 
 one's own. In this way I have used Neander and 
 Baur, Maurice and Dorner, till it has almost seemed 
 unnecessary to render them the tribute of indebted- 
 ness. To my colleague, Professor Steenstra, I wish to 
 acknowledge my obligation for criticisms and sugges- 
 tions while the work has been going through the 
 press ; but he is not in any way responsible for the 
 opinions it expresses. 
 
 Cambridge, August 24, 1884. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 i. 
 
 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 The secrecy which attends the transition from the age of the apostles to 
 the age of the early Christian fathers. — Suggestiveness of the fragments 
 of the post-apostolic age when viewed in the light of later histoiy. — 
 Clement of Rome, the Pastor of Hennas, Papias, the " Epistle to Diogne- 
 tus," the recently discovered "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles." — Ig- 
 natius. — The Epistle to Diognetus serves as an introduction to Greek the- 
 ology. — The Christian principle according to the mind of its unknown 
 author. — The evidence of the incarnation. — Revelation as commending 
 itself to the spiritual consciousness of man. — Importance assigned to 
 knowledge. — The nature of Christian worship. — Ridicule of Jewish super- 
 stitions and usages. — Idea of the catholicity of the church. — The church 
 emerges into the clear light of history by the time of Justin (a. d. 166). — 
 In the account of his conversion we have a picture of the world in his age. 
 — Phases of his intellectual career. — His residence in Rome and its in- 
 fluence upon his thought. — How he differed from other teachers of Chris- 
 tianity in the Latin Church by the importance he attached to philosophy. — 
 In this respect he represents the first great intellectual issue that divided 
 the ancient church. — He maintains the continuity between the higher 
 forms of paganism and Christianity. — Christ the divine reason which is 
 universally diffused. — Influence of the Stoic philosophy traced in his con- 
 ception of Christ. — But he was also influenced by Platonism. — Explana- 
 tion of the return to Plato in the second century. — Traces in Justin of 
 the conflict of thought which finally ripened into the trinitarian contro- 
 versy. — His opinions on other points betray a legal tendency of Latin or 
 Jewish origin. — Christian theology the fruit of the Greek genius. — Its 
 birth in Alexandria — Intellectual freedom of the age. — Resemblance of 
 the second century to the nineteenth. — Confusion of thought and the 
 search after a principle of unity. — The complexity of the problem which 
 Greek theology was called upon to solve. — Value to it of its close contact 
 with heathen thought. — The heresies arose in Alexandria, but it was there 
 also that they were met. — Greek theology resisted successfully the orien- 
 tal tendency. — Clement of Alexandria. — What is known of his life. — 
 He vindicated the alliance between Greek philosophy and Christianity. — 
 Tendency in the age to divorce God from the world. — The cause which 
 
xii TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 underlay this tendency. — Affinities between Plato's thought and Bud- 
 dhism. — The course of Greek philosophy after Plato. — Influence of Sto- 
 icism. — Why it failed to satisfy. — Clement is mainly concerned in en- 
 forcing the immanence of God. — He does not indulge in speculations 
 about the mode of the divine existence. — Christ is God indwelling in the 
 world. — Evidence of the connection between the man Jesus and the Deity 
 incarnate in Him. — Organic relation of the incarnation to the course of 
 human history. — Revelation takes place through the reason. — The image 
 of God in man, the fundamental point in Clement's anthropology. — He 
 knows nothing of the doctrine of the fall of man in Adam. — Ignorance 
 the source of sin. — Revelation as light, the remedy of sin. — The educa- 
 tion of the human race under the tuition of indwelling Deity. — What the 
 idea of such an education implies as to the nature of man. — The function 
 of fear in religion. — The methods of the Divine Instructor. — The nature 
 of the judgment. — The object of punishment. — How Clement met the 
 heresies of the age. — Marcion, the Ebionites, other forms of Gnosticism, 
 the oriental principle. — The doctrine of sacrificial expiation for sin finds 
 no place in his system. — The nature of redemption. — The incarnation in 
 itself the true atonement with God. — The nature of faith. — Its relation 
 to reason. — Clement's use of Scripture. — Idea of inspiration. — Relation 
 toward the principle of heresy in general. — Definition of the church. — 
 The sacraments and rites of worship. — The nature of sacrifice. — Oppo- 
 sition to asceticism. — The principle on which it was resisted. — The future 
 life and the "last things." — The ideas of a second personal coming of 
 Christ in the flesh and the millennium irrational. — Rejection of the material 
 notions about the resurrection. — Life in the future world a progressive de- 
 velopment. — The love of God must eventually vindicate its power in a 
 universal triumph over sin. — Why the theology of Clement has been pre- 
 sented at length. — His relation to those that came after him. — His influ- 
 ence upon his age. — His name stricken from the calendar of Saints in the 
 Roman Catholic church r.bout the beginning of the seventeenth century. 
 
 — Clement succeeded by Origen. — Why he should have been identified 
 more prominently than Clement with Greek theology. — His divergence 
 from Clement. — Influence upon him of Neo-Platonism. — His primary aim 
 as a Christian philosopher. — Significance of his doctrine of the "Eternal 
 Generation of the Son." — How his thought needed to be supplemented. 
 
 — Divergent directions of thought after his death. — Athanasius. — Esti- 
 mate of his greatness. — His Greek culture. — His treatises "Against the 
 Greeks," and "The Incarnation of the Word." — Method of argument 
 against polytheism. — The divine immanence makes a multiplicity of 
 lower gods unnecessary. — God indwells in the world through the Logos. 
 
 — God to be known by looking within the soul. — Revelation a disclosure 
 of man's true nature. — Freedom of the will an inalienable heritage. — Sol- 
 idarity of the human race in Christ. — Defense of the incarnation on the 
 principles of Stoic philosophy. — Identification of the historical Christ 
 with the "Word made flesh." — The church's life the best evidence of 
 the resurrection of Christ. — Appearance of Arius. — His precursors. — 
 His training at Antioch. where the tendency was to separate the human 
 from the divine. — Impossibility of the incarnation from such a point of 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. xiii 
 
 view. — The times favorable to Anus. — His conception of God as tran- 
 scendent Deity apart from the world. — His idea of Christ and of the 
 nature of revelation. — The gulf between God and the world. — Arianism 
 a reversion to Jewish deism. — Inferiority to Mohammedanism. — Ex- 
 citement attending the teaching of Arius. — Athanasius' defense of the 
 incarnation and the Christian doctrine of the trinity. — Reason for the 
 hesitation of the church in accepting it. — The doctrine of the trinity 
 the fulfillment of what was true in Greek philosophy. — The doctrine of 
 the Holy Spirit in Greek theology Pages 23-94 
 
 II. 
 
 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 The relationship between Christian and Pagan Rome. — The revival 
 of Roman heathenism. — The Roman genius for government and law mani- 
 fested its influence in the conception of the church. — First sketches of 
 ecclesiastical polity. — The Clementine Recognitions. — The ideal of Igna- 
 tius. — The Roman Christians see no incongruity in having a head for the 
 church at large. — The Latin church and not the Greek cultivated the 
 study of ecclesiastical government. — The character of this development 
 inferred from the Montanist reaction. — Relation of the Montanist doc- 
 trine of the Holy Spirit to the ecclesiastical ambition of Roman Chris- 
 tians. — Cyprian, about the middle of the third century, first enunci- 
 ates the theory of "Apostolical Succession." — Criticism of the theory. 
 — The motives which inspired the groAvth of the Latin church. — Resist- 
 ance to heresy. — Gnosticism the typical heresy. — The "Apostles' Creed " 
 a protest against Gnosticism. — Why the Greeks were not alarmed by 
 heresy as were the Latins. — Irenoeus asserts the tradition of the Roman 
 church as the best safeguard against heresy. — The same line of reason- 
 ing adopted by Tertullian in his "Prescription of Heretics." — Bishops 
 the guardians of the faith. — Salvation interpreted by the Latin church as 
 escape from endless punishment. — How Tertullian presented this motive to 
 the heathens. — Cyprian's "Address to Demetrian." — First emphatic an- 
 nouncement by him of this life as the only probation. — Superstitious 
 elements creeping into the cultus of the church. — The relation of the con- 
 troversies about the baptism of heretics, and the restoration of apostates, 
 to the Latin idea of the church. — Influence of Constantino's policy upon 
 the church as an institution. — Why the Latins upheld so strenuously the 
 doctrinal decision of Nicaea. — Rapid growth of the church in the fourth 
 and fifth centuries not accompanied by a corresponding moral improve- 
 ment.— Relation of this fact to Christian theology. — The decline of the 
 old civilization as affecting intellectual activity. — Rise of a new school in 
 theology at Antioch. — Significance of the long controversy about the re- 
 lations of the human and divine natures in Christ. — Decisions of general 
 councils. — The historical and the spiritual Christ. —How the sentiment of 
 the church decided the great issue, and its bearings upon later history.— 
 The conversion of Augustine. — His early life, in its connection with this 
 event. — He submits his reason to external authority. — His earlier the- 
 
xiv TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 ology reveals the influence of Greek thought. — The transition to Latin 
 Christianity. —The authority of the church to teach the world asserted 
 against the Manichseans. — The authority of the church to rule the world 
 maintained against the Donatists. — The inner dogmatic principle which 
 justifies the church's existence and its necessity to human salvation main- 
 tained against Pelagius. — The doctrine of original sin in its ecclesiastical 
 bearings— Its effect upon the view of baptism. — Opposition to Augus- 
 tine from the East, from Rome, and by Vincent of Lerins. — Augustine's 
 doctrine of "grace," a substitute for the personal Christ. — The doc- 
 trine of endless punishment in the writings of Augustine, for the first time 
 dogmatically affirmed. — The idea of purgatory a necessary inference 
 from Augustine's attitude. — Its relation to the belief in an intermediate 
 state. — The influence of Augustine upon the church of his own and 
 later ages. — Why the Latin church was able to resist Mohammedan- 
 ism Pages 97-172 
 
 III. 
 
 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 Summary of the differences between the Greek and Latin theologies. 
 
 — They stand to each other in the relation of the higher to the lower. — 
 Later history of Greek theology. — The pseudo-Dionysius. — Position of 
 the Greek church in the present day. — Its possible future. — Mission of 
 the Latin church to the new races. — Increasing reverence for the Bishop 
 of Rome. — Gregory the Great. — The papacy not a usurpation. — Further 
 development of the Latin idea of the church. — Characteristics of the 
 early Middle Ages. — Analogy to Judaism. — Traces of Greek influence 
 among the Irish-Scotch clergy, and in John Scotus Erigena. — Theological 
 controversies in the ninth century. — Why the Latins preferred the filioque. 
 
 — Relation of the adoptionist controversy to the humanity of Christ. — 
 Discussion of transubstantiation. — Modification of the Augustinian doc- 
 trine of election. — The Gottschalk controversy shows that the decrees of 
 the church have been substituted for the decrees of God. — The change 
 which came over the church and the age in consequence of the calamities 
 of the ninth century. — How it affected the relation of the people to the 
 church. — The cathedral as an expression of mediaeval religion. — Anselm. 
 
 — Statement of his doctrine of atonement. — Why it represents an ad- 
 vance in theological thought. — The notion of a ransom paid to Satan is su- 
 perseded by it. — Meaning of the clause in the Creed, " He descended into 
 hell." — Anselm's idea of atonement reflects the local influences of the Mid- 
 dle Ages as well as the legal attitude of the Latin mind. — It falls short of 
 the full teaching of Christ. — Its connection with the doctrine of indul- 
 gences. — The object of Scholasticism to show that the traditional dogmas 
 of the Latin church were in harmony with the reason. — Why such an 
 effort could not be successful. — The fact that the church was not meeting 
 the demands of the people in the twelfth century showed the deficiency in 
 its theology. — Common characteristics of the heretical movements. — Ex- 
 planation of the intellectual freedom of the twelfth centurv. — The revolt 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. XV 
 
 of Abelard against Latin theology. — Comparison with Anselm. — Anomaly 
 of the intellectual situation. — The significance of his work. — Signs of the 
 approaching ecclesiastical reaction. — Condemnation of Abelard. — The 
 church endeavors to subjugate the reason. — The means adopted for this 
 end. — Value to the church of Peter the Lombard's '' Book of Sentences." 
 
 — The work of Thomas Aquinas in reconciling reason with the dogmas of 
 the Latin church. — Transition in Scholasticism from Plato to Aristotle. — 
 Reasons why Platonism had fallen into discredit with the School-men. — 
 Comparison between Plato and Aristotle. — The latter interpreted as stand- 
 ing for conservatism. — Under the influence of Aquinas he became the 
 standard for the reason. — Dangers from the devotion to Aristotle. — It 
 predisposed to the stud}- of nature. — How nature had been regarded in 
 the history of Latin thought. — Unconscious purpose which in this respect 
 the Latin church had served. — Relation of the study of nature to ascet- 
 icism. — Rise of the Mendicant orders coincides with the adoption of Aris- 
 totle. — Theology of Aquinas. — Distinction between the kingdoms of 
 nature and grace, and its application. — Aquinas first distinguishes be- 
 tween natural and revealed religion. — He does not change the basis of 
 Latin theology, but represents the church in the fullness of its splendor. — 
 Criticism of Duns Scotus upon Aquinas. — He limits still further the range 
 of the reason, but asserts the importance of the will. — Contradictions in 
 his thought. — His work tends to magnify the importance of the church. — 
 How Aquinas and Duns Scotus differ in their ideas regarding God. — The 
 distinction a fundamental one and closely connected with the experience of 
 life. — Duns Scotus more in harmony with the spirit of Latin Christianity. 
 
 — Why the Jesuits have preferred Duns Scotus. — Significance of the 
 modern attempt to revive the study of Aquinas .... Pages 175-237 
 
 IV. 
 
 THEOLOGY IN THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 Latin theology begins to decline after the thirteenth century. — Monas- 
 ticism loses its vigor. — Scholasticism becomes skeptical. — The work of 
 the papacy for Christendom had been accomplished. — Review of the 
 mediaeval cultus in its positive aspects as contributing to the progress of 
 humanity. — Relic and saint worship. — Ecclesiastical art. — Beneficial in- 
 fluences of the papacy. — Monasticism represented the principle of indi- 
 vidualism. — Value of nominalism in philosophy. — The growth of the 
 national spirit and not Luther, the power that dismembered Christendom. 
 
 — Development of the vernacular. — What the evangelical reformers and 
 the mystics held in common. — The rise of preaching as a means of re- 
 ligious culture. — Rejection of the principle of church authority. — The 
 Bible as the charter of the church. — Wycliffe's translation of the Scrip- 
 tures. — Revelation as contained in the Bible. — Historical source of mys- 
 ticism. — Relation of the pseudo-Dionysius to Latin Christianity. — How 
 the aim of Latin Christianity subordinated the mystic principle. — French 
 mysticism in the twelfth century. — Superiority of the German mysticism 
 of the fourteenth centurv. — Eckart and the doctrine of the divine im- 
 
xvi TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 manence. — Comparison of mysticism -with the aim of the evangelical re- 
 formers. — German mysticism had a practical spirit. — Why it could not 
 accomplish a reform. — Point at which Luther diverged from it. — The 
 issue which the evangelical reformers had made clear to the world before 
 Luther appeared. — Luther declares the supremacy of the conscience. — 
 The Reformation no break in history. — Its object not merely to correct 
 abuses. — The principle from which abuses sprang. — Luther's " Address 
 to the German Nobility" the answer to Tertullian, Irenseus, Cyprian, and 
 Augustine. — The church not identical with the hierarchy. — No difference 
 in principle between priest and layman, or between religious and secular 
 things. — Meaning of private judgment. — The doctrine of justification by 
 faith. — Process involved in Luther's conversion. — Change in his concep- 
 tion of God. — The assurance of faith. — Criticism of the phrase "justi- 
 fication by faith." — Why the reformers would not add the word "works " 
 to faith. — Luther not a scientific theologian. — His opinions on other sub- 
 jects. — Melancthon's desire to regain the episcopate. — Confession and ab- 
 solution. — Specimens of Luther's biblical criticisms. — Higher significance 
 of the denial of human liberty by the reformers. — Difference between 
 Luther and Zwingle. — God, with Zwingle, the indwelling life of the 
 universe. — His view of the miraculous. — In what sense the Bible is the 
 word of God. — Revelation in the heathen world. — Denial of the doctrine 
 of original sin. — Salvability of the heathen. — Discussion with Luther on 
 the eucharist. — The larger truth implied in Zwingle's denial of a special 
 presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper. — His views of church and state. 
 
 — His system not understood in his own age. — The French nationality of 
 Calvin. — Change in the situation when he began his work. — Melancthon 
 represents the desire for compromise. — Increasing confusion and disorder. 
 
 — Calvin represents the demand for order and discipline. — His conception 
 of the church in some of its aspects not essentially different from the 
 Latin. — His view of the Bible and of revelation. — He rejects the idea of 
 the divine immanence. — Doctrine of the fall and election. — Modification 
 of Anselm's theory of atonement. — The present humiliation of Christ and 
 His future glory. — Calvin's theology, an emphatic reassertion of the 
 principles of Latin Christianity. — His idea of God as absolute and 
 arbitrary will. — Separation between God and humanity. — Points in 
 which his system differs from Latin theology. — The spirit of modern 
 skepticism lurked beneath his assumptions Pages 241-304 
 
 V. 
 
 CONFLICT OF THE TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY WITH RATIONALISM. 
 
 Characteristics of the theology generally received in the seventeenth 
 century. — Its better aspects as seen in Milton's "Paradise Lost," Bun- 
 yan's " Pilgrim's Progress," the career of Cromwell. — Its latent skepticism 
 revealed in Pascal. — Contrast of Pascal with George Herbert. — The life 
 of the world apart from the church. — Roman church as compared with 
 Protestantism. — Reappearance of mysticism, Arndt, Bohme, the Quietists, 
 the Quakers, Molinos, the Pietists. — The struggle for civil and religious 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. xvii 
 
 freedom. — Organizations of the Protestant churches. — The Reformation 
 in the Church of England essentially a lay movement. — Retention in the 
 English church of the old ecclesiastical order. — Theory of the church 
 which underlay the English Reformation. — Theology of the Church of 
 England. — Character and influence of the Liturgy. — How the ecclesias- 
 tical order was essentially changed by the emancipation of the presbyter 
 from unqualified subjection to the bishop. — Remark of Bishop Hampden. 
 
 — Rise of Puritanism. — Significance of the controversy about church 
 authority. — Original attitude of the Church of England against the Puri- 
 tans. — Its change of attitude in the seventeenth century. — Revival of 
 Latin theology under Archbishop Laud. — How it maybe interpreted. — 
 Independents, Baptists, and Quakers. — Relation of these movements to 
 civil and religious liberty. — Importance of the eighteenth century in the 
 history of Christian thought. — Wiry the clew to the history is apt to be 
 lost at this point. — The apparent retrogression in theology connected with 
 the Catholic reaction led by the Jesuits. — Merit of Calvinism in resisting 
 the reaction. — The authority of Scripture as the bulwark against Rome. 
 
 — The Protestant position a strong one. — Preparation for the deistic 
 movement. — Why the authority of reason was substituted for that of 
 Scripture. — The Cambridge school of Platonists. — Significance of the 
 importance attached to nature in the last century. — History of the tran- 
 sition from the study of revealed theology to natural theology. — Meaning 
 of the love for the miraculous. — Hindrance to the study of nature. — How 
 nature was regarded by the mystics. — Influence of scientific discoveries 
 upon the idea of God. — Definition of the religion of nature. — Disposition 
 to subordinate to it revealed religion. — Toland opens the deistic contro- 
 versy. — How the apologists thought natural religion needed to be sup- 
 plemented. — Reply of Tindal in "Christianity as Old as the Creation." — 
 Objections to natural religions, optimism, and pessimism. — Weakness of 
 deism as a proposed substitute for Christianity. — The apologists main- 
 tained that revelation is evidenced by miracles. — This position attacked 
 by Collins, Woolston, and Middleton. — The larger question raised as to the 
 nature of historical evidence. — How the deists regarded the subject. — 
 Why the apologists won an easy victory. — Influence of deism in France 
 and America. — German illuminism. — Vulgar rationalism. — The cause 
 wi'iich explains the prevailing indifference or hostility to theology. — The 
 Latin theology succumbed to the opposition of the reason ; the idea of 
 God, the trinity, the atonement, endless punishment. — Criticism of the 
 deistic movement. — The issue which it bequeathed to the nineteenth 
 century Pages 307-369 
 
 VI. 
 
 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Principles of speculative thought anticipated in great popular move- 
 ments. — The transition from the last century to our own age traced in the 
 evangelical movement. — The idea of conversion. — Its influence upon 
 modern Christianity. — Social or churchly character of the evangelical 
 
xviii TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 movement. — The principle which divided Wesley and Whitefield, and its 
 manifestation in practical religious experience. — Defect of the evangel- 
 ical movement. — Sehleiermacher the regenerator of theology. — His con- 
 ception of religion. — Antecedent influences that moulded his thought; 
 Moravianism, Spinoza, Greek philosophy, German illuminism, the phi- 
 losophy of Schelling. the French Revolution. — His doctrine of the divine 
 immanence. —The Person of Christ in the experience of the religious life. 
 
 — Christ the manifestation of the glory of God. — Modification in the ideas 
 of election and probation. — Revival of the truth that life is an education. 
 
 — Definition of the supernatural, and its relation to the natural. — The 
 application of this principle to Scripture. — Creates the modern method of 
 Biblical criticism. — Progress in the history of revelation as seen in the Old 
 Testament. — Effect of this principle when applied to the New Testament. 
 
 — The religious consciousness and the Christian consciousness. — Reve- 
 lation in the history of the church. — Importance of the idea of the church. 
 
 — The extent of Schleiermacher's influence. — He legitimates mysticism 
 in the church. — Mysticism the Latin name for the Greek theology. —The 
 
 'negations of Sehleiermacher those of Greek theology. — The modification 
 in the idea of God as seen in Goethe, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, in 
 modern art and modern science. — The ecclesiastical reaction. — Inability 
 to apprehend the larger idea of revelation. — Revival of a belief in the 
 church's sanctity as distinct from the state. — Distrust of the democratic 
 tendencies of the French Revolution. — John Henry Newman leads the 
 reaction in England. — The principles which he avowed. — Return to the 
 Latin basis in theology. — Comparison of Pusey with Maurice. — The idea 
 of the spiritual life as held by the Tractarians. — The theory of the church. 
 
 — Their misapprehension of historical continuity. — The working of their 
 principles modified by the tendencies of the age. — "Weakness of the Trac- 
 tarian movement. — The principle of agnosticism avowed by Mansel. — 
 The ecclesiastical reaction has not succeeded in checking the activity of 
 the reason. — Its beneficial effects. — Definition of a reaction. — The intel- 
 lectual confusion of the age. — Weakness in the modern attitude toward 
 theology. — The deficiency in Sehleiermacher. — Relation of the feelings 
 to the reason. — Comparison of Sehleiermacher with Clement of Alexan- 
 dria. — In what respects the resemblance consists between the modern age 
 and the Nicene period of the ancient church. — Relation of Origen and 
 Athanasius to Clement of Alexandria. — Hegel the successor of Sehleier- 
 macher. — The principle for which he stands. — Coleridge and Maurice 
 agree with Hegel in this respect, and not with Sehleiermacher. — Signifi- 
 cance of the attack of Strauss upon historical Christianity. — Why such a 
 tendency as he represented was to have been expected. — The conditions 
 of the problem which he has raised. — How the antagonism is to be recon- 
 ciled. —Conclusion Pages 373-438 
 
CONTINUITY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The traditional conception of God which has come 
 down to us from the Middle Ages through the Latin 
 church is undergoing a profound transformation. 
 The idea that God is transcendent, not only exalted 
 above the world by His moral perfection, but separated 
 from it by the infinite reaches of space, is yielding to 
 the idea of Deity as immanent in His creation. A 
 change so fundamental involves other changes of mo- 
 mentous importance in every department of human 
 thought, and more especially in Christian theology. 
 The epithets applied to God, such as absolute and in- 
 finite, have a different significance when applied to 
 Deity indwelling within the universe. When we no 
 longer localize Him as a physical essence in the in- 
 finite remoteness, it is easier to regard Him as eth- 
 ical in His inmost being ; righteousness becomes more 
 readily the primary element in our conception of His 
 essential nature. There is no theological doctrine 
 which does not undergo a change in consequence of 
 the change in our thought about God. Creation and 
 revelation, the relation between God and humanity, 
 the incarnation and the things which concern our 
 final destiny, are lifted into a higher sphere and re- 
 ceive a deeper, a more comprehensive and more spir- 
 itual meaning. 
 
2 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The object of the following treatise is to present 
 the outlines of that early Christian theology which 
 was formulated by thinkers in whose minds the divine 
 immanence was the underlying thought in their con- 
 sciousness of God. The Greek fathers, from the second 
 to the fifth centuries, could not escape, even had they 
 been inclined to do so, from the influence of a philos- 
 ophy like the Stoic, so entirely in accordance with the 
 well-known tendencies of Hellenic life and culture, and 
 which existed for five hundred years, as the genuine 
 expression of the Greek mind before it was overcome 
 by other forms of theosophical speculation. Although 
 from the second century a retrogressive movement 
 toward Platonism was gaining strength, as seen in 
 Justin and more especially in Origen, yet it was im- 
 possible for Christian thinkers, even so late as the 
 age of Constantine, to emancipate their minds from 
 the subtle spell of that philosophy whose distinguish- 
 ing feature was the belief that God indwelt in the 
 universe and in the life of man. Such an influence 
 was as inevitable as that of scholasticism upon the 
 reformers of the sixteenth century, or of Calvin upon 
 some modern thinkers, who congratulate themselves on 
 having abandoned his system while still adhering to 
 what was fundamental in his method. But the Greek 
 theologians did not stand in an attitude of revolt or 
 alienation from Hellenic philosophy and culture. They 
 knew its value in their own experience, and held it to 
 be a divine gift to the Greek people, — a divinely or- 
 dered course of preparation for the " fullness of time." 
 From the alliance of Greek philosophy with Christian 
 thought arose the Greek theology, whose characteris- 
 tics are a genuine catholicity, spiritual depth and free- 
 dom, a marked rationality, and a lofty ethical tone by 
 
INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 which it is pervaded throughout. For a time its in- 
 fluence was felt and acknowledged in the West, as is 
 seen in the writings of Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Minucius 
 Felix, and to a limited extent even in Tertullian. But 
 the East and West- began to grow apart after the time 
 of Constantine, and the first foundations of the later 
 schism between the Greek and Latin churches were 
 already laid, when there arose in the West, under the 
 influence of Augustine, a peculiar theology with which 
 the Greek mind could have no sympathy, whose fun- 
 damental tenets it regarded with aversion. 
 
 The Augustinian theology rests upon the transcend- 
 ence of Deity as its controlling principle, and at every 
 point appears as an inferior rendering of the earlier in- 
 terpretation of the Christian faith. Augustine is the 
 most illustrious representative in history of a process 
 very familiar to our own age, by which men of con- 
 siderable intellectual activity, wearied with the ques- 
 tionings and skepticisms which they cannot resolve, 
 fall back upon external authority as the only mode of 
 silencing the reason and satisfying the conscience. 
 Like the modern Brown son, he had swung round 
 the circle of theories and systems in which his age 
 abounded, without finding relief ; like Mallock, he 
 was painfully impressed with the moral skepticism 
 concealed beneath the superficial appearance of or- 
 dinary life ; and, like Newman, he possessed an unri- 
 valed skill in dialectic, which he employed in defense 
 of the system which he had chosen to identify with the 
 Christian faith. His conversion took place at Milan, 
 where he was struck by the external power and splen- 
 dor of the church under its majestic administration 
 by Ambrose ; he received, on assent, the Christianity 
 of the time, and included in it the popular notions and 
 
4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 teDdencies which were current in the church, as part 
 of the divine revelation. After he became Bishop of 
 Hippo, and especially after his entanglement in the 
 Donatist and Pelagian controversies, he stood forth as 
 the type of the ecclesiastic in all later ages : like New- 
 man after his perversion, there was nothing so obnox- 
 ious or irrational that he could not make it plausible 
 to the reason ; that which seemed to be useful or desir- 
 able for maintaining the control and ascendency of 
 the church was stamped to his mind with the signet of 
 the truth. The needs of ecclesiastical policy became 
 the standard by which to test the validity of Christian 
 belief. 
 
 The Augustinian theology made possible the rise of 
 the papacy. 1 Leo the Great, in the generation after 
 Augustine, put forth the claim for the authority of the 
 Roman see which was never afterward relaxed, and 
 which saw its realization in the imperial authority over 
 Christendom of Hildebrand and Innocent III. Au- 
 gustinianism and the papacy owe their appearance to 
 an age when free inquiry and intellectual activity were 
 struck with decline, when the reign of barbarism was 
 
 1 How the work of Augustine contributed to the development 
 of the papacy is clearly shown by Geffcken, Staat und Kirche, 
 in ihrem Verhaltniss geschichtlich entwickelt, pp. 95-98. The " City 
 of God " is a prophetic anticipation of the church of the Middle 
 Ages. In Geffcken's words : " Er stellt Natur, Individualit'at, 
 Familie, Nationality, Staat als etwas verhaltnissmassig Gleich- 
 gultiges hin und ordnet alles der sichtbaren, allgemeinen Kirche 
 unter ausserhalb deren es kein Heil giebt, er stellt die Autorit'at 
 ihrer Tradition neben die der Schrift, behauptet den sacramen- 
 talen Character der Ordination und des Priesterstandes. Und 
 wenn er die Vertretung der Kirche nooji in die Aristokratie der 
 Bischofe setzt, so war es, nachdem einmal ein gesonderter Stand 
 der Leviten hingestellt war, nur ein Schritt, diesen auch einen Ho- 
 hepriester als einheitlichen Mittelpunkt der Kirche zu geben." 
 
INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 about to begin. Under such circumstances we may see 
 in both alike a providential adaptation of Christian- 
 ity to a lower environment. They did not grow out 
 of the Christian idea as its necessary development, but 
 were rather retrograde forms under which the Chris- 
 tian principle might still be operative, though in 
 greatly diminished degree. One need not speak of 
 the papacy as a usurpation : it was a dispensation di- 
 vinely appointed for the races of Europe ; a school- 
 master, like the Jewish theocracy which it so closely 
 resembled, to bring them to Christ. But the same di- 
 vine hand which is revealed in its rise and its fortunes 
 is revealed also in the process which led to its over- 
 throw and rejection. The Augustinian theology had 
 subserved a temporary purpose, and began to wane 
 with the papacy when the human mind once more re- 
 gained its freedom. So far as both yet linger in the 
 modern world, it is an evidence that there are those 
 who still need, or think they need, a religion based 
 upon external authority, or a morality whose sanction 
 is fear of the consequences of sin in the future world. 
 The motive which lends interest and value to a study 
 of the history of Latin theology in the Middle Ages, or 
 in its later Protestant modifications, is to seek in its 
 varied fortunes for that tendency to revert again to the 
 true interpretation of the Christian faith, from which 
 it was originally a falling away. The transitions of 
 modern thought in regard to the nature of God and 
 His relation to the world are in nowise abrupt or sud- 
 den, or the result of a preparation to be found exclu- 
 sively in our own time. It is of the highest impoiv 
 tance to show, if it can be shown, that the preparation 
 for the higher and fuller truth may be traced in the 
 progress of thought during the Middle Ages as well as 
 
6 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 in the later Protestantism. For all onr thought con- 
 cerning God has its foundation in the consciousness of 
 man, — or rather, it is in and through the conscious- 
 ness that the divine revelation is made, — and there- 
 fore, among those in every age who have set themselves 
 seriously to find out God, we should expect some testi- 
 mony, however feeble or overborne by contradictions, 
 to the later and fuller utterance of the consciousness 
 as it speaks in ourselves. There is scarcely a thinker 
 in the whole range of Latin or Protestant theology 
 who has not at moments given expression to a higher 
 thought of Deity than that which underlies the formal 
 theology, the ecclesiastical institutions, or the current 
 modes of belief which command his adherence and ap- 
 proval. It is Augustine who, at a certain stage in Ins 
 career, could write : — 
 
 " For God is diffused through all tilings. He saith Him- 
 self by the Prophet, ' I fill heaven and earth,' and it is said 
 unto Him in a certain psalm, ' Whither shall I go from Thy 
 Spirit, or whither shall I flee from Thy presence ? If I as- 
 cend up to heaven, Thou art there ; if I make my bed in hell, 
 behold Thou art there ; ' because God is substantially dif- 
 fused everywhere. God is not thus diffused through all 
 things as though by diffusion of mass, so as to be half in one 
 half of the world's body and half in the other, and thus en- 
 tire in the whole ; but entire in heaven alone, and entire in 
 earth alone, and entire in both heaven and earth, and com- 
 prehended in no place, but everywhere entire in Himself. He 
 is nowhere and everywhere." 
 
 And again, speaking of the incarnation, it is Au- 
 gustine who says : — 
 
 " And though He is everywhere present to the inner eye 
 when it is sound and clear, He condescended to make Him- 
 self manifest to the outward eye of those whose inward sight 
 
INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 is weak and dim. Not the?i in the sense of traversing space, 
 but because he appeared to mortal men in the form of mor- 
 tal flesh, He is said to have come to us. For He came to a 
 place where He had always been, seeing that He was in the 
 world and the world was made by Him." l 
 
 Even Thomas Aquinas, when the exigencies of reason 
 required it, could write : — 
 
 " There have been some, as the Manichees, who said that 
 spiritual and incorporeal things are subject to divine power, 
 but visible and corporeal things are subject to the power of a 
 contrary principle. Against these we must say that God is 
 in all things by His power. There have been others again 
 who, though they believed all things subject to divine power, 
 still did not extend divine Providence down to the lower 
 parts, concerning which it is said in Job, ' He walketh upon 
 the hinges of heaven and considereth not our concerns.' 
 And against these it is necessary to say, that God is in all 
 things by His presence. There have been again others, who, 
 though they said all things belonged to the Providence of 
 God, still laid it down that all tilings are not created imme- 
 diately by God, but that He immediately created the first, 
 and these created others. And against them it is necessary 
 to say that He is in all tilings by His essence." 2 
 
 Passages like these are gleams of a higher thought, 
 flashing forth at exceptional moments, when the relig- 
 ious heart speaks out or the reason forgets its tram- 
 mels. But the formal theology, the ecclesiastical in- 
 stitutions, which Augustine sanctioned for the ages 
 that followed him, which Calvin renewed for the Prot- 
 estant churches, are built upon the ruling principle 
 that God is outside the world and not within ; that 
 
 1 Be Doc. Christ, i. c. 13. 
 
 2 Sum. Theol. Prima Pars, qu. viii. art. 3, quoted in Hamp- 
 den's Bampton Lectures, p. 184. 
 
g INTRODUCTION. 
 
 He is absolute Deity in the sense that His being would 
 be complete without the creation or humanity or the 
 Eternal Son. 
 
 What is sometimes called " modern infidelity " is 
 mainly, I had almost said exclusively, a protest against 
 the theology based upon such a conception of God. It 
 is not Christianity in itself which is to-day obnoxious 
 to serious men, but a Latinized Christianity which the 
 thought of the world has outgrown while it is still 
 perpetuated in the formal attitude of the churches. 
 The traditional doctrines concerning the nature and 
 method of the divine revelation, the atonement, and 
 the final destiny of man, are called in question, not 
 because they are irrational in themselves, but because 
 they no longer spring by an inward necessity from 
 that changed conception of God which is consciously 
 or unconsciously postulated by the mind. We often 
 hear of a Catholic faith which is an older reality than 
 any of the theologies which command the popular as- 
 sent, but those who profess to hold it are too apt to 
 identify the ancient creeds with their Latin inter- 
 pretation. It is not till we get back into an earlier 
 age, before Christianity was translated into its Latin 
 idioms, that we can discern another interpretation of 
 the Christian faith, — the religion of Christ as it ap- 
 peared to men who were living and thinking under 
 intellectual conditions more similar to our own than 
 any intervening age has since exhibited. The ancient 
 Greek theology, as it was developed from the second 
 to the fourth century under the hand of great masters 
 like Clement and Athanasius, differs at every point 
 from Latin theology as it received its final impress 
 from Augustine in the fifth century. 
 
 I have attempted in the following pages to contrast 
 
INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 the two theologies, and to trace the genesis of each to 
 its ruling principle. In so doing, I am not presenting 
 any novel view of the history of Christian thought. 
 The distinction between the Greek and Latin theolo- 
 gies has been made by every recent writer of any im- 
 portance in the field of church history, among whom 
 may be mentioned, as best known, Gieseler, Neander, 
 Dorner, Bitsehl, Baur, Pressense, Kenan, Bunsen, 
 Maurice, and Milman. Gieseler attached the highest 
 importance to Greek theology, and saw in the the- 
 ology of the Latin church, as it originated with Ter- 
 tullian, a debased rendering of the spiritual truths of 
 Christianity. The distinction also runs through the 
 great work of Dorner on the " Person of Christ ; " it 
 is significant that he finds neither in Augustine nor in 
 Thomas Aquinas, the two most celebrated theologians 
 of the Latin church, an adequate conception of the 
 incarnation. Neander appreciated clearly the differ- 
 ences between the two theologies, but was so averse to 
 all that bore upon ecclesiastical organization that he 
 has not traced the western theology to its genuine root ; 
 nor does he see as clearly as Dorner, that the Augus- 
 tinian doctrines of sin and grace implied a fundamen- 
 tal departure from what was highest and most real in 
 the earlier theology. 
 
 Ritschl has devoted an elaborate treatise to the 
 "Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconcilia- 
 tion," and begins his treatment of the subject with 
 Anselm's theory of the atonement, as if the early 
 church had been utterly silent upon so momentous a 
 theme. While he admits that Greek theology stands 
 upon a different niveau from Latin, and that to this 
 cause, and not to political complications alone, was 
 owing the schism between the Greek and Latin 
 
10 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 churches, he gives no intimation that the Greek the- 
 ologians looked at redemption and reconciliation from 
 a point of view distinctly their own, and would have 
 been as averse to Anselm's doctrine of atonement as 
 they were to Augustine's doctrine of original sin. 1 The 
 value of Ritschl's discussion of the subject lies in his 
 exhibition of the progress of thought among the think- 
 ers who followed Anselm, till they approximate the 
 leading principle of Greek theology, that the incarna- 
 tion does not differ from the atonement as the means 
 from the end, but that in the incarnation itself is man- 
 ifested the reconciliation of man with God, and the 
 actual redemption of humanity from its lost estate. 
 But this conclusion Ritschl fails to draw. The mind 
 of Baur was so preoccupied with the antithesis be- 
 tween the Petrine and Pauline types of Christianity 
 and their reconciliation in the Catholic church, that 
 he has failed to read another and deeper antithesis in 
 the history of ancient theology for whose reconcilia- 
 tion the world is still waiting. It is because he sees 
 
 1 The late Rev. J. M. Neale, in the preface to his translation 
 of the Eastern Liturgies, remarks that he finds no trace in them 
 of the modern theory of the atonement, as it has been held in 
 the Latin or Protestant churches, according to which the suffer- 
 ings of Christ were an equicalent for human punishment. " For 
 nearly twenty years," he says, " these and the other early litur- 
 gies have been my daily study ; there are very few passages in 
 them which I could not repeat by heart ; and scarcely any im- 
 portant works on the subject which I have not read. I may 
 therefore claim some little right to be heard with respect to 
 them. And I say most unhesitatingly, that while I conceive 
 that some passages in them might be tortured into a Calvinistic 
 sense were sufficient ingenuity employed, no ingenuity can make 
 any single clause even patient of the theory of equivalence. If 
 that theory be true, the eucharistic teaching of every eastern 
 liturgy is absolutely false." 
 
INTRODUCTION. . 11 
 
 in the Fourth Gospel only a product of Alexandrian 
 thought in the second century, and not an original in- 
 dependent tradition of the teaching of Christ, of equal 
 antiquity and authority with the tradition given in the 
 synoptical gospels, that he is inclined to disparage also 
 the work of the earlier Alexandrian writers like Clem- 
 ent and Origen, as if with the Fourth Gospel it was 
 but a variation of the Gnostic heresy. 1 Apart from 
 this defect, no one has thrown a keener light upon the 
 condition of religious thought in the ancient church, 
 or seen more clearly how great a departure from prim- 
 itive Christianity was involved in the Augustinian 
 dogma of original sin. 2 
 
 A formidable obstacle to the intelligent study of 
 the Greek theology is the lingering hold of Augustine 
 upon the modern mind. The tenets of the Bishop of 
 Hippo have been for so many ages identified with 
 divine revelation, that it requires an intellectual revo- 
 lution in order to attain the freedom to interpret cor- 
 rectly, not only the early Fathers of the church, but 
 Scripture itself. As there has been a traditional in- 
 terpretation of Scripture, so there has been a tradi- 
 tional reading of the theologians before Augustine's 
 
 1 And yet Baur and others who deny the genuineness of the 
 Fourth Gospel, recognize a finer and more elevated spiritual 
 touch in its portraiture of Christ than in what they hold to be 
 the only genuine tradition. " Le doux et profond langage du 
 Christ gnostique, a desarme, conquis les plus severes critiques 
 modernes. lis nient hautement l'historicite des recits du quat- 
 rieme ICvangile, et plus encore celle des discours, mais ils en 
 prennent si bien l'esprit, qu'ils l'opposent aux donnees les plus 
 certaines des Evangiles judeo-chretiens, absolument comme s'ils 
 avaient un Jean authentique." La Revolution Religieuse au Dix- 
 neuvieme Siecle, par F. Huet, p 194. 
 
 2 Baur, Die ChristUche Kirche, ii. 163-181. 
 
12 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 time, by which they were all made to say about one 
 and the same thing. The idea of a Catholic faith, 
 supported by the unanimous consent of the Fathers, 
 continues to perpetuate the error. A false conception 
 of development has done much to confuse the study of 
 ancient theology, by taking it for granted that because 
 Augustine lived at a later time, he therefore built 
 upon the same foundation with his predecessors and 
 carried their work to a higher stage. 
 
 Whatever the source from which it springs, there is 
 one charge so often alleged against the Greek theology 
 that it deserves a moment's notice. It is said that it 
 was deficient in the doctrines of sin and grace. 
 
 It is true that the Greek fathers did not accept the 
 doctrine of original sin as propounded by Augus- 
 tine, 1 with its correlated tenets of total depravity, the 
 loss of the freedom of the will, the guilt of infants, 
 predestination or reprobation by a divine decree, or 
 the endlessness of future punishment. But it does 
 not follow that their conception of sin was on this ac- 
 count wanting in depth or adequacy. If the attitude 
 of Augustine is to be taken as the standard of Chris- 
 tian teaching upon the nature of sin, its origin and its 
 consequences, then other religions, such as Mohammed- 
 anism or Buddhism, would seem in these respects to 
 have excelled Christianity. Compared with the few 
 allusions to the future consequences of sin, and these 
 of a somewhat general character, to be found in the 
 New Testament, the Koran invokes on almost every 
 page the horrors of an endless torment in definite 
 language not to be misunderstood. If the nature of 
 man is wholly corrupted by sin, as Augustine taught, 
 
 1 A summary of the Greek and Latin anthropologies is given 
 in Shedd's History of Christian Doctrine, ii. pp. 42, 91. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 Buddhism rises to a clearer declaration of the same 
 principle, when, running counter to life itself, it makes 
 sin exist in all desire. If views like these constitute 
 what some are pleased to call the backbone of theol- 
 ogy, then the ancient Greek theology was indeed de- 
 ficient, for it assigned the chief importance to the 
 belief that man was made in God's image, and relied 
 upon indwelling Deity to lead mankind from sin to 
 righteousness. 
 
 In the spirit of this earlier theology sin is regarded 
 as a transgression of the law, not the law which is con- 
 ceived as an arbitrary appointment of a will external 
 to man, but the law written in his constitution, — the 
 life and the truth of God imprinted on the human 
 nature in order that it may become partaker of the 
 divine nature. To this end the incarnation takes 
 place,* that man may be delivered from the power of 
 sin, and brought into harmony with that law which 
 constitutes the life of God, in the obedience of which 
 consists the real life of the creature. As obedience is 
 life, so in disobedience is death. The design of God, 
 as revealed in the ages that preceded the coming of 
 Christ, was to teach mankind how sin brought forth 
 death, in order that, in the light of the incarnation, 
 might be discerned the meaning and the value of life. 1 
 It is said of the late Mr. Maurice, that being asked 
 for the best treatise on the nature of sin, he replied, 
 St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians ; or, in other 
 w T ords, that method which most clearly presents Christ 
 
 1 This qualitative or ethical use of the words "life" and 
 " death " is common to Clement, Origen, and Athanasius, and is 
 in harmony with their use in the Fourth Gospel. It was, how- 
 ever, objected to Mr. Maurice, by a distinguished controvcr>i;il- 
 ist, that this use was non-natural. Cf. Mozley's Essay*, \> 1. 
 ii., on Maurice's theology. 
 
14 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 in his spiritual exaltation is best fitted to reveal the 
 nature, the extent, the enormity of sin. Such might 
 have been the reply of Clement of Alexandria or of 
 Athanasius, such surely was the method of Greek the- 
 ology in the days of its vigor ; and even in its decline, 
 it still remained true, in a formal way, to that which 
 had been its ruling principle. The Greek church, it 
 has been often remarked, had but one dogma, that of 
 the incarnation, — a dogma, it should be remembered, 
 resting primarily, not on the authority of a council, 
 but on the reason or the Christian consciousness, — 
 and with the evolution of this truth in its relation to 
 God and to humanity, Greek thought and speculation 
 were occupied for over four hundred years. In this 
 truth lay involved all the issues of the Christian faith ; 
 in its presence, other questions paled in importance; 
 by its light were to be interpreted all tenets and opin- 
 ions concerning man and his destiny. Hence the early 
 fathers did not base their theology upon speculations 
 regarding the origin of evil ; it was enough to know 
 that the redemption of mankind was an accomplished 
 fact, that humanity had been endowed through Christ 
 in its own right with a recuperative power, which 
 would enable it to struggle successfully against all 
 that was contrary to its true nature. The sense of sin 
 was not regarded as an experience generated in the 
 soul apart from God, for there was a divine presence 
 in the world and in human hearts whose mission it was 
 to convince of sin and righteousness. There was no 
 artificial division in human experience, according to 
 which the sense of sin must first prevail and dominate 
 in the consciousness before a man could receive the 
 Saviour ; but the knowledge of Christ, and his recep- 
 tion in the heart, became the power by which sin was 
 
INTR OD UC Tl ON. 15 
 
 increasingly revealed, and by which also it was over- 
 come. 
 
 It is unnecessary to add that all this was reversed in 
 the Augustinian theology. Another conception of sin 
 and of its remedy dates its rise in the church from his 
 influence, and was maintained by the Latin church 
 through the Middle Ages. The system of the confes- 
 sional, with its penitential books, its penances, its 
 priestly absolutions, and conveyancing of grace ; the 
 distinction between mortal and venial sins, the morbid 
 introspection, may seem to some minds to attach a 
 deeper or more adequate significance to sin, but it is 
 gained by a great sacrifice, — for it necessarily in- 
 volves an inadequate conception of Christ and his re- 
 demption. 
 
 The objection to the Greek theology, that its view 
 of sin is superficial or defective, is an old and familiar 
 one, and it is suggestive to note how often it turns up 
 in history when any teaching arises which contradicts 
 the traditional methods of dealing with the problem 
 of human evil. To the enemies of Christ, it appeared 
 as though the Saviour himself was relaxing the bonds 
 of moral order when He sat down to eat with publi- 
 cans and sinners, or when He dismissed the woman 
 who had sinned with no reproof, but with the gentle 
 injunction, " Go and sin no more." It seemed to the 
 hostile Judaism tracking the footsteps of St. Paul, as 
 if his doctrine of justification by faith were not only 
 deficient in its estimate of sin, but as if it put a pre- 
 mium upon sin, —"Shall we continue in sin that grace 
 may abound ? " It seemed to the heathen mind, judg- 
 ing from Celsus' attack upon Christianity, that the 
 doctrine of forgiveness was shallow and immoral ; that 
 in order to overcome evil it must be held that for- 
 
16 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 giveness was impossible, and that every sin must reap 
 its penalty according to irrevocable law. It seemed 
 to the excited mind of Latin Christendom in the six- 
 teenth century, as if the methods of Luther and Cal- 
 vin, in dealing with sin, were of a nature to undo the 
 sanctions of morality and to promote unbridled liber- 
 tinism. It is not strange, therefore, that so time-hon- 
 ored an objection, the embodiment of so conservative 
 an instinct, should be alleged against the theology of 
 the Greek fathers. 
 
 When it is said that the Greek theology failed, not 
 only in its conception of sin, but in its doctrine of 
 grace, the remark implies a misapprehension of its 
 spirit. The doctrine of grace, as a specific influence 
 passing from God to the individual spirit through ex- 
 ternal channels or in some arbitrary way, a grace ap- 
 plied to the soul from without to recreate or strengthen 
 the will apart from the natural action of the human 
 faculties, a grace which might be forfeited and re- 
 gained, which on occasions might be and was with- 
 drawn, — of such a doctrine, which has played so large 
 a part in the sacramental and Calvinistic theologies, it 
 must be admitted the early Greek theology knew 
 nothing. 1 The place occupied by grace in Latin the- 
 
 1 Cf. Wilson's Bampton Lectures (1851), The Communion of 
 Saints, p. 302, for an analysis of the passages in the New Testa- 
 ment in which the word grace occurs. Very few of them, the 
 author infers, can be thought to have anj^ bearing on what are 
 popularly known as the "doctrines of grace," or would give any 
 support to such doctrines. " There is not one text in which 
 the word occurs in any connection with either of the sacraments." 
 It is a remark of Joubert's, Pensees, 35 : — " Les jansenistes font 
 la grace une espece de quatrieme personne de la sainte Trinite. 
 Saint Paul et Saint Augustin, trop etudies ou etudies uniquement, 
 ont tout perdu si on ose le dire. Au lieu de grace, dites aide, se- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 17 
 
 ology is filled by the presence of a divine teacher, 
 whose own eternal life, by contact with human souls, 
 becomes the source of life, of all strength and growth ; 
 the infinite indwelling Spirit, whose action is not ar- 
 bitrary, but uniform as the laws of nature. The doc- 
 trine of grace, as taught by Augustine, or as it has 
 been held in mediaeval and Protestant theology, was 
 the Latin substitute for that belief in the immanence 
 of God in humanity, which had constituted the prin- 
 ciple of Greek theology, and was giving way in the 
 fifth century to another and lower conception of the 
 relations of God to man. 
 
 It may be said, that to revert to the theology of a 
 distant age would be a retrogressive movement in re- 
 ligious thought ; that we are to seek for some recon- 
 struction in theology by the light of our own reason 
 rather than under the guidance of the Nicene fathers. 
 But such an attitude toward the past carries with it 
 its own condemnation. The ground of hope and prog- 
 ress in this recognition of a theology in the ancient 
 church, higher than that which has hitherto prevailed 
 in Christendom, is the attestation thus gained for the 
 human consciousness as the ultimate source of author- 
 
 cours, influence divine, celeste rosee: on s'entend alors. Ce mot 
 est comme un talisman dont on peut briser le prestige et le male- 
 fice en le traduisant: on en dissout le danger par l'analyse. Per- 
 sonnifier les mots est un mal funeste en theologie." 
 
 In Tyndale's translation of the New Testament, the attempt 
 was made to break the mediaeval prestige of the word grace by 
 rendering it "favor." Cf. St. Luke i. 28, where "Ave, gratia 
 plena " of the Vulgate becomes, " Hail, thou that art highly fa- 
 vored," etc. King James's translators retained in some places 
 the old rendering, and in others followed Tyndale. The revised 
 version follows the same usage. 
 2 
 
18 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ity in religious truth. Were the present movement in 
 theological thought emphatically new, had it never 
 found substantial utterance in all these ages of Chris- 
 tian history, one might well be inclined to suspect that 
 it had no foundation in the nature of man. That 
 which is new in theology cannot be true ; a proposition 
 of which the converse holds equally good, that what is 
 true cannot be new. A return to the theology of the 
 ancient church does not mean the abandonment of the 
 reason, or the shutting our eyes to the light which God 
 especially vouchsafes to the later ages of the church. 
 Our task to-day is not a mechanical reproduction of 
 past thought, or a literal adherence to the forms in 
 which it was cast. There were elements in the meth- 
 ods of Greek theology which we cannot accept ; there 
 was much which the early fathers saw imperfectly, or 
 not at all. And yet, in spite of their defects, and the 
 disadvantages under which they labored, the Greek 
 theologians may be to us, what Plato and Aristotle 
 have been to modern philosophical thought, — our 
 emancipators from false conceptions, our guides to a 
 more spiritual, more intellectual, more comprehensive 
 interpretation of the Christian faith, than the church 
 has known since the German races passed under the 
 tutelage of the Roman bishops, and accepted a Latin- 
 ized Christianity in place of the original divine reve- 
 lation. In the words of a recent writer, 1 — 
 
 " We have lost much of that rich splendor, that large- 
 hearted fullness of power, which characterizes the great 
 Greek masters of theology. We have suffered our faith 
 for so long to accept the pinched and narrow limits of a 
 most unapostolic divinity, that we can hardly persuade peo- 
 
 1 Rev. H. S. Holland, M. A., Logic and Life, with other Ser- 
 mons, page vii. 
 
INTRODUCTIOX. 19 
 
 pie to recall how wide was the sweep of Christian thought 
 in the first centuries, how largely it dealt with these deep 
 problems of spiritual existence and development, which now 
 once more impress upon us the seriousness of the issues 
 amid which our souls are traveling. We have let people 
 forget all that our creed has to say about the unity of all 
 creation, or about the evolution of history, or about the 
 universality of the divine action through the Word. We 
 have lost the power of wielding the mighty language with 
 which Athanasius expands the significance of creation and 
 regeneration, of incarnation and sacrifice, and redemption 
 and salvation and glory." 
 
 After all, however, the question is not whether we 
 shall return or ought to return to what is called the 
 Nicene theology ; the fact is, that the return has al- 
 ready begun. The tendencies of what we call modern 
 religious thought have been reproducing the outlines 
 of an elder theology, while we have been unconscious 
 even of its existence. There is hardly a point on 
 which there is to-day a disposition to diverge from the 
 traditional theology, which has not been anticipated by 
 the Greek fathers. None of the individual doctrines 
 or tenets, which have so long been the objects of dis- 
 like and animadversion to the modern theological 
 mind, formed any constituent part of Greek theology. 
 The tenets of original sin and total depravity, as 
 expounded by Augustine, and received by the Prot- 
 estant churches from the Latin church ; the guilt of 
 infants, the absolute necessity of baptism in order to 
 salvation, the denial of the freedom of the will, the 
 doctrine of election, the idea of a schism in the di- 
 vine nature which required a satisfaction to retribu- 
 tive justice before love could grant forgiveness, the 
 atonement as a principle of equivalence by which the 
 
20 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 sufferings of Christ were weighed in a balance against 
 the endless sufferings of the race, the notion that 
 revelation is confined within the book, guaranteed 
 by the inspiration of the letter or by a line of priestly 
 curators in apostolic descent, the necessity of miracles 
 as the strongest evidences of the truth of a revealed 
 religion, the doctrine of sacramental grace and priestly 
 mediation, the idea of the church as identical with 
 some particular form of ecclesiastical organization, — 
 these and other tenets which have formed the gist of 
 modern religious controversy find no place in the 
 Greek theology, and are irreconcilable with its spirit. 
 And, on the other hand, the doctrine of the incarna- 
 tion, in the fullness and sublimity of its real import, — 
 the essence of the Christian faith, from which other 
 beliefs and convictions must spring, and with which 
 they must correspond, — this truth is finding in mod- 
 ern times a recognition and appreciation akin to that 
 which it held in the theology of Athanasius. 
 
THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 Deus erat in Christo mundum reconcilians sibi. — 2 Cor. v. 19. 
 Erat lux vera, quae illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mun- 
 dum. — St. John i. 9. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 
 
 B. C. 
 
 800. [c] The great age of Hebrew prophecy begins. 
 
 600. [c] The rise of Buddhism. 
 
 584. (?) Birth of Pythagoras. 
 
 469-400. Socrates. 
 
 430-348. Plato. 
 
 384-322. Aristotle. 
 
 340-264. Zeuo, founder of the Stoic school. 
 
 A. D. 
 
 65. Seneca died. 
 
 70. Fall of Jerusalem. 
 
 89. Epictetus flourished. 
 
 115. (?) Martyrdom of Ignatius. 
 
 120. (?) Plutarch died. 
 
 150. [c] Celsus, Montanus, Marcion. 
 
 160-170. Pseudo-Clementine writings. 
 
 161-180. Marcus Aurelius, Emperor. 
 
 166. (?) Justin became a martyr. 
 
 185-254. Origen. 
 
 202. Irenasus died, Pantrenus died. 
 
 204-270. Plotinus. 
 
 220 Clement of Alexandria died. 
 
 243. Ammonius Saccas died. 
 
 250. [c] Sabellius. 
 
 260. Paul of Samosata. 
 
 274. Manichasism. 
 
 296-373. Athanasius. 
 
 318. Pise of Arianism. 
 
 325. Council of Nicsea. 
 
 326-379. Basil of Caesarea. 
 
 330-389. Gregory of Nazianzus. 
 
 400. [c] Gregory of Nyssa died. 
 
THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 The transition from the age of the apostles to the 
 age of the early Christian fathers is involved in the 
 darkness and secrecy which seems to attend, as by a 
 universal law, the beginning of all great movements 
 in history. At the very moment when we are most 
 anxious to follow the fortunes of the Christian church, 
 we are thrown back upon conjecture and hypothesis. 
 The period extending from the fall of Jerusalem 
 (a. d. 70) to the middle of the second century, a 
 period covering the lifetime of more than two genera- 
 tions, is almost a blank so far as any positive knowl- 
 edge can be drawn from the writers who have been 
 designated the Apostolic Fathers. But we turn to 
 them still with a curious interest, — these writers who 
 might have told us so much, but who have told us 
 so little. We can feel as w r e read them that we are 
 watching in the early dawn of a great day, by whose 
 cool, dim light are faintly outlined the characteristics 
 of the church that is to be. In the Roman Clement's 
 exhortations to humility, so significant as proceeding 
 from the home of the later papacy, or in the military 
 aspects which in his pages the ecclesiastical adminis- 
 tration is assuming : in Iarnatius's reflection that the 
 confession made by martyrdom would bring him into 
 a more intimate relation to the Lord ; in the sombre 
 mood of the Pastor of Hermas, where the tower which 
 
24 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 represents the destinies of the church is seen rapidly 
 nearing its completion ; in the fragments of Papias, 
 who was storing up in his memory the oral traditions 
 of an earlier age, under the feeling that " what was 
 to be got from books was not so profitable to him as 
 what came from the living and abiding voice ; " in the 
 speculations of the unknown author of the "Epistle 
 to Diognetus," as to the reason of Christ's late ap- 
 pearance in the world, — in hints like these are seen 
 the germs of the larger movements, whether of senti- 
 ment, thought, or action, which mark the church when 
 it emerges into the clearer light of history. 
 
 While the fragments of this obscure period shed lit- 
 tle or no light on the points about which ecclesiastical 
 controversy has turned, — such, for example, as the 
 nature of the church's government, 1 and her ritual 
 usages, or the origin of the gospels and the authorship 
 and purpose of the disputed books of the New Tes- 
 tament, — we may still be thankful that they reveal as 
 much as they do, that in them we may discern the 
 tendencies operating from the beginning which are to 
 color the history of the church in all coming time. 
 Especially do they disclose to us how races were still 
 preserving their national characteristics under the 
 shelter of the common faith, how the peculiarities of 
 
 1 The recently discovered Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, 
 which probably belongs to the same age, adds more definite infor- 
 mation regarding Christian antiquities, as they are called, than 
 any other of the writings attributed to the apostolic fathers. But 
 into what confusion it plunges long established traditions re- 
 specting the ministry and the sacraments ! If anything could 
 excite suspicion as to its genuineness, it would be the abundant 
 confirmation it yields to the conclusions of historical scholarship 
 as to the origin of the church's order and the nature and admin- 
 istration of the sacraments. 
 
EPISTLE TO DIOGNETUS. 25 
 
 inherited cultures were to modify the interpretation of 
 the Christian principle. Clement of Rome writes as 
 a genuine Roman, concerned with matters of adminis- 
 tration and of subordination to authority. Ignatius, 
 who may be taken as representing the Christian com- 
 munities of Asia Minor, displays the traditional con- 
 servative spirit, — the timidity and anxiety in the pres- 
 ence of innovations, which continue to this day such 
 prominent features of oriental Christendom. The 
 writer of the beautiful epistle to Diognetus betrays by 
 his style and thought the influence of Hellenic culture, 
 and gives, as it were in epitome, the theology which 
 was to be developed under the great masters of a 
 later age, a Clement of Alexandria, an Origen, and an 
 Athanasius. 
 
 A brief survey of this epistle may serve as an intro- 
 duction to the Greek theology. The date of its com- 
 position cannot be definitely determined, but it is gen- 
 erally admitted that its author lived very near to the 
 time of the apostles. 
 
 I. 
 
 In the mind of this unknown author, the Christian 
 principle is identical with what Plato had taught to be 
 the highest aspiration of man, — the " free imitation 
 of God." To love God is to be an imitator of his 
 character, an imitation which is possible to man be- 
 cause he is made in the divine image. He who as- 
 sumes his neighbor's burdens, who is ready to commu- 
 nicate to those who are deficient the blessings he has 
 received, becomes in his turn, as it were, a God to 
 those who receive his benefits, and truly follows that 
 which is most characteristic of the nature of Deity. 
 To such an one it is given to see God and to enter into 
 
26 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 the mysteries of the divine nature. When Gocl would 
 redeem the world from wickedness to the obedience of 
 the faith, he does not send any servant or angel, or 
 any ruler in the celestial hierarchies, however exalted 
 his rank, but He comes who is the creator and fash- 
 ioner of all things. The evidence of the incarnation 
 of the eternal Wisdom in humanity is not sought for 
 in miracles, but in the moral transformation exhibited 
 in Christian lives, in the heroic endurance of persecu- 
 tion, in the growth of the church, which no earthly 
 power can hinder. 
 
 Such a revelation commends itself to the spiritual 
 consciousness of man. No allusion is made by the 
 writer of this epistle to Jewish prophecies foretelling 
 the advent of Christ ; he does not attempt to repro- 
 duce the apostolic teaching, but he is occupied with 
 grounding what he conceives to be the Christian idea 
 in the inmost instincts of man ; he speaks of Christ in 
 His spiritual being as established firmly by God in 
 human hearts. In the imj)ortance assigned to knowl- 
 edge he shows still further the influence of his Hel- 
 lenic culture. It was not the tree of knowledge in the 
 ancient paradise that proved destructive. The tree of 
 life was planted close to the tree of knowledge, to in- 
 dicate that there can be no life without knowledge, and 
 that apart from knowledge life is insecure. 
 
 Nothing is said by this writer regarding the nature 
 of Christian worship except indirectly, by way of pro- 
 test against the superstitions of the Jews. In these 
 are included their sacrifices, their scruples concerning 
 meats, their ideas of Sabbath observance, their no- 
 tions about fasting and new moons and circumcision, 
 all of which are spoken of as ridiculous and unworthy 
 of notice. The use of seasons, some for festivities and 
 
JUSTIN MARTYR. 27 
 
 some for mourning, is no part of divine worship. But 
 the mystery of the Christian cult us, it is said, cannot 
 be learned from any mortal. The worship of the 
 Christians, which distinguishes them from every people 
 among whom they sojourn, is essentially a moral atti- 
 tude toward God and toward man, — the love which is 
 the fulfilling of the law. Hence, to sum up all in one 
 word, " the Christians are in the world what the soul is 
 in the body." They are diffused throughout all cities, 
 in the world but not of it. As the soul is the princi- 
 ple which holds the body together, so Christians hold 
 together the world itself." 
 
 In such an utterance as this may be traced the 
 earliest and also the highest conception of the Catho- 
 lic church, — the embodiment of humanity in its ideal 
 aspect. Such a conviction of the absolute value and 
 universal mission of the church, in the mind of a soli- 
 tary thinker musing in the early dawn of Christian 
 history, is a testimony that a new life has entered into 
 humanity, which persecution cannot extinguish, and 
 which is destined to overcome the world. 
 
 When we reach the age of Justin, who became a 
 martyr in the reign of Marcus Aurelius (a. d. 166), 
 the church is beginning to emerge from its hidden ex- 
 istence into the clear light of history. In the account 
 of his conversion, we have a picture of the world of 
 educated thought in the middle of the second century. 
 The varieties and confusions of opinion are seen in 
 contrast with the power of the new revelation slowly 
 making its way to the conquest of the human intellect. 
 Like Augustine, whom in other respects he also re- 
 sembles, Justin had run through the different schools 
 of heathen thought before finding that which his spirit 
 craved. Beginning with Stoicism, he turned from it 
 
28 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 to Aristotle ; lie then made a trial of Pythagoreanism, 
 and had at last adopted the Platonic philosophy as 
 the only adequate explanation of the problems of life, 
 when he was once more unsettled by the presentation 
 of the Christian faith, in which he reached the com- 
 plete satisfaction of his being, of his intellectual as 
 well as his moral nature. 
 
 The nationality of Justin is unknown. After his 
 conversion he passed much of his life in Rome, where 
 he is said to have established a school for the philo- 
 sophical explanation and defense of Christianity. But 
 such an institution had little chance of success in the 
 Eternal City, and it is not surprising to learn that the 
 school ceased to exist after his death, having pro- 
 duced one unfortunate disciple, Tatian, whose career 
 did little credit to his master. As a theologian, Jus- 
 tin must be regarded as a representative of that ten- 
 dency which afterward gave birth to Latin theology. 
 Through his familiarity with that phase of Christi- 
 anity which prevailed at Rome where Jewish influence 
 was especially active, he was led to adopt the current 
 opinions of the church in Rome, to identify them with 
 the Christian revelation, and to fall back for their de- 
 fense upon the authority of the Jewish Scriptures. 
 One can see from his mental history that he had a 
 taste for philosophy rather than that high mental en- 
 dowment which constitutes the genuine philosopher. 
 His culture consisted in what he gained from this or 
 that teacher, rather than in the attainment of the phil- 
 osophic mind. 
 
 But in one important respect Justin differs from 
 those who followed him as teachers of Christianity in 
 the Latin church, — he did not turn his back upon 
 philosophy as an evil thing when he became a Chris- 
 
RELATION TO GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 29 
 
 tian. Tertullian and Irenaeus, and even Augustine 
 in his later years, condemned philosophy as a source 
 of danger and evil to the church, as the parent of all 
 heresy. Justin on the other hand remained true to his 
 old teachers. After his conversion he still continued 
 to wear his philosopher's cloak, and maintained that 
 Christianity was the only true philosophy. He recog- 
 nized a continuity in his spiritual history. He had not 
 accepted the gospel because he had found his pagan 
 teachers to be false, — they were true, and had taught 
 truly so far as they had conformed to that divine reason 
 which is everywhere diffused throughout the world. 1 
 
 In this attitude of Justin toward Greek philosophy 
 may be seen the first great theological issue which 
 divided the ancient church. Justin represents the 
 class of educated minds who had been led to Chris- 
 tianity by another line of approach than that which 
 lay through Jewish tradition, and who could not but 
 maintain the continuity of their spiritual development. 
 Although they had not been taught to believe, as had 
 the Jewish Christians, in a Messiah foretold by Hebrew 
 prophets, they saw behind them a long and glorious 
 line of philosophers and teachers, through whose pre- 
 paratory labors they had been enabled to enter into 
 the heritage of the Christian faith. When Justin is 
 obliged to meet the objection, that since Christ had 
 been born only one hundred and fifty years before, all 
 who lived previous to his advent were without the true 
 light for the reason and the conscience, he rises at 
 once to the idea of the spiritual essential Christ who 
 is limited by no conditions of time or space. Christ 
 is the Word of whom every race of men are par- 
 takers. Those who have lived in a manner conformed 
 
 1 Apol.,\. c. 10. 
 
30 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 to truth are Christians, even though they have been 
 held as atheists. 1 Such were, among the Greeks, 
 Socrates and Heraclitus and those who resembled 
 them ; and among the barbarians, Abraham, Ananias, 
 Azariah, Misael, Elias, and many others of whom 
 it is superfluous to mention the deeds or recite the 
 names. Of Socrates and others, he further remarks, 
 that like the Christians they were persecuted because 
 of their devotion to the truth. For Socrates had 
 known Christ, 2 though but in part, for Christ was 
 and is the divine reason which is universally diffused. 
 In all this Justin was only expanding the utterance of 
 St. John, " He was the light that lighteth every man 
 that cometh into the world." 3 
 
 Justin is the first writer among the ancient Fathers 
 to assert the truth that God had revealed Himself to 
 the heathen world as well as to the Jewish people, that 
 He had done so not merely through some subordinate 
 process in external nature, but through his Son, who 
 is the divine reason in every man. In this compre- 
 hensive idea of revelation is revealed the influence of 
 the Stoic philosophy which was still potent in the spir- 
 itual atmosphere of the age. The indwelling divine 
 reason which Justin identifies with the Christ who in 
 the fullness of time became manifest in the flesh, is no 
 other than the immanent Deity of whom Seneca says 
 that He is near to man, is with him and is in him, 
 who not only comes near to men but comes into them, 
 whose abiding presence in the soul alone makes good- 
 ness possible. 4 
 
 1 Apol. t i. c. 46. 2 Apol, ii. c. 10. 
 
 3 Cf. Diet. Christian Antiquities, Art. Justinus, by Rev. H. S. 
 Holland, M. A., for a discussion of the point, whether Justin was 
 familiar with the Fourth Gospel. 
 
 4 Ep. ad Lucilium, 41, 73. 
 
INFLUENCE OF PLATO. 31 
 
 But there is also to be discerned in Justin's thought 
 the influence of the Platonic philosophy, leading him 
 to another and widely different conception of Deity. 
 The treatise of Plato which seems to have most pow- 
 erfully affected the religious thought of the second 
 century was the "Timseus," which deals more directly 
 with theology than the other dialogues. Here the 
 Deity appears withdrawn from the world into a dis- 
 tant heaven, distinct and separated from the creation, 
 because of the evil with which matter is essentially 
 connected. 1 Justin tells us that the Stoic idea of God 
 was deficient in that it made Him responsible for the 
 evil in the world by identifying Him too closely with 
 the life underlying all phenomena. It was this sense 
 of evil to which the conscience of Plato had become 
 so sensitive, that was also operating upon the minds 
 of thoughtful and earnest men in the second century, 
 and was leading them to a renewed study of the Pla- 
 tonic philosophy. The consciousness of sin was ban- 
 ishing God from the universe ; and it was becoming a 
 question whether the Christian consciousness of re- 
 demption — the conviction that this world had been 
 actually redeemed by Christ — was strong enough to 
 reverse the tide of heathen thought, and to maintain 
 its hold upon a God united to humanity in an organic 
 indissoluble relationship. 
 
 In the writings of Justin we find the first traces of 
 the conflict between these two tendencies, — a conflict 
 which went on for two centuries before the church 
 acquiesced in the theology of Athanasius. Justin 
 does little more than reveal the conditions of the 
 great issue. On the one hand, in accordance with 
 what he has received from Plato, he speaks of Deity 
 1 Cf. Jowett's Introduction to the Timceus, ii. p. 458. 
 
32 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 as the unknown and the unknowable, the ineffable 
 transcendent One, the absolute in the sense that He 
 exists in His completeness and perfection apart from 
 all relation to the world of finite being. But on the 
 other hand his gaze is fixed in love and adoration on 
 the immanent Deity revealed in Christ. He may be 
 deficient, he undoubtedly was, when judged by the 
 technical language of a later age, in his definition of 
 the relation of Christ to the Father, but there can be 
 no doubt in which direction his thought was traveling. 
 The Christ whom he worshiped was the eternal Wis- 
 dom become incarnate, the indwelling God by whom 
 the worlds were fashioned, whose existence is recog- 
 nized in human souls, who mingles with humanity 
 " as the perfume with the flower, as the salt with the 
 waters of the sea." 
 
 It is unnecessary to allude here to the opinions on 
 other subjects connected with the Christian faith, put 
 forth by Justin as the orthodox teaching of the church. 
 It may be said of them in passing, that they are for 
 the most part in harmony with that theological ten- 
 dency which was afterward more fully represented 
 by Tertullian. It is vain to attempt to reconcile the 
 contradictions in Justin's thought. Opposing cur- 
 rents of influence met in his mind, and while he was 
 in some respects the forerunner of the Greek theology, 
 he leaned in his practical conception of Christianity 
 to the Jewish legal attitude which saw in Christianity 
 a new law, and in Christ a second law-giver, after the 
 analogy of the Mosaic dispensation. His conception 
 of Deity after the Platonic idea, as the absolute and 
 the incomprehensible, prevented his rising to the 
 knowledge of God as the father, or his grounding the 
 revelation in the divine love, as the inmost essence of 
 
FREEDOM OF THOUGHT. 33 
 
 the being whom Christ revealed. But despite his 
 contradictions and his failures, the genuine Christian 
 feeling in Justin was never overcome. His writings 
 remain as a monument to that earlier, purer t} r pe of 
 Christianity, when priesthood and altar, temple and 
 sacrifice, were regarded as having been abolished in 
 Christ ; when as yet there was no observance of sacred 
 seasons, for life was one perpetual Sabbath or day of 
 rejoicing ; when fasting was not an outward obser- 
 vance but an inward principle of restraint upon all 
 evil. 1 
 
 II. 
 
 Christian theology was the fruit of the Greek gen- 
 ius, and had its origin in the Greek city of Alexan- 
 dria. It was here, in the second and third centuries, 
 that the most favorable conditions existed for the 
 development of Christian thought. Not only was the 
 Greek genius still at the height of its powers, but it 
 had renewed its life on this foreign soil. Alexandria 
 had become more thoroughly Greek than Athens in 
 the days of its renown. For the first time in history 
 thought was absolutely free. 2 No dominant religious 
 conviction could hinder the freest inquiry, no fear of 
 persecution repressed the utterance of obnoxious 
 tenets. The limits of thought were as boundless as 
 the flight of the human imagination. In such an at- 
 mosphere it was inevitable that the hirgest hearing 
 should be accorded to him who spoke most directly 
 and powerfully to the heart, the conscience, and the 
 reason of the age. In the presence of the truth, the 
 oppositions of error tended ultimately to die away. 
 
 1 Dial cum Tn/ph., cc. 15, 21, 22, 117. 
 
 2 Cf. Renan, Conferences, p. 22. 
 
34 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 This rare conjunction of intellectual freedom, and of 
 the intellectual capacity to improve it, was not of long 
 duration ; but before it vanished, to reappear again 
 only when ages had rolled away, it had given birth to 
 Christian theology. The Christian thinkers in Alex- 
 andria, at that favored moment in the history of 
 thought, gave the outlines of a theology which for 
 spirituality and Catholicity could never be rivaled or 
 even appreciated at its true value, till, in an age like 
 our own, the same conditions which made its first 
 appearance possible, should make its reproduction a 
 necessity. 
 
 The resemblance between the second century and 
 the nineteenth has often been noted. The likeness is 
 seen more esjDecially in this, that the conquests of 
 Rome had brought the then existing world together, 
 had compacted it and made it more easy of compre- 
 hension, just as in recent times mechanical appliances 
 in navigation and the quick communication of intelli- 
 gence have again repeated the same result on a larger 
 scale. The benefit of Roman conquests to later civ- 
 ilization has been fully acknowledged in the results 
 achieved by Roman jurisprudence. The necessity of 
 enforcing one common method of legal procedure upon 
 a variety of peoples, each with its own conception of 
 justice and of its practical administration, gave rise to 
 the comprehensive spirit of Roman law and the en- 
 deavor to ground it in the nature of man. A similar 
 necessity gave rise to similar efforts in the sphere of 
 religious thought. If, on the one hand, the spectacle 
 of so many religions dividing the allegiance of men 
 created confusion and skepticism, on the other hand, 
 there were those who sought to penetrate beneath the 
 diversity to some underlying principle of unity, and 
 
DESIRE FOR UNITY. 35 
 
 by doing justice to all the elements of truth and 
 spiritual thought wherever they might be found, at- 
 tain the idea of a universal religion. Such an effort 
 was made by Plutarch and other heathens who stand 
 as the representatives of heathen faith in the midst 
 of a prevailing skepticism. Such also was the role of 
 some of the Gnostics, and at a later time of the Neo- 
 Platonic philosophy. A similar duty devolved upon 
 the Christian thinkers of Alexandria. They were 
 forced, if they would address intelligently and success- 
 fully the inquiring mind of heathenism, to do justice 
 to the truth in all systems of thought, to interpret 
 their aspirations after the eternal light, to emphasize 
 the value and importance of the divine revelation 
 given in Greek philosoplry, and always to keep prom- 
 inently in view that feature of Christianity upon which 
 rested its claim to be a universal religion. 
 
 The city of Alexandria represented in miniature 
 the world of that distant age. In some respects it 
 was a city more cosmopolitan than any other in the 
 empire, in comparison with which even Rome was 
 provincial. In its population were included large 
 numbers of Greeks and Jews, Orientals and Romans. 
 It had also become one of the great centres of the 
 Christian church. The combination of these different 
 types of religious thought stimulated the speculative 
 mind to the highest activity. There the Jews came 
 under the influence of Greek philosophy ; the Greeks 
 discerned in Judaism a moral force and directness in 
 which heathenism was wanting. Each was impelled 
 to the search after a universal principle in whose com- 
 prehensive grasp might be realized the unity of all 
 things human and divine. There was also felt the 
 subtle contagion of oriental theosophy, with its dark 
 
36 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 consciousness of sin and disorder in the world, with 
 its dualism between God and some rival power for 
 evil, to which the consciousness of sin, without the 
 full light of redemption, has always and everywhere 
 given birth. 
 
 No doubt there was danger to the faith of Christian 
 thinkers in such a situation. The problem was indeed 
 a complex one which the Greek theology in Alexan- 
 dria was given to solve. To maintain the divine im- 
 manence, and yet not identify God with the world ; to 
 combat Gnosticism and oriental tendencies, and yet not 
 underrate the evil and heinousness of sin; to insist 
 upon the divine love as the essence of Deity, and yet 
 enforce the judgments and punishments of sin ; to as- 
 sert the superiority of the Scriptures of the Old and 
 New Testaments, and yet do justice to the divine reve- 
 lation contained in Greek philosophy ; to combat Jew- 
 ish deism as an unworthy conception of God, to resist 
 the tendency to reduce Christianity to a ritual in imi- 
 tation of the Jewish ceremonial law, and yet not fail 
 to acknowledge in Jewish history the preparation for a 
 higher truth ; to assert the importance of intellectual 
 culture, and yet to recognize the power and value of 
 simple faith, — such were the conditions under which 
 Greek theology was developed. 
 
 Complex and difficult as was the environment of the 
 church in Alexandria, yet this close contact with hea- 
 then thought in its various forms and its highest moods 
 was necessary and unavoidable, if the Christian reve- 
 lation was to be put to the severest test, if its essential 
 principle was to be apprehended in its purity by the 
 intellect as well as by the moral sentiment, if in a word 
 Christianity was to make the conquest of the human 
 reason. What the persecution of the church by the 
 
CONFLICT WITH HEATHENISM. 37 
 
 Roman state was to the simple lives of Christian peo- 
 ple, developing a heroism which the world had never 
 seen before, demonstrating' that no earthly force could 
 subdue the power of faith, such also was the conflict in 
 the intellectual sphere between heathen philosophers 
 and Christian theologians. Christian thought, as pre- 
 sented by Clement and Origen and Athanasius, over- 
 came the polemics of their heathen antagonists, and 
 brought forth into the clear light of the reason the 
 principle which bound heaven and earth together, and 
 formed the basis of a universal religion. Alexandria, 
 it is true, generated some of the worst heresies that 
 endangered the Christian faith, but it also produced a 
 Catholic theology in which those heresies were met as 
 they were nowhere else in the church. No other writer 
 overcame the principle of Gnosticism so completely as 
 Clement of Alexandria : when Celsus assaulted by ar- 
 gument and by ridicule that which was most distinc- 
 tively sacred in Christian belief, it was from Alexan- 
 dria that the answer came ; when Arianism would 
 have reduced Christianity to a form akin to heathen 
 polytheism, it was Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexan- 
 dria, who fought for the doctrine of the incarnation, 
 and secured its triumph. 
 
 Whatever may have been the deficiencies of Greek 
 theology, it may be safely averred, that until its prog- 
 ress was arrested by the mysterious decline which par- 
 alyzed all intellectual activity and freedom, it did not 
 succumb to the subtle spirit of heathenism, nor adopt 
 unwittingly what was foreign to the Christian idea 
 in Gnostic or Manichaean theosophies, nor was the 
 principle of redemption neutralized by an oriental or 
 Buddhist conception of human sinfulness, which di- 
 vorced God from the world, and left humanity, in its 
 
38 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 isolation and weakness, a prey to the encroachments 
 of an ambitious priesthood. These were the evils 
 which befell the church, more especially in the West, 
 where intellectual culture had come to be disowned as 
 having no connection with Christian faith, where rea- 
 son was separated from feeling and piety, and philos- 
 ophy was denounced as the parent of all evil. 
 
 Clement of Alexandria may be called the father of 
 Greek theology. 1 Of Pantsenus, his predecessor in the 
 theological school, but little is known ; the important 
 fact has been recorded, that he was an adherent of 
 the Stoic philosophy, and Clement, who was his pupil, 
 bears witness to the high value of his teaching. Very 
 few details of the life of Clement have been preserved. 
 The date of his birth may be fixed about the middle 
 of the second century, while that of his death is un- 
 known. The period of his greatest literary activity 
 was when he presided over the school at Alexandria 
 (a. d. 190-203), and when he must have been in the 
 full maturity of his powers. As to his nationality, he 
 was a Greek, possibly an Athenian, and his acquaint- 
 ance with Greek philosophy and literature was thor- 
 ough and extensive. The epithet " learned " belongs 
 to him not merely in virtue of the courtesy which ex- 
 tends it to all the Fathers of the church : apart from 
 their theology, his works are valuable to the classical 
 student for their numerous quotations from books no 
 
 1 Sketches of Clement's thought may be found in Pressense, 
 Histoire des trois premiers siecles de Veglise, t. iii. — UHistoire da 
 dogma ; Hitter, Die Ckristliche Philosophie, i. 300-310 ; Studien 
 und Kritilcen, 1341; Bp. Kay e, Clement of A lexandria ; Freppel, 
 Clement d'Alexandrie. A sympathetic study of Clement is con- 
 tained in Neander, Ch. His., vols. ii. and iii., Bohn ed. 
 
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. 89 
 
 longer extant, and for the light they shed upon the 
 manners and customs of the ancient world. He had 
 traveled widely in search of knowledge, and after he 
 became a Christian he studied the new religion under 
 several masters before he came under the influence of 
 Pantamus, and heard a presentation of Christian truth 
 which commended itself to his reason. That which 
 attracted him in Christianity was its lofty ethical 
 teaching, and the fruits which it bore in the practical 
 transformation of the life. In the character of Christ, 
 not in miracles or prophecy, did he find the highest 
 evidence of His divine mission to humanity. 1 
 
 We meet in Clement a more emphatic statement 
 than in any other ancient father of the universality of 
 the preparation in the Old World for the advent of 
 Christ. As a Greek, it fell to him to vindicate the 
 alliance between the Hellenic philosophy and the new 
 religion. Such an alliance he does not regard as call- 
 ing for an apology; it is a divine ordering of the 
 world that Greek philosophy should have prepared the 
 way for Christ, and to doubt that it did so would be 
 to undermine belief in the possibility of a revelation, 
 as well as to deny the providence of God. 2 Christian- 
 ity, if the expression may be allowed, grew as directly 
 out of Greek philosophy as out of Hebrew prophecy. 
 The narrow conception that the only prophecy of 
 Christ is to be found in Jewish anticipations of Mes- 
 siah, belittles the subject of the divine dealings with 
 humanity. The influence of Hellenic speculation in 
 determining the true nature of the person of Christ is 
 not a thing smuggled surreptitiously into the sphere of 
 Christian thought, — an alien element, to be carefully 
 
 1 Cf. Bp. Kaye, Life and Writings of Clement of Alexandria, p. 3. 
 
 2 Strom., vi. 17. 
 
40 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 eliminated, if we would understand the original revela- 
 tion in its simplicity and purity. It enters into the 
 divine process of preparation for the advent of Christ 
 as a constituent factor ; it is essential to a right inter- 
 pretation of the Christian idea in its widest and high- 
 est application. 
 
 What Clement asserted so eloquently as of vital im- 
 portance to the understanding of the Christian faith, 
 the Greek fathers who came after him accepted as an 
 axiom without further discussion. The doctrines of 
 the incarnation and the trinity, as developed by Ori- 
 gen, by Athanasius, and the Cappadocians, especially 
 Gregory of Nyssa, rest upon the alliance with Greek 
 philosophy, securely and serenely. In later times, 
 when a meagre, mechanical notion of divine revela- 
 tion obscured the earlier apprehension of its univer- 
 sality, the argument for the divinity of Christ's person 
 came to rest almost exclusirely upon Hebrew prophe- 
 cies which found in Him their fulfillment, — a method 
 which reached its legitimate result in a return to the 
 Jewish deism from which it had derived its inspiration. 
 
 The following passages from Clement show how 
 large and free was his conception of the methods of 
 divine revelation : — 
 
 " To the Jews belonged the Law, and to the Greeks Phi- 
 losophy, until the Advent, and after that came the universal 
 calling to be a peculiar people of righteousness through the 
 teaching which flows from faith, brought together by one 
 Lord, the only God of both Greeks and barbarians, or rather 
 of the whole race of men." 1 " And in general terms we 
 shall not err in alleging that all things necessary and profit- 
 able for life came to us from God, and that philosophy more 
 
 1 Strom., vi. c. 17. The translation is that of the Ante-Nicene 
 Library. 
 
REVELATION IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 41 
 
 especially was given to the Greeks as a covenant peculiar to 
 them, being, as it is, a stepping-stone to the philosophy 
 which is according to Christ." x "Should any one say that 
 it was through human understanding that philosophy was 
 discovered by the Greeks, I find the Scriptures saying that 
 understanding is sent by God." 2 " God was the giver of 
 Greek philosophy to the Greeks, by which the Almighty is 
 glorified among the Greeks." 3 " The studies of philosophy 
 therefore, and philosophy itself, are aids in treating of the 
 truth." 4 " Before the advent of the Lord, philosophy was 
 necessary to the Greeks for righteousness. And now it be- 
 comes conducive to piety; being a kind of preparatory 
 training to those who attain to faith through demonstration, 
 — a schoolmaster to bring the Hellenic mind, as the law the 
 Hebrews, to Christ." 5 " By reflection and direct vision 
 those among the Greeks who have philosophized accurately 
 see God." 6 "In the whole universe all the parts, though 
 differing one from another, preserve their relation to the 
 whole. So then the barbarian (Jewish) and Hellenic phi- 
 losophy has torn off a fragment of eternal truth from the 
 theology of the ever-living Word. And he who brings to- 
 gether again the separate fragments and makes them one, 
 will, without peril, contemplate the perfect Word, the truth." 7 
 
 In the second century Christianity was struggling 
 against the tendency felt in all forms of religious and 
 
 1 Strom., vi. c. 8. 4 Strom., vi. c. 11. 
 
 2 Strom., vi. c. 8. 5 Strom., i. c. 5. 
 
 3 Strom., vi. c. 5. 6 Strom., i. c. 19. 
 
 7 Strom., i. c. 13. Clement often asserts that Greek philoso- 
 phy had plagiarized from the Hebrew Scriptures. But ho takes 
 this ground when trying to convince the Greeks, who boasted 
 their philosophy to be sufficient, that the highest spiritual truth 
 in Plato and others had been anticipated long before. There is 
 no real contradiction in Clement's thought, however it may ap- 
 pear as such in his language. His highest meaning is clear, that 
 Greek philosophy contained a direct divine revelation. 
 
42 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 philosophical thought, to banish Gocl from His crea- 
 tion, — to maintain the divine transcendence at the 
 expense of an absolute divorce between God and hu- 
 manity. The tendency sprang from a growing con- 
 sciousness of sin, a conscience quickened to the per- 
 ception of good and evil. All interest in other lines 
 of human research was disappearing, and philosophy 
 began to be characterized by an ethical purpose in 
 comparison with which all else was unimportant. 
 
 It is perhaps the one most striking peculiarity of 
 the religion of Christ, that it stimulates the keenest 
 susceptibility to moral evil, and yet brings God close 
 to humanity in an abiding eternal relationship. It 
 does what no other religion has been able to do, — - it 
 develops the consciousness of sin, and yet maintains 
 the consciousness of an actu?d. redemption from sin. 
 The most complete illustration of the gospel was 
 given in one short sentence, when it was said of Christ 
 that He sat down to eat with publicans and sinners, — 
 a picture it may called of indwelling Deity in close 
 contact and communion with humanity stricken with 
 a sense of its debasement and guilt. 
 
 And yet in the " fullness of time " when Christ ap- 
 peared, the world was witnessing the mightiest transi- 
 tion recorded in the spiritual life of man. The belief 
 in immanent Deity was slowly yielding to the concep- 
 tion of a God removed to an infinite distance from the 
 world and from all human interests. Wherever we 
 look in the second and third centuries, we may see the 
 transition in process of accomplishment. To enter 
 upon its full description is here impossible. It must 
 suffice to allude briefly to the causes which initiated 
 so vast a revolution, and to the most significant indi- 
 cations of its progress, in order to get the key to the 
 
TRANSCENDENCE OF DEITY. 43 
 
 theology of the incarnation, as it was presented by the 
 Greek fathers, before the world and the church had 
 acquiesced in a change which was to alter the charac- 
 ter of human civilization. 
 
 The leading cause which underlies and modifies the 
 conception of God is the action of the human con- 
 science under the conviction of sin and guilt. It was 
 in the ancient home of the Aryan races that the pri- 
 meval idea of Deity received its profoundest modifica- 
 tion in the reaction of Buddhism. In the Buddhist 
 mind, the consciousness of evil was so supreme, as to 
 almost rob the world of anything answering to the 
 idea of God at all. That which took place in India 
 was substantially repeated, not long after, in the pro- 
 test of philosophy against Greek religion in the time of 
 Socrates and Plato. The religion of ancient Greece 
 resembled that of India in resting on a pantheistic 
 basis, where God and man and the external world are 
 hardly distinguishable from each other. It is not 
 necessary that Plato should have felt the direct in- 
 fluence of Buddhism, but it is certain that he was 
 moved by kindred motives to those which had gener- 
 ated it. In the " Timaeus " he pictures God as the 
 passive Deity at an infinite distance in the heavens, 
 unable to come into immediate contact with a world 
 of which the very materials contain the conditions of 
 evil. We may admire, as we study Plato, his high 
 moral conception of the nature of God, while at the 
 same time we discern in him how the quickened moral 
 sense, when not enlightened by the Christian idea of 
 redemption, perverts the true relationship between God 
 and humanity. 
 
 In the subsequent course of Greek philosophy may 
 be read, as in a register of man's spiritual life, the 
 
44 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 records of the variation of human thought as it 
 studied the relation of God to the world. Plato did 
 not willingly give up the world to absolute separa- 
 tion from its Maker: he strove hard to overcome 
 the schism which his own thought had created. But 
 the tendency of his theory of ideas was to reduce the 
 creation to a pale reflection of the divine glory, a poor 
 substitute for that beautiful vision which had haunted 
 the dreams of earlier Greek religion. Aristotle com- 
 bated Plato in the interest of redeeming the external 
 world from the unreality which it tended to assume 
 in his master's thought. In the religious estimate of 
 Greek philosophy, he may be said to have prepared 
 the way for the Stoic school, which appeared in the 
 third century before Christ. The Stoic philosophy 
 returned to the idea of God from which Plato had de- 
 parted, and conceived of Him as indwelling in the 
 world, penetrating everywhere and filling it with His 
 presence. The world was thought to sustain the 
 same relation to God as the body to the spirit ; it was 
 directed and controlled by an immanent life of whose 
 beauty and glory outward nature is the direct mani- 
 festation, while the human spirit in its moral capacity 
 and attainments expressed the highest revelation of 
 the actual presence of the divine. That such a sys- 
 tem of philosophy as the Stoic should have prevailed 
 till the second century after Christ, and on the eve of 
 its decline should have given birth to three such men 
 as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, is a cir- 
 cumstance, the importance of which it is hardly pos- 
 sible to overestimate, when considering the influences 
 which moulded the early teachers of Greek theology. 
 But in the second century of the Christian era, the 
 tendency of thought was back again to Plato. Sto- 
 
CLEMENTS IDEA OF GOD. 45 
 
 icism was failing" to satisfy the dark mood of an age 
 in which the sense of sin was once more becoming the 
 supreme motive underlying" all speculative thought. 
 The world was no longer what it had been. The ho- 
 rizon seemed dark and forbidding to those who sought 
 to read the future destinies of mankind. They saw 
 everywhere the presence of gigantic evils, and no 
 power at work adequate to redress them. Even to 
 many Christian thinkers it required too much faith to 
 believe that the world as they saw it had been re- 
 deemed. Hence the Gnostics reverted to Plato, with 
 his idea of a distant passive Deity, and gave up the 
 world to destruction, with the exception of a chosen 
 few in whom kinship to God was sufficiently strong 
 to enable them to secure salvation. Neo-Platonism 
 had its forerunner in Plutarch (a. d. 120), who by 
 one of the strange perversions which so often accom- 
 pany the revival of an earlier thought, saw in Plato a 
 principle for the renewal of the old mythology which 
 Plato had done so much to bring into discredit. 
 
 Such was the spirit of the age when Clement was 
 aiming to commend Christianity to earnest and inquir- 
 ing minds. That he was to some extent influenced by 
 the current sentiments of his time it is sufficient to 
 admit. We should be misled, however, as to his real 
 meaning and purpose, if we sought only in his writings 
 for his formal concurrence with prevailing ideas. Like 
 Justin, he sometimes speaks of God as the absolute 
 and the unknown, or even as the incomprehensible, 
 whose life is sufficient in itself without the creation. 
 But he has no real interest in concessions like these to 
 the fashion of the age ; his higher utterances contra- 
 dict and disprove them. He is mainly concerned in 
 enforcing the immanence of God. Christ is every- 
 
46 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 where presented by him as Deity indwelling in the 
 world. The world is viewed as part of an organic 
 whole, moving on to some exalted destiny in the har- 
 mony of the divine order. Humanity has its life and 
 beino* in Christ, to whom also it is constitutionally re- 
 lated ; the whole human race, not any elect portion 
 only, is included under the operation of grace as well 
 as of law ; all human history is unified and consecrated 
 by the visible traces of divine revelation- 
 Less than any of the fathers is Clement tempted to 
 indulge in speculations about the mode of the divine 
 existence. He is concerned with realities, not with 
 mere speculative opinions. He attempts no formal 
 explanation of how Deity in His immanence is to be 
 reconciled with the transcendent and unknown essence 
 of God. But there is no qualification in his belief, 
 that Christ is in the fullest sense God indwelling in 
 the world and in humanity. Language seems poor and 
 inadequate as he struggles with it in order to assert 
 and illustrate the workings of the present God. 
 
 Nor does Clement formally endeavor to demon- 
 strate the connection between the historic personality 
 of Jesus, and the Deity whom he held to have been 
 incarnate in Him. This is the assumption which un- 
 derlies his thought, that which he takes for granted, 
 because, in his own exuberant faith, he feels no need 
 of labored demonstration. But the connection, as it 
 exists in his mind, may be clearly traced. He does 
 not rely upon the display of omnipotent power, as seen 
 in the miracles of the historic Christ, to confirm His 
 divine character, but upon the life of the church of 
 which He is the perennial source, in the transforma- 
 tion which His name still works in human character, 
 in the self-sacrifice which is the reproduction of His 
 
THE INDWELLING GOD. 47 
 
 example, in the boundless hope which has its spring 
 in the love and devotion which He still continues to 
 inspire, in the spiritual illumination of a soul who has 
 acknowledged Him as its master. 
 
 Since Christ is the indwelling God, His incarnation 
 is not a thing new or strange, an abrupt break in the 
 continuity of man's moral history ; it had not been 
 decreed in the divine counsels, in order to avoid some 
 impending catastrophe which suddenly confronted or 
 threatened to disappoint the divine purpose ; it was 
 not merely an historical incident by which He came 
 into the world from a distance, and, having done His 
 work, retired again from it. He was in the world be- 
 fore Pie came in the flesh, and was preparing the 
 world for His visible advent. As indwelling Deity, 
 He was to a certain extent already universally incar- 
 nated, as the light that lighteth every man, the light 
 shining in the darkness, the light and life of men in 
 every age. Hence the prophecies of his advent enter 
 into the organic process of human history, and in the 
 spiritual life of man may be read the foreshadowings 
 of Him who was the crown and completion of human- 
 ity, the fulfillment of the whole creation. 
 
 Because Deity indwelt in humanity, and the human 
 reason partook, by its very nature, of that which was 
 divine, Clement was forced to see in the highest prod- 
 ucts of the reason the fruit of divine revelation. He 
 makes no distinction between natural and revealed re- 
 ligion, between what man discovers and God reveals. 
 All that is true and well said in Greek philosophy was 
 as truly given by divine revelation, as was the moral 
 truth proclaimed by Jewish legislators and prophets. 
 The higher activities of human thought and reflection 
 are only the process by which the revelation of truth 
 
48 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 is conveyed to man, 1 and inspiration is the God-given 
 insight which enables men to read aright the truth 
 which God reveals. 
 
 The doctrine of indwelling Deity — of the Logos, 
 as constitutionally or organically related to the human 
 soul — may be called the theological principle in the 
 teaching of Clement. Closely connected with it, and 
 indeed the necessary inference from it, is his doctrine 
 of man as made in the divine image. No other writer 
 in the ancient church has presented this truth with so 
 much clearness, or so insisted upon its importance as 
 the ground of faith in God or of hope for man. With 
 Clement it is the point of departure in treating of sin 
 and of redemption, — the key-note, it may be called, 
 of his anthropology. 2 The image of God in man is a 
 spiritual endowment of humanity which is capable of 
 expressing the inmost essence or character of God, — 
 it is a moral or spiritual image, containing, as it were, 
 in the germ, the highest and divinest qualities as they 
 exist in God. It is that in the Son, which comes from 
 being begotten by the Father. Because man's spir- 
 itual constitution is made after a divine type, it be- 
 comes the law of his being to fulfill its possibilities, 
 and to rise to the full resemblance to God. The image 
 of God in every man constitutes the warrant for be- 
 lieving that he may rise from the possibility into the 
 actuality, that the image may develop into a living and 
 speaking resemblance. It is because man is made in 
 the divine image that his nature responds to the call 
 of God, and his conscience reechoes the commandments 
 of God. But the law of God, according to such a 
 view, is not conceived as a code of external command- 
 
 1 Exhort, c. vi. ; Strom., i. c. 19 ; also, i. c. 5. 
 
 2 Exhort., c. x. ; c. xii. 
 
THE NATURE OF MAN. 49 
 
 ments, — it is a law written within the heart. Chris- 
 tianity, as compared with Judaism, is the passing from 
 the stage where the law is presented from without on 
 external tables of stone, to that in which it is discerned 
 as written within man's nature ; and when thus rec- 
 ognized, the hard sense of duty gives place to willing 
 aspiration, and the attainment of character is set over 
 against the fulfillment of formal ordinances. Such is 
 the spirit of the new covenant in Christ as St. Paul 
 discerned it, as the prophet Jeremiah described it, in 
 the transition hour of Jewish history : " Behold, saith 
 the Lord, I will make a new covenant with them in 
 those days : I will put my laws in their hearts, and in 
 their minds will I write them, and their sins and in- 
 iquities will I remember no more." 
 
 Clement does not speculate on the nature or the 
 origin of evil. He knows nothing of the later dogma 
 of the fall of man in Adam, nor of Adam as the fed- 
 eral representative of mankind ; nor does it seem as 
 if such opinions would have commended themselves 
 to his mind as explaining the nature or the source of 
 human sinfulness. He sees, rather, in Christ the nor- 
 mal man, the true head and centre of humanity ; and 
 in treating of sin and its ravages, never lets go his 
 hold on the truth that man is constituted after the di- 
 vine image. Hence he regards the will as free to fol- 
 low out the divine purpose which is the law of man's 
 being. The freedom of the will, which Clement held 
 in common with all the Greek fathers, was not a tem- 
 porary expedient in their thought in order to meet the 
 fatalism of Gnostic theories ; it was a necessary prin- 
 ciple flowing from the importance assigned to the 
 primary truth that man was created in the divine im- 
 age. However much that image might have been 
 4 
 
50 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 obscured by human sinfulness, it still existed witb its 
 original endowment, and the work of Christ had con- 
 sisted in revealing man to himself, in making known 
 to him the divine constitution of his being, as well as 
 in presenting the nature and character of God. The 
 freedom of the will was not the freedom of a being 
 independent of God or detached frcm Him, but rather 
 allied to Him by his inmost constitution, and there- 
 fore retaining the capacity, through all the vicissitudes 
 of his career, of fulfilling his appointed destiny. 1 
 
 Like others of the Fathers who had come under the 
 influence of Hellenic thought, Clement regarded ig- 
 norance as the mother of sin, and finds in revelation, 
 considered as light, the divine remedy. But he does 
 not view ignorance as the only difficulty to be over- 
 
 1 It was not till Augustine had fallen back into the bondage of 
 an essentially Gnostic or Manichsean fatalism, and accepted the 
 principle of an arbitrary election common to all the Gnostic sys- 
 tems, that he gave up the freedom of the will. His denial of 
 freedom was, indeed, a consequence of his doctrine of election, 
 but beneath this notion of election lay the idea which conditioned 
 all Gnostic speculation, that humanity had become separated from 
 God, and, in its independence and isolation, needed the aid of a 
 power foreign to itself in order to its restoration ; or, in theolog- 
 ical language, the image of God forfeited by Adam must be re- 
 stored by an external creative act, as in baptism. A recent 
 writer has remarked on the impressiveness of the fact that the 
 Greeks were never embarrassed as were the Latins by questions 
 relating to free will and necessity. The fact does not lose its 
 impressiveness, though no longer difficult to understand, when it 
 is remembered that the Greek theologians regarded the image of 
 God in man as an inalienable possession, and therefore regarded 
 God and man as bound together by an organic tie ; while the 
 Latins regarded mankind as having, through the fall of Adam, 
 lost its spiritual kinship to God, while yet remaining susceptible 
 to an omnipotent influence capable of bearing down all finite 
 opposition. Cf. Maine's Ancient Law, p. 342. 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE HUMAN RACE. 51 
 
 come in the redemptive process ; there is also in man 
 the inability to follow righteousness, which springs 
 from the weakness or disinclination of the will. Ig- 
 norance of the right, or the unwillingness to follow it, 
 these are the two obstacles to be removed in order 
 that man may rise to the free imitation of God, and 
 share in that humanity which has been deified in 
 Christ. 
 
 The history of man's redemption from sin becomes, 
 according to Clement's conception, the education of 
 the human race, under the tuition of indwelling 
 Deity. 1 The divine teacher, whom he has portrayed 
 in his work called the " Instructor," is, he tells us 
 with constant reiteration, no other than God Himself. 
 One can imagine that he had in view, as he wrote it, 
 the prophetic language of Plato : " We must wait for 
 one, be it a God or a God-inspired man, who will 
 teach us our religious duties, and take away the dark- 
 ness from our eyes." But the reality, in Clement's 
 view, surpassed the prophecy and the anticipation. 
 Such a divine teacher had come in the flesh and 
 dwelt amongst us in visible form ; but in his spiritual, 
 his most real presence as the essential Christ, He re- 
 mained here forever as the teacher of humanity ; nor 
 had there been a time since the world began when He 
 was not present to superintend the education of the 
 race. It was He who spoke through Moses and the 
 prophets, and it was He who spoke in Greek philoso- 
 phy. In the progressive education of humanity, He 
 even gave the sun and moon to be worshiped, in 
 order that men might not be atheistical ; in order, 
 also, that they might rise through the lower worship 
 to something higher. 2 He is not the teacher of a few 
 1 Pcedag., i. c. 9. 2 Strom., vi. c. 14. 
 
52 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 only, in some favored time or place, but He comes to 
 all, at all times and everywhere. He is the Saviour 
 of all, for all men are His ; " some with the conscious- 
 ness of what He is to them, others not as yet ; some 
 as friends, others as faithful servants ; others barely 
 as servants." 1 As their teacher, He educates the 
 enlightened by the inward intuition of truth, the 
 believers by good hopes, and those who are hard of 
 heart by corrective discipline through operations that 
 can be felt. 
 
 The idea of life as essentially an education under 
 the guidance of immanent Deity implies a divine con- 
 stitution in man formed to receive the divine teaching. 
 The idea of education involves capacity and ability in 
 the pupil, and also an innate disposition to receive and 
 follow instruction. To educate is to educe and de- 
 velop the powers already implanted in the soul. The 
 teaching of the divine Instructor follows the analogy 
 of human methods, — it appeals to, it evokes and 
 strengthens, the divine that is in man, those instincts 
 of the soul which yearn after all that is true or beau- 
 tiful or good. The gracious and benign Instructor of 
 humanity possesses unwearied patience, and in accom- 
 plishing His task has at His disposal all the resources 
 of God. His methods vary with the need of the 
 pupil. He overcomes ignorance by setting forth the 
 truth ; He meets unwillingness to follow and obey 
 the truth, by threatening, by censure, by discipline, by 
 chastisement. He prefers the gentler methods, but 
 never hesitates to follow severer measures when gentle 
 ones do not avail. 
 
 Clement has much to say upon the function of fear 
 as a motive to righteous action. He regards it as in- 
 
 1 Strom., vii. c. 2. 
 
THE PURPOSE OF FEAR. 53 
 
 dispensable in this lifelong process of redemption 
 from the power of sin, but he also refuses to con- 
 sider fear apart from the work of the instructor. 
 Fear is not a quality begotten in man in separate- 
 ness and isolation from God, for in his view no hu- 
 man soul can escape the divine tuition. It is rather 
 a necessary part of the divine method of education, 
 that fear should be implanted in man in order to his 
 protection from the evils that assault and hurt the 
 soul, as well as from those that endanger the body. 
 But if we may so speak, the ultimate objective ground 
 of this saving fear in spiritual things lies in no being, 
 no condition of time or place, save God Himself. God 
 alone inspires the fear, and always for a disciplinary 
 purpose. 1 In whatever forms the fear may be clothed 
 by the human imagination, the only reality to be truly 
 feared is God ; and he has read rightly the true mean- 
 ing of fear, who, in the words of St. Paul, works out 
 his own salvation in fear and trembling, because it is 
 God that is working in hi?n, to will and to do of His 
 good pleasure. 
 
 The Instructor has not only fear at his disposal as 
 a means of education, but He inflicts judgments and 
 penalties. The unbeliever who will not heed exhor- 
 tation, or the believing Christian who still cherishes 
 the inclination to sin, must experience the severity 
 of God. The judgment is not conceived as the final 
 assize of the universe in some remote future, but as 
 a present continuous element in the process of hu- 
 man education. The purpose of the judgment, as of 
 all the divine penalties, is always remedial. 2 Judg- 
 ment enters into the work of redemption as a con- 
 
 1 Strom., ii. c. 7; Pcedag., i. 9. 
 
 2 Strom., i. c. 27 ; iv. c. 24. 
 
54 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 structive factor. God does not teach in order that 
 He may finally judge, but He judges in order that 
 He may teach. The censures, the punishments, the 
 judgment of God are a necessary element of the edu- 
 cational process in the life of humanity, and the mo- 
 tive which underlies them is goodness and love. They 
 are at the disposal of a divine Instructor, who or- 
 ders the course of the external world for a benefi- 
 cent end, who has attested His love by coming into 
 the world and dying for men. 1 There is no essential 
 difference between justice and goodness (as Marcion 
 had taught) ; justice resolves itself into love ; even 
 the divine anger — if it is proper to so term it — is 
 full of love to man, for whose sake God became in- 
 carnate ; " to Him alone it belongs to consider, and 
 His care it is to see to the way and the manner in 
 which the life of men may be made more healthy." 2 
 
 The idea of life as an education under the immedi- 
 ate superintendence of a divine Instructor, who is 
 God Himself indwelling in the world, constitutes the 
 central truth in Clement's theology. Here lies his 
 answer to the diverse Gnostic heresies with which his 
 age abounded. To Marcion and others denouncing 
 the heathen world before Christ came as under the 
 dominion of demons, and as only ripening for destruc- 
 tion, Clement virtually replies that the divine In- 
 structor had himself been speaking to the heathens, 
 through their own recognized teachers, their poets 
 and philosophers, by exhortations to the pursuit after 
 righteousness ; that these utterances, however imper- 
 fect, appealed to a humanity made in God's like- 
 ness, and endowed with a desire to reach forth after 
 the divine. To Marcion, still further sharply dis- 
 1 Pcedag., i. c. 12. 2 Padag., i. c. 12. 
 
CLEMENT AS AN APOLOGIST. 55 
 
 languishing between justice and love, and discarding 
 the Old Testament and Jewish religion, because in 
 them justice appears as the ruling principle, Clement 
 replies that justice is but another form or manifesta- 
 tion of the divine love, designed to act upon those 
 who are in the lower stages of the redemptive pro- 
 cess ; that the judgments of God, which are in all 
 the world, are purifying the spiritual atmosphere, and 
 adapting the earthly environment of man to his spir- 
 itual life. 1 Against those, on the other hand, who 
 saw in Christianity only the continuation of Jewish 
 religion, as in Ebionism, or the pseudo - Clementine 
 writings, Clement, while doing full justice to the 
 principle of historical and spiritual continuity which 
 binds together the two dispensations, asserts their 
 difference by showing that He who spoke through 
 Jewish prophets had in the fullness of time appeared 
 as God manifest in the flesh, and given to men to 
 know the truth, which in Judaism was but faintly 
 discerned, and enabled man, through Christ, to rise 
 to the imitation of God, to the contemplation of Deity 
 in His inmost nature. In opposition to the tendency 
 which showed itself in all the Gnostic systems to divide 
 the human family into fixed classes, the elect and the 
 non-elect, separated by impassable barriers, Clement 
 emphasized the spiritual oneness of humanity, its ac- 
 tual redemption as a whole in Christ, while each indi- 
 vidual is necessarily related to God in virtue of his 
 constitution in the divine image. The idea of a dis- 
 tant Deity which underlies all the Gnostic theosophies, 
 — a God outside the framework of all human things, 
 and incapable of communicating Himself to human- 
 ity, — is met by the idea of God as indwelling in the 
 1 Pcedag., i. c. 12. 
 
56 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 world, a real and continuous presence of the Word 
 made flesh, who is one with God, and who is God. 
 The Gnostic conception of the world as an accident, 
 in its nature evil, only by the renunciation of which 
 a few rise to salvation, is everywhere contradicted in 
 Clement's thought, by the conception of the world 
 as organized throughout in accordance with a moral 
 principle, and as lending itself to the higher inter- 
 ests of man. Salvation is not a physical process, but 
 an ethical growth, through union with God; divine 
 knowledge is no mere speculative insight into the 
 origin of things, but an ever-growing perception of 
 the true character of God, as it is revealed in Christ. 
 Another ruling idea among the Gnostics, that in the 
 process of redemption God remains passive and un- 
 concerned, an idea which also lay at the root of all 
 oriental theosophy, and at a later time became influ- 
 ential in Neo-Platonic thought, is met in Clement's 
 theology by the truth, to advocate which was the 
 object of all his writings, that God Himself initiates 
 and indwells in the process of redemption; that God 
 alone is the immanent force acting directly or im- 
 mediately within humanity, dispensing with the neces- 
 sity for mediators in heaven or in earth. 
 
 The doctrine of a sacrificial expiation for sin as 
 commonly understood finds no place in Clement's view 
 of redemption. There is no necessity that God should 
 be reconciled with humanity, for there is no schism 
 in the divine nature between love and justice which 
 needs to be overcome before love can go forth in free 
 and full forgiveness. The idea that justice and love 
 are distinct attributes of God, differing widely in 
 their operation, — a doctrine first propounded in all its 
 rigor by Marcion, — is regarded by Clement as having 
 
THE INCARNATION AND ATONEMENT. 57 
 
 its origin in a mistaken conception of their nature. 
 Justice and love are in reality one and the same attri- 
 bute, or, to speak from the point of view which distin- 
 guishes them, God is most loving when He is most 
 just, and most just when He is most loving. Love 
 constitutes the essential quality of God ; not the love 
 which in its inferior human manifestations appears as 
 an indulgent, weak affection ; but love in its highest 
 sense, as that in God which seeks the perfection of all 
 His creatures, and follows them with cliastisements 
 for the insurement of its end. 
 
 In the redemptive work of Christ, Clement sees no 
 readjustment or restoration of a broken relationship 
 between God and humanity, but rather the revelation 
 of a relationship which had always existed, indestruc- 
 tible in its nature, obscured but not obliterated by 
 human ignorance and sin. Humanity in the light 
 of the incarnation appears as constitutionally allied 
 with its Maker, as in its inmost being lovable and 
 therefore loved by God. Truly to know Him who in 
 love guides men to the life that is best, carries with it 
 the recognition of duty and the obligation of obedi- 
 ence. The forgiveness of sin comes as by a spiritual 
 law to those who respond to the divine Teacher speak- 
 ing within the heart. In the life and especially the 
 death of Christ lies the evidence of God's identifica- 
 tion with man ; the incarnation is in itself the atone- 
 ment by which God reconciles the world unto Himself. 
 God in Christ is seen sharing all that is darkest and 
 most bitter in human experience, in order to the su- 
 preme manifestation of His love. 1 
 
 According to Clement, faith is the inward response 
 of a soid constituted for the truth ; it is the spiritual 
 1 Pcedag., i. cc. 6, 8. 
 
58 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 vision by which spiritual truth is discerned, corre- 
 sponding in the sphere of spiritual things to the eye 
 of the body in the world of external things. 1 It may 
 be weak in its first ventures, but it grows stronger 
 and clearer under the divine tuition ; its tendency in 
 the matured Christian is to pass over into that knowl- 
 edge winch is the absolute certainty of the things re- 
 vealed, — the knowledge (Gnosis) of St. Paul when 
 he said, " I know in whom I have believed." In this 
 consciousness of the soul lies the principle of certitude. 
 Back to it must be referred for final sanction, the 
 teachings of philosophers, of apostles, and prophets. 
 Clement admits no antithesis between faith and knowl- 
 edge, between reason and revelation ; knowledge en- 
 ters into faith as one of its constituent elements ; 2 rea- 
 son and reflection are the avenues through which the 
 divine revelation comes. What is called "culture" 
 has therefore a close relationship to faith, 3 and human 
 knowledge in all departments of inquiry is necessary 
 for the comprehension of the Scriptures. 4 As Clement 
 recognizes no schism in the divine nature between jus- 
 tice and love, so neither is there an antagonism be- 
 tween the faculties of the human soul. Those are 
 wrong who make faith an exceptionally supernatural 
 gift, as if it were sufficient in itself apart from the in- 
 tellect or reason ; faith in its highest aspect is truly 
 natural, springing from the endowment of our consti- 
 tution with God's image. But if Clement exalts what 
 some have called the human element in religion and 
 revelation, he does not fall into the error of thinking 
 that man originates a revelation, or evolves the truth 
 
 1 Pcedag., i. c. 6. 
 
 2 Pcedag., i. c. 6 ; Strom., i. c. 8 ; also vii. c. 10 ; and ii. c. 4* 
 8 Strom., i. c. 6. 4 Strom., i. e, 9. 
 
REASON AND SCRIPTURE. 59 
 
 by some internal process apart from God; for he 
 cannot conceive of man except as under a continu- 
 ous divine influence, under an education which binds 
 him closely to those objective facts in human history 
 through which the divine Instructor speaks to the 
 reason, above all to the supreme historic fact of the 
 incarnation of the Word. It is for this reason that 
 Clement attaches the highest importance to the Scrip- 
 tures both of the Old and New Testaments ; he has 
 grasped the principle which makes the Bible to be the 
 word of God ; everywhere he sees in the written Word 
 the traces of the divine Instructor, exhorting and 
 teaching, reproving and correcting, disciplining men 
 by judgments and punishments, presenting Himself 
 in the body as the consummate model of life, using 
 all the events of life as the instruments of that spir- 
 itual education whose end is conformity to His own 
 likeness. 
 
 But Clement's use of Scripture is also in harmony 
 with the principle that all authority for spiritual truth 
 lies in its last analysis, within the consciousness of 
 man. He does not adduce scriptural proof as having 
 an independent value for the support of tenets obnox- 
 ious to the reason, which must be received if at all on 
 evidence external to the reason. Although he has 
 given no formal definition of inspiration, it is clear 
 that he regards it as having the same general charac- 
 ter in the sacred writers that it has among the best 
 of Greek philosophers ; l it is no arbitrary action of 
 God upon the human faculties, but rather the high 
 exhibition of that capacity with which the human con- 
 stitution is endowed in virtue of its divine affiliation, 
 and by which is discerned the revelation which God is 
 1 Strom., i. c. 13 ; Ibid. vi. c. 17. 
 
60 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 always making to the world ; l in its highest action it 
 still corresponds in principle, however it may differ in 
 degree, with the humblest insight of faith. 2 Hence the 
 verification of Christian truth is dependent upon no 
 line of hierarchical descent ; the apostles are to be 
 revered and followed, not so much because they were 
 apostles, but because and in so far as they have pene- 
 trated into the divine treasures of the incarnate Word ; 
 the true successors of the apostles 3 are they who like 
 them live perfectly in accordance with the highest 
 reason. 
 
 In his relation toward heresy the position of Clem- 
 ent differs greatly from the attitude of the Roman 
 church in his own day, or that of the later degenerate 
 church of the East. Although he lived in the centre 
 from which most of the heresies proceeded, and was 
 familiar with them in their worst forms, yet such is 
 his faith in the power and invincibleness of the truth, 
 that he believes in the freest examination, and boldly 
 urges upon the heretics themselves the necessity for a 
 deeper study of the faith as the remedy for false opin- 
 ions. He does not fall back upon a creed or rule of 
 faith to be received on the external authority of the 
 church or of tradition ; he does not appeal to any tri- 
 bunal to cut off the heretics from the communion of 
 the faithful; he does not denounce them in extrava- 
 gant language in order to show a becoming horror for 
 their tenets. From some of his allusions to the here- 
 tics, it appears that he regarded them as men earnest 
 and sincere in the pursuit of truth. When those out- 
 side of the church urge the diversity of opinion within 
 its ranks as an argument against joining the Christian 
 
 1 Strom., i. c. 19. 
 
 2 Strom., i. c. 4 ; Ibid. c. 9. 3 Strom., vi. c. 13. 
 
CLEMENTS TREATMENT OF HERESY. 61 
 
 communion, he replies that there are many sects in 
 philosophy, and yet one does not refuse for that reason 
 to philosophize ; that there are many opposite opinions 
 in medicine, and yet one does not decline to call in a 
 physician. 1 Heresies call for a deeper and more 
 searching inquiry, they entail a greater labor on the 
 seeker for truth, but for this very reason they are aids 
 to the discovery of the truth. 2 As to the heretics 
 themselves, if their errors proceed from vanity or self- 
 will, or any other evil root, the remedy lies with the 
 divine Instructor, the living present Christ, whose 
 discipline and chastisements alone can wean them 
 from their evil state to the knowledge of Himself. 3 
 So far as their errors proceed from a superficial use of 
 the reason, the remedy lies in a fuller use of the reason. 
 If they have mistaken the sense of Scripture, they are 
 to be invited to its more thorough study. Clement 
 wrote no books, as did some of the fathers, " against 
 all heresies," for the purpose of a detailed exposure of 
 error ; but he did that which was better : he combated 
 the errors most effectively by writings whose object 
 was to exhibit the truth in the fullness of its attraction 
 and adaptation for man ; indeed his entire literary ac- 
 tivity may be regarded as one great apology for the 
 Christian faith by showing what the faith really was. 
 
 Clement does not give any formal definition of the 
 church, nor are his few allusions to the subject of a 
 kind to satisfy those in search of a historical catena 
 by which later notions regarding the church may be 
 supported. There are no traces in his writings of the 
 doctrine of apostolic succession ; the unity of the 
 church is nowhere made to depend upon unity with 
 
 1 Strom., vii. c. 15. 
 
 2 Ibid,. 3 Strom., vii. e. 1C. 
 
62 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 the bishop ; baptism is not presented as essential to 
 salvation ; nor is salvation limited to those within the 
 visible organization. The clergy are not regarded as 
 having any special priestly character ; in the current 
 acceptation of terms, there is in the church neither 
 priesthood, sacrifice, nor altar. Everywhere the Scrip- 
 tures are placed above the church as well as before 
 it, and Scripture is not intrusted to the hierarchy for 
 preservation or interpretation, but to the Christian 
 conscience. And yet the church which Clement por- 
 trays has its notes. Its main characteristic is ethical. 
 It is composed of those who realize their calling as the 
 children of God, who have put aside the old man and 
 stripped off the garment of wickedness, and put on 
 the immortality of Christ. The church has also or- 
 ganic life ; it is a community of men who are led by 
 the divine Logos, an invincible city upon earth which 
 no force can subdue, where the will of God is done 
 as it is in heaven. The church is like a human be- 
 ing, 1 consisting of many members ; it is refreshed and 
 grows ; it is welded and compacted together ; it is fed 
 and sustained by a supernatural life, and becomes in its 
 turn, in the hands of the divine Instructor, a means of 
 leading humanity into life. The bond of the church's 
 unityf, the secret of the church's life and growth, is the 
 living personal Christ, whose immanence in humanity 
 is the only force adequate to its deliverance from sin, 
 and its final perfecting according to the original pur- 
 pose of its creation. 
 
 The sacraments, and, in general, the rites of wor- 
 ship, do not meet any extensive treatment in the writ- 
 ings of Clement. What is said on these topics is 
 always in the way of incidental allusion rather than 
 
 1 Pcedag., i. c. 6. 
 
THE SACRAMENTS AS SYMBOLS. 63 
 
 of direct exposition. In Clement's thought, the real 
 presence and the divine activity of the living personal 
 Christ is organically related to the soul, in all times 
 and places, in all the conditions and circumstances of 
 life. He alone purifies man from sin, leads him to re- 
 pentance, and prepares him for that supreme moment 
 when, in the waters of baptism, he takes the vow of 
 self -consecration to the divine will. He alone every- 
 where and always gives Himself to humanity as the 
 bread of life. Hence the sacraments became symbols 
 of great spiritual processes ; they are signs, and effec- 
 tive signs, of an actual purification and an actual 
 sustenance. But the vast spiritual reality is never 
 limited, diminished, or materialized by identifying the 
 sign with the thing signified. The water of baptism is 
 charged with no magical potency ; the bread and wine 
 are not transmuted into spiritual power operating as 
 by a mechanical law ; the bread and wine stand as 
 metaphors * of that eternal Word of life conveyed by 
 God in Christ to those who know to receive it, by the 
 many and diverse channels of approach to which the 
 soul lies open. The idea of a sacrifice in the eucharist 
 which the church pleads before God, or which propi- 
 tiates the divine favor, is disavowed : u Neither by sac- 
 rifices nor offerings, nor, on the other hand, by glory 
 and honor, is the Deity won over, nor is He influenced 
 by any such things ; " " we glorify Him who gave Him- 
 self in sacrifice for us, we also sacrificing ourselves." 2 
 There is in the nature of spiritual things no other sac- 
 rifice than that of self to do God's will, which man 
 can offer to the Eternal. 3 " The altar that is with us 
 here on earth is the congregation of those who devote 
 themselves to prayer, having, as it were, one common 
 1 Pcedag., i. c. 6. 2 Strom., vii. c. 3. 8 Strom., vii. c. 6. 
 
64 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 voice and mind." " The sacrifice of the church is the 
 word breathing as incense from holy souls, the sacrifice 
 and the whole mind being at the same time unveiled 
 to God." 
 
 In the lifetime of Clement, the contagion of a false 
 asceticism was beginning to spread in the church, al- 
 though its recognition as a principle of the Christian 
 life was still chiefly confined to the heretical sects, such 
 as the Montanists and the Gnostics. In opposition to 
 those who advocated voluntary poverty or the aban- 
 donment of property, by a misunderstanding of the 
 teaching of Christ, Clement reasons that it is the inor- 
 dinate love of money which the Saviour condemns ; 
 that the abuse of riches, not their possession, hurts 
 the soul. What Christ desires is the conversion of 
 the inward man to Himself, and this can be accom- 
 plished by no external procedure. It is God's design 
 that property should be unequally distributed ; the di- 
 vine education of humanity includes the right use of 
 riches ; they are the stewardship of a trust for one's 
 own benefit, and that of others. Hence the doctrine 
 of the community of goods appears to him to contro- 
 vert the divine will. 1 Clement does not conceive of 
 fasting as consisting in abstinence from meat and 
 wine ; such an idea prevailed in heathen religions, and 
 has no essential relationship to Christian culture. 2 
 There is a true fasting, 3 which lies not in the mortifi- 
 cation of the body or the endeavor to extirpate the 
 physical appetites, but in obtaining the mastery over 
 sin ; the abstinence from all evil in thought, word, or 
 action, — from covetousness and voluptuousness, from< 
 which all vices flow. The only true fasting is that 
 
 1 Strom., iii. c. 9. 2 Strom., iii. c. 7. 
 
 3 Pcedag., vii. c. 12 ; Strom., vi. c. 12 ; Ibid. vii. c. 12. 
 
OPPOSITION TO ASCETICISM. 65 
 
 which God has appointed, — to loose the bands of 
 wickedness, to dissolve the knots of oppressive con- 
 tracts, to let the oppressed go free, to cover the naked, 
 and to shelter the homeless poor. Against those who 
 urged the celibate life as preferable in itself, on the 
 ground that thus a greater work could be done for 
 God, or the salvation of the individual soul more per- 
 fectly secured, Clement maintained that marriage is a 
 divine ordinance, given to subserve the loftiest pur- 
 poses of human education and discipline, and not a 
 concession to the flesh. He who is married is more of 
 a man and fitted for a larger work for God, in that he 
 receives thereby the fuller, more complex discipline of 
 life, in his solicitude for wife and children, home and 
 possessions, remaining faithful through all temptations, 
 and inseparable from the love of God. 1 In Clem- 
 ent's application the words of Christ, " There am I 
 in the midst of them," apply to the family, where 
 father and mother and children gather together in his 
 name. 2 
 
 The principle which made Clement strong to resist 
 the sinister tendencies of asceticism sprang from his 
 idea of God and of His relationship to the world. The 
 world is sacred as a divine creation, — the abode cf 
 indwelling Deity ; the human body is the temple of a 
 Holy Spirit, and becomes a very sanctuary by conse- 
 cration to the will of God. The outward world is or- 
 dered in the divine purpose for the well - being of 
 man, its beauty is the reflection of a higher, di- 
 viner beauty ; it belongs to one organic whole, the 
 disowning of which in any part is to distrust God 
 and contemn His wisdom. While the power of self- 
 restraint is one of the divinest gifts of God to man, 
 
 1 Strom., vii. c. 12- 2 Strom., iii. c. 10. 
 
 5 
 
66 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 and temperance and moderation are to be followed in 
 all things, so that the life of the senses does not en- 
 tangle and weaken the higher energies of the spirit, 
 yet every creature of God is good and to be received 
 with thankfulness ; " The economy of creation is good, 
 and all things are well-administered : nothing happens 
 without a cause. I must be in what is thine, O om- 
 nipotent One ; and if I am, then am I near Thee." 1 
 Man, it is true, is in this world as in a pilgrimage ; 
 yet he uses inns and dwellings by the way ; he has a 
 care of the things of the world, of the places where 
 he halts. The wise man is ready to leave his dwelling- 
 place and property without excessive emotion, he gives 
 thanks for his sojourn, and blesses God for his depar- 
 ture. We are sojourners in the world, but we are also 
 at home in the world. No one is a stranger to the 
 world by nature, for their essence is one, and God is 
 one. 2 
 
 Clement has expressed himself sparingly in refer- 
 ence to the future life, and what are called the " last 
 things." Either he is not interested in questions which 
 cannot be solved, and avoids the sphere of mere opin- 
 ion, or his mind is preoccupied with the theme of re- 
 demption, as calling out and satisfying the highest 
 energies of the soul. The opinion once so generally 
 held, especially among Jewish Christians, and still 
 prevailing among the Christians in the West in Clem- 
 ent's own time, that Christ was soon to make a sec- 
 ond personal coming in the flesh, in order to introduce 
 a millennium for the faithful and to take vengeance 
 upon his adversaries, is to his mind irrational, for it 
 contradicts his supreme conviction that the essential 
 spiritual Christ is already here in the fullness of his 
 1 Strom., iv. c. 23. 2 Strom., iv. c. 26 
 
THE IMMORTAL LIFE. 67 
 
 exalted might, and has already begun to witness his 
 triumph "at the right hand of the Father." The 
 judgment of the world is not viewed as a fixed event 
 in the distant future, but as now forming part, an 
 integral part, of the process by which the human race 
 is educated under its divine Instructor. The motives 
 and sanctions of the higher spiritual life are not the 
 rewards of future bliss ; but the service and imitation 
 of God for His own sake is the inspiration and reward 
 of the truly enlightened Christian. 1 Clement did not 
 accept the opinion regarding the resurrection, which 
 was received in the West, and sustained by Tertullian, 
 that the identical flesh of the body which had been laid 
 in the grave would be reanimated ; the resurrection 
 was the standing up again in immortal life ; it was not 
 the same body, but a reclothing in some higher form 
 of the purified spirit. The future life is conceived as 
 existing in different stages of blessedness on the prin- 
 ciple of a progressive development. " God works all 
 things up to what is better." 2 The beneficent work 
 of the Saviour is not restricted by any accidents of 
 time or place, but He operates to save at all times and 
 everywhere. " If in this life there are so many ways 
 for purification and repentance, how much more should 
 there be after death. The purification of souls when 
 separated from the body will be easier. We can set 
 no limits to the agency of the Redeemer ; to redeem, 
 to rescue, to discipline, is His work, and so will He 
 continue to operate after this life." 3 It may be that 
 Clement had limited notions of the immensity of the 
 universe, as modern astronomy has revealed it; but 
 
 1 Strom., iv. c. 22. 
 
 2 Strom., iv. c. 26. 
 
 3 Strom., vi. c. 6 ; ef. Neander, History of Doctrine, p. 254. 
 
68 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 even had he known all that we know, one cannot think 
 that it would have shaken his faith in the doctrine of 
 the incarnation, — that the insignificance of this planet 
 amonc the millions of the spheres would have been to 
 him a reason why God could not have walked it in hu- 
 man form. His belief in the inherent worth of the 
 individual soul, as constituted after the divine image, 
 would not allow him to succumb to the thought that 
 man was created practically an animal only, with the 
 possibility attached of some time receiving an immor- 
 tal spirit in virtue of his own exertions ; or, on the 
 other hand, that any soul could continue forever to re- 
 sist the force of redeeming love. Somehow and some- 
 where, in the long run of ages, that love must prove 
 mightier than sin and death, and vindicate its power 
 in one universal triumph. 
 
 The theology of Clement has been presented at 
 some length, because, as the first of the great Greek 
 fathers, he stands in the same relation to those that 
 came after him that Augustine sustained to the Latin 
 theology of the Middle Ages, or Luther and Calvin 
 to the later Protestantism. The modifications of his 
 thought by later fathers were considerable ; but as in 
 the mediaeval church the type of Augustine's theology 
 continued to prevail though some of his tenets were 
 discarded, or as Lutheranism and Calvinism, while 
 abandoning much that was essential in the attitude of 
 their leaders, still retained a certain faithfulness to 
 them which continued to manifest itself in their his- 
 tory, so the Greek theology, as presented or developed 
 by Origen, Athanasius, Basil, and the two Gregories, 
 remained substantially true to the spirit of Clement's 
 teaching. 
 
CLEMENT AND MARCUS AURELIUS. 69 
 
 In one respect, Clement had an advantage over all 
 that followed him. He lived in a fresh creative epocli ; 
 his age witnessed the production of the ancient creeds, 
 those spontaneous utterances welling forth from the 
 heart of the church, which, as summaries of great 
 convictions by which the soul of man was possessed, 
 have an enduring freshness and value which no lapse 
 of time can impair. It was Clement's peculiar merit 
 that he kept himself so free from entanglement with 
 mere opinions. He never lost sight of the distinction 
 between God as the great reality and all human spec- 
 ulations about Him. In his own words, " there is a 
 difference between declaring God and declaring things 
 about God." To declare God was the ruling purpose 
 of his life. He held, or rather was held, by a supreme 
 conviction, that God and humanity were bound together 
 in one through Christ ; that God did not leave men to 
 themselves in the search after Him, but was forever 
 going forth in Christ to seek after men and to lead 
 them into life. 
 
 It was some such truth as this for which Plutarch 
 had been yearning, which he and many other noble 
 heathens were in vain trying to extract from the old 
 polytheism. Had Marcus Aurelius known of such a 
 teacher as Clement described, it would seem as though 
 the inmost need of his being must have been met and 
 satisfied. 
 
 The history of the age in which Clement lived yields 
 no traces of the extent of his influence, vast as we may 
 feel that influence must have been. It is strange how 
 almost all knowledge of the man himself has disap- 
 peared. Only his books remain to show us what he 
 was like. Judging from these, said the late Mr. Mau- 
 rice, " he seems to me that one of the old fathers 
 
70 . THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 whom we all should have reverenced most as a teacher 
 and loved as a friend." * 
 
 III. 
 
 Clement was succeeded in the headship of the school 
 at Alexandria by Origen (186-254), who had been his 
 pupil, and whose brilliant genius eclipsed the reputa- 
 tion of his teacher. The fame of Origen surpasses 
 that of any other ancient father for the extent of his 
 learning and the range of his mental powers. So pro- 
 found was the impression which he left upon his own 
 and succeeding ages, that he became the starting-point 
 from which later directions of thought took their de- 
 parture, while still acknowledging their indebtedness to 
 his influence. Systems even that were hostile to each 
 other, the right and the left wing in the trinitarian 
 controversy, each claimed the sanction of his name. 
 If Arius appealed to his authority, Athanasius was 
 eager to vindicate his reputation for orthodoxy. For 
 these reasons, Origen has been often taken as the best 
 representative of the Greek theology, while the name 
 of his master has been allowed to sink into neglect. 
 There was another reason why Origen rather than 
 Clement should have been identified so exclusively 
 
 1 Eccles. History of the First and Second Centuries, p. 239. The 
 name of Clement was retained in the calendar of the Roman 
 Catholic Church as a saint until the close of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, when it was omitted under the pontificate of Clement VIII- 
 (1592-1605). Pope Benedict XIII. (1724-1730) justified its 
 omission, on the grounds that little was known of his life, that 
 no popular cult had gathered round his memory, and that there 
 were divergent estimates of the value of his teaching. It was 
 manifestly an oversight that his name should have remained so 
 long in the Roman calendar. Cf. Freppel, Clement d 'Alexandrie, 
 p. 65. 
 
0R1GEN. 71 
 
 with Alexandrian theology. Coming as he did a gen- 
 eration after Clement, he fell upon an age which was 
 seeking to define and justify, in speculative terms, the 
 doctrine of the Christian trinity. When this great 
 issue began to absorb the energies of the church, an 
 earlier writer like Clement, who had not approached 
 the problem on its purely intellectual side, nor con- 
 tributed anything definite to its solution, would fall 
 outside the circle of living interests. 
 
 But notwithstanding the different requirements of 
 his age and his own mental independence, Origen was 
 in substantial sympathy with the theology of his 
 teacher. In his interpretation of the Christian faith, 
 Clement reappears, often in greater clearness and 
 fullness, as well as beauty of expression. It is there- 
 fore as unnecessary as it would be impossible to at- 
 tempt a resume of his complete thought. It is in 
 his relation to philosophy that Origen diverged most 
 widely from Clement, and to this divergence were 
 owing the fanciful opinions which have disfigured his 
 teaching, and which the common sense of the church, 
 even in his own time, repudiated. Like Clement, 
 Origen believed that philosophy was a divinely ap- 
 pointed means for attaining the truth. But Clement 
 adhered to no one system of philosophical thought as 
 containing the absolute truth, and possessed an in- 
 ward vigor of spirit, by which the heathen elements 
 in the systems of Plato or Aristotle or Zeno might be 
 eliminated or transmuted by a higher method. " By 
 philosophy," he says, " I do not mean the Stoic or 
 the Platonic or the Epicurean or the Aristotelian, but 
 whatever has been well said by each of those sects 
 which teach righteousness along with a faith pervaded 
 by piety." 
 
72 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 Orio-en, on the contrary, came under the influence 
 of the rising Neo-Platonism, and was inclined to re- 
 ceive it as a whole, to adopt its methods for the ex- 
 plication of the more recondite principles of Christian 
 theology. 1 The principle of the Neo-Platonists, whose 
 object was to create an eclectic system in which all 
 forms of philosophy and religion might be harmonized, 
 commended itself naturally to a mind like Origen's, 
 with its vast capacity for generalizations, with its in- 
 satiate thirst for a system which should embrace all 
 things in heaven and earth. Thus are explained his 
 notions about the origin of evil, a fall in celestial cir- 
 cles, the preexistence and transmigration of souls, the 
 design of the body as a prison-house of the spirit, the 
 prominence assigned to angels as corresponding some- 
 what to the demons of the old polytheism, and also 
 his principle of biblical interpretation which led him 
 to neglect the literal teaching of Scripture in the in- 
 terest of some fancied higher truth discerned beneath 
 the letter. 2 
 
 While Origen was to some extent unfavorably in- 
 
 1 After Origen had begun his career as a teacher in the Chris- 
 tian school in Alexandria, he placed himself under the instruc- 
 tion of Ammonius Saccas, the first of the long and distinguished 
 line of Neo-Platonic philosophers. Euseb. H. E., vi. 19. See, 
 also, Mosheim's Commentaries, ii. sect. 27 ; Redepenning, Ori- 
 genes, p. 230 ; Ritter, Die Christliche Philosophie, i. 340. 
 
 2 Origen, it should be said, recognized a wide difference be- 
 tween his speculative fancies and the essentials of Christian rev- 
 elation. Nor did the purity of his faith or the simplicity of his 
 Christian character suffer from his intellectual vagaries. Mos- 
 heim, who had great contempt for his philosophical aberrations, 
 says of him : " Certainly, if any man deserves to stand first 
 in the catalogue of saints and martyrs, and to be annually held 
 up as an example to Christians, this is the man." — Commentaries, 
 ii. 149. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND NEO-PLATONISM. 73 
 
 fluenced by Neo-Platonic thought, yet in his attitude 
 toward the fundamental issues which it was the aim 
 of that philosophy to explain, he rests upon the Chris- 
 tian revelation, and brings out the truth of the incar- 
 nation as that which can alone meet the needs of 
 speculative inquiry or the wants of the religious life. 
 In some respects, it is true, the Neo-Platonists had 
 before them the same problem which confronted the 
 Christian theologian. That problem was no other 
 than to bind together in close organic unity the world 
 and God, — to overcome the tendency to separation 
 derived from oriental theosophies which was exerting 
 its influence upon Greek philosophy as well as upon 
 Christian thought. The dying words of Plotinus have 
 been often quoted as expressing the ruling idea of his 
 philosophy : " I am striving to bring the God which is 
 in me into harmony with the God which is in the uni- 
 verse." One difference between the Christian thinker 
 and the pagan philosopher lay in this : that the one 
 started with the conviction of the divine immanence 
 in the world and in humanity, while the other could 
 not escape from the notion of God as primarily exist- 
 ing at an infinite distance, in an absolute isolation 
 from the world. The problem of the Neo-Platonic 
 philosopher had been already solved indeed, had he 
 but known it, in the theology of the incarnation. 
 Hence, however Origen may seem to approximate to 
 the position of heathen thought, the appearance is but 
 superficial ; he may admit the heathen postulate of a 
 distant and unknown Deity, and the admission may 
 involve him in contradiction and confusion, but he 
 never yields his conviction of the indwelling God as 
 revealed in Christ. In Him the visible creation in all 
 its grades of existence lives and moves and has its 
 
74 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 being ; in Him it is the prerogative of humanity by 
 virtue of its constitution to participate. 1 
 
 The contribution of Origen toward the great ques- 
 tion of his age was of the highest value to all who 
 followed him. He did not indeed reach the true for- 
 mula of the Christian trinity, but he made it possible 
 for his successors to do so by his well-known doctrine 
 of the eternal generation of the Son. When interpret- 
 ed by the light of his age, that doctrine was the effort 
 to bind together Father and Son and Holy Spirit in 
 a necessary organic communion and fellowship. The 
 result of the heathen belief invading the church was 
 not only to separate God from man, but to separate 
 also between the Father and the eternal Son ; to reduce 
 Christ to the rank of creatures brought into existence 
 by the absolute will. In the doctrine of the eternal gen- 
 eration of the Son, Origen was resisting the heathen 
 principle which makes God the absolute incommuni- 
 cable Deity. From all eternity, so Origen reasoned, 
 by a necessary law of His being, God communicates 
 Himself to the Son, — the light which is the life and 
 blessedness of the whole creation goes forth eternally 
 from the source of light, as the rays go forth from the 
 sun. To exist in relationship is the essential idea of 
 God. To think otherwise would be to rob Deity of 
 His true glory. If He existed alone in simple unity 
 and solitary grandeur, apart from some object upon 
 which from all eternity to expend His love, in whom 
 He forever delighted to see Himself reflected, then 
 He was not from all eternity God ; His fatherhood, 
 His love, His infinite power would be accessions to His 
 being in the course of time. There would have been 
 a time, therefore, when He was imperfect, when love 
 1 De Princip., i. c. 3. 
 
THE CHURCH'S DILEMMA. 75 
 
 did not go forth, when the light did not shine, when 
 the righteousness and power of Deity lay idle and in- 
 effective. 1 
 
 Beyond this, Origen did not go. There remained 
 another step to take, the nature of which could be 
 seen, and its necessity demonstrated only when the 
 logic of events should have ripened the mind of the 
 church, and exposed more clearly the danger to which 
 the Christian faith was exposed from the inroads of 
 the heathen principle. To this end even the errors 
 of Origen contributed. It was seen that his thought 
 must be supplemented if the truth which he had 
 reached was to be retained. For while Origen had 
 asserted the eternal generation of the Son from the 
 Father, he did not resist successfully the prevailing 
 oriental notion that what is generated must be in 
 some way inferior to the source from which it pro- 
 ceeds. Hence he had so subordinated the Son to the 
 Father and the Spirit to the Son, that his conception 
 of the trinity might be regarded as akin to the prin- 
 ciple by which Neo-Platonism was seeking to revive 
 the old polytheism. 
 
 Two directions in thought lay open to the church 
 after Origen's departure, both of which claimed the 
 authority of his reputation : the one, neglecting his 
 doctrine of eternal generation, pushed to an extreme 
 the principle of subordination ; while the other dropped 
 the idea of subordination, and asserting the coequality 
 of the three distinctions in the divine name, sought to 
 carry out all that was implied in the positive prin- 
 ciple of a Son eternally generated from the Father. 
 Long before Arius appeared the divergence had be- 
 gun to be manifested. In what was known as Sabel- 
 1 De Princip.f i. c. 2. 
 
76 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 lianism may be read the protest of the Christian con- 
 sciousness against the separation of the Son from the 
 Father, or of the infinite Spirit from both. But this 
 protest against separation and subordination was car- 
 ried so far as to obliterate the eternal distinction 
 between them. The tendency of what is known as 
 Sabellianism, if it had prevailed, would have so en- 
 feebled the Christian doctrine of the trinity as to 
 make Father, Son, and Holy Spirit merely names for 
 the diverse operations of God, and thus eventually 
 have substituted for the complex and fruitful idea of 
 Deity as given in the Christian revelation the single 
 or simple essence of Jewish or Mohammedan deism. 
 To this result the Arianism of a later age was also 
 tending, though by a different process. 
 
 The situation was a difficult one, — to maintain the 
 distinct and eternal existence of Father, Son, and Holy 
 Spirit, while not denying the unity of the one God, 
 and on the other hand to emphasize the divine unity 
 without endangering with Sabellius the eternal distinc- 
 tions within the bosom of Godhead. Jewish deism on 
 the one hand, and polytheism on the other, were the 
 Scylla and Charybdis between which the church was 
 moving. Either of them was an easy and simple solu- 
 tion of the difficulty, and either of them was alike 
 fatal to the Christian revelation. The issue became a 
 clear one in the early part of the fourth century. The 
 church was profoundly moved at the voice of Athana- 
 sius proclaiming, as the doctrine of God, the one 
 essence within which coexisted, and as it were circu- 
 lated from all eternity, the three vital and coequal 
 forces or distinctions of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 
 
CHARACTER OF ATHANASTUS. 77 
 
 IV. 
 
 Athanasius was born in the city of Alexandria in 
 the year 296, and follows Origen as the next most 
 illustrious representative of Greek theology. But it 
 is not to Athanasius in his capacity as a theologian 
 onty that the church has decreed the highest honors. 
 He has been designated the father of orthodoxy, but 
 he is also the ecclesiastical hero in the supreme crisis 
 of the church's career. He was great in himself, but 
 he also owed his greatness to the environment of his 
 age. What he might have been had he lived at an 
 earlier period or under different circumstances it is 
 useless to conjecture. The external events of his 
 time developed in him a character not seen in the 
 church before, — that of the statesman or ecclesiastical 
 politician whose object it was not to attain martyrdom 
 but triumph, who exposed himself to danger in order 
 to secure success, who fought in order to conquer. It 
 is sometimes forgotten in ecclesiastical circles, where 
 it most needs to be remembered, that he fousrht not 
 only the world in the shape of an intriguing imperial 
 court, but his hardest conflicts were with the church 
 itself, his greatest victory over the oriental bishops 
 arrayed against him in a large majority. His name 
 stands for the encouragement of those who resist the 
 church in the interest of some higher truth which it 
 has not yet learned to appreciate ; his experience 
 illustrates that one man standing out against the 
 church may be right and the church may be wrong : 
 and further, his life demonstrates how at all critical 
 moments the faith takes refuge, not in institutions but 
 in individual men. To Athanasius, with his clear 
 insight and his unconquerable purpose, is it owing that 
 
78 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 the church was saved to the doctrine of the Christian 
 trinity. 
 
 But all this belongs to the history of the church 
 as an institution. We are concerned now only with 
 the place of Athanasius in the history of Christian 
 thought. 
 
 Born and brought up as he was in the home of 
 Greek theology, he had drunk in the influence of that 
 culture whose aim it has been said was the discovery 
 of the highest beauty and the divinest wisdom. The 
 traces of Greek philosophy are apparent in his writ- 
 ings, and the principles drawn from Greek philosophy 
 underlie his controversy with the Arians. " He was a 
 Greek by birth and education ; Greek also in subtle 
 thought and philosophical insight, in oratorical power 
 and supple statesmanship." 1 In his theology the 
 habit of spiritual thought seen in Clement and Ori- 
 gen is everywhere visible ; all that was distinctive of 
 Greek theology in its contrast with the later Latin be- 
 longs to him, not merely by way of traditional accept- 
 ance, but through the free concurrence of independent 
 and original reflection. 
 
 The greater part of Athanasius' writings are of a 
 controversial character. But in two small treatises 
 written before Arius arose, we have the groundwork 
 of the theology which served him in his long struggle. 
 They are entitled, " A Treatise against the Greeks," 
 and " The Incarnation of the Word." The value of 
 the first treatise lies in the manner in which he con- 
 ducts his polemic against heathenism. He broke 
 away from the tiresome and fruitless method of 
 former apologists, and addressed himself directly to 
 
 1 Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism,^. 67 ; Fialon, Saint Athanase-, 
 284-291. 
 
ARGUMENT AGAINST HEATHENISM. 79 
 
 the great issue between Christianity and polytheism. 
 The class of educated men to whom he spoke no 
 longer believed the absurd and immoral myths which 
 the traditional apologist from force of habit continued 
 to expose and ridicule. But while discarding the ab- 
 surdities of mythology, men like Porphyry and Jam- 
 blichus still maintained that the world was created 
 and governed by intermediaries, lower deities, who 
 were the beneficent forces of nature, whose dwelling- 
 
 7 o 
 
 place was in the sun or planets, in the ocean, in rivers, 
 in forests and groves, or in the human mind. To 
 worship them, they thought, was only to recognize 
 through them the higher Deity from whom they pro- 
 ceeded. This was the point to which the controversy 
 between Celsus and Origen had reduced itself. The 
 emperor Julian, in a treatise now lost, in which he was 
 combating Christianity, expressed the most deep-rooted 
 conviction of heathenism when he said that what hin- 
 dered him from giving his assent to the new religion 
 was the impossibility, to his mind, of conceiving how 
 the one and infinite God was able to govern the world 
 without a retinue of intermediate deities. 
 
 Athanasius met this position in his discourse against 
 the Greeks by asserting that there was no necessity 
 for such intermediaries, since God Himself was dwell- 
 ing in the creation, and that all things had been made 
 directly or immediately by Him. The principle upon 
 which he rested was the Stoic doctrine of the divine 
 immanence. " The all-powerful and perfect reason of 
 the Father," so he wrote, " penetrating the universe, 
 developing everywhere its forces, illuminating with 
 His light things, visible and invisible, made of them 
 all one whole and bound them together, allowing noth- 
 ing to escape from his powerful action, vivifying and 
 
80 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 preserving a]l beings in themselves, and in the har- 
 mony of the creation." " In the light of the divine 
 Logos, everything lives upon earth while all is organ- 
 ized in the heavens. There is nothing of that which 
 is and which each day appears which has not its being 
 in Him, and by Him, its place in the universal har- 
 moiry. 1 
 
 In his treatise on the incarnation one can see the 
 inner process in Athanasius' mind as he labors to re- 
 tain the Stoic principle of immanent Deity without 
 confounding God with the world. Like his predeces- 
 sors Clement and Origen, he builds his thought upon 
 the divine immanence, not on the transcendence of 
 God. " This divine Logos, a being incorporeal, ex- 
 pands Himself in the universe as light expands in the 
 air, penetrating all, and all entire, everywhere. He 
 gives Himself without losing anything of Himself, and 
 with Him is given the Father who makes all things 
 by Him, and the Spirit who is His energy." He un- 
 folds Himself in all things without mersnn°- Himself 
 in them. The Deity communicates Himself to His 
 creatures, penetrates them, animates them, while yet 
 remaining distinct from them, — the true God of hu- 
 manity whose presence and love we feel, the vivifying 
 intelligence which mingles and circulates in the great 
 body of the universe. 2 
 
 In order to know God He must be looked for within 
 the soul. 3 The soul contemplates shining within itself 
 as in a mirror, the image of the Father, the Word in- 
 carnate, and in itself it conceives the Father. 4 Upon 
 
 1 Contra Gentes, c. 42. 
 
 2 Be Incar. Verbi, cc. 8, 17. Cf. also Dorner's Person of Christ, 
 Eng. trans. Div. i. vol. ii. p. 250. 
 
 3 Contra Gentes, c. 33. 4 Contra Gentes, c. 34. 
 
HOW GOD IS TO BE KNOWN. 81 
 
 this point, the way to the knowledge of God, the 
 thought of Athanasius reproduces the teaching of 
 Greek philosophy, and more especially that of the 
 Stoic school. The revelation of God is written in the 
 human consciousness ; the ground of all certitude is 
 within man, not in any authority external to his nature. 
 " In order to know the way which leads to God and 
 to take it with certainty, we have no need of foreign 
 aid, but of ourselves alone. As God is above all, the 
 way which leads to Him is neither distant, nor outside 
 of us, nor difficult to find. The kingdom of God is 
 within us. Since we have in us the kingdom of God, 
 we are able easily to contemplate and conceive the King 
 of the universe, the salutary reason of the universal 
 Father. If any one asks of me, What is the way ? I 
 answer, that it is the soul of each and the intelligence 
 which it encloses." *• The wise man has no need to 
 seek without himself, or to infer the divine existence 
 from the external world. He sees God within himself, 
 who is His image and as it were His shadow. 
 
 The preparation of a soul for seeking and knowing 
 God is in its own purification. In order to rise to the 
 knowledge of the truth, it is necessary to unite with 
 the intelligence a virtuous life and purity of heart. It 
 is the soul itself which of itself and by itself disen- 
 gages itself from that which stains it, and is thus 
 rendered worthy of entering into communion with 
 Him who is purity. It is not through grace coming 
 from without, but by a voluntary purification within, 
 that man can see God. In thoughts like these, Atha- 
 nasius was only asserting the principles implied in the 
 doctrine of the incarnation. As he reasons in his dis- 
 course against the Greeks, it is through the revelation 
 
 1 Contra Gentes, c. 30. 
 6 
 
82 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 of God in Christ that man comes to know his real 
 nature, and the power with which he has been invested. 
 The revelation is a disclosing to man of his true con- 
 stitution. Christ has come to break down the barriers 
 of ignorance and neglect by which man is hindered 
 from knowing himself in the capacities and destiny 
 imprinted upon his nature in the first creation. Hence, 
 with Athanasius as with his predecessors, the freedom 
 of the will is an inalienable heritage in virtue of the 
 human constitution in God's image ; it still exists as 
 the ability to turn to what is good, even after man has 
 turned away to the evil ; it cannot be forfeited or lost 
 because it is the endowment of a constitution which is 
 divine. 1 
 
 If in any respect in his view of the incarnation, 
 Athanasius advances upon the teaching of his pred- 
 ecessors, it is in the more emphatic assertion of the 
 solidarity of the human race in Christ. Christ is the 
 head and representative of all mankind, and through 
 His organic relationship with humanity all that He was, 
 all that He did, belongs to the race of man. From 
 Him mankind inherits a glory and distinction in which 
 all its members share ; from Him a Spirit flows forth 
 upon all, anointing them as with a precious ointment ; 
 or, in other words, humanity has been actually re- 
 deemed in Christ. He took upon Himself the sin and 
 guilt of men ; in Him all men died to sin ; in Him 
 all men suffered the consequences of sin ; in Him all 
 men share in the punishment of sin ; all men inherit 
 the blessing which through Him comes from the fulfill- 
 ment of the law of righteousness, and all are clothed 
 with incorruption through the power of the resurrec- 
 tion. The saving force which was in Him becomes 
 
 1 Maurice, Philosophy of the First Six Centuries, pp. 85-90. 
 
ILLUSTRATION OF THE INCARNATION. 83 
 
 henceforth through Him inherent in the life of human- 
 ity and is diffused through all its members. 1 
 
 No better illustration to set forth his thought can be 
 found, than that which Athanasius himself employed : 
 "As when a mighty king entering some great city, 
 although he occupies but one of its houses, positively 
 confers great honor upon the whole city, and no en- 
 emy or robber any longer throws it into confusion by 
 his assaults, but on account of the presence of the 
 king in one of its houses, the city is rather thought 
 worthy of being guarded with the greatest care. So 
 also is it in the case of Him who is Lord over all. 
 For when He came into our country and dwelt in the 
 body of one like ourselves, thenceforth every plot of 
 the enemy against mankind was defeated, and the 
 corruption of death that formerly operated to destroy 
 men lost its power." 2 
 
 In defending the truth of the incarnation against 
 those who maintained that such a doctrine implied 
 what was absurd and impossible, Athanasius draws 
 his argument from Greek philosophy, and urges the 
 Stoic principle of the divine immanence, as lending 
 rationality and probability to the conviction that the 
 Word became flesh and dwelt among men. " For the 
 world itself may be thought of as one great body in 
 which God indwells; and if He is in the whole, He is 
 also in the parts. It is no more unworthy of God that 
 He should incarnate Himself in one man, than it is 
 that He should dwell in the w r orld. Since he abides in 
 humanity, which is a part of the universe, it is not un- 
 reasonable that he should take up His abode in a man 
 who should thus become the organ by which God acts 
 on the universal life." 3 
 
 1 De Incar., cc. 8, 9, 20 ; Oratio contra Arianos, i. 46—18. 
 
 2 De Incar., c. 0. 3 De Incar., c. 41. 
 
84 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 The process by which the historical Christ who lived 
 and taught in Judaea is identified with the eternal 
 Word of God made flesh, does not for Athanasius de- 
 pend primarily upon any external evidence for its 
 verification. Miracles in his view illustrate the inti- 
 mate relationship of Christ to the physical world as 
 its Lord and Master, and given the Christ, they are 
 results to be expected by way of confirmation of that 
 which is already perceived and believed. But the 
 greatest miracles are wrought in the sphere of the spir- 
 itual life, and it is by these that the miracle in the out- 
 ward life of nature is corroborated. For example, the 
 evidence of the resurrection of Christ is to be found 
 mainly in the reality of the church's life. When the 
 darkness of the material world gives way to light, it 
 is proof that the sun has appeared. So also in the 
 spiritual world, the light which is diffused where be- 
 fore there was darkness is evidence that Christ still 
 lives. Once men lived under bondage through fear of 
 death ; now death has lost its sting ; even women and 
 children voluntarily submit to it. In the power which 
 effects the conversion of the heathens, in the influence 
 which transforms the life, in these and results like 
 these lies the evidence that Christ is not dead, that He 
 is risen from the grave. The Saviour Himself continues 
 to offer the proof of His resurrection in the works 
 which He still accomplishes for the salvation of men. 1 
 
 Such had been the teaching of Athanasius before 
 the year 318, when Arius arose in Alexandria. Arius 
 had had his precursors in the history of the church. 
 In the sect of the Ebionites, and in the pseudo-Clemen- 
 tine writings of the second century, may be seen a view 
 of Deity struggling for recognition, which, at a later 
 1 De Incar., cc. 27-32. 
 
RISE OF THE AR1AN THEOLOGY. 85 
 
 time, was to find its full development in the teaching 
 of Mohammed. The Jewish faith was so popular in 
 the second century throughout the Roman empire 
 that it threatened to break the bonds of national ex- 
 clusiveness, and expand into an universal religion. 1 
 Had it done so, it might have anticipated by centuries 
 the system of Islam, which like Judaism commended 
 itself to deep-rooted instincts in the oriental mind. 
 
 Arius had received his training, not in Alexandria, 
 but in Antioch, a city which, located as it was on the 
 eastern confines of the empire, had not been able, de- 
 spite its attachment to Hellenic culture, to overcome 
 the preponderating influence of orientalism. Here 
 toward the close of the third century was growing up 
 a school of Christian thought, antagonistic in its spirit 
 to that which had constituted the ruling idea of Greek 
 theology, — a school which was destined also to leave 
 its impression on the Christian church. The leading 
 characteristic of the school of Antioch was the orien- 
 tal tendency it displayed to separate the human from 
 the divine. The tie which united them, however it 
 may have been viewed, did not spring out of the natu- 
 ral kinship of the human with the divine, — a kinship 
 always existing, but revealed in the splendor of its 
 perfection in Christ. In the Antiochian theology 
 there was a disposition to regard the nexus between the 
 Deity and humanity as the arbitrary exertion of the 
 divine power, by which natures incongruous and in- 
 compatible in their essence had been brought together 
 in an artificial alliance rather than a living union. 
 
 Beneath this conception of the relation of the hu- 
 man to the divine lurked the oriental idea of God as 
 the absolute and incommunicable, for whom contact 
 
 1 Renaii, Le Judaisme comme Race et comme Religion, p. "0. 
 
86 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 with humanity or with the world was by his very 
 nature impossible. From such a point of view, the 
 incarnation of God in Christ was not only inconceiv- 
 able by the reason, but seemed also to endanger the 
 well-being of true religion. 
 
 Alius was the first to formally advocate such a view 
 of Deity, and to follow it out in its logical conse- 
 quences to the denial of the incarnation. Of his sin- 
 cerity there can be no doubt, nor of his high moral 
 character. It does not surprise us to learn that he 
 was a strict ascetic, surpassing in this respect his 
 Christian contemporaries ; for asceticism was a neces- 
 sary concomitant of oriental religion, and had at first 
 appeared in those sects and heresies claiming an orien- 
 tal origin before it made itself at home in the church. 
 The time in which Arius lived was favorable to the 
 spread of his thought, for the Roman emperor had just 
 professed himself a Christian, and the world was willing 
 to follow in his train if only the one obnoxious tenet 
 of the incarnation could be so modified as to reconcile 
 Christianity with the principle of heathen religion. 
 
 To this task Arius addressed himself in all earnest- 
 ness, and with singular powers of influence and even 
 fascination. In his theology God is conceived in his 
 absolute transcendence as at an infinite distance from 
 the world and humanity, and in his solitary grandeur 
 forever abides beyond the possibility of communion 
 with any creature. For the purpose of creating the 
 world He calls into existence a highly endowed super- 
 natural being of a different essence from His own, who 
 yet participates to some extent in the attributes of 
 Godhead, and is therefore worthy of being called a 
 god. In reality He is neither God nor man, but 
 stands midway between the two, as far below the one 
 
ARIAN IDEA OF REVELATION. 87 
 
 as He is exalted above the other. Because of the in- 
 feriority and limitation of his nature compared with 
 that of Deity, He is not able to perfectly comprehend 
 the character of God. What He sees and knows of 
 God is after a measure proportionate to His capacity, 
 and the revelation which He imparts to man is still 
 further reduced and limited by the weakness of human 
 faculties. God therefore remains in His inmost char- 
 acter unknown and unknowable ; revelation becomes 
 a regulative principle of conduct, but is no longer a 
 ground for communion between the human and the di- 
 vine. Union with Deity, according to such a theology, 
 is impossible. The supernatural being whom Alius 
 sets forth as a mediator between God and man, does 
 not unite but separates them, for He serves to reveal 
 the infinite impassable gulf that lies between them. 
 
 The system of Arius was in its principle a reversion 
 to Jewish deism, as if it had been the highest type of 
 human thought concerning the nature of Deity. But 
 it was also a system inferior to Judaism and even 
 to Mohammedanism, for it was weakened rather than 
 strengthened by its adherence to Christ at all. In 
 Jewish and Mohammedan theology the world is at 
 least created directly by God Himself, whereas accord- 
 ing to Arius, creation is the work of a being inferior to 
 God. The door was thus opened for a return to poly- 
 theism, and there was no obstacle to the introduction 
 of many such beings, inferior to God and yet higher 
 than man, who should serve as intermediaries in the 
 economy of external nature or of the spiritual life. 
 
 If it seems strange that a system like this could 
 have grown up within the church and have spread 
 far and wide, it is only necessary to recall how strong 
 was the hold of the dying heathenism over the im- 
 
88 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 agination, or how, at a later time, Islamism snatched 
 away a vast Christian population and took possession 
 of what had once been the fairest possessions of 
 eastern Christendom. In both cases the rationale 
 of the process was the same. Humanity, overcome 
 with the sense of sin, and struck with fear and terror 
 as it contemplated the judgments of God in the world, 
 was under the control of motives bred by a diseased 
 and guilty conscience in its thought of God, and could 
 not accept the pure consciousness of Christ, with his 
 filial love and perfect truth toward the Father, as the 
 normal principle of true religion. Rather than ac- 
 cept it, men adopted methods of their own by which 
 to overcome the divine wrath, or acquiesced in any 
 arrangement, however superficial, by which the con- 
 sequences of sin might be evaded. Such was the 
 principle of Judaism, in its popular aspects a religion 
 in which God was believed to be propitiated by sacri- 
 fices. Such was Mohammedanism, with its doctrine 
 of election, in which the followers of the prophet 
 took refuge as a shelter from the waves of the divine 
 anger ; and akin to them was Arianism, — a symptom 
 that the popular Christianity was shifting its basis 
 from love to fear, and was thus endangering what 
 was highest and most distinctive in the religion of 
 Christ. Whether God was present or absent, whether 
 humanity had been redeemed or still lay under the 
 curse of sin, whether the incarnation had revealed the 
 inmost nature of God, as written in the nature of 
 man, or the revelation made by Christ was an official 
 code of duty promulgated by some high celestial am- 
 bassador, — such were the issues involved in the Arian 
 controversy. 
 
 The excitement which shook the church as if to its 
 
ATHANAS1AN DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY. 89 
 
 very foundations, and which threatened to destroy its 
 unity, on which Constantine rested his hopes for the 
 consolidation of the empire, indicates the gravity of 
 the crisis which the teaching of Arius had precipi- 
 tated. In this critical hour, it was not Koine that 
 came to the rescue. She was as silent, it has been 
 said, as St. Peter at the door of Caiaphas when Christ 
 was delivered up to the power of the High Priest. It 
 was a Greek theologian, going forth from the home of 
 Greek theology, who uttered the word to which the 
 heart of the church ultimately responded. 
 
 According to Athanasius, the Christian revelation 
 is summed up in the divine name of the Father, the 
 Son, and the Holy Spirit. Into this name, and into 
 the actual and living relationships which it implies, 
 those who accept the religion of Christ were to be 
 baptized. It was the formula of benediction, the 
 •ever-recurring refrain in the solemn and inspiring 
 worship of the church. It declared of God that His 
 essential character was love. Deity in the inmost 
 recess of His being, in that mysterious background 
 of existence, as ancient thought conceived it, whence 
 sprang the divine consciousness and thought and will, 
 was henceforth known truly and absolutely as the 
 Father. The deepest and most endearing of human 
 relationships found its basis in the divine nature, and 
 received its consecration from an eternal prototype. 
 
 The revelation of God as the Father was made 
 through the Son. He who became incarnate in the 
 fullness of time had been from all eternity with the 
 Father, as His second self, in whom the Father knew 
 Himself and saw Himself reflected. By Him the 
 world had been created ; upon its constitution had 
 been stamped the impress of the divine nature ; and 
 
 • 
 
90 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 in humanity was implanted the image of God, through 
 which it was made capable in its totality of attaining 
 the divine likeness. All things in heaven and earth 
 live and move and have their being in Him, — the 
 indwelling God, who is all and in all. In the incar- 
 nation God not only reveals Himself to man, but also 
 makes known to man his true nature and constitution. 
 The incarnation is the union of humanity with Deity, 
 and the divine life of Christ, who is the head and 
 representative of humanity, is diffused through all its 
 members. Humanity, in all its fortunes and aspects, 
 is one whole, and as such has been redeemed in Christ, 
 who carries it, as it were, in Himself, — in its sin and 
 guilt as well as in its exaltation and glory. In Him 
 the human race has died to sin and risen again to life 
 and immortality. Life has been shown stronger than 
 death, righteousness mightier than sin. In Him has 
 been manifested the apotheosis of humanity, its re- 
 demption, salvation, and deification. 
 
 The incarnation made possible the life of the 
 Spirit, through whom mankind becomes increasingly 
 conscious of its relationship to the Father and the 
 Son. The holy and infinite Spirit is the life of the 
 Father and the Son as they are bound together in 
 perfect communion and fellowship ; the work of the 
 Spirit is to lead men to participate in this life which 
 is in God. The Spirit abides in humanity as the law 
 of its progress ; He acts upon all men ; but He in- 
 dwells only in those who have been renewed after the 
 image of Him that created them. 1 
 
 Such a conception of the nature of the triune God- 
 head as existing from eternity and manifested in time, 
 
 1 On the immanent trinity, cf. Voigt, Jahrb. fur Deutsche 
 The.oL, 1858. 
 
THE NICENE CREED. 91 
 
 demanded that its members should be regarded as in 
 their essence one and coequal, and as forming together 
 the one absolute or infinite personality whom we call 
 God. 1 It was a result of Arianism that it showed to 
 Atbanasius the nature of the danger which threatened 
 the integrity of the Christian revelation, and the step 
 also which must be taken to guard against it. As 
 the tendency of Arianism was to separate between 
 Christ and the Father, between the world and God, 
 so the aim of Athanasius was to present them as 
 sharing alike in the one divine essence, and thus retain 
 the world and humanity in close organic relationship 
 w r ith Deity. The word which he used for the purpose 
 of defining the relation of the Son to the Father, — 
 the 6/xoovcrto?, — was, to the minds of many even who 
 did not sympathize with Arius, a damaged and sus- 
 picious word. It had been first used by Sabellius, 
 and then by Paul of Samosata, and had thus been 
 identified with the heresies of a past age which the 
 church had condemned. To the minds of the ma- 
 jority of Eastern bishops 2 it still savored of the pan- 
 theism with which it had been first associated. It 
 was the one word which was most obnoxious to the 
 Arians, the significance of which their dialectic could 
 not evade. It was irreconcilable with the Arian 
 trinity, in which three beings were loosely associated 
 in polytheistic fashion. It presented God in the rich- 
 ness of a complex nature, triple in His unity and one 
 in His triplicity, in opposition to Judaism, with its 
 meagre, impoverished notion of unity as identical with 
 sinoleness of essence. 
 
 o 
 
 1 Liddon, Bampton Lectures, p. 37. 
 
 2 For the attitude of the Asiatic bishops to the Nicene con- 
 troversy, see Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, pp. OO-'Jii. 
 
92 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 The ofioovo-ios was admitted into the creed of the 
 church at its first general council ; but it was not on 
 the authority of the council that the church received 
 it. The synod of Nicaea was the beginning of a long 
 controversy, in which Athanasius bore the principal 
 part, and in which the question was argued with all 
 the subtilty of the oriental mind, — whether Christ 
 was of the same essence with the Father, or of a 
 similar essence, or of a different essence. The victory 
 of the 6/aoovo-los was at last a victory of the reason ; it 
 was the triumph of the Greek theology over oriental 
 theosophies, whether Jewish or heathen ; it stood for 
 the sign by which the church had overcome the 
 heathen mind, as Christian faith had already over- 
 come the force of persecution and the sword. 
 
 But the Christian doctrine of the trinity could not 
 have triumphed over heathen thought, had it not also 
 beeu the fulfillment of all that was true in Greek phi- 
 losophy. In the formula of Father, Son, and Holy 
 Spirit, as three distinct and coequal members in the 
 one divine essence, there was the recognition and the 
 reconciliation of the philosophical schools which had 
 divided the ancient world. In the idea of the eternal 
 Father the oriental mind recognized what it liked to 
 call the profound abyss of being, that which lies back 
 of all phenomena, the hidden mystery which lends awe 
 to human minds seeking to know the divine. In the 
 doctrine of the eternal Son revealing the Father, im- 
 manent in nature and humanity as the life and light 
 shining through all created things, the divine rea- 
 son, in which the human reason shares, was the recog- 
 nition of the truth after which Plato and Aristotle 
 and the Stoics were struggling, — the tie which binds 
 the creation to God in the closest organic relationship. 
 
DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 93 
 
 In the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the church guarded 
 against any pantheistic confusion of God with the 
 world by upholding the life of the manifested Deity 
 as essentially ethical or spiritual, revealing itself in 
 humanity in its highest form, only in so far as hu- 
 manity realized its calling, and through the Spirit en- 
 tered into communion with the Father and the Son. 
 
 It is true, as has been often noticed, that the ancient 
 church dwelt chiefly upon Christ as the indwelling 
 Deity who manifested the Father, and that the idea of 
 the Holy Spirit is not formally presented with equal 
 prominence. 1 But it was necessary that the incarna- 
 tion should become the full possession of the Christian 
 consciousness before the life of the Spirit could be 
 understood or appreciated. To the infinite Spirit it 
 belongs, in the economy of the trinity, to lead human- 
 ity into all truth. But the " ways of the Spirit " had 
 yet to be disclosed more fully to the reason in the long 
 and painful process of human experience, — the world 
 that then was had to pass away, and a new world to 
 arise, and grow, and reach maturity, before the life of 
 God as the Spirit could be revealed in humanity as its 
 actual possession, by which it shares while on earth in 
 the glory of the eternal trinity, and moves forward to 
 its destiny in attaining the fullness of Christ. It has 
 been given to us to read in the church's history, since 
 the new world in western Europe began its career, 
 the larger record of the continuous divine revelation, 
 and to trace the process by which the Spirit has been 
 convincing of sin, and of righteousness, and of judg- 
 ment. As we survey our inheritance in the past, we 
 
 1 For a summary of the views of " thoughtful meu " upon the 
 subject of the Holy Spirit, see Greg. Naz., Oratio 38, De Spiritu 
 Sanctu. 
 
94 THE GREEK THEOLOGY. 
 
 are unrolling what to the Fathers of the ancient church 
 was a future hidden from their eyes. In the fresh 
 enthusiasm of a great conviction, they dwelt upon the 
 glorious consummation of all things in Christ, and 
 were inclined to foreshorten the long perspective of 
 human history. It is as though to them the words of 
 Christ were more especially addressed : "I have many 
 things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." 
 
THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 Etenim cum deberetis magistri propter tempus : rursum indigetis ut vos 
 doceamini quae sint elementa exordii serrnonum Dei. — Heb. v. 12. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 
 
 A. D. 
 
 14. Death of Augustus Caesar. 
 150. [c] Montanism and Gnosticism. 
 160. Apuleius flourished. 
 
 201. (?) Tertullian becomes a Montanist. 
 
 202. Irenaius died. 
 235. Hippolytus died. 
 249-251. Decius, Emperor. 
 258. Cyprian died a martyr. 
 306-337. Constantine the Great. 
 311-415. Donatist Controversy. 
 
 312. Toleration granted to the church 
 
 323. Constantine sole Emperor. 
 
 331-420. Jerome. 
 
 333. Jamblichus died. 
 
 374-397. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. 
 
 379-395. Theodosius the Great, Emperor. 
 
 387. Augustine's Conversion. 
 
 396-430. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. 
 
 397-407. Chrysostom, Patriarch of Constantinople. 
 
 412-431. Pelagian Controversy. 
 
 412-444. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria. 
 
 429. Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople. 
 
 429. Theodore of Mopsuestia died. 
 
 431. Third General Council. 
 
 440-461. Leo the Great, Bishop of Rome. 
 
 451. Fourth General Council. 
 
 485. Proclus died. 
 
 553. Fifth General Council. 
 
 622. Flight of Mohammed. 
 
 680. Sixth General Council. 
 
THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 In the Latin church, theology was subordinated to 
 the requirements of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. The 
 Roman church gave birth to no system of theology. 
 It devoted its energies from the first to the work of 
 perfecting its organization and of exercising its ca- 
 pacity for discipline and control. The foundations of 
 the later primacy of the Bishop of Rome date back to 
 a very early stage of Christian history. Roman con- 
 troversialists have not been very far wrong in making 
 the preparation for the Roman supremacy almost co- 
 eval with the birth of the Roman church. 
 
 During the second century, the Latin church was, 
 under the influence of Greek thought, and for some 
 time longer tho echoes of Greek theology continued to 
 be heard in its principal writers. It was rather as 
 souvenirs of a culture which had been abandoned, than 
 as living and profound intuitions of thought, that 
 Greek ideas appear among the Latin writers of the 
 second and third centuries. However this may be, 
 Christianity had come to the West from the East. It 
 was Greek missionary enterprise and not Roman that 
 carried the Christian faith to Gaul. The writings of 
 apostles, the narratives of the life of Christ, had ap- 
 peared in the Greek language ; even the ritual of the 
 Roman church, so far as one existed, may have been 
 in Greek, and the circumstance mentioned by the his- 
 
98 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 torian Socrates, that during the first centuries there 
 was no public preaching in Rome, may be explained 
 by the absence of the vernacular in the Christian as- 
 semblies. But it was impossible that the Greek influ- 
 ence should long dominate over a spirit so deeply 
 imbued with native characteristics as the Roman. In 
 the course of the third century, the Latin language 
 was generally substituted for the Greek, and the pro- 
 cess began by which the two churches were to grow 
 more widely apart, until all Christian fellowship be- 
 tween them should come to an end. 
 
 As in the history of Greek theology the continuity 
 with Greek philosophy was not broken ; so in the his- 
 tory of Latin Christianity the continuity may be 
 traced with j)agan Rome in its religious as well as its 
 political aspects. 
 
 I. 
 
 The early religion of pagan Rome discloses no prin- 
 ' ciples which distinguish it in any marked way from 
 other local religions. It has enriched in no way our 
 knowledge of the religious consciousness of man. It 
 was essentially a borrowed product, with no traditions 
 of its own running back to the origin of things. It 
 was a formal thing, consisting mainly in the scrupu- 
 lous performance of a ritual. It did not stimulate 
 devotion, or give rise to hymnody, or lead to mystic 
 excesses. It rested on a belief in the power of the 
 gods which, by the use of right methods, might be 
 made available for the requirements of Roman ambi- 
 tion. It was a religion grounded on fear as its motive 
 and sanction. The Romans did not cultivate friendly 
 or intimate relations with their gods as did the Greeks ; 
 there was no sense of the constant nearness of a divine 
 
REVIVAL OF HEATHEN RELIGION. 99 
 
 benignant presence as is seen in Greek mythology. 
 The Roman kept his gods at a distance, and avoided 
 as a calamity the actual vision of a supernatural being. 
 The chief innovation which Rome introduced into re- 
 ligion was in illustrating its connection with the for- 
 tunes of the state. Religion became an affair of the 
 government, to be administered chiefly in its interest. 
 When the conquests of Rome had demonstrated the 
 value of Roman deities to the state, it was only natu- 
 ral and fitting: that the highest officer of the state 
 should assume a religious character, and, as Pontifex 
 Maximus, preside over the administration of the secret 
 deposit by which the priesthood deciphered the secrets 
 of the future. 
 
 The religion of ancient Rome, despite its lack of 
 interest in theology, could not remain apart from the 
 larger movements of thought, at a time when the hu- 
 man mind was so widely occupied with religious issues. 
 From the time of Augustus it had begun to recover 
 from the disintegrating effects of the rationalism which 
 had prevailed in the last days of the republic. 1 To 
 some extent it had been clarified and elevated by the 
 Stoic philosophy, so that it seemed not unworthy of 
 the respect and devotion of a man like Marcus Au- 
 relius. But the Stoic interpretation of polytheism, at- 
 tractive as it might have been to poetical minds or to 
 the highly educated, must have seemed to the mass 
 of ordinary men like explaining religion away. The 
 gods, as the Stoics viewed them, were no longer per- 
 sonal beings, but rather impersonal manifestations of 
 the presence of the universal spirit which penetrates 
 and fills all things, so many different names, as it 
 were, for the activity of the divine soul of the uni- 
 1 Boissier, La Religion Romaine, ii. c. 7. 
 
100 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 verse. It was through the influence of Platonism, 
 which had been made popular in Rome by the writ- 
 ings of Apuleius during the second century, that poly- 
 theism became once more a living belief affecting pro- 
 foundly all classes of society. Apuleius proclaimed 
 the Platonic notion regarding the nature of Deity and 
 His relation to the world, a being who exists in sol- 
 itary majesty outside of the world, who, having ac- 
 complished creation by an act of omnipotence, secludes 
 Himself at a distance from all communication or con- 
 nection with it. Thus the tie which unites God to na- 
 ture is broken : on the one side is God, and on the other 
 man, and a vast abyss lies between them. To bridge 
 this abyss, Apuleius employed as intermediaries the 
 gods of ancient religion, — no longer names only for 
 spiritual functions as the Stoics thought, but real ex- 
 istences, who from their lowest form, as the demons 
 standing near to men, rise by gradations to the throne 
 of infinite Deity. This was the underlying principle 
 which everywhere quickened polytheism into activity, 
 the spirit in the air when the writings of the first dis- 
 tinctively Latin fathers were beginning to appear. 
 
 It was inevitable that in the transition from heathen- 
 ism to Christianity, the influence of such tendencies 
 should be perpetuated, and in some degree modify the 
 character of the new religion. The practical bent of 
 the Roman mind, the love of order, the genius for 
 government, were destined, like the Greek love for phi- 
 losophy, to find a home in the Christian church. The 
 Roman Christian may have begun very early to dream 
 of the possibility that his new worship might be a 
 substitute for the pagan state cultus, — the Christian 
 hierarchy standing in the same close relation to the 
 empire, usurp the place of the sacerdotal machinery of 
 
ROMAN IDEA OF CHRISTIANITY. 101. 
 
 paganism. For the empire itself the Christian con- 
 verts continued to cherish admiration and reverence. 
 To their minds it was doing a divine work in breaking 
 down the barriers of a seliish individualism, bringing 
 the nations into a common fellowship, and consoli- 
 dating them into one great people ; extending to all, 
 rich and poor, equal privileges under a system of uni- 
 form law. This was also, as the Roman Christian 
 conceived it, with the necessary modifications, the idea 
 of Christianity itself. The religion of Christ was to 
 him the " new law," and in obedience to rightful 
 authority lay the principle of redemption. Latin 
 Christianity gravitated naturally, as if by instinct, to- 
 ward that conception of the church as an external 
 kingdom which sprang out of the Jewish conception 
 of Messiah, and of which the apostles of Christ had 
 dreamed while they were striving about the places of 
 honor which it offered. It is possible that a similar 
 idea underlay the organization of the church in Jeru- 
 salem, where James, in virtue of his relationship as the 
 brother of Christ, became His successor in the head- 
 ship of the messianic kingdom. Certainly thoughts 
 like these were current in the Roman church of the 
 second century. The Clementine recognitions, — the 
 first Christian romance, as it has been called, — even 
 though of heretical origin, is valuable as bearing wit- 
 ness to germinal ideas which were afterward to ex- 
 pand into institutions. Its unknown writer makes 
 Rome take the place of Jerusalem as henceforth the 
 sacred centre of Christendom, and St. Peter take the 
 place of St. James as the visible head of the new 
 society. 
 
 Ideas not dissimilar, though in some respects more 
 limited in their range, had occupied the mind of Ig- 
 
102 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 natius, the Bishop of Antioch. Though not a Roman 
 by birth or education, he had the same conservative 
 anxiety for the welfare of the church as an organized 
 society. In his desire for unity, the only guarantee 
 of strength, he conceived each local church as having 
 its hierarchy and its primate. He may be said to 
 have given the first rough outline of what was later 
 known as the apostolical succession, as well as of the 
 Roman supremacy. In his scheme of the hierarchy 
 there are bishops, presbyters, and deacons ; but the 
 bishops are regarded as the successors and represen- 
 tatives of Christ, while the presbyters hold the rank of 
 apostles. Each local church was thus to reproduce 
 the picture of Christ and his apostles ; to the bishop 
 was due the absolute submission of conscience and 
 will, as if to Christ in person, and the presbyters were 
 to be attuned to the bishops as the strings to the harp. 
 Ignatius (ob. 115) lived before the idea of a Catholic 
 church had been fully recognized, and his conception 
 of the church implied only an aggregation of highly 
 organized ecclesiastical atoms, each one complete in 
 itself, but without any visible tie binding them organ- 
 ically to each other. This defect in his scheme was 
 supplied b}^ the Roman conception of a hierarchy for the 
 universal church, with the Bishop of Rome as the rep- 
 resentative of Christ to the whole body of believers. 
 
 The Roman Christians not only saw no incongruity 
 in the church or kingdom as having a visible head, but 
 could not understand the existence of a visible society 
 without it. To think of the church as having an in- 
 visible king with no delegated representative on earth, 
 was to the Roman mind to leave it in an indefinite, in- 
 tangible condition. It was not enough to talk of the 
 real, though spiritual, presence of the invisible Christ 
 
LATIN CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH. 103 
 
 as a bond of unity, the principle of all life and growth ; 
 a divine-human fellowship of Christian disciples, — a 
 school for learners under an invisible instructor, — was 
 to the Roman mind no church at all. The church 
 must have a visible centre and a visible circumference : 
 the terms of admittance and of exclusion must be ex- 
 actly denned ; the nature of the powers delegated to 
 its officers must be explicitly determined ; there must 
 be uniformity of practice and uniformity of opinion as 
 well ; there must be stringent methods of securing 
 obedience and subordination, — all this, and even more, 
 if the church was to be the kingdom of God, a power 
 of God unto salvation. 
 
 Such was the spirit and aim of the Latin church as 
 traced in the Christian literature of the first three 
 centuries. If we compare the Epistle to Diognetus 
 with the Epistle of Clement of Rome, contemporaneous 
 as they were among the earliest writings of the post- 
 apostolic age, we may note the divergence between 
 Greek and Latin Christianity as clearly marked as at 
 any later stage in history. The author of the Epistle 
 to Diognetus is occupied with the work and person of 
 Christ, with the endeavor to read the new revelation 
 in its largest, most spiritual relationships. In the Ro- 
 man Clement's writings, we recognize the familiar 
 strain so often repeated in later literature down to our 
 own age, how Christ had sent apostles, and apostles 
 had appointed bishops and deacons, and how all this 
 had been done to prevent strife about ecclesiastical 
 offices. The supreme question in Clement's mind con- 
 cerns orders in the ministry, the necessity of obedi- 
 ence, and subordination. The contrast is further seen 
 if we compare Tertullian with Clement of Alexandria, 
 Cyprian with Origen, or Ambrose with Athanasius. 
 
104 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 With the one class of writers the constantly recurring 
 burden is the divine authority of the established order, 
 the necessity of uniformity in opinion, the claims of 
 tradition, the need of some centre of authority, the 
 terms of entrance into the church or of exclusion from 
 its fold, the power of the keys ; in a word, all that is 
 implied in ecclesiastical administration. For these 
 things it is not to the theologians of the Greek church 
 in the second or third century that we must go, if 
 one is impressed with their importance or in search of 
 weapons in ecclesiastical controversy. In the Greek 
 church we are in a different atmosphere altogether. 
 
 By the middle of the second century a great advance 
 had been made in the work of organizing; and consol- 
 idating the Christian communities scattered through- 
 out the empire. The idea had taken root of a Catholic 
 church which, in its earliest form, as it appeared in 
 Greek thought, was the fellowship of those in whom 
 Christ had been revealed, or in whom He was uncon- 
 sciously active ; in the Latin mind, an organization 
 which was not to be cut short in its career by the sud- 
 den reappearance of Christ, but as destined to grow 
 and spread throughout the empire, was worthy of the 
 highest efforts of the Roman genius for administra- 
 tion. By this time also it is evident that the prin- 
 ciple which inspired the Latin method must have 
 already begun to yield its fruits in the separation of 
 the clergy from the body of the people, in the grow- 
 ing tendency to regard them as a sacred caste, as 
 rulers of the church by some external law of divine 
 right, instead of ministers and organs of the Christian 
 community in whose recognition lay the foundation of 
 all authority. Already men were beginning to iden- 
 tify the church with the clergy, to regard the most 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OF MONTANISM. 105 
 
 precious promises of Christ as made to the apostles, in 
 their capacity as ecclesiastical administrators handing 
 down a deposit to their successors in office. 
 
 That such a view of the church was repugnant to 
 many, and especially to the oriental communities, is 
 apparent from the protest made in the Montanistic 
 movement which originated in the East about the 
 middle of the second century, and whose influence 
 was felt, not only in Asia Minor, but in North Africa 
 and Gaul. It is not necessary here to enter into a dis- 
 cussion of its character, or seek to disentangle its 
 original purpose, so much obscured by the angry decla- 
 mations of its opponents. That the movement was in 
 some respects a retrograde one, that it cherished prin- 
 ciples which would have hindered the spread of gen- 
 uine Christianity, — all this may be at once conceded. 
 It revived the old belief, which was fast dying out, 
 that the coming of Christ in the flesh was near at 
 hand, as the most fundamental tenet of Christian 
 faith and practice ; it introduced a rigid and gloomy 
 asceticism as a preparation for the disasters which 
 would precede His advent, and by its false enthusiasm 
 gave birth to much disorder. But the main signifi- 
 cance of Montanism in this connection was its as- 
 sertion of a truth to which the church had not yet 
 awakened, or which was lost sight of under the in- 
 creasing activity in the development of ecclesiastical 
 order. The Montanists declared the active presence 
 in the church of a Holy Spirit who, since Christ's de- 
 parture, had come to carry on His work. It was the 
 Holy Spirit, and not apostles, who was the true and 
 only successor of Christ, the only prelate, because He 
 alone succeeds Christ. 1 It was the work of the Spirit 
 1 Tertullian, De virg. vel., c. i. 
 
106 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 to lead men into all truth, to truth which had not yet 
 been discerned, to break down the power of custom and 
 tradition when they obstructed the process of a fuller 
 revelation. The organs through which the Spirit 
 spoke were not necessarily the clergy ; any man or 
 woman might be chosen to declare the Spirit's mes- 
 sage to the churches. So far did the Montanists 
 carry their opposition to the encroachments of the 
 hierarchy, that women rather than men were their 
 favorite oracles, and it is even possible that women 
 may have been set apart to the sacred offices of the 
 church. 
 
 The movement was welcome to different people for 
 different reasons. Irenaeus plead in its behalf because 
 its doctrine of the coming of Christ commended itself 
 to his judgment. Tertullian, after having been a 
 Catholic Christian, became a Montanist, and found in 
 the exclusiveness of the sect, with its rigid protest 
 against the world and the flesh, elements that were 
 congenial to the fierce vehemence of his natural tern- 
 per. He never seems to have got on well with the 
 Roman clergy, and in the freedom of the Spirit, as the 
 Montanists proclaimed it, may have found an inward 
 satisfaction never experienced in the Catholic church 
 as he had known it. But Montanism was doomed to 
 failure from its origin. Too many false conceptions 
 mingled with the truth which it held : it lacked a 
 spirit of soberness and self-control ; in its idea of the 
 church as a faithful few, holding together till Christ 
 should come to claim them as His own, there was no 
 working theory to oppose to the ambition of an aspir- 
 ing hierarchy. The church, however, did not fail to 
 take lessons from a movement which, as a sect, it 
 opposed and crushed. Some of the ascetic regulations 
 
THEORY OF APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION. 107 
 
 which the Montanists were the first to advocate, and 
 more particularly the dislike to science and art, were 
 domesticated in the Catholic regime. After the strong 
 protest in behalf of the Holy Spirit, the doctrine could 
 no longer remain unheeded. But Rome economized 
 the doctrine to its own advantage. It was a crisis in 
 the history of ecclesiastical development when it came 
 to be admitted that such a Spirit as the Montanists 
 described did indeed continue to bring gifts to the 
 church, but connected with this admission was the 
 strenuous assertion of Rome that the Holy Spirit was 
 tied in His action to the hierarchy, and spoke only 
 through its accredited representatives. The bishops 
 thus came to be regarded as the sole depositories of 
 the Spirit's presence, and in accordance with this be- 
 lief grew up a theory that the decisions of councils 
 composed of bishops were directly given by the Holy 
 Spirit, inasmuch as they were given by the voice of the 
 united episcopate. 
 
 It was Cyprian, the famous Bishop of Carthage (ob. 
 258), who first enunciated this theory explicitly, who 
 first distinctly taught the doctrine of apostolical suc- 
 cession, giving to it a form that made it easy of com- 
 prehension, as well as adapted to the needs springing 
 out of the growing recognition of the Catholicity of 
 the church. His well-known treatise, entitled " The 
 Unity of the Church," may be regarded as the charter 
 of the institution which was to be known in history as 
 the Latin or Roman Catholic church. In Cyprian's 
 view, the episcopate, which in reality constitutes the 
 church, is conceived as an organic whole complete in 
 itself, everywhere diffused and endowed with the di- 
 vine powers necessary for the salvation of men. To 
 be in unity with the bishop has, according to this con- 
 
108 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 ception, a wider significance than it had in the mind 
 of Ignatius, — it implies the larger relationship with 
 the universal body of the episcopate, of which the 
 local bishop is the organ or representative. 
 
 The theory of Cyprian had its defects as a working 
 policy, however it may for a time have commended it- 
 self to Christian sentiment. It did not meet the rising 
 demand for a head and centre of the church which 
 should give to the episcopate an actual and visible 
 unity. It asserted the equality of the bishops as the 
 representatives of the apostles, but there was a convic- 
 tion in the mind of the Roman people that the church 
 was entitled to have not only representatives of the 
 apostles, but, as Ignatius had thought, a representative 
 of Christ as well. Cyprian's theory called attention, 
 and that in a conspicuous way, to the majesty of the 
 vacant place which in the days of apostles had been 
 filled by the divine Master. The same method of ar- 
 gument which Cyprian had used, in demonstrating the 
 apostles to have been the divinely ordered rulers of 
 the church, was employed by the Roman church to 
 prove that St. Peter had been the supreme prince or 
 pontiff of the apostolic college. Why else should it 
 have been said that the church was built upon Peter, 
 why should the power of the keys have been imparted 
 to him alone, with the commission to feed the flock of 
 Christ, and how otherwise explain his prominence in 
 the first days of the church, and the grandeur with 
 which his memory still filled the Christian imagina- 
 tion ? Cyprian could not easily meet such an argument. 
 In his view, the words spoken to Peter were addressed 
 to him simply as a representative of all the apostles. 
 But if Peter was a representative of the apostles, why 
 should not the apostles themselves be regarded, not 
 
WEAKNESS OF CYPRIAN'S POSITION. 109 
 
 merely as the princes or divinely ordered rulers of 
 the church, but as the representatives of a sanctified 
 humanity which was larger than they ; and why should 
 not the promises and commissions given to them have 
 been given in their name to all Christians in virtue of 
 their membership in the body of Christ ? 
 
 If we may characterize the Cyprianic and Roman 
 theories in the well understood language of political 
 institutions, it may be said that Cyprian was arguing 
 in behalf of the government of the church by an oli- 
 garchy, while Rome was urging the principle of eccle- 
 siastical absolutism, — the need of the impersonation of 
 authority in one man. An analogy may be found for 
 the relation of Cyprian to the Bishop of Home in the 
 earlier political history, when Cicero, in behalf of the 
 senatorial oligarchy, disputed the advances of Cassar 
 to supreme authority. The same reasons which justi- 
 fied imperialism in the state might be applied- w r ith 
 equal force in behalf of its adoption by the church. 
 The oligarchy of the Roman senate succumbing to the 
 fascinations of Caesarism was a type of the episcopal 
 oligarchy yielding its claim to the Roman papacy. 
 
 II. 
 
 In order to a fuller understanding of the work of 
 the Latin genius, as inspired anew under Christian 
 auspices it sought to create another empire and to go 
 forth a second time upon a career of conquest, it will 
 be necessary to dwell for a moment upon the Latin 
 church in the presence of the intellectual and moral 
 vagaries of heresy, and also to inquire what shape the 
 object and goal of Christianity assumed to the Latin 
 mind. To what end was the authority which she cre- 
 ated subservient ? What motive inspired the growth 
 
110 THE LATIN THEOLOGY, 
 
 of the hierarchy and the submission to its rule ? What 
 was the object in view of this vast elaboration of ec- 
 clesiastical machinery known as the Roman Catholic 
 Church? 
 
 The one typical heresy which confronted the Chris- 
 tian faith in Rome, as elsewhere throughout the church, 
 was known as Gnosticism. Whatever the date of its 
 origin, it was at its height as a phase of religious 
 thought by the middle of the second century. While 
 it is difficult to speak of the movement as a whole, 
 since it comprised so many different systems, yet in 
 its general outline it was unmistakably a reflection 
 of that oriental tendency whose embodiment may be 
 seen to-day in Buddhism. The sense of weariness of 
 human life, the despairing pessimism which saw no 
 hope for the future of humanity in this world, the 
 contempt for external nature, the deification of asceti- 
 cism as the principle of salvation, — such were the 
 external features of oriental religion as it began to be 
 reproduced in the West, and which in Gnosticism 
 threatened to combine with the religion of Christ. In 
 the second century the Gnostic Christians were asking 
 themselves the same questions that Buddha had pro- 
 pounded in his long reveries before he came forth a 
 religious reformer. They were so impressed with the 
 magnitude of the evils and the miseries of life, that 
 they questioned the divine omnipotence, and wondered 
 why the world should have been called into existence. 
 All the Gnostics were agreed. that God could not have 
 been its creator. He stood in their imagination at an 
 infinite distance from such a scene as the world pre- 
 sents. Bat having severed the world from God, the 
 Gnostics, like the Neo-Platonists, endeavored to reunite 
 them by a long series of potencies or beings who 
 
ORIGIN OF THE APOSTLES' CREED. Ill 
 
 stretched themselves across the abyss which lay be- 
 tween humanity and the supreme Deity. The lowest 
 being in this line of intermediaries, in whom the evil 
 was conceived as predominating' over the good, was 
 selected by the Gnostics as fit to be the creator. Since 
 the world-maker is not wholly evil, for he has some 
 remote relationship to the heavenly sphere, there is 
 still something in his creation which is capable of re- 
 demption, though he himself is not able or disposed to 
 assist in the process. In order to rescue the few souls 
 who have an affinity for the divine, in whose composi- 
 tion the good outweighs the evil, one of the higher 
 beings known as the Christ descends into the world 
 and makes known the method by which their salvation 
 is to be accomplished. But inasmuch as the very 
 nature of matter is evil, it was impossible for the 
 Gnostics to admit an incarnation, — to believe that 
 Christ had really taken a human body and died upon 
 the cross. The historical aspects of Christ's earthly 
 life were explained away as unworthy of a being who 
 was divine. He appeared to have a human body in 
 order that he might proclaim his message ; and the 
 essence of his teaching is, that by ascetic practices a 
 few may rise into the sphere of the higher, spiritual 
 world, — the majority of men are doomed to annihila- 
 tion or perdition, and the physical world to be finally 
 consumed in a great conflagration. 
 
 What is known as the " Apostles' Creed " is the 
 simple but emphatic protest of the church against the 
 Gnostic heresies, — the summary of that which was be- 
 lieved or felt to be true as recorded in history or veri- 
 fied in Christian experience. There were other sum- 
 maries of a similar character, which, like the Apostles' 
 Creed, had grown up after the middle of the second 
 
112 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 century ; while differing in detail, they agree in their 
 sub stance a^ expansions of the baptismal formula, and 
 the explanation of their appearance is due to the en- 
 ergy with which the heart and common-sense of the 
 church resisted the errors which were fatal to its ex- 
 istence. As we examine the Apostles' Creed with 
 reference to its historical interpretation, the antago- 
 nism is apparent at every point. In the first clause, — 
 " I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of 
 heaven and earth," — it is affirmed that God is not 
 limited or hampered by an evil power in the universe 
 which acts contrary to His will, and that this earth as 
 well as the heavenly sphere is created by supreme De- 
 ity, and not by some inferior or malignant being. In 
 the second article of the creed, the words referring to 
 Christ as " His only begotten Son our Lord," imply 
 a rejection of the long line of Gnostic intermediaries 
 who do not so much unite as sej)arate God from hu- 
 manity. The Gnostic notion that the Saviour did not 
 have a real body is met by the assertion that He was 
 born of a human mother whose name is preserved in 
 history ; against the Gnostic denial of the fact of His 
 death, the time of His suffering is fixed by the mention 
 of the Roman procurator in Judaea ; and in order to 
 make emphatic the church's belief in the reality as 
 well as in the importance of his death, it is declared 
 with a threefold reiteration, — " He was crucified, dead 
 and buried." The creed which thus arose as a protest 
 against Gnosticism was afterwards extended to meet 
 other needs of the church as they appeared in later 
 ages. 1 As a confession of faith, it shows how strong 
 
 1 At what time the clause, " He descended into Hell," was 
 added to the creed is not known. The clauses, "The Holy- 
 Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of 
 
ISSUES THAT LAY BACK OF THE CREED. 113 
 
 was the hold of the essential truth upon the Christian 
 consciousness, in the presence of the worst skepticism 
 which it could be called upon to encounter. In its 
 Eastern or its Western form, it is simply the em- 
 phatic assertion of the incarnation as the essence of 
 the church's faith. 
 
 But there were profound issues that lay back of the 
 creed, which the creed does not mention. To these 
 Greek theology had addressed itself in order to over- 
 come the principle which made Gnosticism possible. 
 The Greek theologians were optimists, not because 
 they shut their eyes to the darker side of life, but be- 
 cause they had exhausted pessimism at its source by 
 refuting the principle in which it originated. They 
 were not given to raising the cry that the church was 
 in danger ; they were not alarmed at the rise of here- 
 sies, nor had they fears for the safety of the church, 
 because they accepted the incarnation not only as an 
 historical fact which had taken place in the past, but 
 as a living present reality, and saw the essential Christ 
 always and everywhere exerting his spiritual force in 
 
 Sins," were probably inserted in the West in connection with the 
 Novatian schism after the middle of the third century. None of 
 the above expressions are to be found in the rale of faith as re- 
 cited by Irenams (i. c. 10, and iii. c. 4), or Tertnllian (De prces. 
 Ticeret. 12, and De vir. vel, i.), nor were they contained in the 
 creed as recited at Nicaja. The clause, "the Resurrection of 
 the Body, " is given by both Irenams and Tertullian, but is want- 
 ing in the Nicene Creed. It may have been a protest against the 
 views entertained by Greek theologians, and was incorporated 
 into the Eastern creed in the latter part of the fourth century or 
 still later. The interesting legend that the Apostles' Creed was 
 the verbal composition of the apostles themselves, each of them 
 contributing a clause to the joint result, was first mentioned by 
 Runnus in the fifth century. As a legend it embodies the Latin 
 idea of tradition as the sole authority of faith. 
 
114 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 order to make manifest the redemption which He had 
 wrought in the flesh. 
 
 The Latin church had no more aptitude for theol- 
 ogy as a science than the Latin people had for philos- 
 ophy throughout their history. Literary men could 
 borrow to a certain extent from the philosophy of the 
 Greeks, or adapt it to their own conceptions ; but as 
 the Roman people created no philosophy, so the Ro- 
 man church gave birth to no theology. A deep and 
 instinctive aversion to all speculative thought, a desire 
 for a definite faith firmly grounded on tradition as the 
 only stable basis, a faith that could be as exactly for- 
 mulated as a code of law, the slightest variation from 
 which could be easily detected and exposed, — such 
 was the characteristic, the ideal and ambition of the 
 Latin church in the second and third centuries, and 
 such they have remained throughout her entire career. 
 
 As a matter of fact, it does not appear that the he- 
 resies of the second century particularly disturbed the 
 peace of the Latin church, or that they were dissemi- 
 nated to any great extent. For the most part they 
 originated in the East, and after they had become full- 
 fledged were taken to Rome. What principally dis- 
 turbed the Latin church was the existence of heresy 
 at all, whether near or remote. It seemed to the gen- 
 uine Roman mind a contradiction or violation of the 
 Christian principle that heresy should dare to assert 
 its existence. That principle, as the Roman Christian 
 understood it, was an explicit and implicit obedience, 
 which included within its range the intellect as well as 
 the conscience. Heresy in its last analysis was simply 
 self-will setting itself above the authority of the church, 
 and thus endangering the external unity of the Chris- 
 tian empire. Hence it was above all necessary to pro- 
 
AUTHORITY OF TRADITION. 115 
 
 claim a definite faith, and to maintain it by some tan- 
 gible authority which could not be misunderstood or 
 evaded. This was the problem to which Latin eccle- 
 siastics devoted their energies. 
 
 At first, as has been already remarked, the Latins 
 received their theology from the Greeks as submis- 
 sively as their ancestors had received their philosophy. 
 But after the Latin language had become the vehicle 
 of religious thought in the West, and the two churches 
 had begun to grow apart, it became difficult to fol- 
 low the development of Greek theology. And even 
 if it had been understood and intelligently followed, 
 it would not have been congenial to the Latin spirit, 
 which so profoundly distrusted the human reason. 
 What could Roman ecclesiastics, dreaming of a great 
 Christian empire, do with a theology which rested for 
 its sanction on so vague a basis as the Christian reason 
 or consciousness, or how with such a principle could 
 they meet the Gnostic and other heretics ? Even the 
 " rule of faith " was of little value unless it were 
 based on some more material foundation than Chris- 
 tian experience enlightened by a divine spirit. If the 
 appeal was made to Scripture as the final authority, 
 the case was not helped, for Scripture was capable of 
 varied interpretations, and had been already discred- 
 ited by the heretics who had been the first to use ifas 
 a refuge from their opponents. 
 
 Irenseus (ob. 202) was the first among western writ- 
 ers who combated the Gnostic heresies. 1 He had been 
 
 1 Tn his conception of the incarnation Irenseus is in full sym- 
 pathy with the spirit of Greek theology, and has set forth the 
 doctrine with great force and beauty of expression. He has been 
 sometimes regarded, together with his pupil, Hippolytus, as rep- 
 resenting a distinct school in which a liberal theology was com- 
 
116 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 born in the East, and was to some extent familiar with 
 Greek philosophy. Yet in his distant home in Gaul 
 he had felt the influence of the Roman spirit, and his 
 writings reveal that in the compromises of his thought 
 the Roman principle was predominant. He used his 
 knowledge of philosophy in reasoning with the Gnos- 
 tics merely to point a moral. He had no faith in 
 philosophy as such — in the reason as a divine gift 
 through which God reveals His truth. To be able to 
 trace a Gnostic opinion to its supposed origin in the 
 teaching of some philosopical sect was sufficient evi- 
 dence of its falsity. It is not surprising, therefore, 
 that he should fall back upon the tradition of the 
 church, descending through the episcopate from the 
 apostles, as the best bulwark that could be raised 
 against the danger of heresy. He formulated the idea 
 of tradition so forcibly, that his memorable words have 
 been regarded by the Latin church ever since as an 
 axiom in dealing with the divergences of religious be- 
 lief. It is possible that he did not intend to convey 
 the meaning which later generations attached to his 
 language, but as to the general bearing of his argu- 
 ment there can be no doubt. While he admitted that 
 
 binecl with an ecclesiastical tendency. While in some respects he 
 stands by himself and cannot be classified, his real affinity was 
 with the West and not with the East. He had no confidence in 
 the reason as an organ of the truth, and accepted the Latin idea 
 of the episcopate as possessing the charisma veritatis. His ten- 
 dency was toward a legal apprehension of Christianity. Cf. Art. 
 Irenseus by Lipsius, Die. Chris. Biog. The difference between 
 Origen and Hippolytus has been clearly stated by Martineau, 
 Studies of Christianity, p. 246. In meditating on the conjunction 
 between Father and Son, Origen would think of the relation be- 
 tween thought and volition • Hippolytus of that between volition 
 and execution. 
 
ARGUMENT OF IREN^EUS. 117 
 
 the " deposit " of the faith might have been preserved 
 in every church in which an unbroken descent of the 
 episcopate from the apostles could be traced, yet, as 
 he argued, it was preeminently the church of Kome by 
 which the tradition of every other church must be re- 
 gulated, because of its high importance as the capital 
 of the empire and as founded by the two most glorious 
 apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul. The apostolic tradi- 
 tion, he further reasoned, must have been faithfully 
 preserved at Rome, because any departure from it 
 would there have been most easily detected among be- 
 lievers from all parts of the church who were in the 
 habit of meeting there ; and, therefore, since the tradi- 
 tion had been maintained in its purity at Rome, all 
 other churches are in possession of the faith so far as 
 they are in agreement with the church in Rome. 1 
 
 The same line of reasoning was also adopted by 
 Tertullian (Ob. circ. 220) in his famous treatise on 
 the " Prescription of Heresy." He had been a Roman 
 lawyer before his conversion to Christianity, and the 
 legal attitude is everywhere apparent in his writings. 
 He was always the advocate, holding, as it were, a 
 brief for Christianity as he understood it, not con- 
 cerned so much for the truth as for overthrowing the 
 adversaries that rose up against it. From his point of 
 view the church's faith was its property, and the aim 
 of heresy was to weaken the church's sense of security 
 resulting from long possession. Hence the receipt for 
 dealing with the heretics was the legal argument that 
 the church had a presumption in its favor springing 
 from long and undisputed possession, which constituted 
 its prescription against all new claimants. Or, to drop 
 
 1 iii. c. 3. " Ad hanc enim ecclesiam propter potiorem prin- 
 cipalitatem uecesse est omnem coiiveuire ecclesiam." 
 
118 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 the figure, heresy is simply self-will, and is instigated 
 by philosophy, — the one source of evil against which 
 the church must be always on its guard. Athens has 
 no connection with Jerusalem, the academy with the 
 church, or heretics with Christians. " Away with all 
 efforts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Pla- 
 tonic, and dialectic composition." Truth does not call 
 for continual research and inquiry, — it is a definite 
 thing, to be sought after until it has been found, and 
 then all inquiry should cease ; just as the woman in 
 the parable did not go on looking for the piece of sil- 
 ver after she had found it. Away with the man who 
 is ever seeking because he never finds ! The creed or 
 rule of faith is the summary of all truth, and curios- 
 ity should not attempt to go beyond it. Nor should 
 the church condescend to support the rule of faith by 
 arguing with the heretic from Scripture, for the Scrip- 
 ture belongs to the church alone, and heretics should 
 not be allowed its use, since they have no title at all 
 to the privilege. The appeal, therefore, does not lie to 
 Scripture, but to the authority of tradition handed 
 down through the apostles and apostolic churches. 
 Here lies the test of truth, the principle of certitude. 
 Since Christ gave a " deposit " to the apostles and 
 sent them forth to preach, no others ought to be re- 
 ceived as preachers than those whom He appointed. 
 Having been under the teaching of Christ, the apos- 
 tles must have been fully instructed in all things, and 
 were quite competent to transmit safely the truth as 
 they had received it. The fact that St. Paul rebuked 
 St. Peter for his inconsistency or cowardice does not 
 at all invalidate the teaching of St. Peter. Nor did 
 St. Paul have any superiority, as a preacher of truth, 
 to St. Peter. The apostles did not keep anything 
 
THE METHOD OF TERTULL1AN. 119 
 
 back, as the heretics pretend, but handed on the entire 
 " deposit " to their successors. It is inconceivable to 
 imagine the churches which they founded as capri- 
 cious or unfaithful stewards of a treasure held in trust 
 for those that came after them ; nor is the value of 
 this argument affected by the circumstance that the 
 apostolic church of Galatia fell away from the truth, 
 and " was so soon removed to another gospel " than 
 that which St. Paul had preached ; or that the church 
 in Corinth required to be fed with milk because it was 
 not able to bear strong meat ; for if these churches 
 were rebuked for falling away from the truth, were 
 they not also corrected by the apostle ? That the trans- 
 mission of the " deposit " has been faithfully accom- 
 plished is shown by the substantial agreement in the 
 churches everywhere. Variations and diversities in- 
 dicate a corruption of the faith, and are the essential 
 mark of heresy. 
 
 The heretics are therefore challenged to display their 
 record ; let them unfold the roll of their bishops, com- 
 ing down in due succession from the apostles, so that 
 the first in the line of descent can show that he was 
 ordained by some apostle or apostolic man. Here lies 
 the strength of the Catholic church, that it has apos- 
 tolic sees which utter the voice of the apostles them- 
 selves. There is Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, and 
 Ephesus. In Italy there is Rome, which may boast a 
 threefold apostolic authority. How happy is its church 
 on which apostles poured forth all their doctrines along 
 with their blood, — where Peter was crucified, and 
 Paul beheaded, and John came forth unharmed from 
 immersion in boiling oil. So, then, to conclude, the 
 heretics are trespassing on a domain which is not theirs. 
 It may be fairly said to them, Who are you ? When 
 
120 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 and whence did you come? As you are none of mine, 
 what have you to do with that which is mine ? By 
 what right do you hew my wood, or divert the streams 
 of my fountain, or remove my landmarks ? This is 
 my property. Why are you sowing and feeding here 
 at your pleasure ? This is my property ; I have long 
 possessed it ; I possessed it before you ; I hold sure 
 title-deeds from the original owners themselves to 
 whom the estate belonged ; I am the heir of the apos- 
 tles. As they carefully prepared a will and testament 
 and committed it to a trust, even so I hold it. 
 
 Such was the argument of Tertullian in his "Pre- 
 scription of Heretics." The book was probably writ- 
 ten in the early part of his life ; after he became a 
 Montanist he ceased to make so much of apostles as 
 successors of Christ, and dwelt upon the work of a 
 divine spirit, whose office is to break down custom and 
 routine as the sanctions of truth, and to lead men into 
 a deeper knowledge of the things of God. But the 
 argument of the Prescription was too clear and valu- 
 able, too much in accordance with the genius of the 
 Roman church, to be laid aside because its author had 
 become recreant to its significance. Of all the writ- 
 ings of Tertullian, it was the one most deeply studied 
 in later ages, the favorite treatise with ecclesiastics 
 who have aimed to revive the authority of the church 
 or resist the encroachments of the reason. In the 
 early church it marked an important step in the pro- 
 cess by which the authority of the episcopate was cre- 
 ated as a means of overcoming heresy. Like the 
 argument of Irenseus, it tended naturally to build up 
 the supremacy of the see of Rome, for it was a method 
 which found its most emphatic illustration in pointing 
 to the one church which was believed to concentrate in 
 
BELIEF IN ENDLESS PUNISHMENT. 121 
 
 itself the united labors of the most eminent of the 
 apostles. 
 
 The desire to rid the church of heresy was one 
 of the causes which stimulated the growth of the 
 ecclesiastical organization in the West, and gave di- 
 rection to the peculiar genius of Rome. But back 
 of this desire may be seen the operation of a yet 
 more powerful motive. The practical purpose for 
 which the church had been established, or for which 
 Christianity existed, was not to the Latin mind 
 primarily an ethical one ; even the obedience which 
 the church required, or the morality which the gospel 
 enjoined, were not an end in themselves but a means 
 to a remoter end, — the salvation of the soul from the 
 consequences of sin in the future world. The doc- 
 trine of an endless punishment for all who rejected 
 the claims of Christ must have been from an early 
 period the underlying belief which gave the strongest 
 sanction to the church's authority. 
 
 At first the church had appeared as the community 
 of Christian disciples held together by their love for 
 the Master, and waiting for his return in order to be 
 reunited to Him in His millennial kingdom. The fate 
 of those outside its limits, who had not repented of 
 their sins or abandoned the worship of idols, and es- 
 pecially of those who persecuted the church, is por- 
 trayed in the gloomy visions of the Apocalypse. All 
 that the human imagination could conceive as most 
 awful was the punishment in store for these when 
 the seals of the future were broken, when the angels 
 should sound the successive trumpets of human doom. 
 This belief in a millennial kingdom soon to be estab- 
 lished grew weak in the second centurv, and in the 
 third may be said to have disappeared. But the vision 
 
122 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 of a lake that burned with endless fires for the ene- 
 mies of Christ, the tortures in reserve for those who 
 persecuted his faithful followers, still appealed to a 
 church that existed in the face of a perpetual ha- 
 tred and scorn on the part of the heathens. It was 
 impossible that recriminations should not be heard 
 from heathens and Christians alike. The latter told 
 their adversaries of a day of judgment, when the 
 punishment which had been withheld in this world 
 should fall upon them in awful severity, — when the 
 final sentence should be pronounced which remanded 
 them to the tortures of endless suffering. Tertullian 
 grows eloquent as he describes the scene which he 
 shall witness when that last judgment day, with its 
 unlooked-for issues, shall be over. The vast spectacle 
 which will then burst upon his gaze will excite his 
 admiration, his derision, his joy, his exultation. He 
 will see illustrious monarchs who had been deified 
 on earth groaning in the lowest darkness with great 
 Jove himself, and with them the governors of prov- 
 inces, in fires more fierce than those which they lighted 
 on earth for the followers of Christ. The world's 
 wise men and philosophers, who had taught falsely, 
 and among them those also who had denied the 
 resurrection of the same identical body which they 
 had left, these will be there, to be consumed in the 
 body, covered with shame, in the presence of those 
 whom they had deceived. The poets who had sung 
 of a judgment seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos will 
 appear at the unexpected judgment seat of Christ. 
 There will then be a better opportunity than he has 
 cared to avail himself of here, of witnessing the 
 tragedians and the play-actors declaiming in a real 
 calamity, the charioteers glowing in their chariots of 
 
MORBID TONE OF THE AGE. 123 
 
 fire, the wrestlers tossing in their fiery billows. Or if 
 he should not find interest enough in such a spectacle, 
 he is sure to turn with eager and insatiable gaze upon 
 those who vented themselves in fury against the Lord. 
 These are sights which no quaestor or priest can now 
 procure a Roman audience the pleasure of beholding, 
 but the Christian can even now by faith behold these 
 things in the pictures of the imagination. 1 
 
 When Christian apologists like Tertullian were thus 
 proclaiming to their heathen brethren a day of final 
 judgment, in which they were to receive the never- 
 ending penalty of their madness, we may admire the 
 boldness which their speech displays, but we can no 
 longer wonder at the growing indignation which was 
 soon to culminate in the Decian persecution, in one 
 supreme effort to root up and exterminate the Chris- 
 tian church. 
 
 A certain unhealthy and morbid tone characterized 
 the spirit of both Christians and heathens in the third 
 century. The decline of the Roman empire since the 
 death of Marcus Aurelius (a. d. 180) was attended 
 by disasters of varied kinds, often on an immense 
 scale, — pestilences, famines, earthquakes, frequent de- 
 feats of the Roman legions. The feeling that some- 
 thing was wrong, that more fearful judgments were im- 
 pending, took possession of the public mind. Under 
 such circumstances it was becoming difficult to main- 
 tain the conviction of the love of God. The heathens 
 were cherishing a fatal conviction that the gods were 
 angry because the Christians neglected their worship, 
 and were visiting their wrath upon the empire. Cy- 
 prian replied in the same strain, that God was angry 
 with the heathens because they did not turn from 
 
 1 De Spec, 30. 
 
124 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 their idolatry. The writings of Cyprian reveal how 
 the popular theology of the Latin church was taking 
 shape in one of the darkest moments in its history. 
 The Decian persecution (249-251) had been followed 
 by a calamity even more awful in the great plague 
 which reached Carthage in the year 252, and is said 
 to have destroyed half of the population of Alexan- 
 dria, and for a time to have carried off at Rome five 
 thousand people daily, lasting for some twenty years 
 before its ravages were over. An event of this kind 
 must have gathered additional horror when we con- 
 sider how society was sharply divided against itself, 
 Christians and heathens accusing each other of being 
 the cause of the calamity. 
 
 Cyprian sought to improve the moment by calling 
 the heathens to repentance, but his method of appeal 
 was calculated to embitter rather than appease the 
 pagan mind. Like Tertullian, he portrayed the suf- 
 ferings of the future world endless in their duration, 
 of which the present disasters were a warning and a 
 prophecy. He did not, indeed, exult in the prospect, 
 but still thought it would be a compensation to the 
 Christians for what they endured at the hands of 
 their persecutors. In the history of theology his let- 
 ters and treatises possess a peculiar value as bringing 
 out his theory of life, — a theory now for the first 
 time announced with dogmatic clearness and precision. 
 The world, he declares in his "Address to Deme- 
 trian," is nearing its end, and the coming of Anti- 
 Christ is at hand. The earth has grown old and 
 exhausted, life is failing at its sources, the sun is 
 losing its heat, the rain diminishes, the harvests grow 
 thin, the disemboweled mountains no longer }deld 
 the precious ores, young men are born prematurely 
 
LIFE AS A PROBATION. 125 
 
 old, — everywhere he looks he reads the signs of 
 decay and approaching dissolution. Meantime the 
 church remains as an ark of deliverance from the 
 wrath of God. The Christians may seem to share 
 with their neighbors in the troubles of the time, but 
 they who have a confidence in the good things that a 
 future life will bring do not in reality suffer from the 
 assault of present evils. To the pagans the church 
 offers a refuge, if they will turn to it. But the op- 
 portunity is brief, the end is near ; after this world is 
 over there is no hope, no possibility of repentance. 
 The pain of punishment will then be without the fruit 
 of repentance, tears and prayers will be of no avail. 
 Here life is either saved or lost. So long as one 
 remains in this world, no repentance is too late. 
 Death constitutes the line between hope and despair ; 
 it puts an end to human probation. Hereafter a 
 punishment devouring with living flames will burn 
 up the condemned in an ever-burning Gehenna ; to 
 their agonies will be neither end nor respite. Souls 
 with their bodies will be reserved in infinite tortures 
 for suffering. 1 
 
 When Christianity was presented in ways like these 
 to the heathen world, when fear was becoming the mo- 
 tive to the worship of God and the communion of the 
 church, and salvation was escape from impending 
 wrath, it was only a question of time how long the 
 Christians themselves could maintain their faith in 
 their own salvation. Cyprian's theory made life a 
 probation for the heathen world, while those within 
 the church had already entered by anticipation upon 
 an assured •inheritance. But how were the Christians 
 to retain this assurance when they saw the great ma- 
 1 Ad Demetrianum, 23-25. 
 
126 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 jority of their heathen brethren passing to endless 
 perdition, when religion was no longer grounded in 
 love, and God had become a passive spectator in the 
 struo-ole where endless issues depended upon the de- 
 cision of an hour? To such an inquiry the answer 
 may be read in the changes which were coming over 
 the church after the middle of the third century, some 
 of them in Cyprian's lifetime. The world was be- 
 coming, in the Christian imagination, a theatre for 
 the activity of malignant supernatural forces. The 
 heathen deities ceased to be regarded as mere phan- 
 toms ; they became real existences, demons in the air, 
 which lurked in wait for unwary souls. Baptism 
 assumed the character of a magical rite, by whose 
 waters the soul was rendered invulnerable against 
 the assaults of evil spirits. Connected with baptism 
 from this time, as an indispensable preliminary, was 
 the rite of exorcism, by which the evil spirit was first 
 banished before the formula of the sacred name could 
 be repeated. The sign of the cross was thought to 
 be a safeguard against the thousand shapes in which 
 the deities of heathenism sought to regain possession 
 of the Christian convert. The dread and terror which 
 had fallen upon this world began to extend to the 
 next, and when men began to pray for their dead it 
 was a sign that the old assurance had departed which 
 regarded them as safe in the bosom of God. So far 
 had God retreated from man that the gulf which 
 divided them began to be bridged with saints and 
 martyrs and confessors, to whom prayers might be 
 addressed, through whose mediation with Christ 
 prayers stood a better chance of being heard and 
 answered. Influences like these began thus early to 
 transform the Lord's Supper into a sacrifice after 
 
LATIN IDEA OF CATHOLICITY. 127 
 
 Jewish and heathen types, by which the favor of God 
 might be propitiated. The clergy were a priesthood 
 after the same analogies, whose function was to stand 
 between God and the people, as the mediators through 
 whose intercession heaven remained open, and the 
 favor of God descended to man. 
 
 The course of events in the third century tended to 
 confirm the Roman idea of the church by determining 
 how its catholicity was to be conceived as a working 
 principle. A brief allusion to the controversies which 
 were connected with this result will be sufficient. 
 After the Decian persecution it became an important 
 question what should be the method of treatment 
 adopted toward the large number of Christians who 
 had apostatized or denied their faith. Should they 
 be received back into the church on easy terms after 
 professing repentance, or should they be subjected to 
 a severe, protracted discipline, or was it proper that 
 they should be received back into the church on any 
 terms, so heinous was the offense which they had 
 committed ? Another kindred issue was whether the 
 baptism performed by heretics possessed validity, or 
 whether the rite must be repeated in the case of those 
 who, rejecting their h3res} r , sought the communion of 
 the church. The position of the African church dif- 
 fered in both instances from that of Rome. The 
 Montanist influence still lingered in Carthage, and 
 even Cyprian, who had been a pupil and admirer of 
 Tertullian, retained something of that stern old Mon- 
 tanist's exclusive zeal for the purity of the Christian 
 community. He was a Protestant at heart, despite 
 his sympathy with the Roman spirit for order and 
 administration. While he condemned the extreme 
 attitude of those who said that forgiveness was impos- 
 
128 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 sible for those guilty of apostasy, and therefore for- 
 bade their return to the church on any condition, yet 
 he insisted on a penitence and discipline which to 
 many seemed too severe. In his controversy with 
 the Bishop of Rome about the rebaptism of heretics, 
 he vehemently assailed the invalidity of heretical 
 baptism. 1 The purpose of Cyprian was to keep the 
 church as pure as possible, even though such a policy 
 should hinder its extension. Two theories of the 
 
 1 The Bishop of Rome maintained, on the ground of tradition, 
 that baptism in the name of Christ only, by whomsoever admin- 
 istered, possessed validity (Cyprian, Ep. 72, c. 18); while Cy- 
 prian held that a true baptism required the name of the trinity, 
 as well as its performance in the Catholic church. But how 
 could the Bishop of Rome, so early as the middle of the third 
 century, have made a mistake in so important a matter as the 
 tradition concerning baptism, especially when, if Irenseus was 
 right, Rome was the one place where any departure from the 
 tradition would be most easily detected, and whose possession of 
 such safeguards made the Roman church the best custodian of 
 tradition ? Firmilian, Bishop of Csesarea, in a letter to Cyprian, 
 gets over the difficulty by alleging that Rome was not specially 
 distinguished for maintaining the traditions of the apostles. But 
 if Rome did not keep the traditions, what apostolic see could be 
 depended upon to do so; and then what becomes of the argu- 
 ment from tradition ? Firmilian went on further, in the same 
 epistle, to say that the Bishop of Rome, not content with the one 
 rock on which the foundation of the church was laid, had intro- 
 duced many other rocks, and indeed, by his innovations, had 
 abolished the rock on which he claimed to rest as the successor 
 of Peter. For this famous epistle, which patristic scholars in 
 the Roman church have never sought to make easily accessible, 
 see Routh, Scrip. Ecclesiasticor. Opusc, i. pp. 235, 243. 
 
 It is a curious fact in the history of baptism, that in the ninth 
 century Pope Nicholas I. should have again taken the ground oi 
 the Roman bishop in the third century and have declared bap- 
 tism in the name of Christ only to be valid. Labbe, Concilia? 
 viii. p. 548. 
 
ACCESSION OF CONSTANTINE. 129 
 
 church were contending in his mind, one of which 
 made it consist in the clergy, the other in the body of 
 the faithful, and to neither view did he give unquali- 
 fied approval. It was quite otherwise with the au- 
 thorities at Rome. They rejected by a sure instinct 
 whatever conflicted with the idea of the church as an 
 entity in itself existing independently of those within 
 its fold. A stable, divinely ordered society, as Rome 
 conceived it, could only exist and grow on condition 
 that the mode of entrance should be easy and the 
 gates of admission stand open to all postulants. The 
 demands which it made upon its members should not 
 be too rigid or exacting, and in case of failure or 
 apostasy the terms of restoration must not be severe. 
 Against the restrictions which Cyprian imposed, the 
 Roman church contended, in the interest of a more 
 comprehensive and flexible organization, though at 
 the expense of the spiritual claims which marked the 
 early Christian communities. The Roman policy was 
 bringing the church nearer to the world by lessening 
 the difference that divided them, — its result was to 
 make the church accessible and attractive to the great 
 multitude of pagans who were incapable of inheriting 
 its spiritual heritage. 
 
 III. 
 
 The accession of Constantine in the early part of 
 the fourth century marks a new era not only in the 
 history of the church but also in the fortunes of the- 
 ology. No greater change can be conceived than took 
 place when the once persecuted and despised Chris- 
 tian community first realized that it had superseded 
 the old paganism, that the Roman emperor was hence- 
 forth to stand in close relationship to the church as its 
 9 
 
130 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 protector and highest representative. Constantine be- 
 stowed a great favor upon the church by giving to it 
 the recognition of the law. The church fell heir to 
 the old pagan temples and their revenues ; it was freed 
 from the burden of taxation ; its representatives be- 
 came a privileged class by exemption from the disa- 
 greeable duties which rested so heavily upon Roman 
 citizens. There were no formal terms of alliance be- 
 tween church and state, but it was understood that the 
 church made some return for these favors so gener- 
 ously bestowed. Constantine wanted unity above all 
 things, and saw in the Christian communities a com- 
 prehensive method of organization capable of being 
 utilized for the restoration of unity to a distracted 
 empire. It was his policy to exalt the bishops as the 
 representatives everywhere not only of the church but 
 of the state. One of the first effects of his reign was 
 the realization of the external unity of Christendom 
 in a formal and imposing manner. When the contro- 
 versy arose over the teaching of Arius, and it seemed 
 as though the empire itself was shaken in the excite- 
 ment which rent the church, a great synod of bishops 
 w r as held at Nicaea (325), which not merely disposed 
 of the question in dispute, but illustrated the glory of 
 the church's external unity in a way calculated to for- 
 ever enthrall the Christian imagination. 
 
 It had been the work of the Latin church to per- 
 fect and establish the ecclesiastical organization, and 
 the church in the East had received and exemplified 
 the theory which Cyprian had been the first to enun- 
 ciate, of the solidarity of the episcopate. The doctrine 
 of the trinity, the formula of which had resulted 
 from the alliance of Greek philosophy with Christian 
 thought, had on the other hand been received by the 
 
THE NICENE CREED IN THE WEST. 131 
 
 Latin church from the hands of Greek theologians. 1 
 The doctrine came to the Latin church in the shape 
 which it preferred, — a dogma put forth upon author- 
 ity. It is doubtful whether the Latins appreciated 
 always the process of speculative thought by which 
 the doctrine of the trinity was maintained by Greek 
 thinkers. The opposition to the doctrine did not come 
 from the West, but from oriental countries where the 
 bishops were in bondage to notions about emanations, 
 which prevented them from accepting easily the idea 
 of the coequality of Christ with the Father. When 
 this doctrine had once received the sanction of a re- 
 putable authority, the Latins not only accepted it but 
 became its strongest supporters. In the long contro- 
 versy that followed the Council of Nicaea, before its 
 decision gained the voluntary recognition of the ori- 
 ental bishops, it was mainly by a process of reasoning 
 that the Nicene formula won its way in the East to 
 acceptance. Athanasius declined to rest upon the au- 
 thority of the council when urging its claims. But the 
 Latins, who wished a definite faith set forth upon un- 
 questioned authority, sustained from the first the deci- 
 sion of Nicaea as final and unchangeable. What in- 
 deed to the Latin mind would become of the faith 
 itself, if a decision once solemnly rendered under the 
 inspiration, as it was believed, of the divine Spirit, 
 could be rescinded or modified by a subsequent dis- 
 cussion. There may have been deeper reasons for the 
 acceptance of the dogma, but with the Latins it was 
 a question of life or death that the authority of the 
 Council of Nicaea should be maintained. And it may 
 
 1 The only Western writer who took an important part in 
 the trinitarian controversy in the third century was Dionysius, 
 Bishop of Rome, and he was Greek by birth and education. 
 
132 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 be regarded as providential in the divine ordering of 
 history, that the one doctrine which contains the es- 
 sential and comprehensive principle of the Christian 
 faith should have met with such powerful and unques- 
 tioning support in an age when reason and philosophy 
 were so soon to abdicate their throne. 
 
 The fourth and fifth centuries have been idealized 
 by the worshipers of catholic antiquity as the halcyon 
 ao'e of the church — as the actual fulfillment for once 
 in its history of the promise which attended its birth. 
 The church developed to a fuller extent its organiza- 
 tion by following the new political divisions of the 
 empire, and a graded hierarchy of bishops arose cor- 
 responding to the grades of the civil service. As the 
 state borrowed from the debased courts of oriental 
 despots a ritual of great magnificence, attaching an 
 exaggerated importance to form and etiquette, and by 
 the symbolism of pomp and luxurious display endeav- 
 ored to impress the people with the sacred majesty 
 of the emperor's person, so the church also developed 
 a ritual of extraordinary beauty and splendor. The 
 church grew rich and powerful. Her coffers were 
 filled with the voluntary offerings of the people or 
 with the property of a declining paganism. Her bish- 
 ops became personages of so great distinction that no 
 officer of the state could rival them in power and con- 
 sideration, and even emperors stood in awe of them 
 as wielding a power which was greater than their own. 
 Certainly there was something in the spectacle of such 
 a church to awe the mind of the multitude into sub- 
 mission. It is not to be wondered at that paganism 
 hastened to abandon its discredited deities, that the 
 Koman world became a nominally Christian one. But 
 there is a dark side to the picture. The morality of 
 
MORALITY AND THEOLOGY. 133 
 
 the age was no better under Christian emperors than 
 it had been under pagan ; the church had lost much of 
 the simplicity, the purity, the self-sacrifice which had 
 marked the era of her depression and apparent weak- 
 ness. The records of the period are full of incidents 
 connected with the ambition and rivalry of bishops ; 
 schisms, intrigues, and scenes of cruelty and bloodshed 
 attendant upon episcopal elections were far from being- 
 rare occurrences. We read of them in Home, in Con- 
 stantinople, in Alexandria, in Ephesus, in Antioch, in 
 Jerusalem. If they happened in the great centres, we 
 may be sure that smaller towns and cities were not ex- 
 empt from the same disgrace. These things constitute 
 the scandals of church history. There have been times 
 when it was thought a Christian duty to pass over 
 them in silence. They are alluded to here because 
 they have a close connection with Christian theology. 
 The want of charity, the hardness, the almost system- 
 atic cruelty which had invaded the church, which were 
 the invariable accompaniments of general councils, — 
 these things hurt the Christian ideal. More than 
 anything else, they were insensibly modifying human 
 convictions about the character of God and His rela- 
 tion to humanity. The high officials of the church 
 claimed to represent Deity and to act as His ambassa- 
 dors or delegates. In one sense, and that the highest, 
 all men are called to the performance of the same 
 function. Men represent God to each other, and if 
 they fulfill their task unworthily the idea of God is de- 
 graded in human estimation. When justice and char- 
 ity and humanity prevail in the life of society, then 
 God is most truly worshiped as He is. It is hard to 
 believe in the divine love or in a righteous order in 
 the world, when these qualities cease to be reflected in 
 
134 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 the institutions which have the moulding of human 
 character. 
 
 The moral deterioration which marked the fourth 
 and fifth centuries had affected the state before it 
 reached the church. It may not have been possible 
 for the church to resist the fatal influences which were 
 undermining the strength of the ancient civilization. 
 Roman imperialism from the time of Constantine, and 
 largely in consequence of his policy, had become an in- 
 creasing burden, crushing out the life and spirit of the 
 people. It had destroyed all vestiges of self-govern- 
 ment, and had substituted an elaborate machinery 
 which had to be maintained by force and at great 
 expense, and which had become identified in the public 
 mind with an odious, exacting tyranny. The condi- 
 tions of human life under such a regime were growing 
 cheerless and unattractive. The future held out no 
 prospect of improvement. The dark cloud which had 
 hovered over the empire for two centuries was now 
 closing in around it and was portentous of fearful dis- 
 asters. The barbarians had already, in the latter part 
 of the fourth century, gained a footing within the em- 
 pire, and no occasional victories on the side of the 
 Roman armies did more than postpone the evil day. 
 
 It is not surprising therefore that Christian people 
 should have fled from the cities into the desert, in the 
 hope of realizing there a vision of the kingdom of 
 God. They fled from a church that was becoming 
 corrupt, from a civilization that was dying, from a 
 state of society of whose improvement they despaired. 
 But it does not appear that they carried with them 
 in their flight any higher or truer conception of the 
 Deity by whose fear they were moved, to whom they 
 wished to render a more acceptable service. The 
 
INTELLECTUAL DECLINE. 135 
 
 true fear of God, which constitutes the motive of the 
 religious life, was assuming the shape of a wild and 
 superstitious terror, such as afterwards fell upon the 
 races that responded to the call of Mohammed. 
 
 The process of decline may be seen in the famous 
 school of heathen philosophy at Alexandria. The 
 earlier Neo-Platonists had resisted bravely the en- 
 croachments of orientalism when they first appeared 
 in the Gnostic sects. In the spirit of Plato, they had 
 tried to view the world as everywhere instinct with a 
 divine life. Inheriting as they did the peculiar qual- 
 ity of Hellenic culture, nothing could be more obnox- 
 ious to them than the anathema which the Gnostics 
 flung upon the whole creation. Jamblichus and Pro- 
 clus, their successors, not only failed to sustain the 
 high intellectual tone of their predecessors, but showed 
 the debasing influence of the age in their disposition to 
 put magic and theurgy in the place of the ethical and 
 intellectual effort by which, according to earlier Neo- 
 Platonism, elect souls might rise to the vision and 
 communion of the gods. Christian theology shared 
 in the decline which had overtaken Greek philosophy. 
 The theological school of Alexandria, which had main- 
 tained itself in great wealth of intellectual and spirit- 
 ual power for more than a hundred years, ceased to 
 lead the church in the East after the fourth century. 
 As Alexandria declined there was rising in Antioch 
 another school, marked by a different tendency and 
 occupied with other issues. Its leading theologians, 
 Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Theodoret, 
 still bore the impress of their Greek teachers, and still 
 held in reverence the name and labors of Origen, how- 
 ever much they differed in their methods. But they 
 lived in an age when tradition was fast usurping the 
 
136 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 place of free inquiry in theology. 1 The false and 
 superstitious reverence which haunted the church as 
 intellectual activity declined, — the last expiring influ- 
 ence, it may have been, of the old Egyptian love of the 
 mysterious for its own sake, — led the representatives 
 of the school of Antioch in a rationalistic direction, 
 
 1 The time when tradition was first formally adopted in the 
 East as a better method than free theological discussion for de- 
 termining disputed points, dates back to the year 383, if we may 
 trust the historian Socrates. At this time the Emperor Theodo- 
 sius, thinking that a mutual conference of the bishops would heal 
 the dissensions in the church, sent for Nectarius, the Bishop of 
 Constantinople, in order to advise with him on the best method of 
 procedure. In the emperor's opinion a fair discussion was the 
 best means for the detection and removal of the causes of dis- 
 cord. The emperor's proposition gave Xectarius the greatest 
 uneasiness, for he was a man unacquainted with theology, who 
 had been suddenly transferred from the army t» the episcopate, 
 and in whose case it had been necessary to hastily run through the 
 sacred offices from baptism to consecration as bishop, hi order 
 that he might occupy his see without delay. Nectarius therefore 
 referred the matter to Agelius, his friend and sympathizer, and 
 he turned it over to Sisinnius. This Sisinnius was said to have 
 been just the person to manage a conference. He was eloquent 
 and possessed great experience, well read in Scripture and in 
 philosophy, and above all was aware that free discussions, far 
 from healing divisions, generally make them worse, and even cre- 
 ate new heresies of a most inveterate kind. He therefore ad- 
 vised Nectarius to fall back upon the testimonies of the ancients 
 instead of entering into logical debates. Let the emperor, he 
 said, ask the representatives of the different sects if they had 
 any respect for the fathers, who flourished before divisions arose, 
 or whether they rejected their teaching as that of men alienated 
 from the Christian faith. If they took the latter course, they 
 were then to be called upon to anathematize them, and the mo- 
 ment they should do this, the people would arise and thrust them 
 out. This plan commended itself to the bishop, and the em- 
 peror perceiving its wisdom and propriety carried it out with 
 consummate prudence. Socrates, Hist. Eccles., v. c. 10. 
 
RISE OF A GREAT CONTROVERSY. 137 
 
 and in opposing what was superstitious or irrational, 
 they were in danger of limiting the truth of the incar- 
 nation as it had been apprehended by the masters of 
 Greek theology. 
 
 f Toward the end of the fourth century there appeared 
 the first traces of a controversy destined to endure 
 with varying fortunes for three hundred years be- 
 fore its issue was finally determined. It is strange 
 that a controversy of such duration, absorbing so much 
 of the thought of Christendom, and attended by such 
 grave consequences, should have awakened so little in- 
 terest in the modern theological mind. The long dis- 
 cussion about the two natures of Christ, in which the 
 opinion of the ancient church was so widely and deeply 
 divided, occupied the attention of four successive gen- 
 eral councils, while three schisms existing to this day, 
 two of them of large extent, in Oriental Christendom, 
 attest the inefficacy of conciliar decisions resting upon 
 external authority to promote the harmony of the 
 church. 
 
 The christological controversies, as they are called, 
 turned upon the question whether Christ had one or 
 two natures : or more exactly whether the human and 
 divine natures were in Him so closely united as to 
 form but one nature, or whether they still remained in 
 their distinctness, conjoined, but not in themselves 
 united, and always capable of being discerned the one 
 from the other, not only in thought but in the histor- 
 ical incidents of His human career. Two tendencies 
 can be seen running through the ages during which 
 the church was occupied with the solution of this 
 problem. One of these tendencies, which proceeded 
 from the home of Greek theology, where the influence 
 of Athanasius still lingered, regarded the human na- 
 
138 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 ture as in its constitution so closely akin to the divine, 
 that when Christ assumed humanity He did not take 
 something in its nature foreign to the divine princi- 
 ple : He rather by His incarnation revealed the kin- 
 ship of the human with the divine, and the perfected 
 human was therefore declared to be identical with 
 that which was most divine. Christ did not exist in 
 two distinct natures formally united or combined by 
 some bond external to either of them, but there was 
 one nature only of the God-man, and in His sacred 
 person the human and the, divine were no longer to be 
 distinguished even in thought, much less in the reality 
 of His earthly life. He willed and acted, He spoke 
 and thought, in the undivided consciousness of His 
 unique personality, — a consciousness in which human 
 nature was deified and identical with the divine. The 
 other tendency, which proceeded from the school of 
 Antioch and was most acceptable to the Western 
 mind, was grounded in the conviction that the human 
 and the divine were incompatible with or alien to each 
 other, and were therefore incapable of a real unity, 
 and remained forever distinct, however firm the con- 
 junction into which they had been brought by the in- 
 carnation. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to remark that the age was 
 no longer a favorable one for the discussion of a 
 theme which implied so profound an issue as the 
 innermost significance of the human in its relation to 
 the divine. The controversies upon the subject were 
 embarrassed by the passions and local excitements, so 
 easily generated in the bosom of a declining society. 
 As the empire grew weaker, the fragments of which it 
 was originally composed tended to fall back into their 
 original isolation, and national jealousies combined 
 
DECISIONS OF THE COUNCILS. 139 
 
 with theological differences to make Syria and Egypt 
 so tenacious of their respective attitudes as to render a 
 common understanding impossible. The controversies 
 were further complicated by imperial or ecclesiastical 
 intrigues and combinations. Popular instincts were 
 invoked against theological distinctions. Such im- 
 portant terms as nature and person were not denned 
 or carefully distinguished. While some held that a 
 nature necessarily implied a person or personality, 
 others contended that personality was distinct from the 
 nature. To some it appeared as though to assert two 
 natures in Christ was to teach a double personality, 
 while their opponents maintained that one personality 
 might be the tie which bound the natures together. 1 
 The general councils, as might have been expected, 
 fluctuated in their decisions, leaning now to one side, 
 now to the other. The third general council held at 
 Ephesus in the year 431 — to whose acts no moral 
 value attaches in consequence of the spirit in which 
 it w r as conducted — gave its support to the doctrine 
 of one nature in Christ as it had been expounded by 
 Cyril ; the fourth general council held at Chalcedon 
 in 451 decided that there were two natures in Christ 
 remaining forever distinct ; and although it protested 
 against their separation in the unity of the divine per- 
 son, it did not attempt to explain their inner relation- 
 ship or the mode of their union. The fifth general 
 council held at Constantinople in 553, although unable 
 
 1 It is important to bear in mind that the defect of ancient 
 thought, as Dorner has pointed out, was the lack of the modern 
 idea of personality — the ego as self-conscious spirit moving 
 toward the fulfillment of its existence. The ancient fathers were 
 feeling their way toward this conception in the use of such 
 lerms as essence, being, nature, hypostasis, prosopon, etc. Cf. 
 Dorner, Person of Christ (Eng. trans.), A. ii. p. 510. 
 
140 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 to set aside the action of the fourth council, did what 
 it could to discredit the decision reached at Chalcedon 
 by condemning the great leaders of the Antiochian 
 school, of whose attitude the Council of Chalcedon was 
 but the reflection. And finally, the sixth general coun- 
 cil in 680 reasserted in another form the decision of 
 the fourth council, by declaring that as there were two 
 natures in Christ, so also there were two wills, the 
 human and the divine ; but following Chalcedon it did 
 not recognize their ethical oneness, and contented itself 
 with declaring that the human will followed and was 
 subject to the divine. 1 
 
 1 If, as is generally admitted, the anathemas of Cyril against 
 Nestorius received the approval of the Council of Ephesus, as 
 the letter of Pope Leo received the approval of the Council of 
 Chalcedon, it is plain that Leo committed the error which the 
 fourth anathema of Cyril condemned. The two passages here 
 given — the fourth of Cyril's anathemas, and the sentences from 
 Leo's letter — are certainly in downright opposition to each other. 
 The original texts are given in Labbe, Concilia, torn. iii. p. 958, 
 and iv. p. 1222. They may also be found in Gieseler, Eccles. 
 Hist, i. pp. 349-357. 
 
 E5f ris Trpoo-dmois dvalv, tfyovv vnocrrdcreai, rds re iv to?s evayyeAittols 
 kou airo(TTo\iKOLS avyy pdix^aai Stave/Aci (poouas, $) e7rl Xpiarw trapa tQv 
 aylwv Xeyofxevas, $1 Trap avrov 7repl kavrov, KaX ras fxeu ws avdpwirw iraph 
 rbv 4k Oeov Xoyov iSitctas voovfxevu> trpoadimi, ras 5e ws 6eoirpe7re?s \xovy 
 T<£ e/c deov ivarphs \6ycv, audde/xa ecrrw. 
 
 (If any one portions out to the two persons or hypostases the 
 expressions in the evangelical or apostolic writings, or the ex- 
 pressions used by the saints concerning Christ, or those put forth 
 by Him concerning Himself, and shall assign the one class of ex- 
 pressions as especially belonging to the man as distinct from the 
 divine Logos, and the other class as divine to the Logos only, let 
 him be anathema.) 
 
 Quern itaque sicut hominem diabolica tentat astutia, eidem 
 sicut Deo angelica famulantur officia. . . . Ita non ejusdem na- 
 ture est dicere ; Ego el Pater unum sumus (Joan. x. 30) ; efc 
 dicere ; Pater major me est (Joan. xiv. 28). 
 
SPIRITUAL CONCEPTION OF CHRIST. 141 
 
 As we review these long-enduring controversies 
 about the person of Christ, it becomes apparent that 
 their varying moods and results are the visible signs of 
 a profound inward transformation going on within the 
 church, which is to determine the character of Chris- 
 tianity for a thousand years until another transforma- 
 tion, equally profound and far-reaching, shall reverse 
 the spirit and the bent of centuries. From the time 
 of the Nestorian controversy, when the unfortunate 
 patriarch of Constantinople protested in vain against 
 the application to Mary of the title, Mother of God, 
 a title heathen in its origin, and in its Christian use 
 obscuring the meaning of the incarnation, 1 it is in- 
 creasingly evident that the earlier and more spiritual 
 conception of Christ as the divine immanence in hu- 
 manity is disappearing from the church. The vision 
 of the essential Christ as He existed from eternity, and 
 as He still revealed Himself to the world, was giving 
 way to a limited portrait of His historical existence 
 in which His mother and His brethren, according to 
 the earthly relationship, were rising into a prominence 
 which Christ Himself had not countenanced. The 
 woman who lifted up her voice in the crowd and ex- 
 claimed, Blessed is the ivomb that bare TJiee and the 
 paps which Tliou hast sucked, was now becoming, as 
 
 (Therefore just as diabolical subtilty tempts Him as man, so 
 also angelical ministrauts wait upon Him as God. ... It does 
 not belong to one and the same nature to say, I and my Father 
 are one, and to say, My Father is greater than 7.) 
 
 1 Upon the phrase, "Mother of God," as applied to Mary, 
 Coleridge remarks : " An epithet which conceals half of a truth, 
 the power and special concerningness of which relatively to our 
 redemption by Christ depend on our knowledge of the whole, is 
 a deceptive and dangerously deceptive epithet." — Coleridge, 
 Works, v. p. 60, Am. ed. 
 
142 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 it were, the typical spokesman of the church, whether 
 in Alexandria or Asia Minor, in the East or in the 
 West. The spiritual relationship was becoming subor- 
 dinated to the relationship after the flesh, and the 
 words of Christ were becoming unintelligible, — Nay, 
 rather blessed is he that heareth the will of God and 
 heejoeth it : he that doeth the will of my Father which 
 is in heaven the same is my mother and sister and 
 brother. In proportion as Christian faith was losing 
 its hold on the essential Christ, with greater tenacity 
 did it cling to the historical Christ. In proportion as 
 men ceased to realize the divine immanence in human- 
 ity, they emphasized the fact that God had once 
 blessed the world in visible form, and dwelt with in- 
 creasing devotion upon the historic environment of his 
 earthly life. The worship of Mary, the cultus of 
 apostles, became a means to this end by enabling the 
 lower intelligence to realize more easily the historic 
 fact of an incarnation, or to deepen the vividness of 
 its apprehension. From this time the Latin church 
 began to realize more distinctly her peculiar mission, 
 — to impress upon the new races that there had once 
 been a manifestation of God in the flesh. So long as 
 that belief remained, the world was the richer for it; 
 and though humanity went on its way groping in the 
 dim light of an eclipse of the fuller faith, yet it could 
 never again become so helpless or forsaken as before 
 the advent of Christ. 
 
 Whatever weight is to be attached to the conflicting 
 utterances of the general councils on the subject of 
 the person of Christ, one thing is clear — that they did 
 not and could not control a mighty sentiment silently 
 operating in the church, whose growth was stimulated 
 by causes, the influence of which could not at the time 
 
THE SENTIMENT OF CHRISTENDOM. 143 
 
 be detected or measured. While theologians in the 
 councils were carefully selecting their language in 
 order to express some delicate shade of meaning, or 
 were devising compromises by which the peace of the 
 church might be obtained, the sentiment of Christen- 
 dom was slowly gravitating to the conclusion that the 
 human and the divine were not only distinct from, but 
 alien to, each other ; and no assertion, however care- 
 fully balanced, in regard to their union in Christ, could 
 overcome the conviction that an infinite impassable 
 gulf divided and separated humanity from God. The 
 doctrine of the two natures which Rome and Antioch 
 agreed in asserting at Chalcedon in opposition to Al- 
 exandria, when it had been filtered through the ex- 
 perience of later ages, became a principle of dualism 
 which sanctioned the divorce between the human and 
 the divine, the secular and the religious, the body and 
 the spirit. The dualism of the two natures runs 
 through all the institutions of the Middle Ages, affect- 
 ing not only the religious experience, but the political 
 and social life of Christendom. As a theological prin- 
 ciple, it underlies asceticism in all its forms ; it creates 
 and enforces the distinction between sacred and pro- 
 fane things, holy days and common days, between the 
 clergy and the people, the church and the world, the 
 pope and the emperor, the city of God and the city of 
 man. As a theological principle it reigned supreme 
 from the time of Augustine till the age of the Refor- 
 mation. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The most important event in the history of the 
 Latin church was the conversion of Augustine in the 
 year 387. It was the mission of Augustine to per- 
 sonate the crisis through which the church and the 
 
144 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 world of Ills time were passing. In his experience we 
 may read as in a mirror the inward moods of the 
 darkest and saddest age in human history. All the 
 sinister tendencies which had been gathering strength 
 for generations met in his mind. The decline of the 
 Roman empire, which had become so evident that men 
 of great capacity no longer looked to it as a sphere 
 in which the highest ambition for usefulness might be 
 gratified ; the decline of intellectual activity, accom- 
 panying necessarily the decadence of human hopes for 
 this world ; the skepticism which looked upon philos- 
 ophy as a vain struggle for the attainment of truth ; 
 the feeling that things were out of joint, that evils 
 whose horror and extent the mind could not fathom 
 were at hand, and could not be postponed much longer ; 
 the sense of sin, which, in its crudest shapes as it ap- 
 pears in history, is the inward conviction that some- 
 thing is wrong in the relation of the world to the un- 
 seen powers, and is drawing down upon it the divine 
 vengeance, — these were the dominant moods of the 
 age which gave birth to Augustine. He lived them 
 out in his own experience, and became therefore the 
 type of his time ; he reveals how other men were 
 thinking, how the age itself was tending ; he discloses 
 the inner process of transition from heathenism to 
 Latin Christianity. He was as truly a prophet to the 
 Eoman world as was Mohammed, two centuries later, 
 to the Arabian races, — both of them struggling with 
 the same great issues of human destiny. 
 
 The conversion of Augustine is an event inexplica- 
 ble unless we go beneath the surface of the conven- 
 tional language used in describing it. One may read 
 his " Confessions," and feel that the secret of the 
 change has evaded him. As in all similar cases, when- 
 
CONVERSION OF AUGUSTINE. 145 
 
 ever they occur, the actor himself is not capable of 
 giving an intelligible explanation of that which has 
 befallen him. The full significance of Augustine's 
 conversion becomes apparent only when we follow his 
 career to its close, or interpret it in the institutions 
 upon which he impressed his convictions. 
 
 The outward life of Augustine before his conversion 
 was the ordinary life of a young and ambitious Ro- 
 man, looking forward to success and distinction in the 
 customary ways, except that he possessed extraordi- 
 nary talents which seemed to promise an unusually 
 brilliant career. Despite the sins of his earlier years 
 and of a certain want of honor and sensitiveness in 
 his relationships which still appears strange to us, not- 
 withstanding our allowance for the social usages of an 
 age very unlike our own, there was also something in 
 Augustine's early life which represents the serious 
 bent of his nature. He was interested in the search 
 for truth and studied Greek philosophy as a means to 
 its attainment. That which most of all attracted him 
 in the problems of human thought was the question! 
 concerning the origin of evil. It was therefore a sig- 
 nificant fact that in his early life he became a Mani- 
 chsean and for nine years remained a member of this 
 sect, or till he had reached the age of thirty. In the 
 dualism of the Manichaean theosophy, which explained 
 the predominance of evil by the existence of an evil 
 deity, who from all eternity combated the good deity 
 and who furnished the larger part of the material out 
 of which the world had been made, there was some- 
 thing which appealed to the darker moods of thought- 
 ful men in the fourth century. Manichgeism was in no 
 respect a Christian system of thought, although it had 
 adopted a Christian nomenclature, and it showed its 
 10 
 
146 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 divergence from the Christian idea in another respect 
 by denying the redemption of humanity in Christ. 
 Such a world as this was incapable of being redeemed, 
 — the only hope was in a principle of election by which 
 a few might be saved. 
 
 Even though Augustine turned away from such 
 teaching and believed he had renounced it, it was im- 
 possible that it should not have left its traces stamped 
 indelibly upon his mind, to reappear again under 
 other forms, in different combinations. The next stasre 
 in his mental career was one of skepticism, in which 
 he doubted if the reason was capable of attaining 
 the truth. It was in this mood, which extended over 
 some five years of his life, that he went to Milan about 
 the year 384, in the exercise of his profession as a 
 teacher of rhetoric. So far, his life from a human 
 point of view had not been successful ; he had not 
 achieved the wealth or the honor which he was entitled 
 to expect; his mind was in a perturbed unsettled condi- 
 tion, ready to receive the strongest influence that could 
 be brought to bear upon it. His familiarity with dif- 
 ferent phases of thought, the various changes which 
 he had already gone through in his mental experience, 
 the profound dissatisfaction which he felt with himself 
 and with the world, — these things were undermining 
 his intellectual integrity. For such a man whose will 
 was weak and whose passions were powerful, whose 
 strength lay chiefly in the life of the emotions, who 
 had no canon for the recognition of truth, whose intel- 
 lectual stability had been shaken by so many changes 
 of opinion, there was but one resort at last, — to fall 
 back upon some external authority, if any such existed v 
 powerful enough to subdue the intellect, to open up a 
 channel for the emotions, and to hold the will to a 
 definite purpose. 
 
ABANDONMENT OF THE REASON. 147 
 
 Hitherto Augustine does not seem to have had much 
 respect for the church ; it probably appeared to him 
 as to most educated Romans as offering no sphere for 
 thoughtful persons. That it had been the object of 
 his mother's devoted love was no recommendation in 
 his eyes, for it had been one of his principles to refuse 
 to be led by a woman's influence. But at Milan, where 
 the church was administered by Ambrose, it was im- 
 possible that a genuine Roman should not be im- 
 pressed with a profound respect for the power which 
 it exerted and the future which awaited it. In the 
 fact of Ambrose turning away from the service of the 
 state to what must have seemed a nobler opportunity, 
 was an indication that far-sighted men had ceased to 
 expect anything from the empire and were looking 
 elsewhere. The church was already undergoing a mo- 
 mentous change, — it was beginning to grow into the 
 state, as the state was tending to become a mere func- 
 tion of the church. Already the church must have 
 appeared as stronger than the state when a bishop like 
 Ambrose could successfully defy a Roman empress 
 and humiliate under his spiritual authority an emperor 
 like Theodosius. Augustine could not remain insensi- 
 ble to the spectacle of such a church and of such a 
 bishop, — a predecessor in all but the name of the 
 greatest popes of the Middle Ages. His contempt for 
 the church gradually gave way to a feeling of rever- 
 ence. As he attended its services and was moved by 
 the eloquence of the great bishop, as he wept silently 
 by the side of his mother during the singing of the 
 hymns by the great congregation, a change was com- 
 ing over his spirit. He was renouncing himself, his 
 reason, his whole past life, in the presence of an ex- 
 ternal authority, whose power and splendor awed while 
 
148 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 it charmed his imagination, — a church in which truth 
 assumed a concrete, tangible form for the practical 
 control and guidance of life. 
 
 There was an important step in the process by 
 which Augustine's conversion was accomplished which 
 deserves a moment's notice. It is a phase of his men- 
 tal or religious history upon which he does not dwell 
 in his "Confessions," nor is it difficult to understand 
 why in his later life he should pass it over so lightly. 1 
 While he was still in Milan under the influence of 
 Ambrose, he was also studying the Platonists as he 
 called them — the Alexandrian school of philosophers 
 
 — and was coming to understand how, by the applica- 
 tion of their method to Christian theology, there might 
 be a more rational and liberal way of interpreting the 
 doctrines of the church than he had hitherto met. He 
 admits, for example, 2 that there was one difficulty 
 which he had to overcome before entering the church, 
 
 — the crude anthropomorphic conception of Deity as 
 localized in space, which he had always supposed was 
 the Christian idea of God, — an idea which Tertullian 
 had advocated and which was certainly the popular 
 view. The traces of this earlier theology, by means of 
 which Augustine sufficiently satisfied his reason while 
 yet making the sacrifice of reason, are to be found in 
 those of his writings which were produced in the years 
 immediately following his conversion, — before the ne- 
 cessities of ecclesiastical administration in the see of 
 Hippo had revolutionized his intellectual methods or 
 led him to economize the truth in the interest of the 
 
 1 Confess., vi. 5, and viii. 2. The Confessions were written 
 after Augustine became Bishop of Hippo. Cf. Owen, Evenings 
 with the Skeptics, ii. p. 173. 
 
 2 Confess., vi. 4. 
 
AUGUSTINE'S EARLIER THEOLOGY. 149 
 
 church, or to adjust it to the comprehension of a bar- 
 barous people. In these treatises 1 he speaks like 
 Athanasius, of Deity as immanent in the world, of the 
 incarnation as the necessary mode of the divine mani- 
 festation, — a necessity inherent in the divine nature, of 
 the love of God as the ground or determination of 1 1 is 
 will, of man as having power to read the divine charac- 
 ter because of an inward light in the reason which is the 
 evidence of the indwelling God, of the will as free and 
 having power to follow the right, of the purification of 
 the soul as the way to the knowledge of and union with 
 the divine. But thoughts like these only served Au- 
 gustine in the epoch of his transition ; in his later 
 writings they disappear, giving way to a set of dogmas 
 more congenial to the Latin mind, or more in harmony 
 with the aim of the Latin church as Augustine con- 
 strued it. 
 
 For it was to the church as it had grown up in Latin 
 Christendom that Augustine had been converted, and 
 great as were the innovations which he sanctioned 
 upon the theories of his predecessors, it was still to the 
 Latin church as an institution that he consecrated the 
 labors of his life. As he came in contact with sects or 
 heresies which denied its authority or rejected its es- 
 sential principle, his conception of it became more 
 clear and dogmatic ; 2 and it may be said of his life- 
 
 1 Among them are the works entitled De moribus ecclesice 
 Catholicce et Manichcearum, De vera religione, De libera arbitrio, 
 and De utilitate credendi. 
 
 2 It was a characteristic of Augustine that he depended so 
 largely upon controversy to determine his thought. He had not 
 the constructive power of a consecutive thinker. The late Canon 
 Mozley, who had made a special study of his controversial writ- 
 ings and was regarded as having an unusual gift for analyzing 
 character, says of him as a controversialist : " In argument he 
 
150 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 work as Bishop of Hippo, that its predominant aim was 
 to adjust social institutions and even humanity itself 
 to the claims of a hierarchy divinely appointed to 
 teach and to rule the world. 
 
 Against the Manichaeans, with whom he conducted 
 his first controversy, Augustine maintained the author- 
 ity of the church to teach. The same argument which 
 Tertullian and Irenseus had employed is again brought 
 forward, but with the increased weight which two cen- 
 turies of growth had given to the power and magnifi- 
 cence of the hierarchy. Truth is a "deposit" in- 
 trusted to the episcopate for preservation ; it is to be 
 found only within the church, and to the sanction of 
 the church even Scripture owes its authority. 1 The 
 church for which is claimed such supreme authority is 
 not the consentient reason of those who are enlightened 
 by a divine teacher speaking within the soul, — it is 
 the institution of which the episcopate holds the char- 
 ter, which is possessed of a "deposit" intrusted to it by 
 a power external to itself. The leading notes of such 
 a church, as they were presented by Augustine to the 
 
 was not too deep ; to have been so would have very much ob- 
 structed his access to the mind of the mass, and prevented him 
 from getting hold of the ear of the church at large. He un- 
 doubtedly dealt with profound questions, but his mode of dealing 
 with them was not such as to entangle him in knots and intrica- 
 cies arising from the disposition to do justice to all sides of 
 truth." In some parts of the Manichsean controversy "he re- 
 turned neat answers rather than full or final answers." In the 
 Pelagian controversy, " he did not allow the unity and simplicity 
 of his answers to be at all interfered with by large and inclusive 
 views of truth. To the extreme contradictory on the one side, 
 he gave the extreme contradictory on the other." — Ruling Ideas 
 of Early Ages, p. 255. 
 
 1 Contra Epistolam Manichcei, c. G : " Ego vero evangelio non 
 crederem, nisi me catholicae ccclesiae commoveret auetoritas." 
 
AUGUSTINE'S IDEA OF THE CHURCH 151 
 
 Manichseans, are its power, its splendor, its miraculous 
 gifts, its vast extension, its long succession of bishops 
 coming down through the ages from the see of Peter. 1 
 Unless it had possessed these credentials, its author- 
 ity would have gone for little or nothing with Augus- 
 tine. 
 
 In his controversy with the Donatists, the progress 
 of Augustine in fixing the idea of the church is still 
 further manifest, and there is also revealed the change 
 in his conception of Deity which such a view of the 
 church necessarily implied. The Donatists had al- 
 ready existed as a sect in North Africa for nearly a 
 century when Augustine was led to take up the con- 
 troversy against them. They had their origin in a 
 protest against the laxity which allowed the apostates, 
 in the Diocletian persecutions, to be received back 
 again into the communion of the Catholic church, and, 
 in accordance with the view which had been held by 
 Montanists and Novatians, they contended that the 
 church consisted only of those who were known or be- 
 lieved to be faithful. Hence they had organized as a 
 separate community, calling themselves the only true 
 church, and, toward the end of the fourth century, 
 when Augustine came as bishop to Hippo, they were 
 a formidable body in numbers and influence. In con- 
 sequence of the persecution which they had encoun- 
 tered from the Roman emperors, who had endeavored 
 to extirpate a sect which disturbed the external unity 
 of the church, the Donatists had assumed another 
 principle, — that it was sinful for the church to depend 
 upon the state for protection ; that between church 
 and state there should be no connection whatever. A 
 sect with such tenets could not but be obnoxious to 
 1 Contra Ep. Man., c. 5. 
 * 
 
152 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 one, like Augustine, bent on maintaining the undis- 
 puted authority and unity of the church, and who, as 
 a practical administrator of a diocese, was constantly 
 witnessing the confusion and weakness which its pres- 
 ence created. He was moderate at first in his opposi- 
 tion, and endeavored by conciliatory measures to meet 
 the evil. But it was a feature of Augustine as a con- 
 troversialist, as it was, also, of Tertullian, that he al- 
 ways appeared as a lawyer holding a brief for the 
 church ; and it became his object to find some prin- 
 ciple which would completely subvert the position of 
 his adversaries. If it was successful, if it shut the 
 mouths of opponents, such a principle was to him its 
 own verification. In the case of the Donatists, it was 
 necessary to assert, if they were to be overcome, that 
 the church, by its very nature, must include the un- 
 faithful and the wicked, — the chaff was inseparable 
 from the wheat in this world, the tares must grow until 
 the harvest. 
 
 But such an attitude could not be maintained with- 
 out going further, and Augustine seems to have hesi- 
 tated before taking a step which, when once accepted 
 and avowed, entailed momentous consequences. Au- 
 gustine could not conceive of the church otherwise 
 than he had first known it, — the majestic institution 
 which had borne down his doubts and commanded the 
 surrender of his reason, his conscience, and his will. 
 He had taken the church as he found it ; he had ac- 
 cepted unhesitatingly the dictum of Cyprian, that out- 
 side of this church there was no salvation, — that lie 
 who had not the church as his mother could not have 
 God as his father. It was not enough, therefore, to 
 assert against the Donatists the divine right of the 
 hierarchy to an authority which required implicit obe- 
 
AUGUSTINE'S IDEA OF THE CHURCH. 153 
 
 dience on the part of those only who acknowledged 
 that authority. The nature of the church demanded 
 that all men should submit to its sway. The church 
 was not placed in the world in order to offer a proba- 
 tion to men, as Cyprian had thought. The idea of 
 probation in any form was foreign to the mind of Au- 
 gustine. There was rising in his soul the idea of God 
 as a beins: who intended to rule this world, and did 
 actually do so. To leave men to decide for themselves 
 the great issues of their destiny was to leave God out 
 of the question. The church was here by divine ap- 
 pointment, and if so it was the divine will that all 
 men should come into it ; and if they would not come 
 of themselves, they must be forced to do so ; and if 
 the church lacked the power of compulsion, it was the 
 sacred duty which the state owed to the church to 
 come to its rescue, and by the might of the sword 
 " compel them to come in," that the church might be 
 filled. 1 
 
 The Manichseans denied that the Catholic church 
 was the sole depository of truth ; the Donatists denied 
 that it had a divine right to rule the conscience : but 
 there was growing up a third tendency which, as Au- 
 gustine and others clearly perceived, denied that the 
 church had any real motive for existence. In the sys- 
 tem of Pelagius such a church as Augustine so rigor- 
 ously and devoutly upheld was simply unnecessary ; it 
 subserved no indispensable purpose in the process of 
 salvation ; man could be saved without it ; the human 
 will was sufficient to itself ; it had pow r er to turn away 
 from evil and follow righteousness ; or, if necessary, 
 God would vouchsafe His special aid to its assistance. 
 Exactly what the Pelagians held, it may be difficult to 
 1 Epistula (93) ad Vincentium. 
 
l'A THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 determine, 1 but it is clear what their opponents thought 
 they held, or ought to hold, and this is more important 
 to the course of the history than the actual belief of 
 the famous heresiarch who personated to the Latin 
 mind the lowest stage of intellectual and religious de- 
 pravity. 
 
 "When we recall the prominence of the church in 
 
 1 If the Pelagians were resting upon the same principle that 
 Augustine had adopted, — the absolute separation of humanity 
 from God, and yet held man to be capable of attaining salvation 
 by his own unaided efforts, — their views were certainly most per- 
 nicious, and would have substituted a sort of Confucian morality 
 in the place of the religion of Christ. But it is more likely that 
 their teaching was the echo of an earlier and higher theology im- 
 perfectly apprehended, if, indeed, it was any longer capable of 
 apprehension by the Latin mind on account of its inversion of the 
 true relationship between Christ and the church. The contempo- 
 rary Greek theologians could see no harm in Pelagius's teaching, 
 and Greek synods declined to condemn it, — a fact which the 
 Latins could only explain on the supposition that Pelagius dis- 
 sembled his opinions. The third general council, it is true, con- 
 demned Pelagius, but this seems to have been the result of an 
 understanding between Cyril and the Bishop of Rome, by which 
 Cyril anathematized the Latin heretic, while the pope gave his 
 voice against the Greek heretic, Nestorius, who had also incurred 
 his displeasure by sheltering the Pelagians who fled to Constan- 
 tinople. Because they were condemned together, it has been 
 thought by some that there was a subtle connection between Pe- 
 lagianism and Nestorianism ; but there was in reality a closer 
 connection between Nestorianism and Aujmstinianism. If the 
 third council condemned Pelagius, it did not undertake to say in 
 what his error consisted ; and the two tenets of Pelagius which 
 were most obnoxious to Augustine, namely, that original sin im- 
 plies no guilt in Adam's descendants, and that the will of every 
 man is free to choose good or evil, have remained the teaching of 
 the Greek church to this day. A summary of what the Pela- 
 gians asserted against Augustine, as shown by their own state- 
 ments, and not those of their opponents, is given in Gieseler, 
 Eccles. Hist., i. 383. 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OF PELAGIANISM. 155 
 
 the history of Latin Christendom from the time of 
 Clement of Rome to Augustine, we are forced to ad- 
 mit that the same idea underlay the famous Pelagian 
 controversy. Consciously or unconsciously it was the 
 church, as the Latins conceived it, which formed the 
 determining motive in the doctrines concerning the 
 nature of sin and redemption, of grace and free-will. 1 
 When it is remembered that the result of Augustine's 
 teaching upon these points was to subject men to the 
 absolute authority of the Latin church, it is evident 
 that this must have been also the intention which, 
 however veiled, or subtly mixed with other tendencies, 
 controlled his thought and influenced his conclusions. 
 The church had already, before Augustine's time, 
 taken shape in the Latin mind as a vast, pervasive, 
 mysterious entity, a personification as it were of the 
 hierarchy or episcopate, a living corporate existence 
 endowed from without with all the powers, the super- 
 natural gifts and grace for the salvation of men. In 
 one sense, it is true, all men who were in communion 
 with the Catholic episcopate were spoken of as the 
 church. But in the most important sense, the church, 
 as teaching and ruling the world, was not the people 
 but the hierarchy ; the grace that saved was deposited 
 primarily not in the congregation, but in the bishops, 
 by whom it was administered to the people. Thus the 
 church had taken the place of Christ as the way of 
 redemption, and had become the mediator between 
 God and man. Such a view of the church implied 
 that the departure of Christ from the world was real 
 
 1 " The Auo-ustianian theology coincided with the tendencies 
 of the age towards the growth of the strong sacerdotal system ; 
 and the sacerdotal system reconciled Christendom with the Au- 
 gustinian theology." — Milman, Latin Christianity, i. p. 172. 
 
156 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 and complete ; that the episcopate was appointed to 
 teach and to save as vicars of the absent Lord. The 
 church moulding itself by a natural instinct after the 
 empire, and reaching out toward the centralization of 
 authority in the most convenient and practical form, 
 must, like the civil government vested in the emperor, 
 regard its power as derived not from the people as 
 their representative, but as coming from a source 
 external to and above them. In other words, Latin 
 Christianity had reverted to a deistic basis, in which 
 God is conceived as existing apart from the world 
 in the distant heavens, regulating human affairs from 
 without through the agency of commissioned dele- 
 gates. 
 
 To this church it was that Augustine had been 
 converted, although the full significance of his con- 
 version was not at once apparent, and for years his 
 thought was in confusion in consequence of the lin- 
 gering influence of a higher theology. But from the 
 time when he became Bishop of Hippo, the ecclesias- 
 tical leaven began to work most powerfully, and truth, 
 as such, was no longer the object of his life. Before 
 the Pelagian controversy began, he was seeking for 
 some dogmatic basis by which to justify the claims of 
 the church as a mediator between God and man, with- 
 out whose intervention salvation was impossible. In 
 so doing he was laying the corner-stone of Latin the- 
 ology. When the Pelagian controversy was over, the 
 Latin church was for the first time in possession of 
 a theology of its own, differing at every point from 
 the earlier Greek theology, starting from different 
 premises and actuated throughout by another motive. 1 
 
 1 It is in his famous treatise De Civitate Dei, and in his anti- 
 Pelagian writings passim, that Augustine's matured theological 
 convictions are to be found in their complete form. 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF ORIGINAL SIN 157 
 
 The foundation of that theology was the Augustinian 
 dogma of original sin. That doctrine was alone ade- 
 quate to explain the existence and mediatorship of the 
 church, or to justify its claim to teach and to rule 
 with supreme authority. The dogma of original sin 
 was unknown to Greek theology as well as an innova- 
 tion also in Latin thought, though it had been vaguely 
 broached by Tertullian and Cyprian, and intimations 
 looking toward it are to be found in the writings of 
 Ambrose. According to this dogma, humanity is ab- 
 solutely separated from God in consequence of Adam's 
 siu. In the guilt of that sin the whole human race is 
 implicated, and has therefore fallen under the wrath 
 and condemnation of God, — a condemnation which 
 dooms the race, as a whole and as individuals, to 
 everlasting woe. So deeply is Augustine interested 
 in establishing this position, that the redemption of 
 the world by Christ inevitably assumes a subordinate 
 place, and is practically denied. Adam and not Christ 
 becomes the normal man, the type and representative, 
 the federal head of the race. There is a solidarity of 
 mankind in sin and guilt, but not in redemption, — a 
 solidarity in Adam, not in Christ. There stands, as it 
 were, at the opening of the drama of human history a 
 quasi-supernatural being, whose rebellion involves the 
 whole human family in destruction. Endowed with a 
 supernatural gift, — the image of God in his constitu- 
 tion which united him closely with his maker, — he 
 lost it for himself and his descendants by one sinful 
 act, and thus cut off humanity from any relationship 
 with God. In this catastrophe, the reason, the con- 
 science, the will of man suffered alike; the traces of 
 the divine image in human nature were destroyed. 
 How then is the sundered relationship to be re- 
 
158 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 stored ? What is redemption, and how is it to be 
 applied ? The place of Christ in Augustine's scheme 
 is not a prominent one, for humanity has not been re- 
 deemed. Augustine continues to speak of Christ, it is 
 true, in the conventional way, but he no longer finds 
 in His work any bond which unites God with human- 
 ity. The incarnation has become a mystery, — God 
 chose to accomplish human salvation in this way, but 
 so far as we can see He might have adopted some 
 other method. It almost seems as though, if Christ 
 were left out altogether, the scheme of Augustine 
 would still maintain its consistency as a whole and 
 retain its value as a working system. The reasons 
 which led Augustine to deny the universality of re- 
 demption were the same as had influenced Gnostics 
 and Manichaeans, — he was oppressed by the sense of 
 sin in himself, the knowledge of it in others, the ap- 
 palling extent and depth of human wickedness ; these 
 things to the mind of a practical Roman made it 
 meaningless to think or act as if humanity were re- 
 deemed to God. But when the Christian principle of 
 redemption had been abandoned, there was only one 
 other alternative, and that was to follow still further 
 in Gnostic and Manichsean footsteps, — to adopt the 
 principle of an individual election by which some souls 
 were saved out of the great mass doomed to destruc- 
 tion. The bond of union between this world and God 
 is the divine will, — a will not grounded in righteous- 
 ness or love, into whose mysterious ways it is vain for 
 man to inquire, the justice of which it is presumptuous 
 for him to discuss. That will whose arbitrary deter- 
 minations constitute right, chooses some to salvation 
 and leaves the rest to follow out the way to endless 
 misery. In one respect the Augustinian idea of pre- 
 
PREDESTINA TION. 159 
 
 destination diverged from the Gnostic and approxi- 
 mated the later Mohammedan conception, — it is a 
 predestination which acts here and there in an arbi- 
 trary way without reference to human efforts or attain- 
 ments. The clearest manifestation of the divine will in 
 the world, which is open to the gaze of all, is the Catho- 
 lic church, the one divinely appointed channel through 
 which God has decreed that the elect are to be saved. 
 Predestination is to a process within the church. For 
 although Augustine believed that outside of the 
 church none could be saved, he by no means held 
 that all within the church would escape damnation. 
 Although all are to be compelled to enter the church, 
 this is only in order that the elect among thorn who 
 are known only to God may obtain the grace to be 
 found alone in the church, by which they make their 
 election sure. 
 
 According to Augustine, sin has its seat in the will. 
 The effect of original sin has been to so enfeeble or 
 corrupt the will, that it has become powerless in every 
 man to turn away from evil. The will is so firmly set 
 toward evil, that only a divine creative act can renew 
 it again after its original character. In this respect 
 each man is isolated, and no man can help his brother ; 
 exhortations and example go for nothing ; the enlight- 
 enment of the reason is in vain, — only God Himself 
 acting upon the will from without, by His omnipotent 
 power, can break down its opposition to what is good, 
 and recreate it after the divine image which has been 
 ruined in Adam's fall. This creative act takes place 
 in baptism. In this rite, the image of God is restored, 
 and the soul becomes possessed again of that super- 
 natural gift which united man originally to his Creator. 
 Hence, in the system of Augustine, baptism acquired 
 
160 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 a dogmatic significance which it had not hitherto pos- 
 sessed, great as was the importance which had always 
 attached to it. For unless the divine image is re- 
 placed, it is impossible, in the nature of the case, that 
 any one should be saved. Man, without baptism, is 
 only a highly gifted animal, lacking the one essential 
 quality which makes him capable of salvation, — of the 
 divine communion here, and of the divine presence 
 hereafter. Hence, for heathens and for unbaptized 
 children, there is no hope in the world to come of ever 
 seeing God. Their punishment may be a thing of de- 
 grees, for those who have not actually sinned it may 
 hardly be punishment at all, — Augustine was willing 
 to be lenient where his theory did not suffer, — but it 
 will be endless, and the essence of their loss consists 
 in this, that they can never to all eternity come to the 
 knowledge of God, in which consists supernatural bless- 
 edness. The result of this belief was to make general 
 the practice of infant baptism, which was not before 
 Augustine's time the universal custom. 1 
 
 Augustine's doctrine concerning original sin and its 
 remission by baptism, as well as his views upon pre- 
 destination, were regarded at the time as innovations, 
 as well as a dangerous disturbance of the faith of the 
 church. There is no doubt that the bishops of Rome 
 were in sympathy with Augustine's policy ; but in the 
 course of the controversy there was one exception 
 
 1 Some of the most eminent fathers of the fourth and fifth 
 centuries, though born in Christian households, were not baptized 
 till they reached maturity. Such were Basil, Gregory of Nazi- 
 anzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Jerome, and also Augustine himself. 
 Gregory of Nazianzus would have still further postponed the 
 rite, had it not been a prerequisite for ordination. The custom 
 of postponing baptism continued in the East for some time after 
 infant baptism had become the rule in the West. 
 
OPPOSITION TO AUGUSTINE. 161 
 
 among them in the person of Zosimus, before whom 
 the case of the Pelagians was laid, and who declared 
 that their confession of faith revealed no taint of her- 
 esy, and that the whole discussion arose from a child- 
 like love of innovation. Zosimus may have been, as 
 is generally thought, a Greek, but he could not have 
 called the doctrine of original sin and its remission by 
 baptism, in the case of infants, a novelty, if it had 
 formed a part of the Roman tradition and usage. 1 
 Theodore, of Mopsuestia, the greatest among Eastern 
 theologians in the fifth century, charged Augustine's 
 lack of insight into the nature of the Christian faith 
 to his ignorance of the Scriptures ; he called his doc- 
 trine of original sin a novelty recently set forth ; he 
 reflected upon his lack of reverence and of true fear, 
 in asserting things about God which human justice 
 would condemn, and with which no wise man could 
 agree. 2 But the most remarkable opposition to the 
 Augustinian theology came from the remoter West, 
 and was formulated by Vincens of Lerins, in his fa- 
 mous motto, by which he sought at once a principle of 
 Christian certitude, as well as a convenient test for 
 detecting the innovations of error : " That should be 
 held for Catholic truth which has been believed every- 
 where, always, and by all." 3 Judged by this stand- 
 
 1 Cf. Labbe, Concilia, torn. iii. pp. 401, 403, for the letters of 
 Zosimus to the African bishops. 
 
 2 Gieseler, Ec. Hist., i. 339. 
 
 3 Commonitorium pro Catholicce fidei antiquitate et universitate, 
 etc., c. 2, Migne's Patrulog., toni. 50, p. 640 : " In ipsa item 
 Catholica Ecclesia magnopere eurandum est, ut id teneamus 
 quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum sit." A par- 
 tial translation of the Commonitorium was made by John Henry 
 Newman, in Tracts for the Times, vol. i. p. 592, where it is in- 
 tended to form a companion for Tertullian's Prescription of Here- 
 
 11 
 
162 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 ard, the teaching of Augustine lacked each one of the 
 three essential marks of truth. That it was the ob- 
 ject of Vincens to controvert the great African father, 
 though he does not mention him by name, is generally 
 admitted ; but the latter part of his " Commonito- 
 rium," in which he enforced the application of his 
 principle, has been lost, and is said to have been stolen 
 in his lifetime. The first part has ever since remained 
 a standard exposition of what is called the " great 
 Catholic principle." It is one of the curiosities — not 
 to say variations — in the history of Latin theology, 
 that the Roman church has accepted the principle of 
 Vincens, and at the same time approved the theology 
 which that principle was set forth to condemn. 
 
 No point more clearly illustrates the degradation 
 which Christian theology underwent at the hands of 
 /Augustine than his doctrine of grace. Christ as the 
 invisible teacher of humanity, whose presence in the 
 world, in the reason and conscience of man, is the 
 power by which men are delivered from sin and 
 brought into the liberty of the children of God, gives 
 way in the system of Augustine to an impersonal thing 
 or substance which is known as grace. However it 
 may be defined — and Augustine's use of the word 
 varies — it is grace that constitutes the beginning, 
 middle, and end of the way of salvation. There is pre- 
 venient grace that makes man ready to receive the 
 gospel, there is grace that operates to renew the will, 
 grace that cooperates with the will restored, irresisti- 
 
 tics. The notes attached by the illustrious translator have still a 
 melancholy interest. A valuable criticism of the " Quod ubique," 
 etc., may be found in Sir G. C. Lewis's Authority in Matters of 
 Opinion, c. iv. The history of theology, however, is the best crit- 
 icism upon this much vaunted test of truth. 
 
AUGUSTINE'S VIEW OF THE SACRAMENTS. 163 
 
 ble grace that insures the final triumph. In one as- 
 pect, this grace may be defined as the will of God de- 
 creeing the salvation of the elect ; in another aspect, 
 it is a quality or spiritual potency deposited in the 
 church or hierarchy and distributed to the people by 
 the priesthood in the sacraments. What is sometimes 
 called the sacramental theology is based upon the Au- 
 gustinian notion of grace, — the principle that man is 
 built up in the spiritual life by a subtle quality con- 
 veyed to him from without through material agencies, 
 rather than by evoking the divine that is within. For 
 such a system Augustine laid the foundation upon 
 which the Latin church in the Middle Ages reared the 
 elaborated structure. 1 Even in Augustine's time, it 
 
 1 Augustine laid the dogmatic foundation of the sacramental 
 theology by his doctrine concerning grace ; but he did not con- 
 nect the doctrine with the sacraments in the same way or to the 
 same extent as was done in the mediaeval church. According to 
 Baur, his theory of the nature of a sacrament implied some su- 
 pernatural affiliation between the sign and the thing signified : 
 " Das Wesen des Sacraments setzte er in die Unterscheidung 
 eines doppelten Elements, eines sinnlichen und ubersinnlicheu, 
 welche beide sich nur wie Bild und Sache zu einander verhalten 
 konnen. Das Vermittelnde dieser Beziehung ist das Wort." 
 Dogmengeschichte, § 49. But the predominance of the idea of 
 election in his system forced Augustine to modify what might 
 otherwise have been a tendency to the lowest form of sacramen- 
 talism. Cf. Epist. (98) ad Bonifacium for the famous passage in 
 which he seems to endeavor to speak plainly, but of which the 
 apparent meaning can of course be disputed. Augustine cer- 
 tainly did not teach that all were regenerated in baptism, but 
 only the elect ; in the Lord's Supper also, only the elect, in virtue 
 of their faith, participated in the body and the blood of Christ, 
 while to all others it was hut an empty sign. Such substantially 
 was the teaching of Calvin. The leaders of the Tractarian move- 
 ment in the Church of England were unconsciously asserting the 
 mediaeval view of the sacraments and not the Augustinian. In- 
 
164 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 was felt to be desirable that the number of the chan* 
 nels or avenues of grace should be increased beyond 
 the original two which Christ had appointed ; and had 
 the sacraments expanded until they included every 
 agency for good with which human life abounds, the 
 evil in the system would have been in some measure 
 neutralized. But here also, as in the sphere of doc- 
 trine, the ecclesiastical idea was the controlling influ- 
 ence, and the sacraments were ultimately limited to 
 those rites which bound men in absolute dependence 
 upon the church for salvation. 1 
 
 The effect of Augustine's views concerning the na- 
 ture and consequences of original sin was to create a 
 new dogmatic basis for the relationship between God 
 and humanity, for the church, the priesthood, and the 
 sacraments. The effect of these views is further seen 
 in all that relates to human destiny in a future world. 
 The doctrine of endless punishment assumed in the 
 writings of Augustine a prominence and rigidity which 
 had no parallel in the earlier history of theology, 
 which had no warrant in the New Testament, and 
 which savors of the teaching of Mohammed more than 
 of Christ. Hitherto even in the West, ifthad been an 
 open question whether the punishment hereafter of sin 
 
 deed it was the recognition by the Privy Council of -the Augus- 
 tinian view of baptism, as held by Mr. Gorham, that occasioned 
 the stampede to the Church of Rome in 1852. 
 
 1 The development of the sacraments in the Greek church fol- 
 lowed in appearance somewhat the same course as in the Latin 
 church, but was chiefly influenced by the teaching of the pseudo- 
 Dionysius and not by the Augustinian idea of grace. The sacra- 
 ments have never been to the Greek church quite what they are 
 to the Latin, because they are viewed in their connection with 
 the living and ever present Christ, rather than as channels 
 through which the priesthood distribute an impersonal grace. 
 
ENDLESS PUNISHMENT. 165 
 
 unrepented of and not forsaken was to be endless. 
 Augustine lias left on record the fact that some, very 
 many indeed, 1 still fell back upon the mercy and love 
 of God as a ground of hope for the ultimate restora- 
 tion of humanity. Tertullian and Cyprian, as we have 
 seen, had used harsh language in depicting the endless 
 punishment of sin hereafter, but they may be said to 
 have been speaking rhetorically and under the influ- 
 ence of excited emotion — under the conviction that 
 only such a motive was adequate to move their cruel 
 and hardened persecutors. But no such possible exten- 
 uation can be pleaded for Augustine. He is the first 
 writer to undertake a long and elaborate defense of 
 the doctrine of endless punishment and to wage a po- 
 lemic against its impugners. In the 21st book of his 
 " City of God " he seeks to establish it by Scripture, 
 by analogy, by dialectic, by its inner necessary rela- 
 tionship with the scheme of God's government of the 
 world. He rallies the " tender hearted Christians," \ 
 as he calls them, who cannot accept it. The spirit in 
 which he conducts his argument against the various 
 classes of opponents whom he mentions, reveals how 
 to his mind the doctrine entered as a necessary factor 
 into the divine government, and was indispensable 
 to the existence and work of the church on earth, 
 which had been invested with the divine vicegerency. 
 
 1 "Frustra nonulli, immo quam plurimi, seternam clamnatorum 
 pcenam et cruciatus sine intermissione perpetuus lmmano mise- 
 rentur affectu atque ita f uturum esse non credunt." Enchirid. ad 
 Laurentium, c. cxii. " The belief," says Gieseler, " in the inaliena- 
 ble capability of improvement in all rational beings and the lim- 
 ited duration of future punishment was so general even in the 
 West and among the opponents of Origen, that even if it may 
 not be said to have arisen without the influence of Orijren's 
 school, it had become entirely independent of his system."— Ec- 
 cles. Hist., i. 321, Am. ed. 
 
166 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 The allusions in Augustine's writings to the purify- 
 ing fires which await the elect in another world, 1 have 
 been sometimes regarded as hardly sufficient to war- 
 rant the mediaeval doctrine of purgatory which was 
 deduced from them. But Augustine is the father of 
 the system, and its later modifications do not affect 
 the substratum of the doctrine as announced by him. 
 For if here on earth humanity is absolutely separated 
 from God by Adam's fall, and the incarnation reveals 
 no essential kinship between them, but is a device to 
 overcome human sinfulness, and otherwise would not 
 have been necessary, 2 why should the mere incident of 
 death bring man at once into the presence of God and 
 the enjoyment of his felicity. The causes which have 
 operated here to maintain humanity in its isolation, 
 may and even must continue in force to a certain ex- 
 tent hereafter. One can see that the dogmatic basis 
 of thought and sentiment upon which the church was 
 resting required, so to speak, that the church's influ- 
 ence and control should follow men into another world, 
 before they were made quite ready to endure the be- 
 atific vision. Hence Augustine's hint, that the elect 
 might remain for an indefinite period after death 
 under the same penal system which held during life, 
 was no mere casual remark, but rather an inevitable 
 logical deduction. 
 
 The doctrine of purgatory followed naturally an- 
 other belief which had prevailed chiefly in the Latin 
 church, known as the doctrine of the intermediate 
 state. This latter doctrine in its turn was dependent 
 on those opinions concerning the resurrection of the 
 body which had been advocated so vigorously by Ter- 
 
 1 Enchiritf., c. 69, and De Civitate Dei, xx. c. 25. 
 
 2 Enchirid., cc. 33 and 48. 
 
ORIGIN OF PURGATORY. 167 
 
 tullian, and which in the main Augustine accepted. 
 When the doctrine of the resurrection was understood, 
 as by Clement of Alexandria and others, to be an im- 
 mediate standing up again in greater fullness of life, 
 there could be no such conception entertained as that 
 of an intermediate state ; life here and hereafter was 
 a regular and orderly progression under the guidance 
 everywhere of the divine in-dwelling Word. But the 
 belief in the resurrection as implying a restoration of 
 the same identical body which had been laid in the 
 grave, to which body all the particles which had com- 
 posed it were essential, postponed the day when the 
 dead should rise to the distant future. In the mean 
 time the great host of the departed remained in a wait- 
 ing attitude for the ultimate consummation. The idea, 
 therefore, of a purgatory was, from such a point of 
 view, an effort to occupy this waiting period with some 
 definite purpose, and in some intimate way connect it 
 with the life and work of the church on earth. In 
 some respects, the belief in purgatory was an advance 
 on the views of the future life which had prevailed 
 among Jews and heathens, for it involved a moral 
 principle and aim ; and further, the imprisonment was 
 not a final one, — at some time the doors were to be 
 opened and souls to be received into their everlasting 
 home. But both the doctrine of purgatory and that 
 of the intermediate state have a close analogy with 
 pre-Christian views, whether Jewish or heathen, and 
 bear witness to a lower continuity between Christian- 
 ity and the systems it supplanted. Apart from the ele- 
 ment of hope which inheres in the Christian belief, the 
 future life, whether of the intermediate state or pur- 
 gatory, recalls again the Jewish Sheol and the world 
 of the dead in Homer or in Virgil, — a place where 
 
168 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 souls exist in a disembodied condition wanting the 
 richness and attractiveness of terrestrial life. To their 
 brethren on earth their condition seemed one appeal- 
 ing to sympathy and pity. Augustine thought they 
 might be helped by the sacraments and by the alms 
 of their friends on earth. Certainly, with such a be- 
 lief, it was not strange that men should pray for their 
 dead ; it would have been inhuman for them not to do 
 so. But "prayers for the dead," as they were now 
 offered, differed widely in spirit from that devout re- 
 membrance and giving of thanks for the departed 
 which had characterized the higher and purer faith of 
 the early church. Then it was believed that they were 
 safe in the bosom of God, in joy and felicity ; in the 
 communion of Christ they had gone upwards to be 
 with Him ; and even the lower Hades, since Christ had 
 penetrated its gloomy recesses, could no longer hold 
 its own, but yielded up its inmates to the superior 
 world of spiritual light and life. In the change of be- 
 lief on this subject alone is sufficiently indicated the 
 profound transformation which the Christian faith had 
 undergone in Latin theology. 1 
 
 In this brief sketch of Augustine's theology, his 
 life has been alluded to only so far as it was connected 
 with that system of opinions which he matured in 
 his later years. In no ancient writer, however, does 
 Christian experience seem to stand in such sharp con- 
 
 1 It has been shown by De Rossi that none of the earlier ex- 
 pressions of confidence and hope, which are common among the 
 few epitaphs of the second and third centuries, are to be found 
 among the fifteen hundred inscriptions which belong to the fourth 
 and fifth centuries. In their place appear the cold convention- 
 alities of the obituary record, and utterances sometimes more 
 pagan than Christian. Cf. Northcote, Christian Epigraphy, pp. 
 74-76. 
 
ESTIMATE OF AUGUSTINE'S WORK. 169 
 
 flict with formal opinion. When he writes from the 
 heart, he still speaks to the Christian world to-day, as 
 he has spoken through the ages, with an appeal in 
 his tone which we are powerless to resist, with an ex- 
 quisite charm in his language which we cannot forget. 
 He lived in an age of transition, when the civilized 
 world was passing in the West into a state of barbar- 
 ism, and in connection with that fact his work as a 
 theologian should always be remembered. He made 
 the transition possible from the Roman empire of his 
 day to the papal empire of the Middle Ages. The 
 history of nearly a thousand years is summed up in 
 his experience ; but it was, on the whole, a history 
 which the world does not care to see repeated, valu- 
 able as may be the results which it has contributed to 
 secure to Christian civilization. It may have been 
 necessary that the world should go back again to the 
 " beggarly elements " from which it seemed to have 
 escaped ; but if so, it was because new races had come 
 forward to carry on the line of human progress, who, 
 before they could appreciate the Christian revelation, 
 must undergo the preparatory training of tutors and 
 school-masters, — who must pass under the yoke of the 
 law before they were ready for the spirit of life and 
 liberty. The work of Augustine ministered to this 
 end. All through the Middle Ages his writings were 
 the supreme authority in the study of theology. In 
 one respect his books served a larger purpose than the 
 aim of their great author, for they contained the germs 
 of more than one system of theology, and from him 
 the scholastic theologians, who knew no distinction 
 between his earlier and his later writings, gained 
 glimpses of a higher and vaster system of Christian 
 thought than that which came down in tradition with 
 
170 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 the sanction of his name, — a system which they were 
 debarred by their ignorance of the Greek language 
 from studying in its original sources. He has been 
 enumerated among the four great doctors of the Latin 
 church ; but he stands facile princeps among them. 
 Ambrose was a distinguished administrator and popu- 
 lar orator ; Jerome gave to the church its translation 
 of the Scriptures ; Gregory the Great illustrated, in a 
 brilliant way, what service a pope might render to 
 Christendom. But Augustine was great in that he 
 may be said to have made possible the career of the 
 Latin church. For a thousand years those who came 
 after him did little more than reaffirm his teaching, 
 and so deep is the hold which his long supremacy has 
 left upon the church, that his opinions have become 
 identified with the divine revelation, and are all that 
 the majority of the Christian world yet know of the 
 religion of Christ. 
 
 The question is sometimes asked why Mohammed- 
 anism, which swept over the East, should have halted 
 at the gates of Rome, and never have succeeded in 
 gaining anything but a precarious foothold in Western 
 Eumpe. The answer to the question must take into 
 consideration the work of Augustine. His doctrine 
 of the church with which he inspired Western Chris- 
 tendom proved the impregnable rock to the irresist- 
 ible wave. The belief of Islam in a theocracy of 
 which the prophet and his successors were the divinely 
 appointed rulers, — a theocracy outside of which all 
 were infidels and beyond the pale of salvation, — was 
 met by the Latin church with a similar belief in a 
 theocracy in which Peter and his successors were the 
 vicars of Christ. It may be regarded as one claim of 
 the papacy to gratitude that it stood for a principle 
 
AUGUSTINE AND MOHAMMED, 171 
 
 about which the crude sentiment of barbarous ages 
 could rally, and thus prevent the surrender of the 
 West to the religion of Mohammed. But it must 
 also be remembered that so great a result was ob- 
 tained by a corresponding sacrifice, and that Chris- 
 tianity approximated in its inmost principle to Islam. 
 We have traced the process of deterioration in the 
 Latin church, and more particularly in the theology 
 of Augustine. In his idea of God as absolute and 
 arbitrary will in which consists the only ground of 
 right ; in the depreciation of Christ, so that deism is 
 the tacit assumption of the church on which its insti- 
 tutions rest ; in his doctrine of election which differs 
 in no essential particulars from the Mohammedan 
 predestination ; in his view of grace which becomes 
 an act of the divine condescension, designed to ex- 
 hibit chiefly the power and glory of God, and only 
 incidentally considering the welfare of man ; 1 in the 
 
 1 " Der Begriff der Gnade bei Aug. ist noch nicht bestimmt als 
 Liebe Gottes fixirt; sie ist vielmehr so gefasst, dass die Creatur 
 ihr als Mittel dient, sich zu offenbaren. Es ist in dieser Vorstel- 
 lung, dass ich so sage, der gottliche Egoismus noch nicht iiber- 
 wunden ; Gott hat noch einen audern Zweck, wenn er den Men- 
 schen inspirirt, als den Menschen selbst zu vollenden ; er inspirirt 
 ihn nur, um sich durch ihn." — A. Dorner, Augustinus. Sein 
 theologisches System, und seine religionsphilosophische Anschauung, 
 p. 212. 
 
 " Mohammed deemed it a monstrous absurdity to suppose that 
 the attributes of man gave him any peculiar claims on the con- 
 sideration of God. But it was worse than an absurdity; it was 
 blasphemy to suppose that man could claim any spiritual kinship 
 with his Creator, that any particle of the divine essence had 
 breathed into him." ..." God is called the Merciful and the 
 Compassionate, not because love is of the essence of His nature, 
 but because, though all-powerful, He forbears to use His might 
 for man's destruction." — Islam Under the Arab, by li. D. Osborn, 
 quoted in Clarke's Ten Great Religions, ii. 379. 
 
172 THE LATIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 defiance of the reason and the subjugation of man 
 under the divine omnipotence, — in such features as 
 these do the Augustinian theology and the faith of 
 Islam betray a fatal resemblance. Did we look to 
 formal theology alone, the history of the church would 
 remain inexplicable. But Christendom has never at 
 any time quite lost its original birthright. Even in 
 its darkest days and its lowest estate, the fact has 
 never been forgotten that God had once visited the 
 world in human form, that divine love had been mani- 
 fested in the sacrifice upon Calvary. In that con- 
 viction, however much obscured or inadequately ex- 
 pressed, lay the difference between Christianity and 
 Islam, and out of it has grown whatever is highest 
 and most enduring in Christian civilization. The 
 new world that was growing up in Western Europe 
 had been taught, and believed sincerely, that the 
 Bishop of Rome was the vicar of the absent Christ. 
 So long as that belief prevailed, the papacy was sup- 
 ported by the sentiment of Western Christendom. 
 When that belief died out, a new era in the world's 
 history began. 
 
THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 Itaque lex paedagogus noster fait in Christo. — Gal. iii. 24. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 
 
 A. D. 
 
 467-511. Clovis, King of the Franks. 
 
 500. [c] Pseudo-Dionysius. 
 
 590-604. Gregory the Great, Pope. 
 
 680-755. Boniface, the Apostle of Germany. 
 
 785-818. The Adoptionist Controversy. 
 
 787. Seventh General Council approves image-worship. 
 
 800. Coronation of Charlemagne. 
 
 809. Acceptance of the Filioque. 
 
 816-840. Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons. 
 
 820-839. Claudius, Bishop of Turin. 
 
 831. Raclbertus teaches transubstantiation. 
 
 840. [c] Origin of the Forged-Decretals. 
 
 847-868. Controversy about predestination. 
 
 850. [c] John Scotus Erigena. 
 
 858-867. Nicholas I, Pope. 
 
 1000. Expectation of the end of the world. 
 
 1033-1109. Anselm of Canterbury. 
 
 1073-1085. Gregory VII. (Hildebrand), Pope. 
 
 1079-1142. Abelard. 
 
 1091-1153. Bernard of Clairvaux. 
 
 1096-1291. Period of the Crusades. 
 
 1159-1164- Peter the Lombard, Bishop of Paris. 
 
 1170-1221. Dominic, Founder of the Dominican order 
 
 1182-1226. Francis d'Assisi. 
 
 1198-1216. Innocent the Great, Pope. 
 
 1209-1229. Crusade against the Albigenses. 
 
 1215. Twelfth General Council of the Latins. 
 
 1227-1274. Thomas Aquinas. 
 
 1232. Establishment of the Inquisition. 
 
 1265-1321. Dante Alighieri. 
 
 1265-1308. Duns Scotus. 
 
 1294-1303. Boniface VIIL, Pope. 
 
THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 It has been the object of the preceding lectures to 
 trace the characteristics of two distinct theologies. 
 There were other theological movements in the early 
 ages of the church, but they were relatively unimpor- 
 tant ; the Jewish interpretation of Christianity, which 
 may be seen in the Nazaritic and Ebionitic sects, had 
 no enduring existence, and soon disappeared ; Arian- 
 ism, which had a kinship with the Hebrew or deistic 
 phases of Christian thought, also disappeared, leaving 
 no organized results as a monument of its influence. 
 It was quite otherwise with what may be called the 
 Greek and Latin theologies : they have been perpet- 
 uated in their essential characteristics in the two 
 great divisions of Christendom known to-day as the 
 Greek, or Holy Orthodox Church of the East; and 
 the Latin, or Roman Catholic Church of the West. 
 Before considering the mediaeval development of Latin 
 theological thought, which is the subject of the present 
 lecture, let us review in a brief summary the differ- 
 ences on all essential points of the Greek and Latin 
 theologies. 1 
 
 1 The general accuracy of this summary of the two theologies 
 may be verified by consulting any of the doctrine histories, such 
 as Neander, Hagenbach, or Baur. The Greek theology, it should 
 be remembered, is distinct from the oriental tendency which 
 prevailed in Asia Minor and elsewhere. Having been held in 
 
176 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 The Greek theology was based upon that tradition 
 or interpretation of the life and teaching of Christ 
 which at a very early date had found its highest ex- 
 pression in the Fourth Gospel ; while the Latin theol- 
 ogy followed another tradition preserved by what are 
 called the synoptical writers in the first three gospels. 
 The fundamental principle of Greek theology, under- 
 lying every position which it assumed, was the doctrine 
 of the divine immanence, — the presence of God in 
 nature, in humanity, in the process of human history ; 
 in Latin thought may be everywhere discerned the 
 working of another principle, sometimes known as 
 Deism, according to which God is conceived as apart 
 from the world, localized at a vast distance in the in- 
 finitude of space. By Greek thinkers the incarnation 
 was regarded as the completion and the crown of a 
 spiritual process in the history of man, dating from 
 the creation ; and by Latin writers as the remedy for 
 a catastrophe, by which humanity had been severed 
 from its affiliation with God. With the Greek, the 
 emphasis was laid on the spiritual or essential Christ, 
 who had always been present in human souls, who had 
 become man in order that He might manifest the full- 
 ness of the Godhead bodity ; with the Latin, the ten- 
 dency was to magnify exclusively the historical Christ, 
 who had come at a moment in time and then departed, 
 leaving the world bereaved of His presence. Eevela- 
 
 check for a time by Greek influence, its distinctive principle be- 
 came more prominent after the age of Athanasius, when Greek 
 theology entered upon the stage of decline. The oriental ten- 
 dency showed itself more particularly in the doctrine of the sacra- 
 ments, as in the case of Cyril of Jerusalem and even of Gregory 
 of Nyssa, who represent in this respect the thought of Ignatius 
 and Irenseus. A resume of patristic teaching on the sacraments 
 may be found in Norris, Rudiments of Theology. 
 
SUMMARY OF THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 177 
 
 tion, according to Greek theology, was a continuous 
 process, — a law of the spiritual creation, by which 
 God was forever revealing Himself in and through the 
 human reason ; and reason itself was but the evidence 
 in man of an immanent divine activity, of the light 
 that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. 
 While the revelation was continuous and in its scope 
 included the whole discipline of life, there were great 
 revealing epochs, such as the age of Hebrew prophets 
 or Greek philosophers, and the work of these in turn 
 was but fragmentary and incomplete compared with 
 the life of Him who was God manifest in the flesh, — 
 the incarnation of that divine reason which abides 
 eternally in God. The tendency of Latin theology 
 was to regard the reason as untrustworthy and dan- 
 gerous ; revelation was viewed as the definite and 
 final communication of a message, a " deposit " in a 
 book or rule of faith, to be guaranteed by tradition, 
 or handed down as an heirloom from age to age. 
 
 It followed as a necessary sequence from the first 
 principle of Greek theology, — the doctrine of the di- 
 vine immanence, — that man should be viewed as 
 having a constitutional kinship with Deity ; by the 
 image of God in man was understood an inalienable 
 heritage, a spiritual or ethical birthright, which could 
 not be forfeited. Deity and humanity were not alien 
 the one to the other, and it was their constitutional re- 
 lationship which made the incarnation not only possi- 
 ble but a necessary factor in the process of redemp- 
 tion. An opposite tendency was manifested in Latin 
 thought ; the tie which binds humanity to God was 
 regarded as having been severed by Adam's fall. 
 Only that part of humanity in whom the lost image of 
 the Creator had been restored by a supernatural crea- 
 
 12 
 
178 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 tive act could therefore be the recipients of redemp- 
 tion. With such a view of human nature the incar- 
 nation became a difficulty to the reason ; and it is not 
 surprising to find the mediaeval theology developing a 
 skepticism as to whether the incarnation was necessary, 
 or if God might not have saved men in some other 
 way. The Greeks held to the organic unity of man- 
 kind in Christ ; the Latins recognized the principle of 
 solidarity in Adam. With the one, redemption lay 
 in evoking and confirming, by a spiritual education, 
 the divine that is already in man ; with the other, it 
 consisted in an impartation of strength from without, 
 through external channels. For the living presence 
 in the soul of the spiritual Christ, the Latins substi- 
 tuted an inanimate thing which was designated in re- 
 ligious nomenclature as grace. The end of Christ's 
 religion, as viewed by the Greeks, was the realizing of 
 aspirations after a divine character, — the free imita- 
 tion of God ; as viewed by the Latins, it was obedience 
 to an external law. Faith, in the Greek acceptation, 
 was spiritual vision, — the insight of the soul into eter- 
 nal realities ; in the Latin, it was primarily assent to 
 external authority. 
 
 The church, in its most essential aspect, was re- 
 garded by Greek theologians as the congregation of 
 those who consciously acknowledged Christ as the 
 way of righteousness and of life ; the office of the 
 clergy was a representative one ; their authority came 
 from the people, but they were also inspired by the 
 Divine teacher to be the instructors and mouth-piece 
 of those who constituted the body of Christ. In the 
 Latin idea of the church, there was a tendency from 
 the first to regard it as a divinely endowed, mysterious 
 entity, distinct from the congregation, existing as a 
 
SUMMARY OF THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 179 
 
 mediator between it and God. The church was prac- 
 tically identified with the hierarchical order, and the 
 clergy held their office and prerogatives through a 
 sanction away and apart from the people, — the dele- 
 gates of a remote sovereign commissioned to rule in 
 Plis name. The Greeks saw in the sacraments the 
 symbols of the great verities of the Christian life, in- 
 structive monuments or witnesses to a divine presence 
 and activity, whose traces were always and everywhere 
 to be discerned. The Latins identified the symbols 
 with the things signified, and with them the sacraments 
 became external agencies, in the hands of the hie- 
 rarchy, for communicating grace, the exclusive chan- 
 nels through which the divine life was imparted. In 
 the comprehensiveness of the Greek estimate of Christ 
 and His revelation, the salvation of which He is the 
 author was not confined to those in union with the ec- 
 clesiastical organization, and His presence was seen 
 working unconsciously in devout heathens in all ages ; 
 in the Latin scheme of redemption, salvability was 
 not possible outside the communion of the visible or- 
 ganization ; the whole body of heathens, without dis- 
 crimination, as well as all infants dying without bap- 
 tism, were inevitably lost forever to the vision and 
 the presence of God. The Greeks thought of eternal 
 life as consisting in that knowledge of God and of 
 Christ which carried with it the harmonious develop- 
 ment of the whole man in the way of truth and right- 
 eousness ; the lack or rejection of this knowledge 
 was death — the absence or negation of life. In the 
 state of existence hereafter, the resurrection was con- 
 ceived as the standing up again in the larger fullness 
 of that immortal life which is in Christ. The Latin 
 mind translated these conceptions into quantitative es- 
 
180 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 timates : the resurrection was the revivifying of the 
 identical particles of that body which had been laid 
 in the grave and seen corruption ; eternal life be- 
 came unendiug happiness, and eternal death unending 
 woe. 1 
 
 The two theologies which we have contrasted do not 
 stand to each other in the relation of the true to the 
 false, but of the higher to the lower. The principle 
 of historical continuity was not violated when Greek 
 thought was translated into the theological idiom of 
 the Latin mind. Latin Christianity was but the pop- 
 ularized version of Christian truth suited to the unde- 
 veloped capacity of the new races that were entering 
 the empire, and alike adapted to the declining intel- 
 lectual and spiritual forces of a people whose career of 
 
 1 The " larger hope " for humanity which Clement and Origen 
 asserted is nowhere denied by Athanasius ; indeed, it was im- 
 plied in his doctrine of the incarnation. The same view was en- 
 tertained by Gregory of Nazianzus, and more emphatically by 
 Gregory of Nyssa, — the one an intimate friend, and the other a 
 brother, of Basil. It is found in the writings of Didymus, who 
 was held in high repute in Alexandria, and was affirmed in the 
 Antiochian school by Diodorus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, — a 
 school of which Chrysostom was a pupil. In view of this har- 
 mony among the leading representatives of Greek theology, the 
 language of Basil and Chrysostom may be regarded as dictated 
 by the practical requirements of their work as great preachers 
 and energetic administrators of large dioceses, rather than as 
 theologians inquiring only after what is true. They may have 
 acquiesced in an unfortunate admission of Origen's, of whom 
 Basil was an earnest admirer, that it might be necessary to preach 
 what one did not believe. Upon Chrysostom's position, see Ne- 
 ander, Ch. Hist., iv. p. 442. Basil was also rebuking the presump- 
 tion of those who abused the belief that punishment would have 
 its limits. Cf . Regulce Brev. Tract, Interrog. 267. See, also, Smith 
 and Wace, Diet. Chris. Biog., Art. Eschatology, for a careful 
 summary of the opinion of the ancient church. 
 
DETERIORATION OF GREEK THEOLOGY. 181 
 
 advance was over, and who were passing into the stage 
 of senile weakness and decay. For the second child- 
 hood which was overtaking the old civilization, and for 
 the first childhood in the history of the new, Greek 
 theology, with its comprehensive range and its lofty 
 spirituality, was unsuitable ; even Origen had felt the 
 inadequacy of the highest spiritual motives for those 
 who were sinking into moral degeneracy with the grow- 
 ing barbarism, or for those who, in first flush of phys- 
 ical vigor, were given over to bestiality and a brutal 
 materialism. Under such circumstances it was a thing 
 to be expected that Greek theology would show a ten- 
 dency to Latinize, and the lower interpretation of spir- 
 itual truth be accepted in the place of the higher. 
 Traces of such a deterioration may be seen in the 
 Greek fathers of the fifth century ; even in the latter 
 part of the fourth century, such writers as Basil, the 
 two Gregories, and Chrysostom, show a tendency to 
 subordinate thought to rhetoric, and while true in the 
 main to the spirit and method of Greek theology, are 
 unconsciously affected by the waning light of the old 
 Hellenic culture. 
 
 The age was over which had produced a Clement, 
 an Origen, and an Athanasius ; centuries were destined 
 to roll away before the work which they had dropped 
 could be resumed in their spirit and with their advan- 
 tages at the point where they left it. Meantime no 
 opening was offered to the Greek church, in the prov- 
 idence of God, by which its life might be quickened 
 with the enthusiasm of missionary zeal. No mission 
 devolved upon it to undertake the training of the new 
 peoples, with whom, in the mystery of the divine pur- 
 pose, lay the future of civilization. Closed in as the 
 Eastern empire became by races inaccessible to Chris- 
 
182 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 tian influences, the Eastern church was not only robbed 
 of the larger part of its territory, but its spirit was 
 benumbed and chilled, and it passed into that state of 
 stagnant conservatism which has characterized its his- 
 tory to our own day. Tradition was substituted for 
 free theological inquiry; scholastic refinements and 
 adherence to formal orthodoxy were valued as of the 
 highest moment. To make a mistake in the matter of 
 dogma became to the Greek the one unpardonable sin. 
 The anthropomorphism, against which its greatest the- 
 ologians had struggled in the endeavor to maintain 
 the divine existence as a purely spiritual one, became, 
 through the blind and partisan efforts of the monkish 
 orders, the popular conception of Deity. God was 
 conceived as existing in human form, and with this be- 
 lief came image worship, and the cultus which depends 
 upon material agencies to feed the life of the immortal 
 spirit. The writings of the pseudo-Dionysius (a. d. 
 500), who, following the later Neo-Platonists, put God 
 at an infinite remove from man, filling up the chasm 
 between them with a heavenly hierarchy of graded an- 
 gelic existences, whose continuators in the church on 
 earth were the hierarchy of bishops, priests, and dea- 
 cons, — these writings were received, in the ignorance 
 of the age, as having an apostolic origin, and became 
 more influential than the fathers in moulding the opin- 
 ion and practice of earnest and aspiring souls. The 
 pious author of the Celestial Hierareliy, who had bap- 
 tized under a Christian name the last expiring breath 
 of paganism, had, like his Neo-Platonist teachers, de- 
 clared it possible to attain the vision of God by throw- 
 ing the soul into a trance through the well-known 
 methods of oriental asceticism. It is interesting and 
 touching, withal, to notice in the history of Greek 
 
THE MODERN GREEK CHURCH. 183 
 
 mysticism so late as the fourteenth century, how a 
 controversy arose on the point whether the light which 
 the deluded monks, in their hallucinations, fancied sur- 
 rounded their heads as a halo, was not the uncreated 
 light which had also shone around the head of the 
 Saviour upon Mount Tabor, — a feeble reminiscence 
 of Greek theology in its better days with its postulate 
 of revelation as light, — that light then in which was 
 no darkness at all. 
 
 The Greek church still retains in its decayed and 
 immobile condition the traces of its high descent. De- 
 spite its external resemblances to the Latin church, 
 the ignorance of its clergy, or the superstitions and 
 customs which repel the casual observer of its wor- 
 ship, there may still be seen in its standards and lit- 
 urgies the ruling conceptions of those ancient masters 
 of theology, Clement of Alexandria and Athanasius. 
 In the high importance which it has always attached 
 to preaching, in the ethical and homiletic tone of its 
 liturgies, remaining substantially unchanged since their 
 revision by Basil and Chrysostom, — liturgies which, 
 to the practical mind of the West, seem interminably 
 long, with a dreary waste of words, — in its attitude of 
 doctrinal protest against the errors of Rome and of 
 Geneva, there still speaks the voice of the most an- 
 cient, the most spiritual theology, as it existed in the 
 days before its standard was lowered in the presence 
 of an all pervading barbarism. The Greek church 
 is as far removed from the spirit of Koine and of 
 a Latinized Anglicanism on the one hand, as it is 
 from the types of Protestant theology which, under 
 the name of Calvinism, have perpetuated the spirit 
 and the methods of Augustine, and to neither the 
 one nor the other does it lend a willing ear. It still 
 
184 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 lies inactive, seemingly unconscious of the signifi- 
 cance of later history, and may long continue to re- 
 main so. Its future is perhaps involved in the des- 
 tinies of the vast empire which owns its allegiance ; 
 the fate of the Turk and the Mohammedan oppressor, 
 when revealed, may be the signal for its awakening. 
 No mission, as has been said, came to it as to its Latin 
 neighbor to become the school-master to a new people 
 with a high destiny ; and yet, once in history, there 
 came a great revival of the study of Hellenic litera- 
 ture, which, while attended by grave evils, especially 
 in the home of the papacy, became among the north- 
 ern nations the precursor of the Protestant Reforma- 
 tion. The study of Greek became from that time the 
 basis of a new learning for Latin Christendom. Then 
 it appeared that the Greek church had, during all of 
 her apparent lifelessness, been assigned a providential 
 role in history, — to preserve the ancient literature and 
 hand it over when the new world was ready to receive 
 it. In the consolation which Milton felt when he found 
 himself debarred from the activities of life, there may 
 be found the divine message to the apparently lifeless 
 churches of the Orient, — they also serve who only 
 stand and wait. 
 
 II. 
 
 The mission of the Latin or Roman Catholic church 
 began when that of the Greek church had apparently 
 ended. When the barbarian races overspread the 
 Western Empire, overthrowing civilization and intro- 
 ducing everywhere the wildest disorder, there was one 
 institution which was not overthrown, which not only 
 resisted the shock, but girded itself anew to the for- 
 midable task of reducing the untamed mass of human- 
 
MISSION OF THE LATIN CHURCH. 185 
 
 ity to submission and order. The Latin church now 
 began to reap the advantage of that labor of organ- 
 ization, which had been slowly elaborated for cen- 
 turies, and, like a subtle net-work, had extended itself, 
 throughout the limits of the old society. The Roman 
 church fell heir to the old Roman genius for conquest 
 and discipline ; the spirit of Roman law survived, and 
 was perpetuated in ecclesiastical institutions. From 
 the sixth to the ninth century the work of convert- 
 ing the new races to the recognition and obedience of 
 the church went on with unabated and successful 
 ardor, resembling nothing so much as that earlier 
 process of conquest by which the city of Rome had 
 made herself mistress of the nations. The races 
 whom old Rome could never entirely vanquish be- 
 came in course of time the submissive children of the 
 Roman church, receiving from its hands the gifts 
 which they had spurned at the hands of Roman war- 
 riors. 
 
 While the period of the early Middle Ages presents 
 but little direct material for the history of theology, 
 there may be traced in it the growth of sentiments 
 which are charged with deep meaning for the future 
 of humanity. Among these, the most prominent was 
 a natural and spontaneous growth of reverence for 
 the bishops of Rome. Up to the time of Gregory the 
 Great (590-604) the papacy, although it had contin- 
 ued to make a persistent claim to the primacy of the 
 church, had gained no acknowledgment of its author- 
 ity in the churches of the East. But in the West, 
 when the waves of the barbarian invasion began to 
 subside, and the constructive instincts of men began 
 to assert themselves, the opportunity had come for 
 the Roman see, which had been long and patiently 
 
186 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 awaited. The papacy never appeared so fair, so at- 
 tractive, as in the person of Gregory the Great, who 
 stood, as it were, on the dividing line between two 
 worlds, with the modest consciousness of a great des- 
 tiny. Others might assume more pompous titles, as, 
 for example, the patriarch of Constantinople, who 
 called himself the " bishop of bishops," but Gregory 
 was content, in the consciousness of an actual greatness, 
 to be designated as the humblest of all, " the servant 
 of the servants of God." The rise of the papacy in 
 the new world was no usurpation ; there was at first 
 no eager grasping after power ; the popes simply stood 
 and received that which came to them as the willing 
 offering of the people. In the confusion which every- 
 where prevailed there sprang up the desire for order, 
 and as a prerequisite for order, some common centre 
 of unity and authority. Where could such a centre 
 be looked for except in Rome, whose bishops in the 
 general depression of the age stood so high above 
 their contemporaries ? It seemed only natural in a 
 world from which God stood at a distance, over which 
 all His waves and storms had been breaking, that 
 some one should have been appointed as His vicar or 
 regent to stand in His place and act in His stead. 
 The papacy, indeed, as men then began to regard it, 
 was but the form which the conviction took among a 
 rude people, of the truth that God had not abandoned 
 the world to itself, and was present, in the person of 
 His delegate, to order and control its affairs. 
 
 The idea of the church which Augustine had done 
 so much to determine was now further developed, and 
 gained a new significance from the force of external 
 events. The church was viewed as an ark of deliver- 
 ance, — a refuge from the dark and evil world. Tho 
 
THE EMPIRE BECOMES A THEOCRACY. 187 
 
 Augustinian idea, that only some of those within 
 the church were predestinated to salvation, gradually 
 disappeared in favor of the more comprehensive and 
 genial view, that all the baptized were alike elected to 
 a great opportunity. The church became more entirely 
 than ever the mediator, the manifest bond of union 
 and of reconciliation between God and man. In com- 
 munion with the church, in obedience to the church, 
 lay the principle of salvation and redemption. 
 
 Such was the aspect of the church to devout and 
 timid souls, in an age of lawlessness and violence, 
 when the great world had lost its attractiveness, and 
 offered for the many no prospect of peace and secu- 
 rity. As the conquests of the church progressed, and 
 race after race were enrolled in its ranks by baptism, 
 it became evident that it was the most potent of agen- 
 cies for promoting the end most desired, — order and 
 due submission to authority. A process was silently 
 but surely operating, which, bringing the people under 
 the control of the clergy, the clergy under the obe- 
 dience of the bishops, and the bishops into due sub- 
 jection to the earthly head of the church at Rome, 
 was also consolidating the empire into one great family 
 united by a common faith and hope. In this process 
 the civil power lent its aid ; force was emplo} r ed to 
 convert the peoples whose stubborn adherence to hea- 
 thenism the moral influence of missionaries had failed 
 to overcome ; legislation was enacted by the state en- 
 forcing obedience to the church's decrees. What 
 would have been the history of the church, if Charle- 
 magne and his predecessors had not given their willing 
 support to its policy, is a question concerning which it 
 is idle to speculate. Those able rulers had also a pol- 
 icy of their own to support, and believed themselves 
 
188 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 to be strengthening the civil authority by an alliance 
 with the Bishop of Rome. Such might have been the 
 result had the external course of affairs been ordered 
 differently than it was. It was made clear by the 
 subsequent course of the history that the alliance with 
 the church had not strengthened the state. When the 
 vast empire of Charlemagne was broken into frag- 
 ments, with a constant tendency to divide and subdi- 
 vide, one thing became evident, that the Roman bishop 
 was master of the situation ; the state had become 
 hopelessly divided, while the church was united under 
 the rule of the pope ; to all intents and purposes the 
 state had been simply resolving itself into a church, — 
 a theocracy, whose divine sovereign was the Bishoj) of 
 Rome. The reverse had been taking place of what is 
 seen in Christendom to-day, when the church is divided 
 and the state is united, — a prophecy to the minds of 
 some that the process is destined to go on, till the 
 church grows into and becomes identified with the 
 state. 
 
 The period known as the Early Middle Ages, ex- 
 tending from the beginning of the sixth century to 
 the dismemberment of the empire of Charlemagne 
 in the ninth century, is marked by many character- 
 istics distinguishing it sharply from the age that fol- 
 lowed. The supremacy of the pope, so far as it 
 had been achieved, was chiefly of a moral kind, rest- 
 ing on the free recognition of the people, winning its 
 way to such recognition because of its genuine ser- 
 vices to the cause of morality and of order. This 
 period is in some respects also analogous to the career 
 of the Jewish church. Underneath its religious man- 
 ifestations may be discerned the deistic conception of 
 God as outside of the world in the distant heavens, 
 
LOW STAGE OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 189 
 
 while morality rested for its sanctions upon a belief in 
 temporal rewards and punishments. But the connec- 
 tion of religion and morality was not a close one, and 
 despite the efforts of the church there prevailed the 
 idea, always seen in the initial stages of religious de- 
 velopment, that God was pleased at His acknowledg- 
 ment by men apart from the nature of the service 
 rendered to Him, or that what was desired by them 
 was to be obtained by asking. Even the missionaries 
 themselves condescended to an argument, which had 
 great weight with their heathen auditors, that the 
 Christian God was stronger than the old deities, and 
 disposed to aid by His powerful support those who 
 accepted His allegiance or to thwart the schemes of 
 those who rejected it. The argument told upon the 
 barbarian races who were inclined to attribute to the 
 weakness of their deities the disasters experienced in 
 the long process of migration, and whose hold upon 
 their worshipers had been further relaxed in conse- 
 quence of the breaking up of the old local associa- 
 tions. Besides, as a matter of fact, victory did clearly 
 seem to follow the acknowledgment of the Christian 
 Deity. So reasoned the high-priest of heathenism in 
 England, when Christianity was first presented for his 
 acceptance, — the old gods had never done much for 
 him, though he had been faithful in their service, and 
 it might be expedient to make a change in the hope 
 of better results. Clovis in an emergency prayed to 
 the Christian God, and obtained a great victory. The 
 Burgundians, who were among the earliest races to 
 be converted, finding themselves at the mercy of the 
 Huns, applied for baptism to the neighboring Chris- 
 tian bishop as a preservative against those sons of the 
 demons. 
 
190 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 In the dense ignorance that closed in around the 
 Western empire, it is interesting to note that the traces 
 of the old Hellenic culture have not entirely disap- 
 peared. The Irish-Scotch clergy alone seem to have 
 maintained a knowledge of the Greek language and 
 literature ; and at a time when it was the universal 
 belief that all outside the church were doomed to 
 endless woe, it is curious to read of Irish monks 
 proclaiming in Germany, to the great scandal of the 
 Anglo-Saxon Boniface, the doctrine of a plurality of 
 worlds and of the possible salvation of the heathen. 
 The famous John Scotus Erigena in the ninth cen- 
 tury holds the same relation to the world of letters 
 that Charlemagne does to the slowly rising civilization, 
 — both of them, as it were, men born out of due time, 
 phenomena as striking as the sudden and inexplicable 
 appearance of comets darting across the dark heavens. 
 John Scotus was one of the very few with any knowl- 
 edge of Greek. He had studied the works of Plato 
 and of Origen to such advantage as to produce a sys- 
 tem of religious philosophy of vast scope and pro- 
 fundity, the anticipation in all important aspects of 
 the systems of our own day. 1 But John Scotus only 
 confused and puzzled his age ; he seemed to be ortho- 
 dox, but in a fashion hardly available for practical 
 
 1 " La theologie de Jean Scot, heretiere des plus grandes con- 
 ceptions de l'Eglise d'Orient, ne convenait pas au Christianisnie 
 du moyen age. Elle ouvrait a la pensee religieuse d 'immense 
 perspectives ; elle repandait de hautes clartes sur les problemes 
 les plus difficiles de la metaphysique ckretienne ; elle continuait 
 les traditions de ces magnifiques genies, qui avaient eleve le 
 Christianisnie au sommet de la pkilosophie elle-meme. Mais 
 telle lumiere etait trop eclatante pour les faibles yeux de la 
 Scliolastique." — Vacherot, Histoire de Vecole d'Alexandrie, iii. 
 p. 81. 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FIL10QUE. 191 
 
 purposes ; what could such an age as his do with a 
 man who talked about evil as a negation, as having 
 no real existence, or who defined predestination as the 
 consciousness of achieving one's destiny. At a later 
 time the justice which he failed to receive in his life- 
 time was meted out to him, and he was condemned as 
 a heretic. His main contribution to Latin theology 
 was his translation of the " Celestial Hierarchy " of 
 Dionysius, hitherto a sealed book for want of knowl- 
 edge of the Greek language. In the main the atti- 
 tude of Gregory the Great toward learning was main- 
 tained throughout the early Middle Ages, — the piet- 
 ism which regards all study that does not concern the 
 salvation of the soul as useless and profane. Alcuin 
 rebuked the too eager curiosity of Charlemagne to un- 
 derstand the secrets of the natural world ; the study 
 of nature and of the classics was regarded as danger- 
 ous and heathenish ; attention was concentrated on the 
 Bible and Latin ecclesiastical writers, among whom 
 Augustine had the preeminence. 
 
 The theological controversies of the ninth century 
 are significant as showing the drift of religious thought 
 toward what became later the established authorita- 
 tive teaching of the church, although none of them 
 were conducted in a satisfactory way or brought to 
 any definite conclusion by representative synodal ac- 
 tion. The problem of the jilioque, — whether the Holy 
 Spirit proceeded from the Father alone, as the Greeks 
 maintained, or from the Father and the Son, whatever 
 may be its true speculative solution, was decided in 
 favor of the latter hypothesis, and the filioque was 
 added about the beginning of the ninth century to the 
 Nicene Creed. It may be difficult to fathom the mo- 
 tives which have always made this conclusion most ac- 
 
192 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 ceptable to the Latin mind, but there can be no doubt 
 of the fact. One can readily see that with the gen- 
 erally received view of the church as an institution 
 founded on earth by Christ, the government of which 
 had been intrusted after His departure to the pope as 
 His vicar, it would De incongruous to think of the 
 Holy Spirit as a diffused spiritual activity not bound 
 to the hierarchy or confined within the ecclesiastical 
 organization, but proceeding from the Father alone, 
 and therefore at liberty to act as the wind, where He 
 listed. Such a view would undermine the received 
 view of the nature of the church as a definite organi- 
 zation beyond the communion of which there was no 
 salvation. 
 
 The adoptionist controversy which arose in Spain 
 shows the influence of the prevalent Mohammedan 
 faith in weakening the adherence of Catholic Chris- 
 tians to the doctrine of the incarnation. In the face 
 of the vigorous proclamation of Islam, Far be it from 
 God that He should have a son, the Spanish Chris- 
 tians were inclined to confine the real Sonship of 
 Christ to His divine nature, and to regard His human 
 nature as alien from God, and as brought into relation 
 with him by adoption. 1 The church in the Frankish 
 empire opposed the principle of adoption, but it is 
 evident that on both sides of the controversy there was 
 a disposition to lay the supreme stress on the divine 
 element in Christ, while His humanity was becoming 
 the mere shadow or reminiscence of the great reality 
 of the God made man. The historical Christ had re- 
 treated to a distance by the side of the equally distant 
 
 1 That the position known as adoptionism was only a natural 
 inference from the decision of the sixth general council has been 
 shown by Dorner, Person of Christ, b. ii. p. 252. 
 
DISCUSSION OF TRAN SUBSTANTIATION. 193 
 
 Father, and coming events were soon to transform 
 Him into the cold, unpitying Judge who stood await- 
 ing the close of this earthly dispensation, when hu- 
 manity should be summoned to His dread tribunal. 
 
 It was in the ninth century that the doctrine of 
 transubstantiation became for the first time the sub- 
 ject of formal discussion. In the ancient church from 
 an early period, and chiefly by oriental writers in Asia 
 Minor, a highly rhetorical language had been used on 
 the subject of the Eucharist, which might seem to 
 imply the belief in an actual transformation in the ele- 
 ments of bread and wine. The Greek theologians, as 
 has been already said, interpreted the expressions, the 
 body and the blood of Christ, as symbols or figures of 
 a spiritual reality ; and even the early Latin fathers, 
 as Tertuliian and Cyprian, vacillated in their utter- 
 ances between the spiritual and material interpreta- 
 tion of the great Christian feast. Augustine had been 
 obliged by his principle of predestination to hold the 
 spiritual view, according to which the benefits of the 
 sacraments were received only by the elect, while to 
 all others they were but an empty sign. It certainly 
 cannot be called a propitious moment in the ninth 
 century for the clear and intelligent discussion of any 
 theological topic, when the intellect of the new races 
 was only just awakening to its first activity, when the 
 few who bore the title of scholar were not only unac- 
 quainted with the history of theology, but were wholly 
 untrained in the art of reasoning and the expression 
 of thought. Under such circumstances it is remarka- 
 ble how the common sense and robust spiritual nature 
 of some of the most intelligent men of the age pro- 
 tested against the notion advanced by the monk Rad- 
 bertus (831). thai a miraculous change took place at 
 
 13 
 
194 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 the consecration of the elements. But Ratramnus 
 (Bertram), John Scotus Erigena, Rabanus Maurus, 
 and others could not remake their time; Radbertus 
 had expressed the tendency of the church at large — 
 the presence of Christ, His continuous incarnation in 
 the world, was not in the activity of the reason or in 
 the spiritual life of His followers, but in the sacrament 
 of the altar, and even there it was not the spirit of 
 Christ, but His body, that was offered in sacrifice and 
 eaten by the people. 
 
 There was one other controversy (847-868) more 
 bitter and of longer duration than the others. Gott- 
 schalk was a monk, the son of a Saxon count, who had 
 been from infancy devoted by his parents to the mo- 
 nastic profession. Although of a deeply religious na- 
 ture, he desired after reaching maturity to free him- 
 self from the shackles of monastic obligation, but when 
 he made the attempt he found it to be impossible. 
 Another power stood between him and God, making 
 him realize that he was no longer free to follow inde- 
 pendently the bent of his native disposition. Unable 
 to escape the monastic thralldom he gave himself to a 
 deeper study of Augustine, and advocated in an ex- 
 treme form, and in a passionate way, the doctrines of 
 predestination and reprobation. He became the type 
 and forerunner of those who in later times would de- 
 tach the Augustinian doctrine of election and grace 
 from their close connection with the Latin institution 
 of the church, as Augustine had held them, and find a 
 larger liberty and higher manhood in depending upon 
 God alone and directly, through the bond of His final 
 decree. But meantime, as Gottschalk realized in a 
 life of painful martyrdom, it was the church's decree 
 and not God's which regulated the process of human 
 
BEGINNING OF THE "AGES OF FAITH:' 195 
 
 salvation. Despite the prevailing reverence for Au- 
 gustine, the doctrine of individual election by divine 
 decree was abandoned by the most representative the- 
 ologians for the election through baptism of an uncon- 
 scious humanity to the discipline and the cultus of the 
 church. 
 
 III. 
 
 The ninth century forms the culmination of the 
 early Middle Ages. It was marked by the awaken- 
 ing of the human mind, a curiosity for knowledge, 
 the rise of schools in which the rudiments of educa- 
 tion were taught, and by a group of theologians who 
 devoted themselves with great energy and vigor to the 
 religious issues of the time. The papal see had been 
 occupied by great men like Nicholas I. and Hadrian, 
 who used their power during the political disturbances 
 of the age in behalf of the higher interests of the 
 church, and almost anticipated the sway of Hilde- 
 brand and his successors. But the results which had 
 been so laboriously achieved in raising the new world 
 out of barbarism suddenly disappeared in the latter 
 part of the century, and two centuries rolled away 
 before the work thus interrupted was again resumed 
 on the same level. In the eleventh century, when the 
 church emerges from the dark ages, and mediaeval 
 theology enters upon its second stage, it was no longer 
 the same world that it had been. A mighty change 
 had passed over the human spirit, which can be ac- 
 counted for only by a divine Providence in human 
 affairs mysteriously ordering external events in the in- 
 terest of a spiritual development. 
 
 The early Middle Ages, taken as a whole, reveal a 
 people that had not yet been brought into complete 
 
196 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 subjection to the church. It was characterized by a 
 certain freedom and simplicity in the religious life. 
 The image worship which the degenerate East had 
 approved at a general council (789) was not accept- 
 able to the healthier, manlier tone of the western 
 mind, and had been rejected by the- church in Eng- 
 land and on the continent. There had been theolo- 
 gians like Agobard of Lyons, and Claudius of Turin, 
 who had discerned the outlines of a purer Chris- 
 tianity with the clearness of vision of the reformers 
 of the sixteenth century. The people, and even the 
 clergy, do not seem to have stood greatly in awe of 
 the pope's excommunications ; such a thing as the 
 papal ban or interdict was unknown ; the property 
 of the church had not been regarded as having a 
 sacred, inalienable character, while the contributions 
 demanded for its support needed civil legislation to 
 enforce their payment. The common people showed 
 no appreciation of a high moral ideal, no deep con- 
 viction of sin ; on the contrary, the migration of the 
 barbarians seemed to have had for its first effects the 
 dissolution of morals in an extraordinary degree. If 
 the course of external circumstances had not come to 
 the aid of the church, it does not seem as though 
 Europe would ever have bent its head to the yoke of 
 the priesthood. What are called the " ages of faith " 
 had not yet begun. 
 
 The causes of the change which came over the 
 human spirit may be roughly traced to the profound 
 as well as extensive social disturbances, caused by the 
 second migration which went on in the ninth century. 
 The Huns appeared with renewed numbers and en- 
 ergy, overrunning the Frankish empire as far as the 
 sea before they returned ; the Northmen came down 
 
THE EFFECT OF TERROR. 197 
 
 upon the coast of France, and, sweeping- south by sea, 
 took possession of Italy ; the Danes invaded and con- 
 quered England ; the Saracens passed through the 
 Mediterranean, and appeared even before the gates of 
 Rome. In consequence of these movements, govern- 
 ment and order grew weak and almost disappeared; 
 monastic establishments were pillaged and burned ; 
 life and property became everywhere insecure. And, 
 as if the universal terror caused by these events was 
 not sufficient, there was bred a general conviction that 
 the end of the world was at hand, — >that when the 
 year 1000 should be reached the world would be de- 
 stroyed, and humanity summoned to appear before 
 the judgment-seat of Christ. The shadow of a great 
 dread fell upon Christendom, and took shape in the 
 universal sense of horror of the final judgment that 
 was impending. Such was the divine method of re- 
 vealing to men the sinfulness of sin, and rousing into 
 activity the human conscience. The old idea that God 
 was pledged, as it were, to protect His own people 
 and to punish their enemies could thrive no longer 
 after such a visitation at His hands. The attention 
 of men was drawn away to a future world, where the 
 sins which had been punished so terribly in this world 
 would be followed by endless retribution, or where 
 alone those who had served God faithfully would re- 
 ceive the reward which had been denied them here. 
 
 Under circumstances like these it did not require 
 civil legislation to bring a terrified people into com- 
 plete and even abject submission to the church and 
 her offices. We read, on the eve of this dark period, 
 of forged decretals, of pretended donations, and of 
 stolen titles to honor and dignity ; but it was not these 
 which riveted the bands of ecclesiastical authority 
 
198 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 upon the people. It was rather the workings of the 
 human conscience, — the feeling that there was some- 
 thing wrong, in man or in the world around him ; that 
 God was angry and was making His wrath felt in 
 visible signs which could not be mistaken. It needed 
 no longer urgent entreaty to induce the people to make 
 offerings to God and His church of their worldly 
 goods. Property had lost its value to those who were 
 concerned about the safety of their souls. The church 
 grew rich with the money and the lands that were so 
 freely offered, and in return granted remission of sins 
 through the confessional, and by the power of the 
 priesthood kept the heavens open to human supplica- 
 tion in the stupendous mystery of the altar. When 
 the tenth century had closed, and when hope again 
 returned, as to the world after the deluge, the erection 
 of great cathedrals began, — offerings to Heaven as 
 for a great deliverance, in which were written the 
 story of a people's experience. In their vast propor- 
 tions, in the feeling of awe and the sense of the pro- 
 found mystery of life which they inspired, — the mys- 
 tery of the forest, with its chastened, solemn light, — in 
 the dim hope for humanity revealed through the dark- 
 ness by the twinkling candle before the consecrated 
 host, in the columns, pinnacles, and spires, always 
 pointing away from earth and upward to heaven, in 
 an architecture thus calculated at once to enthrall the 
 imagination and subdue the natural impulses, did the 
 spirit of mediaeval Christianity find its beautiful em- 
 bodiment. 
 
 It was in the eleventh century, when external events 
 had given one common tone and direction to Christian 
 piety, when the popular belief found a satisfactory ex- 
 pression in the prevailing cultus, when asceticism was 
 
ANSELM' S DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT. 199 
 
 taking on an oriental severity, when the human mind 
 sought a congenial field for the first exercise of its un- 
 trained powers in the effort to demonstrate the truth 
 of the church's teaching, that Anselm arose, the first 
 and among the greatest in the long line of scholastic 
 theologians. 
 
 He was an Italian by birth, identified with the mo- 
 nastic revival of his time, and, when late in life he 
 became archbishop of Canterbury, he devoted himself 
 in an ultramontane spirit to the extremest claims of 
 the papacy in its conflicts with the secular power. 
 The merit of Anselm lay in the fact that, more than 
 any one who came after him, he combined with his 
 dialectic capacity the deep experience of an earnest 
 Christian feeling. Hence he was successful in inter- 
 preting the deeper moods of the soul, and gave such a 
 clear expression to the theory which underlay the re- 
 ligious tendencies of his age that he still remains 
 their best exponent, whenever under similar circum- 
 stances they have reappeared in the church. 
 
 The doctrine of the atonement, with which his name 
 remains associated, was elaborated in a treatise whose 
 nominal object it was to demonstrate to the reason the 
 necessity of the incarnation. But in elaborating this 
 remarkable theory Anselm was in reality seeking for 
 a bond of union between man and God which should 
 satisfy the heart and conscience as well as the specula- 
 tive demands of his intellect. According to Anselm's 
 theory of the atonement, man owes a perfect obedience 
 to the divine law ; but no one has rendered this obedi- 
 ence, and so all men have fallen in debt, for sin is 
 a debt, the failure to render what man owes to God. 
 Divine justice dooms all men to endless punishment, 
 since sin against an infinite being calls for infinite 
 
200 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 penalty. But if justice were executed the divine 
 goodness would be thwarted, and the divine goodness 
 cannot allow that all men should be endlessly lost. 
 The divine wisdom therefore devises a plan whereby 
 goodness can be manifested and yet justice satisfied. 
 Man cannot pay the debt, and yet, if it is to be paid, 
 it must be paid by man for it is man that has sinned. 
 Only God can pay the debt ; for only an infinite be- 
 ing can satisfy infinite justice, only God can satisfy 
 God. The schism in the divine nature is healed by 
 God becoming man and rendering a full satisfaction. 
 The obedience of Christ as the God-man, even to suf- 
 fering and death, possesses an infinite value, and is 
 more than an equivalent for what the race would have 
 suffered if punished forever, as the honor of God re- 
 quired. Thus the debt is paid, justice is satisfied, 
 goodness is triumphant, and God can pardon sinners. 
 Upon this theory of Anselm, it may be remarked 
 that it indicates an advance in theological thought, be- 
 cause it represents the action in humanity of a quick- 
 ened conscience seeking for some firm ground on 
 which to rest in its relation to God. In other respects, 
 also, it marks an advance in formal theology as an ef- 
 fort to escape from that unchristian dualism which had 
 been inclined to regard the death of Christ as in some 
 sense a ransom paid to Satan, in order to withdraw 
 mankind from his power. This view of a ransom 
 paid to Satan was never, it should be said, the real 
 doctrine of atonement in the ancient church. In Greek 
 theology the incarnation in and of itself was the power 
 which redeemed and regenerated humanity, — which 
 reconciled man to God and God to man ; in the death 
 of Christ was seen the highest and most conclusive 
 evidence of God's identification with the interests and 
 
CRITICISM OF A NS ELM'S THEORY. 201 
 
 the lot of humanity, the strongest proof of the divine 
 love. But even in the ancient church when that vast 
 transition of souls was taking place from the dreary 
 under-world, as conceived by Jewish or pagan thought, 
 upward to the abode of light and blessedness, there 
 were vague and obscure allusions to a process by 
 which Satan, the lord of the under-world, had lost his 
 hold over spirits confined within his domain, through 
 the power of the death and resurrection of Christ. 
 For Christ Himself had, in obedience to the law of 
 death, also been obliged to enter the under-world, and 
 there by His preaching had made known to captive 
 spirits His mission to them as well as to mankind, and 
 when He rose again from the dead, He had won the 
 right to empty Hades of all believers. Satan had for 
 a moment held the Saviour in his grasp, and although 
 he had been, as it were, outwitted by an event which 
 he had not foreseen, — His resurrection again to life, — 
 yet in that one moment in which he had held Christ 
 in his power through His submission unto death, there 
 had been an acquittal of his claims against humanity. 
 Such was the view which may have led to the inser- 
 tion in the Apostles' Creed of the clause now so dif- 
 ficult to interpret : " He descended into hell." It 
 remains there as a monument to a great historical 
 process in human thought, — how through the belief 
 in the universal mission of a Christ ascended into the 
 heavens with God, the belief in an under-world passed 
 away, yielding to the Christian heaven of perpetual 
 light and ever-increasing growth in divine activities. 
 In the Middle Ages, when the historical origin of the 
 theory had long been forgotten, its residuum took the 
 shape that the death of Christ had been a ransom 
 paid to Satan for the deliverance of mankind from 
 
202 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 his power. Anselm took a great step forward when 
 he combated such a view by declaring the ransom to 
 have been paid to God, and for the schism or dual- 
 ism of two hostile powers, Satan and God, substituted 
 a dualism within the divine nature itself between 
 justice and love. That the older view did not easily 
 disappear is seen in the fact that it was reasserted in 
 the following century by no less distinguished a per- 
 sonage than Bernard of Clairvaux, so far was he car- 
 ried away by his opposition to the theological ration- 
 alism of his time. 
 
 It may be further remarked concerning this theory 
 of Anselm that it reflects the local influences of the 
 Middle Ages and of the legal attitude of the Latin 
 mind. God is viewed as a distant and mighty suze- 
 rain, having an absolute claim on the obedience of his 
 subjects, whose honor injured or diminished requires 
 an awful reparation. No figure could have been 
 chosen more expressive in the days of feudalism and 
 of chivalry to bring home to the conscience the rela- 
 tion of God to man. In the conception of sin as the 
 violation of an external law, was the only adequate 
 representation of it to a people who were still in the 
 condition of those to whom Moses had declared the com- 
 mandments on Mount Sinai, amidst the awe-inspiring 
 convulsions of the outward world, and who had not 
 yet learned to regard the law as the expression of the 
 divine character, written in the inward nature of man, 
 — that alluring power in his constitution which at- 
 tracts him onward in devoted love to the free imitation 
 of God. The figure of sin as a debt had, indeed, 
 been used by Christ Himself in the parable of the 
 debtor ; but there were some features in the Saviour's 
 language which Anselm passed over in silence. What 
 
THE PARABLE OF THE DEBTOR. 203 
 
 was the significance of the fact that the servant's lord 
 had at first freely forgiven the whole debt because it 
 was desired of him ; and what was the reason that the 
 debt came back upon the wicked servant after it had 
 been once remitted ? The Saviour when the parable 
 had ended dropped the figure and came back again to 
 the language of reality : " So also shall my heavenly 
 Father do unto you, if ye from your heart forgive not 
 every one his brother their trespasses." The real de- 
 fect in Anselm's doctrine of the atonement is that he 
 built upon the action or the fears of a diseased and 
 guilty conscience in its sense of alienation from God, 
 instead of the pure and free consciousness of Him who 
 is the type of the normal man, who abode in undis- 
 turbed communion with the Father, and aims through 
 the power of His living presence to bring all men into 
 the same relation. The thought of Anselm was defi- 
 cient also in another important respect, in not clearly 
 exhibiting the process by which the individual man 
 availed himself of the advantage springing from the 
 payment of the debt. When in the later Protestant 
 theologies Anselm's scheme of atonement, like Augus- 
 tine's doctrine of predestination, was detached from 
 its connection with the Latin idea of the church, the 
 faith of the individual believer, or his assent to the 
 transaction, became the means by wdiich its benefits 
 were appropriated. But Anselm made no such provi- 
 sion ; the tendency of his thought was to hand over 
 the result achieved by the death of Christ to the con- 
 trol or disposition of the church, and thus magnify 
 the church as the real mediator between God and 
 man. 
 
 Anselm had spoken of the suffering of Christ in 
 its infinite character as constituting an equivalent for 
 
204 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 the endless punishment of mankind, but the later 
 School-men thought to do greater honor to the death of 
 Christ by regarding it as more than an equivalent, and 
 as creating in addition a vast treasury of merit which, 
 with the superfluous merit of the saints, was placed at 
 the disposal of the church, and by it assigned at will 
 to the credit of individual souls. Such was the foun- 
 dation of the later doctrine of indulgences; it may 
 seem but a parody of the gospel of Christ ; it has 
 appeared absurd and even grotesque to modern theo- 
 logians ; and yet in it can be discerned the gropings of 
 the human mind in a crude way, and under great dis- 
 advantages, after that higher conception of the incar- 
 nation and of the solidarity of mankind in the Son of 
 God, which has been presented as the leading princi- 
 ple in Greek theology. In the thought of Athanasius 
 we see interpreted the struggles of mediaeval scholas- 
 ticism after the knowledge of Him who gave His 
 body to the death for all, and thus paid the universal 
 debt ; in whom all mankind have died ; who taking 
 humanity up into Himself, and suffering in the flesh 
 for all, bestowed salvation upon all ; through whom 
 humanity restored and deified is endowed henceforth 
 in its own right with a divine, recuperative power. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Just as Greek theology, in the age of its decline, 
 showed a tendency to Latinize, to fall away from the 
 high interpretation of spiritual realities into literal 
 and crude conceptions, so also does Latin theology, 
 when it begins a career of fresh and independent ac- 
 tivity in the later Middle Ages, show a tendency to 
 Hellenize, to rise by processes of its own from the let- 
 
RISE OF SCHOLASTICISM. 205 
 
 ter to the spirit, from the outward to the inward as- 
 pects of the revelation in Christ. Such a course is 
 necessitated by the law of progress, which is the law 
 of the life of humanity. It is impossible to stay the 
 rising force of the human mind, or check the expres- 
 sion of the human consciousness divinely sown with 
 the seeds of eternal truth, when the expanding germs 
 press forward into the light. External repression may\ 
 seem to hinder or even annihilate the process, but in 
 reality deepens, intensifies, and strengthens it. In the 
 long run, nothing can succeed against the truth, but 
 for the truth. 
 
 The peculiar form which the intellectual activity of 
 the Middle Ages assumed is known as Scholasticism, 
 a name, however, which reveals nothing of the inner 
 characteristics of a process which lasted for centuries 
 before its task was demonstrated to have ended in 
 failure, so far as its direct object was concerned, but 
 which indirectly promoted in a powerful way the higher 
 interests of humanity. Scholasticism originated in the 
 schools, which were afterward developed into the great 
 universities, and was therefore primarily an intellect- 
 ual movement, as contrasted with monasticism, that 
 other great institution of the Middle Ages, whose 
 primary aim was the cultivation of piety. The real 
 object, whether avowed or tacitly assumed, of this vast 
 and long-continued intellectual process, was to adjust 
 the theology of the church to the human conscious- 
 ness ; to show, if possible, by demonstration, that the 
 dogmas and tenets, handed down by tradition from 
 Augustine and his Latin predecessors, or modified since 
 then by the practical necessities of the church, were in 
 harmony with the reason of man, and were the abso- 
 lute expression of divine truth. The movement did 
 
206 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 not begin in skepticism, but rested upon unquestioning 
 assent to the church's teaching, so far as it was known 
 or understood. The scholastic philosophers took it for 
 granted, in the nature of things, that this demonstra- 
 tion could be reached, — the only question was as to 
 the method. It need hardly be said that they were 
 unaware that there had been an earlier interpretation 
 of Christianity, made by a people, in the full maturity 
 of their intellectual powers, whose reason had been 
 trained for ages by a philosophical culture of the 
 highest order, and in possession of a language beauti- 
 fully adapted as a perfect vehicle for the expression of 
 the subtlest forms of human thought. They were not 
 aware that this earlier interpretation of the Christian 
 faith differed on every essential point from that which 
 they had received from the hands of the Latin church. 
 They did not know that Christianity, as it had been 
 received in the West, was but a lower form of the 
 truth adapted to a ruder apprehension ; that it was a 
 temporary expedient in the long range of human de- 
 velopment ; that the controlling principle in the devel- 
 opment of theology, as they had received it, was its 
 adaptation to the necessities of a hierarchical organi- 
 zation. To them the church, viewed as the Latin ec- 
 clesiastical organization, was divine, the possessor of 
 absolute truth, to receive which, in unquestioning as- 
 sent, was the highest duty of man. To bring such a 
 system into accord with human reason, or the con- 
 sciousness that is in man, necessitated its retranslat- 
 ing back into its higher and more ancient form, the 
 passing at every point from the outward to the inward. 
 But to succeed in such a process was to revolutionize 
 theology — to change the conceptions of the being of 
 God and his relation to the world, of the incarnation, 
 
THE CHURCH NOT MEETING THE AGE. 207 
 
 of revelation, of the nature of man, of the origin of 
 evil, of atonement, of the true cultus of the spirit, and 
 of all that relates to the last things in human destiny. 
 And yet of such a process the scholastic philosophy 
 was the beginning, even though its results were mainly 
 of a negative character. It lasted long enough to 
 show that the highest reason could not defend or main- 
 tain the tenets of Latin theology ; and in the course 
 of its progress it revealed intimations of a higher 
 attitude toward truth which could and did commend 
 itself not only to the intellect but to the Christian 
 heart. 
 
 The first step in such a process was the gradual 
 revelation of the fact that the church itself was not 
 meeting the needs of humanity. All through the 
 twelfth century there went on a series of protests 
 against the church and its teachings from almost 
 every part of Christendom, some of them formidable 
 in the extent of their influence, others of narrow pro- 
 portions, all of them more or less disfigured by whim- 
 sical fantasies, by erroneous and even dangerous ten- 
 dencies, and yet all of them connected by an inward 
 principle indicating their organic relationship to hu- 
 man life, and all of them significant of the future 
 that was to be. Such were the Cathari or Albigenses 
 in France, the Sect of the Holy Spirit, the Petrobru- 
 sians, the Apostolical Brethren, and the Waldenses. 
 These movements, however diverse in aspect, were yet 
 alike in their aim to realize a closer relationship and 
 communion between God and man, and to seek for 
 God within the soul, rather than at a distance from, 
 it without ; in their assertion of the in-dwelling pres- 
 ence of a Spirit who was no other than God Himself, 
 of whom the human body was the abiding temple, and 
 
208 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 not merely the ecclesiastical edifice ; in the emphasis 
 attached to the morality of the Sermon on the Mount 
 as concerning itself with the inward motives, and not 
 exclusively, as the current morality taught in the con- 
 fessional, with the outward act ; in the opposition to 
 rites, ceremonies, and ordinances as the means of con- 
 veying an external grace, or of infusing virtues into the 
 soul from without ; in the tendency to exalt poverty as 
 a protest in behalf of the native worth and dignity of 
 the human soul. 
 
 The age in which these movements originated (the 
 twelfth century) was remarkable for its freedom as 
 well as its range of intellectual activity. The freedom 
 is accounted for by the circumstance that the attention 
 of those in authority was called elsewhere. Absorbed 
 as were the popes with struggles of a different charac- 
 ter, there was little disposition or energy for watching 
 the greater dangers that threatened the church from 
 an unknown and hitherto unsuspected^ quarter. The 
 church was dealing with kings, princes, and nobility ; 
 it was organizing great crusades ; it was contending 
 for the rights of the clergy against the secular power ; 
 and, above all, it had entered upon a life and death 
 struggle with the German emperors, in which no less 
 an issue was at stake than the civil supremacy of the 
 papacy. The intellectual activity came by a law of 
 its own in the life of peoples, but was greatly stimu- 
 lated by the contact with Mohammedan culture and 
 civilization, whether in Spain, or in the remoter East, 
 where the crusades were carrying so large a part of 
 the population. It was through Mohammedan media- 
 tion that the Latin church was becoming acquainted 
 with Greek philosophy, a gift that could not be re- 
 ceived directly from the elder church, because of the 
 
ABELARD AND FREE INQUIRY. 209 
 
 hostility that had long since resulted in a schism and 
 sundered all ecclesiastical communion. 
 
 In this age of great freedom and incessant activ- 
 ity, when the larger world was first opening upon the 
 vision of a hitherto secluded and quiet life, the most 
 representative man was Abelard. He bears the same 
 relation to formal theology that the new sects which 
 are multiplying in Christendom sustain to the practi- 
 cal life of the church. His thought from beginning: 
 to end was in revolt against the accepted principles of 
 Latin theology. He undermined the foundations of 
 assent to authority, and it was his misfortune, not his 
 fault, that he had not the power to substitute some- 
 thing better in its stead. The respective mottoes of 
 Anselm and Abelard have often been put in contrast, 
 as if they stood for diametrically opposite methods of 
 inquiry, and yet both contain an element of truth. 
 The motto of Anselm, " I believe in order that I may 
 understand," — Credo lit intelligam, — was equivalent 
 to saying that truth must have revealed its full influ- 
 ence in the life before it can be measured by the in- 
 tellect. Abelard reversed the motto of Anselm, but 
 in so doing, he had in view the formal definitions of a 
 theology that had not originated in a living process of 
 thought, but had been received by tradition on exter- 
 nal authority, — a tradition which commanded a merely 
 nominal assent, and which was maintained in the in- 
 terest of ecclesiastical order. When his admiring dis- 
 ciples told him they did not understand the doctrine 
 of the trinity, and that it seemed impossible to be- 
 lieve, unless they understood, Abelard assented to the 
 principle, and undertook to explain the doctrine to 
 their comprehension. In so doing, he was attempting 
 a task to which he was unequal, and was further mis- 
 14 
 
210 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 taken in supposing that he understood what he pro- 
 fessed to explain, or that he had fathomed the truth 
 which lay beneath the formula. 1 His situation was an 
 anomalous one, where it was necessary that the mind 
 should inquire and seek to understand, but where it 
 must inevitably fall short of the reality until illu- 
 mined by a fuller light. His attempt was not alto- 
 gether a failure, though it might for a time create 
 confusion of thought, and even lead to erroneous opin- 
 ions. But it was something that he called attention 
 to the doctrine as a great verity whose value woidd 
 be enhanced by its full appreciation, rather than a 
 mysterious formula, the investigation of which by the 
 reason was in its nature irreverent. 
 
 The work of Abelard finds its real significance not 
 so much in any immediate influence exercised upon 
 his own age, as in the light thrown upon the work- 
 ings of the mind — the prophetic disclosure of the 
 . road which future generations were to travel. In his 
 treatise entitled, " Scito te Ipsum," the words of Soc- 
 rates when he led the great innovation in Greek 
 philosophy, it was his aim to show that sin lies in the 
 motive or intention, and not in the outward act. The 
 ultimate effect of this principle, had it been received, 
 would have been to overthrow the whole mediaeval 
 system of the confessional with the abuses growing out 
 of penances commutable into money payments at the 
 discretion of the priest. The outward act was capable 
 of being easily estimated or graduated on a financial 
 scale, while to deal with subtle motives was a thing 
 lying beyond the capacity of human confessors. But 
 
 1 The tendency of his thought was toward Sabellianism. See 
 Remusat, Abelard, sa Vie, sa Philosophie, et sa Theologie, ii. p. 
 303. 
 
I 
 
 ALARMING SPREAD OF HERESY. 211 
 
 the confessional, based upon the view that sin was a 
 transgression of an external law, with its arbitrary 
 division of offenses into mortal or venial, was still 
 destined to remain and manifest its tendency to de- 
 grade the tone of morality before it was rejected by an 
 enlightened public opinion. The nature of Abelard's 
 work, so far in advance of his age, was further seen in 
 a treatise entitled " Sic et non," whose object was to 
 show that church tradition, based as it was supposed 
 upon the consensus of the ancient fathers, rested on an 
 unstable foundation. The contradictions of the an- 
 cient writers when placed side by side were evidence 
 that no such consensus existed, as had hitherto been 
 taken for granted. Indeed, Abelard might have car- 
 ried his contrast further if he had possessed the requi- 
 site knowledge of the materials at his disposition. 
 
 Although the twelfth century has been spoken of as 
 an age of freedom, yet it was not a freedom which had 
 been purchased by struggles and the martyrdom of 
 blood. It was a premature thing, destined to disap- 
 pear as suddenly as it had arisen. Even in the time 
 of Abelard there were signs of the great ecclesiastical 
 reaction which half a century later would reach its full 
 dimensions. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) and 
 others like minded were becoming alarmed at the 
 rapid spread of heretical opinions, and at the seeming 
 recklessness of those like Abelard who showed no re- 
 spect for the sacred convictions of the church. Cause 
 enough for alarm indeed existed. Within the mem- 
 ory of those still living Berengar had created a pro- 
 found sensation by denying the reality of the miracle 
 of the altar ; Roscellin had speculated with such dan- 
 gerous results about the trinity as to fall into trithe- 
 ism, and his adherents still existed ; Abelard and Gil- 
 
212 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 bert de la Porree continued to exercise their dialectic 
 upon the most sacred of mysteries ; undisguised pan- 
 theism had appeared among the sect of the Free Spirit, 
 and was spreading everywhere in the highest circles 
 under the influence of Averrhoes' philosophy; an al- 
 most Manickaean dualism was taugkt among tke Cath- 
 ari ; rites and ceremonies were being set at naugkt, 
 tke priestkood inveighed against, and, generally, a 
 tendency was evident to break away from the author- 
 ity and discipline of the church. It was also well 
 known that the contagion of Abelard's influence had 
 been felt by high dignitaries in close relationship to 
 the Roman see. 
 
 The condemnation of Abelard, which was secured 
 by the influence of the saintly Bernard of Clairvaux, 
 was the first indication of the rising ecclesiastical reac- 
 tion. It shows how ill-prepared was the age for the 
 deadly conflict of truth against authority that Abelard 
 retreated, at the most critical moment in his career, 
 from his vantage-ground in the conscience, and ap- 
 pealed to the pope for his vindication. In one sense, 
 it is true, there was deep meaning in the appeal ; it 
 was one of those tests applied to the papacy by which 
 its inadequacy to its position was to be fully revealed 
 to all thoughtful men. The principle of the reaction 
 lay in the desire to maintain order and unity against 
 the growing confusion which sprang from the unac- 
 customed use of the reason. When the popes were 
 free to turn their attention to the dangers threatening 
 the church from within, the work of subjugating the 
 reason went on apace. Toward the close of the twelfth 
 century the " Holy See " instituted a crusade for the 
 complete annihilation of the Cathari ; the work of de- 
 struction, as it went on, included all who dissented 
 
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REACTION. 213 
 
 from received traditions and usages ; no difference was 
 made between the heretical sects, for their greatest 
 guilt was common to them all — the assertion of the 
 reason against authority ; and all alike, Waldenses, 
 Arnoldists, Petrobrusians, disciples of Amalric and 
 Apostolic Brethren, vanished, or seemed to do so, be- 
 fore the invading hosts of the militant church. Strin- 
 gent laws were enacted by which heresy could be de- 
 tected and punished wherever it appeared, and of 
 these, the bishops were appointed the executors. 
 There were some who believed in the efficacy of 
 preaching as a means of conversion from heresy ; but 
 a stronger, more quickly available engine was discov- 
 ered in the inquisition, which was soon to be organized 
 for the purpose of ferreting out heresy in its most se- 
 cret recesses. In the year 1215, an imposing General 
 Council assembled, which for the first time formally 
 declared it to be the cloo;ma of the church that the 
 bread and wine in the Eucharist were miraculously 
 transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. 
 The leaders of the reaction were far-seeing men, aware 
 that the growing reason was fed by the direct access 
 to the Scriptures ; and in order to extirpate heresy by 
 the root, the influential Council of Toulouse in 1229 
 declared it a sin for the laity to be found in the pos- 
 session of the Bible, or to read even the Psalter or the 
 Breviary in the vernacular. 1 
 
 1 Labbe, Concilia, torn. xiii. p. 1239. " Ne laiei habeant libros 
 scripturse, prseter psalterium et Diviuum officium ; at eos libros 
 ne habeant in vulgari lingua." 
 
214 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 V. 
 
 The severe measures taken for the repression of 
 heresy may have had the effect of making the students 
 of dialectics more cautious in their treatment of the 
 dogmas of the church. The tendency to speculation 
 had been so far checked that Mysticism seemed for a 
 while to have taken its place, and contemplation to 
 have been regarded as a better method than intellectual 
 analysis for gaining an insight into the deeper things 
 of the Christian faith. At this juncture of intellect- 
 ual depression, it was a fortunate thing that Peter the 
 Lombard was able to execute successfully the delicate 
 task of interpreting the consciousness of the mediaeval 
 church, and to express in his " Book of Sentences " 
 those opinions regarding Christian truth which were 
 most in accordance with the mind of the age, and 
 most in harmony with its ecclesiastical institutions. 
 The " Book of Sentences " met with a wonderful suc- 
 cess; it became the standard of orthodoxy, and was 
 stamped with the formal approval of the church in the 
 great council of 1215, the most important synod which 
 had yet been held in the Latin church. It now be- 
 came possible for those who wished to be orthodox to 
 use their reason within the limits marked out by the 
 church, without fear of transgressing those limits 
 through ignorance of what the church intended to 
 teach. 
 
 But although the church seemed to have been suc- 
 cessful in banishing heresy, there still remained the 
 unsettled question concerning the relation between 
 reason and faith, out of which had grown the free 
 thought and liberalism of the twelfth century. To 
 adjudicate this issue, or to make some compromise 
 
TRANSITION FROM PLATO TO ARISTOTLE. 215 
 
 with the human reason, was the task of theology in the 
 thirteenth century, and until this was done the great 
 ecclesiastical reaction was not complete. The theolo- 
 gian who accomplished this peculiar work for his age 
 was Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274). In order to ap- 
 preciate his peculiar place in the history of theology, 
 it is necessary to glance for a moment at the inner 
 history of Scholasticism from the time of Anselm. 
 
 The doctrine of " universals," as it is called, or the 
 conflict between nominalism and realism, important as 
 it was in the history of mediaeval theology, should not 
 be allowed to obscure another issue of deeper impor- 
 tance, — the transition which took place from Plato- 
 nism to Aristotelianism as the basis of Latin theology. 1 
 The earlier Scholastic theologians had been Platonists. 
 The impetus given by John Scotus Erigena to the 
 thought of Plato was seen after a lapse of two centu- 
 ries to be still working in the mind of Anselm, though 
 he may have been primarily indebted for his knowl- 
 edge of the Platonic philosophy to the encyclopaedic 
 works of Augustine, in which was contained sufficient 
 information regarding it — which Augustine had 
 fortunately not retracted — to enable an independent 
 thinker to work out for himself its relation to Chris- 
 tian thought. The same was true of Abelarcl, whose 
 knowledge of Greek philosophy was confined chiefly 
 to Plato, and whose acquaintance with Aristotle ex- 
 tended only to his small treatise upon logic. The study 
 of Plato in the Middle Ages seems to have been asso- 
 
 1 Realism underlay the Greek theology, and was part of its 
 inheritance from Plato, from whom also Augustine inherited it, 
 transmitting it in a debased form to the mediaeval church. The 
 question in historical theology is, what is the true realism upon 
 which the highest Christian thought is based. 
 
216 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 ciated not only with an exalted estimate of the powers 
 of the human reason, but to have led to a skepticism 
 regarding the dogmas of the Latin church, — a result 
 which was natural enough, inasmuch as Augustine 
 had given shape to those dogmas only after his aban- 
 donment of philosophy in the interest of ecclesiastical 
 authority. But there was still another result from 
 this alliance between Scholasticism and Plato, — a 
 modification in the conception of Deity which was so 
 totally foreign to the prevailing Latin idea, that it 
 was felt instinctively, especially in its grosser mani- 
 festations, to be utterly irreconcilable with the spirit 
 and aim of Latin Christianity. The pantheism of the 
 twelfth century as seen in Amalric of Bena, David of 
 Dinanto, and Simon of Tournay, and in its popular 
 forms among the " Brethren of the Free Spirit," may 
 have been partly owing to a natural reaction from the 
 growing importance attached by the church to the 
 localization of Christ in the Eucharist. But this mod- 
 ification in the thought about God, which in its higher 
 form was a return to the doctrine of the divine imma- 
 nence, was also connected with the influence of Plato- 
 nism ; it appeared in John Scotus, and has been traced 
 even in the speculations of Anselm. 1 
 
 1 It has often been remarked that the Scholastic realism was 
 but a step removed from what is commonly called pantheism. 
 Even Anselm's famous argument for the existence of God is not 
 free from a suspicion of the same tendency. That the mind has 
 a necessary idea of a perfect being, and that therefore such a 
 being exists, was a method of proof accepted not only by Des- 
 cartes, but by Spinoza and Malebranche. It was the opinion of 
 Hegel also that with a slight modification, which would bring out 
 more clearly the idea in Anselm's mind, this so-called a-priori 
 demonstration of the existence of God was a strong statement of 
 the truth that because God in-dwells in the reason, therefore the 
 
TENDENCY OF PLATO TO RATIONALISM. 21 
 
 rr 
 
 That the tendency of Platonism, rightly understood, 
 was not toward the doctrine of the immanence of God 
 is evident from the whole purpose of his philosophy. 
 But the so-called Platonism of the Middle Ages was 
 that religious interpretation of Plato's thought by the 
 school of Alexandria which had attempted to reconcile 
 his teaching: with a certain leaven of Stoic influence. 
 For this reason it was necessary that Scholastic theol- 
 ogy should abandon Plato, if the cardinal tenet of 
 Latin Christianity was to be maintained, — the doc- 
 trine of the transcendence of Deity and His isolation 
 from the world. For this reason it turned by a true 
 instinct to Aristotle, who like Plato believed in a 
 Deity outside the frame-work of the universe, but un- 
 like Plato had not been mixed up with religious specu- 
 lations foreign to his system or obscuring its leading 
 idea. There were other reasons, also, why Aristotle 
 should have supplanted Plato in the affections of the 
 School-men. The tendency of the study of Plato in 
 every age of its revival, has been to what is called 
 rationalism, — to a dissatisfaction with things as they 
 are and a desire to attain some ideal vision of beauty 
 and perfection, the type of which abides in its purity 
 
 necessary idea in the mind concerning God corresponds with the 
 reality. See Remusat, Saint Anselme, p. 469. " Anselme est un 
 Saint. Son orthodoxie ne fait pas question. II est reste une 
 autorite dans les e*coles de theologie : et pourtant nous avons 
 trouve dans ses ecrits quelques traces de Vinjiuence de la philosophic 
 d* Alexandrie. Nous voyons une influence analogue se continuer 
 dans une partie du cartesianisme qui a donne pretexte a Spinoza, 
 et le tout est venu aboutir aux eloges de Hegel et de M. de 
 Schelling." 
 
 The great Scholastic theologians of the thirteenth century 
 abandoned the a-priori method and adopted the a-posteriori as 
 the only safe ground on which to maintain the existence of God. 
 
218 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 in God. Aristotle on the other hand, whether justly 
 or not, has always stood for that conservatism which 
 maintains things as they are to be divine. To Platonic 
 idealism, the world as it is is unsatisfactory, and 
 Plato forever points away to a world where things 
 corresj)ond to the perfection of their original divine 
 idea. Aristotle sought to redeem the world from the 
 neglect into which such an attitude would lead, and 
 the importance which he gave to the physical sciences 
 is in reality the practical mark which distinguishes his 
 philosophy from Plato. When such a tendency ap- 
 peared in the Middle Ages, viz. : to combat an ideal 
 rationalism in the interest of existing institutions, it 
 would practically appear as the application of Aris- 
 totle to that which was most prominent in the con- 
 sciousness of Christendom. The church was the one 
 institution that seemed to belong to the eternal order 
 of things. As it then existed, it had been existing for 
 ages ; its long continuance and power stamped it as 
 the clear expression of the mind and will of God. For 
 this reason, the alliance of Scholastic theology with 
 Aristotle seemed to place the great ecclesiastical reac- 
 tion of the thirteenth century upon a stable basis in 
 philosophical thought. 
 
 And, still further, if there was to be any adjustment 
 of the great issue between reason and faith, it was 
 necessary that some authority should be placed over 
 the reason, as there was already an authority for faith, 
 — there must be a pope in philosophy as well as in 
 theology. Hitherto, in the intellectual awakening of 
 the twelfth century, the reason had seemed to flounder 
 aimlessly about, producing as many differences of 
 opinion as there were individual thinkers. Such di- 
 varication and confusion was in its very nature obnox- 
 
ARISTOTLE A STANDARD FOR REASON. 219 
 
 ious to the spirit of Latin Christianity and defeated 
 its essential aim. The church, therefore, set up a 
 standard for the human reason, and henceforth the ob- 
 ject of the Scholastic theology was not to reconcile its 
 dogmas with reason, but with the Aristotelian philoso- 
 phy. From the beginning of the thirteenth century, 
 when the complete works of Aristotle were for the 
 first time available in Latin translations, the Scholas- 
 tic theologians 1 began their twofold line of commen- 
 taries, on Aristotle's philosophy and on Lombard's 
 sentences. Thus the triumph which the church had 
 celebrated over the hostile attacks of the reason was 
 believed to be rendered secure by the great knights of 
 theology, who rode forth in its defense invulnerable 
 to every assault in the double armor with which they 
 were invested. 
 
 This adoption of Aristotle as the ally of the Chris- 
 tian faith has been often regarded as one of those dis- 
 plays of an almost supernatural intuition by which the 
 Latin church has been guided throughout its history. 
 Certainly it was an expedient well calculated to meet 
 the exigencies of the hour. But Aristotle concealed 
 hidden dangers for the faith which were not seen at 
 the time, or if they were it was thought they might 
 be overcome. It is one among the many variations 
 of Romanism, as it has sought to adapt itself to the 
 changes which life always involves, that at first Aris- 
 totle was suspected of being the subtle cause of the 
 pantheism which was so extensively diffused in the 
 last half of the twelfth century. 2 His name, it was 
 
 1 Alexander of Hales (ob. 1245) and Albert the Great (ob. 
 1280) were the first authorities for this combination. 
 
 2 The physical and metaphysical writings of Aristotle were 
 condemned at a synod held in Paris in the year 1209. Cf. Labbd, 
 Concilia, torn. xiii. p. 805. 
 
220 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 well known, was in great repute with the Moham- 
 medans, and the tendency which he stimulated to cul- 
 tivate the study of outward nature was thought to be 
 almost as dangerous to the faith as the disposition to 
 confound God with the world. From the time of Aris- 
 totle almost to the close of the Middle Ages nature 
 remained a sealed book. There had come a revival 
 for Plato in the early Christian centuries, but none 
 for his successor. The world had lost its interest in 
 the study of nature, and was preoccupied with spiritual 
 and moral themes. Christian theology had held the 
 field to itself from the time of Athanasius and Augus- 
 tine, and no rival disputed its claims to be the one 
 all-important, all-absorbing pursuit. Outward nature 
 was not only rejected ; it had fallen into contempt, as 
 unworthy the attention of spiritual men. Like the 
 human body, which the ascetics despised and mal- 
 treated, the outer world was a temporary prison house 
 of the soul, originating out of nothing and destined to 
 return to the non-existence from which it came. Just 
 as fasting became a law of spiritual growth, and the 
 nearer man could come to the condition of a disem- 
 bodied spirit by denying the claims of the body to 
 shelter, food, or clothing, the surer was his prospect 
 of salvation ; so also outward nature was believed to 
 have no inner relationship to the human spirit ; it was 
 an evil thing, resting under the curse of God since 
 Adam's fall. It was not in this world that the king- 
 dom of God was to come, but in some other distant 
 world, and the gaze of humanity was, like the cathe- 
 drals which symbolized its attitude, away from earth 
 to heaven. From the time when Augustine fixed the 
 dogma of original sin as the controlling principle in 
 psychology as well as in theology, mankind stood 
 
DANGERS IN A NEW DIRECTION. 221 
 
 alone in its isolation, apart from nature on the one 
 hand, and apart from God on the other. In all this 
 there was a great purpose to be achieved in the di- 
 vine economy. It was necessary that, through the 
 long-continued cultus of the immortal spirit as the ex- 
 clusive object of human interest and attention, man 
 should come to the consciousness of himself and should 
 realize, as it had never been realized before, that he 
 was not a part of nature or identified wholly with its 
 life, but distinct from it as something higher and with 
 a higher destiny. The old nature religions, against 
 which Latin Christianity had been from the first a 
 sturdy protest, merged God in humanity and human- 
 ity in the life of nature. It had been the work of 
 the Latin church and hitherto its mission, to sharply 
 draw the lines between them ; to carry God to a dis- 
 tance on the one hand, and as far as possible annihi- 
 late all communion with nature on the other. 1 
 
 From the time of the introduction of Aristotle's 
 physical studies to the West, there had begun to be 
 manifested an interest in the outer world and its phe- 
 nomena, which was the harbinger of an impending 
 revolution in the distant future. It was evident that 
 the mysterious relationship which man holds by a law 
 of the creation to the external world could no longer 
 be overlooked, nor could its study much longer be de- 
 ferred as a dangerous pursuit carried on by an un- 
 earthly compact with the spirit of darkness. The 
 
 1 " In history the divine element lies hid ; is missed at the 
 time, even by those who are its vehicle ; and does not parade 
 itself in what they consciously design, but lurks in what they un- 
 consciously execute. It comes forth at the end of the ages, — 
 the retrospect of many generations instead of the foresight of 
 one." — Martineau, Studies of Christianity, p. 292. 
 
222 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 sentiment of distrust in regard to Aristotle's influence 
 which at first prevailed was in some respects wiser, so 
 far as the interests of Latin Christianity were con- 
 cerned, than the second sober thought which placed 
 him as sovereign over the reason. For the Latin 
 church was still true to its original purpose, and had 
 these two distinct objects to maintain as essential to 
 its existence and the fulfillment of its mission — on 
 the one hand to hold humanity distinct and separate 
 from God, and on the other to insist upon a like sepa- 
 ration between man and the world of outward nature. 
 The difficulty was to conjoin the two purposes with 
 equal success. Monasticism or asceticism, which flour- 
 ished under the first line of Scholastic theologians 
 with whom Plato had been the authority, could not 
 long continue to thrive under the sovereignty of Aris- 
 totle. The " spirit in the air" in the beginning of the 
 thirteenth century was felt in the monastic ranks, and 
 gave rise to two new orders, the Franciscan and the 
 Dominican, which mark an epoch in the history of as- 
 ceticism. Both orders showed a peculiar susceptibility 
 to the changes which were taking place in the environ- 
 ment of human life. While they endeavored to inten- 
 sify in their practice the ascetic principle, and to all 
 outward appearance seemed to embody the spirit of 
 the great ecclesiastical reaction, with whose triumph 
 their rise coincides, yet they sustained a very different 
 relation to the world from the orders of the Bene- 
 dictine family of monks. The principle of seclusion 
 was modified, or practically abandoned, which tied 
 each monk to his domicile ; Franciscans and Domini- 
 cans went forth into the larger world where they could 
 not avoid the influences which were undermining the 
 institutions of ascetism. Such were the dangers for 
 
THOMAS AQUINAS. 223 
 
 which no mode of escape had been provided when 
 Aristotle was approved by the church as the guide 
 of the human reason. If the outer world should come 
 to be regarded as sacred, and man were to be allowed 
 to feel at home within it as the work of God which 
 was very good — and to such a result the philosophy 
 of Aristotle must tend — then it was all over, not 
 only with monasticisin and its ascetic observances, but 
 the church itself, as an ark of deliverance from the 
 miseries of this evil world, was likewise eventually 
 doomed to succumb to some higher conception of the 
 nature of Christian redemption. 
 
 The greatness of Thomas Aquinas as a theologian 
 has been universally admitted, though the grounds 
 upon which his distinction rests have not always been 
 clearly discerned. While his sensitive spirit was sus- 
 ceptible to every living impulse that stirred his age, 
 he saw with peculiar directness the dangers that 
 threatened the church, and saw also, or thought he 
 did, how the danger was to be averted. To him 
 mainly it was owing that Aristotle assumed his sway 
 over the reason, becoming in the sphere of the natural 
 life a precursor of Christ, as John the Baptist had 
 been in the sphere of the spiritual. 
 
 Aquinas also applied the corrective to that tendency 
 in Aristotle's philosophy, which, if not checked, might 
 lead to an exaggerated estimate of the importance of 
 the physical sciences, — to the sanctity of the outer 
 world as diminishing the sanctity of the church. To 
 this end he drew his famous distinction between the 
 kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace, 1 a dis- 
 
 1 This distinction between the kingdoms of nature and of grace 
 had been first made by Albertus Magnus, of whom Aquinas was 
 
224 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 tinction which he carried out in every direction and 
 applied to every interest of human life. He accepted 
 at once the fact of a kingdom of nature, and though he 
 had not interrogated nature for himself, but had done 
 so with Aristotle's eyes, yet he recognized and denned 
 what he regarded as its proper sphere. It was a graded 
 kingdom, with a hierarchy proceeding upwards from 
 the lowest grades of life till it reached its crown and 
 completion in man. But over against this kingdom, 
 and above it, resting upon it indeed, as the spirit de- 
 pends upon the body, towered the kingdom of grace, of 
 which the church is the external embodiment. Like 
 all his illustrious predecessors in Latin Christendom, 
 he simply assumed the existence of the church as 
 a hierarchy, which, proceeding upwards through the 
 grades of clergy to the vicar of Christ on earth, found 
 its continuation in angels and archangels, and its cul- 
 mination in the throne of God. These two kingdoms 
 of nature and grace are everywhere distinct from 
 each other ; the lower does not pass over into the 
 higher, but is separated from it, as if it were simply 
 its outer vestibule. The only door which opens from 
 
 the pupil. Cf. Ritter, Die Christliche Philosophie, p. 640. It be- 
 longs to Aquinas, in so far as he appropriated it, and because his 
 reputation in the church eclipsed that of his teacher. Haureau 
 has remarked upon the relation between the two : " Les juge- 
 ments de la posterite ne sont pas toujours equitables. Elle devait 
 un eclatant hommage au genie de Saint Thomas, mais elle a 
 manque de justice lorsqu'elle a donne son nom a la doctrine de 
 l'ecole dominicaine : cette doctrine est 1'csuvre d'Albert-le-Grand. 
 . . . Ayant done proteste centre Finjure faite a la memoire 
 d'Albert-le-Grand, reconnaissons que Saint Thorias a consider- 
 ablement developpe le systeme de son maitre et l'a revetu de- 
 cette forme solonelle, doctrinale, sous laquelle il est parvenu 
 jusqu'a nous." — De la Philosophic Scolastique, ii. p. 104. 
 
KINGDOMS OF NATURE AND GRACE. 225 
 
 the lower into the higher is the sacrament of bap- 
 tism, where the natural man, who has received a 
 natural life at birth, receives a supernatural gift 
 which constitutes his birth into the kingdom of' errace. 
 Iii the life of humanity, considered as belonging to 
 these separate kingdoms, there was a twofold mani- 
 festation, represented by the secular affairs of the 
 state or the empire on the one hand, with the em- 
 peror at its head, and by the church or sphere of 
 spiritual things on the other hand, where reigns a 
 higher potentate, — the pope as the vicar of Christ. 
 There were the natural virtues capable of being ac- 
 quired by unaided efforts, such as the natural man 
 even in heathendom might possess, and which have 
 their reward in conducing to a natural happiness ; and 
 there were the supernatural virtues infused into the 
 soul by sacramental grace, which have also their re- 
 ward in conducting to supernatural bliss. There was 
 also a natural theology whose contents might be read 
 or demonstrated by the natural reason, — such as the 
 existence of God, the creation of the world, and the im- 
 mortality of the soul. So much of a concession Aquinas 
 was forced to make in deference to Aristotle or the well- 
 known features of Mohammedan religion. But the 
 natural reason could not discern, nor could it demon- 
 strate to be true, the contents of a revealed or super- 
 natural religion which must therefore be received on 
 authority. This revealed theology includes the doc- 
 trines of the incarnation, the trinity, original sin, the 
 sacraments, purgatory, the final judgment, and end- 
 less punishment. But because the contents of natural 
 theology could have been discovered only by a few, 
 they, too, are included within the revelation, in order 
 to their more general diffusion. The scope, therefore, 
 
 15 
 
226 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 of revealed theology as a science becomes an all-com- 
 prehensive one, for it treats of God in all His rela- 
 tions, whether to the kingdom of nature by His power, 
 or to the church by His grace. 
 
 Of such a system it is evident that if it should 
 commend itself to the religious sentiment of the age, 
 it would suppress any inordinate or unhealthy activity 
 in the kingdom of nature which threatened the time- 
 honored supremacy of the kingdom of grace. And, 
 indeed, it did more for the church than all the repres- 
 sive measures which had been devised to extirpate 
 heresy. It was a view easily conceived as a whole, 
 and, in all its bearings, it seemed rational and carried 
 conviction to the religious mind. So strong is its 
 rationality and cohesiveness when once its premises 
 have been admitted, that it has ever since had a ten- 
 dency to reappear among those who are leading the 
 way in ecclesiastical reactions. It has the advantage 
 also of opening up a field for the activity of the 
 reason, so capacious that its boundaries are not imme- 
 diately felt as a hindrance. For Aquinas assumed, as 
 upon his principles he was justified in doing, that the 
 revelation was not contrary to reason, but only above 
 reason, as the kingdom of grace is above the kingdom 
 of nature ; and therefore if reason could allege objec- 
 tions against revealed religion, the reason also was 
 competent to meet and overcome them. Thus was 
 afforded a large scope for the dialectic activity of the 
 School-men, without endangering the stability of dog- 
 matic authority. 
 
 The basis of Latin theology, as it had existed from 
 the time of Tertullian or Augustine, remained un- 
 changed in the system of Aquinas. God conceived 
 as outside of and remote from the world, communi- 
 
RELATION OF AQUINAS TO HIS AGE. 227 
 
 eating with nature by His power or with the church 
 by His grace, was the primary assumption which reg- 
 ulated and bound together in harmony the tenets of 
 his theology. That body of opinions which, from an 
 early period, had been developed in the Latin church 
 in order to maintain the economy of ecclesiastical 
 administration, these he identified with the original 
 divine revelation. The episcopate as the continuator 
 of the apostolate, in which, by virtue of succession, 
 inhered the gifts or deposit of truth and grace and 
 authority, — a consolidated body which found in the 
 pope, as the vicar of Christ, its head, mouth-piece, and 
 bond of unity ; human nature as essentially foreign 
 to and incompatible with the divine ; the incarnation 
 as an arbitrary and mysterious arrangement for which 
 it was conceivable some substitute might have been 
 found ; revelation as the communication of facts and 
 doctrines, — a certain amount of information for which 
 man has no inward aptitude in the reason, the accept- 
 ance of which on the authority of the episcopate or 
 the church constitutes the merit of faith ; the priest- 
 hood as intrusted with miraculous power through the 
 grace of ordination, offering a veritable sacrifice which 
 had power to take away sin, and therefore an indis- 
 pensable mediator between God and man ; salvation 
 only through the grace that comes by sacraments ; 
 transubstantiation, purgatory, indulgences, by which 
 the church on earth manifests its power over the un- 
 seen world and human destiny in the future, — these 
 were the dogmas concerning; the truth of which it is 
 said that Aquinas never knew what it w r as to have a 
 doubt, — dogmas which he fortified by a clearer and 
 more positive enunciation. 
 
 The theology of Aquinas was the development, in 
 
228 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 its full splendor and practical realization, of that 
 which the Latin church had begun to dream of from 
 its infancy. It marks the church in the hour of its 
 completest triumph, when, after overcoming every 
 other power, it made, or seemed to make, the con- 
 quest of the human reason. It holds the same rela- 
 tionship to religious thought and life in the Middle 
 Ages that Innocent the Great sustained to the polit- 
 ical and ecclesiastical institutions of his time, — it 
 reflects the consciousness of Latin Christendom in 
 the century that followed his reign, when, for nearly 
 a hundred years, the papacy exercised an almost un- 
 disputed supremacy over Western Europe. As a sys- 
 tem, it has become a part of the world's literature 
 through Dante's imagination, and may be still read 
 in the " Divine Comedy," 1 as it appeared to a great 
 poetic genius who lived and died within the inclosure 
 of its thought. 
 
 But just as there were elements at work in the 
 thirteenth century which were secretly weakening the 
 foundations of papal authority, so that the humilia- 
 tion of Boniface (1294-1303) by Philip the Fair of 
 France was an event whose antecedents grew out of 
 the very conditions which had seemed to secure papal 
 autocracy, so there were elements also in the theology 
 of Aquinas which were not altogether in harmony 
 with the spirit of Latin Christianity^ — rudiments, as 
 it were, of a higher faith which could not be brought 
 into subjection to the ruling idea of his formal sys- 
 tem. 
 
 It is probable that the rivalry between the two great 
 orders of mendicant monks stimulated Duns Scotus 
 
 1 For the traces of Aquinas' theology in Dante, see Ozanam, 
 Dante et la Philosophie Catholique au 13"* e Siecle. 
 
CRITICISM OF DUNS SCOTUS. 229 
 
 (1265-1308) in his effort to find the weak points in 
 the position of the Angelic Doctor. For Aquinas had 
 lent great renown to the Dominican order, as well as 
 gained the gratitude of the whole church for the ser- 
 vices he had rendered to the faith, while the Francis- 
 cans were as yet without a representative theologian. 
 It is true, also, that the captious, hair-splitting ten- 
 dency in the dialectics of the School-men received a 
 great impetus from Duns Scotus, which tended to 
 bring the whole method into ridicule. But however 
 this may be, there is no reason for doubting his intel- 
 lectual sincerity, although it may still remain an 
 enigma by what common principle the various criti- 
 cisms which he made upon the theology of Aquinas 
 can- be included in one consistent system of thought. 
 Every great thinker has been followed by a Duns Sco- 
 tus. Indeed, it is inevitable in the interest of free- 
 dom and of progress that the human mind should 
 rebel against a system like that of Aquinas, which 
 definitely fixed all tilings in heaven and earth without 
 the need of any further inquiry, and stamped the 
 whole result with the assumption of infallibility. 
 
 To the mind of Aquinas, theology was a comprehen- 
 sive, universal science, embracing the whole range of 
 human thought concerning God, humanity, and the 
 world in a system of absolute truth. Duns Scotus, on 
 the other hand, regarded theology as practical wisdom 
 for the regulation of the life, dismissing its larger re- 
 lationships as beyond the ken of human intelligence. 
 The defect in Aquinas' attitude, to his view, was its 
 exaggerated estimate of the importance of the human 
 reason. Hence he reduced the contents of what Aqui- 
 nas called natural theology ; he admitted that the rea- 
 son might attain to the idea of God, but the doctrines 
 
230 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 of the creation of the world out of nothing, and of 
 the immortality of the soul, were beliefs that reason 
 could not demonstrate, and must be relegated to the 
 sphere of revealed religion. Aquinas had maintained, 
 on the grounds of reason, that this was the best pos- 
 sible of worlds, but Duns Scotus disputed that the 
 reason was entitled to make such an affirmation ; all 
 that could be said was, that it was such a world as it 
 had pleased God to create. The doctrine of the atone- 
 ment, as Anselm had stated it, and as the later School- 
 men generally received it, had to Duns Scotus no 
 foundation in nature or in the fitness of things, — it 
 was simply an arbitrary arrangement, the results to be 
 accomplished by which, God might, had He willed, 
 have attained in some other way. But while thus ap- 
 parently disparaging the reason, and disowning any 
 such authority as Aristotle for its standard, he was in- 
 clined to assert an inward kinship between the divine 
 and the human, which resembles the fundamental pos- 
 tulate of Greek theology. Duns Scotus did not, there- 
 fore, lay the same emphasis upon the doctrine of grace, 
 nor did he maintain the sharp distinction between the 
 kingdoms of nature and of grace, but rather inclined 
 to lessen the difference between the natural and the 
 supernatural. Throughout his whole system, Aquinas 
 had, as Duns Scotus thought, not only exaggerated the 
 power of the reason, but he had lost sight of the high 
 significance of the will, whether in God or man, or 
 had so subordinated the will to the reason as to weaken 
 its efficiency or destroy its creative activity. 1 Duns 
 
 1 Le volontarisme de Duns Scot est a Vintellectualisme de Thomas 
 (Aquinas) ee que le Kant de la Critique de la raison pratique sera 
 au Kant de la Critique de la raison pure, et ce que le panthelisme 
 de Schopenhauer sera au panlogisme de Hegel. Weber, Histoire 
 de la Philosophie Europtenne, p. 225. 
 
VARIATIONS OF ROMANISM. 231 
 
 Scotus affirmed the freedom of the will, as it is gen- 
 erally said, after a Pelagian fashion ; he denied the 
 doctrine of predestination, which Aquinas had taught 
 with Augustine, and asserted that the highest virtue 
 or merit in man lay in the obedience which he was 
 freely able to render by the capacity of his nature. 
 Such a system might seem to dispense with the neces- 
 sity of the church, but Duns Scotus assigned to the 
 church a higher prerogative than even Aquinas had 
 done, if that were possible, for his denial of the claims 
 of the reason tended to throw men back upon its abso- 
 lute authority as the only recipient of a divine reve- 
 lation. 
 
 These divergencies between the two master minds 
 who stood at the close of the papal dispensation are 
 sufficient to reveal that, despite the efforts of Aquinas 
 to regulate the reason, and to adjust its relation to ex- 
 ternal authority, he had not succeeded. Differences 
 like these in the two systems of theology, which from 
 this time began to divide the allegiance of the schools, 
 show the confusion into which mediaeval thought had 
 fallen, and from which it was powerless to extricate 
 itself wit! out revolutionizing the basis of Latin the- 
 ology. The only point which Aquinas and Duns Sco- 
 tus held in common was the authority of the church ; 
 and this was a bond which, while uniting them, was 
 also the cause of the contradictions and confusions 
 that marked their thought. Whatever they had suc- 
 ceeded in doing or failed to do, one thing had been 
 rendered clear by their labors, — that Latin theology 
 was dependent for its authority upon the Latin church, 
 and must be subordinated to the end of maintaining 
 its undiminished prestige. 
 
 The differences that have been enumerated between 
 
232 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 the systems of Aquinas and Duns Seotus, however 
 significant they are in themselves, or as permissible 
 variations in Latin theology, gain a deeper signifi- 
 cance when we trace them to their source in the con- 
 flicting ideas of God which were entertained by these 
 two representative theologians. 1 In the theology of 
 Aquinas, the will of God is viewed as the reflection of 
 a divine character or reason, which is, as it were, the 
 groundwork of the divine being. With Duns Seo- 
 tus, there lies no character behind the divine will to 
 which it conforms ; the will of God is the ultimate 
 factor in His existence, — an absolute, arbitrary, uncon- 
 ditioned will, which is the only ground of right. Ac- 
 cording to Aquinas, it is possible to regard righteous- 
 ness or goodness as constituting the essence of Deity, 
 and to view the divine will as the necessary expression 
 of His moral nature. Hence, righteousness, as the 
 human reason may discern it, becomes the law in ac- 
 cordance with which the universe is organized and di- 
 rected. The action of the divine will does not create 
 right, but is the expression of a righteousness that lies 
 ba^k of the will, to which the will must conform. All 
 this is reversed in the thought of Duns Seotus. The 
 will of God is the highest, divinest quality in God, the 
 motive power of all that is, the only sanction which 
 gives validity to the reason. God does not command 
 what is good because it is good, but the good is such 
 because He commands it. 
 
 1 In the question discussed by Aquinas and Duns Seotus, — 
 whether there was in God a divine essence to be distinguished 
 from His attributes, — was raised one of the deepest and most 
 fundamental issues in theology. A summary of the discussion is 
 given in Morin, Dictionnaire de Philosophie et de Theologie Scolas- 
 tiques, i. pp. 951 ft". 
 
CONFLICTING IDEAS OF GOD. 233 
 
 Theories like these may seem to have no connection 
 with the experience of life or with our insight into the 
 ways of God in the world. But history teaches that 
 human convictions about the nature of God, however 
 abstruse or speculative they may appear, do yet control 
 the fate of races and of institutions. And of these 
 two theories it may be said that they are charged with 
 momentous consequences for civilization as well as re- 
 ligion. It is only when we look at them in their his- 
 torical embodiment, as they have been lived out in hu- 
 man experience, that we are able to try them by more 
 tangible tests than the dialectics of metaphysical sub- 
 tlety. 
 
 The conception of God as maintained by Aquinas 
 is substantially identical with Plato's " idea of the 
 good " 1 which had passed from Plato as a ruling prin- 
 ciple into Greek theology. In Aquinas, indeed, it ap- 
 pears but imperfectly developed, and does not have its 
 full influence upon his thought, owing to the limita- 
 tions of the Latin church and the tenets which he 
 received on its authority. But the natural tendency 
 of such a conviction, freely working itself out, is to 
 elevate humanity by bringing it into closer relation- 
 ship with God, by affirming in the human constitution 
 the same essential relationship between the reason and 
 the will, as it exists in God : it is a conviction which 
 ennobles and consecrates the reason by regarding it as 
 endowed with a constitutional capacity for the discern- 
 
 1 " If it is the Idea of the Good which imparts to things their 
 Being, to intelligence its capacity for knowledge, if it is called 
 the source of all truth and beauty, the parent of light, the source 
 of reality, it is not merely the end but the ground of all Being, 
 efficient force, cause absolute." — Zeller, Plato and the Old Acad- 
 emy, p. 282. 
 
234 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 ment of truth and righteousness ; it emancipates the 
 will by viewing it as predetermined, like the divine 
 will, to execute the law of its being which is grounded 
 in right. In the history of theology it marked a crisis 
 when Augustine practically abandoned this conception 
 of Deity, and fell back to the belief that God was ab- 
 solute will whose decree alone makes righteousness, 
 who reveals a system of regulative information which 
 man must receive on external authority, who elects to 
 salvation or condemns to endless misery by arbitrary 
 determinations, to examine into or to question which 
 is presumption and impiety. The outcome of this be- 
 belief, in Augustine or in later Latin theology, may 
 have been modified by a Christian influence from 
 which they could not escape ; but in Mohammedanism, 
 where the principle is seen working out unchecked 
 its natural consequences, it resulted in a complete di- 
 vorce between God and humanity, it made the reason 
 powerless, it robbed the conscience of any inward im- 
 pulse, it reduced morality to a slavish fear, — a cring- 
 ing obedience to omnipotent power ; and the fatalism 
 which it induced in religion when operating in the 
 state deprived its civilization of those elements of en- 
 terprise and hope which make possible the stages of 
 human progress. 
 
 Of these two ways of apprehending the being of 
 God, that of Duns Scotus — that He is the uncondi- 
 tioned arbitrary will — is more in harmony with the 
 spirit of Latin Christianity. This underlying belief 
 may be traced in those ideas of the church as consist- 
 ing in the episcopate, or of the revelation as a deposit 
 intrusted to its charge, which were so fundamental 
 that they had been the axioms of Latin Christianity 
 from the time of Tertullian. The same belief is al- 
 
THEIR ILLUSTRATION IN HISTORY. 235 
 
 ways and everywhere the principle of imperialism or 
 despotism in church or state, — the principle which is 
 invoked in the call for the " strong man " as he ap- 
 pears in history. When the Protestant Reformation 
 brought great disasters to the Latin church in the six- 
 teenth century, Ignatius Loyola led again an ecclesi- 
 astical revival, under the conviction that the church as 
 it then existed, unreformed and unchanged, was the 
 absolute expression of the divine will, and that to 
 serve the church, by whatever methods, was to contrib- 
 ute to the greater glory of God. With this convic- 
 tion Calvin arose, one might say that with it he seems 
 to have been born — that God's will must at all haz- u 
 ards be made supreme. The existence and work of 
 Loyola made Calvin not only necessary but indispen- 
 sable for the nascent Protestantism. Both men were 
 building upon the same foundation — the only differ- 
 ence was that Loyola said the divine will was ex- 
 pressed in the institution of the Latin church, while .. 
 Calvin maintained that its only expression was to be 
 found in Scripture, In the long and fierce duel be- 
 tween the followers of these two leaders, it is not 
 strange that the theology of Aquinas in the Roman 
 church, as well as the Lutheran type of theology in 
 the Protestant churches, should have sunk into abey- 
 ance. The Jesuits have never had any great respect 
 for Aquinas, but have always championed Dims Scotus 
 as their favorite theologian ; l the Calvinists also have 
 regarded the Lutheran theology as a halting, half- 
 hearted attitude, if not a compromise between truth 
 and error. 
 
 1 Most of the literature upon Duns Scotus belongs to the sev- 
 enteenth century when the Jesuits were at the height of their 
 activity. For a list of works then published cf. Franck, Diction- 
 naire des Sciences I'hilosophiques, ii. p. 169. 
 
236 THEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 Once more in the history of Christianity, in our 
 own age, an ecclesiastical reaction has been and still 
 is in progress, which is based on the same, principle 
 that inspired Augustine or Loyola. To the mind of a 
 writer like De Maistre, seeking to impose again on 
 the modern world the authority of an infallible pope 
 as the highest expression of the will of God, the theol- 
 ogy of Aquinas, even though illustrated with the bril- 
 liancy of Bossuet's genius, seemed like shuffling, vacil- 
 lating weakness. Carlyle, who at heart remained as 
 he had been born, a sturdy Calvinist, presents in liter- 
 ature the spectacle of one who finds no institution that 
 responds to his ideal ; everywhere appears weakness, 
 disorder, and confusion, accompanied with shallow talk 
 about liberty ; he bewails the absence of the " strong 
 man " upon whose portrait in history he gazed with 
 fascinated vision, whose coming he invoked as the one 
 crying need of the time. 
 
 These illustrations may serve to show that what 
 seem to be subtle theological distinctions are yet 
 closely connected with the life and experience of men. 
 The aim of the present occupant of the papal see to 
 reinstate Aquinas in his former prestige, if it has any 
 significance at all, indicates a purpose to overcome 
 Jesuit influence, and to put the church, as far as is al- 
 lowable, in harmony w r ith the reason. For this pur- 
 pose it may be that no better instrument could have 
 been chosen than the revival of the study of Aquinas. 1 
 
 1 For a criticism on the significance and probable results of this 
 modern attempt to revive the study of Aquinas' philosophy, see 
 an article entitled Philosophy in the Roman Church, by Thomas 
 Davidson, in Fortnightly Review, July, 1882. The author is right 
 in maintaining that Aquinas is hopelessly out of sympathy with 
 what is highest and best in modern thought. But it is not the 
 
- MODERN REVIVAL OF AQUINAS. 237 
 
 It even constitutes a ground of hope that the renewed 
 interest in his writings and their deeper perusal may 
 yet lead Latin theologians to discover, that while he 
 represents a past when the Latin church was in the 
 noontide of its glory, he was also in some respects the 
 prophet, though unconsciously to himself, of a larger 
 and higher because more spiritual and more rational 
 dispensation. 1 
 
 system of Aquinas, but the inconsistencies and contradictions in 
 his theology, which may render its renewed study a means of 
 profit and of advance. 
 
 1 The best works in English upon the Scholastic philosophy are 
 Bishop Hampden's Bampton Lectures for 1832 — The Scholastic- 
 Philosophy in its Relation to Christian Theology ; and Maurice, 
 Mediaeval Philosophy. Bishop Hampden traced clearly the preva- 
 lence of mediaeval modes of thought and expression in the current 
 Protestant theology, and in this lies the special value of his book. 
 Other works which maybe consulted are Haureau, De la Philoso- 
 phic Scolastique ; Rousselot, Etudes sur la Philosophie dans le 
 Moyen Age ; Kaulich, Geschichte der Scholastischen Philosophie ; 
 Stockl, Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, — all of them 
 dealing mainly with the relation of scholasticism to speculative 
 thought. Ritter, Die Christliche Philosophie, is the best exposition 
 of its relation to the progress of religious thought. The most 
 elaborate treatise on the theological bearings of Scholasticism is 
 Morin, Dictionnaire de Philosophie et de Theologie Scolastiques ; 
 but its labored and voluminous expositions lack an intellectual 
 perspective. It professes to be a dictionary, but its object is to 
 defend the Roman Catholic theology. Of its value there can be 
 no doubt. Among the general histories of philosophy that of 
 Ueberweg is the best. 
 
THEOLOGY IN THE AGE OF THE 
 REFORMATION. 
 
 Justificati ergo ex fide, pacem habeamus ad Deum per Dominum nos- 
 trum Jesum Christum. — Rom. v. 1. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 
 
 A. D. 
 
 1300. [c] Occam teaches nominalism at Paris. 
 
 1309-1377. Papacy at Avignon. 
 
 1324-1384. Wycliffe. 
 
 1329. [c ] Death of Eckart. 
 
 1348-1350. Pestilence of the Black Death. 
 
 1361. [c.j Tauler died. 
 
 1380-1471. Thomas a Kempis. 
 
 1383. Wycliffe's Translation of the Bible. 
 
 1415. Martyrdom of Huss. 
 
 1440. Discovery of the Art of Printing. 
 
 1453. Fall of Constantinople. 
 
 1467-1536. Erasmus. 
 
 1483-1546. Martin Luther. 
 
 1484-1531. Zwingle. 
 
 1491-1556. Ignatius Loyola. 
 
 1497-1568. Melancthon. 
 
 1498. Savonarola died at the stake. 
 
 1509-1564. Calvin. 
 
 1517. Posting of the Theses. 
 
 1521. Diet of Worms. 
 
 1529. Discussion between Luther and Zwingle 
 
 1545. Opening of the Council of Trent. 
 
 1553. Servetus burnt at Geneva. 
 
THEOLOGY IN THE AGE OF THE 
 REFORMATION. 
 
 i 
 
 The period known as the Middle Ages reached its 
 culmination in the thirteenth century. Up to that 
 time, as it has been said, there was lurking in every 
 movement the spirit of a Hilde brand ; after it every- 
 thing pointed to a Luther. For two centuries before 
 the Reformation, the Latin church was slowly losing 
 its hold upon the reason and the conscience of Chris- 
 tendom. When Luther appeared, he only declared 
 the result which had been already accomplished. The 
 decline of the Latin church as an institution implied 
 the ultimate abandonment of that system of doctrine 
 which is known as Latin Christianity. It had been 
 from the first an economizing of the Christian revela- 
 tion in the interest of an episcopal hierarchy, which 
 had successfully claimed the right to teach and govern 
 the world in the place of Christ. As a system of 
 doctrines, it had been constructed in obedience to one 
 test, — its fitness or utility for holding mankind in 
 subjection to an external authority. When that au- 
 thority was no longer needed, or could be no longer 
 maintained, the system of doctrines which it had up- 
 held miffht indeed lon^ continue to survive through 
 the conservative force of tradition, or through its lin- 
 gering hold upon the imagination ; but the time must 
 come when it would appear as untrue to the divine 
 
 16 
 
242 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 revelation, as a hindrance to the growth of the human 
 spirit. 
 
 The age before the Reformation reveals the Latin 
 jchurch in a state of hopeless decline. None of the 
 'peculiar institutions of the Middle Ages came any 
 more to its help against the forces that were slowly 
 but surely compassing its downfall. Monasticism put 
 forth no more fresh outshoots full of life and vigor, 
 as in the days of Hildebrand or Bernard or Innocent 
 the Great. The old orders partook of the general de- 
 cline which touched everything that the mediaeval 
 spirit had inspired. The corruptions that were bred 
 within the cloister were an evidence that as an insti- 
 tution monasticism had outlived its usefulness, and 
 was out of harmony with the larger life of the time. 
 Scholasticism also, which in the days of Aquinas had 
 turned back the tide of skepticism, could no longer 
 avail itself of the compromise with the reason which 
 the Angelic Doctor had proclaimed ; it not only showed 
 no energy in defending the church's teaching, but in 
 order to save philosophy it proclaimed an absolute 
 divorce between religion and speculative thought, leav- 
 ing the church to defend itself as best it could without 
 the aid of reason. Most of "those who still bore the 
 scholastic mantle settled down to the skeptical con- 
 clusion, that what was false in philosophy might yet 
 be true in theology. At a time when the church most 
 needed every support which could contribute to sus- 
 tain its decaying strength, it was deserted by the rea- 
 son. The reason which had been treated with distrust 
 and suspicion, which the church had sought to humil- 
 iate as its vassal, was now taking its revenge. 
 
 As to the papacy, when in the fourteenth century it 
 fled from Rome and took refuge in Avignon, it was 
 
WHY THE PAPACY DECLINED. 243 
 
 seen as abandoning the rock from which it had been 
 hewn, and the pit from which it was digged. It could 
 then be contemplated as a thing apart from the mys- 
 terious source of its greatness, and the result was a 
 blow at its prestige from which it never recovered. 
 That the papacy could not be regarded as the source 
 whence a new life might spring up for the regenera- 
 tion of the church was evident from the papal con- 
 flicts with itself ; it was becoming the heaviest burden 
 which the church had to carry. It was only by pro- 
 claiming that there was a power in Christendom su- 
 perior to the popes, and by which they could be pun- 
 ished or made amenable to law, that the hopes of 
 reform continued for generations to be nourished. 
 
 If we ask for the causes which explain this appar- 
 ently sudden decline of the papacy, and with it of 
 the ascendency of the mediaeval church, they are to be 
 found in a reversal of that process which had accom- 
 panied its first appearance in history. The papacy 
 rose at a time when men were unable or no longer free 
 to think for themselves, when they had ceased to be 
 competent to the task of self-government. Its career 
 drew to a close when men were once more able to re- 
 sume the office which in their weakness they had del- 
 egated to a priesthood, when they were once more free 
 to think for themselves. The reason and conscience 
 of humanity had outgrown the papacy, and refused to 
 be held by its leading-strings. The tide which had 
 been rising in the history of the popes, from the time 
 of Leo the Great in the fifth century, had now begun 
 to go out. The work of the popes was done, and He 
 who had raised an institution so unwelcome in its first 
 appearance, but so necessary, was now removing it or 
 gently letting it down from its old supremacy. 
 
244 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 No institutions which have played a large part in 
 human history have lived in vain. Bef ore they decline 
 or disappear, they yield up to the larger life of human- 
 ity the secret of their success or influence. As his- 
 tory evolves its contents, and its seemingly uncon- 
 scious purpose is disclosed, that which had appeared 
 most untrue or antagonistic to the spirit of Christ's 
 religion is seen to have subserved the progress of 
 mankind. 
 
 The worship of relics, which was so prominent a 
 feature in mediaeval life, had, in the absence of litera- 
 ture or the want of ability to use it, ministered to the 
 desire to get nearer to historic events and personages, 
 or to realize more vividly their existence ; it had stim- 
 ulated pilgrimages to holy places, which had finally 
 culminated in the great Crusades. The Crusades in 
 turn changed the shape of society, broke down feudal- 
 ism, and prepared the way for modern states ; they en- 
 larged the narrow horizon of Christendom by bringing 
 it into contact with Mohammedan culture and civiliza- 
 tion ; they concentrated its gaze upon Christ, and in- 
 tensified the consciousness of the Christian principle 
 in contrast with that of Islam. Even by their failure 
 to accomplish their direct aim — the wresting of the 
 holy sepulchre from the hands of the infidel — they 
 damaged irretrievably the prestige of the Latin church, 
 for the popes had committed Christendom to the at- 
 tempt, and could not evade the consequences which it 
 entailed. 
 
 The worship of saints, which under one aspect was a 
 disowning of the perfect humanity of Christ, and the 
 substitution for it of lower ideals, was yet a testimony, 
 in however debased a form, to the belief that human- 
 ity had been redeemed, — that in its inmost being it 
 
THE MEDIEVAL CULT US. 245 
 
 was affiliated with the divine nature ; out of saint- 
 worship had grown the miracle-plays, which were the 
 germs of the modern drama ; in the lives of the saints 
 as they were read or commemorated, were the rude 
 beginnings of the study of history as something deeper 
 and more inward than a mere chronicle of events. 
 The production of images was the preliminary step to 
 Christian art, whose glory it was to have anticipated 
 the long and arduous process of theological thought. 
 The separation between humanity and Deity was over- 
 come for the popular mind when artists, discarding 
 conventional symbols like the halo, which had hitherto 
 been considered necessary for representing the divine 
 as distinct from the human, were content to see in per- 
 fect humanity the manifestation of God. In the ten- 
 dency of painting to concentrate attention upon human 
 personality, in its aim to reproduce upon the canvas 
 the likeness of the inward spirit, may be seen a prepa- 
 ration for receiving the truth that in the human con- 
 sciousness lies the reflection of a divine image. 
 
 The papacy had served the purpose of consolidating \ 
 the different races of Europe into one great family, so 
 that they could never again lose the sense of relation- 
 ship ; it had held men under subjection to an external 
 law until they were able to hear a voice that spoke 
 within ; it had served as the conscience of the people 
 at a time when otherwise they would have been mute 
 under the oppression or brute force of the civil 
 power. 1 
 
 1 " There is a spirit of community in the modern world which 
 has always been regarded as the basis of its progressive improve- 
 ments, whether in religion, politics, manners, social life, or litera- 
 ture. To bring about this community, it was necessary that the 
 western nations should at one period constitute what may be 
 
246 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 Monasticisni had stood for the idea that human sal- 
 vation was not a mechanical process by which the col- 
 lective mass of humanity, within the communion of 
 the church, was to be lifted by no effort of its own in 
 the kingdom of heaven. It was a protest in behalf of 
 the truth, which in the Middle Ages most needed to 
 be emphasized, that salvation demands the activity of 
 all the faculties of one's being. In this aspect mo- 
 nasticism was the assertion of the truth of individual 
 responsibility. It declined as an institution because 
 of the fearful perversion of which it had been guilty, 
 — the abuse which it had heaped on things most di- 
 vine, the neglect with which it treated a large range 
 of human duties and relationships, whose right dis- 
 charge is essential to the fullest salvation of man. 
 But it did not decline till the truth which it had con- 
 served, — the principle of individualism, — had been 
 acknowledged as the basis of the coming reform. 
 
 To this same end Scholasticism contributed, in the 
 change which it underwent from realism to nominal- 
 ism in the fourteenth century. Whatever may be the 
 speculative estimate of its value, nominalism was in- 
 dispensable to the work of reform by the importance 
 which it attaches to the processes of the thinking mind. 
 Its tendency was to emancipate the reason from the 
 yoke of authority, to disperse a host of false concep- 
 tions which embarrassed the mind in the search after 
 truth, — especially to free the individual from bond- 
 age to a mysterious species in which his distinct exist- 
 ence was absorbed, to proclaim the man in his indi- 
 
 callecl a single politico-ecclesiastical state. But this also was to 
 be no more than the phenomenon of a moment in the grand 
 march of events."— B,anke, Hist, of the Popes, i. p. 25. (Bohn 
 ed.) 
 
INDIVIDUALISM AND THE CHURCH. 247 
 
 vidual responsibility as the unit with which God dealt 
 directly in His government of the world. Other in- 
 fluences were also combining to strengthen the same 
 conviction. It had been one of the false assumptions 
 of mediaeval theology, that those in the communion of 
 the church who had been regenerated by baptism con- 
 stituted, as it were, a distinct species marked off by 
 sharp lines from the larger circle of humanity, to 
 which they only belonged by some lower tie. In its 
 origin this belief had sprung from a strong desire on 
 the part of men to realize their oneness through the 
 church. The terrors of the " dark ages," as the tenth 
 century has been designated, had consolidated a fright- 
 ened people and made them feel that their strength 
 lay in union. The Latin church, in its aspect as the 
 outcome of this conviction, had offered the possibility 
 of a collective salvation to the mass within its fold. 
 But the world was no longer to the imagination what 
 it had been in the days of Augustine or Hildebrand. 
 Men were besnnnin^ to feel themselves at home within 
 it as in a universe where God was dwelling ; they no 
 longer hesitated to explore its secrets or to travel till 
 they reached its utmost bounds. As the times changed 
 and the great outer world opened up its attractions to 
 the eager gaze, the church as a secluded nursery for 
 timid or despairing souls, under the guardianship of 
 a vigilant hierarchy, must inevitably give way to the 
 conception of a church which did not fear to trust an 
 invisible head, in which each individual man stood 
 in a personal relationship to an unseen but almighty 
 Father. 
 
 All through the period which preceded the Reforma- 
 tion can be traced the reassertion of those divine ele- 
 ments in the life of humanity which, since the time of 
 
248 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 Augustine, had been suppressed or subordinated in the 
 interest of the church, — nature, the state or nation, 
 the family and the individual. So vitally are all these 
 connected with the environment of man as God in- 
 tended it, that the revival of one seemed to carry with 
 it the restoration of all to their true dignity. We 
 have already seen how the introduction of Greek phi- 
 losophy through the writings of Aristotle had created 
 an impulse toward the study of nature. Following 
 closely in its train came the development of the na- 
 tional consciousness. It was the proclamation of the 
 sanctity of the state as an end in itself, in the regula- 
 tion of whose affairs no external power had a right to 
 interfere, which constituted the lever by which the 
 papacy was overthrown. The popes never recovered 
 from the humiliation of Boniface by Philip the Fair 
 of France, in the beginning of the fourteenth century. 
 The theory of the state in its relation to the church 
 which Augustine had propounded, the realization of 
 which by the great popes of the Middle Ages had 
 made possible the retention of their supremacy over 
 the civil power, could no longer be maintained in its 
 ancient vigor, when men were convinced that the 
 highest end of the nation was not merely to enforce 
 by the might of its arm the legislation and policy of 
 the church, but to consider its own well-being as its 
 first and most sacred obligation. In the working out 
 of this principle was involved the dismemberment of 
 Christendom. It was not Luther who shattered a so- 
 called Catholic unity into fragments, but the expan- 
 sion of the national consciousness, whether in France, 
 in Germany, or in England. This was the force which 
 took from the church its temporal power, and by so 
 doing initiated the process which was to restore it to 
 
INFLUENCE OF NATIONALISM. 249 
 
 its earlier and purer condition, when it was a perva- 
 sive spiritual influence, depending upon its advocacy 
 of truth and the voluntary recognition of its disciples 
 for maintaining and extending its influence. 
 
 Accompanying the growth of the national spirit was 
 the development of the national languages as a vehicle 
 for the expression of a people's thought. Nationalism, 
 the use of the vernacular, and the desire for reform 
 went hand in hand, whether in England or France, 
 Germany or Italy. When the Latin language, which 
 had been the sacred tongue into the mould of which 
 the Christian revelation had been cast, was displaced 
 by the vernacular, that repressive force was removed 
 which had prevented the thoughts, the impulses, the 
 longings of the people from finding a full and natural 
 expression. 1 As we listen for the first fresh utterances 
 of the people, as they found a voice in the rising 
 national literatures, there is one tone which character- 
 izes them all alike, — that of opposition to the hier- 
 archy and the abuses which it was perpetuating. 
 
 The evangelical reformers and the mystics of the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, great as were the 
 differences that divided them, were alike in their sym- 
 pathy with the rising nationalism, alike also in using 
 the vernacular as the means for the expression of their 
 
 1 " The language of the Roman people," says Heine, " can 
 never belie its origin. It is a language of command for gener- 
 als ; a language of decree for administrators ; an attorney lan- 
 guage for usurers ; a lapidary speech for the stone-hard Roman 
 people. . . . Though Christianity with a true Christian patience 
 tormented itself for more than a thousand years with the attempt 
 to spiritualize this tongue, its efforts remained fruitless ; and 
 when John Tauler sought to fathom the awful abysses of thought 
 and his heart overflowed with religious emotion he was impelled 
 to speak German." 
 
250 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 thought as well as for reaching the popular mind. 
 Wycliffe was a statesman as well as a theologian, with 
 a jealousy for his nation's honor ; Huss, who followed 
 him, was equally unable to separate his theological 
 convictions from his politics ; Savonarola was haunted 
 by the vision of a perfect state, to the accomplishment 
 of which in Florence he believed he had been divinely 
 called. The mystic theology of Eckart, Tauler, and 
 others was the first expression of the German con- 
 sciousness, anticipating by centuries its maturer form 
 in the systems, whether religious or philosophical, of 
 our own age. 
 
 I. 
 
 Before treating of the differences that distinguish 
 the two reformatory movements, known as the evan- 
 gelical and the mystic, it is important to note the fea- 
 tures which they possessed in common, by which both 
 contributed to the revolution of the sixteenth century. 
 
 Evangelical and mystic reformers were united in 
 rejecting the theory upon which the authority of the 
 hierarchy reposed. Both had ceased to regard the 
 church as a mysterious entity, existing apart from 
 the congregation, or as possessing in this capacity a 
 " deposit " of supernatural trusts. The abandonment 
 of this belief carried with it also the rejection of the 
 principle of sacramental grace. This, too, had been a 
 peculiarly Latin growth, of which Augustine had laid 
 the dogmatic basis in his doctrine of original sin. 
 AVlien God was thought of as at a distance, and man- 
 kind was believed, in consequence of the catastrophe 
 of Adam's fall, to have lost all inward divine capacity, 
 it had seemed necessary that man should be restored 
 
THE RISE OF PREACHING. 251 
 
 and supported by influences infused into the soul from 
 without. In Augustine's thought, redemption did not 
 lie in the power of the incarnation, or in the personal 
 influence of the present living Christ. To baptism 
 and other sacramental channels was confided the oper- 
 ation of a quality which was known as grace, — a 
 quality or force which, infused into the soul, would 
 enable it to rise above the dominion of sin, and abide 
 in union with its Creator. 
 
 So long as the sacramental theory prevailed, but lit- 
 tle importance was assigned to preaching. In the 
 Latin church, from the very earliest period, it had 
 played a subordinate part ; whereas, in the Greek 
 church, not only had the sermon constituted an impor- 
 tant element in the worship, but even the liturgies had 
 taken on a homiletic cast. The absence of preaching 
 is one of the striking features of the mediaeval church. 
 It cannot be accounted for altogether on the ground 
 that the language of the people was not sufficiently 
 developed for such a purpose. The sacramental the- 
 ology dispenses with the need of preaching, for it pro- 
 fesses to accomplish the end of preaching in another 
 way. There were great preachers in the Middle Ages, 
 but they rose in connection with the Crusades, when 
 such a method was the only one of rousing the popular 
 enthusiasm. Preaching, as a necessary and constituent 
 part of religious culture, originated with the heretical 
 sects of the twelfth century, such as the Cathari and 
 the Waldenses. When its power was seen in diffus- 
 ing heresy, the Dominicans seized upon it as equally 
 effective for overcoming heresy. But even the Domin- 
 icans, though they never gave up the principle, were 
 unequal to the task of coping with heretical oratory, 
 and it is very significant that into their hands should 
 
252 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 have been intrusted the management of the inquisi- 
 tion. It really required the combination of the two 
 means to suppress obnoxious thought. 
 
 Preaching, as a means of spiritual culture, presup- 
 poses a divine constitution of the soul, a human nature 
 charged with divine possibilities. Its object is, by 
 forcible exhortation, by attractive presentation and re- 
 iteration of the truth, to awaken the slumbering capac- 
 ities of the soul into activity, to educate and strengthen 
 that which is already divinely implanted in the germs, 
 to evoke the divine that is in man, to feed the soul from 
 within rather than from without. For such an end it 
 was first used by the great mystics, Eckart and Tauier, 
 in the pre-reformation age. Wycliffe maintained that 
 preaching was the best work that a priest could do ; 
 better than praying or ministering the sacraments. 
 He showed his sense of its value by organizing his band 
 of preachers to go throughout the kingdom proclaim- 
 ing the gospel as it was then read in its freshness and 
 novelty in the newly translated Bible. The power of 
 the new preaching produced a marvelous effect ; the 
 human soul responded to the spoken word as by an 
 innate law of its being ; all the pomp and splendor 
 of the church and its ritual were as nothing compared 
 with the fascination which the people felt under the 
 spell of the preacher, whose heart, glowing with the 
 truth, appealed to their own hearts with irrepressible 
 power, interpreting to them the vague motives and 
 longings of the soul. Preaching became from this 
 time a factor in human development, and prepared the 
 way for the Reformation. When the Reformation was 
 accomplished, it took its rightful place in the newly 
 constituted churches, becoming the sacrament, as it 
 were, of the larger faith. Under its influence the 
 
SCRIPTURE SUBSTITUTED FOR TRADITION. 253 
 
 confessional disappeared with its grace conveyed by- 
 priestly absolution ; the preacher became the public 
 confessor in the presence of the congregation ; the 
 declaration of absolution was ratified by the enlight- 
 ened conscience of the people, as the voice of God 
 speaking in human hearts. 
 
 When the principle of church authority, represented 
 by the hierarchy as the ecclesla docens, was repudiated 
 in the interest of reform, the appeal was taken by the 
 evangelical reformers to the Bible as the word of God. 
 Hitherto, in the long course of theological develop- 
 ment, no attempt had been made to determine the rela- 
 tion of the Bible to the authority of the church. The 
 voice of the church had been assumed as final in all 
 matters relating to the faith, and a practical infallibil- 
 ity attributed to its decisions. When the evangelical 
 reformers rejected the authority of the church, it be- 
 came necessary to find another authority for the tenets 
 of the Christian faith, to which all men could go alike 
 in search of that absolute truth which God had com- 
 municated to men. When from the time of Wycliffe 
 the church began to tend toward the form of a consti- 
 tutional monarchy in contrast with the absolutism of 
 the papacy, it became necessary that it should be gov- 
 erned in accordance with a clear and inviolable char- 
 ter, instead of being subject to the arbitrary will of 
 its former rulers. Wycliffe, and others like minded, 
 while holding that the predestinated constituted the 
 true though invisible church, were by no means dis- 
 posed to sweep away the ecclesiastical organization, 
 however they might have been inclined to dispense 
 with the necessity of the pope, or been willing to make 
 other changes in ecclesiastical and religious usages. 
 But, whatever might be the form of its government, 
 
254 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 the church must have its charter to which all could 
 appeal, to which, as to a standard and au ideal, the 
 government, the discipline, and the ritual of the church 
 must necessarily conform. 
 
 But the Bible now came to be regarded in a higher 
 light than as a book for the people and a charter for 
 the church. In the time of Wycliffe we stand on the 
 eve of a long process, in which the Reformation is to 
 be seen departing most widely from the whole method 
 and spirit of the Middle Ages. When Thomas Aqui- 
 nas first made the memorable distinction between nat- 
 ural and revealed theology, he made a contribution to 
 theological thought which was destined to play a part 
 of the highest magnitude in the future, — a distinction 
 which would survive and retain its vitality when all 
 else in his system would be neglected or forgotten. In 
 making this distinction, Aquinas, however, did little 
 more than call attention to two different directions 
 which the human mind might follow. On the one 
 hand, it might explore more thoroughly than had yet 
 been done the real nature and contents of the Chris- 
 tian revelation, as given in Scripture, — for that was 
 what mediseval theology had never done or dared to 
 do ; or, on the other, it might investigate dispas- 
 sionately, unhindered by prejudices or restraints of 
 any kind, the nature and powers of the human reason, 
 with reference to its capacity to originate or receive, 
 to appreciate or criticise, a revelation. From the time 
 of Wycliffe we can see in which direction Christian 
 thought was moving. There was a deep conviction 
 spreading like a contagion in all spiritual minds, that 
 God had given to mankind a revelation in the Scrip- 
 tures. To study and to know that revelation became 
 the primary aim, the most pressing necessity ; and so 
 
A REPRESENTATIVE CRITICISM. 255 
 
 late as the seventeenth century the mind of the church 
 was still centred on the study of the Bible as an au- 
 thoritative external revelation, before there came a 
 change which demanded a rehearing of the claims of 
 the human reason. 
 
 Wy cliff e was impelled to the translation of the 
 Scriptures into the vernacular by the profoundest 
 tendeucies of his age. Like the Jews at the restora- 
 tion of their ancient city, as he fought with one hand 
 the enemies of the truth, he was building with the 
 other, when he set forth the Bible as the constitution 
 and the charter of the true church against error and 
 oppression, and called attention to the necessity of in- 
 quiring anew into the divine revelation by going to its 
 source in the word of God. Plow his efforts to this 
 end were regarded may be easily inferred from a rep- 
 resentative criticism upon his work, made by a genuine 
 pupil of the old school : " This Master Wycliffe," says 
 Knighton, " translated into English, not an angelic 
 tongue, the gospel that Christ committed to the clergy 
 and doctors of the church, that they might administer 
 it gently to laymen and infirm persons according to 
 the requirements of the time and their individual wants 
 and mental hunger. So by him it has become common 
 and more open to laymen and women who know how 
 to read than it usually is to clerks of good understand- 
 ing with a fair amount of learning. And thus the 
 gospel pearl is cast forth and trodden by swine ! 
 What used to be held dear by clerks and laymen is 
 become as it were a common amusement to both ; the 
 gem of clerks is turned into the sport of laymen ; and 
 what was once a talent given from above to the clergy 
 and doctors of the church is forever common to the 
 laity." 1 
 
 1 Quoted in Gairdiier, Studies in English History. 
 
256 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 There were not wanting other critics who saw in the 
 use made of Scripture by the evangelical reformers a 
 perversion of its true purpose, and who, ecclesiastics 
 though they were, uttered a protest in behalf of the 
 reason, and of customs and usages, whose justification 
 was to be found in reason, even if no authority could 
 be found for them in the Bible. But the new day now 
 dawning for humanity was one in which men were 
 seeking to walk by what they believed to be the light 
 of God alone. They were timid of any substitutes for 
 Him, whether in papal vicars of Christ, or hierarchies, 
 or in the reason which seemed to them identified with 
 all the abuses of the past. They believed that God 
 Himself had once actually spoken to the world, that 
 His message of lisrht and life to mankind had been 
 recorded in a book, and that only one duty remained, 
 — to regulate life and manners, worship and disci- 
 pline, government in church or state, according to the 
 revealed infallible letter of Scripture. 
 
 Mysticism, whether in its historical development or 
 in its abstract character as a religious movement, is 
 best understood by placing it in comparison with the 
 ruling: aim of the Latin church. That the church not 
 only tolerated it in some of its forms, but even sanc- 
 tioned it, does not indicate that mysticism was in har- 
 mony with the predominant purpose of Latin Chris- 
 tianity. Just as there was a rationalism, whether that 
 of Anselm or Aquinas, or even a skepticism, like that 
 of Duns Seotus or Occam, which could adjust itself to* 
 the principle of church authority, so there were phases 
 of mysticism which have not only existed undisturbed 
 in the Latin church, but have been regarded with com- 
 placency, and even with approval. 
 
 The historical source from which mysticism in the 
 
HISTORICAL SOURCE OF MYSTICISM. 257 
 
 Middle Ages drew its inspiration was the writings of 
 the pseudo-Dionysius, popularly regarded as Dionysius 
 the Areopagite, who had been converted under St. 
 Paul's preaching at Athens. It was one of the nu- 
 merous offenses of Abelard against the judgment of 
 the church, that he had questioned the identity of the 
 author of the tw Celestial Hierarchy " with the Diony- 
 sius who was the patron saint of Paris. What the 
 effect would have been upon Latin theology had it 
 been known that Dionysius wrote in the latter part of 
 the fifth century, and was not entitled to apostolic au- 
 thority, would be a curious subject of inquiry. For 
 from the time when his books were first translated 
 into Latin in the ninth century, they were regarded as 
 having the highest sanction ; even a theologian like 
 Aquinas was indebted to them for elements in his 
 thought which accorded imperfectly with the general 
 tenor of his theology. It is even possible that the 
 tendency to pantheism, against which the School-men 
 were always struggling, might have been eliminated 
 earlier and more easily if it had not been believed 
 that Dionysius spoke to the church with the authority 
 of an associate of the apostles. 1 
 
 1 The writings of Dionysius are given in vols. iii. and iv. of 
 Migne's Patrologia, as if belonging to the age of the Apostolic 
 Fathers ; and the late Archbishop of Paris demonstrated anew 
 that the author was Dionysius the Areopagite, — evidence that 
 the Roman Catholic church, as represented in France, still clings 
 to the old tradition. These writings have been translated into 
 German and French, but there is no complete English transla- 
 tion. Colet, the famous Dean of St. Paul's in the time of Eras- 
 mus, translated parts of the Celestial Hierarchy, of which a new 
 edition has recently been published. For a fuller account of 
 Dionysius, see Ritter, Die Christliche Philosnphie, pp. 386-390 ; 
 Vacherot, Histoire de Vecole d' Alexandrie, iii. pp. 37, ff ; Hcrzog- 
 Plitt, Real-Encyldopadie, Art. Dionysius ; Maurice, Hist, of Phi- 
 losophy ; Vaughan, Hours ivith the Mystics. 
 
258 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION, 
 
 Viewed in its largest relations the system of Dio- 
 nysius was a combination of Neo-Platonic philosophy 
 with the leading characteristics of Latin Christianity. 
 As that philosophy had already been used as an agent 
 for reviving the various forms of heathenism, it is 
 not strange that when Christianity had triumphed 
 and become the religion of the Roman state, Neo- 
 Platonism should seek an alliance with the church 
 through those lower characteristics which, though they 
 had received their original development in the West, 
 had become the common property of Christendom. 
 The hierarchy and the sacraments were the two fea- 
 tures of the church which presented themselves to the 
 mind of the pseudo-Dionysius as most easily harmo- 
 nizing with the Neo-Platonic method of uniting the 
 divine and the human. To this end he increased the 
 number of the sacraments to six, attaching to them a 
 supernatural potency, and emphasized the orders of 
 bishops, priests, and deacons as corresponding to the 
 lower orders of demons in the Neo-Platonic scale of 
 emanations, and as means through which the soul took 
 its first steps toward union with Deity. Above the 
 earthly hierarchy rose the heavenly, where angels and 
 seraphim, each in its threefold order, carried on the 
 process of mediating between humanity and the dis- 
 tant Deity. A system like this, which glorified the 
 human institution by incorporating it as an integral 
 part of a divine unearthly order, throwing around the 
 church's rites a resplendent lustre of supernatural 
 color, could not but win for itself an almost univer- 
 sal acceptance. 1 But despite its easy and apparently 
 
 1 Maximus, the Confessor, in his exposition of the system of 
 Dionysius, modified it in one important respect. Dionysius had 
 made the vision of God attainable in this life ; Maximus post- 
 
THE SPIRIT OF THE PSEUD0-DI0NYS1US. 259 
 
 natural affiliation with Latin Christianity, the system 
 of Dionysius was only Neo-Platonic heathenism in a 
 debased form, and its author had done little more 
 than baptize with a Christian nomenclature the vari- 
 ous grades of personal agency which in the heathen 
 view stretched themselves across the vast abyss that 
 separated humanity from God. 1 
 
 It is not, however, in the form of Dionysius' thought, 
 but in its spirit, that we must seek for the cause which 
 made him in the Middle Ages the source of mysti- 
 cism. While the aim of the Latin church was to hold 
 God and humanity apart, — to maintain their separa- 
 tion as the foundation of the only true cultus for the 
 human spirit, — the object of Dionysius was to bring 
 them together in the closest relationship. In this re- 
 spect he was still perpetuating, although in a degraded 
 form, the purpose of the earlier Neo-Platonism, and 
 not only so, but there was speaking through him the 
 spirit of the early Greek theology. If he seemed to 
 make unduly prominent the hierarchy and ritual orcli- 
 
 poned the vision to another world and the distant future. A 
 change like this put Dionysius in closer accord with the spirit of 
 Latin Christianity. See Ritter, p. 392, and Vacherot, iii. p. 38. 
 
 1 Le faux Denys semble un neoplatonicien des derniers temps, 
 qui, en passant au Christianisme, a garde, conime avait deja fait 
 Synesius, ses doctrines philosophiques, en les fondant hauilement 
 avec les principes de sa nouvelle croyance. La distinction des 
 trois methodes, rationelle, symbolique, et mystique, pour parvenir 
 a Dieu, est empruntee a Proclus, ainsi que la theorie de l'extase ; 
 la doctrine de la Hierarcliie Celeste n'est que la theorie des Ordres 
 divins assez heureusement adaptee a la theologie chretienne ; le 
 traite de la Hierarchee ecclesiastique rappelle la description du 
 culte pai'en restaure par le neoplatonisme. La theologie du faux 
 Denys n'est pas meine un melange des idees alexandrines et 
 chretiennes ; sous des formules et des noms empruntes au Chris- 
 tianisme, le fond en est tout neoplatonicien. Vacherot, iii. p. 37. 
 
260 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 nances of the church, it was always as a means to a 
 higher end. That end was never allowed to fade 
 from the view, or the means to the end usurp its place 
 as a home in which the soul might rest. Hence the 
 study of Dionysius' writings by vigorous and inde- 
 pendent minds must put them on a track which di- 
 verged from the road which the church was traveling, 
 leading them back again to higher conceptions of God 
 and of man, and of their mutual relations, than those 
 which the Latin church had inherited from Augustine. 
 The hierarchy and the ritual were relegated to a sub- 
 ordinate sphere, as the lower rounds of the ladder are 
 left behind in mounting the higher. 
 
 It is unnecessary to do more than refer to the mys- 
 ticism of the twelfth century, which is known as the 
 French or Romanic, to distinguish it from the later 
 German school. It was connected chiefly with the 
 monastery of St. Victor near Paris, although its mood 
 was shared by Bernard of Clairvaux, and in the fol- 
 lowing century it found a distinguished representative 
 in Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor of the schools. 
 While it drew its inspiration from Dionysius, it dif- 
 fered from the later German mysticism in the absence 
 of an intellectual or speculative temper, owing partly 
 to the disfavor into which the exercise of the intellect 
 had fallen through the condemnation of Abelard. In 
 the place of the reason as the faculty which appre- 
 hends the divine, the French mystics were inclined to 
 believe in some special faculty of the soul to which 
 was vouchsafed, under certain conditions, the imme- 
 diate intuition of God. This school of mysticism was 
 also wanting in the ethical tone which pervades the 
 thought of Eckart and Tauler ; its tendency was to 
 conceive of God as if a physical essence ; it sought in 
 
CHARACTER OF GERMAN MYSTICISM. 261 
 
 the emotions for the evidence of the union of the soul 
 with God ; its language in describing the ecstatic 
 sweetness of the divine communion assumed a pas- 
 sionate and sensuous tone. 
 
 It was left to the German mystics of the fourteenth 
 and fifteenth centuries to assert for the first time in 
 the history of Latin theology a higher and truer con- 
 ception of God. They did not constitute a sect in 
 the church ; they were simply independent thinkers 
 with a kindred aim ; there were diversities in their 
 method, and variations in the results of their thought, 
 but they were agreed in declaring that God dwells in 
 the innermost recesses of the spirit, that there is in 
 the natural constitution of man a divine element, that 
 to find God or to grow in the knowledge of God is 
 to be accomplished by looking within, and not to ex- 
 traneous infusions from without. The scholastic theo- 
 logians were always on their guard against pantheism, 
 checking or modifying the free expression of their 
 thought for fear of confounding God with the world. 
 But the mystics had no such fear, for in their concep- 
 tion of God righteousness was conjoined as essential 
 with the divine love ; with such an idea of God it was 
 not possible to identify Him in a pantheistic fashion 
 with the life of nature or of humanity. Hence they 
 asserted the divine immanence without fear or quali- 
 fication. " God (says Eckart) is alike near in all crea- 
 tures. I have a power in my soul which enables me 
 to perceive God; I am as certain as that I live that 
 nothing is so near to me as God. He is nearer to me 
 than I am to myself. It is a part of His very essence 
 that He should be nigh and present to me. God is in 
 all things and places alike, and is ever ready to give 
 Himself to us in so far as we are able to receive Him : 
 
262 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 he knows God aright who sees Him in all things." 1 
 This doctrine of the divine immanence as held alike 
 by all the German mystics, Tauler, Suso, or Ruys- 
 broek, involved the correlate truth that human nature, 
 in which God can dwell so intimately, must be in its 
 inmost essence akin to the divine nature. The two 
 natures can no longer be conceived as foreign to each 
 other ; the one is the image of the other. The capac- 
 ity for God is not, as Augustine and Aquinas had 
 conceived it, a thing of which man is destitute by cre- 
 ation in consequence of Adam's fall, and therefore a 
 supernatural gift infused into the soul at baptism ; the 
 divine in man is the very essence of his soul. That 
 which, according to Aquinas, is a superadded quality 
 not to be found in the kingdom of nature, is with 
 Eckart the inmost principle of man's being as it ex- 
 ists by nature ; the supernatural becomes with him 
 that which in the highest sense is the most truly 
 natural. The kingdom of God does not stand apart 
 from man's constitution by nature under the rule of 
 an external hierarchy ; it is a kingdom manifested 
 within the soul : he who knows and perceives how 
 nigh God's kingdom is may say, " Truly the Lord is 
 in this place and I knew it not." The doctrine of 
 the incarnation, which in Latin theology had been an 
 incomprehensible, mysterious fact, before which man 
 humiliated himself in awe, became the central point 
 in mystic theology, as showing how closely God and 
 
 1 A sermon of Eckart which contains his most distinctive 
 belief is given among Tanler's sermons (Second Sunday in Ad- 
 vent), translated by Miss Winkworth. See, also, Dorner, Per- 
 son of Christ, b. ii. pp. 1-50, for a discussion of German mysti- 
 cism in the pre-reformation age, and Schmidt, Les Mystiques du 
 14 e Siecle. 
 
THEOLOGY OF ECKART. 263 
 
 man could come together, how Deity had assimilated to 
 itself in Christ that which in its essence was congruous 
 with the divine. The relationship was so close be- 
 tween God and man, that in Eckart's thought human- 
 ity was as necessary to Deity as Deity to humanity. 
 The incarnation reveals God as love, and love as God. 
 The essence of Deity is not physical, but moral or spir- 
 itual, and the object of this union of God with man is 
 that man also may develop his personality in love, ac- 
 cording to the law of the divine existence. 
 
 The German mystics did not aim to lose themselves 
 in ecstatic emotion, or to gain merely some sensuous 
 impression of a vision of the divine. Tauler, who was 
 the great preacher of his age, sought to impress his 
 hearers with the idea of righteousness as indispensa- 
 ble to knowing God and realizing the divine nearness. 
 The position of the mystics seemed open to the objec- 
 tion, that if God's presence is a reality in the soul and 
 in the world, everything may be left to the divine ac- 
 tivity in accomplishing human salvation, while man 
 may remain merely passive in the process. But to 
 this Eckart's answer would be that man's blessedness 
 does not consist in this, that God is in him and so 
 close to him, but in his perceiving God's presence and 
 thus knowing and loving Him. Only he who knows 
 in this sense will feel that God's kingdom is nigh at 
 hand. Knowledge, as Eckart uses the expression, car- 
 ries with it the obedience of the whole nature. In this 
 sense Plato had used the term, and the early Greek 
 theologians, when they said that sin lay in ignorance ; 
 or to speak after a higher authority, This is life eter- 
 nal, to know Thee the true God, and Jesus Christ 
 Whom Thou hast sent. In the language of Eckart: 
 "God is ever ready but we are very unready; God is 
 
264 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 nio'h to us but we are far from Him ; God is within, 
 we are without ; God is at home, we are strangers. 
 God leadeth the righteous by a narrow path till they 
 come unto a wide and open place ; that is unto the 
 true freedom of that spirit which has become one 
 spirit with God." 
 
 The German mystics when compared with the evan- 
 gelical reformers are seen to have had a different mo- 
 tive and aim. They had little interest in proclaiming 
 the revelation of the book ; they were occupied with 
 that which God revealed in the inner life of the soul. 
 There lay the real revelation, compared with which 
 the other was a thing without, powerless to help as 
 are all external agencies. The ground of certitude 
 with them lay not in the outward letter of the record, 
 but in the attestation of the spirit within. They took 
 little part therefore in the effort to change the form or 
 structure of the church ; they had little of that spirit 
 of combativeness or antagonism which would lead 
 them to any open revolt ; they were content with the 
 old organization so long as they were free to put their 
 own more spiritual interpretation upon its cultus. The 
 order to which they belonged, the " Friends of God," 
 had no political aim ; its object was to develop true re- 
 ligion in the soul, and to bind together for that object 
 all men of a kindred spirit. But while they seem in- 
 active compared with a Wycliffe, they did in some 
 respects a greater, more positive work than the evan- 
 gelical reformers, although with the latter lay the more 
 immediate future. The one class was preparing the 
 way for the overthrow of the hierarchy, and at the 
 same time presenting a substitute that would still hold 
 man in subjection to an external authority ; the mys- 
 tics developed a principle, which, when its full signif- 
 
MYSTICISM NOT A VAGUE REVERIE. 265 
 
 icance should be discerned in later ages, would appear 
 as the foundation of a more spiritual, more compre- 
 hensive theology than the Latin church had ever 
 known in all her history. The voice of Eckart is not 
 merely the echo of an Athanasius pleading* for the 
 truth of the divine immanence. It is an utterance 
 from the fresh consciousness of a new race which 
 hitherto, under the tutelage of Latin discipline, had 
 not come to itself or recognized its true descent. But 
 the day was as yet far olf when the church would be 
 prepared to receive the message with which he was 
 commissioned. 
 
 German mysticism was not a vague reverie with no 
 practical purpose in view. The labors of Tauler, who 
 was a pupil of Eckart and adopted his speculative phi- 
 losophy, are an evidence that it had a mission for men 
 in the midst of trouble and desolation. Tauler was not 
 only the great preacher of his time, but he put his 
 Christianity to a practical test in Strasbourg when the 
 pestilence known as the black death was carrying off 
 its victims by thousands. At a moment when the city 
 lay under the papal interdict in consequence of its po- 
 litical affiliations, he defied the authority of the church 
 in order to minister to the sick and dying. The fra- 
 ternity known as the " Friends of God," — a beautiful 
 designation, summing up in a word the whole spirit 
 and aim of German mysticism in accordance with the 
 saying of Christ, Henceforth I call you not servants 
 but friends, — this order, which owned Eckart as its 
 founder and guide, was widely spread in the south- 
 western part of Germany ; it included a large num- 
 ber of laity in its fold, and its object was not only the 
 cultivation of religion among its members, but a spirit 
 of helpfulness to others. A similar organization arose 
 
266 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 in the Netherlands,: — the Brethren of the Common 
 Life, — which undertook the training of the younger, 
 clergy, and was a powerful agent for the cultivation of 
 spiritual religion. To this order belonged Thomas a 
 Kempis, whose " Imitation of Christ," it is said, has 
 had a larger circulation than any other book except the 
 Bible ; from it, also, proceeded a little treatise called 
 " German Theology,'' which Luther republished, and 
 to which he acknowledged his deep indebtedness. The 
 spirit of mysticism had extended also into the Domin- 
 ican and other orders, and was still surviving in the 
 sixteenth century. In Staupitz, the provincial of the 
 Augustinians, whose spiritual relations to Luther pre- 
 pared the way for his conversion, we have the outward 
 connecting link between it and the German reforma- 
 tion. 
 
 But although the Reformation could not have taken 
 place without the preparatory labors of the mystics, 
 yet there were deficiencies in the theology of Eckart, 
 of Tauler, or of Thomas a Kempis, which made impos- 
 sible for them the work which Luther accomplished. 
 They had reverted to the essential principles of an 
 earlier theology, overleaping, as it were, with one 
 bound the intervening ages which separated them from 
 Athanasius and other kindred spirits of the ancient 
 church. They talked like the Stoics and the Neo- 
 Platonists of the purification of the soul in order to 
 spiritual contemplation or to the union of the soul with 
 God. But they were oblivious to the principle of his- 
 torical continuity; they did not take into account the 
 influence of the training of the Latin church through 
 long ages, and how the basis of that training had been 
 laid in the doctrine of original sin with the guilt which 
 it assumed for every man at birth, or the fearful con- 
 
DEFICIENCIES OF GERMAN MYSTICISM. 267 
 
 sequences which that primordial crime was thought to 
 have entailed here and hereafter in separating human- 
 ity from the source of its life. Whether the Augus- 
 tinian dogma of original sin was true or false, it had 
 entered into the fibre of mediaeval religion, and could 
 not be eliminated by a mere negation. Any readjust- 
 ment in theology must now take it into consideration 
 as if it were a part of the divine order, and, even sup- 
 posing it to be true, still find a principle by which 
 God and humanity could be reunited in an organic 
 relationship. It was here that Luther diverged from 
 the track of German mysticism. Because he started 
 from the attitude of the people as they had been edu- 
 cated by the church, he was able to make a successful 
 protest against the abuses of his age ; he was powerful 
 to restore again the simple faith of Christ's religion. 
 While the mystics had been preaching the purification 
 of the soul as the way to the union with God, the 
 church was selling pardons or indulgences for sin, 
 which never would have been bought so eagerly if 
 there had not been a demand for them on the part of 
 the people. To overcome so gigantic a perversion of 
 the spirit of Christianity was a task for which the 
 mystics were unsuited by their distance from the pop- 
 ular mind. 
 
 There were other deficiencies also in German mysti- 
 cism. In its idea of human nature there still lingered 
 a relic of the Latin tradition, that it was an evil thing 
 to be repressed or subdued. It talked of renunciation 
 rather than consecration. In the " Imitation of Christ " 
 there still breathed the close, unhealthy air of the clois- 
 ter. The full imitation of Christ implied directions 
 of human aspiration and endeavor which did not enter 
 into the thought of Thomas a Kempis. There was 
 
268 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 yet a longer preliminary work to be done before theol- 
 o°y and the Christian life could revert to their true 
 ground in Christ, in whom and by whom and for whom 
 are all things. 
 
 II. 
 
 The evangelical reformers prepared the way for 
 revolt from church authority. Wyeliffe, Huss, Savo- 
 narola, and others, while differing from each other in 
 the extent to which they carried their opposition to 
 mediaeval doctrines, were alike in one respect, — they 
 had emancipated themselves from the Latin idea that 
 the church was identical with the hierarchy. That 
 idea, the traces of which go back almost to the time 
 when Christianity was planted in Rome, the develop- 
 ment of which is found in Latin writers, as Clement 
 of Rome, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Cyprian, and Augus- 
 tine, — the idea of the solidarity of the episcopate hold- 
 ing by tactual succession from the apostolate, to which 
 as a body had been intrusted the graces and powers 
 for the salvation of man, together with the " deposit " 
 of the faith, whose purity it guaranteed by its contin- 
 uous existence, — that idea of the church which by a 
 natural and necessary process had developed a pope as 
 the representative of Christian unity and power, was 
 the first feature of Latin Christianity which yielded 
 to the solvent influence of the growing intellect and 
 conscience. That which had been the first to rise was 
 the first to succumb, and its fall was equivalent to 
 freeing the human mind from the yoke of external 
 authority. 
 
 The great reformers before the Reformation had 
 made the issue clear to all the world. Although Wye- 
 liffe had been allowed to die quietly in his bed, yet at 
 
THE PREPARATION COMPLETED. 269 
 
 the command of Pope Martin V. his grave had been 
 opened, his bones had been burned, and the ashes 
 thrown into the little river that flows by Lutterworth. 
 In the quaint words of Thomas Fuller, that river 
 "took them into the Severn, Severn into the narrow 
 seas, they into the main ocean, and thus the ashes of 
 Wycliffe are the emblems of the doctrine which is 
 now dispersed all the world over." 1 
 
 Huss had been condemned to death in 1414, at the 
 Council of Constance, for heresy, — a heresy which lay 
 not so much in the denial of special doctrines as in his 
 unwillingness to disown the conviction of conscience 
 at the bidding of external authority. The issue was 
 plain, and the wayfaring man could read it, that Huss 
 stood for the sacred majesty of conscience, undaunted 
 in the presence of the most imposing assemblage that 
 the church could muster. His condemnation was 
 meant as a declaration of the principle that the con- 
 science had no rights against the hierarchy. In the 
 answer of Savonarola from the stake, when the bishop 
 who preached the customary sermon declared him cut 
 off from the church militant and the church triumph- 
 ant, was the same issue repeated, — " No, not from 
 the church triumphant ; you cannot cut me off from 
 that." 
 
 To all outward appearance the Latin church stood 
 strong as ever at the opening of the sixteenth century. 
 There was no sign of the catastrophe which was to 
 
 1 It has been generally supposed that Huss, although indebted 
 to Wycliffe, was by no means a blind disciple of the English re- 
 former. How entirely the Bohemian movement was the after- 
 effect of Wycliffe's labors, and how closely Huss had accepted 
 his teaching, is shown by Lechler, Johann von Wiclif und die 
 Vorgescliichte der Reformation, ii. pp. 233-kTO. 
 
270 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 dismember Christendom, the popes revealed no con- 
 sciousness that their prestige had been weakened, and 
 walked smiling to their downfall. In reality all things 
 were hollow with decay ; the mediaeval age was over, 
 the preparation for a new age was already accom- 
 plished, and the world was waiting for him who should 
 lead out the people from the house of bondage. When 
 Luther burned the pope's bull in 1520, he took the 
 bold step toward a revolution which set free one half 
 of Christendom from papal subjection. When at the 
 Diet of Worms, in 1521, he declared that he could 
 not retract his writings at the bidding of any exter- 
 nal authority, unless shown that he was wrong, he af- 
 firmed the supremacy of the human conscience as the 
 highest earthly court of appeal ; and so firm did he 
 stand in this conviction that he dared to invoke God 
 to set His seal to the truth which His servant pro- 
 claimed. As one contemplates Luther at the coun- 
 cil hall in Worms, an insignificant monk, a man of 
 the people standing before the highest potentates of 
 church and state, with his life depending upon the 
 answer he made to his judges, the mind travels back 
 to a similar scene when Abelard also stood before his 
 judges, a man whose intellect was clear, but whose 
 moral nature had been hurt by the sins of his earlier 
 life. Between the two men whose attitude was so sim- 
 ilar, between the appeal of the one to the pope, and 
 the other to the conscience, lay the distance of nearly 
 four hundred years, — so long had it taken for God to 
 educate a race to understand and to maintain its high 
 prerogative. 
 
 The events of the sixteenth century have been too 
 often regarded as constituting a break in history. But 
 to the eye of thought reviewing the course of history 
 
THE COMING OF LUTHER. 271 
 
 the continuity remains unbroken. Luther was but the 
 child of the ages preceding ; the Protestant revolution 
 was the natural and orderly sequence of a long course 
 of preparation. It was indispensable indeed for a time 
 that men should regard the Reformation as break- 
 ing with the past, in order that they might estimate 
 more deeply the meaning of the truth which had been 
 revealed to them, and secure its firmer establishment. 
 So, also, in the ancient church, there had appeared a 
 violent antagonism to Judaism, and to heathen art, 
 which served the purpose of making more clear and 
 emphatic the vital difference between Christianity and 
 other religions. In the turmoil of an age of transi- 
 tion it is not always given to the leaders to discern 
 the route by which they have been led. Luther en- 
 tered upon the inheritance of Wycliffe and of Huss, 
 and still further was he indebted to the spirit of Ger- 
 man mysticism. But his greatness was also peculiarly 
 his own. He was not so much a theologian as a man 
 who afforded in his own rich nature, unveiled so com- 
 pletely before his age, the materials for theology. His 
 life was a type of humanity for his own and succeed- 
 ing ages. He lived through the religious experience 
 of the mediaeval dispensation before he came to his 
 knowledge of a higher birthright. Viewed from the 
 standing point of a formal theology, he is full of in- 
 consistencies and contradictions, and even dangerous 
 errors. Bat regarded simply as a man with his rich 
 endowment of human instincts and yearnings, to which 
 he gave the freest, most unguarded expression, he was 
 in himself a revelation of the human consciousness in 
 its freshness and simplicity, with which a complete 
 theology must come to terms. It is because the ex- 
 plosive utterances of his vigorous, tumultuous nature 
 
272 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 have been weighed as if they were carefully formed 
 dogmatic statements, that Luther has been so often 
 misunderstood by Protestant as well as by Koman 
 Catholic writers. 
 
 It is a popular mistake to regard the Reformation 
 as having for its main object the correction of abuses 
 which had grown up in the church. While some jus- 
 tify the work of Luther by exposing these abuses in 
 detail, others have tried to show that the abuses were 
 not so great as had been supposed, or that some things 
 which the reformers regarded as such were in reality 
 customs which are consonant with reason or with 
 piety ; and still a third class, defending the Latin 
 church against the assaults of Protestantism, have 
 boldly affirmed that there were no abuses whatever in 
 the sixteenth century which called for protest or re- 
 form, — that the movement of Luther from beginning 
 to end was the work of an evil will setting itself 
 against divine authority. 
 
 Luther, it is true, began his work as a reformer by 
 opposition to the principle and the practice of indul- 
 gences, in which he saw not only a perversion of the 
 gospel of Christ, but the source of a vicious influence 
 injurious to ordinary morality. The doctrine of in- 
 dulgences as taught by Lombard or Aquinas may dif- 
 fer from the belief regarding their operation which 
 was preached by a Tetzel, and received by the people 
 in the sixteenth century. But the fact cannot be ob- 
 scured that indulgences were then regarded at Rome 
 by those high in authority as the best available means 
 of replenishing the papal treasury, whose resources, 
 as it was alleged, were heavily taxed in building St. 
 Peter's cathedral, or in carrying on the war with the 
 Turks. The Latin church, as a matter of fact, saw no 
 
ADDRESS TO THE GERMAN NOBILITY. 273 
 
 objection then, and indeed has never yet been able to 
 see any, why people should not be made to pay for 
 spiritual privileges, or, if they value God's pardon, why 
 they should not be called upon to express their sense 
 of its value in some such tangible form as money. 
 The practice of selling indulgences by which were re- 
 mitted the penalties of sin, whether enacted by God or 
 the church, — for the two were practically identified, 
 — grew out of the disposition to guard zealously the 
 " deposit " intrusted to the hierarchy. From such a 
 point of view, there was reason to fear that if people 
 were not called upon to pay for God's pardon, they 
 would not attach to it any exalted importance. 
 
 Luther saw from a very early stage in his career as 
 a reformer, that it was not against abuses in them- 
 selves alone that he was waging his warfare, but 
 against the principle from which they flowed, — the 
 Latin idea of the church, by which was maintained 
 and justified what the enlightened conscience of Chris- 
 tendom was beginning to regard with abhorrence and 
 contempt. In his " Address to the German Nobility," 
 written in the year 1520, only three years after the 
 posting of the theses, he had come to see that the root 
 of all that was obnoxious in the traditional Chris- 
 tianity was the assumption that the church consisted 
 primarily in the hierarchy or episcopate, and as such 
 was commissioned to teach and rule the world. In the 
 " Address to the German Nobility " we have at last 
 the direct and final answer to Tertullian and Irenaeus, 
 Cyprian and Augustine. 1 The church does not con- 
 sist in the episcopate. No privileges, no "deposit," 
 no trusts are assigned by God to the bishops which do 
 
 1 An kaiserliche Majestat und den christl. Add deutscher Nation, 
 in Luther's Sammtliche Schriften ed. Walch, x. 
 18 
 
274 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 not also belong by right to every Christian man. Or- 
 dination is but a human arrangement, by which the 
 divine prerogatives lodged in the church as the con- 
 gregation of faithful men are delegated to a few to 
 exercise in the name and by the authority of all. If 
 a small number of Christians were to find themselves 
 in a desert without a regularly ordained priest, and 
 with no means of obtaining one, it would be only the 
 exercise of their divine and natural right if they were 
 to set apart one of their number for the office. Such an 
 one would just as truly preach and absolve and admin- 
 ister the sacraments as if he had been consecrated by 
 all the bishops in Christendom. Between laymen and 
 clergy there is no other difference than that of func- 
 tion or office ; the highest dignity which can be con- 
 ferred on man is common to both, — that of belonging 
 to the body of Christ, and being every one members 
 one of another. 
 
 But Luther could not so successfully have attacked 
 and overthrown the mediaeval conception of the church 
 had he not grasped with singular strength and clear- 
 ness another principle, namely, that there is no inher- 
 ent and essential difference between religious and what 
 are called secular tilings. 1 The dualism which the 
 mediaeval church had inherited from ancient Latin 
 fathers, which had even found expression in the de- 
 cisions of general councils, sharply distinguishing be- 
 tween the divine and the human as incompatible with 
 each other, was also at last met by a principle which, 
 in proportion as its significance was apprehended, 
 would reverse the thought of ages. The belief that 
 the divine and the human were foreign to each other 
 had led to distinctions between clergy and people, be- 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, x. pp. 302, 303. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 275 
 
 tween church and state, between nature and grace, and 
 had been the underlying sentiment which supported 
 the aspiration of the popes to set themselves above 
 kings and princes. Luther taught that the secular 
 power was divine, and directly ordained by God with- 
 out papal mediation ; that civil or secular functions do 
 not differ in kind from those called religious ; that even 
 a shoemaker, a blacksmith, or a peasant, were alike set 
 apart with bishops and priests to a calling that was 
 sacred, inasmuch as all kinds of service minister to 
 the well-being of the community and knit together 
 the members of the one bodv in a closer communion 
 
 %j 
 
 and fellowship. 
 
 And still another principle, closely connected with 
 the preceding, was set forth by Luther before he pro- 
 ceeded to enumerate to the German nobility the abuses 
 which stood in need of correction. 1 He calls it one of 
 the walls by which the church had intrenched itself 
 apart from the Christian community that the Bible 
 had been regarded as a " deposit " in the hands of the 
 episcopate or hierarchy, and that to it alone, or speak- 
 ing through its mouth-piece, the papacy, belonged the 
 right of determining what was the meaning of the 
 divine revelation. If, as Luther argued, the laity 
 were on an equality with the clergy, then it must be 
 also admitted that they have the faith, the spirit, and 
 the mind of Christ, and are entitled to interpret the 
 Scriptures for themselves. It was of them that it had 
 been said, they should be all taught of God ; to them 
 Christ had referred when He said, Neither pray I for 
 these alone, but for them also which shall believe on 
 me through their word. Such was the original idea 
 in Luther's mind of what was afterwards designated 
 i Werke, ed. Walch, x. p. 309. 
 
276 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 as private judgment — the affirmation of the Christian 
 consciousness as the basis of certitude for Christian 
 belief. From a historical point of view it may be re- 
 garded as the first emphatic protest coming from the 
 heart of the church against the argument of Tertullian 
 in his " Prescription of Heretics," or of Irenasus ap- 
 pealing to a tradition of whose purity the episcopate 
 was the guarantee, or of Augustine asserting against 
 human reason the divine prerogatives of the episcopal 
 office to teach infallible truth. 1 
 
 But the assertion of great principles like these, far 
 reaching as they are in the full extent of their appli- 
 cation, does not constitute Luther's most distinctive 
 work as a religious reformer. His title to greatness 
 as a spiritual hero rests upon his proclamation of the 
 doctrine of justification by faith, or, in other words, his 
 readjustment, first for himself, and then for others, of 
 
 1 The most characteristic of the thoughts and beliefs in which, 
 according to Bunsen, all the reformers of the sixteenth century 
 agreed, are summed up by him in the five following propo- 
 sitions : — 
 
 1. " The congregation in the full sense of the word, the whole 
 company of faithful people, and not the clergy alone, constitute 
 the church. 
 
 2. " The whole church as thus defined is the deposit of man's 
 consciousness of God in the public worship of Him. 
 
 3. " The collective community in its national capacity ought to 
 represent a people of God. 
 
 4. " There is no difference between spiritual or religious acts 
 and secular acts. 
 
 5. "A personal faith is the condition of inward peace with God. 
 But this personal faith necessarily involves free convictions, and 
 therefore free inquiry and free speculation on the results thereof, 
 though carried on under a sense of responsibility to God ; and 
 this again presupposes freedom of conscience and thought." — 
 God in History, vol. iii. pp. 199-201. 
 
MEANING OF JUSTIF1CA TION BY FAITH. 277 
 
 the conception of man's relation to God. In the con- 
 flicts of his inner life, — the bitter strujjffles through 
 which he passed before he attained that for which his 
 soul was hungering, — he stands for humanity itself as 
 it had been left by the tutelage of the Latin church ; 
 made to feel his need of Christ, but not having yet 
 known Him after the spirit ; stricken with a sense of 
 sin and guilt, laboring under the consciousness of sep- 
 aration from God, and yet demanding an absolute as^ 
 su ranee of His pardon and reconciliation with Him in 
 the inmost depth of his being beyond the possibility of 
 uncertainty or doubt. His experience in the monas- 
 tery at Erfurt, where he put to the test the mediaeval 
 method of asceticism, confession, and penance, failed 
 to bring him the conviction of forgiveness. Indeed, 
 this was not its intention or aim. The Latin church 
 did not profess to impart certitude of salvation to her 
 children. It preferred to retain them in a condition 
 of hope which would stimulate to activity, but the 
 certainty of their acceptance with God could not be 
 known till life was over. When the church was gird- 
 ing itself to its distinctive task in the beginning of 
 the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory the Great had re- 
 plied to a correspondent who demanded the assurance 
 that her sms were forgiven, that such assurance was 
 difficult and unprofitable. 1 In uncertainty and self- 
 distrust the soul should remain as its normal atti- 
 tude till the end of life revealed the final result. The 
 idea of probation, as thus defined, became the ruling 
 principle of the church, and had been known in Latin 
 theology as the conjectura moralis. As a principle it 
 was not out of harmony with the mediaeval practice 
 of asceticism, by which the soul might increase the 
 1 Neander, Church History, v. p. 200. 
 
278 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 probability, but not secure the certainty, of its sal- 
 vation. 1 
 
 After this confidence, however, Luther was strug- 
 gling in his earlier years, and the attainment of the 
 principle by which it was gained constituted his con- 
 version. In his later life, when he saw more clearly 
 the nature of the struggle through which he had 
 passed, he described the process in unmistakable 
 terms. He then recognized that his thought about 
 God had undergone a change. When he first read 
 the words of St. Paul, so he tells us, as given in the 
 Latin Vulgate, the justice of God is revealed in Him, 
 — justitia Dei in eo revelatur, — he hated the expres- 
 sion because he misunderstood its meaning. " I said 
 to myself : 4 Is it not then enough that wretched sin- 
 ners, already eternally damned for original sin, should 
 
 1 How firmly the mediaeval church was wedded to this view of 
 the Christian life was shown anew at the Council of Trent, where, 
 in opposition to the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith, a 
 decree was put forth condemning the " vain confidence of her- 
 etics." Sess. vi. c. 9. " No one can know with a certainty of 
 faith which cannot be subject to mistake, that he has obtained 
 the grace of God." Neither Augustine, Luther, nor Calvin, held 
 the doctrine of probation. Indeed, it may be said that the doc- 
 trine of justification, as Luther propounded it, involving as it did 
 the Jiducia or certainty of acceptance with God,^vas a protest 
 against probation. The idea of probation is clearly incompatible 
 with the Calvinistic doctrine of election. The retrogression from 
 Calvinism, as its founder proclaimed it, to the mediaeval idea of 
 life as a probation, was recorded at the famous Westminster As- 
 sembly in the seventeenth century. Cf. Sir William Hamilton, 
 Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, pp. 505 ff. In his essay 
 on Luther, Canon Mozley has selected this point for his strongest 
 animadversion. Luther, in his view, made his great mistake in 
 not being willing to walk in the subdued and uncertain twilight 
 in which the mediaeval church retained humanity ; he attempted 
 a flight beyond the reach of man in this world. 
 
WHY THE DOCTRINE SEEMS OBSCURE. 279 
 
 be overwhelmed with so many calamities by the de- 
 crees of the Decalogue, but God must further add 
 misery to misery by His gospel, menacing us even 
 there with His justice and His anger?' It was thus 
 the trouble of my conscience carried me away, and I 
 al\va} r s came back to the same passage. At last I per- 
 ceived that the justice of God is that whereby with 
 the blessing of God the just man lives, that is to say, 
 faith. . . . Thereupon I felt as if born again, and it 
 seemed to me as though heaven's gates stood full open, 
 and that I was joyfully entering therein." * In other 
 words, the " justice " of the Latin Vulgate when un- 
 derstood as righteousness became the most attractive 
 thins: that the soul could know ; it constituted the 
 bond between man and God, that man by the insight 
 of faith was able to read the inmost nature of God re- 
 vealed in Christ, and to find in the divine nature that 
 which the human nature was struggling with all its 
 powers to attain. 
 
 But the gospel, according to Luther's new reading 
 of it, contained a still more marvelous truth. Al- 
 though man was a sinner, and fell infinitely below 
 the divine ideal of his destiny, yet such was the good- 
 ness of God, that those who through faith in Christ as 
 manifesting God's righteousness had come to love and 
 to follow Him, were in God's sight already sharers in 
 Christ's deified humanity, they stood before God not 
 merely clothed in the feeble and meagre righteousness 
 which they could call their own, but in the glory of 
 Christ's righteousness imputed to them. So long as 
 a man looked away from himself to Christ and His 
 righteousness, he was not only in the way to making 
 that righteousness his own, but he already shone with 
 
 1 Michelet, Memoires de Luther. Merits par lui-meme, i. p. 26. 
 
280 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMA TION. 
 
 the reflected righteousness of Christ, in virtue of the 
 mysterious oneness which unites Christ to all believers. 
 And this was only an endeavor to regain the truth 
 which Clement of Alexandria and Athanasius had as- 
 serted when they spoke of humanity as having been 
 deified in Christ, and of an actual redemption already 
 accomplished in which all men shared by their consti- 
 tutional relation to the hea-d of the race. 
 
 Such was Luther's doctrine of justification by faith. 
 He arrived at his conviction by processes which have 
 now become unfamiliar, and the language which he 
 used often serves to conceal his thought from the 
 modern inquirer. It was his misfortune that he stud- 
 ied St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans too much under 
 the guidance of Augustine's commentary, instead of 
 reading the gospel as it is condensed in one brief il- 
 lustration given by Christ Himself in the story of the 
 Prodigal Son. What Luther was trying to express, 
 what flashes out in his occasional remarks interspersed 
 amid his technical language, was nothing else than the 
 principle contained in that most complete, most beau- 
 tiful of all the parables of Christ. The story of the 
 prodigal reveals how man in all his sinfulness and deg- 
 radation and guilt is yet received into the divine favor, 
 and treated as though he were a son that had never 
 wandered from the father's house. But when Luther 
 used the phrase "justification by faith," he was bor- 
 rowing a figure of speech from St. Paul, by which the 
 great apostle sought to convey to the legal mind of 
 the Roman people how it w r as possible that a guilty 
 person might be acquitted at the bar of infinite jus- 
 tice. The Latin mind naturally fastened upon an il- 
 lustration so apt, and the word " justification " became, 
 like " grace," one of the current phrases of Latin the- 
 
JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ONLY. 281 
 
 ology. Instead of a figure of speech, an adaptation of 
 language for a special end, it was made the corner- 
 stone of a system of theology by the successors of 
 Luther, and its very significance perverted and lost in 
 the effort to follow out the figure to its logical re- 
 sults. 
 
 But with Luther the reality was greater than the 
 now almost obsolete language in which it was clothed 
 would seem to convey. The doctrine of justification 
 by faith implied that man stood to infinite Deity in 
 the closest and most endearing relationship. It car- 
 ried with it the positive assurance, the certainty (fidu- 
 cial) of ultimate salvation from sin to holiness. Every 
 man by the power of a true faith could henceforth 
 know himself as a son of God, and the intimacy of 
 true sonship gave rise in the soul to an experience of 
 blessedness and peace which the storms of doubt could 
 not weaken or destroy. The Romanists wished to add 
 works to faith as the instrument of justification, but 
 that would have changed the whole complexion of 
 the truth, and brought back again the error which 
 Luther was resisting. It was justification by faith 
 only, just as the prodigal was received into divine 
 favor by the faith which led him to arise and go to 
 his father. In the strength of this mighty conviction 
 Luther stood with a majesty unsurpassed, confronting 
 the world that had been, and that which was to be. It 
 made no difference to him that he stood alone, opposed 
 by all the sacred traditions of Latin Christendom 
 running so far back in the past that they seemed co- 
 eval with Christianity itself. He stood before his 
 age with the uplifted open Bible, and the truth which 
 he there read so corresponded with the life within 
 him, that it made no difference if, as he said, a thou- 
 
282 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION, 
 
 sand Augustines, or a thousand Cyprians, or a thou- 
 sand councils were against him. In such a spectacle 
 as this we read a testimony to the divinely endowed 
 consciousness of human nature which has no equal in 
 history. Compared with this testimony to the real- 
 ity of the life of God in the soul, the contradictions, 
 the inconsistencies, the mistakes of Luther weigh as 
 a feather in the balance. 
 
 The sixteenth century was a period of intellectual 
 confusion. When a great revolution is in process of 
 accomplishment there is little room for calm, dispas- 
 sionate examination of intellectual formulas. No phi- 
 losophers arose after the decline of scholasticism in the 
 fifteenth century, until the reformation period was 
 over. The turmoil was unfavorable to the interest of 
 scholarship, of which Erasmus stood as the represen- 
 tative. To look for an intelligent criticism of the doc- 
 trines of the Latin church at the hands of Luther or 
 any of the reformers, is to seek for the impossible. In 
 retaining some or rejecting others they were governed 
 by impulses and instincts which were often healthy 
 and true, while at the same time they were still to a 
 large extent unconsciously under the influence of that 
 tradition which they professed to discard as having no 
 authority in the light of Scripture. 
 
 With this qualification, it becomes an interesting 
 task to review the opinions of Luther. He rejected 
 the Latin idea of the church, and fell back upon the 
 earlier and higher view, that it was composed of the 
 body of Christian believers. The form of ecclesias- 
 tical organization which ministered to the spiritual wel- 
 fare was a matter of indifference, so Ions: as it met the 
 need of holding men together in Christian communion 
 and fellowship. The sanction of the clergy lay in no 
 
OTHER OPINIONS OF LUTHER. 283 
 
 gift communicated by an external authority, but was 
 derived from the body to which it ministered as its 
 representative. The episcopate had been so involved 
 in the Latin theory of the hierarchy, that it seems to 
 have been spontaneously dropped without discussion as 
 an unnecessary excrescence out of harmony with the 
 new order. At a later time, when the signs of a reac- 
 tion against the Reformation were evident, and when 
 the reformers themselves were growing timid in the 
 presence of the increasing disorder, there were ex- 
 pressed some regrets that so much concession had 
 been made to the democratic principle in the church, 
 and that the episcopate had not been retained as an 
 efficient means of centralizing authority. But even 
 the temporizing Melancthon was careful to specify 
 that it should be regarded, if restored, as a thing of 
 human origin, or, according to the mediaeval distinc- 
 tion, jure huma?w, not jure divino. 1 With regard to 
 priestly powers in what had been called the sacrament 
 of penance, Luther attached importance to the decla- 
 ration of absolution, but thought the confession or 
 enumeration of special sins unnecessary and even in- 
 jurious. But the power to make the declaration of 
 God's absolution belonged as a right to every Chris- 
 
 1 For a list, of passages bearing upon this point see Gieseler, 
 Eccles. Hist., iv. p. 529. The words of Melancthon are, — Utinam, 
 utinam possim non quidem dominationem confmnare, sed admbuttra- 
 tionem restituere Episcnporum. " It is evident," says the Memo- 
 rial of the Wittenberg and other divines to the Diet at Smalcald, 
 1540, " that the churches need to be visited by those high in office, 
 else the churches will not be long honored, and pastors will be 
 evil treated in villages." There would have been no difficulty in 
 securing bishops, or what is called the "succession," had the sen- 
 timent of the church or the policy of the princes been in favor of 
 their restoration. 
 
284 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 tian man, in virtue of the universal priesthood of be- 
 lievers, and its exercise by the ministry was a matter 
 of human administration. 1 
 
 A peculiar interest attaches to Luther's treatment 
 of Scripture, because underlying it may be discerned 
 a grasp of a larger view of the nature and method of 
 divine revelation than was afterwards held by the 
 common consent of the reformed churches. He seem? 
 indeed to have united in a living combination the 
 apparently contradictory positions of the evangelical 
 reformers and the mystics : with the one he upholds 
 Scripture as an external and absolute authority, the 
 very Word of God, the charter and constitution 'of the 
 church ; and with the other he exalts the divine con- 
 sciousness in man as that by which Scripture is known 
 and judged to be from God. The Bible is divine be- 
 cause it is the mirror in which is reflected the experi- 
 ence of humanity in its highest exaltation, under the 
 influence of a divine Spirit. No amount of hostile 
 criticism could shake a man's faith in Scripture whose 
 reverence for it was based on such a foundation. In 
 this way may be explained Luther's extraordinary 
 freedom in criticising the contents of the Bible, a free- 
 dom and boldness which was a source of mortification 
 to his successors, which they endeavored to cover over 
 and forget. 
 
 The following specimens of Luther's biblical criti- 
 cism, were their source unknown, would appear to 
 some like the destructive attacks of modern rational- 
 ists. In regard to the Pentateuch, Luther thought it 
 a matter of indifference whether or not it was written 
 %/ by Moses. The Book of Kings he spoke of as excel- 
 lent, — a hundred times better than the Chronicles. 
 1 Gieseler, ibid. p. 540. 
 
LUTHER'S BIBLICAL CRITICISMS. 285 
 
 Jeremiah, as a prophet, was much inferior to Isaiah. 
 None of the discourses of the prophets were regularly 
 committed to writing at the time, but were collected 
 subsequently by their disciples and hearers, and thus 
 the complete collection was formed. In the Gospel of 
 St. Luke the Saviour's passion is best described ; but 
 the Gospel of St. John is the true, pure gospel, the 
 chief of the gospels, because it contains the greatest 
 portion of Christ's sayings ; it is far preferable to the 
 other gospels, " the unique, tender, true, main gospel." 
 Even the Epistles of St. Paul are higher in authority 
 than the Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. 
 Luke, for they deal with faith in Christ and how it 
 justifies, while the latter are mainly occupied with 
 His works and miracles. In a word, St. John's Gos- 
 pel with St. Paul's Epistles, especially those to the 
 Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians, and also the first 
 Epistles of St. John and St. Peter, these contain and 
 teach all that it is necessary to know, even if one were 
 never to see any other books. Luther did not regard 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews, nor that of St. James, to 
 be of apostolic origin, and the latter he characterized 
 as an epistle of straw, with no trace of the gospel in 
 it. He estimated very lightly the Epistle of St. Jude, 
 and thought it was a copy of the Second Epistle of 
 St. Peter. He could detect no trace in the Book of 
 Revelation of its having been inspired by the Holy 
 Ghost. The causes which led him to reject it from 
 the canon were its visions, whose obscurity was in 
 contrast with the clearness of a genuine revelation ; 
 many of the church fathers had long ago rejected it ; 
 Christ is not presented there as it was the duty of an 
 apostle to recognize and teach Him. 1 In harmony 
 1 Luther's biblical criticisms are found in the various prefaces 
 
286 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 also with Luther's attitude towards Scripture was his 
 estimate of miracles. They had, to his mind, a very 
 subordinate value as evidence of the truth of Christ's 
 teaching. " External miracles," he said, " are the 
 apples and nuts which God gave to the childish 
 world as playthings ; we no longer have need of 
 them." 
 
 Luther is not to be regarded as a constructive, sys- 
 tematic theologian ; no ruling idea gives symmetry 
 and completeness to his thought ; in many of his posi- 
 tions he retained the old scholastic phraseology. He 
 did not combat the doctrine of original sin, which, 
 as interpreted by Augustine, had colored the entire 
 teaching; and cultus of the Latin church. In the 
 prominence which he gives to the agency of the 
 devil may be seen the expression of his desire to 
 relieve Deity of all responsibility for human evil ; 
 but he makes no effort to define the relationship of 
 Satan to God in any formal way. It must be ad- 
 mitted, also, that Luther denied, in extreme and even 
 violent language, the freedom of the human will, in 
 order to assert the activity of God and man's absolute 
 dependence upon Him. Erasmus, who was carried 
 away by no overpowering impulse, selected this point 
 as the weak spot for an attack upon Luther's position. 
 But there was an element in this denial of human 
 liberty, made alike by all the reformers, which Eras- 
 mus did not appreciate, — an element which grew out 
 of the very situation of reform. In order to snatch 
 men from the servitude of the church it was necessary 
 
 to his commentaries on the books of Scripture, Werke, ed. Walch ; 
 also in his Table-Talk, translated by Hazlitt, and in the fuller 
 edition of the Tischreden, by Bindseil. Compare, also, Michelet 
 and Hagenbach's History of the Reformation. 
 
REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 287 
 
 to bring them into bondage to God ; the denial of 
 human liberty meant the profound conviction that 
 God Himself was acting and speaking in His human 
 agents, that they were under the spell of an Almighty 
 Spirit which they were powerless to resist. The con- 
 cession of human liberty, as in the Latin church, had 
 carried with it subjection to the power of an earthly 
 priesthood ; to assert the absolute subjection of the 
 will to God was to bring men into that servitude 
 which is perfect freedom. 
 
 III. 
 
 The Reformation in Switzerland was independent of 
 the movement led by Luther ; it began earlier, it fol- 
 lowed a leader widely different in character from the 
 hero of Germany, it originated from another impetus 
 than that which impelled Germany to revolt, it was 
 based on a different principle and reached in theology 
 a different result. While Luther and Zwingle were 
 both indebted to the influence of mysticism, yet that 
 which can be traced only as latent in Luther's mind, 
 or may be implied but is not clearly stated in the 
 doctrine of justification by faith, — the idea of the 
 divine immanence, — was the fundamental principle 
 with Zwingle, giving unity and consistency to his life 
 as well as to his theology. Luther was roused to in- 
 dignation by the practice of indulgences, in which he 
 saw exposed for sale the free forgiveness of God ; 
 Zwingle was moved to action by the crowd who came 
 to worship the miracle-working Madonna at Einsier 
 deln. The one was seeking to find a true basis for the 
 distinctively religious life, the other for a principle 
 that would harmonize man on all sides of his nature 
 
288 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 and in all departments of his activity with a divine 
 purpose in the creation. 
 
 The idea of Deity in Zwingie's thought is that of a 
 beino- whose indwelling life constitutes the essence and 
 the reality of all things, who is not only infinite wis- 
 dom but infinite love. The creation had its origin in 
 the divine love ; humanity was called into existence 
 that it might rejoice in God ; all the grades and ranges 
 cf existence are so many revelations of the divine ex- 
 istence which operates in and through them. 1 The 
 divine action in the world is immediate, and even mir- 
 acles, as they are called, are not abrupt and sudden 
 interpositions, but fall within the lines of uniform and 
 all-pervading law. To Zwingie's mind the whole as- 
 pect of the world was in the highest sense miraculous, 
 and ordinary phenomena were more divine than events 
 which merely strike the imagination because of their 
 extraordinary or rare character. 2 Man is born with 
 the capacity to know and to possess God. His spirit, 
 by its very nature, goes out to God. But it is not by 
 and in himself, as a being distinct from God, that man 
 can rise either to the knowledge of God cr the true 
 knowledge of himself. Hence revelation becomes part 
 of the organic process of things — a living, actual, 
 present process, whose results are not exclusive^ re- 
 
 1 Numen enim ut a se ipso est, ita non est quicquam quod a se 
 ipso et non ab illo sit. Esse igitur re rum universarum esse mi- 
 nimis est. Ut non sit frivola ea Philosophorum sententia, qui 
 dixerunt, omnia unum esse ; si recte modo illos capiamus, vide- 
 licet ita ut omnium esse numinis sit esse, et ab illo cunctis tribu- 
 atur es sustineatur. Quo fit ut ab illo nihil possit negligi. Quuni 
 enim omnia ex illo et in illo sint, iam nihil aut ex illo aut in illo 
 esse poterit, quod ab illo aut ignoretur aut contemnatur ; vetant 
 enim sapientia et bonitas. — De prov. Dei, Op., iv. 139. 
 
 2 Op., iv. 129. 
 
ZWINGLE'S VIEW OF REVELATION. 289 
 
 corded in Scripture. In one sense the Bible is the 
 word of God, but in a higher sense the word of God is 
 a personal force stirring within the soul, speaking with 
 supreme authority, and constituting the standard by 
 which the written letter of the book is to be criticised 
 and judged. 1 Hence Zwingle, more than others among 
 the reformers, recognized the traces of historic growth 
 in the different parts of Scripture. Luther's principle, 
 that the Bible is essentially the mirror of devout expe- 
 rience, misled him more than once into grave errors. 
 Zwingle approaches the book with no anxiety about 
 reconciling discrepancies. He expects to find there 
 things which belong to a lower as well as a higher 
 stage of spiritual development. But the word of God 
 has spoken not only in the Bible, but always and every- 
 where, wherever there is any knowledge of that which 
 is good and true. Heathen writers, like Plato and 
 Pliny and Seneca, have uttered the truth under the in- 
 spiration of the revealing word. 
 
 The law of God as revealed in Scripture or else- 
 where is not a series of arbitrary, external statutes, but 
 reveals the inmost divine nature, and the basis, there- 
 fore, of human morality lies in the inward sentiments 
 which determine action. The widest divergence in 
 Zwingle's views from the traditional opinions still re- 
 tained in the reformed church is seen in his view of 
 sin. He denied the doctrine of original sin as set forth 
 by Augustine, maintaining a position similar to that 
 of the Greek Fathers, Chrysostom and Theodore of 
 Mopsuestia, that misery but not guilt attaches to man 
 in consequence of the fall. Zwingle also makes an 
 effort to define more precisely the nature of sin, see- 
 ing in it a principle of disharmony which a divine in- 
 
 1 De vera et falsa religione, Op., iii. 130, 288 ; also Op., iv. 85, 95. 
 19 
 
290 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION, 
 
 dwelling presence is working to overcome, rather than 
 a successful revolt against the divine purpose. Sin is 
 even necessary as part of an educating process by 
 which man comes to know and follow the right, just 
 as justice could not be appreciated without the expe- 
 rience of injustice, or good be fully measured without 
 a sense of evil. 1 Hence sin is best described as a state 
 of death in which man is unconscious of God and lives 
 only to himself. The law of God does not excite to 
 sin, but it reveals sin and shows how great is the bar- 
 rier it has raised between the soul and God. Christ 
 comes to remove this barrier, which prevents God and 
 the soul from flowing together like two streams in a 
 common life. Zwingle's thought with reference to 
 this aspect of the Saviour's work does not differ sub- 
 stantially from that of Luther. Christ delivers man 
 from the sense of condemnation by revealing not only 
 the divine justice and horror of sin, but also the divine 
 mercy and love. If Zwingle does not seem to lay 
 stress upon justification by faith, it is not because he 
 underrates its importance ; it is everywhere assumed as 
 true without need of discussion ; that which Zwingle 
 dwells upon is the divine character to be built up in 
 those who have made the beginning in the Christian 
 life. Faith, hope, and love are three qualities not to 
 be separated in Christian experience — the three con- 
 stituents of the divine life in man, which from first to 
 last is inspired and perfected by the indwelling infi- 
 nite Spirit. 
 
 Zwingle seems to have shocked the religious senti- 
 ments of the German reformers not only by his clear 
 denial of the Latin view of original sin, but by his 
 conception of the salvability of the heathen, and his 
 
 1 Op., iv. 109. 
 
THE LORD'S SUPPER A MEMORIAL. 291 
 
 doctrine of the sacraments. In regard to the former 
 he expressed himself in a memorable passage in the 
 confession of his faith, sent shortly before his death to 
 the French king. " In the company of the redeemed," 
 he said, "you will then see Hercules, Theseus, Socra- 
 tes, Aristides, Antigonus, Numa, Camillus, the Catos, 
 and the Scipios. In a word, not one good man, one 
 holy spirit, one faithful soul, whom you will not then 
 behold with God." l The Latin idea, that there was 
 no salvation outside of the church, lingered on with 
 the reformers long after they had rejected the view that 
 the church was identical with any one organization. 
 At a later time Bossuet selected this passage for severe 
 animadversion in his " Variations of Protestantism," 
 oblivious of the fact that Justin Martyr, an approved 
 saint of the early church, and so recognized in the 
 Latin calendar, had expressed himself in similar terms. 
 The controversy with Luther about the sacrament 
 of the Lord's Supper was one of the painful incidents 
 in the Reformation, if for no other reason, because Lu- 
 ther appears in the affair so far below his true self. It 
 was a case where the disputants failed to understand 
 each other, because neither fully understood himself. 
 Zwingle made the sacrament a memorial of the death 
 of Christ, and found in it as such a spiritual efficacy ; 
 to Luther's mind this seemed to empty the sacra- 
 ment of its significance ; he preferred to regard it as 
 charged with a divine presence, as containing the 
 actual body and blood of Christ. But Zwingle had 
 no necessity for confining to the eucharist a beneficent 
 presence with which the world was full, whose secret 
 shrine was in every faithful heart. If Zwingle seemed 
 to rob the sacrament of a real presence of Christ, 
 1 Fidei Christians Expositio, 0p.> iv. 65. 
 
292 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 Luther seemed to rob the world itself of such a pres- 
 ence, just as the Latin church had done when she lost 
 the idea of the immanence of Christ in humanity, and 
 made the sacraments channels for the conveyance of 
 grace from His remote abode. The controversy illus- 
 trates the inevitable confusion of thought in the age 
 of the Reformation, bat it also shows how Zwingle had 
 revolutionized theology from its basis, while Luther re- 
 mained divided in his allegiance between two systems, 
 one of which claimed the devotion of his life, while 
 the other held him bound by the sacred associations of 
 religious sentiment. So long as Luther did not for- 
 mally recognize the immanence of the essential Christ 
 as the redeeming force in human life, there was a want 
 in his thought, which his doctrine of the eucharist was 
 an attempt to supply. It was creditable to Zwingle 
 that he still wished to maintain Christian fellowship 
 with Luther, despite their difference of opinion. It 
 was characteristic of Luther, that although the hour 
 was full of danger, he would make no compromise of 
 his convictions for the sake of advantage. The words 
 of Luther to Zwingle when the discussion was over, 
 " You have a different spirit than we," — Ihr habt 
 einen andem Geist dennum\ — were true in a deeper 
 sense than either of the antagonists were aware. 1 
 It would seem as if the great ecclesiastical reaction, 
 
 1 Wilson, Bampton Lectures, 1851, on the Communion of Saints, 
 points out the bearings of Zwingle's theology on the deeper prob- 
 lems of the Christian life and its relation to Christian psychology ; 
 Sporri, Zwingli-Studien, traces his theological views to one com- 
 mon principle, — that the material symbol is inadequate to the 
 expression of spiritual ideas and relationships. Dorner, Hist, of 
 Prof. Theol.f compares Zwingle with Luther and Calvin, and ex- 
 pounds these three distinct types of theology to which the Refor- 
 mation gave birth. 
 
ZWINGLE IN ADVANCE OF HIS AGE. 293 
 
 led by the followers of Loyola, might have been ren- 
 dered powerless to injure the work of the Reforma- 
 tion could the views of Zwingle have been generally 
 received. But he was so far in advance of his a<re 
 that his teaching produced no immediate influence. 
 It remains only as a monument to the workings of the 
 Christian mind at a rare moment when it shone forth 
 in all the richness of its native endowment, in a cre- 
 ative epoch when its powers were stimulated and ex- 
 alted as if by special communion with its divine source 
 in God, when for a time there was no restraint upon 
 its action in thought or utterance. Zwingle was not 
 merely misunderstood ; he was hardly understood at 
 all, or, so far as his meaning was comprehended, it 
 was regarded with distrust, if not with derision. Un- 
 der happier circumstances than those which followed 
 the Reformation, his death upon the battle-field of 
 Cappel might have seemed a bright example of martyr- 
 dom for the truth ; as it was, it appeared rather as a 
 gloomy warning, — a penalty for mixing up his re- 
 ligious profession with the political affairs of the state. 
 Zwingle made little or no distinction between the 
 church and the state; his ideal was the common- 
 wealth in which the Christian was sunk in the citizen, 
 after the model of that higher state of which it is 
 written that our citizenship is in heaven. He lived 
 long enough to see that his dream was not soon to be 
 realized. In his last years, he fell back for support 
 and comfort upon that higher view of the Christian 
 revelation which regards it as finding its natural ex- 
 pression in the human reason ; he consoled himself 
 with the vision of the divine reason, the word of God, 
 which speaks always and everywhere to human souls, 
 — the only pledge for the fulfillment of the Christian 
 
294 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION, 
 
 anticipation, — that the kingdoms of this world shall 
 become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. 
 
 IV. 
 
 In considering the influence of Calvin upon theol- 
 ogy, it is important to remember that he was French 
 as to his nationality. The character of his mind is 
 not that of the Germanic races, whether in Germany 
 or England. He had the tendency of his nation to 
 adhere relentlessly to abstract principles ; he made no 
 allowance for the utterance of the consciousness in 
 man, sacrificing without a struggle that large part of 
 our nature, where spirit and sentiment appear in a 
 living combination. It is certainly interesting to note 
 how the French influence, which was destined to dom- 
 inate the literature, the art, and the morals of both 
 Germany and England during the seventeenth cen- 
 tury and on into the eighteenth before it was thrown 
 off, should have been anticipated in theology by Cal- 
 vin in the sixteenth century, and that French theology 
 should have maintained an ascendency in Protestant 
 Christendom for two centuries before Germany shook 
 herself free from foreign control. 
 
 Calvin was born in 1509, the interval of a genera- 
 tion elapsing between the commencement of his work 
 and that of Luther and Zwingle. When he appeared 
 as a reformer, the first glow of enthusiasm and zeal 
 which characterized the earlier generation had begun 
 to die away, and in its place had come timidity and 
 distrust, a tendency to compromise truth in the inter- 
 est of quiet and order. There was no longer the dis- 
 position to seek for truth at all hazards, or to put faith 
 in that which was true as that which must conduce to 
 
EVILS ATTENDING THE REFORMATION. 295 
 
 the highest well-being of society. Melancthon, who 
 best represents this mood of the Reformation, was a 
 timid, or, as Luther said, a pusillanimous spirit, capa- 
 ble of seeing two sides of a question, or enough to 
 weaken his allegiance to truth, but not capable of see- 
 ing all around and through it. With him it was not 
 so much what was true as what would be useful in 
 maintaining social and ecclesiastical order. His com- 
 pliance was so great that there seemed no limit to the 
 concessions he was inclined to make to this end. Even 
 the doctrine of justification by faith he thought might 
 be modified so as to include works, in order to avoid 
 the abuses to which it was exposed; it was better to 
 allow man a little freedom than to make him alto- 
 gether dependent upon God's action ; there might be 
 no harm in restoring the old cultus, with its rich and 
 tender associations. 1 Luther stood firm to the truth as 
 it had been revealed to him. But his last days were 
 full of sadness ; he seemed to lose hope for the world, 
 and at times longed to be delivered from the impend- 
 ins; evil. The fearful strain which he had undergone 
 in leading the revolt from the papacy may have been 
 too much for his constitution. The situation was in- 
 deed a trying one. As in the case of Moses when he 
 led the Israelites out of Egypt, the crossing of the sea 
 was a light task, because of the spiritual exhilaration 
 attendant upon the consciousness of a Divine presence ; 
 but the real trial came afterwards when the people 
 had no fixed home, no laws with the sacred associa- 
 
 1 Although Melancthon fills a considerable place in the theol- 
 ogy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he has no special 
 interest or importance for the larger process of theological de- 
 velopment, and is therefore omitted in this account of theology 
 in the age of the Reformation. 
 
296 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 tions of ages, when the customs which bind a people 
 together had not yet grown up. 
 
 It had been one of the inevitable effects of the Ref- 
 ormation that it caused a profound un settlement of 
 the human mind, even in those by whose faith it had 
 been accomplished. Speculation about the foundations 
 of religion or morality or human government is always 
 attended with danger ; the great mass of men take 
 these things for granted, and any event which leads 
 them to think that the institutions of life are not as di- 
 vinely fixed as the everlasting hills, is sure to precipi- 
 tate in its train the wildest disorder. The Protestant 
 Reformation had served, as it were, to discover " the 
 foundations of the round world." As men glanced at 
 the process by which the order of things had grown 
 up and been maintained, it seemed as though any- 
 thing might be changed, as though the hour had come 
 for the reconstruction of society as well as the church. 
 Communism and polygamy were preached as the basis 
 of a new civilization ; so-called prophets traveled about 
 proclaiming themselves in possession of new revela- 
 tions, throwing discredit upon adherence to the Bible 
 as a vile servility to the letter. Under such circum- 
 stances, the claims of order became more pressing 
 than inquiry after truth. No one ever misread his 
 age more than Servetus when he took for granted that 
 the reformers were engaged in a process of free theo- 
 logical investigation, and would welcome the aid of 
 any who could throw a new light upon the interpre- 
 tations of old doctrines. Calvin stood for order and 
 discipline as the primary requisites of his time. He 
 became the founder of a church whose value as an ally 
 in promoting these ends was recognized far and wide, 
 — an organization which rivaled the church of Rome 
 
CALVIN'S IDEA OF THE CHURCH. 297 
 
 in its discipline as well as in its power of adaptation 
 to different nationalities. Its cosmopolitan character, 
 in comparison with the organization of the church in 
 England or in Germany, is seen in the fact that it 
 became the ecclesiastical polity of Scotland and the 
 Netherlands, of the Puritans in England, the Hugue- 
 nots in France, of a large part of Germany, as well as 
 Switzerland where it originated. 
 
 Calvin held that the church consisted of the elect, 
 and like all the reformers asserted the invisible aspect 
 of a body which could only be known to God. But he 
 was far more interested in the visible church than in 
 the invisible, and devoted a large part of his " Insti- 
 tutes " to delineating its constitution and its discipline. 
 That feature of discipline, as it is called, which the 
 Church of England did not retain, which the Lutheran 
 church also dropped, assumed in the church organized 
 by Calvin a prominence as marked as it had possessed 
 in the old ecclesiastical order. But it was retained at 
 the expense of sacrificing the idea which Luther and 
 Zwingle and others had maintained — that the clergy 
 were the representatives of the congregation and 
 gained the sanction of their office from the approval 
 and choice of the body. Neither Luther nor Zwingle 
 had attached importance to ordination as conveying 
 any gift from a source away and apart from the peo- 
 ple. But in Calvin's system, as in the mediaeval, the 
 clergy are the delegates of a remote sovereign, sepa- 
 rate from the people, endowed by the Holy Spirit with 
 the gifts and the powers of their high office. In other 
 words, Calvin retained substantially the Latin idea of 
 the church with some necessary modifications, intend- 
 ing that the reformed clergy should take the place of 
 the Latin hierarchy, with supreme authority over the 
 
298 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 congregation. The duty of the state, in its relation to 
 the church, as in the Middle Ages, was to sustain the 
 action of the clergy by the sword. 
 
 Calvin's system of church organization and dis- 
 cijjline may be studied apart from his peculiar theol- 
 ogy. In the seventeenth century in England, under 
 the regime of Cromwell, the Independents- or Congre- 
 gationalists discarded the former for a more demo- 
 cratic constitution, while still retaining his system of 
 doctrine. His labors as an ecclesiastical administrator 
 were not so enduring as his work as a theologian. In 
 this direction he so impressed himself upon Protestant 
 Christendom that his influence still lives, even in ec- 
 clesiastical circles which believe themselves emanci- 
 pated from any traces of his spirit. 
 
 Calvin's theology is drawn, or professes to be drawn, 
 exclusively from Scripture. The Bible, as he defined 
 and understood it, is the corner-stone of his system. 
 He had no respect for Luther's view of Scripture as 
 the mirror of the religious experience of humanity, 
 nor for Zwingle's view of a " word of God " in the 
 soul by which man judges the value of the written 
 word. He denied the position of the Latin church, 
 that the Bible was given and attested by the authority 
 of the hierarchy, or the continuous existence of the 
 episcopate. According to Calvin, God reveals Himself 
 to man through the book by the power of the Holy 
 Spirit. Man was incapable of knowing himself or 
 knowing God, except by this revelation. Revelation, 
 as given in the book, is a communication from God to 
 man, supernaturally imparted, apart from the action 
 of the consciousness or reason ; Calvin speaks at times 
 of the human writer as an amanuensis only of the 
 Spirit. He does not, therefore, presume to criticise 
 
THE BIBLE AND REVELATION. 299 
 
 the canon or its formation ; the Bible is received as 
 one whole, as it has come down through the a^es. 
 There is no other revelation except that which God 
 made to the Jewish people through the Old Testament, 
 and to the Christian world through the New. God 
 may have given light enough to the heathen to secure 
 their condemnation, but that is all. 1 The revelation 
 which God makes of Himself in the Bible may not 
 disclose to us the inmost character of Deity; there 
 is in reason no ground for believing that it does so ; 
 God only reveals what He designs that man should 
 know and practice. The God who is thus revealed is 
 a being outside of the frame-work of the universe, who 
 called the world into existence by the power of His 
 will. Calvin positively rejected the doctrine of the 
 divine immanence. When he spoke of that " dog of 
 a Lucretius " who mingles God and nature, he may 
 have also had Zwingle in his mind. In order to sep~ 
 arate more completely between God and man, he inter- 
 posed ranks of mediators, the ministers of the divine 
 will in nature, or in the process of redemption, — 
 angels as ministers of the good, and demons as instru- 
 ments of evil. Satan is the supreme agent in the 
 hand of God for accomplishing evil ; it is he that 
 secures the punishment of the reprobate and dis- 
 ciplines the elect. According to the prologue of the 
 Book of Job which Calvin read as veritable history, 
 Satan has a knowledge of the mind of God, and 
 though an evil spirit, he never thwarts, but always 
 fulfills, the divine purpose. Why there should be evil 
 in the world it is as presumptuous to inquire as why 
 there should be a world at all, but there is no evil 
 which does not redound to the glory of God. The fate 
 1 Institutes, ii. c. 2. 
 
300 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 of Adam was not an unforeseen catastrophe ; it had 
 been decreed by God before the creation. He also de- 
 creed that Adam's sin and guilt should be imputed 
 to his entire posterity. All men were born under the 
 divine condemnation, not merely because they had in- 
 herited the effects of Adam's transgression, but be- 
 cause God willed that Adam's guilt should be also 
 theirs. He elects a few of the human race to salva- 
 tion, and the vast majority He leaves to the condem- 
 nation which by their sins they deserve. 1 He does not 
 make them sin in order to merit the condemnation 
 which He has decreed, but He simply withholds His 
 grace so that they cannot but sin. Those who are 
 elect are not so in virtue of any goodness of disposi- 
 tion which God foresees, but simply by the act of His 
 sovereign, arbitrary will. Upon the elect He confers 
 greater benefits than upon Adam before his fall, for 
 He endows them with the gift of perseverance which 
 insures the fulfillment of their destiny ; even their 
 transgressions and failures minister to their humility, 
 and thus secure the perfecting of their character. 
 
 With reference to the doctrines of the trinity, the 
 incarnation, and the two natures in Christ, Calvin does 
 not differ from the statements of Latin or mediaeval 
 
 1 Calvin admits that all this may seem horrible, but it is just, 
 because it is God that has decreed it. Institutes, iii. c. 23 (7). It 
 is a common mistake to represent Calvin as attributing the decree 
 of reprobation to the divine anger. Calvin does not think that 
 God is ever angry ; he speaks like a modern rationalist of the 
 accommodation of Scripture, in this respect, to our weakness: 
 "Though God declares that He is angry with the wicked, we 
 ought not to imagine that there is any emotion in Him, but ought 
 rather to consider this mode of speech accommodated to our sense, 
 God appearing to us like one inflamed and irritated whenever He 
 exercises judgment." — Institutes, i. c. 22, 
 
CALVIN'S THEORY OF THE ATONEMENT. 301 
 
 theologians, except in relying on the authority of Scrip- 
 ture for their confirmation in place of tradition or the 
 authority of the church. He was unacquainted with 
 the history of their dogmatic development in the 
 ancient church, nor had he attempted its study would 
 he have found it a congenial one. He accepts, like 
 the other reformers, the mediaeval idea of an atone- 
 ment, as Ansel in had given it expression ; he sees in 
 the offering of Christ a provision for escape from the 
 consequences of sin, but he modifies the view of An- 
 selm in one important respect, — he looks upon the 
 sufferings and death of Christ as a veritable punish- 
 ment in which the Saviour bore vicariously the wrath 
 and condemnation of God. To this end he is inclined 
 to magnify the intensity and horror of Christ's an- 
 guish upon the cross, and His descent into hell was 
 viewed as necessary for the completeness of his vica- 
 rious punishment. The doctrine of the atonement be- 
 came in the following period a subject of discussion 
 and controversy as it had not been in the age of the 
 Reformation, and it then received a more exact state- 
 ment ; but in all its later modifications the doctrine 
 still bore the stamp of Calvin's mind rather than of 
 Anselm's, and as such has come down to our own 
 day. 1 
 
 1 Instit., ii. c. 15. Upon this view of the atonement it has been 
 correctly remarked : " For three centuries it has been the popular 
 view in England, though not without protest. Grotius's early 
 work against Socinus (de Satisfactione Christi) helped to fix it in 
 our theology, even Hammond, Outram, and Bishop Pearson em- 
 bracing it ; and so largely has it been adopted, that it has come 
 to be viewed as the orthodox view of the English church, although 
 it has no place in our prayer-book, and although even those who 
 adopt it (as Dr. Shedd, in his History of Doctrine) are fain to ac- 
 knowledge that it has never received the stamp of Catholic 
 truth." — Xorris, Rudiments of Theology, p. 2G7. 
 
302 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 The vista of future ages in the world to come, as Cal- 
 vin saw and described it, is clear and definite. The 
 earthly life of Christ he regarded as the period of 
 His humiliation, when His divine glory was concealed 
 behind a veil. When He rose from the dead He de- 
 parted to distant realms to sit down at the right hand 
 of God. His mediatorial kingdom then commenced, 
 and will continue until the elect are gathered in. 
 For these He died and rose again ; His merits are im- 
 puted to them by divine decree ; they are sheltered by 
 His intercessions at the throne of God ; they partake 
 of His life, and are progressively sanctified till they 
 are called away into His presence. He is to come 
 again to judge the world, and then will be made 
 manifest the divine glory ; His mediatorial kingdom 
 will then come to an end ; He will return back again 
 into the bosom of the Father, as He existed before 
 the foundation of the world ; the period of humilia- 
 tion will be over, and the veil which now covers the 
 face of His glory will be done away. 
 
 In some respects the system of Calvin not merely 
 repeats but exaggerates the leading ideas of Latin 
 Christianity. In no Latin writer is found such a 
 determined purpose to reject the immanence of Deity 
 and assert His transcendence and His isolation from 
 the world. In his conception of God, as absolute 
 arbitrary will, he surpasses Duns Scotus ; he rivals 
 Mohammedanism by a doctrine of decrees that sub- 
 dues the creature into fatalistic submission to neces- 
 sity. The separation between God and humanity is 
 emphasized as it has never been before, for Calvin 
 insists, dogmatically and formally, upon that which 
 had been, to a large extent, hitherto, an unconscious 
 though controlling sentiment. And yet there were 
 
MERITS OF CALVIN'S THEOLOGY. 303 
 
 features also about this theology which show some 
 advance over Latin Christianity, — it contained ele- 
 ments which prepared the way for future develop- 
 ments. Although Calvin aimed by his doctrine of 
 the church to restore the ascendency of the clergy 
 over the conscience of the people, yet the action of 
 this principle was modified by the force of his doc- 
 trine of an individual election, which obliged men to 
 contemplate themselves as forever standing face to 
 face with the sovereign majesty of God. The effect 
 of this conviction was necessarily to destroy every 
 tyranny, whether in church or state ; to break down 
 all human mediators which professed to control human 
 destiny, and thus to minister in reality to human free- 
 dom. The importance which Calvin attached to the 
 sanctification of the elect made the cultivation of 
 righteousness and the obedience of the moral lav/ 
 stand forth more clearly as the end of all true living. 
 He has also the merit of drawing attention to the life 
 of Christ, and not solely His birth, His death and 
 resurrection, and of bringing into greater prominence 
 the perfect righteousness which made an element in 
 His offering to God. In his treatment of the life of 
 Christ he was the pioneer of modern efforts to recon- 
 struct, in more complete and scientific form, the con- 
 tents of the gospel narratives. He was the first theo- 
 logian, since the days of Greek theology, to bring out 
 the spirit that was in Christ. While he admits the 
 miraculous birth of the son of Mary, yet it was not 
 to the virgin mother that Christ owed anything of the 
 purity or sanctity of His nature, but to this, that 
 God directly endowed Him with all the fullness of 
 spiritual wealth. 1 Hence he struck intelligently at 
 that lower conception of the incarnation so prominent 
 1 Institutes, ii. cc. 13, 14. 
 
304 THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 in the Latin church, whose tendency was to deify the 
 mother of Christ as the source whence the Saviour 
 drew His human purity or excellence. His sharp 
 distinction between the elect and the non-elect con- 
 tributed to destroy that almost Egyptian cultus of the 
 dead, which in the later Middle Ages had absorbed 
 so much of the prayers, the wealth, the energies of 
 the living. The assertion of the absolute supremacy 
 of the divine will destroyed all lingering fondness for 
 images of every kind ; it concentrated the worship of 
 man exclusively upon God. 
 
 Such was the system which carried with it the im- 
 mediate future in the history of Protestantism. It 
 professed in every part and smallest detail to reflect 
 faithfully the teaching of Scripture; in reality it only 
 rested for its confirmation upon a misreading of St. 
 Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and was then applied 
 to all Scripture as a measuring-rod. But when such a 
 system had once taken possession of the mind it was 
 not difficult to read the Bible in the light of it, and 
 indeed it was impossible not to do so, especially when 
 ingenious treatment of special passages was capable 
 of bringing them into harmony with the preconceived 
 assumptions of the reader. And the system of Calvin 
 had, strange as it may now seem, a wondrous fascina- 
 tion for the generations that followed him. It was 
 voluntarily adopted to a large extent, even in the 
 Lutheran and Anglican churches. It was, so to speak, 
 the spirit in the air. It had a genuine mission to ac- 
 complish for humanity, and not until its mission was 
 over would its real weakness be apparent. Then it 
 would be seen that it rested upon assumptions which 
 Calvin had been unwilling to analyze, and that at its 
 basis lurked the spirit of what is called modern 
 skepticism. 
 
CONFLICT OF THE TRADITIONAL 
 THEOLOGY WITH REASON. 
 
 Hoc primura intelligentes quod omnia prophetia Seripturae propria inter- 
 pretatione non fit. 
 
 Non enim voluntate humana allata est aliquando prophetia ; sed Spiritu 
 sancto inspirati locuti sunt sancti Dei homines. — 2 Pet. i. 20, 21. 
 
 20 
 
CHEONOLOGICAL TABLE. 
 
 A. D. 
 
 1436. Raymund of Sabunde taught at Toulouse. 
 
 1553-1600. Richard Hooker. 
 
 1555-1621. Arudt, a German Mystic. 
 
 1558-1603. Reign of Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 1559. Beginning of Puritan dissent. 
 
 1571. Robert Browne, the first Independent. 
 
 1576-1624. Jacob Bohme 
 
 1593-1632. George Herbert. 
 
 1599-1658. Oliver Cromwell. 
 
 1604-1610. Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 
 1608-1675. John Milton. 
 
 1617-1688. Cudworth, the philosopher. 
 
 1618-1648. Thirty Years' War. 
 
 1620. Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers. 
 
 1623-1662. Blaise Pascal. 
 
 1627-1696. Michael Molinos. 
 
 1628-1688. John Bunyan. 
 
 1630-1694- Archbishop Tillotson. 
 
 1632-1704. Locke, the philosopher. 
 
 1633. First Congregation of Baptists. 
 
 1635-1705. Spener, Father of German Pietism. 
 
 1642-1717. Madam Guion. 
 
 1642-1727. Sir Isaac Newton. 
 
 1646. George Fox begins to preach. 
 
 1649-1660. Ag;e of the Commonwealth. 
 
 1660. Restoration of Charles II. 
 
 1688. The English Revolution. 
 
 1689. Act of Toleration passed. 
 1692-1752. Bishop Butler. 
 1694-1778. Voltaire. 
 1703-1791. John Wesley. 
 1711-1776. Hume, the philosopher. 
 1729-1781. Lessing. 
 
 1745. Swedenbory: in his religious career. 
 
CONFLICT OF THE TRADITIONAL 
 THEOLOGY WITH REASON. 
 
 There were elements of hope and of progress in 
 the attitude of the reformers of the sixteenth century 
 which were not fulfilled in the age that followed. In 
 the prevailing theology of the seventeenth century 
 there was no divergence in principle from the scholas- 
 tic theology of the Middle Ages. Indeed, it seems as 
 though the aim of the leaders of thought was to re- 
 turn as near to the spirit of Latin Christianity as was 
 possible without actually passing the line that divided 
 the hostile communions. 
 
 The thought about God which always underlies and 
 controls all other thought, remained unchanged. De- 
 ity continued to human vision as a sovereign will en- 
 throned at an immeasurable distance from man. God 
 and man were regarded as alien to each other, in their 
 inmost being ; the characteristic of fallen humanity 
 was not only incapacity for the divine, but even an 
 active hatred and enmity for God. The incarnation 
 resolved itself into a scheme or plan of salvation, by 
 which the schism in the divine nature between justice 
 and love might be overcome, and God be free to par- 
 don man and to receive the chosen few into His favor. 
 The nature of this scheme was revealed in the Bible. 
 Man had no inward power in the reason to appreciate 
 its fitness ; the glory of revelation lay in its confound- 
 ing the mind and humiliating it in abject submission to 
 
308 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 that which had been arbitrarily revealed. Revelation 
 was a matter of the past ; God had once spoken finally 
 and for all in the book — the oracle that had been 
 miraculously communicated and preserved. The Bible 
 took as it were the place of the living Christ ; its very 
 letter was deified ; in it alone was thought to lie the 
 power of imparting life and salvation. The kingdom 
 of God that was to be was viewed as rising in another 
 world than this. Here all was darkness and misery, 
 savins: the revelation that God vouchsafed to make to 
 those whom in His inscrutable purpose it might be 
 His will to save. The outer world still lay under 
 the curse of the divine displeasure, serving to conceal 
 rather than make known its divine Creator; it had 
 been called into existence out of nothing and was des- 
 tined to relapse again into its original nothingness. 
 Despite Luther's teaching of justification by faith and 
 the inward assurance that it implied, or Calvin's doc- 
 trine of predestination, which was also an effort to 
 overcome the uncertainty about salvation, the conjec- 
 tura moralis of the Middle Ages came back again in 
 more distressing form. It took the shape of the doc- 
 trine of probation, according to which each individual 
 man, in his loneliness and isolation, is awaiting the 
 final day of judgment, when the outcome of his career 
 shall be disclosed. On the issue of this probation it 
 depended whether man should be ultimately admitted 
 in the distant future to the presence of God, or be for- 
 ever banished from the society of the redeemed. The 
 motives to obedience were found in external sanctions 
 — the endless bliss which awaited the saved, the end- 
 less woe which awaited the lost. Salvation was not 
 construed ethically but physically, as an escape from 
 the horrors attending the divine condemnation. Be- 
 
THEOLOGY OF THE 17TH CENTURY. 309 
 
 cause salvation was not primarily an ethical process, 
 it followed that other considerations than righteous- 
 ness and conduct modified the issue of human proba- 
 tion. To think rightly became of the highest impor- 
 tance ; orthodoxy in belief was capable of covering 
 a multitude of sins ; to give one's assent to the scheme 
 of salvation was the first step toward acceptance with 
 God. It will always remain one of the curiosities of 
 theological literature, that Lutheran divines should 
 not only have maintained that right belief might 
 exist in those who are wholly unregenerate, but that 
 carelessness of life did not necessarily diminish the 
 preacher's power to convey to others the salvation of 
 God. 
 
 Such were the leading features of the formal theol- 
 ogy of the seventeenth century. Its development was 
 attended by bitter controversies and angry recrimina- 
 tions, which hurt the spiritual life of the newly organ- 
 ized churches. When orthodoxy of opinion assumed 
 such indispensable importance, it was inevitable that 
 any deviation from the traditional system of Scripture 
 interpretation should be opposed with a corresponding 
 hatred. And yet the system had a side which com- 
 mended it to many of the noblest men of the age. It 
 did assert in an age of great political confusion and 
 low moral ideals the absolute supremacy of God, the 
 fact that He did rule this world, however mysterious 
 and incomprehensible might be His will. For those 
 who could believe themselves within the charmed cir- 
 cle where operated the divine grace there was comfort 
 and peace. Like the Mohammedan moscpie which 
 outwardly bristles with a threatening aspect, there was 
 within a beautiful inclosure which was like the garden 
 of God. As a system of theology, it possessed a charm 
 
310 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON 
 
 for the imagination, as may be seen in the great epic 
 poem of " Paradise Lost." Milton did for the theol- 
 ogy of his age what Dante had done for the theology 
 of Thomas Aquinas. He translated it into poetry, he 
 remoulded it into a beautiful theosophy, which long 
 held men in thralldom to that against which their 
 hearts revolted. More than the Bible itself, more 
 than all the theologians combined, has Milton's imagi- 
 nation identified the thought of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury with divine revelation ; it created a picture which 
 the world having once seen could never forget. 
 
 In the immortal work of Bunyan, " The Pilgrim's 
 Progress," the same theology was reproduced in at- 
 tractive guise for the needs of the humblest Christian. 
 Despite the fact that Christ is only to be reached 
 when the pilgrim's journey is over — when the dark 
 river which separates man from God has been safely 
 crossed ; or that only angelic or other intermediaries 
 aid the traveler on his way ; or that there is no rec- 
 ognition of the dearest and closest relationships of life 
 compared with the celestial selfishness that inspires 
 the desire for salvation ; despite the fact that the Chris- 
 tian life is not regarded as preeminently one of chari- 
 ties and of doing good to others in the name of Christ, 
 the work of Bunyan will always be regarded with 
 pride and tenderness not only as one of the master- 
 pieces of Christian literature, but as a rare and beau- 
 tiful picture of Christian experience whose fidelity to 
 human nature will prevent it from ever becoming an- 
 tiquated. 
 
 The theology of the seventeenth century on its 
 practical side is exemplified, better, perhaps, than 
 anywhere else, in the career of Oliver Cromwell. In 
 him may be seen its genuine fruits, — the hardness 
 
ITS PRACTICAL ILLUSTRATION. 811 
 
 and severity, even the cruelty which he systematically 
 manifested for the accomplishment of his ends, the 
 narrow range of the intellect, the confusion of his own 
 ambition with the divine will, and yet withal the in- 
 spired hero, who wrought in the consciousness of a 
 God-appointed mission, who humiliated himself only 
 before God and never before man, and to whom the 
 English people are largely indebted for that liberty 
 which has made them foremost among the peoples of 
 the world. The same religious characteristics that are 
 found in Cromwell, and the leaders of the civil war, 
 are seen also in those who led resistance in the Nether- 
 lands against the tyranny of Spain, and above all in 
 the Pilgrim fathers who consecrated to God the new 
 world in the West. These were the practical results 
 which attested the power of a living belief in God, 
 — that He was calling men to the execution of His 
 will, to the making of that will dominant in human 
 society. 
 
 So long as external events called out the heroic side 
 of human nature, so long as the reformed churches 
 were engaged in a struggle to maintain their existence 
 against the machinations of Rome, the Calvinistic the- 
 ology preserved an inward life, notwithstanding its 
 grave defects. The human heart to some extent un- 
 consciously supplemented its deficiencies, while the 
 wants, the necessities which it failed to recognize, were 
 such as required another age with other conditions of 
 life in order to their full appreciation. Then the sys- 
 tem would appear in its emptiness and hollow for- 
 mality, and men would realize that, if they were to 
 retain their belief in God, they must find some deeper, 
 more organic relationship, as the basis of the divine 
 communion with humanity. 
 
312 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 Even in the age when it was at its best, one can read 
 the painful skepticism which it engendered in the writ- 
 ings of Pascal. As a Jansenist, devoted to the spirit 
 and letter of the Augustinian theology in opposition 
 to the Jesuits, he may also be taken as the most illus- 
 trious representative of Calvinism on its intellectual 
 side. The " Thoughts " of Pascal reveal the tortures 
 of a soul, which, in its search for God, can find no 
 ground which satisfies the reason, and falls back in 
 a spirit akin to despair upon a supposed revelation 
 which defies the reason. To such a mind, the princi- 
 ple of Tertullian affords the only rationale of belief, 
 — to accept the impossible because it is impossible ; 
 to find the evidence of truth in its absurdity. The 
 attitude of Pascal is a thorough - going agnosticism 1 
 which sees no evidence of the being or goodness of 
 God in the nature of things, or the constitution of 
 the soul ; his faith rests upon a precarious foundation 
 which the intellect refuses to examine. How could a 
 man have any well-founded confidence in the reality of 
 a divine life in the soul who could write : " All nature, 
 
 1 " II serait difficile aujourd'hui, apres la demonstration victo- 
 rieuse de M. Cousin, de nier que dans Pascal se rencontrent a 
 chaque page des traits qui trahissent uu absolu scepticisme. II 
 attaque la philosophic dans ses sources psychologiques en niant la 
 legitimite de tons nos moyens de connaitre ; il ebranle la morale 
 et la religion naturelle en niant la justice et en n'admettant que 
 la force ; il ebranle la theologie elle-meme en justifiant l'athe- 
 isme comme une marque de force d'esprit, en substituant aux 
 demonstrations philosophiques de Pexistence de Dieu la fameuse 
 preuve tiree du calcul des probabilites qu'il venait d'inventer, 
 jouant Dieu a croix ou pile. II n'est pas moins sceptique sur les 
 affections que sur les idees, et il a ecrit cette phrase odieuse, que 
 Hobbes ne desavouerait pas ; ' Les homines se haissent naturelle- 
 ment les uns les autres." ' — Janet, Les Maltres de la Pensee 
 Moderne, p. 249. 
 
SKEPTICISM OF PASCAL. 313 
 
 both within and without us most manifestly declares a 
 God withdrawn from us; " or again : " The appearance 
 of things indicates neither the total abandonment, nor 
 the manifest presence, of the Divinity, but the presence 
 of a God that hideth Himself." 1 " The strange se- 
 crecy impenetrable to the view of man, into which God 
 has retired, is an impressive lesson to teach us to with- 
 draw into solitude far from human observation. He 
 remained concealed under the veil of nature which 
 hides Him from us until the incarnation, and when it 
 was necessary that He should appear, He was more 
 fully concealed under the garb of humanity." 2 How 
 could one long continue to believe in a divine revela- 
 tion who could assert that out of all the world God 
 revealed Himself only to the Jews, and that all other 
 religions, except the Christian, are notoriously false. 3 
 The interest attaching to Pascal lies in the fact that 
 he endeavored to square his religious experience with 
 a formal theology which he accepted as revealed truth. 
 Other men, not organized like him, might hold their 
 theology somewhat loosely, living by convictions which 
 were larger than their thought. Pascal was bent on 
 subduing his nature, his heart, and conscience within 
 
 1 Pense'es, ed. par Louandre, c. xxi. 2. 
 
 2 Lettres a Mademoiselle de Roannez ; Pense'es, ed. Louandre, p. 
 427. 
 
 3 Pense'es, p. 266. Also the following passages : " L'homme 
 n'est done que deguisement, que mensonge et hypocrisie, et en 
 soi-meme et a l'egard des autres." p. 141. " Dieu etant ainsi 
 cache toute religion qui ne dit pas que Dieu est cache n'est pas 
 veritable ; et toute religion qui n'en rend pas la raison, n'est pas 
 instruisante. Lanotre fait tout cela : Vere tues Deus abscond it us." 
 (A favorite text with Pascal.) p. 240. " L'abandon de Dieu parait 
 dans les Paiens ; la protection de Dieu parait dans los Juifs." 
 p. 321. 
 
314 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 the hard and narrow limits of a revived Augustinian- 
 ism. 1 A distant Deity, an absent Saviour ; humanity 
 utterly depraved and worthless, life full of vanity and 
 misery ; a dim revelation of a hidden God arbitrarily 
 communicated from without, and full of difficulty, to 
 which no inward voice of the soul responds in divine 
 confirmation, — a revelation to be received, if at all, on 
 the authority of the book ; the heavy burden of an in- 
 dividual probation or responsibility before God, not 
 lightened by the sense of solidarity or of the fellowship 
 within the church, as the old mediaeval theology pre- 
 sented it, — such are the thoughts of Pascal, full of 
 the deepest sadness, of an unutterable melancholy. 
 
 1 There is a suggestive contrast between the religious experi- 
 ence of Pascal and of George Herbert. The latter shared in the 
 new life which was stirring in the Church of England, when it 
 broke away in the early part of the seventeenth century from the 
 Calvinistic theology. Herbert, while still retaining the dogmas 
 of a Latinized Christianity, could rise as a poet above the tram- 
 mels of his theology ; he had escaped, also, from the depressing 
 influence of an individual solitary probation, into the joyous sense 
 of a Christian fellowship which was under the dominion of a law 
 of love. Traces of the struggle against the limitations of his 
 churchmanship are apparent in his writings. But the beautiful 
 lines entitled the " Elixir " show how at times the spirit tri- 
 umphed, and how grand and complete the triumph was. They 
 reflect an experience to which Pascal seems to have been a stran- 
 ger. They imply a redeemed world where man through his kin- 
 ship with Deity possesses, as it were, a magic spell by which the 
 commonest things may be transmuted into divine. All that was 
 highest in the theology of Luther and Zwingle was working as a 
 leaven in the heart of Herbert beneath the external aspect of a 
 representative priest of the Anglican school. 
 
 But one can never dwell upon the deficiency in Pascal's theol- 
 ogy or religious life without deep reluctance, after knowing of 
 the physical tortures which he must have suffered from malfor- 
 mation of the brain. For the details upon the results of an au- 
 topsy made upon his body, cf. Louandre, p. 74. 
 
THE WORLD APART FROM THE CHURCH. 315 
 
 I. 
 
 In Pascal may be seen a typical illustration, how- 
 ever exaggerated, of the religious experience gener- 
 ated by a conscientious adherence to the Augustinian 
 or Calvinistic theology. It is not surprising to dis- 
 cover by its side the assertion of a larger, freer life, 
 the unconscious life of the larger world moving apart 
 from the church, with elements of health and truth, 
 with a sense of joy and triumph which cannot be 
 seen within the ecclesiastical confines. A Spenser, a 
 Kaleigh, a Shakespeare, are the best representations 
 in some respects of the fullness and wealth of that 
 promise which the Reformation in its maturity did 
 not seem to have reaped. Lord Bacon was at the 
 same time withdrawing from the sjmere of ecclesi- 
 astical prerogative the rising science of nature which 
 was to absorb the intellect and energy of coming gen- 
 erations. It still remains doubtful whether he spoke 
 in earnest faith when he put revelation and the church 
 on the one side, and the natural sciences on the other, 
 as two distinct departments of life which had no con- 
 nection with each other. In the one, reason was to be 
 discarded ; in the other, it was made the only guide. 
 The spirit of enterprise and healthy activity which 
 had been stimulated by the discoveries of naviga- 
 tion, especially the opening of the new world in the 
 west, does not seem to have affected the ecclesiastical 
 atmosphere. The absence of the missionary spirit in 
 the Protestant communities is a fact of deep signifi- 
 cance. The church was experiencing the gloom which 
 came from the realization that the bridegroom was 
 absent. The sense of melancholy which arose when 
 the disciples felt themselves bereaved by the death 
 
316 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 of the Master must remain the characteristic of the 
 church's Kfe until the higher truth should be experi- 
 enced, that He had risen from the grave, and that His 
 life has become the immanent spirit of life in a re- 
 deemed, regenerated world. 
 
 But the best intellect of the age had not broken 
 with the church in the seventeenth century, nor had 
 the line of real progress and historical continuity been 
 even temporarily sundered. In some respects the 
 Roman Catholic church, especially in France, ap- 
 peared to greater advantage than Protestantism, as 
 in a certain freedom and largeness of spiritual ap- 
 prehension. The old organization was renewing its 
 youth. 1 The many converts it received, repelled by 
 the coldness and severity of the reformed faith, seemed 
 to point to the failure of the revolt which owned 
 Luther as its leader. The Jesuits were trading suc-< 
 cessfully in the weaknesses of human nature, and the 
 ease with which they relaxed all moral considerations 
 would have made them more dangerous than they 
 were had not the heart of humanity been sound at 
 the core. But Protestantism remained true, in theory 
 at least, to that which God had actually accomplished 
 by the hands of the great reformers. In rejecting 
 monasticism it had asserted, more forcibly than it 
 knew, that the world was redeemed and sacred, that 
 life in the world as God made it was better and 
 higher than in a cloistered world of man's construc- 
 
 1 The seventeenth century was an age of missions for the Ro- 
 man church. The relative inactivity of Protestantism was owing 
 to causes beyond its control; among others to an inherent weak- 
 ness in its theological attitude which was not overcome till the 
 close of the eighteenth century. But the development of North 
 America under Protestant auspices must be regarded as part of 
 a spiritual history. 
 
PROTESTANT MYSTICISM. 317 
 
 tion ; in discarding the theory of sacramental grace 
 it was preparing for the larger sacrament of life it- 
 self, with all its events and circumstances ordered for 
 the education of man ; in the importance attached to 
 preaching lay a means of educing the divine elements 
 in the constitution of the soul, whose fruits must ap- 
 pear when the training was complete ; in the attention 
 concentrated upon Scripture it was in reality bringing 
 the consciousness of man into contact with the highest 
 expression of the human consciousness as revealed in 
 saints, prophets, and apostles, and especially in Him 
 in whom the consciousness of a perfected humanity 
 found its absolute and perfect utterance. The im- 
 portance attached to individual salvation, as against 
 the collective salvation through the medium of the 
 church, although lacking important qualifications, and 
 resting upon a false conception of God, was the one 
 grand truth which was never obscured, in whose train 
 must inevitably follow a higher reverence for the spirit 
 in man, in all its manifestations, — in the reason, the 
 moral nature, and the inward sphere of the affections. 
 But the formal Protestantism of the seventeenth 
 century, as represented in its orthodox systems of 
 theology, contained within itself the seeds of its ulti- 
 mate dissolution. Hardly had it been established 
 when the protests arose, and continued to increase 
 in extent and duration, — the protests of humanity 
 against being shut out from the presence of God. 
 The mystics again appear, as they had done under 
 somewhat similar circumstances in the age that fol- 
 lowed the great system-makers of the thirteenth cen- 
 tury. The Lutheran church gave birth to Arndt, 
 who endeavored, in a popular treatise called " True 
 Christianity," to show what the apostle means when 
 
318 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 he says, " I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." 1 
 Jacob Bohme took for a motto these words ; — u Our 
 salvation is the life of Jesus Christ within us." Of 
 the books which he had written, he said, " I have 
 written not from human teaching or knowledge gained 
 from books, but from my own book, which was opened 
 within me." The Quietists in France, represented by 
 Madam Guion and Fenelon, taught that God was to 
 be served for Himself alone, and not for the sake of 
 external rewards and punishments ; that the end of 
 religion was to find Christ living within the soul. The 
 Quakers in England declared the existence of an " in- 
 ner light" in every man whereby God was constantly 
 revealing Himself, a divine light, by which is discerned 
 the meaning and the truth of the outward revelation 
 given in the book. Molinos, the Spaniard, attached 
 little importance to outward ritual compared with the 
 silent inward communion of the soul with God. 2 The 
 
 1 Arndt's True Christianity is divided into four books : 1. The 
 Book of Scripture, to show the way of the spiritual life, and that 
 Adam ought to die and Christ to gain the ascendant in the heart 
 more and more daily. 2. The Book of Life, directing the Chris- 
 tian to rejoice in sufferings, and to endure persecutions after 
 Christ's example. 3. The Book of Conscience, wherein the 
 Christian is taught to recognize the kingdom of God within his 
 own heart. 4. The Book of Nature, that all creation leads men 
 to the knowledge of their Creator. 
 
 2 I have not thought it necessary to call attention to the de- 
 fects and mischievous results attendant upon all these move- 
 ments known as mystic, especially as they were not illustrated 
 upon a large scale. Their historical interest lies in the common 
 protest they all made against the fundamental principles of 
 Augustinianism, whether in its Latin or its Protestant forms. 
 That they were all guilty, more or less, of confusing their fancies 
 with a divine light must be admitted. But this was just the 
 trouble also with Augustine and with Calvin. 
 
CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. 319 
 
 Pietists, in Germany, sought to restore Luther's con- 
 ception of the Bible, as the mirror of religious experi- 
 ence, the object of whose study was to deepen the life 
 of Christ in the soul rather than to extract isolated 
 proof-texts to confirm a system of theology. These 
 and similar utterances are not interesting merely as 
 opinions ; they illustrate the workings of the human 
 consciousness in its relation to God ; they bear an im- 
 pressive testimony to the truth that a religion can 
 never be imposed from without, or become authorita- 
 tive, unless it be the expression of that spirit in man 
 upon which God has stamped the impress of His own 
 nature. 
 
 There were other lines of divine activity where hu- 
 manity was struggling to realize its high calling in 
 the face of obstacles which could only be overcome by 
 a fierce and stubborn resistance. Hitherto the church 
 had been indifferent to that liberty which is the right- 
 ful heritage not of a few, but of all men in virtue of 
 their creation in the image of God. Hildebrand had 
 talked of the liberty of the church, but he had meant 
 only the emancipation of the clergy from secular con- 
 trol, in order to their more complete subjection to the 
 authority of Rome. The hierarchy of the Middle 
 Ages was a graded system by which the clergy repre- 
 sented the bishop, the bishops represented the pope, 
 and the pope represented God. When Luther asserted 
 the rights of the individual conscience against all ex- 
 ternal authority, he had given the principle which did 
 away with all artificial castes, whether in church or 
 state, — a principle by which, as it were, every man 
 became a pope, standing in immediate relation to God, 
 owning no other or higher allegiance than the will of 
 God should sanction. But a long time must necessn- 
 
320 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 rily elapse between tlie declaration of a principle and 
 its realization. The struggle in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury for civil and religious freedom was wrapped up 
 as in a germ in Luther's attitude, and ever since the 
 course of history has witnessed one continuous effort 
 to secure in increasing measure the liberty which is 
 the rightful heritage of man. 
 
 Luther himself was well aware that such a liberty 
 could only come to those who were prepared to receive 
 it. At first he had been inclined to a more democratic 
 constitution of the church than he afterwards ap- 
 proved. The church at Hesse, where the first rough 
 draft of the changed ecclesiastical order was made, 
 had been a purely democratic one, in which the people 
 were to rule, and the popular voice was to administer 
 discipline. But this organization did not commend 
 itself to Luther's judgment when he became more im- 
 pressed with the prevailing popular ignorance. He saw, 
 also, that in the aristocratic organization of German 
 society, the nobility and the princes would never sub- 
 mit to be controlled in religious matters by the voice 
 of the people. Hence the final organization of the 
 church in Germany followed the social order ; princes 
 became the superintendents or bishops over the clergy 
 and people, forming, together 1 with their body of ad- 
 visers, a sort of ecclesiastical oligarchy. The consti- 
 tution of the Lutheran church thus assumed a sort of 
 hap-hazard, accidental character, dictated by the emer- 
 gencies in which it arose. The organization, on the 
 other hand, of the Reformed or Calvinistic churches 
 was based upon what was believed to be a divine order 
 revealed in Scripture. In the place of the ancient 
 hierarchy, which was abolished, the ecclesiastical ad- 
 ministration was intrusted to the body of the clergy, 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 321 
 
 elders or presbyters, who ruled like the hierarchy, not 
 in the name of the people, but in virtue of a power and 
 commission with which they were intrusted by God. 
 Such a scheme was identical in principle with that of 
 the Latin church, differing- from it only in appearance, 
 or in so far as it was modified by circumstances which 
 the church could not control. 
 
 The reformation in England was conducted on a 
 method of its own, which differs widely in principle 
 from either of those just mentioned. Its peculiarity 
 lay in the fact that it was essentially a lay movement 
 originating with the King and Parliament rather than 
 with the clergy. Convocation led in no reform, nor 
 had it any disposition to do so ; the bishops and clergy 
 accepted and ratified what Parliament dictated. It 
 was the laity and not the clergy who led the Church of 
 England in the great revolution of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury by which the authority of the Bishop of Home was 
 declared no longer binding. With a king whose au- 
 thority was practically absolute, and a submissive clergy 
 who accepted his decree, whether voluntarily or not, 
 there was no necessity and indeed no moral possibility 
 of abolishing the old ecclesiastical order. The Church 
 of England continued in possession of the church prop- 
 erty, the bishops remained in their respective sees, 
 and the outward aspect of the church was substantially 
 unchanged by the revolution which had deposed its 
 ancient sovereign the Bishop of Rome. In such a 
 method of reform, there were great advantages ; but 
 it also involved great dangers. The Church of Eng- 
 land, by retaining so much of the old ecclesiastical 
 order and ritual, also retained and bore witness to the 
 historical continuity of the church, as an external in- 
 stitution, through all the vicissitudes of time. In the 
 
 21 
 
322 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 reformed churches there was a tendency to under- 
 value this principle ; they appeared rather as " new " 
 churches, with a "new" order and a "new" faith, 
 while the Church of England appeared as an orderly 
 growth, with its roots in the historic consciousness of 
 humanity. But there was danger, also, that the old 
 spirit of mediaeval religion would linger about its ac- 
 customed haunts, and when the opportunity offered 
 reenter and take possession. 
 
 The theory of the church which underlay the Eng- 
 lish reformation — the tacitly -accepted, working the- 
 ory, whether avowed or not, was not the old Latin 
 idea that the church lay in the hierarchy. In all the 
 changes that took place, there was implied an organic 
 relationship to the state ; the king was regarded as 
 directly and primarily the anointed of God ; the 
 church was simply the whole nation in its religious 
 aspect, for whose well being the king was as directly 
 responsible as for its civil order and prosperity. The 
 worst that is usually said against such a theory is that 
 it is Erastian, whatever that may mean. Cranmer 
 regarded the bishops as holding their jurisdiction from 
 the king, and on the accession of Edward VI. took out 
 a new commission of authority. This theory prevailed 
 through the long reign of Elizabeth before it yielded 
 to another conception of the church and a different 
 view of the relations of church and state. But the 
 older view, Erastianism, if it must be so known, has 
 given to the Church of England its peculiar charm and 
 its most distinctive merit. 
 
 The Church of England produced no great theolo- 
 gian and followed no one special type of theology. It 
 represented in the age of the Reformation the large 
 communis sensus of the people, so far as they were 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARD THEOLOGY. 323 
 
 educated to speak for themselves. The influence of 
 Luther and of Calvin is apparent in the articles of 
 religion, but it nowhere appears as bondage to the ipse 
 dixit of a man. Justification by faith only is clearly 
 set forth with no evasive qualification. The doctrine 
 of predestination is admitted, but a caution is given 
 against its abuse. The highest reverence is expressed 
 for Scripture ; yet there is no worship of the letter ; it 
 was enough to declare that " it contains all things nee- 
 essary to salvation." Tradition is rejected as an ab- 
 solute authority, when it is affirmed that the creeds 
 are to be received because they have the warrant of 
 Holy Scripture, not because they are given on the au- 
 thority of the church. And yet tradition is regarded 
 as having a value which forbids it from being entirely 
 thrown aside, in that the old ritual is not discarded 
 but modified, or when it is asserted that the govern- 
 ment of the church is in accordance with ancient cus- 
 tom. The definition of the church has the true Prot- 
 estant ring, when it is affirmed to be the " congregation 
 of faithful men," and not the mysterious impersona- 
 tion of Latin Christianity. The large practical wis- 
 dom of the reformers is seen in the absolute rejection 
 of that which the reason has demonstrated false, such 
 as image-worship, purgatory, and transubstantiation, 
 and a cautious tone prevails where there is room for 
 difference of opinion. In one respect, and that the 
 most significant of all, the Church of England as- 
 sumed a position which no other communion had dared 
 or been willing to take. It not only does not assert its 
 own infallibility, but it declares that other churches 
 have erred in matters pertaining to the faith — a posi- 
 tion from which the only inference is that it does not 
 claim for itself the infallibility which it has denied to 
 
324 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 them. The clergy are called upon to be faithful to 
 their conscience, and to teach nothing as requisite for 
 salvation in which their private judgment of Scripture 
 does not concur ; nor is any provision made for the 
 exigency of their conscience leading them in opposi- 
 tion to what may be at any time the prevailing inter- 
 pretation of the church's standards. The predominant 
 tendency in its standards is to throw the clergy back 
 upon their conscience as enlightened by the word of 
 God. 
 
 Such an attitude may appear to the dogmatist or to 
 the skeptic as essentially weak and unworthy ; but to 
 the eye of faith, which acknowledges an infinite Spirit 
 of truth, pledged to lead humanity into an ever- 
 increasing knowledge of the truth, it is the highest, 
 sublimest attitude that a church can assume. And 
 the Church of England has been true, in the main, to 
 the idea which was implanted in its constitution in the 
 plastic moment of its rebirth ; it has remained open 
 to all the tides of thought and spiritual life which 
 have swept over the nation ; it has been able to retain 
 in its fold those whom no other form of organized 
 Christianity could tolerate. 
 
 The power of the Church of England lay not so 
 much in its formal theology as in its liturgy. The 
 Prayer-Book was placed in the hands of the people, 
 as an educating, elevating influence, whose intention 
 was to raise the laity to a sense of their equality with 
 the clergy, as participants in the spiritual priesthood 
 of all Christians. "There have been few things," 
 says a recent writer, " which have affected the char- 
 acter of the modern English more than the liturgy." 
 " The Prayer-Book," said Dean Milman, " is the best 
 model of pure, fervent, single devotion as it were, 
 
ITS LITURGY AND ORDER. 325 
 
 and concentration of all the orisons which have been 
 uttered in the name of Christ since the first days of 
 the gospel ; that liturgy which is the great example of 
 pare vernacular English, familiar yet always unvulgar; 
 of which but few words and phrases have become ob- 
 solete, which has an indwelling music, which enthralls 
 and never palls upon the ear, with the full living ex- 
 pression of every great Christian truth, yet rarely 
 hardening into stern dogmatism, satisfying every need 
 and awakening and answering every Christian emo- 
 tion, entering into the heart, and, as it were, welling 
 forth again from the heart, the full and general voice 
 of the congregation, yet the peculiar utterance of each 
 single worshiper." "In many respects," said Ma- 
 caulay, " it was well for the Church of England that 
 in an age of exuberant zeal her principal founders 
 were mere politicians. To this circumstance she owes 
 her moderate articles, her decent ceremonies, her noble 
 and pathetic liturgy. Her worship is not disfigured 
 by mummery, yet she has preserved, in a far higher 
 degree than have her Protestant sisters, that art of 
 striking the senses and filling the imagination in 
 which the Catholic church so eminently excels." 
 
 The Church of England retained the threefold order 
 of bishops, priests, and deacons, as it was to be found 
 by reading Scripture and ancient authors, but a change 
 was made in that order which completely transformed 
 its character. From the time when Tertullian wrote 
 his " Prescription of Heretics " the belief had begun 
 to prevail in the Latin church that to the bishops 
 had been intrusted the guardianship of the Christian 
 revelation ; that to them alone had been primarily 
 committed the " deposit " of faith, whose integrity they 
 guaranteed in a continuous line of descent through the 
 
326 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 ages. Hence had originated the bishop's vow at his 
 consecration to u defend the faith and to banish and 
 drive away from the church all erroneous and strange 
 doctrine contrary to God's word." The Church of 
 England at the Reformation showed its sense of the 
 change which had come over Christendom by in- 
 trusting to the presbyter the same guardianship as 
 had hitherto devolved alone on the bishop, requiring 
 from him at his ordination the same identical vow. 1 
 By this simple change the clergy ceased to be mere 
 creatures of the bishop, representing the bishop in 
 their respective parishes, as had been, and still is, their 
 position in the Latin church; they became the spirit- 
 ual representatives of the congregation, charged with 
 the responsibility of inquiring for themselves into the 
 nature of the Christian revelation, and of presenting 
 to the people that only which they believed had the 
 sure warrant of Holy Scripture. Thus the Church of 
 England had secured, without discarding the episco- 
 pate, that which the reformed churches of the con- 
 tinent had only been able to secure by the abolition of 
 the ancient order. 
 
 1 " I call this," says Bishop Hampden, " a very remarkable 
 injunction of the Service for the Ordination of Priests; because, 
 in no other church is the like commission given to any other but 
 to the highest order of the ministry, the bishops of the church 
 exclusively. Neither in the Greek forms of ordination, nor in the 
 Roman Pontifical, do we find any such charge given to the min- 
 isters of the inferior orders, but only to the bishops. All that is 
 exacted of the priest and the deacon, according to the formu- 
 laries of the Greek and Roman churches, is the promise of obedi- 
 ence to the bishops ; an absolute and summary power being vested 
 in the bishop to restrain and censure them at his discretion." 
 Memorials of Bishop Hampden, p. 196. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE PURITANS. 327 
 
 II. 
 
 When the church was established, under Queen 
 Elizabeth, in the shape which it still substantially 
 retains, it was confronted by another theory of the 
 church and the ministry, which was plainly irrecon- 
 cilable with its own. The Puritans, or, as they were 
 afterwards known, the Presbyterians, had derived 
 from Calvin the principle that the clergy held a 
 divine commission directly from God to teach a sys- 
 tem of authoritative doctrine, and in God's name to 
 rule and administer discipline in the congregation. 
 From such a point of view the order of the Church 
 of England was plainly opposed to Scripture, in which 
 discipline no longer existed, where authority was vested 
 in the sovereign, or in a body like Parliament, of which 
 the great majority were laymen. The inevitable con- 
 flict was precipitated by the Act of Uniformity put 
 forth by Parliament in 1559, which made the use of 
 the Book of Common Prayer binding upon the clergy 
 and the people throughout the kingdom. Whatever 
 the bishops may have thought regarding their own 
 prerogative, there is no doubt of the fact that Queen 
 Elizabeth regarded them as convenient servants of the 
 crown, for enforcing its will throughout their jurisdic- 
 tions. The Puritan or Presbyterian clergy, who were 
 not yet separated as a body from the communion of 
 the church, resisted the law which commanded the use 
 of the Prayer-Book, and soon passed from the stage 
 of hostility to the petty details of ritual, to a denial 
 of the authority of bishops to enforce its use ; the 
 episcopate was denounced as a " man-made " institu- 
 tion, having no sanction in Scripture ; and gradually 
 the feeling arose that it was a Christian duty to sepa- 
 
328 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 rate from their communion. When the state entered 
 into the struggle, and bishops and sovereign endeav- 
 ored to enforce uniformity and to suppress the ob- 
 noxious dissidents, the Puritans entered the third 
 stage of the controversy and resisted the arbitrary 
 policy of the crown. Thus was precipitated the civil 
 war, which led to the temporary establishment of the 
 commonwealth under the protectorate of Cromwell, 
 and the momentary ascendency of Presbyterianism. 
 
 The controversy about church authority is interest- 
 ing because it concealed deeper issues than the com- 
 batants on either side acknowledged. Before speaking 
 of the ultimate consequences which flowed from it, the 
 positions assumed on either side deserve a brief con- 
 sideration. Hooker, the greatest intellect whom the 
 Church of England had then produced, and who died 
 as the seventeenth century was opening, had taken the 
 ground, in the first five books of his " Church Polity," 
 that the organization of the church was not to be de- 
 duced from Scripture, but was a thing to be judged 
 and regulated by common sense, and convenience. 
 Even if it were not found in the Bible, it was no less 
 divine, because all established order was divine, hav- 
 ing its basis in the very bosom of God, from whom all 
 law acquired its sacred and binding character. Even 
 if the order of bishops was a " man-made" institu- 
 tion, as the Puritans alleged, and its origin and growth 
 could be traced in the early church, coming out of an 
 antecedent order of some other kind, yet, as Hooker 
 reasoned, that did not impugn its divineness, provided 
 it was convenient for the maintenance of the well-be- 
 ing of the church. 1 But such a lofty and comprehen- 
 
 1 Or, in the words of Matthew Arnold, " Hooker's great work 
 against the iinpugners of the order and discipline of the Church 
 
THE PRINCIPLE INVOLVED. 329 
 
 sive conception of the true nature of church govern- 
 ment did not commend itself either to the bishops or 
 the Puritan clergy. The Church of England had in- 
 sensibly imbibed the Puritan view that Scripture con- 
 tained an authoritative revelation not only of a system 
 of doctrine, but of church government as well. More- 
 over, it was not in the nature of bishops, when their 
 order was attacked as a " man-made " institution, not 
 to resent the charge. 1 From this time we hear again 
 the familiar refrain in Bancroft, Andrews, Laud, and 
 others, of that doctrine of apostolic succession, which 
 had been elaborated in the Latin church under Ter- 
 tullian, Irenaeus, and Cyprian. 
 
 of England was written (and this is too indistinctly seized by 
 many who read it), not because Episcopalianism is essential, but 
 because its impugners maintained that Presbyterianism is essen- 
 tial and that Episcopalianism is sinful." Culture and Anarchy, p. 
 xxxvii. See, also, Hunt, Relig. Thought in England, i. pp. 57, 58. 
 The following passage from Hooker would seem to be sufficient «/ 
 to put all doubt upon this point to an end : — 
 
 " Which divisions and contentions might have easily been pre- 
 vented, if the orders which each church did think fit and conven- 
 ient for itself had not so peremptorily been established under 
 high commanding form, which tendered them unto the people as 
 things everlastingly required by the law of that Lord of Hosts 
 against whose statutes there is no exception to be taken. For by 
 this it came to pass that one church could not but condemn an- 
 other of disobedience to the will of Christ." Keble's ed. p. 101. 
 
 1 The " Preface " to the Ordinal is conceived in the spirit of 
 Cranmer and Hooker rather than in that of Bancroft and Laud. 
 It affirms it to be evident from the study of Scripture and an- 
 cient authors that there have always been these three orders in 
 the church, and that their maintenance, so strictly preserved, tes- 
 tifies to their importance — a general statement which commands 
 assent on the ground of its apparent truth. But this is a very 
 different thing from saying that Scripture contains a definite 
 form of church government which is unalterably binding by di- 
 vine command, that it is a part of the revelation which Christ 
 came to bring, and that to dissent from it is of the nature of sin. 
 
380 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 The hostility of the leaders of the Church of Eng- 
 land to the Puritans led them also to dislike that sys- 
 tem of doctrine which, under the name of Calvinism, 
 had been accepted to a large extent in the church dur- 
 ing the sixteenth century, which had been taught at 
 its great universities and held by its great divines. 1 
 There grew up in consequence a system of theology in 
 the Church of England widely remote from that which 
 the reformers had accepted, the details of which are 
 so familiar that it is only necessary to allude to them. 
 The church became again practically identified with 
 the episcopate — a personification as it were of Deity 
 Himself, a mysterious entity intrusted with the divine 
 gifts necessary for human salvation ; the sacraments 
 became the channels of grace ; baptism secured the re- 
 mission of original sin, and implanted in the soul a 
 principle of life, which was nourished in the Eucha- 
 rist ; the bishops conveyed to the clergy, by a tactual 
 process, the power to administer the sacraments with 
 validity. The ritual became more ornate, a tendency 
 appeared to restore the confessional and the custom 
 of praying for the dead, tradition resumed its old au- 
 thority, and the church claimed to be the custodian 
 and interpreter of Scripture. While all this was a 
 return to the spirit of Latin Christianity, yet there 
 were also elements in what is known as High Angli- 
 canism, which may be interpreted as a desire to restore 
 neglected truths which Puritanism had discarded. In 
 the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, as asserted by 
 seventeenth century divines, as well as in other fea- 
 
 1 Calvin's Institutes had been used as a text-book at Oxford 
 and Cambridge in the sixteenth century. Archbishop Whitgift 
 had endeavored to get the Thirty-Nine Articles amended so as 
 to include the distinctive points of the Calvinistic theology. 
 
RISE OF HIGH ANGLICANISM. 331 
 
 tures of the system, we may discern an effort, however 
 blind, to escape from the arbitrary principle of elec- 
 tion as taught by the Puritans, by resting the Chris- 
 tian life upon a larger basis in some universal law. 
 The reverence for antiquity was the expression of the 
 feeling that all truth must have its roots in the con- 
 sciousness of the past. The importance assigned to 
 the principle of salvation through the church, instead 
 of by individual effort, may be viewed as a desire to 
 regain the sense of the solidarity or collective life of 
 the human family in opposition to the individualism 
 which, by making men stand alone in solitary isolation, 
 threatened to disintegrate the sacred fellowship of hu- 
 manity. 
 
 But whatever interpretation we may claim as the 
 under-current of a movement, which on its face was 
 a feeble imitation of mediaeval Christianity, the im- 
 portant fact remains to emphasize that in England in 
 the seventeenth century two systems confronted each 
 other, each calling itself divine, each claiming for its 
 clergy a divine appointment and sanction, each declar- 
 ing the other false and untrue to the word of God. 
 As time went on, there grew up a third movement 
 known as Independency or Congregationalism, which 
 denounced Presbyterianism as un scriptural, and de- 
 manded for the laity a place in the government of the 
 church. The Independents not only deduced from the 
 Bible a still different form of church government from 
 any hitherto taught, but they took a further step to- 
 ward dissolving the larger fellowship of Christendom 
 by declaring the entire and absolute independence 
 of the local body of believers. It remained for the 
 movement known as the Baptist, which followed on 
 the heels of Independency, to finally dispel the larger 
 
332 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 vision of a redeemed humanity in which even uncon- 
 scious children participated, and of which infant bap- 
 tism might be regarded as an expressive symbol. The 
 Baptists were only more consistent interpreters of Cal- 
 vin's theology than their predecessors. So long as the 
 incarnation was resolved into an arrangement for sav- 
 ing from the consequences of sin, or for securing the 
 salvation of the elect, the baptism of children was an 
 unintelligible performance ; it was pointing to another 
 and higher interpretation of the incarnation of which 
 no trace is discerned in the Puritan theology — the 
 actual redemption of all mankind. The number of 
 sects received one further addition by the appearance 
 of the Quakers, who also drew from Scripture the tenet 
 that a regularly constituted and educated ministry was 
 unnecessary, and even an injury to the well-being of 
 a true church. The hireling clergy, as they were 
 called, were only an obstacle in the way of the inner 
 revelation of the spirit. The churches, to the mind of 
 the Quakers, had all alike missed the true reading of 
 Scripture in adherence to outward worship and visible 
 sacraments. 
 
 It is an interesting question why in England differ- 
 ing religious opinions should have been embodied in 
 hostile organizations, when in Germany they rarely 
 led to separation from the Lutheran communion. It 
 was owing in a great measure to the attitude of the 
 Tudor sovereigns in enforcing their will upon the na- 
 tion, a policy which the Stuart dynasty endeavored to 
 follow out when the age would no longer endure it. 
 But the fullest answer to such an inquiry must admit 
 an ulterior element in the problem, — that God had 
 chosen England as the theatre in which the develop- 
 ment of human freedom should be exhibited for the 
 
MORAL OF THE PURITAN STRUGGLE. 333 
 
 benefit of the larger world. The moral of the Puritan 
 struggle against the authority of the Church of Eng- 
 land does not lie, as some fondly think, in the con- 
 fusion and enmities which arise when ecclesiastical 
 uniformity is broken down. The confusion may be 
 only the sign of a deeper life. The evils of the sec- 
 tarian spirit, the divisions and subdivisions of relig- 
 ious parties, undoubtedly weakened the true church 
 idea, which aims at the largest, most comprehensive 
 human fellowship as the truest expression of the one 
 common spirit that indwells in humanity. 1 But little 
 as the actors in the great struggle might discern its 
 full significance, it can now be seen that the confu- 
 sions eventually ministered to a higher order. The 
 rigid, invincible exclusiveness of hostile sects became 
 the indispensable condition for obtaining religious tol- 
 eration. It was for civil and religious freedom that 
 the English people had been blindly striving through 
 all the confused and complicated struggles" of the 
 seventeenth century. When the principle of religious 
 toleration had been acknowledged, the confusions and 
 
 1 How great these evils were is shown by the contemporaneous 
 testimony of witnesses who themselves contributed largely to the 
 confusions of their time. " We are a people," said Cromwell, 
 " that have been unhinged these twelve years ; as if scattering 
 and division and confusion came upon us like things that we de- 
 sired, these which are the greatest plagues that God ordinarily 
 lays upon nations for sin." Milton, in the latter years of his life, 
 is described as attending no place of public worship ; " he was 
 above the sects and loathed their mutual jarrings." Bunyan, 
 who was a Baptist, said, " I would be and hope I am a Christian. 
 But as for those factious titles of Ana-Baptists, Independents. 
 Presbyterians, and the like, I conclude that they came neither 
 from Jerusalem nor Antioch, but rather from hell and Babylon. 
 For they naturally tend to divisions : You may know them by 
 their fruits." — Quoted from Curteis's Bampton Lectures, p. 227. 
 
334 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 the enmities subsided, and England entered into the 
 serene and placid atmosphere of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. 
 
 III. 
 
 The eighteenth century occupies a large and impor- 
 tant place in the history of Christian thought. The 
 traditional theology, as it had been developed in the 
 Latin church, as it had descended unchanged in its 
 fundamental aspects to the Protestant theologians of 
 the seventeenth century, was now compelled to enter 
 into conflict with the human reason. Once before, in 
 the time of Abelard, a similar process had been sum- 
 marily arrested by the power of the church ; but no 
 power now existed which could hinder its progress. 
 The movement which defied the traditional theology 
 may be said to date from the English Revolution in 
 1688, when religious toleration was granted to the dis- 
 senting sects. In the course of its development every 
 dogma of the church was assaulted, whether in its 
 Latin or its Protestant form. How far we still are 
 from a common understanding in regard to the work 
 of the eighteenth century is shown by the divergent 
 estimates of its significance in our own day : to some 
 it appears as if inspired by an evil agency for the de- 
 struction of the truth ; to others, a necessary part in 
 a divine process by which God was taking away the 
 old that he might establish the new. 
 
 Before speaking of the movement known as deism, 
 or rationalism, it is necessary to revert once more, 
 even at the risk of repetition, to the place in history 
 which is occupied by the seventeenth century. It is 
 here that the clew is apt to be lost by the student of 
 religious thought. The political history of the period 
 
I 
 
 THEOLOGICAL RETROGRESSION. 335 
 
 which follows the Reformation has been thoroughly 
 and impartially explored ; but in the history of theol- 
 ogy there still exists confusion, owing for the most 
 part to the continued rivalry of the sects which then 
 took their rise, which still nourish the prejudices of 
 that remote epoch as part of a sacred heritage. Even 
 now, there are those to whom the names of Charles I. 
 or of Archbishop Laud are dear as martyrs for the 
 truth, with whom the name of Baxter is a lauffhiii"-- 
 stock, and the memory of Cromwell is execrated. 
 Churchmen cannot forget or forgive, much less ex- 
 plain, the mortal insult to the establishment in the 
 civil war ; Presbyterians and their Puritan sympa- 
 thizers are still painfully affected when they recall the 
 Act of Uniformity of 1662, with the sufferings it en- 
 tailed upon their ancestors. 
 
 The difficulty in tracing the line of progress in 
 theological thought through this age of confusion is 
 owing also to the fact that theology seems to have gone 
 backward, reverting again to those principles of Latin 
 Christianity which the Reformation had discarded. 
 The influence of Zwingle ceased to be felt after the 
 rise of Calvin. In the Lutheran systems of theology 
 of the seventeenth century one can scarcely hear the 
 voice of Luther. His doctrine of justification by faith 
 was so changed as hardly to be recognized ; his free- 
 dom in the use of Scripture gave way to a bondage to 
 the letter which put the Bible in the place of Christ ; 
 the rights of private judgment were usurped by a tra- 
 ditional method of biblical interpretation. In Eng- 
 land the comprehensive spirit and lofty ethical tone 
 of the reformers, such as Cranmer, Jewell, or Hooker, 
 yielded in the next age to the contracted vision and 
 narrow ecclesiastical policy of men like Bancroft, 
 
336 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 Andrews, or Laud. Calvinism alone continued to 
 thrive in its native purity, whether on the continent 
 or in England. 
 
 The cause of this theological retrogression must be 
 sought in the great Catholic reaction which was led 
 by the Jesuits. Even before the death of Luther it 
 had become apparent that the immediate result of the 
 Reformation had been to put two armies in the field 
 which must prepare for battle. The old church, after 
 awakening from the lethargy in which the Reforma- 
 tion found it, determined upon the effort to regain 
 what it had lost. The wars in the Netherlands, the 
 Thirty Years' War in Germany, the papal intrigues 
 against the throne in England, have their counterpart 
 in the theological controversies of the seventeenth 
 century. When the Jesuits arose, declaring that the 
 maligned church of the Middle Ages, with all its 
 abuses and corruptions, with its services and ritual, 
 and offices of every kind, was consecrated by the will 
 of God, — that to touch any, even the least of these, 
 for the purpose of reform, was to raise one's hand 
 against God ; when, in the strength of this conviction, 
 they went forth everywhere to restore the old order, 
 regarding every means as justifiable which conduced 
 to such a meritorious end, it was necessary that Prot- 
 estantism should step down from the heights it had 
 occupied in a great creative epoch, and gird itself 
 for the conflict with a deadly foe by borrowing its 
 armor. 
 
 It is here that Calvinism finds its place in the 
 philosophy of history. Its merit lay in its ability to 
 resist Jesuitism on its own ground. It did not hesi- 
 tate to identify Calvin's opinions with the divine will. 
 In this respect its audacity may be equalled, but is 
 
CONTROVERSY WITH ROME. 337 
 
 not surpassed, by the disciples of Loyola. Calvinism 
 was the fighting mood of the Reformation. It de- 
 serves admiration and praise for what it accomplished, 
 as do the sovereigns of England, Henry VIII. and 
 Queen Elizabeth, for their devotion to the principle 
 of absolute government, or the Stuarts and High 
 Anglicans for their assertion of divine right, which 
 did much to save the national independence against 
 the intrigues of Rome. 
 
 The theological entrenchment which was built up in 
 the emergency of the conflict with Rome, and chiefly 
 under the inspiration of Calvin, was the authority of 
 Scripture as a communication from God, miraculously 
 given and preserved, to whose teaching" reason and 
 tradition must bow, — an authority supreme in all 
 that related to the doctrine, the worship, and the dis- 
 cipline of the church. To have held with Luther, 
 that Scripture was to be tested by the inward experi- 
 ence, or with Zwingle, that there was an inner word 
 of God in the human reason, by which the word of 
 God, as given in the book, was to be judged, — posi- 
 tions like these were thought to be of little avail in 
 the controversy with Rome. To have allowed the 
 reason to examine or criticise the contents of the Bible 
 would have been to weaken its authority. 1 Its very 
 style and letter had been dictated by the Holy Spirit 
 to men who acted as only mechanical amanuenses ; no 
 human element had been permitted to participate in 
 
 1 The Duchess of Fer^ara had intimated to Calvin that the 
 higher spirit of the New Testament condemned such acts, re- 
 corded in the old dispensation, as the execration of his enemies 
 by David. But Calvin answered that to take such liberties 
 with Scripture would undermine its authority. Henry, Leben 
 Calvin'Sf i. 452. 
 
 22 
 
338 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 the communication of so divine a message. The 
 Bible was as distinct in kind, and separated from all 
 other books, as God is distinct and separate from the 
 world. 
 
 So far as the controversy with Rome was concerned, 
 it must be admitted that the Protestant position was 
 a strong one. Transubstantiation, the additional sac- 
 raments, image-worship, the cultus of Mary and of the 
 saints, purgatory, prayers for the dead, the papacy and 
 the hierarchy, — for none of these could there be found 
 any support in Scripture. Admitting, as Rome did, 
 the premise of its opponents that the Bible was " a 
 book of which God was the author," it was continu- 
 ally tempted away from its own stronghold in tradi- 
 tion, and was worsted in the encounter whenever it 
 sought refuge in Scripture. But when the war with 
 Rome w r as over, the situation changed. A new era 
 began, in which it might have been possible to take up 
 the line of advance where it had been dropped in the 
 sixteenth century, had it not been necessary first to 
 get rid of the false attitude which Protestantism had 
 assumed under the leadership of Calvin, and which 
 long continued to embarrass the progress of Christian 
 thought. 
 
 It is customary to-day, now that Calvinism is spoken 
 of as something from which we have been emancipated, 
 to drop a pious tear to its memory or to eulogize the 
 services which it has rendered to humanity. But it 
 is not quite so clear that these eulogies are deserved. 
 The service which it rendered cannot be traced alto- 
 gether to its theology as its inspiring source ; the evil 
 which it has done is all its own. Had not the system 
 of Calvin, like that of the mediaeval church, possessed 
 some features of a common Christianity which still 
 
REASON IN THEOLOGY. 339 
 
 exerted their influence, despite the restrictions with 
 which they were bound, or had it not as a system been 
 engrafted upon a people whom God had chosen, with 
 whom lay the future of the world, whose native in- 
 stincts and powers were still in the freshness and 
 hopefulness of youth, far from the period when de- 
 cline and decay would assimilate them to the ex- 
 hausted races of history, — had it not been for condi- 
 tions like these, Calvinism, like Mohammedanism, 
 might have been an incubus too heavy to be thrown 
 off, and have dragged humanity down to a lower plane 
 where liberty and progress would have seemed like 
 the baseless fabric of a dream. It was not the in- 
 fluence of Calvinism which has given the modern 
 world its superiority. It is quite as legitimate to be- 
 lieve, that, because so large a part of Protestant Chris- 
 tendom refused to accept it, the world is what it is 
 to-day. 
 
 The deistic movement did not appear until after its 
 essential principle had been reached by leading divines 
 in the age of the English Revolution. 1 Even during 
 the period of the commonwealth, there were not want- 
 ing those like Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, or Hales, 
 who had seen that the Bible was not to be identified 
 with any one definite system of doctrines, the accept- 
 ance of which was a necessary condition of salvation. 
 The internal conflicts of Protestant sects which were 
 attended with so much bitterness and scurrility, the 
 hatreds generated by theological differences, the grow- 
 ing complications of the theological method, all tended 
 
 1 Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who lived in the first half of the 
 seventeenth century, is BOmetimes mentioned as the first deist. 
 But he stood by himself, and his thought grew out of other con- 
 ditions than those which originated the later movement. 
 
340 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 to impress men with the conviction that peace and 
 security could only be attained by adopting some other 
 standard in theology than the appeal to Scripture. It 
 was impossible any longer to fall back upon the au- 
 thority of the church, as Anglican divines had sought 
 to do in the early part of the century. Church author- 
 ity had fallen into discredit with its failure to over- 
 come Puritanism, as well as by its inability to restrict 
 that liberty of thought which was leading to the re- 
 jection of all external authority in religion. If the 
 church had not been able to prevent the evil by its 
 appeal to antiquity, how could it be expected to cure 
 it? There was only one ground to take, if religion 
 was to be saved from the inroads of the invading skep- 
 ticism, and that was to assert the supremacy of the 
 reason. 
 
 The Cambridge school of Platonists, which flour- 
 ished in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and 
 whose disciples belonged for the most part to the 
 Church of England, were agreed in proclaiming the 
 reason as having a divine quality. " Scripture faith," 
 said Cudworth, " is not a mere believing of historical 
 things and upon artificial arguments or testimonies 
 only, but a certain higher and diviner power in the soul 
 that peculiarly correspond eth with Deity." 1 Which- 
 cote believed that there was no incongruity between the 
 grace of God and the use of the reason. Rationality 
 had a divine foundation. " The spirit in man is the 
 candle of the Lord, lighted by God, and lighting man 
 to God." To go against reason, therefore, was to go 
 against God, for reason was the very voice of Deity. 
 The Bible was not the only or even the first discovery 
 to man of his duty. It only gathered and repeated and 
 1 Preface to Intellectual System of the Universe. 
 
THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS. 341 
 
 reinforced the principles of truth scattered through all 
 of God's creation. 1 Another member of the same 
 school, John Smith, saw in revelation " the free influx 
 of the divine mind upon our minds and understand- 
 ings." 2 In his book on the " Light of Nature," Cul- 
 verwell, a Puritan divine, asserted the supreme author- 
 ity of the reason in matters of religion ; to blaspheme 
 the reason " is to reproach Heaven itself, to dishonor 
 the God of reason, and to question the beauty of His 
 image." 3 Archbishop Tillotson, the great preacher 
 of his age, whose popularity enabled him, as it were, 
 to set the fashion in theology, affirmed that every doc- 
 trine before it could be received must be " judged by 
 its accordance with those ideas of the divine character 
 which are implanted in man by nature." 4 
 
 The importance attached to the religion of nature is 
 the most prominent characteristic of formal theology 
 in the eighteenth century. In any attempt to trace 
 the development of Christian thought, the profound- 
 est significance must be attributed to the fact that 
 natural theology should have taken the place of re- 
 vealed religion, as the one absorbing subject of hu- 
 man interest and inquiry. In a change like this there 
 was implied a revolution at the very basis of Chris- 
 tian theology. The extent of the change, which the 
 transition reveals, may be seen by reverting to the 
 time when Thomas Aquinas first made the memorable 
 distinction between natural and revealed religion. 
 He had made the distinction in the interest of re- 
 
 1 Whichcote's Aphorisms, quoted in Tulloch, Rational Theology 
 in the Church of England, vol. ii. p. 100. 
 
 2 Discourse v. c. 3. 
 
 3 Tulloch, ii. p. 416. 
 
 4 Sermons, vol. iii. p. 485. 
 
342 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 vealed religion, either for the purpose of carrying 
 out his analogy between the kingdoms of nature and 
 of grace, or in order to get rid of speculative dif- 
 ficulties which had been raised by the progress of 
 heresy. But in the thirteenth century no practical im- 
 portance was assigned to the distinction. Natural re- 
 ligion had been passed over as unworthy of the notice 
 of those to whom a revealed theology had been in- 
 trusted. In the eighteenth century the situation was 
 reversed : revealed religion was sinking into abeyance 
 or neglect, while the religion of nature commanded an 
 almost exclusive attention. 
 
 But the transition was not a sudden one. The prep- 
 aration for it had been going on within the human 
 consciousness, in obscure and devious ways, from the 
 time when Latin theology had emphasized the separa- 
 tion of humanity from God on the one hand, or from 
 nature on the other. 1 In the ready acceptance of the 
 miraculous, which was a characteristic of popular Chris- 
 tianity from an early date, may be seen the traces of a 
 surviving though latent belief in some organic rela- 
 tionship between man and his environment. The mar- 
 vels and wonderful legends of the Middle Ages were 
 the substitute for science. The taste for the miracu- 
 lous points to a view of nature which sees in it the 
 
 1 " There is also a considerable difference between the Greek 
 and Latin Fathers in respect of their estimate of nature and its 
 service to theology. Largely imbued with the genial spirit, as 
 well as employing the language of ancient Greece, the Fathers of 
 the Alexandrian school regarded nature with somewhat of that 
 comprehensive and tender sympathy which distinguished the 
 most nature-loving people of antiquity. Among these nature 
 seems partly relieved from her ancillary position, and is awarded 
 her own merits independently of theology." — Owen, Evenings 
 with the Skeptics, ii. p. 437. 
 
IMPORTANCE ATTACHED TO NATURE. 343 
 
 reflection of the human spirit, as if it contained a 
 response to humanity in its deeper moods or in the 
 crises of its career. In the marvelous effects which 
 were wrought by relics and dead men's bones, in the 
 recuperative power that lurked in the touch of a holy 
 man, in the inanimate images that winked or bowed 
 in response to prayers, — in the belief in these was 
 an unconscious testimony to the truth that the mate- 
 rial world stands in close relation to the experience 
 and aspirations of the human spirit. We may read 
 the same unconscious testimony in Gothic architecture, 
 as if, when the Teutonic people first gave expression 
 to the spiritual life that stirred within them, they were 
 inspired by the ancient religion of nature with its cul- 
 tus developed in the native forests of Germany, before 
 Christianity had reached them. Xow and then, at rare 
 intervals, we hear voices in the Middle Ages like those 
 of Bernard of Clair vaux or Francis of Assisi, which 
 tell of an intimate relationship between man and na- 
 ture, although the bond that unites them is still con- 
 cealed. Bernard speaks almost in a modern strain of 
 his delight in nature ; " You will find something," so 
 he writes, " far greater in the woods than you will in 
 books. Trees and stones will teach you that which 
 you will never learn from masters." In the exquisite 
 sites selected for their monasteries, as in England by 
 the Cistercian and Carthusian monks, it has been 
 thought may be read the growing inclination for com- 
 munion with nature, for which the heart hungered, 
 wdiile its study was condemned as fatal to the w r ell- 
 being of the soul. 
 
 After the study of nature had begun, under the in- 
 fluence of Aristotle, its progress was slow, owing to 
 the prejudice it encountered from the accepted prin- 
 
344 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 ciple that nature was not only subordinate to revela- 
 tion, but that the law of nature had been abrogated in 
 the kingdom of the supernatural. But though the 
 interest in religious questions was still supreme, al- 
 though the Reformation diverted attention for a while 
 from all other issues, the conviction was secretly cher- 
 ished that the study of nature was closely connected 
 with theology. Raymund of Sabunde : may be called 
 the first clear herald of the truth that God's revela- 
 tion of Himself in the outer world or in the nature of 
 man is the foundation upon which rests all certitude 
 in religious knowledge. The spirit of the German 
 reformation tended in the same direction. 2 If the 
 appreciation of nature finds no expression in the the- 
 ologians who succeeded Luther and Zwingle, yet with 
 
 1 On Raymund of Sabunde or Sabieude, see Owen, Evenings 
 with the Skeptics, c. xi. 
 
 " The Book of Nature has always occupied a more or less sub- 
 ordinate position in all the great religions of the world. Bud- 
 dhism despises nature and tramples it under foot ; Judaism, in 
 its later phases, has recognized it, but by no means admits it to a 
 footing of equality; Mohammedanism ignores it ; Christianity has 
 for the most part patronized it as a corroborative but altogether 
 subsidiary proof of its own truth. Raymund of Sabieude is 
 the first Christian writer who not only vindicates the right of the 
 Book of Nature to an equality with Holy Writ, but who asserts 
 the superiority in many respects of the former over the latter. 
 According to Raymund, the Bible is only true so far as its utter- 
 ances agree with and are confirmed by the higher testimony of 
 nature." Vol. ii. p. 448. 
 
 2 As compared with Luther and Zwingle, Calvin was indiffer- 
 ent to nature. Although living for so many years at Geneva, he 
 made no allusion in his letters, says his biographer, to the won- 
 derful beauty by which he was surrounded. 
 
 On the place which nature holds in Milton's poetry, cf. De 
 Laprade, Le Sentiment de la Nature chez les Modemes, pp. 240- 
 250. 
 
RISE OF LANDSCAPE PAINTING. 345 
 
 the German mystics of the seventeenth century, who 
 more truly represent them than those who clung to 
 the letter of their teaching', there is a vital connection 
 between the spiritual life in man and the external 
 world. Through their contact with nature they had 
 been aided in reaching a closer relationship to God 
 than they could gain from the received theology. 
 Jacob Bolnne was accustomed to see all things " en- 
 vironed with a divine light ; " in the outward world 
 was reflected to his vision an inner spiritual world ; 
 through the contemplation of nature, the mind of man 
 rose to an insight into the inmost essence and glory 
 of God. 1 It is a curious fact that Arndt, one of the 
 most practical and spiritual of German mystics, should 
 have been suspected of tampering with alchemy, or of 
 making gold by the use of the philosopher's stone. 
 It is also a circumstance of no slight importance, that 
 almost contemporaneous with the mysticism that de- 
 manded a closer alliance between nature and hu- 
 manity should have been the appearance of land- 
 scape painting, as an especial branch of art, in which 
 nature was presented for the first time for its own 
 sake, and not as the setting for some historical sub- 
 ject or human drama. 2 The mystic and the artist 
 
 1 For the influence of Bohme upon Sir Isaac Newton, see an 
 interesting note in Overton, Life and Opinions of the Rev. William 
 Law, p. 189. According to Law, " Sir Isaac ploughed with Bell- 
 men's heifer." 
 
 2 " Durant tout le moyen age, la figure humaine avait seule 
 paru digue d'occuper l'art humain. Qu' etaii ce que le pa 
 dans les fresques du treizieme et du quatorzieme siecle ? II 
 n'existait pas, les peintres semblaieni ne pas avoir regarde la face 
 de la terre maudite. Michel-Ange lui-meme meprisait tout ce 
 qui n'est pas de 1' homme. C'est contre ce point de vue de 
 P^p-lise que s'eleve Leonard de Vinci, dans son Traite de la 
 
346 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 were like sensitive barometers foretelling subtle 
 changes in the spiritual atmosphere. 
 
 By the opening of the eighteenth century the results 
 achieved in the study of nature had begun to be, ap- 
 parent. The discoveries of Galileo, of Kepler, of 
 Harvey, of Leibnitz, and Newton had illustrated the 
 principle that the outward world is organized and 
 governed in accordance with uniform law. The in- 
 ference was a natural and inevitable one, that, if 
 Deity revealed Himself in nature, He had also re- 
 vealed Himself in the constitution of man, — that in 
 a religion according: to nature must be sought the 
 principles which should guide human conduct and 
 the basis of certitude in the knowledge of God. In 
 religion, as in science, a silent revolution had taken 
 place, modifying the conception of God, which lay 
 at the basis of the Calvinistic theology. The notion 
 of Deity as absolute will, unconditioned by a law of 
 righteousness to which it must conform, yielded to 
 the conviction that the divine will is subordinated to 
 a law which constitutes the ground of the divine 
 nature ; or, in the words of Bishop Butler, " I have 
 argued upon the principles of the fatalists, which I do 
 not believe, and have omitted a thing of the utmost 
 importance, which I do believe, — the moral fitness 
 and unfitness of actions, prior to all will whatever, 
 which I apprehend as certainly to determine the di- 
 vine conduct as speculative truth and falsehood nec- 
 essarily determine the divine judgment." : 
 
 peinture ; relevant de sa decheance l'univers visible, il replace 
 l'horame au sein de toutes les formes de la creation." — Quinet, 
 Les Revolutions aVItalie, c. 8. 
 1 Analogy, part ii. c. 8. 
 
NATURAL THEOLOGY. 347 
 
 IV. 
 
 The religion of nature, as it was generally under- 
 stood in the eighteenth century, included, as its pri- 
 mary tenets, the existence of God, the immortality of 
 the soul, the necessity of virtue, and a future state 
 of rewards and punishments. The great advantage of 
 the religion of nature, which commended it to all alike, 
 whether deists or their opponents, was its simplicity, 
 as contrasted with the intricacies of revealed theology ; 
 its universality, as compared with the divergent and 
 contradictory teaching of hostile sects ; its unalterable- 
 ness, as built upon the eternal and uniform laws of 
 nature. It was a religion peculiarly fitted to meet the 
 skepticism and the decline of morality which set in 
 with the restoration of Charles II. However the de- 
 cline in morality is to be explained, whether, as was 
 generally thought, it was a reaction from the enforced 
 puritanical severity of the times of the commonwealth, 
 or whether it was owin^ to the contagion of French 
 example, it constituted a serious circumstance, chal- 
 lenging the attention of the church. To produce a 
 moral transformation now came to be regarded as the 
 end of religion — a view which was congenial to the 
 practical bias of the age. 
 
 As to the tenets of revealed religion there was a 
 general disposition to leave them in abe} T ance. It is 
 hard to resist the doubt that, even before the seven- 
 teenth century closed, those who best represented the 
 leading tendencies of the time had felt that the foun- 
 dations, on which the traditional theology rested, had 
 been shaken, — that it was no longer possible to jus- 
 tify their retention on the grounds either of reason or 
 of practical utility. But to pass them quietly by was 
 
348 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 impossible. The deists insisted on raising the question 
 of the relation between natural and revealed theology. 
 Toland, the author of a treatise entitled u Christian- 
 ity not Mysterious," which was published in 1696, 
 may be said to have opened the deistic controversy. 1 
 A man of impulsive temperament, he was led to speak 
 out what many others were thinking. There was 
 scarcely a point in the long controversy with the deists 
 which he was not the first to raise. His book pro- 
 duced an excitement only to be compared, in the his- 
 tory of religious thought, with Luther's posting of the 
 theses. His object, he said, was to defend Christian- 
 ity, to which end he had prayed that God would vouch- 
 safe His grace. It was his fundamental principle that 
 religion must be reasonable and intelligible. Reason 
 was above the authority of the fathers or of general 
 councils. As there can be no infallible interpreter 
 of Scripture in the past, it is by reason that the Bible 
 must be examined and interpreted. It was a mistake 
 to assert the authority of Scripture before examining 
 
 1 Mr. Hunt, in his History of Religious Thought, does not cliiss 
 Toland among the deists. Nor does the term " deist " apply ac- 
 curately to some other writers who are generally so designated. 
 The word is now used to indicate a certain conception of the De- 
 ity, such as the Jewish or Mohammedan, which makes impossible 
 the idea of the trinity. Hence it has lost its applicability to one 
 like Toland, who leaned toward pantheism. The German dis- 
 tinction between the Illuminati and the Rationalists, if applied 
 to the movement in England, would include Toland in the former 
 class. Illuminis'm was the application of the principle, that the 
 moral consciousness in man is divinely inspired, to any depart- 
 ment of human thought or interest, whether education or society, 
 literature or art. Rationalism was the effort to reconstruct re- 
 ligion upon the same principle by seeking for it in the Bible. 
 The English deists, properly so called, did not labor with the 
 Bible as did their German brethren. 
 
THE DEISTIC CONTROVERSY. 349 
 
 its contents, as it was also the fault of Protestants that 
 they had taken for granted that its teaching was to be 
 identified with the tenets of the sects. He combated 
 the principle that we should receive what we do not 
 understand, or that there were mysteries in Scripture 
 which, while above reason, were not contrary to reason. 
 Reason was the only ground of certainty. Whatever 
 has been revealed, has been revealed through reason. 
 Revelation is essentially an unveiling of that which 
 had not been understood. A mystery in religion is 
 something that has now been made clear which before 
 was not clear. In one sense, to be sure, all things are 
 mysterious, — even a blade of grass or any object in 
 the outer world whose essence we do not know. But 
 we do not speak of these as mysterious. So in religion, 
 while the essence of God is unknown, His character 
 and attributes are revealed. No Christian doctrine 
 can be properly called a mystery. All things in re- 
 ligion, as in nature, speak to the reason. There is 
 nothing in the gospel contrary to reason or above rea- 
 son. The notion that things might be above reason 
 and yet not contrary to it was a distinction without a 
 difference — a theological subterfuge or evasion. 
 
 The natural inference from Toland's position would 
 have been that God revealed Himself in and through 
 the human reason. But the inference which was 
 drawn was that he denied the existence or the neces- 
 sity of a revelation. On this point, while agreeing 
 in first principles, the Christian apologists divided 
 from those who were to be known as deists. Among 
 the opponents of deism, as it was now understood, 
 there was a general concurrence in maintaining that* 
 natural religion required for its efficiency to be sup- 
 plemented by a revelation. Christianity furnished ad- 
 
850 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 ditional motives to the practice of virtue, as in the 
 announcement of the doctrine of endless rewards and 
 punishments which the natural reason could not have 
 discovered, or in the clearer assertion of the doctrine 
 of immortality by the resurrection of Christ from the 
 dead. It was indeed hinted by some that such tradi- 
 tional tenets as original sin, the atonement, and the 
 sacraments still held a place in revelation ; but it was 
 done in the way of apology, as if there might be points 
 of view where they did not appear as altogether irra- 
 tional or useless. The stress of the controversy did not 
 turn upon questions like these. 
 
 In reply to these strictures upon natural religion the 
 deists maintained that natural religion was not only 
 clear, certain, and unalterable, but that it was suffi- 
 cient, without any addition or confirmation. Tindal, 
 who published his book called " Christianity as Old 
 as the Creation," in 1730, represents this advanced 
 stage of the controversy. He summed up the argu- 
 ments in behalf of the sufficiency of natural religion 
 by boldly declaring that Christianity was identical 
 with the religion of nature. In order to think rightly 
 concerning God, it was necessary to hold that He 
 should, from the first, have given men an adequate 
 knowledge of Himself, and of those elemental truths 
 by the obedience to which they might become accept- 
 able to Him. As much as this He must have done, 
 and more than this He could not have done. If the 
 law of nature is perfect, it can receive no additions ; 
 or if it was so imperfect at the beginning as to need 
 alterations, it argued a want of wisdom in the divine 
 lawgiver who promulgated it. " The law of nature is 
 absolutely perfect, it has the highest internal excel- 
 lence, the greatest plainness, simplicity, unanimity, 
 
THE LINES OF ARGUMENT. 351 
 
 universality, antiquity, and eternity. It does not 
 depend upon the uncertain meaning of words and 
 phrases in dead languages, much less upon types, 
 metaphors, allegories, parables, or on the skill or 
 honesty of weak or designing transcribed (not to 
 mention translators) for many ages together, but on 
 the immutable relation of things always visible to the 
 whole world." 
 
 As the controversy went on, two distinct lines of 
 procedure against deism were adopted. According 
 to the first of these, objections began to be made to 
 the law of nature, that it was not so perfect, so clear, 
 so universal as its advocates supposed. Even before 
 Bishop Butler appeared it had been often suggested 
 that if there were difficulties in revealed religion 
 there were also enigmas in the religion of nature. 
 It was shown that nature had its dark side, that it 
 was full of mysteries to faith, that the evil in the 
 world, on the whole, predominated over the good. 
 The pessimistic rule now assumed by the advocates of 
 revelation forced the deists to assert, as Leibnitz had 
 already been doing, that this was a perfect world after 
 all, the best possible of worlds, that the good more 
 than counterbalanced the evil, that the evil only ap- 
 peared to be such, and was in reality the good in dis- 
 guise, or, in the words of Pope : — 
 
 " Respecting man, whatever wrong we call 
 May, must be right as relative to all. 
 Discord is harmony not understood; 
 All partial evil universal good." 
 
 But in order to maintain the universal good, or " the 
 right relative to all," it was necessary to subordinate 
 the individual, or to count out his interests and expe- 
 rience as non-essential to the well-being of the whole. 
 
352 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 It is here that we touch the point where deism 
 entered upon its rapid decline as a proposed substi- 
 tute for Christianity. While there was a profound 
 truth in deism which the age did not grasp, and yet 
 only by the full acceptance of which could Christianity 
 be upheld as a divine revelation essential to man, there 
 was also a fatal lack in its premises, the influence of 
 which began to be disclosed when Shaftesbury and 
 Bolingbroke took up the movement at this point and 
 proceeded to carry it on to its necessary conclusion. 
 If divine Providence was revealed only in a care for 
 the general well-being, and did not extend to the indi- 
 vidual ; if God was manifested only in general laws, 
 whose operation might call for the sacrifice of the 
 individual, there must be, according to the current 
 reasoning of the time, an end to personal or churchly 
 religion. Prayer, whether in private or in the con- 
 gregation, must come to be regarded as a vain and 
 empty performance. With the depreciation of the 
 value of the individual soul in the sight of God there 
 would follow a weakening of the belief in personal 
 immortality. When the doctrine of immortality had 
 disappeared, morality would inevitably decline to a 
 cold, prudential estimate of duty. And, finally, God 
 Himself would be no longer necessary, His existence 
 would become an enigma, — a burden from which 
 men would be happier if they were free. Such was 
 the process by which the deism of Shaftesbury was 
 resolved into the atheism of Hume, to whom the 
 whole subject was an inexplicable mystery. 
 
 There was another line of procedure against deism 
 besides this negative method of finding defects in the 
 law of nature. If Christianity was identical with nat- 
 ural religion, how was the Bible to be accounted for, 
 
EVIDENCE FROM MIRACLES. 353 
 
 with its vast preparation, as if for some supernatural 
 disclosure ? Why should evangelists and apostles 
 have sealed their teaching with their blood, if Christ 
 had not come upon some supernatural delegation to 
 the world? The miracles which had been wrought 
 by Christ and His apostles were surely the evidence 
 that God had interposed in the affairs of the world, 
 either in order to communicate truth, which the human 
 reason could not have discovered, or to confirm and 
 give additional sanctions to the law of nature. 
 
 Upon this point there was complete accord among 
 the opponents of deism ; the signs of a revelation were 
 the miraculous exhibition of God's power in external 
 nature. The deists would be content only with inter- 
 nal evidence drawn from the fitness of things or the 
 testimony of the reason. They saw no necessity for 
 an interposition which, in its very nature, was opposed 
 to a government *of the world by law. It has been 
 often said that the philosopher, John Locke, laid the 
 foundations of the deistic movement. But Locke was 
 not a deist, and it was upon his views of the human 
 understanding that the Christian apologists rested in 
 combating deism. He distrusted the whole matter of 
 internal evidence. He rejected the theory of innate 
 ideas, as Descartes had held it, because it lacked clear- 
 ness ; under its cover the old confusion might return 
 about the nature of the mind from which he was seek- 
 ing an escape. In his book on the "Reasonableness 
 of Christianity," published in 1695, he maintained 
 that Christianity might be reduced to one single tenet, 
 that Christ was the Messiah, whose advent was fore- 
 told by prophets, the truth of whose divine mission had 
 been attested by miracles. Beyond that position the 
 orthodox theology of the eighteenth century did not go. 
 
 23 
 
354 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 The assault upon this position was opened by Col- 
 lins in his " Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of 
 the Christian Religion." In this work he took up one 
 line of the evidences for the Messiahship of Christ — 
 that drawn from the prophecies of the Old Testament. 
 To his mind it was a clear case that the prophecies 
 which were supposed to refer to Christ had a relation 
 only to contemporary events, that none of them had 
 been literally fulfilled, that it was only by the use of 
 the allegorical method of interpretation that any allu- 
 sion could be found in them to the being whom the 
 Christians claimed as Messiah. This attack upon 
 prophecy was followed by Woolston's effort to demol- 
 ish the evidence drawn from miracles. His scurrilous 
 and even blasphemous method in treating the subject 
 must not be allowed to diminish the importance of his 
 constructive attempt to show that the significance of 
 the miracles lay in the moral or spiritual truth which 
 they were designed to convey — an application, as he 
 proved, which had been made by the ancient fathers. 
 Neither of these treatises possessed any scientific value. 
 Collins's scholarship was defective, and it was gener- 
 ally believed that Woolston was insane. A much more 
 significant work in reference to miracles was Middle- 
 ton's " Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers which 
 are supposed to have existed in the Christian Church 
 through several successive Ages." The inquiry where 
 and on what grounds the line was to be drawn between 
 the miracles of the early ages of Christianity and the 
 ecclesiastical miracles of later ages raised another and 
 more important question as to the nature of all histor- 
 ical evidence. 
 
 We are thus led to the great controversy, which, 
 after the lapse of more than a hundred years, still goes 
 
AUTHENTICITY OF SCRIPTURE. 355 
 
 on with unabated ardor about the genuineness and 
 authenticity of the books of Scripture. The contribu- 
 tions to this controversy in its early stages, by English 
 writers, have only an historical interest. The answers 
 of the apologists to the attacks of the deists met the 
 demands of the hour, it may be, but they did not touch 
 the deeper principles involved in questions of historical 
 criticism. These lay beyond the vision of the eight- 
 eenth century. As to the deists, while they antici- 
 pated at times the modern lines of biblical criticism, 
 they were too much under the influence of deep-seated 
 prejudices and antagonisms to read the Bible any 
 longer in a right spirit. They had rejected the popular 
 theologv as it had been moulded under Calvin's influ- 
 ence, and they saw, or thought they saw, too much in 
 the Scriptures that sustained it. The Calvinistic sys- 
 tem, with a Jewish conception of Deity at its basis, had 
 made the Old Testament necessarily a favorite with 
 the Puritan churches. It is this which explains the 
 antipathy in every writer among the deists for Juda- 
 ism and its history. Nor could any amount of histor- 
 ical evidence reconcile them to the theological or dog- 
 matic view of the miracles of the New Testament. 
 Any hypothesis or alternative, however rash or ab- 
 surd, was welcome to them, if by it they could embar- 
 rass their adversaries. They assumed such attitudes 
 as would make the study of history impossible ; and 
 indeed for history itself they felt somewhat the same 
 contempt as they did for the ancient records of re- 
 vealed religion. Thev errew distrustful of all trans- 
 mitted written documents. They could more easily 
 believe in the willful perversions of transcribers or the 
 mistakes of translators, or in forgeries, of which, as in 
 the case of " Eikon Basilike," they had seen a recent 
 
356 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 illustration. If a great part of the English people, in- 
 cluding its scholars and clergy, could be thus imposed 
 upon by a bare-faced forgery in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, why should not similar attempts have been per- 
 petrated with success in the early ages, when men 
 were even more uncritical and there were fewer oppor- 
 tunities for detecting imposition. It was harder to 
 accept an obnoxious theology, which their reason and 
 moral nature condemned, than it was to admit that 
 evangelists and apostles had been falsifiers, dupes, or 
 impostors. But such gross charges against the apos- 
 tles shocked the Christian common sense of the peo- 
 ple, and enabled the apologists and evidence-writers 
 to win an easy victory. It was easy to show that the 
 apostles could not have been forgers or impostors or 
 dupes, and upon this line of evidence the adversaries 
 of the deists continued to ring the changes until the 
 century closed. 1 
 
 1 Among the more important works in recent years bearing 
 upon the history of deism may be mentioned : Lechler, Ge- 
 scliiclite des EngliscJien Deismus ; Pattison, Tendencies of Religious 
 Thought in England from 1688 to 1750: Hunt, Religious Thought 
 in England; Stephen, History of English Thought; Abbey and 
 Overton, English Church in the Eighteenth Century; Lanfrey, 
 UEglise et les Philosophes au lS me Siecle. Mr. Stephen has not 
 been content to enumerate merely the tenets of the different de- 
 istic writers, but he has undertaken to trace the inner significance 
 of the movement as a whole. Many of the distinctions which he 
 has made are valuable. But his range of vision is too short. He 
 belongs to that school of theological critics who find it confusing 
 to have meanings assigned to theological terms different from 
 those which they carried in the seventeenth century, and who de- 
 nounce the modern tendency to see in the old language a higher 
 meaning as an evasive if not dishonest process. At the expense, 
 however, of removing from such critics a convenient target, which 
 they have acquired great skill in hitting, it must be maintained 
 that the theologians of the Calvinistic era had no prescriptive 
 
DEISM IN FRANCE AND GERMANY. 357 
 
 When the deistic movement had exhausted itself 
 in England, as was the case before the middle of the 
 eighteenth century, it was taken up in France, and 
 thence passed into Germany. England was the coun- 
 try that led Europe in this mighty effort to reconstruct 
 religion and theology upon some other basis than that 
 which Augustine or Calvin had assumed. Voltaire, 
 with his keen vision, watched the process as it went 
 on in England, and drew his own conclusion. Rous- 
 seau adopted the principles of the religion of nature, 
 disseminating them in France by writings whose pop- 
 ularity has never been surpassed. A new school of 
 French philosophy and ethics arose, combining the 
 teaching of Loeke with that of the later deists. In 
 France, more than in England, there was reason for 
 suspecting lawgivers, kings, and priests of creating 
 and upholding systems for their own advantage. The 
 Latin church was more obnoxious to the illuminated 
 reason and conscience than the modified form which 
 it had assumed in the Protestant sects. The French 
 Revolution, in its relation to theology, was only a 
 more violent and disastrous effort than the English 
 Revolution had been, to get rid of the notion of God 
 
 right to fix forever the use of terms in theology, and that the 
 modern tendency is in reality older, as well as possessed of a 
 higher authority, than that which it aims to supersede. On the 
 history of rationalism in Germany, cf. Hagenbach, History of 
 the Church in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (translated 
 by Hurst) ; Kahilis, Internal History of German Protestantism ; 
 Hurst, History of Rationalism ; Amand Saiutes, Histoire Critique 
 du Rationalisme en Allemagne ; Tholuck, Abriss einer Geschichte 
 der Umwdlzung, welche seit 1750, aufdem Gebiete der Theologie in 
 Deutschland stattgefunden hat. Dr. Pusey's Historical Inquiry into 
 the cause of German infidelity is valuable, although retracted by 
 the author. 
 
358 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 which made Him the absolute will, as Augustine or 
 Loyola or Calvin had conceived Him, whose will, not 
 being grounded in a prior righteousness which the 
 reason of man could discern, had become a shelter 
 for worse abuses and tyrannies, whether ecclesiastical 
 or civil, than had ever been recorded in human 
 history. 
 
 The ideal of human government, as it had been 
 discerned under the influence of natural theology, 
 was a government according to constitutional law to 
 which the will of princes must be subordinated, just 
 as God was the constitutional ruler of the world, sub- 
 jecting His will to the eternal law of right. Upon 
 this truth was founded the American Republic, whose 
 indebtedness to the principles of the English deists 
 may be read in the opening sentences of the " Declara- 
 tion of Independence," which justify the revolt from 
 foreign rule by appealing to the " laws of nature " and 
 the " God of nature." 
 
 The movement which is known as " Illuminism " in 
 Germany was essentially the English deism, however 
 modified by passing under the influence of French 
 thought, or colored by the enthusiasm and subjectivity 
 of the German people. 1 As in England and France, 
 
 1 In this brief sketch of religious thought in the eighteenth 
 century I have confined myself to England, because the field is 
 a more familiar one, as also because the extent of the subject 
 makes it necessary to select some one particular country in which 
 to trace the operation of principles that were felt everywhere in 
 Christendom. It was England also that gave the impetus to the 
 revolt from the traditional theology. It is the more important to 
 call attention to this fact because there has long been a disposition 
 to saddle Germany with the responsibility of rationalism. On 
 the direct influence of English deism in Germany, see Lechler, 
 p. 447. 
 
ILLUMINISM AND RATIONALISM. 859 
 
 it carried with it the rejection, in root and branch, of 
 the Latin theology. It was attended by much that 
 was puerile and absurd, by an exaggerated senti- 
 mentalism peculiarity offensive to the English mind ; 
 but in Lessing, its chief representative, was a man of 
 whom his country has never seen reason to be ashamed, 
 whose fame is part of the world's heritage, who, coming 
 forth from the bosom of a Lutheran parsonage, has 
 conferred upon theology, no less than upon literature, 
 the highest obligation. Illuminism, like deism, as a 
 definite movement, or school of thought, had no en- 
 during existence ; but the influence which it exerted 
 indirectly in Germany was vast. Without it we 
 should not have had Herder or Jacobi or Jean Paul, 
 or, in a word, the modern German literature, or the 
 modern school of German philosophy. But influences 
 of another and higher kind had combined with its 
 essential principles before Schleiermacher appeared 
 as the herald of a new epoch in theology. On the 
 rationalism with which it was associated (rational- 
 ismus vulgaris*) it is unnecessary to dwell. It was 
 simply an effort to make the Bible conform to the 
 tenets of deism, as they were generally accepted, by 
 eliminating from Scripture, or explaining away in 
 various methods whatever was obnoxious or contra- 
 dictory. Such an attempt must end in Germany, as 
 it had done so far as it was attempted in England, in 
 utter and inglorious failure. But in its failure, with 
 all the negative results attending it, it had yet ac- 
 complished one manifest result of the highest value, 
 — it had shown that the Bible could no longer be 
 regarded as a miraculous book, whose composi 
 and interpretation violated the laws of the human 
 reason. The Bible could no longer be regarded as 
 
360 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 a storehouse from which to collate proof-texts in de- 
 fense of foregone conclusions. It had been demon- 
 strated that reason and the individuality of the differ- 
 ent writers entered into its composition, that it reflected 
 the local historical influences of the various times at 
 which its books had been written. Discrepancies had 
 been discovered, to reconcile which was too much for 
 human ingenuity. The effect of the discovery that 
 the human element entered so largely into what had 
 been supposed to be a purely divine communication 
 was, at first, to destroy faith in the authority of the 
 Bible as the record of a revelation from God. But 
 when this point had been reached, the Christian mind 
 of Germany was ready to return to what had been one 
 of the first principles of Greek theology, — that the 
 divine and the human are not foreign or alien to each 
 other ; that if God speaks to man it must be through 
 the reason or the consciousness which is in man ; that 
 human reason is the reflection of a divine reason ; that 
 humanity, by its constitution, participates in the eter- 
 nal Wisdom which became incarnate in Christ. 
 
 It is not by turning again to the voluminous trea- 
 tises written in defense of Christianity that we shall 
 best learn the place of deism in the history of Chris- 
 tian thought. Such works, as Butler's " Analogy," 
 Lardner's " Credibility of the Gospel History," Sher- 
 lock's "Trial of the Witnesses," Chandler's "De- 
 fense of Christianity," or Paley's " Evidences," no 
 doubt served a valuable purpose in the immediate ex- 
 igencies of the time. But the circumstance which 
 calls for explanation is this — that the leading writers 
 of the age, including the apologists, should have be- 
 come so indifferent to the doctrines of Christianity in 
 
INDIFFERENCE TO DOGMA. 361 
 
 their traditional form, as to make it difficult to draw a 
 line between them and the deists. They were not 
 only indifferent, they seem to have lost the clew to 
 dogmatic Christianity altogether. Doctrinal preach- 
 ing almost ceased in the churches. Such doctrines 
 as the trinity, incarnation, and atonement, whatever 
 might be their meaning or value, it was taken for 
 granted were above the popular comprehension, and 
 had no connection with the practical duties of life. 1 
 Such a position was equivalent to their rejection or 
 denial. The apologists had found it hard to say in 
 what respects Christianity supplemented the religion 
 of nature. Even Bishop Butler was more of a moral- 
 ist than a theologian. After so many centuries of 
 Christian training it had become a matter of uncer- 
 tainty as to what Christianity really was. 
 
 The subtle cause which explains the situation may 
 be discerned, though it may not be easy to trace its 
 workings. The assertion that the foundation of re- 
 ligion lies in the moral consciousness was a silent chal- 
 lenge to the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. 
 The doctrine to which Augustine had attached su- 
 preme importance, which had led him to disown the 
 authority of f\ie reason and the freedom of the will, 
 which had reduced man, as it were, to a mere animal 
 until he had been regenerated by an outward grace im- 
 parted in baptism, which had suggested the idea of 
 election, together with the condemnation of the whole 
 heathen world, which had separated humanity from 
 God, which had made revelation impossible except by 
 arbitrary agencies external to reason, which had re- 
 duced revelation itself to a mystery, and had put men 
 
 1 Abbey and Overton, English Church in the Eighteenth Century, 
 ii. p. 41. 
 
362 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 at the mercy of the priesthood and the church, — this 
 doctrine which Calvin had again enforced in Protest- 
 ant theology, practically ceased to be believed in the 
 eighteenth century. The result of its rejection is more 
 manifest than is the application to theology of the. 
 principle which supplanted it. It is this which ac-r 
 counts for the negative character of the work of the 
 deists or for their influence upon their Christian oppo- 
 nents. They attacked a system of doctrine which was 
 not built upon the reason or the moral consciousness. 
 Neither the Augustinian nor the Calvinistic theology 
 professed to respect the reason, — they simply defied 
 it as an unruly thing to be brought into subjection to 
 the divine will. Calvinism, with its doctrine of total 
 depravity, is at the furthest possible remove from the 
 conviction that in the moral nature lies the test of cer- 
 titude in religious truth. Hence it was not so much 
 that the traditional theology was attacked, as that it 
 simply succumbed, in the presence of a truth which it 
 had no power to withstand. 
 
 The principle that in the moral consciousness lies 
 the foundation of religious truth had been clearly ap- 
 prehended and set forth by the Cambridge Platon- 
 ists, by Archbishop Tillotson, and others ; it had been 
 taken up by the deists ; it had been accepted by their 
 opponents. But as a principle in theology it must 
 eventually conduce to higher results than those which 
 attended it in the last century. Its inevitable tend- 
 ency was to bring back the belief, which underlay 
 the ancient Greek theology, that God and humanity 
 were connected by an organic tie, that God indwelt in 
 His creation, that the revelation through the reason or 
 the moral nature was the manifestation of present 
 Deity. Of truths like these we may trace the un- 
 
DEISTIC CONCEPTION OF GOD. 363 
 
 conscious workings in the deistic controversy, but they 
 do not appear on the surface of its thought. Indeed, 
 they only led to contradiction and confusion, serving 
 rather to embarrass than to aid the combatants. The 
 old idea which had descended through Latin Chris- 
 tianity to Calvinism, that God was at a distance from 
 the world, could not be easily overcome. It had be- 
 come so firmly rooted in the imagination that it must 
 long continue to hamper the reason and the conscience. 
 In the deistic controversy, so far as only the interests 
 of formal theology were involved, it was this view of 
 God which was assumed by both parties alike. Men 
 reasoned of God as if He were a mechanician in the 
 distant heavens. On the comparison of the watch 
 and the watchmaker the whole discussion hinsred. 
 The deists thought that the world would go of itself as 
 the handiwork of an almighty and all-wise Creator 
 without the need of special interpositions in order to 
 the better regulation of its affairs. To suppose the 
 necessity of miraculous interference was to imply that 
 the work of the creation had been imperfectly ordered 
 at the first, — it was to reflect upon the wisdom and 
 the power of God. To the Christian apologists, mir- 
 acles were the credentials of a divine teacher ; to deny 
 their possibility was to give up the Bible as the record 
 of a revelation. Approaching the subject from this 
 point of view, although agreeing with the premises of 
 their opponent, they were obliged to maintain that 
 there were cases which called for an interposition, — 
 that a revelation could not be given without a miracu- 
 lous interference with the laws of nature. 
 
 The effect of this conception of Deity as a sort of 
 colossal man, who acts upon the world from a distance 
 by His power, is farther apparent in those doctrines 
 
364 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 which were still nominally retained, though they had 
 ceased to be of vital importance to the religious con- 
 sciousness. The idea of such a Deit}^ becoming incar- 
 nate in Christ was an impossibility to the reason. The 
 doctrine of the trinity seemed a palpable absurdity, 
 whose origin, if it were worth tracing, would be found 
 in the corruption of Christianity by heathen philos- 
 ophy. The tendency to Arianism is apparent through 
 the whole of the eighteenth century. That Christ was 
 a supernatural being, who had come to the world as 
 a delegate from the distant Deity, had been the only 
 view possible to Milton's imagination ; it had com- 
 mended itself to Newton ; it lurked under Locke's 
 conception of Christ as the Messiah sent from God ; 
 it had been openly avowed by Dr. Clarke ; nor could 
 Waterland's defense of the Christian doctrine of the 
 trinity avail to check the tendency to acquiesce quietly 
 in a belief like this, which accorded so naturally with 
 tho ruling idea in theology. With, the deists, even 
 Arianism was unnecessary as a theory of the person of 
 Christ. As there had been no special message, there 
 was no necessity for a supernatural messenger. 
 
 The doctrine of the atonement, in its Anselmic or 
 Calvinistic form, had also ceased to be held or preached 
 by those who had come under the peculiar influence of 
 the age. That God would pardon sin upon condition 
 of repentance was one of the tenets of the deists. The 
 reason for the decline of belief in what was essentially 
 a Latin dogma may be more readily seen by referring 
 to its origin in the time of Anselm. It had then been 
 offered as explaining the meaning of the incarnation. 
 To Anselm's mind, the inquiry, why God had become 
 man, had suggested an answer, which was the echo 
 from the heart of the age in which he lived. But 
 
RETENTION OF ENDLESS PUNISHMENT. 365 
 
 if men were unconsciously under the influence of a 
 doubt whether God had indeed become man, such a 
 theory of the atonement with its complications to the 
 reason as well as to the moral nature, must pass into 
 abeyance as having no practical or theoretical signifi- 
 cance, even if it were not openly rejected. So far as 
 the apologists, who were the theologians of the time, 
 felt the necessity for answering Anselm's inquiry, they 
 subordinated the death of Christ to His resurrection, 
 by which the natural intimations of the immortality of 
 the soul had been confirmed. 
 
 In an age when the final appeal was taken to the 
 reason and the moral consciousness, it might have 
 been expected that the doctrine of endless punishment 
 would have been more obnoxious than it seems to have 
 been. 1 It was one of the charges against Archbishop 
 Tillotson, that he had made hell precarious by his ad- 
 mission that God had a dispensing power from His 
 threats and penalties. Tim'.al, in Iris " Christianity as 
 old as the Creation," had maintained that the object 
 of all punishment was disciplinary. That a disposition 
 already existed, in the earlier part of the eighteenth 
 century, to reject the doctrine may be also inferred 
 from the treatment of the subject by Bishop Butler. If 
 it was not openly impugned to any great extent, it was 
 owing, in part, to the practical view which was then 
 generally taken, that religion was preeminently useful 
 as a sort of police-force for keeping society in order. 
 Hence it was asserted by the apologists that morality 
 
 1 Cf. on this subject, Abbey and Overton, vol. i. ;ip. 308-318. 
 "If by the majority the doctrine in point was practically Bhi 
 it was everywhere passively accepted as the only orthodox faith, 
 and all who ventured to question it were a1 once set down a 
 advanced in ways of deism or worse." p. 312. 
 
366 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON 
 
 needed stronger sanctions and motives than natural 
 religion could discover, and that endless punishment 
 constituted one of the distinguishing features of re- 
 vealed theology. It is a profound remark of the late 
 Isaac Taylor that the hand of God in the great evan- 
 gelical awakening of the last century is seen in this, — 
 " that it took place at the very verge of that period 
 when the ancient belief as to future punishment was 
 still entire." x 
 
 In a history of the Christian life or of Christian in- 
 stitutions, the "great awakening " under Wesley and 
 Whitefield would assume the highest prominence. In 
 a history of Christian thought, its place though impor- 
 tant is only incidental. What its relation has been to 
 the intellectual life of the church an attempt will be 
 made to determine in the following lecture. It must 
 suffice to say, in concluding this sketch of the conflict 
 between the traditional theology and the reason, that 
 the results of the struggle were unsatisfactory and dis- 
 appointing. Theology suffered from the divorce be- 
 tween the intellect and a living Christian experience. 
 Religion, in the first half of the eighteenth century, was 
 practically identified with ethical culture, and so it con- 
 tinued to be throughout the century, except among the 
 few who were stirred by the appeals of Wesley and 
 Whitefield. The devotion, the zeal, and enthusiasm of 
 an inward spiritual life were rarely exhibited, and were 
 even discouraged as leading to mischief. The age was 
 still suffering from the over-zeal, the heated passions, 
 the misguided enthusiasms, which characterized the 
 times of the commonwealth. When things are sepa- 
 rated, which should go together, the result must be 
 
 1 Wesley and Methodism, p. 154. 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OF DEISM. 367 
 
 disastrous. Theology tended to assume a cold, intel- 
 lectual tone, as though it were merely an affair of the 
 head, while in the revival under Wesley or in the 
 Evangelical party in the Church of England, we sadly 
 miss that intellectual element which lends dignity and 
 strength to religion, which saves it from degenerating 
 into superstition. Could the rationalism of the last 
 century have been united with the mysticism which 
 was struggling for recognition, the God of the deists 
 would not have become a mere impersonation of gen- 
 eral laws. 
 
 But such is not the law of human progress. Move- 
 ments must first differentiate themselves from all that 
 would obscure their significance, in order that the pe- 
 culiar truth which each is divinely appointed to reveal 
 may be plainly and distinctly seen. It was not the fault 
 of the deists, it was their misfortune, that while de- 
 stroying the old they could not replace it with some- 
 thing better. They rejected what was called revealed 
 theology as not in harmony with the reason; they were 
 mistaken in supposing that the theology which they 
 scorned was the only form which Christian thought 
 could assume. They made impossible the old inter- 
 pretation of the Bible which had perverted its mean- 
 ing, which had destroyed its true significance as the 
 " word of God,"' by a forced conventional treatment of 
 its letter. They were unable to show how it should be 
 interpreted, so as to restore it once more to its true 
 supremacy over the free spirit. But whatever their 
 failures, we may be thankful to them for what they 
 did, in breaking down all tyrannies over the human 
 mind, whether of Scripture or of the church. As we 
 review their work we can see how to them is owing that 
 later theology has been able to build upon surer foun- 
 
368 TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND REASON. 
 
 dations. In emphasizing the laws of nature, in their 
 assertion that true religion was like the laws of nature, 
 simple, certain, uniform, and unalterable, grounded in 
 the constitution of man, they were preparing the way 
 for a return to the truth which underlay the ancient 
 Greek theology, — that the incarnation of the Son of 
 God was also intimately connected with the laws of 
 God as they are revealed in outward nature, that His 
 manifestation in the flesh was part of an immutable, 
 eternal process. 
 
 Yet while the instinct was a true one, which led the 
 deists to reject a religion based upon miracles, in so 
 far as it seemed to imply a God outside the " reign of 
 law," who was planning schemes and revising His work, 
 interposing in human affairs in order to guard against 
 emergencies, who could only attest His interest in man 
 by signs and wonders, while we may admit the reason- 
 ableness of their protest against an anthropomorphism 
 which degraded the nature of God — yet it is also im- 
 portant to do justice to the opponents of deism, the 
 once famous Christian apologists whom we have been 
 led too often to decry. They too were bearing witness 
 in their own way to another truth, equally indispen- 
 sable with that which the deists proclaimed. They 
 stood for the importance and necessity of the idea of 
 revelation. In the presence of much that was calcu- 
 lated to disturb or weaken their faith, they clung to 
 the conviction that God had actually spoken to man in 
 some direct, immediate way through Christ, however 
 He might also have spoken through the law engraved 
 upon the heart. 
 
 How to unite these truths held in separation and 
 hostility in the last century, 1 how to bring revelation 
 
 1 There were others in the eighteenth century who gained a 
 
PROBLEM OF MODERN THEOLOGY. oG9 
 
 within the sphere of law and to lift up law to the 
 higher level of divine revelation, has been the problem 
 of what we call our modern theology — a problem, 
 however, whose solution had been already grasped in 
 its essential principle by Clement, by Origen, and by 
 Athanasius, when they proclaimed a Deity indwelling 
 in outward nature, but more especially in humanity, 
 and above all in Christ. 
 
 fuller view of the relation of God to the external world than 
 the English deists. Such were in Germany, Lavater and Stilling, 
 and more especially Oetinger, to whom is attributed the profound 
 remark that the end of the ways of God is corporeity. Cf. 
 Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., ii. pp. 234—240. Oetinger anticipated 
 most that was true in the interesting visions of Swedenborg. 
 The Swedish seer endeavored to combine in his system what he 
 rightly regarded as the two revelations, that in nature and that 
 given in the Bible. But his idea of the process of revelation, as 
 recorded in the Scriptures, rose no higher than the then current 
 theory of verbal inspiration. In order, however, even on this 
 theory, to make the Bible serve his purpose, he was obliged 
 to omit from the canon of Scripture many of the most valuable 
 books, while he also exaggerated the importance of others, for 
 example, the Book of Revelation, about whose genuineness and 
 authenticity there have always been grave doubts in the church. 
 Swedenborg was profoundly read in the study of nature, as he 
 was also profoundly ignorant of the history of Christian theology, 
 which is the history of the consciousness of man under the guid- 
 ance of divine revelation. He, therefore, saw no other way of 
 introducing to the world the truth, which, in common with others, 
 had dawned upon his mind, than by smuggling it into the Bible 
 by means of allegorical interpretation, the key to which he seems 
 to have sincerely believed had been imparted to him in some ex- 
 ternal supernatural way. The sect sometimes called after his 
 name still survives as a monument to a movement in the last 
 century which was summarily interrupted by the great ecclesias- 
 tical reaction in our own age. 
 
RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY IN THE 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Ergo jam non estis hospites et advenoe, sed estis cives sanctorum et 
 domestici Dei. — Eph. ii. 19. 
 
CHKONOLOGICAL TABLE, 
 
 A. D. 
 
 1632-1677. Benedict Spinoza. 
 
 1636-1761. William Law. 
 
 1700-1760. Zinzendorf, Founder of the Moravians. 
 
 1703-1791. John Wesley. 
 
 1714-1770. George Whitefield. 
 
 1724-1804. Immanuel Kant. 
 
 1725-1807. John Newton of Olney- 
 
 1726. The Wesleys and Whitefield at Oxford. 
 
 1741. Separation between Wesley and Whitefield. 
 
 1747-1821. Thomas Scott, the Commentator. 
 
 1749-1833. Goethe. 
 
 1753-1821. Count Joseph de Maistre. 
 
 1759-1827. William Blake, artist and poet. 
 
 1759-1836. Charles Simeon of Cambridge. 
 
 1768-1834. Schleiermacher. 
 
 1770-1831. Hegel. 
 
 1770-1850. William Wordsworth. 
 
 1772-1834. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 
 
 1775-1851. Turner, the landscape painter. 
 
 1775-1854. Schelling. 
 
 1789. Beginning of the French Revolution. 
 
 1790-1886. Keble, author of the " Christian Year." 
 
 1800-1882. Dr. Pusey. 
 
 1805-1872. F. D. Maurice. 
 
 1814-1863. F. W. Faber. 
 
 1833. Beginning of the Tractarian Movement. 
 
 1835. Publication of Strauss's " Leben Jesu." 
 
 1845. Newman received into the Church of Rome. 
 
 1858. Hansel's Bampton Lectures. 
 
 1870. The Pope declared infallible. 
 
RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY IN THE 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 I. 
 
 It is a familiar truth that all great changes which 
 have revolutionized society have proceeded from the 
 people. The thoughts which may have been antici- 
 pated by philosophers must take shape as popular 
 sentiments before they become active forces for the 
 amelioration of human interests. It was so in the 
 beginning of Christianity, when the teaching of Christ, 
 the loftiest spiritual truth that has ever been uttered, 
 met with its first response, not in the upper classes of 
 society as they are called, but among the outcast and 
 the lowly ; when not many mighty, not many noble, 
 were called, but when God chose the weak things of 
 the world, and base things, and even things that were 
 not, as His agency for overcoming the mighty and for 
 bringing to naught the things that were. The prin- 
 ciple of Descartes, that all true knowledge must begin 
 with doubt, which when once enunciated could not be 
 forgotten, received its application as a working prin- 
 ciple in the history of the church during the eighteenth 
 centuiy, when a general suspicion was everywhere cur- 
 rent that the church, the priesthood, the traditional 
 dogmas, and even the received Christianity, were an 
 imposition of designing men, which must be utterly 
 
374 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 destroyed if true religion were to rise and flourish. 
 The principle of the philosopher Kant, that in the 
 consciousness of man lay the certification and author- 
 ity of all truth, may seem as a metaphysical principle 
 to be far removed from the popular apprehension. 
 And yet to an idea like this, powerful enough to 
 become a fulcrum by which humanity was to be moved 
 through the whole range of its activities, the people 
 were responding in ways, it may be, that were vulgar 
 or extravagant, but which yet attest how the specula- 
 tive process of the highest thought may be corrobo- 
 rated by the inward moods and necessities of the 
 soul. 
 
 The transition from the last century to our own age 
 may be sought among the leaders of thought, such as 
 Lessing or Goethe or Kant, or we may seek it among 
 the uneducated, uncritical followers of Wesley and 
 Whitefield and Zinzendorf. Under the influence of 
 Spinoza, Lessing disowned the prevailing theological 
 conception of a God outside of the world who could 
 attest His existence only by so-called supernatural 
 evidences, such as signs and miracles. Kant demon- 
 strated that such a deity was impossible to the rea- 
 son, rejecting any external authority which upheld His 
 existence, whether of the church or of the Bible ; only 
 in the reconstructive process which is based upon the 
 inward convictions of the soul can God, as Kant de- 
 clared, be sought and found. Upon the same basis, 
 whether consciously or not, stood the ranting Meth- 
 odists and Evangelicals in England, the Pietists or 
 Moravians in Germany. Their religious faith and 
 life, their very existence, is in striking contrast with 
 the temper of an age which regarded God as im- 
 movably fixed at a distance from the world, which 
 
EVANGELICAL AWAKENING. 375 
 
 inclined to deny a special Providence, or the value or 
 significance of prayer, which regarded the church and 
 its ordinances as a sort of superfluous clothing with 
 which the human spirit had been overlaid by an am- 
 bitious priesthood. What the age w r as discarding 
 the disciples of Wesley and Whitefield were accepting 
 with a new zeal and enthusiasm which England had 
 not seen for a century. But they no longer accepted 
 the faith on the old authority, however they might 
 think or profess to do so. It came to them with a 
 new authentication which they found in the feelings. 
 
 We have become so familiar with the idea of conver- 
 sion as the characteristic of much of the popular Chris- 
 tianity of our own day, that we realize with difficulty 
 that it was presented as a new truth in the last cen- 
 tury, — a thing so obnoxious to the common sense of 
 the age that it seemed to defy all dignity and decency 
 in religion. It is not easy to recall the prevailing 
 tone of thought which explains why the doctrine of 
 conversion was so obnoxious. One reason of its 
 offensiveness lay in that which constituted its peculiar 
 charm to those who had experienced it, — that God 
 came into direct contact with the soul. It was this 
 conviction which underlay the great evangelical awak- 
 ening, and that marks the movement as distinct in 
 its kind from every other in history. It controverted 
 the deistic conception of God, not by the reason, but 
 by the experience. It declared that every man might 
 be conscious of the action of Deity in the recesses of 
 the spirit. It rested the reality of the religious life in 
 sensations and emotions which were regarded as bear- 
 ing witness to the presence of God. 
 
 The doctrine of conversion, as it was preached by 
 Wesley and Whitefield, has another interest in the 
 
376 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 history of religious thought besides the change which 
 it indicates in the conception of Deity. It passed out 
 of the narrow sphere in which it was first proclaimed 
 among the Methodist or evangelical societies ; it in- 
 vaded, to some extent, the Church of England ; it 
 was accepted by Presbyterians, Congregationalists, 
 and Baptists. It gave homogeneousness to the sects 
 which date their birth in the seventeenth century, thus 
 binding together in a common method bodies which 
 had originated in antagonism to each other. It illus- 
 trates how when God is believed to be in immediate, 
 and, as it were, tactual relationship with the soul, there 
 is no longer any inclination for priesthoods and sacra- 
 mental agencies which usurp His place. As the idea 
 extended that God Himself works the great change in 
 man by which he is turned from sin to holiness, the 
 last relics of the system of sacramental grace vanished 
 from the popular mind. 
 
 Another distinctive feature of the evangelical awak- 
 ening, whether in England, Germany, or America, was 
 its social character. It did what the church was not 
 doing, — it bound men closely together in groups or so- 
 cieties, making them feel their close relationship to 
 each other, by making them realize their relationship 
 to God. Such was the origin of the Methodist move- 
 ment in its germ at Oxford, — a band of men associ- 
 ating themselves for a religious purpose. It was here 
 that the evangelical movement began to correct the dis- 
 integrating tendencies of the age. Wherever it spread 
 it carried with it the spirit of coterie. The charm of 
 the movement, in its earlier days in the Church of 
 England, was the bond which united its adherents as 
 in some mystic brotherhood. As in the ancient church, 
 the scorn and contempt which they encountered only 
 
EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY. 377 
 
 served to deepen the ties which bound its members 
 together. Such may be called the first practical step 
 toward' dispelling the illusion that society was based 
 upon some selfish contract, by which a check was put 
 upon those natural tendencies of men which would 
 otherwise tend to their destruction. The idea of the 
 church was reappearing in its original beauty and sim- 
 plicity, as a form of association growing out of the 
 very necessities of the religious life, — a prophecy of 
 a regenerated society which has its being in God. 
 
 It is useless to look to the evangelical movement, in 
 any of its forms, for any theologian who directly ad- 
 vanced the progress of Christian thought. The study 
 of the evangelical theology is only interesting as 
 showing what were the truths in the formal theology 
 which appealed most strongly to the emotional moods. 
 Methodists and Evangelicals were children of the 
 feelings. In what they accepted or rejected they 
 were guided by instinct, not by reason. As we ex- 
 amine the tenets to which they attached the highest 
 importance, we can see that the motive which imparts 
 to them their significance is the bearing they have 
 upon the central truth of conversion. If they took 
 up again the discredited doctrine of original sin, hold- 
 ing to it with surprising energy and tenacity, it was 
 not so much, with Augustine or Calvin, as the corner- 
 stone of a system of theology, but because it magni- 
 fied, by contrast, the value of that work of redemption 
 of which they were conscious as the work of God in 
 the soul, — a transformation which no human effort 
 could accomplish. If the divinity of Christ became 
 to them as an essential truth in the presence of an 
 Arianizing tendency which hung Like an atmosphere 
 over the age, lowering the tone of Christian piety, it 
 
378 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 was because they felt it to be indispensable to their 
 religious life, not because they had reasoned out its 
 necessity or saw its speculative value in a system of 
 theology. They returned to the Bible with an un- 
 qualified devotion, because they found in its teach- 
 in^ that which corresponded to their experience or 
 met the deepest wants of the soul. They did not stop 
 to reason about prayer, or how a special Providence 
 could be reconciled with general laws ; they prayed 
 because they found in prayer the vital principle of 
 religion. In a word, it was a theology reposing upon 
 the feelings as the only sure foundation when every 
 other support had given way. 
 
 The evangelical movement has been thus briefly 
 referred to because it constitutes the transition to 
 Schleiermacher, the representative theologian of the 
 nineteenth century. Before dismissing it, attention 
 should be called to the principle which divided the 
 Evangelicals into two distinct schools, and which has 
 also made itself felt in the later history of theology. 
 The separation between Wesley and Whitefield in- 
 volved a point of primary importance. Wesley re- 
 jected the Augustinian or Calvinistic idea, that the 
 will had lost its freedom through Adam's fall, — a 
 tenet which Whitefield retained. While with both 
 conversion was a change sudden, revolutionary, and 
 complete, with the one it was regarded as a process 
 for which man might prepare the way, with the other 
 it was necessary to wait until God chose to act. But 
 while the assertion of Wesley, that the will was free, 
 might seem to be an advance in theology — a rejec- 
 tion of the Augustinian dogma of original sin, yet it 
 does not appear that Wesley grounded his belief in a 
 truer intellectual conception of the nature of God or 
 
WESLEY AND WILLIAM LAW. 379 
 
 of His relation to man. It is a characteristic of 
 Wesley, as a religious reformer, that he is disclosed 
 to us in his earlier life as undertaking anew the search 
 after God. How to find God, and how to adjust one's 
 relationship to Him, under the consciousness of sin, 
 are the uppermost questions in his mind. The one 
 man of the age who, above all others, may be said to 
 have lived and to have had his being consciously in 
 God, was William Law, a non-juring clergyman of 
 the Church of England. To him Wesley turned for 
 assistance, but came away disappointed. When, at 
 last, he had reached a principle which seemed to solve 
 his difficulty, he reproached Law with not being a 
 Christian, nor understanding the true meaning of the 
 work of Christ. Wesley had accepted as the fun- 
 damental principle in religion that which Law intel- 
 ligently and determinately rejected. He had found 
 peace with God through belief in a doctrine of the 
 atonement such as Anselm or as Calvin had taught it. 
 The doctrine came to him through the Moravians, and 
 whire essentially the old Latin doctrine in its spirit, it 
 had assumed a grossness of form and statement which 
 makes Anselm's view seem lofty by comparison. The 
 effect of this belief in Wesley's theology was to give 
 an almost exclusive prominence to the person and 
 work of Christ. As with the Moravians, Christ takes 
 the supreme place in Christian experience, while, 
 if °ne may so speak, God is relegated to the back- 
 ground, as if a being from whom Christ had come t > 
 deliver us. Thus an element had entered again into 
 the popular theology which affiliated it with the pre- 
 dominant characteristic of mediaeval religion, and 
 which also explains the ease with which the transition 
 has been so often made from the Protestant faith to 
 the acceptance of Romanism. 
 
380 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 With the evangelical school in the Church of Eng- 
 land, while a similar importance was attached to the 
 doctrine of atonement, yet the Calvinistic influence 
 which it perpetuated prevented it from seeking to 
 escape from God. There was, on the contrary, a 
 tendency to degrade the idea of Deity by too familiar 
 association in the experience of conversion. The ele- 
 ment of awe and of mystery, which enters so vitally 
 into a true relationship with Deity, was in danger of 
 disappearing, unless some corrective could be found 
 which evangelical theology was unable to supply. 
 The defect of the evangelical movement, as a whole, 
 and in all its phases, was the narrowness of its range. 
 It limited too much the sphere of the feelings in 
 religion. It had no interest in art or science, in phi- 
 losophy or in intellectual culture. It had a tendency 
 to disclaim all human learning as corrupting to the sim- 
 plicity of faith. It stood so near the old deism, from 
 which it was reacting, that it failed to catch the pro- 
 found truth which it contained, — that religion was 
 included in the realm of universal law. There' was 
 something irregular, if not spasmodic or fitful, in the 
 ideas of revival and conversion. There still lurked 
 beneath them the principle of election, even though 
 Wesley intended to reject it. The conception of a 
 redeemed humanity, wjiose solidarity was in Christ, 
 
 was still a truth waiting; for recognition. Without 
 
 © © 
 
 the evangelical awakening, the restoration of a higher 
 theology would not have been possible. Its great 
 service was in illustrating the profound reality of the 
 religious life. Its defect was its want of an intel- 
 lectual tone and a more ethical aim. For the lack 
 of these it failed to retain its grasp upon the ad- 
 vancing life of Christendom. Its methods became 
 
SCIILEIERMA CHER. 381 
 
 distasteful to a more enlightened sentiment. It was 
 unable to meet the skepticism of an age which had 
 seen the exposure of the unreasonableness of the 
 formal theology of Protestantism when traced to its 
 foundation. 
 
 II. 
 
 The spirit of the evangelical movement, as it was 
 represented in Germany by the Moravians, formed an 
 important element in the training of Schleiermacher 
 for his great work as the regenerator of theology. In 
 this respect, with his ardent devotion to the person of 
 Christ gained in the schools of Moravian piety, he 
 stands in striking contrast with the religious temper of 
 his age. It was in the closing year of the eighteenth 
 century that he stood up before the German people 
 to advocate personal religion as a relationship to God 
 grounded in the deepest instincts of human nature. 
 Eeligion is not a system of dogmas addressed to the 
 intellect, it is not a ritual, neither is it a collection of 
 precepts enjoined upon the will. It is the essential 
 primitive action of the human soul, a feeling or sen- 
 timent innate in man which unites him witli God and 
 with the universal order of things, — it springs from 
 the constitutional endowment of humanity in God's 
 own image. Religion may be developed by reflection 
 and by a j>rocess of external training ; it may act upon 
 all other departments of human interest, and even 
 come to include in its sphere the intellectual or moral 
 sciences ; but primarily it is not these, — it resolves it- 
 self into a simple feeling of dependence upon God. 
 
 In thus basing religion upon the feelings, which 
 possess, as it were, a certain cognitive power, whose 
 perceptions it may be the work of the intellect to in- 
 
382 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 terpret, Schleiermacher was returning to the prin- 
 ciple of the ancient Greek theology, before the true 
 relationship of man to God had been misrepresented 
 by the Augustinian dogma of original sin. His idea 
 of the feeling as the basis of religion implied, how- 
 ever, much more than the superficial life of the emo- 
 tions, or that sensuous mood into which Moravian or 
 evangelical piety had a tendency to degenerate. It 
 included the deeper instincts and yearnings of the 
 soul, as they were seen not merely in the individual 
 man or the local transitory phases of some particular 
 age, but as they were illustrated in the experience of 
 humanity through all its history. At a time when the 
 old intellectual conceptions of God and of the world 
 had lost their meaning, when as yet they had not been 
 replaced by larger conceptions which would meet the 
 demands of the growing reason, what other mode of 
 procedure remained than to revert to the original en- 
 dowment of human nature as it might be read in his- 
 tory, or in the individual consciousness, — to those in- 
 timations within the soul however dim or shadowy, — 
 
 " Which, be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
 Are yet the master light of all our seeing." 
 
 In his idea that religion is based upon the feeling 
 and consists in the consciousness of a personal relation 
 to Christ, Schleiermacher was reflecting the immediate 
 influence of his Moravian training. But other ele- 
 ments than the somewhat narrow pietism of the evan- 
 gelical movement had entered into the composition of 
 his theology. There converged in his mind, as if it had 
 been a focus for the preceding ages, the scattered rays 
 of truth, which had been illuminating individuals here 
 and there in the long course of human progress. Into 
 
ANTECEDENTS OF THEOLOGY. 383 
 
 his thought concerning God there had entered the in- 
 fluence of Spinoza, of whom he had -remarked in his 
 famous " Discourses on Religion : " — 
 
 " The sublime spirit of the world penetrated him ; the in- 
 finite was his beginning and his end ; the universal his only 
 and eternal love ; living in holy innocence and profound 
 humility, he contemplated himself in the eternal world, and 
 saw that he too was for the world a mirror worthy of love : 
 he was full of religion and full of the holy spirit.*' 
 
 In Schleiermacher we have also, for the first time 
 since the days of Greek theology, a representative the- 
 ologian of the highest intellectual capacity, who had 
 drunk deeply at the springs of Greek philosophy and 
 culture. The habit of devotion to the classics anion ir 
 the students of the last century brought forth a pos- 
 itive result in the deeper insight into the workings of 
 the Hellenic spirit. Upon Schleiermacher the study 
 of Plato had produced its inevitable effect, releasing 
 him from intellectual servitude, enlarging his mental 
 horizon, stimulating the critical faculty, imparting the 
 desire for the truth at any hazards, the love for all 
 that was highest and best, the conviction that the 
 world when rightly viewed was resplendent with the 
 glory of God. He remained in full possession of the 
 truth contained in German illuniinism, after what was 
 weak or foolish in its tentative applications had boon 
 eliminated. He had followed the new philosophy of 
 Schelling, who, in his search after God in the his- 
 tory of nature and of humanity, had traced the pro- 
 found analogy between the laws of matter and the laws 
 of thought ; who no longer regarded nature as under 
 the sway of a blind fatality, but as penetrated with a 
 divine intelligence, slumbering unconsciously till it 
 came to the knowledge of itself in man : who saw that 
 
384 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 humanity, although free, was still under the dominion 
 of law ; that the spiritual life which had been engrafted 
 upon an organic basis in nature reproduced its move- 
 ment in completer form and upon a vaster scale. He 
 rejoiced in the German awakening, of winch Lessing 
 had been a pioneer, whose results were seen in the 
 rejection of foreign influence, in the rise of a distinc- 
 tively German literature in which all that was most 
 truly characteristic of the German people found an un- 
 trammeled expression. He had drawn from France, in 
 the earlier years of the French Revolution, an enthu- 
 siasm for the idea of humanity, — an idea which, be- 
 fore Europe had been startled by the wild excesses 
 that marked the struggle for its realization, had caused 
 a thrill of wonderful expectation as of some great and 
 unexampled good that was coming to man. He was 
 in the first flush of his manhood at a time when, in 
 the words of the poet who has caught so exquisitely 
 the mood of the hour, — 
 
 " Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
 But to be young was very heaven." 
 
 Influences like these were unknown to Latin the- 
 ology as well as repugnant to its spirit. The same 
 is true, also, of Protestant theology so far as it had 
 inherited from Calvin a similar tendency and aim. 
 Their introduction as ruling principles in modern re- 
 ligious thought marks a quiet revolution which has 
 modified the traditional theology at every point, — a 
 revolution, compared with which that of the sixteenth 
 century was insignificant. As we review the leading 
 features of the theology, which has been gradually ex- 
 tending its reception in the church, from the time of 
 Schleiermacher, it appears in every essential aspect as 
 
RETURN TO GREEK THEOLOGY. 385 
 
 a reproduction of what Greek theologians had taught, 
 when the influence of Christ was yet fresh in the world, 
 when the Christian intellect was quickened as if by a 
 supernatural impidse, when, as yet, the teaching of 
 Christ had not been modified or economized, reduced 
 or disowned by the interests of ecclesiastics claiming 
 authority to teach and govern the world in His name. 
 
 To trace this revolution as it has been silently 
 wrought in so many noble minds, — to follow the 
 struggles by which one after another of the leaders of 
 the modern church have attained a higher and more 
 comprehensive conception of the religion of Christ, — 
 interesting as such a task would be, it is impossible to 
 undertake it here. We must be content to note the 
 process in a single mind. For this purpose Schleier- 
 macher may be taken as a representative man, who 
 being dead yet speaketh ; whose insight was so true 
 and so far-reaching, that as a religious thinker he is 
 still in advance of many who feel and acknowledge his 
 influence. 
 
 While there were deficiencies in his conception of 
 God, to which allusion will be made hereafter, the 
 statement needs no qualification that the theology of 
 Schleiermacher is affected throughout by the convic- 
 tion that God indwells in the world. His belief in 
 a divine presence in the world and in man was deep 
 and vivid. Against the cold idea of deism, he asserted 
 a living spiritual presence, a God who is with us and 
 in us, who is allied to humanity by a a organic rela- 
 tionship. The result of this conviction of the im- 
 manence of God implied the restoration to a supreme 
 place in his theology <>f the spiritual or essential 
 Christ, who is above the conditions of time or space. 
 As in Greek theology, or in every school of mystical 
 
 25 
 
386 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 thought, whether mediaeval or Protestant, it is no 
 longer the Christ after the flesh, but after the spirit, 
 who occupies the central throne in Christian thought 
 and experience. Christ was the incarnation of the 
 divine consciousness as it exists in its fullness in God. 
 To think of Him exclusively as one who had come upon 
 a mission to the world from the distances of space, and 
 then departed, was to miss the idea of One who stands 
 by an eternal law of God-head in intimate and contin- 
 uous relationship with the human spirit. That He 
 was now set down at the right hand of the Father did 
 not mean that, His work being accomplished, He had 
 retired from the world, passively awaiting the end of 
 the dispensation. To be seated at the right hand of 
 immanent Deity, is to be in the thick of the conflict 
 which humanity is waging with sin and evil, it is to 
 be forever here in our midst, the inspiration of all 
 strength and courage, the source of hope and faith, 
 the pledge of ultimate victory. It is through contact 
 with the personal Christ that sin is overcome ; it is by 
 entering with Him and through Him into the divine 
 life, that man attains union and reconciliation with 
 God. 
 
 Schleiermacher contradicted the inmost principle of 
 the mediaeval or Calvinistic theologies, when he de- 
 clared that in the earthly life of Christ there was to 
 be seen the glorious exhibition of manifested Deity. 
 Calvin had regarded the life of Christ in this world as 
 the humiliation of the Son of God, in which the divine 
 glory was concealed as it were behind a veil, while His 
 glorification, when the universe should behold Him in 
 the fullness of divine exaltation, was reserved to some 
 period in the future when this world should have been 
 swept away. Because Schleiermacher had also risen 
 
NATURE OF THE INCARNATION. 387 
 
 above the dualism of Latin theology which made the 
 human and the divine alien to each other, the incarna- 
 tion appeared once more as it had in Greek theology, 
 — the actual manifestation of God in the human, the 
 entrance of the divine into humanity itself, so that 
 Jesus of Nazareth became the revelation of God in 
 His absolute glory. From the time when Augustine 
 wrote his "City of God," the sentiment prevailed in 
 Christendom that the divine kingdom, for whose ad- 
 vent we pray, was to come in some other world in the 
 remote future. In this world the Christian must 
 always remain a pilgrim and stranger, journeying 
 through darkness and danger to the celestial hearth- 
 stone. The veil has been upon the face of man and 
 not upon the face of Christ. When Schleiermacher 
 discerned, as by a revelation, in the humble existence 
 of the prophet of Nazareth the unveiled glory of the 
 infinite God, the thought of ages was reversed. This 
 world was seen as if lit up with the light of God : 
 man was introduced even here to the fellowship of 
 saints and angels, to the intimate converse of the only- 
 begotten Son of God with the Father. Or, in the 
 words of an apostle : " Now therefore ye are no more 
 strangers and pilgrims, but fellow-citizens with the 
 saints and of the household of God." 
 
 Another principle which Schleiermacher regarded 
 in its larger relationships and restated from a higher 
 point of view was the doctrine of election. The 
 Latin church had called itself Catholic, but its catho- 
 licity had been limited by the epithet Roman. In re- 
 ality it had not aspired to do more than to build up a 
 Latin family: it had been committed to the principle, 
 from the hour of its birth, that part of the human race 
 and not the whole was destined for salvation. Calvin- 
 
388 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 ism had only emphasized in a different way that which 
 constitutes the motive of ecclesiasticism in all its 
 forms. So far as the principle is concerned it makes 
 little difference whether it is an election by baptism 
 through the church, or an election of the individual by 
 special decree. The genesis of this belief in election 
 has been already traced in the history of Latin the- 
 ology to the negation of the truths which constitute 
 the essential features of Christianity. As those truths 
 began to reappear in their pristine strength and beauty 
 in the eighteenth century, the belief in election tended 
 to grow weak and to yield to some higher conviction. 
 To the ideas that religion is included in the sphere of 
 law, that God is the constitutional ruler of the world, 
 responsible to the infinite righteousness which is the 
 charter of the divine activity, that humanity has a 
 common life, and is endowed with native rights which 
 every human government must respect, that God must 
 rule the world for the good of all, and not in the in- 
 terest of a few, — to these truths, Schleiermacher added 
 the conviction that humanity as a whole had been re- 
 deemed in Christ, that grace, no less than law, was 
 the dispensation under which all men everywhere were 
 living. The idea of election in some form will always 
 continue to prevail, as it always has done. To Greeks 
 and to Romans, no less than to the Jews, election was 
 the principle by which they lived. But Schleiermacher 
 gave a different answer to the question, What end was 
 the election intended to serve ? He distinguished be- 
 tween the predestination of all men to salvation as the 
 end of their being, and the election which in this world 
 and within the limits of time is able to save only a few 
 in order that all may eventually attain to the same re- 
 sult. Election may still seem an arbitrary principle, 
 
ELECTION AND PROBATION. 389 
 
 but it is necessary in the ordering of this present 
 world. It is a provisional arrangement by which the 
 few are called for the ultimate benefit of the many, 
 not merely to secure their individual salvation. From 
 such a point of view, the belief in election with its 
 wonderful tenacity points to a divine inspiration as its 
 source, which has led nations and institutions and in- 
 dividuals to make their calling and election sure. 
 
 Not only the principle of election, but the doctrine 
 of life as a probation, was transformed into a higher 
 and more comprehensive truth by the idea, of which 
 Schleiermacher saw the full bearings, that human life 
 was essentially an educational process, for which no 
 limits could be assigned through conditions of time or 
 place here or hereafter. To Lessing belongs the cred- 
 it, in his treatise on " The Education of the Human 
 Kace," of having first restored a truth, of which it may 
 be said that it solves more problems in theology, as 
 well as in practical life, than any other view which lias 
 been suggested. It is to history, and to religion more 
 especially, what the doctrine of evolution, of which it 
 is the anticipation in its highest form, has been to 
 science. That it should have lain dormant from the 
 time of Clement of Alexandria, by whom it received 
 so Ml an elaboration as a prominent truth in theology, 
 is a suggestive commentary on the intervening ages of 
 history. The belief that humanity as a whole, as well 
 as each individual man, are in this world to begin an 
 education under the tutelage of a divine instructor, 
 lends sacredness to human life under all its manifes- 
 tations, in every period of its development. Election 
 is therefore an incident of a universal pieces.. Pro- 
 bation also is a necessary accompaniment of a moral 
 history, but its results at any one stage of progress 
 
390 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 cannot be measured except by the eye of Him who 
 sees things in the perspective of infinity, who as the 
 Teacher of humanity has at His command the resources 
 of omnipotent and omniscient love. The idea of the 
 divine education of the race is also, as it were, the 
 complement to the truth which Kant affirmed so 
 strongly, that the human consciousness is the only au- 
 thority for the verification of truth. But the reason 
 or consciousness in man is educed by a divine train- 
 ing : the original forces of the soul are trained and 
 enlarged by a process in which converge the course of 
 external nature and all the events of human history. 
 The reason grows from age to age. The reason of the 
 individual can be no standard for the truth until he 
 has lived in the experience of humanity, discerning, 
 however dimly, some measure of the arc which spans 
 the progress of the whole. Into this experience Schlei- 
 ermacher had entered more deeply than any theologian 
 who had preceded him. Living in the universal rea- 
 son, he could no longer be confined by the restricted 
 opinion of Augustinian theology, which had confined 
 all direct revelation to the Jewish people until the 
 coming of Christ. He saw that Christianity was as 
 closely, connected with paganism as with Judaism ; 
 that, so far as its inner character was concerned, there 
 was no more affinity with it in Judaism than in the 
 higher forms of heathen thought. 
 
 Schleiermacher also gave a new definition of the su- 
 pernatural, which, if accepted, disposed entirely of the 
 questions which had been debated between the ration- 
 alists and their opponents. He did not regard miracles 
 as the mark of a divine revelation, nor was it by them 
 that the truth of Christianity is confirmed. He agreed 
 with the deists or rationalists in so regarding the na- 
 
MEANING OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 391 
 
 ture of the divine activity in the world, that interpo- 
 sitions or interferences were incongruous or impossible. 
 The sphere of the supernatural includes the whole life 
 of the spirit in man, in so far as it is higher than the 
 life of nature. Christianity, as a revelation or in his- 
 tory, belongs wholly to the region of the supernatural, 
 as do also all of God's relations with the human con- 
 science. But the supernatural as well as the natiu:ii 
 falls within the realm of eternal immutable law. 
 While Christianity and the results it produces are su- 
 pernatural in the truest sense, as belonging to a higher 
 sphere than the natural life of man, yet from another 
 point of view the supernatural is also most truly nat- 
 ural, for it represents the eternal nature of things in 
 the kingdom of the sjjirit, — it follows a law which is 
 the expression of the inmost mind of God. Hence 
 there is no distinction between natural and revealed 
 religion, though there may be grades in the process of 
 divine revelation. Christianity is revealed, but be- 
 cause it corresponds to the needs and aspirations of 
 man as a spiritual being, it is also a natural religion. 
 The human spirit cannot be divorced from its rela- 
 tionship with God. Since God indwells in humanity, 
 the mind of man is in necessary and continuous con- 
 tact with an infinite spirit, by whose inspiration alone 
 he is led to know and receive the truth. The reason 
 or consciousness is divinely gifted with the power to 
 read what God imparts. It is as vain as it is irra- 
 tional to attempt to draw the line between the human 
 reason acting b} T itself and a divine reason which im- 
 parts a revelation. To do so is to separate things that 
 are allied by an inner principle of fitness, t<> regard 
 man as separated from, or independent of, the action 
 of God. 
 
392 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 When such a principle is applied to Scripture, it 
 redeems it from the misinterpretations and abuses 
 which have obscured its meaning. The Bible is the 
 record of God's revelation of Himself in the human 
 consciousness, — a revelation addressed to man through 
 human channels, through reason, through experience, 
 through all the events and discipline of life. It finds, 
 therefore, in the reason or consciousness the confirma- 
 tion of its truth. The authority of the Bible lies in 
 the appeal which it makes to the reason. Even in its 
 highest utterances, where it reflects the consciousness 
 of Him who was in the fullest sense God immanent in 
 humanity, it still rests for its attestation upon the con- 
 sciousness in man which is made in the image of God. 
 And this consciousness in man, it is necessary to re- 
 peat it, to which is referred the divine revelation as 
 the only authority capable of attesting its truth and 
 preserving it inviolate, is bound in eternal ties to an 
 infinite spirit whose work it is to educate it to its task. 
 It is a consciousness in which lie imbedded the germs 
 of a vast process. It is not an isolated or individual 
 thing. It exists necessarily in relationships : on the 
 one hand with God who is its author, and on the other 
 with humanity. It involves in its highest, completest 
 action the idea of humanity as a corporate whole. 
 
 From this point of view is easily seen the derivation 
 of the principles of modern biblical criticism. If the 
 Bible is the record of a progressive revelation, it must 
 contain much in its earlier portions which is super- 
 seded, or even contradicted, by the later and higher 
 truth. The deists had been repelled from Scripture 
 because it appeared to sanction what seemed to them 
 irreconcilable with their reason or conscience. They 
 could make no allowances for the imperfections, the 
 
MODERN BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 393 
 
 half-truths, the unlovely distortions which contronted 
 them in what was claimed to be an inspired, infallible 
 book. But while they were urging the application to 
 religion of immutable law, they were ignorant of the 
 all-inclusive law which runs through human existence, 
 that all things grow from rude beginnings. To the 
 modern mind the Bible would be incomplete, unfit to 
 be the text-book of religion, if it did not include the 
 traces of childhood's faith as well as the matured ex- 
 perience of the perfect man. To look beneath the 
 surface of much that is repugnant to the ideas of a 
 later age, for the presence of the same humanity that 
 speaks in ourselves, bearing witness to its relationship 
 w r ith God, to follow the growth of the conscience as 
 under a divine tuition it rises to more adequate con- 
 ceptions of God and man, — it is this principle in 
 modern criticism which has given a higher sanctity to 
 Scripture, and imparted to its study a more fruitful 
 interest. 
 
 But Schleiermacher did not stop here. He applied 
 the same principle in the criticism of the New Testa- 
 ment. Although evangelists and apostles spake as 
 they were moved by the Holy Ghost, it does not 
 follow that the attribute of infallibility pertains to all 
 their utterances. They were expressing, in accord- 
 ance with their different temperaments and habits of 
 training, the influence upon their minds of the revela- 
 tion in Christ, as it was given to them to read it. It 
 is not necessary to reconcile their utterances in some 
 artificial way, to interpret St. Paul in harmony with 
 St. Peter or St. James, or to make any one assertion 
 the standard to which all must bend. The true object 
 of biblical criticism is to ascertain exactly what they 
 thought, and, if possible, why their thought should 
 
394 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 have taken the shape it did. The different types of 
 Christian teaching in the New Testament point to 
 differing mental and religious attitudes, to differing 
 degrees in the power of apprehending the truth of 
 Christ, or differing points of view in coming to its 
 study. This variety in the interpretation of Christian 
 truth is, in Schleiermacher's opinion, one of the most 
 valuable features of the New Testament, too valuable 
 to be explained away. It further points to the com- 
 prehensiveness and true catholicity of the church in 
 its early days. It shows that Christian fellowship 
 does not depend upon agreement in the intellectual 
 apprehension of the truth, but rather upon love and 
 devotion to the personal Christ. 
 
 Schleiermacher spoke not only of a religious con- 
 sciousness in man, whose primary characteristic was 
 the feeling of dependence upon God, but also of what 
 he called the Christian consciousness, — the product 
 of specifically Christian influences during the ages of 
 the church. The fact of a Christ, His teaching, and 
 the events of His life, had entered into history, be- 
 coming inwrought, as it were, into the consciousness, as 
 if an essential part .of its furniture. For this reason 
 the history of the church became the continuation of 
 a revealing process, in which the action of God, as 
 the indwelling spirit, perpetuated and developed the 
 work of Christ. Wherever the human mind was seen 
 seeking to understand or explain the teaching it had 
 received from Christ, there also the traces of an in- 
 finite spirit might be discerned struggling to over- 
 come human errors and infirmities, or enforcing some 
 neglected aspect of Christian truth. A view like this 
 redeemed the study of history from the perversions 
 which, like the Bible, it had suffered from those who 
 
IMPORTANCE OF THE CHURCH. 395 
 
 claimed it as their own. As in the one case the nature 
 and method of divine revelation, in all its breadth 
 and grandeur, had been sacrificed to the exigencies of 
 what was called the " analogy of faith," so Christian 
 history had been interpreted in accordance with eccle- 
 siastical analogies, whether Latin or Calvinistic or 
 Anglican. It was a wonderful moment in the church's 
 life, when, under the inspiration of Schleiermacher's 
 example, Germany turned away from empty disputes 
 between rationalists and supra-rationalists to study the 
 records of Christian history, with the single purpose 
 of following the Christian principle as it evolved itself 
 in the human consciousness. 
 
 It was a feature in Schleiermacher's thought, which 
 commended him to Roman Catholic as well as Lu- 
 theran theologians, that he attached the highest impor- 
 tance to the church and its institutions. The effort 
 to escape from the tyranny of the Latin church over 
 the intellect and the conscience had necessarily bred 
 a disposition to regard organized Christianity as a 
 matter of secondary importance. With this tendency 
 the spirit of individualism was in harmony. The doc- 
 trine of election, when detached from the ecclesiastical 
 organization with which Augustine had associated it, 
 had led men to feel that salvation was altogether a 
 private or personal affair. The same consequence 
 resulted from the doctrine of probation. In its medi- 
 aeval interpretation, after Gregory the Great had sub- 
 stituted it as the true theory of life in place of pre- 
 destination, it was still a process within the church. 
 In the modified Calvinism of the seventeenth century, 
 when probation again displaced election, it was prac- 
 tically presented as a view of life to which the church 
 was not essential; each man was to be saved in his 
 
 / 
 
396 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 solitariness and isolation ; the fellowship of men, de- 
 sirable as it might be for other reasons, had no nec- 
 essary organic relationship to the accomplishment of 
 individual destiny. When men had rejected the me- 
 diaeval idea of the church, which claimed for the 
 clergy peculiar gifts and powers of grace held in trust 
 for the laity, it was not easy to say exactly what 
 purpose the church served in the economy of religion. 
 The deists and rationalists, more particularly, had 
 reached the conclusion that it was an incumbrance 
 and not a help, an antiquated relic of a superstitious 
 age. 
 
 Schleiermacher asserted the importance of the 
 church, as vitally related to the well-being of men, 
 with a vigor and directness which even an adherent 
 of the old order might welcome. It is true that the 
 church, as he conceived it, was no longer the hierarchy, 
 or an institution holding a deposit of grace, which 
 might be thought of as separate from the people. 
 He agreed with Wycliffe, with Luther, with Hooker, 
 that it is the congregation of faithful men. But to 
 the church, as thus denned, he assigned the highest 
 significance, making it essential to the realization of 
 human redemption. Salvation, instead of being ex- 
 clusively an individual process, is accomplished only 
 through the fellowship of the church. The principle 
 of association enters into the religion of Christ as a 
 necessary factor. The Spirit which saves men is a 
 spirit of holy fellowship, seeking to unite them more 
 closely together. It is a spirit of love, and not of 
 selfishness or division. Man is most highly exalted 
 and honored by his membership in a common human- 
 ity, of which Christ is the head. It is in his relation- 
 ship to the race of mankind that he has been re- 
 
INFLUENCE OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 397 
 
 deemed. In the church, as the congregation of faith- 
 ful men, there is the conscious knowledge of the 
 work of Christ ; it is the pledge of a regenerated 
 society to be realized in the future, the picture and 
 the model after which is slowly fashioning itself the 
 kingdom of God in the world. To the church, in 
 this higher conception of its nature, is committed the 
 work, under the Holy Spirit, of educating humanity, 
 by preserving and extending the Christian conscious- 
 ness till the prayer of Christ is fulfilled. To this end 
 its organization is important ; its positive institutions 
 possess a sacred and binding character, — they arc 
 essential to the well-being of an external society 
 which proposes to itself no less an end than the 
 conversion of the world to Christ. 
 
 The theology of Schleiermaeher, if it had been pre- 
 sented to the world under different auspices, or in 
 some other period of the church's history, might have 
 left no impression and been soon forgotten. It shows 
 the change which has come over the church, that such 
 has not been its fate. It is a theology which has 
 grown out of the conditions of modern thought. As 
 truly as Augustine represented his age, and therefore 
 profoundly affected the fortunes of the church, so 
 Schleiermaeher still utters the truth to which all 
 that is highest in modern Christianity continues to 
 respond. The spiritual forces which combined to 
 form his thought at the opening of the century have 
 none of them lost their power ; as time has gone on 
 they have rather gained in intensity and e\t< ; 
 their action more widely. Wherever their influence 
 has been felt, or the influence of any one of them, 
 there has followed, as by a necessary law of human 
 thought, the inclination to pronounce the conclusions 
 
398 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 which he was the first to draw. His name is held in 
 honor in Germany as that of one from whom dates a 
 " new era in the history of theology." The great 
 German theologians who have come after him have 
 been his disciples. Directly or indirectly his influence 
 has been telling upon every student of religious truth 
 in this country and in England. Even the traditional 
 theology of the Latin church has caught something 
 from his inspiration by which it has been enabled to 
 present its tenets in a fairer light, and to give a more 
 rational account of its origin and place in history. 1 
 
 In other ages Schleiermacher might have })assed 
 for a mystic. It is among the changes which his in- 
 fluence has helped to accomplish that what has been 
 called mysticism has at last been legitimatized in the 
 church. Mysticism was indeed but the Latin name 
 for the Greek theology, which had become so un- 
 familiar that those who, ever and anon, had caught 
 something of its spirit seemed to their contemporaries 
 to be speaking in an unknown tongue. Even Athana- 
 sius would have been called a mystic had he lived in 
 the Middle Ages, or in the seventeenth century, when 
 principles so diverse from his own were the axioms 
 of Christian thought. The modern church has given 
 birth to none who are specially designated as mystics, 
 because the essential principle of mysticism has entered 
 as a ruling idea into advancing inquiry in theology. 
 
 1 Among the best known of the German theologians who have 
 acknowledged the influence of Schleiermacher are Neander, 
 Nitzsch, Liicke, Olshausen, Ullman, Julius Miiller, Dorner, De 
 Wette, Gieseler, Twesten, etc. Among Roman Catholics, Mohler 
 adopted Schleiermacher 's idea of development, applying it as a 
 method of explaining the contents of tradition, in place of the 
 old method of urging the "secret discipline." In this respect 
 even Cardinal Newman must plead guilty of having come under 
 German influences. 
 
MYSTICISM AND LATIN THEOLOGY. 399 
 
 As the positive convictions of Schleiermacher, 
 which have wrought the revolution in modern relic:- 
 ious thought, are identical with the principles pro- 
 fessed by Clement of Alexandria in the second century, 
 so also his negations were the negations of Greek 
 theology. He resisted the spirit and the results of 
 rationalism, so far as they were antagonistic to the 
 interests of genuine Christianity; but he accepted 
 what the last century was almost unanimous in affirm- 
 ing, — that the tenets of Latin theology had no ground 
 in the reason. To him, as to the deists, such beliefs 
 as the total corruption of human nature by Adam's 
 fall, or the expiation of sin by the blood of Christ 
 shed as in a literal sacrifice of the old Jewish dis- 
 pensation, or the endless punishment of the wicked, 
 were repugnant, — he found them, as he said, neither 
 in the gospel nor in his heart. So also with the doc- 
 trine of the trinity, as it had been expounded by 
 Latin theologians. The current conception of per- 
 sonality, when applied to Deity, seemed to him inade- 
 quate, as though it limited the nature of God. AVhile 
 he denied the divine personality, in its popular ac- 
 ceptation, and his thought of God in this respect re- 
 mained vague and unsatisfactory, yet his denial was a 
 preliminary step toward a vaster, more spiritual c< in- 
 ception of the nature of Deity. In this respect also 
 he was a type of his age, prophesying by his failures 
 that an hour was coming again in the history <>f relig- 
 ious thought when the mind would concentrate its 
 energies, as in the ancient church, upon the idea of 
 God. For the same reason that the ordinary idea of 
 personality seemed inapplicable to God, the popular 
 notion of immortality seemed unworthy <>!' belief. 
 That man should simply continue to exist forever in 
 
400 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 his independence and separateness from God appeared 
 to him as unreasonable as it was undesirable. For 
 immortality, as meaning merely an endless existence, 
 he found no warrant in the instincts of the soul. But 
 to gain an immortal life in God, to lose the individual 
 existence in order to find it again in God in fuller 
 measure, this was the only goal worth placing before 
 humanity, the only view which would emancipate re- 
 ligion from sordid and selfish considerations. 
 
 III. 
 
 However inadequate may have been Schleiermach- 
 er's expression of the larger conception of Deity which 
 he aimed to reach, such a conception was none the 
 less the motive which inspired every attitude of his 
 thought. The doctrine of the immanence of Deity 
 gives to his theology the vast expansion of its range, its 
 profound suggestiveness, its lofty spirituality. A cer- 
 tain tone of exhilaration marks his language, as though 
 the paradisiacal conditions of human life had been 
 restored, as though God were making all things new. 
 As if he breathed the air of a redeemed world redolent 
 with the presence of Deity, in whom he now lived and 
 moved and had his being, as truly as he should do 
 hereafter, he broke forth in those remarkable words 
 which recall the spiritual enthusiasm of his great pred- 
 ecessor in the ancient church : — 
 
 " Unenfeebled will I bring my spirit down to life's closing 
 period : never shall the genial courage of life desert me ; 
 what gladdens me now shall gladden me ever ; my imagina- 
 tion shall continue lively, and my will unbroken, and nothing 
 shall force from my hand the magic key which opens the 
 mysterious gates of the upper world, and the fire of love 
 
THE NEW ENTHUSIASM. 401 
 
 within me shall never be extinguished. I will not look 
 upon the dreaded weakness of age ; I pledge myself to su- 
 preme contempt of every toil which does not concern the 
 true end of my existence, and I vow to remain forever 
 young. . . . The spirit which impels man forward shall 
 never fail me, and the longing which is never satisfied with 
 what has been, but ever goes forth to meet the new. shall 
 still be mine. The glory I shall seek is to know that my 
 aim is infinite, and yet never to pause in my course. . . . 
 I shall never think myself old until my work is done, and 
 that work will not be done while I know and will what I 
 ought. . . . To the end of life I am determined to grow 
 stronger and livelier by every act, and more vital through 
 every self-improvement. . . . When the light of my eyes 
 shall fade, and the gray hairs shall sprinkle my blonde locks, 
 my spirit shall still smile. No event shall have power to 
 disturb my heart ; the pulse of my inner life shall remain 
 fresh while life endures." l 
 
 The poet Goethe had felt, like Schleiermacher, the 
 influence of Spinoza, experiencing a profound disturb- 
 ance in. the depths of his being as he received the 
 idea of indwelling God. When applied to nature, it 
 
 1 Hagenbach, History of the Church in the Eighteenth and Nine- 
 teenth Centuries (Amer. trans.), vol. ii. p. 330. 
 
 " In contradistinction, therefore, to the older people, the new 
 people are called young, having learned the new blessings; and 
 we have the exuberance of life's morning prime in this youth 
 which knows no old age, in which we are always growing to 
 maturity in intelligence, are always young, always n.ihh always 
 new; for those must necessarily ho new who have become pais 
 takers of the new Word. And that which participates in eternity 
 is wont to be assimilated to the* incorruptible; so that to o 
 pertains the designation of the ago of childhood, a life-long 
 spring-time, because the truth that is in as, and our habits satu- 
 rated with the truth, cannot be touched by old age."— Clemens 
 Alex., Panlag., i. c. 5. 
 
 26 
 
402 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 revealed to him the outer world instinct with a divine 
 life ; as he expresses it in " Faust," " the living garment 
 of the Deity." The precocious child who corresponded 
 with him was revealing his spell upon her sensitive 
 imagination, as she wrote, " When I stand all alone 
 at night in open nature, I feel as though it were a 
 spirit and begged redemption of me. Often have I 
 had the sensation, as if nature, in wailing sadness, 
 entreated something of me, so that not to understand 
 what she longed cut through my very heart." In 
 one of his shorter poems Goethe has given an almost 
 dogmatic form to his belief in the immanence of 
 God : — 
 
 "No! such a God my worship may not win 
 Who lets the world about His finger spin 
 A thing extern: my God must rule within, 
 And whom I own for Father, God, Creator, 
 Hold nature in Himself, Himself in nature ; 
 And in His kindly arms embraced, the whole 
 Doth live and move by His pervading soul." 1 
 
 Coleridge was to England, both in theology and lit- 
 erature, what Schleiermacher and Goethe were to Ger- 
 many. The same antecedent influences had entered 
 into his being. Growing up under the traditions of 
 the eighteenth century he had undergone a revolution 
 in his spirit, as he yielded to the magic power which 
 was transforming the age. He read Plato in the light 
 of his Alexandrian commentators ; he studied Kant, 
 
 1 " Was war' ein Gott, der nur von aussen stiesse 
 Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse ! 
 Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, 
 Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zu hegen, 
 So dass was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist. 
 Nie Seine Kraft, nie Seinen Geist vermisst." 
 
 From verses entitled Gott und Welt. 
 
 
COLERIDGE AS A THEOLOGIAN. 403 
 
 and more especially Schelling ; lie also was thrilled by 
 the prospect of a great future for humanity, of which 
 the French Revolution had seemed to him a foretaste ; 
 he bent before Spinoza, receiving the full significance 
 of his thought, and yet discerning more clearly than 
 Schleiermacher had done wherein lay the deficiency of 
 the doctrine of the "one substance." It has been said 
 of him, that taking up a volume of Spinoza he kissed 
 the portrait of his face, and said, " This book is a 
 gospel to me; " but he immediately added, " to I lis phi- 
 losophy is nevertheless false." The weakness of Spi- 
 noza's teaching, he went on to affirm, lay in his begin- 
 ning with an " it is " instead of the " I am." In his 
 desultory poems, where the truth of the divine im- 
 manence is seen inspiring his thought, he reveals also 
 the process in his mind accompanying its reception, as 
 though such a belief were unbecoming to weak and 
 sinful man ; as if a lower flight were better suited to 
 humanity in its present stage of existence. There 
 are passages, however, in Coleridge's poetry which as- 
 sert this conviction in language so unqualified that 
 if we did not know how deep and unshaken was his 
 adherence to the personality of God, we might think 
 them the utterances of undisguised pantheism, con- 
 founding God with his creation : — 
 
 " 'T is the sublime of man, 
 Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves 
 Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole. 
 This fraternizes man, this constitutes 
 Our charities and bearings. But 't is God 
 Diffused through all that doth make all one whole; 
 This the worst superstition, him except 
 Aught to desire, Supreme Reality." 
 
 Or again, speaking of nature in its relation to God : — 
 
404 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 " And what if all animated nature 
 Be but organic harps diversely framed, 
 That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps 
 Plastic and vast one intellectual breeze, 
 At once the soul of each, and God of all ? " 
 
 The true idea of immortality is finely expressed in 
 language that would meet the demand of Schleier- 
 macher's aspiration ; — 
 
 " Lovely was the death 
 Of Him whose life was love. Holy with power 
 He, on the thought-benighted sceptic, beamed 
 Manifest Godhead, melting into day 
 What floating mists of dark idolatry 
 Broke and misshaped the Omnipresent Sire ; 
 And first by Fear uncharmed the drowsed soul 
 Till of its nobler nature it 'gan feel 
 Dim recollections; and thence soared to Hope, 
 Strong to believe whate'er of mystic good 
 Th' Eternal dooms for his immortal sons. 
 From Hope and firmer Faith to perfect Love 
 Attracted and absorbed; and center'd there 
 God only to behold, and know, and feel, 
 Till, by exclusive consciousness of God, 
 All self -annihilated, it shall make 
 God its identity; God all in all ! 
 We and our Father one ! " 
 
 The spirit of Wordsworth's poetry bears witness to 
 his consciousness of the larger revelation which God 
 was vouchsafing to his age. In its light he saw hu- 
 manity clothed with a new dignity : even the lowliest 
 and most common things were invested with a sacred 
 charm, because all things were viewed as if in 
 
 God: — 
 
 "I have felt 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 
MODERN ART RELATED TO THEOLOGY. 405 
 
 Whose dwelling- is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky and in the mind of man : 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 Even Shelley, who has been set down as an atheist 
 for rejecting, in somewhat contemptuous language, the 
 deism which the popular religious mind had not out- 
 grown, illustrates the working of some deeper, more 
 comprehensive idea of God at the basis of the aspira- 
 tions, the struggles, the confusions, and the discontent 
 which marked his inner life. " His subtle intellect," 
 says his biographer, "delighted in the thought that 
 behind the universal mind, behind even the life of its 
 life, which he calls spirit, there was some more recon- 
 dite principle, some more essential substance, the 
 nature of which we cannot imagine or find a name 
 for." 
 
 The same influence which was remoulding religious 
 thought and inspiring a fresh literature appears also 
 in art, whose affiliation with theology is of no acci- 
 dental kind. 1 The founder of a new school arose in 
 Turner, whose greatness lay in his power to repre- 
 sent nature as it appeared after passing through the 
 
 1 "We shall find," says Raskin, "that the love of nature, 
 wherever it has existed, has been a faithful and sacred element 
 of human feeling*; that is to say, supposing all the circumstances 
 otherwise the same with respect to two individuals, the one who 
 loves nature most will always be found to have more capacity for 
 faith in God than the other." The devotion to nature, he farther 
 remarks, " will be found to bring with it such a sense of the 
 presence and power of the Great Spirit as no mere reasoning can 
 either induce or controvert." "It becomes the channel of cer- 
 tain sacred truths which by no other means can be conveyed. " — 
 Frondes Agrestes, sect. viii. G-. 
 
406 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 medium of the human spirit. The principle of the 
 spiritual interpretation of nature in art, through the 
 power of the human imagination in reading its hidden 
 meaning, was seen by William Blake, to whom religion 
 and artistic insight were identical, though his state- 
 ment of the principle may seem exaggerated or fanci- 
 ful:— 
 
 61 1 assert for myself that I do not behold the outward 
 creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. 
 What ! it will be questioned, ' when the sun rises do you 
 not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea ? ' Oh, 
 no ! no ! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly 
 host, crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty. 
 I question not my corporal eye any more than I would ques- 
 tion a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and 
 not with it." 
 
 It has been a fortunate coincidence that modern 
 science should have been attended by such a com- 
 panion as modern art, to prevent it from degenerating 
 to a merely physical basis, apart from God and from 
 its inner relations to the human spirit. But science 
 also has contributed to illustrate and enforce the belief 
 that God indwells in His creation. The acknowledg- 
 ment of its indebtedness to science for the confirma- 
 tion of this truth is a duty which theology has been 
 slow in rendering. The mystics of the last century 
 were hovering in thought about a mystery contained 
 in nature which had some close connection with the 
 religious life. The mystery was no other than the 
 divine immanence in nature as revealed in the forces 
 whose activity is everywhere governed by eternal, im- 
 mutable law. Hitherto, in the popular conception of 
 the Middle Ages, as well as under the influence of 
 Calvin's theology, the great processes of nature were 
 
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REACTION. 407 
 
 believed to be carried on from without by angelic 
 mediators, to each of whom was assigned his special 
 office. It would have been a poor substitute for so 
 beautiful and poetic a belief, if the laws of nature 
 had been shown to be necessary forces apart from 
 God. But when Deity is revealed as immanent in 
 the life of nature, it implies a sense of nearer and 
 closer relationship to God than the angelic host in all 
 its beauty and splendor could ever convey. To have; 
 God Himself is the highest reach and aspiration of 
 the soul. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The influence of any great reformer like Schleier- 
 macher, who opens up a new era in the history of 
 religious thought, may be traced in those who are un- 
 prepared to receive the truth which he announces as 
 well as in those who embrace it or carry on its devel- 
 opment. To the former it will seem a source only of 
 confusion and disintegration. To the large majority 
 with whom the idea of a personal God was associated 
 with the deistic notion of His separation from the 
 world, all efforts to reach a larger conception of His 
 personality, or to view Him as indwelling in nature 
 and in humanity, seemed to savor either of pantheism 
 or atheism. Such a Deity as Schleierinacher wor- 
 shiped was to them no God at all. They were lost 
 in a wilderness of vague negations when they at- 
 tempted to follow the tendencies of modern thought. 
 It seemed as though all definite truth was slipping 
 from their grasp. They could not distinguish between 
 the destructive spirit of the old rationalism and the 
 constructive mood of the new era. 
 
 The impulse given by Schleierinacher to biblical 
 
408 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 criticism was leading to results which to the minds of 
 many made all revelation seem impossible. They 
 could understand how revelation could be imparted in 
 a book, which had been preserved by ecclesiastical 
 guardians or by some miraculous agency, but they 
 could not see how the revelation of God to man was 
 a continuous process through the reason, through ex- 
 perience, through the courses of history, or through 
 the events and discipline of life. The free handling 
 of Scripture, although in a devout spirit, was to them 
 an endangering of its integrity as the word of God. 
 What was to be the end of it all, what would remain 
 of the Bible, if every man was to be at liberty to select 
 or reject, according to his own judgment, what was 
 true or false ? If certain books were to be set aside 
 as having no place in the Canon, who could say by 
 what principle others should be retained ? If cer- 
 tain accounts were to be regarded as poetical or alle- 
 gorical, which had been always thought to be the 
 statements of sober facts, who could tell where ro- 
 mance ended and reality began ? If it were once 
 allowed that there were mistakes in Scripture, or irrec- 
 oncilable discrepancies, if it were admitted that nar- 
 ratives had been exaggerated or colored by the indi- 
 viduality of the writers, or that certain books had 
 been written in the interest of some tendency of opin- 
 ion, what guarantee had any one of the truth of a 
 divine revelation ? 
 
 The idea that reason was divine, or that humanity 
 emancipated from the old superstitions was entering 
 upon a higher stage in its career, or that liberty was 
 the inalienable possession of all men, — truths like 
 these which had been identified with the French Rev- 
 olution, and were believed to have sanctioned its ex- 
 
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. 409 
 
 cesses, did not commend themselves to statesmen and 
 ecclesiastics who still imagined that the conduct of the 
 world had been committed to their charge. It had 
 been one of the indirect results of Schleiermacher's in- 
 fluence that he had stimulated a revival of the old 
 ecclesiasticism as well as a higher view of the nature 
 and functions of the church. Even before the re- 
 action began, men were getting tired of the confu- 
 sion and of the freedom which seemed to mean only 
 license, and were turning again with longing eyes to 
 the "ages of faith" when the church held men in due 
 subjection to authority. The Middle Ages seen by 
 the light shed upon them by the modern study of 
 their history were not as repulsive as an ultra-Protest- 
 antism had painted them. To restore the church to 
 its old supremacy seemed to be the one duty of the 
 hour in view of the dangerous tendencies which the 
 democratic principle was encouraging. The treatment 
 which the Roman Catholic church had received in the 
 French Revolution, as well as at the hands of Napo- 
 leon, was awakening everywhere a sympathy for the 
 old ecclesiastical order. The French writer, De Mais- 
 tre, in whom was concentrated, in its most virulent 
 form, the spirit of the rising reaction, denounced the 
 French Revolution and the principles which led to it, 
 as the work of Satan let loose upon the world. To 
 his mind the democratic idea was essentially false in 
 all its manifestations; the Pope was the only saviour 
 of society from impending dissolution. The Jesuit 
 order which had been dissolved by Pope Clement 
 XIV., in the latter part of the eighteenth century, 
 was reconstituted in 1814 by Pius VII.; attention 
 was again directed to the inouisition and the "index 
 of prohibited books," as means for suppressing within 
 
410 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 the church all knowledge and inquiry not favorable 
 to the dignity and prerogatives of the Roman see. 
 Statesmen united with ecclesiastics in the endeavor to 
 restore and support the church as the best bulwark of 
 society against the destructive tendencies of demo- 
 cratic reform, as well as the no less fatal tendencies of 
 liberalism in theology. 
 
 The ecclesiastical reaction was precipitated in Eng- 
 land by the movement of a liberal government toward 
 a reform of the church. Already the idea had taken 
 root in the minds of those who were to be its lead- 
 ers, that the church was too sacred to be touched by 
 the hands of the secular authority. To arouse among 
 the English people a deeper sense of the sanctity of 
 the ecclesiastical organization was one object of the 
 agitation which owned Newman as its leading spirit. 
 But to Newman's mind liberalism in theology was the 
 worst enemy which the church had to encounter, — 
 the source of every other evil which afflicted it. The 
 object of the movement known as Tractarianism, New- 
 man confesses in his " Apologia," was " to hurl back 
 the ao'2:ressive force of the human intellect." In or- 
 der to overcome liberalism, he set himself to restore 
 the idea of the church as it had appeared to the Latin 
 fathers in the early centuries. 1 The first doctrine 
 which he attempted to revive was the " Apostolical 
 Succession," as it had been held by Tertullian, Ire- 
 nasus, and Cyprian. To the bishops, according to this 
 idea, had been committed the " deposit " of the faith, 
 and at their hands the church must continue to re- 
 ceive it. Tradition must take the place of free inves- 
 
 1 A glance at the Tracts for the Times is sufficient to show that 
 it was Latin fathers almost exclusively who received attention 
 from the Tractarian School. 
 
THE TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT. 411 
 
 tigation as the sole authority for the truth. Newman 
 felt that the Bible was an unsafe book unless inter- 
 preted by the Fathers. He rejected the idea that God 
 revealed Himself through the consciousness of man, 
 or that the human reason was an evidence <>t* the in- 
 dwelling of a divine reason. "If 1 looked," so he 
 said, " into a mirror and did not see my face, I should 
 have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me 
 when I look into this living, busy world, and see no 
 reflection of its Creator. The sight of the world is 
 nothing else than the prophet's scroll, full of lamen- 
 tation, mourning, and woe." God and humanity to 
 his mind were alien to each other, — the human race 
 was implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. 
 " The tendency of the human reason is toward a sim- 
 ple unbelief in matters of religion. No truth, how- 
 ever sacred, can stand against it in the long run." To 
 the discoveries of modern science, that the powers 
 which control the life of nature are immanent in 
 nature, Newman was indifferent. God was separated 
 from nature as from humanity. It was angels who 
 conducted as mediators the processes of the external 
 world ; or in his own exquisite language, whose beauty 
 might make one oblivious to the higher truth : " Every 
 breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beau- 
 tiful prospect is, as it were, the skirts of their gar- 
 ments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces 
 see God." 1 
 
 1 One of the worst evils which has been wrought by the eccle- 
 siastical reaction in the nineteenth century lias been tin- breach 
 between religion and science. Their relation in the lasi century 
 has not only not been retained, hut has given way to an actual 
 hostility, the fault of which lies mainly at the door of tin- 
 church: "Le theologien compromet les angustes verites donl il 
 est le depositaire dans une lutte impossible aveo dea rente's moins 
 
412 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 From such a position there followed naturally a 
 return to Latin theology in all its details. Start- 
 ing from the same premises as the Latin fathers of 
 the second century, Newman lived over again in his 
 experience the course of Latin history. It became 
 gradually more evident that there was nothing in 
 Latin Christianity which was repugnant to his mind. 
 The sacraments appeared again as the conduits of 
 grace ; the soul was fed from without by supernatural 
 influences lodged in the episcopate, and conveyed to 
 the people through a priesthood receiving its divine 
 consecration in the sacrament of ordination. He 
 made one last effort to harmonize the Latin theology 
 with the Articles of the Church of England, before 
 he recognized where his logic was driving him, and, in 
 the customary phrase of ecclesiastical circles, trans- 
 ferred his adherence to the Latin obedience. His life 
 has been a parable to his age. Side by side with men 
 who had attained a higher view, he pursued his re- 
 
 hautes, mais plus saisissantes et plus palpables. La science phys- 
 ique s'est ainsi constitute en dehors de la religion ; par cela 
 meme elle est devenue impie. La science est coupable d'avoir 
 accept^ cet exil qui l'eloignait du monde moral ; elle aurait du 
 forcer les portes du sanctuaire par ses supplications. La theo- 
 logie n'aurait pu lui refuser place au banquet spirituel. Wj 
 vient-elle pas apporter pour ecot mille verites sublimes qui ren- 
 dent la Providence plus manifeste, tout un aspect de l'innni, et 
 comme une part de Dieu lui-meme retrouve dans la Nature ! 
 Osons le dire, la faute premiere est a la theologie ; elle a pre- 
 cede la science, elle est son ancetre logique et sa mere dans 
 l'ordre des temps ; elle aurait du l'elever dans son sein, et la 
 nourrir de son lait, elle l'a repousee de l'Eglise comme une autre 
 Agar, elle l'a rejetee dans le desert du materialisme et les nom- 
 breuses tribus engendrees d'Ismael s'elevent contre la posterite 
 legitime d' Abraham." — De Laprade, La Nature avant le Chris- 
 tianisme, p. xcvii. 
 
NEWMAN, PUSEY, AND KEBLE. 413 
 
 actionary way ; what to them was as light, to him was 
 as darkness ; he began with skepticism and ended by 
 disowning that which was most divine. 
 
 There were other elements : in the Tractarian move- 
 ment than that which was represented by Newman, 
 though he must always remain its most logical and 
 consistent exponent. The Latin infusion was not so 
 strong in either Pusey or Keble. Pusey, indeed, be- 
 lieved in asserting ecclesiastical tradition as the main 
 defense against what he took to be the skepticism of 
 modern thought. As with Newman, what to others 
 appeared as a divine revelation was to his mind a 
 dangerous infidelity. A recent writer has said of 
 him, that " his religious seriousness was the condition 
 
 1 The current of the Tractarian movement received accessions 
 from various minor tributaries. There gravitated naturally to- 
 ward it, " the martyrs of disgust," as they have been so aptly 
 called, who were repelled by what seemed to them the vulgar 
 familiarity with God which was found in the evangelical school, 
 whether in the Church of England or among the Non-conformists. 
 Here, also, at the root of the disaffection, may be traced a cer- 
 tain " blind desire " to realize in God some deeper, more mysteri- 
 ous relationship than found expression in the type of piety repre- 
 sented by Newton, Scott, or Simeon. Witness the language of 
 the saintly Faber, who, like others, disowned with a bitter con- 
 tempt his evangelical antecedents: "The dreadful facility of 
 turningtoGod inculcated there (in the evangelical school) throws 
 such a complete mist over the face of the sacraments that it 
 perverts and distorts all my views of the symmetry of the scheme 
 of Redemption. It seems as if I could never get free from (he 
 entanglements of that base theology. However, it is in such 
 difficulties as these that I find the doctrine of the Church such 
 an inestimable privilege. There 1 cense to he an individual. 
 I seem to fall into my own place quietly, and without disturb- 
 ance; and the noiseless path of childlike obedience, slew :i- my 
 progress must be, here a little and there u little, offers a calm 
 and peaceful progress of spiritual growth." — Faber's Life and 
 Letters, p. 72. 
 
414 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 of one who not only believed, but was penetrated in 
 his whole being with the belief, that God had made 
 a communication to men." 1 Such also was the pro- 
 found conviction of Latin theologians from the time 
 of Tertullian. It might have been said of Dr. Pusey's 
 great contemporary, the late Mr. Maurice, that he 
 was only asserting another phase of belief among 
 those Catholic fathers whom the Tractarians neglected, 
 when he proclaimed that God had never ceased to 
 make a communication to men ; that now, as always, 
 He revealed Himself, by the law of His being, in the 
 reason, the conscience, the experience of humanity. 
 To neither Pusey nor Keble was it given to read this 
 law of the divine life, in the order of nature or in the 
 courses of history. And yet they, and others like 
 them, were aspiring for a higher truth than they 
 could find in the current belief of Protestant Chris- 
 tendom. 
 
 The Church of England, as an institution, had 
 hitherto been unmoved by the influences that created 
 the evangelical awakening of the last century. If a 
 new life was to enter the Church of England, it must 
 come in some other way. The popular belief that 
 
 1 Rev. E. F. Talbot, Warden of Keble College, in Fortnightly 
 Review, March, 1884. He also remarks : " There was a passage 
 in the Canon concerning preachers, passed in the very synod 
 which imposed the thirty-nine articles, which was a kind of locus 
 classicus with the Tractarians, and which ran, ' Let them teach 
 nothing in sermons . . . except what is agreeable to the doctrine 
 of the Old and New Testaments, or what Catholic fathers and 
 ancient Bishops have gathered from the same doctrine.' " That 
 there might be any divergence of a decided and important char- 
 acter among the " Catholic fathers " which affected every tenet 
 of the received theology, was a fact not taken into considera- 
 tion. 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 41 o 
 
 God acted in an irregular, spasmodic manner, as in 
 revivals, by occasional effusions of grace, was repug- 
 nant to those who had unconsciously come under the 
 influence of the modern principle, — that the spiritual 
 life is part of an eternal order, and not at the mercy 
 of the transient moods of the soul. The doctrines of 
 apostolical succession, of baptismal regeneration, and 
 of sacramental grace, seemed to the minds of the 
 leaders in the Tractarian movement to be expressive 
 of a divine order, — a divine supply to human needs, 
 granted in no fitful way, but as regular in its action 
 as the laws in accordance with which planets move. 
 From another, and that a higher point of view, these 
 doctrines were but symbols of an order which included 
 not only the elect in the Church of England, or its 
 supposed branches, but also all humanity, — the law 
 that God is always and everywhere seeking to impart 
 Himself to human souls, employing to this end all 
 the events and circumstances of life. Because the 
 Anglican leaders were still hampered by Augustinian 
 or Calvinistic notions of election, they were blind to 
 the larger scope of the law of the spiritual life ; they 
 were forced to contradict their own principle, and to 
 hold that, in the case of the vast number of Protestant 
 Christians who could not depend upon the apostolical 
 succession, God was obliged to act in irregular ways. 
 Their view of the divine life was too narrow in its 
 range ; it shut out more than it included ; it implied, 
 when closely examined, irrationality and confusion. 
 And } T et with all its defects it marks an advance : it 
 shows how the spirit of the age acts even upon those 
 who set themselves to resist it. 
 
 Of the Tractarian movement it may be further re- 
 marked that, in its theory of the church, there was a 
 
416 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 desire to escape from that national conception of the 
 Church of England which isolated it from the larger 
 outlying life of Christendom. The leaders of the 
 movement separated sharply between those bodies who 
 had the so-called apostolic succession and those who 
 had not ; but they sought to overcome the effects of 
 the principle which cut them off from fellowship with 
 their Protestant brethren, by tying more closely to the 
 older historic churches, in which the succession had 
 been preserved. For the purposes of their theory it 
 made no difference that their advances toward fellow- 
 ship with the Greek and Latin churches were coldly, 
 or even contemptuously met. 1 It was something still 
 
 1 How the Tractarian idea of the church, which was only the 
 old Latin idea rehabilitated, was received by the Greek church, 
 has been shown in W. Palmer's Visit to the Russian Church, lately 
 edited by Cardinal Newman. In the Preface, the editor sums 
 up the result of this labored effort to get the Russo-Greek 
 church to commit itself to an unwelcome theory : " Some of 
 their highest prelates and officials go out of their way to deny 
 altogether, or at least to ignore the catholicity, as recognized in 
 the creed, as if their time-honored communion was but a revival 
 of the ancient Donatists. They say virtually, even if not ex- 
 pressly, we know nothing about unity, nothing about catholicity; 
 it is no term of ours," etc But let one of these high officials 
 speak for himself : " It (the church) seems to me like a great 
 sphere revolving round the sun. All the different churches and 
 sects are attracted to the same centre and revolve around the 
 same centre, but at different distances; the church which is 
 simply true orthodox and catholic, i. e., the Eastern, being the 
 nearest, and being joined to it by a more close and legitimate 
 connection; but of the rest, some are further off, some nearer, 
 without there being any distinct separation or difference in kind." 
 p. 271. M. Sidonsky, a professor of philosophy, remarked, 
 " Nothing has forced us hitherto to consider the question of the 
 definition of the Visible Church. When our circumstances re- 
 quire it, it will no doubt be examined." p. 250. Mr. Palmer 
 seems to have gone to Russia with the impression that its church 
 
PRINCIPLE OF HISTOHI'' CONTINUITY. 417 
 
 to be able to feel, in accordance with the notion that 
 now began to prevail, that the church was divided 
 into three great brandies, — the Greek, the Roman, 
 and the Anglican, although by some dark and mys- 
 terious dispensation all fellowship between them was 
 suspended. 
 
 The Church of England was reviving its spiritual 
 life by a law of its own constitution. As a church, 
 it had not forgotten its historic existence, running 
 back through the ages. It resisted the efforts of hos- 
 tile sects to make it become like one of them, a prod- 
 uct of the Reformation. Everywhere were visible 
 the landmarks that pointed to an ancient lineage. Its 
 cathedrals, its churches, its ritual, its order, were the 
 product of a piety long antecedent to the revolution 
 by which it had been severed from its fellowship with 
 Rome. It was easy for the leaders of the Tractarian 
 movement to accept the principle that the continuity 
 of the divine action upon humanity through the church 
 had never been broken. Instead of that feeling which 
 had prevailed in the eighteenth century, that the life 
 of the church before the Reformation was a thing to 
 be discarded as a memory of shame and degradation, 
 there spread the conviction that the church's record in 
 history might be recalled with a sense of pride and 
 triumph. In the historic life of the church lay the 
 evidence that God had never left the world to itself; 
 that the life of Christ had been somehow perpetuated 
 in the life of the ecclesiastical organization. 
 
 This was, indeed, the same truth which Schleier- 
 
 already accepted the Latin idea of catholicity, and with the pur- 
 pose to induce it also to accept and act upon the Anglican modifi- 
 cation, known as the branch theory, — that the Catholic church 
 
 was Greek, Roman, and Anglican. 
 27 
 
418 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 macher had proclaimed, whose reception in Germany 
 was leading to a revolution in the methods of study- 
 ing the church's history. But the Tractarians held it 
 with limitations which weakened or perverted its true 
 significance. They were unable, for this reason, to 
 discriminate between that which was transient or pro- 
 visional and that which was permanent. They confined 
 themselves mainly to a study of Latin theology or the 
 revival of a Latin ritual, oblivious to a higher theol- 
 ogy with a better lineage than that which descended 
 through Latin Christendom. Like every great prin- 
 ciple which is seized with rapture by the imagination 
 and imperfectly apprehended by the reason, the doc- 
 trine of historical continuity was so presented as to 
 lead the church in a false direction. There arose a 
 contempt for Protestantism in all its forms, for its 
 theology, and for its methods of cultivating the relig- 
 ious life. Men talked of the historical continuity of 
 the Church of England, but there was one ugly fact 
 in its history which they wished might be blotted out, 
 — that it had been implicated in the disgraceful, so- 
 called, reforms of the sixteenth century. There was 
 a continuity in the life of Christendom, but they could 
 not conceive it as including a Luther, a Zwingle, or a 
 Calvin. Hence the tendency to Latinize the Church 
 of England, to make it a mere satellite of the Church 
 of Rome, which had been the unconscious purpose of 
 Newman in the days of his greatest influence, still con- 
 tinued to operate, carrying back to the fold of Rome 
 hundreds of its clergy and thousands of its laity. 
 
 The presentation of the principle of historical con- 
 tinuity, as apprehended by Newman or Pusey or 
 Keble, was indeed absurd and self-contradictory. To 
 talk of the continuous incarnation of Christ in the 
 
THE IDEA OF APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION. 419 
 
 world as dependent upon "apostolic succession," or 
 the communication of the life of God to the soul, as 
 involved in the validity of sacraments administered 
 by those who have been episcopally ordained, carries 
 with it its own condemnation. As one takes a look at 
 things as they are, its falsity is manifest enough with- 
 out any serious refutation. But obsolete beliefs like 
 these revived in the nineteenth century may yet have 
 served a different purpose or led in a different direc- 
 tion than when first announced by Tertullian or Cyp- 
 rian. The drift of the age and its counter-currents 
 must be taken into consideration as forces which 
 modify all statements of truth. Such beliefs may 
 even tend to reflect the larger spirit which dominates 
 the time when they reappear; they may be efforts 
 even to give it expression, taking this shape as the 
 most convenient clothing in which to present them- 
 selves to the popular mind. Some living truth may 
 be incased in a mouldering husk which is unsightly 
 and repulsive, — a great reality be implied beneath a 
 teaching which, in its literal form, seems like a gro- 
 tesque caricature of Christ's religion. The idea of 
 apostolical succession may be interpreted as a testi- 
 mony of the human conscience to the belief that 
 God is a God of order and not of confusion. Its 
 preservation in the church for eighteen centuries — 
 admitting the fact for the sake of the argument — 
 may testify to the vitality of ecclesiastical institutions 
 as surviving through all the changes of society, the 
 dissolution and fall of empires, through calamitii 
 great that they threaten to wipe away all traces of 
 civilization. The emphasis laid upon the exaci 
 in which the sacraments are to be administered, while 
 concealing, or even distorting, their significance, may 
 
420 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 be a testimony to the truth that the spiritual life is 
 part of an eternal order based upon a law which 
 knows no exception ; that the relationship of man to 
 God is an immutable fact, not dependent upon the 
 passing phases of depression or exhilaration which 
 mark the emotions. Whatever men may have thought 
 or still think of the sacraments, however materialistic 
 or superstitious the notions which obscure their mean- 
 ing, they still remain to all in the ages of illumination 
 or the ages of darkness ; whether men can read or are 
 too illiterate to do so, they remain the two great sym- 
 bols, the two instructive monuments of Christianity, 
 pointing to an actual relationship with God. Bap- 
 tism is the witness to a divine power which purifies 
 from sin ; the Lord's Supper testifies to the incarnate 
 Word as forever giving Himself to the soul, to the 
 communication of the divine life to the human spirit, 
 the eternal reason to human thought. 
 
 The Tractarian school refused to read the lesson 
 which the French Revolution so impressively taught. 
 Its leaders distrusted the instincts of humanity ; they 
 feared the reason as a dangerous possession ; they 
 sought to restore the priesthood as it ruled in the 
 ages when men could not think for themselves, as it 
 had impersonated the conscience when the conscience 
 could find no other utterance. The overthrow of the 
 Roman Catholic church in France might have shown 
 them that if humanity is to receive the teaching of 
 Christ, it must be because there is an inward aptitude 
 for its reception, not because it is imparted on some 
 external authority. Here lay the weakness of the 
 Anglican revival in the hour of its birth, that it dared 
 not trust the divine constitution of man. There was 
 no recognition of the truth that the incarnation was 
 
MANSEL'S BAMPTON LECTURES. 421 
 
 the light of the eternal reason addressing itself to the 
 reason in man as akin to its own essential nature. It 
 was this distrust which vitiated its scholarship and 
 the value of its patristic learning. 1 It showed no 
 love of truth for its own sake. The study of the past 
 was undertaken in order to confirm a foregone and 
 erroneous conclusion. History was written on the 
 principle which throws out pamphlets in a time of 
 confusion with their special pleading for some par- 
 tisan purpose. 
 
 The skepticism which lurked beneath the Augustin- 
 ian and Calvinistic theologies is also to be seen in the 
 Tractarian movement. It is implied in its very atti- 
 tude of disowning the reason, of seeking refuge in some 
 remote, obscure principle of external authority which 
 the reason is forbidden to examine. The Tractarian 
 reaction may be said to have culminated as a move- 
 ment in thought, when Professor Mansel, in his Bamp- 
 
 1 "The Tractarian movement," says Tulloch, " was in no sense 
 a scientific movement. It threw no light on theological or scii o- 
 tific difficulties. It travestied rather than studied church history, 
 and instead of seeking to explain its great epochs, it made a nitre 
 polemical quarry of them for the support of foregone conclusions. 
 It scouted the idea of new light; its pride was to reproduce old 
 traditions and ' Catholic ' dogmas. It not only held no key to 
 the great movements of Christian thought in the past, hut it 
 blundered over the simplest of them, as Cardinal Newman did 
 so notably in the history of the Arians of the fourth century. 
 What may be said to be now a commonplace in all historical 
 inquiry, that every great epoch in the formation of opinion is the 
 product of all the forces operating in the preceding time, and 
 therefore so far justified in the very fact of its existence, — that 
 it is a living growth in short, and not a mechanical manipulation 
 of parties, — was never realized by them. They took their stand 
 on an imaginary platform of their own, which they identified 
 with Christian antiquity." 
 
422 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 ton Lectures on the " Limits of Religious Thought," 
 attempted to defend on a philosophical basis the skep- 
 tical principle that God was the unknown and the 
 unknowable. In the name of orthodoxy he boldly- 
 avowed what has since been designated as Asnosti- 
 cism. In theology, as in philosophy, the difficulties 
 which beset the human mind in its effort to find 
 out God were to his mind insoluble. Since even to 
 think of God implied irreconcilable contradictions in 
 the very nature of thought, religion must rest upon 
 some other authority than the reason. The true atti- 
 tude of reason toward things divine is that of simple 
 acquiescence in what purports to be an authoritative 
 revelation. Like Calvin, whom in his formal theology 
 he so closely followed, he maintained that revelation 
 is a purely regulative affair. Whether God has re- 
 vealed to us His inmost nature we have no means of 
 knowing. He has imparted what He wills that man 
 should receive. Mr. Mansel accepted the methods of 
 Kant in demonstrating that such a Deity as the popu- 
 lar mind had been taught to receive was impossible to 
 the reason. Of the two alternatives, that of retaining 
 the lower conception of God in defiance of the reason, 
 or of rising to a higher conception in harmony with 
 the reason, he chose the former, falling back upon 
 some supposed external authority for its support. He 
 rejected the intuitional theology, as he called it, assert- 
 ing the necessity for traditional dogmas which the 
 higher development of the conscience had outgrown, 
 because they seemed to him, without inquiry into their 
 origin or meaning, to form a part of that authorita- 
 tive revelation which man was bound to receive even 
 in defiance of his reason. The controversy which took 
 place between him and Mr. Maurice, in which the lat- 
 
MA UR1 CE'S " WHA T IS RE VELA TIONf » ' 423 
 
 ter called attention to the question, " What is revela- 
 tion," is perhaps the most significant one in the whole 
 history of the church since Athanasiua stood up to 
 resist the Arians on a similar, if not the same iden- 
 tical issue. 
 
 The ecclesiastical reaction which was led by New- 
 man in England was felt throughout all Christendom. 
 The same desire "to hurl back the aggressive forces 
 of the human intellect," w r as manifested in the church 
 of Kome, in the Lutheran and Reformed churches, 
 whether on the continent, in England, or America, 
 wherever Christian thought was still resting on its 
 old basis. Tractarianism, Romanticism, Ritualism, 
 Millenarianism, all the theologies of fear and despair 
 arose to contest the larger truth. It is now fifty years 
 since Newman arose with his " fierce thoughts against 
 a liberalism that was invading the church." Two 
 generations of men have passed away while the con- 
 flict has been going on between the advocates of a 
 higher theology and a larger faith, and those who 
 were bent on maintaining Christianity as it had been 
 handed down in Latin tradition. With the third gen- 
 eration, as Isaac Taylor was fond of remarking, there 
 comes a change of outlook. 
 
 As we review the history of the ecclesiastical re- 
 action, which now shows signs of haying spent its 
 force, it is safe to say that the crusade against the hu- 
 man reason, in which Newman was a leading repn 
 tative, has not been successful. The free investigation 
 which he deprecated in dread of its tendencies and 
 results has been carried on with unabated ardor. Ii' 
 there is danger from its activity, it is because the Hood 
 of light may bewilder us, which has been thrown upon 
 
424 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 the Bible, upon the history of the church, upon the 
 ways of God in revealing Himself to the human 
 spirit. The time is ripe for quiet reflection upon the 
 results which have been achieved. What the age now 
 demands is the enforcement of the principles for which 
 the reason has been furnishing the materials in super- 
 abundant measure. The effort to repress the reason 
 has come too late in the world's history to attain suc- 
 cess. The tide of things is setting more and more 
 strongly against ecclesiastical obscurantism. Even 
 reactions against the reason are lifted up into a 
 higher sphere, and serve the cause of God against 
 their will. We owe another debt to Newman and to 
 Mansel, than those we generally acknowledge. The 
 one has shown in a typical way, which has had no 
 such illustration since the conversion of Augustine, 
 how distrust of the reason must logically end in ac- 
 knowledging an infallible pope ; the other in his chiv- 
 alric attempt to defend the traditional dogmas or to 
 overcome the Germanism, as he called it, which was 
 infecting the church, could accomplish his purpose 
 only by cutting away the foundations on which the 
 possibility of a revelation rests. These instances teach 
 us anew that modern Christianity is committed to 
 progress and growth in the knowledge of God and of 
 His revelation. If it is dangerous to advance, it is 
 only more dangerous to retreat. The human reason 
 at last is free, and is increasingly realizing what free- 
 dom means. Christianity must now trust, as indeed 
 it is trusting, to its own merits for its vindication to 
 the reason. It must stand or fall as it can show itself 
 to be true. 
 
 The term reaction, when applied to the movement 
 we have been considering, may mean that there are 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OF REACTIONS. 425 
 
 neglected aspects of truth which need to be reasserted. 
 A reaction is, as it were, a check applied to the wheels 
 of progress lest it go too rapidly for the good of all. 
 In every reaction there is a backward look, as if be- 
 fore the church committed itself to a great advance, it 
 were necessary to take a careful survey of the past, in 
 order that nothing which is true should be left behind. 
 The church, like the world, possesses a conservative 
 spirit, requiring that every step forward be carefully 
 tested, offering an opposition, which, despite its blind- 
 ness or irrationalism, serves the cause of truth by be- 
 coming its foe. It has been among the advantages of 
 the reaction of the nineteenth century, that it has 
 served to preserve a home for those who were not pre- 
 pared for the advance. It has done also a great ser- 
 vice to the cause of theology by keeping before us the 
 life of the past in such a vivid and living way that all 
 that was true and enduring in the ages that are gone 
 is still before our eyes to be read and interpreted. In 
 this way it has also clarified our vision by revealing 
 the concrete evils that obstruct the reception of the 
 larger thought. It has illustrated impressively the 
 truth which Schleiermacher taught, that the church 
 as the fellowship of men under the consciousness of a ( 
 relationship to God is essential to human salvation in 
 its truest sense. It has again borne witness by the re- 
 vival of Christian activities, that such a church alive to 
 its social obligations is the strongest evidence of the 
 incarnation of Christ. 
 
426 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 V. 
 
 The representative process of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury in its spiritual history has been the transition 
 from the deistic conception of a God outside of the 
 universe to the Christian idea of God as indwelling 
 in His creation. It has been a process illustrated in 
 the mental history of every religious thinker who has 
 been seeking for a larger and truer theology. It is a 
 process which may be studied in its various degrees of 
 completeness. With some it has been so imperfectly 
 apprehended as to lead to merely negative results. 
 They have rejected the traditional view of Deity which 
 has been so long identified with Latin or with Protest- 
 ant theology, but they have assumed that, in the nature 
 of the case, there could be nothing to take its place. 
 They have professed themselves atheists, rejoicing to 
 believe that there is no God, or have called themselves 
 agnostics, maintaining that if there be a God He can- 
 not be known. They have sought for substitutes for 
 the discarded belief, such as the worship of humanity, 
 thinking to find in it an ideal worthy of their highest 
 devotion. Others still, after struggling to reduce to 
 some intelligible objective form the vague intuitions, 
 as they deem them, by which they have obtained 
 glimpses of a higher truth, have renounced it all as 
 unprofitable and vain, falling back to the old idea, 
 despite the protest of the reason, in order to obtain a 
 " definite faith " by which they may live and train 
 their children. We hear impressive voices warning 
 us of the danger of advance or sounding the note of 
 retreat. 1 As the century draws toward its close, which 
 
 1 The following may be taken as a representative utterance : 
 " Quand il est bien etabli que Dieu n'est pas immanent, mele au 
 
A SOURCE OF WEAKNESS. 427 
 
 opened with a boundless prospect whose beauty thrilled 
 the soul, the intellectual confusion seems to have in- 
 creased rather than abated, — a state of things from 
 which the ecclesiastical reaction continues to profit. 
 
 There must be some hidden weakness or defect in 
 what we call our modern theology which accounts for 
 what seems to many its failure to make good the place 
 of what has been rejected. The intellectual confusion 
 is no sign, it is true, of failure ; it may be also viewed 
 as the necessary condition of progress. But it is not 
 a state of things whose permanence is desirable. It 
 certainly becomes us to labor for its removal. 
 
 It is by reverting again to Schleiermacher's atti- 
 tude in theology that we may discover one source of 
 the weakness which embarrasses our progress. He 
 grounded religion in the feelings, or the dee}) instincts 
 and sentiments of our nature. He used his great 
 dialectic power within certain limits to interpret the 
 feelings in the language of tin- intellect. But he 
 paused at the idea of God ; Deity he maintained was 
 incomprehensible, except through the feeling ; only 
 through the pious affection could the Infinite and the 
 Eternal one be known. 1 His idea of God remained 
 
 monde, tout pe>il de malentendu grave est rearte. . . . Revenous 
 a ces simples expressions de la vieille metaphysique, pour designer 
 Dieu: la premiere Cause, l'Etre <l<s etres, en v ajoutant I'at- 
 tribut qui determine le mieux son rapporl avee If monde, ['intel- 
 ligence." — Caro, L'Idc'e de Dim, pp. 386, 387. 
 
 1 It is common to hoar Schleiermacher, as also Coleridge, 
 Hegel, and others, spoken of as pantheists. The term, however, 
 has never been defined. It was generated in the deistic atmos- 
 phere of the last century, and was applied to those who dissented 
 from the mechanical notion of God as the distant architect of the 
 universe. It seems also to have been regarded, and quite natu- 
 rally, as equivalent to atheistical. Bayle, for example, charges 
 
428 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 in consequence incomplete and unsatisfactory ; it may 
 have met a certain transitory demand when the mind 
 was escaping from a notion of personality which limited 
 the Divine being after some inferior anthropomorphic 
 conception : but it was no final resting-place for the 
 heart or the reason. The thought about God must 
 control all other thought. If our idea of Him be so 
 vague or imperfect that it can find no expression in 
 language, or if the attempt to find some approximate 
 expression is forbidden as undertaking the impossible, 
 then uncertainty and vacillation will be apt to attach 
 to all the results of religious inquiry. The appeal to 
 the feelings, as that consciousness in man by which all 
 truth is attested, may be the necessary beginning of a 
 great era in religious history, but to stop with the feel- 
 ings is to disown another part of our nature which 
 imperatively demands that it shall not be sacrificed. 1 
 
 Spinoza with having introduced, not pantheism, but atheism, into 
 theology. The term seems to have been first used by Toland, 
 who applied it to himself. It is a word still associated in the 
 minds of many with the opprobrium of a deistic antipathy, but 
 it is also used in another and a higher sense. What its future 
 destiny may be is still uncertain. See article Pantheismus, in 
 Herzog, Real-Encyliopadie. 
 
 1 A recent writer, speaking of what is called the " New The- 
 ology, 5 ' remarks : " But the new theology will not be wise above 
 what is written. The fundamental facts of revealed religion are 
 received in their simplicity. Theories about the application of 
 the facts to the spiritual needs of men are not formulated. 
 Thus, we are agreed upon the truth that ' God was in Christ 
 reconciling the world unto himself; ' but we do not attempt to 
 unravel the interior workings of the divine nature, that clothes 
 the man of Nazareth with the habiliments of the superhuman. 
 In like manner, the doctrine of the trinity is accepted for its 
 practical worth, as a revelation of the many-sidedness of God ; 
 while all endeavors to define the doctrine, on the basis of tri- 
 personality, are abandoned to those ingenious persons who are 
 
SCHLEIERMACHER' S DEFICIENCY. 429 
 
 The appeal to the feelings or instincts is made in order 
 to gather fresh materials for the use of the reason. 
 Even if the mind fail to do justice to the whole eon- 
 tent of the consciousness of humanity, as it is dis- 
 closed in history, it is still bound to make the effort, 
 and to continue to repeat it, notwithstanding succes- 
 sive failures. 
 
 It has been said that the nineteenth century resem- 
 bles more closely the age that gave birth to Greek 
 theology than any intervening age in history. The 
 comparison holds true in some respects to which at- 
 tention should be emphatically called. Schleiermacher 
 closely resembled, both in his general attitude as well 
 as in the principles he set forth, Clement of Alex- 
 andria, the great founder of Greek theology. But 
 the age of Clement was succeeded by that of Origen 
 and Athanasius, when new conditions required that 
 just that which Clement had left undetermined should 
 be definitely expressed if the truth of the incarnation 
 was to be retained as the one all-important, all-inclusive 
 idea which gave unity to human thought, or made the 
 history of mankind intelligible. Schleiermacher, in 
 consequence of the deficiency of his thought regarding 
 God, illustrated again the process of thought in the 
 
 fond of enigmas." \\ hat is it that is written, unless it be upon 
 the human reason, which is an integral part of our spiritual na- 
 ture ? Why should we not, if we are made in God's own imago, 
 attempt to unravel the interior workings of the divine nature ? 
 If we have abandoned the traditional misconception of the 
 trinity, why must we be forbidden to define the doctrine in some 
 truer formula? Is the use of reason in religion to be confined 
 to those ingenious persons who are fond of enigmas ? And what 
 difference is there in principle between such an attitude in the- 
 ology and that of the Roman Catholic church which disowns the 
 reason as dangerous ? 
 
430 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 ancient church in his disposition to adopt what was 
 called Sabellianism, 1 of which it may be sufficient to 
 say that its tendency was to destroy the historic reality 
 of the life of Christ, and thus eventually to return, 
 like Arianism, to the deistic conception of God. 
 
 But, in another respect, the resemblance between 
 our own age and the early church is a striking one. 
 Once more in history we are confronted by the same 
 problem with which the Greek fathers were occupied, 
 and in substantially the same form. Like the Greek 
 philosophers of the Neo-Platonic school, they aimed to 
 reconcile the idea of the divine immanence, which had 
 been the groundwork of all their culture, with the idea 
 which was then invading the sphere of thought as well 
 as of religion, that God was outside of the world, ex- 
 isting in solitude and passivity apart from the crea- 
 tion. The process of reconciliation between these two 
 conceptions of Deity, neither of which would give 
 way to the other, was begun by Origen and completed 
 by Athanasius in the doctrine of the trinity, accord- 
 ing to which transcendent Deity, as the eternal Father, 
 the mysterious background or abyss of all existence, 
 is united by a holy and infinite Spirit with immanent 
 Deity — the eternal Son by whom and for whom all 
 things were made and in whom all things consist, who 
 in the fullness of time became flesh and dwelt amongst 
 us, the glory of the invisible Father, full of grace and 
 truth. The problem is the same for us, but we ap- 
 proach it in history in our own way. Then the idea 
 of immanent Deity was already beginning to fade out 
 of the consciousness ; now it is slowly returning after 
 centuries of abeyance. We bring with us a conviction 
 of the divine transcendence which has been the basis 
 
 1 See ante, p. 76. 
 
HEGEL SUCCEEDS SCHLE1ERMACIIER. 431 
 
 of thought and experience through so many genera- 
 tions, both in Latin and Protestant Christendom, that 
 to escape from it is impossible, and we seek to recon- 
 cile with it the conviction of the immanence of God, 
 which is enforced upon us by the deeper utterances 
 of the consciousness, by all that is highest in the re- 
 searches of modern life, whether in history, in science, 
 in art, in philosophy, or in religion. 
 
 Hegel was Schleierinacher's successor in the order 
 of thought, although contemporaneous with him in 
 the order of time. He was the continuator in the 
 modern church of the mystic succession to whose rep- 
 resentatives John Scotus, Eckart, and Bohme, he 
 acknowledged his relationship. But his system goes 
 back for its fundamental principle to Origen and 
 Athanasius. The statement of Hegel may differ in 
 form from that of ancient Greek theology, but it is 
 the same thing in its essential principle. His idea of 
 Deity going forth out of Himself in order to return 
 again in a self-conscious process through the media- 
 tion of the spirit is not essentially different from Ori- 
 gen's doctrine of the " eternal generation of the Son," 
 upon which Athanasius stood when he announced the 
 Christian formula of the trinity. If, according to 
 the belief to which the church is committed, God ex- 
 ists in the triune distinction of Father, Son, and Holy 
 Ghost, then this distinction must underlie all thought 
 or experience of His presence and operations in the 
 world. It was characteristic of the Latin theology 
 that it formally accepted the doctrine of the trinity, 
 and then reasoned about God on an Arias or deistio 
 basis, as if the trinity were a sort of accidental attach- 
 ment to His essence, to be used for a Deus ex machina 
 as occasion demanded. The same was true of Calvin 
 
432 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 and his successors. The clear vision of the eighteenth 
 century rejected such a trinity, which seemed to have 
 no organic relationship to the outer world or to the 
 life of man. Hegel stands for the restoration of the 
 Athanasian or Nicene formula, as having its ground in 
 the reason, which is also the vehicle of revelation, — 
 as the one essential truth in philosophy or in theology, 
 without which we are unable to elicit the meaning of 
 nature or the course of human history. 1 
 
 1 The history of theology in England, so far as it has been in- 
 fluenced by Coleridge and by Maurice who was his disciple, has 
 been guided by the principle of Hegel rather than that of Schlei- 
 ermacher. Coleridge in his early life, while still under the in- 
 fluence of eighteenth century traditions, became a Unitarian 
 minister. But acquaintance with Schelling's philosophy, which 
 is akin in its theological bearings to Hegelianism, led him to see 
 the larger relationships of the trinity to human reason as well 
 as human life, so that a doctrine which had seemed to him 
 irrational or absurd from the stand-point of deism, became of 
 vital importance in his maturer thought. In this respect Cole- 
 ridge has been followed by Maurice, the greatest of modern Eng- 
 lish theologians. He, too, fought his way through the repre- 
 sentative struggle of the age, — from deism to the Christian idea 
 of God. The application of the doctrine of the trinity to the 
 spiritual needs of man, or as the clew to the interpretation of 
 human history, may be said to constitute the substance of Mau- 
 rice's theology. More than any other modern theologian was 
 he in accord with the fundamental principle of Hegel. It is this 
 which explains his obscurity to those not yet emancipated from 
 deistic notions, or who regard the trinity as an attachment to 
 the idea of God, to which justice has been done in acknowledg- 
 ing it as a Catholic tradition. It is strange that Maurice should 
 have given so little attention to the one man whose philosoph- 
 ical thought he reproduced hi its practical and religious bear- 
 ings. 
 
 The life of Maurice, lately published, brings out one fact of con- 
 siderable importance, namely, that he thought English theology 
 must always remain different from German, because it started 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY, -\>V-\ 
 
 It is sometimes said that Hegel has been discredited 
 in his own country, that his philosophy has been shat- 
 tered into fragments. 1 It may be that the details of 
 the system as expounded by the master must undergo 
 revision. It may be that a further preliminary process 
 is necessary before the full significance of his prin- 
 ciples can be generally discerned. There is still much 
 to be done in fields which Hegel did not exhaust be- 
 fore an intelligent assent or denial can be given to his 
 generalizations. He lived in an age when the mate- 
 rials were collecting for a great ecclesiastical reaction, 
 the spirit of which was also affecting other depart- 
 ments of inquiry than theology. It may be for these 
 
 from a different principle and followed a different method. Cf. 
 i. p. 253. " Bnnsen's book on the Church of the future taught 
 me clearly what I had suspected before, that every earnest Ger- 
 man must begin with the Spirit, that he may come to learn some- 
 thing of the Father and the Son. I am as certain as I can be of 
 anything, that our process is the opposite one, that we must begin 
 from the Father in order that we may know something of the 
 Son and of the Spirit." See, also, ii. p. 468. "We (English 
 and Germans) must be to a considerable extent unintelligible to 
 each, because we start from exactly opposite points ; we, nat- 
 urally, from that winch is above us and speaks to us ; they, 
 naturally, from that which is within them and which seeks for 
 some object above itself. ... I am most anxious to assert the 
 worth of our English position, to prove that truth must look 
 down upon us, if we would look up to it ; that Truth must bea 
 person seeking us, if we are to seek him." But (his distinction 
 may be said to also mark the difference between Schleiermacher 
 and Hegel. 
 
 1 "For any one whose view is not limited by words or super- 
 ficial appearances, it is not difficult to see that, in the scientific 
 life of Germany as of other countries, there is no greater power 
 at present than Hegelianism, especially in all that relates to met- 
 aphysics and ethics, to the philosophy of history and of religion. 
 — Professor Caird, in his Sketch of Hegel. 
 •7 28 
 
434 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 among other reasons that the religious thought of the 
 age seems to have halted for a moment as if realizing 
 the mighty change which the full acceptance of the 
 Christian doctrine of the trinity involves. A great 
 position like this is not taken without many defeats 
 and many successive assaults on the citadels of tradi- 
 tion and prejudice. In this respect history teaches us 
 the lesson of the patience of hope. 
 
 The effort of Hegel to find in the trinity the com- 
 prehensive formula which explains the phenomena of 
 nature and the course of human history, has been fol- 
 lowed by what has seemed the most destructive attack 
 upon the verities of the Christian faith in the annals 
 of Christianity. The criticism of the last century 
 appears like trifling compared with the attempt of 
 Strauss to reduce to a myth the facts of the gospel 
 history. The author of this famous theory claimed 
 to be applying the teaching of Hegel more fully and 
 consistently when he practically denied the historic 
 reality of the events relating to the life of Christ, 
 making Christ Himself only an ideal creature of the 
 human imagination. It was fortunate, if we may so 
 speak, in a world where God is present as the one con- 
 trolling force in the evolution of history, that the at- 
 tack of Strauss should have coincided with the eccle- 
 siastical revival whose object it was to reassert with a 
 new vigor the historic personality of Christ, calling 
 attention anew to the history of the church as the best 
 evidence of its reality. But dangerous as the attack 
 may seem, there is a point of view from which it may 
 be regarded as a hopeful sign for the future of the- 
 ology. It shows that the age has become conscious of 
 the antagonism, the deepest, the most significant that 
 is involved in the true apprehension of Christianity. 
 
THE TWO CONCEPTIONS OF CHRIST. 435 
 
 We have already seen : how the Latin church, when it 
 began its independent career, lost the vision of the 
 spiritual, essential Christ in its effort to know Christ 
 after the flesh or to realize His earthly existence 
 through a more vivid portrayal of His earthly environ- 
 ment. He who was the light that lighteth every man 
 that cometh into the world, or as Greek theologians, 
 Justin, Clement, Origen, and Athanasius had ex- 
 pressed it, the Eternal reason in whom humanity par- 
 ticipated in virtue of its constitution, by whom the 
 world in every age had been enlightened, by whom 
 even Socrates was a Christian, as Justin had said, 
 though but in part, — this conception of the higher 
 spiritual Christ, the Latin church had sacrificed in 
 order to emphasize and make its own the historical fact 
 of an incarnation. It is not strange, therefore, that 
 when Christ after the spirit had been once more appre- 
 hended in the fullness of His relationship to humanity, 
 Christ after the flesh should have seemed like a lim- 
 itation which hindered the appreciation of His true 
 character. It is not strange that to Strauss and 
 others, the events recorded in the narrative of His life 
 should have appeared as so many efforts to express in 
 tangible forms the idea of a being who was beyond 
 and above the limitations of humanity. It may even 
 have been necessary that for a moment in the church's 
 history men should have refused, like St. Paul, to 
 know Christ any more after the flesh, in order that 
 they might discern more clearly the spiritual relation- 
 ship by which Christ in man, and no longer outside of 
 him, becomes the transforming power of a new crea- 
 tion. The work of Strauss has shown the Christian 
 world the antagonism, in its clearest form between the 
 1 See ante, pp. 141, 142. 
 
436 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 two ways of regarding Christ which have been repre- 
 sented in the Greek theology on the one hand and in 
 the Latin on the other. As the Latin church has 
 shown by its history and its influence on modern 
 thought, that if Christ be not known after the spirit, 
 the incarnation possesses no inner necessary meaning 
 in the history of redemption, so Strauss has demon- 
 strated that if the fact of an historical incarnation in 
 the person of Jesus be denied, it is impossible to re- 
 tain as a great objective truth the spiritual, essential 
 Christ indwelling in humanity. The higher concep- 
 tion of Christ's person evaporates into thin air, it be- 
 comes like the baseless fabric of a vision which can- 
 not be disentangled from other dreams, if the fact be 
 doubted or denied of the historic manifestation in 
 Jesus of the fullness of the eternal God-head. The 
 reconciliation of the two attitudes must be sought in 
 the church in its higher aspects, as the congregation of 
 faithful men called out from the world to bear witness 
 to an historic influence as well as created by it. It 
 must be sought further, in the more definite rejection 
 of that pernicious dualism which has separated nature 
 and humanity from God, as though it were beneath 
 the divine dignity and greatness that the Eternal 
 should unite Himself in close organic relationship 
 with man. It is a reconciliation that is possible be- 
 cause it was once achieved in the theology of a people 
 who stood facing the oriental and occidental worlds, 
 who combined the subtle speculative power of the one 
 with the practical bent and capacity of the other. It 
 is a reconciliation that must be accomplished in the 
 heart and intellect of the church before Christianity 
 can address itself with something of its old power to 
 the great world of the Orient, which has so long been 
 
CONCLUSION. 437 
 
 waiting for the solution of the problems which have 
 pressed heavily upon its spirit. To this end, it is a 
 mark of progress that the issue should be clearly per- 
 ceived. 1 
 
 In concluding this sketch of the history of Chris- 
 tian thought, we are leaving it on the threshold of a 
 larger future. Modern theology in its essential prin- 
 ciple has risen above the negations of Latin Christian- 
 ity, whether in its Augustinian or Calvinistic form. 
 Things that have been separated in order to the more 
 distinct realization of each are coming together in a 
 comprehensive unity. Whatever may be the difficul- 
 ties that await adjustment, and they are many, it is a 
 great step in advance that we have regained our confi- 
 dence in human reason as participating in Eternal wis- 
 dom. Back of all the theories and imperfect expla- 
 nations of religious truth there stands a silent judge, 
 the heart of that humanity which is larger than in- 
 dividual thought. Such a judge is quietly recording 
 the infallible verdict against all that is untrue, or ap- 
 proving all that is genuine and final in the results 
 of sincere inquiry. When the confusion that sur- 
 rounds all efforts to reach the higher truth is gradually 
 cleared away, the judgment will be manifest and wis- 
 dom will be justified of all her children. Christian 
 
 1 Substantially the same issue raised by Strauss had been an- 
 ticipated among the Quakers in the movement led by Hicks 
 (1827), who pushed to an extreme the doctrine of the inner light, 
 denying all positive Christianity. 
 
 Among the many replies made to Strauss, the most valuable 
 was given by the late lamented Dr. Dorner, in his truly great 
 work on the Person of Christ, whose object is to trace the 
 course of Christian thought which takes its rise in an historic 
 personage. 
 
438 RENAISSANCE OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 theology lias regained at last the point where it was 
 left by the master minds of the ancient church. Latin 
 Christianity is seen as a parenthesis in the larger 
 record of the life of Christendom. The factors of a 
 true theology are now in our possession as they have 
 never been before in all the church's history, — God, 
 humanity, and nature, bound together in indissoluble 
 relationship. The preparation begins to be approxi- 
 mately complete for undertaking the result which the- 
 ology aims to achieve, and which it alone can achieve, 
 — a science which shall embrace all knowledge, be- 
 cause it sees all things in God. Even now the church 
 holds the key to the situation as the collective body of 
 those who live in the consciousness of a relationship 
 to God in Christ, through the indwelling of an infinite 
 Spirit. Some facts there are which speak louder than 
 any words. The interest in foreign missions which 
 characterizes the church to-day, bears witness to the 
 deep-seated conviction that the incarnate Christ stands 
 in organic relationship to humanity. Notwithstand- 
 ing the differences that divide the Christian world, it 
 constitutes a ground of hope that the Catholic church, 
 as a whole, has never committed itself to any theory 
 of its existence which can prevent the congregation of 
 faithful men from expanding itself into the fuller life 
 of a redeemed humanity, where the communion of 
 men shall become the communion of saints, and God 
 shall have fulfilled the meaning and the promise of 
 the incarnation. 
 
Princeton Theological Semmary-Speer Libr, 
 
 1 1012 01145 7076 
 
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