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 BR 45 .H84 1892/93 
 Heard, J. B. b. 1828. 
 Alexandrian and Carthaginian 
 theology contrasted 
 

 
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ALEXANDRIAN AND CARTHAGINIAN 
 
 THEOLOGY CONTRASTED. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 Ill cruicn Scu, jyi'ice Gs., 
 
 OLD AND NEW THEOLOGY: 
 B Constructive Critique. 
 
 We predict an earnest welcome for this volume."— Literary World. 
 
 In croirn 8co, Fifth Edition, 2^'>'ice Qis., 
 
 THE TRIPARTITE NATURE OF MAN 
 
 Spirit, Soul, anJ> :fi3oDi?» 
 
 Applied to Illustrate and Explain the Doctrine of Original Sin, 
 
 the New Birth, the Disembodied State, and the 
 
 Spiritual Body. 
 
 "The author has Kot a striking and consistent theory. ... It is 
 book which any student of the Dible may read with pleasure."- 
 Gvardiau. 
 
 Edinbuugh; T. & T. CLAEK, 88 Gkorge Stiiekt. 
 
ALEXANDRIAN 
 
 AND 
 
 OARTHAGmiAN THEOLOGY 
 CONTRASTED. 
 
 THE HULSEAN LECTURES. 1892-93. 
 
 BY 
 
 Key. J. B. HEAKD, A.M., 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 ■THE TRIPARTITE NATURE OF MAN," " OLD AND NEW THEOLOGY. 
 
 EDINBUEGH: 
 
 T. & T. CLA'EK, 38 GEORGE STREET. 
 
 1893. 
 
PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB, 
 FOR 
 
 T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH. 
 
 I.ONDON : SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND CO. LIMITED. 
 NEW YORK : CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 
 TORONTO: THE PRESBYTERIAN NEWS CO. 
 
TO 
 
 JAMES MOORHOUSE, D.D. 
 
 LORD BISHOP OF MANCHESTER 
 
 A PIONEER 
 
 CLEAR, CALM, CIRCUMSPECT 
 
 THROUGH THE JUNGLE WHICH LIES BETWEEN 
 
 OLD THEOLOGY AND MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 THESE LECTURES 
 
 ARE INSCRIBED BY PERMISSION 
 BY HIS OBLIGED FRIEND, 
 
 THE AUTHOR 
 
PREFACE 
 
 A FEW words of explanation will be enough to put the 
 reader in line with the leading thoughts of these Lectures. 
 Some years ago I had put forth a volume of constructive 
 criticism, bearing the title of Old and Nev: Theology. 
 This contrast of old and new inadequately conveyed my 
 meaning, as it set the reader thinking of some " time" test ; 
 and it seemed to raise needless offence by the vague hint 
 that the new was better than the old. As yet I had not 
 struck my finger on the true contrast between old and 
 new ; but I had not long to wait. Through the kindness 
 of a friend, I was sent an early copy of the Bohlen Lecture 
 for 1884, on the Continuity of Christian Thought; a 
 Study of Modern Theology in the Light of its History, by 
 Professor Allen of the Episcopal Theological School of 
 Cambridge, Mass. This able and thorough-going treatise 
 put in my hands for the first time a better canon than 
 that of old and new. I there learned, to my surprise, that 
 what I had described as new theology was in reality the 
 oldest of all. It was that which was from the beginning 
 in the East, and had there been held to as a consistent 
 tradition of truth in Alexandria by all the early Greek 
 Fathers, from Clement to Athanasius. The contrast 
 between early Greek and Latin theology was the key to 
 Dr. Allen's book, and showed that the " traditional con- 
 ception " of God which has come down from the Middle 
 Ages through " the Latin Church is undergoing a pro- 
 
viii Preface, 
 
 found transformation." "The idea that God is tran- 
 scendent, and not only exalted above the world by His 
 moral perfections, 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 momentous importance in every 
 department of human thought, and more especially in 
 Christian theology." 
 
 This was the contrast between a God immanent and 
 a God transcendent, which is the master-key to the many 
 contrasts between two theologies which I had crudely 
 described as old and new, whereas in reality they were 
 as far apart as the East is from the West. It was to 
 me a joyful discovery that the so-called new theology of 
 modern thinkers was nothins^ more than a fresh draft of 
 the oldest of all theologies. It was that Logos doc- 
 trine of a Word, a wisdom indwelling in men, which is 
 from the beginning. It is as old as St. John, though 
 later Augustinianism had effaced that early type, and set 
 up a new standard of orthodoxy based on Church autho- 
 rity and the blindness of the natural conscience. To 
 this transcendent Deity the whole West has for fourteen 
 centuries blindly bowed, and accepted under the phrase 
 " sovereignty," the Eoman magisterial conception of God. 
 There have been protests here and there, but they were 
 only scattered voices, lurid and broken lights seen up and 
 down the ages ; but to question the argument from autho- 
 rity was to write oneself down among the mystics, and to 
 lay oneself open to the reproach of indefiniteness. But 
 thanks to Professor Allen's far-reaching contrast between 
 East and West, we have been given a clue by which 
 again to thread the labyrinth of Church history. We 
 are at one dead lift raised out of that uncritical stage of 
 scholarship in which the " Eathers " were regarded as a 
 
Preface. ix 
 
 whole, and Church teaching was considered a body of 
 truth, one and indivisible. Such a work as these Bohlen 
 Lectures of Dr. Allen were to me " epoch-making." They 
 express what I had been hammering at for years without 
 striking the blov/ home. To thank a writer to whom, 
 in Plato phrase, the re'^vr] /jiaievrtKr) has been so largely 
 given, will seem wasteful and ridiculous excess. How 
 helpful it has been to me, let these Hulsean Lectures ex- 
 press. It confirms the old remark, that all discoveries are 
 only recoveries. A thought is in the air, and some one has 
 set it in motion. It is they who are the first to recognise 
 its far-reaching importance, who feel that it clears up 
 contradictions between old and new which were before 
 insoluble. 
 
 Another writer to whom I wish to express how deep 
 a debt I owe for unexpected help is Dr. Moorhouse, the 
 Bishop of Manchester. His University Sermons on the 
 Teaching of Christ ; its Conditions, Secret, and Results, are 
 full of suggestive thought. What can be better than his 
 account of the Book of Origins, and his linking together 
 of the Genesis traditions with those of Chaldgea ? The 
 concessions which this broad - minded Bishop makes 
 to the demands of the age, justifies his remark that 
 " nothing is nearer to heresy than a stiff and narrow- 
 minded orthodoxy." 
 
 But my chief obligation to Bishop Moorhouse lies in 
 his skilful handling of what he describes as the after- 
 thoughts of dogmatic theology. One of the oldest of 
 these difficulties of belief grows out of the theory of 
 Satanic influence on those cases of obscure disease de- 
 scribed in the New Testament as Satanic possession. 
 The Bishop here makes good use of Dr. Martensen's theory, 
 corresponding to Schopenhauer's " Will to Live," which 
 must, from its very nature, come into constant conflict with 
 
X Pi-eface. 
 
 that Almii^lity " AVill to Love," which is God. The devil 
 "so defined," says Martensen, " hungers after fuhiess of life, 
 and must come for his substance, for the material on 
 which he works, to the world of man." This, like every 
 other great thought, is pregnant of many others, and the 
 whole difficulty of diabolical possession yields up its 
 meaning, and falls into line with law when touched with 
 this one thought of a God who is " Will to Love." All 
 separate Hfe is mere " Will to Live." It belongs to that 
 lower world which is the " creature, which is not subject 
 to the law of God, neither indeed can be." 
 
 I hope in these few pages of explanation I have at 
 least acknowledged some of my debts ; discharge them I 
 never expect to do, since a fresh writer sets in motion 
 new trains of thought. It is like the " power " let in to 
 the looms of Manchester, which afterwards seem to go 
 on spinning of themselves, as if endowed with perpetual 
 motion. A remark of St. Beuve is here to the point, 
 that to admire with mediocrity is an unerring mark of 
 mediocrity. I hope I have acknowledged the obligations 
 which I owe to these two writers. There are many 
 more, doubtless, to whom I am indebted, but I am not 
 conscious of it to the same extent. If I have erred, I 
 have at least erred in good company. If I have found 
 the key to this standing contrast between new and old in 
 theology, I at least lay no claim to originality. To have 
 found the true thread to the labyrinth, and the root 
 of the contrast between the one and the many, is what 
 multitudes have toiled after, and still are in search of. 
 Catholic and Protestant have each raised their Eureka 
 cry, only to lose it again in some new form of traditional 
 dogmatism. To these two, my masters in theology, Dr. 
 Moorhouse and Dr. Allon, I gladly inscribe anything 
 that is fresh or new in these Lectures. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Epimetheus Afterthofghts, 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 Theology Proper, 31 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 What are Afterthoughts ? 58 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Dissipation of Energy, 87 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 Excuse for Afterthoughts, 114 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 Not to Premeditate, 149 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 Augustine and his System, 175 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Augustine, his Merits and Defects, 201 
 
 xi 
 
xii Contents. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 DiDACHE AND DOGMA, 229 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 Afterthoughts on Inspikation, 260 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 Remedy, 275 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 Thhee Tests of Afterthoughts — 1. Unphimitive ; 2. Irre- 
 concilable WITH Higher Light to break from God's 
 Word ; 3. Metaphysical Stage of Thought, . . . 314 
 
 Epilogue, 334 
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 Page 243, line 32, /or "times" read "tomes." 
 Page 249, line VI, for "or alter" read "in order." 
 Page 281, line 15, " protagonist " /or " protagenist. 
 Page 347, line 2>2,for "lamine a^stit" read '^ vestU.' 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 EPIMETHEUS AFTERTHOUGHTS. 
 
 The earliest, perhaps the most precious, fragment of 
 sub-apostolic teaching is the " Teaching of the Twelve." 
 It sets out with the contrast between two ways, " the 
 way of life " and " the way of death." A lifetime has 
 taught nie the same sharp contrast between two theo- 
 logies, the one setting out with the first thoughts of God, 
 the other with man's interpretation of these thoughts, 
 which I describe as second thoughts or afterthoughts. 
 The first thoughts, which are God's thoughts, all address 
 themselves to the conscience — they enter in, and they 
 lodge there. As they are the first thoughts of Him who 
 is the Word of God, so, like that word of God, which 
 is quick and powerful, they pierce sharper than any 
 two - ed^ed sword. The unerrinc^ mark of the first 
 thoughts of God is that they come, as all Christ's 
 teaching came, with authority to the conscience. They 
 bind and they loose alone in the region of the inner man, 
 while with superb indifference they sweep by, as beneath 
 notice, those ritualisms and liabbinisms on which smaller 
 teachers lay such store. The self-limitation of Christ is 
 nowhere more seen than in this, that in discussions which 
 to the critical mind seem so urgent, such as the question 
 
 A 
 
2 Epimetheus Afterthoughts, 
 
 of the authorship of the books of Moses, He is severely 
 silent. To questions merely curious, such as whether few 
 shall be saved. He leaves us as before in blank ignorance ; 
 as an able modern apologist expresses it : ^ — " Judging, 
 liowever, from His ordinary method of teaching, I should 
 have expected that just as He said to the man who 
 desired Him to interfere in a question of inheritance, 
 ' Who made me a judge or a divider between you ? ' He 
 would have said in reply to a question about the age or 
 authorship of a passage in the Old Testament, ' Who 
 commissioned me to resolve difficulties in historical 
 criticism ? ' " 
 
 This is a mark of God's thoughts, the note, as we should 
 say, of " Inspiration " in the true sense of the term, 
 and as contrasted with modern notions of a book religion. 
 Christ is silent, severely so, on all subjects on which the 
 human mind is able to find a path for itself. To para- 
 phrase a celebrated line of Virgil, it leaves others to 
 fuse the meltinc^ brass, or make cold marble to breathe. 
 Others may measure the course of the stars or pour out 
 streams of passionate eloquence ; but for the arts of moral 
 self-control, and to find out the place of wisdom and the 
 l)lace of understanding, then we may turn to the old 
 Book and appeal to it as to the lively oracles of God. 
 These oracles are dumb where the inquisitive mind of man 
 expects to be saved the search for truth. On this wide 
 reach of thought, embracing the whole of science and the 
 whole of ethics and of politics, on its speculative side at 
 least, these so-called oracles are dumb. So much so, that 
 the Gnostic type of mind turns from them with contempt, 
 and describes itself as Agnostic, or indifferent to truths 
 which are hid from the wise and prudent, and revealed 
 only to babes. God's thoughts, in a word, are not as our 
 
 ^ Sermons on the Teaching of Christ, by Bishop Moorhouse, p. 42. 
 
Epwietheus Afterthoughts. 3 
 
 thoughts ; and the Bible in its way of putting truth ever 
 will be a stumbling - block and offence to the merely 
 curious and inquisitive. A sublime chapter in Job sums 
 it all up as to these silences of Scripture. It is silent on 
 mineralogy, botany, biology, and all the antiquities of 
 man and his dwelling-place, but it breaks out only to 
 teach, as — " Unto man He saith, Behold, the fear of the 
 Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil, that is 
 understanding." 
 
 Now, contrast with this theology of God's first thoughts 
 the afterthoughts of man, which make up our dogmatic, 
 deductive systems built up on scattered texts and inferences 
 of the hereafter all grounded in our ignorance. These 
 second or afterthoughts all want this true note of authority, 
 and they make up for it by the mock thunder of dogmat- 
 ism. They are positive where revelation is silent, and 
 they venture to lift the veil which hangs over the future, 
 where apostles and prophets, who should know most, pro- 
 fess to know least. It is instructive to pursue this contrast 
 between inspired and uninspired men and books. As 
 soon as we get out of the Canon into the Apocrypha the 
 difference is apparent. It needs little learning to see 
 why even an uncritical age like that which drew up the 
 Hebrew Canon had to exclude such a book as Tobit, with 
 its strange demonology and still stranger medical magic. 
 It is too obvious; and this same contrast of fine gold with 
 base metal runs throucfh all the later books. Even the 
 Wisdom of Solomon is too " Solomonic " by far. It is an 
 evident afterthought on the hints thrown out by the way 
 in canonical books on the subject of Solomon's wisdom. 
 Ecclesiastes is eponyraic, no doubt, and affects a gnomic 
 style such as an ancient king of Israel of the heroic age 
 would presumably \^rite in. But it is sober in com- 
 parison to the more than romantic style of the later 
 
Epimetheus Afterthoughts, 
 
 Solomon. His love for wisdom is so piled np witli 
 phrases which are the echoes of a truth-seeker, not the 
 voice itself, that it compels us to say that no man really 
 wise would descant in such a style. It sets us thinking 
 of the age of copyists, which always sets in when the 
 atjje of true wisdom is over. 
 
 We have, then, in these apocryphal books a ready test 
 of the contrast we are in search of. The first thoughts of 
 God are simple, self-evidencing, and go home to tiie con- 
 science straight as a bolt to its mark. But when we 
 descend to afterthoughts, we at once enter a lower level 
 of thought. It is less direct, more discursive ; it is 
 more ingenious, but less heart-searching. It may be said 
 to begin at the point where Holy Writ leaves off, and to 
 lift the veil expressly on those subjects on which Scrip- 
 ture lets it fall, cautioning us that " it doth not appear 
 what we shall be." It has been often remarked that the 
 Mosaic creation contains no cosmogony, but the reason 
 for this omission is not seen to be as intentional as it is. 
 But at last we have been able to recover the sources of 
 these primitive legends which lie at the base of the Mosaic 
 narrative. The legend of the Creation, the Fall, and the 
 Deluge are all Accadian, and the Cylinder rolls have 
 given a similar version to our Book of Origins. But the 
 contrast is quite as instructive as the resemblance of the 
 jMosaic to these Chaldee legends. The latter are all 
 polytheistic, and the ethical teaching corresponds to it, 
 while the Mosaic are all set to the note of Monotheism. 
 Tliey are grave, ethical, and not inconsistent with the 
 character of One whose " eyes behold, and wliose eyelids 
 try the children of men." 
 
 This contrast is not accidental. It runs tlirough the 
 whole Old Testament, and suggests to us the true and 
 only Canon of inspiration, which has been so strangely 
 
Epimethens Afterthoughts. 5 
 
 misunderstood by those who take the Bible for what it is 
 not, and mistake what it is. Every scripture inspired by 
 God, according to tlie apostle (2 Tim. iii. 16), is profitable 
 for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction 
 which is in righteousness. Here the predication unques- 
 tionably is not so much with regard to what theopneustia 
 means in itself (that lies quite in the background), or 
 with regard to the channels through which theopneustia 
 ilows. These are its four criteria : it is profitable in these 
 four directions — (1) For hthacricaXla, which is not so much 
 the thing taught — this would be didacM — as the way of 
 teaching; (2) for reproof, or the elenchus of conscience, 
 convincinsf, as it were, and bindins: it with cords of a 
 man ; (3) for iTravopOaxjcv, which means a good deal more 
 than correction, and which rather means that re-setting 
 our nature on a true spiritual and moral basis, that 
 edifying which is in love, which is the true note of 
 Holy Scripture. Lastly, the end and aim of all truly 
 theopneustic writing is iraLheia, which is a good deal 
 more than mere instruction or schoolmaster's work. 
 Parental education differs from instruction as a whole 
 from its part, or as genus from species. Fatherly discip- 
 line more nearly represents the meaning — that " loving 
 correction which makes us great " when it comes from the 
 God and Father of all. 
 
 We have only to put these four tests of a theo- 
 pneustic book together, and we see what the Bible is not 
 and what it is as a whole, and so are able to measure 
 the contrast between the first thoughts of God and the 
 afterthoughts of man. This, as we hold it, is the true 
 Canon of what is to be the Canon. This is the best 
 reason for accepting on the whole (with some reserve, 
 we admit, which modern criticism calls for) the Hebrew 
 Canon. The Palestinian Canonists extruded certain 
 
6 Epimetheus Afterthoughts. 
 
 additaments because " found in the Greek but not in 
 the Hebrew." So far, by this expression, they seem 
 partial, and judges of themselves. Alexandria was a 
 rival centre for Judaism, and the Jerusalem doctors of 
 the law naturally became jealous of their rival. So far 
 we can understand the enlarged Canon of tlie Greek Old 
 Testament and the somewhat abridged Canon of the 
 same in Hebrew. As a matter of fact, since the Keforma- 
 tion at least, our suffrages have gone with the Palestinian 
 against the Alexandrian Jews. We have accepted St. 
 Jerome's view of the matter, and censure the Latin 
 Church for its Vulgate version, which obliterates the deep 
 distinction between the canonical and the uncanonical 
 books of the Old Testament. It is one of the many 
 errors of Eome which in its place Protestant contro- 
 versialists do not fail to single out for censure. 
 
 But the true Canon of inspiration lies not in any 
 decision of Piabbis, who chiefly for linguistic reasons 
 decided for a Hebrew and against a Greek version. This 
 contention, based on verbal inspiration, is no better than 
 that between Samaria and Jerusalem as rival centres of 
 Palestinian Judaism, and would be decided by the Lord 
 on the same grounds, that " wliile salvation was of the 
 Jews, the time was coming when neither in this mountain 
 nor yet in Jerusalem men should worship the Father." 
 The old Hebrew draft of Law, Prophets, and Psalms has 
 this advantage over the Greek translation, that these 
 apocryplial additions, which have crept into the Greek, 
 have the unerring mark of all afterthoughts. They do 
 not strike the same note as the first thoughts of God — 
 they are not profitable in the same way for instruction 
 in righteousness. Their iraiheia is of a very inferior 
 type. They import an angelology on which canonical 
 books are expressively silent. They are effusive in 
 
Epimetheus Afterthoughts. 7 
 
 idealisincr that foreign notion of Chachmah which is not 
 Hebrew but Greek ; but these Wisdom echoes of the so- 
 called Solomonic sage lack the one note of archaic 
 simplicity. The canonical book of Proverbs is quite in 
 the true note. When we come to Koheleth, it seems as 
 if we are on the border line, and the low place which 
 it takes in the Hebrew Canon shows the small estimation 
 in which it was held. The Hebrew Canonists would 
 perhaps have done better if they had used the knife 
 more boldly, and amputated more of the later books 
 of the Hagiographa. When we have named Psalms, 
 Proverbs, and Job, we have included all that come np to 
 the full standard of theopneustic books as profitable for 
 moral and spiritual training. There are, of course, in the 
 Bible, as in any " library," lesser as well as greater lights. 
 Our minor poets have their place in any anthology 
 deserving the name. So for this reason we would not 
 exclude from the Canon such a fragment as that so-called 
 Vision of Obadiah, which critics conjecture was an 
 amplification of the last five verses of Amos, and was 
 therefore placed next after the book of Amos. All we 
 contend against is the superstitious sense of finality in 
 dealing with the books of the Old Testament. 
 
 We come, then, to this conclusion with regard to 
 inspiration in general and the Canon of the Old Testa- 
 ment in particular, that Mosaism is Monotheism, and that 
 it is this Monotheism which differentiates the Book of 
 Origins from all other origins or cosmogonies like the 
 Chaldtean, on which they are apparently transcripts. Why, 
 in following the current tradition of Semitic and Accadian 
 races, the Hebrews, that is the men from beyond the river 
 who broke off under Abraham from the common stock, who 
 served other gods, should set up new traditions of their own 
 which were like and yet unlike the old, it is impossible 
 
8 Epwictheus Aftei^thotights, 
 
 to explain if we leave out of account that election of the 
 father of the faithful. The true beginning of inspiration 
 is that which we may describe as the call of Abraham. 
 That was the true birthday of the chosen race, of which 
 the exodus was the baptism, when they were baptized into 
 Moses in the cloud and in the sea. Then began that 
 course of education which we sometimes describe as 
 inspiration and sometimes as revelation ; but these are 
 only different names of the same thing, the education of 
 the race under prophets in sundry times and divers 
 manners. Mosaism is only prophetism, since Moses was 
 the first as Malachi is the last of a long chain of teachers, 
 — a chain of many links and of different patterns. The 
 book element was quite subordinate, if it ever existed, 
 in early times. It is an old fallac}' of human nature to 
 judge the past by the present, and so to forget that the 
 best teaching is catechesis — it is ear- wise not eye-wise, 
 by the living voice, not the dead letter, that man acts on 
 man and mind opens mind. It is mere modernism to 
 regard us as dependent on books. These modern oracles 
 are the reverse of lively. We have fallen like the 
 Moslems into the same mistake of describing our holy 
 faith as a book religion. To this day Moslems are 
 described by Kaffirs or pagans of Africa as " men of the 
 book." It is with much the same superstitious venera- 
 tion as Moslems look on the " Koran " — the " writing " 
 where inspiration is its own witness of itself — that we 
 moderns take the Hebrew Keri or written text of what 
 the Jews came to regard as canonical, and make a 
 Protestant fetich of it. Our Bible Societies and such- 
 like agencies do much to deepen this uncritical tradition 
 which passes current under the Chilli ngworth phrase, the 
 " Bible the religion of Protestants." 
 
 Thus Bible and Church relicjions are in damper alike of 
 
Epimetheus Afterthoughts, 9 
 
 forgetting how they grew up. We have to bring them 
 back from " afterthoughts " to the " first thoughts " of 
 God. His " first thought " is the education of the human 
 race as a whole ; and we regard it as the lasting disgrace 
 of all latter-day theology, from Augustine downward, that 
 it so let go this " thought of God's purpose " that it had 
 to be refound. This was done, as is too often the case, by 
 a mere man of letters like Lessing, driven to Deism for 
 want of anything like a spiritual conception of God in 
 the theologies of his day. But that best truth of Erzie- 
 hung, or education, the unfolding of our spiritual life, 
 which is the key to all revelation and inspiration, is also 
 the key to the Bible as a book. It helps us to deal 
 with the Canon on rational grounds, which are also 
 happily the same as those of conscience and our inner 
 spiritual faculties. They are what Luther meant by his 
 golden rule for testing the Canon, oh sie Christum treihen. 
 Mosaism is Monotheism — this is its true point of depart- 
 ure, but Monotheism must go on to the sense of God's 
 covenant - relation to man, else it sterilises into mere 
 Deism, and dies as Islamism dies, for want of some sense 
 of God's immanent relation to man, grounded on the truth 
 that we are His offspring. Hence the next stage onward 
 of the Mosaic dispensation is to get on from Monotheism 
 to Messianism. " Jehovah and His anointed " — this is 
 the key to all Old Testament teaching. It also explains 
 the many apostasies of the covenant people. It is 
 against " Jah and His anointed " that kings furiously 
 rage together and people imagine a vain thing. Here 
 comes in the true significance of prophetism. This 
 precious, this priceless deposit, the one vital germ of all 
 man's after-spiritual education, lay in these true concep- 
 tions of Monotheism 'and of Messianism. "Jah and His 
 Christ " is the true end of Mosaism ; and as Moses is the 
 
lo Epimetheus Afterthoughts. 
 
 first, so ]\Ialachi is the last messenger of the covenant, 
 whose last word is not a little expressive. He has to 
 turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and of the 
 children to the fathers. The Old and the New, that is, must 
 be linked together. The first thought of God, His unique 
 transcendent glory, that He is El-Shaddai, is to be linked 
 with His later name, Jah, which completes the covenant 
 and rounds off Mosaism into one consistent whole. Thus, 
 when Monotheism meets with Messianism, it has found 
 its complementary truth : like the fragments of a broken 
 tessera or plate, these two one-sided truths fit into each 
 other — the one of a transcendent, the other of an imman- 
 ent Deity. Apart, each is defective. They are like the 
 chemical constituents of our food — the starch matter and 
 the hydrocarbons, on which singly we starve, but which 
 when combined nourish us. It is so with these elements 
 of our spiritual life. In the blaze of absolute Deity true 
 devotion dies down into blind fatalism and submission. 
 Such is the state to which Judaism and Islamism alike 
 decline, because they are sterilised truths. The one has 
 rejected its Messiah, and now, like Islamism, is a form of 
 out-of-date Deism. The two degenerate types of a true 
 religion have both wandered down a blind alley with an 
 inscription at the end, " No passage here." They have 
 petrified in both cases into mere book religions, and it 
 would be a sorry day for popular Protestantism should 
 it ever sink to class itself with the mere " men of the 
 Book," as its rivals for carrying the Koran to the fetich- 
 worshippers of Central Africa are known. 
 
 But true Mosaism goes on from Monotheism to Messian- 
 ism. This is its mark of inspiration. Speaking in 
 general terms, we should say that Monotheism is the key- 
 note of all earlier revelation, Messianism of all its later 
 forms. The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. 
 
Epimetheus Afterthoughts, 1 1 
 
 and here Luther's Canon is unerring. A book is inspired 
 in the Old Testament in proportion as it is Messianic. 
 Oh sie Christum treihen. This is why the second Isaiah, 
 probably a disciple of the first, or, at least, of the Isaiaii 
 school, a son of the prophets, was, if possible, even 
 greater than his father, the proto-Isaiah. He stands at 
 the very head of inspired writers. His pre-eminence is as 
 unchallenged as that of Shakespeare, who took the drama 
 and poetry and fused them into one as they have never 
 been fused before or since. So with the evangelical 
 prophet Isaiah. He saw the day of a suffering, who 
 was also the ascended Messiah, as none of his equals ever 
 did. He is pre-eminent among prophets, as St. Paul 
 is among apostles. The last Isaiah, as one born out of 
 due time, saw under the captivity much farther even 
 than Ezekiel, who seems never to the last to have 
 shaken off his Jewish altar-clothes, and who was a Levite 
 to the last. The younger Isaiah soared aloft like his 
 namesake, whose call, in the year that King Uzziah died, 
 is nearly the most sublime vision in the Bible. If we 
 knew all, we should probably know that all Hebrew 
 names are chiefly eponymic, which would disperse nine- 
 tenths of our modern matter-of-fact difficulties as to 
 dates and names of authors. Authorship, and the fame 
 of it, was about the last thing which an inspired man 
 would have dreamed of laying claim to. Hence the 
 mistake of our modern w^ay of discussing the books of 
 the Bible and their authors, and repelling attacks on 
 traditional views of the Canon, which are, after all, only 
 Jewish, as if our faith rested on a Canon or rule of 
 faith. We are not yet out of the stage of Bibliolatry in 
 which Coleridge found us. His half- learned father, a 
 country clergyman, 'used, it is said, to pour out strings 
 of Biblical Hebrew and Greek from the pulpit of Ottery 
 
1 2 EpimctJicus AfterthougJUs. 
 
 St. Mary, which impressed the old folk there as not 
 at all pedantic. " Blessed man," they said, " he gives us 
 God's word as He wrote it." This was the Bibliolatry 
 stage which the younger Coleridge, witli that spiritual 
 insight given more often to poets than to theologians, 
 helped to deliver us from. Our popular religion is on the 
 move, but slowly, from the platform of an external creed, 
 bound within the covers of a book, to that higher 
 platform of inspiration in the Church and people of God. 
 Holy men of old were inspired, not magically, but 
 because they were holy men : they became either God's 
 witnesses, by deed as Elijah, or by Avord as Isaiah. Such 
 inspiration has never ceased in the Church ; and were 
 it to cease, we should have to cease to believe in the 
 Holy Ghost, who spake for the prophets. We should 
 then deserve Elijah's taunt, that " he is a god who is on 
 a journey, or, peradventure, he is asleep, and must be 
 awaked." Inspiration, like miracles, is continuous and 
 constant, though we still look back, and not forward, for 
 both. 
 
 Such, then, are first thoughts and afterthoughts in 
 their leading contrasts. Afterthoughts are in general 
 fossilised first thoughts. They rest on what God has 
 said or done in the past ; they seldom glance at tlie 
 thought that God has more truth to break out of His 
 w^ord. They are like that roll of the law which was 
 shut up in the ark, and in the priests' custody ; but the 
 priests were such sleepy custodians of its letter that they 
 forgot its spirit, till it was accidentally rediscovered in 
 good King Josiah's age, — which is a singular parallel to 
 the I^rotestant lieformation age, when we aw^oke for a 
 time and then went to sleep again in a fresh sleep of 
 tiaditional dogmatism. But the first and most lasting 
 petrifaction of Christian theology began, as we hold, with 
 
Epimetheus Afterthoughts. 1 3 
 
 the great Bishop of Hippo. We are not going too far, 
 then, in asking our age to reform root and branch this 
 term " theology " altogether, and to confine it to its first 
 reading out of the word of the " thoughts of God." " For 
 I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the 
 Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an 
 expected end," Jer. xxix. 11. As soon as we know our 
 God in this sense, we are at once out of the region of 
 provisions, of plans of SEilvation either by faith alone or by 
 sacraments alone. All that we may describe not disre- 
 spectfully as " Church clothes " then fall off, and we are 
 at once lifted up in spirit, and are on the mount with 
 God. It is these first thoughts which alone are lasting, 
 which reveal Christ, which satisfy the conscience, and in 
 the end wean us from our unbelief. The other type of 
 afterthoughts only stir up unbelief, and then seek to 
 smother it by some magisterial thought of God. Pascal in 
 his day, ISTevvman in ours, are types of sceptical minds, 
 acting on the old out-of-date idea in medicine, that 
 morbus morlncm pcllit. The Hindus have a saying that 
 to battle sin with sin, and doubt with doubt, is like 
 letting a hungry tiger in to drive another tiger out. 
 Such will be our fate if we <:jo on in this rut of doGrmatic 
 
 CD O 
 
 theology. The myth of Epimetheus, perhaps, points at 
 the mistake of these afterthoughts. It is a Greek 
 anticipation of a Christian error. 
 
 The first myth of Prometheus was, as we now know, 
 like all myths, a disease of language. Ignorant of the 
 meaning of Pramantha, the fire drill, they invented an 
 explanation of their own by coining a word, and so gave 
 to the name of the first fire filcher from heaven the 
 appropriate title of the fore-thinker, the Prometheus. He 
 looks before and after, he provides for the future by the 
 discovery of fire, the first step of man out of primeval 
 
14 Epwietheits Afterthottghts, 
 
 brutishness. But, having started the legend, the invent- 
 ive Greek went on to improve on it. Prometheus, the 
 fore-thinker, must have a brother, Epimetheus, the after- 
 thinker. In the Hesiod version of the legend, this 
 vouno-er de^jenerate brother of Prometheus lets himself be 
 deceived by Pandora, that fatal gift of the gods. In spite of 
 the warning of his more far-sighted brother, Epimetheus 
 takes to himself this Eve, the temptress, to wife, and so 
 opens the baleful history of sin and misery, all springing 
 out of self-will. It is evidently the Greek version of 
 that old Chaldcean legend of man's first disobedience 
 through the suggestion of woman, which the Hebrew 
 Book of Origins has also incorporated, as it did after 
 purging it of certain fantastic and non-moral details. 
 Thus Prometheus and Epimetheus stand as the types, to 
 the Greek mind, of that contrast of character between 
 the fore-thinker, the wise man who looks ahead, and the 
 after-thinker, who is only wise after the event, which has 
 been described as the exactest definition of a fool. To 
 learn no lessons from the past, to remember nothing, and 
 to forget nothing, as was said of the Bourbons after the 
 Eestoration, tliis is that type of folly which brings on 
 revolutions, and then goes far to excuse their excesses. 
 On such persons the great lessons of history seem lost, 
 since they are lapped in such self-conceit that they 
 never seem to see that tliey have been sowing the wind, 
 and must, therefore, reap the whirlwind. 
 
 But it is when we turn to Church history that this 
 Epimethean temper is seen in its most striking form. 
 No one is so dangerously near self-delusion as the divine 
 who, presuming on his infallible chart and compass, 
 overlooks the one loophole of error which lies in his own 
 fallibility. It has been often said that, admitted the 
 truth of infallibility either of book or Church, where is our 
 
Epimetheus Afterthoughts, 1 5 
 
 guarantee that we have read the book aright, or that the 
 Church is plenarily inspired when teaching ex cathedrd ? 
 If the members are singly and even collectively fallible, 
 how can we be sure all is changed because pope and 
 council, as head and members, lay their heads together 
 to extract new definitions out of old dogmas. Errors in 
 theology are never, then, slight, like the mistakes of poli- 
 ticians, who are mere opportunists or tide-waiters. Such 
 men get tripped up to-day, and pick themselves up to- 
 morrow. But the divine who sets out with the note, " Thus 
 saith the Lord," is in grave danger of going on adding 
 error to error, till we stand aghast at the measureless 
 miscalculation which, like errors in astronomy, do not 
 stop till they break down beneath their own weight of 
 absurdity. 
 
 Such is the Epimethean mind in theology. It is so 
 conservative of the mere hull and husk of truth, that it 
 sometimes forgets that the corn of wheat must die to 
 bring forth any fruit at all. It is so concerned with the 
 details of the faith and their defence, that it forgets that 
 a living faith is in reality its own best defence. The 
 two theologies, then, which we contrast as Promethean 
 and Epimethean diverge at once at this point, that the 
 faith of the one centres in a living Person ; that of the 
 other, in the doctrines and duties, the credenda and 
 ageiida, which are only the after results of faith in that 
 living Person. The one theology we may compare with 
 the seamless robe of Christ ; the other is that raiment of 
 needlework in which, in the expressive phrase of the 
 Vulgate, the bride is brought to the king. The Church 
 is, in more senses than one, circumamicta varietatibus. 
 The phrase varietatibus, too, well expresses the many hues 
 of that dogmatic deductive theology " received by tradition 
 from the Fathers." It is that supellex of superfluous dog- 
 
1 6 Epimethetis AftertJio^ights. 
 
 inatism, which is as gaudy as tlie paraphernalia of bridal 
 array of Pharaoh's daughter when brought to King 
 Solomon. It saddens us to think how nniuh the Church 
 loses when she recedes from tlie simplicity which is in 
 Christ Jesus. How unlike her afterthoughts are to the 
 faith delivered once for all {aiza'^) to the saints. 
 
 If we are asked for a simple test to distinguish 
 between first thoughts and afterthoughts, we should say 
 that first thoughts are few and afterthoughts many. 
 The first thoughts touch life and conduct, and are "accord- 
 ing to godliness." Afterthoughts, on the other hand, 
 make up the body of what is known as polemical divinity. 
 The Churchman is seen to be armed at all points when 
 he puts on this Saul's armour of afterthoughts ; but how 
 weak he is in reality, the history of polemical divinity. 
 Catholic and Protestant, of Latin and Greek Church con- 
 troversialists, alike attest. The one unites the most, the 
 other divides most. How many there are, especially among 
 young and ingenuous minds, who, if presented with the 
 truth, as, for instance, Justin Martyr was, and brought to 
 them as a message comincr from one who had found it to 
 be true, would, as Justin did, lay aside the philosopher's 
 cloak and put on the baptismal robe of faith. But it is 
 these afterthoughts of theology which stop the w^ay and 
 hinder their coming in. Either it is the claims of book 
 inspiration which bar all honest criticism of either author- 
 ship or contents, or it is some narrow theory of atonement 
 or satisfaction for sin which strike the conscience as 
 repellant and unworthy of a God who is justice and love 
 in one, and who acts not on the bare rule of an autocrat — 
 " Whom He wills He kills, and whom He wills He keeps 
 alive." Or, again, it is some predestination theory of the 
 extent of the atonement which spreads like a mist over the 
 face of the whole heaven and darkens the very eye of God, 
 
Epimetheus Afterthoughts. 1 7 
 
 which is good to all. I^ow, if we can succeed in showing 
 that all these theories are among the mere afterthoughts 
 of theology, which never would have been thought at all, 
 unless some prying, presumptuous Epimetheus had opened 
 this Pandora's box of curious questions and puzzles of half- 
 learned minds, what a relief it will be, what a riddance 
 of so much top -hamper, and how we may thus lighten 
 the ship of our faith, and again make it seaworthy. 
 
 The so-called Eeformation was a golden opportunity 
 given and lost — though where to assign the blame it is 
 hard to say off-hand. The very zeal of the Eeformers 
 probably defeated its own object. They betrayed that 
 it was a revolt against a single form of tyranny only when 
 they inserted that clause into the Litany, soon afterwards 
 expunged, " From the intolerable tyranny of the Bishop 
 of Eome : good Lord deliver us." But mere revolts never 
 go to the root of the evil. They end in exhaustion, nay, 
 they even invite reaction, as soon was the case under 
 Elizabeth. The queen and her astute advisers soon saw 
 that the Crown, on taking over the papal supremacy, had 
 to take over a good deal besides with it, which the early 
 Edwardian Eeformers had regarded as the wardrobe of 
 Eome, the livery of the woman in scarlet. The royal 
 supremacy led on to a kind of Byzantinism, as Dollinger 
 calls it, the C8esaro-Papacy,in which the Crown decided, and 
 that for reasons of mere statecraft only, what ceremonies 
 of the old cult were to be retained and what rejected. 
 It was a compromise, and, like all compromises, pleased 
 neither extreme, and so the Elizabethan settlement con- 
 tained within it the germs of those acute dissensions which 
 came to a climax in the feuds of the Puritans and Pre- 
 latists, and which ended in an appeal to the sword under 
 a weak and sentimental Stuart king. 
 
 It is no use regretting the past. But we may, at 
 
 B 
 
1 8 Epimetheus Afterthoughts. 
 
 least, learn a lesson from it, and see how to do better 
 should an opportunity for a new Eeformation offer. Jewell, 
 Hooker, and the best of the Reformers, were on the right 
 track in holding up the principle of continuity, and of 
 the unbroken descent, so far as it could be maintained, 
 of apostolic doctrine and discipline. So far, they stood 
 out for a truth which the Edwardian school of Eeformers 
 had nearly let go and forgotten, viz. the continuity of 
 the Catholic Church. But in an uncritical age, when 
 the Renaissance and the revival of Greek letters was 
 itself a novelty, it was ill understood even by the handful 
 of scholars gathered around Erasmus and Colet. The 
 Greek Fathers were little read and less understood. The 
 great name of Augustine overshadowed the whole West. 
 The one heresy was to differ from this one doctor of all 
 the Schoolmen and of all the Reformers alike. Bishop 
 Cox once ventured to take Queen Elizabeth to task for 
 reading Chrysostom's Homilies. Those of Augustine 
 were, as he said, much more wholesome fare — much 
 more distinct against " what the Pelagians vainly talk." 
 Had our Reformers been riper Greek scholars, had they 
 travelled farther to the east than Carthage, and studied 
 in the early schools of Antioch and Alexandria, they 
 would have met witli a theology ready to their hand, on 
 which Eeformation doctrine might have modelled itself at 
 once and for ever. Instead of that, they uncritically 
 stopped short at the rigid type of narrow theology which 
 Augustine had fixed on in his day, and beyond which 
 the West has not since made any real advance. The 
 I'esult has been a call, in our day, for a new Reformation. 
 What is known as " broad " theology, or " new " theology, 
 is summed up in the two phrases — 1st, the Logos 
 doctrine of the inner light ; and 2nd, the education of 
 the human race with salvation open to all here or here- 
 
Epimetheus Afterthoughts, 19 
 
 after. But these two truths would not have been 
 stamped out as crypto-heresy, or driven into a corner to 
 take refuge as the hidden gospel of certain mystics and 
 Cambridge Platonists, had the Greek Fathers been better 
 known and more widely read. As it was, the English 
 Eeformers, with scarcely an exception, differing widely as 
 they did in the lengths to which they pushed their 
 Augustinianism, agreed, at least, in this, that the great 
 Carthaginian was the true fountainhead of theology, 
 and the one nnerring interpreter of the " Teaching of the 
 Twelve." 
 
 The result of this initial error was more serious than 
 we might at first suppose it w^ould be. But we know 
 that no lie is of the truth, and, consequently no error, 
 which is a kind of lie in the germ, the scorpion in the 
 egg stage, ever remains a single error. It genders of its 
 kind. Need we wonder, then, that the history of 
 theology is the history of afterthought, or of wrong 
 hypotheses — cycles on epicycles scribbled o'er, as in the 
 old geocentric theory of astronomy. Yinet saw this in 
 his day, when he hinted that there was some tremendous 
 error in the popular theology which the next century 
 would stand aghast at. It is a pity Vinet was not more 
 explicit ; but, as a revivalist of the Eeveil movement in 
 Switzerland, he had to move on the same lines, and not 
 stand aside and criticise the current Calvinism, with its 
 limitations and shortcomings. A much bolder spirit 
 was that of Beccaria, who, setting out as a law reformer 
 to displace the vindictive theory of punishment by the 
 reformatory, he went on consistently to point out that 
 error was the rule, and truth the exception, in all three 
 faculties alike of law, physic, and divinity. " The story 
 of human progress presents to us," he says, " the picture 
 of an immense sea of error, in which only a few in 
 
20 Epimetheus Afterthottghts, 
 
 confusion, and at a vast distance from each other, emerge 
 to the surface of truth." Censures bold and unsparing 
 such as these may pass unchallenged in any secular 
 science, but to charge the Church universal, the " witness 
 as well as keeper of Holy Writ," with deliberately 
 misconstruing the document on which her charter rests, 
 this sounds presumptuous in a Christian advocate. 
 Does he not put himself out of court by this rash 
 assertion that the current interpretation is all wrong, 
 and the precedents which have hitherto ruled in court 
 are based on a grave misconstruction of the terms of the 
 last will and testament of the testator himself ? 
 
 So serious a charge must have strong supports, which 
 we are now prepared to give it. The testament or will of 
 God to men must have certain interpreters who are 
 authorised, because first hand, as well as others who are 
 mere giossarists or case lawyers, because they have no 
 first hand knowledge of the will or its maker, but only 
 gather the intentions of the devisor from certain phrases 
 of the document which have little or no bearing on the 
 will as a whole. Let us begin in this way by trying to 
 find out the true construction of the " will " from the 
 teaching of a single interpreter, the apostle of the Gentiles, 
 whom all agree to accept as final and authoritative. 
 The Old Testament being the record of God's exclusive 
 dealings with His covenant people, does not presumably 
 travel outside the inner circle of the covenant. It is 
 silent with regard to the hereafter, — silent as to the 
 purposes of God with the mass of mankind in this life, 
 — much more, therefore, with regard to tlie dim, unknown 
 world to which we all pass at death. The beyond is 
 briefly named as Sheol. What meaning the term Sheol 
 gives up I leave Hebrew critics to say. We may exclude, 
 then, the Old Testament, with no disrespect to its teaching 
 
Epimetheus Afterthoughts, 2 r 
 
 as a " sealed book," with regard to God's general purposes 
 towards the mass of mankind here or hereafter. 
 
 I go farther. I make bold to say that of the inspired 
 writers of the New Testament, the apostle of the Gentiles 
 alone seems to have wrung out the meaning of God's 
 ultimate purpose in the call of the Gentiles ; nor let 
 this seem strange, as if we disparaged the " Teaching of 
 the Twelve." The apostle of the circumcision distinctly 
 limits his teaching to the circumcision. When he writes 
 a letter, it is to the Diaspora of certain provinces who 
 were the elect remnant out of the mass of his unre- 
 generate countrymen. In his " brother Paul " there were 
 things hard to be understood — probably referring to that 
 universalism, that wide gospel, to all, which, as from sad 
 experience since we know, has never been proclaimed as 
 the gospel, but ignorant and unstable men have wrested 
 it unto their own destruction. God's dealing with the 
 Gentiles, and salvation here or hereafter, lay outside the 
 covenant, and waited till a new commission was given 
 and a new apostolate was raised up. 
 
 In this sense the Apostle St. Paul magnifies his office. 
 He is never weary of telling us that his message is a 
 new gospel, an everlasting gospel, a message so wide in 
 its bearings that it was a mystery which had been kept 
 silent for aeonian ages, but now at last was made known 
 to the sons of men. That mystery of which he was the 
 steward and minister, and which he was required to be 
 found faithful to, was the revelation that the Gentiles 
 were to be fellow-heirs and one body in Christ. The 
 equality of Jew and Gentile in the general Fatherhood 
 of God was to have no stint. True, that for a time 
 these Gentiles were only the " little dogs," and entitled to 
 nothing more than the crumbs from their master's table. 
 But all this was past from the day when the veil was 
 
22 
 
 Epimetheus Afterthoughts. 
 
 rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and more 
 significant still, if possible, the middle wall of partition 
 was taken down. This is the Apostle Paul's ministry and 
 commission. It has been so deeply misunderstood, almost 
 from sub-apostolic times, that a legend could grow up 
 uncontradicted to our day, that the two apostles, Peter and 
 I'aul, were the joint founders of the metropolitan Church 
 of Pome. The legend itself is beneath criticism ; but the 
 ignorance it betrays of the contrast of Jew and Gentile 
 shows how little those ages knew either of the limitations of 
 one apostle or the world-embracing commission of the other. 
 Peturning, then, to the Apostle St. Paul as the one 
 authorised interpreter of the New Testament as the 
 covenant or will of God to the mass of mankind in the 
 gospel of His Son, we soon discern how far his know- 
 ledge in that mystery went. It is so comprehensive that 
 he is a debtor both to Jew and Gentile, and seems pos- 
 sessed of a kind of enthusiasm of humanity to carry 
 his message as far as to Pome, and even to set up no 
 altar to Terminus there. Pome itself is only a stage on 
 his journey to Spain ; and whether he bathed his feet in 
 the waters of the wide ocean, and stood like another 
 Cortez " silent as on a peak of Darien," we leave legend 
 to conjecture. In any case the spirit was willing, though, 
 as the prisoner of the Lord, the flesh was weak. Now, 
 in his letter to the Pomans he distinctly declares that 
 lie was not ashamed of the gospel of God, for it was the 
 power of God unto salvation unto all them that believe, 
 both Jew and Greek. Would he not have been ashamed 
 of his gospel had it been the same as that modern version 
 of it, which, like a rift in a stormcloud, only shows a 
 gleam of light on the few who are saved during the short 
 years of man's life of ignorance and error here on earth ? 
 That this is the view — with all its Augustinian limita- 
 
Epimethem Afterthoughts. 23 
 
 tions of grace to those who believe and are baptized — 
 of these honest translators of our English version, is only 
 too apparent from the construction which they and others 
 have put on the following paragraph, in which the apostle 
 goes on to speak of a wrath of God revealed from heaven 
 against all who hold back (not merely hold, as our trans- 
 lators misconstrue it) the truth of unrighteousness. The 
 apostle, like the righteous Psalmist, was " terribly afraid 
 for them that forget Thy law." He looked out on distant 
 Eome as he once looked down on Damascus, the city of 
 sweet waters ; but to his spiritual vision Eome was a hell- 
 pool of wickedness, a pest-house whose moral fetor was 
 sickening. Had he been a seer like St. John, he might 
 have had visions of the doom of this spiritual Sodom, — 
 this Babylon of the West, — cast like a millstone into the 
 sea : " Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon 
 be thrown down." But he did not see Eome in this seer- 
 like spirit, or even as Augustine four centuries later, who 
 in his strange philosophy of history drew up a " tale of two 
 cities " — the City of God and the City of Destruction. 
 
 To the apostle's larger, saner mind it seemed that the 
 wrath of God was revealed, as it must be, against sin ; for 
 sin is its own tormentor. The fires of lust once kindled 
 within burn, as all cases of spontaneous combustion do, till 
 there is nothing left to consume ; " self-fed and self-con- 
 sumed " till " evil on itself shall back recoil, and mix no 
 more with goodness," as Milton grandly describes it. But 
 God's wrath against sin — this spontaneous combustion of 
 evil from within, adding hate to hate and lust to lust — is 
 no part of the gospel as such, as some would describe it of 
 mercy after wrath. It is an incident, a terrible incident, 
 which was sent to quicken his pace as the messenger of 
 mercy ; but the revelation of wrath is not part of the 
 message itself, or even its background. Here it is that 
 
24 Epimetheus Afterthoughts. 
 
 the afterthoughts of theology, the second unwiser thoughts 
 cabout God, enter in. Men say that God is an angry God, 
 and His fires on earth are hot ; but hotter still those of 
 hell. To preserve some at least from that hottest of all 
 fires, this must be the genuine gospel. The real remedy 
 begins and ends with the rescue — 
 
 " Flj', Cliristian, to their rescue fly, 
 Preach Jesus to them ere tliey die." 
 
 The second line of this sing-song hymn conditions the 
 first. It is now or never. "At last," as the apostle 
 teaches, the appointed time, the day of salvation, has 
 come. But our Augustinian theology of afterthoughts 
 reads the quotation forward not backward. Hereafter 
 there is no appointed time — no day of salvation beyond 
 the grave. This may or may not be so, but it is not the 
 teaching of the passage. 
 
 But the apostle is strangely misunderstood, and God's 
 gospel dishonoured, by reading into it these afterthoughts 
 of traditional theology, which all date more or less from 
 Augustine, when they were at last fixed as the reigning 
 theology of the West. Discarding if we can — and it is 
 not so easy as we think — all these prepossessions of 
 current teaching, let us see what was the first thought of 
 the apostle which fired him with such pity for Eome, such 
 a longing to reach there, and to quench this flaming fire of 
 sin and lust which seemed to him like a revelation of 
 the wrath of God from heaven. Was it that unless put 
 out in time it never could be quenched in eternity ? He 
 nowhere says so ; all he teaches is that the gospel is such a 
 sovereign remedy, the power of God unto salvation, that as 
 soon as we believe, the fires of our hell within die down, 
 we are no longer slaves to sin, but sit clothed and in our 
 right mind at the feet of Jesus. The gospel, in a word. 
 
Epimetheus Afterthoughts, 25 
 
 is tlu remedy for sin — the one antidote to the poison of 
 diseased selfhood. God is not angry with His children 
 because, like the lunatic boy of the Gospels or the man 
 with the legion of devils, he cries out, What have we to 
 do with Thee, Thou Son of God ? God is not angry, but 
 He is sorry ; and all the more grieved when His ignorant 
 disciples, these theologians of afterthoughts and of man's 
 gospel, try to cast out the evil spirit and fail, and that 
 only because of their own unbelief. It is no slight mis- 
 take when we make God responsible for our mistakes, 
 and throw on His purposes, as Augustine and Calvin did, 
 the limitations which arise from an ignorant practi- 
 tioner misusing a remedy which in itself is a specific for 
 all manner of sin and disease. 
 
 That the salvability of all men does not require ex vi 
 terminis the ultimate salvation of all men, no serious 
 thinker has ever asserted. Hence all anti-Augustinians, 
 such as Origen and the Eastern Fathers, who were gener- 
 ally Pelagian, throw the responsibility on man as the 
 shaper of his own destiny here and hereafter. So the 
 moralist reasons that acts make habits, and habits char- 
 acter, and character once formed is fixed for ever. No one 
 had been able to snap that fatal chain, the links of which 
 Aristotle had firmly riveted, save Christ. It was He who 
 came to destroy the works of the devil, and to whom 
 demoniacs cried out, " Thou art the Son of God." But 
 we have grown afraid of this limitless gospel of love, 
 ashamed of it, as the apostle certainly was not. This 
 power of God unto salvation is mighty to save ; and even 
 the will of man cannot weave a chain of acts, habits, and 
 character which the grace of God bringing salvation can- 
 not break. Why, then, men ask, if the gospel can break 
 all chains, why do we not see them snap at the preaching 
 of Christ crucified ? * The answer is, Why do we not see 
 
26 Epimetheus Afterthoughts. 
 
 last year's snow ? — because it is last year's snow. But it 
 is still the winter time of our existence in this prison- 
 house of flesh. Many are called, but few chosen here. 
 The reasons for the limitation of the gospel at present lie 
 thick around us, like the thick-ribbed ice of an Arctic 
 winter. The resistance of man's will is only one of 
 many hindrances ; the feebleness and unfaith of her 
 ministers, the allurements of sin, all that is meant by the 
 lust of the flesh, of the eye, and the pride of life, make 
 up the rest. All these choke the word, and it becometh 
 unfruitful. But we are no judges of what lies beyond. 
 Even the apostle judged nothing before the time, and did 
 not rush in, as modern universalists do, with an easy 
 " Eureka " cry, since it is no longer regarded as damn- 
 able heresy to indulge the larger hope which a poet's 
 phrase has now made a household word. On this subject 
 the silence of God is expressive, and none should lift the 
 veil till the time come and the day shall declare it. But 
 the fault lies the other way with the dogmatic decisions 
 of the Church of the past, which forbade that larger hope, 
 and condemned the one Church Father who was too ex- 
 plicit in teaching that type of Christian Platonism, the 
 key of which is that all punishment is remedial. The 
 vindictive notion of punishment reigned in the lloman 
 law courts, and passed thence unquestioned as an axiom 
 of theology into lioman and Iteformed scholastic divinity 
 alike ; and here we find it entrenched to this day, and met 
 only by a timid protest here and there. Sometimes the 
 " heart in wrath" starfds up to say that there is some lie 
 latent in the logic of that head religion, in those after- 
 tlioughts of theology which all deplore, but few have the 
 courage to face on Scripture grounds. 
 
 What, then, we return to ask, was the real mind of 
 tlie apostle, which we can only gather from a few hints 
 
Epimethetis Afterthoughts, ly 
 
 up and down his letters ? Was it Augustinian, as 
 the majority hold ; or would he have turned on Augus- 
 tine a look of wonder for so perverting his gospel ? That 
 he is a universalist in idea none can dispute. "As in 
 Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive," — a 
 most incautious expression of Augustinianism, is the 
 legitimate outcome of Paulinism. But ingenious minds 
 remind us that there may be truth in idea which does 
 not become true m fact. God's intention to put all men 
 into a salvable state may fail in fact through an unbelief, 
 and then free will and its abuse is the short and ready 
 explanation of this logical antinomy, this surd or insoluble 
 problem. But the simpler way out of the difficulty is to 
 confess that none of us know what eternity means, and 
 what dispensations lie in the scenes beyond, all folded up 
 like the colour and perfume in a rosebud. Unfortunately 
 for Latin theology, the three Carthaginians, Tertullian, 
 Cyprian, and Augustine, more Carthaginian than Christian, 
 more Pessimist than Platonist, moulded a theology for us, 
 into which, as time went on, the minds of men became 
 fixed, and out of which they are only slowly emerging 
 under two influences, one on the side of the new juris- 
 prudence, the other on the side of the new geology. The 
 law reform of our age is that all punishment is, or ought 
 to be, remedial. This is no longer a piece of pure Pla- 
 tonism, one of the many abstractions of an ideal republic. 
 It has been tried, and to some extent succeeded, and so 
 at least it has set men thinking, that if our criminal code 
 is rising slowly, and after many reactions, to the reforma- 
 tory stage, may we not so think of the great Judge and 
 Father of men as a Father first and a Judge afterwards, 
 and that His very judgments are mercies disguised ? 
 Then, again. Science as well as Law has her analogies of 
 good days to come. ' All points to a past without form 
 
2 8 Epimethetis AfterthoiigJits, 
 
 and void, all points 'to a future when kosmos will over- 
 take chaos ; man's ape-like qualities will be dwarfed, the 
 rational and the spiritual be developed, and so the great 
 purpose be reached, man the crown of all things, and the 
 final stage be reached of the evolution of the second 
 Adam out of the first, as the first Adam was an evolution 
 out of many lower forms of animal life. These are some 
 of the lessons which law and science have to teach 
 theology. 
 
 But it is needless to go farther into this. We shall 
 never explain why the gospel, in its breadth, length, 
 depth, and height, has not as yet been adjusted to our 
 little systems, for which it is too great. Let us be 
 thankful that we have not lost more of the message in 
 its fulness under the accretions of error. Instead of 
 denouncing these afterthoughts as apostasies, let us 
 admit there is a kind of economy in the dispensation of 
 a gospel whose unclouded splendour would have made 
 it still more incredible than it is. To a pure and sinless 
 angel this message of God's measureless love is intuitively 
 seen to be true, because worthy of God. To men in a 
 mixed state of being, selfish, self-regarding, and who can 
 only get as far as tlie notion of a " moral governor of the 
 universe " — a gospel of limitations and reserves for men 
 as shut into the Church under tlie one key of baptism 
 was the only gospel credible. To this day no other is 
 really popular among earnest souls who enter the king- 
 dom of heaven by violence. Universalism is justly 
 stigmatised as " easy going." It may suit philosophers 
 who are half sceptics already, but for an orthodox Church- 
 man or a truly converted Christian to let his thoughts 
 go out in the direction of salvation hereafter, is to put a 
 sleeping potion to the soul. From that day out his 
 yearning to make all men know what is the fellowship 
 
Epimetheus Afterthoughts, 29 
 
 of this mystery is tainted by the indulgent excuse that 
 they will some day come to know it, and if so, why press 
 on them to flee from the wrath to come ? 
 
 But all tliis arises from men taking sin and the 
 punishment of sin to be two separate things, whereas 
 they are really one and indivisible. All punishments are 
 natural, as all sin is its own self-tormentor. Men invent 
 hell, as the poets did, to make tyrants know that remorse 
 would reach where the dagger of the assassin could not. 
 The reason and the reasoning seem sound, that even if 
 men can slip through God's fingers here, they cannot 
 escape hereafter. It is hecause men so reason (though 
 wrongly, for no sin ever escapes instant chastisement) 
 that Christ's parable of Dives was cast in that form. 
 Here was a man who fared sumptuously every day, and 
 of whose torments of conscience there is no Tacitus to 
 write the annals. But that he did not escape these furies 
 of the soul hereafter, if not here, this was that sound 
 element in popular thinking which our Lord wished to 
 strenothen and confirm. We are comincr to a time, how- 
 ever, when punishment will be seen to be inherent in 
 evil. Every transgression and disobedience receives its 
 due recompense of reward. With nature, as Huxley 
 teaches, it is a word and a blow. We are struck, though 
 we do not feel it at once, the instant we violate a single 
 law of health. Such is the gospel of modern sanitarians, 
 and theology is learning the same lesson. For this 
 reason there is no longer the same great gulf fixed 
 between retribution here and hereafter. Sin is the same 
 tormentor in this world as in the next. When the vin- 
 dictive element of punishment is evaporated, there will 
 still remain the sense that the wages of sin is death, and 
 that sin can gender nothing but death and torment here 
 or hereafter. The immoral type of universalism which 
 
30 Epimetheus Afterthoughts. 
 
 overlooks tliis is discredited even in America. It is a 
 calumny on those who preach God's measureless love to 
 say that they leave the door open to men to live as they 
 list. No great truth ever dawned on mankind but owls 
 and bats and birds of night flapped round to hoot at 
 it, and warn us that this comes of too much sunlight. 
 Milton saw this in his noble defence of liberty. It 
 always throws reactionary minds into a fit of alarm that 
 this must end in a century of sects. But truth is great, 
 and must prevail. Afterthoughts, which are later births 
 of time, do not live on in honour for ever, like the elder- 
 born heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ of the 
 kingdom of all things. Let us, then, go forward and 
 rejoice in the liberty of our day, when we have freedom 
 to say not only what is truth, but also to say out boldly 
 how much error has mixed with that truth, like sand 
 with gold, as it rolls down the river of time. 
 
CHAPTEE 11. 
 
 THEOLOGY PROPER. 
 
 Before we can enter on the subject of these afterthoughts 
 of theology, we must set out with a clear conception of 
 what we mean by theology, since no sound reasoner would 
 attempt to deal with the pathology of the subject until 
 he had first gained a clear conception of its physiology. 
 So it would fare wdth us, if, as dogmatists too often do, 
 we discuss the theology of any age before first deciding 
 on what we understand, what we mean by theology in 
 itself. Nor need we be at a loss for a definition of 
 theology, since the Master has Himself deigned to define 
 it. At the crowning stage of His ministry, in summing 
 up all He had been given to teach. He thus sums it 
 up : " And this is life eternal : that they might know 
 Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou 
 hast sent." 
 
 Theology, it will thus be seen, is not any knowledge 
 of God as the Absolute. As the Absolute this God-con- 
 ception is a branch of metaphysics, and a barren one, as all 
 who have dipped into later German theosophists can recall 
 to their sorrow. Nor, again, is theology to be confounded 
 with what was once known as natural religion, and which, 
 ever since Kant's Critiqite, has retired into comparative 
 obscurity, together with ontology, cosmogony, and other 
 
 31 
 
J- 
 
 Theology Proper, 
 
 such proofs of a Supreme Being. Theology, rightly con- 
 sidered, is the knowledge of God in His relation to us, 
 the cardinal point of which lies in the truth which the 
 old Greek poet had glanced at. " For we are also His 
 offspring" — this is the true keynote; and theology, setting 
 out from this kinship between us and God, we at once 
 soar, as on wings of a spiritual intuition, across the abyss 
 between creature and Creator. At any other point of 
 departure theology is confronted with a primal difficulty, 
 tliat its teachings are unthinkable, and that the only 
 response of the baffled understanding is blank Agnosticism. 
 Theology as taught in the schools is to a great degree 
 responsible for raising many of the difficulties which it is 
 unable afterwards to solve. It is in vain to invent a 
 new meaning for the term faith, and to ask us to believe 
 hccause we cannot understand. Such tricks with thought, 
 such as that arch-sophist, the author of the Grammar 
 of Assent, has attempted to popularise, only recoil on 
 those that use them. Not to enter on the psychology of 
 faith and its relation to reason, which is beside our sub- 
 ject, it is enough to remark here that faith is simply 
 consent of the will, grounded on a previous assent of the 
 understanding. It is no mere leap in the dark, as the 
 theological mystery men would have us assume. Reason 
 and faith run together, like the two disciples, to the 
 same tomb, and though faith, the younger and more 
 ardent of the two, outruns reason, yet it enters not in till 
 the elder inquirer follows, to investigate whether these 
 things are so or not, and to make sure that we have 
 not followed " sophisticated myths," as the apostle assures 
 us was not the case. 
 
 Faith, then, is not, as some divines teach, a new faculty, 
 which enables us to swallow down mysteries whole and 
 assimilate them after, in some ostrich fashion. Scholastic 
 
Theology Proper. 
 
 oo 
 
 divines are largely responsible for conjuring up much 
 of the doubt which they afterwards denounce as devil- 
 born. Let us see to ourselves that we take the right 
 departure in theology, and truths will then fall into their 
 proper place, which when arranged in any other order 
 refuse to come together, like the pieces in a child's dis- 
 sected map. Out of Deism, when taken as our point of 
 departure, nothing comes but confusion, with its demands 
 on us of a transcendental faith to explain the way in which 
 a transcendental Deity could be found in fashion as a 
 man. The transcendental God of the old deistic theology 
 must remain a being apart, like the Jahveh of the Heb- 
 rews or the Allah of the Kuran ; and it is because Jews 
 and Turks have been asked to conceive what to the 
 human mind is inconceivable, and which, if accepted as a 
 mere dogma, only opens the door to idolatry, that Mono- 
 theists outside Christendom have rejected the incarnation 
 altogether ; while those inside the pale have explained it 
 away in some Arian or Crypto-Unitarian fashion. 
 
 But as soon as we replace the transcendental by the 
 conception of an immanent Deity, our point of view is 
 altered, and the stone is at once rolled away from the grave 
 of a stolid unbelief. God is light : this is His first stage 
 of immanency ; and as light He broods over the darkness, 
 though the darkness comprehends Him not. We are 
 here on a stage of lower and lifeless being, and where 
 consciousness has not so much as dawned. Then the 
 next stage of immanency is when the light passes on 
 into life, and earth and water swarm with beings who 
 have all our senses, save one, the sense of selfhood and 
 the yearning for some other self which we call love. 
 Now we are on the threshold of the third and last stage of 
 immanency. Light has passed up into life, and life now 
 dawns into love. Liclit,'Lelen, Ziehen; this is Herder's Triad. 
 
 c 
 
34 Theology Proper, 
 
 It is inscribed as his best epitaph and the sum of all his 
 teachino" in the Herder-room at Weimar — this is the true 
 point of departure of theology. This, it is needless to say, 
 is the theology of the beloved disciple ; and it is mainly be- 
 cause, with the exception of the early Alexandrian Fathers, 
 this has been nearly a sealed book to all but a few mystery 
 and inner-light men among the Churches of the West, that 
 theology has only made a stumbling-block of the incarna- 
 tion, instead of its being the key to open all mysteries. 
 
 Happily, in our day the long eclipse is over, and the 
 true light is beginning to shine. We have done speaking 
 as our Puritan forefathers did of the attributes of God, 
 justice and love and the rest, and of the provision where- 
 by these warring attributes of justice and love are all alike 
 harmonised in the sacrificial death of Christ. This mode 
 of thinking has not been refuted merely by pitting 
 text against text, nmch less by contrasting Pauline with 
 Johannine theology in the way that Baur of Tubingen 
 taught the tendenz Kritik. In a better and a more 
 excellent way we have outgrown all this, by discovering 
 the root of our mistakes, which lay in setting up a tran- 
 scendental Deism, such as that of Descartes and Leibnitz, 
 as tlie foundation for our faith in God " manifest in the 
 flesh, justified in the spirit." Out of the data of Deism 
 nothing but Deism can emerge. Each philosophy, in 
 so far as it is a loriina philosojyJiia at all, genders after 
 its kind. No discussion, as Sir W. Hamilton used to 
 remind his pupils, can emerge in theology which has not 
 first emerged in philosophy. As far as the east is from 
 the west, so far is the intuitional thought of God as " not 
 far from any one of us" from the mechanico-physical 
 conception of God common throughout the whole West, 
 regarded as He is as the Maker and Euler of the universe, 
 tlie Judge of all moral agents, and the Pedeemer of the race. 
 
Theology Proper. 35 
 
 The first afterthought of theology, its 7rpo)Tou yjrevSo^, 
 then, was to elide or overlook that Johannine conception 
 of God, that in Him is light and no darkness at all, that 
 light goes on to reveal itself as light rational and moral in 
 all moral and rational agents. Nor is this all : the last 
 word is love. The life was manifested. In man it found 
 its true nidus for the incarnation ; that incarnation, instead 
 of a conception, repellant to thought, is the only explana- 
 tion of these " fallings from as vanishings," that yearning 
 of the pure in heart to see God, that hunger and thirst after 
 righteousness which nothing but God in person can fill. 
 The love of God which passeth knowledge can have 
 one meaning and no other. It is integral and internal. 
 To the Calvinist as to the Moslem, God is will — a mighty 
 resistless will ; and if He predestines some to eternal life 
 and passes by others, who is he who can resist His will ? 
 To such demands the heart can only say in reply, " This is 
 no God to adore ; but, like the devils, we believe and 
 tremble." Or, again, to the Deist of the mechanico- 
 physical school, God is the wise artificer who has made 
 all men, and hateth nothing that He hath made. 
 
 Let us be thankful that we have emerged at last out of 
 the horrible pit of predestinarian sovereignty. But we 
 still have not entered as yet into the " secrets of the Lord." 
 We dare not say our Father unless we get deeper into 
 God's character than as the mere cmcsa caicsarum, the 
 antecedent cause of all effects. In this sense God may 
 be said to be the Father of the dew, the all-Father of the 
 human family, in the sense that He is our maker. But 
 when we say God is love, we predicate of Him not one 
 attribute out of many, as the old Deistic school sup- 
 posed. We affirm His inner essence, the fontal origin of 
 all His perfections, to. be love. As theologians use the 
 special term " procession " in describing the Trinity, the 
 
o 
 
 6 Theology Proper. 
 
 Son proceeding from the Father, and tlie Spirit again from 
 the Father through the Son, let us put these three con- 
 ceptions in their order of subordination — Love, Wisdom, 
 l^ower or Win. The Father is Love, the Son is Wisdom, 
 and the Spirit is the operating Will which enters our will, 
 and which makes our wills — which are our own we know 
 not how — at last to become Thine. Love is then supreme. 
 It is this drawing of the Father, under the sense of our 
 orphanage and crying for a Father's love, by wdiich we 
 come to the Son, and the Spirit takes up His dwelling 
 in our spirits. Theology, then, has to get back to this 
 fatherly conception before it can even unlearn its own after- 
 thoughts, and one by one filter them out and separate the 
 truth from the error. 
 
 Here let us observe that errors never enter in single- 
 handed. The old saw is true, Chimcera chimccram 'parit. 
 An inadequate conception of God, the obscuring of His 
 fatherly by His magisterial character, began as soon as 
 lioman, or rather Carthaginian, conceptions of God had 
 replaced those Greek and Alexandrian concepts which 
 faded away at last in mysticism. It was towards the 
 end of the second century that Christendom was called 
 on at last to develop itself, and, as we venture to think, 
 it took the wrong turn. Singularly enough, two North 
 African cities lield out distinct ideals, the one hierarchical, 
 tlie other educational, and the Church as a whole took 
 tlie one and refused the other. Such offers in history 
 are not repeated. With the rise and decline of the 
 catechetical school of Alexandria, and all within the space 
 of less than half a century, there grew up and passed 
 away the one serious attempt to set up Christianity on 
 the basis of the education of the human race. The 
 school, as we admit, has ever held a certain secondary 
 place as a valuable adjunct to the Church ; but never 
 
' Theology Proper. 3 7 
 
 before or since lias the attempt been made to identify 
 the school with the Church. The " Schoolmen," properly 
 so called, moved on entirely different lines from those of 
 the catechetical school of Alexandria. By the twelfth 
 century the Church had made good her position as 
 the ruling spirit of the age. She had conquered the 
 barbarian conquerors of Eome itself, and was seated on 
 the vacant throne of the Caesars as the mistress alike of 
 faith and morals, of law and religion. Out of her 
 cloisters there stepped a race of monks who undertook to 
 scatter the seeds of letters among the masses, and, at the 
 same time, to watch over thought in its infancy, and see 
 that it never broke bounds, or dared to depart from the 
 traditional lines of Church teaching. It carefully set out 
 with a credo id intelligam, and only allowed of philosophy 
 at all as the handmaid of faith. As soon as Abelard 
 dared to turn the sentiment round the other way, and 
 put knowledge as the condition of faith, instead of faith 
 as the condition of knowledge, Church authority at once 
 closed on him, and quenched at once a spirit of revolt 
 from authority. Criticism has dared to assert itself openly 
 only six centuries after Abelard was banished from Paris, 
 and the first interdict put on the new learning. 
 
 But the catechetical school of Alexandria were scholas- 
 tics of a different type from either Anselm or Abelard. 
 It grew up as a protest against the Judaising, legalising 
 party in the Church, and was an attempt to set forth 
 Christianity on distinctly opposite lines from theirs. 
 The question thus came up for decision towards the 
 close of the sub-apostolic age, as to what shape the Church 
 was finally to take. Two types were set before her to 
 choose from — one the Hebrew-Latin type, as we may 
 call it, into which, unhappily for her, she finally settled 
 down ; the other tlie Hellenist type of a Demos, or 
 
o 
 
 8 Theology Proper, 
 
 commonweath of free citizens, all equal, all alike kings 
 and priests unto God, and whose moral and spiritual 
 growth was left very much to the initiative of each 
 member of the community. In Alexandria, as the 
 meeting-point of all nationalities, and where Judaism 
 itself had tried to set up a new type of thought, eclectic 
 between Hebraism and Hellenism, and comprehending 
 what was best in both, naturally enough there grew up a 
 Christian type of electicism corresponding to that of 
 Philo. This was represented by the catechetical school 
 of Alexandria, the most remarkable attempt ever made 
 to include the whole Church in a school. The Church 
 liad outgrown its congregational or synagogue stage, and 
 tlie mould was preparing for a rigid hierarchical caste of 
 priests, into which the still molten metal of the primitive 
 faith was to be poured. Just at that critical moment, 
 when the Church was in transition, an attempt was 
 made to set up a totally distinct ideal. The Church was 
 no longer to consider herself a sect cut off from the 
 world, it was rather to become a school or porch to 
 prepare the world for the higher truth. Philosophy, like 
 jMosaism, had long been a training - ground for elect 
 spirits, but philosophy — especially since Stoicism — had 
 narrowed its portals. It had degenerated precisely in 
 the same way as Judaism did. It had narrowed its mind, 
 and to party give up what was meant for mankind. 
 The new Thitonism of Alexandria had fallen into the 
 same excesses of spiritual pride and exclusiveness which 
 had withered up Judaism. There was the same Pharisa- 
 ism of the porch as of the law. The initiated were the 
 elect ; and as for the rest of mankind, they were as swine, 
 too brutish to be of any final account. 
 
 Into this seething world of rival sects and races the 
 Alexandrian school of catechists threw themselves, and 
 
Theology Proper. 39 
 
 made a noble attempt to rescue the Church, the synagogue, 
 and the Stoics alike from the one bane common to all — 
 the dancjerous delusion that the truth was for them, not 
 they for the truth. Setting out on the assumption that 
 God's purpose was the education of the whole human 
 family, they saw in the Logos doctrine of St. John the 
 key to harmonise all truth, whether of Christian sect, 
 Hebrew synagogue, or Stoic philosophy. At various 
 stages of spiritual growth the Logos has been the light 
 of men — to some, as Gentile truth-seekers — to others, 
 as made under the yoke of the law; and lastly, in the 
 fulness of times, as the Word made one flesh with us 
 that we may become one spirit with Him. To educate 
 all men up to this standard seemed to them the true 
 ideal of the Church. True Gnosis was their keynote ; 
 and the Gnostic, as Clemens loves to describe himself, was 
 to them the pattern philosopher and Christian in one. 
 They regarded, moreover, a discipline of at least three 
 years as imperative ; it was the preliminary condition of 
 entrance into the Christian Church. During the first 
 year the catechumen was trained in the doctrine of the 
 Eternal Father, the fountain of being, the first cause of all. 
 In the second, the doctrine of the Son, under the two 
 central mysteries of His incarnation and redeeming death. 
 Then, in the third year, the final stage was reached in the 
 doctrine of the Holy Ghost, and the mystery of His 
 indwelling in the hearts of the regenerate people of God. 
 It will be easily seen from this sketch that theology 
 proper, or the doctrine of the Father, Son, and Holy 
 Ghost, made up the entire circle of Christian teaching in 
 Alexandria. This is its real contrast with the theology 
 of the West, into which other considerations of sin and 
 salvation, the Church, its sacraments and ministry, 
 entered in and raised discussions on which the early East 
 
40 Theology Proper. 
 
 had not so much as entered. It is impossible to under- 
 stand the afterthoughts of theology, unless we so 
 distinofuish these first from the later drafts of Christian 
 teachinii. Had the school of Alexandria carried the 
 day and fixed its type of religion on the world, it is not 
 improbable that the world's history would have taken 
 a different course. There would have been no such 
 reaction as that of Justinian, who, under clerical prompt- 
 ing, at last shut up the schools of philosophy at Athens ; 
 there would have been no Byzantine type of sacerdotalism, 
 no Eoman attempt to reproduce a universal Church and 
 State theocracy, no revolt from Eome merely to take up 
 with a debased type of Augustinianism, such as the 
 lieformation settled down to. Church history as we 
 now read it would have been a blank, and then those 
 insignificant sects of Mystics, Quakers, and Cambridge 
 Platonists, who are all who can claim direct descent from 
 the Alexandrian school, would then have expanded out 
 of the sect stage, and become the great Catholic Church 
 of the whole world. 
 
 Why it seemed best to the All-wise Father of spirits 
 that this interesting educational experiment should have 
 died still-born, as, we may add, the Cambridge Platonism 
 afterwards did, it is not for us to say. Enough that it was 
 so. It reminds us at least of that wise saying of Aristotle, 
 ^pav fiekTidTodv v6ao<^ tyj^ '^^%^'}?, The desire for perfection 
 is a disease of the soul. Our ideals may be too lofty to 
 ]je practicable, and in that case God takes the education 
 of the Imman race out of our hands and passes it on to 
 ruder, less spiritual instruments, who shape it less per- 
 fectly than we could do, but in the end, perhaps, more 
 fittingly for future use than any mere idealist could do. 
 At the same time, there are failures which are more in- 
 structive than any successes. Tlie catechetical school of 
 
Theology Proper. 41 
 
 Alexandria, by holding up the flag of an intuitional 
 idealist religion, reminds us in this day what the goal is 
 we should advance to. That goal is something which Rome 
 and the Eeformation have alike missed, with their Church 
 and State controversies. It points to an age, millennial 
 perhaps, when the Church itself shall become a school of 
 prophets and teachers, and society at large, merging its old 
 contrasts of sacred and secular, shall again rise into a theo- 
 cracy such as Israel was designed to be, and when they shall 
 no more teach each man his brother, "Know the Lord," but 
 when all shall know Him, from the least to the greatest. 
 Why the Alexandrian type of theology proper failed to 
 fix itself on the Church as the true type, while the Cartha- 
 ginian or Eoman dogmatic type succeeded, would lead us 
 too far afield to inquire into here. On the whole, the 
 Baur theory commends itself, not only as the most 
 ingenious, but on the whole as the most historical. He 
 sees in Church history a repetition of the old Eoman 
 instinct of government — 
 
 ' ' Tu regere imperio populos Romaiie memento. " 
 
 The Church, plagued with Gnostic types of heresy, and 
 failing to see, as her better instincts should have taught 
 her, that truth can only fight error with weapons of its 
 own forging, fell back on authority. It listened to the 
 insidious excuse of Tertullian for pleading prescription. 
 Much must be said for this short-sighted plea. Greek 
 philosophy had joined hands with Jewish theosophy, 
 and the Church knew not where to look for help. So 
 serious did the danger seem, when it was assailed at once 
 and from opposite sides by Jewish and Greek types of 
 Gnosticism, the one from the monotheistic point of view 
 impugning the Godhead, the other for the Docetic side 
 explaining away the manhood of Christ, that the Church, 
 
42 Theology Proper. 
 
 in despair of beating error by mere apology, fell back on 
 the method of authority. The Church was the only safe 
 keeper of the deposit of sacred tradition ; whoever im- 
 pugned tliat tradition, let him be put out of the communion 
 of saints. The next step, then, was to lodge that central 
 authority, the power of the keys, in one man, who was the 
 bishop or president of the Churcli. It was probably at 
 first the bishop in council, as he sat in cathedra or seat of 
 office, the arch-presbyter, from his apsidal throne, sur- 
 rounded by his fellow-presbyters. From this there was 
 but one step more to full-blown magisterial rule in the 
 Churcli. To borrow Baur's metaphor, the Church drew into 
 a kind of fortified camp, as the legions did when on their 
 march. Unlike other armies, who lay down with their arms 
 and trusted to chance against a night surprise, the Roman 
 legionaries marched in a kind of moving camp. Every 
 night there was a fresh stockade thrown up, a fresh 
 valliun et agger, which, however rude, served the purposes 
 of defence. This instinct of a nation of born soldiers 
 passed from the pr?etorium to the basilica. Nor is it without 
 sicrnificance that the courts of law in Rome became the 
 earliest churches. To say nothing of the temples being 
 utterly unsuited for congregational worship, the early 
 Church saw in the tribune the pattern of her true holy 
 place, and in the curule chair of the magistrate, her 
 pattern of the holy table. It was the place where Jesus 
 Christ her Head had witnessed a good confession before 
 Pontius Pilate, and probably before any thought of Jewish 
 altars had entered the mind of the early Church — which 
 was a much later afterthought of a still more corrupt 
 age — this correspondence of a basilica and a church had 
 fastened itself on the thoughts of the second and third 
 century Christians as a pattern to be copied when they 
 should have rest from persecution. 
 
Theology Proper, 43 
 
 Be this as it may, we do not care to lay too great stress 
 on a correspondence which, after all, may turn out partial 
 There is little doubt that Eoman ideas of jurisprudence 
 and strategy largely entered into and modified the simpler 
 draft of Christianity found among the Churches of the East. 
 It is enough for our present contention if we lay stress on 
 the thought that theology proper had its home in the East, 
 while the Latin Fathers, almost without exception, took up 
 much lower ground, on questions, such as of sin and re- 
 demption, of grace and church order, which do not touch the 
 centre in the same deep way. That uncritical phrase the 
 " Fathers " is the root of all our mistakes. Till we sift our 
 Fathers in a critical sieve, passing Greek theology into one 
 class and Latin anthropology into another, our study of the 
 Fathers will be sterile, because wanting the light of true 
 criticism. This contrast of East and West is by no means 
 original ; but it has been generally assumed as linguistic 
 only, and then passed over as of no particular importance. 
 It is the key, as we hold, to all our thinking on the subject. 
 We are not insensible to the spiritual greatness of the 
 Carthaginian school, and most of all to the great merits of 
 the doctor of the Latin Church. His spiritual insight was 
 penetrating and profound, and his deliverances on the 
 Trinity, the Incarnation, and all other subjects bearing a 
 theology proper, were of permanent value. But this was 
 not the sphere of his true activity. As a theologian, he 
 spent his strength on controversies, the importance of 
 which he unduly estimated. We shall return to this 
 subject elsewhere. All we contend for here is, that if 
 theology be understood in its strictness as the knowledge 
 of God in His triune relation to us as Father, Son, and 
 Spirit, it is to the East we must look for light and leading. 
 The West was " orthodox " on all these truths, but wanted 
 the Logos doctrine, wliich is the clue to the mystery. It 
 
44 Theology Proper. 
 
 is sometimes scrmo and sometimes mrhum with which it 
 tries to express the Greek Logos, and we have only to try 
 to use either of these poor equivalents to see why, and in 
 what sense, the West were not theologians in the sense 
 that theology was understood by St. John and his dis- 
 ciples of the East. 
 
 It is the first thought of God which colours all after- 
 thoughts. Such as we set out with, such is our concep- 
 tion of the great Supreme to the very end. Awe must 
 enter in from the first and abide to the last ; but there is 
 the awe of filial fear, and the awe of the slave who would 
 make some composition with his dread taskmaster. The 
 theology of the West has been largely coloured with this 
 debased conception which belongs to the primitive savage, 
 and which soon ripens into superstition and priestcraft, 
 unless it is purged out by a purer revelation of God such 
 as the name of the Lord as revealed to Moses. This maij^is- 
 terial view of God on which His majesty overshadows 
 His goodness, will descend and darken the whole field of 
 theology; God's true character will be eclipsed; one half of 
 the truth that " power belongeth unto God " will be taken 
 at the expense of the other half, " also unto Thee apper- 
 taineth mercy," and the result will be disastrous to the 
 whole. It is a libel on the Old Testament to describe 
 God as a God of terror and wrath, who is only softened 
 down in later times under the milder whisperings of a 
 more humane age. We fail to see how much the superior 
 civilisation of the age of Hezekiah over that of the Judges 
 succeeded in humanising the half-savage conception of 
 a local Jahveh, the patron Deity of the Hebrew tribes, 
 who, bursting out of Egypt, made a clean sweep of the 
 Canaanites. Taking the sacred text by itself, and not 
 reading into it the inferences of later criticism, it seems 
 that Moses stood at quite the same spiritual elevation as 
 
Theology Proper, 45 
 
 Malaclii. The prophets, in a word, were the purifiers of 
 spiritual conceptions which had become debased by time, 
 and the dead discharge of mere ritual functions by a 
 caste of hereditary priests. But they were not the dis- 
 coverers of a new and nobler conception of God than that 
 which Israel had reached on the very dawn of its career, 
 — at the height where Abraham stood when he looked 
 down on the cities of the plain, and priest-like interceded 
 with God for them, — at the height where Moses stood 
 when he communed with God face to f^ice on Sinai's peak, 
 or when on Pisgah's height he looked out on the goodly 
 land he was not to enter, and died there under the kiss 
 of God. It seems to us that the phrase " progress " is a 
 little unmeaning when applied to our spiritual intuitions. 
 The covenant with the chosen people was entered on 
 when Abraham was called out of Haran to serve the 
 living God, — this w^as the true education of the race. 
 True, there were advances, — the law and the prophets were 
 each a stage on towards Messiah's times, but the advance 
 was only given to meet and overcome serious relapses. 
 The law was added because of transgressions, and the 
 prophets in their turn came to replace the priesthood 
 when it had sunk into formalism, that ritual of the letter 
 out of which tlie typical meaning had departed. 
 
 All this teaches us that the first thoughts of the 
 covenant people were their best thoughts. As for the 
 after - growths, they were at best expedients to meet 
 and overcome the deepening of corruption of the times. 
 Nothing was really added to the covenant by these after- 
 thoughts. The river as it broadened and deepened swept 
 down certain impurities and also oxidised others, the 
 volume remaining on the whole much tlie same, a mixed 
 tide of good and evil. So we should say it has been 
 with that later revelation of God as contained in the 
 
46 Theology Proper. 
 
 gospel. Those who set out with the Fatherhood of God 
 have had little to learn. Their theology, like that of 
 Abraham, the father of the faithful and the friend of God, 
 stands at a height of spiritual elevation which we in later 
 times may come up to, but certainly never can surpass. To 
 know the true God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent, 
 this is the whole meaning of the message ; — what can 
 we add to it or take from it ? The only way in which 
 we can possibly attenuate its meaning, and so dim the 
 glory of the gospel, is when we descend from these heights, 
 and put up with that servile conception of our relation 
 to God which the elder son is ever too prone to, while 
 he is in the fields doing mere task-work of dry, dull, 
 religionism, and grudging the Father's goodness towards 
 returning prodigals. It is this root mistake of measuring 
 the heart of God by our poor standards of love and duty, 
 thinking " wickedly that He is altogether such as we are," 
 which lies at the root of all these miserable afterthoughts 
 which make up nine-tenths of our popular evangelical 
 theology. They have been often refuted and exposed. 
 ])y no one was this done so acutely and unflinchingly as 
 by the late Thomas Erskine, who laid bare the Lutheran 
 dogma of solifidian salvation, and also the Calvinist dogma 
 of a mere arbitrary election. 
 
 We have nothing here to add at this stage of our 
 argument, unless it be to press home the thought that 
 afterthoughts can be swept off our spiritual sky only 
 in one way. The north wind driveth away rain ; so 
 an angry countenance a backbiting tongue. A just 
 jealousy, in a word, for the character of God — this must 
 ]je our best, our only safeguard against that evangelical 
 legalism which creeps in, as all afterthoughts do in 
 later times, to steal away the hearts of men from the 
 simplicity which is in Christ Jesus. We have main- 
 
Theology Proper, 47 
 
 tained that the home of this misconception of God was in 
 Latin rather than in Greek theology, arising chiefly from 
 the magisterial view of God which the West was more 
 inclined to than the East. Still, it would not have 
 wrought all the mischief that it did in the West, but for 
 those hard thoughts of God which s^Drang up in the wake 
 of Augustine's predestinarianism. It was the singular 
 quality of that perfervid African, that, having begun to 
 brood on a particular line of thought, he never could rest 
 till he had rounded it off by rejecting all those concessions 
 and compromises which men run to in practical life. The 
 best use of a theory when constructed was, according to 
 Turgot, to demolish it and set up another in its stead. 
 Not so thought Augustine. But, having passed over from 
 his earlier and better stage of Christian Platonism, he 
 moved altogether, and so went on to elaborate that coat 
 of mail wdth predestination as its first link, and the final 
 salvation of an elect remnant as its last link, with all the 
 stages of grace worked up between. Canon Mozley, whom 
 no one can accuse of any bias against Augustinianism, 
 has struck at the root of the mistakes of this ]3rince of 
 dogmatists. He observes, " If revelation as a whole does 
 not speak explicitly, revelation did not intend to do so ; 
 and to impose a definite truth upon it when it designedly 
 stops short of one, is as real an error of interpretation as 
 to deny a truth which it expresses." ■^ Augustine, whose 
 method was the vicious one of all dogmatists, which is 
 first to lay down certain propositions, which are little else 
 than our own philosophical conceptions, and then to turn 
 to the Bible for verbal proof of these rash overreachings 
 beyond that which is written, is thus an example and a 
 warning. In his Enchiridion he piles up one assumption 
 on another till we stand amazed at what a flimsy support 
 ^ Mozley, AuguHiinian Doctrine of Predestination , chap. v. p. 156. 
 
48 Theology Prop 
 
 cr 
 
 the whole structure of this theology rests on. The angels 
 who fell were to be replaced by an elect remnant out of 
 another race created on purpose so to fill up the gap. 
 We should like to have some better authority for this than 
 Augustine's i^psc dixit. It is a bold leap in the dark as to 
 the reasons which moved God to create man. Then, as the 
 sin of our first parent was all foreseen and provided for, 
 he goes on to assert that " the restored part of humanity 
 shall, in accordance with the promises of God, succeed to 
 the place which the rebellious angels lost." So persuaded 
 is he that actual sin as well as guilt becomes an inherited 
 taint, that he discusses the question whether " children are 
 involved in the guilt, not only of the first pair, but of 
 their own immediate parents." He seems to feel that it is 
 difficult to decide whether the sins of a man's other pro- 
 genitors are imputed to him. There is much more of this 
 <.rold-beating in the Enchiridion which we need not discuss 
 here; but it is curiously illustrative of that temper of mind 
 which is unable to stop short of conclusions till rounded 
 off and admitting no question. He discusses, for instance, 
 the text whether God will have all men to be saved, as 
 1 Tim. ii., and the conclusion he comes to is most sophist- 
 ical : " who will have all men to be saved " means only 
 " that no man is saved unless God wills his salvation ; 
 not that there is no man whose salvation He does not 
 will, but that no man is saved apart from His will." Such 
 evasions of the plain meaning of Scripture are so common 
 in Augustine, that when we meet them in later writers we 
 should know where they come from. It is only as we 
 know the usual way of those who, having made a system 
 of their own out of the ohiter dicta of Holy Writ, seem 
 surprised when reminded that truly inspired men are 
 strangely negligent of their logical cobwebs. They state 
 apparently contradictory truths about man's free will 
 
Theology Proper, 49 
 
 and God's purposes, faith and good works, and other such 
 antitheta, in the sense that Dr. Mozley wisely remarks : 
 " The two ideas of Divine Power and Free Will are, in 
 short, two great tendencies of thought inherent in our 
 minds which contradict each other, and can never he 
 united or brought to a common end, and which, therefore, 
 inasmuch as the essential condition of absolute truth is 
 consistency with other truth, can never, in the present 
 state of our faculties, become absolute truths, but must 
 for ever remain contradictory tendencies of thought going 
 on side by side till they are lost sight of and disappear 
 in the haze of our conceptions, like two parallel straight 
 lines which go on to infinity without meeting." 
 
 These wise reflections of Mozley seem an echo of the 
 Hamiltonian teaching of the limitation of our faculties to 
 construct a philosophy of the Absolute. But they had 
 not occurred to Augustine, who, setting out on the 
 single track of the eternal purpose of God, had to push 
 aside, one by one, every other theory of life which 
 conflicted with it, till he had reached the last stage of 
 determinism. iSTot all at once did Augustine make this 
 final breach with the purer traditions of the early 
 Church ; and nothing, we may add, would have drawn 
 him down such an abyss of fatalism but the unhappy 
 dogmatism of Pelagius in the contrary direction. 
 
 But this is the old story of all dogmatism, and is the 
 warnincj acrainst afterthinkino^ theolo'][y which we are in 
 search of. The test is whether it conflicts or not witli 
 our intuitive sense that " God is good and doeth good." 
 Any misconception, such as that God, as Lord of all, must 
 be master, and must lay down His own rules of right 
 and wrong, is at once a deadly wound to truth. In this 
 sentiment lies more Atheism than old-school theologians 
 suspect. It is the " damned error," though pious brows 
 
 D 
 
50 Theology Proper, 
 
 may bless it, and approve it with a text. All after- 
 thoughts, then, must come up to the bar of our 
 "intuitions" or first thoughts; and if the complexion 
 v'hich they then show seems revolting to conscience, and 
 hard to accept, we are bound at once to reject them as 
 among the presumptuous conjectures of those who would 
 say, Lord, are there few that shall be saved ? 
 
 ■ " Can tyrants but by tyrants conquered be ? " we are 
 tempted to ask ; is there no escape from dogmatism but by 
 dogmatism ? Is the age to reel for ever and stagger like 
 a drunken man, between the affirmations resting on bare 
 authorityand negations quite as unwarranted, and onlylead- 
 inof down to gulfs of despair ? Some restoration of belief 
 is the cry of the age, but it must be on other, better 
 grounds than the old dogmatism. It must rest on the three- 
 fold support of conscience, the average agreement of the 
 Christian world, and the testimony of the historic record. 
 To this cry of pain we think we can ofier a satisfactory 
 reply. There is such a type of thought ; there is such 
 a body of truth, which is both catholic, i.e. expressive of 
 the Christian consciousness, and also of the needs of the 
 awakened conscience, and which is living water drawn 
 direct from the fountainhead of Holy Writ. But to 
 get it we must make a clean breach with dogmatism in 
 all its phases. Theologies are such tyrants, that unless 
 discarded tliey return by back doors and again assert 
 their mastery over us. We are only safe when we 
 discard dogma altogether, and fall back on the simpler 
 Biblical phrase didacM, or the teaching. One is our 
 Master, and all we are brethren. If doctors of the 
 Church give us doctrine, let us thankfully take it for 
 what it is worth. We shall venerate it in proportion as 
 it comes from a venerable source. Antiquity is an 
 immense presumption in favour of any teaching, but 
 
Theology Proper, 5 r 
 
 it is a presumption which may disappoint us if it 
 approaches apostolic times, and yet seems to fail and 
 come short. We want the signs of an apostle when we 
 speak of apostolic teaching. 
 
 Dogma, on the other hand, strikes a totally different 
 note. It comes with authority ; it bears us down with the 
 peremptory requirement, " Accept this or reject Church 
 teaching ; " and, after all, what is it but Sofa fossilised. 
 Such and such a Father expressed an opinion ; the 
 majority came round to that way of thinking, and the 
 consent, or rather the indolent assent, of the many is 
 assumed to have given to an obiUv dictum a finality 
 which it never otherv>dse could lay claim to. This 
 attitude of mind, common enough in theology, but 
 utterly foreign to all other branches of thought, must 
 have a root somewhere, either in some great virtue or in 
 some striking defect of human nature. This limpet-like 
 clinging to the rock of tradition and antiquity must be 
 either a sterling quality, or the note of some strange 
 halting of the mind in reaching after the things of God. 
 It is to the latter side of our nature that we assign it. 
 
 Whenever men lay hold of a sense of God as the 
 living God, then they wrestle with Him as Jacob of old 
 did. They will not let Him go. " Eighteous art Thou, 
 Lord; yet let me talk with Thee of Thy judgments." 
 They sometimes rise, as the prophets do, into passionate 
 pleadings - with God, " Doubtless Thou art our Father, 
 though Abraham acknowledge us not." They are like 
 that Syro-Phoenician woman, ready to retort upon God, 
 " Truth, Lord, yet the dogs eat of the crumbs." Such is 
 faith at first hand. It is a persuasion and assurance 
 that whatever else God is, He is not the mere omni- 
 potence of a distant Deity. Sovereignty, unless it be of 
 loving-kindness, is the very last, not the first and only 
 
52 Theology Prope7\ 
 
 thoudit of God. Such a misfaitli as that of Ahaz, " I 
 will not tempt the Lord by seeking a sign," is that 
 atheism of the heart, tlie very sin of sins, which the 
 record condemns from first to last. 
 
 But dogmatism at once brings us to a lower level of 
 thought, in which systematic theology lives, moves, and 
 has its being. It has its arrangements, covenants, 
 creeds, and systems. The machine is so very perfect 
 in itself that it is never to be taken to pieces, much 
 less supposed that it is a mere provisional arrangement. 
 The men of the first covenant were shocked at the 
 prophet who hinted at another covenant founded upon 
 better promises. We of this latter day have come to 
 think his words " inspired," and admire the predictive 
 power of Jeremiah ; but the men of his own day saw no 
 inspiration in such " blasphemous words against Moses 
 and the law:" and because he was a prophet he earned a 
 prophet's reward. The religious world was not worthy 
 of him, or he of the religious world. Such is dogma 
 in all ages. It lacks the one element of living faith, 
 that grand discontent with things as they are, and the 
 sublime determination to turn the world upside down 
 rather than let them remain as they are. Faith, unlike 
 dogma, must "know" God; it will put up with no mere 
 eidolon or second - hand representation. Tresentative 
 truth is, in the Hamiltonian phrase of the Scotch common- 
 sense school, to know things as they are : as long as we 
 only know appearances, and liave to put up with notions, 
 our knowledge is representative only. It is a presentative 
 truth only when perception and sensation exactly tally, 
 and the real thing and our real idea of it are one and in 
 harmony. Are we never to "know" God in this sense ? 
 If not, then Scripture misleads when it promises the pure 
 in heart that they shall see God, and know Him in the 
 
Theology Proper, 53 
 
 only way that He can be known, by reflecting His 
 moral perfections. To love God is to know Him, as 
 conversely to know Him must be to love Him. On this 
 relation of love to knowledge all true theology turns. 
 It is the ^ou sto of the lever which moves the universe. 
 
 Not cognition, then, as an intellectual act, but know- 
 ledge in the intuitive sense that we know God to be light, 
 and in Him no darkness at all, — this is the point where 
 didciM and dogma part company. It is here that the 
 Church ceases to be primitive, as she wrangles over words 
 after their true meaning is exhausted. Every fossil was 
 once the shell of some molluscous thing which had life in 
 itself ; so we admit it was with the old phrases of our old 
 creeds. There was a time when the timeless generation 
 of the Logos was worth contending for, as Athanasius did 
 against the world. But when the Logos doctrine lost its 
 true meaning, as it soon did in the West, it became mere 
 logomachy, whether we hold with Tertullian, that God 
 nmde- the Word in time to be the first-born of every 
 creature, which is plain Arianism ; or whether we hold 
 the opposite, which is the orthodox view. So essential 
 is it to see that we not only hold the right faith, but 
 also hold it in the right way, and as a living stock 
 springing out of a living root. To know God as He is, 
 — this, in a word, is theology proper ; all outside this 
 belongs to those afterthoughts of theology on which 
 dogma lives, as on its native element. 
 
 To trace, then, the course of theology proper as com- 
 pared with its afterthoughts, we must adhere to the strict 
 etymology of the term. It is the doctrine of God and of 
 His relations with us. Abstract theology or ontology, 
 properly so called, lies too far in the background. It 
 is abstruse and metaphysical, and beside the purpose of 
 a revelation, properly so called. In the other extreme, 
 
54 Theology Proper. 
 
 theolofi^y, when it enters into anthopology, and takes up 
 .ground such as that of St. Ansehn in liis Cur Deus Homo, 
 declines in the other direction from the true bent and 
 bearing of theology. It is singular that the same St. 
 Anselm, who in his Monologium and Prologium attempted 
 to rest the existence of Deity on strict ontological grounds, 
 should also have passed in the other extreme into a 
 class of conceptions in his Cur Dens Homo in which theo- 
 logy is merged into anthropology. He loses the sense of 
 Divine justice by assimilating it too much to the forensic 
 conceptions of a Eoman magistrate. The law became an 
 abstraction to be set beside the tlirone of God Himself, 
 and to which His other attributes must bow, or at least 
 conform. His theory of a satisfactio adiva vicaria, on 
 which all modern teachings of the doctrine of the atonement 
 rest, draws the idea of God too far down to a lower level 
 than that of the scriptural standard to which the earliest 
 ages conformed. In these opposite extremes of Anselm's 
 teaching, we liave an instance how ill able the West was 
 to move in that inner circle of truth, the knowledge of 
 God in Himself, which was the native element of theology 
 in the East. The proper knowledge of mankind is man, 
 is a smart •epigram in Pope which sounds original. It is 
 in reality a reflection of the whole mode of Western think- 
 ing on all subjects, theology not excepted, from Augustine's 
 (hiy and downward. With the exception of the Mystics, 
 wlio were always regarded as only semi-orthodox, and 
 bordering on Pantheism, Western divines made no disguise 
 of confounding theology proper with anthropology. The 
 incarnation and the Trinity itself were treated as "regu- 
 lative " trutlis, or as incapable of speculative handling, but 
 which assist us to approach the true kernel of the question 
 which lay in the plan of salvation and the mode of God's 
 reconciliation with sinners. The interest of the West in 
 
Theology Proper. 55 
 
 all questions of theology proper was quite subsidiary to 
 the question of how God could be just and yet the justi- 
 tier of them that believe. We are far from implying that 
 the West was indifferent to the Arian controversy or to 
 those discussions at Nice over which a Western theologian, 
 Hosius of Cordova, presided as the representative of the 
 voice of united Christendom. But its interest in these later 
 discussions, on which Eutychians and Nestorians rent the 
 East with their rival cries, was always comparatively 
 languid. On the other hand, that Pelagian controversy 
 to which the East was utterly indifferent, siding on the 
 whole with Pelagius rather than Augustine, these dis- 
 putes, which have their roots in anthropology, not in 
 theology, were those which stirred the West to its depths. 
 This contrast is not accidental, but goes to the root of 
 the whole question. For theology proper, we have to turn 
 to the East : we there find ourselves in a region of thought 
 where we can breathe freely, if we delight to dwell on a 
 class of conceptions such as those which breathe through- 
 out the whole of St. John's writings. What sounds 
 " mystical " to our more practical Western needs, seemed 
 to be the very vital air which they breathed. Take the 
 orations of St. Athanasius, which to the superficial reader 
 seem only echoes of a strife which we have laid to rest in 
 condemning Arius and his opinions — to the careful student 
 they come out as the breathings of a devout nature, to 
 whom the Eternal Logjos was much more than a mere 
 abstraction, unmeaning apart from the incarnation. In 
 our ignorance we smile at the zeal with which he con- 
 tended for the eternal generation of the Son of God. To 
 Athanasius and the orthodox East this was much more 
 than a contention of words — as if it were a dispute of 
 a diphthong, as Gibbon sarcastically describes it, justly 
 enough from the mere deistical point of view. To Athan- 
 
56 Theology Proper. 
 
 asius and the East this contention for the Homoousian 
 cairied the whole question of the Logos, to which the West 
 was strangely insensible from the first. In Latin, such 
 is the poverty of the language, there is no term at all 
 equivalent to the Logos. Probably the reason of this — 
 for speech is but the reflection of thouglit — was because 
 this inherent plurality of persons in the Deity was only a 
 dogma to Latin theology — infinitely important, no doubt, 
 but still a dogma, which found no support in their funda- 
 mental conceptions of God in Himself. As long as we are 
 content with a mere contrast of creature to Creator, there 
 seems no need to go beyond the grounds of " regulative" 
 theology, as we are now taught to phrase it, since Dean 
 Mansel stole it from Kant's ethics and applied it to theo- 
 logy. We may be Monotheists with Jews and Moslems, 
 or Tritheists with the orthodox East and West, but our 
 Tritheism rests on the mere letter of certain texts, and 
 has no warrant beyond the page of revelation. But to 
 Athanasius and his school, the Logos, as the only pos- 
 sible mode of self-manifestation of the Absolute to the 
 lielative, of the Infinite Father of all to the finite universe, 
 this was a conception so vital, that the whole of revelation 
 stood or fell with this truth of the eternal generation of 
 the Son, or rather of the Logos, since sonship and father- 
 hood are relative terms, the one implying the other. 
 
 We never do justice to Athanasius unless we thus 
 place him on his tlirone as the greatest of all theologians, 
 because he contended to the death for this foundation 
 truth of all theology. Disregarding the Logos doctrine 
 and all it implies of mediation between the finite and the 
 infinite, the Homoousian and Homoousian of Athanasius 
 and Arius must seem a mere wrangle of words. Orthodox 
 Western divines never say so, but they certainly imply 
 as much ; and the wide spread of Arianism, as well as its 
 
Theology Proper. 57 
 
 long duration, among the Gothic and other races converted 
 to Clnistianity in the West, is easily accounted for by that 
 tendency of Western theology to set out from a Deistic set 
 of conceptions, on which Trinitarian teacliing comes in as a 
 kind of afterthought or awkward accommodation. The 
 frequent lapses of the West into Arian and Unitarian view 
 of God in later times are accounted for in the same way. 
 Assuming Deism as our base line on which we rest our 
 belief in God, Trinitarianism invariably rises like a build- 
 ing from an insecure foundation. So it has always struck 
 the best and devoutest thinkers ; hence the desire of our 
 day to recast theology by revising its foundation conceptions 
 of God. Deism or Vetrc supreme is no foundation on which 
 to rear such a superstructure as that of Father, Son, and 
 Holy Ghost. But when we set out with the Eternal 
 Father, who through the Logos instrumentally, and by 
 the Eternal Spirit effectively, has moved out into crea- 
 tion, we are then on ground out of which the Christian 
 doctrine of the Trinity springs, as a building out of a rock 
 into which its foundations are dug deep. 
 
 All that we mean by theology proper is contained in that 
 text, " This is eternal life to know Thee, the true God, and 
 Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." In proportion as 
 we get back to that position, and rest in it as the Alpha 
 and the Omega of our thinking, our theology becomes 
 sound and stable. Without that, our theology will be only 
 a house on the sand, as too much of our afterthoughts of 
 derivative later theology is found to be. He is a theo- 
 logian in the true sense of the term, who keeps close to that 
 central truth, and then the knowledge of the living God 
 never can be barren and unfruitful. It never can lie like 
 a dead dogma in the dormitory of the soul ; it must ever 
 quicken us to fresh strivings after fellowship with Him 
 whom to know is life everlasting. 
 
CHAPTEE III. 
 
 WHAT ARE AFTERTHOUGHTS ? 
 
 Having seen what are the first thoughts of theology, and 
 that they all centre round the doctrine of God in Christ, 
 we are in a position to go on to consider what are after- 
 thoughts, and how tliey take their rise. Theology is at 
 its best and purest stage when it is intuitive ; it is based 
 on our spiritual instincts ; its only logic is that best of all 
 logic, when there is one single step, as it has been well 
 said, from the premiss to the conclusion. '' We know 
 that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an 
 understanding, that we may know Him that is true ; and 
 we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. 
 Tliis is the true God, and eternal life." It is all contained 
 liere. The philosophy of the faith — if we do not wrong 
 it by so describing it at all — is here all summed up in a 
 plirase or two. What, then, we may ask, are our spiritual 
 intuitions ? Here we sev3 that with a defective draft of 
 Imman nature we have reached wron^ conclusions with 
 regard to the Divine nature. It could not be otherwise, 
 since " in the image of God made He man ; " and the 
 result is tliat our bald and meagre psychology has resulted 
 in a dogmatic defective theology of afterthoughts. By an 
 intuitional theology we mean one grounded on the funda- 
 mental conception that man is the child of God, and some- 
 
What are Afterthoiights ? 59 
 
 thing more than His creature. Into the scriptural proofs 
 of this we need not enter; the genealogy of the second 
 Adam, traced up through ancestors to the first Adam, 
 who is said to be the son of God, may suffice. We come 
 from God and go to God. The first and the last links 
 of the long chain are fastened to the throne of God. 
 Any other theory, such as that held by the whole "West, 
 which excludes this conception of the original and indis- 
 soluble relationship of the race to God under the one 
 headship of Christ, must be an " afterthought," and must 
 be rejected as such. It may not be impossible to har- 
 monise the two theologies, but surely we must admit 
 that it must be by interpreting afterthoughts in the 
 light of first thoughts, and not the other way about. 
 " Let God be true, and every man a liar," — so we must 
 conclude that if our eschatological inferences impugn the 
 Divine perfections and dim our vision of God, we need 
 scarcely ask which of the two must go overboard. So 
 much the worse for afterthoughts. 
 
 It is only when we are familiar with these deep and 
 lasting contrasts between Latin and Greek theology that 
 we get hold of the master-key by which to determine 
 what are, and what are not, afterthoughts in theology. 
 In a word, we learn in this way to distinguish between 
 a genuine and a spurious evolution in theology. The 
 Greeks, at least until they had sunk into the slough of 
 Byzantinism, after the removal of the seat of empire from 
 old to new Eome, always understood the term theology 
 in one definite sense only. It was the doctrine of God 
 in His relation to man; but not conversely of man in 
 his relation to God. Greeks invariably set out at the 
 other end of the chain from Latins, — the one left off 
 where the other began. But it will be said this comes 
 to the same thing, — whether we box the compass east to 
 
6o What ar'e Afterthoughts f 
 
 west or the other way about, west to east, — we come to 
 the same point at last. Not so. The difference is more 
 than verbal, whether we make man or God the starting- 
 point of our inquiries on this subject. Setting out with 
 man, we have to take him as we find him, blind and 
 insensible to spiritual things. We have to find an 
 explanation of this strange fact — we have to begin with 
 a tlieory of original sin, a tradition of the fall, and the 
 problem of evil in general. We get out of our depth all 
 at once in a kind of theodicee, which lands us at last 
 in a dilemma which no thinker has yet overcome, and 
 which J. S. Mill admitted to be logically insoluble. 
 Either God is all-goodness, but not all-mighty, or He is 
 all-mighty, but not all-goodness. Pelagians and Augus- 
 tinians, Arminians and Calvinists, have beaten their wings 
 against tlie bars of this cage ever since Latin theology 
 replaced Greek, as it did soon after Augustine's day, and 
 we are no nearer a solution than ever. 
 
 On the other hand, setting out, as the Greeks did, at 
 the other end of the problem, all unfolds itself in a 
 simple and natural order, and there is no room for these 
 gloomy afterthoughts which have made earth a prison- 
 house, and evil a kind of Manichcean partner with good 
 in the government of the universe. Let us notice the 
 order in which the early Fathers of the Alexandrian school 
 approached the problem. Their point of departure was 
 the general Fatherhood of God, — of a God, let us add, wIk) 
 was not so much transcendent as immanent in the world. 
 The opening verses of the Gospel of St. John is the key 
 to all that is distinctively Hellenist in contrast with 
 tlie Latin or magisterial conception of God. The Logos 
 is airepfiaTLKO'^, or germ-like, in the world ; that Logos 
 in man becomes reason or thought in its twofold mani- 
 festation of speech and action. At a loss for a Latin 
 
What are Afterthoughts ? 6 1 
 
 equivalent for the Greek Logos, the Latin mind lost hold 
 of the primitive and deep significance of the thought 
 that there was a Wisdom which was one with God, and 
 yet which had its habitation with the children of men. 
 The xcrhiim of the Latins was bald, and carried with it 
 no such connotation of terms ; it awaked no such far- 
 reaching associations, such latent adumbrations and anti- 
 cipations of the incarnation. It has been well said by 
 Bishop Lightfoot, that what the word was to the world, 
 that Christ the incarnate Word is to the Church. Eedemp- 
 tion is thus the pleroma of creation, the completing work 
 of Him who lilleth all in all. In any other sense than 
 this, the description of the Church as His body, the fulness 
 of Him who lilleth all in all, is unmeaning. The most 
 fruitful and original of Justin Martyr's opinions is that 
 concerning the X0709 cirepfiarLKo^, the germinal word, the 
 word that is sown as conscience in the hearts of all men. 
 It is on the ground of this X0709 aTrepfiariKo^, this light 
 which lighteth every man, this anticipation of Immanuel 
 God with us, as the God in us of the light of conscience, 
 that the Greeks maintained the true ground of the X070? 
 7rpo(j)opiK6<; as the Word manifested in the flesh, and by 
 which the Holy Ghost was given without measure to Him 
 wlio as Son of God was also Son of man. 
 
 The Latins, lacking the Logos doctrine, never could see 
 the true grounds of the incarnation which were laid deep 
 in the original and unchangeable relations of God to men. 
 What Liebnitz describes as the sufficient cause is tlie 
 only cause which adequately explains the effect. It 
 leaves it no longer a bare phenomenon suspended in the 
 air, open to sense perception, but accepted then as a 
 final fact. The sufficient cause is that which, as soon as 
 it is reached, transforms what was before arbitrary into 
 a necessity ; it renders it reasonable and consistent with 
 
62 What are Afterthoughts? 
 
 all other views of things, thus impressing us with a 
 settled sense of its truth. In this point of view Latin 
 theology never has been " rational " in the sense that the 
 early and best type of Greek theology harmonised reason 
 and revelation. To the Hellenist mind there was no 
 strained reconciliation between reason and faith. Such 
 a rhetorical phrase as that of the Carthaginian Tertullian, 
 credo qiiia impossihile, would have seemed a senseless 
 swa<T^G:er, if not a sin against true selfhood. The contrast 
 between two theologies, for which we have to thank 
 Aquinas, the one known as natural and the other as 
 revealed, never so much as occurred to Greek thought 
 when at its best and earliest stage. All revelation was 
 an orderly process upward and inward. In this it 
 anticipated what we now describe as evolution, and 
 which old-school dogmatists, having hastily denied and 
 derided, are now only too anxious to make their peace 
 with. To the Greek the Eternal was from eternity 
 immanent in the universe, and has manifested Himself 
 in time under three stages, as Light, as Life, and as Love. 
 It is at the last and highest stage, as Love, that He 
 breaks into consciousness, as the intelligent and spiritual 
 agent, revealing Himself to man by that which, in the 
 early Hebrew record, is said to be the voice of the Lord. 
 " Where art thou, Adam ? " is the first utterance of God 
 in which we see the first link of the long chain of 
 recovery of God-consciousness let down to the erring 
 child from his offended Father in heaven. All after- 
 revelation is nothing more than the unfolding of that 
 far-reaching cry, " Where art thou ? " History may be 
 said to contain two chapters, and only two — one in which 
 man seeks after God and loses himself in the search ; 
 and a second, in which God seeks after man, and seeks, 
 as the shepherd after the lost sheep, until He finds it. 
 
What are Afterthoughts f (^2> 
 
 Speaking, then, generally, we may say that early Greek 
 theology held fast by this clae which Latin never seems 
 to have known. The best apologists, who are without 
 exception of the Greek school, all keep to this leading 
 principle, which the Latins lost sight of, that secular and 
 sacred history are only different sides of the same truth, 
 corresponding to the Word in the world and the Word 
 in the Church. Philosophy was to the Greeks the same 
 prop?edeutic that Mosaism was to the Hebrews. In both 
 cases men were placed under tutors and governors. 
 Hence the keynote of the Greek is the education of the 
 human race, certainly not its probation, much less that 
 last afterthought of a too logical theology, its reproba- 
 tion. All those gloomy inferences from the known to 
 the unknown, which make up the body of what is known 
 as Augustinian theology, were unheard of in the Church 
 until the close of the fourth century. They were echoes 
 of the despairing cry of a dying world which had laid to 
 heart only too seriously the extra ecclesiam nulla salus 
 dogma. Is it accidental — we think not — that three 
 Carthaginian doctors, Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, are 
 responsible for that arbitrary magisterial view of religion 
 which is more Eoman than Eoman law itself ? This is 
 too often the colonial type of mind, to exaggerate the 
 qualities of the mother country. American Puritanism 
 ran to seed the home type of Calvinism, as we know, 
 before the middle of the last century. Predestinarianism 
 in New England reached its last term of Determinism, in 
 which that pure and spiritual conception of election, as 
 the progressive purpose of God to redeem the many 
 through the few, which runs like a river through Holy 
 Writ, is lost in the sands of a dark and hopeless fatalism. 
 This was the point reached by Jonathan Edwards, when 
 the outraged public conscience took the matter in hand, 
 
64 IVhal are Afterthoughts ? 
 
 and restored the balance by asserting the suppressed 
 truth. It reasserted all the moral attributes of Deity. 
 It set up a form of Deism which for the time concealed, 
 if it did not deny, these trinitarian trutlis, to which a 
 dominant Calvinism had given a twist. In any case, the 
 protest against the God of Jonathan Edwards ran its 
 course, and in the way that we might expect ; and at 
 last the Christian consciousness of America has set itself 
 to build up a new theology to replace the old. It has set 
 out from the low ground of Deism, passing on then through 
 transcendentalism, intuitionalism, and other vague phases 
 of thought of the Emerson school, it has reached at last 
 the same point from which theology began to decline 
 in tlie wrong direction, when by the third century Alex- 
 andriauism began to give way to Carthaginianism. 
 
 It is to three Carthaginian doctors, then, that we trace 
 this development of tlie Latin Church in the line of 
 extreme dogmatism. All three were rhetoricians, and of 
 a debased provincial type. Tertullian, the father of this 
 deviation in the wrong direction, brought into the service 
 of dogmatics a fierce temper, which would have disgraced 
 an advocate of the worst type of hired sophistry. The 
 prescription of heretics, wliich was the poisoned weapon 
 first brouglit into use by Tertullian, may be said to have 
 led the way to rack and dungeon, to Dominic and his domini 
 canes, Alva and the blood-bath of the Netherlands, Spain 
 and its Inquisition. All lay, as the eagle in its egg, in this 
 one misconception of truth by this fiery Carthaginian. 
 His noble confession and martyrdom must not blind us 
 to the sad fact that Cyprian was on the same line which 
 Tertullian had laid down, on which he only too faithfully 
 followed. Da magistnim, Give me my Master, was, ac- 
 cording to Jerome, the phrase with which Cyprian, the 
 father of the hierarchical, as Tertullian was of dogmatic, 
 
What are Afterthoughts ? 65 
 
 theology, took down these treatises which he never passed 
 a day without perusing. It has been said by Harnack, 
 that Cyprian polished the language that TertuUian had 
 made ; he sifted his thoughts, rounded them off, and 
 turned them into current coin. Nisi Lyra li/rassd, Luther 
 non saltasset, may be more or less true, for the filiation of 
 ideas is often more mixed than we suppose. But it is as 
 certain as that Socrates taught Xenophon and Plato, so 
 Tertullian set in motion the hierarchical principle, the 
 Koman regimental view of religion, which Cyprian took 
 up with such determination. This theory, when passed on 
 to a still abler Carthaginian, became in Auo-ustine's hands 
 that appalling conception of the Ecclesia Clavigera, with 
 its two keys of baptism and extreme unction, with which, 
 like a janitor, it stands at the two doors of life, passing 
 the new-born babe by one sacrament into the visible 
 communion of the faithful on earth, and by the other 
 passing the dying into the dread world, with its vast 
 spirals, upward and downward, on which the gloomy 
 genius of Dante threw a lurid light of imagination in 
 one direction, as Milton did in another. 
 
 To discuss all these afterthoughts of theology, sin and 
 salvation, heaven, hell, and purgatory, grace and its two 
 channels, faith and the sacraments, would be to write the 
 history of Augustinianism in its many phases. Criticism 
 of Augustine is like plying a pick on a rock of basalt. 
 There has been too much waste of good hand labour of 
 this kind by divines of the type of Jeremy Taylor and the 
 liberal school of Anglicans, who, in a day before criticism 
 was born, seemed to feel that mixed feeling for the great 
 doctor of the West which the poet felt to his mistress — 
 
 " Nee tecum vivere possum nee sine." 
 
 Unable to trace the error to its true source in a departure 
 
 E 
 
66 What are Afterthoughts ? 
 
 from tlie Greek conception of theology as beginning and 
 ending with the knowledge of God in Christ, they stopped 
 short at one of these half-way houses, which, whether 
 we call it senii-Pelagianism, or in more modern phrase 
 Arminianism, it disheartens us even to look into. To say 
 that Augustine was right in his contention against Pelagius 
 is quite to understate the truth. The Pelagian theory 
 was little else than an afterthought of an afterthought. 
 The ascetic theory of salvation by self-righteousness ran 
 to seed in Pelagius, and to stamp it out was the smallest 
 of Augustine's services to truth. Unfortunately it became 
 a case of stamping on Plato's pride with greater. The 
 anti-Pelagian Augustine not only came out of the fight 
 victorious, as he deserved to be, but also burdened with 
 a doctrine of grace so ultra-Pauline, that we feel it 
 impossible to describe it unless by Joubert's phrase, '' Les 
 Jansenistes font la grace une espece de quatrieme personne 
 de la sainte Trinite." The key to this mistake, which has 
 been the bane of theology, Joubert strikes his finger on 
 in one memorable phrase, " Personnifier Ics mots est un mal 
 faneste en thMogie." This explains why the Church, from 
 the first, favoured realism and consistently discouraged 
 nominalism. Nominalism, which is free-thought in the 
 germ, is death to dogmatic traditional theology of the 
 Latin type. It was a true instinct which drew the 
 Schoolmen to the side of realism ; for as soon as mental 
 concepts are taken out of the subjective sphere of con- 
 cepts, and treated as ultimate, undeniable truths to be 
 accepted as data of thouglit, behind which we dare not 
 go, or ask the why or the wherefore of, at once slavery 
 begins. Conscience is dethroned, and in its place is set 
 up a director, he may be a father confessor or a popular 
 preacher with a gilt-edged Bible, — but at once the new 
 note of authority is struck. Dogmatism, in one of its 
 
What are After thoitgJits f 67 
 
 two forms of an infallible Church or book, — it comes to 
 the same thing whether in Church or book we have 
 our one infallible interpreter, — becomes the doctrine of 
 theology, and truth has to get back into its well, or 
 muffle up its meaning in mysticism, if it is even allowed 
 to whisper its thoughts at all. 
 
 To the last and greatest of the three Carthaginians we 
 trace this strange aberration, by which he sought to com- 
 pensate for that other aberration of his early life, the 
 Manichaeanism to which in a sense he returned in his 
 very recoil from it. It is the irony of history that, as 
 Tertullian set out orthodox and ended as a heretic, so 
 Augustine began in heresy and worked back into straight 
 orthodoxy. But the error and the truth in both cases 
 were congenital, and congenial to the nature of both. 
 There was that same fiery temper in both characters, 
 mixed with a certain Punic faith, which is unable to 
 understand that truth wants no champion, no challenging 
 of error, no riding up and down the world and running a 
 tilt against the smaller sectarianisms which grow out of 
 men's earnestness, dashed as it is with ignorance. Far 
 wiser is Coleridge's golden saying, " Presume yourself 
 ignorant of a man's understanding until you understand 
 his ignorance." This is the key to the highest type of 
 toleration, which is that of being tolerant of intolerant 
 people. But the saint-worship which throws an aureole 
 round the head of the second and third of these Cartha- 
 ginians, while the saintly prefix is refused to the first of 
 the three, who was the undeniable master of both, is con- 
 sistent with the monkish ignorance which denies to Origen 
 a distinction allowed to men like Demetrius and Epi- 
 phanius, — men so contemptible that nothing but their 
 rancour against Origen has helped to keep them in 
 remembrance. 
 
68 W/iat are Afterthoughts ? 
 
 But enough of these contrasts between the first, 
 second, and third redactors of the tlieology of the West. 
 For all its later exorbitances its first three teachers are 
 not fairly responsible. The immoral fiction of sin im- 
 puted to the unconscious posterity of the first Adam, and 
 the strange logic of the Westminster Confession on the 
 subject of elect infants, this is an afterthought of an 
 afterthought. In the case of Augustine, there were two 
 mitigations to his cruel Carthaginian theology : he had 
 reserved a limhus infantum, with its inarticulate wail of 
 infanti perdudi, and he had emphasised the pious desire 
 for an intermediate place lying not quite beyond the 
 reach of our prayers on earth. It is fair to Augustine 
 to add that he was the first doctor to do so, as con- 
 sistently enough he had closed the gates of mercy on 
 mankind. With a horrible inconsistency which alone 
 explains the counter-Reformation, the Eeformers went on 
 to teach one-half of Augustinianism without the other, 
 Zwingli always excepted, — the one Reformer to whom 
 justice has never been done in orthodox or Anglican 
 circles, — the Reformers turned the afterthoughts of 
 Augustine into a strange mass of thorny contradictions, 
 which it would tax a logician to cut his way through. 
 The race, all endowed with separate immortal souls 
 lodged in mortal bodies, enter the world one by one 
 a foredoomed race, " hell-deserving sinners," as the old 
 phrase was. Still, having lost the day by one probation, 
 which turned out a defeat in Eden, they are sent into 
 the world in a second state of probation, to form char- 
 acters which are foredoomed to failure on account of 
 some antenatal defect for which the race is not respon- 
 sible, but which clings to it like the Nemesis in some 
 Greek tragedy. Thus the probation of man is meant 
 only to exhibit — ^justify it never can — this reprobation 
 
What are Afterthoughts ^ 69 
 
 at the last day. Out of this fatal circle the semi- 
 Pelagian and Arminian school, such as Jeremy Taylor 
 and the Anglicans, and also Wesley and his followers, 
 try to escape only to impale themselves on still greater 
 difficulties. If we are the makers of our own character, 
 and responsible for the whole issue on which eternity 
 hangs, why is it that beings are flung ashore in life like 
 that coming of Arthur born in a storm, and ending like 
 that passing of Arthur in the din of battle ? All this is 
 more than perplexing on any of the two theories which, 
 since Augustine's day, hold the field of the old orthodoxy. 
 
 But as soon as we get behind Augustine into a 
 stratum of thought more primitive than that of the later 
 Latin theology, we discover, as the German proverb has 
 it, that " behind the hills there are people." There were 
 brave men before Agamemnon, and so there were theo- 
 logians before the austere doctor of Carthage, to whom 
 the whole West has agreed to bow with unquestioning 
 submission. In the apse of St. Peter's the four doctors of 
 the Church, who are supposed to support the chair of 
 Peter, are Ambrose, the administrator and statesman- 
 bishop ; Jerome, who gave the West its Latin version of 
 the Scriptures ; Gregory, the great model of the Papacy in 
 its best estate; and Augustine, who, if not summns epis- 
 copus, is regarded as the one doctor incomparctbilis. He 
 surpasses them all in this unique quality, that he has 
 Ibrmulated the whole theology of the West, and fixed it 
 in a type which it has never since diverged from. 
 
 The dogma of original sin, out of which the whole of 
 Augustinianism grows as a building out of its foundation, 
 never held the same place in Greek theology as in Latin. 
 It had been referred to indistinctly by Tertullian and 
 Cyprian, and certain' intimations of the two headships of 
 tlie two Adams looking in that direction are to be found in 
 
70 What are Afterthoughts ? 
 
 the writings of Ambrose. According to tins dogma, when 
 taken in its harshest form, humanity is absolutely separ- 
 ated from God in consequence of Adam's sin. In the 
 "uilt 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 
 as also each individual to a future of unending woe. So 
 deeply is Augustine interested in establishing this posi- 
 tion, that the redemption of the world by Christ inevit- 
 ably 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 one common 
 sentence of doom. How Augustine could have so mis- 
 understood the apostle as to assume that the headship of 
 the two Adams was not coextensive, is not apparent at 
 a first glance. But unless we get back to Augustine's 
 point of view, we shall fail to trace this afterthought of 
 theology to its true tap root. It lay in the exaggerated 
 conception of the " two cities," and that salvation depends 
 on an act of grace on God's part, and of faith on 
 man's part, to remove us out of the one city into the 
 other. All the well-worn Old Testament illustrations of 
 Noah and the ark, of Lot escaping out of Sodom, of the 
 exodus out of Egypt, were pressed into the service of this 
 one aspect of personal salvation. It was a case of spiritual 
 subjective experience on Augustine's part, the sense of con- 
 version and consequent salvation, which he extended into 
 an obligation of all to pass under a similar experience. 
 Conversion based on the text, " Ye must be born again," 
 
What are Afterthoughts ? 7 1 
 
 grew up in Augustine's mind into a kind of new decalogue. 
 The rescue of a doomed, imperilled soul became the whole 
 duty of man. " Hell-deserving sinner" — the phrase excus- 
 able, perhaps, as coming in the heat of the moment from 
 a street preacher with a message to deliver, and calling 
 for a response of " now or never " — passed into dogmatic 
 theology, and underwent there, as words do, a silent 
 transformation. Men forget the law of connotation of 
 terms, and that a teaching might be experimentally true 
 but dogmatically false. So it was that Augustine and 
 his followers reached the startling conclusion that guilt 
 passed from Adam to his unborn posterity, through for- 
 getting that the moral consequences of evil are quite 
 distinct from that physical sequence which we now call 
 the law of heredity. 
 
 As a taint or defect, evil may pass on per trachtcem; 
 but traducian guilt, or the forensic fiction of sin imputed, 
 even though set off by a counter fiction of merit imputed, 
 lands us in conclusions which the moral sense of mankind 
 revolts at. The imputation of Adam's sin to his as yet 
 sinless posterity is a strange exaggeration of the Pauline 
 expression, that death passed over all, for that all have 
 sinned ; or, as the other rendering is, " all sinned in Adam 
 as their federal head." But Augustine and his school 
 forgot that the apostle, as if startled at his own conclu- 
 sion, throws in considerations which go far to neutralise 
 its apparent harshness, " not as the offence, and not 
 as it was by one that sinned." He meets the obvious 
 injustice of thus making the innocent suffer with the 
 guilty. He remembers Abraham's plea, " That be far 
 from Thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous 
 with the wicked ; " so he throws out two considerations, 
 first, that if it is dreadful to think that the mass of man- 
 kind suffer for the transgression of the one, on the other 
 
72 W/iat are Aftcrthovghts ? 
 
 liand, to the mass of mankind {ol iroXKol) the grace and 
 the gift of grace whicli is by one man "abounds." In the 
 next verse he restates this truth, that *' wliere sin abounds 
 grace much more abounds ; " for he adds, if the judgment 
 was by one offence to condemnation, the free gift is of 
 many offences unto justification. It comes, then, to this, 
 that if one sinner made many sinners, and one sin 
 brought many offences in its train, the remedy is co- 
 extensive with the disease. It reaches to all, yea, it 
 abounds. Apostolic language is exhausted in order to 
 bar the strange ];)erverse conclusion which Augustine, 
 and after him Calvin, drew from his statement of the 
 universal spread of evil from the sin of our first parent. 
 It was a conclusion quite foreign to the Pauline type of 
 thought, which was to set the second Adam's headship as, 
 at least, coextensive to the headship of the first, and 
 even something more, in so far as He was greater. We 
 are thus able to say that we have gained, not lost, by the 
 fall— 
 
 ** What Adam lost and forfeited for all, 
 Christ keepetli now, who cannot fail or fall." 
 
 It puzzles us at first to see how the Augustinian school 
 could have gone wrong. It seems that their after- 
 thought of particular redemption grew out of the dogma 
 of the salvation of the elect only. They reasoned, as 
 men sometimes do, backwards : irom their estimate of 
 what the end must be to their opinion as to the provision 
 for meeting that end. They reasoned on this disjunctive 
 syllogism, either Christ died for all the sins of all men, 
 and then all will be saved ; or for some of the sins of all 
 men, and then none will be saved ; or, lastly, for all the 
 sins of some men, and then some will be saved. Our 
 only comment on it is the wise words of a greater than 
 Augustine, his spiritual father iu Christ, Ambrose of Milan, 
 
What are Aftei'thoughts ? 
 
 /6 
 
 " Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum 
 suuni" {De Fide, i. 5, s. 42). It is this logic in theology 
 which has undone both logic and theology. Eules of 
 reasoning are all very well, but when the distribution of 
 middle terms is of our own making, the wliole conclusion 
 is arbitrary and worthless — we are weaving spiders' webs 
 which even flies can push through. What kind of dis- 
 tribution of terms is that which speaks of sins and sinners 
 as separable conceptions. It is mere logic-chopping to 
 divide between all the sins of all men and some of the 
 sins of all men, as if in God's sight there was any quanti- 
 tative measure of evil at all, or as if salvation were a 
 mere ransom for the penal consequences of sin. It was 
 in the AYest, more than the East, this magisterial mode 
 of thinking of evil grew up, and with it theories of the 
 atonement which, thousjh riddled throui^h and through 
 with criticism, have lingered on to this day. Even yet 
 they are not argued out of the field ; but we are out- 
 growing them, and may leave to the twentieth century to 
 report that the doctrine of equivalence or compensation 
 has passed out of the statute book of theology, like other 
 pale ghosts of a jurisprudence now seen to be barbarous. 
 Like all " afterthoughts," this notion of quid pro quo retri- 
 bution went on till it reached the breaking point of self- 
 contradiction. Equivalence, to Calvin's mind, suggested 
 that as the elect were " hell-deserving " sinners, it was 
 necessary that the Substitute should taste death in the 
 sense of a descensus ad inferos never dreamed of before, 
 and which would have revolted Augustine himself. Calvin 
 held that eternal torments were undergone hy Christ 
 during that time when, as St. Peter teaches. He was 
 preaching to the spirits in prison, whatever that means. 
 Such a distortion a^ that of Calvin's has only to be 
 named to be rejected, as it has been, even by his followers. 
 
74 TV/iat arc AfterthoitgJitsf 
 
 But it is as well to fasten on this 7tiagistcr of French 
 locric some of the heretical conclusions which he does 
 
 o 
 
 not spare others. If the representative of the redeemed 
 endured eternal torments, only in a temporal sense, what 
 is this hut turning hell into purgatory, and so upsetting his 
 own narrow creed of an eternal-punishment theory. The 
 quihble that the intensity of Christ's sufferings made up 
 for their non-eternity is worthy of its author ; but it may 
 be left to others to say that if this be " logic in theology," 
 the less of such logic and the less of such theology the 
 better for the true interests of morality and religion. 
 
 But the question remains, How are the sundered relation- 
 ships to be restored ? What is redemption, and how is it 
 applied ? The place of Christ in Augustine's scheme is 
 not a prominent one, since humanity, as a whole, has not 
 been redeemed. Augustine continues, it is true, to speak 
 of Christ in the conventional way ; but he no longer finds 
 in His work any bond which unites God with humanity. 
 The incarnation has become a mystery. God chose to 
 accomplish human salvation, but as far as we can see He 
 might have adopted some other method. Unquestionably 
 in tliis criticism of Augustine there is the key to the 
 deep contrast between East and West. The East is 
 Johannine, the West exclusively Pauline in its Christ- 
 ology. Are we, then, to set tliese two apostles in 
 opposition, and describe them offhand, as the Baur theory 
 would do, as the respective heads of two rival theologies, 
 in the same way as Paulinism and Petrinism are opposed 
 in tlie Tubingen version of Acts. There is no need what- 
 ever to go so far as this. The East never effaced or 
 ignored the sense of sin and the need of redemption. The 
 teaching of St. John in his Epistles is quite as distinct as 
 that of St. Paul on that subject; and the Alexandrian 
 Fathers are quite explicit on the redemptive meaning of 
 
What are Afterthoughts? y^_ 
 
 Christ's death, as well as of its peculiar value. But they 
 sought to hold the analogy or proportion of faith ; and this 
 same law of subordination, which they saw and taught in 
 the doctrine of the Trinity, they also held in setting forth 
 the work of Christ. As the Father sent the Son to be 
 the propitiation for the world, so also the incarnation not 
 only precedes the atonement in the order of time, but 
 there is the same subordination to be traced between the 
 two dogmas. The birth of Christ, in a sense, necessitates 
 His death, as the seed of corn must die to bring forth 
 much fruit. Fellowsliip with man carries with it as its 
 complementary truth a fellowship with His sufferings and 
 obedience to death, even the death of the cross. All 
 this the East saw as clearly as the West. But to the 
 devout but uncritical mind of Augustine, a few phrases in 
 a single chapter of one of the Apostle Paul's Epistles 
 seemed enough on which to build up a whole theology 
 of two covenants, one of works and one of grace, of two 
 federal heads of humanity, a first and second Adam, and 
 then by a strange twist of the apostle's argument to draw 
 an inference the very opposite to the apostle's true teacli- 
 ing, viz. that the redemption w^as not coextensive with 
 the ruin. Universal damnation in Adam, and particular 
 salvation in Christ. This seems a strange inference to 
 draw from the twice-repeated expression, " Not as the 
 offence, so also is the free gift," and again (see text in 
 Kom. V. 15, 16), "And not as it was by one that 
 sinned, so is the gift." Twice over the apostle is care- 
 ful to explain (which the English translators, steeped in 
 Augustinianism, have quite overlooked) that the many or 
 the mass, if included in the ruin of the first Adam, are 
 also included in the redemption of the second Adam. So 
 wide, in a word, does 'the apostle throw open the gates of 
 a universal salvation in Christ in the fifth chapter of the 
 
"j^ What are Aftei'thoiighis ? 
 
 liomans, tliat he has to exph^in the meaning of his own 
 expressions in the sixth chapter, and to point out that his 
 teaching does not lead up to an immoral universalism 
 (too connnon to-day in America as a reaction against 
 Calvinism), but the very contrary. He emphasises the 
 true meaning of salvation, which is delivery from that 
 form of sin which is selfhood ; a redemption which has 
 not even begun in us till the death of Christ produces in 
 us a corresponding death to self, and we reckon ourselves 
 to be dead indeed unto sin and alive unto rigliteousness. 
 It would lead us too far into exegesis, if we were to 
 turn aside liere to discuss how far Augustinianism is a 
 narrow^ misleading draft of the true Pauline teaching 
 as to the race and its destinies. Enough here to remark 
 that at the point where the turn was to be taken, the 
 Bishop of Hippo turned the wrong handle, and so, like a 
 careless pointsman, switched the theology of the West 
 on to a wrong track. The Augustinian theology, as Dean 
 Milman observes {Latin Christianity, i. p. 172), coincided 
 with the tendencies of the age towards the growth of a 
 strong sacerdotal system ; and the sacerdotal system re- 
 conciled Christendom with the Augustinian theology. This 
 explains the paradox, that two widely contrasted systems 
 the Pelagian theory of creature merit by ascetic exercises, 
 and the doctrine of grace without works, nestled together 
 in the same Church, and only broke asunder when the true 
 Augustinianism of grace without works was dug out of the 
 nmd of media3valism by Luther and Calvin, and set up 
 as the keynote to their teaching. Neither set of rival 
 doctors, the lieformers nor the anti-Ptcformers, dared to 
 traverse a single text of Augustine. Both were equally 
 interested in upholding his reputation as almost, if not 
 quite, on the level of Holy Writ, and the result is an 
 unquestioning acceptance of Augustinianism through the 
 
What are Afterthoughts f 
 
 J J 
 
 whole West, with some exceptions which we liave already 
 glanced at. 
 
 It is no longer, then, a vague charge which we bring 
 against the dogmatic theology of the entire West, that it 
 is one long afterthought traceable to three Carthaginian 
 teachers. Criticism has already begun to trace a contrast 
 between North African and Alexandrian teaching; but, 
 generally speaking, the verdict has gone in favour of 
 ISTorth Africa. The overwhelming weight of prescription 
 was so much in favour of Augustine, Cyprian, and Ter- 
 tullian, that to set Tertullian and Origen in opposite 
 scales, or Clement and Cyprian, or even Athanasius 
 against Augustine, would seem to the uncritical mind to 
 exchange brass for gold. Euling ideas are not all at once 
 overturned — these idols of the tribe and theatre are not 
 turned out of doors like the idols of the den, and treated 
 as our mere private delusions may be. Still, the tide has 
 already turned, and is beginning to carry all with it, ex- 
 cept a few old hulks moored on mud-banks high and dry 
 beyond the reach of tidal waters. Even in Scotland and 
 the States, where the high-water mark of dominant Augus- 
 tinianism was reached a century ago, the reaction is too 
 marked to be passed over. The Westminster Confession 
 goes down every ten years into a deeper lumber-room 
 than before, among the muniments of a now fossilised 
 type of thought. The general Fatherhood of God, once 
 so strange an expression, that when employed by Irving in 
 a small Scotch church in London, it drew Brougham and 
 Canning to hear a preacher of so singular and so unique 
 a type of thought, has now passed out and become the 
 common property of all. Scotch professors like the late 
 Doctors Candlish and Crawford have disputed over the 
 sense of Fatherhood-^ — Is it adoptive only for the elect, 
 or is it natural, and extended to the whole race in its 
 
78 What are Afterthoughts f 
 
 rt4ationsliip to God ? — but even that phase of the con- 
 troversy is now out of date, and with a great price the 
 Church has gained her freedom to say " Our Father " over 
 the race in general. 
 
 But never let us fail to admit the debt which we owe 
 to the late Thomas Erskine for helping us to break the 
 chains of Augustinianism, which even Butler contentedly 
 wore a century ago. The " state of probation " theory of 
 life remained an unchallenged dogma, although Lessiug, 
 a few years after Butler, had questioned it in a short 
 treatise, only known in this country when Dr. Temple 
 popularised it in an essay, the first of the Essays and 
 Jlevicivs, once so notorious. It is Erskine's distinguishing 
 merit that he seized on this stronghold of the old 
 theology, the probation theory of life, and turned the 
 " position." Eor the term " probation " he substituted 
 " education," and this changes our whole view of exist- 
 ence. That we come from God and go to God is the 
 whole account of man. Passing through life we enter 
 the foul and turbid stream of humanity, and so are 
 l)efouled by our surroundings. The environments con- 
 dition all life, whether of plant or animal ; they modify, 
 but do not wholly control it. They modify by elevating 
 or depressing, and at certain extreme points may 
 actually make life impossible. Within these limits there 
 is room for the education of man to go on here below ; 
 l)ut does tliis bar or forbid that education being carried 
 on under more favourable conditions when transplanted 
 to some fairer clime ? Such is life at present, as in the 
 lively allegory of Milton life is compared to the plant 
 Hoemony, which " presents a small unsightly root, but 
 of divine effect. The leaf is darkish, and had prickles on 
 it ; but in another clime bore a bright golden flower, but 
 not in this." Such is life at present. The error of the 
 
What are Afterthoughts f 79 
 
 Aiigusfcinian school has been to shut us in to a short 
 probation here, with " finality " written broad across the 
 portal of the exit of life. But as soon as we replace the 
 term probation by education, all these eschatological 
 difficulties, which make the gospel according to Augustine 
 a hard saying to many who are neither scoffers nor 
 infidels in heart, will pass off of themselves. It was all 
 the better that this alternative term "education" came, 
 not from a trained theologian, but from a layman, whose 
 training had been forensic, and who early in life had 
 begun to suspect what lengths of error this Latin forensic 
 theology had run to, when it turned the death of Christ 
 into a transaction between three parties — the Judge, the 
 prisoner, and his Advocate, who was also his Substitute, 
 and paid the penalty in His person. 
 
 It has been truly said that no Eastern divine would 
 have ever asked the question, Ciir Bens Homo .? which 
 makes up Ansehn's celebrated argument for the atonement. 
 In the first place, a Greek would never have set out with 
 a cur at all, a why and a wherefore, for the incarnation. 
 Clearly to the mind of Anselm, as of all Latins after 
 Augustine, the incarnation was a kind of afterthought 
 of God. Sin and salvation were the facts of a morbid 
 experience which he set out with. It is not man so 
 much as the child of God, but man as a fallen, guilty rebel, 
 that he sets out with. To forgive him freely might be 
 the fatherly instinct of God, but these Latin theologians, 
 steeped in Koman conceptions of forensic jurisprudence, 
 saw that there was a bar to mercy in the demands of justice. 
 There must be satisfaction and equivalence of punishment 
 to guilt before the claims of justice could be discharged. 
 Out of this grew all those theories of the atonement 
 which we do not enun^erate here, much less discuss. One 
 immoral theory Anselm has the merit of laying to rest, 
 
8o W/iat are Afterthoicghts ? 
 
 for which hiter Greek theologians were more responsible 
 tlian tlie Latins, viz. that man was the lawful prize and 
 shive of Satan, and that the slaveholder's claims must be 
 discharged before the ransom could be complete. Anselni 
 took the dogma out of one difficulty only to land it in 
 another. The debt or guilt of sin was due to one attri- 
 l)ute of God. The schism was thus set up in the Divine 
 nature, which has been closed only when Christ, Curtius 
 like, leaped into the gulf, and so reconciled, not only man 
 and God, but more than that, reconciled God's mercy 
 and His justice. The incarnation, then, in Anselm's 
 point of view, is not an end in itself, but simply a means 
 to an end ; and this exactly indicates the deep divergence 
 l)etween the older Greek and the later Latin theology. 
 His coming as man is a mere preparation or condition, to 
 give value to His death in the Latin view. To the Greek 
 His coming alone lifts man up to the stage of becoming a 
 ]jartaker of a Divine nature, to which his whole training 
 and antecedents were preparing the way. 
 
 It is needless to follow further these contrasts between 
 East and West. To all liberal divines they have this 
 consoling aspect, that we are not so heterodox as we were 
 at first considered to be. When appealing against the 
 school of Erskine as teaching another gospel different 
 from the good old gospel of an angry God reconciled by 
 a dying Son and Saviour, we can now lay our appeal for 
 orthodoxy before any educated tribunal. To the ques- 
 tion, " Whose are the Fathers ? " we reply by asking, 
 Which Fathers? \i it be said the Fathers of the Latin 
 Church, from Augustine downward, then we admit 
 judgment goes against us. But if we lay our appeal to 
 the Fathers of the oldest theology of all, that of Alex- 
 andria and Antioch, then we claim to be orthodox " old 
 Catholics," and our opponents are the neologiaus. Nor is 
 
W/iat are Afterthonghis f 8 r 
 
 this all. Singular as it may seem, it is the oldest and 
 the newest theologies which harmonise best. Durini^^ 
 the long interval of sixteen centuries, error has had the 
 Held almost to itself. Nor need we be surprised at this. 
 When jurisprudence awoke from its long sleep under the 
 humanitarian tone of last century, jurists like Beccaria 
 were startled to find how strong was error, how weak 
 was truth. Punishment in those days was almost exclu- 
 sively vindictive, and, as Bentham puts it, it took out 
 in severity what it lacked in certainty. " If I catch you, 
 I'll skin you alive," seems to have been the merciless 
 cry of the carnifex ; and he was so often baulked of his 
 prey, that, like a hungry beast, he did torture when he 
 could catch a victim. " Luke's iron crown and Damien's 
 bed of steel," such were the conceptions of the century 
 which brought on the French Eevolution. 
 
 It was in the dawn of that age that Beccaria lived and 
 struck the note which has revolutionised our jurisprudence. 
 He saw that severity had to give place to certainty. He 
 did not go so far as Plato and the Platonist divines did, 
 who held that all punishment is, or ought to be, remedial. 
 ]>ut then Beccaria was only a jurist. He had to deal 
 with crimes and punishments from a magistrate's point of 
 view. His horizon was bounded by time. But if his 
 view was limited, he saw clearly within tliese limits. He 
 saw that error was the rule, and right opinion the excep- 
 tion all through life. " La storia," as he expresses it, 
 " del progresso umano ci da I'idea di un immense pelago 
 d'errori in quale, pochi, e confusi, e a gran distanza, verita 
 sopranuotano." — The story of human progress gives us 
 the idea of a vast sea of error, in which only a few in con- 
 fusion, and here and there, emerge to the surface of truth. 
 If jurisprudence has thus seen and corrected its mistakes, 
 it is time for theology to drop its old dogmatic note, and 
 
 F 
 
82 What arc Afterthoughts ? 
 
 admit, with Vinet, there is some tremendous error in our 
 popular theology which it is our duty to find out and 
 expose. 
 
 This is the only class of criticism which is wholesome, 
 and by which alone we can put down dogmatism. If we 
 can get divines once to admit that they may be wrong in the 
 dogmatic theology as much as jurists have been in juris- 
 pi'udeuce or physicians in medicine, the point is carried. 
 Our contention on the evil of afterthoughts is at an end, 
 and the remedy in sight. 
 
 We have nothing more to add than the demand — 
 surely a moderate one — that as one set of "ruling ideas," 
 the Eoman forensic, largely drawn on in the Augus- 
 tinian theology, had set us on a wTong track, so we should 
 leave each age to mould its own theology according to 
 the " ruling ideas " then dominant. Far be it from us t^ 
 seek to bind our grandchildren, or to pledge them to our 
 conceptions, as if God had no more truth to break out of 
 His word. This is the very temper we revolt from, and it 
 is sad to remark that there are divines of the school of the 
 larger hope who seem dogmatists turned inside out. They 
 have given up some old fortress only to entrench tliem- 
 selves in a new. It comes with very bad grace when the 
 heretics of one age turn round and play the persecutors 
 of another. Shocking as the murder of Servetus by 
 Calvin was, it deepens our horror when we know that 
 Calvin almost played into the hands of the bishop of 
 Vienne, taking care that he should be torn by the young 
 leopard of Geneva lest he should fall into the fangs of the 
 old lion of Iiome. This crime of crimes darkened the 
 bright promise of the Eeformation, and prepared the way 
 for that reaction in which the Spanish Jesuits were near 
 making an end of it. After that day the dogmatic temper 
 again drew breath, its deadly wound was healed, and all 
 
What are Afterthoughts ? Zt^ 
 
 men again marvelled at the beast whose wound was so 
 healed, and in such a singular way. 
 
 To us the lesson should not be lost. Let there be no 
 more fossilising of truth by these afterthoughts of any kind, 
 coming in from any quarter. Aniiqiiam cxqidrite matrem 
 should be our note, especially to tliose who lay such 
 store on antiquity and the note of Catholic consent. It 
 has been often said of Vincent of Lerins, who laid down 
 the oft-quoted test of true catholicity against false, that 
 this is nearly begging the question ; but it has been little 
 supposed that it was formulated by Vincent, not in blind 
 submission to the reigning Augustinianism, but as a flag 
 of revolt to its teaching. It was a recognition that these 
 anthropological disputes as to sin and its heredity, and as 
 to salvation and its extent, were in reality novelties, and 
 failed of the true note of catholicity. They were not 
 part of the teaching as laid down by the Church from 
 the beginning, but derivations from doctrines which had 
 been accepted as beyond dispute, that man was a sinner, 
 but that Christ's salvation extended to the sin of the 
 whole world. " Augustine's doctrine," as Mr. Allen truly 
 remarks, " concerning original sin and its remission by 
 baptism, as well as his views upon predestination, were 
 refijarded at the time as innovations, as well as a dangerous 
 disturbance of the faith of the Church." Theodore of 
 Mopsuestia, the greatest among Eastern theologians in the 
 fifth century, ascribed Augustine's lack of insight into the 
 Christian faith to his ignorance of the Scriptures. He 
 called his doctrine of original sin a novelty recently set 
 forth ; he reflected on his lack of reverence and true fear, 
 in asserting things about God which human justice would 
 condemn, and with which no wise man could agree. 
 But the most remarkable opposition to the Augustinian 
 theology came from the remoter West, and was formulated 
 
84 What arc Afterthoughts ? 
 
 by Vincent of Lerins in liis famous motto, by which he 
 sought at once a principle of Christian certitude as well 
 as a convenient test for detecting error, " That should be 
 held for Catholic truth which has been believed every- 
 where, always, and by all." Judged by this standpoint, 
 the teaching of Augustine lacked every one of the three 
 essential marks of truth. 
 
 It is probable enough that this widespread ascendancy 
 of Augustinianism would not have maintained itself so 
 long but for the utter decay of the Greek Church, under 
 that debasing servility of the Church to palace intrigue, 
 which is known as Byzantinism. It has been truly said 
 that, just as the rise of scholasticism in the West was an 
 attempt of the Latins to Hellenise, and so let a breath of 
 philosophic thought pass over the stagnant morass of dead 
 dogmatism ; so, on the other hand, Greek theology in the 
 age of its decline showed a tendency to Latinise, and 
 to fall away from the high intuitional view of spiritual 
 realities, by mixing its gold with the clay of legal con- 
 ceptions. The result of this falling away of Greek 
 theology into Byzantinism, by the adoption of a magical 
 external type of ceremonial religion, has been that 
 Keformers have ceased to look any longer for new light 
 from the East, and have steadily set their faces to the far 
 West. We have ceased to think of the Church of the 
 future as a revised orthodox Church. That dream seems 
 to us to-day to Ije out of date, and as hopeless as the 
 Old Catholic movement, which, since Dr. Dollinger's death, 
 seems to be given up by its most hopeful friends. So, in 
 the same way, the well-meant attempts of our Patriarch 
 of Canterbury to reuew communion with the Patriarch of 
 Constantinople has led to nothing; it is forgotten, and is as 
 a sentimental dream, doomed only to pass out of the gate 
 of ivory. This is only what we may expect as long as 
 
What are Afterthoughts f 85 
 
 the East continues sunk, as at present, in a sleep of 
 traditionalism. Naturally enough, in the absence of any 
 other type of national life, Greeks clung to their priests 
 in the same way as the Irish did. But just as the breath 
 of independence coming from America has stirred the 
 Irisli Nationalists into an attitude opposed to X->riestly 
 dictation, so it may, and probably will, come about in the 
 East as soon as the last traces of Turkish ascendancy 
 have passed away. 
 
 Then it may be possible for a Greek Church to arise, 
 such as the Church of Athanasius and Chrysostom, and 
 then, perhaps, we shall reach a higher unity in a com- 
 plete setting aside of Augustinian afterthoughts by a new 
 theology, which we shall discover to be older than the 
 old. " So runs my dream ; but what am I ? " and so we 
 may indulge hopes which may be realised, though not in 
 our own time or in our way. In any case. Magna est 
 Veritas. It is not from one point, but from many, that 
 the light breaks in at morning : it is not in one creek, 
 but all along the shore, that the ocean swells the channel 
 with the incoming tide ; and so, when the time comes for 
 larger thoughts and sweeter views of what God has pre- 
 pared, for them that love Him, our evangelical legalism, 
 under names as great as Augustine, will pass away 
 like an evil dream. This is the time appointed by the 
 Eather. He knows best why an evangelical legality 
 should have overshadowed the whole West for fourteen 
 centuries, and why tutors and governors should so long 
 have held the yoke over the children. But the end 
 must come at last, and this is the true reunion point of 
 Christendom. This is not to be some new type of 
 ecclesiasticism, born out of base compromise ; it is a 
 return to the point where dogma melts into doctrine, and 
 theology recognises its true mission, which is to be an 
 
86 What are Afterthoughts ? 
 
 educational process. In tljis sense theology at its best is 
 philosophy and ethics in one, vitalised and energised by 
 the sense of a living, loving God and Father. Then shall 
 our ancient discords between nature and grace, between 
 law and gospel, between reason and faith, cease — we 
 shall enter at once into that grand sense of unity summed 
 np in the " one God, one law, one element." Instead of 
 aftertlioiiglits, theology shall at last yield back its first 
 precious juice of the grape, and in that sense the mystical 
 words of Christ may be said to attain their meaning, " I 
 will henceforth drink no more of the fruit of the vine 
 till I drink it new in my Father's kingdom." 
 
 If "charity be the blood of Christ as faith is His 
 body," in the striking saying of Ignatius, then we can see 
 in what sense He will drink this fruit of the vine new in 
 His Father's kingdom. The kingdom or rule of the true 
 Father of men has not yet come ; but it is coming. The 
 old wine of legality and doctrinalism is nearly spent, and 
 the new wine of charity is ready to be poured out. The 
 wine of charity poured out in the cup of comprehension, 
 or a return to Catholicism in its true sense, awaits us in 
 a future at hand but not yet come ; and the signal of its 
 coming will be the breaking up of sects and parties, and 
 the return of the Church to such a simple and primitive 
 standard known as the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, 
 so that even those who stand outside will do so in the 
 attitude of seekers, only to find it here or hereafter in the 
 bosom of Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. 
 
CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 DISSIPATION OF ENERGY. 
 
 The " dissipation of energy " is the scientist's phrase for 
 expressing the theory that some forces of the universe, 
 such as nmch of the light and heat of the sun, go off into 
 space infinite, and represent so much pure waste. On this 
 subject we dare not venture an opinion ; we know too 
 little of the forces of the universe to hazard an opinion 
 whether there is any waste at all, and whether forces 
 which seem lost may not return like comets whose paths 
 we are unable to calculate. But at least in the thoughts 
 of men we may speak of a dissipation of energy. We 
 may say of some thoughts that they wander through 
 eternity 
 
 ' ' Swallowed up and lost 
 In the wide womb of uncreated niglit, 
 Devoid of sense and motion." 
 
 Such are these useless discussions ^ as to what might have 
 been had events happened otherwise, had there been no 
 
 1 The ingenious author of The Umeen Universe has discussed this 
 question, Whether in the wheel of life all that comes on may not go off 
 and leave not a rack behind? "Are we not inevitably led to conclude 
 that our present state cannot last even for a lengthened period, but will 
 be brought to an end long before the inevitable dissipation of energy shall 
 have rendered our earth unfit for habitation ? ''—The Unseen Universe, p. 
 196, London 1884. 
 
88 Dissipation of Energy. 
 
 evil, no pain, no ruin, and no redemption. This type of 
 thinking has happily gone out with the age of tlie School- 
 men. These disputes of Scotists and Thomists as to con- 
 tingencies of other worlds outside our own, represent only 
 the connnon-room talk of monks in their refectory,on which 
 it was as idle to make books as it is waste of time for us 
 to read them. The Church has gained this at least from 
 the Kants and Lockes of philosophy, that she knows the 
 limits of the human mind ; she does not let down the 
 plummet of reason too deep into the ocean of the hidden 
 purpose of God. She has learned to be silent at least 
 concerning the hidden things of God ; and this is no small 
 advantage gained on tlie side of truth. It is a deliverance 
 from the tyranny of old outworn dogmatism. 
 
 At the same time, we have to see and determine at the 
 outset what are and what are not the afterthoughts of 
 theology. Some deductions we should describe as legitim- 
 ate — they are no Epimethean afterthoughts, inquisitive 
 reaching forth unto the unknown, or impertinent inferences 
 that certain consequences must flow from certain admitted 
 verities most surely believed among us. There are 
 Promethean as well as Epimethean truths in theology, 
 and we have now to seek for some canon or criterion by 
 which we may distinguish between the two. 
 
 A text in St. John's Epistle seems to offer a simple 
 and easy test. The apostle, having spoken in the 
 l»revious verses of two truths of experience, — first, our 
 knowing that whosoever is born of God sinneth not ; and, 
 secondly, our knowing that we are of God, and that the 
 whole world, or rather the world as a whole, i.e. all that is 
 of the world and its lusts, lieth in the evil one, and is 
 ])laced in the sphere of his influence, — goes on to sum 
 up that which is the whole of the knowledge of God, and 
 that truth which " makes one thing of all theology." It is 
 
Dissipation of Energy. 89 
 
 all contained in this, " We know that the Son of God is 
 come, and hath given ns an understanding " (Stdvoia, a 
 solecism in St. John's writings, and so all the more notice- 
 able) " that we may know Him that is true " {i.e. the 
 original norm and pattern of all things, any false repre- 
 sentation of which is a mere idol, whether of the tribe, 
 the theatre, or the den), " and we are in Him that is true, 
 even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and 
 eternal life." To which St. John adds in a postscript 
 full of significance, " Little children, keep yourselves from 
 idols. Amen." 
 
 In this passage, as we venture to think, we have the 
 criterion of what is the true and what is the false gnosis 
 in theology. The true Gnostic is the theologian who 
 does not read into theology what he afterwards reads out 
 of it, anxious questions, chiefly anthropological, as to man 
 and his dwelling-place here, or his destiny hereafter. 
 Much that we call Augustinianism, for want of a better 
 term, is of that theanthropological character. It may 
 be true, it may be false ; but it is of that mixture of 
 23hilosophy with theology which, like all mixture of drinks, 
 spoils both. Let mental philosophy, like physical science, 
 go its own way. But this infecting of theology with 
 metaphysics, and too often with muddy metaphysics, 
 accounts for that degenerate type of dogmatism best 
 described as the afterthoughts of theology. The strict 
 sense of the term theology, which we must always 
 insist on, is that knowledge of God as 6 aXydivo^, the true 
 and genuine God, any refraction of whose rays, as through 
 a prism or by diffraction, from these rays passing round 
 the edges of some opaque object, must lead us to see 
 only an ecBfoXov, some false image of God, which to 
 adore or worship, tmder any pretext, however pious, is of 
 the essence of idolatry. 
 
90 Dissipation of Energy. 
 
 What are known as Atheists should in charity rather 
 be described as antitlieists. They are, to borrow their 
 favourite phrase, only iconoclasts of some image of God 
 which to them seems devil-born. We need not discuss 
 this further, but here will remark that true theology not 
 only begins but ends in the knowledge of the true God. 
 In a sense the centre is also the circumference. Of Him 
 and to Him and through Him are all things. Any in- 
 quiry beyond this of knowing the true God as the Father 
 in the Son, can be no Gnosis at all ; it is that Gnosticism 
 falsely so called which in the reaction fosters the growtli 
 of Agnosticism. Not a few Christian apologists in our 
 day waste their time in replying to Agnosticism. They 
 would do better in distinguishing, with Clement of Alex- 
 andria, what is the true from what is the false Gnostic. 
 Gnosticism and Agnosticism being relative terms, the best 
 argument against the Agnostic is, by his own admission, to 
 drop that dogmatic, arrogant temper too common among 
 certain divines, who, professing to hold the key of an 
 inspired book in their hands, claim to have opened by it 
 all doors and unlocked most if not all mysteries. As 
 soon as the orthodox Gnostic begins to take up more 
 modest ground, and to say with the wisest teacher of his 
 day, " that the whole scheme of Scripture is not yet 
 understood, and that if it ever comes to be understood 
 before the restitution of all thino's, and without miraculous 
 interpretations, it must be in the same way as natural 
 knowledge is come at. Nor is it incredible," as he goes 
 on to add, " that a book which has been so long in the 
 possession of mankind should contain many truths not 
 yet discovered." This cautious temper of Bishop Butler, 
 which is the only antidote to Agnosticism, acts, as we 
 may easily see, as a febrifuge would do by lowering the 
 pulse of the old orthodox Gnostics who add inference to 
 
Dissipation of Ene7'gy, 91 
 
 inference, and so build up a whole scheme of dogmatic 
 theology on the deductive method only. 
 
 As soon, then, as theology begins to give up these 
 outworks, as we have described them, of the defensive 
 dogmatic method, men fear she will have nothing to fall 
 back on. She will become, it is said, a bare skeleton, or 
 rather the mere simulacrum and shadow of what she once 
 was. Eut is this so ? What remains of it after theology 
 has surrendered one by one her afterthoughts ? To this 
 our answer is simple, What remains is tlieolcgy properly 
 so called. Theology etymologically means a discovery of 
 the true God and of His dealings with us ; but all know- 
 ledge being relative, we do not push on to transcendental 
 theology, or the philosophy of the Absolute, which ends 
 in mere word play. Dismissing all this as the new 
 German scholasticism, as arbitrary as the old, we take 
 our stand at that point where St. John is content to 
 rest. To know God as He is in the person of His Son 
 — this is theology ; this is that eternal life which was 
 with the Father, and is now revealed to us by the Son 
 through the Holy Ghost. 
 
 There are, then, these first Sowings of Scripture which 
 we describe as theology proper ; nor do we deny that 
 there are certain legitimate inferences from them which all 
 serious divines must go on to draw for tliemselves. They 
 circle, in a word, around the Incarnation and that triune 
 relationship of the Absolute which we call the doctrine 
 of the Trinity. Here, as we have remarked, our centre 
 becomes also our circumference. God has been defined 
 as a circle whose centre is everywhere, but whose circum- 
 ference is nowhere ; which is only an antithetical way of 
 saying that God is the Infinite Being ; He is the ocean on 
 whose shores we play as children with pebbles, unable 
 even to conceive what we mean when we speak of that 
 
92 Dissipation of Energy. 
 
 iiifiDite wliicli contains and surrounds all finite things. It 
 is He who sitteth on the circle of the earth ; but the 
 centre is that which is present everywhere, and of which 
 alone we are conscious. It is the awful presence of one 
 whom we can never flee from or evade. This is the 
 lesson wliich Jonah had to learn in one way, as perhaps 
 we have to learn it in another ; since, some by land and 
 some by sea, some in the day and some in the dark, try 
 to hide from the presence of the Lord God. A theology, 
 tlien, which is not full of God, charged with the sense, 
 not of His perfections ouly as mere abstractions, but of 
 His presence as the oue reality of life — such a theology 
 is a mere second-rate draft of a grand original. Such 
 has been too much of the theology of so-called systematic 
 divinity. Gott-crtrmikencs has been the reproach against 
 these pantheistic types from Spinoza to Schleiermacher, 
 whose sole justification was that they were reactions 
 against that Dutch fiat of Deism into which the orthodoxy 
 of last century had subsided. The mystics may have 
 pushed too far this desire to make one thing of 
 all theology. But at least it was a healthy reaction 
 against that way of regarding God as if He were only 
 another name for distributive justice, and doing what 
 ]Ie wills with His own. Such shadows as these lie thick 
 around us, while we are in the lower walks of life, and as 
 mere field hands doing drudgery as hired servants, when 
 we might have an elder brother portion. " Son, thou art 
 ever with me, and all that I have is thine." 
 
 Far be it from us to rob any one of the least and 
 lowest sense of the Great Supreme, to whom we must give 
 account. But it is too true tliat those who describe God 
 as their great taskmaster generally do so as slaves. Their 
 service is only eye-service, and any worship only lip- 
 Lonour, breath which the poor slave would fain deny but 
 
Dissipation of Energy. 93 
 
 dares not. It is because men are too generally unspiritual, 
 and, what is sadder still, content that it is so, that theology 
 keeps as a rule to this region of " afterthoughts," with its 
 provisions of pardon and its plans of salvation. We drive 
 Jacob-like bargains with God, that in return for so much 
 faith and works (and how much the schools and sects 
 are not quite agreed on), we covenant that He shall be 
 our God, and we will erect our little Bethels in token of 
 such a covenant. But as soon as Jacob has wrestled 
 with God and prevailed, and is known by his new name 
 of Israel, men of the better sort get beyond this theology 
 of afterthoughts, with its Lutheran, Calvinistic, and 
 other glosses, and get up to the first thoughts as they flow 
 from the inspired pen of a Paul or Peter or John. Theo- 
 logy then reasserts its true sense, described in the first 
 clause of the Westminster Confession, that man's chief and 
 highest end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever. 
 But to glorify God, unless we know Him to be altogether 
 glorious, is like the clashing of cymbals by slaves in a pro- 
 cession in which they have no part but as slaves. Too 
 much of man's worship has been of that kind ; and if the 
 conception of God of these Westminster divines was all 
 that was left us to hold on by, doubtless some of us might 
 fall out of the ranks and describe ourselves as Agnostics. 
 Against this falling aw^ay from the "faith once delivered 
 to the saints" there seems to be one and only one remedy. 
 This is to decline to pay lip-homage to these " after- 
 thoughts," and to point out how debased a copy they are 
 of a glorious original. On this subject the tone of cul- 
 tured men is deplorably weak. They see the falling 
 away caused by confident negations ; they know and 
 admit that vamping up the old apologetics is of next to 
 no use ; that the usual apologies for the supernatural, for 
 book inspiration, for the authority of the Church and its 
 
94 Dissipation of Energy. 
 
 claim to be a witness and keeper of God's word, are all as 
 useless as sending wooden ships into action with iron- 
 clads. They persist in this to their own discomfiture. 
 It may fortify the faith of those who believe already, to 
 receive assurance that miracles are not incredible on tlie 
 assumption of a personal God, that revelation with its 
 corollary of plenary inspiration is also equally reasonable 
 on the same data of a personal God, and that, lastly, the 
 (Jhurch and her functions are also the necessary accom- 
 paniment of such a revelation ; for the word without the 
 witness of the Church is as incomplete as the Church 
 without the warrant of the word. But the orthodox 
 forget that this chain of deductive a friori reasoning 
 from a personal God to His last incarnation or inhabiting 
 of the Church by His Spirit, must, like all chains, depend 
 on the strength of each separate link. If faith loses only 
 a single link, then all is lost. This is the real objec- 
 tion which scientists feel to deductive reasoning in 
 theology. To assume and then build up a whole 
 theology on the personal will of God seems to them a 
 mere anthropomorphism. It is the setting out witli an 
 assumption to which science presents a blank negation 
 of Agnosticism. It may be so, the naturalist replies to 
 our assumption, but nature knows nothing of it. Behind 
 the natura natiirata there is no doubt a natura naturans, 
 l)ut its relation to the universe is the same as that of art 
 to nature, it aids and improves it ; but it is always the 
 case that nature is made better by no mean, but nature 
 makes tliat mean. The scientist as sucli declines to 
 take a single step outside the charmed circle of pheno- 
 mena and their antecedents. The first cause which the 
 ]Jeist demands as a postulate, is to him a postulate of pure 
 reason, which he neither affirms nor denies. Even Kant 
 could only cut himself out of this charmed circle into 
 
Dissipation of Energy, 95 
 
 vvhicli Hume Lad lured him, by a new dogmatism as 
 audacious as the old. He laid down the categorical 
 imperative of duty, and here with his back to the wall 
 he faces all-comers. Eternal honour to Kant for this 
 invention of the dogmatism of duty, which rears the 
 temple of worship again out of its ruins, God and duty 
 being the Jachin and Boaz on which this new temple of 
 natural religion rests I 
 
 But if there be no categorical imperative, no demand 
 of duty to which the youtli may not reply with a side 
 glance at consequences, where are we but back again to 
 the great dismal swamp of scepticism under the mask of 
 scientism. A new school of American transcendentalists 
 have put Kant's Ezra-like reconstruction of the old 
 temple in a couplet — 
 
 " So very nigli is God to man, 
 Such honour in his dust, 
 When duty whispers low. You can, 
 The youth replies, I must," 
 
 But the assumption of the first line carries the whole 
 question of spiritualism against scepticism. " So very 
 nigh is God to man," — if this is a mere pditio principii, 
 where are we ? Alas, we have to say it is so in some cases 
 though not in others ! To one it is self-evident, and he 
 turns to God and duty — in a word, he con;ieth to the light. 
 To another this is a mere que sais-je, and he describes 
 himself in a new phrase which Montaigne would have 
 repeated with delight, as an Agnostic to intuitional truth. 
 The intuitive spiritual school who set out with the 
 vision of God, — not an open vision, we admit, but the 
 vision of God given in this tabernacle to the pure in 
 heart, — to them theology can mean only one thing, the 
 display of the Divine perfections, and the sense that the 
 more perfectly they are displayed before the eyes of men 
 
96 Dissipation of Energy. 
 
 the more disposed they will be to say with the Psalmist, 
 " Oh, come let us worship, and fall down and kneel before 
 the Lord our Maker ! " But this must be the free service 
 of sons, not the mere marching in procession of slaves, 
 clashing cymbals of traditional and unverified belief. 
 
 The ci'iterion, then, of what are forethoughts and what 
 are afterthoughts is simpler than many suppose. Cutting 
 ourselves loose from the traditions of men, and going up 
 to the true fountainhead of Grod-consciousness, which is 
 laid up in our own spiritual consciousness, let us work out 
 a theology on lines, let us say, such as those of Barclay of 
 Ury, the first apologist since the early Alexandrian school 
 who rested the argument from revelation, not on the fall 
 and darkness of nature, so much as on the light born with 
 every one coming into the world. Eevelation is thus 
 supplementary to, not in place of, any knowledge of God 
 gained from other sources. Simple as it may seem, this 
 is the key to the standing controversy between the claims 
 of natural and revealed religion. If it be that we come 
 into the world with some seminal germs of spiritual light 
 (the old innate ideas, as they were once inaccurately 
 phrased, and as such quietly disposed of), then revelation 
 becomes antecedently probable, and the foundations are 
 laid for a spiritual theology deep in the rock of man's 
 constitution as a child of God, though a lost and orphan 
 child. The presumption that our heavenly Father will 
 not leave us orphans, but by His Son and through His 
 indwelling Spirit that He will come to us and in some 
 way reveal Himself, is at once so strengthened that the 
 antecedent dilficulty begins to change sides. It is now 
 no longer antecedently improbable that God should come 
 and dwell among us and Shekinah among the children of 
 men. On the contrary, we may throw on our opponents 
 the way of showing that it is not so. The fool may say 
 
Dissipation of Energy. 97 
 
 ill his heart, " There is no God," i.e. he may put the 
 thought of God from him with a peevish Tush 1 But tlie 
 revehxtion of God has begun beforehand, when that candle 
 of the Lord was lighted in our conscience, and which from 
 our birth has given off some glimmers, though it be only 
 tliat of the " smoking flax." As soon as we take our stand 
 at that point, nine-tenths of the difficulties of harmonising 
 nature and grace, the natural order and the supernatural, 
 are seen to be of our own making, and arise from two 
 exaggerations, to neither of which we need approach. If, 
 on the one hand, man is a mere intellectual animal, 
 and wholly dark and destitute of any spiritual instincts 
 or cravings, how can he be illuminated cib extra ? This is 
 the puzzle which no orthodox theologian of that type can 
 explain. " War nicht das auge sonnenhaft," as Goethe 
 puts it in his inimitable lines — 
 
 ' ' Wie konnt'es in das Liclit erblicken 
 Lebt niclit in uns das Gottes eig'ne Kraft 
 Wie konnt'uns Gottliclies entziicken." 
 
 Were the eye not apprehensive of light, no amount of 
 sunshine could ever produce in us the sense of seeing. 
 This correspondence between organ and function runs 
 through the whole of man's nature, and the fact that he 
 craves some one to worship and adore, some one above 
 his soulish self to keep him from sinking into a brutish 
 self, — this must be our first evidence that God exists, and 
 exists to us. To argue, as some short-sighted people 
 have done, that we exalt revealed religion when we take 
 the ground from under natural, deserves the contempt 
 into which it has fallen. An obscure sect of " Bereans," 
 as they were called in Scotland, held that opinion ; but 
 the worthy Dr. Archibald Campbell, who a century ago 
 maintained, Hutchisonian-fashion, that the knowledge of 
 the existence of God was derived from revelation alone 
 
 G 
 
98 Dissipation of Energy. 
 
 and not from nature, has not left his mark outside his 
 little sect, the very name of which is probably now for- 
 <,rotten in Scotland. The error in the opposite extreme is 
 much more diffused, that all that can be known of God 
 is known already through the open page of nature, so 
 tliat no special revelation can ever be needed. If our sense 
 of God is so confined that we are content with a Dens 
 Artifex, who is also vindex d Judex, then these two leaves 
 out of tlie open book of nature may suffice. Men with a 
 superficial ethical code, content to dwell in decencies for 
 ever, with no sense of sin, no ideals of holiness unsatisfied, 
 no longings for the betterment of mankind at large — men 
 of the world of this type may accept things as they are in 
 this the best possible of all worlds. But easy optimism 
 of this kind sits with an ill grace on those who profess 
 to leave well alone, but who in reality only leave ill alone. 
 Setting aside these exaggerations, right and left, of 
 those who deny that there is any natural religion, and of 
 tliose who say that it suffices, we set out at the point of 
 our being sons of God, but sons who are orphans or 
 infants crying for the light, and with no language but a 
 cry. Unless we strangely misread God's character, it 
 follows from this that He will undertake man's education, 
 and meet him exactly at the point where our gropings 
 after our Father in heaven have gone wrong. What is 
 idolatry but the attempt to get from nature more than 
 she can give. She is our foster-mother, and with all the 
 foolish fondness of fosterage does us no little harm. 
 
 *' Yearnings slic liatli in her own natural kind, 
 And e'en with something of a mother's mind, 
 
 And no unworthy aim ; 
 The homely nurse does all she can 
 To make her foster-child, her inmate man. 
 
 Forget the glories he hath known, 
 And that imperial palace whence he came." 
 
Dissipation of Energy, 99 
 
 These idolatries or nature worship, springing as they do 
 out of sense, must lead downwards. This is why all 
 cults outside the covenant only deepened the degenera- 
 tion of man — they arrested progress at the beginning — 
 they paralysed philosophy under the withering charge to 
 which Socrates fell a victim, that it was a setter forth 
 of strange gods. Never was morality able to disengage 
 itself from the cobra-like embrace of immoral supersti- 
 tions. The fountain of humanity was tainted at its 
 source, and unless the Son of God had come forth Him- 
 self and dried up tlie fountain of pollution by making 
 nature cults impossible after His coming, we should have 
 lain in the same helpless state in the Yfest that they are 
 to this day in the East. In India there are debased and 
 ugly symbolisms of nature to which a race in its child- 
 hood still pays pujah. As soon as the schoolmaster gets 
 abroad in India, this pujah ends ; but the educated Babu 
 has nothing to put in its place. A new syncretism has 
 sprung up, which seems a weak imitation of the English 
 Deism of last century. It may be left to the fate of all 
 imitations ; it has no roots in itself. Hindus will not be 
 slow to see that, like Babu English, it is our discarded 
 clothes, and that only an inferior race wears cast-offs, or 
 wears them long. 
 
 The true basis of man's spiritual nature lies in the 
 thought that he is a son of God, and made in His image, 
 though the sense of sonship has been forgotten through 
 our long orphanage, while that image has been defiled by 
 sin. For this reason a revelation is more than possible, it is 
 probable. The presumptions are all in its favour ; and to 
 nnfallen angelic natures the surprise must lie the other 
 way, that man has lain so long grovelling in error and 
 ignorance, and that God has looked on so long and with 
 such apparent indifference to the cries of this Ishmael, 
 
I oo Dissipation of Energy. 
 
 our outcast race. Eedernption and ultimate restoration 
 of the race, root and branch, seems the conclusion which 
 we are shut in to, and the only outstanding difficulty is 
 this, why God moves so slowly and in such wide circles 
 of sundry times and divers manners. Analogy is at best 
 cold comfort. It is very true that the Saurian age, when 
 " dragons of the prime fought and battled in their slime," 
 may be an ugly foreshadow of the world as it now is. 
 AVell, then, does the prophet exclaim, " Oh that Thou 
 wouldest rend the heavens and come down ! " to which 
 a psalmist's cry, " Why pluckest not thou thy hand out of 
 thy bosom ? " seems only too true an echo. 
 
 To argue that because revelation is only partially 
 understood, that its partial extension is also designed, 
 may have suited Butler's over-cautious temper. But 
 this half-scepticism in one direction, mated with a half- 
 scepticism in the other, only helps us a little way on out of 
 the horrible pit of unbelief. As soon as we leave behind 
 the stagnant marshes of Deism, and get up into the 
 clearer air of a spiritual order of things, all our prospect 
 brightens. In God's liiiht we see lio-ht. Then our 
 theology draws up a train of deductions which are not 
 mere afterthoughts, because they do not spring from a mere 
 governmental view of God. The first is that, as the 
 Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world, so 
 it is His will that the world should be saved ; but every 
 man in his own order — first the head, then the members 
 — first the elect, then the remnant, that massct jocrditionis 
 whom we have described as not of the election of grace. 
 That a design of universal salvation should emerge in 
 a universal home-bringing of younger sons, seems to be a 
 deduction so obvious, that the wonder is it has been ever 
 disputed. Nor would it have been, but that Catholic 
 antiquity, in its recoil from Origenisra, some of whose 
 
Dissipation of Energy. loi 
 
 theories were too fantastic to deserve reply, had fastened 
 on this, the least objectionable, on which to show that 
 kind of Jehu zeal for Jehovah which is too often the 
 note of a dead orthodoxy which mistakes formulas for 
 faith. Augustine, as the late Dean Plumptre^ truly 
 remarks, shrank from the term Origenista, as the framers 
 of Article XLIL of 1552 shrank from being classed 
 with the Anabaptists or others who revived Origen's wider 
 hope in the sixteenth century, and was led to disclaim 
 more emphatically any approach to the special view of 
 Oriij^en. On the other hand, he continued also to assert, 
 even more definitely, his own view of a purgatorial 
 punishment for the baptized. Even in him, however, 
 there is at times a strange absence of the horror and 
 alarm with which the assertion of the hope of universal 
 restoration has not unfrequently been met in later times. 
 He admits that that view was held by numiulli immo quani 
 plurimi, who were led from feelings of human pity. 
 He does not accept it, hut he allows men to believe, if 
 they like, that there will be a mitigatio and levamen of 
 the punishment of the lost. 
 
 But some will say our afterthoughts in the direction 
 of the larger hope are just as much ultra vires as those 
 deductions of orthodoxy, that salvation is limited to the 
 present place of being, and to men who, in the days of 
 their flesh, had been enabled to walk, not after the flesh, 
 but after the Spirit. We admit that all such reachings 
 forth to the hereafter, whether in the direction of parti- 
 cularism or universalism, are mere feats of levitation, 
 such as that of sleepers who, in their dreams, yield to 
 delusions, and leap the life to come, and who suffer foi- 
 their presumption. The true attitude on eschatology is 
 that, since Scripture is silent, it is for us to keep silence, 
 
 ^ Spirits in Prison, p, 144, by Dean Plumptre. 
 
I02 Dissipation of Energy, 
 
 and wait for the day. On this suhject of the hereafter 
 we stand precisely on the same footing as the chiklren of 
 the oki covenant. Warburton's paradox, which, like all 
 paradoxes, had its grain of truth, maintained that Moses 
 sought to wean the people from the eschatology of Egypt, 
 with its elaborate sclieme of rewards and punishments 
 held in terrorcm over the heads of the ignorant masses 
 by a caste of priests who were members of the governing 
 body. Against this official type of a terrorising religion 
 Moses entered the expressive protest of silence. He 
 knew nothincj, taui^jht nothin^j of a God who winked hard 
 at wickedness during the years of man's lifetime on 
 earth, reserving His deferred payments of rewards and 
 punishments for a world to come. The silence of 
 Mosaism on all these subjects struck a deistical age, 
 such as AYarburton's, with an uncomfortable feeling of 
 omission. Clearly here was a blot on the system of this 
 clever legislator Moses, who, with all the wisdom of the 
 Egyptians to hand, seems to have omitted future rewards 
 and punishments, which was the very pulse of the 
 niachine of State in all other politics. Warburton saw 
 this defect, and, like a keen apologist for orthodoxy in an 
 unspiritual and deistical age, he turned round and twisted 
 an o1)jection into an argument. "Surely," so argued this 
 l)ishop, "the omission by Moses, as it could not be acci- 
 dental, was intentional. What a mark of a miraculous 
 orgin it must be that he could work the machine of State 
 by appealing to temporal rewards and punishments only, 
 when Egyptian priests could only hold the vulgar in 
 awe by calling in the hereafter to back up the task- 
 master's lash in time. The whips and scorpions of the 
 shadowland beyond the river were called in to reinforce 
 the terrorism of temporal rulers. Moses must have been 
 a marvellously clever man, and had a whole apparatus of 
 
Dissipation of Energy. 103 
 
 miracles to back him up, before he dared to keep that 
 many-headed beast, the people, in order without the lash 
 of remorse and the branding-iron of eternal punishment." 
 So argued Warburton in the age of Deism ; but his 
 apologetics have gone to the same oblivion as the sceptics 
 against whom he sharpened his pen. Defence and attack 
 are alike out of date. We now see, as last century 
 apparently did not, that a scheme of rewards and punish- 
 ments on a nicely-graduated scale of terrorism is obsolete 
 in jurisprudence, and for theology to furbish up such 
 blunted arms is to show a stupid indifference to the best 
 thoughts of the age. Ever since Beccaria replaced 
 severity by certainty as the governing principle of law, 
 a silent revolution has passed over men's minds. With- 
 out thinking why they do so, they have dropped without 
 discussion the Jupiter tonans theology of our grand- 
 fathers : they have gone to their Bibles, and began to 
 re-read them in the light of the new thoughts of God 
 as the lovinsf Father whose lonG^-sufferinf? is salvation. 
 They now see that eternity is the sphere which the Eternal 
 alone inhabits; and as for things created, from the angel to 
 the amoeba, they live only in so far as they live in Him. 
 Thou takest away their breath, and they die. So of the 
 animal world, and it is also true of man in so far as he 
 leads a soulless, selfish life ; " in that day all their thoughts 
 perish," and so we render intellectual life and being 
 together. Immortality is nowhere predicated save of 
 the Eternal, and of those whose life here or hereafter is 
 drawn from the fountain of life. Such was David's hope 
 that his soul should not be left in Hades, or his flesh see 
 corruption. There was a path of life even out of the 
 Sheol of oblivion, and on this hope men lived and died 
 from Moses to the Maccabees, trusting that the God 
 of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who is not the 
 
104 Dissipation of Energy. 
 
 God of the dead, but of the liviug, would be their God 
 even for ever and ever. 
 
 Turning to the New Testament, Ave find at first, to our 
 surprise, that it strikes the same note, and apparently 
 does not lift the subject into a higher plane. The error, 
 that the Jews knew nothing, is balanced off against an 
 opposite error, that we latter-day saints know all about 
 eschatology. "VYe smile at the conceit of both dogmat- 
 isms. Martha at the grave of Lazarus was quietly 
 disabused of her Pharisaic theology, the tradition of a 
 Maccabean age, as to a resurrection of the last day. 
 Christ cuts short her ratiocinations with a peremptory 
 " I am " — the emphasis of whicli we seem to have over- 
 looked, if we may judge by the language of the after- 
 thinkers of theology, wlio are often Pharisees of the 
 Martha typo. As for " Eesurrection," Christ would say, 
 " I know of none " but in me : " I am the head of the 
 new humanity, and the first-fruits of the dead." With 
 one little word He seals up all the old fountains of 
 Pharisaism, — would they had never been opened again ! — 
 and lays down the new law of the life eternal. It is a new 
 law, which is, in truth, only the old which was from the 
 beginning, that life is in Christ only, and that if He be 
 the head of humanity, then it follows that "as in Adam 
 all (lie, so in Christ shall all be made alive." There seems 
 to be no limitations, unless of our own making ; and here 
 it is that the afterthoughts of theology come in. The 
 lieart of God is too large. His fatherly pity too pro- 
 found, for His erring, ignorant, younger children, for the 
 elder brother, the elect of our day, to understand it at all 
 He is angry, and will not come in on these terms, and so 
 theology, with the aid of Augustine and other famous 
 doctors, has drawn up a traditional scheme of theology, 
 with all its provisions and safeguards, its limitations and 
 
Dissipation of Energy, 105 
 
 conditions, some subjective, others objective, here of faith, 
 there of the sacraments, which are so ingenious, but at 
 the same time so perplexing to the minds of untrained 
 theologians, that the poor vexed layman often dies like 
 JSTelson, hoping he has not been a great sinner, and that 
 perhaps Christ's mercies may reach unto him, at least as 
 a makeweight. 
 
 The criterion, then, as to what are and what are not 
 mere afterthoughts of theology turns on this point. All 
 outside " theology proper," limiting the term to its strict 
 meaning, the doctrine of the love of the Father, the grace 
 of the Son, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, are 
 mere afterthoughts. They belong to that outside region 
 in which the perspective is hazy, and theologians can 
 make affirmations do for argument. There is no term so 
 much misused as that of "grace," which the New Testament 
 brims over with, and to wliich the awakened spiritual heart 
 leaps up, as the bride in the song, to the voice of her be- 
 loved. Who would have thought that this term, which has 
 
 *' a cliarraing somid, melodious to the ear, 
 Heaven at the echo shall resound, and all the earth shall hear," 
 
 could have become the key to lead us into another house 
 of bondage — a legalism as bitter as the old legality which 
 the Christian Pilgrim supposes he has got quit of? But 
 so it is. It is impossible to glance at the long-standing 
 old disputes of Jansenists and Jesuits, without feeling 
 that truth does not lie so wholly on the Jansenist side as 
 the inimitable wit of Pascal, backed by the fervour and 
 austerity of Port Ptoyal, would have us suppose. On the 
 mdrix causa cliis principle, the world has judged that the 
 Jansenists were right because Louis XIV., cajoled by 
 the Jesuits, took ' the Pelagian side, and stamped out 
 the Augustinianism of the half-reformed Gallican Church, 
 
io6 Dissipation of Energy. 
 
 thus crippling her religious together with her civil liberties 
 at one rude touch of arbitrary power. The world has sat 
 in judgment on the Jesuits, and dearly have they paid for 
 their treaclierous act of calling on the State to stamp out 
 theological differences in the Church, which w^as to be 
 Catholic, but only on their terms. 
 
 On the other hand, it must be said that the Jansenist 
 sense of the term grace was almost as wide of the apos- 
 tolic meaniniT as the Jesuit. It has been said with 
 some justice, that Jansenists made of grace a kind of 
 fourth Person of the Trinity. The taunt is not so wide 
 of the mark as it seems. The old realist trick of taking 
 a Biblical term, and then importing into it all sorts of 
 derivative meanings, and so setting it up as a kind of 
 entity to keep house for itself, has been the making of 
 technical theology. It is the one parent source of all its 
 " afterthoughts." As soon as we depolarise an expression, 
 as the " Autocrat of the breakfast table " urges us to do, 
 much of the mystification of scholastic theology in such 
 phrases as Church, sacraments, grace, condignity, congruity, 
 and what not, all go off. Eealism is the one magician's 
 wand which turns these rods into serpents, or serpents 
 into rods, according as we take the primitive or the 
 technical and after sense of the term grace. By itself 
 the term grace simply means God's distinguishing favour 
 to men, the beaming forth of His love in such a golden 
 shower of warmth and light that it is able to pierce the 
 mists of unbelief. Grace is described in the text : " God, 
 who commandeth the light to shine out of darkness, hath 
 shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of 
 God in the face of Jesus Christ." 
 
 But as soon as we thus think of grace, there steals 
 into the mind this first afterthought on which theology 
 begins to build. Why is grace efficacious in some and 
 
Dissipation of Energy, 107 
 
 not efficacious in the case of others ? To the term 
 "grace," so simple by itself, we add an appellative, 
 " efficacious;" and in trying to explain this we end, as too 
 many interpreters do, by making simple things difficult. 
 Every step we advance on the road of making religion 
 easy, we only get farther into the tangle, and so lose 
 ourselves, as the divines of the seventeenth century did, 
 in interminable strifes between Eemonstrants who 
 Pelagianise, and the school of Free Grace. The criterion, 
 then, here comes in. Theology is to be tested in this 
 way as to whether it is pure or applied theology. 
 Applied theology is the Shibboleth which may be slain 
 at the brook — pure theology can render up but one mean- 
 ing, that the Father loved the world, and sent His Son 
 to be its Saviour. We are painfully conscious how meagre 
 this aspect of God must seem to the trained theologian. 
 
 This is the true note which theology in Cambridge 
 has never failed to strike, and whose philosophy, ever 
 since the reaction against Paley set in, has emphasised the 
 same note of " strong-siding champion conscience." May 
 1 name two only among our worthies of the near past 
 whose memories still echo in the ears of the elders 
 among us ? They shall be the names of Hare and 
 Whewell. It is not so much for what they taught (though 
 much of this is precious to many of us as the aroma of 
 spiritual and self - verifying thought, emancipating us 
 from the leaden yoke of dull tradition and blind 
 authority) that we shall revere the names of Hare and 
 Whewell. Behind Hare and Whewell lay, of course, 
 Coleridge, that Titan who might have been a Prometheus, 
 had not a fatal spell, accursed as that rabble rout of 
 Comus and his crew, arrested his will and paralysed it 
 in the endeavour' to produce something which the age 
 would not willingly let die. As it was, his followers, 
 
loS Dissipation of Energy, 
 
 the Colerklgians of tlie type of the Cambridge men of 
 the early Victorian era, have caught up some of his 
 Sibylline leaves and woven them into something like a 
 system. It has traced the outlines of a new theology on 
 lines not unlike his own " confessions of an inquiring 
 spirit," which startled the old orthodoxy by its free 
 utterances on the subject not of the matter, but the 
 form ; of inspiration, critical, but reverend at the same 
 time as to the contents of the sacred book. It is Cole- 
 ridge who, more than any other professed divine, broke 
 the yoke of our old Bibliolatry, and asked us to face, 
 fair and square, certain theories of the atonement, and to 
 ring out their meaning, fearless of the taunt of a crypto- 
 Socinianism being liurled at us. We in this day enjoy 
 all this liberty, but forget at what a price it has been 
 gained. We have been born free, let us all the more 
 reverence those who bought us that freedom with a great 
 price, the Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century, 
 the Coleridgian Platonists of the nineteenth. They 
 have left us a legacy which it is for us to improve by 
 putting it out to interest. Light and liberty should Ije 
 our twofold claim — light with which to explore the 
 hidden meaning of the record, and liberty to deal with 
 its details as the results of criticism call us to do. That 
 which stands of theology after this straining off its lees 
 of traditionalism will then be new wine of theology 
 proper, which Christ on His coming in His kingdom 
 left to His apostles as the authentic depository of truth. 
 Our theology, in a word, will undergo that process of 
 gradual purification, by eliminating extraneous and 
 redundant afterthoughts, described in Euckert's fable of 
 the king and his library — 
 
 "Von einem KiJnig wird erzahit class im Palast 
 Er hat sicli geliauft, die f^rosste Bucherlast." 
 
Dissipation of Energy. 109 
 
 Setting out on a royal progress, he found that his library 
 would amount to a hundred -and-one camel-loads of 
 books ; which, finding burdensome, he set a hundred-and- 
 one sages to work to condense into a single mule's 
 burden of books. Even this, at last, seemed so much 
 useless baggage, and a further condensation brought the 
 whole contents of this library into a single pocket 
 vokime, which became the king's library in a hand- 
 book. 
 
 But let us not in a seat of learning even seem to pour 
 contempt on letters, much less on sacred letters. There 
 always was, and there always will be, a literature 
 gathering around the one book which is itself a library : 
 it is the best of all that ever has been said on the one 
 subject of imperishable interest to mankind. A library 
 has gathered around that library which is growing every 
 day. It is a library partly of comment, partly of 
 criticism on the records ; so that we may describe as the 
 lively oracles no longer dumb when intelligently inter- 
 preted. Since our oracle is lively, we are therefore bound 
 to make it intelligible to living men, as a translation baldly 
 literal fails to do. It asks and rewards all the labour of 
 the student, whether of philology or philosophy. It has 
 a system of its own, best understood when it is set side 
 by side with the systems of men. Faith has her own 
 philosophy ; it has even a science, as we may call it, since 
 it tracks all secondary causes into the abyss of first 
 causes, and there lays bare the secret of the universe. 
 It detects as the one ultimate fact of the problem that 
 there is a Supreme Will, whose three expressions or 
 names are Love, Wisdom, Power, and whom we adore as 
 Father, Son, and Spirit. 
 
 Any theology of this type will bear both expansion 
 and contraction. It is not too vast when the kino;'s 
 
1 1 o Dissipation of Energy. 
 
 library swells out into a luindred-and-one camel-loads of 
 books : it is not too contracted when it is condensed into 
 the modest compass of a pocket Bible. But the criterion 
 we have insisted on all through this chapter is, that tlie 
 camel-load of books shall be no more, no less, than one 
 continued comment on the one Book of books, which is 
 a library in itself, the literature not of one race but of 
 several, and whose record, like the title on the Cross, has 
 been written in Hebrew, in Greek, and in Latin. 
 
 In one sense, Euckert's fable seems to gain a fresli 
 meaning as we glance at history. The king employed a 
 hundred- and -one sages to reduce the hundred-and-one 
 camel-loads of books into a pocket library or single 
 mule's burden ; tliis, too, was found to be mere sur- 
 plusage, and the king at last settled down to the sober 
 compromise that a traveller's library should consist of 
 one book only — so Pilgrim on his progress carried a roll, 
 and no more. But the Keformation theology fell back on 
 a tame compromise, which failed, as all compromises 
 usually do. The mule's burden was found too much or 
 not enough, — too much for the unspeculative man of 
 active benevolence, who, like the sailor, wants only chart 
 and couipass ; not enough for the student and scholar, 
 who must know all that other men have said, and who, 
 of all states of mind, most distrusts a state of half 
 knowledge. The most dangerous condition for theology 
 to be in is to be charo-ed with its mule's burden of 
 books, and mistaking abridgments and common-places for 
 the whole body of divinity. There may be a sense in 
 which tlie half is more than the whole, but this Hesiod 
 gnome is more often (juoted than understood. Melanc- 
 thon, Turretine, and, generally speaking, the Swiss and 
 (Jerman Iteformers after the Pieformation, who brought 
 in a new scholasticism, with Au!:fustine for their one 
 
Dissipation of Energy. in 
 
 doctor serapldcus, — theirs was the theology whicli, like 
 the condensed traveller's library, is at once too much or 
 too little. In matters of learning we must have all or 
 nothing. In law, searches for precedents done out of 
 compends are worse than misleading. The real case 
 lawyer sees an easy victory when he has to deal with an 
 opponent who thus comes half-armed into the battle. 
 David's sling, or a panoply from top to toe, — there is 
 meaning in either of these extremes. It is the mean 
 between the two, adopted from the new Schoolmen of the 
 post-Keformation age, which makes us tremble for the 
 faith, when it has flung away antiquity and authority, 
 and then set up a new antiquity and a new authority of 
 its own. It was the same with Anglican apologists of the 
 Bishop Jewell order. They went too far or not far 
 enough. In his discussion with Harding the Jesuit, all 
 that could be alleged against the Eoman supremacy is 
 alleged, and from the historical point of view Jewell 
 emerges the conqueror. But on the dogmatic-develop- 
 ment ground Jewell comes off with divided honours. 
 AVhat right had he to stop at the fourth or fifth century, 
 and to take up with the Byzantine type of royal 
 supremacy as the primitive pattern of Church govern- 
 ment, based as it is, not on Christian antiquity, but on 
 a crude analogy from Hebrew history, when the true 
 theocracy was debased, and when Samuel reluctantly, 
 and against his better judgment, consecrated a soldier- 
 chief, and so brought Mosaism down to the much lower 
 standard of a military monarchy. Anglicans of the 
 Caroline type argued in this uncritical way, and much 
 of this has come down by tradition to the Anglican 
 school of our day. 
 
 We have illustrated our meaning at sufficient length, 
 that theology as a science must have no half-learning. 
 
1 12 Dissipation of Energy. 
 
 To avoid compends and digests is the only safe rule in 
 any subject like case law or traditional theology, which 
 rests on precedents. This is the reason why theological 
 disputes are best left in the hands of case lawyers, who 
 look at it in the lumen siccum of precedent. The 
 so-called spiritual courts are the tribunals of half-trained 
 lawyers, who import their prejudices, and try to pass 
 their private opinions off for the verdicts of past ages. 
 Again and again we say, let us have all or nothing, — let 
 us be on sea or on land, afloat with tradition or on 
 shore on the rock of personal conviction ; but that one 
 foot on land one foot on shore position of the Eeformers 
 after the Eeformation — Anglican, Lutheran, and Cal- 
 vinist alike — is the position which no man who respects 
 his own judgment can take up. Let us add, in conclu- 
 sion, that real learning is the last danger which a theology 
 resting on the rock of conviction has to fear. Listead 
 of Dogmatik, German professors now teach theology as a 
 Dogmengcschichte. The distinction explains itself. Before 
 the birth of criticism, in a word, before the age of 
 Kant, Lutherans, and Eeformed, the Evangelische and 
 the lieformirte Churches of Germany wrapped their mail 
 armour of Dogmatik around themselves and glared at 
 each other, attack and defence being equally out of the 
 (piestion. But in our age of Dogmcngcschidtte all is 
 changed — a new attitude comes over the Churches. The 
 movement for some Unions-Kirche, though set up too 
 much in the Prussian drill-sergeant style, has this to 
 recommend it, that horses stalled together are expected 
 not to kick out at each other. It is a step towards com- 
 prehension, and one step often leads on to another. The 
 result of the critical method applied to theology, begun 
 in Germany a century ago, and beginning in this country 
 since Anglican and Evangelical have been compelled by 
 
Dissipation of Energy. 1 1 3 
 
 certain Privy Council decisions to eat out of the same 
 stall and manger, is already encouraging. It will bring 
 together things new and old, the past and the future, 
 on a basis which, if apparently sceptical and sub- 
 versive of old dogmas, is in the best sense restorative 
 of that which is the oldest of all. God, it has been said, 
 wants neither our learning nor our ignorance, but we 
 can get on better with either extreme than with the 
 dangerous mean of half-learning. A hundred-and-one 
 camel - loads of learning seems a large order for the 
 theology of the past ; but when we condense, let us 
 do so thoroughly, and not put up with a mule's-load of 
 compends. Let us then turn back to the compacted form 
 of certain prophets and apostles who taught as having 
 authority, and not as the scribes, and who wrote, as we 
 are told by one of themselves, " not of their own private 
 interpretation, but as they were moved by the Holy 
 Ghost." The criterion of theology, then, is simple — all 
 that is taken first-hand out of these records is theology, 
 the true doctrine of God ; all that is merely derivative 
 is among these afterthoughts which dogmatism asks us 
 to spare, but which criticism lays bare with a knife and 
 scalpel as destructive as Kant's Kritik was, only that, 
 like Kant, it may become constructive again of something 
 better and more enduring, as Clough's lines express it — 
 
 "The souls of now two thousand years 
 H.ave laid up here their toils aud fears ; 
 And all the earnings of their pain, 
 Ah, yet consider it again." 
 
 H 
 
CHAP TEE V. 
 
 EXCUSE FOR AFTERTHOUGHTS. 
 
 But let ns be just to these afterthoughts of theology, 
 this sub-apostolic type of teaching in which doctrine 
 passed into dogma, and religion became a cult, with its 
 ritual and ceremonies, its holy places and holy days, and 
 with its priests and its sacraments. The transformation 
 was complete in Augustine's day, whose two widely con- 
 trasted sayings — uhi Christus ibi ecclesia and hahcre Caput 
 Christum ucmo i^otcrit nisi qui in ejus corpore fuit — may 
 be said to measure the whole diameter of Christian 
 thought from extreme individualism to extreme collec- 
 tivism. Let us be just, then, to these " afterthoughts," 
 and instead of condemning them unheard as apostasies 
 from the primitive standard of StSa;)^?;, let us see what 
 needs in human nature sacramentalism and sacerdotalism 
 represent. Perhaps we shall then come to the wise 
 conclusion of the truly charitable, because far-seeing, 
 apostle, that " circumcision is nothing," and that also 
 " uncircumcision is nothing." Those who see far, as St. 
 Paul did, into the mind of God, see that the mind of 
 Christ, as we may call the pure gospel, must be an attain- 
 ment only to be reached at the end of a lifetime ; it is 
 not seen at a glance at the beginning. To be baptized 
 into Christ as a formulary is one thing ; to drink of the 
 
Excuse for AftertJioiights, 1 1 5 
 
 cup wliicli He drank of, and to be baptized with the 
 baptism which He was baptized with, is quite another 
 thing. All Church history and all Christian experience 
 alike confirm this. On the one hand, we find the instinct 
 for collectivism too strong for that of individualism. 
 We find the ccdns fidelium agglomerating into Churches 
 under impulses quite irresistible — we find those Churches 
 presided over each by its own presbyter-episcopos. 
 This clerical office develops in two directions, under 
 that law of differentiation, in which Herbert Spencer 
 has found the key to all phj'siological and ultimately 
 of all sociological processes. The presbyter and the 
 episcopos differentiate, and so the elder of elders becomes 
 ruling elder, and to him the style and title of episcopos 
 exclusively attaches. He presides over the Church 
 planted in every city; for as yet Christ has not left 
 His mark in the open country. Eustics are pagans, and 
 the chorepiscopos is a kind of deputy-bishop, his func- 
 tions corresponding to those of a rural dean among 
 ourselves in this day. Into the details of the other 
 stages of differentiation w^e need not enter. The late 
 lamented Dr. Hatch, whose loss Oxford still regrets, 
 had opened up fresh lines of thought on this subject, 
 and had worked out the Baur theory of the defensive 
 dogmatic attitude of the Latin Church, in face of the 
 Gnostic heresies, on lines which showed both research 
 and original thought. In any case, without pursuing 
 details further, we may say that these afterthoughts, by 
 which didacM sjrew into dosjma and faith fixed itself 
 on form, represent a true instinct. It was this con- 
 servatism which carried Christianity in the corporate 
 form of a Church through the cataclysm of the break- 
 up of the old Eoman world, and presided over the 
 birth of a new world after the loncj nidit of the 
 
1 1 6 Excuse for Aftei'iJioitghts. 
 
 Middle Ages was over. A thousand years had to pass 
 over between the death of one type of thought and the 
 birth of another — between the geometry, for instance, of 
 Ptolemy and the geometry of Descartes and Newton. 
 As if to prepare an ark against that deluge, God had 
 provided the Church, which, with her ascetic clericalism, 
 was so unlike the mind of Christ ; it was nevertheless 
 better prepared to do the rough work required of her, 
 than if she had grown into a philosophical school like 
 that of the Alexandrian catechists, or had lost herself in 
 dreams of saintly piety like the hermits of the East or 
 the mystics of the West. Ecclesiasticism is, we admit, 
 a debased copy of an ideal much " too good for human 
 nature's daily food." In this sense individualism comes 
 nearer that ideal ; when, for instance, the Friends at a 
 meeting-house sit waiting for angel visits, and the stirring 
 the waters, which are rare in this age of mammon worship, 
 we seem nearer the primitive type than with any of the 
 more ceremonial forms of worship. But ideals may be un- 
 workable, epav pekricrTwv voao^ tt}? ylryxf]^ — the desire 
 for idealisms is a disease of the soul. This is Aristotle's 
 wise way of clipping the wings of young idealists, more 
 Platonist than Plato. Man is a social animal in worship 
 as in other respects. The governmental tendency in 
 religion may be carried too i'ar, but it may easily be 
 neglected so entirely that the spirit evaporates with the 
 form. Doctrine may wear away, as coins do, when a 
 certain alloy of dogma is not put in to harden it. We 
 may come to see, after considering all the conditions of 
 the problem, that Judaism, if we must call it so, is a 
 phase of religious thought which the world has not out- 
 grown, or is likely to do so as long as it remains as it 
 is, while the enmity between flesh and spirit continues. 
 What confirms this view of the case is the distressing fact, 
 
Excnse for Afterthoughts, 1 1 7 
 
 which idealists have never explained away, that as soon 
 as one type of Judaism had been thrown off by large 
 sections of Northern Europe, the Eeformers lost no time 
 in settling down to another type of Judaism. It was 
 like the revolt of ten tribes against two under Jeroboam. 
 We do not say that it was calf worship against temple 
 services — that comparison is unjust and question-begging. 
 But it certainly was the setting of Eabbinism in place 
 of Sacerdotalism, and it is a question whether the young 
 Eabbi was not a spiritual despot as harsh as the old 
 priest. ISTew presbyter was old priest writ large. So 
 Milton thought, who dreamed of an independency which 
 should comprehend all types, but which in its turn 
 degenerated into a new type which we may call " Pas- 
 torism," since Congregationalism is quite as much a thing 
 of traditions and tenets as stiff and unyielding as 
 Presbyterianism, against which it was the same revolt 
 that Presbyterianism had been against Prelatism. Thus 
 sects come and go, and God fulfils Himself in many 
 ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 
 
 But the moral of the whole is this, that for wise reasons 
 God has willed it so, that " faith should fix itself in form." 
 There are some who are of a philosophical temper, and who 
 are tempted to stand off' from the hurly-burly of life : like 
 Saturn, which sleeps on its luminous ring, they should 
 " leave their sister where she prays her early heaven her 
 happy views ; " since if they are real philosophers, and not 
 merely wearing the cloak, they must know that diff'ormity 
 is a worse evil than conformity. In joining a Church and 
 accepting its limitations, both of doctrine and discipline, 
 there is more true humility than in " remaining single and 
 talking of population." Isolation is no sign of strength, 
 though it seems so'. We may belong to a dogmatic body 
 but escape the dogmatic temper, as conversely we may 
 
1 1 8 Excuse for Afterthoughts. 
 
 become ultra-dogmatists while our standpoint is the dis- 
 sidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant 
 religion. 
 
 *' And spite of praise or scorn, 
 As one ■who feels the inimeasarable workl, 
 Attain tlie wise inditierence of the wise." 
 
 It was not accidental that the gospel should grow into a 
 "cult" with a "creed," and with custodians of that creed, as 
 it did soon after in the sub-apostolic age. We must see 
 in this something more than God's bare permission of a 
 degeneracy. Much as Ahijah saw that the revolt of the 
 Ten Tribes was of the Lord, so we may go on to say that 
 this regulative religion was providential, since, but for 
 this hard Eoman type of Church, the barbarians would 
 never have been beaten into shape. Those hard Komans, 
 whose very games were cruel, and who butchered their 
 prizes of war to make a Eoman holiday, were not a lovely 
 type of humanity, but they did for the world what neither 
 talking Greeks nor mystic Syrians could do. Even in pass- 
 ing away they left a legacy of strength, mixed with severity 
 and dashed with cruelty, on which the Church entered, 
 and which has carried on Christianity down to our day. 
 
 Whether the Poman type of haughty unbending dog- 
 matism has not also had its day, and may now cease to 
 be, is an anticipation which we make with many reserves. 
 Dogmatic Christianity, including in that phrase all that 
 we mean by the afterthoughts of theology, still lives on, 
 and seems likely to continue to live. The reaction Pome- 
 wards has partly spent its strength ; but then the age has 
 ceased to rail at it. Popular Protestantism has forgotten 
 its fears of forty years ago, and going over to Pome 
 "verting," as it is now gaily described, is one of these 
 swings of the pendulum which we look for and balance off" 
 against " verting " in the contrary direction. The con- 
 
Excuse for Afterthottghts. 1 1 9 
 
 elusion seems to be, that in our present imperfect state of 
 being, and with flesh and spirit so opposed, the flesh so 
 strong, the spirit so weak, some " regulative " type of 
 religion, with its stiffness, its inexorable dogmatism, is 
 needed to right the balance. That it is so, we infer from 
 the rise of Protestantism, with its infallible Book, to 
 oppose Eomanism, with its infallible Church, and between 
 the two dividing the pale of professing Christendom. The 
 admission made on both sides seems to be that religion, 
 unless in some corporate form, will never be accepted by 
 the mass of mankind. There must be a need for these 
 afterthoughts, which run out either on inspiration or on 
 Church authority — in other words, which set up some 
 regulative principle outside conscience. It lies in this, 
 that the average ill-instructed and nominal Christian has 
 some vague dread of something after death which he can 
 neither explain nor explain away. He believes in God 
 and the devil in that sort of divided way, that the 
 Samaritan remnant, being plagued with lions, " feared the 
 Lord and served their own gods." It is conscience which 
 makes cowards of us all ; but this, instead of inducing us 
 to silence conscience, or smother it with lies, should lead 
 us on to read its whispers aright, as St. John teaches "us to 
 do, 1 John iii. 20, 21. In the one case, he supposes that 
 the heart, the seat of self-consciousness, condemns us, and 
 for that he points, not to some scholastic fiction, but to 
 the spiritual truth that God is greater than our hearts, 
 and knoweth all things. Eepentance towards God and 
 faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, not priestly theology of 
 any kind, is the only salve for a sore and sick conscience. 
 In the next place, he goes on to deal with the happy case 
 of those whose hearts condemn them not, and who, accord- 
 ingly, have confidence toward God. 
 
 This is the only true remedy for the sense of sin which 
 
1 2 o Exc use fo r Afterthoughts, 
 
 is distance from God ; it is that of direct dealing witli God 
 as the Father of our spirits. But the mass of mankind, 
 the baptized as much as the unhaptized, seem to have 
 such a feeble sense of God's fatherly relation to them, 
 and of their original sonship, which only waits the spirit 
 of adoption to become a full fruition, that they are all their 
 lifetime subject to bondage. The misleading direction 
 of Pauline teaching, for which Augustine is chiefly respon- 
 sible, has set up a new and false relation between God and 
 men. They are told they are children of wrath, and that 
 He is an angry God. The old devil-worship of our past 
 heathenism had scarcely been driven out when it came 
 back with seven other devils, more wicked than the first. 
 Men, mistaught by divines themselves scarce escaped from 
 Manicha^anism, went on to represent the Blessed One who 
 hates sin only because He loves the sinner, as if His wrath 
 passed on from the act to the person. Since, in our half 
 Pharisaic dread of contagion, we hate the garment spotted 
 by the flesh, we go on to regard Christ like another Aaron, 
 as standing between the living and the dead till the 
 plague is stayed. Too often have we thus limited God's 
 mercies, and measured His compassion by our poor stint 
 of pity. This lies at the root of our religionism, and 
 will continue to do so as long as Augustinian conceptions 
 of election and particular redemption reign as they do 
 under one modification or another. 
 
 The painful truth is, as Pascal long ago suspected, 
 but did not himself see the remedy, that man needs 
 the gospel, and will have it ; but as soon as he gets it 
 he finds it too strong meat, and sets about mixing it 
 with his own seasonings. He makes it into a religion 
 with cult and creed. He takes over the terms of the 
 old classic world — parishes, dioceses, liturgies are all 
 phrases to hand, they have a well-known secular sense ; 
 
Excuse for Afterthoughts. 1 2 1 
 
 he now fits into them a new theological meaning. 
 His very church clothes — dalmatics, copes, surplices, 
 and what not — were all once secular garments, and he 
 is offended to be told that his Aaron's wardrobe is 
 only everyday Eoman dress under a new name, as the 
 late Dean Stanley took pleasure in impressing on him. 
 All this is true ; but it does not shake the fact that 
 since man must have a religion, that of Christ's is the 
 only religion which can walk abreast of the age ; but it 
 must at the same time be accommodated to the asje. 
 II faut clcs spectacles pour Us granclcs miles : il faiit clcs 
 Tomans p)OUT les mo&urs corromims. This opening sentence 
 of Eousseau's Emilc explains other things besides Eous- 
 seau's excuse for dressing up his moral reforms in a garb 
 of sentimentality. The grand simplicity of the gospel, 
 that God so loved the world, is too much for men in the 
 full flash of life ; it may sustain us on our dying beds, 
 it will carry us into the haunts of sin and vice, but 
 for summer-weather religionism there must be a certain 
 Ethos and QEsthesis, — terms best left untranslated, — that 
 flavour of Patristic lore, which, whether East or West, early 
 or late, alike carries respect. In a word, tradition reigns 
 in religion with a rod of iron. Human nature, timid in 
 proportion to its ignorance, and with a thick curtain lying 
 before the unknown hereafter, distrusts novelties. It is 
 enough to say that a theology is new to condemn it. Pre- 
 scription, a phrase first coined by Tertullian, has reigned 
 ever since, and, like all long settled dynasties, has become 
 an intolerable tyrant. The average of mankind who hear 
 with complacency of the new chemistry, or of the new 
 jurisprudence, regard with something more than suspicion 
 the use of the phrase the " new theology." They never 
 trouble to ask whether the so-called old Augustinianism 
 was not once a novelty against which Vincent of Lerins 
 
1 2 2 Excuse foj" Afterthotights, 
 
 drew up his canon qiiod scmjKr, etc. Tried by these three 
 tests of constancy, ubiquity, universality, in all three 
 directions Augustine was the innovator, and Pelagius of 
 the two was the one who, in the opinion of the whole 
 East, stood in the old ways. 
 
 The foolish world, whose forte is not criticism, has 
 forgotten all this ; and as we must take human nature 
 as we find it, we have to say with Eousseau, " There must 
 be spectacles for great cities, and romances for an age 
 which likes to be cheated with a mixture of truth and 
 fiction." On these grounds the old Eoman conception 
 of religion as civilis and licita must be adhered to. 
 We must drop our ideals, wdiich only land us in a 
 type of transcendental Quietism, like the Friends and 
 the Cambridge Platonists, who both alike felt themselves 
 very much out of harmony with the theological strifes 
 of the seventeenth century. It must be said for the 
 two dogmatic types, against which Friends and Platonists 
 entered a feeble protest, that both Calvinists and 
 Anglicans understood the age they lived in much better 
 than these well-meaning mystics. " What must I do to be 
 saved ? " is the first cry of the awakened soul, and it lays 
 all the stress it possibly can on the word doing. To be 
 told to do nothing, and " only believe," sounds senseless, 
 almost mocking; for even those who say "only believe," 
 as all strong I^rotestants do, mean a good deal more. 
 Their " belief " is in reality a " salvation of works," 
 though they do not think it such. The fallacy of soli- 
 fidianisni was long ago detected by the late Thomas 
 Erskine, who bluntly put it, that of the two he preferred 
 the extreme Arminian to the extreme Calvinist as the 
 less insincere of the two. The one understood by good 
 works, such as were good and useful to men in the 
 ordinary sense of the term ; while the other turned his 
 
Excuse for Afterthoughts, 1 2 3 
 
 solifidian creed into a new title to salvation, as if a mere 
 apprehension with the intellect of a plan of substitution 
 and vicarious merit could transfer merit to the one who 
 so apprehended it. Can we wonder that as cliimcera 
 chimmram parit, so the solifidians of fifty years ago are 
 now the chief champions of what are known as " holi- 
 ness " meetings, in which the same one-sided stress is 
 laid on entire consecration of heart and life as was 
 formerly laid on the bare apprehension of the forensic 
 transfer of merit. So true is it that narrow minds 
 can only take in one truth at a time, and, like children, 
 must drop one pebble before they can pick up another. 
 
 All this impresses us with the conviction that there 
 must be a religion for the people, and the more sober, 
 grave, and unsentimental it is the better. For this reason, 
 if a college of philosophers instead of a chapter of divines 
 were to sit down and draw up a good working religion 
 for the average mass of men and women, they would 
 alight on some such happy compromise as the English 
 Church has dropped on, though scarcely owing it to her 
 clerical guides. It has been the large, roundabout common 
 sense, as Locke calls it, of the average Englishman that 
 has done it all. As for the sacerdotal spirit, whether in 
 its Calvinist type as Whitgift, or its Anglican type as 
 Laud, it has been sour, severe, and Auoustinian, with all 
 the faults of the master exaggerated in the disciple. It 
 is to Englishmen at large that we owe that type of 
 theology of which the English Prayer Book is a happy 
 example. It is ever old and new and receptive of what 
 is good, even without formal revision. Eor instance, it 
 omitted a hymnal, which, considering how archaic the 
 music of the sixteenth century would sound to-day, was 
 a happy omission. But it is supplemented by the 
 unauthorised printing of hymnal companions as an ap- 
 
1 2 4 Excttse fo7' Afterthoughts. 
 
 pendix to the Prayer Book. Taken tlius as a whole, our 
 prayers and hymns together make up a model of offices, 
 which, when controlled by sanctified common sense in the 
 preacher, makes up a type of worship which few Dis- 
 senters would dissent from. The proof of this is that 
 in most cases, when on the Continent or on shipboard, 
 Nonconformists of all but one or two extreme types 
 prize the services of the chaplain, especially if he is 
 not very young and very " one idea'd " about his own 
 sacerdotal importance as a dispenser of the sacrament. 
 In that case the liturgy suffers, because the liturgist 
 fori^ets that the leitouroos is the ministerincj servant of 
 the community, whether in Church or State ; he belongs to 
 it, not it to him. It is this half-educated type of mind, 
 tilled with some small theological cram and little else, 
 v;hich has brought the oood old Church of England into 
 a place where two seas meet, and where she is in danger 
 of going to pieces unless skilfully piloted out again into 
 the open of a new and broad theology. 
 
 These are the grounds which make us patient of 
 afterthoughts since the age asks for them ; and since there 
 must be a religion for the people, it is of all types the 
 least unreasonable. All that men of thought with some- 
 thing of the Promethean mind have to ask themselves is, 
 what is the type which will best prepare us for the 
 Church of the future ? Now that the world is open to us, 
 the study of comparative religions goes on even among 
 those who are not students. It is impossible for a young 
 officer to be quartered in India, for a young lieutenant or 
 surgeon-assistant to sail round the world, without learn- 
 ing that lesson of Peter's great sheet let down out of 
 heaven full of all beasts, clean and unclean. General 
 Gordon's religion, so Christ-like in its grand simplicity of 
 dogma, so unlike the Scotch creed of his forefathers, is a 
 
Excuse for AftertJioiights. 125 
 
 sample of what is going on everywhere. It is not exactly 
 syncretism — that is too philosophical a method for the 
 average Englishman, who above everything abhors formu- 
 lating his ideas. But it is that conservatism of the old 
 joined to an open-mindedness towards anything new, which 
 at the same time seems true, and, on the wdiole, leads to 
 a fair temper of mind. It is the same in the working of 
 our old British Constitution, in which changes are readily 
 made in proportion as they do not go down too deep. 
 To unsettle the Union Settlement of 1800 will take, not 
 one or two, but three or more wrenches of the old oak, 
 and so more than one Milesian Milo has learned to his 
 cost — 
 
 "Beware of Milo's end, 
 Wedged in the timbers which, he strove to rend." 
 
 Our only excuse for an incursion into politics is to 
 point out that the same temper of mind governs the 
 average Englishman all through his thinking. The late 
 Mr. Buckle, who wrote loosely about inductive and deduct- 
 ive types of mind, generalised hastily tliat all Scotchmen 
 were " deductive," Englishmen " inductive " only. What 
 he should have said was that the Scotch intellect is 
 2)erfervidum. The wheels take fire with their swift rota- 
 tion, and the result is that they see principles in their 
 extremest form. Scotch Toryism and Scotch Eadicalism 
 are both full flavoured. It is the same with their theo- 
 logy. It was more Augustinian than Augustine, and for 
 this very reason, when waking up to see that Augustine's 
 version of Paulinism was too subjective, while his grasp 
 of St. John's teaching was wholly defective, they are 
 seeing it with a distinctness which few Englishmen can 
 attain to. The leader of most progressive minds in Scot- 
 land was a layman, the late Thomas Erskine, who with 
 little more critical apparatus than an acute legal intellect 
 
1 2 6 Excuse fo r After th o ugh Is. 
 
 joined to a saintlike devout spirit, in which, in his later 
 years, he bettered the example of Augustine's earlier 
 years, has become the latter-day prophet of Scotland. 
 Englishmen, as a rule, knew little and cared less for this 
 anti-Augustinian reaction, for the best of all reasons, that 
 they have never been in bondage to any man or any 
 system of theology. Their innocence of systematic think- 
 ing of any kind lias been at once their strength and weak- 
 ness. It is three Scotchmen, Adam Smith, M'Culloch, and 
 James Mill, who built up that deductive system of polit- 
 ical economy, based on laisscz fairc, which like the chain 
 armour of one age is not found to fit another. Englishmen 
 of the new democracy feel where the shoe pinches, but do 
 not know how to remake it. The same lesson meets us 
 in theology. Its " afterthoughts " are many of them felt 
 to be out of date, and sorely to need revision ; but who is 
 to do it, and how is he to be listened to? As for councils 
 for the revision of theological formularies, to name them is 
 to show we must put no trust in princes, much less in the 
 Pharisees of tradition. Even in so small a matter as textual 
 revision we see what trusting the broth to too many cooks 
 has cost us. Professors, again, with the weight of official 
 responsibility on them, are the last to lead in a move- 
 ment on which they may smile silent approval. They 
 are experts, and their testimony is invaluable as ex- 
 perts ; just as case law comes in when a new judg- 
 ment has to fit in with the precedents of leading 
 lawyers of the past. It is only once in a generation that 
 the judicial bench rises to the dictum, fiat justitia mat 
 ccehcm, as it did in the case of O'Connell's release from 
 Piichmond Prison in 1846. Even then it was a great 
 Whig lawyer commenting on the decisions of great Con- 
 servative judges who reversed their sentence on appeal. 
 This teaches us how rare, how exceedingly rare, is judg- 
 
Excuse for Afterthoughts. 1 2 7 
 
 ment in its purest form in professional circles. To the 
 trained mind, whether advocate or divine, precedent is 
 too stroD2^, and the fear of " unsettlinc^ men's minds " 
 haunts them to a degree which they can neither describe 
 nor account for. 
 
 Knowing, then, the springs of action in human nature, 
 we take men as we find them, and accept their 
 adjustments and compromises on religion as the best 
 possible under the circumstances. We know that "per- 
 fect love casteth out fear," but the majority of mankind 
 think it presumptuous to dream of perfect love in this 
 imperfect state of being. Fear then enters in to fill the 
 vacuum. "The fear of hell's the hangman's whip;" this 
 is not a noble motive for soul- saving. But it exists; it 
 can be replaced only at a cost which no one is pre- 
 pared to pay. As for that jerky, jaunty thing known as 
 American universalism, it is the old theology without its 
 solemn sanctions, its vista of infinite hopes and fears ; 
 and the watch is expected to go without its mainspring. 
 We do not judge human nature in this way. Mankind is 
 not at all likely to put off Augustinianism as a whole 
 unless it is given something much better to put in its 
 place. But to get at this, the whole superstructure of 
 Latin theolosfv must be taken down and the buiklincr 
 renovated from its foundation. A new psychology must 
 precede a new theology, and the age has not as yet 
 awakened to this thought. A few mystics as they are 
 considered of the school of Maurice, have tried to assure 
 us that we are the sons of God by nature, and not merely 
 by " adoption " and grace, as the old orthodox teach. The 
 age is so puzzled by statements of this kind that they put 
 Maurice and his school on one side as mystifiers, who 
 make broad assertions on a slender basis of fact. So it 
 is if we go to textual theology and try and piece it out 
 
1 2 8 Excuse for AftertJwughts, 
 
 with Paulinism, into which we presume to put a new 
 meaning of our own, much in the same w^ay as Sweden - 
 liorg first put into the Athanasian Creed all sorts of 
 Swedenborgian senses, and then produced it as the 
 pattern of the theology of the New Church. 
 
 It is precisely the same with the " Broad Church " 
 school, which asks us to take up with a new theology, 
 but does not make clear to the public mind whence 
 it is getting it, and from what wells it is drawing its 
 water. Again, we insist that a new psychology must be 
 the "prodromus or forerunner of the Christ which is to be. 
 AVe must not take up the story of man at the " Fall," as 
 old theology usually does. The story of the contrasted 
 doom of mankind, if Augustine is to be our teacher, 
 represents God as acting as Pharaoh did when the chief 
 butler and the chief baker were in prison, hanging the 
 one and giving the cup of confidence back to the other. 
 It is no use patching up this old theology by filtering 
 new meanings into it. 
 
 A new psychology must lead the way to a new theo- 
 logy. It will not be content to open Genesis at chap. iii. 
 It will open at chap, i., which describes man in his ideal 
 state as seen in Christ, who is the Logos or archetypal man 
 before the worlds were. As for the story of the so-called 
 " Fall," and of God's dealing wdth Adam and the rest of the 
 covenant race, it is a part, not the wdiole of our story ; we 
 never understand the whole till we see that it is headed 
 up in Christ, who is also its fountainhead — the Alpha 
 and the Omega of all history, which, like these rivers of 
 Eden, parted into four heads, never meet till they mingle 
 at last and for ever in the ocean of God's love. Man is 
 thus made in the image of God ; he is a child or emana- 
 tion — God's image in flesh and blood. This, like God's 
 " imnge in ebony," seems far below the ideal, and so it is. 
 
Excuse fo r Afterthoughts. 129 
 
 We are much lower than the angels, but only for a little 
 while ; and to judge of the whole of humanity from its 
 behaviour in a body of corruption, is to judge of a Newton 
 from the babe which was so tiny that it was put — so the 
 story goes — into a quart pot. Theology has been far too 
 rash in overlooking the second birth of death and the 
 baptism of blood which we must all pass through, saint 
 and sinner alike. This opens up possibilities on which it 
 is best to be silent ; bnt at least it suggests that as the 
 education of the human race is not limited to the cove- 
 nant people, so the education of every man is not finally 
 closed when he passes out of the school of life. 
 
 Psychical — pneumatical — here are two contrasts which 
 the word of God is said to pierce and divide between, 
 as it certainly does in the case of those who reach the 
 deeper self-consciousness which becomes mingled and 
 lost with that of God-consciousness. But how of those 
 who scarcely attain self-consciousness in this life, and 
 who, with regard to God - consciousness, are entire 
 Agnostics ? What are we to say, for instance, of three 
 of the world's leading minds, Confucius, Aristotle, and 
 Goethe, to name no others ? Is their existence here a 
 mistake, a huge blot on the copy of God's book of 
 remembrance ? This short and easy way of reading the 
 world's history as if it were a monk's chronicle, or, as 
 Bossuet's, miscalled universal history, which meant Pales- 
 tine and the lands adjacent, is now, too, out of date, 
 even for censure. It is part of the childhood of man 
 when he understood as a child. We now think thoughts 
 more worthy to be called thoughts of God, who does not 
 re!:jard man as a thino; of naus^ht because his time here 
 passes away so soon. 
 
 All history is prophecy — it is travailing with the 
 birth of the Christ that is to be, and who already is the 
 
 I 
 
1 3 o Excuse for Afterthoughts. 
 
 desire of all nations. We are accustomed to speak of a 
 Messianic people, it is very true, though also true that 
 the elect race is the one race which has nationally 
 rejected its Messiah. But in ::trictness all progressive 
 races have been Messianic ; to have no future of promise 
 is to perish as Azteks and many of the red and black 
 races have perished, leaving nothing behind them. But 
 who can say that Greek and Koman races were not 
 Messianic, seeing that their geometry and law remain ours 
 to this day ? Greece and Rome have between them helped 
 l*alestine to build up all that we call our culture, which 
 is the one permanent element, wanting which mere 
 material greatness, like that of Nineveh and Babylon, 
 Ijecomes only civilised barbarism. We conclude, then, that 
 the world's history is one long preparation for Christ, and 
 the whole of man's education here, the beginning of his 
 education in ieons yet to come. This notion, if taken in 
 in all its bearings, must transform theology. This was 
 beyond the thinking of all but a few great names in the 
 past of theology. It was impossible to all but a few 
 l*romethean minds who saw beyond their age. 
 
 But how are we to rescue it from seeming to be the 
 dream of a few mystics, who took a too optimist view of 
 the future of the race as redeemed in its totality in 
 Christ ? The answer is one which theology by itself 
 cannot give, though we must not build too much on the 
 general silence of Sacred Scripture. " Then cometh to 
 Te\o9," as we translate it, — the end, — but as it should be 
 rendered, not Jlnis, but eventus, the goal up to which we 
 are tending. What that goal is tlie heart of man 
 cannot conceive, for God is greater than our heart : He 
 is far more benign to us than we are to Him. But we 
 are not to allow the silence of Scripture to imply tacit 
 approval of an escliatology which the heart of man rebels 
 
Excuse for Afterthoughts. 1 3 [ 
 
 at, and whicli made Wesley (lialf a universalist, as 
 those who know affirm) say that " Whitfield's God was 
 his devil." We may say with a secular poet — 
 
 "Then at the judgment let's be mute, 
 We never can adjust it," 
 
 But, turning from the silence of the lively oracles, let us 
 consult another living oracle, our own deep self-con- 
 sciousness. Its longings for immortality are the theme 
 alike of poets and divines, and those very longings have 
 been twisted into strange forms of pre-existence, as also 
 of arguments for the necessary existence of the soul as 
 a thinking principle, and other foundations of natural 
 religion, latterly very much shaken, and crumbling since 
 Kant's pulverising criticism. Enough of this : there are 
 august anticipations, as we should call them, of a yet 
 unborn faculty in man, which in exact language we call 
 the Pneuma. It is only rudimentary at present, like the 
 lungs in a bird still in the ovum stage. How much 
 embryology has to teach theology if theologians were 
 only modest enough to learn, we dare not say. But the 
 " learned ignorance " of divines is appalling. What is 
 worse, it is an ignorant ignorance. It forgets that side 
 lights are the best lights in which to see new truths. 
 If Darwin and Newton had not spent their twenty years 
 of brooding over difficulties, do we suppose we should 
 have heard an Eureka at the end of all ? Theology has 
 long since acknowledged its debt to Newton, and in the 
 pretty rhetoric of Pope we write on his tomb, " God said, 
 Let Newton be : and all was light." Are we prepared to 
 see that Darwin may have done more for theology than even 
 Newton ? The one rolled back the curtain to show the 
 vastness of the universe all under control of three simple 
 laws of motion ; but the other has carried us much 
 
1 3 2 Excuse for Afterthoughts, 
 
 farther ; he has shown that, instead of several snccessive 
 creations, there has been only one ; and though some of 
 liis followers have been rash enough to infer that thus 
 we can do without a presiding intelligence, Darwin has 
 never said so, nor do his lessons lean that way. The 
 old Aristotle school of fixed types led us to think we 
 could get on very well without God, except when we 
 came to the end^ of a series, when a miracle of new 
 creation must be slipped in, as in Babbage's argument for 
 miracles, which makes God a kind of mill-hand, half- 
 asleep over a power-loom. But Darwin's teaching leads 
 up to that crcatio conti7iua (John v. 17) where "hitherto'* 
 is mistranslated for "up to tJic present'' Translators with 
 a deistical notion of creation do not seem to have under- 
 stood the passage which teaches that the Eternal Will and 
 the Eternal Logos have been ever in the world, and are 
 to this day " creating," notwithstanding the symbolical 
 conception of God entering on His Sabbath, not to be 
 taken too literally. 
 
 This being so, and taking " evolution " as tlie keynote 
 of the universe, why not suppose that man is on a spiral 
 of evolution ever working upward ? We should not dare 
 to affirm this of man, if he were only another " quad- 
 rumanus." If he were not a worshipping animal ; if 
 his aspirations and his adorations akin to love, but much 
 more lofty, are not to be considered " magnetic mockeries," 
 
 ^ Very mucli to the point on tliis subject are Wallace's remarks in liis 
 new edition of Natural Selection, v. p. 212: "If, therefore, we have 
 traced our force, liowever minute, to its origin in our own rvill, wliile we 
 liave no other knowledge of any other primary cause of force, it does not 
 seem an improbable conclusion that all force may be will force, and thus 
 that the whole universe is not merely dependent on, but altogether is 
 the will o^, higher intelligence, or of one supreme intelligence." If this 
 is what evolution is working up, who can say but the Theism of the 
 future will look back on Darwin and his school as suspected enemies who 
 were allies in disguise. 
 
Excuse for Afterthoughts. 
 
 OJ 
 
 the disease of a soul which, Narcissus-like, is iu love with 
 his own image, this cannot be the last stage. Those who 
 affirm this, are themselves diseased. They are like deaf 
 men denouncing music, or the blind who bemoan not their 
 fate, but ours, who are entranced with art. It is on 
 these august anticipations of spiritual existence hereafter 
 that w^e build up our reconstructed theology. The new 
 psychology, as we affirm it, has observed the Pneuma, 
 and placed it as Adams and Leverrier placed Neptune. 
 That this new planet does not swim before our eyes, and 
 give us ocular demonstration, as Galileo gave of the moons 
 of Jupiter, does not disturb the scientific astronomer, who, 
 reasoning deductively, had placed Neptune, before the 
 eye, assisted by the magic glass, had come to the aid of 
 deduction. So with objections to the Pneuma, they may 
 be many, and valid from the side of sense experience, but 
 what of that ? Need it disturb the deductive theologian, 
 who argues in psychology as much as in physiology, 
 that function implies organ as much as organ suggests 
 function? The terms are reciprocal, the one unmeaning 
 without the other. Is there, then, any spiritual function 
 distinct from a mere intellectual act ? Is there a bowing 
 the will in prayer, an ecstasy of silent adoration which 
 words and phrases, so far from helping, very much 
 interfere with ? The question turns on this ; and if any 
 one tells us that they never prayed in that sense, our 
 reply is that the courtly flatterers of King Darius so 
 reasoned when they decreed to shut heaven up for 
 thirty days, leaving only one vent-pipe open, through the 
 man-god Darius. Heaven, in a word, is easily closed to 
 formalists, to whom it has never been really open. In 
 this sense it is easy to deny the spiritual life which men 
 have never felt. But to some the function is so distinct, 
 so unique, that they feel compelled to predicate a special 
 
1 34 Excuse for Afterthottghts. 
 
 organ. If the old Scotch psychology does not help them 
 for a type, they must invent one for themselves ; and if 
 the school psychologists object to this, we can only turn 
 round and say, so much the worse for psychology. 
 Happily, the day is over when man's tripartite nature 
 needs to be contended for. The hints let fall up and 
 down Scripture have been picked up by careful critics 
 like Bisliop Ellicott and Dean Goulburn, to name no 
 others of less note. What we call pneumatical psychology, 
 to coin an odd misnomer, is no longer on its trial, it is 
 past that ; but its application to reconstruct theology still 
 lags on account of tliis ultra-conservatism which hangs 
 around us under the shadow of Augustine's great name, 
 as if whatever the African did not know is never worthy 
 of notice. When this fit of somnolence is over, we shall 
 first go back, then go forward, and so pick up those miss- 
 ing links in theology which, from Justin Martyr down- 
 ward, are thick strewn in the East, but only escape us 
 in the West. 
 
 Then a new theology will emerge, and this without 
 effort or stress, as soon as a new psychology has made it 
 imperative. So one invention or discovery leads to another. 
 Faust's movable types moved the world — it discovered 
 America, it made the German renascence of religion, and 
 the Italian renascence of art and scholarship — it made 
 monkery impossible ; and so one by one the owls iiew 
 off because the sun had risen. In the same way a new 
 theology will some day steal on us, and meanwhile we 
 must put up with " afterthoughts," and make the best of 
 them. He is a bad workman who quarrels with his tools ; 
 but he is a worse one who, if he can get better, does not 
 fling away the old. As soon as man's true nature and 
 his deep inalienable relationship to God is understood, 
 the old make-shift arrangements of plans of salvation and 
 
Excuse for Afterthotights, 135 
 
 conditions and terms, whether of subjective belief or 
 objective use of sacraments, will be found to be only pro- 
 visional, not permanent arrangements. They will take 
 themselves off of themselves, for the same reason that 
 Judaism faded away before the risen sun of Christ's 
 coming : when that which is perfect is come, then that 
 which is in part shall be done away. 
 
 But the new psychology would be a barren thing if it 
 ended in itself. It may be interesting to know that man 
 has a seed of a " deiform nature," to use Whichcote's 
 phrase. "VVe must go on to apply this to ethics and theo- 
 logy. Intuitive theology and immutable morality seem 
 to be the two pillars of the temple of truth. It is sad to 
 think how many there are who fail to see the connection 
 between these two. Many refuse to recognise that a 
 scheme of morality raised on the shifty foundations of 
 the idiU or the dulce, is left dependent on custom or 
 caprice. It is opportunism in morals, which, if it does 
 not debauch the moral sense at once, goes a long way 
 towards it. It is the same with theology, unless its 
 truths are intuitive, and by that we mean resting on the 
 conscience for their ultimate support, we are compelled 
 to say that "the pillared firmament is rottenness, and 
 earth's base built on stubble." We are aware, of course, 
 that in describing theology as intuitive, we lay ourselves 
 open to the retort that in that case there can be no 
 need of revelation. The distinction between natural and 
 revealed religion disappears of itself, and all that we 
 mean by the mysteries of the faith, such as the Trinity, 
 the atonement, and so forth, become mere evolutions of 
 the moral consciousness, much as Hegel evolved them out 
 of his logical consciousness, to his own satisfaction, and 
 to the no small distress of devout souls. 
 
 We do not take intuition in this sense as the exclusive 
 
J 
 
 6 Excuse for AfterthougJits. 
 
 source of the Christian consciousness. All we contend 
 for is that no truth deserves to be called a revelation of 
 God from heaven which is not so " commended " to the 
 conscience. Here is its criterion — by this touchstone we 
 test it. The old theology to a great extent overlooked this. 
 It was autlioritative because dogmatic : striking this one 
 note of authority, in a Book as its charter and a corporate 
 body of teachers to interpret that Book, it has stood 
 before the world and claimed obedience. Ever since 
 Augustine's day, if not before, this magnificent conception 
 of the Church lias imposed on men's minds, and all but 
 a resolute few have bowed before its pretensions. Philo- 
 sophy was forced to go into retreat, and scholarly men 
 kept their doubts to themselves; and on this condition of 
 silence were not molested. They were tolerated, as the 
 phrase goes, because of two evils, to leave them alone was 
 the least. But the age has assumed a new attitude to 
 these questions ever since the advances of science have 
 made the old traditional account of the origin of man 
 simply impossible. The Church has not agreed on any 
 new interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis to 
 replace the Augustinian theology, which rests on this as 
 a building does on its foundations. Till this is done, the 
 whole subject of sin and its supposed derivation from one 
 man's offence may be said to be unhistorical — the waters 
 below are cut off from the waters above, and honest minds 
 who wish to believe their Bibles, but who cannot evade 
 the teachings of science, are in the utmost distress. They 
 do not see, and no one has the courage to say so, that 
 with Augustine's name and authoi-ity the literal inter- 
 pretation of Gen. ii. iii. stands or falls. But for these 
 Augustinian inferences of original sin, and its derivation 
 from a single source, we might let go the literal inter- 
 pretation, and read it, as Philo and the Jews did, as an 
 
Exatse for Afterthoughts. 1 3 7 
 
 allegory. Our whole point of view would then be changed, 
 and this distress growing out of the conflict of reason and 
 faith would pass off of itself. We should then take up the 
 narrative and read it in a new light. We should see that 
 the education of the race began from the beginning, when, 
 in the early morning of history, a great while before day, 
 the first of the primates awoke from a long sleep of 
 animalism, and God breathed into his nostrils the breath 
 of lives. As soon as man had passed (and this is the 
 true creation point of the race) out of the anthropoid 
 ape type, and became a rational and moral agent, wdth 
 conscience as the centre point of his being, he must enter 
 on the trial or testing stage. He is led to know good 
 and evil by that which symbolically is called a tree of 
 knowledge, and when he yields to tlie baser side of his 
 nature, and so fails of true immoi'tality, symbolised by 
 the tree of life, then his education is entered on under 
 sterner conditions. He is no longer allowed to dwell in 
 a garden of delights, but is put to till the ground and eat 
 bread by the sweat of his brow. Tliere is a fall and a 
 curse ; but the fall is at the same time a step upward, in 
 that man learns his weakness and its source in the 
 strength of his animal desires, and the curse becomes a 
 blessing disguised, since he learns to toil, and so to subdue 
 and keep under the desires of the flesh. Then begins 
 that long warfare of flesh and spirit which is the key to 
 all man's long history from the dawn until now. 
 
 The key, then, to the new theology lies in a fresh exegesis 
 of Genesis. The literal story as taken from Augustine 
 will stand no longer. Unless we are to reject it altogether 
 and relegate it back to the original Chaldean legends, of 
 which the Mosaic seems to be an expurgated and a 
 spiritual version vitalised by the great truth of Monothe- 
 ism, we must read the narrative as a spiritual allegory of 
 
138 Excuse for AftertJiotights. 
 
 the origin of man and his passage from the purely animal 
 on to the moral stage. It is the story, not of one man, 
 but of the race " ha-Adam " — humanity at large. Seen 
 in this light, we see the stages of development. Man is 
 at first of the earth earthy, an animal only, then he is 
 "breathed into" and becomes soulish ; but he has not 
 yet readied tlie last term until he becomes a living spirit 
 through the quickening presence of the Logos, who is the 
 Lord from heaven. These are the three stages of man's 
 development, two of which are attained on earth — the 
 animal and the rational ; but the third of which, the 
 pneumatical, waits its full fruition when flesh and blood, 
 which cannot attain the kingdom of heaven, are laid aside 
 in the grave. Then the psyche-pneuma, emancipated from 
 the flesh, shall attain a new stage of being ; then as a 
 formative principle it shall build around itself a new 
 body, and that whicli was true of Christ, the first-fruits, 
 shall be reached by all who are Christ's. "Destroy this 
 temple, and in three days I will build it again ; " we take 
 this saying as exclusively true of Christ. But it may 
 be, as Swedenborg taught, that this is typical of the 
 transformation of the whole of redeemed humanity. This 
 is very unlike the Augustinian doctrine of the resurrec- 
 tion of the old body of flesh, with hair and nails quantum 
 decet. But the qutstion occurs, may not Swedenborg be 
 right and Augustine wrong ; and if so, shall we not have 
 to throw overboard this and a good deal more of the 
 literalistic materialism which clings to traditional theology, 
 and makes its reception a burden and a heartsore to many 
 who in heart are with Christ, but who only come to Him 
 by night and secretly, for fear of the Jews ? 
 
 This Judaising gospel sums up all that we have said 
 on the subject of afterthoughts in theology. It is better 
 than blank unbelief; it is a provisional system in which 
 
Excuse for Afterthoughts, 139 
 
 the Church is kept at present shut up as in a kind of 
 ark, till the fulness of the times has come. Of such a 
 state we may say that it is bondage to the letter — it 
 falls short of the liberty with which Christ would make 
 us free. It is a faith which is neither robust nor abreast 
 the best thoughts of an age, either in philosophy or 
 science. It can attempt no concordat with either, for it 
 lags behind in the crude and childish literalism of Augus- 
 tine and his times. Still, as it is a faith, as it sets forth 
 Christ in His full Godhead and manhood, and points to 
 His cross and resurrection as the turning-point of the 
 world's salvation, we have only to say of it, " Hold fast 
 that which thou hast till I come." As a faith, mixed 
 as the gold is with the clay of traditionalism, it may 
 elevate the soul and purify the life. Judaism, to those 
 under the covenant, was perfect freedom, as the writer 
 of the 119 th Psalm points out through twenty-two 
 couples of acrostic verses on the law. May not our 
 present Church theology be such a liberty to many devout 
 souls ? All that we desire to press is that it is not God's 
 last word to men, and that there are many truths ready 
 to break out of God's word, as old Eobinson of Leyden 
 taught, if we will " observingly distil them out." 
 
 But the difficulty of getting at a right interpretation 
 of Genesis lies not only in the crude literalism of writers 
 like Tertullian and Augustine. There is also another 
 cause. It is an old remark, attributed to Selden, that 
 the afterthoughts of theology are all explained as rhetoric 
 turned into logic. If this is so, the lesson that it teaches 
 us is sobriety of speech. We may not believe every spirit, 
 but should try the spirits by this simple test — Did the 
 so-called Fathers and doctors of the Church weigh their 
 words ; or did they anticipate, or even so much as suspect, 
 what strange extensions of meaning would be put on their 
 
1 40 Exc2Lse for Aflertho7tghts. 
 
 Byzautinisms by those who came after ? Would Chry- 
 sostom, for instance, have applied such phrases as the 
 " dreadful sacrifice " to the oblation of the Eucharistic 
 bread and wine, could he liave foreseen that a new 
 sacrificial sense would be put on the old act of oblation, 
 and that, instead of a feast upon a sacrifice, the Eucharist 
 would be turned back into a spectacular re-enactment of 
 the sacrifice itself ? In this way " Pelion on Ossa. error 
 on error piled," the minister of a simple memorial act 
 and love-feast has become the actual sacrificial priest 
 of a renewed atoning death. As soon as rhetoric is thus 
 turned into logic, it never stops there. Error, like the 
 irruption of the barbarians, is not to be bought off by 
 a single payment down. Having tasted Eoman gold, 
 Goths and Avars, Gepida3 and Huns, swarm on one after 
 the other ; and history shows us that, as wolf never preys 
 on wolf, so Goths, like Stilicho, hired as mercenaries to 
 defend the empire, did not turn against old comrades in 
 arms like Alaric who were invading the empire. It was 
 so under the great Theodosius, and still more signally 
 under his two degenerate sons, Arcadius and Honorius. 
 The development of doctrine into dogma, and dogma at 
 last into distinct departure from primitive truth, is full 
 of instruction to those who keep a cool head to see facts 
 as they are, and do not let their imagination loose in a 
 deluge of phrases. Heated " pulpiteering " was too often 
 the atmosphere in which the Fathers of the fourth and 
 fifth centuries lived. They were in many cases tribunes 
 of the people, Mirabeaus of a mob of ignorant monks 
 and women vowed to virginity. How could a Cyril, for 
 instance, keep cool in Alexandria, when Hypatia was set 
 on by a howling mob, led by Peter the IJeader, and by 
 parabolani or grave-diggers who were the scum of the 
 people ? The breath of popular applause was the theo- 
 
Excuse f 07' Afterthoughts. 141 
 
 logical hothouse in which they lived, and out of which 
 they came fired with zeal to maintain against a rival 
 Patriarch some new dogma, such as that of Theotokos, or 
 to stamp out some old school like that of Antioch, which 
 seemed to them to miss the precision of the new defini- 
 tions of the dual Christ as of two natures inhering in one 
 person. Cyril of Alexandria,'^ sainted on account of his 
 resistance to ISTestorius, may be said to have reached the 
 high- water mark of that new orthodoxy, which only 
 called, out fresh heresies in resisting the old. If the 
 East split asunder at last between Monophysites and ]N"es- 
 torians, and Churches once Catholic separated never to 
 reunite together under any form of orthodoxy, who is 
 so much to blame for this as those word-splitters who 
 carried Greek subtlety of speech to the point that it 
 seeks to enclose and liem in by a technical term concep- 
 tions which we cannot even shape in thought ? The 
 mode of indwelling of the divine in the human must be 
 left at the point where Athanasius broke off in resisting 
 the shallow rationalism of Arius ; to carry it on into 
 the second stage, where Cyril contended with Nestorius, 
 was to open the door to endless definitions, meaning 
 nothing but the separation of those who wanted a casus 
 helli, and who found it in disputing over an inscrutable 
 mystery. Such wranglers end in wrangling the life out 
 of a divine truth. 
 
 ^ Tillemont, on this subject of the reputed saintship of Cyril of Alex- 
 ancli'ia, shows his usual discretion and good sense. He observes : " S. 
 Cyrille est saint, niais on ne pent pas dire que toutes ses actions soient 
 saintes," adding, with words of memorable significance, "les plus saintes 
 out beaucoup a craiudre la tentation qui nous porte a regarder conime 
 legitime ce qui semble nous pouvoir faire reussir daus les entreprises 
 saintes. II faut combuttre pour Dieu selon les loix de Dieu si Ton veut 
 qu'il nous couronne." — €f. Pusey's translation of aS'^. Athanasius, p. 149. 
 That we are not crowned unless we strive law^fully, is a test of saintship 
 wdiich theology has never looked square in the face. 
 
142 Excuse for Afterthoughts, 
 
 It is melancholy to reflect Low much hurt to souls 
 has thus been caused by this strife of words, to no profit 
 but for the subverting of the hearers. We have selected 
 Cyril as the epoch-making man, who set tlieology in tlie 
 East on the wrong track of dogmatic definition. It has 
 been said in his defence by Canon Bright and others, 
 who are the defenders of Conciliar Church teaching, that 
 Cyril only came forward to defend the truth when first 
 attacked, so that Nestorius was the innovator, Cyril 
 only the champion of the old faith. Fairness compels us 
 to admit that there is something in this remark, and the 
 truth probably lies with ^Neander's summing up of the 
 subject. He holds that Antioch and Alexandria repre- 
 sented contrasted conceptions of the Person of Christ, the 
 one more clear and logical, the other more mystical, and 
 fading away into a one-sided theosophical exaggeration, 
 against which the humanitarian recoil was inevitable. 
 All this is true enough ; but the blame must rest with 
 those who pushed theological nuances, or tendencies of 
 thought in conceiving a mystery, into the fierce light of 
 popular and passionate speech. Here Alexandria was 
 most at fault, and Cyril was the chief offender. His 
 claim to saintliness rests on precisely the same ground as 
 that of Augustine : we may add that the two characters 
 mark the same temper as dominant East and West at 
 tlie same time and for the same reason. Both were 
 ascetics and monks, who went into logic - chopping 
 because cut off from the serious business of life, " to 
 make a happy household chime to bairns and wife." If 
 we overlook all this, as professional theologians are in 
 the habit of doing, we shall miss the meaning of this 
 Selden phrase, that rhetoric turned into logic has brought 
 theology to its last crowning contradiction — the doctrine 
 of the corporal presence in the Eucharist. This is seen 
 
Excuse for After though ts. 143 
 
 in Cyril's case : one error of exaggeration opened tlie 
 door to another. As we have seen, Goths never fought 
 against Goths : the mercenary, paid to guard the frontier, 
 let in the new invader, who was of tlie same race, and 
 so Church and Empire went down together, and from the 
 same cause. From the admitted truth, that the flesh of 
 Christ was received in the Eucharist as life-giving, Cyril 
 argued that it must be in some sense the flesh of God, 
 and so that the Nestorian error of Mary beiug the mother 
 only of His manhood could be stopped by appealing to 
 sound Eucharistic doctrine. This is an illustration of 
 the way in which one dogma leads on to another, and 
 reminds us that rhetorical phrases are not so innocent as 
 they seem. We forget the " fetichism " that ignorant 
 human nature is too prone to. There is a sensual side 
 to which a spiritual truth invariably falls over, the instant 
 that we forget that the " words which I say unto you, 
 they are spirit, and they are life." Alas for the fact that 
 erring men and women are too prone to the idolatry of 
 sense, and that, in certain stages of low development, a 
 spiritual truth cannot reach them at all unless under 
 symbolisms which are revolting when too literally taken ! 
 To eat His flesh and drink His blood must be symbolical. 
 No Jew could have been listened to by Jews even for an 
 instant unless he were assumed to be speaking symbolic- 
 ally. So far all are agreed — Romanists included — as to 
 the strict meaning of the Lord's words in John vi. But 
 when these same theologians turn to the Eucharist and 
 attempt its interpretation, then they drop their own con- 
 ception, and interpret the Lord's words in a literal sense, 
 which would have been revolting to those who first heard 
 them. Instead of taking John vi. as a well-known 
 
 1 See Smitli's Dictionary of Christian Biography, "Cyril," by Dr. 
 Bright. 
 
1 44 Excuse for Aftei^thoughts. 
 
 Eastern symbolism of " eating," for " reading, marking, 
 learning, and inwardly digesting," they run away from this, 
 its true primary, and to an Oriental its natural sense, and 
 set up a crude cannibal sense which is unbearable applied 
 to the original flesh and blood of the Lord, and therefore 
 must be equally unbearable of any transmuted bread 
 which, under the magic of consecration, is said to become 
 " flesh." 
 
 We are not here discussing " transubstantiation," or any 
 other such afterthought of inventive dogmatism. All we 
 are discussing is the state of mind out of which this trick 
 of loose speech governing loose thought, instead of clear 
 thought controlling accurate speech, has grown up. It 
 has arisen, as Selden has remarked, from bad rhetoric 
 passing into worse logic ; but w^ho are to blame most, the 
 " rhetoricians," who escape rebuke, or the logicians, wlio 
 are so severely scolded by all Eeformation divines, and 
 by Anglicans most of all ? To do Anglicans justice, 
 especially the Caroline divines of Laud and his school, 
 they are extremely opposed to tlie doctrine of the 
 '•' corporal " presence. In this they are honourably dis- 
 tinguished from their later copyists, who follow Keble 
 in his lapse into what is substantial liomanism on this 
 point, when he struck out the line, " not in the hand, but 
 in the heart," and altered it, in his old days, so as to 
 admit Eucharistic adoration of the corporal presence. 
 On this subject the old Laudian Anglicans stand stiffly 
 on the Protestant side of the controversy, as their de- 
 <^enerate descendants seem to forget. But let tliis pass ; 
 our point is that Anglicans, old and new, who oppose 
 twelfth-century scholasticism for defining the nature of 
 the change, and so rounding off the dogma logically, have 
 not a word to say against the rhetoric out of which all 
 this twelfth-century logic grew. Eor our part, we hold 
 
Excuse for A/terthotights, 1 4 5 
 
 that the Schoolmen were the more innocent of the two. 
 They took from the Fathers such phrases as the " dreadful 
 sacrifice," and rendered it into intelligible terms of the 
 understanding. They rationalised, if it must be so said, 
 concerning a mystery, that of tlie " presence," whatever 
 tliat ultra - scri|)tural phrase may mean ; but they only 
 rationalised as men must do, who, given three terms of a 
 proportional, go on to find the fourth. In this "rule of 
 three " way the Schoolmen reasoned as they were bound 
 to do. A priest implies a sacrifice, as conversely a 
 sacrifice suggests a priest, — the terms are reciprocal 
 Granted, then, the priesthood and the altar service, what 
 is so natural as to suppose that the Eucharist is such a 
 sacrifice ? We are already a long way on the road, — we 
 have got as far as the " unbloody sacrifice," which soon 
 is seen to be a verbal contradiction. Where is the 
 fault of their logic ? We fail to see a single flaw, 
 unless it be, as Anglicans say, in jumping the gap and 
 erasing the term " unbloody." As for the term " transub- 
 stantiation," it is a long w^ord for what meant very little 
 in the twelfth century, and which we now see grew out 
 of muddy metaphysics and still muddier conceptions of 
 physics. That bread had a certain siihstantia or entity 
 apart from its phenomena, was part of the prevailing 
 realism. This, when it got mixed wdth the rei^nincr 
 notion in chemistry, that base metals could pass into 
 noble as soon as a certain flux was introduced into a 
 cupel signed with the sign of the cross, and so called a 
 crucible, explains what seems to us a monstrosity of 
 thought. It did not seem such a monstrosity to the 
 twelfth century. To this day it is no monstrosity to the 
 devout Eomanist, and to men of at least as keen logical 
 acumen as any Ahglican or ultra-Protestant. How can 
 we account for this divergence of thought, assuming, as 
 
 K 
 
146 Excuse f 07' Afterthoughts, 
 
 we are bound to do, perfect honesty on both sides ? It 
 is explained, as we have seen, by the trend of thought 
 in the human mind. Started on one line of rhetoric by 
 theologians enamoured of their own self-importance as 
 an order of " priests," all then follows, since the laws 
 of logic are inexorable. The decline is smooth, but it 
 is the torrent's smoothness ere the torrents fall. Terms 
 meant to be only rhetorical are taken only two literally, 
 and who is to blame but those who gave currency to sucli 
 phrases ? To recall them, as Anglicans ask us to do, to 
 their primitive Patristic sense, is to ask us, too late, to 
 cork up again these Genii of an aftertliinking theology : 
 we must go back altogether, or not at all. If we go 
 back, we get up to the first thoughts of the clidaM of 
 the apostle's age ; but if we go forward into the sacerdotal 
 age of theology, we may as well go on, and take develop- 
 ment, as Dr. Newman has insisted on, as our guiding 
 star. If it leads to the Eoman obedience with Corpus 
 Christi Day for our second Christmas Day, when the 
 mystery of the Incarnation is explained by the mystery 
 of the Mass, let us not complain, let us not say we have 
 been carried farther than we wanted to go. This is the 
 penalty of afterthoughts, that they are weak in themselves. 
 They have no root in the moral sense, without which 
 religion is only a form of words, and God becomes 
 a mode of explaining second causes by inventing a first 
 cause. Thus we have to go on piling, as we have seen, 
 hypothesis on hypothesis, dogma on dogma, till " Pius IX. 
 last " has become a byword for that inept Jesuit way of 
 silencing doubt. To be religious we must be manly, and 
 face the consequences of our own beliefs. If these come 
 out ugly fetichisms, wanting all support in the moral 
 sense, we have only ourselves to blame for putting out 
 the eyes of the mind, and then complaining that we 
 
Excuse for Aftei^tJioiLghts. 147 
 
 are scared with doubts. On the other hand, if we make 
 the first sense of awe and mystery our last, if with Moses 
 and the elders we go up into the mount, and there eat 
 and drink with God, in the grand metaphor of the old 
 Book, all other mysteries will then melt otf of themselves, 
 and we shall certainly never again be led away by the 
 mystification of juggling priests. God, let us add, God 
 in Christ, will be intuitively seen reflected in the light 
 of the awakened spiritual faculty. The pneumatical 
 man judges all things, yea, the deep things of God. For 
 why ? — he has a God-consciousness ; he has seen God, if 
 not face to face, at least in the Son of His love. He can 
 trust those wdio report that they have " handled of the 
 word of life ; " and though ours is at present only second- 
 hand, yet, being authenticated by credible witnesses, we 
 reach forth spiritual hands into the unseen, and instead 
 of merely groping after, we now grasp God, as Jacob did 
 on that memorable night when he was named no longer 
 Jacob, but Israel, because as a prince he had prevailed. 
 
 We have, in a word, one remedy, and only one, against 
 that pullulation of dogma which has gone on unchecked 
 from the fourth century to the sixteenth ; and which, even 
 then, w^as wounded with a deadly wound, like the " ser- 
 pent scotched, not killed." This is to have done with after- 
 thoughts, one and all, and to hark back to first thoughts. 
 The two schools, of intuitional theology, and of immutable 
 morality, stand hard by each other. The great but now 
 forgotten Cudw^orth, who, if the last, was also the 
 greatest of the Cambridge Platonists, laid the basis of 
 morality deep in our intuitive sense of right. His ethics 
 are substantially those of the Kant school, who reject 
 utilitarianism as a misnomer when applied to questions 
 of right and wrong. He is with Kant in planting his 
 feet on the rock of an eternal inherent contrast between 
 
148 Excuse for AftertJiotigJits. 
 
 right and wrong. The heavens may fall, and God Him- 
 self fade out of consciousness, before ridit can ever be 
 confused with wrong. The voice of Duty is awful, her 
 imperative is categorical. Such is Kant's ethics, such 
 were Cudworth's. But where Kant halted (for after all 
 he was a Urne films, a child of the age of Deism) Cud- 
 worth went on, and took up, as all his school did, the 
 standpoint of an intuitional theology, the only worthy 
 sequel of an immutable morality. In proportion, let me 
 add, as Cambridge is true to these two positions, which 
 none of her sons have so nobly asserted as the little 
 Emmanuel school of divines, who stood aloof from 
 Puritans and Prelatists alike, and their strife of tomjues, 
 — in that proportion will Cambridge hold its own as the 
 light-bearer in the race of the Lampadoplioroi. We may 
 conclude in the favourite phrase of the late Dr. Whewell, 
 himself a distinguished Platonist and Christian — 
 
CHAPTEK VI. 
 
 NOT TO PKEMEDITATE. 
 
 In the direction of Christ to His disciples as to their line 
 of defence when brought before kings and rulers for His 
 name's sake, this remarkable injunction is added, " Settle 
 it therefore in your hearts, not to meditate before what 
 ye shall answer." The expression, " Settle it in your 
 hearts," like all of Christ's injunctions, seems forth-reach- 
 ing and prophetic. It anticipates the very state of things 
 which occurred, and condemns it by anticipation. There 
 are apologetics of the Christ-like type and apologetics 
 which offend against this canon. Those of the early sub- 
 apostolic age are to be contrasted with apologetics of the 
 later post-apostolic age. "We may say, speaking roughly, 
 that Justin Martyr was the last of the first type and 
 Tertullian the first of the second. In an age of first 
 thoughts, it is the simple message of Christ's love which 
 is proclaimed, and His followers are a little flock who 
 follow His steps like sheep on a sheep-track, walking one 
 by one. In an age of afterthoughts it is Christianity 
 as a whole, and the Church as the keeper of God's word, 
 which is defended, which is quite another matter. 
 
 This injunction not to premeditate, i.e. not to give 
 anxious thought to the nature of their defence, seems to 
 touch by anticipation at the root of all these mistakes of 
 
 149 
 
1 50 Not to Premeditate. 
 
 defensive dogmatic theology. As errors arise, let tlie 
 error be met, A frank reply to a frankly-faced difficulty 
 is sure to do good on both sides. Would that the 
 Church of Christ had acted in this way, and that her 
 apologists of later ages had followed the admirable 
 example set by the apologists of the second century. 
 Instead of that, we can trace a steady deterioration in the 
 tone of the apologists in proportion as the Church ap- 
 proached her hour of triumph and began to change places 
 with the world. "We can speak of a golden, a silver, and at 
 last, by Augustine's time, of an iron age of Church defence. 
 Such we may describe Augustine's tone in dealing with 
 the Donatists, when he perversely, and in the teeth of all 
 sound criticism, misquoted the text, " Compel them to 
 come in." In this respect the contrast between the 
 second and fourth centuries is the contrast between the 
 iron and the golden age. Even the fierce Tertullian, 
 forerunner as he was of much of the defective method 
 of later dogmatism, starts back with horror from perse- 
 cution : " God has not hangmen for priests ; Christ teaches 
 us to bear wrong, not to revenge it " {Ad Scajp. 2). In 
 his Aioology he says, in his antithetical way, " Take care 
 lest it redound to the cause of irreligion that we take 
 away the liberty of religious worship." Nor is the 
 silver age, as we may call the beginning of Conciliar 
 Church authority, from Cyprian to Athanasius, deaf to 
 the same note as understood by the heathen, that Dcorvm 
 injurice Dis curcc. This was the ground of Athanasius, 
 who suffered much wrong, but never requited it in return. 
 " Nothing," he says, " more forcibly marks the weakness 
 of a bad cause than persecution."^ When Ambrose and 
 Martin of Tours indignantly exclaimed against shedding 
 the blood of heretics, and refused to communicate with 
 
 ^ Archdeacon Farrar, Lives of Fathers, vol. ii. p. 537. 
 
Not to Premeditate. 151 
 
 those who had ordered the execution of the Priscillianists, 
 they were only continuing the traditions of the early 
 Church. They shuddered at those who were champions 
 in name only, but in reality were the mere mercenaries 
 of the faith. " It belongs," said Tertullian, " to the 
 human right and natural power of every man to worship 
 what he thinks right, and the religion of one is no 
 advantage or injury to another." Gregory of Nazian- 
 zen had always expressed his abhorrence of persecution, 
 and his determination to employ no methods but those 
 of moral suasion. Even under Constantine, Lactantius 
 had written that " religion cannot be enforced : we must 
 act with words rather than blows, that the will may be 
 with us. Nothing is so voluntary as religion." Even 
 Augustine in his earlier days had repeatedly insisted on 
 the true method of dealing with heretics, which was by 
 reasoning and forbearance. 
 
 But alas, the fine gold had become dim ! By the time 
 of Theodosius, when the last pagan reaction under Julian 
 had spent itself, and the orthodox Catholic faith had 
 ceased to tremble at the possibility of another Arian 
 Csesar, too soon the note was changed, and we must add 
 wdth regret, that it is in Augustine's lifetime the strange 
 transition began, when persecuted and persecutors changed 
 places — the persecuted Church became the persecuting. 
 Xor have we far to seek the explanation. As soon as a 
 creed fossilises into dogmas, what before was conviction 
 passes away into conformity. It calls for no inward act 
 of spiritual verification ; it sets up no struggle, such as 
 that indicated by the expression, " Lord, I believe, help 
 Thou mine unbelief." All these strivings within — the 
 desire to believe,, attended with difficulties, intellectual 
 or moral — the travailing in birth till Christ be formed 
 in you, as an apostle describes it, — these are phases of 
 
1 5 2 Not to Premeditate. 
 
 faith unknown to an age of mere dogmatic belief. Hence 
 it is to an age of afterthoughts that intolerance itself is 
 transformed into an angel of light. To rescue from hell 
 becomes the first duty to the mere dogmatist. He has him- 
 self bolted his own opinions, why should others then stand 
 off in mere squeamishness of conscience ? Such scruples 
 as these should be whipped out of men. Tliere is a short 
 and easy method of drilling men into conformity. The 
 state of mind which calls in the sword to cut the knot 
 of controversies can only be understood when we have 
 seized some of the deep contrasts which faitli suggests. 
 
 Faith is, in truth, a complex state of mind, the 
 result, as it has been well said, of a consent of the will 
 following on an assent of the understanding. But to rest 
 the whole of our faith on a single support is to require 
 too much of human nature. Authority is, we admit, of 
 use in the first instance to raise initial presumption in 
 favour of religion ; then follows reason, or the orderly 
 marshalling of proofs, on which the divines of last century 
 laid if anything too much stress. Lastly, there is the 
 concurrence of conscience, since, unless it is seen to be 
 right by the best lights which God has given us, how 
 can we pretend that it comes from God. The result of 
 this is that the supports of our faith are these three — (1) 
 antecedent testimony or authority ; (2) reason, or the 
 harmony of these proofs with each other; and (3) and 
 lastly, conscience, or the correspondence of the revelation 
 without with the interior light of that candle of the Lord 
 lighted in every man's breast. There are thus, in the 
 language of St. John, three that bear record on earth, 
 tradition, the written word, and the interior word ; and 
 when these three are found to agree in one, then we 
 reach the state of assurance — our heart condemns us not, 
 and we have confidence with God. 
 
Not to Premeditate. 153 
 
 Men have unfortunately failed to see tliis composite 
 character of faith, and that it rests, not on a single strand 
 of private persuasion, but on a threefold cord of authority, 
 argument, and private conviction, which is not easily 
 broken. Hence the desire has arisen for a theology of 
 safeguards, and we fall back on dogmatisms as defensive 
 outworks of truth. In the good old days of the evan- 
 gelical revival, marked by such works as Scott's Force of 
 Truth, the note of all true religion was that it was 
 " experimental ; " men believed because they knew what 
 they believed in. Accepting it first as a pious tradition, 
 a deposit of truth found in the Church, they at once 
 went on to test it for themselves, using the usual 
 evidential tests, historical and internal, and only settling 
 down to a belief in the deep and true sense of the term 
 when Faith had seated herself firm on her tripod of the 
 Church, Bible, and conscience, and was able to say, 
 " These three agree in one." This was the experimental 
 religion of those Samaritan converts who said, " Now 
 we believe, not because of thy saying, for we have heard 
 Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour 
 of the world." 
 
 This leads us to notice the strancje oversidit made bv 
 the Evangelicals of last century, as indeed by the whole 
 Augustinian school, with its right and left wing of 
 Bible and Church authority. Such has been their narrow 
 distrust and suspicion of the school of interior light, that 
 they have almost gone as far as deliberately to put out 
 one of the eyes of faith. They then expect it to see 
 plainly, forgetting that the eye is single only when there 
 is the one picture painted on the brain, and that from 
 two distinct camera views are two separate retinas. 
 Binocular vision is so well understood in our day, that 
 we fail to see spiritual things unless there are also two 
 
T54 ^ot to P7'emeditate. 
 
 eyeholes. Without this provision there must be want of 
 perspective ; man becomes an intellectual Cyclops ; and 
 sometimes, sadder still, on his discovery of this require- 
 ment of the self- verifying power of truth, he starts back 
 in amaze at liis seein" thin^js in some distorted form, and 
 punctures out his eyes, like another QEdipus, in horror at 
 tliis discovery. Far better is it to act on the line — 
 
 " He fought liis doubts, lie gathered strength, 
 He Avould not make his judgment blind, 
 But faced the spectres of the mind 
 
 And laid them : thus he came at length 
 
 To find a Higher Power Lis own ; 
 
 And Power was with him in the night. 
 That makes the darkness and the light, 
 
 And dwells not in the light alone." 
 
 It was the glory of the Cambridge Platonists to have 
 restored the truth of the verifying power of the spiritual 
 consciousness, which later Augustinianism had departed 
 from, if he never expressly denied it. Augustine in his 
 early and better days was not averse to this type of 
 Christian Platonism, which he unhappily threw aside for 
 the dogmatic theology of his later life, and which lost 
 itself in the sands and shallows of controversy against 
 Manichees, Donatists, and Pelagians. The overwhelming; 
 authority of Augustine, overshadowing every other teacher, 
 left tlie faith impoverished by the deliberate exclusion of 
 one of its three factors. Tradition and the Bible between 
 them helped to bolster up a religion of authority. But 
 such a religion, with one afterthought brought in after 
 another to supply the missing link of the spiritual con- 
 sciousness, only prepared the way for scepticism. It is a 
 case like that of our food — exclude one of the three 
 essentials, the albuminous, nitrogenous, and the heat-sup- 
 porting hydrocarbon element, tlie result is slow decline. 
 The soul may be starved in the same way as the body ; 
 
Not to Premeditate. 1 5 5 
 
 and it is not without significance that just as the body, 
 denied one of its three constituents of food, flies to it and 
 gorges on it with greediness ; so in the spiritual world 
 the discovery of the neglected truth of the inner light, 
 by seekers like George Fox and other uneducated men, 
 was attended in its first stages with all sorts of extrava- 
 gances which brought this type of early Quakerism into 
 contempt. Happily the Cambridge school of Platonists, 
 with their calm and almost too philosophical way of 
 putting things, restored the doctrine of the inner liglit to 
 its true supremacy without that senseless recoil against 
 steeple religion or Book religion, such as the early 
 Quakers fell into. Well would it have been for the age 
 if this sweet reasonableness,^ which Cudworth, Whichcote, 
 and More showed, had spread out into wider circles, and 
 had been better understood by the following age. This 
 was unfortunately not the case. After Tillotson, who was 
 the last expiring echo in public of this cloistered type 
 of thought, there began a sterile age of external formalism, 
 in which the Church lost itself in dull discussions with 
 the Deists as to the reasonableness of revelation. It set 
 out with cutting Scripture in two, and divided between 
 
 ^ On this neglected chapter of Chnrch histor3^the late Principal Tulloch's 
 work is still our chief guide ; but the subject is one well deserving fuller 
 consideration ; and if Augustinianism is ever to be dethroned, it can only 
 be by recalling the memory of these worthies, who in an age steeped in 
 dogmatism dared to aj)peal to the counter principle of the spiritual light 
 of the Logos born in every man. "The days," Dr. Tulloch remarks, 
 " of Augustinian dominance are for ever ended. It can only come by the 
 slow elaboration of Christian reason looking before and after, and gather- 
 ing into its ample thoughtfulness the experience of past as well as the 
 larger aspirations of the present." Of Hales of Eton, Dr. Tulloch 
 sensibly remarks that he did not pass, as too many of that day, out of 
 dogmatic Calvinism into dogmatic Arminianism. "When he wished John 
 Calvin good night, it was not to say good morning to Arminius. This 
 probably is the true ground why the Cambridge Platonists took no root. 
 Their calm philosophical temper was not understood. 
 
15^ Not to Pj'cineditate. 
 
 M'hat it called the internal and the external evidences for 
 its truth ; but a truncated is never a living body, it is 
 simply the limbs of Osiris collected in the chest of Isis ; 
 and we know what impression this piecing together of 
 the mangled remains of truth must produce on the 
 age. 
 
 Wesley, under Moravian teaching, came to a clear 
 conception of the subjective side of religion ; but, like 
 too many revivalists, he ended in turning his subjectivity 
 of conversion into a new objectivity of a dogma binding 
 on all on pain of damnation. The Church Evangelicals 
 then took up the task, and began well ; only it has ended 
 ignobly in tame and meaningless compromises between 
 the Church and the Bible, in which the supremacy is 
 alternately shuffled from the one to the other, leading to 
 panics and protests like that of the Essays and Reviews con- 
 troversy, repeated again the other day. The true remedy 
 is to get back to the "three witnesses" theory of faith which 
 we have glanced at, and which has never been held with 
 the same distinctness by any body of Church teachers as 
 by the Cambridge Platonists. In the reaction against 
 Angustinianism and its afterthoughts, the best thinkers of 
 our day have discovered to their deep satisfaction that 
 in this comparatively obscure school of Eeformers after 
 the Preformation, they had met with the singular anticipa- 
 tion of their best thoughts. So the late Principal Tulloch 
 of St. Andrews, Scotland, and many more whom it would 
 be invidious to name in this honoured seat of learning, 
 have looked back on them as in a sense their fathers in 
 God, the spiritual progenitors of anything good and 
 lasting in their teaching. Among such may I venture 
 to class myself, as a follower of forty years' standing ? 
 To the merchantman seeking goodly pearls, it is always 
 treasure-trove to come upon something in the past which 
 
Not to Premeditate. 157 
 
 anticipates his own best thoughts. It encourages him to 
 feel that he is not a mere egoist and off the track, since 
 he finds that he comes upon footsteps which show that 
 others have traced the same solitary path of internal 
 experience, and found that it leads to Christ. He wdio 
 is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, will most certainly be 
 found by us when we are on the same "way" which others 
 have trodden before us ; when we find that it is the 
 " truth " which corresponds to our best intellectual appre- 
 liensions, and that it is the " life " which satisfies all our 
 spiritual longings. 
 
 It strengthens us, then, and gives us a sense of security, 
 to find that many, if not all the best minds of former ages, 
 have taken the same road that we are journeying on. They 
 rested their faith, as we do, provisionally on authority, only 
 to ground it at last on the sure rock of an internal con- 
 viction from which we can never be shaken. Had others 
 done the same, we should have had less of tliis base 
 tradition of second-hand dogmatism to sweep, like last 
 year's dead leaves, out of our path. But let us be just 
 to this age of defensive dogmatic theology, the age which, 
 in its fear of a general shipwreck, came to regard the 
 Church as the Divine ark of a doomed and perishing age. 
 Augustine's philosophy of history is the theory of two 
 cities, a Babylon and a Jerusalem, out of the former of 
 which we must escape to be saved in the other ; — this 
 may seem narrow, but it is the same conception which 
 coloured Bunyan's vision. Both were bounded by the same 
 horizon, and for the same reason could see nothing for 
 the soul but to escape from the city of destruction. The 
 larger thought of the world reclaimed to God, and of the 
 progressive growth of the mustard seed, of the inward 
 leavening of the whole lump — this sweeter aspect of 
 Christ's work was as foreign to the thinking of the fourth 
 
158 Not to Premeditate. 
 
 as it was to the seventeenth century. The old Eoman 
 world was incurably corrupt, and, steeped in unutterable 
 pollution past all remedy, it was dying and had to die. It 
 was too late. The Church could not save the Empire ; it 
 could only save itself. It could only look on, sadly in 
 some cases, exultingly in others ; but it looked on like a 
 loving nurse. It waited, as has been well said, with her 
 gentlest and unwearied ministrations by the miserable 
 deaih-bed of tlie ancient world. 
 
 So, again, the ascetic principle which came in early in 
 the fourth century soon began to corrupt the simplicity 
 which was in Christ. It had this excuse, that in no 
 other way could men escape the corruptions that were 
 in the world through lust. Finding it hard to conquer, 
 they learned to fly. The nobler course, no doubt, would 
 have been to follow the path of holiness in the quiet 
 circle of the home life. Rut one error, as is always the 
 case, led on to another. The dogma of sin as ex (jencra- 
 tiom had led, at least in the West, to a strange overestimate 
 of virginity as such. It was not enough to observe purity 
 (jf life in a home and hearth wliere no corruption was 
 allowed to cross the threshold. It was a certain defile- 
 ment even to be 1)orn. Instead of seeing, as they should, 
 that the Son of God, by clothing Himself with our humanity, 
 liad dignified tlie passage into life, they read into it a new 
 and strange meaning. " Thou didst not abhor the Virgin's 
 womb," suggests a mode of thinking on the subject of the 
 eternal order which would be revolting if it were not the 
 too naturalistic sense which they took of tlie generation 
 of evil, resting on a crude, uncritical interpretation of 
 Psalm xxii., in which David declares he was shapen in 
 wickedness. 
 
 The Gnostic and Oriental notion of tlie intrinsic evil of 
 matter has travelled far, and lost nothing in its wanderings 
 
Not to Pi^erneditate. 159 
 
 to the West. From India to Persia it had passed on, till it 
 had infected the Latin Church of the West with its subtle 
 misconception of the source of evil, not so much in the de- 
 praved will and conscience, as in the existence of matter 
 and of our present subjection to matter, through our im- 
 prisonment in a corporeal frame. We all know how Sankya 
 Muni began the struggle by seeking entire emancipation 
 from all flesh environment. The pure love of wife and 
 child were as much polluting as the actual defilements of 
 sin ; and the forsaking even of family life was regarded 
 by this prince of ascetics as the first step upward and 
 on to spiritual emancipation. Passing on to Persia, this 
 ascetic principle took a deeper dye, if possible, when 
 brought in contact with the theory of two rival deities 
 of light and darkness. Dualism thus entered in to deepen 
 and still further deprave the ascetic principle ; and the two 
 errors, when combined, first the Buddhist conception of 
 tlie inherent evil of matter, and, secondly, the Persian 
 dualism of rival deities of good and evil, poured in one 
 tide into the Christian Church. The Christian doctrine 
 of sin was thus distorted by two corruptions which de- 
 praved its original meaning. Sin, as it is understood in the 
 Hebrew Scriptures, is a form of lawlessness. Amartia is 
 defined as Anomia: hence without the law, sin might exist, 
 but only as a peccant humour, some latent inability to do 
 good ; but the law entering in, to follow the vigorous 
 Pauline metaphor, a marriage takes place between the 
 law and the flesh, so that flesh now quickened by the law 
 conceives lust and brings forth sin — the end of which is, 
 and must be, death, or the destruction of a progeny so un- 
 naturally gendered. 
 
 But the afterthinkers of theological systems in the fourth 
 century were not content to pause here with tliis simple 
 scriptural theory of the genesis of evil, gendered by the 
 
i6o Not to Premeditate. 
 
 irritation and clash of two opposite principles, the law of 
 light and the desire for wrong. They went as far as to 
 Persia to fetch thence a dualistic theory of evil arising 
 from the eternal discord between the all-good and the all- 
 evil Tliey wandererd even farther East — they went to 
 India to import thence a theory of the inherent evil of 
 matter as such. Sin had thus two fresh factors in the 
 Augustinian theology which are wanting in the Pauline, 
 or at least are glanced at in the lightest way possible. 
 Sin arises from the malice of the devil, the Ahriman of the 
 East; and sin also is produced from this flesh of ours, which 
 is inherently evil, aud from which there is no escape but 
 by the ascetic discipline, not merely of keeping the body 
 under, but more than this, of so mortifying it that the 
 spirit may become a pure and passionless image of the 
 Divine perfection. 
 
 Thus asceticism in its two types, the Hindu and tlie 
 Persian, laid hold of the Church of the fourth century. 
 It must be said that at first its wildest excesses were 
 more Eastern than Western. It was only slowly that 
 the West followed the East into its excesses of monachism. 
 The G;ood sense and stern self-restraint of the Eoman 
 mind was too averse for better or worse from that type of 
 dreamy abstraction which is more Eastern than Western, 
 and more germane even to the speculative Greek than to 
 the Itoman training of lawyers and soldiers. Nothing 
 but the overshadowing name of Augustine could have 
 fixed such a type as the favourite one in the West, where, 
 singularly enough, it was a reaction against one type of 
 monachism, that of Pelagius, which impelled Augustine 
 into another. The Pelagian theory of perfectability had 
 so impaired the sense of original sin, that in his anti- 
 Pelagian zeal Augustine struck out an exaggeration in 
 the contrary direction. The race had been tainted at the 
 
Not to Pj^emcditate. 
 
 i6i 
 
 fonntainhead. Evil, not mere vitium, but peccatum, had 
 entered in with Adam and descended to the whole race, 
 who accordingly became guilty, according to the strange 
 distortion of this African Father, not of temporal con- 
 sequences only, but of eternal. Instead of a mere priva- 
 tion of good, there enters at birth (whether ^;er traduceuDi 
 or not, Augustine will not decide) an active principle 
 of evil, which makes every man born in the world, not 
 a member of Christ, — a child of God and an inheritor 
 of the kingdom of heaven, — but the opposite of all these. 
 He is a child of wrath, — a child of the devil, and doomed 
 to the same everlasting exclusion from God's presence 
 unless sacramentally sealed in the laver of regeneration. 
 
 Is it strange, with these conceptions of the genesis of 
 evil ex propagatione, i\\Qit the ascetic principle rooted already 
 in the East sprang up in fresh and rank luxuriance in 
 the West ? If men were born children of the devil, the 
 less of this serpent's brood brought to the birth the better. 
 Virginity thus got a new sacredness as such strangely 
 foreign to the whole texture of Old Testament thought. 
 Marriage had been honourable in all, and the bed unde- 
 filed, but at last marriage was barely permitted, for 
 the curious reason glanced at in the marriage ritual as 
 a " remedy against sin," and for those who, as mere 
 tertiaries, made up the rank and lile of lay religionists. 
 For all the higher ranks there was only one rule, viz. 
 that of absolute undeviating continence. Pelagius the 
 monk was now " hoist with his own petard." Here was 
 Augustine, the rival monk, with an ascetic theory more 
 terribly consistent than his own, not resting on a half- 
 Manichean, half-Buddhist theory of evil which Pelagius 
 would have started back from with horror. It was not 
 easy to bring the East round from the Pelagian to the 
 Auc^ustinian view of evil as inherent in the flesh. For 
 
 L 
 
J 62 Not to Premeditate, 
 
 some time the Pelagian was the orthodox view. iSTot in 
 the East only, but even in Gaul and other Cliurches whose 
 traditions were those of tlie East, Augustine's was con- 
 sidered to be the novelty ; and even Jerome, that prince of 
 theological trimmers, was slow in coming round to the 
 Augustinian view of the question. We may ask what 
 induced him to do so, and the wliole East after him, since 
 Jerome in his day was the one livingbridge between East and 
 West ? The explanation is tliat the poison of the ascetic 
 system had so eaten into the sounder mind of the Greek 
 Eathers, that they reluctantly gave up tlieir sounder tradi- 
 tions and followed the Latins into theoiies of the descent 
 of evil ex traduce, which but for this they would have 
 treated with contempt. These supporters of the doctrine 
 of free will and man's responsibility turned round and 
 changed sides under the darkening superstition of monkery. 
 It was an evil day for the Church and for truth when 
 celibates and ascetics became her theologians, as was the 
 rule after Augustine. In Ambrose and Cyprian's case, 
 with all their hierarchical pretensions, there is lingering 
 on a common-sense element of moderation, at least in 
 cases where their own private prejudices were not rudely 
 crossed. But in your genuine ascetic all this moderatism 
 disappears. The price which human nature pays for 
 trampling out a whole class of instincts and desires, is 
 that passions dammed up in one diiection break out 
 in another. If it is not good that man should dwell 
 alone, the reason is more than a mere sensual one. It is 
 because, as a fact of rude experience, neither his ethical 
 nor his intellectual unfolding is possible in absolute 
 solitude. Shut in to himself, shut out from society, and, 
 above all, from that best of all training grounds of the 
 will, in the innocent, expansive play of the family affections, 
 man's egotism runs wild. He becomes arrogant, self- 
 
Not to Pre77ieditate, 1 6 
 
 o 
 
 sufficient — in a word, an " intellectual all-in-all." Nay, his 
 very zeal for the glory of God, or what he considers such, 
 distorts his perspective. He sees errors of opinion, not in 
 the large lenient way of the great All-Father, but as a kind 
 oilhc-majesU; it is a slight on a great Supreme, whose viziers 
 and avengers the clerical order consider tliemselves to be. 
 The companionship of w^oman is something more to man 
 than he at first supposes : as long as he regards her solely 
 as the half-savage does, either as his nurse at one age, or 
 his concubine in another. Woman is more than this, or 
 she has failed of her mission, as she had failed in that 
 corrupt age which marked the decay of the Eoman Empire, 
 and when the ascetic system sprang up. Woman trained 
 in the home has leisure to see life under those softer 
 side-lights which escape man. Life is not seen by woman 
 in tlie white light of some abstract theory, whether 
 political or religious, but broken and melted in its many 
 hues of home charities, of personal pities, of likes and 
 dislikes, sympathies and antipathies, for which she can 
 give no other reason but a woman's. 
 
 All this seems to strike man as sentimental and 
 illogical ; but is it the logic of real life — not the logic 
 which rules in cloisters and within chancels — not the 
 logic of Church Councils and Assemblies, but the logic 
 wliicli, like that of the poet of spiritual insight, regards 
 man as a tangled chain of good and evil ? 
 
 We do not know what broader and more general type 
 the fierce African doctor might have developed into had 
 his mother Monica remained by his side, or had he carried 
 out his first intentions of an honourable marriage hastily 
 come to in Milan after his conversion, and as hastily 
 abandoned. The truth must be told, which Augustinian 
 critics have strangely overlooked. There were two 
 Augustines, the early and the later ; and our attachment 
 
164 Not to Premeditate. 
 
 to the author of the Confessions, the early Augustine, 
 has blinded us to the detects of the Bishop of Hippo, 
 who spent the latter years of a long life as red-handed 
 with perpetual battle ; or, to use a milder metaphor, he 
 clasped in strife so often, that, like the dyer's hand, his 
 very style acquired a brand. 
 
 No one forgets to rake up against Tertullian the falling 
 off into heresy of his later Montanist writings. But 
 Churchmen, carried away by the letter of traditional 
 orthodoxy, seem to forget that there is a Montanism or 
 spiritual pride and rigorism quite as hateful in the later 
 Augustine as in the later Tertullian. The one, it is true, 
 cut himself off from external Church fellowship, as the 
 other did not, and it tells to his advantage. But let us 
 not forget that Augustine was a champion for the Church 
 only when the Church was on the side of Augustine. 
 He was not provoked as Tertullian, the mere layman and 
 lawyer, was to wander off into the by-paths of sectarian 
 separatism. But the same temper was there, and we 
 liave misread all Augustine's later polemical treatises if 
 we do not see the same temper of unyielding and 
 arrogant dogmatism as in the seventeenth century Cal- 
 vin is ts, who stamped on the pride of the Prelatists with a 
 greater pride, and who soon showed how it would fare 
 with religious liberty under a yoke as bitter as that 
 which they rebelled against. 
 
 We shall never deal fairly, then, with these after- 
 thoughts of theology unless we set them down principally, 
 if not entirely, to one school, the Carthaginian, and to 
 one man, the latest and greatest of the three dogmatists 
 who have darkened theology with their type of diseased 
 egotism. Human nature only too readily takes a wrong 
 ])ias under its idols of the den, its subjective colourings 
 of truth ; but when to these are added the idols of the 
 
Not to Premeditate, 165 
 
 theatre, when the zcit gcist, or spirit of the age, has taken 
 up a popular delusion, such as asceticism, and works the 
 delusion to death, the results are disastrous. As a monk, 
 Augustine came to look on original sin in a new light. 
 It started out in new distinctness, like a letter in 
 invisible ink when held before the fire. Then he becran 
 to see and teach for the first time that mere generation 
 genders sin. The simple, self-evident truth that " like 
 produces like," the law of heredity, in a word, which is a 
 law as much of science as of Scripture, got a twist in the 
 cell of an ascetic, who, in renouncimr carnal lusts, forgot 
 that lust is only one out of many forms of evil. 
 Augustine succeeded, though not without many protests, 
 in forcing on the West a dogma of original sin. It was 
 peccatum, not merely vitiuvi, out of which grew that 
 amazing superstructure of covenant theology, which in 
 Witsius stands out like one of those old houses on 
 London Bridge,^ storey over storey, and each arching over 
 the other, till the wonder begins why it had not toppled 
 whole over long ago into the river. Adam was a sup- 
 posed covenant head of humanity. The race germinally 
 lived in the loins of their first parent. In his sin there 
 was the sin, not the mere misfortune, of all of him born. 
 His responsibility was direly aggravated by this conse- 
 quence, which he was assumed to be conscious of. There 
 was a Titanic presumptuous revolt of our first parent, 
 who, more like Milton's Satan than the Adam of Genesis, 
 
 ^ Fuller, I find, lias forestalled me in this simile, which I should quote 
 to clear myself of unconscious plagiarism : "As such who live in London 
 and like populous places, having but little ground for their foundations to 
 build houses on, may be said to enlarge the breadth of their houses by 
 height ; so the Schoolmen in this age, lacking the latitude of general 
 learning and languages,' thought to enlarge their active minds by mounting 
 up, so improving their small bottom with towering speculations ; " of. his 
 Holy and Profane State. 
 
1 66 Not to Premeditate. 
 
 dragged after liim millions of his unborn posterity into 
 the same hell-deserving Titanic attitude of God defiance. 
 That we are not found lying on the fiery marl, but laid 
 helpless babes in a mother's arms, is the only exception 
 to this gloomy mythological afterthought, this travesty 
 of the myth of the fall of the Titans transferred to the 
 story of tlie first man. Let us not follow out this now 
 forgotten theory of the theology of the covenants into 
 the details of these Angustinian afterthoughts. It is, 
 from first to last, one long iiditio iwinciini. It has been 
 riddled through and through with criticism, and the 
 average layman lays it on the shelf with the easy remark, 
 " Thank God, we are out of our baby-clothes, or grave- 
 clothes rather, of seventeenth-century Calvinism ! " But 
 this so-called Calvinism is in reality Aquinism in the 
 first stage, and in the second it is Augustinianism ; and we 
 must break, not with Thomists only, but also the whole 
 traditions of the Latin Church, before we c^et into light 
 again. Our half-Eeformation of the sixteenth century 
 must begin again where it left off; it must aim at a mark 
 which Calvin, Luther, and Cranmer alike miserably missed, 
 and for reasons which no one so well set out as the late 
 Bishop Hampden in his Bampton Lectures of 1833. It 
 must rise above that type of Protestant scholasticism, the 
 evil of which no one so well understood as Dr. Hampden, 
 who was probably one of the two or three men of his 
 day competent even to say what scholasticism really 
 meant. The theology which is to substitute something 
 better than Augustinianism, filtered through Anselm and 
 Aquinas, and so passed on through Augsburg and Geneva 
 into Anglican channels, must be at once more primitive 
 and more progressive. As primitive, it will never stop 
 short of the Greek type of theology, which was Christo- 
 centric, not anthropo-centric. As progressive, it will 
 
Not to Premeditate. 167 
 
 accept the best thoughts of our age as to an increasing 
 purpose running through man's story, and elevating him 
 by slow stages, as geology reminds us that the evolution 
 upward of organic life has been slow, constant, and 
 continuous. The crude theory of a " fall," out of 
 harmony with all science, and quite as unreconcilable 
 with sound conceptions of an unchangeable God, must be 
 replaced by another account of the matter quite as 
 orthodox, and incomparably more reasonable. The half- 
 ]\Ianichean, half-mytbical conception of a Satan who is a 
 rebel from a previous order of things, and who is found 
 stealing into the young earth to draw the race after him, 
 must give way to sonie simpler account of man's origin, 
 and of his slow evolution upward from the anthropoid 
 ape up to his ultimate destiny, as equal with the angels. 
 It is a libel on true science to represent it as if 
 instinctively averse to a spiritual view of the origin of 
 all things, and of a cause behind causes which we can 
 only adore with a " Thrice Holy " whisper. But science 
 also, like true faith, insists that this " causa causariim " 
 should never be described as arbitrary only ; He is also 
 holy, and just, and good. It is this taint of arbitrariness, 
 in a word, that worst of all anthropomorphisms, which 
 exalts G-od into another Pharaoh, or Cyrus, or Cresar, 
 whom He wills He slays, and whom He wills He keeps 
 alive, which lies at the root of the recoil against religion 
 of so many scientific men. Simple souls, who never 
 analyse their own thoughts, ask us do we dare to deny 
 God's " sovereignty " ? as if the use of the phrase " sove- 
 reign" covers the question. People of this class forget 
 the connotation of terms, and that the most august and 
 ancient titles of Deity may for that reason have become 
 semi-profane through the clustering around it of concep- 
 tions which repeat the Gnostic theories of the beginnings 
 
1 68 Not to Premeditate, 
 
 of evil. Tor, let it be known, the objections of educated 
 men to the popular theology do not lie any longer in the 
 direction that they once lay. It is, in our day, no 
 longer a question of detail and of criticism, more or less 
 verbal, as to the book and its contents. This might be 
 tlie case in days when the Puritans debated points in 
 dispute with lawyers like Selden : "Perhaps in your 
 little ]3ocket Bibles, with gilt leaves, which they would 
 often pull out and read, the translation may be thus and 
 thus, but in the Greek and Plebrew it signifies the other ;" 
 and his opponents had to bow to his superior knowledge. 
 The difference lies deeper now. It is not even natural 
 and revealed religion which have to be harmonised with the 
 course of nature, as in Butler's day. The roots of dissent 
 with the popular theology go down deeper still. What 
 men want to know is the character of the God they are 
 asked to adore. Is He intrinsic goodness, or only an 
 angry God, conciliated by an amazing sacrifice. At least, 
 in the Hindu Triads, A'ishnu and Siva are not equally 
 benign emanations from Brahm ; evil is not eternal, it 
 is the mere shadow of goodness. It is a dream which is 
 to pass away when Brahm awakens. But the popular 
 theology, mainly, if not entirely, under Augustine's 
 leading, has starved down our conception of the All-good, 
 until sovereignty becomes the oppressive vision of God. 
 All other rays but the red rays are cut off in the prism, 
 and with it light loses all its sweet actinic property of 
 fostering life. We ask, in our ignorance of all this, why 
 the scientific mind inclines to Atheism ? but we forget 
 that to ask the question is to answer it. Doubt is never 
 natural to any mind, it is too tormenting for that ; it is 
 the noblest intellects that, as a rule, crave for God ; but 
 the scientist cannot accept such conceptions so coarse that 
 they only adapt themselves to the savage stage of mind. 
 
Not to Premeditate. 169 
 
 There must be no crude terrorism, no thunderbolt in 
 the background; to frighten souls whom love fails to 
 persuade. 
 
 We are at this point at last set on the true track of 
 all, or nearly all, the objections to evangelical religion, not 
 of men of taste merely, such as John Foster tried to reply 
 to in his day, but of men of intellect and candour, who 
 would believe if they could. The day has gone by when 
 a few texts of the Bible uncritically interpreted are to 
 decide the question, and those who reject them are told 
 to stand back and consider themselves infidels if not 
 Atheists. We want to turn the flank of the class who 
 rather exult in the phrase " Agnostic," forgetting as they 
 do that but for certain types of Gnosticism among the 
 orthodox, their phrase would lose all its point. But for 
 the recoil against the peremptory conclusions of Augus- 
 tinian theology shutting up the whole of man's destiny 
 to the few short years of his spiritual infancy on earth, 
 there would have been no room for Agnosticism. To 
 say that a man is indifferent, and sneers at the three tre- 
 mendous verities which awoke Kant out of his sleep of 
 dogmatism, the law of duty or personal lawgiver, and our 
 accountability to Him here or hereafter, would be for a 
 man to write himself down a fool. ]N"o man in his heart 
 of hearts ever went so far as that, however he may 
 brazen out his infidelity, more to shock simple souls 
 than really to deceive those who detect the false note in 
 Iconoclasm of this kind. Let us say, and say it with 
 satisfaction, that the declining tone of dogmatism of the 
 old type brings with it a corresponding decline of that 
 contemptuous tone which regards all religions alike as 
 mere survivals, the prolonging into an historical age 
 of a class of conceptions which went out with the first 
 dawnings of a conception of the reign of law. 
 
1 70 Not to Pre7iieditaie. 
 
 How to clear true religion from these superfetations 
 which we have described as afterthoughts, is not so easy as 
 it is to denounce them. But it is something to have traced 
 them to tlieir root in certain misconceptions of God and 
 man, dualism and asceticism, the Persian and Hindu dis- 
 tortions of what God is in Himself, and the relations 
 of spirit to matter, — these are the prolific source of all 
 the corruptions of Christianity. That they entered in 
 together, and about the fourth century, has never been 
 disputed ; but the working out of the two has been some- 
 what different according as we turn from East to West. 
 In the East, where asceticism ran to extremes even more 
 revolting than in the West, it resulted in that petrifaction 
 of faith in mere orthoxody which we recognise as the 
 true note of the East. On the other hand, the West, 
 if less extravagantly ascetic, only escaped this error to 
 fall into a worse. It failed to purge the conception of 
 God from that dualism which Augustine shook off in 
 name only, to return to it in a disguised form. Augus- 
 tiuian dualism was no longer like that of Manes, two 
 distinct deities struggling together. The scission now 
 was in the attributes themselves of the Divine Being. 
 His justice and love were turned from abstractions into 
 concrete entities by the Eealists, who make theology. 
 God's good will to men, which none disputed, was barred 
 by the prior demands of justice. There was thus a vari- 
 ance between the very perfections of God, a dead-lock, so 
 to speak, in His administration, until by a covenant of the 
 Trinity, which approaches perilously near Tritheism, the 
 Son and Spirit covenanted with the Eternal Father to 
 cancel the claims of justice by a satisfaction and equival- 
 ence of punishment. Out of tliis grew, as we know, tlie 
 whole Latin theory of the atonement so foreign to the 
 East, that we are not aware of a single theolosjian of the 
 
Not to Premeditate. 1 7 1 
 
 East who lias ever approached the subject from the 
 Anselmian point of view. To the East the theory of 
 satisfaction suggested compensation to Satan, the slave- 
 holder, before the ransom of the sinner was complete. 
 But the East never intruded into the council-chamber of 
 the Most High, there to view His attributes of mercy and 
 justice at variance, and to ask itself the way in which 
 the Father's wrath against sin could be slaked by the 
 sword of justice being plunged into the heart of His own 
 dear Son. "Awake, sword, against my shepherd, 
 against the man that is my fellow," was uncritically 
 taken from one of the old prophets to mean, that Deity 
 could be satisfied with nothing less than the sacrifice of 
 the Shepherd who was God's fellow and equal. Exegesis 
 of this kind carries its own refutation, and it would lead 
 us into a new field if we were to turn aside to discuss it. 
 Here we confine ourselves to the single remark that East 
 and West differed in nothing so much as their distinct 
 senses of the term theology. To the theology of the 
 West such discussions as distracted the East, the mode 
 of the incarnation, and as to whether the Divine will 
 replaced the human or merely energised it, the Mono- 
 thelite and Duothelite controversies were, so to speak, 
 non-existent. Nestorian and Eutychian controversies 
 ruffled not the hard metallic temper of the Latin mind. 
 Here we see the advantage of their non-metaphysical, 
 unpsychological turn of thought. But reverse the picture 
 — regard man as part of a scheme of the Divine govern- 
 ment, as a moral agent and a defaulter to the law of 
 duty — then theology in the West opens up fields of con- 
 troversy which the East regards with blank indifference. 
 Pelagian and Augustinian are to the West battle-cries, the 
 same as ISTestorian and Eutychian are to the East. 
 
 As loni]' as w^e rerard these contrasts with a mere 
 
1 7 2 Not to Premeditate. 
 
 critical eye, we may be disposed to say a plague on both 
 your houses. We may regard both as the mere scuffling 
 of kites and crows. In this sense the history of theology 
 is the history of battles in the air, or rather of school 
 metaphysics, all the more absurd because not fought out 
 in the schools, but brought into pulpits to disturb the 
 thoughts and perplex the minds of simple laymen. But 
 is tliis a fair account of the whole matter ? May we set 
 aside Homoousion and Homoiousion alike with a solemn 
 sneer as that of Gibbon ? Is tlie wliole subject of grace 
 and its relation to nature a, niere logomachy of two 
 sophistical monks, Augustine and Pelagius ? 
 
 Such a temper is unfair, and only too common among 
 those who stamp on dogmatism with dogmatism. It is 
 no use reviling theology, much less for its using dogmatic 
 terms for its definitions. Every ho^a, it has been well 
 said, is a ho^fxa in the making. The subjective element 
 of private opinion, inherent in the aoristic form Sofa, is 
 eliminated in the preterperfect form. What was a Doxa 
 grows soon after — too soon — into a dogma ; and as soon 
 as this transformation occurs, then bei:jins the acre of 
 heterodoxy, then of heresy, last of schism and of ex- 
 communication. All these results of religious rationalising 
 grow with accelerating force as time goes on, and as men 
 recede farther and farther from the fountainhead of truth. 
 There is no check to the evil but one, to insist on what 
 are and what are not afterthoughts. By bringing back 
 theology, as we have seen, to the strict sense of the term, 
 the character of God in His dealings with men, some 
 check may be set to afterthinking. The doctrines of 
 theology, passed through a prism, break into many hues, 
 and as we see God through one of these or the other, do 
 we fail to see Him in the white light of His perfection. 
 The East failed in this way when it lost itself in Nestorian 
 
Not to Premeditate. i ^i^ 
 
 and Eutycliian subtleties, against which the sublime 
 Monotheism of Islam rose and swept it away as with a 
 blast of Divine displeasure. Equally so the West failed 
 when the Pelagian and Augustinian doctors tore nature 
 and grace asunder, as if nature without grace or grace 
 without nature were not as unmeaning as the Divine or 
 human in Christ, apart from their union. Here we trace 
 in both cases the dividing line between a theology of 
 forethoughts and of afterthoughts. After Athanasius in 
 the East, and after Augustine in the West, it lost itself 
 in a quagmire of subtleties, and the only safe path for the 
 theology of the future is to dissolve continuity by cutting 
 out of the page of its record, and treating as a great 
 dismal swamp, the ages after Nice almost down to the 
 present. The conclusion sounds Philistine to some. 
 They say this is nothing else than the position of the old 
 Bible Protestant of the seventeenth century. Bat this 
 is precisely what it is not, although the Bible Protestant, 
 ignorant of his own ignorance, assumes that it is so. He 
 is Pauline, as he supposes he is, because he stands true 
 to the teachings of Luther and Calvin ; he is only so in 
 so far as early Protestantism was a true transcript of 
 Pauline theology. But we have wasted words, unless 
 we have shown cause for treating Augustinian with the 
 same distrust as we do the entire post-Athanasian theology 
 of the East. The dividing line between what are and 
 what are not afterthoughts begins in the tenth century, 
 and only deepens with the division of East and West, 
 and the after division of the West into Eeformed and 
 Unreformed Churches. To repair these afterthoughts by 
 agreeing to sink some of them while retaining others, is 
 impossible — what is written is written — what is rent is 
 the seamless robe of Christ, which is not to be patched up 
 by hollow compromises. But it is something to know the 
 
1 74 Not to Premeditate. 
 
 mistakes of the past. It sets us on the right track to 
 amend them, and so we are learning the right road of 
 reunion in our day. A sweeter, more truly catholic, 
 more conciliatory theology is growing up around us. 
 Humanitarianism is not a name now of hate and fear 
 among theologians. Piationalism is now admitted to 
 liave taken its beginnings, first, among the orthodox, then 
 to spread outwards into heterodox circles. Agnostics 
 are admitted to be the illegitimate offspring of Gnostic 
 parents ; there are heresies outside the Cliurch regarded 
 as truths which we failed to take the bearings of. In a 
 word, the age of polemics has passed away with that of 
 eirenics, and so a clear space is thus being made where 
 we may ground our arms, proclaim a truce, and mark 
 a new departure to unity, in the sincere endeavour to 
 hold the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. 
 " Even so, Lord, hasten it in its time. Surely I come 
 quickly. Even so. Lord Jesus, coine quickly. Amen." 
 
CHAPTEK VII. 
 
 AUGUSTINE AND HIS SYSTEM. 
 
 It is not enough to point out the divergence between 
 Paulinism and Augustinianism, unless we go on to trace 
 the error to its true source in an entire misunderstanding 
 of the purpose of the apostle's teaching. It has been 
 often remarked that the letter of Pauline teaching seems 
 to support the predestinarian system which Augustine 
 hrst and Calvin afterwards laid stress on. But the 
 source of this mistake has not been made quite so clear 
 as it should be. It seems to have sprung from honest 
 ignorance of the Pauline standpoint. The apostle set 
 forth predestinarianism, not as an absolute, but only as 
 a relative truth, and solely with a controversial purpose. 
 What he had in his mind was to beat down the immoral 
 predestinarianism of his countrymen. The Israel after 
 the flesh maintained that God was bound by His promises 
 given to the elect, and so their salvation was sealed 
 and secure, no matter how evil their lives were. The 
 Gentiles, on the other hand, were non-elect and reprobate, 
 and the apostle had to beat down this presumptuous 
 dogma, as he does in Romans iii. and ix. God must be 
 true, though every man were a liar. The apostle thus 
 wrests this weapon of predestinarianism out of their 
 hands, and turns it against them. He is more Calvinist 
 
 175 
 
1 76 Align si ine and his System. 
 
 than Calvin, more Angiistinian than Augustine, but with 
 a very different aim in view than that of these doctors 
 of a theological determinism as lurid as the teachings 
 of modern pessimism. The tendency of tlie apostle's 
 teaching is the very opposite to tliis narrow creed of 
 despair. It is, that God has included all in unbelief, 
 in order that He may have mercy on alL It is a 
 Christian adaptation of the teaching of Hosea, that Ammi 
 is Lo-ammi, and Euhamah is Lo-ruharaah. He will 
 call them His people who were not His people, and will 
 have mercy on those on whom He had not mercy. This 
 casting off of the Jew was to become the riches of the 
 Gentiles. Here w^e may pause to note the deep contrast 
 between Pauline predestination and that of those later 
 doctors, who took the letter but missed tlie spirit of his 
 teaching — by and by He might have mercy on all. At 
 this point, when Jew and Gentile have been alternately 
 elect and alternately reprobate, leading up to a universal 
 salvation wide as the wide world, he can contain himself 
 no longer. He bursts out into a rapture of praise, and 
 " silent as on a peak of Darien " he looks out on this 
 boundless ocean of God's love, and exclaims. Oh altitiido. 
 But it is wdien we turn to the Epistle to the Ephesians 
 that we get the true key to the Pauline sense of pre- 
 destination. It is here when we read that we begin to 
 understand His knowledge in the mystery of Christ, — 
 a knowledge, let us add, in which this less than the least 
 of all saints surpassed all the older disciples. The 
 Twelve were not mere narrow Judaisers ; it was with 
 no reserve on that disciplina arcani, which is polite for 
 duplicity, that they gave the right hand of fellowship 
 to Paul and Barnabas ; but they never reached the same 
 spiritual elevation as the apostle who, if younger in 
 Christ, surpassed them all in spiritual insight into this 
 
Atigitstine and his System. 1 7 7 
 
 mystery of the Gentiles being fellow-heirs, and one body 
 in Christ. They went as far as this, that the Gentiles 
 should be admitted into full fellowship, and on their 
 own terms released from observing the mere ceremonial 
 precepts of Mosaism. But, after all, it was admission 
 only by a back door. It was the overflow of God's 
 grace — crumbs from a rich man's table — that the Gentiles 
 were entitled to ; but they had a younger son's portion, 
 never the birthright and blessing of the elder. This 
 doling out God's mercies at the door of the synagogue 
 did not content Paul as the apostle of the Gentiles. 
 He magnified his office ; he proclaimed that the admission 
 of the Gentiles was no mere '' afterthought " of God, a 
 grace of superfluity. It was the eternal purpose of the 
 eternal God. As the Lamb had been slain from the 
 foundation of the world — so the Gentiles had been 
 " predestinated " quite as much as the elect of Israel. 
 Peter could address the Diaspora as elect, according to 
 the foreknowledge of God the Father; and Paul is 
 quite as emphatic as to the predestinating purpose of 
 God towards the Gentiles. 
 
 This is the keynote to the predestinarian teaching of 
 the Apostle Paul. It has no meaning unless to convince 
 the Jews that there was no difference in this respect 
 between Jew and Gentile. Now, every writer, as we 
 know, must be taken in the sense that he sets out with. 
 Unless we look at the subject from his own point of view, 
 we are sure to miss his meaning. His statements are 
 ad hoc, and to be taken no farther. The predestinarianism 
 of later theology was an "afterthought" which would 
 have staggered the apostle, and made him wonder how 
 men could have wrested his words to get out of them so 
 partial a sense of God's ultimate purpose. We may go 
 on farther to say, that by anticipation he almost excludes 
 
 M 
 
1 78 A2ig2isti?ie and his System. 
 
 the room for such an inference as that which Augustine 
 and Calvin drew from his teaching. Instead of cutting 
 the human race into two sections, — a small remnant of 
 elect and saved souls, and a mass of rejected reprobates 
 foredoomed in Adam's transgression and afterwards doomed 
 through their actual sins, — he regards the race as drawing 
 its first unity and last destiny from Christ ; it is a case 
 of a universal ruin met by a universal redemption. The 
 only difference that he makes between the two universals 
 is that, if possible, the race has gained in Christ more 
 than it lost in Adam, and that not intensively only, as 
 the old school hold, but extensively as well. It is not 
 the case that the many are lost and the few saved, as 
 Augustine taught, but the many or the massa perditionis 
 becomes the many or multitude that no man can number, 
 who stand before the throne all washed white in the 
 blood of the Lamb. 
 
 The dark shadow of Augustine and Calvin's limitation 
 of God's love will never be rolled away till tlie Church 
 goes back to the apostle's own teaching, and takes his pre- 
 destinarian phrases in their true sense. It is not an absolute 
 transcendent truth, but a truth adversative to the narrow 
 construction of the Jew — the elder ])rother who grudges 
 the goodwill of the Father to the younger and prodigal 
 son. Predestination, election, effectual calHng, redemption, 
 and final salvation — these are the same five points over 
 which the elect Israel wrested, as later divines do, on the 
 five points of the quinquarticular covenant and charter. 
 These the apostle snatclies out of their liands and passes 
 them on to the Gentiles. It is a sorry abuse of language, 
 when later theologians, repeating this Jewish mistake, also 
 set up five points again by which to cut off the mass of 
 the Gentiles and to disinherit them over again. More 
 Jewish than the Jew^ is our verdict, then, on this theology 
 
Augustine and his System. i 79 
 
 of afterthoughts ; and till this miserable perversion of 
 Paulinism, in which the letter has killed the spirit, is 
 quite got rid of, we shall never read the Pauline Epistles 
 aright. Tliese letters are, indeed, hard to be understood, 
 and ignorant and unstable men wrest them as they do 
 other scriptures ; but who is to blame for this so mucii 
 as our interpreters, who, microscope in hand, discuss 
 datives and aorists, but seem blind to the broad bands 
 of light which play over the whole page like sunshine on 
 a silver sea ? The Church which, with some conspicuous 
 exceptions, has so twisted Paulinism into a groove of par- 
 ticularism, must repair her own mistakes, and get back as 
 best she can to true Paulinism. But this she never can 
 do until she has made a clean sweep, not of Calvin only, 
 but Augustine as well. The compromises of the school 
 of minute criticism will never help us to roll away the 
 reproach on theology, that it has made a yoke heavy 
 which was meant to be light, and so has driven from 
 Christ souls whom He meant to draw. Predestination is 
 a word which seen in one light is a cloud and a darkness ; 
 it becomes a pillar of lire when we get behind instead of 
 before it, and so learn that it beckons us on to our 
 Father's home out of the Egypt of bondage to sin and 
 self. 
 
 The lesson, then, which '* Augustinian afterthoughts " 
 point to should never be lost to the Church. Truth 
 distorted is no longer felt to be truth at all, but that 
 mixture of a lie which repels conscience and raises a 
 revulsion against the truth as it is in Jesus. It is a 
 sad fact that many in their aversion to Augustinian 
 narrowness include some of the Apostle Paul's writings, 
 especially the three chapters in the Epistle to the 
 Ephesians, in which he dwells on an eternal purpose of 
 God which has been mistaken for predestination in the 
 
1 80 AtLgitstine and his System. 
 
 later adulterated sense of the term. It is known that 
 Swedenborg conceived an intense aversion to Pauline 
 teaching, because he was so uncritical as to confound 
 Paulinism with later forms of Lutheran ism. Finding 
 imputed righteousness taught in Sweden, and assuming 
 (which he had no right to do) that this must be Pauline 
 because some kind of imputation is referred to in the 
 fourth chapter to the Eomans, Swedenborg went so far 
 as to reject Paulinism because he rejected Lutheranism. 
 Augustine and Calvin in the same way have brought up 
 an evil report on Paulinism which it does not fairly 
 deserve. Criticism is worth very little if it cannot rescue 
 the blessed apostle's teachings from such debased after- 
 thoughts as those of the Determinist doctors of later 
 Christendom. Alas ! how little our ordinary exegetical 
 criticism has done to help us on to a higher standpoint, 
 we may see from the prejudice still felt against Pauline 
 predestination on account of its seeming to agree, verbally 
 at least, with the narrow notion of the election of a small 
 remnant, and of the reprobation of the many of later 
 theology ! To read the apostle as he should be read, and 
 to see that he is a Jew among Jews, beating down their 
 dogma by a counter dogma of Gentile race election, this 
 is what criticism is bound to give us. The Partikd-lehre 
 of Hartung and the minute critics may be useful in its 
 way, — we are the last to make little of it, — but the broad 
 comprehensive view of Paulinism as a whole, this is the 
 true Augustinian counterblast, and till it has been done, 
 as it will be some day, and on a scale worthy of the sub- 
 ject, we must continue to suffer from these unauthorised 
 glosses on the apostle. It is this reading into St. Paul 
 a particularism he never meant to teach, which has led 
 to that revolt which in America is described as univer- 
 salism. Like many American reactions, it is loose and 
 
Attgustine and his System. 1 8 1 
 
 nncritical ; it is handled often in a sensational way which 
 revolts sober minds. This drives timid natures back into 
 a counter-reaction in which they cling close to the skirts 
 of so-called Catholic teaching ; and as Augustine is facile 
 ;princeps among Catholic doctors, this free handling of 
 Augustinianism seems to them only another symptom of 
 the dissoluteness of an age wliich has broken from its 
 moorings and is adrift on a sea of doubt. 
 
 Again, then, let us raise the note of true reform by 
 getting back into a pre-Augustinian stratum of theology. 
 To the fresh feelings of the apostle the wonder of God's 
 grace as seen in His electing the Gentiles and predestin- 
 ating them in love to full fellowship of privilege with 
 the Jew, this was a subject of adoring joy. Could we see 
 predestinarianism in that light, instead of its seeming a 
 hard saying, a Jiorribile decretiim, it would be the new 
 wine of the kingdom, the Saviour's joy in bringing many 
 sons unto glory. That dreadful particularism, which was 
 the nightmare of the Church in a sacerdotal form before 
 the Keformation, and in a non-sacerdotal form since that 
 so-called reform which so lamentably came short, would 
 then melt off, and we should see the sun as when the 
 morning mists disperse. Anglicans, Catholics, Calvinists, 
 all shiver alike under the cold shade of Augustinianism ; 
 they all alike, but for this theological taskmaster, the 
 durus pater of particularism, would go on to see the 
 educational view of God's covenant purposes, and we 
 should hear no more of probation in this life as the be- 
 all and end-all of theology in its two schools, the Eeformed 
 and the Unreformed, which divide Christendom. 
 
 The strange part of all this confusion in the popular 
 theology is, that the critical few who know better do not 
 step forward and denounce this base determinism, by 
 showing that it has no warrant either in God's word or 
 
1 82 August ine and his System, 
 
 even in Catholic antiquity down to Augustine. It is the 
 outgrowth of a spasm of terrorism which afflicted man- 
 kind about the fifth century, when, at the break-up of 
 the Western empire, men's hearts were failing them for 
 fear, and the dies irm seems to have rung a dirge in 
 Church and empire alike. The Flagellants and the Black 
 Death processions of the fourteenth century have left 
 their mark in history ; but we forget that when Augus- 
 tine built up his narrow scheme of particularism, based 
 on the eo^tra ccclesiam nulla salus dogma, the human 
 mind had sunk to its nadir of intellectual decline. The 
 ascetic theory had taken the virile temper out of theology. 
 Greek philosophy, alike with Eoman law, it had closed 
 their schools, and had become the tradition of a dead past. 
 The age w^as folding itself up for the long chrysalis-sleep 
 of the seven centuries from Augustine to Dante, — a sleep 
 so deep, though not quite dreamless, that we may pass 
 it over like that legend of the Sleepers of Ephesus. To 
 take our type of theology, then, from its most tainted 
 source, as we hold Augustine's age to be, is no mark of 
 criticism, but the reverse. How long we have submitted 
 to this, and for what ignoble reasons, it is unnecessary 
 here to repeat. Scholarly men, who have long ago 
 shaken off the yoke of traditionalism, do not know and 
 do not seem to feel for those who cling to Anglican or 
 Calvinist theology, under fear that without these guides 
 they would lose touch of tlie apostle. Even so-called 
 Bible Christians, ignorant of their having read into I'aul 
 much that they have read out of him, go on confirming 
 this false traditionalism. Out of all this confusion 
 nothinfT but confusion worse confounded can emerge. 
 There is " no night but of ignorance ; " and this double 
 night of ages and of her " night's daughter, ignorance," has 
 gathered thick around the Church, chiefly resulting from 
 
A ng us tine and k is Sy stern, 1 8 3 
 
 its superstitious reverence for one great name. " The 
 whole world is Jansenist," was once said by a Jesuit 
 opponent ; and as he added sarcastically, without knowing 
 why or wherefore, the same unreasoning fit of Augustine 
 worship is repeated as in the Jesuit-Jansenist scuffle 
 of the Gallican Church. Five propositions which Bishop 
 Jansen had picked out of Augustine's writings are con- 
 demned in Jansen, but declared not to be in Augustine. 
 The poor Jansenists pleaded in reply that, as a matter of 
 fact, these five points were all verbatim taken out of the 
 writings of the African saint. But no, the Jesuits urged 
 in reply, Augustine was a saint, and for this reason no 
 such taint of heresy could be supposed to come from so 
 saintly a source. Facts were against this Jesuit gloss ; 
 but so much the worse for the facts. The Pope's infalli- 
 bility scarcely extends to making the facts, as the Jansenists 
 urged ; but all the same the Jesuits triumphed, and the 
 weaker went to the wall. All the wit of Pascal, and all 
 the piety of the Port Eoyalists, could not make the Pope 
 budge from the absurd position, that what was heresy in 
 the Bishop of Ypres was only orthodoxy in the Bishop of 
 Hippo. Circumstances, we all know, alter cases, and so 
 it has fared with Augustine more than once. He has 
 escaped criticism, and, like Manlius in sight of the 
 capitol, it has been impossible to censure him. For his 
 extraordinary merits as the great sacerdotalist of one 
 school and the great pietist of another, he has wrung abso- 
 lution from both sects. Anglicans cannot, or rather will 
 not, see his predestinarianism, and Calvinists do not pre- 
 tend to see his sacramentalism ; and so he is wafted off, 
 as on a net of swans' wings, high out of the reach of 
 criticism, like that sweet gossamer spirit in Eosetti's 
 picture, which is seen as a sort of exhalation of earth 
 above and beyond all criticism. 
 
184 Augustine and his System, 
 
 But the end of all this sentimentality is a stern 
 demand of history to pass jud^^ment on traditions which 
 do not bear the light of common day. A gospel which 
 is no gospel, but only a provision for a few out of many 
 who are in a state of probation apparently, but in reality 
 hanging like miners on a chain over the pit's mouth, — 
 this conception will not conquer the world or reach and 
 pierce the heart of humanity. That God so loved the 
 world that He sent His Son to save only the elect few, 
 this is not exactly the message to melt the heart and 
 subdue the stubborn will. It wants a more powerful 
 magnet than this appeal to the most subtle form of self- 
 interest. Love which is death to self does not understand 
 such a gospel. " My sheep hear my voice." They know 
 self-sacrificing and disinterested love — the love that would 
 die for a friend — the love which in losing its life finds it. 
 This is not the soul-saving gospel of provisions and plans 
 all based on the eudeemonism of popular theology, whose 
 keynote is to make the best of both worlds, and whose 
 latter-day prophets are those popular preachers whom 
 the world has begun to turn from with something more 
 than Carlylese contempt. 
 
 A reaction has set in; but where is it drifting us on to, 
 unless to the sands of a shallow Deism, whether of the 
 "Unitarian or other defective drafts of the mind of Christ. 
 The doctrine of sin as selfhood is overlooked, on account 
 of the horrible distortion describing sin as an infinite 
 offence against an infinite Being, and so deserving an 
 infinite punishment. No one seemed to see that such a 
 statement of sin, as qualified by the Being sinned against, 
 cuts the other way. It is quite as certain that sin is 
 finite because the act of a finite being. More than that, 
 we define sin as the outcome of man's emptiness and lack 
 of all true centre of being. Sin, as such, is as the chaff 
 
A ugustine and h is System . 185 
 
 which the wind drives away, or, if collected at all, it is 
 to be burnt up once for all in an unquenchable fire. 
 This the popular Augustinianism failed to teach, and so 
 has driven men to other teachers than Christ. It set up 
 a crude terrorism, and threw the mind off its balance by 
 appeals to flee from the wrath to come, never caring to 
 define whether this wrath were temporal or eternal, either 
 a judgment on the Jews of the Baptist's day, or the judg- 
 ment of the last great day of assize. It was under the 
 weight of one strong personality that these strange 
 distortions of Christ's original message took permanent 
 form, and at last were fixed as the standard theology, at 
 first of the West, and finally of the East as well. 
 
 It is not easy to measure the slow encroachments of 
 error on truth. To explain the rise of adulterated 
 Christianity, we must go into history much more critically 
 than the majority of Church historians do. It is easy, 
 on the pragmatic side, to draw up lists of schisms and 
 heresies, to fix their date and name their author. But 
 this kind of pragmatism helps us but a little way when 
 all is said : truth and error do not separate like two 
 compounds not in chemical union, one of which is subli- 
 mated and the other precipitated. If it were so, the 
 Christianity of our day would be apostolic and primitive; 
 and there are ingenuous minds, who have not broken the 
 shell of their dogmatism, who dream that it is so. But 
 such a sancta swiplicitas does not become the true student, 
 who knows that life is not quite the same as a child's 
 drawing on a transparent slate — a tame copy of a tame 
 pattern behind. Many things happen with or without 
 God's approval, though certainly not without His appoint- 
 ment. Whether .we own to the phrase " evolution " as 
 adequate to explain the laws of history, much more of 
 Church history, in any case all will admit that the 
 
1 86 Azigustine and his System. 
 
 Christian Church of to-day has taken shapes and developed 
 tendencies which seem foreign to what its founder designed 
 it to be. By the two parables of the Mustard Seed and 
 the Leaven, Christ marked out the two sides or aspects 
 of His truth — its external growth from the least to the 
 greatest, and its internal action on society at large — as 
 setting up a ferment, and making a new lump out of the 
 nnkneaded mass of the old humanity. With these two 
 symbols in view, we may gauge what the gospel was 
 designed to be and to do. It was to grow into a great 
 outward society — the tree of the Church ; but it was 
 also to do a work on secular society, as such, correspond- 
 ing to the action of leaven on flour. 
 
 The history of Christianity has been the carrying out 
 of these two distinct and contrasted conceptions ; but 
 how imperfectly, and under what drawbacks ! The seed, 
 least of all seeds, has become a mighty tree ; but then 
 the birds of the air have lodged in the branches, and 
 there, as from a perch, ungodly ambitions and pretensions 
 to secular sovereignty have been screamed out from 
 priestly lips. The leaven has leavened, it is true, the 
 lump of the old pagan world ; but the sad result has 
 been that the reagent itself, the gospel leaven, has been 
 reacted on, and if the faith has built up a philosophy of 
 its own, that philosophy in its turn has moulded our faith 
 into types distinct from the original. So much has this 
 been the case, that some devout critics have turned the 
 parable right round, and interpreted the leaven as the 
 evil elements of the old heathenism which mixed with 
 the gospel, instead of the new elements of Divine truth 
 which were designed to infuse the old with a new spirit. 
 
 The truth probably is that both interpretations are 
 correct. The gospel has leavened society for good ; but 
 then, on the other hand, society has leavened the gospel 
 
Augjistine and his System. 187 
 
 for evil. There is no reaction without a reagent ; but, on 
 the other hand, the reaction so destroys the reagent, that 
 it passes by a kind of sea change into something rare and 
 strange. Church historians, too often mere apologists, with 
 too much of the advocate, too little of the judge, overlook 
 all this. They are often uncritical in the last degree, and 
 drop their judgment when they have to deal with a "saint," 
 or one who passes for such. The injustice to Origen, for 
 instance, who happens to pass down unstarred, un- 
 decorated, into the page of Church history, is only 
 surpassed by injustice in the opposite extreme to Augus- 
 tine, w4iom all sections of the Church compete for as 
 their patron " saint." The one is too little of a saint, 
 and the other too saintly by far. It is too late to re- 
 write Church history, or appeal for a rehearsing in both 
 cases ; but loyalty to truth compels us to say that all the 
 mistakes of Origen were the mistakes of callow youth. 
 His zealotry for sanctity by cutting off one of the external 
 occasions for sin, marked the immature Christian. That 
 he saw his mistake in later years is admitted by all, who 
 fail to remark that he never fell into that very fault too 
 common to the ascetic type of character, harsh uncharit- 
 able judgments of others. He w^as gentle even to the 
 ungentle, and certainly did not render back railing for 
 railing, as Jerome, Epiphanius, and other clerical scolds 
 were in the habit of doing. But when we turn to Augus- 
 tine, we meet with a character strangely contrasted with 
 that of Origen. Both have need to exclaim, "Oh, remember 
 not the sins of my youth ! " and both purged these youth- 
 ful follies in his own characteristic way. Origen matured 
 into the student and devout thinker, "in labours more 
 abundant," and, we may add, " in stripes above measure." 
 He was Pauline in his width of sympathy and in his 
 grasp of God's educational purpose in history. He saw 
 
1 88 Augustine and his System, 
 
 \\\\X\ the apostle that the law was the pedagogue, and he 
 also classed Plato with Moses as one of the preparations 
 for the gospel. But he was also Pauline in his stirring 
 up the enmity of tlie Judaisers of his day. He was the 
 " mark for episcopal envy," and especially at the time when 
 the episcopate was beginning to display that prelatical 
 temper, the only issue of which must be the Papacy. No 
 sound thinker, who can see effects or their causes, can 
 withhold sympathy from Origen as the last type of that 
 noble Alexandrian theology of which we may say in a 
 memorable Butler phrase, " If it had the might as it has 
 the right, it would have conquered the world." 
 
 Now, contrast with this the saintly Bishop of Hippo. 
 All are agreed as " to the sins of his youth," but too 
 many have stepped unguardedly into the sophism, " The 
 greater the sinner, the greater the saint." If this is spoken 
 without reserve, it may become more than a sophism — 
 there may be the serpent's hiss in it. There are sins which 
 are (pdaprcKo^; tmv rjdcov, so destructive of the basis of 
 character which is truth, that if repentance is possible, it 
 is the repentance of a man who has strained his spine, or 
 who limps to the grave, like Jacob the supplanter. There 
 are too many signs that Augustine passed out of the 
 sinner into the saint class under stress of one of those 
 sudden conversions which the Christian Church has 
 accepted as normal, because it is assumed that they 
 are cases in which the Apostle St. Paul was a " pattern 
 to them tliat should hereafter believe." We must not 
 turn aside to discuss St. Paul's conversion ; all we wish to 
 insist on here is that it does not justify, or indeed throw 
 any light on, that mischievous sophism, " The greater the 
 sinner, the greater the saint." In the case of Saul of 
 Tarsus, it was the sudden discovery of one who had 
 walked in all crood conscience before God, that he 
 
Augustine and his System. 189 
 
 had made a huge mistake, and had been kicking against 
 the pricks. Jesus of Nazareth, whom he had regarded 
 as the ringleader of a pestilent sect, was the Lord of 
 glory. It was sudden conversion to learn that this 
 Jesus of Nazareth was the Lord's Christ, and so far Saul 
 of Tarsus was suddenly turned from darkness to light. 
 In all other details his spiritual education follows the 
 law of growth, extending over years, and was not a 
 whit more precipitate than any of the other apostles'. On 
 the contrary, measured by lapse of years, he was less of 
 an eKTpwjjia, one whom we should call an untimely birth, 
 than any of the rest of the apostles of the circumcision. 
 But let that pass. 
 
 Turning to the case of Augustine's conversion, whose 
 genuineness we have not a thought of throwing a sus- 
 picion on, it has features in sharp contrast with that of 
 St. Paul. It lacks, we are compelled to say, the same 
 inner harmony. It has a jerky, impulsive air of a man 
 torn between conflicting emotions, the slave of his sen- 
 suality, the most ape-like of sins, yet with a hearty desire 
 to escape and be free. The majestic calm of the Catholic 
 Church under such a ruler as Ambrose, its order, its self- 
 consistency, its unbroken antiquity, its firm front to a 
 rabble of warring outside sects seething in the 'filth of 
 Eastern philosophies and mythologies, now out of date — 
 all this brought him to the crisis in which the tolle lege 
 echo of boys chanting seemed like a voice from heaven. 
 His conversion, in a word, has a certain mystical element, 
 not unlike that of Colonel Gardiner and other men of 
 pleasure, who learn the Byron lesson that the "soul begirt 
 with guilty woes, is like the scorpion girt by fire." That 
 these men find in. the crucified Jesus the very death they 
 desire to the dominion of lust, is, we know, a glad truth, 
 and we magnify the grace of God which can snatch them 
 
190 Au^tistme and his System. 
 
 out of the fire, hating even the garment spotted by the 
 flesh. 
 
 But we liave to note in each case their after career, 
 to see that they bring forth fruits meet for repentance. 
 Their very way of extricating themselves from the mire 
 of their old evil acts has to be jealously watched. A¥e 
 have never, for instance, understood the indifferent way 
 in which Augustine flung off that concubine, the mother 
 of liis dear boy Adeodatus, and who, to all purposes and 
 in God's sight, who hates putting away, was his lawful 
 wife. The easy morality of the age may have condoned 
 it, and a mother's fondness may have seen no sin in his 
 annullinc; this left-handed marria^jje to contract one with 
 an honourable maiden of his own class in Milan. So 
 much of morality is conventional, that the " immutable " 
 element, which is not for " an age, but for all time," is in 
 danger of being overlooked even in saintly circles. But 
 we must add that Church historians have been lax to a 
 degree in slipping over this transition stage of Augus- 
 tine's life, and never even hinting that eternal and 
 immutable morality calls for some sterner judgment than 
 theirs on such lax conduct. What became of his cast- 
 off wife, the motlier of his dear boy, not a hint is given. 
 If sent back to Carthage, flung off into the whirlpool of 
 unfortunates in that city of sin, we are sorry for the 
 saint's memory. One so effusive as to his own secret 
 thoughts and private vices, which he castigated Eousseau- 
 like in public, might have said something on the subject. 
 The world lias not spared Bousseau for canting about 
 virtue while casting his children off to sink or swim in 
 a Foundling Hospital. Augustine was not such an un- 
 natural father. Adeodatus was his acknowledged son, 
 and shared his after life as a ccienobite in Tagaste and at 
 Hippo. But what of her, the mother, but unacknow- 
 
Augustine and his System. 191 
 
 ledged wife, who was " torn from his side as a hindrance 
 to my marriage ; my heart, which clave unto her, was 
 also torn and bleeding" ? Of her he adds {Conf. vi. 15), 
 " she returned to Africa vowing unto thee never to know 
 any other man, leaving with me my son by her. But 
 unhappy I, who could not imitate a very woman, im- 
 patient of delay, inasmuch as not till after two years 
 was I to obtain her word, not so much being a lover of 
 marriage as a slave to lust, procured another." Is it 
 strange that he adds that all this incontinence left its 
 sting in his character ? " Nor was that my wound 
 cured which had been made by the cutting away of the 
 former, but after inflammation and most acute pain it 
 mollified, and my pains became benumbed, and more 
 desperate." 
 
 The saint's own admission is more manly, and nearer 
 the mark, than that of his too indulgent biographers. 
 Futrescebat et quasi frigidius seel eiesperatius dolebat — his 
 wounds were benumbed, but more desperate. So the 
 Psalmist speaks of sensual sins — sin probably the same 
 type of intemperate lust — " My wounds stink, and are 
 corrupt through my foolishness." But the worst evil of 
 sensual indulgence lies behind, " Oh, it hardens all within, 
 and petrifies the feeling." This is the real sting of sin. 
 It may be repented of, the lust may be subdued, but the 
 unclean spirit has been known to return with seven other 
 spirits more wicked than the first. So it is often with 
 these sudden changes of sinners into saints. They 
 become ascetics, and turn that same severity on others 
 with which they stamped out their own lusts. In this 
 Augustine is contrasted with Origen, who was never the 
 slave to violent sin, and so his life was " sjentle, and the 
 elements so mixed, that nature might stand up and say, 
 That was a man." Augustine, on the other hand, grew 
 
192 Angles tine and his System. 
 
 severer in liis asceticism as Origen became gentler. He 
 sold all liis possessions at Tagaste, and so literally cast 
 himself on God. Happily for him, he fell in with the 
 coeuobite type, and so escaped the hermit folly, then at 
 its height in the far East, but which never penetrated to 
 the West till two centuries later, when Benedict of 
 Nursia began to outrage nature by intruding as a 
 " solitary " into her solitudes. As for Augustine, there 
 was enough Eoman good sense left in the fourth century 
 to save the West from the folly of Eastern " anchorets." 
 To what a degraded level these hermits brought down 
 the religion of the Eastern Church in the fifth and 
 sixth centuries, is known to history, though passed over 
 far too indulgently by Church historians, afraid to be 
 thought " illiberal " in judging the dead past. 
 
 But though Augustine was no monk, in the hermit 
 sense of the term, he was a coenobite, and with all the 
 faults of his class emphasised in his case by his episcopal 
 dignity. A prelate who is also an ascetic is thus exposed 
 to a double danger. He is a monk of monks, and, like 
 Dunstan or St. Thomas of Canterbury, it is hard to see 
 how he can escape being a tyrant. " Spiritual despotism " 
 is the sin of Churchmen. " How can ye escape the 
 damnation of hell ? " is the Master's warning to the 
 Pharisees of His day. In Dunstan's, as probably in that 
 of Anselni and a Becket, there was the excuse that 
 a bad king called for a domineering priest. In the 
 world's roundabout way of reaching right through 
 wrong, one injustice is called out to check another. So 
 Schiller's phrase rings out its rhyming meaning, that the 
 Welt-gescliichtc is the Welt-rjericht. To tins excuse the 
 Dunstans and Anselms are fully entitled, and Augustine 
 may be included in the same amnesty of " pardon for 
 praise." But here we must draw the line. As a monk 
 
Augiisiine and his System, 193 
 
 he wrangled with monks, and Jeremy Taylor's verdict on 
 the scuffle of Augustine with Pelagius is all that need be 
 said on that subject. But the same contentious temper 
 that seems to haunt the monk's cell, that " other worldli- 
 ness " which is nature's way of paying off these unworldly 
 men, is seen in Augustine in its most marked form. He 
 scarcely rivalled Jerome in acerbity of temper ; but in 
 morbid egotism, and that desire to be ego et rex mens 
 with God Himself, he is almost unique in Church history. 
 Like all the *' three Carthaginians " who gave theology a 
 fatal twist, he was an intrepid asserter of his own notions 
 of truth, as if they were God's own truth, not the 
 shadows on the wall of his own mind, idols of the den. 
 But where Augustine left Tertullian and Cyprian far 
 behind was in the calm, bloodless way in which he 
 looked down into the abyss of the hereafter, and waved 
 souls into the fire-world of God's wrath for ever and 
 ever, in a way which perhaps excused Dante for dealing 
 out the same measure to his enemies, the Guelphs of 
 Florence and the neighbourhood. Dante was an "artist," 
 and is absolved by the easy code of art morals. But 
 Augustine was a serious theologian, and has been taken 
 only too seriously, as Calvin afterwards was for the same 
 reason. The strangest part of it is that the Carlyle 
 school, to whom " purpose " instead of charity covers 
 a multitude of sins, have absolved Calvin, and also 
 absolved Augustine, both for darkening Christianity 
 aud distressing souls. " Earnest," no doubt, he was ; but 
 what an earnestness, that earns a harvest of warring 
 dogmatism and scepticism for all after ages 1 Men are 
 sometimes said to be "intrepid," because callous to 
 suffering. Such \yas Napoleon's intrepidity, when he 
 turned cannon on the retreating Eussians at Austerlitz, 
 and broke the ice on the frozen lake across which they 
 
 N 
 
1 94 Augustine and his System. 
 
 were passing. Sucli was Goethe's " intrepidity," which 
 earned for liim from his blind worshippers the distinction 
 that he was a " demonic " man, superior to patriotism 
 and otlier prejudices. 
 
 "He took the suflering human race, 
 He read each wound, each weakness, clear ; 
 And struck his finger on the place, 
 And said, 2'hou a'dest here and here." 
 
 Such, let us add, was Augustine's " intrepidity;" and if we 
 are to be Stoics of a new type of Carlyle's Christianity, 
 we shall leave the aureole of saintship around Augustine 
 now. But if not, we shall ask why he may not be " free 
 handled," as poor John Calvin has been by Eomanists 
 and Anglicans at least. The Bishop of Derry has 
 described one of Calvin's followers " with something of a 
 narrow brow and something of a narrow heart ; " will this 
 eloquent Irishman, who has idealised Augustine in a 
 graceful poem, now turn on the search-light of his critical 
 faculty ? Let us see how Augustine comes out in the 
 iierce light of real criticism. We know only too little of 
 our saint's after life, except from his own letters, which 
 are not likely to be accusing documents. We have 
 spoken of his Coiifessions, which, like those of Eousseau, 
 set self in a sickly light of sentimentality. But we 
 should wish that a prophet would turn on him the same 
 light that Nathan did on David — "Thou art the man." 
 We may then ask what he would shrivel up into. 
 Women, who are always keener judges than men, passed 
 the sharpest judgment on Augustine, and w^e w^ait for a 
 life of the saint written from the woman's point of view. 
 Who remembers, or cares to ask, whether Calvin was 
 married ? who, on the other hand, does not love Luther all 
 the more for his home life, his Kate, the honest, perhaps 
 too homely, German Haus-Fmu, and his little George, to 
 
Aitgustine and his System. 195 
 
 whom he talked, perhaps, tlie best table-talk that ever 
 came from a theologian ? We could give up a good many 
 volumes of anti-Pelagian and anti-Donatist divinity for 
 such touches of humanity as we find in Luther and 
 Zwingli, the only two men of that age who were too 
 great to muffle up their personality in sham Greek, like 
 Melancthon, CEcolampadius, and others, who remind us 
 of great schoolboys in comparison to these two men of 
 men. 
 
 Till the critical method has put a knife into the hands 
 of Church historians, we shall still cling to the traditional 
 Augustine, with Calvinists and Catholics processioning 
 from opposite sides to lay wreaths on his bust till the 
 marble is not seen for the flowers. But truth is above 
 charity, as charity is above rubrics. The rights of truth 
 demand the deposal of the usurper of the West, if the 
 West is not to sink into the same slough of superstition 
 as the East. The honest verdict of history is that there 
 is little to choose between East and West in their down- 
 ward descent to superstition after the great age of the 
 three Cappadocians. But the three Carthaginians, whom 
 we set off against the three Cappadocians, all helped to 
 push on the Church over the fatal descent into dogmatic 
 liierarchy and spiritual despotism. Chief est of the three 
 was Augustine, without whom neither Tertullian nor 
 Cyprian would have done much to fix that severe celibate 
 type for which " priestliness" is the only phrase. But we 
 cannot measure the depth of the descent which began only 
 as yet with Augustine, and which we are at last working 
 out of, unless we contrast Alexandria with Cartilage, and 
 limit our contrast to the Alexandria of Athanasius, To 
 the Alexandria of Cyril's day we have nothing to say in 
 stay of judgment. It was then given over to the same 
 reprobate mind as the West, and we may drop the veil 
 
196 AiigiLstine and his System. 
 
 over both. The Gotli was at the gates of Rome, as 
 the Visigoth was in Carthage, and the Saracen soon 
 coming on in the East to wave his scimitar and close 
 the Church, as the Church had closed the schools of 
 Athens under Theodosius. Bat truth compels us to add 
 that, if Augustinianism corrupted the Church, early Alex- 
 andrianism, if adhered to as a type of anti-sacerdotalism, 
 might have saved it. It w^as a premature type of philo- 
 sophical Protestantism (to use popular language), doomed 
 to perish, as all premature growths are. It failed as the 
 iconoclasm of the Isaurian Leo failed in the eighth 
 century, and for the same reason. The man and the 
 hour must come together ; if he steps on the scene one 
 hour before his time, he will fail, as Arnold of Brescia, 
 as Rienzi did, as Masaniello, as Mirabeau, and many other 
 stage heroes. The world was not ripe for the revival of 
 the larger hope school, so Origen has been made the 
 scape-goat, and on his innocent head has been heaped all 
 that fifth-century monks could fling out of the rinsings 
 of the theological wash-pot. The strangest part is, that 
 the heresies of the East were not the same as the heresies 
 of the West. Origen's universalism was not the true 
 ground for which degenerate Alexandrians reviled him. 
 That they left to Augustinians. To the East his " heresy " 
 lay in ambiguous phrases, which made it open to Arius 
 as much as to Athanasius to claim him as on their 
 side. Then, again, some fancies of his on the subject of 
 the spiritual resurrection, and of pre-existence and the 
 peopling of the stars, gave excuse to those who wanted 
 an excuse for putting his name out of the hagiology. 
 In the West, however, the heresies of Origen were of a 
 deeper dye. If Origen were a theologian, what would 
 become of Augustine, Anselm, and all the scholastics of 
 the West, the mystics only excepted ? It is clear that 
 
Augustine and his System. 197 
 
 sucli a " pestilent " fellow must be made away with. 
 " As for this sect, we know that it is everywhere spoken 
 against." So Paulinism struck the Jews of Eome, and 
 so early Alexandrianism has passed down into the tradi- 
 tional theology of the West as a sect everywhere spoken 
 against. Catholic consent, whatever that is worth, has 
 gone against it, and it seems foolhardy to try an Atlian- 
 asius contra munduni in favour of Origen. So we should 
 regard it if Origen were a single name, with a solitary 
 set of opinions which were not as " Catholic " in the East 
 as Augustine is Catholic in the West But no scholar 
 deserving the name can forget that in saying, with Luther, 
 Origenem diris devovi, we are devoting diris the whole 
 Alexandrian school, and that of Antioch and the whole 
 East. But for Jerome, whose petty egotism deserves 
 more pity than blame, the East would never have taken 
 in that leaven of Augustinianism which in the end 
 leavened the lump, and made Origen's name to pale before 
 that of the Carthadnian school and its leader. 
 
 Criticism owes a deep debt of reparation for these 
 misleading judgments of Church history. After all, pro- 
 fessors are but men, and men too compromised by Church 
 traditions to say out to their classes their real thoughts 
 as to the names which have infected theology. But the 
 time has come for plain speaking, especially since larger 
 hope theologies are coming in by back doors, and men 
 are asking. Is it prudent any longer for professorial chairs 
 to keep silent when the ground is giving way beneath 
 them ? If it is rash to waken sleeping dogs, what shall we 
 say of the rashness which goes on sleeping when watch- 
 dogs are barking alarm ? The age calls for a new theo- 
 logy, and will have it. For want of it, it flies to a 
 hundred novelties, from old Deism to young Theosophy. 
 But it is " God in Christ " which only can stay the soul' 
 
198 Augustine and his System. 
 
 hunger ; but it must be a whole God and a whole Christ. 
 It is no God of " attributes " only, such as Western 
 theologians teach us of, which will suffice. St. John the 
 theologian has taught us not " about " God, of which we 
 have heard only too much. He has taught us that God 
 is light, God is spirit, God is love. Critics have often 
 remarked that in all three cases the term is anartbritic. 
 God is not the spirit, or a spirit, but spirit in the sense 
 that spirit must to spirit in sympathy move before we 
 can approach God at all. It is the same of God as light 
 and of God as love. Till we walk in the light, till we 
 learn to love, God must be an unknown God. Morality 
 and religion are thus two sides of the same truth. This 
 is the lesson of the early East which the West, since 
 Augustine's day at least, has largely overlooked. The 
 result is a deep schism between morality and religion. 
 The two have gone each on its own course, and theology 
 has stagnated because it has become " antinomian " under 
 one form or another. The antinomianism of popular 
 Protestantism is of one type, that of ceremonial sacer- 
 dotalism of another, but both traceable to the same roots 
 in Augustine. 
 
 Let us then cut the cords which tie us to the tradi- 
 tionalism of one Church Father. The age asks for a new 
 theology, and we can offer it one both new and old, if 
 they will be old Catholics of an Alexandrian, not of a 
 Carthaginian type. To timid minds who dread the new 
 merely because it is new, it may be some solace to know 
 that the new is in truth the old which was from the 
 beginning, but which sacerdotalism, East and West alike, 
 has overlaid with base traditions and afterthoughts which 
 are unworthy of Christ's gospel. When that gospel 
 is seen again in its true beauty, we shall wonder that we 
 ever listened to that poor, debased copy by which, under 
 
Augustine and his Systerit. 199 
 
 prudential motives, we sought to save our souls, as 
 Paley taught, because a mighty despot might send us to 
 hell unless we accepted his terms. That this travesty of 
 truth has lived so long, is owing to one name more than 
 any other ; and till that name is sent into the background 
 to exchange places with Origen, we shall go on deploring 
 the doubt and the dogma, which remain warring elements 
 like the waves of the sea when driven by the wind. 
 
 Let us then see that our theology is a theology in the 
 strict sense of the term, not that mere theanthropology 
 which is neither one thing nor the other, but is a base 
 syncretism of school philosophy and Hebrew faith in God. 
 Both are set to the wrong note of a prudential scheme of 
 soul-saving and providing for against an indefinite future. 
 All our best and most spiritual intuitions cry out against 
 the theology of bargain and barter, which is like Jacob at 
 Bethel, but unlike Israel at Peniel. The strange part of 
 Augustine's career is that, unlike other eminent names, 
 he was Israel in his early years at Milan, and Jacob only 
 in his later years at Hippo. If we have to overturn the 
 St. Austin of tradition, we can best do it out of the teach- 
 ings of the St. Austin of the Confessions. It is not often 
 that a writer lends weapons out of his own armoury. Let 
 us add in justice that his own Retractations were written at 
 the close of his life. They harmonise so much better with 
 the teachings of his conversion stage, that we may piece 
 the first draft and the last draft together out of which to 
 answer the Augustine of the middle or controversial epoch 
 of his life. It has been his misfortune — one of those 
 penalties of greatness — to leave behind him a quarry of 
 hewn stones, out of which lesser divines of later ages 
 helped themselves uncritically and without question. 
 Just as the Coliseum was the ready resort of the palace 
 builders of the Eenaissance a^ife in Rome, so Augustine 
 
200 Augustine and his System. 
 
 left bebind liini a mass of polemical writings, out of 
 wbich tbe system makers of a scholastic age had 
 nothing to do but to pull out and pile up stones after 
 their own fashion. It was a sorry result, as we know, 
 for which after Augustinians are even more responsible 
 than the original author. If theology ever since his day 
 has been little more than a tasteless conglomerate of after- 
 thoughts, bodies of divinity lacking the constructive 
 spirit, let us at least divide the blame of this. Even 
 to-day the saying is true in other places more enlightened 
 than Spain, Sin Agostino mil jorecligo. This is the garlic 
 which enters every dish, and wanting which no savoury 
 meat is supposed to be served. An Augustine collection 
 of commonplaces makes up the small library of a Spanish 
 priest, who cuts into the master of sentences much as 
 popular divines with us make up sermons " wholly 
 BibHcal " chiefly by the aid of a Concordance and the 
 English Version. The sorry result is the same in both 
 cases. This verbal knowledge of the letter of Augustine 
 keeps up his authority, and the Roman Church is wise in 
 its generation. As long as " salvationism " on the narrow 
 basis of external authority and sacramental ordinances is 
 the key to theology, so long the doctor of the West must 
 reign without a rival. But the day of criticism has 
 begun. The light of intuitional spiritual religion, self- 
 evidencing to the awakened conscience, has been let in, 
 and the New Eeformation will make short work of the 
 one doctor on whom the Old Eeformation looked on too 
 indulgently. 
 
CHAPTER VI T I. 
 
 AUGUSTINE, HIS MERITS AND DEFECTS. 
 
 But let us not be ungrateful to Augustine. There are 
 excesses of certain thinkers of one-sided genius which are 
 more helpful to a final settlement than the moderation of 
 better balanced but less adventurous thinkers. The hardy 
 dogmatism which pushes a theory to its extreme conclu- 
 sions in which it breaks down in foro conscientice, comes to 
 our help when we wish to hark back. Jonathan Edwards, 
 for instance, rendered that service to New England 
 theology. An intense one-sided nature such as Edwards', 
 whose theology of God all in all almost bordered on 
 Pantheism, was necessary in order to stir its conscious- 
 ness of the counter truth which popular Calvinism had 
 taken little or no account of. A reaction against the 
 theology of mere sovereignty was only possible when 
 sovereignty had been elaborated into a system on which 
 to build up a final account of God's dealings with men, 
 as it was held for the first time by St. Augustine. Till his 
 theology had laid hold of the entire West, and moulded 
 the thoughts of the Latin Fathers in one fixed type, there 
 could be developed no counter theory of God's fatherly 
 relation to men deserving the name. " Theories of the 
 Fall " and of the " Headship of the first Adam " had not 
 deepened as yet into that dogma of original sin which 
 
 201 
 
202 AiigiLstine, his Merits and Defects. 
 
 Augustine affirmed in reply to Pelagius' too facile asser- 
 tion of the indifference of the will, and the sufficiency of 
 human nature to stand in its own strength apart from 
 grace. It was this graceless Pelagianism which drove 
 Augustine into contradictions quite as passionate in the 
 opposite extreme. The indulgent decision of the Cliurch 
 between the two controversalists has been fair. It is 
 that which Dr. Mozley inclines to. He holds that 
 Pelagianism was an error which deepens into heresy, and 
 therefore must be expelled or put down ; while Augustin- 
 ianism is only an exaggeration of a truth which lies at 
 the root of all religious feeling, the truth " that without 
 ]\[e ye can do nothing." Hence this exaggerated sense of 
 the need of grace even in the field of nature is a one- 
 sided truth rather than an actual error, much less a heresy. 
 This is, no doubt, a just summary as between Augustine 
 and Pelagius. But though Augustine has been often 
 opposed, and his great authority set aside, even in the 
 West, it has been left for thinkers in our day to strike at 
 the true root of his error, and so to lead the way into a 
 sweeter, simpler conception of God. 
 
 One of the best results of modern philosophy is to 
 remind us of the length of our tether, to use Locke's 
 phrase ; we never can know the absolute and uncondi- 
 tioned. The very personality of God, His thoughts, His 
 decrees, and so forth, are only taken on trust. Language 
 fails to describe how God thinks and acts, and hence the 
 very term predestination starts a paralogism, something 
 which can neither be thought as thought nor described 
 in language. To Augustine and the Schoolmen it seems 
 never to have occurred that this " magnified man " way 
 of thinking of God was worse than presumptuous: it 
 bordered on blasphemy. It represented the All-good as 
 Absolute AVill, and whose Omnipotence was the attribute 
 
Ati^gustine, his Merits and Defects. 203 
 
 which overshadowed every other. Wisdom, Love, Power, 
 it is in this order that our conceptions of the Great 
 Supreme should take shape. To put Power or Will first, 
 and let the other attributes of Wisdom and Love follow 
 after as contingent qualities not so primary as the 
 thought of Absolute Sovereignty, is to freeze the heart ^ 
 and to set up a type of Monothelite Monotheism, out of 
 which it is not easy to lead on to the thought of a God 
 in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. The result 
 of this passing of the Divine attributes through a prism, 
 in which He is seen as a God of wrath out of Christ and 
 a God of love in Christ, and only to the elect, must be 
 presented in this fashion before its direct tendency to 
 lead on to Atheism is understood. It is well for human 
 nature that it is not quite the slave to its logical con- 
 ceptions, or else this theology of afterthoughts would 
 have made the world even darker than it has been owing 
 to perversions of Christ's gospel. The three worlds of 
 Dante's " Divine Comedy " strike a chill on the heart 
 which we have scarcely recovered from when popular 
 Protestantism takes up the same echo of Augustianism, 
 with additions of its own still more lugubrious. Slowly 
 we have worked through this sdca oscura, and are emerg- 
 ing out of the horrible shadow of a God of terror into 
 the sweetness and light of the General Fatherhood of 
 God and the education of the human race. It has been 
 the fear of Deism, with its dim defective views of sin, 
 which has thrown this shadow of Augustinianism like an 
 
 ^ It is perhaps not without significance that it is in this order the three 
 attributes of Power, Wisdom, Love are seen by Dante on the portal of 
 hell— 
 
 '' Fecemi la divina Potestade 
 La sbnima Sapienza e'l Primo Amore." 
 The vision Divine sees that God is Love, but devils, who believe and 
 tremble, are fixed on the sight of God's sovereignty. 
 
204 Augustine, his Merits and Defects, 
 
 eclipse over the whole West, and we have not yet passed 
 out of its penumbra. But it will soon be past ; and when 
 criticism shall have done its work of disengaging the 
 truth from the error, we shall trace this misconception of 
 grace to its true source in the under-current of dualism 
 which steeped Augustine's thoughts long after he had 
 shaken off his early Manichceism. This externalising 
 the conception of grace in one of its two aspects, objective 
 or subjective, never would have grown up in Augustine's 
 mind but for the dualism of God and nature between 
 which man was suspended, which was the fibre of all his 
 thoughts. God was external to His works, the tran- 
 scendent Lord of the universe, and could only act on the 
 finite through some medium or channel whicli He chose to 
 personify as " Grace." The old Gnostics had their Demi- 
 urge; and this new Gnosticism, for such it unconsciously 
 was, could not conceive of any influx of the Divine into 
 the human but through a medium which they described 
 as " Grace." How much simpler our Western theology 
 would have been had Augustine thought of God as an 
 immanent Deity, and gone on to teach an immanent 
 Christ as the Logos or light which lighted every man in 
 through that candle of the Lord which we call conscience. 
 Mystics and Cambridge Platonists held this concept of 
 grace as Divine influx, the entering of light to the eye or 
 of sound to the ear. But Augustinians, all misled by 
 their master, could only see in grace something magical 
 and external, so to speak, a " sixth sense," which only 
 the regenerate have any faculty for. This is given in 
 baptism, is fed by the sacraments, and, as the Ee- 
 formed teach, came by faith, as faith by hearing, and 
 hearing by the word of God ; but both schools agree 
 in externalising grace as a sense foreign to the New 
 Testament. 
 
Augustine, his M 67^ its a7td Defects, 205 
 
 When we turn to the old Book we find the grace of 
 God is never dissociated from God Himself. All light 
 streams from the sun, but we never use, unless as a 
 playful metaphor, such a phrase as bottled sunshine. 
 Science tells us that the carbon of coal is only fossilised 
 heat, and that the sun gives us back in hydrocarbons the 
 same light and heat which once lay stored up in plant 
 life. Grace may be thus transmuted and pass into 
 character and conduct, but still in its strictness all grrace 
 is of God, as all light is of the sun. 
 
 It will be some time before the Church is cured of her 
 realism, and ceases to externalise grace in one of the two 
 forms of popular Augustinianism. So great a change in 
 the order of our theological conceptions is not to be 
 wrought by one man and in one generation. But some- 
 thing is gained if we point out the source of the error. 
 The science of epidemics leads on to demography, and 
 therapeutics gain by not only naming a disease, but also 
 its habitat and why it travels, as cholera, for instance, from 
 India to Europe. We are no longer in the " Wandering 
 Jew " stage of science so as to identify cholera with the 
 curse of the impenitent thief. It will be the same growth 
 to theology when the demography of the "ruling ideas" 
 fixes this liahitat of the " grace " notion in Augustine's 
 too regulative mind. What was at first a subjective 
 concept, at his conversion grew into a new objective con- 
 cept in the grace of the sacraments, and there it fixed 
 itself in form in the scholastic theology which the Ee- 
 formation rose against and did battle to, and then itself 
 broke down and fell away into new externalisms. 
 
 But we have not traced the error to its root until we 
 go on to deal with another erroneous concept of the 
 doctor of grace, the Divine sovereignty. That power 
 belongs unto God is only an identical truth. It inheres 
 
2o6 AMgustine, his Merits and Defects, 
 
 iu the very conception of God. But a great deal more 
 tlian we suppose depends on our mode of first approach 
 to God. Love, wisdom, power, this is the true order and 
 subordination of God's three attributes which make up 
 the Trinity of heaven. If we may be excused the ex- 
 pression, there is a Trinity of hell when we read his 
 attributes backward, such as Dante read on the portals of 
 that gate Avhich opens inward only, and from which there 
 is no return. Divine power, wisdom, love made me — 
 can we wonder that it is added — 
 
 '* Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate," 
 
 " Abandon all hope ye who enter here." 
 
 Sovereignty, in a word, is not the right concept with 
 which to approach God. " If we being evil know how 
 to give good gifts to our children ; " we do not set out by 
 training them to fear us, and to feel that the distance 
 between us and them is vast and immeasurable. On 
 the contrary, all true parentage on earth takes the 
 opposite course. It first creates the sense of fondness by 
 familiarity, and then goes on to chasten the child only in 
 order to purge out those base qualities which hinder son- 
 ship. Tlie Fatherhood of God, in a word, based on the 
 analogy of earthly fatherhood, is the true key to any 
 theology deserving tlie name. The comparison, it is true, 
 between eartlily and heavenly fatherhood halts, as we may 
 expect it would, on account of fathers of our flesh correct- 
 ing us for their own pleasure, i.e,, arbitrarily, and sometimes 
 with cruelty ; whereas our true Father, the Father of 
 our spirit, corrects us with a loving correction which 
 makes us great ; it is for our profit, that we may be par- 
 takers of His holiness. 
 
 Augustine, it must be said, in common with the whole 
 West, overlooked this essential truth of Fatherhood. He 
 
Angus tine, his Merits arid Defects. 207 
 
 never denied it, that would have been heresy ; and he 
 is entitled to the benefit of his own quibble, '' Errare 
 'possum hcereticiis esse nolo." But his theology sets out 
 with the wrong note of sovereignty. God is our Maker 
 and Judge, but only our adoptive Father if we are brought 
 in some way by faith and baptism into the covenant 
 which He has made with His Son, and which is in all 
 things ordered and sure. Nor is this a mere logomachy, 
 a mere piece of transcendental reasoning, as shallow 
 divines assume, whether we set out with sovereignty, 
 and go on to love, or in the reverse order reason that 
 the Blessed One must love, for that is His nature and 
 property. God is love ; and next to that being all- wise 
 and all-mighty, He must love His creatures in that 
 measure and proportion which infinite wisdom and 
 measureless might dig channels for that love to flow 
 in. His love, for instance, to all His lower works is in 
 measure to their limitations. " Thou art good, and doest 
 good," is the genuine voice of nature to its unknown 
 author ; and if we continue to stand beside the altar of 
 the unknown God, we shall still think of the benevolence 
 of the Deity, and thankfully adore an Almighty who 
 might crush us as worms of the earth into nothingness, 
 but who deigns to give us life and health and all things 
 richly to enjoy. 
 
 But theology which sets out with this note of the old 
 Deism, and then goes on to discourse on God in Christ as 
 it already discoursed on God out of Christ, is a theology 
 self-convicted of contradiction. That our Maker and our 
 Judge is also our Eedeemer, or at least of those who enter 
 His covenant, — this is the reimini^ Augustinianism of the 
 West. It sounds .plausible ; it has a pious ring ; but it 
 covers more errors and wraps up in reverend phrases 
 more irreverence than even the flat blasphemies of the 
 
2o8 Augustine, his Merits and Defects, 
 
 fool who says in liis heart there is no God. Can we 
 wonder that a theology of crude sovereignty which 
 begins in Deism should run back into Deism ? Unit- 
 arianism is the lues theologica of modern Calvinism, and 
 few see or seem to see the nexus which is quite causal. 
 When our keynote is sovereignty, we learn to tremble, 
 we are before a mighty Allah — " Whom He wills He 
 slays; whom He wills He keeps alive." When grafted on 
 this w^e obtain an elective system, predestinating some 
 to eternal life and the rest to eternal separation from 
 the fountain of life ; then a heart rising against this crude 
 form of Deism begins. It is better, men say, and say it 
 with reason, to get back to h hon Dieu of natural religion. 
 This reaction against a theology of mere sovereignty 
 explains all, or nearly all, these relapses into mere Deism, 
 which under the name of Unitarianism were so common 
 last century. What Eousseau says of Geneva in his day, 
 was common to all Churches exactly in proportion as they 
 set out from a mere Augustinian view of God as Judge 
 first and Saviour afterwards. More than we think de- 
 pends on the order in which we approach the Divine 
 attributes. The Athanasian, which is true theology, as 
 the Augustinian is not, is justly careful of the doctrine 
 of subordination. In the Blessed Trinity, if no Person is 
 before or after another with regard to dignity, there is an 
 order of manifestation which never can be revised. The 
 rather is apxv ^etorr^ro?, the fountain of all Godhead ; 
 the Son is of the Father, who loveth the Son, and showeth 
 Him all things that Himself doeth. The Spirit, the 
 Person who proceeds from the Father (here the Greeks 
 were justly jealous of the ap^rj OeioTrjTo^), but who is 
 sent by the Son to witness of the Son in the same way 
 as the Son witnessed of the Father. This is the true 
 doctrine of subordination, which Arius had so strangely 
 
Aiig2tstine, his Merits and Defects. 209 
 
 misunderstood, because he took too anthropomorphic a 
 conception of Sonship as suggesting some pre-existing 
 Fatherhood ; whereas, had he understood the Logos as 
 Athanasius held, he never could have fallen into this 
 fatal misconception. 
 
 Now second, and second only to this Arian mistake, was 
 the error of Augustine in setting out with mere sovereignty 
 or magistracy as apyj) OeLOTrjro^. Love is the fontal 
 principle of Deity, — love which, as wisdom and power, 
 proceeds forth into the finite there to lose itself in the 
 finite, only to find itself again in moral and spiritual 
 beings who reflect that love, and whose blessedness is 
 like the seraphim to burn, and like the cherubim to blaze 
 in the light of the eternal glory. God forbid that we 
 should impair or diminish, even in thought, the goodness 
 of God in showing mercy and pity ! That we are rescued, 
 redeemed, restored sinners, is a precious truth, the gospel 
 of salvation and the first note of alarm as it reaches 
 us when dead in trespasses and sins. But there is a 
 deeper note than this which steals on the attuned ear 
 when we come to the second stage of the gospel, and 
 learn that behind the sending of the Son was God's 
 infinite pity to men. As Law has put it,^ what was love 
 
 ^ No one saw more clearly than the saintly William Law that God's 
 wrath against sin is only another name for His love to the sinner, and 
 that all punishment is remedial. It is the theme of his "humble, earnest, 
 and affectionate address to the clergy," a tractate which has been often 
 reprinted, but is still far too little known for its singular merits. The 
 following extract contains the pith of his teaching : — 
 
 "Love, goodness, and communication of good is the immutable glory and 
 perfection of the Divine nature, and nothing can have union with God but 
 that which partakes of this goodness. The love that brought forth the 
 existence of all things changes not through the fall of its creatures, but is 
 continually at work to b'ring back all fallen nature and creature to their 
 first state of goodness. All that passes for a time between God and His 
 fallen creature is but one and the same thing working for one and the 
 
 
 
2 lo Augustine y his Merits and Defects. 
 
 in heaven became pity on earth. Tliis is the heart of 
 the gospel, which takes us at once beyond mere egotisms, 
 such as saving our own soul, and a plan of salvation 
 which we appropriate by faith, and through the sacra- 
 
 saine end ; and tliougli this is called icrath, that called pvnishment, curse, 
 and death, it is all, from the beginning to the end, nothing but the work 
 of the first creating love, and means nothing else, does nothing else, but 
 those works of purifying fire, which must and alone can burn away all 
 that dark evil which separates the creature from its first created union 
 with God." 
 
 Law is no stylist, but his dry, archaic jirose rises almost to a Miltonic 
 level, as in the following sketch of the ultimate end of redemption : — 
 
 " Amongst unfallen creatures in heaven, God's name and nature is Love, 
 Light, and Glory. To the fallen sons of Adam, that which Avas love, light, 
 (jlory in heaven becomes infinite ' pity ' and ' compassion ' on earth in a 
 God clothed with the nature of His fallen creature, bearing all its in- 
 firmities, entering into all its troubles, and in the meek innocence of a 
 Lamb of God living a life and dying a death of all the sufferings due to 
 sin. Hence it was that when this Divine Pit}'- sulfered its own life-giving 
 blood to be poured on the ground, all outward nature made full declara- 
 tion of its atoning and redeeming power ; the strength of the earth did 
 cpiake, the hardness of rocks was forced to split, and long-covered graves 
 to give up their dead — a certain presage that all that came by the curs(.' 
 into nature and creature must give up its power — that all kinds of hellish 
 wrath, hardened malice, fiery pride, selfish wills, tormenting envy, and 
 earthly passions which kept men under the power of Satan, must have 
 their fulness of death and fulness of a new life from that all-powerful, all- 
 purifying blood of the Lamb which will never cease washing o-ed into 
 ichite till the earth is washed into the crystal purity of tliat glassy sea 
 which is before the throne of God, and all the sons of Adam clothed in 
 such ichite as fits them for their several mansions in their heavenly 
 Father's house." 
 
 This is, of course, pure Origenism, and should pass under the " Index " 
 by those who have branded the greatest of the early Fathers' name with 
 lieresy, though, strangely enough, Epiphanius, who rakes together every 
 charge of heresy he can think of against Origen, is prudently silent on this 
 one reproach of Universalism, seeing that this was the orthodoxy of the 
 East till long after Augustine's day. It was only in the West that 
 jiunishment was vindictive and terroristic. There the ignis sapiens of 
 Lactantius "salted" its victim with fire, and a class of gruesome concc])- 
 tions grew up which at last brought their own relief, since purgatory came 
 in a sense to i)ut out of view the fires of an endless hell. 
 
Aiigitstinc, his Mc7'its and Defects. 2 1 1 
 
 merits as channels sine qua non. Here Augustinianisni 
 begins, and here, we grieve to say, it ends. Unlike Origen, 
 the saintly maligned Origen, who taught that all things 
 are of God, and that sin being an abuse of free will 
 springing up within and not without him, redemption 
 must take this order in the restitution of man to his true 
 selfhood, which is to be made, not in the image only, but 
 also in the likeness of God {Dc Prin. iii. 6) ; in Augustine's 
 mind, tainted to the last with a fatal taint of dualism, 
 evil was something integral in a universe outside God, 
 and man has to be rescued out of that outside world of 
 matter, or the Demiuroe, before he can enter into livincj 
 union with God. The contrasts, in a word, between 
 Alexandrian and Carthaginian theology are so deep and 
 radical, that we are forced to say that if Origen and his 
 school are deep theologians, Augustine and his school are 
 defective. As a provisional scheme of pardon under 
 concepts of God which stop short at mere magistracy, 
 they may be well enough. But they go no farther. 
 The " doctor of grace " soon saw his term " grace " turned 
 into base equivocations, as %a/?t9 ceased to be another 
 name for love, and as such indistinguishable from God 
 Himself. When grace began to flow in subjective 
 channels, and, like the irrigating waters of the Nile, to be 
 turned by the foot here and there, it did not stop till it 
 went on to penances, pardons, indulgences, and all kinds 
 of minor graces, the home charities of mother Church, 
 which has indulgenza i)lenaria for all, because she has 
 the key of Peter and a treasure-house full of the merit 
 of Christ and His saints. Devout women have sometimes 
 asked for the " sacrament on saint days," in order (to use 
 their own strange phrase) that they might get the virtue of 
 the blessed saints in the Eucharist, starlight and sunlight 
 thus combined in one with the candle-liizht on the altar. 
 
2 1 2 Aiigustine, his Merits and Defects. 
 
 These Aiigustinianisms, as we describe them, would 
 never have made their way to the front as " reigning 
 ideas " in theology, but for tlie slavish concepts of God 
 which it set out with. Beginning with sovereignty, we 
 never get beyond it — our theology is a slave's theology, 
 and genders to bondage. But when we set out with 
 love, which is word, will, and work in one, and which 
 what it doeth it doeth " for ever," all is changed. Our 
 adoption into the family of God is grounded on the 
 truth of original sonship defaced, not destroyed, by sin. 
 We are Christ's by creation, and therefore much more 
 Christ's by redemption. Every one of Adam born is 
 also " Logos born," because he is a being breathing 
 thoughtful breatli, a traveller between life and death. 
 These are some of the radical contrasts between early 
 East and later Western theology which never have been 
 given the emphasis they deserve, and which, when they 
 are seen in their true importance, will put a new colour 
 on our conceptions of God, and make " one thing of all 
 theology," the theology of love, which we profess in 
 name, but which we have smothered over with Eoman 
 magisterial conceptions of God, out of which a God in 
 Christ emerges as the sun seen through a mist. 
 
 Errors in theology are like departures from the plumb- 
 line in house building. The wall begins to bulge and lean 
 out of the perpendicular, and it must be buttressed, and 
 so an ingenious system of weights and counterweights 
 goes on, till, like the construction of a cantilever bridge, 
 the out-tln^ust and the back-thrust are exactly balanced, 
 and a composition of forces is carried out often in a kind 
 of haphazard way, which makes some mediaeval buildings 
 a wonder of the balance of statical forces. Augustinianism, 
 to do it justice, as it came from its master's hand was one 
 of these miracles of stability among decay. It balanced 
 
Atigtcstine, his Merits and Defects. 2 1 3 
 
 itself, no one exactly can say how, unless we throw in the 
 explanation that one dogma had an out -thrust and the 
 opposite dogma was accordingly given a back - thrust. 
 Take, for instance, the doctrine of grace, that great 
 master principle of Augustinianism. Happily for Augus- 
 tine, so far from regarding " grace " exclusively from the 
 subjective side, he went on to include in its action 
 what are known as the material channels or vehicles of 
 grace. Augustine thus escaped the narrowness which 
 reduces grace to a single rill trickling into separate souls, 
 according as God opens their heart in His inscrutable love 
 and mercy, as the heart of Lydia was opened to attend to 
 the things spoken of by Paul at Philippi. For Augustine 
 grace thus had acquired two sides, the subjective and the 
 corporate, and so he escaped that limitation dogma which 
 seems to lead direct to predestinarianism and all its five 
 points of Dort theology. Why Augustine did not push to 
 the same one-sided extreme as Calvin, seeing his theology 
 leads up straight to it, seems one of those puzzles which 
 subtle minds, like the late Dr. Mozley, loved to ponder 
 over, without, we must confess, throwing much light on it. 
 The late professor of theology at Oxford, one of the most 
 original thinkers the English Church has trained since 
 Butler, was an Augustinian 'piir sang, and was misunder- 
 stood, therefore, by the popular theology alike of the 
 dosjmatic school of Ancrlicans and of ultra-Protestants. 
 But so it was, because Mozley, like many other learned 
 men, was familiar with his subject, but unable to familiarise 
 others. He saw clearly enough, but has failed to impress 
 others with the notion, that Augustine's theology touches 
 the two extremes of sacerdotalism and spiritualism. Pro- 
 testant and Catholic drink of the same water, and declare 
 that the draught is as different as the buckets which 
 hold it. They are both quite sincere in this, for they 
 
2 14 Aligns tine, his Alcriis and Defects. 
 
 fail to see tliat Augustine the man is greater than the 
 system which comes down to us by tradition as his. 
 To return to our metaphor of a cantilever bridge, there 
 is, in all Augustinianism, a back- thrust to balance an 
 out - thrust, the grace of sacraments returns on us to 
 sweeten and broaden the conception of a grace distilled 
 into the separate soul. Thus the Augustinian con- 
 ception of grace ran the usual course of all afterthoughts. 
 It was first internal and subjective, then external and 
 dependent on Church authority. 
 
 It may be said of every neglected truth of old and 
 apostolic theology, that it is only excluded to come back 
 in some distorted and menacing form. Heresies in this 
 sense are like curses — they are the chickens which come 
 home to roost, but they come in a fashion which tlie 
 orthodox neither care for nor can control. The two truths 
 of apostolic teaching, which have been passed over to the 
 lasting hurt of the Church, are the Johannine doctrine of 
 the Logos and the Pauline teaching of the election ; 
 neither has been denied, but both have been distorted. 
 Till these truths are again seen in their own light, and 
 not brought in as mere aftertlioiiglits of man, but as the 
 best and first thoughts of God to His Church, the present 
 state of distress and confusion must continue, and even 
 deeper divines will go on patching one afterthought on 
 to another, like the piece of new cloth to the old garment, 
 only making the rent worse. The remedy lies, of course, 
 in a new theology ; or if that term sounds too drastic 
 to timid ears, dulled down to the droning note of tradi- 
 tionalism, let us at least point out that what sounds so 
 new to some is, in truth, the old. What savours of 
 heresy is instead Catholic, if we take that vague term in 
 its simple first sense as the theology of the undivided 
 Church down to Athanasius. To draw water at any lower 
 
Atigustine, his Merits and Defects. 2 1 5 
 
 point down the stream, either from Eastern or Western 
 Fathers, is to go to a tainted source. If we are poisoned, 
 or at least devitalised, as those wonld be who drink 
 Thames water at London Bridge, we have no one to blame 
 but ourselves. Let us see what it means to draw living 
 water from these two fountainheads of all true theology, 
 St. John and St. Paul, and we shall be able to measure 
 the loss it was to theology when the key to the Logos 
 doctrine of St. John, the election teaching of St. Paul, 
 slipped out of her careless hands. 
 
 1. With regard to the Logos. For want of this key to 
 true hermeneutics, faith and philosophy fell asunder, and 
 look askance at each other to this day. The Logos is the 
 true mediation doctrine, wanting which creation itself is 
 an enigma, since between the finite and the infinite there 
 is an impassable gulf, across which thought can throw 
 no bridge. A transcendent Deity and a world hung in air, 
 supported on nothing, like the tortoise in Hindu myth- 
 ology, such is Creationism as conceived in the West, 
 where the Logos doctrine soon became a dead letter. But 
 with a Deity immanent in all His works in and through 
 the Logos, the abyss of unthinkable Creationism is fran- 
 chised, and all now proceeds in orderly evolution upwards 
 from blind forces, such as light and heat, to life in its 
 lowest plant and animal form up through life in all its 
 stages, till the sentient becomes conscious, and self becomes 
 a centre or seed-plot out of which love may dawn. Light, 
 life, love, this Trinity, as Herder called it, is only con- 
 ceivable under one class of conceptions, which are those 
 of St. John's teaching of the Logos. 
 
 ' ' Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might, 
 Smote the chord of self, that trembling passed in music out of sight." 
 
 The bald Creationism of the West has raised more 
 
2i6 August uie, his Merits and Defects. 
 
 difficulties than it can solve. Need we wonder that 
 all mere Monotheistic systems, such as Islamism, are 
 infected and honeycombed with Pantheistic mysticism. 
 The abyss is too awful between creature and Creator ; 
 and bending over the chasm, peering into the darkness, 
 fancy sees, or seems to see, a fairy world of its own 
 of Peris and Jins and all those entities which swarm 
 out of thought when the theological stage is over, 
 and the positive stage of exact science not entered as 
 yet. 
 
 Nothing meets this difficulty but the doctrine of the 
 indwelling Logos, who is the light and the life of all 
 that lower world in which man plants his feet before 
 he begins to look up and to look out for something to 
 love, some one to worship. At this stage, again, the 
 Logos takes a new departure. " In Him was the life ; and 
 the life was the light of men;" and, he adds, "that was 
 the true Liglit, which lighteth every man that cometh 
 into the world." The Logos is thus the impersonal 
 conscience, or the spermatic word, as Justin Martyr 
 describes it, which in one way or other has been leading 
 men on to God. The education of the human race, that 
 best thought of the new theology, is thus the key to 
 history as well as to philosophy. It at once bridges 
 over that contrast between sacred and profane history, 
 which to the Augustines and Bossuets of another school 
 seems an abyss not to be crossed without a miracle. 
 The prophets who taught within the covenant, and the 
 sages of the East or of Greece, are not to be considered as 
 distinct orders of men: they are the same order, only at a 
 lower or a higher stage of enlightenment. No longer is 
 book inspiration a dry dogma, as it became to the dull 
 divines of the post-Eeformation age — a miracle un- 
 proved and unprovable, which lays the Bible open to 
 
Aiigitstine, his Merits and Defects. 2 1 7 
 
 far more difficulties than it can solve. The magic of an 
 infallible Book, only matched by the counter magic of 
 an infallible Church, has been resorted to because the 
 West had let go the true thread to the labyrinth in the 
 doctrine of God immanent in the world through the 
 Logos. It is the old story, a bare line thought of God 
 let go — men have then to invent an afterthought, and so 
 the Church or the Book religion was set up to fill the 
 void which the light of God indwelling in and illuminat- 
 ing the conscience was intended to fill up. Whoever 
 sets up a theory of book inspiration, convicts himself by 
 the very statement of such a theory of not having the 
 key to true God-consciousness. 
 
 " God through Himself we then shall know, 
 If Thou dost on us shine." 
 
 This is Charles Wesley's account of book inspiration, 
 and the only one which, being subjective, does not 
 impale itself on the horn of a contradiction, " Thou 
 bearest witness of thyself; thy witness is not true." 
 Such are all dogmas of inspiration — to name them is 
 to expose their self-contradiction. But these after- 
 thoughts of the West never occurred to the East as 
 long as it held fast by the sense of an immanent Deity 
 and an indwelling Logos. To have said to an Alex- 
 andrian that the word of God was all shut up in a roll 
 of a book, would have seemed as simply unthinkable as 
 that the word was in a wafer. Unless we drop plumb 
 down into Pantheism, no Oriental would have understood 
 what the West was brin^infr itself to, when one school 
 of divines found their God in the host, another in the 
 Bible. This bringing God down from heaven, or across 
 from the sea, would have seemed as inept in its exter- 
 nalism as the Deuteronomist reminded Israel it was 
 
2 1 8 Atigiisline, his JMcj'its and Defects. 
 
 when tliey forgot in their idolatry that the Word was 
 nigh them and in their heart. The Logos doctrine, to 
 sum up all, was the one neglected truth which threw 
 the whole theology of the West into confusion. To 
 pick up the thi-eads of this forgotten thought of God is 
 to bring back order out of confusion. The psychology 
 of the Bible alone explains its theology — they throw 
 light on each other. Unless man's nature is interpreted 
 aright, how can we approach the deeper mysteries of the 
 Divine nature ? So, again, the incarnation stands out in 
 a certain bold externality as a dogma to be accepted, 
 but for which there are no premonitions, no august 
 anticipations in the deeper intuitions of our own nature 
 as made in the image of God. All prophecy, all inspira- 
 tion, whether of seer or sage, is a preparation of the 
 gospel. It is God in history, as the vox dainantis 
 crying out in the wilderness, and saying to the cities of 
 Judah, " Behold your God." 
 
 2. If the Johannine doctrine of the Logos is one 
 neglected thought of God which the West has let go, the 
 Pauline doctrine of election is another which equally 
 calls for a fresh restatement. How Aui^justine and 
 Calvin misconstrued this truth, till it became an error, 
 if not a lie, the history of predestinarian controversies is 
 one long comment. It was a dismal perversion of a 
 spiritual truth, a blind afterthought, when election was 
 understood in the later Jewish sense, not the early 
 Abrahamic. To the Jew, perhaps even to the Twelve, 
 election was regarded as the rescue and special salvation 
 of the remnant. The Diaspora were the chosen few — 
 the believing remnant left out of the mass of the perish- 
 ing impenitent Israel after the flesh : this was the 
 Petrine view of the subject, as we gather from his 
 Epistle. Tlie larger, more forthreaching view into the 
 
Augustine, his Merits and Defects. 2 19 
 
 future of the Apostle Paul was among those things 
 " hard to be understood/' on which " brother Peter " 
 (assuming Second Peter to be genuine) seems not to 
 have seen as far as " brother PauL" The very hesitation 
 of the apostle of the circumcision perhaps throws light 
 on the Apostle Paul's bold claim to have been given a 
 distinctive knowledge of the mystery of election beyond 
 any of the Twelve. They looked back, he looked 
 forward. Their liglit was little more than that of 
 Epimetheus, his of Prometheus. Instead of a remnant of 
 a dead past, he saw in election the first-fruits of a 
 future as yet unborn. To him predestinarianism was 
 like Divine philosophy, not harsh and crabbed, as dull 
 fools suppose, but the wisdom of God and the power of 
 God calling out the Gentiles, and raising the elect of the 
 Gentiles into the same place of privilege and respon- 
 sibility which the Jews had been given, and forfeited 
 through unbelief. The promise to Abraham was that 
 he was to be the heir of the world — " In thee and thy 
 seed shall all the famxilies of the earth be blessed." 
 What a distinction ! what a privilege ! It was the 
 eldest born's birthright and blessing in one. But as 
 soon as this birthright was made into a monopoly, a 
 narrow claim to certain preferential blessings, it was at 
 once forfeited, and instead of " Jacob have I loved, 
 Esau have I hated," the word was reversed, and the 
 left hand laid on the Jew and the right hand on the 
 Gentiles. 
 
 Now, it is instructive and full of warning that Augus- 
 tine and Calvin misunderstood election exactly in the 
 same way as the Jew had done. They regarded the 
 elect as separated to salvation by the favour of the one 
 Eather of all. That the election of a few implied the 
 reprobation of the mass^ seemed to these doctors of the 
 
2 20 Aiigttstine, his Merits and Defects. 
 
 West too self-evident to be even questioned. That it was 
 a hard saying, they never pretended to deny or palliate. 
 Many men are better than their creed, as some are 
 worse ; but the hard fate of the reprobate did shock the 
 conscience even of the duriis pater. He tried to soften 
 it down and mitigate the sentence of unending exclusion. 
 The inarticulate wailing of infanti pcrdidi was hushed 
 down to a simpler notion of purgatory, to soften down 
 the do^ma of an eternal hell and make it a little less 
 incredible. In our age a great silence has fallen on the 
 Church upon both issues into the unseen world. The 
 old dogmas have not been expunged from our creeds, but 
 a certain latitude of interpretation has been left us, and, 
 thanks to Privy Council deliverances, the whole subject 
 is left open either to " life in Christ " or to " larger 
 hope " aspirations, which are tolerated on the one condi- 
 tion of being held as private opinions. In this state of 
 suspense the age begins to breathe again, and much of 
 the fierce invective of the negative school against popular 
 theology is now dying out with the decline of much of 
 the dogmatism of the old positive school. But this state 
 of interim cannot go on for ever. Half beliefs in a 
 theology of " afterthoughts " is a poor substitute for 
 whole-hearted faith in a doctrine of God which can be 
 " commended to every man's conscience." As soon as the 
 age starts up, as it soon must do, and takes theology by 
 the throat, requiring it to say out what it believes and 
 what it disbelieves, there will be such a sifting and 
 searching of heart as the sleepy old school of tradition- 
 alists have scarcely a suspicion of Then, at last, the 
 true Pauline doctrine of election will be seen to be the 
 key of one class of difficulties of belief, as the Johannine 
 doctrine of the Logos is the key to another. It will be a 
 comforting conclusion to reach, when we find that election 
 
Aligns tine, his MeiHts and Defects. 221 
 
 is not the same as selection, or the salvation of a mere 
 remnant of Jews and Gentiles out of a onassa pcrditionis 
 is the only last thought of God to the race. We shall 
 fling off those Jewish clouts, and rejoice in the liberty 
 with which Christ has set us free. We shall see that it 
 is by no back door that the Gentiles are admitted into 
 the fold. The middle wall of partition between elect 
 and non-elect will be broken down in the same way as 
 that spirit of separatism between Jew and Gentile was 
 in the apostle's day. Particularism and favouritism, that 
 poor perversion of Pauline election, will be seen in their 
 true light as " afterthoughts," and devout men will not 
 be ashamed of election as at present, or of high doctrine, 
 as they now apparently are. There will come a time, 
 not so far distant, when the old-fashioned hyper-Calvinism 
 will be seen to be nearer the truth, thouoh not the 
 whole trutli of God, than free-will compromises. As for 
 that Arminian explaining away of election as the mere 
 passive foreknowledge of God of a certain contingent 
 event, based on free-will, this will be seen to be the weak 
 attempt to get rid of one '' afterthought " by setting up 
 another, if possible more illogical and less self-consistent. 
 Arminianism and Calvinism are happily dying out 
 together. They were not pleasant in their lives, and in 
 death they will not be divided. But it is no use to 
 dream of peace until something better than either starts 
 up to take the place of both. Faith cannot live on mere 
 negations or compromises. Our English instinct is to 
 throw overboard both, and trust to " common sense," 
 whatever that means, as if our fathers who fought for or 
 against the "five points of Dort" were mere word 
 babblers. The Quinquarticular controversy is looked 
 down on in our day from a lofty point of view. We 
 are such superior minds that we have settled, thanks to 
 
22 2 Augustine, his Me 7' its and Defects. 
 
 Kant and his school, what is a theological " surd," which 
 to name is to rule out of court. This is Dr. Mozley's 
 verdict on Augustinianisra. It is ultra vires, according 
 to the Hamiltonian philosophy of the limitation of our 
 faculties. But this saving of old dogmas by the new 
 method of theology being " regulative " only, not " specu- 
 lative," may last our day. But it will soon be seen that 
 doctrines which we have to apologise for can be no 
 longer considered integral truths of a gospel message 
 which is Gfood news to men. The latent error of these 
 afterthoui^hts will have to be dracj^ed to lidit ; and the 
 sooner our old theology, like the literature of the Bible, 
 is passed through the fires of criticism, to test what is 
 gold and what is hay, wood, stubble, the better it will be 
 for all concerned. Who does not rejoice that a Eegius 
 l*rofessor of Hebrew in Oxford can say out, as Dr. Driver 
 has done, that the literature of the Hebrew canon is a 
 fair field for free criticism. In spite of a timid protest, 
 now forgotten, from a handful of reactionary divines, the 
 right is established to take the traditional view of the 
 canon to pieces, and to show what a patchwork it is of 
 the Palestinian Masorites and of the Vulgate llevisionists, 
 chiefiy Jerome, who took the same liberties with the 
 Hebrew canon that the Talmudist doctors had with the 
 traditions of their fathers. 
 
 But enough of this. The parallel is at least instruct- 
 ive. We are approaching a day when the common 
 conscience of lay Christendom will call on our theological 
 lights to say out what tliey hold and how much they 
 retain of the deposit of tradition locked up in Augus- 
 tinian theology. To pass over one or two harsh dogmas, 
 and to soften down the rest, will be to cry peace when 
 there is no peace. A more thorough-going method will 
 be called for, and those who see this, and say so, will be 
 
Augiisiine, his Merits and Defects. 223 
 
 those whom the age will trust. The revision of popular 
 theology, taken, as it is in too many cases, from tainted 
 iifth-century sources, must go on till we again draw tlie 
 water of life clear as crystal proceeding out of the tlirone 
 of God and the Lamb. " Orthodoxy " has to borrow 
 from " heresy " at present to eke out its slender stock of 
 wholesome teaching. Why have we to go to learn, for 
 instance, from Unitarians, of the general Fatherhood of 
 God ? Why, from Swedenborgians and other mystics, 
 that the Lutheran doctrine of imputed righteousness is a 
 mere scholastic iigment ? Wh}^ from Christadelphians 
 and other obscure sects, that the necessary immortality 
 of the soul, and the unending misery of the lost, is a 
 vain invention of a later theology. Would it not be 
 simpler, more straightforward, to write off all these after- 
 thoughts at once, and to begin afresh with theology 
 draw^n from the fountainhead ? Instead of that thiniz 
 of shreds and patches, the popular preacher's scheme 
 of salvation, we might then be given a new seamless 
 robe, woven from the top throughout. We have only to 
 make a beginning, and in the right spirit, to succeed. 
 We shall then shake off the nightmare of scepticism, 
 which has squat hag-like on the sleeping Christian 
 consciousness. The Church is afraid to face the thought 
 of a new set of Articles of peace ; and certainly no one 
 would ask her to begin, as the sixteenth century did, by 
 defining and drawing up i^lacds on the safe but tame 
 principle of " what divides the least." It will be time 
 enough for Convocation to try " revision " of formularies 
 when we see how revision of our English Bible has been 
 accepted. If it is to be shuffled over as that revision 
 task was got through, then a precious opportunity will 
 be lost, and ten years be wasted on laborious trifling. 
 Councils of war, we know, never fight; and so it has 
 
2 24 Augustine, his Merits and Defects. 
 
 been with Conciliar attempts to attain Catholic con- 
 sent. 
 
 Discarding, then, such metliods, in which fussy 
 officialism generally carries the day against the larger, 
 calmer conclusions of scholars, let us strike out each 
 on our voyage of adventure. The story of Napoleon 
 when overtaken by the tide on the sands of Suez, is full 
 of example on this subject. Standing still himself, lie 
 bid his staff strike out in all directions, with orders for 
 the first who came to shoal water to signal to the rest 
 that land lay in that direction. In the same hopeful 
 attitude we may " stand on the old ways," and yet 
 consider the new in the sense that Bacon employs that 
 well-worn text. To sit down to compose a "new 
 theology " would be to repeat the mistake of those 
 Eeformers who, ignorant of their own ignorance, sat 
 down with intrepidity to sweep out as much of the 
 past as they saw fit and to retain the rest. The result 
 was a lame compromise, which at once went too far and 
 not far enough, and which resulted in that recast of the 
 old scholastic Augustinianism which we are asked to 
 accept as primitive and Catholic, but which is in reality 
 far from either. It is not contrary, we admit, to primi- 
 tive truth, but it is far too steeped in Augustinian mis- 
 conceptions of Pauline theology. It asserts predestinarian 
 election, and then tones it down to mean almost nothing 
 at all, — in a word, our popular Eeformation theology is 
 that diluted semi-Calvinism which satisfies no one, and 
 which compels us to ask, why discuss the subject at all 
 of God's purposes which the writer is afraid to carry to 
 its legitimate conclusions ? It is in no sense such as 
 this that we desire to see a " new theology " replace the 
 old. But we should desire to see those two truths 
 of Pauline and Johannine teaching, " election " and the 
 
Augustine, his Merits and Defects. 225 
 
 " Logos " doctrine, set in their true light as " ruling ideas." 
 The one is the key to God's purposely calling in the 
 Gentiles, and points to the Abraham blessing, " In thee 
 shall all the families of the earth be blessed." The 
 other lays the basis for the larger hope in the education 
 of the human race, and the true conception of " God in 
 history" with the race as a whole, and not alone with the 
 covenant people. These two truths, instead of " after- 
 thoughts," are in fact God's first thoughts, but they are 
 thoughts which were too deep for the age to grasp to which 
 they were given. They have been laid by accordingly as 
 seeds in the hands of a mummy, waiting the day when 
 they could be planted out and germinate in a suitable 
 soil. The time, as it seems to us, has come — yea, the 
 set time, when this buried deposit of apostolic doctrine 
 should be brought out to enrich the Church and en- 
 large its conceptions of what a goodly heritage lies 
 before it as soon as it has courage to go in and possess 
 the land. 
 
 AVhat assures us that the set time is come, is when we 
 glance at what is going on in India and the East. Missions 
 on the old type of making " compound Christians " have 
 gone on long enough. Young men trained up at home 
 in theological hotbeds, some evangelical, some Anglican, 
 but all of a narrow Augustinian school, have gone out by 
 the hundred, and the impression made is as yet in- 
 significant wdien we consider the masses of the East yet 
 unevangelised. Acute minds at home see the defects of 
 our " parochialising " India, and now^ even the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury has thrown out suggestions which are 
 meant to wake up our old missionary societies from the 
 old drowsy delusion that w'e were to Europeanise the 
 East first, and evangelise it afterwards. No one says this 
 in so many terms ; but this is the method which we set 
 
 p 
 
2 26 Augustine y his Merits and Defects, 
 
 out with, and it will have to be abandoned, and the 
 " leaven " principle, rather than that of the " mustard 
 seed," resorted to more boldly. Japan already has 
 slipped out of control of the homebred missionary, and 
 a strange syncretism is beginning of Christian and 
 Buddhist conceptions, not unlike the Gnostic stage of 
 the second century, when the new faith and the old 
 philosophy struggled for supremacy which should be 
 the formative principle of the Church of the future. 
 We are again face to face in the East with conditions 
 which remind us of what occurred in the Alexandria 
 of Clement and Origen, and in the Eome of Hippolytus 
 and Irenseus. We shall have to meet it in the same 
 way as the early Church did, by calling out a school of 
 thinkers and teachers. The catechetical age must suc- 
 ceed that of evangelists ; and though there are perils, no 
 doiibt, in the way of this syncretism, what path is there 
 that is not perilous, and what is the promise of the 
 Comforter given for but to guide us into the whole truth, 
 if we will only go on believingly and step by step ? It 
 is to meet this case of Christianity in the East and on 
 the mission field that we must go back to our muniments 
 and see what they really teach us. God has more truth 
 to break out of His word — of this we may be sure ; but 
 timid theologians assume that hermeneutics has said its 
 last word, because the Greek of the New Testament is 
 better understood than it has ever been before. But 
 these grammarians forget that behind words there are 
 thoughts, sometimes too deep for terms of precision to 
 express. Not enough stress has been laid on the special 
 standpoint which led St. John in his old age to take up 
 the Alexandrian Logos doctrine as the keynote to his 
 latter-day theology. Not enough has been made of St. 
 Paul emphasising predestination in all his Epistles as 
 
Augustine, his Merits and Defects. 227 
 
 part of the hidden wisdom of God which he was called 
 on to unfold, and so magnify his office as the apostle of 
 the Gentiles. We have looked at this subject too much 
 in the light of later controversies, Arminian and Calvin- 
 ist, and forgotten that before predestinarianism in the 
 modern sense of determinism and free will was heard, 
 there was a Pauline type of determinism unlike any that 
 Augustine and Calvin ever suspected. 
 
 These are the outlines of the theology of the future far 
 too hastily traced here. But the day is fast approaching 
 for a settlement and revision of the old, by incorporating 
 into it that which is so old that it is apostolic in the 
 sense that Augustinian theology certainly is not. A 
 grand impatience of hollow compromises is the certain 
 mark of the strong mind. It is also a sign of true faith ; 
 for unless we can trust the living God and the guiding 
 of the Holy Ghost of the future, what is our faith but 
 the same clinging as that of the Jews to their dead 
 deposit of Mosaism ? The scribes and Pharisees of our 
 Lord's day were sure that they had that deposit ; nor 
 does our Lord deny that in a sense it was so. But He 
 goes on to warn them that faith in the past is not 
 enough, or the claim to be Abraham's children of any 
 value unless they did the works of Abraham. The far- 
 seeing patriarch rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it 
 and was glad, — let us then look forward in the same 
 confident hope. The dry bones are stirring, the masses 
 are evangelised at home as they never were before. 
 India and the East are awaking out of the sleep of ages. 
 To suppose that the Englishman's Prayer Book and Bible 
 will go round the world, and in some translated but still 
 traditional form awake the same echoes in the East as 
 among homebred Englishmen — this is that simple view 
 of missions which, as we have seen, we are outgrowing. 
 
2 28 Augustine, his Merits and Defects. 
 
 Let us be prepared, then, and for a new age set out in 
 advance with a new theology. New heavens and new 
 earth can only come when the time for both has arrived, 
 as it seems to be in our day. 
 
CHAPTEE IX 
 
 DIDACHE AND DOGMA. 
 
 Church history has its stages of descent. To some, the 
 conversion of Constantine and that fatal gift on which 
 Dante laid such stress, marks the decline from primitive 
 purity. Others go farther down the stream, and find in 
 the schism of East from West the line of cleavage which 
 marks the beginning of the apostasy, or at least the 
 degeneration of later days. But both are wrong in 
 going too far down the stream to mark where the 
 true point of departure began, the first real descent from 
 primitive and apostolic standards. Words are thus the 
 records of thini:js, and a chansje of a sinde term is a kind 
 of signal to sceneshifters that we have closed one act 
 and entered on another in the five act drama of Church 
 history. During the whole of Act I., as we may call it, 
 the keynote is always BtSa'^rj ; it is a doctrine, and those 
 who preach or teach it are followers of the " way," 
 witnesses of the " word," or stewards of the " mystery." 
 Such is the apostolic keynote ; and such it passed on 
 unchanged into sub-apostolic times, and lasted on un- 
 changed till the last of the " Confessors " of the Alex- 
 andrian school of catechists, Origen, died in exile at Tyre. 
 But a change came over the Church, which explains 
 all her later " afterthoughts " in theology, as soon as the 
 
230 Didachc and Dogma. 
 
 note lila-^i) was dropped, and Sofa at first, and finally 
 hardening into ho^y^a, took the place of S^Sa^^'. It is 
 dogmatic theology in all its forms, early and later, which 
 we indentify with that departure from the faith which the 
 apostle (1 Tim. iv. 1) distinctly refers to as an apostasy. 
 It has rent the Church ever since with heresies and 
 schisms. No sooner has the Church cast out one form of 
 error as a " heresy," than another has sprung up as a 
 schism, fostered in the same way as a poison within for 
 some time, and at last been cast off as a heresy, the 
 Church in its simplicity supposing that as the apostle at 
 ]\IeHta shook off the venomous viper and took no harm, 
 so it should fare with them. But it is one thing when 
 the viper comes out of a bundle of sticks, quite another 
 thing when the venomous beast has been nursed in her 
 own bosom. In apostolic times there were errors and 
 oppositions, false apostles, deceitful workers; and none 
 denounced them more vigorously than that Son of 
 Thunder who had leaned on Jesus' bosom, and drank 
 so deeply into His inner spirit. But to speak of the 
 dogmatism of St. John as we do of the dogmatism of 
 an Augustine, an Aquinas, or a Hildebrand, would be an 
 absurd misnomer. " They went out from us because 
 they were not of us;" this is the only anathema known 
 in the age of preconciliar Church teaching. The same 
 gospel which was attractive to some was a repulsive 
 force to others, and, like electricity, its polar forces freely 
 worked, and scattered or attracted to it those who were 
 so prepared by inward discipline. In this free way the 
 thoughts of many hearts were revealed. The noblest 
 types of men, who beforehand were unconscious Chris- 
 tians, became instinctive Christians as soon as the cross 
 was lifted up and began to draw all men unto it. 
 
 Well would it have been for the Church if it had not 
 
Didachd and Dogma. 231 
 
 gone beyond this rule, and sought to be wiser than those 
 who were content with the foolishness of preaching the 
 simple message. She had a magnet in her hand designed 
 to attract all, and which in time would have attracted 
 all, as in the ages to come it will, as soon as the Church 
 unlearns her first folly, and drops the dogmatic note 
 which becomes her so ill, and which makes her seem to 
 this latter age like a silly sheep in wolves' clothing. She 
 has long tried to frighten men like children into her 
 fold, outside of which, as she declares, there is no salvation. 
 But the mass of mankind looks on and smiles at this weak 
 attempt to wield the thunders of the Almighty. They 
 scoff at this modern version of the old Salmoneus of the 
 j^neid, who presumed to imitate the unimitable thunder- 
 bolt with the mock thunder of his iron-hoofed steeds 
 and the rattle of his brass chariots. It is dogmatic 
 deductive theology, backed by Conciliar authority, which 
 in the first stage has fomented schisms ; it has then 
 produced heresy, and at last filled the world with its 
 moans over the divisions of Christendom which she has 
 done nothing to allay. It is dogmatism which leads to 
 separatism, certainly not separatism which forces the 
 orthodox into a dogmatic attitude. The old fable of the 
 wolf and the lamb is here applicable. The troubling of 
 the waters invariably comes from the stronger side, from 
 those cast out of communion, not from those who go out 
 of communion. The Baur theory of orthodoxy and 
 Church authority, springing up side by side in the second 
 century, and out of a common instinct of the Latin mind, 
 has never yet been confuted. Wearied with the endless 
 confusions and vagaries of Gnostics, some Hebrew, some 
 Hellenist, but all destructive alike of the true faith, the 
 Latin Church in an evil hour for herself began to entrench 
 and throw up external defences other than those of 
 
232 Didachd a nd Dogma. 
 
 apology and argument. When an Irenreus in Gaul and 
 a Tertullian in Carthage had shot their last arrow, then 
 it seemed that the time was come to close the discussion. 
 The Church under Cyprian argued no more, but acted. 
 The primitive Episcopos developed into a monarchical 
 type of Church authority, so that novelties could now be 
 met and disj^osed of by bishops assembled in council. 
 Constantine only acted on a precedent already set 
 when he convened the entire episcopate to an cecumenical 
 council. Then at last the development of dogma and 
 discipline was complete. From this day on we may say 
 that hLha')(r], or a body of simple teaching, and BiBaaKaXta, 
 or the method of teaching, ceased, and in its place So^a, 
 or private opinion, stiffening slowly and by tradition into 
 BojfMa, became the catch-note of the Church catholic to 
 this day. 
 
 It is precisely the same transition as passed over the 
 covenant people as soon as prophecy ceased and the canon 
 was closed. There arose as the result of this long silence 
 of God, interpreters, self-authorised, who undertook to bind 
 and loose like Hillel and Shammai, and so Eabbinism 
 slowly developed out of the order of scribes and elders 
 wlio carried on the traditions of Israel after the captivity. 
 What Eabbinism made of Judaism we have Christ's own 
 words to testify ; but we must be blind indeed not to see 
 that the same causes lead to the same effects everywhere. 
 Instead of wondering, then, at the falling away from the 
 primitive standard of a BiSaxv, let us be thankful that 
 the apostasy was not as utter as it easily might have 
 been. Here let us notice how instructive is the parallel. 
 The essence of Mosaism, the very keynote of its existence, 
 was Monotheism. Wanting this, it was only one of 
 many cults common to the East. All its rites, cir- 
 cumcisiom included, were seals and signs of the covenant ; 
 
Didachd and Dogma. 233 
 
 but the heart of it lay in the word, " Hear, Israel, 
 Jehovah thy God is God alone," i.e. all other gods are 
 vanity and lies. As long as this truth lay locked up 
 in the ten words in the ark, all was safe. Priestism and 
 sacrifices might all pass away, but the one deposit, 
 the one Zi^a^r] of Israel, was intact. 
 
 Now Israel, after coming a second time out of the 
 captivity of Babylon, clung to Monotheism with all its 
 mind and soul and strength. Corrupt in every other 
 direction, here at least they have never blenched 
 from the truth. So with the Church catholic. Its 
 one deposit of truth has been the mystery of the Incar- 
 nation, and to this it has been faithful. In all other 
 directions, like Mosaism depraved by Eabbinism, it has 
 gone astray. It has departed from primitive simplicity 
 in almost every direction. God has preserved His truth 
 quite as often in spite of the Church as through the 
 Church. Sometimes it was an Elijah alone stood up 
 against the prophets of Baal, as it was an Athanasius 
 against a world which was Arian, Church and State alike. 
 All the same, through all its infidelities Mosaism never 
 lost its hold of Monotheism, as the Catholic Church has 
 clung on to the one truth, for the assertion of which 
 alone she is Catholic. The sin of the Church has been 
 the same sin as that of later Mosaism. She has let the 
 Eabbis of theology lay down a new and second law for 
 her. She has invented, as Eabbinism did, other terms of 
 communion than those of confessing Christ. It was Lo 
 here, lo there — the Catholic Church must be episcopal — 
 it must claim apostolic succession — it must insist on cer- 
 tain sacramental rites, the validity of which depends on 
 the operator and the opus operatiim. It must lay claim 
 to an infallible book, or, at least, its doctors must be 
 infallible interpreters of that book. So one afterthought 
 
234 Didachd and Dogma. 
 
 has been piled up on another, till we turn to the New 
 Testament, and ask where is the authority for this mass 
 of traditions. The answer is the same as in the case of 
 Judaism, and we suppose the end is the same in both 
 cases. Moses is read, but the veil is on the face ; and so 
 with this new Mosaism. Let us hope that in both cases 
 the veil shall be taken away, and then we shall see when 
 we turn to the Lord that same Jesus Christ who is the 
 same " yesterday, and to-day, and for ever." 
 
 This contrast, then, between doctrine and dogma, and 
 the gradual substitution of the one term for the other, 
 may be said to mark the stages of descent into these 
 afterthoughts of theology. Faith and doctrine, these are 
 the two terms in frequent use in the New Testament, and 
 invariably used in a single fixed and definite sense — the 
 one as the spiritual, the other as the intellectual, organ 
 of apprehension of things unseen and eternal. Faith is 
 exercised on a person, and is only love in its inchoate 
 form of trust — the trust in One whom not seeing we love, 
 but whom when we see as He is we shall love as we 
 ought. In this sense faith is invariably used in the New 
 Testament as heart affiance, and to strengthen this weak 
 faith of childhood there is given ScSaxn, teaching, — certain 
 object-lessons are set before us, such as the Gospel nar- 
 rative of the life of Christ, and the wonders of love and 
 mercy wliich He wrought, all of which attach us to Him, 
 and compel us to say with our intelligence, " Is not this 
 tlie Christ, the Saviour of the world ?" 
 
 But as soon as we descend even into sub-apostolic 
 times, faith develops, or degenerates rather, into " the 
 faitli," tlie deposit, that is, of credenda, which are to be 
 taken on trust, because they are too high to be under- 
 stood. But soon the intellect steps in and asks for some 
 warrant of these things. Then BiBaxv passes into ho^a, 
 
Didachd and Dogma. 235 
 
 which soon hardens into hoyixa. Why, and for what 
 stages, our opinion grows rigid as a dogma, it is impossible 
 to explain, unless it be that men are impatient of opinions 
 which continue long in a mere state of flux. They ask 
 for something which, like law among the Medes, alters 
 not — which is not here to-day and gone to-morrow. 
 Stability, which is the very conception of a state, is even 
 more importunately craved for in a cult. It is a just 
 instinct in the mind that religious opinion should be 
 rigid ; hence, let philosophers complain of it as they do, 
 this instinct for dogma is not quite so baseless as it 
 seems. It is more than a mere relic of the superstitious- 
 ness of primitive times. But, unhappily, theologians 
 have presumed too far on this craving for definiteness. 
 Going beyond St Luke's modest endeavour to set forth 
 in order an outline of the things most certainly believed 
 among us, they have laid an interdict on free thought by 
 confounding and mixing up together the intellectual and 
 emotional sides of religion. Faith in a person, and 
 doctrine or teaching concerning his work, — the former 
 chiefly found in the Gospels, the latter exclusively in the 
 Epistles, — have been made up into one conglomerate, 
 until we are told we can have no faith in the person of 
 Jesus unless we accept certain doctrines concerning His 
 work. We will allow, of course, that the two regions 
 interlap, as Epistles and Gospels dovetail into each other. 
 But this is not enough for afterthinking theology. It 
 reverses the natural order, and invites us to study the 
 person in the work, not to see the work growing out of 
 the person. In Anselm this inverted order reached its 
 climax, who actually offered the atoning death as the 
 explanation of the initial act of Incarnation, thus making 
 the end explain the beginning, and reading the life back- 
 wards. The note, then, by which to detect the after- 
 
236 Didachd and Dogma. 
 
 thoughts of theology is this, that it lays undue stress 
 on do<4ina, and understands " faith " as " the faith." As 
 soon as this stage is reached, — and it did not take long to 
 reach it in the West, — the gospel has become a new law, 
 and the bondage of the spirit to the letter has begun, 
 from which Christ had once for all set us free. There is 
 only one way of recovery from this decline, which is by 
 insisting on " faith " in a person, and " teaching " con- 
 cerninjx his work, to be laid stress on as the one thins; 
 needful. As long, then, as Trtcrrt? retained its primitive 
 simplicity of meaning as trust or affiance in the living 
 God, so long the term hiha'yr) was the equivalent phrase 
 for those teachings which make up the body of revealed 
 truth. The two terms together make up between them 
 what we may describe as the subjective and objective 
 sides of religion respectively. Only once, and meto- 
 nymically, in one of the later and less authoritative letters, 
 the Epistle of Jude, is " the faith once delivered to the 
 saints" referred to as the /c?cs qiic& crcditur, not thQ fides 
 quel crcditur. It is a solecism, as all cjood critics allow, 
 this use of irLari^ for the body of doctrine. Elsewhere 
 in the Xew Testament, with one or two insignificant 
 exceptions, faith is always the subjective element of trust ; 
 it is the affiance of the heart, the unfolding of the flower 
 to the sun, and in its integrity is less an intellectual 
 tlian a moral act. Hence the close connection which St. 
 Paul draws between faith and a ii^ood conscience, — a con- 
 nection so intimate, that if the conscience is defiled, we 
 sliall make shipwreck concerning faith. Having thus 
 fixed the meaning of faith as that subjective spiritual 
 putting forth of trust as a response to God's truth, it is 
 well to remark the balance of apostolic teaching. Our 
 faith would be vain unless there was a " faithful saying," 
 a body of teaching clear, consistent, and convincing, on 
 
Didachd and Dogma. 237 
 
 which our faith may rest with unquestioning confidence, 
 and feel like the Psalmist, " In Thee have I trusted, and 
 shall never be confounded." 
 
 The primitive use of faith and doctrine as the two co- 
 efficients of the gospel, as the subjective and objective 
 sides respectively of Church truth, lingered on as a tradi- 
 tion far into sub-apostolic times. A precious testimony 
 to that use of the true hit)a'^r) is the recovery of that 
 lost fragment of antiquity, the hi^a^^ rcop BooSeKa, which 
 critics agree is not to be assigned to a date later than 
 between 120 and 160 A.D. To our thinking, the earlier 
 date seems the most probable from the almost Esseuistic 
 character of its teachiug, and the remarkable use of the 
 Syriac w^atchword of the early Church, Maranatha, which 
 indicates Antioch as the earliest home of the Gentile 
 Church. " If any is holy," the writer observes, " let him 
 come ; if any is not, let him repent Maranatha. Amen." ^ 
 The DidaM sets out with a scheme of moral precepts 
 under the head of " The two ways of life and death," 
 followed by ordinances relating to sacraments and the 
 ministry of the Church, and concludes with a striking 
 section on the judgment of the last day. That it should 
 contain no statement or exposition of dogma, is in keeping 
 with its early date ; and, indeed, its reference to the 
 sacramental cup as the vine of David is so peculiar, so 
 half-Jewish, that it betrays its archaic style. It is ad- 
 mitted to be only a kind of skeleton outline of the fuller 
 tradition referred to in the IN'ew Testament with ScBa)^?], 
 or teaching (Acts ii. 42), which is described as one of the 
 four marks of early discipleship, the other three being 
 fellowship with the apostles and breaking of bread, or 
 the sacramental commemoration of Christ's death, and, 
 lastly, prayers, or some liturgical common service. 
 1 Teaching of the Twelve, chai^. x. 
 
238 Didachd and Dogma. 
 
 We have thus in lilaxh the primitive apostolic phrase, 
 which was only slowly displaced as ho^a, the element of 
 subjective opinion, stole into the Church from the schools 
 of pliilosophy, and this in its turn hardened into hc^fia. 
 The stages l3y which this transformation was completed 
 were as follows : — In the schools of philosophy a private 
 opinion was described as a ^6^a, — ^oKel fiol, it seems to 
 me, or " it seems good to me," was the usual ad vere- 
 cmidiam way of introducing some speculative novelty. 
 But just as the resolutions of the will of the monarcli 
 were accepted by his subjects, that is, as it were, trans- 
 muted into resolutions of the will of other persons, so the 
 aflirmations of a thinker might be assented to by those 
 who listened to him, that is, might become affirmations 
 of other persons.^ In the one case, as in the other, the 
 one word dogma was employed. It came thus to express 
 (1) a decree, (2) a dogma. The latter one tended to 
 predominate. The word came ordinarily to express an 
 affirmation made by a philosopher, which was accepted as 
 true by those who, from the fact of accepting it, became 
 his followers and formed his school. The acquiescence of 
 a large number of men in the same affirmation gave to 
 such an affirmation a high degree of probability ; but it 
 did not cause it to lose its original character of a personal 
 conviction, nor did it afford any guarantee that the co- 
 incidence of expression was also a coincidence of ideas, 
 either between the original thinker and his disciples, or 
 between the disciples themselves. 
 
 The stages by which "dogmatism" in 23hilosophy 
 passed from the stage of a private judgment into that of 
 a corporate, collective mode of thinking, which it was 
 presumptuous even to challenge, are well known, and 
 have been often traced. In the second and third centuries 
 
 ^ Hatcli, The Ilibbert Lectures, p. 120. 
 
Didachd and Dogma. 239 
 
 of our era there had come to be three main groups of 
 schools. " Some men," writes Sextus Empiricus, " say 
 that they have found the truth ; some say it is impossible 
 for truth to be apprehended ; some still search for it." 
 Philosophy was divided accordingly into three camps — 
 the dogmatists, the sceptics, and the academics — or the 
 philosophy of assertion, of denial, and of research or 
 inquiry. But the first of these, as Dr. Hatch truly 
 remarks, was in an overwhelming majority. The whole 
 of the Stoics, and the larger section of the more en- 
 lightened Platonists, stood on the ground of dogma ; i.c, 
 that there were certain definite principles, landmarks of 
 right and wrong, which could only be effaced by doing 
 violence to our nature. It was because the empirics and 
 sceptics took lower ground than this that they deservedly 
 fell under a reproach. 
 
 But the philosophy of assertion, of denial, and of 
 research alike lay outside the earliest types of Christian 
 thought. To believers in a crucified and risen Christ the 
 moral and spiritual elements of their faith were not only 
 supreme, but also exclusive. They reflected the philo- 
 sophy, not of Greece, but of Palestine. That philosophy 
 was almost entirely ethical. It dealt with the problems, 
 not of "being" in the abstract, but of human life. It was 
 stated, for the most part, in short antithetical sentences, 
 with a symbol or parable to enforce them. It was a 
 philosophy of proverbs. It had no eye for the minute 
 anatomy of thought. It had no system, for the sense of 
 system was not yet awakened. But before the second 
 century had quite passed away a new phase of thought 
 passed over the Christian consciousness. Philosophy, at 
 first distrusted and .dreaded, began to be taken over, and 
 to shape the thought of Christian teachers into a mould 
 of its own. Two schools arose. The Eastern, which, 
 
240 DidacIiS and Dogma. 
 
 Lfenerally speaking, through its doctrine of the Logos, 
 held, as Justin Martyr did, tliat " the teachings of Plato 
 are not alien to those of Christ, although not in all 
 respects similar. For all the writers of antiquity were 
 able to have a dim vision of realities by means of the 
 indwelling seed of the implanted word." "^ On the other 
 hand, the "Western type of Church teachers held that 
 philosophers had borrowed or stolen their doctrines from 
 the Scriptures. As Minucius Felix observes, " From the 
 Divine preachings of the prophets they imitated the 
 shadow of holy truths." ^ " What poet or sophist," says 
 Tertullian, " has not drunk at the fountain of the pro- 
 phets ? From thence it is, therefore, that the philosophers 
 have quenched the thirst of their minds, so that it is the 
 very things which they have of ours which bring us into 
 comparison with them." ^ 
 
 But whether theologians maintained, as the Eastern 
 Fathers generally did, that theology and philosophy were 
 each independent springs derived from the same fountain 
 of all inspiration, the Eternal Logos, or whether, in the 
 opposite extreme, they set out as writers in the West did, 
 by denouncing philosophy as stealing its treasures from 
 the written word, in any case an approach of some kind 
 was inevitable. The Church, perhaps unconsciously on her 
 part, took over the methods and even the technical terms 
 of philosophy. It had been alleged against Christians of 
 the second century, that they still made it their boast, 
 with the apostle, that not many wise men after the flesh, 
 not many mighty, were called. Origen, from whose reply 
 alone we learn all the taunts that had been flunoj apjainst 
 the gospel by Celsus, quotes the following : " Let no 
 educated man enter, no wise man, no prudent man, for 
 
 1 Justin I\rartyr, Aipol. ii. 13. 2 ^^wi. Felix, Octav. 34. 
 
 ^ Tertullian, Ajjol. xlvii. 
 
Didachd and Dogma. 1 4 1 
 
 such things we deem evil ; but whoever is ignorant, wlio- 
 ever is unintelligent, whoever is uneducated, whoever is 
 simple, let him come and be welcome." This state of 
 things did not long outlive the second century. By the 
 middle of the third century Christians were able to meet 
 philosophers on their own ground, and to beat them with 
 their own weapons. The faith was silently transformed 
 into a philosophy, and the first sign that the transition 
 was taking place was the use of the speculative method. 
 In this way the Sofa of the one grew slowly and by 
 degrees into the dogma of the many. Opinions which, 
 in the making, were mere private judgments, soon gathered 
 authority as they spread and became current, just as 
 rivers deepen and broaden, and so make their own 
 channel by the volume of water which they carry along 
 with them. 
 
 In itself this is inevitable ; and if it went no farther 
 than this, the dogmas of theology would bring no more 
 hurt to others than the dogmas of philosophy. But the 
 formal end of the one is speculation only, the formal end 
 of the other is certainty with regard to that one theme, 
 our relation to God and the hereafter. Theology and 
 philosophy deal with truth on quite a different footing. 
 The same philosopher who is a dogmatist in one direction 
 may be a sceptic in another. It is otherwise with theo- 
 logy ; in this case scepticism is nowhere permissible. At 
 every turn he is met with an affirmation, " Thus saith 
 the Lord," and he is instantly challenged with a " Be- 
 lievest thou this ? " In philosophy the end is not so 
 much truth as the search for truth. Lessing has struck 
 the right note for the true philosopher in the famous 
 contrast, that if he were offered truth in one hand and 
 the pursuit of truth in the other, he would take the 
 casket which contained the search for truth, and exclaim, 
 
 Q 
 
242 Didachd and Dogma . 
 
 " As for absolute truth, that belongs, Eternal Father, 
 only to Thee." This is in the true philosophical temper. 
 Philosophy at its best is neither dogmatism nor scep- 
 ticism, but the free play of both forces : it is the balance 
 maintained between the two, of which the academics were 
 the best examples. They held a middle position between 
 extreme dogmatists and sceptics ; they neither denied, 
 with the sceptics, that truth was attainable, nor affirmed, 
 with the dogmatists, that they had already attained it. 
 They were on the search, and the position which they 
 took up is the only attitude of mind which may be fairly 
 described as philosophical, since if either truth is known, 
 or in the other extreme is unknowable, what further 
 use is there for that temper of mind which is that of the 
 genuine sportsman, who pursues his game partly for the 
 bag, but principally for the pleasure of the chase ? 
 
 It is otherwise with theology ; and as its ends are 
 different, so its methods must differ from those of the 
 schools. It is not so much the discovery of truth first 
 hand, as its recovery out of the wrappings of tradition 
 and the ravages of time. There is a body of doctrine 
 or faith once, i.e. once for all, delivered to the saints. 
 But how soon is that faith tarnished by tradition and 
 covered by the cinder-heap of time, which soon swells 
 into a heap of rubbish like that Monte Testorio outside 
 Kome. The methods of theology are thus largely anti- 
 quarian. In this recovery our process is like treating 
 refractory ores to extract the precious metal. All the 
 helps of philology and sound exegesis, precious as these are 
 in their place, is not enough, unless a fine critical faculty 
 and an unerring spiritual instinct, that never mistakes 
 metal for dross, does not govern the whole process. This 
 is why the list of real theologians, in the strict sense of 
 the term, is so small. The Fathers, with few exceptions, 
 
Didachd a nd Dogma. 243 
 
 were uncritical in the last degree. With little science 
 and no philology, how could they extract out of an ancient 
 document, archaic even in their days, its true meaning, 
 of which the official custodians, the Israel after the flesh, 
 understood even less than they ? Through ignorance of 
 Greek, the later Latin Fathers could only grope their 
 way through the New Testament, as only one or two of 
 the Eastern Fathers could explore the meaning of the 
 Old Testament. Both were workers in a dark mine, of 
 which they had no ground-plan, no map of its galleries. 
 Thus, as their methods were defective, so their conclusions 
 are utterly untrustworthy. The day has gone by when 
 we need either attack or defend the Fathers. The two 
 dogmatic schools which a century ago fought over these 
 old bones of theology, have both disappeared. Since the 
 birth of criticism we hear less and less, both of attack 
 and defence, of the study of the Fathers. 
 
 As for the Schoolmen, our interest in them is, if pos- 
 sible, even more antiquarian. In their case it may be 
 said that the very ruins have perished, and for the best 
 of all reasons. A comment on a comment is like a foil on 
 a foil in heraldry. The Fathers are supposed to inter- 
 pret the apostolic mind ; and we bear with them, in the 
 hope that we may catch echoes even second - hand of 
 what those who had sat at the feet of Jesus, or had 
 leaned on His bosom, knew and taught. But for School- 
 men we do not feel even that scant respect. In their 
 case the tradition is so far off and unreal, so disguised by 
 the later afterthoughts of an ascetic and superstitious 
 age, that we have no patience with those who tell us that 
 they have winnowed some truth from the times of St. 
 Thomas, or the sentences of Peter the Lombard. It only 
 raises a smile, when this second St. Thomas is set on a 
 pedestal by the present Pope Leo XIII. as the guide out 
 
244 Didachd and Dogina. 
 
 of the labyrinth into which modern Jesuit teaching has 
 led that Latin Church over which the Pope is supreme 
 vicegerent for Christ. 
 
 But if theology finds little help in Fathers and School- 
 men, what are we to say of the writings of those blessed 
 Keformers whom the Parker Society tried to exhume and 
 galvanise into the mimicry of life some forty years ago ? 
 The attempt was a ghastly failure, and the verdict of the 
 public mind was decisively this, to let the dead bury 
 their dead. The Anglo-Catholic theology fared no better ; 
 and we are shut in to the conclusion, which Beccaria's 
 cynical saying abundantly verifies, that the history of 
 progress is the history of error — it is the sight of wrecks, 
 on which a few here and there emerge to the surface of 
 truth. As for libraries, whether of law, physic, or divinity, 
 they are the mere cemeteries of sleeping remains. The 
 divining rod of tlie critic may touch dry bones here 
 and there, and they may live. But in this case it is by 
 reversing the sign of Elisha : it is the living man who 
 puts life into the dead bones of the sleeping prophet. To 
 assume that the prophet's bones touching a corpse will 
 make it live, is to suppose a moral miracle out of analogy 
 with all which we know of the action of mind on mind. 
 The thoughts of dead authors may direct and even quicken 
 the thoughts of living men, but only in the case where 
 they are intelligently used, not read, that is, under blind 
 authority ; as some uncritical divines a century ago would 
 go over a course of the Fathers in the original Greek and 
 Latin, and come out of the course the same blind pedants 
 as when they began it. A learned man exploring in the 
 gallery of tlie Fathers and Schoolmen without the torch 
 of the higher critcism in his hands, is as helpless as a 
 tourist turned into the Catacombs of Ptome to grope his way 
 about, and then asked to interpret Christian antiquities. 
 
Didache and Dogma, 245 
 
 What with the smoke of other torches, the broken letters 
 are often at best undecipherable ; and as to put a meaning 
 into the whole, there is no such divination in the dull 
 brain of an ordinary divine, that we can expect such 
 miracles of the higher criticism in which a Niebuhr has 
 failed. It is so much easier to say what early Eoman 
 history is not than to say what it is, that we have no 
 right to complain because the Christian archseologist has 
 not succeeded. Scientific theology is, like scientific his- 
 tory, still a desideratum. In Bacon's phrase, we have 
 still to report it barren of fruit. 
 
 Bearing in mind, then, these contrasts between doctrine 
 and dogma, let us not be too harsh on the dogmat- 
 ists. Their mistake was the inevitable one arising 
 out of the fragmentary nature of apostolic teaching. 
 Evidently it has not been God's will to reveal His mind 
 in a body of articulated truths, which the logical faculty 
 could break up into syllogisms, and discourse on in dialectic 
 form, as an Old Light, a Scotch professor, used to lecture 
 to a body of students on the Westminster Confession. 
 The Author and Finisher of our faith taught, like Socrates, 
 in proverbs ; His words were symbols; and His method, if 
 not ironic as Socrates, had this in common with the irony 
 of the sage of Athens, that He had to remind them that His 
 words were only parables, but that by and by He would 
 no more speak to them in parables, but show them 
 plainly of the Father : " I have many things to tell you, 
 but ye cannot bear them now ; howbeit when He, the 
 Spirit of truth, is come. He shall guide you into all the 
 truth." 
 
 In the case of His twelve chosen followers, the author- 
 ised interpreters of • His teaching, we find that it was 
 ])ede, temjptim, step by step, that they were led on by that 
 Guide. Slowly and cautiously they picked their steps 
 
246 Didachd and Dogma, 
 
 out of Hebraism into Hellenism. One bolder than the 
 rest, and who outran Peter, as John did when they 
 both ran to the sepulchre, was first to emphasise the 
 thought that election is not a narrow, arbitrary preference 
 of one race over another, but that sovereign wisdom 
 which sees, in the Jew at one time and in the Gentile at 
 another, the fittest instrument for evangelising the earth. 
 If this Pauline conception of election had been accepted 
 from the first, we should have heard little of that hideous 
 distortion of the doctrine which, under the shadow of 
 two great names, has cast a blight on theology, and made 
 some of its afterthoughts a strange caricature of its first 
 thoughts. 
 
 Expecting to find all within the canon which could 
 make up a body of divinity, they set to work putting 
 fragments together, and turning incidental, ad hominem, 
 kind of arguments thrown out by the way into proposi- 
 tions of general import. So it was in this uncritical way 
 that Augustine, meeting with the Pauline expression, 
 " Whom He will He hardeneth," went on under the iron 
 logic of necessity, as Calvin also did, to extract reproba- 
 tion as well as election out of the sweet message of mercy 
 to mankind. This reminds us of those lines of the poet — 
 
 " For, like those bees of Trebizond, 
 
 Which from the sunniest flowers, that glad 
 With their pure smile the gardens round. 
 
 Draw venom forth which makes men mad." 
 
 The apostle in reality was stamping out the Jewish 
 dogma of election by a counter dogma; i.e. that election 
 was not an end in itself, but only the means to an end, 
 and that in reaching that end, God, like the wise Father, 
 often remade the clay, turning vessels of honour into 
 vessels of dishonour, and vice versd, the end being always 
 the same, that He might have mercy on all. To read chap. 
 
Didachd and Dogma. 247 
 
 ix. without following on to chaps, x. and xi. of Eomans, 
 and never drawing breath till we reach the Oh altitudo, 
 this is the only intelligent use of Sacred Scripture which 
 seems to have been beyond those mere textuarians to 
 whom we owe that which we call a body of divinity, and 
 which, like the body without the soul, is dead. 
 
 Such is dogmatism which is the dogmatism of early 
 doctrine. The first is apostolic, and lingered on far into 
 sub-apostolic times. The use of the term BcSaxv in 
 connection with the teaching of the Twelve is a witness 
 to the primitive standard. It is of the same value as a 
 certain fossil in showing the Eocene age in geology. 
 
 The " teaching of the Twelve " clearly marks a state 
 of transition in which the importance of a sacramental 
 system and a sacerdotal order is beginning to dawn on the 
 Christian consciousness ; but as yet the new theology, as 
 it was then considered, had not taken dogmatic form. It 
 nestled behind the phrase StSa'^rj ; it has not as yet been 
 formulated. It is only a Bo^a, or private opinion, which 
 in the end, as a Boy/jia, would put on the air of authority, 
 and enforce itself under the threat of an Anathema. It 
 is interesting here to note that the two expressions which 
 St. Paul couples together (1 Cor. xvi. 22), "Let him be 
 Anathema Maranatha," took two devious paths. The 
 earlier Syriac watchword, " Maranatha, the Lord is 
 coming," was the first to drop out of significance, and 
 even of use. But at the time when the JDidacJiS was 
 written in the sub-apostolic age, it still floated on the ear 
 of Eastern Christians ; it had not quite gone out of use. 
 On the other hand, the term Anathema had not yet 
 acquired the conventional sense it was given when Con- 
 ciliar authority came in to back up dogmatic teaching 
 and give it is true ring. The solitary use of Maranatha 
 would of itself decide as to the true date of the DidacM, 
 
248 Didachd and Dogma. 
 
 as well as to the branch of the Church in which it was 
 found. Such a writing, we conclude, could not have 
 appeared later than the first half of the second century, 
 or in any branch of the Church west of the .^gean. 
 The phrase is a kind of water-mark on the sheet, fixing 
 the date and place of its origin, and deciding for us, if we 
 had any doubt, as to the meaning of its contents, both what 
 it taught and what age of Church history it sprang from. 
 
 Only five times in the New Testament is the term 
 dogma used, and in every case it has the same sense of a 
 binding decree imposed by authority from without. In 
 the first case, there went out a decree from Caesar 
 Augustus that all the world should be enrolled, we at 
 once see its meaning. Caesar's commands are dogmas in 
 every sense of the term. In the same sense precisely 
 the decrees of Caesar (Acts xvii. 7) are referred to, and 
 the decrees of the apostles after the first Council of 
 Jerusalem are also described as ho'^ixaja, Acts xvi. 4. 
 In Eph. ii. 15 and Col. ii. 14 the Mosaic ritual is rightly 
 described as contained iv ho^fiaat,, i.e. in positive external 
 ordinances. They are right because commanded, and 
 not so much commanded because right. In both these 
 parallel passages the dogmatic teaching of the Mosaic 
 ritual is contrasted with the higher liberty of the gospel. 
 These dogmas of the ceremonial law have no intrinsic 
 worth and no permanent value. They all are provisional, 
 and replaced by a higher teaching which is not dogmatic, 
 but which is written no longer on tables of stone, but 
 instead, on tlie fleshy tables of the heart. 
 
 The general sense of dogmatism, taking all these pas- 
 sages together, is unmistakeable. Whether it is a decree 
 of Cajsar or of Moses, or of the apostles even, it is a decree 
 or ordinance extending only to external conduct. It 
 begins and ends with the act of obedience. It strikes a 
 
Didache and Dogma, 249 
 
 lower note than that of hiZa'^n^ and that the sub-apostolic 
 Church was deeply conscious of, by clinging to the one 
 term which recalled the one Master who taught as having 
 authority, i.e. first-hand, and not as the scribes, by " base 
 authority of other books." Now the decline of doctrine 
 into dogma is a true note by which to measure the 
 decline of the Church from her standard of primitive 
 purity. It has been well observed that the criterion of 
 the difference between the two phrases is this, that the 
 keynote of doctrine is that it springs from life and its 
 needs. It refers to our duty to God, ourselves, and our 
 neighbour. Dogma, on the other hand, if not quite losing 
 all ethical meaning, leaves that to fall into the back- 
 ground. It sets out by distinguishing between faith and 
 conduct. It confines faith almost entirely to the intel- 
 lectual side of our nature — we believe either because we 
 understand, as one Schoolman taught, or we believe or 
 alter that we may understand, as another and better 
 Schoolman taught ; but in any case fides and intellectits 
 are so related that the one draws on to or presupposes 
 the other. Having thus set up two sides of religion, the 
 credenda and the agenda, the amanda, which in primitive 
 times included both, quite falls into the background, and 
 is left to those mystics and pietists who are in tacit revolt 
 against the doctrinaires and dogmatists of Church discip- 
 line and Church authority. 
 
 We have referred to its ethical bearing as the key to 
 the distinction between doctrine and dogma. There is 
 this further test, doctrine never can be pushed too far, 
 dogma easily can. Take the remarkable instance of 
 Jonathan Edwards. He was one of that rare class of 
 pulpit teachers who preached right out and without any 
 reserve all that he held in his heart to be the whole 
 counsel of God. He had no compromises, no reserves ; 
 
250 Didachd and Dogma. 
 
 but, taking extreme Augustinianism to be the very truth 
 of God, he flung it out among his people as fire from 
 heaven to kindle where it might. The result was as we 
 might expect. His enthusiasm rose almost to the point 
 of insanity, and the people of Northampton rose at last 
 in revolt against him, drove him from his pulpit and oft' 
 into the wilderness, where he was prepared to wander off, 
 like one of the prophets of old of whom the world was 
 not worthy. The crisis in his case was happily tided over, 
 and he ended his days in peace and honour as President 
 of Princeton College. But the revolt against this gospel 
 of terrorism, which drove Edwards out of his charge at 
 Northampton, did not end there. It was the active prin- 
 ciple of that remarkable and melancholy reaction which 
 drove many of the best of the New England divines into 
 that stunted draft of Christianity, that half-Deism, which 
 we identify with Unitarianism. There is nothing more 
 certain than this law of one extreme producing another 
 chimccra chimceram ]3arit. The semi-Deism of Boston 
 was the natural necessary reaction from such an exhibition 
 of the Divine Being as Jonathan Edwards and his school 
 had twisted out of a few texts in the Eomans uncritically 
 put together. " Show us the Eather, and it sufticeth us," 
 was the cry of human nature at Northampton and else- 
 where ; and to that cry the response of Edwards was a 
 doctrine of the Fatherhood such as wrung from Wesley 
 the remark to Whitfield, " Your God is my devil." 
 
 Dogmas, when they reach this point that they not only 
 revolt tlie conscience, but " compel worshippers to break 
 windows in order to let in fresh air," as Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes describes it, are preparing the way for their own 
 removal. The ineradicable instinct of mankind teaches 
 them that any ethical truth is more certain than a merely 
 theological ; or, to vary the thought, what we know of God 
 
Didachd and Dogma. 2 5 1 
 
 by the voice within must be far more certain than the 
 long-drawn deductions of a so-called logic in theology. 
 Dogmas break down when brought to this test, and we 
 are thankful to those who have the courage or the hardi- 
 hood, as Edwards had, to test them up to the breaking 
 point. The majority of divines, happily for their own 
 peace of mind, hold their dogmatic theology as " regula- 
 tive " truth only. They are thankful to Dean Mansel for 
 inventing a phrase by which they can escape from their 
 own conclusions. In the case of the lay-world, they 
 dilute their theology with what they call common sense, 
 and hold as much or as little of it as does not shock their 
 instinct of right and wrong. But trained theologians 
 have no such escape, so they have to invent one. Eoman 
 ecclesiastics, shut in to the dogma that out of the Church 
 there is no salvation, have invented "invincible ignorance" 
 as the loophole through which they may escape, consign- 
 ing heretics and schismatics to eternal perdition. In the 
 same way Anglicans, whose straight-laced orthodoxy admits 
 of no deflection to the right hand or left, find a pious way 
 of escape in this new regulative theory of religion. We 
 are bound to hold our old dogmas whole and undetiled ; 
 but when criticism begins to tell on the dogma, we evade 
 a decision as to its being true or false by the compromise 
 that it may be speculatively false but regulatively true. 
 
 These are some of the pitfalls into which extreme 
 dogmatism tempts its followers, and out of which ingenious 
 apologists for dogmatism, like the late Dean Mansel, have 
 invented escapes which want nothing but the sense that 
 they are inventions. But as soon as we get back from 
 dogma to doctrine, the difficulty disappears of itself, for 
 the reason we have, already seen. No doctrine, pushed 
 however far, ever conflicts with our ethical sense of 
 duty ; with dogma it is otherwise. Here we enter at 
 
2^2 
 
 Didachd arid Do^^ma 
 
 i> 
 
 once a marc daiisicm, strewn witli the wrecks of previous 
 theological systems, and a conflict of duties at once 
 begins. Dogmas, as Hobbes cynically puts it, are, like 
 pills, best swallowed whole, and not chewed. Should we 
 not, then, seriously ask ourselves, is this also the case with 
 the DidacM of Christ and His apostles ; since, if doctrine 
 brings about the same conflict as theological dogma, 
 mankind will have the same excuse for rejecting primitive 
 Christianity which they have for refusing that amalgam 
 of first thoughts and afterthoughts which we describe as 
 dogmatic theology ? It is no light matter which is here 
 at stake. On Christ and His truth rests all the best 
 hopes of mankind for the future. But the Church has, 
 almost without exception, corrupted the simplicity of the 
 gospel with additaments of its own, these afterthoughts 
 brought in to strengthen men's faith, and which in the 
 end have so weakened it that they scarcely know what 
 to believe. Like overdriven sheep, they faint by the 
 way, and instead of the voice, " Come unto me," they 
 feel themselves driven into some Calvinist or Catholic 
 sheepfold, where they hear too much of threaten- 
 ing dogma to catch the sweet, low notes of Him 
 who is meek and gentle in heart. To put it plainly 
 and bluntly, the question turns on this, whether in- 
 fidelity, in one form or another, whether as high, polite 
 Agnosticism or coarse Iconoclasm, is not to overshadow 
 the age and veil the Saviour from our eyes ? Are we 
 prepared to discard dogma, and to return to primitive 
 doctrine ? Are we prepared to allow that theology, ever 
 since the fourth century, took a wrong turn, and, in the 
 West especially, has since gone from bad to worse, until 
 dogmatism wrought its own overthrow at the revolt of 
 Luther. Then, in a fit of short-sighted panic, the 
 lieformers became more scholastic than the Schoolmen, 
 
Didachd and Dogma. 253 
 
 and so it has come down to our day, in which the 
 extreme peril of the situation is at last opening thought- 
 ful men's eyes to see where the real danger lies. It is 
 in a divorce of morality and religion. As soon as 
 ethical teachers tell the age that they can get on better 
 with such sanctions as satisfied Confucius than with those 
 which Christ holds out in His Sermon on the Mount, 
 men are in extreme danger of saying. In what is Christ 
 a better teacher than Sankya Muni or any other 
 moral Eeformer ? This is the state of the case in our 
 day, and calls for a courageous admission that the fault 
 lies in ourselves, and in the dogmatic unethical presenta- 
 tion of the old truth. The average preacher of some 
 dry dogmatic theology seldom pauses to ask. Is this the 
 doctrine which is according to godliness ? It never occurs 
 to him whether these theological formulas, cramhh 
 repetita, ever commend themselves to the conscience of 
 those that hear him. His theological teachers have early 
 warned him not to attend to such texts at all. What is 
 conscience in the natural man ? Are we to be told of a 
 verifying faculty in every man ; and is a tribunal to be 
 set up in the pews by which to pronounce on the 
 dogmas of the pulpit ? It is in this sheep-like frame of 
 mind that our popular shepherds expect us to take their 
 utterances as the last word of the lively oracles. There 
 are some men who will not take truth at all on these 
 terms of authority, as if we are to take or leave it, but may 
 not discuss it. These accordingly are " Church-outed," 
 as Milton described himself; while not a few educated 
 men go to church and regard religion *' regulatively " as 
 the best safeguard for popular morals. There must be a 
 religion for the people, but it will be a sad day for truth 
 in England when Christ's religion is treated thus, and 
 betrayed as the Son of man was with a kiss. 
 
2 54 DidacJic and Dogma. 
 
 If we only have the courage to say this out, it is not 
 yet too late to reseat faith again on its old foundations 
 of personal conviction. Instead of setting out with 
 terrorising men to flee from the wrath to come, as 
 Jonathan Edwards did, let us take the more excellent 
 way of Christ and His apostles. Let us persuade men 
 by commending our gospel to the conscience. Some 
 consciences, it is true, will not respond ; the lock will not 
 always fly open when the key is applied. Are we, then, 
 to conclude that the key does not fit every conscience, or 
 should we not rather infer that the lock may be rusted ? 
 The key is true to the wards, but neglect of use has 
 brought the lock into such a rusty state that Christ will 
 have to stand at the door and knock, and sometimes 
 knock long and loud in Providence, so as to alarm the 
 sleeper within, before the door is opened. 
 
 But when it is opened we see the correspondence of 
 Christ and the conscience, and how well the key fits the 
 lock. As soon as this is perceived, then we understand 
 why we can dispense with dogma, and are content to sit 
 at His feet as the alone true teacher. The dogmatic 
 method of authority falls back, and Christ stands out, 
 seen in His own light and in the self-evidencing power 
 of truth. Then ethics and theology, instead of distinct 
 truths, are seen to be only different aspects of the same 
 truth. The restoration of belief and the reformation of 
 theology thus go on side by side. It is the old paths 
 which we have to get back to, when every single dogma of 
 theology was tested by its ethical truth and in foro 
 conscientice. Were it found to be a dogma only, outside 
 the needs of daily life, then it has to be rejected, or at 
 least revised. In most cases, it will be found that the 
 restatement of the dogma in its primitive doctrinal aspect 
 will save it from this indignity of rejection as a corruption 
 
DidachS and Dogma. 255 
 
 or error. Take the term "grace," which has been 
 hammered on the anvil of later Augustinianism out of 
 all shape, with its original aspect. There is grace of 
 congruity and grace of condignity, prevenient grace, and, 
 in its final form, an efficacious or saving grace. Are 
 these all different names for the same thing, the favour 
 of God to sinners in different stages of their approach to 
 Him ? Or does grace mean the phases of faith as it 
 passes from unbelief to filial trust and confidence ? The 
 Eealists of dogmatic theology have discoursed on grace 
 till, as Joubert remarked, they have almost made of it a 
 " fourth Person of the Trinity." But a return to doctrinal 
 simplicity disposes of all these afterthoughts of later 
 Augustinianism. Grace is seen to be only the good old 
 Hebrew phrase, favour, and which reappears in Jochanan 
 (our John) as the favour of Jehovah. That favour deepens, 
 of course, the nearer we approach Jehovah, as the triune 
 blessing suggests the true meaning. " The Lord bless 
 thee and keep thee," God's general favour to all as the 
 Father of all, '' The Lord make His face to shine on 
 thee," His favour as He draws nearer to us in the Son 
 of His love. " The Lord lift up the light of His counten- 
 ance on thee, and give thee peace," when we are brought so 
 near to God that we see Him face to face in the One who 
 is the express image of His person, and of whom we can 
 say, " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father also." 
 
 The remedy, then, for dogmatism, let us add in conclu- 
 sion, is to bring dogma back to its primitive sense of 
 ho^a, or private opinion. AVhy and how the doxa of one 
 age became the dogma of another we have already seen. 
 The Church only followed the schools of philosophy in 
 this transition from the aorist to the preterperfect sense 
 of the term hoKelv. The intensive form of the verb 
 Boyf^arl^co marks the third and last stage . of the develop- 
 
256 D idacJid and Dogma. 
 
 nient, on which we need not to enlarge, since there is 
 scarcely a divine who will not admit that to dogmatise is 
 a degenerate type of thought. It is, in a word, co-ordinate 
 in time and place with that stage of the Church which we 
 describe as Byzantinism. It was against this contentious 
 polemical temper that Gregory of Nazianzen uttered his 
 memorable protest : " Wouldest thou become a theologian ? 
 Keep the commandments. Conduct is the key to con- 
 templation — 7r/5af t? eV/'/Sao-fc? Qewpla^!' One of the causes, 
 perhaps the principal cause, of the decline of Christianity 
 in the East was the running to seed of gospel truth in 
 dogmatism. It wasted itself in dialectical subtleties. Not 
 content with affirming the human and Divine in Christ, 
 and that in Him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead 
 bodily, it went on to ask in what sense was this 
 aw^ariKO)^. ^ How could the human will coexist with 
 the Divine? And when it reached the definition that there 
 were two natures in the one Person, " without mixture, 
 without change, without division, without separation," a 
 sentence which excluded alike Nestorianism and Eutych- 
 ianism, it was easy to see that this all-round negation, 
 instead of healing the breach, would only widen it. 
 The Nestorians broke away in one direction and the 
 Eutychians in another. The Monophysite Christians of 
 the far East and the Jacobite Church among the Copts 
 alike point to the futility of such nice distinctions. 
 Dogmatism had dug its own grave. The Eastern Church, 
 whicli is notliing if not ortliodox,^ seems to have shrunk 
 
 ^ Greg. Kaz. xx. 12. 
 
 - uuToax'^'hiot loyf^ccriffTKi, oir-haii(l (loginatisers, such is the description 
 wliich Gregory of Nyssa gave of Constantinople during the Council of Nice : 
 " If a trader was asked the cost of such an article, he answered by philo- 
 sophising on generated and ungenerated being. If a stranger inquired the 
 price of bread, he was told the Son is subordinate to the Fatlier. If a 
 traveller asked if his bath was ready, he was told the Son arose out of 
 
Didache and Dogma. 257 
 
 into tlie shell in which it had encased itself, like the 
 hermit crab ; and there it is found to this day, orthodox 
 and little else, with a name to live and it is dead. 
 
 Singularly enough, the West, rejecting the term ortho- 
 dox, takes up the designation Catholic as its equivalent. 
 The genius of old Eome, with its boast, hwperimn sine fine, 
 dedi, repeats itself in the Church, which claims to be both 
 Catholic, Koman, and Apostolic. The semper ubique and 
 ah omnibus are supposed to form its triple crown of 
 orthodoxy. All roads lead to Eome; and all empire flows 
 out of it, as the river runs into the ocean and thus waters 
 the whole earth. 
 
 Thus far we have traced the development of dogma as 
 an afterthought of theology. It was the first stage of the 
 descent from the primitive standard of doctrinal teaching. 
 It is an unpardonable liberty with language for those 
 who mean only doctrine to describe it by that other phrase 
 dogma. The one begins and ends with apostolic teach- 
 ing, the other goes on to Conciliar authority. This dog- 
 matic teaching may be true or erroneous, but we should 
 not confound it with that which is doctrinal only. The 
 late Edward Garbett, in his Bampton Lectures for 1867, 
 made this mischievous confusion by defining his thesis 
 as " the dogmatic faith, or an inquiry into the relation 
 subsisting between revelation and dogma." What the 
 preacher really meant was not so much the dogmatic as 
 the definite faith. His position was the sober stand 
 taken by the Reformed Church of England as soon as she 
 built up her basis of belief on the one foundation of the 
 sufficiency of Holy Writ. Mr. Garbett is emphatic on 
 this one criterion, that it is the faith once for all delivered 
 
 nothing." Can we wonder that the lively Greek intellect, wearing itself 
 out over subtleties of this kind, should sink into a shell of orthodoxy out 
 of which it has never since emerged ? 
 
258 Didachd and Dogma. 
 
 to the saints, and winnowed and kept pure from later 
 traditions and errors introduced under the specious guise 
 of developments. It is unfortunate, then, that meaning 
 one thing, he should define it by another, and lend his 
 respectable name to shield the position of those who are 
 dogmatists pure and simple. Such confusion of thought 
 brings with it its own swift retribution; and if Mr. Garbett 
 and writers of his school, in their zeal against that nebulous 
 thing known as " modern thoufjht," find themselves hunt- 
 ing it down in company with reactionary Church authority 
 teachers, they have no one to blame but themselves. 
 They have gone a mile, and they will soon he compelled 
 to go twain. Beginning with the position that the Church 
 is the keeper of " Holy Writ," they are soon forced on un- 
 willingly to admit that she is the witness, so that ques- 
 tions of the canon and so forth are uncritically to be 
 decided off-hand ; and that from antiquity, authority, and 
 tradition, when so united, there is no appeal. 
 
 Against all these insincerities there is only one remedy, 
 which is to bring theology back behind its afterthoughts 
 into the first thoughts. Neander in his History of Dogma 
 quotes a remarkable admission of Marcellus of Ancyra 
 which decides tlie meaning of the phrase dogma. The 
 term dogma, Marcellus observes, " has in it something of 
 human purpose and opinion." To mix, then, dogma and 
 doctrine, is to mix clay with iron ; and we know that the 
 image whose supports are thus mixed, not as metals in 
 the ore, soon falls to pieces. Well would it have been for 
 the Church if she had never developed out from the 
 doctrinal into the dogmatic stage. The last of great 
 doctors, in the strict sense of the term, were the two great 
 heads of the catechetical school of Alexandria, Clement 
 and Origen. With them ended the doctrinal, and soon 
 after began the dogmatic stage, which is slowly dying out 
 
Didachd and Dogma. 259 
 
 in our day after an unbroken reign of sixteen out of the 
 eighteen Christian centuries. Our hope is that the " new 
 theology " will hark back to that type which is the oldest 
 of all ; and should this hope be realised, we may again 
 realise that ideal of Christian perfection, when the scribe 
 who has been made a disciple in the kingdom of heaven, 
 and has moved on from the Old Testament to the stand- 
 point of the new, is as a householder bringing out of his 
 treasure things new and old. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 AFTERTHOUGHTS ON INSPIKATIOK 
 
 We have laid such stress on " Augustinian afterthoughts," 
 that some would suppose our coniplaiut against after- 
 thoughts in general began and ended with that famous 
 Carthaginian Father. But this is not so. The same 
 temper was at work in the Church ever since. It 
 leavened the Schoolmen ; it leavened the Reformation ; 
 and it has come down almost unchanged to our own day. 
 One hypothesis has been set up to explain another till 
 we can understand the saying of Newton, Hypotlic^es non 
 Jincjo. It was a protest wrung from him as he glanced 
 right and left, as well at the theology as science of the 
 Cambridge of his day. Of the two the condition of 
 theology was nmch more deplorable, for what was an idle 
 guess in science became a dogma in tlieology, which, to 
 dissent from, entailed penalties temporal and eternal too 
 terrible to be named. We pass lightly over all this in 
 our day as if it meant nothing at all in that day ; but 
 it was no light matter to think our own thoughts in an 
 age when those who broke away from the bondage of 
 an infallible Church only did so to set up the second 
 bondage to an infallible Book, taken literally to teach all 
 that men need to know of their origin in the past and 
 of their destiny in the future. 
 
 260 
 
Afterthoughts on Inspiration. 261 
 
 The second class of afterthoughts, then, which we 
 have now to deal with grew out of popular Protestantism. 
 It is not merely in its Augustinian or doctrinal aspects, 
 already discussed, but on its formal side as a book 
 religion. To Augustine, the Church, as the keeper and 
 witness of Holy Writ, was the final authority ; but the 
 Eeformers, in breaking with the Church, and so far part- 
 ing company with the one Church Father whom the}^ 
 cared even to quote, had to set up some ultimate 
 authority. This to them was the Bible, " the Bible the 
 religion of Protestants," though not quite in the Chilling- 
 worth sense, for Chilling worth was one of the small sect 
 of latitude men who anticipated the Cambridge Platonists 
 in thinkinor their own thouGjhts. But even here we must 
 be just to the true Eeformers. It was not so much the 
 first as the second generation of the Eeformers who set 
 up a theory of inspiration as a new court of final appeal 
 with which to combat Church authority. To the men of 
 the first age, from 1520 to 1580, the Eeformation was 
 still fluid, and spiritual faith in a living God and His 
 eternal decrees was the one formative principle. This was 
 the heroic age of the reform, when men died, or were put 
 to death, as Calvin did Servetus, all for the glory of God. 
 It was an age of martyrs and massacres, and it is not for 
 us to say what was persecution when all alike were ready 
 to call down fire from heaven. But in the second genera- 
 tion, when the new faith had settled down and crystal- 
 lised into rigid forms of its own, men began to ask what 
 was the ultimate principle of Protestantism ; and, afraid 
 to own to such a purely spiritual principle as the inner 
 light of conscience (which was the discovery of a later 
 age), they fell back on the letter of the record, and had 
 to set up a theory of book inspiration, which it has 
 tasked modern criticism either to explain or explain away. 
 
262 A fte}' thoughts on Inspiration, 
 
 It is not our intention to discuss inspiration theories 
 as sucli in detail, but simply to assign it its place among 
 those afterthoughts or hypotheses which have kept up 
 the credit of dogmatic theology till the age of true 
 criticism has come to sweep it all away. By criticism, 
 let us add, is meant — not that word -criticism which 
 limits itself to discussing documents, their age, authority, 
 and so forth. This is mere pala;ography — an important 
 aid to discovery ; but it is only the apparatus of the true 
 critic, rather than the higher judgment which intuitively 
 sifts out truth from its accretions of fable. The " higher 
 criticism " only deserves the name when it goes to the 
 heart of the question, and, after disposing of inspiration as 
 the last word of Protestantism, goes on to show what it can 
 set in its place as the verifying faculty of the enlightened 
 conscience, the lamp of God in the heart of man. We 
 have then to show that, besides Augustinianism proper, 
 there is the popular Protestantism of a book religion 
 which calls for careful restatement. 
 
 Tlie afterthoughts of theology are nowhere more seen 
 than in the changed bearings of the age to what is 
 known as book religion. Almost every age has its own 
 mode of settling the relations which must exist between 
 ibe letter and spirit, between the document and its 
 teachings, the scribe deposit and its authority as a rule 
 of faith. To discuss inspiration, much more to enter on 
 the canon and its details, would be beside our subject — 
 specialists have taken this in hand ; and since the able 
 epitome of the last results of modern criticism by Canon 
 Driver on the subject of the Old Testament canon, it is 
 impossible to sit down any longer at the old dogmatic 
 standpoint. We no longer dare to assume that the canon 
 has been settled over our heads long ago. The Jews, it 
 was assumed, were the official custodians of the Old 
 
Afterthoughts on Inspiration. 263 
 
 Testament Scriptures, as the Christian Church was of the 
 New Testament. To these authorities we must submit, 
 and abide by their decision. The Hebrews may reject 
 the N"ew Testament, and the Christian Church may depart 
 from the Hebrew standard of the Old Testament, by 
 admitting the Apocrypha to a co-ordinate position with 
 the canonical book ; but in both cases we are told that 
 they are exceeding their authority. We may accordingly 
 disregard as much the errors of Christians with regard to 
 the Old Testament canon as of the Jews with regard to 
 the New Testament. All we have to consider is that, 
 on their own ground, the testimony of each is final. 
 This was the old line of apologists, but all is changed 
 now. Criticism has stepped in and challenged the trust- 
 worthiness of Hebrew traditions with regard to the canon 
 of the Old Testament, as much as of Church traditions 
 with regard to the New Testament canon. In the latter 
 case we have accepted the challenge, and passed one by 
 one every book of the New Testament through the fire 
 of criticism. The nesrative school have done their worst, 
 but the New Testament has stood the ordeal, and with, 
 perhaps, the exception of the Johannine authorship of the 
 fourth Gospel, the fires of this controversy have begun 
 to smoulder down. It is now the turn of the Old 
 Testament to pass through the same testing furnace. 
 The authorship of the books themselves, their threefold 
 division into Law, Prophets, and Psalms, the date of the 
 books, and the eponymic names to which they have been 
 traditionally assigned, all this has come up in our day for 
 a fresh decision, and we may assume, from the changed tone 
 of the public mind towards Professor Driver's courageously 
 outspoken and free criticism on the subject, that a certain 
 latitude of opinion is to be allowed in future, which would 
 have been impossible to ask for a generation ago. 
 
264 Afterthoughts on Inspiration. 
 
 For much of this increased liberty we have cause to be 
 thankful. Trutli has nothing to fear from free inquiry. 
 The frank admission that the date and authorship of 
 most of the early books of the Old Testament canon 
 are all open to question — that the unity of Isaiah, of 
 Zecbariah, and of Daniel are alike matters of dispute, on 
 which even the most orthodox may keep an open mind 
 — this is no small gain. It is an advantage that should 
 be used with moderation, and not pushed too far, as it 
 seems to us it has been in the case of the far too 
 peremptory decision to post-date the authorship of the 
 I'salter by Professor Cheyne. Where we are to draw 
 the line between too great stiffness in refusing to yield, 
 and too great laxity in rejecting traditional views, — it is 
 not easy to say off-hand. But it is fair to take our 
 stand at this point, that the onus of proof in every case 
 lies with the negative school. A tradition so venerable 
 as that of the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures is not to 
 be lightly set aside, unless on very good grounds. The 
 latest attempt at reconstruction, the Graf-Wellhausen 
 theory, may have much in its favour; but it is too 
 arbitrary and subjective for the more cautious conserva- 
 tive instincts of the average Englishman. We do not 
 wish to prejudge the matter either way ; but we venture 
 to think that we can offer a suggestion or two on the 
 side of intuitive spiritual theology which may go far to 
 allay the fears of tlie old orthodox party, as well as to 
 moderate tlie too defiant tone of the new negative school. 
 In the first place, we set out with the statement, not 
 that the Bible is, but that it contains the word of God. 
 This amounts to saying that the letter in every case in 
 part reveals, but also in part conceals, the living spirit 
 which lies underneath. Ecvelation, in a word, is a 
 curtain or veil, and througli this curtain we may pass 
 
Afterthoughts on Inspiration. 265 
 
 into the inner sanctuary of the spiritual sense of the 
 whole. Of making theories of inspiration there has been 
 no end. Partial and plenary-verbal dictation, — and the 
 mere elevation of the spiritual consciousness, differing 
 only in degree from the inspiration of Dante or Shake- 
 speare, — theories of this kind have covered the entire 
 ground from the highest mechanical down to the lowest 
 dynamical explanation of the equivocal term inspiration. 
 After sifting all these out, there remains this unique fact, 
 that the Bible, which in one aspect is like any other 
 book, is also in another aspect wholly unlike, and with a 
 character quite its own. 
 
 " Thou seemest human and Divine," is the conclusion 
 we must come to of the Bible, and of the Christ who is 
 its glorious end and aim. The testimony of Jesus is the 
 spirit of prophecy. Oh sie Chrishtvi treiben, do we come 
 upon Christ ? is the book Messianic from cover to cover ? 
 — this was Luther's test of inspiration, and it ought to 
 suffice us. The last struggle of the Church on the person 
 of Christ, turned on the dispute with the Monophysites. 
 It long seemed an unthinkable mystery how human and 
 Divine could combine the union of two natures in one 
 person ; and so it was from the mere Deist point of view. 
 The Divine must absorb the human, as the greater contains 
 the less ; or the human must so dim down the Divine 
 that Deity sinks away, swallowed up beneath its veil 
 of flesh. The communicatio idiomatum, or, as the Greek 
 phrase went, the Trepi'x^coprjcrL'^, seemed only an expression 
 of a dogmatic decision to hold on to two opposing truths, 
 and to clasp contradictories together, and at the same 
 time to deny that the admission of the one implied the 
 exclusion of the other. 
 
 In the same way, the Church with a true instinct has 
 upheld that the human and the Divine elements coexist 
 
266 Afterthotights on Inspiration. 
 
 and cohere in the Bible in the same way as they do in 
 the person of Christ ; but we are unable to produce 
 any adequate explanation of the union in either case. It 
 has held fast to its docjma of communicatio idiomatum in 
 both cases, but is unable to offer any adequate explanation. 
 But it occurs to us that the Kenosis doctrine, which 
 relieves much of the mystery on the subject of the 
 human and Divine in Christ, may also throw light on 
 the subject of inspiration. The orthodox Church has 
 been practically Eutychian on the subject of Christ's 
 person, — not formally so, we admit, but in the recoil from 
 the Xestorian extreme it has inclined much more to 
 Eutychianism. This arose not so much from any wilful 
 exclusion of the human element, but from sheer inability 
 of thought to call up any intelligent conception of " two 
 natures in one person." The ground of this inability 
 lay in the equivocal term " nature." It was assumed 
 (as all Deists must do) that the nature of the Infinite 
 must be incommunicable to the finite. Between Creator 
 and creature there is much more than disparity, there 
 is a gulf fixed which no theory can bridge over. The 
 Incarnation, in a word, from the Deistic point of view, 
 becomes an unthinkable mystery — it goes farther back 
 still, since, in fact, creation itself must be unthinkable ; for 
 how can the Creator, if Infinite, pass out of Himself into 
 the finite and conditioned ? Hence we have to fall back 
 on such senseless phrases as that He made the worlds out 
 of nothing, and creation at last becomes a bald affirmation 
 of a fact for which reason by itself can offer no explana- 
 tion which is not merely verbal. The early Gnostics felt 
 this difficulty, and so they set to work to invent a 
 Demiurge, a Bathos, a Pleroma, and other hypotheses 
 which as hypotheses have gone the way of all brain 
 cobwebs. The orthodox East clunj?, however, to the 
 
 O' 
 
AftertJioughts on Inspiration. 267 
 
 conception of the Logos either as ivBiddeTo^, as before 
 creation, or 7rpo(^opiK6<;, as going forth in creation. It 
 was this Logos doctrine which carried the East safely 
 through all the labyrinths of thought, as w^ell on the 
 subject of creation as of redemption. Thanks to the 
 preface to St. John's Gospel, that most precious jewel of 
 God's word, the arcanum of arcana, all was explicated, 
 and the bald dualism of God and matter bridged over, 
 or rather absorbed in that higher Monism in which the 
 Eternal is ever proceeding forth through the Logos and 
 entering into time relations, and so delighting in the 
 habitable parts of the earth. 
 
 The Kenosis, then, which is the key to the Incarnation, 
 is also the key to our conception of God in creation. 
 The Eternal Father is ever communicating, in condescend- 
 ing love through the Son, some of His perfections to 
 those lower orders of being whom we call His creatures. 
 It is His nature and property so to create in condescen- 
 sion or self- emptying, much in the same way as it is the 
 nature and property of the sun to shed his effulgent 
 beams out into space. Kenosis, then, as much in creation 
 as in redemption, at once suggests the key to what 
 we go on to describe as the self-effacement of the 
 Divine in a human consciousness. God spoke by the 
 prophets — so the Creed affirms ; but we are nowhere asked 
 to define the mystery, or to go into psychological 
 puzzles as to the meeting point of human and God 
 consciousness ; nor does the Divine imply a temporary 
 suspension of ordinary self-consciousness. We find in 
 Christ the human was so absorbed by the Divine, that on 
 one occasion when the disciples said, " Master, eat," His 
 reply, was " My meat is to do my Father's will, and to 
 finish His work." In His case we must assume perfect 
 simplicity and entire transparency of character. Hence, 
 
2 6S Afterthoughts on Inspiration. 
 
 that He should forget hunger and thirst in the absorbing 
 spirit of His work, is what much lower minds than the 
 Christ attain to every day. But the Kenosis goes farther 
 than this ; it implies that He emptied Himself of His 
 glory, and took a servant form. If this had been only 
 in His Incarnation, and for three short years, then it 
 would seem a unique, perhaps incredible mystery. But 
 the Logos has been ever so emptying Himself. It is self- 
 abasement, exinanition of the full glory of Godhead, 
 when He paints the lily, and fits an insect's eye to the 
 tiny operations of the insect world. Hence it is that, to 
 mere Deism with its design and argument, it seems per- 
 plexing to find perfection from the least to the greatest 
 of God's works. The notion of condescension in the 
 !Most High, that He "humbleth Himself to behold the 
 things which are done in heaven and earth," seems stranoje 
 to Deism, to whom humility seems only the shadow of 
 the cross ; and that is " foolishness," as w^e know, to the 
 mere natural man. On these grounds we see that unless 
 we set out with this key-word Kenosis, we shall never 
 unravel the mysteries either of creation, redemption, 
 or of that mode of communicating the mind of God to 
 men which we define as inspiration. But this one 
 master-key opens all these three locks. It is the same 
 Logos who is the link in creation between the finite and 
 Infinite, whose goings forth in redemption are that He has 
 become one flesh with us that we may become one spirit 
 with Him, and who is also the source of the old prophetic 
 fire, the one fountain of light and love in inspiration. 
 
 The mistake in theology has been the same as in 
 science, by isolating a single trutli, and then to try and 
 wrestle with it as with Proteus, and to wring its meaning 
 out in single-handed fight. The sciences will not thus 
 be won by direct assault. Their flank must be turned. 
 
Afterthoughts 07i Inspiration. 269 
 
 In laying a subject aside and in thinking of some 
 other thing, a side light will sometimes enter the mind, 
 and one theory thus open the door to another. So 
 ISTewton found it, as he passed from one theory of physics, 
 where his calculations had failed him, to another theory 
 of optics ; and, after exploring the one domain, he was 
 able to re-enter the other as conqueror, and to hold his 
 ground there. It is the same in theology. Inspiration 
 and the Incarnation throw light on each other ; and now 
 that we have got hold of the Incarnation by the right 
 aspect, in the phrase of the Keiiosis, it will be strange if 
 we cannot use the same conception to lead us on to the 
 right meaning of inspiration. In the Kenosis of Christ's 
 person we hold that the wisdom and goodness of God 
 dwelt in Him bodily. In no mere Apollinarian sense 
 (though Apollinarianism is not such a heresy as it seems) 
 the wisdom and goodness of the Logos dwelt in the man 
 Christ Jesus, and were to Him His Pneuma. When 
 we speak of a human pneuma we are using words with 
 no meaning ; we are like the disciples on the Mount, not 
 knowing what we say. The Pneuma itself is the Divine 
 inherent in the human ; it is itself a prophecy of the 
 Incarnation — the ground and sufficient cause of the 
 Incarnation becoming credible and intellia:ible, and not a 
 mere mystery jarring to all our sense of truth. In our 
 Lord Jesus the Christ, a Messianic element was the 
 plenary indwelling of the Holy Ghost, not given to Him 
 by measure as to other sons of men. But this does not 
 imply either omniscience or omnipotence. These are 
 attributes of pure Deity, which must be, and were, laid 
 aside w^hen He emptied Himself of His glory ; and if 
 equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, He became 
 inferior to the Father as touching His manhood. Under 
 false reverence to shrink from this frank confession of 
 
270 Afterthoughts on Inspiration. 
 
 the Kcnosis, is to fail to grasp the true meaning of the 
 Incarnation. This is why, as observed ah-eady, the 
 popular orthodox view is still Eutychian, and explains 
 the outcry of some hyper-orthodox champions of the old 
 school at the measured and well-weighed words of Mr. 
 Gore in the Lux Mitndi on the subject. That they were 
 an offence at all, is an index of the depth of popular 
 ignorance of the true Catholic doctrine of the Incarna- 
 tion. Till the Kenosis is understood, the Incarnation 
 must remain an unassimilated docjma. 
 
 It is the same with inspiration. It also stands apart 
 among unassimilated faith formulas until we see that the 
 Divine can only enter the human by some act of con- 
 descension. Accommodation is the old phrase. Men 
 say that God accommodates His teaching to the im- 
 perfect faculties and immature judgments of men. At a 
 low stacfe of culture He meets them with animal sacri- 
 fices and rites and ceremonies which to us seem burden- 
 some. As the ages advance, He lightens the burden of 
 ritual-teaching, becomes more oral and less ocular, and at 
 last the prophet and scribe supersede the priest alto- 
 gether. Even Judaism had reached the Eabbinic staijje 
 before Christ's coming. And how strange a decline it 
 was when Christ's religion sank back again into the 
 beggarly elements, and the commemoration of His death 
 in the Eucliarist feast was lowered again into a repetition 
 of the type after the antitype, and described as the 
 sacrifice of tlie Mass ! We must go on to see in inspira- 
 tion these advancing stages through accommodation, or 
 else we shall never understand the Bible as a book 
 human and Divine. To throw all the books into pie, 
 so to speak, and read them in a lump, finding the Trinity 
 in Gen. xix. and the doctrine of the Mass in Malachi, this 
 is that kind of uncritical use of the Bible which we need 
 
Afterthoughts on Inspiration, 271 
 
 not waste time in exposing. It is too out of date to find 
 excuse for it in the uncritical use of the Old Testament 
 by the Fathers of the early Church. Inspiration, in a 
 word, is the unfolding purpose of God for the education 
 of the race through a chosen people, that people them- 
 selves only learning the mind of God through an elect 
 race of prophets and teachers. Thus, within the election 
 there is an election, and the prophets themselves had to 
 search what and what manner of time the Spirit of God 
 which was in them did signify. They had to grope, in a 
 word, after the meaning of their own sayings. They 
 uttered dark sayings of old, because God-consciousness 
 always enters in at first to dim self-consciousness, and a 
 man inspired must be for that very reason in a sense 
 beside himself, though always " sober for your sake." 
 Inspiration was always much more than mere mantic 
 phrenzy, we admit, though it often seemed to approach 
 the dangerous limits between sanity and insanity. 
 
 High views of inspiration are generally assumed by 
 devout people to indicate high views of God and His 
 glory. In reverence for His word written our views 
 cannot be too high, just as our reverence for the person 
 of the Lord Jesus. Only in both cases we are to avoid 
 the Eutychian extreme, much more common among the 
 orthodox than the Nestorian. Two natures exist in one 
 person ; but the natures are, since the Incarnation, so 
 fused and intermingled that He is no longer twain but 
 one Christ; this is orthodox theology with regard to our 
 Lord Jesus, who objects to the expression the indwelling 
 of the Eternal Word in the man Christ. For the same 
 reason we should be content to speak of the book as 
 " containing " the word of God. By that expression we 
 mean that in that library which we call the canon, every 
 book has its place and purpose : each is part of a whole ; 
 
272 Afterthoughts on Inspiration, 
 
 and if, to us, some part seems insignificant, it is because 
 Ave fail to see organic unity. It is as with our body, in 
 which some members seem more honourable than others, 
 but all are tempered together and bear reference to the 
 whole. Such is inspiration. As to the literature of the 
 canon, there are certain riglits of criticism which have 
 their place, but they are quite subordinate to and apart 
 from the spiritual use of the Bible as a book of devotion. 
 On that point Canon Driver has taken his stand on 
 strong ground. He is within his rights as a Canon of 
 Christ Church and Hebrew Professor to discuss and to 
 deal with the Palestinian as much as with the Alex- 
 andrian Jew's revision of the canon. He may show 
 grounds, if there are any, why the most negative German 
 critic may be in truer touch with the spirit of the old 
 book than the Massoretic or any other Hebrew school of 
 the older criticism. But he must not forget, as the 
 negative school too often do, that the onus of proof lies 
 with those who advance novelties. Presumption is 
 idways in favour of the occupying holder, since pos- 
 session is nine points of the law. Some of our younger 
 critics, in the first flush of excitement, forji^et that it is 
 easier to assert than to prove. Negation becomes thus 
 quite as dogmatic and far more offensive than the old 
 traditionalism, which maintains that a position must be 
 true because it is long established. There is, we admit, 
 an immense presumption in its favour, since the general 
 sliut up in a garrison with ten thousand men may expect 
 to hold his ground till another with twenty thousand 
 men comes against him. 
 
 But, like Canon Driver, we draw our line at the 
 literature of the Bible. Lihros Caiionicos ad leoncs is a 
 modern version of the Christianos ad leoncs. Let the 
 young lions of criticism work their will on the letter of 
 
Afterthoughts on Inspiration. 273 
 
 the record, and we fearlessly say that what remains after 
 negation has done its worst is that " word of the Lord 
 which liveth and abideth for ever." To us, for instance, 
 this new phrase, the Hexateuch, is as unimportant as the 
 old phrase Pentateuch : it seems like pulling down one 
 house of cards to set up another. If the orthodox had 
 not been so ill-advised as to fall into Bibliolatry, this 
 kind of attack would have never been made. It was the 
 same when the old orthodox school were Creationists, and 
 evolution seemed to set aside the hand of God and the 
 necessity for a first cause. But as soon as the defence 
 ceased the attack died down ; and so it will be with 
 much of this itching ear for the last novelty of negat- 
 ive criticism. As soon as it ceases to alarm by our 
 taking higher ground of inspiration than the old school 
 did, so soon will it sink into the contempt it deserves. 
 The archives of Israel are historical documents, and 
 therefore must go to the school of history there to be 
 tested in the usual way. To fear the result is to show very 
 little faith. If the New Testament canon has come out 
 of the fires of criticism, what have we to fear for the Old ? 
 We shall no doubt have to give up something, especially 
 the uncritical order and ground on which Jerome arranged 
 the Vulgate, borrowing partly from the Hebrew and 
 partly from the Greek arrangement of the books, putting 
 them out of their true order, which was mainly chrono- 
 logical, and so giving fictitious importance to some semi- 
 canonical books, such as Daniel and Koheleth, which 
 were probably of later date than their eponymic authors, 
 and among the Antilegomena. 
 
 All this will soon be over, and then inspiration will 
 be seen to be a growing truth ; and that as Jesus increased 
 in body, soul, and spirit, so there is harmonious orderly 
 growth of the letter and spirit of the Bible. In all the 
 
 s 
 
2 74 Afterthoughts on Inspiration. 
 
 books there is a theopneustic element, the test of which 
 is tliat it is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for cor- 
 rection, for instruction in righteousness. The DiclacM, in 
 a word, is elenchus, or evidence internal of its truth ; this 
 leads on to Paideia, or education, and that established 
 state which he fitly describes as eiravopOwa-L^^ or maturity 
 in the faith. 
 
CHAPTEE XL 
 
 REMEDY. 
 
 We must come back to Kant — We must come back to 
 Christ. Strange as it may sound, these two cries of 
 morality in stress for a true basis, and of religion for a 
 living centre of authority, alike spring from the same 
 source. They both express the same need, the one for 
 an immutable morality, the other for an intuitional 
 theology. We shall have no difficulty in pointing out 
 how they correspond each to the other, how they express 
 the same need for foundation which cannot be shaken in 
 the two departments of duty and God, where alone the 
 conscience has a rigjht to a final decision. 
 
 In the first place, let us glance at the meaning of this 
 last word of sound moralists, " We must get back to Kant," 
 and see how it expresses this need. Ethics had been 
 shaken to its basis by two tendencies in the opposite 
 direction. There were some who had pushed the Egoity 
 of the Ego to its breaking point. Starting from Eichte, 
 they have passed through Hegel up to that dreary extreme 
 in which self is its own God. We not only think our own 
 thoughts, but thought itself becomes its own object, the 
 thing in itself, the ding an sich. As for " duty," it has 
 been sublim^ated into a law of mere self-consistency. The 
 " right " is that which is right in our own eyes. The 
 
 275 
 
276 Remedy. 
 
 ancient Stoic touched the point of apathy, but the new 
 Stoic of subjective morality is not merely superior to 
 pleasure and pain, he is a proud, passionless thing ; he is 
 more than tliis, he is an " intellectual all in all." God 
 and the world are not merely outside him, as the old 
 Stoic taught — he is his own God, his own universe, and 
 quite in a new sense as he thinks in his heart so is he. 
 
 But this extreme subjectivity has brought with it 
 its own corrective — it has called out a reaction in the 
 opposite extreme. This is that " Monism " in which both 
 Schopenhauer and Hartmann have drowned us in the 
 depths of pessimistic despair. A new God has been 
 invented whose name is "Will ; " but it is "Will" divorced 
 from all moral conceptions, or even from self-consciousness. 
 It is Buddhism over again, as Fichte and Hegel's ethics 
 were Stoicism under a new name of Egoism. This new 
 Buddhism is quite as atheistic as the old. The world is 
 WilU and Vorstelhmg — the world rising up out of un- 
 consciousness and only groping after consciousness in 
 man. This is his misery, that he attains self-conscious- 
 ness, and, like a guilty creature surprised, tries to hide 
 himself from self, to escape from his own shadow, as in 
 Chamisso's weird tale of the man without a shadow. 
 No wonder that the last word of this desolate theory 
 is pessimism. It is like Buddhism, weary of selfhood, 
 and longing to get off the wheel of life and to dream 
 itself back into nothingness. The modern Nirvana is 
 annihiliation, and the goal we get on to is to fly off like 
 spray from the fountain, and so not to fall back into the 
 basin to be thrown up again in the eternal round of 
 sinking and rising. Negations like these bring their own 
 remedy. The cry of outraged human nature is to get 
 back to a basis of some theory which is not false to the 
 facts of life, and in which love, conscience, and duty are 
 
Remedy. 277 
 
 more than mere o&gri somnia. That basis of immutable 
 morality is found in the Kantian axiom of the categorical 
 imperative. There is a voice within (we may as well at 
 once name it by its right name, conscience) that calls out 
 that right is right and wrong wrong by an eternal sanction. 
 " For ever, Lord, Thy word is settled in heaven." As 
 in Wordsworth's grand Ode to Duty, which has the true 
 Kantian ring — 
 
 ** Thou dost preserve tlie stars from wrong, 
 And tlie most ancient Heavens through Thee are fresh and strong." 
 
 N'o other basis of morality can be set up than this. 
 If its precepts are not inviolate and binding under every 
 condition, we are ploughing the sand and sowing the salt 
 sea. Casuistry, especially confessional casuistry, began 
 to sap the foundations of ethics, right became right 
 because it was commanded ; and the same power which 
 bound could, of course, also loose. Ethics have thus been 
 absorbed in dogmatic theology; and the same divines who 
 set up the commands of an absolute Jahveh as justifying 
 the slaying of the Canaanites, consistently enough taught 
 that to the chair of Peter such a dispensing power 
 belonged. As the Vicar of Christ, he might within 
 limits lay down what was right and what was wrong. 
 This, of course, was limited at first to indulgences from 
 certain ceremonial duties ; dispensations from fasting and 
 other external oblisjations were bought and sold. But it 
 soon went on to touch the foundations of morality itself. 
 Under Jesuit teaching the Pope became absolute master 
 of the ethical as well as the ceremonial code of duty. 
 When pardoners had gone round Europe daring to sell 
 pardons for sins past and prospective, it was time that 
 Luther came and knocked a hole in Tetzel's drum. It was 
 a case like that of Israel in Egypt when Pharaoh doubled 
 
27S Remedy, 
 
 the burdens of the taskmasters, then Moses came ; so, 
 when theology dared to tamper with the foundations of 
 morality, and treat the immutable and eternal law of 
 right as something mutable or mere mos 'pro lege, then 
 the Eeformation arose, and the rights of the common 
 conscience of mankind were vindicated among the German 
 and Gothic races at least, if not among Latins and Sclavs. 
 Immutable morality has thus, at least since the Ee- 
 formation, become the heritage of all who are on the side 
 of the Eeformation ; and when Hobbes in this country, 
 from his cynical, sceptical point of view, began to tamper 
 with these foundations of all truth, Cudworth was stirred 
 up to write that Treatise on Eternal and Immutalle 
 Morality ^ which is probably the only work of Cudworth 
 which has a right to live. Of Cudworth's learning in 
 the True Intellectual System of the U'7iiverse, it seems, 
 to borrow the phrase of a recent competent editor, "to 
 resemble the knight clad in complete mail, the armour 
 was admirable as a defence against the enemy, but often 
 smothered the wearer. His other works contain merely 
 an expanded and very diffuse application of principles 
 already proved in the Treatise coneerning Eternal and 
 Immutalle Morality^ " Further," as Mr. Scott goes on 
 to observe, " this latter work has an especial claim upon 
 a British public, for it has not yet had a fair field. The 
 first edition was published long after the death of the 
 author, when his memory and a vague respect were all 
 that was left of him ; while the last edition formed a mere 
 appendix to the True Litcllcctual System of the Uni- 
 verse, and was thus put out of the beaten track of the 
 philosophical student. 
 
 ^ See an Introduction to Cudworth's Treatise concerning Eternal and 
 Immutable Morality, by R. W. Scott of Trinity College, Dublin. 
 London : Longmans. 1891. 
 
Remedy, 279 
 
 With regard, then, to the ethical foundations of 
 theology, we regret that we cannot say, " We must get 
 back to Cudworth," and have to repeat the expression, 
 " We must get back to Kant." It was the fault of all 
 the Cambridge Platonists, that they made too much 
 smoke of the fire which they kindled — they were 
 smothered by scholarship. The Puritan divines were one 
 and all intolerably tedious. It has been said of Orton, 
 one of them, that while Orton was striking a match a 
 Bunyan would set the world on fire. The same tedium 
 theologicum, transferred to Platonist philosophy, lay heavy, 
 like a Dutch mist, on Cudworth and his school. He has 
 not left his mark, as he deserved to do, as the first and 
 best opponent of that debased gospel of expediency and 
 opportunism of which Hobbes was the proto-evangelist, 
 and Locke and Paley only later imitators. To do the 
 mystics and inner-light men of the seventeenth century, 
 and above all the Cambridge Platonists, justice, they saw 
 and seized on this defect of popular Protestantism, and 
 raised a standard against it. More especially we find in 
 Whichcote the sentiment that there is a " seed of a 
 deiform nature " in every man, the Divine image or root 
 of goodness, and on which our union with God and 
 conformity to His nature must depend. Culverwell, 
 Worthington, Eust, Patrick, Glanvell, Norris, all fol- 
 lowed on the same lines, and laid stress on the same 
 class of truth. The late Principal Tulloch, who was the 
 first to call up these noble names out of the obscurity 
 into which they had undeservedly fallen, describes 
 them as a "narrow stream running between high banks 
 of authoritative dogmatism." Whichcote's aim was to 
 point out the correspondence of reason and religion ; 
 in a word, to make faith reasonable, and to fuse morality 
 and religion in one. J. Smith, the golden-tongued, as 
 
2 8o Remedy. 
 
 he was named in his day, attempted a revival of Christian 
 riatonism, with, it must be admitted, not a few neo- 
 Platonic elements, which in that uncritical age were 
 mixed up together, the early Plato and his Alexandrian 
 imitators being often confounded. Cudworth, again, 
 dealt far too ponderously with that forgotten theory which 
 he calls Hylo-zoism, and which, under a changed name, 
 is reappearing among us as Monism. In More the 
 Cambridge Platonists declined into something like theo- 
 sophy and ]3ure mysticism, and this is probably the true 
 reason of their falling into contempt during the whole of 
 tlie eighteenth century, which prided itself, more than 
 anything else, on its " common sense " and its contempt 
 for enthusiasm in any form. Coleridge truly observes of 
 this Cambridge school, that " they were more Plotiuists 
 than Platonists. The theosophic reveries of the Alex- 
 andrian school fitted more aptly their own supersensual 
 imaginations, and so they passed from the original to a 
 later type of Platonist writings with the most indiscrimi- 
 nating indifference. They missed the light Greek airy 
 tone of the original Plato, and took up instead that style 
 of profound but sombre and unwieldy thoughtfulness 
 which shows that no one can wholly escape from their 
 surroundings." As the modern Yankee has been described 
 as a cross between a Puritan and a pedlar, so we find the 
 same cross in these Immanuel-men (for with one excep- 
 tion, that of More, they all came from the same Puritan 
 foundation) of the Puritan and the Platonist. They tried, 
 in a word, to recast the popular Augustinian theology of 
 the seventeenth century by introducing the missing ele- 
 ment of a pneuma or verifying faculty in man, the voice 
 of God in every man naturally born in the world. 
 
 The attempt failed, as perhaps it was bound to do. 
 It was born out of due time ; but no such movement 
 
Remedy, 281 
 
 perishes because it does not carry on a corporate life of 
 its own with a visible succession. Spiritual movements 
 pass on into other forms, and the mystics of the Church 
 in all ages have been a fertilising element even in cases 
 where they seem to have died out, leaving no successors. 
 If in our day a spiritual philosophy is possible, and an 
 ultimate concordat between reason and faith, it is because 
 other men laboured, and we have entered into their 
 labour. Spiritual philosophy, we are thankful to say, 
 never was left without a witness, even in the thick night 
 of the secuhtm Deisticum. The lamp of intuitional truth 
 passed on from Shaftesbury to Hutcheson and Butler, 
 and so through a thin thread of witnesses, chiefly the 
 Scotch psychologists, till in Kant we meet with the true 
 protagenist of ethics. He was awaked from his dog- 
 matic slumbers by the scepticism of Hume, probably in 
 the same way as Hobbes aroused Cudworth ; and his 
 assertion of the " Categorical Imperative " was the same 
 high-water mark from the end of the eighteenth century 
 that Cudworth's assertion of eternal and immutable 
 morality became for the age of Charles 11. In any case, 
 whether Cudworth or Kant are to divide the honours, as 
 Leverrier and Adams have done in astronomy, as path- 
 finders of the lost planet, we must so describe eternal 
 immutable morality as the missing link, wanting which 
 all theology labours under the one fatal defect of dog- 
 matism. It wants verification, and we know the position 
 which verification holds in the so-called positive sciences. 
 It is the one brand, wanting which no science can be 
 even hall-marked as positive. Earnest men are lamenting, 
 in notes loud or dulcet, that theology is a poor captive 
 Hecuba, and no longer Queen of the sciences. But 
 whose fault is it but their own ? 'No one would dream of 
 setting up a new set of notions about God, dogmatically 
 
282 Remedy, 
 
 constructed out of crude Bible interpretations, reinforced 
 by traditional theology, into a Queen of sciences. To 
 state such a claim is to dismiss it as absurd. But let 
 us reach a theology based on our spiritual intuitions, and 
 these resting on the rock of a morality eternal as God 
 Himself, and immutable as His "yea and amen;" we are 
 not sure that the age would not alter its note, and treat 
 such a theology with something more than the languid 
 interest with which it listens to the attempts of modern 
 Churchmen to galvanise old - world conceptions of a 
 magical view of the priesthood, and those politic Privy 
 Council decisions how to keep divines, Anglican and 
 Evangelical, tethered to the same rack, and eating out 
 of the same manger. 
 
 We have seen that immutable morality is the first 
 support of a theology of the future. Expediency, eudse- 
 monism, and the prudential ethics of self-interest here 
 and hereafter, must all go, like the rotten pillars of a 
 house built on the sand, before we even begin to build. 
 The next pillar to set up is intuitional theology. On these 
 two supports of immutable morality and the theology of 
 intuition of our spiritual concepts as self-evidencing, we 
 may begin to build. Wanting these two, we had better 
 remain where we are, and believe in the Bible as " in- 
 spired " because it says it is so, and in the Church as a 
 true teacher because a corporation of clergy under that 
 name offer to be our guides. This provisional way of 
 looking at things must go on unless we put a little more 
 courage into our convictions, and say, like the slave at 
 the whetstone, in the Eoman story, Seca. The indolent 
 acquiescence of educated men in dogmatisms on which 
 tliey stake no real belief, lies at the root of the sceptical 
 temper of the age. Young men " play at priests," and 
 old men on the bench bear rule by their means, and my 
 
Kennedy. 28 
 
 people love to have it so. We ask with the prophet of 
 Chebar, who saw wheels within wheels of the mystery of 
 God's enfoldings and unfoldings, " What shall be the end 
 thereof ? " Would that we could go on to say, We must get 
 back to Christ, as we must get back to Kant. We have 
 pointed out a definite meaning to the one phrase ; let us 
 see if we can fix as distinct a meaning to the other. 
 To get back to Christ can only mean — if we take the 
 true Christ meaning of the term — that we get back to 
 the point in which we see in Jesus of Nazareth the 
 Anointed of God. Messiah in the Old Testament has a 
 very definite sense, and we must not slip away from it in 
 the New Testament. St. John, who was much more 
 Hebraistic, even in his Epistles, than many suppose, lays 
 stress on the " anointing which we have received of Him 
 which abideth in you, and ye need not that any man 
 teach you." Can we forget that this anointing is the 
 same Christus, the salbiing, the consecration chrism which 
 made the Christ what He was. Mystical as that sounds 
 to many, the only question should be, Is it true ? Is 
 there any meaning in His prayer for His people, " I in 
 them, and they in me " ? Dogmatic theology has forgotten 
 all these conceptions ; especially since Cyril's day she has 
 sunk into a Eutychian sleep, miscalled orthodoxy. She 
 has so forgotten true Athanasianism, which is the union 
 of God and man in one person, without confusion of 
 nature, that her explanation of that mystery ever since 
 Cyril (the Augustine of the East as Augustine is the 
 Cyril of the West) summoned the Council of Eobbers at 
 Ephesus. Theology has gone astray. It has not lapsed 
 into heresy, God be thanked ; but it has become practi- 
 cally Eutychian. We do not know where to look outside 
 the mystics for a single theology East or West which is 
 not tainted with Cyrillism, as we prefer to call it. By 
 
2S4 Remedy. 
 
 this we mean that hyper-orthodox temper which is so 
 set on extolling the glory of Christ as God that it 
 forgets the meaning of its own term, Christ as the 
 " anointed " of God. All that Augustine did to debase 
 theology in tlie West, and even more, Cyril has done in 
 the East. He was the same maker of heresies that 
 Augustine was, and succeeded to perfection, by his 
 polemic temper, as his Carthaginian contemporary, in 
 patching up one hole by making another. Eutychian- 
 ]S^estorian were a sad battlefield in the East as Augustine 
 and Pelagius in the West. We should be unfair to 
 Augustine's memory to leave him to bear the whole load 
 of our theology of afterthoughts. The Patriarch of 
 Alexandria, whose paraholani were the religious wonder 
 of their day, and whose murder of Hypatia has never 
 been cleared up, stands branded in the page of secular 
 history ; and till Churchmen write history as God's book 
 describes the sins of holy men, we shall have two versions 
 of the same event, — the solemn sneer of a Gibbon, and 
 the still more saddening attempt of a Canon Bright or a 
 Canon Ptobertson to whitewash characters that never can 
 be white as loug as History is true to her office. 
 
 But enough of this censure of afterthoughts. In 
 getting back to Christ we must get back behind Cyril's 
 orthodoxy as much as Augustine's. We must lay hold 
 of the person of the Anointed One, who is to anoint us, 
 as He has been anointed of His Father. This can only 
 mean that we have a witness within ; that we know Him 
 that is true, and we are in Him tliat is true. All these 
 phrases are lightly passed over as part of some mystical 
 inner-light religion which has very little to say to faith 
 and practice, as to what an orthodox Churchman has to 
 believe, and what he has to do. Alas 1 that faith and 
 practice have got so far asunder, that, as in death, " we 
 
Remedy. 285 
 
 cannot hear each other speak." The creed of the average 
 Christian is a list of long and abstruse theological 
 propositions, of which there is no apter summary than 
 the Qidcimqiie vult, now sung in churches, where it is 
 much better not read. As for his practice, it is only the 
 common morality of everyday life salted with a few 
 phrases about grace, but out of which the taking up the 
 cross daily and of imitating Christ is quietly dropped. It 
 is not workable outside convent walls, even if it is within. 
 But theology will never be Queen of the sciences unless 
 Christ is King again in our lives, and the lord of every 
 motion there. Formal theology is no more capable of 
 this than man is able with one dead lift to raise himself 
 up aloft and walk on air. To get back to Christ is what 
 the saint, at the end of a lifelong struggle against the flesh, 
 sees ; it is like land ahead to the sailor who has crossed 
 a stormy ocean. We have not yet attained, and none is as 
 yet perfect, and those who are nearest perfection are those 
 Paul-like spirits, who groan within themselves, waiting 
 for the adoption, to wit the redemption of the body. To 
 " get back to Christ " means so much that it is the end, 
 not the beginning, of a long journey. But a step may be 
 taken which at once enfranchises us, and sets us on the 
 right track. We have to break with all afterthoughts on 
 theology. Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, doctors of all types, 
 have made the simple crabbed, and the sublime scholastic. 
 A narrow scholastic intellect belittles all it touches. 
 First the poetry, then the philosophy, at last even the 
 common sense of religion dissolves away in the mud-pool 
 of technical divinity. Until a healthy scepticism of 
 traditional methods begin, we can promise no true 
 therapeutic in theology. " Wasli and be clean " must 
 be the beginning of the new gospel, as it is of the new 
 therapeutics. All our best hymns brim over with this 
 
2 86 Remedy. 
 
 sentiment, " Thou, Christ, art all I want." What a 
 pity that as soon as the hymn is ended a sermon begins, 
 which sets up a scholastic plan of salvation, often so 
 technical, that were it not for some fire of love and 
 personal appeal, which the preacher, if a born orator, 
 infuses into it, it might be a sermon on stones to stones. 
 All this must be laid aside ; and when, having ourselves 
 found Christ, we go on to preach Him to others, let us 
 not go to bodies of divinity or models of master-preachers, 
 but let us try our appeal on the touchstone of the 
 Iiuman heart. Does it lift men to a self-renouncing life, 
 a level altogether above the old dead level of turnpike 
 road morality, then it is a power of God unto salvation. 
 If not, it will only be like that preaching of morality 
 which Selden laughed at in his day, in which the mastiff 
 of unregenerate human nature is meek as long as we 
 stroke it, but flies at our throat the instant that we 
 threaten or offend it. 
 
 Immutable morality and intuitional theology, in a 
 word, must thus work together. If combined, the play 
 of two such forces would be simply irresistible. But, as 
 the world is constituted at present, we see little or no 
 hope of their being given free play. Eeligion is not yet 
 out of that " regulative " stage in which men of the 
 world wish to keep it. It has been debased into a 
 subtle form of utilitarianism, a "scheme of salvation." 
 It is not an end in itself, but only a means to an end, a 
 mode of securing felicity and escaping suffering here and 
 hereafter. As long as the gospel is so debased, instead 
 of being abreast of the higher morality, it actually falls 
 short of it. As long as it is a kind of disguised 
 eudairaonism, is it possible that it can attach to itself 
 any nobler ethical system than that of the greatest 
 happiness of the greatest number ? It comes, then, to 
 
Remedy. 287 
 
 this, that a pure ethical theory, such as that of Cudworth 
 and Kant, must lead up to a disinterested religion of 
 love. The editor of Lux Mundi well points out the 
 three evils of dogmatic deductive theology under these 
 heads — (1) Christianity is no longer devotion to a liv- 
 ing person, but acceptance on authority of a system of 
 theological propositions and ecclesiastical duties. When 
 Churchmanship, as the writer well observes, assumes this 
 degenerate form, Christianity is not destroyed, but we 
 fall short of the true spirit and temper of sonship. (2) 
 In the next, the adoring contemplation of our one Lord 
 and Master is interrupted by undue exaltation of saintly 
 intercessors. As an illustration of this last, he adduces 
 Alphonso de Liguoris' Glories of Mary, in which the 
 Madonna, as a kind of second Saviour, almost eclipses 
 her Son. When she conceived the Son of God in her 
 womb, and afterwards gave Him birth, she obtained half 
 the kingdom of God, so that she should be Queen of 
 Mercy and He King of J ustice. That this hyperdulia 
 of Mary should lead direct to something like the blas- 
 phemous assertion that justice and mercy have parted 
 company, or at least are divided between mother and 
 Son, is only what we shall expect. (3) The third illustra- 
 tion of degenerate religion, when it is pushed in an unduly 
 subjective direction, is true ; but we have remarked on it 
 already, and need not pursue the subject further. 
 
 This testimony of Mr. Gore is all the more striking, 
 since the tendency of his teaching is unquestionably in 
 the direction of external authoritative Church teaching. 
 It is all the more satisfactory, as a proof of the candour 
 of a writer who is too true a follower of Christ to allow 
 any lesser guide to usurp His place as the one Sun of the 
 soul. The only theology, in a word, which will stand 
 the test of time is that which has been from the begin- 
 
288 Remedy, 
 
 ning. To purge away afterthoughts, we must work 
 down into the stratum of first thought. We must know 
 God as He is, and as revealed by the Son through the 
 Spirit ; and in this sense, and in this only, will an 
 intuitional theology and an immutable morality be found 
 to harmonise. We shall "get back to Kant" and get 
 back to Christ at one and the same time. The time has 
 come to replace this " regulative " theology of plans of 
 salvation, all derived from " three Carthaginians," with 
 something simpler and deeper, at once more human 
 and Divine: the Christ of history, who is also the 
 Eternal Logos, is the light of all men. The time for timid 
 compromises and half-truths has gone by. A theology for 
 the age must be a theology of conscience, with a God 
 revealed in His Son by His Spirit, and with none of those 
 " trailing clouds " of Manichean pessimism still clinging 
 about Him, wdth which Augustine entered the Church. 
 
 Why is it, we sometimes ask, that poets, and not 
 theologians, are so often the best interpreters of the theo- 
 logy of any age ? Dante in his day, Milton in a later day, 
 and now Tennyson and Browning, seem to have that same 
 intuition, the vision and faculty Divine, which made the 
 Hebrew prophets what they were, not only God's messen- 
 gers to men, but also the interpreters of the age to itself. 
 It seems the same in our day, in which the pro]Dhets of 
 the theology of the future are those poets who would ring 
 out the darkness of the land, ring in the Christ that is 
 to be, or, to borrow from another of these modern oracles — 
 
 " I f^o to prove my soul ; 
 I see my way as birds tlieir trackless way. 
 I shall arrive — what time, what circuit lirst, 
 I ask not ; for unless God send Ilis hail 
 Or blinding fireballs, sleet, or stifling snow, — 
 In some time, His good time, I shall arrive : 
 He guides me as the bird in His good time." 
 
Remedy. 289 
 
 There is a note in these lines to which men like Gordon, 
 the soldier-mystic, find a mellow music, beside which 
 our old orthodoxies seem out of tune and harsh. The 
 reason is, because from Augustine's day downward the 
 Church has ceased to be a witness of the Logos or Christ 
 within. We may add that, all but a few mystics and 
 Christian Platonists, such as tliat small Cambridge sect who 
 were forgotten almost in their own day, the whole world 
 went after the dogmatists. Predestinarianism and sacer- 
 dotalism were the toys of children. " Opinions," as 
 Glanvill, one of this small sect of Platonists, observes, 
 are "the rattles of immature intellects." But the world 
 has outgrown these scholastic rattles, and sullenly stands 
 aloof from theology, because it has nothing better to give 
 than these toys of childhood. 
 
 The remedy, then, as we have seen, is simple, if we 
 have only courage to say it out. It is contained in 
 the old Cato phrase, Delenda est Carthago. If we could 
 only agree to take three Church teachers off their stools 
 of authority, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine, the 
 Church of the future will have little trouble in making 
 an accommodation with all the rest of the Fathers. The 
 remedy for afterthoughts, then, let us repeat it, is to get 
 back to first thoughts ; but it is not so easy as we sup- 
 pose to think ourselves up into the first thoughts of a 
 theology which has come down the stream of time, 
 gathering accretions with every age which it passed 
 through. This is not easy, but it ought not to be impos- 
 sible ; nor is it, if we are on our guard against the oldest 
 of all fallacies, the mistaking the connotations of terms 
 for their denotation or definition. The fallacy of the dic- 
 tionary, as the late Bishop Fitzgerald once termed it, lies 
 as heavy as ever on the popular mind to this day. The 
 English reader of the New Testament meets with such 
 
 T 
 
290 Remedy, 
 
 terms as " faith," " grace," " election," " salvation," " the 
 Church," and so forth ; and, scarcely suspecting that it is so, 
 he reads into these terms a Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, 
 or medieval meaning, perhaps as foreign to the mind of the 
 inspired writer as our age and its ideas are foreign to the 
 first age of the Church. To borrow Dr. Johnson's sturdy 
 phrase, we must clear our mind of cant of this kind. It 
 is more difficult to do so than we at first suppose, and 
 yet the only remedy for these afterthoughts of theology 
 lies in getting back to the first draft of truth, so as to 
 see things with purged eyes and unprejudiced minds. 
 This is not easy, but it is also not quite impossible. 
 Every day we hear of converts to' the faith in the mission 
 field, who get a grasp of Christ and His gospel first 
 hand ; and what a grasp it is ! how firm their faith, how 
 simple and childlike their conceptions of the love of the 
 Father, the grace of the Son, and the fellowship of the 
 Holy Ghost ! Sad to say, in their case, as in ours. Church 
 tradition and a theology of afterthought soon enters in. 
 The traditional eschatology, which has scarcely been 
 challenged since Augustine's day, the sacramental system, 
 with its sacerdotal efficacy, salvation itself, as a far-off 
 result of the day of judgment, conditional on a certain 
 discipline of faith and works — all this enters in in the 
 second, if not in the first generation of missionary effort, 
 and so the Christianity of tlie far East pales into a weak 
 reproduction of the Christianity of the far West. We are 
 back again in the school of traditionalism, that type of old 
 diluted Judaism from which Christ has in vain set us free. 
 It is sad to think that it is so ; but we shall gain 
 nothing by pretending that it is otherwise. Men can 
 only give what they have got. The missionary, trained 
 in a theological hotbed at home, can only plant out the 
 same seed which he has received. The Divine archetype 
 
Remedy. 291 
 
 and its dogmatic transcript are to his mind inseparable. 
 He would suspect the more highly trained teacher who 
 even hints that afterthoughts are not quite the same as 
 first thoughts. But the cause of truth calls on us to deal 
 plainly with uncritical minds of this type. In their con- 
 sciences they desire to be Bible Christians, and certainly 
 believe that they are. They may not have passed through 
 the same storm and stress as Chillingworth, and so reached 
 Chillingworth's position, that the Bible is the one author- 
 ity, and so that the religion of Protestants is a safe way 
 to salvation ; but they certainly can subscribe to Chilling- 
 worth's noble declaration, that this presumptuous imposing 
 of the senses " of men upon the words of God, the special 
 senses of men upon the general words of God, and laying 
 them upon men's consciences together, under the equal 
 penalty of death and damnation ; this vain conceit, that 
 we can speak of the things of God better than in the 
 words of God ; this deifying our own interpretations, and 
 tyrannous enforcing of them upon others ; this restraining 
 of the word of God from that latitude and generality, 
 and the understandings of men from that liberty wherein 
 Christ and His apostles left them, — is, and hath been, the 
 only fountain of all the schisms of the Church, and that 
 which makes them immortal, the common incendiary of 
 Christendom, and that which tears in pieces, not the coat, 
 but the bowels and members of Christ. * Take away 
 these walls of separation,' and all will quickly be one. 
 Take away the burning, persecuting, cursing, damning of 
 men for not subscribing the words of men as the words of 
 God ; require of Christians only to believe Christ, and to 
 call no man master but Him only ; let those leave claiming 
 infallibility that have no title to it ; and let them that in 
 their words disclaim it, disclaim it also in their actions. In 
 a word, take away tyranny, which is the devil's instrument 
 
292 Remedy, 
 
 to support errors and superstitions and impieties in the 
 several parts of the world, which could not otherwise long 
 withstand the power of truth. I say, take away tyranny, 
 and restore Christians to their just and full liberty of capti- 
 vating their understanding to Scripture only, and as rivers, 
 when they have a free passage, run all to tlie ocean, so 
 it may well be hoped, by God's blessing, that universal 
 liberty thus moderated may quickly reduce Christendom 
 to truth and unity." ^ 
 
 It may be that we are nearer this reunion of Christen- 
 dom, on the basis of an open book consulted by all, with 
 an open unbiassed mind, than was possible in the days 
 when Chillingworth wrote. A few Latitude men, two or 
 three at most at Oxford, four or five perhaps at Cambridge, 
 of the same school of forethinkers in an age of after- 
 thinkers, caught a glimpse of this Sangreal of Eeunion, 
 on terms of comprehension which would make short 
 work of dogmatic theology. But the age was not ripe 
 for tliis happy result. The Bible itself had to be passed 
 through the fires of criticism, and the canon itself broken 
 up and recast in a furnace heated seven times, before we 
 could say what we are dealing with, in asking Christians 
 to set up the Bible as their one standard. Chillingworth's 
 position has to be restated before we can give it un- 
 qualified acceptance. At last, however, in our day, the 
 whole of the New Testament has passed through the fire, 
 and Christians at least may know what are tlie books 
 they may depend on, and that they are genuine tran- 
 scripts of the original autliors. As for the Old Testament, 
 they can afford to wait till results of recent criticism 
 have reached the same stage of settlement. Alarmists of 
 the uncritical school have raised the cry that their faith 
 is in danger, because the Old Testament is undergoing 
 
 ^ Chillingworth, chap. iv. § 17. 
 
Remedy. 293 
 
 the same sifting process as the New Testament. But 
 this treating the Bible as a whole one and indivisible, 
 this committing of Christians to a blind uncritical accept- 
 ance of the Jewish canon, is unfair on the face of it. 
 The common conscience of Gentile Christendom revolts 
 at this going behind Christ and His apostles. We are 
 Gentiles, not Jews. The lively oracles of the second 
 covenant look back on and reflect the same teaching as 
 the oracles of the first covenant. But farther than this 
 we need not go. To do so is to " build the bridge much 
 broader than the flood ; " it is to stake the truth of Christ's 
 mission on one of the minor issues as " to whose are the 
 fathers." Traditional theology has hampered itself with 
 too much baggage of this kind, and its line of march has 
 constantly been exposed to forays of the negative school, 
 against which its only defence has been to halt in some 
 entrenched camp of dogmatic authority. The Church 
 vouches for the canon, and to oppose the canon is to 
 deny the witness work of the Church, and so the con- 
 troversy ends in a lame conclusion of this kind. 
 
 But at last we seem to be emerging from this blind 
 alley of opposing dogmatism and doubt. Christians are 
 coming to see that these theological afterthoughts, whether 
 about the Church or the Bible, are not what they were 
 baptized into ; and they are beginning to ask whether 
 their baptismal belief is not enough. Is it not as safe a way 
 of salvation, to use Chilling worth's phrase, as any Eoman, 
 Anglican, or Genevan after-copy of it can be ? Happy 
 decision, blessed interim standpoint, certain concordat of 
 a settlement of all controversies in the future I In the 
 name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I, the follower 
 of Jesus Christ, renounce the world, the flesh, and the 
 devil. A threefold confession, and a threefold renuncia- 
 tion, such is the first word of the early Church, and to 
 
294 Remedy, 
 
 this the last and best thoughts of this nineteenth century 
 can say Amen. Eeligion within the bounds of morality, 
 this was Kant's demand in his day, only refused, as we 
 hold, because Kant had narrowed the sense, both of 
 religion and morality. By religion he understood the 
 dry and dessicated caimt onorhum of Deism, even then 
 going off before the attacks of the young intuitional 
 school of Jacobi and others. But worse still, his idea of 
 morality was limited by the narrow circle of duties 
 between man and man which just escape enforcement 
 by statute law, and which the old school of ethics there- 
 fore described as of imperfect obligation. If we take 
 religion to be Deism, and morality to mean a duty to our 
 neighbour with a policeman in the background, we can 
 see that such a settlement of the claims of both never 
 could be listened to. It excuses the fear of docrmatists 
 when philosophy offers reconciliation on these terms. 
 But Kant's accommodation is now forgotten; and, readjust- 
 ing the meaning of the two terms, morality and religion, 
 by the light of intuitional morality and spiritual philo- 
 sophy, we see no reason why we may not bring the two 
 together again. If the keynote of religion be God's 
 general fatherhood, and the keynote of morality be man's 
 general brotherhood, why may not an accommodation be 
 made on these terms, and an accommodation which will 
 prove the basis for the ultimate reunion of Christendom, 
 on the simple basis of love and loyalty to one Master ? 
 
 Let us see how such a revised theology would work ; 
 how much of the old it would cut out, and how much 
 retain. The Trinity, for instance, understood as triunity 
 and purged of all its later scholasticisms, which bring it 
 perilously near Tritheism, would, of course, stand. To 
 what were we baptized to, unless into the name of One 
 who is to us tripersonal as Father, Son, and Spirit ? 
 
Remedy. 295 
 
 Let us forget Sabellian and anti-Sabellian disputes, and 
 limit ourselves to the one phrase in which Augustine 
 spoke more as a Platonist and less as a dogmatist than 
 usual — Homo imago Trinitatis, and we shall see in the 
 triunity of man, body, soul, and spirit, the psychological 
 adumbration of the great theological verity which so 
 many stumble at because misrepresented. So far for 
 one half of the baptismal formula, the confession of the 
 name we adore, l^ext for the other half, our triple re- 
 nunciation corresponding to our triune confession. Ee- 
 ligion here passes into morality, as morality becomes 
 animated with an enthusiasm other than its own. So true 
 is it — 
 
 * ' Unless above himself he can 
 Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man ! " 
 
 This fusing of morality and religion into one, is indeed 
 that return to primitive New Testament Christianity 
 which the age asks for, but does not see its way to. As 
 a matter of fact, simple lay Christians, men and women, 
 have solved the problem, as they do the simple problems 
 of geometry, without knowing there is any problem at all. 
 They walk through them as Pascal and Newton did through 
 the first books of Euclid, solving by intuition what to 
 commoner minds seem to ask for laborious proof. So it is 
 that those who find joy and peace in believing, learn by 
 intuition that they have a great need, that Christ as 
 Saviour can supply all their need, whether they call it 
 pardon, purity, or peace. In idea they sometimes speak 
 of these stages at which all the afterthoughts of theology 
 enter in. There is a pardon stage, at which they ought 
 to stand like penitents at the brazen altar at the porch, 
 and learn of Christ's imputed w^ork. Next, there is a 
 purity stage, at which the merits of Christ once accepted 
 at the golden altar within the veil, return to them in a 
 
296 Remedy. 
 
 steam of acceptance, and they are filled with the fragrance 
 of the sacrifice. Lastly, there is a peace stage, in which 
 holiness, first imputed, then inherent, leads on to union 
 with God, or fellowship with the Father through the Son 
 by the Holy Spirit. 
 
 Now, all this, which is spread out by our theologies 
 into systems, each marking successive stages of Christian 
 experience, is seen at a flash as one intuition of the 
 spiritual mind. The devout scarcely suspect that they 
 leaped to this conclusion just as Pascal and Newton 
 passed at a bound through all the laboured demonstrations 
 of the early books of Euclid. To an intuition, whether 
 from the spiritual or intellectual side of our nature, the con- 
 clusion is contained in the premises; to state the problem 
 is to demonstrate it. Now, the return to primitive 
 Christianity implies the abandonment of all afterthinking 
 theology, but not the abandonment (as simple souls in 
 their fears suppose) of the best truths which this theology 
 in all its leading types, Eoman, Anglican, and Genevan, 
 are agreed in. All that we insist on is, that in any 
 statement in which one of the three theologies differs 
 from the other two, we should call a halt, and insist on 
 some special proof This is what Chillingworth demands 
 of the Church of Eome. Does that Church propose 
 dogmas which are at least far-fetched, not easily derived 
 from the sacred page, and which, even if true, do not 
 touch the needs of daily life or concern the conduct of 
 the man of mankind — these we may relegate to the 
 theological lumber-room. They are among those vanities 
 which Milton said — 
 
 " Fly o'er tlic l)ackside of the world, far off 
 Into a Limbo large and broad, since called 
 The Paradise of Fools ; to few unknown 
 Long after new, unpeopled and uutrod." 
 
Remedy. 297 
 
 We may take Chillingworth's test, and apply it to the 
 divergencies of Churches from each other and from the 
 truth. In the few points on which they are agreed we 
 may see the note of Catholic consent; where they begin to 
 differ, there we may at once ask ourselves, Are not all these 
 afterthoughts ? As Churches diverge, so they grow dog- 
 matic, and the measure of their dogmatism is also the 
 measure of their departure from primitive truth. It is 
 too late now to regret that the Eeformers vied with each 
 other in setting up creeds and confessions. Every Church 
 was a Church State with a confession of its own. Hel- 
 vetic, Belgic, and even separate cities or cantons, such as 
 Basle or Zurich, laid claim each to its own formula con- 
 sensus. A better mind now and then dawned on them 
 with the suspicion that division was a sign of weakness. 
 In the year 1552, when the Council of Trent was framing 
 its decrees against the doctrines of the Eeformatiou, 
 Archbishop Cranmer invited Melancthon, Bullinger, 
 Bucer, and Calvin to a conference in London for the 
 purpose of forming an Evangelical Union Creed. To 
 this Calvin replied, that for such an object he would 
 willingly cross ten seas, and that no labour and pain 
 should be spared to remove, by a scriptural consensus, 
 the distractions among Christians, which he deplored as 
 one of the greatest evils.^ But the danger past, and 
 Trent having uttered its seven thunders in vain, these, in 
 petty national Churches, fell asunder as before, and so 
 far from syncretism gaining any ground, the dissidence 
 of dissent, and a Protestantism which divides the West, 
 because, like the queen in Hamlet, it " protests too 
 much," became the order of the day down to the end of 
 the seculum Dogmaticum. Then, in sheer weariness, 
 
 ^ Quoted from a paper by Dr. Schaff on the consensus of tlie Reformed 
 Confessions, Christ and Christianity, by P. Scliaff, p. 153. 
 
298 Remedy, 
 
 men and theoloc^ians even fell back into the seculuiii 
 Dcisticnm, the end of which only came when Deism itself 
 paled away as a poor ghost of the past before the rise of 
 Kant's Kritik. Ours may be described as the critical age 
 of the Church, when all is passing through the fire, dogmas 
 and documents alike. What survives that testing and 
 stands the fire, may be described as Catholic doctrine, 
 and the deposit of faith which may be handed on to the 
 future as its theology. 
 
 How much will live, and what will pass aAvay as dross, 
 it is too soon to say ; but it is reassuring to know that if 
 much will go off as afterthinking theology, much will re- 
 main. The simple test of that which endures is this, that 
 it centres around the person of Christ, and our love and 
 loyalty to that Supreme Centre of all heart homage. To 
 the earliest type of Christians, such as are glanced at in 
 the Epistle to Diognetus, that gem of the sub-apostolic 
 Church theology, all lay wrapped up, like in the form of 
 that Babe of Bethlehem to which wise men came from 
 the East to lay their gifts at His feet. We often say, 
 Would that the Church could return to this theology of 
 one creed, and that the shortest, the least explicit. But 
 to utter the wish is not to go on, as too many do, to admit 
 that it is a barren wish. So it is, and must be, as long 
 as we go on tagging anthropology on to theology, as the 
 whole West has done ever since Augustine led the way. 
 " Grace " is a charming sound, harmonious to the ear ; but 
 we wish to hear of grace more in a theological, less in a 
 metapliysical sense, — Charis, that is, as it flows from God's 
 free goodwill to men, His kindness and philanthropy — 
 and less of grace as an abstraction, the logical antinomy to 
 freewill in man. As for those long discussions, in which 
 Pelagius and Augustine left an evil legacy to the Church, 
 they are of the schools scholastic, and remind us of Sir 
 
Remedy. 299 
 
 W. Hamilton's key to such discussions, that no controversy 
 of this kind has ever emerged in theology which has not 
 previously emerged in philosophy. What Sir W. Hamil- 
 ton was thinking of, was that thorny quickset hedge of 
 afterthinking theology which Augustine had planted, 
 and Calvin tended down to our day. As for theology, 
 in the strict sense of the term, that theology which goes 
 out as the subject of pure Deity, of His personality and 
 perfections, — His loving care over all His works, and His 
 relationship with man, since He breathed mysteriously 
 into man's nostrils the breath of two lives, a sentient and 
 a spiritual, — on this subject, so far from having too much, 
 we have had too little theology. In the early Alexandrian 
 school this makes up nearly the whole of their teaching. 
 Theirs is theology, as the teaching of the West turned 
 chiefly on anthropology, and it remains to be seen which 
 is most in harmony with the best thoughts of our day. 
 
 What the age requires in religion more than in anything 
 else is simplicity. A creed should be short, and not con- 
 catenated, article upon article, inference upon inference, 
 until belief breaks down beneath its top-load of dogma. 
 Such a creed is that earliest symbol which passes by the 
 name of the Apostles' Creed. Its articles are few, and the 
 teaching is simple ; it is like those circular stone temples, 
 open to the sky, of the age of the Druids, in which each 
 stone is a monolith, and on which the ring of the hammer or 
 mallet of controversy has never been heard. It has no chisel 
 marks ; and we are left to conjecture how it came there, 
 and who drew the sacred circle, into which we can easily 
 pass in through open gates, as if into a temple not made 
 with hands. Siipiplicity, then, is the first note of a true 
 theology, which is at once old and new. The next and 
 most important note is that all turns on the Person of 
 Christ. A theology which is largely notional is, as a 
 
30Q Remedy. 
 
 rule, little emotional, and sd we are working with the 
 wrong instruments, and seeking to enter the citadel of the 
 soul by open assault, not by sap and mine — non in dia- 
 lectica com^jlacuit. 
 
 This golden saying of an Ambrose is even truer to-day 
 than when first uttered ; for what has the march of mind 
 for centuries taught us but this, that the wider the circle 
 of knowledge, the vaster the horizon of our ignorance 
 opens on us. The dream of reaching the earth's circum- 
 ference is a dream of childhood ; we have, or ought to 
 have, long since outgrown it. Vast, too, as has been the 
 expansion of our intellectual sphere, it is as nothing to 
 the discoveries which we have made as to our mental 
 limitations. The new criticism has set up walls which 
 we never can climb, and between which we only can 
 pass. Antinomies of reason and paralogisms of thought 
 are set up by Kant, new like the flammantia mcenia 
 mundi, which we can never pass. Nor are these terms 
 the mere jargon of modern metaphysics. According to 
 Kant, an antinomy means that natural contradiction 
 which results from the law of reason when we seek to 
 know the absolute, passing the limits of experience. Pure 
 reason, again, has its antinonnes, which are like the sic et, 
 non of Abelard, the thesis and antithesis are each logic- 
 ally sustainable. It is the same with the practical 
 reason. The antinomy of the practical reason is that 
 virtue ought to be happy, but cannot be so here. This 
 is answered by the doctrine of the future state, which is 
 a postulate of the practical reason. We only glance at 
 these Kantian distinctions here, to enforce the lesson that 
 reason never can be, and never was meant to be, the 
 organ of the religious faculty. It is instead to close 
 the eye in the act of adoration ; not merely to shut out 
 the lower world sense perception, but also to hush to 
 
Remedy. 301 
 
 rest that inquisitive dialectical faculty which we some- 
 times call reason and sometimes understanding ; but 
 whether in its lower or even in its higher function of 
 pure reason, we never can find out the Almighty to per- 
 fection, and which, if allowed free range, only lands us in 
 logical contradictions out of which there is no escape. 
 It is only the spirit by which we know or are known of 
 God. This is an intuition above reason which searches 
 (epavva) the deep things of God. This spiritual faculty, 
 which is love in its purest, most sublimated form, knows 
 God only so far as it loves Him. This is the best side 
 of Augustine's teaching, in which, with happy incon- 
 sistency, he forgets his dialectical disputation tendency 
 and temper, and falls. " Caritas inchoata inchoata justitia 
 est, caritas provecta provecta justitia est, caritas magna 
 justitia est, caritas perfecta perfecta justitia est,"^ is a 
 golden saying, which may be set off against tomes of his 
 polemical treatises. Indeed, it may be said of Augustine 
 as of Toplady, one of his most logical disciples, if he 
 had written more hymns and less polemics, he would 
 have left a richer legacy to the Church. But let that 
 pass; the lesson which the age asks is that of those 
 Greeks who said, " Sir, we would see Jesus ; " and when 
 it has been led on to know the Eisen Saviour by the 
 Holy Spirit, then its craving is still the same — "Show 
 us the Father, and it sufficeth us." A religion must 
 centre around a person to find acceptance in an age 
 suspicious of logic and wearied with word strife. As 
 long as religion presents itself as a school of metaphysics 
 — Scotch or German — to the schools, it must go and 
 share the fate of these little systems which have their 
 day and cease to be. The wider, and therefore more 
 modest, mind of our day knows its limits too well to put 
 
 ^ Aug. , de Natura et Gratia, chap. Ixx. 
 
302 Remedy. 
 
 lip any longer with these dialectics which passed for 
 theology, and which the Highland woman, who called on 
 Norman Macleod to go over her fundamentals, will soon 
 be the last surviving relic. Let not sincere souls fear 
 that faith will sink when a theology of fundamentals is 
 found out to have overlooked the one fundamental point 
 of all, that God is love, and not mere sovereignty. It is 
 probable that theology, rid of this incubus of a Deter- 
 minism, which is neither scientific nor spiritual, but an 
 unnatural amalgam of both, will then rise as if with 
 wings into its true sphere, the awakened conscience, using 
 intuitions of its own which are purity of heart, faith 
 working by love, and prayer which clasps God, so to speak, 
 by the feet. To the pure and praying spirit heaven is 
 opened; it is such who see God, and who know Him, because 
 they love Him and trust Him, because truth needs trust, 
 and they have tasted His truth by living experience. 
 This is religion in the exact sense of the term, the tie 
 which binds us back to God. Theology suggests a chain 
 of many links, and man-made religions all make the 
 scheme of salvation long and painful ; it is intellectually 
 difficult to grasp, ethically and experimentally it is still 
 more difficult to lay hold of in the right way. The line 
 of the saintly Cowper here comes in, and no one suffered 
 greater tortures than he from leaders of this type — 
 
 " Oh, how unlike the complex works of man 
 Heaven's easy, artless, unencumbered plan ; 
 Luminous alone by the light they give, 
 Stand the soul-quickening words, Believe and live ! " 
 
 Simplicity on the intellectual side, and living trust on 
 the ethical side, are the marks of the faith once delivered 
 to the saints. The purity of a theology may be almost 
 tested in this way. It is seen in a descending scale of 
 second, third, and fourth century theology. After that 
 
Remedy. 303 
 
 the darkness of dogmatism becomes so great, that we 
 may almost gauge the ignorance of monkish commenta- 
 tors by the violence of their vituperation against any 
 who went before and who happened to bear the brand 
 of heresy. It is said Celsus' treatise against Christianity 
 is forgotten but for Origen's reply. In the same way 
 Origen himself has, to a great extent, perished on account 
 of the ignorant copyists treating his commentaries as 
 unworthy of notice. " Throughout the ' Middle Ages,' " as 
 Mr. Bigg remarks {md, Bampton Lecture, The Christian 
 Platonists of Alexandria, p. 277), "the name of Origen 
 was a by-word in the East, and the margins of his MSS. 
 are found scrawled over with fierce execrations of his 
 heresies and his blasphemies." 
 
 May we not measure by this single remark the 
 contrast between primitive and debased theology, — those 
 conceptions of God which may be classed with apostolic 
 times, and those latter-day conceptions of an age of 
 afterthought, when dogmatism had dimmed and asceticism 
 soured those God-implanted instincts in us by which the 
 soul turns to God as a flower to the sun ? We are not 
 concerned in a defence of Origen, much less of Origenism. 
 The Bampton Lectures of 1886 have at last done 
 tardy justice. We can see the true Origen through 
 some clearer medium than the uncritical abuse heaped 
 on him ever since the age of Justinian and the so-called 
 Fifth General Council. It is only as lending point to 
 our comparison between early and after ages of Church 
 history that we single out Origen, the most misunder- 
 stood of early Fathers, because least in harmony with the 
 reigning ideas of later ages, which were all cast in an 
 entirely different mould. But the question remains, 
 Which of the two theologies, that of the early Alex- 
 andrians or the later, is most in harmony with 
 
304 Remedy, 
 
 modern thought ? If we ever ask ourselves, as only a 
 few do, what shape the Church of the future will take, 
 will it be dogmatic and traditional, or spiritual and 
 intuitional ? the answer is obvious. It will certainly not 
 reflect that type of monastic Byzantinism under which the 
 Church became enslaved to one form of bondage and the 
 State to another, until, between these corruptions, society 
 perished, and the sweep of the Saracen's scimitar laid 
 both low together. The Church of the future will look 
 out on a new world, with conceptions so enlarged, puri- 
 fied, and, at the same time, simplified, that it will smile 
 at those complex theories in science, politics, and religion 
 which once weighed down the human mind and held it 
 in such bondage to a dull and spiritless tradition. The 
 so-called sciences are found all to interlap : forces are 
 so correlated, that while the details for specialists become 
 more minute every day, the great unifying principles 
 grow more simple. It is the same in law and politics : 
 rights and duties are seen to be correlative, and a new 
 jurisprudence is growing up on this basis. Lastly, 
 theology itself will have to take a hue from the age it 
 enters on. It will be more humanitarian ; but will it, 
 therefore, as the timid suspect, lose the sense of God's 
 nearness as the all-Father, and of our relationship to 
 Him, indissoluble as the parental tie itself? It is a 
 tie which, so far from being broken by death, will then 
 onl}'' attain its full fruition and meaning. 
 
 With regard to the Church of the future and the 
 theology of the future, there are two superlatives, optim- 
 ism and pessimism, which hitherto have held the field 
 between them, but are alike unmeaning as expressions of 
 God's dealings with the race. Into the history of these 
 phrases we need not enter. The use, or rather abuse, of 
 the one provoked the other, and the true solution lies in 
 
Remedy, 
 
 0^3 
 
 the middle term meliorism, on which we feel disposed to 
 take our stand. The reigning Augustinianism has ever 
 struck a pessimist note with regard to the mass of man- 
 kind. The sentiment of the apocryplial writer Esdras has 
 passed current for orthodoxy, at least in the West : " I will 
 tell thee a similitude, Esdras : As when thou askest the 
 earth, it shall say unto thee, that it giveth much mould 
 whereof earthen vessels are made, but little dust that 
 gold Cometh of: even so is the course of this present 
 world. There be many created, but few shall be saved." ^ 
 ISTor is it strange that a pessimism of this kind, with 
 regard to the mass of mankind who are non-elect, and 
 for whom it is better they had not been born, should lead 
 straight to the other extreme of an almost immoral 
 optimism. The age which has rejected the theology of 
 pessimism has lapsed in an unthinking, unserious way 
 into a kind of bland optimism. We are not universalists 
 ex 'pTofcsso, and those whose thinking all leads straight in 
 that direction are loud in disclaiming a phrase which 
 sprang up in America, and has too much the ring even 
 there of a reaction against the Determinism of the school 
 of Jonathan Edwards. All things are of God ; He is the 
 one Will of the universe. This modern phrase of what 
 is called the Monothelite heresy reigned in the West 
 without a rival. But since Determinism of this kind 
 seemed to make God the author of evil, and carried with 
 it certain reflections on His perfections which no mere 
 appeal to God's sovereignty can get over, men began to 
 twist the argument right round. Since it is unworthy of 
 the one Will of the universe that only some should be 
 saved, let us conclude as consistent Monothelites that 
 it is His sovereign will that all should be saved. In 
 this way the age consciously or unconsciously has 
 
 1 2 Esdras viii. 2, 3. 
 U 
 
3o6 Remedy. 
 
 dropped out of pessimism into optimism. It is a sweeter 
 note, we admit, and one more in harmony with all we are 
 taught of the Headship of Christ, and that He must 
 reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet. But 
 all the same we are forced to say that this optimism is 
 only Augustinianism turned inside out. The American 
 nniversalist is only a revolted Calvinist ; and we are con- 
 firmed in this conclusion by remarking that it is the 
 most Calvinistic Churches which lean most in the new 
 direction. In the East, which was even more Pelagian 
 than Augustinian, it has always been so. Evil is a 
 quality of the freewill of man ; it is an awful endowment 
 of his nature that it can so determine in time its destiny 
 for eternity. In this the so-called Arminians of the 
 West are in harmony with Alexandrian theology as con- 
 trasted with the Determinism to which Augustine set the 
 
 o 
 
 type in the West. Now, it is instructive that the three 
 types of theology which are non-Calvinistic, as we may 
 say the Lutheran, Anglican, and Wesleyan Churches are, 
 do not lean towards universalism, which, as we have 
 seen, is the inevitable reaction from Calvinism. 
 
 There must be a cause for this concomitance, and it 
 is easily seen what it is. The Determinism of the 
 Augustinian theology throws on the one Will of the 
 universe all the issues of life and death, temporal and 
 eternal. In the most logical type of it which Hopkins, 
 who went as far beyond Edwards as Edwards surpassed 
 Calvin, and Calvin Augustine, it has come to this, that 
 even right and wrong are sublimated into varieties of the 
 one same thing, which is the will of God. To the fol- 
 lowers of Hopkins, heaven and hell were alike for the 
 glory of God ; and the occupants of the dungeons below as 
 of the palace chambers above of the Great King would 
 alike sing the same Song of the Three Children, Benedicite. 
 
Remedy, 307 
 
 To argue with one-sided men of this type would be a 
 waste of reasoning. It only confirms what sober thinkers 
 ever have held, that to run a single thought out to certain 
 logical conclusions, is to forget that we can only reason 
 at all within and between certain antinomies of thought. 
 It is no sign of sanity, but the reverse, thus to be ignor- 
 ant of our own ignorance ; and the disease of theology has 
 been this, that some of its brightest lights have forgotten 
 that if any man " thinketh he knoweth anything, he 
 knoweth nothing as he ought to know," Our guesses in 
 the dark may or may not be approximations to the truth, 
 but the instant that we dogmatise and denounce others, 
 as Augustine did Pelagius, we are certainly in error 
 ourselves, and, like the blind, only lead the blind until 
 both fall into the ditch. 
 
 JSTothing strikes us so much as this contrast between 
 the theology of the New Testament and that of later 
 times. The note it strikes is neither that of the optimist 
 nor the pessimist. Meliorism, or an increasing purpose in 
 the ages to come, the education of the human race by 
 slow successive stages of advance, corresponding to the 
 six days of creation, this is the true note of the New 
 Testament, not the mere " now or never " note of the 
 theology of later ages. The soul-saving theology, with 
 belief and baptism standing between us and the awful 
 gulf of eternal death — this was the afterthought of a 
 later age. As is always the case, men read out of the 
 Book what they had themselves first read into it ; and 
 the result was an amalgam of Biblo-scholasticism, which 
 has passed current until a more critical age has passed 
 the whole through . the furnace to test what is primitive 
 and how much yet are the additaments of later thinkers. 
 The result is instructive. The residuum is so small that 
 it is all contained in one short creed, and the clauses of 
 
30 8 Remedy, 
 
 that creed so enigmatic that they seem to cover almost 
 any kind of interpretation. Jesus and the resurrection, 
 this is the sum of the apostles' teaching ; but what vistas 
 these two words open up ! The person of Jesus, human 
 and Divine, covers the whole ground of theology proper, 
 and the Anastasis throws light on all that we mean by 
 man and his destin}^ He is at present " in the flesh," 
 but there are unfoldings and capacities as yet latent, all 
 of which the term Anastasis covers and throws light on 
 when Anastasis is understood in its widest sense. 
 
 Thus it is that the eschatology of the New Testament 
 does not so much differ from the popular eschatology 
 in detail, as in its general drift and direction. 
 It has been the endeavour of trained theologians 
 from the first to attempt to bring the two into textual 
 harmony ; and it would be strange if they had not suc- 
 ceeded in this, especially as dogmatic theology only 
 professes to draw its teachings direct from the well-head 
 of the Holy Book. But there may be a certain surface 
 of agreement when there is no inner harmony. The 
 finer ear of one musician will detect any discord which 
 passes for harmony to another. Much of music is 
 mere noise, for this reason, to the trained and too sensitive 
 ears of a few. So it is that the eschatology of old and 
 new theology strikes quite a different note to those who 
 only judge of man's hereafter from the few pregnant 
 hints of the New Testament. Not to go into detail, the 
 contrast is all summed up in this, that in the New Testa- 
 ment all centres in the person of Christ. He is the 
 Anastasis and the Life, whether here or hereafter. Later 
 theology sets out with assuming, as Martha did, the 
 Pharisaic dogma — which is Platonism run into a Hebrew 
 mould — of an Anastasis at some last day or judgment, as 
 if in some valley of Jehoshaphat. Our Lord neither 
 
Remedy, 309 
 
 contradicts nor corrects Martha. He simply takes the 
 phrase out of her mouth and lifts it into a higher plane 
 of thought. " I am the Anastasis;" the difference in terms 
 is slight, but the point of view is wholly changed. We 
 seem to see the same truth, but with changed eyes. It 
 is like a man returning to the scenes of his youth — 
 
 *' Dost thou look back on what has been ? 
 As some divinely-gifted man 
 Whose life in lowly scenes began, 
 And on a simple village green." 
 
 The eschatology, then, of the New Testament brings us 
 out of all theories of the immortality of the soul, the 
 resurrection of the body, the duration of rewards and 
 punishments, and all those battlefields strewed with the 
 castaway weapons of old combatants. When we get into 
 the mind of Christ and draw near the heart of God, we 
 begin to wonder how such small dogmatisms could have 
 filled our mind at all. Take the term rewards and 
 punishments, how miserably inadequate such a phrase 
 sounds to express the relation of spirits with the Father 
 of spirits ! It is excusable as a phrase of the old school- 
 master and masjistrate sta^e of our training The law 
 w^as such a schoolmaster, and it passed us on to the govern- 
 mental view of God, who will no doubt reward every man 
 according to his works. He is the righteous Judge, who 
 will certainly recompense men as they have deserved 
 — indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish upon 
 every soul that doeth evil ; while to them who by 
 patient continuance in welldoing seek for glory and 
 honour and immortality — eternal life. Kewards and 
 punishments, as the best thinkers have long seen, 
 thus grow out of the nature of the case. In Butler's 
 phrase, they are natural, ix. not arbitrary. Moral laws, 
 like material, execute themselves. To call in the aid of 
 
3IO Remedy, 
 
 some public judge and executioner, is to reduce God to 
 the level of a magnified man. Anthropomorpliism must 
 stop short then — we speak of the eye, the heart, the 
 finger, and hand of God ; but to make Him a mere 
 magistrate to enforce His own sentences, would be to fail 
 to see the meaning of that law which cannot be broken, 
 but in violatiug which we are only ground to powder. 
 
 The eschatology, again, of the New Testament lifts us 
 at once above the old disputes of Sadducee and Pharisee 
 as to the immortality of the thinking principle on the 
 one hand, and of the necessity of a material framework 
 on the other hand, with which to carry on identity and 
 personal consciousness. Plato, as it has been often re- 
 marked, reasoned well as to the immortality of the soul ; 
 only too well, since he overproved his point, and left us 
 with a sense of existence a "parte ante as well as a ^arte 
 post But he failed, as Aristotle pointed out, to give us 
 that sense of personal identity, wanting which our desires 
 for immortality are mere visions through the ivory gate. 
 Aristotle came after Plato and pierced his air-bladder of 
 immortality with the needle point of criticism. He 
 showed that the rational soul of man is immortal but 
 impersonal, while the sensitive soul is conversely personal 
 but not immortal ; and so the deepest thinkers stood 
 beside the grave, and had to say with the women, " Who 
 will roll us away the stone ? " for it was very great. 
 
 Here the eschatology of the New Testament enters in 
 with the true explanation. Our Anastasis after death is 
 an entire Anastasis of both rational and sensitive soul, 
 and our personality which inheres in the latter will thus 
 be complete. This Bishop Butler, in his essay on the 
 subject j)refaced to the Analogy, has entirely missed, and 
 so has failed to see the true reconciling point between 
 Plato and Aristotle's theory of the soul and its immor- 
 
Remedy, 3 1 1 
 
 tality. JSTor is Bishop Butler alone in this capital error. 
 Theology in its afterthinking way has too often mistaken, 
 as Martha did, the true kernel and centre of the whole 
 subject, that our Anastasis is bound up with the Anastasis 
 of Christ ; so much so, that if the one fails the other also 
 fails, as the apostle argues, ex ahundanti, in those verses of 
 the Corinthians where he shows, first, that our resurrection 
 depends on that of Christ; and that, secondly, His resur- 
 rection would be unmeaning, nay impossible and false, 
 unless the Anastasis of the whole human race had been 
 designed as part of the eternal plan of which Christ's 
 resurrection at Easter was strictly the first-fruits, followed 
 by that of every man in his own order. 
 
 There have been many criticisms and exposures of 
 the popular theology for which we cannot be too thank- 
 ful. Archdeacon Farrar, the late Dean Plumptre, Canon 
 Eow, and others too numerous to mention, have cut 
 away the chief excrescences of error which made the 
 outlook into the hereafter too dismal to be taught, until 
 a general scepticism on the whole subject had crept into 
 and at last possessed the popular mind. But this scep- 
 ticism unfortunately cast back a shadow on the New 
 Testament, chiefly because writers were not careful to 
 show that the inferences of theology were not taken 
 direct from the fountainhead in the teaching of Christ 
 and His apostles. Their silence as to restitution and 
 recovery hereafter, was taken to mean that the state of 
 man was eternally fixed at the moment of death. Hence 
 the crude opinion that some last act, whether of sin or 
 repentance, would fix, and fix for ever, the condition of a 
 soul in eternity. . The continuity of character was lost in 
 a magical idea of sudden conversion in the act of dying. 
 This took the place of every other. Our poets, who, if 
 not our theologians, are at least the abstract and epitome 
 
312 Re77iedy. 
 
 of the age they live in, show us this. Hamlet's argument, 
 that it would never do to slay his uncle in the act of 
 praying — 
 
 " JSTow might I do it, jiat, now he is praying ; 
 And now I'll do't : — and so he goes to heaven ; 
 And so am I revcug'd : — that would be scann'd." 
 
 Such conceptions of heaven and hell, turning on the 
 last act in life, are only seen in their crude literalness 
 when bluntly put by a master poet holding the glass up 
 to nature, and giving the very thoughts of his age in its 
 own words. It is by the help of this thinking aloud 
 that we understand what theology really teaches, and are 
 able to point out where the confusion of thought begins. 
 What the ISTew Testament teaches is continuity of char- 
 acter. Such as we are as a whole in this life, such we 
 pass into the life eternal. But it is rank superstition 
 to suppose that a last decision will determine our state 
 for eternity. It is this heaven or hell alternative in 
 which the popular theology built up systems more or 
 less misleading. 
 
 But enough of these errors of afterthought, which w^ill 
 all pass away as soon as the true exegesis of the New 
 Testament is laid hold of, not by scholars only, but by 
 the people at large, through more enlightened pulpit 
 teaching. This must be a work of time ; but we need 
 not despair. Slowly a better, benigner conception of God 
 and His dealings with all His children is filtering down 
 into the public mind. It is not in a day that Eome is 
 either built or overturned. It is not all at once that the 
 misconceptions of ages pass away. As a matter of fact, 
 they are never argued down ; they go out of themselves 
 like candles that burn out in their sockets. The well- 
 meant attempts of reformers to write down the " popular 
 theology " are to a great extent " love's labour lost." 
 
Remedy, 3 1 3 
 
 But the fact remains that the heretics of yesterday 
 become the orthodox of to-day, and perhaps the masters 
 of sentences of an age yet coming : so true is it that 
 Wisdom is justified of all her children ; their ashes, flung 
 out, are gathered in " history's golden urn " — 
 
 "And spite of praise, 
 As one who feels th' immeasurable world 
 Attain the wise indifference of the wise." 
 
CHAPTEE XII. 
 
 THREE TESTS OF AFTERTHOUGHTS 1. UNPRIMITIVE ; 2. 
 
 IRRECONCILABLE WITH HIGHER LIGHT TO BREAK FROM 
 god's word ; 3. METAPHYSICAL STAGE OF THOUGHT. 
 
 In the first place, these afterthoughts are unprimitive, if 
 not uncatholic. The first test of afterthoughts lies in 
 this. What the creeds contain may be said to be dc 
 fide ; what the creeds omit or pass by may be treated as 
 afterthoughts. The two most widely known are that of 
 Chalcedon, commonly called the Mcerie Creed, and that 
 of the Eoman Church, commonly called the Apostles'. 
 The first is that which was drawn up at Nice on the basis 
 of the Creed of Csesarea by Eusebius. Large additions 
 were made to it at Nice to define the full Deity of the 
 Son, and it concluded with anathemas on all who pro- 
 nounced the Son to be of a different hypostasis from the 
 Father. Another creed much resembling this, but with 
 extensive additions at the close, and with the omission of 
 the anathemas, was said to be drawn up at Constantinople, 
 but was first proclaimed at the Council of Chalcedon. The 
 only addition to this made by the West was the addition 
 of the Filiog[ue clause, emphasising the double procession 
 of the Holy Ghost. The shorter creed of the Eoman 
 Church came to be called the Apostles' Creed from its 
 originally consisting of twelve clauses, to which each of 
 
 314 
 
Three Tests of Afterthoughts. 315 
 
 the apostles threw in one, hence it was a o-vjul^oX/] for 
 (7v/x^o\ov. It was successively enlarged. First was 
 added the " remission of sins," next a " life eternal ; " 
 then came the " resurrection of the flesh," which we have 
 rightly softened down to " of the body ; " and lastly, the 
 " descent into hell " and the " communion of saints." 
 This, then, is the Catholic faith. All beyond deserves the 
 name of afterthought, 'Now, it is observable that this 
 creed, whether in its Eastern or Western form, leaves out 
 of view altogether such questions as the necessity of 
 episcopal succession, of the origin and use of sacraments, 
 the honour due to the Virgin Mary, inspiration, pre- 
 destination, and other articles which bulk large in the 
 later Confessions of the Eeformed Churches. 
 
 How are we to account for this ? Either we must 
 close the door, and so shut out both the errors of later 
 times with the defences and replies to these errors, or we 
 must open the door, and so admit that the draft of the 
 faith by Catholic antiquity was incomplete. A door, as 
 the French say, must be open or closed. It will never 
 do to admit some and reject others. The Eoman Church 
 consistently admits development. The Immaculate Con- 
 ception and Papal Infallibility were pious opinions as 
 late as a quarter of a century ago. ISTow they are dogmas 
 which we dare not question if we are to accept the 
 Eoman obedience. On the other hand, if we close the 
 door and take our stand on the one Catholic draft of 
 doctrine as contained in the two historical creeds, of 
 which the Qicicunque vult is confessedly only an ex- 
 pansion, we have to shut out as mere afterthoughts the 
 whole of sacramental theology on the one hand, as we do 
 the distinctive teachincjs of later a^^es, as the atonement, 
 its extent and application, and also of the Bible and its 
 authority. 
 
J 
 
 1 6 Three Tests of AftertJioiigJUs. 
 
 It is clear, then, there is a wide room for this question 
 of afterthoughts. We are forced to ask ourselves, Was 
 the first draft of the faith, as summarised in the two 
 creeds of the East and West, sufficient and precise, or 
 did it slur over intentionally those questions which strike 
 Tis in this day as all-important, both as to the means of 
 grace and whether certain sacramental channels are 
 essential ? Or, on the other hand, were these creeds 
 mere provisional summaries — a compendium of theology 
 good enough for these days, but requiring to be largely 
 supplemented by the maturer thought of later ages ? To 
 this test of afterthoughts we now turn. 
 
 It certainly seems as if East and West, Greek and 
 Latin theology, had diverged from early times. It is an 
 old remark that the Eoman took a practical view of life, 
 the Greek the speculative ; the one, therefore, developed 
 anthropology, the other kept to theology proper. This is 
 so true that we have nothing to add to it. But if so, 
 how is it that the creeds of the East and West (for we 
 assume the Epistles is the Latin draft of the creed) 
 are both alike objective and historical, and pass on one 
 side all that we npw regard as the " way of salvation " 
 theology ? The very term " grace " is not so much as 
 named in any of the creeds. It certainly seems that we 
 are here on the track of these " afterthoughts." To a 
 simple faith, sin and the Saviour are not two experiences, 
 but one. Salvation and the felt need of it grew up in 
 one identical act. It is a flower with two stalks, and 
 we cannot grow the one out of any other root than the 
 other. But it may happen, as in Augustine's remarkable 
 exceptional experience, that sin and striving with sin may 
 go on for a long time without any felt need of a Saviour, 
 any perception of a remedy outside our own will to 
 repent. The result is that Augustine's experience became 
 
Three Tests of Afterthoughts. 3 1 7 
 
 a kind of bed of Procrustes on which theology was laid. 
 Sin was set forth as a single truth breaking up into 
 original and actual sin, with all their endless ramifica- 
 tions, by-ends of controversy, and disputed issues, so that 
 men in discussing sin lost hold of salvation, and had to 
 pick it up afterwards almost as a distinct subject. This 
 lingering long in the forecourts of sin was not only experi- 
 mentally hurtful to Augustine afterwards, for repented 
 sin leaves something more than an outward scar, it 
 " petrifies the feeling," as Burns calls it ; but the mis- 
 chief lay deeper for the Church at large. It led to the 
 development of an elaborate hamartiology and soteri- 
 ology, which, so far from fitting in together and being 
 coextensive, were set each under separate headships of a 
 first and second Adam. What misery this has wrought, 
 w^iat heart-searching as to the coextensiveness or not of 
 sin and salvation, none can say till the last day. The 
 cluTus pater infantum had doomed all to perdition alike ; 
 as an Amalek of old, the doom fell on old and young, 
 infant and suckling. This was chapter one ; then came 
 chapter two, when out of the doomed race an elect 
 remnant was spared, though whether by electing grace 
 or the action of our will, or both combined, this was left 
 open, on which theology might wander in endless mazes 
 lost. These are the afterthoughts, as we have already 
 seen and stated. They all date from Augustine, and 
 stand and fall with his teaching. But they are un- 
 catholic, or at least post-catholic, as not contained, ex- 
 plicitly at least, in any of the creeds ; and for this reason, 
 when we appeal to antiquity, we are on safe ground in 
 saying this old theology of Augustine is not old enough 
 for us, who do not desire to go behind or beyond the 
 teaching of the great creeds of the teneted East and West. 
 Another simple test of the truth or error of after- 
 
3 1 8 Three Tests of Afte7'tJio2tghts. 
 
 thoughts in theology is this — How would it fare with 
 them, had God, as we may trust is the case, more light 
 to break out of His word, the hidden gospel, for instance, 
 of the larger hope ? Tested in this way, we see at once 
 what are and what are not afterthoughts. Let us glance 
 at the outlines of the popular creed, and see what would 
 stand this test and what would go off in a mist of words 
 like the baseless fabric of a vision. Seen in the light of 
 the larger hope, or of oeons of education beyond, such 
 a doctrine as that of the Trinity remains unaffected. 
 Athanasianism would stand when the overhanging edifice 
 of Augustinianism is shaken to its foundations. The 
 dogmatic afterthoughts of the East, such as wander away 
 into Eutychian and ISTestorian errors right hand and left, 
 which neutralise each other, they are left far behind. 
 Dearly has the East paid the penalty for afterthoughts of 
 this kind, wdiich brought in the flood of Mohammedanism 
 and swept them all away. Deism avenged itself for 
 these misreadings of the mystery of the Incarnation, by 
 having none of them, and shutting the whole East up for 
 centuries into little Monophysite or Nestorian sects too 
 insignificant for the general historian even to record their 
 existence. To the ecclesiastical antiquarian they are 
 interesting, as all relics of the past are and must be. 
 But to the progressive mind, which asks what the 
 Christianity of the future will be when the Euphrates is 
 dried up and the Moslem heresy, based on bare Deism, 
 has lost its power, the problem is quite obscure. But in 
 any case, as we have said, the East will have less to cast 
 off than the West when she shakes herself from her 
 sleep of centuries, awakes like the seven sleepers of 
 Antioch in the legend, and descends from her cave of 
 dry, out-of-date dogmatism, to be greeted again with the 
 word, " We are all Christians here." 
 
Three Tests of Afterthoughts. 3 1 9 
 
 But in the West it will be otherwise, where Augus- 
 tinianism in one form or other covers the whole ground 
 of orthodoxy. Sad to say it, but much which now passes 
 for sound Catholic doctrine will then be found strangely 
 uncatholic and sectarian. Much, on the other hand, 
 which passes in the cant of the day as " painfully humani- 
 tarian," will be found to be as theological as it is 
 humane — 
 
 "Thou seemest human and Divine, 
 The highest, holiest manhood thou." 
 
 Tested in this way, we have to ask which of our current 
 theologies will stand and which will pass away. It was 
 one of Burke's wisest sayings, that to find out what the 
 young men are thinking of, — the young men who will 
 make public opinion a decade or two hence, — this is the 
 secret of political prophecy. We know what young 
 Oxford was thinking of in the forties, and so in the 
 seventies and eighties we had it full blown in Angli- 
 canism, based, it is true, on unquestioned acceptance of 
 Augustinianism and its conclusions. But the younor 
 Oxford of our day is again dreaming dreams and seeing 
 visions ; but they are very unlike those out of which the 
 Tract party sprang up, under leaders so venerated that 
 the name of one is given to a large and flourishing young 
 college, and the name of another to a theological house or 
 hostelry, which has shown hospitality sometimes to ten- 
 dencies not quite in harmony with those of its patron 
 saint. Stern and unbending orthodoxy is sometimes like 
 stern and unbending Toryism, subject to strange reactions. 
 Enough of this — the theology of the future, liberating itself 
 on the side of eschatology from the cramping creeds of 
 the past, will emerge as the mountaineer, who gets above 
 crag and forest into an upper air where the survey will 
 be as wide as surprising. He will still see, but far 
 
320 Three Tests of Afterthoughts. 
 
 below his feet, the viUage which he left, with its tinkling 
 chapel bell ; and the only thunder which he will hear will 
 be the voice of God in the awful avalanche. But what 
 of that ? for beyond him is Italy. He is passing out of 
 one zone into another ; soon will he change his climate 
 and breathe larger, freer air. Such is the contrast 
 between old and new in theology which we are entering 
 on in our day, and the question for the educated man to 
 ask and answer is. What baggage of the past is he to carry 
 with him ? Is he to descend into Italy, so to speak, 
 a simple crag-climber, with axe and knapsack only ; or 
 is he to pass like a Hannibal or a Napoleon, carrying 
 an army with him, and prepared to roll into one again 
 the w^hole of Gaul, trans-Alpine and cis-Alpine ? This, 
 to put it shortly, is what the theology of the near future 
 has to settle with itself; and it has shuffled off coming 
 to a decision far too long. The Protestant sects, it is 
 true, who make short work with the past, and laugh at 
 the law of continuity, have settled it in their own rough- 
 and-ready fashion. What is East or West, Athanasius 
 or Augustine, to them ? If these worthies of the past 
 agree with them in their version of the Bible, so much 
 the better for these worthies. For this reason, Calvin, 
 finding Calvinism in Augustine, as Luther found Luther- 
 anism, agreed to extol Augustine, and set him on a plane 
 apart from all other patristic authorities ; and this not 
 because they w^anted help from the Fathers, as a Jewell 
 or a Hooker might have done, but because they were 
 pleased to find one at least of the Fathers who had not 
 gone down into the general apostasy. This, it is need- 
 less to add, is the tone of popular Protestantism to this 
 day. It w^ants no side light from antiquity, it makes no 
 account of this principle of continuity. But we of the 
 English Church, who pride ourselves that we are neither 
 
Three Tests of Afterthoughts. 3 2 r 
 
 Philistines nor Pharisees, like the mere sects, have to ask 
 what baggage of the past we shall take with us into the 
 theology of the future. We have already pointed out what 
 that is. We must go to the East rather than the West for 
 the pattern of a theology in harmony with the Zeitgeist of 
 the future. Even in the East we must stop short with 
 Athanasius, last of the Fathers. He had not sunk into a 
 stupid contempt for philosophy. It was the true pcedagogy 
 of the Greeks, as Moses was of the covenant people. The 
 law of continuity compels us to make a breach somewhere, 
 and to decide what to take over and what not. Even 
 the judicious Hooker (or judicial rather, if we were to 
 assign him his true epithet) hints, as much as he dared 
 do in his day of dominant Calvinism, that the yoke of 
 Augustine was too heavy for some to bear. " The heresy 
 of freewill," he observes in his sermon on Justification, 
 " was a millstone about the Pelagian's neck ; shall we 
 give, therefore, sentence of death inevitable against all 
 those Fathers in the Greek Church which, beins^ mis- 
 persuaded, died in the error of freewill ? " To the same 
 effect is the oft-quoted saying of Jeremy Taylor: " Original 
 sin, as it is at this day commonly explicated, was not the 
 doctrine of the primitive Church ; but when Pelagius had 
 puddled the stream, St. Austin was so angry that he 
 stamped and disturbed it more. And truly I do think 
 that the gentlemen that urged against me St. Austin's 
 opinion, do not well consider that I profess myself to 
 follow those Fathers who were before him, and whom I 
 forsake, as I do him, in the question."^ 
 
 The testimony of these two eminent men, which we 
 could easily enlarge if we cared for catenary authority, 
 points to the real root of bitterness in the old orthodoxy, 
 its strange theory of birth sin, its distortion of the 
 
 1 Jeremy Taylor's Works, vol. ix. p. 396. 
 X 
 
322 Three Tests of Afterthoughts, 
 
 doctrine of heredity by inclusion of an innocent posterity 
 in certain consequences which the conscience refuses to 
 see are moral, and which, therefore, stamp the whole 
 Augustinian system as non-moral. Forensic and federal, 
 they are mere phrases, the flags under which Luther and 
 Calvin led their followers ; but the intelligent thought 
 of Germany has rejected the one as Switzerland has the 
 other. And so the age as a whole is non-theological ; 
 not because indifferent to these subjects, as is commonly 
 said, but because theologians have not carried out the 
 sifting process carefully enough, and thoroughly gone 
 through doctrine by doctrine, as the tribe of Judah was 
 taken man by man until the son of Zerah was taken, and 
 with him was found the strange garment on the floor of 
 his tent. Then it will be seen that a doctrine winch lands 
 us in inconsistencies such as these, that we are free and 
 not free, responsible for our sin yet not responsible, free 
 to do evil but not free to do good, with an inability, as 
 some call it, which we can deepen down till it becomes 
 a disability, — such contrarieties as these carry their own 
 sentence. They are darkening counsel without knowledge. 
 The third test of these afterthoughts of theology is 
 that they betray their origin. They spring up in the 
 metaphysical stage of thought, when the mind mistakes 
 its notions of things for the things themselves. Intrud- 
 ing into things not seen, assertions and explanations of 
 matters which lie behind the veil and beyond the record, 
 queries about quiddities only existing in the scholastic 
 brain, and a general curiosity, half-feminine like that of 
 Queen Caroline, to know the why of the why, — this is 
 the true note of the afterthinker in theology. The 
 problem of evil, its origin and ultimate destiny, is just 
 such a subject as suggests itself to this half-trained 
 thinker, impatient of the limitations of mind and the 
 
Three Tests of After tJwugJUs. 323 
 
 conditions of thought itself. The curse of theology has 
 been, that it has too often turned adjectives into nouns, 
 and made the names or qualities of things identical with 
 the things themselves. To some extent this delusion, 
 this fetishism of mind, has been dispelled by science ; it 
 lingers on in theology only. Who now speaks any longer 
 of colour as an entity ? The rose is red and the violet 
 blue by some entity of redness and blueness when science 
 was in the metaphysical stage. We now know, so far from 
 a quality inherent in matter, colour is only the result o-f 
 the action of light on certain bodies, whereby (and here 
 lies the mystery) they absorb som.e and reject others of 
 the rays of the spectrum. It was not till long after the 
 decomposition of light by N"ewton that this simple account 
 of it dawned on the scientific mind. That colour is the 
 rejected and residual matter of sunbeams, not some in- 
 herent property of matter, clears off at once a whole class 
 of entities which lay like rubbish in the path of science. 
 
 May it not be so in theology ? It has not purged 
 itself of so much metaphysics, which make up three- 
 fourths of its afterthoughts. Evil is the same unsolved 
 problem to the theologian which colour v^as to the 
 physicist till the early years of this century. We set 
 out with assuming the existence of evil as an entity, or 
 at least a quiddity, a quality inherent, that is, in certain 
 moral agents. Then we go on to ask its origin, and never 
 leave off till we have settled to our own satisfaction some 
 theory of its final absorption or extinction. The fine lines 
 of Milton well indicate this personification of evil — 
 
 * ' But evil on itself shall back recoil, 
 And mix no more with goodness, when at last, 
 Gathered like scum and settled to itself. 
 It shall be in eternal restless change 
 Self- fed and self-consumed." 
 
324 Three Tests of Afterthoughts. 
 
 We at once cut our way out of tins forest, pathless as 
 that in which the lady of Comus was lost, when we 
 refuse to speak of evil at all as an entity, and go on 
 personifying abstractions, as Milton does sin and death. 
 Sin is, like death, a mere condition or relation of a 
 moral agent to himself and others. Just as colour is only 
 a modification of light, the rejected rays of certain 
 absorbent but non-luminous bodies, so evil is the result 
 of the action or rather repulsion of God's light on certain 
 of His moral agents. Sin, the apostle is careful to 
 explain, can only exist where law enters ; where there 
 is no law there is no sin. Sin, in a word, is the result of 
 law, which is like light meeting that which is repulsive 
 to it in our lower animal desires, and so are formed what 
 we call the colours of good and evil. All the shades 
 and hues in the world of right and wrong, the myriad 
 twisted beams of conduct up and down the moral scale, 
 from the savage to the saint, are only the action and 
 reaction of law and desire, flesh and spirit, on each other. 
 Evil would cease and disappear if either of the two 
 conditions which keep man midway between an angel 
 and an animal were to cease. He would subside into 
 the brute, and so sink below moral evil, if the law 
 ceased to be the ox-goad of conscience, and he found it 
 hard to kick against the pricks. He would rise above 
 moral evil if there were no flesh, and so no evil desires 
 betraying him into secret rebellion against good. 
 
 Such, then, is man, a pendulum between two opposite 
 tendencies ; and the good that he allows, and the evil 
 which he allows not, but yields to, are only like colours, 
 not light itself so much as light resisted and rejected. 
 Character, we admit, is thus made ; and the possibility 
 of the formation of character, and so of its perpetuity in 
 some fixed type of good and evil, as long as the mind 
 
Three Tests of Afterthoughts, 325 
 
 endures, so stamped with a character or quality of its 
 own, this is as far as we can go and need go. But 
 theology, in its afterthoughts, has gone much farther. 
 It has dealt with character as with colour, as a quality 
 inherent, jper se, in moral agents, and thus has been led 
 to draw out the horizon with the eternity, or at least the 
 possible eternity, of evil much farther than the safe 
 warrant of Scripture allows. This it does, on the 
 assumption of the indelibility of the hues of moral 
 good and evil — an assumption which, as we have seen 
 in the case of colour, is pre-scientific, and of the meta- 
 physical age of thought. Any gardener will show us 
 how we may turn and twist the hues of plants, and so 
 condition the colour receptivity of flowers that they may 
 absorb rays they once rejected, and reject others which 
 they once absorbed. Are we to say less of human 
 nature under a heavenly gardener ? Unless we fall back 
 on the sullen theory of reprobation, and forget that it is 
 not the will of our heavenly Father that one of these 
 little ones should perish, we fail to see the meaning of 
 these gloomy hues in which the old school in their help- 
 lessness paint the perpetuity of evil. It is pitiable to 
 hear that he that is filthy must be filthy still, and so 
 forth ; because, forsooth, as we know is the case, there is 
 no self-remedial power in human nature. It may be 
 ever so true that the Ethiopian cannot change his skin, 
 or the leopard his spots ; but who ever said that it was 
 so, or that the remedy lay in ourselves ? There is no 
 self-adjustment in the plant to change its environment, 
 and so make white roses blush into red. But red roses 
 are as much the- skill of the gardener as white ; and 
 the whole question of man's hereafter really turns at 
 this point, where theology shows its little faith in the 
 fatherly character of God and His educational purposes 
 
326 Three Tests of Afterthoughts, 
 
 with regard to the race as a whole. It is the question, 
 Is God the heavenly husbandman or not ? does He purge 
 all His plants that they may bring forth more fruit ? and, 
 lastly, — a truth by no means to be blinked, — does He 
 turn the vine stocks which bear no fruit into fuel, and 
 burn them up with an everlasting burning ? 
 
 These are issues which dogmatic particularism as much 
 as dogmatic universalism has never looked square in the 
 face. Butler's gloomy ratiocinations, that possibly evil may 
 be as much the eternal order of things, hereafter, as it is 
 at present, rests on a basis of mere naturalism, the legi- 
 timate outcome of which is atheistic pessimism of the 
 Schopenhauer type. In Butler, it certainly seems as if 
 there was a defective sense of the all-goodness of God, an 
 unevangelical taint from the age of Deism, which he so 
 recoiled against, but yielded to, partly from constitutional 
 melancholy, to which he was the same victim as Gray and 
 Cowper, but principally from his lack of spiritual sun- 
 shine. Had he basked more in the beams of Christ's 
 victory over death and sin ; had he seen the headship of 
 Christ over humanity, and His purpose of gathering all in 
 Christ, — he could never have looked on the problem of 
 good and evil in the pessimist light which he has done. 
 Turning his eyes on the gloom of abounding wickedness, 
 and seeing no remedy in or around, here or hereafter, he 
 breaks out into almost despairing language {Analogy, 
 rt. II. chap. V.) on the inability of sin to bring forth aught 
 but retribution, which, as he wisely cautions us, is not so 
 much arbitrary on God's part as inherent in the nature of 
 evil itself. This is very true ; but it is only one side of 
 the truth, the unevangelical side of the problem. Were 
 there no Father to send the Son to seek and to save that 
 which is lost " till He find it," we should echo this de 
 profundis of the melancholy Butler as to evil abounding. 
 
Three Tests of Afterthoughts, 327 
 
 But to a Paul, who sees that sin abounds only that grace 
 may much more abound, the universe presents a wholly 
 different aspect. Butler is the November, in a word, of 
 an age dying under Deism. Wesley is that world just 
 awakening out of its January sleep ; and we, in our day, 
 with the gospel of a larger hope in our hands, may lift 
 up our eyes and see that summer is nigh. 
 
 Let us then get beyond these afterthoughts of theology 
 as to the personality of evil, or, which is the same thing, 
 its inherence in fallen beings as a quality inherent and 
 inseparable from them as such. Augustinianism, with its 
 Manichean conceptions of matter and its inherent evil, 
 laid the train which afterthinkers down to our day have 
 fired. Evil may be, probably is, only good in the making, 
 the potter's vessel marred on the wheel; the true moral from 
 Jeremiah's much misunderstood metaphor is not that the 
 potter preserves these marred specimens as tokens of his 
 failure, proofs that he is but a " 'prentice han'." To argue 
 so of the All-wise, All-good, sounds like flat blasphemy, 
 though men do not mean it so, merely because they repeat 
 phrases the meaning of which they have not rung out. 
 What the potter does, is to render back the unbaked clay, 
 when marred on the wheel, into the lump again, then to 
 turn it a second, perhaps a third time on the wheel ; and 
 then only, when at last it is a vessel unto honour, and 
 worthy of the potter's skill, is it put into the fire and baked 
 for final use. The inference from that sadly misunderstood 
 phrase in the Eomans, so far from leading up to Augus- 
 tinian particularism, opens the door the other way. To 
 understand it, we must go on to the 11th chapter, where 
 Israel's blindness is seen to be blindness in part, and not 
 judicial or final ; so that when this partial blindness is 
 taken away, Israel shall be restored, the fulness of the 
 Gentiles brought in ; and the apostle concludes with the 
 
328 Three Tests of Afte^^thoztghts. 
 
 adoring exclamation, very unlike the gospel of particular- 
 ism, " Oh the depth of the goodness and riches of God ! " 
 
 The late Dr. Hatch, whose early loss Oxford still 
 regrets, remarks on this subject in the Hibbert Lectures 
 of 1888, that "the afterthoughts of theology may all be 
 traced up to these two sources. First, the tendency of the 
 Greek mind to transform belief, or the simple trust in 
 God, into an intellectual conception. It is requisite that 
 a man should define his beliefs ; that it is as necessary that 
 a man should be able to say, with as minute exactness, 
 what he means by God, as that he should say, ' I believe 
 in God/ It is purely philosophical. A philosopher 
 cannot be satisfied with analysed ideas." 
 
 " The second conception comes rather from politics 
 than from philosophy. It is the belief in a majority 
 of a meeting. It is the conception that the definitions 
 and interpretations of primary beliefs, which are made by 
 the majority of Church officers assembled under certain 
 conditions, are in all cases and so certainly true, that the 
 duty of the individual is not to endeavour, by whatever 
 light of nature or whatever illumination of the Holy Spirit 
 may be given him, to understand them, but to acquiesce 
 in the verdict of the majority. The theory assumes that 
 God never speaks to men except througli the voice of the 
 majority. It is a large assumption. It is a transference 
 to the transcendental sphere, in which the highest con- 
 ceptions of the Divine nature move, of what is a convenient 
 practical rule for conducting the business of human society. 
 Let the majority decide. I do not say that it is untrue, 
 or that it has not some arguments in its favour ; but I 
 do venture to point out that the fact of its being an 
 assumption, must at least be recognised." 
 
 These two misconceptions of the essence of religion, the 
 one removing it from the region of the affections to that 
 
Three Tests of Afterthoztghts. 329 
 
 of the intellect, the other from the private conscience to the 
 public decision of the Church in council sitting, go far to 
 explain all that we mean by afterthoughts in theology. 
 Dr. Hatch has here, correctly enough, diagnosed one of 
 the errors of later theology as arising out of the super- 
 subtle love of the Greek intellect for definitions to put 
 in the place of faith in a living God. But he has failed, 
 as we think, in tracing all the evils of dogmatic theology 
 to Greek character. The second defect of dogmatism, by 
 the right of the majority to rule and bear down the 
 dictates of private conscience, is much more Eoman 
 than Greek. Greece fell to pieces much more through 
 anarchy than over-centralisation; and the earliest Churches, 
 because Greek, were, like the Corinthian, much more in 
 danger of that extreme than the other. It was Eome, on 
 the other hand, which took up the regulative magisterial 
 view of religion, and Roma locutct est was soon — much 
 sooner the note in the West than it ever was in the 
 East. Greek theology, it is true, fell under the oppressive 
 yoke of Byzantinism ; but this was because old Ptome had 
 migrated to Byzantium, and carried with her her methods 
 " in Church and State." With this important qualifica- 
 tion, there is much in Dr. Hatch's theory which we can 
 accept and agree with. 
 
 As an illustration of the ''all or nothing" style of 
 reasoning in which the dogmatic deductive school of 
 divines argue, the following extract from one of the ablest 
 preachers of that type will suffice. The late Dr. Liddon, 
 in a sermon on " the Justification of Wisdom," observes 
 truly enough, that when men now-a-days reject Christianity, 
 they reject it, as a'rule, bit by bit. "A single truth, say 
 the grace of baptism, or the atoning value of our Lord's 
 death, or the transmission of original sin, or the union 
 of our Lord's two natures in one Person, or the eternal 
 
^;},o Three Tests of AftertJwtighis, 
 
 punishment of the lost, is supposed to present insurmount- 
 able difficulties. What always or almost always happens 
 is, that the truth is detached from the general body of 
 Christian doctrine; it is treated as a thing complete in 
 itself, having no necessary relations with other truths ; it 
 is taken to pieces ; it is then, from whatever reason, pro- 
 nounced incredible. And what wonder ? It is sub- 
 jected to a strain which it was never meant to bear ; it is 
 placed under conditions which, except in the mind of its 
 critic and rejecter, do not anywhere belong to it. Most 
 assuredly the truths of the Christian creed are not, and 
 may not be treated as these detached isolated atoms. 
 They are parts of a great whole. They shade off one 
 into another by almost imperceptible gradations. They 
 are linked one to another by common underlying prin- 
 ciples, by love of contrast or love of correspondence ; they 
 are just as much a whole as is the world of physical 
 nature, only, of course, an infinitely grander and more 
 overwhelming whole ; and the Eternal Wisdom, whose 
 mind they are and on whom they harmonise, reaches 
 across them from end to end, mightily and smoothly 
 and sweetly ordereth all things." Much of this we can 
 heartily go with, and honestly admire in its fervour of 
 undimmed faith in the gospel as a whole; but this 
 analogy from physical science as a whole and the gospel 
 scheme as a whole, is only true in so far as we say of 
 both, as Butler does, that the scheme of nature is imper- 
 fectly understood as that of revelation. To turn round on 
 all doubters, as Dr. Liddon does, and to charge them with 
 bit by bit rejection of revelation, because Church dogmas, 
 either as to infant baptism or eternal punishment, fail to 
 convince, — this is that perilous type of dogmatism which 
 only genders the very unbelief it declaims against. 
 **Unfaith in aught is unfaith in all," is a line often quoted 
 
TJwee Tests of AfterthoiigJits. 331 
 
 in this connection, but unfairly so. There is unfaith in 
 moral character which is the root of jealousy, and works 
 like madness in the brain ; and we may harbour the 
 same unfaith in God's perfect goodness, which makes us 
 cry out. Shall not the judge of all the earth do right ? 
 For unfaith of that kind, the remedy lies, not in mere 
 dogma, such as Dr. Liddon enumerates, but that display 
 of the Divine goodness when, in the phrase of the old 
 Book, God made all His goodness to pass before Moses. 
 
 By a singular coincidence, the Hulsean and Bampton 
 lecturers for 1885-86 took up the subject of Augustinian 
 and Alexandrian theology respectively. Their treatment of 
 these two widely constrasted schools of thought was fair 
 and impartial, and nothing was left unsaid on either side to 
 set forth the distinctive merits and defects of the great 
 Father of the West by the Hulsean lecturer, and of the 
 two great heads of the catechetical school of Alexandria 
 by the Bampton lecturer. What we were disappointed 
 with in not meeting in both cases, was a discussion of the 
 causes which led to the almost entire effacement of the 
 Alexandrian type of theology even in its native home, 
 the East, while the Augustinian reigned without a rival 
 through the entire West almost down to our own day. 
 To understand the cause of this eclipse of Clement and 
 Origen, and this one-sided Augustinianism of the West, 
 we must bear in mind that to the practical Ptoman 
 intellect, to the still ruder intelligence of the barbarians 
 who succeeded, the Greek type of thought was as strange 
 as its tongue. The Latins neither knew that nearly 
 perfect vehicle of expression, the Greek tongue, nor the 
 thoughts which ' circulated by means of it. They had 
 a profound distrust of philosophy, especially of Platonism, 
 and never forgot that the so-called orthodoxy of Clement 
 and Origen was only Gnosticism thinly disguised. Clement 
 
2,^2 Three Tests of Afterthoughts. 
 
 professed to teach what the true Gnostic was in contrast 
 with the pretended. This alone was enough to excite 
 suspicion, which Origen's conjectures on the stars and 
 their inhabitants certainly did nothing to allay. 
 
 AVhat is desired, then, is a thorough-going criticism of 
 the contrasts between Greek and Latin theology as a 
 whole. As monographs on the subject of Clement and 
 Origen on the one hand, and of Augustine on the other, 
 these volumes are full of instruction ; but we want more 
 than a monograph, we desire to see East and West set 
 side by side, and the merits of each fairly and fully set 
 forth. A thorough-going criticism of that kind is still a 
 want of the day. 
 
 The usual defences of Augustine move on the same lines 
 as those which make out in the same way that Luther 
 was no Lutheran, Calvin no Calvinist, and which only 
 amount to Wilkes' impudent saying, " Your Majesty, I am 
 no Wilkite." Tin sot trouve toujour s unplus sot qui l' admire, 
 is as true of wisdom as of folly, of saints as of sages. 
 Imitation, which is the sincerest form of flattery, never 
 stops till it lands the followers of some great man in an 
 absurdity which he would have been the first to expose. 
 But it still remains the case, error has its germinant force 
 as well as truth; nay, if humanum est errare have any 
 meaning, truth genders error much more readily than error 
 ever winds back up to truth. For this reason, too, Augus- 
 tinianism prevailed in spite of its forbidding aspect to the 
 outside mass of men, that it fell in with the prevailing 
 terrorism of the times when Rome was rocking to ruins, 
 and men crowded into the Church to escape the fate of 
 a perishing age and generation. A century before, a nobler, 
 more disinterested view of the Church prevailed. It was 
 then regarded as the ccetus fideliurti, but there, as Bigg 
 remarks — 
 
 " Probably Luther, whose passionate phrase, Origcnem 
 jam dudum. diris devovi, is one of many which lie heavy on 
 
Three Tests of Afterthoughts. ^iol 
 
 the great Eeformer's fame, is the only man of eminence 
 that ever spoke of Origen in language like this ; though 
 the Augustinian divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 century were scarcely more just to the great Alexandrine 
 than were the Grceculi of the Lower Empire. Even 
 Methodius, even Theophilus, were diligent students of his 
 books. Augustine, Bede, Bernard, respect the memory of 
 one with whom they had little in common but learning 
 and greatness of soul. Origen's name has been a kind of 
 tombstone. There has been no truly great man in the 
 Church who did not love him a little. Let us add to this 
 Erasmus' testimony: 'Plus me docet Christianas philosophise 
 unica Origenis pagina quam decern Augustini.' " ^ 
 
EPILOGUE. 
 
 Two theories, that of evolution and that of the education 
 of the human race, are so entirely master of the field, that 
 to attempt to disturb them by calling in a third and 
 rival theory would seem presumptuous. The two amount 
 to much the same thing. Lessing's education theory is 
 the older of the two : it is historical, and has even a 
 certain Biblical ring about it ; at least it falls in with the 
 Pauline conception of the long minority of the race under 
 the law, when we were under tutors and governors. But 
 the evolution theory of Darwin has at last thrown Lessing's 
 conception of education into the shade. In a sense we may 
 say we are all evolutionists now. If there are any who 
 cling to the old-world conception of special creation, and 
 of that as spread out over six successive stages or days, 
 they so modify their mode of stating it that it shall not 
 conflict, in name at least, with the new notion of the 
 advance of lower forms into higher by some internal 
 force which we may describe as evolution. Between day 
 and day, or stage and stage, there is no longer supposed to 
 be a gap of time. The old Hebrew metaphor, " and it 
 was evening and it was morning," as if God had left off' 
 at night time, and the work stood still till next morning, 
 when a fresh creative start began, this is now regarded 
 as too anthropomorphic. Creation is admitted to be con- 
 tinuous. There are no pauses — no gaps to fill up; and 
 
 334 
 
Epilogue, 335 
 
 though Darwin and his school admit that they have not 
 in every case found the missing link, they have no 
 doubt that it has existed, and the theory stands unshaken 
 although complete verification in all its details is at 
 present not forthcoming. 
 
 But the evolutionists overlook the fact that Nature 
 has other aspects besides that of orderly growth upward. 
 She has a record of degeneracy — of type fixed only to 
 relapse back to some more primitive type — of differ- 
 entiation done and then undone, as if the standard were 
 too high, too artificial, to endure under the strain and 
 stress of actual life. 
 
 If this is so of pigeon-breeding, need we wonder that 
 it is so in a still more marked degree of human nature. 
 Once or twice in history has a small community like 
 Athens, Eome, Carthage, and one or two centres of culture, 
 reached a pitch of refinement at which it was unable long 
 to maintain itself. The standard was too high, the ideal 
 too noble for human nature's daily food, and so it sank 
 back exhausted after its first effort. Hybridity is the fate 
 which overtakes any variety of plant or animal too highly 
 trained. It comes up, and is cut dow^n like a flower, and 
 never continueth in one stay. Evolution, then, without 
 degeneracy is only a half truth ; and his followers, more 
 Darwinian than Darw^in, who harp on the one note of 
 perpetual progress, find themselves confronted with 
 awkward facts which they can neither explain nor explain 
 away. 
 
 But to those who have no special theory to sustain, 
 this degeneracy of higher types into lower is only what 
 we might expect. ' The better sinks back into the worse 
 much sooner than the worse rises up into the better ; 
 Immanum est errare. Not truth, but guesses at truth, 
 error and imperfect conjecture, and fiction or false theory, 
 
^;^6 Epilogue. 
 
 that mixture of a lie which ever delights mankind, — this 
 is the sad heritage of us cave-dwellers, who, as in Plato's 
 grand myth, catch only the distorted images of things on 
 our prison walls, and mistake these idols for the realities 
 beyond. This being so, what can we expect but that 
 men's aftertlioughts soon take the place of the first 
 thoughts of God in the case especially of such a sublime 
 revelation as that of Jesus Christ. It could, at best, 
 come to us under the guise of symbols and parables, for 
 we are but broken lights, and our little systems have their 
 day, and cease to be. As long as we recognise this, and 
 in all humility admit that it is so, no harm can come 
 from our little systems. If "little," they are no more 
 heady than a little learning is, as long as we do not fall 
 into the conceit that it is anything more than a shallow 
 draft, and that drinking deeper will sober us again. 
 
 This is the true lesson of Church history. It seems 
 destined to pass through these three stages, two of which 
 are over, and the third and last we are only entering on 
 since the law of the limitation of our faculties has been 
 better understood. The hint on this subject which Locke 
 threw out, which Kant afterwards formulated, and Sir W. 
 Hamilton finally began to build up, a new philosophy based 
 on the law of relativity, — this is now accepted every- 
 where. We have only to name this law of the limitation 
 of our faculties, and the whole of Augustinianism is seen 
 to be a sand-heap thrown up by children playing on the 
 shore, while beyond are the mighty waters rolling ever- 
 more. To demolish these dogmas of predestination with 
 limited salvation of the elect alone, is to take them for 
 what they are not. They may be left to time, and the 
 next tide, which is already fast rising, will sweep away 
 this scholastic theology. 
 
 We are enterincj, as we have seen, on the third and 
 
Epilogue, 2>Z1 
 
 last age of Church history. The primitive age of 
 DiclacM held its ground till the Alexandrian school of 
 catechists had to yield before the deepening need for an 
 organised Church under a hierarchy, and falling back on 
 general councils as a high court of appeal. This was the 
 oecumenical or Catholic consent stage of Church history, 
 which under serious limitations, arising from the revolt 
 of Protestantism, has come down almost to our day. But 
 modern thought since Descartes' day has made a breach 
 in this Church continuity theory. Men were called on 
 for the first time by this father of modern thought to 
 cease dogmatising, and to pause and answer one question. 
 What is the Ego ? The Cartesian answer, that the Ego lay 
 in self-consciousness, did not quite go to the root of the 
 difficulty ; and down to Hegel's day, and since, the sphinx 
 is ever at us repeating the same question, to which all 
 the schools and sects of philosophy send back each its 
 own reply. At last, however, Scotland and Germany is 
 to select two names — only Kant and Hamilton have 
 helped us to an answer which seems to spell finality to 
 this tormenting sphinx question. It lies in the relativity 
 of knowledge. All science is regarded only as so much 
 reclaimed land, with the moorland of nescience lying 
 beyond. We know in part, and the instant that we 
 forget this and begin to dogmatise, the curtain drops, 
 and we are again plunged in darkness. This is so in 
 all departments of knowledge. In the sciences properly 
 so called, details so crowed in on us that we cannot 
 see the wood for the trees. We are oppressed by 
 " specialism," and no museum will contain the multitude 
 of " sub-orders " and varieties which advance on us like 
 a plague of locusts, — none breaking their ranks, — so 
 that even to catalogue them is more than science can 
 attempt. 
 
338 Epilogue, 
 
 But it is when we turn to the science of sciences, the 
 knowledge of God and of our eternal state, that the mind 
 sinks under the sense of its own limitations. Here our 
 faculty of " comprehension " soon finds itself compre- 
 hended, and we have to reverse the usual order of mathesis, 
 a science which is itself to know, and then to know that 
 we know. In Divine things we can only apprehend that 
 of which we are apprehended. Here the Gnostic and 
 the Agnostic stand face to face ; and the one apparently 
 has as good right as the other in this sacred precinct, 
 where both seem intruders. At every turn our know- 
 ledge of Divine things is met by mystery. The veil of 
 Isis is on theology, and the Agnostic scornfully asks. Do 
 we intend to tear off the veil, and to forecast from the 
 life here what the life beyond the veil can be ? For 
 these reasons the old worn-out dogmatism of the Church's 
 childhood is so out of date that it is a pity to disturb it. 
 To write out a set of anti-Augustinism teachings, would 
 imply that we feared that the African doctor was more 
 than half right. The day has gone by for replies of that 
 kind. Are we, then, to leave the ancient traditionalism 
 of Catholic consent undisturbed, as the old orthodox ask 
 us to do, and pass it off on the age as a good and safe 
 *' regulative theology"? We might do so but for the grow- 
 ing demand for some readjustment of the old claims of 
 reason and faith. If " faith " would only confine itself 
 to what is purely spiritual and subjective, on the lines 
 of immutable morality and intuitional theology, we should 
 have an easy task to reconcile the two. The conflict of 
 ages would come to an end, and the age of apologetics 
 pass away with the need for defences of a truth seen 
 and felt to be true by its own inherent self-evidence. 
 
 But we are far from that consummation at present, 
 and have still to ask, What can be the end of these after- 
 
Epilogue, 339 
 
 thoughts ? What is to replace them when they are seen 
 to be out of date, when we are on the look-out for some- 
 thing to set up in their stead ? Here the old French 
 saying, that first and third thoughts are of God, but 
 second thoughts of the devil, may throw some light on 
 what we are seeking after. It may be that our third 
 thoughts, the after of afterthoughts, may bring us back 
 to first thoughts, and to that primitive type of DidaM 
 which was before dogma, as it is bound to live after the 
 second dogmatic stage of Church history is past. Too 
 long have utilitarian ethics and prudential soul-saving 
 theology lived on together, and lent each other a helping 
 hand. The builders of afterthouglits of this kind reared 
 a theological Babel, earliest type of confusion, where they 
 took bricks for stone and slime for mortar. What utili- 
 tarianism produced in the hands of a cunning workman 
 like Paley, this university knows only too well. Theology 
 of that type, backed up by a system of rewards and 
 punishments, made it worth the while of the self- regarding 
 eudsemonist to serve God, who would send him to hell if 
 he did not, and who kept in store the glories of heaven 
 with which to reward His followers. Had this account 
 of the gospel scheme come from some scoffing Celsus or 
 Lucian, desirous to hold it up to ridicule, we should have 
 refused to reply to it. But that this came in perfect good 
 faith from the clearest and most candid of thinkers, the 
 ornament in his day of this university, enables us to 
 measure the depths to which unspiritual orthodoxy had 
 descended in the days of our grandfathers. Happily 
 this reward and punishment theology has passed away with 
 that hangman's code, the vindictive jurisprudence of the 
 past, of which, perhaps, it was the consistent outcome. The 
 hanging code and the theology of terrorism, which failed 
 even to terrify, much less to deter, have both had their 
 
340 Epilogue. 
 
 day. As Sir H. Maine remarks, we have outgrown the 
 state of society which regarded terror as its one instru- 
 ment for the repression of crime. Consistently enough, 
 terrorism here and hereafter lived and died together. 
 They were born of the same brood of hard evil thoughts 
 concerning the All-good, and, like other unconscious 
 blasphemies of men against the Son of man, they are 
 now forgiven for the Son of man's sake. They were at 
 least not sins against the Holy Ghost, since many of these 
 worthies in law and theology seem not so much as to have 
 heard whether there was any Holy Ghost. AVhat a 
 spiritual religion becomes when it passes into unspiritual 
 hands, and living doctrine is fossilised into dry dogma, we 
 have only to turn to Church history to see by many and 
 repeated examples. 
 
 Let us hope, then, that the last or third thoughts of 
 theology will suggest some corrective to the worst effects 
 of those afterthoughts or second thoughts, which are in 
 most cases not best, but worst. On this subject a remark 
 of the venerated Charles Simeon deserves notice. It 
 raises him in our esteem, and it shows how far removed 
 he was from that narrow standpoint of the merely orthodox 
 divine, that ne qiiid nimis temper of dull moderatism, which, 
 professing to strike the golden mean, ends in touching 
 only that of a leaden mediocrity. Simeon held on other 
 points besides the Calvinist and Arminian controversy, 
 which was alive in his day as it is now long since dead, 
 that the right way of dealing with certain questions was 
 not on a sic ant non, but on a sic et non. He was dis- 
 posed to say " Yes " and " No." So far from shrinking 
 from extremes, he insisted on pushing every principle to 
 its extreme conclusion, provided only he was at liberty 
 to take up some opposite principle, and also drive it home 
 in the same way. He held that the only reconciling 
 
Epilogue. 341 
 
 point for truth was by letting warring shades of opinion 
 say their last word, and when all were honestly taken 
 up and laid down, we should arrive at last at a sound 
 body of working sentiments. The errors, in a word, of 
 some men are more helpful to us than the platitudes of 
 those who venture little because they believe and love 
 little. The fine song of Montrose — 
 
 " He either fears his fate too much, 
 Or his deserts are small, 
 "Who dares not put it to the touch, 
 To gain or lose it all," 
 
 is more than a mere cavalier's sentiment. There is in 
 it this dashing cavalry charge way of thinking the root 
 of something not far off from the mind of Christ. We 
 have to cast ourselves into the waters, as Peter the dis- 
 ciple did more than once, if we would come to Christ ; 
 and if, beginning to sink, we raise the cry of little faith, 
 " Lord, save me, I perish," the Master will be at our side, 
 and His word will be, " It is I, be not afraid." 
 
 The afterthoughts of theology, then, are not to be 
 corrected by simply recalling them, but by going on to 
 discover the compensating truth of which they are at 
 best but the first draft, rudely drawn and distorted by 
 our fears. There is this to reassure us when our heart 
 condemns us, that God is greater than our hearts, and 
 knoweth all things. The Church has been narrow, 
 distrustful of her Lord, and too ready to teach for 
 doctrines the traditions of men. But what of that ? 
 We all know and deplore it, but we are coming to see 
 that it could not be otherwise. The Church stepped 
 into the derelict seat of the Empire, and took on her all 
 the imperial airs of the old Eoman world. She affected 
 the xitMs et orhis note of stand and deliver ; and when this 
 over-centralisation failed of its effect, she broke up, in 
 
342 Epilogue. 
 
 the opposite extreme, into sectarianism and separateness, 
 in which the old dogmatism repeated itself under 
 conditions which made Geneva a kind of " little sister," 
 or bad imitation of Eome, that Tityreus in the Eclogue 
 describes his native Mantua — 
 
 '* Urbem qiiam dicunt Roman Meliboee putavi 
 Stultus ego huic nostrse similera." 
 
 We have not yet lived down all this reaction, but we 
 are coming on to a time when an accommodation will be 
 possible. The two reactions — the first against Eome, 
 and the second reaction of our day back into her arms 
 as the one visible centre of unity — have both by this 
 time nearly exhausted their strength. There are new 
 forces in our day entering the field which promise to put 
 a new complexion on old controversies, now nearly worn 
 out. The science of comparative religion has sprung up 
 in the wake of comparative philology ; it may be said, 
 indeed, to be its direct product. Both teach the same 
 truth, and point to the same conclusion in a future not 
 very far off. They point to a common spring out of 
 which humanity arose in the past, and a common destiny 
 to which it is tending in the future. 
 
 Comparative theology teaches much the same lesson 
 as comparative philology. It points to a threefold stage 
 of advance in our conception of God, corresponding to a 
 threefold division of tongues — the Turanian, Semitic, and 
 Aryan. The lowest types of ethnic religions, generally 
 speaking, fall under the first category ; they are gross, 
 sensual, fetish forms of worship, and the only steps to 
 their altar up to God are the generative symbols of the 
 visible world. It is at this low stage of calf-worship 
 that idolatry most signally fails as symbolism ; it loses 
 the spiritual in the sensual, and thus ends without 
 
Epilogue, 343 
 
 bringing the worshipper into the presence-chamber of 
 the Unseen and Eternal. The second stage upward is 
 that attained by the Semitic races, to whom the vision 
 was vouchsafed of a one absolute and supreme Euler of 
 the universe. This, the monotheistic stage of religion, 
 roughly speaking, has adapted itself to that family of 
 languages known as Semitic for reasons which it is not 
 easy to explain. The necessary connection between 
 Monotheism and the Semitic type of tongues is not as 
 obvious as the partisans of the parallelism between 
 theology and philology would have us suppose it is. 
 Still less can we go with those who see in Christianity, 
 as the reconciling point of nature-worship and Mono- 
 theism, the product of that higher type of culture which 
 the Aryan races have advanced to in their spread over 
 the world from East to West. Such generalisations as 
 these, which make the growth of the religious sentiment 
 co-ordinate with the development of language, from the 
 mere agglutinative and monosyllabic stage of the Kalmuc 
 on to the inflected and syntactical type of the educated 
 European, are at least premature. But it is enough to 
 say that there are three leading types of religious 
 sentiment, more or less harmonising with the three 
 great linguistic families of men. It is a dead lift out of 
 Polytheism into Monotheism, as great as the passage from 
 a Turanian to a Semitic type of speech. It is no less a 
 dead lift for a stern Monotheist, who worships a tran- 
 scendent Deity such as the El of the Hebrew, the Allah 
 of the Moslem, to get on to that secret of the Incarnation 
 of Deity who is immanent in the spirits of men, and who 
 has shone out in all His glory in the one Son of man 
 who w^as also Son of God. 
 
 If these three stages of comparative theology, corre- 
 sponding to three stages of comparative philology, are 
 
344 Epilogue. 
 
 ascertained to be correct, the inference is obvious, if we 
 may assume progress under continuity to be the law of 
 the evolution of man and the education of the race. We 
 may expect Turanian types of thought to merge into 
 Semitic, which again, in their turn, are to give way to 
 that last generalisation of thought when the Author of 
 nature is no locger adored as a transcendent Deity, but 
 when the tabernacle of God is to be with men, and He 
 is to dwell in them and they in Him. IsTot as yet has 
 even Christendom, with the exception of a few saintly 
 and mystical spirits, realised the deep meaning of its own 
 dogma of the Incarnation. It is still regarded from 
 outside : we see the hard shell of dogma which encloses 
 it ; not a few reject the shell because unaware of the 
 precious kernel of universal truth which it contains. To 
 say that a deistical age like last century should have 
 lapsed into Unitarianism in all but a hollow lip profes- 
 sion, is to say only what we suppose must be the case. 
 Supernaturalists accepted this and all other dogmas of 
 their creed, but they never attempted to assimilate them. 
 To the question. Cur Bens homo ? they gave the Anselm 
 answer, which only goes half-way, and breaks off exactly 
 at the point where a real solution is craved for. If God 
 became man merely for a purpose, i.e. to give worth to a 
 sacrificial death, otherwise of insufficient value, to atone 
 for all the sins of all men, we can well dismiss such a 
 doctrine of the Incarnation as one of many possible plans 
 of salvation. It may be true, but it certainly cannot be 
 the whole truth. On the contrary, it is such a teaching 
 as opens a door for explaining away, first the Atonement, 
 then the Incarnation itself. 
 
 Dogmatic theology, as we have seen, failed to recognise 
 that in Christianity there was something more than an 
 advance on a monotheistic religion. Lessing's Nathan 
 
Epilogtte, 345 
 
 tlie Wise, with its story of three rings, all facsimile, 
 Hebrew, Moslem, and Christian, being simply different 
 versions of the same truth, was legitimate enough from 
 the deistical standpoint at which Lessing stood in 
 common with his age. But this age of Deism is over, 
 and the Christ of history is seen to be the Pleroma, the 
 fulness of Him who filleth all in all. There is not a single 
 glimmer of truth, not a stray spark of God-given light, 
 in any the oldest of the old ethnic faiths, which does not 
 find its fulness in Christ, This is not mere eclecticism, 
 which is a poor, shrivelled conception of the true glory 
 of Christ, of Him who never breaks the bruised reed nor 
 quenches the smoking flax. All voices, however, without 
 meaning to us, are crying in the wilderness, " Prepare ye 
 the way of the Lord." All sounds are preludes of a 
 great concert, when the trees of the wood are to break 
 forth into sinc^ingr. What is more instructive still — 
 monotheistic creeds never can understand polytheistic. 
 They cannot assimilate them ; their last word to them 
 is negation, an abhorrence of idolatry. But spiritual 
 Christianity has a wide sympathy for all. It is the true 
 reconciling point, not only of these monotheistic faiths, in 
 face of which God and nature stand apart in hopeless 
 dualism. It also opens its wide heart of sympathy for 
 the childish faiths of our forefathers who worshipped 
 stocks and stones. " Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him 
 declare I unto you." It lightly passes by their image- 
 worship ; it has no harsh word of iconoclasm to say 
 against it, but fastens on the one symbol, the altar of 
 earth with the inscription, " To some unknown Deity," and 
 makes this the point of departure for the one new and 
 true, because universal, religion. 
 
 The ultimate universalism of Christianity has, of 
 course, been held from the beginning, but held in a sense 
 
34^ Epilogue, 
 
 in which it is very little in advance of Hebraism. To 
 the true Jah every knee should bow, every tongue should 
 swear. This soraewhat narrow draft has been the hope 
 of the Christian Church. Gentiles are to come, but only 
 as proselytes, and through the gate of baptism, and so to 
 enter the Church of the living God. So far the vision 
 of God on these latter times has not been given horizons 
 much wider than those of Isaiah and Ezekiel. But the 
 seer of Patmos also, when rightly understood, has a vision 
 of a city lying four square, and on each side three gates. 
 Twelve gates thus lie open day and night, i.e. to the 
 enlightened and to the ignorant, and open at all the 
 points of the compass. There are north and east prose- 
 lytes, and also those from the south and west. Every 
 breeze that blows wafts some to these happy shores, 
 where is the gathering of the nations, and where our 
 contentions cease. 
 
 There is, then, a new theology to be born, which shall 
 unify and absorb into itself all the contradictions of the 
 old. The river of God has been parted into four heads, 
 as it flows out of its early Eden, and they will never 
 meet again till they meet in the all-embracing ocean. 
 But we already discern where the meeting-point is to be. 
 Hitherto missions have been conducted on mere prose- 
 lytising and soul-saving lines. To gather heathen into 
 the Church and to save their souls from hell, it is 
 on these lines, and these alone, that missionaries, 
 Koman and Protestant alike, have gone out up to the 
 present. It is feared that any society which appealed 
 on any other ground would receive small support from 
 the home oracles of the religious world. But the ablest 
 missionaries who are in the field see farther than their 
 zealous but narrow supporters at home. They see that 
 God fulfils Himself in many ways, and that the stages 
 
Epilogue, 347 
 
 of genuine conversion are so many, that they spread over 
 many generations. The education of the human race is 
 the last thing in the world which can be hurried. If 
 nature does nothing ^cr saltum, how are we to expect the 
 kingdom of heaven to grow in any other way than first 
 the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear ? 
 Thus a universal religion is slowly preparing, and of which 
 we can barely trace the outline at present. For this 
 reason, that some of the building is well above ground, 
 while large parts of the temple of the living God in 
 China and India is at present only to be seen by tracing 
 its foundations. But as soon as India and the East has 
 brought its treasure and riches into the ISTew Jerusalem 
 — as soon as a new Christendom has sprung up coex- 
 tensive with the bounds of the now known and habitable 
 earth — is it supposable that the old theology of that 
 Augustinian Christendom, coextensive with the Eoman 
 Empire and reared out of the ruins of Eome, can be so 
 enlarged and become so elastic as to contain the East 
 and its faith philosophies ? To name such a supposition 
 is to answer it. " The bed is shorter than that a man 
 can stretch himself on it, and the covering narrower than 
 that he can wrap himself in it " (Isa. xxviii. 20). 
 
 What, then, follows but this, to which all our remarks 
 lead up to — the theology of the future will be some 
 grand amplification of the old theology, some fresh relay- 
 ing its foundation verities, some embracing its scholastic 
 and mediaeval afterthoughts in a wider synthesis, out of 
 which nothing essential is left out, but which contains a 
 humanitarianism to which Augustinian theology in all 
 its shapes is strangely unreceptive and unsympathetic to. 
 
 *' Largior hie compos aether, et lumine sestit purpureo." 
 
 We shall breathe freely in those days under the sense of 
 
34^ Epilogue, 
 
 recovery of two primitive verities, wliich the Churcli of 
 Christ early lost hold of in her Atalanta race after the 
 golden apple of greatness. We shall receive the sense 
 of God's Fatherhood and of man's brotherhood. At 
 present, not only do these two truths stand apart, but 
 those who hold the one slight or disregard those who 
 hold the other. The brotherhood of man has been till 
 the other day a kind of dream on the part of the Eous- 
 seaus, Mazzinis, and others who, as humanitarians, 
 stand far aloof from any conception of God corresponding 
 to that of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 Yet, rightly regarded, the two are correlative, and con- 
 sequent the one on the other. God is the Father of the 
 human family only in so far as they stand in a new and 
 filial relation to Him through the sacrifice of Christ. On 
 the other hand, Jesus is the elder brother by whom we, 
 the younger and outcast children, are brought back into 
 the family of God. We need not here discuss that 
 distinction, on which Scotch theology has laid so much 
 stress of late, whether God is the Father of all men 
 simply because all men are made in the image of God, 
 or the Father of men because they have been brought 
 into a new covenant relationship with Him, of which 
 sonship is the test, by the redemption of His death. 
 Virtually the two come to mean the same thing, since 
 we are only redeemed because we are made in the image 
 of God. The original sonship in creation and the adopted 
 sonship of redemption both alike assume that there is a 
 spiritual element in man which entitles us to say — 
 " For we are also His offspring." 
 
 Theology, then, as soon as it begins to revolve on these 
 two polar points, the Fatherhood of God and the brother- 
 hood of men, will present itself in a new light to inquiring 
 and candid minds that now stand outside the Church and 
 
Epilogue. 349 
 
 aloof from religion. Socialism, as it is called, has gener- 
 ally shown itself extremely averse to positive religion in 
 any of its dogmatic types. In vain the Churches try to 
 woo and win the Socialists, and charm away their distrust 
 of definite religion. Latterly, all the Churches without 
 exception have strained their exclusiveness almost to 
 breaking-point, in the hope that they might win those 
 who hold the brotherhood of men into coupling this with 
 the thought of the Fatherhood of God. This was the 
 aim of the so-called Christian Socialists, who, in Germany 
 at least, did not escape the charge of a certain sickly 
 sentimentality. It w^as said that, disguise it as they 
 might, they were after all suspected to be agents of the 
 police, and employed to break up certain anarchic forms 
 of combination by holding out counter attractions of a 
 higher brotherhood and of a new Socialism. To put 
 Christ at the head of the movement seemed to the artisan 
 to be the same artifice as that of Eichard 11. offering to 
 be their leader when the king of the mob. Jack Cade, 
 had been felled to the ground by the mace of Lord Mayor 
 Fitzwalter, turned into a battle-axe. But a better spirit 
 is rapidly coming over both sides of the subject of this 
 attitude of the Church to Socialism. No one is thought 
 the worse of as a Christian for claiming to be a Socialist. 
 On the other hand, the Socialist lecturer does not feel 
 bound to rail at religion as the log across the stream of 
 progress, damning the current, and compelling it to over- 
 flow its banks. This change for the better on both sides 
 is a sign that the new theology is beginning to take the 
 place of the old. We are on the eve of such a mighty 
 change that we can only speak of it as the "regeneration " 
 and the preparation for the second coming of the Son of 
 man. Humanitarianism, in a sense undreamed of be- 
 fore, has entered in and is permeating our theology. 
 
350 Epilogue, 
 
 This was regarded at first as the entrance of an enemy. 
 The Church having forgotten our Lord's humanity, and 
 lapsed unconsciously, of course, into what was practical 
 Patripassianism, the excluded truth entered in as a heresy 
 at first, and only recovered its footing when the Church 
 saw that it had forgotten one of the clauses of its own 
 creed. The result of this awaking to a fresh study of 
 Christ on the human side is seen not only in the success 
 of such a book as Ecce Homo, with many inferior imita- 
 tions, which follow it as the jackal the lion ; it is seen 
 in a desire to face fairly the difficulties of working men, 
 not only as to the Bible, but also as to those class distinc- 
 tions which, have passed from the world into the Church, 
 and so have lowered its ideal of our oneness in Christ. 
 
 As soon, then, as the standing quarrel between the 
 Church and Socialism has been adjusted, as it seems 
 likely to be in our day, we may be prepared for a new 
 attitude of the masses towards Christianity, the effects of 
 which no one can forecast, much less assign limits to. 
 But it is no exaggeration to say that it will be as life from 
 the dead to our sleeping Churches. It will lift us at once 
 into a larger and purer air, where we shall rise above 
 old outworn magisterial conceptions of God and separatist 
 views of our fellow-man. It will be seen in the light 
 of humanitarianism, that the old probation theory of man's 
 destiny breaks down, and that the only key to the Divine 
 dealings with man must be some education theory. 
 Education, with eternity to work in, at once alters our 
 whole standpoint ; one after the other the old safeguards 
 which the old theology brought in will be seen to be no 
 safeguards at all. Their effect has been the exact 
 opposite. Instead of keeping the sheep in the fold, it 
 has tempted many to stray off to strange pastures, and 
 hindered others from coming in who might have stood 
 
Epilogue. 3 5 1 
 
 had they heard no other voice than that of the " Good 
 Shepherd." 
 
 Hard theology, as it is known in New England, led, of 
 course, in the reaction straight away to what, in their 
 phrase, is called soft-shell theology. Let us hope that in 
 this country, at least, where the door has never been 
 closed to the hope of God's general Fatherhood by the 
 remorseless logic of a theology improperly so called, we 
 shall adopt without strife the theology of the future. 
 Any theology deserviug the name of a doctrine of God 
 must exhibit a whole God in an entire Christ. There 
 must be no passing, as if through a prism, of the white 
 light of God's sevenfold perfection with some of the rays 
 seen more refracted than others. This pencil of refracted 
 rays, such as comes from writers on the attributes of the 
 old school, like Charnock and others, must be produced 
 no more. Unless in every case, and to all alike, God is 
 represented as holy and just and good, we shall begin to 
 doubt whether this is the light of God as it streams from 
 heaven. Because the old school drew sharp lines of 
 distinction between God in Christ and God out of Christ, 
 casting the red wrath rays at one end of the spectrum on 
 the non-elect, and the violet rays of colourless compassion 
 on the predestinated, a reaction set in towards Univer- 
 salism, which has been nearly as paralysing to sound 
 scriptural faith as the original error from which it was a 
 reaction. We must live all this down as we are doing. 
 The second thoughts of theology, ending in themselves in 
 blind negations such as we have glanced at, must be 
 succeeded by those third thoughts which, as being lasting 
 and final, can be said to be of God, as only first and 
 third thoughts are. 
 
 This is the consummation we must lead up to ; but the 
 theology of the future sets us asking about the Church of 
 
352 Epilogue, 
 
 the future. It seems to us a question whether the men 
 of this age, with a few bright exceptions, are prepared to 
 welcome either such a new Church and theology, at least, 
 not in England. In Germany, where men of the type of 
 liichard Kothe — to name only one — abound, and where 
 the calm culture of the university type of man is the rule 
 and not the exception, such an attitude of waiting for the 
 kingdom of God is not uncommon. But Englishmen, who 
 have the faults of their qualities, are prosaic in the same 
 sense as the old Eoman world was. They hold the 
 captive East in fee, and excusably enough think that the 
 political masters of India must give and not borrow from 
 the East. We evangelise there and we educate, but 
 schoolmaster and missionary, secular and spiritual alike, 
 go out with a quiet sense of our own vast superiority, 
 and with almost a spirit of condescension. We never 
 suspect that the faith and philosophy of the West has 
 something to learn from the East. It is a sense of the 
 Bms immanens which will profoundly modify the Beus 
 transcendens class of conceptions which have dominated 
 the whole West : when this comes it will set the doctrine 
 of the Incarnation in a new light. The conversion of the 
 Jew is to be, in the language of the apostle, as life from 
 the dead. But what is the stumbling-block to the Jew, 
 as well as to the Moslem, but that hard, unbending type 
 of Monotheism which, out of a sublime truth, has evolved 
 a sterile negation which ends in itself ? The gathering of 
 the nations and the fulness of the Gentiles all point to 
 the same result, when East and West shall flow together, 
 and Jew and Gentile meet and mingle like rivers long 
 parted. This is the consummation of all things ; and 
 when this blessed day of gladness and reunion of Chris- 
 tendom in one wide embrace and kiss of charity shall 
 arrive, then, in the language of prophecy, there shall be 
 
Epilogue. 353 
 
 new heavens and a new earth, or, to drop metaphor, a new 
 Church to contain a new theology. It was mere self-will, 
 unsupported by a general consensus of the best thoughts 
 of the best minds, when Swedenborg in 1757 proclaimed 
 that the new Church had descended like the Bride of the 
 Apocalypse out of heaven adorned for her Bridegroom. 
 But extravagant as the claim was, and unsupported by 
 later evidence, this much must be said for it, that a new 
 theology seems to call for a new Church as its witness 
 and keeper. To Swedenborg, perhaps to others a century 
 ago, the festering bodies of the Eeformed and the Eoman 
 communion seemed, like the bodies of these two wit- 
 nesses, to have lain in the streets of the great city, which 
 spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where our Lord 
 was crucified. It seemed to him the resurrection of 
 these two witnesses could only mean the new theology 
 which a new Church was raised up to proclaim. To a 
 new doctrine there was to be attached a new discipline, 
 and those who admit the one claim will not raise much 
 difficulty as to the other. 
 
 Mgri somnia is all we can say of these dreams of 
 Swedenborg. But the day is coming for the new theology 
 and the new Church, but traced on wider, more world- 
 embracing lines than the ingenious Swede, who himself 
 was before his time, ever dreamed of. Men are wearying 
 in all directions of those provincialisms which shut men up 
 in political units called the State, and of those theological 
 departments called the Church, with their several con- 
 cordats or alliances, offensive and defensive. The Ultra- 
 montane ideal of a Church supreme, with the civil power 
 as its deputy, has had its day and ceased to be. It can 
 never return. The new ideal which Ptothe ended his 
 days in groping after, was some perfectionised civil polity 
 into which the Church should merire. It was the old 
 
354 Epilogue. 
 
 Ultramontane turned inside out, a type of Erastianism 
 in excelsis. We only glance at it here to indicate the 
 tendencies of modern thought. They are all towards 
 some new generalisation which shall assimilate all that 
 is good in the old, leaving only the dross behind. In 
 science we are wearying of specialisms. Too much detail 
 is turning men from studies in which a library cannot 
 contain all that is written on one small subsection of 
 entomology. It is disheartening to know that no book 
 on physiology ten years old has any other place than the 
 lumber-room. Unless re-edited or re-written, its place is 
 in the cellars and no longer on the shelves. This is the 
 pace which kills a science. In mental philosophy there 
 are still, it is true, a few classics left ; and men who can 
 edit a dialogue of Plato with notes may still set up some 
 modest claim to be students in psychology. But all this 
 points to only one conclusion, that we must, in very 
 weariness of the iteration of the old, under assumed airs 
 of novelty, get on to some grand new generalisation 
 which shall be at once, in the best sense of the term, 
 both new and old — 
 
 " One God, one law, one element, 
 And one far-off Divine event 
 To which the whole creation moves." 
 
 Is it too extravagant to pitch our expectations high on 
 the dawn of the twentieth century. There is an increas- 
 ing purpose as the centuries go by. Any gain is real 
 gain, and the relapses are few. Science has firmer hold 
 and has truer methods than when Bacon began to point 
 the way without so much as suspecting the true path 
 of discovery by imaginative insight, not by perpetual 
 plodding over " experiments solitary." It is the same in 
 politics and social science. The old political economy of 
 industrialism, the true wealth of nations advanced by 
 
Epilogue. 355 
 
 self-help alone, is now seen to be a half truth. The comple- 
 mentary half of State help or co-operative industrialism 
 is now recognised, and so a full-orbed ideal is at last 
 attainable. 
 
 Are we to be told, then, that the comparative method, 
 which has raised anatomy and philology into exact 
 sciences on lines which Bacon never suspected, and wdiich 
 has made advances in social science beyond the reach of 
 Adam Smith and Eicardo, whose method was deductive 
 only on a scanty basis of induction, that nothing remains 
 for sacred science so soon as she shall take up the same 
 instrument of a higher research ? Comparative religion, 
 based on anthropology and comparative philology, has 
 only crossed the threshold of preliminary and tentative 
 guesses, and has scarcely yet made her voice heard in 
 university pulpits. But the day is not far distant when 
 the comparison of Christ and other masters will be 
 pushed to lengths which such genial teachers as the late 
 Archdeacon Hardwicke would have smiled approval on 
 could he have lived to see that day, before whose very 
 dawn he died. We shall see Japanese scholars trying to 
 find the key to our occidentalisms in the same stumbling 
 fashion as we guess at the inner philosophy of the East. 
 These guesses at truth will be found in the first attempt 
 to strike wide of the mark. But, like all approximations, 
 they will mark ground gained, and which we shall never 
 have again to give up. Not one of our political ameliora- 
 tions but has its reflex action on theology. To name 
 only one already glanced at. The reformatory theory of 
 punishment has replaced the vindictive, marking, as Sir 
 H. Maine has pointed out, the third and last stage of 
 jurisprudence, when man becomes again in a better sense 
 his brother's keeper. We should be as stupid as the 
 Bourbons, and remember nothing and forget nothing, if we 
 
35^ Epilogue, 
 
 could delude ourselves to suppose that a theology which 
 lags behind jurisprudence could escape early extinction. 
 In an age when such phrases as the "new chemistry," 
 the new jurisprudence, or the new political economy, are 
 on every one's lips, what can be the use of shutting 
 ourselves up in old scholasticism, miscalled theology ? 
 Let our note rather be to set our faces forward towards 
 the coming day — 
 
 " They are tired of what is old, 
 I will give it voices new ; 
 For the half has not been told 
 Of the beantifiil and true." 
 
 In this way only can we deal with the afterthoughts of 
 theology, not by sweeping them away, but by coupling 
 on more last words. Such is our Epilogue ; Prometheus, 
 not Epimetheus, must be the keynote for the Church 
 and theology of the future. It is summed up in a phrase 
 of Teucer's address to his comrades in exile in the well- 
 known ode — 
 
 " Nil desperandum Teucro duce et auspice Teucro." 
 
 Nil desperandum should be our note in navigating un- 
 known seas, and in seeking a second Salamis, a fresh 
 island home. Our countrymen launch out over the seas 
 at the rate of a thousand a day to found new Eiiglands 
 at the Antipodes, and under new constellations and 
 seasons reversed, summer when we have winter, winter 
 when it is our summer. There they find that all that is 
 worth retaining in Church and State at home will bear 
 repeating in colonial life. The lesson is not to l)e lost 
 on us. Our motto should be " Forward," and on our Hag 
 the heroic phrase. Nil desioerandiim — 
 
 " Cras ingens iterabimus sequor." 
 
Epilogue. 357 
 
 In a few years at farthest we shall each one by one join 
 the long procession to the grave. We shall ourselves pass 
 within the veil, and there learn the deep meaning of things 
 that have been. There we shall for the first time fully put 
 away childish things, and know even as we are known. 
 There we shall smile at our crude attempts by conserving 
 old out-worn dogmatisms, and so keep up the divisions 
 of Christendom. Soon, very soon (permit me as one of 
 the elders to say so), we shall see with Baxter, who 
 mellowed as he aged, that the controversies of early and 
 middle age are in most cases mere logomachies, and that 
 our battles of the nineteenth century are only too like 
 those ghosts in the clouds seen for nine days after the 
 battle of Chalons, the afterglow of the strife of Hun and 
 Frank already over. We shall wonder at the long- 
 suffering of our Father, so gently leading us up out of 
 our modernisms, which were only mediaevalisms under 
 another name — the ghosts of slain enemies contending 
 together in the air. All this may seem cynical ; and so 
 it would be, if, when that which is in part is done away, 
 we had not that which is perfect to put in its place. 
 Perfection may not be the note in politics or religion, 
 as finality is certainly not the note in science. But 
 meliorism is a safe note to strike in both. In politics 
 a new jurisprudence has made short work of vindictive 
 punishments. Theology will soon adopt the same 
 methods, and at once there will pass away a whole code 
 of terrorism, such as has dimmed with tears the eyes 
 of the best of men. A Dean, too much respected to be 
 named here, once said to the preacher, that unless he held 
 the natural immortality of the soul and the eternity of 
 future punishment, he could see no sufficient reason for 
 the coming of the Eternal Son in the likeness of sinful 
 flesh. This is that type of religious rationalism which 
 
35^ Epilogue. 
 
 insists on a sufficient reason for everything, and which 
 lies at the root of all our plans of salvation from An- 
 selm's day to our own. It is these afterthoughts which, 
 as soon as seen to be afterthouo'hts, will gjo off of them- 
 selves. Then we shall see the central truth that God is 
 love, and see it stand out in its own light. Then the line 
 of the mystic poet Gellert will be understood — 
 
 " I sometimes think the man 
 Who could surround the sum of things, and spy 
 The heart of God and secrets of His empire, 
 Would speak but love :— to Him the vast expanse 
 Of intermediate things could melt in one, 
 And make one thing of all theology." 
 
 This was a favourite line of the saintly Thomas 
 Erskine, at whose feet I have sat for a lifetime, and 
 whose theology is to my thinking the one type which has 
 any future. To his revered memory I inscribe these 
 thoughts. I can only trust, that as the education of man 
 in place of his probation was the keynote to that theo- 
 logy of the Cambridge Platonists, so in this famous school 
 of learning, where all arts are liberal and the blight of 
 dogmatism has withered theology less than elsewhere, 
 this attempt to declare that one is our Father, and all ye 
 are brethren, will be accepted as the one education theory 
 which we are prepared to hail as the theology of the 
 future. 
 
 Mr. Cunningham in his Hulsean Lectures of 1885 tries 
 to point out that Augustine's doctrine of Predestination was 
 little more than an assertion of Divine foreknowledge, which 
 at once reduces it to a meaningless truism which it is not 
 worth while either to affirm or deny. " God, who foresees all 
 things, sees also that there are some who never receive 
 the message of grace, and some to whom it is brought. 
 He has provided the means of salvation ; He foresees how 
 
Epilogue, 359 
 
 far these shall be rendered accessible to any generation, 
 how far each man shall avail himself of them, and thus 
 there are some who are predestined to salvation, since God 
 knows from the first that they will work out their own 
 salvation with fear and trembling. It is because God 
 foresees what man will do that He predestines ; and thus 
 it is by the use of the means of grace that human beings 
 accomplish the destiny whicli He has foreseen. The 
 doctrine of Calvin, however, by ignoring the distinction 
 between foreknowledge and predetermining, seems to take 
 all reality out of the ordinances of Christian life. Why 
 should I listen to preaching if I am predestined to damna- 
 tion ? Why should I seek to discipline my body or to 
 seek God in prayer, if I am predestined to salvation ? It 
 is thus that the doctrines of Predestination may give an 
 excuse for Antinomianism, if it be regarded as an arbitrary 
 decree, not a foreknowledge which has its grounds in the 
 Divine prevision of the actual occurrences in time. It is 
 because St. Austin holds so firmly to the real efficacy of 
 the sacraments as means of accomplishing God's purpose 
 of love towards the world, that he does not regard Pre- 
 destination as a mere arbitrary decree, but as prescience 
 of the actual course of the ministration of Divine grace 
 through a defective human agency." ^ 
 
 This attempt to exculpate Augustine's Predestinarianism 
 by explaining it away as mere foreknowledge, is not the 
 line of defence which any genuine Augustinian would 
 accept. Dr. Mozley distinctly accepts Angus tinianism 
 on both sides, and sees a reconciliation between its bare 
 Predestinarianism and also its sacramentalism, which to 
 modern minds seem wholly divergent types of thought. 
 But there was no such contradiction between the law in 
 Augustine's mind. The late Dean Milman throws a 
 flying bridge over between the two which is as satisfactory 
 as any other. 
 
 " Latin Christianity in its strong sacerdotal system, in 
 its rigid and exclusive theory of the Church, at once 
 admitted and mitigated the more repulsive parts of the 
 
 ^ Cunningham, St. Austin, p. 126. 
 
360 Epilogue. 
 
 Augustinian theology. Predestiiiarianism itself, at least 
 to those within the pale, lost much of its awful terrors. 
 The Church was the predestined assemblage of those to 
 whom, and to whom alone, salvation was possible. The 
 Church scrupled not to surrender the rest of mankind to 
 that inexorable damnation entailed upon the human race 
 by the sin of their parents. This is the key to the real 
 reconciliation. Augustine was not as illogical as he seems 
 to us, who see old theologies in the light of later after- 
 thoughts. In Augustine's day there had not been time for 
 the distinction to develop between the Church, or the little 
 company of the saved, and the mass of nominal and 
 baptized but unregenerate professors. Hence it was no 
 such inconsistency to hold that all who were so baptized, 
 were also among the little company of the elect and the 
 predestined. How difficult it is, when we have to deal 
 with afterthoughts upon afterthoughts, such as modern 
 Calvinism or old Augustinianism, to thread our way 
 through the labyrinth ! " ^ 
 
 With regard to St. Augustine not being an Augustinian, 
 which is Mr. Cunningliam's contention, some remarks of 
 the Clmircli Times (July 29, 1887) are very much to the 
 point. " This thesis is urged with persistent ingenuity, 
 and in a very plausible fashion, all the more plausible from 
 the entire conviction of the writer ; but, nevertheless, it 
 must be qualified as only an exceptionally brilliant piece 
 of special pleading. Nevertheless, we are convinced that 
 he has not been unfairly charged with the responsibility 
 of generating the system which ordinarily goes by his 
 name. He is the legitimate father of Calvinism, Baian- 
 isni, Jansenism ; he is as truly the parent, though not so 
 legitimately, of the Lutheran doctrine of justification. It 
 is his bastard child, as Calvinism is his lawful offspring." 
 The writer goes on to show that Prosper of Aquitaine, who 
 pushed Augustinianism to its extreme consequences, was 
 never rebuked for his heresy as the East would have 
 regarded it ; on the contrary, when he brought out of St. 
 
 ^ Milmaii, Latin Christianity, i. p. 146. 
 
Epilogue. 361 
 
 Augustine's writings a high-flying supralapsarianism, which 
 Toplady might have called his own, we have proof of 
 St. Prosper's status, that he was chosen at Eome, whither 
 he had betaken himself to hunt down Pelagianism there, 
 where it had taken a strong position, to be secretary to the 
 Pope, — by that Pope himself the most illustrious theologian 
 then living, being no other than Leo the Great. 
 
 With regard, too, to Luther and Calvin finding their 
 theology almost full blown in the writings of Augustine, 
 the writer remarks : " When either Luther or Calvin quoted 
 Augustine on his side, he is not seeking a certificate for 
 himself, but benevolently throwing the shield of his 
 patronage over the elder writer, and graciously excluding 
 him from the number of those who were so unhappy as 
 not to set forth Reformed doctrines in their writings. They 
 literally did not care twopence for any one's opinion but 
 their own ; and the presumption, therefore, is altogether 
 that when they do quote any writer outside the Bible as 
 making for them, they have a strong case in favour of 
 their view of his opinions." 
 
 The conclusion which a reviewer in the Church Ti7nes 
 comes to is naturally this, that there are two St. Augustines, 
 or two distinct bodies of divinity infused by the same 
 spirit, but which it is impossible to homologate and fuse 
 into one. The sacramental teaching of Augustine, that is 
 Catholic and primitive ; but the predestinarian was his 
 private heresy. During the scholastic period of the 
 Church the two struggled on together; but at the Pieforma- 
 tion they were rent asunder, and each branch of the 
 Church claimed to be the possessor of this St. Martin's 
 cloak. This we consider to be a fair account of the whole 
 matter. In any case we agree with the reviewer, that all 
 Mr. Cunningham can make out for his patron saint, St. 
 Austin, is a verdict of not proven ; and if a verdict of guilty 
 must be brought .in, that a strong recommendation to 
 mercy be added to it. 
 
 The strong anti-Augustinian because anti-Calvinist bias 
 of this reviewer is seen from the following : " In fact. 
 Western Christianity will never be what it should be till 
 
362 Epilogue. 
 
 frank abandonment of St. Augnstine's specific theology, as 
 complete as, for instance, the abandonment of St. Anselm's 
 theory of the Incarnation, has been, involving no censure 
 on him for propounding it, taken up as a final position. 
 To call St. Augustine the " doctor of grace." to recommend 
 the Siimma of St. Thomas, wherein Augustinianism is 
 dominant, and then to anathematise Le Bay and Jansen 
 simply for restating it less aggressively than St. 
 Prosper did, is neither honest nor logical. But Mr. 
 Cunningham has made as good a fight as the case per- 
 mitted. In this we heartily agree ; but it is not the first 
 time that it has been St. Augustine's fate to be not only 
 misunderstood himself, but the source of misunderstanding 
 in others. The propositions which Jansen drew up as an 
 epitome of Augustine's teaching, were declared by the 
 Jansenists not to be Jansen's at all, but a Jesuit perversion, 
 till at last, like the cuttle-fish, we are lost as to fact itself 
 in this ink of controversy. 
 
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Princeton Theoloqicitl Semin,iry-Speer Lil 
 
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