7 " BX 5131 .M38 1843 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 1805-1872 . The kingdom of Christ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/kingdomofchristoOOmaur_0 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST; OR HINTS RESPECTING THE PRINCIPLES, CONSTITUTION, AND ORDINANCES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. BY ^ ♦ FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE, M. A. CHAPLAIN OF GUY'S HOSPITAL, AND PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND HISTORY IN ZINGS COLLEGE, LONDON. FROM THE SECOND LONDON EDITION, N E W-Y O R K: D. APPLETON & CO., 200 BROADWAY. PHILADELPHIA : GEO. S. APPLETON, 148 CHESNUT-ST. MDCCC XLIII. " What is now to be done ? Must Truth be for ever in the dark, and the world for ever be divided, and societies disturbed, and governments weakened, and our spirits debauched with error, and the uncertain opinions and the pedantry of talking men ? Certainly there is a way to cure all this evil, and the wise Governor of the world hath not been wanting in so necessary a matter as to lead us into all truth. But the way hath not yet been hit upon, and yet I have told you all the ways of man, and his imaginations, in order to Truth and Peace ; and you see these will not do ; we can find no rest for the soles of our feet, aaiidst all the waters of contention and disputations, and little artifices of divided schools .... We have exam- ined all ways but one, all but God's way. Let us, having missed all the others, try this." — Bp. Taylor, Via Intelligentia. TO THE EEV. DERWENT COLERIDGE, STANLEY GROVE, CHELSEA. MY DEAR MR. COLERIDGE, In a note to your volume on the Scriptural character of the Eng- lish Church, you have alluded to the first edition of these Hints. Your object was to correct one of my many inaccuracies, and this service, which was itself a very kind one, you made more accepta- ble, by the approbation which you expressed of my general design. Under any circumstances I must have valued such a recognition from one who had bestowed so much serious and intelligent consid- eration upon the subject of which I had treated ; I was still more pleased with it, because there were qualities in your work which might have made me fear that you would be less tolerant of mine. Its calm scholar-like tone and careful English style, were strikingly contrasted with the crudeness and hastiness which were visible in every part of my Letters to a Quaker. Nevertheless, I found with great delight, that neither you nor the accomplished Editor of Mr. Coleridge's works, had been hindered by these defects from taking an interest in my thoughts, or from recognising in them one among a thousand indications of the influence which your father's writings are exercising over the mind of this generation. Every one who has felt this influence must, I think, be anxious to acknowledge it. You may well be surprised therefore, that in a book of some length I should have referred to it so seldom. Twenty years ago you might have attributed such an omission to a cowardly and dishonourable dread of being associated with an unpopular name. But at the time I wrote, the basest man could not have been affected by such a motive as this, for the different English parties which, during Mr. Coleridge's life-time, had only differed in the degrees of their dislike to him, were scrambling for a' share of his opinions. It seemed to me that the only danger of another reaction lay in the 6 DEDICATION. ambition of his admirers to make him responsible for their statements of his views or their inferences from them. To this evil I wished not to be accessory. I had never enjoyed the privilege of intercourse with him. I had no means therefore of correcting the impressions of him which I had derived from his works. I was of course liable to the greatest mistakes of judgment in my interpretation of these, as well as to the moral temptation of perverting them to my own pur- poses. I thought it better therefore, to seem even to myself ungrate- ful and a plagiarist, than to incur the risk of abusing his name to the support of sentiments which he might have disapproved, and per- haps, of hindering some from profiting by his wisdom, because I had taught them to connect it with my follies. This caution, however, was of little avail. The only two reviews which, so far as I know, bestowed any attention upon my book — the one treating it with extreme kindness, the other with unbounded contempt, — brought my name into flattering, but most undeserved juxtaposition with Mr. Coleridge's. And I could not help fancying that one of these critics would have been well pleased that its read- ers should have attributed to the master, the monstrous absurdity, self-sufficiency, love of priestcraft, hatred of the rights of conscience, preference of Fathers and Councils to Scripture, which were affirm- ed to be characteristic of the disciple. Every person, I conceive, who has been thus spoken of, should be ready to explain, as well as he can, how far the charge is true, that he has derived his method of thought from his supposed teacher, and if it be true, to what ex- tent that teacher is answerable for his application of the method. Such an explanation I am anxious to make now for the relief of my own mind, and that I may rescue your father's memory from any in- jury which I may have done it. I might have addressed my confes- sion to many dear friends who are admirers of his writings. But I would rather make it to one of his family, first, because I rejoice to think that those who have most profited by what he has taught them, do not and cannot form a school, and because it is most desirable that the English public, with its party notions and tendencies, should not suppose that they form one ; and secondly, because my feeling towards him, though as I have said not founded upon any personal acquaintance in the ordinary sense of the word, is yet so strictly and vividly personal, that I cannot bear to think of him chiefly as a wri- ter of books, and that I am always delighted to connect him with any human representative. DEDICATION. 7 There are persons who can feel no affection for a book unless they can associate it with a living man. I am not sure whether I labour under this incapacity, but I own that the books of Mr. Cole- ridge are mainly interesting to me as the biography of one who passed through the struggles of the age to which we are succeeding, and who was able, after great effort and much sorrow, to discover a resting-place. Those juvenile poems which exhibit him to us, when he was seeking in Unitarianism a refuge from the flatness and the falsehood of a mere state Christianity — the fierce and magnificent ode in which he sees the old European world of convention and op- pression falling to pieces, and rejoices in the sight — the noble recan- tation of his hopes from republican ascendency — his ode to Despon- dency, embodying so perfectly the feelings of a man who, after the disappointment of all practical hopes, had sought in meditation for deliverance and rest, and then on returning to the actual world had found its glor/ departed and his capacities of enjoyment dead — these poems have dways seemed to me so intensely and painfully real, and so expressive of what thousands of minds in different measures must have be3n experiencing, that I do not suppose I have ever done justice to any of them, merely as a work of art. I do not think there is anything inconsistent in this acknowledgment with the be- lief, that in him as in every great poet, the exercise of the creative faculty impied self-forgetfulness, and the power of passing beyond the region of personal experience. No one can utter the thoughts of other men as well as his own, can be in any degree the spokes- man of h:'s time, to whom this quality does not belong. But it con- sists I should imagine, nearly always with much of inward suffering. The person who enters most into what a number of others are expe- riercing, does, in the strictest and liveliest sense, experience it him- sell On these points, however, I have no right to speak, and if I spak ignorantly, you must remember, that I merely pretend to tell yoi what my own impressions have been, not to make them a standard foiother readers. Your father's greater poems, such as the Ancient Mriner, and Christabelle, seem undoubtedly to belong to the region ofthe pure imagination. But I question whether I should be as men interested as I am even in these, if I did not discover in them mny veins and fibres which seem to me to connect them with his prsonal being ; if they did not help me to read more clearly the his- try of his mind, and therein the history of our time. And as I have never learnt to separate his poetical genius from 8 DEDICATION. himself, so I fear I have been as little able to appreciate him formally and abstractedly in the character of a philosopher. In his " Friend" I seem to discover the very same man whom I had known amidst the storms of the revolutionary period. Nor do I find him less im- patient of mere rules and decrees than he was then ; only the impa- tience has taken a new form. He has been convinced that society is a reality, that it would not become at all more real by being unmade and reconstructed, and therefore he has begun to inquire what are the grounds of its reality, and how we may be preserved from mak- ing it into a fiction and a falsehood. That this inquiry is complete and satisfactory I do not affirm, I rejoice to think that it is not; I believe, if it had been more complete, it would not be half so profit- able as it has been and is likely to be for generations to come. Its merit is, that it is an inquiry, that it shows us what we have to seek for, and that it puts us into the way of seeking. Hence it was and is particularly offensive to more than one class of persons. The mere Destructive complains, that it recognises the worth of that which ought to be swept away. The mere Conservative is indig- nant, because it will not assume existing rules and ophions as an ultimate basis, but aims at discovering their meaning and their foun- dation. The man of Compromises is most bitter, because it assumes that the statesman has some other law of conduct than that of sail- ing with the wind. The mere Englishman is angry to fird the com- mon topics of the day, taxes, libels, bombardments of Copenhagen, not treated of as they are treated in his favourite journals. The man of Abstractions cannot understand what such topics have to do with a scientific book. This combination of enemies, with the adran- tage which each derives from being able to speak of the book as " neither one thing nor the other" is quite sufficient to explain |ny measure of unpopularity which it may have met with. To accomt for the power which it has exerted in spite of these disadvantages — and many others of an outward kind which I need not hint atin writing to you — to explain how a book, which is said to be uttely unpractical, has wrought a change in men's minds upon the m<^t practical subjects, how a book, which is said to have no sympatta with the moving spirit of this age, should have affected the mat thoughtful of our young men ; this is a work of greater difficult^ which I hope that some of our Reviewers will one day undertake I am not attempting to solve any such problems, but am merely ao counting for its influence upon my own mind, an influence mainlj DEDICATION. 9 owing to those very peculiarities which seem to have impaired or destroyed its worth in the opinions of wiser people. For this, at least, I am thankful, that this book, so far from diminishing my in- terest in those which treat of the same subject, or tempting me to set Mr. Coleridge up as the one teacher upon it, has enabled me to honour others of the most different kind, belonging to our own and to former times, which I otherwise should not have understood, and might, through ignorance and self-conceit, have undervalued ; above all, to reverence the facts of history, and to believe that the least perversion of them, for the sake of getting a moral from them, is at once a folly and a sin. And it seems to me that I have found help of a similar kind to this in a different department of thought from that still more irregular work, the Biographia Literaria. If a young man in this age is much tormented by the puzzles of society, and the innumerable systems by which men have sought to get rid of them, he is haunted almost as much by the different problems of Criticism, by a sense of the con- nexion between his own life and the books which he reads, by theo- ries about the nature and meaning of this connexion, by authoritative dogmas respecting the worth or worthlessness of particular poems and paintings, by paradoxical rebellions against these dogmas, by ques- tions as to the authority of antiquity and the distinct province of our time, by attempts to discover some permanent laws of art, by indig- nant assertions of its independence upon all laws. A person cannot have observed himself or his contemporaries with any attention, nay, he can scarcely read over the rude statement of these difficulties which I have just made, without feeling how intricately they are in- volved with our thoughts upon some of the very highest subjects. To say that we do not need to understand ourselves upon these cri- tical questions, that it is of no importance to have principles in reference to them, is merely to say that we ought not to meddle with them at all. A person who is not brought into contact with such topics is certainly not bound to think about them ; if he be, he will find the absence of thought respecting them a more serious impedi- ment to him in matters directly concerning his personal life than he may at first suppose. Now, if any one reads Mr. Coleridge's liter- ary life, taking him to be a great poet, and therefore able to supply the principles of his art ready made and fit for immediate use and ex- portation, he will, I should think, be much disappointed. I cannot discover, here, more than in his political work, a system. I have 10 DEDICATION. lately heard that there is one, and that it has been taken whole and alive out of the works of a great German author. But I am speak- ing only of what I saw there myself, and am bound to say that it escaped my notice. I seemed to see a writer, who was feeling his way into the apprehension of many questions which had puzzled me, explaining to me his own progress out of the belief that all things are dependent upon association, into the acknowledgment of something with which they are associated ; into a discovery that there is a key- note to the harmony. I learnt from him, by practical illustrations, how one may enter into the spirit of a living or a departed author, without assuming to be his judge ; how one may come to know what he means without imputing to him our meanings. I learnt that beauty is neither an accidental nor an artificial thing, that it is to be sought out as something which is both in nature and in the mind of man, and which, by God's law, binds us to her. But all this comes out in a natural experimental method, by those tests and trials in which a man may be greatly assisted by the previous successes or failures t>f another, just as Faraday may be assisted by Davy, but which he cannot adopt from another, and which we cannot adopt from him, except by catch- ing his spirit of investigation and applying it to new facts. The " Aids to Reflection" is a book of a different character from either of these, and it is one to which I feel myself under much more deep and solemn obligations. But the obligation is of the same kind. If I require a politician or a critic who. has indeed worked his own way through the region in which he pretends to act as my guide, I certainly should be most dissatisfied with one who undertook to write moral and spiritual aphorisms, without proving that he was himself engaged in the conflict with an evil nature and a reluctant will, and that he had received the truths of which he would make me a partaker, not at second hand, but as the needful supports of his own being. I do not know any book which ever brought to me more clear tokens and evidences of this kind than the one of which I am speaking. I have heard it described both by admirers and objectors as one which deals with religion philosophically. In whatever sense that assertion may be true, and in a very important sense I believe it is quite true, I can testify that it was most helpful in delivering me from a number of philosophical phrases and generalizations, which I believe attach themselves to the truths of the Creed, even in the minds of many who think that they receive Christianity with a most childlike spirit — most helpful in enabling me to perceive that the deepest principles of all DEDICATION. 11 are those which the peasant is as capable of apprehending and enter- ing into as the Schoolman. I value and love his philosophy mainly because it has led me to this discovery, and to the practical conclusion, that those who are called to the work of teaching must cultivate and exercise their understandings, in order that they may discriminate between that which is factitious and accidental, or belongs to our ar- tificial habits of thought, and that which is fixed and eternal, which belongs to man as man, and which God will open the eyes of every humble man to perceive. I have learnt in this way the preciousness of the simple Creeds of antiquity ; the inward witness which a gospel of Facts possesses, and which a gospel of Notions must always want ; how the most awful and absolute truths, which notions displace or ob- scure, are involved in facts, and through facts may be entertained and embraced by those who do not possess the faculty for comparing no- tions, and have a blessed incapacity of resting in them. It is inevitable that the person who first applies this principle to religious questions, should sometimes be involved in the obscurity from which he is seeking to deliver us. Any one who begins the work of encountering notions and theories, will himself be accounted the greatest notionalist and theorist. To get rid of crudities and confu- sions, he will sometimes be obliged to adopt or invent a nomenclature. His rigid adherence to this will be called pedantry ; his followers re- peating his words, instead of carrying the meaning of them into their studies and their life, will deserve the charge ; his enemies will have a plausible pretence for saying that he has made simple truths complex by his way of handling them. The " Aids to Reflection" have been exposed to all these misfortunes. Nevertheless, I have heard them generally denounced as unintelligible by persons whom I had the greatest difficulty in understanding, who wTere continually perplexing me with hard words to which I could find nothing answering among actual things, and with the strangest attempts to explain mysteries by those events and circumstances which were to me most mysterious, and which, as they lay nearest to me, it was most important for my prac- tical life that I should know the meaning of. On the other hand, I have heard the simplest, most childlike men and women express an almost rapturous thankfulness for having been permitted to read this book, and so to understand their own hearts and their Bibles, and the con- nexion between the one and the other, more clearly. It is a book, I believe, which has given offence, and will always give offence to many, 4 12 DEDICATION. not for its theories, but for its essentially practical character. Its manly denunciation of the sentimental school must be painful to many in our day who have practically adopted the Rousseau cant, though they have changed a little the words that express it ; who praise men for being good, though they do the most monstrously evil acts, and account it a vulgar worship of decency to say, that one who is the slave of his own passions, and enslaves others to them, may not be a very right and true man notwithstanding. And yet those who do really exalt decency above inward truth and conformity to a high standard, will not at all the more own Mr. Coleridge for an ally be- cause the school which pretends to oppose them reject him. The whole object of his book is to draw us from the study of mere worldly and external morality, to that which concerns the heart and the inner man. But here, again, he is so unfortunate, that those who have turned " heart religion" into a phrase — who substitute the feelings and experiences of their minds for the laws to which those feelings and experiences may, if rightly used, conduct us — will be sure to regard him as peculiarly their enemy. So that if there were no persons in the land who did not belong to one or other of these classes, if there were not many who have tried them all, and are weary of them all, it would indeed be very difficult to understand how it is that this vol- ume has found its way into so many studies, and has gained access to so many hearts. The idea of the first " Lay Sermon," that the Bible is the States- man's Manual, is less developed, I think, than any of those to which I have alluded hitherto. But the bare announcement of it has been of more value to me than any lengthened exposition that I know of. There is no topic which has more engaged my attention in these vol- umes than the national history of the Bible, but I have said very little indeed of which that thought was not the germ. The little book upon Church and State you will suppose, from the title and character of these volumes, that I am likely to have -tiulied still more attentively. And indeed, if you watch me closely, you will discover, I doubt not, many more thoughts which I have stolen from it than I am at all aware of, though I think I am conscious of superabundant obligations. It seems to me that the doctrine which I have endeavoured to bring out in what I have said respecting the relations between Church and State, is nothing but an expansion of Mr. Coleridge's remark respecting the opposition and necessary har- DEDICATION. 13 mony of Law and Religion, though in this, as in many other cases, I have departed from his phraseology, and have even adopted one which he micrht not be inclined to sanction. The robberies which I have confessed are such in the truest sense; they are conscious and deliberate robberies. If any one had chanced to discover in my book twenty or thirty pages which he could trace to some English or foreign author, I should think his common sense, though he might allow no scope for charity, would induce him to hesitate before he imputed to me a wilful fraud. It is so much more likely that I should mistake what had been for years mixed with my own compositions for one of them, than that I should take such a very stupid and blundering way of earning a reputation, which a few years must destroy altogether, that a court of justice, on the mere ground of evidence, would be inclined, I should suppose, to take the tolerant side. If it had any hesitation, the reason would be, that an insignificant author might do many things with impunity, which a writer of eminence, who had enemies in every direction, would be a madman to venture upon ; or else it would be from a feeling of this kind, that if I had merely forgotten myself, I should have had some vague wandering impression of having read a similar passage somewhere else, and, therefore, that I should, being honest, have at least thrown out some hint, though it might not be exactly the right one, as to the place whence I might have derived it, thus making my reader anxious to see what had been said by the writer to whom I referred : if I did that, of course all suspicion of evil de- sign would vanish immediately from the mind of any one who was capable of judging, or did not industriously pervert his judgment for the purpose of making me out to be an offender. But the use I have made of your father's writings is of entirely a different kind from this. I could not be convicted of it by a mere collating of para- graphs, and, therefore, if I were anxious to conceal it, I should be really, and not apparently, dishonest. And this is not the less true because it is also true that the main subject of my book is one which (so far as I know) he has not distinctly treated of, that the thoughts which he has scattered respecting it, though deeply interesting, are not always satisfactory to me, that I have, therefore, very commonly found myself without his guidance, and that I have sometimes wil- fully deserted it. I shall not fulfil the purpose of this letter, if I do not show how these two apparently opposite statements are reconciled. No man, I think, will ever be of much use to his generation, who 14 DEDICATION. does not apply himself mainly to the questions which are occupying those who belong to it. An antiquary, I dare to say, leads a much easier and quieter life than one who interferes with his contem- poraries, and takes part in their speculations. But his quietness is his reward : those who seek another, must be content to part with it. Oftentimes, I doubt not, every man is tempted to repose in some little nook or dell of thought, where other men will not molest him, because he does not molest them ; but those to whom any work is assigned are soon driven, by a power which they cannot resist, out of such retirement into the dusty highways of ordinary business and disputation. This, it seems to me, was your father's peculiar merit and honour. The subjects to which he addressed himself were not those to which he would have been inclined, either by his poetical or his metaphysical tendencies. But they were exactly the questions of the time ; exactly those which other men were discussing in the spirit of the time. And as we who belong to a younger generation have inherited these questions, we inherit also the wisdom which dealt with them. But there are, it seems to me, questions which we have not inherited — questions which belong more expressly to us than they did to our immediate predecessors. These, I suspect, we must humbly study for ourselves, though the difference will be very great to us, whether we invent a way of investigation for ourselves, or try to walk in a path which better men who have been before us have with great labour cleared of its rubbish, and by foot-marks and sign-posts have made known to us. One of the questions to which I allude is that which your father was led, I believe by the soundest wisdom, to banish, in a great measure, from his consideration, after the events of the French Re- volution had taught him the unspeakable importance of a distinct Na- tional life. I mean the question whether there be a Universal Society for man as man. I have stated some reasons in these volumes why I think every one in this day must be more or less consciously occupied with this inquiry ; why no other topics, however important, can pre- vent it from taking nearly the most prominent place in our minds, There is another question belonging apparently to a different region of thought, yet I believe touching at more points than any one upon this : how all thoughts, schemes, systems, speculations, may contri- bute their quota to some one which shall be larger and deeper than any of them. If I am indebted to your father on one account more than another, it is for showing me a way out of the dreadful vague- EEUICATION. 15 ness and ambition which such a scheme as this involves, for leading me not merely to say, but to feel, that a knowledge of The Being is the object after which we are to strive, and that all pursuit of Unity without this is the pursuit of a phantom. But at the same time I cannot help believing that there is a right meaning hid under this desire ; that it will haunt us till we find what it is ; that we cannot merely denounce or resist this inclination in ourselves or in others; that we shall do far more good, yea, perhaps the very good which we are meant in this age to accomplish, if we steadily apply ourselves to the consideration of it. Again, there is a question which thrusts itself before us continually, and which is the mover of more party feelings just at this time than any other, respecting the reception of those doctrines which are expressed in old Creeds, and which con- cern the nature of God himself ; whether these are to be taken upon trust from the early ages, or whether we are to look upon them as matters for our own inquiry, to be acknowledged only so far as they accord, with what seems to us either the declaration of Scripture, or the verdict of reason. In preparing for the consideration of this great subject, I have felt, with many others, that Mr. Coleridge's help has been invaluable to us. Nearly every thoughtful writer of the day would have taught us, that the highest truths are those which lie beyond the limits of Experience, that the essential principles of the Reason are those which cannot be proved by syllogisms, that the evidence for them is the impossibility of admitting that which does fall under the law of experience, unless we recognise them as its foundation ; nay, the impossibility of believing that we ourselves are, or that any thing is, except upon these terms. The atheism of Hume has driven men to these blessed discoveries, and though it was your father's honour that he asserted them to an age and a na- tion which had not yet discovered the need of them, he certainly did not pretend, and no one should pretend, that he was the first reviver or expositor of them. But the application of these principles to Theology, I believe, we owe mainly to him. The power of perceiv- ing that by the very law of the Reason the knowledge of God must be given to it ; that the moment it attempts to create its Maker, it denies itself; the conviction that the most opposite kind of Unity to that which Unitarianism dreams of is necesssary, if the demands of the reason are to be satisfied — I must acknowledge, that I received from him, if I would not prove myself ungrateful to the highest Teacher, who might certainly have chosen another instrument for 16 DEDICATION. communicating his mercies, but who has been pleased in very many cases, as I know, to make use of this one. This instruction, I say, seems to me a most precious preparation for the inquiry which be- longs more strictly to our age, but still it is only a preparation. I cannot help feeling, while I read the profound, and, to a theological student invaluable, hints respecting the doctrine of the Trinity, which occur in Mr. Coleridge's writings — " This is not enough. If the reason be, as he said it was, expressly the human faculty, be- longing to rich and poor alike — not merely those personal truths which belong to each individual's state and condition, but this highest truth, which he presents to us as demanding the highest ef- forts of thought and abstraction, must belong to the very humblest man ; must be a sacred part of his inheritance ; must in some way or other be capable of being presented to him." Any one who has entertained this thought will find that this theological subject very soon becomes involved with the other two of which I was speaking. The hope that some day " Wisdom may teach her lore In the low huts of them that toil and groan," must wax much brighter, if we can really believe that the deepest lore is the most universal. The hope that diverse sides of thought may some day be brought into reconciliation, may begin to discon- nect itself with the dreary vision of a comprehensive System, from which all life is excluded, if the central Unity be that of the living Being. But how can such a dream ever be realized ? To me the pro- mise of its realization came in sounds which belong to our nursery, in the words in which our infants are baptized. Here, it seemed to me, lay the assurance that this truth belongs to no esoterical region; that it is one of those all embracing mysteries which is about us at every moment, which is gradually drawing us into itself, and which becomes ours most truly when we attain most of the privilege of men by becoming most like little children. Thus I was led to consider the meaning of this ordinance of Baptism as a key to the nature of ordinances generally. I found that they had been much prized by Luther, and by the most earnest of those who, like him, regarded Christianity almost exclusively in its reference to their own personal life. They felt the extreme danger of substituting their belief for the object of it, and so destroying the reality of both. Their testi- mony was of the highest practical value, and it was abundantly con ♦ DEDICATION. 17 firmed to me by the experience of those who had rejected ordinances for the sake of attaining to a more spiritual state of mind. Still I could not discover how one contemplating the subject from their point of view, could ultimately escape from the conclusion which the disciples of the Reformers have so generally adopted, that he who first entertains a reverence for inward Truth, and then acquires a reverence for outward Signs, begins in the spirit, and is made per- fect in the flesh. And I could entirely sympathize with the feeling of Mr. Coleridge, that those who for the sake of exalting Ordinances turn them into Charms, are not making a harmless addition to that which was before sufficient, but are actually destroying its meaning and reality. But supposing them to be signs to the Race — signs of the existence of that universal body which we were inquiring after, they become invested with a very different importance. They be- come indispensable in a higher sense than those dream of, who seem to value them chiefly as means of exclusion ; they are the very voice in which God speaks to his creatures ; the very witness that their fellowship with each other rests on their fellowship with Him, and both upon the mystery of his Being ; the very means by which we are meant to rise to the enjoyment of the highest blessings which He has bestowed upon us. In this way there rose up before me the idea of a Church Universal, not built upon human inventions or human faith, but upon the very nature of God himself, and upon the union which He has formed with his creatures : a church revealed to man as a fixed and eternal reality by means which infinite wisdom had itself devised. The tokens and witnesses of such a church, it seemed to me, must be divine, but the feeling of its necessity, apprehensions of the different sides and aspects of it, must, if it be a reality, be found in all the different schemes which express human thought and feeling. No amalgamation of these can create a real harmony, but each may find its highest meaning in that harmony which God has created, and of which He is Himself the centre. These are the leading thoughts which in this book I have been trying to express, and you will therefore understand what I mean when I say that I may have uttered innumerable sentiments for which your father would not have chosen to be responsible, even while I have wished to study and apply the lessons which he has taught me. He would, I conclude, not have agreed with me in my views respecting Baptism, he would probably have thought that I over-exalted the Ministry, he would not have acquiesced in every 18 DEDICATION. one of my statements respecting the Eucharist, he would have judged me wrong in some of my opinions respecting the Scriptures. Upon all these subjects I have deviated from what I think would have been his judgment, without losing the least of my reverence and affection for his memory, perhaps without approximating nearer than he did to the sentiments of any one of the parties which divide the Church. I am sure that I should not have had courage to differ with them or him, if he had not assisted me to believe that Truth is above both, most of all above myself and my own petty notions and apprehen- sions, that it is worthy to be sought after and loved above all things, and that He who is truth, is ready, if we will obey Him, to guide us into it. I have been so much occupied with a subject which I am sure must be interesting to you above all others, that I have left myself no time to express as I should wish my gratitude for your personal kindness, and for the advantage which I have received from my op- portunities of intercourse with you. But I cannot conclude without wishing you God speed in the noble undertaking in which you are engaged. If you are permitted to raise up a body of wise and thoughtful teachers out of our trading classes, you will do more for the Church than all the persons together who are writing treatises about it. Proportionate, however, to the importance and the novelty of the work will be the trials and the discouragements attending it. In these I trust you will be sustained by the highest consolations which a Christian man and a Christian priest can experience. But there are times in which you will need lower helps also, if they be but of the right kind. I can scarcely think of any which will be more cheering to you than the recollection that you are carrying into effect principles which were years ago urged upon our country- men by your father, and that you are doing what in you lies to provef that one who has been called a theorist and a dreamer, was in truth labouring to procure the most practical benefits for his country and for mankind. Believe me, My dear Mr. Coleridge, Yours very sincerely, F. MAURICE. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTORY DIALOGUE. PAOB A Quakers reason for being discontented with his own Society .... 33 Evangelical influences . 34 Unitarian influences ............ 36 Anglican High Church arguments 37 Romanist arguments » 42 A new method of inquiry proposed 46 PART I. ON THE PRINCIPLES OF THE QUAKERS, AND OF THE DIFFERENT RELIGIOUS BODIES WHICH HAVE ARISEN SINCE THE REFORM- ATION, AND OF THE SYSTEMS TO WHICH THEY HAVE GIVEN BIRTH, CHAPTER I. QUAKERISM. SECTION L CN THE POSITIVE DOCTRINES OP THE QUAKERS. Quakerism as described by modern Quakers 48 Quakerism as described by Penn and Fox 49 Mental history of Fox 50 Discovery of man's relation to the Living Word . 51 Quaker doctrine respecting an universal light and a spiritual kingdom ... 52 Quaker doctrine of spiritual influences . '54 SECTION II. ORDINARY OBJECTIONS TO THESE DOCTRINES. Objection to the doctrine of the inward light or indwelling Word, that it is mysti- cal, how far tenable .... 55 Objection to it as unscriptural, how far tenable 56 Objection to it as unsupported by evidence from heathen records, how far tenable . . 57 Objections to the other Quaker doctrines 62 SECTION III. THE V7AKBR SYSTEM. Renunciation of formulas 63 Renunciation of ordinances 64 Renunciation of national distinctions 64 20 CONTENTS. Opinion respecting the Scriptures as an authority 65 Opinion respecting studies, amusements, language 65 SECTION IV. PRACTICAL WORKING OP THE QUAKER SYSTEM. What evidence is admissible on this subject 66 Quaker attempts at spiritual purity, why abortive 67 Quaker attempts at universality, why abortive 68 Quaker attempts at education, contradictory to the principle in which the society stands 70 Quaker protest against the world ineffectual 70 Final issue of the Quaker experiment 73 CHAPTER II. PURE PROTESTANTISM. SECTION I. THE LEADING PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. Martin Luther — The processes of his mind — Idea of Justification by faith . . 75 Second Reformation principle — Election — how connected with the first — How far characteristic of Calvin 77 Third Reformation principle — Authority of the Scriptures — Its relation to the two other — Its connection with Zuinglins 79 Fourth Reformation principle — Distinction of nations and Rights of sovereigns — Its connection with the previous history of Europe — With other signs of the Reformation ... SO SECTION II. OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED. The objections to the Lutheran doctrines of Justification, as exalting an outward Object of faith 84 Objection to the same doctrine, as involving the idea of Satisfaction and Propitiation 87 Objection to the same doctrine, as mistaking the Act of Conversion for a theological principle 89 Objection to the same doctrine, as substituting individual Consciousness for the uni- versal Atonement ......... 96 Objection to the Calvinistical doctrine of Election, as interfering with the ac- knowledgment of men's relation to the living Word ...... 97 Objection to the same doctrine, as interfering with human Obedience ... 98 Objection to the same doctrine, as substituting the selection of Individuals for the selection of a Body ............ 99 Objection to the Reformation doctrine, respecting the Bible, as interfering with the acknowledgment of an inward Light 99 Objection to the same doctrine, as asserting the right of ■private Judgment 101 Obje«tion to the same doctrine, as attributing the teachings of the Spirit to individuals, and not a body ............. 103 The doctrine of the Reformation respecting Nations 104 SECTION III. PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. Lutheranism — How it became a system — Joint influence of Luther and Melancthon 105 Calvinism, the essentially Protestant system — Development of it .... 107 Zuinglianism — Its principle— Its negative character 109 Arminianism — Its relation to Protestantism and to Popery 109 CONTENTS. 21 SECTION IV. THE PRACTICAL WORKINGS OP THE PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. Luther's feelings respecting his own work 110 How formularies became important to the Lutheran Ill Reaction of spiritual feelings against them 112 Fictions of Lutheranism 113 Reaction of common sense against them 114 Calvinism in its strength 115 Continental Calvinism 116 Scotch Calvinism 117 English Calvinism 121 Final result of the pure Protestant experiment 122 CHAPTER III. UNITARIANISM. 1. Change in the opinion of Protestants during the 18th century respecting the character and importance of those principles which are not peculiar to them- selves .............. 123 2. Change of opinion respecting the source of knowledge 124 3. Change of opinion respecting the origin and principles of society . . . 125 The positive side of Unitarianism 126 Effect of natural studies in leading to an impatience of every doctrine which'seemed to contradict the idea of the Divine Unity 126 Or to involve any qualification of the Divine benevolence 128 Or to represent the condition of Humanity as wholly lost 129 Attempted confutation of the positive parts of Unitarianism, why unsuccessful . 130 Its negative elements how connected with them 131 Their essential contradiction to each other 132 Final result of the Unitarian experiment 134 CHAPTER IV. ON THE TENDENCY OF THE , RELIGIOUS, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND PO- LITICAL MOVEMENTS WHICH HAVE TAKEN PLACE IN PROTESTANT BODIES SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE LAST CENTURY. SECTION I. THE RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. Methodism — How far a reassertion of the Protestant principle .... 136 In what respects it stood upon a different ground 137 Attempts at an extra-national religious Organization 140 Attempts to discover a wider Theology than that which is founded upon mere Protestant principles, in Germany, America, and Scotland .... 142 Attempts to form a New Catholic Church 149 SECTION II. PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. Materialism of the eighteenth century 150 How it affected religious men 151 A gradual revolution 152 Its connection with religious feelings and principles 153 Change in men's feelings respecting Natural Philosophy 155 Modern Poetry and Criticism 156 Their practical effects 159 Pure Metaphysics— Influence of Kant 162 Old and new Rationalism 164 22 CONTENTS. Connection of new Rationalism with Catholicism 166 Inferences from it, and reactions against it 167 Eclecticism 170 Its practical influence on our age — visible in all directions 172 SECTION III. POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. Change in the feelings of Protestants respecting monarchical government . . 174 Puritan colonies in North America 175 Progress towards the French Revolution — Ordinary Parisian Philosophy — Philo- sophy of Rousseau — Glorification of Nature 176 Effects of the French Revolution upon Protestant countries — Assertion of the su- periority of Law to Nature 179 Recent reaction against these effects. — Assertion of the superiority of Will to Law 180 Consequence of this reaction 181 The French Revolution, an attempt to establish an Universal Polity . . 183 Reaction against this attempt in Protestant countries 183 Renewal of the attempt in different forms, Benthamism, St. Simonianism, Owenism 184 Result of these experiments 190 Rousseau's doctrine of Education. — Reaction against it in Protestant countries . 190 More recent, feelings on the subject, grounded on the actual circumstances of So- ciety 191 Spiritual tendency of these feelings; the acknowledged object of Education to ob- tain a dominion over the human will 193 Effort of States to obtain a control over Education — at variance with this feeling — how justified 194 PART II. OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE ROMISH SYSTEM. CHAPTER I. RECAPITULATION. Popular modern notion respecting the gradual Substitution of the Ideal for the Personal and Historical ,n religious systems 197 Is it supported by the failure of the Quaker system ? 198 Is it supported by the failure of the Protestant systems ? 199 Is it supported by the failure of the [Initarian system ? 201 Popular modern notion respecting the substitution of an Idea for a Spiritual Society — Is it borne out by the failure of the Reformers, the Quakers, the Unitarians, modern Philosophers, to establish a united society ? . . 203 Popular modern notion that there may be a universal society not grounded upon Revelation 206 Is it borne out by the history of Quakerism, Calvinism, Unitarianism ? . . 207 Is it borne out by the discoveries of recent philosophers 1 208 Popular modern notion that there may be a universal society not governed bv an actual King 209 la it borne out by the history of Quakerism, pure Proetstantism, Unitarianism ? . 209 CHAPTER II. INDICATIONS OF A SPIRITUAL CONSTITUTION. The existence of families treated as unimportant by religious sects and by phi- losophers 212 The fact that they do exist — the first indication that a spiritual Order is appointed for men — and yet belongs to them as voluntary creatures .... 212 CONTENTS. 23 The fact that Nations exist, a second indication of the same truth — How con- nected with the foregoing 215 Indication of a feeling in men after a more comprehensive Society . . . 218' CHAPTER III. THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW OF THIS CONSTITUTION. Character of the Bible not systematic, but methodical 220 Idea of a covenant between God and man — the central one in it — This covenant first wilh a family 221 Secondly, with a nation — Development of the nation out of the family . . . 223 Wherein the nation was distinct from the family 224 How the nation was identified with the family 225 Attempts at Babylonian and universal monarchy — How resisted by the Jewish nation 226 Vision of a true Universal Kingdom, of which this was the counterfeit and per- petual enemy 227 The JSew Testament begins with the announcement of a Kingdom . . . 229 Charge against this language that it is Jewish, considered 229 Connection of this kingdom with the old Jewish kingdom 230 Effects of the proclamation of this kingdom upcn different classes of the Jews . 231 How interpreted by the acts of our Lord's life 233 The establishment of a Kingdom grounded upon a Name — The consummation of the gospel history 234 Development of' this idea through the Acts of the Apostles and the different Epistles 234 CHAPTER IV. SIGNS OF A SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. Question to be considered 240 SECTION I. ; BAPTISM. Statement of the fact — Use and prevalency of this sign 240 Is it connected in the Gospels with the Kingdom which our Lord came to establish ? 241 Inference — The baptized man is a member of Christ's spiritual and universal Kingdom ... . 243 Quaker objections to this inference — " A spiritual fact cannot be denoted by an outward sign" — " It is false to give the sign to one who has not the reality" — " The sign is useless to a man who is already united to the Divine Word" — His interpretation of John's Baptism 244 Antipaedobaptist objections — "Those who have no spiritual consciousness or capa- city cannot be admitted to baptism" 247 Modern Protestant objections — " There are two kingdoms, one outward and one inward — Baptism admits to the first, Conversion to the second" . . . 250 Modern philosophical objections — 11 Baptism cannot be the sign of a universal society, it belongs to the members of a certain religious sect" — " It does not distinguish the wise from the unwise" — " It involves the acknowledgment of an incomprehensible dogma" — "It presumes the existence of an evil Spint" . 256 The Romish system — Idea of the opus operatum 263 Why this idea is in direct opposition to that which has been set forth in this sec- tion • 265 The Caiholic and Romish doctrine found side by side in the same writers — How to distinguish them 267 24 CONTENTS. SECTION II. THE CREEDS. How the Catholic idea of Baptism reconciles the doctrines of those who oppose if. — Transition to the Creeds 268 The Apostles' Creed, its form, its relation to Baptism, its relation to the Scrip- tural idea of Christ's Kingdom 271 The Nicene Creed, wherein it resembles the Apostles', wherein they differ . . 273 Q,i alcer objection to 1 the outward character of the Creed' 275 Modern Protestant objection.— ' The Creeds interfere with the Bible' . . . 286 Rationalistic objections. — 'The Creed embodies an idea, the historical elements in it is imaginary' 278 The Romish System. — 'The notions and opinions of the Doctors of the Romish Church are necessary to elucidate Scripture, and to supply that which is deficient in it' 281 The Catholic Creeds are a defence of the Scriptures and of the poor man against the attempts of Doctors, to confuse the one, and rob the other . . . 282 SECTION III. FORMS OF WORSHIP. Varieties of worship in different countries 285 The existence of common Liturgies belonging to different nations, a strange fact 286 Explicable only upon the hypothesis, that there is a spiritual and universal king- dom 287 Quaker objection to Liturgies— 1 Prayer is given by the Spirit, prepared iorms make it the utterance of the will and reason of man' 288 Objection of the pure Protestant — 1 Forms of Prayer cannot be adapted to changes of circumstances and individual feeling' 291 Objection of the modern Philosopher — 'The idea of Worship is inconsistent with the immutability and perfection of God' ....... 296 The Romish System. — Romish Prayers not distinguished from Catholic Prayers, by a chronological line 303 True distinction — The one treats the Church as if she were admitted into the presence of God, the other, as if she were not 304 SECTION IV. THE EUCHARIST. Evidence of permanency and universality in thi3 sign 307 Scripture explanation of it 309 Inference — This Sacrament is an actual and not an imaginary bond between God and, man, and fulfils the idea of the Jewish Sacrifices . . .311 Quaker objection. — 'The Sacrifice required ot Christians is real and personal — the Encharistic Sacrifice is formal and fantastic' 312 Division of Protestant Objections 317 General Objection. — 1 If any sacrificial character be imputed to the Eucharist, the Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross was not complete' 318 Zuinglian Doctrine. — ' This Sacrament is merely the memorial of a paBt Trans- action' 321 The Calvinistical Doctrine. — t There is a real presence in the Sacrament to those who believe' 326 Lutheran Doctrine.—' 1 he divine body and blood are consubstantiated with the ele- ments' 327 Rationalistic Objection.— ' The Christian mysteries are only a continuation of the old heathen mysteries' . . . . . 329 The Romish System — The Romish doctrine respecting the eucharistic sacrifice and respecting transubstantiation, is in more direct opposition to the Cath- olic idea of this Sacrament, than it is to the doctrine of the pure Protestants 337 Participation of the Spiritual Ijoiy practically denied by the Romanist . 340 Priesthood degraded by the Romanist 341 CONTENTS. 25 SECTION V. THE MINISTRY. Character commonly imputed to a Sacerdotal caste — Spirit of Domination — Dis- position to enslave — Narrowness 342 Idea of the Christian Ministry — All who belong to this caste, servants — Its prin- cipal office, absolving or setting free — Its highest office, a witness to the universality of the Church 343 Connection of this sign with the general idea of a Spiritual Kingdom . . . 347 How expounded in the New Testament . 348 Inference — ' A Ministry grounded upon an Episcopal order, and possessing an absolving power, is a permanent institution of the Christian Church' . 350 Quaker objections — 1 A true minister is made such by an inward call' — 1 The idea of succession belonged to'the Old Dispensation' — 'A minister is fitted for his work by the teaching of the Spirit' 351 Presbyterian Objections — 1 Christ is the only Bishop of his Church' — 1 The Bishop is not in Scripture distinguished from the Presbyter' — 1 The Episcopal or- der has introduced corruption and secularity into the Church' . . . 367 Objections to the absolving power in Ministers — 1 The minister sets the conscience free by preaching ; when he tries to absolve in any other sense, he usurps the power of his Master' * 373 Objection of the followers of Mr. Irving — 1 There should be an order of Apostles superior to that of Bishops' 377 Philosophical Objections — 1 Men of letters and of science are the true priests' . 382 Tfte Romish System — The Romish System maintains a vicarial, the Catholic Church a representative priesthood — These two ideas are in direct contra- diction to each other 386 How the Romanist has destroyed the idea of absolution by his vicarial doctrine 388 How he has set at nought the Episcopacy 389 How he has destroyed the connection between the Jewish and Christian economy 391 SECTION YL THE SCRIPTURES. The Scriptures interpret the other signs of the Spiritual Kingdom, but are also themselves signs of it 392 The Canon explained by looking at the Scriptures in this light .... 393 Different methods of interpreting them reconciled 393 The Question, where are the interpreters of the book to be found? considered 384 The question, how criticism can be applied to the Scriptures? considered . . 396 The question of inspiration, and of the relation of Scriptures to other books, con- sidered ... 402 The question of miracles considered 409 The question of the Gospel narratives considered 412 The Romish System — The Romish doctrine respecting the concealment of the Scriptures from the Laity — The inspiration and miracles of particular men, and the lives of particular saints considered in reference to this subject . 416 CHAPTER V. ON THE RELATIONS OF THE CHURCH AND NATIONAL BODIES. INTRODUCTORY. Different views as to the permanence of the Jewish institutions .... 424 The Ten Commandments 424 Illustration of these commandments from Pagan history , . . . . 426 The institutions to which these commandments refer, exist in Modern Europe 427 They may be national institutions and yet divine . 429 Punishments, Oaths, War, belong to the religion of the Jewish State . 429 And of every heathen State 430 26 CONTENTS. They cannot belong to our Dispensation if they are prohibited in the New Tes- tament— They may belong to it, though they are not enjoined in the New Testament 431 The relation between Spiritual and National life exhibited in the Old Testament 433 Exhibited in Pagan history — Lost under the Roman empire 434 The Christian Kingdom felt to be incompatible with this empire .... 435 Attempted union with it 436 Overthrow of the Roman empire, and gradual rise of national societies under the influence of the Church 436 SECTION L OBJECTIONS OP THE QUAKER. 1 The Sermon on the Mount annuls the laws of the old dispensation' . . 440 ' A national provision for ministers is unchristian' 467 SECTION II. THE PURE THEOCRATIST. 4 The Nation is to be used for religious purposes' — The Covenanter — The Millenna- rian — The Non-juror 470 SECTION III. THE SEPARATIST. ' The union of the Church with the State is the union of an antisecular with a sec- ular body' . 474 SECTION IV. THE PATRICIAN. ' The golden age of the Church was that which existed before the rise of national life in Europe' 478 SECTION V. TnE MODERN STATESMAN. 1 If the Church and the nations be united according to the idea set forth in this chapter, the education of each nation must belong to the Church — Such a pretence was always dangerous, is now intolerable' 495 SECTION VI. THE MODERN INTERPRETERS OP PROPHECY. 'The constitution of Society cannot be right and divine now, for Christ at his second coming will make all things new' — 4 The Jewish nation is the divine nation' — 4 The Latin Church is apostate, and will be cut off" ' . . . 506 PART III. THE ENGLISH CHURCH AND THE SYSTEMS WHICH DIVIDE IT. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. HOW FAR THIS SUBJECT IS CONNECTED WITH THOSE PREVIOUSLY DISCUSSED. What the inquiries of the English Churchman ought to be 518 I CONTENTS. 27 SECTION I. DO THE SIGNS OF AN UNIVERSAL AND SPIRITUAL CONSTITUTION EXIST IN ENGLAND * All the Catholic institutions exist here 519 The meaning attached to these deduced from the Liturgy— The meaning of the Lit- urgy from the complaints of those who object to it 520 The relative claims of the two sets of persons in England who call themselves Catholics, to represent the Church 527 The Articles— the first division of them sets aside the Calvinistic system— The second division the Romish— The Calvinistical principle asserted in the one as the Catholic is in the other 527 section n. DOES THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH IN ENGLAND EXIST APART FROM ITS CIVIL INSTITUTIONS, OR IN UNION WITH THEM 1 The answer to this question unanimous 531 The nature of the union determined from history ~ . ...... 531 How affected by the Reformation 533 How affected by subsequent events 533 SECTION III. WHAT IS THE FORM OF CHARACTER WHICH BELONGS ESPECIALLY TO ENGLISHMEN 1 TO WHAT DEPRAVATION IS IT LIABLE 1 The ordinary answer ihat Englishmen are essentially political, the true one . . 537 We cannot throw off this character 538 That part of our literature is the noblest which exhibits it most strikingly . . 539 It is not unfavourable to the highest virtue and devotion 539 It belongs equally to all parties . . 540 How it was depraved in the period between the English and the French Revolution 541 Form which it assimed in the reign of George III 542 Attempt to discover a substitute for it 543 CHAPTER II. THE E2VGLISH SYSTEMS. SECTION I. THE LILERAL SYSTEM — THE EVANGELICAL SYSTEM — THE HIGH CHURCH OR CATHOLIC SYSTEM. The Liberal protest against English orthodoxy — ' It is opposed to all improvement and comprehension' 544 The Evangelical protest against it — 1 It substitutes conduct for faith' ■ . . 544 The Catholic protest against it — 1 It confounds the Church with the civil power' . 545 SECTION II. REFLECTIONS ON THESE SYSTEMS AND ON OUR POSITION GENERALLY. Importance not of one, but of all these protests 546 Value and truth of the Liberal principle ; it is contradicted by the Liberal system 546 Value and troth of the Evangelical principle; it is contradicted by the Evangelical system ~. 547 Value and truth of the Catholic principle ; it is contradicted by the Catholic system 548 Mutual charges of these parties, how far true 551 How they may be made useful to our old English feeling — How they actually threaten to destroy it .... 553 How an English Churchman may serve his country without belonging to a party . 556 Conclusion • 566 28 CONTENTS. NOTES. Note A. — Extracts from St. Augustipe, illustrating the primitive mode of teaching Catechumens, and arguing with heretics 571 Note B. — Remarks on a passage in Tittmann's Meletemata Sacra . ' . . 575 Note C — On the modern treatment of ancient philosophers 578 Note D. — 0,i the writings of Philo 582 - Note E. — On the charges against the Alexandrian fathers , 588 Note on German Protestantism . 591 Note on the Athanasian Creed 592 ERRATUM. P. 65, third line from bottom, for members, read nucleus. ADVERTISEMENT. This work appeared originally in the form of Letters to a Mem- ber of the Society of Friends. It was suggested by a controversy which was dividing the Quaker society. Its main object was to in- quire whether an acknowledgment of the spiritual principles, which were professed by the Quaker body, involved the rejection of Chris- tian ordinances, or whether one did not necessarily imply the other This question was almost identical with another. The Quakers had sought to establish a spiritual kingdom in the world. Did not such a Kingdom exist already, and were not these ordinances the expres- sion of it ? Among many minor but serious mistakes in my treatment of this subject, I found that there was one which had tended to make my purpose unintelligible. The early Quakers affirmed, that the Spirit- ual Kingdom was denned by no national boundaries. But the Quaker Society has, in fact, existed only in England and in Ame- rica. As I wished to show the Quaker to whom I wrote that there was a spiritual body in which he himself might find a home, when the Quaker sect no longer afforded him one, I naturally alluded, in every Letter, to the English Church — speaking of her sacraments, ministers, forms of worship, &c. It seemed, therefore, to many, that I was composing an apology for this Church. But if so, how. it was asked, had I fulfilled my promise of showing the Quakers that there was a Church Universal, such as they had dreamed of? I found that my book had been much more read by members of my own communion than by Quakers. Some of my friends, there- fore, naturally suggested, that in any new edition I should convert it 30 ADVERTISEMENT. into a Treatise on the Church, leaving out all reference to the sect, for the sake of which it had been written, This advice I could not take. If I have been able to suggest any thought to a Churchman which he will not find far better set before him in a hundred other books, I owe it to the circumstances which induced me to attempt a comparison between our own position and that of those who seem to be at the greatest distance from us. Moreover, it is obvious, from what I have just said, that if I lost sight of the Quakers, I should abandon one means of repairing the error which I have committed. By following out their line of thought, we may have a good hope of learning how men of earnest minds have been brought to feel that they need a Catholic Church, and not merely a National Church. But though I cannot cease to connect my hints with the princi- ples of the Quakers, I find that I am almost obliged to omit any allusion to the particular controversy which led me to address them. For that controversy appears to be at an end, and the Society is much more likely to perish by a slow decay, than by a sudden con- vulsion. Owing to this circumstance, and to others of a more pri- vate nature, the form of Letters, which I originally adopted, is no longer applicable. I have been induced, therefore, to rewrite and reconstruct my book ; and thus I hope to remove, in some degree, the fault of which I have spoken. I have endeavoured also to remove some of the more gross and palpable errors, which I discovered in it myself, or were pointed out to me by others. Enough, I doubt not, remain ; and in the additions which I have made, others may have been introduced. It will never, I hope, be regarded as any thing but a collection of Hints, which, if they lead the reader into deeper thought and greater reverence, may soon be the means of making him far wiser than his instructor. The following Dialogue will explain how the subject of the whole book is connected with the history of the Quaker body. The con- versation is, as to its form, an imaginary one ; but I have often express- ed the same sentiments in intercourse with members of the Society, and the Quaker's description of the trials, to which a thoughtful man who has found a sectarian position no longer tenable is exposed ADVERTISEMENT. 31 from within and without, may, I believe, be regarded as an " ower true tale."* * My readers are of course aware, that the Archbishop of Dublin has lately pub- lished a work entitled, The Kingdom of Christ Delineated." From a feeling of respect to so distinguished an author, as well as on selfish grounds, I should have been disposed to change my title as soon as I knew that it had been so appropriat- ed. But it will be seen that the description of the book is very closely connected with the intention of it, and that the present edition answers more strictly to the name than the former did. I am, therefore, obliged to retain it. THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. INTRODUCTORY DIALOGUE WITH A QUAKER. Quaker. Are you serious in saying, that you do not wish me to forsake the Society in which I have been educated ? Author. I did not say that. I hope that you will not forsake the principles in which you have been educated. Q. You mean those general principles of morality and that common Christianity, which you and I have been alike taught to revere ? A. No; that is not my meaning. Whatever those general principles and common doctrines may be I do not believe that you will retain them, unless you retain also those which are proper to Quakerism. Q. What can that imply, except that I ought to continue in the Society 1 A. I can answer that question better, if you will tell me what are your present inducements to leave it. Q. The story is a long one. I am afraid you will not hear me to the end of it. I think I was first startled by a contradiction which I remarked between the profession and the practices of our members. A. You may make many changes before you find a body in which the same observation will not force itself upon you. Q. I am quite aware of it ; and I hope I have common sense enough not to part with any serious conviction, because hypocrites may feign to possess it, or a good man may hold it with a feeble grasp. That was not my difficulty. The contradiction I noticed seemed to me to infect all the arrangements, nay, in some de- 3 34 INTRODUCTORY DIALOGUE gree, the very constitution of our Society. We are witnesses for spirituality ; I feel as if we were rank formalists. A. Corruption may have crept into your system ; but why judge of it by its present appearances ? Is there no possibility of reformation ? Q. For a long time I believed there was. I said to myself, I will study the writings of the early Quakers. I shall find in them that higher and purer spirit which seems to have departed from us. A. Were you disappointed ? Q. I thought not. The writers I studied manifested deep earnestness, courage, self-denial, an intense conviction that what they said was true, a readiness to live and die that others might hear it. A. You concluded, therefore, that your Society had a sound foundation to rest upon? Q. If I had been convinced of that, I do not think I should have despaired of its present state. But here lay my perplexity. Since I had read the Scriptures diligently and had known something of my own heart, the statements which I heard from our Quaker ministers respecting human depravity, the grace of God, the re- demption by Christ, had seemed to me for the most part vague and unsatisfactory. Still the doctrines upon these subjects, which are ordinarily, and I think rightly, called Evangelical, are recognised among us ; by some they are brought out prominently. On the contrary, by those older Quakers, whom on some grounds I felt so much disposed to admire, these doctrines are far less distinctly ex- hibited ; other Christians seem to be blamed for attaching import- ance to them ; sometimes expressions are used which are almost incompatible with the belief of them. A. Did you think that they substituted some notions of their own for these doctrines 1 Q. I reluctantly adopted that suspicion, and this it is which makes me wonder that you should talk about my retaining the principles of Quakerism. These principles are, it seems to me, in opposition to what I suppose you consider the leading tenets of the Gospel. A. How did you arrive at that persuasion ? Q. I was led to it by the workings of my own mind, and then WITH A QUAKER 35 it was confirmed to me by the testimony of two persons, who in many of their views were at variance. A. Who were these ? Q. The first was an Independent dissenter. He expressed strong admiration of the language and conduct of Fox and Penn on many occasions. He said indeed that he could not join them in objecting to all pecuniary provision for ministers, in their dislike of baptism and in several points of that kind; but that he heartily wished the energy which they displayed in denouncing ecclesiasti- cal superstitions and oppressions would communicate itself to En- glish dissenters. A. Surely this was most complimentary language. Q. But when he came to speak of Fox's theological tenets, he adopted an entirely different tone. He described him as a mys- tic, ignorant of the truths of the Gospel, the proclaimer of theories which utterly subverted them. The same opinion was maintained, if possible, with more earnestness by a clergyman of your Church, who was present at the time. Much, he said, as he disliked the in- decorous and violent language of Fox respecting the Established Church, he considered his doctrine of an Inward Light immeasura- bly more dangerous than such language could ever be. It was utterly incompatible with the Bible, and with the experience of every true Christian. A. You remember perhaps some of the arguments by which your two friends defended these positions ? Q. I do not think their arguments made so much impression upon my mind as the clear and settled persuasion which they both alike entertained, that if Fox were right, the Bible must be wrong. You may smile at my confession that I attached weight to such assertions, when I cannot recall the evidence which was pro- duced for them ; but I know very well, that assertions which pro- ceed from deep conviction do often affect me more than elaborate and logical proofs. A. The case is the same with me. I shall not, therefore, ridi- cule your acknowledgment. Q. I am glad to hear it j for I do not find that ridicule in gen- eral acts profitably upon my mind. These two gentlemen, the dissenter and the evangelical clergyman, after they had impressed 36 INTRODUCTORY DIALOGUE me very strongly by their serious objections, thought it expedient to indulge their humour at the expense of our founders and their mystical notions. A. When they had entered the castle, they were naturally anx- ious to dismantle it. Q. They took away more defences from me than perhaps they meant. While they were with me, I felt as if I were bound to say something in behalf of feelings and thoughts which from my child- hood I had held sacred, even though they might be deserting me. When I was left alone, I found that I had indeed supported my Quakerism inadequately ; but I had perceived rents and hollows in their system, of which I was not previously aware. Their wit succeeded in shaking my reverence at once for my own faith, and for that which I had hoped would have been a substitute for it. A. A melancholy state of mind indeed, as all who have known it can testify. Q. While I was under the influence of these feelings, I read two Unitarian books, one written by an Englishman of the last century, one by an American of the present. A. The former at least did not treat your mystical feelings with more indulgence than your evangelical friends had shown towards them % Q. No ; but he taught me, that it was possible to throw quite as good ridicule upon the Calvinistical doctrine, as they and he were agreed in throwing upon mine. The value of his critical re- marks and discoveries I was not able to appreciate ; but he said enough to convince me that Scripture had been often strained to make out a case in favour of the opinions which he attacked, and that the number of positive texts in their favour was far smaller than I had fancied. Moreover, his views of the character of God and his feelings respecting his fellow-creatures accorded better with the testimony of my conscience, than those which I had been wont to hear from the members of any sect except my own. A. The impression he left upon your mind then was on the whole pleasing 1 Q. By no means. My feeling, when I laid down the book, was one of utter coldness and dreariness. The very idea of a spir- itual world and of a spiritual life seemed to be wanting in it ; ma- WITH A QUAKER. 37 terialism was the ultimate point to which all its speculations were tending, if it were not the basis of them. A. But that was not the case, I should think, with the Ameri- can ? Q. No; he was a person of a very different temper. Some of his statements were not unlike those which I had met with in Fox and Penn. His mind was more comprehensive than theirs ; more capable of taking interest in ordinary affairs and general literature, but scarcely less morally exalted — I was at times inclined to say — scarcely less spiritual. A. You could acquiesce comfortably in his religious scheme ? Q. I almost fancied that I could ; there was something so very capacious and engaging in it. But just as I had finished the book, I fell ill, and before I recovered I received news of the death of one of my oldest and dearest friends. Then all my interest both in the Englishman and the American vanished ; I think I disliked the last most, because his promises were the fairest. A. But did not you say you had traced a fine vein of humanity and spirituality in him 1 Q. I thought so ; but let him be as humane or as spiritual as he would, he was not personal. There was nothing in him from which a soul, struggling with life and death, could derive the least help. He was evidently meant for sunshine and gala days. Then I recollected the words of my evangelical friends, and the doctrines which they had set before me. These seemed to me in that mo- ment all important. I bitterly accused myself for having thought them narrow and hard. What had I to do with large views about men's happiness or the character of God ? My own individual soul was at war, and he who could show me a way of peace for it was the friend I wanted. With other matters it seemed now that I had no right to trouble myself. A. On your recovery you probably sought the advice of the Independent dissenter whom you named ? Q. On some accounts I desired rather to have another interview with the clergyman who had spoken so strongly against Fox and mysticism ; but just at that time he left the neighbourhood. His successor in the parish was, I heard, an author ; so I purchased his books before I ventured to call upon him. 38 INTRODUCTORY DIALOGUE A. Did they encourage you to expect assistance from him? Q. I thought I had been shaken enough before by my own discoveries, and by the words of my different counsellors ; but it seems not: these books were to upset me altogether. A. How? You encountered a skeptic in the disguise of a clergyman ? Q. Oh, no ; he was the most vehement enemy of all skepticism. He said doctrines had been delivered in the earliest ages of Chris- tianity which it behooved us to receive with a simple uninquiring faith ; that the blessings of salvation were connected with our sub- mission to a certain system which had been ordained by God; that in the evangelical teaching this system had been almost entirely forgotten, or treated as if it were merely a point of external arrange- ment ; that that teaching spoke of a period of conversion in which men passed from death unto life, while the Church and Scripture referred this wonderful change to baptism. A. You did not believe these statements ; why then did they affect you so powerfully? Q. Partly perhaps because they were uttered with that strong and deep conviction which I have confessed does always act most strongly upon me, especially if it be supported, as I know in the case of this clergyman it is, by the testimony of a laborious and self-denying life. But yet I think there was another cause. A person, who has suffered severely from religious struggles, has an inward sighing after rest which no one else can know. Bruised, beaten, humbled, he cannot help listening to any one who tells him that he has been all wrong ; he has been so tormented by his own miserable experiments and failures, that he must rejoice to hear that he ought to give them up altogether. After many struggles therefore with my pride and my modesty, the shame of uttering my feelings and the pain of hiding them, I thought I would state my difficulties to the new clergyman. A. He can scarcely have looked for a proselyte from such a quarter. Q. He evidently did not desire one; and as I had been used to meet persons who spared no pains to bring me over to their ways of thinking, the change was so far rather agreeable. But besides this he evidently did not understand me ; nay, if I was not mistaken, WITH A QUAKER. 39 he thought it would be a wrong thing to understand me. I dare say that I stammered and spoke incoherently when I tried to tell him the thoughts that were in my mind. One cannot speak quite so clearly about one's self as about the weather and the crops, and indeed he made so many efforts to turn the conversation to those subjects, and fixed such steady clear cold eyes upon me when I asked him for information upon any others, that I certainly did not exhibit less embarrassment at the close than at the beginning of our interview. A. How did he show that he misunderstood you? Q. You know how I was educated — to look upon all forms and ordinances as sinful. Such thoughts had grown with my growth, and strengthened with my strength. But of late I have repeatedly felt as if these forms might be desirable ; nay, as if there were something in me which needed them. It was on this point espe- cially that I wished to speak to Mr. . I knew that there were many things which it might not be right that he should teach me at present; but I thought that a person, who looked upon forms as most important to our moral life, might have removed some of the difficulties which clouded ray mind in reference to them, or at least have interpreted some of those desires and longings, which, in spite of my prejudices, I had conceived for them. But this wish he seemed to consider irreverent and presumptuous. " I can enter," he said, " into no explanations with you ; you are not in a state to understand explanations ; you have one plain duty to perform — submit to the ordinances of Christ's Church, confess the sins of your fathers in withdrawing from it, and your own in continuing the schism; receive Christian Baptism; then I shall be happy to in- struct you." "I am much inclined to take this course," I replied. " but I feel some difficulties and scruples which I do not know how to overcome." " Sir," he said, " the case may be stated verv shortly to you. The Fathers of the Church, the Saints and Mar- tyrs of the first five centuries, the Greek Church, the Romish Church, the English Church, all agree that Baptism is the one only door by which we can enter into Christ's fold, and therefore into everlast- ing life. An ignorant mechanic in the 17th century said that there was some other door — you have chosen to disbelieve the whole Catholic Church, and to follow the mechanic. Is this a safe pro- 40 INTRODUCTORY DIALOGUE ceeding ? If a speculation in cloth or wool were proposed to you, and a hundred competent judges said it would be your ruin — one person, totally unacquainted with the trade, that it might turn out wTell — would you not think yourself mad to venture upon it ? Will you put your chances of salvation upon a still greater risk V9 With these words he wished me good morning. A. How did this argument affect your mind ? Q. You will wonder at me, perhaps, — I wonder at myself when I consider how very consistent and plausible it seems — but I never felt less moved by any words in my life: — I am wrong — they did produce an effect upon me — they almost counterbalanced the im- pression which had been made upon my mind before, in favour of your Church and its ordinances. A. How could that be ? Q. Reverence was what I looked for above all things in this clergyman. He had talked of the sin of irreverence in his book, and my heart had felt the truth of his words. He said it was his reverence which hindered him from speaking to me on the subject of his faith. And yet he could teach me to calculate about eternal life as if it were a matter of merchandise ! He spoke not to that in me which was looking above the earth, but to my earthly selfish nature, not to that in me which was ready to submit to any thing or bear any thing for the sake of doing God's will and attain- ing a knowledge of Him, but to all my proud, contentious, disputa- tious feelings. He did not address me as a creature capable of reverence, though he accused me of irreverence ; nay, he taught me to connect a lower, more grovelling, notion with Christianity than I had ever done while under the most irreverent of my teachers. A. You felt, then, that you should be more right in continuing a Quaker ? Q. No, I did not feel that ; my mind was in the most wretched contradiction. But I said to myself, I am urged to forsake the body in which I have lived, and my fathers have lived ; I am to turn away from those who first taught me to revere the operations of my own spirit, and to tremble at the name of God ; I am to break all the bonds of old affection and sympathy : and why ? because there are higher objects and interests for which even these must be sacri- ■ WITH A QUAKER. 41 ficed ? because I must leave father and mother for the sake of Christ ? no, but because it is the safer, the more politic, course ; because it is likely, upon a balance of probabilities, that I shall be in less clanger of suffering a selfish loss here, or hereafter, if I take it. Magnify the loss to me as you will ; heap up the epithets in- finite, eternal, as you may — this is a question of principle, not of degree, and when I set principle at nought, I believe these words, great and terrible as they sound, lose all their meaning to me. A. You must not commit the unfairness of supposing that the clergyman with whom you spoke really attached no higher and more spiritual idea to the words than that which he seems to have conveyed to you ; he probably meant to use an argumentum ad hominem. Q. I fully understood that. The conviction I formed from some parts of his book was, and still is, that he had a very high and spiritual apprehension of things. I knew he would think me unfit to be admitted to his arcana, nor did I claim such an honour. But from the little I have read about the Catechumens in the primitive Church, I fancied that they were not taught something wholly dif- ferent in kind from that which they learnt after their baptism.* I did not know that they were reasoned with upon those selfish motives which it must have been the object of their after initiation to cure them of. But be that as it may, an argumentum ad hominem is meant, I suppose, to produce conviction of some kind or other ; else it is merely a gratuitous insult to the person against whom it is directed. Now I cannot conceive any one on whom this kind of argument would produce conviction. It assumes him to whom it appeals to care fo: nothing but profit and loss. A person who does care for nothing but profit and loss would merely smile at the attempt to awaken his fears about an unseen and future blessing : his whole mind is wrapt up in the things that are passing around him. Your wisdom, therefore, consists in ignoring the existence of that which might listen to you, and in addressing yourself to that which has no ears. A. Well, but if this be an error, it is not peculiar to one or ano- ther school among us. In a commercial country we are all more or less inclined to act, think, and argue upon such maxims as these. * See note (A). 42 INTRODUCTORY DIALOGUE Q. I do not think the clergyman I speak of would be very grate- ful to you for telling him he had adopted his notions from a com- mercial age. But I was not bringing it as a charge against a school, — I was only telling you my own story. A. It is a sad and eventful one— but you have not finished it ? Q. The next incident will surprise you most of all. I have scarcely courage to confess that during the last two months I have had frequent and not unpleasant interviews with a Romish priest. A. The argument about safety is so established and habitual a one among the members of his church that I think he cannot have been more agreeable to you than the English clergyman. Q. He has rarely, if ever, resorted to it — possibly he may have guessed from something I said to him the first time we met, that it was not one which was likely to have any great weight with me. So far from denouncing any of my former thoughts and opinions, he has taken pains to show me how many points of sympathy there are between us. A. Of sympathy — between a Romanist and a Quaker ! Q. " I find," he says, " in the writings of the early Quakers, the most earnest longings after a universal Church. Is it wonderful that they should have felt such longings? That which is called the English Church — the only one they knew of — is limited to a particular locality, subjected to the yoke of a national sovereign, tied down by national laws and customs. Depend upon it, my friend, your founders were right : that is not Christ's Church which is not universal." A. How did you answer that ? Q. I said that our Quaker system was by its very nature spi- ritual, and that his Church seemed to me to be opposed to spirituality. " Opposed to spirituality !" he exclaimed ; " and where will you find so many men and women of a high spirituality — so many men and women who resemble your own in their love of mystical contemplation — as among us ? Has^ not Thomas a Kempis been always a favourite with your friends ? And is not the Imitation of Christ, par excellence, the book of Catholic devotion Vs "These," I said, "were individuals — but the system?" " Well," he continued ; " the system — look, if you please, at that. What is your great complaint against the English system ? Is it not that WITH A QUAKER. 43 the mouths of men are shut who are urged by the Spirit to speak God's word ? Can you bring that charge against us ? Look at our friars, taken from the humblest classes, recognised the moment they discover a real inward vocation, adopted at once as our teachers though they have no one worldly qualification to recom- mend them. Do you not find fault with your English authorities because they forbid one whole sex to act as the handmaids of Christ and of his flock ? It is very true we do not adopt your notion that women may speak in the Churches ; we adhere more strictly to the words of Scripture than to suffer such a practice : but the feeling which has led you to lift your voices in behalf of their rights and duties meets with every encouragement among us Catholics. We rejoice to see women devoting themselves to the service of the Church ; we bestow upon them all help and honour while they are living : we account them saints when they die." Another point of agreement he discovered between us. " What is the great moving spring and centre of action to which all your writers refer ? Surely it is love. They believe that though faith and hope be great Christian graces, the greatest of all is Charity. That is the very principle for which we are contending. The Pro- testants wish to substitute faith for love. WTe say — as your friends have also said — that we will not." A. Do you find that these arguments have brought your mind to greater quietness and satisfaction ? Q. Quietness and satisfaction! The words seem to me as if they were spoken in a dream. No indeed ! I am as far from quietness and satisfaction as any poor mortal ever was. If ever the thought of joining the Romish church do present itself, it comes to me as the fearful dream of something to which I may be driven — as a last hopeless alternative. And just as often it seems to me that I may become a St. Simonian or a Socialist. These systems, too, have their attractions ; they address themselves to wants in me which I think must be satisfied — and yet, perhaps, they never are satisfied. Oftentimes I wish above all things for a potion that would put me to sleep. A. To sleep, my friend, — perchance to dream. Q. I know it well ; this broken fever-sleep is worse than being awake. 44 INTRODUCTORY DIALOGUE A. Need I now answer the question which you asked me at the beginning of our conversation — what I meant by wishing you to keep your Quaker principles, though you might leave the Quaker society ? Q. Indeed you must ; I am as much in the dark about the pos- sibility of such a distinction as ever. A. Your first objection to Quakerism arose from the feeling that it was not acting out its original idea. Q. And my second from the feeling that that idea was a false one. A. Let us consider. Did you really discover that idea to be a false one, or some other to be true ? Q. I found, or thought I found, certain great doctrines laid down in Scripture, — doctrines most important to my own being — and of these the early Quakers seemed to take only a very passing notice, if they did not reject them altogether. A. I do not doubt that you discovered these doctrines in Scrip- ture, or that you found them practically important, or that the early Quakers comparatively neglected them. What I doubt is, whether you ascertained those doctrines of which the Quakers did take notice to be unimportant, unscriptural, or inconsistent with the others. Q. I certainly thought they were. A. Yes, and to that judgment of yours, formed, perhaps, upon very hasty and insufficient evidence, you attached the same sacred- ness as to the witness of your heart and conscience, and of Scrip- ture with your heart and conscience, that those doctrines of which your evangelical friends spoke were needful to you. Q. Is that a practical distinction ? A. It is one which you have yourself recognised in the most emphatic manner. Did not you say that while the dissenting minister and the evangelical clergyman were maintaining their own positions, they made the deepest impression upon you ? And did not you say that when they began to ridicule the mystical opinions, they created the most vehement reaction in your mind against that which you had been previously inclined to adopt ? Q. I certainly said so. A. Well ! and in that confession, I think I can find an explana- % WITH A QUAKER. 45 tion of all your subsequent experience. You parted too suddenly with something which God meant you to keep, and all the bewil- derment and restlessness you have since suffered has been the necessary and appointed punishment of that error. Q. If it be so, it is an error which I cannot retrieve. The Evan- gelical, the Unitarian, the English clergyman, the Romanist, may have left me nothing to fill the void in my mind, but they have effectually despoiled me of what was there before. They have not convinced me that there is a standing-place in any of their systems, but they have made me certain that I have none in my own. A. Alas ! it is thus that men — benevolent men — honest men — holy men, trifle with that which is most awful and sacred in the minds of their brethren ! But they suffer as much evil as they inflict. Q. In what wray ? A. They turn the truths which they hold in their inmost hearts, and which God has given them to defend, into negations and con- tradictions; they oblige themselves to resort to insufficient proofs and false assumptions in support of these truths, because they have wilfully rejected the evidence of them which God was supplying in the wants and cravings of their fellow men ; they encourage infi- delity under the name of faith ; they form parties when they mean to proclaim principles which would make parties impossible ; they set up theories and systems based upon private judgments and individual conceits, wThen they are professing by someway or other to lead us on to permanent truths which belong to all and are necessary for all ; they create new divisions by the very efforts which they make to promote unity ; they invent lines and land- marks of their own, but the grand everlasting distinctions which God has established escape them altogether. Q. But why declaim against an evil which seems so deeply rooted in human nature, that the efforts of six thousand years to eradicate it have proved abortive ? A. Why, indeed ; if I did not believe that God had provided a complete and effectual witness against this evil, which is, as you say, so rooted in our selfish natures ; if I did not see that this wit- ness had prevailed to make itself heard in every age above all the clamours and distractions which were seeking to drown its voice ; if 46 INTRODUCTORY DIALOGUE I were not convinced that the world would have been torn in pieces by its individual factions, if there had not been this bond of peace and fellowship in the midst of it; if I were not sure that peace is meant to drive out war, good evil, light darkness; if I could not recognise more abundant proofs of this glorious fact in our own day than in any previous one; if it did ^not seem to me that all sects and factions, religious, political, or philosophical, were bear- ing testimonies, sometimes mute, sometimes noisy, occasionally hopeful, oftener reluctant, to the presence of that Church Universal, which is at once to justify their truths, explain the causes of their opposition, and destroy their existence. Q. But the difficulty is that these factions have been in the Church Universal itself — assign whatever meaning you please to that phrase. A. That is just the very point I was asserting. I said there was a sect spirit, a spirit which laboured to set up individual whims, opinions, and judgments in each of us; in us of the English Church, as well as in the Romanist, the foreign Protestant, the Quaker, the Evangelical Dissenter, or the Unitarian. The ques- tion is whether we do not all in our hearts and consciences feel and know that this sect spirit is a vile, accursed, devilish spirit ; whether, if we do know this, these same hearts and consciences do not testify that it is not meant to rule the world ; whether, if that testimony be true, we are not bound to inquire what is to rule the world instead of it. Q. And that inquiry you think I may even yet enter upon with some hope ? A. The early Quakers testified that there was a Kingdom of Christ in the world, and that it would subdue all kingdoms to itself. Are you willing to inquire with me into the grounds upon which they made this assertion ; to consider whether those grounds be tenable ; and whether the Quaker system be or be not the realization of the Quaker idea ? Shall we then inquire into the principles of those religious bodies who wish you to reject Quaker- ism ; asking whether these also may not be sound and true, and whether they have not been depraved and degraded by certain negative notions to which they have been appended ; whether the systems which have been invented to express them, do really WITH A QUAKER. 47 express them or no ? Supposing our conclusions on this last point should not be satisfactory, shall we then proceed to consider the assertion of the Romanist — that there is a Catholic Church which existed before all these systems, and which is derived from a higher authority than all of them ? If he should be able to make this assertion good, we may then inquire whether the Romish system be this Church or the disease of it j whether that system have exalted the ordinances of the Church which its supporters acknow- ledge and revere, or have degraded them and deprived them of their significance ; whether this Church Catholic be in contradiction to those ideas which the Quakers and the other Protestant bodies hold, or whether it be the legitimate and perfect realization of them. We cannot complete this investigation without examining that point upon which your Romanist friend discovered so close a resemblance between your views and his ; the point, I mean, whether a national society and a universal society be in their natures contradictory and incompatible ; or whether they have been only made so by certain notions which interfere with the universality of the spiritual body as well as with the distinctness of the national body. When we have arrived at some conclusion upon this matter, we shall be in a condition to speak of our position in England; to inquire if there be a Catholic Church here or not, and if there be, under what circumstances it exists, what are its dangers and evils, whether these dangers and evils are reasons for our living in separation from it or for uniting ourselves more closely to it. Q. I am ready to hear what you have to say on these subjects, though I cannot pretend that I look for any great discoveries. A. I rejoice that you do not. If we begin with the expectation of great results our pride will be rewarded with disappointment, and we shall add one more scheme to those which were so fair in appearance, and which have proved so abortive : if we desire to walk humbly along the path which God has marked out for us, rejecting no light, however feeble, which He vouchsafes, and trusting in Him to guide us to the perfect day, I do not think that his promise to wayfaring men will be unfulfilled to us. PART I. ON THE PRINCIPLES OF THE QUAKERS AND OF THE OTHER RELIGIOUS BODIES WHICH HAVE ARISEN SINCE THE REFORMATION AND OF THE SYSTEMS TO WHICH THEY HAVE GIVEN BIRTH. CHAPTER I. QUAKERISM. SECTION L ON THE POSITIVE DOCTRINES OF THE QUAKERS. The Indwelling Word — The Spiritual Kingdom — Spiritual Influences. In Mr. Gurney's work on the religious peculiarities of the Society of Friends, we are told that the doctrine, " which lies at the root of all their particular views and practices, is that of the perceptible influence and guidance of the Spirit of truth." This author maintains in a previous passage that " a measure of the influence of the Spirit is bestowed upon all men whereby they are enlightened, and may be saved." But it is obvious that he does not look upon this principle as in any degree so important or so characteristic of the Quakers, as the other. I do not see how a mere theory respecting the condition of the world generally can ever seem so important to any man, as a principle which concerns his own conduct and responsibility. But I question whether the older Quakers would have stated the latter doctrine precisely in the terms which Mr. Gurney has used ; I think they would have given it a much more practical form and signification, and that by doing so they would have exhibited the relative position and value of these two portions of their creed very differently. Any one who reads Fox's Journal will find that he adhered most literally and practically to a belief in perceptible impressions and influences. His whole conduct was regulated by the conviction, that he was commanded to do certain acts and utter certain words ; ON THE POSITIVE DOCTRINES OF THE QUAKERS. 49 wherever he went, whomsoever he denounced, whatever tone or manner he gave to his discourses, he believed undoubtedly that he was obeying a divine instigation. But, however strange this conviction may seem in our days, (and some of the results of it would seem strange to the Quakers themselves,) no one who is at all acquainted with the history of the period between 1645 and 1660 will fancy that Fox or his disciples were in this particular distinguished from a number of other religious men. There were hundreds, perhaps I might say thousands, in Cromwell's army who lived and acted as much under this belief, and who followed it out as consistently, as any Quaker could possibly do. Fox himself was frequently brought into collision with such men. He speaks, again and again, of a body of Ranters who gave him much trouble, on this very ground that they all believed themselves under perceptible spiritual influences. And in one very remarkable passage of his Diary, he says that a convert of his, Justice Hotham, told him, that he (Fox) had been raised up to utter a principle which discomfited these Ranters, and that but for this principle they would have overrun the whole land and destroyed it. I. This principle, and not the doctrine respecting perceptible influences, must then, one would think, have been the central one of Primitive Quakerism. Nay, a really earnest Quaker would have been willing that the truth and value of his spiritual impres- sions should be tried by their conformity to it or disagreement with it.* What then was this principle ? William Penn in his preface to Fox's Journal expresses it in the following words. " They were directed to the light of Jesus Christ within them as the seed and leaven of the kingdom of God ; near all, because in all, and God's talent to all. A faithful and true witness and just monitor in every bosom, the gift and grace of God to life and salvation, that appears to all, though few regard it." (Page ix.) This, he says, (page xix.) was " their fundamental principle, the corner-stone of their fabric, and, to speak eminently and properly, their characteristic * In one case, this remark was strikingly verified. James Naylor, whose strange doings at Bristol are recorded in our ordinary English histories, acknowledged that he had been deceived by a false spirit or by the fleshly workings of his own mind. Yet he proclaimed his faith in Fox's principle to the last, and looked upon his errors as the consequence of a departure from it. 4 50 ON THE POSITIVE DOCTRINES or main distinguishing point or principle this principle of " the light of Christ within, as God's gift for man's salvation, is the root of the goodly tree of doctrines, that grew and branched out of it." That this doctrine was the ground of Fox's teaching every page of his Diary proves. It might be a conviction, that he was sensibly led by the Spirit, which induced him to break forth in this or that steeple-house, or to attack this or that Independent, Baptist, Pres- byterian, or " Common-Prayer man." But, when he did speak, thewords he uttered were, " Brother, there is a Tight within thee : resist it and thou art miserable ; follow it and thou art happy." And he again and again expresses his assurance that these were the words which produced a real moral effect upon his hearers ; that whatever else he said was valuable only as it arose out of them, or tended to illustrate and enforce them. He believes that he spoke to something which was in those to whom he spoke, and that, being there, it answered his appeal. It was not from the teachers or popular books of the day that Fox learnt this doctrine. The language in which he describes his early life is remarkably unlike that which we meet with in Puritan biographies. " At eleven years of age," he says, " he knew pureness and right- eousness ;"* while he was a child he was taught to walk to be kept pure ; when he grew up, and " was put to a man that was a shoe- maker by trade, and that dealt in wool, and used grazing, and sold cattle, and a great deal passed through his hands, he never wronged man or woman, for the Lord's power was over him to preserve him . . . people had generally a love to him for his honesty and innocency." The conflicts of mind, which he describes afterwards, had no relation to any of the controversies, religious or political, by which England was then torn asunder. Of Prelacy or Covenant, King or Parliament, he knew nothing. The awful question, What am 1 1 — what have I to do in this strange confused world ? occu- pied his soul. It is one which must be new to each man, though thousands may have been vexed with it before him. Those whom Fox consulted about it afforded him little help ; he withdrew from the society of his fellow-creatures, and studied his Bible. Even that seemed not to tell him the secret which he wanted to * Journal, page 76. OF THE QUAKERS. 51 know : one thing however he learnt ; there was in him that which shrank from this inquiry, and would fain forget it altogether, and there was that in him which would have no rest till he found the answer to it. Now, was not this in itself a great discovery ? Did it not show him (in part at least) what kind of being he was 1 He had desires which drew him down to things which he saw, and tasted, and handled ; he had desires which aspired after something with which his senses and appetites had nothing to do. And was there not another discovery contained in this ? They were actual earthly objects which attracted him towards themselves ; his nature inclined him to them, yet, when he obeyed that nature, he seemed to lose what was most real in him. Must there not be a counter- attraction, a power as real as any of those things which he beheld, raising him out of them, urging him to seek something above him- self, a real substantial good ? Must not that power be in truth greater, though the contrary might seem to be the case, than all which were resisting it ? Could he not obey that higher influence, and, by obeying it, obtain life and peace ? He felt that he could ; that he was meant to do so. The light was stronger than the darkness. He was privileged to dwell in it. But was this light, then, afforded only to George Fox the shoe- maker ? How could this be 1 Did it not witness to him, that whenever he was setting up himself he was resisting it, not follow- ing it ? When he was obeying his selfish inclinations, he knew that he was flying from this great teacher ; when he desired to be led by it, he knew that he was a man. Surely, then, this must be a light vouchsafed to him, because he was a man ; it must be " a light which lighteneth every man who cometh into the world." A terrible majority might be striving against it, but their very stri- vings proclaimed the truth ; the kind of misery which men experi- enced showed the happiness which was intended for them. When we had arrived at this conviction, the Bible seemed to him a new book altogether. From first to last it witnessed to him of that invisible good which men are to seek after, and against the visible idolatries which are drawing them away from it. The lives of the patriarchs, of Moses, of the prophets, were the lives of men who were following the light, the teacher of their hearts, the Lord of righteousness, and were resisting the evil inclinations and appe- 52 ON THE POSITIVE DOCTRINES tites which would make them the slaves and worshippers of out- ward things. On the other hand, all the records of the sins of the Jewish nation, or of heathen nations, were records of revolts from this mysterious guide and teacher, by men who chose darkness rather than light, the outward and apparent good rather than the real and inward. As might be expected, the darkness became continually more gross in each individual who gave himself up to it, and the light brighter and clearer in each one who steadily pur- sued it. And so it had been in each new period — greater blindness and sensuality, greater and more immediate illumination ; Jews and Gentiles becoming more estranged from Him who was yet reveal- ing Himself to them both ; holy prophets holding more wonderful converse than their fathers had done with the Word of God — rising more above outward emblems and institutions, obeying more implicitly his inwTard suggestions. Such, or nearly such, was the form in which the Old Testament history seems to have presented itself to Fox ; and therefore the wTords at the beginning of the Gospel of St. John appeared to him to stand in the most natural connection with all the records to which they refer. And St. Paul's declarations, in the first and second of Romans, that the Gentiles knew God, but glorified Him not as God, and liked not to retain him in their knowledge; and that the Gentiles as well as the Jews, if they sought for glory, and honour, and immortality, would obtain eternal life ; while the Jews as well as the Gentiles, if they were contentious and obeyed not the truth but obeyed unrighteous- ness, would have tribulation and wTrath, — far from containing a puzzle, which it required critical ingenuity to surmount, appeared to him the simple announcement of a truth with which all the rest of Scripture was in agreement. II. But how was the condition of men affected by the appear- ance of our Lord in human flesh 1 This was a question which probably did not at first present itself to Fox ; but by degrees he and the other Quakers found an answer to it. Men having fore- gone their spiritual privileges and given themselves up to the flesh, were not indeed forsaken by their heavenly Teacher, but they could not be treated as spiritual. By outward emblems and images, the elements of the world, they were trained : to the Jews was given a direct intimation of the nature and purpose of their discipline ; OF THE QUAKERS. 53 the Gentiles, through a thicker film of sense, and with fewer helps to penetrate it, might yet, if they would, discover their invisible guide. But these were preparations for a clearer day. Christ, the Living Word, the Universal Light, appeared to men, and showed in his own person what processes He was carrying on in the hearts of all ; subduing the flesh, keeping Himself separate from the world, submitting to death. This manifestation was the signal for the commencement of a new dispensation ; sensible emblems were no longer to intercept man's view of his Lord ; national distinctions were to be abolished ; men might be treated as belonging to a higher state than that which they lost in Adam; they might attain a perfection which did not exist in Adam. The Scriptural testimonies to this doctrine seemed to them most numerous. Stripped of the fantastical covering in which they were sometimes enveloped, few readers will think that they re- ceived a forced or unnatural construction. The announcement by the Prophets of a dispensation which should have these two cha- racteristics above all others — spirituality and universality ; the evident annulling, in the sermon on the Mount, of rules and maxims which had been previously current and the substitution of a spiritual principle for them ; our Lord's constant declaration that He came to establish a kingdom, and that that kingdom was to be within us; the announcement of the Evangelists that his parables were the discovery of mysteries which had been hidden from the foundation of the world ; his own words that He would yet show his disciples more plainly of the Father; the language of the Epistle to the Galatians, affirming that a spiritual covenant had succeeded to the formal Jewish covenant ; the language of the Epistle to the Ephesians, affirming that an economy hidden from ages and generations was then made known to his Holy Apostles by the Spirit ; the exhortations in the Philippians and the Hebrews to press onw7ards to perfection — exhortations evidently grounded upon the new position into which those who were addressed had been brought: these are only specimens of the evidence which every page of the New Testament seemed to the Quakers to con- tain of the doctrine that our Lord came to bring in a universal Light, to establish a perfectly spiritual Kingdom, and to encourage men to seek a perfectly spiritual Life. 54 OBJECTIONS TO III. It is implied, in the very idea of this constitution, that men are brought under a directly divine government or influence. Those who yield themselves to the light, and become members of the spiritual kingdom, recognise this influence in all their acts. They will not move without it ; they will be ready to move anywhere at its bidding. The sacrifice of all personal inclinations, energies, will, in short, self-annihilation in its highest form, is their duty and their privilege ; so they become fit to utter the divine voice, and prompt to perform the divine will. In support of this doctrine the Quakers would plead the words of John the Baptist, announcing the baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire as the great promise of the new covenant ; the ignorance of the Apostles till they received the gift from on high ; the silence and waiting that were enjoined upon them till it arrived ; the whole tenor of the Apostolic history, showing that the first minis- ters of Christ believed themselves to be acting under an immediate inspiration, and to be incapable of acting without it ; the principle so often asserted, and everywhere implied, that the kingdom was to be everlasting, and that those who first witnessed its establish- ment were to be patterns and precedents of all who succeeded them. SECTION II. OBJECTIONS TO THE QUAKER THEOLOGY CONSIDERED. I am far from saying that the early Quakers acknowledged no theological principles except these three. In a sense they admitted most of the doctrines which other men embody in creeds or articles. But these three principles determined that sense ; these had been realized in their minds ; the rest hung loosely about them, and at one time might be heartily recognised, at one time almost rejected? as they seemed to square with the primary truths or to contradict them. These three doctrines, then, may be said to constitute the positive theology of the Quakers ; from these their system has been deduced. Before I inquire what that system is, and how far it is legitimately connected with the principles of which I have spoken I may state in a few words why I cannot join some conspicuous opponents of Quakerism in denouncing these principles — why I THE QUAKER THEOLOGY CONSIDERED. 55 believe them to be either truths or hints of truths which are most vital and important. I. There are three objections usually taken against Fox's doc- trine of the Inward Light or the Indwelling Word. First, it is said to be mystical ; secondly, it is said to be unscriptural ; thirdly it is said to be unsupported by fact, or by any authority, save that of an ignorant mechanic and his credulous disciples. 1. I shall not evade the first charge, by saying that the word mystical may mean any thing, every thing, or nothing; that it may be applied — has been applied — against the most recognised prin- ciples in physics as well as in morals ; that if mystical and myste- rious mean the same thing, all science is mystical. I will at once give the word a sense which may be a legitimate sense, which at all events is a common one, and which I am convinced is an evil one. The tendency to invest certain feelings, consciousnesses, temperaments of individual men with the sacredness which belongs only to such truths as are of universal character, and may be brought to a universal test, is often designated by the name Mys- ticism ; it is unquestionably one to which religious men in all ages have been prone ; and I do not know any records wThich contain more frequent instances of it than those of the early Quakers. But the question is, whether, if this be the definition of mysticism — and I know no definition which distinctly condemns it except this — the doctrine we are considering be not essentially unmystical, nay, whether we might not almost venture to call it emphatically the antagonist principle to mysticism. For surely it disclaims, more vehemently than almost any, exclusive appropriation ; it submits itself more directly than most to a universal test. Fox did not say, " This light is mine ;" he said, " It is yours as much as mine : it is with you ; and in the healthiest, truest, soberest, states of your mind, you know that it is with you." This principle stood out, then, in marked contrast to those peculiar experiences and inter- pretations upon which he often laid so much stress ; attesting its difference from them by the effects which it produced, and obtain- ing at least some sanction in its favour from the circumstance of its being forced upon the conviction of men whose characteristic in- firmities would have led them to an entirely different conclusion. 2. The notion that the doctrine is unscriptural has derived 56 OBJECTIONS TO support, partly from the opinion that Fox and his followers habit- ually disparaged the Scriptures, partly from his own confession that he knew the doctrine before he saw it in the Bible, though after- wards he learnt how to support it from the Bible. How far the general charge against them is true I may consider presently ; that it does not affect this particular case is evident from the appeal which they make, not to a few isolated texts merely, but to the whole tenor and context of the inspired volume in defence of their position. Neither can I see in Fox's account of the mode by which he arrived at an apprehension of this principle any thing different from the statements which are common in writers who are the most opposed to him ; that, after they were spiritually awakened, the Bible, which had been a dead letter to them, seemed to be full of meaning to them, the only wonder being that they had not per- ceived it before — language which I believe is very simple, reason- able, and accordant with the experience of most earnest men, no wise derogatory to the Bible, and not at all incompatible with the belief that the study of it may have been one of the principal in- struments whereby that capacity which makes its words compre- hensible was called forth. And surely no considerations about the course of thought which another man has followed, need hinder us from inquiring whether the views which he takes of a book do throw a light upon it, and render the contents of it more coherent and intelligible. I have stated a few of the reasons which have led others, and, I acknowledge, compel me to believe that the denial of Fox's doctrine makes the scheme, the spirit, and the letter of Scripture alike perplexing. If it were necessary to add further . proofs, I should find them in the violent and tortuous expedients to wThich critics have resorted for the sake, as they profess, of escaping from the extravagances and absurdities of mystical interpretation. When, for instance,* I hear a grave, learned, and (so far as hostility to Socinianism is a title to that name) orthodox interpreter, suggesting that 6 loyog in the first verse of the Gospel of St. John means only 6 XeyofiEvog, (the person talked of — promised,) supporting the gloss by the question of John's dis- ciples, 2v tl 6 tQ%6[itrog ; and treating the two phrases as equiva- lent ; when I find such an opinion as this adopted by respectable * See Note (B). THE QUAKER THEOLOGY CONSIDERED. 57 scholars, as a convenient refuge from mysticism — I am constrained to think that I am not likely to preserve my respect for the letter of the inspired volume more uncorrupted, or my apprehension of what is reasonable in human language more clear, by determining not to believe that the Word of God before He came in the flesh was the light which lightened all men — a principle as much con- firmed to me by the evidence of profane as of Sacred History. 3. I speak of this evidence, for I believe that the third objec- tion to this doctrine is quite as untenable as the other two. It has been said, and I think justly, that if Fox's assertion respecting the light which the heathens possessed were well founded, there would be very clear indications of the fact in the records of their acts and thoughts. Such indications, it is added, would not be contained in a few fine sayings, scattered here and there amidst heaps of evil and offensive matter ; they could not be gathered from the works of a rhetorician like Seneca, who lived after the advent of Christ, and might have availed himself of some Christian notions — they ought to be something different from the mere notions about immor- tality, and an indestructible part of our nature, which have been floating in the minds of civilized and savage men, and which acquired a sort of argumentative consistency, but no practical in- fluence in the minds of the Roman Stoics and Academicians ; they cannot be drawn from the mere denials of the polytheistic creeds into which some of the Greek philosophers were led, and which issued only in an atheistic or at best in a pantheistic theory : even the instance of a man practically, and with some steadiness, recog- nising a standard of right, would not be satisfactory if it should appear that his thoughts, and those of all heathens who preceded or followed him, were moving in directly opposite lines. I fully admit the justice of these maxims, and I take them for my guide when I state the reasons which induce me to think that Fox, though he knew nothing about the men of the old world, was right in the judgment which he formed respecting them. In the best and most recent works* on Greek philosophy its his- tory is divided into the periods before and after Socrates. That this arrangement is the true and natural one, I think every one will admit, who has compared it with the older methods, and has ob- * In that by Ritter for example. 58 OBJECTIONS TO served what light it throws upon the growth and sequence of speculations which had been regarded as independent of each other. Yet there would seem at first sight to be insuperable objections to it : Socrates left no books ; the difficulty of ascertaining which of his disciples reported his opinions most correctly,, what his* opinions were, nay, whether he had any, has been a subject of frequent complaint : all the interest of his doctrine has been said to be con- tained in his life. How is it then possible that he should be a cen- tre to the theories and systems of his countrymen ? The answer seems to me to be this : — Whatever difference there may be in the accounts of him which have been delivered to us, they all testify — the satirical one by the comedian of Athens, as clearly as the narratives of Xenophon and Plato,* — that he saw in the life of man the struggle between two principles, one tending downwards, one upwards; one belonging to the earth, one claim- ing fellowship with something pure and divine. Those who sup- pose him to be a mere ironist or skeptic cannot deny that whatever his words do not mean, they do mean this; those who are most in- clined to reduce his thoughts and those of all other men to a sys- tem, must yet admit that this doctrine lay at the basis of his system, and that it is one which must find a more complete exposition in a man's acts, or in his familiar intercourse with persons of different tempers and pursuits, than it can ever find in a formal treatise. Accordingly, it seems not strange that one observer should be struck chiefly with the efforts which he made, in the discipline of his own mind and in that which he recommended to his scholars, to overcome sensual inclinations, and to raise his spirit, by all means, the traditions and faith of his country among the rest, to higher and purer apprehensions : that another should have been shocked by the tendency, which such attempts to deliver himself and others from the worship of outward things must have had to weaken his and their respect for the gods of his country : that another, of deeper and more earnest meditation, should have perceived, in the conviction which governed his master's life, distinct and personal at it appeared, the hint of a method by which men might be led out of their vagueness, their superstitions, and their unbelief, into the pursuit of permanent truth ; by which also the imperfect hints, * See Note (C). THE QUAKER THEOLOGY CONSIDERED. 59 crude generalizations, and seemingly contradictory discoveries of previous thinkers might be interpreted, quickened, and reconciled. This last notion may easily have occurred to any one who felt how he himself, and noticed how other young men of the day were compelled to acknowledge Socrates as the interpreter of the feel- ings which were at work confusedly within them, and of the ob- jects at which they were blindly aiming. It makes itself good to us by the experiment to which I alluded ; we are able, by taking Socrates as our guide, to understand what the Greeks, for many generations before and after his time, were in different directions pursuing. But if so, we must admit that while the worth and pe- culiarity of the life of Socrates consisted in this, that he aimed steadfastly, of course amidst many inconsistencies, after a pure and invisible good, and sought to overcome the obstacles in himself and in the world which hindered him from apprehending it, this characteristic does not separate him from the thinkers of the old world, or entitle us to view him as a prodigy; but rather enables us to see, what we otherwise should not have seen so clearly, that the like struggle was going forward consciously in every better and truer man — unconsciously, in all. Such, I believe, is the witness which the records of Greek philosophy bear in favour of Fox's doctrine. It may, however, be said that this testimony isn ot complete ; for that whereas Fox uniformly spoke of a personal teacher ot men, the doctrine of Socrates goes no further than to the acknow- ledgment of a search or appetite in man after a supreme good, which need not be personal, or if personal, may not necessarily have originated these desires, or even have taken any interest in them. I believe no one who attends carefully to the language of So- crates, or of his greater pupil, will suppose that he doubted whether the longings and movements of his spirit had a divine source and were subject to a divine impulse or no. His deep conviction that he was under the guidance of an attending demon, the continual reference which he makes to traditional stories, his firm faith in divine interposition and judgments, are proofs that he was not merely seeking to apprehend " the Being," but also acknowledg- ing often, if not habitually, that a Being had first taken cognizance 60 OBJECTIONS TO of him. I admit, however, that the remark has a certain degree of force; I admit that so far as Socrates was simply a philosopher, (in the sublimest sense of that word,) so far he was acting merely as the seeker after what is true and good, not as the receiver of an influence from it. His high merit was, that he acknow- ledged the need of something besides philosophy in order that he might realize the meaning of philosophy ; a very peculiar merit, indeed, setting him and Plato at an immeasurable distance from those who followed, and from most of those who preceded them ; but still, perhaps, the very merit which makes him of such importance as the interpreter of other schools. Be that as it may, there is one fact which is well worthy of notice in reference to this point. So soon as a Jew was able to study and understand the writings of the Greek philosophers, the defect which is complained of was supplied. Philo recognised all the cries of the w7iser heathen afterlight, and wisdom, and truth, as genuine indications of the feel- ings which the writings of the prophets had prepared him to expect would be in all men, and as produced by the teaching and inspira- tion of the Divine Word. So much has been written of late respect- ing the general purpose and character ol his writings, that I need not multiply proofs. A few are given in a note, merely as speci- mens of a tone of thinking which could not have been so habitual in one man, if it had not been adopted by many.* Some modern critics have maintained, that the study of Philo is the proper introduction to the study of the Fathers. I do not mean to discuss the truth or limits of that proposition. The ground of it is unquestionably the discovery of a close resemblance be- tween the language of one class of the Fathers, those who lived in Alexandria before the period of the Arian controversy, and that of Philo respecting the Divine Word.f This resemblance has gen- erally been acknowledged ; any inconvenient inferences from it be- ing avoided, by describing these Fathers in particular, and often the Fathers in general, as the Platonizing doctors, who mingled the pure truths of Christianity with Gentile Philosophy. It is very difficult to encounter such phrases, for this reason, that they are phrases merely. Those Fathers who w7ere brought into immediate contact with the Philosophers told them, as they believed on the * See Note (D). t See Note (E). THE QUAKER THEOLOGY CONSIDERED. 61 authority of Scripture, that the Divine Word had been speaking to the conscience and reason of men in all ages, and by various acts of discipline had been urging them to turn from their idols and seek Him. They affirmed, that whenever any man had ex- hibited any kindly or affectionate feeling, any earnest zeal for truth, this Invisible Guide had inspired him with it. They showed no mercy to the fables of Paganism or to the conceits of philoso- phers ; they merely declared that all error was the forsaking of God's guidance — all sincere and good thoughts the obeying it. The question, whether in using this language theyren dered more honour to mere human wit and judgment, than the persons who attribute to these alone all that was generous and true in the acts or feelings of heathens, I leave to the understandings of my readers : the question whether it is wise or decorous to attack men, whom I may venture, I suppose, without offence, to call pious and venerable, not by showing wherein they contradicted Scripture, but by affixing to them the nickname of Platonizing — I leave to the consciences of those who are in the habit of using such lan- guage. One thing at least is evident, that Fox the shoemaker of the 17th century, was the first person who understood the verses at the beginning of St. John's Gospel in a literal not a metaphor- ical sense. Before I quit this part of my subject, I must take leave to remark, that the kind of charge which is brought against the Fathers who adopted this doctrine shows very clearly whence the main objection to it has been derived. We are told, and some- times in a very solemn manner, to beware how we corrupt the sim- plicity of the Gospel by philosophy and vain deceit. Perhaps the caution may be less applicable to Fox and the Quakers, than to some others ; for he hated Greek and Philosophy most cordial- ly, and his followers have in general retained this part of his opinions with great fidelity ; still, it is an important caution, which those to whom it is offered should receive gratefully, and for which they cannot show their value in any way so effectually as by re- turning it. I believe that any one, who is at the pains to investi- gate the origin of his own opinions, will discover that neither rev- erence for Scripture, nor a great love for simplicity, but precisely the addiction — I must call it, the slavish addiction — to a certain system of philosophy which established itself in this country about 62 OBJECTIONS, ETC. the time of the Revolution, is consciously or unconsciously the cause of this dislike to a principle which has been recognised by the humblest, arid most ignorant men, as well as by the most pro- found. Ever since the position was adopted as a new and sur- prising truth, (which previous thinkers had looked upon as one of the most plausible, most natural, and most degrading forms of error,) that there is no knowledge but that which comes to us through the senses, the idea of a communion between the Divine Word and the heart and conscience and reason of men has been of course rejected. The subject will often recur in the course of our inquiries. II. I need say very little about the two other main articles of the Quaker faith ; first, because the principle of them is contained in that which we have been examining, and secondly, because they are admitted to a certain extent, and under some conditions, by nearly all Christians. The proposition, for instance, that Christ came to establish a spiritual kingdom, a kingdom not of this world, different from the Jewish, in being less .carnal and more spiritual, is constantly proclaimed by those English Dissenters who are moot inclined to denounce Fox's primary tenet as unscriptural and false. Only they think that he pushed this truth to an extreme. They think the kingdom is spiritual, but not quite so spiritual as he fan- cied. So also with reference to the gift of the Spirit and the sub- ordination of man's powers and utterances to his government — they believe that what Fox said was true up to a certain point, but that there is great danger of going beyond that point. I shall have op- portunities of examining the plea for these restrictions hereafter. At present, I will only say that, far from thinking that the Quakers have carried their principles to an excess, I believe all their errors have arisen from the narrow, imperfect and earthly notions which they entertain respecting the nature of a spiritual kingdom, and from the low estimate which they have formed of that transcendent gift which God bestowed upon his creatures when his Holy Spirit came down to dwell among them. My meaning will appear more clearly when I have spoken of the negative articles of Quaker Theology. THE QUAKER SYSTEM. 63 SECTION III. THE QUAKER SYSTEM. 1. It is not difficult to imagine in what way the principle of an inward light must have affected the mind of a man educated as Fox was, provided he were perfectly earnest and sincere. I have spoken of his doctrine — unquestionably it was his doctrine, for it was that which he taught wherever he went ; if I had called it a dogma I should perhaps have described very exactly that which it has be- come to modern Quakers ; but assuredly neither word would have seemed to him the correct one. He had actually discovered a law to which he himself was subject — to which every other man was subject ; would any one tell him that this was a mere notion like those about justification, sanctification, final perseverance, and so forth, which he had heard proclaimed from the pulpits of the day ? The language of the preachers and of the books might be about something which concerned him and all men ; but he had discov- ered the very thing thing itself ; he had a fact to proclaim, not a theory or a system. From the very first, therefore, he began to denounce dogmas and formulas as corrupting and misleading. The young mechanic told the preachers, who had been trained in all the distinctions and divisions, which the Westminister Assembly with such infinite labour and discussion had wrought out, that they knew nothing about the matter they were talking of. Those who had silenced their brethren for their want of spiritual knowledge, were rebuked, and sometimes silenced, (by the voice of a man, not the vote of a trying Committee,) for the self-same sin. But \i for- mulas were evil things, could form s be better? Here were men professing outward acts and ceremonies, and between these and the Christian life they said or signified that there was an intimate con- nection. Strange, almost incredible blindness ! Did not the Chris- tian life consist in following an inward Guide, an invisible Teacher, in eschewing that which was visible and sensible ? What could these outward things have to do with that ? The argument was irresistible. It was a main part of Fox's vocation to bear witness against such idolatries. 64 THE QUAKER SYSTEM. 2. Possibly the thought may sometimes have occurred to one who studied the Old Testament diligently, that forms had been in the olden time the very testimonies for this light, the very means by which the Jews were warned against sensual worship ; that they were converted by those Jews into excuses for the indulgence of a natural idolatry ; but yet that, being God's appointed protests against it, and the means which He had devised for delivering men from .it, they were actually appealed to, from age to age, by the prophets who were raised up to tell the people of their sins ; these prophets being in fact far more diligent observers of the forms than the sensualists and the hypocrites whom they denounced for neglect- ing their meaning. I say, such a thought as this may have glanced into the mind of Fox, and with it the reflection, that possibly a method which was good once might be good still. But he was able to silence such suggestions, or to dismiss them as proceeding from an evil source, by the second doctrine of which I spoke. Till the appearance of Christ, this might be true ; but He came to es- tablish a Spiritual and Universal Dispensation. A spiritual dis- pensation, therefore outward institutions, like that of circumcision, like that of a passover, like that of a priesthood, like that of an outward sacrificial worship, like that of particular sacred seasons, are abolished. But are not Baptism, the Eucharist, a Ministry appointed by imposition of hands, and divided into three permanent orders, Liturgies, the observance of Fasts and Festivals, equally visible and outward ? On what plea then have you substituted one set of ceremonies for another, when you profess to be members of a spiritual kingdom ? Moreover, the dispensation is to be universal as well as spiritual. National distinctions, therefore, are no more ; they belong to the economy of the world. War has been the fruit of these ; under a spiritual and universal dispensation, war is a sin. Nations have always, the Jewish nation as much as the rest, invoked God as the witness of their ordinary transactions — Oaths are forbidden under the new dispensation. Nations have generally made a provision for the ministers of religion, and regarded them as parts of the com- monwealth. Such arrangements are altogether inconsistent with a spiritual and universal dispensation. 3. As the Quakers turned away with disgust from all confes- THE QUAKER SYSTEM. 65 sions whatsoever, it was not likely they would distinguish between the dogmatic articles which were drawn up in later ages of the Church, and the creeds which had been adopted in its infancy. At all events, even the simplest of these creeds was objectionable to them, because it directs our thoughts to the outward acts and events of our Lord's life upon earth, rather than to his presence in the heart. It was a more difficult question how they should regard the Scriptures. These recorded actual events, and appeared to have an outward character. Yet the Bible was the only book of which Fox and several of his brethren knew any thing. In it he had found the strongest confirmation of all that he believed. The language, therefore, of the Quakers became more tinctured with the phrase- ology of Scripture than that of any sect; while, nevertheless, they described it in language which the members of no other sect would have ventured to use. The reading of it was said to be rather a luxury than necessity to the believer, and nothing wTas more im- portant than that he should derive his knowledge from the inward teacher, not from the outward book. No doubt warnings about the danger of trusting in the letter, and still more about the impos- sibility of finding a meaning in it without help of another kind, had been common in the writings of learned doctors before, and even since, the Reformation. But it wTas evident that they acquired a new and much stronger meaning among the Quakers. That meaning was deduced from the doctrine concerning Spiritual In- fluences. He only was a true teacher, who had been called by the inward voice ; he was only teaching rightly at any moment when he was obeying that voice. How then, they argued, can he be at the same time subject to the dominion of a book ? He may read it, and passages in it might be brought to his mind ; but he will only apply them properly when he feels in the position of those who wrote the book \ speaking by the same inspiration which ac- tuated them. The book may be the best of all books, but it must be valuable as an instrument, not strictly as an authority. Such seems to have been their practical conclusion, though the words in which it was expressed might often vary. It seemed to follow still more obviously, from this belief of an immediate spiritual influence, that preparatory studies for the work of the ministry were unlawful and faithless. Studies as such might 5 66 ON THE PRACTICAL WORKING not be positively forbidden, but as the teachers were in some sense the standards of thinking and feeling, it was impossible that a sense of the inexpediency, if not the sinfulness, of any high mental culti- vation should not have diffused itself among the disciples generally. A body asserting the positive doctrines, and having the negative characteristics I have described, gradually formed itself, and as- sumed to itself the name of The Society of Friends. This Society, its members believed, was called into existence to exhibit the features of that kingdom which Christ came into the world to establish. Without wishing to be uncharitable, or denying that there might be good men who did not belong to it, yet they prac- tically looked upon it as the Church of God on earth — the witness against the world. They were, therefore, to keep themselves en- tirely from the habits of this world, from its varying fashions, from its amusements, and, as far as might be, from its phraseology. With these, the so-called Christian body had become defiled ; nay, the very devices by which it had seemed to assert its existence were themselves earthly and sensual, bearing no testimony whatever to the distinction between the light and darkness, to the spirituality and universality of the kingdom, and to the presence of the Spirit. SECTION IV. ON THE PRACTICAL WORKING OF THE QUAKER SYSTEM. We are now to inquire whether this body has fulfilled the office to which its founders believed that it was divinely appointed. Let us see what evidence is admissible in this case, and how much it will prove. Quakers are agreed with us in believing that one of the characteristics of a divine Church is permanency. It was never intended to last only for a generation ; on the contrary, it exists to testify against a changing, capricious world. Neither we then, nor they, are entiled to plead the ordinary law of decay in human bodies, as an excuse for the Church failing to perform the functions to which it has been appointed. Both of us must suppose that this tendency has been foreseen by Him whose handiwork the Church is, and that in some way or other its effects have been counter- acted. The peculiarity of the Quakers is, that they suppose per- OF THE QUAKER SYSTEM. 67 manent institutions, permanent symbols, which man may misinter- pret from time to time, but which continue to testify, in spite of his misinterpretations and against them, are not the remedy or even one of the remedies which has been provided against this danger. The condition of a spiritual body, according to them, is, that it rests in the faith, the purity, the vitality of its individual members. This being the case, it must, I conceive, be admitted, that all confessions by them of degeneracy from an older standard are very startling. They can intimate little less tha,n this, that the constitution or king- dom which God has set up in the world, has been overcome and crushed by the world's kingdom which is opposed to it. Yet such confessions are most numerous in the writings, not of one but of all the different divisions of Quakers in the present day. They take different forms according to the views of the persons who make them ; but in one form or other they may be traced every- where. Still I am far from thinking that such evidence as this, however much it may excite the anxious inquiries of Quakers, could be sufficient of itself to prove, either to them or to us, that the experiment had failed. The indications of that fact should be very palpable ; they should not rest upon the feelings or observa- tions of any particular persons, however impartial or even however prejudiced in favuor of the system, and they should be clearly and obviously connected with the form and order of the Society ; other- wise I think they ought not to be produced, at least for the purpose of disturbing the confidence of any one who still cleaves to it. 1. One such indication must, I think, suggest itself to every thoughtful person. All, said the Quakers, who are not walking in the divine light, who do not recognise the presence and the guidance of an invisible teacher, are of the world. The pure and holy com- pany, the Church, the Society of Friends, must consist of all who are led by the Spirit to perceive their connection with the invisible Guide, and to follow him whithersoever He may lead them. See- ing that there was no body of men answering to this description, such a body must be formed ; and all who did not attach them- selves to it, must in practice be treated as belonging to the world. Thus far all seems easy. One might fancy there was a little ex- clusiveness; that a few persons were treated as aliens, who might possibly be citizens of the household of God ; but this could not 68 ON THE PRACTICAL WORKING be helped. There was need of a palpable distinction between the true men and the false. If the distinction were not perfect, it was at least good so far as it went • and faithful men must expect that the Spirit of God would, in due time, bring all to see that this was the society to which they should belong. But soon a difficulty arose, for wThich the founders of the society seem to have made no provision. Children are born to the members of it. What are these ? Friends or world-citizens ? The consistent answer wrould have been, " They are of the world ; they are not consciously fol- lowing the light ; till they do so, it is a mere dream and contradic- tion to reckon them in the society." But feeling, and, as I believe^ conscience gave a different answer. They said, these must by all means belong to the society ; if not, it is a sin to have been agents in giving them existence. The only resource was to use all pos- sible means for separating these children, outwardly at least, from the surrounding world. The parents would then feel that they had^ done their best, and they would think as little as possible of the falsehood which lay at the root of the whole proceeding. But it is only for a certain time that any falsehood can be hidden. This one is now making itself palpable. The younger Quakers look about, and ask themselves what it means that they are kept from the world 1 If the world means those who do not walk in the light, there is a world within the society as well as without it. Would not their fathers have been right to exclude the idea of con- sanguinity from the society altogether? For it is evident that between the law by which human society is propagated, and the law which governs this body, there is no connecting link. The heavenly kingdom has nothing to do with earthly relationships. Unless the body could be continually recruited by conversions from the ranks of the world, it seems as if it could never escape from the penalty of constantly violating the very distinction for which its presence was meant to be the abiding testimony. 2. But the Quaker Society was to be the witness for the exist- ence of an Universal Kingdom. In this faith Penn went forth and preached to the Indians. He was satisfied that they had in them a sense of right and wrong, that the Word was speaking to them as well as to other men. I believe the results of his very interesting mission show how true the conviction was which encouraged him OF THE QUAKER SYSTEM. 69 to undertake it. But what else do they prove ? Did the settlement of Pennsylvania become the members of a great missionary society ? Did it attract to itself the aboriginal Indians and the English settlers ? It grew up into a colony of prosperous traders, maintain- ing a very creditable position in the states, distinguished by certain badges of dress and manners from the neighbouring people, in- creasing according to the ordinary rate of increase in the popula- tion, indifferent beyond the rest of the sects to missionary enterprises. I speak of America, because it cannot be said that the system has not been fairly tried there. But whether you look at Quakerism in that country in which it flourished by persecution, or in that where it had the greatest opportunities for expansion, I ask what witness has it borne for universality, what signs does it make to prove that it is the universal kingdom which was to be set up on earth ? Perhaps it maybe said that the philanthropy of the Quakers is a testimony to that feeling of fellowship with the whole human race, which their principles of an universal light and an universal king- dom were likely to foster. I am very far indeed from wishing to deny the existence of this philanthropy, or to detract from its merits. I can have no motive to do so, for I inwardly and heartily sub- scribe the doctrine which is supposed, and I think rightly, to be the only ground of sympathy with man as man. I have no doubt that it is that principle, or the tradition of it, which has brought forth whatever has been sound and good in the feelings of the Quakers for their white and black brethren. But the question which we are now considering is — How far is the Quaker system a witness on behalf of that principle ? and to this question, I fancy, the mode in which the benevolence of Quakers, in late years especially, has displayed itself, is a most striking and conclusive answer. For the moment that they began to do any thing besides bearing individual testimonies, the moment they attempted to perform some general, social, organic acts on behalf of their fellow-creatures, that moment they found it necessary to fraternize with the members of other societies. They became members of societies for distributing the Bible, societies for emancipating the negroes, societies for promoting universal peace. Assuredly Fox and Penn would have done no such thing. They would have said : " Our society being raised up 70 ON THE PRACTICAL WORKING and constituted by God Himself to be the witness for what is spi- ritual and universal against that which is earthly and national, is the Bible society, the emancipation society, the peace society ; we know of no other — there can be no other." The notion of uniting with the world for the sake of promoting spiritual objects would have seemed to them most monstrous ; and yet their followers have adopted this method as the only one they know of for carrying out the Quaker principles. 3. Among the benevolent projects of this day, there is none which has interested the Quakers more than the progress of edu- cation ; they have been almost the founders of the British and Foreign School Society, and its greatest supporters. The present is not the opportunity for discussing any point connected with this subject in which I may differ from them. I refer to their exem- plary zeal in reference to it for the purpose of noticing now much it clashes with the Quaker system, so far as that system puts for- ward an assertion of the doctrine of spiritual influences. The Quaker minister speaks only when an immediate perceptible impression determines him that he ought to speak. To prepare for his work, to receive any regular appointment to it, to be paid for it, is incompatible with the spiritual nature of the function. But the Quaker teacher, or the teacher whom the Quaker supports in a school, must have a formal appointment, must prepare regular lessons, must receive a regular salary. It follows either that the spiritual minister is not appointed to educate, or that education is not spiritual. If education be as important as the Society of Friends and as I think that it is, what testimony is borne here to the spiritual economy, or to the spiritual influences which go forth that men may be able to administer that economy ? Education, which is to have so mighty an influence upon society, is to be con- ducted upon principles precisely the reverse of those which are proclaimed to be the only spiritual principles. " But the Quakers," it is said, " have borne a more consistent testimony than others against the habits and maxims of the world." I do not mean, at present, to inquire what precise meaning we ought to attach to this word world, — I take the signification which it bears among religious people generally, and the Society of Friends especially. Now the world, in their sense, though it may OF THE QUAKER SYSTEM. 71 be built upon one common evil principle, assumes many shapes and appearances ; and it must be admitted, I think, that the body which is raised up to protest against it at any particular period, or in any particular locality, ought to bear witness mainly against the form or appearance which is most characteristic of that time or locality. A society which should testify against gladiatorial exhi- bitions in the nineteenth century, or against cannibalism in Europe, might be entitled to the praise of great prudence, but could scarcely allege any strong evidence of a divine vocation. ( The position of the Quakers has been exclusively or almost exclusively in Great Britain and the United States of America during the period between the Civil Wars and the reign of Queen Victoria. I ask any plain person to tell me what he thinks has been the characteristic sin of these two countries during this time especially. That there have been persons, a large body of persons in each, who have been devoting themselves to amusements of one kind or other, and have made them the end of life, I do not doubt ; but assuredly no one, comparing England and America with France or Italy, would affirm that the pursuit of pleasure has been the especial sin of us and our Transatlantic children — least of all, that it has been the especial sin of that part of our respective populations with which the Quakers are brought into contact, and whose evils, therefore, they ought most to have denounced. Again, it is indisputable that a certain number of persons have pursued literature and mental cultivation as the end of life, and have, for the sake of it, over- looked higher and more universal ends. But certainly this has not been our chief infirmity ; other European nations have been far more tempted by it. One deep radical disease has been infecting our two countries, and during the last two centuries has been entering deeper and deeper into our constitution till it has now nearly reached the vitals of both. Will not every one say that it has been money -getting ? How, then, has the Society of Friends borne witness by its habits and constitution against this sin ? It says, indeed, that no portion of the wealth of the body is to be set apart for the support of its ministers j that their subsistence is to be entirely precarious. This may be construed into a proof that money has nothing to do with that which is spiritual. But I con- fess I do not see how this testimony is to act upon the world, when * $ 72 ON THE PRACTICAL WORKING they find that Friends — believing all amusements, and many branches of mental cultivation, to be necessarily evil, to be actually incapable of being sanctified to a good purpose, — believe that the acquisition of wealth is not only a safe and lawful thing, but is to be emphatically, and by the very nature of the community, the business of every one who enters it. A society, the members of which are, to all outward appearance — its ministers as well as others — principally occupied in trade, nay, which till lately had a fear of being occupied in any thing else, is to be the witness against a world, which has for its most characteristic, most irreligious dis- tinction, the worship of mammon. But has the existence of such a body as the Society of Friends had no influence at all in inducing men to believe that the heart and spirit of men are intended to converse with holy and invisible things 1 I hope that it has had this effect. I cannot believe that any system is permitted to exist which is not working some good ; possibly there are minds (out of the Society I mean — of course there must have been many in it) to whom Quakerism has sug- gested thoughts which nothing else would have suggested. But yet it seems to me that the positive witness which it has borne in favour of spirituality is of the most equivocal kind. I am afraid if the majority of Quakers were asked wherein the peculiar spirituality of their body consisted, they would answer — " In our not baptizing, not keeping an outward feast, not offering up pre- pared prayers, not having an outwardly ordained ministry." And unquestionably this a^iswer would express very much the feeling which the sight of such a society communicates to indifferent per- sons who behold it from a distance. A man of the world, who thinks the ordinances of the Church troublesome or unmeaning, observes, perhaps, to himself now and then, that the Quakers con- trive to dispense with these ordinances, and yet are a very religious and thriving people. But at another time he will be equally struck with the observation, that though they have none of these indications, they have others which seem to him not less outward and visible. They have no fixed forms of prayer, but they have a fixed form of dress ; they have rejected sacraments, but they retain a particular kind of language. Surely a man who is inquir- ing with some confusion what spiritual Christianity means, must OF THE QUAKER SYSTEM. 73 be somewhat puzzled when he is told — Those are the marks of a formal earthly body ; these of one essentially spiritual and divine. It may be supposed that these are mere accidents of the Quaker profession, which show what a tendency to formalism there is in the human mind, but which may be laid aside by those who under- stand the true objects of the Society. There cannot be a greater mistake. The younger Quakers are probably very impatient of these restrictions ; but it is not because they have an insight into any essential principles ; on the contrary, indifference to the out- ward badges is very generally accompanied by indifference to the ideas on w^hich Quakerism rests, or by an attachment to them only as far as they are opposed to something else. All the older and more earnest members of the Society maintain, and I believe on the most just and philosophical grounds, that these peculiarities, unimportant as they may seem, cannot be safely abandoned ; that the very existence of Quakerism is involved in their preservation. They assert, it seems to me with equal truth, that every relaxation of the rules which the first Quakers laid down respecting amuse- ments, or literary pursuits, tends to make the existence of the body less intelligible ; nay, tends to a directly immoral result, by exhibiting all restraints upon self-indulgence as hard and unneces- sary burdens, which are to be avoided as far as prudence and the opinions of others will permit. I do not venture to predict how rapid may be the process of decay in a body which exhibits these symptoms. At present Qua- kerism is threatened from without on two sides — on the Evangelical side, and on the Unitarian. Here in England the younger Quakers desire, in general, to be more like those who profess what are called the doctrines of the Reformation ; in America they have been powerfully attracted in the opposite direction. It is quite possible that these feelings may not lead to any great secessions from the Society, besides, those wThich they have caused already. But one or other of these influences will be henceforth predomi- nant ; Quakerism will have less and less a basis of its own. All its grand pretensions are at an end ; its greatest defenders speak of it now not as the Church or Kingdom of God, but as the best of the sects which compose the religious world. Such language can never satisfy those who retain any of the old Quaker spirit. 74 ON THE PRACTICAL WORKING OF THE QUAKER SYSTEM. They must believe that there is a spiritual kingdom somewhere ; if they cannot find it in the Society of Friends, they will look for it in those opposing systems of which I have spoken. Let us inquire, what prospect they have of being rewarded for their search. CHAPTER II. PURE PROTESTANTISM. SECTION L THE LEADING PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. Justification by Faith— Election— The Written Word— Authority of National Sovereigns L The inward struggles of Martin Luther were at least as terri- ble as those of George Fox, and they have left far more remarkable . testimonies of themselves in the history of Europe. For as the character of Quakerism was determined by the conflicts in the mind of the Drayton shoemaker, so the character of the Reforma- tion is interpreted by those which tormented the Monk of Wit- tenburg. In some respects there was a resemblance between them. Any one who reads attentively the first document which Luther put forth against the sale of indulgences, must perceive how deeply and inwardly he had realized the conviction, that he was a two- fold being ; that there was in him that which required to be crush- ed and destroyed ; that there wTas that in him which was meant to enjoy life and peace and freedom. A man could hardly have ar- rived at such a conviction, or at least have been able to express it in such language, who had not experienced much of what Fox de- scribes. But yet the history of their minds was altogether differ- ent ; nay, the contrast is as remarkable as we can expect to find in the lives of two men, both equally sincere and brave. Of a light speaking to his conscience warning him of the evil he had done and of the temptations within and without which were tempting him to forsake it, Luther knew as much as any Quaker could have told him. But the thought of such a light, instead of giving him peace, was the cause of all his tumult and confusion. It spoke to him of a Being of absolute power and wisdom and righteousness, between whom and himself there was no sympathy. It bade him seek, by all means, to be reconciled to that Being, and account all trials and sufferings light, if so be they might but 76 ON THE LEADING PRINCIPLES give a promise, now or hereafter, of such a blessing. But it told him also of a strict, irreversible law, from which there could be no departure, no dispensation ; and the recollection of which made every effort to heal the breach between him and his Maker a new witness to him that it was perpetual. Then came the dream of a possible deliverance from the curse of this law, brought to him in words which he had heard from his infancy, but to which till then he had been unable to attach any meaning. He had been told of a Mediator between the Creator and his creatures ; of his having offered a sacrifice for men ; of their being united or grafted into him ; of their possessing a righteousness in Him which they had • not in themselves. These words, or words like these, had been uttered again and again by doctors and schoolmen whom he had studied. But they had been mixed with the strangest perplexities about cases of conscience ; the effects, kinds, and degrees of re- pentance ; the distinction of mortal and venial sins ; the nature and the mode of justification. And if there were such scholastic obstructions to a man's escape from that which he felt and knew to be a state of evil, there were still some monstrous practical ob- structions which seemed to destroy all intercourse between the soul of man and his deliverer. The sops which were given to the conscience by indulgences, the unfulfilled promises held out to it by penances which really tormented the spirit more than the flesh, all the notions of intervening mediators, beseeching for the re- moval of the curse which had been already borne by Him who alone could bear it, and who alone could fully sympa- thize with the miseries of those for whom He suffered, were so many bandages and fetters upon the human soul ; making it con- tent with the sin that it loved, or hopeless of real deliverance from the sin which it loathed. It was the Bible which set Luther's mind free from the perplexities of the scholastic logic. It was by help of the creeds and sacraments of the Church that he was able to disengage himself from the intricate web of papal inventions. The written word of God seemed to him, from beginning to end, to be witnessing, that a man is justified by faith ; no school phrases being used to express the idea, but every act of affiance in a Divine Person who had revealed Himself to man as the object of his trust and confidence being an exemplification of it. He could OF THE REFORMATION. 77 thus see the meaning of St. Paul's assertion, that Abraham was justified by faith. He trusted in God's promise and word, and that made him a godly and righteous man. All the Psalms, in like manner, were nothing but acts of faith and affiance, where- by a man, crushed down with all kinds of evils, inward and out- ward, rose up and claimed that relation to God which his covenant had given him, and shook off the sins into which he had fallen from forgetting it. Still these, properly speaking, were acts of trust in a Mediator ; they were recognitions of one to whom the suppliant himself was related, who was a bond between him and the absolute God, in whom alone he could dare to call upon Him. Therefore all these were foretastes and anticipations of the justifi- cation which the Son of God made for all who would trust in Him, when, having offered up his body as a sacrifice, he rose again from the dead. To announce this work as accomplished ; to tell men that they became righteous by believing it, and so entering into union with their Lord and Master — this was, Luther believed, the great end of St. Paul's life. He believed also that it was his own appointed office. It was the business of the preacher in every age to tell men this truth simply, using the direct personal language of the Bible, instead of the formal and dogmatic language of the schools. But not the man only was bearing witness of this prin- ciple. The Creed was preaching it, the Sacraments wTere preach- ing it, and the truly instructed doctor would find in these the deepest wisdom, and would labour that they might carry that home prac- tically and in effect to men, which he could only utter in words. This, it seems to me, is Lutheranism according to Luther ; and in this Lutheranism lies the germ of all the doctrines which peculiarly belong to the Reformation, though it might be the work of other minds than his distinctly to evolve them. 2. The principal of these is that which Luther proclaimed with so much vehemence in his controversy with Erasmus, but which yet, it is quite evident, could not have been as habitually present to his mind as it was to that of the Helvetian Reformer, John Cal- vin The idea of an object to which a man might look, and in which he might rest, took precedence of all others in the heart and reason of Luther. Unless, when he were driven to it by some dogma like that of Erasmus, which seemed to him to threaten the 78 ON THE LEADING PRINCIPLES revival of all papal contrivances for the reconciliation of man, he troubled himself little about the origin of those feelings and acts, whereby a man apprehends Him who offers himself to his faith and hope. It is clear, however, not only from this treatise of Luther, but from the very character of his doctrine, that this question must suggest itself, and that it must receive some such solution, as he and Calvin found for it. The idea of an absolute will, with which man must be brought into reconciliation by a Mediator, lay at the base of all Luther's thoughts. Any man, fixedly meditating upon those thoughts and the results to which they had led, must have asked himself: But who devised this whole scheme of reconcilia- tion and redemption ? Who is it that leads men to avail them- selves of it ! Who is it that determines the operations of their minds, and the consequences to which they shall lead ? Such questions had at all times occupied the schools. Augustine, who appeared to have determined them in the same way as Calvin, had ever been regarded as one of their highest oracles. The difference was the same in this case as in the last : the principle that man is to look to God as the direct source of his acts, and thoughts, and purposes, was presented to the faith of men in the real language of Scripture, and not to the understandings of men in the abstract language of the schools. Those who apprehended their relation to Christ were to speak of themselves as the elect people of God, just as Samuel, or David, or the Israelites did, and to believe that they would have been miserable and accursed if God had not elected them. They were not to trouble themselves with questions about the will, or to seek any other reason for their blessedness than that it was God's good pleasure to give it them. On the other hand, this belief was to be the conclusive barrier against all impostures of Romish priests, those impostures being efforts to persuade men that they must seek by their own efforts to win a position, which ought to be received as the gift of God. This, I think, is the Calvinistic side of Protestantism. To some it may appear that I have given to it, as well as to the doctrine of justification, too little of a scholastic character ; that I have spoken of it too much as something that opposed itself to the logical systems of the previ- ous age, whereas Calvin as well as Melancthon and some of the German Reformers, were remarkable for their devotion to logic. OF THE REFORMATION j 79 Nevertheless, I believe that I am right. How the scholastic tend- encies of the Reformation afterward developed themselves, I may have occasion to explain presently. Here I will only remark that the Reformers who had been trained by the schoolmen would of course preserve many of their characteristics ; that men with a strong bias for dialectics, may often be those who are led to feel most strongly the want of what is practical and popular, and to seek out a practical and popular language; and that, in fact, those who have commented most, either in the way of praise or blame, upon the scholastic qualities which appear in the controversial writings of the Reformers, have yet always contended also that the Reformation it- self was an appeal to the feelings and sympathies of common men, 3. If then the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith be the first, and the doctrine of election, as formerly asserted by Calvin, the second, I think most persons will agree with me in considering a certain peculiar estimate of the Scriptures the third characteristic of Reformation theology. But there are one or two questions con- nected with this point. No one acquainted with the writings of the Reformers would say that they were more scrupulous in their treat- ment of their Canon of Scripture than the doctors who preceded them. Luther's language about the Epistle of St. James and the book of Revelation, though it may have been retracted in his later days, would be conclusive against such an opinion, even if there were nothing similar in the writings of his contemporaries. Neither can it be said that either Luther or Calvin regarded the Bible as a book from which persons without any previous initiation would, as a matter of course, derive light and teaching. They rather looked upon it as a divine witness to men already engaged in a conscious struggle with their evil nature, respecting the character of that struggle, and the means whereby they could obtain deliverance out of it. Such, at least, I conceive was the view most present to the mind of the German Reformer ; the Bible was especially the preacher's book, out of which he was to tell men how those of the same flesh and blood with themselves had fought the battle with the world and the flesh and the devil before them, and what man- ner of strength and help God had vouchsafed them in it. At the same time, it was a fixed and permanent authority, which mounted above all the notions and experiences of particular minds, and en- 80 ON THE LEADING PRINCIPLES abled them, even in defiance of such notions and experiences, to discover solid grounds of peace and comfort. It is manifest then that veneration for the Bible, high place as it held in Luther's mind, was subordinate to his zeal in asserting the doctrine of Justification. He looked upon the Bible mainly as the witness for that doctrine, and because it was such a witness he loved it with all his heart, and would have given up his life that men might in their own lan- guage hear what it said. The same, though in a less degree, must have been true of Calvin; the Bible was the witness to him of the divine Election ; on that account mainly it was precious to him, and no diligence that could be employed in studying and expound- ing it were thrown away. But if the Scripture were valuable as the announcement of one or other of these great ideas or principles, was it not in itself a great idea or principle that there was such a book as a Bible, a book speaking directly to the conscience of men, a fixed and permanent utterance of the divine will ? To some (I should think to Zuinglius) this seemed the cardinal idea of the Re- formation, to which other ideas were subordinate. At all events, there was a body which gradually began to be separated by im- portant peculiarities from the other Reformers ; and of this body, faith in the Scriptures, with a less distinct reference to the princi- ples taught in them, seems to have been the most striking positive characteristic. 4. These three principles seem to me, in the strictest sense, positive principles. They are not the less so because they were brought forth in opposition to certain popular notions and current practices. On the contrary, here lies the very test and proof of their positive character. There were a number of abominations prevalent when Luther appeared, which Romanists not only now but then abhorred. Some of them were corrected or mitigated at the Council of Trent ; some of them disappeared when the infidel temper of Leo and the Roman court of that day gave place to the more earnest spirit of the succeeding popes. But great as this dis- gust may have been, evident as it was that the disgust had reached to the people of the different countries in Christendom, and that a class had arisen in them which was disposed to assert a position independent alike of the hierarchy and of the aristocracy, it was still a question — a very solemn question — with the wiser and better OF THE REFORMATION. 81 men, how far it was possible to remedy, or safe to denounce, even the most crying abuses. The building is tottering ; ought we to touch it under the pretence of repairing it ? This was a question which Sir Thomas More, and other men as good as he, may have asked themselves, and for which they may have found it impossible to find a theoretical answer, though they did practically answer it by sitting still. Were they wrong 1 I would not dare to say so. It seems to me, that looking upon these corruptions merely as the excess of something that was good, they were clearly right. Nay, even if they felt, as I make no doubt they did feel, that the loss of faith was, in some most important sense, the cause of these super- stitions— still more of the contrivances to make them profitable — yet if they could not perceive that there was some great truth hid- den or contradicted by these portions of the popular system, they were evidently committing the great hazard — if we ought not rather to call it the sin — of taking away something which had a certain hold upon the affections of men without giving them any substitute for it. Which argument must have acquired a great con- firmation in the minds of those men who had wisdom and opportu- nity to remark what kind of change had been taking place in the mind of Europe, and what kind of cravings those were which threat- ened the Church. The feeling — I do not belong merely to a great Christendom, I have a distinct individual position, was evidently that which had developed itself in the members of the new class ; which made them eager to grasp at novelties, ready to follow par- ticular guides, but impatient of systematic authority. The wise observers, in some countries, might be able to perceive that this feeling was connected with another, which they could allow to be more wholesome and more worthy of encouragement. The trades- man, German or English, along with his Hussite or Lollardite notions, had a sense of belonging to a particular soil, and speaking a particular language, which was often far less strong in the noble- man. But this conviction interfered as much as the other with submission to Church authority, and with an affection for Church ordinances. It gave rise to strange questionings about the domin- ion of the Roman Bishop, to stories about the spirit wTith which kings and emperors in former days had resisted him, to a dislike of the universal language. Was it not clear then that the age had a 6 82 ON THE LEADING PRINCIPLES violent inclination towards infidelity and irreverence ; that every acknowledgment of an error which had been sanctioned or tolerated by Churchmen, tended to make this inclination irresistible; and that the only duty of men, who wished well to the preservation of society, nay, of truth, was to uphold, as well as they could, the entire system ? It seems to me that the Reformers were led by God's providence to find the only escape which was possible out of this fearful dihnma. They were led to perceive that certain great moral principles, involved in the very idea of a relation between God and his creatures — say rather that the belief in that relation itself — were outraged by the existing Roman system. The abuses of that sys- tem were not excesses ; they were essentially evil ; they had their root in a great denial and unbelief. They set at nought great facts concerning man and concerning God — facts which had been an- nounced by an express revelation from heaven. Here was a stand- ing point ; and I do maintain, and would earnestly press the asser- tion— that Protestantism has a standing point of its own ; that it is not merely condemnatory, merely negative ; and that so far as it keeps within its own proper and appointed province, it denounces and condemns only that which is itself negative, and which sets at nought something that is needful for the life and being of man. To the question, what that something is, and what therefore is the appointed province of Protestantism, I have already indicated what seems to me the true answer. The feeling which was most strongly awake at the time that Luther appeared, was the feeling in each man that he was an individual man, not merely one of a mass. Luther did not create this thought; it was there. He strug- gled with it in himself, and would fain have overcome it ; but it was too strong for him. He was obliged to find some interpreta- tion of it ; he was not at peace till he found one, which told him that the only safe, free, true position of a man, is not a position of rebellion, but of allegiance; a position involving the subjection of the whole soul to a righteous and divine government. The clew which led him out of the perplexities of his own mind, was that which thousands besides him needed ; they received it and rejoiced. To say that he was a minister of sedition, or that he raised up min- isters of sedition, is easy, because it is easy to misrepresent history, OF THE REFORMATION. 83 and to attribute the evil consequences of certain states of mind to those who were God's instruments in preventing them from being universal. But those who look steadily and impartially at the facts, not wishing (and I think I have shown that I have no wish) to re- present them to the disadvantage of those who opposed Protest- antism, will, I believe, be more and more convinced, that the Reform- ers did not call forth the rebellious activity of the period in which they lived, but when it was seeking a refuge in infidelity, taught it to find one in faith. The three principles of which I have spoken contained the re- ligious satisfaction of that sense of an individual position which the men of the sixteenth century were experiencing. 1 have hinted that, closely connected with this, was another — the sense of a dis- tinct national position. The fourth principle of Protestantism was the recognition of this feeling also, as true, and as having a reli- gious basis. The protest against the usurpation of the Bishop of Rome was not mainly grounded upon the idea of its interference with the prerogatives of Christ over the whole Church. I do not say that idea may not have been often put forward by the Reform- ers; I do not say that it may not have frequently dawned upon them as the principle which this temporal authority invaded. But I do not think it was constantly present to their minds, that it was ever fully developed in them, or that when they used language which implied it, that language conveyed precisely the same mean- ing to them which it conveys to us. They may also have alluded, in terms of displeasure or even reprobation, to the assumption by one bishop of an authority over others ; but I cannot persuade myself that this was a sin which would have induced them to reject the papal authority. Their con- tempt of it arose, as they became more and more convinced that that was true and necessary which an infallible wisdom had pro- nounced to be erroneous and mischievous, and, as they observed, how it had interfered with the power and functions of the National Sovereigns. By many links the peculiar theology of the Reform- ation was connected with the assertion of the dignity of this office, and of the national distinctness which it represents ; one is very obvious. The Reformers had resorted to the Scriptures not merely for their authority, but for their practical character. But that 84 OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES practical character is especially exhibited in the Old Testament, and in the Old Testament every truth is brought out in relation to the events of a national history. Their own time interpreted the Scriptures to the Reformers, and the Scriptures in turn interpreted their own time. SECTION II. OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES OP THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED. I have already noticed one primary objection against all these doctrines, one which, according to my judgment, would be fatal to thern ; that they are merely negative — merely the contradiction of that faith which Romanists hold. But there are also particular objections against each of them which it is necessary to examine. 1. One charge which is brought against the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith, belongs especially and characteristically to the Quakers. It is said that justification by faith either means the same thing as the doctrine of the Indwelling Word, or, if it mean something different, that one of them is false. Either (it is con- tended) the light dwelt with men or it did not : if it did, the fol- lowing that light is justification; if it did not, the whole doctrine of Fox (which I have defended) is untenable. Men must be jus- tified by the agreement of their minds with a certain inward prin- ciple, or by certain outward acts done on their behalf. To say that a man is in his right state with himself and before God when he subjects himself to the Indwelling Word, and that a man is justified in consequence of certain acts which Christ performed as his re- presentative, is impossible. Now I readily admit that the temper of mind, which leads a man vehemently to assert one of these doc- trines, is not the same temper of mind which leads him to assert the other; nay, that these tempers are not very often found coexisting in any great strength. The Quaker and the Mystic, (to use that word in an indifferent sense, not in the evil sense which I gave to it in my first chapter,) habitually contemplate a divine presence in the heart ; they associate that presence, very probably, with the life of our Lord ; but if they do so, consciously or unconsciously they OF THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED. 85 affix an import to his acts and words which is different from their obvious historical import. The Lutheran habitually contemplates a Divine Person, having a real distinct life ; rejoices that he enter- ed into ordinary human relations and circumstances ; realizes his own connection with him through those relations and circumstances. Unquestionably any one who has observed himself, and knows how very different were the feelings which at different times of his life have attracted him in these two directions, will not be slow to con- fess that Quakerism and Lutheranism have something in their nature which is even curiously antipathic. But I fancy the same observation will equally incline him to the opinion that each of these doctrines is the complement of the other, and that in spite of their apparent opposition, neither can exist in any real strength if the other be denied. To explain what I mean, let us consider what were the actual wants and anxieties of the men in the old world, who experienced the struggle between the light and darkness of wrhich Fox has spoken. Must not such thoughts as these have been continually present to their minds : — Here are two powers struggling within me, one good, one evil ; sometimes one prevails, sometimes the other ; sometimes the darkness seems about to be scattered, some- times the light seems almost quenched : but I, who am I, in the midst of all this awful struggle? Do I belong to the light, or the darkness ? Of which have I a right to call myself the child now ; of which shall I be the child for ever 1 The con- sciousness of evil, of rebellion against a power continually exerting itself for my good, testifies against me; my belief in the gracious- ness, in the mightiness of the Being who is on my side, speaks in my favour: but then, what awful outward facts seem to corrobo- rate the former conclusion ! All the outward sicknesses, sorrows, troubles of the world, seem to be lifting up their voice to condemn me, — to be proving that my unseen Friend is either not omnipotent, or that his forbearance with my often repeated disobedience will at last have a limit ; — and what is that limit ? May not death at last decide this struggle ? may he not be God's permitted minister, to decide it against me ? These thoughts do not imply the least unbelief in a future state; that was not the anxious question of the heathen, as all their mythology proves : but it was, What shall I 86 OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES be, in that state ? Some ethereal particle in me may mount up and enter into rest, and even be united to the Divine Essence ; — but will it be myself? I cannot believe that I shall die, in the sense in which all the things about me die. Whenever I feel that I am at all, I feel that I am immortal ; I may lose the thought while I am speculating ; lean never lose it while I am acting and living. But this is the point, — shall good or evil, shall light or darkness be that to which I am united, when all the spiritual ener- gies, by which I seem to have asserted my connection with some- thing better than myself, shall be as much crushed by pain and weakness and death, the great consummation of them, as the ener- gies by which I eat, and drink, and walk ? The Jews were taught to experience precisely the same difficulty, only with still greater power and reality, only with a brighter and better hope as to its solution. They felt in themselves this struggle ; but then taking hold of the covenant, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they were able to believe that the righteous Lord who revealed himself to their hearts was indeed their Lord, and would be so for ever and ever ; and coming with the appointed sacrifice, at the appointed time, in the appointed place, to the appointed priest, they were able to believe that that covenant had not been destroyed through their iniquity ; that they still had an inheritance in the King of their nation ; that they should behold his face in righteousness \ and that when his glory was manifested to the whole earth, they should partake in it Yet it was a hope still ; — still the doubt rested upon their minds, and at times would gain a dreadful ascendancy — Is this evil and accursed nature which belongs to me, my ownself ? Are not its evils imputed to me ? Are not they counted a part of me 1 Will not death destroy that nature ; and when he destroys it, shall I be spared 1 These questions must have occupied men, not be- cause they did not possess the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, but because they did possess it;— yea, ac- cording to the degree in which that light was revealed to them, or in which they followed it. Surely some answer was needed to them ; surely it is a mockery to say that the light itself was the answer. If we accept the doctrine of Luther, the answer is clear and intelligible. TheWord was made flesh and dwelt among us ; in this flesh He passed through the conflicts and trials of men j He OF THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED. 87 died a real death ; He brought back a real body from the grave. This was the voice from heaven replying to the voice from earth. The man asks, " What ami; am I to account myself a child of the light or a child of the darkness V9 Christ dying and rising from the dead, declares : " Thy nature is accursed, thy person is justifi- ed ; married to thy evil nature, thou art sinful and under the curse ; claiming thy portion in me, thou art holy, and righteous, and re- deemed." Is this merely the doctrine of an indwelling Word 1 Does it contradict that doctrine ? Or does one prove the necessity and the reality of the other? It is most true, however, as I have said already, that there is one side or aspect of the Lutheran doctrine, to which there is nothing corresponding in the mystical. The outward acts of our Lord in human flesh, considered as assertions of the right which creatures bearing that flesh have to rise above themselves and claim a portion in Him, have been recognised by many an earnest mystic in his later years, as most needful portions of a spiritual economy. But the feeling which was at the root of all others in Luther's mind, that these acts were mediatorial, propitiatory acts, having for their ultimate object the satisfaction of the will of the Father, has been generally received by persons of this temper with coldness, if not with disgust. It should, I think, be distinctly under- stood by them at first — for they must arrive at the discovery sooner or later — that they cannot hope to connect this faith with, or to reduce it under any of the ideas which belong properly to mysticism. If those ideas do include all truth, the Lutheran doctrine is not true, for the very assumption upon which it proceeds, and to which every thing is referred that there is an Absolute Will which is the ground of all things, of all being, life, thought, forms no part of mysticism, however mystics may have adopted or grafted it into their faith. The Divine Word is the only real subject of their me- ditation ; a vague gulf of being beyond they may awfully think of, but they dare not speak of it in the forms of human language, or bring it within the region of personality, or dream of it as the ground of human relations. Now that the mystics have most rea- sonable complaints to make against the systems to which the Lutheran theology has given rise, on this very ground, that they have despoiled the idea of God of its fearfulness and grandeur, and 88 OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES reduced it under human notions and experience, I shall be presently obliged to admit But the question here at issue is — Does or does not evidence, similar to that which compelled us to acknowledge the truth of the mystical idea of an indwelling Word, compel us to acknowledge, that there is a truth beside and beyond this, which involves, under some terms or other, the belief of Mediation, Sacri- fice, Satisfaction ? Supposing, for instance, we attached any value to the discovery, that the doctrine of a Divine Indwelling Word was not merely asserted in certain detached texts of Scripture, but that it imparted a coherency and clearness to the whole course of Scripture history, giving a sense to the word Idolatry, showing how and why that was treated as the sin of mankind, explaining the lives and language of those who kept themselves free from it, — may we not observe a parallel line of proofs bearing just as strongly in favour of these, other principles? Is the Lutheran obliged to depend upon certain words or texts, in order to show that the idea of human Mediation is contained in Scripture 1 Is it not worked into the very tissue of the history which the Scripture contains 1 Is it not involved in the constitution of the Jewish commonwealth, which it treats of ? Can less be said concerning the kindred ideas of Propitiation, Atonement, Sacrifice 1 May it not be more correctly affirmed, that what gives the sense of con- tinuousness and unity to the books of Scripture, written under so many different circumstances, and at such wide intervals of time, is this fact, that lawgivers, psalmists, prophets, are, one and all, according to their various functions, in obedience to their inward promptings, and to meet the necessities of their respective times, gradually drawing out these ideas which were already embodied in the institutions and life of the Jewish nation ? If, again, it seemed to us a remarkable witness in favour of Fox's principle, that one great portion of Gentile records was scarcely intelligible without it ; have we no witness in favour of these principles from another part of those same records ? The philosopher discovered a divine light, or wisdom, which he was to cry after and to follow ; did not the whole body of the people believe that there was an invisible power, which it was to propi- tiate, which it was to reach by mediation, to which it must offer sacrifices 1 Did not the wisest statesmen, even in days when all OF THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED. 89 actual faith had disappeared, still recognise these thoughts as strange and mysterious, which the nation must acknowledge if it were to be a nation, though they might dispense with them or over- look them ? Was philosophy ever able to get above these ideas, or to merge them in that which was peculiarly its own ? Many philosophers laboured hard ; the best of them felt more strongly than all others, that there was in the popular faith upon these matters, that which contradicted truths which seemed to him most sacred ; yet he was the least disposed to attack that faith ; the most inclined to recognise it as something which the philosopher needed so much the more, because he was a philosopher. In this view of the subject he was, as I have hinted before, almost peculiar ; nearly all others wished either to extinguish the existing theology 'by philosophical notions, to translate it into philosophical notions, or to invest philosophy with the mysterious and miraculous character of revealed theology. The records of each experiment are preserved, the more they are studied the better. The fact has survived them all — these ideas in one form or another have been and are the most characteristic and funda- mental ideas of humanity ; the very proofs and witnesses that we constitute a Kind. Explain them as you will or as you can, but remember that an explanation is not the thing. If these ideas be not delusions, there is some reality corresponding to them ; and that reality, could we know it, might be expected to contain the explanation of them, and also of the partial, false, and mischievous notions which may have encompassed them; if they be delusions, it would seem that all humanity must be a delusion ; that there can be no common principles to form the groundwork of it. I cannot think, then, that the mystical objection to the Lutheran doctrine, on whichever side we view it, is a tenable one. ^ 2. Another class of persons, who oppose the doctrine of justifi- cation, as it was stated by Luther, maintain that it exaggerates a mere fact or crisis in the history of individuals, into a fixed and permanent law. " At a certain period," they say, " a man, who has been careless of religion, acquires a conviction of his error. He is sensible that he has been leading a faithless, godless life- He has been acting as if there were no Lord and Saviour whom he was meant to trust and to love. He begins to recognise such a 90 OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES Saviour — to believe in Him. It is unquestionably a new feeling ; the beginning of a different class of feelings from any of which he has hitherto been conscious. It is, therefore, invested by him, and rightly, with great sacredness ; but it is only the first in a series of spiritual acts. His belief, if it be not stunted by the notion that it is all-sufficient, grows into love and good works. And this it might have done if there had been no such sudden discovery as that to which he gives the name of Justification. From his bap- tism upward he might have led a faithful and pure life ; then that baptism would be just as rightly and reasonably called his justifica- tion, as that primary and preliminary act of conscious faith. Lu- ther," they continue, " was led by his own circumstances, or by those of his age, to dwell with particular delight and emphasis upon the transition-mom ent of his spiritual history ; yet even he speaks frequently of baptism, as if that was entitled to the credit of his justification ; it is evident then that there was a confusion in his mind which, though it might not unfit him for an active reformer, certainly- must makes us suspicious of him when he assumed to be the enun- ciator of a great principle. And every thing in his words, and the history of his doctrine, tends to heighten that suspicion. For why did he dwell so much upon a formal release from guilt, and a formal imputation of righteousness ? Surely it is a real deliverance from sin, and a real righteousness that man requires. Give the best form you can to the other notion ; strip it of the fictitious char- acter, in which it must be offensive both to God and man ; and still it can only point to some feeling on our part of a position offered to us, which we may, if we please, realize ; and then to speak of that position as something independent of the realiza- tion, while yet you say that it is a position granted to faith, and that faith is the realizing principle, is to give us shadows for sub- stances, a dream of food to satisfy our hunger. 1 have stated the argument, I hope, fairly, avoiding only the use of one or two favourite phrases,* which have become catch- words, and, I believe, embarass the minds of all, on either side, who resort to them. I at once acknowledge the great plausibility of the statement, the admirable piety of those, who, in former days ♦ Such as " forensic." OF THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED. 91 or of late, have brought it forward, and the difficulty of showing why I think the substance of it to be fallacious, without seeming to reject portions of it which I believe to be both true and important. I think, however, that by at once going to the heart of the ques- tion, we may be able to relieve it of many of its perplexities. Every one must have been struck with these words of St. Paul : " That I may be found in hira, not having my own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is by the faith of Christ ; the righteous- ness, that is, of God by or upon faith," (inl nlctEi). What is remarkable in these words is, of course, their connection. St. Paul is speaking of some very high attainment, some end which was to be the consummation of all his strivings. And this attainment, this end, is what 1 Having an individual righteousness ? No ; but precisely the not having it. The highest perfection this saint and apostle could think of, one which he could not dare to say he had achieved, was the ceasing to be any thing in himself, the acknow- ledgment of his whole moral and spiritual life and being as in another. I do not believe that the excellent men, who argue against the Lutheran doctrine upon the grounds I am considering, have the least difficulty in interpreting this passage. I do not fancy that they wish to explain away its force. On the contrary, I am quite persuaded they would say, " Certainly this is one of the para- doxes of divinity ; but it is a paradox upon which every new fact in our spiritual history throws a new light ; a paradox so involved in the idea of Christianity, nay, in the idea of our own moral con- stitution, that there are few persons who do not frequently justify it by their unconscious expressions, even if they have little apparent insight into its meaning. Every man knows, that just so far as he contemplates self in his acts as an object for gratulation, so far those acts are contradictory, and that just so far as he can renounce self, and look upon his acts as beginning and terminating in an- other, just so far he has fought the great fight of life, and has attained his true state." Such language as this is mcst common in writers who have a strong dislike to Luther. Let us look steadily at it for a moment. It is admitted, that this state of self-denial, in the highest and fullest sense of the words, is the true state of a man ; not a fantastic 92 OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES imaginary state at all; something which every good man is to desire and strive after; and to sorrow because his vanity and pride continually check him in his efforts to reach it. Assuredly then it ought not to be assumed, that there is something necessarily ficti- tious in the idea of abandoning a self-righteousness, and acquiring another righteousness ; there is a sense in which that idea is not only not fictitious, but the very reverse of fictitious ; the deliverance from the perpetual fictions and counterfeits of our selfish nature. Nor, again, can it be maintained, that the doctrine of renouncing our righteousness, and receiving another, does necessarily belong to one stage — the lowest stage — of a man's spiritual progress ; it would seem, that in some sense it appertained to the very highest stage of it. " But then, it is said, this cannot be the Lutheran sense; for that sense is as clearly as language can describe it this — that a sinner, a man pursuing an evil course, does by an act of faith, in the righteousness of another, become a righteous and justified man. No one, not wishing to pervert and confuse things essentially distinct, nay opposite, can identify this assertion with one which evidently relates to the most advanced period of Chris- tian life and experience." Now let it be remembered, that the especial charge against Luther is, that he mistook the phenomena of a certain crisis in our life for a fixed law applicable to the whole of it. He is blamed for attaching so much importance to this doctrine, as if it were the key to the entire meaning of a man's spiritual existence, when in fact it merely describes the first con- scious feeling of such an existence. May we not fairly suggest the thought to the objector, that possibly he may be falling into this very error himself, and mistaking Luther just because he wras free from it ? May there not be a law which is expressly the law of a man's being; complete conformity to which is his perfection; but which, from the first hour of his life to the last, is his law ; which does not depend the least for its reality upon his recognition of it, or his denial of it ; which will judge him at the last day ; and which must not, therefore, be concealed from him at any time, but be announced to him as that against which he is rebelling. May not this law be, must it not be, if St. Paul's words are to be received in their simple sense, the law of union with another, the law of self-renunciation ? Suppose then I see a man pursuing an OF THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED* 93 utterly wrong course — a course of indulgence in the most ordinary sense of the words — have I not right to say to him, This is an evil course ; and if he ask me why, to answer, Because it is a course of selfishness, and because you were not meant, and your conscience tells you you were not meant to be selfish. And if he reply to me, as in nine cases out of ten he will — " But how can I be other- wise ? every man is selfish ; selfishness is our nature, and our necessity ; God made us so, we cannot help it," am I hindered from asserting God's ways against man's blasphemy in some such words as these ? * I care not whether you call selfishness your nature or no ; if it be, your nature is a contradiction and a lie, for it makes you do that which you cannot do without being at war with yourself. If that be your nature, then you are not meant to live according to your nature, but to rise out of it — above it. And there is One who has come to redeem you out of your nature, and to unite you to Himself. In Him you may believe and live ; in yourself you cannot." In saying this, I have preached to this sinful man the Lutheran doctrine of justification. I have told him that there is a state belonging to him, with which he is not living in accordance, but with which he is living at variance. I have said, that union with another is his law ; separation from him, his trans- gression. I have said, that that union is not a natural, but a spiritual one. It is a union which is maintained by faith ; unbelief is the renunciation of it : therefore an anomalous sinful condition. There is a fiction here assuredly ; it is a fiction to have a state and not to enjoy it ; a fiction to possess the conditions of a spiritual being, and to be acting as if these conditions did not exist. But it is the fiction of an evil world ; and I know not how we are to get rid of the fiction but by declaring the fact to which it is opposed. The dream, that because it is announced as a fact it will be at once received as a fact, that there will not be a fierce conflict with the selfish nature before it can be acknowledged at all, and that these struggles will not be repeated every day of a man's pilgrim- age through an evil world, was certainly not Luther's dream. Every page of his writings, like every hour of his life, bears wit- ness to a tremendous struggle. The question which he thought to be all-important, was this — Is the struggle against the too great 94 OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES proneness of the evil heart to believe and trust, or against its reluctance to believe and trust ; against its over-eagerness to cleave to its Lord, or against its passion for a selfish independence? His conviction was, that when he distrusted Christ he was a bad and evil man, with no capacity for doing any right or good act. To trust then must be a duty ; a man could not be just or righteous who did not trust ; so far as he did trust he must be so. If he were asked whether nothing must precede this trust and give a warrant for it, he would have answered : Assuredly God's word and promise must precede ; the declaration, that this state is yours, must be your warrant for claiming it. The words of the Bible generally, the assurance of baptism to you particularly, give you the right to believe. To seek the right in any thing else, in any outward acts or inward feeling of yours, is to commit a contradic- tion ; for these acts and feelings, if they are lawful and right, are acts and feelings which imply trust — are expressions of trust. A man's repetition of his Credo does not give him a right to trust in God's mercy and forgiveness, but if he repeats it, as he should, it is a form of trust and affiance in God. A man's comfortable impressions and feelings are not reasons of confidence ; if they are not mere physical sensations, they are the effects of his resting in his true friend. Faith then, according to him, could not be looked upon as a grace, which we may contemplate and reflect upon in ourselves. By its very nature it is the act of going out of self, the act of entering into union with another from whom all our graces are to be derived. That the power of performing such an act is conferred by God, and is therefore a grace, he of course asserted stoutly ; but it made an immeasurable difference whether the grace was supposed to be given to a man as so much stock which he might call his own, or whether its effect was to induce him to disclaim all property in himself, and to live entirely in Christ. It wTas on this account that he resisted so strongly the argument wrhich the Romanists deduced from the relative excellence of faith and love. Love, they said, is a higher grace than faith, by the testimony of your own St. Paul, and yet you make the grace of faith and not of love the ground of justification. I do not, he would answer, make what you would call the grace of faith the ground of justification. I do not tell a man that he is to ask him- OF THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED. 95 self, how much faith he has, and if he have so much, to call himself justified. What I tell him is precisely that he is not to do this, that this is the very trick which he has been practising upon him- self, while he has been under your teaching. He is not to think or speculate about his faith at all. He is to believe, and by believing, to lose sight of himself and to forget himself. And, therefore, I cannot allow that he is justified by his grace of love, though I admit that to be the highest of all graces. Trust is the beginning of love, the way to love. A being who shows that he cares for me, and in whom all love dwells, proposes himself to me as an object of my trust ; I trust him, and so enter into a knowledge and participation of his love. And that love works in me to will and to do of his good pleasure. I do not say that on all these points Luther may not have fallen into a hundred inconsistencies. Those who search his writings for such inconsistencies will, I doubt not, be amply rewarded for their pains. Those who look in him for a strong, steady current of thought and meaning running through all his perplexities and contradictions, and often made more evident by them, will also, I think, find what they desire. One remark I would venture to make in support of the view which I have taken of his theology. It is certainly a rare case that the character of the doctrine which a man spends his life in proclaiming, should stand out in direct contrast to his own personal character. In nearly all cases one receives some strong impression and colouring from the other. Those who read Luther's history, would certainly not expect to find an exception to this rule in his case ; they would fancy that he must have thrown more of his own personality than another man does into any principle he defended — not less. Now Luther is often condemned as coarse, rude, impatient ; did ever any one affirm that he was not sufficiently plain-spoken and substantial ? Is there not then a rather strong a priori improbability in the notion, that his doctrine, to whatever charges it may be open, is obnoxious to just this one, of being a mere pursuing or fight- ing of shadows ? Might not one be glad to discover some escape from a supposition which, to any ordinary person who is not a theologian, must seem most utterly startling and inex- plicable ? N 96 OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES 3. When I have mentioned one other objection to this principle, I believe I shall have encountered all those by which persons in this day are likely to be perplexed. Many students are at a loss to discover how the doctrine of justification by faith differs from the general doctrine of atonement, which wras as strongly recog- nised, in words at least, by the Romanists as it could be by Luther. We can understand, they say, that many practices may have been sanctioned at that time, which interfered w7ith the full acknowledgment of our Lord's sacrifice. We can suppose that it may have been important to reassert the principle strongly for the purpose of protesting against these abuses. But the doctrine was there ; the Romanists insisted upon faith in it ; what more have we to do 1 If Protestantism have got rid of any mischievous outgrowths of the elder system, let us be thankful ; but why endea- vour to maintain this particular mode of expression which was, to all appearance, adopted for a temporary purpose — and has accom- plished that purpose 1 I think that the statement I have given of Luther's doctrine is, to a certain extent, an answer to this difficulty. He did not call upon men to acknowledge either a new doctrine or an old one, to believe either in a certain opinion concerning justification or in a cer- tain opinion concerning the atonement. He called upon them to be- lieve in God the Father Almighty — in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, and in the Holy Ghost. — He said again and again, that the Credo was justification. He told men that union with Christ was deliverance from sin and condemnation \ that that union was claimed and maintained by faith ; that faith was therefore justifi- cation. Such an assertion wTas true or false. If it were true, it cannot have ceased to be true ; all the circumstances and occasions which called it forth may have passed away ; but the law which it proclaimed must be as much a law for us as it was for those to whom Tetzel sold his indulgences. And so far from thinking, as those who make this objection seem to think, that we of this day can afford to substitute faith in a certain notion or dogma, for faith in a living person, though the men of the 16th century could not, I rather fancy that this is a temptation to which we have yielded more than even the Romanist did, and from which we al- most need a second Reformation to deliver us. OF THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED. 97 But I do not believe that the objection really' means this ; I sus- pect that this difficulty about the relation between the idea of justification and the idea of atonement is a very important difficulty indeed ; that it is one which did not force itself upon the con- sideration of the Reformers; that it is one which does force itself upon our consideration ; that people are taking various methods of expressing it to themselves — some of them being very confused methods tending to increase rather than to remove our perplexity, and to rob us of distinctions and principles which with great diffi- culty have been established for us ; but that it must be earnestly considered, and will receive some practical resolution — a very mis- chievous if not a very satisfactory one. — The question is this. Can this doctrine of justification, if it retain its Lutheran meaning, if it be the assertion of a man's personal position and personal duty, if it do not degenerate into the most lifeless of all formulas — as- sume the position which it does assume in a great part of our Pro- testant divinity ? Can it be put forward as the truth which lies at the foundation of the Christian Church? Does this view honour the docrine, or only kiss it, in order to kill ? This is a question which we shall have to consider when we inquire into the Pro- testant systems, and their practical workings. Perhaps the reader may be the less unwilling to enter with me upon the examination, if he perceive, as I hope by this time he does, that it is as much my desire as it can be his, to assert the principle in its integrity and fulness. II. 1. It is evident that the mystics, who oppose themselves mainly to that side of the doctrine of justification which connects it with the idea of the Divine Will, must dislike to see that idea so prominently exhibited as it is in the Calvinistical theology. And it is not difficult to understand, from the style of their previous ar- guments, what kind of substitute they would be inclined to offer for the doctrine of Election, as it appears in that theology. " Each man, they say, stands in a certain relation to the light and to the darkness; following the light, and submitting to the Divine Word, he enters into an elect state ; preferring the darkness he becomes reprobate. In the first case he acts according to the purpose of God ; in the second he resists it. But because this is the case, man is not therefore to be spoken of as the author of his own sal- 7 98 OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES ration ; the nature of the act which he performs, proves that he is not so ; it may be more properly called an act of submission than of choice, though it involve choice ; it is the surrender of his own will ; whereas the opposite kind of act is emphatically the asser- tion of his own will, a declaration of independence." I have already recognised so strongly the principle which this statement embodies, that I am not likely to make any exception against it. I receive it as a satisfactory explanation of the practi- cal conditions under which every man acts ; conditions which must remain true, whatever other truth there may be involved in them. The only question is, whether this doctrine, respecting the Divine Word, can set aside, or make unnecessary, the distinct formal belief of a primary, absolute, or original Will ? I have al- ready said that I think it cannot. That belief seems to lie deeper than the one respecting our relation to the Divine Word, and to be the necessary ground of it. Take away that ground, and I cannot see that we retain any acknowledgment of God in himself; that we contemplate Him otherwise than in reference to us, or his opera- tions upon us. The mystical doctrine may explain the position and circumstances of man; but these very circumstances, if the doctrine be true, imply a theology, and that theology it seems to me is the very thing which mysticism wants. 2. Again, the class of persons who complain of the Lutheran doctrine of justification, as leading to the belief Qf a fic- titious righteousness, see in the doctrine of election an arbitrary dispensation with all righteousness. " A person receives eternal life because it is the good pleasure of God that he should receive it. Supposing we grant that the obedience is decreed, as well as the reward of it, yet where is that which is the essence of all obedience, that can be acceptable to a perfect being, Freedom ? You cannot, therefore, make the doctrine reasonable, except by admitting Divine election to be the foresight of human obedi- ence." Unquestionably I would admit that proposition, or any other, were it never so startling, rather than acknowledge that great primary contradiction, that the source of all being is self-\\\l\. But one contradiction is not the escape from another, and assuredly the idea of an obedience in man, which has no ground to rest OF THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED. 99 upon ; which was foreseen by God, but not derived from Him ; of something good, therefore, which cannot be traced ultimately to the Fountain of good ; nay, which exists independently of it, that is to say, under what we are wont to consider the very condition of evil — is a most agonizing contradiction. And what need have we of it ? Only do not suppose the Being whom you worship to be a mere power ; only acknowledge him to be that in reality which you say in words that He is, the essential truth and goodness ; only suppose the absolute will to be a will to good, and how can we imagine that Happiness, Obedience, Freedom, have their origin any where but in Him ; that misery, disobedience, slavery, mean any- thing but revolt and separation from Him ? 3. The last complaint against the doctrine runs parallel with the last against Luther's. Does not the election mean the election of a body ? Has it any thing to do with the election of individuals ? I would make the same answer here which I made in the other case. Every individual man must be in some state or other. Every individual man ought to know to whom he is to ascribe that state in which he is. The Reformers were especially deal- ing with the circumstances of individual men. They meant to explain to whom each individual should attribute his election. But what the true state of each man is ; in what relation each man stands to a body ; whether the election of an individual can be viewed apart from the Election of the Church ; these are questions which are forced upon us at this time, and which it is possible may be resolved in a way in which some of the Reformers and most of their disciples would not have resolved them. HI. 1. The language of the Reformers respecting the Bible was probably more offensive to the Quakers and the mystics gen- erally, than even their doctrines of justification and election. The notion of a book to which men, possessing the Inward Light and guided by the Spirit, must defer as an absolute authority, puzzled and confused them. Nevertheless, they were by no means inclined to deny, that the more they were walking in the Light and sub- mitting to the Spirit, the more sympathy they had with the words of this book, the less they were disposed to cavil at them. In this, therefore, as in the two former cases, they were inclined to trans- late the language of the Reformers into their own, and to 100 ■OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES affirm that in any other sense except that it was false. The spiritual man had a capacity for discerning spiritual truths under the letter of the Scriptures ; to him, therefore, they had a meaning and an exceeding value. But to call them in themselves, as words, as re- cords of facts, divine ; to hold them up, in this character, as objects of reverence, was to turn men's eyes away from the true light, and so far as you could to quench it. The truth of this statement, so far as it describes the faculty which the Scripture addresses, I have already admitted, and have maintained that it is implicitly recognised by those who seem to be most startled by it. That all revelation is to the conscience — the inner man, and that when that conscience is not awake, when that inner man is buried, the revelation is not really made, most persons, under some form of language or other, are ready to con- fess. And that the most consistent and intelligible interpretation of this truth is contained in the doctrine, that man is created for union with the Living Word, and that except in union with Him, 'he is not in a true living state, I at least am most anxious to maintain. But then if this be the state, not for one man but for all men, and if each man, just so far as he enters into his true state, becomes more of a man, and less of a mere individual, does it not seem strange that there should be no instrument through which the mind of the Living Word is expressed to the race, and wrhich therefore overreaches the feelings and judgments of each particular mind, while it imparts to these feelings and judgments clearness, purity, and strength ? Does not the expectation of such an instrument, a certain conviction, that it is necessary and that it will be given, grow up just in proportion as we take in the other idea, and ob- serve how entirely it contradicts the notion that each man is a law to himself? Now supposing there were such an instrument, of what kind must it be ? You say that the same set of facts, words, records, conveys a different meaning to the spiritual and enlight- ened man and to the fleshly ignorant man. Be it so — then what is there to prevent us from believing that the truth which is meant to be conveyed, should be conveyed in facts, records, and words? Why may it not be a spiritual communication, because it is em- bodied in the ordinary forms of human discourse ? Can you imagine how it should be embodied in any other forms ? That you may OF THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED. not be able to conjecture what facts and events would be adequate to make known to man the law of his own being, his relation to God, the character of God, I willingly acknowledge. But suppose you were told that a set of men — a peculiar nation — had been selected as the organs of a divine communication to the nations generally, and that all their circumstances had been contrived for the purpose of fitting them for such a function, would you say there was a jmori improbability that this would be the method adopted by the Lord of man for speaking to his creatures ? would you not feel there was a singular fitness in it ; that there was some difficulty in conjecturing how any other could be equally in accor- dance with the principle which we have acknowledged ? Whence, then, comes the reluctance of the mystic to receive the reformed doctrine on this subject 1 It may be traced, I believe, to the same defect which we have observed in him already. He perceives the conditions under which man exists, the relation in which he stands to a divine guide and teacher, but he does not trace that relation up to its ground in an Originating Will. Stop- ping short of that, he cannot, it seems to me, heartily believe in a Revelation. He thinks of the eye which receives the Light ; he cannot steadily reflect that there was a Light before the eye, and that it called into existence the eye which should behold it. I do not say that he does not implicitly acknowledge this truth. But the explicit acknowledegment of it is that which I believe gave the Reformation all its moral strength and grandeur, and above all, which imparted to the Protestant doctrine respecting the Bible all its meaning. 2. The Quaker complains against this doctrine because it sub- jects the spiritual man to the government of words and letters. A much more popular objection to it is, that it sets particular men, however ill taught and undisciplined, free from all authority but their own. " Interpretations of Scripture have been compiled by a series of wise, learned, holy men ; some of them receiving their lessons immediately from the apostles. Evidently, therefore, there are difficulties, amazing difficulties, about its meaning. Yet the most ignorant mechanic is to be treated as if he could take cog- nizance of it, and attain to a complete understanding of it." Now it should be understood or remembered, that however the 102 OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES doctrine of the Reformers respecting the Scriptures may have be- come identified with the doctrine of private judgment, it did not present itself to them in that form, but in the most dissimilar form imaginable. They expressly proclaimed the Bible to be that book which puts down and humbles private judgments ; which asserts its claim to be heard above them all and in opposition to them all, and which is able to make that claim good. They believed that its words were with power ; that when it spoke, man felt that power, and either submitted to it or consciously rebelled against it. I appeal to any one who has looked at all into the writings of the Reformers, whether this be not the tone which habitually pervades them. Was this notion of theirs absurd or extravagant ? As- suredly it might have been justified — it was justified to the men who lived at what is called the revival of letters — by the most obvious analogies. Was it the fact that the men and women and children in the Greek isles and on the shores of Asia had heard the Homeric songs from the lips of wandering rhapsodists, and had received them into their memories and their hearts ? Was it the fact that in the most cultivated period of Athenian life these same songs were listened to, with less of genuine admiration perhaps, but still with delight and a confession of their strange power 1 Was it the fact that afterwards they became subjects of philoso- phical speculation to Aristotle, but at the self-same moment stirred the spirit of Alexander to the invasion of the East — without any reference to his master's criticisms upon them ? Did English or German schoolboys wait till they had studied Aristotle or Eustathius to feel them — nay in the best sense to understand them — in their first dress or in their own tongue ? What man in his senses will say that there was any arrogance of private interpretation in all this ; that it was the setting up a right to criticise, and not much rather the abandonment of all such right in submission to an in- fluence which could not be resisted 1 Were the Ionian women and children, the Macedonian prince, the English schoolboys, dis- paraging the labours of Aristotle or Eustathius ; were they not affording the best justification of them ? All then that the Reformers said when they claimed the Bible for peasants was this — that if it pleased God to make himself known to his creatures, and if this book contained the records of OF THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED. 103 his revelation, it was not more strange to expect that his power would go forth to carry the meaning of the book home to those for whom it wTas meant, than that the words of a human book should be able to make themselves intelligible ; it was not more necessary that the peasants of Christendom should wrait for a com- mentary before they opened their ears and hearts to receive the wrords of the one book, than that the peasants of Greece should wait for a commentary before they opened their ears and hearts to receive the wrords of the other. This was their notion, which did not, however, require even this process of reasoning for its con- firmation ; seeing that they had evidence before their eyes that the Bible did speak to poor men, and did make itself heard by them, the more in proportion as it was more directly and livingly set before them. I say livingly, for we must not impute to the Re- formers the opinion that the power of the book wrould be felt by the mere reader of it : they attached, as every one knows, an im- portance and sacredness to the office of the preacher which we are apt, and not without reason, if the circumstances of our own day are to regulate our belief, to consider extravagant. 3. There is however another side to this objection. The doubt recurs here, as in the other cases — Is this power promised to indivi- duals or a certain body 1 Are individuals as such to expect that the word of God will reveal itself to their hearts and consciences? And the former answer must be repeated. Unquestionably the Reformers believed that the wrord was to each man, not to a mere mass of men. They believed that the Bible had its peculiar lesson for every one, and not merely its general lesson for the world. But to ascertain how the peculiar lesson and the general lesson bear upon each other, and under what circumstances and condi- tions any given man may hope to profit by either, we must know whether he is in his true state when he is living in a certain body or when he is standing aloof and asserting his independence. This is, as I have said already, a very important question — perhaps the question for us in this day to decide. A kind of help to resolving it may perhaps be obtained from the comparison which I first used in defence of the Reformers. The Homeric poems were sung to Greek women and children. They were received and loved by them because they had Greek sympathies : we receive and love 104 OBJECTIONS TO THE PRINCIPLES them because we, being members of a nation, are able to enter into those sympathies. Whether a set of savages, without any sense of society, could have listened to them with equal rapture, or with any rapture at all, is a point worth considering. But this is merely a hint for reflection ; the subject must receive a more full consideration. IV. I believe it will be more convenient to pass over for the present the objections which are made to the doctrine of the Re- formers, respecting National distinctions and the power of Sove- reigns. Till we have considered many topics which have not yet come under our notice, the force of these objections could not be appreciated ; it would be therefore unfair to attempt a refutation of them. And the omission is of less importance, as we shall find, that the systems to which the Reformation has given birth have been but indirectly affected by this particular tenet. One remark however I must make, which is necessary in order to understand the contrast which I have attempted to exhibit be- tween the Quaker tendency, and that which characterized the Reformers. I said that the assertion of an Absolute Will was the main peculiarity of the latter, the assertion of a relation between the Divine W7ord and his creatures of the former. It might seem that this assertion was scarcely consistent with another which I made, (and which will be at once admitted as true,) that Luther delighted to realize the connection of our Lord with all human circumstances and relations, and that Fox turned away from such contemplations altogether. But a minute's thought will remove the apparent contradiction. The relation between the Heart and Spirit of man and its Divine Teacher, wTas the one which the Quaker perceived : to connect ordinary human relations with this seemed to him impossible ; it was almost profanation. The Re- former, taking his stand upon the ground of the Divine Will, and looking upon the Bible as containing the revelation of that Will, had no such delicate feeling. The common earth was God's crea- tion. Kings, fathers, and husbands had been appointed by Him, and wyere spoken of in his word ; the whole economy of his king- dom had been transacted through their means. The Papists had treated the world as ths devil's world, with their " touch not, taste not, handle not but there was no safety in such abstinence ; the OF THE REFORMATION CONSIDERED. ]05 security was in serving God with a clean heart, and giving Him thanks for his gifts. Such was the Reformation feeling, wherein we must perceive indications of a high truth, which might lead to a deliverance from sensuality or materialism, or might be perverted into them. This was, at all events, the immediate effect of its proclamation. The Teutonic nations, in which family life had always flourished, and in which the King had been able to assert his position as something distinct from that of the premier baron of his realm, and in which there was a tendency towards business and enterprise, became Protestant ; the Latin nations, in which there was a lower standard of domestic and national feeling, but more of the feeling and sympathies which dispose to general social intercourse, with more also, as I think, of a tendency to pure con- templation, continued to call themselves Catholic. SECTION in. PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. While I have maintained that the Protestant principles are in- separably connected, and that all are implicitly contained in the first, I have hinted also that they presented themselves in quite dif- ferent aspects and relations to the different Reformers. Justifica- tion was the central thought in Luther's mind, Election in Calvin's, the Authority of the Scripture in Zuingle's; the Authority of Sovereigns in all the political patrons of Protestantism, and in some of its theological champions, especially here in England. And as these differences indicated the existence of different, nay, opposite, habits of mind in persons who bore the common name of Protestants, (and had a right to that name, not only as being all opposed to Romanism, but as all recognising the positive doctrines which Romanism denied,) so it portended the growth of immediate divi- sions. I. The character of the German Reformation is mainly, but not wholly, expressed in Martin Luther; most students feel, that in order to understand it fully, we must connect with him, at all events, Philip Melancthon. It has been a wonder to some that Luther, 106 PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. whose language against the teachers of the Church, not only in his own time, but in past times, is probably more vehement than that of any other Protestant, should nevertheless have felt so much sympathy with the man who was least disposed to commit any act of separation from the old Church, and should have turned away with dislike from those who were labouring to consolidate a Pro- testant System. The circumstance is undoubtedly very curious, and cannot, I think, be explained merely by the influence which a man of calm character and logical intellect is wont to exercise over one of ardent temperament and practical energy. The truth seems to be this — Luther believed at first, and believed to the end of his life, that the Creed and the Sacraments were the great wit- nesses for justification — if it was not more proper to call them acts of justification. They w^ere such partly because they were acts of affiance in a person ; partly because they, the sacraments at least, were, as he believed, not merely human acts, but acts on the part of God, recognising and adopting those who would receive them. But every thing in the new endeavour to create a Protestant system was drawing men away from this creed and these sacraments. Systematic articles and confessions were beginning to be formed ; justification was again taught scholastically as one of a set of dog- mas ; the very meaning of it was escaping. Now Melancthon probably was scarcely aware of this danger, for he was an Aristo- telian schoolman, and was half disposed to acquiesce in the scho- lastic theories which Luther abhorred. But his dislike of separation led him to the same result. There was something terrible to him in the thought of leaving the old German Church — the Church of his fathers. He would have said, " We have made our protest against the abuses of Romanism ; possibly we have fulfilled our work." And if he were asked, "But what then becomes of the doctrine of justification ?" he would have said, " Has it not been as- serted, in a sense, in the Church at all times 1 The doctors main- tain a justification." For a moment such words may have come with power to Lu- ther's mind ; whether they occurred to himself, or were suggested by his friend, they will have derived strength from some Anabaptist atrocity, or some Zuinglian discourse on the Eucharist. But an infamous proceeding of the Romish court will just then have come PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. 107 to light, or a decree will have gone forth from the emperor making reconciliation impossible. Then such thoughts will have been cast away as the suggestions of a fiend. To assert justification, not a justification, but the one only real justification, was the business of his life. He who did assert this could have no peace with Rome ; he must break all bonds ; the name of Catholic itself must be cast away. There must be an Evangelical Church ; a Church witness- ing for justification by faith, though all Christendom witnessed against it ; Germany is to be the seat of such a Church. But it shall not be built upon a mere notion. The Sacraments shall be the great constituents of it. Baptism shall declare to its members their spiritual citizenship. They shall not regard the Eucharist merely as a feast, at which they are to express their own faith and love. The consecrated elements shall not be spoken of as if they were made something by the receiver ; they are something in them- selves; they are consubstantiated with the Divine Presence. This is the Lutheran system, and of this the Evangelical Church of Germany professes to be the great Conservatrix. II. It is evident from these remarks, that though the leading Protestant doctrine was meant to be embodied in Lutheranism, we must look for the purely Protestant system to Calvinism. It is not necessary to suppose that Calvin, from the first moment that he began to bear witness against Romanism, contemplated a separation from the old Church. Such a notion would be contrary to all that we know of Ecclesiastical History, and of the lives of those who acted in it. But the idea of an Ecclesia, consisting of individuals taken out of the world by divine Election, was the one which was con- tinually present to his mind, and which gradually subordinated every other to itself. As all the appearances and conditions of the so-called Church outraged in Calvin's apprehension this idea, it must embody itself somewhere else. No self-willed act for the construction of a new body of faithful men might be justifiable. But the circumstances of the time seemed to point out the will and purpose of God ; and his position as to Geneva enabled him to carry out that purpose, by planting the seed of a divine society. '1 hat this society should, except in its acknowledgment of a pope, correspond to that which Calvin did not deny had been once established by God, though it had fallen into so great corruption, 108 PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. would at first have been his wish ; that it should feel itself to have some links of connection with that old stock might be well on some accounts, though on others, dangerous. But the main point was, that it should bear witness to the idea of a distinct election. The question, therefore, practically decided itself. The Church was es- sentially a collection of Individuals. Now, an instinct taught Calvin, and his learning helped his instinct — that the existence of Episcopacy involved another idea than this; it was the witness of something besides mere individual association. Episcopacy there- fore was, at all events not necessary ; might it not be on the whole rather a perplexing and unintelligible institution ? In some other points Calvin could use language not very differ- ent from that which had prevailed among the Fathers, and in the Catholic Church. He attached a high importance to Baptism, and a mysterious worth to the Eucharist. Wherein then consisted his difference from them, and even from Luther ? The Fathers actu- ally regarded the Incarnation — Luther wished to regard it — as the foundation of the Church ; Calvin sought for this foundation in in- dividual election. In this difference all others are included. This idea of election involved the idea of a particular redemption ; the selection of particular men being regarded merely in the light of a Divine decree, logically implied the reprobation of the rest. Thus the Calvinistic system is formed — a system essentially distinct from the Calvinistic principle, but necessarily involved in the constitution of the Calvinian Church. To Geneva, as the nucleus of this sys- tem, the cradle of this Church, men repaired from other lands for teaching and illumination. Thence came John Knox, and planted that which was destined to be the most vigorous shoot from the Helvetian stock. Thence came Englishmen, who had been refu- gees during the Marian persecution, to lay the foundation of our Puritanism, and of the different nonconformist sects which had been derived out of it. Of all these bodies, however much they may dif- fer from each other, the Calvinistical doctrine is the animating principle ; when that is forgotten, or adopted into any other, there ceases to be any meaning in their existence. III. Luther and Calvin entertained a great reverence for the old Creeds of the Church, and some for the teaching of the Fathers. Those in whom reverence for the Scripture took the place of PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. 109 every other feeling, gradually acquired the habit of disparaging both : but this was not their main or distinguishing characteristic. Looking at the written Word of God, as the declaration of God's will, and as his great gift to man, they became impatient of the value which the other Reformers attached to the Sacraments, es- pecially to the Eucharist. Had not this been the great snare of the Romanists 1 had not the belief of sacramental grace made them substitute something else for the great facts of which the Bible is the Record ? It was well, no doubt, as it was commanded, to keep a memorial feast in remembrance of those facts, or of that which is the most transcendent of them. This was to be the sign and bond of church fellowship in all ages ; but the notion that this memorial feast had the virtue which the German, and even the Genevan doctor, was inclined to attribute to it, opened the way to all superstition. These were unquestionably the elements of a peculiar system ; but they had not strength to be the groundwork of a society. The Zuinglians succumbed for a time to the Calvin- ists ; their maxims were not embodied anywhere ; but on that very account they were destined to exercise a more powerful influ- ence over the whole Protestant mass. Another influence of the same kind began to make itself mani- fest within the century which produced the Reformation ; of the same kind in more senses than one, though apparently most unlike the Zuinglian influence, inasmuch as that seemed to contain the very essence of Protestantism, and this to be in direct contradiction to its most remarkable peculiarity. I allude to the doctrines of Arminius and Grotius. These doctrines looked at on one side bore the distinct impress of the Reformation. They were set up in op- position to all mystical notions; they were presented as the plain, popular, practical view of men's duties and responsibilities; they were deduced from texts of Scripture; they were probably felt by their principal propagators to be much more unlike the sacra- mental views of the older Church than the Calvinistic views were. But on the other hand, an acknowledgment of the absolute will of God was believed to be — as we have seen that it was — the re- cognition upon which, not one, but all the Protestant doctrines were grounded. Because Calvinism had put forth this acknow- ledgment more prominently than Lutheranism, Calvinism had be- 110 PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. come almost identical with Protestantism ; it had been believed to be the witness against the self-willed inventions and self-righteous doctrines of the Romanists. It was not strange, then, that the vehement Protestants in England, and elsewhere, should identify Arminianism with Popery, and should believe that the same deci- sive measures were necessary for extirpating one as the other. They were successful in preventing Arminianism from establishing itself into a rival church ; they were quite unsuccessful in prevent- ing it from leavening the minds of those who adopted the Genevan model, and subscribed the Genevan confessions. IV. Our last duty in this section would be to consider how far any of these systems became connected with the government of the nations in which they established themselves — or whether any other has arisen to assert the relation between Protestantism and national life. But the last of those questions is closely connected with the history of the English Church ; the first will be better considered under our next head. SECTION IV. THE PRACTICAL WORKING OF THE PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. I. The character of Luther, like that of most true Teutons, was compounded of hearty joviality and deep sadness. It has often been remarked that the latter element, which was inseparable from his conflicts and his vocation, painfully predominated in his later years, in which one might have hoped there would have been se- renity, if not sunshine. Romanists, and many who are not Roman- ists, have said, that but one inference can be drawn from such a fact; he felt a bitter sense of disappointment in the result of his labours ; if pride had permitted him, he would have confessed that he had rashly and sinfully entered upon them. Such observations are very plausible, and very convincing to those who fancy that a man commences a work, like that to which Luther's life was devot- ed, from some calculations of producing an effect that will redound to his own satisfaction, or profit, or honour, or even to the advantage of the world. He cannot be governed by any such calculations ; no one to whom mankind really owes any great gratitude was PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. Ill ever governed by them. A mighty Power which he must obey, is urging him forward ; at every step there is reluctance ; oftentimes he says to himself, " I will speak no more words in his name ;M he is ashamed and confounded that one like him should pull down and destroy ; but the fire is in his heart and it must come forth from his heart, whatever it consumes. A man who obeys such an impulse will have much sorrow in himself, and will be little understood by others. All he can say in his own defence is, "I know this was to be done, and that I was to do it." Men will tell him that a knave might use the same language ; he will admit it, and will only an- swer, " Whether I be a knave or no, I do not stand before your tri- bunal. My judgment is with the Lord, and my work is with my God." It will be time for the Romanists to say that Luther did not accomplish any thing which he wished to accomplish, or which his time required, when they are able to explain without reference to him the extraordinary change which took place in the morality and energy of their own hierarchy in the generation following. It will be time for Protestants to sneer at Luther, when they have fully ascertained that every step out of the errors which they de- plore in their own systems will not be made most effectually when they understand the spirit in which he acted, and enter into it ; and whether every attempt to set aside the principles which he promul- gated will not establish the evils of those systems, and strengthen them by the addition of others from which they may have been separated. The fact however must not be concealed — Luther did feel that Protestantism in every form, even that form which he had been the means of establishing, would not be an adequate or faithful witness for the truth which he had existed to proclaim. It was not merely that he foresaw a loss of the freshness and fervour by which new converts are wont to be distinguished ; he felt — though he might not be able to find a reason for the feeling which satisfied him — that there was something in the idea of the Evangelical Church which would involve the necessity of great practical contradictions. Experience has justified his fears, and, faithfully used, may perhaps assist us in discovering the ground of them. As soon as a body was expressly established for the purpose of asserting the doctrine of justification by faith, the confessions and 112 PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. formularies which set forth that doctrine began of course to be in the highest esteem. They were the casket which contained the jewel, and the jewel could not be preserved without the casket. It was all very wrell to say, The Creed contains it ; or, as Luther would say, He that can declare, I believe in God the Father, &c. is justi- fied— but the Romanists acknowledge the Creed too, and we are to defend justification against the Romanists. It was still more unsatisfactory to say, The Bible contains the doctrine— the Roman- ists acknowledge the Bible : the Bible, interpreted in a particular way, or not interpreted in another way, might seem to deny it. Consequently, a certain interpretation of the Creed and of the Bible must be guarded and upheld ; these formularies have been carefully worded to include that interpretation, and to exclude every other : to these we must adhere. How to escape from an argument of this kind, none could tell ; it seemed perfectly conclusive. Nevertheless, in a very little time, some men arose who said they had been deceived. You tell us justification is our bond of union ; but it is not so ; — justification is a living thing, the justification of which Luther speaks, and of which St. Paul speaks, means the deliverance of a man's conscience from a burden and a bondage. But the justification of which you speak means a notion or theory about something which you call by this name; which theory is contained in a certain document you call a confession. — This will not do. The Evangelical Church is no Church, it does not deserve its name, if it do not consist of men who are really justified. Moreover the Bible, which is a real book, and speaks of the real justification, must be the book of the Church, and not these formularies — otherwise Protestantism is not Protest- antism. The proclamation went forth ; it was heard and felt to be true ; the living preacher was followed, the dry doctrinalist deserted. But what is the living preacher to do with those who follow him ? They are to form the true Church. But how is it to be ascertained that they do form it ? We must see that they really feel what they profess, that they experience this justification, and do not merely use the name. Well then, there must be another set of tests introduced, and another set of books written to ascertain which of these tests are sound, which fallacious. PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. 113 And now comes another reaction. What ! it is said, and do you call this Lutheranism ? Feelings, experiences — Luther ab- horred the words. All Romanist imposture lurks in them. Luther setup his doctrine of justification as a witness against thern. This proclamation also goes forth. It is seen to be true ; men hearken to it ; the preachers of feeling and experiences are pronounced unsound. Then what can we do but return to the good old way. The confessions regain their esteem. Believing these confessions must mean believing justification ; there is no help for it : we can- not come at any other rule. The records of this series of reactions form the longest and most important chapter in the history of Lutheranism. But there is also another chapter. The ideas of Imputation, Satisfaction, Representation, were, I said, expressed to Luther in living acts of faith and devotion — in the Psalms, in the Creed, and Sacraments. Apart from these, he did not wish to contemplate them, though he might be compelled to do so by the necessities of controversy. But it was the business of his disciples to exhibit all these ideas — being inseparably con- nected with justification — in very precise and accurate expressions. The nature and mode of imputation must be described in proposi- tions ; it must be made clearly and definitely intelligible to every one how the divine Justice was satisfied ; it must be shown what is the amount and measure of sacrifice which was necessary for the deliverance of man from the penalty of sin. If these statements had taken the purely scholastic form which was given to theological propositions before the Reformation — it would have been seen that they were not, at all events, sufficient for men's wants ; that there must be something else, since the Gospel was meant for the poor. But the Reformation had, as we have seen, a peculiarly popular character. Protestantism addressed itself to common men. Even the books that were written for the preachers must have something of this character, as they were to deliver the dogmas which they learnt. Hence these definitions and propositions became strangely mingled with popular illustra- tions. The language of the schools and of the world was blended into a most bewildering mosaic. Precedents and customs from the law-courts, maxims of trade, the vulgarest proverbs of worldly 8 114 PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. men, were all pressed into the service of the sanctuary, and used to explain and defend the acts of Him to whose righteous judg- ment all these customs, and maxims, and proverbs must at last he brought. And because in the dealings of men, what are really deep and true principles, sometimes, through misunderstanding or misapplication to purposes for which they were not intended, come to have the effect of fictions, and to be so regarded, and as fictions are praised and accounted clever by men who know not that any utility they may possess is derived from the original truth that is in them ; these theologians of the semi-scholastic, semi-popular class introduced this habit of thinking into their own study, and taught their disciples to believe it nothing horrible that fictions should be attributed to the God of Truth. I do not say that the temper I have described was more char- acteristic of the Lutheran or Evangelical Church, than of the other Protestants ; but it particularly affected the class of doctrines which that Church especially undertook to defend, and the opposi- tion to it was perhaps more marked in that than elsewhere. This opposition arose from the feeling that these dogmatic teachings had nothing to do with practical morality, nay affected it injuriously. The Reformers had withstood the Popish notion that family duties, national duties, the transactions of common life, were less holy than the services of the cloister ; they had openly or implicitly discouraged the opinion that men who will renounce the ordinary routine of social life may hope to attain a peculiar saintship. Now their language was turned against the doctrines which they had bequeathed. Christianity, it was said, must have for its main object the inculcation of a pure, simple, and practical scheme of Ethics ; it could not be intended to introduce a theory more diffi- cult or embarrassing than that of any Heathen philosopher who had not professed to provide a gospel for the poor and igno- rant ; least of all could it be meant to contain notions respecting the ways, designs, and character of God, which actually contra- dicted all the notions of justice and benevolence, which we recog- nise in ordinary life. As this tone of thinking diffused itself more and more widely, a set of maxims, partly appertaining to outward conduct, partly to the discipline of temper, affections, dispositions, gradually shaped themselves out, and were received as the essential PROTESTANT SYSTEM. 115 part of Christianity. These became the main topics in the discourse of the preacher ; it was the business of the schoolman to show how the Bible might be interpreted, not to mean more, or much more (doctrines being freely interpreted) than these maxims. Some could satisfy themselves more easily than others, that they had succeeded in this task. Those who were critically honest, felt that there were great difficulties — that much of the Bible must be given up in order that the notions of their opponents might not derive a support from it. The precedent had been given by Luther himself ; it was possible to believe that the carrying out of that precedent was the carrying out of the principle of the Reformation. Hence, the commencement of that form of Rationalism, which character- ized the last age. It was a simple, practical, intelligible system, which the way- farer who ran might read, and was demanded by these modern Protestants. But it was found by experiment that the wayfarer who ran did not read the scheme of Christianity which was thus presented to him. The poor men said that it had nothing whatever to do with them. This was a startling practical difficulty which led to results affecting Protestantism in all directions, and not merely the Lutheran form of it. But what I wish the reader to observe here, is, how little the body which took justification by faith as its motto and principle, has been able in any stage of its history, to assert that doctrine ; how constantly the system, whether interpreted by earnest believers or stiff dogmatists, by orthodox doctors or mere moralists, has been laboring to strangle the prin- ciple to which it owes its existence. I cannot touch at present upon the later history of Lutheranism. It belongs to the records of a great struggle, of which our time has witnessed the commencement and may witness the completion, whether the doctrines which the Remormers proclaimed are to be overcome by Romanism, to be merged in Pantheism, or to find for themselves some surer basis than either. II. Some of my remarks upon Luther must of course apply to the Calvinistic bodies ; still they have features of their own, which are well deserving of a separate consideration. We have seen that the idea of an Absolute Will, choosing individual men out of a fallen world, is not merely recognised by these bodies : that it 116 PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. is actually the ground of their existence. What strength there is in that belief, what deep irresistible truth there is in it, has been demonstrated in all ages of the world, and certainly not least in the history of Calvinism. The same divine might — I dare not call it by any other name — which was permitted to go forth with the Islamite armies, when in the sight of Christians who had lost the faith that they were God's chosen and appointed servants, and had sunk into a low slavish unbelief of a spiritual Presence and a spiritual Kingdom, they proclaimed that God's will was still the supreme law, still the actuating spring of all human energy — that same might was given, as I believe, not seldom, to the Covenanters of Scotland and the Puritans of England, when they dared to put their trust in a spiritual arm, and to mock at all human and material weapons which set themselves in opposition to it. God forbid that we should lose the lesson which the record of their victories con- tain, or that we should deny that they were victories given to faith with whatever inconsistencies that faith may have been mingled. But there did lie in the heart of the Mahometan conquerors — mingled with the very truth which gave them all their power, and to their understandings inseparable from it — a dark and des- perate fatalism, which was to prove how unlike it was to this truth, by the difference of its effects ; which was to prove that the system of Mahomet — the system which owed its life to this principle — was a lie, and was charged with a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The history of the Calvinistic bodies ought to show whether any similar fatalism be hid in their creed, and whether they owe it rather to the sound portions of that creed, or to the influence of a surrounding atmosphere which they did not create and would have been glad to exhaust, that they have escaped from the same gloom and helplessness which has succeeded to that early vigour in the soldiers of the Crescent. I. The Calvinists on the Continent, since their first establish- ment, have exhibited little of the energy which I have attributed to their principle. A Dutchman or a Genevan might ask me with a sad smile, to what period in the history of the Reformed Church I could point as affording the least illustration of it. But the conflicts at the Synod of Dort soon brought to light the denying side of the doctrine, and gave it the most evident predominance. PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. 117 The Arminian doctors set up. or seemed to set up, the belief of a will in man against the idea of Election. The Calvinists be^an to set up the idea of the Absoluteness of the Divine Will against the idea of a will in man. Dogmas and determinations came forth — perfectly adequate for the purpose of contradiction, utterly inade- quate for the purpose of assertion. In the next age the Calvinist found that he had got the notion strongly grafted into his creed and rooted in his mind, that he had not a free will ; all that he had lost was the clear conviction that there was a Divine will, and that he had any connection with it. Then began some of the same reactions as in the Lutheran body ; men feeling that they wanted more than logical formulas about Election; declaring that the sense and experience of, a divine election was the condition of it ; this declaration leading to tests for ascertaining who possessed that condition ; such tests again denounced as setting aside the very idea of absolute and unconditional sovereignty. A combination of the spiritual and dogmatic elements is found in the able Dutch and German Commentators, who arose in the early part of the last century ; but they resorted to that same method of illustrating the scheme of God by human precedents, which I have already noticed. The clear acute reasoning temper, which Calvinism especially fosters, detected the inconsistencies of it : the disciples of the Swiss Reformer said that they were meant to be witnesses for simplicity ; and that simplicity in forms ought to be sustained by simplicity of doctrine : the ethical system became universal, and Voltaire wrote to tell D'Alembert, that there were few preachers in Geneva who believed a word of the doctrine which Calvin spent his life in propagating. 2. I have expressed, in as strong language as it is possible to use, my belief that there was a vital and powerful element in the Scotch Kirk and in English Puritanism, which came out in the formation of the one, and in the conflicts of the other with our Royalty and Episcopacy. I am not anxious to qualify the asser- tion by dwelling on all the cruelties and meannesses, the alternate cringing to the state and insolent domination over it, which marked the history of Scotch Presbyterianism in the sixteenth century, or the intolerance and persecution which characterized the English 118 PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. assertors of religious freedom in the seventeenth. These indications may be attributed to the temper of the age, and to the evil lessons which the Calvinistical bodies learnt from our Church. It is more important to observe, how these bodies testified for the principle which called them into existence after the motives to violence had disappeared. The difference in their position makes the experiment a fair one. The Scotch Presbyterian body after the revolution was raised to the dignity of an establishment ; the English sects acquired a recognised position in the country, but, as they boast, were not hampered by any state alliance. Moreover the English Calvinistical sects were several distinct experiments, as to the mode of expressing the principle which was common to them all. To the Presbyterians it seemed that there was one general scheme or platform of polity laid down in Scripture for all the faithful ; the Independent asserted the right of each distinct congregation to be its own lawgiver ; the Anabaptist maintained that each individual ought to be conscious of his own adoption into God's covenant, before he received the sign of it. In the doctrine of this last named sect, we clearly discern the idea which all wTere labouring to embody. Each of the others confessed that it was not a Church, but the shell of a Church, and the effort to become one ; the Ana- baptists believed that if they had not actually solved the problem how to make the piofessing body identical with the elect body, they had at least made the nearest possible approximation to a solution of it. In the period which followed the Revolution we have the most numerous testimonies from their own authorities, that a gradual de- cay of faith and doctrine took place both in England and Scotland. In the latter country it was ascribed by all the older Covenanters to the convention with the government; the English dissenters can only account for it by the general temper of the times. What ren- ovating principle there was in either, to overcome the effects of state influence, or of the world's infidelity, does not appear ; they both alike attribute the restoration of their old doctrine and of some- thing like their former zeal, to an action from without, to an action proceeding from a corrupt body, against which they were each pro- testing. The preaching of Whitfield in Scotland, of Wesley and Whitfield in England, we are told by Presbyterians and dissenters, PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. 119 awakened a spirit which had been long dormant among them. But only one of these Oxford divines was a Calvinist, and his preaching was not at all of the kind which w?as likely to re-create a Calvin- istical system. The quickening influence, however, being once im- parted, these bodies began to require a doctrine. Just at that time an American divine appeared, who united remarkable strength of thought to an earnest spirit, and to what he believed was a profound veneration for the name and creed of Calvin. The Edwards ver- sion of that creed, or some modification of it, became from this time forth the recognised system among English and Scotch Calvinists. Now this system, just so far as it received its complexion from the piety of its author, is unquestionably an assertion of a Divine Will. The strength of Edwards's mind seems to have been derived from his acknowledgment of a distinct Being, dwelling in his own Abso- luteness and Awfulness. But that which gives his system the logi- cal consistency which its disciples so much admire, is his manner of dispensing with a Human Will. Man is a piece of mere mechan- ism, acted upon by a certain set of motives ; he is not a stone, for he has certain affections and sympathies, which are susceptible of out- ward influences ; but the notion that he is capable of being deter- mined from within is utterly repudiated ; the very object of the scheme is to set it aside. But any one who looks at the nature of that power, which the earlier Calvinists put forth in action, or who even attends steadily to their deeper utterances, must perceive, not merely that they did recognise these inward determinations, but that the belief in thum was the life-giving principle of their minds. Whether they could explain the connection philosophically or not, the idea of the Divine Will was inseparably involved with the ener- gy and activity of their own human will; they realized the one in the other. This logical development of the Calvinistical idea has therefore the strange peculiarity, that it stands in the most direct practical contradiction to that idea as it existed in the mind of Cal- vin himself, and of all who sympathized with him. I say practical — for this is no difference about words. In Scotland especially, the working of the new system has been very remarkable. Find any man who has drunk deeply into the spirit of Knox and the old Covenanters, and ask him what manner of doctrine he hears from the Scotch preachers generally (I do not mean of the Robertson 120 PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. school, but of that which is most opposed to it) ; whether it be es- sentially the same with that which he supposes was delivered two centuries ago ? In one form of language or another he will give you to understand that he is sensible of the most violent contrast ; that the modern Calvinism is a compound, to which if John Knox has contributed one part, Thomas Hobbes has contributed three. The consequence is, that a young man going from the house of his fathers to a Scotch university, passes by the most natural steps pos- sible into the philosophical system with which the religious one has been leavened :* he adopts it as the most consistent interpreta- tion of the phenomena of the world ; the idea of any thing spiritual becomes lost in his mind. Afterwards, perhaps, he may take up some one of those philosophical theories by which his countrymen have endeavoured to modify or subvert pure Materialism and Utilita- rianism. But he takes it up as a theory merely ; it has nothing to do with his life; the maxim of the other system reigns there, only the more undisturbed, because it presents itself less formally and ob- trusively. Then if he have a good hardy Scotch understanding, which, though it may dally with abstractions, has great sympathy writh the palpable and the actual, he soon becomes weary of this child's play, and goes forth into the world, to show, by his success- ful management, that he has not lost that sense of an individual im- portance and position which characterized his forefathers, though he may turn it to a different, and wThat he considers a much more profitable, account. I know well what noble minds there are in Scotland, in whom another influence from that which I have describ- ed is at work, and who think, with bitter pain, of the materialism which has crept over their land. But these have no dream that the old faith can be restored. They speak with great reverence of the first age of their Kirk ; they denounce Prelacy and the English * I may probably be encountered by the observation, that Hobbes is, of all authors, the least likely to find favour with a young Scotchman; for that he was a Dogmatist, where- as Hume the proper idol of Scotland was a Skeptic. The criticism I believe is of no great value. No young men are Skeptics in the sense in which Hume was a Skeptic. Their infidelity, as much as their faith, is dogmatic. If they worship Hume, they wor- ship him, because they imagine, however falsely, that he arrived at certain conclusions. They suppose him to have believed and proved that the world is under the dominion of Necessity, not of God— the very principle of Hobbes. It is the point wherein these writers are identical, not that wherein they disagree, which, the youthful philosopher, escaping from a Calvinistical school, takes notice of. 4 PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. l2l Church with vehemence ; they dwell with affectionate tenderness upon the patriarchal life and discipline, which existed in the rural districts of Scotland (among the middle classes) but a short time ago, and which was at all events connected with Presbylerianism ; but they acknowledge that the system is worn out, that it has no longer power to produce energetic action, deep thought, or a sim- ple form of society ; that it flourishes only, while it has something to fight with ; that the symptoms which it exhibits in its decrepi- tude are the consequences of evils and weaknesses which were con- cealed in it, when it was in its best estate — that in that best estate it could not satisfy the wants of which they are conscious. What these wants are, and in what forms they have expressed themselves, are questions belonging to a larger subject, upon which we must presently enter. The present political crisis in the Kirk will be more properly spoken of, when we touch upon its connection with England. The circumstances of the Nonconformists here are still more involved with the circumstances of our own Church ; still, it is almost impos- sible to notice them as illustrations of the history of Calvinism, with- out looking at them on their political side. As theologians they have struck out no path for themselves ; what philosophy they have is derived from Scotland or America. It is therefore precisely as bodies possessing a certain outward organization, that they suggest any important topic for reflection. Of this fact, they are themselves apparently sensible ; they feel more and more that they exist to oppose and destroy certain institutions, which they find established about them. If wTe look at the sects separately, we find that they are confessedly not spiritual bodies; only bodies professing to in- clude within them a certain number of spiritual individuals. We find new congregations arising out of the old, protesting that these have become earthly and corrupt; that the only hope of a pure Church is in fresh division and secession. We find the members of the old societies denouncing these endeavours after an ideal perfec- tion, and maintaining that experience has always confuted them. We find accounts given by their own members of proceedings re- sorted to in the election and deposition of ministers, and the forma- tion of congregations which are, to say the least, what men com- monly call secular. . WTe find these sects engaged in angry contro- 122 PROTESTANT SYSTEMS. versies with each other ; the Pasdobaptists for instance vehemently denouncing the Anabaptists, because they maintain the fearful here- sy that immersion was the earliest mode of initiation into the Chris- tian Church. We find the leaders of these bodies complaining of the great deadness of their congregations, and endeavouring to pro- duce revivals in them, by methods which seem to us of the most mechanical and material character. These are the indications which the different dissenting bodies present, when looked at sepa- rately or in their relations to each other. It is wonderful that they should wish rather to fix our attention on the great united force which they are able to bring into play at public meetings, in vestry rooms, and in newspapers, against that which they name the secu- lar anti-spiritual Church of England ? Unquestionably, if she be secular, or just so far as she is secular, these weapons may prevail against her, for that which is secular may be destroyed by that which is secular: if she be spiritual, they will be as powrerless against her, as secular armour has always proved against a spiritual principle, whether it has come forth in Puritanism, or in any other shape. But this is not the question now before us. It is, whether the evidence furnished by the Reformed Church on the Continent, the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland, and the English Nonconformist sects, tends to confirm or refute the notion that the Calvinistical principle is a sufficient foundation for a universal Church, and the notion that that principle can be safely preserved in a Calvinistic system ? III. As the Zuinglian doctrine was not able to work out a sys- tem or church for itself, and as I have already noticed, while speak- ing of the Lutherans and Calvinists on the Continent, how faith in the Bible, which wTas the strongest element in that doctrine, fared under the protection of those who put it forward as their exclusive profession, I may here close my remarks upon pure Protestantism. Our next duty is to trace the characteristics of that system, of which Zuinglianism has often been called the parent, and in w7hich, as wTe have already seen, all the Protestant systems in the last century showed a tendency to merge. CHAPTER III. UNITARIANISM. Connection of [Tnitarianism, with pure Protestantism, with Natural Philosophy, and with the System of Locke — Its positive side — Its negative side — Final results. I said that the early Quakers acknowledged many of the doc- trines which other Christians acknowledged, but that the sense in which they received them was determined by the nature of those tenets which were specifically theirs. It would be incorrect to apply a precisely similar observation to the Reformers. The doc- trines which were not characteristic of them, but which were professed by their Romanist opponents, and under certain important modifications by the Eastern as well as the Western Church — the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation — stood prominently for- ward in the Protestant confessions. Luther at least looked upon them as the primary doctrines of Christianity, and upon his own great principle as the link which connected them with the distinct personality of each man. But what was not true, or but partially true, of the founders, was emphatically true of the successors — whether they belonged to the spiritual or the dogmatic school. The former uniformly spoke of Election, Justification by faith, the authority of the Writ- ten Word, as the vital, essential truths of Christianity — those which belonged to 'personal religion. When they alluded to the doctrine of the Trinity it was in some such language as this — Every true Christian, they said, must needs recognise a Creator, a Redeemer, and a Sanctifier. These offices wTere necessary to the accomplish- ment of his salvation, and he must attribute them to distinct agents. Hence the necessity of admitting this principle. But the thought would present itself: " these offices are undoubtedly distinct ; but does it follow necessarily that there is a distinction of persons ? May not that notion be a mere effort to explain a diversity of operations, which is capable of being accounted for upon some less difficult hypothesis Vs The suggestion might be repelled by the 124 UNITARIANISM. humble and pious, but bolder spirits would broach it, and tha which was dreaded by the fathers as a temptation, would be wel- comed by the sons as a discovery. The Dogmatic school used a different language. They main- tained that this doctrine was taught in Scripture ; it formed part of the confession, and was just as necessary as any other part. But here another kind of difficulty presented itself. Were the texts alleged in behalf of a doctrine so very strange and incomprehen- sible, adequate to the support of it ? Had not the Romanists done something to keep alive the belief of it by their traditions ? Was it quite consistent with Protestantism to own such help ? These questions were asked, and the answers to them from the doctors of the Evangelical and of the Reformed Churches became daily more faint and incoherent. I have shown already how in the Calvinistical bodies from the first, and in the Lutheran so far as they caught the purely Protest- ant complexion, the idea of the Incarnation was deposed from the place which it had occupied in the older divinity of the Church. The state and constitution of humanity was determined by the fall ; it was only the pure, elect body, w7hich had concern in the Redemp- tion ; that redemption therefore could only be contemplated as a means devised by God for delivering a certain portion of his crea- tures from the law of death, to which the race was subjected. In endeavours to explain the mode of this redemption, and to justify the limitation of it, consisted the divinity of the most purely Pro- testant wrriters, and for this end they resorted to those arguments from the schools, and illustrations from the market-place, of which I spoke in the last chapter. Meantime a great change had been effected in men's notions upon several subjects not obviously theological. The experimental philosophy in physics held out to students the hope of attaining an actual knowledge of things, by delivering them from the impres- sions of the senses, and from the notions which the understanding generalizes out of those impressions. Already this philosophy had borne its noblest fruits, and the Astronomer had asserted a principle as true, which was the most contradictory to sense and to all con- clusions from sense. But if this experimental philosophy wTere the great means of UNITARIAN ISM. 125 leading to such discoveries, did it not follow that Experience was the one source of knowledge ? The conviction became stronger and stronger. " There is no other, there can be no other." Then clever men began to explain how many false schemes and systems had their origin in the notion that there was some other foundation of knowledge than this, and each fresh exposure drew from the enlightened and philosophical world a fresh peal of laughter at the absurdities of their forefathers. There were indeed various thoughtful men in different parts of Europe who were struck with the reflection, that the new doctrine, which seemed to have grown up side by side with the great experiments in natural philosophy, had led to exactly the opposite result. Physical science had ad- vanced, or rather had been found to be possible, just so far as it had set itself free from sensible impressions, and the notions de- duced out of them. Moral science was advancing, it was believed, to its perfection, by acknowledging these impressions and notions as the only standard of truth. But such suggestions were little heeded at the time. It became the first tenet of philosophical orthodoxy, which it was most dangerous to dispute, that sensible experience is the foundation of all belief and of all knowledge. The rise of this philosophical theory is historically connected with that of a great political theory, wThich was also to displace all that had gone before it. In order, it was said, to make men tremble at certain doctrines or notions wThich contradicted their experience, it was necessary to make them tremble also at the authority by which these notions and doctrines were communicated. A mystery was supposed to attach to the origin of society as well as to the origin of knowledge. The one opinion was as fallacious as the other. As knowledge comes in the simplest and most obvious way through eyes and ears, so society grew up in the simplest way by compacts and conventions. Experience was the root of both. Men either felt the miseries of fighting, or dreamed of the blessings of government ; they waived their privilege of being independent units, and either yielded themselves passively to one who was stronger than they, or else entered into stipula- tions with him to rule them till they should find his rule burden- some. All these points must be taken into consideration, if we would 126 UNITARIAN1SM. understand the temper of the last age and the nature of the scheme which obtained so much secret or acknowledged prevalency in it. To suppose that there is nothing positive in Unitarianism, that it derives all the popularity it has ever enjoyed from its denials, is a plausible but a serious mistake. It has been embraced by a num- ber of earnest minds, which never could have had any sympathy with a system merely because it rejected what other men believed. I do not say that they may not have felt a certain delight in that peculiarity of their doctrine ; that the thought of being differ- ent from the vulgar mass may not have been flattering to them, as it is to the evil nature of all men ; and that the positive and nega- tive elements of their minds being confounded by their opponents, may not at last have become hopelessly confounded by themselves. But I do maintain, that something deeper and more solid lay be- neath their not-belief ; that it is very important to know what that was, not only for their sakes but for our own ; not only because the only way of extricating any man from a falsehood is to do justice to his truth ; but because by this course the history of the Church and the plans of God, so far as we may be allowed to examine into them, become far more intelligible. I. From the dogmatic tendencies which distinguished one class of Protestant theologians, and from the disposition to exalt and all but deify the modes and experiences of their own minds which belonged to another, the natural philosopher wras equally free. But if he were a simple, humble man, if he had been trained in his youth to the habit of worship, if he had been taught to connect deep and holy thoughts with the idea of God's presence, his voca- tion would certainly not diminish his awe and reverence. It would call such feelings forth ; nay, he might easily believe that they were first given to him when the marvellous distinctions and in- woven harmonies of creation revealed themselves to him. At all events he was in a new world, a freer world — it would seem a more real world — than that of experiences and notions ; one which bore a more immediate and naked witness of a Divine Being. It was only afterwards that this witness came forth in the guise of arguments and demonstrations (the mind of a scientific man natur- ally enough endeavouring to clothe all thoughts in the forms to which it was habituated, and recognising this idea of a God as one UNITARIANISM. 127 of those certainties to which such forms would.be applicable); but the heart and conscience had spoken first ; the testimony had been received already there where it was needed, before the slow machinery of proofs was constructed to justify the assumption, and the spirit had bowed and worshipped writh a mixed fear and joy at hearing in the world without the echoes of a nearer and a deeper voice. Thus nature spoke to one brought up in a Christian atmosphere, as it was not impossible to suppose it might have spoken to some wondering sage of Greece or India. It seemed to bring the news of a simpler, earlier, more universal faith, which must belong to all, and which all might receive. Other testimonies might be add- ed to this, to confirm it, or to restore it; but no true testimony could set it aside or contradict it. And, therefore, were our Scriptures to be prized to the utter rejection of all Shasters containing the my- thologies of the old or new world. The first evidently were affirm ing and re-establishing this primary testimony ; the others were outraging it. The belief of a being not manifested in outward forms, but manifested in his works ; not divided according to the diversity of his operations, but one, was the belief which lay at the root of all their teaching. And since the universality of Christian- ity had superseded the narrowness of Judaism, it was evident that this belief must be asserted with only greater clearness. It would be strange if the universal religion were more wrapped up in particular notions and opinions, were less expansive, than the ancient, which did, however, testify most strongly against idolatry, as a limitation of the Divine Presence and a division of his essence; strange if the more perfect religion were to throw us back upon the very notions from which the imperfect had succeeded in emancipating all who faithfully received it. By such feelings and arguments did the idea of the unity of God gradually raise itself up in the last age against the faith which had been recognised in Christendom for seventeen centuries. Where lay the force of these feelings and arguments? Surely in the strong inward conviction which they expressed, that the unity of God is a deep, primary truth, which no words can ex- plain away, no experiences of ten thousand minds make unreal, no dogmas of ten thousand generations turn into a nullity; that it has stood its ground and asserted itself in defiance of all such words, 128 TTNITARIANISM. experiences, dogmas; that every thing which is true in the teaching which men have received, has tended to bring it into clearer mani- festation. With this conviction was associated another, less clear- ly brought out, but the stronger perhaps for being latent, that this idea of the unity of God must in some way or other be the ground of all unity among men; that if there be a universal religion, this idea must be at the root of it. With such convictions let no man dare to trifle ; rather let him labour by all means to draw them forth into great strength and clearness, bringing so far as he can all his- tory, and the history of Unitarianism in the last century most espe- cially, to illustrate them. _ 2. A natural philosopher, trained to pious and reverent feelings, free from petty vanity, and keeping himself aloof from vulgar ex- citements, is more likely than most men to have a calm and cheer- ful temperament. His mind is not turned in upon itself; the evil which is there is not constantly reminding him of its presence; his circumstances do not oblige him to contemplate the sins of the world ; he is habitually occupied with objects which are serene and unchangeable. To such a man, the lessons which he has received in his childhood respecting a Being of perfect love and purity, will recur with particular delight; every new fact in nature will bring them home to him ; the whole face of nature will seem to be beaming with them. But then the thought will occur to him of other les- sons received in his childhood, which seemed to contradict these ; lessons respecting justice, and vengeance, and schemes for remov- ing or propitiating wrath. Of a being possessing such attributes, and needing to be approached in such a manner, nature says no- thing. There may be tempests and volcanoes, but all her opera- tions, so far as we are able to penetrate them, are subject to fixed, unchangeable laws ; these will at last be found to obey a law too, and He to whom we refer all creation and all laws, must needs have a mind perfectly at one writh itself, subject to no vicissitudes, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. Here again, see how the pure, original testimony to God's universal love has been dark- ened by human conceits and systems. But that testimony is reas- serted in our Bible, distinguished by this characteristic as much as by its assertion of the divine unity, from all pretended revelations. The heathens are denounced in the Old Testament for setting it UNITARIAN ISM. 129 aside by their cruel inventions ; Jesus Christ, by his words and acts, condemned the Jews because they were not honouring God as the God of mercy and love ; his dispensation is one from which every other idea is banished ; the beloved disciple affirms in words that God is love ; all sacrifices and institutions interfering with that no- tion are expressly abolished. Such were the feelings and argu- ments by which thousands in the 18th century, either openly or secretly, were led to believe, that the idea of Atonement, which had been assumed for seventeen centuries to be the radical idea of Christianity, was a wretched and inconsistent graft upon it from some other stock. Where lay the strength of them ? In the con- viction, it seems to me, that the idea of the love of God is an abso- lute primary idea which cannot be reduced under any other ; which cannot be explained away by any other ; which no records, expe- riences, dogmas, if they have lasted for a thousand generations, can weaken or contradict ; which must be the foundation of all thought, all theology, all human life. With such a conviction I believe it is as dangerous to trifle, as with that respecting the divine unity. 3. I have spoken of the natural philosopher as withdrawn from the observation of the evils in the world around him, and to a great extent of his own, and as disposed, by his circumstances, to a benig- nant view of things. How pleasant to such a man when he came from his closet and his problems, with a mind in a measure fixed and abstracted but not unharmonized, to look round upon his children, and to recollect what he had been told in his nursery, that He who created the sun and moon was their father. How pleasant when he had time to think of all the generations which had looked upon the light of this sun and moon, to believe the same of them. But what jarring thoughts derived from the same nursery would intrude themselves ! All these children of men, all these generations, have undergone a fall \ they are the subjects of a curse ! Of only a few, how few, if the calculations of different divines are to be admitted, is it possible to think, " these are God's children;" all the rset we can only speak of as doomed, and not it would seem by their own sin but by an inevitable necessity. Surely this too must be one of the wretched interpolations into the old and simple faith. Nature teaches no such lesson. The same sunshine and rain for all ; the whole universe claimed for its Creator. And the Bible does mean 9 130 % UNITARIANISM. this, must mean it, whatever divines may assert to the contrary. In some way or other it does reconcile the existence of man with its witness of God's love; in this way it cannot. By such feelings and arguments was the doctrine of a Fall — admitted for seventeen centuries by all Christendom, recognised as the central doctrine of Christian divinity by the Protestant sects — driven out of the hearts of thousands in the eighteenth century. Against these convictions, the orthodox of the day, especially those of the Calvinistical school, opposed many plausible argu- ments. A belief in the unity of God, they said, was no doubt in some way compatible with a belief in the Trinity, but we were not to trouble ourselves with efforts at a reconciliation. The subject was mysterious, profoundly mysterious ; how could we hope for light upon it when there were so many subjects connected with our common life, of which we knew next to nothing ? The Bible re- quired this belief ; numerous texts might be adduced which could be explained upon no other hypothesis ; abandon it, and you must abandon much more, even many of those truths which it had been the peculiar glory of Protestantism to assert. The principles respecting the character of the Divine Being, were disposed of in a similar manner, only with more of logical and me- taphysical subtlety. It was questioned whether we are bound to consider the names given to the attributes of one wholly divine and incomprehensible, as having the same signification with those names when they describe qualities in us; it was said that we must depend wholly on revelation for our knowledge of God, and that if certain acts and feelings were ascribed to Him by the Bible, we must sim- ply acknowledge them, and wait for the explanation of them in a future state; it was maintained, that the attribute of justice was as essential to the perfection of God as that of mercy. To the notions respecting the fall, various answers were given. First, the universality of human depravity was said to be asserted in many passages of Scripture ; secondly, it was attested by experi- ence; thirdly, it was incompatible with the acknowledgment of a natural conscience in man ; fourthly, it was the consequence of a wilful act on the part of the first man ; and fifthly, the visitation of the consequences of that act on his posterity might be defended by many human analogies. UNITARIAN1SM. 131 These arguments were produced in various forms, and with va- rious degrees of ability ; but there were two barriers against them which they were quite powerless to break down. The first was that strong feeling 1 have spoken of already, that these principles con- concerning God and man are great uliimate principles, which can- not be denied without denying every thing that is true and solid, and which must receive the most distinct and solemn acknowledg- ment, unless we would have all the rest of our belief confused and false. To raise any specific argument, any set of texts, against them was propter vitam vivendi perdere cansas — to set aside by reasoning the first witness of reason ; by passages from the Bible, that which was its end and substance. This was the irresistible protection of the Unitarian system in the minds of earnest men who had embraced it. There was another equally secure defence to persons of the most opposite character. It consisted in the doc- trine which Locke had proclaimed — not in a full, clear, steady con- templation of that doctrine, and all its results, for then Hume's conclusion stared them in the face, then it was felt " There is no warrant for acknowledging any being, eternal, immaculate, invisible ; for of no such being do the senses, or experience arising from the senses, furnish an indication" — but in a loose, popular impression about the doctrine — a general feeling spread through society, that experience was in general the only root of knowledge, that you were not to believe much which you could not establish by its evidence. This philosophy, which was commonly recognised by those who assailed Unitarianism, as well as by those who defended it, gave to the arguments of the former the strangest appearance of inconsistency. They were simply affirming something to be re- vealed or made known to man, which according to his nature or constitution, as they understood it, could not be revealed to him. He was to learn and receive something which he could not learn and receive; a condition the Unitarians rightly said which even Papists had not exacted ; for in the days when Popery had made its great demands on men's faith this doctrine of experience was not under- stood. And this demand, they went on to say, you urge upon us at a time when the very idea of a body which can make it has been scattered to the winds. A Catholic Church, if there could be such a thing, a body having divine and mysterious endowments, might 132 UNITARIANISM. with some consistency claim an assent to a mysterious dogma. But your confession of Augsburg has dispersed that dream. You have constituted societies which you may call churches, or what you will, but which do not and cannot pretend that they have any au- thority over the world. They may lay down what canons or max- ims they please for their individual members ; they have the same right of private legislation — of making rules for their own govern- ment, be they ever so absurd, which every other corporation pos- sesses. But the only warrant for impossing an inexplicable creed upon mankind is gone. Each portion of mankind has its own ha- bits, maxims, opinions ; each man his own particular judgments, which he has a right to exercise and defend against the world ; there are a few common principles, admitted alike by saint, by savage, and by sage, but these so far from being identical with those incomprehensible doctrines, are the very reverse of them. Never surely were more plausible opinions promulgated in the world than these ; never any which seemed to carry with them a more natural and less painful demonstration. To divines, they seemed a deliverance from the strangest intellectual confusions ; to easy and comfortable men, the removal of an inexplicable burden from their consciences ; to those who desired to be philosophical, the satisfaction of their longing ; to those who disliked extremes, a convenient refuge from the difficulties of belief, and the dreariness of infidelity. But the more such persons crowded into the ranks of Unitarianism — (not in general by an open renunciation of their for- mer creeds, but by habitually and practically confessing a disbelief in them) — the more were those who had adopted it on the other more positive grounds, startled and confounded. — With deep awe they had acknowledged the Unity of God, as the unfathomable founda- tion of thought, and faith, and being. Now they heard that unity asserted, not as mysterious and unfathomable, but as the escape from mystery. It was a purely material notion ; all the arguments in its favour were deduced from the impossibility and contradiction, which a Trinity presents, when it is contemplated materially. But where, they asked themselves, is unity in matter ? Is not matter infinitely divisible ? Can this be the way of escaping from con- tradictions ? Can this be the way to be rational ? Throwing aside every thing but materialism — dismissing every thought that UNITARIANISM. 133 lies beyond it — we are then called upon to recognise an idea, of which matter affords no realization — scarcely the indication ! Such thoughts brooded in their minds, and led them by very slow pro- cesses, and through bitter conflicts to the conviction ; " if the Unity of God is to be asserted it must be asserted on quite different grounds from those which the so-called Unitarians have chosen, and the true assertion of it may possibly be contained in those creeds which we have rejected." On the popular supporters of Unitarianism such arguments made no impression. They probably received them with indigna- tion. What ! they would have said, Do you suppose we meant a metaphysical unity ? we meant to escape from all subtleties — the Bible is written for simple people. I have hinted already, that this language was unfortunate; they appealed unto Cesar — unto Cesar they must go. They wished to be tried by simple people ; it remained to be seen whether there was that in their scheme, to which the hearts of simple people responded. But, before that experiment was made, the more thoughtful disciples of Unitarianism began to be struck with another strange contradiction between the principles on which it rested, and the system in which they are em- bodied. The Unitarians were the great assertors of the absolute unqualified love of God, in opposition to all mythologies and theo- logies which had preceded. And Unitarianism was the first of all theologies or mythologies, which denied that the Almightly had, in his own person, by some act of condescension and sacrifice, inter- fered to redress the evils and miseries of his creatures ! Every pagan religion had acknowledged the need of an incarnation ; the modern Jew and Mahometan, nominally rejecting it, is yet continu- ally dreaming of it and testifying of its necessity — it was reserved for this religion, to make it the greatest evidence and proof of love in a Divine Being, that He merely pardons those who have filled the world with misery ; that He has never shared in it ; never wrestled with it ; never devised any means, save that of sending a wise teacher, for delivering mankind out of it. Again ; to a man who really cherished with earnest affection the thought, "God is a universal Father, his creatures cannot be merely the subjects of a curse," what a strange reflection it must have been — " And yet according to those doctrines which I hold — 134 UNITAR I ANISM. he is not, and cannot be a Father. The word means nothing. It is a lazy inappropriate synonym of MaJcer, for it is the very glory of my creed to do that which no other has done ; first to deny that there is any human bond between men and God ; secondly, to deny that they have in themselves any capacity, different from that which an animal has, of receiving impulses from God." Once more ; — to purify men of their false notions of morality, to establish religion on the basis of morality, and to reveal the exist- ence of another world than the present, were, according to Unita- rianism, the objects of Christ's appearance in the world, and the objects which the reformers of his doctrine were to keep steadily in sight. For this end they were to desire the removal of all sys- tems and institutions which had kept alive a false faith and a distorted notion of the character of God. " But who," the disap- pointed disciple of this school inquired, " who are the great helpers in this work of reformation ? — who show most longing, that it should be accomplished ? Are they men of deep thought and high devotion, who have been poring in sadness over the condition of society — in solitary chambers crying out, Usque quo, Dornine ? Are they even poor men, not aiming at some high standard, but feeling the burden and oppression of the universe, and believing that God could not have meant so many of his creatures to live and die, with- out comfort or hope ? — or are they not rather men, who for the most part have preserved a quite decent level tone of mind and character ; who belong to the easy, respectable, prosperous classes, and who are actually impatient of any thing which disturbs them with the recollection of an elevated supersensual morality, or of a society based upon self-sacrifice ?" Alas ! he will have said — and is it for this only that I have parted with all the dreams of my childhood ? I thought in my in- fancy that a kingdom of righteousness, peace, joy, had been set up in the world, and that I was to wait and hope, till that kingdom should rule over all. It has been the glorious discovery of my man- hood, that there is no such kingdom here — nothing but a wvrld, in which men are to observe certain rules of behaviour towards each other, to restrain themselves within certain rules of prudence for their own sakes, and to cheer themselves with the prospect of a future world — unknown and undefined — wherein they shall be re- UNITARIANISM. 135 warded if they have not transgressed social decorums, and be for- given if they have. Such a picture of the tendencies and ultimate results of the system, must often have presented itself to those who had embraced it with affection, as a deliverance from the dryness and narrowness of Calvinism, and as a witness for the unity and love of God. But these thoughts would only have stirred powerfully in a few minds if a series of strange movements had not taken place in European society, some of which must have seemed most promising to Unitarians, but which really destroyed the whole credit of their system — depriving it of the patronage of nobles and prelates, and supplying it with no substitute in the sympathies either of the thoughtful or of the poor. I CHAPTER IV. ON THE TENDENCY OF THE RELIGIOUS, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS WHICH HAVE TAKEN PLACE IN PROTESTANT BODIES, SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE LAST CENTURY. SECTION L RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. Methodism — Religious Societies — Search for a Theology. The history of [Methodism, in one of its aspects, belongs to the history of the English Church, and does not therefore form a part of the subject I am now considering. But any considerate reader will admit, that as France has been the centre of the political, and Germany of the philosophical movements of the last hundred years, so England has been the centre of all religious movements which have occurred within the same period. It is not necessary to maintain that the first impulse to them was given in England ; Wesley may have derived much of his teaching frem Zinzendorf, and the different efforts made by him and by others to awaken a more earnest religious feeling, may take chronological precedence of those which our countrymen witnessed ; still the form which they assumed here was so much more determinate, their influence so much more extensive, that if we wish to investigate their character generally, we shall find that our own soil is the proper place for the experiment. It is often said, that the Methodist movement had for its object and its effect the revival of the great principles of the Reformation. There is a sense in which this remark is unquestionably true ; but if that sense be not carefully noticed and defined, we may, I think, fall into great mistakes. The Unitarianism, which formed so large an element in the religious sentiments of the eighteenth century was, as we have seen, essentially impersonal. It was soj RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. 137 even in its best form — for those who felt most deeply and earn- estly the necessity that great and wide principles should be assert- ed respecting the unity and character of God, found no way of connecting these principles with the individual conscience. It came out in direct opposition to Calvinism — as an escape from it, and yet as what seemed a consistent deduction from some of its max- ims ; and the more it advanced towards a mere system of denials, the more it was proclaimed as a deliverance from the narrowness of this theology. Above all, Calvinism had maintained, that a set of individual believers constituted the Church, and were to bear witness against the world ; the Unitarians affirmed that no war- rant existed for any such protest ; that an enlightened age or world was far in advance of those who pretended to be in separation from it ; that the great object which such an enlightened world should propose to itself, was the extinction of the idea of an Ec- clesia, in whatever shape that idea might present itself. It was inevitable that, in any strong revival of religious feel- ing, these notions should be first attacked ; in other words, that the personal interest of men in religion, and the distinction of those wTho felt and acknowledged that interest from those who were indifferent to it, should be asserted. Such convictions are characteristic of any strong awakening in men's consciences ; they may be said to be the awakening. But then the vague phrase — personal interest in religion — cannot long be adequate to describe the feelings of men who have begun to use in it a real sense. One who knows that he is a person requires a personal object — an abstraction cannot satisfy him. The doctrine therefore that a man is justified by faith, and lives by faith in Christ, became a principal element in the Methodist, as it had been in the early Lutheran teaching ; the doctrine that individual believers consti- tute a peculiar Ecclesia grew out of that ; and the Bible began again to be put forth as the poor man's book, which he could re- ceive in its simplicity, though the learned sought to explain it away. But it is remarkable, that the most decided proclamation of these Protestant dogmas grew not out of Methodism itself, but out of a reaction in the minds of those who had been brought, more or less directly, under its influence. The history of the very violent conflicts of the Calvinists under Toplady and Sir Richard Hill 138 RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. against Wesley and Fletcher, is abundant evidence of this fact. It is true that the most powerful of the Methodist preachers, Whit- field, joined the opponents of his master and early coadjutor ; but it is highly probable that he was led to this step by observing how much his own preaching had tended to stir up affections and feelings in men's minds rather than to give them a firm resting- place — and that he sought in the Calvinistical doctrines for a bal- ance and a counteraction to this danger : at all events it is quite certain that though a far greater influence was attributed to him in his lifetime than to Wesley, he left a comparatively insignifi- cant body ol disciples. It must then, I conceive, be admitted, that the revival of these Protestant doctrines, though it might be an in- separable accident, was not the essential distinction of Methodism. There was something in it different from the feelings which worked in the mintls of the Reformers — nay opposite to them, though not therefore incompatible with them. I think every one must admit that Luther and Calvin directed men very much more to the invisible object which men are to contemplate, or to the original source of their faith in the Will of God ; and the Methodists very much more to the operations of a Divine Spirit upon their own minds. This distinction is so ob- vious, and was so clearly brought out in the controversies to which I have alluded, by persons who acknowledged, that they had once adopted the Methodist peculiarity themselves, and who showed clearly that they could not divest themselves of it even while they laboured diligently to speak another language, that it needs not to be established by proofs, though it ought to be very carefully noticed. The denial that it was possible for men to be the subjects of a spiritual influence, was the great char- acteristic of Unitarianism, and of the age which was imbued with it; the assertion of the reality of such an influence, and of its con- tinual manifestation, was the distinguishing property of the teach- ing which disturbed and partially subverted the liberal system. But there were other peculiarities connected with this. Method- ism was not, like Quakerism, the proclamation of a law in each man's own mind, or of a power working there. It was expressly addressed to large masses of men; the power was believed to de- scend upon them, especially when they wTere met together ; and RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. 139 though every individual was, in an important sense, said to be taken apart and brought into debate with his own conscience, it was not denied that the feeling of a united influence had a great tendency to increase the consciousness of it in each one. All that was most fanatical in the Methodists was undoubtedly connected with this belief, and it gave the most plausible, often the most just ground, for the assertion, that the effects said to be produced by their preaching might be traced wholly to contagion and sympa- thy, and would disappear when the moving cause had ceased. Still we do not get to the meaning of a fact, merely by using the words " contagion and sympathy" to describe it ; fanaticism and even consciously dishonest quackery cannot produce any results unless they have some true principle to work with, and it seems as if the principle involved in Methodism might be one which has often been dawning upon us in our previous inquiries, though we have never yet found any satisfactory development of it. We have often been obliged to ask ourselves, whether these distinct individ- ual acts, on which Protestantism dwells so exclusively, may not, must not, depend at last upon some relation in which men stand to their fellows; whether we can take our start from individuals, and form a society out of them ; whether the existence of society be not implied in their existence ; and whether, consequently, if each man have a spiritual existence, and be subjected to a spiritual government, there must not be somewhere a spiritual body, of which he should account himself a member? The facts of Methodism may offer but few helps for solving this problem, but assuredly they force it upon our attention, and make it more abundantly necessary that we should seek the solution of it some- where. There are other points of great importance and interest closely connected with the two to which I have adverted. This proclama- tion of a spiritual power went forth from men who had been brought up in a university which had the reputation of preserving more of the old Catholic temper than could be found elsewhere, and whose very nickname indicated that they had been more scrupulous and regular than the majority in their devotion to forms and ordin- ances. Those who are acquainted only with the practices which the Wesleys afterwards tolerated, and which their followers regard 140 RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. as characteristic of their system, would not easily believe how much importance they attached in the outset of their career to the episcopal ordination of ministers. Nevertheless a certain impa- tience of order — nay, a conviction that it ought to be broken through — might be discovered in them from the first. It seemed to them that there was an immense body of human souls, which had no national position, and of which the nation took no account. The upper classes in England cared not much for religious minis- trations, but they might have them if they would ; the middle class, if they were not particularly well affected to the National Church, had provided for themselves in different organized and tolerated sects ; but the class below them, the mob, the canaille, as they were then named by their despisers, the masses, as they are now called by their flatterers, were as little regarded by the churchman who inherited the family living, as by the dissenting minister who received his appointment from the tradesman of the market town. To these, therefore, the Methodists, like the friars of old, addressed themselves; in them they, like those friars, awakened thoughts and hopes to which their educated country- men had appeared for a long time to be strangers ; in providing for their wants, like the friars, they invaded the privileges of the parochial (both alike would have called them the secular) clergy. I know not in what way Bishop Lavington maintained the position that the enthusiasm of the Methodists and of the Papists had many points in common ; but no one who considers these facts, or a hundred others connected with the peculiar superstitions to which they respectively gave currency, will doubt that he may have found very plausible arguments in favour of his opinion. At all events, it must, I think, be admitted, that Methodism had some im- portant peculiarities which it did not derive from Protestantism, and with which apure exclusive Protestantis m can scarcely coexist. 2. The practical belief of a spiritual operation upon the minds and hearts of men, may be said to constitute Methodism so far as it is a creed. But as soon as the creed had obtained prevalency, a system developed itself, which, as Mr. Southey has remarked, is a more complete specimen of organization than any which has been produced in Europe since the days of Loyola. The more this or- ganization is examined, the less it seems to have to do with any RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. 141 spiritual principle; the more evidently it proves itself to be an in- vention of human policy. This assertion will scarcely be denied by Wesley ans themselves; though they are stronger than most in asserting the principle of a divine inspiration in individuals, they have pretended less than almost any that their scheme had a divine origin ; they attribute it with scarcely any hesitation to the wisdom and sagacity of their founder and of his successors. In one respect only is there a resemblance between the system and that which call- ed it into existence; the spiritual feelings of the Wesleyans led them to overlook national distinctions ; the system of the Methodists is essentially extra-national. It is the effort to establish a power- ful government in the heart of a nation, which at no point shall im- pinge upon, or come into contact with the government of the nation. It differs from the systems of the older dissenting sects in this im- portant point ; the limits of each of them are defined by the profes- sion of some peculiar tenet in which they differ from the others, and from the rest of Christendom ; that of the Wesleyans, professing no tenet which is not recognised or tolerated by the National Church, simply exists to assert their own independence of it, and the im- portance of such an organization as theirs for the conversion of mankind. In this respect Wesleyanism is an indication and specimen of the religious tendencies which prevail in this age very far beyond the immediate circle of its influence. The religious feeling of the last century has given birth to religious societies, between which and their parent one finds it difficult, for some time, to discover a feature of resemblance. The first tended to draw men into them- selves ; the last throw them altogether out of themselves. The first was grounded upon the acknowledgment of a directly spiritual influ- ence, as the only source of any moral change in the condition of individuals or of the world ; the latter are constructed upon the most earthly principles, and seem to attribute all power to them. Accordingly the contrast has been felt, as well by the good men who took part in the movements of the last age and have survived them, as by the younger men who have grown up under their teaching. The first confess, with something of timidity, as if they were afraid of appearing to disparage the fruits of a tree which they believe to have been planted by a divine hand, that the restless 142 RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. turmoil and bustle of a modern religious life is not what they or their fellow-labourers would have wished to produce ; the latter in more open, sometimes in more angry language, complain, that under spiritual words and pretexts there has grown up amongst us a great machinery — complicated, noisy, but inefficient to produce any great results; acknowledging no law in its workings, save certain vulgar maxims, which are applicable only to trade, if even trade itself do not demand principles of a simpler and nobler kind. Nevertheless we find the very persons who make these complaints confessing that they know not how to dispense with this machinery, for that there must be some method of combined voluntary action, grounded not upon our relations to each other as members of a state, but upon some higher and more universal relation. Here again then we are struck with indications of a Catholic feeling arising out of the very heart of Protestanism. 3. The religious feelings of our age, in both the forms which they have taken, seem almost incompatible with the existence of a positive theology. Men studied the movements and operations of their own minds till these and their endless vicissitudes acquired such an absorbing interest, that the idea of the absolute and the perma- nent was almost lost. They fled from these inward contemplations to occupy themselves with an external mechanism, which they be- lieved was meant to promote the glory of God ; how difficult not to believe that any meditation upon his being and nature was an idle occupation for schoolmen ! how difficult not to feel an entire alienation of mind from such studies ! Therefore it has come to pass that the main part of what is called theology in Great Britain of late years has been an attempt to systematize individual experi- ences, or else to discover some general theory about the condition and prospects of the world at large. Still the craving in men's hearts after something deeper and larger than this can never be ex- tinct ; the literature of past times, which bears witness that men have ventured into a more awful sanctuary, was not wholly closed ; and by degrees, either weariness of merely experimental divinity and mere views about the world, or a conviction that they cannot sub- sist alone, has led to the inquiry, whether that which was once called Theology be a reality or only a dream ? In Germany, where outward religious excitements are so few, RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. 143 where students are students in the strictest sense, and where habits of meditation are assiduously cultivated, those who had felt the evangelical influence, and had been delivered by it from the mate- rialism of the last age, soon perceived that, unless this influence led to a search for theological principles, it would melt away, or only produce a succession of fever-paroxysms. They therefore ap- plied themselves earnestly to consider how the religious feelings, without being lost or weakened, could be turned in this direction. They had seen the mischiefs which the dry dogmatism of the Lu- theran and Calvinistical bodies had produced ; they had seen that the spirit of man, whenever it was strongly stirred, became im- patient oithis dogmatism, and sought to escape from it by making spiritual motives and consciousnesses all in all. Did not these ob- servations prove that the affections — the seat of these conscious- nesses— are the proper and appointed organs of religious belief? And may it not be, that all religion — so far as it acts from without — is simply an orderly cultivation of these affections ; educing them, and enabling them to perceive those objects and that character which must correspond to their wants, and which are fitted to give them a living and permanent form ? Every one must perceive how much there was in the circumstances of the age to suggest the thought, that this is the all comprehending, all satisfying idea of Christianity. It was in fact the scientific methodism of the Evan- gelical feelings and tendencies, which at once vindicated them from the charge of being incoherent and fanatical, and promised them an escape from the peril of becoming so. It seemed to justify much in the Scriptures which philosophical men in the last age had given up as untenable, and at the same time to make the abandonment of much which religious men had thought indispensable, no longer unsafe. It was no strange contradiction upon this hypothesis to believe, that the all-perfect Being should manifest himself to men in one of their own nature; that was evidently the form in which alone He could present himself as an object to their affections, and in which the affections witnessed that they needed He should pre- sent himself. Symbols which brought this image more near to men's hearts and symphathies, carried in them an evidence of their truth which no abuse of them could set aside, and they preserve us from the tendency to mere intellectual dogmatism. On the other 144 RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. hand, the history of the way in which the divine manifestation took place might, perhaps, be open to criticism. Criticism could do no harm by dealing severely with the shell of it ; for the kernel within was something which the affections could not afford to part with, and would defend, in defiance of all efforts to rob them of it. The criticism of the last age, because this principle was not admitted, was generally false. Much had been thrown away as superfluous which the affections felt to be necessary; many things perhaps suffered to remain against which they protested. For it will be found, say these teachers, that they reject as incongruous with them- selves whatever the understanding on other grounds insists should be thrown aside. " Upon this principle we are to deal with the Jewish records ; they explain how the religious feelings of a certain nation wTere awakened ; but we must not invest them with an ex- clusive dignity ; we must not make Christianity dependent upon them. The affections being in all men, every history and every theology will contain hints of the efforts which men have made to discover what they needed for this portion of their being; every scheme of philosophy (though philosophy has a distinct province of its own) will have tried to methodize these hints. Christianity must be looked upon as the announcement to men of what they had been seeking after." Though some of these views may be very offensive to those who compose the evangelical school in this country, they certainly have been adopted by men of deep thought and learning, and as I be- lieve of simple, earnest piety, in the most thoughtful country of Europe, as the only scheme of theology which a person starting from the evangelical premises, and admitting no others to be sound and true, can consistently acknowledge. And I do not believe that the history of the progress of this doctrine in the country which gave it birth, will prove that they were wrong. If indeed it be asked whether it has been found in practice, that those who em- braced this scheme could abide in it, however elaborated and fenced it may have been by the art of a clear logical understanding, sustain- ing a devout and honest heart, I imagine the answer would be, No. Those who have taken up this theory have been compelled either to advance or to retreat. The principle of it is, that the nMnifesta- tion of Christ is the one great fact in the Bible history, to which all RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. 145 others are subordinate, and which we may continue to recognise, even though we should be compelled lo reject many of the records which have been supposed to foretell it, as well as some parts of the story which contains it. To this fact the believer in this system clings as the deliverance from large Pantheistic notions about the Godhead, and as the warrant and protection for that personal reli- gion which he takes to be the especial characteristic of Protestant- ism. But in following out the plan of discriminating between that which men must receive as congenial to their inward feelings and wants, and that which belongs only to outward form and history, it has been found that the recognition of a personal object has evap- orated altogether. Our Lord's life does but embody certain great ideas and principles, which have been at work in men's hearts at all times ; which probably did exhibit themselves very remarkably in Him, and may have seemed to his affectionate, credulous, or inter- ested disciples, to exhibit themselves in Him as they never did or could in any other; but which can be contemplated by us apart from the accidental form which they assumed in that or in any age, as principles appertaining to our general humanity. Such is one result of this method — a result, it will be seen, as directly in oppo- sition as any that can well be conceived to the feelings and inten- tions of its originator, and which yet has seemed to be merely a natural deduction from it. On the other hand, many of those who would have been most inclined, by the habits of their minds and the mode of their initiation into Christianity, to adopt this form of theology, and who probably did adopt it, have been led more and more to feel that the doctrine of a personal manifestation of God cannot rest merely upon the individual experience or feeling of its necessity, however deeply they acknowledge that experience in themselves and wTould wTish to produce it in others, that it must be sustained by a still more awful truth, and that that truth must in some sense have been given to men in order that they might enter into it. This, I apprehend, is a faith which is every day growing to greater strength in many serious German minds, and which must in due time bear important fruits. What these fruits may be, I shall not here inquire. This fact I conceive is at all events estab- lished, tlft as there is a Catholic tendency even in those views con- cerning spiritual influence, and in those concerning outward organ- 10 146 RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. ization, which seem at first sight to be of the most exclusively Pro- testant character, so likewise there is a Catholic tendency in that theology which can be traced most directly to a Protestant origin. Even that system which builds theology upon something purely in- ternal, yet makes the idea of a divine manifestation or incarnation its central idea, and connects with this the use of outward symbols, and two opposite schemes which have grown up by the side of it and seem to have developed themselves out of it bear unequivocal witness that Protestant Germany cannot be content with a purely Protestant system. Catholicism it must have either in the form of Pantheism or of definite Christianity. I said that Unitarianism in the form which it took in the last cen- tury was crushed, and only not extinguished by the Evangelical movement. But it was susceptible of another form, which it has assumed among the descendants of the English Puritan colonists of North America. The coating of dry materialism with which it was associated, and from which it appeared to be inseparable, has been cast away ; the orthodox systems are charged by the modern Unitarians with a disregard of man's spiritual nature and his spirit- ual powers ; the idea of a divine humanity in one person is only rejected because it interferes with the acknowledgment of it in every one. It is not pretended by these teachers that the idea of the Divine Being can be otherwise than a mysterious idea ; no at- tempt is made to refute the old doctrine of Christendom by exhib- iting its absurd inconsistency with notions which are applicable to sensible things; it is rather accused of being formal and systematic, of making accurate distinctions when all ought to be left vague and indeterminate. Sabellianism has in fact superseded Socinian- ism. The views of the modern school respecting the world or the age, are also different from those of their predecessors. Every thing is growing and progressive ; the existing age sees further than its predecessors, and can afford to reject much which they believed. But the age is only to be contemplated in a few illuminated persons who are setting themselves in opposition to the ordinary feelings and habits of their contemporaries. The idea of an Ecclesia has come to light in another form, and in a very remarkable form, for it is assumed that the Ecclesia (a very narrow and exclusive one, RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. 147 consisting of men of genius and intellect,) is the proper world of which what is called the world is only the counterfeit. Such is modern Unitarianism, against which the different sects in America feel that they have need to strive with great earnestness, and of which they say, I believe most truly, that it makes quite as little appeal to the conscience, has as little to do with the life and heart of men, as that which it has succeeded. The wise members of these sects affirm, (experience will soon show whether they are mistaken,) that between this Unitarianism and Pantheism there is only an imaginary boundary which must soon be transgressed. But neither of their assertions acts with any great power as a check upon the progress of the system. The Americans are craving for something which is Catholic, and not sectarian. This system ap- pears to have that merit, and it is a common opinion, that either Unitarianism or Romanism will overspread America, or that the two will divide it between them. If there be no Catholicism which is not identical with one of these schemes, I cannot doubt that they are right. Some allusion has been made to a feeling of discontent in the minds of earnest and pious Scotchmen with the Necessitarian sys- tem, which has assumed in that country the name and reputation of the old Calvinism. There, as in Germany, though for some- what different reasons, men cannot be content with mere indivi- dual feelings or mere schemes of action ; they require a theology. Now the great solitary principle of Scotch theology, that the Will of God is the original to which every thing that is real in the uni- verse or in man must be referred, may, as we have seen, take two entirely opposite forms. It may be an assertion, that there is a Sovereign over the world who disposes of all things and persons according to his pleasure ; it may be an assertion, that there is one from whom all good is derived, all evil being the contrary of his nature and the resistance to his purpose. As the former of these views became more and more characteristic of the new Calvinism, the latter began to be proclaimed as the only principle, which is consistent with Scripture by a small minority of Scotch divines, whose zeal, love, and in many cases knowledge also, compensated for their numerical weakness. After a short but violent struggle, they were generally excluded from the Kirk ; the doctrine of the 148 RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. Universal Love of God being declared to be incompatible with its formularies and its existence. But the fact that such a principle once proclaimed can never be suppressed by any efforts of any body of men, is not the only one which makes this apparently in- significant demonstration of great importance to those who are taking account of the religious tendencies of this age. We have seen how the idea of the incarnation or manifestation of God, in the person of man, has presented itself to the Evangelical Germans as that which must be the groundwork of religion, if there be a religion, and how remarkably this question, whether the incarna- tion be a fact or only a dream, has become the turning point of all theological controversies there. Thus that Church body which was created to witness of justification by faith, has found that it must have a deeper ground than this to rest upon, if it rest at all. Again we have seen how among the Unitarians in America — the body which imagined that it existed to protest against the possi- bility of God taking the nature of man — language has become prevalent and popular which, however vague and however unlike the doctrine of a divine humiliation, yet involves all the difficulty and mystery belonging to that doctrine. Yet neither of these changes seem to me so remarkable as the fact, that Scotchmen, trained from their infancy to look upon the fall of man as the only foundation of divinity, and upon the incarnation as only intelligible when regarded as a means of deliverance from the effects of it, should have been led to acknowledge this as the central truth, and to exhibit all other truths in the light of it. Now this is the case with those I have spoken of as protesting against the Calvinism of modern Scotland ; all without exception have spoken of the divine manifestation in Christ as that which constitutes Christianity. But it was remarkably the case with the Scotch divine, whose name, for good and for evil, is best known in this country, and whose thoughts have left upon many minds traces which will remain long after the body which bears his name shall have been forgotten. The late Mr. Irving, bred in the straitest school of Presbyterianism, and retaining, I believe to the last, a vehement admiration for Knox and his principles, was yet led to adopt the conviction, that the doctrine of the Incarnation had been strangely kept out of sight in all Protestant systems ; that it is the centre of RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. 149 all divinity ; the deeper mystery of the Trinity being at once the foundation upon which it rests, and the truth, to the full knowledge and fruition of which it is to lead us. In the attempt to reassert this doctrine, he was betrayed, it is well known, into the use of strange and perilous language, which was vehemently attacked and often greatly misrepresented — language which a man will, I believe, inevitably adopt who has not quite divested himself of the notion that the Fall is the law of the universe, and is trying to reconcile that Calvinistical theory with the Catholic faith. But Mr. Irving was not content with the bare proclamation of a prin- ciple. He felt that this principle must be the foundation of one Catholic Church ; that if a Church existed, this must be the truth on which it rests ; that if this be a truth, there must be a Church. No man had taken more pains to proclaim the coming of a future and perfect dispensation. But he found that the mere prospect of a Church did not satisfy the language of Scripture, nor the faith of one who had really believed in a divine humanity. The existence of such a divine humanity was not a prospect, but a reality ; facts had attested it ; the society which was built upon it must be a fact too. But such a Church, he contended, does not exist ; it has been, but it has ceased, or is on the point of ceasing to be ; it must then be restored ; it can only be restored by a divine intervention. There must be a fact embodying the principle of a union of God with man which is the Church ; this is the incarnation ; there must be an organized body built upon that fact ; there must be the manifestation of a spiritual power to attest its existence, and to enable its respective members to perform their functions. The religious public of England might safely indulge their humour, if there be ever safe occasions for jesting, with the evidence which the disciples of this system produced to show that they had been constituted the Church of God in the world. But I maintain that this public cannot set at naught the principles which led men to desire such evidence, and to accept almost any thing as if it were the answer to their wishes. For whereas the three characteristics which we have noticed in .our modern religious movements, the first, the recognition of a spiritual influence ; the second, the de- mand for an outward organization ; the third, the craving for a positive theology, have been existing hitherto in the greatest con- 150 PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. tradiction to each other ; each by turns putting itself forth as the great necessity ; each by turns crushing and extinguishing the others ; here was an attempt to combine them all, and to exhibit them in that relation which I think we all feel to be the right one. If then there be a falsehood in a conception which seems to unite so many elements, all indispensable, yet unsociable — and every fact in the history of Irvingism convinces me that there is a great and terrible falsehood — one would think it must be in the assump- tion, that there is not already a Catholic Church which is grounded upon a theological truth, possesses a divine organization, and is endowed with the living Spirit ; and that, therefore, it is to be founded in the nineteenth century. SECTION II. PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. Feelings respecting man — Poetry and criticism — Pure metaphysics — Eclecticism. I. At the time when Wesley and his fellow-labourers were proclaiming the doctrine of Spiritual Power and Influence with so much of energy and practical demonstration, the common faith among philosophical men was, that man is a mere creature of flesh and blood. It might be only in the enlightened coteries of France that this doctrine was proclaimed in its breadth and fulness ; only in them was it clearly understood how to the processes of digestion, or rather to the mass of matter in which these strange processes go on, may be referred the phenomena of thinking, hoping, loving ; elsewhere it was more or less confidently received as an article of faith, that there dwells in our bodily frame, a thing called a soul, which is known chiefly by certain negative definitions, and which will survive death. Nevertheless the Encyclopedists did but ex- press, in the shape of a proposition, that which was the habit of feeling in the age to which they belonged. " Given matter, to find whether there is any thing besides, or whether all things may be reduced under its forms;" this was the problem which the men of that time imagined had been set before them to solve in whatever PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. 151 way they could. The experiments which were made by those who were willing in argument to start from these premises are, it seems to me, profoundly interesting ; the results to which they led most satisfactory. Among these we must reckon Hutcheson's discovery of a Moral Sense, and Butler's of a Conscience. Discoveries I have a right to call them, for though the facts which were affirmed had once been taken for granted, they had become a terra incog- nita ; nay, one which, according to the charts then received, could not exist. But like many great facts in the physical world, these were supported by evidence which had much more weight with the next generation than with the one to which it was addressed, and the principle was tacLly recognised that the material is at all events the substantial point of man ; that what is spiritual, if it ex- ist at all, is only his accident. Nay, this doctrine, though refuted by all the conduct and by much of the language of those who took part in the evangelical movement, yet formed a very considerable element in their opinions. They taught men that the soul was all in all ; that every thing was to be postponed to the salvation of the soul ; that all men had souls ; and that the majority of men were guilty of neglecting their souls ; yet if they had been asked wheth- er they really looked upon men generally as spiritual beings, they would have been at a loss to know what the question could mean. " Spiritual beings!" they would have exclaimed, "no, indeed ; an unconverted man, a man who has not been brought under the influence of divine grace, is simply a carnal being ; there is nothing spiritual about him." They knew that this language in some sense was true; they knew that it denoted something real, and the habits of their time hindered them from perceiving the contradiction which lay concealed in it. " What," they would have said, " is philoso- phy to us ? all we want is to declare the truth of the Gospel." But philosophy was very much to them notwithstanding ; the material- istic philosophy had unconsciously a great hold upon their minds, and it may be safely affirmed, that the most extravagant notions and acts which can be charged upon them, arose from the mingling of this philosophy with the spiritual maxims which they had de- rived from Christianity. It seemed so utterly strange to men in the 18th century, that human beings should exhibit any spiritual feel- ings or energies, that the appearance of them was almost necessa- 152 PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. rily looked upon as something not wonderful merely, but startling ; not as the effect of a divine influence merely, but of a magi- cal one. The Methodists, however, led other men into a belief which they did not entertain themselves ; they were the unconscious and unacknowledged, but not the least powerful instruments of a great change in the views of philosophers. It is difficult to determine when a change of this kind may be said to have actually taken place ; in other words, when a principle which has long struggled with opposition and ridicule may be treated as the recognised and popular creed. The generally admitted test is this. As long as a doctrine is held only in such a country as Germany, a country of re- cluse students, so long it cannot be said to belong to the age. But so soon as it has become the common talk and profession of the lec- turers and coteries of France, we may be sure that it has established its claim to that distinction, notwithstanding any resistance it may still encounter from the opinions and habits which have been bequeathed by previous generations. And this test is especially applicable to the doctrine that man is to be spoken of as a spiritual being. The materialism which the last age implicitly adopted did not fully de- velope itself in that age; the successors of the Encyclopedists car- ried their doctrines even further than they had done, and proclaimed them with even more confidence. Nevertheless, they have been losing ground every hour for the last len or twelve years in the coun- try which seemed to belong to them ; till there is scarcely a sub- ject, not even that of physiology and medicine, on which they have not been vehemently assaulted, nay, from which they have not been almost dislodged. We may, therefore, fairly assume, that a philosophical revolution has occurred, quite as signal as that which distinguished the middle of the seventeenth century, though of a di- rectly opposite kind. The change which we noticed in the phrases of Unitarians and in the whole conception of their system is an index of it, and may help us to understand the character and effects of it. It does not consist in any dry, tame, acknowledgment that man has an immortal part or property which may survive the dissolution of his animal frame ; it amounts to nothing less than a distinct affirmation, that those powers and properties which he has within him, of which the senses can take no account, and which are not reducible under PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. 153 any mechanical conditions, are what constitute him a man ; and that all the most important part of his history is the history of these powers, of the restraints to which they have been subjected and of what they have achieved. A dynamical philosophy has gradually superseded a mechanical one in those countries where philosophy is considered of a distinct substantive value, and in spite of the in- fluence of trade proper, and trade political, is endeavouring to sup- plant it in England also. And though I call it a philosophy, I mean something which diffuses itself through the most ordinary and popular literature, and has created a language for itself, which will become in a short time, if it have not become already, familiar to clubs and drawing rooms. This language will of course very often touch upon points which religious men have thought belonged exclusively to them. All the facts which concern the internal life and consciousness ; all the re- ligious changes which have taken place in different periods of soci- ety ; all the personal conflicts of Christians, will be spoken of with the deepest interest, as being vastly more important than accounts of wars and state intrigues and the fall of empires. Men in old times will be admired because they esteemed themselves the sub- jects of a divine inspiration, and faithfully acted upon that hypo- thesis. The ages in which faith gave place to infidelity will be denounced as barren and worthless. It will be affirmed that in our day, as much as in any former one, men ought to exercise faith, and to look upon their different talents as marks of a spiritual voca- tion. In such expressions, mingled as they generally are with many in which religious men can have no sympathy, it is common to say that there is fraud and insincerity; language is wilfully per- verted to mean something different from its common meaning. In many cases there may doubtless be this insincerity ; the more fash- ionable the tone becomes, the more of it there will be. But it is dangerous to prefer such charges, for they are very often untrue, and they may often be retaliated upon ourselves. The case I con- ceive stands thus. A considerable number of persons in Germany, in France, and in England, believe that they have found an expla- nation for most or all of the facts which readers of the Bible attri- bute to the power of the Spirit of God. They believe that the last age had no such explanation, and that its attempts to interpret or 154 PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. deny these facts were ridiculous. Treating human beings, they say, merely as material mechanical creatures, you will always be puzzled with what pious people tell you that they have felt, and with what they have actually done ; treat them as spiritual beings, and the difficulty ceases. You cannot account for every thing ; their divine interventions, spiritual illuminations, and miracles, were not mere inventions of priestcraft, though priestcraft has much to do with the continued belief of them ; they are all to be traced to man's spiritual nature ; by observing what theory prevailed in each age on such matters you form a notion of its character, and of its relation to that which succeeded it. This is a language which per- fectly satisfies some persons who can put all these subjects at a dis- tance from them, and speculate about them with entire calmness. There are others, on the contrary, whose phrases will often be very like these — nay, the very same — but in whom they are indications of an entirely different state of mind. These are men who do not consider it their duty or vocation to explain away facts, or to phi- losophize upon them ; they cannot look at any thing as apart from themselves; when they talk of sufferings and conflicts, they are not expounding a scheme of metaphysics, they are speaking of what they have known and what they can therefore sympathize with in others. Such persons cannot adopt the old religious language, be- cause it seems to set aside facts which they feel to be certain ; it seems to deny that a man is any thing in himself; that he has an eye wherewith he is to receive light. But neither can they wholly reject this old religious language; they feel inwardly that the phi- losophical is no substitute for it; they feel that the words about gifts and inspirations did mean something more than that a man has all powers within him; they feel that an abdication of powers, a denial of self, is the characteristic of all really honest men; they feel that humility, and not exaltation, the acknowledgment of re- ceiving, not the boast of possessing, ought to be the criterion of spiritual excellence. They, therefore, hover between the two forms of language, using either as the feeling of the weakness or false- hood of the other predominates, often committing the grossest in- consistencies, often uttering the most absurd extravagancies, but proving the honesty of their intentions more by these inconsisten- cies and extravagancies than by much which seems to their ad- PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. 155 mirers coherent and reasonable ; and I believe laying religious men, but especially divines, under an obligation to inquire what this perplexity means, and whether their own modes of speaking or thinking, the indistinctness of their minds, or the faithlessness of their hearts, may not have given occasion to it. 2. I attributed much, both of the good and evil which distin- guished the last age, to the exclusive study of Natural Philosophy. Self-forgetfulness and the sense of something permanent and abso- lute distinct from us, accompanied with a tendency to overlook the importance of man altogether, and to regard God as merely a syno- nyme of nature, are habits of mind, which seem so much connect- ed with this pursuit, that wise men have alternately exalted it as the one pure and safe region for the soul to dwell in, and have fled from it as dreary and infectious. In our day the most vehement efforts have been made by eminent individuals and by societies to assert the superiority of this study to all others ; the certainty of its conclusions and its progressive im- provements have been set in strong contrast with the insecurity of all moral principles, when they are not mere commonplaces, equal- ly obvious to the savage and the sage ; the mighty practical results of it, which every one must recognise, have been appealed to as proving its claim to be the useful, and therefore the precious part of knowledge. Yet all these arguments and encouragements have been insufficient to excite any ardent zeal for it in the minds of those young men who most represent the character of the age, or are most likely to stamp it with their own — insufficient to deter them from devoting themselves to the inquiries and speculations which are pronounced to be without any present advantage or pro- mise of fruit hereafter. The Utilitarian does not acknowledge the ad hominem appeal of the natural philosopher; he declares that there are more useful studies than that of the stars or of strata. Religious men are in vain besought to believe, that the great evi- dences of the divine existence and character are to be found in the outward universe ; their tendency, as we have seen, is to reflect almost exclusively upon the feelings which belong to themselves. But above all, nature itself has been, to a very great extent, con- quered from the natural philosopher. Sympathies have been disco- vered between the beholder and the objects which are presented to 156 PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. him, and attempts to express these sympathies or investigate the conditions and laws under which they exist, have become the fa- vourite, are threatening to become the exclusive, occupation of the more thoughtful and abstracted men in this time. A few hints respecting this important revolution are necessary in this place. I am quite unable to do justice to the subject ; but the tendencies of our modern poetry and criticism cannot be overlooked by any one who is studying the influences which are acting upon himself and his fellows. From about the middle of the last century, we may trace the commencement of a poetry which had a much more direct and substantive reference to the outward universe than that of earlier periods. The doings of men, as well as the songs in which they wrere celebrated, had become artificial and conventional : those whom domestic habits had inspired with a dislike of the hollowness of general society, or whom their early cultivation had taught to desire something more living and permanent than the modes of a particular generation, took refuge in nature. To their simple and sincere utterances succeeded violent paroxysms of rapture, concern- ing its more magnificent images, and most vague and abortive efforts to describe them. But both these forms of writing were rather indications that a new state of feeling was at hand than themselves the expression of it. Presently European society was shaken by an earthquake ; conventions were loosened or dissolved ; the links between the past and the present were snapt asunder ; passions which had been smothered or icebound by the rules of etiquette broke forth ; men in different classes remembered, that under some conditions or other they had common rights and a common hu- manity ; the question what law are we to obey, if old observances and decorums can no longer command us, began to be earnestly discussed. The admiration and love of nature became strangely connected with all these movements of the human heart and will, and different forms of poetry appeared to illustrate and exhibit the connection. One form of it presented us with chivalrous legends of other days, enabling us to feel that there was still a bond be_ tween us and them, though the institutions which they had bequeathed might be perishing. In this poetry scenes in nature came forth as a gallery of pictures, which had lasted for genera- PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. 157 tions, and upon which the heroes as well as the readers of the poem had gazed. Another form of it expressed the wailings of those who had been prematurely disgusted with society, or had not been able to reconcile its demands with their desire for individual inde- pendence. All the storms and tumults in nature echoed these dis- contents and discords ; its more peaceful scenes were welcomed as the only medicine for them. A third was the calm utterance of a calm mind, which had sought to discover what bonds of fellowship existed between it and men of all different orders and degrees. Nature was evidently a common thing in which lord and peasant might participate, from which no proscriptions and formalities could exclude. A fourth was of a far more comprehensive, if not of a deeper quality. It exhibited the efforts of a profound thinker to find a principle of life and action, and that principle is expressed in some such language as this — The 'perfection of a man is to be in harmony with nature. Here then we are arrived at a result towards which the other experiments were evidently tending — a result of the very last prac- tical importance — which is likely to produce a greater influence on the period which follows one of remarkable poetical genius and activity than on that period itself. But since many persons find it difficult to understand how works of the imagination can have become so involved with views belonging directly to human life and action — since they are apt to suppose that the only moral effect of such works is to create and strengthen good or bad feelings and impressions, not to elucidate or to establish principles, — I must endeavour to trace the steps by w^hich they have acquired this new character. In the last age it was customary to divide men of letters into two classes — those who followed the vagrant impulses of genius, and those who were content to subject themselves to rules and forms. The first received a patronizing and qualified admiration, but they were beacons rather than examples ; the latter because they had less originality might be more safely followed. The im- pulse of men just recovering the feeling that they had strange powers within them was exactly to reverse this decision, to assert the prerogatives of genius, to boast of its chartered libertinism, and to denounce forms as inconsistent with it. But this is a language which cannot last long : when men began to compare the writings 158 PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. which have stood for ages with those which affect their nature and freedom, it was perceived that the secret of power does not lie in its carelessness or vagrancy ; that wantonness is allied to weak- ness ; that it is the very characteristic of genius to own principles, not to despise them. It has been shown that the last age was not at all too careful in asserting the existence of laws to which all art and poetry must conform itself; it only mistook the character of those laws ; it supposed them to be mere rules respecting the outsides of expression and construction, not forms belonging to the thought and mind itself. If there be such principles and forms, then the intuition of them, accompanied with the capacity of work- ing according to them, is the very quality of genius, and the study of works of genius in a spirit of submission, not of dictation, is the way of obtaining that knowledge which the artificer possessed. There may be a purely creative intuition which does not necessarily imply consciousness of the laws which it follows ; there may be a critical intuition which discovers them after they have been already exhibited in practice, and is not necessarily associated with the faculty of embodying that which it recognises; but the critic is no further a judge of the poet than as he is able to perceive when he has departed from the principles which give coherency and har- mony to his work. These doctrines, which seem to carry in them a witness of their truth, a witness confirmed as much by the success of those who have followed them in their criticism of great authors as by the feebleness and confusions of their predecessors, have, however, necessarily led to further reflections. What are these laws and forms, and where are they to be sought for 1 Are they laws of nature, or laws of the mind ? Is the man of genius the author of them, or does he merely perceive them, and adapt him- self to them ? It has been found impossible to affirm either posi- tion— to adopt either form of language as the sufficient and exclu- sive one. Those who endeavour to do so, are soon seen to contra- dict themselves ; some unconscious phrase asserts in one sentence that which was denied in the previous one. It seems to follow7, that the law of the imagination is a law of fellowship or intercom- munion with nature ; you cannot describe it in any terms which do not imply this to be the case; you cannot go deeper than to say, that it creates only so far as it sees, and that it sees only so far as it has PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. 159 the faculty of creating; just as sight and sound can neither be predicated solely of the eye nor of the thing beheld — of the ear nor of the thing heard, but are the product of both. Now if we admit, as I think we may, that the clear apprehen- sion of this position, and of the manifold consequences which flow from it in reference to poetry and the arts generally, has been re- served for our time ; that as it was the characteristic task of the last age to discover the laws of the physical world, as it is in itself, so it has been the characteristic task of this age to investigate the re- lations in which men stand to that physical world ; we need not wonder if this study, like the other, should seem to those who have made any proficiency in it all satisfying, if it should seem to them to determine the very ends and conditions of man's being. No one who has considered thoughtfully the history of astronomy, of logic, or of political economy, would be surprised to hear that any study in any age has assumed to itself the character of the universal, all- including study. But in this case I cannot help feeling that there is still a stronger reason. I cannot but think that those who have detected this law of the imagination — this law of sympathy and communion between themselves and that which is distinct from them, have been assailed by a conviction which they cannot resist or part with, that some such law of communion is the law of their whole life ; that life is an unintelligible blank without it ; that here must be the key to its deepest mysteries. Neither can I doubt that they feel they have been in some way or other robbed and cheated of this truth, and that it is time to assert it, or recover it. And, therefore, when I hear persons affirming, that harmony with nature or the universe is the great attainment of the wisest and greatest man; when I hear them drawing from this proposition the natural corollary, that the artist or poet is the elect man — the demigod of the world ; when I hear it maintained, that all the religious systems which have existed have been attempts to embody a theory of man's relations with this universe; that the forms which are suita- ble to express these relations in one age become unsuitable in an- other ; that the gifted man knows at what moment the old forms have worn themselves out, and must be rejected and new forms must be invented ; when I hear such language as this — though I believe that greater danger lurks in it than in any phrases which 160 PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. have ever been current in any age — though it seems to me likely to subvert all acknowledgment of fixed, unchangeable truth, and to perpetuate and sanctify that tyranny of modes and fashions against which it feigns to protest — I yet cannot treat it merely as the quackery of talking men, merely as the fanaticism of men who have seen one fact and wish to explain all facts by that ; still less merely as a deliberate wickedness which wishes to undermine the faith of mankind under a show of paying it compliments. There may be persons in abundance who practise this quackery, are pos- sessed by this fanaticism, and hope to accomplish this wicked de- sign ; but they did not invent these expressions, they have only adopted them as they would in the last age have adopted its cant which they now can afford to despise. The sincere minds who have given currency to this tone of thought and speech, or to whom it conveys a real meaning, will exhibit their difference from the rest by their inconsistency. At one moment you will hear them pro- claim harmony with nature to be the great object of all men's strivings ; the next you will find them expressing the deepest ad- miration for those who have believed that they were sent into the world to contend writh all those inclinations and appetites which connected them with nature and the outward world ; wrho believed this to be the characteristic glory of men, and who exhorted others to be men by doing the like. One while they worship the artist because he submitted himself to nature, one wrhile because he hum- bled nature to himself, and created it afresh ; first they will speak as if the universe were created that poets and artists might live and reign, and as if all who had not their faculty, or the faculty of ad- miring and worshipping them, ought to be hunted out of it ; then they will declare that the great difference between these poets and artists and others is, that they have more sense of a common hu- manity, and that there ought to be a spiritual commonwealth in which the meanest labourer and serf should feel that he had a por- tion. Now they can interpret all religious systems as imperfect at- tempts to explain the relations between man and the universe, and to embody the sense of those relations in certain forms ; presently you will find them extolling some great Reformer or Iconoclast, whose peculiarity has been, that he utterly repudiated those parts of the popular system which were the links between man and nature, PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. 161 as the spurious outgrowths of a later time when men had lost their sense of a connection with a Being above themselves, and therefore had bowed down to images and likenesses of the things below them ; and that he reasserted the worth and meaning of those old forms which witnessed for the fact of that higher relation. These are strange inconsistencies, but they are honourable inconsistencies ; they prove those who commit them to be earnestly and affectionately desirous to hold what is true, even when it crosses and interferes with views which they regard, or think they regard, as the climax of all past discoveries and revelations. And there- fore it is impossible not to believe that there is something in these views which ought to be upheld, and which may be upheld, not amidst contradictions which make the practical application of them impossible, but in conjunction with principles which determine their meaning and prove their reality. We cannot say to these men, You must cast aside this faith in the existence of bonds between man and the universe ; these bonds exist — they have been felt and realized — the more they are felt and realized the better. Neither can we say to them, There is an individual soul in you which is more precious to you than all these bonds ; they will go all lengths with you in tbat affirmation ; they have been generally bred in a school of pure, exclusive Protestantism ; they believe in this indi- vidual soul ; they all but worship it. Nevertheless they feel that there are human bonds — bonds not merely for the individual soul, but for humanity ; they feel that these must be acknowledged quite as much as the needs of the individual soul ; that that soul does itself witness of them. But they have been told by their Protestant teachers, that there are no sucb bonds between humanity and God ; He is connected only with the individual ; all forms signifying any more general relation than this, are unmeaning and obsolete. They have been told this ; they have learnt the lesson ; tney believe it as heartily as such a lesson can be believed. Only they believe also, that if this be true, then humanity must seek its hap- piness in fellowship with something else than God, or rather must make its god or its gods out of objects which can have living intercourse with it. And strangely agonizing as the thought may be, that after all, this humanity has had nothing firm to rest upon or to commune with ; that the only objects it could admire and 11 162 PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. love have been changing their aspects continually, and have re- ceived their beauty from the mind of the beholder ; that therefore the idols have been changed with every new period ; and that the incalculably few men who could discern a meaning in those things they conversed with, have been the real gods — because the god- makers of the universe — painful as it may be thus practically to deny the existence of any constant being who has held the frag- ments of humanity together, even while you are in the very act of asserting that they are bound together, and thus to treat the idolatry which has been the apparent cause of all its divisions, as the one only explanation of its unity, even this must be borne, because facts seem to enforce these conclusions though conscience and reason may revolt against them. Is it not the fact, say these men, that all Protestant systems — the last the most perfect attempts at a religious system — are crumbling in pieces 1 They have swallowed up all previous forms of faith, now they are proving themselves to be weak and good for nothing. Men have discovered wants in themselves which such systems cannot satisfy ; it is idle to pretend that these narrow platforms can ever be a ground for mankind to rest upon ; they are not wide enough for a few individuals to stand together upon without quarrelling and kicking. Their very merit consisted in the exclusiveness, as well of their admissions as of their objects. A few who have particular sympathies on certain points of religion, are drawn together in them ; but the study of nature, of art, of man, they confess, belongs to another sphere from theirs ; they may tolerate it, or prohibit it, but with it their religion or their fellowship has nothing to do, or if they do endea- vour to find a connection it is by making these studies dishonest ; by compelling them to say what they do not say ; by changing their object from the investigation of truth into the confirmation of certain pre-established maxims. This is language which we may hear in all quarters. I beseech divines, and the men who influence the religious feelings of this age, earnestly to ponder it, and to consider what it indicates. 3. Before either of the tendencies of which I have been speak- ing had decidedly manifested itself, the question respecting the grounds of knowledge which was supposed to be settled by Locke, had been submitted to a new and a most rigid examination. For PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. 163 a long time a ridiculous notion prevailed here, and in Scotland, in reference to the eminent German thinker who conducted this inves- tigation. It was seriously believed that he had been swTayed by the impulses of a vagrant and mystical imagination . . . nay even philosophical writers were not ashamed to insinuate that the British public might form a tolerably fair conception of the metaphysics of their neighbours, from the wild freaks which were exhibited in the fictions of some of their least cultivated or most immature poets. It is now, however, well understood that the persons who sanctioned this pious fraud were really deterred from the study of this author, not by the looseness, but by the severity of his logic ; by the absence in him of all those vague and popular modes of thought and speech to which they had accustomed themselves, and their readers. He entered upon his inquiry with no theological bias which could make him averse from the system of Locke merely because it had led to infidel results ; with the very strongest dislike of a system which an earlier German philosopher had set up in opposition to the worship of experience ; with a conscience which admonished him to reject every customary notion and opinion if it hindered him in the pursuit of truth ; with an understanding adapted to the most calm and patient analysis. Those who understand most thoroughly the tests by which physical facts and laws have been ascertained, will probably pay most respect to the course of critical inquiry which led him to assign a large and most important province to experience, and then, for the sake of saving that province from the destruction with which its extravagant pre- tensions threatened it, to show what region lies beyond it, and by what faculty that region is cognizable. But those who are least competent to judge of these merits must yet perceive that this doctrine has been subject to the most pelting storm of ridicule and abuse ; has been resisted not only by the most accomplished intel- lects in Europe, but (which is more important) — by all the habits of thought which had rooted themselves in the minds of ordinary men ; has had as many appearances and plausibilities to oppose it, as the Copernican doctrine, or any other that is most startling, and yet has not merely stood its ground but has forced itself under one modification or other into the speculations of thoughtful men, and is moulding the language and opinions of those who have the 164 PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. least comprehension of its meaning, or are most disinclined to acknowledge its truth. How important this fact is, in a theological point of view, may be judged from one circumstance. English writers con- tinually use the word rationalism as if it designated* one set of opinions or one mode of thought. But there is the widest difference between the rationalism of the last century and the rationalism of this — between that which grew up under the patronage of Locke, and that which is derived from the influence of Kant. The former, whether assuming the mild, modified, and feeble shape which it received from our critics in the last century, or the destructive character which terrifies us in some of the (now obsolete) German neologians, is merely the fruit of a desire to be rid of facts which are at variance with the ordinary notions and experience of man- kind ; and to make revelation the announcement of certain moral notions and axioms which men by their constitution must derive from without ; the latter leads to the underrating of facts because they belong merely to the region of experience, and to the notion that naked principles, which alone are of paramount importance, and with which alone the reason is conversant, are not imparted to it, but contained in it. From this statement it is evident that the results of the two systems may often coincide ; but the habits of thought which have engendered them are so adverse, that a person wrho takes one for the other, is likely to misunderstand the pro- cesses of his neighbour's mind, if not of his own. It may be said, " But surely the difference, be it great or small, is in favour of the older opinion, and not of the more recent one. That assumed the existence and the necessity of a revelation, only confining its use within very narrow limits ; this dispenses with a revelation, perhaps denies the possibility of it altogether;" I am not anxious to disprove this statement. I may feel the force of it as strongly as those who are most inclined to put it forward in the shape either of denunciation or of warning. But before I can at- tach any great value to it in one form or the other, I must be sure that it is not disturbing the faith of those whom it condemns or counsels in a truth; that this truth is not one which God would have us of this age especially receive and hold fast ; that it is not one which when thoroughly understood and heartily embraced may PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. 165 contribute much to the recovery of those principles and the assertion of ihose facts which it seems to set at naught. I would ask any one to reflect calmly upon the circumstances of the country in which this philosophical revolution has taken place. In that country Luther had asserted the doctrine, that there were certain truths which were so necessary to the life and being of man that the simple proclamation of them — " the foolishness of preaching" — would carry home the conviction of them to innumer- able hearts. They were proclaimed in the words of a book, be- cause that book contained the simplest, most genuine, most vital exhibition of them. This was the first act of the Reformation. The curtain rises in the second, and exhibits to us the disciples of Luther poring over the words of this book, in the hope, often a most vain hope, of extracting some meaning from them ; then fighting with one another in defence of the fragment of meaning DO O D which they had discovered in it. Then we see another generation engaged in quite a different occupation, that of tearing page after page out of this book because it speaks of unintelligible matters with which reasonable men have no concern ; but yet maintaining the wisdom and propriety of certain parts of it which were con- sistent with the general verdict of nature and experience. Then a a man arises who asks what this general verdict is ? He takes to pieces all the demonstrations by which men had fancied that they could make out to themselves the importance of morality, the immortality of the soul, the being of a God. He says, " All these are good for nothing ; they establish no conclusion ; it is as- sumed in the premises." But he says at the same time, " This is no reason for doubting or disbelieving these truths ; if they be fundamental truths, they must be the premises of every demonstra- tion, not the results of it; you cannot have a greater witness for these great elements of human faith than this, that every thing seems to prove them, because in fact nothing can be proved with- out them. And then this argument ab extra is clenched and established by a corresponding one from within. " You say that this cannot be, because there is no faculty which takes cognizance of such primary truths as these. I say there is and must be such a faculty, otherwise the existence of a mathematical science — the existence of that science upon which the demonstration of physi- 166 PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. cal facts rests — would be just as impossible as the existence of a moral science. I say further, that this faculty is not merely one of the faculties of humanity, but that it is precisely the human faculty ; that which does not belong to an individual as such, but which belongs to each man as a man, as the member of a race; the faculty which is conversant with that which is universal as well as with that which is necessary." Such language as this, so far as it is understood and believed, must, of course, displace a whole host of notions and conclusions which had previously been looked upon as sacred, not because they were old but because they were new — because they seemed to have been the last and most perfect effort of the human intellect in repealing and annulling* the decrees of former times. The doc- trine would therefore assume something of a destructive character — not that it really had that character, even in reference to the maxims of the school of experience so far as they were positive ; for it distinctly ratified the doctrine of Locke, that all notions and conceptions are the results of sensible experience, and that the im- pressions of sense precede in order of time all generalizations (such as that the whole is greater than its part) ; it merely affirmed the existence of principles, at whatever time they may be discovered to the mind, which are presumed in the existence of the mind it- self, and without which it could form no notions, conceptions, or generalizations, nay, could receive no impressions. Still the effect upon the persons who adopted the system was not altered by this circumstance ; they felt that they had found out something which set aside the most favourite theories of their immediate predecessors. And if it had set aside their theories, had it not even in a more complete way set aside those of the thinkers who had preceded them, and over whom they had prevailed ? Had it not proved that to be involved in the very constitution of man, which had been supposed to be merely delivered to him, and delivered to him moreover as if it were essentially at variance with his constitution, as if he could not receive it except by miracle ? To be sure the school of the Encyclopedists had talked nonsense when they at- tempted to say what Reason was, and when they affirmed that what they called Reason was the judge of what is true ; but they were right in saying that reason is the judge of what is truth ; nay, PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. 167 that truth and reason cannot have any existence apart from each other. I would entreat a patient consideration for the previous difficul- ties of the persons who adopted this language, for the temper of mind which they inherited even when they fancied that they had thrown it off, for all the temptations to pride and self-exaltation which arise from the sense of a new discovery — I would entreat a consideration of all these circumstances before such phrases as these are immediately supposed to mean all the mischief which I am quite ready to acknowledge is lurking in them. But above all I would entreat my reader to reflect upon the fact, which I have been forced to present to him under several other forms already, that while the Protestant system encourages all possible demands on the part of the human mind for satisfaction, it provides nothing to satis- fy the demand for some truths or principles which shall belong to us, not as individuals, but as members of a race. Protestants say that every truth is to be realized by each man for himself, and that when a certain number of individuals have been made conscious of the same truth, they are to meet together and have fellowship in the profession of it ; they have never effectually taught men that there are truths appertaining to them as men, which do not depend for their reality upon our consciousness of them, but are the grounds on which that consciousness must rest. The doctrines of Protestant- ism do, as 1 believe, necessarily imply this, but they do not distinct- ly affirm it ; they refer distinctly and formally to men as individuals- The systems of Protestantism not only do not affirm it, but in the most practical manner deny it. I think then that this metaphysical revolution points the same way as those other changes in men's feelings which I have noted already, namely, to the demand for something Catholic, and for that, not as an accident and addition to the faith which we hold as individuals, but as the very groundwork of it. And if I am asked to explain how I suppose it is possible that a doctrine, which seems to set all revelation and all tradition aside, and to claim a more di- rect independence for the human reason than any other has ever done, may yet be leading, through God's gracious guidance and providence, to the assertion and confirmation of those principles which Christians refer to revelation or tradition, and which are said, 168 PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. and I think rightly said, to humble the reason of man — I believe the kind of conflicts which have been excited among philosophical men by the promulgation of Kant's doctrine are an answer to the question. Almost from the time that its meaning began to be earnestly canvassed, three great difficulties, or at least blanks, were discover- ed in it. One set of persons complained, that it was a hard, dry doctrine, with which a man who had a heart could have no sym- pathy. It supposed the highest of all affirmations to be — God is, immortality is, freedom is. These great primary truths of the rea- son lay there without any power of addressing themselves to or connecting themselves with any one form or feeling — the Hercules pillars of the intellect, or the premises of a demonstration — nothing more. This was one objection which may probably have led to that division between the objects of philosophy and religion which I noticed in the last section, and to the assigning to the latter what- ever concerns our human feelings and sympathies. Others, to whom this distinction seemed artificial and impracticable, laboured to con- struct a philosophy which should possess the warmth and cheerful- ness of a religion. Next comes the feeling, which in a Protestant country could not but force itself upon a number of minds. The reason speaks of all these great and eternal verities ; but what have I to do with them 1 What link is there between my personal consciousness and these grand and universal affirmations ? Tell us this, or your scheme, be it as strongly fenced with demonstration as it may, cannot con- tent a man. But, lastly, there seemed to be a fatal contradiction, if not in the principle itself, yet between the principle and the inferences which were instantly deduced from it. There is an organ in man which speaks of that which is absolute and eternal. You believe that this organ, call it reason or what you will, is distinct from the one that merely forms notions and affirms propositions. But how distinct? If it merely affirm, " There is something absolute ; there is something eternal;" these are propositions. To suppose this then, is to destroy your own doctrine. But if this be not the wit- ness of the reason concerning that which is absolute, what must it be ? It must affirm the existence of that which is absolute, not as PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. 169 the intellect affirms a proposition, but as the eye affirms an object. As an object, it must be something distinct from that which beholds it, anterior to it, that without which it could not be. Suppose the Universe be the great, eternal, absolute thing which we feel must be — well, then, this Universe spake to us first ; we did not form it* did not even discover it ; it revealed itself to us. But it is the eye or the imagination which demands an external universe; the Rea- son must demand something different from that. Does it not, ac- cording to your own showing, demand that which is homogeneous to itself? Does it not demand an absolute Reason ? And if there be such an absolute Reason to which the reason in man looks up, a real being, is it more consistent to believe the reason found him out, or that he revealed himself to the reason ? According to this last statement, the doctrine that there are principles antecedent to experience, whereof the reason of man takes cognizance, supersedes the necessity of a revelation only when it contradicts itself. But this is not all — If this view of the case be the right one, the revelation which the reason demands, cannot be one merely of moral principles or axioms, — it must be the revelation of a living Being. It cannot therefore be one in which events are merely accidents that can be separated from some idea which has tried to embody itself in them. Facts may be only the drapery of doctrines ; but they would seem to be the only possible method of manifestation for the Being, the essential Reason. And seeing that by the hypothesis, this Being of whom the reason speaks is one wrho transcends the conditions of space and time; seeing that this one faculty in man has the power of beholding that which is not under these conditions, but that all the other faculties are subject to them, it would be nothing strange or contradictory if the facts which em- bodied the revelation, should be such as at once presented him to all the faculties which we possess, and enabled that highest one to realize its own peculiar prerogative of looking through them. In this way one might perhaps discover a hope of reconciling the law of the affections and the law of the reason, without that contrivance of separating them under two departments and supposing that a mere scholastic boundary could keep them really apart. One might dream too, of a way by which the consciousness of each individual should be called forth, through the sense of his relationship to the 170 PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. Being who was revealing himself to him and condescending to his necessities. But whether this be the case or not, it seems clear that this new form of rationalism cannot be satisfied with itself ; that it will become irrational if it cannot find something to unite and combine with it ; that if it be followed out fairly it involves the conclusion that something must have been originally given or im- parted to the reason ; that this gift must be of some truth which is transcendent and divine ; that it must proceed from, and have refer- ence to a living being ; that it must concern all men as men ; that the best test of its concerning them and really being necessary to the constitution of humanity itself, is that it should have been receiv- ed and believed by men merely upon the bare announcement of it, and that in every subsequent stage of human history it should have been doubted, contradicted, ridiculed, and yet have kept its ground, and proved itself, in the most advanced period of civilization as well as in the simplest, to be that which men want as the sign and bond of their fellowship. 4. One feature more must be taken notice of in the philosophi- cal countenance of our age, or we shall have still an imperfect image of it. The effort to bring all systems of thought into har- mony, or to frame a system to which each one shall contribute certain elements, has been repeated in various periods of the world. But unquestionably the inclination for such experiments was not so strong, even in the period immediately following the promulgation of Christianity as in our own. I do not think the strength of this inclination can be fully ascertained even by observing how many conspicuous men, and those of the nation which most represents the form and pressure of the time, have felt it and indulged it. Every one can perhaps discover its workings in himself. One after another plan of union which we have devised may have failed ; some strange, uncouth performer may have insisted with cruel pertinacity upon his right to play his solo, without the least regard to the order under which the rest have been reduced ; or we may have found that when we had got rid of the discords, the music became so flat and uninteresting, that no one cared to listen to it; but amidst all discouragements, in spite of the just ridicule of others, or the more sad and painful scorn which the wearied Irenicus is tempted to indulge at his own expense, the wish continues unabated, and it PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. 171 is sustained by a secret spring of hope — an unconquerable convic- tion that the dream was a true one, though it may seem to have met with the most palpable practical contradiction. This temper as we have already seen, has exhibited itself among religious men — among a class of them in whom it might least have been expected, and who would have felt the strongest abhorrence of any system which was merely compounded of fragments from previous speculations and heresies. Nor can it be said with strict truth, that when it appears among the philosophers of our day, this is the object which they propose to themselves. The name Eclec- ticism, which they willingly adopt, seems to portend a mere hortus siccus of flowers gathered from all soils, and arranged according to the taste of the collector. But if they spoke for themselves, they would give a very different representation of their system. They would say that their will had nothing to do with it; that Eclecti- cism was a necessity of the age : that one partial theory had suc- ceeded and displaced another in the by-gone periods — that it was no longer possible to adopt any of these as adequate and self-suf- ficing— that they were all seeking some more capacious and univer- sal scheme, in which they might merge. The difference between this feeling and that which prevailed in the last century, is made the more striking by the one point in which they are alike. The disciples of Cousin express as much reverence for the age into which they are born, as the disciples of Voltaire felt for their own; but the earlier school believed that it was created to destroy all forms of opinion which had existed previously; the later one, that it is meant to put a sanction and imprimatur upon all, and to dis- cern the principle which is the climax of all. The first and most ob- vious effect of this difference is an entirely opposite estimation of the truth and uses of history. By the French school of the last century it was slighted as useless, for any other purpose than as a record of absurdities to be ridiculed and avoided ; by the French school of this century it is regarded as the key to all knowledge ; the acts of past times are studied, not merely with diligence, but with reverence. Such a habit of mind on whatever subject it is exercised, must draw a reward after it, and these philosophers have been permitted to throw a most valuable light upon the meaning and succession of events, especially in the annals of modern Europe. * 172 PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. Upon the meaning and succession of events, they have thrown this light ; but very little, I suspect, upon the feelings or cha- racter of men. It is a complaint which I believe is universal among their greatest admirers, that they have no faculty for understanding a living human being in any other way than as a link in a chain of operations. They do not wish to set aside free agency ; their the- ory would rather dispose them to give it great honour, but they cannot look at it except in relation to a theory, which is nearly the same thing as saying that they dispense with it altogether. Now this will surely be found a most unfortunate peculiarity in men who hope to adjust and harmonize the different thoughts and feelings of our time. Putting religious opinions and habits out of the ques- tion— assuming that they are too vagrant and fanatical to be sub- jects for an eclectical experiment — passing over also all political questions, and the struggles of different individuals or classes for a recognition in the polity of a state — we shall find in the philoso- phical dispositions of our days most awkward and refractory mate- rials. The strongest of these dispositions, I observed, was to ac- knowledge a spirit in man, and to regard all other facts with which he is concerned in reference to that one. Then again we found men full of living sympathies with nature, and longings for forms in which this sympathy might be expressed. Now no theory, let it make what allowance it may for the existence of both these in- clinations, can really provide any satisfaction for them. All its efforts, therefore, must be confined to that region of thought which I have designated by the name of pure metaphysics ; to the adjust- ment, that is, of the doctrine respecting the reason and the truths antecedent to experience, with previous speculations. But there are difficulties in the way even of this limited application of Eclec- ticism. The first is, that the rationalist will say, " The work is already done; the critical philosophy is that which discriminated between the provinces of reason and experience; any attempt to eclecticise upon that is to gild refined gold or paint the lily. But the other objection is more fatal. The reason, it would seem, from the remarks which have been made already, speaks of an actual being, an absolute reason ; and all attempts to make it merely ut- ter a proposition about that being, tend to destroy its very nature, as that nature is expounded by the rationalist. It is evident then that PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS. 173 no scheme of Ontology, be it as complete as it may, can dispense with or include the truth which he proclaims. It may be a sound theory, a valuable theory, but it will be a theory concerning some- thing, and of that something itself he is endeavouring to bear witness. Nevertheless, all these arguments will never persuade men in our day that reconciliation of some kind is not possible, and must not eventually take place, between warring opinions and feelings. All kinds of endeavours at the compromise and suppression of truth — endeavours which succeed just as long as men feel nothing, and care for nothing, and are laughed to scorn the moment any ener- getic man arises, or any energetic thought is awakened — endeav- ours which (however strange the assertion may sound) are, on the whole, more hopeless in our day than in any previous one, — will be suggested and made by individuals and by governments, with a desperate conviction, that one at last must be meant to prosper, and with infinite rage and astonishment that the one proposed does not fare better than its ten thousand predecessors. Undoubtedly too there is great need that the philosophical feelings which I have spoken of as all belonging to this time should find some meeting point, for though all equally strong and apparently proceeding from the same source, they oftentimes clash strangely with each other. The assertor of man's spiritual powers exalts the hero who main- tains a battle with circumstances and triumphs over them ; the ar- tistical philosopher delights in him whoc an adapt himself to circum- stances. If they maintain any fellowship with each other, it is a fellowship founded upon the pleasure which the one takes in no- ticing a curious, and to him a puzzling specimen of human nature, and upon the awe which the other entertains of a person who has realized a state which he knows that he can never reach, and with which he half confesses to himself that he has no sympathy. Again, both agree in dislike to the metaphysician, one because he seems to bind down the energy and freedom of man by fixed and absolute laws; the other because he sets up a dry truth against all forms and images. It would seem that if all these tendencies be sound and true, as I have maintained that they are, there ought to be some method of bringing them into harmony, which should pre- serve each of them in its strength ; which should not merely account 174 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. for them, but embody them, and enable them to produce some real fruit. But then would it not seem at least possible that if reason affirm a truth which must have always been ; if the communion writh nature be something implied in our constitution, and therefore implied in the constitutions of those who lived a thousand years ago; if humanity be essentially spiritual, the reconciling method may already exist, and that the work of our age may be not to create it afresh, but to discover its meaning and realize its necessity 1 section nr. POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. American Revolution — French Revolution — Individual Rights — Individual Will — Schemes of Universal Society — Education — Power of the State. I have had occasion to speak of the theological temper of the United States of North America, as illustrating one stage in the history of Protestantism, and as indicating a desire for something that Protestantism does not supply. But the political change which took place in these states, when they revolted from the mother country, is, in the same point of view, even more important. Among the leading characteristics of the Reformation, I noticed an anxiety to assert the rights of national Sovereigns, and, as in- volved in them, the distinct position of each nation. This feeling, I said, was closely intertwined with that feeling of personal distinct- ness in each man which is the main spring of Protestantism. But when the Protestant systems had developed themselves, these insep- arable twins began to manifest great impatience of each other's company. The monarchs of the reformed states found that the belief in each individual's right to act and think for himself trench- ed very inconveniently upon their authority, and tended in no de- gree to the consistency and unity of the nations which they gov- erned. They observed that whenever the religious feeling was strong, it treated all things as subordinate to itself ; therefore, unless it could be made to conspire with the objects of their government, it must thwart them. There seemed to be but two expedients; to orce the religious feeling into this agreement, or as much as possi- POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. 175 ble to weaken it. The first policy was tried, and failed ; afterwards the latter was adopted for a time with better success. The dispo- sitions on the other side of course corresponded to these. The re- ligious bodies became more and more jealous of the sovereign's interference with them ; in times of strong excitement they resisted it ; but as such times made their terms of communion more strict, these bodies became less and less identical with the nation ; there- fore it was not difficult to believe, when peace returned, that they had nothing to do with national affairs, that it was their business to be wholly religious, and the business of the monarchs to be wholly secular. This opinion, however, was very slowly adopted by any class of Reformers. The Lutherans thought, and still think, a State tyranny less intolerable than the abandonment of the Reformation principle. The Calvinists, in their palmy days, resolved, that if the state could not be religious with a sovereign, it should be religious without one. The Scotch Covenant affirmed the state to be essen- tially theocratic ; the whole effort of our civil wars was to establish the same principle, and in one strange interlude between the acts of that tragedy, the Scotch tried to create a Presbyterian theocracy in the person of Charles the Second. It was only upon the disap- pointment of these schemes, that the modern doctrine under its dif- ferent modifications began to prevail. And in the mean time an experiment was to be made whether religious men, if they could not exercise an influence over the old societies of Europe, might not frame societies for themselves in another world. The legislation and government of the Puritan colonies bore every mark of their origin. They were, in fact, if the solecism maybe pardoned, sect-commonwealths, connected by their religious peculiarities more than by the bonds of a common language, of a common origin or of subjection to a distant sovereign. Before the time arrived when the last mentioned of these ties was to be snapt asunder, the colonies had acquired an important position as trading communities. The religious feeling of the early settlers had lost much of its strength, but had left behind it industrious habits, clear- ness of understanding in common matters, indifference to refine- ments either physical or intellectual, and a useful pertinacity of cha- racter. Of such elements the heroes of the revolution were com- posed, men who, being exceedingly like the Puritans in these qual- 176 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. ities, differed from them in this, that their notions of government and society were unconnected with a spiritual principle, and refer- red wholly to the condition and circumstances of this world. This change was evident from the declaration of Independence — a docu- ment in which the old Protestant feeling, that each man is a distinct being possessing distinct privileges and rights, is curiously blended with a vague notion of a general fellowship, which was beginning to gain currency in Europe, and which was rather a reaction against Protestantism than the natural result of it. And of this declara- tion the ultimate consequence was, that union of the different inde- pendent states, respecting which future history will determine whether it have taken effect by a process of natural fusion, or merely by the decrees and contrivances of legislators. These events were undoubtedly indications that a strife of prin- ciples was at hand, though the scene of it was not to be laid in the and of Franklin and Washington. It was in a country of the old world, a country in which the Protestant doctrine had been stifled two centuries before, a country in which society had been every thing and human beings almost nothing, that the most vehement declaration of men's individual rights was to be made, and that the death struggle between those impulses which lead each person to maintain such rights, and those which lead him to seek communion with his fellows was to begin. It has been truly and profoundly observed, that the French Revo- lution could not have been brought about merely by the skepticism of the philosophers, merely by the sins of the civil and ecclesiastical rulers, merely by the starvation of the people, nor by all these combined, if there had not been a certain element of faith to mix with and contradict the skepticism — to create a kind of moral indig- nation against the sin — and to convert the sense of hunger from a dead anguish into a living passion. The Parisian philosophy of the eighteenth century was little more than the expression by men cleverer and bolder than their contemporaries, of that feeling which pervaded the whole of society. All the teachers did was to make their disciples conscious of the unbelief which already had possession of them ; their wit was irre- sistible, because it brought to light contradictions which existed in the persons they were addressing. So long as such contradictions POL. TIC AL MOVEMENTS. 177 are painful, so long as the conscience is at all awake to say, " This which you are not you are meant to be" — wit of this kind is most torturing. The mind may feel a kind of awful delight in it, as in a just penance which it deserves to undergo, but no grave admoni- tion is half so bitter. But when the conscience is not awake at all, or is only so far awake as to perceive that hypocrisy is an evil and dishonourable thing, this wit will be very differently received. The mere time killer — the lounger of the upper classes — who is con- vinced that every thing must go on as it has always gone on, that words can do no harm, and that his position in society gives him a title to see further than a clown or a shopkeeper, listens gladly, and entertains a doctrine which both is so consistent with his practice, and which enables him to cast away as absurd any lingering sense of responsibility. The active, intelligent, aspiring member of the middle class, who thinks that he is unfairly depressed, who sees that the habits of society are false, who knows that it derives a support from certain feelings of reverence and awe which are con- nected with the acknowledgment of invisible principles, eagerly welcomes the discovery that no such principles exist ; for then a system which, at least in all its outward appearances, is hollow and deceitful, and which certainly is a hinderance to his ambition, may gradually fall to pieces. But though this philosophy had, for these opposite reasons, a hold both upon the soirees of Paris, and upon the enterprising lawyer of the provincial town, there was nothing in it which could possibly appeal to the sympathies of poor men — of those who were actually suffering. It is true that many of the philosophers were economists, and could descant upon the circum- stances which made bread dear, and might make industry more profitable ; but hungry men, hating all abstractions, hate those most which refer to their hunger, and do not relieve it. Again, in many districts, the doctrines which the wise men derided, even if we may not believe that they commended themselves as realities to those who had no home or portion on earth, were at least connected with the friendly faces of cures who had sympathized and suffered with their flocks, and with actual gifts of bread at the convent doors. Doubtless such relics of religious association and sympathy must have been much more thinly scattered among the mechanics of the capital : the habits of the classes above them will have descended 12 178 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. upon them, and the quicker wit of the citizen will have more quickly detected the falsehood and hypocrisy — being much more glaring — which he saw among his instructors. Still, even to this class, what was there in the teaching of such a man as Helvetius, for instance, which could have given the least pleasure ? Sir James Mackintosh speaks of the Helvetian philosophy as the philosophy of the pot- house. But the frequenter of the pot-house would scarcely have cared to be told that a man, apart from the influences of society, deprived of the help which he receives from legislators, soirees, and tailors, is good for nothing, even though it were added, that legis- lators, soirees, and tailors, through the influence of priestly impos- ture, had managed their affairs badly, that they needed to be re- formed by philosophy, and that when so reformed many persons now proscribed might be brought within the charmed circle of civi- lization. The poor man must have felt that, whatever good chance might befall him hereafter, he was, at all events for the pre- sent, not within the horizon of the philosopher's telescope. But how different was the case when a voice was heard from Switzerland, proclaiming that each man has in himself, apart from all social institutions and social civilization, rights and power ; that he may claim those rights and put this power forth ; that he must do so if he would break the bonds which legislators, tailors, and soirees have been fastening around him, and if he would form a society in accordance with nature and truth. This was an appeal which went straight to the hearts of those who had nothing that they could call their own except their human limbs and counte- nance, and whatever there was, known or unknown, which gave motion to their limbs and life to their countenance. It appealed to the sense of strength, of wrong, of suffering, which is extinct in none ; it called that forth into energy and action which the philosophi- cal systematizers, for the most part, either denied the existence of, or would have been willing should not exist ; it mixed itself with all those notions about the frauds and tyrannies of priests and law- yers which the unsentimental school had propagated ; it turned to its own use all the materialist notions of the age respecting the origin of governments in compacts and conventions ; finally, it compelled the sages to acknowledge that the government of reason must begin in outbreaks of popular fury, and to join with the people POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. 179 in laying the foundation of society in a declaration of individual rights. The allies soon became enemies : it was found that the philoso- phers could do nothing with their theories ; then the poorer men tried what they could do with other weapons. The lookers-on were terrified ; they began to ask themselves whether the notions which they had adopted, as the highest discoveries of the enlight- ened intellect, must not have been falsely deduced. Could law and government have had their birth in the way that the teachers of the eighteenth century supposed ? Must not they have had some higher source? Was it not necessary to believe that some myste- rious power upheld them ? These thoughts stirred in the minds of men, especially in the Protestant nations, and prepared them to listen to Burke when he told them, as one who knew, that law rests upon deep invisible principles, not upon philosophical maxims or generalizations; that it is to be feared and reverenced as some- thing above us, not to be dealt with as our creature and servant ; that if its existence and awful derivation be trifled with or denied, it will prove its power and have its revenge. This teaching, so unlike any to which the last age had been accustomed, was received by many wondering nobles and ecclesiastics as if it were the reve- lation of a new truth, especially given for the defence of their houses and lands ; — by others it was welcomed with a more genial and thankful feeling, as the application to new circumstances of a doctrine which had been familiar to all great thinkers, and which had been delivered with peculiar power and solemnity by the noblest writers of the English nation. How much Burke, an adventurer, an Irishman, a philosopher, was the instrument of restoring the tone of English feeling, both amongst the men of action and of meditation, both in the upper and middling class, many are now ready to confess. Nor was his influence confined to this country. The deep historical researches of Niebuhr and the jurisprudential wisdom of Savigny, if they were not called forth by his writings, at least received their direction, in a great measure, from him — they would not have found readers to understand or appreciate them, if the soil had not been first prepared by our statesman and orator. The French revolution then has led many thoughtful persons, and many who are not thoughtful, to the conviction, that the doc- 180 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. trine upon which the declaration of rights rests is essentially false ; that a man choosing to stand upon his independence — choosing to be an individual — choosing the state of nature — can have no claims on his neighbour ; that to build up a fellowship upon this principle of independence is a monstrous contradiction, which proves itself to be so the moment it is brought to a practical experiment; finally, that law, being the appointed corrector of and judge of man, must be derived from, and rest upon, sanctions which men regard as superhuman. But, on the other hand, there are not a few who, without directly opposing these doctrines, nay, perhaps assenting to them in so far forth as they are answers to Rousseau, are inclined to draw inferences from the same facts which are most unlike these — one might fancy almost incompatible with them. " Whatever may be talked about the majesty and tran- scendent character of law," say these persons, " it is manifest that men did set themselves above law during the Revolution, and did show that they could defy it. The popular will proved that all the terrors of law, affirmed and made more fearful by religion, were not sufficient to bind it; and when at last it succumbed, it was not to this powrer, but to the will of a man, who showed that there was that in him wThich all the units of the nation together could not resist. Afterwards, it is true, the political machine seemed to run into its old ruts; tradition and custom apparently resumed their sway. But again the same truth was established ; all such influences have been found ineffectual ; a will, a despotical will, is wanted somewhere ; to this alone will men really bow down. Whether there be a right in individual men or not, there is — (I borrow the favourite phrase of a writer who has exhibited this position with the greatest clearness, and who has converted the whole history of the Revolution from an abstraction into a living reality,) — ' a might,' and this might will make itself felt, either in a whole nation, or in some single person who compels the whole nation to acknowledge that he is meant to govern it." One might fancy, when the opinion is put into this form, that Hobbes was again speaking in the nineteenth century. But what- ever resemblance there may be in the words, the feeling which finds utterance in them is the most opposite possible to that of the hard materialist ; it is a feeling of reverence for spiritual force. POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. 181 The triumphant despot is not the man to whom men submit, be- cause they find it more convenient to abstain from fighting, or because they find the government of one less perplexing than that of many ; no, he is the man to whom they do homage, because he has the highest title, the most perfect ordination, because he was in truth created to be their king. And therefore this is only an- other, and I fancy a more advanced and reasonable, form of that reverence for will, as superior to the forms of government and society, which has led many to look upon the notions of rule and subjection as hateful inventions of priests and monarchs. The writer of " Prometheus Unbound," and the " Revolt of Islam," preached the freedom of man from all outward forms and restraints : those who say that subjection is a necessity of man's being, that he longs to be governed, are yet equally certain that he can only sub- rait to the dominion of a man ; that he can never bow to the authority of an outward rule. And both alike differ from the senti- mental teachers of the last age, who exhorted men to follow their natures — to give their good feelings and impulses fair play, &c. Both acknowledge that a man must not yield to inclination, that he must win a victory over his nature — that otherwise he can neither be free himself, nor obtain lordship over his fellows. Meantime these notions, which in this form might be passed by as the dreams of idle men, are forcing themselves in another form upon the reflection of all practical politicians. Not only in quiet chambers, but by fierce mobs, is the doctrine proclaimed that Will is superior to Law — that it ought to be superior — that to it belongs the power of unmaking and re-making that which pre- tends to hold it down. Any one who attends carefully to the phrases which are current among us now, will perceive, I think, that they are very far more tremendous than those which were heard at the beginning of the French Revolution. " We have a right," is a phrase which betokens the acknowledgment of some antecedent principle ; but in our day this language, if we chance to hear it, translates itself immediately into " Wte will." This is the ground of the right ; it aspires to be the ground of all things. " And why has it not yet attained its aspiration, and what can hinder it from doing so ?" asks the terrified statesman. He finds 182 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS,. that when such a question is started, politics must have become an awful science ; a science which can scarcely be pursued success- fully by one who determines that he will confine himself to official rules or precedents, and that he will admit nothing as concerning him which involves transcendent considerations. However he may be inclined to laugh at metaphysics and scorn theology, he finds that he must discuss a subject* which touches upon all the deepest principles of both ; that he must ascertain by what means the existence of law may be reconciled with the existence of the human will. The debate between the disciple of Rousseau and the disciple of Burke brought out the old controversy — " Is the nature of man a good thing, — a thing to be trusted, as Rousseau affirms that it is ? or is it an evil thing, as the Reformers said it was, which is to be kept down, and which every good man is to triumph over V9 And this controversy, after the experiment of the French Revolution, was decided by politicians in favour of the ancient opinion, and against the new one. But here is another old scholastic controversy brought to the like practical issue, and submitted to the same adjudication : " Is Man, as the successors of the Reformers have affirmed, to be identified with that nature which is attached to him ; or is he, when he sinks under the do- minion of that nature, to be considered as abandoning his proper state, as subjecting himself to that over which he was meant to rule Vf If this controversy be decided in favour of the first notion, the notion of modern Calvinism, the politician must invent what charms he can to lull that will to sleep, " which hath oftentimes been bound with fetters and chains, and the chains have been 'plucked asunder by it, and the fetters broken in pieces, neither hath any man tamed it. But in the mountains and the tombs has it been continu- ally— crying and cutting itself with stones." If on the other hand he admit the existence of a will or spirit in man, and that this will is only safe and free when it has found some other will to govern it, and that in the vain effort for independence it constantly be- comes the slave of its own natural inclinations, it can be no con- tradiction on the one hand to suppose that law is meant to overawe these inclinations ; on the other hand, that there is some spiritual government, in which the man himself has a claim of citizenship, and in which he may find his rightful king. POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. 183 2. But this hint leads us to another aspect of the French Revo- lution, that which may be called its properly political aspect. It began with a declaration of individual rights, but upon that declar- ation it professed to build a society ; and this society was to be univer- sal. It is true that the character of the revolutionary proceedings, from first to last, was eminently French. It is true that a strong burst of French patriotism was called forth by the invasion of the allies, and that a desire of French predominance may be traced in the different counsels of the nation, from the commencement of the war to the abdication of Napoleon. But the principle of the Revo- lution— I mean not its nominal principles, as they were expressed in parchment documents or in pompous phrases, but the real prin- ciple which governed the minds of those who acted in it, and which alone rescued their documents and phrases from the charge of utter unmeaningness — was the substitution of a universal polity for national polities. Every monstrous absurdity which marked the speakers, writers, and actors who figured in it savoured of this feeling, and proved its existence ; all its achievements, both when it was acting as a republic and was concentrated in one man, tended to this result. Even the constitutions which were propounded one after another for France itself, had no more reference to France than to Kamschatka ; they were all constructed upon universal principles, all meant for mankind. These illustrations of the worth and preciousness of particular governments, when they are framed in conformity with general maxims, awakened the thoughtful men of Europe to a study of national history, and of that internal life in nations whereby they have been able to preserve their identity for generations amidst all changes of external circumstances. And these profound investi- gations received light and strength from the national feelings which the propagandism of France and the tyranny of the universal empire called forth. A spirit was roused which made it impossible that men should look upon the histories of Voltaire, of Hume, and of Robertson, as representing the feelings and mind of past gene- rations ; a spirit which led the children to feel that there was a bond between them and their fathers, that they were inheritors of the same soil, and that names, and memorials, and institutions, ■ 184 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. more permanent than the oaks which grew upon it, had been bequeathed to them to keep. But this patriotic temper did not much survive the war in Ger- many and the Peninsula ; and though the historical inquiries to which it had given life and interest were not neglected, nay, though they began to be more valued as the wisdom and learning which had been exhibited in them were better known, yet they no further influenced the popular mind than as they supplied the armour for resisting some of its most prevalent tendencies. In spite of the deep and solemn warnings which those who engaged in them have supplied, schemes of universal society, which pass over as insig- nificant all peculiarities of race, and of language, ridicule custom and the reverence of ancestors, and annul the old constitutions in which these are embodied, have been most rife amongst us. It may be well to notice two or three of them. Considering the change which has been gradually taking place in the philosophy of Europe, — a change which only of late years has been distinctly perceptible, but which has been in progress at least from the commencement of the present century — it may seem a matter of some surprise that Mr. Bentham, a philosopher emphat- ically of the last generation, who was formed in the school of Locke and Hobbes, and who aspired to reduce their maxims to practice, should have exercised so considerable an influence over the minds of persons who live in this day. The fact would un- doubtedly be difficult of explanation, if Mr. Bentham's influence had continued, and had overcome those which were opposed to it. To understand why it should have been for a time felt both in his own country and abroad is not, I think, impossible. He came into notice when the great Rousseau experiment had been made, and had led to the consequences of which we have spoken. It wTas impossible for any one to deny that Burke and the Constitutionalists had gained much for their argument by that experiment. To all appearance they were right, and the defenders of popular govern- ments wrong. Still there was a restless feeling that the trial might have been conducted differently, and that then it wrould have answered to the wishes of those who commenced it. And besides this, the several countries of Europe, and presently, also, the Spanish colonies of America, were in that naked revolutionized 4* POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. 185 condition which seemed to make a new constitution of some kind necessary for them. These feelings Mr. Bentham met. He told men that the Rousseau scheme was false in its very conception ; that anterior to the existence of society we have no rights ; that except in combination we are good for nothing ; that the end of any combination is the greatest happiness of the greatest number of the units who enter into it ; that the combination is preserved by the mutual .suspicion of its members, and by such contrivances as dispose the governing body not to violate the interest of those whose affairs they administer. Having these few and comprehen- sible rules to guide him, the writer applied a very acute and pains- taking intellect, first, to the construction of a scheme of govern- ment and legislation which should accord with his theory ; secondly, to a detailed exposure of the various contradictions and absurdities which are to be found in the practice of different nations, and especially of his own. To young men who were ashamed of being reckoned sentimental, and who yet panted for the glorious common- wealth which the sentimental school had promised, the sight of a new society built upon logic was most consolatory ; their elders could more easily appreciate, even if they were not disposed to acknowledge, the justice of Mr. Bentham's practical charge, that while in their ordinary acts and discourses they admitted no other principle than that to which he referred all things, they were yet maintaining various institutions, which upon that principle could not be justified ; that they were, consequently, carrying out the doctrine of self-interest so far as it furthered their own ends, and repudiating it just when it might inconveniently interfere with them. These were facts which could not be gainsaid ; and if Mr. Bentham could have contrived that his system should seem to meddle with nothing but law and government, he would for a considerable time have retained the disciples which he had made, and even have obtained frequent accessions to their numbers. After the shock of the French revolution and of the French war had subsided, men whose tendency was to occupy themselves with the workings of their own minds, began to lose all interest in politics, and even to decry them as belonging to a merely outward region ; they could, therefore, easily consent that almost any system upon that subject should gain currency. But they soon found that a compact organ- 186 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. ized political scheme must involve the questions which they looked upon as alone sacred. The impossibility of distinguishing social Utilitarianism, of reconciling the acknowledgment of a certain ultimate end in one region of thought with the positive denial of it in another, became apparent to those whose minds were most real, most impatient of mere artificial boundaries, as well as to those who were strictly and formally logical. Poets found that if their art could be defended at all, it must be merely as a kind of amusement, upon the same grounds as cards or horse-racing : religious men, however reluctant they might be to acknowledge any relation between such topics, were driven to ask themselves whether the doctrines of Paley and Bentham could be reconciled with that of the Sermon on the Mount, and if not, which was to be abandoned ? This school, therefore, found itself unexpectedly assailed by all those new and strange thoughts respecting literature, metaphysics, and the spiritual universe, which had been gradually working themselves out in the minds of men in different parts of Europe, while Mr. Bentham had been occupied in his study with the rationale of evidence, and having nothing to oppose to them, it could only sound a retreat, and endeavour, at whatever risk of theoretical or practical inconsistency, to defend the existence of its philosophy by circumscribing the application of it within very narrow limits. But even within these limits it has no safe dwelling-place. For while the desire of man for a universal polity has grown every day more strong, this desire has connected itself more and more with deep feelings and passions, has had less and less to do with the mere calculating understanding. But to this calculating under- standing the Benthamites make their sole appeal ; by this they would fashion the whole scheme of human life, and of the universe. The right thing is that the will of the majority should be omnipo- tent. But what calculus have they discovered for measuring the strength which lies in that word — will— or for ascertaining what is to become of all theories and axioms of legislation when it has obtained supremacy 1 Far more profound in its conception, and I think, also, more interesting in its details, than the system of which I have been speaking, was that which was proclaimed in France about twelve years ago, under the name of St. Simonianism. In their project of POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. 187 society the Benthamites discarded, or treated as mere accidents, all national distinctions. But there was one circumstance in the con- dition of man which could not be wholly accidental, or entirely the fruit of bad legislation. Men do exist in families ; it would seem that in the most fortunate societies the principle of family life has been most recognised, its limits most accurately defined. Without taking any cognizance of this fact, the Benthamites created a society upon the hypothesis that mankind is an aggregate of indi- vidual atoms. The St. Simonians felt at once that such a scheme was a practical delusion : so long as the notions of mankind con- tinue what they are, so long as the morality which maintains these notions, and is maintained by them, subsists, men will be continually acting, speaking, voting, per stirpes, and not per capita. Thus the aristocratical idea intrudes itself; the existence of a perfect demo- cratical fellowship is impossible. Now while I reverence the feel- ing, to whatever cause it may be traced, which hindered the En- glish Utilitarian school from boldly looking down into the gulf which this thought opens — while I rejoice that they dared not sacrifice their moral impulses to their logical consistency, and though I can easily understand how they may have persuaded themselves that they were logically consistent, because it was not for the greatest happiness of the greatest number that all family ties should be sacrificed — I must yet maintain that if a universal society is to be constructed, either upon the Utilitarian maxim, or upon the chacun selon sa capacite maxim of the St. Simonians, it is an indis- pensable preliminary that domestic feelings, associations, sympa- thies, all the laws by which they are upheld, all acknowledgment of relationship as a significant fact, should be extinguished. The deepest mind that ever dwelt in a mere mortal when searching, and that with the noblest and purest aims, for the foundation of univer- sal society, could find no escape from this conclusion ; and every new project for the actual establishment of it has supplied fresh evidence that, if such a society is to be built by human hands, these must be the conditions of it. But the St. Simonians felt that a universal society, even of the kind which they had imagined - even a universal bank — could not be established by mere human hands. Here was another indica- tion of the deeper wisdom which was at work amidst their extra- 188 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. vagancies and contradictions. They must have asked themselves as they repeated the words, " chacun selon sa capacite" — But where shall we find the judge of capacities ? where dwells that seeing eye which shall perceive in each, that mighty power which shall assign to each, his rightful vocation? The question carried them into a mysterious region. There must be some supernatural foun- dation for this commonwealth, some supernatural superintendence over it. It was inconceivable upon any other hypothesis. Once convinced of that fact, it became a duty, or what seemed to them the same thing, a logical necessity, to invent a supernatural ma- chinery, and assume the airs of inspired men. Upon this fraud of course followed every species of absurdity and falsehood, — under the weight of these the system sank rapidly. French philosophers were not yet prepared for an Apollonius in the nineteenth century ; they had not yet learnt to feel as Porphyry felt, that there was a kingdom in the world which, without the help of some mythical hero, could not be opposed. Possibly, if the vision of such a king- dom should become more clear and threatening, some will be driven to that resource, and then St. Simonianism will reappear, under' another name and form, to try whether it can satisfy the inextin- guishable longing in human hearts for a human fellowship. The socialism of Mr. Owen is wholly unlike the St. Simonian doctrine in all its more striking and philosophical features, but for that very reason it may obtain for a time a wider popularity. A benevolent person established a factory in a certain district of Scot- land upon a principle which made it a blessing, not a curse, to its inmates and the neighbourhood. One who had taken part in this experiment, though he did not originate it, adopted the very plau- sible notion that a similar arrangement might be applicable in all our manufacturing districts. The problem how to deal with the population concentrated there, is the most awful one which presents itself to the modern politician ; any one who could offer but a sug- gestion on the subject, especially if it were the result of experience, was entitled to a patient hearing. When Mr. Owen showed that men, brought by certain contrivances under a laborious, kindly, self-denying superintendence, would be more happily situated than those who were merely treated as animals capable of producing a certain quantity of cotton twist, the demonstration was not the less POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. 189 valuable because the result of it might have been anticipated. But by a process (alas ! most natural) he went on to the convic- tion that the whole secret lay in the particular machinery which he recommended : then, by another step, to the further conclusion that such a machinery was in itself capable of producing every desirable moral result. That rubicon once passed, it needed only a mind somewhat more generalizing, daring, and self-conceited than that which is found in the majority of men, one withheld by no historical knowledge and few intellectual impediments from ex- periments for the disorganization of society, to produce a preacher of the doctrine that men are mere creatures of circumstances, and that by a readjustment of circumstances their condition may be completely reformed. The necessary corollaries from these propo- sitions worked themselves out by degrees, without the help of any intellectual subtlety, as the obstructions to the new scheme made themselves manifest : — whatever principles, practices, institutions existing among men were connected with the idea of a will or spirit in us which might be superior to circumstances, must be abandoned. That all forms of religious faith should be included among these was inevitable; but it is a discovery of the highest practical value which the Owenites have been permitted to enforce, though they certainly were not the first to make it, that Marriage is in the same category, that its meaning or validity cannot be maintained, either logically or practically, when the existence of a spiritual principle and of spiritual obligations is denied. Owenisin may be described as an attempt, upon a larger scale than Benthamism, to apply to society universally the maxims which have been already adopted by certain of the classes which compose it. The worship of circumstances is the habit of feeling into which the easy and comfortable part of mankind naturally fall ; their in- ward thought is that their houses shall continue for ever, and that thought makes them at once indisposed to change, and skeptical about the existence of any invisible government. When the poor men say, " We, too, will acknowledge circumstances to be all in all, we will cast away any belief in that which is invisible, this world shall be the only home in which we will dwell," the language may well appal all who hear. To one who sympathizes with the poor it is fearful, because of that which it shows they are ready to 190 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. abandon. To one who has no sympathy with the poor it is fear- ful, because of that which it shows they are ready to take away from him. Nevertheless, be it observed, the force of these asser- tions lies in that very point in which they are anti-socialist — it is the " we will" that gives them all their meaning, — it is that which imparts to the dry chips of Mr. Owen's theory the semblance of vitality. He protests against the existence of that to which he owes his own pertinacity, and all the effects which it has been ever able to produce. Combination therefore in its simpler forms, combination for the purpose of assisting the will of the majority, and enforcing its right to be heard and to rule ; combination in the form of trades' unions, and chartist unions (I use language derived from our English expe- rience, but, I fear, by no means unintelligible to the members of other nations, at least not to Frenchmen); combination — not divested of religious sympathies, but with a piteous fury striving to seize and to appropriate them to its own purpose ; — this, it seems to me, is much more really the characteristic of our times, is much more really fearful, because it carries with it so many more elements of real power, than all the schemes and systems for the reconstruction of the universe. No doubt every one of these schemes embodies some truth which cannot be lost. The greatest happiness of the greatest number, though it may be the most idle and insignificant of all formulas till each one of its substantives and adjectives has been translated, must yet contain a meaning which will somehow or other be realized. The phrase chacun selon sa cwpacite, indicates a persuasion of gifts appropriated to peculiar vocations and offices which we cannot afford to part with ; the idea of co-operation, on which Owen dwells, is one of wonderful depth and importance. But each of these is chiefly remarkable as the shrine of a feeling which it cannot satisfy, and of a conviction which it labours to stifle, — the feeling, I mean, that a universal society is needful to man ; the conviction that if there be such a society, the treatment of man as a voluntary or a spiritual being must be the character- istic distinction of it. 3. Among the notions which Rousseau scattered about the world, some of the most striking and startling, as every one knows, had reference to education. The commonwealth of Plato, said the POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. 191 author of "Emile," is neither more nor less than a scheme of edu- cation ; and when the true commonwealth which answers to that dream shall rise out of the ruins of the old form of society, the question, how education is to be conducted, will be the one which will absorb all others into itself. Men, who started from the most opposite point to Rousseau, and took the most different directions from him and from each other, adopted this opinion. It began to be believed that education would be a substitute for prisons, peni- tentiaries, and hangmen, and that consequently statesmen wrere, above all other men, bound to interest themselves in it. These feelings received a shock from the events of the French Revolution. As the awfulness and dignity of Law began again to be acknow- ledged, the notion of substituting more benignant influences for its punishments and terrors was scouted; the education doctrine w?as regarded as part of the sentimental creed respecting the goodness of human nature ; that creed having been proved to be absurd — it having been seen how little man, left to himself, either can do, or wishes to do, without prisons or guillotines, — the different infe- rences from it must also be abandoned. To some such feelings as this language indicates, — feelings which seldom shaped themselves into definite thoughts or arguments, but which exercised a powerful influence, nevertheless, — we may attribute the dislike to popular education which was manifested, especially in England, by the sup- porters of existing institutions. But both parties in the controversy had forgotten one important point — Education must henceforth, said the disciple of the new school, be the grand agent and influence in the world. Nonsense, replied the English country gentleman, wre will stand in the old ways, we will do as our forefathers did before us. Well ! but what are the old ways ? what did our forefathers before us ? His- tory shows that they attached as much importance to education as Rousseau himself could do — that they believed it to be that with- out which prisons and penitentiaries were perfectly ineffectual — which had powers that wTere never intrusted to them. It is evident that they had no thought of confining education to any class, for they were continually making provision for the training of youths whose main qualification was their poverty. The discovery of this fact was fatal to the argument against the philosophers. For a 192 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. time it decided the practical question in their favour. The old in- stitutions for education had been abused in England by carelessness or selfishness, had been destroyed upon the continent by revolution- ary violence ; and in the one and the other were multitudes growing up with all the new notions about popular power and will, with all the new indisposition to bow down before authorities merely be- cause they were established. Jails could not be provided for all, or if they could, it might in time be a question who would be the jailors. Therefore the statesmen began to say, we must have fresh schools ; the old have served indifferently well to train those who have a national position ; they are not meant for those masses which have none ; they may train those who desire instruction, and will make sacrffices to obtain it ; they can be of no service to those who look upon it scarcely as a blessing, who scarcely know what it means. It is evident, I think, that these thoughts have worked a great change in the minds of all men upon these subjects. I say of all men, for the change is as remarkable in those who have declared education to be the panacea, as in those who have but lately been awakened to a sense of its necessity. The former used to urge the great advantage it wrould be to the poor to have the means of intellectual cultivation placed within their reach : how many new pleasures they would be able to command, how many temptations they might avoid. The latter were able to rebut such arguments by plausible appeals to fact. Did the boys of the schools acquire these new tastes 1 were they the better for their knowledge 1 was the population more refined or more moral? I know not where such controversies could end, or what violent twisting of statistics there might have been on each side in order to make out the the- orem which was to be demonstrated. But the advocates of educa- tion now say, Look at these masses of human beings ; it is not a question what you should do to amuse or benefit them, but what you must do in order to govern them, in order to prevent them from destroying the land and themselves. You have found the ordinary resources of government fail ; you have proved how inadequate religion is when it only assumes the character of a support to law ; you must resort to some other means. You may laugh at the notion of a silent moral influence, such as education pretends to POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. 193 possess, being efficient ; but does not history — do not these living masses, laugh at the notion of your physical appliances being effi- cient 1 Surely this is different language altogether. The answer to it is not easy. There is no answer to it but the sleepy determi- nation not to think about the matter till we are compelled to think of it by a revolution. In this change of language, however, some other changes are involved which may not be obvious. There may be a hundred differences about the instruction which ought to be communicated, and the persons who should communicate it, but those who defend education upon these grounds are agreed so far as this — Whatever be the right agency or instruments for getting a dominion over the will of these masses, it is the attainment of this dominion which is our object. It signifies not much in what phrases this object is expressed. I can easily conceive that earnest and able defenders of education may be loth to adopt the conviction into which I remarked that many political students had been led by comparing the theories and the events of the last fifty years — very loth to speak of man as a mysterious being, whose natural inclinations, if they be followed, make him a transgressor of law and order, and an enemy of his fellows, but who may be raised above those inclinations, may attain a true freedom which sets him above the penalty of laws because he has no wish to break them — such expressions may appear to them strange and fantastical, and most unlike those of the school in which they have been trained. Nev- ertheless they may mean very nearly what the persons who indulge in such odd mystical talk mean ; they may confess by a number of words and acts that they do look upon education as a won- drous power which is to act upon men in a very wondrous manner; yet not in the way of a charm, not in a way inconsistent with their constitution : a power which is by some means to reach a faculty or principle, call it what you like, that swords and clubs cannot reach. There is, I think, a very general consent indeed about this point, however diverse the elements may be which make up that consent. For instance, those who say that it is hopeless to com- municate religious instruction to all the members of a nation, and that, therefore, (what they call) secular instruction must be com- municated to them first, defend the proposition upon these two 13 194 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. grounds, one that the perils of leaving the people untaught are infinite, there being everywhere threatenings of popular outrage which the legislature cannot put down — the other, that there must be something common to all men, something which all men may receive, and that this cannot be the same with those sect-notions and opinions wThich manifestly do not belong to all. Such is the line of their argument. Taken simply as it stands, it does, I submit, lead us into reflections quite unlike any that would be naturally suggested by the ablest treatises on education in the last century. It sets us upon thinking what manner of power that must be which can address itself to a whole body of human creatures, and can call forth that in each of them w^hich will give him the rights of a Man, and make him a fellow-worker with his brethren. Sad experience has convinced thoughtful persons that the secret does not lie in the mechanical contrivances for bringing a number of children together in a school, wmich were produced as the perfect cure for the nation's evils a few years ago. These contrivances organize and discipline masses into a certain stupid material con- sistency, or they call out now and then into dangerous self-exalting activity the powers of one or two clever pupils ; they do not infuse into the whole body a quiet life, which may circulate regularly and continually through each of its distinct members. Again, the different Protestant systems and sects, as I have said already, are found inadequate for the purpose ; they scarcely recognise the existence of that in the pupil which can be spoken to and called forth ; they divide instead of harmonizing. Still it would seem that there must be such a power somewThere — who shall tell us where 1 4. The method which has been used for cutting this knot explains the last remarkable peculiarity in our modern political views. All those bodies w?hich profess a voluntary character having been found unequal to the task of conducting education, the conclusion has appeared inevitable, that the government of each nation should undertake the formation and superintendence of it. Any one who has soberly set himself to consider in what way it is possible to provide for this dire necessity, will not be surprised that this should offer itself to hundreds as the only refuge from positive despair. However many a cherished notion of personal and domestic liberty POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. 195 they may be obliged to abandon, however painful the thought may be that we in the nineteenth century have no better resource than that which we have learnt to consider unsatisfactory and dangerous in the old republics of Greece, still a wise lover of his species will not be hindered by such thoughts from adopting that which he is sure is the only practical means for its relief. But there are some perplexing reflections which will intrude themselves, before he attains to that perfect certainty. Is it not somewhat strange that w?e should be asserting this marvellous power for the state, just at the time when there is most reluctance to acknowledge even those powers which evidently do belong to it ? Is not the Will of the multitude asserting its independence of the civil power, and are we not devising a remedy for this very exigency ? Have not the govern- ments in most European countries been for some time past rather hastily undressing themselves of the spiritual properties and func- tions to which they had in earlier times laid claim ? Are not those called illiberal which hesitate to perform these acts of renunciation ? and is it not a little inconsistent that these governments should at the selfsame moment, be assuming that which, by their own con- fession, is in the very strictest and most remarkable sense an authority over the spirits of Men ? I say, by their own confession, for do we escape at all from the difficulty, by saying that the state shall only have the charge of secular education, — other portions of it being left to more peculiar and individual interests ? Is not that which we propose to ourselves by our education — the attainment of a certain influence over those human hearts which are entertain- ing such fearful dreams of independence and defiance ? Is not this the very plea — the only plea for the state's interference — that its existence is endangered by ignorance and self-will ? And must not, therefore, the education of which the state undertakes the superintendence, most especially aim — by such means as seem the likeliest to answer — (it matters not what epithet you give them) at the accomplishment of this design ? This is a contradiction by which I fancy the practical statesman will be haunted continually j which will perplex him far more in action than even in meditation. To satisfy the cry for a power which shall not be merely legal — not merely punitive— but which shall act directly upon the human spirit, that the legal and punitive 196 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS. sanctions may make their appeal to the consciences of men, not to the fears of brutes — you inspire a body with this power, or at least you force it into acts implying this power, which is saying contin- ually, that it can deal with nothing internal, — can take cognizance only of overt acts. To satisfy the cry for a universal body, in which men shall be regarded as human beings and not merely as the members of a local society, you insist that the government of a local society shall assume to itself a universal human character, when all the new schemes for the management of the world are bearing witness that it never has had, and never can have such a character ; that its only security consists in its distinctions and lim- itations. Still the difficulty remains : if there be no spiritual universal society — and all attempts to create one in this nineteenth century have been very abortive, — the state must, at any hazard of inconsistency, in despite of every danger to individual liberty, notwithstanding the strong and increasing feeling of its incompe- tency, assume the appearance, and perform the duties of one. PART II. OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE ROMISH SYSTEM. CHAPTER I. RECAPITULATION. The conclusion to which we have arrived seems to be this — that the principles asserted by the religious societies which have been formed in Europe since the Reformation are solid and im- perishable ; that the systems in which those principles have been embodied were faulty in their origin, have been found less and less to fulfil their purpose as they have grown older, and are now ex- hibiting the most manifest indications of approaching dissolution. Now I have alluded, when speaking of modern philosophical movements, to certain prevalent and popular statements which seem at first sight very closely to resemble those which have been the result of our inquiry. The doctrine that systems, religions, churches, are dying out, but that they have been the clothing of certain important ideas which will survive their extinction, and wrhich it is the business of wise men to note, preserve, and perhaps furnish with a new vesture, is one which I cannot be expected to entertain ; nay, to which if this book mean any thing I must be directly opposed ; nevertheless a conscientious reader may find it difficult to discover what is the point at which this doctrine and mine diverge. It is necessary for the purpose of making the con- nection of what has been said with what I am about to say intelli- gible, that I should relieve him of this embarrassment ; and I know no way in which I can do it so effectually as by reminding him of the different points of evidence which have gradually offered them- selves to us as we have proceeded. L The doctrine which, upon the authority of the old Quaker books, and in opposition to one of their modern teachers, I main- 198 RECAPITULATION. tained to be the fundamental one of Quakerism, is, that man is a twofold creature, having inclinations towards sensible things — being united to the divine Word by trusting in whom he may rise above these inclinations and attain to a spiritual life and commu- nion. Of all persons, those who seem the most unlike the primitive Quakers are modern philosophers, artists, and politicians ; yet we found that various persons belonging to these different classes had been led by different processes of thought to adopt the maxim which had formed the great obstacle to the belief of Fox's prin- ciple. " It cannot be true," said religious people, " because man as such apart from a peculiar religious vocation and impulse is not spiritual ;" " It cannot be true," said the philosophers of the last generation, * because he is not susceptible of a religious vocation and impulse at all — he is simply a creature of flesh and blood." Both these opinions would be disowned by those who claim to re- present the enlightenment of our time ; they would say " man as man has spiritual powers, and is a spiritual creature." Now it is probable that many of those who use that language would produce it as an instance of the way in which a doctrine has been disencumbered of its ancient form and been reduced to a pure and simple essence — " In the acknowledgment of a spiritual life or existence in man," they would say, " we uphold Fox's meaning, we only take away from it that phraseology with which the religious traditions of former centuries had invested it." My object is not to argue the point w7hether this be so or not, but to show that our observations have not led us to this conclusion, but to a most opposite one. It seemed to us that a man believing he has certain spiritual capacities within him, is just the person who is obliged to consider under what conditions these capacities exist; that it was this problem about which Fox was occupied ; that the sense of certain upward tendencies within him wThich were con- tinually restrained and resisted, instead of giving him peace and happiness was the very cause of his torment : that wre may talk generally about our spiritual power and existence, but that the moment we practically realize them, amidst all the contradictions under which they exist in this world, they become so involved with awful feelings of responsibility, with the vision of an unknown world, with the certainty of moral evil, that we are glad to escape RECAPITULATION. 199 from them into materialism : that this escape being now impossible we must inquire whence these spiritual desires and impulses have come, by what they are upheld, whither they are tending ; that these questions lead directly to the principle which Fox asserted, that it may be omitted or substituted for some other in a system, but that it must be steadily faced and considered by every man who is really engaged in the world's conflict ; that modern thinkers are perpetually exhibiting their want of it, especially when they speak of our self-consciousness, the necessity of it, the misery and falsehood of it ; that the words * Not I but Christ in me" are the answer to these perplexities ; that we may search heaven and earth before we find any other. And if we are asked on what ground, then, we affirm that the Quaker system has proved inade- quate— the answer would be, Precisely on this ground, that it has failed in giving a clear definite expression to the idea of Fox ; that it has reduced that idea too nearly into a vague synonyme of the notion that we have certain spiritual capacities or feelings within us, that it has not exhibited to men the object on whom Fox affirmed that their spiritual capacities and feelings were to be ex- ercised. The founder of Quakerism is however not much known to the ordinary philosopher : he would be much more anxious to show that he had retained all that is really precious in the teaching of the great Reformer. Our mere men of letters, who reverence Leo and believe Erasmus to have protested quite as much as was need- ful against the abominations of his time, regard Luther, who knew nothing of statues and wrote indifferent Latin, with positive aver- sion ; but the more earnest men among us — those especially who believe that European society has been making continual progress from darkness to light — speak of him as one who worked mightily for the overthrow of opinions based upon mere authority and tradi- tion, and prepared the way for the utterance of thoughts which he himself would have rejected with horror. I am not now alluding to the ignorant declaimers who boast of Luther because he exalted the understanding in place of faith ; but of those who being really acquainted with his writings, are aware that he as much deserves that praise as Brutus deserved to be canonized by the French Sans Culotte for the noble plebeian spirit which led him to slay the 200 RECAPITULATION. 4 great aristocrat Julius Cesar ; and who would consider it a very ill compliment to any one that he wanted faith himself and wished to destroy it in others. They will cheerfully admit that the asser- tion, " A man is justified by faith" is more characteristic of Luther than his opposition to popes or masses. They will allow that the different acts of his outward life had all a more or less direct refer- ence to that principle. But then they would say, " this principle when it is taken out of the swaddling bands of the sixteenth cen- tury and allowed to move freely, means just this, that it is the inward state of a man and not his performance of certain pre- scribed acts, or even the worthiness of his outward conduct which entitles him to be called good — not what he seems nor even what he does, but what he is constitutes him a right and true man. This truth had been set at naught by the Church of that day : by the vehemence with which he declared it and compelled men to listen to it, Luther established his chief claim to the gratitude of mankind." I am well convinced that this principle had been practically denied by the Romanists, and that Luther wTas the most powerful of all instruments in re-asserting it. But we have seen reason to believe that George Fox maintained the doctrine of an inward right- eousness quite as strongly as the German ; and yet that there was a very marked difference between them. The difference seemed to consist in this, that while Fox urged his disciples to exercise their faith in a spiritual being, the Lord of their spirits — Luther delighted to declare that that Being had actually taken human flesh, had died a human death, and by these acts had redeemed us from a curse and justified us before his Father. If Luther was, as his modern admirers constantly affirm that he was, eminently straightforward and practical, impatient of abstractions, dealing in all plain homely images — here, it seemed to us, lay the secret of these qualities. It was no fantastic Being he was speaking of, no mere idea ; not even merely an object for spiritual apprehension, though that in the highest degree ; it was one who had identified himself with men, had by a series of outward acts — those which the creed announces — established his human as well as his divine character. It struck us that this, which is in the strictest sense the Lutheran characteristic, was particularly necessary as a complc- RECAPITULATION. 201 ment of the Quaker doctrine ; that this without it soon passes into mere vapour. But be that as it may, it was this peculiarity in Luther's preaching which enabled him to effect the overthrow of existing superstitions, and so to be (as we are told) the precursor of greater deliverances hereafter. No doubt the fact of the Incar- nation was fully recognised by the Romanists, but by certain no- tions about inward and inherent righteousness, and by certain practices which were grounded on these notions, this fact had been deprived of its significance. It had ceased to be a witness to any man of what he was. By affirming the reality of this fact and its sig- nificance, Luther got rid of the impositions upon the understand- ing and conscience, which the practical unbelief of it had made possible. It seemed to us then, judging from these facts, that we do not merely strip Luther of his dress, but that we destroy the man himself, when we make him the witness for a principle and not for a fact, that wTe do not preserve that quality in him which enabled him to be a reformer, and deprive him of that which be- longed to him in common with those whom he reformed, but that we take from him that wherein his reforming powrer consisted, and leave ourselves to the certain peril, if all history be not a delusion, of falling under those sensible tyrannies from which he was per- mitted to emancipate us. And if I be asked again in this case, what then is my objection to the Lutheran system, I answer this and no other — that it does not bear witness for the all importance of that fact which Luther asserted to be all important ; that it teaches us to believe in justification by faith instead of to believe in a Justifier \ that it substitutes for Christ a certain notion or scheme of Christianity. Quakerism and pure Protestantism both belong chiefly, if not entirely, to the region of individual life and experience — Unitarian- ism we found was of an altogether different character; it took men away from self-reflection to thoughts about nature and God. Nevertheless, it has changed its complexion as men's views about themselves have changed ; it applied material standards to the In- finite, so long as it was the habit of the time to consider men as purely material ; when that habit ceased, it began to decry the ordinary theological language as too earthly and definite. Here then perhaps we have discovered a system which answers exactly 202 RECAPITULATION. to the philosophers' demand, which readily abandons the dress of one period that it may clothe itself in that of another. But will it be said that this is merely a change of dress 1 Can those who just now represented the acknowledgment of man's spiritual powers as the very essence of all religion, so entirely alter their note that they look upon it too merely as an accident ? Accord- ing to their showing Unitarianism has not preserved its identity at all — the alteration of popular opinion has abolished its very nature and substance. But it seemed to us that this was not the case ; that it had a principle, that it did contain something which is con- stantly and invariably true. The hold which it had maintained for a time over earnest minds arose, we thought, from this, that it de- clared the unity of God, the absolute love of God, the existence of a good and pure state for mankind, to be primary truths which can- not be altered or set aside by any experiences or any dogmas. These were eternal principles not subject to the mutations of costume or fashion ; needful for man, needful for him at all times. And the objection which we made to the Unitarian system was, that it did so feebly and miserably represent these truths — nay, that it practi- cally contradicted them as no other system ever did ; a charge which applies to the modern scheme no less than to the old one on grounds even more forcible; for whereas the whole virtue of Unitarianism consisted in its asserting the existence of God as dis- tinct from the thoughts and apprehensions of men, the later teach- ers are continually approaching nearer and nearer to a confusion between our own spiritual " nature" and the Being whom it ac- knowledges. The transition from this stage of belief to the wor- ship of the separate feelings and moods of that " spiritual nature," and thence the prostration before them in the shape of idols is very rapid indeed. Surely a strange apotheosis for Unitarianism ! I contend then that the principles of Fox, of Luther, of the Unitarians, are too strong, too vital to bear the imprisonment to which they have been subjected in the different systems which have been invented for them ; but so far from thinking that those prin- ciples will be more true and vital when they have lost their reli- gious and personal character, and have been translated into the terms of a philosophical theory, I believe that when they shall suffer that change they wall lose all their preciousness, and will at- RECAPITULATION. 203 tain the perfection of the impotence and insignificance to which hitherto they have been but partially reduced. II. Seeing, however, that these principles, even in the time of their strength, have shown a disposition to clothe themselves in some form or other, nay, that it is only in times of great weakness that they can be content to remain merely as notions or opinions for individual minds; we are bound to inquire further, what this tendency means, and how it is possible that it may be satisfied when the systems which have owed their existence to it shall satisfy it no longer. To answer this question we must refer to another class of facts which we have been considering. The second distinguishing Quaker tenet was, that there is a spiritual and universal kingdom established in the world. We may con- ceive, though not without great difficulty, how the doctrine re- specting the Indwelling Word might have been received and ac- knowledged as a doctrine and as nothing more — at all events might have appeared to Quakers only as the governing law of their own individual lives. But it is obvious that this tenet ceases to be one at all if it is nothing more — ceases to be a principle for individuals if it be only for them. That there should be such a kingdom, and that an honest man believing it to be should not ask, What are the conditions of citizenship in it ? is incredible. To this conviction then we trace the origin of the Quaker society and the Quaker system : by entering the first the disciples of George Fox sought for themselves a place in this kingdom ; by adopting the second, they interpreted to themselves and others its nature and its laws. And therefore our main inquiry in reference to the society was, Does it answer to this character ? Does it even any longer pro- fess to answer to it 1 and with respect to the system — what is there here which may tell us the secret of the failure to which the his- tory of the body bears such a striking witness? I will not now dwell on the answer to this question further, than to remark that we observed a resolute eschewing of forms to be one of the main characteristics of the Quaker system, and a dispostion to formalism one of the most striking characteristics of the Quaker body. But my object at present is rather to remark upon the faith which seemed to make the existence of Quakerism necessary, than upon any of its good or evil features. 204 RECAPITULATION. Was this faith a new one ? was George Fox the first proclaim- er of it ? We found the acknowledgment of a spiritual kingdom among the Reformers as well as among the Quakers — a most strong and distinct acknowledgment of it. We found it working so strongly in Luther's mind, connecting itself so closely with his recognition of a divine Person, a divine Man, as the object of all trust and allegiance, as to make him most reluctant to introduce any theory or scheme of doctrine which might eventually become a substitute for it : we found at the same time that it at last urged him and the other Reformers to set up little Churches or kingdoms of their own because they could not imagine or discover how other- wise God's purpose could be accomplished. And we found that it was partly the unspiritual character of these bodies — their mani- fest inadequacy to express the idea of Christ's spiritual kingdom, partly the importance which the Reformers and their followers at- tached to national societies and the confusion that seemed to have arisen between them and the universal body, which led to Fox's protest in the subsequent age. But though this idea of a spiritual and universal kingdom was not new in the seventeenth century, may it not have become obso- lete in the nineteenth ? The history of Unitarianism was an im- portant link in the evidence on this subject. WTe found that in the last century the idea of a spiritual kingdom was distinctly and formally repudiated by those who were most admired for wisdom and enlightenment ; man at all events being excluded from any concern in such a kingdom, seeing that he had no faculties where- with he could take cognizance of it. At the same time the idea of a very comprehensive world, which should include all nations, sys- tems, religions, began at that time to be prevalent, and to be pro- duced in opposition to the different sects of Christendom. Here, then, was one half the belief which had belonged to other ages, that half which had been apparently least regarded by Protestants — trying in the eighteenth century to assert itself under new condi- tions and to the exclusion of the other half. But if the Roman em- pire, from Augustus to Diocletian, had not been the sufficient type of this all tolerant all including vmld, the French Empire which succeeded to and carried out the speculations of the last generation was a fair specimen of what it must be. While this Empire was RECAPITULATION. 205 diffusing philanthropy through Europe, we noticed in different di- rections the gradual reappearance of that other element in the idea of a kingdom for mankind, which this philanthropy had cast aside as unnecessary. First, we observed a religious awakening — men becoming strongly convinced that there is a spiritual power and in- fluence at work among them. The immediate result of this awakening was a greater value for personal religion ; then it led to a desire among those who had felt it for combination and fellow- ship in the promotion of spiritual objects ; finally, to the inquiry whether such a combination must not have a spiritual foundation, whether it must not be connected with belief and worship. Then we were struck by various indications among philosophical men of a new habit of thinking in reference to the constitution of our race, of a tendency to look upon man as essentially a spiritual creature, and therefore to conclude that his highest and most important acts and exercises must be of a spiritual kind. Along with this faith, we noticed the growth of another, that there must be a region for those acts and exercises ; that they cannot merely turn in upon themselves, though that may be part of their occupation, but that there must be a world adapted to them and formed for them. We could not find any clear account of this world except that it was this universe which surrounds us, and of which our eyes and ears take account ; but though this universe be proclaimed as the great possession and inheritance of mankind, we could not learn that more than a few gifted poets and sages had a right of admission to its meanings and mysteries. Another difficulty which these philoso- phers seemed to experience, arose from the question, whether a dis- tinct spiritual world do exist at all, or whether it be only created out of this common world, by the class which is endued with faculties for that purpose. But this point was peremptorily decided by another set of deep and earnest thinkers, who seemed to have proved the existence of something which man did not create him- self, but to which he must in some sort refer all his acts and thoughts, and which must be assumed as the ground of them. Meanwhile we found the most eager and passionate demands for a universal constitution into which men as men might enter, oc- cupying not religious, not philosophical men, but labourers, handi- craftsmen, serfs. The nature of this constitution had been discussed 206 RECAPITULATION. again and again ; and the settlement of it had not been left to mere discussions ; it had been brought to the most severe practical tests. These inferences seemed to follow from them all ; first, that every modern attempt to construct a universal society had been defeated by the determination of men to assert their own wills ; secondly, that the true universal society must be one which neither overlooks the existence of those wills, nor considers them as an inconvenient and accidental interruption to its workings, as a friction to be re- gretted and allowed for, but which assumes them as the very prin- ciple and explanation of its existence : thirdly, that it is equally impossible for men to be content with a spiritual society which is not universal, and with a universal society which is not spiritual. This doctrine then, I think, cannot be said to be obsolete, cannot be turned into a mere philosophical notion. Time has added to its strength, not diminished it : there is more necessity now than in any former day, that it should have a practical not a theoretical satisfaction. III. It would seem from these observations, that the spiritual and universal society must be involved in the very idea of our hu- man constitution, say rather, must be that constitution, by virtue of which we realize that there is a humanity, that we form a kind. " But supposing this to be the case, may not we suppose that this constitution has been gradually making itself known to men as civilization has advanced ; and that when it has been diffused more widely, each man will feel and understand his place in it — rightly and harmoniously exercising those spiritual powers, which fit him for living in it, and suffering his neighbour without molestation, nay, kindly assisting him to exercise his; that in this way, those strifes and oppositions of opinion, which have hindered men from cheer- fully co-operating with each other, will gradually cease, and peace and good will become general ; and may not one means to this end, be the abandonment of those notions which prevailed in the early ages of the world, and which have been kept alive by the different religious sects and systems since — that the character of this consti- tution has been revealed to us in an inspired Book ; and that it is ruled over in some incredible manner, by a divine Person V This is the last hint I shall consider. It leads us to notice another class of facts which have passed under our review. RECAPITULATION. 207 The Quakers, we found, were great disparagers of what they called the outward Letter. They were jealous lest reverence for the Bible should interfere with the belief of a Spiritual Invisible Teacher. Nevertheless, it was in the Bible that George Fox learnt clearly the fact that there was such a Teacher ; it was from the Bible that he preached of it to others. It wastiot merely the prin- ciple of Justification by Faith which Luther, torn by inward con- flicts, learnt from the Bible — he owed to it still more, the personal form of that doctrine, and the conception of it as a vital truth, not as a scholastic dogma. The belief of Election in its highest, purest form, was received by Calvin from the same source; the Unitarian prized the Bible as the great witness for the Divine Unity, for God's absolute and universal love, for the fact that mankind is under some better condition than that of a curse. Thus, whenever there has been in any man any one of these strong convictions, which seemed to us so precious and important, then he has looked with reverence upon the Scriptures, as the teachers of it and the authority for it ; whenever he has been able to carry home that conviction to the minds of his brethren, these have been his instruments. And this fact comes out the more remarkably, when it is set by the side of another, which the study of the different religious systems made known to us — namely, that just in proportion as any of them has become consolidated, the Bible, even if it has been nominally and formally held up to admiration, nay even to worship, has been de- posed from its real dignity. The Quaker, who converts it into a system of conceits and allegories, under pretence of doing reverence to the Spirit, has not really treated it worse than the Lutheran, or the Calvinist, who cuts it up into texts for the confirmation of dogmas, or the mottos of sermons, or than the Unitarian, who would reduce it into a collection of moral maxims. So that, instead of being obliged by our belief of the instability and helplessness of these systems, to suspect the value, or underrate the authority of the book to which they all appeal ; may we not say boldly, that as it was this book which revealed to each founder of a sect, that side or aspect of the spiritual economy, which it was his especial voca- tion to present and elucidate, so it has been a perpetual and most embarrassing witness against the effort to compress that economy 208 RECAPITULATION. within the rules and formulas, which he and his followers have devised for the statement of their opinions ? But this is not enough. It is alleged, that whatever may have been the case with religious bodies, the greatest light has, of late especially, been thrown upon the nature of our spiritual constitution, by those who did rfbt derive their knowledge from the Scriptures ; nay, who had great doubts about their value and authenticity. Now, I have not affected to disparage the labours of philoso- phers, either in these or in past days. I have expressed the highest respect for those who have brought to light what seem to me pre- cious truths respecting certain faculties in us, which had been sup- posed to have no existence. But I have also intimated an opinion, which I am most anxious should be sifted, and if it be false, exposed, that this is precisely the limit of their doings. They have proved that we have certain faculties which do take cognizance of spiritual transcendental objects : they have not shown what these spiritual transcendent objects are ; they have shown that we must have a spiritual constitution ; they have not shown what that spi- ritual constitution is. I do not therefore deny that we have learnt what our forefathers did not know, or did not know nearly as well. I do not deny that it has been the effect of experiments, failures, contradictions, to make us better acquainted with what we are and what we want. I am very thankful, for the sake of mankind, that there have been men who were permitted to make these discoveries, without (obviously, and so far as we know, I mean) seeing the truths which I think answer to them, and which show that Tantalus is not the one type of humanity. But so far from being led by any thing that I see or hear of these writers, to believe that they have discovered any substitute for a Revelation of that which is needful for man's highest necessities, I am well convinced that their teachings honestly received will make his cries for one more pas- sionate; and that it will be seen at last, that the book which has always hitherto met the cravings of its readers, and given them that glimpse of the mysterious world which they required, does contain the full declaration of that state which God has established for us, and which we have been toiling all our lives to find. The second part of the question is very much involved with the RECAPITULATION. 209 first, and for our purpose is perhaps the most important. " Is not the idea of a spiritual King, an actual Person, superintending and ordaining the movements of the universal and spiritual society, the dream of a past age — is it not one which a sensible man, who was also an honest one, and used words in their simple straightforward sense, would be rather reluctant than anxious to bring forward 1 Is it not obvious, that every step in the progress of thought and dis- covery has taken us further from such a notion as this, and has be- queathed it, as their proper possession, to old wives and children f I have perhaps implicitly treated this point already ; still, I am so anxious to give it a direct consideration, that I will, at any hazard of repetition and tediousness, recur to my former method of proof. A belief in a direct spiritual government over the life, thoughts, acts, and words, of those who would submit themselves to it, was, we have seen, the third distinguishing peculiarity of Quakerism ; the one which produced so many more outward and apparent results than the other two, that in the notions of modern Friends it has absorbed them both into itself. The system of the society appears to be expressly devised for the purpose of giving expression to this belief. Did it then seem to us that this system was falling into decay, because it had borne too decisive and consistent a witness to this bygone notion, or had prevented it from undergoing those changes to which, with the increase of light and civilization, it ought to have been subject ? On the contrary, the essential feeble- ness of Quakerism appeared to lie in this — that it exhibited the doctrine of spiritual superintendence in an inadequate, inconsistent, and shrivelled form. It testified that sudden thoughts, sudden acts, sudden speeches, oftentimes of the most obviously trifling character, had their origin in divine teaching and inspiration ; it virtually ex- cluded what is the most significant, and what Quakers, like all other persons, are obliged to acknowledge as the most significant portion of our life — that which is occupied with calm, orderly, con- tinuous transactions — from the spiritual sphere. Education, we saw that the Quakers looked upon as most important; education according to the system of the society could not be a spiritual work. If we turned from Quakerism to that which is most unlike it, to Calvinism, the same inference was forced upon us in another form. — A belief in the will of God as the only spring of Good, Order, 14 210 RECAPITULATION. Happiness, was, we found, the earnest practical life-giving principle in the minds of Calvin and his disciples ; whatever brave acts they had done, whatever good thoughts they had uttered, sprang from this conviction. Had they pushed it too far — had their system riv- eted the notion of a ruling Will in their minds, and so perpetuated it to an age, when, in the natural course of things, it ought to have been abandoned? We were led to adopt exactly the opposite opin- ion. Their system, by setting aside the idea of a human will, had left the doctrine of a Divine will barren and unmeaning ; the idea of a personal Ruler had disappeared, and those who were most anxious to assert the government of the living God, had been the great instruments of propagating the notion of an atheistical Ne- cessity. But it may be said, ? Though these Quaker, and these Calvin- istical opinions, concerning the Spirit which works in man, and the absolute Will of God, may involve or be involved in that idea of an actual King of men to which we are alluding — they are not identical with it. That idea evidently turns upon the doctrine of an Incarnation ; it asserts that one who is the Son of Man, as well as the Son of God, is the Lord of the world, and, in some higher sense, of the spiritual Society— and it is this doctrine which seems so connected with the oldest fables of the world, that we cannot but think it must give way before the light of truth.' So the Uni- tarian of the last century thought, and the question we discussed was — How did this opinion, which was the root of their system, affect these principles which really formed the faith of the better men among them 1 It seemed to us, that the idea of the unity of God was sacri- ficed, because the person who was acknowledged as the great ob- ject and centre of human admiration, was denied to be one with the Father ; that the idea of the love of God was sacrificed, because it was denied that he had in his own Person interfered on behalf of his creatures ; that the idea of our being children of God was sac- rificed, because there was nothing to give the name of Father re- ality ; to show that it was more than a loose and almost blasphe- mous figure of speech. Accordingly, in the new Unitarianism, Jesus of Nazareth is beginning to be recognised as merely one of the world's heroes ; RECAPITULATION. 211 it may or may not be the most important and conspicuous one. But this belief, this last and highest discovery of the nineteenth century, takes us back to that stage of history, in which universal fellowship was impossible ; to the time when there was a Grecian Hercules and an Egyptian Hercules ; when he who repealed bad laws was the hero of a country, and he who drained a marsh of a neighbourhood ; and when men were crying and sighing for some one who should be the head and prince of all these ; who should be indeed the Lord of their race ; who should rescue the race from the evils to which, as a race, it was subject ; who should connect it with the absolute Being of whom their consciences witnessed. Is not this a strange and melancholy relapse under the name of progression ! We have then a reasonable excuse for inquiring, whether there be on this earth a spiritual and universal kingdom, which the differ- ent religious systems have not been able to supersede or destroy ; which is likely to make itself manifest when they have all perish- ed ; and with which we of the nineteenth century may have fel- lowship. And as a preface to this inquiry, it seems not unfitting to con- sider whether there be any traces of a spiritual constitution in the early ages of the world, and whether the books of Scripture afford us any help in interpreting them. CHAPTER II. INDICATIONS OF A SPIRITUAL CONSTITUTION. When I was speaking of the Quaker system, I noticed one practical inconsistency which seemed to lie at the root of it, and to affect all its workings. The member of the Society of Friends ought to be the conscious disciple of a Divine Teacher. But every child born to a Quaker is actually considered and treated as a Friend, till, by some act of rebellion, he has deprived himself of the title. Something of the same anomaly we have traced in the Protestant systems ; consciously justified men ought to constitute the Evan- gelical Church ; persons conscious of a divine Election — the re- formed. Yet, neither of these have had the courage to exclude their children from all religious fellowship, to treat them absolutely as heathens. The Anabaptists have made the nearest approach to that practice ; but even in them there are very evident indications of timidity and inconsistency. When we examined the schemes of the world which had been constructed by philosophers, we observed that they had been en- countered by a knot, not unlike that which had perplexed the au- thors of religious sects, and that they had found themselves com- pelled with more or less of ceremony to cut it. It was next to impossible to organize a universal society, while the distinction of families prevailed. In such a society men must be so many sepa- rate units. But there is this glaring fact to prove that they are not units ; that they are bound together by a certain law, which may be set at naught, and made almost utterly inefficient, but which cannot be entirely repealed. L Now this fact, that men exist in families, which seems so grievously to disturb the inventors of systems, is perhaps the very one which would be most likely to suggest the thought to a plain person, that there must be a moral or spiritual constitution for man- kind. We are obliged to speak of every man as being in two con- INDICATIONS OF A SPIRITUAL CONSTITUTION. 213 ditions. He is in a world of objects which offer themselves to his senses, and which his senses may be fitted to entertain. He is a son, perhaps he is a brother. These two states are equally inevita- ble ; they are also perfectly distinct. You cannot by any artifice reduce them under the same law or name. To describe the one, you must speak of what we see, or hear, or handle, or smell ; to describe the other, you must speak of what we are; "I am a son," " I am a brother." It is impossible therefore to use the word " cir- cumstances" in reference to the one state with the same strictness with which you apply it to the other. All the things which I have to do with, I naturally and rightly call, my circumstances — they stand round me : but that which is necessary in an account of myself, seems to be entitled to another name. We commonly call it a re- lationship. And this difference soon becomes more conspicuous. We speak of a man having a bad digestion or a bad hearing ; we speak of his being a bad brother or a bad son. By both these phrases we imply that there is a want of harmony between the man and his condition. But by the one we evidently wish to sig- nify that there need not be this want of harmony, that he is volun- tarily acting as if he were not in a relation in which nevertheless he is, and must remain. This inconsistency we describe by the term moral evil, or whatever equivalent phrase we may have in- vented ; for some equivalent, whether we like it or not, we must have. It might seem to follow from these observations, that the family state is the natural one for man ; and accordingly we speak of the affections which correspond to this state, as especially natural affec- tions. But it should be remembered that we use another phrase which is apparently inconsistent with this ; we describe the savage condition, that is to say, the one in which man is striving to be independent, as the natural state of society. And though it may be doubtful whether that should be called a state of society, which is the contradiction of all states and of all society, yet there seems a very considerable justification for the application of the word natural to it ; seeing that we cannot be acquainted with a family, or be members of a family, without knowing in others — without feeling in ourselves, certain inclinations which tend to the dissolu- tion of its bonds, and to the setting up of that separate independent 214 INDICATIONS OF life, which when exhibited on a large scale we name the savage or wild life. These inclinations are kept down by discipline, and the affections which attract us to the members of our family are called out in opposition to them ; surely, therefore, it cannot be a mistake to describe them by the name which we ordinarily apply to plants that spring up in a soil, uncultivated and uncalled for. We have here some of the indications of a spiritual constitu- tion; that is to say, we have the marks of a state which is designed for a voluntary creature ; which is his, whether he approve it or no ; against which, he has a nature or inclination to rebel. But still, most persons would mean something more by the phrase than this ; they would ask how you could call that spiritual, which had no reference to religion. Now the histories and mythologies of all the people with whom we are acquainted bear unequivocal witness to this fact, that men have connected the ideas of fathers, children, husbands, brothers, sisters, with the beings whom they worshipped. This is the first, rudest observation which we make upon them. But, when we search further, we begin to see that this simple observation has the most intimate connection with the whole of mythology ; that it is not merely a fact in reference to it, but the fact, without which all others which encounter us are unintelligible. You say all kinds of offices are attributed to the gods and god- desses ; they rule over this town and that river, they dispense this blessing or send that curse. Be it so ; but who are they who ex- ercise these powers ? The mythology tells you of relations exist- ing between them; also of relations between them and the objects of their bounty and their enmity. In later ages, when we are studying the differences in the mythology of different nations, it is no won- der that we should notice the character of the soil, the nature of the climate, the beauty or the dreariness of the country, the rains or the inundations which watered it, as circumstances helping to determine the views which the inhabitants entertained of their unseen rulers. And then the transition is very easy to the belief, that by these observations we have accounted for their faith, and that the histories of the gods are merely accidental poetical embel- lishments. But, if we consider that the worshippers evidently felt that which we call accidental to be essential ; that the merging the gods in the objects with which they were connected was merely A SPIRITUAL CONSTITUTION. 215 an artifice of later philosophy; that the circumstances of soil and climate did indeed occasion some important differences between the objects reverenced in various nations, but that the circumstance of their being parents, brothers, and sisters, so far as we know, wns common to all, or only wanting in those which were utterly savage, that is, in which the human relations were disregarded : if we observe that those who endeavour to explain mythology by the phenomena of the world, are obliged to beg what they call " a law of nature," alleging that we are naturally inclined to inquire into the origin of any great and remarkable objects which we see ; if we will notice how utterly inconsistent it is with all experience and observation to attribute such a disposition as this to men, whose feelings and faculties have not been by some means pre- viously awakened — how very little a savage is struck by any, ex- cept the most glaring and alarming phenomena, and how much less he thinks about them : if we will reflect upon these points, we may perhaps be led to adopt the opinion that the simplest method of solving the difficulty is the best ; that it is not our being sur- rounded with a strange world of sensible objects which leads us to think of objects with which we do not sensibly converse, but that these perceptions come to us through our family relationships ; that we become more and more merely idolaters when these relation- ships are lost sight of, and the other facts of our condition only regarded ; that a world without family relationships would have no worship, and on the other hand, that without worship all the feelings and affections of family life would have utterly perished. II. But is there no meaning in that savage wish for indepen- dence ? is it merely the dissolution and destruction of those family bonds which are meant for men, or is it the indication that he was meant for other bonds than these, not perhaps of necessity incom- patible with them ? History seems to decide the question in favour of the latter opinion. It seems to say, that as there is a worse state of society than the patriarchal, there is also a better and more advanced one ; it declares that the faculties which are given to man never have had their proper development and expansion, except in a national community. Now if we examine any one of these, taking our specimen from the Pagan world, we shall perceive that the member of it had a more distinct feeline of himself, of his own 216 INDICATIONS OF personality, than the mere dweller in a family could have. It may seem to us very puzzling that it should be so ; for if we look at Sparta or Rome — at any commonwealth except Athens — it seems as if the society were imposing the severest restraints upon each man's own taste, judgment, and will. Nevertheless, it is the mani- festation of energetic purpose in particular leaders, and the assur- ance we feel that there was the same kind of purpose, though in a less degree, existing in those who composed every rank of their armies, which gives the interest to the better times of these repub- lics ; as it is the feeling of a change in this respect — of the armies having become a body of soldiers merely, not of men, which makes the declining ages of them so mournful. We have evidence, there- fore, coming in a way in which it might least be expected, that this personal feeling is connected with the sense of national union. Of all men, the savage* has least of the feelings of dignity and personal self-respect ; he is most emphatically a mere work- man or tool, the habitual slave of his own chance necessities and inclinations, and therefore commonly of other men's also. He who understands the force of the words, "I am a brother," has taken a mighty step in advance of this individual man, even in that respect on which he most prides himself ; he is more of a person, more of a freeman. But he is not enough of a person, not enough of a freeman. If he will be more, he must be able to say, " I am a citizen this is the true onward step ; if he aim at freedom by any other, he relapses into an independence which is only another name for slavery. Now, we may observe several facts, too obvious to escape the most careless student of history, except it should be from their very obviousness, which are closely connected with this. One is, than in every organized nation at its commencement, there is a high respect for family relations, that they embody themselves necessarily in the national constitution ; * Of course there is no ideal savage in actual existence — no one who is perfectly independent. The North American Indian has so many tribe feelings, that the admirers of savage life, taking him for an example, have been able to contend that it is the very soil for the cultivation of domestic affections. But not to dwell upon the violent exag- gerations and distortions of fact which have been necessary for the support of this hypothesis, it is quite obvious that these feelings and affections are just so many depart- ures from savage perfection — so many threatenings of a degeneracy into the social and civiliz- d condition. The true savage is Caliban ; the nearest approximation to him is probably to be looked for in New Holland. A SPIRITUAL CONSTITUTION. 217 another is, that there is a struggle between these relations and the national polity, although they form so great an element in it ; the legislator, feeling that each brother, husband, father, is a citizen, and that as such, he comes directly under his cognizance. In Sparta, we see the principle of family life, though distinctly recognised, sacrificed in a great degree to the Laws. In Athens, we see the legislator in his anxiety to leave men to themselves, allowing the growth of an independence which proved incompatible both with family relations and with national society. In Rome, we see the legislation so exquisitely interwoven with the family principle, that so soon as that became weak, the commonwealth inevitably fell. These facts lead us to ask what this legislation means, wherein its power lies, and in what way it comes to be so connected with, and yet diverse from, these relationships 1 In trying to find the answer to this question we are at once struck with this observation — Law takes each man apart from his fellows ; it addresses him with a Thou; it makes him feel that there is an eye fixed upon his doings ; that there is a penalty overhanging him. It is therefore, in this point of view, the direct opposite of a relationship by which we are bound to each other, and are made to feel that we cannot exist apart from each other. But, again, we find that the Law denounces those acts which make union and fellowship impossible — those acts which result from the determination of men to live and act as if they were independent of each other, as if they might set up themselves and make self-pleasing their end. The law declares to each man that he is in a fellowship, that he shall not do any act which is inconsistent with that position. That therefore which is the great foe to family relationship, the desire for individual- ity, is the very thing which Law, even while it deals with men as distinct persons, is threatening and cursing. A nation then, like a family, would seem to possess some of the characteristics of a spiritual constitution. If we take the word spiritual in that sense in which it is used by modern philosophers, we have abundant proofs that where there is no feeling of national union, there is a most precarious and imperfect exercise of intellectual power. If we take it in the sense of voluntary, we find here a constitution, evi- dently meant for creatures which have wills ; seeing that it is one 218 INDICATIONS OF which men do not create for themselves, that it is one which may be violated, nay, which there is a natural inclination in every man to violate ; and that by the words " bad citizen," we express moral reprobation, just as we do when we speak of a bad father or mother. And if we ask whether there are any religious feelings connected with national life, as we found there were with family life — the mythology of the old world is just as decisive in its reply. If the Homeric gods were fathers, brothers, husbands, they were also kings ; one character is just as prominent, just as essential as the other. It is possible that the former may have been the most ancient, and this would explain the notion of scholars that traces of an earlier worship are discoverable in the Iliad. In Homer's time they were incorporated, and the offices of the gods as con- nected with nature, though they might be gradually mingling themselves with these characters, and threatening to become iden- tical with them, are nevertheless distinct from them. The princes of Agamemnon's league felt that there must be higher princes than they ; they could use no authority, take no counsel, except in that belief. And though they spoke of these rulers as compelling the clouds and winds, they did not look upon this exercise of power as higher or more real, than that of putting wTisdom and spirit into Diomed, and arming Hector for the fight. And hence the leaders were always types of the gods in every country which had attained the forms of a national polity. Wherever these existed, invisible rulers were recognised ; a class of men interpreted the meaning of their judgments ; they were invoked as the guides in battles ; sacrifices were offered to avert their displeasure or to claim their protection. But, a time came, when thoughts were awakened in men's minds of something more comprehensive than either this family or this national constitution. The former belonged to all men ; yet, in another respect it was narrow, separating men from each other. The latter was obviously exclusive ; a nation was limited to a small locality ; it actually treated all that lay beyond it, and whom it could not subdue to itself, as aliens, if not enemies. If this ex- clusion were to continue, there was certainly some nation which ought to reign, which had a right to make its polity universal. Great Asiatic monarchies there had been, which had swallowed all A SPIRITUAL CONSTITUTION. 219 tribes and kingdoms into themselves, but these had established a rule of mere physical force. Might not Greece, the land of intellectual force, show that it was meant to rule over all ? The young hero of Macedon went forth in this hope, and in a few years accomplished his dream. In a few more his empire was broken in pieces ; Greece was not to be the lord of world : still in the Egyptian and Syrian dynasties which she sent forth, she asserted a mental supremacy. But a nation, which paid no homage to art or to philosophy, swallowed up all these dynasties, and with them all that remained of Greece herself. A universal polity was established in the wrorld, and the national life, the family life of Rome, perished at the very moment in which she established it. Was there a religion connected with this universal polity as there was with the family and the national ? We find that there was. The Emperor was the great God. To him all people and nations and languages were to bow. Subject to this supreme divinity all others might be tolerated and recognised. No form of religion was to be proscribed unless it were absolutely incompatible with the worship of a Tiberius and a Vitellius. It has been sug- gested already, that this Roman Empire answers exactly to the idea of an universal world. If there is to be any thing different from this — if there is to be an universal Church, we ought to know of what elements it is to be composed, we ought to know whether it also sets aside family or national life, or whether it justifies their existence, reconciles them to itself, and interprets the problems of ancient history concerning their mysterious meaning. CHAPTER III. THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW OF THIS CONSTITUTION. It is commonly acknowledged by religious persons, that the Bible is remarkably unsystematic. Sometimes this admission is made thankfully and even triumphantly ; it is urged as a proof, that the Bible is mainly intended to supply the daily wants and to meet the ever-changing circumstances of the spiritual man. Some- times it furnishes the ground of an argument for the necessity of that being done by others which is not done here — by those who lived nearest the age of the Apostles, or at the Reformation, or in a more advanced period of civilization. Sometimes it is alleged as a reason for denying that there is any book possessing the char- acter which Christians have attributed to this one — for asserting that it is a collection of documents, belonging to a particular na- tion, accidentally strung together, and invested by the superstition of after-times with a fictitious entireness. All these notions, it seems to me, assume that the words system and method are synonymous, and that if the first is wanting in the Scriptures the last must be wanting also. Now to me these words seem not only not synonymous, but the greatest contraries imaginable — the one indicating that which is most opposed to life, freedom, variety ; and the other that without which they cannot exist. If I wished to explain my meaning, I should not resort to a definition ; I should take an illustration, and, of all illustrations, I think the most striking is that which is afforded by the Bible it- self. While the systematizer is tormented, every page he reads, with a sense of the refractory and hopeless materials he has to deal with, I am convinced, that the person who is determined to read only for his own comfort and profit, is haunted with the sense of some harmony, not in the words but in the history, which he ought not to overlook, and without reference to which the meaning of that in which he most delights is not very certain. And, while THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW, ETC. 221 this sense of a method exists, the fact, that these works were writ- ten at different periods, in different styles, and by men of to- tally different characters, increases the impression that there is something most marvellous in the volume they compose. The most skilful, laborious analyst cannot persuade his disciples to abandon the use of the word Bible — he cannot divest himself of the feelings with which it is associated. I. Perhaps it may be useful for the purpose at which we are aiming, that we should examine a little into this phenomenon. Every one who reads the Old Testament, must perceive that the idea of a covenant of God with a certain people, is that which presides in it. In plain history, in lofty prayers and songs, in im- passioned denunciations of existing evil, and predictions of com- ing misery — this idea is still at the root of all others. Take it away, and not merely is there no connection between the different parts, but each book by itself, however simple in its language or in its details, becomes an incoherent rhapsody. A person then, who had no higher wish than to understand the character and feelings of that strange people which has preserved its identity through so many generations, would of course begin with examin- ing into the account of this covenant. He would feel that the call of Abraham, the promise made to him and to his seed, and the seal of it which was given him, were most significant parts of this re- cord. But one thought would strike him above all — This covenant is said to be with a family : with a man doubtless in the first in- stance— but with a man expressly and emphatically as the head of a family. The very terms of the covenant, and every promise that it held forth, was inseparably associated with the hope of a posterity. It is impossible to look upon the patriarchal character of Abraham, as something accidental to his character as the chosen witness and servant of the Most High. These two positions are absolutely inseparable. The fact of his relationship to God is in- terpreted to him by the feeling of his human relations, and his ca- pacity of fulfilling them arose from his acknowledgment of the higher relation. A little further reflection upon the subordinate parts of the narrative (which, when this fact is felt to be the cen- tre, will all acquire a new value and meaning) must convince us, that sensuality, attended "of necessity with sensual worship, was 222 THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW the character of the tribes among which Abraham was dwelling ; that in this sensuality and sensual worship was involved the neglect of family bonds ; that the witness for an invisible and righteous God, against Gods of nature and mere power, was, at the selfsame moment and by the same necessity, the witness for the sacredness of these bonds. The notion of a Being exercising power over men, seen in the clouds, and heard in the winds, this was that which the world entertained, and trembled — till utter corruption brought in utter atheism. That there is a God related to men and made known to men through their human relations, this was the faith of Abraham, the beginner of the Church on earth. But this truth could not be exhibited in one individual faithful man ; it must be exhibited through a family. The rest of Genesis, therefore, gives us the history if the patriarchs who fol- lowed Abraham. But, what if these, or any of these, should not he faithful? What, if they should not maintain the principle of family relationship, or retain a recollection of the higher principle involved in it t What, if the world should find its way into the Church 1 The historian does not wait for the question to be asked him ; his narrative answers it. The great majority of the sons of Jacob were not faithful men, they did not maintain the principle of family life — they did not recollect the Being who had revealed Himself through it. Perhaps then, the Joseph, the true believer, separated himself from his godless brethren, and established a new and distinct fellowship. Had he done so, he would have acted upon the principle of Ishmael or Esau ; he would have founded a society which was built upon choice, not upon relationship. The historian declares, that he followed a different course, that he was indeed separated from his brethren, but by their act, not his : that he continued a witness for God's covenant, not with him, but with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; not with an individual, but with a family. According then to the Jewish Scriptures, the Abrahamic family, though cut off by their covenant from the other families of the earth, was so cut off expressly that it might bear witness for the true order of the world ; for that order against which all sensi- ble idolatry, and all independent choice or self-will, is rebellion ; for that order in which alone men can be free, because to abide in it they must sacrifice these inclinations which make them slaves; OF THIS CONSTITUTION. 223 for that order, in and through which, as we might have guessed from the Gentile records, the idea of God can alone be imparted. The promise of the covenant therefore was, that in the seed of Abraham all the families of the earth should be blessed. II. But, whatever sentimentalists may say about the patriarchal condition of the world, its essential purity, and the misery of de- parting from it, the Scriptures give no countenance to such dreams. It was part of the promise that the children of Jacob should enter into another state. They were to possess the Canaanitish nations. They were to become a nation. And" although the history, in strict conformity to all experience, describes the middle passage between these two conditions as a grievous one, though the children of Abra- ! ham are said to have sunk into moral debasement and actual slave- ry, yet their redemption is connected with a more awful revelation than any which had been imparted, or, as far as we can see, could have been imparted to them in their previous state; and leads to new and most wonderful discoveries respecting the relations be- tween men and God. The God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob declares that he remembers his covenant, and has seen the affliction of his people. But He declares himself to the appointed guide and deliverer by another name than this — that name upon which the Jewish covenant stands, which is the foundation of all lawT, i am that i am. And so soon as the judgments upon natural worship, and upon a tyranny which set at naught all invisible and righteous government had been accomplished, and the people had been taught to feel that an unseen Power had delivered them, that awful code was proclaimed amidst thunders and lightnings, which spoke straight to the individual conscience of each man, even while it re- minded him in the most direct and solemn manner that he was re- lated to God and his brethren. I will not enter here into an ex- planation of the manner in which the tribe institutions, those which speak of family relationship, were so embodied in the Jewish con- stitution that they gave a meaning to this law and yet did not de- prive it of its awful personal character. That observation must needs strike every one who studies with the slightest attention the Jewish institutions, as they are described in the Pentateuch. It is more necessary to notice those which led the thoughts of the Jews above the bonds of family and of lawT, though they were insepara- 224 THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW bly intertwined with both. I mean the tabernacle, the priesthood, and sacrifices. That these were the shrines of an undeveloped mystery every thoughtful Jew was conscious ; but he was equally certain that this mystery was implied in all his acts, in all his fami- ly relations, in the national order, in his legal obedience. That there was an awful self-existent Being from whom all law came, was declared by the commandments : the Tabernacle affirmed that this Being was present among his people, and that it was possible in some awful manner to approach Him. The family covenant bore witness that there was a relation between Him and his wor- shippers ; the Priesthood from generation to generation witnessed that this relation might be actually realized — that it might be real- ized by the whole people, in a representative. The National Con- stitution and punishments awakened in each person the feeling of moral evil, and taught them that that evil arose from violating his relations with God and his countrymen, and that the effect of it was a practical exclusion from these blessings ; the sacrifices intimated that the relation was restored, when he had personally, and through the priest, given up something, not selected by himself as the most appropriate, or the most precious, but appointed by the law ; and when he had given up that self-will which caused the separation. Such thoughts were wrought gradually into the mind of every humble and obedient J ew j they were brought directly home to him by the parting instruction of his great Lawgiver ; they were con- firmed and illustrated by all his subsequent experience, and by the teachers who showed him the purpose of it. The national polity of the Jews was in its essence exclusive. We dwell upon this fact, as if it destroyed all connection between this polity and that of the Pagans, or of modern Europe. But every nation, as such, is exclusive. Athens was exclusive, Rome was exclusive; nevertheless, we have admitted, all persons admit, that more of humanity came out in the exclusive nations of Athens and of Rome, than ever showed itself in the savage tribes of the earth, which have never attained to a definite polity. Before we can ascertain, whether the exclusiveness of the Jews was an inhuman exclusiveness, we must find out what it excluded ; and here the same answer must be given as before. It excluded the worship of sensible, natural things ; it excluded the idea of choice and self- OF THIS CONSTITUTION. 225 will. The covenant with an invisible Being made it treason for men to choose the objects of their worship. This worship of the one Being was the bond of the commonwealth, and, if this were broken, it was dissolved. The covenant with an invisible Being obliged them to look upon all Kings as reigning in virtue of his covenant, as representing his dignity, as responsible to Him ; upon all other officers, the priestly, the prophetical, the judicial, as in like manner directly receiving their appointments and commission from Him. By its first protest it affirmed that there are not a set of separate gods over each territory — various, according to the pecu- liarities of soil and of climate ; but that there is one Almighty and Invisible Being, who is the Lord of all. The God of Israel is de- clared to be the God of all the nations of the earth ; the Israelites are chosen out to be witnesses of the fact. By the second protest the exclusive Hebrew witnessed, that no king, no priest, no judge, has a right to look upon himself as possessing intrinsic power ; that he is exercising office, under a righteous king, a perfect priest, an all-seeing judge ; that, in proportion as he preserves that thought, and in the strength of it fulfils his task, the character of that king, and priest, and judge, and the relation in which he stands to men, reveal themselves to him ; that these offices are continued from generation to generation, as a witness of his permanence who is Lord of them all, and who abides for ever and ever. As then in the patriarchal period the Divine Being manifest- ed himself in the family relations, and by doing so manifested on what these relations depend, how they are upheld, and wherein their worth consists : so in the national period. He was manifest- ed to men through all national offices ; thereby explaining their meaning and import, how they are upheld, and wherein their worth consists. But, we are not to suppose that the family relations had less to do with this stage of the history than with the former. As they were embodied in the national institutions, as the existence of these institutions depended upon them, so their meaning in connec- tion with national life and national sins, and with a Being of whom both witnessed, became continually more apparent. I need not point out to any one who reads the prophets, what is their uniform method of awakening the conscience of the Jew, and of imparting to him the highest truths. I need not say that the 15 226 THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW Lord is throughout presented in the character of the husband of the nation ; that acts of apostasy and false worship are constantly re- ferred to as adulteries; and that the greatest pains are taken to con- vince us, that these are no poetical flourishes or terms of art, by connecting the actual human relation and human offence with the properly spiritual one. Oftentimes the verbal commentator is at fault, from the apparent confusion of the two. He cannot make up his mind whether it is the infidelity of the nation to her God, or of actual wives to their actual husbands, which the holy man is de- nouncing. And such perplexity there must needs be in the thoughts of all persons who are determined to separate these two ideas, — who do not see that it is the main object of the prophet to show their bearing upon one another, — who will not enter into his mind, by feeling that human relationships are not artificial types of some- thing divine, but are actually the means, and the only means, through which man ascends to any knowledge of the divine ; and that every breach of a human relation, as it implies a violation of the higher law, so also is a hinderance and barrier to the perception of that higher law, — the drawing a veil between the spirit of a man and his God. But, how did this idea of a human constitution harmonize, or come into collision with those attempts at universal empire, which appeared to be the necessary consummation or termination of the ancient polities ? The Asiatic monarchies have been sometimes called patriarchal, and beyond a doubt the patriarchal feeling — the belief that the king was the father — did lie at the foundation of them, and did constitute all that was sound and healthful in the acts of the monarch, or the reverence of the people. But if we are to believe the Bible, the king is not merely a father, he is some- thing more ; his position has its ground in the acknowledgment of an unseen absolute Being, whose relations to men lead up to the contemplation of Him in Himself. The effort therefore to make the paternal relation all in all is, according to this showing, a false effort, one necessarily leading to false results. In this case the re- sult is very apparent. The power of the monarch not having any safe ground to rest upon, soon becomes reverenced merely as power. No conscience of a law, which they ought to obey, is called forth in the minds of the subjects or the monarch ; he may have kindly OF THIS CONSTITUTION. 227 affections towards them, which may be reciprocated, but that is all. There is nothing to preserve the existence and sanctity of the family relationship, upon which the sovereign authority is built : nothing to resist the tendency to natural worship, which destroys it : nothing to hinder the monarch from believing that he reigns by his own right. Hence, these so-called patriarchal governments, besides that they awaken neither the energies of the human intel- lect nor the perception of right and wrong, soon are changed into the direct contraries of that which they profess to be. The father becomes an oppressor of his own people, a conqueror of others; all idea of the invisible is swallowed up in a reverence for him. Ulti- mately he is looked up to as the God of gods and the Lord of lords. It is no false feeling which leads us to rejoice when these patriarchal kings were driven back by the little national bands at Marathon or Plataea. No one who reveres invisible more than visible strength, will restrain his paeans at that discomfiture. It is a hateful and a godless thing to check them, or to stir up our sympathy on behalf of the Eastern tyrant. He who cherishes such a habit of feeling, will not be able to rejoice, whatever he may fancy, when Pharaoh and his host sink like lead into the waters, or, when Sisera with his six hundred chariots, is put to flight by the prophetess of Israel. If we look at the history of the Jews, we shall find that their distinct polity was a witness, through all the time it lasted, against these Babel monarchies; that in them the Jew saw that world concentrated in its worst form, out of which the covenant with the Abrahamic family, and with the Israelitish nation, had deliver- ed him. To be like this world, however, to share its splendours, to adopt its worship, was the perpetual tendency of his evil nature, a tendency punished at length by subjection to its tyranny. But it was not merely by punishment that this inclination wTas resisted. The wish for fellowship with other nations was a true wrish invert- ed ; the dream of a human polity was one which the true God had sent to the Jew, though he had been taught how to realize it by an evil spirit. To bring out the true idea of such a polity, to show how it lay hid in all their own institutions, and how it would at length be brought out into full manifestation, this was the great office of the Hebrew Seer. Side by side with that vision of a Babylonian kingdom, which he taught his countrymen to look upon 228 THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW as based upon a lying principle, the contrary of their own, and as meant to be their scourge if they adopted that principle into their own conduct, rose up another vision of a king who did not judge after the sight of his eyes or the hearing of his ears, but who would rule men in righteousness, and whom the heathen should own. And as each new step in the history of the covenant — the first call of the patriarch which made them a family — their deliverance under Moses which made them a nation — was connected with a fresh re- velation of the Divine King through these different relations, neither displacing the other but adopting it into itself; this glorious vision would have been utterly imperfect, if it had not involved the pros- pect of such a discovery as had not been vouchsafed to any former age. The prophet, trained to deep, awful meditation in the law, the history of his land, but above all in the mysterious services of the temple, was able by degrees to see, as one sin after another, one judgment after another showed him what were the dangers and wants of his nation, that the heir of David's throne must be a man, in as strict a sense as David was, capable, not of less but of infin- itely greater sympathy with every form of human sorrowr than he had been capable of, and yet that in Him, the worshipper must be- hold God less limited by human conceptions, more in his own ab- soluteness and awfulness, than even in the burning bush, or amidst the lightnings of Sinai. How these two longings could be both accomplished ; how idolatry could be abolished by the very mani- festation which would bring the object of worship more near to all human thoughts and apprehensions; how the belief of a Being nigh to men, could be reconciled with that of one dwelling in his own perfection ; how unceasing action on behalf of his creatures consists with eternal rest ; how He could be satisfied with men, and yet be incapable of satisfaction with any thing less pure and holy than himself ; these were the awful questions with which the pro- phet's soul was exercised, and which were answered, not at once, but in glimpses and flashes of light coming across the darkness of his own soul, and of his country's condition, which even now startle us as we read, and make us feel that the words are meant to guide us through our own confusions, and not to give us notions or for- mulas for disguising them. One part of his teaching must have been derived from that polity, which was the great contrast to his OF THIS CONSTITUTION. 229 own. The universal monarchs, the Sennacheribs and Nebuchad- nezzars, were Men-gods. They took to themselves the attributes of the Invisible : and just in proportion as they did so, just in pro- portion as they hid the view of any thing beyond humanity from the eyes of men, just in that proportion did they become inhuman, separate from their kind, dwelling apart in an infernal solitude. This black ground brought the perfectly clear bright object more distinctly within their view; they felt that the God-man, in whom the fulness and awfulness of Godhead should shine forth, might therefore have perfect sympathy with the poorest and most friendless, and might at the same time enable them to enter into that transcendent region which their spirits had ever been seeking and never been able to penetrate. III. Now, when we open the first book of the New Testament, the first words of it announce that the subject of it is the Son of David and the Son of Abraham. As we read on, we find that, ac- cording to the belief of the writer, this person came into the world to establish a Kingdom. Every act and word which is recorded of Him, has reference to this kingdom. A voice is heard crying in the wilderness, that a kingdom is at hand. Jesus of Nazareth comes preaching the Gospel of the kingdom. He goes into a mount to deliver the principles of his kingdom. He speaks parables to the people, nearly every one of which is prefaced with, " The king- dom of heaven is like." He heals the sick : it is that the Jews may know that his kingdom is come nigh to them. His private conferences with his disciples, just as much as his public discourses, relate to t»he character, the establishment, and the destinies of this kingdom. He is arraigned before Pontius Pilate for claiming to be a king. The superscription on the cross proclaims him a king. That there is a difference of character and style in the different Evangelists, and that a hundred different theories may be suggested as to their origin, their coincidences, their varieties, no one will deny. But that this characteristic is common to them all, that the most sweeping doctrine respecting the interpolations which have crept into them could not eliminate it out of them, that it would not be the least affected if the principle and method of their forma- tion were ascertained, is equally true. The kingdom of Christ is under one aspect or other the subject of them all. But this pecu- 230 THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW liarity, it will be said, is easily accounted for. The writers of the New Testament are Jews; language of this kind is essentially Jew- ish. It belonged to the idiosyncrasy of the most strange and bigot- ed of all the people of the earth. To a certain extent, the reader will perceive, these statements exactly tally with mine. I have en- deavoured to show that the habit of thinking, which this perpetual use of a certain phrase indicates, is Jewish, and why it is Jewish. But there is a long step from this admission, to the one which is gen- erally supposed to be involved in it, that this phrase is merely con- nected w7ith particular accidents and circumstances, and has nothing to do wTith that which is essential and human. According to my view of the position of the Israelite, he was taken out of all nations expressly to be a witness of that which is unchanging and perma- nent, of that which is not modal, of the meaning of those relation- ships which belonged to him in common with the Pagans and with us, and which, as every Pagan felt, and as every peasant among us feels, have a meaning, and of the ground and purpose of national institutions and of law, which the Pagans acknowledged, and which most of us acknowledge, to be the great distinction between men and brutes. And since beneath these relationships, and this national polity, the Pagans believed, and we believe, that seme other polity is lying, not limited like the former, not exclusive like the latter, I cannot see why wre are to talk of the prejudices and idiosyncracies of the Jew, because he expresses this universal idea in the wrords which are the simplest and the aptest to convey it. That, say the Evangelists, which w7e have been promised, that which we expect, is a Kingdom ; this Jesus of Nazareth we believe and affirm to be the King. Either proposition may be denied. It may be said, " Men are not in want of a spiritual and universal society." It may be said, " This person has not the credentials of the character which he assumes." But it must, according to all ordinary rules of criti- cism, be admitted that this was the idea of the Evangelists, and we ought surely, in studying an author, to seek that wTe may enter into his idea, before we substitute for it one of our own. I am aware, however, that the objector would be ready with an answer to this statement, and that it is one which will derive no lit- tle countenance from the opinions which are current among religious people, and therefore will have no inconsiderable weight with them. OF THIS CONSTITUTION. 231 It will be said, " We have an excuse for this attempt to separate the inward sense of the Gospels from their Jewish accidents, in the in- consistency which we discover in the use of those very phrases to which you allude. Do not the Evangelists constantly represent this kingdom as if it were an outward and visible kingdom, just like that of David and Solomon, nay, that very kingdom restored and extended ? as something to supersede the government of Herod, ul- timately perhaps that of the Cesars ? And do they not at the same time introduce such words as these and attribute them to their Mas- ter: 'The kingdom of God cometh not with observation,' ' The kingdom of God is within you,' ' My kingdom is not of this world,' — words which indicate that He taught (at least commonly) an- other doctrine, which has become leavened with these coarser and more sensual elements ? If so, are we not justified in decomposing the mass, and taking out the pure ore ?" I think the reader, who has gone along with me thus far, will not be much staggered by this argument. The kingdom of David, the kingdom of Solomon, was distinguished from the kingdoms of this world. It did not come with observation. It stood upon the principle which other kingdoms set at naught — the principle that the visible king is the type of the invisible, that he reigns in virtue of a covenant between the invisible king and the nation, that he is subject to a divine law. This principle, which was practically denied in all the great nations of the earth — denied then especially and emphatically when they became kingdoms (the ordinary, apparently the neces- sary, consummation of them all,) — the Israelitish kingdom existed to enforce. All through the history, the tendency of the nation and its kings to set at naught the constitutional principle, to forget the covenant, is manifest ; but this very tendency proved the truth of the idea against which it warred. If this be so, what contradiction was it to affirm that the new kingdom wras the kingdom promised to David, the kingdom of his son, and yet that it was in the high- est sense a kingdom not to be observed by the outwTard eye, a king- dom within, a kingdom not of this wrorld ? Do I mean that there was nothing startling: in such announce- ments to all or to most of those who first heard them ? If I did, I should be rejecting the express testimony of the Evangelists. They tell us that the leading members of the Jewish commonwealth, and 232 THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW all the most admired and popular sects which divided it, were con- tinually perplexed and outraged by this language. But they tell us also, that these same persons had lost the family and national character of Hebrews, that they perverted the express commands of God respecting the honouring of fathers and mothers, that they had no feelings of fellowship with Israelites as Israelites, but glori- fied themselves in their difference from the rest of their countrymen either on the score of righteousness or of wisdom ; that individual self-exaltation, on one or the other of these grounds, was their dis- tinguishing characteristic. They tell us, in strict consistency with these observations, that these men were never so scandalized as when Jesus spoke of his Father, of his coming to do his will, of his knowing Him, and being one with Him. The idea of a relation between men and their Maker, which was the idea implied in the Abrahamic covenant, had wholly departed from them ; and there- fore, the hope of a complete manifestation of the ground upon which this relationship rested, the hope which had sustained every suffering Israelite in every age — which was expressly the hope of Israel — could not be cherished by them. Their idea of God was the heathen one of a Being sitting in the clouds or diffused through the universe, entirely separated from his worshippers, incapable of speaking through men to men, only declaring himself by signs, like those of the red sky in the morning and the lowering sky in the evening. And therefore the king they expected was the counter- part of the absolute Emperor. It is true that the awful words, *We have no king but Cesar." would not have been uttered at any other moment than the one which called them forth ; that it required the most intense hatred and all the other passions which then had possession of their hearts, to induce the priests formally to abandon the dream of Jewish supremacy; and that they proba- bly reserved to themselves a right of maintaining one doctrine in the schools, another in the judgment-hall. Still these words ex- pressed the most inward thought of the speakers; the king of Abra- ham's seed whom they wanted was a Cesar and nothing else. But those who amidst much confusion and ignorance had really claimed their position as members of a nation in covenant with God ; those who had walked in the ordinances of the Lord blame- less, finding in every symbol of the Divine Presence, which seemed OF THIS CONSTITUTION. 233 to the world a phantom, the deepest reality, and in what the world called realities, the merest phantoms ; those who were conscious of their own darkness, but rested upon the promise of a light which should arise and shine upon their land ; those who, uniting to pub- lic shame a miserable sense of moral evil, looked for a deliverer from both at once ; those to whom the sight of the Roman soldier was oppressive, not because it reminded them of their tribute, but because it told them that the national life was gone, or lasted only in their prayers ; those who under the fig-tree had besought God that the clouds which hid his countenance from them might be dispersed, that He would remember the poor, and that men might not have the upper hand : these, whether or no they could recon- cile in their understandings the idea of a kingdom which should rule over all with one which should be in their hearts, at least acknowledged inwardly that only one to which both descriptions were applicable, could meet the cries which they had sent up to heaven. And whatever they saw of Him who was proclaimed the king, whatever they heard Him speak, tended to bring these thoughts into harmony, or, at all events, to make them feel that each alike was necessary. He exercised power over the elements and over the secret functions of the human body, (of course I am assuming the story of the Evangelists, my object being to show that the different parts of it are thoroughly consistent, when they are viewed in reference to one leading idea,) but this power is exercised for the sake of timid fishermen, of paralytics and lepers. He declares that his kingdom is like unto a grain of mustard-seed, which is indeed the least of all seeds, but which becomes a tree wherein the fowls of the air lodge ; He declares also that this seed of the kingdom is scattered over different soils, and that the right soil for it is in an honest heart. His acts produce the most obvious outward effects, yet their main effect is to carry the persuasion home to the mind of the prepared observer, that a communion had been opened between the visible and the invisible world, and that the one was under the power of the other. His words were ad- dressed to Israelites as the children of the covenant, yet every one of them tended to awaken in these Israelites a sense of humanity , a feeling that to be Israelites they must be more. And all this general language was preparatory to the discoveries which were ; 234 THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW made in that last supper, when, having loved his own who were in the world, He loved them unto the end, — to the announcements that they were all united in Him, as the branch is united to the vine — that there was a still more wonderful union between Him and his Father, to the knowledge of which they might through this union attain — and that a Spirit would come to dwell with them and to testify of Him and of the Father. All which dis- courses to men are gathered up in the amazing prayer, " That they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may be one in us." Either those words contain the essence and meaning of the whole history, or that history must be rejected as being from first to last the wickedest lie and the most awful blasphemy ever palmed upon the world. And if they do contain the meaning of it, that meaning must be embodied in acts. The Evangelists therefore go on to record in words perfectly calm and simple, the death of their master and his resurrection. As events they are related ; no com- ment is made upon them ; few hints are given of any effects to follow from them. We are made to feel by the quiet accurate detail, " He certainly died, who, as we believed, was the Son of God, and the King of Israel ; He actually rose with his body, and came among us who knew Him, and spake and ate with us : this is the accomplishment of the union between heaven and earth ; it is no longer a word, it is a fact." And of this fact, the risen Lord tells his Apostles that they are to go into the world and testify ; nor merely to testify of it ; but to adopt men into a society grounded upon the accomplishment of it. In connection with that command, and as the ultimate basis of the universal society, a name is pro- claimed, in which the name that had been revealed to Abraham, and that more awful one which Moses heard in the bush, are com- bined and reconciled. To a person who has contemplated the Gospel merely as the case of certain great doctrines or fine moralities, the Ms of the Apostles must be an utterly unintelligible book. For in the speci- mens of the Apostles' preaching which it gives us, there ere com- paratively few references to the discourses or the parables of our Lord. They dwell mainly upon the great acts of death and resur- rection as evidences that Jesus was the king, as expounding and OF THIS CONSTITUTION. 235 consummating the previous history of the Jewish people, as justify- ing and realizing the truth which worked in the minds of the heathen, u that we are his offspring/' On the other hand a per- son who really looks upon the Bible as the history of the establish- ment of a universal and spiritual kingdom, of that kingdom which God had ever intended for men, and of which the universal king- dom then existing in the world was the formal opposite, will find in this book exactly that without which all the former records would be unmeaning. The narrator of such transcendent events, as the ascension of the Son of Man into the invisible glory, or the descent of the Spirit to take possession of the feelings, thoughts, utterances of mortal men, might have been expected to stand still and wonder at that which with so entire a belief he was recording. But no — he looks upon these events as the necessary consummation of all that went before, the necessary foundations of the existence of the Church. And therefore, he can quietly relate any other circumstances, how- ever apparently disproportionate, which were demanded for the outward manifestation and development of that Church, such as the meeting of the Apostles in the upper room, and the completion of their number. If the foundation of this kingdom were the end of all the purposes of God, if it were the kingdom of God among men, the human conditions of it could be no more passed over than the divine ; it was as needful to prove that the ladder had its foot upon earth, as that it had come down out of heaven. As we proceed, we find every new step of the story leading us to notice the Church as the child which the Jewish polity had for so many ages been carrying in its womb. Its filial relation is first demon- strated, it is shown to be an Israelitic not a mundane common- wealth ; then it is shown, that though not mundane, it is essentially human, containing a principle of expansion greater than that which dwelt in the Roman empire. And here lies the apparent contradiction, the real harmony of these two aspects in which this kingdom was contemplated by the Apostles of the circumcision and by St. Paul. The one witnessed fpr the continuity of it, the other for its freedom from all national exclusions. These, we may believe, were their respective offices. Yet, as each fulfilled the one, he was in fact teaching the other 236 THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW truth most effectually. St. Peter and St. James were maintaining the universality of the Church, while they were contending for its Jewish character and derivation. St. Paul was maintaining the national covenant, while he was telling the Gentiles, that if they were circumcised Christ would profit them nothing. Take away the first testimony and the Church becomes an earthly not a spirit- ual commonwealth, and therefore subject to earthly limitations ; take away the second, and the promise to Abraham is unfulfilled. In another sense, as the canon of Scripture shows, St. Paul was more directly carrying out the spirit of the Jewish distinction, by upholding the distinctness of ecclesiastical communities according to tribes and countries than the Apostles of Jerusalem ; and they were carrying out the idea of the universality of the Church more than he did by addressing the members of it as of an entire com- munity dispersed through different parts of the world. But we must not forget, that while this universal society, according to the historical conception of it, grew out of the Jewish family and nation, it is, according to the theological conception of it, the root of both. " That," says Aristotle,* " which is first as cause is last in discovery." And this beautiful formula is transla- ted into life and reality in the letter to the Ephesians, when St. Paul tells them that they were created in Christ before all wyorlds, and when he speaks of the transcendent economy as being gradu- ally revealed to the Apostles and Prophets by the Spirit. In this passage it seems to me, lies the key to the whole character of the dispensation, as w7ell as of the books in which it is set forth. If the Gospel be the revelation or unveiling of a mystery hidden from ages and generations ; if this mystery be the true constitution of humanity in Christ, so that a man believes and acts a lie who does not claim for himself union with Christ, we can understand why the deepest writings of the New Testament, instead of being digests of doctrine, are epistles, explaining to those who had been admitted into the Church of Christ their own position, bringing out that side of it which had reference to the circumstances in which they were placed, or to their most besetting sins, and show- ing what life was in consistency, what life at variance with it. to tiqojiov aiTiov laxaxov 'lv JV Bigtaei, OF THIS CONSTITUTION. 237 can understand why the opening of the first of these epistles, of the one which has been supposed to be most like a systematic treatise, announces that the Gospel is concerning Jesus Christ, who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and marked out as the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holi- ness, by the resurrection of the dead. The fact of a union between the Godhead and humanity is thus set forth as the one which the Apostle felt himself appointed to proclaim, which was the ground of the message to the Gentiles, and in which all ideas of reconcili- ation, of a divine life, justification by faith, sanctiflcation by the Spirit, were implicitly contained. We can understand why the great fight of the Apostle with the Corinthians should be because they exalted certain notions, and certain men as the representatives of these notions, into the place of Him who was the Lord of their fellowship, and why pride, sensuality, contempt of others, abuse of ordinances should be necessarily consequent upon that sin. We can understand why St. Paul curses with such vehemence those false teachers who had denied the Galatians the right to call them- selves children of God in Christ in virtue of the new covenant, and had sent them back to the old. We may perceive that those wonderful words in which he addresses the Ephesians, when he tells them that they were sitting in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, are just as real and practical as the exhortations at the end of the same letter, respecting the duties of husbands and wives, fathers and children, and that the second are involved in the first. We may see what connection there is between the entreaty to the Colossians not to stoop to will worship and the service of Angels, and the assertion of the fact, that Christ was in them the hope of glory, and that He is the head in whom dwell all the riches of wisdom and knowledge. We may see how possible it was for some of the Philippian Church to be enemies to the cross of Christ, their god their belly, their glory their shame, not because they had not been admitted to the privileges of being members of Christ, but because they had not pressed forward to realize their claim. We may enter a little into the idea of the letter to the Thessaloni- ans, however we may differ about the particular time or times of its accomplishment, that there must be a coeval manifestation of the mystery of iniquity and of the mystery of godliness; that the 238 THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW two kingdoms being always in conflict, at certain great crises of the world, are brought into direct and open collision. We shall not need any evidence of the Apostolical derivation of the epistle to the Hebrews, to convince us, that it unfolds the relations between the national and the universal dispensation, between that which was the shadow and that which was the substance of a Divine humanity ; between that which enabled the worshipper to expect a perfect admission into the Divine presence, and that which admit- ted him to it ; between that which revealed God to him as the enemy of evil, and that which revealed Him as the conqueror of it. Nor is it inconsistent with any previous intimation which has been given us, that the writer of this epistle should in every part of it represent the sin of men as consisting in their unbelief of the blessings into which they are received at each stage of the Divine manifestation, and that he should with solemn earnestness, mixed with warnings of a fearful and hopeless apostasy, urge those whom he is addressing to believe that the position into which they had been brought was that after which all former ages had been aspiring, and as such, to claim it. From these exhortations and admonitions, the transition is easy to those Catholic epistles which some have found it so hard to reconcile with the doctrine of St. Paul. And doubtless, if the faith which the epistle to the Romans and the epistle to the Hebrews adjured men, by such grand promises and dire threats, to exercise, were not faith in a living Being, who had adopted men into fellowship with himself on purpose that being righteous by virtue of that union they might do righteous acts, that having claimed their peace as members of a body the Spirit might work in them to will and to do of his good pleasure, the assertions that faith without works saves, and that faith without works cannot save, are hopelessly irreconcilable. But if the idea of St. Paul, as much as of St. James, be, that all worth may be attributed to faith, in so far forth as it unites us to an object and raises us out of our- selves— no worth at all, so far as it is contemplated simply as a property in ourselves ; if this be the very principle which the whole Bible is developing, one does not well see what either position would be good for, if the other were wanting. If our Lord came among men that he might bring them into a kingdom of righteous- ness, peace, and joy, because a kingdom grounded upon fellowship OF THIS CONSTITUTION. 239 with a righteous and perfect Being, the notion that that righteous- ness can ever belong to any man in himself, and the notion that every one is not to exhibit the fruits of it in himself would seem to be equally contradictions. And therefore I believe without this consideration we shall be as much puzzled by the sketch of a Christian man's life, discipline, and conflicts, in the epistle of St. Peter, and by the doctrine of St. John, that love is the consumma- tion of all God's revelations and all man's strivings, as by any former part of the book. For that men are not to gain a kingdom hereafter, but are put in possession of it now, and that through their chastisements and the oppositions of their evil nature, they are to learn its character and enter into its privileges, is surely taught in every verse of the one ; and that love has been manifested unto men, that they have been brought into fellowship with it, that by that fellowship they may rise to the fruition of it, and that this fellowship is for us as members of a family, so that he who loveth God must love his brother also, is affirmed again and again in express words of the other. With such thoughts in our mind, I believe we may venture, with hope of the deepest instruction, upon the study of the last book in the Bible. For though we may not be able to determine which of all the chronological speculations respecting it is the least untenable, though we may not decide con- fidently whether it speaks to us of the future or of the past, whether it describes a conflict of principles or of persons, of this we shall have no doubt, that it does exhibit at one period or through all periods a real kingdom of heaven upon earth, a kingdom of which the principle must be ever the same, a kingdom to which all king- doms are meant to be in subjection ; a kingdom which is main- taining itself against an opposing tyranny, whereof the ultimate law is brute force or unalloyed selfishness ; a kingdom which must prevail because it rests upon a name which expresses the perfect Love, the ineffable Unity, the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. CHAPTER IV. SIGNS OF A SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. We have observed the traces of a spiritual constitution for man- kind. We have observed that the two parts of this constitution, which are united by family relationships and by locality, depend upon a third part which is universal. We have observed that there are two possible forms of a universal society, one of which is destructive of the family and national principle, the other the ex- pansion of them. The first of these is that which in Scripture is called this world, the latter is that which in Scripture is called the church. We have observed that the principles of the world exist in the heart of every family and of every nation ; that they are precisely the natural tendencies and inclinations of men ; that they are always threatening to become predominant; that when they become predominant there ceases to be any recognition of men as related to a Being above them, any recognition of them as pos- sessing a common humanity. The other body, therefore, the Church, being especially the witness for these facts which it is natural to us to deny, must be a distinct body. In losing its dis- tinctness it loses its meaning, loses to all intents and purposes, though the words may at first sound paradoxical, its universality. The question then which we have to examine is, are there any signs in the present day of the existence of a spiritual and universal body upon the earth 1 Do these signs identify that body with the one spoken of in Scripture ? Are they an effectual witness against the world ? SECTION L BAPTISM. That there has existed for the last 1800 years, a certain rite called Baptism ; that it is not derived from the national customs of any of the people among whom it is found ; that different tribes of SIGNS OF A SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 241 the most different origin and character adopted it, and when they had received it believed themselves to be members of a common society ; that this society was supposed to be connected with an invisible world, and with a certain worship and government ; that an immense proportion of all the children in Europe are admitted very shortly after their birth to the rite ; that it is generally per- formed by a peculiar class of functionaries — these are facts, which it is not necessary to establish by any proof. The only question is whether these facts have a meaning and what that meaning is. The idea of the Scriptures, so far as we have been able to trace it, is that Jesus Christ came upon earth to reveal a kingdom, which kingdom is founded upon a union established in his person between man and God — between the visible and invisible world — and ulti- mately upon a revelation of the divine Name. If then the setting up of this kingdom, and the adoption of men into it, be not connect- ed in the New Testament with the rite of baptism, we may be quite sure that the fact we have just noticed, let its import be what it may, does not concern us. Even though baptism were enjoined as a rite by our Lord himself, yet if it were appointed in such terms as leave us at liberty to suppose that it was merely accidental to the general purposes of his advent, we cannot prove an identity be- tween the universal society which acknowledges it now and the one which He founded. Let us then turn to the Gospels that we may see there how far this is the case. One of the first events announced there is con- tained in these words : " In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea and saying : Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Then went out to him Jerusa- lem and all Judea, and were baptized of him in Jordan confessing their sins." This narrative is at least singular : baptism is connect- ed with a spiritual act, that of repentance ; with a spiritual promise, that of remission ; with the announcement of a kingdom ; with an intimation that that kingdom should not merely be composed of the children of Abraham. Supposing it were, as some imagine, a ceremony not known until that time, then it was introduced at the very moment that the kingdom of heaven was to begin ; supposing it had been practised, as others say, at the reception of Gentile con- verts to the privileges of the outer court, then the administration of 16 242 SIGNS OF A it to the Jews would appear to be a most significant intimation that they were henceforth to take their stand upon a universal hu- man ground. This baptism then was the preparation for the gos- pel. It may, however, for aught that appears at present, have been only a preparation. But Jesus Himself descends into the water, and as He comes out of it, a voice from heaven proclaims Him the well beloved Son, and the Spirit descends upon Him in a bodily shape. The announcement then that the Divine man, the king of men, had really appeared, was, according to the Gospels, connected with Baptism. And this same Baptism they speak of as the begin- ning of our Lord's public ministry, and of all the acts by which his descent from above was attested. Yet this might have been neces- sary to mark the leader ; it need not have any application to his disciples. But Jesus preached, saying, " Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand j" he appoints Apostles to go and declare that kingdom ; and these Apostles baptize. The nature of their mes- sage may denote, however, that they wrere only continuing the dis- pensation of John, that they had nothing directly to do with that higher Baptism of the Holy Ghost and of fire, which John had de- clared would supersede his own. Our Lord has a conversation with Nicodemus in which He tells him that he must be born again if he would see the kingdom of heaven ; because that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit ; be- cause it was impossible for the fleshly man to understand even earthly things, much more these heavenly things, which He alone could reveal who had come down from heaven, and was in heaven. And this declaration of the transcendental character of the new kingdom is joined to the words, "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven." Yet perhaps, even here there may be a reference rather to the spi- ritual eye in man, which this ordinance, like those earlier ordinan- ces of the Jews, might be the means of opening, than to the actual gift of God's Spirit which was promised ; for it is said expressly, " The Spirit was not yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified." Our Lord appears to his disciples after He had risen from the dead, and He says, " All power is given unto me in heaven and earth, go therefore, and preach the gospel to all nations, baptiz- ing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 243 Ghost." This language is certainly strange; for it seems as if it could only look forward to the establishment of a spiritual kingdom. But one other point of evidence is still wanting. Did the Apostles, after the glorification of Christ, after the descent of the Holy Ghost, still bap- tize with water ? St. Peter stood in the midst of the disciples, and said to the Jews, " God hath made this Jesus whom ye crucified, both Lord and Christ ; repent therefore, and be baptized and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost and the same day three thousand were baptized. This evidence may perhaps be enough to show that the writers of the Gospels and of the Acts, believed this to be the sign of admission into Christ's spiritual and universal kingdom, and con- sequently, that every person receiving that sign was, ipso facto, a member of that kingdom. As the son or servant of the Roman commonwealth entered so soon as he was manumitted upon the rights of a citizen, as all immunities and responsibilities appertain- ing to this character from that hour became his, the young Chris- tian convert who had derived his instruction from the Scriptures could not doubt, that from the time of his baptism he was free of that brotherhood of which his Lord was the head. He could not doubt that whatever language, be it as lofty as it might, described that brotherhood, described his state ; that if Christ came to make men sons of God, he was a son of God ; if He came to make them members of his own body, he was a member of that body ; if He came to endue men with his Spirit, that Spirit was given to him. His baptism said to him, This is your position ; according to the conditions of it you are to live. It will not be an easy life. It will be one of perpetual conflict. You will have a battle not with flesh and blood only, but with principalities and powers, with the rulers of spiritual wickedness in high places. But understand the nature of the battle. Your foes are not hindering you from obtaining a blessing ; they are hindering you from entering into the fruition of one that has been obtained for you ; they will laugh at you for pretending that it is yours; they will tell you that you must not claim it But in the strength of this covenant you must claim it ; otherwise your life will be a lie. I ask any one calmly to read the Epistles, and tell me whether any other sense than this could be put upon baptism by those who exhorted men, because they were bap- tized, to count themselves dead unto sin and alive unto God ; by U4A SIGNS OF A those who addressed men, the majority of whom they did not know personally, some of whom they did know to be inconsistent and un- holy, as being in Christ, elect, children of God; by those who con- jured their disciples not to doubt, not to disbelieve, that they had been admitted into the communion of saints, and told them they would sink into apostasy if they did ? But then I must ask also, why, if the kingdom of Christ was declared to be an everlasting kingdom, and this sign was fixed as the admission of men into it at the first, and this sign still exists among us, all we who have re- ceived it are not in the same position, have not the same privileges, are not under the same responsibilities, as those who lived eighteen hundred years ago ? I ask whether Baptism be not the sign of a spiritual and universal kingdom ? objections. — I. The Quaker. To this question various answers are given. I will consider first that of the Quakers. I. It seems to them utterly incredible and monstrous, that a spiritual fact or operation should be denoted by a visible sign. " Either men are livingly united to the Divine Word, or they are not ; if they are the sign is useless ; if they are not, it is false. If Christ's kingdom depend upon these outward ceremonies, wherein does it differ from the Jewish ? What do the words, that John came baptizing with water but Christ with the Spirit and fire, mean, if both baptisms are equally outward V9 Positions of this kind are so self-evident to the Quaker, that Scripture cannot be suffered to contradict them. It is in vain to allege texts and commandments. These are primary truths which ride over them all, and determine the interpretation of them. If the Apostles did act in opposition to them, the Apostles showed that they were still ignorant and Judaical. Be it so — if these notions are good for any thing, if they do not contradict the leading posi- tive truths of Quakerism, let them be upholden at all risks. But that is the point I wish to examine. We have seen that Fox did not consider it the work of the Gospel to reveal the fact of men's relation to the Divine Word; that fact, he believed, was intimated both to Heathens and to Jews. To the latter it was intimated by a sign. The Invisible SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 245 Teacher by this means declared to the children of Abraham that there was a union between themselves and Him, warned them of the tendency there was in their fleshly natures to separate from Him, promised to uphold them against that tendency. This, I say, Fox acknowledged to be the divine method in the Jewish dispensation. He never pretended that the union which was made known to the Jew was a material union ; if it had been, there would have been no sign, for there would have been nothing to signify. He never pretended that it was a variable union, deriving its existence from certain feelings in the minds of the human creatures who shared in it; if it had been there could have been no sign, for the thing to be signified would have been differ- ent each day. So that the appropriateness — the possibility, if I may so speak, of this method, arose from the fact that a certain spiritual and permanent relation was to be made known by it. And yet the reason, according to the Quaker, why this method should be abandoned, is this and this only, that the dispensation of the Gospel has a spiritual and permanent, not a material and transitory, character ! Surely this is an inconsistency which needs to be justified by something else than vague declamations about carnal practices, and angry denunciations against the whole of Christendom, from the Apostles downwards, for being guilty of them. " But it is a false thing to give the sign to any one who has not the reality." What is meant by the words, has not the reality? Is it meant that the relation is not real? If so, Fox was wrong, for he affirmed that it was leal, for all men. Or does the word real refer to the feeling and acknowledgment of the relation? Then this proposition affirms, that it is false to tell a man a truth because he does not believe it. Unquestionably we are guilty of that falsehood ; the whole Old Testament dispensation was also guilty of it ; Fox and the Quakers themselves are guilty of it. " But the sign is useless to a man who is truly united to the Divine Word." There are two opinions implied in this language, both of great importance, both very illustrative of Quaker feeling and history. One is that it is nothing to a man that a thing is true, true in itself, true universally, provided he feels it to be true for him ; the other is that union with the Divine Word is all which men require. Now every earnest word which Fox spoke was a 246 SIGNS OF A testimony against both these notions ; first, (as I have shown so often,) the truth of the thing was the ground upon which he exhorted men to place their feeling of it ; secondly, he declared that union to the Divine Word did not satisfy those Heathens or Jews who perceived it, but that it made them long for something more, for a kingdom of Heaven. See here an evidence for Baptism, which all the history of Christendom could not have afforded, frankly offered to us by those who reject it. Their whole preaching is against Judaism, against the old covenant ; and yet they are thrown back upon Judaism, they cannot rise above the great doctrine of the old covenant. But neither can they keep that doctrine ; they cannot keep the faith that we are related to the Divine Word; they can only substitute for it certain individual feelings and impres- sions. And now, having this thought on our minds, let us compare for an instant our interpretation of the words of John the Baptist with theirs. WTe say that John came baptizing with water unto repentance, for the remission of sins. Here lay the spiritual mean- ing of his Baptism. Our Lord's baptism, we maintain, includes this meaning, but it has a deeper one. His baptism is not only unto repentance ; not only intimates that the heart has turned to God, and so turning is delivered from sin : it gives the spirit and power whence repentance and every other right act must flow ; it brings the subject of it under the discipline of that purifying fire whereby the old and evil nature is to be consumed. This mean- ing of the passage seems to be literal enough, and it precisely ac- cords with the promises and anticipations of the prophets, with the expositions and retrospections of the Apostles. How does the Quaker improve upon it ? He makes it the great characteristic of John, that he did baptize with water, and of Christ, that He would not baptize with water. So that the voice crying in the wilder- ness said this, " Hear, oh Israel ! rejoice, oh ye Gentiles ! the glorious time is at hand, which your fathers expected, which the whole universe has been groaning for — the time when signs are to be abolished. The great Prince and Deliverer is at hand, who will cause that the things of earth shall be no longer pledges and sacraments of a union with Heaven ! This is the consummation of all the hopes of mankind, this is what is meant by the Taber- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 247 nacle of God being with men; by his dwelling with them, and their being his people, and his being their God." 2. The Jlnti-pcedobaptist. II. The Anti-paedobaptist is, in many respects, strongly con- trasted with the Quaker. He attaches a very great value to the baptismal sign. He believes that it is intended to be the witness of a spiritual kingdom. In general, he is remarkable for holding the belief firmly, in which the Quaker is deficient, that men are chosen by God to their place in the Divine Economy. But he con- ceives that the admission of those who have no spiritual conscious- ness or spiritual capacity to this ordinance, is destructive of its meaning ; as it exists in modern Europe it has nothing to do with the Kingdom of Christ. I should be very careful to answer this objection, for it certainly affects the whole of my argument, if it had not been already so fully considered. The issue to be tried between us and the Ana- baptists is not whether the existence of such and such a sign in- dicates the existence of a kingdom, but what that kingdom is which it should indicate. I have maintained, upon the authority of Scrip- ture, that the Catholic Church is emphatically a kingdom for man- kind, a kingdom grounded upon the union which has been estab- lished in Christ between God and man. I have maintained that it grew out of a family and a nation, of which social states it proved itself to be the proper and only foundation. Supposing this notion to be altogether false, it may be most reasonable to say, that a child, an embryo man, ought to be treated as if he were not a citizen of this kingdom. To one who believes it true, such a doctrine must seem absolutely monstrous. Let us take a member of either of the classes out of which the early Church was formed. First let him be a Heathen. He has been struck with the threatenings of coming judgments which were visible in the sins of the Roman empire, in the divorces, adulteries, incests, parricides of its most conspicuous mem- bers. He has felt how little the idea of the gods which was re- ceived among his countrymen, tended to repress such atrocities. The preaching of some Christian Apostle has awakened him to the fact, that the evil nature from which all these crimes have proceed- ed is in himself. He hears of a deliverance out of that nature. He 248 SIGNS OF A hears that God has revealed himself to men as the enemy of all unrighteousness ; that He has also revealed himself to men as their Father; that his Son has come down to dwell among men ; that He has made himself the brother of our race ; that He has claimed the members of it for members of his own body ; that He has given them a sign of admission into it; that He has promised them his Spirit. Could he who received this joyful message, and acted upon the command which was involved in it, doubt that he was received into the true human family, that he was taken out of a hateful, anomalous, inhuman world ? Could he then dare to say, " This child whom I have begotten, belongs to this inhuman anomalous world; he has a human form and countenance — that form and countenance which Christ bore — yet the accursed nature which I have renounced is his proper, his appointed master ; the evil society out of which I have fled, is his home ; to the evil spirit who I be- lieve has infused his leaven into that nature and that society, I leave him." I am now reasoning with a person who does not attach any high meaning to Baptism, but with one who believes it to be really the sign of the redeemed covenant family. I ask such a person to consider, what less than this a Christian convert could suppose to be signified, by any one who told him that he was not to baptize his child, because he could not be sure that it was in- cluded in Christ's redemption ? Nor let it be supposed that this is the whole of the contradiction which such a prohibition would involve. Far from it. The idea of the Gospel, as the revelation of truths which are expressed in the forms of family society, and which, to all appearance, are not expressible in. any other forms, truths to the apprehension of which he had risen through the feelings, which his domestic relations or the consciousness of their violation had called forth, would seem to him utterly destroyed, all links between human relations and divine at once abolished, if he might not dare to speak of his child as united to him in a spiritual bond. Again, the idea of the Gospel, as the promise of a Spirit who would awaken all consciousnesses, convic- tions, and affections, would be equally trifled with, by the doctrine that the existence of these convictions, consciousnesses, affections, was the condition precedent to an admission into the Gospel Covenant. SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 249 On this last point, the perplexities of a Hebrew Christian, who was commanded not to baptize his child, must have been still more distressing. His own covenant had been emphatically with chil- dren. That which had superseded it was, in all other respects, wider, freer, more directly referring all acts of the creature to the love and good pleasure of the Creator. Yet, without one word of Christ being produced to this effect, J command you not to follow the analogy of God's earlier dispensation, not to suppose that,in my kingdom of grace, infants are accounted human and moral beings as they were under the law — without the record of one sentence to this purpose ; with the record of many acts and words which led to just the opposite conclusion, that infants were a most honoured part of that race which He came to seek and save; with the doc- trine forming an article of his daily confession, that the Redeemer of humanity had himself entered into the state of childhood, as w7ell as into that of manhood, the Israelite convert is forced to abandon all the habits of thought and feeling which he had derived from God's own teaching, not because they were too narrow, but be- cause they were too comprehensive for his new position. The Anti-paedobaptist then, I think, cannot plead, (and this is his only plea,) that the application of Baptism to infants is a strange and perplexing departure from the admitted sense and object of the ordinance. On the contrary, there is some reason, I fancy, for suspecting danger on the other side. It was so reasonable, so in- evitable a consequence of the baptismal principle, that infants should be received into the Church — the law of the Church's pro- pagation was thereby so clearly explained and reconciled with the ordinary laws of God's Providence — that it would be no wonder if liier truth, equally necessary, were lost sight of in the eagerness to enforce that which this practice inculcated. It might be for- gotten that we baptize children, not because they are children, but because they are embryo men ; that to the complete idea of a spiritual blessing, a receiver is needful as well as a giver ; that Baptism is not a momentary act but a perpetual sacrament. Be- fore I finish this section, I may have occasion to show that some or all of these errors have arisen in the Church, and to their prevalen- cy the rise of a sect of Anti-paedobaptists is, no doubt, to be attri- buted. But there is found, side by side with Baptism, in all the 250 SIGNS OF A countries where it is adopted, an institution which is a far more complete testimony against such perversions, than those have been able to bear who set aside the principle out of which they have grown. This institution, not displacing or superseding Baptism, but confirming, as its name denotes, the authority and pledges of that sacrament, declares to the child that He who has guided it through infancy will be with it in the conscious struggles of man- hood, and that it has been made free, not only of a particular con- gregation, but of the Universal Church. The doctrine of the Anabaptists then, like that of the Quakers, supplies a strong argument in favour of my position, for it shows that just so far as the operation of Baptism is restricted, just so far does the belief of a human society become impossible.* 3. The Modern Protestant. Next to the Anabaptist comes the soi-disant disciple of Luther and Calvin, the modern Protestant or Evangelical. His doctrine * As the notion that the Baptism now existing in Christendom is in- valid, because it is generally performed by sprinkling, and not by immersion, is accidentally connected with the Anti-psedobaptist theory, it may be well to say a few words upon it in this place. 14 The practice," it is said, "of the early ages, so far as we can ascertain, was to immerse ; the emblematical character of Baptism as a burial is destroyed by the other practice ; if we admit an outward ceremony at all, we cannot afterwards pretend that the mode of performing it is indifferent. " I acknowledge that there is truth in each of these propositions. I admit (with, I suppose, the majority of Church- men) that there is a high probability in favour of the prevalence in early times of that practice which is least likely to have been afterwards intro- duced, and that most of the facts we know would confirm the opinion. I admit that the word " buried with him," in the sixth chapter of the Romans, is a better argument for immersion, than the words " sprinkled from an evil conscience," in St. Peter, can ever furnish for the modern custom. I admit, that having received a certain form and not another, as the sign of a certain thing, we have no business to give ourselves airs about the unimportance of certain particulars of that which has been prescribed. But here lies the dis- tinction. No particular mode of baptism is prescribed by our Lord. It is said, you shall make water the sign ; and you shall accompany the use of this water with certain words. It is not said, Thus shall you use it, and in no other way. Now the highest probability, that a practice now existing is different from one formerly existing, does not, I contend, make that practice illegitimate, if it answer to the terms of the law which ordained it. And this rule applies especially to the case of a Universal Institution ; we cannot tell that the old practice, however laudable and right, may not have been deter- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 251 is that there are two kingdoms of Christ, one real and spiritual, the other outward and visible. It is highly desirable, perhaps mined by the circumstances of a particular country or time ; we cannot tell that the liberty of modal alteration may not have been contemplated and provided for in the terms of the enactment. A sign which is divinely insti- tuted and meant for mankind, is too serious a thing to be determined by any guesses or judgments about antiquity. They may be most useful as sugges- tions, they may unfold to us meanings which we have lost ; they cannot be produced as condemnatory of that, which he who appointed the sign has not condemned. Least of all must the notion intrude itself, that such or such a sign is not big enough, does not involve self-sacrifice enough ; for this is to set aside the first principle upon which the validity of all signs must rest, that the one, be it great or little, which the Ruler has fixed, is the right one, and must denote what He meant it to denote. What I have said, I hope is sufficiently plain. If not, the case of the ring in marriage may illustrate it. Supposing a ring to be prescribed by any law in virtue of which marriages are performed, a ring is indispensable. But the strongest evidence to prove that rings at weddings had been commonly of gold, and the absence of all evidence to prove that they had been any thing else, ought not to be sufficient to make a marriage void, which was concluded with some ring. And this example suggests an observation in reference to the alleged loss of the baptismal emblem, by the use of sprinkling. Suppos- ing it were urged by one, who was impeaching the validity of a marriage which was celebrated with a brass or copper ring, that some notion of purity was implied in the choice of the nobler metal ; nay, supposing he were able to produce clear proof that that notion had been attached to it, had even given occasion to the custom — a judge would surely not listen for an instant to such an argument ; though he would admit, in the strongest manner, that the idea of marriage implied purity, and that it was the object of all marriage institutions and ceremonies to preserve it. He would at once declare that the emblem, however interesting, however useful for personal meditation, however law-ful as the foundation of a custom, was altogether distinct from the sign. The prescribed sign testified that the union betwreen the parties was complete and final ; a purely arbitrary sign, having no emblematic value, would do this ; and the force of it as arbitrary, as appointed, must not be lost through any consideration of its wisdom or propriety. This reflection is especially needful in the present case. An institution of divine appointment will necessarily carry in it a profound wisdom, and manifold adaptations to the condition of the creatures for whom it is destined. Such a symbol as water at once suggests numerous hints and analogies, and many more pre- sent themselves to an earnest, even though he be not a fanciful, thinker. But the main fact to which Baptism bears witness, our adoption into Christ, must be, after all, the key to these analogies, and not they the keys to it. And that adoption into Christ must be received as a fact, upon the authority of the sign, without the least reference to any apparent likeness in it to the thing signified ; else the sign will lose its universality, and be treated as 252 SIGNS OF A necessary, that young as well as old should be admitted into the latter. Baptism is the appointed mode of admission. "What are the privileges of the Gentile court into which, by this ordinance, we are received, they do not precisely determine. Possibly some grace is communicated at Baptism ; or if not, the blessings of being permitted to hear preaching, and of obtaining a Christian education, are great, and may be turned to greater use hereafter. But the important point of all is this, to press upon men that till they have been actually and consciously converted, they are not members of Christ or children of God. Some disciples of this school believe that these words may be applied to baptized people in a sense ; but if you desire to know in what sense, the answers are so vague and indeterminate, as to leave a painful impression upon the mind, that such language is very awful and significant, and yet that it may on certain occasions be sported with or used with a secret reservation. But those who make these statements say, that they wish to get rid of equivocations, not to invent them. They resort to this hypothesis of a double kingdom, because the plainest observation tells them, that a baptized man may be a very evil man, and be- cause, being evil, they cannot see what he has to do with a king- dom of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. Again, they say, " Let people make out what theological scheme they please, we know that we, having been baptized in infancy, did in manhood as much pass from death unto life, as any heathen in the first age could have done." It is not, they contend, fair or honest to suppress either of these facts, either that which is obvious to every man's common sense, or that of which they themselves are conscious ; but that this is done, and must be done, if we assume nothing to those who cannot, through deficiency in the faculty of comparison, or any other cause, discover the resemblance. These remarks are merely intended to show, that there is no warrant for the notion that the Baptism now existing among us, is not formally the bap- tism which Christ ordained, and therefore the sign of admission into his uni- versal and spiritual kingdom, because the mode of administering it may not be that which his Apostles practised. The question whether any power and what power has a right to prescribe for the whole Church, or for any parti- cular branch of it, a certain mode of performing Baptism, is quite a distinct one. which must be considered in its proper place. I SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 253 Baptism to be what it is sometimes called — A New Birth — the actual introduction into a spiritual wTorld. Now I feel as little disposed to deny the melancholy propo- sition that Christian men are not living Christian lives, as the Jewish prophet felt to pass over the truth, that the name of God was blasphemed through his countrymen in all lands. The prece- dents which Holy Scripture furnishes I believe to be strictly appli- cable to us ; that which was the function of the preacher then is his function now ; if he who prophesied in Jerusalem was to re- buke men for sin, and to call them to repentance, we in London or Paris are to do the like. The question is, What is the sin which we are to rebuke, what is the repentance to which wTe are to in- vite 1 The Jewish prophet charged his people %ith forgetting the covenant of their God. He traced up all sins to this sin. He said that the Jew was guilty, because he did not claim the privilege of a Jew, because he did not act as if he was a Jew. Are we to fol- low this precedent or not? Are wre following it when we say, " This covenant is, I will be to you a father, and you shall be to me sons and daughters ; you are acting as if you were not in this covenant, you are forgetting it," or when we say, " These titles are not yours, or are yours only in some formal imaginary sense,'' that is, if we spoke plain English, in no sense at all ? As little do I desire to deny or explain away the other assertion, that baptized men, who have lived without God in the world, are converted to Him by his grace. This is a doctrine which I believe was held as strongly by St. Bernard, Thauler, and A Kempis, I might add by Loyola and Xavier, as by any modern Methodist. These eminent persons did not limit their language to cases of open profligacy (though they by no means excluded such cases); they applied it to laymen or priests, who under a respectable exterior had sought the praise of men more than the praise of God. Whether we have a right to restrict the word to a particular act or crisis ; whether every act of repentance is not one of conversion or turning to God ; whether we are not apt to forget that every such act must be as much attributed to the Spirit of God as the recovery from habitual thoughtlessness and sin, are questions for serious re- flection ; but the decision of them does not affect the opinion, that there may be an entire change in the feelings and aims of one who 254 SIGNS OF A has received Christian Baptism. But by what words is such a re- volution to be denoted ? I believe the answer may be obtained, by comparing different approved records of conversions. We shall find a great difference in them. In some we shall hear a man speaking with great horror and loathing of his past years and of his youthful companions. We shall hear another transferring these expressions of loathing to his evil nature, and to himself for having yielded to it, manifesting the deepest affection for all he has ever been acquainted with, owning them to be more righteous than himself, believing that God cares for them as well as for him — certain that what is true for him, is true also for them. The first talks much of the new start he has taken, of his new heart, of his purified affections ^the latter rejoices that having discovered the feebleness of his own heart, he has been led to see that there is another in whom he ought to have trusted before, and may trust now. The first speaks of the grace that has been bestowed ^ipon himself ; the other of being taken under the gracious guidance of a Spirit, whom he has resisted too long. Granting that these modes of expression may be sometimes intermingled, that there may be a true feeling in those who chiefly use the former, and that there may be error and confusions in those records wherein the latter predominate, yet does not every one recognise a character- istic, a most practical difference between them 1 Would not any experienced person of the Evangelical school feel, that the one kind of language indicated a much more healthful, genuine, state of character than the other ? But then ought he not to ask him- self whether both of these kinds of language are incompatible with the idea of Baptismal regeneration, or only one of them ; and if only one, whether the false or the true ? If the words, " then I was awakened," do not imply " I had been asleep if the words, " then I came to the knowledge of the truth," do not imply " that which I knew was true before I knew it;" if the words, "I ceased to strive against the Spirit," do not imply " that there had been a previous resistance to the Spirit," they are mere cant words, good for nothing, nay, utterly detestable. But, if they do imply all this, they imply just what the believer in Baptismal Re- generation is charged with fiction and falsehood for maintain- ing. They presume the existence of a state, which is our state, SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 255 whether we are conscious of it, whether we are in conformity with it, or no. It is then not necessary for the vindication of these two facts, that we should adopt the notion that there are two kingdoms, one earthly, formal, fictitious; the other heavenly, spiritual, real. It is not necessary for their vindication, seeing that neither of these facts can be calmly examined, even in the reports of those who insist most upon them, without suggesting the notion, that there must be a heavenly, spiritual, real kingdom, against which all evil men, just in so far forth as they are evil, are rebelling; and into subjection to which all converted men, in so far forth as they are converted, are brought. And therefore, whatever evils have flowed and are flowing from this notion, are not justified or compensated for by one practical advantage. How practical the evils are, let the history of Christian Europe since the Reformation attest ! I have spoken of the difference between Luther and the Lutherans, even between Calvin and the Calvinists; I have spoken of the way in which Justification by faith has been turned from a living principle into an empty shibboleth, in which the divine Election has lost its force, except as an excuse for doubting the existence of our own awful responsibilities. If we trace these miserable fruits to their root, we shall find it I believe in this notion. This at least is certain, as I have had occasion again and again to remark, that the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration was held by Luther not in conjunction with that of Justification by faith, (as he might have I held any doctrine which belonged to the natural philosophy of his age,) but that he grounded the one on the other. "Believe on the warrant of your Baptism, You are grafted into Christ ; claim your position. You have the Spirit, you are children of God ; do not live as if you belonged to the devil." This was his invariable language, with this he shook the Seven Hills. What, I ask, have those done who have abandoned this lan- guage, and who, while they talk of Luther, would actually de- nounce any one as heretical and papistical who used it ? The children of Protestant families are told that they have no right to call themselves children of God. They grow up in that convic- tion ; in maturer years they carry it to its legitimate consequences. They feel that they have no right to use the Lord's prayer, no 256 SIGNS OF A right to pray at all ; that they have no power near them to keep them from temptation ; that they have no bonds of fellowship with any, except on the grounds of liking and taste. Gradually as their understandings ripen and their feelings decay, they begin to regard Protestantism as a half-way house between Popery and Infidelity ; and whether they shall go back to the one, or on to the other, depends principally upon their circumstances, and upon the predominance of the fancy or of the intellect in their constitu- tion. I speak of the more courageous ; in the majority, dull indif- ference, which is incapable of either resolve, becomes the ruling habit of mind. Thanks be to God, the exceptions to my statement, in all Protestant countries, are innumerable. But I believe it will be found almost universally, that they occur when parents have acted upon the principle which I am maintaining, though in words they have disavowed it ; when they have treated their children as if they possessed all Christian titles and privileges, though they did so in utter disregard of their own theory. That, even in such cases, the contradiction has not been innocuous, I think I can affirm with some confidence. A sense of perplexity, of half sin- cerity, cleaves to the minds of those who most long to keep a clear heart and a free conscience. They do not dare to call themselves by a name which yet they feel they must claim, if they are to serve God or to do any right act. Hence their conduct becomes uncertain, their thoughts are not manly ; and, in place of humility, they cultivate a false shame, in which they are conscious that pride is a large ingredient. There are hundreds of young men who will understand my meaning ; there are others, I mean ministers of the Gospel, to whom I wish that I could make it intelligible. But at all events, those who feel as I do in this matter, will have bitter cause for self-reproach, if they do not protest in season and out of season, against a notion which, if 1 be not greatly mistaken, is doing more than all others to undermine the Christianity of the Protestant nations. 4. The Philosopher. IV. Last come our modern Philosophers. Their notions upon this subject are generally indicated by some such language as the following. " Baptism cannot be the sign of a Universal Society, SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 257 for it excludes Pagans and Mahometans — all but the members of a certain religious sect ; Baptism cannot, in any proper sense, be the sign of a Spiritual Society, for it makes no distinction between the most stupid and the most cultivated, the most brutal and the most humane ; Baptism, by the very terms in which it is performed, implies the acknowledgment of a doctrine which many Christians deny, few think of, and none understand ; Baptism, if wTe may judge from the words or the ceremonies which everywhere accom- pany it, presumes the belief of an evil spiritual agency, a belief belonging only to the darkest ages. Baptism was unquestionably a bond of fellowship in certain periods ; it did mean something to those who lived in them ; but its significance is gone ; it is changed into a worthless symbol which may be allowed to last so long as it does not pretend to be any thing, but which the moment it en- deavours to recover its obsolete importance will be rejected by wise men altogether." To the first of these objections, that Baptism is exclusive, be- cause merely for those wrho profess a faith in Christ, I reply. As against the theologians who look upon Christ merely as the great teacher, this argument has the greatest force : to baptize men into the name of Christ is, if they be right, to receive them into the sect or school of a certain person who appeared in Palestine 1800 years ago. We may prefer him to one who appeared in Arabia about 1200 years ago, but our taste, which increased information may change altogether, is surely no true foundation for a human fellowship. But, be it remembered, this is not the idea of Baptism as it is expressed in any one formulary which is recognised in any part of Christendom. That idea assumes Christ to be the Lord of men ; it assumes that men are created in Him ; that this is the constitution of our race ; that therefore all attempts of men to reduce themselves into separate units are contradictory and abor- tive. Now say, if you please, that this is an utterly false view of things ; say that it does not in the least explain the relations of men to each other and the meaning of their history ; say that there is no spiritual constitution for mankind, or that it cannot be known, or that it is not this. But you cannot say that if it were this, a society founded upon such a principle would be merely one for a party and not for mankind. According to our doctrine we must 17 258 SIGNS OF A say to Jews, Pagans, Turks, There is a fellowship for you as well as for us. We have no right to any spiritual privileges to which you have not as complete, as indefeasible a right. We protest against you, Jews, because you deny this, because you maintain that there is no fellowship for mankind. We protest against you, Pagans, because by giving us different objects of worship, you necessarily divide us according to circumstances, customs, localities. We protest against you, Mahometans, because, by affirming the greatest man to be merely a man, you destroy the communication between our race and its Maker; you suppose that communication to exist, if at all, merely for certain sages, not for every human creature. You set up the idea of absoluteness against the idea of relationship ; whereas each is involved in the other and depends upon the other ; and therefore you make it impossible for the Is- lamite nations to have any feeling of a humanity, to be any thing but slaves. Again, it is said, that our baptismal fellowship is not spiritual, for that it takes no account of the spiritual differences in men. The dullest clod has the same place in it, as the man who sees fur- thest into the meaning and life of things. Here, again, it is neces- sary, that we should recall the objector to the baptismal principle. He may think that we are using a mere phrase, or form of words, when we say that the man or the child is actually adopted into union with a Being above himself, and that the Spirit of Life, of Power, of Wisdom, is given to him. All this may seem to him the merest absurdity. But we do not think it so. And, supposing it were not an absurdity, supposing it were a truth, there would be no pretence for the accusation we are considering. Then we should not only be bearing witness that the greatest distinction of all is that between the man who has an eye for spiritual objects, and the man who sees nothing but the ground at his feet ; we should not only be bearing this witness, but we should actually be taking men into a position in which they might, if they w?ould, overcome their downward tendencies and attain the highest insight. Un- questionably we do not look out for intellectual or moral aptitudes, and expose the children in whom we do not discover them ; we believe that there is an eye in all men which can be opened if the evil Will do not keep it closed j that all peculiar faculties and SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 259 capacities are subordinate to this, and will be best awakened when it is most in exercise. But this doctrine is surely not one to which philosophers of this day can on principle object, however little they may be inclined habitually to act upon it. The third complaint is, that this universal sign is inseparably associated with the belief of an incomprehensible dogma. Now when we were examining the features of the Unitarian creed, we were led to notice, as the most prominent and striking of them, the assertion that the unity of God is a great primary unchange- able truth, upon which all others must rest, and the acknowledg- ment of which must be the foundation of unity among men. This affirmation seemed to us of the highest importance ; we said that no theories or conclusions or dogmas, let them be backed by what authority, or supported by what arguments they might, could destroy its force, or make it nugatory. But we found that this truth of the Divine Unity, this awful, everlasting primary truth, had been turned by the (so called) Unitarians into a mere notion or dogma, a notion or dogma actually deduced from material con- siderations and therefore self-contradictory ; a notion purely negative, which said to Poly t heists, " You ought not to worship many gods" without declaring to them the one God whom they ought to wor- ship ; a notion not leading to the adoration of a Living Being, but to a superstitious reverence for the number one, a notion therefore which never could be the symbol of a human fellowship. If then it be true that this unity is at the root of all union among men, if it be the deep foundation upon which the pillars of the universe rest, one must look not for a rude national announcement of it, but for a gradual discovery of it, through the forms and relations of human society. Such a discovery I have urged is to be found in the Scriptures ; a discovery of which the name revealed to the father of the faithful was the first step ; the words, " Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord," a second ; the name into which we are baptized, the final and perfect step. I do not say that this is a progress from the obscure to the intelligible, from the remote to the near ; far from it : like all science it is an advance from that which may be apprehended by the Senses or the Affections, to that which is deeper and is only within the reach of the Understanding or the Conscience ; then onwards to those amazing abysses which 260 SIGNS OF A the Reason seeks after, in which she delights, wonders, and is lost. If it were not this, it would not be a revelation of God ; but being this, it is, as we believe, not the cold denial and contradiction of all that men have been dreaming of through the different ages of the world, but rather the sweet reconciliation and exquisite harmony of all past thoughts, anticipations, revelations. No Pagan mythol- ogy could exist without the acknowledgment of a Something beneath and behind all their conceptions of the gods, too awful to speak of, almost to think of. Each mythology contained also its Heroes of divine and human race, whom men might admire, and with whom they might sympathize. And this was not enough without the dream of an Inspirer, Life-giver ; not removed from men, not even a mere object to be beheld and adored, but the source of all their deeper thoughts and longings. How dark and sensualized this faith became — how the absolute Being was regard- ed as a dreary fate, the Heroes as the fruit of earthly passions and full of earthly crimes, the Inspirer as the god of folly and drunken- ness— I need not tell ; nor how jarring these forms of belief were in their best estate, how continually seeking for a unity and not finding it. Still, the feelings were really there ; expressed indeed, by poets and sages, but only because it was their gift to utter that which was in the hearts of poor men, that which they were ob- scurely feeling or dimly acting out. Now, if the Name, into which we Europeans have for so many centuries been baptized, be, as wTe believe it is, that which brings all these thoughts at one, sepa- rating them from their hateful and degrading additions, raising them to Heaven, and yet establishing a more direct and intimate connection between them, and all the daily transactions of this earth — are we guilty of fencing men off from our Communion by a strange dogma of which they can know nothing, when we tell them that this Name is to go with them from their cradle to their grave; that the grace, the love, the fellowship of this name are to be with them as charms against all perils, light in all darkness, comfort in all sorrow ; that it is to bind them with that which was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be ; that every homely duty, every act of self-sacrifice, every deed of mercy, will make the vision of it more bright, as that vision will be clouded by every act of sin, every proud thought, every uncharitable feeling ; that SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 261 the more they cleave to this name, the less they will dream of selfish rewards, the more they will long for the day when the sun- light of God's countenance may gladden the whole creation ; that the communion of the Father and the Son in one Spirit, as it has been the ground of all their thoughts and hopes, so will be the consummation of them all, to those who shall wake up in the same likeness, and be satisfied with it ? But Baptism implies the acknowledgment of an evil spiritual agent, and this belief is at war with all civilization and philosophy. 1 am as little disposed to shrink from this charge as from any of the others. Baptism unquestionably has been connected with this doctrine ever since it was practised ; it must, I think, be an un- meaning ceremony to any one by whom this doctrine is denied. This opinion I ground upon the remarks which have just been made respecting the Baptismal Name. Baptism asserts for each man that he is taken into union with a divine Person, and by virtue of that union is emancipated from his evil Nature. But this assertion rests upon another, that there is a society for mankind which is constituted and held together in that person, and that he who enters this society is emancipated from the World — the society which is bound together in the acknowledgment of, and subjection to, the evil selfish tendencies of each man's nature. But, further, it affirms that this unity among men, rests upon a yet more awful and perfect unity, upon that which is expressed in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Lose sight of this last and deepest principle, and both the others perish ; for to believe that there is a Truth, a Unity, a Love, existing under certain forms, and not to believe that there is an absolute Truth, Unity, Love, from which these forms have derived their excellence and their existence, is impossible, and has been always felt to be impossible. But is it not equally impossible to the Reason, has not the Experi- ence of mankind proved it to be impossible, to contemplate the antagonist forms of evil, without ascending to the belief of an evil which has impregnated those forms, and wThich can exist apart from them ? So necessary has this conviction been found, not to a few but to all, that the imagination has been continually framing to itself the horrid notion of an evil, which is not merely the source and spring of all that is evil in the actual condition of things, but 262 SIGNS OF A which is the source of those things themselves, a primary original power, a rival Creator. This Manicheeism, though only at par- ticular seasons it may have been congealed into a system, has been haubting men's minds from the beginning of the world, and is haunting us all still. But whence comes it, and what is the great prop of it ? Surely it is this. We cannot deny the facts of misery and evil which thrust themselves upon our notice. We feel that we must refer them to a cause. But not daring to look steadily at the idea of an evil will, and to contemplate it in the light of a perfectly pure and holy will, we fancy that the powers which are exerted for an evil end are evil, that the things which are turned to an accursed use are themselves accursed. Hence the Oromasdes and Arimanes doctrine ; hence, too, all the superstitious notions which have peopled nature with malignant influences and objects of dread. How are such dark dreams to be dispelled ? Not by setting aside facts ; not by outraging the innermost convictions of mankind ; not by separating men from one another, as you do most effectually, when you teach them that the evil which each is to contend with in himself, and the evil which he sees in his fellow- creatures, or w7hich he notices in the history of the world, have no common derivation. These outrages upon reason and conscience have been perpetrated again and again by so-called philosophers, but what have they effected ? What one dark fear have they removed out of our path ? What new bond of affection have they created between the members of the human family ? The mockery has gone forth ; it has been listened to, admired, adopted ; and in the next age all the old superstitions have returned ; the imagination has revenged itself for the denial of an evil Spirit, by turning all the forms of Society and of Nature into evil. Meantime, this Baptism has been testifying to high and low, to meh of all coun- tries, languages, customs, that they have a common friend and a common enemy ; but that the enemy has been vanquished, has been declared to have no right or property in any human creature, in any one corner of the universe ; that his power is con- ferred by our faithlessness ; that while we are claiming our true position we may despise and defy him ; that it is only by making a lie that we come under the dominion of the father of lies. And yet it testifies as strongly to the fact, the monstrous fact, that men SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 263 may be making lies, may be living in a position the most utterly anomalous and unreasonable ; that nothing but entire dependence upon the righteous and holy Being rescues any one from this posi- tion ; that every one therefore has a devil to fight with, as well as a world and a flesh. Get rid of this contradiction, if you can, by the philosophy of denials. We shall continue, with God's assist- ance, to seek deliverance from it by declaring to men their true state, and by adopting them into it. To what extent the general charge is made out that Baptism is a bygone symbol, may be inferred from the particular arguments upon which it is grounded. If there be nothing which does not be- long to a particular age, nothing permanent, nothing real ; if there be nothing to connect together the portions of mankind which are separated by space and time, then the sign is obsolete because there is nothing to be signified by it. If, on the other hand, all men in all times have sought, and the men of this age above all others are professing to seek, for some common human bonds which were not created to suit a particular period and locality, and which do not change when the notions and theories of that period have proved futile, when the customs of that locality are not applicable, I ask, where is the proof that this sign is not as fresh now as it was 1800 years ago? That men in times of sensuality, of luxury, of religious exclusiveness, of philosophical pretension, become impatient of it, I willingly admit. What better argument do I want than this, that it is a true thing, a witness for that which is spiritual, real, simple, universal ? Thanks be to God, that He has not left eternal truths, which concern all men, to the custody of the wise and prudent of the earth; that He has embodied them in forms which from gene- ration to generation have been witnesses of his love to the humble and the meek, and which all the contradictions of pride and self- will only help to illustrate and interpret. THE ROMISH SYSTEM. I have stated why I look upon Baptism as the first sign of the existence of a Catholic Church or Kingdom of Christ in the world. I have considered the different objections to that view of it. But in the course of these remarks I have alluded to a class of persons who are most earnest in proclaiming the fact that there is such a 264 SIGNS OF A Church, and equally earnest in maintaining that Baptism is the only induction into it. I have intimated that, nevertheless, I differ most widely with these persons, and believe that the dignity of Baptism was asserted against them by the Reformers of the 16th century. I am then, I conceive, bound to consider the doctrine respecting Baptism which is professed by the Romanists, and to give my rea- sons for not adopting it. The common phrase that the Romanist regards Baptism as an opus operatum, is one which may be liable to much perversion. An intelligent defender of the system would protest earnestly against some opinions which might seem, at first hearing, to be im- plied in it. " To suppose," he would say, " from our use of it, that we look upon a baptized person as incapable of falling into sin or losing heaven, would be to contradict monstrously and ridiculously every notion which our doctors have inculcated in their writings or our priests enforced in their practice. The disciples of the Reform- ation complain of us for our vigilance and self-suspicion. It is our strongest conviction that a dereliction of baptismal privileges is at once most possible and most awful." But having guarded himself by this explanation he would, I think, be most ready to admit the phrase as legitimate, and to unfold, in some such words as these, the sense of it. " By baptism," he wTould say, " we receive the benefits of the redemption which Christ wrought out for us. We become new and holy creatures. The work is finished ; wTe have received the highest blessing which God can bestow upon us. Henceforth our business is, by the use of all the means which the Church prescribes, to keep ourselves in this state of purity. We shall not preserve it altogether : we shall be committing frequent venial sins, which, after confession and penance, will, we have a right to hope, be forgiven us. But wTe may, by constantly availing ourselves of the prayers and communion of the Church, preserve ourselves from those mortal sins which wrould utterly rob us of the divine blessing. Should a sin of this kind have been committed, or should there be any fear that it has been committed, wre may still have just such a hope of restoration as is an encouragement to the most unabated earnestness and diligence in seeking for it by the appointed methods." Now it will strike the reader at once, that in certain points this SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 265 explanation corresponds exactly with the one which I have given. First, as to the effect of Baptism. I have contended that Baptism affirms a man to be in a certain state, and affirms the presence of a Spirit with him, who is able and willing to uphold him in that state, and to bring his life into accordance with it. Secondly, as to the sin of men. I have contended that this consists in their volun- tarily refusing the blessings of God's covenant. Thirdly, as to the means by which we are most likely to be kept in the right way ; I should say, as the Romanist does, by abiding in those ordinances, whereby we maintain a communion with our brethren and with God. Where then does the difference between us begin ? I an- swer, at the threshold of these very statements. A man is brought into a certain state. The point is, what state ? I have said, and I know the Romanist would not in words contradict me, into a state of union with Christ. But this state, I have contended, pre- cludes the notion that goodness, purity, holiness, belongs to any creature considered in itself. To be something in himself is man's ambition, man's sin. Baptism is emphatically the renunciation of that pretence. A man does not, therefore, by Baptism, by faith, or by any other process, acquire a new nature, if by nature you mean, as most men do, certain inherent qualities and properties. He does not by Baptism, faith, or any other process, become a new creature, if by these words you mean any thing else than that he is created anew in Christ Jesus, that he is grafted into him, that he becomes the inheritor of his life and not of his own. That, being so grafted, he receives the Spirit of Christ, I of course believe. But I contend, that the operation of this Spirit upon him is to draw him continual- ly out of himself, to teach him to disclaim all independent virtue, to bring him into the knowledge and image of the Father and the Son. Upon these grounds, I have maintained, against our modern Protestants, that the sin of a baptized man consists in acting as if he were not in union with Christ, in setting up his own nature and his own will, and in obeying them. That is to say, his sin consists in doing acts which are self-contradictory, in assuming to be that which he is not and never can be, in denying that he is that which he is and ever must be. What follows ? Surely that faith in this union is a duty, the greatest of all duties^ and that it can never cease to be a duty. A man has no right to believe a lie. Sin leads 266 SIGNS OF A him to do it; sin brings him into a condition of mind in which a lie seems truth to him. It may bring him into a condition of mind in which lying becomes the element of his being, in which truth is absolutely closed from his eyes. The possibility of this sort of mor- tal sin I cannot doubt, either while I meditate upon the awful ten- dencies to atheism, which there are in every one of us, or while I read the Epistle to the Hebrews. But supposing this awful condi- tion had actually taken place in any man, it could not change the fact in the least degree ; it would establish the fact. Is the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews less earnest in his exhortations to faith than the other writers of the New Testament ? Does he less invite men to enter into God's rest ? Does he separate these exhortations and invitations from his warnings respecting the peril of apostasy? or does he not make that peril one of his main arguments why every one of those whom he addressed should claim his privileges as a citizen of the New Jerusalem ? For precisely the same reason, I attempted to show that the Evangelical or modern Protestant notion made repentance impos- sible. If we are not allowed to call ourselves children of God, how can we be told to arise and go to our Father ? If we are not to do this, what does our repentance mean ? It can be nothing but a sinful selfish struggle after the blessings of corn, and wine, and the fatness of the earth, which we think we have lost ; not an humble confession that we have made light of our birthright, and are no more worthy to be called sons. The repentance of the world may be produced by the desire or effort to obtain an assurance that we are members of God's redeemed family ; the repentance which leadeth to life must be the confession of the unbelief, ingratitude, hardness of heart, which have led us to slight a love which has been bestowed freely, and which has never ceased to watch over us and to struggle with us. Now the doctrine of the opus operation leads, I think, by a more circuitous, but also by a more certain, route to those practical re- sults which seem to me to make our Protestant systems so danger- ous and objectionable. When it is said that a baptized man loses his baptismal state, it is inevitably implied tflat this state was one of independent holiness and purity. We do not, as I have again and again urged, cease to SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 267 be children because we are disobedient children. If, therefore, Baptism were looked upon as the adoption into the state of chil- dren, and if its virtue were believed to consist in this, the notion we are considering would be impossible. But, it is supposed that the man acquires something for himself in the instant of Baptism, that he is endowed with heavenly virtues, that he is in himself, separately considered, a new creature. By this opinion the Roman- ist supposes -that he exalts Baptism. He seems to me utterly to degrade it and rob it of its meaning. He turns a sacrament into an event. He supposes the redemption of Christ to be exhausted by a certain gift, while the Bible represents it as bringing men into an eternal and indissoluble fellowship. He thinks that he promotes a safer, holier, more watchful feeling. It seems to me, that just so far as this opinion becomes the governing one of our lives, it undermines holiness, watchfulness, safety. For it turns the whole of life into a struggle for the recovery of a lost good. If this struggle is pursued honestly, there is no holiness in it, for it is purely selfish, it does not, cannot, be prompted by love. But in most men there arises a cruel sense of contradiction. They are commanded to repent ; they feel that they cannot repent, for their consciences tell them that lamentation for the consequences of sin, present or expected, is not repentance ; hence a craving for indul- gences, a habit of unbelief, a despair of holiness. AVhich of these conditions of feeling is a safe one for a human creature to be in ? But the Romanist thinks that at all events he is honouring the Church by this notion. To me it seems that he is destroying the very idea of the Church — denying its necessity. For he makes it appear that the blessing of Baptism is not this, that it receives men into the holy Communion of Saints, but that it bestows upon them certain individual blessings, endows them with a certain individual holiness. How then is self-renunciation and fellowship as members of the same body possible ? And if these are impos- sible, what is the Church ? * It will be admitted, I hope, that I have not imputed to Roman- ists any thing which is merely an excess or exaggeration of their creed upon this great subject. There is a system of which this doc- trine forms an integral part. But do I therefore mean to affirm either that this doctrine is only to be found in Romanist writers, or that 268 SIGNS OF A the one I have defended is not to be found in them ? I believe that if I brought forward any such propositions I should be easily confuted. On the one hand it might be proved, by extracts from the Fathers, that the doctrine of an opus operatum did mingle itself in their minds with that of our being grafted into Christ ; on the other by extracts from Anselm, from Hugo de St. Victore, from Bernard, from Aquinas, nay from eminent Romanists of the present day, that the very idea which I have endeavoured to Express has been unfolded by them, only with infinitely more eloquence and unction. All this I believe most fully. So far from washing to hin- der the theological student from making such observations, I would do my best to force them upon his attention. I wrould labour to convince him, that whenever any great spiritual principle has been strongly revealed to men, a material counterfeit of that principle has always appeared also; that they have dwelt together in the minds of the best and wisest men ; that if we seek for the one we must turn to their devotional exercises, to the occasions when they were most cultivating fellowship with God and most forgetting themselves ; to those parts of their writings therefore which their disciples often study the least ; that if we seek for the others we shall find them in elaborate controversial treatises, those which supply the best materials for theorems, the most ready formulas, the most convenient weapons of argument and ridicule against op- ponents : that the first remain for the delight and consolation of humble Christian people in all ages; that the last gradually shape themselves more and more into a definite system ; that they are supposed to be bone of each other's bone, and flesh of each other's flesh, till some great crisis arrives, in which it pleases God to de- monstrate the difference of the causes by the difference of the ef- fects, to show that one had proceeded from Him and the other from the devil. Let the reader then not be dismayed if he find the very highest authorities alleged in support of the doctrine of an opus operatum ; let him not be surprised to find it in any age or in any part of the Church, (especially in any which had greatly under- valued sacraments,) reappearing and asserting its claim to be iden- tical with the Scriptural and Catholic idea of it. Let him not be terrified by being told, when he attempts to discriminate between them that he is setting up his own judgment against the opinion of SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 269 doctors and the testimony of antiquity. Let him say boldly, I am doing no such thing. I am simply determining that I will not be- lieve the doctors against themselves; that I will not suffer myself to be cheated of a transcendent truth which they have taught me, a truth which was evidently dear to their inmost hearts, a truth which they felt was derived from the teaching of Christ himself, and bound them to the Apostles and Martyrs of all times, a truth which they acknowledged was contrary to all their carnal apprehensions, and was only preserved to them by the continual teachings of God's Spirit; because they have elsewhere, while arguing with adver- saries, while attempting to make a principle tell upon the hopes or fears of men who were incapable of entering into its true meaning, while drawing conclusions from Scripture by their private judg- ments, while apologizing for some fungus which the maxims of their age had confounded with the tree upon which it grew, pro- duced a plausible explanation of this truth, an explanation forgot- ten in every moment of higher inspiration, and proving itself the less divine the more it is tried by its fruits. It is easy to accuse those of wanting humility who have courage to act upon this deter- mination. I believe that the proud system-seeking, system-loving intellect within us, disposes us to embrace the doctrine of the opus operatum ; that the humble and contrite heart craves for a deeper principle, and, finding it, is obliged to part with the other for the sake of it. SECTION II. THE CREEDS. In the last section I defended my view of Baptism as the sign of admission into a Spiritual and Universal Kingdom, grounded upon our Lord's incarnation, and ultimately resting upon the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, against the different Quaker, Protestant, Philosophical, and Romanist theories, which are current respecting it. But I have very much failed of my pur- pose, if I have not led the reader to observe that Baptism, according to this idea of it, is also the justification of many of those Quaker, 18 270 SIGNS OF A Protestant, Philosophical principles, which were considered in the first part — one step towards the satisfaction of that great idea of a Church, one, indivisible and imperishable, to which the Romanist clings writh such honourable tenacity. That man is a creature prone to sense, rising above it by virtue of a union with an invisible teacher, is the doctrine of Quakerism. Baptism embodies that doctrine, and converts it, as Fox wished that it should be converted, from a mere doctrine into a living fact. The only foundation, says the Calvinist, for faithful action and for sound hope, is the belief that we are God's elect children. Bap- tism offers to men that foundation ; it tells them that they are chosen of God, and precious. It makes this foundation what Calvin and all earnest Calvinists have felt that it ought to be, not de- pendent upon our feelings, apprehensions, and discoveries, but on the will and word of God. At the same time the distinction which it draws between the new and the old man, the man in Christ who alone can be raised and glorified, and the old man which is to be utterly abolished, is a far finer, clearer, more practical distinction than any which the exclusive Calvinist has been able to reach. It denounces the unclean living into which the believer in an absolute separate election for him is in such danger of falling, as absolutely in- compatible with the knowledge and enjoyment of God which is eter- nal life ; and yet it does not treat any living man as lying beyond the pale of God's covenant. Philosophers say that man can only be that or do that which is according to his constitution ; he cannot be made by some miraculous process something else than he is; or, if he can, that power must be an injurious one. Baptism de- clares man's true and right constitution to be that of union wTith God, and separation from Him to be a violation of that only order according to which, as reason and experience alike show, he can live. It is a fact that men are living anomalously ; it is their own testimony that in doing so they are following their natures. Bap- tism declares that those who will are taken out of that inconsistent condition to which they are prone, and are taken into a reasonable condition, in which they may live so long as they remember the covenant of God. Finally, Romanism demands that by some di- rect, visible, permanent token, which all may acknowledge, it shall be felt that God has established the true, divine, Catholic body SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 271 upon earth ; that it is the same from age to age ; that the mem- bers are brought under a condition of divine and spiritual disci- pline, are invested with mighty privileges, are laid under mighty responsibilities, are trained for a high and glorious condition. Of this demand, Baptism is the accomplishment, in a larger, fuller sense, than the Romanist will at all admit. By this sign we claim him, and hundreds of thousands in the East and West, whom he has anathematized to be members of the Church and body of Christ ; by this sign we protest against him and them, when by any acts or any theories they degrade the spirituality, or narrow the universality, of that fellowship into which they have been ad- mitted, and so (as far as in them lies) make void the covenant and the purpose of God. I wish now to consider whether there be any other notorious facts which can only be explained on the same principle as this of the existence of Baptism ; facts appearing on the face of them to import that there is a spiritual and universal constitution of society for mankind ; facts denied to have that significance by a number of warring parties; facts which establish their claim to be what they seem to be, by the help which they afford us in justifying and realizing the leading principles of each of these parties, and in reconciling them with each other. The first which presents itself is this : There is actually found at this present day, in every Christian country, a certain document called a Creed. It is not necessary to inquire minutely at what time it was formed. Let it be admitted that there is an obscurity over its origin ; that we cannot say who put it into that shape in which we now see it. From whatever quarter it may have come, here it is. It has lasted through a great many storms and revolutions. The Roman empire has passed away ; modern European society has risen out of its ruins. Political sys- tems have been established and overthrown ; religious systems have been established and overthrown. Even the physical world has undergone mighty alterations, and our conception of its laws is altogether changed. The very languages which were spoken in all parts of the world when the Gospel was first preached, have given place to others ; but this, "I believe," remains. It is precisely what it was, to say the very least, twelve hundred years ago. 272 SIGNS OF A During that time it has not been lying hid in the closet of some antiquarian. It has been repeated by the peasants and children of the different lands into which it has come. It has been given to them as a record of facts with which they had as much to do as any noble. In most parts of Europe it has been repeated publicly every day in the year ; and though it has been thus hawked about, and, as men would say, vulgarized, the most earnest and thought- ful men in different countries, different periods, different stages of civilization, have felt that it connected itself with the most per- manent part of their being, that it had to do with each of them personally, and that it was the symbol of that humanity which they shared with their brethren. Reformers who have been en- gaged in conflict with all the prevailing systems of their age, have gone back to this old form of words, and have said they lived to reassert the truths which it embodied. Men on sick beds, martyrs at the stake, have said that because they held it fast, they could look death in the face. And, to sink much lower, yet to say what may strike many as far more wronderful, there are many in this day, who, having asked the different philosophers of their own and of past times what they could do in helping them to understand the world, to fight against its evils, to love their fellow men, are ready to declare that in this child's creed they have found the se- cret which these philosophers could not give them, and w hich, by God's grace, they shall not take away from them. Now a man who has noticed these facts, and has settled it in his mind that, whatever they mean, they must mean something, would certainly wish to inquire into the nature of this document which has been diffused so widely, has lasted so long, and has seemed to so many different persons of much value. He will find, I think, that it differs from all the digests of doctrines, whether religious or phi- losophical, which he has ever seen. A man is speaking in it. The form of it is, I believe. That wThich is believed in is not a certain scheme of divinity, but a name — a Father, who has made the heaven and the earth : his Son, our Lord, who has been con- ceived, born, and died, and been buried, and gone down into hell, who has ascended, and is at the right hand of God, who will come to judge the world : a Holy Spirit who has establish! d a holy uni- versal Church, who makes men a communion of saints, who is the SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 273 witness and power whereby they receive forgiveness of sin, who shall quicken their mortal bodies, who enables them to receive everlast- ing life. The Creed is evidently an act of allegiance or affiance ; and since it has ever been connected with Baptism, one must sup- pose that from Baptism it derives its interpretation. If by that act we are acknowledged as spiritual creatures, united to a spirit- ual Being, by this act we claim our spiritual position, we assert our union with that Being. The name into which we are adopted there, is the name we confess here. Those acts which, having been done for all mankind, were the warrant for our particular admission into the covenant, are the acts which we here proclaim to be the warrant of our faith and our fellowship. So far the form is consist- ent with its apparent object. But is it also consistent with the idea of Christ's kingdom which the Bible developes to us ? There we found the primary postulate of such a kingdom to be a condescen- sion of God to man, a cognizance taken of the creature by the Creator ; the second, an apprehension of God by men, a recogni- tion of the Creator by the creature. By grace are ye saved ; by faith are ye saved. The position is freely given ; a position of union and fellowship with another, a position of self-renunciation : the power is given wherewith to claim it ; then comes the claim itself. Such seems to be the testimony of Scripture : and the re- lation in which the Creed stands to Baptism, and their common re- lation to that name and that kingdom which Scripture is reveal- ing, surely expounds, in a remarkable way, that testimony. But there is another creed possessing apparently equal authority with the one of which 1 have spoken, adopted perhaps into earlier use in the Eastern part of Christendom, and recognised by the Western ever since the age of Constantine. If it should be found that these two creeds clash with each other, or that they are not constructed upon the same principle, or that they do not both con- nect themselves with the idea of which we have spoken, the evi- dence from the preservation of either would certainly be weakened. Or if, these differences not appearing, it should seem that one could be conveniently substituted for the other, that there is nothing dis- tinct and peculiar in each, one might be puzzled to account for the . existence of both, at least as universal symbols. To see whether any of these objections apply, I would urge the reader to a 274 SIGNS OF A thoughtful comparison of the two documents. First I would ask him whether in reading that which we call the Apostles' Creed, considering it as a declaration of the name into which he is baptiz- ed, he do not feel that it is meant to proclaim the distinct person- ality of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, as signified by certain relations in which they have been manifested to men? Then whether another question do not arise in his mind, which he may perceive from history has arisen also in other men's minds : — Is there not a more mysterious and awful relation implied and prefig- ured in these ? Does not the name express such a relation ? Is not the knowledge of this, as the ground of those relations, part of the revelation which has been vouchsafed to us ; one of the deep things which cannot indeed be understood, (for who under- stands the mystery of his own ordinary human relations ?) but which lies so immediately beneath those facts which most concern us all, is so needful as the interpretation and reconciliation of those facts, has been so eagerly felt after in all ages, that if it be not disclosed to the heart and reason of man, they will be tormented with such dreams and imaginations concerning it, as must make the acknowledgment of the Divine Unity impossible ? Now the JVicene Creed agrees with the Apostles' altogether in its form and principle. It is still 1 believe; it is still belief in a name, and not in notions. It differs in this, that it unites with a declaration of the divine relations to men, a declaration of the re- lations in the Godhead. To every peasant and child it speaks of this marvellous subject. Certainly a strange fact, doubly strange when one knows how much it has been the tendency of teachers and priests in all ages to believe that only a few initiated persons are fit to know any thing which concerns the name and nature of God; and how much this tendency did actually mingle itself with the awe and rev- erence of those ages by which these creeds have been transmitted to us. That the doctors of the Church should have allowed the Aposles' Creed to be heard in every cottage is strange ; that they should not have said that this deeper creed, though embodying the , principles and date of the other, was only for theologians, is scarcely credible ; yet so it was. Now if it were the purpose of God that his name should be revealed to men ; if his name, which SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 275 seems to most of us to be connected with the highest and most esoterical abstractions, be really the only ground of a universal so- ciety, we can interpret these facts. What other explanations have been found for them, I wish now to consider. Objections. — The Quaker. To the Quaker it seems quite evident that the invention of creeds is one manifest symptom of the working of that mystery of iniquity which has been always arising to counterfeit and to destroy the kingdom of Christ. The faith which a Christian man exercises in the Divine Invisible Teacher is entirely of an inward spiritual kind. Here it is thrown outward, turned into propositions, made the lan- guage of a whole body or congregation, reduced into a nullity. One side of this objection I considered when I was speaking of the differences between the Quaker and the Lutheran. It is pre- cisely the objection to the acknowledgment of the manifested Word, and arises from a desire, more or less consciously entertain- ed, to divorce the idea of a spiritual object from that of an actual person. There is, however, mixed with this radical dislike, a feeling of a most different kind — a feeling that mere conceptions, opinions, no- tions, are most inadequate to the wants of a spiritual being, mere pictures and poor pictures of that which is real. To this doctrine I assent most heartily ; there is none which I have been so anxious to maintain throughout this book. The problem how we may be delivered from opinions and notions, how we may rise out of them into another region, is the very one which I am investigating. The History of Quakerism I have found most helpful to me in the inquiry— at least in a negative way; for it shows us, I think, that there is no such certain and direct road into mere notionality, as that of rejecting all common and united forms of utterance. The apprehensions and conceits of each man's mind, being those which he regards as alone sacred, become his tyrants ; and so far as he is able to give expression to those apprehensions and conceits, they become the tyrants over the minds of others. In no society are there so many traditional phrases which have had a meaning once and have lost it, or are rapidly losing it, as in the Quaker so- ciety ; in no society is there greater bondage to these phrases, a 276 SIGNS OF A greater dread of exchanging them for any equivalents. And, therefore, without pressing the point again, that by this means all universality is lost, that a body which professed to be for mankind became in a very few years the narrowest and most peculiar of sects, 1 maintain that the experiment of dispensing with a confes- sion as a means of promoting spirituality has been made, and has failed utterly. Once more I claim our strongest opponents as wit- nesses in our favour. By the character of their arguments, and by the results of their practice, they have increased the probability that if there is to be a kingdom of Christ on earth, a cret'd, which should present a living object as revealed in living acts to the faith of all men, would be one of the divinely- appointed means of its preservation. Modern Protestant Objections. But the moment we use the phrase, divinely -appointed means, the modern Protestant, or Evangelical, steps in, and demands how we dare to claim such a dignity as this for a mere human composi- tion, a mere ecclesiastical tradition ? The Bible is the divine document; it is a gross intrusion upon the rights of the Bible to assert that character for any other. I would beseech the person who proposes this objection, to ask himself whether he seriously believes that the Bible is the only document, the only thing — which has been preserved to men by divine care and providence ? If he will say boldly, " I do think this," all debate is at an end. We are reasoning with a person who is separated by the very narrowest plank from absolute Atheism ; a plank so narrow and so fragile, that in a very short time, it will be broken down. For that he should believe this, and yet con- tinue for any length of time to acknowledge a book which is cha- racterized by nothing so much as its strong assertion, that whatever men possess they are to attribute to God's care and providence, is impossible. But supposing he disclaims, as he no doubt will, very indignantly, any such wicked hypothesis, I would beg him next calmly to consider what assertion of mine it is which offends him. Have I said that the creed is a substitute for the Bible ? Have I urged that the creed is necessary, because it supplies information which the Bible does not supply ? Have I said that the creed cor- • SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 277 rects or qualifies any thing which the Bible asserts 1 I have main- tained none of these propositions. 1 have said, " I find a document which has lasted for eighteen centuries. It is a document which explains to me the meaning and purpose of the Bible, which shows me that it has done what it proposed to do. As a declara- tion of the . name of God, it proclaims that that which the Bible undertakes to reveal, has been revealed ; as an act of faith on the part of men, it proclaims that that faiih by which the Bible af- firms we are saved, can be exercised." Is the doubt, then, why the creed, seeing that it only affirms the principles and facts of the Bible, should be necessary to those who already possess the Bible ? The history of Protestantism gives the answer. The Bible, in the hands of its orthodox teachers, was reduced into a set of dry propositions, about the limitations of which they were perpetually fighting. The Bible, in the hands of its Unitarian and Rationalistic teachers, was reduced into a set of dreary truisms, not worthy to be fought about. You talk about the Bible, and the Bible only; but when you are brought to the proof, you give us, in place of it, dry husks of logic or pompous inanities, dignified with the name of simple truths. We want the Bible as it is, in its life and reality ; and experience shows that we shall not have it, if we have not some witness of the principles which it embodies. Again, the doctrine that faith justifies is, as Protestants affirm, the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesice. So said Luther, and looked to the creed as the great witness of what he said— as that " confession of the mouth unto salvation," in which " the heart's belief unto righteousness" is expressed and fulfilled. Such lan- guage seems to the modern Protestant dry, cold, and carnal ; what is the warm, juicy, and spiritual language, which he has substituted for it? History replies, endless controversies about the nature, mode, effect, signs, attributes, qualifications of a living or dead faith ; controversies in which nothing is forgotten, save the object of the faith and the person who exercises it ; controversies which fill the hearts of humble Christians with bewilderment and des- pair ; controversies in which the exercised dialectician detects on each side great acuteness, admirable ingenuity, but regrets that in both the favourite argumentative figure should be the petilio prin- 278 SIGNS OF A cipii. Am I then wrong in claiming the pure Protestant as a witness that this Catholic creed is an essential sign of the kingdom of Christ ? Rationalistic Objections. The rationalist denies that the creed can be a permanent sym- bol of human fellowship, because it rests upon the acknowledg- ment of certain events. " Now, assuredly," he says, " these events could not have met with so much credence, if they had not pointed to certain great principles or ideas which are characteristic of us as members of a race. They do point most clearly to the sense which there is in all men of a something divine ; to the possibility that this should overcome evil, sorrow, and death ; to the feel- ing that it must submit to sorrow and death as a way to that victory. This, which is the essence of the creed, is no doubt uni- versal ; it may be traced in heathen and Jewish records ; it has survived all the fables with which, in both, it is encompassed. There is therefore every probability that it will survive what are called the facts of Christianity likewise. And this is more likely, because every day the documents in which those facts are record- ed, are subjected to a more sifting analysis, and because every day the evidence in the former seems to be less decisive." In the former part of this book I have considered the general meaning and effect of this argument. 1 have endeavored to show how true the assertion is upon which it is grounded, that the belief of a divine humanity has existed in all ages — that it has taken innumer- able forms. I have maintained that all these forms have presumed the existence of some more perfect form ; that they never have com- passed the end at which they aimed ; that they have not revealed The Man, the head of the race, while nevertheless they have tes- tified, one and all, with more or less distinctness in proportion as the light which they endeavored to concentrate was more or less clear, that such a one there must be. When a great man assumed to be this, he became a tyrant and oppressor, in our Lord's words, a thief and a robber — not the asserter of humanity, but the denier of it. You do not therefore advance one step in weakening the authority of this creed, by producing instances of this worship from ancient or modern history, or by dwelling upon the tendency SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 279 which they so manifestly indicate. The more you can produce of them the better ; the more they are examined the better. They prove that there is such an idea in humanity as you speak of ; they prove just as strongly, that, with the idea, humanity can never be satisfied ; they declare that the idea is the idea of an actual living Being, of a perfect Being ; of one who should prove his per- fectness by entering entirely into the lowest condition into which man has ever entered, and actually rising into the highest of which man has ever dreamed. If these two elements of the lowest hu- miliation, of the greatest exaltation, be not combined — if they are not combined in acts — the idea is not fulfilled, it waits to be ful- filled ; that is to say, we wait for a person who shall do precisely those acts of which the creed speaks. Any others will not avail ; any others will not be universal enough, will not be the testimonies that He who performs them is the Man. We are asked then for the evidences of the creed. Our answer is ; This — You have shown why it has been believed, what need there was in the deep- est heart of mankind, that it should be believed. It was believed, not upon the evidence of documents, but upon the simple procla- mation of men who had the whole universe against them. They said to men, Christ must be ; Christ you have been asking for in every land, through every age : Jesus the crucified is the Christ. The answers were three : The first was, — There are a thousand Christs ; every kingdom and district has its own. It would have been satisfactory if men had not listened to that other proclama- tion ; " You are members of one body, and therefore you need one Head." But they did listen to it ; they felt it to be true ; therefore the thousand could not prevail against the one. No wonder this answer should be revived now ; no wonder that when the sense of being one body has so practically forsaken us, the principle which is its counterpart should be so readily abandoned. But I hope I have shown that there never was so strong a cry for a universal and united fellowship as in this day of division ; a cry proceeding from so many opposite corners of the earth, from so many different kinds of men. This reply, then, if it failed once, will not prevail now. The second answer was, — " There is an ideal Christ under these different Christs ; and it is this, not them, you are to wor- ship." The people admitted the doctrine of the philosopher, 280 SIGNS OF A but they said, " This is the ideal Christ, and here he is manifested to us." That this argument should be repeated in a day when ab- stract notions have been so much substituted for living truths, can- not be surprising. Yet we have seen, I think, that there was never more impatience of these abstractions, or a more vehement de- mand for realities, embodied realities, than at this very time. If then there be an idea of a universal Prince in men's minds, they will either continue to believe that this idea has been realized in Jesus of Nazareth, or they will seek a realization of it in some other person. And thus we arrive at the third answer which was made to the proclamation of the Creed in the first ages, and which has been made so often since ; " This crucified man is not the per- fect Being we look for; we want a warrior, a philosopher, a poet, possessing qualities altogether different from those which are brought out in the Gospel narrative, though we may acknowledge that these too have a certain value of their own." Such has for twelve centuries been the belief of a large portion of the w^orld which was once Christian. Another portion of it has declared that they see in the Cross the symbol of love triumphing through suffering, in the Crescent only of power claiming dominion over weakness ; that the first is a bond of mutual fellowship among the members of a suffering race ; the other the pledge of a univer- sal slavery. That the spirit of the Cross prevails very little in the nations which still profess to honor it ; that self-sacrifice is very generally and very systematically denied to be the law of our be- ing, most of us are ready with shame to confess. And therefore the expectation is surely very reasonable, that the experiment which was so successful in the nations of the East, will be made, under other conditions, in the West. We have had many prepar- atory Antichrists, many sovereigns reigning by the strength of mind and will, and scorning all other right — why should we doubt that this image will be yet more completely manifested ? May God preserve those who live in the day when it is mani- fested to the world, and when the world goes wandering after it ! In that day when intellect and w ill shall be utterly crushed under the car of the idol which they have set up ; in that day when the poor man shall cry, and there shall be no helper, may God teach his saints to proclaim these words to the sons of men : He was born SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 281 of the Virgin ; He suffered under Pontiles Pi/ate ; He was cruci- fied, dead, and buried, and went down into hell ; He rose again cn th>> third day ; He ascended on high ; He sitteth on the right hand of God ; He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. May they be enabled to say, This is our God ; we have waited for Him. The Romish System. Any one who maintains the creed to be an heirloom of the Church, which has been preserved to men by the providence of God, and which each generation of her members is bound to watch over, as an essential sign and necessary safeguard of her existence, may be said to acknowledge the authority and value of a Tradi- tion. He must be, I should think, a rather feeble and cowaidly thinker, who is afraid of the name after he has recognised the thing ; the creed he believes has been handed down, and that which has been handed down is a tradition. But the Romanist is the ureat apologist for tradition : how in principle can one who attaches this kind of value to the Creed differ from the Romanist? It is not necessary to inquire to what extent any given Roman- ist would approve of language like the following : That Scrip- ture is not of itself suffcint to make known all the system which the Church requires ; that the notions, opinions, and explanations of the doctors of the Church, partly elucidatory of Scripture, partly as supplying that which is deficient, and was meant to be deficient in it, are authoritative and necessary ; that these, together with Scrip- ture, constitute the ecclesiastical doctrine — 1 say I shall not inquire whether any particular Romanist writer may have objected to this statement ; it will be allowed, I think, that so far as he did, so far he was rejecting, not certain excesses or exaggerations of th*. Romanist theory, but a characterestic and integral portion of it. 1 think if this statement be compared with the view which I have taken of the Creed, it will be seen that they are not exactly the same. It will be admitted that there are points of difference; that at all events I do not choose to use the phrases which Roman- ists use. But is the difference one of terms only, or is it a vital one, indicating an entirely different conception of the purposes for which this document, and the other documenls bequeathed to us by antiquity, exist ? I shall reply to this question by translating 282 SIGNS OF A my words, " The creed is the sign of a spiritual and universal so- ciety," into others which I believe to be equivalent — " The creed is the document which has served as a protection to the meaning of the Scriptures against the tendency which the Church doctors in different ages have exhibited to disturb and mangle them. The creed has served as a protection to the humbler members of the Church against the inclination which the Church doctors of differ- ent ages have manifested to rob them of their inheritance, and to appropriate it to themselves." These propositions I have already illustrated, in reference to the doctors of reformed bodies; I have maintained that the Bible, left to their mercies, would have been utterly deprived of its signifi- cance ; and that had we been left to their mercies, we should have been fed with stones rather than with bread. In making these re- marks, I speak only of an inclination, at times a most pre- dominating inclination, which has been discernible in these teachers. I do not mean that there have not been many coun- teracting influences at work both in their own minds and in the minds of those whom they addressed. I have asserted again and again that there have been and are such influences ; and that the more we consider the meaning and object of the Reformation, the more we shall discover of them. But I do assert that it is such an inclination as has needed a most strong and divine power to re- sist it ; and that power which delights to work by humble instru- ments, has, I believe, been exerted in a great measure through this child's creed. 1 will now endeavor to show in what sense and under what limitations I conceive similar remarks are applicable to those early teachers whom the Romanists and we both profess to honor, as well as to the pontifical writers, whom he reverences, and whom we, I trust, do not despise. It was the great glory of the greatest philosopher of antiquity to affirm, What man wants is a knowledge of that which is ; he cannot be content with opinions and notions about that which may be. His being will not rest upon this. Society will not rest upon it. The ground of both must be a reality, an invisible spiritual reality — not any scheme or theory about this matter or that. The first Fathers of the Church had the strongest sympathy with this philosopher, precisely because he affirmed this. They felt that he SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 283 was asking for the very thing which a revelation, if it were a rev- elation, ought to give. They felt we have a revelation not of certain notions and dogmas about certain things, but a revelation of God himself. When I say they felt this, I mean that it was the deep- est, strongest conviction of their minds, the one which their admi- rers have always acknowledged to constitute the great charm of their writings. To know God is eternal life. The Church is that society which rests upon the Name and Unity of God, and through which they are made known to man. I ask any lover of the Fathers, whether he will not fix upon these as the two great principles which by their words and their lives they are illustrating ? Now surely, if this be so, the theology of the Fathers must be most precious. They worked their way through infinite confusions into the heaven of these truths : God is — He is one — and his unity is not a dead material notion, but a unity of life and love, the foun- dation of all unity among men. If we have no sympathy with them — with those who first saw the light and rejoiced in it — above all, if we dare to mock them, surely we must expect that it will become every hour less clear to us and to our children. And what if these Fathers, having the idea of God ever before them, rather merged those of man and of nature in it, than perceived that each must be distinct, in order that each may preserve its proper relation to the other ; may not this very fault of theirs be only an addition- al help to us, if we will use it humbly and faithfully ? Their works are given to students j to them expressly and exclusively. They are committed, then, to men who have a peculiar vocation, a pecu- liar responsibility ; who need nothing so much as to be taught how prone we all are to worship idols of the cave and idols of the forum ; to set up the notions which are fashioned by our own peculiar tem- peraments, or which are popular in our age, in place of great princi- ples, whereof they are the false likenesses ; to be taught this in order that they may perceive the glory of that which is free and universal, and be delivered from the preference which our devil-infected nature conceives for that which is esoterical and self-exalting. This lesson, if it be received at all, must be received from the examples of good men, not of bad; of those whose light makes the darkness visible, not of those in whom all is dark. Why, then, should we deem the Fathers less valuable because they are capable of imparting it ? 284 SIGNS OF A Alas ! students did not make this use of the Fathers ; but just that use which they could not have made if they had ever heartily admired that which was most precious in them, or had not lost the admiration of it through the vanity of possessing something in which other men did not share. They set up notions, opinions, theories of those saints who had declared that men are thirsting, not for theories, or notions, or opinions, but for the living God, and that they must have that thirst satisfied, or perish. Of course, then, the Bible became to the Patristic, as it did to the Protestant student, a mere congeries of notions ; of course he also proclaimed, that to ascertain what these notions are was the great problem of human life, the necessary step to the attainment of everlasting salvation. But this necessary step could not be taken by men generally ; they could not find out the true notions. The Fathers must help them. They must interpret the Bible, and supply its deficiencies. Still we are at fault. The Fathers are as unattainable as the Bible. What each of them affirmed, what they agreed in affirming, could be as little ascertained, as what each of the writers of the Bible affirmed, or what they agreed in affirming. There must then be an authority capable of pronouncing on this point — a living authority. Where was it ? Was it the whole Church of any given age, or some particular member of it ? The first doctrine was plausible, but impracticable ; the last, therefore, was adopted. To find the com- mission was not difficult where the necessity for it was clear. A man was enthroned as the dogmatist of Christendom ; he was ap- pointed to say, and could say, what men ought to think. Thus was another stone added— not, perhaps, the key-stone — to the Romish system. But the system was not all that existed in the ages which gave it birth, and brought it to maturity. There was another element at work. Men still repeated their Paternosters and Credos; eminent men felt M Here lies the deepest wisdom; no decrees and dogmas can reach the sense of the Scriptures, the sense of the Fathers, like this infantine lore" And so through the very heart of school divinity there ran a stream of simple faith, a silent acknowledgment that the truth had been revealed, and that the infinite complications of our minds, the various forms under w hich we are capable of beholding it, need not hinder us from knowing it and loving it. By degrees this faith became more and more SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 285 obscured ; opinion became all in all ; then corruptions and infidelity grew and flourished by the side of increasing superstition and sla- very. Still here were holy and brave men, even in the later schools, who sought for a truth beyond opinions. The mystical writers spoke of beholding God, and dwelling in God. Ficinus and the Platonists, at the revival of letters, declared that there was a method of seeking the substantial and the real. But the " I be- lieve" changed the glorious hope of the one, the philosophical idea of the other, into a fact for men. Then it became necessary for Pope Pius IV. to do that openly, which had so long been clone covertly — to set antiquity at defiance, and to invent a creed of his own. Thanks be to God, he could not do this work effectually ! In the nations which acknowledge his infallibility, not his creed, but the Apostles' is still repeated by mothers and nurses to their infants, still lisped by them in their own language, still taught them by their priests. The words, surely, are not always dead sounds; at all events they may start, some day, into life. Protestants may discover that there is in them the very heart of that Reformation doctrine which the systems of Protestantism have been setting at nought ; the Churches which seek for a centre of unity by crouch- ing to Rome, may find in them, at once, the bond of their fellow- ship, and the charter of their liberation ; the Greeks may wake up to the conviction, that centuries of alienation have been unable to deprive them and the West of these common symbols, it cannot be God's will that they should be divided. What a day will that be for the Catholic Church ! what a day for the Romish system ! SECTION III. FORMS OF WORSHIP. Every traveller is ready to testify how different the modes of worship are in the countries where he has visited. They vary, he says, with every degree of latitude. Within the same district he notices a persistency in certain practices and in the acknowledg- ment of the traditions which have given rise to them. Nevertheless the effects of Time may, he remarks, be traced almost as visibly as 19 286 SIGNS OF A those of Locality. If through an invasion, or by any other fortu- nate accident, the habits of a more cultivated people are brought to bear upon an inferior one, the old customs acquire a more rea- sonable character ; by and by, if the cultivation spread, and a par- ticular class do not acquire the power of narrowing it to a certain point, a skepticism respecting old traditions becomes general. On the other hand, if a people be left to itself, without any of these influences, their minds become daily grosser, and the old supersti- tions lose all traces of the meaning and worth which they might have once possessed. These remarks, which must be familiar to every modern reader, are undoubtedly derived from a true observation. Nor is their ap- plication at all limited to Pagan or Mahometan countries. I believe that where Christianity is found, the influence of locality and of periods is far more noticeable than elsewhere. There is a more strongly marked nationality in the different countries of modern Europe than in all the rest of the world at any moment of its existence; and that one century differs more from another in them than in the East, is a truism which it is almost foolish to utter. It is equally certain (as liberal writers so continually assure us) that the effect of this nationality and these changes in society upon reli- gious opinion is most striking, and that there is no parallel to it in China or Hindostan. But if it be so, is it not remarkable that certain forms of wor- ship, actually of worship, have subsisted through all the revolutions to which Christendom has been subjected ; have defied the re- straints of national customs and languages ; have stood their ground against all the varieties of opinion in reference to subjects human and divine ? Is it not a strange thing, to take an example, that we in Eng- land in this nineteenth century should be using forms of prayer which were written by Greeks in the third and fourth ? nay, that the whole conception of our liturgy from beginning to end ; the assignment of particular services to particular seasons of the year ; the use of Psalms ; the ascriptions ; the acts of confession, thanks- giving, adoration, should have been taught us by nations from which, by taste, by feelings, by political institutions, by the pro- gress of civilization, by religious antipathies, we are divided ? SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 287 Think only of our northern character, our cloudy skies, our Teutonic independence, our vehement nationality, and then recollect that we are using, perhaps every day, certainly every week in the year, at the times which we believe to be most solemn, words which we owe to Hebrews and Greeks and Latins ; and that in these words the simple folk of England, in spite of their narrow notions and local customs, are able to find solace and delight. Now if the meaning of Baptism be that we are brought into God's family, and that we become therefore capable, with one mind and one mouth, of glorifying his name; if the creed be teach- ing us, as children of that family, severally and unitedly to ac- knowledge that name, and how it is related to us, we must feel that acts of worship should be, of all acts, those which most belong to our position, and in which our fellowship is most entirely real- ized. And this feeling is surely one which must be wrought out in us the more we read the Bible and enter into the sense of it. That all division comes through idolatry ; that all union comes through the adoration of the one living and true God ; these are the two texts of the Bible, which, from the record of the dispersion at Babel, where men would build a tower whose top should reach to heaven, for the worship of natural things, down to the day of Pentecost, when the little band of Apostles in the temple were heard by the multitudes, each in their own tongue, magnifying God, it is illustrating and inculcating. If any thing is to break down the barriers of space and time, it must be the worship of Him who is, and who was, and who is to come, whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain, and whose dwelling is with the humble and contrite heart ; if any thing is to bring those at one whom these accidents of our mortality are separating, this must be the means. That men have turned worship to precisely the opposite use ; that they have made it the slave of their circumstances, the badge of their divisions, the instrument of their hatred, I have con- fessed. The question is whether there be any witness in the world against this tendency ; whether God has given us any sign that these separations are the effects of our choice, not of his will. I say that these forms of worship, preserved through so many gen- erations, adapted to every locality, are such a sign ; I say, that using these, I have a right to believe that the blessings of the day of 288 SIGNS OF A Pentecost have been given once, and never withdrawn ; that in the deepest and most practical sense there is a community which the distinction of tongues and the succession of ages cannot break. Objections. — The Quaker. Against this conclusion the Quaker protests vehemently. Forms of worship are not only no signs of the existence of a spiritual commonwealth ; they are positively incompatible with it. The Spirit bloweth where it listeth. Prayer is given by the Spirit. By these prepared forms we make it the utterance of the will and reason of man. Nothing can be truer than the last assertion. We do make prayer the utterance of the Will and Reason of man. WTe consider it their highest and most perfect utterance ; that in which, and in which alone, they fully realize themselves. What the human Will is we can understand from no terms and definitions of logic. They can only express one half of its meaning, for they can only describe it by its intrinsic properties; whereas its essential char- acteristic is, that it is ever going out of itself. They can only de- scribe it at rest ; whereas it only is while it acts. But in prayer we can know truly and safely what the will is; prayer expounds to us its inmost nature ; prayer substantiates it, and proves that to be the greatest reality which seems in language to be the greatest contradiction. The will gives itself up that it may be itself. It dies that it may enjoy life. In acknowledging another will as the only will, it attains its own freedom ; even as in trying to have a being of its own, it becomes a slave. " Father, not my will, but thine." Where do we behold the human will in such perfection, in such distinctness of life and power as in these awful words ? And it is the same with that organ which beholds as with that which determines, with that which is the seat of wisdom as with that which is the source of action. This only knows itself when it forgets itself ; this only sees while the sense of sight is lost in the object of it. Accordingly the Reason also finds its deepest mean- ing and expression in worship. But do we therefore deny that the Spirit of God is the author of prayer, or, in Barclay's words, that all prayer is spurious which SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 289 does not proceed from Him ? No ; but in affirming the one pro- position we affirm the other. We believe that the Spirit of God is the awakener, the only awakener, of the spirit of man ; that the will and reason not called forth by Him must remain for ever the torpid, helpless victims of nature and sense. We believe that un- less the Spirit of God give these powers their direction, they will only minister to that which they are meant to rule, only rivet the bondage which it is their privilege to break. We believe that whoever in past ages, either in heathen or Jewish lands, used them aright, was taught and enabled so to use them, and in proportion as he used them aright, confessed the inspiration. We believe that it is our privilege to exercise them as they could not be exercised by heathens, or even by Jews, because it is our privilege to know that there is a living Person actuating and governing them ; and to know what manner of person He is, of whom He is the Spirit, from whom He proceeds, with whom He dwells. We believe that this knowledge is far more deep and awful than that which any one possessed who merely felt that he was the subject of an inspiration ; but that being deep and awful, it is incompatible with excitement, with any distortions of manner or of voice, with the notion that we are merely the unconscious animal utterers of cer- tain sounds which are imparted to us, instead of the living, con- scious, voluntary, rational agents of One who, when He promised the Spirit to his disciples, said, " Henceforth I call you not serv- ants, but I have called you friends, for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth ; but whatsoever I have heard and learned of the Father, I have made known unto you." We believe that we must attribute every act of our minds, every exercise of our affec- tions, every energy of our will, to this Spirit; if the purpose to which we direct them be wrong, still the gift and power are his, that purpose only ours ; if it be right, we shall own that of it also He i^ the author. We believe again that every operation in nature, the growth of every tree, the budding of every flower, should be referred to the influence of Him who first moved the face of the waters; but we do not call this a spiritual influence, because, though wrought by a Spiritual Being, it is wrought upon unspiritual subjects, upon things, and not upon persons. Such are some of the inferences which follow directly from the 290 SIGNS OF A idea of Baptism as a new birth, and of the Creed as the proper act of the newborn creature. That which is born of the Spirit, is spirit, and seeks its spiritual home and Father, refers all its acts and movements to his inspiration, and thereby attains its own proper distinctness and freedom. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and seeks the earth from which it came, acknowledging no influence and attraction but that. The contradiction of hu- manity is this — when the human spirit glorifies itself; and as the necessary consequence and punishment of that sin, abdicates its own proper rights and throne, and sinks into the slave of the flesh, impregnating it with its own sin. The glory of humanity is this — when the human spirit renounces itself, and as its reward attains a knowledge of Him from whom it came, a victory over the flesh, and the power of communicating to it its own life. The objection, then, which the Quaker makes to forms of prayer, that they proceed from man's reason and will, and not from the Divine Spirit, is one which involves a denial of the very nature and possibility of prayer. And this denial has been of the most practical kind. He acknowledges prayer to be a necessary act, at once the sign of moral health and the instrument in producing it. Yet he dares not pray unless he have a sensible impulse urging him to the exercise. I will not dwell upon the Quaker use of the word " sensible," though it seems to me very significant, indicating that those who most abhor all appeals to the senses in worship, who think that the sights and sounds with which God has filled the universe cannot be redeemed by the redeemed spirit to his service, do yet grossly confound impressions on the spirit with impressions on the sense. But the important point is that the idea of our life as a conflict, an idea continually present, one would suppose, to Fox's mind, is thus set at nought. If they understood that the true will and real self was ever at war with the mere sensible impulse, they would surely have believed that the reluctance of the natural man to an act which we know to be good, and feel to be necessary, is one of the best proofs that it is prompted and encouraged by the Divine Spirit. But the truth is, that the idea of a constant living personal presence has practically deserted those who seemed atone time to make this belief the whole of their religion ; that the notion of an influence, an inspiration, visiting certain persons at certain SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 291 seasons, which is common to Christianity with Paganism, is nearly all that they have preserved. Is it wonderful, then, that they should be unable to understand howT the Spirit should have taught men in distant generations to express their deepest wants in the same words, or how through these words they should enjoy secret and awful communion with each other, and with the Most High ? But, if so, what better proof do I want that these forms are one of the clear and indispensable signs of a spiritual and univeral fellowship ? The Pure Protestant. The pure Protestants who have rejected the use of Li turgies sympathize but little in the Quaker's objections to them. They have no disposition to deny the voluntary nature of prayer or of any religious act. Because it has this character, they say forms are an intolerable bondage. ' Each man should be able to express his own wants in his own way. In his chamber each man does or should lay bare his own feelings and wishes before God. This is the proper rule and standard of prayer, according to our Lord's words : " When thou prayest, enter into thy closset." But since the minister, who is or should be chosen by the congregation, has a knowledge of the different circumstances of its members, and is looked up to by them as a person fit to preach the Gospel of Christ to them, it is very right that he should offer up prayers for himself and them, suggested by the feelings of the moment, probably a preparation for the sermon he is about to deliver, and therefore full of earnestness and unction. Forms of prayer are manifestly un- suitable for both these purposes; they cannot be adapted to changes of circumstances ; they cannot be connected with the feelings either of the pastor or of the people; they are the impositions of another age, affronting to the understanding and painful to the conscience of those who use them.' Prayer to God is assumed in this statement to be, according to the primary notion of it, individual. A particular man wants to obtain certain blessings ; he therefore asks them of Him who he believes can bestow them. To many persons this proposition seems self-evident; whoever doubts it is an enemy of common sense. Nevertheless it is, I believe, at war with the experience of every religious man. He learns very soon that passionate eagerness to 292 SIGNS OF A get some good thing for himself — be it fine weather for the sake of his crops, or the salvation of his soul — is not a help to pray, but the greatest possible hinderance to it. Explain the fact as you will, but a fact it is, confessed by persons of different sentiments in dif- ferent forms of language, continually presenting itself afresh to those who visit dying beds. The selfish object which we seek floats before our minds — if it be an earthly object, palpably ; if an invisi- ble unknown object, in hazy images, having more in them of terror than of beauty — but the object, He to whom our prayer is address- ed, is afar off ; of Him there is scarcely the least discernment. He is regarded as a Being who can inflict evil and may choose to confer a blessing ; or if through the teachings of our childhood we have some better knowledge, the consciousness of self-seeking pervents it, and we rise up feeling that the sacrifice is not accepted ; " we are very wroth, and our countenance falls." And how is it that this kind of prayer, so natural to every man, is changed for any other ? " When thou enterest into thy closet," these are the words of our Lord to which the pure Protestant appeals, say, " Our Father which art in heaven ; Hallowed be thy name." Oh won- derful teaching! not how the selfishness of the closet may be car- ried into the temple, but how the breadth and universality of spirit which belong to the temple may be attained in the closet. When thou art most alone thou must still, if thou wouldest pray, be in the midst of a family j thou must call upon a Father; thou must not dare to say my, but our. Dost thou desire to be very holy 1 Yet this must not be thy petition ; thou must say, " Hal- lowed be thy name." Dost thou wish for some assurance of a heaven for thyself? Yet this must be thy language: " Thy king- dom come." Dost thou wish to get some favourite project accom- plished ? it must be sought in this manner : " Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Dost thou want a supply of thy necessities, bodily or spiritual ? Then thou must desire the same for all thy brethren, as well as for thyself : " Give us this day our daily bread." Dost thou want forgiveness for thy individual sins 1 The prayer is still, " Forgive us our trespasses," and the gift is only received when it is circulated, " as we forgive them that trespass against us." Do you feel that your fellow-creatures are your tempters ? Yet you must acknowledge their temptations and yours to be the same ; you SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 293 must ask that they may not be led into the very temptations which they cause, else you will be their tempter as well as your own. And this because the evil from which you must pray to be delivered is a common evil, an evil which is the same in root and principle, though it may take innumerable forms ; that very evil of selfishness, of individuality, which we are disposed to make our very prayers a means of seeking, and which will encompass us and and possess us, if we do not learn to join in the ascription : " Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory." I do not mean that many objectors to forms may not have pre- served these truths, and with heart and soul entered into them ; but I must maintain, that just so far as they have done so, the reason of their complaint ceases. If the individual prayer is not the highest and most essential prayer, but rather is no prayer at all, then the prayer of the congregation is not an aggregate of such indivi- dual prayers, but the prayer of a body, each member of which pro- fesses to have renounced his own, selfish position, that he may come as one of a family to seek the Father of it. In what sense, then, can extempore utterances be said to be most declaratory of our wants ? Of wrhat wants ? Do the mem- bers of the congregation feel that they have sinned, and do they wish to confess their sins ? Is this a local feeling, a feeling be- longing to one set of circumstances, or to one period of time ? Or is it a human feeling, belonging to men as men ? ' But each man has his own particular sin ; his own burden, of which he himself is conscious.' Undoubtedly ; and is not his sin and burden just this, that he has chosen a scheme of his own, that he has followed cer- tain tastes and inclinations of his own, and so that he has forgotten his Father in heaven and his brethren on earth ? Does not each particular sin spring from this root ? And is it not this which inter- prets that sense of the individual character of sin, and the personal responsibility for it, upon which so much stress is, so rightly, laid ? The load lies on the separate conscience of each man. It is the very nature and law of the conscience that it singles out each man, severs him from his fellow, makes him feel that the participation of the whole universe in his guilt does not make it less to him. But then the conscience reproves us for this very thing ; for having chosen to be divided when we were meant to be one. And since 294 SIGNS OF A it has reproved men for this sin ever since Adam's fall, and since it has taught every Christian man that this was emphatically and most awfully his sin — ever since Christ died that we might be all one, as He is with the Father — there seems no reason why the lan- guage of one generation, in confessing this sin, should not be the language of all. No reason why it should not be ; the greatest blessing, if by any means it could be ; since by this means the sense of sonship and brotherhood would be realized and revived in the very act of acknowledging disobedience and selfishness. Or does some member of the congregation desire to give thanks for a blessing which has been vouchsafed to him particularly — must this be a local temporary feeling, because it is called forth by a local temporary occasion i Does it not cease to be a true feel- ing if it is ? If from the particular blessing the heart do not gain enlargement, be not drawn out into a contemplation of other bless- ings ; if it be not led to dwell most upon those which are com- mon and permanent, as being the greatest, though perhaps only ob- served when they are taken away, or when some startling novelty brings them into notice, the purpose of God in bestowing that good thing is surely not accomplished ; the man has not really profited by it. But if he have, his feelings become human feel- ings; they do not want a specific, self-chosen mode of expression; he can find them in the Psalms of David ; he can utter them in the language of Christian men who lived in other climes and pe- riods. He can give thanks for creation, preservation, redemption ; for gifts enabling him to enjoy this life and another, which are be- stowed upon his race as wTell as himself ; he can ask that they as well as he may have, above all other good things, that of a thank- ful spirit ; his own special mercies will then be understood and ap- preciated. Or does a particular member of the congregation long for some means, noJ: of declaring his own sins, or his own thankful- ness, but of praising the name of God, of glorifying Him for his great glory ? Is this a specific, local, temporary, individual emo- tion ? Can it have a specific, local, temporary, individual expres- sion ? Is it too humiliating, too limiting to the largeness of a modern intellect, that it should use the words of other days, and say, " We praise thee, 0 God ; we acknowledge thee to be the SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 295 Lord !" or, " Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost : As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end." Or, lastly, does the same particular member of the congregation feel his need of mercies spiritual and temporal, and desire to ask for them? We have seen by the Lord's prayer how he ought to ask them, if he be alone in his chamber ; how necessary it is that he should not look for them as meant for him, otherwise than as the child of a father, as one of many brethren. Are they tempo- ral, the blessings of food and raiment ? Does he dare to seek for these with a desire to appropriate them exclusively 1 Then his prayer becomes a sin. Are they spiritual ? Then the blessing itself is that of more intimate communion with his Father, a larger communion with the family. Is it necessary that he should limit these by the particular notions and phrases of his own time ? Is it a great hardship and bondage to be obliged to use a more general, and therefore, one would fancy, a more becoming language ? If it be said, * Every prayer must be composed in some age, why do you suppose that those which have come down from an- other time must possess those qualities which you attribute to prayer more than those which are composed in our own V I answer, I do not say that they must be better, or why they must be better, I have merely been contending with those who say, that because they come down to us from another time, they cannot be fit for our use. I do believe, however, that the prayers written in the first ages of Christianity are in general more free, more reverent, more universal, than those which have been poured forth since. I do not think the opinion is a singular one; and I would rather its sound- ness were tried by the feelings and sympathies of religious men in different periods and circumstances, but especially of men in times of great suffering, than by any theories or arguments of mine. Still I do not find it harder to explain to myself why this should be so, than why there should be a fresher, truer feeling respecting nature and the outward transactions of men in Homer, than in the poetry of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. If there were that feeling respecting God, as the source of all things and the end of all things, which I attributed in the last section to the age of the Fathers, it cannot be strange, I think, that their devotional 296 SIGNS OF A outpourings should have been simpler, purer, more human, than those of men who were occupied, and, as I conceive, were by the order of Providence meant to be occupied in subtle questions re- specting the operations of their own minds, or with inquiries into the law and course of nature. Whether the succession and order of devotional acts may not have much to do with the history and circumstances of man, as well as with the nature and plans of God ; and whether, therefore, other ages may not have thrown a light upon this subject, which the first did not possess, I will not say. To those who deny all order in devotion, who think it little less than a sin that offices of confession should be laid down as prepar- atory to offices of thanksgiving, these again to offices of prayer, and these to the higher communion, it can seem no great derogation from the honour of the primitive times, if we should admit that the apprehension of this spiritual sequence may only in part have be- longed to them. And if such persons still require a further reason why we think that the particular acts of praise and prayer were more congenial to older times than to modern, the considerations which have been occupying us under this head involve the reply. There has been a constant tendency for several centuries towards greater individuality of thought and feeling. There is a true ground for this tendency, though it may have led to the most false results. But it is in itself, w7hen unsustained by another tendency, unfavorable to the worship of God, as well as to fellowship among men. A vehement reaction against this tendency has begun in all parts of Europe. One of the fruits of it will certainly be an aver- sion from all those utterances which modern Protestants have dig- nified with the name of devotion ; if another consequence of it be not a return to the old forms and a delight in them, we must ex- pect a reign of atheism. The Philosopher. When the modern philosopher makes any objections to forms of worship, it is chiefly because they substantiate and perpetuate two mischievous superstitions. One is that a Being, who by his idea and law is unchangeable and perfect, can be swayed or led into better acts and purposes than his own by our petitions ; the other is that it can please Him to receive the praises or commen- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 297 dations of his creatures. These complaints are usually put forth with most breadth and precision by disciples of the Utilitarian school. But it is evident that they are practically adopted, though with some varieties of expression, and in connexion with a different anthropological theory, by a large section of Rationalists. Now in one phrase or another both these parties acknowledge, by every word which they speak, and every act which they do, either as philosophers or as ordinary men, that evil exists, and that it ought to be and may be by some means diminished. Tne Utili- tarian traces it all to bad systems of government ; the Rationalist refers it directly to man's ignorance of himself and his own pow- ers. Each looks forward to his own Avatar, and to a millennial period of the species which shall follow. Each then does acknow- ledge an Ideal, with which men should be in agreement, with which they are not in agreement, into agreement with which they may by some process be brought. Wherein, then, do we and they differ ? Not in the acknowledgment of actual inconsistency and contradiction : this has nothing to do with either of us ; we simply own what we cannot deny. But in this, that our Ideal is a living Be^ng ; that we believe Him to have given all things their right type and order ; that we believe them when in their relation to Him to be still very good; that we believe their disturbance and incoherency to be the result of a voluntary renunciation of alle- giance to Him, by the only creature which could commit such an act ; that we believe all disturbance and incoherency to be con- trary to his will ; that we believe the restoration to begin in the submission of those who have brought about the confusion. The submission consists in the confession that his will is the good will ; one of the main acts and exercises of it is that of entering into his will, and beseeching that it may be put forth for the removal of those curses whereof the evil will has been the cause. This is the rationale — in cold and miserable words — of those ancient litanies which express to this day the thoughts and longings of the most earnest people in different corners of the earth. They are not founded on the notion that any thing is mutable in God. They are cries for the vindication and preservation of his immutable order. They are confessions that every act of his providence, from the first hour of the world, has had for its end the making this im- 298 SIGNS OF A mutable order manifest, and the bringing the universe into con- formity with it. But they are not founded upon the lying fancy that the world is right ; that persons are fulfilling their proper re- lations to each other ; that things are not discomposed and made evil by the sin of those who are meant to direct them. Man, they assume, is God's minister, acting for Him, able to perform his in- tentions towards his involuntary creatures ; able, because he has a will, to set them at nought. His proper condition, in whatever place he were, would be that of dependence, of doing the will of another. His proper way of fulfilling that condition here, is by crying out for the rectification of that which is independent, which has lost its centre, which is struggling to stand by itself, and which therefore cannot stand at all ; for the rectification of this, and there- fore of whatever else has through this cause suffered decay and ruin. But if it be said, " This supposes that a restoration has taken place already. These prayers are unmeaning, unless those who offer them believe themselves, on some pretext or other, to be in a better condition than those about whom they pray — " I an- swer, " Unquestionably ; it is the very point which I have been pressing, that prayer does suppose a restoration ; that the idea of prayer and the idea of a Church can never be separated, each im- plying the other; and that a Church which is not built upon the confession of a restored humanity is a contradiction in terms." But, observe, a restored humanity ; and therefore those who offer their prayers do not put forth any claim of superiority to their race — nay, not to the worst member of their race. The very essence of their prayers is this : a cry that those sins which they feel in them- selves, under which they are groaning, which they have commit- ted, may not be, as they have been, their masters, and the masters of the universe. They who pray do not feel this less than other men but more ; they do not reject evils from themselves, to cast them upon their neighbours more than other men do ; on the con- trary, they identifyt heir neighbours' sins with their own ; they feel that they have them, and are responsible for them. Only as mem- bers of a redeemed race and family they can vindicate the privi- lege, which has been asserted for them, of being new creatures, of casting off the slough of their selfish natures, of disclaiming that SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 299 misery which by their rebellion they have made their own, of en- tering into that blessedness which their Master by his obedience has obtained for all who will have their portion in Him. So that the Philosopher says well and truly, that this superstition of pray- er, if it be one, has been maintained by forms, and without forms would be likely to die out. Not as if the sense and necessity of prayer could ever die out in man, but because the only condition under which it can be a true and reasonable service, that of its being presented by men, as members of a body or family, which continues the same from generation to generation, and which con- verts the notion of a human race from a dream into a reality, is in these forms embodied, and wheresoever they are neglected is nearly lost. I have still to speak on the subject of praise, which seems to the Philosopher a thing so unworthy of men to offer or of God to receive. The ground of this conclusion is that the words praise and flattery are convertible ; and that since flattery is offensive to an imperfect being, so far as he has right feelings, and is only so far tolerable as he is weak and vain, it must to a perfect Being, if He took cognizance of such folly, be altogether odious. Now I join issue with them upon all these points. Suppose praise to be offered to a fellow man which he does not deserve, it is abominable because it is false ; suppose that, being deserved, it is offered to him with the view of bribing him to bestow future favours, it is of- fensive, because it is mean ; suppose him to deserve it, and that it is offered with no unworthy motive, it may be wrong, because it is imprudent ; for men, through their imperfections, are made vain, by hearing themselves even rightly commended. But if we could suppose these circumstances absent, I confidently affirm, that there is not any occupation so elevating and delightful to a man, as that of praising and thanking his brethren. Generous men, in all ages and nations, have felt it so ; and when the motives of self-interest have been farthest from them, even respect for the object of their admiration, and fear of doing him hurt, have not availed to restrain them from expressing their sense of the favours which he has be- stowed on them, or their delight in the beauty and harmony of his character. With no ignoble aim, these outpourings of the heart have often been directed to kings and great men ; because the 300 SIGNS OF A thankful and humble heart has felt their acts as a condescension, and has perceived a kind of special propriety and suitableness in their virtues. But they have been directed also to suffering friends, and poor scholars, and persecuted saints, and especially to the dead, from whom nothing could ever be expected, and to whom they could not be dangerous. Wherefore, the true and obvious analogy from human experience is, — that if God have none of the imper- fection which could make Him obnoxious to the mischievousness of praise; and if there have proceeded from Him all the benefits which all his creatures have received ; and if there be in Him all the goodness and truth, of which the goodness and truth in man are the reflection, — there can be no act so entirely suit-able to man, so thoroughly joyful, as that of thanking and blessing Him. In which act, if any one discovers a low and cringing desire to win some good from the Being thus magnified, let him know that, whoever enters upon the work in this spirit, and with this object, will be soon so struck with its utter ridiculousness and incongruity, or else so wearied with the heartless and hypocritical effort, that no pains he can use will enable him to persevere in it; or, at any rate, to persuade himself that he is doing more than repeating a set of incoherent, unintelligible sounds. In the loss of self, in the escape from self, consists the freedom and enjoyment of that act. The worshipper has found that object to which the eyes of himself and of all creatures were meant to be directed, in beholding which they attain the perfection of their being, while they lose all the feeling of selfish appropriation which is incompatible with perfection. They gaze upon Him who is the all-embracing Love, with whom no selfishness can dwell, the all-clear and distinguishing truth, from which darkness and falsehood flee away ; and they are changed into the same image, and their praises are only the responses to the joy with which He looks upon his redeemed creation and declares it very good. Let this service seem foolish to whom it will, we know not only that it must be acceptable to God, because He is a spirit, and be- cause He is truth, and because He seeketh them to worship who will worship Him in spirit and truth, but we know also that it meets all the deepest wants which men, in the student's garret, in the palace and the hut, have been all, by different methods, trying to express. SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 301 The man of earnest meditation, hating the world's turmoil, angry at its meanness, yet amidst many thoughts of pride and dis- content retaining a desire for its good, learns that to seek truth is the proper end of his life, — to find it his only felicity ; and he strives, and toils, and suffers, and if perchance the vision of some principle of living power dawns upon him, he shouts tvQrjxa through the universe. His joy is true joy ; yet when he thinks of the thou- sands of living creatures, men like himself, to whom his discovery will do no good, who must groan and die still, his labour seems all vanity, his truth a dream, and he curses himself for having dared to dwell so apart from human sympathies. The gentle and gene- rous man, nursed amid kindly and family influences, his imagina- tion early trained to converse with lovely objects, his heart and conscience not seared, sees a beauty living and moving through all things, and pursues it with an insatiable passion. He cannot doubt the reality of his faith, though men call it a delusion; that which has so possessed his being and exalted it, cannot be a lie. But what mean pain, and confusion, and death ? Are they merely shadows to make the light shine brighter? — No ! they master it, — they obscure it. He becomes saddened ; the glory has fled from the earth, and he sees not how it can ever return again. Thus in their solitary hours have men, according to their different tendencies and education, been haunted by the vision of a truth for which it were worth while to die, and of a loveliness which must be the sole charm of life ; and the one has seemed to dwell only in cold words and propositions, and the other to be ever changing its shapes, and vanishing at last altogether. Meantime the business of the world has not been intermitted ; kings have been reigning and dynasties changing; and men have felt that unless there were some awful Law which those kino-s acknowledged, and which lasts amidst all those changes of dynasty, society was a mere dream and impossibility. Philosophers have felt that such a Law must be ; politicians that they must create the impression of it. But what is this Law ? There are times when you cannot put aside this question, — when it is asked, and must be answered; for men rise up and say, that it is but a cobweb imagination which has been cut through by swords in former days, and which they with their brushes can now sweep away entirely. 20 302 SIGNS OF A Where is its birth-place and its home, — the warrant of its autho- rity, the guardian of its permanence ? Yet supposing this question too were answered, there is a uni- verse of distinct living beings groaning for a daily subsistence. What shall we say of these ? " Try and make them philosophers," cries one ; " teach them to understand the truth of things ; teach them to see the fair proportions of things." Well ! this is plausi- ble,— let us begin. " But no," says another, who seems to be wise, " this will never avail. Wliat will your people care about the sun and stars ? They are men ; they feel that other men have ruled them, and not for their benefit ; they want to rule themselves. Give them some share in the state; then it will be time to think of making them natural philosophers." WTe are convinced by the wisdom of these remarks; we see that men cannot be satisfied with merely contemplating things at a distance; they must feel that they belong to a system ; they must feel that it does not move without them. And though we do not like to give up the hope of seeing our brethren better acquainted even with the wonders of the world about them, we acknowledge that the world in which they are actually to live and move, must be one of human feelings and hopes. But when we ask you where and how you are making the experiment for raising the poor man to a feeling of his position, for giving him citizenship and political power, we are bound to confess that we can see nothing but a scheme to rob the poor man of that which he has already, to take from him all sense of dignity and freedom, and equality, and reduce him into a condition of hope- less slavery. Now supposing it were possible that truth and goodness are not abstractions, are not formulas, but are realities ; and as the traces of them have been seen in the acts of persons, so that they dwell absolutely in a Person; supposing it were true that this Being is the King of kings and Lord of lords, from whom all law7 derives its life and potency ; supposing this Being has established for Himself a witness in the heart of the poorest man in this world, and has decreed that there should be desires in that heart which any thing short of his own infinite perfection shall not satisfy ; and has called this poor man to be a citizen of his kingdom, yea, a member incorporate thereof, and has said that he, as much as the SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 303 richest man, is concerned in the order and organization of this kingdom, and may urge on the wheels in the midst of which the spirit of the living creature is moving ; would it not then be true that the cravings of the philosopher, the necessities of the states- man, the hopes of the wayfarer, have all their highest interpreta- tion in this worship wThich is said to be the idlest of all ceremonies ? Are not the recorded deeds and desires of the world utterly unin- telligible without it ? If this ceremony were abolished — if the idea of a perfect Being united to man, inspiring him with prayer, and hearing his prayers, were lost out of the universe, — would not the imperfect hope of the philosopher die too ? would not the be- lief in Law become impossible ? would not each man sink further and further into solitude and brutality, finding none able to raise him, none who was not assisting to deepen his degradation ? THE ROMISH SYSTEM. But still these old Liturgies are in some sense Popish. The prayers in them have reached any modern nations wThich may have adopted them through Popish hands ; they have received a Popish imprimatur. Nay, portions of them may be actually the composition of Bishops of Rome, or of persons who acknowledged their supremacy. What can be said to rebut this charge ? Can it be pretended that there is an exact chronological line, at which what we please to call Catholicism ends and what we call Popery begins ? Would we reject a prayer of Bernard's as pass- ing the limit 1 If not, may there not by possibility be one by A Kempis or even by Pascal, which we would not utterly disown ? To these questions I answer precisely as I did in the former case ; I want no chronological lines. I am quite ready to use a prayer of A Kempis or of Pascal or of many a person less commonly tolerated among us. Why I conceive the older prayers are in general likely to be better than those which have been composed in any part of Europe for several centuries I have explained ; but that explanation has no direct connexion with the question before us. If there be no clearer and more palpable distinction between the forms of the Catholic Church and those to which the Romish system has given birth, than that which is arrived at by special pleadings about the date of the birth or the degree of the 304 SIGNS OF A soundness of particular men, I at least would rather leave the ques- tion unresolved. But if the main and characteristic glory of the Church be pre- cisely this, that it is brought into the Holiest of the Holies, not into the figure of the true, but into the presence of God himself ; if this be the grand point of separation between older forms and the cold efforts of modern devotions, that with holy fear and confidence they claim this privilege ; if ascriptions to the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are continually on the lips, always in the hearts, of those who wrote them, giving at once the essence and the body to their supplications ; if each individual member of the Church be in these forms supposed to join with the whole of it in every act of confession, of petition, or of thanksgiving ; if this union of each with all be involved in the fact that these prayers are offered up for the merits and mediation of the one Lord of the whole body ; if it is on the ground of these merits and this media- tion, that the poorest member of the flock may join with saints and angels about the throne because the virtue and life of both are in Him ; if to these same causes is owing the freedom of the older prayers from those fetters of time and locality which mankind in the person of its King has shaken off ; if therefore in these quali- ties consists their Catholicity, we have another, a more righteous and a more safe measure for determining the value of the system which takes to itself the Catholic name. For that this system does in its mildest form embody the doctrine — men who are members of Christ's Church and body cannot enter into the Holiest of the Holies, cannot present themselves before God, cannot ascend up where Christ has gone before them, unless they approach through intervening mediators; that this notion is practically and con- stantly embodied in those forms which would be recognised by all as truly and properly Romish ; that the mediators are not merely ideals of human excellence and beauty, but also the helpers and heroes of particular towns, professions, individuals ; thus much will not be denied even by those who are most eager to disclaim the charge of positive idolatry. Now, more than this I do not want. I do not care to dwell upon those practical results which seem to me to have followed quite inevitably, and by a far stronger ne- cessity than a mere logical one, though by that also, from these SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 305 premises, I do not care to establish the fact, which seems to me written with sunbeams 0i the history of Europe, that a continually downward progress from divine worship to hero-worship, from hero-worship to natural must be the consequence, when that first fatal step is taken of doubting or denying that the communion be- tween God and his creatures is really established in the incarnate Son, that the union of men with their Lord has been completed and cemented in Him. I simply take my stand upon this ground. I say, " By these acts you Romanists have set aside so far as in you lies, the very meaning and end of the Church's existence ; have destroyed the very principle of its union and fellowship ; you have reduced it into a set of incoherent fragments held together by no divine law, and therefore needing some wretched human law to give it consistency." I repeat it, as for as in you lay, for you have not done the work. A mightier power has been traversing your schemes and preparing the way for their ultimate confusion and dis- comfiture. Not without you, but within you has there been a seed of life with which these seeds of corruption and death have been seeking to amalgamate, because they could not destroy it. These old, holy, reverent forms have been mocking your inventions as no vulgar Protestant scoffer was ever able to mock them, mocking them by witnessing that the blessings which they offered were not too great for men to dream of, but too poor and pitiful for them not to trample under their feet when once they know out of what curse they have been delivered and to what height they have been raised. These forms witness to us of holy men whom we are to remem- ber, and with whose special graces we may sympathize, just be- cause we are united like them, to Him of whose fulness all have received, and grace for grace. Let them be multiplied if you will, let each age contribute its quota to the goodly company, let all the blessings which through them Christ has bestowed upon his flock or upon any the least portion of it (for blessings to a part are blessings to the whole), be thankfully commemorated. The forms bear no protest against such recollections ; rather teach how it is possible rightly to entertain them. But the moment any one of these holy men is so regarded, that his translation out of this world shall not be a sign to the poorest man who stays in it of his own 306 SIGNS OF A fellowship with an unseen Lord, but shall rather he a restraint upon his spirit, a fleshly impediment to^ommunion, an earthly dream to obscure the vision of a heavenly reality, that moment the principle of these forms is assaulted, and any new language which may be introduced into them sanctioning such an inversion or denial of the doctrine of the communion of saints stands out in the most broad and palpable contradiction to the living words in which they have embodied it. These forms invite us on certain days to remember our Lord's acts, condescensions, humiliation, triumph. They teach us that if we forget the days, we shall be in danger of forgetting that of which they speak, and therefore of sinking back into that dark, idolatrous, divided state, out of which by Christ's work we have been brought (seeing that there is not and cannot be any return to the state of Jewish outlooking and hope ; denying the fulfilment, we lose also the expectation ; every thing but a confused dream of a possible blessing). But, if through any degrading sensiti- zation of this testimony, men shall come to fancy that the Church is not really redeemed, justified, and glorified in Christ, but that by the keeping of these days, or by any observances whereby they preserve their own fellowship with the Church, these yet unob- tained blessings are to be purchased, then the forms which com- memorate these days, as the great signs and trophies of Christ's accomplished wotk, do far more by anticipation to refute such a shameful and ignominious delusion, than all the words which can be devised after it has become prevalent. These forms authorize certain days and seasons, during which, the members of Christ's body may enter into his humiliation, and chasten themselves with his stripes, that so they may keep down the evil inclinations which separate them from their brethren, may sympathize in the sorrows of mankind, may realize the blessings which are given to the whole Church. But, if any selfish and lying spirit should go forth pro- claiming that by these fasts and penances for subduing the flesh that blessing is to be obtained which is given without money and price, that by them the individual man who performs them is put into a higher individual condition, and has a right to claim something for himself on that score which as an ordinary Churchman is not his, then these forms of humiliation do pour such contempt upon that SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 307 godless and uncatholic pride, as no one who thinks all restraints upon self-indulgence vain and childish has ever been able to ex- press. I might go on through a number of other cases, but these will suffice as hints. They prove, I think, that there lies hid in these ancient forms of worship, something of that power which I attri- buted to Baptism and the Creed; a power before which all human systems, and therefore the Romish, the most complete of them all, must at last shrink and quail. SECTION IV. THE EUCHARIST. In all those old forms of worship of which we have been speak- ing, there is one service which is supposed to be of a higher cha- racter than all the rest, and to give them their worth and their interpretation. This is the service which belongs to a feast, called sometimes the Lord's Supper, sometimes the Eucharist, sometimes the Communion. This feast does exist at this day in every part of Europe, in various districts of Asia, of America, of Africa. It has existed for 1800 years. It has survived, therefore, all those changes of which we spoke when we were considering Baptism and the Creed; it has been the most holy symbol to nations between which race, poli- tical institutions, acquired habits, had established the most seem- ingly impassable barriers. In each of these nations, during that course of years, there have been endless conflicts between rich and poor, nobles and plebeians. Nevertheless this feast, during the time when these conflicts were the greatest, was acknowledged as the highest gift to the great, and yet as one in which the lowest were intended to share. During the same period the boundary line be- tween the untaught and the scholar was even stronger and more marked than that which w^s made by wealth or honours. The baron might need the help of the serf ; the student seemed to dwell in a region altogether his own, yet he acknowledged that in this feast he found the deepest, most unfathomable subject for his thoughts and speculations, and that the most unlearned might pos- 308 SIGNS OF A sess its blessings as much as himself. When the Reformation came it may be supposed that one at least of these phenomena ceased ; that this feast was no longer regarded as the centre round which religious and philosophical meditations naturally revolved. Un- questionably there was a change in this respect ; it was the effort of the Reformation to detach itself from this centre ; to a certain extent the different reformed bodies succeeded in discovering each a separate centre for itself. But it is equally true, that in spite of this effort the Reformers were compelled to make their views re- specting this feast the characteristic and distinguishing feature of their systems. Because they could not agree respecting its cha- racter and validity, ail the terrors of a common enemy, all the sympathies w7hich attracted them to each other, were insufficient to bind them together. Through the seventeenth century the strife continued ; new religious and philosophical systems were completed or established ; still the Eucharist, in Protestant, no less than in Romish countries, was a strange remnant of the past, which could not be passed over, which it was most hard to compress into any of the systems, and yet which must be brought into them, seeing that it was continu- ally asserting its power in defiance of them. The eighteenth cen- tury came, and the same processes which were used for shutting out the invisible in every other direction, were applied also in this. And yet tens of thousands of men and women in every part of Europe, would in that day have rather parted with their lives, or with any thing more dear to them, than with this feast. And now in this nineteenth centuiy there are not a few persons, who, medi- tating on these different experiments, have arrived at this deep and inward conviction, that the question whether Christianity shall be a practical principle and truth in the hearts of men, or shall be exchanged for a set of intellectual notions or generalizations, de- pends mainly on the question whether the Eucharist shall or shall not be acknowledged and received as the bond of a universal life, and the means whereby men become partakers of it. Supposing this notion to be utterly extravagant and false, yet it must be interesting to know what the institution is which seems to have obtained so many willing and so many reluctant testimonies to its importance. Now to describe its nature may be difficult, SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 309 without entering on some of the points upon which these parties are disagreed. But its origin is not a matter of dispute. Protest- ants, Romanists, Greeks, all who receive it, refer it to the same period of time, and practise it in obedience to the same authority. All would say, ' The night before the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, when He was keeping the passover with his disciples, He took bread and wine, and blessed them, saying, " This is my body, this is my blood ; do this in remembrance of me." This is the meaning of our custom ; we continue it in subjection to this com- mand.' Now these words were addressed to a little band of disciples ; to them, and only to them. There was no multitude present, as in the case of many of our Lord's discourses; no distant bystanders to whom the sentence might apply : " What I say unto you, I say unto all." Neither is there any express language affirming that the command given to these poor fishermen on that night was meant to extend to other ages. They might only signify that a person who had been deeply beloved was leaving with the friends from whom He was about to be separated a token and memorial of his intercourse with them. The words, indeed, " This is my body, this is my blood," might sound strange and hyperbolical, especially in a moment of what seemed final separation, for then the utterances of such a friend would be especially simple and aw- ful, as we know that his other utterances were ; but yet they might only signify, This will remind you of my person, and this of the blood which is about to be so unrighteously shed. Such an expla- nation, however embarrassing, would be the easiest, nay, it would be the only possible one, unless there were some circumstances con- nected with the whole character of Him who spake the words, with his other acts and purposes, with the time when they were spoken, which determined them to a different sense. Suppose now that the person who spoke these words was the Son of man and the Son of God ; suppose at the very time He spoke them He had been declaring himself to be the way through which men must come to the unseen Father, to be the truth, to be the life, to be in that relation to his disciples in which the vine is to its branches, to be about to bestow upon them a Spirit who should guide them into the knowledge of the Father 310 SIGNS OF A and of the Son ; suppose Him to have told his disciples that they were the appointed messengers of these truths to men ; suppose Him to have prayed that not only they, but all who should believe in Him through their word might be one in Him as He and the Father were one ; suppose Him to have connected all these myste- rious words with the giving up of Himself to death ; suppose death to have been felt in all ages and in all countries to be the great barrier between the visible and the invisible world ; suppose sacri- fice, or the giving up of certain animals to death, and the offering them to some unseen Ruler, had been felt in all countries which attained to any thing like national fellowship and consistency to be the means whereby they could approach that Ruler's presence, obtain his favor, remove his wrath ; suppose sacrifices to have been the most essential part of the Jewish institutions, the most important element in their worship, the only way whereby they could draw nigh, as members of a nation, to the God of their nation ; suppose them, however, to have been taught, both by the law which appointed those sacrifices and by the prophets who ex- pounded it, that they were not valuable for their own sakes, but were accepted when they were performed by God's appointment, through his priests, as a confession on the part of the offerer that he had violated his relation to the head of the commonwealth and to its members, as a submission of the will, as a prayer to be re- stored to that position which through self- will had been lost, or else as a means of expressing that entire self-surrender which was implied in the fact of belonging to the divine society ; suppose that the feast which the disciples were keeping with their Master was the most purely national and strictly sacrificial of all the feasts, that one which celebrated the first deliverance and establishment of the nation, and which recalled the fact that it was a nation based upon sacrifices in which every Jew realized the blessings of his covenant, rejoiced that God was his King, knew that he was indeed an Israelite ; suppose all this, and then consider whether that which seemed the only possible interpretation of Christ's words, though a most difficult and perplexing one, do not become actually irrational and monstrous ? Consider whether any one who believed wThat we know the Apostles did believe respecting their Master, his Person, his king- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 311 dom, could attach any but the very highest significance to lan- guage concerning his body and blood. Consider whether any persons who believed what we know they believed respecting their own office and work, could imagine that this significance was limited and temporary. Consider, whether persons wTho connect- ed, as we know they did connect, the kingdom whereof they were ministers with the earlier dispensations, could believe otherwise than that, by the same simple, wonderful method which had been used in all countries, and had been appointed, as they believed, by the authority of God himself in their own, by the method which had enabled the Jews to enter into the fruition of their covenant and its privileges, and the neglect of which had again and again cheated them of it, He meant to put them in possession of all the sub- stantial good things which He came to bestow upon mankind ? Could they doubt that when they ate this bread and drank this wine, He meant that they should have the fullest participation of that sacrifice with which God had declared himself well-pleased — that they should really enter into that Presence, into which the forerunner had for them entered — that they should really receive in that communion all the spiritual blessings which, through the union of the Godhead wTith human flesh, the heirs of this flesh might inherit ? Could they doubt that the state of individual death which they had claimed for themselves in Baptism, was here to be practically attained by fellowship with Christ's death ; that the new life which they had claimed for themselves, as members of Christ's body, was here to be attained through the communication of his life ? Could they doubt that if their spirits were to be raised up to behold the infinite and absolute glory, here they were ad- mitted into that blessedness ? that if their hearts and affections de- sired a manifested and embodied king, here they became united to Him ? that if spirit, soul, and body were to be subjected to the government of God's Spirit, that each might be delivered from its own corruption, receive its own quickening, and exert its own liv- ing powers, here each received that strength and renewal by which it was enabled to do its appointed work, to overcome its peculiar temptations, to be fitted for its future perfection? Could they doubt that if they were baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and if this deepest unity were the foun- 312 SIGNS OF A dation of such a union among men as no barrier of time, or space, or death, could break, here they were actually received into com- munion with that awful name, and into communion with all the saints who live by beholding it and delighting in it ? Could they doubt that here the partial views, and one-sided words, and oppos- ing thoughts of men, found their meeting-point, and complete re- conciliation ? that here lay the clear vital expression of those dis- tinctions which in verbal theology become dry, hard, dogmatic oppo- sitions? that here it is apprehended how faith alone justifies, and how faith without works is dead? how it is we that act, and yet not we, but Christ in us ? how he that is born of God cannot commit sin, and yet if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves ? how we may be persuaded that neither life nor death, nor things present, nor things to come, shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ, yet may tremble lest we should be castaways ? Could they doubt that it was their office to present Christianity in its dif- ferent aspects to the different wants and circumstances of their own age and of ages to come ; that it was the office of this sacrament to exhibit it as a whole truth, at once transcendent and practical, surpassing men's thoughts, independent on men's faith and opi- nions, and yet essentially belonging to man, the governing law of his being, the actuating power of his life ? Could they doubt that they were to lay the foundation of the Church on earth, and that this sacrament was to give it permanency, coherency, vitality throughout all generations ? And if this were their faith, why, I ask, is it not to be ours? What has happened to rob this sacra- ment of its meaning, or to make that meaning less applicable to us of the nineteenth century, than it was to those who lived in the first, — less necessary for us than it was for them ? The answers to these questions are various. Objections. — The Quaker. In this case, as in that of Baptism, the Quaker believes that we have adhered dangerously to Jewish precedent, have preserved signs when they should have been abolished, have followed shadows when the spiritual subtance was that which we should have ap- prehended. But here the sin is more flagrant. The essence of Christianity lies in the reality of the sacrifice which we after the SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 313 example and by the power of Christ are able to offer up. For the surrender of ourselves, the true self-annihilation, this ceremony is substituted, a ceremony clothed with great names and fictitious at- tributes, in order that we may excuse ourselves from the necessity 6f any practical sacrifice. I am not unwilling to answer the charge of tautology, for the sake of noticing; again the first and more general of these com- plaints. For they receive a new and most valuable illustration from the special arguments which are connected with them. It will be remembered that the difference between us and the Quakers in the other instance seemed to be this. They suppose that the Christian Covenant, because it is spiritual, dispenses with that method which was sanctioned by Divine authority in the earlier dispensation. We believe that the Christian Covenant, because it is more spiritual than the Jewish, requires another application of the same method in order that the difference may be perceived. Having the sign of the lower covenant to compare with the sign of the higher, I can understand wherein the one surpasses the other ; the Quaker, being unable to make any such comparison, only talks of the distinction, cannot apprehend it in fact, cannot even express it in language; while he rates the old far below its true value, he yet continually in his thoughts reduces the new to a level with it, in his practice makes the perfect spirituality of the latter to consist merely in the absence of a characteristic, which the degree of spirituality possessed by the former made necessary. Thus much with reference to the preliminary act or condition of the covenant. Applying the same rule to the results, privileges, and enjoyments of it, the Quaker asserts that the Jew realized the blessings of his covenant in a sacrificial feast; that the blessings of ours being spiritual, such a method is impossible. We affirm, that the privi- leges which the Jew realized in his festivals were spiritual privi- leges; that the privilege of looking up to an invisible Guide and King and Friend, and rejoicing in Him, was a spiritual privilege; that the privilege of feeling themselves a nation was a spiritual privilege ; that these are emphatically the privileges which the spirit of man craves for ; that God gave them to him in a most simple, reasonable method; and that when we understand what the things given were, it becomes difficult to imagine, how by any other 314 SIGNS OF A method they could have been received. We affirm again that our privileges are higher than those of the Jews, but higher only as being the perfection of what they had imperfectly. They are the privileges still of fellowship with God, of fellowship with our brethren ; but of fellowship with God as with a Being who has entered into a direct union with our race in the Person of his Son ; of fel- lowship with a Race in its Head, not merely a particular Nation. Now we want to know what there is in the character of these blessings which makes a united festival unsuitable for the realiza- tion of them ? It was suitable, nay, actually necessary for the realization of the others; show us in some other way than by merely repeating the words, carnal and spiritual, how the change has taken place ? We grant most freely that there must be a change in the nature of the institution appropriate to a change in the nature of that which it expresses. We grant that Christianity is nothing, if it be not the actualization and substantiation of a union which was before to a great extent prophetical and ideal. We grant that a mere shadow, a pictorial feast, would be more inconsistent with the nature of the Gos- pel, than even of the Law — though inconsistent with either, seeing that in each case the feast ought to put the receivers of it into actual possession of that which at the time they were capable of possess- ing. But admitting all this, the questions recur, " Can there be no feast which is applicable to the position of Christians, as the feast of the Passover was to that of the Jews 1 Have those who deny the existence of such a feast, stigmatizing it as a mere ceremony and phantasm, shown that they retain the substance of Christianity ?" To examine this last point, let us consider why it is that the Quaker protests against this particular institution. The Christian sacrifice, he says, ought to be real ; the giving up of a man's own self to death according to the example of our Lord and Saviour. Our Lord's death in itself was most real, carried into every act which He performed and every word which He spoke ; how can we think that we manifest that death in a service less actual, indi- vidual, continuous 1 From this statement it will be seen at once, that the end of Christianity, according to the Quaker, is individual self-denial or self-sacrifice. Christ perfectly sacrificed Himself; by Christ's power in us we may do the like ; this is their habitual SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 315 language. Now that Christianity involves this, that there is no meaning in it if the principle of self-sacrifice be not at the root of it, I believe I acknowledge as strongly as he can. Bat as we both agree that our Lord's example is the one by which we are to shape ourselves, that the type of sacrifice is in Him, I must inquire whether He referred to sacrifice as the object of his life, or only as the in- dispensable condition of it. The answer which He gives on this point seems to me very express. He declares that he came to glo- rify his Father's Name, to do his Father's Will. He declares that He came to die for the sheep. Because He glorified his Father's Name and would not glorify his own ; because He would not be an individual man but would identify Himself with the lowest con- dition of those whom He was not ashamed to call his brethren, therefore do we see in Him the perfect example of self-sacrifice. The whole idea of his life is lost the moment we forget this. Im- agine Him coming into the world not to manifest God, but to ex- hibit a specimen of glorious heroic self-sacrifice ; not to die for men, but to show how He could die, and the example perishes. We have an object presented to us which no man who has been used to contemplate his Lord with any thing of love or devotion, could bear to look at. And yet if we believe that the end we are to keep in view in our own lives is this of self-annihilation, we either must make this change in the image we profess to copy, or else forget it altogether and fix your eyes only upon ourselves. Nor is this all, as the history of the Quakers has proved. This doctrine of self-sacrifice and self-annihilation, when it has not led them into conscious self-righteousness and self-glorification, has oc- casioned a miserable confusion respecting their own lives and duties. If the Spirit of Christ, they have said to themselves, be leading us to entire crucifixion, how can wTe resist Him by keeping alive any pe- culiar affection or faculty 1 And yet the same conscience which seemed to enjoin this duty, said also, How dare you crush those powers, energies, and afTections which God has given you, and of which you are to render an account to Him ? The difficulty is most practical, the contradiction most agonizing. And the fruits of it to those who have witnessed it have been as distressing as to those who have been exercised by it : one part of them, thinking that such feelings must be the consequence of a dark superstition, 316 SIGNS OF A fly to infidelity or indifference ; another, more earnest and sincere, seeing that the sacrifice of Christ has been lost sight of in these efforts after self-sacrifice, have violently denounced all such efforts as godless and vain, and adopting sound language respecting the all- sufficiency of the one sacrifice, have made it a foundation for Antinomian doctrine and practice. But if we kept this thought steadily before us, that the hallowing of God's name is the end for which our Lord lived and for which we are to live ; that to give Him thanks and praise for that which He is, and for that which He has done, and so to enter into the perception and apprehension of that which He is and that which He has done, is the highest felicity which we can attain ; that our Lord who was one with the Father did in all the acts of his life exhibit this perfect sympathy with Him and delight in Him, and submission to Him ; that the voluntary sacrifice of his body to death was the final and consummate act of sympathy, delight, submission ; that as self-will and disobedience are the obstacles to the communion of men with their Creator so are they obstacles to communion with each other; that the same act therefore which removed the only obstacle to the one communion removed also the obstacle to the other ; that the cross of Christ is the centre point of all fellowship ; that while we seek our fellowship there, affirming ourselves to exist only as members of Christ's body, and to derive our life from Him, we may find strength habitually to deny ourselves according to his ex- ample— we surely obtain an idea of Christianity altogether differ- ent from the other, and yet one which includes all the practical truth of it, and which must have hovered as we know it did hover before the minds of the early Quakers, in order that they might be able to conceive their own narrow and fragmentary notion. A person who lives in the light of this truth must look upon the sac- rifice of Christ as distinct from all other sacrifices, because it is only by means of it that we are brought into the presence of God or are made one body. He cannot look upon the sacrifice of Christ as separate from any other sacrifice, because he conceives all sacrifices to derive their worth and meaning from it. He must regard self- sacrifice as the necessary element of a Christian life. He cannot permit it to assume a self-conscious and therefore contradictory SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 317 character by regarding it as the means of procuring a blessing, when it is in fact the fruit and the fruition of a blessing already procured. He must consider every Christian obliged to mortify his selfish nature, in order that he may offer an acceptable sacrifice to God. He cannot confound the mortification of the evil nature with the destruction or weakening of a single faculty which God has bestowed. For those faculties are impaired and ruined by the dominion of the evil nature ; they are strongest when it is most subdued. They must be kept strong because God requires them as a sacrifice ; and the more they are sacrificed to Him the more strength do they acquire. We have seen then yet another instance in which the Quaker, refusing to maintain what he calls a mere form, has utterly pre- vented or lost a principle. I do not charge it upon him as a spe- cial sin that he has inverted the notion of sacrifice, has substituted means for ends, has introduced self-righteousness under the name of self-forgetfulness. These tendencies are common to all ages, they are precisely the tendencies of our individualizing natures. In this respect he is not different from the rest of men. The sin which I do charge him with is this; that when Christ had, of his love and mercy to mankind, provided them with a simple and won- derful testimony against these narrow notions and dividing tenden- cies— when He had embodied in a living feast the complete idea of his kingdom, which we, looking at things partially, from differ- ent sides, through the prejudices and false colourings of particular times and places, are continually reducing under some name, notion, or formula of ours, — when He has made this feast ef- fectual for imparting to men a faith far above the level of their ordi- nary theories and speculations, — when He had given it as a bond to all peoples and languages and generations — they chose to fancy that his ordinance signified nothing, that they had a much better storehouse for his truths in their own fine thoughts and spiritual apprehensions. Of this sin I maintain that they are suffering the punishment in the almost entire loss of that Spirituality and that Universality which they hoped by these means to attain. 2. The Zuinglian, the Calvinist, the Lutheran. 1. There is one objection to my statements on this subject in 21 318 SIGNS OF A which pure Protestants would in general agree. They would say that when I call the Eucharist a sacrificial feast I am using danger- ous language, incompatible with the full recognition of Christ's finished sacrifice upon the cross. " If it be sacrificial it must be propitiatory ; the words are convertible ; then what becomes of the doctrine of the Atonement as it was held by the Reformers'?" Starting from this negative point of agreement our opponents soon divide themselves into several classes. To the first the Eucharist appears a mere memorial of a past transaction. When I treat it as a substantial feast, as in some strange way identified with the spiritual things of which it speaks, and as being a channel through which actual blessings are received, I am using phrases for which Scripture gives no warrant, and which are contrary to plain sense and experience. The second class think differently. According to them the true believer does realize in the sacrament an actual mysterious blessing. He not only recollects a past good ; he is conscious of a present good : Christ is with him in the feast. The mistake I have com- mitted consists in supposing the good to exist in the Sacrament apart from the faith of the receiver. Such a doctrine unsettles the very foundation of Protestant Christianity. The third party by no means agree in this opinion. They think that the Sacrament has a reality in it which it does not receive from the mind of the partaker. Christ is actually consubstantiated with the elements. The error of the principle I have maintained consists in this, that it supposes us to be brought into a holy and didine Presence, and yet offers no explanation of the way in which so wonderful a transaction takes place. Before I consider the first objection, in which Zuinglians, Lu- therans, and Calvinists agree, let me remind my readers of the re- marks which I made under the last head. I affirmed that Quaker history had proved the incredible danger which results from sup- posing that our Lord's sacrifice is merely a pattern or example of our sacrifices, or merely the power by which these sacrifices are effected, it must have an entirely distinct character ; otherwise it is of no worth as an example or as a power. And I maintained further that this distinct character, in virtue of which it is an ex- ample and a power, is exhibited in this Sacrament, and that by SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 319 losing this Sacrament the Quakers have lost the sense of it. I think these assertions hardly bear out the suspicion that I confound the sacramental act, — an act performed by men and therefore their act, by the hypothesis one of our sacrifices, — with the sacrifice of Christ ; or suppose the necessity of the one to prove the other incomplete. Every word I have used leads to precisely the opposite conclusion. I have maintained that because the sacrifice had once for all accom- plished the object of bringing our race constituted and redeemed in Christ, into a state of acceptance and union with God, therefore it was most fitting that there should be an act whereby we are admitted into the blessings thus claimed and secured to us. And because those blessings were not given to the generation which lived in the days of our lord's incarnation and death, but to all genera- tions, therefore is it fitting that this act should be renewed through all generations; and because those blessings do not belong to one moment of our existence but to every moment, therefore is it fitting that the act by which we receive them should continually be re- newed by us during our pilgrimage on earth. When we say then that our feast, like that of the Passover, is sacrificial, we do not mean that it does not commemorate a blessing which has been fully obtained and realized ; if we did we should violate the analogy in the very moment of applying it ; for the Passover did comme- morate a complete deliverance and the establishment of a national state in consequence of that deliverance. But as that deliverance was accompanied with a sacrificial act, and by a sacrificial act accom- plished,— and yet in this passover the act was perpetually renewed, — because in this way the nation understood that by sacrifice it sub- sisted, and consisted, — and because by such a renewal its members realized the permanent and living character of the good that had been bestowed upon them, so it is here. The sacrifice of Christ is that with which alone God can be satisfied, and in the sight of which alone He can contemplate our race ; it is therefore the only meeting- point of communion with Him ; but this communion being estab- lished, it must be by presenting the finished sacrifice before God that we both bear witness what our position is and realize the glory of it; otherwise we have a name without a reality, and with the words 'finished and complete' are robbing ourselves of the very thing 320 SIGNS OF A which makes it so important that we should prize them and preserve them. Why these considerations have been overlooked by Protestants I think will be evident from the remarks which were made in the former part. The worth of Protestantism consisted in this, that it asserted the distinct position of each man, affirming that he was a person and not merely one of a mass. This truth had been work- ing itself out into clearness for many centuries, but the process was a strange and painful one. The conscience is that which tells each man he is a person, making him feel that which he has done in past time to be his own, giving him an awful assurance of identity, responsibility, permanence. Overburdened with the sense of evil, it sought for a remedy ; it was commanded to perform certain ser- vices in the hope of rinding one ; with each attempt the sense of moral evil increased. The Reformers found that the whole scheme was a delusion. The services presumed that freedom of conscience which men sought to acquire by them ; without it they were not true godly services. The emancipation of the conscience was therefore that which they sought as the step to all good ; they de- clared that by faith in Christ, grounded upon acts of complete redemption done on their behalf, they could alone obtain it. How true this language was, what a curse had come upon the Church through the denial of it/howr necessary it was that, at that time especially but also at all times, it should be proclaimed, I have contended again and again. But it is equally certain that as the Quakers believe self-sacrifice, so the Reformers believed the eman- cipation of the conscience to be not a necessary condition of our moral being but the end of it. Whatever contributed to this end was necessary, whatever did not contribute to it was worthless. The belief of Christ's sacrifice upon the cross was that which had given peace to their consciences ; that it had any purpose save that of giving peace to the conscience was more and more forgotten. And therefore it became necessary to explain how it accomplished this purpose. Then began all the theories about sacrifice, satisfac- tion, and imputation, which I spoke of as at once so fatal to the principles of the Reformation and to the practical life of Christi- anity, as affording no comfort to the humble heart, as leading to all SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 321 disputes and separations, as preparing the way for the infidelity of the eighteenth century. These hungry notions of the understand- ing being substituted for the clear, simple belief of the Reformers, that we are adopted into Christ by Baptism and are therefore children of God and may draw nigh to Him in all duties and ser- vices, confessing the sins which have polluted us and separated us from Him, turned everything into confusion. Men knew that they were not approaching God with pure consciences ; the Reformers said that if they did not, the service was a mockery ; they therefore sought hither and thither for some better kind of faith which could give them relief; not finding it, they deemed the whole Gospel to be a dream and fable. 2. But that which lay beneath all these dark imaginations and sad results was I believe the imperfect apprehension which the Re- formers themselves had of the nature of the Communion. This feast, says the Zuinglian, is nothing but the memorial of a past transaction. That it is the memorial of a past transaction is of course assumed in every word I have said. If it were not it could have no pretence to the name of Eucharist ; it would bear no analogy to the Passover. But the Passover had not merely reference to the past. The Jew had been brought out of Pharaoh's government and brought under God's government. In commemorating the past emancipation of his nation he claimed for himself a privilege which belonged to it then. It would, I think, be insulting: the Zuinglian to suppose that he thought the Christian ordinance, in this respect, different from its predecessor. He is particularly practical and ra- tional; he must thereforeyknow well that no men ever did or ever could celebrate with the least heartiness and afTectionateness, an event which they did not suppose in some sense to be the cause or the commencement of an improved condition of things, that con- dition of things being one with which they were in some way connected. The Zuinglian then cannot mean by his words " Sim- ple memorial" that there is nothing of present continuous interest in it; if he did he would suppose, contrary to all his professions, that our Lord's religion imposes, as a test of obedience, a most dry, dreary, unmeaning ceremony. But if he allows, as of course he will, that certain effects have followed from our Lord's death, in which we are partakers, and that these effects, and not merely the 322 SIGNS OF A cause which produced them, are recalled to us by this feast, then the question immediately occurs, What are these effects ? The great effect which we believe to have proceeded from it, that in which every other is included, is that thereby we are made capa- ble of entering into the presence of God ; that a mercy-seat is re- vealed to mankind, where his Maker may meet with him. Sup- posing this were so, this must surely be one of the effects which is brought to our recollection by the Eucharist. I do not object to the word recollection ; there is nothing in it which is not ap- plicable to a Living Actual Presence. What I plead for is the duty of recollecting that presence in the Eucharist, because it is there. But the Zuinglian will ask, Why there, and not elsewhere? The question may bear two constructions. It may mean, Why may we not feed upon the sacrifice of Christ at all times, and thus enter into the presence of Him who perfectly delights in that sacrifice ? Or it may mean, God is omnipresent ; why then are we not always in his presence 1 Evidently these two thoughts are of the most different kind, and originate in most different states of feelin g The first suggests to us the highest standard of perfec- tion which a Christian can propose to himself, and yet a standard which, if what I have said be true, must be a most real and reason- able one: for that the Church is brought into the presence of God, is the first principle of the New Dispensation, the one which is especially involved in this sacrament; and if every one of us ought to consider himself a member of the Church, this wonderful privilege belongs to us, not in proportion as we raise ourselves to some individual excellence, but in proportion as we renounce all such distinctions, and yield ourselves to the Spirit who dwells in the whole body. What then I should say, in reference to this view of the case, is precisely what I have said in reference to the Quaker doc- trine. If we acknowledge that the light is somewhere concen- trated, that it reveals itself to us in some way which it has chosen ; that the revelation is not for us only, but for all ; if we make this acknowledgment practically, we are at least in the right road to the realization of that blessing which it is so truly affirmed that we ought to seek. Otherwise we shall fancy that we produce this presence by our acts of meditation or faith ; we glorify ourselves SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 323 for these acts, and for a reality we get a dream ; then we gladly betake ourselves to the other doctrine, which comes forth with the boast that it asserts " the Omnipresence of the Deity." So I believe it has happened with the Zuinglians. An early disciple of the school, attaching an almost superstitious veneration to the Bible, would at once have rejected this phrase as incompati- ble alike with its letter and its spirit. He would have asked how it could be reconciled with the words of the book of Genesis, which speak of God as meeting Adam in the garden, as coming down to see the tower which men had builded, as appearing to Abraham at the tent-door? A Zuinglian of the next century would have learnt perhaps to use the phrases, " figures," " eastern allegories," and such like, in reference to these passages. Still he would have said to himself, " Honest men use allegories and figures for some purpose ; they mean something by them ; it is a truth which they wish to convey. But if I admit these phrases, 1 ubiquity,' 6 omnipresence,' in their ordinary sense, I must sup- pose the word of God less honest and true than the words of men ; for these stories, instead of implying or hinting a truth, involve the direct contradiction of one." But a Zuinglian of the third century will have mastered all these difficulties. He will at once dispose of these scriptural expressions, by calling them 4 anthro- pomorphic,' or indications of a low state of civilization ; or with less honesty he will pass them over altogether, only assuming that the phrase, " Omnipresence of the Deity," must be good and true, whatever else, either in the early thoughts and feelings of men, or in the revelations to which these have been leading, should happen to be false. Let us consider then for a moment the philosophy of this phrase. It has been adopted to convey the impression that the limits of space are not applicable to a divine and absolute Being. But does it convey this impression to any one who is capable of reflecting upon his own thoughts ? Is " everywhere" less a word of space than " somewhere V9 Did the ancients less imprison the Divine Essence in forms, when they spoke of it as inhabiting every tree and flower, than when they viewed it in the person of a Jupiter sitting on the Thessalian mount 1 No ! in proportion as they attached personal qualities to their Jupiter, in proportion as 324 SIGNS OF A they believed that he was capable of loving and hating, and that he had the feelings of a father, they were conceiving of him in- finitely less under the limits of space (and of time also) than when they were translating his name by " the air," and regarding him as a subtile fluid diffused through every portion of the universe. In the one case they were dreaming of a Spirit with whom men might converse ; a Spirit indeed mixed of good and ill — their own image — but still to be apprehended by that which is spiritual in man : in the other case their thoughts were wholly physical ; not the less so for being rarefied and subtilized ; or if there wras any thing else in them, it was what they derived from the older faith. In strict conformity with this principle is that passage of our Lord's teaching which is so often quoted to prove a very different doctrine. He told the woman of Samaria that a time was coming when neither on Mount Gerizim nor at Jerusalem should men wor- ship the Father. He does not give as the reason, " God is every- where;" but He rises at once to the higher level ; He says " God is a Spirit," and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. And He connects with these wTords, what would seem to modern thinkers the most direct contradiction of them : " We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews." Unquestionably such language would have been utterly inconsistent with the Omnipresent doctrine ; it was nowise inconsistent with the doctrine " God is a Spi- rit." Every step in the Jewish revelation and history had presumed that truth, and had been preparing the way for the full manifestation of it. Every step of it had been more fully bringing out the idea of God as the Holy One, as the Moral Being, the object of trust and awe and reverence. And in nothing had this idea been more ex- pressed, than in those arrangements which seemed to localize the Divine Presence. Because He was the Holy One. He must not be worshipped in all the forms of nature and visible things ; He must be viewed as distinct, personal ; He must be approached, in the temple, through the priest with the sacrifice. By all these means, now regarded as so sensual, men were taught that it was not with their senses that they were to apprehend God ; that it was that in them which desires truth and holiness which must seek Him, which by a wonderful method He was drawing towards Himself. And therefore, though simple people who had sought God without the SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 325 law, might be far better prepared to welcome Him who brought their sins to their mind, and told them all things that ever they did, than the proud idolater of the law could ever be; yet those who had profited by the law, those who were Israelites indeed, and without guile, those who had served God day and night in the temple, and waited for the consolation of Israel, were far better prepared than any others could be to see the glory of God in the man Christ Jesus ; to feel that there was no contradiction in the perfectly Holy One inhabiting a body of human clay ; that it was a low, carnal, sensual notion of the Godhead, one which really identified Him with physical things, and therefore subjected Him practically to the laws of space, which made it seem to be a con- tradiction. I maintain, then, that the highest, clearest, most spiritual, most universal idea of God which any creature can attain to, is not that which he receives from a dream about the attribute of omnipre- sence, but that into which he enters when he contemplates the fulness of truth and holiness and love, the absolute and perfect Being pleasing to identify Himself with a human soul and body, to suffer with them, to raise them out of death, to raise them to glory. We have not here an attempt to merge complete spirituality and distinct locality — each of which is demanded by man's reason, each of which is necessary to the other — in a wretched abstraction called ubiquity, a notion vacant of all substance and reality, only serving to puff up the mind with the vague consciousness of possessing a great idea, which it really needs but has missed altogether. I should be scrupulous about the use of such language as this, in reference to a phrase which is so prevalent among religious people, and which may therefore have some sacred associations connected with it, if I did not see that it had been the means of perplexing the minds of little children, of making moral and Christian education almost im- possible, of introducing infinite vagueness and weakness into our pulpit discourses, of preparing men's minds for a settled and hopeless pantheism. That it has also been the means of lowering and con- founding our feelings about the Eucharistic feast, is implied in all its other effects. But here it has met with an enemy able to cope with it. The impression that this sacrament is a reality, in spite of all men's attempts to prove it and make it a fiction, has kept alive 326 SIGNS OF A the belief that the presence of God is a truth and not a dream ; and that we may enter into it in a better and truer way than by fancy- ing ourselves in it, when we are only indulging pleasant sensations and high conceits.* But if I maintain so strongly that it is only with the Spirit that we can hold communion with a spiritual Being, how do I differ from the Calvinists, who admit that there is a presence in the sacra- ment to those who believe ? I do not think that I differ from them except when they differ from themselves. I no more suppose that our spirits can perceive a spiritual object without faith, than that our eyes can perceive a natural object if they be blind. Faith is as much that exercise in which the spirit is and lives, as sight is the exercise in which the eye is and lives. What more does the Cal- vinist require ? He requires that we should suppose there is no object present unless there be something which perceives it ; and having got into this contradiction, the next step is to suppose that faith is not a receptive, but a creative power ; that it makes the thing which it believes. We have seen what a tendency to this be- lief there has been among all Protestants ; but we have seen also that there were characteristics in the creed of the Calvinist which ought especially to have delivered him from it. His principle is to refer every thing to the will of God, to suppose that nothing originates with the creature. How then has he fallen into an hypothesis ap- parently so foreign from his deepest convictions ? He has been driven into it by his habit of resolving his belief of the Divine Will into his doctrine of individual Election. He cannot suppose that God has any higher end in his manifestations than the redemp- tion and sanctification of particular men ; the idea, therefore, of the God-Manhood, of God manifesting Himself in the person of his Son. shrinks and dwindles into a mere expedient for accomplishing his objects of mercy towards the favoured members of the race, and by necessary consequence the belief that He has devised a means whereby men, as members of a body, may apprehend Him who is * Mr. Coleridge has expressed rdl that I have been saying on this momentous subject in these striking words : " All this comes from the young men of this day having been educated to understand thc^Divine Omnipresence in any sense rather thnn the alone safe and legitimate one, the pkesknce of all things to God." — Aids to Reflection, p. 398 ; and consider the whole passage from p. 388 to p. 401. SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 327 the head of the body, loses itself in this strange attempt to conceive a presence which is not a presence till we make it so. Still it is a curious and interesting fact, that the form and principle of Calvin's doctrine, as distinguished from his system, was mainly upheld by his faith in this sacrament ; and that when his followers approxi- mated, as of necessity they did ; more and more nearly to the Zuinglian doctrine on this supject, the system became more and more prominent and exclusive. It is a great transition to go from either of these views to the Lutheran, wherein the actual presence of Christ as the ground of faith, and not as grounded upon it, is so unequivocally asserted. It might seem that in doing so I must change the character of my statements ; that whereas I have hitherto been endeavouring to assert this presence against those who deny it, I must now, if I discover any difference with this class of Protestants, point out the danger of carrying a true principle to its extreme. But I shall make no such change, and I see no such danger. I complain of the Lutheran, as I do of the Zuinglian and the Calvinist, for seeking the deliverance of the individual conscience as an ultimate end ; and therefore for failing to acknowledge the completeness and integrity of the bless- ing which Christ has bestowed upon his Church. Whatevealogical perplexity the Lutheran has fallen into ; whatever violence he has done to the understanding by his theory ; whatever of confusion he has introduced between the sensible and the spiritual world, is, as I conceive, the consequence of his not taking the language of our Lord and of his Apostles in a sufficiently plain and literal sense. Our Lord says, " This is my body." St. Paul addresses the Ephe- sian converts as sitting in the heavenly places with Christ. He tells the Philippians that their bodies shall be made like unto Christ's glorious body. Surely this is Christianity. It is the Gospel of the deliverance of the spirit and soul and body from all the fet- ters by which they are held down, and prevented from fulfilling each its own proper function — from maintaining their right relations to each other. And this emancipation is connected with and conse- quent upon, our union, as members of one body, with Christ, the crucified, the risen, the glorified Lord of our race. Now, if these be the privileges of Christian men, and if these privileges, what- 328 SIGNS OF A ever they be, are in this sacrament asserted and realized, what a low notion it is, that we are invited to hold communion, not with Christ as He is, not with his body exalted at the right hand of God, but with a body consubstantiated in the elements. Think only of the freedom, the fellowship of hope — not only compatible with, but inseparable from, humiliation and fear — im- plied in intercourse with the Prince and Forerunner who has actually broken through the barriers of space and time, whose body has been subjected to the events and sufferings of mortality, and who is now glorified with the glory which He had with the Father before the worlds were, and hereafter to be manifested in the sight of quick and dead. Bring these thoughts before you in connexion with the words, " This is rny body," and with the command that we should show forth his death till He come ; and then reflect, if you can, upon the logical dogma of Consubstantiation, the notion that all these blessings do in some way dwell in the bread and wine. Surely what we need is, that they should be made a perfectly trans- parent medium, through which His glory may be manifested, that nothing should be really beheld by the spirit of the worshippers, save He into whose presence they are brought. For this end the element require a solemn consecration from the priest, through whom Christ distributes them to His flock ; not that they may be clothed with some new and peculiar attributes ; not that they may acquire some essential and miraculous virtue, but that they may be diverted from their ordinary uses, that they may become purely sacramental. No doubt the world is full of sacraments. Morning and evening, the kind looks and parting words of friends, the laugh of childhood, daily bread, sickness and death ; all have a holy sa- cramental meaning, and should as such be viewed by us. But then they have another meaning, which keeps this out of sight. If we would have them translated to us, we need some pure un- troubled element, which has no significancy, except as the organ through which the voice of God speaks to man, and through which he may answer, " Thy servant heareth." Such we believe are this bread and wine when redeemed to his service : let us not deprive them of their ethereal whiteness and clearness by the colours of our fancy or the clouds of our intellect. SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 329 Rat ionalist ic 0 bjecticm. The philosophical objections to the Eucharist in our day will generally take some such form as this. " The Christian mysteries are evidently a continuation and adaptation to new circumstances of those which formed such an important element in Pagan worship. It would be wrong to say of either, that no meaning is involved in them, that they are merely the inventions of priestcraft. Unques- tionably the Samothracian worship did express, not only to those who took part in it, but to the Greeks generally, something deep and awful, something which lay beyond the region of their sense and ordinary experience. The priests availed themselves of the feelings respecting the invisible which are so curiously wrought into our being, sometimes for a good purpose, sometimes for an evil one. As long as their own faith lasted, they did much to keep alive what was good in the minds of their countrymen ; the mis- chief was, that they continued to practise the rites long after it was possible to attach any value to them ; hence insincerity in them- selves and growing superstition and debasement in those who looked up to them. Then the old forms of religion passed away, and after an interval of mere skepticism, some new one, suitable to the stage of progress which the world had reached, was of neces- sity introduced ; this, of course, must have its mysteries. They were destined to pass through the same process as the others; first honestly received as the symbols of that which men's hearts and consciences dreamed of, then sinking into mere impostures. The effort to speak of them now as if they had any reality or signifi- cance is a deceitful effort, — in persons of any intelligence, a con- sciously deceitful one ; in others, an instance of the mad fanaticism which seeks to ' galvanize' that which has been long dead." That there is much plausibility in this statement, and that there are some undoubted truths in it, few will question. The danger is, that one set of persons being shocked at the conclusion, should not dare to ask themselves what the truths concealed in it are, and should therefore go away wilh an uncomfortable sense of being only half honest in a service which they nevertheless feel that they cannot part with ; and that another class, taking as little pains to sift as- sertions which come to them with such an air of evidence and wis- dom, should adopt them as the satisfactory explanation of difficul- 330 SIGNS OF A ties which seem half historical, half personal, and which, if they can but be cleared out of the history, may, it is hoped, cease to perplex us in our own lives. Let it then be conceded at once. 1. That there is a point of connexion between the Christian myste- ries and those of the old world. 2dly, That the priests in the old world did, as it has been said they did, partly keep alive in the wor- shippers a sense of what is true and unchangeable, partly sanctify and perpetuate the transitory notions and degrees of knowledge which belonged to their own or a previous stage of civilization. 3dly, That the priests in the old world did, as it is reported of them, gradually become deceivers both of others and themselves. 4thly, That neither of these evil tendencies has been confined to the hea- then world, but has been manifested just as strongly in Christian Europe, and has connected itself especially with the sacrament of which we are speaking. 5thly, That we are not, any of us, free from either of these tendencies now; that we are as liable to them, and as likely to fall into them, as our forefathers in any age. 6thly, That the temptation to practise those galvanic experiments upon obsolete customs, which have been alluded to, has been strong at all times, and may, on some accounts, be particularly strong at this time. All these concessions I make without a moment's hesitation, and I will now proceed to examine them in detail. 1st. It is not pretended that the resemblance between the old mysteries and the Christian mysteries consists in any similarity of actual rites or practices. It lies, according to the statement of these philosophers, in the deep acknowledgment which there has been in all ages of a something which the senses cannot grapple with, and which is most awful and necessary for men. That this feeling belongs to the most permanent part of our being ; that it cannot satisfy itself; that of every faith, and every society, the deepest principle must be mysterious: this is admitted by both parties. Thus much is involved, and so far as I can see, no more is involved, in the assertion, that the mysteries of Eleusis have that which corresponds to them in the Christian Church. 2ndly, The confusion in the minds of the ancient priest, as well as of the ancient worshippers, was of this kind. He believed in an awful Being above man, and not cognizable by the senses ; he believed in an outward universe speaking to the senses. Whe- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 331 ther that Being, and this world, were distinct or the same ; whether he stood apart in his own awfulness, or was to be seen in the out- ward forms, or was to be recognised in the hidden powers and life of the universe; whether he was nearer to man, according to the faith of the heroic ages, or to the world in which man dwelt, were the puzzles which nothing could solve, and which the confused indefinite character of the mysteries well expressed. Hence that mixture of a permanent faith with transitory notions, which is so often referred to. The physical world was an unknown unexplored world. Sensible observations, which were, of course, various in every region, were the groundwork of all the study respecting it ; these observations were generalized into theories ; these theories became parts of the sacerdotal theology. Its nature was neces- sarily therefore determined by localities, and alterable writh the increase of experience. But being grafted upon that which was not changeable, it was treated as if it possessed the same sacred- ness ; and both flourished and suffered together. Hence — 3dly, We are able to explain the causes of that insincerity which distinguished the later from the earlier priests. The moral aspects of the worship ; the reverence for that which the inner man desires ; the affections and sympathies which can be rendered to that which is personal, and strictly speaking only to that — these were most strong in the infancy of nations : the sense of the absolute and the unapproachable lay beneath these feelings, but was not brought out into distinct consciousness. The physical notions which were attached to these acknowledgments of moral relations were of a simple kind, directly deduced from simple sensible observations. In process of time, the one set of feelings became weaker and baser ; the facts of the other kind, and the inferences from them, were mul- tiplied. The remnants of ancient faith, and still more of ancient fear, became inextricably combined with these ; human desires and sympathies inseparably attached themselves to, and embodied themselves in, visible things ; these became the real objects of worship in spite of an ever struggling conviction, that they were not meant to be so, and that the ceremonies and mysteries which had been handed down were not strictly appropriate to them. Meantime the philosopher having enlarged his sphere of outward observation, having felt an impenetrable depth, as well as an un- 332 SIGN'S OF A definable extent in the world around him, having detected incon- sistencies in the anthropomorphic notions of his countrymen, having crushed his own human longings, and lost his sympathies with individual men, begins to speak of the world as the one great mystery. That which he expresses in abstract language, is really the habit of thought in. the age generally. The priest secretly confesses that it is his own ; but, either from fear, from affection and reverence, from an honest conviction that he has something which the philosopher has not, from mere ignorance, from all these motives combined, or from lower motives than any of these, he cleaves to the old forms and language, cleaves to them so much the more tenaciously, because he doubts whether one part of them may not be as insecure as another, and therefore dreads lest the loss of any part should involve the loss of the whole. The people, meanwhile, are conscious of wants of which the philosopher takes no account, conscious that they are despised by him. They have no longer any guides to that which is higher and nobler than their own conceits ; these must at all hazards be gratified ; the priest seeks to gratify them, and sinks lower himself, while he drags them down in the attempt. 4thly, It is not difficult for any student of modern history, in both these cases, to perceive the parallel between heathendom and Christendom. If we look at the first ages, we see those deep thoughts concerning God, his being, his unity, his relations to men, which I spoke of in a former section, mixing themselves with, and sometimes almost losing themselves in speculations about the out- ward world and the creatures which inhabit it — speculations derived from no revealed authority, ascertained by no careful study and experiment, founded on no satisfactory data; for the most part, the result of mythological or philosophical traditions. These specula- tions, however, could not be separated by men whose souls and spirits were wholly occupied with divine contemplations from that which is divine. They felt that God must be the author of the outward world, that it must be made for his glory, that there are in it marvellous types of that which is spiritual. They believed, moreover, that the visible and invisible had been brought into close and inseparable union, by the incarnation of the Son of God; that every part of their own lives, and of creation, was to be in- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 333 formed by the New Life which had been manifested ; and they could not understand how they might maintain these principles, and yet not invest with a certain sanctity their own conceptions of the universe. Then came the downfall of that world under which the Fathers lived, and the growth of the new forms of society in Western Europe. By the merciful providence of God, a great part of the treasures of past times was hidden from the Latin and Teutonic nations, that they might not be hindered from following their own peculiar and appointed course of discipline. This disci- pline led them into a class of investigations, upon which the Fathers had only in part entered, or which had been entirely subordinate in their minds to the higher theology — investigations respecting the nature of man, the laws and conditions under which he is and acts. Such inquiries, pursued with earnest and holy feelings, and, as I think, with the most positively beneficial results, as far as their own peculiar sphere of labour was concerned, by the school- men, led, however, to increased confusion in the provinces both of theology and physics. For both alike were viewed through the forms and colours of the human intellect ; the invisible relations which the heart and reason acknowledge, the visible things which the eye perceives, were alike subjected to our conceptions and theories, and treated as inseparable from them. In the sacrament of which we are speaking, the results were so striking as to be a clew to those which meet us in every other direction. In the age of the Fathers there might have been a frequent blending of phy- sical with spiritual language ; not in general arising from any unbelief in the distinct reality and substantiality of that which is unseen, but rather from a desire to invest the outward universe with a portion of its glory. But in the middle age all these ex- pressions must be stiffened into a theory ; logic must inseparably incorporate the theological idea with the physical notion, and must itself claim dominion over both. And then it signified not how much the understanding recoiled at its own invention ; the dogma was established, the sacrament meant transubstantiation, and those who admitted the institution to be sacred, must at all hazards re- ceive the opinion. 5thly, Such being the state of things it is not wonderful, that for a time faith in the sacrament, as a witness of a real commu- 22 334 SlGiNS OF A nion between man and his Maker, should be able to uphold the notion which was appended to it ; that in a later time the extra- vagance of the notion should have served to destroy a faith already from other causes waxing weak ; that the priests should have made desperate efforts to keep both alive together ; that in doing so they should have resorted to arguments which made the evil part of their scheme yet stronger, and obscured still more its purer element ; that the effect upon their own minds, and the minds of their flocks, should have been a still increasing insincerity. Nor must we suppose that these sad effects were stopped by the Refor- mation, or that after the Reformation they were confined to those who remained in communion with Rome. Every great shaking must bring out that which is true and sound in men's hearts, and make the untruth in those who have willingly yielded to it more palpable as well as more actually dominant. The first effect, I make no doubt, took place in the hearts of many Romanists. They were thrown back upon their higher moral principles ; these they thought were invaded by the new doctrines ; these could not be sacrificed on account of any intellectual puzzles and contradictions. On the other hand, a more conscious and direct identification of the formula with the principle must have been the consequence of the decrees of the Council of Trent upon those who yielded to them, and a disposition to invent some antagonist formula would have been excited by the same cause in the reformed bodies. While the controversies which these attempts awrakened were proceeding in the religious circles, men in general became occupied with that new class of thoughts to which I alluded in my first part. The principle upon which the outwTard world had been hitherto investi- gated was shown to be impracticable ; men were taught how they might study it in itself, without imputing to it their own concep- tions ; the new method wras rewarded with the most signal disco- veries ; gradually, as I observed, a pursuit which had produced, and which promised such grand results, took the place of every other. This alone was supposed to be founded upon any sure data ; if there were any other religion, it could only be examined accord- ing to these data. Of course all the physical mixtures which had intruded themselves into theology, were scornfully rejected ; this was the first step. The next was a disbelief in those forms and SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 335 conceptions of the mind itself, which had so much darkened the face of nature. And since the Romanist theology was inseparably interwoven with both physics and logic ; the Reformation theolo- gy not much with physics but even more with the forms of the un- derstanding ; there grew up an almost unavoidable suspicion of both. And this suspicion might only have been profitable, as in the end I trust it will prove, if along with it there had not arisen that entire disbelief in spiritual realities, of which moral corruption was the primary, the pride of physical speculation only the secon- dary, cause. This incredulity found its way into the hearts of the priests of both communions. In some it had the effect of inducing a general latitudinarianism, a willingness to abandon all ancient forms, a tolerance of all kinds of language, because there seemed to be no truth to which any of them was pointing. In others it oc- casioned a pertinacious clinging to every thing which had been, through old tradition or modern innovation, identified with theolo- gical principles. The root of these evils was the same in the third age as in the first. God and the world were confounded. That which the spirit of man demands for its satisfaction, that which hu- manity seeks after as its object, was identified with the visible things over which the spirit is meant to rule, in which humanity is meant to see the image of those realities that surpass it. Hence the mysteries of Christianity, which the first age had sought to connect with misunderstood terrestrial things for the sake of glori- fying them, which the second age had connected with those forms and conceptions of our own minds, wherein physical things had been hitherto contemplated, were in the third age described as ut- terly unmeaning by the wise and prudent, who had learnt the right method of studying nature and the impositions which the mind practises upon itself, — were held fast with a loving but trembling faith by the poor and the childlike, who, amidst all perplexities will not forsake that which their hearts tell them that they need. 6thly, I have traced then the causes and the progress of the confusion which is common to the history of the pagan and the Christian world. And now the question occurs, who are likely to fall into this confusion in our day, and by what means is it to beavoid- ed ? I by no means deny that we, the priests of theChristian coven- ant are in danger of falling into it. We hear many denials all around 336 SIGNS OF A us; we are told that things are obsolete, which we feel were never so much needed as now ; we are informed that what is objective, is nothing worth, and we find from the history of the world that, the subjective notions and fancies of men have brought all kinds of perplexities into it. We observe a continual inclination to reject that which seems to us solid and precious, and we are threatened that this inclination is to increase indefinitely. What so natural as that we should throw ourselves back upon the past, that we should pledge ourselves to what we think a determined resistance to the spirit of the age — not only seeking to retain what we have, but to recover what we have lost ; that we should number among our losses the apprehensions respecting the physical world, which be- long to the infancy of society, the logical systems which grew up in its boyhood ; and that we should think the effort to regain these a proof of our reverence for God's sacraments, an acknowledg- ment of their permanent and real character ? Such feelings, I say, are most natural, and just so far as we yield to them we shall un- questionably try to galvanize the habits and notions of a foregone period. But why should we not yield to them 1 I answer, Because in doing so we show that we are not free from the spirit of the age, but are infected by it; because in doing so, we show that we are not impressed with the permanence and reality of God's sacraments, but have yielded to the prevailing skepticism respecting them. For what is the spirit of the age, as it exhibits itself in those philoso- phers whose objections we are now considering ? I have endea- voured, in a former part of this work, to show that no persons are so disposed as they are to confound God with the world, — to look at this visible universe, with its mysterious powers and properties, as the real Being, or at least as the greatest manifestation of the real Being. This pantheistic tendency is especially our tendency at this time ; and this has been in all past times the source of that confusion between the permanent and the transitory, the essential and the accidental, which we are told, and rightly told, to beware of. And therefore Christian priests will not be the only galvani- zers. It is to the philosophers of the age following the promul- gation of Christianity, to Plotinus and Porphyry, and Jarablichus, that we are indebted for the most remarkable galvanic experi- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 337 ments on record. They tried to reproduce the old Pagan forms, ex- pressly as a means of giving a body to their philosophy, which otherwise they felt that it had not, and as a means of resisting the progress of the new kingdom. There are symptoms of the same inclination among us now. We shall see more and more of them. Pantheism never has existed, and never will exist, in that naked essential character which it affects. It will beget idolatries, and since the imagination of man has well nigh exhausted itself in that kind of production, these idolatries will not be new, but old. How may they be withstood ? I believe in no way so effectually as by the simple putting forth of this Sacrament, not clothed with a number of fantastic rites and emblems, but in its own dreadful grandeur, as the bond of a communion between heaven and earth, — as a witness that man is not a creature of this world, but has his home, his citizenship in another, — as a witness that his spirit is not the function or creature of his body, and has not therefore need to make out its enjoyments from the things which the eye sees, and the ear hears ; but that his body is the attendant and minister of his spirit, is to be exalted by it, is to bring all visible things under it, — as a witness that the Son of man is set down at the right hand of the Throne of God, and that those who believe in Him, and suffer with Him, are meant to live and reign with Him there. The forms of nature, the forms of the understanding, have striven to reduce this sacrament to their own level ; it remains as a mighty power in God's hands, to raise man above these forms, into com- munion with himself. THE ROMISH SYSTEM. After the remarks under the last head, it may seem scarcely needful that I should vindicate my statements respecting this sacra- ment from the charge of Romanism ; but since I have maintained that the character of the Eucharistic feast is sacrificial, that Christ is really present in it, and that the words of institution are to be taken literally ; since it is very evidently implied in what I have said, that a certain order of persons first received the sacramental elements, and that a certain order ought to administer them now : it may be advisable to show, even at the risk of some repetition, wherein I am opposed to the Romish theory upon each of these points. 338 SIGNS OF A h I need only ask the reader to compare the observations which were made respecting the difference between the Catholic and the Romish idea of Baptism, and the Catholic and Romish forms of worship, with those which have been made in this section respecting the question of sacrifice ; in order that he may perceive the principle which governs all three cases. I complained that the baptized man, according to the Romish theory, only receives a momentary gift, and is not admitted into a permanent state; that the worshipper, according to the Romish notion, is purchasing some future benefit by his acts of devotion, not claiming a blessing which has been already purchased for him. It is impossible that he should not act in strict conformity to these maxims, when he is dealing with the sacrifice which is the foundation of the Christian's state, and the consummation of the Christian's worship. The Eucharistic sacrifice is of course regarded by him as the means of obtaining those advantages and blessings which Christ's sacrifice has not fully procured for us, or which we through our sins and negligence have lost. Such, I need hardly say, is the view com- monly presented of it by Romish writers, and such is the view against which all the attacks of the Reformers were directed ; consequently the doctrine which I have put forward, that this feast derives its peculiarity, deriv es its sacrificial character, from the fact that a complete sacrifice has been offered up for man, is far more formally and practically opposed to Romanism than that which is prevalent in our day. There is no formal opposition between the doctrine which denies the very existence of a Eucharistic sacrifice, and that which affirms it to be the carrying out of an incomplete sacrifice made for us by Christ. The two opinions contradict each other, but they cannot be brought into comparison ; each is con- tinually gaining strength from the denial which is contained in the other ; but what each asserts, or to what test they can be brought, the supporters of them are constantly puzzled to discover. Neither is there a practical opposition, for the Protestants are constantly losing sight of the finished sacrifice of Christ, in their anxiety to assert the importance of human faith ; and the Romanists are con- stantly trying, through a violent effort of recollection, assisted by visible images and presentations, to bring back the very event of our Lord's crucifixion, and all the circumstances attending it; so SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 339 that there is an unconscious confession on the part of the one, that there must be acts of ours in which the blessing of the sacrifice is realized ; on the part of the other, that it is that one sacrifice, and not any repetition of it by us, in which all virtue dwells. I main- tain that the sacrament being acknowledged as the sacrificial feast of the new dispensation, realizes and harmonizes these two truths, satisfies the meaning which the Romanist feels that he cannot part with, and so enables him to cast aside, as degrading, dangerous, and antichristian, that doctrine which has been one of the greatest barriers between him and his Protestant brethren. 2. To the same habit of mind which introduced this view of the Eucharistic sacrifice, we must attribute the entertainment which was given by the Church, after some hard struggles, to the doctrine respecting the transubstantiation of the elements. I have discov- ered the intellectual origin of this dogma in the scholastic philoso- phy ; but that philosophy could never have given it currency, if there had not been a moral predisposition in men's minds to receive it. The cry for some signal proof of condescension to our low estate, the sense of a weakness which could only be met by a mighty act of divine humiliation, — these feelings characterized the middle ages, and constituted their strength. The belief that by these acts the spirit of man was to be raised out of its grave of sense, was to be made capable of actual communion with the invisible and the absolute; this belief hovered about many minds, was conveyed in many emblems and enigmas, was actually grasp- ed by some earnest and thoughtful men, but never really entered into the practical life of the period. To show forth acts of bravery, condescension, sacrifice, and so to glorify God, was the desire of a number ; to inspire others with the same ambition, the aim of a few. But everywhere one may trace the wish to see the likeness of God in visible things, and under earthly conditions, rather than the craving to see Him as He is. I have no need to inquire how far good or evil preponderated in this temper of mind. That it was a very imperfect one, most will be ready to acknowledge ; and that its imperfection laid it open to invasions of gross sensual- ity, is only questioned by resolutely one-sided or one-eyed inquirers. In such a state of mind it was impossible that the thought of com- munion with Christ where He is, should be as distinctly presented 340 SIGNS OF A to the best men in their best moments, as it may now be presented to indifferent men who may very little realize their own vision. The discovery, therefore, of a substitute for this faith, of a way in which Christ might be believed to be present by a fresh act of descent and condescension into the circumstances of human nature, was naturally and eagerly welcomed — the obstacles which the understanding opposed to the opinion readily swept away. What sensuality and death grew out of this notion, were fostered by it, and helped to keep it alive ; what profaneness mingled in the speculations to which it gave rise, how it connected itself with every other shape of idolatry, I think all ecclesiastical history de- monstrates. But I have no belief that the demonstration will be heeded, that facts will not be perverted and explained away, that the natural results of a system will not be treated as if they might be condemned without any reference to the system itself, unless men be led to perceive that there is a spiritual truth which this doctrine has been counterfeiting and keeping out of sight, and to which it is in far more direct antipathy than it ever can be to the different Protestant and infidel notions which have been set up against it. 3. It is evident from these remarks, and from all which 1 have said in this section, that I do not seek to get rid of the papal no- tion respecting a real presence, merely by saying that what is spi- ritual is also most real. I do indeed look upon that proposition as nearly the most important one which a theological student can think of or remember, and also as the one which Romanism is most habitually denying. But I have maintained, that in order to the full acknowledgment of Christ's spiritual presence, we must dis- tinctly acknowledge that He is clothed with a body ; that if wre lose this belief, we adopt a vague pantheistic notion of a presence hovering about us somewhere in the air, in place of a clear spiritual apprehension of a Person in wrhom all truth and love dwell; that the spiritual organ therefore does demand an actual body for its nourishment ; that through that spiritual organ our bodies them- selves are meant to be purified and glorified; that this sacrament meets and satisfies the needs both of the human spirit which is re- deemed, and of the body which is waiting for its redemption. But all these admissions only bring out the difference with the Roman- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 341 ist into stronger relief. To enter into fellowship with Christ as He is, ascended at the right hand of God, in a body of glory and not of humiliation, this must be the desire of a Christian man, if he seek the presence of a real, not an imaginary object, if he desire his body as well as his spirit to be raised and exalted. On this ground then he must reject all theories which involve the imagination of a descent into the elements ; on this ground, also, he must feel that the intel- lectual contradiction which such theories contain, and even boast of, is the counterpart of a spiritual contradiction still more gross and dangerous. 4. I must say a few words before I conclude upon the differ- ence between my views and those of the Romanists, respecting those who administer this sacrament. The pure Protestant express- es his differences in such words as these. The Romanist, he says, unhappily connecting the idea of sacrifice with the Eucharist, ne- cessarily supposes that the Christian Church must have its priests as well as the Jewish ; we rejecting the first idea, of course reject the second. Now as I have so carefully connected the idea of sa- crifice with the Eucharist, it follows from this statement, that if I suppose it to be administered by human hands at all, I must sup- pose those hands to be, in some sense of the word, sacerdotal. Nay, it would seem to follow by almost necessary inference, that if I sup- pose the Jewish sacrifice to have passed into something higher, I must suppose the Jewish priesthood to have passed into something higher. And this in fact is my belief. I do think a Melchisedec priesthood has succeeded to an Aaronical priesthood, even as the power of an endless life has succeeded to the law of a carnal com- mandment. I do think that he who presents the perfect sacrifice before God, and himself and his people as redeemed by that sacri- fice, has a higher function than he had who presented the daily of- fering, or made the yearly atonement before God. I do think he who is permitted to feed the people with this bread and wine has a higher work to do than he who came out of the holy place to bless the people in God's name. And I complain of the Romanists for lowering this office, for depriving it of its spiritual and Catholic character, for reducing it to the level or below the level of that which existed before the incarnation. No honour which is put upon the person of the priest can make amends to him for the de- 342 SIGNS OF A gradation which he suffers by being treated as if he were without the veil, pleading for admission into the presence of God, not claim- ing the privilege for himself and his people of being admitted into it. No emblems which exhibit his own mysterious glory and beau- ty can be any compensation for the loss of the belief that he is per- mitted with open face to behold the glory of his Lord. Above all, the differences which are made between him and his flock, espe- cially that most gross and offensive one, by whatever arguments it may be palliated, of permitting him alone to receive the sacramen- tal wine, do but show that he is not like his Lord, that he is not one of many brethren, but has only the melancholy delight of fan- cying that there are blessings reserved for him in which other men are not sharers. Herein he is far below the Jew. The high-priest believed that he was one of a kingdom of priests ; that he received his garments of beauty and his holy mitre because he was their re- presentative. A Jew would have answered to the complaint of Korah, " Ye take too much upon you, seeing that all the congre- gation are holy, every one of them." * We take this upon us which has been put upon us, because the congregation is holy, and because it would not be holy if we were not consecrated to be wit- nesses and preservers of its holiness.' A Jew could see that the oil upon Aaron's head went down to the skirts of his garments. It is not surely for Christians and Catholics to set up an office in the Church against the Church itself, to set at nought the ascription which they are appointed to offer up in the name of the whole body : "Unto him that loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Fa- ther ; to him be glory and dominion for ever and for ever." But I am intruding upon the subject of the next section. SECTION V. THE MINISTRY. It is commonly observed, that the sacerdotal caste has three in- variable characteristics. It assumes a lofty dominion over the minds as well as the bodies of men, it imposes a very heavy yoke upon both, it is opposed to every thing humane and expansive. SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 343 How much warrant there is for these accusations, every one who reads history must perceive. And assuredly these evil ten- dencies have not been confined to one set of circumstances or one form of religion ; they have manifested themselves in Judea and Christendom as well as in Hindostan. They may therefore be fairly considered as belonging to human nature, and as being especially likely to assail any one who anywhere and under any conditions, assumes the office of a religious guide and authority. That this institution has not been merely fruitful of evil, the im- partial inquirer, especially in the most modern times, is ready to acknowledge. But he rightly observes, that we must not restrict the advantages it has produced to any particular system. Much has been done for civilization by Memphis, and Delphi, and by the Brahmins of the East. And it remains, he says, to be proved, that the idea of the priesthood does not involve tyranny and narrowness, though at certain periods the tyranny may have been useful, the narrowness common to all classes. Undoubtedly this is the real question. If we should find upon inquiry that the fundamental principles of a sacerdotal caste, amidst all its outward varieties, are those we have just set down, it ought to be got rid of as soon as possible ; and it will disappear as soon as truth and honesty have gained the victory, which we at least are bound to believe they will ultimately gain, over fraud and falsehood. If on the other hand it should be found that an idea of the priest- hood, curiously and exactly opposite to that which presumes domin- ion, restraint upon the human spirit, confinement of men within cer- tain districts and habits of thought, to be its objects, is embodied in the forms and language of the Christian Church, we may perhaps ask ourselves whether this may not be the idea after which men in all ages and in all religions have been feeling ; whether the good which is attributed to them have not been the consequence of their attaining to some apprehension of it, the evil they have done, the consequence of their losing sight of it or contradicting it ; whether therefore the triumph of truth over falsehood may not be exhibited in the full accomplishment of this idea, not in the destruction of the institution which has witnessed for it and preserved it. Now these facts are indisputable. 1. The whole sacerdotal caste in Christendom has the name of ministers or servants. 344 SIGN'S OF A From the Bishop of Rome down to the founder of the last new sect in the United States of America, every one who deals with the Gospel at all, or pretends in any sense to have a divine commis- sion, assumes this name as the description of his office. 2. The most remarkable power which these ministers have claimed, and that on account of which the greatest homage has been paid to them, is the power of absolving or setting free. This claim has iu a manner been universal. Luther believed that he was to ab- solve as much as Tetzel. Every person who says that the sole office of a minister is to preach the Gospel, says so because he be- lieves this is the way to absolve. There are most serious differ- ences about the nature of the power and the mode in which it is to be exercised, none at all about the existence of it, and about its connexion in some way or other with the Christian ministry. 3. The third fact is this. In Christian Europe, ever since it be- came Christian, the most conspicuous order of ministers has been one which assumed to itself an universal character. The overseers or Bishops of the Christian Church have felt themselves to be em- phatically the bonds of communication between different parts of the earth. The jurisdiction of each has been confined within a certain district; but, by the very nature of their office, they have held fellowship, and been obliged to hold fellowship, with those who lived in other districts, who. spoke different languages, who were bound together by different notions and customs. Now though such an order may be very far more dangerous, and may have been felt by the rulers of particular countries to be far more dan- gerous than that kind of priesthood which confines itself within a particular region, yet it is evidently of an entirely different kind. Whatever this institution may have effected, it seems to aim at establishing a more extended commerce and fellowship among men. Looking at it superficially, one would say that this ecclesi- astical order imported something nnre comprehensive, more dif- fusive, than any civil order which one can think of, unless it should be some one which attempts universal conquest, and destroys its character as an order by the attempt. And yet this episcopacy has not been merely an accidental addition to, or overgrowth upon other forms of piiesthood. In those countries where it is recog- nised, it has been the root of all other forms, and has been sup- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 345 posed to contain them within it. It has been believed, as a neces- sary consequence of the importance attached to the Eucharist, that an order of men must exist in the Christian Church corresponding to the priests of the oh! dispensation, with the difference that the sacrifice in the one case was anticipatory, in the other commemo- rative. This office has been associated with that absolving power of which I spoke just now. Yet it has been always supposed to be included in that of the Bishop ; and where it is assigned to a distinct class of persons, that class receives its authority from him. In like manner there has been acknowledged in the Church an order whose functions are evidently distinct from either of these ; whose main object is to provide for the bodily wants of men, or only to announce to them spiritual truths. Yet even this office has been understood to be only a delegation of certain powers in- hering in the Bishop, which he has not leisure to discharge, and no person can undertake it, in the countries which recognise episco- pacy, without such a delegation. So that an office implying an intention so very remote from that which the word priest ordinarily suggests to us, would seem to have been the characteristic one in the Christian Church, that which includes all others, and out of which they arise. But I have used the phrase, " the countries in which episcopacy is recognised." It is important, that we should consider what these countries are, lest we should be drawing an inference re- specting the nature of this institution which facts do not warrant. Let, then, the reader call to mind, first of all, the circumstances of the Eastern Church for the last fifteen or sixteen hundred years. Let him think of it at the time Constantinople was in its glory, of the different sects which broke from it, of the horrible contentions which took place between those sects and their common mother. Let them remember the degradation which every part of this Church, and every one of these sects, has suffered from the Otto- man power, and let him then reflect that in whatever countries they may have (Kvelt, to whatever circumstances of good or evil fortune they may have been exposed, whatever strifes may have gone on amongst them, this institution has been preserved by them ail. Let him next consider the different circumstances under which Christianity was preached and adopted in the different na- 346 SIGNS OF A tions of the West, the different influences to which it has been sub- jected, the different characters of the different races which com- pose it; and let him then remember that all these nations, under all these influences, amidst all their conflicts with the eastern part of Christendom, did, without one clearly established exception, preserve this institution till the sixteenth century. Let him con- sider the circumstances of the Reformation leading to the separa- tion of the nations, to a violent conflict with the old system of Europe, to an excessive magnifying of individual faith, and then reflect that this universal institution was preserved in all the Latin nations — among the Teutonic nations in England, in Denmark, and in Sweden ; that it wras rejected, and that not without great re- luctance, in certain parts of Germany, in Holland, in Switzerland, and in Scotland ; that in each of these countries some witness of its existence has been preserved ; that in at least one of them there are those wbo think that it is more necessary now than in any past time. Let it be remembered, further, that this institution has passed over to the continent of America ; that it has established itself in a set of colonies founded by Puritans and Quakers ; that it grew up after the influence of England had ceased in those colonies; that without the least state patronage it is making itself an instrument for diffusing the Gospel from those colonies to many parts of the world. These are the pretensions which Episcopacy makes to the character of a Catholic institution. It is implied in what I have said, that this institution has a char- acter of permanence as well as of universality. It is implied also that this permanence is something different from the permanence of a custom which has first derived its significance from some local accident, and then has perpetuated itself by the care of some body especially created by its conservation. For we have seen this in- stitution maintaining itself amidst the oppositions and contradic- tions of bodies differing most vehemently with each other; we have seen it reappearing when all local habits and customs were adverse to it. How then has it been preserved or seemed to be preserved'? It has been preserved by an act of consecration performed through the agency of three existing Bishops ; signifying, according to the faith of all the nations and ages which have retained it, that the per- son newly entering upon the functions receives the same kind of SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 347 authority and the same kind of gifts as those who were first en- dowed with it. It must be quite evident to the reader, that the facts which we have now been considering, touch the very heart of the questions which I have been discussing in this work. These questions have been, Is there any meaning in the words Kingdom of Christ 1 Do the words mean what they seem to mean ? Are there any facts in the history of the world which seem to show that they denote that which is really and actually existing 'I Now wTe have found a series of facts, all, it seemed to us, bearing to the same point, all proving the existence of an universal and spiritual society ; a society maintaining its existence amidst the greatest perplexities and contradictions ; a society of which all the conditions are inex- plicable unless we suppose it to be connected with, and upheld by, an unseen power. But as all these signs which we have considered hitherto exist for the sake of men, so also they imply the agency of men. And upon the character of this agency must depend the whole character of the kingdom itself. It may be something else, but it is not a Commonwealth, not a kingdom according to any- admitted sense of the word, if it have not certain magistrates or officers. Practically these exist even in those societies which boast most of their self-government ; they have officers whatever be the tenure of their office. And, therefore, we must either give up all that we have previously maintained as untenable, or we must stea- dily consider this question— What kind of officers would be con- sistent with the character of such a kingdom as those other signs speak of? It would seem clear that as all these signs pointed to an invisible presence, and were intended to admit men into it, these officers must be constituted with a view to the same end. They must be intended to bring before men the fact that they are subject to an invisible and universal Ruler. And if so it would seem also necessary that they should exhibit Him to men in that character, and in those offices which He actu- ally came to perforin. If He came not to be ministered unto but to minister, if his exercise of power was a ministry, theirs must be so too. They can look upon themselves in no other light than as ministers ; they cannot suppose their power diminished by this acknowledgment ; they cannot suppose that their power will be 348 SIGNS OF A real, if not exercised with a continual recollection of it. If one chief part of his work in the world was to absolve men from past evil, from the power of present evil, from the danger of future evil; and if there be a continual necessity for all men who come into the world, that they should have this absolution, and if He exercise his powers or make himself manifest in any way through men, one must suppose that they would be called especially to represent Him in this office of Absolver. If his greatest purpose was to bind men together in one family, if the office in which He entered when He ascended on high, was that of Head and overseer of this family; if all his other acts and services to men are implied and presup- posed in this, one must conceive the highest office of his servants would be to exhibit Him in this character, and so to make it known that his kingdom was a real kingdom, and one that ruleth over all. If, finally, Jesus himself when upon earth received a formal and outward designation to the office which He had undertaken, that it might be signified to men on what terms He held it — not as a separate independent Being, but as one with the Father, and hon- ouring Him in all his words and acts — it would seem reasonable to expect that an equally formal and visible designation would bear witness to men, that those offices which are fulfilled for their sakes, by creatures of their own flesh and blood, are not held in virtue of any qualities or merits in those creatures, but are held from Christ and under Christ by persons who can exhibit his character truly only just so far as they perform their work faithfully. But is there any thing in the language of the New Testament which accords with these anticipations and explains these facts. One would think that this language, like that which refers to the institution of Baptism, must lie on the very surface of the record, and yet must connect itself with all its deepest announcements ; otherwise it can be no authority for institutions which pretend to embody the whole character of the new dispensation. A few casual hints could never suffice as the warrant for fallible men to suppose that they were meant to be the ministers of Christ and to present Him before men. Still less could such hints be an excuse fo» sinful men who should take upon them, In God's name, to absolve their brethren. Least of all could they justify the exist- ence of an order, which assumes such a singular position, and SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 349 claims such high functions as the Episcopal. The mere appearance of such an office, even in the time immediately following our Lord's departure from the world, ought not, I think, to be looked upon as a sufficient reason for its claiming to be an estate of his kingdom, if He did not expressly and formally institute it Himself. We turn, then, to the Gospels for the purpose of inquiring whether they offer any guidance upon the subject ; and we are immediately encountered by the history of the selection and ap- pointment of a set of men who were emphatically distinct from all classes which had existed in the Jewish polity. They are, indeed, carefully connected with that polity ; their number shows that they were meant to remind the Jews of the tribes into which their nation had been distributed. They were all Jews, and their first commission was strictly confined to the house of Israel. But these circumstances only make the peculiarity of their office more remark- able. The most evident indications were given to them even from the first, even at the time when they were least capable of under- standing the nature of their service, that it was meant to transgress national limitations. At the same time, even while they were falling into the greatest confusion respecting the place which they were to occupy in the world, even while they had need to be reminded continually that the kings of the Gentiles exercised dominion over them, but that it was not so to be in the Church ; they were still assured, in the strongest language, that they were to perform a wonderful work, and to be endued with wonderful powers ; that he who received them, would receive their Master ; that they were sent forth by Him, even as He was sent forth by the Father. Every one must perceive that these intimations are not scat- tered carelessly through the Gospels, that they form a part of their very substance and tissue. It was in teaching the disciples that those who became as little children were greatest in the kingdom of heaven — that their rule was to be a service — that it was in the acts which accompanied these teachings, that our Lord's own life and image are most distinctly brought before us. Evidently He never separates the thought of training them in their office from that of performing his own. As evidently He is training them to an office ; He is not teaching them to be great saints, to keep up a high tone of personal holiness as if that were the end of their lives. 23 350 SIGNS OF A But He is teaching them that they have a work to do even as He has ; that He is straitened till He can accomplish his ; that they must be straitened till they can accomplish theirs ; and that in trying to accomplish it, they will most find that they are lights of the world, and that they must derive their light continually from Him. So that if we called the four " The Institution of a Chris- tian Ministry," we might not go very far wrong, or lose sight of many of their essential qualities. Above all, one would not lose sight of the different crises in our Lord's life, and of their connec- tion with different discoveries of grace and truth to man. Before the resurrection there was merely the general commission, " Go and preach the kingdom of God. Heal the sick. Cast out devils. Freely ye have received, freely give." Far deeper views of their office were brought out in those conversations which our Lord had with them the night before his Passion ; views of all connecting themselves with the awful facts of which they were to be witnesses, and with the mysterious service which they had been performing. But it was not till our Lord came back from the grave, with the witness and the power of a new life for man, that He breathed upon his disciples and said, " Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose- soever sins ye remit, they are remitted ; whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained." It was not till He was just leaving them that the commission was given, " Go ye into all nations," and the pro- mise, " Lo I am with you always even unto the end of the wrorld." And it was not till He had ascended on high that the powers for fulfilling this commission were confirmed, that a sign was given of the existence of a union which the distinctions of nations and language could not break, that they were declared to be the pillars of an universal church. Now these poor fishermen could not doubt for a moment that these powers belonged to them officially, and not personally ; and therefore the chief question to be considered is this : Did they sup- pose this kingdom was to die with them, or that they were to per- petuate its existence ? Were they to perpetuate it in the manner in which our Lord himself had established it, or in some other man- ner ? Was the change which the new circumstances of the Church necessarily occasioned in the position of those who were to be its ministers, to be a change in the nature of their office and institution, SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 351 or only a change in their numbers and in the circumstances of their jurisdiction ? Supposing the latter to be the case, were those who succeeded to the Apostolic office to reckon that they derived their powers less immediately from Christ, that they were less witnesses of his permanent government, than those who received their first commission from Him while He was dwelling upon earth 1 If these questions be answered in one way, those nations which have pre- served the episcopal institution have a right to believe that they have preserved one of the appointed and indispensable signs of a spiritual and universal society. If they are answered in the other way, it seems difficult to understand how such a universal society can exist at all. The Quaker. But we must consider the arguments of those who think other- wise. The Quaker tells us at once that we have described a formal and not a spiritual ministry ; a ministry of the Old Testament, not of the New. " A true minister is consecrated such by an inward call. The voice of the Spirit, not of men, invites him into God's vineyard. Older and more experienced men may judge whether his vocation be a real one ; but they do not give him his appoint- ment ; still less can they confer one upon persons not chosen by God. Under the old dispensation there was a succession to the office of priest in a certain family. Such an arrangement belonged to the time; it is done away in Christ. And even under the first covenant there was a race of prophets who simply obeyed the divine voice, simply spoke and acted as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The (so called) Church of Christ has adopted the obsolete part of the old system, has rejected the living and spiritual part of it. Lastly, the Christian teacher is fitted for his work by the teaching of the Spirit, not by the preparation of human culture.', Each of these points deserves a careful consideration. 1. It follows from that doctrine of Baptism, which lies at the threshold of our Churchmanship, that we suppose every Christian infant to be taken under the guardianship and education of God's Holy Spirit. In the faith of this truth, the well-instructed parent brings up his child. Whatever of stern discipline he uses to curb its self-will, whatever of tender affections he manifests to call forth 352 SIGNS OF A in it corresponding affections, hath this end, that the subject of his invisible and temporary government may be brought to feel that it is under the government of an unseen Teacher ; that the object of his imperfect and wavering love may perceive that it is unceasingly tended and brooded over by a love which is unchangeable and im- perishable. Which life-giving tru h, when it has dawned upon the mind of the child, will create some blossoms and buds there, upon which the parent will gaze with an anxious but confiding eye. Strange thoughts and impulses before unknown, — wonder respect- ing his own condition. — hopes stretching into infinity, — a deepen- ing sense of ever present evil — a brightening view of an ever-pre- sent Deliverer. Such mingled emotions, as he watches them arising, the foster-father knows assuredly to be indications that his care has not been in vain, and that the boy is learning the secret of his other — his royal — parentage. And gradually he imparts to him the conviction, that not merely his adoption and expected inheri- tance appertain to another region than this, but that all the dim desires and longings which have pointed to them, have been hea- venly inspirations. Joyful and consolatory tidings indeed, — yet, not precious only for their own sake, but as interpreting other feel- ings and impulses which are to arise within him hereafter. For now the questions, What is he ? or, Whither he is going ? are not all that occupy him ; but what relations exist between him and his fellow-men ? how is he to act upon them ? what is his destined vocation ? In pursuing this inquiry, he will remember, first of all, that which he has often been told by his earliest instructors, that just so far as he nourishes all gentle affections within him, and keeps himself from sensual defilement, and seeks the temper of a little child, and thinks on things which are lovely and pure, and main- tains a cheerful heart, and does good according to his opportunity, and strives to avoid noisy excitements of the flesh or the spirit, and is not impatient of present perplexity, or greedy of distinctions, — so far he will be able, in quiet meditation and prayer, to learn the mind of the Spirit, and to know in what part of his vineyard God has destined him to labour. And then, if the circumstances of his out- ward position show him that he is intended to be one of those who minister to the carnal necessities of men, and the apparent end of whose vocation is mercenary, he will be sure that in this station, SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 353 whether esteemed among men or not, he is to glorify God, and vin- dicate his calling from every deserved reproach, maintaining a free, and a noble, and heavenly spirit, amidst all temptations to be sordid and secular. Or if a secret impulse of his spirit, not the less to be heeded because outward influences and early education may have co-operated with it, or have created it, should lead him to those pur- suits which have their basis in science, and require in him a scien- tific insight, as well as all diligence in the study of experiments and facts, — then, whether it be man's physical structure, and the secret powers of his life, and the circumstances of his diseases and decay, which most engage his thoughts, — or whether it be the holy ordinances, by which our social position is upheld, and our wrongs redressed, — or whether he is drawn to look still more comprehen- sively at our different relations, and to meditate on those mysterious powers of sympathy, or fear, or awe, which are the real bonds of human policy, he will feel that it is a Divine Instructor who is marking him out for a physician, a lawyer, or a statesman ; and to the same watchful guidance he must look to direct his intellect while he is preparing for the work, and w7hile he is actually en- gaged in it to preserve him in the fear of God, and in honourable affectionate thoughts of his fellow-men, that he may not dare to follow any low or selfish impulses, or be ever tempted to think of his brethren as the legitimate victims of quackery, chicanery, or party-spirit. Nor can I so far yield to prejudices and feelings which I respect, and which I would not wish to remove from the mind of any Quaker till I can show him what I conceive is the truth which they pervert, as not to carry this principle a step farther, and to maintain, that every soldier of really brave and gentle heart has been led to reflect on the preciousness of national life and the duty of upholding it even at the cost of individual life, awful as that is, and has been taught to dedicate his energies to the preservation of this higher life, not by an evil spirit, but by that same Spirit of truth and love, who, when He would lay the foun- dation of his new kingdom on earth, chose for the first subject and witness of it a Centurion of the Italian band. But, when a young man, studying in all things to approve himself to his great Task- master, finds not in himself any of these particular promptings, but rather a large and general desire to be the servant of his race, — 354 SIGNS OF A when a certain stronger sense is given to him than to others of man's highest destiny, mixed, perhaps, with a less keen perception than in other men would be desirable of those necessities which, though they may be baptized with a heavenly life and adopted into religion, are themselves of the earth, earthy, — when spiritual forms, which the majority have need to see reflected in sensible mirrors, rise up before him in their naked substance and majesty, — when good and evil present themselves to him, not as means to some re- sult, but as themselves the great ends and results to which all is tending, — when the conflict which is going on within himself, leads him to feel his connexion with his kind, — when there is imparted to him a lively sense of temptation, and of its being most perilous to those whose objects and vocation are the highest, — when he has been endued with a certain habit of measuring acts and events, not by their outward magnitude, but according to their spiritual pro- portions and effects, — when he has been taught to reverence poverty and helplessness, — when he has understood that that truth is the highest, not which is the most exclusive, but which is the most universal, — when the immediate vision of God, and entire subjection of heart and spirit to his loving will, seem to him the great gifts intended for man, after which every one for himself and his fellows may aspire ; then, surely, if a strong combination of outward circumstances do not oblige him to what perhaps is a still more glorious, though more painful task of yielding to a wisdom which he adores without understanding, he may conclude that it is to no partial or specific service, but to that one which we emphati- cally call The Ministry , that the Divine Voice is inviting and com- manding him. Thus far, then, our opinion respecting inward calls seems to accord with that of the Quaker, only that we carry it farther. He considers that there is one inward call, which is needful for a Christian, and another which is needful for the Christian preacher. We contend that every Christian should believe himself called to every work in which he engages ; and that except he believe this, the work will be unholy and cheerless, pursued without confi- dence in God or any expectation of high and worthy fruit. Not that in this I mean to explain away the express call of the minis- ter, as if it meant nothing more than what every one pleases it to SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 355 mean ; my wish is rather to maintain, that the language, which we use in reference to the highest pursuit, determines the tone which we should adopt in speaking, or at least in thinking, concerning all our pursuits. Other men may have honourable thoughts and inspi- rations, and may honestly obey them, and silently and implicitly attribute them to their true source. But the minister of God, with fear and trembling indeed, but still without cowardly diffidence, is to declare to himself and to others, the real fountain of that which is within him. He cannot teach others to believe themselves the temples of the living God, if he dare not acknowledge the plain consequences of this doctrine in relation to himself. But then this question remains, — If, in every rightly ordered com- munity, the tradesman, the lawyer, the physician, the soldier, the statesman, believes that the secret influences which determined him to embrace his own vocation in preference to any other, were not themselves his title to enter upon that vocation, but only the pre- disposing motives to seek for such a title, — is the analogy in this instance violated, is the immediate minister of God in a different predicament ? Does the secret call in his spirit make him a min- ister, or does it only set him upon inquiring what is the lawful way of becoming one ? I confess I do not understand what should make the difference. I can see, indeed, that the call is to a higher work. I can see that it has need to be more distinctly apprehend- ed as to its principle and origin, by him whose very outward duty is a spiritual one, than by others. But I cannot see that the differ- ence is one of kind, and that while the Spirit of God in all other cases moves a man to adapt himself to some rule or order, here it teaches him that he has no need of such an order, but that the M motion " is a substitute for it. I should have expected, certainly, that the minister of God, — if his very name be not a mere inven- tion ; if there be any communication between heaven and earth ; if any men be intended or called to teach their brethren in mat- ters directly pertaining to God, — should receive his commission in some very different way from that in which the member of any other profession receives his. I should have expected that some scheme would have been devised, to show that he did not derive his authority from the king of his land, or from any learned incor- poration, or from any limited power whatever. But I should never 356 SIGNS OF A have expected that, whereas in other cases the witness of a man's own mind, and its inward impulses, though most needful for his own satisfaction, though most needful to convince him that he is walking in the road appointed for him, are yet considered wholly inadequate to confer authority, and affirm his position to others, here, in an office especially instituted for the sake of mankind, for the poor and ignorant, — an office in which the individual perform- ing it is to be especially hidden and forgotten, and the majesty of God asserted, — these motions should be all in all, and no token given which all men alike can apprehend, as to the extent and de- rivation of the influence which they are intended to obey. 2. Next comes the question, so often discussed in previous sec- tions, of the relation between the Old and the New Testament. In the Jewish Commonwealth, as the Quaker confesses, we disco- ver at first a strict, definite organization; a priesthood limited to a certain tribe, a place and time appointed for sacrifices, the sacri- fices themselves appointed. Here is a rigid system, the author of which now and then, as in the case of Eli, asserts as well his own prerogative, as the fact, that this, like every system, exists for an end and is not itself an end, by infringing some of its maxims. Yet we know that this divine precaution was not adequate to pre- vent a dead sense of routine, injurious to the working of the sys- tem itself, from creeping over the hearts of the people who were subject to it. Wherefore the next contrivance which wre notice in this celestial machinery, seems intended to counteract this tendency, without any violation of uniformity. When the ecclesiastical con- stitution had been well established, and its principle explained by its operation, a new order of men is raised up, for the express purpose, it seems, of proving that forms and institutions are indications of our relation to God, and means of attaining to intercourse with Him, but neither create the one, nor are substitutes for the other. This being the very intent of the Prophet's vocation, several con- sequences follow inevitably. His functions cannot be defined in a ritual. It cannot be ascertained by a formal law, as in the case of the priest, to what portion of the community he shall belong. Either of these limitations would defeat the end of his existence, he would cease to fill his proper place in the great order. The prophet lives as the witness of a continual presence and power SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 357 dwelling in the nation, which it may forget, but of which it can- not rid itself. He must rise up, as the emblem of the conscience which he awakens, of the law concerning which he testifies ; he must come as a thief in the night upon the guilty soul ; he must not allow it to forget itself in the dizzy whirl of events, or the monotony of observances; he must make it feel that both alike speak of a living person, who is coming out of his place to judge, whose day is at hand. To fasten this fact upon the mind and heart of the people, he must oftentimes do strange acts ; he and his children are for signs and wonders ; he must walk barefoot ; he must carry on a mimic siege ; he must see his wife die and not weep; he must marry an adulteress; by all mean she must break the yoke of familiarity and custom. And yet he is most orderly. From first to last he is a witness for order. The neglect of insti- tutions, the indifference to divine precepts, the recklessness of the everlasting covenant; these are his charges against kings, and priests, and people. If he reveals the in ward law of God, it is in the outward law that he learns its nature and mystery; if he de- sires communion with God, it is in the temple he expects to enjoy it, and to behold his glory ; if he is stricken with a sense of his own iniquity, and of his people's, it is a coal from the altar touch- ing his lips, which purges it away ; the desolation of the beauti- ful city calls forth all his human feelings ; the loss of the Shechi- nah is the key-note to his most melancholy and awful religious musings. Such are the most obvious characterestics of the Jewish prophet, the appointed witness for a spiritual faculty and life in man. Ac- cording to the doctrine, then, that an outward appointment is the great cause of corruption and hypocrisy in the Church, it ought to appear that the race of prophets was far more uniformly pure and exemplary than the race of priests; that the abominations which we know are charged upon the one, had no counterparts among the other. But if we are to believe Scripture, this was not the case at all. There were just as many false prophets as there were scandalous priests ; just as many who pretended to be uttering the word of the Lord, when they were but speaking a vision of their own hearts, as there were who could not distinguish between the clean and the unclean, or who made the offering of the Lord to be 358 SIGNS OF A abhorred. There were as many who abused the spiritual call as the outward ordination. But this remark is by the way. My main obiect is to fix the reader's attention upon this point, that the best prophets were still Old Testament ministers ; that they were not ministers of the Spirit. The Quakers will not deny this. But wherein did the prophet come short of the dignity of a New Testament minister ? He exactly answers to their definition of one. Take away the law, the priesthood, the sacrifices, and leave simply the prophet, and we have the Quaker idea of the Christian ministry in its most noble and complete manifestation : for the Jew is a witness to spiritual life ; he obeys a spiritual impulse ; he speaks of the Living Word dwelling in the heart ; he speaks by the Spirit. Surely, if they are right, he stands on a much higher level than Peter and Paul, the witnesses for outward acts, the preachers of Christ's death and resurrection. And so the early Friends evidently thought ; for all the precedents of their proceed- ings are drawn from the records of his. Their sudden appearances, and utterances, and witnesses at the gates of cities, were copied (not acurately, I conceive, since the reverence for order and institutions, for sacred places and national worship, which were so conspic- uous in the original, were wholly omitted in the imitation — but still copied) from the acts of the Old Testament seer, and had no sort of type or warrant in apostolical practice. For, strange to say, the apostles of our Lord, appointed to introduce a new dis- pensation, addressing a sense-hardened people, and foretelling the most awful crisis of their history as at hand, did nevertheless, in their outward conduct and bearing, entirely depart from that pro- phetical model which was constantly before their eyes, and which, for other purposes, they studied most diligently. All the sensible and startling peculiarities of the prophetical character were aban- doned by men who proclaimed that they were sent by Heaven to announce the fulfilment of the promise made to the fathers, the accomplishment of law and prophecy. Far, indeed, were they from saying, that the function was obsolete ; its essential charac- teristics were represented in themselves. They had no authority to declare, that even its accidental features were lost, any more than they had authority to abolish sacrifices or circumcision. Ag- abus might still bind the girdle on his knee; the daughters of SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 359 Phillip the deacon might prophecy ; but the especial ministers of the New Covenant were throughout asserting for themselves a dif- ferent function from this. They would not even submit to the voices of brethren and sisters whom they acknowledged to be rightfully inspired. Paul went up to Jerusalem in defiance of their expostulations and warnings. But whence this difference 1 What is the explanation of it ? We say, that the difference arose from this, that in the days of the prophets the Spirit was not yet given, for that Christ was not yet glorified. The priests and sacrifices in the Jewish commonwealth testified of a divine constitution established in the Word. The order of prophets testified of a divine Spirit actuating and ener- gizing in man ; but as the person of the Word was not yet mani- fested, so neither was the person of the Spirit. The mystery was hid for ages and generations. Each new step in the divine plan is a preparation for the discovery of it ; and faithful men are enabled to apprehend it before it is yet fully made known ; first, by the undeviating regularity of the priesthood, like the settled succession of day and night; then, by the gusts of prophetical inspiration, like the wind blowing where it lists ; lastly, by the inseparable connexion of one with the other. The one, when alone, a mere collection of chords, from which no sound of music could proceed ; the other, at best, a mere iEolian harp, from which a sweet note might now and then come forth, but utterly incapable of satisfying the soul with any sustained or continuous harmony. Bat when the Son of God came in human flesh, to proclaim Himself the source of all the order of the universe, it was inevitable that the outward organization which had been foretelling his advent should be con- verted into one which assumed it for its ground ; and for the same reason it was to be expected, that when the Spirit of Truth, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, was given by the ascended Lord, to testify of the Father and of Him, the prophetical dispen- sation, which had been opening the way for this great manifesta- tion, should undergo a corresponding change. The occasional glimpses of a Divine Lord of man, the beautiful vision in the plain of Mamre, the angel in the bush, and he who did wondrously be- fore Manoah, — these preludings of the incarnation, as Bishop Bull calls them, had been lost in the full swell of the words, " Lo, I am 360 SIGNS OF A with you always." The crucified man had been declared, by the resurrection, to be the Son of God with power, — the ever-present King of man. But the foretastes of this revelation in the Old Testament, did not fall farther short of the revelation itself, than the sudden inspirations under the Old Testament fell short of the meaning expressed in the words, " When he ascended up on high, he received gifts for men, that the Lord God might dwell among them." The Apostles, therefore, could not, without sinking their dignity as New Testament ministers, have given the same form to the prophetical office which it had assumed under the old dispensa- tion. They believed themselves continually, not momentarily in- spired ; they felt that it was their sin to doubt of this continued inspiration ; a sin not to act upon the principle of it ; a sin to do any thing which would weaken the perception of it in the minds of those to whom they preached. They therefore delivered their appointed message with perfect calmness and coherency. They had their commission, and this was a surer token that they had the Spirit with them to govern them, than any impulses and emotions could possibly have been. They were therefore always ready to preach, and always able to be silent. This was their notion of a New Testament ministry, and wTe say it ought to be ours. As ministers of the New Covenant, we must draw our rule of conduct from Apostles and not from Prophets. It is nothing to us that the holy men of old were sometimes called from the sheep-folds to be the witnesses of a spiritual presence to the people, and that this inward call sufficed, without any other designation. We know that the Apostles of our Lord received from Him a formal and ex- press designation, before He gave them powers to go and preach in the villages whither He himself would come ; that after his resurrection, He gave those Apostles a new and more awful com- mission, accompanying it with the words, " Receive the Holy Ghost $" that after his ascension they completed their numbers by an external arrangement before the Holy Ghost endued them with powers to testify of the risen King. It is nothing to us if these prophets, in exact conformity with the nature of their office, and the end for which it was instituted, waited for a conscious afflatus before they could utter their divine oracles. We know that St. Paul said, — " If I do this willingly, I have a reward ; but if against SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 361 my irill, a dispensation of the Gospel is committed to me. . . . A necessity is laid upon me, yea, wo is me, if I preach not the Gospel." We know that he set it forth as the peculiarity of a New Testament preacher, that he put no veil over his face, that he used gr3at plainness of speech. We know that now his preach- ing consists of a plain statement of actual facts, now of a long his- torical deduction, now turns upon some point connected with the habits, national character, and circumstances of the people to whom he speaks, — is not merely eloquent, but at times most skilfully rhetorical, — but never exhibits a man over-mastered by a power which prohibits him from expressing himself in that way which is most suitable to the spiritual wants of his hearers. Was this be- cause he wanted zeal ? Or was it because he possessed an intensity of zeal which would never permit him for a moment to lose sight of the end of his apostleship ; to sacrifice it for the sake of any pleasant feelings or emotions ; to think about his own mind, when his business was to go forward ; or to overlook any instruments which God had placed within his reach ? Was it because he had not the Spirit ? Or was it because he was under the habitual gov- ernment of that Spirit who hindered him from surrendering him- self to his own tastes or emotions, to his own projects or fears, and which converted every object in nature or art, all history, all pass- ing events, to the service of the sanctuary ? Once more, it is no- thing to us that, under the old economy, there were prophetesses as well as prophets, and that during the interval between the estab- lishment of the Christian Church and the destruction of the Jewish Commonwealth, this part of the system may, like all its other mere accidents, have been gradually disappearing indeed, but not have actually ceased. If there had been any restriction whatever, any, I mean, but what is reserved in the depths of Divine Wisdom, as to the subjects of the prophetical call, it would not seem to have answered its purpose as a balance to the rigid formality of the priestly institution. But when the Apostle of the Gentiles an- nounced, that he would have women keep silence in the churcheSj we perceive at once that the principle which had been all along asserted in the regular organization of the Jewish Church, now that the formal constitution had been brought into union with the spiritual power, was to become an universal law. If St. Paul had 362 SIGNS OF A. merely suggested this rule as one which was expedient, in order to meet Jewish and Heathen prejudices, we easily admit that the Om- nipotent Spirit might be expected at different periods pr actically to annul it. But if he was actually restraining a practice common among both JewTs and Heathens, and if he was doing this profess- edly upon principles connected with the divinely appointed relation of the sexes to each other, we can have no doubt that the Spirit of Order, by the mouth of his chosen witness, was announcing the lawT of his own commonwealth. And that the Holy Spirit does not break down eternal laws and ordinances, for the mere sake of bearing witness to his power, is one of the fundamental maxims of Christian morality ; because power is the handmaid of love and order, and when it forsakes their fellowship, and claims a separate existence, is devilish, not godlike. In this case, as in all the others we have as yet considered, it seems that the Quaker is guilty of the very sin which he imputes to his brethren ; that he is the reviver of the old economy while he is professing to assert the glory of the Gospel. And it will be seen how remarkably his complaints against a succession of ministers illustrate this tendency. Just as he will not allow7 that in an univer- sal and spiritual dispensation Baptism can take the place of Circum- cision, the Eucharist of the Passover, so he cannot understand howT in such a dispensation the succession by merely laying on of hands can take place of the Levitical and Aaronic succession. And just as I maintained, that the difference between a national dispensation and one which is spiritual and universal is realized in the difference between these two sets of institutions, and is lost when the old institutions are merely abolished ; so I maintain, that the same difference is set in the clearest light by the change from a ministry which is permanent in a particular tribe and family, to one which is perpetuated by ecclesiastical tradition, and that those who, upon Quaker grounds, reject this last method as carnal and secular, have no escape but that of slavishly imitating the most superficial and transitory peculiarities of a by-gone period. 3. The last point to be considered is that of ministerial gifts. There were, as every one knows, under the old dispensation, schools of the Prophets. But we must not lay such stress upon this fact as to deny, that in many cases the Prophet's call was itself that which SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 363 endowed him with the functions necessary for his task. At any rate there was, it should seem, no outward act by which he became invested with the powers that he afterwards exercised.* If what I have said respecting the nature of his office be true, it could not have been otherwise. There was no great difficulty in understand- ing, that the Priest might be attired with his solemn robes, and in- vested with his awful authority, by a right of consecration ; his endowments were matter of formal, legal explanation. But no idea which had yet been presented to the mind of the Jew, could have enabled him to understand how gifts of so subtle and inexplicable a character as those which the Prophets exercised, could have been transmitted by any similar method. The man of holy meditation, whose life is a witness to his own continual sense of unseen pres- ence, comes forth, and awakens in kings, or priests, or people, the feeling of their own subjection to an eternal law, which they have forgotten or resisted. By eloquence and song he rouses the spell- bound, death-stricken conscience of the nation ; compels it to re- member that it is within the bonds of an everlasting covenant ; and shows what judgments must startle it out of its long sensual dream. The acknowledgment of an operation from above, inspiring the understanding of the Prophet, comes at the same moment to the mind of the hearer with the consciousness of a secret wonderful operation upon himself. He does not distinguish with any accuracy between the power which has raised the teacher into a poet, and himself into a man ; still less does he know from whom either impulse proceeds. He perceives only that there is some deep influence at work, invisible, indefinite, incomprehensible. But, happily for that age, and for all ages to come, the duties of the Prophet were not limited to this task. Beneath this consciousness of a living judge spying out his ways, with the awful thoughts which it generates, other desires discover themselves in the mind of the holy Israelite, which the teacher is to educate by certain promises and glorious hopes. Through him man is to be taught, not only of that within him which fears and trembles before * The case of Elisha may be considered an exception. But was not a prophet in Samaria in some sense a substitute for the priest, or, at all events, a witness for the institution ? 364 SIGNS OF A God, but of that which nothing but the vision of God can satisfy. The same event which is to set free the conscience, so far as its fears spring from the dread of sin, not the love of it, is also that which is to present these longings with their perfect object. The coming of the Lamb of God, who is to take away the sin of the world, — of Him who is to show men the Father, — this, consequently, is that glorious consummation of all past history, to which the prophetic eye is always turned, and in the glories of which every true Israelite, whether still sojourning on earth or departed from it, understands assuredly that he shall be a partaker. But on this hope is entailed another, equally exhilarating and still more mysterious. The spirit in man, striving after this perfect object, hereafter to be revealed, feels that when it is admitted to behold him, it will need to be sustained by a life proceeding from himself — feels that, if it is admitted to converse with Him, it will need the assurance that He also is conversing with it. An unspeakable communion, a Spirit witnessing with our spirit, nothing less than this can be the boundary of the aspirations which have been thus wonderfully called out. The Prophet meets this deepest cry of the inner man ; and the promise of the Spirit being poured from above, and the desert blossoming with the rose, is indissolubly linked to the promise of a King who shall reign in righteousness, and in whom the glory of the Most High shall shine forth. As the mind of the prophet himself rose to the level of these anticipations, it is impossible but that he must have perceived a dis- tinction between that spirit in him which longed for intercourse with the Everlasting Spirit, and those faculties of thought and ex- pression, by which he was able to impart the desires and hopes with which he had been inspired, to other men. Both, he will have felt, are subject to a divine impulse, a divine government, but one is in some sense a divine faculty, meant for fellowship with that which is divine, not realizing its own properties but in that fellowship ; the other is meant to obey a motion with which, strictly speaking, it cannot sympathize. But the deeper, the diviner faculty, is the more universal ; this belongs to me as a man ; this is the privilege of my race ; the other is specially imparted to me for wise and gra- cious purposes ; distinguishing me from my fellows ; to be received SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 365 as an awful trust; to be used for their benefit. Hence, in that great period of manifestation to which he looks forward, he will, at times, have anticipated, — first, that in close connexion with the revelation of Him who is the object of desire to all nations, there would also be a revelation of Him who had been moving secretly the hearts and understandings of men ; next, that this revelation would in some striking manner be at once the assertion of Him as holding fellowship with men universally, and as bestowing those special gifts by which some men are qualified to be the guides and teachers of their brethren. Whether this anticipation did take a definite form in the minds of the Prophets or no, we can tell how it was realized. The Son of God selects his chosen servants, the heralds of his kingdom, from the fishermen of Galilee. With them he converses for three years, teaching them to apprehend mysteries wrhich had been kept hid from generations ; telling them that they were permitted to see that which Kings and Prophets had not seen ; in all his intercourse with them, still treating them as men destined for a work — not merely imparting to them a knowledge of truth, but a method of commu- nicating it. But, after the call which these disciples had received; after the wonderful discipline by which He had so long prepared them ; after He had re-appeared to them in his risen form, and breathed on them, saying, " Receive ye the Holy Ghost ;" still He told them that they were to tarry in Jerusalem t j receive the prom- ise of the Father ; and that then, and then only, should they have power from on high to perform their work. As I have remarked before, they were met, not as individuals, but as a college; they had formally completed their number when this promise was fulfill- ed. And what was the fulfillment ? The deep mystery of it, I have contended before, (herein following the Church, which has fixed Trinity Sunday to follow next upon Whitsunday,) consisted in the formal declaration of the Holy Spirit as a Person, the assertion of the Divine Unity of the Father and the Son in Him, and in the establishment of a Universal Church. But this is inseparably connected in Scripture with the conferring of powers on a set of men previously marked out to be Ministers of Christ. The call of Christ was not sufficient ; here was a formal endowment with the gifts which Christ had designed for them when He bade them 24 366 SIGNS OF A leave their nets, and which He had now received for them from on high. Signs, we know7, accompanied the first great declaration of this Divine Presence in the Church. Those signs were like the twig or clod of earth which in ancient feoffments attested the delivery of a portion of land to a certain person and his heirs for ever. We should as little expect them to be continually repeated, as that the twig or clod should be solemnly presented to the new possessor, whenever he performed a fresh act of ownership. But the princi- ple asserted by these signs, wTe affirm to be perpetual. The Spirit of God, by a wonderful demonstration, declares that He is dwelling among men ; that an organized body of men has been provided for his habitation ; that through this body his blessings are to be trans- mitted to the world ; that through a portion of this body, his bless- ings are to be transmitted to the rest. Every thing on this great day of spiritual inspiration, speaks of preparation, order, distinction, unity. No chance or casual moment is selected, but the period of an ancient festival ; no secret place, but an upper chamber in the temple ; no chance individual, but men who have been for years openly preparing for the work. Whatever system, then, teaches that a minister is not publicly and openly, and once for all endow- ed with certain powers and faculties for his work, these powers being sustained within him by the constant presence of Him who bestows them ; whatever system conveys the notion, that the min- ister, being such by virtue of his inward call, is either then invested with the requisite gifts, or receives them afterwards, from time to time, by sudden movements and inspirations, we affirm is essential- ly an Old Testament system. And the consequences of such a sys- tem must infallibly be these : — The mere spiritual faculty, which is awakened in him by the voice of the Spirit of God, will be confound- ed with that Spirit himself ; his personality will be forgotten in his operations ; there will be a fearful confusion between the human speaker and the Invisible powrer which speaks in him, alternating with a continual attempt to separate them ; the intellectual facul- ties and endowments will first be despised, because they are suppos- ed to have no connection with the Spirit ; and then will be con- founded with the faculty which is truly divine and spiritual in man, when both are found to proceed from the same source, and the for- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 367 mer to be the means of evoking the latter. I say, if we considered wherein the Old Testament system was defective, and how the blanks are filled up in the New ; and then heard of a scheme in which these blanks were restored, without, however, a restoration of those other portions of the old system, which prevented that which was necessarily imperfect from being evil, we should look for all these mischiefs as the fruits of it. And the actual history of the Quakers fulfils every one of these predictions. The belief in the Personality of the Spirit, in his difference from the spiritual life which He originates, has been that truth which they have found it most difficult to realize, and which has been continually slipping away from them. Their ministers, even in the best age of their so- ciety, were almost idolized. They have veered continually between contempt for the intellectual powers generally, and a vast over- appreciation of them, when they seemed to be under spiritual guid- ance. And all these contradictions are now reaching a head, and threatening the extinction of their body. The Presbyterian. We pass to those whose objections are principally and express- ly against Episcopacy. Some of these turn upon the idea of the Church, some are derived from the letter of Scripture, and some are founded upon experience. The first take this form — ' Christ is the only Bishop of his Church. All attempts to substitute another overseership, for his, are founded upon a misconception of our re- lation to Him. The words " Call no man your father upon earth, for one is your Father which is in heaven,,' though they do not in- terfere with the acknowledgment of spiritual fathers in some sense, for St. Paul constantly calls himself one, do assuredly confound all such pretensions to fatherhood as the Bishops by the very nature of their office put forth. Assumption and domination, the very oppo- site qualities to those which should appear in a ministry, are impli- ed in the conception of this function. And secondly, it is not borne out by the least warrant of revelation. That the word im'axonog is to be found in the Acts of the Apostles, no one will dispute. But it is found in such connexions as show that the officer whom it de- notes was not distinguished from the Presbyter — that the Apostles, at all events, did not look upon the distinction as in any wise con- 368 SIGNS OF A nected with the being of the Church. If then we would have a Church upon a scriptural platform, framed according to Apostoli- cal precedent, there seems little doubt that Bishops would find no place, or a very unimportant place in it. But, thirdly, it may be said that we cannot return strictly to those precedents, that the Church has a principle of life and authority in itself, and that we are to consider the way in which institutions have actually devel- oped themselves. Very well ; then look at all the cruelty, usurpa- tion, pride, secularity, which have been manifested by these spirit- ual fathers. And then say, whether the history of the Church be not as conclusive a witness against them as the words of inspi- ration.' It is evident that the objection which is founded upon the con- stitution of the Church, does not merely affect the principle of Epis- copacy. Its application is very wide indeed. Presbyterians in general have perceived that it strikes at the notion of any human priesthood. If the fact that Christ is the universal Bishop, interfere with the existence of earthly Bishops, the fact that He is the Priest of his Church, of course makes it impossible that any inferior per- sons should usurp that name. Probably the last case will be felt to be stronger than the first ; at all events, many persons are found to denounce the use of the words ie$w§ and Sacerdos in the Divine economy, who will contend stoutly for the importance of Bishops. Now I wish it might be considered, that if these phrases be on this ground denied to the ministers of the Church, they must on the same ground be denied to the members of it. The words, " We are made Kings and Priests unto God," which are so often quoted to confute the pretensions of a particular caste or ministry, are themselves profane and dangerous words. They are appropriating to the servant the acts and offices which, according to this doctrine, exclusively appertain to the Lord. Nor can the argument stop here. There must be a careful weeding out in theological books, and above all, in the Book of Revelation, of every phrase which, being first used to describe the head of the body, is afterwards ap- plied to the body itself, or to any of its members. I beseech any one calmly and seriously to reflect upon the effect which such a change must produce — I do not say in the dialect of Christianity, but — in its deepest and most essential principles. For surely, if it SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 369 have one principle which more essentially belongs to it than ano- ther, this is the one, that the language which makes Christ known to us, is the only language which can fitly make the Church known to us. Not merely Catholic divinity, but Puritan divinity, recog- nises the identification of offices in Christ and in his faithful mem- bers, as involved in the very idea of the Gospel. Where, I ask, is the line to be drawn ? Whence arises the propriety of the doctrine, that the state of the whole Church, and of each member of the Church, is the image of his state who has redeemed it ; and the impropriety of the doctrine, that every office in the Church is the image of some office perform- ed by Christ in his own person — is the means by that office present- ed to men, and made effectual for them through all time ? I have no more earnest desire than that the proposition which I have put forward : ' If the Incarnation mean any thing, if the Church be not a dream, all offices exercised by her on behalf of hu- manity must be offices first exercised by Christ' should be set side by side with the Presbyterian proposition, * It is profane and wick- ed to apply to ordinary huma7i creatures, the names which designate the works and offices of Christ,1 that each should be pushed to its furthest consequences, and that each should be submitted to the judgment of the holiest men among those whose educational preju- dices would lead them to reject Episcopacy. I have no fear as to the result ; and I am quite sure that a great collateral advantage would follow from this method of considering the subject. We are constantly asked how we dare to lay so much stress upon an outward ordinance, as if it had any thing to do with the great essen- tial truths of the Gospel. Is it not at best a mere outwork of Christianity ? Our answer is derived from this great Presbyterian argument. That cannot be a trifle which involves the most oppo- site conception of the whole order of the Church and of human society. If the objection we have been considering be a true one, the language which the most earnestly religious men have been using, at the times when they were most religious, when they were striving to express the most spiritual and fundamental truths, is inconsistent language, and must be abandoned. If, on the other hand, our principle be a true one, it must be a question of the highest practical moment, whether the idea of Christ's Episcopacy 370 SIGNS OF A or of his Priesthood can be preserved among men, when that, which upon this hypothesis is the divine method for preserving them, has been rejected. 2. ' But this view, however it may be defended by theories, re- ceives no justification from Scripture.' I admit at once, that if the Acts of the Apostles were set before me, and I were desired to make out from them alone wrhat the office of the Overseer was, as distinguished from that of the Presbyter, I should decline the task as hopeless. Nor do I think, that if I were allowed to add to the hints which this book supplies, all that I could gather with respect to these particular names from the Epistles, I should be much nearer to satisfaction. My difficulty, I confess, is to understand how, from these scattered notices, the Presbyterian has been able to arrive at the clear and satisfying conclusion, that the whole Church for thirteen centuries, and the greater part of the Church for sixteen centuries, has been utterly wrong in believing that such an officer as the one who is understood by the word Bishop, is meant to exist in it. I should be sorry upon such evidence to con- demn the very paltriest ceremony which could allege a similar pre- scription in its favour. Of course, therefore, I should be equally sorry to put in such evidence as supplying the original title-deed of the institution. For, were there no other, I should scarcely know how to state the question which is to be settled. The Presbyterian would not allow me to word it thus : ' Did there exist in the time of the Apostles an order of priests distinct from that of Bish- ops V for he does not admit that there is an order of priests any more than one of Bishops, nor should I be at all anxious to ascer- tain how soon the functions which I attribute to the priest became separated from those which I suppose belong to the Bishop. The only point, therefore, which could be brought into debate, would be whether the word iniaxonog always means in the language of the New Testament, the pastor of a number of congregations, and the word nQta^vtEQog always means, in the same language, the pastor of one ; a question which I should be inclined to answer in the negative. But when I turn again to these Acts and these Epistles, I find a name which puzzles me much more than either of these ; one which meets me at every turn, one which is implied in every sentence of them, one of which I must get a solution some- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 371 where if I can. What manner of people are these Apostles whose acts are recorded in the work of St. Luke, whose letters are pre- served for the perpetual instruction of the Church 1 It may be answered, 'They were the persons selected by our Lord to be with Him in his temptations while He was upon earth, and to bear wit- ness of his resurrection after He had left the world.' No doubt these were the functions of the first twelve disciples. The Incar- nation of Christ was to be the ground of the new kingdom ; it was needful that there should be persons who had seen and handled the word of life. About this matter there is no dispute. The question is, first, whether the fruits of the Incarnation ceased with the time when our Lord left the world, or whether they only began to show themselves ; next, whether the form which Christ himself gave to the infant kingdom, was the form which it was to retain through all the future circumstances of its development; and therefore, 3rdly, whether the office of the Apostles was to be de- funct when the particular circumstances which made the name ap- propriate had ceased to exist. If the apostleship were inseparably connected with its first accidents, it would seem strange that St. Paul, whose calling was of an altogether different kind from that of the twelve, who had not been with our Lord during his stay upon earth, who was expressly a witness of that state of glory in which we believe that Christ is now, as much as when He stopped the persecutor on the way to Damascus, should have so eagerly asserted for himself the position and the powers of an Apostle. It would seem strange, too, that those powers, in virtue of which the other Apostles were able to go forth witnessing of their Master's resurrection, were not those which they derived from Him while He was upon earth, not those even which they received from Him immediately after his resurrection, but were those which came upon them after He had gone out of the sight of men, and was as- cended on high that He might fill all things. The question, there- fore, to be decided when this evidence is brought before us, is sim- ply whether there was or was not to be continued in the Church, any office corresponding in its essential characteristics to that one which we judge from the New Testament to be the distinguishing one of the Church at its foundation. The common opinion is, that by the perpetuation of this office the Church has been per- 372 SIGNS OF A petuated ; the connexion of different ages with each other realized ; the wholeness and unity of the body declared. The changes which have taken place in the condition of this office we suppose to be changes as to name, as to the number of the persons feeling it, as to the limits of their government ; changes, some of them presupposed in the very existence of a body which was to have an unlimited expansion ; none of them affecting its nature or its ob- ject. The Presbyterian says that no institution of the kind does exist in the Church ; that is to say, that the platform of the Church in the present day is not the apostolic platform. Yet he says this in the same breath with which he protests against our departure from the simplicity of the New Testament practice, and calls upon us to abandon all ecclesiastical precedents for the sake of conforming to it. 3. One of the main reasons which he gives for this exhortation, is the gross corruption and secularity which have been the result of the Episcopal system wherever it has been established. I neither meet this charge by saying that there is no foundation for it, nor by special pleading the instances which are brought forward in support of it ; nor by resorting to the seldom satisfactory common- place, that the abuse of an institution is no argument against its use. I might with far more reason and success produce the facts, which prove that in nearly every case in which the Church has enlarged her borders, in which the commission, " Go ye into all nations" has been really acted out, Bishops have been the instru- ments of fulfilling the command and obtaining the promise. But I would rather place the argument on another ground : I would undertake to show, and I would go through all ecclesiastical history in support of the position, that the secularity of Bishops has been in all cases the effect of their not believing in the dignity and divinity of their own ordination ; and the assumption of any par- ticular Bishop has always been the effect of his denying the dignity and effect of his brethren's ordination. You show me a Bishop who is in all respects a splendid feudal lord, with his hounds and his falcons — his sumptuous table— his armed retrainers. Well ! I see a man who feels about his office, just as you do, that it carries with it no divine authority ; that he is under no responsibility for the exercise of it except to the class in which he moves, and to the SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 373 civil power which has added certain honours to it. My wish is to cure him of the habit of feeling which you would rivet in him. But you will say, perhaps, 1 were he a Christian minister he would not be tempted to this secularly.' — What do you mean by such words 1 Do you mean that he would not be tempted to any seculari- ty — that the parochial clergyman, comfortably settled in his manse, has not the temptation to sink into the habits of an ordinary mem- ber of the middle class— that the mendicant friar, or the itinerant Protestant preacher, is not liable to be infected by the set to whom he ministers, and by whom he obtains his livelihood ? You cannot say this without outraging the authority of Scripture and the wit- ness of experience. Secularity of some kind, — (of what kind the character of the age, of the man, of his company determines,) has assailed, and must always assail every man in this world ; and I believe there is no deliverance from it for any man, but in the belief that he has a vocation. Whether it is in accordance or not with the order of Providence, that the ministers of Christ's flock should be also ministers of the nation, and that each class of the nation should feel the influence of some one of its classes, I shall consider in a future section. On the subject of Episcopal assumption, I need only refer to the history of popes and partriarchs for a proof, that the occasion of it is ever an exaltation of some advantage of place or circumstance connected with the order above the order itself. Objections to an absolving power in ministers. I have said that the main principle of the Presbyterian argu- ment is as directly opposed to the idea of a priesthood as it is to the idea of Episcopacy. In dealing with the one question, then, 1 have implicitly discussed the other. Moreover, the doctrine of a priesthood is so much involved with the doctrine of sacrifice, that my last section may be looked upon as a sufficient statement of my views respecting it. Still there is so much horror in many minds of that absolving power which I have attributed to the Christian Bishop and to those whom he endows with it, and their complaints involve consequences of so practical a character, that I think I should be wrong not to give them a separate consideration. I do not class them under the head of Presbyterian objections, because 374 SIGNS OF A there are many Episcopalians who appear to share in them. They may be expressed thus : ' According to St. Paul, those who believe in Christ are justified from all things from which they could not be justified by the Law of Moses. Ambassadors are sent forth to declare Christ's Gospel to men, in order that they may not be prevented from believing by the want of hearing ; in order that if they believe they may re- ceive this justification and freedom of the conscience. This is the true office of the minister ; all these are accidental and subordinate to it. He may own orders and governments in the Church, Pres- byterian, Episcopal, Apostolical, what you will ; but the preaching of Christ is his true and essential function : his commission is to do this, this first, this above all things. When he pretends that he has some other way of relieving the conscience than this ; when he says that he has the power of pardoning and absolving, — that he may pronounce men free from their sins, — he is not only committing a fearful usurpation upon the rights of Christ, he is actually mis- understanding and denying the true character of his own office. He deprives himself of his true power, in his eagerness to grasp a power which has never been given him by God, and can never be of the least use to man.' There is one point which is very important to take notice of in reference to this subject. According to the idea which has always existed in the Christian Church, the same person to whom the function of absolving is committed has also the function of ad- ministering the Eucharist. These two duties never have been separated, and it is most needful that they should be contemplated in their relation to each other ; for if the Eucharist be that act in which the worshipper is especially brought into direct communion with his Lord, that act in which the mere human and visible agent is most entirely lost and forgotten, or only contemplated as one who bears witness that He whom he serves is a living and actual person, we must suppose that this is a key to the whole character of the office, in whatever way it may be exercised. If, again, the Eucharist involve at once a confession of sins on the part of the receivers, a thankful acknowledgment of a state of fellowship and blessedness with their Lord, into which they have been brought, though they may have walked most unworthily of it, the acceptance of a pledge SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 375 of forgiveness for the past, strength for the present— a strength only to be realized by union with the invisible Lord, — a promise of future blessings, to be attained in the same way and in no other, this would seem to determine the nature of that particular function which the minister presumes to exercise when he pronounces absolution. His whole object is to present Christ to men and men to Christ really and practically. Suppose him in the congregation, he is there to represent its unity, to offer before God as a whole body, to confess the sins which its members have committed by separating them- selves from the body. Then he is a witness of Christ's continual intercession for the entire Church. • Suppose him alone, with any particular member of the congregation, he is with him to preserve him in the unity of the Church, to present before God his tears and contrition for having lived unworthy of his position in it. Then he is a witness of' Christ's distinct intercession for every member of his flock. But still this can be but half his duty. The incar- nation means very little, the kingdom of God is a mere delusion, if there be not a voice speaking from heaven as well as one crying from earth ; if the one be not an answer to the other, if the minis- ter may not say to the congregation, 4 God has heard your petitions, rise up as pardoned men, with strength to offer up praises and prayers, with strength to do your work,' the confession is but half real — the Gospel is not real at all. And if he may not say in like manner to the sick and solitary penitent, God accepts thy tears and pardons thy sin, I do not see what he means by saying that he has authority to preach forgiveness of sins. He preaches forgiveness to those who will accept it, understanding its nature and purpose ; receiving it not as a license to the conscience, but as a deliverance of it. He delivers forgiveness under precisely the same conditions. How many of the congregation are in a state of mind to claim their fellowship with Christ and each other, and so to take the mercy which is freely given them — whether the individual man can do this — God only knows. The absolver at all events has spoken the truth ; he has acted out his commission ; the rest he must leave. His public preaching, his private exhortations, are all intended to remove some stumbling-block out of the way of those to whom he has been sent ; to explain to them the meaning of their confession and of his absolution ; to prevent their offering the one, or receiving 376 SIGNS OF A the other in vain ; to hinder them from turning either to an evil account. Supposing this to be the case, it would seem that there is no greater peril in this doctrine, than in the one which makes preach- ing the main work and office of a minister. As to misconstruction, there is, at all events, no greater likelihood of it in the case of words which are not our own, which are spoken in the name of God, and on the most solemn occasion, than in the case of words which, under whatever teaching from above, we have composed, which must be mixed with our own peculiar modes of expression and habits of thought. So much I think must be admitted by every one, who considers the subject without prejudice. And the question which such a person might be inclined to ask, would per- haps be this : * Where is the great difference 1 You mean by your absolving power just what others mean by preaching the Gospel. Let this be clearly understood, and then no Christian would object to your statements any longer.' My answer is, I cannot make this explanation, because it would not be a true one. I do conceive, there is very great difference between the notion that the act of absolution which the minister pronounces in the name of the Church is that act which interprets the object of his preaching, and the notion that he is sent to preach, and that be- cause he preaches, he may, in a certain sense, absolve. The differ- ence seems to me to be this ; in the former case the minister pre- sents Christ actually and personally to his congregation. His office is a witness of Christ's presence among them, of Christ's relation to them. It is grounded on the acknowledgment of an actual union between the body and its Head. In the other case there is much speech, it may be eloquent, it may be true speech, about Christ, his work, and his offices. But it is a painted ship Upon a painted ocean j a description of what is very good and beautiful, and what man wants, but not the thing itself, not the reality. I appeal to the history of modern preaching whether this be not the case, and to the complaints of men in all directions, whether it is not felt to be the case. And if so it must be a serious question in what way SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 377 those ends may be best accomplished, which I fully believe that the objectors I am now addressing sincerely desire, the end of bringing men more directly in contact with the true and unseen Absolver; the end of making his ministers understand that they are nothing except as representatives of Him, that they do nothing, except as they lead men to the knowledge of Him. Let it be considered patiently and calmly, whether a priest, who habitually believes, that as he may confess in the people's name, so he may absolve in Christ's name, must not have a humbler sense of his own insignificance, a greater confidence in an invisible kingdom, a more serious conviction that all men are meant to be members of it, than one who believes that he has ever so many gifts, merely- bestowed for the purpose of enabling him to announce the message of salvation. And do we not find, in fact, that the best of those men, whose education and theories would induce them to adopt the latter opinion, have been led in practical life, in the conduct and discipline of their flocks, in their intercourse with them as well as in their discourses to them, to act upon the former ? The followers of Mr. Irving. Out of the heart of Presbyterianism have arisen a class of per- sons, whose objections to our Episcopacy assume the most opposite form possible to that which we were just now considering. A few words respecting this modern development of ecclesiastical feeling- will throw great light upon the whole subject. In answering the Quaker argument respecting the relation of the Old to the'New Testament ministry, I have maintained the idea of ministerial Succession to be one which is justified by the analogy of God's dealings, and which has not been made obsolete by any of the new conditions which the Gospel dispensation has intro- duced. The difference in the mode of presenting or manifesting the idea seems to be clearly determined by the difference between a national and a universal kingdom; the hereditary tradition, ac- companied with a solemn consecration, expresses the character of the one : make consecration the substance of the tradition, and abolish the family limitation, we have the true nature of the other. This conclusion is so obvious, and has been so much assumed in the history of Christendom, that there would seem to be no occasion 378 SIGNS OF A for disputing about it, except with those who, like the Quakers, reject outward ordination altogether. Admit ordination, and you admit the principle of succession ; you admit the improbability of that succession having been, in any important instance, infringed by those who habitually recognised it ; at all events, you admit that the onus probandi lies upon those who allege such an infringe- ment, to show when it took place and wherein it consisted. This, I say, would be the natural state of the argument, suppos- ing no other consideration to intervene. But those who had aban- o doned Episcopacy by degree felt that a great link — if my view of Episcopacy as the great bond of a Christendom life be the correct one, the great link — between them and the older Church had been cut off. They were therefore much more concerned than their fathers, who were not equally conscious of this severance, could be, to prove, first, that there was some flaw in the idea of succession as it obtained among Episcopalians generally ; secondly, that they possessed some adequate substitute for this idea. The flaw was easily found. The whole Church, to say the least from the time of Hildebrand, but most likely from a much earlier time, down to the Reformation, had been, with the exception of a few witnesses in the valleys of Piedmont, a popish and corrupt Church; through the Bishops of this Church and no other the transmission of powers and gifts must have come to those who claimed them in later days. But secondly, it was said that the reformed bodies had lost nothing by the breach of formal ministerial connexion with the first ages, seeing that they had preserved the really important succession ; they had inherited the pure apostolical doctrine. Now just so long as men could calmly acquiesce in the notion that Christians form a sect professing certain sound opinions, more probable and more useful than those of Mahomet or of Confu- cius,— just so long as this notion was felt to correspond with the descriptions which our Lord and the Apostles give of the purposes for which they came into the world — these two statements seemed reasonable and satisfactory. It was nothing strange that the sect should almost cease for a time, or be only preserved in a few men, about whose very names there is great confusion, about whose opin- ions and practices a much greater ; nothing strange that identity of opinions, (though it might be somewhat hard to establish in a SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 379 court of law the identity of the dogmas of the New Testament, with those which prevailed in Scotland and Germany during the eighteenth century,) should be received as the one sign that the sect had reappeared. But the moment any one was awakened to the fact that the Gospel spoke of a kingdom — a kingdom actually to be set up among men, — they became exceedingly perplexed. At first it was easy to treat these words as bslonging to the future, as pointing to that which shall be after a second appearing of our Lord, not to that which was the effect of his Incarnation and As- cension. But there was much which could not bear this construc- tion ; and supposing there was to be a Church in the world at all between the first and second advent, it must be something answer- ing to these words, it could not be something wholly different in kind from that which they set forth. But a sect professing certain dogmas, would be something wholly different in kind from the Church therein spoken of. There was still an escape to the idea of a purely spiritual body, but that escape was fairly open only to the Quakers, and with them the Presbyterians had no sympathy. They had admitted an organization ; they had said the spiritual life of the Church ought to express itself through this organiza- tion ; they had looked upon the ministry as forming an indispen- sable part of it ; they had constantly referred to the Scriptures as exhibiting the model and idea of the Church's constitution. Pressed by these difficulties, the late Mr. Irving, in his com- mentary on the Book of Revelation, betook himself to the belief that the Kirk of Scotland had preserved a succession of ministers in its Presbytery ; at the same time maintaining, as stoutly as any one of his countrymen could, that a human Episcopacy is incom- patible with the idea of Christ's universal lordship. But it could not escape a person of so much reflection and honesty as Mr. Irving, first, that whatever succession of a ministerial kind had been fore- told in the Scriptures, or believed in any age of the Church, was an Apostolical succession ; that is to say, a succession of persons possessing the essential part of the Apostolical functions. And it was equally clear, that by his own argument he denied the descent of any such function upon the Scotch ministers. His position, therefore, could not be long tenable, and either Mr. Irving himself or certainly his followers, soon abandoned it for another. They 380 SIGNS OF A admitted, to a certain extent, the truth and validity of the Episcopal succession which had been in the Church hitherto ; they admitted, at any rate, the importance of the idea of such a succession ; but they said that something was yet wanting, and had been wanting ever since the first ages, to give the Church its true completeness : v'z. a distinct order of Apostles, who should either supersede the present order of Bishops, or, at least, to whom they should do hom- age, and from whom they should derive their authority. NowT setting aside all questions which are merely collateral to this doctrine, as to the way in which the persons of these Apostles are to be ascertained, &c, the reader will see at once how much plausibility there must be in it, to men in the state of mind I have described. They have been taught that the Church for many cen- turies was in a kind of abeyance ; they know from experience that no part of it is in a right condition now; they think that the faults they see are faults arising from disorganization ; if they can dis- cover a defect of organization which has existed from the very first ages, how easily are these facts explained, how evident the origin of them ! In like manner, the habit which they have received from their instructors, of looking to the Scriptures as the true guides to all notions respecting the nature of the Church ; and the conviction which they have acquired in their maturer years, that the Scrip- tures derive their explanation from the history of the Church, are by this hypothesis reconciled. They do homage to the plain letter of Scripture, and yet it is a letter wrhich means nothing except in reference to the progress of Christ's kingdom. Thus, too, they are able to connect the idea of a restoration of spiritual life and spirit- ual gifts to the Church, with the strongest recognition of its organic and visible character. When there are such inward reasons for acquiescence in this faith, there is little use in making assaults upon its outworks. Men are not likely to be laughed out of an opinion which seems to bring all their other thoughts into harmony, merely by being told that they are paying a superstitious homage to the number twelve, or that the sudden recovery of an apostolic order after an intermission of eighteen centuries is most improbable. They will say, in answer to the first objection, that even if there be no meaning and mystery in numbers, they have the warrant of Scripture for attaching this number to this particular case. And SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 381 in answer to the second, they will say that if it be the purpose of God to uphold his Church in the world, and to heal the breaches in it, they think it reasonable to believe that He will, by any means or by any interference, renew that which seems indispensable to it. Nor can I help perceiving that the arguments by which Epis- copacy and Episcopal succession are sometimes defended, have a tendency to strengthen these convictions. As Presbyterians have been the persons with whom writers on this subject have chiefly held controversy, they have in a manner assumed the existence of two orders in the Church, and tried, by such means as they had, to prove that a third was also necessary. Now this method of resolv- ing the Church ministry into deacons and presbyters plus an epis- copate, must certainly leave an impression on the mind of any careful student of the New Testament, that this episcopate can have no close connexion with that apostolic order which is evi- dently the root of all others, and in which they all originally dwelt. Again, from certain ways of speaking respecting the Episcopal succession which have been prevalent among us, the feeling has certainly been communicated to many minds that it is necessary, because the first Apostles had an ordination from Christ himself, and because the effect, or a certain portion of the effect of that ordination has communicated itself through a series of hands to those who represent them in later ages. I do not say that any defender of the succession would state the reason for it in this form, but certainly the contemners of it must suppose that this is intend- ed ; otherwise they would not resort to their jokes about a virus which must have lost its power by repeated inoculations, or about gifts which must have been spoiled through the unclean hands that have transmitted them. And supposing such a feeling in any de- gree to prevail, we can conceive how utterly shocking it must be to men whose belief is that Christ is still present in the Church, and that He wTould still communicate actual powers to his ministers if their faithlessness did not interfere. But supposing it were calmly represented to those who have adopted this theory, that, according to the doctrine which has al- ways prevailed in the Church, the episcopate does contain in it the administration of the sacraments, the delivery of absolution, the preaching of the Gospel, the ministering to the sick and poor — all 25 382 SIGNS OF A the functions, in short, which were at any time committed by our Lord to his immediate disciples ; and that the Bishops have, and ought to believe they have, all needful 'powers for performing these functions : secondly, that their connexion with previous ages and with the first Apostles is maintained expressly as a witness of the permanent constitution of the Church, and therefore of the continued abiding of Christ in it, and of each Bishop in each age being his servant and the receiver of gifts and powers directly from Him — they may begin perhaps to view the whole subject somewhat dif- ferently. They may examine somewhat more carefully into the grounds upon which they have rested their belief of a super-epis- copal order, and if they should be convinced that any charm which there may have been in the number of the Apostles had reference to their Jewish position, and was broken by the act of Christ him- self when he called Paul to the same dignity, and through him destroyed the middle wall between Jews and Gentiles; that it was, at least, more likely, a priori, that an office which had been estab- lished with so much solemnity would be upheld by divine power, than that it would be destroyed by human unbelief ; that in all other cases unbelief displays itself in doubting and denying the existence of powers, and mistaking the character of a function actually possessed ; that such unbelief will account for all the painful phenomena which the history of the episcopate presents ; they may ask themselves with some anxiety, whether there be any reason to expect that an order will be introduced by signs and wonders which seems to be already in being, whether there be any thing to justify them in standing aloof from the body of Christ's universal Church, and in not submitting to those wThom He has himself placed over it. The Philosophical Objector. Between this class of reasoners, and the one with whom I am next to engage, there seems to be not one point of mutual under- standing. The modern rationalistic philosopher admits that the word * priest,' is one which contains much historical significance; nay, which even yet is not obsolete, and may have a good mean- ing. ' The error which men generally commit in this, as in all other cases, is that they do not distinguish between the essential SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 383 truth and the fleeting applications of the word, that they do not see wherein the real and valuable power of the priest consisted, and who inherit that power in our day*. Churchmen boast, it is said, that priests were the conservators of letters, and that they led men into the belief of a government which is not outward but inward, not over the body but over the mind. True, they did so ; and for this we are to remember them with gratitude. But they who pos- sess their name, and pretend to a formal succession from them, have no such influence ; they do not preserve science or letters, they are afraid of both ; they are anxious only to keep up their religious system. The real men of letters and of science, those who make us feel what are the bonds of spiritual intercourse be- tween persons of different nations and kindreds, those who lead us to the apprehension of fixed laws — these are the true priests, these possess the faculty, the true insight, to which men involuntarily pay homage ; the more they have been recognised, the less has the outward ordination and the nominal priesthood been regarded ; ultimately they alone will be honoured ; the counterfeit thing will be cast out as withered and worthless.' There are indications in this language of a desire, which I, at least, cannot regard without the greatest sympathy — a desire to discover that which is real, and to separate it from whatever is artificial, temporary, and insincere. I shall not inquire whether this desire dwell deeply in the hearts of all who adopt the phrases which express it; whether these phrases may not be as easily learnt by rote, and as glibly repeated as any others ; whether they may not offer to some the promise of an easy and comfortable sub- stitute for any zealous efforts to disengage their own minds from the frivolity and falsehood which they so eloquently denounce. Such questions each person may fitly propose to himself : I would much rather deal with these words as they came forth from the person who utters them with the least self-deception, with the most inward longing to be honest himself and to make his neighbours honest. To such a person, I would at once concede that his main proposition is right. The man of letters and the man of science, I believe, are called of God to the work in which they are engaged; they are his ministers — I would earnestly wish that they might feel themselves to be so. I will go further; I will admit that their 384 SIGNS OF A function, especially that of any one who has a real poetical gift, does answer in several most important respects to that of the an- cient prophet ; that they may, without any impropriety, be said to perform a similar office, and to be endowed with powers which correspond to the circumstances of their different periods. In what sense they do not correspond, in what respect the words of the Jewish prophet have become a Scripture and are taken out of the circle of ordinary words, I hope to consider in the next section. Now I am speaking of them as living, acting, speaking men, and, looking at them in this light, I think it far more important to mark the grounds of their essential resemblance, than the occasions of their difference. So far from wishing the modern poet or philosopher not to consider him- self as possessing a high vocation and a real inspiration, it is the feel- ing which I should most wish to awaken and cultivate in him. What I dread is that he should not feel this, that he should think his words are his own ; that he should glorify himself on his powers, and so inevitably deprave them and abuse them. The misery of the last age, of its poets especially, was that they utterly cast away this belief. When they talked about a Muse speaking to them and teaching them, they did not mean what they said ; it was a phrase merely which they adopted because Homer had used it and Virgil had copied it. There was not even the least sense of the words having been once spoken honestly ; the poor old singer to the maidens of the Greek isles had, forsooth, invented a very clever and cunning ' machinery.' And those who could write edifying critiques on " Paradise Lost," could suppose that Milton had solemnly invoked that Spirit, who prefers before all temples the upright heart and pure, with the same profaneness to assist him in a task of the same kind. What could an age which cherished such thoughts have produced, but ingenious satires upon the follies of the day, and elaborate efforts to clothe the ancients in its laces and ruffles? By all means, then, let those who feel their gifts strong in them, train themselves to an awful and humble acknowledgment of them, and of the source from which they proceed. It is not the inclination which the students and artists of our land show to put forth these claims on their own behalf, which should make any re- ligious man tremble. Just so far as they do this, they have taken SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 385 a great step out of the infidelity of the last generation. What is alarming is the pretension which accompanies these claims ; the loud talk about powers and faculties not derived but inherent; the practical evidence which our men of talent furnish by their scorn and contempt of others that they do rest upon these inherent powers, and do not recognise any sustaining, quickening inspiration. Now I cannot think that men who indulge in this language are likely to be prophets themselves, or to recognise the prophetic gift in their brethren. It. seems to me, therefore, most needful for the sake of our men of letters and of the world, that both they and it should be reminded, by some clear and visible tokens, what they are, whence their power comes, under what conditions it must be exercised, who renders it effectual for the good of men. But no one desires that they, in their own persons, should receive a visi- ble designation. Such a designation would be incompatible with the character of their office, and it would convey little in- struction to other men respecting their own position, seeing that they regard the poet or man of letters as a person of a peculiar order, following an impulse different from that which they obey, and pursuing a different class of objects. But supposing there ex- isted any set of men who were occupied about the most obvious and interesting circumstances of humanity, those which are com- mon to the tradesman and mechanic with the man of genius, those which are most strange but yet are continually recurring, about marriage and sickness, life and death ; and supposing that while thus dealing with that which belongs to all men, they were yet dealing with it as related to those awful and inward feelings which carry us out of the visible into the unseen world ; supposing they even connected these earthly accidents with certain fixed and eternal laws of that region, this class would seem to be one, which from the general, continuous, and practical nature of their duties, might well be selected as signs and instances to all men of the meaning and derivation of all power ; to the sage, of the mean- ing and derivation of those powers with which he is especial- ly intrusted. Such a class would be the natural link between those who are continually liable to lose their sense of a divine government in the monotony of daily occurrences, and those who are liable to lose it in the consciousness of their own energies. ■ml 386 SIGNS OF A And if it should come to pass that the selected class should itself lose sight of its position by falling into either of these temptations, if it should merely court an outward distinction, and occupy itself in a round of outward services, forgetting its mysterious meaning ; or if, in the desire to assert its difference from other vocations, it should become proud and self-exalting ; then I know not what better or more terrible witness can be borne against these sins, what more terrible prophecy of the effects which must flow from them, than that ordination, which has marked it out for the highest and lowest ministries; which has declared, that we exist for the sake of men, that all our authority is from God, that our only safety is in forgetting ourselves, our highest privilege to be instruments in connecting the members of our race with each other and with their Lord. Abolish our ordination, and you lose the strongest testimony which you have against our sins. You lose, too, I am well persauded, one of the greatest securities against the degrada- tion of our poets and men of learning, through sensual contamina- tion or through spiritual pride. The Romish System. It remains that I should explain wherein the views I have ex- pressed on the subject of the Christian ministry differ from those of the Romanists. It will be obvious at once, that on some most im- portant points, I must be in agreement with them. For I have spoken of ministers as representing Christ to men ; I have main- tained that the absolving power is not a nominal but a real one ; I have maintained that the apostolic functions and authority still exist in the Church ; I have admitted the Judaical institutions have their counterparts in the new dispensation. Let us inquire under each of these four heads, what points of similarity there are be- tween that which I have asserted to be the Catholic principle, and that which is acknowledged to be the Romish one. First, I have spoken of ministers as representing Christ to men. Long before there was the assertion of a supreme vicar of Christ upon earth, there was a feeling in men's minds, that the office of the priest is vicarial, that ministers are deputed by our Lord to do that work now which He did himself while He was upon earth. This notion has gone into the heart of the Romish system. I SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 387 believe it has created the system. Now those who laugh at the notion of a man like Athanasius contending to the death about an iota, will, of course, be much amused by my affecting to discover an important difference of signification in the words representative and vicarial. And, certainly, if the difference between the Nicene Fathers and the Arians was a difference about a word and not about a reality, those who contended upon either side were very wTeak and vain men. And if I suppose any charm to reside in these two words, so that the one which I reject might not be used in a good sense, and the one which I adopt in an evil one, I shall be exhibiting a less pardonable instance of folly. But I will endea- vour to show that the difference to which I allude, whether it be rightly or improperly expressed by these particular phrases, is as essential and practical a one as it is possible to conceive of. In the word vicarial, the Romanist means to embody his notion that the priest is doing the work of one who is absent, and who, only at certain times and under certain conditions, presents himself to men. By the word representative, I mean to express the truth that the minister sets forth Christ to men as present in his Church at all times, as exercising those functions himself upon which He entered when He ascended on high. Now it must be felt, I think, that this is a radical difference, not about a word, but about the most solemn question upon which the mind of man can be occupied. And it will be seen that it is no isolated difference. It stands in the closest connexion with all those which we have been taking notice of in former sections. The principle of the Catholic Church which I have endeavoured to develope in reference to Baptism, the Eucharist, the Creed, the Forms of Worship, is the principle of a direct, real, and practical union between men and their Lord. The doctrine of the Romish system, which we have discovered in each and all of these cases, is that the veil between us and the in- visible world is not yet withdrawn ; that offices and ordinances are not the organs through which men converse with their Lord and He with them, but are mere outward things, which He has stamp- ed with a certain authority and virtue, or mere pictures which ex- hibit Him to the imagination. Happily, this system has never fully realized itself; there seems an impossibility in the nature of things that it should. The moment it becomes or nearly becomes 388 SIGNS OF A that which it is always striving to be, it so entirely loses its mean- ing, it becomes such a merely oppressive phantom, that the judg- ments of God, and the faith as well as the infidelity of man, appear together to confound it. 2. It follows from what I have said, that the absolving power which I claim for the Catholic priest is altogether a different one from that which is claimed by the Romish priest. I do not say that it is a less power, it seems to me a much greater one. He who can, in Christ's name, declare to a man that the state of union with Christ, which was assured to him in baptism, is his state still ; that he has committed evil by living inconsistently with it ; that this evil shall not be imputed to him, though it may perchance be sorely punished for his good, if he turn to God and claim the better life which is his, in his Lord; that he shall have strength from Him to be his servant and do his will ; that he shall know Him, and that this knowledge shall make him free ; he who can pronounce these words confidently, because they are true and because he has received a commission to declare them to such and such men — neither their truth nor his commission being in the slightest degree affected by the unbelief and the consequent unrepent- ance of those to whom they are addressed — has a power of absolution affecting the past, the present, and the future, which he would be sorry indeed to exchange for any which have ever been exercised, by those who claimed it vicarially as their own, not re- presentatively as their Lord's. For he must perceive, if he know any thing of history, that this vicarial power has been one which did not absolve the human spirit, but bound it with heavy chains, giving it no sense of the glorious liberty which Christ has pur- chased for it ; not only leaving it but teaching it to grovel when God has provided wings wherewith it may soar. How could pe- nances ever have been translated from their proper and legitimate use, as means whereby those evil habits may be subdued which make the spirit proud, and hinder it from being free, into heavy shackles and torments of the conscience, into checks upon all holy and thankful devotion, into instruments of pride and self-exaltation, if those who enjoined them had really felt that they were acting on behalf of the great Redeemer and Absolver ; if they had not said within their hearts, " The Lord delayeth his coming," and SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 389 therefore had thought themselves privileged to heat the men-ser- vants and the rnaid-servants, while they themselves ate and drank, and were drunken ? How could the monstrous thought of indul- gences ever have crept into the minds of men who had not lost the sense of their direct subjection to an invisible Lord, and therefore of necessity had become the slaves of those whom they professed to rule, obliged to cater to their fleshly and worldly appetites, in order that they might keep them in bondage ? These may be very old stories, but they are written legibly upon the history of the world, not to be exaggerated, doubtless, for the sake of establish- ing Protestant conclusions, but also not to be erased by any chica- nery of another kind ; not to be overlooked, because we may choose to fancy that other facts of an opposite kind concern us more nearly. Facts cannot contradict each other. The records of the miseries which the Romish system has produced, cannot con- tradict those which prove even to the satisfaction of the most thoughtful liberals of our day, that the Catholic Church has con- ferred innumerable blessings upon mankind. If we only understand both they must confirm and illustrate each other. What we want to discover is the point of their connexion. 3. This point, I believe, is found in that Romanist application of the vicarial doctrine which has reference to the episcopal or apos- tolic authority. According to the representative doctrine, all minis- ters exhibit Christ in that office to which they are called. The whole body of bishops — each bishop in his own sphere— present him to men as the bishop or overseer of the Church. Once make ministers vicarial, and it is evident that we have the seed of an en- tirely new scheme. The oneness and universality of Christ's office of course distinguishes Him from each one of his representatives, and from the whole body of his representatives. But this oneness and this universality are utterly lost to the world, they are merely dreams — if Christ be absent from his Church. They must, therefore, be imaged somewhere, since they have lost their virtue as realities. Ministers must not only be vicars of Christ, but there must be a vicar of Christ ; one who absorbs into himself, and exhibits in him- self his one and universal episcopacy. Here is the Popedom, an idea which may have been most gradual in its development, which could not come forth into actual manifestation as a Church idea, 390 SIGNS OF A while one so very like it was openly realized as the idea of the World in the persons of the Roman emperors : but which, neverthe- less, was latent in the minds of all ministers, who assumed to them- selves a vicarial character — in the minds of all laymen who acknow- ledged them in that character. The conception of an apostolical primacy in St. Peter, upon which it appears to rest, is evidently a mere creature of this idea, a harmless, it may be a legitimate, his- torical theory when considered in itself ; but when it has received the vicarial virus, capable of supporting one of the greatest denials and contradictions recorded in the annals of the universe. For this view of the Popedom is not merely that which came under our no- tice, when we were considering how men had been led to look for a great dogmatist to give them right and safe opinions ; this is that other aspect of the office, its kingly aspect, that in which it presents itself either as the true law of Christ's kingdom, or as the flagrant transgression and violation of it. If Christ be really in his Church, if all the offices of the Church be declaring Him to men, then is the existence of a Pope the most frightful of all anomalies, then is his existence a key to all the other anomalies in the history of Chris- tianity. If Christ be not really in his Church, if there be no real connexion between Him and those who speak in his name, or if that connexion be merely an individual one, and there be no spirit- ual constitution among men, then I own I do not see how the popish system can fail to commend itself to us as the most compre- hensive, the most effective, the most practical religious organization ever conceived of. Nor will this conviction be materially weaken- ed by any display of the evils which the system may have produced. All these will be described as excesses. We shall be asked, what is so good or so divine, that it is not exposed to corruption from the corruption of the human will ? We shall be asked, how we can account for the good that flowed in the middle ages, not from a cer- tain idea of Christianity merely, but from that idea as expressed in the organization of the Church ? I think we are able to answer, as we have answered before, ' This papal system' is itself, in its simplest, best form, that result of the corrupt human will which you speak of. It is itself not the excess but the counterfeit of the Church constitution, the violation indeed of an idea, but also of the organi- zation in which that idea is embodied. Because it could not destroy SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 391 that idea or that organization, the Church Catholic was able to dif- fuse some of those blessings which God meant it to diffuse. Just so far as the system prevailed, just so far as it did not contradict itself by asserting the principles it sets at nought, it has hindered God's mercies from reaching the world, it has turned them into curses.' Such language as this craves to be tried by Scripture, by history, by the conscience of papists themselves, by the truths which they profess, and which some of them, I am convinced, hold most dear. The other language which supposes that there is no spiritual consti- tution of Christ's ministry, has, I believe, done more, and is, at this present time, doing more to promote and establish Popery than all its own most diligent efforts. 4. I must still allude briefly to the connexion which I suppose, and which the Romanist supposes, to exist between the Jewish and the Christian economy. We are agreed so far as this — we both believe the connexion to be a real one, we both believe that it has to do with an ecclesiastical economy, we both believe that the forms of the Jewish commonwealth, so far as they were not merely nation- al or oriental, were translated into corresponding forms, and not merely into spiritual notions. Wherein then do we differ ? In this all-important point, that we look upon the Incarnation, the Resur- rection, and the Ascension of our Lord, as declaring Him to be real- ly and actually, not nominally or fantastically, head of the universal kingdom as the mortal High Priest had been of the peculiar king- dom, all the Jewish history being a preparation for the substitution of the one for the other. They believe that this High Priest has been succeeded in the new dispensation by one mortal and sinful as himself ; that he is to preserve the doctrines of the Creed to the Church, while he practically and in his own person declares that those doctrines do not mean what they seem to mean ; that a real connexion has not been established between man and God in the person of the Mediator; that the Church is not what her Creed af- firms her to be, united to Him in his victory as well as in his hu- miliation. Again, then, we contend, and with so much more con- viction and earnestness, as we approach nearer to the heart of the sub- ject, that the Romish system and the Catholic Church, instead of being identical, instead of having any natural affinity for each other, are deadly opposites, one of which must perish if the other is to survive. 392 SIGNS OF A SECTION VI. THE SCRIPTURES. In a preceding chapter I inquired into the meaning of certain indications of a spiritual and universal constitution which offered themselves to us while we were studying the actual phenomena of the world and its past history. We wanted some help to explain these to us, and to tell us how they should exist and yet the acknow- ledgment of this constitution by men should seem to be the excep- tion rather than the rule. We found this help in the documents which compose our Bible. These documents profess to reveal a constitution, which is declared to be the divine constitution for man. It is revealed first to a particular family, then to a particular nation, then, through that family and nation, to mankind. But this reve- lation is a history. The acts of this family and this nation, and the acts by which their possession becomes an universal one, embo- dy the discovery. The oppositions which arise without and within this family and nation to the principle upon which they are founded, explain to us the contradiction between the will of man and the order in which he is placed. They make us conscious of the exist- ence of two societies, one formed in accordance with the order of God, the other based upon self-will. Now, as the Bible declares that the constitution which it affirms to be the true one should last for ever, and as it speaks of a society grounded upon that constitution which is to last for ever, we wish- ed to inquire what signs there are of such a society in the world at this present moment. We have discovered some, which seem to import the existence of it ; we have inquired whether they cor- respond with the signs of it which we found set down in Scripture. Thus we have referred to the Bible, not only to clear up our difficulties respecting the meaning of God in his universe, but also to tell us how far that meaning is effectual for us at this day, not only to make known the nature of the order in which we are placed, but also the outward shape of the body in which that order is expressed. It may seem, then, that the purpose and character of the Scrip- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 393 tures have been already investigated as much at large as the limits of a book like this can permit, especially as the subject has already come before us in another shape, while we were discussing the opinions of different religious bodies. But it can hardly escape the observation of any reader, that if there be such a book as the Bible has seemed to us to be, it must not only interpret to us the signs of a spiritual and universal kingdom, but must be itself one of the most remarkable of those signs. And if so, we may, per- haps, by considering its relation to the other signs of which we have spoken, obtain a solution of some difficulties which much em- barrass the modern student. I. 1st. This view of the general intent of the Scriptures seems to show how particular books may have been ascertained to form a part of them, or to have no claims of admission to them. To conceive the possibility of a canon of Scripture is the same thing as to conceive the possibility of Scripture itself. If one be neces- sary, the other is necessary. If one be supposed to be formed by human agency, there is no difficulty in supposing that human agency should have been most proper for the other. Regard the Bible merely as an isolated thing, and it is no doubt hard to under- stand how such an authority as that of fixing what it is, should have been exercised by any persons who were not employed in the writing of it. Look upon it as the witness of a permanent kingdom, believe that it is a part of the plan of God for the estab- lishment and building up of that kingdom, and there is surely no difficulty in supposing that wisdom adequate to the work of deter- mining, with all necessary practical exactness, what books did and what did not contain the authentic history of this kingdom, should have been imparted to men, whose offices proclaimed that they could not fulfil their most ordinary tasks by any wisdom of their own. 2dly. By looking at the Scriptures as the sign of a spiritual and universal kingdom, we seem able to reconcile several methods or schemes for interpreting them, which often present themselves to us as contradictory and exclusive. For instance, it has been one well known tendency of men to look for a mystical character in them, to suppose that beneath the letter some secret cabala must be lurking. It has been the tendency of another class to 394 SIGNS OF A maintain the strictness and sufficiency of the letter, and indignantly to repudiate every recondite meaning as inconsistent with the sim- plicity of a revelation. Now every sign of this kingdom which we have considered hitherto has partaken of this double character; it has pointed to a relation which is invisible, mystical, transcend- ent ; it has been in itself plain, definite, visible. The relation which it expressed was real and permanent ; here lay the necessity of a sign which had nothing in it of a fluctuating character, which did not derive its strength from the notions and apprehensions of men, which spoke to all. One would certainly expect to find the same principle holding good in the case of this other sign ; one would think that the more simple, accurate, and historical the out- ward clothing was, the more it would be felt to embody some higher principle. Again; it has been a great controversy whether each part of these records should be taken to have a disiinct definite meaning, applicable to some particular event and crisis, or whether it may have a remote application to some other crisis, or even to a series of yet undeveloped events. Now supposing the Bible to be the history of the gradual development and manifestation of a kingdom fixed upon certain permanent principles, it seems the most natural supposition, that it would always exhibit these principles in refer- ence to some present or approaching contingency, yet that it would • explain similar contingencies and circumstances to the end of time. Refusing to acknowledge the first event, we lose the principle ; determined to restrict it to some other event of our own selection, we compel ourselves to depart from the letter without gaining any thing for the spirit. We may be right in our feeling that the particular event we have fixed upon does fall under the law which this part of Scripture makes known to us ; we are almost sure to be wrong when we restrain the application of the law to that given event. These conclusions proceed naturally from the belief that the Scriptures are not to be looked upon apart from the spirit- ual kingdom. 3dly. Hence also we seem to obtain the solution of another, and what strikes many as a more difficult problem, Where are the interpreters of this book to be found ? how is it at once to be a lawgiver, and yet to be subject to the maxims and rules of inter- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 395 V pretation of those who are its subjects ? The difficulty is the same as in all previous cases. Take the Bible as a solitary fact, speak of it simply as the Word of God addressing itself to man, -without inquiring what this word of God affirms man to be, what kind of order it says that he is placed in ; and there must be endless puz- zles to ascertain in what position of simple acquiescence or earn- est inquiry such utterances are to be received, whether each man is to grasp them for himself, or whether his fellows are in any wise helping him to grasp them. But let it be supposed that the words speak 'as they seem to speak, of men being placed in a certain divine order — of God, as addressing them in that order — it would seem plain enough that the words will be realized just so far as we avail ourselves of our position, missed just so far as we reject it. The difficulty of under- standing how, through the. help of Christ's ministers, wTe may at- tain to a practical insight into the facts and principles which this book makes known, how, choosing to dispense with that help, we shall be most likely to go astray, is precisely the difficulty which is supposed in all education ; or, would it not be more correct to say, that here wTe find the key to the puzzles of ordinary education, be- cause we arrive at a point, where we find God proclaiming Him- self as the educator, and marking out those through whom He will educate ? The difficulty which arises from the discovery that these ministers may forget their task, and instead of calling out the personal life and apprehension of their disciples, stifle them with mere words and notions, is still the same problem of daily life re- peated, only that we perceive more clearly against whom the sin is committed, and what the responsibility for it is. The difficulty of comprehending how men should teach out of a book, which they acknowledge to overreach themselves, and to be above them, is but the difficulty of every magistrate and judge who is set for the purpose of bringing out into light and clearness the meaning of the Law which he both administers and obeys, who may, doubtless, put himself in the place of it, may read himself into it, may choose to keep it from men instead of guiding them into an intelligent submission to it, but who acts in this way at his peril, bringing himself under the sentence, if of no earthly superior, of one who 396 ' SIGNS OF A yet, in this spiritual kingdom, holds his constant and acknowledged court of appeal. II. These questions are debated between those who are agreed in acknowledging the Scriptures as possessing divine authority. Let us now7 consider the objections of those w7ho either reject the notion of a Bible altogether, or who see no special reason why the books which we hold sacred should usurp the name. These objections may be stated in this way. 4 Ever since the critical spirit and knowledge of modern Europe have been brought to bear upon these documents, it has been found more and more difficult to maintain the claims which are put forth on their behalf by the elder church as well as by the reformers. Supposing the doctrine of their inspiration, of their paramount authority to all other books, of their fixed and peculiar character, to be true, the detection of any unauthentic record amongst them, of any report which will not bear sifting, even of any considerable error in the reading of a text which had been used to support some opinion, must be sufficient to shake the credit of the whole scheme. It was, therefore, unquestionably honest in those early critics who wished to assert the general authority of the book, that they ventured to commence these fatal inroads. But if they were not stopped at first, they certainly cannot be stopped nowr. The principle of criti- cism, which has been admitted as to a part, must be applied to the whole. Whatever maxim has been thought just, and has stood the test of inquiry in reference to other books, must be brought to bear upon these. And little help will be derived in our day from those evidences, wThich in the last century were thought so conclusive. The credit of the book wras supposed to be sustained by the miracles which are recorded in it, by the consistency of the facts with the general testimony of antiquity, by the admirable character of the four narratives which form the centre of it, by its ideal truth and consistency. NowT those miracles are the very stories which we require should be accounted for. The testimony of antiquity has been proved only to establish the existence of certain habits of thought and feeling in different nations, which will themselves account for what has been supposed to be peculiar in these records. The four narratives have been subjected to a SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 397 severe analysis, and it has been found most difficult to understand either their internal history or their relation to outward events. Finally, the supposed ideal consistency has been examined of the whole record, and has been shown, indeed, to be an explanation of the phenomena of Christianity, but in a way most unsatisfactory to those who regard it as embodied in a series of facts.' This is a statement, I hope it is a fair statement, of the objections which are now current in all parts of society, and which, when they do not appear as a complete system of arguments, are only the more effectual, because they suggest the thought that much has been left unsaid which would be quite conclusive if it might safely be uttered. I begin, then, with admitting that I do not see how it is possible for those who look upon the Scriptures merely as a set of documents contrived for the instruction of individual men, merely as a witness to them of what has been done for them, of what the plans and purposes of God respecting them are, to encounter some of these arguments. I do not mean that they may not encounter them prac- ticilly, in what seems to me a most honest and effectual method. If they will resolutely hold fast that which they have felt and ascer- tained in their own lives to be true ; if they will say, ' This we have learnt and received; the Bible taught it us, and we cannot give it up for any arguments I believe their position is a safe and impregnable one. It is not a position of prejudice, it is a reasonable and sound position ; it is founded upon the first and wisest maxim of ethiral philosophy, Keep what thou hast ; add to it if thou canst ; but if thou wishest to realize more, never let any thing which thou hast realized be snatched away from thee. My fear is that few people in our day are likely to be content with this position. They will be going out of it with their arguments and their evidences, with their attempts to prove how and why a book having the char- acter which they impute to the Bible, must be divine and perfect. Here I think they will be discomfited. This logic is not a part of their realized truths, it is something altogether extraneous to them. And what is worse, they do not yet know what it is they are argu- ing about ; for they may have derived these individual facts from the Bible ; but the Bible itself evidently assumes to be something else ; it assumes to be a collection of historical documents, and the 26 398 SIGNS OF A question is, how this assumption is connected with that quality of it which they have discovered and recognised. Are we, then, to hope that those who are willing to consider it principally as a collection of historical documents, and as such to defend it, will be able to maintain their position 1 I think writers of this class will bring forward much that is very valuable, much that their opponents cannot without great difficulty and without some dishonesty, reply to ; I think they will do more than this j they will be enabled to leave an impression upon thoughtful and sincere minds, that there are facts existing in the world now, and that there has been a series of such facts, of which these books may offer the explanation. But here, again, the difficulty is to find how these facts cohere, how it is that they are related to the doc- trines and principles which these books embody ; why it is neces- sary to suppose any divine oversight in the arrangement and pre- servation of them. Are we then to say, as the objector affirms we must say, that criticism is wholly inapplicable to this particular set of records ; that they must be taken for granted upon some authority or other, be it that of primitive antiquity, or of the Church in the present day ; and that, being so taken for granted, all further inquiry re- specting them is to be discarded ? Every one will see that there is a plausibility in this opinion ; nay, there is more than plausibility, there is a truth hidden in it which we must not deny. As long as we receive the Scriptures at all, as long as we do not determine abso- lutely to reject them, we must in the education of our own minds, in the education of our children's minds, take them for granted. We cannot begin with being critics, or with making them critics. If we do, we and they will assuredly be most miserable critics, and as certainly we and they shall be nothing else. But do we not in this respect deal with the Scriptures as we deal with other books ? We take them for granted too ; we do not in merely reading or in teaching them, enter into a criticism of the sources whence they are derived or of the conditions of their authority. There comes a time, however, when other books are subjected to this trial ; it has been the will of God that the book which we consider pre-eminently his, should be subjected to the same. It is a solemn inquiry for us, whether we shall dare to pretend that we will take better care of SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 399 his book than He has taken of it ; whether we shall affirm that it cannot bear the application of tests, which we believe that ordinary literature will bear. And this brings us to the main question which I wish to place before the reader, What has been the character of that criticism to which the Scriptures have been for the most part subjected during the last century and a half 1 I do not ask whether it has been sound criticism, learned criticism, devout criticism. It may have had any or all of these characters. But what has been its object ? The safest answer with respect to the last century may be obtained from a consideration of what was the object of all criticism, whether it referred to the human body or the human soul, to the universe or to the creatures who lived in it. Nearly every philosopher of that day thought it was the business of his life to analyze ; he was to analyze the operations of the mind, to analyze himself, to analyze his fellow creatures, to analyze the being of his Maker. Do I say that all this labour was wasted, that nothing came out of the in- quiries and dissections of that period? I say no such thing; I believe much was learnt from them ; that many false notions and phantoms, which men had transferred from themselves to the objects of their study, were got rid of; many idols thrown down, broken in pieces, and trampled upon, which had beset the caves of thought- ful men or the market-places of busy men. But the great lesson of all which this method of study bequeathed to us, was the lesson of its own utter incapacity to lead into the apprehension of any truth, though it might avail for the discomfiture of some error. Hence every step that has been taken in our day towards real pro- fitable inquiry, whether in physics or metaphysics, has been a step out of this method, a step towards the investigation of the powers and principles of things as they exist ; not an attempt, except for certain subordinate purposes, to reduce them into their elements. Above all, this change has been effected in reference to literature. Here the analytical spirit of the last age, displayed itself in its full power ; every book was to be cut up into its elements, and whatever elements did not please the critic to be cast out as worthless ; nothing whatever was done in the study of a book as a whole, nothing towards the discovery of the purpose which actuated and informed it. The Scriptures were treated in the same manner. The fact of 400 SIGNS OF A their constituting a whole, which had been felt as a whole by innu- merable minds for many centuries, was more and more overlooked as utterly unimportant to the critic and the philosopher. He could not deny that they had a common name, but his business was to show what separate items went to the composition of this name, and then to pursue his inquiries with as little reference as possible to it. Of course it was part of the ordinary philosophy at the period, that every thing in this book, which spoke of invisible powers, should be ex- plained away. The object was to discover how many of its elements might be preserved, without infringing upon the ordinary maxims of the times in reference to physics, metaphysics, and ethics. Now I would say, in reference to these inquiries, just as I said in reference to all others undertaken at the same period, that I do not believe they were useless, or will ultimately be mischievous. If the student of the physics of the seventeenth century perceive that there were a multitude of strange theories and superstitions then accumulated and accumulating, wThichhad need by some whirlwind to be swept away ; the student of theology must equally confess that a number of hard, dogmatical abstractions respecting spiritual objects, and, not least, respecting the books which treat of these objects, were darkening the face of the heavens, and making men's path along their common earth less clear. That same fiery process would be necessary for the destruction of these, we might conjecture. Of what kind it should be, we could not be judges. God ordained that it should be this destructive analysis. We cannot doubt that what He appointed was best. Many obstructions to the perception of that which is real and substantial have been removed out of the path of the young theologian ; it is his own fault if he seeks for them again. He may, if he will, be less entangled with the ab- stractions and conceits of the intellect than his forefathers were. And in this case, as in the others I have mentioned, the analysts have conferred this great blessing on us — they have proved the in- adequacy and feebleness of their method to explain any one living fact, or to lead us onward to any one important discovery. When, therefore, the objectors of whom we are speaking, say that the Bible ought to be tried by the same rules as other books, we can perhaps go a great way with them, provided we understand what they mean. It always, I believe, will be tried by the same SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 401 standard as other books ; that is to say, the habits of mind which we cultivate in regard to one, we shall cultivate in regard to the other. When all books are merely cut up into their elements, the Bible will be dealt with in like manner. When other books, and the whole series of books which constitute the literature of a na- tion, are contemplated in reference to their principle or idea, it is utterly impossible but that these should be studied upon the same principle. And the question arises, what is this principle or idea ? We have had occasion to consider that view of it, so prevalent in our day, which tries to separate the idea from the event, to exhibit the one as common to all ages, the other as its mere accidental temporary clothing. I have endeavoured to show how inadequate this doctrine is to account for the phenomena which present them- selves to us in the history of the world ; how it turns living ideas into mere notions and apprehensions of our minds, and so legalizes and stamps with authority the very superstitions from which it seeks to deliver us ; how it confounds the permanent and the transitory in the very attempt to distinguish them ; how it destroys human progress in the very attempt to assert it. If, indeed, it were possi- ble entirely to separate this modern idealism from the old analytical method which it professes to supersede and to despise, we might easily prove the insufficiency of either. The chief strength of each lies in a vague notion of the one being the expansion and full de- velopment of the other ; in a loose impression that the belief of inspiration, of miracles, of a gospel history, which had been par- tially subverted by the one, has been completely subverted by the other. The facts, in recent German history especially, which prove that the ideal system could not have been produced at all, if it had not been preceded by a vehement religious protest against the ana- lysts, are not known or not heeded j and we are asked what hope there can be of maintaining our obsolete notions respecting a divine order and a divine book, when each age has furnished its own pe- culiar and appropriate refutation of them. Our answer is, ' no hope at all, if what you call our notions be not something: more than notions, if they be not founded on eternal principles and truths. But, on the other hand, the belief that they have this foundation is strengthened, not weakened, by the history of these different 402 SIGNS OF A attempts to confute them ; strengthened, not weakened, by the fact, that no adequate answer has been offered to the particular charges against the Bible, except by those who are willing to speak of the Bible in the way it seems to speak of itself, as the revelation of a divine kingdom.' I. Looking at it in this light, I would inquire, first, what diffi- culties there are in the old notion that the writers of the book were inspired men ? According to the principle of a spiritual kingdom, as we have considered it, inspiration is not a strange anomalous fact; it is the proper law and order of the world ; no man ought to write, or speak, or think, except under the acknowledgment of an inspi- ration ; no man can speak, or write, or think, if he have not really an inspiration. Is, then, the constant habitual confession of divine teaching, the reference of every thing to God by the writers of this Bible, something which stamps them with the character of impos- tors ? Would not this seem to be the characteristic of true men ? But still you say ' it is the characteristic of fanatics, of those who are not true men ; where do you draw the line V I draw it in this way : I say, according to the principle of a spiritual king- dom, every man who is doing the work he is set to do, may believe that he is inspired with a power to do that work ; every man who is doing some other work which he is not set to do, may, indeed, say that he is using powers which he has received from above ; but he is violating the purposes for which those powers have been given him ; his will is obeying an impulse contrary to the will of the Being who bestowed the power. Here is fanaticism, here is con- fusion. The question, therefore, is not really, Were these men who wrote the Scriptures inspired by God 1 but, Were they in a certain position and appointed to a certain work ? So that we are driven by this argument, as we are driven by the book itself, from that which we read to that which we read of. Was there such a soci- ety as that which this book speaks of? was there such a nation as the Jews ? had they a history ? was there a meaning in that his- tory ? does this book explain to us their history and its meaning ? The question of inspiration belongs to these questions — cannot be viewed apart from them. If there be no spiritual kingdom in the world, no kings, priests, prophets appointed by God, then assuredly I cannot make out that the Scriptures had a right to describe such SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 403 kings, and priests, and prophets. If there were such men, I have as great difficulty in understanding how we can dispense with such a record, or how any Being, save He who formed the society for the sake of his own glory and for the good of his creatures, can nave caused that book to be written. But it will be answered, ' This is evading the difficulty. It is not merely the rren, but the words, which, according to the com- mon theory, are inspired. And though less extravagant theories may have been invented and received among Christians, yet none which denies a verbal inspiration or dictation is consistent with itself, is any thing but a subterfuge.' Two words are used here as synonymous, which seem to me to involve the most different signi- fications. When y,ou speak to me of verbal inspiration, though I do not like the phrase, though it seems to me to involve a violent — a scarcely grammatical — ellipsis, yet I subscribe most unequivocally to the meaning which I suppose is latent in it. I have no notion of inspired thoughts which do not find for themselves a suitable clothing of words. I can scarcely, even in my mind, separate the language of a writer from his meaning. And I certainly find this difficulty greater in studying a book of the Bible than in studying any other book. The peculiarities of its language seem to me strangely significant. And yet its greatest peculiarity of all, if I may be pardoned the solecism, is its universality, its capacity of translation into any dialect which has a living and human quality, which is not merely the echo of passing impressions and the utter- ance of animal necessities. But just because I see this link between the imbreathed thought and the spoken word, I must reject as mon- strous and heretical the notion of a dictation. I call it monstrous and heretical, for I know none more directly at variance with the letter and spirit of Scripture. If the hint of it is to be found any- where, it is certainly in the history of the giving of the divine code. That was, of course, a formal literal document, and therefore is sig- nified to proceed formally and literally from its Author. Yet mark how carefully we are warned against the notion, so natural to the sensual and idolatrous heart of man, that Moses was a mere me- chanical utterer or transcriber. Why are we told that he went into the thick darkness ? why do we hear of his awful communion for forty days ? why have we the records of his deep sympathy • 404 SIGNS OF A with his people, of his prayers, his meditations, his murmurings, if not that we may be exalted to understand something of the human privilege of spiritual intercourse, and that we may consider this the great privilege of the most honoured seer ? And this surely is the object of all Scripture, if it have any object at all, to withdraw u% from outward sensual impressions of the divine Majesty, to make us feel the reality of the relation between Him and his creatures, to make us understand that it is a spiritual relation, and that, therefore, it can manifest itself in outward words and acts. It is, then, no concession to the Rationalist, but a necessity of our own faith, that we should utterly reject and abhor this theory of dictation. And it remains for him to show how the discovery of different readings in MSS., or the rejection of books as not genuine, which are now esteemed to be parts of the Canon, or even the detection of histori- cal inconsistencies and mistakes in the inspired writers, would affect our belief. With regard to the new readings, just in proportion to our feeling of the importance and sacredness of the language, must be our desire to find what it really is. If there be no Bible, these investigations are idle and useless ; if there be, they must be most interesting. The mental exercise in such inquiries must be most healthful, involving, if it be rightly conducted, the necessity of re- flection upon the whole mind and scope of the text, a cautious and calm use of the judging faculty, a faith in the existence of truth, and in its willingness to reveal itself. Again : any person who really believes that there is a book, of which the distinct office is to explain the nature and conditions of a kingdom into which he has been actually brought, must enter upon the inquiry whether any one of the documents of which this book is supposed to consist be or be not genuine, in the same simple and honest spirit. The king- dom exists ; he is not afraid of losing it or of losing his place in it, even if God thought fit to take away the book altogether. Yet he has no fear that He will do this, no doubt in the wTorld that it is his good pleasure to tell us what He is and what we are. That this book has revealed these truths to himself and to thousands of others for generations, he is certain ; whether he or they have been right in supposing that a particular portion of it was necessary to the rest, he is willing reverently and diligently to consider ; nothing doubting that He who upholds the kingdom and has given the book, SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 405 will not allow the ultimate continuance of any intruder into it, or permit any integral part of it to be taken away. And if it be asked, But does not this admission open a door to unlimited skepti- cism ? has not nearly every book been the subject of some modern suspicion % — the answer, I think, has been given already. Let those talk to me about interpolations in Shakspeare who know what Shakspeare is, who have really studied his mind and writings. I do not care the least because Theobald or Pope may determine that such and such passages are not suitable to their taste ; neither do I care in the least wrhat may be the taste of the analysts or the modern idealists about passages or books of Scripture. Their taste is no law of criticism. I believe it to be a very low and bad taste indeed. Let them bring forward external evidence and we will weigh it — cautiously, because their taste is very apt to mingle with their words, because they continually assume a maxim from which we utterly dissent, as if it were part and parcel of a fact which we may acknowledge ; but still earnestly and impartially. I am not the least afraid of touching a corner of the edifice because the rest is likely to fall down ; on the contrary, I believe it will prove to be a much firmer edifice than we have been wont to suppose that it is. The books which were thrown aside, even by religious men, at the time of the Reformation, because they seemed to have no direct bearing upon individual life, will be found to contain their own evidence, when they are looked upon as meant to develope the order and life of the spiritual kingdom. The same principle precisely applies to alleged mistakes or incon- sistencies in the admitted parts of the records. Suppose these mis- takes and inconsistencies to be such as prove dishonesty in the wri- ters— suppose them to be connected with any part of the revelation of the character of God or the development of his kingdom — they fall under the last head, they become {pro tanto) arguments against the genuineness of that document wherein they are found. Sup- pose them to be merely accidental to the narrative, such as do not affect the meaning of the facts or the integrity of the writer, or such as may be corrected by comparison with another narrative of the same transactions, then I do not know that I have any right, a priori, to affirm from the existence of a Bible that none such will exist. I see no promise to that effect; I see no reason why it may not have 406 SIGNS OF A pleased God to teach men by this very means ; I mean, to permit the ordinary differences of opinions and eyesight which manifest them- selves in the testimony of different witnesses of a fact, to be helps to us in the study of the real character of that fact; the ordinary confusion respecting points of detail to be the means of leading us away from those points of detail to that which is real and substan- tial. I say, T can see no reason, a priori, either in the nature of a Bible or in the meaning of inspiration, why this may not be so. I even fancy that I can see reasons in the analogy of the Divine deal- ings, and in the tendency of man to dwell upon the minutiae of a transaction, not as helps to discover its real meaning and essence, but for their own sakes, why such a discipline may be most suited to us. If it should be found that this is not the case, I shall acquiesce most readily, but I shall have no more faith in the Bible than I have at present. For the Bible will not allow me to have any faith in it apart from faith in God, and whatever I find to be his way of train- ing me and my race, that I hold to be the right way, and the way in which we may be trained to all goodness and all truth. I do not want to lay down a scheme or chart of the road in which it is fitting we should be led ; that, I think, is presumption. According to this showing, then, the charge of departing from the ordinary rules which we apply to the study of other books, is far more applicable to those who urge it than it is to us. We claim that the Bible should be looked at as a fact, a most pregnant fact, in the history of mankind. It stands apart from other books ; we wish to know why it so stands apart, what there is that differences it from other books, just hs we wish to know what there is in the writings of Cicero that differences them from other writings, or what there is in the literature of Rome that differences it from other lite- rature. And if we should discover that there is that in this book which entitles it to be called, as it has been commonly called, The Book, or The Book of Books, we do not surely by such a name sig- nify any contempt of books — rather a high appreciation of them. We declare that there is a book which directly and formally connects letters with the life of man, with the order of God ; a book, which, just so far as it fulfils its idea, becomes the key by which all other books may be interpreted, that which translates them into signifi- cance and determines the value and position of each. We declare, SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 407 moreover, what is the temper and spirit in which a book should be studied. Nothing seems to me more preposterous than the notion, that we can change our habits of mind when we turn from one sub- ject to another. It is a flagrant violation of every ethical principle, that is to say, a flagrant tampering with our moral being, to sup- pose that we can be reverent at one moment and irreverent at ano- ther ; that we are to be humble in the presence of this person, and proud when we are brought into intercourse with another. I per- fectly agree, therefore, with the Rationalist, that to talk as some do of our right to sit in judgment upon all other books, and of the duty of submitting our judgments to the Bible, is not practical or reason- able. If we think that in reading Cicero or Shakspeare our proper position is that of judges, I am quite certain that we shall not be able to think otherwise when we study the Scriptures. And I am equally certain that while we do fancy that we are judges of Cicero or Shakspeare we shall not understand them. The posture of children or learners is the true profitable posture in all cases. It is not safe to propose to ourselves the end of being judges in any case- It is not safe for our minds generally, it is most unsafe for the judg- ing faculty itself. That is invariably turned awry at first, blunted and stupified afterwards, if it be not sent to school, and if it do not carry through life the docility which school is meant to give it. But what is the schooling? We all know how difficult the acquisition of docility is, how difficult in all days, how difficult especially in our own. There are some books which naturally tempt us to exercise the proud condemning spirit; feebleness is stamped upon them; they themselves affect a right to judge others ; we feel as if here we might safely indulge our propensity. Therefore we see the wisdom of the old notion, that only the best books, only those which carry a kind of authority with them, should be set before boys ; when they have been drilled by them into habits of deference and humility, then they may venture, if their calling requires it, upon the study of the worst, for then they will have acquired the true discerning spirit, that spirit of which the judging spirit is the counterfeit; the one perceiving the real quality of the food which is offered, the other, merely setting up its own partial and immature tastes and aversions as the standard of what is good and evil. But even this is not suffi- cient, as experience has proved. Starting from the study of the 408 SIGNS OF A meanest books, our modern critics have gone on to higher books, and have asked why they may not exercise their right of private judgment on one as much as the other. Why they may not pro- nounce their sentence upon Herodotus or Livy as well as upon any modern compilation ? The Rationalist goes a step further, and says, Why not pass our sentence upon those which you call your inspired books as well as upon Herodotus or Livy ? It is good that such a question should be proposed, because it brings the question to an issue. It enables us to say, You have wanted to get rid of these in- spired books, because, you have said, they were an affront to other literature; learn by this that they are the needful protectors to other literature. If there be a book, of which wre can say, Herein God is speaking to you ; be silent and listen : we have the power of keep- ing down that saucy and insolent temper, which, so far as it is ap- plied to any thing, makes that thing unintelligible. We have the power of cultivating your judgment, because we have the power of making it not a private judgment. A private judgment means, the judgment of a man who is cut off from his fellows, the judgment of a savage. A man certainly has a right to such a private judgment, if by right you mean the power to exercise it. For he has the power of being a savage ; he has the power of saying, I will not be educated ; I will not be led out of my own partial apprehensions, and the partial apprehensions of my age; I will not be a reasona- ble being, I will not be a man. He may do this ; I say also he may do something else if he will. He may be taken under training and discipline, the training and discipline of God himself, for the pur- pose of being led out of his private judgment, into a knowledge of the judgment and mind of Him who " weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance." He may have a book set before him, which unfolds the scheme and purpose of this universe and its Creator ; he may be led by slow degrees to understand his own con- nexion with this universe, with those who lived in it, and with Him who is the author of it. And if he will have this learning, if he will be taught out of this book, then every other book which he reads will be also a part of the same divine institution. God will be training him by that too ; to trace out the course of his govern- ment, to see how different men have, consciously or unconsciously, cheerfully or involuntarily, been accomplishing some part of his de- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 409 signs towards his creatures; till having descended through different gradations of thoughtful inquirers, who, each in his own department, are humbly desiring to discover the meaning of their Lord, when he comes, at last, to the lowest point in the scale, to the last new criti- cism, or the last tavern speech in defence of the inalienable right of men to think what they like, he will find even in that something which is true, something which could not have been spoken if there were not a Bible in the world. 2. This view of the relation between the Scriptures and other books, may perhaps assist us in considering the question of miracles. The analyst of the last century maintained that these miracles might be referred to natural causes. The idealist of the present day con- siders thern as inventions attesting that belief of something super- natural which belongs to men because they have spiritual faculties. Both alike agree, that they are stumbling-blocks and not helps to a belief the doctrines and facts of Scripture. I cannot regret that either of these opinions has been propounded. Unphilosophical as I think them, they yet may clear our minds of a great confusion, and may help us in arriving at a great truth. We have been used to speak of miracles as the chief evidences for the truth of Chris- tianity. Now if it is meant by this, that a miracle or prodigy, as such, proves the divine commission of the person who enacts it, we have the strongest reason for rejecting such a notion, for the Bible commands us to reject it. We dare not believe any thing merely because something which strikes us as a departure from ordinary experiences or laws is done to confirm it; we are warned in Scrip- ture, that we shall see such wonders, and that we are to be aware of being deceived by them. Again, the Bible is remarkably a book of laws, a book explaining the divine order of the universe; if it be not this it is nothing. Can we suppose that violations of laws, infringements of order, would be the great signs and witnesses in confirmation of it ? Surely, then, the eagerness of the analyst to get these miracles resolved into natural causes, that is, according to his notion, to get them connected with the general order of the world, is not surprising. But, once more, it is quite true, as the other class of rationalists affirm, that there has been a feeling, not at one time and in one age, but at all times and in all ages, after some power which is not circumscribed by the rules of ordinary visible 410 SIGNS OF A experience, but which is superior to these rules, and can transgress them. He is quite right, that the acknowledgment of such a power lies deep in the heart of man, and that we are continually demand- ing instances and proofs of its exercise. Both these assertions are true ; the difficulty is to reconcile them and apply them. Now, supposing the Bible were the revelation of a spiritual kingdom or constitution for man, such as we have described ; sup- posing it were the history of a divine power for the redemption of man out of a slavery into which he had brought himself, we may perceive, I think, at least a dawn of light upon this controversy. I do find, unquestionably, in the portents recorded by Livy, the signs of a feeling in men's minds that there is something supernatural ; that the powers of the world are not all with which men have to deal. But the feeling contradicts itself in the attempt to utter itself ; it does homage to the powers of nature in the very act of seeming to rise above them. And, therefore, under such a system there could be no liberty for the human spirit, there could be no brave in- vestigation into the mechanism or into the energies of the universe. Before these blessings could be attained, the sense of the superna- tural in man must be justified and purified. He must know that when he is dreaming of something above himself, he is dreaming of a reality ; he must know that nature is not that which he is dreaming of; that he is not to tremble before this, but to claim the dignity of a spiritual creature, to understand it and to subdue it. He must know that he is not the victim of a set of blind natural agents ; he must have something more than a vague conception of what that power is, of which he is the servant. Such an effect, I say, the miracles of the Bible may produce upon him. Every one of those which is recorded in the Old Testament is recorded expressly as a witness, that the Jehovah, the I am, the personal God, the Lord of the spirits of all flesh, is the King of the world, and that gods of sense are not its kings. Every miracle recorded in the New Testament is recorded expressly and professedly for the purpose of showing that the Son of man is the Ruler of the winds and the waves; the sustainer and restorer of animal life; the healer and tamer of the human spirit; and that those who are the adopted children of God in Him, while they are doing his work, are not the servants of visible things, but their rulers. These mira- SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 411 cles say to the poor man, "Fear not the mighty unfathomable ocean, for your King and Friend has calmly walked upon it ; fear not the powers of disease and sickness, for He who took your flesh has mastered them ; fear not the more terrible powers that get the mas- tery of the understanding and heart, for Christ also hath cast out devils : walk boldly and bravely over this earth, as freemen united to this triumphant Deliverer ; dread only separation from Him ; dread only that you should not trust Him and cleave to Him suffi- ciently, and so sink again under the bondage to nature and death, out of which He, by his life and death, has purchased you." And do not they speak also to the better taught man according to his necessities and temptations ? He does not so much want to be raised above the natural fear of outward things ; a calculation of probabilities, or a habit of encountering difficulties may easily give him that victory. But the very means of his deliverance are occa- sions to him of fresh bondage. He acquires a drowsy, dull sense of an ever-moving system of chances; he does not become an idolater of the powers of nature ; but he worships its evenness and persistency. Most wretched and degrading faith ! far more to be loathed and dreaded than the living and half-human idolatry of the peasant. Yet unless there be some demonstration that spiritual power is superior to mechanical; that the world is subject to God, and not to chance or nature ; that there is an order, far more beau- tiful and perfect than that of sun and stars, in which men are in- tended to abide, and in which every thing that is great and noble within them receives its full development ; — I see not how this ma- terialist superstition can fail to become the Creed of every nation, and to bring about the decay of all institutions and political life, all feeling, affection, hope. With the other faith it has been possible for men to pursue physical science. The world has presented itself to them as a solemn, awful subject of study, but not as a tyrant before which they must bow. They have learnt that the mere cus- tomary links which connect a fact with its highest principle, may be suspended for the purpose of making that principle manifest. They have, therefore, risen above the slavish notion, that sensible experience is the law to which things are subjecte d ; they have been able to set it at nought and defy it ; not merely the astrono- mer, but every chemist who has truly investigated the functions and 412 SIGNS OF A powers of material things, has moved on in this line, humbly asking nature to tell hirn her secrets, and receiving answers, the most satis- factory indeed, but the most contrary to our sensible anticipations and conclusions. If, then, we are asked why we reject the analyst's doctrine about these miracles, our answer is, because by accepting it we should not be acknowledging the true order of the world, but we should be refusing to acknowledge it. We do not believe that the world is under the government of natural causes ; we do not know what the phrase ' natural causes' means. We confess, and rejoice to confess, that there is an habitual appointed course of things; that each agent, Voluntary or involuntary, has his proper place in the scheme ; that no one link of this agency will be ever needlessly broken or dispensed with. But we say that no dishonour is put upon any of these agents, when He, who has assigned them their place, keeps them in their own relation to each other, imparts to them their powers, withdraws the veil which conceals Himself the prime worker, and so explains the meaning of his ordinances, the secret of their efficiency, the reason of their abuse. It is in this sense that we say the miracles are evidences of the truth of Christianity. If Christianity be the manifestation of a spiritual kingdom ; if it be the satisfaction of the dreams of past ages ; if it be that which was to exhibit through all the complications of after ages, what is the law which governs them, and who is the Giver of that law, then we cannot see how it could enter the world without miracles, or how those miracles should not be such as the Bible affirms that they M ere.* 3. The records of these miracles form such an integral portion of the Gospel narratives, that in speaking of the one I have neces- sarily anticipated many of the remarks which I should have made upon the other. The real difficulty which has presented itself to men's minds in the study of these has been this, * How can we admit narratives * Every reader of the Gospels will of course have observed, that our Lord's signs did not satisfy the rulers of the Jews. They wanted another kind of signs, 'signs from heaven,' glaring tokens which the eye might recognise, not ' powers' exercised upon the inner man, and calling forth an effort of the spirit in answer to them. Beautifully do our Lord's words express the difference, 'It is a sinful and adulterous, or sense-bound» generation which seeks after such signs.' SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 413 which report such very strange stories to be true, without some higher evidence than belongs to almost any other writing." This suggestion being once offered, of course every difficulty which har- monists have experienced, in bringing the parts of the different narratives into connexion, every doubt which has been raised re- specting the authorship of any one of them, every question about the existence of a common source from which they may have pro- ceeded, has given new encouragement to skepticism. It has been said, ' so far from there being more evidence, it would seem as if there were less evidence for these than for the other parts of the record.' Now our last inquiry seems to lead us to these conclusions. Either the strange stories spoken of are in accordance with the scriptural idea of the Founder of a spiritual and universal kingdom, or they are not. If they are not, no evidence whatever could establish the authenticity of the document containing them; for they would be self-contradictory; we should be bound to reject them because we believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God. On the other hand, if they are, we should require evidence to account for their omission in any record professing to contain the history of such a person. We should have a right to ask, Why did he give no signs that he came to connect the visible with the invisible world ; why did he do nothing to .break the yoke of custom and experience; nothing to show men that the constitution which he pretended to reveal and establish has a true foundation ? Take away the miracles, and there is an inexplicable chasm and incon- sistency in these records, which it would require a vast amount of wit and ingenuity to explain.* Now when this difficulty is surmounted, when the reader of the Gospels is not haunted perpetually with the thought, * I wish * We are told sometimes that Mahomet understood the true nature of miracles far better than the Apostles of the Christian Church; he said, 4 The corn growing was a miracle, the rise of the sun was a miracb, life and death were miracles,' &c. Very likely he did, and they were very fine words no doubt. The question is, what effect have they produced ? Have his best disciples been able, were they able even in the highest times of Arabian cultivation, to rise above the prejudices and illusions of sensi- sible experience? But the fact of the difference is important. It shows how closely the kind of miracles recorded in Scripture belongs to the idea of the Incarnation. Re- jecting that idea, Mahometans rightly reject the signs and forms which connect the visi- ble with the invisible worfd. And there is the secret of their slavery. 27 414 SIGNS OF A that story were away ; I wish I could have the morality of these discourses, and the morality of the life of Jesus, without being per- petually asked to acknowledge something marvellous,7 when he has seen that the marvel belongs essentially to the morality of the discourses and of the life, the other perplexities, I believe, will not be very serious. In the first place, he will see that all the failures of harmonists to bring the different facts of the different Gospels into connexion or chronological sequence, have nothing whatever to do with the books themselves. They exist, they are facts, they have exercised a wonderful influence on the world in their present form, they have made knowTn to men the same living Person. If they should be found to fit one into another, or to be contrived as supplements to each other, [ do not see that they would accomplish their purpose better. I am quite willing to listen to those who say they have discovered such an agreement in them, and to believe them if they make their point good. But I certainly am not the least troubled when I see them at fault. A revelation to men of their Lord and King, must be something altogether wonderful. I could not the least conjecture beforehand how the records of it would be composed. They might come in the form of annals, no doubt. That is not the form from which one in general derives most knowledge of a character ; oftentimes the story of a few days or hours brings it into clearer light ; still this method might have been appropriate for such an occasion. But if another has apparently been adopted ; if I am in possession of a set of documents, seeming to present to me a life in a number of different circumstances, all human and intelligible circumstances, the wonder lying not in them but in him who is acting through them, and in the meaning he shows to be latent in them, and if I have the opportunity of comparing these documents, so that I may learn more of the meaning of the life, from seeing how the trans- actions which exhibit it appeared to different men, I am certainly not careful to disturb this order, for the sake of inventing another which I think would be much less adapted to us. So again, secondly, it should be remembered that the existence of these do- cuments is not affected by any theories about their authorship or their construction. Omit all the names which we are wont to as- sociate with them, or say that these names do not indicate any SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 415 known persons, or that these persons were not eye-witnesses, or that they were merely reporters of a current tradition, or that they all drew from a common tradition, or that they had communications with one another, or that they had none — still the books are; and the secret of their influence, and the strange impression which men have, that they do exhibit a real being to man, and that Being the Lord of man, the image after which he is created ; this must still be explained, either by means of some one of these hypotheses, or without it. They may be all worth considering ; each, doubtless, means some- thing, and may teach something ; but if they should all prove to be un- tenable, still the marvel itself is not got rid of. To that the theolo- gical student must address himself; he must look it fairly in the face, he must confess that all processes of his criticism must be pre- ceded by the acknowledgment that there is something to be criti- cised. And however much he may be disposed to turn away from the commonplace remark, that there is a singular absence in these records of those contrivances by which men usually try to set forth a hero; that the divinity which the writer believes he is ex- hibiting, does not occasionally but habitually exhibit itself in the simplest and lowliest forms of human life ; that there is actually no exception to this practice in any one of these narratives, not one in- stance in all these traditions of affectionate, credulous, ignorant dis- ciples, of an attempt to establish their Master's celestial origin by connecting him with circumstances of outward greatness; however dull and dreary, I say, the repetition of such remarks may be, be- cause they have been forced upon us all in books of evidence, be- cause we have learnt them by rote, before they came out to us naturally and simply as characteristics of that which we were reading, yet they are true remarks, and can as little be passed over by any thoughtful reader, as any peculiarity in the style of an ancient classic. Therefore we find an evidently growing conviction in the minds of the more intelligent skeptics, that there must be a scheme for the purpose of explaining these difficulties. The whole history must be accounted for, not merely by finding fault with the details of the narrative, but by dividing the person of whom it speaks, according to his historical and his mythical attributes. This is the experiment which I have so often noticed. It may be applied to the Gospel narratives ; but unless it will solve all the facts relating to 416 SIGNS OF A a spiritual and universal kingdom which we have been considering it is worth nothing. Show that there is no such constitution for mankind, and you have confuted the Gospels, for they are built upon the assumption that there is. But if there be such a king- dom, we must know who is the Head and Lord of it, and how He has established it. These Gospels have given that knowledge to men for many centuries ; we believe that they have yet much more to communicate, which we have not been able to receive, but which the events of this time, and these very controversies, will make known to us. Feeling that they are given us, and that they have a deep reality in them, we cannot be unwilling that they should be submitted to any scrutiny. If there be any thing in them which was not meant to be in them, we doubt not but it will be brought to light, and that He who brings it to light will make his own truth the clearer by the discovery. But that they contain that which no other books in the world contain, which no other parts of the Scripture contain, and which is a key to all that is written elsewhere ; this, we believe, has been made and will be made only the more evident, by the questions w7hich have been raised in these and former days respecting them. THE ROMISH SYSTEM. I have contended, then, that a Bible without a Church is in- conceivable, that the appointed ministers of the Church aret the appointed instruments for guiding men into a knowledge of the Bible, that the notion of private judgment is a false notion, that Inspiration belongs to (he Church, and not merely to the writers of the Bible, that the miracles of the New Testament were the intro- duction of a new dispensation, and were not merely a set of strange acts belonging to a particular time ; lastly, that the Gospel narra- tives must be received as parts of the necessary furniture of the Church. Now is there not a manifest tendency towards Romanism in these positions 1 Do they not one and all belong to the system which I have denounced ? Let us consider : 1st. I have supposed the Bible and the Church to be mutual in- terpreters of each other. The Church exists as a fact, the Bible shows what that fact means. The Bible is a fact, the Church SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 417 shows what that fact means. Now, what I complain of in Ro- manism, is that it has entirely overlooked the relation of these two parts of God's scheme to each other. It has concealed the Bible from men on purpose that the Church might be exalted. And it has proved that the Church could not be exalted while the Bible was hidden, that while there was no book to explain to the whole body of the Church its own position, that position of necessity be- came unintelligible. Men did not know what it was to be Church- men, because they could not learn it from this book, and because no other was able to tell them. 2dly. Hence we see, wherein my notion of the powers of min- isters differs from that of the Romanist. He thinks that a minister has a power and commission to hide the Bible from the laity. I think he has a power and commission to lay it open to the laity. I think that every one has an appointed work to do ; that when we refuse our own appointed work, or do not acknowledge the different appointment of another, we necessarily miss some good which was intended for us. And therefore I do not think that the laity, rejecting the teachings of their appointed ministers, will understand the Bible. And I do not think, on the other hand, that the minister, putting himself in the place of the Bible, and not encouraging the laity to read it and digest it, can be a true teacher, can exercise the powers wThich God has committed to him. 3d. I believe, as I have said, that the Bible and the Church were intended to raise men out of their private judgments, and to guide each man who will be guided, into the truth which is meant for all. The Romanist claims an authority for the Church in op- oposition to private judgments. But it is not an authority to call forth the spirits of men — to draw them out of the little narrow cir- cle of private experiences and conclusions — but an authority to crush the exercise of their spirits, to hinder them from obtaining freedom. And therefore this authority has itself become the tool of private judgments. Half the inventions of Romanism are the in- ventions of private judgment — the fruits of a condescension on the part of the priest to the narrow-minded feelings and judgments of his subjects, or else the creations of his own judgment, both alike manifesting the need of that universal law and standard by which both ought to have been tried. 418 SIGNS OF A 4th. The presence of that Spirit who is the source of all inspira- tion, in the whole body of the Church, and in each of its members that he may fulfil his own appointed position ; this is involved in the idea of our baptism ; disbelieving this, we acknowledge no Church at all. In virtue of this gift, we are to believe that every member of the Church has a capacity for understanding the high privileges which have been obtained for him ; in virtue of this gift, we believe that the ministers of the Church can educate their flocks into the apprehension of them. Our complaint against the Romish system is, that it does not allow us to act upon the faith of this in- spiration. It supposes inspiration to be communicated to certain persons at certain periods, for the sake of certain startling effects. It supposes an inspiration to reside somewhere in the Church, for the purpose of determining what men are and what men are not to hold, for the purpose of keeping down questioning, and giving a sense to Scripture. But an abiding Spirit, one who will guide into all truth, and can tolerate no falsehood, one who can unfold the Scriptures to different a^es according to their different wants, such a Spirit, such an inspiration, it will not allow us to recognise. 5th. And therefore, our difference on the subject of miracles is also very intelligible. If you recognise miracles, as connected with the idea of a spiritual kingdom, and not merely belonging to a cer- tain book, why, the Romanist asks, will you not recognise the mir- acles in which we believe ? why not suppose that they may occur in the nineteenth century as well as in the first ? I answer, I neiiher affirm nor deny any thing as to the question how often in the his- tory of the Church, or in what periods of it God may have been pleased to suspend the operations of intermediate agents, for the purpose of showing that He is at all times the Author and Mover of them. This question must be determined by a careful study of his- torical evidence; upon the result of such a study I should be very sorry to dogmatize. Those who believe that miracles are for the assertion of order, and not for the violation of it, for the sake of proving the constant presence of a spiritual power, and not for the sake of showing that it interferes occasionally with the affairs of the world, will be the least inclined to expect the frequent repetitions of such signs, for they hold, that being recorded as facts in the for- mer ages of the world, they become laws in ours, that we are to SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 419 own Him who healed the sick of the palsy, in every cure which is wrought by the ordinary physician, Him who stilled the storm on the Lake of Gennesareth, in the guidance and preservation of every ship which crosses the ocean — and that this effect would be lost, if we were led to put any contempt upon that which is daily and habitual. Still, I should think it very presumptuous to say, that it has never been needful, in the modern history of the world, to break the idols of sense and experience by the same method which was sanc- tioned in the days of old. Far less should I be inclined to underrate the piety, and criticise the wisdom or honesty of those men, who, missing or overlooking intermediate powers, of which they knew little, at once referred the acts and events they witnessed to their primary source. But these admissions only compel me the more solemnly to re- ject at least nineteen twentieths of all the miracles recorded in Ro- manist books in later times. In reference to these, we are not bound to go into a careful collation of evidences. In general there is very little to collate, but where there is apparently the best and most respectable, there is a grand preliminary objection. I dare not believe such miracles as these, because I believe the miracles of the New Testament. I am expressly told in Scripture that there are mira- cles which I am not to believe, which are to produce no impression upon me whatever. I do not want to go into the question of the honesty or the dishonesty of persons who report them, that is a question between their own consciences and their Creator, they best know whether they are or are not lying for God. But it is the character of the miracle which determines my judgment of it. Is it to lead me into the wTorship of the Visible or the Invisible ? Is it to deliver me from sensible things, or to make me a slave of sensible things 1 Does the Romanist advocate say that I have no right to ask these questions ? I know he says so — and I will tell him why he says so. He says so because there is a secret root of unbelief in his mind, a secret doubt whether any thing wtrue, which finds refuge in the thought that every thing may be true. This is a very prevailing tendency in our day ; it is the natural reaction against the skepticism of the last century. A number of men in France and Germany, and perhaps quite as many in England as in either, have passed or are passing, not through any gradual stages, but per solium, from universal doubt to universal credence. And they are able to carry 4 420 SIGNS OF A the same habits of mind into both professions ; they are able to say to themselves with great complacency, and with no little truth, * we are not really changed, we do not acknowledge any standard now more than before ; the only difference is, that we have substituted the new7 pourquoi non for the old pourquoi.' It does not the least surprise us to hear such men, who twenty years ago would have laughed us to scorn for believing in the resurrection of Lazarus, now indulging in fierce denunciations of all who doubt the miracles in the Tyrol. The logic, £ where are you to stop short V was that which they used in their contemptuous manhood, and which still seems to them perfectly conclusive, in their not less contemptuous, nor less really skeptical old age. We can only repeat, we stop short when we find ourselves arrived at the exact contradiction of that which we have believed. We have received our Lord as the Great Deliverer, who has led captive our captivity to sense ; we stop short when we meet with persons who would bring us into that captivity again. The Bible, we believe, is meant to cultivate in us a habit of distinguishing ; faithfully and humbly used, it has that effect. If you, who have not used it or believed in it, show that you have not acquired that habit, we have only another reason for giving thanks, that God has been pleased not to hide the blessing from us or from our children. 6th. These last considerations apply very remarkably to the case of the Gospel narratives. It is said, " the Church has pre- served to us these histories of our Lord's life ; you receive them upon the authority of the Church. You know very little about the persons who wrote them, you accept them because they are given to you as parts of the canon. Well, but the Church has put its sanction upon many histories of the saints ; she deems them also profitable for her children. Granted that they refer to inferior persons, that they never can be as important as the Gospels, yet where do you draw the line? You have admitted Church autho- rity in one case, the highest case of all, why not admit it also in a lower case ?" I answer, by the care of God's providence through his Church, these records of its Lord and Head have been preserved. They have been preserved, no doubt, for many great and solemn purposes, but for this especially, that there may SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 421 be a standard in the world, by which all other acts and lives may be tried. Exclude the Gospels from our canon, let there be nothing there but epistles setting forth spiritual principles, and not only do those principles lose their meaning for want of a true per- sonal object to which they may refer ; but this end is wholly lost — there is no character set before men, which exhibits to them the image after which they were formed, in connexion with the life of this earth. Now if the Church have preserved for me these books, and have told me the object for which they were preserved, I am not obeying her when I lose sight of this object ; I am not obeying her when I am not bringing all other books and lives to this standard. I am not, indeed, to do this for the sake of condemning them, not for the sake of seeing what is wrong in them — I have no commission or powers for that purpose — but certainly for the sake of seeing how far I may safely follow them. If, then, I find records of different men, all professedly acknowledging this type or image as the one to which they should be conformed, I am bound thankfully to admire every feature of their lives, which has been caught by reflection from it. I may very often go wrong in my judgment of these features; I may mis- take a bad copy for a good one, or disown a true one because I have not sufficient spiritual cultivation to understand the circum- stances of its form and colouring. Still, the more I study the ori- ginal under such guidance as is given to me, the more I must be- lieve and hope that the faculty will be cultivated in me, whereby I may discern the true from the counterfeit. And I must look to the Church to help me in this work, to be continually teaching me how to observe the traces of the divine model in the human imitation, how to see what in it was produced merely by the accidents of the time, or by human self-will and frailness. Such help I believe the Church, holding the Bible in her hand, is able to furnish to her faithful disciples; and my charge against the Romish system is, that it has hindered the Church from exercis- ing this prerogative, and forced her to exercise a most different one. What I mean will be best understood by the use which has been made in this system of the word ■ Saint.' The Gospels teach me, the Church in all ages teaches me, to acknowledge our Lord as one who perfectly identified himself with 422 SIGNS OF A humanity, with all its sorrows and sufferings, yea, with its sins ; because He was without sin, He was able to bear the sins of all men. This character of essential humanity, is so much the charac- ter which we feel to belong to our Lord, so much the character which did manifest, and which alone could manifest his divinity, that it may be said to be the grand object of the Church, in her Advents, her Epiphanies, her Lents, her Passion Weeks, her Easter-Days, her Ascension-Days, to exhibit it. And it has been the feeling of every true saint in the world's history, that this was the character which our Lord would especially seek to produce in his disciples. A largeness of heart, a sympathy with all our race, a fellowship in its sufferings, grief for the sins which hold it down, these assuredly are qualities which the most conspicuous saints of the Romish calendar acknowledge as most high and divine. Along with these are associated humiliation, suf- fering, indifference to good or evil report. Bnt now comes in the counterfeit system ; 4 What a great and glorious thing it is to be a saint, to he above the rest of men, to be unlike them ! What a fine thing it is to be humble, self-denying, submitting to persecu- tion and shame ! What glory do those get who can eclipse one another in this race ! What an honour it is to be enrolled in this calendar; what fame w-e get here, what rewards in the life to come !' Who does not feel instinctively that we have here introduced a new image, the very opposite to that we were just considering ? It has come in one knows not how, under the very names and words which seemed so sacred and beautiful ; but see how frightful and deformed it is ! Yet will any one dare to say there has not been a system, that there is not a system now, which sanctions this image, puts honour upon it, holds it up to imitation and idolatry? We are not bound to say of any particular person, He has given himself up to this system, he has caught this image. We may be- lieve, and rejoice to believe, that there have been multitudes in every age of the Church, that there are numbers in every country of Eu- rope at this day, who, be their outward professions and symbols what they may, do in their hearts confess the true image, do in their lives conform to it. Such persons belong to the Catholic Church, they are witnesses of her permanence, and that she will one day come out bright and beautiful from all her corruptions, as a bride adorned for SPIRITUAL SOCIETY. 423 her husband. But the existence of such persons only makes us see more clearly and hate more fervently the system which has assum- ed the name and affected the powers of the Church ; only makes us believe more surely, that it will be destroyed by the brightness of His coming, who is the true and only Pope and Potentate, the real King of Saints. CHAPTER V. ON THE RELATIONS OF THE CHURCH WITH NATIONAL BODIES. SECTION I. The Old Testament.— Ancient Pagan History. — History of Modern Europe. — General Inferences. The question»how the Old Testament dispensation is related to the New, has already come before us in several forms. Bi;t hitherto we have considered it only in reference to those signs which all Christians believe to have passed away — the Quaker merging them in certain spiritual ideas, we supposing to have been exchanged for other signs betokening higher truths. When we speak of that which is commonly called the moral side of the Jewish economy, the controversy assumes another shape. One set of Christians strongly affirm, that the precepts of this kind in the old Law ai I of permanent obligation and validity ; others say that they have no authority except so far as they are re-enacted by, or involved in the Gospel law of love. The holders of the first opinion in general confine their asser- tions to the ten commandments. They do not positively affirm that the sacredness of the Divine Code may not extend to certain parts of the Jewish institutions — that point they are content to leave open — but these commandments stand out in clear and awful dis- tinctness ; they were proclaimed amidst thunders and lightnings ; the Jews looked upon them as written with the finger of God ; the sense of mankind has received them as divine. On the other hand, their opponents see no reason for separating these commandments from the rest of the ritual, either for honor or dishonor. ' The his- torian declares that both proceeded from the Lord ; it is not on the ground of a difference in their authority, then, that you can distin- guish them. Neither can you distinguish them by their character. The Sabbath is as much a positive institution as the cities of refuge; THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. 425 if you admit the distinction between that which is moral and that which is positive, you must acknowledge both to be transitory; if you reject that distinction, neiiher.' It was impossible to consider this subject in the last section ; yet, perhaps, some hints which were given there may assist us now. I have maintained that the Scriptures interpret to us signs which we discover actually existing amongst us, and which require an in- terpreter. The New Testament has explained to us the signs of Baptism, The Creeds, Forms of Worship, The Eucharist, The Or- ders of Ministry, as these exist in modern Europe. It has explained them to be signs of a spiritual and universal society. It has shown us what such a society means ; what place each' of these signs holds in it. Supposing these signs to have perished, supposing there to be no longer a dream of such a society, the Scripture would be a very puzzling book; while they last it is an indispensable one to those who would understand their own position. The early parts of it were necessary in this point of view, because they discovered part of the meaning which each sign embodies, enabling us gradu- ally to attain to a perception of its full import, and to look upon it as connected with the life of man. When, therefore, we meet in these early records with customs, institutions, ordinances which God has not been pleased to preserve to us, we presume that they are to be contemplated historically by the light of that which He has pre- served to us. Or, if there be a question whether, perhaps, they might not be advantageously restored, we are in a condition to ex- amine this point by the light which Scripture gives us respecting the whole dispensation. But supposing we find any signs which, amidst all changes of circumstances, have maintained their existence and have become identified with the life of modern society, we must desire an explanation of them, and must seek for it where it is to be had. If we belong to a different period of the world from that in which we first find these traces, it may be very important to know how the change has affected them, whether they exist under the same conditions now as heretofore; but the fact that they do exist is the first of all ; this compels us to ask, whence they are derived, and on what ground they rest ? Now any one who considers these ten commandments, must perceive that they are definitive and conservative, not creative or 426 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. constitutive. They presume the existence of certain facts, princi- ples, and institutions, and it is the violation or forgetful ness of these which they denounce. The first presumes that the Jews had been brought out of Egypt by an unseen Being. He is their deliverer and Lord ; as such they are to acknowledge Him. The second presumes the existence of Worship, a tendency in men to create the objects of it for themselves out of the things which they see and handle; a relation between the worshippers and the Invisible Lord; a government exercised by Him from generation to genera- tion. The third presumes the practice of appealing to the Name of God, of invoking Him as one who knows whether a man be guilty or innocent. The fourth assumes the institution of the Week; explains whereof it is the sign; gives warning against the forgetfulness of the distinction between the six days and the seventh day. The fifth presumes the existence of the Paternal Relation, and treats the respect for it as the condition of abiding in the land given to the nation. The sixth presumes the existence of a community which is interested in the Life of each of its members. The seventh presumes the institution of Marriage. The eighth presumes the institution of Property. The ninth presumes the ex- istence of Tribunals, before which one may give witness respecting another. The tenth affirms the existence of a bond of Neighbor- hood— the same bond which is supposed in all the rest — and de- clares that even the coveting of that which is a neighbour's is a violation of it. That these facts, institutions and principles, had a very close connexion with the life and being of that nation which was brought out of Egypt, most readers will acknowledge : but if they turn to ancient history, they find that some of them had a very close connexion with the being and life of every nation wThich it speaks of. The Greeks and Romans were remarkably distinguished from each other. But they were both alike distinguished from the slaves and barbarians, of whose existence we become aware chiefly through them. Wherein lay the difference ? Apart from all in- tellectual superiority, (though it is hardly right to say, apart, the one characteristic was so involved in the other,) it is quite evident that they had a clear sense of certain great landmarks and bounda- ries in human society, the violation of which was an evil ; that THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. 427 they believed these landmarks to have been fixed by an awful unseen power, and to be preserved by that power : that among the chief of these landmarks they reckoned the sacredness of life, of the paternal relation, of marriage, of property, of appeals to the Divine name, of tribunals for rectifying wrong ; the law of neighbourhood as binding those who acknowledged a common ancestry, and were living in the same locality; the majesty of law as preserved by the majesty of worship. But two of the Commandments have no counterparts in the legislation of Greece or Rome. There was, I have said, a distinct recognition of an unseen Majesty from which it proceeded, and by which it was upheld ; there was not the prohibition of confounding the unseen Majesty with things visible. There was the recognition of different sacred seasons connected with the course of the sun and moon. There was not the recognition of a Week ; a division of time depending upon some other law than the astronomical; defining human life, by its two great principles of action and rest ; connecting these two principles with the life and being of God ; teaching that his rest and action are the patterns of ours, and yet that He is ever at rest while we are working, and ever at work on our behalf while we are resting; incorporating the Divine with the common, and yet hallowing the distinction between them; sig- nifying that the palace and the hut, nay, the master and his cattle, are subject to the same government; making each nightly slumber the image of the final repose of the spirit and soul and body, each in its proper and appointed object. Let any one consider how the political life of these nations was affected by the sensual tendencies of their worship ; let him meditate upon the difficulty which every philosopher experienced in his endeavour to reconcile the idea of a living, acting God, with one continually resting in his own beati- tude, the still greater difficulty of finding any point of sympathy between his own thoughts and those of common men who felt that the God they feared must interfere in all their transactions, and then let him say whether the second or the fourth Commandments do not receive as much illustration and confirmation from the human feeling and con cience of the old world as the sixth or the seventh. Be that as it may, not only some of these institutions but all of them exist among ourselves. The Jewish order of time, so far as 428 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. the week is concerned, has become as much a part of the institu- tions of modern Europe as marriage or property. All three may be regarded indifferent places with more or less of reverence; but they are recognised by every nation of Christendom, and incorpo- rated with their daily transactions. But on what authority do these institutions rest ? Here begins another difference of opinion. The ordinary statesman answers, 'They are national provisions, of more or less importance, deriving their sanction from the legislation of each particular national so- ciety, invested with a factitious and useful sacredness in the eyes of the vulgar by the tradition that they had a mysterious origin.* The ordinary religious man answers, ' They have nothing to do with the mere political or national life of any society ; they are religious ordinances, appointed by God himself, binding upon all because He has appointed them.' With the first I agree so far as this, that I do look upon these institutions as belonging especially and emphatically to particular nations as such, to England as Eng- land, to France as France, to Germany as Germany. I do not look upon them as universal institutions in the sense in which I have called Baptism and the Eucharist universal institutions; that is to say, as institutions which have nothing to do with the relations of space and time. And if the religious man objects to this dis- tinction,! tell him that I must make it because the Scripture makes it. 'I am the Lord thy God' — this is the sanction of the code; clearly a distinct national sanction. But I differ with the statesman in this point. I do not think national society is a lie or stands upon a lie. If I did I should wish it to perish, and I should be sure it must perish. Now unfortunately he does think this, for he knows that he cannot maintain any of those institutions which he believes to be necessary for his nation, and for every nation, merely by his own rules and conventions. He is obliged to ask help from the faith which men everywhere have had that there is a Divine ruler, not only over men generally, but over their particular common- wealth: and this faith, he says, is a mere delusion. I believe that the imposition and dishonesty are in himself; that the conviction of mankind is a safe and an honest one; and that it will at last pre- vail against all the frauds which have endeavoured to support it, and have really made it weak. THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. 429 In my conclusion, then, I agree with those who take the com- mon religious view of this matter. But the difference in our pre- mises is not a slight one, or one without the most practical conse- quences. I have partly explained wherein it consists, but I must endeavour to make my meaning more clear. We are first told that we must not look upon these commandments merely as parts of a national institute. And yet they evidently are parts of a national institute. We are told that we must not receive them merely as of outward or formal obligation, for they contain the essence of moral- ity. But they do seem to have a particular outward and formal character. They refer, not one but all, to formal institutions; only the last even touches upon any internal habit of mind, and the ex- ceeding definiteness of that one, ' Thou shalt not covet thy neigh- bour's wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass/ shows that the habit is noticed for the sake of the act, not the act for the sake of the habit. So far from wishing to over- look this characteristic, I am most anxious to notice it and dwell upon it ; for herein I believe consists the exceeding importance of these commandments, and the proof that they are not superseded by the new dispensation. They set the divine seal upon that which belongs to man as a creature of flesh and blood, inhabiting a par- ticular place, having a definite circle of human relations and earth- ly associations; they declare these to be settled according to a divine order, and to be taken under a divine cognizance ; they bring acts, outwTard ordinary acts, into judgment. By adopting this view, we seem to escape from some serious confusions. We are able to enter into the peculiar character of' the Jewish nation, without losing our sense of its connexion with all mankind. We are able, by help of it, to connect our own lives with the lives of those people in the old world, of whom we read, and with whom we feel that we have such close sympathies, in spite of all differences of race, of language, of religious faith and knowledge. Above all, we are able to rid ourselves of the Mani- chean notion, (which it should be remembered has been always connected with a low notion of the Old Testament,) that the out- ward and visible universe, and the ordinary social relations, are the creations of an evil spirit, to be esteemed lightly of by all who have attained to the perception of a higher economy. That this last 28 430 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. accursed doctrine, which cleaves most closely to the hearts of us all, and perhaps was never more threatening than at this day, will ever be fully exposed and scouted till we acknowledge the sanctity, the grandeur, the divinity of national life, I do not think that the history of mankind offers us the least excuse for believing. But, then, if we admit these positions, and have arrived at them by this method, other questions will necessarily force themselves upon us. We have seen that the objectors to the authority of the Ten Com- mandments found their most plausible argument upon the difficulty of separating them from the surrounding history. It has seemed to us that this difficulty is a very light one when we meet with records of that to which we have nothing answering among ourselves. As- sume the fact of a nation, assume the Jews to be the specimen of a nation, and you assume, as a matter of course, the necessity of hun- dreds of regulations applicable to their condition, and therefore not applicable to ours. But if principles of national life have discover- ed themselves to us in the midst of these regulations, we must ex- pect to find the history illustrating these principles, and thereby furnishing the key to facts which directly concern our own conduct. And this proves to be the case. We find it a part, not an accidental but an essential part of the idea, of a Jewish commonwealth, that Punishments should be inflicted upon transgressors, that in certain cases their Lives should be taken away. The judicial Oath again belongs to the religion of the Jewish state ; every Jew would have understood the third commandment in reference to it. Still more obviously was the Jew instructed to look upon War, in certain cases, not as a permitted license but as a sole mn duty, to be under- taken in the full confidence that it was God's will he should en- gage in it, and that he should have God's help in carrying it through. Now these feelings and convictions belonged in like manner to every great nation of antiquity ; belonged to them as na- tions, formed part of their religion, were the means of exhibiting those qualities in them which we are most compelled to admire. Courage, self-discipline, order, faith, all these moral attributes were connected in them with the conviction, that national life is a more precious thing than individual life, and that hundreds of thousands of individuals are cheaply sacrificed, for the sake of preserving it. If it be said that these moral qualities were mixed with others of THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. 431 the most opposite character, and that these two found their grati- fication in wars and in judicial severity, no man in his senses will dispute the assertion. What I contend for is, that they were op- posite qualities, however they might be intermingled ; and that therefore, if we hate the one we must love the other, or else all moral distinction will become effaced in our mind<. And what I say further is, that if we attach any sacredness to the Jewish his- tory, as containing the divine specimen of a national life, we can- not refuse to believe that the other nations of antiquity were justi- fied in their deep inward conviction, that God has not given swords to men in vain, but that there are occasions on which the magis- trate is bound, by his allegiance to God, to cut off the offender against the majesty of the law ; in which the ruler of the land must invite and command his subjects to chastise the removers of landmarks, the corrupters of the earth, and the oppressors of mankind. But even this discovery would not give us more than an histo- rical interest in this part of the Jewish records. They are brought directly home to ourselves by the fact that every nation of Chris- tendom resorts to judicial Oaths, imposes Punishments, in some cases capital, and believes War, under certain circumstances, to be a duty. The question, then, becomes a very important one ; Is this meant to be so or not 1 Is this Old Testament, this book which we have found to be a key to the main problems of our national life, a justification of these convictions ? It is in vain to say that Jewish precedent will only justify oaths administered, punishments fixed, or wars undertaken under the express command of God. I have maintained that every nation ought to look upon itself as hav- ing the Lord for its King ; that if we do not recognise that princi- ple, the commandments mean nothing to us, the institutions of which the commandments speak have no authority but that which they derive from human convention. According to this doctrine, the question what acts a nation ought to perform, and what it ought to omit, means, in other words, what acts are in conformity with the purpose for which God has appointed it, and what are not. These acts need not to be the same as those which the Jews performed, because each nation has a pur- pose to fulfil different from that which the Jews were to fulfil. But these convictions which I speak of are common to all nations as 432 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. nations. They have been guiding maxims assumed in the examin- ation of particular cases. The conscience of men has said, Because oaths, punishments, and wars are in themselves authorized by God, and can be only justifiable in those cases and under the conditions which he approves, therefore we ought to consider earnestly what these cases and conditions are. The question is, whether this pri- mary assumption is or is not warranted by the book which sets forth to us the divine principles of national society. It is idle to say, But where do you find the authority for wars, oaths, or punish- ments in the New Testament ? I do not find the authority for any of the distinct institutes of national life in he New Testament. The Manichseans and Anabaptists were quite right, when they said that there was no distinct precept respecting prop- erty in the New Testament ; that the first sign of the existence of a Church was that of men not calling their goods their own, but counting all things common. Nor was there any thing unnatural in their feeling, that since in the resurrection men neither marry nor are given in marriage, the kingdom of Christ, which is the kingdom of the risen life, must look with some contempt on the union of the sexes. Nor was it a surprising inference, from the continual allusions in the Gospels to our Lord's controversies writh the Pharisees respecting the Sabbath day, that under the new economy, the distinction of days had been abrogated. If their first maxim was true, that we are to look for the whole law of man's life in the New Testament, all their conclusions, even though they might be contradicted by actual passages in it, were inevitable. If it can be shown that these, or any portion of our national creed, are denounced in the New Testament, we, of course, must abandon them, even though by doing so we involve ourselves in the most painful perplexities respecting the nature and the permanence of moral principles. Whether they are so denounced, I shall have to consider presently. What I am maintaining now is, that the mere absence of the same kind of language, in reference to these subjects, which occurs in every page of the Jewish Scripture, is no more a proof that they do not concern us, than the omission of any direct allusion to the principles of moral philosophy by a writer on politi- cal economy is a proof that he disbelieves them. But it will be said, these two cases are not analogous, or, if THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. 433 they are analogous, it is because the writers on political economy ought to take cognizance of moral principles. If the universal so- ciety and the national society be both intended for man, any book which sets forth the character of either must touch upon the nature and laws of the other. Be it so : I am far from denying this as- sertion ; it is one which I especially wish that the reader should feel the importance of. I do not expect to find the principles of the universal society developed in the Old Testament, nor the prin- ciples of the national society in the New. I do expect to find each illustrating and sustaining the other. I do expect that under one dispensation as much as the other, there should be signs that they are distinct but inseparable. Such signs force themselves upon me when I look into the Jewish records. We have seen how the germs of an universal society were planted in the heart of the Jewish commonwealth ; how the existence of the priest, of the sacrifices, of the tabernacle, as much testified to the existence of that which is human and general, as the king, the judge, the law testified to the existence of that which is peculiar and exclusive, The words at first sound paradoxical ; to a Jew they would sound very paradoxical. He would say, ' Why, our likeness consisted ir those features which you set down as peculiar, our difference in those which you set down as common.' Such a notion i plausible ; I have already, I think, explained sufficiently why it i not true. The Hebrew was to be separate from all other people in order that he might be the steward of a possession which wa meant for all. He was cut off that he might witness of a Being who was not cognizable by the senses, not material, not therefon divided, not belonging to this or that locality. When the membei of the nation forgot that He was the Lord God of the Hebrews and sought to break the chain of his peculiar polity, he failed t< perform his function, he failed to be witness for a God of the who! earth. WThen he refused to look upon his covenant as capable of ex panding to comprehend all nations, he lost his peculiar position, hi became the member of a sect, instead of a citizen of a kingdom This is unquestionably a paradox, but it is the paradox of Scripture well worthy of our observation and study. I say, then, that ther was a human element in the national society, and that the method by which this element was incorporated with the national element 434 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. and yet shown to be distinct from it, were very remarkable. The priestly tribe is one of the twelve tribes, but it is cut off from all the rest, placed under particular conditions, supported by a particular species of property. From the very commencement of the com- monwealth, the office of the priest and the lawgiver are carefully separated. Both are equally divine, but neither may intrude upon the functions of the other. And this is not because the office of the priest is limited to what are technically called religious services. He examines the leprous man. and pronounces whether he is or is not fit to go into the congregation of the Lord ; he distinguishes between the meats which are clean and unclean. Whatever has to do with the direct oversight of that which is internal, whether in the physical or the moral life of man, this belongs to the sacerdotal part of the commonwealth ; whatever has to do with the outward regulation of society, whether those regulations have reference to the bodily comfort or to the behaviour of men, this, it would seem, belongs to the legal part of it. Each presents the unseen Lord to the Israelites ; the one as a Judge, taking cognizance of all their acts ; the other, as one who spies out all their ways, knows what is passing within, deals not with crimes only, but with sins ; who can take away the source of evil as well as its fruit, At the same time, as there is no division between the internal and the external life of man, no division in the character of God as the Lord of the outward and the Lord of the inward world, so neither is therein the Jewish economy between the offices which represent him in these characters. The sacrifice of the priest is necessary to hallow the troops which the king is leading out to battle ; the king takes part in every ecclesiastical reformation. We feel that the Jewish com- monwealth is one society, not a national body plus an ecclesiastical, but a body which could not be national if it were not ecclesiastical, or ecclesiastical if it were not national. Now the counterpart of these signs we discover in both the two great nations in the pagan world. The difference between them is remarkable and characteristic. In the heart of each Greek state, we may indeed observe a priesthood, exercising some important functions. But the far more striking object which presents itself to our notice is the sacred ground of Elis, the common temple of Del- phi. These were the signs and pledges of a fellowship between THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. 435 Greeks as Greeks, w hich the diversities of race, and the antipathies of democratical and aristocratical governments could not sever. On the other hand, in Rome, the sacerdotal influence is incorpora- ted with all the national institutions, the name of every conspicu- ous office in the republic reminds us of the union. And it was this union which imparted so much solidity to the Roman society, after the principles upon which it was founded had been set at nought, after the Roman emperor had become " the king of kings and lord of lords," and his kingdom had been changed into one of those which are described in Scripture as Babylonian kingdoms, resting upon mere power, effacing national distinctions, exalting the visible above the invisible. To this kingdom, we have considered the kingdom of Christ as the direct and formal opposite. The question, then, which we pro- posed before we entered upon the examination of its different signs, whether or no it resembled the Roman world in its hostility to na- tional society, or whether it is meant to be, as it was in its embryo condition, the quickening spirit of national society, is one which we are bound to consider. We have seen that it had its cradle in a nation, that it appeared in that nation at a time when the old spirit had departed; when the Jews were calling themselves Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes ; were striving to make their kingdom into a system or a sect. We have seen that the disciples of Jesus at once went back to the old language of their countrymen, refused to be spoken of as a sect of Nazarenes or Christians, proclaimed their Master to be the heir of David's throne, the King of Israel, declar- ed themselves, and invited all men to be his subjects. Such a pretension was intelligible to the Jews; by them it was denounced and persecuted ; to the Romans it seemed utterly ridicu- lous. The Christians were one, perhaps the most extravagant, but certainly the least rebellious, of the Jewish sects ; the pro-con- suls in the different provinces were willing to protect them against the fanaticism of their countrymen. It was a little different, when the professors of the new doctrine were brought face to face with the Caesars. An instinct seemed to tell Nero that there was something in their position which was in- compatible with his ; what it was, however, could not be clearly understood till the Jewish polity had been destroyed. Then this 436 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. body was seen still to remain, still to be adopting that language which was apparently derived from the old Jewish dreams now so signally confuted. The still Christians speak of themselves as mem- bers of a kingdom. The exclusiveness which had made the Jewish pretension comparatively harmless was not preserved in them : they addressed themselves to all people in all provinces of the empire ; they bound them together in a corporation, held them in one by a strange free-masonry. The most philosophical emperors were least able to look with indifference upon such a fellowship. They might from benignity or contempt deal kindly with individual cases, but the society was an anomaly incompatible with the safety of the government. As that government approached more and more nearly to the character of a military despotism, the contest between it and the spiritual so- ciety became more flagrant, the necessity that one or the other should fall more evident. When Rome became almost Asiatic under Diocletian, the cross had attained a power which the mild emperor might be inclined to tolerate, but which the state could not endure. But the most vigorous of all the persecutions failed of its object ; the new kingdom could not be put down : under Con- stantine, the eagle did homage to it. Then the organization of the Church became connected with that of the empire ; the civil dio- ceses became coincident with the jurisdictions of the Bishops, as well in Italy as in the provinces ; the ecclesiastical officer acquired a civil position, the emperor exercised more or less of jurisdiction in spiritual affairs. Here was the phenomenon of a superannuated despotism, based upon the acknowledgment of mere power, entering into union with a body based upon the acknowledgment of a King ruling in right- eousness, whose strength both in himself and in his disciples had been made perfect in weakness. The alliance had not been sought by the Church ; as a proof of her Master's dominion it was to be received with thankfulness; as a part of God's dispensations to mankind she was to enter into it, not as a state which could last, but as one which must hasten the coming of a new order of things. The change of the centre of government prepared the way for the approaching revolution. The Byzantine monarchy might be con- sidered in some respects a new one, coming into existence at the THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. 437 very time Christianity was recognised, not necessarily established upon the old military maxims. But these maxims were implied in it ; there was the same effort, however checked by other influences, after uninversal dominion. The dislocation of it by the Mahome- tan conquests, proved that such a dominion is one, which, in con- junction with Christianity, cannot exist. In the West the demon- stration was still clearer. The century after Constantine saw the dissolution of a frabric which had stood for a thousand years. Charlemagne re-established it as a Christian empire; in the next generation it is again shivered into fragments. But, meantime, the Christian Church was at work upon the barbarian tribes. And what was the nature of the operation ? Had the Bishops of the Church acted according to their own notions of what was best, they would, of course, have reduced Europe into one great society, hav- ing a common language, scarcely acknowledging any territorial or political distinctions. Such a dream would have seemed to be a most pious one, carrying out the idea of the divine commonwealth. That they entertained it, and at different times strove to realize it, and that they found the old Roman jurisprudence a helpful aid in the experiment, the history of the middle ages abundantly testifies. But how was it defeated ? I answer, By the influences which they themselves, when acting simply as Churchmen in their appointed vocation, and not as agents of a preconceived system, brought to bear upon the tribes. The ecclesiastical society was the main instru- ment in creating within each of these tribes a distinct national or- ganization, altogether different from the ecclesiastical organization, though acting in concert with it; by the ecclesiastical or Catholic spirit, peculiarities in the character and intellect of each one of these tribes were developed. The Bishops called themselves an Order, said that they received their commission from an invisible King, that they were a link with generations past and generations to come. When the chieftain who came into the land previously subjected to Roman government found this order established and submitted himself to it, he began to think differently of his own office, to consider it less as conferred by individual powers or cun- ning, to connect it less with the sword and conquest, more with some claim of religion. If these first notions of a government rest- ing upon ordinance perished in the bud, or were extinguished by 438 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. the ruder feelings of power with which they were associated, the tribe remained barbarous, became divided, and was overcome by some other more capable of receiving cultivation. If they bore fruit, (and this was more quickly the case when Bishops were the invaders of a ground previously pagan than when they converted the pagan invaders of their own,) the military chief over some dis- trict, or the bretwalda over several, was changed into the king anointed with oil, doing homage for his authority to Christ, trans- mitting his kingdom in a hereditary line. He has, of course, his council of chieftains, the sharers with him of the soil which he has conquered. The Bishops, as possessing greater wisdom and a char- acter of sacredness, are invited to take part in the deliberations of this council. Gradually the whole council begins to look upon it- self as an Order, bound together by another tie of allegiance to their sovereign than that of mere fellowship in arms ; holding their lands by another tenure than that of mere conquest, recognising re- lations between themselves and their dependents. Here is the first form of a national society. If it merely stays in this form, it will be still only a feudal society : but it may gradually develop itself under the same moral influence, till one and another portion of the commu- nity shall have felt itself also to be an order, shall have become an integral part of the nation. But while this process is going for- ward, we find indications that the spiritual society itself has acquir- ed a national position. It had established itself already when it was a missionary body first in some great city, wThich became the home of its Bishop or overseer ; then it had sent forth its presbyters into different districts. The Bishops become permanently connected with the cities, the districts are parishes acknowledged by the civil body as connected with an ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The owners of the soil do homage to this arrangement ; a part of its produce is appropriated to the teacher of the district in which it is found. The wealth of individuals is voluntarily contributed for the purpose of establishing permanent endowments in particular districts, or for the use of particular districts in certain diocesan centres. And it begins to be felt more and more that the spiritual officer is, as he was among the Jews, conversant with all that is internal, all that lies beyond the sphere of sense. This conviction gives rise to schools and universities ; first, some enlightened ruler establishes THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. 439 them, then some noble or commoner, interested in the welfare of a certain neighbourhood, provides funds, which may enable the objects of his peculiar care to share in the general education of the land. I am not aware that any of these statements are exclusively applicable to any one nation of modern Europe. Under different modifications, this is the history of the formation of modern society. The modifications are very interesting and very important, be- cause they illustrate another point to which I have alluded ; the way in which the characters and institutions of the nations received their distinct form, so that there should be vastly more difference between Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans now, than there ever can have been between Saxons, Franks, and Burgundians twelve hundred years ago. Still they were only in part the cause of these differences. A similar tillage, working upon different soils, will educe all their latent peculiarities, will make it manifest what each was meant to bring forth. This tillage has been carried on by the universal society. It has not, as we have seen, acted according to its own notion ; it has not cast Christendom into the mould into which a churchman would have naturally tried to cast it. There has been evidently a higher will, another power at work, crossing human calculations. But if we trace the history of modern Europe, we see, that by some means or other, a witness has been borne to that very constitution which Scripture makes known to us. The form of national society which the Old Testament invests with so much sacredness, is reproduced by that other New Testament socie- ty which seemed to have displaced it. As before, a spiritual ele- ment was proved to be necessary to uphold a legal society, so now, a legal element, a body expressing the sacredness and majesty of law, is shown to be necessary in order to fulfil the objects for which the spiritual and universal society exists. In what way each is ne- cessary to the other, what kind of duties each has to perform for the sake of the other, this has been the question which men have constantly asked themselves, and to which they have invented the most opposite answers. Those who have gone along with us in our earlier inquiries, will feel that this question, instead of being obso- lete, was never so much present to men's thoughts as at the present time. And they will feel too, perhaps, that though the speculations 440 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. of men may have done comparatively little, the experience of the world has done much, in supplying an answer to it. The legal power can no longer help the spiritual powTer by persecuting and putting dowTn its enemies; the spiritual power can no longer help the legal power, by throwing a fictitious sacredness around it. On the other hand, the spiritual power cannot make men feel that there is a being who is the Judge and punisher of evil acts, unless it can show that his authority is somewhere impersonated ; the legal pow- er tries in vain to convince those who are subject to it, that there is a Being who can renew and mould the will, unless it can show how that mighty influence is^exerted. The Church wishes to make men feel that they are subjects, but its owTn influence is one which especially aims at setting them free; the State wishes to have a free intelligent people, but it has itself only the power of keeping men servants. If any great work is to be done for man, if God's gracious purposes to him are to be fulfilled, one would think that these two powers must be meant continually to act and react upon each other, and to learn better, by each new error they commit, their distinct functions — their perfect harmony. SECTION II. THE QUAKER. Sermon on the Mount. — Different passages in it considered. — Provision for Ministers. The Quaker objects to this whole statement ; formally to that part of it which treats of war, oaths, and punishment, and of a na- tional provision for the spiritual body ; practically, to all the prin- ciples upon which these institutions have been defended. 4 Our arguments,' he says, * may sound plausible enough to worldly men ; those who take the Gospel simply, and try to form themselves ac- cording to its precepts, find them directly and in terms contradicted by the Sermon on the Mount. The highest of all authorities has said, " Swear not at all ;" " resist not evil ;" " love your enemies.'* We choose to say that the practices of statesmen, who set these precepts aside, are reasonable and religious. He has in the plainest words annulled the maxims of the old dispensation in reference to THE QUAKER. 441 these points ; it pleases us to affirm that they are still binding. But it is not in our power to make bitter sweet, or evil good, though we may call them so; men will be judged by Christ's commands, not by our glosses upon them. Our theory, however, is consistent, if not with the language of our master, at least with our own prac- tice. We wish worldly men to receive us into their houses ; it is fitting that when they are in debt one hundred measures of wheat to their Lord we should bid them take their bills and write four- score. If we become pensioners on the nation's bounty, we must make the best of the nation's sins. The Apostles followed a differ- ent rule. They lived upon the love of their flocks; they took what was cheerfully given them by those whom they served. We have not only become hirelings instead of shepherds, but we actually boast of the change, and think ill of them who will not submit to it.' I. As the first class of these charges turns primarily upon the interpretation of the fifth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, I will enter at once into an examination of that portion of Scripture. We are accused of violating the spirit of it ; of perverting the letter of it, of lowering the high standard of duty set forth in it. I shall think my case not established, if I fail in bringing home each of these charges to the Quaker himself. 1. It is impossible to read the first sentences of the Sermon on the Mount, without feeling that they must be in some measure a key to its whole purpose. The series of blessings upon certain states of mind compels us to feel that we are in the presence of One who is come to establish a kingdom in the inner-man ; to deal with the principles of things ; to lay the axe to the roots ; to bap- tize with the spirit and fire ; to reform the fruit by reforming the tree. We cannot help feeling, that however little worth there may be in the notion or superstition of an intended parallelism between the mountain on which the trumpet sounded long and loud, and that on which Jesus opened his mouth and spake, the principle im- plied in that parallelism is exactly true. 2. The words, " Ye are the salt of the earth, ye are the light of the world"— the exhortation to see that the salt possess that quality by which it hinders putrefaction in other bodies, and do not contract their tendency to corruption ; to take care that the light be not quenched by the inner darkness which it is meant to pene- 442 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. trate, and thus be prevented from manifesting itself outwardly to men ; — these exhortations are in exact accordance with that which has preceded them, and show forth the nature of the authority with which the new teacher spake, and which distinguished Him from the letter-hunting Scribe. In all these passages we observe, more- over, that the effects which are promised to follow from these states of mind, are of the same kind with themselves, — are distinctly spi- ritual effects ; the poor in spirit shall understand what it is to be brought into a kingdom ; the mourner shall be comforted ; the meek shall have the government of the earth, (shall have the joy, the greatest he can know, of making other men happy ;) the mer- ciful shall obtain mercy ; those that hunger and thirst after right- eousness shall obtain righteousness ; those that are peace-makers shall be called the children of Him who is the great Peace-maker ; the pure in heart shall see God : the privilege of him who preserves the salt within him from corruption, is that he shall preserve the earth from decay ; of him who keeps the light alive within him, that men shall glorify their Father which is in heaven. I am anxious to make this remark, because it is my object to show how carefully our Lord preserves the characteristics of his kingdom, and its rewards, from all secular mixtures ; how he transports men into a region entirely unlike that with which they are ordinarily con- versant, and yet their own native region — the region of their own true and proper being. 3. But how is this distinctness preserved ? Is it by denying the existence of a lower outward region ? Is it by setting aside that lower outward region as being in itself evil and impure ? Is it by- absorbing all influences into the one paramount, transcendent influ- ence ? Or is it precisely by taking the opposite course to this, by recognising the fact and reality of that outward world, by showing how it is provided for in God's economy, by showing what relation it bears to the invisible and celestial atmosphere, which informs and encompasses it ? Our Lord's next words answer these questions : " Think not that I am come to destroy the law and the prophets ; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. Verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in nowise pass from the law till all be fulfilled." It may be as well to remind the reader, since every word in this memorable passage is important, THE QUAKER. 443 that the word * fulfil' is not the same in these two verses ; that it would be better to translate the last clause of the eighteenth, " until all things have been done, or have come to pass." I suppose it is our inconvenient version which has given colour to the notion that our Lord speaks here of his own personal obedience to the law, as that which should practically abrogate it ; as if He had said, " I am come to fulfil the law, and when I have fulfilled it, then indeed it may pass away ; but not a jot or tittle of it till then." But such an exposition as this destroys the connexion of the passage with all that preceded it and all that follows it. The sentence, " Whoso- ever, therefore, shall destroy one of the least of these command- ments, and teach men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven," could not have been added, if the law were spoken of as destroyed by the work of Christ ; for the kingdom of heaven is that kingdom, which his work was to establish. Our Lord must there- fore use the word fulfil in its most strict and ordinary sense : he must mean, that he is come to give that which fills up the husk of the outward law — its kernel, its substance. He must mean further, that this kernel or substance will not destroy the husk ; that that will remain still in all its dryness and literalness ; not one jot or tittle of its enactments abolished, not one jot or tittle of its autho- rity diminished, until all things be done, or have come into their perfect estate and condition ; till formal law have lost its applica- tion to the universe, because its meaning and spirit are accomplish- ed in every human creature. Till heaven and earth have passed away,— till the whole existing economy of things has ceased, — so long as there is any evil to be prevented in it, — so long as there is flesh in any man which is not subject to the will of God, — so long law in its outward character must exist ; and he is the least in the kingdom of heaven, he has least spiritual intuition, who shall try to abridge it of its precepts or its terrors. 4. Thus far every thing in this sermon of our Lord would seem to negative the opinion, that He came to repeal one set of rules, and establish another. Every thing would seem to show, that He came to confirm rules existing before ; to show the ground, the inward righteousness of these rules ; and to lead those who were willing to be his disciples, into the possession and enjoyment of it. The next words greatly strengthen this conclusion : " Verily I say 444 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. unto you, Except your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." There are but two ways of interpreting this passage. The one treats the righteousness required of the disciples as some- thing different in degree from that of the Scribes and Pharisees ; the other as different in kind. If the former notion be adopted, then, indeed, it will follow inevitably, that our Lord comes to set aside the decrees of the Mosaic law, and to establish another set of stricter decrees, more difficult to be complied with, in their place. And no doubt there is a feelings indicated in this way of consider- ing these words, which ought not to be despised. It is so common to believe that the Christian economy is a system of mitigations and allowances, mainly valuable because it dispenses with trouble- some restrictions upon self-indulgence ; that it is no wonder honest men should be startled into a violent reaction against this notion, and should be eager to press all Scripture into a proof that the re- quirements of the perfect dispensation are really higher and severer than those of the imperfect. But, after rendering full honour to the truth implied in this exposition, we are bound to say, that its fruits have been most pernicious ; that it has turned the Christian race into a selfish contest who should gain most of the rewards of a future state ; that it has wholly blinded men to the nature and quality of these rewards ; that it has destroyed all high, pure, dis- interested morality ; that while it has depraved the principles of those who seemed to be aiming at the highest ends, it has done in- finite injury to the practice of those who were content with lower achievements, in making them suppose that there is not a universal standard to which all men must be conformed, but a peculiar stand- ard, which men may choose for themselves ; that it has been the parent of useless superstition, ecclesiastical oppression, on the one hand, and of utterly lax and reckless habits on the other; in fine, that it has more utterly contradicted the whole scope and meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, than any other opinion which has prevailed in the Christian world. We are driven, then, to the other, which is the interpretation of all good commentators, — that the righteousness which exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, is one which is spiritual and not literal, — the conformity of the life and character to the original mould after which all outward laws THE QUAKER. 445 are fashioned, — the pattern on the Mount, — and not the mere con- formity of conduct to any precepts. And, seeing that the Phari- sees notoriously had the idea of supererogation, — seeing that they did themselves suggest to their disciples a more exalted righteous- ness than that of the multitude, — nay, that their sect was based upon the profession of such a righteousness, — we might expect our Lord to sohw the difference between this sort of superlative moral- ity and his own ; we might expect to find Him showing how the one actually set aside the law in attempting to refine upon it, how the other sustained the law while impregnating it with a new life ; we might expect to find Him showing that every attempt to adapt or modify the law, for the purpose of reforming and exalting the inner life, was utterly hopeless, because it existed for quite another purpose ; — because the principle to which it was the finger-post was something quite different from the mere exterior command, and could not be extracted from it by any twisting of its formulas. But we should certainly not expect to find Him, after so many cautions, after so careful a declaration of his object, undertaking to annul any of the precepts which He was not to destroy but to fulfil, or introducing any new legal dogmas instead of them, when He came to bring in a righteousness that is above all dogmas. 5. Let us see, then, whether he disappoints our anticipations in this respect, or whether every passage which follows is not a clear, consistent, and beautiful illustration of the preface. " Ye have heard that it has been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill, and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judg- ment; but I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment ; and whoso- ever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the coun- cil ; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire." What consequences would follow if we supposed that the for- mula, " It has been said by them of old time, but I say," meant in this case, " I am about to tell you something which annuls or abolishes what has been said of old time ?" In that case the expressions, " He that says to his brother, Raca," till every epistle be weeded of some of its most striking warnings and exhor- tations, we must be content to admit (every body has practically ad- mitted), that there were spots even then in the feasts of charity; yea, that every form of corruption, every habit which threatens apostasy, might be found in the infant family of Christ. Do we, then, betake ourselves to the notion, that the glory of the apostolic period is to be sought in the ministers of the Church though not in its members ? The epistles to the angels of the seven churches come in to perplex this conclusion. Some of these had lost their first love, some did not exercise discipline, some were guilty of tolerating a heresy, (which a moderately well supported ecclesiastical tradi- tion would trace to one of the seven Deacons,) some had a name to live and were dead, some were neither hot nor cold. Are we, then, ready to give up altogther the feeling, that the apostolic periods were different from other periods 1 If not, I think we must resort to some such hypothesis as this, which will perhaps really satisfy the minds of most men, who will give themselves leisure to consider it. That there was a more distinct and evident conflict in the age of the Apostles with different forms of evil, both without and within the Church, than there ever has been since. It was a critical period, one might say the critical period in the history of mankind, and therefore was one which brought to light all dark images side by side with the perfect light to which they were op- posed. And this, it may be, is the true idea of the golden age ; at all events, the only one which the past history of the Church presents to us — not an age of innocence, but an age of conflict ; not one which was holding itself up as a model to the world, but which was bringing out the idea of the Church as a body belonging to no age ; as the permanent witness against that secular spirit which would always make some period of time, and not the principles exhibited in that time, the object of its admiration. Now surely the history of the Church for the first five for six centuries, does present the Church in the same kind of struggle as this which we have discovered in the apostolic time. The battle is somewhat changed in its character after the accession of Con- stantine, but who will say that it was less severe ? Or who will venture to affirm that the divine image was less brought out through 480 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. these strifes in such men as Athanasius and Chrysostom, than it had been in Ignatius or Justin ? The whole history of this century is a book of the wars of the Lord ; most precious, surely, because it shows how the principle of strength made perfect in weakness was working itself out in individual men and in the whole of so- ciety ; because it shows how the shouts of the soldiers of the Cross were laying low the highest Babel tower that was ever raised in this world ; becaues it shows that the scheme of God was to prevail, and that nothing was to withstand it. But surely this is the picture which that time presents; not a picture of still, beautiful, pastoral life, but of great crimes and great virtues — often- times appearing in the same men, yet always illustrating each other ; always enabling us, if we look, to see what man is with God and without Him. He has been pleased to exhibit to us this age, not in particular specimens of virtue and excellence, but as a whole ; as a whole it is precious to us. We lose the blessing of it, we lose the idea of the Church which it presents, if we omit any of its darker features. Let us consider, then, what we do when we desire that this age, so invaluable as a portion of history, should be restored to us in fact. If wre ask that the age in which St. Paul preached may come again, we ask that Nero may come again ; if we ask that we may be transported back to the glorious period of Athanasius, we ask to live under the tyrant Constantius, to have the wrorld almost wholly pagan, to have the Church almost wholly Arian. If we long to sit at the feet of Chrysostom, we long for the infamous corruptions of Antioch and Constantino- ple, for the government of Eutropius, for the horrible villanies of the eunuchs of the palace. If we reckon that it would have been a blessing to live under the teaching of Augustine, we must be content to see Rome sacked by one set of barbarians, and the Church in Africa threatened by another ; we must get our learn- ing from a race of effete rhetoricians; we must dwell amidst all the seductions and abominations of Manicheism. These are very common-place considerations ; but as they are true, it is very ad- visable for the honour of the Church and of its Head, as well as for the removal of a certain fantastic habit of mind, which is most alien from the temper of the early ages, that we should occasion- ally dwell upon them. The effect of doing so cannot be to make i'HE PATRICIAN. 481 us fall into any contempt of the Fathers, or to adopt those notions respecting them which have been propagated of late in this coun- try with so much more of self-conceit than learning, and which could only have gained currency through some weakness in the theory to which they were opposed. Unquestionably, if we are reasonable men, the more we look at that mass of evil in society, which the Church was sent to decompose, the more we shall ad- mire the power which decomposed it, and be thankful for the in- struments by whom He worked. 2. But, then, can we do this, and not see something more than a permission of those national societies which the Church called into being, and with which, in the Western world, she became identified 1 Must we not believe that this was a mighty step in the development of the divine scheme, in the establishment of the divine kingdom upon earth ? The Church had been brought out as one body existing in different places, to try its strength against the Roman world, and it had prevailed. It had made good the principle upon which it stood against the most terrible odds. What so reasonable as to believe that it was to carry on its work of crea- tion, in the very line in which the world's work of destruction had been carried on; that as the Roman empire had swallowed up all nations into itself, its mighty antagonist was to make them breathe again, to show each what its proper place and function was in God's proper place and commonwealth ? Are we told that this doctrine savours of those modern theories respecting progression? which are so godless and intolerable ? I care not what ill name may be given it, provided it justifies the ways of God to man, and shows that the Church has not existed for nothing. But if by this charge it be meant that we are supporting a notion of progress, which is inconsistent with the permanency of God's order and truth, there never was one so ill supported or so unfortunate. They are the innovators, they are the deniers of the permanence of God's order, they would make the Church merely a growth out of fore- gone and exhausted states of society, who maintain that national life, upon which so much honour was put in the old world, has been discarded as worthless in the new. We say that there was no such alteration in the counsels of the Divine mind, that the his- tory of modern Europe proves there was not. We say that the 482 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. constitution of the Church, as it was exhibited during the conflicts with the Roman empire, was simply an universal constitution ; we rejoice that it was so; hereby such a constitution was shown to exist, hereby the meaning of past history, which had all been lead- ing to the discovery of it, was made evident. But we say that this constitution was necessarily imperfect, for it left all the rela- tions of men, as held together by the bonds of neighbourhood, as distinguished by race and language, unaccounted for ; it did not bring these relations under Church influence. And we say that, seeing these relations are especially developed in the Old Testa- ment, it was the necessary consequence of this imperfection, that one aspect of that Testament should be lost to the first age of the Church. I know that I am using language which will shock some good persons, and therefore I will endeavour to explain myself. 3. It is commonly said that the Fathers must be looked to as the interpreters of Scripture, in consequence of their proximity to the Apostles, the opportunities they might have had of hearing the very words which they uttered, &c. I confess I have never been able to understand this doctrine of proximity. It would seem to me to prove that Athanasius, or Ambrose, or Augustine, must be of far less value to us, as elucidators of truth, than Hermas or Igna- tius; and I do not think that this has been the practical feeling of the Church in any age. It would have seemed to me rather, that the great worth of the Fathers arose from their being placed by God in circumstances which especially enabled them to apprehend certain great truths, especially those foundation truths which con- cern his Being and the order of the Universal Society. Adopting that view, I can believe that each had his own special merits ; that the Alexandrian might see that which the Latin could not see ; that one principle would be brought out in mighty power by him who struggled with Arians, another by him who, in his own heart and in the world, had done battle with Manicheism. Adopting the other, I think that I shall not only be in danger of making an age into a Church, but of exalting particular individuals of that age above others, to whom perhaps a more important work was com- mitted. But whichever of these views be adopted, it will be difficult to prove that the Fathers had any better means than other men of un- THE PATRICIAN. 483 derstanding the circumstances of the Jewish nation. They had no proximity with the Fathers of that nation. The Jews with whom they could converse were either those in whom the national feel- ings had been merged in more general Catholic sympathies, or those who were trying to set up their old national distinctions against the Church, or those who regarded their whole past his- tory as little more than a collection of allegories, or the develop- ment of a Mosaic philosophy. Again, their circumstances could give them no sort of sympathy with the old national life of the Jews ; the temple was gone, the city was laid waste; these events had been necessary to the establishment of the universal Church, and that Church stood in the midst of a great empire, in which there was no nation " that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or peeped." Would it not have been most reasonable to expect, under such circumstances, that so far as they were polemical, they might be able to prove clearly that the Jewish commonwealth was meant to be the seed of a great tree ; so far as they were experi- mental, that the Jewish saints had struggled with the same internal enemies, which were assailing themselves ; so far as they were mystical, that there had been an invisible guide and teacher, train- ing man to know Him through all past ages of history : but that whatever belonged to the common, daily, human life of the Jews would be utterly puzzling to them, would seem quite out of place in a divine book, and would therefore of necessity be translated into cabalistic lore ? I say, would not any one expect this from the position m which the Fathers were placed ? And if the facts should be found exactly to accord with these expectations, if every Christian of the present day who looks into them should be puz- zled and perplexed by curious and subtle spiritualizations of facts, which simply as facts have been his delight as a child, and which, as he grew to be a man, have seemed to connect themselves with what is passing in the world around him ; if there be a use of this spiritualizing method, which the Church even of that age has itself condemned, if yet this extravagant use of it was justified in the practice of the most learned and laborious of all the Fathers, and if it be most difficult to find where the point is at which he trans- gressed the legitimate rule, is it more wise and pious, and more respectful to these holy men, to say that they could not take in the 484 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. literal meaning of the old Scriptures, so as to give that literal mean- ing any life, and that it was not intended they should do so ; or to determine that we will make out a case for them by renouncing all our own advantages, by resolutely praising a system of interpre- tation which our consciences and hearts are continually repudiating ; and then, after all, to give up the defence of it when it is clearly and consistently worked out 1 I will not stop to remark, what must be obvious to every per- son who considers the foregoing statements, that the ideas of the Fathers respecting marriage, property, every institution which be- longs in the first place to our earthly condition, must have been exceedingly affected by their views of the Old Testament generally. In all cases they will have sought for the highest, most transcen- dental ground upon which such ordinances were to be defended ; since they must exist, they will readily have looked upon them as types of something higher; but how to connect the type with the actual fact, how to avoid the conclusion, that that which is not di- rectly of heaven belongs in some sense to human depravity, was impossible. It will be impossible, I believe, for us, if we do not feel something more than a grumbling acquiescence in the scheme of God for the education of our race, if we do not acknowledge, that by restoring national life through the means of the Church, He was carrying out the law of redemption, and showing how every thing that belongs to man and his position here, every thing that does not involve the violation of that position, is comprehended under it. 4. But it is affirmed that the discipline of moral offenders was recognised by the early Church as essential to its existence, and is almost lost sight of since the Church entered into fellowship with the nations. I admit at once that the principle of spiritual discipline, of a discipline for the rectification of habits and principles, a discipline far more deep and subtle than any which lawgivers can exercise, is implied in the constitution of the spiritual body, and that it was first manifested to the world, like all the other principles of the Church's polity, in its first ages. I admit, further, that in connex- ion with this highest power, there is one implied in the very exist- ence of every society, (but especially necessary to such a society as the Church,) of noticing the more outward and flagrant transgres- THE PATRICIAN. 485 sions committed by its members, and of determining how far they exclude the offender from its privileges. This power, I conceive, was not only exercised by the early Church, but was almost the only witness to the degraded, sensualized slaves of a military des- potism, that there is any authority in heaven or earth competent to punish the offences of the high as well as of the low. One such example as that which St. Ambrose gave, in his sentence upon Theodosius, was for its practical effect worth all the tomes of the Roman juris-consults. But yet the history of that transaction, and of all the other transactions of that period, proves that the Church was utterly unable to deal with the accumulated mass of profligacy, which was to be found among those who had been ad- mitted to its fellowship. Councils might determine that such and such crimes excluded the offender for five, or six, or twenty years from the Eucharist, yet we know that crimes of the blackest cha- racter were prepared by clergymen as well as laymen. And it must occur to every one sometimes to ask himself whether the Church, while she was claiming such lofty and heavenly powers, was not frequently compelled by the circumstances in which she was placed, to degrade these powers, and to assume far too mucl the character of a mere spiritual policy. Now I readily allow, that the effect of the restoration of fixed, positive national law, and of outward formal tribunals for the pun- ishment of crime, has been to make men less sensible of the mean- ing and of the need of spiritual discipline. And the more strict and definite this law has become, and the more men in general have been brought to acknowledge it as a fixed, necessary element in their lives, so much the less has the sense of another kind of government, one reaching to the feelings and character, prevailed ; nay, there has been a desire to get rid of it altogether. But none of these facts convince me, that the establishment of outward law, the formation of national societies, were not parts of God's great scheme for developing more fully the nature and character of Christ's kingdom. Looking at the question in the most obvious way, if I compare the state of any nation in modern Europe, I *wTould include even Russia, with that which we know to have been the state of the Roman and Byzantine empires during the first 486 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION seven centuries, I should really tremble for my own ingratitude, if I did not wonder at the change which God has wrought. And this change, I affirm to be not merely one in outward and material happiness, but one connected with the very ends for which the Church exists. It does seem to me, in the first place, a positive good that the Church should not be looked upon at all in the light of a police, that there should be another body performing that func- tion, and leaving it to find out its own. And next, I believe that every circumstance in the later history of Europeans has been en- abling the Church in each nation to discover if she will what her powers are, how much greater than those of the statesman — how indispensable to the statesman. In the first age, spiritual discipline tried to be every thing. Since that time, outward law has tried to be every thing ; the existence of spiritual discipline has been for- gotten. I showed, in my first part, how clearly and awfully it has been demonstrated that law cannot do what it wishes to do and pretends to do. Thus, then, I think we are coming to a time, when the spiritual side of Christ's kingdom must come forth into a prominence which it has not yet assumed ; when the education and discipline which the Church exercises will be demanded by each nation for the preservation of its own existence. But the Church, I believe, can only profit by this great crisis in the history of man- kind, if she be ready to acknowledge that according to the will of her author and her Lord she is not meant to have an independent existence ; that she is not meant to be extra-national ; that she has no commission or powers which dispense with the necessity of positive, formal law, and with outward government ; that her highest honour is to be the life-giving energy to every body in the midst of which she dwells. 5. " But the Church in old times was able to cast heretics out of her bosom. When she becomes connected with a nation, it either undertakes the punishment of them by its own vulgar methods, or else entertains them and tolerates them, without pay- ing the least heed to the Church's sentence." Here, again, I be- lieve the same observations apply. The character and constitution of the Church in the early ages were, I think, manifested in its* contest with heretics. One or another partial theory was broach- THE PATRICIAN. 4S7 ed, one or another article of the Creeds were set aside or pared away. The Church, often against terrible odds, asserted the integ- rity of her constitution ; asserted that spiritual unity which is the ground of her existence. That there might not be divisions, she was driven to draw subtle distinctions, submitting oftentimes to the charge of logomachy, that she might maintain the realities which logomaehists were making void; often seeming to puzzle the way- farer that she might preserve to him his inheritance. This was her conflict at that time ; for this end it was necessary she should have her individual champions and her general councils. I have no doubt this was the work of the early Church, and that amidst all the sins even of her best and bravest members, she fulfilled it as it was meant to be fulfilled. But does not every one feel in reading ecclesiastical history, that this position, though in some respects a glorious one, was in many an unfortunate one ? In these struggles with those -who would have divided her, the Church was maintaining her character as a kingdom, cohering by its relation to an awful name, which it was bound to assert and defend. And yet the impression of her having this character was in no slight degree impaired by the strifes into which she entered for the sake of it. These led men more and more to fancy that the battle was for a set of dogmas or opinions, which the particular set of doctors called Catholics had agreed to maintain against the world, but which, unfortunate- ly, they could not settle among themselves. Supposing Pagans or Jews had taken up this notion, it might be a matter of regret ; but if Christians and Christian teachers fell into it themselves, the very existence of the Church was put in peril. And it is evident that this was the case. The Greeks especially, priding themselves upon that gift of subtlety which has in all ages been committed to them, seem to have lost unawares the entire substance, every part of which they were able with such accuracy to distinguish ; to have called forth new heresies by the very zeal and decrees which suppressed the old j to have felt less and less that the Church was any thing but a school, even while they were resorting most un- scrupulously to measures which could only be justified to their con- sciences by the belief that it was the one human fellowship. I 488 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. think we must all feel it a relief to escape from this Greek world of controversy into the Latin world of business and enterprise. There may be much evil there too, but there is a practical work going out ; societies are growing ; the Church is felt to be herself a society, governed by certain laws, informed by a certain princi- ple. Who can help feeling, that amidst all the contradictions of the middle ages, the sense of a common bond, the feeling of a one spirit and a one object, were far more realized than they had been except by a very few of the highest minds in the age of the (Ecu- menical Councils 1 And this is surely what one would expect, if one really believed that the Church was under God's government, and that He was making its meaning and power manifest, amidst all the perplexities and distractions of men's self-will. Now, how- ever strange it may appear, the connexion of Church polity with national polity was certainly the means of keeping this feeling alive. The Greeks could not look upon the Church as a kingdom? because they had nothing to teach them what a kingdom was ; they were living under a despot with whose government they had no sympathy, who ruled by creatures and tools not as the centre of a social order. And this assertion is confirmed by a fact which seems at first to interfere with it, and to supply a better reason for the character which I have attributed to the Western Church. The Pope, it will be said, made the middle ages conscious of their Church unity, and yet the Pope was the great antagonist of na- tional societies. I answer, it was the feeling of national life that grew up in the countries of the West, which made it possible that there should be a Bishop assuming the position which the Pope assumed. When once the national feeling had been strongly de- veloped, it was impossible to view the Church in the light of a mere learned school ; men were obliged to look upon it as a king- dom, for it was exercising the powers of one, and in no other cha- racter could they have paid it homage. Hence it was possible for the Bishop of Rome to give an outward formal character to this kingdom, to put himself at the head of it, and though amidst con- tinual reluctations and manifestations of independence, to act as the feudal superior of the different societies into wThich Christen- dom was divided. But mark under what conditions this was THE PATRICIAN. 489 possible. The Pope himself becomes the sovereign of a state ; he does honour to the very principle he is setting at nought. I feel, of course, all the anomaly of this position ; but it explains, I think, clearly, how truly it was the will of God that the Nations should come into being, and how necessary this was, not for the chastise- ment of the Church, but for its development. And to return to the point immediately under our consideration, it is in this way that the new position of those who differed from the doctrine or order of the Church is explained. In the first age, they are pronounced guilty of violating the tradition and creed of the universal society ; in the second age, they are treated as invaders of the order and unity of the particular state in which they are found, or of the states generally, so far as they feel themselves united for a common ob- ject ; in the third age, the state feels that it consults its own peace better by leaving them alone, by allowing them a settled position, by treating them as the rest of its subjects. I have already said why I believe that each state will continue to do this only just so long as it maintains its relation with a spiritual society ; why, the moment it becomes a mere civil body, it will of necessity resort to force again for the putting down of opinion. But now I am look- ing at the question in another light, and I would ask whether this is not a most important step in the plans of God. First, the spiritu- al society in her general councils took cognizance of schisms and heresies, but in doing so she ran the risk of seeming to be herself only the maintainer of a certain system of opinions, not the pillar and ground of truth. She inadvertently cultivated the very spirit of disputation which she wished to check. Next, the particular states show that they are interested in the repression of these schisms and heresies, hereby testifying that they are of a practical character, that they do really interfere with government and order. But in bearing this testimony, the states were also doing a great injury to the Church ; they were putting themselves into its place ; they were using vulgar visible arms, for the accomplish- ment of an invisible and spiritual end. Lastly, the states have foreborne, or are inclined to forbear, from these experiments, having found them to be ineffectual. But in turn, they are inclined to look upon all spiritual matters as trans- acted between quarrelling schools and sects, with whom the national 490 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. government has little to do ; except when they become very vio- lent to keep peace between them ; at other times leaving them to carry on the work of mutual destruction. Now, I say, if there be a Church in the world, these are circumstances in which she can produce an evidence of her reality which she could not produce in either of the previous periods. She cannot cut off heretics from her communion, for they have cut themselves off — they do not care for her communion. But she can show that she has that secret power within her which may unite them ; that those nice distinc- tions of fathers and of councils were not really distinctions meant to cause separation, but to prevent it ; meant to preserve truth in its fulness and completeness against a time, when men, having tried their different plans and methods of thought, should begin to desire that which would reconcile them, and when they should acknowledge no higher evidence of a divine mission in any body than this, that it satisfies the aspiration. The Church, again, cannot make civil rulers perceive that she has a power of the same kind which they possess, for when they have fought her with her own weapons, they have prevailed and she has been foiled ; but she may prove to them that she has another power, entirely distinct from theirs, far higher than theirs, to which they must resort, or perish in their feebleness. 6. I will conclude this head with one or two remarks upon the alleged impossibility of recognising a one Catholic Church under the distinctions and limitations of national bcdies. 'How,' it is asked, ' can a Church be one if it have no visible tokens of unity 1 Those who dream with the Quakers, that the Church is a purely spir- itual unseen body, may perchance think that all ceremonial uniformity is of no worth. But the defenders of National Churches are very far from any such notion as this. They require that the ecclesias- tical organization should be strict and formal. Yet, according to them, it must have a different organization in every country, for there can be no general councils, seeing that every thing is subject to -the will of particular princes, and seeing that even provincial synods, and national convocations, are regarded with great jealousy by the civil power. What can happen, then, but the Church should lose all the features by which its identity is ascertained in different parts of the earth, that it should gradually become more and more THE PATRICIAN. 491 accommodated to the habits of particular districts ; till at last it becomes more proud of that which separates it from other com- munities in other parts of the world, than of that which it has in common with them.' My answer to these arguments is this: I have maintained against the Quaker, that there are certain permanent ordinances in which the character and universality of the Church are expressed ; she does not, therefore, depend for her unity, upon the faith and feeling of her particular members, but bears a constant and abiding testimony against the want of faith or feeling in any or all of them. If this be a true doctrine, if it be the will of God, that these ordi- nances should denote the universal and spiritual society, we should naturally expect that He would manifest the distinction between them, and every thing which is but accidentally connected with them. Evidently there are some accidents with which they must of necessity be connected. Baptism and the Eucharist must be administered in some mode ; there must be rules about the juris- diction of Bishops. If there are forms of prayer there must be given forms. There may also, of course, be a number of accidents which are not necessary, but which, from particular reasons, have obtained sacredness in different parts of the Church, or through the whole of it. Now the effect of the general legislation which the Church possessed in the early ages, was unquestionably to connect together a particular mode of treating these ordinances with the ordinance itself. I do not say that this was the wish of the early Church ; on the contrary, I believe that the study of the proceed- ings and decrees of councils would lead us to trace a very cautious and often subtle wisdom, in discriminating between that which was merely of needful ecclesiastical institution, and that which was of the nature of the thing itself. And there was a higher wisdom than this, directing the practice of the early Church, and actually hindering different portions, even of such an empire as the Roman, fn m adhering to one ritual or one set of observances, with that fidelity which they observed in preserving the Creed and the ordi- nances. Still the result of oecumenical government in some degree to those who lived then — in a much greater degree to us who merely read their history, — is to efface this distinction, and to pre- vent us from contemplating the divine sign in its own simplicity 492 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. and integrity, as separate even from the mos^ desirable and indis- pensable arrangements respecting it. When the Bishop of Rome tried to perpetuate in his own per- son this oecumenical legislation, the peril became infinitely greater. The most fearful confusion arose between the signs of the Church, and the ecclesiastical appointments which had been devised to make these signs effectual. Nothing could so obscure the divine origin and constitution of the Church as this confusion. The eagerness of the Church to claim the power of legislating in emergencies hid the fact from view, that she was resting upon any principles, or that God had legislated for her. At the same time she could not practically maintain a legislation which was purely universal ; the habits, maxims, and precedents of different localities interfered — only to make the confusion of authorities and obli- gations more complete. Then came the Reformation, asserting the law of God as something paramount to the law of the Church, and, when its maxims were perverted, suggesting to men that their wills or their notions were superior to either. Meantime, however, the Church within each nation had begun practically to claim for itself the power of decreeing rites and ceremonies. That claim, properly considered and used, was the greatest witness which could be borne against the notion that Ordinances and Ceremonies are the same. It did homage to the one as the gifts to the Church universal ; it treated the other as needful provisions to be taken cognizance of by the spiritual body, this body having at once the strongest obligation to teach men by outward evidences that they were members of one family, and not to ppermit its own theories or notions of what was suitable to this end to mix with the great principles of God's government. Various causes, however, inter- fered to mar the effect of this proclamation. As the ecclesiastical body in any particular nation found itself checked by the self-will of individuals unwilling to submit to the regulations which are necessary to the existence of every society, and which acquire an especial sacredness in one which is meant to be the pattern of a hu- man fellowship ; it was inclined to put forth its pretensions more strongly, and to identify that which is decreed with the very being of the Church. This temper was especially likely to prevail in THE PATRICIAN. 493 nations which had acquired a strict civil organization, and which were continually exercising their powers of legislation. The ecclesiastical body would naturally catch the habit of looking upon itself as merely existing to legislate, and would be more proud of the rules which it was laying down for its own government, than of all the influence it was exerting upon the heart of society. Supposing such a tone of mind to become prevalent, I can conceive no greater mercy than that the c; vil power should step in to put a stop to clerical convocations, or to discourage provincial synods. But for such violence I cannot conceive how any National Church could have learnt what its own peculiar powers were. I think it must have been crushed under the weight of its own decrees ; and, above all, that it must have lost sight of the only grounds of unity which it can have with the members of other nations. On the other hand, it seems to me that by this discipline it has been manifested wherein the substance and essence of a national Church consists ; that its substance is given it by those ordinances which belong to it in common with Christians elsewhere ; that its essence consists in those powers which belong to it in common with the different parts of the body, and which are to be exerted in the first place for the benefit of its own country. When this lesson has been well learnt, I have no doubt but that each national Church will recover its synods and its convocations ; for then she will know7 how to use them. Not with the lust of legislation, not in the hope of accom- plishing her chief objects by decrees, but for the purpose of satis- fying scruples, of leading men away from the restless study of what is external, by not compelling them to arrange and deliberate about it for themselves, of determining those ceremonies, which to people of a particular climate, character, and constitution best express the great ideas of the Church, of more effectually establishing and di- recting discipline and education, of promoting fellowship with national Churches which are willing to acknowledge themselves as parts of a great Catholic body. Whether when national Churches begin to understand their own position they may not once more send their representatives to a general council, and whether the princes of the different nations may not feel such a measure helpful instead of injurious to their objects, I will not inquire. I see no reason why, if we follow God's 32 494 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. method, we may not arrive at such a result, though I can see the strongest why if we violate that method, and seek to have an in- dependent existence, no councils, no compacts, no projects of union can ever be otherwise than evil in themselves and pregnant with mischief. Ought we to say then, that Church unity belongs to the first six centuries, and that since national distinctions began, there have been no traces of it? We have, I think, been able to perceive, that the separation of the Greek from the Latin Churches, which is so fre- quently lamented over, and which ought to be a great cause of shame and humiliation to both, has, nevertheless, led to very blessed results, by separating the Church from a cruel and mischievous ty- ranny, and enabling it to develope its powers under freer and hap- pier conditions. In like manner, if we consider the subject calmly and solemnly, not omitting repentance for our sins nor thankfulness for our mercies, we shall, I believe, perceive, that but for the refor- mation in the sixteenth century, European society must have sunk into the condition of an infidel world, nominally ruled by the in- triguing head of a little Italian principality ; really divided into a number of warring states, each aiming at the most selfish objects, each only looking to religion as the means of accomplishing them. From that time it has been evident to thinking persons, that there are two principles struggling in Christendom for supremacy ; the one, that which is embodied in Protestantism, resisting the claim of the spiritual power to any extra national domination, and always tending to set at nought spiritual authority altogether; the other, that which is embodied in Romanism, resisting the attempts of the particular states to divide their own subjects from the rest of Chris- tendom, continually striving to uphold the Church as a separate power, and to set at nought the existence of each particular nation. These principles have fought together in Europe for centuries. If it be really the purpose of God in our age to reconcile them, and to cast out the element in each which is contrary to his will, and which has been introduced to it by the perverseness of men, shall we whine about the loss we have sustained by not being born at a time when the Church was making its first struggling efforts to assert its own unity ? shall we not rejoice and give thanks, that we are born in these latter days of the world, when all things are hastening to their THE MODERN STATESMAN. 495 consummation, and when the unity of the Church shall be demon- strated to be that ground upon which all unity in nations and in the heart of man is resting? SECTION v. THE MODERN STATESMAN. Such statements as these, however unacceptable to man}' church- men, will not avail to conciliate modern politicians, or to remove the terrors which they entertain of ecclesiastical influence. Per- haps they will be inclined to say that the power which I claim for the spiritual body is really a more dangerous one than that which I re- nounce. 'To admit the existence of a dominant hierarchy is the necessity of a statesman's position ; nay, he has not much right to complain of the necessity; it helps in common times to keep other sects quiet, and clergymen indifferent. But when you say that this hierarchy is the proper educator of the land, you are not content that it should be entertained with a bauble. You wish it to become practically and politically mischievous. That power which can ed- ucate a land must rule over its families, over its arts, its literature, its science, its ethics, its philosophy, nay, in one sense, as the head of the professional classes, over its law and its medicine. These are pretensions which no government in this day can tolerate fur- ther than as it is compelled to tolerate them by circumstances. The religious bodies in every country must undoubtedly affect its educa- tion for good or for evil ; but they are happily broken into frag- ments, and it is the statesman's business to see that they act, one and all of them, as religious bodies, and in no other character. The general education of the land he must gradually (for unquestiona- bly there are many difficulties from old prejudices and institutions which he must remove before he can fully accomplish his desire) take under his own direction. If he allows it to be superintended by any ecclesiastical body, that body becomes just as dangerous as the Jesuits have ever been. For where has lain the real power of the Jesuits? not in their government over courts, but over schools; not in the poison they have been able to infuse into the ears of monarchs, half so much as in the maxims of ecclesiastical submis- 496 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. sion and craft which they have communicated to children along with their primers and their grammars.' In the first division of this work I have endeavoured to trace the history of some of those political and philosophical movements, which have led men in our day to contemplate education as the only adequate means of preserving government and society. I showed that the course of thought by which we had arrived at this opinion, was altogether at variance with the practical results to which it seemed to be leading. The statesman demands education as a power for acting upon the spirits of men. But the statesman of our day has distinctly and formally repudiated the notion that he can deal with the spirits of men ; he has blamed his forefathers for assuming any such authority. It seemed to us, therefore, that when the statesman claimed himself to be the educator of his land, he was involved in a strange contradiction. Yet it was a contradic- tion into which he had fallen most naturally. He found that a set of warring religious bodies were not competent to exercise the kind of influence over his subjects which he feels to be necessary for them. He wants them to be united and harmonized ; a sect-educa- tor sets them at strife. He will therefore do what he can. He will leave to these religious bodies the right of teaching their own dog- mas ; whatever else is included in the idea of education must be taken under his own immediate cognizance. And this course, awk- ward and inconvenient as it evidently is, nay, destructive of the very idea of education, seemed to us the only one which is left for the modern statesman, unless there were some spiritual body existing in the heart of his nation, which was as organic as the civil body, and able to perform those functions which by its own confession it is incompetent to perform. Our subsequent inquiries have led us to believe that there is such a body ; that it has established itself in the heart of every European nation ; that it has been the teacher of every nation ; that it has incorporated itself with the civil soci- ety ; that the statesman finds the society with which he has to deal everywhere bearing witness of its existence ; that he is obliged to depose this body from its functions before he can commence school- master himself. Such is the state of the question at present. I shall not enter into it at large, because it has been discussed else- where. But it is necessary for our present purpose, that I should THE MODERN STATESMAN. 497 offer some indications of the difference between the effects of an education given by a national Church which understands its own powers and responsibilities, and one given, first, by the state; sec- ondly, by a set of different sects ; thirdly, by an ecclesiastical extra- national order, like that of the Jesuits. That I may follow the method in which I have supposed the objections to arise, I will speak very shortly of these kinds of education as they affect family life, science, art and literature, popular ethics, and philosophy. L 1. I have already had occasion to speak more than once on the first of these subjects. I have shown that a mere religious body, such as that of the Quakers, of the Calvinists, &c, though it may regard family life with reverence, though, at certain stages of its existence, it may even have preserved family life in great purity, cannot connect the institution of the family, as such, with its re- ligion. The religious man is one who chooses for himself ; who at a certain time has been led to seek for a new life, and a new fellowship expressive of this new life. Such is the notion in which a sect begins. It becomes exceedingly modified when the sect has established itself. Hereditary feelings and sympathies develope themselves ; to desert the faith of forefathers begins to be spoken of as an evil. But still the religious society subsists upon this principle. Those who are admitted into its privileges do not grow into them. The religious body is looked upon as something different in kind from the family. And therefore it is the com- mon complaint in all sects, that wherever the hereditary habit has begun to prevail, the religion becomes a matter of course, its power is exhausted ; some violent efforts must be made to revive it. Now such influences as these, I maintain, cannot by possibility cultivate the family life of a nation. They do not bring the spir- itual life into any direct relation with the life of natural kinsman- ship. And in a day when so many influences are threatening- household sanctities, when so many schemes of universal society exist which cast them aside altogether, the statesman who has no better means of protecting them than that which is afforded by the teaching of religious sects, must be prepared to see them perish altogether. Where there are no political influences and motives at work, no trade-temper, no grand philosophical generalizations, the religious men in the sects may hope to keep alive the habit 498 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. of respect and attachment among their children. Where these are abroad, they must tremble ; at all events, he who believes that the existence of the nation depends upon the preservation of do- mestic relations, must tremble if these be their only guardians. 2. But what can the statesman himself do by his education to protect these relations ? Nothing whatever. Ought I not rather to say, that of necessity he must do much to shake the confidence in them, and to impair their sacredness ? It is no fault of his, it is the necessity of his position, a part of his duty that he should aim at making men citizens. He cannot teach them to be sons and brothers, he is obliged to interfere with the duties which belong to them in these capacities. He must have his schools established upon the express principle, that the parents are not competent to teach, or to choose teachers themselves. He must treat the author- ity of the father as if its sacredness depended upon the authority of the law. All wise statesmen of antiquity felt this difficulty, and rejoiced to avail themselves of such means as they had of escap- ing from it. Modern statesmen should surely ask themselves with some earnestness, whether any helps for this purpose are within their reach. 3. That the Jesuit is not exactly the person to whom one can safely coufide the custody of family life and relations, most of the persons with whom I am now arguing will acknowledge. And perhaps they will agree with me in thinking, nay, may wonder that I should make such a concession, that the evil of the Jesuit's influence does not arise solely, or perhaps chiefly, from the particu- lar opinions which he inculcates — that if there could be a Protest- ant order of the same kind, it would be almost equally mischiev- ous. And wherein, then, upon my principle, does its evil consist 1 Precisely in this ; 1 believe God has established a universal Church in the world, which grew out of a family, which embodies the idea of family life in its highest possible expansion. That idea, I believe, is preserved in freshness and reality, just so long as a strict unbroken connexion is kept up between it highest form and its lowest ; so long as the application of the word Father to Him who was, who is, and who is to come, is felt to be no figurative abuse, but rather the only possible explanation of its most ordinary ap- plication. And I believe that Ignatius Loyola established a uni- THE MODERN STATESMAN. 499 versal order of his own upon a principle altogether different from this divine principle, nay, subversive of it ; that such an order cannot be the means of preserving any part of the true constitution of soci- ety; that it must be continually interfering with it, and substitut- ing something else in the place of it : that, above all, family order and this pseudo ecclesiastical order must be perpetual, irreconcila- ble enemies. 4. If this be the case, I need not spend any words in proving that the spiritual and universal society of which we have dis- covered the signs, seeing that it assumes the family to be taken by baptism into God's family, seeing that it supposes all civil duties and relations to grow naturally out of these first duties and rela- tions, and seeing that it looks upon the highest ecclesiastical duties and relations as connected with the ordinary social duties, should be the great instrument for accomplishing that object which divided sects, the civil power, a seemingly universal fellowship cannot ac- complish, that of building up and sanctifying the domestic society of every nation. II. 1. How far religious bodies or sects can be trusted with the scientific education of a nation, may be judged from the difference of the feelings with which they have regarded science at different stages of their history. Almost without exception, the impulse of every sect, when its religious faith and sympathies were most strong, has been to look at science as something wholly alien from the nature of faith, and not to be reconciled with it. Whether this has arisen from a Manichean horror of the outward world, or from a dread of it as something too holy to be touched, or merely from a dislike of the slow and cold methods by which a knowledge of its secrets is obtained, or, as in the case of the Quakers, from a cer- tain dim intuition of a link between the laws of physical and spiritual investigation which ordinary philosophers had over- looked, the result has been the same. In a generation or two the case becomes altogether changed, at least to all outward appear- ance. Persons arise out of these sects who show a genius for physical speculation, and devote themselves wholly to it ; a notion pervades the members of the body generally that such pursuits can no longer be discouraged, as they were in the days of their fathers; a few sturdy Protestants still remain to warn younger men against perils 500 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. which a sure instinct tells them are most real ; others who fancy themselves more wise and enlightened, and yet withal very reli- gious, explain what lessons respecting the Divine wisdom and good- ness may be gathered from natural discoveries. This last change strikes some as a very promising one ; to me it seems that the old state of things was far better. The old teachers were acting out a principle ; they believed that the business of man's life is to ac- quaint himself with his Creator and to do his will ; they did not see what these studies had to do with this great end, therefore they rejected them. Their descendants, when they first enter upon these pursuits, do not complain that the application of the maxim was narrow; they complain that the maxim itself was narrow ; that men, if they attend properly to their religious duties, may bestow a fair portion of their time upon pursuits which have a different aim and motive. Soon of course these pursuits are felt to be genuine and real, the religious duties artificial and traditional ; if the former are not wholly followed and the latter neglected, there is, 'at all events, no sympathy between them. Then if there should come a religious revival, and the feelings which are embo- died in the different sects should be able to influence public opinion, and to create what is called a religious world, the expedient is re- sorted to, of making sciences tell a tale about the truth of the Scriptures and the being and attributes of God. A moral is wrung out of its facts, by fair means or by foul, often by most dishonest con- struction of evidence, often by positive suppression of that which has been proved. If any fact is brought to light which opposes a current notion in theology or a current interpretation of the Scrip- tures, it must not be fairly looked at ; the question is raised whether there ought to be such a fact, and, therefore, whether we may re- cognise it supposing it should be one. The scientific men are right- ly disgusted. They see that not only the cause of science but also of honesty is at stake, they begin to suspect an hypothesis the more for its gratifying religious feelings. 2. And here comes in the civil power, and sa)s, * This we can- not permit ; our subjects must be taught science fairly and truly. We must have railways and steam-engines. In the present state of society, our very handicraftsmen must understand something of the regulations of that machinery which they have to work ; the THE MODERN STATESMAN. 501 knowledge of a multitude of subjects unknown to their ancestors is needful for them ; you religious men may impart wmat correc- tions or draw what inferences you please, we must teach the things, we must give our countrymen a scientific culture.' I have nothing to say in answer to this determination, but that I believe it will defeat itself. This teaching of a multitude of things is not, I fancy, scientific culture, but is fatal to it. The favourite name with those who defend this sort of education is the name of Bacon. 0 that they would devote some real pains to the study of Bacon! They would find him denouncing as one of the main hin- derances to scientific knowledge and scientific progress, the desire for facts which should be " fructiferous" and not " luciferous," which should lead to mere results, and not to the search for higher princi- ples. The whole object of his writings was to teach how in facts one may seek for laws ; not how, out of a heap of observations, one may make first a theory and then a machine. To the passion for mere effects, and what are called practical results, he attributed most of the delusions and crimes of the alchemists. And unques- tionably; if he were to reappear in our day, and were to hear him- self eulogized as the man who had taught how much nobler a thing it is to make shoes than to seek for principles, he wrould believe that the very mischiefs out of which he had been the means of de- livering his countrymen, were coming back upon them through the abuse of his own wisdom. Yet this is the doctrine which the states- man, who is merely a statesman, does inevitably adopt ; this has ever been and must ever be the maxim of a state education. 3. The Jesuits cannot be accused of neglecting to give informa- tion on physical subjects to their scholars. Nor does it appear that they attempted to restore old theories on these matters, or to teach any other opinions than those which had the general sanction of philosophers in their day. As the Dominicans and the Francis- cans were the means of reversing the papal decree against Aristo- tle, so it seems as if the Jesuits had practically reversed the decree against Galileo, rather eagerly availing themselves of the direction which men's minds were taking towrards physical inquiries, to turn them away from inquiries into subjects more immediately concern- ing themselves. Here, as everywhere, their instruction proceeded upon one principle, and in one regular, coherent system. Teach 502 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. every thing, be it physics, history, or philosophy, in such wise that the student shall feel he is not apprehending a truth, but only re- ceiving a maxim upon trust, or studying a set of probabilities. Act- ing upon this rule, they could publish an edition of the " Principia," mentioning that the main doctrine of it had been denounced by the Pope, and was therefore to be rejected ; but, at the same time, re- commending the study of the book as containing a series of very ingenious arguments and apparent demonstrations. There was no curl of the lip in this utterance, strange as it may seem to us, nor, in the sense we commonly give to the word, any dishonesty. The editors did not believe that Newton had proved his point. They had not enough of the feeling of certainty in their minds, to think that any thing could be proved. All is one sea of doubts, perplexi- ties, possibilities ; the great necessity is to feel that wre cannot ar- rive at truth, and that therefore we must submit ourselves to an in- fallible authority. This was the habit of their mind ; whether it was a true one or no the religious man will be able to resolve when he has considered its effects in producing the skepticism of the eighteenth century ; the scientific man, when he thinks how hope- less of progression those who cherish it must be. 4. Now a national Church, which believes that it exists for the purpose of cultivating the inner man, just as the civil power exists for the sake of the outward man — which believes that it has a com- mission and vocation for this end, — must be a continual witness against all these notions of education. She cannot tolerate for an instant the sectarian notion, that the study of the laws according to which God has framed this universe is not a solemn and religious work, to be carried on reverently, in connexion with the study of the laws upon which He has constructed the moral universe. As she believes that there is a method for arriving at the knowledge of the one constitution, so she believes that there is a method for arriving at the knowledge of the other. There may be a connexion between these two methods, but they cannot be the same. The spiritual method is not honoured when you compel the physical facts into obedience to it ; you are certain they cannot contradict it ; you are sure they will, at all events, illustrate it ten thousand fold more than all your moralities about them ever can. A national Church must believe in the highest sense that what is is right. THE MODERN STATESMAN. 503 This is the pillar of her own existence ; this is what she opposes to the maxim of the world, that things are right which we make so by our rules and conventions ; therefore she must teach her chil- dren to ask bravely and boldly, " What is V encouraging them by all means to expect an answer ; teaching them in what frame of mind to wait for it, to receive it, to give thanks for it. But this lesson is very unlike that one which the civil power seeks to inculcate in its education. The spiritual teacher in his own sphere is occupied in leading men into the secret heart of things, in teaching them the laws of their own being, and their direct relation to the Creator. In this sphere of physical science he must act upon the same principle. He cannot merely teach facts and opinions, he must seek to guide his pupil into the knowledge of laws. This method he will follow with the higher or professional classes who are submitted to his discipline. He cannot change it, though he may alter altogether his scheme of instruction when he is occupied with the lowest classes. For these, too, consist of men ; of men who want to know, and who have a right to know what that order is in which they are placed; what the meaning of the things which they are doing is ; who must not merely be taught what they are to do, or merely be furnished with rules for doing it. And therefore it is almost needless to say, that such a teacher looks upon authority, not in the way in which the Jesuit does, as a substitute for truth, but as that which is to put us in the right way of searching after it. A national Church believes that she is set in the midst of a nation by Him, 6 who for this end was born, and for this end came into the world, that He might bear witness to the truth,' in order that she may bear witness of it ; and may rebuke the slavish and godless tempers which hinder men in any direction from coveting it ; and that by leading them to know it she may make them free. III. The treatment which literature and art are likely to receive from these different classes may be conjectured from the remarks which have been just made. Sects in their infancy reject both as worldly and heathenish, in their manhood and decline tolerate them as necessary indulgences, or endeavour to make them religious by sugaring them over with a Christian phraseology. The civil power encourages both, because they furnish certain measures of diver- 504 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. sion and entertainment to different classes of the community ; but determines their value by the degree in which they minister to im- mediate utility. The Jesuit favours all that kind of literary dili- gence which exhibits itself in laborious compilations, annals, chronologies, &c. ; all that kind of art which may help to connect devotion more closely with the senses. So that in each of these forms of education there is, from different causes, the same tenden- cy to give to human utterances, whether in books, or pictures, or sculpture, or music, or architecture, an artificial, outward, fictitious character ; to make them insincere expressions of that which is ac- tually in the hearts of men ; or else to make those hearts themselves insincere, by leading them constantly to aim at the production of some effect to which the names, " moral, useful, religious," by a great abuse of language are applied. But if there be any body which really believes that it has a commission to cultivate the mind and spirit of a nation ; to call forth in it that which is truest and noblest ; to awaken the reason, the understanding, the affections ; to give them their key note, to bring out their different harmonies ; such a body will feel that the men to whom God has given the power of expressing their own minds and the minds of their age, whether in words or in sensible forms, have a high vocation and a mighty responsibility; that the influences of the world are likely to choke their powers and prevent them from freely and happily ex- panding ; that the spiritual mother is to brood over them with ten- der and affectionate care ; to cheer them on amid outward and in- ward discouragements ; to give them the soothing food and medi- cine of peaceful devotions and outwTard images of serenity and quiet- ness ; to stir them up by heroical examples, to make them conscious of their relation to the past and the future ; to hold forth high and distant ends, that they may not be crushed by the influences of their age, or be tempted to court its approbation ; to humble them that they may be exalted ; to teach them how they may discover the invisible in the visible, instead of confounding them and bringing the higher under the conditions of the lower. While thus training the more illustrious citizens of the commonwealth, she is really marking out the course by which all should be trained who are to be citizens indeed ; for to each God has committed some trust, which may be fulfilled for his glory and for the good of the land. THE MODERN STATESMAN. 505 IV. 1. I will conclude this subject with a few words upon the subject of ethics. Strictly speaking, the sectarian does not recog- nise the existence of such a study. For he looks upon the religious man as taken into a position altogether different from that which other men occupy. He and they are not under the same law. There is a set of rules and maxims which they must observe, in order that they may be members of the family and citizens of the community to which they belong. The religious man submits to these, but he is subject to another set of Gospel influences, with which the ordinary man has nothing to do. Christian ethics mean the religion of the heart according to the Bible, they apply only to the converted ; worldly ethics mean the regulation of the conduct according to the rules and maxims which are received among worldly men, these apply to the unconverted. Upon this showing a morality for man as man does not exist. 2. Accordingly the statesman interferes, and says in this case as in the others, * Then you shall teach that morality which belongs to your position ; I will teach that which belongs to mine. Men must acknowledge some rule of life. These subjects of mine, call them converted or unconverted, must be trained to some sense of their relations to each other. Mere legal penalties are not suffi- cient for them, they must be taught some reason for their conduct, some method of self-government.' Of course these reasons and these methods must turn upon maxims of self-interest. How can they turn upon any other maxims? The statesman has been warned off the religious ground, this is all that remains to him. 3. Of Jesuit ethics I need not speak at length, they are in sufficiently bad odour among us, and probably in most nations of the Continent. What I wish to remark is, that all the evil which is in them has flowed from that first principle of establish- ing an universal order upon a human calculation of what is ex- pedient for the preservation of the Church and of religion. Once construct a society of such power and of such coherency as the Jesuit society, and it is impossible, in the nature of things, that the preserva- tion of this order should not begin to be regarded as the one great end, to which every other is subordinate. To keep this great machine in motion, to make it effective, every thing must be sacrificed. I do not think that there is one pernicious maxim in the Institute which 506 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. may not be legitimately deduced from this primary assumption. The Jesuits feel, about morality, as about science, not that it is, but that it has been made, and, therefore, that it may be remade for a higher object. The world has framed its maxims in order to keep itself alive ; he may frame his maxims in order to keep the holy religious order alive. The object is surely better ; the ways in both cases are determined by arrangement and convention. 4. Once again, I say a national Church exists to protest against these outrages upon that which is the very ground of a nation's existence. It affirms morality to be universal, in its highest form to be meant for all men and to be attainable by all men, seeing that the covenant of Baptism takes all who will receive it into the highest state which a man on earth can enjoy; the state in which he has all helps for resisting the powers of the flesh, the world, and the devil, which are seeking to rob him of his human privilege. It affirms morality to be in direct opposition to selfishness, not in its highest forms merely, but in its lowest; the penalties of the lawgiver, the prayers of the Church, being alike directed against this sin ; one denouncing its outward effects, the other aiming at the extirpation of the internal disease. It declares morality, not in its highest forms only but in its lowest, to be grounded upon the character and will of God ; subjection to that will being the lesson inculcated by the law, conformity to that character being the effect produced by the power of the Gospel. And, therefore, of necessity it must hate and curse all such schemes of morality as the Jesuits have sanctioned ; schemes which pervert the truth, that each individual case has peculiar points and delicate complications of its own which require wisdom and refinement and a freedom from rash habits of judging in the person who deals in them, into the confounding doctrine that there is no common law of right and wrong, or that no conscience for perceiving that law exists in the creatures to whom it is addressed. I have but two remarks to make before I conclude this head of my subject. The first is, that I believe all the defects in national Churches, and in the education which they have communicated, may be traced to a notion which has prevailed far too generally in the members and ministers of them ; either that their position is sectarian, that they are merely civil bodies constructed for certain THE MODERN STATESMAN. 507 civil ends ; or, on the other hand, that they are merely parts of a religious society or order existing for purposes wholly foreign to those for which the civil power exists. Should therefore any op- ponent produce facts which illustrate the weakness and inefficiency of these Churches, or of any one of them, I shall be most willing to consider his statements. I am satisfied they will all tend to the confirmation of mine, that they will all tend to prove the inherent viciousness of those schemes of education which have at different periods suggested themselves as most plausible and satisfactory, that they will furnish another reason why every national Church should understand its own high position, and should zealously assert it. My other remark is addressed to the statesman. He has felt in most countries of Europe, he feels still, the peril of Jesuit influence, and the necessity of guarding himself against it. But what can he do ? If he tries to get rid of the idea that there is one Catholic Church in the world, and treats religion as if it were merely a matter of private sectarian opinion, he will not hinder the Jesuits from entering his dominions and becoming masters of his schools. His tolerant maxims will make their settlement more easv ; the earnest cry which will be raised throughout a land left to sectarian influence for some united body, some organic fellowship, will cause their appearance to be hailed with delight. Will he, then, in despair resort to his own peculiar powers ? Will he proscribe and banish the intruders, or put them to death ? These methods, he knows, have been tried and tried in vain ; the crushed order has risen with all its other influences made stronger by the credit of persecution and of martyrdom. One barrier, and one alone, this subtle and Protean society knows that it cannot break through. A national Church, strong in the conviction of its own distinct pow- ers, paying respectful homage to those of the state, educating all classes to be citizens by making them men ; this is a spectacle which the Jesuit regards with wonder and despair. W7here there is such a national Church he may be safely allowed to walk up and down in the land ; the sting of his order is taken away; he may become a worthy and respectable member of the commonwealth. If the statesman be convinced that the maiming and ultimate sup- pression of such a Church is the true object of his policy, he must invent some new charm for laying this enemy. None has yet been discovered. 508 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. SECTION VI. THE MODERN INTERPRETERS OF PROPHECY. There is one class of persons for whom I entertain a sincere respect, who may, I fear, be offended by some of these observations : I allude to the modern interpreters of Prophecy. First, they will think that while I have professed great reverence for the Old Testa- ment, as containing the national history of the Jews, I have over- looked one of its most remarkable features, its promise of perma- nence and restoration to God's ancient people ; that hereby I have shown an indifference to the words of inspiration, and a preference for my own theories. 2dly, They will say that my notion of a divine constitution already established, which is not merely spi- ritual and universal but national, practically sets aside the doctrine of the second coming of Him who is to make all things new. 3rdly, That when I have spoken of the Romish system as distinct from the Latin Church, I have overlooked the clear declarations of the divine word respecting the judgments upon the apostasy and the ultimate excision of all bodies wThich belong to it. 1. I agree with those who look forward to a national restora- tion of the Jews, that much of the language which is commonly applied to their views, is the result of prejudice and misapprehen- sion. I do not, for instance, understand what is meant by the word ' carnaV when it is used in connexion with the doctrine, that other privileges exist besides those which belong to the Church as a spi- ritual body, and that of these the Jews were formerly and shall be hereafter the possessors. If I am right, these privileges are just as necessary witnesses against carnality (when by carnality is meant the inclination of that flesh which is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be), as those which directly appertain to us as children of God and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven ; nay, in one sense, they are stronger witnesses against this carnality, for they come more directly into contact with the acts and proceedings of our earthly life, which are wont to call it forth. And so far from considering this witness as less belonging to our age than to previous ages, I believe it is our characteristic infirmity, that we are disposed to place religion in a middle region, and that we will MODERN INTERPRETERS OF SCRIPTURE. 509 not understand it either in its most transcendent character or in its application to common doings and daily occurrences. I cannot help, therefore, suspecting these phrases about carnality ; they in- dicate a tendency which the sight of a national commonwealth, constituted as the Jewish commonwealth was, might counteract more effectually than any thing which one sees at this time, or per- haps has seen at any time, in the Catholic Church. Neither, again, do I understand how the reappearance of such a commonwealth on the very soil which was the original seat of it, could be other than a very marvellous and glorious testimony to the mighty scheme which God, whose works are known to Him from the beginning of the world, has been carrying on, and which no human self-will can frustrate. To me it seems that every thing is tending towards this result ; that so strange a body as the Israelites are could not have been permitted to exist for so many generations unconnected with any country or polity, if such a destiny were not in reserve for them ; that it is a strange and painful effort for the mind even to imagine all traces of national distinctness lost in men who, in their glory and depression, have been for nearly three thousand years witnesses for the existence of such distinctness; that this miracle would be infinitely more startling than the establishment of a Hebrew commonwealth in Palestine ; but that the first miracle would be in violation of all the analogy of God's dealings, the other, the natural consummation of them. These conclusions seem to me so reasonable, that I cannot help asking myself why I have had so much difficulty in arriving at them, and why so many persons, less hindered than I may be by prejudice or want of faith, should still experience the same diffi- culty so strongly. And I cannot help feeling that the mode in which the claims of the Jews are ordinarily stated has been, at all events, one great obstacle to oar acknowledging them. At one time it would seem as if the modern interpreters of prophecy ex- pected that the Jewish nation should take the place of the univer- sal Church ; at another, as if they expected Jerusalem to be the centre of that Church in the next age, even as Rome has tried to be the centre of it in this ; at another, as if they believed that in the restoration of all things, the Jews were to furnish the one specimen of a true and godly nation. Now it is very possible that none of 33 510 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. these views may really be entertained by those who use language which appears to import them. But surely the very approxima- tion to such notions may well inspire good men with some alarm. If we are to relapse into a national dispensation, if the idea of the universal Church is to be absorbed in that of an exclusive society, all the promises made to the fathers, it seems to me, are set at nought; the very truth of which the Old Testament history was pregnant has come to nothing; the mighty conflicts of St. Paul, to prove that it had actually been brought into light, were idle and vain; the last eighteen centuries have been a dead blank in the annals of mankind. If, again, the principle be admitted, that in any corner of the universe, in profane land or in holy land, the spiritual Church can find a visible capital for herself, the principle of Romanism seems to be confirmed, and all the sad experiments which have demonstrated it to be an ungodly principle are set aside, as of no worth. If, lastly, the Jewish nation or the Jewish Church is to exalt itself in solitary greatness over the ruins of a fallen universe, it seems to me that Isaiah and the prophets wTere wrong, and the Pharisees in the days of our Lord's incarnation strictly right. I do not mean merely that Isaiah and the prophets looked forward to a universal dispensation, to a Church which should develop itself out of a particular nation ; but I mean that they uniformly speak of Judea, even in their time, as the centre of a set of countries, each of wThich was (or was trying to be) a nation. The burden of the ' Valley of Vision' stands not alone, it is connect- ed with the burden of Egypt and the burden of Moab, with the burden of Tyre and with the burden of Damascus. The Jewish nation interprets to each of these what it ought to be. But each is looked upon as standing in some relation to the Lord God of the Hebrews; each as connected with his scheme of judgment and mercy, each as threatened by the same Babylonian power. This feeling had been wholly lost by the Pharisees; their only desire was that Judea might be supreme as Rome was supreme, that it might, in fact, be that Babylonian monarchy against which it had been for so many generations bearing testimony. But supposing all these views of Jewish restoration were abandoned, then, I think, that the way in which I have spoken of the state in this chapter may possibly strike earnest and thoughtful men as the true explana- MODERN INTERPRETERS OF SCRIPTURE. 511 tion and justification of an idea which they cherish so devoutly, and which I hope they may not be obliged, through the argu- ments of their opponents or through their own inconsistencies, to abandon. I look upon the Jewish nation as an abiding sign to the Chris- tian Church of the honour which God has put upon national life, and of his will that the Church should never strive to set itself up as something separate from the nations. I look upon it as the sign to each nation in the East or West of the law under which it is constituted, and according to which it will be judged. And be- cause I believe this to be a true unchangeable law, therefore I be- lieve it will at last make itself good in each case. One great cen- tral manifestation of it may be, and I trust and believe will be, the restoration of the Jewish commonwealth. And that restoration will, as I hope, be followed by the restoration to national life, in connexion with Christian and catholic life, of those countries which are now combined under the sceptre of the prophet, separa- ted from each other by the most violent sectarian controversies, in- capable of understanding how they may be distinct and yet one. In a Christian Jew a Mahometan sees what he was meant to be : sees the truth embodied which he has been twisting into a denial and a falsehood. I cannot, therefore, quarrel with the conviction of those who dream that Jews will be the agents in the conversion of Mahometans, and that a Hebrew nation will be the sun and centre of the Eastern world. But if no one pretends that such a result will be accomplished without great conflicts and heavy judg- ments, why may I not suppose that the West will, through the like process, attain to a like blessing ? Why may I not suppose that the principle of Judaism will be asserted, the exclusiveness of Pha- risaism be confounded, by the full development of European na- tions, and of their colonies in the other parts of the world, the uni- versal Church being still the life-giving power, the uniting princi- ple to them all ? 2. But it is indeed a decisive confutation of all these hopes, if they set at nought that truth of the second appearing of our Lord, upon which the Church has been resting in her greatest troubles, and to which the Scriptures urge us so continually to look forward. I should be more sorry perhaps than most, to say a word which 512 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. could weaken this faith in any mind, because it seems to me that the revival of it in our day has been one great means of removing the clouds which had hindered us from looking at Christ's Church as a Kingdom, and from connecting all individual blessings and re- wards with its existence and its establishment in that character. The wretched notion of a private selfish Heaven, where compensa- tion shall be made for troubles incurred, and prizes given for duties performed in this lower sphere — this unnatural notion, clothing it- self in the language of Scripture and of other days of the Church, but severing that language from the idea wTith which it was always impregnated, and connecting it with our low, grovelling, mercan- tile habits of feeling, had infused itself into our popular teachings and our theological books. It could not be driven out by those who merely preached the doctrine of justification by faith, for they, in their eagerness to get rid of the doctrine of human merit, seemed to take away the hope of reward altogether, and while giving a present relief to the conscience, to leave the heart and spirit with- out any future object after which they might aspire. If to the state of feeling which either of these forms of teaching was likely to pro- duce, there has succeeded in any country of Europe a vague and indistinct, but still perhaps a real acknowledgment of another end which men may seek after, than the selfish individual end, even the end of beholding Him in whom is no selfishness, no darkness at all, of sharing the light of a common sun, of feeling a common warmth and life from his rays, the change, I believe, must be ascribed in a great measure to those who have steadfastly asserted, amidst much opposition from others, and much discouragement from the confu- tation of their own favourite schemes of interpretation, the doctrine that the Church is to live in the expectation of the appearance and the triumph of her Head. But the more strongly I feel our obligation to these teachers on this account, the more 1 must regret, not perhaps particular cru- dities of opinion which may have mingled themselves with this faith, for these we must always expect, but any great central con- fusion which may have weakened the grounds upon which it rests, made it unacceptable to wise and thoughtful men, and given an almost unlimited license to the speculations of those who are not thoughtful or wise. Such a confusion seems to me to lurk in the MODERN INTERPRETERS OF SCRIPTURE. 513 notion that the Advent, or, as St. Paul far more frequently describes it, the Epiphany of our Lord, will be the beginning of a new order and constitution of things. Now it seems to me that the phrases in Scripture which refer to this event positively refute any such imagi- nation. The appearance of a light which shall show things as they are, and before which the darkness shall flee away, the day of judg- ment and distinction, the gathering of all together in one, the resto- ration of all things, this is the language in which we are taught to express our thoughts and anticipations respecting the future. Nay. such is the language we are obliged to use, even though our own theories might suggest some other as more suitable. And what do such words imply, but the full evidence and demonstration of that which is now ; the dispersion of all the shadows and appearances which have counterfeited it or have hidden it from view ? What do they imply, but the existence of a kingdom, or order, or consti- tution, which men have been trying to set at nought and deny, but under which they have been living notwithstanding, and which, in the clear sunlight of that day, is shown to be the only one under which they can live ? Is not this view of the case exactly in ac- cordance with the language of those who speak most about the second Advent, when they say that it will take place at a period of great darkness and almost universal denial ? Denial of what ? — if not of a truth which has always been recognised in our institutions and our ordinary habits, which men have only just found courage utterly to reject as inconsistent with their conduct and their other professions, at the moment which shall show that conduct and those professions to have been false, the witness of conscience against them, and in favour of that which they resisted, to be true ? Is there any shelter from this conclusion in the distinction between the spiritual dispensation, or spiritual kingdom which has existed since our Lord's first Advent, and the outward visible kingdom which shall be established after his second ? If by the words outward and visible it be meant that something less spiritual is in reserve for the time to come than for the time which is ; that now we are liv- ing by faith, that then we shall live by sense ; that now we recog- nise the highest glory in that which 1 eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor it hath entered into the heart of man to conceive;' that then we shall recognise all glory as being in the visible and com- 514 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. prehensible ; I cannot conceive a darker or more dreadful vision than this of a millennial perfection. But if it be meant by outward and visible, that Christ's dominion will not be merely over the heart and spirit of man, over that which directly connects him with God and the unseen world, but over all his human relations, his earthly associations, over the policy of rulers, over nature and over art, then, I say, this is as much the truth now as it ever can be in any future period. This dominion has been asserting itself, has been making itself felt for these eighteen centuries. The Son of Man claimed it for himself when He did not abhor the Virgin's womb, when He mingled with the ordinary transactions of men, blessing their food, their wine, and their marriage feasts. The claim may have been denied at all times ; it may be denied especially at the time to which we are looking forward ; but that time must assert it, not as something new, but as something old ; as a government which has been actually in exercise, and the ceasing of which, even for a moment, would have been followed by dreariness and death throughout the universe. Now if this be so, I think that the principle which I have endeavoured to defend in this book is not one which interferes with any sound or true apprehensions of our Lord's second coming, but only with a system which has tended to prevent men from acknowledging it ; to make them think lightly of their present responsibilities, to give them a fantastic habit of speaking respecting the course of God's providence in the world, as if it sig- nified nothing new, but was only leading to something hereafter ; and which is very likely to suggest the thought, that when He has taken the power whose right it is, the Cross will not any longer be the symbol of glory and victory. THE ROMISH SYSTEM. With a few remarks upon the charge of underrating the guilt and punishment of Romish apostasy, 1 will conclude this part of my work. A reader who has followed me through the discussions in my last and present chapter will scarcely suspect me of an inclination to look more mildly upon Romanism, when it presents itself as the sworn enemy of nations and national Churches, than when it came before us as the corrupter of creeds and sacraments. One evil seems THE ROMISH SYSTEM. 515 to be necessarily implied in the other ; the same assumption which made it an uncatholic principle has made it an anti-national prin- ciple. It has perverted the idea of spiritual power, therefore it has interfered with civil power. And yet if we look at it on another side, that which we call in common parlance the Church of Rome has borne and does bear a very striking witness on behalf of the truth that Christ's Church is a kingdom, and not merely a collec- tion of sects bound together in the profession of particular dogmas. I have never concealed this fact, for no fact ought to be concealed which concerns the history and government of the world. But what is it that we call the Church of Rome ? / call it the diocese over which the Bishop of Rome presides ; I know no other Church of Rome than this. Certain people may have invented another notion for it, but I do not adopt their notion ; if I did, I should adopt the Romish system. Now this Church of Rome, this Italian diocese, may be in a very corrupt state — I am afraid it is. I think many persons who belong to it, and who acknowledge the jurisdiction of its Bishop, would acknowledge that it is. They, therefore, must agree with us in desiring that it should be reformed. Perhaps they would agree in acknowledging, also, that the refor- mation is likely to be accompanied with many punishments and judgments for the sins of which its members have been guilty. The nature of those sins and the roots of them I have partly con- sidered in this chapter. The nature of the judgments I am not competent, and I have no wish to consider. They may be heavier or lighter than any other which will come upon the other portions of the Church ; they may even go the length of leaving Rome a prey to some infidel power. The determining of this question is in the best hands, and in those hands we must leave it, as we may leave also the fate of the Spanish, or Gallican, or of any other Church. But the end of these judgments, I conceive, be they more or less tremendous, will be the destruction of a false apostate system. You say that the system is part and parcel of the Church ; that if one perishes, the other must perish. That is precisely the point about which I know nothing, and about which you know nothing. But this I do know, that as long as a man is alive and struggling, I have no business to say that his disease and he are identical, that 516 THE CHURCH AND THE NATION. the cure of the disease must be the death of the patient. Here it is that I am at issue with our modern interpreters of prophecy. I do not differ with them in that I hate the Romish system less than they do. It often seems to me that they do not hate it sufficiently ; that they do not see where its extreme evil lies ; that they are ready to tolerate a portion of its evil in themselves. And this want of a sufficient appreciation of its mischiefs, I discover espe- cially in their language respecting the Latin Church. They do not seem to see that popery is continually undermining the Church, and therefore they do not feel, that the more you can persuade men to be Churchmen, the more effectually you deliver them from pope- ry. They cry out to the members of the different Latin Churches, ' Come ye out of Babylon, and be ye separate.' Take the words as they stand in Scripture, and as they are explained by the whole context of Scripture, and there cannot be any more important. But how are they to be obeyed 1 The common answer is, ' by leaving the corrupt Church to which you belong.' It seems to me that the person who does so, is exceedingly likely to carry the Babylonian system along with him, and to leave nothing behind but the good elements which were mixed with it. Whereas, he who will stay in the Church of his fathers, maintaining resolutely that it is a Church, and that those who have struggled to deprive it of its dis- tinct ecclesiastical character are his enemies, and are to be resisted, must, I think, arrive at a deliverance from popery. He will not be delivered in the same way in which the Protestant nations in the sixteenth century were delivered. God has a different method for working out the freedom of his servants in each different age ; but I cannot see why it should be a less effectual method ; I hope and trust it will be far more effectual. The serpent at the Reformation was scotched, not killed. It could not be killed so long as there was any thing good remaining in it. Once separate the belief of Christ's kingdom from this system, once believe that they are not necessary to each other, and the moral power of the papacy is gone. What signifies it, then, if all the physical power in the universe should for a time be granted to it, if kings should send presents to it, if all forms of infidelity and false worship should combine them- selves with it ? The Church may then with confidence take up the language of the prophet, " Associate yourselves, and ye shall be THE ROMISH SYSTEM. 517 broken in pieces ; gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces ; take counsel together, and it shall come to nought, for God is with us."* * I had developed at some length in reference to each of the different European nations, the idea which is hinted at in this section. My object was to show, that there are at the present moment in every part of the Continent, indications of a struggle which is very imperfectly explained by the phrases, 1 democratical tenden- cies,' 'dissatisfaction with old opinions,' 'commencement of a new era' — a struggle which may indeed include all these signs or promises, but which can be very little understood by any one who overlooks the relation between Catholicism and Nation- ality, and who does not perceive that the history of modern Europe has been one continual effort to establish or to break that relation. I had inquired, further, whether this question has lost its application to the United States of North America, or whe- ther there also, it be not that which will take precedence of every other. But I found that I was led almost unawares into dreams of the future, which may be intended for each of these nations ;— and such dreams seemed scarcely in accord- ance with the character of a book which aims at the discovery of that which is solid and certain. The lesson from the whole is expressed in the sad, consolatory dirge which poets of old sang, and which is now the chant of the whole Church miiitant.— aihvov aV.ivov sins' to (T tv vi/.dro). PART III. THE ENGLISH CHURCH AND THE SYSTEMS WHICH DIVIDE IT. CHAPTER I. HOW FAR THIS SUBJECT IS CONNECTED WITH THOSE PREVIOUSLY DISCUSSED. Are these principles applicable to our circumstances as Eng- lishmen ? If not, we may be sure that there is some flaw in them which we have not yet detected. If they are, the question how to apply them must be, above all others, important to us. I think the young English ecclesiastical student is very apt to be perplexed with questions of this kind. ' Is our National Church, as I have often been told it is, the best in the world ? Supposing it is not, why may I not go in search of a better 1 It is easy to talk of acquiescence in the state which Providence has assigned us. But surely there are circumstances in which a Christian must regard acquiescence as a sin. How do I know that mine are not these circumstances ? Now were the principles which have seemed to prove them- selves to us in other cases appropriate to this one, the reader will perceive at once that there is a fallacy in the statement of these questions. We have maintained that there is a spiritual and uni- versal society in the world : that there are also National Societies in the world, that the Universal Society and the National Society cannot, according to the scheme of Providence, be separated from each other, that when they are brought into conjunction, that form of character which is intended for each nation is gradually deve- loped in it, by means of the spiritual body. Can we then be called upon to prove either, ( 1st,) that there is some constitution for the Universal Society as it exists in England, which does not belong to it elsewhere, and which makes it better here than elsewhere; or? (2,) that the principles which unite the Universal Society with the THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 519 National Society among us are not the same principles which unite it elsewhere, and that we are better for this difference, or, (3,) that what is peculiarly our National character, ought to be the character of every other nation ? Evidently, no one who has any real affec- tion for his Church or his land, will put forth such claims as these on its behalf. He will inquire whether it does or does not recog- nise that constitution which belongs to all mankind ; whether this constitution be or be not so recognised here, as to be compatible with the distinct National constitution ; what character it is which is intended for Englishmen ; how that character may be realized in its perfection, or depraved. But putting the inquiry into this form, one does not see what acquiescence can be demanded of us, which is inconsistent with the position of militant Christians. Have we lost that Universal Constitution or any element of it ? We must labour by all means to recover it. Have we lost our distinct Na- tional position ? We must seek it again. Are we living incon- sistently with the one or the other 1 We must inquire where the evil is, and commence at once the wrork of personal reformation. The subject then upon which 1 propose now to enter will divide itself in the way which I have indicated. As we take for granted the previous steps of our discussion, it will not, I hope, occupy us long. SECTION I. Do the signs of an universal and spiritual constitution exist in England ? There is no difficulty in giving a direct answer to this question. Supposing these signs to be Baptism, the Creeds, Forms of Wor- ship, the Eucharist, the Ministerial Orders, the Scriptures, no one will deny that a society has existed in England for the last twelve hundred years, of which these are constituent elements. Under all changes in the outward circumstances of the country, in its na- tional policy, in its religious opinions, a body has dwelt in this land, which has acknowledged not one or two, but all of these signs, which has acknowledged them as the conditions of its own sub- sistence. But is this the only point to be considered ? Ought we not to 520 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. inquire whether the same import has in all times, or what import has at any particular time been attached to these signs, by the body which acknowledged them ? And again, may there not be two bodies existing at the same time in this country differing with each other, and yet both acknowledging all these signs ? In such case how are we to determine which does and which does not re- present the universal society ? I. In reference to the first question I answer, If you mean that I am to take the votes of the members of the English Church, now or at any period since it was established, for the purpose of ascer- taining what the majority think or have thought about any or all these signs ; I should decline the task, not merely on the ground of its impossibility, but because, if it were possible, I should be viola- ting all the principles which I have put forward in this book, by undertaking it. I have said, that the members of a Church will be continually losing sight of the grounds of the society to which they belong, and that permanent institutions are given us for the purpose of witnessing against our tendencies to degeneracy, and of enabling us to obtain, in each successive age, a clearer view of the Divine purpose and order. On the same grounds, I must pro- test against any attempt to ascertain the principles of the English Church, by comparing or balancing the opinions of its most emi- nent writers. For I have urged, that permanent creeds and insti- tutions are our preservatives against the particular judgments and prepossessions of these writers. But if there be among these signs any one which has so far a peculiar character, is so far distinctively English, that it may be taken as expressive of the mind of the English Church itself, by that I am most willing it shall be tried. Now a Liturgy is of this kind. I have shown how remarkably it is the sign of an universal society. Yet it is equally true that each nation has always had its own liturgies. To this, therefore, there is a fair appeal. But how shall the appeal be made ? Why may I not read my own opinions into the liturgy as well as into any other book ? Undoubtedly I may. And therefore the fairer way of getting at its meaning, is to receive it from others, especially from those who have attacked it. Let us try this course. 1. Again and again the English Dissenters have complained of our formularies, because they assert in what seems to them such ITS CATHOLIC SIDE — LITURGY. 521 plain and direct language, so solemnly, so habitually, the principle that a baptized man is to regard himself as regenerate, a child of God, an heir of the blessings of the New Covenant. f It is idle,' say these Dissenters, * to pretend that by leaving out a few words in your form of baptism, you would remove this dreadful plague- spot from your Church. Supposing that were possible, think what a monstrous delusion you have been propagating in such solemn moments for so many generations. What, thrust out such words privily in this nineteenth century ! They ought to be extirpated amidst groans and confessions of sin, for having mocked God and ruined the souls of men. But if you did thrust out the words, the spirit of them goes through all your other services. You tell the same story to the children whom you are catechising ; you declare to them that they are members of Christ, and children of God. Nay, every confession and every prayer in which you call upon adults old in sin to engage, turns upon the same principle. You invite them to confess and to pray, as if they were children of God, and as if the Spirit were still with them.' That these charges are constantly preferred against us every one knows. I ask, are they not true ? Has any apologist for the liturgy, who agreed with the Dissenters in their theological princi- ple, been able to refute them ? And is it not very painful to think that we should be using equivocations and double meanings, at a time when we are professing to address the most awful prayers to Him who is truth ? 1 may affirm then, not from any conclusions of my own, but on the authority of those w7ho are most opposed to me, that the idea of baptismal Regeneration is the idea of our Liturgy. But is this connected with the idea of an opus operatum? I think the question has already been answered. The Dissenter per- ceives, every one who thinks perceives, that the whole of our liturgy is constructed upon the principle, that the men who engage in it have not lost their baptismal privileges; that the sin which they confess is the sin of not having owned God as their father, of not having remembered his covenant, and therefore, of not having walked in his ways ; that they ask to be restored to the enjoyment of a position with which their lives need not have been and have been at variance; in one word, that the sacrament is not believed to have conferred on men a temporary blessing, but to have ad- 522 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. mitted them into a permanent state, which is at all times theirs, which they are bound at all times to claim, and by which they will be judged. I know that we have apologists who can defend us from this imputation as well as the other, by dint of ingenious special plead- ing. They say, ' all this language presumes the existence of dis- cipline ; we have undoubtedly lost our discipline, but we are not therefore to lose our prayers.' How, not to lose our prayers ! We had better lose any thing than go on in direct mockery of God. If the want of discipline makes the prayers false, if there are not half a dozen persons in any congregation who would dare to say, they have not lost their baptismal purity ; and if those nine or ten be the very persons, who one may be sure cannot join in these prayers, or in any prayer but that of the Pharisee, how can we have courage to practise such profaneness, because, at some time or another, we hope to get a discipline which shall cut off the majority of those who now call themselves Churchmen ? But does our liturgy give the slightest sanction to the notion, that the most complete restora- tion of discipline would make these prayers more true than they are now 1 Why, then, in her ' Commination Service' does she not announce the doctrine of the opus operatum ? Why does she not say, there, ' you have been made members of Christ once, but the privilege is gone, the blessing is exhausted ; you have resisted the Spirit, He is striving no more with you ; recover the gift, if possi- ble, by penitence and prayer V Why in this service, as much as in all the rest, are men called to repent, on the ground of their being children, though rebellious children ; on the ground of the will of God, that they should turn from their wickedness and live ? 2. Thus far I have spoken of baptism. The view which the liturgy takes of the Creeds, is sufficiently evident from the mode of their introduction into it. They are made parts of our worship ; acts of allegiance, declarations by the whole congregation of the name into which each one has been baptized ; preparations for pray- ers; steps to communion. The notion of them as mere collections of dogmas is never once insinuated, is refuted by the whole order of the services. 3. In speaking of the Eucharist, it is safer again to refer to the language of opponents. Again and again we have been told, that ITS CATHOLIC SIDE LITURGY. 523 the idea of a real presence is distinctly implied in our communion service. That at all events the words must convey this impression to any ordinary person; that they are such as could not have been written by any one who held the simple Zuinglian dogma, and can- not be used with comfort, nay, without a sense of pain and contra- diction, by any one who feels it to be the true one. And what though there may be constant admonitions respecting the spirit in which this sacrament is to be received, the faith and repentance which are the preparations for it, the danger of a careless and un- worthy treatment of such mysteries, is it not evident at the same time, from the earnest exhortations to partake of it, that it is looked upon as a common blessing, as one to which all men have a claim, as one from which it is a perilous responsibility to exclude any, whose open sins do not show that they have excluded themselves? The English Dissenter, regarding this ordinance as the right of a few who can give an account of their feelings, and experiences, and change of mind, is continually denouncing our service for its manifest departure from the maxims upon which he acts. On the one hand the Eucharist is spoken of in such awful language, as it seems to him must have been borrowed from periods of pure super- stition ; on the other hand, there is the strangest notion of it, as if it were a bond of fellowship for the whole universe. ' One would suppose,' he says, 1 from the phrases you use, that you look upon this sacrament as the very opening of the kingdom of heaven, and yet you treat it as the proper preparation for the most vulgar and earthly employments. Sometimes you seem to fancy it possible, that men should eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man by partaking of these elements, and yet you can admit persons to be partakers of it who would have very great difficulty in explain- ing themselves respecting the most ordinary propositions of the Christian system. By your carefulness in restraining the administra- tion of the sacrament to a particular class, one would suppose that you regarded it as a Jewish sacrifice, or as something yet more wonderful. And yet you speak, at the same time, of the sacrifice of Christ, once made upon the cross, as full, and sufficient, and satisfactory.' Meantime, it is not pretended by any person, be he friend or foe, that a single passage exists in this service which favours the notion that the presence of Christ is connected with a change in the ele- 524 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. ments. Whoever adopts that notion instantly becomes dissatisfied with the eucharistic part of our liturgy, proclaims it to be cold, heartless, dead, &c. In like manner, whoever believes the Eucha- rist to be a sacrifice in any sense which implies that the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross is less complete and finished for all mankin than it has been supposed to be by the strongest Lutheran or Cal- vinist, also denounces our liturgy as departing from that idea which the Mass, in other portions of the Latin Church, embodies. By the confession, then, of all, it regards the feast as the highest Christian privilege, as the most complete reality ; not because it works a change in our Christian state and position; not because it brings one before us who is habitually absent from us, but because it ena- bles us to enter into the fulness of our Church life, into that truly human and divine fellowship, which Christ, by his incarnation, his death, and his ascension, has claimed for all whom He is not asham- ed to call his brethren. 4. This being the case, the communion service in our liturgy interprets the rest of our worship. Throughout, it is the worship of a body, of a family. It is open, and has been subject, to all the objections which the defenders of extempore prayer can raise against any form as belonging to mankind in general, and not to our nation and our family, to our particular circumstances, except so far as we can connect them with the knowledge of God and of his purposes to our race. On the other hand, it is open, and has been subject, to the objections of those who think that worship is cold and dead, if it lead us from the visible to the invisible, if it claim the privilege of approaching at once through the Mediator, the throne of the Absolute and the Infinite. It proscribes nothing ; it does not affirm how much or how little of the sensible may be useful in assisting us to reach that which is beyond our senses. Human agency and help it distinctly recognises as the appointed and ordinary channel through which the blessings of Him, who was made flesh, descend upon his Church, and through which the prayers and praises of his Church ascend as an united sacrifice to Him. But it does affirm, that all sensible helps, and all human agency, lose their meaning and become positively evil when they are converted into ends, or when they impair the belief that the whole Church is admitted into the holiest place. ITS CATHOLIC SIDE LITURGY. 525 5. It is impossible to separate this subject from that of ministe- rial orders, as it Is expounded to us in our ordination and consecra- tion services. Part of the complaint against these has been con- sidered alreadv. Only those who have received presbyterial ordi- nation are allowed to administer the Eucharist %r to pronounce ab- solution. -Now,' argue the Dissenters, 4 you may say if you will, that the words tiQecfivTiQOS anc^ *£Q&>$ are different ; and that you affix the former, not the latter, to the second rank of your ministers. But is not the refusal of these particular offices to the lower order a distinct and significant recognition of the prin:iple, though you mav not express it by a name ? If your Church felt as we do about the sin of appropriating these names to men, would she have dared to approach so very closely in her acts to such an assumption'? Would she have proceeded habitually upon a maxim, which must at least convey the impression, that she thinks it no assumption at all V I leave those who please to answer these arguments; to me thev seem irresistible. Nor am I better able to clear our ser- vices of the charge of distinctly and formally connecting the gift of spiritual powers with ordination; of distinctly encouraging and urging her ministers to believe, that they have the Holy Spirit com- mitted to them for the work of the ministry. I do not complain of anv one who performs the office of a minister in our Church, and yet believes that he possesses no such power. I should no more wish to exclude him from his office on that account, than I should wish to depose a magistrate who did not understand the extent of the powers which the laws invested him with. Each may be using that which he does believe is his, very far more honestly than I am using that which I believe is mine. Each is far more honest than he would be if he merely acknowledged the words without attach- ing a meaning to them. But still the words are there : and I think he cannot complain of me for taking them in their plain sense; for saying that little as I enter into their force, little as my conduct cor- responds with them, there are very few which I have ever heard, that I could bear less to part with, or that I more feel I must learn to understand by acting upon the conviction of their truth. With the continual allegation of Dissenters, that in spite of many tendencies to the contrary opinion in some of our divines, ancient as well as modern, our liturgy recognises the Episcopate 34 526 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. as the root of all the other orders, and supposes it to contain them all within itself, I can as little quarrel as with either of the former. They seem to me to have made their point good. And I cannot find that any answers which have been made to them, amount to more than awkward though ingenious evasions. But where are we to find the doctrine of the vicarial powers of ministers in any part of these services 1 Where are we to find one single hint that the Presbyter absolves or administers the Eucharist, that the Bishop exercises his own functions or that he ordains others, as the minister and delegate of one who is absent from his Church ? Those who adopt this opinion begin at once to exclaim against our services, as containing the most cold and unsatisfactory recognition of the mighty authority with which the Priest and Bishop of the New Testament are endowed. They feel it absolutely necessary that he should clothe himself with other attributes, in another mystery than any which the English Church recognises in him. The self-same language which offends the Dissenter as con- taining such high and profane assertions of a perpetually derived and renewing power, is that which contradicts this notion of an in- herent power. 6. Lastly, we come to the Scriptures. Here the intention of the liturgy seems remarkably evident. The Scripture is adopted into our worship, the service explains the lessons, the lessons ex- plain the service. The Bible is read partly as a continuous history, the history of God's revelation, and of the Church's growth and expansion ; partly in connection with our communion — the epistles of the New Testament expounding to us the law of the Spirit of life, the Gospels, the image after which the Spirit would form us. This is precisely that relation between the Scriptures and the Church, which I endeavoured to set forth in the former part of this book The Protestant Dissenter says, that we set aside the Bible, though we read more of it in any one month in one of our Churches, than he reads in two years in any of his meetings ; and though our reading of it is continuous, his casual and arbitrary. The Romanist says, that we set aside the authority of the Church in the interpre- tation of Scripture, though we make it a formal and habitual part of the services, in which the mind of the Church is expressed. II. 1. I think then, I have answered the question as to the ITS CATHOLIC SIDE WHO ARE CATHOLICS? 527 meaning, which the English Church puts upon the signs which it has in common with other Churches, fairly and legitimately. Another question was, how we can determine between two bodies, both existing in this country, and both possessing these signs, which may and which may not fairly call itself Catholic. If our previous statements have been true, this question is also settled. A body acknowledging itself connected with the Church in all previous ages by the bond of sacraments, of creeds, of worship, of ministerial succession, has the prima facie marks of Catholicity. Should any other body standing aloof from it, put in a claim upon the same grounds to be Catholic, it is bound to show the reasons of its own pretension, and the reasons upon which it rejects the former pre- tension. Those reasons must be the same which we have considered already. We are not Catholic in the opinion of the Romish body which resides in this country, because we do not acknowledge the opus opera- turn in Baptism, the new creeds of Popes, Transubstantiation, the Eu- charist, the existence of an intermediate agency between Christ and his members on earth, the vicarial authority of ministers, the ex- istence of a Universal mortal Bishop, the right of the Church to hide the Scriptures from the Laity, in one word, because we do not acknowledge that system which appeared to us before we entered upon English ground at all, to be anti-Catholic. The Church in every land exists under the condition, either of professing this sys- tem, or of protesting against it. Its existence is not denoted by the Profession, or by the Protest, but by the Signs to which the profes- sion and the protest refer. If the Romish body say that it stands in certain notions about sacraments and about orders, and not in its sacraments and in its orders themselves, that declaration is a prac- tical renunciation of its claims to be a Church. We say that we protest against these notions, because they are incompatible with the acknowledgment of Christ's Spiritual and Universal Kingdom. 2. But since we have seen that the confessions in different Protestant bodies have (contrary to the intentions of their com- pilers) greatly interfered with the simple recognition of the facts contained in the creed, and that the Romish confessions sanctioned by the Council of Trent, and by Pope Pius IV., interfere with it yet more ; we are bound to show whether there is any thing corres- ponding to these in the Church of England, any addition made 528 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. upon its own authority to the admitted formularies of the whole Church. Till we are satisfied on this point we cannot, I conceive, rightly understand our own position in reference to the other por- tions of the Church. Now it appears that in the sixteenth century, we as well as the Protestants and Romanists on the Continent, drew up a set of dog- matic articles, and that these have continued to be the test of ortho- doxy for those who take orders in our Church and for those who are studying in at least one of our universities, ever since. Seeing then, that there were different systems at that time in vogue, and that the object of different religious bodies in making confessions, was to identify themselves with one or other of these systems; (for example, the Genevan body thus identified itself with the Calvin- istic system, the Romanist bodies with the Tridentine system ;) we must desire to know how far these articles of ours identify us with any of them. One remark has been made respecting them, which is not unimportant for our present purpose, that they carefully avoid any intrusion upon the ground occupied by the old creeds. They do not take the living forms of the creeds, they constitute a set of distinct dogmatic propositions ; they would be ridiculous if introduced into worship, they are not intended for the majority of the laity ; they belong exclusively to the student. But these ob- servations respecting them would be of little worth, if it appeared that they inculcate upon the teacher a certain theological system alien from the spirit and temper of the creeds ; for this system he will communicate to those who hear him. How stands the case ? We have seen that there is one main characteristic of the Calvinistic system as a system. It makes the fall of man the central point of its divinity : it treats the incarna- tion, and all the facts which manifest the Son of God to men, as merely growing out of this, and necessary in consequence of it.* On this principle that very spirited confession which was drawn up by the Scotch preachers for the use of the Kirk in the sixteenth century, is constructed. The first article is on the Trinity; the * A reader may ask, what then is meant by a Supralapsarian ? I answer, not a per son who supposes the union of mankind with its Creator to be an idea anterior to that of the fall, but a person who thinks that the redemption and salvation of certain individuals out of mankind, is the highest end of all God's purposes, lor the sake of which the fall itself was permitted and ordained. ITS CATHOLIC SIDE WHO ARE CATHOLICS : 529 second, on the Fall ; then comes the explanation of the existence of the Church or Kirk, as grounded upon the predestination of cer- tain individuals in this fallen race, to eternal life. There cannot be a finer or better model of a purely Calvinistical confession than this one ; nor any which illustrates more completely the direct op- position between the idea of the Genevan system, and the idea of the old Catholic Creeds. We have seen again, that the Lutheran had a very different conception of Christianity from this, a great desire to make the incarnation of Christ the centre of all his thoughts, and to use the Apostles' Creed as his symbol : of such a disposition the Augsburg confession is a satisfactory testimony. But we have seen also, that in his eagerness to assert conscious Justi- fication, as the one great principle of divinity, he was driven back upon the same ground as the Calvinist ; he was forced to start from the evil root, in order that he might explain the process of restora- tion. Aud thus, as I remarked before, systematic Protestantism became identical with Calvinism, until the Arminian form of it was developed, which is little more than a contradiction of Calvinism, little more than a denial of the principle, that the will of God is the orginating cause of all good in man. Now if any one will turn to our Thirty-nine 'Articles, he will perceive that the first article being upon the Trinity, the second is upon the Incarnation, and that the first eight articles relate to truths directly connected with the being of God, to his manifestations of Himself, to the Scriptures as expounding them, to the Creeds as illustrating and interpreting the Scriptures. When this Catholic foundation has been laid, we proceed in the ninth Article to the fall of man, and then to all those questions concerning free-will, justification and election, which were occupying men's minds in the sixteenth century. On all these points it seems to me the language of the Articles is as distinct and definite as it can be. The Cal- vinistic and Lutheran principles are plainly and distinctly asserted, there is no hint or prophecy of Arminianism ; the Romish system in every point wherein it is opposed to the distinct affirmations of the Reformers, on the subject of God's will and man's faith, is re- pudiated ; that is to say, the System of Romanism is rejected in the articles from the ninth to the nineteenth, just as the system of Cal- vinism, or pure Protestantism, had been repudiated by the articles 530 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. from the first to the eighth. The principles of the Reformation are asserted in the one division, not as necessary qualifications, but as indispensable conditions of the great Catholic truths which had been asserted in the other. And so to whatever cause we owe it, this has been the result of these articles ; they have been thorns in the side of those who have wished to establish an English theo- logical system, either fashioned out of the materials which Roman- ism or Calvinism supplies ; they have encouraged persons of all sects and schools to hope that their principles, in some sense or other, might be contained in them, or by some process or other extracted out of them, or, at all events, not positively denied by them ; and yet there is no sect or school, when speaking its sect or school language, which, if it were honest, would not confess that there are clauses and passages in them which it would be glad to be rid of, that a small omission, or addition, of a ' not ■ would often be very acceptable to it ; that it would like exceedingly, if not to remodel them, at least to subjoin to them on all occasions a com- mentary of its own. I conclude this head with remarking, that if our observations respecting the true meaning of Quakerism, of Calvinism, of Luther- anism, of Unitarianism, be true, the ideas and principles of each of these bodies are expressed in the forms of our English Church ; only the system which they have grafted upon these, and which have separated them from each other, rejected. The idea of men as constituted in the divine Word, of a Kingdom based upon that constitution, of a Spirit working to bring him into conformity with it, of a perpetual struggle with an evil and sensual nature, this is the idea of Quakerism, and it is the idea of our Liturgy in every one of its forms and services. The idea of a divine Will going before all acts of the human Will, the primary source of all that is in eternity, and all that becomes in time, to which every thing is meant to be in subjection, which can alone bring that which has rebelled into subjection, to which every creature must attribute all the motions to good which he finds within him, the primary direc- tion of his thoughts, the power of perseverance, this is the idea of Calvinism, and it is the idea which is implied in all the prayers of our Litany, which is formally set forth in the words of our Articles. The idea of man struggling with his own evil nature, discover- ITS NATIONAL SIDE. 531 ing in it nothing but a bottomless pit of evil, grasping at a deliverer, finding that in union with him only is his life ; that he is strong only in his strength, righteous only in his righteousness ; this is the idea of Lutheranism, and it is the idea which is involved in all our prayers and Creeds, which our Articles reassert in logical terms. The idea of an unity which lies beneath all other unity ; of a love which is the ground of all other love, of Humanity as connected with that love, regarded by it, comprehended in it, this is the idea which has hovered about the mind of the Unitarian, and which he has vainly attempted to comprehend in his system of contradictions and denials : this idea is the basis of our Liturgy, our Articles, our Church. SECTION II. Does the Universal Society in England exist apart from its Civil Institutions, or in union with them ? To this question the answer is unanimous. The English dissenter affirms that the Church is embodied in the State; it is an Act of Parliament Church. The modern civil Ruler says, that the state is impeded in all its operations by the Church ; the Sovereign is crowned by the Archbishop, the Bishops as a body take part in the deliberations of parliament ; above all, the greater part of the education of the land is ecclesiastical. The Romanist affirms that the Church has no pretensions to be called a Catholic body ; it is a national body. There can be no doubt then, that the ecclesiastical and civil institutions are united, and this by bonds which it must require some violence to break. But when did this union take place ? How was it brought to pass ? Who were the contractiug parties to it ? On all these ques- tions history preserves a profound silence. It records no meeting of Sovereigns and Bishops to adjust the terms of the fellowship ; it fixes no date at which the Church began to say it would acknow- ledge the state, or at which the state said it would acknowledge the Church. So soon as we find the Church in the land, we find her doing homage to the civil powers, such as they were, which ruled the land. So soon as the Church begins to exercise its own peculiar influence, the civil power begins to feel that influence, and to be 532 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. moulded by it. Then indeed we meet with records of transactions between these two bodies, each of which is perceived to have its distinct representative, and its peculiar object, though neither the representatives nor the objects are defined by any formal line of separation. But these transactions are not for the purpose of es- tablishing a covenant on the part of the State, that it will protect the Church, or on the part of the Church, that it will do certain services for the State ; far rather they are attempts by each, either to claim a portion of its own province which it supposes that the other has invaded, or to conquer a portion of that province of which the other has hitherto had peaceable possession. They are such transactions as presuppose a real, though a yet imperfectly understood relation, not such as could have been produced by a compact, or had the least tendency to create one. The Church affirms, that it has a right to assign the powers and jurisdiction of its own Bishops ; the State maintains that Bishops as well as the rest of its subjects must acknowledge its paramount authority. The Church affirms that it has a spiritual government altogether distinct from the civil government. The State says that the minister of the Church must submit like other men to its laws and its tribunals. Every impartial and thoughtful reader of our history, feels that there is a right and a wrong in each of these pretensions ; that Becket must have been contending for a principle, that Henry must have been contending for a principle. The resolution of our annalists generally to choose favourites, and' to nickname opponents, the eagerness of young readers to arrive at a positive conclusion about every matter in dispute, the obvious injustice of those (so called) fair critics, who try both parties by the standards of their own time, and of course condemn both, acquitting and exalting only them- selves and their own wisdom, may hinder us from acknowledging at once and in terms, that we are under deep obligations to these opposing champions, and that a higher power was working out its ends by the help of both ; but we all feel inwardly, that this is the case, we all unconsciously express our conviction that it is so in one set of phrases or another. And we feel also in a remarkable way, that the history of these struggles is, if not the history of England, yet the heart and centre of it, whence more light is thrown upon the records of the conflicts between Kings and Barons, Nor- ITS NATIONAL SIDE. 533 mans and Saxons, the old orders and the new, than they throwback upon it. Those who have learnt that the science of politics is not comprehended in the theory of representation, that in order to under- stand what representation means, we must first know what there is to represent, have perceived that in these civil and ecclesiastical disputes, lies the inward secret which we have need to investigate before we can trace its working on the surface and in the external machinery of Society. So it was before the Reformation. And what was the Refor- mation itself? Its opponents of both classes say that it was merely a national movement. ' Henry not Cranmer was at the root of it. There was more of politics in it than of religion.' I should not use such language; I do not understand their distinction between politics and religion. But I believe that in their meaning they are right. The most obvious peculiarity of the English Reformation seems to be this, that it was a movement originating with the Sove- reign and not with Theologians. And therefore it was not a new movement, but one of a series of movements. Not only the con- stitutions of Clarendon, made in the days of a rebellious Sovereign, but the statutes of praemunire, passed in the time of some of the most orthodox, some of the greatest persecutors of Lollardism, had attempted to cut off the correspondence of the Church with Rome. The difference in the reign of Henry VIII. was simply this, that a large body of the Bishops and Clergy had been led by their reli- gious feelings to desire that this correspondence should be broken off; to feel that the English Church could not maintain its own position unless it became strictly national ; unless it abandoned that subjection to a foreign Bishop, which the state had always wished it to abandon. And what has been the state of things since the Reformation ? It is this : a number of bodies or sects have gradually grown up in the country, which have affirmed that the principles of Protestant- ism were not asserted with sufficient boldness at our Reformation. We stopped short, it is said, at a certain point. We retain much of the papal system, which the other Protestant nations have thrown off. On the other hand, the Romanists have felt that the English Reformation was more fatal to the maxim upon which they were habitually acting, than the reformation in any other quarter had 534 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. been. There was a hope that men might renounce a new system of opinions and adopt an old one. But a Church which had affirm- ed the principle of nationality, which had come to an understanding with the sovereign of its own land, was, to all appearance, utterly incorrigible. The most earnest and intelligent Jesuits who came over, perceived that this was a condition of things which must be changed, not merely by preaching, but by plotting ; many of them believed that the best hope of the restoration of the papal power lay in the triumphs of those sects which professed a more vehement Protestantism. Another curious point deserves to be noticed ; the Puritan body was, as I have said before, essentially Calvinistical. Calvinism was the principle of its life. It was the feeling that the English Church was not founded upon the Calvinistical idea which gave occasion to the earliest Puritan movements. And yet we imported the anti-Calvinistical doctrine, which the Puritans after- wards identified with popery, from one of the purely Protestant countries of the Continent. Nay, further, it was not till we had a Scottish king upon the throne, a king bred under Presbyterian preachers, that we had any connexion with this Arminian system at all. It is to this king that wTe owTe a very marked change in our position. Elizabeth had troubled herself as little as possible about systems of opinion; she had merely endeavoured to assert her position as a national sovereign. James could only look upon every subject as a schoolman and a pedant. He had, indeed, one living practical feeling ; he had been disgusted with the Presbyte- rian preachers, and had found that their power practically interfer- ed with his. But he had no sense of sympathy or connexion with our Church, he only wished that the Episcopalian system should prevail against the Presbyterian. And this system, with whatever belonged to it, was to be established in Scotland, and maintained here by the efforts of the state. Both in Scotland, therefore, and in England, the feeling that there is a spiritual power distinct from and higher than the mere state powrer, wras called forth. In Scot- land this spiritual feeling connected itself with the national feeling. The people revolted against the notion of a prelacy which w7as im- posed upon them by England. Here, the mixture of spiritual with national feelings in the Puritan produced some strange anomalies. The body in the Commons' House, which had most sympathy with ITS NATIONAL SIDE. 535 Puritanism, were occupied in maintaining the old forms of the national constitution against the royal prerogative. The Puritan clergy were raising their voices against old national and ecclesias- tical forms, and maintaining the rights of the spiritual man. Mixed with these assertions, however, one can perceive in them from the first a desire for a more formal and systematic divinity than had ever existed in England before. At length they triumph, and it is their business to realize as well as they can their three objects, of upholding the liberty of the subject, which had been asserted by the Long Parliament; the superiority of Christians to outward forms, which had been maintained by their preachers against Laud and the Bishops ; and, lastly, the all importance of a peculiar theologi- cal system. The first attempt issued in the establishment of a mili- tary despotism ; the second led to the rise and independence of the different sects which revolted from the stern Presbyterian govern- ment and sought to maintain freedom of conscience ; the last effort was embodied in the deliberations, decrees, catechisms, committees of triers, of the Westminster Assembly. It is a grievous thing that English Churchmen should, from their prejudices and partialities, refuse to study the history of this remarkable period simply and fairly, looking at it from all sides and all points of view, and labour- ing to do justice to the feelings of all the parties who were con- cerned in it. For it is when thus considered, and not when warped into an apology for some ecclesiastical hero, or into a sentence of condemnation upon his opponents, that it illustrates and makes manifest the essential relation between spiritual and civil life, and the impossibility of destroying that relation by any efforts of ours, however unfriendly and uncomfortable we may make it. The Westminster Assembly had done their best to establish an uniformity of opinions ; that wherein they had left their ministers free, was in their modes of worship. The opposite principle had been the one hitherto recognised in England. The bond of national fellowship had been supposed to be the bond of worship : men who had books and leisure might occupy themselves with the study of opinions. I do not know how far the Episcopal clergy at the Resto- ration were aware that this was the question at issue between them and their opponents ; possibly they were not ; possibly they looked upon it merely as a question whether the nation should adopt a more 536 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. or less comprehensive system. But if so, their old habits were stronger than their theories ; the state felt that it could not trouble itself about shades of opinion, but that old forms of worship were practical and general, and there was One over us who saw further than either statesmen or churchmen. At all events, this was the result. The act of uniformity in worship was the substitute for the efforts at a dogmatic uniformity, which belonged to the genius of Presbyterianism. The immediate effect of that measure, was the separation of the Puritan clergy from that which was now again recognised as the national Church. Then began various stupid efforts on the part of the state to silence them, or to coerce them into an union, mixed with various royal experiments at a general liberty of conscience which should include Romanist as well as Pro- testant Dissenters. The resistance to these, marks the strong sense of the people and of the parliament that Romanism was something anti-national. This feeling was strong in the minds of the seven Bishops who refused to read James's declaration. They believed that the act of the king was, as it proved to be, suicidal. Several of them could not, however, follow out that principle to what seems to me its legitimate consequence ; that when the king did commit his act of legal suicide by deserting the country, he was as one lying under a sentence of deposition from God himself, for having violated the covenant by which he held his power. The Conven- tion Parliament took that pious view of the matter, and accordingly inquired, not what person they might by their own power or in con- formity with the people's will, choose into his place, but who seemed to be designated to the office by the providence of God.* At no period, I think, was the religious character of the English state more distinctly asserted than at this ; and at no time was it more impor- tant that it should be asserted. For now was beginning that change in the habits and feelings of men, here as well as elsewhere, to which I adverted in my first part ; the change, I mean, from the notion of government as grounded upon deep mysterious principles, to the notion of it as the result of mere commercial arrangements — of some imaginary artificial compact. That this change has been productive of very mischievous effects to the Church and the nation * See the celebrated passage jn Burke's Reflections, wherein he replies to the sermon of Dr. Price upon the subject. ENGLISH FORM OF CHARACTER. 537 of England, I shall have occasion presently to remark. That it has led to any legislative acts which involve a formal or a virtual violation of the union between the ecclesiastical and the civil bodies, I believe is a notion which could only have become prevalent through this very habit of mind. We have supposed the Church and the state to be knit together by some material outward terms of agreement : we do not know what they are ; they may be that the state shall not recognize any persons as its subjects who are not Churchmen ; in other words, that it should ignore facts ; they may therefore be violated by acts of toleration, repeals of test laws, emancipation of Romanists. I do not express any opinion about the policy of one or other of these measures ; some of them may have been inexpedient measures j they were all, I should conceive, defended as well as attacked by many feeble and imperfect argu- ments. But I do think that it requires something far deeper and more subtle than any such measures, to destroy an union which has cemented itself by no human contrivances, and which exists in the very nature of things. By carelessness, ignorance, faithlessness, immorality, we may undermine our national life, and to these perils it is continually exposed. But the acts of our legislators when they are evil, are in general but reflexes of something which is evil in the national mind, and which legislators cannot correct. And in general they are better than could at all be expected from the tem- per of those who passed them, or of us who criticise them. Often- times the very errors which are in them, and the mischievous conse- quences to which they lead, may become our teachers, and may be far more profitable to us than the success of our opposition to them could have been. And therefore I am naturally led from the con- sideration of this subject, to that which I proposed next to consider. SECTION III. What is the form of character which belongs especially to Englishmen ? to what kind of depravation is it liable ? From what 1 have said already, it will be evident to the reader that I believe the first thoughts of men upon this subject to be well founded. 1 You Englishmen are such mere politicians^ this is the 538 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. ordinary complaint which foreigners make of us. ' Alas ! how exclusively we are devoted to politics,9 this is our continual groan concerning ourselves. The proofs of the position are manifold — none more striking than those which are supplied by men who are determined that they will at all events be exempt from the national disease ; that they will be artists, philosophers, mystics — any thing but politicians. Watch them well, and you will see how utterly impossible it is for them to realize their dream ; how continually some speculation about the organization of society, some practical effort to remodel it, mixes with their high and serene contempla- tions; how fierce and restless the contemplators become, from the very effort to keep themselves from all contact with the fever and restlessness which they suppose to be inherent in the English char- acter, and wThich they know are in their own. Other cases there are, of another kind, which confirm the same fact still more re- markably. I have known persons who possessed no practical tal- ent whatever, all whose attempts at action were of the most ludi- crously and painfully abortive kind, who, if they tried to realize some fine conception of their own, were sure either to render it contemptible by their failure, or else very soon to run into one of the old ruts from which they had been labouring with all their might to extricate themselves. And yet such Englishmen as these, who, if they have any gifts at all, seem to be exclusively endowed with those which are most un-English, feel themselves just as much compelled to be political and practical as their countrymen. They find it impossible to think unless they can in some way or other connect their thoughts with action, and despairing of any such al- liance in their own persons, they try whether they may not at least be able to point out a method of action to others, aspiring to no other fame than that of the whetstone : " acutum Reddere quae ferrura valet, exsors ipsa secandi." But though these arguments are very decisive, I cannot but^think that there are others which are more cheering. Why do wre turn to the literature of the reign of Queen Elizabeth as to that which most represents the genius of our nation, as that which most shows of what we are capable ? Why but because in every department it was more historical, more political, than it has been at any time ENGLISH FORM OF CHARACTER. 539 since. Look at our drama, how it draws its highest inspirations from the old records of our national life. See how needful it was even for the allegorical poet, the singer of 1 Fairy Land/ when dealing with his twelve moral virtues, and the battles of the inner man, to interweave a history of Prince Arthur, and to confound the image of Gloriana with that of Queen Elizabeth. With all their dreams about poetry, and scholarship, and philosophy, how evident it is that the deepest and most earnest thoughts of Sidney and Ra- leigh were occupied with policy and politics. What nation may not be able to show profounder works in exegetical or dogmatical divinity than we ? Who can hold our countrymen pace, when they fashion their minds to the consideration of the laws according to which God has formed heavenly, and human, and natural creatures ? Hooker's work is the specimen of a class, though certainly the highest specimen. And when one considers it, and the whole life and character of the man who wrote it, I think we must feel how very little excuse lies in that habit of mind which God has bestowed upon us, for any defect in meekness and gentleness, in superiority to the low notions and canons of this world, in converse with the hier- archies of heaven. I do not wish to exalt this form of character above every other ; I cannot tell whether it is better or worse than that which belongs to Frenchmen or Germans ; I know only that it is ours, and that it is capable of being expanded into that which is most noble, as well as of sinking into that which is most base. We ought to contemplate it in both conditions, that we may not separate hope from humiliation, that we may know both our respon- sibilities and our temptations, and that we may be able to honour the good when it is mixed with the evil which lies nearest to it. — Of that charity we have need in every part of our history. It is im- possible not to observe a tendency in the English Reformers of the sixteenth century to a kind of diplomacy which one does not like to perceive in holy men, and which it is very easy to represent as per- vading the whole of their characters, and explaining the meaning of their acts. Presently after you find them suffering with a con- stancy worthy, their detractors say, of heroes,* we have been used * Wherein lies the distinction between a hero and a martyr ? I should presume in the feeling of the first, that he is acting by some power and energy of his own ; of the latter, that he has to depend upon that strength which is perfected in weakness. We may safely 540 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. to believe and think, of martyrs. The political bias of their mind did not, I fancy, tend on the whole to lower the tone of it, to bring them more helplessly into contact with outward things, or to give them less faith in the invisible. Its main effect was to lead them to think of Christ's church, as a Kingdom rather than as a system : in the dust and bustle of affairs their strong conviction that this king- dom was a reality and not a metaphor may have led them to forget that it is the type of all kingdoms, and is not moulded after the maxims of any even of those which confess it, and do homage to it. But in silence and suffering, this thought gave a fixedness and sub- stantiality to their faith, which even the most devout schoolmen are seldom able to attain. They knew that it was a Person in whom they were believing ; in the hour of trial and death they looked di- rectly to Him and not to any dogma or system of dogmas, for strength and consolation. That this way of considering the Church is an eminently Eng- lish one, became evident in the time of the civil wars. It might be said to characterize every class of thinkers. It was at first less marked in those among whom one would expect most of it, I mean among the Episcopalians ; for the systematic tendency had become very prevalent through the influence of James I., and Laud especial- ly seems to have contracted it. His faults were far more those of a schoolmaster* or a collegian, than of an arrogant and usurping politician. And these faults made him especially unable to deal with the energetic national impulses of that period. But the sense of the Church as a kingdom returned to the Episcopalians in their hour of humiliation. It is this which prevailed in the mind of Jer- emy Taylor, above all other views. In spite of his learning and his fondness for casuistry, he could not bear to contemplate Chris- tianity as a system. He would look upon it as a life, but then it was a life connecting itself with an order, and realized in that kind of dependence which a subject pays to his sovereign, rather than that which a pupil renders to his master. Therefore one may trace a curious point of sympathy between him and the most extreme mystics and spiritualists of that age; all spoke of a divine king- appeal to the discourses and letters of our Reformers in prison, to decide which feeling is most characteristic of them. * Mr. Carlyle has made this remark, in his Lectures on Hero Worship. ENGLISH FORM OF CHARACTER. 541 dom, none could be content with any language which did not im- port it, or with any acts which did not endeavour to realize it. Even Milton, who was a star, and dwelt apart, was in the last age of his life as much as in the first, dreaming of a polity. All men might be kings and priests in his commonwealth, but kings and priests they were to be, not professors and doctors. But we must look at another side of the picture. When the feeling of spiritual life and spiritual government decayed, as we saw it did decay, in the latter part of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, one may fancy what an effect must have been produced upon a people, whose political feelings were the deepest which they had. Our literature could not sep- arate itself from our social life. It was a mere mockery and pre- tence when it tried to throw itself into some Arcadian condition of things. It had always been real and homely, and such it must continue to be. But if all realities had become conventions, if what was homely had become base, we need be at no loss to un- derstand the necessary limitations of our best, and the fearful de- basement of our worst literature during the period between the Revolution in England and that in France. The degradation of our professed statesmen, the loss of all high ends in their policy, the maxims and practices which have made Sir Robert Walpole's name and administration immortal, are all equally explicable. Still there were indications of English strength, and of the di- rection which that strength naturally takes. In the physical world, men are busy, either about the mechanism of actual things, or about God's laws and order. Either study was most fitted to the truest and noblest part of our character, and here therefore there were true and wrorthy results. But the commercial activities, and the scientific discoveries of this age, were gradually concentrating an immense population of human beings in our cities. Who were caring for these ? The Church possessed some prelates of high and even comprehensive views, many humble and sincere pastors in its rural districts ; many men capable of thinking vigorously respecting the moral constitution of individuals and of society. In general, however, its habit of mind was too well expressed in the theory of Warburton respecting the alliance of the Church and State ; in the practice of 35 542 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. sending bishops to Ireland for the sake of supporting the English in- terest. It apparently possessed the means of influencing the Aris- tocracy ; but the Aristocracy was commonly infidel. It should have been able through its less exalted members to have reached the heart of the trading classes, but they were chiefly under the influ- ence of dissent ; it seemed not to be aware that the new class of poor men was coming into existence. Undoubtedly they were the members of the National Church who first went forth to evangelize the mining and manufacturing districts ; but their movements were regarded with any thing but sympathy by the rulers of the Church ; no pains were taken to give them a right direction. Humble and quiet men in country parishes disliked them because they were op- posed to the order and regularity which had been always associated in their minds with the idea of religion ; to others they were odious be- cause they appealed to feelings which were dormant in themselves, but which were found to exist in their flocks. Then came the French revolution, with its terrors' and warnings. The clergy be- gan to feel themselves less mere parts of an obsolete machinery existing for some unintelligible purposes; more necessary to the being of the commonwealth. The aristocracy began to acknow- ledge them in that character. Their skepticism vanished, and they spoke of religion and its teachers with much respect, as exerting those influences of fear and hope, which could alone make proper- ty and government secure. Such was the new tone which the char- acter and patronage of George III., and the dread of French dis- organization, rendered popular. One cannot call it a very eleva- ted tone. So long as the war lasted, it was mixed with much that was generous and patriotic in the upper classes of laymen ; the por- tion of the clergy who shared in it became active magistrates, care- ful of their domestic and relative duties, zealous in defence of that which seemed to them old and English. With these useful dispo- sitions were connected a tendency to maintain customs and practices, simply because they did exist, and could allege some moderate pre- scription in their favour ; an acquiescence in the maxims of society- even when they seemed to be at variance with the higher morality ; a great impatience of enthusiasm and mysticism, and all that can- not be at once brought under the rules of existing convention or ob- vious expediency ; a suspicion of any great efforts of active ENGLISH FORM OF CHARACTER. 543 virtue and self- sacrifice ; a feeling that the Church is bound to sympathize with the aristocracy, and to overlook its sins, for the sake of preserving good order among the people; a strong sense of the service which subjects owe their rulers, without any corresponding sense of the service which rulers owe to their sub- jects; an inclination to assert the privileges of clergymen, chiefly by treating it as a rudeness that any infidel notions should be broached in their presence; great anxiety for a state encourage- ment of religion on the ground that otherwise it was not likely to thrive, or to enlist fashion and opinion of the world on its side j a vehement dislike of dissenters, as disturbing the quietness and reg- ularity of society, and as introducing something of vulgarity into re- ligion ; a certain anger and restlessness at the discover}' of any new doubts respecting the English Church or Christianity, which could not at once be removed by an application of the arguments used on behalf of Establishments in Paley's Moral Philosophy, and of the Gospel in his Evidences. Now the spirit of this State Churchmanship was evidently the spirit of an age of our national Church, not of the Church itself. That continued to express itself in the Liturgy ; and when it required a dogmatical language, in the Articles. The younger and more active members of the Church soon became conscious of the contra- diction. They began to seek for some System which should be a refuge from the dreariness of political Anglicanism. What they have found is our next inquiry. CHAPTER II. MODERN ENGLISH SYSTEMS. SECTION I. The Liberal System. — The Evangelical System.— The High Church or Catholic System. 1. 'See!' exclaims the liberal, taking his view of this English orthodoxy from that side on which it presents itself as the antago- nist of change and improvement, ' see what a hopeless class of peo- ple these old pillars of the Church are ! How can it stand if it is to be supported by such maxims as these ? Is not every thing moving about us, and can we determine to remain stationary ? Opinions upon every subject are undergoing revolution, and we think that our Articles and Formularies can be kept as they are ! How can you be so foolish as not to perceive that the Dissenters will grow upon us, and ultimately overwhelm us, unless we discover some scheme for comprehending them ? And then, there is that body of Romanists in the midst of us ; why are you determined to look upon them as if they belonged to the days of Gregory the seventh or Innocent the third ? Why not make them your friends, by assuming that they are so ? Why not throw overboard your prejudices, and enter at once and heartily into the spirit of the age V 2. In quite other language did the Evangelical complain of the spirit which animated the members of the old school ; ' They have lost sight of all spiritual influences and realities : a dry notion of human merit is at the bottom of all their thoughts and teachings. They expect men to get to heaven by being baptized, and by lead- ing good and respectable lives ; the principle of faith is forgotten altogether. The power of the Gospel, as a message of peace to man, is not felt or regarded. Another bond of union than that of spiritual fellowship with Christ is set up ; hence holy Dissenters are THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. 545 denounced, ungodly Churchmen fraternized with. Restore the doctrines of our Articles ; preach the Gospel in season and out of season ; this is the only way to improve the condition of things among us, to remedy the mischiefs which the indifference of the last age has produced.' 3. ' Alas I' cry those members of the English Church who wish to be called catholics, ' miserable comforters are ye all. It is true that our English orthodoxy is very bad ; you liberals and evangeli- cals will introduce something which is a thousandfold worse. The error of those whom you attack is, that they thought they were members of a nation rather than members of a Church ; that they were to follow the maxims of their own day, and not recall the maxims of better days ; that they were to look up to the State as their guide and authority, instead of feeling that the state has an object altogether different from ours, that at certain happy mo- ments, under some godly princes, it may conform itself to our teachings, but that habitually, and at this time above all others, it is our jealous foe, and aspires to be our tyrant. The Church is a body which may combine with a State, or rather, submit to it, but which has no natural connexion with it. It has divine sacraments, an apostolic order, a power of binding and loosing ; the practice and rules of the age of the Fathers are her model, to these she must be ever seeking to adapt herself. She must reject communion with the Dissenters in this country, not because they want the privileges of the state, but because they have cut themselves off from the uni- versal Church ; renouncing her orders — counterfeiting her sacra- ments. She must, in like manner, repudiate those Protestants abroad who have separated from and abandoned the succession ; she must aspire after union with the orthodox Greeks and Latins, but must be content to wait till we or they are prepared for this union. At home we must labour to assert the worth of sacraments, to introduce discipline for the purpose of preserving baptismal puri- ty in our children, and giving repentance to those who have lost it; of cutting off those who hold schismatical or heretical notions under the garb of Churchmen. We must stir men up to a more exact and religious life, encourage them to do good works, and to expect heavenly rewards for them. We must urge our disciples to retire- ment from the world, to penances and mortifications ; we must 546 THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. preach repentance as the only way of "recovering the privileges of Churchmen, which were given once, but which most men lose through sin ; we must discountenance every exercise of private judgment, except in the matter of choosing teachers ; we must advise our disciples to be content with probable conclusions, as all that faith requires, and bid them leave certainties to men of science.' SECTION IL Reflections on these Systems, and on our Position generally. These are the main outlines of the three systems which offer themselves to the deliberation of the young English theologian in the present day. He is told by the supporters of each that he must embrace one or other of them. All his attempts to incorporate them into each other have been very vain. It seems prodigious arro- gance to invent a scheme of his own. He feels that he cannot fall back upon the old State Churchmanship. This fear of arrogance is surely one which we ought to encour- age in ourselves, and in every other person. If we had more humility, we should probably have much fewer difficulties to en- counter than we have. And therefore 1 would say, if I had any chance of being heard, Let us try by all means to be humble. And that we may not be otherwise, do not let us hastily set ourselves up to condemn any of these systems, or those who propound them. Our consciences, I believe, have told us from time to time that there is something in each of them which we ought not to reject. Let us not reject it. But we may find, that there is a divine harmony, of which the living principle in each of these systems forms one note, of which the systems themselves are a disturbance and a violation. This seemed to be the case in our previous inquiries respecting Protestant bodies and the Catholic Church ; let us see whether our own national Church presents an exception to the rule, or an illus- tration of it. L How much does every true heart respond to that assertion of the Liberal, that if our Church indeed be a living body, it cannot be tied down by the system of a particular age, it must have an expan- THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. 547 sive power, it must breathe and move ; it must be able to throw off the results of partial experiences, it must be able to profit by all new experiences. With what sympathy do we listen to him, when he says that the Church is meant to comprehend and not to exclude > that neither Protestant Dissenters nor Romish Dissenters should be out of the range of its sympathies, or should be prohibited from sharing in any portion of its benefits. And, now, how would he accomplish his beautiful conception 1 He proposes to us that we should abandon the prayers which we have derived from ages gone by, and the Articles which have come down to us from the Reforma- tion ; or he would have us adapt these to the maxims of our own time. But what if those Prayers should be the very means by which we have been preserved from the bondage to particular modes and habits of feeling, when they have been threatening to hold us fast ? What if those Articles have kept us from sinking into a particular theological system, and have compelled us to feel that there were two sides of truth, neither of which could be assert- ed to the exclusion of the other 1 What, if the abandonment either of the Prayers or the Articles, or the reduction of them to our own present standards of thought, should bring the Church into the most flat and hopeless monotony, should so level her to the superstitions of the nineteenth century, so divorce her from the past and the fu- ture, that all expansion would for ever be impossible ? Again, how would he accomplish his projects of comprehension ? He would take away this and that thing about which we and the Dis- senters differ, till at last he discovered a few common principles upon which we might all agree. But what, if the peculiar feelings and sentiments of each class of Dissenters, be those in which their most living feelings are expressed ? What, if all plans of compre- hension have failed, just because the best and most earnest men were those who saw most the importance of that which was to be given up ? If these suppositions should be true, we must look somewhere else than to a liberal system, to produce the effects which Liberals have dreamed of. •2. With what truth and power do the words of the evangelicals come home to us ; that the loss of faith was the great misery of the last age ; that outward acts usurped the place of life-giving principles; and that, therefore, outward acts were poor and dead; 548 THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. that if a vital glow were restored to any part of the Church at the close of the last century, it came from the feeling that God had interfered on behalf of his creatures, and was interfering on behalf of them still ; that there is a real relation between the creature and the Creator ; that there is a real power coming forth from the Creator to succour his creatures, and to enable them to do his will. What mighty words are these ! how important it must be, as the evangelical says, that all men should hear them, and be brought to act upon the conviction of their truth ! And how is this hope to be realized ? Go forth and tell men, that their baptism is not an admission into the privileges of God's spiritual Church ; that they are not to take this sign as a warrant of their right to call themselves members of Christ, and to pray to God as their Father in Him. Go and tell them that they are not in a real relation with God, but only in a nominal one ; go and tell them that if they are ever to enter into that relation they must bring themselves into it by an act of faith, or else wait till an angel comes down and troubles the waters ; go and tell them that the Ecuharist is not a real bond between Christ and his members, but only a picture or likeness, which, by a violent act of our will, we may turn into a reality ; go and make these comfortable de- clarations to men, and mix them well with denunciations of other men for not preaching the Gospel ; thus you will fulfil God's com- mission, thus you will reform a corrupt and sinful land. 3. What a charm lies in the words of the propounders of the Catholic system ; that there is indeed a Church in the world, which God himself has established ; that He has not left it to the faith and feelings and notions of men ; that He has given us permanent signs of its existence ; that He has not left us to find our way into it, but has himself taken us into it ; that being in it we are under his own guidance and discipline; that we are not bound to prove ourselves members of it, by tests which exclude others who share the same privileges with us ; that we are not bound to form our- selves into circles and parties and coteries ; that we belong to the Communion of Saints, and need not seek for another. What good tidings, amidst all the confusions of our political parties, to hear that we are not the slaves of any of them ; that we can do without the State's money, or the State's sword j that we have THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. 549 powers of our own, which the state did not give nor can take away. And as to practical matters, how evidently true we feel the assertion to be, that men ought to be called to repentance, and to do good works, and to restrain themselves, and to offer sacrifices to God. How clear it seems, that the evangelicals, though they may wish most heartily to press these duties upon their flocks, are practically unable to do so ; that they cannot bid the members of their congregations generally, ' Arise and go to their Father,' be- cause they will only allow that a portion of them may call God their Father ; and because that portion of them, according to their doctrine, has already repented and turned to God ; that they can- not call the members of their congregation generally to do holy acts from holy principles, because they do not believe that the majority of them have received the Spirit, from whom all holy de- sires and just works must proceed. But how great then must be our confusion and dismay, when we discover that the preaching of repentance and of good works, is just as impossible, upon the Catholic system, as upon the evan- gelical ; that the congregations of the one are to be treated prac- tically as if they had lost their baptismal rights, just as the congre- gations of the others are to be treated as if they had never ob- tained them ; that repentance and moral discipline are to be held forth as the possible means of recovering a treasure, not as the fruit of shame for the past, and precaution against the future abuse of it ; that exhortations to good works, therefore, must of necessity take a selfish form, and be confirmed by selfish sanctions. After all those splendid assurances, that the Church really exists, and that it is endowed with such mighty powers, how grievous it is to find the most strange uncertainty about the terms under which she exists ; whether only as a splendid dream, whereof the record is preserved in the writings of the Fathers, and which may some day be realized; or as a potentiality, which was made a fact dur- ing the middle ages by the supremacy of the Pope ; or, lastly, as an invisible equatorial line between Romanism and Protestantism ; a line, of which some dim traces may, from time to time, be dis- covered, with the help of powerful glasses, in our English history, but which has gradually been lost in the dark ground upon one 550 THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. side of it. And, finally, to men who had felt the intolerable pride, and the real slavery of those notions about private judgment, which have been of late current among us, how painful is the discovery, that these Catholic denouncers of it do in fact justify the most ex- travagant, self-conceited, and unreasonable use which has ever been made of it ; and only condemn it when it has lost its evil character, and is actually exercised under moral discipline and government. For what can be more subversive of all order and government, what so direct an outrage upon fact, as the assertion, that men in general are left to choose their teachers ? And what so subversive of the very idea of a teacher, as the notion that he is not to cultivate the mind and judgment of his pupil, but only to pour into him certain notions of his own ? The very arrogance from which we wish to deliver men, is the notion that they are not to receive the teachers, the parents, judges, pastors, whom God has set over them. The very hope we wish to encourage in them is, that if they receive humbly the light which is vouchsafed to them, it will be increased to them more and more, till they are brought into the perfect day. And, lastly, the dogma respecting probable evidence, which the Catholic school makes the foundation of their intellectual, as the dogma of baptismal purity is the foundation of their moral teaching, seems to contain the very virus of that skepticism which they denounce in the Liberal. The Liberal says, ' Nothing is cer- tain in morals; one opinion may be less mischievous or more plausible than another ; but, as to the thing which dogmatists call truth, sensible men, who know any thing of history, have discarded the dream of it altogether.' And what says our English Catholic: ' We admit nothing is certain in morals ; but then we do not want certainty. We are so faithful and submissive that we are content with appearances and likelihoods ; we receive what we are told by the authority which we have determined to be on the whole the best. God has not willed that we should have more light.' I ap- peal to the conscience of mankind against this language. Do we not mean when we use the awful name of God, 'The Being, He who is V If there be no certainty, how dare we take that name into our lips ? Are not the very words, " I believe in God the Father Almighty," an assertion that there is something fixed and THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. 551 eternal upon which the pillars of the universe rest ? Do not the next words mean, ' He who Is has revealed Himself to us ? We are not to live upon probabilities and plausibilities. He who is Truth does wish that we should know the truth, and that the truth should make us free V I do therefore say, that this system, so far as it stands upon the doctrine of probabilities, begins in skepticism, and that in skepticism it must terminate. It will be observed that I have not charged the authors of these systems with the tendencies which they commonly impute to each other. I have not said that the Liberal wishes to substitute Ration- alism for Orthodoxy; that the Evangelical wishes to establish the principle of Dissent ; that the Catholic systematizer wishes to intro- duce Popery. My charge against each is, that he defeats his own object. As to the question how far these different accusations are true, I should be obliged in many cases to give a double answer in order to make myself intelligible. I can quite understand that each of these parties believes the clear and strong assertion of its own principle to be the best preservative against the very evil which it is supposed to favour. And I think this is a true and reasonable opinion. I think the Liberal has a right to say, 'Recognise the idea of Rationalism in the Church, and it will not assert itself out of the Church in the form of Infidelity.' That the Evangelical has a right to say, 1 Recognise the idea of personal faith as the condi- tion of Christian fellowship in the Church, and it will not assert it- self in the form of Dissent out of the Church.' m I think the Catho- lic has a right to say, ' Recognise the idea of Catholicism in your Church, and it will not assert itself out of the Church in the form of Romanism.' But while I acknowledge this, and therefore can enter into the feelings of disappointment and indignation which each in turn experiences when he finds that his purpose is not un- derstood, I must say also, that it seems to me evident both from facts and reason, that each of these principles, when it is worked into a system, does become fairly obnoxious to the complaint of those who denounce it most vehemently. I cannot see what Church Liberal- ism reduced to a System is, but the denial of any thing as given to men either in the shape of Tradition or Revelation ; what Church Evangelicalism reduced to a System is, but the denial of the very idea of Church fellowship or Unity, and the substitution for it of a 552 THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. combination of individual units; what Catholicism reduced to a System is, but Romanism ; that is to say, the direct denial of the distinction of National Churches, and the implicit denial of the Church as a spiritual body holding a spiritual Head. And it seems to me a false way of speaking, to say that each of these systems is good in moderation, but when pushed to its extreme is bad. I do not think the system is the extension or expansion of the principle, but its limitation and contradiction. I do not see how the principle can be carried too far. I do not see how any thing can be done towards the formation of the System, without introducing a seed of evil which must germinate till it produces all its natural fruits. I have written very much in vain, if I have not yet explained why I suppose this must be the case. These systems, Protestant, Romish, English, seem to me each to bear witness of the existence of a Divine Order; each to be a miserable, partial, human substi- tute for it. In every country therefore, I should desire to see men emancipated from the chains which they have made for themselves, and entering into the freedom of God's Church. But it seems to me, that in England we have a clearer witness than there is any- where, of our right to this emancipation, and of the way in which it may be effected. This system building is not natural to us. We have evils which are natural to us, and against which, we have to be continually on our guard. But this is an exotic product : one of the charges which the Liberal and Evangelical and Catholic sys- tematizes make against our native English divines is, that they have little understanding of any systems; that they go on in a blind mechanical course, merely caring to keep their places and do their work. And yet the members of all these parties are continually giving proof, when they are not occupied with actual controversies, that they feel this maxim of " keeping their places, and doing their work," to be not a low or grovelling one ; but one which their con- sciences testify in favour of, and to which they would wish, if they could, to conform themselves. As they become more aged and holy, more disciplined by affliction, more apprehensive of God's will and of the ends which they are to seek, it would seem as if this old-fashioned notion, which struck them as so vulgar and earthly in their youth, is more and more acknowledged to be one high in its origin, and difficult in its realization. An old systematizer in THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. 553 England is a very rare spectacle indeed. There is either a gravi- tation into some lower region, or an ascent into some higher one; either a fall out of the middle air of speculations to our mother clods ; or a clear perception that the heavenly things are substan- tial, and that in the solid earth and not in the clouds, we are to find the images of them. I should be very presumptuous if I spoke to such men, except in the language of deference and humility, be- seeching them not to make us that which they have ceased to be themselves; not to let us fancy from their words that they belong to schools and parties, when we know that in their closets and in their lives they must be renouncing them all. It is from the ranks of young men that these parties will be recruited. They want, as they say, principles and ideas. They cannot move on in the line of mere practical business and exertion. They must know why they act and what is the end of action, or they will not act at all. I think I am as sensible of this necessity as they can be ; and sensi- ble too, how little their elders are able to sympathize in the want, or to satisfy it. Nay, I think I can see further, that unless we who are younger do earnestly seek after principles and grounds of action, we must sink into the monotony of the last century, or into a far worse state than that. I believe the great principles, which each of these systems has developed, have been made known to us for the wisest purposes. But then I think that they are the sap which is to invigorate and restore the oak trunk which has been standing for so many ages on our soil, and that the seedlings which they themselves have sent forth, are of a poor, weak, tortuous growth, noi capable of resisting any tempest. I do not urge the young Eng- lish student to make light of these principles; 1 say he cannot with safety make light of any one of them. All belong to him, he has need of them all ; but I beseech him to consider solemnly, and as in the presence of God, whether he may lawfully do any acts which imply that he adopts one of the systems in which these principles are buried, and whether he dares to fraternize with any parties, as parties, which profess them. He will be told, of course, that to stand aloof from them is practically impossible ; that to attempt it is an act of self-conceit and self-will ; that he is an Eclectic or a Syncretist ; that in a short time if he perseveres in his determination he will throw off 554 THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. his faith altogether. To the first charge he may reply, that it can- not be impossible for an Englishman to be that which it is the natural bias of an Englishman, not under some peculiar influence, to be. To the second he will answer, that instead of rejecting the instructions of his parents and teachers, he is seeking to hold them fast. Possibly they belong to a particular school. His first im- pulse on beginning to think, is to emancipate himself from their notions, to choose new teachers, to adopt the system which is most opposite to that of his education. Those who beseech not to join a party say, ' By no means do this ; the notions which you have learnt must not be abandoned; there is a truth in them which you must have ; never let them go till you have made yourself master of it ; when you are master of it, do what you like with the sys- tem ; you will love those who taught it you more than you ever did ; you will only not suffer their teachings to keep you separate from men whom you ought also to love.' The accusation of Eclec- ticism or Syncretism it is better not to notice at all ; nine out of ten persons who use the words, do not know what they mean ; they are merely bugbears to frighten children with : the tenth man who does know, will understand that he who endeavours to substitute a Church for systems, must regard with most dread and suspicion the attempt at a complete, all-comprehending system. Hating all systems, he hates those most which are most perfect, because in them there are the fewest crannies and crevices through which the light and air of heaven may enter. He hates the Romish system more than all Protestant systems, because the latter are inconsist- ent and fragmentary, the former is all-embracing and satisfactory, therefore more lifeless, inhuman, godless. As to the fear of his losing his faith,when he has thrown down the party walls which have been raised for the defence of it, he may venture to stand the risk. If his faith be in the doctrines of men and not in the wisdom of God, the sooner it falls the better. If it be in Him whose name is Truth, to Him be the care of it committed. We believe that his sentence has gone forth against systems and parties : we do not be- lieve that he has recalled the words, * None who trusteth in Me shall be confounded.' I am sure our responsibility in this matter is becoming more weighty every day. I have said that these systems are not natural THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. 555 to us. But I do not mean that they are not able to assimilate themselves with our most characteristic tendencies. Elsewhere the defenders of a system may merely form a school. In England, be- cause by constitution we are politicians and not systematizers, they must form a party. The moment we have adopted a peculiar the- ory we begin to organize. We have our flags and our watchwords, our chiefs and our subordinates. All the generous feelings of sym- pathy and courage, of readiness to support a friend, of unwillingness to desert him when he has done some unpopular act, bind us to one and another maxim which our leaders or allies have put forth, even though there is nothing in our own minds which answers to it ; we throw the feelings befitting men of action and soldiers, into the de- fence of propositions which have been worked out by the most dry school logic. Thus personality necessarily enters into all our solemnest discussions. A noble symptom of what we ought to be ! a miserable effect when we are striving to make ourselves some- thing else ! The respectable champions on each side ask, and ask again, why they should be treated with harshness and malignity, for maintaining principles which they believe in their hearts to be charitable and true. Immediately after their Newspapers and Re- views are seen generously striving that no other party shall have the stigma of being more unfair and libellous than their own. What seems to me worse and more grievous still— all, whether they are capable of understanding systems or not, are expected to enlist in one of these parties, and to bear its name. The poor must be instructed in penny tracts to call such a man a Papist, or such a man a Low Churchman. Our children must become polemics be- fore they can repeat their catechism ; and the members of that sex which exists to pacify and harmonize society, to be a witness against our cold logical habits of thought, to teach us the worth of things above words, must talk about opinions, imitate our discords, pollute their minds if not their lips with the ribaldry which we think it a part of our Christian duty and profession to indulge against those who are called by the same name, and partake of the same sacraments with us. Surely such a state of things must bring down heavy judgments upon our Church and land, and therefore every one ought to consider whether he will make himself an accessory to the sin, whether he can do nothing to avert the punishment. 556 THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. I am aware how much pains the defenders of party have taken, to engage the practical feelings of Englishmen on their side. They have said, ' Let theorists talk what they will, the mo- ment we begin to act, we must associate with some men or other, and this association will assume a party character. To bid us abandon parties and systems, is only another way of bidding us hang down our hands in stupid indolence. Those who wish to do any thing must be content to take things as they find them.' Yes, this is undoubtedly the right test, I rejoice that we should be brought to it. I leave then to the defenders of systems and parties, to explain what we are doing with them. They cannot complain that their machinery is not in active operation. It may occasion- ally meet with a little obstruction from a certain vague impression in men's minds, that they have been commanded to love their neighbours as themselves ; still they cannot be so ungrateful as not to acknowledge that it has been broug ht to very tolerable per- fection, and of course, to very great efficiency in this nineteenth century in our English towns and villages. Any description of its results from an opponent could not be a fair one. I will therefore confine myself to a short statement of certain modes of action which I believe are open to a person who does not avail himself of this machinery, but is content with the powers which he believes God has bestowed upon him, as a minister of his Kingdom. 1. Does such a person find himself among the members of dif- ferent sects and parties — a Quaker here, a Baptist there, a Unita- rian on his right, a Plymouth Christian on his left? He believes that he is the member of a polity which recognises the truth con- tained in each of these systems; that they have made a system out of some principle which they have torn apart from the rest; that they have destroyed that principle by its separation. He be- lieves that there are earnest men in these sects who are feeling this to be the cause, who are catching at all schemes of union because they feel it, who are angry with us because we do not enter into their sense of the necessity of a union, and therefore fraternize with them ; who are proclaiming the very principle upon which the Catholic Church stands, that all unity is to be in Christ, and that intellectual notions and opinions ought not to divide men from Him. There is therefore a practical renunciation of the sect principle, as THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. 557 something which is no longer tenable. There is at the same time a very furious desire to maintain it as against the national Church. The reasons will seem to him to be these. First, the Church has put itself forth merely as an English Church. Its character as a Catholic body, as a kingdom set up in the world for all nations, has been kept out of sight. Secondly, in the reaction against this tendency, it has taken a negative, i. e. a sectarian, form. The idea of the Church, as a united body, has been put forth, chiefly to show the wickedness of those who have separated from it. Its episco- pacy and its sacraments have been looked upon chiefly as exclusive of those who have them not. Above all, the spiritual character of the Church as deriving its life from its head, a character which the Dissenters are especially disposed by their professions to recognise, has been disjoined from the institutions which embody it. Men have been asked to receive these institutions merely as such, and then to hope for spiritual life through them. Little attempt has been made to prove to them that the institutions are themselves living portions of the divine kingdom. A person therefore who has entered into these convictions himself, will not despair of see- ing all the true hearty Dissenters gradually receiving them also. He will not be impatient to force any notions of his own upon them. His desire will be to meet their feelings and to enter into them. He will be most anxious not to destroy any thing which they have received or learnt ; to confirm them in their feelings of affection and reverence for their fathers ; to strengthen in them by all means the hereditary affections, which their doctrines respecting private judgment so much impair. He wishes to preserve all the faith which they have from the destruction which is threatening it ; to unite their faith with that of those from whom they are separat- ed ; to make them integral members of the body from which they fancy that it is the object of our pride and selfishness to exclude them. What the result of such a method may be is in God's hands, not ours. At all events other methods have been tried and have failed, this has not been tried. 2. Or does the Churchman I am supposing, find himself in one of our awful manufacturing districts ? Of course, the sense of his own utter inadequacy to deal with the mass of evil which he meets there is the first which will take hold of him, and will grow stronger 36 558 THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. every day. Yet he is there, and he knows that there is One who cares for this mass of living beings infinitely more than he does. Nay, his own coldness and heartlessness will continually remind him that if he is to care for them at all, the feeling must be com- municated to him by Him who often seems to these unhappy creatures utterly heedless of their sorrows and complainings. And then he has the consolation which the Athenian orator found when he reflected on the reverses of his countrymen, and the resistless march of Philip. ' Tf we had done such and such things and they had failed we might despair ; we have not done them, therefore let us hope.' A Church which was looked upon, and almost look- ed upon itself, as a tool of the aristocracy, which compared its own orders with the ranks in civil society, and forgot that it existed to testify that man as man is the object of his Creator's sympathy, such a Church had no voice which could reach the hearts of these multitudes. The Liberal proclamation which says, i Teach them ; impart to them a few of the things that we know,' was more genial, and humane. But there are thoughts ever at work in these English- men, in these human beings, thoughts quickened by hunger and suffering, which such instruction could not appease. More impres- sive far was the speech of the Methodist and the Evangelical : 6 You have immort al souls, they are perishing, oh ! ask how they may be saved.' Such words spoken with true earnestness are very mighty. But they are not enough ; men feel that they are not merely lost creatures ; they look up to the heaven above them, and ask whether it can be true that this is the whole account of their condition ; that their sense of right and wrong, their cravings for fellowship, their consciousness of being creatures having powers which no other creatures possess, be all nothing. If religion, they say, will give us no explanation of these feelings, if it can only tell us about a fall for the whole race, and an escape for a few indivi- duals of it, then our wants must be satisfied without religion. Then begin Chartism and Socialism, and whatever schemes make rich men tremble. Surely, what the modern assertors of a Church sys- tem say about the duty of administering active charity to these suf- ferers, of showing that we do not merely regard them as pensioners on the national bounty, but as fellow men for whom we are to make sacrifices — surely this language is far more to the purpose. THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. 559 Surely, if acted upon even imperfectly, it must produce most happy effects. But how would the proclamation to our Chartists and Socialists, that they had baptismal purity once, and that they have lost it now ; that they must recover their ground by repentance, by prayer and fasting ; that they must submit to discipline, and be de- prived of privileges which they never exercised nor cared for ; how can such a proclamation as this meet any of the confused, disorderly notions which are stirring in thir minds, or set them right ? On the other hand, if the new and unwonted proclamation were to go forth, ' God has cared for you, you are indeed his chil- dren ; his Son has redeemed you, his Spirit is striving wTith you; there is a fellowship larger, more irrespective of outward distinc- tions, more democratical, than any which you can create ; but it is a fellowship of mutual love, not mutual selfishness, in which the chief of all is the servant of all — may not one think that a result would follow as great as that which attended the preaching of any Franciscan friar in the twelfth century, or any Methodfst preacher in the eighteenth ? For these are true words, everlasting words, and yet words which belong especially to our time ; they are words which interpret, and must be interpreted by, that regular charity, that ministerial holiness, those sacraments, prayers, discipline, of which the Catholic speaks. They connect his words about repent- ance with those of the Evangelical, making it manifest, that noth- ing but an accursed nature and a depraved will, could have robbed any of the blessings which God has bestowed upon us all. They translate into meaning and life all the liberal plans for the educa- tion of adults and children ; they enable us to fulfil the notion, which statesmen have entertained, that the Church is to be the supporter of the existing orders, by making her a teacher and ex- ample to those orders respecting their duties and responsibilities ; by removing the hatred which their forgetfulness of those duties and responsibilities is threatening to create in the minds of the lower classes. 3. But a Churchman, such as I have supposed, would be both compelled by his circumstances, and urged by his principles, to change these convictions into action, by enlisting all the wealthier inhabitants of his parish in different services and occupations for the benefit of their inferiors. I am unwilling to enlarge upon this 560 THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. subject ; first, because my practical ignorance makes me unfit to offer any suggestions upon it; and, secondly, because I am certain that our English political wisdom, guided by Catholic feeling, is already doing much in many parts of this land, in the accomplish- ment of such a design. I must, however, refer to it for the purpose of remarking, how the notion, that party organization is necessary, is at once explained and refuted the moment we aim at an ecclesi- astical organization. It is explained when the truth, that no man is meant to work alone, which is the truth that is implied in this strange maxim, is made the principle of our action. It is refuted, for we find how infinitely freer from friction a society is which is held together by sacramental bonds, and is moving under the direc- tion of an appointed pastor, than all societies constructed upon a party model, or acknowledging a party motive, ever have been or ever can be. For the one seeks to preserve all existing ranks and relations, the other sets them all aside. The one is continually en- deavouring to understand how the middle classes may be brought most to act upon the lower, so as to be their guides and not their tyrants ; how the upper classes may be brought to act upon the middle, so as not to be their fawning slaves, and at the same time the betrayers of their consciences at elections — cold and distant, and the objects of their servile imitation at other times ; how each portion of the community may preserve its proper position to the rest, and may be fused together by the spiritual power which exists for each, the minister of all, the creature of none. The other con- founds all orders, and yet does not the least diminish their mutual repulsion, or make them feel that they have a common object. Above all, the Churchman is ever longing to discover how the hand- maidens of the Church may be brought to do her the services which they alone can do, without departing for a moment from their own true estate, as wives, as sisters, as mothers ; how the whole sex may be an order of Sisters of Charity ; and how, in each particular neighbourhood, this order may be at work in lowliness and meek- ness, softening and healing the sorrows of the world. The partisan acknowledges no difference of vocation in man and woman ; all are to be equally feverish and restless; careful about many things, unfit alike for quiet contemplation or regular activity. 4. Again, let us suppose our Churchman in Ireland, amidst a THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. 561 population, the majority of which acknowledge no relation to the body of which he is a member ; how would he feel, and how would he desire to act ? Would he not think thus within himself ; " When Anselm came over from his Norman convent to be Archbishop of Canterbury, and his victorious countrymen thought that he of course would look upon the old Saxons of the soil, as they did ; he told the:n plainly, that a Churchman acknowledged no distinctions of race, and that his vocation was to be the friend of the poor and distressed wherever he met with them. And these principles, of course with great exceptions and deviations, were acted upon by a large portion of the Norman bishops and clergy. What was the effect 1 We grew up to be an English nation. The Saxon serf felt, that he had a portion and a right in the soil ; he recollected the sounds of his native language; he began to speak it ; in due time the conquerors and the conquered became one. If our Church- men had but acted upon this principle in Ireland ; if they had but said to the English settlers, — We will have nothing to do with your Orange lodges and your hell-fire clubs, except to discipline and re- strain those who belong to them ; we are come over as protectors of these Celts; we are to raise them out of barbarism; to speak to their Church feelings and their national feelings ; to call forth both together : — if these had been our maxims, how many problems, which perplex the statesman at this day, might have been solved long ago ! But that phrase, ' The English interest? was continu- ally present to the minds of the statesmen who sent out our Bishops, and though they might often stumble by mistake upon a noble rebel to their commands, they sought diligently for men who should for- ward their own narrow policy. What has been the consequence? The national feeling in Ireland has strangely and unnaturally asso- ciated itself with that Romanism which is the foe of all national feeling. The Irish look upon our Church as a Saxon Church, and they actually fly to Rome to give them an Irish Church. But even now at the eleventh hour, if better and truer feelings of our position are rising in the minds of statesmen, may not the Church be the means of carrying them out ? We have tried what the mere preaching of Protestantism will do in Ireland, and so far as it has been earnest and sincere, it has not been in vain. But still it has not touched the hearts of Irishmen ; there has been a resistance to 562 THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. it, not merely in their bad feelings but in their good. State libe- rality has been tried. So far as it has been the token of kindness and sympathy, perhaps this too has not been in vain. Still all must acknowledge that it has done very little ; most men think that a fair proportion of evil has been mingled with the good. But if there be a sympathy between the Catholic and National principle, if they cannot really exist apart, why may we not begin to speak to the national sympathies of Irishmen; to speak to them as mem- bers of an Irish Catholic Church ; to declare that every Irishman ought to look upon himself as a member of such a Church, and not of any other Church, Saxon or Romish ; to make it manifest by acts, that we hold our revenues for the good of the whole land, and that it would not gain any thing but misery by the confiscation of them, or by the extirpation of those who possessed them V9 Such thoughts, I say, are likely to arise in the mind of an Irish Churchman, who enters into the principles I have endeavoured to develope. They may be very crude, but still they may be the germs of acts which neither the State nor the Church will have reason to complain of. 5. To one who feels the importance of the Protestant principle, and that its true home is in the Catholic Church, it must needs seem a strange providence in respect to England, that she should have on one side of her a nation in which Protestantism has tried to exist nakedly and exclusively ; on the other side, a nation which wishes to be Catholic by being Romanist. Each experiment is, I think, very decisive, but each is connected with sins which we have need to confess and deplore. The utter insufficiency of Pres- byterianism to support a national life has been surely proved by the example of Scotland. But we began with setting up our episco- pacy as if it were an English thing. We gave the Scotch people the notion, that their own kings were coming back to reduce them into an ecclesiastical province of England, and the religious as w?ell as the national spirit, rose against such a pretension. Now, it would seem as if the episcopalian body in Scotland had the op- portunity of showing, that they are neither members of a religious sect nor tools of England. They have existed for many years without any state patronage ; their chief fault has been, that they have not sympathized with the feelings of the people, that they THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS, 563 have stood too much upon their ecclesiastical dignity, that they have seemed too much mere anti-presbyterians. But if, in the pre- sent crisis of Scotland, they will consider earnestly, that they exist as witnesses, not of a system but of a Church, not of certain notions about episcopacy, but of episcopacy as part of the constitution of Christ's spiritual kingdom ; they will find, I think, that they may exercise a quiet and soothing influence over that ferment of Scotch feelings, which all state contrivances have been so utterly ineffec- tual to allay. They will not, I hope, look with proud aristocratical contempt upon the earnest cry which the people have sent forth to be freed from civil dominion. They will not, I hope, indulge in mocking allusions to the proud language in which Presbyterianism used to assert, that it was free of this control. They will acknow- ledge that spiritual freedom is most essential to the life of a nation. They will labour to show, that the Church, rightly and truly con- stituted, is able to humble the lofty and to exalt the lowly ; that the tyranny which Presbyterianism granted to its aristocracy at the time of the Reformation, is the tyranny against which its sons are groaning now ; that its boast of being a Church for the poor has ended in a sadder separation between the poor and the rich than has almost ever existed in any country. Here again I am suggesting no projects or plans to Scotch Churchmen. I am merely urging them to consider seriously the indications of God's will, and to desire that they may act in accordance with it. 6. The lessons which we have derived from the history of our connexion with Scotland and Ireland (I have spoken before of those which are suggested by the circumstances of our old colonies in North America) cannot surely be lost upon us, when we go forth to plant new settlements on the other side of the globe, or when we are inquiring how we are to deal with those which we possess already. Every circumstance of their position and of ours seems to say, ' See that you do not merely establish an English kingdom in those soils ; if you do, that kingdom will not be a bless- ing to the colonists, to the natives, or to the mother country. See that you do not merely send forth preachers in your ships to tell the people that all they have believed hitherto — if they have believed any thing — is false, and that we hold a doctrine which sets it all aside. See that you raise up in the midst of them what they shall 564 THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. feel to be as real a kingdom as the one which is presented to them in the persons of governors and judges ; a kingdom which does not only deal equal justice to natives and to settlers, but which claims both alike for its citizens, endues both alike with its highest privi- leges; a kingdom which comes to subvert nothing, but to restore that which is decayed and fallen ; to adopt into itself every frag- ment of existing faith and feeling ; to purify it and exalt it ; to cut off from it only that which the conscience of the native confesses to be inconsistent with it ; to testify that wherever there is a creature having human limbs and features, there is one of that race for which Christ died, one whom he is not ashamed to call a brother. In such countries as New Zealand and Australia, such a testi- mony as is borne by the establishment of a Christian kingdom of peace and righteousness is every thing ; for there, of course, only the rudest and most incoherent spiritual theories and speculations will be found to exist. In India the case is altogether different ; yet there more than anywhere is it needful that the signs of a spi- ritual kingdom should be introduced, that Christianity should be regarded as something more than a fine theory. For how did the simple tenets of Mahomedanism prevail over the complicated creeds and philosophies of the Hindoos, but because the former came forth in the shape of an organic society, and the latter were only forms of thought connected principally with the physical universe ? The Christian Church ought to understand the positions both of the Hindoo and the Mussulman, in respect to the strange masses of feelings and opinions which are exhibited in the traditions of the one, and to the struggle after consistency and unity which are visi- ble in the actual history of the other. Would that the supporters of Indian missions had taken this ground when they were assailed by the cowardice and indifference of the merchant-emperors thirty years ago! Would that they had been able to reply to those who had accused them of disturbing the faith of the natives, and so en- dangering English dominion- — JYb ; it is your godlessness and ra- pacity which endanger their faith ; you are making them infidels while you pretend to indulge their superstitions ; we go to save their faith by delivering them from their superstitions and your exam- ple ; wcgo, that England may not perish in that day when she shall be called to give account of the crimes which you have committed. THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. 565 But it was not fully understood at that time that Christianity was any thing else but a sect, or a collection of sects, sent into the world to displace Pagan and Mahomedan sects ; therefore the years which have followed have produced their natural effect, and we have now to deal for the most part with a generation of open or disguised in- fidels. Still the good men of that day, guided by a higher wisdom than their own, were led to ask strenuously of the English legisla- ture, that a Bishop might be sent out to them. They felt that they wanted a Church. A heart was put into a country which had hitherto only been directed by wise heads or skilful hands ; a heart which is still beating, and which we trust may yet send a life-blood into every part of that vast empire. The issue is with God, but he has taught us by sufficiently manifest indications in what way He wills that we should fulfil our part in the work. 7. I have not yet spoken of the spirit in which we should act towards the members of foreign Churches, be they Romish or Pro- testant. But enough has been said in former parts of this work to indicate the course which an Englishman, who is not tied down by systems, must strive to pursue, in reference to them. What I have been chiefly wishing to show is, that here we have the means of acting upon the principles which all men everywhere ought to act upon if they could ; herein it seems to me lies the blessing, for which we have to give thanks. Our Church has no right to call herself better than other Churches in any respect, in many she must acknowledge herself to be worse. But our position, we may fairly affirm, for it is not a boast but a confession, is one of singular ad- vantage. If what I have said be true, our faith is not formed by a union of the Protestant systems with the Romish system, nor of certain elements taken from the one and of certain elements taken from the other. So far as it is represented in our liturgy and our articles, it is the faith of a Church, and has nothing to do with any system at all. That peculiar character which God has given us, enables us, if we do not slight the mercy, to understand the difference between a Church and a System, bet- ter perhaps than any of our neighbours can, and, therefore, our po- sition, rightly used, gives us a power of assisting them in realizing the blessings of their own. By refusing to unite with them on the ground of any of their systems, by seeking to unite with them 566 THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. on the grounds of the universal Church, we teach them wherein lies their strength and their weakness ; by determining that we will be a nation distinct from all others, we encourage each of them to be a nation distinct from us and from all others. By showing them how our Church life and our national life are interwoven ; we teach them, that the bonds which make them one with us are ne- cessary to the support of that peculiar character and position which make them independent of us. But for such tasks as these — for reconciling the different sects in our own land, for dealing with the wild feelings respecting gov- ernment and society which are abroad, for bringing the different classes into co-operation, for entering into the strong passions of Scotch Calvinists and Irish Romanists, for taming the savages of the antipodes, for restoring the strange reliques of ancient civiliza- tion among the natives of British India, for suggesting any practi- cal hints, or giving any practical help to our brethren on the con- tinent ; what need have we of another discipline and another spirit than that which we seem at present to possess ? Shall wre obtain either the one or the other by sitting still, by affirming that these tasks are too great for creatures so infirm and fallen, by waiting for some sudden inspiration ? This cannot be. These works are set before us; in one way or other, we are trying to carry them on, and must carry them on. The necessity is laid upon us ; the only point to be considered is how wTe can support it. Do we tremble at the great efforts of thought which are presupposed in these out- ward undertakings, the careful studies in history, ecclesiastical, and civil, the acquaintance with the powers and the distinctions of words as the signs of thought, the intimacy with the symbols which nature and art have furnished to the mythologist, the patient toil with which these must be weighed in our minds before we can cast o ourselves into the feelings of other men, while yet we do not lose our own ? Assuredly this is required of us— not the whole of each student — for the Church is one body, and hath many members — but something of every one, and the habit and disposition of all . But there is nothing in all this to stagger the countrymen of Bacon and of Newton. Study is painful and intolerable to Englishmen THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. 567 if they cannot connect it with action. They cannot pursue it for its pleasure or its comeliness ; make them feel that there is an end in it, that it is necessary for their business, and they will be as dil- igent slaves in the reading of books as in the making of roads. Our systems and our parties have confused us in every direction ; they lead us to fancy that all things are moving round in a weary circle, or are imprisoned in lifeless notions. At the same time they tempt every man to suppose that he is to be every thing, and to know every thing, and to do every thing, for he feels that if he has not the whole of his system before him, each part of it becomes mischievous and false. And he cannot trust other men to do their work while he does his own, for he feels that he belongs to a party rather than to a Church, and therefore he has no security that each person has his order and duties assigned to him. Thus we are at the same time indolent and over-diligent, ignorant and encyclo- paedic. Once break this spell, and we shall again begin to con- nect our specific studies with a general humanity, and so at once preserve their limitations and make them universal. But there is another and the more serious subject. I have spoken of a different discipline, but we need a different spirit in order to that discipline. Not a different Spirit from that which we received in our baptism, but an altogether different one from the spirit of party and of selfishness, which we have allowed to enter into us and possess us in our manhood. To exorcise this, that the other may really inform us and rule us, should surely be our first object. And we cannot drive it out of others until we have striven that it may be banished from ourselves." If we, who form the cler- gy of the land, believe that we are its heart, we must suppose that the purification of the body generally depends upon our purifica- tion ; we must feel that every evil which we call upon others to re- pent of has its origin and root in us, and that we must repent of it first. I fear that the habit of apologizing for our institution, when it has been ignorantly attacked by those who know nothing of its meaning or its blessing, may have operated injuriously upon our lives. We have defended the arrangements of Providence and the order of the Church, till, unawares, we have begun to defend our- selves, who have so grievously sinned against those arrangements 568 THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. and that order, and have hindered men from perceiving what they are. For this fault, if we haveVommitted it, we must wish to make amends ; since we must know that there can be no national con- fession or national reformation, if we, who ought to be the foremost in both, as having the most to answer for, are trying to make ex- cuses for ourselves, hiding the evil which we are inwardly con- scious of, or imputing it to circumstances, most of which are very favourable to us, none of which ought to be our masters. But if shame and humiliation are needful for English clergy- men generally, they must be especially needful in those who have presumed to speak of our sins, and to offer any suggestions for our amendment. It is too probable that they would have known nothing of the evil of systems and parties in others if they had not felt it in themselves ; nay, that the irritation of the beam in their own eye has made them more eager to detect the mote in their brother's eye. I have in this book attacked no wrong ten- dency to which I do not know myself to be liable. I hope I am conscious to a certain degree, though very insufficiently, of the dan- ger I am in of substituting the denunciation of it for the practical correction of it in the only sphere over which I have any control. I am not ignorant, also, that the hints which I have offered in op- position to systems may, themselves, be turned by myself or by others into a system ; and that neither its weakness and inconsisten- cy, nor the insignificance of its originator, may prevent it from con- necting itself with some new party. I believe that some of whom I have spoken in this chapter began to fulfil their mission with as sincere a desire that their words might never become the symbols of a faction as I can feel now. I do not, therefore, confide in my- self. But since a school, which should be formed to oppose all schools, must be of necessity more mischievous than any of them ; and since a school, which pretended to amalgamate the doctrines of all other schools, would be, as I think, more mischievous than that. I do pray earnestly, that if any such schools should arise, they may come to nought ; and that if what I have written in this book should tend even in the least degree to favour the establishment of them, it may come to nought. On the other hand, if there be any thing here which may help to raise men above their own narrow concep- THE ENGLISH SYSTEMS. 569 tions and mine, may lead them to believe that there is a way to that truth which is living and universal, and above us all, and that He who is Truth will guide them along in that way — this which is from Him and not from me, I pray that He will bless. 1 Let all thine enemies perish, 0 Lord all systems, schools, parties which have hindered men from seeing thpe largeness, and freedom, and glory of thy kingdom ; ' but let them that love thee,' in whatever earthly mists they may at present be involved, 1 be as the sun when he goeth forth in his strength/ NOTES. [A.] In the text the Quaker expresses his belief u that the catechumens in the primitive Church were not taught something wholly different in kind from that which they learnt after their baptism," that " they were not reasoned with upon those selfish motives which it must have been the object of their after initiation, to cure them of." It is probable that many passages may be produced from the fathers, to refute this opinion ; to show that they did sometimes resort to selfish arguments, upon the plea that pure things are meant for the pure. Such a practice is so very plausi- ble, so very flattering to our spiritual pride, and therefore has prevailed so much in all later ages of the Church, that one must expect to find the seeds of it in the earliest. From the excellent principle, that milk is for babes and meat for grown men, an economist might easily pass to the notion that there are some constitutions which are not even fit for milk, and that to these some liquid drawn from the muddy streams of the world, or distilled from its poisonous herbs, may be fitly administered. But that this was not the habitual and deliberate opinion of these ages, may, I think, be very clearly inferred from the short treatise of Augustine, "De Catechizandis rudibus."* This valuable book was addressed to a Carthagenian deacon, who had complained of the difficulty which he found in preserving the cheerfulness and freedom of his own mind, while he was engaged in catechising. The remarks which St. Augustine makes upon this subject well deserve the attention of all teachers, whe- ther in the pulpit or the school-room. It is not, however, for their sake, that I refer to this little work, but that the reader may see in what spirit a Bishop of the fourth century would have addressed a young heathen, who was only preparing for admission into the Church. Having stated his views respecting the method in which the historical parts of Scripture should be exhibited to the candidate, and how the com- ing of Christ should be shown to be the end to which they are all point- ing, he goes on to say, " Q,uas autem major causa est adventus Domini, nisi ut ostenderet Deus dilectionem suam in nobis, commendans earn vehementer; quia citm adhuc inimici essemus, Christus pro nobis mor- tuns est? Hoc autem ideo, quia finis praecepti et plenitudo legis, caritas * St. Aug. Op. torn. vi. p. 191. ed. Benedict. 572 NOTES. est: ut et nos invicem diligamus, et quemadmodum ille pro nobis animam luam posuit, sic et nos pro fratribus animam ponamus; et ipsum Deum, quoniam prior dilexit nos, et Filio suo unico non pepercit, sed pro nobis omnibus tradidit eum, si amare pigebat, saltern nunc redarnare non pigeat. Nulla est enim major ad amorem invitatio, quam praevenire amando ; et nimis durus est animus, qui dilectionem si nolebat impendere, nolit re- pendere. Q,u6d si in ipsis flagitiosis et sordidis amoribus videmus, nihil aliud eos agere qui amari vicissim volunt, nisi ut documentis quibus va- lent aperiant et ostendant quantum ament, eamque imaginem justitise praetendere anectant, ut vicem sibi reddi quodam modo flagitent ab eis animis, quos illecebrare moliuntur; ipsique ardentius aestuant, cum jam moveri eodem igne etiam illas mentes quas appetunt sentiunt : si ergo et animus qui torpebat, cum se amari senserit excitatur, et qui jam fervebat cum se redamari didicerit, magis accenditur : manifestum est nullam esse majorem causam qua vel inchoetur vel augeatur amor, quam cum amari se cognoscit, qui nondum amat aut redamari se vel posse sperat, vel jam probat qui prior amat. Et si hoc etiam in turpibus amoribus, quanto plus in amicitia'? Quid enim aliud cavemus in offensione amicitiae, nisi ne amicus arbitretur quod eum vel non diligimus, vel minus diligimus quam ipse nos diligit ? Quod si crediderit, frigidior erit in eo amore uo invicem homines mutua familiaritate perfruuntur : et si non ita estr infirmus ut haec ilium ofFensio faciat ab omni dilectione frigescere ; in ea se tenet qua non ut fruatur, sed ut consulat diligit. Operae pretium est autem animadvertere, quo modo, quamquam et superiores velint se ab inferioribus diligi, eorumque in se studioso delectentur obsequio, et quanto magis id senserint, tanto magis eos diligant, tamen quanto amore exardescat inferior, cum a superiore se diligi senserit. Ibi enim gratior amor est, ubi non aestuat indigentiae siccitate, sed ubertate beneficenlise profluit Ille namque amor ex miseria est, iste ex misericordia. Jam vero si etiam se amari posse a superiore desperabat inferior, ineffabiliter commovebitur in amorem, si ultro ille fuerit dignatus ostendere, quantum diligat eum qui nequaquam sibi tantum bonum promittere auderet. Q,uid autem supenus Deo judicante, et quid desperatius homine peccante ? qui se tanto magis tuendum et subjugandum superbis potestatibus addixerat, quae beatificare non possunt, quanto magis desperaverat posse sui curam geri ab ea potestate quae non malitia sublimis esse vult sed bonitate sub- lines est. " Si ergo maxime propterea Christus advenit, ut cognosceret homo quantum eum diligat Deus; et ideo cognosceret ut in ejus dilectionem a quo prior dilectus est inardesceret, proximumque illo jubente et demon- strante diligeret, qui non proximum, sed longe peregrinantem diligendo factus est proximus ; omnisque Scriptura divina quae ante scripta est ad praenuntiandum adventum Domini scripta est ; et quidquid postea man- datum est litteris et divina auctoritate firmatum, Christum narrat, et dilectionem monet: manifestum est non tantum totam Legem et Pro- NOTES. 573 phetas in illis duobus pendere praeceptis dilectionis Dei et proximi, quae adhuc sola Scriptura sancta erat cum hoc Dominus diceret, sed etiam quaecumque posterius salubriter conscripta sunt memoriaeque mandata divinarum volumina literarum. Gluapropter in veteri Testamento est occultatio novi, in novo Testamento est manifestatio veteris. Secundum illam occultationem carnaliter intelligentes carnales et tunc et nunc pcE- nali timore subjugati sunt. Secundum hanc autem manifestationem spi- ritales, et tunc quibus pie pulsantibus etiam occulta patuerunt, et nunc qui non superbi quaerunt, ne etiam aperta claudantur, spiritaliter intelli- gentes donata caritate liberati sunt. " Quia ergo caritati nihil adversius quam invidentia ; mater autem invidentiae superbia est ; idem Dominus Jesus Christus, Deus homo, et divinae in nos dilectionis indicium est, et humanae apud nos humilitatis exemplum, ut magnus tumor noster majore contraria medicina sanaretur. Magna est enim miseria superbus homo : sed major misericordia, humilis Deus. Hac ergo dilectione tibi tam&uam fine PROPOSITO QUO RE- FERAS OMNIA QUJE DICIS, aUIDQUID NARRAS ITA NARRA UT ILLE CDI LO- QUERIS ACDIENDO CREDAT, CREDENDO SPERET, SPERANDO AMET." These last words are tolerably decisive as to the opinion of Augus- tine, respecting the manner in which the character and purpose of God, and the object of the Gospel, should be set before those who have not yet been received into his covenant. In this point of view his remarks would seem to me chiefly important to missionaries, who are acting directly upon the minds and consciences of heathens. I should never have dreamed of arguing the question at all in reference to those who have been brought up in a Christian country ; who believe that they are struggling far a higher idea of Christianity than that which prevails among their countrymen generally, whose fathers did actually, as I think, maintain a fundamental Church principle which was in great hazard of being forgotten, and have transmitted to their descendants at least the form of that principle, divested I allow, to a great degree, of its strength and vitality, but on the other hand hallowed by feelings of old association and reverence. To deal with such men as if they stood upon the same ground with heathens, because they have not been baptized, seems to me a wilful denial of the effects which God's covenant has produced upon a society which it has encompassed for a thousand years, under pretence of doing honour to the sign of that covenant. In quoting then St. Au- gustine, I mean merely to prove, that even upon this hypothesis we are not warranted by the practice of antiquity, in treating Quakers as if they must receive baptism, before we can speak with them respecting the principles and end of the Gospel. Whoever produces the maxim ayia aytoiq in opposition to the mode of reasoning which I have adopted with the Quaker, is not attacking me but St. Augustine. Nor will he make his case better, if he should plead that the heretic who adopts parts of the Gospel and rejects the rest, and who lives under 37 574 NOTES. the shadow of the Catholic Church, is really in a worse condition than the heathen, and must be treated as one who has sinfully sacrificed all his powers of spiritual apprehension, and can only be appealed to by arguments addressed to his sensible experience. For then we shall pro- duce the two books of Augustine, 1 De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholics et de Moribus Manichaeorum ;'* books written for the express purpose of convincing those who had been seduced, by what St. Augustine knew from his own experience to be the most fatal of all heresies. I allude to this work the rather, because there are many passages in it, which might lead one to suppose that he would in this particular case have adopted the maxim against which I am contending. For instance, in one place he says, speaking of the manner in which the Manichaeans treated the Old Testament, u Dicendum est vobis, Non est vestrum ista intelligere. Non parum mihi cogniti estis. Crassas omnino mentes et corporeorum simulacrorum pestifero pastu morbidas ad divina judicanda defertis, quae multo altiora sunt quam putatis." And again, " Poteram pro mea medio- critate discutere singula, et eruere ac demonstrare quae accepi, in quorum excellentia et altitudine plerumque verba deficiunt : sed quamdiu latra- tis, non est faciendum. Non enim frustra dictum est Nolite sanctum dare canibus. Ne succenseatis. Et ego latravi et canis fui, quando mecum jure non docendi cibo, sed refellendi fustibus agebatur. Si autem in vo- bis esset caritas, de qua nunc agitur, vel etiam si fuerit aliquando, quan- tam cognoscendae veritatis magnitudo desiderat, aderit Deus qui ostendat vobis neque apud Manichaeos esse Christianam fidem, quae ad summum apicem sapientiae veritatisque perducit, qua perfrui nihil est aliud nisi beate vivere, neque esse uspiam, nisi in catholica disciplina." And again, " Unde illud exoritur, quod ab initio satagimus, nihil in Ecclesia catholica salubrius fieri, quam ut rationem praecedat auctoritas." From these passages one might easily infer that Augustine would appeal only to such low hopes as these low minds could reach, would give nothing but fieshless bones to these barking dogs, would insist upon their submitting to the authority of the Church, before he treated them as capable of hearing any reason. How stands the case ? He declares at the outset of his treatise (c. 2), that he wTill appeal only to those scrip- tures which they themselves recognise, and will try the Church by those moral signs which they hold to be sound (c. 3) ; that though according to the true order of nature, authority ought to precede reason, he should nevertheless call upon them to receive nothing, for which he did not pro- duce a reason. Adding " Delectat enim me imitari quantum valeo man- suetudinem Domini met Jesu Christi, qui etiam ipsius mortis malo, quo nos exuere vellet, indutus est." And to what kind of reasons does he ap- peal 1 He inquires what the Summum Bonum is, he shows what an appetite there is in man after it, he proves that God must be the good, and that the knowledge and love of God must be the eternal life, which • August, torn. i. p. 512. ed. Benedict. NOTES. 575 men are craving. These are the principles from which he starts, and to which all that he says about the Scriptures, and the Church, is referred. And he does not speak of these matters in a cold dry spirit, as if he were addressing men before whom he was afraid of exhibiting any deeper emotions ; his words often rise almost into a rapture, though he never for a moment loses his intellectual clearness, or his human affection.* I think then that in abandoning the argument from safety, and in appealing to the principles which are still acknowledged by those who have wandered the farthest from what I believe to be the order of the Catholic Church, I am acting in the spirit of these passages. The other method seems to me to be formed from an incongruous combination of the hardest maxims and precedents of the early times, with the most vul- gar of our own. It is an attempt to graft Paley upon Chrysostom, to establish ancient Christianity by the help of the Stock Exchange. [B.] The following passage from Tittmann's Meletemata Sacra (pp. 27 — 29) will explain the allusion in the text, " Nobis quidem inde a longo tempore visa est, atque etiamnum videtur maximas veritatis notas habere sententia ea, quam innuimus loc. cit deinde vero dudum prolatam fuisse vidimus a Laur. Valla, Not. in N. T. cujus verba infra scripsimus,t et Beza, Not. ad h. 1. ; nostris temporibus autem in primis exornatam a I. A. Cramero, Beytrage zur Beforderung theol. Gelehrsamkeit, P. i. p. 232, et Gabr. Chr. Beni. Moschio, Ecklar. der Evangel. P. i. p. 289. pro- batam quoque Jo. Aug. Ernesti, Bibl. Theol. Nov. T. iii. p. 129, sqq. Scilicet, ut dicamus breviter, nec repetamus, quae V. T. disputavimus loco citato, vocabulum ).6yov arbitramur denotare promissum, usurpatumque esse loco rov ).ty6fitvoq, quod plane sequipollet vocabulo magis usitato ; 6 ioxofitvoq, ejusque usurpandi causam repetitam esse, partim ex more illorum temporum in cogitando denominandoque Servatore, partim ex usu loquendi, partim a consilio Joannis in scribendo hoc libro, partim denique a consuetudine Domini ipsius in se describendo. Primum enim mos illorum temporum, et ex ipsa rei natura, quoniam Servator erat turn futurus, et ex consuetudine V. T. receptus, fuit hie, ut Messias diceretur 6 iox6tutvos, xzn et quemadmodum Cyrillus Hieros.j innuit, ex loco Gen. xlix. 10, in N. T. autem eodem nomine insignitus legitur saepissime, veluti Matth. xi. 3. • See especially the passages between the eighteenth and twenty-sixth chapters of the first book, — a noble piece of Christian Ethical Philosophy. t Sunt autem haec : o Aoyoq benedictum illud semen declarat, de quo Adamo, Abra- hamo, Isaaco, Jacobo, Davidi, et electis omnibus, locutus est Dominus, quasi sermonem, seu Promissum, Dei voces. X Catech. xii. p. 262 ed. Prenot. 576. NOTES. ubi Joannes Baptista quseri ex eo jussit, ab t2 o io^itroq, tj ttsgor 7TQoodo%o)fisv; et apud ipsum Joannem, cap. vi. 16. xi. 27. Unde Judseis, in primisque Christianis, neque incognitum plane nomen esse po- tuit, neque insusitatum in consuetudine vulgari. Deinde quod koyov Evangelista dixit loco vocis Xfyo/uevoq, id quidem offendet neminem, con- suetudinis loquendi Scripturarum sacrarum vel leviter peritum : constat enim, vocabula abstractorum pro concretis centies adhiberi, idque non raro factum esse alias quoque in denominando Domino nostro ; veluti quando amtTjota appellatur loco aonrjooq cap. iv. 22, item t,(orj et cpiaq, aut apud Lucam, Ev. ii. 25 et 30, oonrjqtov et naodxlrjoiq rov 'JcocrqA. Nec dubitationem habere potest, vocabulo Xoyov tribui posse earn vim quam diximus, quoniam vocabulum Hebraicum quod Graeco respondit, Gra?- cumque ipsum Rom. ix. 6, sexcenties in locis de promissione dictum extat} atque ab interpretibus Graecis translatum reperitur ayyeUa et inayytXtoj veluti Prov. xii. 25, atque adeo fayofievoq idem sit et esse possit, quod InayytXXofievoq. Unde etiam in loco Sap. xviii. 15, Angelus divinitus promissus et ablegatus Xoyoq Qiov appellatur, de quo vid. Schleusneri Spicilegium Lexici in interpr. Gr. V. T. Spec. i. p. 75. Ac plane eandem vim vocabulum XoXov obtinet in reliquis libris, Joannis nimirum, 1 Ep. i. 1, ubi Dominus appellatus est loyoq rrq id est, promissus auctor fe- licitatis ; et Apoc. xix. 13, in quo loco dicitur Xoyoq rov 6eov, hoc est, a Deo promissus. Turn porro consilium Joannis in scribendo Evangelio, cum fuerit hoc, ut demonstraret, quemadmodum supra vidimus, Jesum esse promissum exspectatumque Messiam ; facile quisque videt quam aptum sit ei consilio, quamque accommodatum vocabulum rov Xoyov, nunc * ipsum promissum Messiam exprimens. Ad extremum, quod in primis notabile est, Domini ipsi in sermonibus omnibus in hoc libro commemo- ratis, solenne fuit, se appellare legatum a Patre, Patrem vero mitlentem, seque describere tanquam eum qui missus a Patj'e, profectusque in has terras venerit, atque ad eundem rediturus sit ; veluti cap. vi. 38, xvi. 28, xiii. 3, reliqua ; quo innuere volebat manifeste se esse rov in/ofiivov, hoc est, Messiam promissum exspectatumque. Atque hsec consuetudo Do- mini videtur fuisse causa praecipua usurpandi hujus vocabuli alias in hac re paulo insolentioris. Itaque sensus verborum priorum, est hie : pro- missus Servator extitit ante rerum omnium initia, tanquam scriptum fuisset hoc modo, iv aoxrj r\v 6 hyoptvoq owttiq." These remarks would be comparatively unimportant if they merely expressed the opinions of an individual critic, even of one so respectable as Tittmann. But the reader will perceive that he is able to produce a fair list of authorities upon his side, some of them dating as far back as the Reformation, some numbered among the scholars of the last age. All these, with more or less reservation, subscribed to an interpretation, which if it were applied to any passage in any uninspired author, would have been rejected by every one of them with indignation and disdain. Now there must be a reason for this. Men who have studied the laws of language NOTES. could not talk in this way about substituting the abstract for the concrete, or produce such utterly inapplicable parallels from other parts of Scripture, and then resort to the insolent critical dogmas, that ' no one who is in the least degree acquainted with the language of the Bible can be offended' by such a departure from all ordinary principles and usages, if there were not some deeply rooted habit of thought and feel- ing with which the simple mode of rendering the words is at variance. What this is, perhaps, we may for a moment be puzzled to discover ; for the feelings of the writers near the time of the Reformation were, in many respects, directly opposed to those of their successors in the two following centuries. But if we remember the great eagerness which there was among the writers of the earlier period, to assert the distinc- tion of the Bible from all other books, and above all, to cut it off from any fellowship with philosophy, we need not wonder that they should have de- sired wholly to separate the use of the word upon which the Gospel of St. John turns, from the same word as it is employed by Plato and by Philo. The early Socinian writers perceived the fact, which the orthodox Protestants had determined to overlook, and made use of it to prove, thai if this expression imported something abstract and impersonal in either of the uninspired writers, it must have the same import in the sacred ones. That those who replied to them should take fresh pains to assert the special signification, and should pronounce the effort to con- nect it with any other as profane and heretical, was to be expected. Then came the time when the classical writers began to be spoken of with respect ; when the ordinary Protestant commentator was rather glad to look upon Scripture as containing a new and expanded form of heathen morality, and when the descendants of the Polish Socinians be- gan to exercise an important influence on theological opinion. In such a time, one might have looked for a reversal of the former decrees, for a rather excessive willingness to find out an analogy between St. John and the Heathen or Jewish teacher. But by this time Platonism had been just as much exhausted of its meaning as Christianity. So far as any heathen philosopher was found to have laid down fine maxims about virtue, he was respected as a Christian, minus the belief in Christ. But when he uttered any thing which savoured of a feeling and recog- nition of mystery, the reverence for him disappeared; here his paganism or false philosophy was thought to have obtruded itself. A new merit was discovered in the Gospel, that it put an end to such dreams, and brought every thing within the region of common sense. As this feeling belonged both to the believers and to the deniers of the old Creeds, it was not won- derful that the former should be glad of any expedient for proving that St. John, though he asserted a strange dogma, was perfectly free from all taint of mysticism ; and that the latter should have endeavoured to evade the authority of his words, by alleging that he certainly did show symptoms of a tendency which the enlightened of all parties had agreed 578 NOTES. c to denounce. In our own day, the evangelieal protest against mere heathen morality, and the terror of the new attempts to exhibit Chris- tianity as only one out of many forms of religious faith and opinion, have led to the same desire for an exclusive interpretation, which prevailed for different reasons in former periods. Tittmann's interpretation, there- fore, is very likely to be a popular one among religious people both here and abroad. But can we be honouring Scripture, while we are consciously attempt- ing to find strange and tortuous explanations of its most awful and char- acteristic passages ? Ought not every theological student to suspect himself, if he feels that he is inclined to take refuge in this or any similar contrivance for evading the ordinary force of words ? I do most ear- nestly press this thought upon those whom it may most concern, because it seems to me that the recovery of a sound spiritual theology among us depends mainly upon the temper of mind in which we apply ourselves to the study of St. John's Gospel ; upon the way in which we connect it with Old Testament history and prophecy, and upon our willingness to acknowledge that it does interpret to us the history of God's dealings with men in all time. The more I look at the different directions which men's thoughts are taking in this day, the more it seems to me that this is the subject to which we ought to devote ourselves ; and the right meditation upon which may save us from a thousand confusions, and help us to bring the most apparently opposite feelings into reconciliation. The three following notes may perhaps help to explain my meaning, and may enable the reader better to understand the purpose of all my other hints. [G.] It had always been the impression, I believe, upon the minds both of ordinary readers and of scholars, that the Comedian of Athens intended to represent Socrates as a Sophist, who was corrupting the old spirit of Greece, with modern philosophical refinements. Upon this view of the case, Aristophanes, though he may have entirely mistaken the character and objects of the person whom he was ridiculing, will still confirm the impression which we derive from other sources, that he was emphatically a moral teacher, that he meddled with physical speculations only just so far as they illustrated his principles concerning the life of man, that his great effort was to awaken men to self-knowledge. A Teacher who asserted that a constant conflict was going on in man between two prin- ciples, one drawing him upwards, one dragging him to earth, might easily be represented as keeping a right and a wrong reason, and being able upon all fitting occasions to make the latter predominant. One who urged his pupils to study the meaning of words, might be plausibly NOTES. 579 accused of inventing the most subtle and aerial distinctions. One who wished to guide them through the thick coming thoughts and fancies which the teachings of the sophists had stirred up within them to a solid foundation, might easily be suspected of administering to the growth of self-consciousness, and so of interfering with simple and practical life. These charges are just such as any man coming into a vicious state of society, and seeking to reform it, not by preaching about the past, but by actually entering into the present, and endeavouring to find a way out of its confusions, must always incur. It is the best proof which can be afforded of the talent of Aristophanes, that he so clearly understood the kind of work in which Socrates was engaged ; the best excuse for his character, that he confounded him with persons who deserved all repro- bation, and whom he was, by a very different course to that which the Comedian followed, refuting and exposing. But a modern editor of Aristophanes, Mr. Mitchell, whose English notes, whose criticisms, and whose previous translations, are likely to make his work very popular, has promulgated an entirely new theory upon this subject. He maintains that the notion of the objects of Socrates which we obtain from either of his disciples, or from tradition, is utterly false ; that he was primarily, and almost exclusively, a physical philos- opher, that as such he is ridiculed in the Clouds, and that the hero of that part of the play which seems to describe him in another character, is really not Socrates but Euripides ! The last hypothesis will, I should think, be a much more effectual confutation of this ingenious scheme, than any arguments which can be brought against it. To prove his point against the philosopher, Mr. Mitchell is obliged to destroy our respect for the genius of his own favourite poet. For he represents this his most elaborate composition as utterly deficient in unity of purpose or principle, as nothing but a col- lection of incoherent lampoons upon two persons, who it would appear were not even connected by a common object or by the same class of pursuits One can scarcely imagine a more satisfactory confirmation of the common opinion, that Socrates was what Xenophon and Plato (much as they differ in the character of their minds, and in their ways of regard- ing their master) both represent him to have been, than that which is supplied by this desperate effort to set it aside. So far as the assertion in the text is concerned, these remarks might be sufficient. But I cannot help perceiving that Mr. Mitchell's remarks on this point are in strict accordance with those which he is everywhere endeavouring to propagate, respecting Greek philosophy generally, and that he is availing himself, it seems to me most mischievously, of Christian feelings and prejudices in support of them. In a passage of his Preface to the Clouds, he gives it as his opinion, that the highest honour which Pythagoras ever received was to be made 1 the hero and object of ridicule in one of Lucian's unmatched dialogues.' He speaks of him and of 580 NOTES. Epimenides and Empedocles as 1 impostors ' and ' Charlatans.' And having assumed that Socrates belonged to the same class of thinkers with them, and received much of his teaching from the Italian school, he leaves his readers to draw the inference that he was an impostor and charlatan also. As our notices of Pythagoras, though sufficient to show that the greatest among the Greeks regarded him with respect and admiration, are rather scattered and miscellaneous, my readers may wish to know something of the process by which Mr. Mitchell arrives at his conclusions respecting him. Perhaps they may suppose that he collects the remarks respecting him, which are to be found in Plato and Aristotle, that he then resorts to Diogenes Laertius, and finally avails himself of any hints which Cicero either from Greek or Italian sources may be able to supply. No, our author disdains all these vulgar methods. His authorities are derived from a period subsequent to the Christian era. He takes the life of Apollonius of Tyana by the sophist Philostratus. He finds that this mythical hero equipped himself in the cast-off garments of the Samian, inventing, he fairly confesses, some stories, but in alL probability " finding others ready made to his hand ;' the chief ground for this last opinion being that ' the immortal Lucian ' believed or feigned to believe them. Out of these materials Mr. Mitchell constructs a Pythagoras, and thence by the easiest process imaginable (his former hypothesis being admitted), a Socrates. I entreat my reader to verify these assertions, by turning to the pre- face of which I have spoken ; for I do not ask him to believe on my authority that any scholar conversant with the laws of historical evidence, has adopted such a course for discovering the character and merits of an ancient teacher. It is quite superfluous to observe in what way the pre- cedent might be applied to other cases. Of course if any Father or Apostle has been chosen for the subject of a biography by an Italian monk of the last or present century, who has discovered his relics and wrought miracles with them, that biography must henceforth be received as genuine ; upon the strength of it the Father or Apostle of it must be pronounced an impostor or charlatan, provided only Voltaire or some other immortal Lucian of the west has adopted it as the warrant for his jests. Nevertheless Mr. Mitchell's statements will in many quarters be eagerly received. There are some who seem to think that the proof of the divine origin and worth of Christianity depends upon the mean esti- mate which we form of all the wise men whom Greece produced in its best days ; that if we can but succeed in wiping out the respect for them, no matter by what means, there is a tabula rasa on which we may inscribe all the feelings and principles of the New Testament. Alas ! what a tabula rasa ! one on which scorn, skepticism, indifference to all earnest hopes, unbelief in any principle, have been written in the deepest char- acters beforehand ! These are the preparations for the Gospel ! These NOTES. 581 are the habits of mind which we are to foster in order that we may feel our own nothingness, and our need of a Divine Teacher, and may believe that we have one ! That facts are against such a notion ; that the skeptics and scoffers of the ages after Christianity had been proclaimed, were not the men most ready to receive it ; that those who were most earnestly and truly holding fast that wThich they had, seeking for God by every light which Mythology or Philosophy threw in their way, were those who most welcomed the voice of the messenger bringing good tidings, and saying, Behold your God — this is certain. Nevertheless in the teeth of the clearest evidence of this kind, we suppose that we are proving Christianity to be that which all men want, by proving that all those who showed they did want it were imposing upon others or upon themselves. The ground for such a suspicion is however the point upon which I am most anxious to speak. It is this : whenever these heathen philoso- phers perceived a great moral principle, the knowledge of which they believed might be for the good of ages unborn, they said they were inspired. Now that they were ignorant of the conditions, under which spiritual life and wisdom are communicated ; that the belief of being taught from above produced an intoxication which at times carried them into extravagant courses ; that it may have ultimately engendered a vanity which was the parent of real impostures, I make no doubt. But I ask, is it safe, in spite of all these facts, to say that honesty of purpose, and real positive wisdom, were the fruits of delusion and falsehood ? All that is sincere in my mind revolts against such an opinion. Good pro- duces good, lies bring forth lies ; what there was of deceit in these men led to evil results, kept up a superstition which was ultimately exposed and which carried away much sound faith along with it ; but they did some good, great good. Did this come from any hollowness and trickery, Mt] ytvoixo ! It must have come from deep and wise counsels ; earnest meditations; loving feelings. And whence came these? Aie we just because we are Christians, to say it was pretence and cheating to affirm that they came from the source of all truth and good? Are we just because we know that not only rains and fruitful seasons, but all holy thoughts, good counsels and just works have a divine Author, to say that the dim recognition of this truth by elder men was actually a crime ; that they would have been better and wiser if they had taken the honour to themselves ? Yet we must charge this humility upon them as a sin, if we are determined to adopt the Pelagian doctrine, that the good which was in these men had its root in human nature, existing apart from God, and not in the teachings and impulses of the divine Word. 582 NOTES. [D.j The reader will find in Mr. Coleridge's ' Aids to Reflection,' a most valuable passage on the subject of Mysticism, in which the two senses of the word to which I have alluded in the text are finely and accurately distinguished. The instances which are there referred to, as illustrating the way in which a profound apprehension of the law and mystery of our own being, derived either from the simple study of the word of God, or from that study improved by reading and cultivation, may connect itself with notions and allegories suggested by the fancies of particular minds, are those of Buhme and Fenelon. They are most happily chosen — the one as exhibiting the most perfect type of Protestant, the other of Romish, mysticism. But the instance of Philo is perhaps more striking and im- portant than either. No one who looks into his writings can fancy for an instant that he was not a laborious student of the Bible. To no one does the charge often preferred against spiritualists, of undervaluing the Scriptures, and substituting for them the wisdom which they had derived from some other quarter, apply less than to him. He evidently regarded his own sacred writings as more precious than all other books together. He evidently traced up all his thoughts and discoveries to the light which he had received from them. Nevertheless it is true, that Philo's Scrip- ture readings would most utterly confound any one who had been used to look at the text with simplicity. Such a person would not, I think, be inclined to say, (as nine out often who are not simple readers, but who bring to the study all the artificial notions and habits of their own time, certainly would say,) ' all this is mere stuff and nonsense.' He would perceive that there is something in it to which such words are very inap- plicable indeed, nay, that there is a continuous stream of thought through every part of his exposition, by following which, we become convinced that the records he is speaking of have an internal unity. At the same time, I am quite sure that the best and truest reader will be conscious of most restlessness and impatience, when he finds the records of a simple practical life, turned into a set of high-flown conceits and allegories about the different moral virtues, and the sensible and rational part in man. How then are we to distinguish the solid and the real from the fan- tastic in these remarkable books? It seems to me that the position of Philo supplies the answer. Nowhere so well as in Alexandria could a man learn what were the feelings and necessities of men, especially of thoughtful men, in the heathen world, what it was that philosophers were seeking after, what was requisite to satisfy their inquiries. Nowhere so ill as in Alexandria could a man find any thing which should interpret to him the simply domestic life or the national feelings and sympathies of the Jewish people. Going with the advantages which one kind of know- ledge gave him, to the study of his Scriptures, he found everywhere hints of a divine Teacher, who was guiding men out of the ways of NOTES. 583 sense, out of slavery to visible appearances, into the acknowledgment of an unseen Being. He knew how the reason in man had striven against the impressions of sense, had striven to realize an object answerable to itself ; here he found the other side of the picture. Here was the Reason of God leading that higher faculty which he had imparted to his creature to seek after him and to find him. Going with his ignorance to the same books — the real practical conflicts, the human doings, the outward crosses of those whom they speak of, became to him mere pictures and images of certain mental feelings and operations; he could recognise the world of human relations, only as an image world ; he was utterly unprepared for the mystery of the Word made Flesh. The first class of his thoughts connect him with the most thoughtful men of all times, living in a posi- tion the most unlike his own ; the latter connect him with them indeed so far as this, that they as well as he have been prone to read their own cir- cumstances and states of mind in the universal book, but those circum- stances and states of mind being different from his, there is little in their speculations to support his, or in his to afford an excuse for theirs. My object is not to give the reader any account of Philo's Scriptural allegories, nor even* to show how the acknowledgment of the Divine Word is worked into the whole tissue of his thoughts. My wish is merely to illustrate the way in w7hich he represents the Word as a Teacher ; in which he connects that teaching with the Reason of man ; in which he describes it as universal. The other side of the subject, his hints respecting the relation between the Word and the Absolute Being, are in the strictly theological sense more important. But I shall allude to them here only so far as they illustratethe point which belongs strictly to the history of Quakerism. I pass over then his assertion that the Divine Word was at once the framer of things and the image after which they were framed, (see the book on the Mosaic history of Creation, C.i. beginning nooXafiiov yao 6 &sbq to ch. v. 7rob<; alrjdtictv dyaSov^) and all other passages which refer to the physical universe, even though they may speak of an intellectual (noetic) universe as the type of this. Nor will I dwell upon his comment on the words, " and the Lord God took the man whom he had made, and set him in the Garden, to till it and to watch over it" — where he speaks of a distinction between that mind which was merely formed (TtXaoenq), and that which was created, this last, being " a pure reason, unparticipant of corrupt matter, enjoying a purer and more untainted constitution, which pure reason God appre- hends, not suffering it to go from him, but placing it as the watchman and governor of the different virtues which he has planted and made to bud around it." — (Allegories, Book i. §. 28.) Nor will I more than allude to his remark, which supplies an important limitation to the former words, that Cain and Abel represent " two opposite and conflicting opinions, the one whereof refers all things to the reason, as if it were the guide of thought, of feeling, of motion, of power ; the other refers to God as being 584 NOTES. his workmanship. With which two opinions, he adds, the same soul travails. But when they are brought forth, they must needs be divided, since it is utterly impossible for such enemies to dwell together." (On the sacrifices of Cain and Abel, § 1.) Such passages as the following are more directly to our purpose, and will be a key to the others. It is taken from a treatise on the ' Hus- bandry of Noah,' which is of course allegorized after the author's usual fashion. " Wherefore it is needful that our Reason, like a goatherd, or cow- herd, or shepherd, or keeper of cattle generally, should have rule, choos- ing that which is convenient before that which is pleasant either to itself or to the inferior creatures. Nevertheless, that the different portions of the soul are not left ungoverned, but have the blessing of a faultless and altogether good Shepherd, under whose conduct it is impossible that the council of thoughts should be disturbed and scattered, we must attribute, finally, and we might say exclusively, to the oversight of God Himself. For so it is shown to be of necessity under one and the same order, in that it looks up to one Overseer, since the being obliged to serve many different rulers is an intolerable calamity. And so good a thing is this office of the Shepherd, that it is rightly ascribed not to kings only, and to wise men, and to souls purified for the highest mysteries, but to God the universal Ruler Himself. The authority for this is not some insigni- ficant person, but a prophet, a psalmist, whom we may well trust. For he speaks thus, 1 The Lord is my Shepherd, and I shall not want.' Let each man say the same in his own part and measure ; for this is a song which it is comely for every godly man to meditate and sing over with himself, and which at the same time properly appertains to the whole universe. For water, and air, and fire, and whatsoever vegetables or animals are in these, things mortal, and things divine, the nature of the heavens, the courses of the Sun and Moon, the movements and harmo- nious dances of the other Stars, as if they formed one sheepfold, doth God, as Shepherd and King, guide according to order and law, setting over them his true Word, his first begotten Son, who is ready like the viceroy of a great king to receive and to render up the care of this holy flock. Let then the whole world, that greatest and most perfect sheep- fold of the true God say, 1 The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.' Let each say the same individually; not with that voice that comes through the tongue and mouth, which spreads through but a little por- tion of air, but with the far-reaching voice of the mind, which touches the very boundaries of the universe." I do not quote this passage for the sake of its style, which is perhaps somewhat inflated, but as a fair exposition of the idea which is expanded through the whole treatise ; the idea, I mean, that the living Word is the shepherd and teacher of the inner man ; ordaining the whole con- stitution of the mind, and holding direct and continual converse with NOTES. 5S5 it. In precisely the same spirit is the following passage from another work. "But it is a fearful thing for the soul to ascend into the contempla- tion of The Being by itself* not knowing the way, and at the same time lifted up by its ignorance and boldness. Great are the falls which hap- pen from such defect of knowledge and foolish daring. Wherefore Moses prays that he may have God Himself for his guide in the way which leads to Him. For he saith, ' If thou wilt not go with me, lead me not up from hence.' Therefore every movement without the divine direction and oversight leadeth to evil. And it were better to remain here below, leading this confused beggarly mortal life, as the greater part of men do, than having lifted ourselves up to heaven, through boast- ing to be turned back and confounded, which calamity has happened to multitudes of sophists, who have fancied that wisdom consisted in the invention of persuasive words, not in the most true faith of things. Perhaps also something of this kind is signified. 1 Do not lift me up on high by giving me wealth, or fame, or honour, or power, or whatever else belongs to the things called good, if Thou wilt not Thyself accom- pany them.' For these oftentimes procure the greatest curses and bless- ings to those who have them — blessings when God Himself is the guide of the mind; curses, when He is not. For to multitudes those things which are called goods, have been the causes of intolerable evils ; but he that followeth God uses as the fellows and comrades of his journey those Xoyoi whom it is customary to name angels. For it is written 'that Abra- ham went with them leading them on the way.' O beautiful equality when the guide is himself guided, giving what he receiveth, not one thing in place of another, but the very same thing reciprocated ! For while he is not yet perfected, he useth the divine Word as the leader or the way. For the oracle is, ' Behold I send My angel with thee before thy face, that he may keep thee in the way, that he may lead thee to the land which I have prepared for thee ; give heed to him and hearken to him, disobey him not, for My word is in him.' But when he hath come to the highest point of knowledge, vigorously running on, he will measure his paces with him who was before leading him in the way. For both will become followers of God, the universal Guide." (On the Migration of Abraham, ' 31.) Whatever may be thought of the somewhat startling words with which this passage concludes, no one, I think, can read them without feeling more clearly and strongly what the purpose of the epistle to the Hebrews, especially of the first chapter, is, and at the same time without obtaining a clearer light, respecting that form of Gnosticism, which con- nected itself with Jewish ideas. These Aoyoi or angels, ministers of God and to man, the Jew could recognise in his Scriptures ; might not Jesus be one of these? Neither absolutely divine nor absolutely human ; but belonging to a middle race between Godhead and Humanity? The 586 NOTES. writer of the epistle meets this opinion. He proves that the Scriptures speak of one who is not one of the Aoyot, but the A6yo^ not a Son of God buttfte Son of God. And then he goes on to show how this Son of God verily apprehended not the angels but the seed of Abraham. The re- mark of course is familiar to all students of theology. But it may not be wholly useless to suggest it to younger men, as one of the proofs that all the Scriptures become unintelligible and incoherent, when the idea upon which I am dwelling is lost sight of. The following extract from the treatise, ' On the confusion of tongues," has the same kind of value. Phiio has been speaking of the words, ' The tower which the sons of men have builded.' He supposes some jester to ask, why this phrase should be used, for who else but sons of men were likely to build cities and towers? He answers, that these words were not used carelessly or without a meaning. By them it i3 intimated, that the builders of the tower were men who were pursuing a multitude of objects, and had lost sight of the one Creator and Father of all. He then adds, " but the truly wise are fittingly called the sons of the one God, as Moses confesseth, where he saith, ' Ye are the sons of the Lord your God;' and again, 'God that begat thee.' And this belongs to those who have fashioned their souls to think, that that which is in itself pure and beautiful is the only good which is set up as the opposite fortress to that of pleasure, and serves for its subversion and overthrow. And though a man may not yet be fit to be called son of God, yet let him strive to fashion himself after his first begotten Word, the eldest of the angels : the archangel of many names ; for He is called ' Begin- ning,' and ' Name of God,' and ' Word,' and 1 The Man according to the divine Image (6 /.ax tixova avd-i)ono(;)\ and 'He that looketh upon Is- rael.' * * * For though we are not yet reckoned sons of God, yet we may be called so of ' His eternal Image' — ' the most holy Word ;' for this most venerable Word is the image of God." So in a very cabalistic commentary upon the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, he says, in reference to the words, ' he divided not the birds :' " For the word of God, solitary and monadic in the multitude of things that have become, and that are to perish, remaineth uncompounded, ever wont to ascend upwards, and studying to be the companion of the One. Wherefore there are these two undivided natures, that in us of Reason, and that over us of the divine Word. But being undivided, they divide innumerable other things. For the divine Word hath divided the things in nature, and hath distributed them all. And this reason of ours, whatever things or bodies it hath reasonably taken in, these it dis- tinguishes by innumerable ways, into innumerable parts, and never ceaseth from its dissections. And this comes to pass through the like- ness which it hath to the Creator and Father of the whole. For the divinity being unmixed, uncompounded, without parts, hath been to all the world the cause of mixture, combination, apportionment. So it is fitting that NOTES. 587 those things which are like to it, to wit, the reason in us, and that which is above us, being without parts and undivided, should be able, with mighty force, to divide and discriminate each of the things that are." (Who is the Inheritor of divine things 1) Sect. 48. There is a very striking passage in the early part of the first book on Dreams, which I would recommend to the attention of the reader, as an illustration of the way in which Philo connected the idea of Science or Knowledge, with submission to the divine guidance. So far from look- ing upon Science as something directly opposed to Faith, he speaks of it as being the direct opposite of Sense; a very remarkable thought in- deed, which he might have received from Plato, but which certainly seemed to him in strict harmony with the teaching of his own lawgiver and prophets. The evidence respecting Philo's opinion of the universality of the di- vine teaching is not to be gathered from particular passages, so much as from the whole spirit of his books. In all the language which 1 have quoted there is a constant reference to the teaching of the Word, as having reference to man. There is an absence of any attempt to limit the bless- ing within his own nation. In an indifferent Jew, or one who set but lit- tle store by his own Scriptures, looking upon the heathen writers as more profound or advanced than they were, this would have been natural. But with his extraordinary admiration and deep study of the Jewish writings, a study and admiration implying too the greatest thank- fulness for their original separation, and for the ordinances which dis- tinguished them from other people, one might have expected to find indi- cations here and there of the feeling which characterized hi3 country- men generally. It is evident, however, that his acknowledgment of the wisdom and knowledge of God, as the great objects and rewards of hu- man search, and the highest gifts the Creator can bestow, led him to look upon the Jew who, as be believed, had all facilities for this pursuit, as in a far higher condition than he would have been, if he had had the right to treat other men as utterly outcasts and aliens. We are not, however, left to conjecture or inference upon the subject. There is an especial treatise on the Thesis, that 'every virtuous man is a free- man.' In this treatise he lays it down as a maxim, supporting him- self by a line of Sophocles, that "he only is free, who hath God as his guide." § 3. And then when he has expounded the conditions and characteristics of freedom, he meets the question, where have such men as you imagine ever been, or where are they now ? He answers, that men, however rare, are to be found who excelled in virtue ; followed God as their only guide ; lived according to the right law of nature, who were not free only themselves, but inspired their neighbours with free thoughts. Such men he discovers in Greece among the 'seven wise men among some of the philosophers of the Eleatic School ; in India among the gymnos- 588 NOTES. ophists ; in Persia among the magians. From his express words, and from the habitual tone of his thoughts, it is evident that he did not look upon these men as wise or good, in virtue of any intrinsic quality, or because each man might be saved by his own religion, but because, amidst whatever perplexities and contradictions, they followed the one Guide and Shepherd, who had revealed Himself to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob ; that unseen and everlasting Word, who had entered into covenant with the Jews, and had brought them out of sensible idolatry ? into the light and liberty of his children. In some recent English attacks upon the Fathers (I do not refer to that of Mr. Taylor, who has taken a somewhat different line) the charge of adopting the Quaker doctrine respecting the Logos, was put very prominently forward. But these writers did not know how strong their case was. They fancied that the Greek Fathers were merely advancing this notion as one among a great number of others. They should have said boldly, ' This heresy is not one which these teachers took up acci- dentally ; it is woven into the very tissue of their thoughts; their minds were infected by it to the very core. You might as easily take away the doctrine of justification by faith out of Luther, as this doctrine out of them.' Such language as this would have been perfectly true, and it would have brought matters much more directly to an issue. If, for instance, instead of giving a number of extracts, all certainly much to the point, but still leaving room for the hope, that the general tone of thought in the first three centuries might be sound, they had given an analysis of the Pedagogus of Clemens, or indeed of any of his other writings, or had availed themselves of those which the present Bishop of Lincoln has introduced into his lectures, they would have left their readers without a doubt, that the acknowledgment of the Divine Word as the invisible teacher of man in all periods, was involved in the very conception of Christianity, which belonged to these fathers; that if this acknowledgment be heretical, Clemens, and the Church generally, which did not condemn him but sympathized with him and regarded him as one of its greatest lights, were habitually, wilfully, radically heretical. Let such an opinion be but stated in terms, together with the ordinary defence of it, that by this doctrine the authority and inspiration of the Scriptures are set at nought ; and we, who believe this principle to be involved in every part of Scripture, who cannot see any grounds for its authority and inspiration when it is denied, who attribute much of the lifelessness of the Church in our day, much of the feebleness of our the- ology, much of our strife and division, to the habitual disregard of it, will be able frankly to state the grounds of our belief* and by God's NOTES. 589 grace, to encounter any consequences which may follow from the pro- fession of it In speaking of Philo, I have stated why I think one of these conse- quences is not the necessary adoption of all the different theories, respect- ing the interpretation of passages in Scripture and of symbols in nature, which have been promulgated by him, and by those who have acknow- ledged the presence of an invisible teacher. Of course, I cannot be so inconsistent as to deny the application of the same principle to the study ol the Fathers. I have stated in another part of this volume, why I suppose they, just as much as Philo, must have been without the means of entering into the practical life of the Hebrews. I do indeed discover in them a very different tone from that which I find in him ; all that difference in tenderness, consciousness of evil, a readiness to acknowledge themselves in the character of sinners, rather than to claim that of saints, sympathy with men more than with philosophers, which we might ex- pect from those who acknowledged a teacher who had taken human flesh, who, as Clemens expressed it, "assists in all things, both as man and as God ; putting away our sins as God ; training us not to sin as man." Above all, I can trace in them a sense of unity and fellowship, as members of one body, as inhabited by one Spirit, as worshipping the one Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which is a contrast rather than a resemblance to the isolated esoterical temper of the theosophist. But as to the outward relations of life and society, it seems as if their knowledge must have been very much on a level ; and therefore one cannot be surprised to find the same habits of thought in one as in the other. The hypothesis which has been put forward in a late publication that the cabalistic interpretations of Scripture by the early Fathers, may have been communicated by a special revelation, is surely one of the most gratuitous that was ever propounded by a theological writer. Its plausibility to students who have been used only to ; modern Protestant divinity," arises from the feeling, "this is so unlike any thing which other persons say, that it must have been given directly by some divine authority." But when we turn to a sage of an earlier time, who to all appearance never received the Gospel at all, who at any rate has never been reckoned among the teachers of the Church, and find precisely the same tone of thought prevailing in him, nay, probably a number of the very thoughts themselves, which are supposed to have been specially imparted to Lhe Christian sages, or to have been sacred traditions of our Lord's own words : when we find again in the writings of those whom our patristic schools most despise — of Protestants and Quakers — a ten- dency of the same kind, nay, oftentimes most curious resemblances to the actual cabala of the first ages, we may surely inquire whether such thoughts do not belong to human nature under certain circumstances and conditions of it, though they of course presume that nature not to be untaught from above. 590 NOTES. The Fathers, I apprehend, would have disdained altogether the kind of honour which their admirers are seeking to put upon them. Believing their hearts and reasons to be under the teaching of the divine Word, believing themselves to be created and constituted in him, they will have been much more disposed to regard their thoughts respecting na- ture and Scripture as spiritual intuitions, than as authoritative traditions. That they may have been tempted to attach great sacredness to these intuitions, to speak of them as if they were certain, is very true. Every one who has them feels them for a time to be certain ; he cannot feel otherwise. And hence the value of that corrective which was supplied to this dangerous but inevitable conviction in the acknowledgment that those things only were stable and everlastingly true for man which be- longed to the whole Church, not those which were the utterance of indi- vidual minds. These two principles balanced and harmonized, seem to supply the true witness and protection against both ancient and modern fanaticism, against both ancient and modern formality. The divine and everlasting Word is the teacher of each man ; his guide through the sensible into the spiritual, through the individual into the universal. In each man there is, according to the temper and habits of his age, a con- tinual tendency to mix that which is sensual with that which is spiritual ; that which belongs to the idiosyncrasies of his own mind with that which is permanent and for all. These utterances are not meant to be stifled. They remain as witnesses of what each age is ; the truth which that age was especially to defend and develope, could not be seen if they were withdrawn. Then certain men of each particular age say, that what belongs to them is true and perfect ; and other men rise up to show how much deeper wisdom was taught by a former age. Each would stamp with sacredness that which belongs to the fleeting accidents of a particular period in the world's history. But He remains who is the Father of the everlasting age, the perpetual Guide of the spirits of all who will obey him — he remains by the fixed records of his own revelation, by the fixed ordinances of his own Church, by the order and succession of his own natural universe, to teach his servants how to discriminate between that which belongs to the constitution in which he has placed them, and that which belongs to their own, or to other men's apprehen- sions of it. Take away the belief of his presence, and the teachings of antiquity, yea, the written Scriptures of God themselves, become but oppressive restraints upon the spirit, unable to raise it above its own modes of thought, only imparting to it a miserable sense that it ought to rise, and cannot. Losing the conviction, that the whole Church is under his guidance, we at one moment affirm that we will believe nothing but what antiquity tells us, or nothing but what the Bible tells us ; the next moment we are the sport of every dreamer, who affirms that he has the Spirit which the Bible and the Fathers spoke of. For he speaks to something within us which tells us that we are meant to follow a living NOTES. 591 and not a dead voice, and because we will not receive the truth which is implied in that witness, it becomes to us a mischievous falsehood. We do not acknowledge the Word, the great distinguisher between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, " the discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart " who unrolls the volume of experience, and binds times and seasons together, and therefore the Spirit who is the knitter together of hearts, who would bind us into one family, and lead us into the know- ledge and enjoyment of the divine and ineffable Unity, seems to us a spirit of division, who enters our minds that he may exalt us in our own conceits; may lift us up one against another, may make us heady, high- minded, ■ lovers of ourselves more than lovers of God.' Note on Chap. II. Sect. iv. When I speak of the final result of the'experiment of pure Protestant- ism, it must be distinctly understood that I do not suppose those who are called Protestants in Germany, in Holland, in Switzerland, to have lost the blessings which they possessed before the Reformation, or those which were claimed for them then. I mean merely, that the systems called Lu- theranism, Calvinism, Zuinglianism, have had their day, and that the time of their extinction is at hand. No persons are more alive to this fact than Germans. Hence their eagerness to consolidate the professors of these systems into an 'Evangelical Church;' hence their desire to reconcile the ideas of the Eucharist prevailing among the Lutherans and the ' Reform- ed,' by mutual concessions; hence their willingness to tolerate, for a time, subjection to the State, if it will but deliver them from a sectarian posi- tion. The existence of such feelings must be a sufficient proof to all who are not themselves spell-bound by some system, that the descendants of the Reformers are not deserted by the Head of the Church, and that He maybe preparing for them blessings which the great men of the sixteenth century sighed for, but were unable to attain. I will not anticipate the latter portion of my book by explaining what these blessings are, or how they may operate as a cure for the evils under which Germany was groan- ing long before the Reformers arose to help her and purify her. Still less will I enter upon the practical question, by what means these blessings may be recovered. One thing is clear: those who think and feel the un- fortunate ecclesiastical position of Protestant Germany, are also the most determined not to abandon the principles of the Reformation. Some who may have been affected by Austrian or Bavarian influences may dream of recovering the position in which they were before Luther appeared ; but all men who are really in earnest, and who know what they mean, will repel such a thought as at once a folly and a sin. The idea that there must be a progress and not a retrogression is one which the German mind is full of, and which I should be very sorry to drive out of it. The only 592 NOTES. question is, about the nature of the progress. Beginning in the spirit, the Reformation has, in the most grievous sense, been made perfect in the flesh. Its principles have found no clothing but one of system, which has stifled them ; or one of a state organization, which stifles the minds and energies of those who profess them. The progress Protestants should desire is surely one towards an organization, which shall not be an arti- ficial but a vital expression of that which is the faith of the nation. If it should be found that the ecclesiastical organization which Germany once possessed, though corrupted and deadened by the denial of Christ's direct superintendence over it, is of this vital character, the recovery of it will not be less a growth than the acquisition of some newer one would be. Nay, it will be lar more a growth; for the one will belong to the proper history of the land ; the other will be some fantastic dress, fashioned like the institutions of Napoleon, according to the maxims of an age, and therefore an intolerable burden to all who look beyond it, and feel they have a portion in their fathers and in their posterity. Their Protestant- ism will make the old Catholicism new and living; the Catholicism which possesses this quickening element will, by degrees, extinguish the Ro- manist counterfeit of it ; the States, which no civil arrangements have been able to consolidate, will become one through their unity of faith, and the words of the poet will be fulfilled, that wherever his tongue is spoken, and God in Heaven praised in it, there the German will find his father- land. Note on the Athanasian Creed. As I have spoken in my article upon Creeds only of two, it may be supposed by the reader, that I have some reason for objecting to the third. Had I felt such objections I should have stated them openly, and not left them to be discovered by inference. There would be little courage in ac- knowledging them. The number of those who reject this Creed may not be so great as it was in the last century, but it is still large, and com- posed of persons respectable for their learning, their piety, and their in- fluence. Those who are most strong in defending it will find so much fault with my opinions on other subjects, that I should not be at all likely to conciliate them, by professing an agreement with them upon this. I omitted to speak of the Athanasian Creed, merely because it did not concern the subject I was treating of. Its formula is not, ' I believe,' but ' Quicunque vult.' It has never been connected with Baptism. It has never been used except as an occasional service in any Church ; its an- tiquity, though venerable, is certainly below that of others. Evidently, therefore, its merits or its defects stand upon a different ground from theirs. NOTES. 593 I will now endeavour to explain why the ordinary objections to it seem to me of little weight, and wherein I believe its value consists. The complaints against this Creed are chiefly two. 1. That it i3 not consistent with the Nicene, which asserts so clearly the idea of filial sub- ordination. 2. That it is at direct variance with the command, ' Judge not that ye be not judged.' If I believed either of these allegations to be true, the authority of no Church upon earth could induce me to use this formulary. But the more I have considered them, the less reason have I found in either of them. 1. The passage in the Athanasian Creed, which seems to some to in- terfere with the doctrine of the Nicene, is that in which it is affirmed that Christ is equal to the Father as touching his Godhead, inferior to the Father as touching his Manhood. Here we are told, 'it is signified, that the subordination of the Son to the Father is connected with his human nature. Whereas, according to the doctrine of the other Creed, which Bishop Bull has so finely developed, the subjection which was manifested in our Lord's acts when upon earth, was really involved in the very idea of his Being; that flesh which He took could not in any sense change the law of his existence, but was the medium through which it was shown forth.' I cannot doubt the truth of these remarks. The words, i Not I, but the Father,' seem to me to be the key to the mystery of our Lord's self-sacrifice, that is to say, of his innermost life ; how, then, can I think them other than the expression of his own very Personality? But it is implied in what I have said that the fulness of the Godhead was in the man Christ, that He was the perfect God. The very objection which we are considering rests upon the ground, that our Lord's acts, as a man, would not be a complete exhibition of himself, if we might regard them as only belonging to his assumed nature. But, if this be the case, — if we need to express two truths, one, the perfect and complete Godhead of our Lord ; one, his subordination as a Son to the Father ; each necessary to the other, each practically unmeaning without the other ; why may we not look at the union of humanity to the Divinity, as that which supplies us with the language for both ? The idea of subordination apart from all inequality, exists in the very nature of the Godhead; it is brought out and expressed through the inferiority of Manhood to Godhead. The Sonship of Christ is the type and ground of the relation in which t he hu- man stands to the divine. What then more complete and beautiful than the language of the Old Church upon this subject? Do we not feel that if we had only the Nicene Creed, — if a new heresy had not called forth another exposition, — we should have been in great danger of losing our apprehension of a truth, from having but one imper- fect form of language to unfold it in? Nay, do we not feel that as the Apostles' Creed, without the Nicene, would lead us into the danger of think- ing only concerning the relation in which the Divine Being stands to its ; so the Nicene Creed without the Athanasian, would still lead us to think 594 NOTES. merely of divine relations, without remembering that there is an absolute ground visible in them and through them ? 2. But the charge of uncharitableness is one which is far more popular and intelligible than that of which I have been speaking ; perhaps there- fore, I may venture to meet it in a popular way. We are commonly asked such a question as this : 'Though you may be able to explain away these clauses by ingenious sophisms in your study, do you not feel when you are reading the Creed in your Church to the people, that you arenot ut- tering the kind of words which you would wish to utter, or acting in the kind of spirit in which you would wish to act, when you read the seventh chap- ter of St. Matthew's Gaspel, or the thirteenth chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians?' I can only answer this question for myself ; but I doubt not there are hundreds who can say, with a perfectly clear con- science, what I say now. To the best of my knowledge and recollection, I never have felt tempted while reading this creed, however I may have felt tempted at other times, tn indulge one hard thought about the state of any man who is living now or has lived in former times. I do not think that the creed calls upon me to do this ; nay, I think that its awful lan- guage forbids me to do it. I dare not ask myself who has committed the fearful sin, of ' confounding the Persons and dividing the Substance,' which it denounces. It may not be the man who has used the most confused and heretical forms of expression ; it may not be the man who has even seemed to the Church to be most self-willed and refractory ; it may be the man who is resting most contentedly in his orthodoxy ; it may be my- self. Nay, have I not a witness within, that every wrong act which I have done, or wrong thought which I have cherished, so far as it has di- minished my sense of the distinction between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, has been of the nature of that sin which I describe by the words ' Confounding the Persons,' and has brought me into the danger of committing it ; that every self-willed, unkind, schismatical act or thought has been of the nature of that sin which I describe by the words ' Dividing the Substance,5 and has tended to bring me into it? For this creed takes me into another iegion altogether from that of words and names and forms of the intellect, though it makes use of those words and names and forms, for the sake of correcting the abuses which they have produced, and as signs which may show me my way to deeper truths and principles. It is my own fault if I stay in the outer region, and do not let the Church guide me into its inner circle ; it is my own fault if I do not warn others and warn myself, of the connexion between eternal truths and principles, and that ; doing good' or ' doing evil,' to which, as the creed declares in its last articles, eternal life or punishment are appended. But why do I wish to retain this creed, seeing that some may use it amiss for the condemnation of their neighbours, and not for good to them or to themselves? I answer, that if I parted with it, I think I should not help the cause of charity, and should do great injury to the cause of truth. NOTES. 595 The language of the Old Church may sound stronger and fiercer than that which is common in our day, but it is grounded upon the words, ' This is life eternal, that they may know Thee the only true God.' The bottomless pit which the fathers really dreaded was that of Atheism, the state of the human spirit left without God. I believe the more we return to this idea the more of inward charity we shall have, the more we shall understand our glory and our perils, the more we shall have, of common hopes and common objects ; the more we shall be free from vulgar sel- fish desires, and from superstitious fears. I could not give up this creed without saying, that the meaning and principle of it belonged less to this time than to former times. Whereas, I believe that they belong more to our time than to any time. For this, it seems to me, is the question which is in debate now. Are we to behold the unity which has its deep- est and most real ground in that name of God which this creed speaks of informing all society and all nature ; or are we to see every thing bro ken, dvided, unharmonized ; a dark form of self-love, embodied in some visible tyranny, above us, and a gulf of utter nothingness beneath us? THE END. IVEW WORKS AAD 1VEW EDITIONS OP ESTABLISHED) EPISCOPAL 80®l$, PUBLISHED BY D. APPLETON & CO., NEW-YORK: AND GEO. S. APPLETON, PHILADELPHIA. Just Ready, PAROCHIAL SERMON'S, BY JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, B. D. Fellow of Oriel College and Vio ir of St. Mary the Virgin's, Oxford. The six vol- umes of London edition complete in two elegant 8vo volumes of upwards of 600 pages each, $5 00 *.* Mr. Newman's Sermons have probably attain ed a higher character than any others ever published in this country. The following recommendatory letters from the several distinguish- ed Divines whose names are affixed, illustrate their importance. From the Bishop of New- York. It gives me great pleasure to hear of your design to publish an American edition of the Rev. John Henry Newman's Parochial Sermons. From a partial acquaintance with them by my own perusal, and a knowledge of the opinion entertaitied of them by brethren in whose correct views and sound judgment I have the fullest confidence, I have no hesitation in regarding these sermons as eminently calculated to promote the knowledge and practice of genuine evan- gelical religion. I have long, gentlemen, cherished a grateful sense of the obligation under which all true friends of that religion lie to you for the great good which your press has done to its cause. I cordially commend ihe present enterprise as worthy of all patronage, and would be glad to have these volumes of sermons in the possesion of every family in my diocese. For simplicity and godly sincerity, for humble and child-like reliance on the word of God, and for close, pointed, and uncompromising presentation of the truths and duties of the Gospel, I know not their su- periors ; nor their equals, except it be in the well known and generally approved "Plain Ser- mons, by Contributors to the Tracts for the Times." To all then who love the Gospel, and desire true instruction therein, I unhesitatingly com- mend Newman's Parochial Sermons. Wishing you success in the truly good work to which your press is so largely contributing, I have the honor to be, gentlemen, with great respect, Yours very truly, New- York, Dec. 7, 1S42. Benj. T. Onderdonk. From the Bishop of New Jersey. I highly approve your proposal to reprint Mr. Newman's admirable Parochial Sermons, and desire for them the most extended circulation. Much as I have been gratified by your repub- I cation of many excellent books, the heirlooms which the Church of England has derived from ancient piety, and learning, or the production of the vigorous minds and fervent hearts that now adorn while they defend her altars, I have looked and longed for an edition of these sermons, as your noblest contribution to the sacred literature of the times. Mr. Newman's Sermons are of an order by themselves There is a naturalness, a pressure towards the point proposed, an ever salient freshness, about them, which will attract a class of readers, to whom sermons are not ordinarily attractive. Again, they are of a wonderful comprehension. While they are ».t above the level of the plainest readers, they will interest and satisfy the highest and most ac- complished minds. With the most intellectual persons, they will win their way, 1 am sure, as no m idem productions of this sort have done But all these are but incidentals to their ster- ling and imperishable worth, as expositions of the truth of Holy Scripture, and exhortations to the duties of the Christian life, urged to the heart with an earnestness and unction scarcely paralleled ; abvove all, carrying with them a force beyond all argument, beyond all eloquence, in the living power of holiness with which they are instinct, to rouse the careless, to steady the wavering, to sober the worldly, to animate and elevate the humble seeker of the kingd >m of God and its righteousness, and to imbue the age with, what it needs the most, humility and heavenly-mindedness. I shall welcome your proposed volumes as powerful auxiliaries to my exertions to set forth the Gospel in the Church : and devoutly pray that God may bless them to the edification of many souls, and to the advancement of the pure and peaceful kingdom of His blessed Son. Bidding you "God speed" in your career of useful and most honorable enterprise, I am faithfully your friend, Riverside, St. Andrew's Day, 1842. G. W. Doane. From the Bishop of North Carolina. Raleigh, Nov. 28, 1842. Your letter announcing your intention to republish the Parochial Sermons of the Rev. John Henry Newman, B. D , Oxford, has given me sincere pleasure. In compliance with your request for my opinion of them, I do not hesitate to say, — after a constant use of them in my closet, and an observation of their effect upon some of my friends, for the last six years, — that they are among the very best practical sermons in the English language ; that while they are Divinity, Theology, Religious and Devotional Works. free from those extravagances of opinion usually ascribed to the author of the 90th Tract, they assert in the strongest manner the true doctrines of the Reformation in England, and enforce with peculiar solemnity and effect that holiness of life, with the means thereto, so characteristic of the Fathers of that trying age. With high respect and esteem, your friend and servant, L. S. Ives. From the Bishop of Maryland. Dec. 17, 1842. I am glad that you design to publish Mr. Newman's Sermons. The portions of their contents about which there is a difference of opinion, are not to be set in the scale against the general tendency of the volumes. — Deeply spiritual, and searching the reader' s heart with no ordinary insight into its recesses, they cannot fail to quicken faith, alarm lukewarmness, expose hypoc- risy, detect unbelief, and powerfully stimulate the sinner to repentance and the believer to re- newal and increase of holiness. Nowhere have I seen Christ crucified, yea, rather risen again, set forth with more plainness. By no practical writings have I been more strongly moved to loathing of sin, and utter renunciation of self-dependence. Man's helplesness and the all-suffi- ciency of Christ, are nowhere to be found set forth with greater earnestness of enforcement and variety of illustration. Very respectfully your obedient servant, W. It. Whittingham. From the Rev. Dr. Seabury (editorial notice in Churchman). We are pleased ro learn that D. Appleton & Co., contemplate the republication of Mr. New- man's Sermons. The English copy now forms six volumes, and cannot be furnished to pur- chasers at a less price than $3 a volume. The American copy, if published, will give the same amount of matter in two volumes, at $2 50 a volume : making a difference of 13 dollars. The wo k will be put to press as soon as a sufficient number of subscribers are obtained to indemnify the publishers. — We can hardly doubt that many of our readers, on seeing ths notice, will hand in their names. The sermons of Mr. Newman have already in this country produced the hap- piest effects, and we have long and often desired their republication, in order that the sphere of their influence may be enlarged. Now ready, Second Edition. THE HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. By Gilbert Burnet, D. D., late Lord Bish- op of Salisbury. With the Collection of Records, and a copious Index, revised and corrected, with additional Notes and a Preface, by the Rev. E. Nares, D. D. Illus- trated with a Frontispiece and twenty-three Portaits on steel. Forming four elegant 8vo vols, of near 600 pages each. $8 00 This is one of those great standard works for which the publishers have especially deserved the thanks of ecclesiastical students and of general scholars throughout the land. Oftentimes the heart of the lover of truth and true intellectual progress, sinks within him at the si^ht of the pernicious trash that is thrown so broadly before the reading public, and he feels it impossible that, under this influence, the public taste should not become depraved, the public morals de- bauched, and literature, which should be the minister of purity and virtue, made the engine of all corrupting vice. But the efforts, crowned, we are confident, with abundant success, of some of the principal publishing houses in this city and in Philadelphia, to bring out, in a style befit- ting their worth, the rarer standard works of English History and Theology, give ground of en- couragement and hope. To the student either of civil or religious history no epoch can be of more importance than that of the Reformation in Engiand. It signalized the overthrow, in one of its str ongest holds, of the Roman power and gave an impulse to the human mind the full re- sults of which are even now but partly realized. Almost all freedom of inquiry — all toleration in matters of religion, had its birth-hour then ; and without a familiar acquaintance with all its principal events, but little progress can be made in understanding the nature and ultimate ten- dencies of the revolution then effected. The History of Bishop Burnet is one of the most celebrated and by far the most frequently quoted of any that has been written of this great event. Upon the original publication of the first volume, it was received in Great Britain with the loudest and most extravagant encomiums. The author received the thanks of both Houses of Parliament, and was requested by them to continue the work. In continuing it he had the assistance of the most learned and eminent di- vines of his time ; and he confesses his indebtedness for important aid to Lloyd, Tillotson and Stillingfleet, three of the greatest of England's Bishops. " I know," says he, in his Preface to the second volume, "that nothing can more effectually recommend this work, than to say that it passed with their hearty appr obation, after they had examined it with that care which their great zeal for the cause concerned in it, and their goodness to the author and free- dom with him, obliged them to use.'' The present edition of this great work has been edited with laborious care by Dr. Nares, who professes to have corrected important errors into which the author fell, and to have made such improvements in the order of the wcrk as will render it far more useful to the reader or histor- ical student. Preliminary explanations, full and sufficient to the clear understanding of the au- thor, are given, and marginal references are made throughout the book, so as greatly to facilitate and render accurate its consultation. The whole is published in four large octavo volumes of six hundred pages in each — printed upon heavy paper in large and clear type. It contains por- traits of twenty-four of the most celebrated characters of the Reformation, and is issued in a very neat style. It will of course find a place in every theologian's library — and will, by no means we trust, be confined to that comparatively limited sphere. Divinity, Theology, Religious and Devotional Works. PALMER'S TREATISE ON THE CHURCH. A Treatise on the Church of Christ. Designed chiefly for the use of Students in Theology. By the Rev. William Palmer, M.A. of Worcester College, Oxford. Edited with Notes, by the Right Rev. W. R. Whittingham, D.D., Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Maryland. Two vols. 8vo., handsomely printed on fine paper. $5 00. M The treatise of Mr. Palmer, is the best exposition and vindication of Church Principles that we hare ever read ; excelling- contemporaneous treatises in depth of learning and solidity of judgment, aa much as it excels older treatises on the like subjects, in adaptation to the wants and habits of the age. Of its influence in England, where it has passed through two editions, we have not the means to form an opinion ; but we believe that in this country it has already, even before its reprint, done more to restore the sound tone of Catholic principles and feeling than any other one work of the age. The author's learning and powers of combination and arrangement, great as they obviously are, are less remarkable than the sterling good sense, the vigorous and solid judgment, which is every where manifest in the treatise, and confers on it its distinctive excellence. The style of the author is distin- guished for dignity and masculine energy, while his tone is everywhere natural ; on proper occasions, reverential ; and always, so far as we remember, sufficiently conciliatory. M To our clergy and intelligent laity who desire to see the Church justly discriminated from Ro- manists on the one hand, and dissenting denominations on the othei, we earnestly commend Palmer'* Treatise on the Church." — N. Y. Churchman. " This able, elaborate, and learned vindication of the claim of the Protestant Episcopal Church, to be consider the true Catholic Church, and the exposure which is here made of the grounds of difference between it and the Romish Church, and of •he baseless pretensions of that church lo be the ' one Holy Catholic, and Apostolic Church,' will assuredly commend these vol- umes to the favour of Churchmen. " At a moment when Popery aa it well expressed in the American Editor's preface, isspreading among ug bv ' the aid mainly of imported men, money, and members,' it is well, by a true relation of what Popery really if, to put the nation on guard against its encroachments. This service is done by this treatise, of which it were recommendation enough to say, that its re- publication has engaged the labours and time of, and is commended to the use of theological student by, certainly not the least learned, pious, andexemplary of our American Bishops. The publishers deserve a full share of commendation for the handsome ■tanner in which Uiey have sent forth these volumes." — N. Y. American. MAGEE ON ATONEMENT AND SACRIFICE. Discourses and Dissertations on the Scriptural Doctrines of Atonement and Sacrifice, and on the Principal Arguments advanced, and the Mode of Reasoning employed by the Opponents of those Doctrines, as held by the Established Church. By the late most Rev. William M'Gee, D.D., Archbishop of Dublin. Two vols, royal 8vo. beautifully printed. $5 00. K This is one of the ablest critical and polemical works of modern times. Archbishop Magee is truly a maleus hereticolinn. He is an excellent scholar, an acute reasoner, and is possessed of a most extensive acquaintance with the wide field of argu- ment to which his volumes are devoted— the profound Biblical information en a variety of topics which the Archbishop brings forward, must endear his name to all lovers of Christianity." — Ortne. HARE'S PAROCHIAL SERMONS. Sermons to a Country Congregation. By Augustus William Hare, A.M., late Fel- low of New College, and Rector of Alton Barnes. One vol. royal 8vo. $2 25. "Any one who can be pleased with delicacy of thought expressed in the most 6imple language — any one who can feel the charm of finding practical duties elucidated and enforced by apt and varied illustrations — will be delighted with this volume, which presents us with the workings of a pious and highly-gifted mind."— Quar. ittvieio. A MANUAL FOR COMMUNICANTS; Or the Order for Administering the Holy Communion ; conveniently arranged with Meditations and Prayers from Old English Divines, being the Eucharistica of Sam- uel Wilberforce, M.A., Archdeacon of Surry, (adapted to the American service.) Convenient size for the pocket. $37 |. M The order of this work is as follows :— first, " The Exhortation :" comprising the two exhortations which are inserted is Ihe Communion Office ; then the " Ante-Communion ;" next, " The Canon of the Holy communion ; beginning with the. Offertory and ending with the Form of administei ing the elements ; and lastly, the Post Communion. This pan of the work w the Communion Office as contained in the Prayer Book, slightly altered in its arrangement, and accompanied with a few short fcvotional meditations in the margin. After this is the Introduction by Archdeacon "Wilberiorce, chiefly on the importance of attendance at the Lord's Table, and the causos ol the present neglect ot the privilege. We have next a br.tf notice of the writers from whose works nre taken the extracts which form the body of the volume. These are Colet, Cruumer, Jewel, Hooker. Andrews. .Sutton, Laud, Hall, Hammond, Ti.ylor, I.eighion, Brevint, Patrick, Addisou, Ken, Sparrow, tieverid^e, Hickes, Comber, Kettlewell, Wilson, and Potter; whose names are arranged in chronological order, with a mention in few lines of their lives and characters. The remaiu.ier of the work is divided into three parts ; ot which the first consists ot Meditations on the Holy Communion ; the second of Prayers before and after Communion | to which are added, Bishop Wilson's Meditations on Sell ct Passage.", and Hi.-hop Patrick's Prayer lor one who cannot publicly communicate ; auO the third of select passage* explanatory of the Holy .Sacrament and the benefits of its worthy reception. These meditations, prayers and expositions, are given in the very words of ihe illustrious divines above mentioned, marly™, eoufetsors and doctors of the Chorea ; and they form altogether such a body of instructive matter aa is nowhere else lo be found in the same compass. Though collected from \arious authors, the whole is pervaded by a unity of spirit and purpose ; and we most earnestly commend the work as better fitted than any other which we know, tosubserve the ends of sound edification and fervent and substantial devotion. The American reprint has been edited by a deacon of peat promise in the Church, and Is appropriately deuicaied to the rJishop of tius diocese."— Churchman. Divinity y Theology \ Religious and Devotional Works. CHURCHMAN'S LIBRARY. The volumes of this Standard Series are printed on the finest paper, elegantly ornamented, av_ bound in a superior manner, and uniform in size. Bishop Doane says of this collection, " I write to express my thanks to you for reprints of the Oxford Books ; first, for such books, and secondly, in such a «'.yle. I sincerely hope you may be encouraged to go on, and give them all to us. You will dignify the art of printing, and you will do great service to the best interest of the country." In a letter received from Bishop Whittingham, he says, " I had forgotten to state my very great satisfaction at your commencement of a series of Devotional Works, lately republished in Oxford." The Publishers beg to state while in so short a time this Library has increased to so many volumes, they are encour- aged to make yet larger additions, and earnestly hope it may receive all the encouragement it deserves. The following Volumes have already appeared : — THE EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH. Or Christian History of England in early British, Saxon and Norman Times. By the Rev. Edward Churton, M. A. With a Preface, by the Right Rev. Bishop Ives. 1 vol. lGmo. elegantly ornamented. $1 00. ** The following' delightful pages place before us gome of the choicest examples — both clerical and lay — l Christ, and accomplished through the power of his saving truth, exhibits to us some great principle of C ristian act ton, and m>um powerful motive t 'go and do likewise.'" — Vide Preface. LEARN TO DIE. Disce Mori, Learn to Die : a Religious Discourse, moving every Christian man to enter into a serious Remembrance of his End. By Christopher Sutton, D. D., late Prebend of Westminster. 1 vol. 16mo., elegantly ornamented. $1 09. " Of the three works of this excellent author lately reprinted in England, the ' Disce Mori ' is, in our judgment, decid eilly the best. It was the favourite boc k of the Bishop of Joly, who, (the touching incident cannot be forgotten,! died with it in his hands. It was this fact, we belie ve, wnich first recalled the book from the oblivion into vvlnrli it haj falUn ; anil our readers may remember, that shortly after its republication in England, we urged an American reprint, on the ground that it was a book which would prove universally acceptable to the Church. Such is villi our opinion ; we do not believe that a single journal or clergyman in the Church will be found to say a word in its disparagement J but that, on the contrary, all will unite in commending it as one of the very best of our practical works, equally devo- tional and almost equally rich with the similar work ot Tavlor, and free from those leatures with which Taylor (turtle! such weak minds as have a morbid dread of Romanism. Our columns have been, and now that the book is reprinted, will again be, enriched with extracts which will make the ' Disce Mori ' favourably known to our readers. "— CAu; •c/tfjian. MEDITATIONS ON THE SACRAMENT. Godly Meditations upon the most Holy Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. By Chris- topher Sutton, D. D., late Prebend of Westminster. 1 vol. royal 16mo. elegantly ornamented. $1 00. " We announced in our last number the republication in this country, of Sutton's ' Meditations on the Lord's Supper* and having since read the work, are prepared to recommend it warmly and without qualification to the perusal of our readers. It is purely practical ; the doctrine of the Eucharist being touched upon only in solar as was necessary to guard against error. Its standard of piety is very high, and the helps which it affords to a devout participation of the holy sacrament of which it treats, should make it the inseparable companion of every communicant. We know indeed of no work on the subject that can in all respects be compared with it ; and for its agency in promoting that advancement in holiness after whicn every Christian should strive, have no hesitation in classing it with the Treatise on ' Holy Living and Dying ' of Bishop Taylor, and the ' Sacra Privata ' of Bishop Wilson. The penod at which the book was written wdl account for, and excuse, what in the present age would be regarded as defects of style ; but are fewer than might have been expected, and are soon lost sight of in the contemplation of the many and great txcoilencics with which it abounds. The publishers have done good service to the country in the publication of this work, winch is a beautiful reprint of the Oxford edition, and we are glad to learn that it will be speedily followed by the ' Disce Viverc ' and ' Disce Hot-i ' of the same author."— Bonner o/lA# Cross. Divinity, Theology, Religious and Devotional Works. A DISCOURSE CONCERNING PRAYER, And the frequenting Daily Public Prayers. By Symon Patrick, D. D., sometime Lord Bishop of Ely. Edited by Francis E. Paget, M. A., Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Oxford. 1 vol. royal 16mo. elegantly ornamented. $0 75. " This work treats of the nature and necessity of prayer, of the sense of all niaukind about this matter, especially of our blessed Saviour, of the honour done us by God in admitting' us into his pre- teuce, and of the great benefits we receive by it. It shows that public prayer is the most necessary etf all. that God is most honoured by it, that it is most advantageous to us, and most suitable to the nature of man, that the nature of a Church requires it, that our Saviour has taught the doctria*, which is confirmed by the practice of the Apostles and first Christians ; and it treats of daily pubba assemblies and hours of prayer. " To all who have been benefitted and instructed by Bishop Patrick's writings (that is, to all who ha»« with due care read, and meditated, and prayed over anyone of them) it is unnecessary to say a word in commendation of the work before us. To others it may suffice to say, that the sooner they make themselves master of this, and the other admirable works of his lately reprinted, the better will it b* far the soundness of their views in theology, and the firmness and steadiness of their growth in pieti and Christian virtue."' — Charleston Gospel Messenger. THE GOLDEN GROVE. A choice Manual, containing what is to be believed, practised, and desired, or prayed for ; the prayers being fitted for the several days of the week. To which is added, a Guide for the Penitent, or a Model drawn up for the help of devout souls wounded with sin. Also Festival Hymns, &c. By the Right Rev. Bishop Jeremy Taylor. 1 vol. 16mo. $0 50. " The name of Jeremy Taylor will always be a sufficient passport to any work on whose title page rt appears. Of no writer of his period, or indeed of any other period, could it be more truly said, that he has given ' thoughts that breathe in words that burn.' The present little work may perhaps be regarded as among the choicest of his productions. While it is designed to be a guide to devotion, it breathes mucn ol The spirit of devotion, and abounds in lessons of deep practical wisdom. Its author was an Episcopalian and Episcopalians may well be proud of him ; but his character and writings can no more be the property of one denomination than the air or the light, or any other of God's uui- » died in the volume. The edition of this work which has just been issued by D. Appleton & Co., is far superior to the original folio copy, both in its convenience and corr ctness. It has been revised with great care by the English editor, and we have not found one single mistake in any of the references or quotation* which we have consulted. The Creed is illustrated in its Twelve Articles in order — to which are added an Appendix, con- taining the faith, or Symbolum Irencei, Tertulliani, Origen, Council of Nice, Eusebius Cuesarea, Cyril, the Arians, Epiphanius, Basil, Constantinople, Ruffinus, Augustine, Maximus of Thrace, Eusebioe Gallicani, Cassian, Peter Chrysologus, Fortunatus, Alcuin, and Ether — a table of about two thoo- saud texts of Scripture which are cited in the work, and an Alphabetical Index of the most important subjects, both full and minutely applicable. On all the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, this volume on the Creed, by Pearson, is a lumin- ous and learned exposition ; and is peculiarly valuable to American students, on account of the mul- tiplied rcfr-rences to the Early Christian Theologians. In that respect it is a complete Thesaurus ot antiquity — for the extracts from the primitive writers in the original Greek and Latin languages, roclude about three sevenths of the whole volume, devoted to that patristic evidence, upon the moat important subjects of evangelical doctrine. At this period, when so much attention is given to the writers of the early centuries after the Christian era, Pearson's "Exposition of the Creed" is invaluable to the American theologian; as it furnishes to him a large mass of information to which, otherwise, he can scarcely have access, on ao- oountof the scarcity of the original works, and which he would not have time to explore, even were they in his hand. It comprises an excellent theological system, in illustration of revealed truth ; and an expanded view of the various controversies upon the grand themes of religious principles and practice, with much valuable biblical elucidation. It is superfluous to recommend Pearson's '* Expos. tion of the Creed" to persons acquainted with theological literature — but this notice was written to introduce that standard work to persons who have not had the opportunity to become extensively acquainted with those choice productions, equally learned and precious, with which the Anglican writers of the seventeenth century enriched the churches and the world." — Christian Intelligencer. "This admirable Exposition of the Creed, originally preached to his parishioners in the form ol Sermons, has been long and deservedly considered among the best and most useful theological pro- ductions of our language. Of Pearson it was said, 'that the very dust of his writings is gold.'"— Dr. Dibdin's Library Companion. A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS IN DIVINITY, HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, POETRY, VOYAGES AND TRAVELS, ARCHITECTURE AND ENGINEERING, AND PUBLISHED BY D. APPLETON & CO. NEW- YORK. And Geo. S. Appleton, No. 14S, Chestnut-street, Philadelphia. BURNET'S HISTORY of the REFORMATION. The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, by Gilbert Burnet, D.D., late Loro" Bishop of Salisbury — with the Collection of Records and a copious In- dex, revised and corrected, with additional Notes and a Preface, by the Rev. E. Nares, P.D., late Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. Illus. tratcd with a Frontispiece and twenty-three engraved Portraits, forming four ele- gant 8vo. vols. $9 00. The established character of Eishop Bnrnet's History of the Reformation as a standard work, and most valuable historical authority, render it unnecessary to enter into any analysis of its merits, far- ther than briefly to state the advantages of this edition over all others. Often as this celebrated History of the Reformation of the Church of England has been printed and published, often as it has been read, and continually as it has been referred to by successive ■writers, interested in the important subject of which it treats ; yet one thing seems to have been cod atantly overlooked, namely, the necessity of a distinct Preface to point out, and to explain to readers in general, the particular character of the publication. It is a work of too great magnitude to be repeatedly read through, and though its eminence as an historical w..rk, must always be such as to render it imperatively necessary for certain writers to con suit its pages, yet in every reprint of it, it should.be contemplated by the publisher not merely as a book of reference, but as one to be read like other books of history regularly from the beginning to the end, not by professed scholars only, or by persons already versed in history, civil or ecclesiastical, but by such as may be only beginning their historical inquiries and researches — young readers and mere students. Scarcely any other book of equal importance, perhaps, stands so much in need of preliminary ex- planations as this great work of the celebrated writer whose name it bears. And it must often, we should think, have been a matter of just surprise to the readers of this history, that, in the editions hitherto published, the errors in the first and sec ai volumes have been reprinted, which the author himself noticed at the end of the third volume. In the present edition the text will be found correct- ed as it should be, and many explanatory notes added throughout the work. " The extract above from the editor's preface defines the peculiar merits of this splendid work, which is at once the cheapest and the most elepant edition which we have ever seen, of this well known and invaluable history. We were fed on the old folio edition of Burnet in the days of onr childhood, and the impressions which its facts and its illust'ationj then made on the mind, hare never been etfaced, but have had their full share in making us thoroughly Protestant, and aggressive enemies of the church of Rome. We are therefore most heartily rejoiced to see that Appleton ric of the mass. Indices of Texts of Scripture and of the matter contained in the Notes, have also been given, to- gether with a list of authors quoted in the Editor's portion of the volume. In fine, the Editor's design has been to make, as far as was possible, within such a compass, this great work what he humbly hopes it may be found— a Manual for the Theological Student. "The valuable References, Notes, and Indices, which accompany yonr edition, will give it a vast superiority over every other." —The Bishop oj Winchester. " The editor has given to our clergy and our students in theology an edition ni this wor>.. whicl must necessarily supersede every other, and we feel he deserves well at the hands of the Church ef England, which he has so materially served." — Church of England Quarterly Review. "Bishop Burnet is known every where as one of the brightest luminaries the Church of England has ever produced. This work on the thirty-nine articles, h3s always been regarded as among the standard theological works in the English language ; and though it must have peculiar attractions for an Episcopalian, as an exposition of his articles of faith, yet, as a treasury of biblicul and theological knowledge.it is alike valuable to Christians of every communion. It deserves not merely to be read, but studied ; and no Christian can give it a careful perusal, without finding his views of divine truth enlarged, his devout affections quickened, and his value for the religion which he professes greatly increased. This, and ' Pearson on the Creed,' which was lately issued from the same press, belong to the same general class ; and it is difficult to say which of them can claim the higheT degree, of ex- cellence."— Albany Advertiser. " No Churchman, no Theologian, can stand in need of information as to the character or value of Bishop Burnet's Exposition, which long since took its fitting place as one of the acknowledged and ad- mired standards of the Church. It is only needful that we speak of the labours of the editor of the present edition, and these appear to blend 3 fitting modesty with eminent industry and judgment. Thus, while Mr. Page has carefully verified, and in many instances corrected and enlarged the refer- ences to the Fathers, Councils and other authorities, and greatly multiplied the Scripture citations — for the Bishop seems in many cases to have forgotten that his readers would not all be as familiar with the Sacred Text as himself, and might not as readily find a passage even when they knew it existed — he (Mr. P.) has scrupulously left the text untouched, and added whatever illustrative matter he has been able to gather in the form of Notes and an Appendix. The documents collected in tbn latter are of great and abiding value." — Tribune. Divinity, Theology, Religious and Devotional Works. 3 PEARSON ON THE CREED. An Exposition of the Creed, by John Pearson, D.D., late Bishop of Chester. With an Appendix, containing the principal Greek and Latin Creeds. Revised and corrected by the Rev. W. S. Dobson, M.A., Peterhousc, Cambridge. In one hand- some Svo volume. $2 00. The following may be stated as the advantages of this tdition over all otliers. First — Great care has been taken to correct the numerous errors in the references to the texts of Scripture which had crept in by reason of the repeated editions through which this admirable work has passed ; and many references, as will be seen on turning to the Index of Texts, have been added. Secondly — The Quotations in the Notes have been almost universally identified and the references lo tkem adjoined. Lastly — The principal Symbols or Creeds, of which the particular Articles have been cited by the Author, have been annexed ; and wherever the original writers have given the Symbola in a scattered and disjointed manner, the detached parts have been brought into a successive and connected point of view. These have been added in chronological order in the form of an Appendix. — Vide Editor. '•It is one of the gratifying circumstances of the present period that the standard authors in theo- logical literature are republished in a portable form, and at a price which renders the acquisition of them easy to the student, and especially foi public social libraries. Among the works which should thus be extensively disseminated, the " The Exposition of the Creed" by that erudite expositor, Pearson, cannot be too highly estimated ; both for its doctrines, and also for the vast treasury of patristic lore and quotations from ancient writers, which are embc died in the volume. The edition of this work which has just been issued by D. Appleton & Co., is far superior to the original folio cony, both in its convenience and correctness. It has been revised with great care by the English editor, and we have not found one single mistake in any of the references or quotations which we have consulted. The Creed is illustrated in its Twelve Articles in order— to which are added an Appendix, con- taining the faith, or Synbolum Irencei, Tertu'licni, Origen, Council of Nice, Eusebius Cssarea, Cyril, the Avians, Epiphanius, Basil, Constantinople, Ruffinus, Augustine, Maximus of Thrace, Eusebius Gailioani, Cassian, Peter Chrysologus, Fortunatus. Alcuin, aud Ether— a tabl» of about two thou- sand texls of Scripture which are cited in the work, and an Alphabetical Index of the most important subjects, both full and minutely applicable. On all the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, this volume on the Creed, by Pearson, is a lumin- ous arid learned exposition ; and is peculiarly valuable to American students, on account of the mul- tiplied references to the Early Christian Theologians. In that respect it is a complete Thesaurus of •Antiquity— for the extracts from the primitive writers in the original Greek and Latin languages, include about three sevenths of the whole volume, devoted to that patristic evidence, upon the most important subjects of evangelical doctrine. At this period, when so much attention is given to the writers of the early centuries after the "Christian era, Pearson's " Exposition of the Creed" is invaluable to the American theologian ; as it furnishes to him a large mass of information to which, otherwise, he can scarcely have access, on ac- count of the scarcity of the original works, and which he would not have time to explore, even wfere they in his hand. It comprises an excellent theological system, in illustration of revealed truth ; and an expanded view of the various controversies upon the grand themes of religious principles and practice, with much valuable biblical elucidation. It is superfluous to recommend Pearson's " Exposition of the Creed" to persons acquainted with theological literature— but this notice was written to introduce that standard work to persons who have not had the opportunity to become extensively acquainted with those choice productions, equally learned and precious, with which the Anglican writers of the seventeenth century enriched the churches and the world."— Christian Intelligencer. " This admirable Exposition of the Creed, originally preached to his parishioners in the form of Sermons, has been long and deservedly considered among the best and most useful theological pro- ductions of our language. Of Pearson it was said, 'that the very dust of his writings is gold.' "— • Dr. Ikddin's Library Companion. 4 Divinity, Theology, Religious and Devotional Works* PALMER'S TREATISE ON THE CHURCH. A Treatise on the Church of Christ. Designed chiefly for the use of Students in Theology. By the Rev. William Palmer, M.A. of Worcester College, Oxford. Edited with Notes, by the Right Rev. W. R. Whittingham, D.D., Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Maryland. Two vols. 8vo., handsomely printed on fine paper. $5 00. " The treatise of Mr. Palmer, is the best exposition and vindication of Cbrrteh Principles that we have ever read ; excelling contemporaneous treatises in depth of learning and solidity of judgment, as much as it excels older treatises on the like subjects, in adaptation to the wants and habits of the age. Of its influence in England, where it has passed through two editions, we hive not the means to form an opinion ; but we believe that in this country it has already, even before its reprint, done more to restore the sound tone of Catholic principles and feeling than any other one work of the age. The author's learning and powers cf combination and arrangement, great as they obviously are, are less remarkable than the sterling good sense, the vigorous and solid judgment, which isevcTy where manifest in the treatise, and confers on it itsdistinctive excellence. The style of the author is distin- guished for dignity and masculine energy, while his tone is everywhere natural ; on proper occasions, reverential ; and always, so far as we remember, sufficiently conciliatory. " To our clergy and intelligent laity who desire to see the Church justly discriminated from Ro- manists on the one hand, and dissenting denominations on the other, we earnestly coinmenu Palmer's Treatise on the Church." — N. Y. Churchman. " This able, elaborate, and learned vindication of the cktim of the Protectant Episcopal Church, !o be considere*. the troe Catholic Church, and the exposure which is here made of the grounds of dirwrence twtween it and the Romish Chtfch, and of »he baseless pretensions of that church to be the ' one Holy catholic, and Aposioirc Church,' will assuredly commend these vol- ume* to the favour of Churchmen. " At a moment wheD Popery as is well expressed in the American Ed-tor's preface, is spreading among us *jv ' the aid mainly of imported men, money, and members,' 't is well, by a true relation of what Popery really to put the nation on guard against its encroachments. This service is done by this treatise, of w hich it were recommendation enough to say, that its re- publication has engaged the laoour3 ami time of, and is commended to the use of theological studen s by, certainly net the lea*-, learned, pious, and exemplary of our American Bishops. The publishers deserve a toll share of commendation for the handsome fanner in which they have sent forth these volumes." -A*. Y. American. MAG EE ON ATONEMENT AND SACRIFICE. Discourses and Dissertations on the Scriptural Doctrines of Atonement and Sacrifice^ and on the Principal Arguments advanced, and the Mode of Reasoning employed by the Opponents of those Doctrines, as held by the Established Church. By the late most Rev. William M;Gee, D.D., Archbishop of Dublin. Two vols, royal 8vo, beautifully printed. §5 00. " This is one of the ablest critical and polemical works cf modern times. Archbishop Magee is truly a male>i3 herelirohiv: He is an excellent schoWr, an acute reasoner. and is possessed ot a most extensive acquaintance will' the wide field ot argu- ment to which Ins volume. are devoted- iheprofenB ffiWieal information ea a variety ot topics which the Archbishop brings forward, must endear bis nan* l0 ej] lovers of CUrusiianr.y. '-—Orme. HARE'S PAROCHIAL SERMONS. Sermons to a Country Congregation. By Augustus William Hare, A.M., late Fel- low of New College, and Rector of xUton Barnes. One vol. royal fcvo. $2 25. " Any one who can be pVeased w ith delicacy of thouefct expressed in the most simple language— any one who can feel the charm of finding r radical duties elnodajed and enforced by apt and raried illu>-:r.i . .ons— will b« dehglrted with this volume, which presents us-wita the workings of a pious and highly-gilied mind."— Q.uar. Rivien* A MANUAL FOR COMMUNICANTS; Or the Order for Administering the Holy Communion ; conveniently arranged with Meditations and Prayers from Old English Divines, being the Eucharistica^f Sam- uel Wilberforce, M.A., Archdeacon of Surry, (adapted °to the American service.) Convenient size for the pocket. §>37±. " The order of this work is as follows :-First, " The Exhortation comprising die rwo exhortations which are inserted ia the Communion Office : then the Ante-Communion :" next, " The Canon cf the Hrly communion; bei-inning with UV Offertory and ending w ith the I-orm of a,„mmisiennK the elenvnts ; and lastly, the Post Communion. This part of the work is she Communion t Iffice as contained in the Prayer Book slightly altered in its arrangement, and accompanied with a few short devotional meditations in the margin. After this is the Introduction by Archdeacon Wilberforce, chiefly on the importance of attendance el the Lord's 1 able, anj thecauscs of ihe present neglect of the privilege. Wehave next a br.ef notice of the writers f. om whose works are taken the extracts which form the body cf the volume. These are Colel,Cranmer, Jewel, Hooker, Andrews, Sutton, Laud, Hall. Hammond. Taylor, Leighton, Previa!, Patrick Addison, Ken.SparroWjbeveridfe'e, Hickes, Comber, Ketllewell, Wilson, and Potter; whose names are arranged in chronological order, with a menUon fa few lines ol their lives and characters. The remainder of the work is divided into three pans- o? which tne fc-gt consists ol Meditations on the Holy Communion ; the second of Prayers before and after Communion J to which are added, Bishop W ilson s Meditations on Select Pasiages, and Bishop Patrick's Prayer lor one who cannot publicly communicate; and the third ol Belcct passages explanatory of the Holy Sacrament and the benefilsof its worthy reception. These meditations, prayer, and expositions, are given in the very words of the illustrious divines above mentioned martyrs, «onfe«ors and doctors ol the Uiuicu : and they form altogether such a body of instructive matter as is nowhere else to be found in the same compass. 1 hough collected Irorn various authors, the whole is pervadel by a unity of spirit and purpose; and we ■sosl earnestly commend the work as better fitted than any other which we know, tosubserve the ends of sound edification and fcrveni and .ubsisntial devotion. The American reprint has been edited by a deacon of great promise in the Church, and »• appropriately dedicated to the Bishop of litis diocese. ' '— Churchman. Divinity, Theology, Religious and Devotional Works. 5 CHURCHMAN'S LIBRARY. The volumes of this Standard Series are printed on the finest paper, elegantly ornamented, and buund in a superior manner, and uniform in size. Bishop Doane says of this collection, " I write to express my thanks to you for reprints of the Oxford Books ; first, for such books, and secondly, in such a style. I sincerely hope you may be encouraged to go on, and give them all to us. You will dignify the art of printing, and you will do great service to the best interest of the country." In a letter received from Bishop Whittingham, he says, " I had forgotten to state my very great satisfaction at your commencement of a series of Devotional Works, lately republished in Oxford." The Publishers W g to state while in so short a time this Library has increased to so many volumes, they are encour- aged to make yet larger additions, and earnestly hope it may receive all the encouragement it deserves. The following Volumes have already appeared : — THE EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH. Or Christian History of England in early British, Saxon and Norman Times. By the Rev. Edward Churton, M. A. With a Preface, by the Right Rev. Bishop Ives. 1 vol. lGmo. elegantly ornamented. $1 00. *' The following delightful pagps place before us some of the choicest examples — both clerical and lay — of the tnie Christian spirit, in the EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH. In truth, these pages are crowded with weighty'lessons. Here our laity will find that these noble foundations of charity in the mother cojntry— the existence of which they have been accustomed to ascribe to the credulity of ignorance, or the fears of superstition, successfully practised Kpoii by the arts of pnes's, had a higher and holier origin — that they sprang into being under the warm impulses of thai divine And ex- pansive beuevoleuce of which the constraining power of Christ's love made his early followers such large partakers at tlrn period while yet Christian men fully recognised then high vocations, as ' stewards of the manifold gifts of God,' -lived under (he abiding conviction, mat we are~noi our own, but that, 'bought with the precious blood of Christ,' we are * hound to glorify him in our uodies nod our i-pirits, which are his.' Here, too, our clergy may learn a lesson of true self- devotion to their Master — may see, strikingly and beautifully illustrated, that love for Christ, and that zeal for his king- dom, which alone can bear us tranquilly and successfully through the labours and trials of the holy ministry— may see the operation of the true missionary spirit — the spirit of endurance and self-sacrifice, which shrinks from no obstacles when UN! ealvation of sinners is to be achieved under the command and the promise of the Almighty God — may see, in short, an impressive and instructive exemplification of thai chilj-iike submission to God, that pure and simple trust in him, which, at his bidding, performs duty, and leaves the result to his provi Jence and grace. "But, to read these pages with profit, we must pray to God for a portion of that spirit which indited them, and which so manifest iy control the events which they record — must read them with a spiritual eye ; with an eye intent upon discov- ering—not that which may help to sustain some preconceived notion, but that which, prompted by the spirit of Chris:, and accomplished through the power of his saving truth, exhibits to us some great principle of C r istiac action, and some powenul luutive t ' go aud do likewise.' " — Fide Preface. LEARN TO DIE. Disce Mori, Learn to Die : a Rehgious Discourse, moving every Christian man to — ° KPmpmnranne 01 am r>uu. r>y i^nnstopner mutton, u. JJ.. laic Prebend of Westminster. 1 vol. lGmo., elegantly ornamented. $1 00. n I ? thre* works °f Jms excellent author lately reprinted in England, the ■ Disce Mori ' is, in our judgment. rJec^d - e-llythe best. It was the favourite book of the Bishop of Joly, who, (the touching incident cannot be forgotten, -lied It was this fact, we believe, winch first recalled the book from the oblivion into winch it hail mi the groun iiir readers may remember, that shortly after its republication in England, we urged an Amencan rerjrin- d that il was a book winch would prove universally acceptable to the Church. Such is Mill our opinion ■ -c u. ..m believe that a single journal or clergyman in the Church will be found to say a word in its disparagement ' but ihat, on the contrary, all will unite in commending il as one of the verv best of our practical works, equally devo ' tional and almost equally rich with the similar work ot Taylor, and free from those features with winch Taylor startle such weak minds as have a morbid dread of Romanism. Our columns have been, and now that the book is reorinte I will again be, enriched with extracts which will make me ' Disce Mori ' favourably known to our readers •'— Chukiric'Z MEDITATIONS ON THE SACRAMENT. Ciodly Meditations upon the most Holy Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Bv Chris- topher Sutton, D. D., late Prebend of Westminster. 1 vol. royal 16mo. elegantly ornamented. §>1 00. » We announced in our last number the republication in this country, of Sutton's ' Meditations on the Lord's Supper ' and having Since read the work, are prepared to recommend it warmly and without qualifica;ion to the perusal ot our reader*. It is purely practical ; the doctrine of the Eucharist being touched upon onlv in so far as was necessary to guard against error. Its sandard ol piety 11 very high, and the helps which it affords 'to a devout participation of the holy sacrament of which it treats, should make it the inseparable companion of every communicant. W e know unlet il ot no work on the subject that can in all respects be compared with it ; aud for its agency in promoting that advancement in holiness alter which every Christian should strive, have no hesitation in classing it with the Treatwa on ' Holy Living and Dying of Bishop Taylor, and the • Sacra Privata ' ol Bishop Wilson. The penod at which the book was written will account for, and excuse, what in the present age would be regarded as delects of style ; but tjfcese are fewer than might have been expected, and are soon lost sight ot in the contemplation of the many and 'great ncelleiKics with which it abounds. The publishers have done good service to the country in the publication of this work, which is a benuUi.l reprint ot the Oxtord edition, and we are glad to learu that it will be speedily followed by the ' Disce Viverc ' and ' D.-te Men ' of the same author."— Baruier of '.he Cross. 6 Divinity, TJieology, Religious and Devotional Works. A DISCOURSE CONCERNING PRAYER, And the frequenting Daily Public Prayers. By Symon Patrick, D. D., sometime Lord Bishop of Ely. Edited by Francis E. Paget, M. A., Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Oxford. 1 vol. royal lGmo. elegantly ornamented. $0 75. "This work treats of the nature and necessity of prayer, of the sense of all mankind about th:s matter, especially of our blessed Saviour, of the honour done us by God in admitting us into his pre- sence, and of the great benefits we receive by it. It shows that public prayer is the most necessary el all, that God is most honoured by it, that it is most advantageous to us, and most suitable to the nature of man, that the nature of a Church requires it, that our Saviour has taught the doctrine, -which is confirmed by the practice of the Apostles and first Christians ; and it treats of daily public assemblies and hours of prayer. " To all who have been benefitted and instructed by Eishop Patrick's writings (that is, to all who have ■with due care read, and meditated, and prayed over anyone of them) it js unnecessary to say a word in commendation of the work before us. To others it may suffice to say, that the sooner they make themselves master of this, and the other admirable works of his lately reprinted, the better will it be for the soundness of their views in theology, and the firmness and steadiness of their growth inpietv and Christian virtue." — Charleston Gospel Messenger. THE GOLDEN GROVE. A choice Manual, containing what is to be believed, practised, and desired, or prayed for ; the prayers being fitted for the several days of the week. To which is added, a Guide for the Penitent, or a Model drawn up for the help of devout souls wounded with sin. Also Festival Hymns, &,c. By the Right Rev. Bishop Jeremy Taylor. 1 vol. ISmo. $0 50. " The narce of Jeremy Taylor will always be a sufficient passport to any work on whose title page it appears. Of no writer of his period, or indeed of any other period, could it be more truly said, that he has given ' thoughts that breathe in words that burn.' The present little work may perhaps be regarded a3 among the choicest of his productions. "While it is designed to be a guide to devotion, it breathes mucn of the spirit of devotion, and abounds in lessons of deep practical wisdom. Its author ••vas an Episcopalian and Episcopalians may well be proud of him ; but his character and writings can no more be the Dronertv of one ilpnAmmoiinn than o-:r m tha lin-ht. or any richer nf {Sea's uni- versal blessings to the world."— Albany Advertiser. THOUGHTS IN PAST YEARS, A beautiful collection of Poetry, chiefly Devotional. By the author of " The Ca- thedral." 1 vol. royal lGmo., elegantly prmted. $1 25. " This is a new Trans-atlantic poetical work, and although we have not much confidence in our own judgment of poetry, we do not hesitate to venture the opinion that this book is by no means to be ranked with the ephemeral poetical effusions of the day. It 'is made up of miscellaneous poems, all of them of a moral tendency, and many of them breathing a spirit of deep devotion and earnest piety." — Albany Journal. THE CHRISTMAS BELLS: A Talc of Holy Tide, and other Poems. By the author of " Constance," " Virginia," &c. 1 vol. royal 16mo., elegantly ornamented. $0 75. "Many of the smaller pieces in this volume have appeared from time to time in various journals and magazines, and have been received with unqualified favour. The leading poem was written for the most part during ths season whose enjoyments and happy influences it is designed to commemo- rate. The plan of it was suggested by the perusal of Washington living's delightful Essays on the Christmas Season, in the Sketch Book."— Preface. Divinity, Theology, Religious and Devotional Works. 7 OGILBY ON LAY-BAPTISM. A.n Outline on the Argument against the validity of Lay-Baptism. By the Rev. John D. Ogilby, A. M., Professor of Ecclesiastical History. 1 vol. 12tno. $0 75. "We can but acknowledge the receipt of this volume, on a subject that hardly falls under the range of our criticism. The author, whose baptism of two persons, who had previously received lay-baptism, has raised against him no little outcry, has been induced to write these pages in his own defence, and has set forth in them the principles and reasons which have governed his practice. He Hsks fur them, what we doubt not they will receive, a patient hearing." — N. Y. Ameiican. SCRIPTURE AND GEOLOGY. On tne Relation between the Holy Scriptures and some parts of Geological Science. By John Pye Smith, 1) D., author of the Scripture Testimony of the Messiah, &c. &c. 1 vol. 12mo. $1 25. '* The volume consists of eight lectures, to which are appended seventy pages of supplementary notes. The first lecture is introductory ; the second is scientifically descriptive of the principal to- pics of geological science ; the third includes a research into the creation of our globe : the fourth ;aid fifth lectures comprise an examination of the deluge ; the sixth discusses the apparent dissonance between the decisions of geologists, and the hitherto received interpretation of Scripture, with an additional exposition of the diluvial theory ; the seventh is devoted to illustration of the method to interpret the Scriptures, so that they may harmonize with the discoveries of geology; the eighth is the peroration of the whole disquisition. •'We most earnestly recommend these lectures to junior theologians. They will discover new sources of Biblical knowledge unfolded in them, and if their geological attainments are not suffi- ciently ample to enable them to grasp all Dr. Smith's arcana, and they cannot therefore assent to that which they do not lucidly comprehend, and of which they have not convincing evidence, yet they will close the volume infallibly confirmed in the verities aunounced in the ensuing forceful para- graph, with which the seventh lecture so nobly and eloquently terminates. It follows,' says the learned professor, 'as a universal truth, that the Bible, faithfully inter- preted, erects no bar aertinst the most free and extensive investigation, the most comprehensive and searching induction. Lot but the investigation be sufficient, and the induction honest. Let observa- tion take its farthest flight, let experiment penetrate into all the recesses of nature, let the veil of ares be lifted up from all that lias been hitherto unknown, if such a course were possible, Religion need not fear, Christianity is secure. True science will always pay homage to the Divine Creator and Sovereign ; of whom, and through whom, and to whom are all thnigs. Unto whom be glory for ever.' :' — Xrw- York Observer. WORKS BY THE REV. DR. SPRAGUE. TRUE AND FALSE RELIGION. Lectures illustrating the Contrast between True Christianity and various other systems. Ey Wil- liam B. Sprague, D.D. 1 vol. 12ino. $1 00. LECTURES ON REVIVALS IN RELIGION. By W. B. Spuaoue, D.D. With an Introduce -rtficed a new edition of Sartor Resartus, by the same author. It is a very! remarkable work, though we must con- fess somewhat too Germau and transcendental for our taste. We rejoice to say that we find no such difficulties besetting us in these disquisitions on heroes. They are in truth philosophical enough, abrupt enough, tearinsr enough ; but their philosophy is clear, distinct, and intelligible ; their abrupt- ness is the vigour of Demosthenes : their tearing the acts of a giant who has a wildsraess to b:;rst through and open to the rest of mankind. 4* In the division of his lalwurs. the author considers '.he Hero in his ancient incarnations as, 1. A Divinity ; 2. A Prophet : 3. A Poet, and 4. A Priest — quasi Odin, Mahomet. Dante and Shakspeare, Luther and Knox, and latterly, as 5. A Man of Letters; and 6. A King — quasi Johnson, Rousseau, Burns. Cromwell, and Napoleon. It is to the fifth of these Lectures that we devote our attention. Its exordium is original and splendid. And here we must close a work — such as we have seldom seen the like of, and one which redeems the literature of our superficial and manufacturing period. It is one to purify our natures, expand our ideas, and exalt our souls. Let no library or book-room be with- out it ; the more :t is studied the more it will bo esteemed." — Literary Gazette. A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF PETER VAN S.CHAACK, LL.D. Embracing; Selections from his Correspondence and other "Writings during the American Revolution, and his Exile in England. By his Son, Henry C. Van Schaack. One handsome volume, Svo. §2 50. ■ This work forms a novel contribution to the history of the American RevoluKo*, and totally un- iike any work which has yet appeared on that subject. It presents a touching picture of the hardship* undergone by an Amer.cau of elevated character, in consequence of his maintaining a neutrality in the revolutionary war. The work is characterized by Mr. Sparks, the African historian, " as not only a very curious and interestiug piece of biography, but a valuable contribution to the history of the country during the important period of the revolution." 12 History, Biography, cf-c. GUIZOTS HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION. General History of Civilization in Europe, from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution* Translated from the French of M. Guizot, Professor of History to la Faculte des Lettres of Paris, and Minister of Public Instruction* Third American edition, with Explanatory Notes, (adapted for the use of Colleges and High Schools,) by C. S. Henry, D.D., Professor of Philosophy and History in the University of the city of New- York. One handsomely printed vol., 12mo. $1 00. •*' We hail with pleasure the republication of this able work. It is terse and full, and adverts *.o the most interesting topic in the social relations of mankind, the progressive improvement of the European nations from the overthrow of the Roman Empire by the Goths, and Huns, and Vandals, in the Fifth Century. " The work of M. Guizot comprehends a Course of Lectures which he delivered, and which con-1 tain the spirit of Modern History, all condensed, into a focus, to illuminate one most impressive fea- ture in the annals of the world. A concise view of the chief themes will accurately uufold the im- portance of this volume. " The introductory lecture is devoted to a discussion of the general subject in its principles ; which is followed by the application of them to the condition of European Society. " M. Guizot next proceeds to develop the deranged state of the kingdoms of Europe, after the subversion of the Roman power, and the subdivision of the ancient empire into distinct sovereignties ; which is followed by a survey of the feudal system. The various changes and civil revolutions of the people with the crusades, the conflicts between the hierarchical supremacy, and the monarchical and aristocratical authorities also, are developed with the fluctuations of society, through their combined tumultuous collisions ; until the invention of printing, and the maritime discoveries of the fifteenth century, with the Reformation, produced a convulsion, whose mighty workings still are exhibited, and the rich fruits of which constantly become more plentiful and fragrant. " The two lectures which close the series, are devoted to the English revolution of the seventeenth, and the French revolution of the eighteenth century. " There are two features in M. Guizot's lectures which are as attractive as they are novel. One is, the lofty moral and religious principles which he inculcates. We doubt that very few professors ot history in our own country, in their prelections, among their students, within an American College, would have commingled such a continuous stream of the best ethics, with a subject avowedly secular, as If. Guizot has incorporated with his lectures addressed to the Parisian infidels. "Another is, the predominant influence which he has attributed to Christianity, in effecting the progressive melioration cf European society. " To the friends of religious freedom especially, M. Guizot's Lectures on Civilization are a most acceptable present ; because they are not the result of a controvertist's endeavours to sustain his own opinions in a polemical conflict with an adversary, but the deliberate judgment of an impartial ob- server, who has embodied his decisions incidentally, while discussing another topic." — jY. Y. American. SCHLEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. The Philosophy of History, in a course of Lectures delivered at Vienna, by Frederick von Schlegel, translated from the German, with a Memoir of the Author, by J. B. Robertson. Handsomely printed on fine paper. 2 vols. 12mo. <$2 50. "If there be »ne book not professedly religious which we could have wished republished rat.heT than another, it is Frederick Schlegel's immortal work. No other work of the kind, we venture to say, Jt calculated to effect so much good among the reflecting and intellectual portion of the American public, — with that portion capable of appreciating the pure and elevated wisdom of the ' Philosophy of llistnry.' We do not at present intend to enter into anything like a detailed review ; it is quite un- necessary to do more than direct attention to a work which, beyond all others, has contributed to exalt and purify modern Science and Literature. This it was which showed the world of the nineteenth century how the great scheme of history should be viewed, — on man and his relations with the exter- nal world, — on human science and human art, refining and purifying them to the highest point of earthly excellence."— Truth Teller. THE LIFE OF ALEXANDER HAMILTON. Edited by his son, John C. Hamilton. 2 vols. 8vo. $5 00. "We cordially recommtnd the perusal and diligent study of these volumes, exhibiting, as they do, much valuable matter relative to the Revolution, the establishment of the Federal Constitution, and other important events in the uanals of our cjuntry."— -Yew- York Review. History, Biography, Poetry, ast ; but the same sen- tences which he condemned, and which might perhaps seem warm, glowing, and often exaggerated, to a cold and northern fancy, sent a thrill through all the millions of France, and aroused that terri- ble valour which bore the eagle of victory triumphant over a hundred battle-fields, and placed it at last on the towers of the Kremlin to be torn and broken by the northern tempest. The work is superior to the long verbose productions of Scott and Bourienne — not in style alone, bat hi truth — being written to please neither Charles X. nor the English aristocracy — but for the cause of freedom. It has advantages over every other memoir extant." SOUTHEY'S POETICAL WORKS. The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Esq., LL.D. The ten volume London edition in one elegant royal 8vo. volume, with a fine portrait and vignette. $3 50. %* This edition, which the author has arranged and revised with the same care as if it were in- t-nded for posthumous publication, includes many pieces which either have never before been coUected, or have hitherto remained unpublished. Preliminary notices are affixed to the long poems, — the whole of the notes retained, — and such additional ones incorporated as the author, since the first publication, has seen occasion to insert. Contents. Joan of Arc. , The Curse of Kehama. Juvenile and Minor Poems. Roderick, the last of the Goths. Thalaba the Destroyer. The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo. Madoc. Lay of the Laureate, Ballads and Metrical Tales. Vision of Judgment, &c. " At (he ape of sixty-throe I have undertaken to collect and edit my poetic il works, with the last corrections that I can expect to bestow upon litem. They have obtained u reputation equal to my wishes. .... Thus tocollect and revise them » a duty whir'- lowe to tbi it part of the public by whom they have been auspiciously received, and to those who will take a lively concern iu my good name v, hen 1 shall have departed. "—Extract from Autlujr'n Preface. 14 The critic has little to do but to point out the existence of the work, the beauty of the type and embellishments, and the cheapness of the cost ; the public has long ago acknowledged its merit and established its reputation The author ofllte ' Lite ot Nelson' must live as long as our history and language en hire. Then is no man to whom the latter owes a greater obli- gation—no man who has done more for literature by his genius, his labours, and his life."— Times. " We are. very glad to see the works of a poet, for whom we have always fell the warmest admiration, collected, and in a shade which will ensure their popularity."— Atlienceum. " Southey 's principal poetical works have been lone before the world, extensively read and highly appreciated. Their appear- ance in a neat and uniform edition, with the final corrections of the auUior, will atl'orJ unfeigned pleasure to these who are ' married to immortal verse.' "—Literary Gazette. " The beauties of Mr. Southey "s poetry are such that this edition can hardly fail to find a place in the library of every mc» fond of elegant literature."— hclcclic Rroitu. 14 History, Biography, Poetry, a:;e. — Brother Jonathan. Wo have read the greater part of this work and are much gratified with the novelty, raciness and <>asy— yet dashing style w ith which it is written. Among the incidental sketches, the story of Neddy Daaod, a kind-hearted but poor American who could not subdue his inchuation for travel in foreign parts— is beautifully told. The entire episode is full of nature, feeling and pathos. Indeed the pecu- hur claim of the writing consists in its being the evident portraiture of fresh and vivid impression which it leaves upon the reader, that ho soon unconsciously finds himself as it were cue of the travelling party." — Philadelphia Enquirer. We do not hesitate to pronounce it the most interesting work on Egypt that we have ever met with. Mr. Cooley seems to have struck out in an entirely new pa^h and pursued it successfully. Imbued with a rich vein of humour, and possessed of keen satirical powers, an American at heart, and not at all intimidated by success, there is a freshness of style and easy familiarity of manner and astern in- dependence in his writiug which cannot fail to please as well as to instruct. — Brooklyn Eagle. It is really one of the most curious and interesting books that has made its appearance fur some time. — N. Y. Courier Enquirer. Of all the volumes on Egypt that have yet appeared, this work of Mr. Cooley's is by far the most attractive. The author has given the most graphic and amusing picture of life in Egypt, as it pre- sents itself to the American traveller. — Baltimore Patriot. TOUR THROUGH TURKEY AND PERSIA. Narrative of a Tour through Armenia, Kurdistan, Persia, and Mesopotamia, with an Introduction and Occasional Observations upon the Condition of Mohammedanism and Christianity in those countries. By the Rev. Horatio Southjratc, Missionary of the American Episcopal Church. 2 vols. 12moM plates. §>2 50. An exceedingly interesting book of Travels, which no reader will be very likely to lay by for good till he has seen the end of it. It contains a vast amount of information, religious and general, and is written in a style of perfect ease and simplicity. It deserves, and we douLt not will gain, an exten- sive circulation. — Albany Advertiser. SCOTLAND AND THE SCOTCH; CR THE WESTERN CIRCUIT. By Catharine Sinclair, author of Modern Accomplishments, Modem Society, &c. &c» 1 vol. 12mo. £>0 75. SHETLAND AND THE SHETLANDERG; OR THE NORTHERN CIRCUIT. By Catharine Sinclair, author of Scotland and the Scotch, Holiday House, &c. &c. 1 vol. 12mo. $0 87 1 Miss Sinclair has already proved herself to.be a lady of high talent and rich cultivated mind. She thinks with precision and vigor, and she possesses the quality of seizing the objects of her thoughts in \ ;ie right place and at the proper time, and of presenting them to the mind's eye of her readers, in the most clear and captivating light. Her style is characteristic of her mind, transparent, piquant, and lively, yet sustained by pure, moral and religious feeling. — New-York American. THE FLAG SHIP; OR A VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD, In the United States Frigate Columbia, attended by her consort, the Sloop of War John Adams, and bearing the broad pennant of Commodore George C. Read. By Fitch W. Taylor, Chaplain to tho Squadron. 2 vols. 12nio., plates. $2 50. This work has been some tune before the public ; but if in consequ?nce of our lute notice, it shall afford *.o any reader the very great pleasure and profit which its perusal has given us, we are sun; he will think it beUerlate limn never. The records effc voyage round the world, made by a man, who, in mingling wiih the various and wonderful scenes it must present, h.ts had h« ercpooeo, could not fail to be interestiiiK. Facts and real occurrences, are thinjs of which we never prow weary, lint (hi* work hasa lar h'ghcr claim to regard, lis literary character is certainly very respectable, and the benevolent spirit tfnd Christian interest with which the varied incidents of a visit to almost every nation on the globe were regarded, pi^e the book an unwontM value- The ability to survey the mural aspects of the world, is a qualification of which the far greater put of traveller.? are utterly deficient. 1'iobauly since the valuable journal of Tyermar , and Bennett, mere has been no other one published which exhibits to satisfactory a view of the Christina missions of the world ostitis. We think it adapte1. 10 interest i's readers not only, but greatly to instruct Ibest, and especially to awaken a deep and livr.y sympathy for tne moral waiusaud miseries ol the worli. — £vaft$iilUl. 16 History, Biography, Poetry, Voyages, Travels, fyc* THE BOOK OF THE NAVY; Comprising a general History of the American Marine^ and particular accounts of all the most celebrated Naval Battles, from the Declaration of Independence to the present time, compiled from the best authorities. By John Frost, Professor of Belles Lettres in the High School of Philadelphia. With an Appendix containing Naval Songs, Anecdotes, &c. Embellished with numerous original Engravings and Portraits of distinguished Naval Commanders. Complete in one handsome volume octavo. $1 50. • * This work has been written with a partfcu'lar view to popular entertainment and instruction. To re- mind the people that the Navy is the right arm of the national defence ; to recall the glorious actions by •which the independence of the country was asserted in the days that tried men's souls ; to revive the re- collection of those brilliant exploits on the ocean in that war with France of which the battle cry was ''Millions for defence, but not a cent for tribute ;" to display those gallant achievements in defence of " Free Trade and. Sailors' Rights," which taught Britain that she could no longer claim the sovereignty of the seas ; and to exhibit those deeds of gallantry by which the barbarian Tripolitans and Algerines were taught to respect the Star-Spangled Banner ; to render the whole of this brilliant history familiar to the recollections of the people as household words, is the end and aim of the BOOK OF THE NAVY. Fully sensible that delineation is more effective than mere description and narrative, the author has embellished the vvork with forty-eight splendid Illustrations, representing the most celebrated Naval Actions, Portraits of distinguished Commmanders, naval scenes, and exploits of every description. The object being to increase the popularity of the Navy by widely diffusing the knowledge of its glo- rious history in all parts of the country, and among all classes of people, it is afforded at an exceed- ingly low price, for the purpose of placing it in the hands of the PEOPLE. " This is the only popular and yet authentic single view which wehave of the naval exploits of our country arranged with good taste and set forth in good language." — V. S. Gazette. " This is just such a work as has long been wanted — a history of the Navy sufficiently condensed for popular use. Mr. Frost has performed his task in the best manner and has produced precisely the book that was desired." — Pennsylvanian. " It is by no means so tedious and minute as Cooper's Naval History, and is at the same time written in a style every way equal to that work." — N. Y. Aurora. " It is a faithful account of the origin and progress cf the American Navy, of its exploits, and of the character of those who have done it honour. There are fine portraits of Perry, Decatur, and M'Don- ough, and very splendid engravings at the commencement and close of each chapter." — N. Y.Cour § Eng. " The literary portion of the work is a faithful record of those glorious naval exploits which have rein dered our flag honoured and respected by every nation of the globe, while the style in which it is got up and its splendid embellishments confsrthe highest credit on the publishers."— Boston Times. "This elegant volume is dedicated to the present Secretary of the Navy and is altogether a very faithful and attractive historical record. . It comprises twenty-two chapters, detailing the promi- nent events connected with the naval history of the American federal republic. To the narrative is subjoined an appendix of seventy pages includiug thirty-two very interesting characteristic anecdotes, nineteen lyrical poems, and a minute chronological table of events in American Naval History. It is appropriately adorned with steel engraved portraits, numerous vignettes, and full page representations of various conflicts. The Book of the Navy deserves, and will doubtless, have a very extended circu- lation."— National Intelligencer. INCIDENTS OF A WHALING VOYAGE. To which is added Observations on the Scenery, Manners, and Customs, and Mis- sionary Stations of the Sandwich and Society Islands, accompanied by numerous plates. By Francis Allyn Olmsted. One handsome volume, 12mo. $1 50. The various publications before the public, illustrating our marine and naval history, have never, we believe, as yet entered into the minutiae of a whaling voyage— a whale ship, its equipments, dis- cipline, and course of operations in the internal economy and varied contingencies,— until the appear- ance of the present volume, by one who has some pretensions to science, both in the philosophy of na- ture and education. The work indeed only presents the events of a single voyage, but is blended with so much of incidental history, abounding in facts relative to the Islands of the Pacific, the Missionary stations there, and the effects of civilization upon the untutored natives of the South, together with the illustrations of the whale fishery, as to embody a mass of intelligence, interesting to the ordinary reader as well as to the philosophical inquirer. The author is a son of Professor Olmsted, of Yale College, who, in the pursuit of health, in along voyage, has noted the observations to which we refer. — N. Y. Courier. Arts, Manufactures and Mines. IT A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, MANUFACTURES, AND MINES; Containing a clear Exposition of their Principles and Practice. By Andrew Ure, M D., F.R.S., &c. &.c. Illustrated with 1241 Engravings, and containing up- wards of 1400 closely printed pages. In every point of view a work like the present can hut be regarded as a benefit done to theoretical and practical science, to commerce and industry, and an important addition to a species of literature the exclusive production of the present century, and the present state of peace and civilization. Criti- cisms in favour of its intrinsic value to all classes of the community might be produced (if space would permit,) from upwards of three hundred of the leading journals in Europe and this country. The following is from, the Democratic Review. Wo have received this excellent work from the press of the Messrs. Appleton, at a price placing it within the resell of the thousands to whom it must soon become a book of absolute necessity. Of Dr. Ure's eminent reputation as a man of both high science and extensive practical experience in its application, it is unnecessary to speak. We cannot do better to give our readers an idea of the value of the work we desire to make known to them, than place before them the following- quotations from the author s Preface : u I have embodied in this work the results of my long experience as a Professor of Practical Science. Since the year 1805, when I entered at an early age upon the arduous task of conducting the schools of chemistry and manufactures in the Andersonian Institution, up to the present day. I have been as- siduously engaged in the study and improvement of most of the chemical, and many of the mechanical arts. Consulted professionally by proprietors of factories, workshops, and mines of various descrip- tions, both in this country and abroad, concerning derangements in their operations, or defects in their products ; I have enjoyed peculiar opportunities of becoming acquainted with their minutest details, and have frequently had the good fortune to rectify what was amiss, or to supply what was wanting. Of the stores of information thus acquired, I have availed myself on the present occasion ; careful, meanwhile, to neglect no means of knowledge which my extensive intercourse with foreign nations affords. " I therefore humbly hope that this work will prove a valuable contribution to the literature of science, serving — " Iri the first place, to instruct the Manufacturer, Metallurgist, and Tradesman, in the principles of their respective processes, so as to render them, in reality, the masters of their business ; and, to emancipate them from a state of bondage to such as are too commonly governed by blind prejudice and a vicious routine. •' Secondly. To afford Merchants, Brokers, Drysalters, Druggists, and Officers of the Revenue, cha- racteristic descriptions of the commodities which pass through their hands. Thirdly. By exhibiting some of the finest (Ipvplnpaionto of Chemistry and Physics, to lay open an excellent practical school to students of these kindred sciences. " Fourthly. To teach Capitalists, who may be desiruu^ oi puv,..,, ~ branch of industry, to select, judiciously, among plausible claimants. " Fifthly. To enable gentlemen of the Law to become well acquainted with the nature of those pa- tent schemes which are so apt to give rise to litigation. " Sixthly. To present to Legislators such a clear exposition of the staple manufactures, as may dis- suade them from enacting laws, which obstruct industry, or cherish one branch of it, to the injury of *^An£lastly to give the general reader, intent, chiefly, on Intellectual Cultivation, views of many of the noblest achievements of Science, in effecting those grand transformations of matter to which Great Britain »r»d the United States owe their paramount wealth, rank, and power, among the nations of the earth. Tl>e latest statistics of every important object of Manufacture are given from the best, and, usu- ally from official authority, at the end of each article." " The mogt complete encyclopaedia of useful science that has ever issued from the press." — United Service Gazette. '• It not only treats of the application of chemistry to the arts and manufactures, but it also enters very fully into the mechanical arrangement of the building, the plans, and implements of a great variety of trades, on which it communicates much lucid and well-arranged information. It is compiled with, great care, and besides containing the latest materials, is strictly confined to what is useful, without superfluous detail." — Civil Engineer. " Dr. Ure's reputation precludes the necessity of our saying any thing in proof of the accuracy and sterling worth of this publication. It is designed to embody the results of his long experience as a professor of practical science, and will be found to supply a mass of important information to manu- facturers, engineers, chemists, and other numerous classes. It is drawn up in a style at once exact and popular, and is so well illustrated as to be level to the comprehension of the generality of readers. As a book of reference it is invaluable, and as such must speedily find its way into every well-selected library." — Eclectic Review. " A book much wanted. It contains a mass of information, important to the generality of readers, divested of the difficulties of technicality, and the pedantry which generally confuses and deters the aiere common sense and common-capacity student." — Tunes. 18 Hydraulics, Mechanics, Steam- Engine, fyc. HYDRAULICS AND MECHANICS. A Descriptive and Historical Account of Hydraulic and othsr Machines for Raising Water, including the Steam and Fire Engines, ancient and modern ; with Observations on various subjects connected with the Mechanic Arts ; including the Progressive Development of the Steam Engine ■ Descrip- tions of every variety of Bellows, Piston, and Rotary Pumps, Fire Engines, Water Rams, Pressure Engines, Air Machines, Eolipiles, &c. Remarks on Ancient Wells, Air Byds, Cog Wlieels, Blow- pipes, Bellows of various People, Magic Goblet.-,, Steam Idols, and other Machinery of Ancient Tem- ples. To which are added Experiments on Blowing and Spouting Tubes, and other original De- vices, Nature's modes and Machinery lor Raising Water. Historical notices respecting Siphons, Fountains, Water Organs, Clopsydne, Pipes, Valves, Cocks, &c. In five books. Illustrated by nearly three hundred Engravings. By Thomas Ewbank. One handsomely printed volume of six hundred pages. $3 50. Although the subject of this work may present nothing alluring to the general reader, it will be found not destitute of interest to the philosopher and intelligent mechanic. The ai t of raising water has ever been closely connecied with the progress of man in civilization, 30 much so, indeed, that the state of this art among a people maybe taken as an index of cheir position on the scale of refinement. It is also art art, which, from its importance, called forth the ingenuity of man In the infancy of society, nor is it improbable that uori&-inatsd some of the simple machines of mechanic powers them- selves. It was a favourite subject of research with eminent mathematicians and engineers of old, and the labour of their suc- cessors in modern days, have been rewarded with the mo3t valuable machine which the arts ever presented to man, the STEAM ENGINE, for it was " raising of water," that exercised the ingenuity of Decatus and V/ orcester, Morland and Papin, Savary and Newcomen, and those illustrious men whose successive labours developed and matured tiiat '* semi-omnipotent engine," which " draweth up water by fire." A machine that has already changed and immeasura- bly improved the state of civil society, and one which, in conjunction with the printing press, is destined to renovate both the political and the moral world. The subject is therefore intimately connected with the present advanced state of the arts ; and the amazing progress made in them during the last two centuries may be attributed in some degree to its culti- vation.— '— Vide Preface. " This work of Mr. Ewbank seems to be something new in its design, which is effected with wonderful ability and success It could only have been written by one,a large portion of whose life had been spent in searching the dusty volumes of an- tiquity, and who possessed besides an ardent eiuh-vixsm in the cause of science and mechanic improvement. ' We have not time to give anything like a general summary of its contents. It traces the history of machinery of all sorts from the very earliest dawn of its invention — exploring with the most ceaseless assiduity the records of antiquity, and cross exam- ining their traditions, cus;oms, &>c. with consummate skill, intermingling the whole with the most entertaining sketchos of life and character and the most just and instructive reflections upt.!» the features of society and ordinary life, which are indicated by the habita thus brought to light. The work is divided into five book3, of which the general subjects are as follows: 1. Primitive and Ancient Devices for .Raising' Water : 2. Machines for Raising Water by the Pressure of the Atmosphere: 3. Machines for R-aising Water by Compressive independently of Atmospheric influence : 4. Machines for Raising Water, chiefly of Modern Ongin, including early modern applications of steam for that purpose : 5. Novel De- vices for Raising Water, with an account oi syphons, locks, valves, clopsydis, &.c. it is illustrated by nearly 300 tine en- gravings, and is published in the finest style of the typographic art.— Tribune." " This is a highly valuable production, replete with novelty and interest, and adapted to gratify equally the historian, the philosopher and the mechanician, being the result of a protracted and extensive research among the arcana of histori- an and scientific literature." — National Intelligencer. HODGE ON THE STEAM-ENGINE. The Steam Engine, its Origin and Gradual Iinptove-ment, from the time of Hero to the present day, as adfr-V.ed to Manufactures, Locomotion aiul Navig^ti^ iu„.,«^i _;tk fo-tj- oiff>>t Platca in full 8vo7"'$12 6oV ' "y Uod&> C-E- 1 vol. folio of plates, and letter-press m ml^ai^^t™^^11^ a compressive history of the invention and the various im- ££%2TriA In ^^nT^ '? thV'eam-engine,from the earllest Period to the present time, together with such practical tulos and explanations a, ure necessary to enable the mechanic to der. Johnson. _ " How happy that th;s, the most mora] of romances, u not only the most charming of books, but the most instructive." — A. Chalmers. " No fiction in any language was ever better supported than these Adventures of Robinson Crusoe."— Dr. Alnir. "Crusoe has obtained a ready passport to the mansions of the rich, and the cottages of the poor, and communicated equal de- lurhutAaJl, tanks and clasps of the community. , Few works have been more generally read, or more justly admired ; few " The Messrs. Appleton & Co., of New- York, have just published a beautiful edition of 'The I-ife and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.' Not the miserable abridgment generally circulated, but De Foe's genuine work, Robinson Crusoe in full and at length, a story which never pal's upon the reader, and never can lose its popularity while the English language endures. This elegant edition, which also gives an interesting memoir ot Daniel De Foe, and an essay upon his writings, illustrated with nearly five hundred admirably executed wood engravings, by the celebrated French artut Grandville, the ■.vhole being compressed into an octavo volume of about five hundred pages. Without Robiuson Crusoe, the domestic library seems incomplete— it has a never failing charm both for the young and the old. Apart from the intense interest which De Foe always gives to his narrative, he is one of those masters of composition who cannot be too carefully studied by those who aspire to simplicity and strength." — Pennsyhanian. PICTORIAL VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. The Vicar of Wakefield. By Oliver Goldsmith. Elegantly illustrated with nearly 200 Engravings, making a beautiful volume, octavo, of about 350 pages. $1 75. " We love to turn back over these rich old classics of our own language, and rej ivinate ourselves by the never -failing associations which a re-perusal always calls up. Let any one who" has not read this immortal tale for fifteen or twenty years, try the- experiment, and we will warrant, that he rises up from the task — thepleasur; we should have said— u happier and a better man " In the good old Vicar of Wakefield, all is pure gold without dross or alloy of any kind. This much we have said to our last generation readers. This edition of the work, however, we take it, was got up for the benefit of the rising genera- tion, and we really envy cur young friends the pleasure which is before such of them as will read it for the first time. We have a perfect recollection of the very seat we occupied while perusing it. So vivid was the impression, that, like the •daguerreotype, every surrounding object (besides the picture designed to be impressed.) was stereotyped tor ever in the memory, ifow often the same colours and (inures have moved through other scenes, in new phases and altitudes, we knovi- not, nor do we wish to k'now, lest we might disturb that blessed picture gallery of ours, which has served us a» are- source through so many weary days and nights, "and which no artist helped to adorn for us more than Oliver Goldsmith. "There is one thing which struck us very forcibly upon the repcrutal— it is the facility with which Goldsmith transfuse a portion of his own experience into every character. To the old parson's son he assigns the pedestrian tour— to Utirchell his own slovenly habits and literary tastes, and so on, through all the dra7iiaiis persona— in each one an occasional glimpse of Ins own peculiar habits and modes of thought, may be detected. " This book, with its beautiful illustrations and gilt binding, will make an appropriate present — and surely no one has a bet- ter riebt to be held in affectionate remembrance round a happy fire-side than Goldsmith— the gentle, die kind- hearted, but uufortunale Goldsmith."— Savannali Republican. 21 Now in Course of Publication, in Monthly Parts, 12J cents each, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY DICK KITCAT, THE FORTUNES OF HECTOR O'HALLORAN, AND HIS MAN MARK ANTONY OTCOLE. By W. H. MAXWELL, Esq. " Let ' Harry Lorrequer,' alias ' Charles O'Malley,' alias ' Jack Hintor.,' tremble for hi3 popularity, as a formidable rival, in the person of 4 Hector O'Halloran,' has entered boldly into the lists, deter- mined to divide with him his empire over the affections of an Irish public. The story is well, simply, and happily opened, in an old castle on the wild coast of Donegal, and in the troubled year of our Lord, 1795 — a year when gentlemen wearing white shirts took especial delight in paying nocturnal visits to mansions suspected of possessing private armories. Our hero is the son of a true soldier, one who smelt powder, arid saw bullets fly; and before the 31st page closes, he sets off for the camp himself and, — but no, we shall not betray what happened to him on the way, as the legitimate curiosity of the reader may be gratified at the small expense of One Shilling. It would be quite absurd were we to offer any comment on the style of the gifted author of the 1 Stories of Waterloo.' It would be 'to paint the lily,' — the quotation is old, but the application is happy in this instance." — CorJfc Examiner. " Faugh-a-Ballagii," is the celebrated and characteristic Irish motto, meaning 'clear the way !' It is a bold undertaking, that on which Mr. Maxwell has ventured, of flinging down the glove of rivalry straight at the feet of the author of Charles O'Malley :' but he has done so boldly and bravely. He has brought forward on his stage a young Irishman, who seems to be the full incarnation of the wild and warm genius of his country t he has given him a body-guard to match, and a commission in the twen- ty-first Fusileers ; and has fairly started him forth on the world as a soldier of fortunp, which in general, as we need not be told, signifies in Ireland, as everywhere else, a soldier of no fortune. The first five numbers, all that have yet appeared, promise capitally for the sequel ; and though we took them up with a pshaw ! of impatience at having to read them for an opinion alxmt them, we intend to read the future ones as fast as they come out, for their own sake, for the fun that is in them." — Democratic Review. Noio in course of Publication, in Monthly Parts, 12| cents each, with Illustrations, by the Author, "HANDY ANDY." By SAMUEL LOVER, Esq* " This boy Handy will be the death of us. What is the police force about to allow the uttering of application that has already brought us to the brink of apoplexy fifty times ? Grave people, under- takers, sextons and the like, may, perhaps read with impunity. Such may laugh over it, but let a fellow with a squeeze of natural fun in him, venture to peruse it, and we'll lay ten to one it throws him into convulsions. — SportingReview. " We fael indebted to the Publishers, not only for the book, but for the hearty laugh we have had over it. Our sides fairly ache from the effect, as bad as even the unfortunate Trumpeter's did from over straining, or O'Grady's kicking. Any one afflicted with the blues, will find a sovereign remedy in Handy k ndy." — Brooklyn. News. , " The fata'.ity which attends every thing to which Handy puts his hand, is not only excessively droll, but higAly dramatic, without treading upon natural conduct and its natural results. Unlike other folks, his very blunders will make his course prosperous ; for who that can read would be without so entertaining acompanion as Handy Andy." — Literary Gazette. 44 The richest, the raciest, and the most frolicking Irish story wo have ever perused." — London Journal of Commerce. '• The history of Handy Andy promises to present a particular and faithful account of one of the 'cutest Paddies that ever made use of his fists." — United Service Gazette. " We trust, for many a succeeding month, to grasp the extended hand of our friend Andy, and each time with renewed pleasure."— Sunday Times. " Handy Andy is the name of a new periodical by Mr. Lover, the author of ' Rory O'More,' and one of the admirable Crichtons of the day. Poet, painter, dramatist, musician, novelist, and orator ; he Mas woh i reputation which thi»new production is likely to increase."— Salopian Journal. 22 ' Juvenile Books. WORKS FOR THE YOUNG. A LIBRARY FOR MY YOUNG COUNTRYMEN. Thjs Library is confided to the, editorial care of one of the most successful writers of the day, and commends itself as presenting to the readers of this country a collection of books, chiefly confined to American subjects of historical interest. The young reader, who is interested in tales and stories of adventure, will find in these volumes all the incident and daring of the most thrilling romance, while they will contain faithful records of his^ torical truths. As thi3 enterprise is left to the entire care of the editor, who will admit none but the best and most useful books, it is believed they will better deserve the patronage of the public, than most collection left to the speculation of publishers. They pledge themselves that no pains shall be spared to make this collection more really valuable than any yet published, to be printed on good paper, clear type, and strong binding, embellished Witk plates, and offered at the very low price of'37i cents per volume. The following volumes are noio ready. THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF HENRY HUDSON. By the author of " Uncle Philip's," " Virginia," &c. ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH; Founder of Virginia. By the author of " Henry Hudson," &c. DAWNINGS OF GENIUS. By Anne Pratt, author of " Flowers and their Associations," &c. LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF HERMAN CORTES. By the author of the "Adventures of Captain John Smith," &c. ZH7 Several other volumes are in immediate preparation. EVENINGS WITH THE CHRONICLERS; Or Uncle Rupert's Tales of Chivalry. By R. M. Evans. With many Illustrations. 1 fSL l&no., elegantly bound. $0 75. «• This prould have been a volume after our own h«arts, while we were vounsrer, and it is scarcely less so now when we *re ecmewhst older. It discourses of thoss things which charmed aH of us tn early youth. The derin«- dead's of the Knights aiul Squires of feudal warfare. The true version of the 'Chevy Cha«e,' the exploits of the siout and stalwari Warriors ol England, Scotland and Germany. Ina word, it is an attractive book, ami rendered more so to vcnin^- readers by a series nf wood engravings, beautifully executed, illustrating the letter-r.rees descriptions. There are seventeen of ihese plates in the volume, and ilie whole bock is so excellently printed, and upon such goud paper, that it is in all re- elects valuable."— Courier Sf Enquirer. THE HISTORY OF JOAN OF ARC. By R. M. Evans, author of " Evenings with the Chroniclers," with t-. Thai a young ;r:rt from the humblest warts of life, incapable of writing Irer name, or even readme it when n was v. i it ten, and trained only to the most servile drudgery, should, under a fanatical impulse, have iveloped an en- ei-'y o! c ,a:acerth:il made her tor some time the terror of one nation and the pride of rum h,,-, -x- should hnvepronoanc- ed impossible, :t a well-authenticated record of the fact had nor come down to us. lit the work before us we have ne: only a most interesting biography of this female prodigy, including what she wws an 1 wont she accorn pished, but also a fallhrtB accouit of the relations that e xisted Deiween Ensrlanit and France, end of the singular stale of tiling that mark- ed the pe-nod when this wonderful personage appeared upon the statre. The leading meideirts ot her life are related briefly indeed, but with exquisite simplicity and touching pathos ; and yon cannot repress vour admiration for tier heroic qualities, or scarcely repress your tears tu view of her ignominious cfid. To the i oulhful reader we heartily recommeiwf this volume." — Alb&ny Acceriiscr. SPRING AND SUMMER. The Juvenile Naturalist ; or Walks in the Country. By the Rev. B. II. Draper. A beautiful vol- ume, with nearly fifty plates. 1 vol. square, handsomely hound. $0 75. " Here we have a charming volume for children more advanced— in which the change of the sea- sons are made to minister instruction, and the common phenomena of animal and recetablo life, of atmospheric pressure, &c— daily seen, and daily unheeded— are agreeably and satisfactorily ex- plained ; wood cuts in abundance add their attractions. "-~N. Y. American. AUTUMN AND WINTER. The Juvenile Naturalist ; or Walks in the Country. By the Rev. B. II. Draper. A beautiful vol ume, with many plates, uniform with " Spring and Summer." $0 7j. "This elegant volume is well calculated to be of service to children in giving them come knowledge of natural history, of field and home occupations in autumn and winter, the manners and customs ot different nations, the structure of man, &c. It is by the Rev. R. II. Draper, and is written in the fa- miliar styie of conversation. Numerous appropriate wood cuts illustrate the text."— Phila. Chroniclt 23 APPLETON'S TALES FOR THE PEOPLE AND THEIR CHILDREN. The greatest care has been taken in selecting the works of which the collection id composed, so that notliing either mediocre in talent, or immoral in tendency, is ad- mitted. Each volume is printed on the finest paper, is illustrated with an elegant frontispiece, and is bound in a superior manner, tastefully ornamented. The following are comprised in the series, uniform in size and style • — THE POPLAR GROVE ; or, Little Harry and his Uncle Benjamin. By Mrs. Copley. 37} cts. EARLY FRIENDSHIPS. By Mrs. Copley. 375 cents. THE CROFTON EOYS. By' Harriet Martincau. 37}. THE PEASANT AND THE PElNCE. By Harriet Martineau. 37* cents. NORWAY AND THE NORWEGIANS ; or, Feats on the Fiord. By H. Martineau. 37 Jots, MAST E RM AN READY; or, the Wreck of the Pacific. Written for Young People By Captain Marryatt. Three volumes ; each 37} cents. 1HE LOOKING-GLASS FOR THE MIND; or, Intellectual Mirror. An elegant collection of Delightful Stories and Tales: many plates. 50 cents. HOPE ON, HOPE EVER; or the Boyhood of Felix Law. By Mary Hewitt. 37} cents. STRIVE AND THRIVE ; a Tale. By Mary Howitt. 37} cents. SOWING AND REAPING; or, What will Come of It? By Mary Howitt. 37} cents. | WHO SHALL BE GREATEST ? a Tale. By Mary Howitt. 37 £ cents. 'WHICH IS THE WISER? or, People Abroad. By Mary Howitt. 37}. LITTLE COIN, MUCH CARE ; or, How Poor People Live. By Mary Howitt. 37} cents. WORK AND WAGES ; or, Life in Service. By Mary Howitt. 37} cents. THE DANGERS OF DINING OUT ; or, Hints to those who would maize Home Happy, To which is added the Confessions of a Maniac. By Mrs. Ellis. 37} cents. SOMERVILLE HALL ; or Hints to those who would make Home Happy. To which is added the Rising Tide. By Mrs. Ellis. 37} cents FIRST IMPRESSIONS; or, Hints to those who Would make Home Happy. By Mrs. Ellis. 37]. MINISTER'S FAMILY ; or, Hints to those who Would make Home Happy. By Mrs. Ellis. 37}. THE TWIN SISTERS; a Tale, By Mrs. Sandham. 37} cents. TIRED OF HOUSE-KEEPING ; A Tale. By T. S. Arthur. 37} cents. • " Of late years many writers have exerted their talents in juvenile literature, with great success. Miss Martineau has made political economy as familiar to boys as it formerly was to statesmen. Our own Miss Sedgwick has produced some of the most beautiful moral stories, for the edification and de- light of children, which has ever been written. The Hon. Horace Mann, in addresses to adults, has presented the claims of children for good education, with a power and eloquence of style, and an eleva- tion of thought, which shows his heart is in his work. The stories of Mary Howitt, Harriet Martin- eau, Mrs. Copley, and Mrs. Ellis, which form apart of 'Tales for the People and their Children,' and a lis; of which we have prefixed to this article, will be found valuable additions to juvenile literature ; at the same time they may be read with profit by parents, for the good lessons they inculcate, and by ell ether readers for the literary excellence they display. " We wish they could be placed in the hands, and engraven on the minds of all the youth in the country. They manifest a nice and accurate observation of human nature, and especially the nature of children, a fine sympathy with everything good and pure, and a capability of infusing it in the minds of others —great beauty and simplicity of style, and a keen eye to practical life, with all its faults, uni- ted with adeep love for ideal excellence. " Messrs. Appleton & Co. deserve the highest praise for the excellent manner in which they hava * got up' their juvenile library, and we sincerely hope that its success will be so great as to induce them to make continual contributions to its treasures. The collection is one which should l>e owned by every parent who wishei that the moral and intellectual improvement of his children should keep pae« ■with their growth in years, and the development of their physical powers." — Boston Timet. 24 Juvenile Books, <§~c. PICTORIAL ROBINSON CRUSOE. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. By Daniel De Foe. With a Memoir of the Author" j and an Essay on his writings, illustrated with three hundred spirited Engravings by the celebrated French artist,