THE LIBRARIES CHURCH PRINCIPLES CONSIDERED IN THEIR RESULTS, W. E. GLADSTONE, Esq., LATE STUDENT OF CHRISTCIIURCH, AND M.T. FOR NEWARK. Sequere viam Catholicsc discipliiiae, quae ab ipso Christo per Apostolos ad uos usque manaTit, et abhinc ad posteros manatura est. S. Augustini de Utilitate Credendi, c. viii. LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, AND HATCHARD AND SON, PICCADII.LY. MDCCCXL. LONDON : Printed by William Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street. ^^- 3 ^ i /^6'b COMPLETED BENEATH THE SHADES OF HAGLEY AND DEDICATED, IN TOKEN OF SINCERE AFFECTION, TO THE LORD LYTTELTON. August, 1840. A 2 CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Par. I— 4. 5— 8. 9, 10. 11— IC. 17. 18. 19, 20. 21, 22. 23. 24, 25. 26. 27. 28. 29, 30. 31 32. 33, 34, 35, INTRODUCTORY. Of the true form of history, and of its materials Periods of variation and reaction may be expected in religion, compatibly with the permanence of the Faith We must not assume that all movement is progres sion ........ The present age seems to be distinguished by two principal and opposite tendencies Illustrated from the Reformation . From the late reaction in poetry . Presumable disadvantai^es of a period of religious reaction, from the nature of the thing From faults of temperament .... From sinister observation • . . . Remedial suggestions .... Particulars of the evil indicated Blame to what and whom chiefly asciibable The bearings of the question highly practical , The subjects to be discussed The title The method of discussing them, not theological But ethical ...... And practical ...... And without pretence of authority Pa-'e 11 17 17 18 20 22 23 26 27 27 28 29 30 30 32 34 CHAPTER II. RATIONALISM. 1 . The antirationalistic principle .... 2 — 4. On the popular and the subtler form of rationalism . 36 37 VI CONTENTS. Par. Page 5—9. The proper work of the understanding, and the limits of its province ...... 40 10 — 17. The understanding is incompetent to cure a fault which lies in the affections .... 46 18. Though it has a collateral and instrumental influence 19. True statement of the question .... 52 20, 21. Homogeneity a condition of the action of the affec- tions 54 22. Objection — why, then, do not belief and practice correspond ?....... 56 23. (1) Because the direct action of the affections may raise belief above practice. Instance . . 56 24. (2) Because passion operates more on conduct than on belief ....... 57 25. (3) Because the understanding participates in the cognisance of the direct motives which bear upon religious belief and practice .... 58 26 — 33. (4) Because the understanding participates in the cognisance of the indirect motives which bear upon religious belief and practice .... 59 34 — 37. (5) Because the affections may be hindered and in- tercepted by the action of other faculties . . 65 38. Need of some access to the man besides that which the understanding affords .... 68 39. The degrees of incompetency of the understanding, taken alone, to appreciate the main religious mo- tives 68 40. (1) Fear of punishment 69 41. (2) Hope of enjoyment ..... 70 42. (3) Love of God 70 43 — 45. Argument from Scriptural instances with respect to the unbaptized ...... 71 Applied 73 Argument from Scriptural exhortations to the baptized 74 The doctrine of a spiritual influence apart from the understanding, necessary for the maintenance of orthodoxy in general ..... 76 And most appropriately illustrated in the Sacraments 78 Harmonious teaching of Scripture with respect to the heart and the understanding .... 79 Mode of its loss and recovery .... 80 Summary of principles and conclusions) in this Chapter. 88 46. 47, 48. 49- -51. 52. 53. 54, 55. 56, 57. CONTENTS. VII CHAPTER III. THE CHURCH. Par. Page 1. The principle of Christian life spiritual . . 85 2, 3. Seeks an external development, first, because we have a body as well as a soul ..... 85 4. Next, for its own consummation as an inward prin- ciple ........ 86 5. Next, because the law of duty binds each man to be- nefit his neighbour, and because human nature is social 87 fi. A great part of the province of common action is ne- cessarily relative ...... 87 7, 8. The principle of sociality requires to be regulated in its operation by fixed limits .... 88 Which limits are best provided by some positive Divine institution ...... 88 9. And Christian religion ordains a system of joint action ........ 89 10. And the whole human hfe is socially constituted . 96 11. And all religions have provided for an external de- velopment ....... 92 12. Need of such a system from the external obstacles to Christianity ....... 93 13. From the internal obstructions .... 93 14. Scope and worth of these presumptive arguments . 94 15. The general result: that right reason leads us to an- ticipate the doctrine of the Visible Church . . 95 16 — 19. Of certain popular and lowered notions of the Church 95 20. Not recognised by the Church of England . . 99 2 1 — 29. Nor in Scripture ; where the Christian religion is for the most part regarded collectively in the person of the Church, and the Church is represented as the subject of prophecy, of preaching, of parable, of prayer, as the inheritress of the promises, the body of Christ, and one . . . . . 100 30, 31. Objection, that the unity commanded is exclusively spiritual . . . . . . . . 107 32 — 37. Objection, that the unity of the body is fulfilled in the distinction between Christians generally and the rest of the world ...... 109 Vlll CONTENTS. Par. 38—40, 41 42 43, 45 46. 47. 48. 49- -52. 53. 54. 55, 56. 57. 58—60. 61. 62—65. G6, ^1. 68—71. 72, 73. 74—82. 83. Objection that, from the mixture of good and bad in the Visible Church, it cannot be the Spiritual Spouse ..... Outline of the result from Scripture, and our lapse from that standard .... Cause partly in the Romish excess Partly also from human corruption Of the advantages of return Considered simply as a command It presents a different view and form of action The Scriptural idea tends to the depression of the idea of self ...... To the growth of Love To increase of force by sympathy and by combina tion ...... To warmth of devotion Generally, to maintain the doctrines of grace, and to facilitate carrying out the details of duty Advantages of defence which it gives to the consci entious and obedient And of aggression .... Application to the charge of peculiar opinions Tends to corroborate faith And to the maintenance of truth All this isappHcable primarily to the general and partially to each particular Church Answers to objections from supposed tendency {.lb, 76.) to lethargy and formality (77.) to obscure the view of the Redeemer (78, 79.) to self-righteousness (80.) to misrepresent the condition of the wicked (81, 82.) to enslave private judgment Conclusion ..... Pa-e 113 116 117 118 121 122 122 123 127 128 129 131 132 135 136 139 141 145 147 147 150 151 154 155 157 CHAPTER IV. THE SACRAMENTS. 1 . Mode of treating 2, 3. Scripture doctrine respecting Baptism 4. Respecting the Eucharist 5. Idea of this doctrine 158 159 161 162 CONTENTS. IX 6, 7. Ancient doctrine ..... 8. Two forms of modern perversion 9. What is the practical difference ? . 10. In faithful adults ; ..... 11. In unfaithful adults ; ..... 12 — 14. In infants; ...... 15. The Sacraments give a handle whereby the senses take hold of religion .... 16. Afford a strong historical evidence of Christianity 17, 18. Are the proper constituents of Christian fellowship 19. Testimonies of St. Auguslin and of Hooker 20. And the proper means of realising consciousness of fellowship ...... 21. And make the strongest appeal to religious motives 22. And are a barrier against fanaticism 23. And against despondency and unbelief . 24. And exhibit men in their true position as recipients 25 — 31. They peculiarly illustrate and defend the proper idea of spiritual grace ; as it respects the Eucharist 32. And as it respects Baptism .... 33. And especially infant baptism 34. Summary view ...... 35 — 38. Cases of the Romanists and of certain divisions of Protestants, compared .... 39—42. Practical warning therefrom to follow the true middle way ....... Page 163 165 165 166 166 167 169 170 170 172 173 174 174 175 176 177 182 182 183 183 186 CHAPTER V. THE APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION. I, 2. Mode of dealing with the subject proposed . . 139 3, 4. Questions which arise respecting the ministry out of the foregoing conclusions . . . . 191 5, 6. Opinion that the perpetuity of the Church is in the doctrine only ....... 193 7 — 9. A society as such implies a government . . 194 10 — 12. Particularly Sacramental ordinances seem to require a specific ministerial agency . . . . 196 13 — 15. The Church and its government historically consti- tuted in the persons of the Apostles . . . 200 X CONTENTS. Par. Page 16. Their office was perpetual ..... 204 1 7. And the Mmistry in general was exercised (where not by Divine Revelation) by commission from them 205 18—20. According to the nature of the office as testified by Scripture 206 21 — 26. Illustrated by consideration of particular cases men- tioned in Scripture ..... 209 27. From the evidence of St. Clement . , . 214 28 — 33. Succession in the Church contrasted with that in the State 216 34. Misapprehensions of the points at issue . . . 223 35. The question twofold 223 36 — 38. Its theological and practical importance , . 224 39. Various theories concerning the channel of the Suc- cession : the Church of England holds it to be the Episcopate ....... 227 40. Essentials to the office of a Bishop . . . 229 41. Scriptural traces of it in the Apostles . . . 229 42. In the charge of St. James at Jerusalem . . 230 43. In Timothy and Titus ...... 230 44. In the Angels of the Apocalypse .... 232 45. In fragmentary notices of other persons . . . 232 46. The historical evidence at large classified . . 233 4 7 — 49. On Chillingworth's objection from the doctrine of chances ....... 234 50. Changes in the use of the terms by which Church offices were designated . , . , . 237 51. Relation of the Church to the Jewish polity . , 237 52, 53. General view from Scripture of the development of the ministry ...... 238 54. And of the natural limit of the Scriptural records . 240 55, 56. Why it properly takes the form rather of narrative than of precept . . . . . . 240 57 — 59. Independently of the investigation of early history, a distinct question arises, whether it be granted that the early Presbyters had the Episcopal power of order, any conclusion can thence be drawn in favour of later Presbyters to whom it has not been given ....... 243 60. Misapprehension of the issue between Episcopal and Non-episcopal communions .... 246 CONTENTS. XI Far. Page 61. Testimony of the Church of England . . . 247 62. Of Bishop Hoadly 249 63. Scope of these inquiries ..... oso 64. Retrospect, and the course of the remaining argu- ments proposed . . . . . , 251 65, 66. Two prefatory cautions . . . . . 25 1 67, 68. The tendencies of the doctrine of Succession as it respects the general expediency of a clerical order 254 69 — 75. As it respects the clergy, from the case of St. Paul, from reason, and from experience . . . 257 76, 7 7. As it respects the relation of governors and people in the Church ....... 266 78 — 80. As it respects individual members of the Church . 269 81 — 87. As it respects the general ideas of spiritual grace and of the visible Church ..... 272 88, 89. Conclusion ....... 279 CHAPTER VI. OF THE SPECIFIC CLAIM OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 1 — 3. View of the discrepancy between the true theory of the Church and the actual religious condition of the country ....... 282 4. The question to be discussed : is the Church of Eng- land invested, within her own sphere, with Catholic prerogatives? ...... 285 5, 6. It has a material bearing upon the question of legal establishment ...... 286 7, 8. Has the Church any general ground of her belief which those dissenting from her have not ? . 288 9. If she has, she stands in an essentially different posi- tion 289 Her historical rights 290 Proper object of religious search . . . . 291 Duty of remaining in the communion of the Church 292 Nominal adherence to Apostolic Faith and Scripture may easily be rendered null . . . . 294 16 — 19. Presumption in favour of the Dissenter as compared with the Deist, from the existence of Scripture . 296 20 — 27. Analogous presumption in favour of the Church as compared with the Dissenter, from the historical and exegetical witness of Christian antiquity . 299 10. U. 12, 13. 14, 15. Xll CONTENTS. Par. Page 28. The argument with Romanism is separate . . 305 29. Question on the historical identity of the Church . 306 30, 31. Identity unbroken before the Reformation . . 307 32. Much more then, at the Reformation, quoad doctrine 308 33 — 37. Nor is it broken quoad succession . . . 309 38. She therefore holds locally the rights and claims of the Apostolic Church . . . . " . 313 CHAPTER VII. CHURCH PRINCIPLES IN RELATION TO PRESENT CIRCUMSTA.NCES. Section I. — Introductory. 1. Summary of conclusions from the foregoing Chapters 314 2. Objections to them from consequences ; I., II., III. . 314 3. Such an issue is subordinate only . . . . 315 4. What is here meant by the phrase " Church Prin- ciples " 316 5. They are unjustly classed with opinions in rehgion, which are properly private and indifferent notions 3 1 7 6. Because they are held by the Church . . . 319 7. And are found in the writings of her Divines, and are imputed by her opponents . . . . 320 Section II. — First Objection. 8_10. Objection I. That Church principles have a ten- dency to Romanism, This objection i^ prima facie of very equivocal merit, from our experience of its use, and from the mixed nature of Romanism . 322 11. Yet it may have some of the elements of truth . 326 12. The specific operation of Church principles is not fa- vourable to Romanism . . . . . 327 13. But they establish certain grounds of sympathy with (among others) the Roman Churches — namely, in 329 14. (1.) The fact of Church essence .... 330 15. (2.) The power of Church principles . . 331 16. (3.) The recognition of permanent objective truth in religion . . ^ . . . . 332 17 — 19. (4.) The principle of provision by symbols in religion for our corporeal nature ..... 334 20, 21 . Of the aggressions of Romanism outwards, and of its terrors within ...... 338 CONTENTS. XIU Par. ^'"^^^ 22. Retrogression of the Reformation in the decline of the 16th century 341 23. Moral of Church history, and a rule of its study . 342 24. Reconversion of England ardently desired . . 343 25. And not now for the first time anticipated . . 344 26. Humanly speaking, hopeless .... 346 27, 28. There is a yet worse, which is also a less improbable alternative ....... 347 29. Special causes of weakness in the Roman Church . 348 30. (1.) Tendency of some of its doctrines to the extreme forms of superstitious error . . . . 348 31, 32. Examples 350 33. Reverence to the Virgin, liable to become idola- trous ........ 353 34, 35. Its idea fascinating, but most perilous and delusive . 355 36. This is the kind of weakness which the present age is likely to detect 358 37. The influences of Romanism in their decay leave be- hind no substitute , . . . . 358 38. It does not powerfully pervade the intellectual and the national life, where it is paramount . . 359 39. In Northern Germany more vigorous, and why . 360 40, 41. (2.) Variations of Romanism : on indulgencies . 361 42—45. On the circulation of Scripture among the people . 363 46, 47. On toleration and religious equality . . • 367 48. The moral versatility thus evinced is really a special cause of weakness ...... 370 49. The English Reformation, as tested by its results on the national destinies, is open on certain points to animadversion . . . . . • 372 50. A National Church is mainly responsible for the con- dition of the country where it exists . . . 373 51. The same test, however, must be applied to the com- peting scheme of Romanism .... 374 52. And in the country whose case is most nearly analo- gous—namely, France . ... 374 53—66. Comparison in detail, unfavourable to Romanism . 375 67 — 70. Church Principles the specific barrier against Ro- manism ....... 389 71, 72. Additional safeguard in some peculiarities marking the conduct of many persons in the Roman com- munion ....... 394 XIV CONTENTS. Par, Page 73. General lesson we have to learn from Romanism . 396 74, 75. The difficulty of applying a right spirit to the discussion 398 Section III. — Second Objection. 76. Objection II. That Church principles place us in a false and uncharitable position as regards other Protestants : and the propositions to be established in reply ..... 400 77 — 80, I. That the matter of the doctrines cannot possibly be arrogant if they be true . . . . 401 II. That their proper tendency is to produce not arrogance but humility .... 403 81 — 83. III. That they purport to invest with Church privi- leges sixfold more than they are charged with " unchurching" ..... 405 84, 85. Many non-episcopal Protestants hold opinions equally liable to the accusation of " unchurch- ing " other Protestants .... 408 86— 92. IV. That Church Principles go to exclude no per- son of piety from the Church of Christ, who, according to the criteria established by his own professed opinions, belongs to it . . . 410 93 — 98. Holy persons are individually united to the Church by inward conformity ; and even their societies, as distinct from the persons composing them, may possibly be portions of the visible Church ; but we want evidence to affirm it . . . 416 99 — 105. Nor do these admissions impair the obligation to adhere to the Apostolical ministry, or annul its advantages ...... 423 106. Summary on the fourth proposition . . . 429 107 — 110. Unconscious attestation to the truth of Church principles from those who smart vmder their imputed consequences ..... 430 Section IV. — Third Objection. 111. Objection III. That Church principles tend to di- vide the Church 434 112 — 114. Answered generally as respects schism . . 435 115. As respects divisions in opinion . . . 437 CONTENTS. XV Far, 117, 118 119 I20-- -126 127 128 129 130 131 13-2- -134 135, 136 137 138 139, 140. 141 142 143 144 145 146. 147. .48, 149. 150. 151. 116. These principles refer us to an acknowledged and a common standard . . • . . 437 Tliey limit and soften differences of opinion . 439 Discussion of their bearing as learned historically from the period since 1688. Effects of the Re- volution unfavourable to these principles . . 441 Causes specified ...... 442 Decline in general doctrine attended the decline in Church principles . . . . . 447 Though the essence of the Church remained en- tire ........ 448 Notices of decay and corruption in the Church elsewhere and at former periods . . . 448 Facts illustrative of the decay of Church principles during the 18th century .... 450 On the corresponding decay of general doctrine . 452 Testimonies to it . . , . . . 453 Instances of it . . . . . . 457 Reasons for a free statement of this declension . 459 Contemporaneous decay of learning and study in the Church 460 Instances of prevailing secularity . . . 462 Schism ....... . 464 Morals of the rich . . . . . . 465 Reaction, first in the doctrines relating to personal religion 466 With exaggerations ..... 468 Which have gradually disappeared as their influ- ence widened . . . . . . 469 Reaction next in the deeper study and stronger inculcation of Church principles, which are the natural complement of the doctrines relating to personal religion . . . . . 4 70 Fictitious doctrinal oppositions which were in vogue 471 Now less and less prevalent .... 471 The order of reaction exactly reverses that of de- cline ....... 473 This, like the former reaction, may have some tem- porary exaggerations . . . . . 473 152, But, hke that, is not innovation .... 475 153 And accordingly makes rapid and steady progress 476 154. Herewith learning revives .... 477 XVI CONTENTS. Par. Page 155 — 158. The substantial and final tendency of these discus- sions is towards the confirmation of unity in the Church 477 159 — ,165, Illustrations from the controversy in Scotland con- cerning settlement of ministers, of a great prac- tical difficulty arising from the want of the Episcopal succession . . . . . 482 Section V.— General View. 107 — 170. Three conditions requisite for the general efficacy of Christianity 493 (I.) Permanence of the Faith ... 4-94 (II.) Comprehensiveness of Communion . 495 (III.) Liberty of Thought .... 496 171. (I.) How realised in the Church . . . 497 172, 173. The same of (II.) 499 174, 175. The same of (III.) 501 176—178. Idea and position of the Church of England emi- nently favourable to the general object of union, which, however difficult, is not in all degrees absolutely hopeless . . . . . 504 179, 180. Even as regards portions of the Roman Communion 509 181. Wherein the peculiar strength of Romanism and of Protestantism severally lies . . . . 511 182, 183. There is no reason why they should not be com- bined, nor anything in the Church of England to disqualify her from fully combining them . 512 A general sentiment of the necessity for religious union is growing among serious persons . . 514 Which cannot be realised by inward feelings alone, or by common reception of the canon of Scrip- ture, but only by oneness of communion . . 515 The apparent ripening of things for a crisis . . 517 How to await it, holding by the law of truth and by the law of love ; and of the relation between these laws . . . . . . . . 518 194, 195. Of the difficulty of access to Divine Truth, and of the value and dignity of the pursuit . . 524 196. Anticipations for the Church of England . . 527 Appendix ......... 529 184 185, 186 187 188- -193 CHURCH PRINCIPLES CONSIDERED IN THEIR RESULTS. CHA.PTER I. INTRODUCTORY. 1—4. True form of History. 5—8. Variation and reaction in religion. 9,10. Movement not necessarily progressive. 11 — 28. Character- istics of this period as one of religious reaction ; the evils and their remedies. 29 — 35. Enumeration of the subjects to be discussed; and the mode of handling them. 1. If it be expedient to note the forms of thought and action by which successive ages are distinguished as they pass by us, and thus to supply the materials of a larger retrospect and of more comprehensive and permanent records, it can scarcely be a task requiring much apology, to consider the bearings of particular truths of religion with respect to the shifting circum- stances of the world from time to time, and to the different degrees and modes in which those truths are apprehended. That which we familiarly call the his- tory of men, is not their history. It is a part indeed of their history, but not the most important and essential part. We should think it strange, and might be tempted to complain of it as either a gross error B 2 INTRODUCTORY- [cHAP. I. or a fraud, if an account of some of the less important classes of material objects should monopolise or even assume the title of natural history. It is not less at variance with the true nature of things, though more in conformity with our habitual but erroneous con- ceptions, that relations, which are only secondary with respect to the most momentous interests of man, and the highest parts of his nature, should, by a semblance of common consent, be considered the history of man. There is fraud in this case, but the fraud is in ourselves, in each of us, in the depra- vation of the inward eye, which misrepresents the comparative magnitude of objects, and gives to the things which are seen, a greater importance than to those which are not seen. 2. Secular history explains to us much of what concerns the bodily and temporal interests of man : his social position and the results upon character arising out of it, much of his experimental life in the senses, in the imagination, in the understanding, and even in the affections. It ought to go, and in right hands it does go, much farther. The true historian interprets and combines its separate phenomena, by constant reference to the central influence which con- trols all the movements of human nature ; the prin- ciple of religion. Yet, for a long time, and until very recently, the mind of our country has been fed with its knowledge of the past, from works which are altogether defective on this vital subject ; and it will probably be long before our habits are so reformed as CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 3 that we shall read history only in the light of revela- tion. But what aspect of the character of the creature is entitled to compete for a moment with that in which he is viewed by the Creator ? To the rescued child of Adam what so vital as the great subject of his re- demption ? To the human being, who, if he is to live permanently, must live by a new life, what matter the concerns and the history of the former state, except in an instrumental and subordinate capacity? We ought indeed to be on our guard against that morbid teaching, which inculcates an universal recoil from earthly objects as the true law of general morality ; which treats this life on earth as if it were a mere acci- dent of our being : and perceives nothing but empty vision in all its impressive and pregnant experience. On the contrary, it is an ordained and necessary part of the development of man : and when its regulation is committed to right laws, it is in harmony much more than in opposition to the future and untroubled existence, which awaits the faithful members of Christ. But still it remains true, that, great as is the im- portance of our civil and social life, it is not an essen- tial but an instrumental importance : it is important for that which it yields and generates, not for that which it is ; and all its influences are real and of weight, only when we take into calculation something that lies without it and beyond it. 3. It is in the history of the Church that we have the final consummation of all human destinies. What- ever we are, or have, or do, is important, at least is B 2 4 INTRODUCTORY. [CIIAP. I. beneficially important, only in connexion with the religious bearing of our lives. Every gift and orna- ment of the human character is either pernicious, or useless, or at best fragile and unenduring, unless it be sanctified and stamped with permanence by a vital union with the spirit of religion. Every form of loveliness, which belongs to this world alone, must pass away with it ; and the beautiful and graceful things we idolize are but like the fillets that once bound the temples of the sacrificial victim, unless we obtain for them a passport to the better world, by applying to them that perpetuating power of religion, which, blending these lighter with the higher and holier qualities, rescues them from abuse ; and, removing them from their dedication to the purposes of pride and selfishness, appoints them to serve God each ac- cording to its capacity. Thus, from being mischievous, do temporal gifts and talents become valuable. They are estimated indeed only at their proper worth, but in that mea- sure they are blessed by God, and acceptable to Him. The common tenor of daily life affords not to the philosophical and sagacious mind alone, but to any man who will look for them, continual occasions for the exercise of duty, though often upon a subject mat- ter apparently unconnected with it : purity, integrity, courage, patience, diligence, self-command, may be fed and strengthened amid the humblest labours of each succeeding hour, though of course it is in the acts of direct duty or worship that the mental powers CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 5 and affections have their liighest honour and reward ; and so the whole circle of human experience is chiefly to be viewed with reference to its religious results. Our relations to God ward are those which should occupy the largest share in our attention, as they will exercise the most determining influence on our destiny, and these are they which compose the history of the Church; for it is in the Church that we have our religious life, derived to us not as individuals, but by virtue of incorporation into her body. In her alone the world is loved, and in her, for the sake of her head, the Redeemer. 4. Further, as secular history will in the natural course of things be gathered from contemporary ob- servations, first recorded with the advantages of prox- imity, and then reduced into order with those of comprehensive and impartial contemplation : so, in the history of religion, we ought merely to consider not only the records of the past, with which our con- cern is comparatively remote, but also those peculi- arities and variations which are actually beneath our eye, which belong to the circumstances and persons of our own time, and by which perhaps in more than trifling particulars the forms of our own belief, and thus of our own character, are determined. And the habit of observation which should arrest and embody some of the religious characteristics of the period as they rise or ripen or decline, and the pen which should record them with fidelity, might be found to render useful service to truth. 5. It may possibly be objected that these remarks 6 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP. I. tend towards the error of those who treat religion as being in its essential as well as its minor parts a pro- gressive science, not only capable of extension in its store of facts and in its secondary laws, but also liable to fundamental change in its fundamental principles. Certainly I would deny the subjective immobility of any religious system. The Roman Church, whatever may have been said of it by some among its extreme foes or friends, is not one at all times, nor in all places at one time. Those communities which admit the ultimate right of private judgment may be re- garded as still more exposed to fluctuation ; but the English Church, in recognising along with, though subordinately to, the Scriptures, the authorised inter- pretations of primitive Christian antiquity, appears to proceed upon the principle that the Church of Christ has an infallibility in some fixed body of truth, and as a necessary consequence of that infallibility, change- lessness in the profession of the truth so held. But as, however, there are fallings away from essential truth, and as this perpetuity is not absolutely assured to any particular portion of the Church, so there are also changes silent and unperceived, originating in some secret tendency, some collateral circumstance, or some apparently trivial enactment; and which, even where they do not touch the vital parts of reli- gion, may nevertheless, in a thousand different degrees, have materially influential consequences in marring or cherishing its growth, in obstructing or facilitating its operation. 6. But it may fairly be required of those who hold CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 7 strong views upon the fundamental immutability of Christian truth, that they should be very explicit in stating the extent of the object contemplated, when they come forward avowedly not for the sole purpose of enforcing what is already acknowledged, but like- wise with the endeavour to reanimate the perception of some things which have been neglected, or even for a time denied. They may be required to show w^hether in any and in what sense they hold the theory of progression in religion ; and whether, or under what limitations, they mean to leave room for the inference, that they would make the propositions they maintain conditions of Christian union. 7. Along with the changelessness then of the Church in the fundamental truths of the Gospel, let us observe that there is ample space for capricious variation in the methods by which those truths are followed out to their consequences, or combined with one another, or with minor truths. It is therefore no reproach to religion that her external aspect on earth, and even certain of the modifications of her internal character, should perpetually appear to be undergoing alteration. First, because she has little or no practical hold on the hearts of most of those whose opinions nevertheless count in the mass, and contribute to form the fashion of the day. Next, because when we consider what is divine truth on the one hand, and what the human nature, its depository, on the other, we see that the true cause for wonder is in the conservation of the essence, and not in the hazards, the assaults, the 8 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP. I. superficial shiftings to which it is exposed ; for there is a continually deteriorating influence at work in the heart upon the truth, which is planted there as exotic and not indigenous ; and even when we omit the spirit of absolute rebellion within us which aims at its extinction, yet still the faintness, the indifference, the backslidings, the immeasurable distance between its heavenly and our fallen nature — these surely are reasons enouo-h to account for the fact that the sub- jective development of that truth in man, imperfect in the best (" for now we see through a glass darkly"*), likewise exhibits, in the thousand differing phases of character, a thousand progressive degrees of imper- fection. 8. The ship retains her anchorage yet drifts within a certain range, subject to the wind and tide. So we have for an anchorage the cardinal truths of the Gos- pel determined by the consent of the Church in all ages, and nowhere more fully or simply recognised than in this island. One who speaks to his brethren in her communion, under the peculiar circumstances of the day, should simply wish to be a fellow-labourer with them, and that all should be mutually helpful in realising to the hearts of its members the full force of its truths. For the progress of truth through the character is slow, and it requires time for its full esta- blishment, long after it has been sincerely and vitally received. It is a task of common interest, to learn better the lesson we must all feel that we have so im- * 1 Cor. xiii. 12. CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 9 perfectly acquired, namely, that which shows how we may least inadequately fulfil all the conditions of that blessed and glorious life which we have in Jesus Christ, and how most effectually oppose its powers to the powers of the fallen and evil life that belongs to our own selves. 9. Now this may be done partly upon a principle of general progression in the Church ; for it might be that the Church should grow, in certain kinds at least of knowledge, and yet retain all her essential prin- ciples without change, as an oak unfolds the life which it has carried seminally within it from the acorn. As the treasures both of spiritual experience and intel- lectual acquirement are accumulated by the labours of successive generations, it may be said we have more assistance, and ought therefore to make more progress. In short, a priori^ a case might perhaps be made to show that while the spirit of the Church must ever remain the same, the mind of the Church might be from age to age continually strengthened and matured and enlarged. Let those, however, who see that such has been actually the fact, declare it : I see it not, and therefore dare not assert it. And perhaps we do not enough consider that a spirit more simple and an un- derstanding less practised, are often preferable to that state in which a limited possession of knowledge has engendered an unlimited presumption of knowledge ; and that not merely the absolute but also the relative state of the heart and the mind determine the true condition of the man, and of the Church. 10. Let us take, for example, that which we com- 10 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP. I. monly and proudly term the dark period of the thir- teenth century. Assume, on the one hand, as much as you will respecting the superior standard of average attainment among men, in knowledge and religion at the present day: still I say the balance is not wholly cast in our favour. It was a strong expression, I think of the late Mr. Irving, that the soil of the Christian Church had more vigour at the time when it was capable of throwing up such plants as the minds of Luther and Melancthon, than warms it at this mo- ment. And so I would say of the darker period of this thirteenth century. Look at the minds of the men, for example at the mind of Dante,* which it moulded. Regard the comprehensive grasp with which he seized the seen and the unseen world, the entire range of ideas and facts, even the possible or imaginary forms of our future existence ; and while interweaving typically with his bold creations the great events and interests of his time,t exhibited along with a richness of fancy and a depth of passion in which he has had few poets for his rivals, an understanding edged for analysis like Aristotle, a spirit of childlike and ecstatic devotion like Augustine or Thomas a Kempis, and a strength of sublime intuition, that highest of human faculties, in which he seems to stand alone. Shall we, can we see again any such form and fashion of a man? Are there the mate- * Another remarkable instance may be found in Roger Bacon, the Franciscan monk, educated at Oxford (see Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, i. 323) ; and a third in Thomas Aquinas. t See the ingenious but exaggerated theory of the work of Professor Rossetti, " Sullo spirito antipapale." CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 11 rials for feeding and for training such a spirit? Among our foot-prints will there be found by pos- terity una simile Orma di pie mortale ?* His works are like the huge spears and swords that are shown in some of our old baronial castles, which none can wield ; and if the gigantic physical stature of ancient times be fabulous, is it equally untrue that the higher ranges of intellect, according to the predic- tion of Lord Bacon, have been reduced, and that our modern pride must begin to suspect and qualify some of its claims to superior excellence ? 11. It may not improbably be the case that, so far as respects religion, we are actually progressing in some particulars while we retrograde in others. The Church may be engaged in developing the ideas which she possesses, and in bringing the bud to be the flower ; or she may be, on the other hand, condensing what has been too much rarefied in a heated atmosphere, directing its power to a definite and palpable object, and seeking, through compression, to attain a more energetic action. She may be imploring her mem- bers to look into their own convictions, and to exa- mine faithfully whether they do not either comprise, or imply, or loudly call in aid those ideas which it is her desire to exhibit ; whether they be not seminally there contained, or whether they be not by consist- ency of reasoning involved, or whether they be not * Manzoni*s Ode on the Death of Napoleon. 12 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP. I. urgently needed to give form and body, completeness, unity, permanence, to the deep principles of personal religion which those whom she addresses bear in their heart of hearts, and for which they are justly and reasonably jealous. 12. We are not led to suppose that those who first followed Christ on earth, or even those who first joined his Church after his death, in the early stages of its progress and before heresy was rife, adopted any great number of propositions intellectually canvassed, ap- prehended, understood, before they became joined in the sacred unity of the Lord's mystical body. But being so joined, they had a guarantee that, as they ad- vanced into a deeper knowledge of the things of God, with enlarging knowledge they should still have a co- extensive unity, unless indeed the heart grew gross with pride, and brought forth its evil fruits, division and error. For the truths of religion being certain and unchangeable, they afford as unexceptionably true a ground of unity to those who know most as to those who know least, and it is the evil nature alone within us which has multiplied heresies upon the earth under pretence of knowledge. They therefore who hold from the Church of England their views of the truths of Scripture, and believe that in her they have a faith- ful expositress of the truths of Catholic Christianity, though they may not have travelled over the entire cycle of those truths together, yet if they have the same love and the same desire, the same belief in the great doctrines which she teaches, and in her faithful- CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 13 ness as a portion of the true Church, they may set out to examine more closely both her and them, in the liope, as well as with the prayer, that they may be enabled thus to advance, without any breach of their present concord, towards ascertaining the adaptation of the entire Gospel to the entire character of man. 13. Together with the experimental fact that there have been in each particular age particular modifica- tions in the features of Christian creed and practice, we may perhaps be warranted in assuming that the age in which we live is peculiarly marked as a reli- gious crisis. It is distinguished by a spirit of inquiry, not laborious but superficial, not friendly to its sub- ject, but sceptical. This is its prominent character for evil ; but, upon the other hand, it has also its tokens for good. From the same combination of circum- stances, which has engendered that spirit of jealous and querulous curiosity, has arisen a counteracting temper of earnest zeal against precipitate innovation. We succeed a series of generations through which the most valuable institutions were allowed to slumber and decay. We belong to a generation apt to censure its predecessors, perhaps for the very reason that we are suflfering from the absence of that moral training which we ought to have received from a due and pru- dent use of those institutions; we are awakened by exciting events to a keener sense of the faculties within us, while a right diet for those faculties and the sobering influences of habit and of inheritance are wanting ; we are almost unanimous in calling for 14 INTRODUCTORY. [cHAP. I. something more than the more tranquil times and habits of our immediate ancestors required ; but while some seek to supply their need out of the resources which the human understanding commands, others look rather to a traditional than to an ideal type, and are deeply impressed with the conviction that in the oldest way of faith alone are truth and peace to be found ; with the anxiety to keep their fellow-men within those sacred limits which have been marked and blessed by God himself, and with the desire so to adjust the instruments of their labour as may best subserve this final purpose. 14. Thus while the men of this age are divided principally into two great classes which divaricate widely in the direction of their desires, they neverthe- less have for the most part one characteristic in com- mon. They who think that in ancient Christianity is to be found the great and only conservative prin- ciple for modern society, are likewise of the belief, that in order to find it we must look not to the common and customary opinion of the generation or generations immediately preceding us, but to the results of a larger experience : and especially to a pe- riod of clearer and better knowledge, all whose fun- damental principles are happily transmitted to us in the treasures of. Scripture, as they have been attested by the witness of the Church. They agree therefore with their antagonists in thinking, that the stores of the last age are not enough to meet the wants of the present. The great question lepending is, whether CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 15 we are to revert in matters of religion to older posi- tions than those which were recently fashionable, or whether we are free to construct at our discretion some scheme founded upon novel principles. But upon either hypothesis we have a great transition to make. They who, with what is strictly termed the spirit of the age, wage war against religious doctrine in general, and they who wish to infuse into the pre- vailing religious tone of the last age a vitality which must be fetched from a greater distance, are each of them undertaking a great labour, are each of them experimenting on a large scale, though with very dif- ferent guarantees and most opposite anticipations, for the one class expects felicity from securing to human will an uncontrolled domination, while the other con- siders that it is only to be found in a patient and sub- missive spirit, assuming the line of ancient and positive revelation as the only competent guide of its future progress. 15. But at all events it appears that we are alike making a great transition ; and that transition is neces- sarily attended with excitement ; and that excitement, operating upon many individual minds, is likely to pro- duce numerous variations in the views which they adopt. On the one hand, it is conceived that the Church of England has in her theory, and has had in the practice of her best men and days, an exemplifica- tion of Christianity harmonising to a rare extent with its original and uncontaminated spirit; — that this spirit had, during the course of the last century, well 16 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP. I. nigh escaped from the prevailing tone of opinion, and from a great portion of her ostensible public agency ; — that those who first saw and mourned for the evil either, on the one hand, had not courage fully to expose it, or, on the other, in attempting to revive a devoted and active spirit, brought in along therewith much " hay, straw, wood, and stubble," much leaven of human invention and caprice, mingling with, and deteriorating, the sincere truth of the Gospel. How should it be otherwise ? How can a creature so frail as man combine vastness with accuracy or energy with caution ? 16. When a nation is returning from one form of religious temper to another, it is not like laying down something from the hand and taking another some- thing into the hand; but it is parting with that which has become a portion of its very self, and seeking to acquire in its stead what is in turn to be so moulded and assimilated as to become a portion of its very self. The agent is too much mixed up with the act to allow of that perfect self-possession which is necessary for nice exactitude and for immediate and entire success. Coming back to a more vital and energetic religion, it either comes while yet under a portion of the sinister influences attending that degenerate form from which it has emerged, or if by some violent and almost pre- ternatural effort it has thrown them off", then the mere violence of that effort produces a derangement in temper and habit of another kind, so that in all cases of great mental change we must expect to find more CHAP, l] introductory. 17 or less of perturbation and consequent weakness. It was so at the Reformation, which in its troubling of the stagnant waters cast up to the surface the un- heal thful product, first of the excesses of the Anabap- tists, then of the Socinian heresy, as well as of other less glaring errors. And at this period we also, in our measure, must look for similar growths. In a greater or a less degree, an inventive will ever be substituted for a restorative process. Even if the principle be to revive what is ancient, yet indolence, caprice, precipi- tancy, will often forge some easy novelty in its stead. 17. The period of the Reformation has been referred to, and it may properly be remarked, that the Pro- testants are reproacheil in nothing by their antagonists more than in their variations, which have been detailed with triumph, and with great power and perspicuity, in the work of Bossuet bearing that title. But the responsibility of such variations as he has detailed is rather chargeable in equity on the accumulators of the corrupt mass which they had thrown off, than on themselves. Time was needful to separate effectually the precious from the vile. So many points were to be canvassed that no human steadiness of mind, nor any gift short of a miraculous aid from above, could avoid occasional error. And so our own age, in expe- riencing what is termed, somewhat hazardously and loosely, a revival of religion, must be expected to dis- play much of hesitation, of defect, and of incongruity, while upon its road to the ameliorations it desires. 18. I do not think it is irrelevant to observe, that in c 18 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP. I. that revival of poetry, which the last generation has witnessed, there have been phenomena somewhat similar to those perceptible in the religion of the day. Some of the famous poets of the century, though revert- ing from unbound principles to sound ones, have marred in a greater or less degree an operation legitimate in the main and needful, by some imputed exaggeration of theory or practice. The great restorers of the art have themselves been more or less at variance upon its principles. The doctrine of Mr. Wordsworth respect- ing the dependence of poetry on actual nature, vividly and wonderfully as it is illustrated in his works, has appeared to Mr. Coleridge to require qualification ; and has, whether justly or unjustly, retarded the ex- tension of the wholesome and elevating influences of his poetry, and the acknowledgment of that debt of gratitude which he has laid upon his country and the world. But I quote from another source words full of genius and of wisdom, which bear on this point. " With the close of the last century came an era of re- action, an era of painful struggle, to bring our over- civilised condition of thought into union with the fresh productive spirit that brightened the morning of our literature. But repentance is unlike innocence : the laborious endeavour to restore has more complicated methods of action than the freedom of untainted nature. ''"^ 19, As however the religious change by which this * Review of Tennyson's Poems in the Englishman's Magazine. CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 19 country has of late years been visited, has been gradual and mitigated in its progress, and softened by the cha- racters and steady exertions of many impartial men, now propelling and now resisting, as either the acce- lerating or the inert force might appear to be in excess — so the evils with which it has been attended have been probably in a much greater degree negative than positive : if we are blind to certain wants in our con- dition, we are not exasperated against those who feel and expose them, nor so obstinately attached to those precise forms of religious teaching which may have been recently most popular, as obstinately to close the ear against the suggestion of any correction which may tend to bring them more into harmony with the full scope and spirit of the Gospel. 20. As Lazarus at his resurrection came forth bound in his grave clothes, so we may expect that at all periods of religious revival, upon the universal prin- ciples of human nature, ihose who are the providential instruments of the change will go forth to their work bearing with them some sign or relic of the state from which they have escaped ; whether it be an adhesive remnant of former prejudices, or an exaggerated revul- sion from them. They will mix with the work of God the frailties of man. They will naturally and laudably direct a special anxiety to those portions of Divine truth which they conceive to have most lain in neglect and desuetude ; and this tendency will often run into excess, so that they will give to those, as it were, ex- humed verities, a degree of weight and prominence c 2 20 INTRODUCTORY. [cHAP. I. beyond that, which they possess in the scripturally adjusted system of Christian doctrine. Upon the other hand, they will be apt to entertain a feeling which partakes, though unconsciously, of resentment against those portions of truth which have been enjoy- ing an undue and exclusive attention ; upon them will be visited the fault of those who have handled them amiss ; as if an article monopolised were like a moral agent and responsible for the actions of the monopolist. There will be then a disposition, more or less con- trolled, to depreciate the received truths, or to con- found them with errors to which at first sight they may have a resemblance : first to misapprehend them, and then to condemn them in virtue and through the effects of that misapprehension. 21. With these difficulties and detriments in respect of the things themselves, there will be others, perhaps more serious, in respect of the agents. For those en- gaged in the movement will have their besetting sins of precipitancy and inconsiderateness, perhaps of vio- lence and vanity. And those who dread the move- ment from timidity, or from indifference to the vitality of religion, or from interest and selfishness, will bring all these vices to the work of resistance ; while at the same time there will be engaged in that work allies of a very different character, particularly honesty and prudence, which must always feel a presumptive jealousy of sudden and extensive change. From the collision of these antagonist qualities will be raised a cloud, as from the tramp of charging cavalry, which rllAP. 1.] INTRODUCTORY. 21 involves in obscurity the objects of dispute ; and the very uncertainties and misunderstandings, which teach temperate men the necessity of dela}^ and investigation, do but the more keenly urge intemperate men to strike at haphazard, too often careless whom they may wound or wliat they may deface. Such has been in great measure the kind of controversy which has been in former years carried on, with national obstinacy, between parties in our Church. Notwithstanding the recognition of a common foundation, firstly in Scrip- ture, and secondly, in the creeds and formularies which we all acknowledge as a basis for the interpre- tation of Scripture, we have seen writers discussing questions such as that of baptism, with apparently no view paramount to that of widening to the uttermost, by every unfavourable interpretation and under cover too often of great theological ignorance, the distance by which they were apparently separated. It is often under the guise of a regard for truth that this dispo- sition insinuates itself into the heart. We persuade ourselves that we are only dragging error from its lair, when in fact we are creating it in order to con- demn it ; a process, that might indeed seem innocent if it were purely abstract, but here with the doctrine imputed, we involve in the charge a brother of like frailty with ourselves, capable of becoming by gentle usage a co-operating instrument, capable also of being exasperated into real and effective hostility. 22. Further, it is difficult for those who have been ardently employed in restoring parts of religion, to 22 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP. I. acquire, after long exercise in that function, the oppo- site mental habit of regarding it as a whole ; of con- sidering how particular portions are shaded and soft- ened by the juxta-position of others. There is in religion something analogous to that which is termed effect in a picture : where so much of the final tone of colouring must be reserved until the completion of the parts, and then adjusted for each individual figure by a calculation of the complex result about to arise out of the entire combination. Now in Christianity, doctrine, and ordinance, and precept are most exactly blended ; but it is easy for human inadvertence or pre- judice to untie the threefold cord, and to behold them as incapable of just assortment, because they are seen apart, and not in that position of contiguity and inter- mixture which the Divine will assigned to them. How difficult is it for those, who would bring forward into light that one of the three which may have been overlooked or inadequately appreciated, to fix its po- sition with a due and constant reference to the com- plexity of its relations, both to the being on whom it is intended to operate, and to the other portions of the scheme of which it is to form a part. 23. While, in these periods of religious transition, we must anticipate that controversies will arise ; we have also to apprehend that they will be more and more embroiled by the flippant and inauspicious in- tervention of those, who animadvert upon the bitter- ness too often attending theological discussion, appa- rently with no other view than to dispose of the evil CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 23 by substituting a scornful indifference to the subject. For the temporary fever to which life in proportion to its very energy is liable, they have no other cure than death. But why has theological controversy been bitter ? Why, but because men have seen and felt the incalculable value of the objects with which it deals. And thus perhaps few kinds of dispute have been more acrimonious than those which are exhibited in the history of politics : because few subjects come more nearly home to our hearts and our characters ; and because unhappily it is one of the proofs and symptoms of our depravity, that upon any given sub- ject our passions are ready to be excited in proportion as our substantial interests are involved. This fact, however, does not justify the temper for which it may fairly be said to account. The question is, where a remedy is to be sought. Not, let us entreat, in a de- 'preciation of that truth which is inestimable for its practical effects ; but in the use of those appointed means for subduing and governing the temper, which afford to the Christian the only guarantee of the ultimate subjugation of inward as well as outward foes. 24. If, however, there be certain evils which pecu- liarly beset the time when religious emotion, already widely and sympathetically spread, is progressively extending its range, there are also means by which they may be susceptible of mitigation. The source and the terminating point of those evils is in self. It is in the tendency of men, however unacknowledged, 24 INTRODUCTORY. [cHAP. I. to claim infallibility as individuals or as a party ; to view as having been created by us that of which we are in fact the mere recipients ; to substitute for ancient and authorised bonds of union others which are new and unrecognised, but which, as framed by our own will, are calculated to gratify the spirit of self-worship. From the disease we leani the remedy. It must be sought in a special solicitude to cling to every principle and usage which depreciates the rela- tive importance of self; and this, be it remembered, not only by a verbal ascription of all honour and of all effectual agency to God. This may often become a mere snare of our great enemy : if, allowing that God is the originator of everything good, we never- theless claim His sanction for all that we may choose to attribute to Him. Self-love may operate as de- structively under the notion that good things come specially through us, as under the more evidently mischievous opinion that they come originally from us. We must all therefore be ready, nor only ready but anxious, '' in honour to prefer one another," by recognising a divine agency through the instru- mentality of others, as freely and fairly, as some may earnestly hope that a portion of it miglit be conveyed through themselves. 25. But further and more specifically I should look for such mitigation of the evils thus attaching to our present condition, from a steady resolution to establish in the mind, by God's help, and to keep constantly in view, the essential principle, that in whatever we pro- CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 25 pose we look not to change, properly so called, not to innovation, but to renovation ; to a bringing back of that which our fathers once had, which was unduly hidden from them, which is ours by inheritance, not by acquisition, which was not made by us, nor even by them, but first received by them, and then transmitted to us. To explore an old way, not to survey for a new one, is the work of liim who would be a reformer in religion ; for it is not here as in other sciences. Not only does there exist a collection of facts, natural and revealed, which form the proper basis of religious argumentation, and analogous to those upon wJiich other systems of knowledge are founded, but there is also, superadded to this resemblance, a broad distinc- tion : namely, that we have in religion the assurance that that scheme of doctrine which the universal Church has ever drawn from Scripture is, in all its fundamental characteristics, eternally and unchange- ably true. To remove from the face of that truth whatever may have sullied or obscured it, to repel assaults upon its purity and integrity, to illustrate and make it known, and to ada})t and prepare the minds of men, by the means which itself supplies, for its reception — these are the objects of religious reform; and when, instead of imaging to ourselves a modern revelation of which we are the favoured subjects, we desire simply a recurrence to the old truth of the Gospel in the old spirit of the Gospel, we check the exorbitance of selfish pride by placing between our- selves and the Divinity an instrumental agency inde- 26 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP. I. pendent of ourselves ; while it still remains true, that for the very perception of the existing defects, and of any means for their removal, we must refer entirely and alone to God. 26. Though with a trembling hand, it will now be attempted to specify particulars, in which may perhaps be perceived the peculiar and unfavourable character- istics of a period of revival. Are we not apt to un- dervalue ordinances and Church authority ? To give to each man, not only the ultimate determination of his own belief and conduct, but an absolute licence of overlooking all but what comes to him direct from the fountain of self? or, at all events, what is transfused through self as the only medium ? Does not the indi- vidual substitute in some measure religious evidences of which he himself is the only possible witness, for the recognised, ordained, and authoritative testimony afforded him by the palpable acts and fixed laws of the Church? Have we sufficiently endeavoured to realise those benefits which even the lower and instru- mental parts of religion may afford, as, for example, even that bodily exercise which for this life is declared to be somewhat profitable ? * Nay, have we not been neglectful of the duty of drawing out and striving to transcribe upon ourselves, the great features of Chris- tian obedience in that degree of detail into which it ought to be developed ? Have we not a tendency to substitute self-contrived bonds of association and of * 1 Tim. iv. 8. CHAP, I.J INTRODUCTORY. 27 agency for the old and recognised relation which, as among ourselves, we should chiefly regard, of creatures ruined and redeemed together, and united in the one CathoHc Church of Christ ? 27. But let it not be supposed that it is hereby de- sired to imply that an amount of blame is due indivi- dually to those who have been mainly employed in promoting the advance of our religious movement, exactly commensurate with the amount of these detri- ments and disadvantages, partial as even these latter are, which may have attended it. The defects and even the positive mischiefs which may adhere to it are mainly imputable to the previous lethargy. As the cold theology of the last century may have partially arisen out of the practical and political excesses by which in the foregoing one religious profession was disgraced, so, in a connexion more evident and prox- imate, the faults in the religious temper of this period may have been connected, to a great extent, with the opposite errors of the age which it succeeds. 28. Lastly, let it not be thought that this is a spe- culative subject. We are too fond of laying the blame of existing evils on "the Church" as an imaginary person. But we have all a real, though divided, re- sponsibility for the character, the actions, and the omissions of the Church, since they are made up of, and determined by, those of her members. Our indi- vidual amendment will brighten her glory, as it has been tarnished by our individual defects and delin- quencies. The full development of religious belief, 28 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP. I. and its free influence upon conduct, are matters finally- placed in practice, under the principle of toleration, at our own disposal, and with the power thus admitted a corresponding obligation is entailed. From a due sense and conscientious discharge of that obligation in individual minds, will be found to proceed a leavening spirit which may, under the ordinar37- providence of God, be speedily and palpably felt to have affected the mass, and to have affected it for good. 29. It is now time briefly to indicate the course of observation which is to be followed in these pages. I shall attempt, in the first instance, to present a familiar, or at least a partial, representation of the moral charac- teristics and effects of those doctrines which are now perhaps more than ever felt in the English Church to be full of intrinsic value, and which likewise appear to have so much of special adaptation to the circum- stances of the time. They are particularly (to omit the mention of points for the most part minor, on which a greater diversity of opinion ma}^ without disadvantage prevail) the doctrine of the visibility of the Church, of the apostolical succession in the ministry, of the au- thority of the Church in matters of faith, of the things signified in the sacraments. On these I shall endeavour to touch in succession, excepting only the one topic which bears upon the right of private judgment, and of which I have elsewhere had occasion to treat in a somewhat similar view.* And I prefix a discussion on * See " The State in its Relations with the Church," chapters V. and VI. (third edition). CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 29 that which is termed Rationalism, by which I hope to supply assistance in determining what are the predis- positions and anticipations with which we ought, upon truly rational grounds, to train our minds for the pro- jjosed inquiry. Lastly, after having thus far regarded the subject ethically, I strive to show the practical re- sults of these principles upon our relations, as members of the Anglican Church, with one another, and with the members of other religious communions, under the peculiar circumstances of the present day. 30. I have been in some degree at a loss to choose an appellation which should be at once convenient for habitual use, intelligible to the generality of readers, comprehensive enough to include the several chief topics on which these chapters touch, and yet not so large as to include other tenets equally Catliolic, equally primitive, equally taught by the universal and perpetual Church. In selecting, as upon the whole preferable to any other, the phrase " Church principles," I do not mean by it to imply that these are the only principles taught by the Church, or that they were the principles specifically urged by the early Church against the early heresies ; for the early heretics were not bold enough, it seems, to deny them. But I mean merely, with whatever degree of precision, to imply by this appellation, that they are the principles relating to the constitution of the Church, that they are strictly its principia or elements, and that all of them are easily to be extracted by analysis from the idea of the Church, as one, holy. Catholic, and apos- 30 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP. I. tolic, according to our constant and unanimous pro- fession of faith. 31. The general subject thus described and thus ordinarily designated in this volume is capable of discussion in several distinct modes. The first, the most appropriate, and the highest of these, is the scientific process whereby these principles are deduced and proved from Holy Scripture. This is the proper office of the theologian : and it has been my desire to occupy no more of this ground than has seemed necessary for the purpose of intelligible statement of my subject. At a time when there is so much defect of information, and so much consequent misapprehen- sion abroad, it is necessary to be more specific in this matter than might otherwise have been desirable : and indeed the sense of the exclusive rights of Scrip- ture as the tribunal of ultimate appeal is so strong among Englishmen, that they would hardly listen to other considerations which they rightly deem secon- dary, at least they would receive them under hostile prepossessions, from any author who should allow it to be so much as suspected, that he had a concealed desire to emancipate himself from such restraints as the sense of the sacred writings may impose. But let no one suppose in opening this volume that it pretends to repeat the process of demonstration upon these topics ; for it the reader must refer to other and easily accessible sources. 32. The next method in which these important questions may be discussed is that which, abandoning CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 31 the examination of their proofs from Revelation, re- gards them in their ethical tendencies, in their bear- ings, that is to say, upon the formation of human character, and in that sense upon the accomplishment of the work of the Gospel. Such a mode of inquiry may establish presumptions in their favour even with those who have not yet been directly instructed in, nor have for themselves ascertained, their truth ; but its more legitimate and specific office is, to corroborate the faith of those who have already received the doc- trines, by evincing their beautiful and perfect har- mony with the purposes, so far as they are legible to us, of the Christian scheme ; their correspondence with the necessities and the capabilities of human nature. Or it may be usefully and seasonably employed in the removal of adverse prepossessions which may already have more or less occupied the minds of men, and which may operate as serious impediments to the consideration of the more direct argument upon the merits, that is to say, upon the theological proofs of the principles themselves. In this labour there is less that bears a strictly professional character : it is con- versant with theology indeed, but in the philosophical aspect of the science, upon the side and at the points where it comes into contact with man : and any re- sults of the investigation may possibly be liable to less suspicion, when they have been wrought out by persons who came to their task under no official obli- gations or prepossessions, and who viewed their sub- ject from a position occupied by them in common 32 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP. I. with every member of the Church who has in any degree given his mind to moral speculations. 33. Besides, however, this inquiry into character- istic tendencies, or what may be called general conse- quences, there is also a more limited yet not immaterial function which remains : it is the examination of the specific and particular bearings which these principles are likely to have upon the religious interests and feelings of the day in our own country : a sphere comparatively narrow, but affording room, as it ap- pears to me, for useful explanations. And this is a part of the subject which has received very little at- tention from those who have written in defence of the Catholic principles of our ecclesiastical institutions, and who, in accordance with the bent of their own minds as well as with their primary obligations, have usually bestowed more labour on the proof of the principles than on attempting to show that they in- volve no painful consequences, introduce no real causes of division, deny to no man his spiritual privi- leges; but, on the contrary, that while they are the divinely appointed bulwarks of the faith as long as the world shall last, they offer to us also tlie best promise of peace and practicable union. I wish to show, or at least to incite the minds of men to that kind and those trains of thought which will lead them to perceive, that neither as it respects our own communion, nor as it respects the Romanists, nor as it respects the Dissenters, ought we to find in these principles, anything but the means of consolidated CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 33 strength, of quickened responsibility, and of extended charity. 34. And this work of disarming prejudice, although it be altogether secondary to that of producing actual and direct conviction, is one at no time to be lightly thought of, but, in particular, not to be neglected at a period when almost the whole of the opposition to these principles has proceeded, not so much upon the ques- tion of their theological truth or falsehood, as upon that of the inconveniences, with respect to the mem- bers of the Church and of other bodies, supposed to follow logically from their recognition ; that is, it has tended not so much to attack conviction directly, as to sap or to impede it by accumulating hostile pre- judice. The inverse process is that which I propose ; and it is one which a man living in the world of politics as opposed to one living in studious retire- ment, a layman as contradistinguished from a minister of the Church, may perhaps, whatever be his counter- vailing defects, undertake thus far not without some comparative advantage. For in situations where the religion we profess is undisturbed and alone, where it seems to enjoy the most venerable and undisputed prescriptions, it might be scarcely possible for us adequatel}^^ to appreciate the difficulties arising from the hostile contact of other forms of faith, or to con- sider in detail, with the requisite nearness of view, its power of self-adaptation to the task of overcoming those difficulties. But those who live where their religion must be constantly subject to assault or im- D 34 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP. I. putation, where a thousand shafts are openly or ob- liquely aimed at it, where at the least it is subject to the competition and the collision of all the bodies, Romanist and Protestant, which have separated from the Church — these are inclined by their daily life to a strictly practical manner of considering the ques- tion : it is not easy for them to avoid perceiving its difficulties, and they will be less suspected of a dis- position to extenuate or hide them. 35. It would, however, be most arrogant in itself, and most remote from my intention, to pretend in any the slightest degree, even within the limited province I have thus marked out, to the functions of a teacher. On this account I have refrained from arguments properly theological respecting the Church, beyond what seemed necessary to supply a counter-statement at least to those trivial, feeble, and depreciated notions which are still more or less current among us, though verging towards extinction. On this account also I have refrained from proceeding to inquire what more strictly practical results, what measures and modes of conduct, ought to arise out of the clear and full ap- prehension of our religious position. It is not, how- ever, only the matter, but the manner of what is said, on which we must rely for the preservation of the demarcating lines between the character of the com- missioned instructor who delivers with authority the message of revelation, and the private person who contributes his mite of thought and of inquiry to the common stock, always reserving his final allegiance CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 35 for that which is catholic and approved. Experience makes him in some degree a witness to results, and study may throw before him some light upon tenden- cies : and it is his duty to exercise his faculties upon that precious inheritance of truth into which he has been adopted, provided in doing it he remember his relation to the Church as a parent, and to her mem- bers, as his fellow learners under her teaching ; and show that he strictly applies to himself that rule which Saint Augustine, in his great humility, adopted be- fore his hearers : Magistrum uniim omiies hahemus, ei in una schold condiscipuli sumus. 36 RATIONALISM. [cHAP. II. CHAPTER II. RATIONALISM. 1—4. The anti-rationalistic and rationalistic principles: the latter in two forms. 5 — 9. Province of the understanding. 10—18. It can- not cure a fault which lies in the affections. 19. True statement of the question. 20, 21. Homogeneity required in the affections. 22 — 37. Objection from the discrepancy between belief and practice. 38 — 42. The need of some access to man besides that through the understanding. 43—48. The existence of such other access illus- trated from Scripture. 49 — 51. Without it doctrinal orthodoxy cannot be maintained. 52. Illustration in the Sacraments. 53, 54. Har- mony and co-operation of the affections and the understanding. 55, 56. Summary. 1. In conformity with the introductory sketch just given, it will be my endeavour in subsequent chapters to discuss the principle of the Sacraments, and to show the vital union and harmony of that principle with the doctrines of the visible Church, and of the Apos- tolical succession ; and how all the three conduce to sustain, embody, exhibit, and impress the great truth that Christianity is, in its first, highest, and most essential character, a religion of influences which tran- scend, though they do not oppose, the understanding. But, to remove prejudices flowing naturally out of the spirit of the age as well as of human nature in general, I would first endeavour to show how perfectly reasonable and how thoroughly Scriptural is this line of argument : and that they, in fact, are the true advo- cates of the legitimate use of the understanding, who CHAP. II.J RATIONALISM. 37 seek to ascribe to it the honour which is its own and not another's, by defining its appointed province : how essentially and necessarily the reception of Christianity implies an action over and above that of the under- standing: and consequently how that reception is rendered difficult, and finally impossible, if we trans- mute our system into one which claims and appeals to that faculty alone. 2. First, let us consider what are the objections taken to rationalism in the popular sense ; let us inquire whether they are sufficient to show that it is an im- proper, and therefore an irrational, method of religious inquiry : and further, whether over and above the common forms in which it appears, still there be not an inner and more subtle form of the evil, liable to aflfect the mental habits in religion even of those who have offered to it, in its primary and popular aspect, a determined resistance. Now rationalism is com- monly, at least in this country, taken to be the reduc- tion of Christian doctrine to the standard and measure of the human understanding. The uniform conse- quence of the theory of rationalism thus understood is, as might be expected, a general depreciation of all other than preceptive teaching, as dealing chiefly with mere abstractions, as belonging to a region re- mote and impalpable : and accordingly there ensues an unnatural disruption of the strictly perceptive parts of the Gospel from those which can alone make them available for the restoration of human nature. Because Christianity in its results comes so imme- 38 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. diately home to every want and capability of our constitution, therefore forsooth, with aggravated in- gratitude and presumption, we own and appropriate those portions of it which tell directly on our mutual intercourse and our personal advantage; rejecting alike the wonderful machinery by which alone they can be brought into activity, and the ulterior pur- poses which they themselves subserve in regulating the relations between our Creator and ourselves. 3. Now if the objectors to rationalism in the sense above stated would act upon the whole of their own argument, it would be found quite sufficient, as I be- lieve, for every theological purpose. They object to the human understanding in its natural state, as the criterion of what purports to be revealed truth. In so doing, they stand upon the broadest ground of Scriptural authority. " The natural man," says St. Paul, in a very well-known text,* " receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." The rationalistic theory maintains the very reverse of the inspired declaration, and teaches that the natural man can know and does receive Divine truth; and so much so, that his reception or rejection of it is to be to the conscience the legiti- mate criterion of its reality. But among us who are agreed in the repudiation of this theory, is there no more hidden yet very influential division or distinc- tion of sentiment ? * 1 Cor, ii. 14. CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 39 4. It is a common opinion, and one respectable on account of the respectability of those persons by whom it is entertained, that where orthodox doctrines are held and in proportion as they are inculcated, the form of religion is to be considered spiritual. Such persons commonly argue that it is not enough to have the precepts of the Gospel taught without its doctrines. True indeed ; but neither is it enough to have what are termed the doctrines along with the precepts, unless we also have the vital influence and powers of Christianity brought into action. If the term ortho- dox doctrine included fully the doctrine of Sacraments and positive institutions in Christianity, this might be sufficient ; but I speak of orthodox doctrine in the common sense, which does not comprise any strong affirmative idea, or any prominent exhibition of the Sacraments and the Church; which scarcely recognises the Church as being an essential part of the Divine re- velation, although it for the most part freely allows it to be fitly and rightly joined with it as a subaltern in- strument for the accomplishment of its purposes. But orthodox doctrine, we must not overlook the fact, is, even in its less usual but more legitimate sense, wholly distinct from spiritual religion, although it be a prepara- tion for it and an appointed instrument of its production; and although, further, spiritual religion can have no permanent hold where orthodox doctrine is denied, we have a partial recognition, even in popular phraseology, of the inefficiency of doctrine when standing singly for the purposes of religion, in the phrase " head- 40 RATIONALISM. [cHAP. II. knowledge," popularly used to describe one defective form of spiritual condition. But the use of this phrase merely throws incidental light upon a truth of which we are too little conscious, and of which I am about to attempt the exhibition. There is, it may be feared, an imperfectly developed form of rationalism, subtler than that heretofore indicated, in which it taints the reasonings and the views of many who are conscious only of honest aversion to that noxious principle. The grosser form is that according to which the natu- ral understanding is the adequate and final judge of all matter purporting to be revealed. The finer form is betrayed in the opinion, which teaches that although the understanding requires correction, yet its concur- rence is a necessary and uniform condition of the entrance of any vital influence of religion into the human being. This religious, and therefore also metaphysical, error it will now be endeavoured on metaphysical grounds to confute. 5. It is a great principle in all psychology, and therefore highly necessary to be remembered in theo- logical investigations, that we must regard the nature of a man as a complex whole, whose parts have im- portant and fixed relations and reciprocal influences. Ancient and modern schemes of philosophy have al- most always been partial and faulty in this particular, looking at some single faculty, or some one tendency, of human nature, adjusting moral and metaphysical sys- tems with an exclusive reference to it, and leaving the residue of the composition of the man without its proper CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 41 nutriment. Thus, in the works of Cicero, it is made matter of reproach by the Academics against the Stoic school, with whom they in great measure concurred, that in excluding from the term and title of good what related to the lower functions of man, they overlooked some of the parts of his nature, whereas they were bound to satisfy all of them. I notice this not as pro- nouncing an opinion on the validity of the objection, since there is an inquiry first to be made whether spiritual good ought to be distinguished by a name peculiar to itself, by reason of its essential distinctions, but because it shows that there was a sense in those who represented the Platonic and Aristotelian schools of the necessity of a complex regard to man as a com- plex being, in his various functions of sense, under- standing, affections, reason, and in their mutual relations. 6. Now, however orthodox doctrine be, in capable subjects, the proper method of first moving the affec- tions of the man, we cannot fail to perceive that the impression upon those affections is a thing distinct from the doctrine itself, even when produced by it. That this impression is not necessarily attendant on an intellectual appreciation of it is manifest, or the devils would not believe and tremble. With equal plainness we see that the immediate purpose of reli- gion must be the sanctification of the man, through the instrumentality of any and of all his faculties. It follows that each of those faculties ought to be em- ployed in the work, in proportion to its capability of 42 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. serving the purpose. Now it will be acknowledged to be known from experience, that the affections precede the understanding in the earlier stage of their respec- tive developments, although the processes be in great part contemporaneous. The human being is, therefore, capable of right or wrong affections at an earlier period of his existence than that at which he becomes capable of having such right or wrong affections en- gendered through the medium of an intellectual, or a consciously reflective, process. And as the need of the human being is thus larger than the measure of his intellect, he requires some other feeders. And by this reasoning, independently of any other, we arrive at the conclusion that the inculcation of orthodox doc- trine, while it is in its own nature a thing distinct from sanctification, is also not sufficient to meet the necessities of our nature, or to apply the antidote im- mediately after the poison has begun to work. We are led therefore to look for some other provision. 7. And further, even when the understanding has been developed, it is insufficient for the full accomplishment of the work committed to it. It was appointed by God to conduct a sound machine, but not to reconstitute a deranged one. It is the very substance and brunt of the charge against the actual human nature, that truth has lost its power over the understanding in a practical and moral sense; that is, its absolute and plenary, above all its impelling power. This seems a paradox to those who are only aware that the understanding is appointed for the consideration and cognizance of CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 43 truth. But the paradox is explained, when it is re- membered that this faculty is now subject to a distract- ing bias, which counteracts by an opposite force the force of truth, and blindfolds the understanding by the fumes which passion can, and habitually does, emit. True, the understanding cannot be forced, except by truth real or apparent, but its vision may be inter- cepted by a thickened atmosphere ; a false colouring may be diffused over objects, of which it cannot divest them ; because our primary ideas of objects are not formed by the understanding, although they cannot be connected and compared except through its agency. But the very terms connexion and comparison imply separate parts, the atoms or units of the moral world. The piimary notions of those objects are formed ac- cording to the affections and not by the intellect, which works with such materials as are furnished to its hand from that more inward storehouse. Thus the under- standing, though not subject to be coerced by the will, is subject to illusion, more perilous than force, because it gives to a false and illegitimate process the aspect of a correct one ; and is liable from following apparent to reject substantial truth. 8. The link therefore is broken in man which should have connected his convictions and his actions. Giveir right affections, and therefore right primary notions, the understanding will do the rest and conduct faith- fully to a conclusion what it has received ; but given (and such is our case) wrong affections, wrong ten- dencies and leanings, as regards the law of duty and 44 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. of life, and then the very fidelity of the understanding perpetuates the error which has vitiated the first pro- positions that it formed, and reproducing it at each successive step establishes it in the conclusion. So that to rely upon those ideas of religion which our nature prompts because they are sanctioned by our natural understanding, would be as absurd as if Eu- clid should argue a proposition upon a wrong axiom, observing at the same time in every step an accurate adherence to that axiom, and a man should allege that accuracy in the subsequent proceeding as a ground for trusting the conclusion, whereas it forms the very demonstration of its falseness. It cannot be true. 9. And further : we constantly recognise the me- thod of orthodox teaching as a principal means of the sanctification of man, and as the proper and specific means for initiating his spiritual instruction wher- ever, and in proportion as, the development of the understanding in the man opens this channel to his affections; but this not by a natural and inherent efiicacy, not, as St. Paul says, by the " words of man's wisdom ;" it is by " demonstration of the spirit and of power." * Why ? Because the spiritual and the car- nal principle have not common grounds in religion from which to reason, sufficient to move the man. True, there is in both a sense of pleasure and of pain ; but of the objects within the range of our experience those which to the apprehension of the one are plea- * 1 Cor. ii. 4. CHAP. 11.] RATIONALISM. 45 surable, are painful in the view of the other, and vice versa. Here, therefore, their range of contact deter- mines. Both again have a conception of duty ; but these conceptions are essentially distinct in respect of the supreme law to which duty is referred, and also of the rules and measures by which it is ascertained in human practice. Reasoning therefore may proceed to a certain point, situated somewhere between religion and irreligion ; and we may undoubtedly derive aid from those relics and fragments of better views which are yet to be found amidst the ruins of the spiritual nature of man. But the analysis of moral action must have its limits : we may resolve questions into their elements, and these again we may divide into their constituent parts ; but when we have fallen back on the simple ideas themselves, which are the original grounds of the argument, we shall find that the law of our actual nature and the law of Divine Revelation are fatally at variance upon those simple ideas, whose grounds (by the hypothesis) argument cannot explain ; and here accordingly we see, that there must be a spiritual process rectifying these simple ideas and their root within us, in order that reasoning may take its due effect by setting out from right premises. Until we have the same primary conceptions of good and evil, of the sources of pleasure and pain, which the Gospel embodies, it is of no avail that we consent to employ in argument the phraseology which Scripture supplies, or that the steps of our reasonings are logi- cally accurate. 46 RATIONALISM. [cHAP. II. 10. Let us, however, proceed to consider the sub- ject in more immediate connexion with its illustrations and under a stricter analysis. The assertion which I would use as the groundwork of all resistance to ra- tionalism is, in its full breadth, this — that there must in every case be an action upon the man independent of the understanding, or the word preached will not profit, not being " mixed with faith in them that hear it." Not because their intellects are weak or obtuse, but because they have not the principle of faith. So it stands in the Scripture ; and so it also stands in the nature of things and in logic, the science of the under- standing itself, as I shall endeavour forthwith to show. All our reasonings may be resolved into syllogisms, all our syllogisms into propositions, all our proposi- tions into terms, with their connecting verb which affirms or denies ; our terms may again be complex, and involve the use of propositions in order to their being duly explained ; but these, in turn, may again be resolved into their constituent parts. Thus at length we arrive at terms which refuse all further analysis, and with respect to which therefore the un- derstanding can afford us no effectual aid ; but yet these terms are the indices of real ideas ; these ideas have a true and not an imaginary being in the mind ; their place is generally near its roots and foundations, and the faculty by which they are grasped has been termed that of simple apprehension. 1 1 . Now it would be quite absurd to say that the faculty of simple apprehension is a part of the under- CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 47 standing, in the sense with which we have now to do. For example, we have a conception of a stone ; it is made up of our perceptions of the different qualities of matter which the object offers, in a particular com- bination. I do not here enter into the metaphysical question of substance, which would be irrelevant. Suffice it to say, that our conception of a stone is made up of certain modes of the ideas of solidity, extension, figure, colour. Let us resolve the complex conception into these its elements : and now who will venture to say that we arrive at these elementary ideas by virtue of the understanding alone ? Undoubtedly they do not become, in strictness of language, ideas, objects distinctly and consciously contemplated, until they have attained to their seat in the understanding. But it is not the understanding which acquires at first hand from the corresponding objects in extrinsic na- ture those particular complex impressions by the ana- lysis of which it reaches finally to the simple ideas ; they are communicated first in the shape of impres- sions to the sense; from the sense they have their form, and by the sense they are given over to the un- derstanding in a state of truth or falsehood, that is of correspondence with jor of difference from the extrinsic reality, according to the state of the sense itself. Upon the veracity of the senses therefore, and not upon the right action of the understanding, it depends whether these notions are accurate or otherwise. 12. Thus the understanding is governed by the sense in the conceptions which it forms of sensible 48 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. objects, whether those conceptions be faulty or correct, until it may have been enabled to institute some col- lateral and circuitous process by which, like a formula of verification in mathematics, it may try and rectify its results. But in the direct process, it has not the merit if our ear, eye, or touch be correct, nor the blame if they be erroneous. Thus the blind boy re- stored to sight attempted to grasp the moon over the top of a house, thinking it was close at hand. This was from no defect of his understanding. And thus a blind man compared his idea of the colour red to the sound of a trumpet, drawing, with great propriety, his analogy from sense. 13. Now as God has given us the senses to be a medium of conveying to us the properties of material objects, so he has enabled each of the other faculties of our nature to fix upon their appropriate objects in the immaterial world and bring them home to the laboratory of the mind, where they enter into their various forms and combinations. Thus the general idea of truth is formed by the pure reason ; the idea of memory and of the simply intellectual faculties themselves in the same wa}^; the mathematical axioms and the relations, for the most part, of number, quality, and (metaphysical) quantity in the same way. Thus much for example. 14. And lastly, the affections also have their appro- priate objects, like the senses, and like the reason. We conceive of objects as suitable for our love or hatred in their various forms and degrees, according to the CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 49 representations made of those objects by the affections to the understanding, just as we conceive of size, co- lour, figure, sound, in quantity and quality, according to the representations carried by the sense to the un- derstanding. Now the senses convey faithfully or un- faithfully according to their own conformation, tJieir own internal aptitude or inaptitude to appreciate and embrace their objects, and to receive, as it were, the type or copy of them. And so likewise the affections transmit faithfully or unfaithfully, according to their own texture and composition. If the ear be vitiated it faultily misrepresents the note in music, and the understanding innocently misapprehends, and the tongue innocently miscalls it. If that faculty whereby we love be vitiated, then, according to the degree of vitiation, it distorts and spoils those impressions of objects which it is appointed to receive ; an object in itself worthy of love is transmitted through a false impression to the understanding as worthy of aversion, and the understanding, by no fault of its own, receives the error and perpetuates it in its own reasonings, re- fusing to it, or ratifying the refusal to it, of love, and attaching to it the name and notion opposite to love. 15. If then the Christian religion consisted in a perception of sensible objects, and in being duly affected by their qualities, we might imbibe it without Divine influence, because our senses, however limited or weak, are not generally corrupt ; but, upon the whole, dis- charge with fidelity the offices to which God appointed them. If the religion of Christ depended upon the 50 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. acknowledgment of mathematical truths, the same re- mark and reason would apply. But because it con- sists in a perception of objects that lie within the pro- vince of the affections, and in the being duly influ- enced by them ; in the receiving as worthy of love that which is worthy of love, and as worthy of hatred that which is worthy of hatred ; because true percep- tion of whatever kind can only be had through affinity and internal aptitude in the percipient function of the mind or body : and because the divine word declares that there is no such affinity and internal aptitude in the present state of our affections, and teaches that they are diseased, and at variance with the truth of objects, and that they misrepresent them, attaching to those worthy of love the attributes that merit hatred, and vice versa; from these premises, it strictly follows, that we, who fully admit the divine word, must both admit the corruption of the affections, and must also, in conformity with the foregoing argument, hold, upon grounds of bare and strict reason, the incompe- tency of the unassisted understanding, not for its own work, but for a work not its own, namely, the correc- tion of primary and fundamental errors in the impres- sions transmitted to it, and by it represented and handled in the distinct shape of ideas. 16. Let us endeavour to illustrate what has been said. Allow that every man follows in the main that which the mass of his nature, or its predominant in- fluences, may desire. Now the Scripture sets forth to us the fulfilment of the will of God as the best and CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 51 paramount object of desire. But that will of God re- fuses to the natural man the very things that he chiefly loves. What natural instinct prompts as desirable, the will of God says is the reverse. Here, therefore, our affection is at variance with the divine command, which command undoubtedly is in its terms perceiv- able by the understanding. They are opposed to one another as affirmative and negative. Nor is the diffi- culty removed by the promise of heaven or the threat of hell. For the natural man does not find in his view of the heavenly life that character of desirable- ness which the word of God asserts to belong to it : again, they are at issue upon the very rudiments which constitute the essence of happiness, and contradict one another. Or if he be tempted by the promise of hap- piness in the gross, and terrified by the prospect of pains, which are undoubtedly described in terms that he can appreciate, still the energy of our affections is much more powerfully incited by proximate objects, as a general rule, than by distant ones, especially when they are also more thoroughly in affinity with our disposition ; and will therefore, unless they be touched from within by a divine influence, incline much more to present enjoyments than to the negative idea of the avoidance of future pains, and the remote and feeble idea of the acquisition of joy in heaven. 17. In fine, to perceive in the will of God those qualities of goodness and desirableness without which we cannot love it, our affections must have been first detached from their present objects, which are such as E 2 52 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. tbey themselves have grasped by their natural im- pulses, arising out of their actual and depraved com- position. No reasoning can effect this change more than it can prove an object to be white which the eye testifies to be black. For as the eye conveys the im- pression of blackness, so the affection conveys the im- pression of desirableness. It attaches that quahty to the dictates of our own will ; that is to say, in effect, of itself. It does not see it belonging to the objects dictated by the will of God. Surely then it is indis- putable, that as the sense if depraved requires a phy- sical operation (whether of nature or art) to rectify it : so the affection being depraved requires a spiritual impression, and that since the subject matter of the Christian religion has for its office to present food to the affections, that food can only be available as such b} an aptitude in these to receive it, instead of the existing contrariety; in other words, belief depends upon assimilation : quod sumus, scimus : and the un- derstanding alone cannot cure the affections, more than it can heal a wound or set a limb. 18. Yet let it not be supposed that, if this reasoning be admitted, it will have the effect of implying the impotence of the understanding. In truth this is not really a question between the understanding and some other faculty, but between the rebellious nature of man and Him who created and w^ho is now reclaiming it. The man who denies the necessity of spiritual influ- ence in order to the right appreciation of the Christian religion, is not asserting the prerogative of the under- CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 53 Standing against the affections. With his views, his understanding will be as much influenced by his affec- tions, as the understanding of those who hold an oppo- site belief would be influenced by their affections. Under cover of asserting the rights and dignity of the understanding, he who thus rationalises, is in truth asserting his intention to be governed by his own no- tions and desires ; to make his actual nature the mea- sure and the law of that scheme of religion, which avowedly aims at operating a fundamental change in it. And the understanding is not deprived, in the Christian theory, of the office which belongs to it : but fulfils the same office for the rectified and divinely renewed affections, as it would have performed for the rebellious and carnal affections. 19. Besides which it is right to observe, that the understanding has in fact the power, by a circuitous process, partially at least, to correct the errors of sense, by its faculty of dealing with a number of subject matters, and applying to one the light of another. Had the boy restored to sight known astronomy before he was shown the moon, he might have reasoned with himself that her appearance corresponded with that of a planet which he had learnt to be very distant from the earth, and might have suspended obedience to the impulse derived from sense, in deference to a doubt thus suggested from another quarter. So also the un- derstanding, presenting to us, for example, the pains of hell, which are appreciable by our natural affections, may exercise a certain influence in controlling our 54 RATIONALISM. [cHAP. II. pursuit of our own pleasures, and thus produce a cer- tain degree of modification in the texture of the affec- tions themselves. But I deny the sufficiency of this influence to cure radical error and vice, such error and vice as the Scripture asserts to be in our affections. It is obviously an influence drawn from the affections themselves ; drawn from one part of them, and applied remedially to another. But although partial good may thus be done, there is no power in any part of the natural affections sufficient to effect such change in their fundamental tendencies as Christianity, ac- cording to all those who admit the plenary authority of Scripture, (to whom alone this reasoning is ad- dressed,) confessedly requires. Let us then recognise the understanding as a helper in the great work to which God makes available each and all of our facul- ties ; but we must see, that to assign it an exclusive or original jurisdiction, is at variance with psycholo- gical truth, inasmuch as it has no influence strictly its own, and as its indirect means are wholly inade- quate : it remains therefore to show the reasonable- ness of believing in a distinct and transcendant in- fluence. 20. No doubt it was an error of ancient philosophy to affirm the abstract existence of general ideas, and their perception by the mind or their necessary in- dwelling there, as a previous condition to our percep- tion of all particular objects. But Aristotle* exploded * Eth. ii. c. 1. CHAP. II. J RATIONALISM. 55 that error, and established in its stead what appears to be the truth, namely, that although we do not per- ceive by virtue of antecedent possession of the formal idea of the thing perceived, yet we do perceive by virtue of something intrinsic to the percipient faculty, namely, its adaptation and conformity to the thing perceived. 21. In the case, however, of the affections, we may go further than in the case of the sense. It may be said, for example, that the visual organ need not have in its composition anything akin to light, in order to dis- charge its function of receiving and transmitting it, more than a conductor of heat has anything of heat belonging to its essence ; or than wax partakes inhe- rently of the nature of the impressions it receives. With the senses, then, it is adaptation and conformity alone which we can show to exist between the faculty and the object, and not actual homogeneity and resem- blance : but in the affections the adaptation is actual, inherent, essential resemblance. That which we love we are, and it enters into our essence upon the whole in the same degree in which, upon the whole, it en- grosses our love. At least, no man surely can love anything except by virtue of elements in his composi- tion, however latent or subdued, yet in their nature homogeneous with that object ; nor hate, except by virtue of elements repugnant to the nature of that object. That is (in each case), the real, or the appa- rent and presumed, nature ; for that it may be misap- prehended is immaterial to the present purpose ; the 56 RATIONALISM. [cHAP. II. argument is, that a man loves or hates by virtue of homogeneity, and having this homogeneity as the basis of the sentiment, though the proportions of love and hatred may be modified by other considerations. Nor can any one, I believe, either deny that the affec- tions are, like the senses, faculties either actually per- cipient, or at least governing the perception, of sub- ject matter in their own province ; or refuse to allow that in all cases we perceive by virtue of an adaptation in the percipient faculty ; or give any definition of that adaptation in the case of the affections, which shall not involve the homogeneity that I have for- mally asserted. 22. It is perhaps here that it may be most appro- priate to consider the objection to the foregoing argu- ment, which readily suggests itself, and which may be clothed in the following language. It will readily be allowed that our conduct depends mainly on the state of the affections : if, then, our moral and reli- gious perceptions are, as well as our conduct, dependent on elements cognisable only by the affections, and conveyed by them to tlie understanding, a man's be- lief must be the necessary measure of his practice, inasmuch as both will depend upon the same causal influences : whereas, it is obvious that, in the gene- rality of cases, if not in all, his belief is greatly above his practice ; this fact consequently destroys, as it may be urged, the rule which it has here been attempted to establish. 23. The reply however is, that the elements of our CHAF. II. J RATIONALISM. 57 religious and moral perceptions are not cognisable exclusively by the affections; and that, even where they are, yet there are some common points upon which our affections, as they are by birth, enable us, though dimly or circuitously, to apprehend what is revealed to us by God, yet with an influence too feeble to reach into our practice. For example, our natural affections prompt us to desire enjoyment as such. The Gospel promises enjoyment in heaven. Thus, because we do not uniformly nor wholly ana- lyse, but dwell in part upon the term enjoyment in the gross, the promise of it is not wholly incompre- hensible and unavailable to us ; and thus has an in- fluence in raising the standard of our belief respecting the duty of seeking heaven, independently of any- thing like a really virtuous state of the affections, in which they would be attracted not to the enjoyment simply, but to the excellence of the particular acts and habits wherein the enjoyments of heaven reside. 24. I now proceed to assign a second cause of dis- crepancy between the belief and practice of a man, between his religious convictions and his affections. Our inward state undergoes very great fluctuations : emotions of different orders are aroused at different times ; and that which at one moment subsists, and acts in such force as to determine both belief and practice, at another becomes perfectly powerless, and a rival influence takes its place Now our belief is more conscious and deliberate than our practice. Many things evil we do upon the impulse of the mo- 58 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. merit, the rightfulness of which, as a general rule, we should hesitate or refuse to affirm. Again, our affec- tions have by nature a certain affinity to right, and repugnance from wrong ; to right imperfectly, I admit, but yet not altogether untruly apprehended : they supply corresponding impressions to the under- standing where the mind is undisturbed, and the un- derstanding forms corresponding conclusions : strong passions, on the other hand, are plainly unnatural, as well as unchristian, and their agency is usually short, and overpowers but does not persuade the under- standing. While, therefore, such passion has a great effect on practice in the tempestuous moment of ex- citement, by reason of the deliberative character of the understanding it has, as it were, scarcely time enough to force a way into our belief, which remains to be governed by such of the affections as have a more steady and permanent action. The second cause of discrepancy, then, is that action is more liable than belief to the sudden assaults of the passions. It is not necessary that we should draw any broad generic dis- tinction between the passions and the affections ; but we may define the former to be affections raised to such a height and violence as to baffle the under- standing, and preclude for the moment its full action. 25. Next let us take an example to show that the jurisdiction of the affections is not exclusive. When we have begun to analyse that notion of enjoyment in Heaven which the Gospel presents, we find a want of CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 59 congeniality between its particulars, the life of thanks- giving and praise, and the like, on the one hand, and the tendencies of our own affections on the other. But the understanding has derived from independent sources a strong conviction of the power of God : far- ther, it knows that our affections are not immutable ; and that that power may hereafter render agreeable wliat is not so now : these convictions have an evident tendency to raise our belief towards Heaven as an object of desire, antecedently to the assimilation of our affections themselves to the food which will there be afforded them ; and thus also to elevate both our belief and practice, but the first more than the last, because the last is more liable to be determined on the moment, in its particular acts, by the quick in- stinctive solicitation of the affections, before reasoning or reflection can take place. 26. I go on to state a fourth mode, in w^hich it may happen that our practice should fall short of our belief, consistently with the theory according to which it has been attempted to show that the main subject matter of ethics is not in the understanding, but in the affec- tions and desires, inasmuch as it is their office to form the models of those terms, which, when allotted in the mind to their respective ideas, become ma- terials for the understanding wherewith to work. Now this mode is one corresponding in great measure to that in which the Trig-rig Yi^ixri, or the principle of confidence, operates according to the science of rhe- toric. Under a stricter analysis than that science re- 60 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. 11. quires, we shall venture to term it the mode of substi- tution. Now let us inquire what this mode of substi- tution is, and how it may operate, not in absolutely lowering the standard of practice, but in raising that of belief. 27. Let it be granted that practice is governed in the main, or upon the average, by the state of a man's affections and desires, varying as they do, in their com- parative weight, at different points of time. Now a depraved theory does not bring with it the same de- gree of pleasure as a depraved practice : consequently the temptation to a depraved theory is less powerful than the inducement to a depraved act, upon the same subject matter. In the case of the act, the pleasure is immediate, and helps to blink or hide the sin. In the case when the evil is to be conceived and to be enter- tained in the distinct form of a principle before it issues into practice, the pleasure is contingent and remote, and less able to raise a tempest of passion in its behalf; so that frequently the same degree of strength will enable us to repudiate a mischievous principle, which will not enable us, when the occasion is immediate, to refuse an action such as can only be justified, and therefore such as can only with consis- tency be performed, upon that principle. The facts here assumed are, I think, as undeniable, as the infer- ences are direct and logical. And hence St. Paul* describes as an aggravated guilt that of those, who * Rom. i. 32. CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 61 not only do evil, but have pleasure in those that do it : i. e., who begin to regard evil as a kind of law to their nature, as a principle authoritative in itself, and a bond, consequently, of union and sympathy : they are supposed to have reached such hardness as that they deliberately contemplate it in their belief, and are not merely surprised into it by negligence or passion, or want of self-government. With this idea it is that Milton, in describing Belial as the extreme of base wickedness, has placed him at the close of the infernal j)rocession, and writes — " Belial came last : than whom a spirit more lewd Fell not from \n Vice for itself." Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love 28. From what has been said, it follows that the influence of example will be much greater in dis- countenancing immoral theories — e. g., that which declares marriage a needless institution — than in re- straining immoral practice. To test this proposition, let us for a moment imagine, on the one hand, an im- moral theory, with results supposed to be convenient or agreeable ; and, on the other, an example of one whom we revere, sustaining an adverse (that is, a moral and true) theory : thus much at least is imme- diately manifest, that our afliection to a particular person, on the one hand, draws us towards a good belief; our aftection to pleasure, on the other, towards a belief which is false and evil. * Par. Lost, b. i. 62 RATIONALISM. [cHAP. II. 29. We are next to observe, that of these two influences the first is one which belongs to the class of substitutions. It is an influence attractive towards good, yet not towards good for its own sake, but for that of an intermediate living object, whom we love in the complex regard under which we behold him as a being made up of many faculties, and holding perhaps many opinions, some of them more acceptable to us, and others less so, but whereof all, being as it were parts of himself, do in effect, by association, derive an authority in our eyes from the fact of their being his, over and above what they would be able to exercise from their own intrinsic force. The in- fluence leads us to follow good for the sake of a parti- cular man who is good ; and whom we love not perhaps at all for his goodness, or less for his good- ness than his power or talent : we therefore substitute, for the proper object of our love, another, and follow the proper object because it thus becomes appended and tied to that other. And here it is clear that the affections are still, in many cases (e. g., where a beau- tiful assemblage of human virtues forms the attracting charm of the person supposed) the principal source from whence, though indirectly, are derived the mate- rials for such an operation in the mind. 30. Here then the principle of confidence, properly so called, induces us to place the judgment of another, as expressed by his actions and character, in that position which is higher than we think our own en- titled to occupy, on account of our love or other attrac- CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 63 tive regard to that other person : and, in the case we have assumed, this influence stands in the place of a certain quantity of intrinsic and direct affection towards what is good ; and, so standing, becomes liable to all the rules under which we show that while both belief and practice are essentially founded upon the affections, yet the latter is, under that very theory, likely to rest below the former. It is unnecessary to consider in detail the other cases in which the same principle of confidence or substitution may appear under different forms. We have taken that where the attraction to good is in the form of example. If it be in the shape of direct precept from those who have influence over us, this makes no change in the conditions. It still remains more apt and able to modify our belief than our conduct. 31. Nor does it matter whether the attractive regard or influence be based upon the strength, or talent, or human virtue of the regarded party ; except as these are in a progressive scale of dignity and worth. But in none of them do we love the man for his goodness ; and yet in all of them, he being by supposition both good and also loved, we are attracted towards his goodness by being attracted towards him ; and towards goodness in general, by being attracted towards his goodness. And it should also be remarked, that all these extrinsic elements of inducement or suasion, which take the forms of precept or example, and which take effect through our love, or admiration, or trust, or respect, or fear of persons, operate much 64 RATIONALISM. [cHAP. II. more effectively upon our theories than upon our practice : they are usually first entertained in the re- ' gion of the understanding, and they are apt to remain in the form of mere speculation. 32. Now in the recognition of these intermediate attractive powers, it is quite clear that the under- standing may have a share. For instance, it is by an intellectual faculty, at all events, that we form the conception of power, or that of talent ; and either of these may be the particular feature, or the joint fea- tures, which are the groundwork of the influence exer- cised over us by the man possessing them. And thus the understanding, by leading us to follow and copy the good man for the sake of these secondary consi- derations, collaterally brings our affections into con- tact with his goodness, and gives to it, as it were, the opportunity of acting upon their susceptibilities. Upon the other hand, if the visible human affections of a man who teaches us to cultivate the divine and spiritual affection be the basis of the charm, then it is obviously through our affections that we appreciate him. 33. This power of confidence, then, has a ground in the several departments of the mind ; and the question, in which of the two it operates with the greater force, depends upon a larger one — that, namely, whether in general, or in the given case, or in both, the affections supply the subject matter and the movements of the individual character in a greater or less degree than the other faculties of his nature, his passions, his particular propensions, his lower desires. It is enough CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 65 here to have shown that the work is a joint one ; that confidence is operative on practice by substitution ; and operative alike through the single action of mind, and through the double action of mind and heart : we might perhaps add, that third case, in which the heart prompts instinctive action without the perceptible in- tervention of the understanding in its instrumental capacity. Consequently other influences, besides those that are derivable from the direct and proper action of the affections, may, by association or substitution, come to have a part in the formation of our own dispositions respecting good and evil, and as these elements may act with different degrees of force on our belief and our practice respectively, we are therefore to expect on this ground that the state of the affections consi- dered singly may not be an accurate and invariable index either of our convictions or of our conduct. 34. Another material part of this subject is that which connects itself with what are termed passive habits. The operations of these habits are those wherein the mind is excited by the presentation of the appropriate object, but does not carry out the move- ment into the corresponding action. For instance, when we see a duty, are reminded of it by something presented to the sight, and yet omit to do it ; or when we see an object of pity, are moved by it, and yet, having the ability, do not administer relief; or when we see an object of desire, and, desiring it, are unable to arrive at it. This last case is mentioned for the purpose of showing that it is not really, though it is 66 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. formally, in point, and though it falls within the de- nomination of passive habits; for the mental act of volition undoubtedly takes place, though the external consequences are barred by obstructions that we are unable to remove ; but in the previous cases, which are properly in point, that act of volition is as un- doubtedly withheld, and practice is not contemplated at all. From this trifling with our nature and with its Maker, arises, as Bishop Butler has wisely shown, a deadening influence, by reaction upon the emotions themselves, and a diminution of their real liveliness and power. Now here we find one of the special dangers to which the action of the understanding exposes us. The emotion, considered singly, will carry us forward to action in its own line, with a force proportioned to its own ; but it is the interven- tion of other faculties, absorbing and exhausting it on the way, which defeats its purpose. 35. When, for instance, it is aroused, but aroused by a spectacle in which are combined with the cause of our emotion, accessories addressing themselves more powerfully to the fancy or the imagination than the cause of emotion addresses itself to the heart — then, because one faculty at a time is apt to take the lead and govern the action of the man, the imagination or the fancy, being more powerfully stimulated, subordi- nates to itself that which is properly termed the feeling, and directs and attaches it to its own ends, which are not, directly at least, in the region of prac- tice, but which consist in the erection of fabrics CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 67 having in the first instance, individually at least, sub- jective existence alone ; and which are thereby distin- guished from the understanding, which, in propor- tion as its action is legitimate, follows strictly, and ascertains the objective existences around us : homo, naturcB minister et interpres* 36. Thus a religious creed presented to the mind for its acceptance may be excluded from the heart if it so be that the imagination, unduly predominating over the mind of the man, interposes, and anticipating the torpid action of the affections, meets that creed, views it artistically, as it is termed, in the manner, that is to say, in which a workman would view a block of marble which he is about to reduce to shape ; estimates it with reference not to its appointed ends, but to the law of beauty and its correspondence there- with, or discrepancy therefrom. 37. But the imagination is not the only interceptor of affections divinely destined to the purposes of action. The understanding may be excited simul- taneously, and when set to work in reasoning upon the relations of any given phenomena, or upon re- ducing them into a system, it may thus, with specu- lative truth for its end, be so delighted with its own energies as to lead us into forgetfulness of action. Thus it absorbs in intellectual exercise the strength that ought to have been spent in practical exertion ; and while it seems to be doing the work of the affections it diverts them from their own end, em- ■' Novum Organon, aph. i. 68 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. ploying all the mental powers in the verification of terms instead of the execution of acts, and then applying them to its own work of classifying, com- paring, concluding, or otherwise as the case may be. Thus again, when a religious creed is presented, say to a disputatious and subtle mind, in which the action of the critical faculty overbears and absorbs all other energies, that faculty regards the creed proposed polemically, considers it with reference to logical and technical precision, and not in respect to its moral characteristics and tendencies, and wastes upon this theoretic handling of sacred themes all the sedu- lity which ought to be employed in seeking to give effect to the proffered means of spiritual amelioration. 38. Now the bearing of these facts upon our subject is most weighty. If the understanding is neither able to dispense with the aid of the affections, nor in itself sufficient to stimulate them for the purposes of prac- tice — if it be so far from this that it may, on the con- trary, often become their hinderer — then we cannot fail to see the religious importance of having some avenues to the affections otherwise than through argu- mentative methods, and with an intervention of intel- lectual powers as slight as can possibly be, in order that, of several fallible processes, each one may help to supply the defects or retrieve the errors of the others. 39. Again : the grand and ruling influences through which we are capable of being led towards religion, are the fear of punishment, the desire of enjoyment. CIJAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 69 the love of goodness. Let us, by way of summing up the argument, consider how far each of these influ- ences is made effective through the sole action of the understanding, and how far by the supply of impres- sions from the affections ; and again, how far through those affections which are human, and how far through those which are themselves derivable only from a divine influence. 40. Now the fear of punishment, in the gross or in the detail, may doubtless be made operative through our human affections, which recoil from pain as such, and with a consciousness of its general nature ; aided by the understanding, which supplies the notion of power on the part of the Deity to make that punish- ment sensible and effective ; but this fear of punish- ment is no genuine religion — it is no more than a still distant stage on the road to it ; and as it may be felt without spiritual influence, so we have further to re- member that it may be entirely overborne and nulli- fied by the force of the temptations which it attempts to resist. There remains therefore a lack that requires to be supplied. But even for this partial influence the understanding alone is insufficient : it depends, in part, upon that apprehension of punishment which our natural susceptibilities, and not the proper ener- gies of the understanding, supply ; and therefore an argument may be drawn from this quarter, not per- haps strictly for the necessity of spiritual grace, but at all events against the sufficiency and so the sole jurisdiction of the understandino-. 70 ' RATIONALISM. [cHAP. II. 41. The desire of enjoyment, in the gross, may be impressed through the same human means : the first, of affection and understanding at work jointly; the second, of understanding alone. But as we go into detail, and come to inquire after any intimation of the nature of the proposed enjoyment which the Gospel offers, our human faculties fail us because we infer — as far as we can infer at all — that it is such as our human faculties cannot receive or appreciate, but would even be inclined of themselves to reject. We therefore need, in order to feel the full force of a view of heaven offered to us, to have an affection towards God of veneration, love, and trust, which our corrup- tion has absorbed. This then is from a divine source: so that we now need not only the understanding and the affections, but likewise renewed affections to initiate the truly religious principle ; and we accordingly see v/ith much more strength and clearness the need of a divine operation other than that which the under- standing carries, in order to set the understanding itself in motion towards God. 42. Thirdly, as regards the love of goodness for its own sake. For this we must be able to recognise the divine will as good in itself, and as determining what is good for us, independently of, or in opposition to, any estimate of our own. It is clear that this love, fixed on goodness as an end, and viewing goodness as embodied in, and as measured and tested by the will of God, is the adoption of an entirely new standard, of which our fallen state supplies none of the elements ; CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 71 and the primary conception of the object, as it is an object of affection, must be in the affections, antecedent to any action of the understanding which acts only upon what is already conceived. It must therefore, in its earliest beginnings, under the strictest necessity, come from a divine influence, and not through the understanding. 43. Let us now look to apostolic practice and argu- ment. Our proposition, be it remembered, is that those who are clear and determined in their repudia- tion of the theory whicli avowedly makes every man's natural understanding the arbiter of Christian doc- trine, are yet, there is reason to apprehend, apt in many cases to fall into the Manichean notion, or to approximate towards it, which makes intellectual con- viction upon the immediate subject matter of a propo- sition a necessary precondition of legitimate belief in it. There are many such persons, who are not con- sistent in this matter with themselves ; for after re- nouncing the authority of the understanding, in the attempt to convert a man to Christianity, or to awaken him from spiritual torpor, and while fully recognising in words the doctrine of spiritual grace, and that too with entire sincerity of heart, they pro- ceed by the way of argument upon each of the doctrines of Christianity, singly and independently regarded. They are doubtless right in arguing, as St. Paul did with the Athenians ; but he used only those topics which were common to his audience and to himself. But did St. Paul, or did any of the apostles in any 72 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. recorded case, attempt to produce in the minds of those to whom they preached a distinct intellectual perception of each of what we now term the funda- mental doctrines of the Gospel, or even of each of those contained in its first and simplest symbol, the Apostles' creed ? 44. No : but apparently having set forth Jesus Christ as the Saviour of the awakened sinner, in the case of the gaoler at Philippi ; or as the desired Messiah, in the case of the Ethiopian eunuch, and of the multitude at Jerusalem ; or having explained the providence of God, like St. Paul at Athens ; or the law of plain moral duty, appreciable even by the natural conscience, and enforced by the terrors of future judgment, like the same apostle with Agrippa, they allowed this call to take effect in producing (or not, as the case might be) such a measure of obedience as was answerable to the light already received ; but instead of first carrying through the entire process of intellectual conviction, and then introducing the sacra- ment of baptism as its witness, sign, or seal merely, they appear, on the first movement of a determinate character, determinate, that is in the heart, though attended with very incomplete knowledge in the understanding, to have brought the convert to a par- ticipation of those directly divine influences which the sacrament conveyed. Thus they wrought by the understanding as far as it would carry them by its natural light, or by grace already infused, or fear awakened ; but having done so, they strove immedi- CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 73 ately to bring to bear the distinct and effectual grace of the covenant upon the heart, proceeding upon the principle of training and moving the whole man by a parallel process, instead of working by one part of his nature exclusively, and of imposing upon that part a duty of which it was utterly incapable. 45. Surely we have a most vivid exemplification of this method in the case of the disciples at Ephesus,* who had been baptized unto John's baptism, and who had not so much as heard whether there were any Holy Ghost. St. Paul does not appear to have given them an elaborate and detailed exposition of the doc- trine of the Holy Spirit, but he directed them simply to a belief in Jesus as the end of John's baptism, and then baptized them in His hol}^ name. By that bap- tism, as is evident from the passage, the Holy Ghost was set before them as an object of faith ; but surely no one can infer from the sacred narrative that they were argumentatively taught the nature and attributes of the Holy Ghost. This full instruction was reserved for their Christian state. Why, but because spiritual influence upon the heart is necessary to furnish the understanding with those primary perceptions by which we become adequately cognisant of spiritual objects, and capable of exercising that faculty with profit upon the Christian doctrines at large ? 46. We fall then into error, and desert the way of God's appointment, if we attempt to furnish the un- derstanding of a heathen with a complete Christian * Acts xix. 1 — 5. 74 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. armoury before operating upon the heart by those means which transcend it as well as by those which are akin to it ; and the error into which we fall is ra- tionalistic ; we assume the competency of the under- standing to do that which is beyond its function : or, more properly, we assume the fitness of the actual and fallen human nature to do that which is contrary to its fixed bias and deliberate preference. We attempt to perform God's work, but we make the attempt, taking to our aid only a part of the resources which He has supplied for the purpose. We argue — it is well ; we pray — it is well ; we conjure him with whom we are concerned to pray, to read, to reason ; all this is well ; but the truth we have here to regard is this : that when once that disposition on his part has been indicated which would lead him to pray, to read, and to reason, then he is in a temper of obedience and submission, he has the prerequisites for further spi- ritual grace, and the way to enable him to pray, to read, and to reason with effect, is to induce him to be- come partaker of the remaining, the crowning means, namely the sacrament appropriate to his case. 47. I have thus endeavoured to illustrate the argu- ment from the practice of the Apostles with regard to unbaptized persons; let us now see whether it does not derive a light equally instructive from their method of addressing the members of the Church, those to whom in their several stages of spiritual advancement they administered the "principles" or the "perfection" of Christian doctrine. Let us see whether St. Paul CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 75 does not use something more than an appeal to motives in the ordinary sense: i. e. to objects which, though calculated to influence us, are nevertheless extrinsic to the man himself, such as for instance are a heaven and a hell. 48. Yes ; his appeal is directly made, not merely to that which lies without the man, but to the constitution of the man himself. And again, not merely to the fragments and ruins of the primeval image of holy love and simple dependence, but likewise to the lineaments and forms already impressed upon him, and to the principle of growth living within him, in order to its full restoration. As he informs us that the word preached does not profit if not mixed with faith in them that hear it, thus proving the necessity of an in- ward and transcendant operation ; so he impels rather than persuades his Christian brethren to right practice, by drawing the fountain-head of his argument from within them — " Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth."* Again : " How shall we that are dead to sin, live any longer therein."t And, "Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body.":}: And St. Peter: "Pass the time of your sojourning here in fear seeing ye have purified your souls love one another v/ith a pure heart fervently, being born again, not of corruptible seed * Col. iii. 3, 5. t Rom. vi. 2. % Rom. vi. 11. 76 RATIONALISM. [CHAP II. but of incorruptible."* Thus the sacred writers make a work which is not of the understanding, a ground — • for what ? for exchiding the operation of that faculty ? No, certainly ; but for producing it ; while the proof of that work, that primary super-intellectual work, remains indisputably clear ; and while it, and not any process of the intellect, is always represented as the basis of Christian character and action. 49. We see then from the above doctrine of simple ideas, that if we admit the fall and corruption of human nature, we must also admit a spiritual influ- ence independent of the understanding. If, upon the other hand, we set out denying the corruption of the human will, we may easily set down spiritual influence as a superfluity in our scheme of religion. And having thus placed on the right hand and on the left, these two separate views of religion, do we not see how necessary it is to maintain the notion of an influ- ence conveyed to the heart otherwise than through mere teaching, however sound (which is in effect the same thing as to say, the notion of something beyond orthodox doctrine), if we would preserve a true vievr of human nature, without which true view of human nature, we cannot measure the ground we have to traverse in order to arrive at righteousness. And conversely, when a belief in the necessity of influences beyond and distinct from orthodox doctrine is weak and on the wane, and when orthodox doctrine, in its popular but perhaps narrow sense, is regarded as the * 1 Pet. i. 17, 22, 23. CHAP. II ] RATIONALISM. 77 alplia and omega of Christianity; again, I ask, do we not see that we are upon the verge of losing our true conception of the extent of the universal human dis- ease, and therefore of the remedy which it requires ? 50. But we may call, and call loudly, upon those who have accustomed themselves to regard orthodoxy (in the sense specified) as the highest characteristic and surest guarantee of the Christian life, if they value either the truth of religion or the force and consistency of their own arguments, to join with us against ra- tionalism in all its forms, and especially against that its subtlest form which teaches or assumes that spiritual life can only be initiated through an intellectual pro- cess. They denounce, and justly denounce, the idea of converting men by merely preceptive teaching : the truth of moral maxims and their intrinsic beauty, say they, may be unquestionable, but you present them to a being whose percipient faculties are corrupt and who requires an antecedent spiritual influence to enable him to appreciate them. So far they are right ; but are they not incorrect in imagining, that the presenta- tion of doctrine to the understanding (for to the un- derstanding in the first instance it presents itself) is the sole and sufficient guarantee divinely appointed for the realisation of that spiritual influence ? If truth of a less immediately practical nature may convey it, — i. e. truth of doctrine, why may not the more im- mediately practical— i. e. the preceptive truth convey it also ? Why may not the precept carry with it the power of its own accomplishment, as well as the 78 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. doctrine carry with it the disposition for its own re- ception and likewise the power of accomplishing the precept ? 51. If they establish a title as against Sacramental influences, which some may deride as mystical, they cannot establish one in sound argument against moral teaching, which they suspect as rationalistic ; for such a title must be grounded on the general preroga- tives of truth ; and on its affinity to the understanding, as subject matter to an instrument appointed for working on it. Such a title will evidently include moral teaching as a positive channel of grace ; they cannot find any distinction which shall shut it out. Then will arise the danger which I have striven to exhibit ; in the active and robust play of the intellect, the more delicate conception of divine influence will be lost. Why will they not use the security, which God in his wisdom has provided for them, by con- structing separate vehicles of an influence quite dis- tinct from the understanding, and therefore permanent witnesses of its independent essence ? 52. The reader is earnestly requested to remem- ber, that the drift of these observations is simply to provide against our letting slip any one of the guaran- tees, which Divine mercy has afforded us against the fatal inroads of rationalism. To this end we should strenuously maintain the necessity of Christian doc- trine, and of its being received even when beyond our power of comprehension. In order however to make this principle effectual and fruitful, it must ever be CHAP. II.] RATIONALISM. 79 borne in mind that such doctrine must not be filtered and strained through any medium of human inven- tion ; its vitahty is not in its terms ; it is in spiritual grace attending it, as soul resides in a body ; but be- cause in the case of teaching, the soul is more likely to be confounded with the body and the distinct percep- tion of it absorbed, therefore we find (as will hereafter be more fully shown) a singular, though secondary, use of the Sacraments to be, their tendency to preserve the vitality of Christian doctrine by exhibiting the union of that soul with another body, from which it is so obviously distinct that we are in less danger of con- founding them. And because the proper action of the Sacraments is direct upon the affections, it has been endeavoured in strict connexion to show that the affections and not the understanding of a man are the basis, and afford the chief criterion, of our religious state. Were they not so, the notion of grace inherent in these holy institutions would be exploded. But when we have well studied and appreciated the real function of the affections in religion, and have clearly noted the lines which divide it from the province of the under- standing, the reception of these truths opens the way for our apprehending what more immediately belongs to the Sacraments themselves. 53. Finally let it be observed that these truths, if such they be, as we believe them, are not matter ac- cessible only by long trains of argument, or to minds familiar with speculation ; but are a part of the public patrimony of the people of God, being intervoven with the whole fabric of the sacred Scriptures. On the 80 RATIONALISM. [cHAP. II. one liand we hear of the evil heart, the hardened heart, the fool that said in his heart there was no God. On the other, of turning the hearts of the disobedient, of God's opening the heart of Lydia, of his writing his laws in the hearts of men, of putting a new heart and a right spirit within them. In conformity wherewith we pray in the Church, " Lord incline our hearts to keep this law," and yet there is no discrepancy, in the view of Scripture, between this use of the heart and the functions of the understanding ; for we also read in St. Luke, chap. xxiv. v. 45, of the Redeemer's open- ing the understanding of his disciples ; so as on the one hand their union is not overlooked, on the other their distinctness is preserved ; as when St. Paul de- sires men to sing with the heart and with the under- stayiding also ; and again, just before the verse last cited from St. Luke, the disciples " said one to ano- ther. Did not our heart burn within us . . . while he opened to us the Scriptures ?" 54. It has been only our indolence and corruption which, oscillating perpetually between contrary ex- tremes, only alike in being each vicious, has imagined, and in ourselves has formed a notion of opposition be- tween the prerogatives of the understanding and those of the heart, which has no truth in the nature of things, but which has become but too true, relatively to us. The Manicheans are alleged to have taught that knowledge, or intellectual comprehension, was a necessary precondition of right belief in any given proposition v^hich purported to belong to the Christian Revelation. And St. Augustin, condemning this prin- CHAP II.] RATIONALISM. 81 ciple as heretical, both in his writings against their opi- nions, and elsewhere, reverses the position. Differat intellectum et incipiat a fide.^ Credidimns et cogno- viinus, he observes, in the natural order, not cognovimus et credidhnus.f It has been reserved for modern days to draw into the light and to exalt for worship that false opinion which in earlier ages skulked into obscurity, and only came to its followers as it were by night, that radical principle of all heresy, which teaches that we are to accept, as parts of revelation, or to reject, as spurious, any doctrine claiming to be of Christian faith, according to our own judgment of its reason- ableness. It is truly the one, essential, universal, deter- mining characteristic of heresy, that it subordinates the faith to human nature, instead of yielding up human nature to the faith. We are haunted and infected by this pernicious error in a thousand forms, some of them more virulent and some more mild. But for its counteraction we must establish the opposite princi- ples, that the authority of revelation is independent of our assent ; that the heart must be rectified in order that it may not mislead the understanding ; that we must not only hold -truth, but hold it as truth, value it, that is primarily, for what it is in itself, and not for what it is to us; or we shall assuredly let it slip. And if I have here dwelt but little on the value and need of the exercise of the understanding in religion, and have been content witli merely admitting that it has a full recognition in Scripture, it is not from any * Exp. in Ev. Joan. Tr. xiv. f Ibid. Tr. xxvii. G 82 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. H. disposition to estimate it lightly, bvit from the belief that to the theory at least of this portion of duty the mind of the Church is in the present day sufficiently alive ; it is, therefore, as it seems to me, by showmg what the understanding cannot do, what is the proper work of the affections, that we shall best restore a due sense of the harmony of revelation upon this subject ; and it is matter of no small difficulty to recover the full sense of that harmony when it has been suffered to decay. 55. In such difficulty, there are the signs of a righteous retribution : from the ease of habitual pos- session and open undisputed access, there is ever apt to grow a carelessness of mind respecting truth ; and so the grasp of it is gradually loosened, and its single- ness and unity disregarded, until at length, as our slum- ber deepens, some portion of it is perhaps even wholly resigned. And then comes the necessity of effort to re- cover the lost idea, and with that effort many accom- panying dangers. Not the danger alone of failure, by faintness in toil or difficulty of the task, but the danger, too, of distorting the proportions and mutilat- ing the parts of that truth in the attempt to replace it, a process in itself unnatural, though aiming at and tending towards that which is natural : next, the dan- ger of alarming others by the aspect of innovation which our ignorance ascribes to resuscitated anti- quity : and last, yet not least, the danger of presuming that we are creators or discoverers, when we are at the verv best but employed in clearing away the CHAP. 11.] RATIONALISM. 83 mould and dirt which has gathered through tract of time about the letters that are graven with a pen of iron in the rock for ever. 56. As the chapter which is now at length drawing to a close is intended to serve as a key to the general tone of argument in which in subsequent parts of this volume the subjects of the visible Church, of the Apostolical Succession, and of the Sacraments, are discussed, it may perhaps be well to present a brief summary of its principles and conclusions, which are mainly these. That rationalism is generally taken to be a reference of Christian doctrine to the human un- derstanding as its measure and criterion. That, in truth, it means a reference of the Gospel to the de- praved standard of the actual human nature, and by no means to its understanding, properly so called, which is an instrumental faculty, and reasons and concludes upon the Gospel according to the mode in which our affections are disposed tow^ards it. That the understanding is incompetent to determine the state of the affections, but is, on the contrary, governed by them in respect to the elementary ideas of religion. That, therefore, to rely upon the under- standing, misinformed as it is by depraved affections, as our adequate instructor in matter of religion, is most highly irrational. That, without any prejudice to these conclusions, the understanding has a great function in religion, and is a medium of access to the affections, and may even correct their particular im- pulses. G 2 84 RATIONALISM. [CHAP. II. 57. That consequently upon the foregoing prin- ciples, the natural entry of grace into the soul of man is through the affections, and anterior to the action of the understanding upon the subject. As, therefore, it is rationalistic to say, Christian doctrine must be true or false, according as it is agreeable or repug- nant to our natural perceptions, so also is it rational- istic to trust exclusively to teaching as an instrument of salvation : or to maintain that intellectual appre- hension is a necessary or invariable precondition of spiritual agency upon the soul. That as the need and the applicability of Divine influences are so large in extent and embrace so many more persons than pos- sess an active understanding, the rationalism which makes these influences dependent on doctrine only as the medium of their conveyance to men, is exceed- ingly dangerous to Christianity. That by all these considerations we are prepared to anticipate, in a reli- gion having the wide scope of the Gospel, some dis- tinct provision for the conveyance of grace otherwise than through the understanding or in connexion with its agency ; and some rites or institutions which should both convey grace in this separate and tran- scendant manner, and likewise mark, to the view of men, in the most forcible manner, the distinctness of these channels ; and the complex and mystical consti- tution of all religious ordinances whatever, as consist- ing of an outward representation or instrumentality, and an inward living power. CHAP. III.] 85 CHAPTER III. THE CHURCH. Quod autem socialem volunt esse vitam sapientis, nos multo amplius approbamus. — S. Aug. de Civ. Dei, xix, 5. Es ist dem religiosen leben weseiitlich, ein leben in der gemeinschaft zu seyn. — Rothe, Anfange der Christlichen Kirche, i. I. 1 — 15. Ethical and analog;ical presumptions. 16 — 19. Some popular notions. 20. Not recognised by the Church of England. 21 — 9. Outline of Scripture doctrine. 30 — 40. Obje(;tions to the interpreta- tion. 41 -5. Actual deviation, and its causes. 46 — 71. Advantages of return. 72, 73. Argument a})plicable in degree to particular Churches. 74—82. Objections considered. 83. Conclusion. 1. The Redeemer of the world bequeathed to men the new principle of life which He had realized in His own humanity, and a body of laws by which that principle of life should be guided. It was an inward life, having its first and main aspect towards God. 2. Yet, however, in its origin strictly spiritual,* it was applicable not to the spirit alone, but to all the parts of the mixed human nature : inasmuch as He came to redeem the whole man in the full extent of his need ; and the body had been a sufferer by sin as well as the soul, and, like the soul, needed redemption. Therefore, because this principle of life is intended to effect the entire renovation of man, it must be repre- sented to his bodily as well as to his mental organs : * Rothe, Anfange der Christlichen. Kirche, i, 1. 86 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. III. and for that purpose it requires some form of external development. 3. It could not reasonably be anticipated that the disease of human nature which exists alike in his material and his spiritual functions, should be cured by a process addressed to his immaterial part alone. The form of temptation, whereby he was originally seduced, partook of the appeal to both. The resulting evil abides in both. The connexion of the two is so close and subtle that no one can discern the demarcating lines. The reciprocal influences of one upon the other are so abundant and constant both ways, that we are at a loss to conceive how they could be rectified by a power operating only in the one current, and leaving unregarded the other. 4. But, further, it is true even of every purely inward principle of that nature, (as love, pity,) that it struggies for an outward development,^ — and the more strongly in proportion to its own proper strength. It is the law of the growth of man that the acts which he does shall themselves re-act upon, expand, confirm, and accomplish that constitution from which they proceeded. Therefore his internal principles expand themselves in acts, by no vague, arbitrary movement, but in order to their own increase and perfection. This effort for external manifestation begins perhaps in strictness, whenever the principle comes to be placed objectively before the conscience. And the in- ternal principle is not a loser by that which it seems to spend in external operation, but positively gains by CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 87 it. The religious life is the highest form of the rational and moral life, and therefore, if it be healthy, strives with the greatest force for external expression, in order, through the medium of acts, to accomplish and consummate itself in the resulting habits, and thus in the general structure of the character. 5. Each inward principle of human nature seeks for expression in an outward, active existence, not only for its own consummation, but also in order that it may be expansive, communicative. We are to bear one another's burdens. Each of us is to care not only for his own concerns, but for those also of his brethren. The principle of this care is the same, whether it be applied to ourselves or to others, — " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself:" though the degree may be different. The subjective basis of this duty is indi- cated by the common and established doctrine that our nature is social and sympathetic. External deve- lopment is the necessary result of this social and sympathetic law,— the essential condition of its ful- filment. 6. Further, a large part of our necessary action in life, independently of the positive desire to propagate religion, and to be at one therein with our brethren, is relative, has influence for good or for evil upon their condition as well as our own ; and in order that such influence may be determined to good, and not to evil, the power of Christian religion, of the new prin- ciple of life bequeathed by the Redeemer, must be applied to it : and thus, in the whole of such applica- 88 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. III. lion to external conduct, that inward spiritual prin- ciple receives external form. 7. But this external development requires limita- tion as well as scope. Because this expansive, commu- nicative tendency is, in a being of disordered and un- ruly will, prone especially to derange his relations with his fellows. Therefore, in order to regulate its action, the limiting schemes of communities, civil and religious, are required. And those schemes will surely restrain the irregularities of human nature more effectually when the main lines of the institution are divine, than when, seeming to have been originally drawn at man's own discretion, they seem likewise, by consequence, alterable according to the unrestricted dictates of the same : and this principle is true and sound in a due proportion, although it may demand qualification at the point when it meets and is modified by other princi- ples, which contemplate other kinds of discipline and advantage, to accrue to man through the exercise of a regulated liberty in the discernment and settlement of details. Thus it may fairly be urged, that the exer- cise and growth of faith might be hindered, and the analogies of the Divine government would apparently be violated, if a system of the minutest points were lite- rally revealed. But the fixing of principles by reve- lation leaves ample scope for faith. 8. As, for civil order, no man would deem it suffi.- cient that a code of written laws should be promul- gated, and their interpretation and application left to the private spirit, so neither does it antecedently appear CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 89 enough for the regulation of the expansive tendency and relative functions of the religious life, that a written law of God should exist. The necessity of our nature seems to demand a corresponding Divine interpretation for the administration of the Divine law. For if, on the other hand, the interpretation of controul- ing laws be left simply to each individual, their effect will be nominal and nugatory. Or, further, if each in- dividual, instead of interpreting directly for himself, be morally justified in choosing his own interpreter of the civil laws, irrespectively of any general consent or of anything but his own impressions, and be legally entitled so to make a selection, the result will be little better : nay worse in one respect, because he will then seem to himself to have the sanction of authority. Upon these grounds, then, our reasonable anticipation would be, not only that institutions should exist in order to the general and systematic application of Divine laws, but likewise that such institutions should correspond in origin with the laws themselves, and that both should come from God. Further, that as in the case of the rules of Scripture for personal conduct, we find clear and broad enunciation of prin- ciples with little of minute specification, so also with regard to any institution which might be ordained for the preservation and propagation of Christianity, as we should according to reason expect principles to be revealed for our guidance, we should similarly expect details to be left indeterminate for our ex- ercise. 9. Further, religion contemplates and ordains the 90 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. III. co-operation of individuals for a common end : not their unconscious, but their designed and deliberate co-operation in the government and extension of the kingdom of Christ, and the maintenance of His truth, a perpetual system of joint and organised action. But there can be no such co-operation on a permanent footing, and on an effective scale, except through the medium of some institution whereinto individuals are introduced by some known and palpable method, which, in order to be known and palpable, must have outward form : and wherein also they remain under common laws, which laws must have application to other than merely inward and mental acts : otherwise the reality of the bond of union could not be ascer- tained, nor any substantive result secured.^ 10. A similar presumption would be raised by in- cluding within our view the other less directly Divine dispensations under which we live. Civil society, for example, is an ordinance of God. After we have put aside all questions upon particular forms of govern- ment, there remains, at least by nearly universal con- sent, this principle, — that our combination together in nations and polities, and our relation of subjection, as individuals, to the authority of a government, are parts and features of our condition, as men, which must be referred immediately to the will of our Maker.f And this will necessarily implies an outward repre- sentation of the governing principle in some kind of * Rothe, I. 4. t As much as this is I think admitted by Algernon Sidney in his work on Government. CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 91 governing body. But the most remarkable example of the provision of an external form as a tabernacle for an inward principle, is that of the family. Here the whole authority originally was, and the chief part of it still is, a living and (in an inoffensive sense) an arbitrary authority : and here the union and interde- pendence of our interests and concerns, of our whole being as human creatures, is most vividly exemplified. We might have been appointed to come into existence each springing separately from the dust whereof we are made, and each receiving individually the breath of the Divine Spirit into his nostrils. Instead of which it has pleased the Father of us all that we should be a race, produced in the way of natural pro- pagation one from another : around this function are clustered our tenderest and most inward and perma- nent affections : to it belong the most complex reci- procal offices, reaching over long periods of our life, and generally succeeding and replacing one another throughout the whole or the greater part of its course : thus the principle of communion amongst men is carried into the most minutely ramified- intermixture. And in a still larger sense, the whole of our human condition which lies beyond its domestic and political relations, is also eminently social. Interests and attachments are inseparably intertwined : the actings and sufferings of each one are made in a very great degree dependent on the actings and sufferings of others. From all these arrangements, therefore, by which we are not separately but socially constituted 92 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. III. under the Divine ordinance, the presumption is raised that we shall find the same social constitution, the same principle of visible intercommunion in any scheme which God may have established for our spiritual recovery and development. 1 1 . From the history of all other religions the same analogy is derivable. They, whether true or false, — whether resting on the basis of revelation, like the patriarchal and the Jewish forms, — or whether de- praved remnants of primeval knowledge, with large supplements of erroneous invention, devised by the craft of political or sacerdotal ambition, have corre- sponded in this one respect, that, in order to perma- nence and practical application, they have ever been embodied in an outward development of rites and of social institutions, claiming a Divine origin. Schemes of speculative opinion, indeed, have been propagated from age to age without any such regular organi- sation : they live chiefly by the delight of the human understanding in the exercise of its intellectual ener- gies : and they have no practical system to carry into eflect. They, however, rarely maintain for a great length of time a continuous existence. But where, whether by piety or by superstition, the object has been to impose restraints upon human nature, the aids of system and organised combination claiming to be Divine, have never been neglected ; that is to say, in all the forms, theological or mythological, which have ever exercised any large sway for any consider- able period over portions of the human race. Universal CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 93 experience, therefore, teaches us the conduciveness of fixed institutions to the maintenance of religion, and thereby leads us to expect that, in a revelation from God to man, some such institutions will be included. 12. Again, it may be worth while to consider whe- ther the promulgation of a religion hostile to the actual tendencies of human nature, and to the powers of the world, might not, it being first given that its permanent existence should be maintained upon a principle of faith and not of sight, that is, not of the continual interposition of supernatural power, require as a further condition that it should be embodied in a visible institution. There the faith might dwell as in a house ; there recover and refresh itself after the rude shocks of persecution : there difi*use the vital warmth through all its members, which they should spend in their common and habitual life : there gather its energies for fresh aggression upon the kingdom of darkness. And thus it would appear upon consider- ation of the foes who were ever ready to assail the religion of Christ from without, that it required the fortress of a fixed and Divine institution for its abode. ] 3. And if we are led to anticipate the foundation of such an institution from considering the extrinsic difficulties with which the religion was destined to contend, much more may it be asked, how was a scheme, which had no natural home prepared to wel- come it within the human heart, to fix itself perma- nently there ? How, when the tenacious and desperate resistance which to the last is opposed to religion by 94 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. III. all the forms of inward sin is taken into view, can we suppose that it is permanently not only to remain but to triumph, and to expel all its foes from the heart of the individual ? Much more still, how is it to pass from generation to generation ? Individual zeal decays, or it is benumbed ; or if the will remains the power of communication is obstructed or decayed by age and infirmity. Not from leaf to leaf is the sap given, but from the trunk. For the perpetual repro- duction of tlie spiritual life in individuals there must be (as one should anticipate) a trunk, and that not only invisible, to be apprehended through the specu- lative faculties alone ; but visible also, that as at every opening the soul of man is assailed, so through every avenue also which his faculties command, he may derive help in his spiritual warfare. 14. We must not, however, overrate the importance, or mistake the bearing, of arguments drawn like these from anticipation. Doubtless the omnipotence of grace is not tied to such methods as lie within our discern- ment ; nor are we to affirm that it could not have discovered a thousand modes of preserving and trans- mitting the living legacy of the Redeemer, a spiritual principle, besides that of a permanent, visible institu- tion. But I am now arguing not upon the theolo- gical proofs of the Divine establishment of such an institution : I am striving to show how it harmonises with our reason, fulfils our anticipations, satisfies the necessities which we see to have arisen, and to be likely evermore to arise. And when we see how in CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 95 all these various aspects the institution of a visible Church corresponded with the nature of the beings among whom the religion of Christ was to go forth and to conquer; how it overcame obstacles in our view insurmountable by any other means, supplied wants which we can discern no other mode of supplying ; these facts do not indeed prove that God has founded such an institution, but they prove that if He has founded it, and if we are called upon to believe it, then we are called upon to believe what is not only not opposed, but what is eminently conformable to our own reasonable apprehension. 15. Thus, then, by examining the fixed conditions of our own nature and constitution, and some of the essen- tial and of the circumstantial features of the Christian revelation, as well as the general results of experience, we are prepared to recognise an adaptation to our own knowledge and reasonable anticipations in that repre- sentation of Christianity, which exhibits it as a revela- tion, comprising in itself not only a body of Divine truths, but also an institution in which those truths are preserved, professed, perpetuated in the world, and brought to effect by spiritual ordinances in the hearts and lives of men. And this is no other than an out- line of the doctrine of the Visible Church, contained in that Article of the Creed where we specify our belief in " the Holy Catholic Church ;" in " one Catholic and Apostolic Church." 16. He who reads the Scriptures diligently and as a whole, and who regards the Epistles with that parti- 96 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. Itl. cular kind of attention which belongs to them as being the part of our religious code which was produced when the Church was in actual and progressive ope- ration, can hardly fail to be struck with the difference between their tone respecting the Ecclesia, or Church, and that of modern teachers in general. For what are our ideas of a Church ? The Romanist, indeed, has for his part a conception which, upon other grounds, we may regard as either wholly or partially unscrip- tural ; but which at least does not fall short in mag- nitude and importance of that which the Apostles appear to have entertained. But of those who are in- cluded in the wide designation of Protestants, one not inconsiderable sectarian portion regards each particu- lar congregation as in the strictest and highest sense a Church ; and holds that such a body should ac- knowledge on earth no authority superior to its own ; and should, in its relations with other Churches, be- have as a sovereign independent power. There is little room left, under these conditions, for attaching any palpable or substantive meaning to that ancient and venerable designation, so frequently recurring in our public services, " the Catholic Church." 17. But others of us, too, have our besetting sin in this matter : it is of an Erastian colour. These are too apt to view the Church as founded simply upon the law and will of the State, and as deriving its entire au- thority, and not only its civil rights and temporal jurisdiction, from that source. Many of us forget the undoubted historical fact, that the Church of Christ CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 97 had a vital and visible organisation of its own as a body, not only independent of, but long antecedent to, that of any now existing State with which it is in con- nection. Religion, indeed, as an individual concern, is not regarded by persons of this class as dependent on civil law ; but then it is also considered very much as independent of and anterior to the Church. This they view as being in regard to individuals a sort of voluntary combination, not binding upon the con- science, but rather framed at their discretion upon groiHids of Christian expediency ; in regard to the governing power, an institution erected and proposed to the people for their use upon grounds both of duty and of policy, dispensing to the people certain truths and ordinances of Divine authority, but by a machinery which is of human sanction, and is subject to be va- ried or removed as human authority may resolve. I do not mention this as a theory formally drawn out, or consistent with itself; but as merely giving the sum of those vague impressions which exist, unexamined and unproved, yet practically influential, in many minds regarding the nature of the Church. 18. There cannot be a more marked illustration of the extreme laxity of our principles in this important respect than the very frequent use of the term Church as synonymous with the clergy, and of the phrase going into the Church, although this be not without the countenance of authority, as equivalent to receiving holy orders; whereas the candidate for holy orders is just as truly in the Church as their possessor. And 98 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. HI. yet it is probable that not only does this verbal fal- lacy circulate very commonly undetected, but that the simple consideration which suffices to expose it would not always be recognised with ease, as proposing a truth incapable of dispute. There are other uses of the word as inaccurate. We speak of going to church, meaning ordinarily no more than the Sunday service. " Is church over ? " would be said for, " Is the service over?" This is not a mere verbal remark. Human language is the most copious and most accu- rate witness to human inconsistency and error : to it we, as it were, confide our secrets; we make it the depository of our thoughts, and, when subjected to pa- tient and searching scrutiny, it reveals them such as they were given into its custody. The misuse of a term, in this and in ten thousand other instances, indi- cates a mental perversion. Here, for example, it is too closely connected with our individualism in reli- gion, and indicates a sort of latent assumption that the Church has no permanent and corporate being of an independent kind, but only exists under particular conditions, or for particular seasons or functions, deter- minable by the will of individuals, and even as if de- pending on their local assemblages. 1 9. To show that the distinction taken in the last sentence is not unreal — for men will begin to deny what they have long forgotten or neglected — let us appeal to the nature of a family. That term indicates a bond of union, independent of and superior to the will of the persons composing it, and imposing obli- CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 99 gations upon them towards one another which they are bound to fulfil. The actual fulfilment may be oc- casional ; but the law of fulfilment, and the institution to which the law is attached, have a permanent exist- ence. So, like the family, the Church entails upon us, who are her children and members, obligations be- longing to us as such ; which we are not at liberty to disregard — which are not limited as are in many cases the terms of a voluntary combination — which, though they may be brought out into positive and for- mal actions, only from time to time, yet retain a real and a perpetual existence. 20. Although, however, our prevailing tone on the subject of the Church be so low, that some regard it as little more than a sort of religious club, yet in the institutions of that portion of the communion of saints to which we of this nation claim to belong, we find all the evidences and guarantees of a high, living, and fruitful doctrine. The State may cripple her action as it had indeed heretofore done, and it has almost annihi- lated her discipline, which it seems now to feel the duty of reviving ; but it was surely under her protest, for she everywhere asserts her own functions as a mother to us all. She provides for us the ordinary services of her Liturgy, intended to be to us as our daily bread, La cotidiana manna * Senza la qual per quest 'aspro diserto Di retro va chi piu di gir s'aifanna ; and she likewise furnishes those which are termed oc- * Purgatorio, xi. 13. H 2 100 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. III. casional, which mark the grand stages and seasons of life, to be thereby claimed for God ; and both these classes of religious office she requires to be observed, with unimpaired authority, though it may be with mutilated and insufficient influence and power. 21. Does then the character assigned in Scripture to the Church accord best with the lofty principle, or with the degenerate practice ? In answering this ques- tion let us observe, in the first place, that throughout the Old Testament, God is pleased to foreshow his elect not as the sum of a certain number of indivi- duals taken here and there out of the mass, for each of whom he designs and contrives individual salvation; but in their corporate character, either under some single and personal image, as the King's daughter of the Psalms, and the Beloved of the Canticles; or under the figure of an object of magnitude, as the mountain ; or of capacity to contain many, as the Lord's House, or the city of Jerusalem. The evident intention of all these kinds of figure is to draw us away from our spirit of self-regard, while the first of them specifically represents to us the intimacy of our union in the Church with the Redeemer; and the two latter our participation of character and privilege with many brethren. 22. If we look to the New Testament, in its very opening we find the coming dispensation always an- nounced in its collective character. " Repent ye," said the Baptist, " for the kingdom of heaven is at CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 101 hand."* When Christ himself assumed the functions of the ministry, He commenced His preaching in the very same terms : " Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."f At a subsequent period, when he commissioned his disciples to preach in Judea, his charge to them was in a strain precisely similar : " Go ye and preach, saying the kingdom of heaven is at hand.":]: To the individual confession of St. Peter our Lord responds, by the promise not that every soul making that confession shall be saved, but with a far wider scope, that upon this rock He will build his church. The same kingdom of heaven is the prin- cipal and nearly uniform antitype of His parables. When after the Resurrection He abode forty days with His disciples, and prepared them for their high office of propagating the Gospel and governing the Church, His speaking was of the things pertaining to the king- dom of God.§ Why is it then that we deem this '' kingdom of heaven" so secondary a representation of our religious life, while in the teaching of our Re- deemer it is so prominent ?|| 23. There is indeed another passage of Scripture where our Saviour says,^ " The kingdom of God Cometh not with observation ; neither shall they say Lo here ! or Lo there ! for behold, the kingdom of God is within you :" and which might at first sight seem to indicate a different idea from that of the pub- * Matt. iii. 2. t Matt. iv. 17. % Matt. x. 7. § Acts i. 3. II Rothe, Anf ange der Christlichen Kirche, i. 2. % Luke xvii. 20,21. 102 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. III. lie, universal, visible Church. But in truth there is no opposition. The Pharisees demanded of our Lord when the kingdom of God should come. He shows in His reply that the access of the religious system so represented as a kingdom to the individual, is, in the first instance, by means of an internal work ; without which no man may enter therein. It is when the principle, by virtue of which we become obedient sub- jects of the kingdom of God, is already born within us,* that the corresponding outward development is re- quired. And if this text were to receive an interpre- tation adverse to the doctrine of the visible Church at all, it would be likewise and equally adverse to all visible forms of the kingdom of God, in individuals and voluntary associations, as well as in the Church, which is evidently out of the question. 24. The commencement of the Lord's Prayer affords another striking instance of this principle. Connecting it with the directions immediately pre- ceding it, (" but thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet," &c.) we must, of course, regard it as in- tended not alone for joint, but also, and that too pri- marily, for private devotion ; and yet' the address is, not " My," but " Our" -Father. We are taught to call upon Him in this solemn and endearing exordium, not under the view of His personal love to each one of us, but in virtue of that bond of grace wherein we are all embraced. We may also remark by the way * Rothe, Anf ange, i. 2. CHAP. III.] THL CHURCH. 103 how faithfully this unselfish character (for how easy it is to become selfish even in our prayers, and how wisely therefore does the Apostle St. Paul also* guard us against it by supplying directions in detail for our intercessory petitions) has been transfused into the tone and phraseology of the Christian Liturgies. 25. On this principle surely it was that our Lord in determining the form of that grand rite, which was to remain as an everlasting token among his disciples, and to convey to them the grace that should feed their spiritual existence, made choice of a supper, which is in its nature social, as the occasion of its institution. That grace might have been given through another medium ; or the soul of one man might have received it independently of the souls of others ; why then was a mode chosen which required the presence and par- ticipation of several ? May we not answer, it was pro- bably, in part at least, from the design of our Saviour to imprint strongly upon us our character as portions of a whole, that whole being the Church ? Does not His solemn promise to hear the prayer of two or three point distinctly to the same end? Why of two or three ? The prayer of one righteous man availeth much. It is not bare numerical multiplication which can give weight to our petitions. No; but Jesus Christ it seems has willed, that creatures, whose joys and sorrows, whose hopes and fears are the same, who are involved in a common ruin and are heirs of a ♦ 1 Tim. ii. 1, 2. 104 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. HI. common recovery, should pray too with that unity of voice which belongs to their unity of spiritual exist- ence and relationship to him. 26. It may next be observed that to the Church in general the promises of victory over the gates of hell,'^ and of the Lord's perpetual presence with her gover- nors, belong.f So St. Paul writes to the community of the Corinthians,^ which seems to have comprised offenders of almost every class, " who also shall con- firm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ." And to that of the Philippians,§ " being confident of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you, will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ." It is very instructive to compare the unqualified tone of these declarations respecting the blessedness of the Christian community, with the not faint nor desponding but yet more guarded terms in which St. Paul|| writes of the salvation of an individual, although that individual was one so eminent for gifts and graces as himself. 27. The Church is the body of Christ,^ for He is one body, having many members ; into which we are all baptized by one spirit. And we " are the body of Christ, and members in particular."*^ Christ is " the head of the Church," " the Saviour of the body ;"tt the spouse of the Church. JJ And she is " the * Matt. xvi. 18. + Matt, xxviii. 20. % 1 Cor. i. 8. ^ Phil. i. 6. II Phil. iii. 11—14; 1 Cor. ix. 27. f 1 Cor. xii. 12, 13. ** 1 Cor. xii. 27. ft Eph. v. 23, 32. %X Rev. xxi. 9 CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 105 bride, the Lamb's wife,"^' that longs for his coming. Again : " the bread, which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ ; for we being many are one bread, and one body."t The house of God is *' the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. ":t^ He that will not hear her voice in her discipline is to be regarded as an heathen man and a publican. § And, finally, when her warfare is accomplished, the Redeemer will present her to His Father a glorious Church, holy and without blemish. || 28. And this Church is called to unity; as the coat of the Lord was woven throughout without seam from top to bottom, even so " there shall be one fold and one shepherd."^ " For," says St. Paul, " I be- seech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you."** And divisions were, according to the mind of this great Apostle, a sign of carnality ; but is it not true that according to the mind of modern religion, an absolute indifference to them is too often regarded as a sign of spirituality ? " For ye are yet carnal ; for whereas there is among you envy- ing, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal ?"tt And it is obvious, that it was not merely an inward unison or concord which was contemplated by Him, for this reason as well as others, because such is not the natural signification of the terms used to denote * Rev. xxii. 17. t 1 Cor. x. 16. % 1 Tim. iii. 15. § Matt, xviii. 17. || Eph. v. 27. 1[ Job. x. 16. ** 1 Cor. i. 10. tt 1 Cor. iii. 3. 106 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. III. Christian unity. " We being many, are one body."* Christ is like the body integral, but compounded of many parts. The Redeemer reconciled Jews and Gentiles unto God in one body by the cross.f In order that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs and of the same body. J We are called to the law of peace in one body.§ 29. The entire istorical development of the insti- tution of the Church, as recorded in the Acts, and as illustrated in the Epistles, is such as would occupy, if duly exhibited, considerable space I cannot, how- ever, refrain from quoting the verse which describes the state of things immediately after the first sermon of St. Peter, when the Christian society had now but just begun to act as an organized body. " And they continued stedfastly in the Apostle's doctrine and fel- lowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers." || Now the word here rendered fellowship is that which is elsewhere translated communion. Thus we have a most comprehensive and accurate description of all that essentially belongs to our habitual position as members of the Church : namely, to continue sted- fastly in, or to cling stedfastly to (zTpofrxapTspslv) the doctrine or teaching (for we have not here that later sense of the Divine doctrine in which it is logically opposed to precept) of the Apostles ; to the ecclesias- tical fellowship or communion of the Apostles, to the * 1 Cor. X. 17; xii. 12. f Eph. ii. 16. % Eph. iii. 6. § Col. iii. 15. II Acts ii. 42. See a Consecration Sermon by the Rev. E. B. Ramsay, Edinburgh, 1837. CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 107 celebration of the Lord's Supper, and to the observ- ance of common worship. I am at a loss to know or conceive what description can, if Scripture be indeed written for our learning, more clearly prove that a visible Church was founded by the Apostles, or more authoritatively inculcate the duty of adhering strictly to that church which they so founded, as well as to that doctrine which they taught, and those public or- dinances which they established and administered. 30. But shall it be objected that St. Paul is rebuk- ing animosities and not outward distinctions ; that " body " is in the teaching of the New Testament a metaphor, signifying a Church which is real but in- visible ? It is most clear that St. Paul rebukes both the spirit of bickering, and the fact of, or rather the tendency to, external division. Because in the passage alread}^ cited he clearly distinguishes them : " whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions," (^i^oa-roia-lai, literally standings apart).* Because, further, the practice which he exemplifies (" one saith I am of Paul, and another, I of Apollos,") relates strictly to external division, and that too in an incipient state,t for St. Paul and Apollos were in the same body ; but when men thus spoke they were evi- dently beginning to allow themselves in distinctions of Christian profession, and thus to break or endanger unity. Because, in enumerating the works of the flesh, he has names comprehending each form of of- * 1 Cor. iii. 4. f Sherlock on Religious Assemblies, Introduction. 108 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. III. fence against unity :^ variance, emulations, wrath, strife, these have regard to breaches of the unity of tlie spirit ; seditions, Ziyoa-raa-'iai (or divisions, as the term is rendered in 1 Cor. i.) designating the infrac- tion of unity of the body ; heresies, denoting a similar rupture in respect of the unity of the Divine Truth committed to the Church. 31. But why is it unreasonable to resolve the term body into metaphor ? Not only because we may think that the plain sense of Scripture precludes it, but fur- ther, also, because the whole primitive Church concurred in the literal sense. Because figurative interpretation, unless supported by the highest authority, or rather compelled by the necessity of the sense, is full of li- cense and of hazard. Because the functions assigned to the Church, that for example of exercising discipline,t and that of exhibiting the truth like a pillar,^ are manifestly attached to an institution or body. Because St. Paul, after giving to Timothy directions which evi- dently apply to the government of the visible Church, tells him that the Church in which these directions are meant for his guidance, is the pillar and ground of truth, that is to say undeniably, is also a spiritual Church. Because our Lord prays for the unity of his disciples, in order that the world may believe in the truth of his mission ; but a mere invisible union would be only appreciated by saints, and would afford no evidence to the world. § Because the unity of spirit * Gal. iv. 19-21. + Matt. xvi. 19. :t 1 Tim. iii. 15. § John xvii. 17. CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 109 is in express terms distinguished from the unity of body by St. Paul. " For by one spirit are we all baptised into one body, .... and have been all made to drink into one spirit." *' Because even as the hope of our calling is one, even so there is one body and one spirit, one faith, one baptism. | Because the early be- lievers continued in the fellowship as well as the doc- trine of the Apostles. :|: Nor let it be supposed that the passages here quoted afford anything like a full, though it is hoped they give for the present purpose a sufficient view, of that authority which Holy Scripture gives to the doctrines that the Church which inherits the promises of Christ, and which is declared by Scripture to be His body, is one, and is visible. 32. There is, however, another form of possible ob- jection, which it may be well to notice. It may be argued that the condition of unity of body, which be- longs to the Church, is satisfied by its actual state in the world ; inasmuch as all who believe in Christ are called by a distinctive name, besides possessing that distinctive tenet, and are therefore one body, as con- trasted with the rest of mankind ; and that therefore no more was intended by the precept of unity in the body than the present state of Christianity fulfils. 33. But if we depend on Scripture for our autho- rity, the answer is plain. We have seen that St. Paul would not tolerate in Corinth so much as the assump- tion of the names of particular teachers, although, so * 1 Cor. xii. 13. t Eph. v. 4. % Acts ii. 42. 110 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. III. far as we know, without any rupture of communion. What would he now behold ? He would see that as- sumption of denominations from this and that man, which he forbade, often even attended with an appa- rently total unconsciousness of its opposition to the Divine commands. He would see those breaches of Christian communion which human corruption had not yet in his time engendered. He would hear a claim advanced from a thousand quarters to interpret the Scripture even on articles of faith, in a thousand different manners ; and further, to reject its obvious and apparent sense, whenever it is contrary to what men term the dictates of their reason, which means, in effect, whenever it transcends the measure of our limited faculties. Was this the unity of body which he intended when he wrote that the body of the Church was one, in no vague or equivocal sense, but one even as was the hope of her calling ? * 34. Again, if the Church be the pillar and ground of truth, if there be a promise that there shall always be a society visibly professing all things necessary to salvation, and if the body of the Church be com- mensurate with that visible profession, who can say that there could now be compiled any body of truths acknowledged by all the denominations that bear the Christian name, such as would present to view a re- hgion distinguished from that of the rest of the world by other than nominal differences? Suppose Christ reduced to a mere humanity, His atonement denied, * Eph. iv. 4. CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. Ill the reality of spiritual grace, the original sinfulness of man, the eternity of future punishment rejected, as by the Unitarians, and the Sacraments taken away, as by the Society of Friends, what remains that can be said, without an insult to common sense, to constitute the religion, the one positive religion of Scripture ? 35. But if the other alternative be taken, and if men say, excluding a few bodies of extreme opinions, the residue agree in the Articles of the Faith ; without stopping to question this assertion, I observe, that if we cut off a certain number of those who are called Christians from the Church, we can no longer say with consistency, that the unity of the body of the Church is satisfied by the fact that one part of the world, as professing Christianity, is thereby distinguished from the residue of mankind who do not profess it. I do not now inquire whether the principle of unity in the body is fully satisfied in the Church of Christ at this time upon earth, or whether unity prevails among all the parts of his true Church, be that Church what it may ; but I here simply argue, that it clearly is not satisfied by the mere distinction of the Christian name. To constitute unity of body there must be some unity of law and of action ; but this cannot exist where not only there is no unity of action, but no provision for it, and where the vital principles of the one part are not only not found, but blasphemed in the other part, so that if the one be life the other must be death. 36. Indeed it would suffice to rest the opposition to the notion that the unity of the Church designated 112 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. III. in the New Testament Scriptures is an invisible unity, on either of the two following grounds taken singly : First, we may challenge the proof from Scripture of any plurality of Churches, except such as is local only ; of any such division as that of a present visible and a pre- sent invisible Church, differing in essence, the latter only possessing gifts, and the former but types and shadows of gifts, intended, as the theory teaches, to incite and awaken the minds of men. And then if it be admitted that Scripture designates but one present and general Church, the only resort for those who contend that that Church is invisible, is to have re- course to the expedient of figurative interpretation, on a scale fearfully extensive ; an expedient undoubtedly sufficient for this purpose, or for any other mischiev- ous perversion, sufficient to reduce the whole Bible to a practical nullity ; an expedient of the readiest and most universal application, because any man may adopt it under the pressure of argumentative diffi- culty, with an absolute security, if he do but go far enough in its use, from detection. In its best and most substantial form this notion rests upon a confu- sion between the Church, which is a body of mixed composition, and the spiritual harmony or union which exists among all those who have a living faith in Jesus Christ. 37. Secondly, I think it might be fairly argued, that the very phrase " invisible Church," when it is applied to the Church militant here on earth, presents a contradiction in terms. That the Church is essentially visible. That its essence (unless we again employ CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 113 the aid of metaphor to escape from the plain meaning of terms) depends upon visible characteristics. That it is, in the nature of the thing, an institution furnished with outward badges and rites, and that no mere com- munity of opinions can make an institution, though such a community may induce men to form one. And whenever men do attempt to embody the idea of a Church, the attempt assumes a form of visibility. Quakerism itself, which has been more consistent than any other system in following out the idea of the invisi- ble Church, cannot exist without external signs, with- out some marks and bonds of association palpable to sense and to general experience, and it has found them in the conventional unities of dress. If, therefore, it be admitted (and who can deny it ?) that the Apostles founded a Church, those who admit it are bound, in logical consequence, to admit its visibility. 38. And lastly, what objection so obvious or so popular as that which argues from the mixed character of the visible Church, composed as it is partly of con- scientious and partly of unfaithful members, and with a great ostensible preponderance of the latter — that no body containing within itself so much pollution can be entitled to those lofty prerogatives which are given in scripture to the spouse of Christ? This is the plausible though most unscriptural argument, which has produced the greatest amount of delusion. And in accordance with this persuasion that the true Church cannot be recognised in the visible body, men proceed to seek for it elsewhere. 114 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. HI. 39. To this ofjjection I would reply : first that we must put out of view such increase of scandal and ungodliness in the Church as has arisen from the relax- ation of discipline, or from any local or temporary circumstances. But supposing discipline in the best state to which it has ever attained, it is clear, even one may say from the cases historically recorded in the New Testament, that the composition of the Church must ever be not only mixed, but so mixed that she does not even contemplate eifecting on earth any thing like that final separation which must one day be made. Therefore, in the second place, we may, fairly, be called upon to justify this mixed condition from Scripture, and to shew that it answers to the idea there given of the Church. Which may easily be done. Why does our Lord refer to the day of judgment* as the period of separation, if that separation generally were to be made here? By the branches f which are in Him and yet which bear not fruit, and by those ministers of His power J and gifts who have wrought wonders in His name and yet shall be finally cast out, and by the participation of Judas Iscariot in the minis- trations of His Apostles, He shews us that a continual indwelling of unholy members was contemplated in the Providential view of the Church. The parable of the net having good fish and bad :§ of the tares mixed with the wheat in the field, || indicate yet more determinately the same state of things. The Church (Ixx^ria-ia) is of * Matt. XXV. 32. f Joh. xv. 2. % Matt. vii. 22. § Matt. xiii. 47—51. |1 Matt. xiii. 24—30, and 36-43. CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 115 the called (xXtjto)); and they are many: but few are chosen.* *'The Lord knoweth them that are His." From all which, it is fairly to be inferred that the discipline of the Church was not designed to aim at anything like an effectual and entire separation corresponding with the final one. 40. Now if this representation should shock the preconceptions and stagger the faith of any man in the promises of Christ respecting the Church, I would appeal to every one of humble heart and thoughtful mind, and ask him whether the paradox be not as evidently striking in the case of the individual — or his own experience can have taught him nothing — as it is in the case of the body. If the contrast be wide between the high privileges and destinies of the Church on the one hand, and that inward state where evil continually contends for and at times seems well nigh to obtain the mastery : is there not in miniature precisely the same conflict, and a discrepancy as horrible and appalling, between the state of grace into which the individual is adopted, the hopes of which he is made heir, nay and the gifts of which he is put actually in possession, and that subtle and deep energy of his fallen nature, which still abides in him, and lives and struggles in a thousand forms and with desperate tenacity? But if he has notwithstanding good hope for himself in God's love, and in the sure mercies of His covenant, may he not have equal faith for the Church that she too may be as * Matt. XX. 16. 1 2 116 THE CHURCH. [ CHAP. III. a Church the adopted of God, and that in her He shall one day absolutely and finally triumph ? 41. The Scriptures then, it is henceforth to be assumed, hold out to our view the actual, historical Church as the great object of the love and regard of Christ, as the medium whereby was conferred that title under which His favour is conveyed to His indi- vidual members : and as intended to have unity in the body and the spirit, with universality, authority, visibiHty, permanency, sympathy : as the casket and treasure-house of God's immortal gifts : as destined to a present warfare, and a final glorification. Why have we lapsed from this magnificent conception of a power incorporated upon earth, capable of resistance to all the enemies of Divine Truth with the certainty of ul- timate victory, this conception which comprehends alike all space and all time, concentrating to tenfold efficacy the power of every noble motive, and realising and bringing home to our gross and feeble minds the sublime doctrine of supernatural grace ? Why have we sub- stituted for the idea, of which this is but a sketch, attesting by its very defects the losses we deplore, that misty, formless, lifeless, anomalous, negative, chaotic shape. If shape it might be called that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb : which is the only counterpart, in many minds, to the name of the scripture-honoured Church ? How far must we have departed from that condition in which Saint Augustine could write, credamus, fratres^ CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 117 quantum quisque amat Ecclesiam Christi, tantuin hahet Spiritum Sanctum.^ 42. It is not difficult to perceive a part at least of the cause to which we are to ascribe this evil. It has been the pohcy of the Romish church, and her practice, instead of leading her members more immediately near to their Head through the grand idea of incorpo- ration, rather to interpose herself as an organ of com- munication distinct from them, and represented only in the persons of the hierarchy, between them and the Redeemer. She took into her own hands the powers that belong to Deity alone, and thus acquiring an absolute command over the souls of men, she confined their spiritual free agency within the narrowest possible limits that she might have the larger scope for her own discretionary power; and thus she reduced the greater portion of her children, more nearly than could have been anticipated, to the condition, so far as respected the religious action of the understand- ing, of machines. The Reformation generally took vengeance upon this excess by establishing its opposite. Not indeed in the deliberate intention of its great authors, but in its ulterior tendency, it went, instead of retaining the tme conception of a visible and universal Church, and restoring and attaching it to the mass of Christians who had been deprived as it were of their part and lot in it, to erase that idea alto- gether and to substitute others much more narrow and partial. The idea of its first movers was, to restore * Exp. in Ev. Joan. Tr. xxxii. 118 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. III. together, privilege and responsibility in the inquiry about truth : but the intoxication of suddenly and often violently recovered privilege greatly enfeebled the impression of responsibility which ought to have at- tended and chastened it. Free assent came to be con- sidered not only as the condition of adequate religion in a rational being, but as the arbiter and criterion of truth : and thus the throne of authority being set up within each individual breast, we have deprived the Church of her prerogative, and therein ourselves of some of our substantial advantages. 43. But in honesty I must also allude to another reason why the doctrine of the Church has been nearly erased, with many of us, not indeed from our creed, but from our practical apprehensions of religion — it is, the spirituality of that doctrine. As our hearts are set upon the world, and upon the fulfilment of our natural wills, we are much indisposed to hear of the world to come, and of the fulfilment of the Divine will as our own appropriate business. In these terms, however, it may be said, is a mere statement of the general truth, that the natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God — and it may be asked, what is its special operation in depressing the doctrine of the Church ? I answer, this. If I individualise my religion, if in modem language I place the account only between God and my conscience, free from all inspection and controul, I manifestly rid myself of a host of trouble- some remembrancers, whose admonitions I cannot disprove and will not obey. I shall have thus succeeded CHAP. Til.] THE CHURCH. 119 in removing, in rendering wholly nugatory, so far as I am concerned, all that might have had an entrance to my soul with authority, and might thus have wounded me and dispelled my spiritual torpor. There surely can be no doubt that a view of the Church not as a voluntary combination but as one preordered for us, and entailing obligations and even having parental claims upon us, should naturally tend to disturb the fatal ease of a deluded conscience fortified within its own fancied independence, and should bring near and obtrude upon us the idea that there is a God in the world whose will asserts audibly in the Church its title to be preferred to our own. 44. Let us exemplify familiarly. A man notorious for neglect of the poor, is exceedingly averse to be- coming a member of a society, which has their benefit for its object. A man whose mind is disinclined to politics when proposed as an incidental topic of con- versation, recoils with tenfold horror from an invitation to enrol his name in a political association. Why? because in each of these cases the association with others would be a force, a distinct additional force, propelling us towards an object which we had felt to be unattractive. It would add to the existing religious obligation to relieve the poor, a public pledge in acknowledgment of it : it would bring the opinions of our fellow men to bear strongly upon our conduct, it would rivet their eyes by the glaring contrast between profession and practice. It would practically invest them with an authority over us which they had not 120 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. III. before, calling them in as auxiliaries to the law of God, a visible power to aid the invisible, and calculated to operate with so much the greater force, as it was our own voluntary act which called it into being. 45. Shall we then wonder if the soul which dreads religion and would flee from it, which has not yet thoroughly suborned its natural witnesses within the breast but yet has imposed upon them a partial silence, and lulled them into a temporary slumber, if such a soul, feeling that its peace depends on the prolonga- tion of that lethargy, should shun with watchfulness those sounds by which it might be dissipated ? In that sad position, a position occupied, alas ! by how many myriads, every moment of inaction is a step towards the consummation of the triumph of Satan. God has a claim to our whole existence. Every act which is performed in a state of mind not recognising that claim, is in truth an act of rebellion against the Almighty, and assuredly goes to form the habit of alienation within us : as every year during which an usurper continues to occupy his throne, diminishes the probability of the restoration of the legitimate possessor. Give therefore time to the Evil One, and you give him all he requires. If then we get rid of the notion of a Church, and shut up the affair of our religion within our own bosoms — if the ministers of the Church dare not inter- fere — and if there be nothing in the decent usages of society to awaken unpleasant recollections — soon in the darkness and coldness of the silent breast does religion CHAP, III.] THE CHURCH. 121 surrender all its vital powers. So the great object of a man who knows he is living in sin usually is, not to profess irreligion, but simply to claim independence in respect of his religion. This is enough for this purpose. But the more he is compelled (whether by law or opinion) to associate with others, and to feel his association with others, in matters of religion, the more likely is he to be awakened to a sense of his danger : because then there is a power independent of himself and yet strongly operative upon him, which he can neither bribe nor stifle into silence. Such a power exists in the full, public, general acknowledgment of the Church as a religious society, and in a faithful carrying out of that idea into the functions of our life. 46. Let us now consider both the duty and the ad- vantages, of endeavouring, in all sobriety, to revive and realize that conception of the Church which pervades the works of the Apostles, and according to which we should contemplate her as our mother in the faith, from whom by Divine dispensation we received spiri- tual life, and from whose ordinances, together with the Word which she has preserved for us, and attested to us, we are still to gain our progressive growth in spiritual stature during the period of that childhood which we spend upon earth. Only be it observed that by her ordinances we do not mean only those which are public, but such also as, being private in their nature, belong to us as members in particular of the body ; each member having functions primarily referable to 122 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. TIT. itself, as well as others that more immediately regard the body at large. 47. Now, in the first place, we cannot donbt, that if the will of God do indeed enjoin us to think, feel and act, less as individuals and more as members of a body than we now do, there must be advantages attending the fulfilment of that will. The fact of its enunciation is enough to satisfy every Christian mind. Yet it is permitted to our infirmity to trace out into particulars, the wisdom of the Divine dis- pensations, that we may husband every resource against our manifold temptations, and may stand armed at all points. Only let us not imagine when we have specified this and that use of some one of the ordinances of God, that we have exhausted the sub- ject, that we have stated the whole amount of its capacity to justify His command. On the contrary, it is a point of duty to remember that besides the results perceptible to us, there probably are far more and more weighty consequences which we do not appre- hend ; and the best method of summing up these is, always to fall back on the Divine command, as being the most cogent and legitimate of all motives to its own fulfilment, and as indicating an obligation which is paramount to any view of advantage or incon- venience. 48. And this appears to be the place for observing that the distinction between acting, feeling, thinking, as individuals, and discharging those functions as members of an organised and permanent and authori- CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 123 tative body, is neither visionary nor slight. Now looking steadily and singly at the point just proposed, any man who has been accustomed to act in combina- tion with others, even under some merely conventional compact, will know that such a position involves con- ditions most materially different from those which attach to a man acting on his own account. While enumerating them in particular, we shall also be enabled to bring out the beneficial results annexed to those differences. 49. First in order and in magnitude of them all is this : that adoption into a body tends to depress and absorb the idea of self. Now whatever may or has been said, and by persons of great authority, re- specting self-love as a part of our constitution, may it not well be questioned whether self was ever in- tended to form an object of separate contemplation on any distinct principle of preference ; whether in short the whole amount of our dealings with self, though they may constitute the greater part of our mental life, be not subject to exactly the same laws as the ordinarily less amount of our dealings with others ; Avhether a preference to self as such be ever justified in a Christian view : and further, whether at all events, and on the shewing even of those who would here support an opposite doctrine, the idea of self as an authority, and of the mere dictate of self as a motive, whether to belief or to practice, and whether in things human or in things divine, be not by a great deal too prominent in almost every mind ? Then coalescence 124 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. III. with our brethren is advantageous. For united action will be incompatible with an arbitrary or capricious independence of judgment : it will discourage self- reliance in the adoption of conclusions : it will bring before us in the processes of reflection the sentiments of others, their claims to respect, their comparative probabilities of correctness. Men have felt these truths : and have responded to them by every kind of combination in religion : and the many combinations which we perceive in sects around us, are simply so many imperfect aftergrowths, intended to supply the place of the primitive and legitimate idea of the Church. But when we have adopted that idea of divine original, we shall find that every other need of combination will range under it, and harmonise with it : " Me this unchastened freedom tires : I feel the weight of chance desires :* for the principle of selfishness is, after all, weariness to the soul : its repression will give us more ease with more liberty, and more energy : and it will be most effectually repressed when we come to feel our real dependence on one another as members, and on the Saviour as head, in that Church, which we are so ex- pressly told is His body. 50. In truth, a sound view of the Church seems to detach us altogether from the idea of self as such. It represents to us an extrinsic body of Divine truth : calls us to try and prove it : and having proved it to * Wordsworth, Ode to Duty. CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 125 hold it fast — but why ? not because we have proved it, but because it is true and therefore also good. Because we have proved it, we know it to be good : but this our knowledge is merely a condition and a medium, it is not properly the cause of our attachment to it. We are not therefore to dwell upon the mental processes which composed the proof, upon the argu- mentative part of religion : but upon the things proved : and to carry away the eye from self to the Redeemer, accepting all as His gift ; desiring to concentrate the whole soul in the contemplation of Him, and in an offering to Him ; and not feeling that we in our feeble- ness have any powers to spare for a distinct self-re- gard. Then we, as it were, receive back from Him the soul which we have offered to Him, to be instru- mentally the appointed object of our care and culture ; but He remains the source and the end even of all that labour which we bestow upon our own selves, as the portion of the vineyard primarily allotted to our charge. 51. Now if our belonging to a Church merely meant, as in the popular modern signification, that each of us has attached himself by choice to one or another of the prevalent denominations of Christians, there is nothing in such a conception to indicate that we are no longer the self-centered and self-actuated beings, which we are by natural inclination. But if the Church be as an institution independent of and superior to our will, and if it claim our adhesion with a moral authority, then our connexion with it is of 126 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. III. a different description : then we surrender our indi- viduality into her general life, we give ourselves as members to a body ; and our particular powers and functions become subordinate to the general purposes of the body, and our will, in order to attain a right state, falls in and concurs with the will which governs all its parts by a common and pervading actuation. There is then in the catholic idea of the Church, pro- vision made for superseding the idea of self as a centre of motion, and the idea of self-interest as an end, by giving to us our Christian privileges, not in our capa- city of individuals but as component portions of that great frame of which the glorified Redeemer is the living and sympathising Head. 52. Let us compare the effect of the other theory upon the prominence of the idea of self in our per- sonal religion. There the Church is not considered as intervening in any way between the Saviour and the individual, but rather it is regarded as an institu- tion of convention resting upon grounds of religious expediency ; and her laws as dependent on the will of individuals, whether few or many. The scheme of salvation is addressed by God not through one channel to a vast visible body, but to a selected num- ber of particular persons. This salvation is conveyed direct by an operation exclusively internal ; and it is recognised and known by an evidence which does not appeal to any outward signs, cognisable by others, as guarantees of the Divine love. Thus each man becomes to himself the arbiter of revealed truth, and CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 127 the sole witness of effectual grace ; and the love shown to him does not, according to his conceptions, belong alike to all those around him ; some among them may, he hopes, be taken in like manner, but there is no palpable and general warrant under which he may pour out upon them his own sanctified affections under that dearest of all relationships, which is con- stituted by a common redemption from a common ruin. He sees then God : he sees himself : he sees other individuals : in Christian humility he may lean on some of them : may lean on them too much, to their injury and his own ; but the Church supplies a safer and more probable guide to his judgment : a witness of his Father's love both preceding and inde- pendent of, and additional to, that derived from his personal experience, and a broad channel to his affec- tions, showing him a whole visible community as the proper claimants, not merely of his human but of his Christian sympathies ; but especially, in each of these particulars, supplying other objects of contem- plation and of subordinate reliance besides the single one of self, and releasing and diffusing the pent up energies of his love alike for the benefit of others and his own. 53. So much for the depression of our pride. But the enlargement of our love, thus intimately connected with it, is deserving of notice as a distinct benefit attaching to the true notion of the Church. In the early ages, when that notion was most vigorous, love was most abundant among the disciples. Love de- cayed in the subsequent perversions : in the first per- version of exaggeration, and in the second perversion 128 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. HI. of attenuation. Surely love is stronger where union is closer, and union is closer where natural relations, hav- ing some seal and sanction over and above that of private choice, combine with private choice, than where the lat- ter is alone its tie : as for example, usually in marriage than in friendship. And analogous to this is the relative position of these two views of the Church. From this junction, in a natural and not merely a conven- tional body, arises the multiplication of joys and suf- ferings, and the benefit which under the Christian covenant accrues in common from both ; but a mul- tiplication of the former is in a greater ratio than the latter, because virtuous and sympathetic suffering always brings with it an infusion of compensating joy. The exercises of love are enlarged, and thus its ener- gies increased by being called into action on an in- creased number of occasions ; and hereby the education of the soul for heaven receives a fuller accomplishment. We know how much in all common matters indi- vidual strength is increased by combination : how much the whole exceeds the mere aggregate of the parts : it is so in the Church under the Catholic creed respecting her, but in the vague notion of recent days, the very best we can hope for is a mere union by juxta-position, but not the intertwining, the knitting and tempering together, of bone, muscle, nerve, and flesh, which intimacy, nay intricacy of connexion, is the strength alike of the material and of the spiritual body. 54. Again we know that sympathy is a principle which for the most part gives increased energy to CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 129 action. When the electric chain pervades the hearts of many, it seems to render all their combined force available for each individual, as the momentum of a material body composed of many parts would carry every one of them with much greater rapidity and power than they would have possessed if they had been put in motion apart from one another. And thus we may see how eloquence works its effect on crowds much more powerfully than on individuals ; and how the most indifferent wit is sufficient to con- vulse a popular assembly with laughter, which if obtruded on any one of its component members in private, would either pass unnoticed or excite con- tempt. In this strength of sympathy is a part of the rationale, so to speak, of public prayer ; it husbands and multiplies individual energies; and the higher our conception of the Church, the better we shall be prepared to estimate and to profit by this great func- tion. ^^, We are next to observe that a strong, habitual, practical conception of the Church and of our own personal adoption into it, is eminently calculated to give energy and warmth to those public devotions which are always so dearly prized by persons of wisdom and piety. On any theory, indeed, public prayer, the union of many souls in a common petition to the throne of grace, presents a noble idea, embracing alike the needs and the capacities, and worthy of the high destiny of man. But how much more does this idea acquire both of solemnity and of concentration, when K 130 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. III. we not only believe, but live and act and meet in worship under the belief that the very spouse of Christ is then discharging her high function of immediate address to Him in her character as such. Thus the worship of the Church will be to men not the mere accumulation of the prayers of so many individuals ; but each will be acting in confession, thanksgiving, and prayer, for all the rest as well as for himself, and will be thus uplifted into a higher and larger sphere of duty by a warrant expressly divine ; and from this increased dignity and magnitude of function will result an enlargement and fervency of heart which will give new wings to our prayers, as they mount, through buoyant air, the serene firmament of heaven. 56. True the individual in his closet addresses the Saviour ; and precious is the privilege of his perpe- tual access to his Lord : but more elevated still is the public worship, because as an individual he stands in a lower position than that which belongs to him in the Church as a part of her incorporate life : he is not as an individual so assured of his being wedded to Christ, as is the Church of her mystical and indissoluble relations with Him : and she acts upon this, not sup- position merely, but moral certainty of His favour, and of vital union with Him and the continual derivation of vital graces from Him, with a degree of confidence which for the body is safe, but for the individual would be intoxicating. Her privilege is so high, that the sense of it would probably destroy in most even of pious men the just equilibrium of the mind, were it CHAP. III. J THE CHURCH. 131 contemplated with the same certainty as a personal possession : but being contemplated as a common good, and as realised to the individual not as such, but in virtue of his enrolment in a body, the force of self-love is broken and dissipated ; for we are not so apt to be proud for our brethren as for ourselves. A man is not proud of the light of the sun : but would he not be so, if it were not common to his brethren with himself? Pride, in one form or another, ever dogs and haunts us ; and, to use another simple illus- tration, as national pride is better, or in any case less bad, than personal pride, so the sentiment of the Catholic is better, and its besetting danger less, than those of the individualist in religion, to whom the Church is but an exterior framew^ork, and in no higlier sense attached to the essential relations be- tween God and his soul. 57. We would earnestly and seriously entreat men to consider, whether there be not something in the conception of the Church as an indefeasibly though partially blessed and sanctified body : and as a legi- timately authoritative, though not an infallible, body : which is eminently fitted to assist the earnest Christian in attaining these two great objects : — firstly, as has already been argued, in the maintenance of a very high view of the doctrines of grace and of the Chris- tian privilege of communion with God through and in his Son, and of personal union with that Son as the very life and substance of Christianity, with less of the commonly attendant danger of presumptuous K 2 132 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. HI. inflation and spiritual pride : secondly, in the execution of the details of a stricter holiness in habitual practice. 58. To exemplify the latter, let us suppose a person assailed for peculiarity, for righteousness overmuch, and for an implied affectation of superiority over others, because he encourages frequency of worship in the Church, and beheves it a duty to participate in the outward acts of that worship according to her directions when they are authentically conveyed ; or let it be, because he argues for the propriety of carrying into effect (after our Saviour's example) our Saviour's command to use the practice of fasting, as a part of our religious discipline. Now, supposing he did these things from a spontaneous and original (as he does them from a free) conviction of their propriety, he would be open to a plausible imputation under the heads just mentioned. Doubtless he would be doing them in single-minded obedience to what he believed to be the divine will : but let us consider his case while defending himself against his impugners. Is it not quite obvious that he is greatly aided in repelling the charge of assumption, by being enabled to point to the precepts and practice of the Church, as a body endowed with authority to assist the faithful ? He may say, this is no invention of mine ; it is proposed to me ; I approve it, it is true ; but I did not discover it ; I adopted it from a legitimate and sufficient autho- rity ; I am not now setting up my judgment over yours, but were I to desist from this or that practice, to abandon this or that conviction, I should then, in- CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 133 deed, be setting up my judgment unsupported by reason against that of the Church. He would thus show that he was endeavouring to bring his practice to the very point at which alone it might rightfully be expected to coincide with that of Christians in ge- neral, the very line of conduct which in the nature of things must be least liable to be marked with a spirit of egoism. So true, then, is it, that the Church, when viewed in that parental character which is so broadly separated from the nature of despotism, is not viewed as having dominion over our consciences, but as a helper of our faith. 59. Yes, strictly and eminently a helper of our faith ; for she affords to religious practice an extrinsic support, by an appeal to an acknowledged standard ; available very frequently in cases when other tribunals would not be recognised. Let us consider the prac- tical effect in a case of weak and infant faith exposed to ridicule from some person careless of religion, though possibly not a hardened scoffer ; one exempli- fying the very character, perhaps, whose opposition in the way of ridicule is likely to be formidable, because blasphemy would generally cause so strong a revul- sion as to defeat its own object. How advantageous for the young follower of God, instead of appealing alone to his inward sentiments and convictions, v;hich his assailant would in no sense comprehend, much less regard, to be able also to point to an authority* * Are there not many young men who have felt how great a reli- gious advantage they possess in our universities, particularly that of Oxford, through the strict injunction of religious study, which is 134 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. HI acknowledged by the mass of men as entitled to a general respect, and so to place a great strength of human opinion on his side, thus forming a shelter for his own spiritual convictions, within which though human yet divinely provided shelter, they may grow into maturity and hardihood. St. Paul did not dis- dain thus to attempt enlisting human sentiment in his favour when he announced to an assembly of persons chiefly holding Pharisaic opinions, that of the resur- rection of the dead he was called in question. This is the true wisdom of the serpent, and perfectly com- patible with the innocence of the dove. 60. And again, as regards the accuser himself, how much is the hope hereby increased of an impression upon him ! From the principles confessed, he cannot suspect formality : by the appeal to an extrinsic and public authority, he is deprived of every shadow of a plea to impute fanaticism or any form of egoism. He is not always nor ordinarily destitute of all candour : and in any stage but the very extreme one of unfair- ness, surely such a case is likely to impress him. And now let us suppose the accused retaliating, or at least becoming the assailant, though not retaliating, be- cause he returns good for evil. He is able to say, " this very authority under which I act is one which required of every undergraduate, in order to enable him to pass through the schools and obtain an academical degree ? They are thus enabled to give scope to what they love, without fear of the reproach of singularity : a reproach always painful to delicate and sensitive minds. True, with a high and confirmed Christian principle they would bear it ; but the question is about persons not yet having attained such maturity of principle as to be indifferent to taunts, and how they may be best helped along the early stages of the road towards Heaven. CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 135 you acknowledge, and which, believe me, is binding upon you ; you have no conscientious scruple against it ; you cannot, then, evade its force ; and you, not I, are the opponent of the most legitimately constituted and established opinion. You have the high privi- leges of the Church ; you are a member of the body of Christ : see that His grace be not to either of us a savour of death unto death : and yet it must be so if it be not a savour of life unto life : if we live not that life, whose obligations and conditions, whether we will it or no, are already entailed and bound upon us." 61. Consider how much is acquired of additional force, upon such a ground, for operating upon the character of the baptized but still careless Christian. The popular teaching of the day tells him that he is in a state of condemnation ; and this is true, but not the whole truth : in fact, his condemnation is double : it is not the simple condemnation of the fallen child of Adam, but a compound twofold condemnation ; made up, first of the sentence upon that state ; se- condly, of the aggravated wrath due to a neglect and abdication, more or less deliberate, of the grace of Christianity : it is not that the man has refused to enter the covenant, but that, being already within its terms and obligations, he has habitually broken them : and whatever, therefore, the force of the motives which, without such a view of the Church, can be brought from the armoury of the terrors of the Lord to act upon a man, thus greatly are these motives en- hanced when that view is added. 136 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. III. 62. And here we may observe upon a difficulty which may arise in the daily intercourse of life, namely, with reference to the manner in which it is right to meet censures often pronounced upon persons for assuming and professing peculiar opinions in reli- gion. Nothing can be more alien to the idea and to the spirit of the Church of Christ, than any introduc- tion of such opinions as are novel and peculiar with reference to her scheme of Divine truth. In this sense therefore, to say a man holds peculiar views is indeed to pronounce a sentence of the heaviest repro- bation. But on the other hand it may happen, that the mass of the members of the Church at a particular time or place, may themselves have sunk into a lethargic state, and may have seriously lowered their own sen- timents, in proportion to the lapse of their practice from the elevation of the Christian standard. Now in such a case the peculiarity apparently chargeable on him who in a degenerate community first attains to a sense of this degeneracy, and recurs to the use of a juster measure of Christian doctrine, is really charge- able only on that community which has fallen away from the principles maintained in the universal and perpetual creed of the Church, the bod}^ of Christ. 63. At the same time it is fair to observe that in that progressive extension of vital and inward religion, Avith which God appears of late years to have blessed this branch of His Church, there has not been, as neither w^as it to be expected that there should be, a preservation of the perfect harmony and equilibrium CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 137 of Christian truth. It was natural that the first im- pressions of ardent minds should have reference to the perils overhanging individual souls, and thence to the truths which are most palpably connected with indi- vidual deliverance, rather than with the general edifi- cation of the body of the Church in grace and glory ; and hence men in adopting what to them has been a new view of Christian truth, may not always have been sufficiently mindful of the fact, or careful to maintain it before others who rebuke them for pecu- liarity, tliat their belief of Christianity, so far as it is true, is not new but old ; that they are not wilfully, and ought not to be, carvers out of novel devices, but that they simply revert and recur to the faith which is professed by the visible and permanent institution of the Church, under that very clear and pure manifesta- tion of it which the Church of England seems to afford. 64. But there has been something of a just retribu- tion as well as of divine teaching — something of a just and tender admonition — in the hardship and mis- construction that persons of this class may have suf- fered. They have adopted their religion individually, and as it were under a peculiar title, not given to the body at large; they have forgotten that it is simply as members of that body that they have or can have any rights at all ; they have appealed to some novel name as of a class or party under which they have allowed themselves to rank, sometimes, perhaps, provoked and challenged to adopt it ; but also sometimes readily, or even with eagerness owning the distinctive appella- 138 THE CHURCH. [chap. IH. tion, instead of disdaining any other foundation, either nominal or substantial, than that which was laid in the Apostolic Church. In this way they may either have appeared to become fanatical, or may, by being too little careful to protest against the imputation of novelty, have surrendered to persons of minds sub- stantially less sound than their own, the vantage ground of the Church and of general consent ; they may have substituted, insensibly perhaps, a narrower sentiment for that of devotion to the Church ; and may have been compelled to lean apparently either with presumption on their own private judg- ment, or with some imprudence at least, upon the opinions of teachers few in number, recently arisen, shallow in qualification, and like themselves failing to claim relationship with the cloud of witnesses, who attest his faith to the well-informed and established Christian. 65. May they learn from the harsh treatment with which they may have met, to inquire whether there has not been something of error in their conduct, which they are in this manner mercifully reminded to cor- rect. Renouncing all self-reliance, acknowledging no standard of faith in the first and highest sense except the revealed word of God, recognising as the most natural and most probable witness of the sense of that word, the uncorrupted and undivided Church, in pro- portion as genuine historical inquiry can find that it satisfied in substance these two conditions ; and using, therefore, its aid, not as a fetter but as a prop to human CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 139 judgment, partly on account of its authority, but pri- marily on account of its veracity in handing down the early views and practices of Christianity ; they will act upon the principles not less of common sense than of spiritual religion, and they will disarm, not indeed the obstinate and carnal persecutor of Divine truth, but all the weaker yet frequently well-intentioned brethren, whose fears they, perhaps in part by impru- dence, have alarmed, but whose confidence they are bound to seek, under the law of Christian charity. 66. The past remarks leave two purposes yet re- maining to be specified. The permanent and un- broken existence of the Church as a visible institution through so many ages, its having survived the wreck of that vast empire on which it was first engrafted, and again its having outlived the vitality of most of those modern monarchies which arose out of the seminal period of the middle ages, retaining all its essential conditions as they were in the very first era of its existence, is not only an elevating idea to the Christian, but it is in itself a standing witness to the truth of his religion, and a powerful corroboration of his faith, operating in a similar manner to its awful counterpart, the equally permanent, unbroken and palpable existence of the Jewish nation, in a state of exile from the covenant of grace. Among known human institutions there is no parallel to this. The Church has not only thus existed, but has thus existed in immediate juxtaposition with the most energetic mental developments, which the history of the human 140 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. HI. race during: its term has exhibited. If the launch of Mahometanism was more violent, and its early- conquests more sudden and extensive, yet not only the amount of influence it now exercises in a strictly- religious sense, but the amount both of secular and of social and moral power now exercised by its professors, is immeasurably inferior to that which has been fos- tered under the shade of Christianity. 67. It must be observed that the whole efficacy of this attestation rests upon the notion of the Church as a visible institution. For upon the theory of an invi- visible Church, there is no provision for the transmis- sion of the testimony from man to man. It matters not how often it be revived in individual minds ; they may enjoy the witness of its suitableness to their own desires, but they cannot establish its identity with the primitive faith, or the integrity of the docu- ments in which it professes to be contained. To establish that identity, you must have continuity in the chain of witnesses through all generations ; and the only continuity that can be available for the pur- pose, appears to be that of public and official succes- sion. For it is not only needful in order to make out our case, that the organ which now witnesses to the genuineness of Scripture, should have been informed of that genuineness traditionally by an uninterrupted series of persons ; but also that all those who compose the series, should, in each of the intervening genera- tions, have borne the same witness. The fact that this witness has been continually borne, and continu- CHAP. III. J THE CHURCH. 141 ally subject to scrutiny and trial, is what assures us against delusion. And not continually alone, but it was needful also that it should be formally borne, by parties avowedly and ostensibly receiving and trans- mitting it. Now does not this necessarily suppose visibility in the Church, whicli, as it will hereafter be argued, implies public succession in its governing body ? 68. And not only is it an office of the Church to attest the genuineness of the sacred writings, but like- wise it is peculiarly hers to maintain a pure and sound interpretation of them, by directing the minds of her members, and especially of her ministers, to the pur- suit of that kind of learning which connects itself with both the transmission and the exposition of the faith. First, as regards its transmission. The teaching of religion is to extend over all lands, over all languages, over all generations. Now immediately that we con- sider Christianity as overstepping all the barriers of language, and as comprehending a vast range of place and time, we essentially involve, not the expediency alone, but the necessity of the aids of learning. For it is documentary correspondence in the main that connects distant places. Still more it is documentary evidence that connects distant ages by a light per- vading their whole tract, and ascertaining to each one the facts and histories of every other. It is true that oral tradition somewhat assists the attainment of the same purpose; but it is only while it is subject to perpetual correction and verification from that which 142 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. III. is documentary. Lastly, as respects different lan- guages, it would be a contradiction in terms, or nearly so, to deny that learning must be the instrument, in the absence of miracle, of securing substantial identity in the representations of the Divine Word, which are produced through these different media. ^9. And now as respects the exposition of the faith. Let us consider the necessity which exists for a re- sponsible body, specially charged with the office of defending the Gospel against heretical invasion and perversion. It may naturally be asked, why all this solicitude ? If you attest the transmitted Word, is it not enough ? Does not the essential purity of that Word stand admitted, and must it not be ever and in- finitely more pure than any system of interpretation ? Undoubtedly it must; and had it pleased God that the work of tlie Gospel should be carried on by His Word alone, and not also by the agency of human in- terpretations of His Word, this answer would have been more satisfactory, though the function of the Church mio;ht still have remained as a witness to other facts besides that of the genuineness and authen- ticity of the sacred writings. But He has established in the Church an office of interpretation. Not that there has been infallibility, or impeccability, in its discharge. But there can be no doubt of its exist- ence, nor any question that it attaches peculiarly to the accredited ministry of the Church. We cannot therefore abolish the function ; and the question arises, whether deep study be not necessary in order to fulfil CHAP. III. J THE CHURCH. 143 its obligations ? But, it may be asked, is the function legitimate and useful ? Let us now consider, both of the necessity of such a function, and whether, upon the whole, immense beneifit has not arisen from its exercise. 70. Mankind have by nature a sense of the power of God combined with an alienation of the will from Him. Had they the first alone, they would of course receive his word as He gave it ; had they the second alone, they would of course and avowedly reject it. But under the existing combination of these recipro- cally counter-working sentiments, they are for the most part disinclined either heartily to accept or boldly to renounce it ; and they are apt accordingly to re- ceive it in form for the satisfaction of their fears, but to evade and neutralise it in substance to avoid the sacrifice of their individual wills. Now this evasion and neutralisation can best be effected by the method of misinterpreting the sacred text and thereby misre- presenting its coramands, and thus getting rid of whatever in them is mortifying to human pride and desire, or inventing compensations which revelation has not really allowed. Here therefore we have in our view a cause not only of the most malignant but of the most unceasing operation. As permanent as is the force of human inclination, is also the bias towards heresy, towards the putting glosses upon the word of God, and reducing it to the measure of our own dis- cretion. It seems to follow, that an equally permanent corrective is required to uphold everywhere the faith 144 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. III. in its integrity and unity against the multiplying and fluctuating forms of error. 71. Here therefore is the necessity, which it was proposed to investigate, of an organised and pei'petual body, charged in the face of all men with the mainte- nance of the truth. But that body fulfils its functions by a human instrumentality. It follows that it par- takes of the very evils against which it is appointed to contend ; it follows that the attainment of its purpose, that the provision for meeting that necessity, are only partial— so is every operation of nature, so is the earthly consummation of every one of God's merciful dispensations. Yet there is a provision. Look back to the history of the Romish Church in the middle ages : it preserved throughout both the written word and the fundamental doctrines and symbols of Chris- tianity. The same is true of the Greek and of other branches of the Church, although themselves, perhaps, in particular points defective or corrupt. There was no body, in the nature of a sect, of which we are en- abled to say the same. The Vaudois, if aboriginal, were not in the nature of a sect ; if seceders, then they derived the doctrines of the creeds from the Church of the west or of the east. I omit to mention the period of the Church's glory, when, with undi- vided voice and heart, she condemned the heresies of earlier ages. Even in later times, but then much more easily and palpably, was she a repressor of he- resy in matters fundamental, however infected in her own body with error short of fundamental, according HAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 145 to the promise of the Redeemer, which guarantees the preservation, but not the perfection, of the Church. Here, then, is the benefit which it remained to show, the constant preservation of fundamental truth within the precinct of the visible Church at large. 72. It is now time to pass onwards to another por- tion of this inquiry — to the endeavour, namely, to meet such objections to the foregoing principle as may probably be anticipated. First, let us obviate a mis- conception that is most likely to arise. There is no claim here made or implied for any particular local })ortion of the Church as such, to possess the high dis- tinction of being invested in all minds with those plenary ideas of privilege and authority which belong in full only to the Church universal ; the full measure of regard and deference to her as a parent and guide, as qualified to be regarded like parents with afiection, like guides with confidence, is only due to the body which fulfils the idea of the Catholic Church of Christ. We need not now inquire what are the essential con- ditions of membership in that Church, or what is necessary to constitute her unity — these are properl}^ subsequent considerations. It may be that she has lost that virgin beauty and harmony of her form which adorned her youth, and that, so far, the aflPections she once riveted upon herself are now baffled and without a home ; but we must not allow ourselves to be hin- dered in receiving the truth of Scripture by the antici- pation of posterior difficulties, which, if they have arisen at all, will have arisen only out of our own misdeeds: the L 146 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. III. object here urged is, to aim at grasping and embodying in the first instance by effort, (under Divine grace,) and then confirming by mental habit, an effectual concep- tion of the Church as a body within which we are comprehended, as that to which we belong rather than that she belongs to us ; as a living admitted proof of the love of Christ to us, and as having the stewardship of his word and the ordinances of his grace. And by an effectual conception is here meant that which is not only allowed by the understanding and then dis- missed and laid aside, but that which vitally pervades the whole mind and heart, which imbues the affections, which is ever at hand to mould even the first forms of thought as it is born, and to impress its character upon it more and more, as it assumes a more definite shape, and finds vent outwardly in word or act. 73. This we may claim for the Church of Christ. She is however represented to us partly in what be- longs to her universal and permanent character, partly in subsidiary rules and in executive powers, which must needs be locally distributed for the pur- poses of order and of discipline : the local power cannot claim the general authority in general matters, but in local matters, and with reference to local peculiarities ; this power, too, is entitled to be heard upon the same principle, just as the sovereignty of this great empire, for example, is represented in her colonial dependen- cies by a delegated power, to which obedience is paid in more limited subject matter, but upon the same principle and under the same obligation, as to the CHAP. IIJ.] THE CHURCH. 147 central and original authority. Yet the local Church, in matters of a permanent nature, is bound to have re- gard to the sense of the general one ; a principle, which was eminently exemplified by the Church of England even during the fiery period of the Reformation. 74. It is next intended to enumerate, and after- wards to meet, the five following forms of objection. Firstly, that such an idea of the Chvirch, as a real ob- jective ens in the scheme of religion, as a portion of Divine revelation, tends to abate the reflective sedulity of individual piety; and this, when discussed, will give occasion to show how anomalous it would be that a real sacrifice of spiritual advantages by the indivi- dual should be the result of these professedly more elevating forms of general principles. Secondly, that the Church, when placed so prominently in our view, obstructs our contemplation of the Redeemer, and our access to Him. Thirdly, that it also tends to destroy the singleness of our trust in Him, and to introduce unawares that most offensive and most injurious doc- trine of human merit. Fourthly, that whereas the wicked in the Church have no title to final salvation, it is a mere fiction to include them in our view of the body of Christ. Fifthly, that it nullifies the liberty of private judgment. 75. With regard to the first, if it be true that God has not chosen to establish his relations with each of us on a distinct and individual footing, but has consti- tuted us in a body to derive from its source of life a portion of its general life, we need not fear that an L 2 148 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. Ill ample discharge of one branch of duty should encroach upon another. Each of our natural members has offices to perform for itself, has contrivances for feeding itself, besides being evidently fitted and intended to discharge certain functions on behalf of the body. Now, its exercise in those functions, within the limits of nature, does not hinder but promotes its own par- ticular health and growth. The leg, for example, of a man who walks much, the arm of one who labours with the spade, draw an increase of strength to them- selves from performing offices not undertaken on their own account, but wherein they serve as the instruments of the entire body, while it is a central principle that carries into outward and physical effect the resolutions of the mind. And surely so it is with our spiritual position in the body of the Lord Jesus Christ. Surely here, as in the natural form, the operations of a man are intended to be performed, not in the contemplation of his own narrow self as an end, but of an end which is extrinsic to him and of far larger scope. Just so we see that every act of benevolence loses the flower of its purity when reflection on any benefit that may result to the agent is intermixed with its composition and execution — " It is the battle, not the prize, That fills the hero's breast with joy." It is the mercy, not the ensuing and rewarding peace, which animates the heart of the merciful. And yet the benefit, though uncontemplated, will come if the CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 149 act be done aright — it is not sacrificed by being put out of view. 76. Nor let any one suppose it to be here recom- mended or implied that a man should be neglectful, in the smallest degree, of that most Aveighty and most multifarious care which is due to his own self, as his first, nearest, and most usual province of duty. His own self affords a distinct province of duty, and that province, measured by quantity of action, is the largest of all ; but it does not furnish a distinct law or principle of duty ; in truth it is not a visionary no- tion, it is a sober and solid Christian truth, that every high-minded man will carry on the work of self-disci- pline itself, not so much with his own individual be- nefit and happiness habitually before his eyes as with the glory of God, filling, and delighting, and enlarg- ing his vision, and enabling him to discharge that work more joyfully and more effectually than if his thoughts and hopes ran only the narrow round of his own insulated being. Besides, there is generally im- planted in our natural constitution an ample security for at least a sufficient amount of desire and inclina- tion towards our own particular benefit ; so that for one error of defect there will always be a thousand of excess in this direction. Sound ethics would surely require of us not to look only at the one, but also to make some provision against the thousand cases. There is no fear of any extensive deficiency in the regard of the individual to his own welfare, so far as quantity is concerned ; the great difliculty is to induce us to 150 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. III. adopt the true way of attaining it, namely, by looking at that higher end which we are bidden and bounden to contemplate, and leaving the result in God's hand. All the reflex action and care of the conscientious mind upon itself will in this way be preserved ; but it will be kept more free from the taint of selfishness, while it will also securely realise the objects at which that hateful spirit grasps in vain. 77. The second objection, again, if it could be proved to have a foundation in fact, would be absolutely fatal, for God's ordinances are not suicidal and self-contra- dictory. But is it not more probable, that a true and high doctrine concerning the Church would have the very opposite effect ; that it would bring men more palpably near to Christ, and greatly promote their sacred and vital union with Him. Let it not be sup- posed that reliance is to be placed on this or any mere doctrine, or on anything else but the effectual actuating grace of God as the true means of making a man re- ligious ; but it is well to point out that what the Catholic faith teaches to be the appointed, are also, in the view of our understanding, the appropriate chan- nels of grace. Now the Catholic doctrine of the Church is intended to bring home to the mind the joint ideas, that we are members of a body, that that body is the body of Christ, and that the body of Christ is also the spouse of Christ, under the law that two shall be one flesh. The doctrine that represents the Church as the ground of our Christian privileges, so represents it because this in fact is the most accurate, the most CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 151 comprehensive, the most profound and inward manner of exhibiting our close and vital relation to the Re- deemer as very organs of that body in which He fulfils, from day to day, His work of redemption upon earth. The effect of these ideas is, to compose a chain con- sisting of links alike few and firm which attach the soul of the believer in the most indissoluble manner to his Saviour. True the individual mind may at times have a sense of that holy union more directly sympathetic, or rather more personally available (but therefore more limited) than that of connexion with Him in a body ; a sense of personal reliance stronger than the sense of corporate union. But this need in no way be precluded ; be it so : the doctrine of the Church will place him on a higher level, and supply firmer supports, from which he may thus spring up- wards, to avail himself of all his individual gifts for Divine contemplation. But on the other hand the indi- vidual mind will flag, from time to time, or entirely ; sin will arise like a cloud between the Redeemer and the offending soul; then it is that the idea of the Church, and the fact of incorporation into Him through the Church, will remain a token of Divine love, and a solace to the penitent, a sign for good in the midst of darkness otherwise impenetrable ; and in all the habitual moods of his life and his daily occupations, it will supply a consciousness of spiritual blessing, not exclusive, nor offensive, nor irreverent, but yet proximate, familiar, and ready for all the acts and occasions of life. 78. I take next the objection concerning the doc- 152 THE CHURCH. [CHAP. HI trine of human merit.* There seems to be an obvious and popular answer to this particular charge, in the remark, that a latent idea of merit, whether acknow- ledged by the individual to himself, or not, is far more likely to grow up, where he rests upon an individual title to his salvation, than where he conceives himself an heir of grace and an object of Divine love, in com- mon with masses of men and whole communities around him. But let us analyse a little more particu- larly. There is a notion, that the Church enjoins many positive practices in religion ; and that the per- formance of these practices would induce self- right- eousness. Now, the objection pre-supposes that the practices are good in themselves ; we must therefore assume this to be the fact. For if they were bad, then of course the right line of conduct would be to seek * An important distinction is to be taken between the first use of the term merit, and that antichristian sense of inherent and intrinsic desert which it has been in more recent ages used to convey. It appears that in the writings of the early fathers, when the word mereri was intro- duced, it meant no more than to earn, or simply to attain, or work out, the aQ^wvan of Homer in the Odyssey (voo-Tav «^i'i;'^svo;, Od. i. 5). Thus it by no means went beyond the doctrine of Scripture, which speaks of the sanctified man as «?<«?. It is easy to cite passages from Saint Augus- tine, for example, in support of this remark. Exp. in Ev. Joan. xxiv. meruerunt priora tempera prophetas afflatos, et impletos verbo Dei : meruimus nos prophetam ipsum verbum Dei. There is no shadow of a reason for supposing that St. Augustine meant to urge any real desert in its least substantial form in this passage, but it appears he simply intended to convey what different periods had derived or received from God. Clearly he does not imply any relation of the gift to merit ; on the contrary, the age to which Christ came was that which was to fill up and heap to overflowing the measure of the iniquities of their fathers by the sacrifice of that Just One ; and this was the age to which not only inspired teaching but the Messiah himself was given.. CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 153 for their abrogation or reform. What then is the real scope of this objection? It is the general truth, that even in carrying out the principle of holiness into the details of charity or self-discipline, we are continually beset by the danger of imbibing some tinge of belief that our acts are meritorious ; of mistaking what is done in us, for what is done by us ; and of imagining that anything done either in us or by us, could esta- blish a claim of desert properly so called. 79. But are we on account of this danger to suffer the principle to lie barren ? Are we to refrain from acts of benevolence, because we may inflate ourselves upon them with our insane pride ? Why then should we not refrain from acts of self-government, self-restraint, self-discipline, because we may be guilty of the same wickedness to which in every act of duty, be it what it may, we are perpetually liable ? From which we can only be preserved in discharging any of them, by the power of Divine grace : but that power is alike sufficient to preserve us in them all ; and in fact we may fear that the carnal mind sometimes shelters itself under this plausible objection, in order to avoid the sacrifice of its appetites, because whenever the argu- ment is tested by application to one of the other de- partments of Christian obligation, we at once see that, while most useful as a warning, it is utterly futile in argument and mischievous in practice, if it be opposed to acts good in themselves and in their circumstances. Upon the whole, then, the objection is valid, if taken in the nature of a general caution, applicable to the 154 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. III. whole range of Christian practice ; but it has no force as against the doctrine of the Church. 80. The fourth objection upon the list does not seem to present any real difficulty. We cannot dive into the mystery which represents to us wicked men as the real though wasteful recipients of spiritual bless- ings; but we see this profound truth supported on every side by the analogy of nature in a thousand forms, under which such men have the undoubted en- joyment of real temporal blessings, of the sun and the rain and all physical arrangements, as well as many that are social and domestic, intellectual, and even in a limited sense, moral. " Many are called, but few are chosen :" great is the mystery involved in these words, and we are not only not bidden, but forbidden to pierce into its depths. We stand upon the simple fact, that throughout the Scriptures of the New Testa- ment not only those who shall constitute the final Church, but the whole community of the baptized, are in a long course both of parables and facts, represented as objects of the redeeming love of God. They are all made branches of the vine, though some be un- fruitful. The seed is sown in all, though in many it never reach perfection. But the ingrafting and the sowing are given to prove, and amply prove, the love of God towards these perishing souls. The whole course of apostolic teaching coincides with the sense of the metaphors just cited. Rebuking every form of sin as it appears; predicting. its final destruction; the first governors of the Church everywhere address the CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 155 mass within its pale as the subjects of sanctifying grace : it follows, that their successors must do the same. And if we want more argument than is afforded by scriptural precept and inspired practice, we must surely find it in the affecting reason assigned by our Lord — his command not to attempt rooting up the tares at this time, " lest ye root up the wheat also :" lest in the blindness and rashness of human nature you cast out into the region of despair those whom a Saviour's love has placed in the region of blessing, and who will in time bear fruit, who are perhaps even now secretly bearing fruit, beneath His tender culture. 81. And lastly, persons are in great alarm for their liberty of private judgment. The true doctrine of private judgment is, as has been shown by many writers, most important and most sacred : it has the direct sanction of Scripture. It teaches the duty, and as correlative to the duty, the right of a man to assent freely and rationally to the truth. It is commonly called a right to inquire; but it is to inquire for the pur- pose of assenting : for he has no right (that is, none as before God) to reject the truth after his inquiry. It is a right to assent to truth, to inquire into alleged truth. Now all that the true idea of the Church pro- poses to him is a probable and authorised guide. This is wholly distinct from the Romish infallibility. The Church of England holds individual freedom in things spiritual to be an essential attribute of man's true nature, and an essential condition of the right reception of the Gospel ; and testifies to that sentiment in the 156 THE CHURCH. [cHAP. III. most emphatic mode, by encouraging the fullest com- munication of Scripture to the people. Yet is it per- fectly possible that the best use of such a freedom may often be thus exemplified : when a man, having prayed for light from God, and having striven to live in the spirit of his prayer, and yet finding his own opinion upon a point of doctrine opposite to that of the univer- sal undivided Church, recognises the answer to his prayer and the guide to his mind in the declarations of the creeds rather than in his own single and per- haps recent impressions upon the subject, not thus surrendering his own liberty of judgment, but using it in order to weigh and compare the probabilities of his or the Church's correctness respectively, and acting faithfully on the result. 82. In truth, we have been in an excess upon the subject of private judgment. Civil society could not be held together were every man to withhold his alle- giance from the State until he had been able to make up his mind upon the grounds of the theory of its constitution. Not less injurious is the idea, that hu- man beings growing up from infancy in a Christian land are not to accept the truths of religion before trial ; however it be just that they should be encou- raged to try and prove them in proportion as they arrive at the capacity to do so. And what has been the result of our jealousy? Our impoverishment; our remaining as it were conversant only with the alphabet and first elements of religion. Perpetually busied about what is rudimental, from our extreme CHAP. III.] THE CHURCH. 157 jealousy of all things except such as (we think) we understand, we do not obey the command of St. Paul, to go on unto perfection, and we fail to attain to much of that finished beauty of hoHness which is perceived in its accurate and full development. Surely it shall be better, when we accept with more of trust and thankfulness those great truths which are of our patri- mony as members of the Church, and when the super- fluous portion of that energy, which is now absorbed by the active jealousy of private judgment, shall be more worthily bestowed in accumulating new treasures of stable Divine knowledge, to the end that we may be more thoroughly furnished unto all good works. 83. It may be hoped, then, that when we have more carefully considered the doctrine of the Church, as it is proposed to us by the authority of Holy Scripture, as it is hereafter to be assumed in these pages, and as likewise it is prescribed to us by our own apostolic mother, we shall find that it tends practically to the accomplishment of the great and sacred purposes of the Gospel, bringing us nearer to God, realising and making plain that way of access which is revealed to us, and not sufiering us to hang upon the Redeemer through the frailty of any merely intellectual medium, through any mere body of propositions, however holy and excellent, but attaching us to Him, and habitu- ating us to view ourselves as attached to Him by the most intimate and the most enduring of all bonds, a vital incorporation. 158 [chap. IV. CHAPTER IV. THE SACRA MEr^TS. Significationibus pascimur, ut ad res ipsas perdurautes pervenire possimus. — S, Aug, in Ev. Joan. Tract, xvii. 1. Mode of treating. 2 — 7. The Scriptural and ancient Doctrine. 8 — 14. Modern perversion, and its several bearings upon different cases. 15 — ^33. Of certain specific uses of the Sacraments. 34. Summary view. 35 — 38. Cases of the Romanists, and of certain di- visions of Protestants compared. 39 — 42. Practical warning to follow the true middle way. 1. Adhering to the practice which seems to me most accordant with the intention of these pages, I shall, in treating of the Sacraments of the Church, endea- vour to contemplate them rather practically than scien- tifically. I shall not argue at any length upon the proofs of that idea or doctrine of Sacraments which is embodied in the services of the Church of England, and which exhibits them as institutions significant in- deed and symbolical, but likewise as not merely cal- culated to stimulate in the way of extrinsic motive our spiritual affections, and so to draw upon us spiritual benefit, or qualify us for its advantageous and cordial reception ; not even merely as entailing by a direct pro- cess benefit of that nature, but as actually consisting of two parts — the one outward and a sign, the other inward and a power ; so that he who has the Sacra- ment has both, and he who has the outward part alone without the inward, has not the Sacrament any more CHAP. IV.] THE SACRAMENTS. 159 than he who has the Old Testament without the New has the Bible. A member of the Church has a right, at least prima facie^ to assume that she teaches, upon any given point, in accordance with Scripture ; and my main object will be, not critically to examine and vindicate her interpretation of the sacred text, but to show in the tendencies of her teaching, as it respects the matter now before us, adaptation and conducive- ness to the Divine purpose, declared in the Gospel, to restore and sanctify our ruined nature. 2. But lest this should be interpreted into a depre- ciation of the supreme and ultimately exclusive autho- rity of Scripture, I refer briefly to some of those passages which have ever been held to teach the effi- cacy of Baptism, proper and intrinsic, yet capable undoubtedly of being nullified by inadequate or re- pugnant conditions in the state of the receiver. We may, indeed, find authorities in the Sacred Volume for this doctrine, as many and as clear as can be cited in support of the greater portion of the distinctively Christian doctrines. " Except a man be born of water and of the spirit (!§ rjloLTog xai zjus6[j.oltos, denoting unity and simultaneity of act), he cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven."* " Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."t " He that believeth, and is baptized, shall be saved."J " Arise and be baptized, and wash away thy sins"|| — ad- * John, iii. 5. t Matt, xxviii. 19. % Mark, xvi. 16. II Apts, xxii. IG. 160 THE SACRAMENTS. [cHAP. IV. dressed to St. Paul, when already penitent and already- called . " Therefore we are buried with him by bap- tism into death." " Likewise reckon ye also your- selves to be dead indeed unto sin."* " But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God."t " That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word." :j: " Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God." || " Ac- cording to his mercy he saved us by the washing" (more correctly, bath) " of regeneration and renewing ofthe Holy Ghost." § 3. These are but a few of the texts which may be urged as importing by the interpretation, whether of common sense without prejudice, or of unanimous Christian antiquity, that a spiritual power and opera- tion belong to Baptism. Is not that, however, a yet more conclusive evidence, at all events a most appropriate consummating testimony when added to the more im- mediate declaration of doctrine, which we derive from the general tenor of the Apostolic teaching ? We find them offer to the Pagan or the Jew, first, repentance and faith, and then baptism. But we know the doc- trine of a new life was essential. Where, then, do we hear of it in their intercourse with the unconverted, unless it be covered under the outward form of Bap- tism, its initiatory process ? But how stands the case * Rom. vi. 4, 11. t 1 Cor. vi. 11. % Eph. v. 26. II.Col. ii. 12. J Tit. iii. 5. CHAP. IV.] THE SACRAMENTS. 161 with the converted ? Still more conclusively. Here we have that essential change, that passing from death to life, the very purpose of the Gospel, so often spoken of, but ahvays retrospectively. The new birth is never held out to the baptized as a thing yet to be attained, but is often designated as a thing possessed. On the other hand, the new life is indeed described as requiring renewal day by day, but renovation and replenishment are essentially different from initiation. We touch not now upon the question, who are capable receivers of the Sacrament of Baptism; but earnestly contend, that, according to the faith once delivered to the saints, Baptism is a rite involving in its complete idea the exercise of a spiritual power, whose office it specifi- cally is to impart a principle of spiritual life. 4. As regards the Holy Communion, our Church teaches a similar doctrine. She does not feel that the solemn words of the institution of the Eucharist are adequately, that is scripturally, represented by any explanation which resolves them into mere figure ; and she fears lest the faithful be thus defrauded of their con- solation, and of their spiritual food. Accordingly she believes, that there is a real though not a carnal truth in the solemn words, " this is my body," " this is my blood ;" in just conformity with the precept in which St. Paul desires us to discern, that is, to discriminate from common elements, the body and blood of the Lord.* So also we are taught by him, that the cup in * 1 Cor. xi. 29. M 162 THE SACRAMENTS. [CHAP. IV. that Sacrament is " the communion" (or participation) "of the blood of Christ;" and the bread, " the com- munion of the body of Christ."^ And the Eucharist is also appealed to as the consummation of our unity in Christ : " for we, being many, are one bread, and one body, for we are all partakers of that one bread." That is to say, our being partakers of that one bread is the instrument not only of our being one bread by unity, as of a physical constitution, but of our being- one body, which we are spiritually and in Christ. Here, therefore, is also comprised the idea of a spi- ritual power feeding that new life, which we have in the Church or body of Jesus Christ our Redeemer, and which was first given us at our Baptism, when we became by covenant, whether for good or for evil, members of that Church or body. 5. Such is the substantial ground- work of religion laid by the inspired writers in the doctrine of the Sa- craments. Thus viewed, it does not dwell in fancy, in speculation, or even in argument ; but it is exhibited as dependent upon an actual food, received like the manna from God, and supplying, after the type of manna, nutriment in forms and elements too subtle, too inward, for human sense or intellect to reach. Can we fail to recognise the beauty of such a doctrine, and its adequacy to our need ? In the body as well as in the mind, we are fallen creatures : in the body as well as under mental conditions of a human kind, came our Lord * 1 Cor. X. 16, 17. CHAP. IV.] THE SACRAMENTS. 163 and Saviour; and now, accordingly, He applies His medicine, even the participation of Himself, to the whole of that nature, which in all its parts alike requires and responds to His effectually renovating power ; " My soul hath a desire and a longing to enter into the courts of the Lord ; my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.''*' 6. And so taught the ancient Church. Her idea was of an intrinsic virtue, residing by Divine appoint- ment in the Sacraments, but capable of being inter- cepted in that passage to the soul of man by his unfaithfulness and insincerity. Thus at once was pre- served in this true belief a lofty conception of the Sacraments, and a security against their profanation by any such false supposition as that they work mechanically and irresistibly. 7. It is almost superfluous to cite passages in illus- tration of a position so generally recognised ; yet it may be observed, in conformity with this representa- tion, that we find St. Augustin going so far as to say,'f " Optime Punici Christiani haptismmn ipsum nihil aliud quam salutem vocantr There cannot be a stronger assertion of a power properly belonging to and residing within this ordinance. But, on the other hand, he teaches as follows \\ '* Cum igitur honi et mali dent et accipiant haptismi sacvamentum^ nee rege- nerati spiritaliter in corpus et membra Christi cocedi- ficentur nisi boui, pi^ofecto in bonis est ilia ecclesia, * Ps. Ixxxiv. 2. t De Pecc. Mer. i. 24. % De Unit. Ecclesiae, 21 (on Cant. 1). M 2 1G4 THE SACRAMENTS. [CHAP. IV. cui dicitur, sicut liliuin in medio spinarum, ita proxima mea in medio Jiliarum'' That is to say, when there is in the recipient the inherent incapacity, the disquahfy- ing condition of a will averse from God, the Sacra- ment is frustrate, and disappointed of its legitimate effect : in fact, it is not complete ; it loses not an ac- companiment or a consequence, but a J[96>r^^<9/^ of itself: according to the sound doctrine of the Catechism, which teaches that the outward sign alone does not constitute the Sacrament, but that the visible act, and the inward spirtiual grace, are alike parts of it, which, by their (combination, make up its substance.* * There is, indeed, an important verbal question wliich may be raised on the meaning of the word Sacrament, which appears to exhi- bit considerable diversity of sense. For instance, we find St. Augustin write thus (Exp. in Ev. Joannis, Tr. xxvi.)— Ampere potest sacra- mentum nolens, of the Eucharist. And again, Hoc ergo totum ad hoc nobis valeat, dilectissimi, ut carnem Christi et sanguinem Christi non edamus tantuin in Sacramento, quod et multimali. (Exp. in. Ev. Joan- nis, Tr. xxvii.) It appears, from a great variety of passages, that he uses the term most commonly as denoting the sign alone, together with Avhich he considers that the substance is, in all right recipients (as for instance infants at baptism), realised, and to which it is attached ; but he does not, in such cases at least, comprehend the substance under the word sacramentum, as has been generally done in later periods of the Church. The term is used very constantly as importing type or figure, that is one part only of the rites now called Sacraments, but perhaps always such a figure or sign as is closely united with some real corresponding antitype and substance. Thus he writes, " Sed forte hoc exigitur a nobis, utrum habeat aliquod sacramentum quadraginta sex annis csdificatum templum.'' Inattention to this variation in the sense of the term might lead to embarrassment ; of course it is essen- tially distinct from variation in the doctrine. Further, under the term Sacrament, I deal only with those two institutions which our Church declares to be " generally necessary to salvation." (See also S. Aug. Exp. in Ev. Joannis, Tr. xii. " in Spiritu nascimur verbo et Sacra- mento," " Tr. XV. plena mysteriis et gravida sacramentis." And see a letter of Dr. Doddridge, " Diary and Correspondence," vol. ii. p. 339.) CHAP. IV.] THE SACRAMENTS. 165 8. But, for this ancient and true doctrine, we find substituted in many of the common opinions of the day, a very defective one. The second part of the Sacrament is in two ways forgotten. First, by those who have never truly thought upon spiritual religion. From them nothing else could be expected. Regard- ing the doctrine of a new life as a fanatical invention, they escape, by the never-failing remedy of figurative interpretation, from the numerous passages of Scrip- ture in which it is pointedly expressed ; they do not look for the actual existence of a corresponding prin- ciple anywhere, and therefore of course not in the Sacrament : which it follows that they reduce to a bare sign or badge. But, secondly, the truth is injured likewise by those who, having thought upon the matter, and being distinct believers in the necessity of a spi- ritual life by grace, have, however, forgotten that that grace is a part of the Sacrament, and that, therefore, it of course resides therein. They rather consider, that the efficacy of faith in the mind of the receiver is so stimulated into activity by the act and circumstances of the reception, considered as an impressive solemnity, that a spiritual grace is in the worthy superadded to the Sacrament or sign. 9. It may, however, be said, if, on the one hand, you admit that without faith in the heart of the receiver no benefit is derived from the ordinance ; and if, on the other, it be held that, with faith in the heart, benefit is realised at and with it, do not the two ideas coincide under these conditions, and what prac- tical difference remains ? 166 THE SACRAMENTS. [cHAP. IV. 10. As regards these receivers, who, being adult, are also faithful, there does not appear, at first sight, any practical difference of great importance ; yet we can- not but apprehend that the doctrine which regards a Sacrament as a rite endowed by the Redeemer with essential sacredness and intrinsic power, conduces even in this case much more to reverence, and there- fore to edification : besides, that if it be the truth, this is at once enough. But the practical difference is broad and palpable, indeed, when we consider the case of those who are either not faithful, being adult, or who are not adult : and this, in countries called Chris- tian, is the case of almost the entire population. 1 1 . For, in the first case, that namely of intelligent but unfaithful receivers, if we follow the modern and diluted notion of Sacraments, we are in great hazard of losing one moiety of the Scripture doctrine — namely, that the ordinances of the Church are a savour of death unto death, when they are not a savour of life unto life. Doubtless the sin and danger of sacramental profanation would still be taught sin- cerely by pious men, even under the supposition that the Sacrament was no more than a sign : but it could neither be perceived so clearly, nor enforced so effec- tually. The amount and guilt of all acts of profanation must vary, in proportion as in each the wickedness of man is brought into close and evident juxtaposition with something immediately belonging to the Divine attributes. Now, doubtless, under this definition it will be profane to go to what we deem the token of a holy thing without a temper corresponding to the sacred- CHAP. IV.] THE SACRAMENTS. 167 ness of the thing betokened : but is it not much more profane, is not the sin much more vividly exhibited, is it not shown to bear a distinct and far more aggra- vated character, and is not the sense of it more strongly brought home, if we view a man as be- coming an actual partaker of that, whereof God has willed holy powers and virtues to be part and parcel, with a heart directly opposed to and incapable of those powers and virtues which, nevertheless, he makes deliberate profession of taking into it ? 12. The second case is that of persons not adult; and here the effect of throwing the virtue out of the Sacrament into the faith of the receiver, instead of regarding faith in its true light, that is to say, as the condition necessary to ensure and attest the sub- mission of his understanding and his will, has been to induce the false and most dangerous belief, that per- sons not adult or not conscious are incapable of being made the subjects of spiritual influences. I have read with sorrow, in the popular work of an excellent man,* some taunt to this effect : how can the heart of a child be changed by throwing a little water on his face ? The pious writer, when he penned that sen- tence, did not reflect upon it, or he would have per- ceived that it contained the seed of all infidelity. For if man is to judge according to his own imaginations of the competency of Divine means, and to deny and renounce effects by anticipation, wherever he conceives that the assigned causes are inadequate to their office, not a shred of Christianity, nor indeed of physical * Village Dialogues, by the Rev. Rowland Hill. 168 THE SACRAMENTS. [CHAP. IV. truth, will remain to us. Accordingly, the Pelagians were those who first disparaged the Sacrament of baptism : and they consistently. Denying the trans- mitted taint of nature and the inborn principle of dis- obedience, they might well deny the capacity of the infant to undergo influences strictly remedial and counteractive of these. But how can we, who admit that corruption has been imparted to the nature of the babe, and contend that it is not now such as God ori- ginally made it, deny His power to bring it back towards that first condition in any manner or degree that it may please Him? 13. When, however, men had habitually associated sacramental efficacy with the working of the intellect under IJivine grace, it was natural enough that they ;