APHORISM XVIII.

Stedfast by faith. This is absolutely necessary for resistance to the evil principle. There is no standing out without some firm ground to stand on: and this faith alone supplies. By faith in the love of Christ the power of God becomes ours. When the soul is beleaguered

**See Literary Remains, vol. iii, pp. 57-92. Ed. 241 by enemies, weakness on the walls, treachery at the gates, and corruption in the citadel, then by faith she says--Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world! Thou art my strength! I look to thee for deliverance! And thus she overcomes. The pollution (miasma) of sin is precipitated by his blood, the power of sin is conquered by his Spirit. The Apostle says not--stedfast by your own resolutions and purposes; but--stedfast by faith. Nor yet stedfast in your will, but stedfast in the faith. We are not to be looking to, or brooding over ourselves, either for accusation or for confidence, or (by a deep yet too frequent self-delusion) to obtain the latter by making a merit to ourselves of the former. But we are to look to Christ and him crucified. The law that is very nigh to thee, even in thy heart: the law that condemneth and hath no promise; that stoppeth the guilty past in its swift flight, and maketh it disown its name; the law will accuse thee enough. Linger not in the justice-court listening to thy indictment. Loiter not in waiting to hear the sentence. No, anticipate the verdict. Appeal to Caesar. Haste to the king for a pardon. Struggle thitherward, though in fetters; and cry aloud, and collect the whole remaining strength of thy will in the outcry--I believe; Lord help my unbelief! Disclaim all right of property in thy fetters. Say that they belong to the old man, and that thou dost but carry them to the grave, to be buried with their owner! Fix thy thought on what Christ did, what Christ suffered, what Christ is--as if thou wouldst fill the hollowness of thy soul with Christ. If he emptied himself of glory to become sin for thy salvation, must not thou be emptied of thy sinful self to become righteousness in and through his agony and the effective 242 merits of his cross?** By what other means, in what other form, is it possible for thee to stand in the presence of the Holy One? With what mind wouldst thou come before God, if not with the mind of Him, in whom

** God manifested in the flesh is eternity in the form of time. But eternity in relation to time is as the absolute to the conditional, or the real to the apparent, and redemption must partake of both;--always perfected, for it is a Fiat of the Eternal;--continuous, for it is a process in relation to man; the former the alone objectively, and therefore universally, true. That redemption is an opus perfutum, a finished work, the claim to which is conferred in Baptism: that a Christian cannot speak or think as if his redemption by the blood, and his justification by the righteousness of Christ alone, were future or contingent events, but must both say and think I have been redeemed, I am justified; lastly, that for as many as are received into his Church by Baptism, Christ has condemned sin in the flesh, has made it dead in law, that is, no longer imputable as guilt, has destroyed the objective reality of sin:--these are truths which all the Reformed Churches, Swedish, Danish, Evangelical, (or Lutheran,) the Reformed, (the Calvinistic in mid-Germany, France, and Geneva, so called,) lastly, the Church of England, and the Church of Scotland--nay, the best and; most learned of divines of the Roman Catholic Church have united in upholding as most certain and necessary articles of faith, and the effectual preaching of which Luther declares to be the appropriate criterion, stantis vel cadentus Ecclesia. The Church is standing or falling, according as this doctrine is supported, or overlooked, or countervened. Nor has the contrary doctrine, according to which the baptized are each individually, to be called, converted, and chosen, with all the corollaries from this assumption, the watching for signs and sensible assurances, the frames, and the states, and the feelings, and the sudden conversions, the contagious fever-boils of the (most unfitly, so called) Evangelicals, and Arminian Methodists of the day, been in any age taught or countenanced by any known and accredited Christian Church, or by any body and succession of learned divines. On the other hand, it has rarely happened that the Church has not been troubled by Pharisaic and fanatical individuals, who have sought, by working on the fears and feelings of the weak and unsteady, that celebrity which they could not obtain by learning and orthodoxy; and alas! so subtle is the poison, and so malignant in its operation, that it is almost hopeless to attempt the cure of any person, once infected, more particularly when, as most often happens, the patient is a woman. Nor does Luther, in his numerous and admirable discourses on this point, conceal 243 alone God loveth the world? With good advice, perhaps, and a little assistance, thou wouldst rather cleanse and patch up a mind of thy own, and offer it as thy admission-right, thy qualification, to Him who charged his angels with folly! Oh! take counsel of thy reason. It will show thee how impossible it is that even a world should merit the love of eternal wisdom and all-sufficing beatitude, otherwise than as it is contained in that all-perfect Idea, in which the supreme Spirit contemplateth itself and the plenitude of its infinity:--the Only-Begotten before all ages, the beloved Son, in whom the Father is indeed well pleased!

or palliate the difficulties which the carnal mind, that works under many and different disguises, throws in the way to prevent the laying firm hold of the truth. One most mischievous and very popular misbelief must be cleared away in the first instance--the presumption, I mean, that whatever is not quite simple, and what any plain body can understand at the first hearing, cannot be of necessary belief, or among the fundamental articles or essentials of Christian faith. A docile, childlike mind, a deference to the authority of the Churches, a presumption of the truth of doctrines that have been received and taught as true by the whole Church in all times; reliance on the positive declarations of the Apostles--in short, all the convictions of the truth, of a doctrine that are previous to a perfect insight into its truth, because these convictions, with the affections and dispositions accompanying them, are the very means and conditions of attaining to that insight--and study of, and quiet meditation on, them with a gradual growth of spiritual knowledge and earnest prayer for its increase; all these, to each and all of which the young Christian is so repeatedly and fervently exhorted by St. Paul, are to be superseded, because, forsooth, truths needful for all men, must be quite simple and easy, and adapted to the capacity of all, even of the plainest and dullest understanding! What cannot be poured all at once on a man, can only be supererogatory drops from the emptied shower-bath of religious instruction! But surely, the more rational inference would be, that the faith, which is to save the whole man, must have its roots and justifying grounds in the very depths of our being. And he who can read the writings of the Apostles, John and Paul, without finding in almost every page a confirmation of this, must have looked at them, as at the sun in an eclipse, through blackened glasses.

And as the mind, so the body with which it is to be clothed; as the indweller, so the house in which it is to be the abiding-place.** There is but one wedding-garment, in which we can sit down at the marriage-feast

**St. Paul blends both forms of expression, and asserts the same doctrine, when speaking of the celestial body provided for the new man in the spiritual flesh and blood, (that is, the informing power and vivific life of the incarnate Word: for the blood is the life, and the flesh the power)--when speaking, I say, of this celestial body, as a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, yet brought down to us, made appropriable by faith, and ours--he adds, for in this earthly house (that is, this mortal life, as the inward principle or energy of our tabernacle, or outward and sensible body) we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: not that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life. 2 Cor. v, 1-4.

The four last words of the first verse (eternal in the heavens) compared with the conclusion of v, 2, (which is from heaven) present a coincidence with John iii, 13, "And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, which is in heaven." [Would not the coincidence be more apparent, if the words of John had been rendered word for word, even to a disregard of the English idiom, and with what would be servile and superstitious fidelity in the translation of a common classic! I can see no reason why the

so frequent in St. John, should not be rendered literally, no one; and there may be a reason why it should. I have some doubt, likewise respecting the omission of the definite articles

and a greater as to the

both in this place and in John i, 18, being adequately rendered by our which is. What sense some of the Greek Fathers attached to, or inferred from, St. Paul's in the heavens, the theological student (and to theologians is this note principally addressed) may find in Waterland's Letters to a Country Clergyman— a divine, whose judgment and strong sound sense are as unquestionable as his learning and orthodoxy. A clergyman, in full orders, who has never read the works of Bull and Waterland, has a duty yet to perform].

Let it not be objected, that, forgetful of my own professed aversion to allegorical interpretations, I have, in this note, fallen into the fond humour of the mystic divines, and allegorizers of Holy Writ. There is, believe me! a wide difference between symbolical and allegorical. If I say that the flesh and blood (corpus noumenon) of the Incarnate Word are power and life, I say likewise that this mysterious power and life are 245 of Heaven: and that is the bridegroom's own gift, when he gave himself for us, that we might live in him and he in us. There is but one robe of righteousness, even the spiritual body, formed by the assimilative power of faith, for whoever eateth the flesh of the Son of Man, and drinketh his blood. Did Christ come from Heaven, did the Son of God leave the glory which he had with his Father before the world began, only to shew us a way to life, to teach truths, to tell us of a resurrection! Or saith he not, I am the way--I am the truth--I am the resurrection and the life?

verily and actually the flesh and blood, of Christ. They are the allegorizers who turn the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, the hard saying,--who can hear it?--after which time many of Christ's disciples, who had been eye-witnesses of his mighty miracles, who had beard the sublime morality of his Sermon on the Mount, had glorified God for the wisdom which they had heard, and had been prepared to acknowledge, This is indeed the Christ,--went back and walked no more with him!--the hard sayings, which even the Twelve were not yet competent to understand farther than that they were to be spiritually understood; and which the chief of the Apostles was content to receive with an implicit and anticipative faith!--they, I repeat, are the allegorizers who moralize these hard sayings, these high words of mystery, into a hyperbolical metaphor per catachresin, which only means a belief of the doctrine which Paul believed, an obedience to the law, respecting which Paul was blameless, before the voice called him on the road to Damascus! What every parent, every humane preceptor, would do when a child had misunderstood a metaphor or apologue in a literal sense, we all know. But the meek and merciful Jesus suffered many of his disciples to fall off from eternal life, when, to retain them, he had only to say,--ye simple ones! why are ye offended! My words, indeed, sound strange; but I mean no more than what you have often and often heard from me before, with delight and entire acquiescence!--Credat Judaeus! Non ego. It is sufficient for me to know that I have used the language of Paul and John, as it was understood and interpreted by Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaesus, and (if he does not err) by the whole Christian Church then existing.