CHAPTER XXII.

Early History of Truth that Divinity of Christ Participated in Suffering—Early History of Prevalent Theory—Its Inconsistencies—Has Theology for Closet and Theology for Sanctuary —Its Hymns and Prayers and Sermons—Effects upon Devotion from unmasked and universal Development of Theory

THE soul-elevating truth that the divinity of Christ participated in his expiatory agonies, was not a stranger in the early Christian Church. Athanasius himself, in his appended argument, treated and anathematized it as an article of pre-existent faith. This doctrine of our holy religion, always at variance with the Arian heresy, had now to oppose the more formidable hostility of him who was generally esteemed the lawgiver of primeval orthodoxy. It had, moreover, to encounter the errors of its professed friends, not less dangerous than the opposition of its open assailants. Long before the birth of Athanasius, and as early as the second and third centuries, a sect had appeared and reappeared, called Patripassians, who affirmed that the only person of the Godhead was the infinite Father, and that he became the incarnate sufferer. About the time of Athanasius' death, Apollonaris, bishop of Laodicea, while holding to the true faith that the divinity of our Lord participated in his vicarious pains, infused into it the dangerous heresy that Christ had no human soul. With errors like these did the subtleties of the primitive ages involve the simple truth, that both the mediatorial natures shared in the atoning sufferings.

Thus opposed by Arian heretics, hunted down by those who claimed a patent for exclusive orthodoxy, bewildered in the intermingled errors of its own friends, this truth of our holy religion had another trial to encounter. The terrible arm of civil authority was uplifted. In the year 388, the emperor Theodosius, moved, no doubt, by the followers of Athanasius, passed an edict, excluding from the right to dwell in cities, from the franchise of having bishops or other spiritual fathers, from the sacred privilege of worshipping in the temples of the living God, all who dared to refuse their allegiance to the dominant creed. A military force was organized to carry the edict into effect, and death followed in its train. It is said that the Inquisition, with its dungeons and torturing wheel, owed its birth to this epoch.*

*Rees' Cyclopædia, Article, Apollinarians. Ibid. Article, Theodosius I.

About the middle of the fifth century, Eutyches became the founder of another compound of truth and falsity. He held that the second person of the Trinity united to the body that was prepared for him, but one spiritual nature. As the new faith sought virtually to abstract from Christ his human soul, it must of course have imputed sufferings to his divinity. One class of the Eutychians, called Theopascites, maintained that the Father and the Holy Ghost, as well as the blessed Son, suffered in the passion of Jesus Christ. The followers of Eutyches were ultimately consolidated under the name of Monophosites, the heresy of the one nature imparting to them their distinctive appellation. Against the Eutychians of every shade were fulminated, from the west, the thunders of the Vatican, and, from the east, the edicts of imperial despotism, announcing degradation and exile as the penalties of their faith.

That the simple doctrine of divine participation in the expiatory sufferings, thus confounded by its heretical, friends, and hunted by its spiritual and temporal enemies “as a partridge in the mountains,” should for ages, have been obliged to seek refuge with the monks of Scythia, and in the sequestered regions of Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Egypt, Nubia and Abyssinia, tinctured with copious infusions of bewildering error, ought not to excite our special wonder. To restore to its proper place in Christian theology this great scriptural truth, stripped of the extraneous heresies in which its early adherents unfortunately involved it, is the humble aim of our imperfect essay.

From the first establishment of the prevalent theory in the fourth century, its adherents have found great difficulty in selecting terms to express its meaning, without coming too palpably into collision with the language of Scripture, or with the deep and strong current of popular devotion. This difficulty, seated in the very core of the theory, was smothered for several successive generations; but finally displayed itself, in a fearful explosion, early in the sixth century. In the year 519, the pressing inquiry, threatening the vitality of the theory, was widely and vehemently announced: “Whether it could be said, with propriety, that one of the Trinity suffered on the cross."*

*Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, (by Maclaine,) vol. 2. pp. 131, 132.

This trying inquiry was referred to the Roman pontiff for his solemn adjudication. Hormisdas, an adherent of the prevalent theory, then filled the papal throne. Had he thought as we think, an affirmative response would have been unhesitatingly rendered. But he did not believe as we believe. He had received and held “strong as proofs of Holy Writ,” the hypothesis of Athanasius that God is impassible. That hypothesis compelled him to respond in the negative. For how would his conscience have permitted a pontifical decree, that “it could be said with propriety that one of the Trinity suffered on the cross,” when he believed in his heart that from everlasting to everlasting each of the Sacred Three is wrapped in impassability, as with a garment? That one of the Trinity could not in fact have suffered on the cross, if suffering is diametrically opposed to the fundamental and changeless laws of his being, is a self-evident truism. And to have said that one of the Trinity suffered on the cross against what was deemed the eternal truth of his own holy nature, must have seemed to the Roman pontiff a libel upon the awful attributes of the Godhead.

The negative response of the papal oracle filled Christendom with consternation. It had lifted the veil from the prevalent theory, leaving it exposed in all its unscriptural lineaments. It had revealed to the Christian world the appalling truth that the dogma of Athanasius substituted, for the sufferings of the Creator, the sufferings of the creature. Dissatisfaction was first heard in ominous whispers. Soon it burst forth in a thunder peal of remonstrance, commencing in the wilds of Scythia, and rolling onward, and gathering strength as it rolled towards the throne of the spiritual Caesar. The friends of the Prevalent theory were deeply and justly alarmed. It could be saved only by severing what has been deemed the else continuous chain of pontifical infallibility.

Hormisdas then slept with his fathers; John II. reigned in his stead. Another appeal was made to the incumbent of St. Peter's chair. The new pontiff paused. He saw full before him the recorded decree, not yet twenty years old, of his ghostly predecessor. Papal consistency loudly demanded his forbearance. The acclamations of the Christian world urged him forward. From its death struggle, the prevalent theory, dear to him as life, stretched forth its supplicating hand for aid. He reversed the decree of Hormisdas; he proclaimed to succeeding generations that “it could be said with propriety that one of the Trinity suffered on the cross.” Utterly disbelieving the fact, he nevertheless decreed that it could with propriety be affirmed. He cast over the theory, the kind veil which his predecessor had rent.*

* Rees’ Cyclopædia, Article, John II. Pope of Rome.

Had there been no discrepancy between the decrees of the successors of St. Peter—had the decree of John confirmed that of Hormisdas—the prevalent theory would probably have perished in the second century of its existence. The mind of the millions, then thoroughly aroused, would scarcely have brooked, and sustained, and sent it down to posterity, the unmasked dogma that the second of the Holy Trinity suffered for the redemption of the world only in metaphor. Without the restitution of its wordy covering, the theory must have sunk beneath the conscious and frowning eye of the Christian mass. Justinian, the reigning emperor of the East—the architect of the immortal civil code—the patron of sacred as well as juridical lore—would not leave the great truth, involved in the question upon which the two fathers of western Christendom had disagreed, to rest on the unstable basis of clashing papal bulls. In the year 553, he invoked at Constantinople a council of the universal church, styled in ecclesiastical history, the fifth general council. That high tribunal confirmed the second pontifical decree. That “it could be said with propriety that one of the Trinity suffered on the cross,” was now finally established as a fundamental article of theology by the united authorities of the Christian world. Thus, if speech intends what its words fairly import, the vital truth seemed to be fixed on a changeless rock, that

Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, (by Maclaine) vol. 2. p. 130

divine as well as human suffering was incurred for the salvation of the redeemed. But, alas! speech does not always mean what its words seemingly import.

In the composition of the fifth general council was mingled a controling infusion of the prevalent theory. Their decretal language had an occult meaning, radically different from its ostensible import. It ostensibly imported that one of the Trinity actually suffered for the remission of mortal sins. The council declared that it was proper to say he had suffered. And how could an affirmation be proper, unless it was true, especially when applied to the Majesty of heaven? To say untruth of man is always reprehensible; to say untruth of the living God can be saved from the charge of impiety only by innocency of intention. The declaration that “it could be said with propriety that one of the Trinity suffered on the cross,” was equivalent to declaring that he had actually suffered. And yet the master spirits of the sixth century believed no such thing. The hypothesis of divine impassibility had wound itself around their souls perhaps more closely than the Bible. The words of their lips and the thoughts of their hearts were diametrically opposed. What caused this mysterious discrepancy? Stratagem in war is justified by the perhaps too flexible policy of profane history. We would not impute to the polemic champions of the Justinian age the admission of like stratagem into ecclesiastical conflict. And yet the unwelcome question will spontaneously arise, why else did they send their ghostly bark along the flood of time with false colors floating at her mast?

The position established by the fifth general council yet holds its place in academic theology, unmoved by the lapse of ages. The decree of the sixth century has never been reversed; reformations have not reformed it. Still the time-worn proposition, that it can “be said with propriety that one of the Trinity suffered on the cross,” has its meaning official, and its meaning confidential. To the general mind it shadows forth the sublime conception that the second of the Sacred Three, made incarnate, actually endured redeeming pangs for our salvation; to the initiated it imports only that he suffered by construction in the sufferings of the associated man. We would not cast censure upon our learned, pious, and venerated opponents; they have but yielded honest allegiance to that theory which came down to them as a consecrated relic of the olden time, scarcely second to the Bible in its dominant authority. Of that theory, discrepancy between its thoughts and words was an original, inherent, and vital element; without which it would not have ruled for fifteen centuries.

The proposition affirmed by the second papal decree and the fifth general council is a striking sample of the bewildering language of the prevalent faith in all the generations of its existence. The learned well understand its occult meaning; but the millions are little conscious how it empties the atonement of that which constitutes it the glory of the universe. Go, simple hearted reader, to the sanctuary where the triune Jehovah is recognized and worshipped. What is it that swells heavenward the seraphic notes of its sublime psalmody? What is it that bends the knee of the heart in its pathetic prayers? What is it that imparts to the teachings of its heaven-ordained pulpit their power over the soul? It is the conscious presence of a Suffering, dying, risen God. Follow to his closet the sacred teacher, and how would your heart sink within you if, finding him a disciple of the prevalent theory, he should lift the veil from his ancient idol, and invoke its denunciation of your Sabbath day dream as an heretic delusion!

The prevalent theory has not been wont to devotions in the sanctuary its occult meaning. We do not affirm that it is never announced there. Yet we believe that its open developments in the temples of Jehovah are

“Like angels’ visits, few and far between.”

But while the exclusive humanity of the redeeming pains is seldom promulged in Christian worship, the house of God, in spite of the prevalent theory, is ever vocal with the spirit-stirring thoughts of a suffering Deity. We appeal to the psalmody of Christendom. From the sacred melodies of its principal churches, we have selected copious, extracts, which will speak from our appendix to the head and the heart.* If these copious extracts have truth in their composition, they must needs expose the fallacy of the prevalent theory. They portray the sufferings of the dying, risen God in terms more glowing than any our imagination could command. The extracts are too copious for insertion in the body of our work. We implore the candid searcher after truth not to allow them to escape his attention because we have been obliged to locate them in the appendix.

* See Appendix, No. 3. p. 358.

The appended extracts are, indeed, poetic effusions; but they are effusions deliberately incorporated into the devotions of the sanctuary, and read and sung for successive generations in the temples of the true God. We would not chill the heart of poesy; it is the

“Gilded halo hovering round”

the sad realities of mortality. We know, we feel, that the poetic muse is never so lost in inspiration, as when her pen is dipped in

“Siloa’s brook that flow’d

Fast by the oracle of God.”

But sacred poesy must not—dare not—transplant into consecrated soil, flowers gathered in fairy land. Her hymns of praise breathed forth in God's house, must be truthful as the sister chaunts of the upper sanctuary. The terrestrial dwelling place of Him in whose sight “the heavens are not clean” may not admit falsity, open or disguised, in prose or in song, within its hallowed walls. What would be said of psalmody, read and sung in the sanctuaries of our holy religion for years and for centuries, which should ascribe lack of power to the All-powerful, or lack of wisdom to the All-wise; which should, deny prescience to Him who “inhabiteth eternity,” or impute untruth to the God of truth? And yet if the Bible has, indeed, taught that the Deity is, by the laws of his own blessed being, necessarily impassible—that he could not suffer without ceasing to be God—the ascription of suffering to him in his own holy temple, either in prose or in rhyme, by those who believe and affirm his impassibility, would seem no less impious than derogating from his infinite power, or wisdom, or knowledge, or verity.

Some author says, that, if he had control of the ballads of a nations he would not care who controlled its laws. Psalms and hymns are the ballads of our religion. Over the general mind they exercise a dominion, perhaps wider and more absolute than the formal teachings of the pulpit. They accompany devotion to its home; they live in its memory; they are chaunted at its domestic altar; they hover around its pillow; they are graven, as it were, “upon the palms of its hands.” Error is nowhere more dangerous than when insinuated into the harmonies of the church. Sacred verse has no poetic license to misrepresent the attributes of the Deity, and call such misrepresentation a figure of speech! If it be indeed a revealed truth that God can no more suffer than he can sin, Christian psalmody, with the belief of that truth resting on its soul, had better have hung its harp forever “upon the willows” than wilfully to have predicated suffering of the eternally IMPASSIBLE!

The royal David was a poet. Israel's king was the prince of sacred song; unequalled and unapproached, save by other heaven-taught bards, in simplicity, in pathos, in glowing imagery, in awful sublimity, in that dissecting power over the human heart, which lays open its spiritual anatomy to its very core. Falsity found no place in the minstrelsy of Jesse's son. Clothed in the richest drapery of Oriental metaphor, his soaring thoughts are nevertheless true as the verity of heaven. Christian psalmody, in its multifarious ascriptions of suffering to Him, believed to be impassible from the fixed elements of his holy being, can, if such ascriptions are untrue, find no precedent or extenuation in the truth-breathing rhapsodies of David's sacred harp.

We believe that the melodies of Christendom, ascribing suffering to Christ's divine nature, were prompted, or at least approved, by the Spirit of Truth, who “helpeth our infirmities” and “maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.”—Romans, 8. 26. The Captain of our salvation himself declared, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”—Matthew, 18. 20. The great Head of the Church, then, presides over his own sanctuaries. He has listened to every sincere anthem of thanksgiving and adoration that has ascended since his own ascension, and, as it rose toward heaven, has breathed upon it his most precious benediction. The psalmody of Christendom he would not have permitted, for fifteen centuries, to run astray on the sacred theme of his own expiatory sufferings. Asia, and Africa, and Europe, and America, and the Isles of the Seas, would not have been allowed, for successive generations, to defame the attributes of his Godhead, in their songs of praise, within his own holy temples, and in his own immediate presence. The melodies of the general church, read and sung for ages, and pervading all its denominations, are the irrepressible outpourings of pious feeling; they are the comments of unschooled devotion upon the plain language of Holy Writ, sanctioned, as we believe, by the presiding Lord of Christian assemblies. The godly heart is often a better scriptural commentator than the learned head.

If we pass from the poetry of the sanctuary to its prose, we shall find its pulpit teachings often as unequivocal as its melodies. The occupants of the sacred desk, even of the prevalent faith, are frequently borne along by their own glowing and irrepressible convictions far beyond the thraldom of their earth-formed theory. The great Hooker exclaimed from the depths of his pious soul,

“We care for no knowledge in the world but this,

that man hath sinned, and God hath suffered.”

And yet the great Hooker bowed to the sceptre of the dominant theory! The profound Barrow, when he poured forth the following tribute to truth, must have felt falling from around him the shackles which he had thought himself born to wear. He says:

“That the immortal God should die, that the Most High should be debased to so low a condition, as it cannot be heard without wonder, so it could not be undertaken without huge reason, nor accomplished without mighty effect.”

The learned Witherspoon, emancipated from theory for a moment by his uplifting devotion, with his suffering God full before him, could not choose but exclaim:

“It was no less a person than the eternal and only-begotten Son of God, who was before all worlds, the brightness of his Father's glory, and the express image of his person, who suffered in our stead.”

The eloquent Robert Hall, oblivious for the time to all terrestrial dogmas, burst forth into the following truthful rhapsody:

“He who upholdeth all things sinking under a weight of suffering—the Lord of life, the Lord of glory, expiring on a cross the Light of the world sustaining an awful eclipse—the Sun of righteousness immerged in the shadow of death.”

And yet the eloquent Hall yielded fealty to the dominant theory!

We have copiously selected and inserted in our appendix similar extracts from the discourses of many other pulpit teachers, belonging to the prevalent faith, and justly claiming brotherhood in profoundness of intellect, extent of erudition, and depth of piety, with Hooker and Barrow and Witherspoon and Hall. Thus we array against the theory, the authority of those very names, to which it clings for its solo support. In perusing the appended extracts, too copious for insertion in the body of our volume, the intelligent reader cannot but wonder at the inherent and self-destroying inconsistencies of error, however vigilantly guarded by talent and learning.*

*See Appendix, No. 4. p. 368.

The more formal and published prayers of the sanctuary, so far as they have reached our knowledge, afford no aid to the prevalent theory. The unwritten prayers of dissenting Christendom have left no record behind them, save on the pious hearts of their hearers. To that living record we appeal. How often in those oral supplications, has devotion been melted to its deepest pathos, or lifted to its sublimest rhapsody, by the immediate vision of its own suffering, dying, risen God! In such a place, at such a time, when the curtain between our world and heaven seems withdrawn for the moment, how unsatisfactory and chilling appears that terrestrial theory, which recognizes as the only vicarious sufferer, the human son of the Virgin!

What would be the fate of general devotion should the prevalent theory habitually develope its occult meaning in its sanctuaries, as plainly as it now does in its closets? Let not its clerical adherents respond from the mere inspection of their own devout hearts. They may find there a vigorous piety, capable of overcoming the poison of an insulated error. But not every descendant of Jacob could, like Sampson, have broken the seven green withs of the Philistines, “as a thread of tow is broken when it toucheth the fire.” Our inquiry seeks the bearing of the unmasked theory upon the promiscuous throng of gospel hearers; some “babes in Christ;” some “filled with unbelief and sin;” some going to the sanctuary “to spy out” “the nakedness of the land.” Nor must the response to our inquiry be influenced by the assumption that the channel of devotion has widened and deepened since the days of Athanasius. Adopting the assumption as a glorious truth, it follows not that the increase of piety has been caused by the prevalent theory. From its cradle, the theory has generally reposed, as a sort of hieroglyphic in the archives of the learned. It has seldom made its public exhibition; its occult characters have not often been deciphered.

Our own response to the inquiry we render with diffidence and humility. And yet is the conviction deeply engraved on our soul, that the unmasked development of the prevalent theory, from sabbath to sabbath, from sanctuary to sanctuary, from continent to continent, until it should become as familiar to universal Christendom as the Prayer of prayers taught by our Lord, would, in its bearings on the general mass, exercise a deleterious influence over that blessed cause which cost the dying agonies of the Son of God. It would tend to infuse the chill of winter into the soul of piety.

In view of such unmasked development, how would Unitarian scoffers reiterate, and give to the four winds, the taunt once uttered by one of their ablest and most eloquent, “Thus the vaunted system goes out—in words. The Infinite victim proves to be a frail man; and God's share in the sacrifice is a mere fiction!”* Under such a development, how would devotion, simple-hearted and unschooled, mourn and wail at the abstraction of her suffering, dying, risen God; saying, as the weeping Mary said at the sepulchre, “They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him!” Should such a catastrophe occur, we could but submit the ark of our salvation to the guidance of Him, who “hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm.”

*Channing's Works, volume 3. page 199. Sermon at dedication of second Unitarian Church in New York.