THE little volume of Select Passages from the Theological Writings of Benjamin Jowett has been well received; and it is hoped that a more extensive reprint of some of the dissertations in his edition of St. Paul’s Epistles may find acceptance.
The Essays on St. Paul and the Twelve, and on Casuistry, have been slightly abridged. The remaining five are given here as they appear in Professor Jowett’s second edition (1859).
L.C.
THE present Bishop of Oxford, to his lasting honour,
preaching in Christ Church Cathedral, as Dean, in
October 1893, exhorted his hearers to ‘praise God for
the strenuous ungrudging energy, the hidden bountifulness, the true kind heart, the public spirit, the unworldliness, the deep reserve of strength, which
were in Benjamin Jowett‘ Studies of the Christian Character, by Francis Paget, D.D.,
1895. See Life of Benjamin Jowett, I, 239. E. B. Pusey. Samuel Wilberforce. In the Times of Oct. 15, 1859. Letter to Lady Beaumont, 1807.
Some part of what he expected from his own method in theology
may be inferred from a passage towards the end of the essay on the
interpretation of Scripture Essays and Reviews, p. 423. Reprinted in 3rd edition of
the Epistles, vol. ii, p. 91.
‘Is it a mere chimera that the different sections
That essay was contributed to a volume whose professed object was ‘to illustrate the advantage derivable to the cause of religious and moral truth, from a free handling in a becoming spirit of subjects peculiarly liable to suffer by the repetition of conventional language and from traditional methods of treatment’. In some such attempt as this Jowett saw the only hope of making Christianity a universal religion (see below, p. 220).
The essays which are here presented to the reader may be said
to have had a threefold purpose:—(1) While interpreting St. Paul, to call up as
far as might be, a true image of the Apostolical age;
(1) The nature of the first endeavour may be best described in the words of Arthur Stanley, who, as Arnold’s pupil, had the same problem in his eye. He says of Jowett in the article already quoted:—
‘He has approached the Apostolic writings with the view, not of imposing his meaning on them, but of learning their own meaning from themselves. He has placed himself not merely on the external scene, but in the living atmosphere of the Apostolic age. He. . . prepared himself for his work by committing to memory the whole of St. Paul’s Epistles in the original Greek. But this is not enough. . . the immense layers of Papal, scholastic, and Puritan philosophy which intervene between ourselves and the Apostolic times; the elevation of the Apostolic point of view above the petty disputes in which we are absorbed; the very familiarity of the words of Scripture—all aggravate the difficulty of such an effort. . . . So to reproduce the past by the microscopic power of scholarship, and by the telescopic power of genius and learning, is the very purpose for which Universities are endowed, and for which Theology exists,
(2) The second element or factor in Jowett’s work
belonged to the insight of a man of large experience
and profound religious feeling, whose power of
‘No one with a heart open to human feelings, loving not man less, but God more, sensitive to the happiness of this world, yet aiming at a higher—no man of such a nature ever made a great sacrifice, or performed a great act of self-denial, without impressing a change on his character which lasted to his latest breath. No man ever took his besetting sin, it may be lust, or pride, or the love of rank and position, and, as it were, cut it out by voluntarily placing himself where to gratify it was impossible, without sensibly receiving a new strength of character. In one day, almost in an hour, he may become an altered man; he may stand, as it were, on a different stage of moral and religious life; he may feel himself in new relations to an altered world.’
Or consider the following passage from an essay not included here:—
‘There is a state in which man is powerless to act,
and is, nevertheless, clairvoyant to all the good and
evil of his own nature. He places the good and evil
principle before him, and is ever oscillating between
them. He traces the labyrinth of conflicting principles in the world, and is yet further perplexed and
entangled. He is sensitive to every breath of feeling,
and incapable of the performance of any duty. Or
take another example: It sometimes happens that
the remembrance of past suffering, or the consciousness of sin, may so weigh a man down as fairly to paralyse his moral power. He is distracted between
what he is and what he was; old habits and vices,
and the new character which is being fashioned in
him. Sometimes the balance seems to hang equal;
he feels the earnest wish and desire to act rightly,
but cannot hope to find pleasure and satisfaction in
a good life; he desires heartily to repent, but can
never think it possible that God should forgive. “It
is I and it is not I, but sin that dwelleth in me.” “I have, and have never ceased to have, the wish for
better things, even amid haunts of infamy and vice.”
In such language, even now, though with less fervour
than in “the first spiritual chaos of the affections” does the soul cry out to God—“Oh wretched man
that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of
this death?”’ Epistles, 3rd edition, vol. ii, p. 297.
In this and other adaptations of the Apostle’s thoughts the interpreter is guided by what he
frequently calls ‘the analogy of faith’ Cf.
(3) The remaining purpose was one which made a more severe demand on strenuous thought and spiritual imagination. It was nothing short of the endeavour to give to the truths which darkly join 1 in Christian theology, and which the Church of the fourth century, or the reformed churches in the sixteenth, had formulated in a manner suited to that age, an expression which may appeal to the heart and intellect of modern times, and may not be found to clash with other truths, or with the highest standard of morality. It was through this attempt that Jowett gave offence to the religious world of his day by departing at once from ‘Patristic’ and from ‘popular’ theology.
Bishop Kaye, of Lincoln (1827-1853), had said that the decree of the Council of Nicaea ‘was the greatest misfortune that ever befell the Church’. On this Jowett quietly remarks ‘that is, perhaps, true; yet a different decision would have been a greater misfortune’. His method in this respect has much in common with that recommended by the late M. Auguste Sabatier in his sketch of a Philosophy of Religion. See, for example, the following passage:—
‘Par ces discussions, par ces controverses mêmes
auxquelles heureusement aucun pouvoir extérieur ne
vient mettre fin, le dogme est sans cesse mis à l’épreuve, refondu en quelque sorte au feu de la
forge; il perd sa dureté de loi extérieure; il reste
chaud, malléable; il se dépouille des superstitions
mortes du passé pour répondre aux besoins du présent, se di versifier naturellement avec les esprits, Esquisse d’une Philosophie de la Religion, 7e
édition, p. 332.
In the present volume a certain progress may be
traced from the first of these endeavours to the
third,—the first two essays dealing more directly
with the Apostolical age, while the third and
fourth dwell more on religious experience generally,
and the last three are mainly concerned with theology.
The seven dissertations here reprinted are in this
way representative of the whole work. It may be
mentioned that the essay on the Character of St.
Paul gave the motive for an ideal work of sculpture
by Woolmer, and that on Conversion was pointed out
at the time by H. J. S. Smith as likely to conciliate
the Evangelical School. The essay on Casuistry
should be compared with the account of Loyola in
the volume of Biographical Sermons. Much else,
of equal interest, might have been included, but
would have extended the volume beyond the limits
assigned to this series. Readers whose interest is
awakened by what is here contained may be led to
examine other portions of the original work,—such
as the essay on Predestination, full of subtle disquisition, that on The Law as the Strength of Sin,
where modern analogies are drawn out with deep
observation, or that on Contrasts of Prophecy, or
Professor Jowett was far from thinking that his
work in theology was complete or final. Posterity,
he said, ‘will remark that up to a certain point we saw clearly; but that no man
is beyond his age—there was a circle which we could not pass’ 3rd edition of
Epistles, vol. ii, p. 138.
Many persons still require to be taught that ‘the
whole world, and all things in it, instead of being
secular and external to revelation, needs to be
brought back to within the sphere of revelation’ See Life of Benjamin Jowett, vol. i, p. 372.
Students of Professor Jowett’s book on St. Paul
may have much besides to learn, but they will not
have much to unlearn. Historical studies have
greatly advanced and so has Natural Science; but
Gibbon and Humboldt are still worth reading. The
very extent of the field makes concentration difficult.
The success of special inquiries renders it harder
for philosophy and for the religious mind to take all
into one view. But, as Plato said, comprehensiveness belongs to the only kind of knowledge which
takes lasting root. Plato, Rep. 537 c.
And religious thinking ebbs as well as flows. The
past sometimes prevails over the present and dims
the forecast of the future. There is a real danger
lest Obscurantism should divide the ground which
Religion and Science ought to occupy harmoniously
together. The serene spirit which breathes through
The two large volumes published in 1855 (second edition, 1859) were after all only a fragment of the work which their author had in view. There are those amongst his friends who will always regret that the labours of the Oxford Vice-Chancellorship, and the exhaustion which followed, should have deprived him first of the leisure, and then of the mental vigour, that was requisite for the execution of his literary designs. He never lost his interest in theology; and the strong vein of reverent thoughtfulness, which pervades the book on St. Paul, was the same which carried him onward through many trials to the attainment of the Christian graces so eloquently commended by Bishop Paget.
Professor Jowett was less inclined indeed in later years to engage in controversy. He used to say, ‘when we were younger, religious doctrines such as that of the Atonement were often presented in a form repugnant to the moral sense. That is not equally so now.’ But it were much to be wished that he had written the treatise he so long contemplated on Moral Ideas, or had worked out his views on the Religions of the World; or had been able to substantiate the dream that was suggested to him by the Imitatio Christi:—
‘Would it be possible to combine in a manual of
piety religious fervour with perfect good sense and
knowledge of the world? This has never been
Will Jowett some day have a successor an inheritor of his unfulfilled renown—to sum up with calm insight, and with unclouded faith in God, the spiritual outcome of the last fifty years?—A Christian philosopher, gifted with knowledge of the world and human nature, yet not worldly; loving truth unflinchingly, and not despairing of it; accomplished, not only in theology, but in history and science, full of devotion to God and Christ, and also to the good of man?—Who knows?
LEWIS CAMPBELL.
ALASSIO, ITALY,
March, 1906.
Οἴδατε δὲ ὅτι δι᾽ ἀσθένειαν τῆς σαρκὸς εὐηγγελισάμην ὑμῖν τὸ πρότερον,
καὶ τὸν πειρασμὸν ὑμῶν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου οὐκ ἐξουθενήσατε οὐδὲ ἐξεπτύσατε,
ἀλλὰ ὡς ἄγγελον θεοῦ ἐδέξασθέ με, ὡς χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν.—
THE narrative of the Gospel gives no full or perfect
likeness of the character of the Apostles. Human
beings do not admit of being constructed out of
a single feature, nor is imagination able to supply
details which are really wanting. St. Peter and
St. John, the two Apostles whose names are most
prominent in the Gospels and early portion of the
Acts, both seem to unite two extremes in the same
person; the character of St. John combining gentleness with vehemence, almost with fierceness; while in
St. Peter we trace rashness and timidity at once, the
spirit of freedom at one period of his life, and of
narrowness and exclusiveness at another. He is the
first to confess, and the first to deny Christ. Himself
the captain of the Apostles, and yet wanting in the
qualities necessary to constitute a leader. Such extremes may easily meet in the same person; but we
do not possess sufficient knowledge to say how they
were really reconciled. Each of the twelve Apostles
grew up to the fullness of the stature of the perfect
man. Even those who to us are little more than
names, had individual features as lively as our own
contemporaries. But the mention of their sayings
or acts on four or five occasions while they followed
More features appear of the character of St. Paul,
yet not sufficient to give a perfect picture. We
should lose the individuality which we have, by
seeking to idealize and generalize from some more
common type of Christian life. It has not been
unusual to describe St. Paul as a man of resolute
will, of untiring energy, of logical mind, of classic
taste. He has been contrasted with the twelve as
the educated with the uneducated, the student of
Hebrew and Greek learning, brought up in Jerusalem
at the feet of Gamaliel, with the fishermen of Galilee ‘mending their nets’ by the lake. Powers of government have been attributed to him such as were
required, and in some instances possessed, by the
great leaders of the Church in later ages. He is
imagined to have spoken with an accuracy hardly
to be found in the systems of philosophers. Not
of such an one would the Apostle himself ‘have
gloried’; he would not have understood the praises
of his commentators. It was not the wisdom of this
world which he spoke, but ‘the hidden wisdom of
God in a mystery’. All his life long he felt himself
to be one ‘whose strength was perfected in weakness’;
he was aware of the impression of feebleness which
his own appearance and discourse made upon his
converts; who was sometimes in weakness and fear
and trembling before them, ‘having the sentence of
death in himself’, and at other times ‘in power and
the Holy Ghost and in much assurance’; and so far
There are questions which it is interesting to
suggest, even when they can never receive a perfect
and satisfactory answer. One of these questions may
be asked respecting St. Paul:—‘What was the relation
in which his former life stood to the great fact of
his conversion?’ He himself, in looking back upon
the times in which he persecuted the Church of God,
thought of them chiefly as an increasing evidence of
the mercy of God, which was afterwards extended to
Yet we cannot but admit also the possibility, or
rather the probable truth of another point of view.
It is not unlikely that the struggle which he describes
in the seventh chapter of the Romans is the picture
of his own heart in the days when he ‘verily thought
that he ought to do many things contrary to Jesus
of Nazareth’; the impression of that earlier state,
perhaps the image of the martyr Stephen (
The gifts of God to man have ever some reference
to natural disposition. He who becomes the servant
of God does not thereby cease to be himself. Often
the transition is greater in appearance than in reality,
from the suddenness of its manifestation. There is a
kind of rebellion against self and nature and God,
which, through the mercy of God to the soul, seems
almost necessarily to lead to reaction. Persons have
been worse than their fellow men in outward appearance, and yet there was within them the spirit of
a child waiting to return home to their father’s house. A change passes upon them which we may
figure to ourselves, not only as the new man taking
the place of the old, but as the inner man taking the
place of the outer. So complex is human nature,
that the very opposite to what we are has often an
inexpressible power over us. Contrast is not only
a law of association; it is also a principle of action.
Many run from one extreme to another, from
licentiousness to the ecstasy of religious feeling, from
Perhaps we shall not be far wrong in concluding,
that those who have undergone great religious
changes have been of a fervid imaginative cast of
mind; looking for more in this world than it was
Such men have generally appeared at favourable
conjunctures of circumstances, when the old was
Often such men have been brought up in the faith which they afterwards oppose, and a part of their power has consisted in their acquaintance with the enemy. They see other men, like themselves formerly, wandering out of the way in the idol’s temple, amid a burdensome ceremonial, with prayers and sacrifices unable to free the soul. They lead them by the way themselves came to the home of Christ. Some times they represent the new as the truth of the old; at other times as contrasted with it, as life and death, as good and evil, as Christ and anti-Christ. They relax the force of habit, they melt the pride and fanaticism of the soul. They suggest to others their own doubts, they inspire them with their own hopes, they supply their own motives, they draw men to them with cords of sympathy and bonds of love; they themselves seem a sufficient stay to support the world. Such was Luther at the Reformation; such, in a higher sense, was the Apostle St. Paul.
There have been heroes in the world, and there
have been prophets in the world. The first may be
divided into two classes; either they have been men
of strong will and character, or of great power and
range of intellect; in a few instances, combining both.
They have been the natural leaders of mankind, compelling
Saul of Tarsus is called an Apostle rather than
a prophet, because Hebrew prophecy belongs to an
age of the world before Christianity. Now that in
the Gospel that which is perfect is come, that which
is in part is done away. Yet, in a secondary sense,
the Apostle St. Paul is also ‘among the prophets’.
He, too, has ‘visions and revelations of the Lord’,
though he has not written them down ‘for our instruction’, in which he would fain glory because they
are not his own. Even to the outward eye he has
the signs of a prophet. There is in him the same
Reflections of this kind are suggested by the absence
of materials such as throw any light on the early life
of St. Paul. All that we know of him before his
conversion is summed up in two facts, ‘that the witnesses laid down their clothes with a young man
whose name was Saul’, and that he was brought up
at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the few Rabbinical
teachers of Greek learning in the city of Jerusalem.
We cannot venture to assign to him either the ‘choleric’ or the ‘melancholic’ temperament. [Tholuck.] We are unable to determine what were his
natural gifts or capacities; or how far, as we often
observe to be the case, the gifts which he had were
called out by the mission on which he was sent, or
the theatre on which he felt himself placed ‘a spectacle
to the world, to angels, and to men’. Far more interesting is it to trace the simple feelings with which
he himself regarded his former life. ‘Last of all he
was seen of me also, who am the least of the Apostles,
that am not worthy to be called an Apostle, because
We are apt to judge extraordinary men by our
own standard; that is to say, we often suppose them
to possess, in an extraordinary degree, those qualities
which we are conscious of in ourselves or others. This
is the easiest way of conceiving their characters, but
not the truest. They differ in kind rather than in
degree. Even to understand them truly seems to require a power analogous to their own. Their natures
are more subtle, and yet more simple, than we readily
imagine. No one can read the ninth chapter of the
First, or the eleventh and twelfth chapters of the
Second Epistle to the Corinthians, without feeling
how different the Apostle St. Paul must have been
from good men among ourselves. We marvel how
such various traits of character come together in the
same individual. He who was ‘full of visions and
revelations of the Lord’, who spake with tongues
more than they all, was not ‘mad, but uttered the
words of truth and soberness’. He who was the
most enthusiastic of all men, was also the most
prudent; the Apostle of freedom, and yet the most
moderate. He who was the strongest and most en
lightened of all men, was also (would he have himself
Qualities so like and unlike are hard to reconcile;
perhaps they have never been united in the same
degree in any other human being. The contradiction
in part arises not only from the Apostle being an
extraordinary man, but from his being a man like
ourselves in an extraordinary state. Creation was
not to him that fixed order of things which it is to
us; rather it was an atmosphere of evil just broken
by the light beyond. To us the repose of the scene
around contrasts with the turmoil of man’s own spirit;
to the Apostle peace was to be sought only from
within, half hidden even from the inner man. There
was a veil upon the heart itself which had to be
removed. He himself seemed to fall asunder at times
into two parts, the flesh and the spirit; and the world
to be divided into two hemispheres, the one of the
rulers of darkness, the other bright with that inward
presence which should one day be revealed. In this
twilight he lived. What to us is far oft both in time
and place, if such an expression may be allowed, to
him was near and present, separated by a thin film
from the world we see, ever ready to break forth and
gather into itself the frame of nature. That sense of
the invisible which to most men it is so difficult to
impart, was like a second nature to St. Paul. He
walked by faith, and not by sight; what was strange
to him was the life he now led; which in his own
often repeated language was death rather than life,
the place of shadows and not of realities. The Greek
philosophers spoke of a world of phenomena, of true
being, of knowledge and opinion; and we know that
what they meant by these distinctions is something
Could we expect this to be otherwise when we
think of the manner of his conversion? Could he
have looked upon the world with the same eyes that
we do, or heard its many voices with the same ears,
who had been caught up into the third heaven,
whether in the body or out of the body he could not
tell? (
Yet this glory was not that of the princes of this
world, ‘who come to nought’; it is another image
which he gives us of himself;—not the figure on
Mars’ hill, in the cartoons of Raphael, nor the orator
with noble mien and eloquent gesture before Festus
and Agrippa; but the image of one lowly and cast
There have been those who, although deformed by
nature, have worn the expression of a calm and
heavenly beauty; in whom the flashing eye has
attested the presence of thought in the poor withered
and palsied frame. There have been others again,
who have passed the greater part of their lives in
extreme bodily suffering, who have, nevertheless,
directed states or led armies, the keenness of whose
intellect has not been dulled nor their natural force
of mind abated. There have been those also on
whose faces men have gazed ‘as upon the face of an
angel’, while they pierced or stoned them. Of such
an one, perhaps, the Apostle himself might have
gloried; not of those whom men term great or noble.
He who felt the whole creation groaning and travailing together until now was not like the Greek drinking in the life of nature at every pore. He who
through Christ was ‘crucified to the world, and the
world to him’, was not in harmony with nature, nor
nature with him. The manly form, the erect step,
Often the Apostle St. Paul has been described as
a person the furthest removed from enthusiasm; in
capable of spiritual illusion; by his natural temperament averse to credulity or superstition. By such
considerations as these a celebrated author confesses
himself to have been converted to the belief in
Christianity. And yet, if it is intended to reduce
St. Paul to the type of what is termed good sense
in the present day, it must be admitted that the view
which thus describes him is but partially true. Far
nearer the truth is that other quaint notion of a
modern writer, ‘that St. Paul was the finest gentleman
that ever lived’; for no man had nobler forms of
courtesy, or a deeper regard for the feelings of others.
But ‘good sense’ is a term not well adapted to express
either the individual or the age and country in which
he lived. He who wrought miracles, who had hand
kerchiefs carried to him from the sick, who spake
with tongues more than they all, who lived amid
visions and revelations of the Lord, who did not
appeal to the Gospel as a thing long settled, but
himself saw the process of revelation actually going
on before his eyes, and communicated it to his fellow
men, could never have been such an one as ourselves.
Nor can we pretend to estimate whether, in the
modern sense of the term, he was capable of weighing
evidence, or how far he would have attempted to
What has given rise to this conception of the Apostle’s character has been the circumstance, that with what the world terms mysticism and enthusiasm are united a singular prudence and moderation, and a perfect humanity, searching the feelings and knowing the hearts of all men. ‘I became all things to all men that I might win some’; not only, we may believe, as a sort of accommodation, but as the expression of the natural compassion and love which he felt for them. There is no reason to suppose that the Apostle took any interest in the daily life of men, in the great events which were befalling the Roman Empire, or in the temporal fortunes of the Jewish people. But when they came before him as sinners, lying in darkness and the shadow of God’s wrath, ignorant of the mystery that was being revealed before their eyes, then his love was quickened for them, then they seemed to him as his kindred and brethren; there was no sacrifice too great for him to make; he was willing to die with Christ, yea, even to be accursed from Him that he might ‘save some of them’.
Mysticism, or enthusiasm, or intense benevolence
and philanthropy, seem to us, as they commonly
are, at variance with worldly prudence and moderation. But in the Apostle these different and
contrasted qualities are mingled and harmonized.
The mother watching over the life of her child, has
all her faculties aroused and stimulated; she knows
almost by instinct how to say or do the right thing
at the right time; she regards his faults with mingled
love and sorrow. So, in the Apostle, we seem to
trace a sort of refinement or nicety of feeling, when
he is dealing with the souls of men. All his knowledge
Once more; there is in the Apostle, not only
prudence and knowledge of the human heart, but
a kind of subtlety of moderation, which considers
every conceivable case, and balances one with an
other; in the last resort giving no rule, but allowing
all to be superseded by a more general principle.
An instance of this subtle moderation is his determination, or rather omission to determine the question
of meats and drinks, which he first regards as in
different, secondly, as depending on men’s own conscience, and this again as limited by the consciences
of others, and lastly resolves all these finer precepts
into the general principle, ‘Whatever ye do, do
all to the glory of God’. The same qualification of
one principle by another recurs again in his rules
respecting marriage. First, ‘do not marry unbelievers’, and ‘let not the wife depart from her husband’. But if you are married and the unbeliever is willing
to remain, then the spirit of the second precept must
prevail over the first. Only in an extreme case,
The Gospel, it has been often remarked, lays down
principles rather than rules. The passages in the
Epistles of St. Paul which seem to be exceptions to
this statement, are exceptions in appearance rather
than in reality. They are relative to the circum
stances of those whom he is addressing. He who
became ‘all things to all men’, would have been the
last to insist on temporary regulations for his converts
being made the rule of Christian life in all ages.
His manner of Church government is so unlike a rule
or law, that we can hardly imagine how the Apostle,
if he could return to earth, would combine the freedom of the Gospel with the requirements of Christianity as an established institution. He is not a
bishop administering a regular system, but a person
dealing immediately with other persons out of the
fullness of his own mind and nature. His writings
are like spoken words, temporary, occasional, adapted
to other men’s thoughts and feelings, yet not without
an eternal meaning. In sending his instructions to
And with this communion of himself and his
converts, this care of daily life, there mingles the
vision of ‘the great family in heaven and earth’, ‘the Church which is his body’, in which the meaner
reality is enfolded or wrapt up, ‘sphered in a radiant
cloud’, even in its low estate. The language of the
Epistles often exercises an illusion on our minds
when thinking of the primitive Church; individuals
perhaps there were who truly partook of that light
with which the Apostle encircled them; there may
have been those in the Churches of Corinth, or
Ephesus, or Galatia, who were living on earth the
life of heaven. But the ideal which fills the Apostle’s mind has not, necessarily, a corresponding fact in
the actual state of his converts. The beloved family
of the Apostle, the Church of which such ‘glorious
things are told’, is often in tumult and disorder.
His love is constantly a source of pain to him: he
watches over them ‘with a godly jealousy’, and finds
them ‘affecting others rather than himself’. They
are always liable to be ‘spoiled’ by some vanity
of philosophy, some remembrance of Judaism, which,
like an epidemic, carries off whole Churches at once,
Great men (those, at least, who present to us the
type of earthly greatness) are sometimes said to
possess the power of command, but not the power
of entering into the feelings of others. They have
no fear of their fellows, they are not affected by
their opinions or prejudices, but neither are they
always capable of immediately impressing them, or
of perceiving the impression which their words or
actions make upon them. Often they live in a kind
of solitude on which other men do not venture to
intrude; putting forth their strength on particular
occasions, careless or abstracted about the daily
concerns of life. Such was not the greatness of the
Apostle St. Paul; not only in the sense in which
he says that ‘he could do all things through Christ’, but in a more earthly and human one, was it true,
Let us look once more a little closer at that ‘visage
marred’ in his Master’s service, as it appeared about
three years before on a well-known scene. A poor
aged man, worn by some bodily or mental disorder,
who had been often scourged, and bore on his face
the traces of indignity and sorrow in every form—such an one, led out of prison between Roman soldiers, probably at times faltering in his utterance, the
creature, as he seemed to spectators, of nervous sensibility; yearning, almost with a sort of fondness, to
Such is the image, not which Christian art has delighted to consecrate, but which the Apostle has left in his own writings of himself; an image of true wisdom, and nobleness, and affection, but of a wisdom unlike the wisdom of this world; of a nobleness which must not be transformed into that of the heroes of the world; an affection which seemed to be as strong and as individual towards all mankind, as other men are capable of feeling towards a single person.
EVENTS of the greatest importance in the annals of
mankind are not always seen to be important, until
the hour for preserving them is past. There is a
time before biography passes into history, when a
society has not yet learned to register its acts, and
individuals have not awoke to the consciousness of
national or ecclesiastical life. In this intermediate
period, events the most fruitful in results may lie
buried (the unfolding of the germ in the bosom of
the earth is not the least part of the growth of the
plant); they may also be reproduced in a new form
and their spirit misunderstood by the imperfect knowledge of after ages. Two or three centuries elapse;
documents are lost or tampered with, or confused;
there is no eye of criticism to penetrate their meaning. The historian has ‘the veil upon his face’ of
a later generation; he cannot see through the events,
institutions, opinions in the circle of which he lives.
Who can tell what went on in a ‘large upper room’ about the year 40? which may, nevertheless, have
had great consequences for the world and the
Church. Who, when Christianity was triumphant
in the fourth century, would comprehend the simple
ways and thoughts of believers in the first? Nor is
there anything more likely to be misunderstood, than
the differences between the first teachers of a religion,
and the disputes of their respective followers about
All history receives a colour from the age in which
it is written. This is the case with ecclesiastical
history even more than secular; it glows with the
faith and feelings of the historian; it reflects his
principles or convictions—it is sometimes embittered
by his prejudices. Eusebius, ‘the father of ecclesiastical history’, believing as he did that the constitution of the Church which he saw around him
had existed from the first, was not likely to give a
consistent account of its origin or growth. Nor was
it to be expected that he should trace the history
of doctrines, who, within the Church at least, could
have admitted of no doctrinal difference or development. It was impossible for him to describe that of
which he had no conception. Had he been disposed
to write an accurate account of the progress of the
Christian faith in the first two centuries, the scantiness of his materials would have prevented him from
doing so. The antiquarian spirit had awoke too
late to recover the treasures of the past. Those
who preceded him had a similar though less definite
impression of the first age, of which they knew so
little, and wrote in the same way. It would be an
anachronism to expect that he should sift critically
the few cases in which the earlier authorities witness
against themselves. In point of judgement, he is
about on a level with the other ‘Father of History’;
that is to say, he is not wholly destitute of critical
Records of the earliest heretics have passed away;
no one of them is fairly known to us from his own
writings. Their names have become a byword
Many doubts and possibilities arise in our minds
respecting the age of the Apostles when we look on
the picture ‘through a microscope’, and dwell on
those points which are commonly unnoticed. We
are tempted to frame theories and reconstructions,
which are better, perhaps, represented by queries.
Did those who remained behind in the Church
regard the death of the martyr Stephen with the
same feelings as those who were scattered abroad?
or was he in their eyes only what James the Just
appeared to be to the historian Josephus? Were
the Apostles at Jerusalem one in heart with the
brethren at Antioch? Were the teachers who came
from Jerusalem to Antioch saying, ‘Except ye be
circumcised, ye cannot be saved’, commissioned by
the Twelve? Were the Twelve absolutely at one
among themselves? Are the ‘commendatory epistles’ spoken of in the Epistle to the Corinthians, to be
ascribed to the Apostles at Jerusalem? Can ‘the
grievous wolves’, whose entrance into the Church
of Ephesus the Apostle foresaw, be other than
If we conceive of the Apostles as exercising
a strict and definite rule over the multitude of
their converts, living heads of the Church as they
might be termed, Peter or James of the circumcision
and Paul of the uncircumcision, it would be natural
to connect them with the acts of their followers.
One would think that, in accordance with the spirit
of the concordat, they should have ‘delivered over
to Satan’ the opponents of St. Paul, rather than
have lived in communion and company with them.
To hold out the right hand of fellowship to Paul
and Barnabas, and yet secretly to support or not to
discountenance their enemies, would seem to be
treachery to their common Master. Especially when
we observe how strongly the Judaizers are characterized by St. Paul as ‘the false brethren who came
in unawares’, ‘the false Apostles transforming themselves into Apostles of Christ’,
‘grievous wolves
entering in’, and with what bitter personal weapons
they assailed him (
It may be questioned whether the whole difficulty does not arise from a false conception of the authority of the Apostles in the early Church. Although the first teachers of the word of Christ, they were not the rulers of the Catholic Church; they were not its bishops, but its prophets. The influence which they exercised was personal rather than official, derived doubtless from their ‘having seen the Lord’, and from their appointment by Him, yet confined also to a comparatively narrow sphere; it was exercised in places in which they were, but hardly extended to places where they were not. The Gospel grew up around them they could not tell how; and the spirit which their preaching first awakened passed out of their control. They seemed no longer to be the prime movers, but rather the spectators of the work of God, which went on before their eyes. The thousands of Jews that believed and were zealous for the law would not lay aside the garb of Judaism at the bidding of James or Peter; the false teachers of Corinth or of Ephesus would not have been less likely to gain followers, had they been excommunicated by the Twelve. The movement which, in twenty years from the death of Christ, had spread so widely over the earth, they did not seek to reduce to rule and compass. It was beyond their reach, extending to communities of the circumstances of which they were hardly informed, and in which, therefore, it was not to be expected that they should interfere between St. Paul and his opponents.
The Apostolic name acquired a sacredness in the
second century which was unknown to it in the first.
We must not attribute either to the persons or to the
writings of the Apostles the authority with which
after ages invested them. No Epistle of James and
The moment we think of the Church, not as an
ecclesiastical or political institution, but, as it was in
the first age, a spiritual body, that is to say, a body
partly moved by the Spirit of God, dependent also
on the tempers and sympathies of men swayed to and
fro by religious emotion, the perplexity solves itself,
and the narrative of Scripture becomes truthful and
natural. When the waves are high, we see but
a little way over the ocean. The first fervour of
religious feeling does not admit a uniform level of
Church government. It is not a regular hierarchy,
but ‘some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists,
others pastors and teachers’, who grow together ‘into
the body of Christ’. The description of the early
Church in the Epistles everywhere implies a great
freedom of individual action. Apollos and Barnabas
are not under the guidance of Paul; those ‘who
were distinguished among the apostles before him’, could hardly have owned his authority. No attempt
is made to bring the different Churches under a common system. We cannot imagine any bond by which
Of this fluctuating state of the Church, which was
not yet addicted to any one rule, we find another
indication in the freedom, almost levity, with which
professing Christians embraced ‘traditions of men’. The attitude of the Church of Corinth towards the
Apostle was not that of believers in a faith ‘once
delivered to the saints’. We know not whether
Apollos was or was not a teacher of Alexandrian
learning among its members, or what was the exact
nature of ‘the party of Christ’,
Amid such fluctuation and unsettlement of opinions
we can imagine Paul and Apollos, or Paul and Peter,
A subject so wide is matter not for an essay but for a book; it is the history of the Church of the first two centuries. We must therefore narrow our field of vision as much as possible, and content ourselves with collecting a few general facts which have a bearing on our present inquiry.
First among these general facts, is the ignorance
of the third and fourth centuries respecting the first,
and earlier half of the second. We cannot err in
supposing that those who could add nothing to what
is recorded in the New Testament of the life of Christ
and His Apostles, had no real knowledge of lesser
matters, as, for example, the origin of Episcopacy.
The second general fact is the unconsciousness of this
ignorance, and the readiness with which the vacant space is filled up, and the
Church of the second century assimilated to that of the third and fourth.
History often conceals that which is discordant to preconceived notions;
silently dropping some facts, exaggerating others, adding, where needed, new
tone and colouring, until the disguise can no longer be detected. By some
process of this kind the circumstance into which we are inquiring has been
forgotten and reproduced. Nothing has survived relating to the great crisis
which Christianity under went in the age of the Apostles themselves; it passed
away silently in the altered state of the Church and the world. Not only in the
strange account of the dispute between the Apostles, given by Origen and others,
is what may be termed the ‘animus’ of concealment discernible, but in fragments of earlier
writings, in which the two Apostles appear side by
side as co-founders of the Corinthian, as well as of the
Roman Church (Caius and Dion, of Corinth, quoted
by Euseb., ii. 25), pleading their cause together before
Nero; dying on the same day, their graves being
appealed to as witnesses to the tale, probably as early
as the first half of the second century. The unconscious motive which gave birth to such fictions was,
seemingly, the desire to throw a veil over that occasion on which they withstood one another to the
face. And the truth indistinctly shines through this
legend of the latter part of the second century, when
Bearing in mind these general considerations, which throw a degree of doubt on the early ecclesiastical tradition, and lead us to seek for indications out of the regular course of history, we have to consider, in reference to our present subject, the following statements:—
1. That Justin, who is recorded to have written against Marcion, refers to the Twelve in several passages, but nowhere in his genuine writings mentions St. Paul. And when speaking of the books read in the Christian assemblies, he names only the Gospels and the Prophets (Apol. i. 67).
. That Marcion, who was nearly contemporary with Justin, is said to have appealed to the authority of St. Paul only.
(On the other hand, it is true that in numerous quotations from the Old Testament, Justin appears to follow St. Paul. It is difficult to account for this singular phenomenon.)
3. That in the account of James the Just, given by Josephus and Hegesippus (about A.D. 170), he is represented as a Jew among Jews; living, according to Hegesippus, the life of a Nazarite; praying in the Temple until his knees became hard as a camel’s, and so entirely a Jew as to be unknown to the people for a Christian; a description which, though its features may be exaggerated, yet has the trace of a true resemblance to the part which we find him acting in the Epistle to the Galatians. It falls in, too, with the fact of his peaceable continuance as head of the Church at Jerusalem, in the Acts of the Apostles; and is not inconsistent with the spirit of the Epistle which bears his name. (Comp. Euseb. ii. 23.)
4. That the same Hegesippus regards the heresies
5. That in the Clementine Homilies, written about the year 160, though a work generally orthodox, St. Paul is covertly introduced under the name of Simon Magus, as the impersonation of Gnostic error, as the enemy who had pretended ‘visions and revelations’, and who ‘withstood’ and blamed Peter. No writer doubts the allusion in some of these passages to the Epistles of St. Paul. Assuming their connexion, we ask, What was the state of mind which led an orthodox Christian, who lived probably at Rome, about the middle of the second century, to affix such a character to St. Paul? and what was the motive which induced him to veil his meaning? What, too, could have been the state of the Church in which such a romance grew up? and how could the next generation have read it without perceiving its true aim? Doubtful as may be the precise answer to these questions, we cannot attribute this remarkable work to the wayward fancy of an individual; it is an indication of a real tendency of the first and second centuries, at a time when the flame was almost extinguished, but still slumbered in the mind of the writer of the Clementine Homilies. It is observable that at a later date, about the year 210-230, in the form which the work afterwards received under the title of ‘the Clementine Recognitions’, which have been preserved in a Latin translation, the objection able passages have mostly vanished.
6. Lastly, that in later writings we find no trace of the mind of St. Paul. His influence seems to pass from the world. On such a basis ‘as where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty’, it might have been impossible to rear the fabric of a hierarchy. But the thought itself was not present to the next generation. The tide of ecclesiastical feeling set in another direction. It was not merely that after-writers fell short of St. Paul, or imperfectly interpreted him, but that they formed themselves on a different model. It was not only that the external constitution of the Church had received a definite form and shape, but that the inward perception of the nature of the Gospel was different. No writer of the latter half of the second century would have spoken as St. Paul has done of the law, of the sabbath, of justification by faith only, of the Spirit, of grace, of moderation in things indifferent, of forgiveness. An echo of a part of his teaching is heard in Augustine; with this exception, the voice of him who withstood Peter to the face at Antioch was silent in the Church until the Reformation. The spirit of the Epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians has revived in later times. But there is no trace that the writings of the Apostle left any lasting impress within the Church, or perhaps any where in the first ages.
Yet the principle of the Apostle triumphed, though
at the time of its triumph it may seem to have lost
the spirit and power of the Apostle. The struggle
which commenced like Athanasius against the world,
ended as the struggle of the world against the remnant of the Jewish race. Beginning within the
confines of Judea, it spread in a widening circle among
the Jewish proselytes, still wider and more faintly
marked in the philojudaizing Gentile, fading in the
distance as Christianity became a universal religion.
It would be vain to carry our inquiry further, with the view of gleaning a few results respecting the first half of the second century. Remote probabilities and isolated facts are not worth balancing. The consciousness that we know little of the times which followed the Apostles is the best part of our knowledge. And many will deem it well for the purity of the Christian faith, that while Christ Himself is clearly seen by us—as a light, at the fountain of which a dead Church may receive life, and a living one renew its strength—the origin of ecclesiastical institutions has been hidden from our eyes. In the second and third centuries Christianity was extending its borders, fencing itself with creeds and liturgies, taking possession of the earth with its hierarchy. Whether this great organization was originally every where the same, whether it adopted the form chiefly of the Jewish worship and ministry or of the Roman magistracy, or at first of the one and afterwards of the other, cannot be certainly determined. A cloud hangs over the dawn of ecclesiastical history. By some course of events with which we are not acquainted, the Providence of God leading the way, and the thoughts of man following, the Jewish Synagogue became the Christian Church; the Passover was superseded by Easter; the Christian Sunday took the place of the Jewish Sabbath. While the Old Testament retained its authority over Gentile as well as Jewish Christians, the law was done away in Christ, and the Judaizer of the first century be came the Ebionitish heretic of the second and third.
THUS have we the image of the lifelong struggle gathered up in a single instant. In describing it we pass beyond the consciousness of the individual into a world of abstractions; we loosen the thread by which the spiritual faculties are held together, and view as objects what can, strictly speaking, have no existence, except in relation to the subject. The divided members of the soul are ideal, the combat between them is ideal, so also is the victory. What is real that corresponds to this is not a momentary, but a continuous conflict, which we feel rather than know,—which has its different aspects of hope and fear, triumph and despair, the action and reaction of the Spirit of God in the depths of the human soul, awakening the sense of sin and conveying the assurance of forgiveness.
The language in which we describe this conflict is
very different from that of the Apostle. Our circum
stances are so changed that we are hardly able to view it
in its simplest elements. Christianity is now the established religion of the civilized portion of mankind.
In our own country it has become part of the law of
the land; it speaks with authority, it is embodied in
a Church, it is supported by almost universal opinion,
and fortified by wealth and prescription. Those who
know least of its spiritual life do not deny its greatness
But if with ourselves the influence of Christianity
is almost always gradual and imperceptible, with the
first believers it was almost always sudden. There
was no interval which separated the preaching of
Peter on the day of Pentecost, from the baptism of
the three thousand. The eunuch of Candace paused
for a brief space on a journey, and was then baptized
into the name of Christ, which a few hours previously
he had not so much as heard. There was no period
of probation like that which, a century or two later,
was appropriated to the instruction of the Catechumens. It was an impulse, an inspiration passing from
the lips of one to a chosen few, and communicated by
But however sudden were the conversions of the
earliest believers, however wonderful the circumstances
which attended them, they were not for that reason
the less lasting or sincere. Though many preached ‘Christ of contention’, though
‘Demas forsook the
Apostle’, there were few who, having once taken up
the cross, turned back from ‘the love of this present
world’. They might waver between Paul and Peter,
between the circumcision and the uncircumcision;
they might give ear to the strange and bewitching
Such was the nature of conversion among the early Christians, the new birth of which by spiritual descent we are ourselves the offspring. Is there anything in history like it? anything in our own lives which may help us to understand it? That which the Scripture describes from within, we are for a while going to look at from a different point of view, not with reference to the power of God, but to those secondary causes through which He works—the laws which experience shows that he himself imposes on the operations of his spirit. Such an inquiry is not a mere idle speculation; it is not far from the practical question, ‘How we are to become better’. Imperfect as any attempt to analyse our spiritual life must ever be, the changes which we ourselves experience or observe in others, compared with those greater and more sudden changes which took place in the age of the Apostle, will throw light upon each other.
In the sudden conversions of the early Christians
we observe three things which either tend to discredit, or do not accompany, the working of a similar
power among ourselves.—First, that conversion was
marked by ecstatic arid unusual phenomena; secondly,
When we consider what is implied in such expressions as ‘not many wise, not many learned’ were called to the knowledge of the truth, we can scarcely avoid feeling that there must have been much in the early Church which would have been distasteful to us as men of education; much that must have worn the appearance of excitement and enthusiasm. Is the mean conventicle, looking almost like a private house, a better image of that first assembly of Christians which met in the ‘large upper room’, or the Catholic church arrayed in all the glories of Christian art? Neither of them is altogether like in spirit perhaps, but in externals the first. Is the dignified hierarchy that occupy the seats around the altar, more like the multitudes of first believers, or the lowly crowd that kneel upon the pavement? If we try to embody in the mind’s eye the forms of the first teachers, and still more of their followers, we cannot help reading the true lesson, however great may be the illusions of poetry or of art. Not St. Paul standing on Mars’ hill in the fulness of manly strength, as we have him in the cartoon of Raphael, is the true image; but such a one as he himself would glory in, whose bodily presence was weak and speech feeble, who had an infirmity in his flesh, and bore in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus.
And when we look at this picture, ‘full in the
face’, however we might by nature be inclined to
turn aside from it, or veil its details in general
language, we cannot deny that many things that
accompany the religion of the uneducated now, must
then also have accompanied the Gospel preached to
the poor. There must have been, humanly speaking,
spiritual delusions where men lived so exclusively in
This difference between the feelings and habits
of the first Christians and ourselves, must be borne
in mind in relation to the subject of conversion.
For as sudden changes are more likely to be met
with amongst the poor and uneducated in the present
day, it certainly throws light on the subject of the
first conversions, that to the poor and uneducated
the Gospel was first preached. And yet these sudden
changes were as real, nay, more real than any gradual
changes which take place among ourselves. The
Stoic or Epicurean philosopher who had come into
an assembly of believers speaking with tongues,
would have remarked, that among the vulgar religious
extravagances were usually short-lived. But it was
not so. There was more there than he had eyes
to see, or than was dreamed of in a philosophy like
his. Not only was there the superficial appearance of
poverty and meanness and enthusiasm, from a nearer
But it is a further difference between the power of
the Gospel now and in the first ages, that it no
longer converts whole multitudes at once. Perhaps
this very individuality in its mode of working may
not be without an advantage in awakening us to its
higher truths and more entire spiritual freedom.
Whether this be so or not; whether there be any
spiritual law by which reason, in a measure, takes
the place of faith, and the common religious impulse
weakens as the power of reflection grows, we certainly
observe a diminution in the collective force which
religion exercises on the hearts of men. In our own
days the preacher sees the seed which he has sown
gradually spring up; first one, then another begins
to lead a better life; then a change comes over the
state of society, often from causes over which he
has no control; he makes some steps forwards and
a few backwards, and trusts far more, if he is wise,
to the silent influence of religious education than
to the power of preaching; and, perhaps, the result
of a long life of ministerial labour is far less than
that of a single discourse from the lips of the
Apostles or their followers. Even in missions to
the heathen the vital energies of Christianity cease
to operate to any great extent, at least on the effete
civilization of India and China; the limits of the
kingdoms of light and darkness are nearly the same
Looking at this remarkable phenomenon of the
conversion of whole multitudes at once, not from its
Divine but from its human aspect (that is, with
reference to that provision that God himself has
made in human nature for the execution of his will),
the first cause to which we are naturally led to
attribute it is the power of sympathy. Why it is
that men ever act together is a mystery of which
our individual self-consciousness gives no account,
any more than why we speak a common language,
or form nations or societies, or merely in our physical
nature are capable of taking diseases from one
another. Nature and the Author of nature have
made us thus dependent on each other both in body
and soul. Whoever has seen human beings collected
together in masses, and watched the movements that
pass over them, like ‘the trees of the forest moving
in the wind’, will have no difficulty in imagining,
if not in understanding, how the same voice might
have found its way at the same instant to a thousand
In ordinary cases we should truly say that there
must have been some predisposing cause of a great
political or religious revolution; some latent elements
acting alike upon all, which, though long smouldering
beneath, burst forth at last into a flame. Such a
cause might be the misery of mankind, or the intense
corruption of human society, which could not be
quickened except it die, or the long-suppressed
yearnings of the soul after something higher than
it had hitherto known upon earth, or the reflected
light of one religion or one movement of the human
mind upon another. Such causes were actually at
work, preparing the way for the diffusion of Christianity. The law itself was beginning to pass away
in an altered world, the state of society was hollow,
the chosen people were hopelessly under the Roman
yoke. Good men refrained from the wild attempt
of the Galilean Judas; yet the spirit which animated
such attempts was slumbering in their bosoms.
Looking back at their own past history, they could
not but remember, even in an altered world, that
there was One who ruled among the kingdoms of
men, ‘beside whom there was no God’. Were they
Spiritual life, no less than natural life, is often
the very opposite of the elements which seem to give
birth to it. The preparation for the way of the
Lord, which John the Baptist preached, did not
consist in a direct reference to the Saviour. The
words ‘He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost
and with fire’, and ‘He shall burn up the chaff with
fire unquenchable’, could have given the Jews no
exact conception of Him who ‘did not break the
bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax’. It was
Except from the Gospel history and the writings
of Josephus and Philo, we know but little of the
tendencies of the Jewish mind in the time of our
Lord. Yet we cannot doubt that the entrance of
Christianity into the world was not sudden and
abrupt; that is an allusion which arises in the mind
from our slender acquaintance with contemporary
opinions. Better and higher and holier as it was,
it was not absolutely distinct from the teaching of
the doctors of the law either in form or substance;
it was not unconnected with, but gave life and truth
to, the mystic fancies of Alexandrian philosophy.
Even in the counsels of perfection of the Sermon on
the Mount, there is probably nothing which might
not be found, either in letter or spirit, in Philo or
some other Jewish or Eastern writer. The peculiarity
of the Gospel is, not that it teaches what is wholly
new, but that it draws out of the treasure-house of
the human heart things new and old, gathering
together in one the dispersed fragments of the
truth. The common people would not have ‘heard
Him gladly’, but for the truth of what He said.
The heart was its own witness to it. The better
nature of man, though but for a moment, responded
And yet, after reviewing the circumstances of the first preaching of the Gospel, there remains some thing which cannot be resolved into causes or antecedents; which eludes criticism, and can no more be explained in the world than the sudden changes of character in the individual. There are processes of life and organization about which we know nothing, and we seem to know that we shall never know any thing. ‘That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die’; but the mechanism of this new life is too complex and yet too simple for us to untwist its fibres. The figure which St. Paul applies to the resurrection of the body is true also of the renewal of the soul, especially in the first ages, of which we know so little, and in which the Gospel seems to have acted with such far greater power than among ourselves.
Leaving further inquiry into the conversion of
the first Christians at the point at which it hides
itself from us in mystery, we have now to turn to
a question hardly less mysterious, though seemingly
more familiar to us, which may be regarded as
a question either of moral philosophy or of theology,—the nature of conversion and changes of character
among ourselves. What traces are there of a
spiritual power still acting upon the human heart?
What is the inward nature, and what are the out
ward conditions of changes in human conduct? Is
our life a gradual and insensible progress from infancy
to age, from birth to death, governed by fixed laws;
or is it a miracle and mystery of thirty, or fifty, or
Were we to consider mankind only from without, there could be no doubt of the answer which we should give to the last of these questions. The order of the world would scarcely even seem to be infringed by the free will of man. In morals, no less than in physics, everything would appear to proceed by regular law. Individuals have certain capacities, which grow with their growth and strengthen with their strength; and no one by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature. As the poet says,—‘The boy is father to the man’. The lives of the great majority have a sort of continuity: as we know them by the same look, walk, manner; so when we come to converse with them, we recognize the same character as formerly. They may be changed; but the change in general is such as we expect to find in them from youth to maturity, or from maturity to decay. There is something in them which is not changed, by which we perceive them to be the same. If they were weak, they remain so still; if they were sensitive, they remain so still; if they were selfish or passionate, such faults are seldom cured by increasing age or infirmities. And often the same nature puts on many veils and disguises; to the outward eye it may have, in some instances, almost disappeared; when we look beneath, it is still there.
The appearance of this sameness in human nature
has led many to suppose that no real change ever
takes place. Does a man from a drunkard become
sober? from a knight errant become a devotee?
from a sensualist a believer in Christ? or a woman
from a life of pleasure pass to a romantic and
This ‘practical fatalism’, which says that human
beings can be what they are and nothing else, has
a certain degree of truth, or rather, of plausibility,
from the circumstance that men seldom change
wholly, and that the part of their nature which
changes least is the weakness and infirmity that
shows itself on the surface. Few, comparatively,
ever change their outward manner, except from the
mere result of altered circumstances; and hence, to
a superficial observer, they appear to change less
than is really the fact. Probably St. Paul never
lost that trembling and feebleness, which was one of
the trials of his life. Nor, in so far as the mind is
dependent on the body, can we pretend to be wholly
free agents. Who can say that his view of life and
his power of action are unaffected by his bodily
state? or who expects to find a firm and decided
character in the nervous and sensitive frame? The
commonest facts of daily life sufficiently prove the
connexion of mind and body; the more we attend
to it the closer it appears. Nor, indeed, can it be
denied that external circumstances fix for most men
the path of life. They are the inhabitants of
a particular country; they have a certain position
in the world; they rise to their occupations as the
morning comes round; they seldom get beyond the
circle of ideas in which they have been brought up.
Fearfully and wonderfully as they are made, though
If from this external aspect of human things we
turn inward, there seems to be no limit to the
changes which we deem possible. We are no longer
the same, but different every hour. No physical
fact interposes itself as an obstacle to our thoughts
any more than to our dreams. The world and its
laws have nothing to do with our free determinations.
At any moment we can begin a new life; in idea at
least, no time is required for the change. One
instant we may be proud, the next humble; one
instant sinning, at the next repenting; one instant,
like St. Paul, ready to persecute, at another to
preach the Gospel; full of malice and hatred one
hour, melting into tenderness the next. As we
hear the words of the preacher, there is a voice
within telling us, that ‘now, even now, is the day
of salvation’; and if certain clogs and hindrances
of earth could only be removed, we are ready to pass
immediately into another state. And, at times, it
seems as though we had actually passed into rest,
and had a foretaste of the heavenly gift. Something
more than imagination enables us to fashion a divine
pattern to which we conform for a little while. The
But besides such feelings as these, which we know to be partly true, partly illusive, every one’s experience of himself appears to teach him, that he has gone through many changes and had many special providences vouchsafed to him; he says to himself that he has been led in a mysterious and peculiar way, not like the way of other men, and had feelings not common to others; he compares different times and places, and contrasts his own conduct here and there, now and then. In other men he remarks similarity of character; in himself he sees chiefly diversity. They seem to be the creatures of habit and circumstance; he alone is a free agent. The truth is, that he observes himself; he cannot equally observe them. He is not conscious of the inward struggles through which they have passed; he sees only the veil of flesh which conceals them from his view. He knows when he thinks about it, but he does not habitually remember, that, under that calm exterior, there is a like current of individual thoughts, feelings, interests, which have as great a charm and intensity for another as the workings of his own mind have for himself.
And yet it does not follow, that this inward fact
is to be set aside as the result of egotism and illusion.
It may be not merely the dreamy reflection of our
life and actions in the mirror of self, but the subtle
and delicate spring of the whole machine. To purify
the feelings or to move the will, the internal sense
may be as necessary to us as external observation is
to regulate and sustain them. Even to the formula
But not in this place to get further into the
meshes of the great question of freedom and necessity, let us rather turn aside for a moment to consider some practical aspects of the reflections which
precede. Scripture and reason alike require that we
should entirely turn to God, that we should obey
the whole law. And hard as this may seem at first,
there is a witness within us which pleads that it is
possible. Our mind and moral nature are one; we
cannot break ourselves into pieces in action any more
than in thought. The whole man is in every part
and in every act. This is not a mere mode of
thought, but a truth of great practical importance. ‘Easier to change many things than one’, is the
common saying. Easier, we may add, in religion or
morality, to change the whole than the part. Easier
because more natural, more agreeable to the voice of
conscience and the promises of Scripture. God himself deals with us as a whole; he does not forgive us
in part any more than he requires us to serve Him in
part. It may be true that, of the thousand hearers
of the appeal of the preacher, not above one begins
a new life. And some persons will imagine that it
might be better to make an impression on them little
by little, like the effect of the dropping of water
Many a person will tease himself by counting minutes and providing small rules for his life, who would have found the task an easier and a nobler one, had he viewed it in its whole extent, and gone to God in a ‘large and liberal spirit’, to offer up his life to Him. To have no arrière-pensée in the service of God and virtue is the great source of peace and happiness. Make clean that which is within, and you have no need to purify that which is without. Take care of the little things of life, and the great ones will take care of themselves, is the maxim of the trader, which is sometimes, and with a certain degree of truth, applied to the service of God. But much more true is it in religion that we should take care of the great things, and the trifles of life will take care of themselves. ‘If thine eye be single, thy whole body will be full of light.’ Christianity is not acquired as an art by long practice; it does not carve and polish human nature with a graving tool; it makes the whole man; first pouring out his soul before God, and then casting him in a mould’. Its workings are not to be measured by time, even though among educated persons, and in modern times, sudden and momentary conversions can rarely occur.
For the doctrine of conversion, the moralist substitutes the theory of habits. Good actions, he says,
produce good habits; and the repetition of good
actions makes them easier to perform, and ‘fortifies
us indefinitely against temptation’. There are bodily
From a consideration of such instances as these,
the rule has been laid down, that, ‘as the passive
impression weakens, the active habit strengthens’. But is not this saying of a great man founded on
a narrow and partial contemplation of human nature?
For, in the first place, it leaves altogether out of
sight the motives of human action; it is equally
suited to the most rigid formalist and to a moral
and spiritual being. Secondly, it takes no account
of the limitation of the power of habits, which
neither in mind nor body can be extended beyond a
certain point; nor of the original capacity or peculiar
character of individuals; nor of the different kinds
of habits, nor of the degrees of strength and weakness
All that is true in the theory of habits seems to be implied in the notion of order or regularity. Even this is inadequate to give a conception of the structure of human beings. Order is the beginning, but freedom is the perfection of our moral nature. Men do not live at random, or act one instant with out reference to their actions just before. And in youth especially, the very sameness of our occupations is a sort of stay and support to us, as in age it may be described as a kind of rest. But no one will say that the mere repetition of actions until they constitute a habit, gives any explanation of the higher and nobler forms of human virtue, or the finer moulds of character. Life cannot be explained as the working of a mere machine, still less can moral or spiritual life be reduced to merely mechanical laws.
But if, while acknowledging that a great proportion of mankind are the creatures of habit, and that
a great part of our actions are nothing more than
the result of habit, we go on to ask ourselves about
the changes of our life, and fix our minds on the
Every man has the power of forming a resolution,
or, without previous resolution, in any particular
instance, acting as he will. As thoughts come into
the mind one cannot tell how, so too motives spring
up, without our being able to trace their origin.
Why we suddenly see a thing in a new light, is
often hard to explain; why we feel an action to be
right or wrong which has previously seemed indifferent, is not less inexplicable. We fix the passing
dream or sentiment in action; the thought is nothing,
the deed may be everything. That day after day,
to use a familiar instance, the drunkard will find
abstinence easier, is probably untrue; but that from
once abstaining he will gain a fresh experience, and
Nor is it less true, that by the commission, not of many, but a single act of vice or crime, an inroad is made into our whole moral constitution, which is not proportionably increased by its repetition. The first act of theft, falsehood, or other immorality, is an event in the life of the perpetrator which he never forgets. It may often happen that no account can be given of it; that there is nothing in the education, nor in the antecedents of the person, that would lead us, or even himself, to suspect it. In the weaker sort of natures, especially, suggestions of evil spring up we cannot tell how. Human beings are the creatures of habit; but they are the creatures of impulse too; and from the greater variableness of the outward circumstances of life, and especially of particular periods of life, and the greater freedom of individuals, it may, perhaps, be found that human actions, though less liable to wide-spread or sudden changes, have also become more capricious, and less reducible to simple causes, than formerly.
Changes in character come more often in the form
of feeling than of reason, from some new affection
or attachment, or alienation of our former self,
rather than from the slow growth of experience, or
a deliberate sense of right and duty. The meeting
with some particular person, the remembrance of
some particular scene, the last words of a parent or
Of many of these changes no other reason can be
given than that nature and the Author of nature
have made men capable of them. There are others,
again, which we seem to trace, not only to particular
times, but to definite actions, from which they flow
in the same manner that other effects follow from
their causes. Among such causes none are more
powerful than acts of self-sacrifice and devotion.
A single deed of heroism makes a man a hero; it
becomes a part of him, and, strengthened by the
approbation and sympathy of his fellow men, a sort
of power which he gains over himself and them.
Something like this is true of the lesser occasions
of life no less than of the greatest; provided in either
case the actions are not of such a kind that the
performance of them is a violence to our nature.
Many a one has stretched himself on the rack of
Nor, in considering the effects of action, must
the influence of impressions be lost sight of. Good
resolutions are apt to have a bad name; they have
come to be almost synonymous with the absence of
good actions. As they get older, men deem it a
kind of weakness to be guilty of making them; so
often do they end in raising ‘pictures of virtue, or
going over the theory of virtue in our minds’. Yet
this contrast between passive impression and active
habit is hardly justified by our experience of ourselves or others. Valueless as they are in themselves, good resolutions are suggestive of great good;
they are seldom wholly without effect on our conduct; in the weakest of men they are still the
embryo of action. They may meet with a concurrence of circumstances in which they take root
A further cause of sudden changes in the moral constitution is the determination of the will by reason and knowledge. Suppose the case of a person living in a narrow circle of ideas, within the limits of his early education, perplexed by difficulties, yet never venturing beyond the wall of prejudices in which he has been brought up, or changing only into the false position of a rebellion against them. A new view of his relation to the world and to God is presented to him; such, for example, as in St. Paul’s day was the grand acknowledgement that God was ‘not the God of the Jews only’; such as in our own age would be the clear vision of the truth and justice of God, high above the clouds of earth and time, and of His goodwill to man. Convinced of the reasonableness of the Gospel, it becomes to him at once a self-imposed law. No longer does the human heart rebel; no longer has he to pose his understanding with that odd resolution of Tertullian,—‘certum quia impossibile’. He perceives that the perplexities of religion have been made, not by the appointment of God, but by the ingenuity of man.
Lastly. Among those influences, by the help of
We have wandered far from the subject of conversion in the early Church, into another sphere in
which the words ‘grace, faith, the spirit’, have
disappeared, and notions of moral philosophy have
taken their place. It is better, perhaps, that the
attempt to analyse our spiritual nature should assume
this abstract form. We feel that words cannot
express the life hidden with Christ and God; we
are afraid of declaring on the housetop, what may
only be spoken in the closet. If the rights and
ceremonies of the elder dispensation, which have so
little in them of a spiritual character, became a figure
There is a view of the changes of the characters of men which begins where this ends, which reads human nature by a different light, and speaks of it as the seat of a great struggle between the powers of good and evil. It would be untrue to identify this view with that which has preceded, and scarcely less untrue to attempt to interweave the two in a system of ‘moral theology’. No addition of theological terms will transfigure Aristotle’s Ethics into a ‘Summa Theologiae’. When St. Paul says—‘O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord’; he is not speaking the language of moral philosophy, but of religious feeling. He expresses what few have truly felt concentrated in a single instant, what many have deluded themselves into the belief of, what some have experienced accompanying them through life, what a great portion even of the better sort of mankind are wholly unconscious of, It seems as if Providence allowed us to regard the truths of religion and morality in many ways which are not wholly unconnected with each other, yet parallel rather than intersecting; providing for the varieties of human character, and not leaving those altogether without law, who are incapable in a world of sight of entering within the veil.
As we return to that ‘hidden life’ of which the
Scripture speaks, our analysis of human nature
seems to become more imperfect, less reducible to
rule or measure, less capable of being described in
a language which all men understand. What the
believer recognizes as the record of his experience
Directly, religious influences may be summed up under three heads:—The power of God; the love of Christ; the efficacy of prayer.
(1) So far as the influence of the first of these is capable of analysis, it consists in the practical sense that we are dependent beings, and that our souls are in the hands of God, who is acting through us, and ever present with us, in the trials of life and in the work of life. The believer is a minister who executes this work, hardly the partner in it; it is not his own, but God s. He does it with the greatest care, as unto the Lord and not to men, yet is indifferent as to the result, knowing that all things, even through his imperfect agency, are working together for good. The attitude of his soul towards God is such as to produce the strongest effects on his power of action. It leaves his faculties clear and unimpassioned; it places him above accidents; it gives him courage and freedom. Trusting in God only, like the Psalmist, ‘he fears no enemy’; he has no want. There is a sort of absoluteness in his position in the world, which can neither be made better nor worse; as St. Paul says, ‘All things are his, whether life or death, or things present, or things to come’.
In merely human things, the aid and sympathy of
others increase our power to act: it is also the fact
that we can work more effectually and think more
truly, where the issue is not staked on the result of
our thought and work. The confidence of success
(2) But yet more strongly is it felt that the love of
Christ has this constraining power over souls, that
here, if anywhere, we are unlocking the twisted chain
of sympathy, and reaching the inmost mystery of
human nature. The sight, once for all, of Christ
crucified, recalling the thought of what, more than
1800 years ago, he suffered for us, has ravished the
heart and melted the affections, and made the world
seem new, and covered the earth itself with a fair
vision, that is, a heavenly one. The strength of this
feeling arises from its being directed towards a person,
a real being, an individual like ourselves, who has
actually endured all this for our sakes, who was above
us, and yet became one of us and felt as we did, and
was like ourselves a true man. The love which He
felt towards us, we seek to return to Him; the unity
which He has with the Divine nature, He communicates to us; His Father is our Father, His God our
Every one knows what it is to become like those
whom we admire or esteem; the impress which a disciple may sometimes have received from his teacher,
or the servant from his Lord. Such devotion to
a particular person can rarely be thought to open
our hearts to love others also; it often tends to
weaken the force of individual character. But the
love of Christ is the conducting medium to the love
of all mankind; the image which He impresses upon
us is the image not of any particular individual, but
of the Son of Man. And this image, as we draw
nearer to it, is transfigured into the image of the
Son of God. As we become like Him, we see Him
as He is; and see ourselves and all other things with
true human sympathy. Lastly, we are sensible that
more than all we feel towards Him, He feels towards
(3) The instrument whereby, above all others, we
realize the power of God, and the love of Christ,
which carries us into their presence, and places us
within the circle of a Divine yet personal influence,
is prayer. Prayer is the summing up of the Christian
life in a definite act, which is at once inward and out
ward, the power of which on the character, like that
of any other act, is proportioned to its intensity.
The imagination of doing rightly adds little to our
strength; even the wish to do so is not necessarily
accompanied by a change of heart and conduct. But
in prayer we imagine, and wish, and perform all in
one. Our imperfect resolutions are offered up to
God; our weakness becomes strength, our words
deeds. No other action is so mysterious; there is
Of what nature that prayer is which is effectual to the obtaining of its requests is a question of the same kind as what constitutes a true faith. That prayer, we should reply, which is itself most of an act, which is most immediately followed by action, which is most truthful, manly, self-controlled, which seems to lead and direct, rather than to follow, our natural emotions. That prayer which is its own answer because it asks not for any temporal good, but for union with God. That prayer which begins with the confession, ‘We know not what to pray for as we ought’; which can never by any possibility interfere with the laws of nature, because even in extremity of danger or suffering, it seeks only the fulfilment of His will. That prayer which acknowledges that our enemies, or those of a different faith, are equally with ourselves in the hands of God; in which we never unwittingly ask for our own good at the expense of others. That prayer in which faith is strong enough to submit to experience; in which the soul of man is nevertheless conscious not of any self-produced impression, but of a true communion with the Author and Maker of his being.
In prayer, as in all religion, there is something that
it is impossible to describe, and that seems to be
untrue the moment it is expressed in words. In the
relations of man with God, it is vain to attempt to
separate what belongs to the finite and what to the
infinite. We can feel, but we cannot analyse it. We
can lay down practical rules for it, but can give no
adequate account of it. It is a mystery which we
do not need to fathom. In all religion there is an
element of which we are conscious—which is no
mystery, which ought to be and is on a level with
reason and experience. There is something besides,
This partial indistinctness of the subject of religion,
even independently of mysticism or superstition, may
become to intellectual minds a ground for doubting
the truth of that which will not be altogether reduced
to the rules of human knowledge, which seems to
elude our grasp, and retires into the recesses of the
soul the moment we ask for the demonstration of its
existence. Against this natural suspicion let us set
two observations: first, that if the Gospel had spoken
to the reason only, and not to the feelings—‘if the
way to the blessed life’ had to be won by clearness of
ideas, then it is impossible that ‘to the poor the
Gospel should have been first preached’. It would
have begun at the other end of society, and probably
remained, like Greek philosophy, the abstraction of
educated men. Secondly, let us remark that even
now, judged by its effects, the power of religion is of
all powers the greatest. Knowledge itself is a weak
instrument to stir the soul compared with religion;
morality has no way to the heart of man; but the
Gospel reaches the feelings and the intellect at once.
In nations as well as individuals, in barbarous times
as well as civilized, in the great crises of history
especially, even in the latest ages, when the minds of
men seem to wax cold, and all things remain the same
as at the beginning, it has shown itself to be a reality
without which human nature would cease to be what
it is. Almost every one has had the witness of it in
himself. No one, says Plato, ever passed from youth
to age in unbelief of the gods, in heathen times.
As a fact, it would be admitted by most, that, at some period of their lives, the thought of the world to come and of future judgement, the beauty and loveliness of the truths of the Gospel, the sense of the shortness of our days here, have wrought a more quickening and powerful effect than any moral truths or prudential maxims. Many a one would acknowledge that he has been carried whither he knew not; and had nobler thoughts, and felt higher aspirations, than the course of his ordinary life seemed to allow. These were the most important moments of his life for good or for evil; the critical points which have made him what he is, either as he used or neglected them. They came he knew not how, sometimes with some outward and apparent cause, at other times without,—the result of affliction or sickness, or ‘the wind blowing where it listeth’.
And if such changes and such critical points should be found to occur in youth more often than in age, in the poor and ignorant rather than in the educated, in women more often than in men, if reason and reflection seem to weaken as they regulate the springs of human action, this very fact may lead us to consider that reason, and reflection, and education, and the experience of age, and the force of manly sense, are not the links which bind us to the communion of the body of Christ; that it is rather to those qualities which we have, or may have, in common with our fellow men, that the Gospel is promised; and that it is with the weak, the poor, the babes in Christ,—not with the strong-minded, the resolute, the consistent,—that we shall sit down in the kingdom of heaven.
RELIGION and morality seem often to become en tangled in circumstances. The truth which came, not ‘to bring peace upon earth, but a sword’, could not but give rise to many new and conflicting obligations. The kingdom of God had to adjust itself with the kingdoms of this world; though ‘the children were free’, they could not escape the fulfilment of duties to their Jewish or Roman governors; in the bosom of a family there were duties too: in society there were many points of contact with the heathen. A new element of complexity had been introduced in all the relations between man and man, giving rise to many new questions, which might be termed, in the phraseology of modern times, ‘cases of conscience’.
Of these the one which most frequently recurs in
the Epistles of St. Paul, is the question respecting
meats and drinks, which appears to have agitated
both the Roman and Corinthian Churches, as well as
those of Jerusalem and Antioch, and probably, in
a greater or less degree, every other Christian community in the days of the Apostle. The scruple which
gave birth to it was not confined to Christianity; it
was Eastern rather than Christian, and originated
in a feeling into which entered, not only Oriental
notions of physical purity and impurity, but also
those of caste and of race. With other Eastern
influences it spread towards the West, in the flux of
The same tendency exhibited itself in various forms. In one form it was the scruple of those who ate herbs, while others ‘had faith’ to eat anything. The Essenes and Therapeutae among the Jews, and the Pythagoreans in the heathen world, had a similar feeling respecting the use of animal food. It was a natural association which led to such an abstinence. In the East, ever ready to connect, or rather incapable of separating, ideas of moral and physical impurity,—where the heat of the climate rendered animal food unnecessary, if not positively unhealthful; where corruption rapidly infected dead organized matter; where, lastly, ancient tradition and ceremonies told of the sacredness of animals and the mysteriousness of animal life,—nature and religion alike seemed to teach the same lesson, it was safer to abstain. It was the manner of such a scruple to propagate itself. He who revolted at animal food could not quietly sit by and see his neighbour partake of it. The ceremonialism of the age was the tradition of thousands of years, and passed by a sort of contagion from one race to another, from Paganism or Judaism to Christianity. How to deal with this ‘second nature’ was a practical difficulty among the first Christians. The Gospel was not a gospel according to the Essenes, and the church could not exclude those who held the scruples, neither could it be narrowed to them; it would not pass judgement on them at all. Hence the force of the Apostle’s words: ‘Him that is weak in the faith receive, not to the decision of his doubts.’
There was another point in reference to which the
same spirit of ceremonialism propagated itself, viz.
meats offered to idols. Even if meat in general
A third instance of the same ceremonialism so
natural to that age, and to ourselves so strange and
unmeaning, is illustrated by the words of the Jerusalem
On the last point St. Paul maintains but one
language:—‘In Christ Jesus there is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision.’ No compromise could be
allowed here, without destroying the Gospel that he
preached. But the other question of meats and
drinks, when separated from that of circumcision,
admitted of various answers and points of view.
Accordingly there is an appearance of inconsistency
in the modes in which the Apostle resolves it. All
these modes have a use and interest for ourselves;
though our difficulties are not the same as those of
the early Christians, the words speak to us, so long
We may begin with
So we may venture to amplify the Apostle’s precept, which breathes the same spirit of moderation as his decisions respecting celibacy and marriage. Among ourselves the remark is often made that ‘extremes are practically untrue’. This is another way of putting the same lesson:—If I may not sit in the idol’s temple, it may be plausibly argued, neither may I eat meats offered to idols; and if I may not eat meats offered to idols, then it logically follows that I ought not to go into the market where idols’ meat is sold. The Apostle snaps the chain of this misapplied logic: there must be a limit some where; we must not push consistency where it is practically impossible. A trifling scruple is raised to the level of a religious duty, and another and another, until religion is made up of scruples, and the light of life fades, and the ways of life narrow themselves.
It is not hard to translate the Apostle’s precept
In accordance with the spirit of the same principle
of doing as other men do, the Apostle further implies
that believers are to accept the hospitality of the
heathen (
Both in
Cases may be readily imagined, in which, like the
The Apostle adds a fourth principle, which may be
termed the law of Christian freedom, as the last
solution of the difficulty: ‘Therefore, whether ye eat
or drink, do all to the glory of God.’ From the
perplexities of casuistry, and the conflicting rights of
a man’s own conscience and that of another, he falls
back on the simple rule, ‘Whatever you do, sanctify
the act’. It cannot be said that all contradictory
obligations vanish the moment we try to act with
simplicity and truth; we cannot change the current of life and its circumstances
by a wish or an intention; we cannot dispel that which is without, though
Questions of meats and drinks, of eating with washen or unwashen hands, and the like, have passed from the stage of religious ordinances to that of proprieties and decencies of life. The purifications of the law of Moses are no longer binding upon Christians. Nature herself teaches all things necessary for health and comfort. But the spirit of casuistry in every age finds fresh materials to employ itself upon, laying hold of some question of a new moon or a sabbath, some fragment of antiquity, some inconsistency of custom, some subtlety of thought, some nicety of morality, analysing and dividing the actions of daily life; separating the letter from the spirit, and words from things; winding its toils around the infirmities of the weak, and linking itself to the sensibility of the intellect.
Out of this labyrinth of the soul the believer finds his way, by keeping his eye fixed on that landmark which the Apostle himself has set up: ‘In Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.’
There is no one probably, of any religious experience, who has not at times felt the power of a
scrupulous conscience. In speaking of a scrupulous
conscience, the sense of remorse for greater offences is
not intended to be included. These may press more
Strange as it may appear, it is nevertheless true,
that scruples about lesser matters almost always involve some dereliction of duty in greater or more
obvious ones. A tender conscience is a conscience
unequal to the struggles of life. At first sight it
seems as if, when lesser duties were cared for, the
greater would take care of themselves. But this is
not the lesson which experience teaches. In our
moral as in our physical nature, we are finite beings,
capable only of a certain degree of tension, ever liable
to suffer disorder and derangement, to be over-exercised in one part and weakened in another. No one
can fix his mind intently on a trifling scruple or
become absorbed in an eccentric fancy, without finding the great principles of truth and justice insensibly
depart from him. He has been looking through a
microscope at life, and cannot take in its general
scope. The moral proportions of things are lost to
him; the question of a new moon or a Sabbath has
taken the place of diligence or of honesty. There is
Scruples are dangerous in another way, as they tend to drive men into a corner in which the performance of our duty becomes so difficult as to be almost impossible. A virtuous and religious life does not consist merely in abstaining from evil, but in doing what is good. It has to find opportunities and occasions for itself, without which it languishes. A man has a scruple about the choice of a profession; as a Christian, he believes war to be unlawful; in familiar language, he has doubts respecting orders, difficulties about the law. Even the ordinary ways of conducting trade appear deficient to his nicer sense of honesty; or perhaps he has already entered on one of these lines of life, and finds it necessary to quit it. At last, there comes the difficulty of ‘how he is to live’. There cannot be a greater mistake than to suppose that a good resolution is sufficient in such a case to carry a man through a long life.
But even if we suppose the case of one who is
endowed with every earthly good and instrument of
prosperity, who can afford, as is sometimes said, to
trifle with the opportunities of life, still the mental
consequences will be hardly less injurious to him.
For he who feels scruples about the ordinary enjoyments and occupations of his fellows, does so far cut
himself off from his common nature. He is an
isolated being, incapable of acting with his fellow
men. There are plants which, though the sun shine
It is one of the peculiar dangers of scruples of conscience, that the consequence of giving way to them is never felt at the time that they press upon us. When the mind is worried by a thought secretly working in it, and its trial becomes greater than it can bear, it is eager to take the plunge in life that may put it out of its misery; to throw aside a profession it may be, or to enter a new religious communion. We shall not be wrong in promising ourselves a few weeks of peace and placid enjoyment. The years that are to follow we are incapable of realizing; whether the weary spirit will require some fresh pasture, will invent for itself some new doubt; whether its change is a return to nature or not, it is impossible for us to anticipate. Whether it has in itself that hidden strength which, under every change of circumstances, is capable of bearing up, is a question which we are the least able to determine for ourselves. In general we may observe, that the weakest minds, and those least capable of enduring such consequences, are the most likely to indulge the scruples. We know beforehand the passionate character, hidden often under the mask of reserve, the active yet half-reasoning intellect, which falls under the power of such illusions.
In the Apostolic Church ‘cases of conscience’ arose out of religious traditions, and what may be termed the ceremonial cast of the age; in modern times the most frequent source of them may be said to be the desire of logical or practical consistency, such as is irreconcilable with the mixed state of human affairs and the feebleness of the human intellect. There is no lever like the argument from consistency, with which to bring men over to our opinions. A particular system or view, Calvinism perhaps, or Catholicism, has taken possession of the mind. Shall we stop short of pushing its premises to their conclusions? Shall we stand in the midway, where we are liable to be over-ridden by the combatants on either side in the struggle? Shall we place ourselves between our reason and our affections; between our practical duties and our intellectual convictions? Logic would have us go forward, and take our stand at the most advanced point—we are there already, it is urged, if we were true to ourselves,—but feeling, and habit, and common sense bid us stay where we are, unable to give an account of ourselves, yet convinced that we are right. We may listen to the one voice, we may listen also to the other. The true way of guiding either is to acknowledge both; to use them for a time against each other, until experience of life and of ourselves has taught us to harmonize them in a single principle.
So, again, in daily life cases often occur, in which we must
do as other men do, and act upon a general understanding, even though unable to
reconcile a particular practice to the letter of truthfulness or even
to our individual conscience. It is hard in such cases
to lay down a definite rule. But in general we should
be suspicious of any conscientious scruples in which
other good men do not share. We shall do right to
So far we arrive at a general conclusion like St. Paul ‘s:—‘Whether ye eat or drink, do all to the glory of God’; and, ‘Blessed is he who condemneth not himself in that which he alloweth’. ‘Have the Spirit of truth, and the truth shall make you free’; and the entanglements of words and the perplexities of action will disappear. But there is another way in which such difficulties have been resolved, which meets them in detail; viz., the practice of confession and the rules of casuistry, which are the guides of the confessor. When the spirit is disordered within us, it may be urged that we ought to go out of ourselves, and confess our sins one to another. But he who leads, and he who is led, alike require some rules for the examination of conscience, to quicken or moderate the sense of sin, to assist experience, to show men to themselves as they really are, neither better nor worse. Hence the necessity for casuistry.
It is remarkable, that what is in idea so excellent
that it may be almost described in St. Paul’s language
as ‘holy, just, and good’, should have become a by-word
The unseen power by which the systems of the
casuists were brought into being, was the necessity
of the Roman Catholic Church. Like the allegorical
interpretation of Scripture, they formed a link between the present and the past. At the time of the
Reformation the doctrines of the ancient, no less than
of the Reformed, faith awakened into life. But they
required to be put in a new form, to reconcile them
to the moral sense of mankind. Luther ended the
work of self-examination by casting all his sins on
Christ. But the casuists could not thus meet the
awakening of men’s consciences and the fearful looking for of judgement. They had to deal with an
altered world, in which nevertheless the spectres of
So far it would not be untrue to say that casuistry had originated in an effort to reconcile the Roman Catholic faith with nature and experience. The Roman system was, if strictly carried out, horrible and impossible; a doctrine not, as it has been some times described, of salvation made easy, but of universal condemnation. From these fearful conclusions of logic the subtlety of the human intellect was now to save it. The analogy of law, as worked out by jurists and canonists, supplied the means. What was repugnant to human justice could not be agreeable to Divine. The scholastic philosophy, which had begun to die out and fade away before the light of classical learning, was to revive in a new form, no longer hovering between heaven and earth, out of the reach of experience, yet below the region of spiritual truth, but, as it seemed, firmly based in the life and actions of mankind. It was the same sort of wisdom which defined the numbers and order of the celestial hierarchy, which was now to be adapted to the infinite modifications of which the actions of men are capable.
It is obvious that there are endless points of view
By the aid of such distinctions the simplest principles of morality multiply to infinity. An instrument has been introduced of such subtlety and elasticity that it can accommodate the canons of the Church to any consciences, to any state of the world. Sin need no longer be confined to the dreadful distinction of mortal and venial sin; it has lost its infinite and mysterious character; it has become a thing of degrees, to be aggravated or mitigated in idea, according to the expediency of the case or the pliability of the confessor. It seems difficult to perpetrate a perfect sin. No man need die of despair; in some page of the writings of the casuists will be found a difference suited to his case. And this without in any degree interfering with a single doctrine of the Church, or withdrawing one of its anathemas against heresy.
The system of casuistry, destined to work such
great results, in reconciling the Church to the
world and to human nature, like a torn web needing
to be knit together, may be regarded as a science
or profession. It is a classification of human actions,
made in one sense without any reference to practice.
For nothing was further from the mind of the
casuist than to inquire whether a particular distinction would have a good or bad effect, was liable
to perversion or not. His object was only to make
such distinctions as the human mind was capable of
perceiving and acknowledging. As to the physiologist objects in themselves loathsome and disgusting
may be of the deepest interest, so to the casuist the
foulest and most loathsome vices of mankind are not
matters of abhorrence, but of science, to be arranged
The science was further complicated by the ‘doctrine of probability’, which consisted in making anything approved or approvable that was confirmed by authority; even, as was said by some, of a single casuist. That could not be very wrong which a wise and good man had once thought to be right,—a better than ourselves perhaps, surveying the circumstances calmly and impartially. Who would wish that the rule of his daily life should go beyond that of a saint and doctor of the Church? Who would require such a rule to be observed by another? Who would refuse another such an escape out of the labyrinth of human difficulties and perplexities? As in all the Jesuit distinctions, there was a kind of reasonableness in the theory of this; it did but go on the principle of cutting short scruples by the rule of common sense.
And yet, what a door was here opened for the
dishonesty of mankind! The science itself had
dissected moral action until nothing of life or meaning remained in it. It had thrown aside, at the
same time, the natural restraint which the moral
sense itself exercises in determining such questions.
And now for the application of this system, so
difficult and complicated in itself, so incapable of
receiving any check from the opinions of mankind,
The marvels of this science are not yet ended. For the same changes admit of being rung upon speech as well as upon action, until truth and falsehood become alike impossible. Language itself dissolves before the decomposing power; oaths, like actions, vanish into air when separated from the intention of the speaker; the shield of custom protects falsehood. It would be a curious though needless task to follow the subject into further details. He who has read one page of the casuists has read all. There is nothing that is not right in some particular point of view,—nothing that is not true under some previous supposition.
Such a system may be left to refute itself. Those
who have strayed so far away from truth and virtue
are self-condemned. Yet it is not without interest
to trace by what false lights of philosophy or religion
good men, revolting themselves at the commission of
evil, were led step by step to the unnatural result.
We should expect to find that such a result originated
not in any settled determination to corrupt the
morals of mankind, but in an intellectual error; and
it is suggestive of strange thoughts respecting our
moral nature, that an intellectual error should have
had the power to produce such consequences. Such
appears to have been the fact. The conception of
moral action on which the system depends, is as
erroneous and imperfect as that of the scholastic
philosophy respecting the nature of ideas. The
immediate reduction of the error to practice through
the agency of an order made the evil greater than
that of other intellectual errors on moral and religious
subjects, which, springing up in the brain of an
1. Casuistry ignores the difference between thought and action. Actions are necessarily external. The spoken word constitutes the lie; the outward performance the crime. The Highest Wisdom, it is true, has identified the two: ‘He that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery with her in his heart.’ But this is not the rule by which we are to judge our past actions, but to guard our future ones. He who has thoughts of lust or passion is not innocent in the sight of God, and is liable to be carried on to perform the act on which he suffers himself to dwell. And, in looking forward, he will do well to remember this caution of Christ: but in looking backward, in thinking of others, in endeavouring to estimate the actual amount of guilt or trespass, if he begins by placing thought on the level of action, he will end by placing action on the level of thought. It would be a monstrous state of mind in which we regarded mere imagination of evil as the same with action; hatred as the same with murder; thoughts of impurity as the same with adultery. It is not so that we must learn Christ. Actions are one thing and thoughts another in the eye of conscience, no less than of the law of the land; of God as well as man. However important it may be to remember that the all-seeing eye of God tries the reins, it is no less important to remember also that morality consists in definite acts, capable of being seen and judged of by our fellow creatures, impossible to escape ourselves.
2. What may be termed the frame of casuistry
was supplied by law, while the spirit is that of the
scholastic philosophy. Neither afforded any general
3. The distinctions of the casuist are far from
equalling the subtlety of human life, or the diversity
of its conditions. It is quite true that actions the
same in name are, in the scale of right and wrong, as
different as can be imagined; varying with the age,
temperament, education, circumstances of each individual. The casuist is not in fault for maintaining
this difference, but for supposing that he can classify
4. There are many cases in which our first thoughts,
or, to speak more correctly, our instinctive perceptions, are true and right; in which it is not too
much to say, that he who deliberates is lost. The
very act of turning to a book, or referring to an
other, enfeebles our power of action. Works of art
are produced we know not how, by some simultaneous
5. Casuistry not only renders us independent of
our own convictions, it renders us independent also
of the opinion of mankind in general. It puts the
confessor in the place of ourselves, and in the place
of the world. By making the actions of men matters of science, it cuts away the supports and safe
guards which public opinion gives to morality; the
confessor in the silence of the closet easily introduces
principles from which the common sense or conscience
of mankind would have shrunk back. Especially in
matters of truth and falsehood, in the nice sense of
honour shown in the unwillingness to get others
within our power, his standard will probably fall
short of that of the world at large. Public opinion,
it is true, drives men’s vices inwards; it teaches them
to conceal their faults from others, and if possible
from themselves, and this very concealment may sink
them in despair, or cover them with self-deceit. And
the soul—whose ‘house is its castle’—has an enemy
within, the strength of which may be often increased
To conclude, the errors and evils of casuistry may be summed up as follows:—It makes that abstract which is concrete, scientific which is contingent, artificial which is natural, positive which is moral, theoretical which is intuitive and immediate. It puts the parts in the place of the whole, exceptions in the place of rules, system in the place of experience, dependence in the place of responsibility, reflection in the place of conscience. It lowers the heavenly to the earthly, the principles of men to their practice, the tone of the preacher to the standard of ordinary life. It sends us to another for that which can only be found in ourselves. It leaves the high way of public opinion to wander in the labyrinths of an imaginary science; the light of the world for the darkness of the closet. It is to human nature what anatomy is to our bodily frame; instead of a moral and spiritual being, preserving only ‘a body of death’.
THE revelation of righteousness by faith in the Epistle to the Romans is relative to a prior condemnation of Jew and Gentile, who are alike convicted of sin. If the world had not been sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, there would have been no need of the light. And yet this very darkness is a sort of contradiction, for it is the darkness of the soul, which, nevertheless, sees itself and God. Such ‘darkness visible’ St. Paul had felt in himself, and, passing from the individual to the world, he lifts up the veil partially, and lets the light of God’s wrath shine upon the corruption of man. What he himself in the searchings of his own spirit had become conscious of was ‘written in large letters’ on the scene around. To all Israelites at least, the law stood in the same relation as it had once done to himself; it placed them in a state of reprobation. Without law ‘they had not had sin’, and now, the only way to do away with sin is to do away the law itself.
But, if ‘sin is not imputed where there is no law’, it might seem as though the heathen could not be
brought within the sphere of the same condemnation.
Could we suppose men to be like animals, ‘nourishing
a blind life within the brain’, ‘the seed that is not
quickened except it die’ would have no existence in
them. Common sense tells us that all evil implies
a knowledge of good, and that no man can be
responsible for the worship of a false God who has
Such is the train of thought which we perceive
to be working in the Apostle’s mind, and which
leads him, in accordance with the general scope of
the Epistle to the Romans, to speak of natural
religion. In two passages in the Acts he dwells on
the same subject. It was one that found a ready
response in the age to which St. Paul preached.
Reflections of a similar kind were not uncommon
among the heathen themselves. If at any time in
the history of mankind natural religion can be said
to have had a real and independent existence, it was
in the twilight of heathenism and Christianity. ‘Seeking after God, if haply they might feel after
Him and find Him’, is a touching description of the
efforts of philosophy in its later period. That there
were principles in Nature higher and purer than the
creations of mythology was a reflection made by
those who would have deemed ‘the cross of Christ
foolishness’, who ‘mocked at the resurrection of the
dead’. The Olympic heaven was no longer the air
which men breathed, or the sky over their heads.
The better mind of the world was turning from ‘dumb idols’. Ideas about God and man were
taking the place of the old heathen rites. Religions,
like nations, met and mingled. East and West were
While we remain within the circle of Scripture language, or think of St. Paul as speaking only to the men of his own age in words that were striking and appropriate to them, there is no difficulty in understanding his meaning. The Old Testament denounced idolatry as hateful to God. It was away from Him, out of His sight; except where it touched the fortunes of the Jewish people, hardly within the range either of His judgements or of His mercies. No Israelite, in the elder days of Jewish history, supposed the tribes round about, or the individuals who composed them, to be equally with himself the objects of God’s care. The Apostle brings the heathen back before the judgement seat of God. He sees them sinking into the condition of the old Canaanitish nations. He regards this corruption of Nature as a consequence of their idolatry. They knew, or might have known, God, for creation witnesses of Him. This is the hinge of the Apostle’s argument: ‘If they had not known God they had not had sin’; but now they know Him, and sin in the light of knowledge. Without this consciousness of sin there would be no condemnation of the heathen, and therefore no need of justification for him,—no parallelism or coherence between the previous states of Jew and Gentile, or between the two parts of the scheme of redemption.
But here philosophy, bringing into contrast the
Scriptural view of things and the merely historical
or human one, asks the question, ‘How far was it
The question here raised is one of the most
important, as it is perhaps one that has been least
considered, out of the many questions in which
reason and faith, historical fact and religious belief,
come into real or apparent conflict with each other.
Volumes have been written on the connexion of
geology with the Mosaic account of the creation,—a question which is on the outskirts of the great
difficulty,—a sort of advanced post, at which
theologians go out to meet the enemy. But we
cannot refuse seriously to consider the other difficulty,
It sometimes seems as if we lived in two, or rather
many distinct worlds,—the world of faith and the
world of experience,—the world of sacred and the
world of profane history. Between them there is a
gulf; it is not easy to pass from one to the other.
They have a different set of words and ideas, which
it would be bad taste to intermingle; and of how
much is this significant? They present themselves
to us at different times, and call up a different train
of associations. When reading Scripture we think
only of the heavens ‘which are made by the word of
God’, of ‘the winds and waves obeying his will’, of the accomplishment of events in history by the
interposition of His hand. But in the study of
ethnology or geology, in the records of our own or
past times, a curtain drops over the Divine presence;
human motives take the place of spiritual agencies;
effects are not without causes; interruptions of
Nature repose in the idea of law. Race, climate,
physical influences, states of the human intellect
and of society, are among the chief subjects of
ordinary history; in the Bible there is no allusion
to them; to the inspired writer they have no
existence. Were men different, then, in early ages,
or does the sacred narrative show them to us under
a different point of view? The being of whom
Scripture gives one account, philosophy another,—who has a share in Nature and a place in history,
who partakes also of a hidden life, and is the subject
of an unseen power,—is he not the same? This is
the difficulty of our times, which presses upon us
Yet the Scriptures lead the way in subjecting the purely supernatural and spiritual view of human things to the laws of experience. The revocation in Ezekiel of the ‘old proverb in the house of Israel’. is the assertion of a moral principle, and a return to fact and Nature. The words of our Saviour,—‘Think ye that those eighteen on whom the tower of Siloam fell, were sinners above all the men who dwelt in Jerusalem?’ and the parallel passage respecting the one born blind,—‘Neither this man did sin, nor his parents’, are an enlargement of the religious belief of the time in accordance with experience. When it is said that faith is not to look for wonders; or ‘the kingdom of God cometh not with observation’, and ‘neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead’, here, too, is an elevation of the order of Nature over the miraculous and uncommon. The preference of charity to extraordinary gifts is another instance, in which the spirit of Christ speaks by the lips of Paul, of a like tendency. And St. Paul himself, in recognizing a world without the Jewish, as responsible to God, and subject to His laws, is but carrying out, according to the knowledge of his age, the same principle which a wider experience of the world and of antiquity compels us to extend yet further to all time and to all mankind.
It has been asked: ‘How far, in forming a moral
Now the difference between these two views of
morality is analogous to the difference between the
way in which St. Paul regards the heathen religions,
and the way in which we ourselves regard them, in
proportion as we become better acquainted with
their true nature. St. Paul conceives idolatry
‘Moving all together if they move at all’.
to be suddenly freed from the bond of nationality, from the customs and habits of thought of ages. The moral life which is proper to the individual, he breathes into the world collectively. Speaking not of the agents and their circumstances, but of their acts, and seeing these reflected in what may be termed in a figure the conscience, not of an individual but of mankind in general, he passes on all men everywhere the sentence of condemnation. We can hardly venture to say what would have been his judgement on the great names of Greek and Roman history, had he familiarly known them. He might have felt as we feel, that there is a certain impropriety in attempting to determine, with a Jesuit writer, or even in the spirit of love and admiration which the great Italian poet shows for them, the places of the philosophers and heroes of antiquity in the world to come. More in his own spirit, he would have spoken of them as a part of ‘the mystery which was not then revealed as it now is’. But neither can we imagine how he could have become familiar with them at all without ceasing to be St. Paul.
Acquainted as we are with Greek and Roman
Among the many causes at present in existence which will influence ‘the Church of the future’, none is likely to have greater power than our increasing knowledge of the religions of mankind. The study of them is the first step in the philosophical study of revelation itself. For Christianity or the Mosaic religion, standing alone, is hardly a subject for scientific inquiry: only when compared with other forms of faith do we perceive its true place in history, or its true relation to human nature. The glory of Christianity is not to be as unlike other religions as possible, but to be their perfection and fulfilment. Those religions are so many steps in the education of the human race. One above an other, they rise or grow side by side, each nation, in many ages, contributing some partial ray of a divine light, some element of morality, some principle of social life, to the common stock of mankind. The thoughts of men, like the productions of Nature, do not endlessly diversify; they work themselves out in a few simple forms. In the fulness of time, philosophy appears, shaking off, yet partly retaining, the nationality and particularity of its heathen origin. Its top ‘reaches to heaven’, but it has no root in the common life of man. At last, the crown of all, the chief corner-stone of the building, when the impressions of Nature and the reflections of the mind upon itself have been exhausted, Christianity arises in the world, seeming to stand in the same relation to the inferior religions that man does to the inferior animals.
When, instead of painting harsh contrasts between
Christianity and other religions, we rather draw them
together as nearly as truth will allow, many thoughts
Some facts also begin to appear, which have
hitherto been unknown or concealed. They are of
two kinds, relating partly to the origin or development of the Jewish or Christian religion; partly also
independent of them, yet affording remarkable parallels both to their outward form and to their inner
life. Christianity is seen to have partaken much
more of the better mind of the Gentile world than Buddhism.
The Greek world presents another parallel with
the Gospel, which is also independent of it; less
striking, yet coming nearer home, and sometimes
overlooked because it is general and obvious. That
the political virtues of courage, patriotism, and the
like, have been received by Christian nations from a
classical source is commonly admitted. Let us ask
now the question, Whence is the love of knowledge?
who first taught men that the pursuit of truth was a
religious duty? Doubtless the words of one greater
than Socrates come into our minds: For this end
was I born, and for this cause came I into the world,
that they might know the truth’. But the truth
here spoken of is of another and more mysterious
kind; not truth in the logical or speculative sense of
the word, nor even in its ordinary use. The earnest
inquiry after the nature of things, the devotion of a
life to such an inquiry, the forsaking all other good
in the hope of acquiring some fragment of true knowledge,—this is an instance of human virtue not to be
found among the Jews, but among the Greeks. It
is a phenomenon of religion, as well as of philosophy,
that among the Greeks too there should have been
those who, like the Jewish prophets, stood out from
the world around them, who taught a lesson, like
them, too exalted for the practice of mankind in
general; who anticipated out of the order of nature
the knowledge of future ages; whose very chance
words and misunderstood modes of speech have
moulded the minds of men in remote times and
countries. And that these teachers of mankind, ‘as
they were finishing their course’ in the decline of
Paganism, like Jewish prophets, though unacquainted
But it is not only the better mind of heathenism
in East or West that affords parallels with the
Christian religion: the corruptions of Christianity,
its debasement by secular influences, its temporary
decay at particular times or places, receive many
illustrations from similar phenomena in ancient times
and heathen countries. The manner in which the
Old Testament has taken the place of the New; the
tendency to absorb the individual life in the outward
church; the personification of the principle of separation from the world in monastic orders; the accumulation of wealth with the profession of poverty;
the spiritualism, or childlike faith, of one age, and
the rationalism or formalism of another; many of the
minute controversial disputes which exist between
Christians respecting doctrines both of natural and
revealed religion;—all these errors or corruptions of
Christianity admit of being compared with similar
appearances either in Buddhism or Mahomedanism.
Is not the half-believing half-sceptical attitude in
which Socrates and others stood to the ‘orthodox’ pagan faith very similar to that in which philosophers, and in some countries educated men generally,
have stood to established forms of Christianity? Is
it only in Christian times that men have sought to
consecrate art in the service of religion? Did not
Paganism do so far more completely? or was it
Plato only to whom moral ideas represented themselves in sensual forms? Has not the whole vocabulary of art, in modern times, become confused
Those religions which possess sacred books furnish
some other curious, though exaggerated, likenesses of
the use which was been sometimes made of the Jewish
or Christian Scriptures. No believer in organic or
verbal inspiration has applied more high-sounding
titles to the Bible than the Brahmin or Mussulman
to the Koran or the Vedas. They have been loaded
with commentaries—buried under the accumulations
of tradition; no care has been thought too great of
their words and letters, while the original meaning
has been lost, and even the language in which they
were written ceased to be understood. Every method
of interpretation has been practised upon them; logic
and mysticism have elicited every possible sense; the
aid of miracles has been called in to resolve difficulties
Let us conclude this digression by summing up the use of such inquiries; as a touchstone and witness of Christian truth; as bearing on our relations with the heathens themselves.
Christianity, in its way through the world, is ever
taking up and incorporating with itself Jewish,
secular, or even Gentile elements. And the use of
the study of the heathen religions is just this: it
teaches us to separate the externals or accidents of
Christianity from its essence; its local, temporary
type from its true spirit and life. These externals,
which Christianity has in common with other religions
of the East, may be useful, may be necessary, but
they are not the truths which Christ came on earth
to reveal. The fact of the possession of sacred
books, and the claim which is made for them, that
they are free from all error or imperfection, if
admitted, would not distinguish the Christian from
The study of ‘comparative theology’ not only
helps to distinguish the accidents from the essence
of Christianity; it also affords a new kind of
testimony to its truth; it shows what the world
was aiming at through many cycles of human history—what the Gospel alone fulfilled. The Gentile
religions, from being enemies, become witnesses of
the Christian faith. They are no longer adverse
positions held by the powers of evil, but outworks or
buttresses, like the courts of the Temple on Mount
Sion, covering the holy place. Granting that some
of the doctrines and teachers of the heathen world
were nearer the truth than we once supposed, such
resemblances cause no alarm or uneasiness; we have
no reason to fable that they are the fragments of
some primeval revelation. We look forwards, not
backwards; to the end, not to the beginning; not
to the garden of Eden, but to the life of Christ.
There is no longer any need to maintain a thesis;
we have the perfect freedom and real peace which is
attained by the certainty that we know all, and that
nothing is kept back. Such was the position of
Christianity in former ages; it was on a level with
the knowledge of mankind. But in later years
The study of the religions of the world has also
a bearing on the present condition of the heathen.
We cannot act upon men unless we understand
them; we cannot raise or elevate their moral
character unless we are able to draw from its
concealment the seed of good which they already
contain. It is a remarkable fact, that Christianity,
springing up in the East, should have conquered the
whole western world, and that in the East itself it
should have scarcely extended its border, or even
retained its original hold. ‘Westward the course of
Christianity has taken its way’; and now it seems as if the two ends of the world
would no longer meet;
And yet the command remains: ‘Go forth and preach the Gospel to every creature’. Nor can any blessing be conceived greater than the spread of Christianity among heathen nations, nor any calling nobler or higher to which Christians can devote themselves. Why are we unable to fulfil this command in any effectual manner? Is it that the Gospel has had barriers set to it, and that the stream no longer overflows on the surrounding territory; that we have enough of this water for ourselves, but not enough for us and them? or that the example of nominal Christians, who are bent on their own trade or interest, destroys the lesson which has been preached by the ministers of religion? Yet the lives of believers did not prevent the spread of Christianity at Corinth and Ephesus. And it is hard to suppose that the religion which is true for ourselves has lost its vital power in the world.
The truth seems to be, not that Christianity has
lost its power, but that we are seeking to propagate
Christianity under circumstances which, during the
eighteen centuries of its existence, it has never yet
encountered. Perhaps there may have been a want
of zeal, or discretion, or education in the preachers;
sometimes there may have been too great a desire
to impress on the mind of the heathen some peculiar
doctrine, instead of the more general lesson of ‘righteousness, temperance, judgement to come’. But however this may be, there is no reason to
believe that even if a saint or apostle could rise
from the dead, he would produce by his preaching
alone, without the use of other means, any wide or
deep impression on India or China. To restore life
to those countries is a vast and complex work, in
In the direct preaching of the Gospel, no help
can be greater than that which is gained from a
knowledge of the heathen religions. The resident
in heathen countries readily observes the surface of
the world; he has no difficulty in learning the habits
of the natives; he avoids irritating their fears or
jealousies. It requires a greater effort to understand
the mind of a people; to be able to rouse or calm
them; to sympathize with them, and yet to rule
them. But it is a higher and more commanding
knowledge still to comprehend their religion, not
only in its decline and corruption, but in its origin
and idea,—to understand that which they misunderstand, to appeal to that which they reverence
against themselves, to turn back the currents of
thought and opinion which have flowed in their
veins for thousands of years. Such is the kind of
knowledge which St. Paul had when to the Jews he
became as a Jew, that he might win some; which
led him while placing the new and old in irreconcilable opposition, to bring forth the new out of the
treasure-house of the old. No religion, at present
existing in the world, stands in the same relation to
Christianity that Judaism once did; there is no
other religion which is prophetic or anticipatory of
it. But neither is there any religion which does
not contain some idea of truth, some notion of duty
or obligation, some sense of dependence on God and
brotherly love to man, some human feeling of home
or country. As in the vast series of the animal
creation, with its many omissions and interruptions,
Natural religion, in the sense in which St. Paul
appeals to its witness, is confined within narrower
limits. It is a feeling rather than a philosophy; and
rests not on arguments, but on impressions of God
in nature. The Apostle, in the first chapter of the
Romans, does not reason from first causes or from
final causes; abstractions like these would not have
been understood by him. Neither is he taking an
historical survey of the religions of mankind; he
touches, in a word only, on those who changed the
glory of God into the ‘likeness of man, and birds,
and four-footed beasts, and creeping things’ (
The appeal to the witness of God in nature has
passed from the Old Testament into the New; it is
one of the many points which the Epistles of St.
Paul and the Psalms and Prophets have in common. ‘The invisible things from the creation of the world
are clearly seen, being understood by the things that
are made’, is another way of saying, ‘The heavens
declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handywork’. Yet the conception of the Old
Testament is not the same with that of the New: in
the latter we seem to be more disengaged from the
things of sense; the utterance of the former is more
that of feeling, and less of reflection. One is the
poetry of a primitive age, full of vivid immediate
impressions; in the other nature is more distant,—the freshness of the first vision of earth has passed
away. The Deity Himself, in the Hebrew Scriptures,
has a visible form: as He appeared ‘with the body
of heaven in his clearness’; as He was seen by the
prophet Ezekiel out of the midst of the fire and the
whirlwind, ‘full of eyes within and without, and the
spirit of the living creature in the wheels’. But in
the New Testament, ‘No man hath seen God at any
time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom
of the Father, he hath declared him’. And this
But the God of nature in the Old Testament is
not the God of storms or of battles only, but of
peace and repose. Sometimes a sort of confidence
fills the breast of the Psalmist, even in that land
of natural convulsions: ‘He hath set the round
world so fast that it cannot be moved’. At other
times the same peace seems to diffuse itself over the
scenes of daily life: ‘The hills stand round about Jerusalem, even so is the Lord
round about them that fear him’. ‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he
leadeth me beside the still waters.’ Then again the Psalmist wonders at the
contrast between man and the other glories of creation: ‘When I consider the heavens, the work of
thy hands, the moon and the stars, that thou hast
ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of
him? or the son of man, that thou visitest him?’ Yet these ‘glories’ are the images also of a higher
glory; Jerusalem itself is transfigured into a city
in the clouds, and the tabernacle and temple become
the pavilion of God on high. And the dawn of day
in the prophecies, as well as in the Epistles, is the
light which is to shine ‘for the healing of the
nations’. There are other passages in which the
thought of the relation of God to nature calls forth
a sort of exulting irony, and the prophet speaks of
God, not so much as governing the world, as looking
down upon it and taking His pastime in it: ‘It is
He that sitteth upon the circle of the heavens, and
the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers’; or ‘He measureth the waters in the hollow of His hand’; or
‘He taketh up the isles as a very little thing’: the
It is hard to say how far such meditations belong only to particular ages, or to particular temperaments in our own. Doubtless, the influence of natural scenery differs with difference of climate, pursuits, education. ‘The God of the hills is not the God of the valleys also’; that is to say, the aspirations of the human heart are roused more by the singular and uncommon, than by the quiet landscape which presents itself in our own neighbourhood. The sailor has a different sense of the vastness of the great deep and the infinity of the heaven above, from what is possible to another. Dwellers in cities, no less than the inhabitants of the desert, gaze upon the stars with different feelings from those who see the ever-varying forms of the seasons. What impression is gathered, or what lesson conveyed, seems like matter of chance or fancy. The power of these sweet influences often passes away when language comes between us and them. Yet they are not mere dreams of our own creation. He who has lost, or has failed to acquire, this interest in the beauty of the world around, is without one of the greatest of earthly blessings. The voice of God in nature calls us away from selfish cares into the free air and the light of day. There, as in a world the face of which is not marred by human passion, we seem to feel ‘that the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest’.
It is impossible that our own feeling towards
nature in the present day can be the same with that
It is a simpler, not a lower, lesson which we gather
from the Apostle. First, he teaches that in Nature
there is something to draw us from the visible to
the invisible. The world to the Gentiles also had
seemed full of innumerable deities; it is really full of
the presence of Him who made it. Secondly, the
Apostle teaches the universality of God’s providence
over the whole earth. He covered it with inhabitants, to whom He gave their times and places of
Aspects of Nature in different ages have changed
before the eye of man; at times fruitful of many
thoughts; at other times either unheeded or fading
into insignificance in comparison of the inner world.
When the Apostle spoke of the visible things which ‘witness of the divine power and glory’, it was not
the beauty of particular spots which he recalled;
his eye was not satisfied with seeing the fairness of
the country any more than the majesty of cities.
He did not study the flittings of shadows on the
hills, or even the movements of the stars in their
courses. The plainest passages of the book of nature
were, equally with the sublimest, the writing of
a Divine hand. Neither was it upon scenes of earth
that he was looking when he spoke of the ‘whole
creation groaning together until now’. Whatever
When thoughts like these fill the mind, there is
little room for reflection on the world without.
Even the missionary in modern times hardly cares
to go out of his way to visit a picturesque country
or the monuments of former ages. He is ‘determined
to know one thing only, Christ crucified’. Of the
beauties of creation, his chief thought is that they
are the work of God. He does not analyse them by
rules of taste, or devise material out of them for
literary discourse. The Apostle, too, in the abundance of his revelations, has
an eye turned inward on another world. It is not that he is dead to Nature, but
that it is out of his way; not as in the Old Testament, the veil or frame of the
Divine presence, but only the background of human nature and of revelation. When
speaking of the heathen, it comes readily into his thoughts; it never seems to
occur to him in connexion with the work of Christ.
In the common use of language natural religion is opposed to revealed. That which men know, or seem to know, of themselves, which if the written word were to be destroyed would still remain, which existed prior to revelation, and which might be imagined to survive it, which may be described as general rather than special religion, as Christianity rationalized into morality, which speaks of God, but not of Christ,—of nature, but not of grace,—has been termed natural religion. Philosophical arguments for the being of a God are comprehended under the same term. It is also used to denote a supposed primitive or patriarchal religion, whether based on a primeval revelation or not, from which the mythologies or idolatries of the heathen world are conceived to be offshoots.
The line has been sometimes sharply drawn between
natural and revealed religion; in other ages of the
world, the two have been allowed to approximate, or
be almost identified with each other. Natural religion has been often depressed with a view to the
exaltation of revealed; the feebleness of the one
seeming to involve a necessity for the other. Natural
And if, turning away from the complexity of
human life in our own age to the beginning of
things, we try to conceive revelation in its purity
before it came into contact with other influences, or
mingled in the great tide of political and social
existence, we are still unable to distinguish between
natural and revealed religion. Our difficulty is like
the old Aristotelian question, how to draw the line
between the moral and intellectual faculties. Let
us imagine a first moment at which revelation came
But although the opposition of natural and
revealed religion is an opposition of abstractions, to
which no facts really correspond, the term natural
religion may be conveniently used to describe that
aspect or point of view in which religion appears
when separated from Judaism or Christianity. It
i. Natural religion in the first sense is an idea
and not a fact. The same tendency in man which
has made him look fondly on a golden age, has
made him look back also to a religion of nature.
Like the memory of childhood, the thought of the
past has a strange power over us; imagination lends
it a glory which is not its own. What can be more
natural than that the shepherd, wandering over the
earth beneath the wide heavens, should ascend in
thought to the throne of the Invisible? There is
a refreshment to the fancy in thinking of the morning of the world’s day, when the sun arose pure and
bright, ere the clouds of error darkened the earth.
Everywhere, as a fact, the first inhabitants of earth
of whom history has left a memorial are sunk in
helpless ignorance. Yet there must have been
a time, it is conceived, of which there are no
The origin of an error so often illustrates the
truth, that it is worth while to pause for an instant
and consider the source of this fallacy, which in all
ages has exerted a great influence on mankind,
reproducing itself in many different forms among
heathen as well as Christian writers. In technical
language, it might be described as the fallacy of
putting what is intelligible in the place of what is
true. It is easy to draw an imaginary picture of
a golden or pastoral age, such as poetry has always
described it. The mode of thought is habitual and
familiar, the phrases which delineate it are traditional, handed on from one set of poets to another,
repeated by one school of theologians to the next.
It is a different task to imagine the old world as
it truly was, that is, as it appears to us, dimly
yet certainly, by the unmistakable indications of
language and of mythology. It is hard to picture
scenes of external nature unlike what we have ever
beheld: but it is harder far so to lay aside ourselves
as to imagine an inner world unlike our own, forms
of belief, not simply absurd, but indescribable and
unintelligible to us. No one, probably, who has
not realized the differences of the human mind in
different ages and countries, either by contact with
heathen nations or the study of old language and
Instead of this difficult and laborious process, we readily conceive of man in the earliest stages of society as not different, but only less than we are. We suppose him deprived of the arts, unacquainted with the truths of Christianity, without the knowledge obtained from books, and yet only unlike us in the simplicity of his tastes and habitudes. We generalize what we are ourselves, and drop out the particular circumstances and details of our lives, and then suppose ourselves to have before us the dweller in Mesopotamia in the days of Abraham, or the patriarchs going down to gather corn in Egypt. This imaginary picture of a patriarchal religion has had such charms for some minds, that they have hoped to see it realized on the wreck of Christianity itself. They did not perceive that they were deluding themselves with a vacant dream which has never yet filled the heart of man.
Philosophers have illustrated the origin of government by a picture of mankind meeting together in
a large plain, to determine the rights of governors
and subjects; in like manner we may assist imagination, by conceiving the multitude of men with their
tribes, races, features, languages, convoked in the
plains of the East, to hear from some inspired
legislator as Moses, or from the voice of God
himself, a revelation about God and nature, and
their future destiny; such a revelation in the first
day of the world’s history as the day of judgement
will be at the last. Let us fix our minds, not on
the Giver of the revelation, but on the receivers of
it. Must there not have been in them some common
sense, or faculty, or feeling, which made them capable
ii. The theory of a primitive tradition, common to
all mankind, has only to be placed distinctly before
the mind, to make us aware that it is the fabric of
a vision. But, even if it were conceivable, it would
be inconsistent with facts. Ancient history says
nothing of a general religion, but of particular
national ones; of received beliefs about places and
persons, about animal life, about the sun, moon, and
stars, about the Divine essence permeating the
world? about gods in the likeness of men appearing
But although we find no vestiges of a primeval
revelation, and cannot imagine how such a revelation
could have been possible consistently with those
indications of the state of man which language and
mythology supply, it is true, nevertheless, that the
primitive peoples of mankind have a religious principle common to all. Religion, rather than reason,
is the faculty of man in the earliest stage of his
existence. Reverence for powers above him is the
first principle which raises the individual out of
himself; the germ of political order, and probably
also of social life. It is the higher necessity of
nature, as hunger and the animal passions are the
lower. ‘The clay’ falls before the rising dawn;
it may stumble over stocks and stones; but it is
struggling upwards into a higher day. The worshipper is drawn as by a magnet to some object out
of himself. He is weak and must have a god; he
has the feeling of a slave towards his master, of
a child towards its parents, of the lower animals
towards himself. The Being whom he serves is, like
himself, passionate and capricious; he sees him
starting up everywhere in the unmeaning accidents
of life. The good which he values himself he
attributes to him; there is no proportion in his
ideas; the great power of nature is the lord also
of sheep and oxen. Sometimes, with childish joy,
he invites the god to drink of his beverage or eat
of his food; at other times, the orgies which he
enacts before him, lead us seriously to ask the
question ‘whether religion may not in truth have
been a kind of madness’. He propitiates him and
Out of this troubled and perplexed state of the
human fancy the great religions of the world arose,
all of them in different degrees affording a rest to
the mind, and reducing to rule and measure the way
ward impulses of human nature. All of them had
a history in antecedent ages; there is no stage in
which they do not offer indications of an earlier
religion which preceded them. Whether they came
into being, like some geological formations, by slow
deposits, or, like others, by the shock of an earth
quake, that is, by some convulsion and settlement
of the human mind, is a question which may be
suggested, but cannot be answered. The Hindoo
Pantheon, even in the antique form in which the
world of deities is presented in the Vedas, implies
a growth of fancy and ceremonial which may have
continued for thousands of years. Probably at a
much earlier period than we are able to trace them,
religions, like languages, had their distinctive
characters with corresponding differences in the first
rude constitution of society. As in the case of
languages, it is a fair subject of inquiry, whether
they do not all mount up to some elementary type
But if the first origin of the heathen religions is in
the clouds, their decline, though a phenomenon with
which we are familiar in history, of which in some
parts of the world we are living witnesses, is also
obscure to us. The kind of knowledge that we have
of them is like our knowledge of the ways of animals;
we see and observe, but we cannot get inside them;
we cannot think or feel with their worshippers.
Most or all of them are in a state of decay; they
have lost their life or creative power; once adequate
to the wants of man, they have ceased to be so for
ages. Naturally we should imagine that the religion
itself would pass away when its meaning was no
longer understood; that with the spirit, the letter
too would die; that when the circumstances of a
nation changed, the rites of worship to which they
had given birth would be forgotten. The reverse is
the fact. Old age affords examples of habits which
become insane and inveterate at a time when they
have no longer an object; that is an image of the
antiquity of religions. Modes of worship, rules of
One of our first inquiries in reference to the elder
religions of the world is how we may adjust them to
our own moral and religious ideas. Moral elements
seem at first sight to be wholly wanting in them.
In the modern sense of the term, they are neither
moral nor immoral, but natural; they have no idea
of right and wrong, as distinct from the common
opinion or feeling of their age and country. No
action in Homer, however dishonourable or treacherous, calls forth moral reprobation. Neither gods
nor men are expected to present any ideal of justice
or virtue; their power or splendour may be the
theme of the poet’s verse, not their truth or goodness. The only principle on which the Homeric
deities reward mortals, is in return for gifts and
sacrifices, or from personal attachment. A later
age made a step forwards in morality and backwards
at the same time; it acquired clearer ideas of right
and wrong, but found itself encumbered with conceptions of fate and destiny. The vengeance of the
Eumenides has but a rude analogy with justice; the
personal innocence of the victim whom the gods
pursued is a part of the interest, in some instances,
of Greek tragedy. Higher and holier thoughts of the
Divine nature appear in Pindar and Sophocles, and
Yet, in a lower sense, it is true that the heathen religions, even in their primitive form, are not destitute of morality. Their morality is unconscious morality, not ‘man a law to himself’, but ‘man bound by the will of a superior being’. Ideas of right and wrong have no place in them, yet the first step has been made from sense and appetite into the ideal world. He who denies himself something, who offers up a prayer, who practises a penance, performs an act, not of necessity, nor of choice, but of duty; he does not simply follow the dictates of passion, though he may not be able to give a reason for the performance of his act. He whose God comes first in his mind has an element within him which in a certain degree sanctifies his life by raising him above himself. He has some common interest with other men, some unity in which he is comprehended with them. There is a preparation for thoughts yet higher; he contrasts the permanence of divine and the fleeting nature of human things; while the generations of men pass away ‘like leaves’, the form of his God is unchanging, and grows not old.
Differences in modes of thought render it difficult
for us to appreciate what spiritual elements lurked
in disguise among the primitive peoples of mankind.
Many allowances must be made before we judge them
by our own categories. They are not to be censured
for indecency because they had symbols which to
after ages became indecent and obscene. Neither
were they mere Fetish worshippers because they use
sensuous expressions. Religion, like language, in
early ages takes the form of sense, but that form of
sense is also the embodiment of thought. The
These are a few of the differences for which we
have to allow in a comparison of our own and other
times and countries. We must say to ourselves, at
every step, human nature in that age was unlike the
We may conclude this portion of our subject with a few remarks on the Greek and Roman religions, which have a peculiar interest to us for several reasons: first, because they have exercised a vast influence on modern Europe, the one through philosophy, the other through law, and both through literature and poetry; secondly, because, almost alone of the heathen religions, they came into contact with early Christianity; thirdly, because they are the religions of ancient, as Christianity is of modern civilization.
The religion of Greece is remarkable for being
a literature as well as a religion. Its deities are ‘nameless’ to us before Homer; to the Greek
himself it began with the Olympic family. Whatever
dim notions existed of chaos and primaeval night—of struggles for ascendency between the elder and
younger gods, these fables are buried out of sight
before Greek mythology begins. The Greek came
And yet the great riddle of existence was not
answered: its deeper mysteries were not explored.
The strife of man with himself was healed only
superficially; there was beauty and proportion
everywhere, but no ‘true being’. The Jupiter
Olympius of Phidias might seem worthy to preside
over the Greek world which he summoned before
him; the Olympic victor might stand godlike in the
No religion that failed to satisfy these cries of nature could become the religion of mankind. Greek art and Greek literature, losing something of their original refinement, spread themselves over the Roman world; except Christianity, they have be come the richest treasure of modern Europe. But the religion of Greece never really grew in another soil, or beneath another heaven; it was local and national: dependent on the fine and subtle perceptions of the Greek race; though it amalgamated its deities with those of Egypt and Rome, its spirit never swayed mankind. It has a truer title to permanence and universality in the circumstance that it gave birth to philosophy.
The Greek mind passed, almost unconsciously to
itself, from polytheism to monotheism. While offering up worship to the Dorian Apollo, performing
vows to Esculapius, panic-stricken about the mutilation of the Hermae, the Greek was also able to
think of God as an idea, Θεός not Ζεύς. In this
generalized or abstract form the Deity presided over
daily life. Not a century after Anaxagoras had
introduced the distinction of mind and matter, it
was the belief of all philosophic inquirers that God
was mind, or the object of mind. The Homeric
gods were beginning to be out of place; philosophy
could not distinguish Apollo from Athene, or Leto
What the religion of Greece was to philosophy
and art, that the Roman religion may be said to
have been to political and social life. It was the
religion of the family; the religion also of the empire
of the world. Beginning in rustic simplicity, the
traces of which it ever afterwards retained, it grew
with the power of the Roman state, and became one
with its laws. No fancy or poetry moulded the
forms of the Roman gods; they are wanting in
character and hardly distinguishable from one
another. Not what they were, but their worship,
More interesting for us than the pursuit of this
subject into further details is the inquiry, in what
light the philosopher regarded the religious system
within the circle of which he lived; the spirit of which animated Greek and
Roman poetry, the observance of which was the bond of states. In the
age of the Antonines, more than six hundred years
had passed away since the Athenian people first
became conscious of the contrariety of the two
elements; and yet the wedge which philosophy had
inserted in the world seemed to have made no impression on the deeply rooted customs of mankind.
The ever-flowing stream of ideas was too feeble to
Such was the later phase of the religion of nature, with which Christianity came into conflict. It had supplied some of the needs of men by assisting to build up the fabric of society and law. It had left room for others to find expression in philosophy or art. But it was a world divided against itself. It contained two nations or opinions ‘struggling in its womb’; the nation or opinion of the many, and the nation or opinion of the few. It was bound together in the framework of law or custom, yet its morality fell below the natural feelings of mankind, and its religious spirit was confused and weakened by the admixture of foreign superstitions. It was a world of which it is not difficult to find traces that it was self-condemned. It might be compared to a fruit, the rind of which was hard and firm, while within it was soft and decaying. Within this outer rind or circle, for two centuries and a half, Christianity was working; at last it appeared without, itself the seed or kernel of a new organization. That when the conflict was over, and the world found itself Christian, many elements of the old religion still remained, and reasserted themselves in Christian forms; that the ‘ghost of the dead Roman Empire’ lingered ‘about the grave thereof’; that Christianity accomplished only imperfectly what heathenism failed to do at all, is a result unlike pictures that are sometimes drawn, but sadly in accordance with what history teaches of mankind and of human nature.
Natural religion is not only concerned with the history of the religions of nature, nor does it only reflect that ‘light of the Gentiles’ which philosophy imparted; it has to do with the present as well as with the past, with Christian as well as heathen countries. Revealed religion passes into natural, and natural religion exists side by side with revealed; there is a truth independent of Christianity; and the daily life of Christian men is very different from the life of Christ. This general or natural religion may be compared to a wide-spread lake, shallow and motionless, rather than to a living water,—the overflowing of the Christian faith over a professing Christian world, the level of which may be at one time higher or lower; it is the religion of custom or prescription, or rather the unconscious influence of religion on the minds of men in general; it includes also the speculative idea of religion when taken off the Christian foundation. Natural religion, in this modern sense, has a relation both to philosophy and life. That is to say (1), it is a theory of religion which appeals to particular evidences for the being of a God, though resting, perhaps more safely, on the general conviction that ‘this universal frame cannot want a mind’. But it has also a relation to life and practice (2), for it is the religion of the many; the average, as it may be termed, of religious feeling in a Christian land, the leaven of the Gospel hidden in the world. St. Paul speaks of those ‘who knowing not the law are a law unto themselves’. Experience seems to show that something of the same kind must be acknowledged in Christian as well as in heathen countries; which may be conveniently considered under the head of natural religion.
Arguments for the being of a God are of many kinds. There are arguments from final causes, and arguments from first causes, and arguments from ideas; logical forms, as they appear to be, in which different metaphysical schools mould their faith. Of the first sort the following may be taken as an instance:—A person walking on the seashore finds a watch or other piece of mechanism; he observes its parts, and their adaptation to each other; he sees the watch in motion, and comprehends the aim of the whole. In the formation of that senseless material he perceives that which satisfies him that it is the work of intelligence, or, in other words, the marks of design. And looking from the watch to the world around him, he seems to perceive innumerable ends, and innumerable actions tending to them, in the composition of the world itself, and in the structure of plants and animals. Advancing a step further, he asks himself the question, why he should not acknowledge the like marks of design in the moral world also; in passions and actions, and in the great end of life. Of all there is the same account to be given—‘the machine of the world’, of which God is the Maker.
This is the celebrated argument from final causes
for the being of a God, the most popular of the
arguments of natural religion, partly because it admits of much ingenious illustration, and also because
it is tangible and intelligible. Ideas of a Supreme
Being must be given through something, for it is
impossible that we should know Him as He is.
And the truest representation that we can form of
God is, in one sense, that which sets forth His nature
most vividly; yet another condition must also be
remembered, viz. that this representation ought not
only to be the most distinct, but the highest and
(α) In the argument from final causes, the work of the Creator is compared to a work of art. Art is a poor figure of nature; it has no freedom or luxuriance. Between the highest work of art and the lowest animal or vegetable production, there is an interval which will never be spanned. The miracle of life derives no illustration from the handicraftsman putting his hand to the chisel, or anticipating in idea the form which he is about to carve. More truly might we reason, that what the artist is, the God of nature is not. For all the processes of nature are unlike the processes of art. If, instead of a watch, or some other piece of curious and exquisite workmanship, we think of a carpenter and a table, the force of the argument seems to vanish, and the illustration becomes inappropriate and unpleasing. The ingenuity and complexity of the structure, and not the mere appearance of design, makes the watch a natural image of the creation of the world.
(β) But not only does the conception of the artist
supply no worthy image of the Creator and His
work; the idea of design which is given by it
(γ) This difference between art and nature leads us
to observe another defect in the argument from final
causes—that, instead of putting the world together,
it takes it to pieces. It fixes our minds on those
parts of the world which exhibit marks of design,
and withdraws us from those in which marks of
design seem to fail. There are formations in nature,
such as the hand, which have a kind of mechanical
beauty, and show in a striking way, even to an
uneducated person, the wonder and complexity of
creation. In like manner we feel a momentary surprise in finding out, through the agency of a micro
scope, that the minutest creatures have their fibres,
tissues, vessels. And yet the knowledge of this is
(δ) Again, this teleological argument for the being of God gives an erroneous idea of the moral government of the world. For it leads us to suppose that all things are tending to some end; that there is no prodigality or waste, but that all things are, and are made, in the best way possible. Our faith must be tried to find a use for barren deserts, for venomous reptiles, for fierce wild beasts, nay, for the sins and miseries of mankind. Nor does ‘there seem to be any resting place’, until the world and all things in it are admitted to have some end impressed upon them by the hand of God, but unseen to us. Experience is cast aside while our meditations lead us to conceive the world under this great form of a final cause. All that is in nature is best; all that is in human life is best. And yet every one knows instances in which nature seems to fail of its end,—in which life has been cut down like a flower, and trampled under foot of man.
(ε) There is another way in which the argument
from final causes is suggestive of an imperfect conception of the Divine Being. It presents God to us
exclusively in one aspect, not as a man, much less
as a spirit holding communion with our spirit, but
only as an artist. We conceive of Him, as in the
(ζ) If we look to the origin of the notion of a final
cause, we shall feel still further indisposed to make
it the category under which we sum up the working
of the Divine Being in creation. As Aristotle, who
probably first made a philosophical use of the term,
says, it is transferred from mind to matter; in other
words, it clothes facts in our ideas. Lord Bacon offers another warning against the employment of
final causes in the service of religion: ‘they are like
the vestals consecrated to God, and are barren.’ They are a figure of speech which adds nothing
to our knowledge. When applied to the Creator,
they are a figure of a figure; that is to say, the
figurative conception of the artist embodied or
idealized in his work, is made the image of the
Divine Being. And no one really thinks of God
in nature under this figure of human skill. As
certainly as the man who found a watch or piece
of mechanism on the seashore would conclude, ‘here
are marks of design, indications of an intelligent
artist’, so certainly, if he came across the meanest
or the highest of the works of nature, would he
infer, ‘this was not made by man, nor by any human
art’. He sees in a moment that the seaweed beneath
These are some of the points in respect of which the argument from final causes falls short of that conception of the Divine nature which reason is adequate to form. It is the beginning of our knowledge of God, not the end. It is suited to the faculties of children rather than of those who are of full age. It belongs to a stage of metaphysical philosophy, in which abstract ideas were not made the subject of analysis; to a time when physical science had hardly learnt to conceive the world as a whole. It is a devout thought which may well arise in the grateful heart when contemplating the works of creation, but must not be allowed to impair that higher intellectual conception which we are able to form of a Creator, any more than it should be put in the place of the witness of God within.
Another argument of the same nature for the
being of a God is derived from first causes, and may
be stated as follows:—All things that we see are the
The difficulty about this argument is much the
same as that respecting the preceding. So long as
we conceive the world under the form of cause and
effect, and suppose the first link in the chain to be
the same with those that succeed it, the argument
is necessary and natural; we cannot escape from it
without violence to our reason. Our only doubt
will probably be, whether we can pass from the
notion of a first cause to that of an intelligent
Creator. But when, instead of resting in the word ‘cause’, we go on to the idea, or rather the variety
of ideas which are signified by the word cause’. the
argument begins to dissolve. When we say, ‘God is
the cause of the world’, in what sense of the word
cause is this? Is it as life or mind is a cause, or the
hammer or hand of the workman, or light or air, or
any natural substance? Is it in that sense of the
word cause, in which it is almost identified with the
effect? or in that sense in which it is wholly external
to it? Or when we endeavour to imagine or conceive
a common cause of the world and all things in it, do
There are two sources from which these and similar
proofs of the being of a God are derived: first, analogy; secondly, the logical necessity of the human
mind. Analogy supplies an image, an illustration.
It wins for us an imaginary world from the void and
formless infinite. But whether it does more than
this must depend wholly on the nature of the analogy. We cannot argue from the seen to the unseen,
unless we previously know their relation to each other.
We cannot say at random that another life is the
double or parallel of this, and also the development
of it; we cannot urge the temporary inequality of
this world as a presumption of the final injustice of
another. Who would think of arguing from the
vegetable to the animal world, except in those points
where we had already discovered a common principle?
Who would reason that animal life must follow the
laws of vegetation in those points which were peculiar to it? Yet many theological arguments have
The other source of these and similar arguments is the logical necessity of the human mind. A first cause, a beginning, an infinite Being limiting our finite natures, is necessary to our conceptions. ‘We have an idea of God, there must be something to correspond to our idea,’ and so on. The flaw here is equally real, though not so apparent. While we dwell within the forms of the understanding and acknowledge their necessity, such arguments seem unanswerable. But once ask the question, Whence this necessity? was there not a time when the human mind felt no such necessity? is the necessity really satisfied? or is there not some further logical sequence in which I am involved which still remains unanswerable? the whole argument vanishes at once, as the chimera of a metaphysical age. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been peculiarly fertile in such arguments; the belief in which, whether they have any value or not, must not be imposed upon us as an article of faith.
If we say again, ‘that our highest conception must
have a true existence’, which is the well-known argument of Anselm and Des Cartes for the being of God,
still this is no more than saying, in a technical or
dialectical form, that we cannot imagine God without
imagining that He is. Of no other conception can
it be said that it involves existence; and hence
no additional force is gained by such a mode of
statement. The simple faith in a Divine Being
is cumbered, not supported, by evidences derived
from a metaphysical system which has passed away.
It is a barren logic that elicits the more meagre
conception of existence from the higher one of
Arguments from first and final causes may be regarded as a kind of poetry of natural religion. There are some minds to whom it would be impossible to conceive of the relation of God to the world under any more abstract form. They, as well as all of us, may ponder in amazement on the infinite contrivances of creation. We are all agreed that none but a Divine power framed them. We differ only as to whether the Divine power is to be regarded as the hand that fashioned, or the intelligence that designed them, or an operation inconceivable to us which we dimly trace and feebly express in words.
That which seems to underlie our conception both
of first and final causes, is the idea of law which we
see not broken or intercepted, or appearing only in
particular spots of nature, but everywhere and in all
things. All things do not equally exhibit marks of
design, but all things are equally subject to the
operation of law. The highest mark of intelligence
pervades the whole; no one part is better than an
other; it is all ‘very good’. The absence of design,
if we like so to turn the phrase, is a part of the
design. Even the less comely parts, like the plain
spaces in a building, have elements of use and beauty.
He who has ever thought in the most imperfect manner of the universe which modern science unveils,
needs no evidence that the details of it are incapable
of being framed by anything short of a Divine power.
Art, and nature, and science, these three,—the first
giving us the conception of the relation of parts to
a whole; the second, of endless variety and intricacy,
such as no art has ever attained; the third, of uniform laws which amid all the changes of created
Nor can it weaken our belief in a Supreme Being, to observe that the same harmony and uniformity extend also to the actions of men. Why should it be thought a thing incredible that God should give law and order to the spiritual, no less than the natural creation? That human beings do not ‘thrust or break their ranks’; that the life of nations, like that of plants or animals, has a regular growth; that the same strata or stages are observable in the religions, no less than the languages of man kind, as in the structure of the earth, are strange reasons for doubting the Providence of God. Perhaps it is even stranger, that those who do not doubt should eye with jealousy the accumulation of such facts. Do we really wish that our conceptions of God should only be on the level of the ignorant; adequate to the passing emotions of human feeling, but to reason inadequate? That Christianity is the confluence of many channels of human thought does not interfere with its Divine origin. It is not the less immediately the word of God because there have been preparations for it in all ages, and in many countries.
The more we take out of the category of chance
in the world either of nature or of mind, the more
present evidence we have of the faithfulness of God.
We do not need to have a chapter of accidents in
life to enable us to realize the existence of a personal
God, as though events which we can account for
were not equally His work. Let not use or custom
so prevail in our minds as to make this higher notion
of God cheerless or uncomfortable to us. The rays
of His presence may still warm us, as well as enlighten
‘The curtain of the physical world is closing in upon us’: What does this mean but that the arms of His intelligence are embracing us on every side? We have no more fear of nature; for our knowledge of the laws of nature has cast out fear. We know Him as He shows himself in them, even as we are known of Him. Do we think to draw near to God by returning to that state in which nature seemed to be without law, when man cowered like the animals before the storm, and in the meteors of the skies and the motions of the heavenly bodies sought to read the purposes of God respecting himself? Or shall we rest in that stage of the knowledge of nature which was common to the heathen philosophers and to the Fathers of the Christian Church? or in that of two hundred years ago, ere the laws of the heavenly bodies were discovered? or of fifty years ago, before geology had established its truths on sure foundations? or of thirty years ago, ere the investigation of old language had revealed the earlier stages of the history of the human mind. At which of these resting-places shall we pause to renew the covenant between Reason and Faith? Rather at none of them, if the first condition of a true faith be the belief in all true knowledge.
To trace our belief up to some primitive revelation, to entangle it in a labyrinth of proofs or
analogies, will not infix it deeper or elevate its
character. Why should we be willing to trust the
convictions of the father of the human race rather
than our own, the faith of primitive rather than of
civilized times? Or why should we use arguments
about the Infinite Being, which, in proportion as
Why, again, should we argue for the immortality of the soul from the analogy of the seed and the tree, or the state of human beings before and after birth, when the ground of proof in the one case is wanting in the other, namely, experience? Because the dead acorn may a century hence become a spreading oak, no one would infer that the corrupted remains of animals will rise to life in new forms. The error is not in the use of such illustrations as figures of speech, but in the allegation of them as proofs or evidences after the failure of the analogy is perceived. Perhaps it may be said that in popular discourse they pass unchallenged; it may be a point of honour that they should be maintained, because they are in Paley or Butler. But evidences for the many which are not evidences for the few are treacherous props to Christianity. They are always liable to come back to us detected, and to need some other fallacy for their support.
Let it be considered, whether the evidences of
religion should be separated from religion itself.
The Gospel has a truth perfectly adapted to human
nature; its origin and diffusion in the world have
a history like any other history. But truth does
‘There are two things,’ says a philosopher of the
last century; ‘of which it may be said, that the
more we think of them, the more they fill the soul
with awe and wonder,—the starry heaven above, and
the moral law within. I may not regard either as
shrouded in darkness, or look for or guess at either
in what is beyond, out of my sight. I see them right
before me, and link them at once with the consciousness of my own existence. The former of the two
begins with place, which I inhabit as a member of
the outward world, and extends the connexion in
which I stand with it into immeasurable space; in
which are worlds upon worlds, and systems upon
systems; and so on into the endless times of their
revolutions, their beginning and continuance. The
second begins with my invisible self; that is to say,
my personality, and presents me in a world which
has true infinity, but which the lower faculty of the
So, in language somewhat technical, has Kant
described two great principles of natural religion. ‘There are two witnesses,’ we may add in a later
strain of reflection, ‘of the being of God; the order of nature in the world, and
the progress of the mind of man. He is not the order of nature, nor the progress of mind, nor both together; but that which
is above and beyond them; of which they, even if
conceived in a single instant, are but the external
sign, the highest evidences of God which we can
conceive, but not God Himself. The first to the
ancient world seemed to be the work of chance, or
the personal operation of one or many Divine beings.
We know it to be the result of laws endless in their
complexity, and yet not the less admirable for their
simplicity also. The second has been regarded, even
in our own day, as a series of errors capriciously
invented by the ingenuity of individual men. We
know it to have a law of its own, a continuous order
Natural religion, in the last sense in which we are to consider it, carries us into a region of thought more practical, and therefore more important, than any of the preceding; it comes home to us; it takes in those who are near and dear to us; even ourselves are not excluded from it. Under this name, or some other, we cannot refuse to consider a subject which involves the religious state of the greater portion of mankind, even in a Christian country. Every Sunday the ministers of religion set before us the ideal of Christian life; they repeat and expand the words of Christ and his Apostles; they speak of the approach of death, and of this world as a preparation for a better. It is good to be reminded of these things. But there is another aspect of Christianity which we must not ignore, the aspect under which experience shows it, in our homes and among our acquaintance, on the level of human things; the level of education, habit, and circumstances on which men are, and on which they will probably remain while they live. This latter phase of religion it is our duty to consider, and not narrow ourselves to the former only.
It is characteristic of this subject that it is full of
contradictions; we say one thing at one time about
it, another thing at another. Our feelings respecting
It is impossible not to observe that innumerable
persons—shall we say the majority of mankind?—who have a belief in God and immortality, have
nevertheless hardly any consciousness of the peculiar
doctrines of the Gospel. They seem to live away
from them in the routine of business or of society, ‘the common life of all men’, not without a sense
The picture is a true one, and, if we turn the light
round, some of us may find in it a resemblance of
ourselves no less than of other men. Others will
include us in the same circle in which we are
including them. What shall we say to such a state,
common as it is to both us and them? The fact
that we are considering is not the evil of the world,
Many strange thoughts arise at the contemplation
of this intermediate world, which some blindness,
or hardness, or distance in nature, separates from
the love of Christ. We ask ourselves ‘what will become of them after death?’ ‘For what state of
existence can this present life be a preparation?’ Perhaps they will turn the question upon us; and
we may answer for ourselves and them, ‘that we
throw ourselves on the mercy of God’. We cannot
Other oppositions have found their way into statements of Christian truth, which we shall sometimes
do well to forget. Mankind are not simply divided
into two classes; they pass insensibly from one to
the other. The term world is itself ambiguous,
Reflections of this kind are not a mere speculation;
they have a practical use. They show us the world
Doubtless, the lives of individuals that rise above
this average are the salt of the earth. They are not
to be confounded with the many, because for these
latter a place may be found in the counsels of Providence. Those who add the love of their fellow-creatures to the love of God, who make the love of truth
the rule of both, bear the image of Christ until His
coming again. And yet, probably, they would be
the last persons to wish to distinguish themselves
from their fellow-creatures. The Christian life makes
all things kin; it does not stand out ‘angular’ against
any part of mankind. And that humble spirit which
the best of men have ever shown in reference to their
brethren, is also the true spirit of the Church towards
The God of peace rest upon you, is the concluding
benediction of most of the Epistles. How can He
rest upon us, who draw so many hard lines of demarcation between ourselves and other men; who oppose
the Church and the world, Sundays and working
days, revelation and science, the past and present,
the life and state of which religion speaks and the
life which we ordinarily lead? It is well that we
should consider these lines of demarcation rather as
representing aspects of our life than as corresponding
to classes of mankind. It is well that we should acknowledge that one aspect of life or knowledge is as
true as the other. Science and revelation touch one
another: the past floats down in the present. We
No doctrine in later times has been looked at so exclusively through the glass of controversy as that of justification. From being the simplest it has be come the most difficult; the language of the heart has lost itself in a logical tangle. Differences have been drawn out as far as possible, and then taken back and reconciled. The extreme of one view has more than once produced a reaction in favour of the other. Many senses have been attributed to the same words, and simple statements carried out on both sides into endless conclusions. New formulas of conciliation have been put in the place of old-established phrases, and have soon died away, because they had no root in language or in the common sense or feeling of mankind. The difficulty of the subject has been increased by the different degrees of importance attached to it: while to some it is an articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae, others have never been able to see in it more than a verbal dispute.
This perplexity on the question of righteousness
by faith is partly due to the character of the age in
which it began to revive. Men felt at the Reformation the need of a spiritual religion, and could no
longer endure the yoke which had been put upon
their fathers. The heart rebelled against the burden
of ordinances; it wanted to take a nearer way to
reconciliation with God. But when the struggle
was over, and individuals were seeking to impart to
In other words, the Scholastic Logic had been for six centuries previous the great instrument of training the human mind; it had grown up with it, and become a part of it. Neither would it have been more possible for the Reformers to have laid it aside than to have laid aside the use of language itself. Around theology it lingers still, seeming reluctant to quit a territory which is peculiarly its own. No science has hitherto fallen so completely under its power; no other is equally unwilling to ask the meaning of terms; none has been so fertile in reasonings and consequences. The change of which Lord Bacon was the herald has hardly yet reached it; much less could the Reformation have anticipated the New Philosophy.
The whole mental structure of that time rendered
it necessary that the Reformers, no less than their
opponents, should resort to the scholastic methods of
argument. The difference between the two parties
did not lie here. Perhaps it may be said with truth
that the Reformers were even more schoolmen than
their opponents, because they dealt more with
abstract ideas, and were more concentrated on a single
topic. The whole of Luther’s teaching was summed
up in a single article, ‘Righteousness by Faith’. That was to him the Scriptural expression of a
Spiritual religion. But this, according to the manner of that time, could not be left in the simple
language of St. Paul. It was to be proved from
And yet, why was this? Why not repeat, with a slight alteration of the words rather than the meaning of the Apostle, Neither justification by faith nor justification by works, but ‘a new creature’? Was there not yet a more excellent way to oppose things to words,—the life, and spirit, and freedom of the Gospel, to the deadness, and powerlessness, and slavery of the Roman Church? So it seems natural to us to reason, looking back after an interval of three centuries on the weary struggle; so absorbing to those who took part in it once, so distant now either to us or them. But so it could not be. The temper of the times, and the education of the Reformers themselves, made it necessary that one dogmatic system should be met by another. The scholastic divinity had become a charmed circle, and no man could venture out of it, though he might oppose or respond within it.
And thus justification by faith, and justification
by works, became the watchword of two parties.
We may imagine ourselves at that point in the
controversy when the Pelagian dispute had been
long since hushed, and that respecting Predestination
had not yet begun; when men were not differing
about original sin, and had not begun to differ about
the Divine decrees. What Luther sought for was to
find a formula which expressed most fully the entire,
unreserved, immediate dependence of the believer on
Christ. What the Catholic sought for was so to
modify this formula as not to throw dishonour on
the Church by making religion a merely personal, or
individual, matter; or on the lives of holy men of old,
who had wrought out their salvation by asceticism;
or endanger morality by appearing to undervalue
On this narrow ground the first question that
naturally arises is, how faith is to be defined? is
it to include love and holiness, or to be separated
from them? If the former, it seems to lose its apprehensive dependent nature, and to be scarcely
distinguishable from works; if the latter, the statement
is too refined for the common sense of mankind;
though made by Luther, it could scarcely be retained
even by his immediate followers. Again, is it an
act or a state? are we to figure it as a point, or as
a line? Is the whole of our spiritual life anticipated
in the beginning, or may faith no less than works,
justification equally with sanctification, be conceived
of as going on to perfection? Is justification an
objective act of Divine mercy, or a subjective state
of which the believer is conscious in himself? Is the
righteousness of faith imputed or inherent, an attribution of the merits of Christ, or a renewal of the
human heart itself? What is the test of a true faith?
And is it possible for those who are possessed of it
to fall away? How can we exclude the doctrine of
human merit consistently with Divine justice? How
do we account for the fact that some have this faith,
and others are without it, this difference being
apparently independent of their moral state? If
faith comes by grace, is it imparted to few or to
So at many points the doctrine of righteousness by faith touches the metaphysical questions of subject and object, of necessity and freedom, of habits and actions, and of human consciousness, like a magnet drawing to itself philosophy, as it has once drawn to itself the history of Europe. There were distinctions also of an earlier date, with which it had to struggle, of deeper moral import than their technical form would lead us to suppose, such as that of congruity and condignity, in which the analogy of Christianity is transferred to heathenism, and the doer of good works before justification is regarded as a shadow of the perfected believer. Neither must we omit to observe that, as the doctrine of justification by faith had a close connexion with the Pelagian controversy, carrying the decision of the Church a step further, making Divine Grace not only the source of human action, but also requiring the consciousness or assurance of grace in the believer himself: so it put forth its roots in another direction, attaching itself to Anselm as well as Augustine, and comprehending the idea of satisfaction; not now, as formerly, of Christ offered in the sacrifice of the mass, but of one sacrifice, once offered for the sins of men, whether considered as an expiation by suffering, or implying only a reconciliation between God and man, or a mere manifestation of the righteousness of God.
Such is the whole question, striking deep, and
spreading far and wide with its offshoots. It is not
our intention to enter on the investigation of all
these subjects, many of which are interesting as
phases of thought in the history of the Church, but
There is one interpretation of the Epistles of
St. Paul which is necessarily in some degree false;
that is, the interpretation put upon them by later
controversy. When the minds of men are absorbed
in a particular circle of ideas they take possession
of any stray verse, which becomes the centre of their
world. They use the words of Scripture, but are
incapable of seeing that they have another meaning
and are used in a different connexion from that in
which they employ them. Sometimes there is a
degree of similarity in the application which tends
to conceal the difference. Thus Luther and St. Paul
both use the same term, ‘justified by faith’; and the
strength of the Reformer’s words is the authority of
St. Paul. Yet, observe how far this agreement is
one of words: how far of things. For Luther is
speaking solely of individuals, St. Paul also of
nations; Luther of faith absolutely, St. Paul of
faith as relative to the law. With St. Paul faith
is the symbol of the universality of the Gospel.
Luther excludes this or any analogous point of view.
These contrasts make us feel that St. Paul can
only be interpreted by himself, not from the systems
of modern theologians, nor even from the writings
of one who had so much in common with him as
Luther. It is the spirit and feeling of St. Paul
which Luther represents, not the meaning of his
words. A touch of nature in both ‘makes them
kin’. And without bringing down one to the level
of the other, we can imagine St. Paul returning that
singular affection, almost like an attachment to
a living friend, which the great Reformer felt to
wards the Apostle. But this personal attachment
or resemblance in no way lessens the necessary
difference between the preaching of Luther and of
St. Paul, which arose in some degree perhaps from
their individual character, but chiefly out of the
different circumstances and modes of thought of
their respective ages. At the Reformation we are
at another stage of the human mind, in which system
and logic and the abstractions of Aristotle have
It has been said (and the remark admits of a peculiar application to theology), that few persons know sufficient of things to be able to say whether disputes are merely verbal or not. Yet, on the other hand, it must be admitted that, whatever accidental advantage theology may derive from system and definition, mere accurate statements can never form the substance of our belief. No one doubts that Christianity could be in the fullest sense taught to a child or a savage, without any mention of justification or satisfaction or predestination. Why should we not receive the Gospel as ‘little children’? Why should we not choose the poor man’s part in the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven? Why elaborate doctrinal abstractions which are so subtle in their meaning as to be in great danger of being lost in their translation from one language to another? which are always running into consequences inconsistent with our moral nature, and the knowledge of God derived from it? which are not the prevailing usage of Scripture, but technical terms which we have gathered from one or two passages, and made the key-notes of our scale? The words satisfaction and predestination nowhere occur in Scripture; the word regeneration only twice, and but once in a sense at all similar to that which it bears among ourselves; the word justification twice only, and nowhere as a purely abstract term.
But although language and logic have strangely
transfigured the meaning of Scripture, we cannot
venture to say that all theological controversies are
questions of words. If from their winding mazes we
seek to retrace our steps, we still find differences
These latter words have been carried out of their original circle of ideas into a new one by the doctrines of the Reformation. They have become hardened, stiffened, sharpened by the exigencies of controversy, and torn from what may be termed their context in the Apostolical age. To that age we must return ere we can think in the Apostle’s language. His conception of faith, although simpler than our own, has nevertheless a peculiar relation to his own day; it is at once wider, and also narrower, than the use of the word among ourselves,—wider in that it is the symbol of the admission of the Gentiles into the Church, but narrower also in that it is the negative of the law. Faith is the proper technical term which excludes the law; being what the law is not, as the law is what faith is not. No middle term connects the two, or at least none which the Apostle admits, until he has first widened the breach between them to the utter most. He does not say, ‘Was not Abraham our father justified by works (as well as by faith), when he had offered up Isaac his son on the altar?’ but only, ‘What saith the Scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.’
The Jewish conception of righteousness was the
fulfilment of the Commandments. He who walked
in all the precepts of the law blameless, like Daniel
in the Old Testament, or Joseph and Nathanael in
the New, was righteous before God. ‘What shall
I do to inherit eternal life? Thou knowest the
commandments. Do not commit adultery, do not
steal, do not bear false witness. All these have I
kept from my youth up.’ This is a picture of Jewish
But to the mind of St. Paul the spirit presented
itself not so much as a higher fulfilment of the law,
but as antagonistic to it. From this point of view,
it appeared not that man could never fulfil the law
perfectly, but that he could never fulfil it at all. What
God required was something different in kind from
legal obedience. What man needed was a return to
God and nature. He was burdened, straitened,
shut out from the presence of his Father,—a servant,
not a son; to whom, in a spiritual sense, the heaven
was become as iron, and the earth brass. The new
righteousness must raise him above the burden of
ordinances, and bring him into a living communion
with God. It must be within, and not without him,—written not on tables of stone, but on fleshly tables
of the heart. But inward righteousness was no
peculiar privilege of the Israelites; it belonged to
As the symbol of this inward righteousness, St. Paul found an expression—righteousness by faith—derived from those passages in the Old Testament which spoke of Abraham being justified by faith. It was already in use among the Jews; but it was the Apostle who stamped it first with a permanent and universal import. The faith of St. Paul was not the faith of the Patriarchs only, who believed in the promises made to their descendants; it entered within the veil—out of the reach of ordinances—beyond the evil of this present life; it was the instrument of union with Christ, in whom all men were one; whom they were expecting to come from heaven. The Jewish nation itself was too far gone to be saved as a nation: individuals had a nearer way. The Lord was at hand; there was no time for a long life of laborious service. As at the last hour, when we have to teach men rather how to die than how to live, the Apostle could only say to those who would receive it, ‘Believe; all things are possible to him that believes’.
Such are some of the peculiar aspects of the
Apostle’s doctrine of righteousness by faith. To our
minds it has become a later stage or a particular form
of the more general doctrine of salvation through
Christ, of the grace of God to man, or of the still
more general truth of spiritual religion. It is the
connecting link by which we appropriate these to
ourselves,—hand which we put out to apprehend
the mercy of God. It was not so to the Apostle.
To him grace and faith and the Spirit are not
parts of a doctrinal system, but different expressions
Illusive as are the distinctions of later controversies
as guides to the interpretation of Scripture, there is
another help, of which we can hardly avail ourselves
too much,—the interpretation of fact. To read the
mind of the Apostle, we must read also the state of
the world and the Church by which he was sur
rounded. Now, there are two great facts which
correspond to the doctrine of righteousness by faith,
which is also the doctrine of the universality of the
Gospel: first, the vision which the Apostle saw on
the way to Damascus; secondly, the actual conversion of the Gentiles by the preaching of the Apostle.
Righteousness by faith, admission of the Gentiles,
even the rejection and restoration of the Jews, are—himself under so many different points of view. The
way by which God had led him was the way also by which
he was leading other men. When he preached righteousness by faith, his conscience also bore him witness
that this was the manner in which he had himself
passed from darkness to light, from the burden of
ordinances to the power of an endless life. In proclaiming the salvation of the Gentiles, he was
But the faith which St. Paul preached was not
merely the evidence of things not seen, in which the
Gentiles also had part, nor only the reflection of ‘the
violence’ of the world around him, which was taking
the kingdom of heaven by force. The source, the
hidden life, from which justification flows, in
which it lives, is—Christ. It is true that we no
where find in the Epistles the expression ‘justification
by Christ’ exactly in the sense of modern theology.
But, on the other hand, we are described as dead
with Christ, we live with Him, we are members of
His body, we follow Him in all the stages of His being.
All this is another way of expressing ‘We are
justified by faith’. That which takes us out of ourselves and links us with Christ, which anticipates in
an instant the rest of life, which is the door of every
heavenly and spiritual relation, presenting us through
a glass with the image of Christ crucified, is faith.
The difference between our own mode of thinking and
that of the Apostle is mainly this,—that to him
When in the Gospel it is said, ‘Believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved’. this is
substantially the same truth as ‘We are justified by
faith’. It is another way of expressing ‘Therefore
being justified by faith, we have peace with God
through our Lord Jesus Christ’. Yet we may note
two points of difference, as well as two of resemblance,
in the manner in which the doctrine is set forth in
the Gospel as compared with the manner of the
Epistles of St. Paul. First, in the omission of any
connexion between the doctrine of faith in Christ,
and the admission of the Gentiles. The Saviour is
within the borders of Israel; and accordingly little is
said of the ‘sheep not of this fold’, or the other
husbandmen who shall take possession of the vine
yard. Secondly, there is in the words of Christ no
antagonism or opposition to the law, except so far as
the law itself represented an imperfect or defective
morality, or the perversions of the law had become
inconsistent with every moral principle. Two points
of resemblance have also to be remarked between the
faith of the Gospels and of the Epistles. In the
first place, both are accompanied by forgiveness of
sins. As our Saviour to the disciple who affirms his
belief says, ‘Thy sins be forgiven thee’; so St. Paul,
when seeking to describe, in the language of the Old
Testament, the state of justification by faith, cites
the words of David, ‘Blessed is the man to whom
the Lord will not impute sin’. Secondly, they have
Faith, in the view of the Apostle, has a further aspect, which is freedom. That quality in us which in reference to God and Christ is faith, in .reference to ourselves and our fellow-men is Christian liberty. ‘With this freedom Christ has made us free’; ‘where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.’ It is the image also of the communion of the world to come. ‘The Jerusalem that is above is free’, and ‘the creature is waiting to be delivered into the glorious liberty of the children of God’. It applies to the Church as now no longer confined in the prison-house of the Jewish dispensation; to the grace of God, which is given irrespectively to all; to the individual, the power of whose will is now loosed; to the Gospel, as freedom from the law, setting the conscience at rest about questions of meats and drinks, and new moons and sabbaths; and, above all, to the freedom from the consciousness of sin: in all these senses the law of the spirit of life is also the law of freedom.
In modern language, assurance has been deemed
necessary to the definition of a true faith. There is
a sense, too, in which final assurance entered into the
conception of the faith of the Epistles. Looking at
men from without, it was possible for them to fall
away finally; it was possible also to fall without
falling away; as St. John says, there is a sin unto
A few words will briefly recapitulate the doctrine of righteousness by faith as gathered from the Epistles of St. Paul.
Faith, then, according to the Apostle, is the spiritual principle whereby we go out of ourselves to
hold communion with God and Christ; not like the
faith of the Epistle to the Hebrews, clothing itself
in the shadows of the law; but opposed to the law,
and of a nature purely moral and spiritual. It frees
man from the flesh, the law, the world, and from
himself also; that is, from his sinful nature, which is
the meeting of these three elements in his spiritual
consciousness. And to be ‘justified’ is to pass into
a new state; such as that of the Christian world
when compared with the Jewish or Pagan; such as
that which St. Paul had himself felt at the moment
of his conversion; such as that which he reminds
the Galatian converts they had experienced, ‘before
We acknowledge that there is a difference between
the meaning of justification by faith to St. Paul
and to ourselves. Eighteen hundred years cannot
have passed away, leaving the world and the mind
of man, or the use of language, the same as it was.
Times have altered, and Christianity, partaking of
the social and political progress of mankind, receiving, too, its own intellectual development, has inevitably lost its simplicity. The true use of philosophy
is to restore this simplicity; to undo the perplexities
which the love of system or past philosophies, or the
imperfection of language or logic, have made; to
lighten the burden which the traditions of ages have
imposed upon us. To understand St. Paul we found
it necessary to get rid of definitions and deductions,
which might be compared to a mazy undergrowth of
some noble forest, which we must clear away ere we
can wander in its ranges. And it is necessary for
ourselves also to return from theology to Scripture;
to seek a truth to live and die in,—not to be the
subject of verbal disputes, which entangle the religious sense in scholastic refinements. The words
Remaining, then, within the circle of the New Testament, which we receive as a rule of life for ourselves, no less than for the early Church, we must not ignore the great differences by which we are distinguished from those for whom it was written. Words of life and inspiration, heard by them with ravishment for the first time, are to us words of fixed and conventional meaning; they no longer express feelings of the heart, but ideas of the head. Nor is the difference less between the state of the world then and now; not only of the outward world in which we live, but of that inner world which we ourselves are. The law is dead to us, and we to the law; and the language of St. Paul is relative to what has passed away. The transitions of meaning in the use of the word law tend also to a corresponding variation in the meaning of faith. We are not looking for the immediate coming of Christ, and do not anticipate, in a single generation, the end of human things, or the history of a life in the moment of baptism or conversion. To us time and eternity have a fixed boundary, between them there is a gulf which we cannot pass; we do not mingle in our thoughts earth and heaven. Last of all, we are in a professing Christian world, in which religion, too, has become a sort of business; moreover, we see a long way off truths of which the first believers were eye-witnesses. Hence it has become difficult for us to conceive the simple force of such expressions as ‘dead with Christ’, ‘if ye then be risen with Christ’,—which are repeated in prayers or sermons, but often convey no distinct impression to the minds of the hearers.
The neglect of these differences between ourselves
and the first disciples has sometimes led to a distortion
And besides theories of religion at variance with
experience, which have always a kind of unsoundness,
the attempt of men to apply Scripture to their own
lives in the letter rather than in the spirit, has been
Leaving the peculiar and relative aspect of the Pauline doctrine, as well as the scholastic and traditional one, we have again to ask the meaning of justification by faith. We may divide the subject, first, as it may be considered in the abstract; and, secondly, as personal to ourselves.
I. Our justification may be regarded as an act on
God’s part. It may be said that this act is continuous, and commensurate with our whole lives;
that although ‘known unto God are all his works
from the beginning’, yet that, speaking as men, and
translating what we term the acts of God into
human language, we are ever being more and more
justified, as in theological writers we are said also to
be more and more sanctified. At first sight it seems
that to deny this involves an absurdity; it may be
II. It is an old problem in philosophy,—What is
the beginning of our moral being? What is that
prior principle which makes good actions produce
good habits? Which of those actions raises us
above the world of sight? Plato would have
answered, the contemplation of the idea of good.
Some of ourselves would answer, by the substitution
of a conception of moral growth for the mechanical
theory of habits. Leaving out of sight our relation
to God, we can only say, that we are fearfully and
wonderfully made, with powers which we are unable
to analyse. It is a parallel difficulty in religion
which is met by the doctrine of righteousness by
faith. We grow up spiritually, we cannot tell how;
not by outward acts, nor always by energetic effort,
but stilly and silently, by the grace of God descending upon us, as the dew falls upon the earth. When
a person is apprehensive and excited about his future
III. Thus far, in the consideration of righteousness by faith, we have obtained two points of view, in which, though regarded in the abstract only, the truth of which these words are the symbol has still a meaning; first, as expressing the unchangeableness of the mercy of God; and, secondly, the mysteriousness of human action. As we approach nearer, we are unavoidably led to regard the gift of righteousness rather in reference to the subject than to the object, in relation to man rather than God. What quality, feeling, temper, habit in ourselves answers to it? It may be more or less conscious to us, more of a state and less of a feeling, showing itself rather in our lives than our lips. But for these differences we can make allowance. It is the same faith still, under various conditions and circumstances, and sometimes taking different names.
IV. The expression ‘righteousness by faith’ indicates the personal character of salvation; it is not
the tale of works that we do, but we ourselves who
V. Faith may be spoken of, in the language of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, as the substance of things
unseen. But what are the things unseen? Not only
an invisible world ready to flash through the
material at the appearance of Christ; not angels, or
powers of darkness, or even God Himself ‘sitting’, as
the Old Testament described, ‘on the circle of the
heavens’; but the kingdom of truth and justice, the things that are within, of
which God is the centre, and with which men everywhere by faith hold communion. Faith is the belief in the existence of this
kingdom; that is, in the truth and justice and
mercy of God, who disposes all things—not, perhaps,
in our judgement for the greatest happiness of His
creatures, but absolutely in accordance with our
moral notions. And that this is not seen to be the
case here, makes it a matter of faith that it will be
VI. Now, if we go on to ask what gives this assurance of the truth and justice of God, the answer is, the life and death of Christ, who is the Son of God, and the Revelation of God. We know what He himself has told us of God, and we cannot conceive perfect goodness separate from perfect truth; nay, this goodness itself is the only conception we can form of God, if we confess what the mere immensity of the material world tends to suggest, that the Almighty is not a natural or even a supernatural power, but a Being of whom the reason and conscience of man have a truer conception than imagination in its highest flights. He is not in the storm, nor in the thunder, nor in the earthquake, but ‘in the still small voice’. And this image of God as He reveals himself in the heart of man is ‘Christ in us the hope of glory’; Christ as He once was upon earth in His sufferings rather than His miracles,—the image of goodness and truth and peace and love.
We are on the edge of a theological difficulty; for
who can deny that the image of that goodness may
fade from the mind’s eye after so many centuries, or
that there are those who recognize the idea and may
be unable to admit the fact? Can we say that this
error of the head is also a corruption of the will? The
lives of such unbelievers in the facts of Christianity
would sometimes refute our explanation. And yet it
is true that Providence has made our spiritual life
dependent on the belief in certain truths, and
those truths run up into matters of fact, with the
belief in which they have ever been associated; it is
true, also, that the most important moral consequences
VII. In the Epistles of St. Paul, and yet more in
the Epistle to the Hebrews, the relation of Christ to
mankind is expressed under figures of speech taken
from the Mosaic dispensation: He is the Sacrifice
for the sins of men, ‘the Lamb of God that taketh
away the sins of the world’; the Antitype of all the
types, the fulfilment in His own person of the Jewish
law. Such words may give comfort to those who
think of God under human imagery, but they seem
to require explanation when we rise to the contemplation of Him as the God of truth, without parts or
passions, who knows all things, and cannot be angry
with any, or see them other than they truly are.
What is indicated by them, to us ‘who are dead to
the law’, is, that God has manifested himself in
Christ as the God of mercy; who is more ready to
hear than we to pray; who has forgiven us almost
before we ask Him; who has given us His only Son,
and how will He not with Him also give us all
things? They intimate, on God’s part, that He is
not extreme to mark what is done amiss; in human
language, ‘he is touched with the feeling of our
infirmities’: on our part, that we say to God, ‘Not
VIII. A true faith has been sometimes defined to be not a faith in the unseen merely, or in God or Christ, but a personal assurance of salvation. Such a feeling may be only the veil of sensualism; it may be also the noble confidence of St. Paul. ‘I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ It may be an emotion, resting on no other ground except that we believe; or, a conviction deeply rooted in our life and character. Scripture and reason alike seem to require this belief in our own salvation: and yet to assume that we are at the end of the race may make us lag in our course. Whatever danger there is in the doctrine of the Divine decrees, the danger is nearer home, and more liable to influence practice, when our faith takes the form of personal assurance. How, then, are we to escape from the dilemma, and have a rational confidence in the mercy of God?
IX. This confidence must rest, first, on a sense of
the truth and justice of God, rising above perplexities
of fact in the world around us, or the tangle of
metaphysical or theological difficulties. But although
‘And now abideth faith, hope, and love, these
three; but the greatest of these is love.’ There
seems to be a contradiction in love being the ‘greatest’, when faith is the medium of acceptance. Love, according to some, is preferred to faith, because
it reaches to another life; when faith and hope are
swallowed up in sight, love remains still. Love,
according to others, has the first place, because it is
‘Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest
not . . . Then said I, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.’—
THE doctrine of the Atonement has often been explained in a way at which our moral feelings revolt. God is represented as angry with us for what we never did; He is ready to inflict a disproportionate punishment on us for what we are; He is satisfied by the sufferings of His Son in our stead. The sin of Adam is first imputed to us; then the righteousness of Christ. The imperfection of human law is transferred to the Divine; or rather a figment of law which has no real existence. The death of Christ is also explained by the analogy of the ancient rite of sacrifice. He is a victim laid upon the altar to appease the wrath of God. The institutions and ceremonies of the Mosaical religion are applied to Him. He is further said to bear the infinite punishment of infinite sin. When He had suffered or paid the penalty, God is described as granting Him the salvation of mankind in return.
I shall endeavour to show, (1) that these conceptions of the work of Christ have no foundation in
Scripture; (2) that their growth may be traced in
ecclesiastical history; (3) that the only sacrifice,
atonement, or satisfaction, with which the Christian
has to do, is a moral and spiritual one; not the
pouring out of blood upon the earth, but the living
sacrifice ‘to do thy will, O God’; in which the
It is difficult to concentrate the authority of
Scripture on points of controversy. For Scripture
is not doctrine but teaching; it arises naturally out
of the circumstances of the writers; it is not intended
to meet the intellectual refinements of modern times.
The words of our Saviour, ‘My kingdom is not of
this world’, admit of a wide application, to systems
of knowledge, as well as to systems of government
and politics. The ‘bread of life’ is not an elaborate
theology. The revelation which Scripture makes to
us of the will of God, does not turn upon the exact
use of language. (‘Lo, O man, he hath showed thee
what he required of thee; to do justly and to love
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.’) The
books of Scripture were written by different authors,
and in different ages of the world; we cannot, there
fore, apply them with the minuteness and precision
of a legal treatise. The Old Testament is not on
all points the same with the New; for ‘Moses allowed
of some things for the hardness of their hearts’; nor
the Law with the Prophets, for there were ‘proverbs in the house of Israel’ that were reversed; nor
does the Gospel, which is simple and universal, in
all respects agree with the Epistles which have
reference to the particular state of the first converts;
nor is the teaching of St. James, who admits works
as a coefficient with faith in the justification of man,
absolutely identical with that of St. Paul, who asserts
righteousness by faith only; nor is the character of
all the Epistles of St. Paul, written as they were at
different times amid the changing scenes of life,
Nor again is the citation of a single text sufficient
to prove a doctrine; nor must consequences be added
on, which are not found in Scripture, nor figures of
speech reasoned about, as though they conveyed
exact notions. An accidental similarity of expression
is not to be admitted as an authority; nor a mystical allusion, which has been gathered from Scripture, according to some method which in other
writings the laws of language and logic would not
justify. When engaged in controversy with Roman
Catholics, about the doctrine of purgatory, or transubstantiation, or the authority of the successors of
St. Peter, we are willing to admit these principles.
They are equally true when the subject of inquiry is
the atoning work of Christ. We must also distinguish the application of a passage in religious discourse from its original meaning. The more obvious
explanation which is received in our own day, or
by our own branch of the Church, will sometimes
have to be set aside for one more difficult, because
less familiar, which is drawn from the context.
Nor is it allowable to bar an interpretation of
Scripture from a regard to doctrinal consequences.
Further, it is necessary that we should make allowance
The drift of the preceding remarks is not to show
that there is any ambiguity or uncertainty in the
witness of Scripture to the great truths of morality
and religion. Nay, rather the universal voice of the
Old Testament and the New proclaims that there
is one God of infinite justice, goodness, and truth:
and the writers of the New Testament agree in
declaring that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the
Saviour of the world. There can never, by any
possibility, be a doubt that our Lord and St. Paul
taught the doctrine of a future life, and of a judgement, at which men would give an account of the
deeds done in the body. It is no matter for regret
that the essentials of the Gospel are within the
reach of a child’s understanding. But this clearness
of Scripture about the great truths of religion does
not extend to the distinctions and developments of
theological systems; it rather seems to contrast with
them. It is one thing to say that ‘Christ is the
Saviour of the world’, or that ‘we are reconciled to
God through Christ’, and another thing to affirm
that the Levitical or heathen sacrifices typified the
death of Christ; or that the death of Christ has
a sacrificial import, and is an atonement or satisfaction for the sins of men. The latter positions
involve great moral and intellectual difficulties;
many things have to be considered, before we can
allow that the phraseology of Scripture is to be
I. All Christians agree that there is a connexion
between the Old Testament and the New: ‘Novum Testamentum in vetere
patet; Vetus Testamentum
in novo patet’: ‘I am not come to destroy the law
and the prophets, but to fulfil.’ But, respecting
the nature of the revelation or fulfilment which is
implied in these expressions, they are not equally
agreed. Some conceive the Old and New Testaments
to be ‘double one against the other’; the one being
the type, and the other the antitype, the ceremonies
of the Law, and the symbols and imagery of the
Prophets, supplying to them the forms of thought
and religious ideas of the Gospel. Even the history
of the Jewish people has been sometimes thought to
be an anticipation or parallel of the history of the
Christian world; many accidental circumstances in
the narrative of Scripture being likewise taken as an
example of the Christian life. The relation between
the Old and New Testaments has been regarded by
others from a different point of view, as a continuous
one, which may be described under some image of
growth or development; the facts and ideas of the
one leading on to the facts and ideas of the other;
and the two together forming one record of ‘the
increasing purpose which through the ages ran’. This continuity, however, is broken at one point,
and the parts separate and reunite like ancient and
modern civilization, though the connexion is nearer,
It will be considered hereafter what is to be said
in answer to the last of these arguments. The first
is perhaps sufficiently answered by the analogy of
other ancient religions. It would be ridiculous to
assume a spiritual meaning in the Homeric rites and
sacrifices; although they may be different in other
respects, have we any more reason for inferring such
a meaning in the Mosaic? Admitting the application which is made of a few of them by the author of
It may be said that the Levitical rites and offerings had a meaning, not for the Jews, but for us,
‘on
whom the ends of the world are come’. Moses,
David, Isaiah were unacquainted with this meaning;
it was reserved for those who lived after the event to
which they referred had taken place to discover it.
The question here raised has a very important
bearing on the use of the figures of atonement and
sacrifice in the New Testament. For if it could be
shown that the sacrifices which were offered up in
the Levitical worship were anticipatory only; that
the law too declared itself to be ‘a shadow of good
things to come’; that Moses had himself spoken ‘of
the reproach of Christ’; in that case the slightest
allusion in the New Testament to the customs or
words of the law would have a peculiar interest.
We should be justified in referring to them as
explanatory of the work of Christ, in studying the
Levitical distinctions respecting offerings with a
more than antiquarian interest, in ‘disputing about
purifying’ and modes of expiation. But if not; if,
in short, we are only reflecting the present on the
past, or perhaps confusing both together, and
interpreting Christianity by Judaism, and Judaism
II. Of such an explanation, if it had really existed when the Mosaic religion was still a national form of worship, traces would occur in the writings of the Psalmists and the Prophets; for these furnish a connecting link between the Old Testament and the New. But this is not the case; the Prophets are, for the most part, unconscious of the law, or silent respecting its obligations.
In many places, their independence of the Mosaical religion passes into a kind of opposition to it.
The inward and spiritual truth asserts itself, not as
an explanation of the ceremonial observance, but in
defiance of it. The ‘undergrowth of morality’ is
putting forth shoots in spite of the deadness of the
ceremonial hull.
The spirit of prophecy, speaking by Isaiah, does
not say ‘I will have mercy as well as sacrifice’, but ‘I will have mercy and not (or rather than) sacrifice’. In the words of the Psalmist, Sacrifice and offering
thou wouldest not; then said I, Lo, I come to do
III. It is hard to imagine that there can be any truer expression of the Gospel than the words of Christ himself, or that any truth omitted by Him is essential to the Gospel. ‘The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant greater than his lord.’ The philosophy of Plato was not better under stood by his followers than by himself, nor can we allow that the Gospel is to be interpreted by the Epistles, or that the Sermon on the Mount is only half Christian and needs the fuller inspiration or revelation of St. Paul or the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. There is no trace in the words of our Saviour of any omission or imperfection; there is no indication in the Epistles of any intention to complete or perfect them. How strange would it have seemed in the Apostle St. Paul, who thought himself unworthy ‘to be called an Apostle because he persecuted the Church of God’, to find that his own words were preferred in after ages to those of Christ himself!
There is no study of theology which is likely to
And Christ himself hardly even in a figure uses
the word ‘sacrifice’; never with the least reference
to His own life or death. There are many ways in
which our Lord describes His relation to His Father
and to mankind. His disciples are to be one with
Him, even as He is one with the Father; whatsoever
things He seeth the Father do He doeth. He says, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’; or,
‘I am the
way, the truth, and the life’; and, ‘No man cometh
unto the Father but by me’; and again, ‘Whatsoever things ye shall ask in my name shall be given
you’; and once again, ‘I will pray the Father, and
he shall give you another comforter’. Most of His
words are simple, like ‘a man talking to his friends’;
and their impressiveness and beauty partly flow from
this simplicity. He speaks of His ‘decease too which
he should accomplish at Jerusalem’, but not in sacrificial language. ‘And now I go my way to him that
The parables of Christ have a natural and ethical character. They are only esoteric in as far as the hardness or worldliness of men’s hearts prevents their understanding or receiving them. There is a danger of our making them mean too much rather than too little, that is, of winning a false interest for them by applying them mystically or taking them as a thesis for dialectical or rhetorical exercise. For example, if we say that the guest who came to the marriage supper without a wedding-garment represents a person clothed in his own righteousness instead of the righteousness of Christ, that is an explanation of which there is not a trace in the words of the parable itself. That is an illustration of the manner in which we are not to gather doctrines from Scripture. For there is nothing which we may not in this way superinduce on the plainest lessons of our Saviour.
Reading the parables, then, simply and naturally,
we find in them no indication of the doctrine of
atonement or satisfaction. They form a very large
There is a mystery in the life and death of Christ;
that is to say, there is more than we know or are
perhaps capable of knowing. The relation in which
He stood both to His Father and to mankind is
imperfectly revealed to us; we do not fully under
stand what may be termed in a figure His inner mind
or consciousness. Expressions occur which are like
flashes of this inner self, and seem to come from
another world. There are also mixed modes which
blend earth and heaven. There are circumstances in
our Lord’s life, too, of a similar nature, such as the
transfiguration, or the agony in the garden, of which
the Scripture records only the outward fact. Least
of all do we pretend to fathom the import of His
death. He died for us, in the language of the
Gospels, in the same sense that He lived for us; He ‘bore our sins’ in the same sense that He
‘bore our
diseases’ (
IV. Two of the General Epistles and two of the Epistles of St. Paul have no bearing on our present subject. These are the Epistles of St. James and St. Jude, and the two Epistles to the Thessalonians. Their silence, like that of the Gospels, is at least a negative proof that the doctrine of Sacrifice or Satisfaction is not a central truth of Christianity. The remainder of the New Testament will be sufficiently considered under two heads: first, the remaining Epistles of St. Paul; and, secondly, the Epistle to the Hebrews. The difficulties which arise respecting these are the same as the difficulties which apply in a less degree to one or two passages in the Epistles of St. Peter and St. John, and in the book of Revelation.
It is not to be denied that the language of
Sacrifice and Substitution occurs in the Epistles
of St. Paul. Instances of the former are furnished
by
These two passages are a fair example of a few others. About the translation and explanation of the first of them interpreters differ. But the differences are not such as to affect our present question. For that question is a general one, viz. whether these, and similar sacrificial expressions, are passing figures of speech, or appointed signs or symbols of the death of Christ. On which it may be observed:—
First: That these expressions are not the peculiar or
characteristic modes in which the Apostle describes the relation of the believer
to his Lord. For one instance of the use of sacrificial language, five or six
might be cited of the language of identity or communion, in which the believer is described as one
with his Lord in all the stages of His life and death.
But this language is really inconsistent with the
other. For if Christ is one with the believer, He
cannot be regarded strictly as a victim who takes
his place. And the stage of Christ’s being which
coincides, and is specially connected by the Apostle,
with the justification of man, is not His death, but
His resurrection (
Secondly: These sacrificial expressions, as also the
vicarious ones of which we shall hereafter speak,
belong to the religious language of the age. They
are found in Philo; and the Old Testament itself
had already given them a spiritual or figurative
application. There is no more reason to suppose
Therefore, thirdly, We shall only be led into error
by attempting to explain the application of the word
to Christ from the original meaning of the thing. That
is a question of Jewish or classical archaeology, which
would receive a different answer in different ages and
countries. Many motives or instincts may be traced
in the worship of the first children of men. The need
of giving or getting rid of something; the desire to fulfil an obligation or
expiate a crime; the consecration of a part that the rest may be holy; the
Homeric feast of gods and men, of the living with
the dead; the mystery of animal nature, of which
the blood was the symbol; the substitution, in a few
instances, of the less for the greater; in later ages,
custom adhering to the old rituals when the meaning
of them has passed away;—these seem to be true
explanations of the ancient sacrifices. (Human sacrifices, such as those of the old Mexican peoples, or
the traditional ones in prehistoric Greece, may be
left out of consideration, as they appear to spring
from such monstrous and cruel perversion of human
nature.) But these explanations have nothing to
do with our present subject. We may throw an
imaginary light back upon them (for it is always
easier to represent former ages like our own than to
realize them as they truly were); they will not assist
us in comprehending the import of the death of
Fourthly: This sacrificial language is not used
with any definiteness or precision. The figure varies
in different passages; Christ is the Paschal Lamb, or
the Lamb without spot, as well as the sin-offering;
the priest as well as the sacrifice. It is applied not
only to Christ, but to the believer who is to present his body a living sacrifice; and the offering of
which St. Paul speaks in one passage is ‘the offering up of the Gentiles’. Again, this language is
everywhere broken by moral and spiritual applications into which it dissolves and melts away. When
we read of ‘sacrifice’, or ‘purification’, or ‘redemption’. these words isolated may for an instant carry
our thoughts back to the Levitical ritual. But
when we restore them to their context,—a sacrifice
which is a ‘spiritual sacrifice’, or a ‘spiritual and
mental service’, a purification which is a ‘purging
from dead works to serve the living God’, a redemption ‘by the blood of Christ from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers’,—we
Fifthly: Nor is any such use of them made by any of the writers of the New Testament. It is true that St. Paul occasionally, and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews much more frequently, use sacrificial language. But they do not pursue the figure into details or consequences; they do not draw it out in logical form. Still less do they inquire, as modern theologians have done, into the objective or transcendental relation in which the sacrifice of Christ stood to the will of the Father. St. Paul says, ‘We thus judge that if one died, then all died, and He died for all, that they which live shall not hence forth live to themselves, but unto Him which died for them and rose again’. But words like these are far indeed from expressing a doctrine of atonement or satisfaction.
Lastly: The extent to which the Apostle employs
figurative language in general, may be taken as a
measure of the force of the figure in particular,
expressions. Now there is no mode of speaking of
spiritual things more natural to him than the image
of death. Of the meaning of this word, in all languages, it may be said that there can be no doubt.
Yet no one supposes that the sense which the
Apostle gives to it is other than a spiritual one.
The reason is, that the word has never been made the
foundation of any doctrine. But the circumstance
that the term ‘sacrifice’ has passed into the language
of theology, does not really circumscribe or define it.
Another class of expressions, which may be termed the language of substitution or vicarious suffering, are also occasionally found in St. Paul. Two examples of them, both of which occur in the Epistle to the Galatians, will indicate their general character.
This use of language seems to originate in what
was termed before the language of identity. First, ‘I am crucified with Christ’, and secondly,
‘Not
I, but Christ liveth in me’. The believer, according
to St. Paul, follows Christ until he becomes like
Him. And this likeness is so complete and entire,
that all that he was or might have been is attributed
to Christ, and all that Christ is, is attributed to
him. With such life and fervour does St. Paul paint
the intimacy of the union between the believer and
Christ: They two are ‘One Spirit’. To build on
such expressions a doctrinal system is the error of ‘rhetoric turned logic’. The truth of feeling which
The same remark applies to another class of passages, in which Christ is described as dying ‘for us’, or ‘for our sins’. Upon which it may be further observed, first, that in these passages the preposition used is not ἀντι but ὑπέρ; and, secondly, that Christ is spoken of as living and rising again, as well as dying, for us; whence we infer that He died for us in the same sense that He lived for us. Of what is meant, perhaps the nearest conception we can form is furnished by the example of a good man taking upon himself, or, as we say, identifying himself with, the troubles and sorrows of others. Christ himself has sanctioned the comparison of a love which lays down life for a friend. Let us think of one as sensitive to moral evil as the gentlest of man kind to physical suffering; of one whose love identified him with the whole human race as strongly as the souls of men are ever knit together by individual affections.
Many of the preceding observations apply equally to the Epistle to the Hebrews and to the Epistles of St. Paul. But the Epistle to the Hebrews has features peculiar to itself. It is a more complete transfiguration of the law, which St. Paul, on the other hand, applies by way of illustration, and in fragments only. It has the interest of an allegory, and, in some respects, admits of a comparison with the book of Revelation. It is full of sacrificial allusions, derived, however, not from the actual rite, but from the description of it in the books of Moses. Probably at Jerusalem, or the vicinity of the actual temple, it would not have been written.
From this source chiefly, and not from the Epistles
of St. Paul, the language of sacrifice has passed into
Long passages might be quoted from the Epistle
to the Hebrews, which describe the work of Christ
in sacrificial language. Some of the most striking
verses are the following:
That these and similar passages have only a deceitful resemblance to the language of those theologians who regard the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ as the central truth of the Gospel, is manifest from the following considerations:—
1. The great number and variety of the figures. Christ is
Joshua, who gives the people rest (
2. The inconsistency of the figures: an inconsistency
partly arising from their ceasing to be figures and
passing into moral notions, as in
3. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews dwells on the outward circumstance of the shedding of the blood of Christ. St. Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians makes another application of the Old Testament, describing our Lord as enduring the curse which befell ‘One who hanged on a tree’. Imagine for an instant that this latter had been literally the mode of our Lord’s death. The figure of the Epistle to the Hebrews would cease to have any meaning; yet no one supposes that there would have been any essential difference in the work of Christ.
4. The atoning sacrifice of which modern theology
speaks, is said to be the great object of faith. The
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews also speaks of
faith, but no such expression as faith in the blood,
or sacrifice, or death of Christ is made use of by
him, or is found anywhere else in Scripture. The
faith of the patriarchs is not faith in the peculiar
sense of the term, but the faith of those who confess
Lastly: The Jewish Alexandrian character of the
Epistle must be admitted as an element of the
inquiry. It interprets the Old Testament after
a manner then current in the world, which we must
either continue to apply or admit that it was relative
to that age and country. It makes statements which
we can only accept in a figure, as, for example, in
Such were the instruments which the author of
this great Epistle (whoever he may have been) employed, after the manner of his age and country,
to impart the truths of the Gospel in a figure to
those who esteemed this sort of figurative knowledge
as a kind of perfection (
The sum of what has been said is as follows:—
Firstly: That our Lord never describes His own work in the language of atonement or sacrifice.
Secondly: That this language is a figure of speech borrowed from the Old Testament, yet not to be explained by the analogy of the Levitical sacrifices; occasionally found in the writings of St. Paul; more frequently in the Epistle to the Hebrews; applied to the believer at least equally with his Lord, and indicating by the variety and uncertainty with which it is used that it is not the expression of any objective relation in which the work of Christ stands to His Father, but only a mode of speaking common at a time when the rites and ceremonies of the Jewish law were passing away and beginning to receive a spiritual meaning.
Thirdly: That nothing is signified by this language, or at least nothing essential, beyond what is implied in the teaching of our Lord himself. For it cannot be supposed that there is any truer account of Christianity than is to be found in the words of Christ.
Theology sprang up in the first ages independently of Scripture. This independence continued after wards; it has never been wholly lost. There is a tradition of the nineteenth century, as well as of the fourth or fourteenth, which comes between them. The mystical interpretation of Scripture has further parted them; to which may be added the power of system: doctrines when framed into a whole cease to draw their inspiration from the text. Logic has expressed ‘the thoughts of many hearts’ with a seeming necessity of form; this form of reasoning has led to new inferences. Many words and formulas have also acquired a sacredness from their occurrence in liturgies and articles, or the frequent use of them in religious discourse. The true interest of the theologian is to restore these formulas to their connexion in Scripture, and to their place in ecclesiastical history. The standard of Christian truth is not a logical clearness or sequence, but the simplicity of the mind of Christ.
The history of theology is the history of the intellectual life of the Christian Church. All bodies
of Christians, Protestant as well as Catholic, have
tended to imagine that they are in the same stage
of religious development as the first believers. But
the Church has not stood still any more than the
world; we may trace the progress of doctrine as
well as the growth of philosophical opinion. The
The study of the doctrinal development of the
Christian Church has many uses. First, it helps us
to separate the history of a doctrine from its truth,
and indirectly also the meaning of Scripture from
the new reading of it, which has been given in many
The history of the doctrine of the atonement may
be conveniently divided into four periods of unequal
length, each of which is marked by some peculiar In the following pages I have derived great assistance from
the excellent work of Baur über die Versöhnungslehre.
1. The characteristics of the first period may be
summed up as follows. All the Fathers agreed that
man was reconciled to God through Christ, and
received in the Gospel a new and divine life. Most
of them also spoke of the death of Christ as a ransom
or sacrifice. When we remember that in the first
age of the Church the New Testament was exclusively
taught through the Old, and that many of the first
teachers, who were unacquainted with our present
Gospels, had passed their lives in the study of the
Old Testament Scriptures, we shall not wonder at
the early diffusion of this sort of language. Almost
every application of the types of the law which has
The peculiarity of the primitive doctrine did not
lie here, but in the relation in which the work of
Christ was supposed to stand to the powers of evil.
In the first ages we are beset with shadows of an under
world, which hover on the confines of Christianity.
From Origen downwards, with some traces of an
earlier opinion of the same kind, perhaps of Gnostic
origin, it was a prevailing though not quite universal
belief among the Fathers, that the death of Christ
was a satisfaction, not to God, but to the devil.
Man, by having sinned, passed into the power of the
evil one, who acquired a real right over him which
could not be taken away without compensation.
Christ offered himself as this compensation, which
the devil eagerly accepted, as worth more than all
mankind. But the deceiver was in turn deceived;
thinking to triumph over the humanity, he was
himself triumphed over by the Divinity of Christ.
This theory was characteristically expressed under
some such image as the following: ‘that the devil
snatching at the bait of human flesh, was hooked
by the Divine nature, and forced to disgorge what
he had already swallowed.’ It is common in some
form to Origen, Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory of
Nyssa, Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, and
much later writers; and there are indications of it
But the mythical fancy of the transaction with
the devil was not the whole, nor even the leading
conception, which the Fathers had of the import of
the death of Christ. It was the negative, not the
positive, side of the doctrine of redemption which
they thus expressed; nobler thoughts also filled their
minds. Origen regards the death of Christ as a payment to the devil, yet also as an offering to God;
this offering took place not on earth only, but also
in heaven; God is the high priest who offered.
Another aspect of the doctrine of the atonement
is presented by the same Father, under the Neo-Platonist form of the λόγος (word), who reunites
with God, not only man, but all intelligences.
Irenaeus speaks, in language more human and more
like St. Paul, of Christ ‘coming to save all, and
therefore passing through all the ages of man;
becoming an infant among infants, a little one
among little ones, a young man among young men,
an elder with the aged(?), that each in turn might
be sanctified, until He reached death, that He should
be the first-born from the dead’ (ii. 22, 147). The
Another connexion between ancient and modern
theology is supplied by the writings of Athanasius.
The view taken by Athanasius of the atoning work
of Christ has two characteristic features: First, it is
based upon the doctrine of the Trinity;—God only
can reconcile man with God. Secondly, it rests on
the idea of a debt which is paid, not to the devil, but
to God. This debt is also due to death, who has
a sort of right over Christ, like the right of the
devil in the former scheme. If it be asked in what
this view differs from that of Anselm, the answer
seems to be, chiefly in the circumstance that it is
stated with less distinctness: it is a form, not the
form, which Athanasius gave to the doctrine. In
the conception of the death of Christ as a debt, he
is followed, however, by several of the Greek Fathers.
Rhetoric delighted to represent the debt as more
than paid; the payment was ‘even as the ocean to
a drop in comparison with the sins of men’ (Chrys.
on Rom. Hom. x. 17). It is pleasing further to
remark that a kind of latitudinarianism was allowed
by the Fathers themselves. Gregory of Nazianzen
An interval of more than 700 years separates
Athanasius from Anselm. One eminent name occurs
during this interval, that of Scotus Erigena, whose
conception of the atonement is the co-eternal unity
of all things with God; the participation in this
unity had been lost by man, not in time, but in
eternity, and was restored in the person of Christ
likewise from eternity. The views of Erigena present
some remarkable coincidences with very recent speculations; in the middle ages he stands alone, at the
end, not at the beginning, of a great period;—he
is the last of the Platonists, not the first of the
schoolmen. He had consequently little influence
on the centuries which followed. Those centuries
gradually assumed a peculiar character; and received
in after times another name, scholastic, as opposed
to patristic. The intellect was beginning to display
a new power; men were asking, not exactly for a
reason of the faith that was in them, but for
a clearer conception and definition of it. The
2. It was a true feeling of Anselm that the old
doctrine of satisfaction contained an unchristian
element in attributing to the devil a right independent of God. That man should be delivered over to
Satan may be just; it is a misrepresentation to say
that Satan had any right over man. Therefore no
right of the devil is satisfied by the death of Christ.
He who had the real right is God, who has been
robbed of His honour; to whom is, indeed, owing
on the part of man an infinite debt. For sin is in
its nature infinite; the world has no compensation
for that which a good man would not do in exchange
for the world (Cur Deus Homo, i. 21). God only
can satisfy himself. The human nature of Christ
enables Him to incur, the infinity of his Divine
nature to pay, this debt (ii. 6, 7). This payment
of the debt, however, is not the salvation of man
kind, but only the condition of salvation; a link is
still wanting in the work of grace. The two parties
are equalized; the honour of which God was robbed
This theory, which is contained in the remarkable
treatise Cur Deus Homo, is consecutively reasoned
throughout; yet the least reasons seem often sufficient to satisfy the author. While it escapes one
difficulty it involves several others; though conceived
in a nobler and more Christian spirit than any previous view of the work of Christ, it involves more
distinctly the hideous consequence of punishing the
innocent for the guilty. It is based upon analogies,
symmetries, numerical fitnesses; yet under these logical fancies is contained a true and pure feeling of
the relation of man to God. The notion of satisfaction or payment of a debt, on the other hand, is
absolutely groundless, and seems only to result from
a certain logical position which the human mind has
arbitrarily assumed. The scheme implies further two
apparently contradictory notions; one, a necessity in
No progress was made during the four centuries
which intervened between Anselm and the Reformation, towards the attainment of clearer ideas
respecting the relations of God and man. The view
of Anselm did not, however, at once or universally
prevail; it has probably exercised a greater influence
since the Reformation (being the basis of what may
be termed the evangelical doctrine of the atonement)
than in earlier ages. The spirit of the older theology
was too congenial to those ages quickly to pass away.
Bernard and others continued to maintain the right
of the devil: a view not wholly obsolete in our own
day. The two great masters of the schools agreed
in denying the necessity on which the theory of
Anselm was founded. They differed from Anselm
also respecting the conception of an infinite satisfaction; Thomas Aquinas distinguishing the
‘infinite’ Divine merit, and ‘abundant’ human satisfaction;
while Duns Scotus rejected the notion of infinity
altogether, declaring that the scheme of redemption
might have been equally accomplished by the death
of an angel or a righteous man. Abelard, at an
3. The doctrines of the Reformed as well as of the
Catholic Church were expressed in the language of
the scholastic theology. But the logic which the
Catholic party had employed in defining and distinguishing the body of truth already received, the
teachers of the Reformation used to express the
subjective feelings of the human soul. Theology
made a transition, such as we may observe at one
or two epochs in the history of philosophy, from the
object to the subject. Hence, the doctrine of atonement or satisfaction became subordinate to the
doctrine of justification. The reformers begin, not
with ideas, but with the consciousness of sin; with
immediate human interests, not with speculative
difficulties; not with mere abstractions, but with
a great struggle; ‘without were fightings, within
were fears’. As of Socrates and philosophy, so it
may be also said truly of Luther in a certain sense,
that he brought down the work of redemption from
heaven to earth’. The great question with him was, ‘how we might be freed from the punishment and
guilt of sin’, and the answer was, through the appropriation of the merits of Christ. All that man was
or might have been, Christ became, and was; all
that Christ did or was, attached or was imputed to
man: as God, he paid the infinite penalty; as man,
he fulfilled the law. The first made redemption possible, the second perfected it. The first was termed
In this scheme the doctrine of satisfaction is far from being
prominent or necessary; it is a remnant of an older theology which was retained
by the Reformers and prevented their giving a purely moral character to the work
of Christ. There were differences among them respecting the two kinds of
obedience; some regarding the ‘obedientia passiva’ as the
cause or condition of the ‘obedientia activa’. while others laid no stress on the distinction. But
all the great chiefs of the Reformation agreed in the
fiction of imputed righteousness. Little had been
said in earlier times of a doctrine of imputation.
But now the Bible was reopened and read over again
in one light only, ‘justification by faith and not by
works’. The human mind seemed to seize with a
kind of avidity on any distinction which took it out
of itself, and at the same time freed it from the
burden of ecclesiastical tyranny. Figures of speech
in which Christ was said to die for man or for the
sins of man were understood in as crude and literal
a sense as the Catholic Church had attempted to
gain from the words of the institution of the
Eucharist. Imputation and substitution among Protestant divines began to be formulas as strictly
imposed as transubstantiation with their opponents.
To Luther, Christ was not only the Holy One who
died for the sins of men, but the sinner himself on
whom the vials of Divine wrath were poured out.
And seeing in the Epistles to the Galatians and
the Romans the power which the law exercised in
that age of the world over Jewish or half-Jewish
Christians, he transferred the state which the Apostle
there describes to his own age, and imagined that
the burden under which he himself had groaned was
It was not unnatural that in the middle ages, when morality had no free or independent development, the doctrine of the atonement should have been drawn out on the analogy of law. Nor is there any reason why we should feel surprised that, with the revival of the study of Scripture at the Reformation, the Mosaic law should have exercised a great influence over the ideas of Protestants. More singular, yet an analogous phenomenon, is the attempt of Grotius to conceive the work of Christ by the help of the principles of political justice. All men are under the influence of their own education or profession, and they are apt to conceive truths which are really of a different or higher kind under some form derived from it; they require such a degree or kind of evidence as their minds are accustomed to, and political or legal principles have often been held a sufficient foundation for moral truth.
The theory of the celebrated jurist proceeds from
the conception of God as governor of the universe.
As such, He may forgive sins just as any other ruler
may remit the punishment of offences against positive
law. But although the ruler possesses the power to
remit sins, and there is nothing in the nature of
justice which would prevent his doing so, yet he has
also a duty, which is to uphold his own authority and
that of the laws. To do so, he must enforce punishment for the breach of them. This punishment,
however, may attach not to the offender, but to the
offence. Such a distinction is not unknown to the
law itself. We may apply this to the work of Christ.
There was no difficulty in the nature of things which
prevented God from freely pardoning the sins of
4. Later theories on the doctrine of the atonement may be divided into two classes, English and German, logical and metaphysical; those which proceed chiefly by logical inference, and those which connect the conception of the atonement with speculative philosophy.
Earlier English writers were chiefly employed in
defining the work of Christ; later ones have been
most occupied with the attempt to soften or moderate
the more repulsive features of the older statements;
the former have a dogmatical, the latter an apologetical character. The nature of the sufferings of
Christ, whether they were penal or only quasi-penal,
whether they were physical or mental, greater in
degree than human sufferings, or different in kind;
in what more precisely the compensation offered by
Christ truly consisted; the nature of the obedience
of Christ, whether to God or the law, and the
connexion of the whole question with that of the
Divine decrees:—these were among the principal
subjects discussed by the great Presbyterian divines
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Continuing in the same line of thought as their
predecessors, they seem to have been unconscious of the
But at last the question has arisen within, as well
as without, the Church of England: ‘How the ideas
of expiation, or satisfaction, or sacrifice, or imputation, are reconcilable with the moral and spiritual
nature either of God or man?’ Some there are who
answer from analogy, and cite instances of vicarious
suffering which appear in the disorder of the world
around us. But analogy is a broken reed; of use,
indeed, in pointing out the way where its intimations
can be verified, but useless when applied to the
unseen world in which the eye of observation no
longer follows. Others affirm revelation or inspiration to be above criticism, and, in disregard alike of
Church history and of Scripture, assume their own
view of the doctrine of the atonement to be a revealed
or inspired truth. They do not see that they are
cutting off the branch of the tree on which they are
themselves sitting. For, if the doctrine of the
atonement cannot be criticized, neither can it be
determined what is the doctrine of the atonement;
nor, on the same principles, can any true religion be
distinguished from any false one, or any truth of
religion from any error. It is suicidal in theology
to refuse the appeal to a moral criterion. Others
add a distinction of things above reason and things
contrary to reason; a favourite theological weapon,
which has, however, no edge or force, so long as it
remains a generality. Others, in like manner, support their view of the doctrine of the atonement by
a theory of accommodation, which also loses itself in
ambiguity. For it is not determined whether, by
accommodation to the human faculties, is meant the
natural subjectiveness of knowledge, or some other
limitation which applies to theology only. Others
German theology during the last hundred years
has proceeded by a different path; it has delighted
to recognize the doctrine of the atonement as the
centre of religion, and also of philosophy. This
tendency is first observable in the writings of Kant,
and may be traced through the schools of his successors, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, as well as in the
works of the two philosophical theologians Daub and
Schleiermacher. These great thinkers all use the
language of orthodoxy; it cannot be said, however,
that the views of any of them agree with the
teaching of the patristic or medieval Church, or
of the Reformers, or of the simpler expressions of
According to Kant, the atonement consists in the sacrifice of the individual; a sacrifice in which the sin of the old man is ever being compensated by the sorrows and virtues of the new. This atonement, or reconcilement of man with God, consists in an end less progress towards a reconcilement which is never absolutely completed in this life, and yet, by the continual increase of good and diminution of evil, is a sufficient groundwork of hope and peace. Perfect reconcilement would consist in the perfect obedience of a free agent to the law of duty or righteousness. For this Kant substitutes the ideal of the Son of God. The participation in this ideal of humanity is an aspect of the reconcilement. In a certain sense, in the sight of God, that is, and in the wish and resolution of the individual, the change from the old to the new is not gradual, but sudden: the end is imputed or anticipated in the beginning. So Kant ‘rationalizes’ the ordinary Lutheran doctrine of justification; unconscious, as in other parts of his philosophy, of the influence which existing systems are exercising over him. Man goes out of himself to grasp at a reflection which is still—himself. The mystical is banished only to return again in an arbitrary and imaginative form,—a phenomenon which we may often observe in speculation as well as in the characters of individuals.
Schleiermacher’s view of the doctrine of the atonement is almost equally different from that of Kant
Later philosophers have conceived of the reconciliation of man with God as a reconciliation of God
with himself. The infinite must evolve the finite
from itself; yet the true infinite consists in the
return of the finite to the infinite. By slow degrees,
and in many stages of morality, of religion, and of
knowledge, does the individual, according to Fichte,
lay aside isolation and selfishness, gaining in strength
It is characteristic of Schelling’s system that he
conceives the nature of God, not as abstraction, but
as energy or action. The finite and manifold are
not annihilated in the infinite; they are the revelation of the infinite. Man is the son of God; of this
truth Christ is the highest expression and the eternal
idea. But in the world this revelation or incarnation
of God is ever going on; the light is struggling with
darkness, the spirit with nature, the universal with
the particular. That victory which was achieved
in the person of Christ is not yet final in individuals
or in history. Each person, each age, carries on the
same conflict between good and evil, the triumphant
Hegel, beginning with the doctrine of a Trinity, regards the atonement as the eternal reconciliation of the finite and the infinite in the bosom of God himself. The Son goes forth from the Father, as the world or finite being, to exist in a difference which is done away and lost in the absoluteness of God. Here the question arises, how individuals become partakers of this reconciliation? The answer is, by the finite receiving the revelation of God. The consciousness of God in man is developed, first, in the worship of nature; secondly, in the manifestation of Christ; thirdly, in the faith of the Church that God and man are one, of which faith the Holy Spirit is the source. The death of Christ is the separation of this truth from the elements of nature and sense. Hegelian divines have given this doctrine a more Pantheistic or more Christian aspect; they have, in some instances, studiously adopted orthodox language; they have laid more or less stress on the historical facts. But they have done little as yet to make it intelligible to the world at large; they have acquired for it no fixed place in history, and no hold upon life.
Englishmen, especially, feel a national dislike at the ‘things
which accompany salvation’ being perplexed with philosophical theories. They find it
easier to caricature than to understand Hegel; they
prefer the most unintelligible expressions with which
they are familiar to great thoughts which are strange
to them. No man of sense really supposes that
Hegel or Schelling is so absurd as they may be made
to look in an uncouth English translation, or as
they unavoidably appear to many in a brief summary
of their tenets. Yet it may be doubted whether
The silence of our Lord in the Gospels respecting
any doctrine of atonement and sacrifice, the variety
of expressions which occur in other parts of the New
Testament, the fluctuation and uncertainty both of
the Church and individuals on this subject in after
ages, incline us to agree with Gregory Nazianzen,
that the death of Christ is one of those points of
faith ‘about which it is not dangerous to be mistaken’. And the sense of the imperfection of language and the illusions to which we are subject
from the influence of past ideas, the consciousness
that doctrinal perplexities arise chiefly from our
transgression of the limits of actual knowledge, will
lead us to desire a very simple statement of the work
of Christ; a statement, however, in accordance with
our moral ideas, and one which will not shift and
alter with the metaphysical schools of the age; one,
moreover, which runs no risk of being overthrown by
an increasing study of the Old Testament or of ecclesiastical history. Endless theories there have been
(of which the preceding sketch contains only a small
The statements of Scripture respecting the work of Christ are very simple, and may be used without involving us in the determination of these differences. We can live and die in the language of St. Paul and St. John; there is nothing there repugnant to our moral sense. We have a yet higher authority in the words of Christ himself. Only in repeating and elucidating these statements, we must remember that Scripture phraseology is of two kinds, simple and figurative, and that the first is the interpretation of the second. We must not bring the New Testament into bondage to the Old, but ennoble and transfigure the Old by the New.
First; the death of Christ may be described as
a sacrifice. But what sacrifice? Not ‘the blood of
bulls and of goats, nor the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean’, but the living sacrifice
‘to do thy
will, O God’. It is a sacrifice which is the negation
of sacrifice; ‘Christ the end of the law to them that
believe’. Peradventure, in a heathen country, to put
an end to the rite of sacrifice ‘some one would even
dare to die’; that expresses the relation in which
the offering on Mount Calvary stands to the Levitical offerings. It is the death of what is outward
and local, the life of what is inward and spiritual: ‘I, if I be lifted up from the earth, shall draw all
men after me’; and ‘Neither in this mountain nor
at Jerusalem shall ye worship the Father’. It is the
offering up of the old world on the cross; the law
with its handwriting of ordinances, the former man
with his affections and lusts, the body of sin with its
remembrances of past sin. It is the New Testament
revealed in the blood of Christ, the Gospel of freedom, which draws men together in the communion
of one spirit, as in St. Paul’s time without respect of
persons and nations, so in our own day without regard
Again, the death of Christ may be described as a ransom. It is not that God needs some payment which He must receive before He will set the captives free. The ransom is not a human ransom, any more than the sacrifice is a Levitical sacrifice. Rightly to comprehend the nature of this Divine ransom, we must begin with that question of the Apostle: ‘Know ye not that whose servants ye yield yourselves to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey, whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?’ There are those who will reply: ‘We were never in bondage at any time’. To whom Christ answers: ‘Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin’; and, ‘If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed’. Ransom is ‘deliverance to the captive’. There are mixed modes here also, as in the use of the term sacrifice,—the word has a temporary allusive reference to a Mosaical figure of speech. That secondary allusive reference we are constrained to drop, because it is unessential; and also because it immediately involves further questions—a ransom to whom? for what?—about which Scripture is silent, to which reason refuses to answer.
Thirdly, the death of Christ is spoken of as a death
for us, or for our sins. The ambiguous use of the
preposition ‘for’, combined with the figure of sacrifice, has tended to introduce the idea of substitution;
when the real meaning is not ‘in our stead’, but only ‘in behalf of’, or ‘because of us’. It is a great
assumption, or an unfair deduction, from such expressions, to say that Christ takes our place, or that
Now suppose some one who is aware of the plastic
and accommodating nature of language to observe,
that in what has been written of late years on the
doctrine of the atonement he has noticed an effort
made to win for words new senses, and that some
of the preceding remarks are liable to this charge;
he may be answered, first, that those new senses are
really a recovery of old ones (for the writers of the
New Testament, though they use the language of
the time, everywhere give it a moral meaning); and,
1. Everywhere St. Paul speaks of the Christian
as one with Christ. He is united with Him, not in
His death only, but in all stages of His existence; living with Him, suffering
with Him, crucified with Him, buried with Him, rising again with Him, renewed in
His image, glorified together with Him;
Again (2), the import of the death of Christ may
be interpreted by His life. No theological speculation can throw an equal light on it. From the
other side we cannot see it, but only from this.
Now the life of Christ is the life of One who knew
And the death of Christ is the fulfilment and
consummation of His life, the greatest moral act
ever done in this world, the highest manifestation
of perfect love, the centre in which the rays of love
converge and meet, the extremest abnegation or
annihilation of self. It is the death of One who
seals with His blood the witness of the truth which
He came into the world to teach, which therefore
confirms our faith in Him as well as animates our
love. It is the death of One, who says at the last
hour, ‘Of them that thou gavest me, I have not lost
one,’—of One who, having come forth from God,
and having finished the work which He came into
the world to do, returns to God. It is a death in
Lastly, there is a true Christian feeling in many
other ways of regarding the salvation of man, of
which the heart is its own witness, which yet admit,
still less than the preceding, of logical rule and
precision. He who is conscious of his own infirmity
and sinfulness, is ready to confess that he needs
reconciliation with God. He has no proud thoughts:
he knows that he is saved ‘not of himself, it is the
gift of God’; the better he is, the more he feels, in
the language of Scripture, ‘that he is an unprofitable
servant’. Sometimes he imagines the Father ‘coming
out to meet him, when he is yet a long way off’, as
in the parable of the Prodigal Son; at other times
the burden of sin lies heavy on him; he seems to
need more support—he can approach God only
through Christ. All men are not the same; one
has more of the strength of reason in his religion;
another more of the tenderness of feeling. With
some, faith partakes of the nature of a pure and
spiritual morality; there are others who have gone
through the struggle of St. Paul or Luther, and
attain rest only in casting all on Christ. One will
live after the pattern of the Sermon on the Mount,
or the Epistle of St. James. Another finds a deep
consolation and meaning in a closer union with
It seems to be an opinion which is gaining ground among thoughtful and religious men, that in theology, the less we define the better. Definite statements respecting the relation of Christ either to God or man are only figures of speech; they do not really pierce the clouds which ‘round our little life’. When we multiply words we do not multiply ideas; we are still within the circle of our own minds. No greater calamity has ever befallen the Christian Church than the determination of some uncertain things which are beyond the sphere of human knowledge. A true instinct prevents our entangling the faith of Christ with the philosophy of the day; the philosophy of past ages is a still more imperfect exponent of it. Neither is it of any avail to assume revelation or inspiration as a sort of shield, or Catholicon, under which the weak points of theology may receive protection. For what is revealed or what inspired cannot be answered a priori; the meaning of the word Revelation must be determined by the fact, not the fact by the word.
If our Saviour were to come again to earth, which
of all the theories of atonement and sacrifice would
Psalms
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Micah
Matthew
John
Acts
Romans
1:23 3:23 3:23-25 3:25 4:25 12:6 12:6 14
1 Corinthians
1:12 5:7 5:7 8 8:4 9:3-7 10:19 10:20 10:25 10:27 12:28 12:29 15:12 15:32
2 Corinthians
1:9 6:12 10:10 11:23-27 12:1-5 12:7-10
Galatians
2:12 2:20 2:20 2:20 3:13 3:13 4:13 4:14 4:14 6:17
Ephesians
Philippians
2 Timothy
Philemon
Hebrews
4:8 5:6 6:1 7:6 8:13 9:1 9:11-14 9:14 10:12 11:26
Revelation
i ii iii iv v vi vii x xi xii xiii xiv xv xvi xvii xviii xix xx 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 253 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268