LIBRARY 
 
 I UNIVERSITY OP J 
 \CALIFORNIA J 
 
GERARD F. CREAMER 
 
ST. PAUL 
 
 AND 
 
 PROTESTANTISM 
 
"We often read the Scripture without comprehending its full 
 meaning ; however, let us not be discouraged. The light, in God's 
 good time, will break out, and disperse the darkness; and we shall 
 see the mysteries of the Gospel." BISHOP WILSOV. 
 
 "With them (the Puritans) nothing is more familiar than to 
 plead in their causes the Law of God, the Word of the Lord ; who 
 notwithstanding, when they come to allege what word and what 
 law they mean, their common ordinary practice is to quote by- 
 speeches, and to urge them as if they were written in most exact 
 form of law. What is to add to the Law of God if this be not?" 
 
 HOOKER, 
 
 "It will be found at last, that unity, and the peace of the 
 Church, will conduce more to the saving of souls, than the most 
 specious sects, varnished wilh the most pious, specious pretences." 
 
 BISHOP WILSON. 
 
ST. PAUL 
 
 AND 
 
 PROTESTANTISM 
 
 WITH OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 POPULAR EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 
 
 1892 
 
 {The right of translation is reservtil) 
 
IDAN STACK 
 
A? 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 TIME MOVES and Opinion moves with it ; moves to-day, 
 how fast, how sweepingly ! I turn over the pages of 
 St. Paul and Protestantism^ written some sixteen years ago ; 
 what has become of the doctrines of unscriptural Protes- 
 tantism criticised in it ? Sixteen years ago the movement 
 of time and change had indeed reached them, even in this 
 country. But now it has so prevailed over them that the 
 careful exhibition and criticism of them, in the pages which 
 follow, seems almost a waste of labour. Where are now those 
 great and grave doctrines which so possessed the thoughts 
 of religious England formerly ? Where is the doctrine of 
 predestination ? gone ! Where are the doctrines of original 
 sin, imputed righteousness, and justification by faith ? where 
 are they, not as tenets to be formally professed, but as doc- 
 trines to fill and form man's mind and soul ? They are fast 
 going. Where, too, is the * Dissidence of Dissent,' with its 
 * spirit of watchful jealousy ? ' The Liberals of the nadir still 
 hope to conjure with it ; but what open mind does not now 
 perceive its narrowness, poverty, and sterility ? 
 
 What remains growing and puissant, then, of those fac- 
 tors in our religious condition which are in the following 
 
 113 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 pages mentioned ? Undoubtedly growth and power, at this 
 moment, are chiefly with that revulsion to which notice 
 is there directed : the revulsion of man's intellect from 
 the results in which his invincible religious impulse has 
 asserted itself, because of the audacious assumptions and 
 gross inaccuracies with which his account of those results 
 is intermingled. 
 
 This remains, this grows and gains strength. There also 
 remains, undoubtedly, the fundamental and indestructible 
 object of Christianity, the figure and influence of Jesus. 
 But the presentation of this in the arrangement imposed on 
 it by the received Catholic and Protestant theology, filled 
 and informed by mankind's familiar fancies of miracle, blood, 
 bargain and appeasement, to-day endangers it. And there- 
 fore that prodigy of religious insight, by which St. Paul in 
 the first age disengaged it from those fancies, has become of 
 quite inestimable importance. Hardly, perhaps, can there 
 be at present attempted a more beneficial service to religion, 
 than the true criticism of this great and misunderstood 
 author. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM i 
 
 PURITANISM AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND . . Si 
 MODERN DISSENT . . . . . , . .123 
 A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS . . ... . . 147 
 
ST. PAUL 
 
 AND 
 
 PROTESTANTISM, 
 
 M. RENAN sums up his interesting volume on St. Paul by 
 saying : ' After having been for three hundred years, thanks 
 to Protestantism, the Christian doctor far excellence, Paul is 
 now coming to an end of his reign.' All through his book 
 M. Renan is possessed with a sense of this close relationship 
 between St. Paul and Protestantism. Protestantism has 
 made Paul, he says; Pauline doctrine is identified with 
 Protestant doctrine ; Paul is a Protestant doctor, and the 
 counterpart of Luther. M. Renan has a strong distaste for 
 Protestantism, and this distaste extends itself to the Protes- 
 tant Paul. The reign of this Protestant is now coming to 
 an end, and such a consummation evidently has M. Renan's 
 approval. 
 
 St. Paul is now coming to an end of his reign. Precisely 
 the contrary, I venture to think, is the judgment to which a 
 true criticism of men and of things, in our own country at 
 any rate, leads us. The Protestantism which has so used 
 and abused St Paul is coming to an end ; its organisations, 
 strong and active as they look, are touched with the finger 
 
 B 
 
2 ST. PA UL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 of death ; its fundamental ideas, sounding forth still every 
 week from thousands of pulpits, have in them no significance 
 and no power for the progressive thought of humanity. 
 But the reign of the real St. Paul is only beginning ; his 
 fundamental ideas, disengaged from the elaborate miscon- 
 ceptions with which Protestantism has overlaid them, will 
 have an influence in the future greater than any which they 
 have yet had, an influence proportioned to their corre- 
 spondence with a number of the deepest and most perma- 
 nent facts of human nature itself. 
 
 Elsewhere 1 I have pointed out how, for us in this 
 country, Puritanism is the strong and special representative 
 of Protestantism. The Church of England existed before 
 Protestantism, and contains much besides Protestantism. 
 Remove the schemes of doctrine, Calvinistic or Arminian, 
 which for Protestantism, merely as such, have made the 
 very substance of its religion, and all that is most valuable 
 in the Church of England would still remain. These 
 schemes, or the ideas out of which they spring, show them- 
 selves in the Prayer Book ; but they are not what gives 
 the Prayer Book its importance and value. But Puritanism 
 exists for the sake of these schemes ; its organisations are 
 inventions for enforcing them more purely and thoroughly. 
 Questions of discipline and ceremonies have, originally at 
 least, been always admitted to be in themselves secondary ; 
 it is because that conception of the ways of God to man 
 which Puritanism has formed for itself appeared to Puritan- 
 ism superlatively true and precious, that Independents and 
 Baptists and Methodists in England, and Presbyterians in 
 Scotland, have been impelled to constitute for inculcating it 
 a church-order where it might be less swamped by the 
 additions and ceremonies of men, might be more simply 
 and effectively enounced, and might stand more absolute 
 1 See Culture and Anarchy, chap. iv. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 3 
 
 and central, than in the church-order of Anglicans 01 
 Roman Catholics. 
 
 Of that conception the cardinal points are fixed by the 
 terms election and justification. These terms come from 
 the writings of St. Paul, and the scheme which Puritanism 
 has constructed with them professes to be St. Paul's scheme. 
 The same or a similar scheme, I repeat, has been, and 
 still is, embraced by many adherents of the Churches of 
 England and Rome ; but these Churches rest their claims to 
 men's interest and attachment not on the possession of such a 
 scheme, but on other grounds with which we have for the 
 present nothing to do. Puritanism's very reason for existing 
 depends on the worth of this its vital conception, derived 
 from St. Paul's writings ; and when we are told that St. Paul 
 is a Protestant doctor whose reign is ending, a Puritan, 
 keen, pugnacious, and sophisticating simple religion of the 
 heart into complicated theories of the brain about election 
 and justification, we in England, at any rate, can best try 
 the assertion by fixing our eyes on our own Puritans, and 
 comparing their doctrine and their hold on vital truth with 
 St. Paul's. 
 
 This we propose now to do, and, indeed, to do it will 
 only be to complete what we have already begun. For 
 already, when we were speaking of Hebraism and Hellenism, 1 
 we were led to remark how the over-Hebraising of Puritan- 
 ism, and its want of a wide culture, do so narrow its range 
 and impair its vision that even the documents which it 
 thinks all-sufficient, and to the study of which it exclusively 
 rivets itself, it does not rightly understand, but is apt to 
 make of them something quite different from what they 
 really are. In short, no man, we said, who knows nothing 
 else, knows even his Bible. And we showed how readers 
 of the Bible attached to essential words and ideas of the 
 1 See Culture and Anarchy r , chap. v. 
 
 B 2 
 
4 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 Bible a sense which was not the writer's ; and in particular 
 how this had happened with regard to the Pauline doctrine 
 of resurrection. Let us take the present opportunity of 
 going further in the same road ; and instead of lightly dis- 
 paraging the great name of St. Paul, let us see if the need- 
 ful thing is not rather to rescue St. Paul and the Bible from 
 the perversions of them by mistaken men. 
 
 So long as the well-known habit, on which we have so 
 often enlarged, prevails amongst our countrymen, of holding 
 mechanically their ideas themselves, but making it their 
 chief aim to work with energy and enthusiasm for the 
 organisations which profess those ideas, English Puritanism 
 is not likely to make such a return upon its own thoughts, 
 and upon the elements of its being, as to accomplish for 
 itself an operation of the kind needed ; though it has men 
 whose natural faculties, were they but free to use them, 
 would undoubtedly prove equal to the task. The same 
 habit prevents our Puritans from being reached by philo- 
 sophical works, which exist in sufficient numbers and of 
 which M. Reuss's history of the growth of Christian theology l 
 is an admirable specimen, works where the entire scheme 
 of Pauline doctrine is laid out with careful research and 
 impartial accuracy. To exhibit the predominant points in 
 Paul's teaching in so plain and popular a manner as to 
 invite and almost compel men's comprehension is not the 
 design of such works ; and only by writings with this design 
 in view will English Puritanism be reached. 
 
 If when the ideas of St. Paul are so exhibited we are 
 shown that we ought in real truth neither to abase St. Paul 
 and Puritanism together, as M. Renan does, nor to abase 
 St. Paul but exalt Puritanism, nor yet to exalt both Puritan- 
 
 1 Histoire de /a Theologie Chretienne au Stick Apostolique^ par 
 Edouard Reuss; Strasbourg et Paris (in 2 vols. 8vo.) There is an 
 English translation of M. Reuss's work. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 5 
 
 ism and St. Paul together, but rather to abase Puritanism 
 and exalt St. Paul, surely it is best even for Puritanism itselt 
 to come to know this. Puritanism certainly wishes well to 
 St. Paul ; it cannot wish to compromise him by an unin- 
 telligent adhesion to him and a blind adoption of his words, 
 instead of being a true child to him. Yet this is what it has 
 really done. What in St. Paul is secondary and subordinate, 
 Puritanism has made primary and essential ; what in St. Paul 
 is figure and belongs to the sphere of feeling, Puritanism has 
 transported into the sphere of intellect and made thesis and 
 formula. On the other hand, what is with St. Paul primary, 
 Puritanism has treated as subordinate : and what is with him 
 thesis and belonging (so far as anything in religion can 
 properly be said thus to belong) to the sphere of intellect, 
 Puritanism has made image and figure. 
 
 And first let us premise what we mean in this matter 
 by primary and secondary, essential and subordinate. We 
 mean, so far as the apostle is concerned, a greater or less 
 approach to what really characterises him and gives his 
 teaching its originality and power. We mean, so far as 
 truth is concerned, a greater or less agreement with facts 
 which can be verified, and a greater or less power of 
 explaining them. What essentially characterises a religious 
 teacher, and gives him his permanent worth and vitality, is, 
 after all, just the scientific value of his teaching, its corre- 
 spondence with important facts and the light it throws on 
 them. Never was the truth of this so evident as now. The 
 scientific sense in man never asserted its claim so strongly ; 
 the propensity of religion to neglect those claims, and the 
 peril and loss to it from neglecting them, never were so 
 manifest. The licence of affirmation about God and his 
 proceedings, in which the religious world indulge, is more 
 and more met by the demand for verification. When 
 Calvinism tells us : * It is agreed between God and the 
 
6 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 Mediator Jesus Christ, the Son of God, surety for the 
 redeemed, as parties-contractors, that the sins of the re- 
 deemed should be imputed to innocent Christ, and he both 
 condemned and put to death for them, upon this very 
 condition, that whosoever heartily consents unto the cove- 
 nant of reconciliation offered through Christ, shall, by the 
 imputation of his obedience unto them, be justified and 
 holden righteous before God ; ' when Calvinism tells us 
 this, is it not talking about God just as if he were a man 
 in the next street, whose proceedings Calvinism intimately 
 knew and could give account of, could verify that account 
 at any moment and enable us to verify it also ? It is true, 
 when the scientific sense in us, the sense which seeks exact 
 knowledge, calls for that verification, Calvinism refers us to 
 St Paul, from whom it professes to have got this history of 
 what it calls 'the covenant of redemption.' But this is only 
 pushing the difficulty a stage further back. For if it is St. 
 Paul, and not Calvinism, that professes this exact acquaint- 
 ance with God and his doings, the scientific sense calls upon 
 St. Paul to produce the facts by which he verifies what he 
 says ; and if he cannot produce them, then it treats both 
 St. Paul's assertion, and Calvinism's assertion after him, 
 as of no real consequence. 
 
 No one will deny that such is the behaviour of science 
 towards religion in our day, though many may deplore it. 
 And it is not that the scientific sense in us denies the rights 
 of the poetic sense, which employs a figured and imagina- 
 tive language. But the language we have just been quoting 
 is not figurative and poetic language, it is scholastic and 
 scientific language. Assertions in scientific language must 
 stand the tests of scientific examination. Neither is it 
 that the scientific sense in us refuses to admit willingly 
 and reverently the name of God, as a point in which the 
 religious and the scientific sense may meet, as the least 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. ^ 
 
 inadequate name for that universal order which the intellect 
 feels after as a law and the heart feels after as a benefit. 
 1 We, too,' might the men of science say to the men of 
 religion, c we, too, would gladly say God, if only, the mo- 
 ment one says God^ you would not pester one with your 
 pretensions of knowing all about him.' That stream of 
 tendency by which all things seek to fulfil the law of their 
 being) and which, inasmuch as our idea of real welfare 
 resolves itself into this fulfilment of the law of one's being, 
 man rightly deems the fountain of all goodness, and calls 
 by the worthiest and most solemn name he can, which is 
 God, science also might willingly own for the fountain of 
 all goodness, and call God. But however much more than 
 this the heart may with propriety put into its language respect- 
 ing God, this is as much as science can with strictness put 
 there. Therefore when the religious world, following its 
 bent of trying to describe what it loves, amplifying and again 
 amplifying its description, and guarding finally this amplified 
 description by the most precise and rigid terms it can find, 
 comes at last, with the best intentions, to the notion of a 
 sort of magnified and non-natural man, who proceeds in the 
 fashion laid down in the Calvinistic thesis we have quoted, 
 then science strikes in, remarks the difference between this 
 second notion and the notion it originally admitted, and 
 demands to have the new notion verified, as the first can 
 be verified, by facts. But this does not unsettle the first 
 notion, or prevent science from acknowledging the import- 
 ance and the scientific validity of propositions which are 
 grounded upon the first notion and shed light over it. 
 
 Nevertheless, researches in this sphere are now a 
 good deal eclipsed in popularity by researches in the sphere 
 of physics, and no longer have the vogue which they once 
 had. I have related how an eminent physicist with whose 
 acquaintance I am honoured imagines me to have invented 
 
8 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 the author of the Sacra Privata \ and that fashionable news- 
 paper, the Morning Post, undertaking, as I seemed, it said, 
 very anxious about the matter, to supply information as 
 to who the author really was, laid it down that he was 
 Bishop of Calcutta, and that his ideas and writings, to which 
 I attached so much value, had been among the main pro- 
 vocatives of the Indian mutiny. Therefore it is perhaps 
 expedient to refresh our memory as to these schemes of 
 doctrine, Calvinistic or Arminian, to uphold which, as has 
 been said, British Puritanism exists, before we proceed to 
 compare them, for correspondence with facts and for scien- 
 tific validity, with the teaching of St. Paul. 
 
 Calvinism, then, begins by laying down that God from 
 all eternity decreed whatever was to come to pass in time ; 
 that by his decree a certain number of angels and men are 
 predestinated, out of God's mere free grace and love, with- 
 out any foresight of faith or good works in them, to ever- 
 lasting life ; and others foreordained, according to the un- 
 searchable counsel of his will, whereby he extends or with- 
 holds mercy as he pleases, to everlasting death. God made, 
 however, our first parents, Adam and Eve, upright and able 
 to keep his law, which was written in their hearts ; at the same 
 time entering into a contract with them, and with their pos- 
 terity as represented in them, by which they were assured of 
 everlasting life in return for perfect obedience, and of ever- 
 lasting death if they should be disobedient. Our first parents, 
 being enticed by Satan, a fallen angel speaking in the form 
 of a serpent, broke this covenant of works, as it is called, 
 by eating the forbidden fruit ; and hereby they, and their 
 posterity in them and with them, became not only liable 
 to eternal death, but lost also their natural uprightness and 
 all ability to please God; nay, they became by nature 
 enemies to God and to all spiritual good, and inclined only 
 to evil continually. This, says Calvinism, is our original 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 9 
 
 sin ; the bitter root of all our actual transgressions, in thought, 
 word, and deed. 
 
 Yet, though man has neither power nor inclination to rise 
 out of this wretched fallen state, but is rather disposed to lie 
 insensible in it till he perish, another covenant exists by which 
 his condition is greatly affected. This is the covenant of re- 
 demption^ made and agreed upon, says Calvinism, between- 
 God the Father and God the Son in the Council of the 
 Trinity before the world began. The sum of the covenant 
 of redemption is this : God having, by the eternal decree 
 already mentioned, freely chosen to life a certain number of 
 lost mankind, gave them before the world began to God the 
 Son, appointed Redeemer on condition that if he humbled 
 himself so far as to assume the human nature in union- 
 with the divine nature, submit himself to the law as surety 
 for the elect, and satisfy justice for them by giving obedience 
 in their name, even to suffering the cursed death of the 
 cross, he should ransom and redeem them from sin and 
 death, and purchase for them righteousness and eternal life. 
 The Son of God accepted the condition, or bargain, as 
 Calvinism calls it; and in the fulness of time came, as- 
 Jesus Christ, into the world, was born of the Virgin Mary, 
 subjected himself to the law, and completely paid the due 
 ransom on the cross. 
 
 God has in his word, the Bible, revealed to man this- 
 covenant of grace or redemption. All those whom he has 
 predestinated to life he in his own time effectually calls to- 
 be partakers in the release offered. Man is altogether passive 
 in this call, until the Holy Spirit enables him to answer it. 
 The Holy Spirit, the third person in the Trinity, applies 
 to the elect the redemption purchased by Christ, through 
 working faith in them. As soon as the elect have faith in 
 Jesus Christ, that is, as soon as they give their consent 
 heartily and repentantly, in the sense of deserved condem- 
 
io ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 nation, to the covenant of grace, God justifies them by im- 
 puting to them that perfect obedience which Christ gave to 
 the law, and the satisfaction also which upon the cross Christ 
 gave to justice in their name. They who are thus called 
 and justified are by the same power likewise sanctified ; the 
 dominion of carnal lusts being destroyed in them, and the 
 practice of holiness being, in spite of some remnants of 
 corruption, put in their power. Good works, done in obe- 
 dience to God's moral law, are the fruits and evidences of a 
 true faith ; and the persons of the faithful elect being ac- 
 cepted through Christ, their good works also are accepted 
 in him and rewarded. But works done by other and unre- 
 generate men, though they may be things which God com- 
 mands, cannot please God and are sinful. The elect can 
 after justification and sanctification no more fall from the 
 state of grace, but shall certainly persevere to the end and 
 be eternally saved ; and of this they may, even in the 
 present life, have the certain assurance. Finally, after death, 
 their souls and bodies are joyfully joined together again in 
 the resurrection, and they remain thenceforth for ever with 
 Christ in glory ; while all the wicked are sent away into hell 
 with Satan, whom they have served. 
 
 We have here set down the main doctrines of Calvinistic 
 Puritanism almost entirely in formal words of its own choos- 
 ing. It is not necessary to enter into distinctions such as those 
 between sublapsarians and supralapsarians, between Cal- 
 vinists who believe that God's decree of election and repro- 
 bation was passed in foresight of original sin and on account 
 of it, and Calvinists who believe that it was passed abso- 
 lutely and independently. The important points of Cal- 
 vinism, original sin, free election, effectual calling, justi- 
 fication through imputed righteousness, are common to 
 both. The passiveness of man, the activity of God, are the 
 great features in this scheme ; there is very little of what 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 11 
 
 man thinks and does, very much of what God thinks and 
 does ; and what God thinks and does is described with such 
 particularity that the figure I have used of the man in the 
 next street cannot but recur strongly to our minds. 
 
 The positive Protestantism of Puritanism, with which 
 we are here concerned, as distinguished from the negative 
 Protestantism of the Church of England, has nourished 
 itself with ardour on this scheme of doctrine. It informs 
 and fashions the whole religion of Scotland, established and 
 nonconforming. It is the doctrine which Puritan flocks 
 delight to hear from their pastors. It was Puritanism's 
 constant reproach against the Church of England, that this 
 essential doctrine was not "firmly enough held and set forth 
 by her. At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, in the 
 Committee of Divines appointed by the House of Lords in 
 1641, and again at the Savoy Conference in 1661, the re~ 
 proach regularly appeared. ' Some have defended,' is the 
 Puritan complaint, * the whole gross substance of Arminian- 
 ism, that the act of convei sion depends upon the concurrence 
 of man's free will ; some do teach and preach that good 
 works are concauses with faith in the act of justification ; 
 some have defended universal grace, some have absolutely 
 denied original sin.' As Puritanism grew, the Calvimstic 
 scheme of doctrine hardened and became stricter. Of the 
 Calvinistic confessions of faith of the sixteenth century, the 
 Helvetic Confession, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg 
 Catechism, the Calvinism is so moderate as to astonish any 
 one who has been used only to its later developments. 
 Even the much-abused canons of the Synod of Dort no one 
 can read through attentively without finding in parts of them 
 a genuine movement of thought, sometimes even a philo- 
 sophic depth, and a powerful religious feeling. In the 
 documents of the Westminster Assembly, twenty-five years 
 later, this has disappeared ; and what we call the British 
 
12 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 Philistine stands in his religious capacity, sheer and stark, 
 before us. Seriousness is the one merit of these documents, 
 but it is a seriousness too mixed with the alloy of mundane 
 strife and hatred to be called a religious feeling. Not a trace 
 of delicacy of perception, or of philosophic thinking ; the 
 mere rigidness and contentiousness of the controversialist 
 and political dissenter ; a Calvinism exaggerated till it is 
 simply repelling ; and to complete the whole, a machinery 
 of covenants, conditions, bargains, and parties-contractors, 
 such as could have proceeded from no one but the born 
 'Anglo-Saxon man of business, British or American. 
 
 However, a scheme of doctrine is not necessarily false 
 because of the style in which its adherents may have at a 
 particular moment enounced it. From the faults which 
 disfigure the performance of the Westminster divines the 
 profession of faith prefixed to the Congregational Year-Book 
 is free. The Congregationalists form one of the two great 
 divisions of English Puritans. * Congregational churches 
 believe,' their Year-Book tells us, ' that the first man dis- 
 obeyed the divine command, fell from his state of innocence 
 and purity, and involved all his posterity in the conse- 
 quences of that fall. They believe that all who will be saved 
 were the objects of God's eternal and electing love, and were 
 given by an act of divine sovereignty to the Son of God. 
 They believe that Christ meritoriously obtained eternal 
 redemption for us, and that the Holy Spirit is given in 
 consequence of Christ's Mediation.' The essential points 
 of Calvinism are all here. To this profession of faith, 
 published in the Year-Book of the Independents, sub- 
 scription is not required ; Puritanism thus remaining 
 honourably consistent with the protests which, at the 
 Restoration, it made against the call for subscription. But 
 the authors of the Year-Book say with pride, and it is a 
 common boast of the Independent churches, that though 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 13 
 
 they do not require subscription, there is, perhaps, in 
 no religious body, such firm and general agreement in 
 doctrine as among Congregationalists. This is true, and 
 it is even more true of the flocks than of the ministers, 
 of whom the abler and the younger begin to be lifted 
 by the stream of modern ideas. Still, up to the present 
 time, the Protestantism of one great division of English 
 Puritans is undoubtedly Calvinist ; the Baptists holding in 
 general the scheme of Calvinism yet more strictly than the 
 Independents. 
 
 The other great division of English Puritanism is formed 
 by the Methodists. Wesleyan Methodism is, as is well 
 known, not Calvinist, but Arminian. The Methodist Maga- 
 zine was called by Wesley the Arminian Magazine^ and kept 
 that title all through his life. Arminianism is an attempt 
 made with the best intentions, and with much truth of prac- 
 tical sense, but not in a very profound philosophical spirit, 
 to escape from what perplexes and shocks in Calvinism. 
 The God of Calvinism is a magnified and non-natural man 
 who decrees at his mere good pleasure some men to salva- 
 tion and other men to reprobation ; the God of Arminianism 
 is a magnified and non-natural man who foreknows the 
 course of each man's life, and who decrees each of us to 
 salvation or reprobation in accordance with this foreknow- 
 ledge. But so long as we remain in this anthropomorphic 
 order of ideas the question will always occur : Why did not 
 a being of infinite power and infinite love so make all men 
 as that there should be no cause for this sad foreknowledge 
 and sad decree respecting a number of them ? In truth, 
 Calvinism is both theologically more coherent, and also 
 shows a deeper sense of reality than Arminianism, which, 
 in the practical man's fashion, is apt to scrape the surface of 
 things only. 
 
 For instance, the Arminian Remonstrants, in their zeal 
 
14 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 to justify the morality, in a human sense, of God's ways, 
 maintained that he sent his word to one nation rather than 
 another according as he saw that one nation was more 
 worthy than another of such a preference. The Calvinist 
 doctors of the Synod of Dort have no difficulty in showing 
 that Moses and Christ both of them assert, with respect to 
 the Jewish nation, the direct contrary ; and not only do they 
 here obtain a theological triumph, but in rebutting the 
 Arminian theory they are in accordance with historical truth 
 and with the real march of human affairs. They allow 
 more for the great fact of the not ourselves in what we do 
 and are. The Calvinists seize, we say, that great fact better 
 than the Arminians. The Calvinist's fault is in his scientific 
 appreciation of the fact ; in the reasons he gives for it. 
 God, he says, sends his word to one nation' rather than 
 another at his mere good pleasure. Here we have again the 
 magnified and non-natural man, who likes and dislikes, 
 knows and decrees, just as a man, only on a scale im- 
 mensely transcending anything of which we have expe- 
 rience ; and whose proceedings we nevertheless describe as 
 if he were in the next street for people to verify all we say 
 about him. 
 
 Arminian Methodism, however, puts aside the Calvin- 
 istic doctrine of predestination. The foremost place, which 
 in the Calvinist scheme belongs to the doctrine of predesti- 
 nation, belongs in the Methodist scheme to the doctrine of 
 justification by faith. More and more prominently does 
 modern Methodism elevate this as its essential doctrine; 
 and the era in their founder's life which Methodists select 
 to celebrate is the era of his conversion to it. It is the 
 doctrine of Anselm, adopted and developed by Luther, set 
 forth in the Confession of Augsburg, and current all through 
 the popular theology of our day. We shall find it in almost 
 any popular hymn we happen to take, but the following 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 15 
 
 lines of Milton exhibit it classically. By the fall of our 
 first parents, says he : 
 
 Man, losing all, 
 
 To expiate his treason hath nought left, 
 But to destruction sacred and devote 
 He with his whole posterity must die ; 
 Die he or justice must ; unless for him 
 Some other able, and as willing, pay 
 The rigid satisfaction ; death for death. 
 
 By Adam's fall, God's justice and mercy were placed in 
 conflict. God could not follow his mercy without violating 
 his justice. Christ by his satisfaction gave the Father the 
 right and power (nudum jus Patri acquirebat, said the 
 Arminians) to follow his mercy, and to make with man the 
 covenant of free justification by faith, whereby, if a man has 
 a sure trust and confidence that his sins are forgiven him in 
 virtue of the satisfaction made to God for them by the death 
 of Christ, he is held clear of sin by God and admitted to 
 salvation. 
 
 This doctrine, like the Calvinist doctrine of predestina- 
 tion, involves a whole history of God's proceedings, and 
 gives, also, first and almost sole place to what God does, 
 with disregard to what man does. It has thus an essential 
 affinity with Calvinism ; indeed, Calvinism is but this doc- 
 trine of original sin and justification, plus the doctrine of 
 predestination. Nay, the Welsh Methodists, as is well 
 known, have no difficulty in combining the tenet of election 
 with the practices and most of the tenets of Methodism. 
 The word solifidian points precisely to that which is common 
 to both Calvinism and Methodism, and which has made 
 both these halves of English Puritanism so popular, their 
 sensational side, as it may be called, their laying all stress 
 on a wonderful and particular account of what God gives 
 and works for us, not on what we bring or do for ourselves. 
 
t6 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 * Plead thou singly,' says Wesley, ' the blood of the covenant, 
 the ransom paid for thy proud stubborn soul.' Wesley's 
 doctrines of conversion, of the new birth, of sanctification, 
 of the direct witness of the spirit, of assurance, of sinless 
 perfection, all of them thus correspond with doctrines which 
 we have noticed in Calvinism, and show a common cha- 
 racter with them. The instantaneousness Wesley loved to 
 ascribe to conversion and sanctification points the same 
 way. ' God gives in a moment such a faith in the blood of 
 his Son as translates us out of darkness into light, out of sin 
 and fear into holiness and happiness. 7 And again, * Look 
 for sanctification just as you are, as a poor sinner that has 
 nothing to pay, nothing to plead but Christ died? This is 
 the side in Wesley's teaching which his followers have above 
 all seized, and which they are eager to hold forth as the 
 essential part of his legacy towards them. 
 
 It is true that from the same reason which prevents, as 
 we have said, those who know their Bible and nothing else 
 from really knowing even their Bible, Methodists, who for 
 the most part know nothing but Wesley, do not really know 
 even Wesley. It is true that what really characterises this 
 most interesting and most attractive man, is not his doctrine 
 of justification by faith, or any other of his set doctrines, but 
 is entirely what we may call his genius for godliness. Mr. 
 Alexander Knox, in his remarks on his friend's life and 
 character, insists much on an entry in Wesley's Journal in 
 1767, where he seems impatient at the endless harping on 
 the tenet of justification, and where he asks * if it is not high 
 time to return to the plain word : " He that feareth God 
 and worketh righteousness is accepted with him.'" Mr. 
 Knox is right in thinking that the feeling which made 
 Wesley ask this is what gave him his vital worth and cha- 
 racter as a man ; but it is not what gives him his character 
 as the teacher of Methodism. Methodism rejects Mr. Knox's 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 17 
 
 version of its founder, and insists on making the article of 
 justification the very corner-stone of the Wesleyan edifice. 
 
 And the truth undoubtedly is, that not by his assertion 
 of what man brings, but by his assertion of what God gives, 
 by his doctrines of conversion, instantaneous justification 
 and sanctification, assurance and sinless perfection, does 
 Wesley live and operate in Methodism. ' You think, I must 
 first be or do thus or thus (for sanctification). Then you^ 
 are seeking it by works unto this day. If you seek it by 
 faith, you may expect it as you are ; then expect it now. 
 It is of importance to observe that there is an inseparable 
 connexion between these three points : expect it by faith, 
 expect it as you are, and expect it now. To deny one of 
 them is to deny them all ; to allow one is to allow them all.' 
 This is the teaching of Wesley which has made the great 
 Methodist half of English Puritanism what it is, and not his 
 hesitations and recoils at the dangers of his own teaching. 
 
 No doubt, as the seriousness of Calvinism, its perpetual 
 conversance with deep matters and with the Bible, have 
 given force and fervency to Calvinist Puritans, so the loveli- 
 ness of Wesley's piety, and what I have called his genius 
 for godliness, have sweetened and made amiable numberless 
 lives of Methodist Puritans. But as a religious teacher, 
 Wesley is to be judged by his doctrine ; and his doctrine, 
 like the Calvinistic scheme, rests with all its weight on the 
 assertion of certain minutely described proceedings on God's 
 part, independent of us, our experience, and our will ; and 
 leads its recipients to look, in religion, not so much for an 
 arduous progress on their own part, and the exercise of their 
 activity, as for strokes of magic, and what may be called a 
 sensational character. 
 
 In the Heidelberg Catechism, after an answer in which 
 the catechist rehearses the popularly received doctrine of 
 original sin and vicarious satisfaction for it, the catechiser 
 
 c 
 
i8 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 asks the pertinent question : 4 Unde id sds ? ' how do you 
 know all that? The Apostle Paul is, as we have already 
 shown, the great authority for it whom formal theology 
 invokes ; his name is used by popular theology with the 
 same confidence. I open a modern book of popular re- 
 ligion at the account of a visit paid to a hardened criminal 
 seized with terror the night before his execution. The 
 .visitor addresses him : '/ now stand in Paul's place, and 
 say : In Christ's stead we pray you, be ye reconciled to 
 God. I beg you to accept the pardon of all your sins, 
 which Christ has purchased for you, and which God freely 
 bestows on you for his sake. If you do not understand, I 
 say : God's ways are not as our ways.' And the narrative 
 of the criminal's conversion goes on : ' That night was spent 
 in singing the praises of the Saviour who had purchased his 
 pardon.' 
 
 Both Calvinism and Methodism appeal, therefore, to the 
 Bible, and, above all, to St. Paul, for the history they pro- 
 pound of the relations between God and man ; but Calvin- 
 ism relies most, in enforcing it, on man's fears, Methodism 
 on man's hopes. Calvinism insists on man's being under a 
 curse ; it then works the sense of sin, misery, and terror in 
 him, and appeals pre-eminently to the desire to flee from 
 the wrath to come. Methodism, too, insists on his being 
 under a curse ; but it works most the sense of hope in him, 
 the craving for happiness, and appeals pre-eminently to the 
 desire for eternal bliss. No one, however, will maintain 
 that the particular account of God's proceedings with man, 
 whereby Methodism and Calvinism operate on these de- 
 sires, proves itself by internal evidence, and establishes 
 without external aid its own scientific validity. So we may 
 either directly try, as best we can, its scientific validity in 
 itself ; or, as it professes to have Paul's authority to support 
 it, we may first inquire what is really Paul's account of 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 19 
 
 God's proceedings with man, and whether this tallies with 
 the Puritan account and confirms it. The latter is in every 
 way the safer and the more instructive course to follow. 
 And we will follow Puritanism's example in taking St. Paul's 
 mature and greatest work, the Epistle to the Romans, as the 
 chief place for finding what he really thought on the points 
 in question. 
 
 We have already said elsewhere, 1 indeed, what is very 
 true, and what must never be forgotten, that what St. Paul, 
 a man so separated from us by time, race, training and cir- 
 cumstances, really thought, we cannot make sure of know- 
 ing exactly. All we can do is to get near it, reading him 
 with the sort of critical tact which the study of the human 
 mind and its history, and the acquaintance with many great 
 writers, naturally gives for following the movement of any 
 one single great writer's thought ; reading him, also, without 
 preconceived theories to which we want to make his thoughts 
 fit themselves. It is evident that the English translation of 
 the Epistle to the Romans has been made by men with 
 their heads full of the current doctrines of election and 
 justification we have been noticing ; and it has thereby 
 received such a bias, of which a strong example is the use 
 of the word atonement in the eleventh verse of the fifth 
 chapter, that perhaps it is almost impossible for any one 
 who reads the English translation only, to take into his 
 mind Paul's thought without a colouring from the current 
 doctrines. But besides discarding the English translation, 
 we must bear in mind, if we wish to get as near Paul's real 
 thought as possible, two things which have greatly increased 
 the facilities for misrepresenting him. 
 
 In the first place, Paul, like the other Bible-writers, and 
 like the Semitic race in general, has a much juster sense of 
 the true scope and limits of diction in religious deliverances 
 i See Culture and Anarchy ', chap. v. 
 
 C 2 
 
20 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 than we have. He uses within the sphere of religious emo- 
 tion expressions which, in this sphere, have an eloquence 
 and a propriety, but which are not to be taken out of it and 
 made into formal scientific propositions. 
 
 This is a point very necessary to be borne in mind in 
 reading the Bible. The prophet Nahum says in the book 
 of his vision : ' God is jealous, and the Lord revengeth ; ; l 
 and the authors of the Westminster Confession, drawing 
 out a scientific theology, lay down the proposition that God 
 is a jealous and vengeful God, and think they prove their 
 proposition by quoting in a note the words of Nahum. But 
 this is as if we took from a chorus of ^Eschylus one of his 
 grand passages about guilt and destiny, just put the words 
 straight into the formal and exact cast of a sentence of 
 Aristotle, and said that here was the scientific teaching of 
 Greek philosophy on these matters. The Hebrew genius 
 has not, like the Greek, its conscious and clear-marked 
 division into a poetic side and a scientific side ; the scien- 
 tific side is almost absent. The Bible utterances have often 
 the character of a chorus of ^Eschylus, but never that of a 
 treatise of Aristotle. We, like the Greeks, possess in our 
 speech and thought the two characters ; but so far as the 
 Bible is concerned we have generally confounded them, and 
 have used our double possession for our bewilderment 
 rather than turned it to good account. The admirable 
 maxim of the great mediaeval Jewish school of Biblical 
 critics : The Law speaks with the tongue of the children of 
 men, a maxim which is the very foundation of all sane 
 Biblical criticism, was for centuries a dead letter to the 
 whole body of our Western exegesis, and is a dead letter to 
 the whole body of our popular exegesis still. Taking the 
 Bible language as equivalent with the language of the scien- 
 tific intellect, a language which is adequate and absolute, 
 1 Nahum, i, 2. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 21 
 
 we have never been in a position to use the key which this 
 maxim of the Jewish doctors offers to us. But it is certain 
 that, whatever strain the religious expressions of the Semitic 
 genius were meant, in the minds of those who gave utter- 
 ance to them, to bear, the particular strain which we West- 
 ern people put upon them is one which they were not 
 meant to bear. 
 
 I have used the word Hebraise l for another purpose, 
 to denote the exclusive attention to the moral side of our 
 nature, to conscience, and to doing rather than knowing ; so, 
 to describe the vivid and figured way in which St. Paul within 
 the sphere of religious emotion uses words without carrying 
 them outside it, I will use the word Orientalise. When Paul 
 says : ' God hath concluded them all in unbelief that he 
 might have mercy upon all,' he Orientalises ; that is, he does 
 not mean to assert formally that God acted with this set 
 design, but, being full of the happy and divine end to the 
 unbelief spoken of, he, by a vivid and striking figure, repre- 
 sents the unbelief as actually caused with a view to this end. 
 But when the Calvinists of the Synod of Dort, wishing to 
 establish the formal proposition that faith and all saving gifts 
 flow from election and nothing else, quote an expression of 
 Paul's similar to the one we have quoted, ' He hath chosen 
 us,' they say, ' not because we were, but that we might be 
 holy and without blame before him,' 2 they go quite wide of 
 the mark, from not perceiving that what the apostle used as 
 a vivid figure of rhetoric, they are using as a formal scientific 
 proposition. 
 
 When Paul Orientalises, the fault is not with him if he 
 is misunderstood, but with the prosaic and unintelligent 
 Western readers who have not enough tact for style to com- 
 prehend his mode of expression. But he also Judaises ; 
 and here his liability to being misunderstood by us Western 
 
 1 See Culture and Anarchy r , chap. iv. * Rom.) xi, 32. 
 
22 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 people is undoubtedly due to a defect in the critical habit 
 of himself and his race. A Jew himself, he uses the Jewish 
 Scriptures in a Jew's arbitrary and uncritical fashion, as if 
 they had a talismanic character ; as if for a doctrine, how- 
 ever true in itself, their confirmation was still necessary, and 
 as if this confirmation was to be got from their mere words 
 alone, however detached from the sense of their context, 
 and however violently allegorised or otherwise wrested. 
 
 To use the Bible in this way, even for purposes of illus- 
 tration, is often an interruption to the argument, a fault of 
 style ; to use it in this way for real proof and confirmation, 
 is a fault of reasoning. An example of the first fault may 
 be seen in the tenth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, 
 and in the beginning of the third chapter. The apostle's 
 point in either place, his point that faith comes by hearing, 
 and his point that God's oracles were true though the Jews 
 did not believe them, would stand much clearer without 
 their scaffolding of Bible-quotation. An instance of the 
 second fault is in the third and fourth chapters of the Epistle 
 to the Galatians, where the Biblical argumentation by which 
 the apostle seeks to prove his case is as unsound as his case 
 itself is sound. How far these faults are due to the apostle 
 himself, how far to the requirements of those for whom he 
 wrote, we need not now investigate. It is enough that he 
 undoubtedly uses the letter of Scripture in this arbitrary and 
 Jewish way ; and thus Puritanism, which has only itself to 
 blame for misunderstanding him when he Orientalises, may 
 fairly put upon the apostle himself some of its blame for 
 misunderstanding him when he Judaises, and for Judaising 
 so strenuously along with him. 
 
 To get, therefore, at what Paul really thought and meant 
 to say, it is necessary for us modern and Western people to 
 translate him. And not as Puritanism, which has merely 
 taken his letter and re-set it in the formal propositions of a 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 23 
 
 modern scientific treatise ; but his letter itself must be re- 
 cast before it can be properly conveyed by such propositions. 
 And as the order in which, in any series of ideas, the ideas 
 come, is of great importance to the final result, and as Paul, 
 who did not write scientific treatises, but had always religious 
 edification in direct view, never set out his doctrine with a 
 design of exhibiting it as a scientific whole, we must also 
 find out for ourselves the order in which Paul's ideas natu- 
 rally stand, and the connexion between one of them and the 
 other, in order to arrive at the real scheme of his teaching, 
 as compared with the schemes exhibited by Puritanism. 
 
 We remarked how what sets the Calvinist in motion 
 seems to be the desire to flee from the wrath to come ; and 
 what sets the Methodist in motion, the desire for eternal 
 bliss. What is it which sets Paul in motion ? It is the 
 impulse which we have elsewhere noted as the master- 
 impulse of Hebraism, the desire for righteousness. ' I exercise 
 myself/ he told Felix, * to have a conscience void of offence 
 towards God and men continually? l To the Hebrew, this 
 moral order, or righteousness, was pre-eminently the uni- 
 versal order, the law of God ; and God, the fountain of all 
 goodness, was pre-eminently to him the giver of the moral 
 law. The end and aim of all religion, access to God^ the 
 sense of harmony with the universal order, the partaking of 
 the divine nature, that our faith and hope might be in God, 
 that we might have life and have it more abundantly, 
 meant for the Hebrew, access to the source of the moral order 
 in especial, and harmony with it. It was the greatness of 
 the Hebrew race that it felt the authority of this order, 
 its preciousness and its beneficence, so strongly. 'How 
 precious are thy thoughts unto me, O God ! ' 'The law of 
 thy mouth is better than thousands of gold and silver.' 
 ' My soul is consumed with the very fervent desire that it 
 1 Acts t xxiv, 16, 
 
24 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 hath alway unto thy judgments.' l It was the greatness of 
 their best individuals that in them this feeling was incessantly 
 urgent to prove itself in the only sure manner, in action. 
 * Blessed are they who hear the word of God, and keep it.' 
 ( If thou wouldst enter into life, Keep the commandments.' 
 'Let no man deceive you, he that doeth righteousness is 
 righteous.' 2 What distinguishes Paul is both his conviction 
 that the commandment is holy, and just, and good ; and 
 also his desire to give effect to the commandment, to 
 establish it. It was this which gave to his endeavour after 
 a clear conscience such meaning and efficacy. It was this 
 which gave him insight to see that there could be no radical 
 difference, in respect of salvation and the way to it, between 
 Jew and Gentile. * Upon every soul of man that worketh 
 evil) whoever he may be, tribulation and anguish ; to every 
 one that worketh good, glory, honour, and peace ! ' 3 
 
 St. Paul's piercing practical religious sense, joined to his 
 strong intellectual power, enabled him to discern and follow 
 the range of the commandment, both as to man's actions and 
 as to his heart and thoughts, with extraordinary force and 
 closeness. His religion had, as we shall see, a preponder- 
 antly mystic side, and nothing is so natural to the mystic 
 as in rich single words, such as faith, light, love, to sum up 
 and take for granted, without specially enumerating them, 
 all good moral principles and habits ; yet nothing is more 
 remarkable in Paul than the frequent, nay, incessant lists, 
 in the most particular detail, of moral habits to be pursued 
 or avoided. Lists of this sort might in a less sincere and 
 profound writer be formal and wearisome ; but to no atten- 
 tive reader of St. Paul will they be wearisome, for in making 
 them he touched the solid ground which was the basis of his 
 
 1 Ps. cxxxix, 7 ; cxix, 72 ; Ibid., 20. 
 
 2 Luke, xi, 28 ; Matth., xix, 17 ; I John, iii, 7. 
 * Rom., ii, 9, 10. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 25 
 
 religion, the solid ground of his hearty desire for righteous- 
 ness and of his thorough conception of it, and only on 
 such a ground was so strong a superstructure possible. The 
 m.ore one studies these lists, the more does their significance 
 come out. To illustrate this, let any one go through for 
 himself the enumeration, too long to be quoted here, in the 
 four last verses of the first chapter of the Epistle to the 
 Romans, of 'things which are not convenient ;' or let him 
 merely consider with attention this catalogue, towards the 
 end of the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, of 
 fruits of the spirit : ' love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, 
 goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.' 1 The man who 
 wrote with this searching minuteness knew accurately what 
 he meant by sin and righteousness, and did not use these 
 words at random. His diligent comprehensiveness in his 
 plan of duties is only less admirable than his diligent 
 sincerity. The sterner virtues and the gentler, his conscience 
 will not let him rest till he has embraced them all. In his 
 deep resolve ' to make out by actual trial what is that good 
 and perfect and acceptable will of God,' 2 he goes back upon 
 himself again and again, he marks a duty at every point 
 of our nature, and at points the most opposite, for fear he 
 should by possibility be leaving behind him some weakness 
 still indulged, some subtle promptings to evil not yet brought 
 into captivity. 
 
 It has not been enough remarked how this incomparable 
 honesty and depth in Paul's love of righteousness is probably 
 what chiefly explains his conversion. Most men have the 
 defects, as the saying is, of their qualities. Because they 
 are ardent and severe they have no sense for gentleness and 
 sweetness ; because they are sweet and gentle they have no 
 sense for severity and ardour. A Puritan is a Puritan, and 
 a man of feeling is a man of feeling. But with Paul the 
 1 Verses 22, 23. 2 JRom. t xii, 2. 
 
26 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 very same fulness of moral nature which made him an 
 ardent Pharisee, * as concerning zeal, persecuting the church, 
 touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless/ 
 was so large that it carried him out of Pharisaism and beyond 
 it, when once he found how much needed doing in him which 
 Pharisaism could not do. 
 
 Every attentive regarder of the character of Paul, not 
 only as he was before his conversion but as he appears to us 
 till his end, must have been struck with two things : one, the 
 earnest insistence with which he recommends * bowels of 
 mercies,' as he calls them ; meekness, humbleness of mind, 
 gentleness, unwearying forbearance, crowned all of them with 
 that emotion of charity ' which is the bond of perfectness ; * 
 the other, the force with which he dwells on the solidarity 
 (to use the modern phrase) of mankind, the joint interest,, 
 that is, which binds humanity together, the duty of re- 
 specting every one's part in life, and of doing justice to his 
 efforts to fulfil that part. Never surely did such a contro- 
 versialist, such a master of sarcasm and invective, commend, 
 with such manifest sincerity and such persuasive emotion, 
 the qualities of meekness and gentleness ! Never surely 
 did a worker who took with such energy his own line, and 
 who was so born to preponderate and predominate in what- 
 ever line he took, insist so often and so admirably that the 
 lines of other workers were just as good as his own ! At no 
 time, perhaps, did Paul arrive at practising quite perfectly 
 what he thus preached ; but this only sets in a stronger 
 light the thorough love of righteousness which made him 
 seek out, and put so prominently forward, and so strive to 
 make himself and others fulfil, parts of righteousness which 
 do not force themselves on the common conscience like the 
 duties of soberness, temperance, and activity, and which were 
 somewhat alien, certainly, to his own particular nature. 
 Therefore we cannot but believe that into this spirit, so 
 
57: PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 27 
 
 possessed with the hunger and thirst for righteousness, and 
 precisely because it was so possessed by it, the characteristic 
 doctrines of Jesus, which brought a new aliment to feed this 
 hunger and thirst, of Jesus whom, except in vision, he had 
 never seen, but who was in every one's words and thoughts, 
 the teacher who was mild and lowly in heart, who said mert 
 were brothers and must love one another, that the last should 
 often be first, that the exercise of dominion and lordship 
 had nothing in them desirable, and that we must become as 
 little children, sank down and worked there even before 
 Paul ceased to persecute, and had no small part in getting 
 him ready for the crisis of his conversion. 
 
 Such doctrines offered new fields of righteousness to 
 the eye of this indefatigable explorer of it, and enlarged 
 the domain of duty of which Pharisaism showed him only 
 a portion. Then, after the satisfaction thus given to his 
 desire for a full conception of righteousness, came Christ's 
 injunctions to make clean the inside as well as the outside, 
 to beware of the least leaven of hypocrisy and self-flattery, 
 of saying and not doing ; and, finally, the injunction to feel, 
 after doing all we can, that, as compared with the standard 
 of perfection, we are still unprofitable servants. These 
 teachings were, to a man like Paul, for the practice of right- 
 eousness what the others were for the theory ; sympathetic 
 utterances, which made the inmost chords of his being 
 vibrate, and which irresistibly drew him sooner or later 
 towards their utterer. Need it be said that he never forgot 
 them, and that in all his pages they have left their trace? 
 It is even affecting to see, how, when he is driven for the 
 very sake of righteousness to put the law of righteousness 
 in the second place, and to seek outside the law itself for a 
 power to fulfil the law, how, I say, he returns again and 
 again to the elucidation of his one sole design in all he is- 
 doing ; how he labours to prevent all possibility of mis- 
 
28 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 understanding, and to show that he is only leaving the moral 
 law for a moment in order to establish it for ever more vic- 
 toriously. What earnestness and pathos in the assurance : 
 * If there had been a law given which could have given life, 
 verily righteousness should have been by the law ! ' l ' Do I 
 condemn the law ? ' he keeps saying ; * do I forget that the com- 
 mandment is holy, just, and good ? Because we are no longer 
 under the law, are we to sin ? Am I seeking to make the course 
 of my life and yours other than a service and an obedience ? ' 
 This man, out of whom a blinded criticism has deduced An- 
 tinomianism, is in truth so possessed with horror of Antino- 
 mianism, that he goes to grace for the sole purpose of extir- 
 pating it, and even then cannot rest without perpetually telling 
 us why he is gone there. This man, whom Calvin and Luther 
 and their followers have shut up into the two scholastic doc- 
 trines of election and justification, would have said, could we 
 hear him, just what he said about circumcision and uncircum- 
 cision in his own day : * Election is nothing, and justification 
 is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God.' 
 
 This foremost place which righteousness takes in the 
 order of St. Paul's ideas makes a signal difference between 
 him and Puritanism. Puritanism, as we have said, finds its 
 starting-point either in the desire to flee from eternal wrath 
 or in the desire to obtain eternal bliss. Puritanism has 
 learned from revelation, as it says, a particular history of the 
 first man's fall, of mankind being under a curse, of certain 
 contracts having been passed concerning mankind in the 
 Council of the Trinity, of the substance of those contracts, 
 and of man's position under them. The great concern of 
 Puritanism is with the operation of those contracts on man's 
 condition ; its leading thought, if it is a Puritanism of a 
 gloomy turn, is of awe and fear caused by the threatening 
 aspect of man's condition under these contracts ; if of a 
 1 Ga/., iii, 21. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 29 
 
 cheerful turn, of gratitude and hope caused by the favour- 
 able aspect of it. But in either case, foregone events, the 
 covenant passed, what God has done and does, is the great 
 matter. What there is left for man to do, the human work 
 of righteousness, is secondary, and comes in but to attest 
 and confirm our assurance of what God has done for us. 
 We have seen this in Wesley's words already quoted : the 
 first thing for a man is to be justified and sanctified, and to 
 have the assurance that, without seeking it by works, he is- 
 justified and sanctified ; then the desire and works of right- 
 eousness follow as a proper result of this condition. Still 
 more does Calvinism make man's desire and works of right- 
 eousness mere evidences and benefits of more important 
 things j the desire to work righteousness is among the 
 saving graces applied by the Holy Spirit to the elect, and 
 the last of those graces. Denique, says the Synod of Dort, 
 last of all) after faith in the promises and after the witness 
 of the Spirit, comes, to establish our assurance, a clear con- 
 science and righteousness. It is manifest how unlike is this 
 order of ideas to Paul's order, who starts with the thought 
 of a conscience void of offence towards God and man, and 
 builds upon that thought his whole system. 
 
 But this difference constitutes from the very outset 
 an immense scientific superiority for the scheme of Paul. 
 Hope and fear are elements of human nature like the love 
 of right, but they are far blinder and less scientific elements 
 of it ' The Bible is a divine revelation ; the Bible declares 
 certain things ; the things it thus declares have the witness 
 of our hopes and fears ; ' this is the line of thought fol- 
 lowed by Puritanism. But what science seeks after is a 
 satisfying rational conception of things. A scheme which 
 fails to give this, which gives the contrary of this, may indeed 
 be of a nature to move our hopes and fears, but is to science 
 of none the more value on that account. 
 
30 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 Nor does our calling such a scheme a revelation mend 
 the matter. Instead of covering the scientific inadequacy 
 of a conception by the authority of a revelation, science 
 rather proves the authority of a revelation by the scientific 
 adequacy of the conceptions given in it, and limits the 
 sphere of that authority to the sphere of that adequacy. The 
 more an alleged revelation seems to contain precious and 
 true things, the more ought we to be inclined to doubt 
 the correctness of any deduction which draws from it, within 
 the sphere of these things, a scheme which rationally is not 
 satisfying. That the scheme of Puritanism is rationally so 
 little satisfying should incline us, not to take it on the autho- 
 rity of the Bible, but to doubt whether it is really in the 
 Bible. The first appeal which this scheme, having begun 
 outside the sphere of reality and experience, makes in the 
 sphere of reality and experience, its first appeal, therefore, 
 to science, the appeal to the witness of human hope and 
 fear, does not much mend matters ; for science knows that 
 numberless conceptions not rationally satisfying are yet the 
 ground of hope and fear. 
 
 Paul does not begin outside the sphere of science ; he 
 begins with an appeal to reality and experience. And the 
 appeal here with which he commences has, for science, un- 
 doubted force and importance ; for he appeals to a rational 
 conception which is a part, and perhaps the chief part, of 
 our experience ; the conception of the law of righteousness^ 
 the very law and ground of human nature so far as this 
 nature is moral. Things as they truly are, facts, are the 
 object-matter of science ; and the moral law in human 
 nature, however this law may have originated, is in our actual 
 experience among the greatest of facts. 
 
 If I were not afraid of intruding upon Mr. Ruskin's pro- 
 vince, I might point out the witness which etymology itself 
 bears to this law as a prime element and clue in man's con- 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 31 
 
 stitution. Our word righteousness means going straight, 
 going the way we are meant to go ; there are languages in 
 which the word * way ' or * road ' is also the word for right 
 reason and duty ; the Greek word for justice and righteous- 
 ness has for its foundation, some say, the idea of describing 
 a certain line, following a certain necessary orbit. But for 
 these fanciful helps there is no need. When Paul starts 
 with affirming the grandeur and necessity of the law of 
 righteousness, science has no difficulty in going along with 
 him. When he fixes as man's right aim ' love, joy, peace, 
 patience, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control,' 1 
 he appeals for witness to the truth of what he says to an 
 experience too intimate to need illustration or argument. 
 
 The best confirmation of the scientific validity of the im- 
 portance which Paul thus attaches to the law of righteous- 
 ness, the law of reason and conscience, God as moral law, 
 is to be found in its agreement with the importance attached 
 to this law by teachers the most unlike him ; since in the 
 eye of science an experience gains as much by having uni- 
 versality, as in the eye of religion it seems to gain by having 
 uniqueness. ' Would you know,' says Epictetus, * the means 
 to perfection which Socrates followed ? they were these : in 
 every single matter which came before him he made the 
 rule of reason and conscience his one rule to follow.' Such 
 was precisely the aim of Paul also ; it is an aim to which 
 science does homage as a satisfying rational conception. 
 And to this aim hope and fear properly attach themselves. 
 For on our following the clue of moral order, or losing it, 
 depends our happiness or misery ; our life or death in the 
 true sense of those words ; our harmony with the universal 
 order or our disharmony with it ; our partaking, as St. Paul 
 says, of the wrath of God or of the glory of God. So that 
 looking to this clue, and fearing to lose hold on it, we may 
 1 Gal., v, 22, 23. 
 
32 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 in strict scientific truth say with the author of the Imitation : 
 Omnia vanitas, prater amare Deum, et illi soli servire. 
 
 But to serve God, to follow that central clue in our 
 moral being which unites us to the universal order, is no 
 easy task ; and here again we are on the most sure ground 
 of experience and psychology. In some way or other, says 
 Bishop Wilson, every man is conscious of an opposition in 
 him between the flesh and the spirit. Video meliora pro- 
 boque, deteriora sequor, say the thousand times quoted lines 
 of the Roman poet. The philosophical explanation of this 
 conflict does not indeed attribute, like the Manichaean fancy, 
 any inherent evil to the flesh and its workings ; all the forces 
 and tendencies in us are, like our proper central moral ten- 
 dency the desire of righteousness, in themselves beneficent. 
 But they require to be harmonised with this tendency, be- 
 cause this aims directly at our total moral welfare, our 
 harmony as moral beings with the law of our nature and 
 the law of God, and derives thence a pre-eminence and a 
 right to moderate. And, though they are not evil in them- 
 selves, the evil which flows from these diverse workings is 
 undeniable. The lusts of the flesh, the law in our members, 
 passion, according to the Greek word used by Paul, inordi- 
 nate affection^ according to the admirable rendering of Paul's 
 Greek word in our English Bible, 1 take naturally no account 
 of anything but themselves ; this arbitrary and unregulated 
 action of theirs can produce only confusion and misery. 
 The spirit, the law of our mind, takes account of the uni- 
 versal moral order, the will of God, and is indeed the voice 
 of that order expressing itself in us. Paul talks of a man 
 sowing to his flesh, 2 because each of us has of his own this 
 individual body, this congeries of flesh and bones, blood and 
 nerves, different from that of every one else, and with de- 
 sires and impulses driving each of us his own separate way ; 
 1 CoL, iii, 5. 2 Gal., vi, 8. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 33 
 
 and he says that a man who sows to this, sows to a thousand 
 tyrants, and can reap no good harvest. But he talks of 
 sowing to the spirit ; because there is one central moral 
 tendency which for us and for all men is the law of our 
 being, and through reason and righteousness we move in 
 this universal order and with it. In this conformity, to the 
 will of God, as we religiously name the moral order, is our 
 peace and happiness. 
 
 But how to find the energy and power to bring all those 
 self-seeking tendencies of the flesh, those multitudinous, 
 swarming, eager, and incessant impulses, into obedience to 
 the central tendency ? Mere commanding and forbidding 
 is of no avail, and only irritates opposition in the desires it 
 tries to control. It even enlarges their power, because it 
 makes us feel our impotence ; and the confusion caused by 
 their ungoverned working is increased by our being filled 
 with a deepened sense of disharmony, remorse, and dismay. 
 *I was alive without the law once,' } says Paul ; the natural 
 play of all the forces and desires in me went on smoothly 
 enough so long as I did not attempt to introduce order 
 and regulation among them. But the condition of immoral 
 tranquillity could not in man be permanent. That natural 
 law of reason and conscience which all men have, was suffi- 
 cient by itself to produce a consciousness of rebellion and 
 disquietude. Matters became only worse by the exhibition 
 of the Mosaic law, the offspring of a moral sense more poig- 
 nant and stricter, however little it might show of subtle 
 insight and delicacy, than the moral sense of the mass of 
 mankind. The very stringency of the Mosaic code in- 
 creased the feeling of dismay and helplessness ; it set forth 
 the law of righteousness more authoritatively and minutely, 
 yet did not supply any sufficient power to keep it. Neither 
 the law of nature, therefore, nor the law of Moses, availed 
 
 .) vii, 9. 
 
 D 
 
34 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 to blind men to righteousness. So we come to the word 
 which is in some sense the governing word of the Epistle to 
 the Romans, the word all. As the word righteousness is 
 the governing word of St. Paul's entire mind and life, so the 
 word all may stand for the governing word of this his chief 
 epistle. The Gentile with the law of nature, the Jew with 
 the law of Moses, alike fail to achieve righteousness. * All 
 have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. 3 J All 
 do what they would not, and do not what they would ; all 
 feel themselves enslaved, impotent, guilty, miserable. ' O 
 wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the 
 body of this death ? ' 2 
 
 Hitherto, we have followed Paul in the sphere of morals; 
 we have now come with him to the point where he enters 
 the sphere of religion. Religion is that which binds and 
 holds us to the practice of righteousness. We have accom- 
 panied Paul, and found him always treading solid ground, 
 till he is brought to straits where a binding and holding 
 power of this kind is necessary. Here is the critical point 
 for the scientific worth of his doctrine. ' Now at last,' cries 
 Puritanism, ' the great apostle is about to become even as 
 one of us ; there is no issue for him now, but the issue we 
 have always declared he finds. He has recourse to our 
 theurgy of election, justification, substitution, and imputed 
 righteousness.' We will proceed to show that Paul has re 
 course to nothing of the kind. 
 
 1 Rom., iii, 23. There is a reminiscence of Jeremiah, ix, 25, 26. 
 * Rom. % vii, 24. 
 
.ST. PA UL AND PROTESTANTISM. 35 
 
 WE have seen how Puritanism seems to come by its religion 
 in the first instance theologically and from authority ; Paul 
 by his, on the other hand, psychologically and from expe- 
 rience. Even the points, therefore, in which they both meet 
 they have not reached in the same order or by the same 
 road. The miserable sense of sin from unrighteousness, 
 the joyful witness of a good conscience from righteousness, 
 these are points in which Puritanism and St. Paul meet. 
 They are facts of human nature and can be verified. But 
 whereas Puritanism, so far as science is concerned, ends 
 with these facts, and rests the whole weight of its ante- 
 cedent theurgy upon the witness to it they offer, Paul 
 begins with these facts, and has not yet, so far as we have 
 followed him, called upon them to prove anything but them- 
 selves. The scientific difference, as we have already re- 
 marked, which this establishes between Paul and Puritanism 
 is immense, and is all in Paul's favour. Sin and righteous- 
 ness, together with their eternal accompaniments of fear and 
 hope, misery and happiness, can prove themselves ; but they 
 can by no means prove, also, Puritanism's history of original 
 sin, election and justification. 
 
 Puritanism is fond of maintaining, indeed, that Paul's 
 doctrines derive their sanction, not from any agreement 
 with science and experience, but from his miraculous con- 
 version, and that this conversion it was which in his own 
 judgment gave to them their authority. But whatever 
 sanction the miracle of his conversion may in his own eyes 
 
 D2 
 
36 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 have lent to the doctrines afterwards propounded by Paul, 
 it is clear that, for science, his conversion adds to his doc- 
 trines no force at all which they do not already possess in 
 themselves. Paul's conversion is for science an event of 
 precisely the same nature as the conversions of which the 
 history of Methodism relates so many ; events described, 
 for the most part, just as the event of Paul's conversion is 
 described, with perfect good faith, and which we may per- 
 fectly admit to have happened just in the manner related, 
 without on that account attributing to those who underwent 
 them any source of certitude for a scheme of doctrine which 
 this doctrine does not on other and better grounds possess. 
 
 Surely this proposition has only to be clearly stated in 
 order to be self-evident. The conversion of Paul is in 
 itself an incident of precisely the same order as the conver- 
 sion of Sampson Staniforth, a Methodist soldier in the cam- 
 paign of Fontenoy. Staniforth himself relates his conversion 
 as follows, in words which bear plainly marked on them the 
 very stamp of good faith : 
 
 * From twelve at night till two it was my turn to stand 
 sentinel at a dangerous post. I had a fellow-sentinel, but I 
 desired him to go away, which he willingly did. As soon 
 as I was alone, I knelt down and determined not to rise, but 
 to continue crying and wrestling with God till he had mercy 
 on me. How long I was in that agony I cannot tell ; but 
 as I looked up to heaven I saw the clouds open exceeding 
 bright, and I saw Jesus hanging on the cross. At the same 
 moment these words were applied to my heart : " Thy sins 
 are forgiven thee." All guilt was gone, and my soul was 
 filled with unutterable peace : the fear of death and hell 
 was vanished away. I was filled with wonder and astonish- 
 ment. I closed my eyes, but the impression was still the 
 same ; and for about ten weeks, while I was awake, let me 
 be where I would, the same appearance was still before my 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 37 
 
 eyes, and the same impression upon my heart : Thy sins are 
 forgiven thee. 1 
 
 Not the narrative, in the Acts, of Paul's journey to 
 Damascus, could more convince us, as we have said, of its 
 own honesty. But this honesty makes nothing, as every 
 one will admit, for the scientific truth of any scheme of 
 doctrine propounded by Sampson Staniforth, which must 
 prove itself and its own scientific value before science can 
 admit it. Precisely the same is it with Paul's doctrine ; 
 and we repeat, therefore, that he and his doctrine have 
 herein a great advantage over Puritanism, in that, so far as 
 we have yet followed them, they, unlike Puritanism, rely on 
 facts of experience and assert nothing which science cannot 
 verify. 
 
 We have now to see whether Paul, in passing from the 
 undoubted facts of experience, with which he begins, to his 
 religion properly so called, abandons in any essential points 
 of his teaching the advantage with which he started, and 
 ends, as Puritanism commences, with a batch of arbitrary 
 and unscientific assumptions. 
 
 We left Paul in collision with a fact of human nature, 
 but in itself a sterile fact, a fact on which it is possible to 
 dwell too long, although Puritanism, thinking this impossible, 
 has remained intensely absorbed in the contemplation of it, 
 and indeed has never properly got beyond it, the sense of 
 sin. Sin is not a monster to be mused on, but an impo- 
 tence to be got rid of. All thinking about it, beyond what 
 is indispensable for the firm effort to get rid of it, is waste 
 of energy and waste of time. We then enter that element 
 of morbid and subjective brooding, in which so many have 
 perished. This sense of sin, however, it is also possible to 
 have not strongly enough to beget the firm effort to get rid 
 of it, and the Greeks, with all their great gifts, had this 
 sense not strongly enough ; its strength in the Hebrew 
 
SS ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 people is one of this people's mainsprings. l Mine iniquities 
 have taken hold upon me so that I am not able to look up ; 
 they are more than the hairs of mine head ; therefore my 
 heart faileth me.' 1 They are more than the hairs of mine 
 head. The motions of what Paul calls ' the law in our 
 members ' are indeed a hydra-brood ; when we are working 
 against one fault, a dozen others crop up without our ex- 
 pecting it , and this it is which drives the man who deals 
 seriously with himself to difficulty, nay to despair. Paul 
 did not need James to tell him that whoever offends on one 
 point is, so far at least as his own conscience and inward 
 satisfaction are concerned, guilty of all ; 2 he knew it himself, 
 and the unrest this knowledge gave him was his very start- 
 ing-point. He knew, too, that nothing outward, no satis- 
 faction of all the requirements men may make of us, no 
 privileges of any sort, can give peace of conscience ; of 
 conscience, 'whose praise is not of men but of God.' 3 He 
 knew, also, that the law of the moral order stretches beyond 
 us and our private conscience, is independent of our sense 
 of having kept it, and stands absolute and what in itself it 
 is ; even, therefore, though I may know nothing against my- 
 self, yet this is not enough, I may still not be just. 4 Finally, 
 Paul knew that merely to know all this and say it, is of no 
 use, advances us nothing ; * the kingdom of God is not in 
 word but in power.' 5 
 
 We have several times said that the Hebrew race appre- 
 hended God, the universal order by which all things fulfil 
 the law of their being, chiefly as the moral order in human 
 nature, and that it was their greatness that they apprehended 
 him as this so distinctly and powerfully. But it is also 
 characteristic of them, and perhaps it is what mainly dis- 
 tinguishes their spirit from the spirit of mediaeval Christianity, 
 
 1 Ps. xl, 12. 2 James, ii, 10. * Rom., ii, 29. 
 
 * I Cor.* iv, 4. * Ibid., 20. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 39 
 
 that they constantly thought, too, of God as the source of life 
 and breath and all things, and of what they called ' fulness 
 of life ' in all things. This way of thinking was common to 
 them with the Greeks ; although, whereas the Greeks threw 
 more delicacy and imagination into it, the Hebrews threw 
 more energy and vital warmth. But to the Hebrew, as to 
 the Greek, the gift of life, and health, and the world, was 
 divine, as well as the gift of morals. * God's righteousness] 
 indeed, ' standeth like the strong mountains, his judgments 
 are like the great deep ; he is a righteous judge, strong and 
 patient, who is provoked every day.' l This is the Hebrew's 
 first and deepest conception of God, as the source of the 
 moral order. But God is also, to the Hebrew, the power by 
 which we have been { upholden ever since we were born,' 
 and whose ' mercy is over all his works.' 2 He is the power 
 that * saves both man and beast, gives them drink of his 
 pleasures as out of the river,' and with whom is ' the well of 
 life.' 3 In his speech at Athens, Paul shows how full he, too, 
 was of this feeling ; and in the famous passage in the first 
 chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, where he asserts the 
 existence of the natural moral law, the source he assigns to 
 this law is not merely God in conscience, the righteous judge, 
 but God in the world and the workings of the world, the 
 eternal and divine power from which all life and wholesome 
 energy proceed. 4 
 
 This element in which we live and move and have our 
 being, which stretches around and beyond the strictly moral 
 element in us, around and beyond the finite sphere of what 
 is originated, measured, and controlled by our own under- 
 standing and will, this infinite element is very present to 
 Paul's thoughts, and makes a profound impression on them. 
 By this element we are receptive and influenced, not origin- 
 
 J Ps. xxxvi, 6; vii, II. * Ps. Ixxi, 6; cxlv, 9. 
 
 * Ps. xxxvi, 6, 8, 9. * Rom.) i, 19-21. 
 
40 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 ative and influencing ; now, we all of us receive far more 
 than we originate. Our pleasure from a spring day we do not 
 make ; our pleasure, even, from an approving conscience we 
 do not make. And yet we feel that both the one pleasure 
 and the other can, and often do, work with us in a wonderful 
 way for our good. So we get the thought of an impulsion 
 outside ourselves which is at once awful and beneficent. 
 'No man,' as the Hebrew psalm says, 'hath quickened his 
 own soul.' 1 ' I know,' says Jeremiah, ' that the way of man 
 is not in himself ; it is not in man that walketh to direct his 
 steps.' 2 Most true and natural in this feeling; and the 
 greater men are, the more natural is this feeling to them. 
 Great men like Sylla and Napoleon have loved to attribute 
 their success to their fortune, their star ; religious great men 
 have loved to say that their sufficiency was of God. 3 Through 
 every great spirit runs a train of feeling of this sort ; and the 
 power and depth which there undoubtedly is in Calvinism, 
 comes from Calvinism's being overwhelmed by it. Paul is 
 not, like Calvinism, overwhelmed by it ; but it is always 
 before his mind and strongly agitates his thoughts. The 
 voluntary, rational, and human world, of righteousness, moral 
 choice, effort, filled the first place in his spirit. But the 
 necessary, mystical, and divine world, of influence, sympathy, 
 emotion, filled the second ; and he could pass naturally 
 from the one world to the other. The presence in Paul of 
 this twofold feeling acted irresistibly upon his doctrine. What 
 he calls ' the power that worketh in us,' 4 and that produces 
 results transcending all our expectations and calculations, he 
 instinctively sought to combine with our personal agencies of 
 reason and conscience. 
 
 Of such a mysterious power and its operation some clear 
 notion may be got by anybody who has eirer had any over- 
 
 1 Ps. xxii, 29. 2 Jer., x, 23. 
 
 II Cor., iii. 5. 4 Eph.^ iii, ?o. 
 
57". PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 41 
 
 powering attachment. Every one knows how being in love 
 changes for the time a man's spiritual atmosphere, and makes 
 animation and buoyancy where before there was flatness 
 and dulness. One may even say that this is the reason why 
 being in love is so popular with the whole human race, 
 because it relieves in so irresistible and delightful a manner 
 the tedium or depression of common-place human life. And 
 not only does it change the atmosphere of our spirits, making 
 air, light, and movement where before was stagnation and 
 gloom, but it also sensibly and powerfully increases our 
 faculties of action. It is matter of the commonest remark 
 how a timid man who is in love will show courage, or an 
 indolent man will show diligence. Nay, a timid man who 
 would be only the more paralysed in a moment of danger by 
 being told that it is his bounden duty as a man to show 
 firmness, and that he must be ruined and disgraced for ever 
 if he does not, will show firmness quite easily from being in 
 love. An indolent man who shrinks back from vigorous 
 effort only the more because he is told and knows that it is 
 a man's business to show energy, and that it is shameful in 
 him if he does not, will show energy quite easily from being 
 in love. This, I say, we learn from the analogy of the most 
 everyday experience ; that a powerful attachment will give 
 a man spirits and confidence which he could by no means 
 call up or command of himself ; and that in this mood he 
 can do wonders which would not be possible to him with- 
 out it. 
 
 We have seen how Paul felt himself to be for the sake 
 of righteousness apprehended^ to use his own expression, by 
 Christ. ' I seek,' he says, * to apprehend that for which also 
 I am apprehended by Christ.' l This for which he is thus 
 apprehended is, still to use his own words, the righteous- 
 ness of God ; a sense of conformity with the divine moral 
 
 .^ iii, 12. 
 
42 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 order, the will of God, a sense of harmony with this order, 
 of acceptance with God. 
 
 In some points Paul had always served this order with 
 a clear conscience. He did not steal, he did not commit 
 adultery. But he was at the same time, he says himself, * a 
 blasphemer and a persecutor and an insulter,' l and the con- 
 templation of Jesus Christ made him see this, impressed it 
 forcibly upon his mind. Here was his greatness, and the 
 worth of his way of appropriating Christ. We have seen how 
 Calvinism, too, Calvinism which has built itself upon St 
 Paul, is a blasphemer, when it speaks cf good works done 
 by those who do not hold the Calvinist doctrine. There 
 would need no great sensitiveness of conscience, one would 
 think, to show that Calvinism has often been, also, a per- 
 secutor and an insulter. Calvinism, as well as Paul, pro- 
 fesses to study Jesus Christ. But the difference between 
 Paul's study of Christ and Calvinism's is this : that Paul by 
 studying Christ got to know himself clearly, and to transform 
 his narrow conception of righteousness ; while Calvinism 
 studies both Christ and Paul after him to no such good 
 purpose. 
 
 The particular impression mentioned is, however, but 
 the veriest fragment of the total impression produced on 
 Paul by the contemplation of Christ. The sum and sub- 
 stance of that total impression may best be conveyed by 
 two words : without sin. 
 
 We must here revert to what we have already said of 
 the importance, for sound criticism of a man's ideas, of 
 the order in which his ideas come. For us, who approach 
 Christianity through 9- scholastic theology, it is Christ's 
 divinity which establishes his being without sin, For Paul, 
 who approached Christianity through his personal e*pe 
 rience, it was Jesus Christ's being without gin which estab* 
 i I Tim., i, 13, 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 43 
 
 lishes his divinity. The large and complete conception of 
 righteousness to which Paul himself had slowly and late, 
 and only by Jesus Christ's help, awakened, in Jesus he 
 seemed to see existing absolutely and naturally. The 
 devotion to this conception which made it meat and drink 
 to carry it into effect, a devotion of which he himself was 
 strongly and deeply conscious, he saw in Jesus still stronger, 
 by far, and deeper than in himself. But for attaining the 
 righteousness of God, for reaching an absolute conformity 
 with the moral order and with God's will, he saw no such 
 impotence existing in Jesus Christ's case as in his own. For 
 Jesus, the uncertain conflict between the law in our mem- 
 bers and the law of the spirit did not appear to exist. 
 Those eternal vicissitudes of victory and defeat, which 
 drove Paul to despair, in Jesus were absent. Smoothly 
 and inevitably he followed the real and eternal order, 
 in preference to the momentary and apparent order. 
 Obstacles outside him there were plenty, but obstacles 
 within him there were none. He was led by the spirit of 
 God ; he was dead to sin, he lived to God ; and in this life 
 to God he persevered even to the cruel bodily death of the 
 cross. As many as are led by the spirit of God, says Paul, 
 are the sons of God. 1 If this is so with even us, who live 
 to God so feebly and who render such an imperfect obe- 
 dience, how much more is he who lives to God entirely and 
 who renders an unalterable obedience, the unique and only 
 Son of God ? 
 
 This is undoubtedly the main line of movement which 
 Paul's ideas respecting Jesus Christ follow. He had been 
 trained, however, in the scholastic theology of Judaism, just 
 as we are trained in the scholastic theology of Christianity ; 
 would that we were as little embarrassed with our training 
 as he was with his ! The Jewish theological doctrine 
 1 Rom.) viii, 14. 
 
44 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 respecting the eternal word or wisdom of God, which was 
 with God from the beginning before the oldest of his works, 
 and through which the world was created, this doctrine, 
 which appears in the Book of Proverbs and again in the 
 Book of Wisdom, 1 Paul applied to Jesus Christ, and in the 
 Epistle to the Colossians there is a remarkable passa.ge 2 
 with clear signs of his thus applying it. But then this 
 metaphysical and theological basis to the historic being 
 of Jesus is something added by Paul from outside to his 
 own essential ideas concerning him, something which fitted 
 them and was naturally taken on to them ; it is secondary, 
 it is not an original part of his system, much less the ground 
 of it. It fills a very different place in his system from the 
 place which it fills in the system of the author of the Fourth 
 Gospel, who takes his starting-point from it. Paul's start- 
 ing-point, it cannot be too often repeated, is the idea of 
 righteousness; and his concern with Jesus is as the clue 
 to righteousness, not as the clue to transcendental ontology. 
 Speculations in this region had no overpowering attraction 
 for Paul, notwithstanding the traces of an acquaintance 
 with them which we find in his writings, and notwithstand- 
 ing the great activity of his intellect. This activity threw 
 itself with an unerring instinct into a sphere where, with 
 whatever travail and through whatever impediments to clear 
 expression, directly practical religious results might yet be 
 won, and not into any sphere of abstract speculation. 
 
 Much more visible and important than his identification 
 of Jesus with the divine hypostasis known as the Logos, is 
 Paul's identification of him with the Messiah. Ever pre- 
 sent is his recognition of him as the Messiah to whom all 
 the law and prophets pointed, of whom the heart of the 
 Jewish race was full, and on whom the Jewish instructors 
 of Paul's youth had dwelt abundantly. The Jewish lan- 
 1 Prov. t viii, 22 31 ; and Wisd^ vii, 25-27. 2 Col., i, 15-17. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 45 
 
 guage and ideas respecting the end of the world and the 
 Messiah's kingdom, his day, his presence, his appearing, 
 his glory, Paul applied to Jesus, and constantly used. Of 
 the force and reality which these ideas and expressions had 
 for him there can be no question ; as to his use of them, 
 only two remarks are needed. One is, that in him these 
 Jewish ideas, as any one will feel who calls to mind a 
 genuine display of them like that in the Apocalypse, -are 
 spiritualised; and as he advances in his course they are 
 spiritualised increasingly. The other remark is, that im- 
 portant as these ideas are in Paul, of them, too, the impor- 
 tance is only secondary, compared with that of the great 
 central matter of his thoughts : the righteousness of God, 
 the non-fulfilment of it by man, the fulfilment of it by Christ. 
 Once more we are led to a result favourable to the 
 scientific value of Paul's teaching. That Jesus Christ was 
 the divine Logos, the second person of the Trinity, science 
 can neither deny nor affirm. That he was the Jewish 
 Messiah, who will some day appear in the sky with the 
 sound of trumpets, to put an end to the actual kingdoms of 
 the world and to establish his own kingdom, science can 
 neither deny nor affirm. The very terms of which these 
 propositions are composed are such as science is unable to 
 handle. But that the Jesus of the Bible follows the universal 
 moral order and the will of God, without being let and 
 hindered as we are by the motions of private passion and by 
 self-will, this is evident to whoever can read the Bible with 
 open eyes. It is just what any criticism of the Gospel- 
 history, which sees that history as it really is, tells us ; it is 
 the scientific result of that history. And this is the result 
 which pre-eminently occupies Paul. Of Christ's life and 
 death, the all-importance for us according to Paul is that 
 by means of them, ' denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, 
 we should live soberly, righteously, and godly ; ' should be 
 
46 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 enabled to 'bear fruit to God' in 'love, joy, peace, patience, 
 kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.' l Of 
 Christ's life and death the scope was ' to redeem us from 
 all iniquity, and make us purely zealous for good works.' 2 
 Paul says that we are to live thus in the actual world which 
 now is, * with the expectation of the appearing of the glory 
 of God and Christ.' 3 By nature and habit, and with his 
 full belief that the end of the world was nigh at hand, Paul 
 used these words to mean a Messianic coming and kingdom. 
 Later Christianity has transferred them, as it has transferred 
 so much else of Paul's, to a life beyond the grave, but it has 
 by no means spiritualised them. Paul, as his spiritual 
 growth advanced, spiritualised them more and more ; he 
 came to think, in using them, more and more of a gradual 
 v^lTfl * y>cf ' rtr "ifltl2 r> of the world by a conformity like 
 Christ's to the will of God, than of a Messianic advent. Yet 
 even then they are always second with him, and not first ; 
 thg_e.ssegce of paying grace is always to make us righteous, 
 to bring us into conformity~with the divine law, to enable us 
 to 'bear fruit to God.' 
 
 ' Jesus Christ gave himself for us that he might redeem 
 us from iniquity.' First of all, he rendered an unbroken 
 obedience to the law of the spirit ; he served the spirit of 
 God ; he came, not to do his own will, but the will of God. 
 Now, the law of the spirit makes men one ; it is only by the 
 law in our members that we are many. Secondly, therefore, 
 Jesus Christ had an unfailing sense of what we have called, 
 using an expressive modern term, the solidarity of men : that 
 it was not God's will that one of his human creatures should 
 perish. Thirdly, Jesus Christ persevered in this uninterrupted 
 obedience to the law of the spirit, in this unfailing sense of 
 human solidarity, even to the death ; though everything 
 
 1 Tit., ii, \2\ Rom. i vii, 4; Gal., v, 22, 23. 
 
 2 Tit., ii, 14. * Ibid., 13. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 47 
 
 befel him which might break the one or tire out the other. 
 Lastly, he had in himself, in all he said and did, that 
 ineffable force of attraction which doubled the virtue 
 of everything said or done by him. 
 
 If ever there was a case in which the wonder-working 
 powerof attachment, in a man for whom the moral sym- 
 pathies and the desire of righteousness were all-powerful, 
 might employ itself and work its wonders, it was here. Paul 
 felt this power penetrate him ; and he felt, also, how by 
 perfectly identifying himself through it with Jesus, by appro- 
 priating Jesus, and in no other way, could he ever get the 
 confidence and the force to do as Jesus did. He thus found 
 a point in which the mighty world outside man, and 
 weak world inside him, seemed to combine for his salvation. 
 The struggling stream of duty, which had not volume enough / 
 to bear him to his goal, was suddenly reinforced by the 
 immense tidal wave of sympathy ^and emotion. 
 
 To this new and potent influence Paul gave the name of 
 faitiL^ More fully he calls it : ' Faith that worketh through 
 love? * The essential meaning of the word faith is ' power 
 of holding on to the unseen,' ' fidelity.' Other attachments 
 demand fidelity in absence to an object which at some time 
 or other, nevertheless, has been seen ; this attachment 
 demands fidelity to an object which both is absent and has 
 never been seen by us. It is therefore rightly called not con- 
 stancy, but faith ; a power, pre-eminently, of holding fast 
 to an unseen power of goodness. Identifying ourselves with 
 Jesus Christ through this attachment we become as he was. 
 We appropriate him, we live with his thoughts and feelings, 
 and we participate, therefore, in his freedom from the ruinous 
 law in our members, in his obedience to the saving law of 
 the spirit, in his conformity to the eternal order, in the joy 
 and peace of his life to God. * The law of the spirit of life 
 1 Go/., v, 6. 
 
48 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 in Christ Jesus,' says Paul, ' frees me from the law o! sirr- 
 and death.' l This is what is done for us by faith. 
 
 It is evident that Paul adds to the general sense of the 
 word faith, a holding fast to an unseen power of goodness, 
 a particular sense of his own, through identification with 
 Christ. It will at once appear that this faith of Paul's is in 
 truth a specific form of holding fast to an unseen power of 
 goodness ; and that while it can properly be said of Abraham, 
 for instance, that he was justified by faith, if we take faith in 
 its plain sense of holding fast to an unseen power of goodness, 
 yet it cannot without difficulty and recourse to a strained 
 figure be said of him, if we take faith in Paul's specific sense 
 of identification with Christ through the emotion of attach- 
 ment to him. Paul however, undoubtedly, having conveyed 
 his new specific sense into the word faith, still uses the word 
 both in the specific sense of identification with Christ and 
 also in all cases where, without this specific sense, it was 
 before applicable and usual ; and in this way he often 
 creates ambiguity. Why, it may be asked, does Paul, instead 
 of employing another term to denote his special mean- 
 ing, still thus employ the general term faith ? We are in- 
 clined to think it was from that desire to get for his words 
 and thoughts not only the real but also the apparent sanction 
 and consecration of the Hebrew Scriptures, which we have 
 called his tendency to Judaise. It was written of the founder 
 of Israel, Abraham, that he believed God and it was counted 
 to him for righteousness. The prophet Habakkuk had the 
 famous text : ' The just shall live by faith? 2 Jesus, too, 
 had used and sanctioned the use of the word /#///& to signify 
 cleaving to the unseen God's power of goodness as shown 
 in Christ. 3 Peter and John and the other apostles habit- 
 ually used the word in the same sense, with the modification 
 
 1 JRom., viii, 2. 2 Gen., xv, 6; Habakkuk, ii, 4. 
 
 8 Mark, xi, 22. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 49 
 
 introduced by Christ's departure. This was enough to 
 make Paul retain for that vital operation, which was the 
 heart of his whole religious system, the name of faith, though 
 he had considerably developed and enlarged the name's 
 usual meaning. Fraught with this new and developed sense, 
 the term does not always quite well suit the cases to which 
 it was in its old sense, with perfect propriety, applied ; this, 
 however, Paul did not regard. The term applied with un- 
 deniable truth, though not with perfect adequacy, to the 
 great spiritual operation whereto he affixed it ; and it was 
 at the same time the name given to the crowning grace of 
 the great father of the Jewish nation, Abraham ; it was 
 the prophet Habakkuk's talismanic and consecrated term, 
 faith. . 
 
 In this word/z/M, as used by St. Paul, 1 we reach a point 
 round which the ceaseless stream of religious exposition 
 and discussion has for ages circled. Even for those who 
 misconceive Paul's line of ideas most completely, faith is so 
 evidently the central point in his system that their thoughts 
 cannot but centre upon it. Puritanism, as is well known, 
 has talked of little else but faith. And the word is of such 
 a nature, that the true clue once lost which Paul has given 
 us to its meaning, every man may put into it almost any- 
 thing he likes, all the fancies of his superstition or of his 
 fanaticism. To say, therefore, that to have faith in Christ 
 means to be attached to Christ, to embrace Christ, to appro- 
 priate Christ, to be identified with Christ, is not enough ; the 
 question is, to be attached to him how, to embrace him how ? 
 
 A favourite expression of popular theology conveys per- 
 fectly the popular definition of faith : to rest in the finished 
 
 1 With secondary uses of the word, such as its use with the article, 
 ' the faith,' in expressions like 'the words of the faith,' to signify the 
 body of tenets and principles received by believers from the apostle, 
 we need not here concern ourselves. They present no difficulty. 
 
 
 
So ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 work of the Saviour. In the scientific language of Protes- 
 tant theology, to embrace Christ, to have saving faith, is ' to 
 give our consent heartily to the covenant of grace, and so 
 to receive the benefit of justification, whereby God pardons 
 all our sins and accepts us as righteous for the righteousness 
 of Christ imputed to us.' This is mere theurgy, in which, 
 so far as we have yet gone, we have not found Paul dealing. 
 Wesley, with his genius for godliness, struggled all his life 
 for some deeper and more edifying account of that faith, 
 which he felt working wonders in his own soul, than that it 
 was a hearty consent to the covenant of grace and an ac- 
 ceptance of the benefit of Christ's imputed righteousness. 
 Yet this amiable and gracious spirit, but intellectually slight 
 and shallow compared to Paul, beat his wings in vain. Paul, 
 nevertheless, had solved the problem for him, if only he 
 could have had eyes to see Paul's solution. 
 
 * He that believes in Christ,' says Wesley, ' discerns spiri- 
 tual things : he is enabled to taste, see, hear, and feel God.' 
 There is nothing practical and solid here. A company of 
 Cornish revivalists will have no difficulty in tasting, seeing, 
 hearing, and feeling God, twenty times over, to-night, and 
 yet may be none the better for it to-morrow morning. When 
 Paul said, In Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any- 
 thing nor uncircumcision, but faith that worketh through love ; 
 Have faith in Christ ! these words did not mean for him : 
 ' Give your hearty belief and consent to the covenant of 
 grace ; Receive the offered benefit of justification through 
 Christ's imputed righteousness/ They did not mean : 
 1 Try and discern spiritual things, try and taste, see, hear, 
 and feel God.' They did not mean : ' Rest in the finished 
 /work of Christ the Saviour.' No, they meant : Die with 
 him ! 
 
 The object of this treatise is not religious edification, but 
 the true criticism of a great and misunderstood author. Yet 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 51 
 
 it is impossible to be in presence of this Pauline concep- 
 tion of faith without remarking on the incomparable power 
 of edification which it contains. It is indeed a crowning 
 evidence of that piercing practical religious sense which we 
 have attributed to Paul. It is at once mystical and rational ; 
 and it enlists in its service the best forces of both worlds, 
 the world of reason and morals, and the world of sympathy 
 and emotion. The world of reason and duty has an excellent 
 clue to action, but wants motive- power : the world of sym- 
 pathy and influence has an irresistible force of motive-power, 
 but wants a clue for directing its exertion. The danger of 
 the one world is weariness in well-doing ; the danger of the 
 other is sterile raptures and immoral fanaticism. Paul takes 
 from both worlds what can help him, and leaves what can- 
 not. The elemental power of sympathy and emotion in us, 
 a power which extends beyond the limits of our own will 
 and conscious activity, which we cannot measure and con- 
 trol, and which in each of us differs immensely in force, 
 volume, and mode of manifestation, he calls into full play, 
 and sets it to work with all its strength and in all its variety. 
 But one unalterable object is assigned by him to this power : 
 to die with Christ to the law of the flesh, to live with Christ 
 to the law of the mind. 
 
 This is the doctrine of the j^T^tfis^L^-Paul's central doc- 
 trine, and the doctrine which makes his profoundness and 
 originality. His repeated and minute lists of practices and 
 feelings to be followed or suppressed, now take a heightened 
 significance. They were the matter by which his faith tried 
 itself and knew itself. Those multitudinous motions of 
 appetite and self-will which reason and conscience dis- 
 approved, reason and conscience could yet not govern, and 
 had to yield to them. This, as we have seen, is what drove 
 Paul almost to despair. Well, then, how did Paul's faith, 
 1 II Cor., iv, 10. 
 
 E2 
 
52 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 working through love, help him here ? It enabled him to 
 reinforce duty by affection. In the central need of his 
 nature, the desire to govern these motions of unrighteousness, 
 it enabled him to say : Die to them I Christ did. If any man 
 be in Christ, said Paul that is, if any man identifies himself 
 with Christ by attachment so that he appropriates him, enters 
 into his feelings and lives with his life, he is a new creature ; l 
 he can do, and does, what Christ did. First, he suffers with 
 him. Christ throughout his life and in his death presented 
 his body a living sacrifice to God ; every self-willed impulse 
 blindly trying to assert itself without respect of the universal 
 order, he died to. You, says Paul to his disciple, are to do 
 the same. Never mind how various and multitudinous the 
 impulses are ; impulses to intemperance, concupiscence, 
 covetousness, pride, sloth, envy, malignity, anger, clamour, 
 bitterness, harshness, unmercifulness. Die to them all, and 
 to each as it comes ! Christ did. If you cannot, your 
 attachment, your faith, must be one that goes but a very 
 little way. In an ordinary human attachment, you can often 
 suppress quite easily, because by sympathy you enter into 
 another's feelings, this or that impulse of selfishness which 
 happens to conflict with them, and which hitherto you have 
 obeyed. All impulses of selfishness conflict with Christ's 
 feelings, he showed it by dying to them all ; if you are one 
 with him by faith and sympathy, you can die to them also. 
 Then, secondly, if you thus die with him, you become 
 transformed by the renewing of your mind, and rise with 
 him. The law of the spirit of life which is in Christ becomes 
 the law of your life also, and frees you from the law of sin 
 and death. You rise with him to that harmonious con- 
 formity with the real and eternal order, that sense of pleas- 
 ing God who trieth the hearts, which is life and peace, and 
 which grows more and more till it becomes glory. If you 
 1 ii Cor. t v, 17. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 53 
 
 suffer with him, therefore, you shall also be glorified with 
 him. 
 
 The real worth of this mystical conception depends on 
 the fitness of the character and history of Jesus Christ for 
 inspiring such attachment and devotion as that which Paul's 
 notion of faith implies. If the character and history are 
 eminently such as to inspire it, then Paul has no doubt 
 found a mighty aid towards the attainment of that right- 
 eousness of which Jesus Christ's life afforded the admir- 
 able pattern. A great solicitude is always shown by 
 popular Christianity to establish a radical difference between 
 Jesus and a teacher like Socrates. Ordinary theologians estab- 
 lish this difference by transcendental distinctions into which 
 science cannot follow them. But what makes for scientific 
 criticism the radical difference between Jesus and Socrates, 
 is that such a conception as Paul's would, if applied to 
 Socrates, be out of place and ineffective. Socrates inspired 
 boundless friendship and esteem ; but the inspiration of 
 reason and conscience is the one inspiration which comes 
 from him, and which impels us to live righteously as he did. 
 A penetrating enthusiasm of love, sympathy, pity, adoration, 
 reinforcing the inspiration of reason and duty, does not be- 
 long to Socrates. With Jesus it is different. On this point 
 it is needless to argue ; history has proved. In the midst 
 of errors the most prosaic, the most immoral, the most un- 
 scriptural, concerning God, Christ, and righteousness, the 
 immense emotion of love and sympathy inspired by the 
 person and character of Jesus has had to work almost by 
 itself alone for righteousness ; and it has worked wonders. 
 The surpassing religious grandeur of Paul's conception of 
 faith is that it seizes a real salutary emotional force of in- 
 calculable magnitude, and reinforces moral effort with it. 
 
 Paul's mystical conception is not complete without its 
 relation of us to our fellow men, as well as its relation of us 
 
54 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 to Jesus Christ. Whoever identifies himself with Christ, 
 identifies himself with Christ's idea of the solidarity of men. 
 The whole race is conceived as one body, having to die and 
 rise with Christ, and forming by the joint action of its re- 
 generate members the mystical body of Christ. Hence the 
 truth of that which Bishop Wilson says : * It is not so much 
 our neighbour's interest as our own that we love him.' Jesus 
 Christ's life, with which we by faith identify ourselves, is not 
 complete, his aspiration after the eternal order is not satis- 
 fied, so long as only Jesus himself follows this order, or only 
 this or that individual amongst us men follows it. The same 
 law of emotion and sympathy, therefore, which prevails in 
 our inward self-discipline, is to prevail in our dealings with 
 others. The motions of sin in ourselves we succeed in 
 mortifying, not by saying to ourselves that they are for- 
 bidden, but by sympathy with Christ in his mortification of 
 them. In like manner, our duties towards our neighbour 
 we perform, not in deference to external commands and 
 prohibitions, but through identifying ourselves with him 
 by sympathy with Christ who identified himself with him. 
 Therefore, we owe no man anything but to love one 
 another ; and he who loves his neighbour fulfils the law 
 towards him, because he seeks to do him good and for- 
 bears to do him harm just as if he was himself. 
 
 Mr. Lecky cannot see that the command to speak the 
 truth to one's neighbour is a command which has a natural 
 sanction. But according to these Pauline ideas it has a 
 clear natural sanction. For, if my neighbour is merely an 
 extension of myself, deceiving my neighbour is the same as 
 deceiving myself ; and than self-deceit there is nothing by 
 nature more baneful. And on this ground. Paul puts the in- 
 junction. He says : * Speak every man truth to his neigh- 
 bour, for we are members one of another.' l This direction 
 fA fi iv, 25. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 55 
 
 to identify ourselves in Jesus Christ with our neighbours is 
 hard and startling, no doubt, like the direction to identify 
 ourselves with Jesus and die with him. But it is also, like 
 that direction, inspiring ; and not, like a set of mere 
 mechanical commands and prohibitions, lifeless and unaid- 
 ing. It shows a profound practical religious sense, and 
 rests upon facts of human nature which experience can 
 follow and appreciate. 
 
 The three essential terms of Pauline theology are not, 
 therefore, as popular theology makes them : calling, justifi- 
 cation^ sanctification. They are rather these : dying with 
 Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into Christ. 1 
 The order in which these terms are placed indicates, what 
 we have already pointed out elsewhere, the true Pauline 
 sense of the expression, resurrection from the dead. In 
 Paul's ideas the expression has no essential connexion with 
 physical death. It is true, popular theology connects it with 
 this almost exclusively, and regards any other use of it as 
 purely figurative and secondary. For popular theology, 
 Christ's resurrection is his bodily resurrection in Jerusalem 
 after his physical death on the cross ; the believer's resur- 
 rection is his bodily resurrection in a future world, the 
 golden city of our hymns and of the Apocalypse. For this 
 theology, the force of Christ's resurrection is that it is 
 a miracle which guarantees the promised future miracle 
 of our own resurrection. It is a common remark with 
 Biblical critics, even with able and candid Biblical critics, 
 that Christ's resurrection, in this sense of a physical miracle, 
 is the central object of Paul's thoughts and the foundation 
 of all his theology. Nay, the preoccupation with this idea 
 has altered the very text of our documents ; so that whereas 
 Paul wrote, * Christ died and lived,' we read, { Christ died 
 
 1 airoQaveiv ffvv Xpi<TT<, Col. , ii, 2O ; e^avdffraffts e'/c vetcpuv, Philipp. f 
 iii, II ; a^rjffis els XpiffT6t>, Eph. t iv, 15. 
 
56 $T. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 and rose again and revived.' l But whoever has carefully 
 followed Paul's line of thought as we have endeavoured to 
 trace it, will see that in his mature theology, as the Epistle 
 to the Romans exhibits it, it cannot be this physical and 
 miraculous aspect of the resurrection which holds the first 
 place in his mind ; for under this aspect the resurrection 
 does not fit in with the ideas which he is developing. 
 
 Not for a moment do we deny that in Paul's earlier 
 theology, and notably in the Epistles to the Thessalonians 
 and Corinthians, the physical and miraculous aspect of the 
 resurrection, both Christ's and the believer's, is primary and 
 predominant. Not for a moment do we deny that to the 
 very end of his life, after the Epistle to the Romans, after 
 the Epistle to the Philippians, if he had been asked whether 
 he held the doctrine of the resurrection in the physical and 
 miraculous sense, as well as in his own spiritual and mystical 
 sense, he would have replied with entire conviction that he 
 did. Very likely it would have been impossible to him to 
 imagine his theology without it. But : 
 
 Below the surface-stream, shallow and light, 
 Of what we say we feel below the stream, 
 As light, of what we think we feel there flows 
 With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, 
 The central stream of what we feel indeed ; 
 
 and by this alone are we truly characterised. Paul's origin- 
 ality lies in the effort to find a moral side and significance 
 for all the processes, however mystical, of the religious life, 
 with a view of strengthening, in this way, their hold upon us 
 and their command of all our nature. Sooner or later he 
 was sure to be drawn to treat the process of resurrection with 
 this endeavour. He did so treat it ; and what is original and 
 essential in him is his doing so. 
 
 Paul's conception of life and death inevitably came to 
 
 .* xiv, 9. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 57 
 
 govern his conception of resurrection. What indeed, as we 
 have seen, is for Paul life, and what is death ? Not the 
 ordinary physical life and death. Death, for him, is living 
 after the flesh, obedience to sin ; life is mortifying by the 
 spirit the deeds of the flesh, obedience to righteousness. 
 Resurrection, in its essential sense, is therefore for Paul the 
 rising, within the sphere of our visible earthly existence, from 
 death in this sense to life in this sense. It is indubitable 
 that, so far as the human believer's resurrection is concerned, 
 this is so. Else, how could Paul say to the Colossians (to 
 take only one out of many clear texts showing the same 
 thing): * If ye then be risen with Christ, seek the things that 
 are above.' 1 But when Paul repeats again and again, in the 
 Epistle to the Romans, that the matter of our faith is ' that 
 God raised Jesus from the dead,' the essential meaning of 
 this resurrection, also, is just the same. Real life, for Paul, 
 begins with the mystical death which frees us from the 
 dominion of the external shalls and shall nots of the law. 2 
 From the moment, therefore, that Jesus Christ was content 
 to do God's will, he died. Paul's point is, that Jesus Christ 
 in his earthly existence obeyed the law of the spirit and bore 
 fruit to God; and that the believer should, in his earthly 
 existence, do the same. That Christ ' died to sin,' that he 
 * pleased not himself,' and that, consequently, through all his 
 life here, he was risen and living to God, is what occupies 
 Paul. Christ's physical resurrection after he was crucified 
 C-s neither in point of time nor in point of character the 
 resurrection on which Paul, following his essential line of 
 thought, wanted to fix the believer's mind. The resurrection 
 Paul was striving after for himself and others was a resurrec- 
 tion now> and a resurrection to righteousness? 
 
 1 Col, iii, I. 2 See Rom., vii, 1-6. 
 
 8 It has been said that this was the error of Hymenseus and Philetas 
 (II 7V/., ii, 17). It might be rejoined, with much plausibility, that 
 
58 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 But Jesus Christ's obeying God and not pleasing himself 
 culminated in his death on the cross. All through his 
 career, indeed, Jesus Christ pleased not himself and died 
 to sin. But so smoothly and so inevitably, as we have 
 before said, did he always appear to follow that law of the 
 moral order, which to us it costs such effort to obey, that 
 only in the very wrench and pressure of his violent death 
 did any pain of dying, any conflict between the law of the 
 flesh and the law of the spirit, in Christ become visible. But 
 the Christian needs to find in Christ's dying to sin a fellow- 
 ship of suffering and a conformity of death. Well, then, the 
 point of Christ's trial and crucifixion is the only point in his 
 career where the Christian can palpably touch what he seeks. 
 In all dying there is struggle and weakness ; in our dying to 
 sin there is great struggle and weakness. But only in his 
 crucifixion can we see, in Jesus Christ, a place for struggle 
 and weakness. 1 That self-sacrificing obedience of Jesus 
 Christ's whole life, which was summed up in this great, final 
 act of his crucifixion, and which is palpable as sacrifice, 
 obedience, dolorous effort, only there, is therefore constantly 
 regarded by Paul under the figure of this final act, as is 
 also the believer's conformity to Christ's obedience. The 
 believer is crucified with Christ when he mortifies by the 
 spirit the deeds of unrighteousness ; Christ was crucified 
 
 their error was the error of popular theology, the fixing the attention 
 on the past miracle of Christ's physical resurrection, and losing sight of 
 the continuing miracle of the Christian's spiritual resurrection. Pro- 
 bably, however, Hymenaeus and Philetas controverted some of Paul's 
 tenets respecting the approaching Messianic advent and the resurrection 
 then to take place (i Thess., iv, 13-17). If they rejected these tenets, 
 they were right where Paul was wrong. But if they disputed and 
 separated on account of them, they were heretics ; that is, they had 
 their hearts and minds full of a speculative contention, instead of their 
 proper chief-concern, putting on the new man, and the imitation of 
 Christ. 
 
 e affBevf'as, II Cor., xiii, 4. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 59 
 
 when he pleased not himself, and came to do not his own 
 will but God's. 
 
 It is the same with life as with death ; it turns on no 
 physical event, but on that central concern of Paul's thoughts, 
 righteousness. If we have the spirit of Christ, we live, as he 
 did, by the spirit, ' serve the spirit of God,' l and follow the 
 eternal order. The spirit of God, the spirit of Christ, is the 
 same, the one eternal moral order. If we are led by the 
 spirit of God we are the sons of God, and share with Christ 
 the heritage of the sons of God, eternal life, peace, felicity, 
 glory. The spirit, therefore, is life because of righteousness. 
 And when, through identifying ourselves with Christ, we 
 reach Christ's righteousness, then eternal life begins for us ; 
 a continuous and ascending life, for the eternal order 
 never dies, and the more we transform ourselves into ser- 
 vants of righteousness and organs of the eternal order, the 
 more we are and desire to be this eternal order and nothing 
 else. Even in this life we are 'seated in heavenly places,' 2 
 as Christ is ; so entirely, for Paul, is righteousness the true 
 life and the true heaven. But the transformation cannot be 
 completed here ; the physical death is regarded by Paul as 
 a stage at which it ceases to be impeded. However, at 
 this stage we quit, as he himself says, the ground of expe- 
 rience and enter upon the ground of hope. But, by a sublime 
 analogy, he fetches from the travail of the whole universe 
 proof of the necessity and beneficence of the law of trans- 
 formation. Jesus Christ entered into his glory when he had 
 made his physical death itself a crowning witness to his 
 obedience to righteousness ; we, in like manner, within the 
 limits of this earthly life and before we have yet persevered 
 to the end, must not look for full adoption, for the glorious 
 revelation in us of the sons of God. 3 
 
 1 According to the true reading in Philipp., iii, 3. 
 2 Eph. t ii, 6. * Rom.) viii, 18-25. 
 
60 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 That Paul, as we have said, accepted the physical 
 miracle of Christ's resurrection and ascension as a part 
 of the signs and wonders which accompanied Christianity, 
 there can be no doubt. Just in the same manner he ac- 
 cepted the eschatology, as it is called, of his nation, their 
 doctrine of the final things and of the summons by a trumpet 
 in the sky to judgment ; he accepted Satan, hierarchies of 
 angels, and an approaching end of the world. What we 
 deny is, that his acceptance of the former gives to his 
 teaching its essential characters, any more than his accept- 
 ance of the latter. We should but be continuing, with 
 strict logical development, Paul's essential line of thought, 
 if we said that the true ascension and glorified reign of 
 Christ was the triumph and reign of his spirit, of his real 
 life, far more operative after his death on the cross than 
 before it ; and that in this sense, most truly, he and all who 
 persevere to the end as he did are ' sown in weakness but 
 raised in power.' Paul himself, however, did not distinctly 
 continue his thought thus, and neither will we do so for 
 him. How far Paul himself knew that he had gone in his 
 irresistible bent to find, for each of the data of his religion, 
 that side of moral and spiritual significance which, as a 
 mere sign and wonder, it had not and could not have, 
 what data he himself was conscious of having transferred, 
 through following this bent, from the first rank in import- 
 ance to the second, we cannot know with any certainty. 
 That the bent existed, that Paul felt it existed, and that it 
 establishes a wide difference between the earliest epistles 
 and the latest, is beyond question. Already, in the Second 
 Epistle to the Corinthians, he declares that, ' though he had 
 known Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth he knew him 
 so no more ; ' l and in the Epistle to the Romans, shortly 
 
 1 ii Cor. v, 1 6. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 61 
 
 afterwards, he rejects the notion of dwelling on the miracu- 
 lous Christ, on the descent into hell and on the ascent into 
 heaven, and fixes the believer's attention solely on the faith 
 of Christ and on the effects produced by an acquaintance 
 with it. 1 In the same Epistle, in like manner, the kingdom 
 of God, of which to the Thessalonians he described the 
 advent in such materialising and popularly Judaic language, 
 has become ' righteousness, and peace, and joy in the holy 
 spirit. 5 2 
 
 These ideas, we repeat, may never have excluded others, 
 which absorbed the most part of Paul's contemporaries as 
 they absorb popular religion at this day. To popular reli- 
 gion, the real kingdom of God is the New Jerusalem with 
 its jaspers and emeralds ; righteousness and peace and joy 
 are only the kingdom of God figuratively. The real sitting 
 in heavenly places is the sitting on thrones in a land of pure 
 delight after we are dead ; serving the spirit of God is only 
 sitting in heavenly places figuratively. Science exactly re- 
 verses this process. For science, the spiritual notion is the 
 real one, the material notion is figurative. The astonishing 
 greatness of Paul is, that, coming when and where and 
 whence he did, he yet grasped the spiritual notion, if not 
 exclusively and fully, yet firmly and predominantly ; more 
 and more predominantly through all the last years of his 
 life. And what makes him original and himself, is not what 
 he shares with his contemporaries and with modern popular 
 religion, but this which he develops of his own ; and this 
 which he develops of his own is just of a nature to make 
 his religion a theology instead of a theurgy, and at bottom a 
 scientific instead of a non-scientific structure. ' Die and come 
 to life ! ' says Goethe, an unsuspected witness, assuredly, 
 to the psychological and scientific profoundness of Paul's 
 
 1 Rom., x, 6-10. 2 Rom.> xiv, 17. 
 
62 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 conception of life and death : ' Die and come to life ! for, 
 so long as this is not accomplished, thou art but a troubled 
 guest upon an earth of gloom.' 1 
 
 The three cardinal points in Paul's theology are not 
 therefore, we repeat, those commonly assigned by Puritan- 
 ism, calling, justification, sanctification ; but they are these : 
 dying with Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into 
 Christ. And we will venture, moreover, to affirm that the 
 more the Epistle to the Romans is read and re-read with a 
 clear mind, the more will the conviction strengthen, that 
 the essential sense in which Paul in his Epistle to the 
 Romans uses the term resurrection is that of a rising, in this 
 visible earthly existence, from the death of obedience to 
 blind selfish impulse, to the life of obedience to the eternal 
 moral order ; in Christ's case first, as the pattern for us 
 to follow ; in the believer's case afterwards, as following 
 Christ's pattern through identifying himself with him. 
 
 We have thus reached Paul's fundamental conception 
 without even a glimpse of the fundamental conceptions of 
 Puritanism, which, nevertheless, professes to have learnt its 
 doctrine from St. Paul and from his Epistle to the Romans. 
 Once, for a moment, the term faith brought us in conlact 
 with the doctrine of Puritanism, but only to see that the 
 essential sense given to this word by Paul Puritanism had 
 missed entirely. Other parts, then, of the Epistle to the 
 Romans than those by which we have been occupied must 
 have chiefly fixed the attention of Puritanism. And so it 
 has in truth been. Yet the parts of the Epistle to the 
 Romans that have occupied us are undoubtedly the parts 
 which not our own theories and inclinations, for we have 
 
 1 Stirb und werde ! 
 Denn so lang du das nicht hast, 
 Bist du nur ein triiber Gast 
 Auf der dunkeln Erde. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 63 
 
 approached the matter without admitting any, but an impar- 
 tial criticism of Paul's real line of thought, must elevate as the 
 most important If a somewhat pedantic form of expression 
 may be forgiven for the sake of clearness, we may say that of 
 the eleven first chapters of the Epistle to the Romans, the 
 chapters which convey Paul's theology, though not, as we 
 have seen, with any scholastic purpose, or in any formal 
 scientific mode of exposition, of these eleven chapters, the 
 first, second, and third are, in a scale of importance fixed by 
 a scientific criticism of Paul's line of thought, sub- primary ; 
 the fourth and fifth are secondary ; the sixth and eighth are 
 primary ; the seventh chapter is sub-primary ; the ninth, 
 tenth, and eleventh chapters are secondary. Furthermore, 
 to the contents of the separate chapters themselves this 
 scale must be carried on, so far as to mark that of the 
 two great primary chapters, the sixth and the eighth, the 
 eighth is primary down only to the end of the twenty-eighth 
 verse ; from thence to the end it is, however eloquent, yet, 
 for the purpose of a scientific criticism of Paul's essential 
 theology, only secondary. 
 
 The first chapter is to the Gentiles. Its purport is : 
 You have not righteousness. The second is to the Jews ; 
 and its purport is : No more have you, though you think 
 you have. The third chapter announces faith in Christ as 
 the one source of righteousness for all men. The fourth 
 chapter gives to the notion of righteousness through faith 
 the sanction of the Old Testament and of the history of 
 Abraham. The fifth insists on the causes for thankfulness 
 and exultation in the boon of righteousness through faith in 
 Christ ; and applies illustratively, with this design, the his- 
 tory of Adam. The sixth chapter comes to the all-impor- 
 tant question : * What is that faith in Christ which I, Paul, 
 mean ? ' and answers it. The seventh illustrates and ex- 
 plains the answer. But the eighth, down to the end of the 
 
64 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 twenty- eighth verse, develops and completes the answer. 
 The rest of the eighth chapter expresses the sense of safety 
 and gratitude which the solution is fitted to inspire. The 
 ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters uphold the second 
 chapter's thesis, so hard to a Jew, so easy to us, that 
 righteousness is not by the Jewish law ; but dwell with hope 
 and joy on a final result of things which is to be favourable 
 to Israel. 
 
 We shall be pardoned this somewhat formal analysis in 
 consideration of the clearness with which it enables us to 
 survey the Puritan scheme of original sin, predestination, 
 and justification. The historical transgression of Adam 
 occupies, it will be observed, in Paul's ideas by no means 
 the primary, fundamental, all-important place which it holds 
 in the ideas of Puritanism. * This ' (the transgression of 
 Adam) * is our original sin, the bitter root of all our actual 
 transgressions in thought, word, and deed.' Paul did not 
 go to Adam and Genesis to get the essential testimony about 
 sin. He went to experience for it. ' I see,' he says, ' a law 
 in my members fighting against the law of my mind, and 
 bringing me into captivity.' 1 This is the essential testi- 
 mony respecting sin to Paul, this rise of sin in his own 
 heart and in the heart of all the men who hear him. At 
 quite a later stage in his conception of the religious life, 
 in quite a subordinate capacity, and for the mere purpose 
 of illustration, comes in the allusion to Adam and to what 
 is called original sin. Paul's desire for righteousness has 
 carried him to Christ and to the conception of the righteous- 
 ness which is of God by faith, and he is expressing his 
 gratitude, delight, wonder, at the boon he has discovered. 
 For the purpose of exalting it he reverts to the well-known 
 story of Adam. It cannot even be said that Paul Judaises 
 in his use here of this story ; so entirely does he subor- 
 1 Rom., vii, 23. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 65 
 
 dinate it to his purpose of illustration, using it just as he 
 might have used it had he believed, which undoubtedly 
 he did not, that he was using merely a symbolical legend, 
 possessing the advantage of being perfectly familiar to him- 
 self and his hearers. ' Think,' he says, ' how in Adam's fall 
 one man's one transgression involved all men in punish 
 ment ; then estimate the blessedness of our boon in Christ, 
 where one man's one righteousness involves a world of trans- 
 gressors in blessing ! ' l This is not a scientific doctrine of 
 corruption inherited through Adam's fall ; it is a rhetorical 
 use of Adam's fall in a passing allusion to it. 
 
 We come to predestination. We have seen how strong 
 was Paul's consciousness of that power, not ourselves, in 
 which we live and move and have our being. The sense of 
 life, peace, and joy, which comes through identification with 
 Christ, brings with it a deep and grateful consciousness that 
 this sense is none of our own getting and making. No, it 
 is grace, it is the free gift of God, who gives abundantly 
 beyond all that we ask or think, and calls things that are not 
 as though they were. ' It is not of him that willeth or of 
 him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy.' 2 As 
 self-moved agents, for whom alone exist all the predica- 
 ments of merit and demerit, praise and blame, vice and 
 virtue, we are impotent and lost ; we are saved through 
 that in us which is passive and involuntary ; we are saved 
 through our affections, it is by an influence and emotion 
 that we are saved ! Well might Paul cry out, as this 
 mystical but profound and beneficent conception filled 
 his soul : ' All things work together for good to them that 
 love God, to them who are the called according to his pur- 
 pose/ 3 Well might he say, in the gratitude which cannot 
 find words enough to express its sense of boundless favour, 
 that those who reach peace with God through identifica- 
 
 1 Rom. t v, 12-21. ' Rom,) ix, 16. * Rom*> viii, 28. 
 
 F 
 
66 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 tion with Jesus Christ are vessels of mercy, marked from 
 endless ages ; that they have been foreknown, predestinated, 
 called, justified, glorified. 
 
 It may be regretted, for the sake of the clear under- 
 standing of his essential doctrine, that Paul did not stop here. 
 It might seem as if the word ' prothesis,' purpose, lured him 
 on into speculative mazes, and involved him, at last, in an 
 embarrassment, from which he impatiently tore himself by 
 the harsh and unedifying image of the clay and the potter. 
 But this is not so. These allurements of speculation, which 
 have been fatal to so many of his interpreters, never 
 mastered Paul. He was led into difficulty by the tendency 
 which we have already noticed as making his real imperfec- 
 tion both as a thinker and as a writer, the tendency to 
 Judaise. 
 
 Already, in the fourth chapter, this tendency had led him 
 to seem to rest his doctrine of justification by faith upon the 
 case of Abraham, whereas, in truth, it needs all the good will 
 in the world, and some effort of ingenuity, even to bring the 
 case of Abraham within the operation of this doctrine. That 
 righteousness is life, that all men by themselves fail of 
 righteousness, that only through identification with Jesus 
 Christ can they reach it, these propositions, for us at any 
 rate, prove themselves much better than they are proved by 
 the thesis that Abraham in old age believed God's promise 
 that his seed should yet be as the stars for multitude, and 
 that this was counted to him for righteousness. The sanction 
 thus apparently given to the idea that faith is a mere belief, 
 or opinion of the mind, has put thousands of Paul's readers 
 on a false track. 
 
 But Paul's Judaising did not end here. To establish his 
 doctrine of righteousness by faith, he had to eradicate the 
 notion that his people were specially privileged, and that, 
 having the Mosaic law, they did not need anything farther. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 67 
 
 For us, this one verse of the tenth chapter : There is no differ- 
 ence between Jew and Greek, for it is the same Lordofall^ who 
 is rich to all that call upon him, and these four words of an- 
 other verse : For righteousness ; heart-faith necessary ! effect 
 far more for Paul's object than his three chapters bristling wiih 
 Old Testament quotations. By quotation, however, he was 
 to proceed, in order to invest his doctrine with the talismanic 
 virtues of a verbal sanction from the law and the prophets. 
 He shows, therefore, that the law and the prophets had said 
 that only a remnant, an elect remnant^ of Israel should be 
 saved, and that the rest should be blinded. But to say that 
 peace with God through Jesus Christ inspires such an abound- 
 ing sense of gratitude, and of its not being our own work, 
 that we can only speak of ourselves as called tt\& chosen to it, is 
 one thing ; in so speaking, we are on the ground of personal 
 experience. To say, on the other hand, that God has blinded 
 and reprobated other men, so that they shall not reach this 
 blessing, is to quit the ground of personal experience, and to 
 begin employing the magnified and non-natural man in the 
 next street. We then require, in order to account for his pro- 
 ceedings, such an analogy as that of the clay and the potter. 
 This is Calvinism, and St. Paul undoubtedly falls into it. 
 But the important thing to remark is, that this Calvinism, 
 which with the Calvinist is primary, is with Paul secondary, 
 or even less than secondary. What with Calvinists is their 
 fundamental idea, the centre of their theology, is for Paul 
 an idea added to his central ideas, and extraneous to them ; 
 brought in incidentally, and due to the necessities of a bad 
 mode of recommending and enforcing his thesis. It is as if 
 Newton had introduced into his exposition of the law of 
 gravitation an incidental remark, perhaps erroneous, about 
 light or colours ; and we were then to make this remark the 
 head and front of Newton's law. The theological idea of 
 reprobation was an idea of Jewish theology as of ours, an 
 
 F2 
 
68 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 idea familiar to Paul and a part of his training, an idea which 
 probably he never consciously abandoned. But its complete 
 secondariness in him is clearly established by other con- 
 siderations than those which we have drawn from the place 
 and manner of his introduction of it. The very phrase about 
 the clay and the potter is not Paul's own ; he does but 
 repeat a stock theological figure. Isaiah had said : ' O Lord, 
 we are the clay, and thou our potter, and we are all the work 
 of thy hand.' 1 Jeremiah had said, in the Lord's name, to 
 Israel : ' Behold, as the clay in the potter's hand, so are ye 
 in mine hand, O house of Israel.' 2 And the son of Sirach 
 comes yet nearer to Paul's very words : ' As the clay is in 
 the potter's hand to fashion it at his pleasure, so man is in 
 the hand of him that made him, to render to them as liketh 
 him best.' 3 Is an original man's essential, characteristic 
 idea, that which he adopts thus bodily from some one else? 
 But take Paul's truly essential idea. ' We are buried with 
 Christ through baptism into death, that like as he was raised 
 up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also 
 shall walk in newness of life.' 4 Did Jeremiah say that ? 
 Is any one the author of it except Paul ? Then there should 
 Calvinism have looked for Paul's secret, and not in the 
 commonplace about the potter and the vessels of wrath. 
 A commonplace which is so entirely a commonplace to him, 
 that he contradicts it even while he is Judaising ; for in the 
 very batch of chapters we are discussing he says : ' Whoso- 
 ever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.' 5 
 Still more clear is, on this point, his real mind, when he is 
 not Judaising : * God is the saviour of all men, specially of 
 those that believe.' 6 And anything, finally, which might 
 seem dangerous in the grateful sense of a calling, choosing, 
 
 1 Is., Ixiv, 8. 2 Jer., xviii, 6. 
 
 Ecclesiasticus, xxxiii, 13. 4 JRom., vi, 4. 
 
 * Rom. t x, 13. . . ... .^ .. I Tim., iv, 10. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 69 
 
 and leading by eternal goodness, a notion as natural as the 
 Calvinistic doctrine of predestination is monstrous, Paul 
 abundantly corrects in more than one striking passage ; as, 
 for instance, in that incomparable third- chapter of the 
 Philippians (from which, and from the sixth and eighth 
 chapters of the Romans, Paul's whole theology, if all his 
 other writings were lost, might be reconstructed), where he 
 expresses his humble consciousness that the mystical resur- 
 rection which is his aim, glory, and salvation, he does not 
 yet, and cannot, completely attain. 
 
 The grand doctrine, then, which Calvinistic Puritanism 
 has gathered from Paul turns out to be a secondary notion 
 of his, which he himself, too, has contradicted or corrected. 
 But, at any rate, * Christ meritoriously obtained eternal re- 
 demption for us.' ' If there be anything,' the quarterly organ 
 of Puritanism has solemnly told us in its hundredth number, 
 'that human experience has made certain, it is that man 
 can never outgrow his necessity for the great truths and pro- 
 visions of the Incarnation and the sacrificial Atonement of 
 the Divine Son of God.' God, his justice being satisfied by 
 Christ's bearing according to compact our guilt and dying in 
 our stead, is appeased and set free to exercise towards us 
 his mercy, and to justify and sanctify us in consideration of 
 Christ's righteousness imputed to us, if we give our hearty 
 belief and consent to the satisfaction thus made. This hearty 
 belief being given, ' we rest,' to use the consecrated expression 
 already quoted, * in the finished work of a Saviour.' This 
 doctrine of imputed righteousness is now, as predestination 
 formerly was, the favourite thesis of popular Protestant theo- 
 logy. And, like the doctrine of predestination, it professes 
 to be specially derived from St. Paul. 
 
 But whoever has followed attentively the main line of 
 St. Paul's theology, as we have tried to show it, will see at 
 once that in St. Paul's essential ideas this popular notion of 
 
70 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 a substitution, and appeasement, and imputation of alien 
 merit, has no place. Paul knows nothing of a sacrificial 
 atonement ; what Paul knows of is a reconciling sacrifice. 
 The true substitution, for Paul, is not the substitution of 
 Jesus Christ in man's stead as victim on the cross to God's 
 offended justice ; it is the substitution by which the believer, 
 in his own person, repeats Jesus Christ's dying to sin. Paul 
 says, in real truth, to our Puritans with their magical and 
 mechanical salvation, just what he said to the men of cir- 
 cumcision : 'If I preach resting in the finished work of a 
 Saviour, why am I yet persecuted 1 why do I die daily? then 
 is the stumbling-block of the cross annulled.^ That hard, that 
 well-nigh impossible doctrine, that our whole course must 
 be a crucifixion and a resurrection, even as Christ's whole 
 course was a crucifixion and a resurrection, becomes 
 superfluous. Yet this is my central doctrine.' 
 
 The notion of God as a magnified and non-natural man, 
 appeased by a sacrifice and remitting in consideration of it 
 his wrath against those who had offended him, this notion 
 of God, which science repels, was equally repelled, in spite 
 of all that his nation, time, and training had in them to 
 favour it, by the profound religious sense of Paul. In none 
 of his epistles is the reconciling work of Christ really pre- 
 sented under this aspect. One great epistle there is, how- 
 ever, which does apparently present it under this aspect, 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
 
 Paul's phraseology, and even the central idea which he 
 conveys in that phraseology, were evidently well known to 
 the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Nay, if we 
 merely sought to prove a thesis, rather than to ascertain the 
 real bearing of the documents we canvass, we should have 
 no difficulty in making it appear, by texts taken from the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, that the doctrine of this epistle, no 
 
 1 Gal., v,2. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 71 
 
 less than the doctrine of the Epistle to the Romans, differs 
 entirely from the common doctrine of Puritanism. This, 
 however, we shall by no means do ; because it is our honest 
 opinion that the popular doctrine of * the sacrificial Atone- 
 ment of the Divine Son of God ' derives, if not a real, yet at 
 any rate a strong apparent sanction from the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews. Even supposing, what is probably true, that the 
 popular doctrine is really the doctrine neither of the one 
 epistle nor of the other, yet it must be confessed that while 
 it is the reader's fault, a fault due to his fixed preposses- 
 sions, and to his own want of penetration, if he gets the 
 popular doctrine out of the Epistle to the Romans, it is on 
 the other hand the writer's fault and no longer the reader's, 
 if out of the Epistle to the Hebrews he gets the popular 
 doctrine. For the author of that epistle is, if not subjugated, 
 yet at least preponderantly occupied by the idea of the 
 Jewish system of sacrifices, and of the analogies to Jesus 
 Christ's sacrifice which are furnished by that system. 
 
 If other proof were wanting, this alone would make it 
 impossible that the Epistle to the Hebrews should be Paul's ; 
 and indeed, of all the epistles which bear his name, it is the 
 only one which we may not, perhaps, in spite of the hesita- 
 tion caused by grave difficulties, be finally content to leave 
 in considerable part to him. 1 Luther's conjecture, which 
 
 1 Considerations drawn from date, place, the use of single words and 
 phrases, the development of a church organisation, the development of 
 an ascetic system, are not enough to make us wholly take away certain 
 epistles from St. Paul. The only decisive evidence, for this purpose, 
 is that internal evidence furnished by the entire body of the thoughts 
 and style of an epistle ; and this evidence that Paul was not its author 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews furnishes. From the like evidence, the 
 Apocalypse is clearly shown to be not by the author of the fourth 
 Gospel. This clear evidence against the tradition which assigns them 
 to St. Paul, the Epistles to Timothy and Titus do not offer. As to 
 these epistles, the genuine critic will indeed find it impossible to assign 
 them, as a whole, to St. Paul. But not only are they written by an 
 
72 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 ascribes to Apollos the Epistle to the Hebrews, derives 
 corroboration from the one account of Apollos which we 
 have ; that ' he was an eloquent man and mighty in the 
 Scriptures.' The Epistle to the Hebrews is just such a per- 
 formance as might naturally have come from an eloquent 
 man and mighty in the Scriptures ; in whom the intelligence, 
 and the powers of combining, type-finding, and expound- 
 ing, somewhat dominated the religious perceptions. The 
 Epistle to the Hebrews is full of beauty and power ; and 
 what may be called the exterior conduct of its argument is 
 as able and satisfying as Paul's exterior conduct of his argu- 
 ment is generally embarrassed. Its details are full of what 
 is edifying ; but its apparent central conception of Christ's 
 death, as a perfect sacrifice which consummated the imper- 
 fect sacrifices of the Jewish law, is a mere notion of the 
 understanding, and is not a religious idea. Turn it which 
 way we will, the notion of appeasement of an offended God 
 by vicarious sacrifice, which the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 apparently sanctions, will never truly speak to the religious 
 sense, or bear fruit for true religion. It is no blame to 
 Apollos if he was somewhat overpowered by this notion, for 
 the whole world was full of it, up to his time, in his time, 
 and since his time ; and it has driven theologians before it 
 like sheep. The wonder is, not that Apollos should have 
 adopted it, but that Paul should h.ave been enabled, through 
 the incomparable power and energy of religious perception 
 informing his intellectual perception, in reality to put it aside. 
 Figures drawn from the dominant notion of sacrificial 
 appeasement he used, for the notion has so saturated the 
 imagination and language of humanity that its figures pass 
 naturally and irresistibly into all our speech., Popular 
 Puritanism consists of the apparent doctrine from the Epistle 
 
 excellent man, and in an excellent ^nd large spirit ; they abound, also, 
 with what are probably actual words and phrases of St. Paul. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 73 
 
 to the Hebrews, set forth with Paul's figures. But the 
 doctrine itself Paul had really put aside, and had substituted 
 for it a better. 
 
 The term sacrifice, in men's natural use of it, contains 
 three notions : the notion of winning the favour or buying 
 off the wrath of a powerful being by giving him something 
 precious ; the notion of parting with something naturally 
 precious ; and the notion of expiation, not now in the sense 
 of buying off wrath or satisfying a claim, but of suffering in 
 that wherein we have sinned. The first notion is, at bottom, 
 merely superstitious, and belongs to the ignorant and fear- 
 ridden childhood of humanity; it is the main element, how- 
 ever, in the Puritan conception of justification. The second 
 notion explains itself; it is the main element in the Pauline 
 conception of justification. Jesus parted with what, to men 
 in general, is the most precious of things, individual self 
 and selfishness ; he pleased not himself, obeyed the spirit 
 of God, died to sin and to the law in our members, con- 
 summated upon the cross this death; here is Paul's essential 
 notion of Christ's sacrifice. 
 
 The third notion may easily be misdealt with, but it 
 has a profound truth ; in Paul's conception of justification 
 there is much of it. In some way or other, he who would 
 ' cease from sin ' must nearly always 'suffer in the flesh/ 
 It is found to be true, that ' without shedding of blood is 
 no remission.' * If you can be good with pleasure,' says 
 Bishop Wilson with his genius of practical religious sense, 
 1 God does not envy you your joy ; but such is our corrup- 
 tion, that every man cannot be so.' The substantial basis 
 of the notion of expiation, so far as we ourselves are con- 
 cerned, is 4he bitter experience that the habit of wrong, of 
 blindly obeying selfish impulse, so affects our temper and 
 powers, that to withstand selfish impulse, to do right, when 
 the sense of right awakens in us. requires an effort out of all 
 
74 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 proportion to the actual present emergency. We have not 
 only the difficulty of the present act in itself, we have the 
 resistance of all our past ; fire and the knife, cautery and 
 amputation, are often necessary in order to induce a vital 
 action, which, if it were not for our corrupting past, we might 
 have obtained from the natural healthful vigour of our 
 moral organs. This is the real basis of our personal sense 
 of the need of expiating, and thus it is that man expiates. 
 
 Not so the just, who is man's ideal. He has no indu- 
 rated habit of wrong, no perverse temper, no enfeebled 
 powers, no resisting past, no spiritual organs gangrened, 
 no need of the knife and fire ; smoothly and inevitably 
 he follows the eternal order, and hereto belongs happiness 
 What sins, then, has the just to expiate ? ours. In truth, 
 men's habitual unrighteousness, their hard and careless 
 breaking of the moral law, do so tend to reduce and impair 
 the standard of goodness, that, in order to keep this standard 
 pure and unimpaired, the righteous must actually labour 
 and suffer far more than would be necessary if men were 
 better. In the first place, he has to undergo our hatred and 
 persecution for his justice. In the second place, he has to 
 make up for the harm caused by our continual shortcomings, 
 to step between us foolish transgressors and the destructive 
 natural consequences of our transgression, and, by a super- 
 human example, a spending himself without stint, a more 
 than mortal scale of justice and purity, to save the ideal of 
 human life and conduct from the deterioration with which 
 men's ordinary practice threatens it. In this way Jesus Christ 
 truly ' became for our sakes poor, though he was rich,' he 
 was truly ' bruised for our iniquities,' he * suffered in our 
 behoof,' 'bare the sin of many,' and * made intercession for 
 the transgressors.' l In this way, truly, * he was sacrificed 
 as a blameless lamb to redeem us from the vain conversa- 
 1 II Cor. t viii, 9 ; Is., liii, 5 ; I Pet., ii, 21 ; Is., liii, 12. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 75 
 
 tion which had become our second nature ; ' 1 in this way, 
 ' he was made to be sin for us, who knew no sin/ 2 Such, 
 according to that true and profound perception of the import 
 of Christ's sufferings, which, in all St. Paul's writings, and 
 in the inestimable First Epistle of St. Peter, is presented to 
 us, is the expiation of Christ 
 
 The notion, therefore, of satisfying and appeasing an 
 angry God's wrath, does not come into Paul's real concep- 
 tion of Jesus Christ's sacrifice. Paul's foremost notion of 
 this sacrifice is, that by it Jesus died to the law of selfish 
 impulse, parted with what to men in general is most precious 
 and near. Paul's second notion is, that whereas Jesus 
 suffered in doing this, his suffering was not his need, but 
 ours ; not for his good, but for ours. In the first aspect, 
 Jesus is the martyrion, the testimony in his life and in his 
 death, to righteousness, to the power and goodness of God. 
 In the second aspect he is the antilytron or ransom. But, 
 in either aspect, Jesus Christ's solemn and dolorous con- 
 demnation of sin does actually loosen sin's hold and attrac- 
 tion upon us who regard him, makes it easier for us to 
 understand and love goodness, to rise above self, to appro- 
 priate Christ, to die to sin. 
 
 Christ's sacrifice, however, and the condemnation of sin 
 it contained, was made for us while we were yet sinners ; it 
 was made irrespectively of our power or inclination to sym- 
 pathise with it and appreciate it. Yet, even thus, in Paul's 
 view, the sacrifice reconciled us to God, to the eternal order ; 
 for it contained the means, the only possible means, of our 
 being brought into harmony with this order. Jesus Christ, 
 nevertheless, was delivered for our sins while we were yet 
 sinners, 3 and before we could yet appreciate what he did. 
 But presently there comes a change. Grace, the goodness 
 of God, the spirit, as Paul loved to call that awful and 
 
 1 I Pet., i, 18, 19. 2 II Cor. t v, 21. Rom.^ v, 8. 
 
76 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 beneficent impulsion of things within us and without us, 
 which we can concur with, indeed, but cannot create, 
 leads us to repentance towards God, 1 a change of the inner 
 man in regard to the moral order, duty, righteousness. 1 
 And now, to help this our impulse towards righteousness, 
 we find a power enabling us to turn the impulse to full ac- 
 count. Now the spirit does its greatest work in us ; because 
 now, for the first time, the influence of Jesus Christ's preg- 
 nant act really gains us. For now awakens the sympathy 
 for the act and the appreciation of it, which its doer dis- 
 pensed with or was too benign to wait for ; faith working 
 through love towards Christ ' 2 enters into us, masters us. 
 We put on Christ ; we identify ourselves, this is the line 
 of Paul's thought, with Christ; we repeat, through the 
 power of this identification, Christ's death to the law of 
 the flesh and self-pleasing, his condemnation of sin in the 
 flesh ; the death how imperfectly, the condemnation how 
 remorsefully ! But we also rise with him, Paul continues, 
 to life, the only true life, of imitation of God, of putting on 
 the new man which after God is created in righteousness 
 and true holiness, 3 of following the eternal law of the moral 
 order which by ourselves we could not follow. Then God 
 justifies us. We have the righteousness of God and the 
 sense of having it ; we are freed from the oppressing sense 
 of eternal order guiltily outraged and sternly retributive ; we 
 act in joyful conformity with God's will, instead of in miser- 
 able rebellion to it ; we are in harmony with the universal 
 order, and feel that we are in harmony with it. If, then, 
 Christ was delivered for our sins, he was raised for our 
 justification. If by Christ's death, says Paul, we were 
 reconciled to God, by the means being thus provided for 
 our else impossible access to God, much more, when we 
 have availed ourselves of these means and died with him, 
 1 Acts, xx, 21. 2 Gal. t v, 6. 3 Eph. t iv, 24. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 77 
 
 are we saved by his life which we partake. 1 Henceforward 
 we are not only justified but sanctified ; not only in harmony 
 with the eternal order and at peace with God, but conse- 
 crated 2 and unalterably devoted to them ; and from this 
 devotion comes an ever-growing union with God in Christ, 
 an advance, as St. Paul says, from glory to glory. 3 
 
 This is Paul's conception of Christ's sacrifice. His 
 figures of ransom, redemption, propitiation, blood, offering, 
 all subordinate themselves to his central idea of identification 
 with Christ through dying with him, and are strictly subser- 
 vient to it. The figured speech of Paul has its own beauty 
 and propriety. His language is, much of it, eastern lan- 
 guage, imaginative language ; there is no need for turning 
 it, as Puritanism has done, into the positive language of the 
 schools. But if it is to be turned into positive language, 
 then it is the language into which we have translated it that 
 translates it truly. 
 
 We have before seen how it fares with one of the two 
 great tenets which Puritanism has extracted from St. Paul, 
 the tenet of predestination. We now see how it fares with 
 the other, the tenet of justification. Paul's figures our 
 Puritans have taken literally, while for his central idea they 
 have substituted another which is not his. And his central 
 idea they have turned into a figure, and have let it almost 
 disappear out of their mind. His essential idea lost, his 
 figures misused, an idea essentially not his substituted for 
 his, the unedifying patchwork thus made, Puritanism has 
 stamped with Paul's name, and called the gospel. It thunders 
 
 1 Rom., v, 10. 
 
 2 The endless words which Puritanism has wasted upon sanctifica- 
 tion, a magical filling with goodness and holiness, flow from a mere 
 mistake in translating ; ayia.a-fj.6s means consecration, a setting apart to 
 holy service. 
 
 3 II Cor., iii, 18. 
 
78 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 at Romanism for not preaching it, it casts off Anglicanism 
 for not setting it forth alone and unreservedly, it founds 
 organisations of its own to give full effect to it ; these organ- 
 isations guide politics, govern statesmen, destroy institutions ; 
 and they are based upon a blunder ! 
 
 It is to Protestantism, and this its Puritan gospel, that 
 the reproaches thrown on St. Paul, for sophisticating religion 
 of the heart into theories of the head about election and 
 justification, rightly attach. St. Paul himself, as we have 
 seen, begins with seeking righteousness and ends with 
 finding it ; from first to last, the practical religious sense 
 never deserts him. If he could have seen and heard our 
 preachers of predestination and justification, they are just 
 the people he would have called * diseased about questions 
 and word-battlings.' l He would have told Puritanism that 
 every Sunday, when in all its countless chapels it reads him 
 and preaches from him, the veil is upon its heart. The 
 moment it reads him right, a veil will seem to be taken away 
 from its heart; 2 it will feel as though scales had fallen from 
 its eyes. 
 
 But, leaving Puritanism and its errors, let us return, 
 before we end, to the glorious apostle who has occupied us 
 so long. He died, and men's familiar fancies of bargain 
 and appeasement, from which, by a prodigy of religious 
 insight, Paul had been able to disengage the death of 
 Jesus, fastened on it and made it their own. Back rolled 
 over the human soul the mist which the fires of Paul's 
 spiritual genius had dispersed for a few short years. The 
 mind of the whole world was imbrued in the idea of blood, 
 and only through the false idea of sacrifice did men reach 
 Paul's true one. Paul's idea of dying with Christ the Imitation 
 1 I Tim. y vi, 4. 2 II Cor., iii, 15, 16. 
 
ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 79 
 
 elevates more conspicuously than any Protestant treatise 
 elevates it ; but it elevates it environed and dominated 
 by the idea of appeasement; the magnified and non- 
 natural man in Heaven, wrath-filled and blood-exacting; the 
 human victim adding his piacular sufferings to those of 
 divine. Meanwhile another danger was preparing. Gifted 
 men had brought to the study of St. Paul the habits of the 
 Greek and Roman schools, and philosophised where Paul 
 Orientalised. Augustine, a great genius, who can doubt 
 it? nay, a great religious genius, but unlike Paul in this, 
 and inferior to him, that he confused the boundaries of meta- 
 physics and religion, which Paul never did, Augustine set 
 the example of finding in Paul's eastern speech, just as it 
 stood, the formal propositions of western dialectics. Last 
 came the interpreter in whose slowly relaxing grasp we 
 still lie, the heavy-handed Protestant Philistine. Sincere, 
 gross of perception, prosaic, he saw in Paul's mystical idea 
 of man's investiture with the righteousness of God nothing 
 but a strict legal transaction, and reserved all his imagina- 
 tion for Hell and the New Jerusalem. A so-called Pauline 
 doctrine was in all men's mouths, but the ideas of the true 
 Paul lay lost and buried. 
 
 Every one who has been at Rome has been taken to 
 see the Church of St. Paul, rebuilt after a destruction by 
 fire fifty years ago. The church stands a mile or two 
 out of the city, on the way to Ostia and the desert. The 
 interior has all the costly magnificence of Italian churches ; 
 on the ceiling is written in gilded letters : ' Doctor Gen- 
 tium' Gold glitters and marbles gleam, but man and his 
 movement are not there. The traveller has left at a distance 
 the fumum et opes strepitumque Roma ; around him reigns 
 solitude. There is Paul, alone with the mystery which was 
 hidden from ages and from generations, which was brought 
 to the light by him for some half score years, and which 
 
8o ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 then was buried with him in his grave ! Not in our day 
 will he relive, with his incessant effort to find a moral side 
 for miracle, with his incessant effort to make the intellect 
 follow and secure all the workings of the religious percep- 
 tion. Of those who care for religion, the multitude of us 
 want the materialism of the Apocalypse; the few want a 
 vague religiosity. Science, which more and more teaches 
 us to find in the unapparent the real, will gradually 
 serve to conquer the materialism of popular religion. The 
 friends of vague religiosity, on the other hand, will be more 
 and more taught by experience that a theology, a scientific 
 appreciation of the facts of religion, is wanted for religion ; 
 but a theology which is a true theology, not a false. Both 
 these influences will work for Paul's re-emergence. The 
 doctrine of Paul will arise out of the tomb where for cen- 
 turies it has lain buried ; it will edify the church of the 
 future. It will have the consent of happier generations, the 
 applause of less superstitious ages. All will be too little 
 to pay half the debt which the church of God owes to this 
 1 least of the apostles, who was not fit to be called an apostle, 
 because he persecuted the church of God.' l 
 
 1 1 Cor. t xv, 9. 
 
PURITANISM 
 
 AND THE 
 
 CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 
 
 IN the foregoing treatise we have spoken of Protestantism, 
 and have tried to show, how, with its three notable tenets 
 of predestination, original sin, and justification, it has been 
 pounding away for three centuries at St. Paul's wrong words, 
 and missing his essential doctrine. And we took Puritanism 
 to stand for Protestantism, and addressed ourselves directly 
 to the Puritans ; for the Puritan Churches, we said, seem to 
 exist specially for the sake of these doctrines, one or more 
 of them. It is true, many Puritans now profess also the 
 doctrine that it is wicked to have a church connected 
 with the State ; but this is a later invention, 1 designed to 
 strengthen a separation previously made. It requires to be 
 noticed in due course ; but meanwhile, we say that the aim 
 of setting forth certain Protestant doctrines purely and in- 
 tegrally is the main title on which Puritan Churches rest 
 their right of existing. With historic Churches, like those 
 
 1 In his very interesting history, The Church of the Restoration^ 
 Dr. Stoughton says most truly of both Anglicans and Puritans in 1660 : 
 * It is necessary to bear in mind this circumstance, that both parties 
 ivere advocates for a national establishment of religion? Vol. i, p. 113. 
 
 G 
 
82 PURITANISM AND 
 
 of England or Rome, it is otherwise ; these doctrines may 
 be in them, may be a part of their traditions, their theological 
 stock ; but certainly no one will say that either of these 
 Churches was made for the express purpose of upholding 
 these three theological doctrines, jointly or severally. A 
 little consideration will show quite clearly the difference in 
 this respect between the historic Churches and the churches 
 of separatists. 
 
 People are not necessarily monarchists or republicans 
 because they are born and live under a monarchy or republic. 
 They avail themselves of the established government for those 
 general purposes for which governments and politics exist, 
 but they do not, for the most part, trouble their heads much 
 about particular theoretical principles of government. Nay, 
 it may well happen that a man who lives and thrives under 
 a monarchy shall yet theoretically disapprove the principle 
 of monarchy, or a man who lives and thrives under a re- 
 public, the principle of republicanism. But a man, or body 
 of men, who have gone out of an established polity from 
 zeal for the principle of either monarchy or republicanism, 
 and have set up a polity of their own for the very purpose of 
 giving satisfaction to this zeal, are in a false position when- 
 ever it shall appear that the principle, from zeal for which 
 they have constituted their separate existence, is unsound. 
 So predestinarianism and solifidianism, Calvinism and 
 Lutherism, may appear in the theology of a national or his- 
 toric Church, charged ever since the rise of Christianity 
 with the task of developing the immense and complex store 
 of ideas contained in Christianity ; and yet when the stage 
 of development has been reached at which the unsoundness 
 of predestinarian and solifidian dogmas becomes manifest, 
 they will be dropped out of the Church's theology, and she 
 and her task will remain what they were before. But when 
 people from zeal for these dogmas find their historic Church 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 83 
 
 not predestinarian or solifidian enough for them, and 
 make new associations of their own which shall be predes- 
 tinarian or solifidian absolutely, then, when the dogmas are 
 undermined, the associations are undermined too, and have 
 either to own themselves without a reason for existing, or to 
 discover some new reason in place of the old. Now, no- 
 thing which exists likes to be driven to a strait of this kind ; 
 so every association which exists because of zeal for the 
 dogmas of election or justification, will naturally cling to 
 these dogmas longer and harder than other people. There- 
 fore we have treated the Puritan bodies in this country as 
 the great stronghold here of these doctrines ; and in showing 
 what a perversion of Paul's real ideas these doctrines com- 
 monly called Pauline are, we have addressed ourselves to 
 the Puritans. 
 
 But those who speak in the Puritans' name say that we 
 charge upon Puritanism, as a sectarian peculiarity, doctrine 
 which is not only the inevitable result of an honest inter- 
 pretation of the writings of St. Paul, but which is, besides, 
 the creed held in common by Puritans and by all the 
 churches in Christendom, with one insignificant exception. 
 Nay, they even declare that ' no man in his senses can deny 
 that the Church of England was meant to be a thoroughly 
 Protestant and Evangelical, and it may be said Calvinistic 
 Church.' To saddle Puritanism in special with the doctrines 
 we have called Puritan is, they say, a piece of unfairness 
 which has its motive in mere ill-will to Puritanism, a device 
 which can injure nobody but its author. 
 
 Now, we have tried to show that the Puritans are quite 
 wrong in imagining their doctrine to be the inevitable re- 
 sult of an honest interpretation of St. Paul's writings. That 
 they are wrong we think is certain ; but so far are we from 
 being moved, in anything that we do or say in this matter, 
 by ill-will to Puritanism and the Puritans, that it is on the 
 
 o a 
 
84 PURITANISM AND 
 
 contrary just because of our hearty respect for them, and 
 from our strong sense of their value, that we speak as we do. 
 Certainly we consider them to be in the main, at present, an 
 obstacle to progress and to true civilisation. But this is be- 
 cause their worth is, in our opinion, such that not only must 
 one for their own sakes wish to see it turned to more advan- 
 tage, but others, from whom they are now separated, would 
 greatly gain by conjunction with them, and our whole collec- 
 tive force of growth and progress be thereby immeasurably 
 increased. In short, my one feeling when I regard them, is 
 a feeling, not of ill-will, but of regret at waste of power ; 
 my one desire is a desire of comprehension. 
 
 But the waste of power must continue, and the compre- 
 hension is impossible, so long as Puritanism imagines itself 
 to possess, in its two or three signal doctrines, what it calls 
 the gospel ; so long as it constitutes itself separately on 
 the plea of setting forth purely the gospel^ which it thus 
 imagines itself to have seized; so long as it judges others 
 as not holding the gospel, or as holding additions to it and 
 variations from it. This fatal self-righteousness, grounded 
 on a false conceit of knowledge, makes comprehension 
 impossible ; because it takes for granted the possession of 
 the truth, and the power of deciding how others violate 
 it ; and this is a position of superiority, and suits conquest 
 rather than comprehension. 
 
 The waste of power from not including the Puritans 
 in the national Church is measured by the number and 
 value of elements which Puritanism could supply to- 
 wards the collective growth of the whole body. The 
 national Church would grow more vigorously towards a 
 higher stage of insight into religious truth, and consequently 
 towards a greater perfection of practice, if it had these ele- 
 ments ; and this is why we wish for the Puritans in the 
 Church. But, Puritanism has refused to contribute to the 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 8$ 
 
 common growth, mainly because it believes that a certain 
 set of opinions or scheme of theological doctrine is the gospel; 
 that it is possible and profitable to extract this, and that 
 Puritans have done so ; and that it is the duty of men, who 
 like themselves have extracted it, to separate themselves 
 from those who have not, and to set themselves apart that 
 they may profess it purely. 
 
 To disabuse them of this error, which, by preventing 
 collective life, prevents also collective growth, it is necessary 
 to show them that their extracted scheme of theological 
 doctrine is not really the gospel ; and that at any rate, there- 
 fore, it is not worth their while to separate themselves, and 
 to frustrate the hope of growth in common, merely for this 
 scheme's sake. And even if it were true, as they allege, 
 that the national and historic Churches of Christendom do 
 equally with Puritanism hold this scheme, or main parts of 
 it, still it would be to Puritanism, and not to the historic 
 Churches, that in showing the invalidity and unscriptural- 
 ness of this scheme we should address ourselves, because 
 the Puritan Churches found their very existence on it, and 
 the historic Churches do not. And not founding their exist- 
 ence on it, nor falling into separatism for it, the historic 
 Churches have a collective life which is very considerable, 
 and a power of growth, even in respect of the very scheme 
 of doctrine in question, supposing them to hold it, far 
 greater than any which the Puritan Churches show, but which 
 would be yet greater and more fruitful still, if the historic 
 Churches combined the large and admirable contingent of 
 Puritanism with their own forces. Therefore, as we have 
 said, it is out of no sort of malice or ill-will, but from esteem 
 for their fine qualities and from desire for their help, that 
 we have addressed ourselves to the Puritans. We propose 
 to complete now our dealings with this subject by showing 
 how, as a matter of fact, the Church of England (which is 
 
86 PURITANISM AND 
 
 the historic Church practically in question so far as Puritan- 
 ism is concerned) seems to us to have displayed with respect 
 to those very tenets which we have criticised, and for which 
 we are said to have unfairly made Puritanism alone respon- 
 sible, a continual power of growth which has been wanting 
 to the Puritan congregations. This we propose to show 
 first \ and we will show secondly, how, from the very theory 
 of a historic or national Church, the probability of this 
 greater power of growth seems to follow, that we may try 
 and commend that theory a little more to the thoughts and 
 favour of our Puritan friends. 
 
 The two great Puritan doctrines which we have criticised 
 at such length are the doctrines of predestination and justi- 
 fication. Of the aggressive and militant Puritanism of our 
 people, predestination has, almost up to the present day, 
 been the favourite and distinguishing doctrine ; it was the 
 doctrine which Puritan flocks greedily sought, which Puritan 
 ministers powerfully preached, and called others carnal 
 gospellers for not preaching. This Geneva doctrine accom- 
 panied the Geneva discipline. Puritanism's first great wish 
 and endeavour was to establish both the one and the other 
 absolutely in the Church of England, and it became non- 
 conforming because it failed. Now, it is well known that 
 the High Church divines of the seventeenth century were 
 Arminian, that the Church of England was the stronghold 
 of Arminianism, and that Arminianism is, as we have said, 
 an effort of man's practical good sense to get rid of what 
 is shocking to it in Calvinism. And eminently worthy of 
 remark is the constant pressure applied by Puritanism upon 
 the Church of England, to put the Calvinistic doctrine more 
 distinctly into her formularies, and to tie her up more strictly 
 to this doctrine; the constant resistance offered by the Church 
 of England, and the large degree in which Nonconformity 
 is really due to this cause. 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 87 
 
 Everybody knows how far Nonconformity is due to 
 the Church of England's rigour in imposing an explicit 
 declaration of adherence to her formularies. But only a 
 few, who have searched out the matter, know how far 
 Nonconformity is due, also, to the Church of England's 
 invincible reluctance to narrow her large and loose for- 
 mularies to the strict Calvinistic sense dear to Puritan- 
 ism. Yet this is what the record of conferences shows 
 at least as signally as it shows the domineering spirit 
 of the High Church clergy ; but our current political his- 
 tories, written always with an anti-ecclesiastical bias, which 
 is natural enough, inasmuch as the Church party was not 
 the party of civil liberty, leaves this singularly out of sight. 
 Yet there is a very catena of testimonies to prove it; to " 
 show us, from Elizabeth's reign to Charles the Second's, 
 Calvinism, as a power both within and without the Church 
 of England, trying to get decisive command of her formu- 
 laries ; and the Church of England, with the instinct of a 
 body meant to live and grow, and averse to fetter and engage 
 its future, steadily resisting. 
 
 The Lambeth Articles of 1595 exhibit Calvinism potent 
 in the Church of England herself, and among the bishops 
 of the Church. True ; but could it establish itself there ? 
 Mo ; the Lambeth Articles were recalled and suppressed, 
 and Archbishop Whitgift was threatened with the penalties 
 of Ziprczmunire for having published them. Again, it was 
 usual from 1552 onwards to print in the English Bibles 
 a catechism asserting the Calvinistic doctrine of absolute 
 election and reprobation. In the first Bibles of the autho- 
 rised version this catechism appeared ; but it was removed 
 in 1615. Yet the Puritans had met James the First, at his 
 accession in 1603, with the petition that there may be an 
 uniformity of doctrine prescribed : meaning an uniformity in 
 this sense of strict Calvinism. Thus from the very com- 
 
88 PURITANISM AND 
 
 mencement the Church, as regards doctrine, was for open- 
 ing ; Puritanism was for narrowing. 
 
 Then came, in 1604, the Hampton Court Conference. 
 Here, as usual, political historians reproach the Church with 
 having conceded so little. These historians, as we have 
 said, think solely of the Puritans as the religious party 
 favourable to civil liberty, and on that account they favour 
 Puritanism in its disputes with the Church. But, as regards 
 freedom of thought and truth of ideas, what was it that the 
 Church was pressed by Puritanism to concede, and what 
 was the character and tendency of the Church's refusal? 
 The first Puritan petition at this Conference was * that the 
 doctrine of the Church might be preserved in purity accord- 
 ing to God's Word.' That is, according to the Calvinistic 
 interpretation put upon God's Word by Calvin and the 
 Puritans after him ; an interpretation which we have shown 
 to be erroneous and unscriptural. This Calvinistic doctrine 
 of predestination the Puritans wanted to plant hard and fast 
 in the Church's formularies, and the Church resisted. The 
 Puritan foreman complained of the loose wording of the 
 Thirty-nine Articles because it allowed an escape from the 
 strict doctrine of Calvinism, and moved that the Lambeth 
 Articles, strictly Calvinistic, might be inserted into the Book 
 of Articles. The Bishops resisted, and here are the words 
 of their spokesman, the Bishop of London. ' The Bishop 
 of London answered, that too many in those days, neglect- 
 ing holiness of life, laid all their religion upon predestination, 
 " If I shall be saved, I shall be saved," which he termed a 
 desperate doctrine, showing it to be contrary to good divi- 
 nity, which teaches us to reason rather ascendendo than descen- 
 dendo, thus : " I live in obedience to God, in love with my 
 neighbour, I follow my vocation, &c., therefore I trust that 
 God hath elected me and predestinated me to salvation ; " 
 not thus, which is the usual course of argument : " God 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 89 
 
 hath predestinated and chosen me to life, therefore, though 
 I sin never so grievously, I shall not be damned, for whom 
 he once loveth he loveth to the end." ' Who will deny that 
 this resistance of the Church to the Puritans, who, laying all 
 tfieir religion upon predestination , wanted to make the Church 
 do the same, was as favourable to growth of thought and to 
 sound philosophy, as it was consonant to good sense ? 
 
 We have already, in the foregoing treatise, quoted from 
 the complaints against the Church by the Committee of 
 Divines appointed by the House of Lords in 1641, when 
 Puritanism was strongly in the ascendant. Some in the 
 Church teach, say the Puritan complainers, 'that good works 
 are concauses with faith in the act of justification \ some 
 have oppugned the certitude of salvation ; some have main- 
 tained that the Lord's day is kept merely by ecclesiastical 
 constitution ; some have defended the whole gross substance 
 of Arminianism, that the act of conversion depends upon 
 the concurrence of men's free will ; some have denied 
 original sin ; some have broached out of Socinus a most 
 uncomfortable and desperate doctrine, that late repentance, 
 that is, upon the last bed of sickness, is unfruitful.' 
 Such is the complaint ; and what we insist upon is, that 
 the growth and movement of thought, on religious matters, 
 are here shown to be in the Church ; and that on these 
 two cardinal doctrines of predestination and justifica- 
 tion, with which we are accused of unfairly saddling 
 Puritanism alone, Puritanism did really want to make the 
 national religion hinge while the Church did not, but 
 resisted. 
 
 The resistance of the Church was at that time van- 
 quished, not by importing strict Calvinism into the Prayer 
 Book, but by casting out the Prayer Book altogether. By 
 ordinance in 1645 the use of the Prayer Book, which for 
 churches had already been forbidden, was forbidden also for 
 
90 PURITANISM AND 
 
 all private places and families ; any copies to be found in 
 churches were to be delivered up, and heavy penalties were 
 imposed on persons retaining them. 
 
 We come next to the occasion where the Church is 
 thought to have most decisively shown her unyieldingness, 
 the Savoy Conference in 1661, after King Charles the 
 Second's restoration. The question was, what alterations 
 were to be made in the Prayer Book, so as to enable the 
 Puritans to use it as well as the Church party. Having in 
 view doctrine and free development of thought, we say 
 again it was the Puritans who were for narrowing, it was the 
 Churchmen who were for keeping open. Their heads full 
 of these tenets of predestination, original sin, and justifica- 
 tion, which we are accused of charging upon them exclu- 
 sively and unfairly, the Puritans complain that the Church 
 Liturgy seems very defective, why ? Because ' the systems 
 of doctrine of a church should summarily comprehend all 
 such doctrines as are necessary to be believed,' and the liturgy 
 does not set down these explicitly enough. For instance, 
 ' the Confession,' they say, ' is very defective, not clearly 
 expressing original sin. The Catechism is defective as to 
 many necessary doctrines of our religion, some even of the 
 essentials of Christianity not being mentioned except in the 
 Creed, and there not so explicit as ought to be in a cate- 
 chism.' And what is the answer of the bishops ? It is the 
 answer of people with, an instinct that this definition and 
 explicitness demanded by the Puritans are incompatible with 
 the conditions of life of a historic church. ' The Church,' 
 they say, ' hath been careful to put nothing into the Liturgy 
 but that which is either evidently the Word of God, or what 
 hath been generally received in the Catholic Church. The 
 Catechism is not intended as a whole body of divinity.' The 
 Puritans had requested that ' the Church prayers might con- 
 tain nothing questioned by pious, learned, and orthodox per- 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. gi 
 
 sons.' Seizing on this expression, wherein is contained the 
 ground of that separatism for opinions which we hold to be 
 so fatal not only to Church life but also to the natural 
 growth of religious thought, the bishops ask, and in the very 
 language of good sense : 'Who arepwus, learned, and ortho- 
 dox persons 1 Are we to take for such all who shall confi- 
 dently affirm themselves to be such? If by orthodox be 
 meant those who adhere to Scripture and the Catholic con- 
 sent of antiquity, we do not yet know that any part of our 
 Liturgy has been questioned by such. It was the wisdom of 
 our reformers to draw up such a liturgy as neither Romanist 
 nor Protestant could justly except against. Persons want the 
 book to be altered for their own satisfaction.' 
 
 This allegation of the bishops respecting the character 
 of the Liturgy is undoubtedly true, for the Puritans them- 
 selves expressly admitted its truth, and urged this as a reason 
 for altering the Liturgy. It is in consonance with what is so 
 often said, and truly said, of the Thirty-nine Articles, that 
 they are articles of peace. This, indeed, makes the Articles 
 scientifically worthless. Metaphysical propositions, such as 
 they in the main are, drawn up with a studied design for their 
 being vague and loose, can have no metaphysical value. 
 But no one then thought of doing without metaphysical 
 articles ; so to make them articles of peace showed a true 
 conception of the conditions of life and growth in a church. 
 The readiness to put a lax sense on subscription is a proof 
 of the same disposition of mind. Chillingworth's judgment 
 about the meaning of subscription is well known. ' For the 
 Church of England, I am persuaded that the constant doc- 
 trine of it is so pure and orthodox, that whosoever believes 
 it and lives according to it, undoubtedly he shall be saved ; 
 and that there is no error in it which may necessitate or 
 warrant any man to disturb the peace or renounce the com- 
 munion of it. This in my opinion is all that is intended by. 
 
92 PURITANISM AND 
 
 subscription? And Laud, a very different man from Chilling- 
 worth, held on this point a like opinion with him. 
 
 Certainly the Church of England was in no humour, at 
 the time of the Savoy Conference, to deal tenderly with the 
 Puritans. It was too much disposed to show to the Puritans 
 the same sort of tenderness which the Puritans had shown 
 to the Church. The nation, moreover, was nearly as ill- 
 disposed as the Church to the Puritans ; and this proves 
 well what the narrowness and tyrannousness of Puritanism 
 dominant had really been. But the Church undoubtedly 
 said and did to Puritanism after the Restoration much that 
 was harsh and bitter, and therefore inexcusable in a Christian 
 church. Examples of Churchmen so speaking and dealing 
 may be found in the transactions of 1661 ; but perhaps the 
 most offensive example of a Churchman of this kind, and 
 who deserves therefore to be studied, is a certain Dr. Jane, 
 Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford and Dean of Glou- 
 cester, who was put forward to thwart Tillotson's projects of 
 comprehension in 1689. A certain number of Dr. Janes 
 there have always been in the Church. There are a certain 
 number of them in the Church now, and there always will 
 be a certain number of them. No Church could exist with 
 many of them ; but one should have a sample or two of 
 them always before one's mind, and remember how to the 
 excluded party a few, and those the worst, of their excluders, 
 are always apt to stand for the whole, in order to comprehend 
 the full bitterness and resentment of Puritanism against the 
 Church of England. Else one would be inclined to say, 
 after attentively and impartially observing the two parties, 
 that the persistence of the Church in pressing for conformity 
 arose, not as the political historians have it, from the lust 
 of haughty ecclesiastics for dominion and for imposing 
 their law on the vanquished, but from a real sense that their 
 formularies were made so large and open, and the sense put 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 93 
 
 upon subscription to them was so indulgent, that any reason- 
 able man could honestly conform ; and that it was per- 
 verseness and determination to impose their special ideas on 
 the Church, and to narrow the Church's latitude, which made 
 the Puritans stand out. 
 
 Nay, and it was with the wording of the Prayer Book as 
 it was with its doctrine ; the Church took the side which 
 most commands the sympathy of liberal-minded men. Baxter 
 had his rival Prayer Book which he proposed to substitute 
 for the old one. And this is how the ' Reformed Liturgy 
 was to begin : ' Eternal, incomprehensible and invisible God, 
 infinite in power, wisdom and goodness, dwelling in the light 
 which no man can approach, where thousand thousands 
 minister unto thee, and ten thousand times ten thousand 
 stand before thee,' &c. This, I say, was to have taken the 
 place of our old friend, Dearly beloved brethren \ and here, 
 again, we can hardly refuse approval to the Church's resis- 
 tance to Puritan innovations. We could wish, indeed, the 
 Church had shown the same largeness in consenting to relax 
 ceremonies, which she showed in refusing to tighten dogma, 
 or to spoil diction. Worse still, the angry wish to drive by 
 violence, when the other party will not move by reason, 
 finally no doubt appears ; and the Church has much td 
 blame herself for in the Act of Uniformity. Blame she 
 deserves, and she has had it plentifully ; but what has not 
 been enough perceived is, that really the conviction of her 
 own moderation, openness, and latitude, as regards doctrine, 
 seems to have filled her mind during her dealings with the 
 Puritans ; and that her impatience with them was in great 
 measure impatience at seeing these so ill-appreciated by 
 them. Very ill-appreciated by them they certainly were ; 
 and, as far as doctrine is concerned, the quarrel between the 
 Church and Puritanism undoubtedly was, that for the doc- 
 trines of pedestinatibn, original sin, and justification, Puri- 
 
94 PURITANISM AND 
 
 tanism wanted more exclusive prominence, more dogmatic 
 definition, more bar to future escape and development ; 
 while the Church resisted. 
 
 And as the instinct of the Church always made her 
 avoid, on these three favourite tenets of Puritanism, the 
 stringency of definition which Puritanism tried to force 
 upon her, always made her leave herself room for growth 
 in regard to them, so, if we look for the positive begin- 
 nings and first signs of growth, of disengagement from the 
 stock notions of popular theology about predestination, 
 original sin, and justification, it is among Churchmen, and 
 not among Puritans, that we shall find them. . Few will 
 deny that as to the doctrines of predestination and original 
 sin, at any rate, the mind of religious men is no longer what 
 it was in the seventeenth century or in the eighteenth. There 
 has been evident growth and emancipation ; Puritanism itself 
 no longer holds these doctrines in the rigid way it once did. 
 To whom is this change owing? who were the beginners of 
 it? They were men using that comparative openness of 
 mind and accessibility to ideas which was fostered by the 
 Church. The very complaints which we have quoted from 
 the Puritan divines prove that this was so. Henry More, 
 saying in the heat of the Calvinistic controversy, what it 
 needed insight to say then, but what almost every one's 
 common sense says now, that 'it were to be wished the 
 Quinquarticular points were all reduced to this one, namely, 
 That none shall be saved without sincere obedience ; ' Jeremy 
 Taylor saying in the teeth of the superstitious popular doc- 
 trine of original sin : ' Original sin, as it is at this day com- 
 monly explicated, was not the doctrine of the primitive 
 church ; but when Pelagius had puddled the stream, St. 
 Austin was so angry that he stamped and puddled it more,' 
 this sort of utterance from Churchmen it was, that first 
 introduced into our religious world the current of more 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 95 
 
 independent thought concerning the doctrines of predesti- 
 nation and original sin, which has now made its way even 
 amidst Puritans themselves. 
 
 Here the emancipation has reached the Puritans ; but 
 it proceeded from the Church. That Puritanism is yet 
 emancipated from the popular doctrine of justification can- 
 not be asserted. On the contrary, the more it loosens its 
 hold on the doctrine of predestination the more it tightens 
 it on that of justification. We shall have occasion by and 
 by to discuss Wesley's words : ' Plead thou solely the blood of 
 the Covenant^ the ransom paid for thy proud stubborn soul ! ' 
 and to show how modern Methodism glories in holding 
 aloft as its standard this teaching of Wesley's, and this 
 teaching above all. The many tracts which have lately 
 been sent me in reference to this subject go all the same 
 way. Like Luther, they hold that 'all heretics have con- 
 tinually failed in this one point, that they do not rightly 
 understand or know the article of justification : ' 'do not 
 see' (to continue to use Luther's words,) 'that by none 
 other sacrifice or offering could God's fierce anger be ap- 
 peased, but by the precious blood of the Son of God.' That 
 this doctrine is founded upon an entire misunderstanding of 
 St. Paul's writings we have shown ; that there is now very 
 visible a tendency in the minds of religious people to outgrow 
 it, is true, but where alone does this tendency manifest itself 
 with any steadiness or power ? In the Church. The inevi- 
 table movement of growth will in time extend itself to Puri- 
 tanism also. Let it be remembered in that day that not only 
 does the movement come to Puritanism from the Church, 
 but it comes to Churchmen of our century from a seed of 
 growth and development inherent in the Church, and which 
 vas manifest in the Church long ago. 
 
 That the accompaniments of the doctrine of justifica- 
 tion, the tenets of conversion, instantaneous -sanctification, 
 
96 PURITANISM AND 
 
 assurance, and sinless perfection, tenets which are not the 
 essence of Wesley, but which are the essence of Wesleyan 
 Methodism, and which have in them so much that is delu- 
 sive and dangerous, that these should have been discern- 
 ingly judged by that mixture of piety and sobriety which 
 marks Anglicans of the best type, such as Bishop Wilson, 1 
 will surprise no one. Years before Wesley was born, the 
 fontal doctrine itself, Wesley's ' Plead thou solely the blood 
 of the Covenant /' had been criticised by Hammond thus, 
 and the signal of deliverance from the Lutheran doctrine 
 of justification given : ' The solifidian looks upon his faith 
 as the utmost accomplishment and end, and not only as 
 the first elements of his task, which is the superstructing of 
 good life. The solifidian believes himself to have the only 
 sanctified necessary doctrines, that having them renders his 
 condition safe and every man who believes them a pure 
 Christian professor. In respect of solifidianism it is worth 
 remembering what Epiphanius observes of the primitive 
 times, that wickedness was the only heresy -, that impious and 
 pious living divided the whole Christian world into erroneous 
 and orthodox.' 
 
 In point of fact, therefore, the historic Church in England, 
 not existing for special opinions but proceeding by develop- 
 ment, has shown much greater freedom of mind as regards 
 the doctrines of election, original sin, and justification, than 
 the Nonconformists have ; and has refused, in spite of Puri- 
 tan pressure, to tie herself too strictly to these doctrines, to 
 make them all in all. She thus both has been and is more 
 serviceable than Puritanism to religious progress ; because 
 the separating for opinions, which is proper to Puritanism, 
 
 1 For example, what an antidote to the perilous Methodist doctrine 
 of instantaneous sanctification is this saying of Bishop Wilson : c He 
 who fancies that his mind may effectually be changed in a short time, 
 deceives himself,' 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 97 
 
 rivets the separatist to those opinions, and is thus opposed 
 to that development and gradual exhibiting of the full sense 
 of the Bible and Christianity, which is essential to religious 
 progress. To separate for the doctrine of predestination, of 
 justification, of scriptural church-discipline, is to be false to 
 the idea of development, to imagine that you can seize the 
 absolute sense of Scripture from your own present point of 
 view, and to cut yourself off from growth and gradual illumi- 
 nation. That a comparison between the course things have 
 taken in Puritanism and in the Church goes to prove the 
 truth of this as a matter of fact, is what I have been trying 
 to show hitherto ; in what follows I purpose to show how, 
 as a matter of theory and antecedent likelihood, it seems 
 probable and natural that so this should be. 
 
 A historic Church cannot choose but allow the principle 
 of development, for it is written in its institutions and history. 
 An admirable writer, in a book which is one of his least 
 known works, but which contains, perhaps, even a greater 
 number of profound and valuable ideas than any other one 
 of them, has set forth, both persuasively and truly, the im- 
 pression of this sort which Church-history cannot but con- 
 vey. ' We have to account,' says Cardinal Newman in his 
 Essay on Development, 'for that apparent variation and 
 growth of doctrine which embarrasses us when we would 
 consult history for the true idea of Christianity. The in- 
 crease and expansion of the Christian creed and ritual, and 
 the variations which have attended the process in the case 
 of individual writers and churches, are the necessary attend- 
 ants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of 
 the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended 
 dominion. From the nature of the human mind, time is 
 necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great 
 ideas. The highest and most wonderful truths, though com- 
 municated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, 
 
 H 
 
$8 PURITANISM AND 
 
 could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients ; 
 but, as admitted and transmitted by minds not inspired, and 
 through media which were human, have required only the 
 longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation/ 
 And again : ' Ideas may remain when the expression of 
 them is indefinitely varied. Nay, one cause of corruption 
 in religion is the refusal to follow the course of doctrine as 
 it moves on, and an obstinacy in the notions of the past. 
 So our Lord found his people precisians in their obedience 
 to the letter ; he condemned them for not being led on 
 to its spirit, that is, its development. The Gospel is the 
 development of the Law ; yet what difference seems wider 
 than that which separates the unbending rule of Moses from 
 the grace and truth which came by Jesus Christ? The 
 more claim an idea has to be considered living, the more 
 various will be its aspects ; and the more social and political 
 is its nature, the more complicated and subtle will be its 
 developments, and the longer and more eventful will be its 
 course. Such is Christianity.' And yet once more : ' It may 
 be objected that inspired documents, such as the Holy Scrip- 
 tures, at once determine doctrine without further trouble. 
 But they were intended to create an idea, and that idea is not 
 in the sacred text, but in the mind of the reader ; and the 
 question is, whether that idea is communicated to him in 
 its completeness and minute accuracy on its first apprehen- 
 sion, or expands in his heart and intellect, and comes to 
 perfection in the course of time. If it is said that inspira- 
 tion supplied the place of this development in the first re- 
 cipients of Christianity, still the time at length came when 
 its recipients ceased to be inspired ; and on these recipients 
 the revealed truths would fall as in other cases, at first 
 vaguely and generally, and would afterwards be completed 
 by developments.' 
 
 The notion thus admirably expounded of a gradual 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 99. 
 
 understanding of the Bible, a progressive development of 
 Christianity, is the same which was in Bishop Butler's mind 
 when he laid down in his Analogy that 'the Bible contains 
 many truths as yet undiscovered.' 'And as,' he says, 'the 
 whole scheme of Scripture is not yet understood, so, if it 
 ever comes to be understood, before the restitution of all 
 things and without miraculous interpositions, it must be in 
 the same way as natural knowledge is come at, by the 
 continuance and progress of learning and of liberty, and by 
 particular persons attending to, comparing, and pursuing 
 intimations scattered up and down it, which are overlooked . 
 and disregarded by the generality of the world. For this is 
 the way in which all improvements are made ; by thought- 
 ful men's tracing on obscure hints, as it were, dropped as 
 by nature accidentally, or which seem to come into our i 
 minds by chance.' And again : ' Our existence is not only 
 successive, as it must be of necessity, but one state of our 
 life and being is appointed by God to be a preparation for 
 another, and that to be the means of attaining to another 
 succeeding one ; infancy to childhood, childhood to youth, 
 youth to mature age. Men are impatient and for precipi- 
 tating things ; but the author of nature appears deliberate 
 throughout his operations, accomplishing his natural ends by 
 slow successive steps. Thus, in the daily course of natural 
 providence, God operates in the very same manner as in the 
 dispensation of Christianity ; making one thing subservient 
 to another, this to somewhat further; and so on, through 
 a progressive series of means which extend both backward 
 and forward beyond our utmost view. Of this manner of 
 operation everything we see in the course of nature is as 
 much an instance as any part of the Christian dispensation.' 
 All this is indeed incomparably well said; and with 
 Cardinal Newman we may, on the strength of it all, beyond 
 any doubt ' fairly conclude that Christian doctrine admits 
 
 U 2 
 
loo PURITANISM AND 
 
 of developments;' that 'the whole Bible is written on the 
 principle of development.' 
 
 Cardinal Newman, indeed, uses this idea in a manner 
 which, though ingenious, seems to us arbitrary and con- 
 demned by the idea itself. He uses it in support of the 
 pretensions of the Church of Rome to an infallible autho- 
 rity on points of doctrine. He says, with much ingenuity, 
 to Protestants : The doctrines you receive are no more on 
 the face of the Bible, or in the plain teaching of the ante- 
 Nicene Church, which alone you consider pure, than the 
 doctrines you reject. The doctrine of the Trinity is a de- 
 velopment, as much as the doctrine of Purgatory. Both of 
 them are developments made by the Church, by the post- 
 Nicene Church. The determination of the Canon of Scrip- 
 ture, a thing of vital importance to you who acknowledge no 
 authority but Scripture, is a development due to the post- 
 Nicene Church. And thus Dr. Newman would compel 
 Protestants to admit that which is, he declares, in itself 
 reasonable, namely, ' the probability of the appointment in 
 Christianity of an external authority to decide upon the true 
 developments of doctrine and practice in it, thereby sepa- 
 rating them from the mass of mere human speculation, 
 extravagance, corruption, and error, in and out of which 
 they grow. This is the doctrine of the infallibility of the 
 Church, of faith and obedience towards the Church, founded 
 on the probability of its never erring in its declarations or 
 commands.' 
 
 Now, asserted in this absolute way, and extended to 
 doctrine as well as discipline, to speculative thought as well 
 as to Christian practice, Dr. Newman's conclusion seems at 
 variance with his own theory of development, and to be 
 something like an instance of what Bishop Butler criticises 
 when he says : c Men are impatient, and for precipitating 
 things.' But Dr. Newman has himself supplied us with a 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 101 
 
 sort of commentary on these words of Butler's which is 
 worth quoting, because it throws more light on our point 
 than Butler's few words can throw on it by themselves. Dr. 
 Newman says : 'Development is not an effect of wishing 
 and resolving, or of forced enthusiasm, or of any mechanism 
 of reasoning, or of any mere subtlety of intellect ; but comes 
 of its own innate power of expansion within the mind in its 
 season, though with the use of reflexion and argument and 
 original thought, more or less as it may happen, with a 
 dependence on the ethical growth of the mind itself, and with 
 a reflex influence upon it' 
 
 It is impossible to point out more sagaciously and ex- 
 pressively the natural, spontaneous, free character of true 
 development; how such a development must follow laws 
 of its own, may often require vast periods of time, cannot 
 be hurried, cannot be stopped. And so far as Christianity 
 deals, as, in its metaphysical theology, it does abundantly 
 deal, with thought and speculation, it must surely be 
 admitted that for its true and ultimate development in this 
 line more time is required, and other conditions have to be 
 fulfilled, than we have had already. So far as Christian 
 doctrine contains speculative philosophical ideas, never since 
 its origin have the conditions been present for determining 
 these adequately ; certainly not in the mediaeval Church, 
 which so dauntlessly strove to determine them. And there- 
 fore on every Creed and Council is judgment passed in 
 Bishop Butler's sentence : ' The Bible contains many truths 
 as yet undiscovered? 
 
 The Christian religion has practice for its great end and 
 aim ; but it raises, as anyone can see, and as Church-history 
 proves, numerous and great questions of philosophy and of 
 scientific criticism. Well, for the true elucidation of such 
 questions, and for their final solution, time and favourable 
 developing conditions are confessedly necessary. From the 
 
102 PURITANISM AND 
 
 end of the apostolic age and of the great fontal burst of 
 Christianity, down to the present time, have such conditions 
 ever existed in the Christian communities, for determining 
 adequately the questions of philosophy and scientific criti- 
 cism which the Christian religion raises ? God, creation, will, 
 evil, atonement, immortality, these terms and many more 
 of the same kind, however much they might in the Bible be 
 used in a concrete and practical manner, yet plainly had in 
 themselves a provocation to abstract thought, carried with 
 them the occasions of a criticism and a philosophy, which 
 must sooner or later make its appearance in the Church. 
 It did make its appearance ; and the question is whether it 
 has ever yet appeared there under conditions favourable to 
 its true development. Surely this is best elucidated by con- 
 sidering whether questions of criticism and philosophy in 
 general ever had one of their happy moments, their times for 
 successful development, in the early and middle ages of 
 Christendom at all, or have had one of them in the Christian 
 churches, as such, since. All these questions hang together, 
 and the time that is improper for solving one sort of them 
 rightly is improper also for solving the others. 
 
 Surely, then, historic criticism, criticism of style, criticism 
 of nature, no one would go to the early or middle ages of the 
 Church for illumination on these matters. How, therefore, 
 should those ages develop successfully a philosophy of theo- 
 logy, or, in other words, a criticism of physics and metaphysics, 
 which involves the three other criticisms and more besides ? 
 Church-theology is an elaborate attempt at a philosophy of 
 theology, at a philosophical criticism. In Greece, before 
 Christianity appeared, there had been a favouring period for 
 the development of such a criticism ; a considerable move- 
 ment of it took place, and considerable results were reached. 
 When Christianity began, this movement was in decadence ; 
 it declined more and more till it died quite out ; it revived 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 103 
 
 very slowly, and as it waxed, the mediaeval Church waned. 
 The doctrine of universals is a question of philosophy dis- 
 cussed in Greece, and re-discussed in the middle ages. What- 
 ever light this doctrine receives from Plato's treatment of 
 it, or Aristotle's, in whatever state they left it, will anyone 
 say that the Nominalists and Realists brought any more light 
 to it, that they developed it in any way, or could develop it? 
 For the same reason, St. Augustine's criticism of God's 
 eternal decrees, original sin, and justification, the criticism 
 of St. Thomas Aquinas on them, the decisions of the Church 
 on them, are of necessity, and from the very nature of things, 
 inadequate, because, being philosophical developments, they 
 are made in an age when the forces for true philosophical 
 development are waning or wanting. 
 
 So when Hooker says most truly : ' Our belief in the 
 Trinity, the co-eternity of the Son of God with his Father, 
 the proceeding of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, 
 with other principal points the necessity whereof is by 
 none denied, are notwithstanding in Scripture nowhere to 
 be found by express literal mention, only deduced they 
 are out of Scripture by collection ; ' when Hooker thus 
 points out, what is undoubtedly the truth, that these 
 Church-doctrines are developments, we may add this 
 other truth equally undoubted, that being philosophical 
 developments, they are developments of a kind which 
 the Church has never yet had the right conditions for 
 making adequately, any more than it has had the condition*, 
 for developing out of what is said in the book of Genesis, 
 a true philosophy of nature, or out of what is said in the 
 Book of Daniel, a true philosophy of history. It matters 
 nothing whether the scientific truth was there, and the 
 problem was to extract it : or not there, and the problem 
 was to understand why it was not there, and the relation 
 borne by what was there to the scientific truth. The 
 
104 PURITANISM AND 
 
 Church had no means of solving either the one problem 
 or the other. And this from no fault at all of the Church, 
 but for the same reason that she was unfitted to solve a 
 difficulty in Aristotle's Physics or Plato's Timceus^ and to 
 determine the historical value of Herodotus or Livy; 
 simply from the natural operation of the law of develop- 
 ment, which for success in philosophy and criticism re- 
 quires certain conditions that in the early and mediaeval 
 Church were not to be found. 
 
 And when the movement of philosophy and criticism 
 came with the Renascence, this movement was almost 
 entirely outside the Churches, whether Catholic or Protes- 
 tant, and not inside them. It worked in men like Descartes 
 and Bacon, and not in men like Luther and Calvin ; so that 
 the doctrine of these two eminent personages, Luther and 
 Calvin, so far as it was a philosophical and critical develop- 
 ment from Scripture, had no more likelihood of being an 
 adequate development than the doctrine of the Council of 
 Trent. And so it has gone on to this day. Philosophy 
 and criticism have become a great power in the world, and 
 inevitably tend to alter and develop Church-doctrine, so far 
 as this doctrine is, as to a great extent it is, philosophical 
 and critical. Yet the seat of the developing force is not in 
 the Church itself, but elsewhere ; its influences filter strug- 
 glingly into the Church, and the Church slowly absorbs 
 and incorporates them. And whatever hinders their filter- 
 ing in and becoming incorporated, hinders truth and the 
 natural progress of things. 
 
 While, therefore, we entirely agree with Dr. Newman and 
 with the great Anglican divines that the whole Bible is written 
 on the principle of development, and that Christianity in its 
 doctrine and discipline is and must be a development of 
 the Bible, we yet cannot agree that for the adequate deve- 
 lopment of Christian doctrine, so far as theology exhibits 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. w$ 
 
 this metaphysically and scientifically, the Church, whether 
 ante-Nicene or post-Nicene, has ever yet furnished a 
 channel. Thought and science follow their own law of 
 development, they are slowly elaborated in the growth and 
 forward pressure of humanity, in what Shakespeare calls 
 . . . . the prophetic soul 
 Of the wide world dreaming on things to come ; 
 
 and their ripeness and unripeness, as Dr. Newman most 
 truly says, are not an effect of our wishing or resolving. 
 Rather do they seem brought about by a power such as 
 Goethe figures by the Zeit-Geist or Time-Spirit, and St. 
 Paul describes as a divine power revealing additions to 
 what we possess already. 
 
 But sects of men are apt to be shut up in sectarian 
 ideas of their own, and to be less open to new general ideas 
 than the main body of men ; therefore St. Paul in the same 
 breath exhorts to unity. What may justly be conceded to 
 the Catholic Church is, that in her idea of a continuous 
 developing power in united Christendom to work upon the 
 data furnished by the Bible, and produce new combinations 
 from them as the growth of time required it, she followed 
 a true instinct. But the right philosophical developments 
 she vainly imagined herself to have had the power to pro- 
 duce, and her attempts in this direction were at most but a 
 prophecy of this power, as alchemy is said to have been a 
 prophecy of chemistry. 
 
 Still, essentially the Church was not a corporation for 
 speculative purposes, but a corporation for purposes of 
 moral growth and of practice. Terms like God, creation, 
 will, evil, atonement, immortality, evoke, as we have said, 
 and must evoke, sooner or later, a philosophy ; but to evoke 
 this was the accident and not the essence of Christianity ? 
 What, then, was the essence? 
 
 Sir James Stephen, a writer as unlike Dr. Newman as it 
 
io6 'PURITANISM AND 
 
 is possible to conceive, has told us. In an article in 
 jFraser's Magazine, an article written with great vigour and 
 acuteness, this writer advises us to return to Paley, whom we 
 were beginning to neglect, because the real important essence, 
 he says, of Christianity, or rather, to quote quite literally, 
 * the only form of Christianity which is worthy of the serious 
 consideration of rational men, is Protestantism as stated by 
 Paley and his school.' And why? ' Because this Protes- 
 tantism enables the saint to prove to the worldly man that 
 Christ threatened him with hell-fire, and proved his power 
 to threaten by rising from the dead and ascending into 
 heaven : and these allegations are the fundamental assertions 
 of Christianity? 
 
 Now it may be said that this is a very contracted view 
 of * the unsearchable riches of Christ ; ' but we will not 
 quarrel with it. And this for several reasons. In the first 
 place, it is the view often taken by popular theology. In the 
 second place, it is the view best fitted to serve its Benthamite 
 author's object, which is to get Christianity out of the way 
 altogether. In the third place, its shortness gives us courage 
 to try and do what is the hardest thing in the world, namely, 
 to pack a statement of the main drift of Christianity into a 
 few lines of nearly as short compass. 
 
 What then was, in brief, the Christian gospel, or ' good 
 news ' ? It was this : The kingdom of God is come unto you ! 
 The power of Jesus upon the multitudes who heard him 
 gladly was not that, by rising from the dead and ascending 
 into heaven, he enabled the saint to prove to the worldly 
 man the certainty of hell-fire (for he had not yet done so), 
 but that he talked to them about the kingdom of God. ! And 
 
 1 Nothing can be more certain than that the kingdom of God meant 
 originally, and was understood to mean, a Messianic kingdom speedily 
 to appear ; and that to this idea of the kingdom is due much of the 
 effect which its preaching exercised on the imagination of the first 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 107 
 
 how was this come to mankind ? Because Jesus is come to 
 save his people from their sins. And how does Jesus save us 
 from our sins? By teaching us to take his yoke upon us, to 
 do God's will, and to lose our life for the purpose of saving it. 
 On this foundation arose the Christian Church, and not 
 on any foundation of speculative metaphysics. It was in- 
 evitable that the speculative metaphysics should come, but 
 they were not the foundation. When they came, the danger 
 of the Christian Church was that she should take them for 
 the foundation. The Christians who were built on the real 
 foundation, who were united in the joy of Christ's good 
 news, naturally, as they came to know of one another's 
 existence, as their relations with one another multiplied, as 
 the sense of sympathy in the possession of a common 
 treasure deepened, naturally, I say, drew together in one 
 body, with an organisation growing out of the needs of a 
 growing body. It is quite clear that the more strongly 
 Christians felt their common business in setting forward 
 upon earth, through Christ's spirit, the kingdom of God, the 
 more they would be drawn to coalesce into one society 
 for this business, with the natural and true notion that the 
 acting together in this way offers to men greater helps for 
 
 generation of Christians. But nothing is more certain, also, than that 
 while the end itself, the Messianic kingdom, was necessarily something 
 intangible and future, the way to the end, the doing the will of God by 
 intently following the voice of the moral conscience, in those duties, 
 above all, for which there was then in the world the most crying need, 
 the duties of humbleness, self-denial, pureness, justice, charity, 
 became from the very first in the teaching of Jesus something so ever- 
 present and practical, and so associated with the essence of Jesus 
 himself, that the -way to the kingdom grew inseparable, in thought, 
 from the kingdom itself, and was bathed in the same light and charm. 
 Then, after a time, as the vision of an approaching Messianic kingdom 
 was dissipated, the idea of the perfect accomplishment of the will of 
 God had to take the room of it, and in its own realisation to place the 
 ideal of the true kingdom of God. 
 
io8 PURITANISM AND 
 
 reaching their aim, presents fewer distractions, and, above 
 all, supplies a more animating force of sympathy and mutual 
 assurance, than the acting separately. Only the sense oi 
 differences greater than the sense of sympathy could defeat 
 this tendency. 
 
 Cardinal Newman has told us what an impression was 
 once made upon his mind by the sentence: Securus judicat 
 orbis terrarum. I have shown how, for matters of philo- 
 sophical judgment not yet settled but requiring development 
 to clear them, the consent of the world, at a time when this 
 clearing development cannot have happened, seems to carry 
 little or no weight at all ; indeed, as to judgment on these 
 points, we might rather be inclined to lay down the very 
 contrary of Dr. Newman's affirmation, and to say : Securus 
 delirat orbis terrarum. But points of speculative theology 
 being out of the question, and the practical ground and 
 purpose of man's religion being broadly and plainly fixed, 
 we should be quite disposed to concede to Dr. Newman, 
 that securus colit orbis terrarum; those pursue this purpose 
 best who pursue it together. For unless prevented by ex- 
 traneous causes, they manifestly tend, as the history of the 
 Church's growth shows, to pursue it together. 
 
 Nonconformists are fond of talking of the unity which 
 may co-exist with separation, and they say : ' There are four 
 evangelists, yet one gospel ; why should there not be many 
 separate religious bodies, yet one Church ? ' But the Four 
 Gospels arose out of no thought of divergency ; they were 
 not designed as corrections of one prior gospel, or of one 
 another ; they were concurring testimonies borne to the 
 same fact. On the other hand, the several religious bodies 
 of Christendom plainly grew out of an intention of diver- 
 gency ; clearly they were designed to correct the imperfec- 
 tions of one prior church and of each other ; and to say of 
 things sprung out of discord that they may make one because 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 109 
 
 things sprung out of concord may make one, is like saying 
 that because several agreements may make a peace, there- 
 fore several wars may make a peace too. No ; without some 
 strong motive to the contrary, men united by the pursuit 
 of a clearly defined common aim of irresistible attractiveness 
 naturally coalesce ; and since they coalesce naturally, they 
 are clearly right in coalescing and find their advantage in it. 
 All that Cardinal Newman has so excellently said about 
 development applies here legitimately and fully. Existence 
 justifies additions and stages in existence. The living 
 edifice, planted on the foundation of Christ, could not but 
 grow, if it lived at all. If it grew, it could not but make 
 developments ; and all developments not inconsistent with 
 the aim of its original foundation, and not extending beyond 
 the moral and practical sphere which was the sphere of its 
 original foundation, are legitimated by the very fact of the 
 Church having in the natural evolution of its life and 
 growth made them. A boy does not wear the clothes or 
 follow the ways of an infant, nor a man those of a boy ; 
 yet they are all engaged in the one same business of develop- 
 ing their growing life, and to the clothes to be worn and the 
 ways to be followed for the purpose of doing this, nature 
 will, in general, direct them safely. The several scattered 
 congregations of the first age of Christianity coalesced into 
 one community, just as the several scattered Christians had 
 earlier still coalesced into congregations. Why ? because 
 such was the natural course of things. It had nothing in- 
 consistent with the fundamental duty of Christians to follow 
 Christ ; and it was approved by their growing and enlarging 
 in it They developed a church-discipline with a hierarchy 
 of bishops and archbishops, which was not that of the first 
 times ; they developed church- usages, such as the practice 
 of infant baptism, which were not those of the first 
 times ; they developed a church-ritual with ceremonies 
 
-lip PURITANISM AND 
 
 which were not those of the first times ; they developed all 
 these, just as they developed a church-architecture which 
 was not that of the first times, because they were no longer 
 in the first times, and required for their expanding growth 
 what suited their own times. They coalesced with the State 
 because they grew by doing so. They called the faith they 
 possessed in common the Catholic, that is, the general or 
 universal faith. They developed, also, as we have seen, 
 dogma or a theological philosophy. Both dogma and dis- 
 cipline became a part of the Catholic faith, or profession of 
 the general body of Christians. 
 
 Now to develop a discipline, or form of outward life 
 for itself, the Church, as has been said, had necessarily, 
 like every other living thing, the requisite qualifications ; 
 to develop scientific dogma it had not But even of the 
 dogma which the Church developed it may be said, that, 
 from the very nature of things, it was probably, as compared 
 with the opposing dogma over which it prevailed, the more 
 suited to the actual condition of the Church's life, and to 
 the due progress of the divine work for which she existed. 
 For instance, whatever may be scientifically the rights of 
 the question about grace and free-will, it is evident that, 
 for the Church of the fifth century, Pelagianism was the less 
 inspiring and edifying doctrine, and the sense' of being in the 
 divine hand was the feeling which it was good for Christians 
 to be filled with. Whatever may be scientifically the merits 
 of the dispute between Arius and Athanasius, for the Church 
 of their time whatever most exalted or seemed to exalt Jesus 
 Christ was clearly the profitable doctrine, the doctrine most 
 helpful to that moral life which was the true life of the Church. 
 
 People, however, there were in abundance who differed 
 on points both of discipline and of dogma from the rule 
 which obtained in the Church, and who separated from her 
 <ID account of that difference. These were the heretics : 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. irr 
 
 separatists, as the name implies, yr the sake of opinions. 
 And the very name, therefore, implies that they were wrong 
 in separating, and that the body which held together was 
 right -, because the Church exists, not for the sake of opinions, 
 but for the sake of moral practice, and a united endeavour 
 after this is stronger than a broken one. Valentinians, 
 Marcionites, Montanists, Donatists, Manichaeans, Novatians, 
 Eutychians, Apollinarians, Nestorians, Arians, Pelagians, 
 if they separated on points of discipline they were wrong, 
 because for developing its own fit outward conditions of life 
 the body of a community has, as we have seen, a real 
 natural power, and individuals are bound to sacrifice their 
 fancies to it ; if they separated on points of dogma they were 
 wrong also, because, while neither they nor the Church had 
 the means of determining such points adequately, the true 
 instinct lay in those who, instead of separating for such 
 points, conceded them as the Church settled them, and 
 found their bond of union, where it in truth really was, 
 .not in notions about the co-eternity of the Son, but in 
 Christ's injunction, Follow me ! 
 
 Does any one imagine that all the Church shared Au- 
 gustine's speculative opinions about grace and predestina- 
 tion ? that many members of it did not rather incline, as a 
 matter of speculative opinion, to the notions of Pelagius ? 
 Does any one imagine that all who stood with the Church, 
 and did not join themselves to the Arians, were speculatively 
 Athanasians ? It was not so ; but they had a true feeling 
 for what purpose the Gospel and the Church were given 
 -them, and for what they were not given them ; they could 
 see that ' impious and pious living,' according to that sen- 
 tence of Epiphanius we have quoted from Hammond, 
 /divided the whole Christian world into erroneous and 
 orthodox ; ' and that it was not worth while to suffer them- 
 selves to be divided for anything else. 
 
ii2 PURITANISM AND 
 
 And though it will be said that separatists for opinions 
 on points of discipline and dogma have often asserted, and 
 sometimes believed, that piety and impiety were vitally con- 
 cerned in these points ; yet here again the true religious 
 instinct is that which discerns, what is seldom so very 
 obscure, whether they are in truth thus vitally concerned 
 ,or not; and, if they are not, cannot be perverted into 
 fancying them concerned and breaking unity for them. 
 This, I say, is the true religious instinct, the instinct which 
 most clearly seizes the essence and aim of the Christian 
 Gospel and of the Christian Church. But fidelity to it leaves, 
 also, the way least closed to the admission of true develop- 
 ments of speculative thought, when the time is come for 
 them, and to the incorporation of these true developments 
 with the ideas and practice of Christians. 
 
 Is there not, then, any separation which is right and 
 reasonable? Yes, separation on plain points of morals. 
 For these involve the very essence of the Christian Gospel, 
 and the very ground on which the Christian Church is built. 
 The sale of indulgences, if deliberately instituted and per- 
 sisted in by the main body of the Church, afforded a valid 
 reason for breaking unity ; the doctrine of purgatory, or of 
 the real presence, did not. 
 
 However, a cosmopolitan church-order, commenced when 
 the political organisation of Christians was also cosmopolitan, 
 when, that is, the nations of Europe were politically one 
 in the unity of the Roman Empire, might well occasion 
 difficulties as the nations solidified into independent states 
 with a keen sense of their independent life ; so that, the cos- 
 mopolitan type disappearing for civil affairs, and being re- 
 placed by the national type, the same disappearance and 
 replacement tended to prevail in ecclesiastical affairs also. 
 But this was a political difficulty, not a religious one, and it 
 raised no insuperable bar to continued religious union. A 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 113 
 
 Church with Anglican liberties might very well, the English 
 national spirit being what it is, have been in religious com- 
 munion with Rome, and yet have been safely trusted to 
 maintain and develop its national liberties to any extent 
 required. 
 
 The moral corruptions of Rome, on the other hand, were 
 a real ground for separation. On their account, and solely 
 on their account, if they could not be got rid of, was separa- 
 tion not only lawful but necessary. It has always been the 
 averment of the Church of England, that the change made 
 in her at the Reformation was the very least change which 
 was absolutely necessary. No doubt she used the oppor- 
 tunity of her breach with Rome to get rid of several doctrines 
 which the human mind had outgrown ; but it was the immoral 
 practice of Rome that really moved her to separation. And 
 she maintained that she merely got rid of Roman corruptions 
 which were immoral and intolerable, and remained the old, 
 historic, Catholic Church of England still 
 
 The right to this title of Catholic is a favourite matter 
 of contention between bodies of Christians. But let us 
 use names in their customary and natural senses. To me 
 it seems that unless one chooses to fight about words, and 
 fancifully to put into the word Catholic some occult quality, 
 one must allow that the changes made in the Church of 
 England at the Reformation impaired its Catholicity. The 
 word Catholic was meant to describe the common or general 
 profession and worship of Christendom at the time when the 
 word arose. Undoubtedly this general profession and 
 worship had not a strict uniformity everywhere, but it had 
 a clearly-marked common character ; and this well-known 
 type Bede, or Anselm, or Wiclif himself, would to this day 
 easily recognise in a Roman Catholic religious service, but 
 hardly in an Anglican ; while, on the other hand, in a 
 Roman Catholic religious service an ordinary Anglican finds 
 
 i 
 
ru PURITANISM AND 
 
 himself as much in a strange world and out of his usual 
 course as in a Nonconformist meeting-house. Something 
 precious was no doubt lost in losing this common profession 
 and worship ; but the loss was, as Protestants maintain, 
 incurred for the sake of something yet more precious still, 
 the purity of that moral practice which was the very cause 
 for which the common profession and worship existed. 
 Now, it seems captious to incur voluntarily a loss for a great 
 and worthy object, and at the same time, by a conjuring 
 with words, to try and make it appear that we have not 
 suffered the loss at all. So on the word Catholic we will not 
 insist too jealously ; but thus much, at any rate, must be 
 allowed to the Church of England, that she kept enough 
 of the past to preserve, as far as this nation was concerned, 
 her continuity, to be still the historic Church of England ; 
 and that she avoided the error, to which there was so much 
 to draw her, and into which all the other reformed Churches 
 fell, of making improved speculative doctrinal opinions the 
 main ground of her separation. 
 
 A Nonconformist newspaper, it is true, reproaching the 
 Church with what is, in our opinion, her greatest praise, 
 namely, that on points of doctrinal theology she is ' a Church 
 that does, not know her own mind,' roundly asserts, as we 
 have already mentioned, that ' no man in his senses can 
 deny that the Church of England was meant to be a 
 thoroughly Protestant and Evangelical, and it may be said 
 Calvinistic Church.' But not only does the whole course of 
 Church-history disprove such an assertion, and show that 
 this is what the Puritans always wanted to make the Church, 
 and what the Church would never be made, but we can dis- 
 prove it, too, out of the mouths of the very Puritans them- 
 selves. At the Savoy Conference the Puritans urged that 
 * our first reformers did at that time (of the Reformation) so 
 compose the Liturgy, as to win upon the Papists, and to 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 115 
 
 draw them into their Church communion by varying as little 
 as they could from the Romish forms before in use ;' and this 
 they alleged as their great plea for purging the Liturgy. 
 And the Bishops resisted, and upheld the proceeding of the 
 reformers as the essential policy of the Church of England ; 
 as indeed it was, and till this day has continued to be. No ; 
 the Church of England did not give her energies to invent- 
 ing a new church-order for herself and fighting for it ; to 
 singling out two or three speculative dogmas as the essence 
 of Christianity, and fighting for them. She set herself to 
 carry forward, and as much as possible on the old lines, the 
 old practical work and proper design of the Christian 
 Church ; and this is what left her mind comparatively open, 
 as we have seen, for the admission of philosophy and criti- 
 cism, as they slowly developed themselves outside the 
 Church and filtered into her ; an admission which con- 
 fessedly proves just now to be of capital importance. 
 
 This openness of mind the Puritans have not shared 
 with the Church, and how should they have shared it? 
 They are founded on the negation of that idea of develop- 
 ment which plays so important a part in the life of the 
 Church ; on the assumption that there is a divinely ap- 
 pointed church-order fixed once for all in the Bible, and 
 that they have adopted it ; that there is a doctrinal scheme 
 of faith, justification, and imputed righteousness, which is 
 the test of a standing or falling church and the essence of 
 the gospel, and that they have extracted it These are 
 assumptions which, as they make union impossible, so also 
 make growth impossible. The Church makes church-order 
 a matter of ecclesiastical constitution, is founded on moral 
 practice, and though she develops speculative dogma, does 
 not allow that this or that dogma is the essence of Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 ' Congregational Nonconformists,' say the Independents, 
 
 I 2 
 
ii6 PURITANISM AND 
 
 'can never be incorporated into an organic union with 
 Anglican Episcopacy, because there is not even the shadow 
 of an outline of it in the New Testament, and it is our 
 assertion and profound belief that Christ and the Apostles 
 have given us all the laws that are necessary for the consti- 
 tution and government of the Church.' * ' Whatever may 
 come,' says the President of the Wesleyan Conference, ' we 
 are determined to be simple, earnest preachers of the gospel. 
 Whatever may come, we are determined to be true to Scrip- 
 tural Protestantism. We would be friendly with all evan- 
 gelical churches, but we will have no fellowship with the 
 man of sin. We will give up life itself rather than be un- 
 faithful to the truth. It is ours to cry everywhere : " Come, 
 sinners, to the gospel-feast ! " ' And this gospel, this Scrip- 
 tural Protestantism, this truth, is the doctrine of justification 
 by ' pleading solely the blood of the covenant,' of which we 
 have said so much. Methodists cannot unite with a church 
 which does not found itself on this doctrine of justification, 
 but which holds the doctrine of priestly absolution, of the 
 real presence, and other doctrines of like stamp ; Congre- 
 gationalists cannot unite with a church which, besides not 
 resting on the doctrine of justification, has a church-order 
 not prescribed in the New Testament. 
 
 Now as Hooker truly says of those who ' desire to draw 
 all things unto the determination of bare and naked Scrip- 
 ture,' as Cardinal Newman, too, has said, and as many 
 others have said, the Bible does not exhibit, drawn out in 
 black and white, the precise tenets and usages of any Chris- 
 tian society; some inference and criticism must be employed 
 to get at them. 'For the most part, even such as are 
 readiest to cite for one thing five hundred sentences of 
 Scripture, what warrant have they that any one of them doth 
 
 1 Address of the Rev. G. W. Conder at Liverpool, in the Lan- 
 cashire Congregational Calendar for 1869-7(1 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 117 
 
 mean the thing for which it is alleged ? ' Nay, ' it is not the 
 word of God itself which doth, or possibly can, assure us 
 that we do well to think it his word.' So says Hooker, and 
 what he says is perfectly true. A process of reasoning and 
 collection is necessary to get at the Scriptural church-dis- 
 cipline and the Scriptural Protestantism of the Puritans ; in 
 short, this discipline and this doctrine are developments. 
 And the first is an unsound development, in a line where 
 there was a power of making a true development, and where 
 the Church made it; the second is an unsound development 
 in a line where neither the Church nor Puritanism had the 
 power of making true developments. But as it is the truth 
 of its Scriptural Protestantism which in Puritanism's eyes 
 especially proves the truth of its Scriptural church-order 
 which has this Protestantism, and the falsehood of the 
 Anglican church-order which has much less of it, to abate 
 the confidence of the Puritans in their Scriptural Protes- 
 tantism is the first step towards their union, so much to be 
 desired, with the national Church. 
 
 We say, therefore, that the doctrine : ' It is agreed be- 
 tween God and the mediator Jesus Christ, the Son of God, 
 surety for the redeemed, as parties-contractors, that the sins 
 of the redeemed should be imputed to innocent Christ, and 
 he both condemned and put to death for them upon this 
 very condition, that whosoever heartily consents unto the 
 covenant of reconciliation offered through Christ shall, by 
 the imputation of his obedience unto them, be justified and 
 holden righteous before God,' we say that this doctrine is 
 as much a human development from the text, * Christ Jesus 
 came into the world to save sinners,' as the doctrine of 
 priestly absolution is a human development from the text, 
 * Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them,' 
 or the doctrine of the real presence from the text, ' Take, 
 eat, this is my body.' In our treatise on St. Paul we have 
 
ii8 PURITANISM AND 
 
 shown at length how the received doctrine of justification is 
 an unsound development. It may be said that the doctrine 
 of priestly absolution and of the real presence are unsound 
 developments also. True, in our opinion they are so ; they 
 are, like the doctrine of justification, developments made 
 under conditions which precluded the possibility of sound 
 developments in this line. But the difference is here : the 
 Church of England does not identify Christianity with these 
 unsound developments ; she does not call either of them 
 Scriptural Protestantism, or truth, or the gospel ; she does 
 not insist that all who are in communion with her should 
 hold them ; she does not repel from her communion those 
 who hold doctrines at variance with them. She treats them 
 as she does the received doctrine of justification, to which 
 she does not tie herself up, but leaves people to hold it if 
 they please. She thus provides room for growth and further 
 change in these very doctrines themselves. But to the 
 doctrine of justification Puritanism ties itself up, just as it 
 tied itself up formerly to the doctrine of predestination ; it 
 calls it Scriptural Protestantism, truth, the gospel ; it will 
 have communion with none who do not hold it ; it repels 
 communion with any who hold the doctrines of priestly ab- 
 solution and the real presence, because these doctrines seem 
 to interfere with it. Yet it is really itself no better than they. 
 And how can growth possibly find place in this doctrine, while 
 it is held in such a fashion ? 
 
 Every one who perceives and values the power contained 
 in Christianity, must be struck to see how, at the present 
 moment, the progress of this power seems to depend upon 
 its being able to disengage itself from speculative accretions 
 which encumber it. A considerable movement to this end 
 is visible in the Church of England. But the larger the 
 body in which this movement works, the greater is the 
 power of the movement. If the Church of England were 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 119 
 
 disestablished to-day it would be desirable to re-establish 
 her to-morrow, if only because of the immense power for 
 development which a national body possesses. It is because 
 I know something of the Nonconformist ministers, and what 
 eminent force and faculty many of them have for contribut- 
 ing to the work of development now before the Church, 
 that I cannot bear to see the waste of power caused by their 
 separatism and battling with the Establishment, which ab- 
 sorb their energies too much to suffer them to carry forward 
 the work of development themselves, and cut them off from 
 aiding those in the Church who carry it forward. 
 
 The political dissent of the Nonconformists, based on 
 their condemnation of the Anglican church -order as un- 
 scriptural, is just one of those speculative accretions which 
 we have spoken of as encumbering religion. Politics are a 
 good thing, and religion is a good thing; but they make 
 a fractious mixture. ' The Nonconformity of England, and 
 the Nonconformity alone, has been the salvation of England 
 from Papal tyranny and kingly misrule and despotism.' l 
 This is the favourite boast, the familiar strain ; but this is 
 really politics, and not religion at all. But righteousness is 
 religion ; and the Nonconformists say : ' Who have done 
 so much for righteousness as we?' For as much righteous- 
 ness as will go with politics, no one ; for the sterner virtues, 
 for the virtues of the Jews of the Old Testament ; but these 
 are only half of righteousness and not the essentially Chris- 
 tian half. We have seen how St. Paul tore himself in two, 
 rent his life in the middle and began it again, because he 
 was so dissatisfied with a righteousness which was, after all, 
 in its main features, Puritan. And surely it can hardly be 
 denied that the more eminently and exactly Christian type 
 of righteousness is the type exhibited by Church worthies 
 like Herbert, Ken, and Wilson, rather than that exhibited 
 1 The Rev. G. W. Conder, tibi snfira. 
 
120 PURITANISM AND 
 
 by the worthies of Puritanism ; the cause being that these 
 last mixed politics with religion so much more than did the 
 first. 
 
 Paul, too, be it remembered, condemned disunion in 
 the society of Christians as much as he declined politics. 
 This is decisive against the Puritan allegation that it does 
 not matter whether the society of Christians is united or 
 not, and that there are even great advantages in separatism. 
 If Anglicans maintained that their church-order was written 
 in Scripture and a matter of divine command, then, Con- 
 gregationalists maintaining the same thing, to the controversy 
 between them there could be no end. But now, Anglicans 
 maintaining no such thing, but that their church-order is a 
 matter of historic development and natural expediency, that 
 it has grown, which is evident enough, and that the 
 essence of Christianity is in no wise concerned with such 
 matters, why should not the Nonconformists adopt this 
 moderate view of the case, which constrains them to no 
 admission of inferiority, but only to the renouncing an ima- 
 gined divine superiority and to the recognition of an exist- 
 ing fact, and allow Church bishops as a development of 
 Catholic antiquity, just as they have now allowed Church 
 music and Church architecture, which are developments of 
 the same ? Then might there arise a mighty and undis- 
 tracted power of joint life, which would transform, probably, 
 the doctrines of priestly absolution and the real presence, 
 would transform, equally, the so-called Scriptural Protes- 
 tantism of imputed righteousness, but would do more for 
 real righteousness and for Christianity than has ever been 
 done yet. 
 
 Tillotson's proposals for comprehension, drawn up in 
 1689, cannot be too much studied at the present juncture. 
 These proposals, with which his name and that of Stilling- 
 fleet, two of the most estimable names in the English Churcli, 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 121 
 
 are specially associated, humiliate no one, refute no one ; 
 they take the basis of existing facts, and endeavour to build 
 on it a solid union. They are worth quoting entire, and 
 I conclude with them. Their details our present circum- 
 stances would modify ; their spirit any sound plan of Church- 
 reform must take as its rule. 
 
 *i. That the ceremonies enjoined or recommended in 
 the Liturgy or Canons be left indifferent. 
 
 '2. That the Liturgy be carefully reviewed, and such 
 alterations and changes be therein made as may supply the 
 . defects and remove as much as possible all ground of excep- 
 tion to any part of it, by leaving out the apocryphal lessons 
 and correcting the translation of the psalms used in the 
 public service where there is need of it, and in many other 
 particulars. 
 
 '3. That mstead of all former declarations and sub- 
 scriptions to be made by ministers, it shall be sufficient for 
 them that are admitted to the exercise of their ministry in 
 the Church of England to subscribe one general declaration 
 and promise to this purpose, viz. : That we do submit to the 
 doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Church of England as 
 it shall be established by law, and promise to teach and practise 
 accordingly. 
 
 1 4. That a new body of ecclesiastical Canons be made, 
 particularly with a regard to a more effectual provision for 
 the reformation of manners both in ministers and people. 
 
 * 5. That there be an effectual regulation of ecclesiastical 
 courts to remedy the great abuses and inconveniences which 
 by degrees and length of time have crept into them ; and 
 particularly that the power of excommunication be taken out 
 of the hands of lay officers and placed in the bishop, and not 
 to be exercised for trivial matters, but upon great and 
 weighty occasions. 
 
 * 6. That for the future those who have been ordained 
 
122 PURITANISM, ETC. 
 
 in any of the foreign churches be not required to be re- 
 ordained here, to render them capable of preferment in the 
 Church. 
 
 * 7. That for the future none be capable of any ecclesias- 
 tical benefice or preferment in the Church of England that 
 shall be ordained in England otherwise than by bishops ; 
 and that those who have been ordained only by presbyters 
 shall not be compelled to renounce their former ordination. 
 But because many have and do still doubt of the validity of 
 such ordination, where episcopal ordination may be had, 
 and is by law required, it shall be sufficient for such persons 
 to receive ordination from a bishop in this or the like form : 
 " If thou art not already ordained, I ordain thee," &c. ; as 
 in case a doubt be made of any one's baptism, it is ap- 
 pointed by the Liturgy that he be baptized in this form : " If 
 thou art not baptized, I baptize thee." ' 
 
 These are proposals 'to be made by the Church of 
 England for the Union of Protestants' Who cannot see 
 that the power of joint life already spoken of would be far 
 greater and stronger if it comprehended Roman Catholics 
 too? And who cannot see, also, that a movement is possible 
 which may at last bring about a general union of Christen- 
 dom ? But this will not be in our day, nor is it business 
 which the England of this generation is set to do. What 
 may be done in England in our day, what our generation has 
 the call and the means, if only it has the resolution, to bring 
 about, is the union of Protestants. But this union will never 
 be on the basis of the actual Scriptural Protestantism of our 
 Puritans ; and because, so long as they take this for the 
 gospel or good news of Christ, they cannot possibly unite 
 on any other basis, the first step towards union is showing 
 them that this is not the gospel. If I have succeeded in 
 doing even so much towards union as to convince one of 
 them of this, I have not written in vain. 
 
MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 THE foregoing essay was meant to clear away offence or 
 misunderstanding which had arisen out of the treatise on 
 St. Paul and Protestantism. There still remain one or two 
 points on which a word of explanation may be useful, and- 
 to them the present essay is addressed. 
 
 The general objection, that the scheme of doctrine 
 criticised by me is common to both Puritanism and the 
 Church of England, and does not characterise the one more 
 essentially than the other, has been removed, I hope, by the 
 preceding essay. But it is said that there is, at any rate, a 
 large party in the Church of England, the so-called Evan- 
 gelical party, which holds just the scheme of doctrine I 
 have called Puritan ; that this large party, at least, if not 
 the whole Church of England, is as much a stronghold of 
 the distinctive Puritan tenets as the Nonconformists are ; 
 and that to tax the Nonconformists with these tenets, and 
 to say nothing about the Evangelical clergy holding them 
 too, is injurious and unfair. 
 
 The Evangelical party in the Church of England we 
 must always, certainly, have a disposition to treat with for- 
 bearance, inasmuch as this party has so strongly loved what 
 is indeed the most loveable of things, religion. The Evan- 
 gelicals have also avoided that unblessed mixture of politics 
 and religion by which both politics and religion are spoilt. 
 This, however, would not alone have prevented our making 
 
124 MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 them jointly answerable with the Puritans for that body of 
 opinions, which calls itself Scriptural Protestantism, but which 
 is, in truth, a perversion of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. 
 But there is this difference between the Evangelical party in 
 the Church of England and the Puritans outside her : the 
 Evangelicals have not added to the first error of holding 
 this unsound body of opinions the second error of separat- 
 ing for them. They have thus, as we have already noticed, 
 escaped the mixing of politics and religion, which arises 
 directly and naturally out of this separating for opinions. 
 But they have also done that which we most blame Non- 
 conformity for not doing ; they have left themselves in the 
 way of development. Practically they have admitted that the 
 Christian Church is built, not on the foundation of Lutheran 
 and Calvinist dogmas, but on the injunction of Jesus, Follow 
 me. Bishop Ryle or Dean Close may have as erroneous 
 notions as to what truth and the Gospel really is, as Mr. 
 Spurgeon or the President of the Wesleyan Conference ; but 
 they do not tie themselves tighter still to these erroneous 
 notions, nor do their best to cut themselves off from out- 
 growing them, by resolving to have no fellowship with the man 
 of sin who holds different notions. On the contrary, they 
 are worshippers in the same Church, professors of the same 
 faith, ministers of the same confraternity, as men who hold that 
 their Scriptural Protestantism is all wrong, and who hold other 
 notions of their own quite at variance with it. And thus they 
 do homage to an ideal of Christianity which is larger, higher, 
 and better than either their notions or those of their oppo- 
 nents, and in respect of which both their notions and those 
 of their opponents are inadequate ; and this admission of 
 the relative inadequacy of their notions is itself a stage 
 towards the future admission of their positive inadequacy. 
 
 In fact, the popular Protestant theology, which we have 
 criticised as such a grave perversion of the teaching of St. 
 
MODERN DISSENT. 125 
 
 Paul, has not now in the so-called Evangelical party of the 
 Church of England its chief centre and stronghold. This 
 party, which, following in the wake of Wesley and others, 
 so felt in a day of general insensibility the power and com- 
 fort of the Christian religion, and which did so much to 
 make others feel them, but which also adopted and pro- 
 mulgated a scientific account so inadequate and so mis- 
 leading of the religion which attracted it, this great party 
 has done its work, and is now undergoing that law of trans- 
 formation and development which obtains in a national 
 Church. The power is passing from it to others, who will 
 make good some of the aspects of religion which the Evan- 
 gelicals neglected, and who will then, in their turn, from the 
 same cause of the scientific inadequacy of their conception 
 of Christianity, change and pass away. The Evangelical 
 clergy no longer recruits itself with success, no longer lays 
 hold on such promising subjects as formerly. It is losing 
 the future and feels that it is losing it. Its signs of a 
 vigorous life, its gaiety and audacity, are confined to its 
 older members, too powerful to lose their own vigour, but 
 without successors to whom to transmit it. It was impos- 
 sible not to admire the genuine and rich though somewhat 
 brutal humour of the Dean of Ripon's famous similitude of 
 the two lepers. 1 But from which of the younger members 
 of the Evangelical clergy do such strokes now come ? The 
 best of their own younger generation, the soldiers of their 
 own training, are slipping away from them ; and he who 
 
 1 In a letter to the Times respecting Dr. Pusey and Dr. Temple, 
 during the discussion caused by Dr. Temple's appointment to the see 
 of Exeter. Dr. Temple was the total leper, so evidently a leper that 
 all men would instinctively avoid him, and he ceased to be dangerous ; 
 Dr. Pusey was the partial leper, less deeply tainted, but on that very 
 account more dangerous, because less likely to terrify people from 
 coming near him. A piece of polemical humour, racy, indeed, but 
 hardly urbane, and still less Christian ! 
 
126 MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 looks for the source whence popular Puritan theology now 
 derives power and perpetuation, will not fix his eyes on the 
 Evangelical clergy of the Church of England. 
 
 Another point where a word of explanation seems de- 
 sirable is the objection taken on a kind of personal ground 
 to the criticism of St. Paul's doctrine which I have at- 
 tempted. 'What!' it is said, 'if this view of St. Paul's 
 meaning, so unlike the received view, were the true one, 
 do you suppose it would have been left for you to discover 
 it? Are you wiser than the hundreds of learned people 
 who for generation after generation have been occupying 
 themselves with St. Paul and little else ? Has it been left 
 for you to bring in a new religion and found a new church?' 
 Now on this line of expostulation, which, so far as it draws 
 from unworthiness of ours its argument, appears to have, 
 no doubt, great force, there are three remarks to be offered. 
 In the first place, even if the version of St Paul which we 
 propound were both new and true, yet we do not, on that 
 account, make of it a new religion or set up a new church 
 for its sake. That would be separating for opinions, heresy, 
 which is just what we reproach the Nonconformists with. 
 In the seventh century, there arose near the Euphrates a 
 sect called Paulicians, who professed to form themselves on 
 the pure doctrine of St. Paul, which other Christians, they 
 said, had misunderstood and corrupted. And we, I sup- 
 pose, having discovered how popular Protestantism perverts 
 St. Paul, are expected to try and make a new sect of Pauli- 
 cians on the strength of this discovery ; such being just the 
 course which our Puritan friends would themselves eagerly 
 take in like case. But the Christian Church is founded, 
 not on a correct speculative knowledge of the ideas of 
 Paul, but on much surer ground : on Christ's command, 
 Follow me\ and, holding this to be so, we might change 
 the current strain of doctrinal theology from one end to the 
 
MODERN DISSENT. 127 
 
 other, without, on that account, setting up any new church 
 or bringing in any new religion. 
 
 In the second place, the version we propound of St. 
 Paul's line of thought is not new, is not of our discovering. 
 It belongs to the ' Zeit-Geist,' or time-spirit, it is in the air, 
 and many have long been anticipating it, preparing it, setting 
 forth this and that part of it, till there is not a part, pro- 
 bably, of all we have said, which has not already been said 
 by others before us, and said more learnedly and fully than 
 we can say it. All we have done is to take it as a whole, 
 and give a plain, popular, connected, exposition of it. 
 
 Thirdly, and in the last place, we by no means put 
 forth our version of St. Paul's line of thought as true, in 
 the same fashion as Puritanism puts forth its Scriptural 
 Protestantism, or gospel, as true. Their truth the Puritans 
 exhibit as a sort of cast-iron product, rigid, definite, and 
 complete, which they have got once for all, and which can 
 no longer have anything added to it or anything withdrawn 
 from it. But of our rendering of St. Paul's thought we con- 
 ceive rather as of a product of nature, which has grown to 
 be what it is and which will grow more ; which will not 
 stand just as we now exhibit it, but which will gain some 
 aspects which we now fail to show in it, and will drop some 
 which we now give to it ; which will be developed, in short, 
 farther, just in like manner as it has reached its present 
 stage by development. 
 
 Thus we present our conceptions, neither as something 
 quite new nor as something quite true ; nor yet as any 
 ground, even supposing they were quite new and true, for a 
 separate church or religion. But so far they are, we think, 
 new and true, and a fruit of sound development, a genuine 
 product of the 'Zeit-Geist,' that their mere contact seems 
 to make the old Puritan conceptions look unlikely and in- 
 defensible, and begin a sort of remodelling and refacing of 
 
128 MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 themselves. Let us just see how far this change has prac- 
 tically gone. 
 
 The formal and scholastic version of its theology, Cal- 
 vinist or Arminian, as given by its seventeenth-century 
 fathers, and enshrined in the trust-deeds of so many of its 
 chapels, of this, at any rate, modern Puritanism is begin- 
 ning to feel shy. Take the Calvinist doctrine of election. 
 
 * By God's decree a certain number of angels and men are 
 predestinated, out of God's mere free grace and love, with- 
 out any foresight of faith or good works in them, to ever- 
 lasting life; and others foreordained, according to the 
 unsearchable counsel of his will, whereby he extends or 
 withholds mercy as he pleases, to everlasting death.' In 
 that scientific form, at least, the doctrine of election begins 
 to look dubious to the Calvinistic Puritan, and he puts it a 
 good deal out of sight Take the Arminian doctrine of 
 justification. ' We could not expect any relief from heaven 
 out of that misery under which we lie, were not God's dis- 
 pleasure against us first pacified and our sins remitted. 
 This is the signal and transcendent benefit of our free justi- 
 fication through the blood of Christ, that God's offence 
 justly conceived against us for our sins (which would have 
 been an eternal bar and restraint to the efflux of his grace 
 upon us) being removed, the divine grace and bounty may 
 freely flow forth upon us.' In that scientific form, the doc- 
 trine of justification begins to look less satisfactory to the 
 Arminian Puritan, and he tends to put it out of sight. 
 
 The same may be said of the doctrine of election in its 
 plain popular form of statement also. ' I hold,' says Whit- 
 field, in the forcible style which so took his hearers' fancy, 
 
 * I hold that a certain number are elected from eternity, and 
 these must and shall be saved, and the rest of mankind 
 must and shall be damned.' A Calvinistic Puritan now-a- 
 days must be either a fervid Welsh Dissenter, or a strenuous 
 
MODERN DISSENT. 129 
 
 Particular Baptist in some remote place in the country, not 
 to be a little staggered at this sort of expression. As to the 
 doctrine of justification in its current, popular form of state- 
 ment, the case is somewhat different. * My own works,' says 
 Wesley, * my own sufferings, my own righteousness, are so 
 far from reconciling me to an offended God, that the most 
 specious of them need an atonement themselves. I have 
 no hope but that of being justified freely through the 
 redemption that is in Jesus. The faith I want is a sure 
 trust and confidence in God, that through the merits of 
 Christ my sins are forgiven and I reconciled to the favour of 
 God. Believe and thou shalt be saved ! He that believeth 
 is passed from death to life. Look for sanctification just as 
 you are, as a poor sinner that has nothing to pay, nothing 
 to plead but Christ died.' Deliverances of this sort, which in 
 Wesley are frequent and in Wesley's followers are unceasing, 
 still, no doubt, pass current everywhere with Puritanism, are 
 expected as of course, and find favour; they are just what 
 Puritans commonly mean by Scriptural Protestantism, the 
 truth, the gospel-feast. Nevertheless they no longer quite 
 satisfy ; the better minds among Puritans try instinctively to 
 give some fresh turn or development to them ; they are no 
 longer, to minds of this order, an unquestionable word and 
 a sure stay ; and from this point to their final transformation 
 the course is certain. The predestinarian and solifidian 
 dogmas, for the very sake of which our Puritan churches 
 came into existence, begin to feel the irresistible breath of the 
 * Zeit-Geist ; ' some of them melt quicker, others slower, but 
 all of them are doomed. Under the eyes of this generation 
 Puritan Dissent has to execute an entire change of front, and 
 to present us with a new reason for its existing. What will 
 that new reason be ? 
 
 There needs no conjuror to tell us. It will be the Rev. 
 Mr. Conder's reason, which we have quoted in our pre- 
 
 K 
 
130 MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 ceding essay. It will be Scriptural Protestantism in church- 
 order, rather than Scriptural Protestantism in church-doctrine. 
 ' Congregational Nonconformists can never be incorporated 
 into an organic union with Anglican Episcopacy, because 
 there is not even the shadow of an outline of it in the New 
 Testament, and it is our assertion and profound belief that 
 Christ and the Apostles have given us all the laws that 
 are necessary for the constitution and government of the 
 Church/ This makes church-government not a secondary 
 matter of form, growth, and expediency, but a matter of the 
 essence of Christianity and ordained in Scripture. Ex- 
 pressly set forth in Scripture it is not; so it has to be 
 gathered from Scripture by collection, and everyone gathers 
 it in his own way. Unity is of no great importance ; but 
 that every man should live in a church- order which he 
 judges to be scriptural, is of the greatest importance. This 
 brings us to Mr. Miall's standard-maxim : The Dissidence oj 
 Dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion ! 
 The more freely the sects develop themselves, the better. 
 The Church of England herself is but the dominant sect\ 
 her pretensions to bring back the Dissenters within her pale 
 are offensive and ridiculous. What we ought to aim at is 
 perfect equality, and that the other sects should balance 
 her. 
 
 On the old, old subject of the want of historic anc 
 philosophic sense shown by those who would make church 
 government a matter of scriptural regulation, I say nothing 
 at present. A Wesleyan minister, the Rev. Mr. Willey, 
 said to an applauding audience : * He did not find any- 
 thing in either the old or New Testament to the effect that 
 Christian ministers should become State-servants, like soldiers 
 or excisemen.' He might as well have added that he did 
 not find there anything to the effect that they should wear 
 braces ! But on this point I am not here going to enlarge 
 
MODERN DISSENT. 1 3 1 
 
 What I am now concerned with is the relation of this new 
 ground of existence, which more and more the Puritan 
 Churches take and will take as they lose their old ground, to 
 the Christian religion. In the speech which Mr. Winter- 
 botham ] made on the Education Bill, a speech which I had 
 the advantage of hearing, there were uncommon facilities 
 supplied for judging of this relation ; indeed that able speech 
 presented a striking picture of it. 
 
 And what a picture it was, good heavens ! The Puritans 
 say they love righteousness, and they are offended with me 
 for rejoining that the righteousness of which they boast is 
 the righteousness of the earlier Jews of the Old Testament, 
 which consisted mainly in smiting the Lord's enemies and 
 their own under the fifth rib. And we say that the newer 
 and specially Christian sort of righteousness is something 
 different from this j that the Puritans are, and always have 
 been, deficient in the specially Christian sort of righteous- 
 ness ; that men like St. Francis of Sales, in the Roman 
 Catholic Church, and Bishop Wilson, in the Church of 
 England, show far more of it than any Puritans ; and that 
 St. Paul's signal and eternally fruitful growth in righteousness 
 dates just from his breach with the Puritans of his day. Let 
 us revert to Paul's list of fruits of the spirit, on which we 
 have so often insisted in the pages which precede : love, joy, 
 peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control? 
 We keep to this particular list for the sake of greater 
 distinctness ; but St. Paul has perpetually lists of the kind, 
 all pointing the same way, and all showing what he meant 
 by Christian righteousness, what he found specially in 
 
 1 Mr. Winterbotham has since died. Nothing in my remarks on 
 his speech need prevent me from expressing here my high esteem for 
 his character, accomplishments, oratorical faculty and general promise, 
 and my sincere regret for his loss. 
 
 2 Gal., YJ 22, 23. 
 
 K 2 
 
132 MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 Christ. They may all be concluded in two qualities, the 
 qualities which Jesus Christ told his disciples to learn of him, 
 the qualities in the name of which, as specially Christ's 
 qualities, Paul adjured his converts. * Learn of me,' said 
 Jesus, ' that 1 am mild and lowly in heart? 'I beseech you/ 
 said Paul, ' by the mildness and gentleness of Christ} * The 
 word which our Bibles translate by 'gentleness,' means more 
 properly 'reasonableness with sweetness,' 'sweet reasonable- 
 ness.' ' I beseech you by the mildness and sweet reasonable- 
 ness of Christ? This mildness and sweet reasonableness it 
 was, which, stamped with the individual charm they had in 
 Jesus Christ, came to the world as something new, won its 
 heart and conquered it. Every one had been asserting his 
 ordinary self and was miserable ; to forbear to assert one's 
 ordinary self, to place one's happiness in mildness and 
 sweet reasonableness, was a revelation. As men followed 
 this novel route to happiness, a living spring opened beside 
 their way, the spring of charity ; and out of this spring arose 
 those two heavenly visitants, Charis and Irene, grace and 
 peace, which enraptured the poor wayfarer, and filled him 
 with a joy which brought all the world after him. And still 
 whenever these visitants appear, as appear for a witness to 
 the vitality of Christianity they daily do, it is from the same 
 spring that they arise ; and this spring is opened solely by 
 the mildness and sweet reasonableness which forbears to 
 assert our ordinary self, nay, which even takes pleasure in 
 effacing it. 
 
 And now let us turn to Mr. Winterbotham and the Pro- 
 testant Dissenters. He interprets their very inner mind, he 
 says ; that which he declares in their name, they are all feel- 
 ing, and would declare for themselves if they could. ' There 
 was a spirit of watchful jealousy on the part of the Dissenter s, 
 which made them prone to take offence ; therefore statesmen 
 
 1 5<A T-fjs irpavryros Kal fvieiitetas rov Xpiffrov. II Cor., x, I. 
 
MODERN DISSENT. 133 
 
 should not introduce the Established Church into all the 
 institutions of the country* That is positively the whole 
 speech ! ' Strife, jealousy, wrath, contentions, backbitings,' 1 
 we know the catalogue. And the Dissenters are, by 
 their own confession, so full of these, and the very existence 
 of an organisation of Dissent so makes them a necessity, 
 that the state is required to frame its legislation in consider- 
 ation of them ! Was there ever such a confession made ? 
 Here are people existing for the sake of a religion of which 
 the essence is mildness and sweet reasonableness, and the 
 forbearing to assert our ordinary self; and they declare 
 themselves so full of the very temper and habits against 
 which that religion is specially levelled, that they require to 
 have even the occasion of forbearing to assert their ordinary 
 self removed out of their way, because they are quite sure 
 they will never be equal to it ! 
 
 Never was there a more instructive comment on the 
 blessings of separation, which we are so often invited by 
 separatists to admire. Why does not Dissent forbear to 
 assert its ordinary self, and help to win the world to the 
 mildness and sweet reasonableness of Christ, without this 
 vain contest about machinery ? Why does not the 
 Church? is the Dissenter's answer. What an answer for a 
 Christian ! We are to defer giving up our ordinary self 
 until our neighbour shall have given up his ; that is, we are 
 never to give it up at all. But I will answer the question 
 on more mundane grounds. Why are we to be more 
 blamed than the Church for the strife arising out of our 
 rival existences ? asks the Dissenter. Because the Church 
 cannot help existing, and you can ! Therefore contra 
 ecclesiam nemo pacificus, as Baxter himself said in his better 
 moments. Because the Church is there ; because strife, 
 jealousy, and self-assertion are sure to come with breaking 
 1 II Cor., xii, 20. 
 
134 MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 off from her ; and because strife, jealousy, and self-assertion 
 are the very miseries against which Christianity is firstly 
 levelled ; therefore we say that a Christian is inexcusable 
 in breaking with the Church, except for a departure from 
 that primal ground of her foundation : Let every one that 
 invokes the name of Christ depart from iniquity. 1 
 
 The clergyman, poor soul ! cannot help being the 
 parson of the parish. He is there like the magistrate ; he is 
 a national officer with an appointed function. If one or two 
 voluntary performers, dissatisfied with the magisterial system, 
 were to set themselves up in each parish of the country, 
 called themselves magistrates, drew a certain number of 
 people to their own way of thinking, tried differences and 
 gave sentences among their people in the best fashion they 
 could, why, probably the established magistrate would not 
 much like it, the leading people in the parish would not 
 much like it, and the new-comers would have mortifications 
 and social estrangements to endure. Probably the estab- 
 lished magistrate would call them interlopers ; probably he 
 would count them amongst his difficulties. On the side 
 of the new-comers ' a spirit of watchful jealousy,' as Mr. 
 Winterbotham says, would thus be created. The public 
 interest would suffer from the ill blood and confusion 
 prevailing. The established magistrate might naturally 
 say that the new-comers brought the strife and disturbance 
 with them. But who would not smile at these lambs 
 answering : ' Away with that wolf the established magistrate, 
 and all ground for jealousy and quarrel between us will 
 disappear ! ; 
 
 And it is a grievance that the clergyman talks of Dissent 
 
 as one of the spiritual hindrances in his parish and desires 
 
 to get rid of it ! Why, by Mr. Winterbotham's own showing, 
 
 the Dissenters live 'in a spirit of watchful jealousy/ and this 
 
 1 ii TV/At., ii, 19. 
 
MODERN DISSENT. 135 
 
 temper is as much a spiritual hindrance, nay, in the view 
 of Christianity it is even a more direct spiritual hindrance, 
 than drunkenness or loose living. Christianity is, first and 
 above all, a temper, a disposition ; and a disposition just 
 the opposite to ' a spirit of watchful jealousy.' Once admit 
 a spirit of watchful jealousy, and Christianity has lost its 
 virtue ; it is impotent. All the other vices it was meant to 
 keep out may rush in. Where there is jealousy and strife 
 among you, asks St. Paul, are ye not carnal"* * are ye not 
 still in bondage to your mere lower selves ? But from this 
 bondage Christianity was meant to free us ; therefore, says 
 he, get rid of what causes divisions, and strife, and * a spirit 
 of watchful jealousy.' ' I exhort you by the name of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ that ye all speak the same thing, and 
 that there be not divisions among you, but that ye all be 
 perfectly joined in the same mind and the same judgment.' 2 
 Well, but why, says the Dissenting minister, is the 
 clergyman to impress St. Paul's words upon me rather than 
 1 upon the clergyman ? Because the clergyman, I repeat, 
 is the one minister of Christ in the parish who did not invent 
 himself, who cannot help existing. He is not asserting his 
 ordinary self by being there ; he is placed there on public 
 duty. He is charged with teaching the lesson of Christianity, 
 and the head and front of this lesson is to get rid of * a spirit 
 of watchful jealousy,' which, according to the Dissenter's own 
 showing, is the very spirit which accompanies Dissent. How 
 he is to get rid of it, how he is to win souls to the mildness 
 and sweet reasonableness of Christ, it is for his own conscience 
 to tell him. Probably he will best do it by never speaking 
 against Dissent at all, by treating Dissenters with perfect cor- 
 diality and as if there was not a point of dispute between them. 
 But that, so long as he exists, it is his duty to get rid of Dissent, 
 to win souls to the unity which is its opposite, is clear. It is 
 1 I Cor., iii, 3. 2 I Cor., i, 10. 
 
136 MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 not the Bishop of Winchester l who classes Dissent, full of 
 'a spirit of watchful jealousy, 7 along with spiritual hindrances 
 like beer-shops, a pollution of the spirit along with pollu- 
 tions of the flesh; 2 it is St. Paul. It is not the clergyman 
 who is chargeable with wishing to ' stamp out ' this spirit ; 
 it is the Christian religion. 
 
 But what is to prevent the Dissenting minister from 
 being joined with the clergyman in the same public function, 
 and being his partner instead of his rival ? The requirement 
 of episcopal ordination, we are told, prevents it. 3 But if I 
 leave the service of a private company and enter the 
 public service, I must receive admission at the hands of 
 the public officer designated to give it me. Sentiment and 
 the historic sense, to say nothing of the religious feeling, 
 will certainly put more into ordination than this, though not 
 precisely what the Bishop of Winchester, perhaps, puts ; 
 this which we have laid down, however, is really all which 
 the law of the land puts there. A bishop is a public officer. 
 Why should I trouble myself about the name his office 
 bears ? The name of his office cannot affect the service or 
 my labour in it. Ah, but, says Mr. Winterbotham, he holds 
 opinions which I do not share about the sort of character he 
 confers upon me ! What can that matter, unless he compels 
 you, too, to profess the same opinions, or refuses you ad- 
 mission if you do not? But I should be joined in the 
 
 1 The late Bishop Wilberforce. * I Cor., vii, I. 
 
 3 It has been inferred from what is here said that I propose to 
 make re-ordination a condition of admitting Dissenting ministers to the 
 ministry of the Church of England. Elsewhere I have said how 
 undesirable it seems to impose this condition ; and to what respectful 
 treatment and fair and equal terms, in case of reunion, Protestant 
 Nonconformity is, in my opinion, entitled. See the Preface to Culture 
 and Anarchy. What is said in the text is directed simply against the 
 objection to episcopal ordination as something wrong in itself and a 
 ground for schism. 
 
MODERN DISSENT. i.tf 
 
 ministry with men who hold opinions which I do not share ! 
 What does that matter either, unless they compel you also to 
 hold these opinions, as the price of your being allowed to 
 work for Christ's kingdom ? To recur to our old parallel. 
 It is as if a man who desired the office of a public magistrate, 
 and who was fitted for it, were to hold off because he had to 
 receive institution from a Lord-Lieutenant, and he did not 
 like the title of Lord-Lieutenant ; or because the Lord-Lieu- 
 tenant who was to institute him had a fancy about some 
 occult quality which he conferred on him at institution ; or 
 because he would find himself, when he was instituted, one 
 of a body of magistrates of whom many had notions which 
 he thought irrational. The office itself, and his own power 
 to fill it usefully, is all which really matters to him. 
 
 The Bishop of Winchester believes in apostolical suc- 
 cession ; therefore there must be Dissenters. Mr. Liddon 
 asserts the real presence ; therefore there must be Dis- 
 senters. Mr. Mackonochie is a ritualist ; therefore there 
 must be Dissenters. But the Bishop of Winchester 
 cannot, and does not, exclude from the ministry of the 
 Church of England those who do not believe in apostolical 
 succession ; and surely not even that acute and accom- 
 plished personage is such a magician, that he can make a 
 Puritan believe in apostolical succession merely by believing 
 in it himself. In the same way, eloquent as is Mr. Liddon 
 and devoted as is Mr. Mackonochie, their gifts cannot yield 
 them the art of so swaying a brother clergyman's spirit as to 
 make him admit the real presence against his conviction, 
 or practise ritualism against his will ; and official, material 
 control over him, or power of stipulating what he shall 
 admit or practise, they have absolutely none. 
 
 But can anything more tend to make the Church what 
 the Puritans reproach it with being, a mere lump of sacer- 
 dotalism and ritualism, than if the Puritans, who are free 
 
138 MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 to come into it with their disregard of sacerdotalism and 
 ritualism, and so to leaven it, refuse to come in, and leave it 
 wholly to the sacerdotalists and ritualists? What can be 
 harder upon the laity of the national Church, what so incon- 
 siderate of the national good and advantage, as to leave us 
 at the mercy of one single element in the Church, and deny 
 us just the elements fit to mix with this element and to 
 improve it? 
 
 The current doctrines of apostolical succession and the 
 real presence seem to me unsound and unedifying. To be 
 sure, so does the current doctrine of imputed righteousness. 
 For me, sacerdotalism and solifidianism stand both on the 
 same footing ; they are, both of them, erroneous human 
 developments. But as in the ideas and practice of sacerdo- 
 talists or ritualists there is much which seems to me of value, 
 and of great use to the Church, so, too, in the ideas and 
 practice of Nonconformists there is very much to value. To 
 take points only that are beyond controversy : they have 
 cultivated the gift of preaching much more than the clergy, 
 and their union with the Church would renovate and 
 immensely amend Church preaching. They would cer- 
 tainly bring with them, if they came back into the Church, 
 some use of what they call free prayer ; to which, if at pre- 
 sent they give far too much place, it is yet to be regretted 
 that the Church gives no place at all. Lastly, if the body 
 of British Protestant Dissenters is in the main, as it 
 undoubtedly is, the Church of the middle-class Philistines, 
 nevertheless there could come nothing but health and 
 strength from blending this body with the Establishment, of 
 which the very weakness and danger is that it tends, as we 
 have formerly said, to be an appendage to the upper-class 
 Barbarians. 
 
 So long as the Puritans thought that the essence of 
 Christianity was their doctrine of predestination or of justi- 
 
MODERN DISSENT. 139 
 
 fi cation, it was natural that they should stand out, at any 
 cost, for this essence. That is why, when the ' Zeit-Geist 
 and the general movement of men's religious ideas is begin- 
 ning to reveal that the Puritan gospel is not the essence of 
 Christianity, we have been desirous to spread this revelation 
 to the best of our power, and by all the aids of plain popular 
 exposition to help it forward. Because, when once it is 
 clear that the essence of Christianity is not Puritan solifi- 
 dianism, it can hardly long be maintained that the essence 
 of Christianity is Puritan church-order. When once the 
 way is made clear, by removing the solifidian heresy, to look 
 and see what the essence of Christianity really is, it cannot 
 but soon force itself upon our minds that the essence of 
 Christianity is something not very far, at any rate, from 
 this : Grace and peace by the annulment of our ordinary self 
 through the mildness and sweet reasonableness of Jesus Christ. 
 This is the more particular description of that general 
 ground, already laid down, of the Christian Church's exist- 
 ence : Jesus Christ's injunction, Follow me. If this general 
 ground, particularised in the way above given, is not 'the 
 sincere milk ' of the evangelical word, it is, at all events, 
 something very like it. And matters of machinery and out- 
 ward form, like church-order, have not only nothing essen- 
 tially to do with the sincere milk of Christianity, but are the 
 very matters about which this sincere milk should make us 
 easy and yielding. 
 
 If there were no national and historic form of church- 
 order in possession of the field, a genuine Christian would re- 
 gret having to spend time and thought in shaping one, in 
 having so to encumber himself with serving, to busy himself 
 so much about a frame for his religious life as well as about 
 the contents of the frame. After all, a man has only a certain 
 sum of force to spend ; and if he takes a quantity of it for out- 
 ward things, he has so much the less left for inward things. 
 
140 MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 It is hardly to be believed, how much larger a space the 
 mere affairs of his denomination fill in the time and thoughts 
 of a Dissenter, than in the time and thoughts of a Church- 
 man. Now all machinery-work of this kind is, to a man 
 filled with a real love of the essence of Christianity, some- 
 thing of a hindrance to him in what he most wants to be at, 
 something of a concession to his ordinary self. When an 
 established and historic form exists, such a man should be, 
 therefore, disposed to use it and comply with it. But, as 
 if it were not satisfied with proving its unprofitableness by 
 corroding us with jealousy and so robbing us of the mild- 
 ness and sweet reasonableness of Christ, which is the 
 Christian's mainstay, political Dissent, Dissent for the sake 
 of church-polity and church-management, proves it, too, by 
 stimulating our ordinary self through over-care for what 
 flatters this. In fact, what is it that the everyday, middle- 
 class Philistine, not the rare flower of the Dissenters but 
 the common staple, finds so attractive in Dissent ? Is it 
 not, as to discipline, that his self-importance is fomented 
 by the fuss, bustle, and partisanship of a private sect, instead 
 of being lost in the greatness of a public body ? As to wor- 
 ship, is it not that his taste is pleased by usages and words 
 that come down to him^ instead of drawing him up to them ; 
 by services which reflect, instead of the culture of great men 
 of religious genius, the crude culture of himself and his 
 fellows ? And as to doctrine, is it not that his mind is 
 pleased at hearing no opinion but its own, by having all 
 disputed points taken for granted in its own favour, by 
 being urged to no return upon itself, no development? 
 And what is all this but the very feeding and stimulating of 
 our ordinary self, instead of the annulling of it ? No doubt 
 it is natural ; to indulge our ordinary self is the most natural 
 thing in the world. But Christianity is not natural ; and if 
 the flower of Christianity be the grace and peace which 
 
MODERN DISSENT. 141 
 
 comes of annulling our ordinary self, then to this flower it is 
 fatal. 
 
 So that if, in order to gratify in the Dissenters one or 
 the two faults against which Christianity is chiefly aimed, 
 a jealous, contentious spirit, we were to sweep away our 
 national and historic form of religion, and were all to tinker 
 at our own forms, we should then just be flattering the other 
 chief fault which Christianity came to cure, and serving 
 our ordinary self instead of annulling it. What a happy 
 furtherance to religion ! 
 
 For my part, so far as the best of the Nonconformist minis- 
 ters are concerned, of whom I know something, I disbelieve 
 Mr. Winterbotham's hideous confession. I imagine they are 
 very little pleased with him for making it. I do not believe 
 that they, at any rate, live in the ulcerated condition he de- 
 scribes, fretting with watchful jealousy. I believe they have 
 other things to think of. But why? Because they are men 
 of genius and character, who react against the harmful in- 
 fluences of the position in which they find themselves placed, 
 and surmount its obvious dangers. But their genius and 
 character might serve them still better if they were placed 
 in a less trying position. And the rank and file of their 
 ministers and people do yield to the influences of their posi- 
 tion. Of these Mr. Winterbotham's picture is perfectly true. 
 They are more and more jealous for their separate organisa- 
 tion, pleased with the bustle and self-importance which its 
 magnitude brings them, irritably alive to whatever reduces 
 or effaces it ; bent, in short, on affirming their ordinary 
 selves. However much the chiefs may feel the truth of 
 modern ideas, may grow moderate, may perceive the effects 
 of religious separatism upon worship and doctrine, they pro- 
 bably will avail little or nothing ; the head runs risk of being 
 overpowered and out-clamoured by the tail The Wesleyans, 
 who used always to refuse to call themselves Dissenters, 
 
i<2 MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 whose best men still shrink from the name, the Wesleyans, 
 a wing of the Church, founded for godliness, the Wesleyans 
 more and more, with their very growth as a separate de- 
 nomination, feel the secular ambition of being great as a 
 denomination, of being effaced by nobody, of giving con- 
 tentment to this self-importance, of indulging this ordinary 
 self ; and I should not wonder if within twenty years they 
 were keen political Dissenters. A triumph of Puritanism is 
 abundantly possible ; we have never denied it. What we, 
 whose greatest care is neither for the Church nor for 
 Puritanism, but for human perfection, what we labour to 
 show is, that the triumph of Puritanism will be the triumph 
 of our ordinary self, not the triumph of Christianity ; and 
 that the type .of Hebraism it will establish is one in which 
 neither general human perfection, nor yet Hebraism itself, 
 can truly find their account. 
 
 Elsewhere we have drawn out a distinction between 
 Hebraism and Hellenism, 1 between the tendency and 
 powers that carry us towards doing, and the tendency and 
 powers that carry us towards perceiving and knowing. 
 Hebraism, we said, has long been overwhelmingly prepon- 
 derant with us. The sacred book which we call the Word 
 of God, and which many of us study far more than any 
 other book, serves Hebraism. Moses Hebraises, David 
 Hebraises, Isaiah Hebraises, Paul Hebraises, John He- 
 braises. Jesus Christ himself is, as St. Paul truly styles 
 him, 'a minister of the circumcision to the truth of God.' 2 
 That is, it is by our powers of moral action, and through the 
 perfecting of these, that Christ leads us ' to be partakers of 
 the divine nature.' 3 By far our chief machinery for spiri- 
 tual purposes has the like aim and character. Through- 
 out Europe this is so. But, to speak of ourselves only, 
 
 1 See Culture and Anarchy, chap. iv. 
 2 Rom., xv, 8. 3 II Peter, i, 4. 
 
MODERN DISSENT. 143 
 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury is an agent of Hebraism, 
 the Archbishop of York is an agent of Hebraism, Car- 
 dinal Manning is an agent of Hebraism, the President of 
 the Wesleyan Conference is an agent of Hebraism, all the 
 body of the Church clergy and Dissenting ministers are 
 agents of Hebraism. Now, we have seen how we are begin- 
 ning visibly to suffer harm from attending in this one-sided 
 way to Hebraism, and how we are called to develop our- 
 selves more in our totality, on our perceptive and intelli- 
 gential side as well as on our moral side. If it is said that 
 this is a very hard matter, and that man cannot well do 
 more than one thing at a time, the answer is that here is the 
 very sign and condition of each new stage of spiritual pro- 
 gress, increase of task. The more we grow, the greater is . 
 the task which is set us. This is the law of man's nature 
 and of his spirit's history. The powers we have developed 
 at our old task enable us to attempt a new one ; and this, : 
 again, brings with it a new increase of powers. 
 
 Hebraism strikes too exclusively upon one string in us ; 
 Hellenism does not address itself with serious energy enough 
 to morals and righteousness. For our totality, for our 
 general perfection, we need to unite the two ; now the two 
 are easily at variance. In their lower forms they are irrecon- 
 cileably at variance ; only when each of them is at its best, 
 is their harmony possible. Hebraism at its best is beauty 
 and charm ; Hellenism at its best is also beauty and charm. 
 As such they can unite ; as anything short of this, each of 
 them, they are at discord, and their separation must con- 
 tinue. The flower of Hellenism is a kind of amiable grace 
 and artless winning good-nature, born out of the perfection 
 of lucidity, simplicity, and natural truth ; the flower of 
 Christianity is grace and peace by the annulment of our 
 ordinary self through the mildness and sweet reasonableness 
 of Christ. Both are eminently humane, and for complete 
 
144 MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 human perfection both are required ; the second being the 
 perfection of that side in us which is moral and acts, the 
 first, of that side in us which is intelligential and perceives 
 and knows. 
 
 But lower forms of Hebraism and Hellenism tend always 
 to make their appearance, and to strive to establish them- 
 selves. On one of these forms of Hebraism we have here been 
 commenting ; a form which had its first origin, no doubt, 
 in that body of impulses whereby we Hebraise, but which 
 lands us at last, not in the mildness and sweet reasonable- 
 ness of Christ, but in * a spirit of watchful jealousy.' We 
 have to thank Mr. Winterbotham for fixing our attention on 
 it ; but we prefer to name it from an eminent and able man 
 who is well known as the earnest apostle of * the Dissidence 
 of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion/ 
 and to call \\.Mialism. Mialism is a sub-form of Hebraism, 
 and itself a somewhat spurious and degenerated form ; but 
 this sub-form always tends to degenerate into forms lower 
 yet, and yet more unworthy of the ideal flower of Hebraism. 
 In one of these its further stages we have formerly traced it, 
 and we need not enlarge on them here. 1 
 
 Hellenism, in the same way, has its more or less spu- 
 rious and degenerated sub-forms, products which may be at 
 once known as degenerations by their deflexion from what 
 we have marked as the flower of Hellenism, ' a kind of 
 humane grace and artless winning good-nature, born out 
 of the perfection of lucidity, simplicity, and natural truth.' 
 And from whom can we more properly derive a general name 
 for these degenerations, than from that distinguished man, 
 who, by his intelligence and accomplishments, was in some 
 respects so admirable and so truly Hellenic, but whom his 
 dislike for ' the dominant sect,' as he calls the Church of 
 England, the Church of England, in many aspects so 
 1 See Culture and Anarchy, chap. ii. 
 
MODERN DISSENT. 145 
 
 Deautiful, calming, and attaching, seems to transport with 
 an almost feminine vehemence of irritation ? What can we 
 so fitly name the somewhat degenerated and inadequate 
 form of Hellenism as MillismJ This is the Hellenic or 
 Hellenistic counterpart of Mialism ; and like Mialism it has 
 its further degenerations, in which it is still less commend- 
 able than in its first form. For instance, what in Mr. Mill 
 is but a yielding to a spirit of irritable injustice, goes on and 
 worsens in some of his disciples, till it becomes a sort of 
 mere blatancy and truculent hardness in certain of them, in 
 whom there appears scarcely anything that is truly sound or 
 Hellenic at all. 
 
 Mankind, however, must needs draw, however slowly, 
 towards its perfection ; and our only real perfection is our 
 totality. Mialism and Millism we may see playing into one 
 another's hands, and apparently acting together ; but, so 
 long as these lower forms of Hellenism and Hebraism pre- 
 vail, the real union between Hellenism and Hebraism can 
 never be accomplished, and our totality is still as far off 
 as ever. Unhappy and unquiet alternations of ascendency 
 between Hebraism and Hellenism are all that we shall see ; 
 at one time, the indestructible religious experience of 
 mankind asserting itself blindly ; at another, a revulsion of 
 the intellect of mankind from this experience, because of 
 the audacious assumptions and gross inaccuracies with 
 which men's account of it is intermingled. 
 
 At present it is such a revulsion which seems chiefly 
 imminent. Give the churches of Nonconformity free scope, 
 cries an ardent Congregationalist, and we will renew the 
 wonders of the first times ; we will confront this modern 
 bugbear of physical science, show how hollow she is, and 
 how she contradicts herself ! In his mind's eye, this Non- 
 conforming enthusiast already sees Professor Huxley in a 
 white sheet, brought up at the Surrey Tabernacle between 
 
I 4 6 MODERN DISSENT. 
 
 two deacons, whom that great physicist, in his own clear 
 and nervous language, would no doubt describe as like his 
 disinterred Roman the other day at Westminster Abbey, 'of 
 weak mental organisation and strong muscular frame,' and 
 penitently confessing that Science contradicts herself. Alas, 
 the real future is likely to be very different ! Rather are 
 we likely to witness an edifying solemnity, where Mr. Mill, 
 assisted by his youthful henchmen and apparitors, will burn 
 all the Prayer Books. Rather will the time come, as it has 
 been foretold, when we shall desire to see one of the days 
 of the Son of Man, and shall not see it ; when the mild- 
 ness and sweet reasonableness of Jesus Christ, as a power 
 to work the annulment of our ordinary self, will be clean 
 disregarded and out of mind. Then, perhaps, will come 
 another reaction, and another, and another ; and all sterile. 
 Therefore it is, that we labour to make Hebraism raise 
 itself above Mialism, find its true self, show itself in its 
 beauty and power, and help, not hinder, man's totality, 
 The endeavour will very likely be in vain ; for growth is 
 slow and the ages are long, and it may well be that for 
 harmonising Hebraism with Hellenism more preparation is 
 needed than man has yet had. But failures do something, 
 as well as successes, towards the final achievement. The 
 cup of cold water could be hardly more than an ineffective 
 effort at succour ; yet it counted. To disengage the reli- 
 gion of England from unscriptural Protestantism, political 
 Dissent, and a spirit of watchful jealousy, may be an aim 
 not in our day reachable ; and still it is well to level at it. 
 
A 
 
 COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 BISHOP WILSON is full of excellent things, and one of his 
 apophthegms came into my mind the other day as I read 
 an angry and unreasonable expostulation addressed to myself. 
 Bishop Wilson's apophthegm is this : Truth provokes those 
 whom it does not convert. ' Miracles,' I was angrily re- 
 proached for saying, * do not happen, and more and more 
 of us are becoming convinced that they do not happen ; 
 nevertheless, what is really best and most valuable in the 
 Bible is independent of miracles, and for the sake of this, I 
 constantly read the Bible myself, and I advise others to read 
 it also.' One would have thought that at a time when the 
 French newspapers are attributing all our failures and mis- 
 fortunes to our habit of reading the Bible, and when our 
 own Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal is protesting that the 
 golden rule is a delusion and a snare for practical men, the 
 friends of the old religion of Christendom would have had 
 a kindly feeling towards anyone, whether he admitted 
 miracles or not, who maintained that the root of the matter 
 for all of us was in the Bible, and that to the use of the Bible 
 we should still cling. But no ; Truth provokes those whom 
 it does not convert. So angry are some good people at being 
 told that miracles do not happen, that if we say this, they 
 
 L 2 
 
US A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 cannot bear to have us using the Bible at all, or recom- 
 mending the Bible. Either take it and recommend it 
 with its miracles, they say, or else leave it alone, and let 
 its enemies find confronting them none but orthodox 
 defenders of it like ourselves. 
 
 The success of these orthodox champions is not at all 
 commensurate with their zeaJ ; and so, in spite of rebuke, I 
 find myself, as a lover of the Bible, perpetually tempted to 
 substitute for their line of defence a different method, 
 however it may provoke them. Christmas comes round 
 again, and brings the most beautiful and beloved festival of 
 the Christian year. What is Christmas, and what does it 
 say to us ? Our French friends will reply that Christmas is 
 an exploded legend, and says to us nothing at all. The 
 Guardian, on the other hand, lays it down that Christmas 
 commemorates the miracle of the Incarnation and that the 
 truth of this miracle is the fundamental truth for Christians. 
 Which is right, the Guardian or our French friends ? Or are 
 neither the one nor the other of them right, and is the truth 
 about Christmas something quite different from what either 
 of them imagine ? The enquiry is profitable ; and I kept 
 Christmas, this last winter, by following it 
 
 Who can ever lose out of his memory the roll and march 
 of those magnificent words of prophecy, which, ever since 
 we can remember, we have heard read in church on 
 Christmas-day, and have been taught to regard as the grand 
 and wonderful prediction of the miracle of the Incarnation?' 
 * The Lord himself shall give you a sign : Behold, a virgin 
 shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Im- 
 manuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, until he shall know to 
 refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child 
 shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land 
 that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings. 
 
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 149 
 
 We all know the orthodox interpretation. Immanuel is 
 Jesus Christ, to be born of the Virgin Mary ; the meaning 
 of the name Immanuel, God with us, signifies the union of 
 the divine nature and ours in Christ, God and man in one 
 Person. ' Butter and honey shall he eat,' the Christ shall 
 be very man, he shall have a true human body, he shall be 
 sustained, while he is growing up, with that ordinary nourish- 
 ment wherewith human children are wont to be fed. And 
 the sign that the promised birth of Immanuel, God and man 
 in one Person, from the womb of a virgin, shall really happen, 
 is this : the two kings of Syria and Israel who are now, in 
 the eighth century before Christ, threatening the kingdom 
 of Judah, shall be overthrown, and their country devastated. 
 1 For before the child shall know,' before this promised 
 coming of Jesus Christ, and as a sign to guarantee it, the 
 kings of Syria and Israel shall be conquered and overthrown. 
 And conquered and overthrown they presently were. 
 
 But then comes the turn of criticism. The study of 
 history, and of all documents on which history is based, 
 is diligently prosecuted ; a number of learned, patient, im- 
 partial investigators read and examine the prophets. It 
 becomes apparent what the prophets really mean to say. It 
 becomes certain that in the famous words read on Christmas- 
 day the prophet Isaiah was not meaning to speak of Jesus 
 Christ to be born more than seven centuries later. It 
 becomes certain that his Immanuel is a prince of Judah to 
 be born in a year or two's time. It becomes certain that 
 there is no question at all of a child miraculously conceived 
 and born of a virgin. What the prophet declares is that a 
 young woman, a damsel, at that moment unmarried, shall 
 have time, before certain things happen, to be married and 
 to bear a son, who shall be called Immanuel. There is no 
 question in the name Immanuel of a union of the human 
 and divine natures, of God and man in one Person. 'God 
 
ISO A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 present with his people and protecting them ' is what the 
 prophet means the name to signify. In ' Butter and honey 
 shall he eat,' there is no question of the Christ's being very 
 man, with a true human body. What the prophet intends 
 to say is, that when the prince Immanuel, presently to be 
 born, reaches adult age, agriculture shall have ceased in the 
 desolated realm of Judah itself ; the land, overrun by enemies, 
 shall have returned to a wild state, the inhabitants shall live 
 on the produce of their herds and on wild honey. But 
 before this comes to pass, before the visitation of God's wrath 
 upon the kingdom of Judah, and while the prince Immanuel 
 is still but a little child, not as yet able to discern betwixt 
 good and evil, ' to refuse the evil and choose the good,' the 
 present enemies of Judah, the kings of Syria and Israel, 
 shall be overthrown and their land made desolate. Finally, 
 this overthrow and desolation are not, with the prophet, the 
 sign and guarantee of Immaniiel's coming. Immanuel is 
 himself intended as a sign ; all the rest is accompaniment 
 of this sign, not proof of it. 
 
 This, the true and sure sense of those noble words of 
 prophecy which we hear read on Christmas-day, is obscured 
 by slight errors in the received translation, and comes out 
 clearer when the errors are corrected : 
 
 4 The Lord himself shall give you a sign : Behold, the 
 damsel shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his 
 name Immanuel. 
 
 ' Milk-curd and honey shall he eat, when he shall know 
 lo refuse the evil and choose the good. 
 
 ' For before the child shall know to refuse the evil and 
 choose the good, the land shall be forsaken, whose two kings 
 make thee afraid.' 
 
 Syria and Israel shall be made desolate in Immanuel's 
 infancy, says the prophet ; but the chastisement and desola- 
 tion of Judah also, he declares, shall follow later, by the time 
 
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 151 
 
 Immanuel is a youth. Farther yet, however, Isaiah carries 
 his prophecy of Immanuel and of the events of his life. In 
 his manhood, the prophet continues, Immanuel, the pro- 
 mised child of the royal house of David, shall reign in 
 righteousness over a restored, far- spreading, prosperous, and 
 peaceful kingdom of the chosen people. * Of the increase 
 of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon 
 the throne of David, and upon his kingdom.' This com- 
 pletion of the prophecy, too, we hear read in church on 
 Christmas-day. Naturally, the received and erroneous in- 
 terpretation, which finds, as we have seen, in the first part 
 of the prophecy 'the miracle of the Incarnation,' governs 
 our understanding of the latter part also. But in the latter 
 part, as well as in the former, the prophet undoubtedly has 
 in view, not a scion of the house of David to be born and 
 to reign seven centuries later, but a scion of the house of 
 David to be born immediately ; a scion who in his youth 
 should see Judah afflicted, in his manhood should reign 
 over Judah restored and triumphant. 
 
 Well, then, the ' miracle of the Incarnation,' the preter- 
 natural conception and birth of Jesus Christ, which the 
 Church celebrates at Christmas, and which is, says the 
 Guardian, the fundamental truth for Christians, gets no 
 support at all from the famous prophecy which is commonly 
 supposed to announce it. Need I add that it gets no sup- 
 port at all from any single word of Jesus Christ himself, 
 from any single word in the letters of Paul, Peter, James, 
 or John ? The miraculous conception and birth of Jesus 
 is a legend, a lovely and attractive legend, which soon formed 
 itself, naturally and irresistibly, around the origin of the 
 Saviour ; a legend which by the end of the first century 
 had established itself, and which passed into two out of the 
 four Gospel narratives that in the century following acquired 
 canonicity. In the same way, a precisely similar legend 
 
152 A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 formed itself around the origin of Plato, although to the 
 popular imagination Plato was an object incomparably less 
 fitted to offer stimulus. The father of Plato, said the 
 Athenian story, was upon his marriage warned by Apollo in 
 a dream that his wife, Perictiona, was about to bring forth 
 a babe divinely conceived, and that he was to live apart 
 from her until the child had been born. Among the students 
 of philosophy, who were Plato's disciples, this story, although 
 authorised by his family, languished and died. Had Plato 
 founded a popular religion the case would have been very 
 different. Then the legend would have survived and thriven ; 
 and for Plato, too, there would have certainly been a world- 
 famous 'miracle of the Incarnation' investing his origin. 
 But Plato, as Bossuet says, formed fewer disciples than Paul 
 formed churches. It was these churches, this multitude, it 
 was the popular masses with their receptivity, their love of 
 wonders, with all their favouring native tendencies of mind, 
 heart, and soul, which made the future of the Christian 
 legend of the miracle of the Incarnation. 
 
 But because the story of the miracle of the Incarnation 
 is a legend, and because two of the canonical Gospels pro- 
 pound the legend seriously, basing it upon an evidently fan- 
 tastic use of the words of prophecy, and because the festival 
 of Christmas adopts and consecrates this legend, are we to 
 cast the Gospels aside, and cast the celebration of Christmas 
 aside ; or else are we to give up our reason and common 
 sense, and to say that things are not what they are, and 
 that Isaiah really predicted the preternatural conception 
 and birth of Jesus Christ, and that the miracle of the In- 
 carnation really happened as the Guardian supposes, and 
 that Christians, in commemorating it, commemorate a solid 
 fact of history, and a fact which is the fundamental truth 
 for Christians? By no means. The solid fact of history 
 marked by Christmas is the birth of Jesus, the miraculous 
 
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 153 
 
 circumstances with which that birth is invested and pre- 
 sented are legendary. The solid fact in itself, the birth of 
 Jesus with its inexhaustible train of consequences, its ' un- 
 speakable riches,' is foundation enough, and more than 
 enough, for the Christmas festival ; yet even the legend and 
 miracle investing the fact, and now almost inseparable from 
 it, have, moreover, their virtue of symbol. 
 
 Symbol is a dangerous word, and we ought to be very 
 cautious in employing it. People have a difficulty in owning 
 that a thing is unhistorical, and often they try to get out 
 of the difficulty by saying that the thing is symbolical. Thus 
 they think to save the credit of whoever delivered the thing 
 in question, as if he had himself intended to deliver it as 
 symbolical and figurative, not as historical. They save it, 
 however, at the expense of truth. In very many cases un- 
 doubtedly, when this shift of symbol is resorted to for saving 
 the credit of a narrator of legend, the narrator had not him- 
 self the least notion that what he propounded was figure, but 
 fully imagined himself to be propounding historical fact. 
 The Gospel narrators of the miracle of the Incarnation were 
 in this position of mind ; they did not in the least imagine 
 themselves to be speaking symbolically. Nevertheless, a 
 thing may have important value as symbol, although its 
 utterer never told or meant it symbolically. Let us see 
 how this is so with the Christian legend of the Incarnation. 
 
 In times and among minds where science is not a power, 
 and where the preternatural is daily and familiarly admitted, 
 the pureness and elevation of a great teacher strike power- 
 fully the popular imagination, and the natural, simple, 
 reverential explanation of his superiority is at once that he 
 was born of a virgin. Such a legend is the people's genuine 
 construing of the fact of his unique pureness. In his birth, 
 as well as in his life and teaching, this chosen one has been 
 pure, has been unlike other men, and above them. Signal 
 
154 A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 and splendid is the pureness of Plato ; noble his serene 
 faith, that 'the conclusion has long been reached that 
 dissoluteness is to be condemned, in that it brings about the 
 aggrandisement of the lower side in our nature, and the 
 defeat of the higher.' And this lofty pureness of Plato im- 
 pressed the imagination of his contemporaries, and evoked 
 the legend of his having been born of a virgin. But Plato 
 was, as I have already said, a philosopher, not the founder 
 of a religion ; his personality survived, but for the intellect 
 mainly, not for the affections and imagination. It influenced 
 and affected the few, not the many, not the masses which 
 love and foster legend. On the figure of Jesus also the 
 stamp of a pureness unique and divine was seen to dwell. 
 The remark has often been made that the pre-eminent, the 
 winning, the irresistible Christian virtues, were charity and 
 chastity. Perhaps the chastity was an even more winning 
 virtue than the charity ; it offered to the Pagan world, at 
 any rate, relief from a more oppressive, a more consuming, 
 a more intolerable bondage. Chief among the beatitudes, 
 shone, no doubt, this pair : Blessed are the poor in spirit, for 
 theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and, Blessed are the pure in 
 heart, for they shall see God ; and of these two, the second 
 blessing may have brought even the greater boon. Jesus, 
 then, the bestower of this precious blessing, Jesus, the high 
 exemplar and ideal of pureness, was born of a virgin. And 
 what Jesus brought was not a philosophy, but a religion ; he 
 gave not to the few, but to the masses, to the very recipients 
 whom the tender legend of his being born of the gracious 
 Virgin, and laid in the humble manger, would suit best ; 
 who might most surely be trusted to seize upon it, not to 
 let it go, to delight in it and magnify it for ever. 
 
 So the legend of the miraculous conception and birth of 
 Jesus, like the legend of the miraculous conception and 
 birth of Plato, is the popular homage to a high ideal of 
 
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 155 
 
 pureness, it is the multitude's way of expressing for this 
 its reverence. Of such reverence the legend is a genuine 
 symbol. But the importance of the symbol is proportional 
 to the scale on which it acts. And even when it acts on 
 a very large scale, still its virtue will depend on these 
 two things further : the worth of the idea to which it does 
 homage, and the extent to which its recipients have suc- 
 ceeded in penetrating through the form of the legend to 
 this idea. 
 
 And first, then, as to the innate truth and worth of that 
 idea of pureness to which the legend of the miracle of the 
 Incarnation does homage. Blessed are the pure in heart, for 
 they shall see God, says Jesus. God hath not called us to 
 impureness, but unto holiness, adds his apostle. Perhaps 
 there is no doctrine of Christianity which is exposed to more 
 trial amongst us now, certainly there is none which will be 
 exposed, so far as from present appearances one can judge, 
 to more trial in the immediate future, than this. Let us 
 return to nature, is a rising and spreading cry again now, 
 as it was at the Renascence. And the Christian pureness 
 has so much which seems to contradict nature, and which 
 is menaced by the growing desire and determination to 
 return to nature ! The virtue has suffered more than most 
 virtues in the hands of hypocrites ; and with hypocrites and 
 hypocrisy, as a power in human life, there is an increasing 
 impatience. But the virtue has been mishandled, also, by 
 the sincere ; by the sincere, but who are at the same time 
 over- rigid, formal, sour, narrow-minded; and these, too, are 
 by no means in the ascendant among us just now. Evi- 
 dently, again, the virtue has been mishandled by many of 
 the so-called saints, and by the asceticism of the Catholic 
 Church ; for these have so managed things, very often, as to 
 turn and rivet the thoughts upon the very matter from which 
 pureness would avert them and get them clear, and have to 
 
156 A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 that extent served to endanger and impair the virtue rather 
 than forward it. Then, too, with the growing sense that gaiety 
 and pleasure are legitimate demands of our nature, that they 
 add to life and to our sum of force, instead of, as strict 
 people have been wont to say, taking from it, with this 
 growing sense comes also the multiplication everywhere of 
 the means of gaiety and pleasure, the spectacle ever more 
 prominent of them and catching the eye more constantly, an 
 ever larger number of applicants pressing forward to share in 
 them. All this solicits the senses, makes them bold, eager, 
 and stirring. At the same time the force of old sanctions 
 of self-restraint diminishes and gives way. The belief in 
 a magnified and non-natural man, out of our sight, but 
 proved by miracles to exist and to be all powerful, who by 
 his commands has imposed on us the obligation of self- 
 restraint, and who will punish us after death in endless fire 
 if we disobey, will reward us in Paradise if we submit, this 
 belief is rapidly and irrecoverably losing its hold on men's 
 minds. If pureness or any other virtue is still to subsist, it 
 must subsist nowadays not by authority of this kind enforc- 
 ing it in defiance of nature, but because nature herself turns 
 out to be really for it 
 
 Mr. Traill has reminded us, in the interesting volume 
 on Coleridge which he has recently published, how Cole- 
 ridge's disciple, Mr. Green, devoted the last years of his 
 life to elaborating, in a work entitled Spiritual Philosophy 
 founded on the Teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 
 the great Coleridgian position ' that Christianity, rightly 
 understood, is identical with the highest philosophy, and 
 that, apart from all question of historical evidence, the 
 essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal 
 truths of reason, truths which man, by the vouchsafed light 
 of nature and without aid from documents or tradition, may 
 always and everywhere discover for himself.' We shall 
 
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 157 
 
 not find this position established or much elucidated in 
 Spiritual Philosophy. We shall not find it established or 
 much elucidated in the works of Coleridge's immediate dis- 
 ciples. It was a position of extreme novelty to take at that 
 time. Firmly to occupy it, resolutely to maintain it, required 
 great boldness and great lucidity. Coleridge's position 
 made demands upon his disciples which at that time it was 
 almost impossible they should fulfil ; it embarrassed them, 
 forced them into vagueness and obscurity. The most emi- 
 nent and popular among them, Mr. Maurice, seems never 
 quite to have himself known what he himself meant, and 
 perhaps never really quite wished to know. But neither 
 did the master, as I have already said, establish his own 
 position ; there were obstacles in his own character, as well 
 as obstacles in his circumstances, in the time. Nevertheless 
 it is rightly called * the great Coleridgian position.' It is 
 at the bottom of all Coleridge's thinking and teaching ; it is 
 true ; it is deeply important ; and by virtue of it Coleridge 
 takes rank, so far as English thought is concerned, as an 
 initiator and founder. The * great Coleridgian position,' 
 that apart from all question of the evidence for miracles 
 and of the historical quality of the Gospel narratives, the 
 essential matters of Christianity are necessary and eternal 
 facts of nature or truths of reason, is henceforth the key to 
 the whole defence of Christianity. When a Christian virtue 
 is presented to us as obligatory, the first thing, therefore, to 
 be asked, is whether our need of it is a fact of nature. 
 
 Here the appeal is to experience and testimony. His 
 own experience may in the end be the surest teacher for 
 every man ; but meanwhile, to confirm or deny his instinc- 
 tive anticipations and to start him on his way, testimony as 
 to the experience of others, general experience, is of the 
 most serious weight and value. We have had the testimony 
 of Plato to the necessity of pureness, that virtue on which 
 
I5 A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 Christianity lays so much stress. Here is yet another testi- 
 mony out of the same Greek world, a world so alien to the 
 world in which Christianity arose ; here is the testimony of 
 Sophocles. * Oh that my lot might lead me in the path of 
 holy puremss of thought and deed, the path which august 
 laws ordain, laws which in the highest heaven had their 
 birth ; .... the power of God is mighty in them, and 
 groweth not old.' That is the testimony of the poet So- 
 phocles. Coming down to our own times, we have again a 
 like testimony from the greatest poet of our times, Goethe ; 
 a testimony the more important, because Goethe, like So- 
 phocles, was in his own life what the world calls by no means 
 a purist. * May the idea of purenessj says Goethe, ' ex- 
 tending itself even to the very morsel which I take into my 
 mouth, become ever clearer and more luminous within me ! ' 
 But let us consult the testimony not only of people far 
 over our heads, such as great poets and sages ; let us have 
 the testimony of people living, as the common phrase is, in 
 the world, and living there on an every-day footing. And let 
 us choose a world the least favourable to purists possible, 
 the most given to laxity, and where indeed by this time 
 the reign of the great goddess Lubricity seems, as I have 
 often said, to be almost established, the world of Paris. 
 Two famous women of that world of Paris in the seven- 
 teenth century, two women not altogether unlike in spirit, 
 Ninon de 1'Enclos and Mme. de Sevigne, offer, in respect to 
 the virtue with which we are now occupied, the most strik- 
 ing contrast possible. Both had, in the highest degree, 
 freedom of spirit and of speech, boldness, gaiety, lucidity. 
 Mme. de SeVigne", married to a worthless husband, then a 
 widow, beautiful, witty, charming, of extraordinary freedom, 
 easy and broad in her judgments, fond of enjoyment, not se- 
 riously religious, Mme. de Sevigne, living in a society where 
 almost everybody had a lover, never took one. The French 
 
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 159 
 
 commentators upon their incomparable country-woman are 
 puzzled by this. But really the truth is, that not from what 
 is called high moral principle, not from religion, but from 
 sheer elementary soundness of nature and by virtue of her 
 perfect lucidity, she revolted from the sort of life so common 
 all around her, was drawn towards regularity, felt antipathy 
 to blemish and disorder. Ninon, on the other hand, with 
 a like freedom of mind, a like boldness and breadth in her 
 judgments, a like gaiety and love of enjoyment, took a 
 different turn, and her irregular life was the talk of her 
 century. But that lucidity, which even all through her irre- 
 gular life was her charm, made her say at the end of it : 
 ' All the world tells me that I have less cause to speak ill 
 of time than other people. However that may be, could 
 anybody have proposed to me beforehand the life I have 
 had, I would have hanged myself.' That, I say, is the 
 testimony of the most lucid children of this world, as the 
 testimony of Plato, Sophocles, and Goethe is the testimony 
 of the loftiest spirits, to the natural obligation and necessity 
 of the essentially Christian virtue of pureness. So when 
 legend represents the founder of Christianity and great 
 exemplar of this virtue as born of a virgin^ thus doing 
 homage to pureness, it does homage to what has natural 
 worth and necessity. 
 
 But we have further to ask to what extent the recipients 
 of the legend showed themselves afterwards capable, while 
 firmly believing the legend and delighting in it, of penetra- 
 ting to that virtue which it honoured, and of showing their 
 sense that accompanying the legend went the glorification of 
 that virtue. Here the Collects of the Church which have 
 come down to us from Catholic antiquity, from the times 
 when all legend was most unhesitatingly received, most 
 fondly loved, most delighted in for its own sake, are the 
 best testimony. Now the Collect for Christmas- day, 
 
160 A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 that very day on which the miracle of the Incarnation 
 is commemorated, and on which we might expect the 
 legend's miraculous side to be altogether dominant, 
 firmly seizes the homage to pureness and renovation 
 which is at the heart of the legend, and holds it steadily 
 before us all Christmas-time. 'Almighty God,' so the 
 Collect runs, ' who hast given us thine only-begotten Son to 
 take our nature upon him, and ; as at this time to be born 
 of a pure virgin, grant that we being regenerate, and made 
 thy children through adoption and grace, may daily be 
 renewed by thy Holy Spirit.' l The miracle is amply and 
 impressively stated, but the stress is laid upon the work of 
 regeneration and inward renewal, whereby we are to be 
 made sons of God, like to that supreme Son whose pureness 
 was expressed through his being born of a pure virgin. It 
 is as, in celebrating at Easter the miracle of the Resurrec- 
 tion, the Church, following here St. Paul, seizes and elevates 
 in the Collect for Easter Eve 2 that great ' secret of Jesus ' 
 which underlies the whole miraculous legend of the Resur- 
 rection, but which could arrive at the general heart of man- 
 kind only through materialising itself in that legend. 
 
 So manifest is it that there is that true and grand and 
 profound doctrine of the necrosis, of 'dying to re-live,' 
 underlying all which is legendary in the presentation of the 
 death and resurrection of Jesus by our Gospels, so mani- 
 fest is it that St. Paul seized upon the doctrine and elevated 
 it, and that the Church has retained it, that one can find 
 no difficulty, when the festival of Easter is celebrated, in 
 
 1 The point in the Collect is taken from the Mozarabic Breviary 
 at Lauds : ' Nos a mundanis contagiis munda, et in hoc mundo mundos 
 nos esse constitue.' 
 
 2 The point here is taken from a Benediction of St. Gregory for the 
 First Sunday in Easter : ' Resuscitet vos de vitiorum sepulchris qui eum 
 resuscitavit a mortuis.' See Blunt's Anne -ated Book of Common Prayer. 
 
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 161 
 
 fixing one's thoughts upon the doctrine as a centre, and in 
 receiving all the miraculous story as poetry naturally invest- 
 ing this and doing homage to it. But there is hardly a 
 fast or a festival of the Christian year in which the underly- 
 ing truth, the beneficent and forwarding idea, clothed with 
 legend and miracle because mankind could only appro- 
 priate it by materialising it in legend and miracle, is not 
 apparent. Trinity Sunday is an exception, but then Trinity 
 Sunday does not really deal with Gospel story and miracle, 
 it deals with speculation by theologians on the divine nature. 
 Perhaps, considering the results of their speculation, we 
 ought now rather to keep Trinity Sunday as a day of peni- 
 tence for the aberrations of theological dogmatists. It is, 
 however, in itself admissible and right enough that in the 
 Christian year one day should be given to considering the 
 aspects by which the human mind can in any degree ap- 
 prehend God. But Trinity Sunday is, as I have said, an 
 exception. For the most part, in the days and seasons 
 which the Church observes, there is commemoration of 
 some matter declared in Scripture, and combined and 
 clothed more or less with miracle. Yet how near to us, 
 under the accompanying investment of legend, does the 
 animating and fructifying idea lie ! in Lent, with the ' 
 miracle of the temptation, the idea of self-conquest and self- 
 control ; in Whitsuntide, with the miracle of the tongues of 
 fire, the idea of the spirit and of inspiration. 
 
 What Christmas primarily commemorates is the birth- 
 day of Jesus, Jesus, the bringer to the world of the new 
 dispensation contained in his method and secret, and in his 
 temper of sweet reasonableness for applying these. But 
 the religion of Christendom has in fact made the promi- 
 nent thing in Christmas a miracle, a legend ; the miracle 
 of the Incarnation, as it is called, the legend of Jesus 
 having been born of a virgin. And to those who cannot 
 
 M 
 
i(52 A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 bring themselves to receive miracle and legend as fact, 
 what Christmas, under this popularly established aspect 
 of it, can have to say to us, what significance it can con- 
 tain, may at first sight seem doubtful. Christmas might at 
 first appear to be the one great festival which is concerned 
 wholly with mere miracle, which fixes our attention upon 
 a miracle and nothing else. But when we come to look 
 closer, we find that even in the case of Christmas the thing 
 is not so. That on which Christmas, even in its popular 
 acceptation, fixes our attention, is that to which the popular 
 instinct, in attributing to Jesus his miraculous Incarnation, 
 in believing him born of a pure Virgin, did homage : pure- 
 ness. And this to which the popular instinct thus did 
 homage, was an essential characteristic of Jesus and an 
 essential virtue of Christianity, the obligation of which, 
 though apt to be questioned and discredited in the world, 
 is at the same time nevertheless a necessary fact of nature 
 and eternal truth of reason. And fondly as the Church has 
 cherished and displayed the Christmas miracle, this, the 
 true significance of the miraculous legend for religion, has 
 never, the Christmas Collect shows us, been unknown to her, 
 never wholly lost out of sight. As time goes on, as legend 
 and miracle are less taken seriously as matters of fact, this 
 worth of the Christmas legend as symbol will more and more 
 come into view. The legend will still be loved, but as 
 poetry, as poetry endeared by the associations of some 
 two thousand years ; religious thought will rest upon that 
 which the legend symbolises. 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose that rules for conduct and 
 recommendations of virtue, presented in a correct scientific 
 statement, or in a new rhetorical statement from which old 
 errors are excluded, can have anything like the effect on 
 mankind of old rules and recommendations to which we 
 have been long accustomed, and with which our feelings and 
 
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 163 
 
 affections have become intertwined. Pedants always sup- 
 pose that they can, but that this mistake should be so com- 
 monly made, proves only how many of us have a mixture of 
 the pedant in our composition. A correct scientific state- 
 ment of rules of virtue has upon the great majority of man- 
 kind simply no effect at all A new rhetorical statement of 
 them, appealing, like the old familiar deliverances of Chris- 
 tianity, to the heart and imagination, can have the effect 
 which those deliverances had, only when they proceed from 
 a religious genius equal to that from which those proceeded. 
 To state the requirement is to declare the impossibility of 
 its being satisfied. The superlative pedantry of Comte is 
 shown in his vainly imagining that he could satisfy it ; the 
 comparative pedantry of his disciples is shown by the 
 degree in which they adopt their master's vain imagination. 
 The really essential ideas of Christianity have a truth, 
 depth, necessity, and scope, far beyond anything that either 
 the adherents of popular Christianity, or its impugners, at 
 present suppose. Jesus himself, as I have remarked else- 
 where, is even the better fitted to stand as the central figure 
 of a religion, because his reporters so evidently fail to com- 
 prehend him fully and to report him adequately. Being so 
 evidently great and yet so uncomprehended, and being now 
 inevitably so to remain for ever, he thus comes to stand be- 
 fore us as what the philosophers call an absolute. We cannot 
 apply to him the tests which we can apply to other pheno- 
 mena, we cannot get behind him and above him, cannot 
 command him. But even were Jesus less of an absolute, 
 less fitted to stand as the central figure of a religion than 
 he is, even were the constitutive and essential ideas of 
 Christianity less pregnant, profound, and far-reaching than 
 they we, still the personage of Jesus, and the Christian rules 
 of conduct and recommendations of virtue, being of that 
 indisputable significance and worth which in any fair >yew 
 
164 A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 to be taken of them they are, and also so widely known 
 and loved from of old, would have a value and a substan- 
 tiality for religious purposes which no new apparitions and 
 constructions can possibly have. No new constructions in 
 religion can now hope to found a common way, hold aloft 
 a common truth, unite men in a common life. And yet 
 how true it is, in regard to mankind's conduct and course, 
 that, as the Imitation says so admirably, ' Without a way 
 there is no going, without a truth, no knowing, without a 
 life, no living.' Sine via non itur, sine veritate non cognos- 
 citur, sine vita non vivitur. The way, truth, and life have 
 been found in Christianity, and will not now be found out- 
 side of it. Instead of making vain and pedantic endea- 
 vours to invent them outside of it, what we have to do is to 
 help, so far as we can, towards their continuing to be found 
 inside of it by honest and sane people, who would be glad 
 to find them there if they can accomplish it without playing 
 tricks with their understanding ; to help them to accom- 
 plish this, to remove obstacles out of the way of their 
 doing so. 
 
 Far from having anything to gain by being timid and 
 reticent, or else vague and rhetorical, in treating of the 
 miraculous element in the Bible, he who would help men 
 will probably now do most good by treating this element 
 with entire unreserve. Let him frankly say, that miracle 
 narrated in the Bible is as legendary as miracle narrated 
 anywhere else, and not more to be taken as having actually 
 happened. If he calls it symbolical, let him be careful to 
 admit that the narrators did not mean it for symbol, but 
 delivered it as having actually happened, and in so deliver- 
 ing it were mistaken. Let him say that we can still use it 
 as poetry, and that in so using it we use it better than those 
 who used it as matter of fact ; but let him not leave in any 
 uncertainty the point that it is as poetry that we do use it. 
 
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 165 
 
 Let no difficulties be slurred over or eluded. Undoubtedly 
 a period of transition in religious belief, such as the period 
 in which we are now living, presents many grave difficulties. 
 Undoubtedly the reliance on miracles is not lost without 
 some danger ; but the thing to consider is that it must be 
 lost, and that the danger must be met, and, as it can be, 
 counteracted. 
 
 If men say, as some men are likely enough to say, that 
 they altogether give up Christian miracles and cannot do 
 otherwise, but that then they give up Christian morals too, 
 the answer is, that they do this at their own risk and peril ; 
 that they need not do it, that they are wrong in doing it, 
 and will have to rue their error. But for my part, I prefer 
 at present to affirm this reality of Christian morals simply 
 and barely, not to give any rhetorical development to it 
 Springs of interest for the emotions and feelings that reality 
 possesses in abundance, and hereafter these springs may and 
 will most beneficially be used by the clergy and teachers ot 
 religion, who are the best persons to turn them to account. 
 As they have habitually and powerfully used the springs 
 of emotion contained in the Christian legend, so they whl 
 with time come to use the springs of emotion contained in the 
 Christian reality. But there has been so much vagueness, 
 and so much rhetoric, and so much licence of affirmation, 
 and so much treatment of what cannot be known as if it 
 were well known, and of what is poetry and legend as if it 
 were essential solid fact, and of what is investment and dress 
 of the matter as if it were the heart of the matter, that for 
 the present, and when we are just at the commencement of 
 a new departure, I prefer, I say, to put forward a plain, 
 strict statement of the essential facts and truths consecrated 
 by the Christian legend, and to confine myself to doing this. 
 No doubt, not even those facts and truths can produce 
 their full effect upon men when exhibited in a mere naked 
 
166 . A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 statement. Nevertheless, the most important service we 
 can render to Christianity, at the present moment, is perhaps 
 not so much to work upon men's feelings with rhetoric about 
 it, as to show to their understandings what its essential facts 
 and truths really are. 
 
 Therefore, when we are asked : What really is Christ- 
 mas, and what does it celebrate? we answer: The birth- 
 day of Jesus. But what, then, is the miracle of the Incar- 
 nation ? A homage to the virtue of pureness, and to the 
 manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What is Lent, and the 
 miracle of the temptation ? A homage to the virtue of self- 
 control and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. 
 What does Easter celebrate ? Jesus victorious over death 
 by dying. By dying how ? Dying to re-live. To re-live 
 in Paradise, in another world ? No, in this. But if in this, 
 what is the kingdom of God? The ideal society of the 
 future. Then what is immortality ? To live in the eternal 
 order, which never dies. What is salvation by Jesus Christ ? 
 The attainment of this immortality. Through what means ? 
 Through faith in Jesus, and appropriation of his method, 
 secret, and temper. 
 
 Men's experience of the saving results of the method and 
 secret and temper of Jesus, imperfectly even as his method 
 and secret and temper have been extricated and employed 
 hitherto, makes truly the strength of that wonderful Book, 
 in which, with an immense vehicle of legend and miracle, 
 the new dispensation of Jesus and the old dispensation 
 which led up to it are exhibited and brought to mankind's 
 knowledge ; makes the strength of the Bible, and of the re- 
 ligion and churches which the Bible has called into being. 
 We may remark that what makes the attraction of a church 
 is always what is consonant in it to the method and secret 
 and temper of Jesus, and productive, therefore, of the saving 
 results which flow from these. The attraction of the 
 
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 167 
 
 Catholic Church is unity ; of the Protestant sects, con- 
 science ; of the Church of England, abuses reformed but 
 unity saved. I speak of that which, in each of these cases, 
 is the attraction, the promise apparently held out ; I do not 
 say that the promise is made good The attraction, in each 
 case, is something given by the line of Jesus. That which 
 makes the weakness and danger of a church, again, is just 
 that in it which is not consonant to the line of Jesus. Thus 
 the danger of the Catholic Church is its obscurantism ; of 
 the Protestant sects, their contentiousness ; of the Church 
 of England, its deference to station and property. I said 
 in a discourse at the East- end of London that ever since 
 the appearance of Christianity the prince of this world is 
 judged. The Guardian was much alarmed at my saying 
 that, and reproved me for saying it. I will urge nothing in 
 answer, except that this deference to the prince of this world, 
 to the susceptibilities of station and property, which has been 
 too characteristic of the Church of England in the past, a 
 deference so signally at variance with the line of Jesus, 
 is at the same time just what now makes the Church of 
 England's weakness and main danger. 
 
 As time goes on, it will be more and more manifest that 
 salvation does really depend on conformity to the line of 
 Jesus ; and that this experience, and nothing miraculous or 
 preternatural, is what establishes the truth and necessity of 
 Christianity. The experience proceeds on a large scale, and 
 therefore slowly. But even now, and imperfectly moreover 
 as the line of Jesus has been followed hitherto, it can be seen 
 that those nations are the soundest which have the most 
 seriously concerned themselves with it and have most en- 
 deavoured to follow it. Societies are saved by following it, 
 broken up by not following it ; and as the experience of this 
 continually proceeds, the proofs of Christianity are con- 
 tinually accumulating and growing stronger. The thing 
 
'168 A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 goes on quite independently of our wishes, and whether 
 we will or no. Our French neighbours seem perfectly and 
 scornfully incredulous as to the cogency of the beatitude 
 which pronounces blessing on the pure in heart ; they 
 would not for a moment admit that nations perish through 
 the service of the great goddess Lubricity. On the contrary, 
 more and more of them, great and small, philosophers as well 
 as the vulgar, maintain this service to be the most natural and 
 reasonable thing in the world. Yet really this service broke 
 up the great Roman Empire in the past, and is capable, it 
 will be found, of breaking up any number of societies. 
 
 Or let us consider that other great beatitude and its 
 fortunes, the beatitude recommending the Christian virtue 
 of charity : * Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the 
 kingdom of heaven.' Many people do not even understand 
 what it is which this beatitude means to bless ; they think it 
 recommends humbleness of spirit. Ferdinand Baur, whose 
 exegesis of texts from the Gospels is more valuable than his cri- 
 ticism of the mode in which the Gospels were composed, has 
 very well pointed out that the persons here blest are not those 
 who are humble-spirited, but those who are in the intention 
 and bent of their spirit, in mind, as we say, and not in pro- 
 fession merely, indifferent to riches. Such persons, whether 
 they possess riches or not, really regard riches as something 
 foreign to them, something not their own, and are thus, in the 
 phrase of another text where our received translation is mis- 
 leading, faithful as regards riches. ' If ye have not been 
 faithful in that which is foreign to you, who will give you 
 that which is your own ? ' The faithfulness consists in having 
 conquered the temptation to treat that for which men desire 
 riches, private possession and personal enjoyment, as things 
 vital to us and so be desired. Wherever there is cupidity, 
 in short, there the blessing of the Gospel cannot rest. The 
 actual poor, therefore, may altogether fail to be objects of that 
 
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 169 
 
 messing, the actual rich may be objects of it in the highest 
 degree. Nay, the surest of means to restore and perpetuate 
 the reign of the selfish rich, if at any time it have been 
 menaced or interrupted, is cupidity, envy, and hatred in the 
 poor. And this, again, is a witness to the infallibility of 
 the line of Jesus. We must come, both rich and poor, to 
 prefer the common good, the interest of 'the body of 
 Christ,' to use the Gospel phrase, the body of Christ of 
 which we are members, to private possession and personal 
 enjoyment 
 
 This is Christian charity, and how rare, how very rare it 
 is, we all know. In this practical country of ours, where 
 possessing property and estate is so loved, and losing them 
 so dreaded, the opposition to Christian charity is almost as 
 strong as that to Christian purity in France. The Saturday 
 Review is in general respectful to religion, sane in behaviour, 
 in matters of criticism reasonable. But let it imagine property 
 and privilege threatened, and instantly what a change ! There 
 seems to rise before one's mind's eye a sort of vision of an 
 elderly demoniac, surrounded by a troop of younger demo- 
 niacs of whom he is the owner and guide, all of them sud- 
 denly foaming at the mouth and crying out horribly. The 
 attachment to property and privilege is so strong, the fear of 
 losing them so agitating. But the line of Jesus perpetually 
 tends to establish itself, as I have said, independently of our 
 wishes, and whether we will or no. And undoubtedly the 
 line of Jesus is : ' How hardly shall they that have riches 
 enter into the kingdom of God ! ' In other words : ' How 
 hardly shall those who cling to private possession and per- 
 sonal enjoyment, who have not brought themselves to regard 
 property and riches as foreign and indifferent to them, who 
 have not annulled self and placed their happiness in the 
 common good, make part of the ideal society of the future ! ' 
 
 The legend of Christmas is a homage to the Christian 
 
I/O A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 
 
 virtue of pureness ; and Christmas, with its ' miracle of the 
 Incarnation/ should turn our thoughts to the certainty of this 
 virtue's final victory, against all difficulties. And with the 
 victory of this virtue let us associate the victory of its great 
 fellow-virtue of Christian charity, a victory equally difficult 
 but equally certain. The difficulties are undeniable, but here, 
 however, the signs of the times point far more to the emer- 
 gence and progress of the virtue than to its depression. 
 Who cannot see that the idea of the common good is ac- 
 quiring amongst us, at the present day, a force altogether 
 new ? that for instance, in cases where, in the framing of 
 laws and in the interpretation of them by tribunals, regard 
 to property and privilege used to be, one may say, para- 
 mount, and the idea of the common good hardly con- 
 sidered at all, things are now tending quite the other way ; 
 the pretensions of property and privilege are severely scrutin- 
 ised, the claims of the common good entertained with favour. 
 An acceleration of progress in the spread of ideas of this 
 kind, a decline of vitality in institutions where the opposite 
 ideas were paramount, marks the close of a period. Jesus an- 
 nounced for his own period such a close ; a close necessitated 
 by the emergence of the new, the decay of the old. He an- 
 nounced it with the turbid figures familiar through prophecy 
 to his hearers' imagination, figures of stupendous physical 
 miracle, a break-up of nature, God coming to judgment. 
 But he did not announce under these figures, as our Bibles 
 make him announce, the end of the world ; he announced 
 1 the end of the age,' * the close of the period.' That close 
 came, as he had foretold ; and a like * end of the age ' is 
 imminent, wherever a certain stage is reached in the conflict 
 between the line of Jesus and the facts of that period through 
 which it takes its passage. Sometimes we may almost be 
 inclined to augur that from some such ' end of the age ' we 
 ourselves are not far distant now ; that through dissolution 
 
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS. 171 
 
 dissolution peaceful if we have virtue enough, violent if 
 we are vicious, but still dissolution, we and our own age 
 have to pass, according to the eternal law which makes 
 dissolution the condition of renovation. The price de- 
 manded, according to the inexorable conditions on which 
 the kingdom of God is offered, for the mistakes of our 
 past, for the attainment of our future, this price may per- 
 haps be required sooner than we suppose, required even of 
 us ourselves who are living now : ' Verily I say unto you, it 
 shall be required of this generation. 1 
 
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 Mrs. Perkins's Ball Dr. BirchOur Street The 
 Kickleburys on the Rhine The Rose and the 
 Ring. With Seventy-four Illustrations by the 
 
 BALLADS AND TALES. With Illustra- 
 
 tions by the Author. 
 
 THE FOUR GEORGES; THE ENG- 
 LISH HUMORISTS OF THE EIGHT- 
 EENTH CENTURY. With Portraits and 
 other Illustrations. 
 
 ROUNDABOUT PAPERS. To which is 
 
 added the SECOND FUNERAL OF NAPO- 
 LEON. With Illustrations by the Author. 
 
 DENIS DUVAL; LOVEL THE 
 
 WIDOWER; AND OTHER STORIES. 
 With Illustrations by FREDERICK WALKER 
 and the Author. 
 
 CATHERINE, a Story ; LITTLE 
 
 TRAVELS; THE FITZBOODLE 
 PAPERS; CRITICAL REVIEWS; ANO 
 THE WOLVES AND THE LAMB. 
 Illustrations by the Author, and a Portrait. 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS, 
 
 SKETCHES, AND REVIEWS. With Illus- 
 trations by the Author. 
 
 CONTRIBUTIONS TO * PUNCH.' With 
 
 132 Illustrations by the Author. 
 
 VANITY FAIR. A NOVEL WITHOUT A 
 HERO. Two Volumes. With Forty Steel 
 Engravings and 150 Woodcuts. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS : His 
 
 FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES : HIS 
 
 FRIENDS AND HIS GREATEST ENEMY. 
 Two Volumes. With Forty Steel Engravings 
 and numerous Woodcuts. 
 
 THENEWCOMES: MEMOIRS OF A MOST 
 RESPECTABLE FAMILY. Two Volumes. 
 With Forty-eight Steel Engravings by RICH- 
 ARD DOYLE, and numerous Woodcuts. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND, 
 
 ESQ. : A COLONEL IN THE SERVICE OF 
 HER MAJESTY QUEEN ANNE. With Eight 
 Illustrations by GEORGE DU MAURIER, and 
 numerous Woodcuts. 
 
 THE VIRGINIANS : A TALE OF THE 
 LAST CENTURY. Two Volumes. With 
 Forty-eight Steel Engravings and numerous 
 Woodcuts. 
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP ON 
 
 HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD, 
 SHOWING WHO ROBBED HIM, WHO 
 HELPED HIM, AND WHO PASSED HIM BY. 
 To which is prefixed A SHABBY GEN TEEL 
 STORY. Two Volumes. With Twenty 
 Illustrations. 
 
 THE PARIS SKETCH-BOOK OF MR. 
 
 M. A. TITMARSH AND THE MEMOIRS 
 OF MR. C. J. YELLOWPLUSH. With 
 Illustrations by the Author. 
 
 THE MEMOIRS OF BARRY LYNDON, 
 
 ESQ., WRITTEN BY HIMSELF: WITH THE 
 HISTORY OF SAMUEL TITMARSH, 
 AND THE GREAT HOGGARTY DIA- 
 MOND. With Illustrations by the Author. 
 
 THE IRISH SKETCH-BOOK: AND 
 
 NOTES OF A JOURNEY FROM CORN- 
 HILL TO GRAND CAIRO. With Illustra- 
 tions by the Author. 
 
 THE POPULAR EDITION. 
 
 Complete in Thirteen Volumes, Crown 8vo. with Frontispiece to each Volume, 
 
 G'ce $s. each, 
 h, gilt top, price 3. 5* ; or in half-morocco 
 gilt, price 5. 
 i.-VANITY FAIR. 
 1.-THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS. 
 3.-THE NEWCOMES. 
 4.-ESMOND AND BARRY LYNDON. 
 5. -THE VIRGINIANS. 
 i.~THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP, 
 
 to which is prefixed A SHABBY GENTEEL 
 STORY. 
 
 y.-PARIS, IRISH, AND EASTERN 
 
 SKETCHES: 
 
 Paris Sketch BookIrish Sketch Book Corn- 
 hill to Cairo. 
 
 8. -HOGGARTY DIAMOND, YELLOW- 
 PLUSH PAPERS, AND BURLESQUES :_ 
 The Great Hoggarry Diamond Yellowplush 
 Papers Novels by Eminent Hands Jeames's 
 Diary Adventuresof Major Gahagan A Legend 
 of the RhineRebecca and Rowena The His- 
 kry of the Next French Revolution Cox's Piary 
 -The Fata! Boots 
 
 9- -THE BOOK OF SNOBS, AND 
 
 SKETCHES OF LIFE &CH ARACTER :_ 
 The Book of Snobs Sketches and Travels in 
 London _ Character Sketches Men's Wives 
 the Fitzboodle Papers -The Bedford Row Con- 
 spiracyA Little Dinner at Timmins's. 
 
 PAPERS AND 
 
 IO.-ROUNDABOUT 
 
 LECTURES:- 
 
 Roundabout /"apers The Four Georges Th 
 English Humoilsts of the Eighteenth Century-^ 
 The Second Funeral of Napoleon. 
 
 ii. -CATHERINE, &c. 
 
 CatherineLovel the Widower Denis Duvsl 
 Ballads-The Wolves and the Lamb Critift^l 
 Reviews Little Travels and Roadside Sketches. 
 
 I2.-CHRISTMAS BOOKS :- 
 
 Mrs. Perkins's Ball_Dr. Birch Our Street Th 
 Kickleburys on the Rhine The Rose and the 
 Ring. 
 
 iS.-MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 
 
 SKETCHES. AND REVIEWS; CONTR1 
 BUTIONS TO 'PUNCH.' 
 
 London: SMITH, ELDEF, & CO.. 15 Waterloo Place. 
 
' A work absolutely indispensable to every well-furnished library.' THE TIMB& 
 
 Price 15s. net per volume, in cloth; OP in half-morocco, marbled 
 edges, 20s. net. 
 
 DICTMARYofMTIONAL BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Edited by LESLIE STEPHEN and SIDNEY LEE. 
 
 Volume I. was published on January I, 1885, and a volume has been issued 
 every three months since that date. 
 
 A further Volume will be published on January I, April \,July I, and 
 October I of each year until the completion of the work. 
 
 EXTRACTS FROM A FEW RECENT PRESS NOTICES OF THE WORK. 
 
 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ' A "DIC- 
 TIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY," OF 
 WHICH THE COUNTRY MAY BE JUSTLY 
 PROUD, which, though it may need correct- 
 ing and supplementing, will probably never 
 be superseded, and which, in unity of con- 
 ception and aim, in the number of the 
 names inserted, in fulness and accuracy of 
 details, in the care and precision with which 
 the authorities are cited, and in the biblio- 
 graphical information given, will not only be 
 immeasurably superior to any work of the 
 kind which has been produced in Great 
 Britain, but will as far surpass the German 
 and Belgian biographical dictionaries now 
 in progress, as these two important under- 
 takings are in advance of the two great 
 French collections, which until lately reigned 
 supreme in the department of Biography.' 
 
 THE LANCET. 'Its contents show no 
 falling off in accuracy and completeness, so 
 far as by a critical examination we have been 
 able to discover, from those of the previous 
 volumes, of which we have on all occasions 
 spoken with praise. When completed, THE 
 
 DICTIONARY WILL BE WELL NIGH INVALU- 
 ABLE. 
 
 THE PALL MALL GAZETTE. 'As to the 
 general execution, we can only repeat the 
 high praise which it has been our pleasing 
 duty to bestow on former volumes. To find 
 a name omitted that should have been inserted 
 is well-nigh impossible.' 
 
 THE GLASGOW HERALD ' It is not easy 
 to overpraise a book, which, although bearing 
 the unpretentious name of a dictionary, is 
 not more perfect in design than comprehensive 
 and admirable in execution. It is so use'ul 
 as to be necessary in all libraries, public as 
 well as piivate.' 
 
 TRUTH. * I am glad you share my ad- 
 miration for Mr. Stephen's magnum opus 
 
 THE MAGNUM OPUS OF OUR GENERATION 
 
 "The Dictionary of National Biography." 
 A dictionary of the kind had been attempted 
 so often before by the strongest men pub- 
 lishers and editors of the day that I hardly 
 expected it to succeed. No one expected 
 such a success as it has so far achieved.' 
 
 THE ATHENAEUM. 'The latest volume 3 
 of Mr. Stephen's Dictionary are FULL OF 
 
 IMPORTANT AND INTERESTING ARTICLES. 
 
 Great names strike the eye constantly as we 
 turn the pages. . . . Altogether the volumes 
 are good reading. What is more important, 
 the articles, whether they are on small or 
 great personages, are nearly all up to the 
 high standard which has been set in the 
 earlier portions of the work, and occasion- 
 ally above it.' 
 
 SATURDAY REVIEW. 'From the name 5 
 we have cited it will be seen that great pains 
 have been taken with that portion of the 
 Dictionary which relates to modern times, 
 and this has been rightly done ; for often 
 nothing is more difficult than to hnd a concise 
 record of the life of a man who belonged to 
 our own times or to those just preceding 
 them. Consistently enough, the Editor has 
 been careful to keep the work reasonably up 
 to date.' 
 
 THE MANCHESTER EXAMINER AND 
 TIMES. 'This magnificent work of reference 
 has now left the tentative stage of its existence 
 far behind, and Mr. Leslie Stephen and his 
 contributors are well under weigh. . . . We 
 extend a hearty welcome to the latest instal- 
 ment of a most magnificent work, in which 
 both the editing and the writing appear still 
 to improve.' 
 
 London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place. 
 
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 University of California 
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ID /UOUD