SOME ELEMENTS OF RELIGION RIVINGTONS SLotttJOtt Waterloo Place ©xfortf High Street GTambritJjje Trinity Street SOME ELEMENTS OF RELIGION 3Lent ILectuxex 1870 BY H. P. LIDDON, D.D. CANON OF ST. PAUL S RIVINGTONS lontoon, ©xforb, nut) ffltttfitgl 1872 Perche, se tu alia virtu circoncle La tua misura, non alia parvenza Delle sustanzie che t' appaion tonde, Tu vederai mirabil convenenza, Di maggio a piu, et di minore a meno, In ciascun cielo, a sua intelligenza. Par. xxviii. 73 — 78. LOAN STACK mnJ TO Sofjn OTtllfam (DgU, ffigq., fH.D. OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD WHOSE WORK AND CHARACTER SUGGEST MANY PRECIOUS LESSONS WHICH HE NEVER THINKS OF TEAC HING 853 ADVERTISEMENT. These Lectures were delivered in St. James' Church, Piccadilly, during the Lent of 1870. They were, at the time, through God's mercy, of service at least to some minds, — anxious, if it might be, to escape from perplexities which beset an age of feverish scepticism. It was accordingly difficult to resist the practical reasons which were urged in favour of publishing the Lectures; but the announcement of their intended publication was, perhaps, made, before the drawbacks which must necessarily accompany the rhetorical treat- ment of such a subject as the present, in a perma- nent form, had been sufficiently considered. More- over, a fulness and method of discussion which satisfies the purp086fl of a L< vtmv, and which in- deed is all that an audience will bear, must fall altogether below the standard which may be rea- sonably looked for in a book, supposed to make viii Advertisement. any pretension whatever to claim the character of a formal treatise upon a wide and serious subject. Of this, upon further reflection, the writer be- came so strongly convinced as to have enter- tained the design of expanding these fragments into a larger work. But, apart from the pressure of other duties, he could not but feel that such an attempt would destroy, together with the identity of the Lectures, any moral or spiritual associations that might cling to them; and, in working for the cause of Faith, as in other matters, " Un sou, quand il est assure, Vaut mieux, que cinq en esperance." The Lectures are therefore published as they stand. It will be borne in mind that they sug- gest only a few thoughts on each of the points of which they treat; that they cannot but raise some difficulties which they leave unanswered ; and, in a word, that their limits are not in any sense de- termined by those of the general subject, but only by the number of Sundays in Lent. Whitsuntide, 1872. CONTENTS LECTUEE I. iFtrst j&untmg in 3Lent. THE IDEA OF RELIGION. Ps. cxliii. 8. FAGB Shew Thou me the way that I should walk in, for I lift v< soul unto Thee ...... 1 LECTUEE II. Second Stmtmjj in lent GOD, THE OBJECT OF RELIGION. Ps. xlii. 2. My soul is athirstfor God, yea even for the living God: when shall I come to appear before the presence of God . .39 LECTURE III. E\)ixt} Shmfeag u\ iLmt. THE SUBJECT OF RELIGION— THE SOUL. Pb. vi What it mail, that thou art mindful of him? . . .81 x Contents. LECTUKE IV. Jourtij Smrtrag in 3Lent THE OBSTACLE TO EELIGION— SIN. S. James i. 1 5. PAGE When desire hath conceived, it bring eth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeih forth death . . . .128 LECTUKE Y. jFtftfj Suntrag in 3Lent. PEAYEE, THE CHAEACTEEISTIC ACTION OF EELIGION. S. Matt. vii. 7. Ask and it shall be given you . . . . .166 LECTUEE VI. Palm iSunfcag* THE MEDIATOR, THE GUARANTEE OF EELIGIOUS LIFE. S. Matt, xxiii. 41. Jesus asked them, saying, What think ye of Christ ? . . 204 LECTURE I. dFivat Suntiag in %Ltnt THE IDEA OF EELIGIOK Ps. cxliii. 8. Skew Tliou me the way that I should walk in, for J lift up my soul unto Thee. UE age, it has been said, longs to be religious. If this is too unguarded an assertion, it is at least true that the instinct or sentiment of religion is treated anion- us with more respect and sympathy than has been the case at some past epochs of our national history. Amid the de- Ikiih heries of the Restoration, and the shallow habits of thought Oil the gravest subjects which marked portion the last century, Religion, is the broad sense of the term, was largely discredited, even when it was not openly Bcouted as a weakness or a superstition. Whereas in our day religion is named, even by the irreligious, with the forms ifnol with the sincerity <>!* ivspect. And some men interest them i as an abstract good, with •aval sincerity, who oppose hy turns all thata88erts its power .- in the world. Thus they declaim B 2 Religion, how far welcomed [Lect. against churches, while they explain that in doing this they are befriending that true Eeligion which churches misre- present. Or, they would do away with priesthoods; but then they are only anxious, while rescuing the fair jewel of religion from clerical keeping, to make its sway more imperial, by making its mien and countenance more human. Or they make war upon theology — the theology of Apostles, Fathers, Creeds; but theology, they declare, again and again, is a pedantic product of the clerical un- derstanding, and they for their part are passionately inter- ested on behalf of the religion of the human heart. They discredit * book revelations," and insist upon errors of fact or errors of morals, which they hold to be discoverable in the Bible; but they are all the more eager to profess and feel a zeal for that unerring and sublime essence of religion, which is not bound, as they phrase it, to the letter, and which fires their enthusiasm in renouncing the letter. And thus, however warmly the institutions, the ministers, the beliefs, the sacred literature of religion, may be suc- cessively assailed, religion itself, we are assured, is respected ; or rather it is respect for and loyalty to religion — to religion divested of accretions which have gathered round it and ob- scured its beauty during the lapse of time, — which is in fact the animating motive of this most friendly and discrimina- ting opposition. That religion should be thus safeguarded as an idea, when all that secures its practical power is by turns ob- jected to; that the abstract, disembodied, intangible essence L] in the Modern World. 3 should be so sedulously honoured, while its concrete forms, its living and working embodiments, are opposed and de- nounced, is a fact which must engage attention. How are we to account for it ? Is it that we live in a " period of transition," when men have not yet faced the last conse- quences of the principles which they are adopting, and hang with a pardonable, although illogical tenderness between premiss and conclusion ? Does the sacred name of religion still command an awe which, while it is not strong enough to protect many practical interests, can yet hedge around a remote object with the forms of popular respect? Is it that, as of old, barbarian invaders, who will without scruple devastate the precincts and sack the interior of the temple, are pausing involuntarily, spell-bound, almost terrified, upon the threshold of the sacred shrine ? Or does the aesthetic feeling of our time, looking at human life with the eye of an artist rather than with the eye of a statesman or philanthropist, prompt this in- terest on behalf of religion, as alone adequately repre- senting and upholding the. ideal side of human ei Does it anticipate, not without reason, the dull, barren, uninteresting, prosaic l«-\el of ice to which we should be reduced, if all that points upward in thought and feeling could be utterly stripped from us, and eliminated; if human life oould be robbed of the most refining and stimulating intluenees that can be lit to bear on it? Or is this reserve of interest on behalf of religion at bottom a social, or political — if yom 4 Why religion is respected. [Lect. like, a selfish — class instinct ? Is it order cowering before approaching revolution, and endeavouring to support its regiments and its policemen with forces summoned from some higher world, whether of fact or fancy; with invisible powers capable of making their way into the very heart of the enemy's camp ? Is it that we of this generation, who have read in the annals of a neighbouring country the stern lessons taught by eighty years of active or suppressed anarchy, are more keenly alive than were our ancestors to the tremen- dous force of the volcanic passions latent in human nature ? Are we willing to grant that some religion at least is a social necessity ; a necessity in the sense of Machiavelli, if not in the sense of Jesus Christ ? Are we satisfied that the brute within us, if he is to be chained and imprisoned at all, can only be taken captive by a superhuman master, and will never forfeit his destructive liberty, except at the bidding of an unearthly creed ? Undoubtedly, it may be admitted that religion owes some- thing, on the score of respect yielded to her as an abstract idea, to each of these causes. The awe which a reasoned scepticism cannot always crush, the perception of what it is that constitutes beauty in life, combine with the stern prac- tical instincts of social safety, with the love of order, and the anxiety to make property and life secure, to insist that man must have something in the way of a religion. Schemes of independent morality, even if they were theoretically defen- sible, are not equal to resisting the impetuosities of passion, or the exorbitant demands of a low self-interest. " Take my L] Influence of the s?cbjective spirit. 5 word for it," said a great statesman, " it is not prudent as a rule to trust yourself to any man who tells you that he does not believe in a God or in a future after death." 1 But a deeper reason for the fact we are considering, is to be found in the wider conviction that religion is, if I may so express it, an indispensable part of man's moral and mental outfit. Two causes have contributed to deepen this conviction in modern times. The first is the subjective spirit of the age, which insists on looking at truth, not as it is in itself, in its utter independence of the mind of man, but as it pre- sents itself to man's mind, or rather as man's mind in very varying moods apprehends it. This spirit, while it has weakened the public hold upon Creeds and Script un- directed attention, with an intensity unknown before our day, to the needs of the human mind, and among them to its supreme need of a religion. It lias in, 1,, ; this into maintaining, aa with Feuerbach, thai all 1 religions are but the creations of human thought, which, while it is really doomed to an uninterrupted eoi tli the world of sense, aspires to create, if it canno ran ideal world beyond; but this paradox only yields an additi testimony to the need we have, as men, of some religion, in order to do justice to our humanity, I: li on, says a modern Knglish writer, who certainly will n <>t be suspected of any desire to exaggerate its influence, is thai •• v bo man. in the midst of the rest of creation, his special »8ii v«jL 6 Influence of historical studies. [Lect. elevation and dignity." 1 And it was perhaps, upon the whole, the most marked feature in the work of Schleier- niacher, that when groping his way back from the grim intellectual desert into which many of his countrymen had been led, under the guidance of the older Bation- alism, he insisted with such emphasis and success upon the necessity of religion in order to the completion of human life. Beyond any of his contemporaries, he saw and pointed out that by our capacity for religion; by our power of looking beyond this deceptive and passing world of sense to a higher world, invisible and eternal; by loyalty to the obligations which that clearer sight imposes on us, we men are best distinguished from the brutes around us. Language itself, the physical dress in which we clothe our thought, is not more distinctly royal among our out- ward human prerogatives, than that upturned countenance which, as the heathen poet divined, is the symbol of our intelligent capacity for a higher life. The indispensableness of religion to human life has also been forced on the mind of this generation by a deeper study of history. The more we know of the annals of our race, the more clearly is it seen how the greatest catastrophes, and the most profound and far-reaching changes, have really turned upon religious questions ; and that the stronger and more definite has been the religion, the more fundamental and striking have been these results. Thus, for instance, the modern history of Europe has been little else than a 1 Froude : Hist. Engl. xii. 535. I.] A more permanent cause. 7 history of struggles fundamentally religious. A recent historian of civilisation has indeed maintained that this is true only of the past, l and that the present age has more and more learned to restrict its enthusiasm to material objects. But he forgets that religion does not cease to influence events among those who reject its claims : it excites the strongest human passions not merely in its defenders, but in its enemies. The claim to hold communion with an unseen world irritates when it does not win and satisfy. Atheism has again and again been a fanaticism ; it has been a missionary and a per- secutor by turns ; it is lashed into passion by the very pre- sence of the sublime passion to which it is opposed. ¥ to-day know full well that no political subjects are discussed so warmly as those which bear even remotely upon religion. " The deepest subject," says Goethe, "in the history of the world and of mankind, and that to which all others are sub- ordinate, is the conflict between faith and unhelief." 2 While these causes make an interest in religion, of \\ hat- ever kind, inevitable among thought in 1 men in our day and generation, they only reinforce, they do not obscure or supersede, those permanent reasons for its iniluenee, whieh arc part of our natural and human circumstances. Among it may suffice to mention one. It is a fact, certain to each one of us, that we shall individually die. If science could arrest, the empire of death, as it has limited that of •c ; if thought, 111 its onward march throughout the cen- turies, ould rob us utterly of the presentiment of an im- 1 1> ill 325. ■ Qu. by Luthardt. 8 What is religion ? [Lect. mortality and of our aspirations towards a higher world, then religion would retain, in the fixed circumstances of life, no ally of anything like equal power. But there is the certainty, present to each one of us in our thoughtful moments, never entirely absent from the thought of those who seriously think at all, that an hour will come when we shall face the problem of problems for ourselves and alone; when we shall know by experience what really is beyond the veil, and how it is related to that which we see and are here ; and it is impossible, with this prospect before us, to treat the voice and claims of religion as wholly trivial or unimportant. 1 But here the question arises as to what it is that man seeks in seeking religion. Or rather, what is religion? We know it when we meet it in life ; we know it by its bearing, by its fruits, by the atmosphere with which it surrounds itself. But what is it within the soul? what is its chief element or substance ? What is this power which does not meet the eye, but which we trace in its results ? what is the true psychological account that must be given of it ? As we repeat the question, " What is religion," we find ourselves, it may be, in the position of standing face to face 1 This is admitted, although, of course, in terms which the writer would not adopt, by Mr. Buckle. Hist. Civ. i. 113. L] Does it consist in right feeling? 9 with a very old acquaintance, with whose countenance and habits we have been familiar all our lives, but of whose real self we cannot but feel we have a somewhat shadowy perception. 1. Is religion, then, in the heart of man, to be looked upon chiefly as the highest and purest form of feeling ? Is feeling the essential thing in true religion ? So thought no less a person than Schleiermacher. 1 He makes religion to consist in feeling — notably in our feeling of dependence on a Higher Pow T er ; and his influence has won for this representation a w T ide acceptance in modern P Germany. 2 Such in England is, or has been at times, the practical instinct, if not the decision, of Wesleyanism and kindred systems. 3 Feeling, not knowledge ; feeling, not morality ; feeling, not even conscience, is the test of accep- tance — that is to say, of satisfactory religion. Acceptance is warranted by the sense of acceptance ; religious progress is measured by the sense of enjoying more and more the raptures of the religions life. Nor, if we look either into the recesses of the human heart, or into the historical expressions of religious earaetf- 1 Srhli -i. una. h. -r, Christliclw Glaube, i. pp. 6-14. He is expanding tho i<>ii thai MiMoit. v. Basis aller kirvhlichen 1 ' ir Mch l.i-trachti-t weder ein Wissen noch cin Th mu, Kmdara ein Bestimmtheit dee QefUbls oder dee unmittelbaren bewu stseins." Compare p. 16. Das genieinsame aller derjenigen Bestixnmtheiten del S. 1! tUwusstseins, welehe uberwiegend ein Irgend- n« -in del 1 '. i . : i ; ^ ■ : ;. ! , k< it aussagen, Ut data wir una ala ihlen, 9 As with Nitzsch, Tweatcn, and othera. Cf. Grimm, Inst Th. Dogm. !' W :1 Oompare tlu« remarin in South. xf% * i-if«- ol Wealty, M p, 867. i o "Feeling " in the Psalter and S. Paul. [Lect. ness, can the high place of feeling in the religious life be rightly depreciated. Feeling is the play of our conscious- ness coming into contact with its object : it varies in in- tensity according to the interest we take in that object : it is a totally different thing in the case of a casual acquaint- ance and of a near relative. When, then, the soul is in intimate contact with the Object of objects — with God, — feeling, the purest and the most intense, is not merely legitimate, but ordinarily inevitable. How much of the Psalter is feeling — the tenderest, the strongest, the most loyal, the most affectionate ! " Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after Thee, God. My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God : when shall I come to appear before the presence of God ?" "Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of Thee !" " My soul hangeth upon Thee: Thy right hand hath upholden me." " Do not I hate them, Lord, that hate Thee, and am not I grieved with those that rise up against Thee : yea, I hate them right sore, even as though they were mine enemies I" 1 How profoundly is the religion of S. Paul, as we study it in his Epistles, penetrated by feeling ! Always in felt contact with an unseen Master ; he is tender, he is vehe- ment, he burns, he is melted : his dispositions towards his fellow-men are so various and keen, because in him feeling has been educated in a higher Presence. — "The love of Christ constraineth us :" " To me to live is Christ :" " Who 1 Ps. xlii. 1 ; lxxiii. 25; lxiii. 8; cxxxix. 21-22. L] "Feeling " must have a true object, 1 1 shall separate us from the love of Christ ? " "I live ; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me:" "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema maranatha." x But the question is not whether feeling be an element of sincere religion ; but whether it be the one most essential element. And here two observations cannot fail to strike us. In the long run, there can be, for well-ordered minds, no strong play of feeling apart from a sense of the intellectual truth of the object upon which feeling is bestowed. To lavish feeling, if it be possible to do so, upon a personage who is even suspected of being mythical or half mythical, is to prostitute feeling. Some idea, then, of the object of feeling must precede the feeling, as well as a conviction of the truth of the object so conceived of. We are told that religious feeling is especially the sense of entire de- pendence upon a Higher Power : man's inmost soul hangfl confidingly upon the Power in which we live and move and have our being. But, then, what is this power? That is a question which must be answered before feeling can determine its complexion. Is this power an impersonal force? is it a blind fate or destiny? is it so machine, haying neither heart nor will, but moving on- wards through endless cycles of destructions and recom- binations, of life and death, nneeasinvjv, lvsistlossly, inexorably? If so, feeling at least can n t» form of absolute dependence: there is no sueh thing as . "inscir iii trustful on to a piece of ma. Iiinery, 1 2 Cor. v. II; Phil 35; Gal. ii I 22. 12 "Feeling " must lead to right practice. [Lect. which may crush you to death at any moment in its advance. Trustful dependence is only possible when that on which we depend is seen to be a Person, and a moral Person, that is to say, holy, truthful, compassionate, just. But here we pass out of the region of feeling. It appears that before feeling can trust itself, something is wanted to guide and colour it. Knowledge is at least as essential to religion as feeling; and knowledge of the Object of religion, expressed in clear and precise terms, is after all only another name for dogma. But, moreover, feeling, even if intelligent, must accom- pany right moral effort, in order to be religious. Feeling, even when directed to heavenly objects, may be, in its substance, partly physical ; and there is no necessary con- nection between feeling so originating and moral earnest- ness, or even a right morality. Nay, it is very possible for those who feel warmly to imagine, mistakenly enough, that warm feeling is the same thing as, or an adequate substi- tute for, acting rightly. He who said, " If ye love Me, keep My commandments," * implied that there are forms of reli- gious passion, distinct no doubt from the true Christian grace of love, which may co-exist with disobedience, and may even appear to compensate for it. The Galatians had not been the less willing to " pluck out their own eyes," out of devotion to S. Paul, at the time of their conversion, because they afterwards looked on him as a personal enemy for telling them the truth about the Judaisers. 2 The 1 S. John xiv. 15. 2 Gal. iv. 15, 16. L] Is religion a kind of knowledge f 1 3 Apostle was not insincere who protested, " Though I should die with Thee, yet will I not deny Thee;" 1 albeit a few hours later, at the crisis of danger, he could exclaim, " I know not the Man." 2 Feeling is not necessarily moral purpose ; and its possible deficiencies on this side, as well as on the side of knowledge, shew that we cannot regard it as alone forming the raw material of religious life. 3 2. Is it then more nearly true to say that the one essential thing in religion is knowledge — knowledge of God and of the things of God ? Somewhat of this kind was the opinion of the Gnostics of the second century. They regarded the Christian doctrines as simply an addi- tion to the existing stock of current human speculations, and they ventilated what appear to us nothing less than the wildest fancies under the protection of current Chris- tian phrases, which served to decorate and recommend speculations that often had nothing to do with Christianity. They thought that the Apostles had been oninteUectoa] persons, upon whose well-meant efforts they had them- selves improved. 4 Since faith lias in it a large moral ele- ment, their watchword was, not faith, but km and, 1 S. Matt. xxvi. :::.. *S. Matt, w. ; • 11. . I, Werke, wii. 296 (qa Grimm). Gritndet sJeh dio 1. ben mir ant" (in I irfiihl, .-<> hat solches riohtig krine weitere Be*tim- ala das Gefiiiii Minor Ibhai , tmd to wire dtr Hvnd be Christ, dean er trttgt dieses am it nehm- Liofa in diesem Geftthle. Auoh srlostDD^i^elQhk hat dsf Hun.l, wenn ■einem Hunger doroh sines rXnoohen I This does In. li • tin- truth that tin- all. OtfoOJtfe lojsltjj of S> •!■. t • 1 hi I a rebuks to the ooldheari dm m of ( in 1 itian - ; 1 nl it fa rightlj bn| bed that the religion ofhumanitj must be based on something more than feeling. *S. Irenaos, Bta III. 12, 1% 14 "Knowledge" necessary to religion, [Lect. in their own phrase, this knowledge was to be the salvation of souls. l The history of the human mind repeats itself, and a position which is at bottom akin to the foregoing, is familiar to some of us in the philosophies of Schelling and Hegel. Here too faith is only the lower grade, the popular form of the religious consciousness; its most cherished doctrines are only parables of the realities open to the eye of science upon which the modern thinker may gaze. His religion is thus mainly an effort of the intellect, which is perpetually engaged in disentangling and distilling from the rude forms of old-world creeds those abstract scientific conceptions which are better suited to the palate of modern philosophy. 2 It has already been implied that knowledge — true know- ledge of truth — is of vital importance to religion. No one would question this, except in the interests of a morbid fanaticism. Eeligion is impossible without some know- ledge of its object ; and our capacities for true religious life must, to a certain extent, vary with our varying degrees of religious knowledge. 3 "This," says our Saviour, "is 1 Compare the account which S. Irenseus gives of the Valentinians, Haer. i. 6, 2. Their contemptuous estimate of Catholic Christians is ex- pressed in the phrase " ol dl Zpycov /cat 7rtcrrews ^/lXtjs fiefiaiovfxevoL kclI /at) ttjp reXeiav yvwcriv exovres." 2 In the words of a more recent Hegelian writer, u Dass der Inhalt der Religion und Philosophic derselbe sey, indem den Vorstellungen des religiosen Bewusstseyns ein ihner fern liegender Sinn untergelegt wird, den man unverholen auszusprechen sich nicht getrauen darf . Daumer, A ndeutung dries Systemes speculativer Philosophic, p. 45, qu. by Grimm. 3 Rom. x. 2; Eph. i. 17; iv. 13; Phil. i. 9; Col. i. 9, 10 ;ii . 2; 1 Tim. ii. 4 ; 2 Tim. iii. 7 ; Heb. x. 26 ; 2 Pet. i. 2, 3, 8 ; ii. 20. L] but it must be accompanied by love. 1 5 life eternal; that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, Whom Thou hast sent." x The knowledge spoken of here, and elsewhere in the Bible, is indeed not merely intellectual: it is knowledge in act; it is the knowledge which is won by love and obedience, as distinct from, although together with, intelligence. Nevertheless, knowledge, in its ordinary sense of informa- tion apprehended by the understanding, is indispensable to religion. Sight is not the power of walking or working ; but we cannot work or walk blindfolded without disaster. Yet no mere action of the intelligence, however active, upon the subject-matter of religion, is the true back-bone of religion. Knowledge alone may only enhance responsibility. If Christ had not come and spoken to the Jews, they had not had sin : as it was, they had no cloke for their sin. 2 S. Paul contrasts a merely intelligent apprehension of reli- gious subjects with love. "Knowledge," he says, " pullet h up, but charity edifieth." 3 The whole drift of S. James' Epistle goes to shew the worthlessness, religiously speaking, of unfruitful knowledge. The hearer of the Word who is not a doer, is compared with the man who continueth in the perfect law of liberty besides looking into it. The first does but realise a fleeting and unproductive impression; the second baa undergone a change of lit. The most intellectual of the Greeks, whose thou-lits abod (Jod and the soul might at times almost seem U) antieipate 1 S. John xvii ::. » S. John 41. »1 Oar. viii i. *S. Junes i. 2 J 1 6 Is religion another name for morality ? [Lect. Christianity, as they have been welcomed with the respect of many a generation of Christians, has unwittingly warned us of the religious impotence of mere culture, by staining his pages, not once or twice, but habitually, with sympathetic re- ferences to crimes, tolerable enough to the public sentiment of Athens, but the very names of which are defiling to Chris- tian lips. The most intellectual Gnostics were sensualists ; sensualists upon a theory and with deliberation. 1 And modern history, if it were worth our while to consult it here, yields many a warning that intellectual culture about religious things is one thing, and genuine religion quite another. Henry VIII., who had been destined for the English Primacy, was among the best read theologians of his day ; but whatever opinion may be entertained of his place, as a far-sighted statesman, in English history, no one would seriously speak of him as personally religious. Intelligence indeed, however cultivated, is only a depart- ment of human life. Man is something greater than a culti- vated intellect ; even than an intellect cultivated by study of the highest objects that can be presented to it, — by study of the things of God. More than this is needed to con- stitute religion ; which, if it be not merely a sentiment or passion, so certainly it is more than an intellectual effort, however serious be its purpose or sublime its goal. 3. Are we then to say, with a large section of the modern world, that the essential thing in religion is morality ? This 1 S. Irenaeus, Hser. i. 6, 3. Sib drj icai tcl airetpyix^va irdvra dSetos ol reXetoTaroi irp&TTovaiv clvt&v, irepl &v at ypcupal diapefiaLOvvTai, tovs iroiovvras ai'ra (3aai\eiav Qeov p.7] K\r)poPO/JLr}(reiv. Cf. 1 Cor. vi. 9, 10. L] Morality essential to trtie religion. 1 7 was the teaching of Iinmanuel Kant. Eeligion, as he phrases it, is a practical recognition of the Divine origin of the moral law. 1 And it is a doctrine which constantly meets us in the society and- the general literature of our own country at the present day. Its popularity is easy of explanation in an age when belief in the Unseen has been seriously weakened among those classes of the people to which the political necessity of strengthening virtues which purify life and uphold society is pre-eminently obvious. And certainly we must admit that religion has no more appropriate work than the regulation of human life in accordance with moral truth: it is in this province especially that we look for evidences of its reality and its power. "By their fruits ye shall know them,"- said its one great Master, of certain religious aspirants. "Pure religion," according to His Apostle, "and undefiled before God and the Father, is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in theil a miction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." 3 In other words, it is active philanthropy and per- sonal purity, The language used to describe it in the Bible, implies thai knowledge of religion and religious emotion are, as we has r seen, worse than incomplete, if they do not lead to active goodness. 4 What a man knows or feels is Of little im- port, until it is ascertained what he does,or rather whal lie is. 8 J But it by no means follows that morality can be truly described as the essence of religion. It differs torn religion 1 Quot in Luthardt: ApologetUche Vortrage, 1. 6. * S. Matt vii. 16. • S. James « S. Matt vii. 22, 23 ; 2 S I 1 . wi\. 3, 5; Rom. viii. I C 1 8 Morality, how related to religion. [Lect. in this, that morality is conformity to a law of right, while religion is essentially a relation towards a Person. A perfect, absolute morality will cover the same practical ground as true religion. But if men endeavour to treat morality as the only essential element in religion, and accordingly attempt to plant it on some independent basis, physical or otherwise, of its own — two things will happen. Such a morality will be much narrower than a religious morality; it will, in the judgment of religious men, present an incomplete view of the real cycle of duty ; notably, it will fail to recognize that most important side of duty which we owe exclusively to God. But, besides this, morality,' divorced from religion, will tend more and more, from the nature of the case, to approximate to a depart- ment of mere human law; to concern itself only with acts and not with motives ; to make the external product, and not the internal governing principle, the supreme con- sideration. Morality, severed from religious motive, is like a branch cut off from a tree : it may, here and there, from accidental causes, retain its greenness for a while ; but its chance of vigorous life is a very slender one. Nor is it possible to popularize a real morality, a morality that shall deal with motives as well as with acts, without unveiling to the eye of the soul something more personal than an abstract law. It is when man has caught sight of the one Perfect Being, and in the effort to escape from the weak- ness and degradations of his own earthly life, " lifts up his soul" to this unseen, all-powerful, all-bountiful Friend, L] Religion a bond between man and God. 19 that he may hope to discover the true ideal of his life, and to realize it. Eeligion is thus the constant spring and best guarantee of morality; but morality is not the " essence of religion." Eeligion consists fundamentally in the prac- tical recognition of a constraining bond between the inward life of man and an unseen Person. x The ancients were fond of discussing the derivation of the word religion ; and Cicero refers it to that anxious habit of mind which cons over again and again all that bears on the service of heaven. 2 Lactantius may be wrong in his etymo- logy, but he has certainly seized the broad popular sense of the word, when he connects it with the idea of an obliga- tion by which man is bound to an invisible Lord. 3 With this the Biblical phraseology is in substantial har- mony. The expressions which describe the religion of the earliest Patriarchs are in point; and, like much else in the Pentateuch, they mould the later language of the Psalter. Enoch and Noah are said to have "walked with God;" Abraham was hidden " walk before the face of God, and be perfect" 4 Here God is represented as the houmlen Com- panion of a man's life, as well as his all-surveying J and Master; and this idea of religion as personal devoted- boGod underlies all the representations of Sc riptur e 1 Compare Eus. Pr»p. Ev. 1,2. i) rpbs t6p tra *al n6vo* wi &\r\BCn 6fio\oyovnev6u re kclI 6rra Qc6v &i>d¥€vaii kclI if Kara rovror fW^. 9 Nut. I tear. (L 23. Qui omnia que ad cultum deorum pertinerent. .lirti sunt n ralagndo, I • Oh iv 88. \ in ul |.i«t mys- terious:" hut he <>nl\ MuvirtU-d in leading a certain num- 1 i>i 24 2. Definiteness of true religion. [Lect. ber of minds to a belief that it is false. That " the Gospel contains nothing contrary to reason " is the conviction of every Christian, who knows that right reason and revela- tion are alike gifts of God. That the Gospel "contains nothing above reason/' is an assertion so paradoxical, as to be undeserving of a reply from those who believe that the historical and doctrinal statements of the New Testament are integral elements of the Gospel. Toland, indeed, could only make any approach to demonstrating his thesis, by tampering with the ordinary and world-wide sense of the term " Mystery;" and since the days of Toland science her- self has, by her discoveries, made men feel more keenly than did our fathers the mysteriousness of Nature, and through Nature, of Nature's God. 2. Next, God's answer to man's prayer must, at least within limits, be definite. An answer made up altogether of vague hopes, aspirations, surmisings, guesses, probabilities, whatever its other merits, will not meet the specific needs of man. What does man seek in seeking a religious creed ? He seeks intellectual satisfaction and moral support. His intellect asks for reliable information upon certain subjects of the most momentous importance. How does he come to be here ? Whither is he going ? What is the purpose and drift of the various forms of existence around him ? Above all, what is the nature, what are the attributes and dispositions, of that Being to Whom the highest yearnings of his inmost self constantly point as the true object of his existence ? In asking that the answers to these questions shall be I.] Moral and intellectual reasons for it, 2 5 definite, that what is certain shall be affirmed as certain, what is doubtful as doubtful, what is false as false, he is only asking that his religious information shall be pre- sented in as clear and practical a shape as his information on other subjects. In no department of human knowledge is haziness deemed a merit: by nothing is an educated mind more distinguished than by the resolute effort to mark the exact frontiers of its knowledge and its ignorance ; to hesitate only when hesitation is necessary ; to despair of knowledge only when knowledge is ascertainably out of reach. Surely on the highest and most momentous of all subjects this same precision may be asked for with reve- rence and in reason ; surely the human mind is not bound to forget its noblest instincts when it approaches the throne and presence of its Maker. Yet more necessary are definite statements of troth and duty to the moral side of human life. To obey at all, we must know what are the true limits of obedience, and what the nature and authority of the lawgiver. A soldier under Ore lias two things to do: first to attend to the \\ commanding officer, and then to strengthen his will I the Considerations which may enable him to do his duty. Man, as a moral \> «1 in a perpetual campaign 1 the invading forces of temptation which assail him from without, and the insurrectionary outbreaks of lawless 'mm within. If he is I essfil] resi8- tance, lie musl he penetrated l.y a< D that it is of vital importance to resist to the last exti 26 Theology necessary to religion. [Lect. conviction must itself be made up of and depend upon other convictions, such as the sanctity of God, His power, His omnipresence, the interest which He takes in our suc- cess, the strength with which He supplies us, the certainty that He will come to judge us. A faltering, hazy represen- tation may feed an aimless sentimentalism ; it is useless for the purposes of an earnest moral struggle. An exact creed and code of conduct is therefore a need of man's mental and moral nature, and all religious systems, whatever their truth or falsehood, have attempted to satisfy it. The answer to this need, with which we are familiar, is that contained in the Christian theology ; and we use that w T ord in its broad sense, as including the whole cycle of revealed doctrine and morals. Theology, in its scientific exhibition, results from the effort which the Christian mind makes from age to age to reduce to a precise and working form the deposit of truth committed at the first to the Chris- tian Church. It is the elaborate inventory which century after century the Church has been taking of the priceless treasures which were committed to her keeping in the age of the Apostles. What doctrines may and may not be catalogued in that inventory without serious inaccuracy, is a point upon which, unhappily, there are wide divisions in the Christian world ; but in the fifty generations of Christians from the first until the present age there has never been any sort of question as to the duty of ascertaining, as correctly as may be, what are the truths which Christ and His Apostles have taught, what is the exact area and I.] Aisthetic objections to definiteness. 27 import of these truths, what their moral and social signi- ficance, what our practical duties towards them. Yes ; but it is said, has not this inveterate instinct of the Christian mind been fatal to the beauty of religious truth ? Is not religious truth better left in the vague, hazy distance of popular thought ? Is it not vulgarized by this nearer probing, by this inquisitive anxiety to make out exactly what it is ? Is not the New Testament vague and undecided, and are we likely to improve upon it ? Are not the clergy, too, under a temptation to confuse between their professional instinct of making the most of their title-deeds, and the real broad interests of Christendom ? Has not Christendom, in fact, suffered by over-definitions, by false definitions ; and this in former ages as certainly as in our own ? Certainly there are arguments which may be urged against definitions; and first of all on aesthetic grounds. A picture of Turner's is a more beautiful thing than a working drawing; but if your object be to give the measurements of a pnblie edifice, Turner's picture would not be the more useful guide of the two. It is easy to advise a man to "study and admire the poetry of Isaiah and S. John, without troubling himself with the troth of their theological dogmas, or even of I rical statements." No doubt the poetry of the 1 t and of the Prophel ia of ronftumxnate beauty, but it is not their poetry w hieli has ini] I 111 on the thought and heart of the ( 'hristian world. The really importantques- t ion about both th« rs is, whai | exactly teach 28 Definiteness of the Nezv Testament. [Lect. upon the gravest subjects that can interest thoughtful men ? And next, is their teaching true ? The answer to this, to be worth having, must be a sharply defined answer ; and art, if needs be, must make a sacrifice to the demands of truth. That there have been unnecessary definitions, rash defini- tions, false definitions in Christendom, must be frankly granted; that they are still possible cannot be denied, in view of contemporary events; that they have injured the cause of Christ cannot be doubted. But the ques- tion is as to the principle of definiteness, not as to its abuse : false definitions, like false miracles, imply the true, of which they are a counterfeit and caricature. As to the New Testament, those who speak of its teaching as indefinite, appear to confuse between its substance and its form. Made up as it is of four biographical sketches, of one narrative of the lives and works of some missionary teachers, of twenty-one letters, six of them addressed to individuals, and of one description of a heavenly vision, its form is, of necessity, unmethodical ; it is, if you will, anti-scholastic. But its form is distinct from its substance ; and from age to age the clear import of its sub- stance is pressed upon the imagination and heart of the world by the matchless beauties of its form. The teaching of the New Testament indefinite ! It is simple paradox. What can be more definite than the account of Christ's Birth, of His Miracles, of His Besurrection, of His Ascension into heaven, in the first three Gospels ? What more definite than the awful representation of His Person in the fourth ? L] Definiteness of the New Testament. 29 Is tlie account of justification in the Epistle to the Romans and the Galatians indefinite ? Or that of the Eucharist and the supernatural gifts of the Spirit in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, or that of the incorporation of the Church with the living and triumphant Christ in the letters to the Colossians and Ephesians, or that of its organization in the Pastoral Epistles ? Is it not rather true that the New Testament is much too definite for modern unbelief, and that the real crime of the Church is, not that she has added the quality of definiteness to the writings of the Apostles and the Evangelists, but that she has persistently called attention to that quality which from the first, and from the nature of the case, belonged to them ? How, indeed, could it be otherwise? How would the cry of humanity for light and guidance have been answered? how would it not rather have been mocked and scorned, by a revelation of the indefinite; by a revelation of mists whereof none could decide the fron- tiers, or unfold the meaning; or insist upon the worth \ Such a revelation would have in fact revealed nothing; nothing that might not have been in some di surmised by reason; nothing that could invigorate the heart or control the will. And in Christianity God had not disappointed as. Ee has not contrived to say mnoh with- out asserting anything. If our Heavenly bather has not . ivd the petition of His children for the solid luvad of truth with a stone, He as certainly has aol met ii with a transcendental vapour. 3<3 3. Positive character of a true religion. [Lect. 3. Thirdly, a real answer to the religious needs of man must be positive. It must state what is truth, and not merely what is not truth. The soul of man does not look inward and upward only in the hope of detecting falsehoods: its deepest desire is to know, not what is not, but what is. Merely negative teachers are as the wind ; they destroy but they cannot build ; at their best they do but sweep away the unsubstantial fictions of human fancy or human fraud, but they erect nothing solid in the place of the discarded fictions. Positive truth alone can feed, sustain, invigorate the soul. It is no support in the hour of despondency or in the hour of temptation to reflect or to be told that such and such a doctrine or system is false. Possibly enough it is false; but what then ? Does a sense of its falsehood nerve the will to do and the heart to sustain when action and endurance are hard ? A sense of falsehood only supplies moral power so long and so far as you are confronted with the falsehood. You hate the lie, and your hatred imports force into your contradiction ; you loathe the idol, and a righteous scorn nerves your arm to shatter it. But when the idol has been pulverized and the lie is exploded, your force is gone. Your force was purely relative to the objects of its animosity, and it perished with them. ISTay, more ; even while they lasted, your force was good for nothing beyond and beside the function of destroy- ing them. Such force is like Jehu ; it is trenchant energy so long as vengeance has to be wreaked upon the house of Ahab; but it is abject impotence when the time comes for settling the polity of Israel on a sure foundation, and of I.] Unfruitf illness of religzotcs negations. 31 storing up a legacy of strength and safety for the coming times. Positive doctrine, on the other hand is, or ought to be, moral power. The whisper in the heart of the moral fool, " there is no God," can never add to his stock of moral strength. The faith of the Psalmist, " the Lord liveth," is at once followed by the exclamation, " and blessed be my strong Helper, and praised be the God of my salvation." 1 The soul cannot rest upon the void which is the result of that vast negation : it can and does draw comfort, strength, support, determination, as it grasps and leans upon this greatest of all assertions. This is a point which requires insisting on, especially in an age of criticism. Here and there criticism may vindicate an affirmation ; its more ordinary occupation is to destroy. It almost proceeds upon the assumption thai the soil of truth is encumbered on all sides with brushwood and rubbish, and that it can scarcely do wrong in burning and clearing away for ever. We may allow that there is legitimate and useful work for it to do; but it is not the less true that the temper of mind which it creates is prone to entertain a most serious misapprehension on religious matters. It, tends to beget the notion tliat religious truth is simply negation negation of false beliefs, negation of superstitious practices, negation of the errors and mistakes of other people; but scarcely anything that is really posi- tive, with a body and substance of its own. Very many people in this country, especially anions the educated 1 Tb. Kfffi. 17. 32 A true religion has negative aspects. [Lect. classes, conceive of religion in this way, and to their own unspeakable loss. What God is not, what Christ is not, what the atonement and work of Christ are not, what prayer is not, what sacraments are not; — these are the ques- tions with which they concern themselves almost exclu- sively. Yet the only question that is lastingly practical is what God, Christ, the atonement, prayer, the sacraments are. The negative conclusion does nothing beyond remov- ing one or more misconceptions, or being supposed to do so ; or rather it does something which were better undone. It satisfies the vague sense that religion is too important a concern to be entirely passed by : it furnishes a form of interest in religion, of strictly intellectual interest, that may be warranted to entail no practical consequences. And thus the half-awakened conscience is again lulled to sleep, by en- countering a religious idea which only presents itself to be discarded ; and the eyes of the spirit close, perhaps for ever. Do I say that a true faith has no negative aspects ? Certainly not. The Jewish faith was a negation of Poly- theism : Christianity is a negation of Polytheism, and of much besides. The most characteristic writings of the great Apostle are protests against false ideas of the work of Christ : the most elaborate of the Catholic creeds contains a repudiation of errors which deny the truth of the Divine Nature, or the truth of the Person of Jesus. But in these cases the negation does not stand alone ; it is only the inevitable corollary of a greater affirmation. Unlike the dreary criticism which makes a solitude in the human I.] 4. Absoluteness of the trite religion. 33 spirit, and then sardonically calls it peace, the negations of the Creed do but remove obstructions to its positive statements : they clear a space in thought for laying the foundations and raising the walls of a solid edifice, within which the Divine Architect has provided for the most urgent wants of man. 4. Yet again, if man's deepest needs are to be satisfied, he must believe that his creed is absolutely, and not merely relatively, true. Eelative truth — truth which is true only to certain persons or under certain circumstances — ceases to be truth when those persons and circumstances pass. It is transient; and to say that truth is transient, is to quality the idea of truth by an attribute which destroys it. Rela- tive truth is not truth, in the plain sense of the term ; it is only opinion ; it is opinion which in the event proves to be unfounded. We are often told that Christianity, like the other positive religions of the world, is relatively true ; and hard words are used of Christians, who say that its truth is absolute if it be true at all. Yet how can a creed profess to be relatively true without admitting itself to be really false? It was pardonable in Benhadad'a Syrians to suggest that the God of Israel was only a God of tin hills ; hut no bdi Israelite could have -ranted this without denvin- th. : : ait idle of his creed. And Philosophy has sometimes meant bo befriend Christianity, by asserting that it teaches a rela- tive truth. She bids believers make the best of it, on the ground thai it' not absolutely true, Li ia a phase of truth, D 34 Worth of u relative" truth in religion. [Lect. true to the believer, true provisionally, although liable to be superseded by a higher truth in days to come. But who could make the most of a creed with such an estimate of its worth as this ? Would any sensible man die for a " rela- tively true " religion ? Could it teach him the duties of prayer or self-sacrifice ? Would he live for it ? Would he be even interested for long in a philosophy which he believed to be only relatively true ? While the Ptolemaic system of the heavens lasted, it was supposed to be absolutely true : Would the ancient world have listened quietly to the Ptolemaic teachers had it suspected, however distantly, the advent of a Copernicus? The ceremonial element in the Jewish dispensation, as S. Paul has taught us, was only of relative authority. But it was believed by the Jews to be absolute. To see in it "a figure of the time then pre- sent," was already to have become a Christian. Any creed, whether true or false, must claim to be absolute, or it must make no claim at all, since upon faith in its absolute truth depends the necessity and reasonableness of all the acts, habits, efforts, sacrifices, which constitute its practical side — all the ventures, in short, which men make on account of it. To say that Christianity is only relatively true ; that it is but the prelude and introduction to some broader reli- gion of humanity, which will in time supersede it, is, in fact, to reject Christianity. For from the first Christianity has claimed to be the Universal Eeligion. It was destined from the first to embrace the whole world ; it was to last through- L] The universal religion must be absolute. 35 out the ages. " Go ye/' said its Founder, " and make dis- ciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost ;" and, " lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." x In this claim of universality, whether in time or range of empire, there lay the implied and further claim to be the Absolute Eeligion — the one final unveiling of the Universal Father's mind before the eyes of His children. 2 This con- viction underlies S. Paul's earnest apostolate of the Gentiles in the face of active Jewish prejudice. He "owed" 3 the absolute religion, as he could have owed no relative religion whatever, to the Greeks and to the Barbarians alike, to the philosophers and to the uneducated. To his eye all the deepest divisions of country, race, and station vanished entirely as men passed within the Church. " There is," he exclaimed, "neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor un- circumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ is all, and in all." 4 A religion conscious of being suitable only to particular dates or localities could never have originally aspired to bring within the range of its influence all the varieties of race and thought that are found in the Inn 1 11 1 1 family. It would feel its unsuitableness to some races, to some « i\ ili/ations, to some historical periods, if not to ill r» make all men see what is the fellowship of the ery which from the \w «»f the world hath been 1 S. Matt, xxwii. i:>, 20. * Baur : Vorlosungon Uber NcutegUmentlich* Theologio, p. 131. ■ K..111. i. 1 I. I ial. iii. 28. 36 5- Provision for the heart and will. [Lect. hid in God," x was an ambition appropriate " to the faith once for all delivered to the Saints." 2 5. Lastly, if man's religious wants are to he answered, his creed must speak, not merely to his intelligence, hut to his heart and will. He cannot really rest upon the most unim- peachable abstractions. He needs something warmer than the truest philosophy. He yearns to come in contact with a heart ; and no religion therefore can really satisfy him which does not at least lead him to know and love a person. An unseen Friend, who will purify, and teach, and check, and lead, and sustain him : — that is his great necessity. And this want, this last but deepest want of man's religious life, Christi- anity has satisfied. As humanity, " sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death," pleads with the Power Whom it feels but cannot see — "Shew Thou me the way that I should walk in, for I lift up my soul unto Thee " — lo ! the heavens drop down from above, and the skies pour forth righteousness. And One fairer than the children of men presents Himself to all the centuries and countries of the world with the gracious bidding, " Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." 3 In the Lectures which are to follow during the succeed- ing Sundays of Lent, an attempt will be made to insist upon some of the truths which are most fundamentally related to the soul's religious life, as they come into contact with some forms of modern thought. Of so vast a subject a few fragments are all that, from the nature of the case, 1 Eph. iii. 9. 2 S. Jude 3. 3 S. Matt. xi. 28. L] Anticipatiojis and cautions. 37 can possibly be offered. If we could say all that could be said, such truths must still shade off into the unknown. But we may at least endeavour to trace what we can see of their real outline, to quicken our sense of their positive contents, to deepen our convictions of their absolute and unchanging significance, to enhance the influence which they already exert over our moral natures. It is not well that such topics should be approached with no higher purpose than that of an intellectual enterprise. If we do not mean the cry, " Shew Thou me the way that I should walk in, for I lift up iny soul unto Thee," it were better not to enter on the holy ground. Eeligion indeed must always command the attention of practical men, because it is, at least, one of the most powerful forces, because it shapes the strongest ions, that can govern the conduct of large masses of man kind. It also will ever be interesting to serious thinkers, whether they accept its authority or not; for without controversy it has a word to say upon the highest ol of human thought. But for those who look at ii, not only from without but from within, not as a toy of the intellect, hut as a necessity of the soul, it must be something more than this. If there beany truth in its teachings at all. it' its aspirations he anything more than a waste ofheart and etVort. hed through 1 upon what are after all only weird or graceful phantoms of the brain, then nothing that ean occupy our thoughts oan really compare with it in point <»f absorbing and momentous import Beyond everything i'. must have imperious claims upon 1 38 Anticipations and cautions. [Lect. I. thought and working power of every human being who has ever felt, in any serious degree, the unspeakable solemnity of life and death. May God endow us with a sense of this interest in that which binds us to Himself, or may He deepen it ; and then, in answer to the longings which in every sincere soul it will assuredly foster, may He this Lent be merciful to us, each and all, and bless us, and shew us the light of His countenance, and be merciful unto us ! 1 1 Ps. lxvii. 1. LECTURE II. Second Sutras in Hent. GOD, THE OBJECT OF KELIGIOK Ps. xlii. 2. My soul is athirst for God, yea even for the living God : when shall I come to appear before the presence of God ? fTIHEEE is scarcely, even in the Psalter, a more touching ■*- psalm than this. The Psalmist is probably an exile of the early Assyrian period. In the land of his captivity, he is surrounded by all the institutions of an established idolatry, and, as he sadly reflects, he is far removed from the Holy Home of the race of Israel ; from the place which the Lord had chosen to put His name there ; from the worship and fellowship of the sacred commonwealth. His thought spans the intervening desert, and he dwells with a full and aching hear! on all that lies beyond it. He remembers the festival services in Jerusalem in bygone years, when he went with the "mull itude keeping holyday," when he,toO,had his share in the " voice of joy and pi .Vs he calls up in memory this cherished pari, he pours out his soul in secret grief; and while the cruel heathen around taunt him with the 40 The " living" God. [Lect. insulting question, Where is thy God ? he can only find refuge in tears ; his tears, as he tells us, flow by day and by night. When will the long years of exile have an end ? When will he come to " appear before the presence of God" ? He is like the thirsty stag, panting after the distant water- brooks ; his inmost being is " athirst for God, yea even for the living God." " The living God ! " What a strange, yet what a preg- nant phrase ! Surely, the Author of Life must live ; yet here is an expression which hints at the idea of deities who are not alive. It was thus that the Hebrews distinguished the true God Who had revealed Himself to their ancestors from the false gods of the nations around them. " As for all the gods of the heathen, they are but idols; but it is the Lord that made the heavens." * The heathen deities were so much carving, sculpture, and colouring; or they were so much human imagination or human speculation ; they had no being independent of the toil, whether of the hands or of the brains of men. They had no existence in themselves ; they did not live, whether men thought about them or not : as we should say, they had no objective existence. It was true that evil spirits, by lurking beneath the idol forms, or draping themselves in the debasing fancies of the heathen world, might contrive to appropriate the homage which the human heart in its darkness lavished upon its own crea- tions ; and thus the Canaanites are said, in their cruel Moloch-worship, to have sacrificed their sons and their 1 Ps. xcvi. 5. II.] Elements of truth in heathenism. 41 daughters unto devils. 1 But the broad contrast, latent in the expression " the living God," is the contrast between imagination and fact; between an Existing Being and a collection of fancy personages; between a solemn truth and a stupid and debasing unreality. We are not here concerned to inquire what elements of truth there may have been in the forms of heathen worship with which the Jews came into contact. 2 Some truth there certainly was in the most degraded of them ; since a religion which is pure undiluted falsehood could not continue to exist as a religion, and the false religions which do e only exist by virtue of the elements of truth which in varying proportions they severally contain. The lowest fetichism witnesses to the great truth, that man must go out of himself in order to seek for an adequate object of his heart-felt devotion — of his highest enthusiasms. And no instructed Christian would deny that certain forms of heathenism embrace incidentally the recognition of considerable tricts of fundamental truth. If, indeed, as S. Paul says, God teaches all men up to a certain point through nature and conscience, 3 it could not be otlu ml this inter- mixture of truth, which is thus latent in all heathenism. 1 !'s. OTJ 9 On the '• Dispensation of Paganism," see New Fourth Century, pp. ^7 *.»1 ; and the qu- ! ; ... Hfort\ th the former and the Utter, aw draw m one fount ; tl». n who win before the Law, not suffered to be without Law; 1 1 ear the Jewish philosophy, not surrendered to an unbridled me." 1. i. 10, 20. 42 Heathenism, how estimated in Scripture. [Lect. yields the best starting-point for convincing heathens of the errors which they admit, and of the truths which they deny beyond. 1 In this sense, undoubtedly, the science, which has been of late named Comparative Theology, may be made really serviceable to the interests of Christian truth. It is a widely different thing to start with an assumption that all the positive religions in the world, the Jewish and Christian revelations included, are alike conglomerate formations in very varying degrees, partly true and partly false ; and that the religion of the future — an etherealized abstraction, to be distilled by science from all the creeds and worships of mankind — will be something beyond, and distinct from all of them. Certainly heathenism is not treated, either in the Old Testament or in the New, with the tenderness which would befit such an anticipation as this. Practically speak- ing, and as contrasted with the revealed truth, whether Jewish or Christian, heathenism is represented as a lie. To live within its territorial range is to live in the kingdom of darkness ; 2 to practise its rites is to be an enemy to God by wicked works ; 3 to go after false gods is to have the earnest of great trouble, 4 and to provoke the anger of the real Lord of the Universe. The Assyrian idols did not raise in the exile's mind any question as to the stray elements of truth which might be underlying so much tawdry and impure error. * My soul," he cried, " is athirst for God, yea even 1 So S. Clem. Alex, speaks of Greek philosophy as virofiadpav ovaav ttjs /card Xpiarbp f completeness by S. Augustine, Boethius, S. Anselm, and To cite the two last, S. Ans. Proslog. 2, convincitur etiam us (Ps. xiv. 1) esse vel in intellectu aliquid quo nihil majus cogitari Et certe id quo majus cogitari nequit non potest esse in intellectu solo. Si enim vel in solo intellectu est, potest cogitari esse et in re quod lu.ijus est. Si ergo id quo majus cogitari non potest est in intrlhdu ; id i|< urn, quo majus cogitari non potest est quo majus cogitari potest: Bed >u potest. Existit ergo procul duhio aliquid quo majus ri lo-ii ralet, et in InteQeotQ et in re. Descartes observes (Medit dn I'rim. 1'liilos. 3, 4, sub fin.) " n-tiones nostras esse aut adventitial, nut f.u titi.is, aut innatas. Ideam de Deo non ease adventitiara, Deum enim non cx|»cricnt.i:l ihuv r.j.criri ; noque factitiam, nam non nrbitrio I Dobil cftictam esse; ergo ease innatam, sive a Deo ipso nobis suppe* • lit it. mi." Ilii is undoubtedly the weakest of the argument : bui its iv.il value should not be mistaken on account of the . with which it lends IteeU to the Hegelian doctrine that "God is 1 in so far as He has knowledge of Himself ; but His self-knowledge ns ■ \n in Mms.h.n un.l das Wis*en dee Menschen Ton vol p, 576, qu. by Grimm). 5 2 Instinctive apprehension precedes proof, [Lect. soul upon which Plato dilates; 1 it is the universal hypo- thesis which Aristotle registers; 2 it is the world-wide prejudice of Epicurus ; it is the " anticipation " naturally imbedded in the human mind, of Cicero. 3 It precedes de- monstration ; it is out of the reach of criticism ; it resists hostile argument. It is, speaking philosophically, a fact in psychological science, and a fact so fruitful and stimu- lating, that to it must be traced all in human life and effort that looks really upward, — man's love of truth, his clinging to a coming life, his aspirations to rise above the level of animal existence. It is, speaking religiously, in its way, a revelation ; it is a revelation of God within, as S. Paul says, answering to the revelation of God from without; it sets man's thought in motion as he gazes upon the natural world, and bids him not to rest until he has wrung from it a disclosure of the highest truth which it has to teach him. And thus, with this preparatory idea or intuition of a Divinity, the human mind approaches what are called the 1 Cf. the whole passage in Plato, de Legibus, ix. x. 899, c. d. e., qu. by Staudenmaier, Dogm. II. 22. 2 Arist. de Ccelo, 1-3. irdvres yap avOpwiroi irepl OeCov ^x 0Vi'-u, c. 1, 2. To the original form of the argument which, looking upon the world as an effect, seeks for its cause, Leihnits. adds a second, based upon the contingent nature of the world sad its several parts, which obliges us to leek In thr wp&rm klvovv, <>r First Cause, the Cm-hanging ami intrin- sic! I ly Necessary Being. This Necessary Being is not, as Strauss says, tli<- " ewigcs (J rui or the permanent material of the universe, m distinct from its ever-el use obliges us to go beyond the universe, wlmh, asa whole, is an .'fleet. On tl ther hand, the COSmologtosJ II ;um. nt doSl Bod of the instincts of piety — the " thirst, " ol tC ■ Of. jN Method of the Divine Government. * IV. Newton, Philos, Nat. Prinoip, 1. III. Rcholgen. Perseverabunt qi in orUbui suis per leges gravitatis, sed regularem orbium situm primitus aoquirire per has leges minime potu 54 The first caitse the Highest Intelligence, "[Lect. explanation of phenomena by natural causes leads us away from God and His Providence, that those philosophers who have passed their lives in discovering such causes can find nothing that affords a final explanation without having recourse to God and His Providence." 1 The father of the inductive philosophy does but speak the common sense of religion ; but will it be maintained, except by writers who are prepared to deny the existence of causation, that he does not also utter the common sense of scientific thought ? Does the universe tell us anything as to the nature of its First Cause ? Surely we may at least presume that the Author of the natural world must be higher and greater than anything in the natural world. 2 Water will not rise above its source ; and it is inconceivable that, if there be an Author of nature at all, His Self-existent Life must not be higher and nobler than any life which He has bestowed. Who does not see the force of the Psalmist's argument, " He that made the ear, shall He not hear ? and He that gave the eye, shall He not see ?" 3 Above the life of the 1 De Augm. Scient., iii. 4. Adeo ut tantum absit ut causae physicae hominem a Deo et Providential abducant, ut contra potius philosophi illi qui in iisdem eruendis occupati fuerunt, nullum exitum rei reperiant, nisi pos- tremb ad Deum et providentiam confugiant. 2 That the one true God may be known from His works in Nature is taught, as against Gentile idolatry, in Isaiah xliv. ; xlv. 18, sqq. ; Acts xiv. 15-17 ; xvii. 22, sqq. ; Rom. i. 19-20. That the natural world witnesses to the beauty of His Being and Attributes is implied in Psalms viii. 2-4 ; xix. 1, sqq. ; civ., passim, &c. Holy Scripture, of course, does not demonstrate the existence of Him Whose true Nature it unveils ; but it points to the natural world as involving for all reasoning beings the privilege and the responsibility of some knowledge of its Author's existence, and of His character. 3 Ps. xciv. 9. II.] The Teleological Argument. 55 tree, there is that of the animal ; above that of the animal, there is the life of man. Man, with all his ingenuity and will, cannot produce a leaf or a shell-fish : and is it to be supposed that the author of man's life is less endowed with thought and volition than man ? We may paraphrase the Psalmist : He That made the human intellect, shall He not think ? And how came it to exist, if He did not make it ?* There are chasms in the natural world which no theories substituting a fated self-development for the free action of God will really bridge over. There is the chasm between the inorganic and the organic; the chasm between the lifeless and that which lives; the chasm between animal instinct and the reflective consciousness. At each of these levels of creation we seem to feel more sensibly than else- where the fresh intervention of a creating Intelligence; and our conviction of His activity is strengthened when we observe the interdependence and harmony of t lie uni- verse as a whole, in which each part is necessary, in wlii.li nothing is really out of place, and between the several elements of which new relations are continually coining to li^lit, as if to justify II lit and to enhance our estimate of II m inexhaustible resomoee. 1 "Those 1 Botsuet, (Euv. i. 79. Si nous 6tions tous seuls intelligent* dans la monde, nous seula nous fandriflM ulMX avoc notre intelligence imparfaitc, quo toute la reste, qui serait tout-a-fait brute at stupide, et on ne pourrait compre- hendre d*on viendrsit dans ce tout qsjj u'untend pas cette partie qui entend, 1 int. Uigence ne pouvant naitre d'une chose brute et inasnsse. 'ogical argument for the existence of God, which sees a purpose in t li«" forces and laws of the natural world, and in the events of human history, has been chiefly discredited in modern times by the popular suppo- sition th.it modem attacks upon the doctrine of final causes have been really 56 God, how related to the Cosmos. [Lect. persons/' says Montesquieu, "who maintain that a blind fate has produced all the effects we see in the world, main- tain that which is a great absurdity ; for what absurdity can be greater than a blind fate producing intelligent beings V n How do you know, a Bedouin was asked, that there is a God ? " In the same way," he replied, " that I know, on looking at the sand, when a man or a beast has crossed the desert — by His footprints in the world around me." III. Thus does the common sense or reason of man lead him up to recognizing One Supreme Intelligence as at least the original cause of all that he is and sees around him. But then the question arises, what is the relation that actually subsists between this Highest Intelligence and the uni- verse ? To this question there are two leading answers. successful. For a partial and popular consideration of some recent objec- tions to Final Causes, urged by Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Lewes, and others, cf. M'Cosh, Christianity and Positivism, pp. 78-88. Even if a doctrine of evolution should in time be accepted as scientifically, and so as theologically certain, such a doctrine would not be inconsistent either with that belief in the original act of creation which is essential to Theism, or with " the recog- nition of plan and purpose in the number and variety of animated beings." " Evolution," from a Theistic point of view, is merely our way of describing what we can observe of God's continuous action upon the physical world ; and because the phrase seems tacitly or poetically to invest the universe with a power of self -unfolding, it does not follow that the question of an Intelligent Creator and Ruler is thereby decided in the negative by those who employ it. 1 Esprit des Lois. Cf. Ps. xiv. 1. II.] God banished from the world by Detsm. 57 The Deist so far agrees with the Christian, as to admit that God is related to the world as its Creator ; and that He must have made it out of nothing by the fiat of His Will. But with this admission — momentous as it is — the old Deism practically closes its account of God's free personal action upon His work. Since the creation, God's action is represented as being practically superseded by a system of unchangeable routine ; and this routine is conceived to be so strictly invariable, as to bind the liberty of the pre- sumed Agent. The Deistic theory of the universe might remind us of the relations which, at least until some very recent events, were understood to exist between the Government of Egypt and the Sublime Porte. There occasionally a formal recognition of the sovereign p on the part of the nominal dependency, but Egypt was governed by a practically independent Viceroy ; the 9 rain's name was mentioned rarely, or only in a formal way; his active influence would have been at once resented, the real power being lodged elsewhere. Ac- eording to the old Deism, God created the world ; bat He cannot he supposed ever to interfere with the ordinary laws of its government. He cannot work miracles ; Ee is, in no . ;i Pr«»\ idenee. He is well out of the Way of aetive human interests: it is not to be supposed that He can hen the prayer of a worm writhing on one of 11 planets; thai the happiness or misfortunes of a larger sort .if animal. Mil;! e Him any real concern. Bo lie is throned by the Deistie writes in magnifioeni inactivity 58 Deis tic apotheosis of Nature. [Lect. at a very remote corner of the universe, while a new power has practically taken His place. In the last century, at the first great outburst of Deistic thought, Nature practically superseded God. Men talked and wrote persistently about the laws of Nature, the moods of Nature, the religion of Nature : Nature was so vividly and constantly personified in conversation and in literature, that the European world might be supposed to have lighted upon a new goddess, charged, in a very special sense, with the interests of humanity. We live in a more positive and realistic age ; and where our fathers talked of Nature, modern Deism names " laws." What is lost in pictur- esqueness is gained in truth. There is no such person as Nature; but there are observable modes of the Divine activity, which may never vary within the experience of a race. Order is, as Christians know, a characteristic of all God's works ; but He, the Almighty, is so little enslaved by the rules which He freely observes, that moment by moment He wills the very order that seems to bind His liberty. Deism, however, really means by " laws " — forces which have become somehow independent of God; fatal forces, which defy His power to innovate upon their resist- less play. But what can this impotent Deistic God, from whose control his universe has so escaped as to constitute itself a self-governing machine, — say or do to meet the aspirations, or relieve the despondencies of the human soul ? If we cannot love and trust volcanic forces, or vital forces, the laws of growth or the laws of decomposition; II.] Deistic experiments of Robespierre. 59 can we love and trust a being who has left this universe to itself ; who surveys it, if he does survey it, in the cynicism of an unbroken silence from a very distant throne ; to whom its vast oceans of hope and fear, and struggle and disappointment, and triumph and failure — all the mysteries of its moral life, are of no more concern than they are to the rocks and seas around us ? No, the god of Deism does not quench the religious thirst of the soul. The soul of man seeks the Living God, not a deity who is as remote from human interests as was the Jupiter of expiring Paganism. The French Eevolution was fertile in religious or irreli- gious experiments; and as it endeavoured to satisfy the human soul with Atheism, so it made yet more strenuous effort to satisfy it with Deism. 1 Eobespierre had publicly 1 So Alison. Compare Pressense*, l'Eglise et la Revolution, p. 294. La fete eut lieu le 20 prairial. Rien n'avait dtd e*pargne" pour la rendre grandiose et cependant elle n'e'vita pas les puerility's ridicules. Robespierre, president de la Convention, en bel habit bleu, avec un bouquet de fruits et d'e*pis dans les mains, prit place avec tous sea collegues sur rainphithe'atre elevd au inilu-u drs Tuilciies. Aprbs un pompeux discours, il en desceiulit jnmr incendier la statue de 1' Atheisme, promptement remplacee par celle de la Sagesse qui parut niillu ui.us, un nt, tres enfumee. Des Tuileries la Convention se rendit ;m Champ mini par le cri de vivt la RtpuUique. Ces pompes d'opera eomiquc, ml ...Irs ridicules et ces rites glace* apprenaient a la France qu'il est 1<< decreter un changement de religion que de l'operer. Jamais au- nr fondcra un culto d i ut ce qu'il essay era dans ce genre tombera 60 The Sotcl's thirst unsatisfied by Deism. [Lect. declared that Chaumette deserved deatli for trie abomina- tions which accompanied the Feast of Eeason in Notre Dame, on November 7, 1793 ; and he took a leading part in the Feast of the Supreme Being, which was celebrated in the gardens of the Tuileries and in the Champ de Mars, on June 9, 1794. The Convention decreed that he should discharge the duties of Supreme Pontiff on the occasion. The Deism of Eobespierre was sufficiently vivid to admit of his believing that God does rule the affairs of men ; he maintained with particular earnestness that God hates kings and priests. The undeniable eloquence of the presi- dent of the Convention, the art and industry of the painter David, the music, the costumes, the political enthusiasm at fever height, did all that could be done for the success of the festival. But you cannot lash a multitude into devo- tion to a remote and hypothetical abstraction by any elaborate display of ceremonial ; and the real deity of the occasion was Eobespierre. As he marched along, over- shadowed with his plumes, and adorned with his tricolor scarf, while the air resounded with cries of " Vive Eobe- spierre," his countenance, says the historian, was radiant with joy. " See how they applaud him," said his colleagues. " He would become a god: he is no longer the High Priest of the Supreme Being." History does not ascribe to this attempt any special efficacy in reviving among the French sous la risee publique. La fete fut trouvee bien longue, surtout pour ceux qu irritait le r61e preponderant de Robespierre. On raconte qu'un repre- sentant moins patient que ses collegues lui dit en termes d'une trivialite energique: " Tu commences a nous ennuyer avec ton Etre Supreme." II.] God buried in the world by Pantheism. 6 1 people a sense of their duties towards their forgotten Maker. The most tangible result of the day was the decree proposed by Couthon, for increasing the powers of the Revolutionary Tribunal. To the question, What is the relation between the universe and the Supreme Intelligence ? another and a very different answer has been given. If Deism practically banishes God from the world, Pantheism, at least, sees what it calls God everywhere, and in everything. 1 The Pantheistic god is the common principle which not only is held to constitute the unity of, but which is, the universe. According to Benedict Spinoza, 2 God is the one eternal sub- stance, which makes its appearance in the twofold realm of thought and of matter. Out of it all individual forms of existence are constantly emerging, and like waves upon the ocean, they are as constantly sinking back into, and being absorbed by it, as the common stream of universal life. God alone is, says Fichte, and apart bom Him is nothing, 3 — a great truth in one sense, and a great falsehood in another. Hegel teaches thai the Absolute is the universal reason; which, after having buried and lost itself in nature, recovers itself in man. in the shape of self-eon-. thought Man'.- thought of (io.l, therefore, is the true God, the only existing God. God exists only in human thou 1 \\ P- 240. Panthoiamus — ea scntvntia qua i diviiiani mundo mi| ponaut ot Dcum ao mundum unuui idcinque mm hi: A limit. I iu tit «l(Deo. o. 2. Suppl. ad. opp. Amat. 1862. For hia Theory tance, cf. Ethic, p. 1, 1 1 lite, Von S, ! I 62 Secret of the strength of Pantheism. [Lect. human thought is the reason of nature arriving at self- consciousness. Man thinks of God, and, in man's thinking, God exists ; He has no independent or personal existence. 1 The great attraction and strength of Pantheism lies in the satisfaction which it professes to offer to one very deep and legitimate aspiration ; it endeavours to assure man of his real union with the source of his own and of the universal life. It is this profound idea, this most fascinat- ing allurement, that can alone explain the empire, which, in various ages and under various forms, Pantheism has wielded in human history. It inspires Eleatic and Indian philosophies ; it is the animating principle of such wor- ship of the generative and life-sustaining powers in nature, as was, for instance, that of the Phoenician Baalim. Since Lessing, Spinoza has almost reigned in certain districts of cultivated Europe, and Germany is by no means the only home of the thought of Schelling and of Hegel. In its later forms Pantheism is, speaking historically, a reaction from and a protest against the older Eationalistic Deism. It often represents a noble plea that God shall not be banished by modern thought from all real contact with humanity : nay, it would fain essay to do in its way what the Divine Incarnation has actually done ; it would make men partakers of the Divine Nature. And this, its religious aim, is beyond question a main secret of its power. 1 Hegel's fundamental error consists in his identification of the "abstract thought" of man with the "Absolute Thought." Fiehte (Zeitschrift fur Philosophic, Bd. 17, § 292) says that this is " nicht niir hochst willkurlich und grundlos, sondern eine contradictio in adjecto." Qu. by Hettinger ; cf. Hegel, Phil, der Eel. §§ 207, 261, 263 ; Encycl. § 56. II.] Does it satisfy the thirst of the Soul? 63 Yet does the Pantheistic deity afford any real satisfac- tion to the needs of the soul of man ? Can he be the object of any serious religious effort whatever ? What is there in him to which the life of religion can possibly attach itself ? He is not a person : for Pantheism necessarily denies the existence of personality. He is not a cause: for Pan- theism cannot tolerate any doctrine of causation. He is not even, as the Absolute Substance, in anywise distinct from phenomena ; for, while it is loyal to its central position, Pantheism cannot afford to admit the correctness of such a distinction. What is he then ? He is only a fine name for the universe. He has no existence apart from it : he is the universal life, of which you and I are transient manifesta- tions or forms. You may indeed encounter him draped and veiled in a phraseology so reverent and tender, that it might seem to have been borrowed from the inmost shrines of Christian mysticism ; but when you force yourself to look at the hard reality beneath, you find that it is practi- cally identical with that presented by Materialism. 1 If God be in reality only the spirit or life of the universe, how can He provoke the yearnings of the soul, or how- satisfy its aspirations ? How can He be the objed . % 1 of religious homage, or of religious trust? How can we yield love, oto idi< nee, worship to a mere torrent of existence that Bows onwards inexorably beneath our feet; we, the ripples, who do bu1 rise upon its surface to sink away 1 StraoM, <;i. 1, § ;.ir. s, in.- i\i •.:.-.:. Dun ; aber Mint ruale Existenz ist die Natur, eu welcher das einselne Denk- ende als Moment gclu 64 Pantheism, the sanction of moral evil. [Lect. after our little moment of undulation ? Or how can a sensible and modest man love, trust, worship, his own self- consciousness, under the idea that in each reflecting mind God has become conscious of Himself ? Nay, if religion has anything to do with reverence for goodness and with abhorrence of moral evil, if it is not a sentiment that has been rendered by modern speculation wholly independent of moral truth, how can we worship either an inner self into which, as we must each of us know, evil penetrates so constantly and so pervadingly; or an universal life of which in its highest, that is its human, manifestation, evil is, as a matter of fact, more frequently an accompaniment than good ? How, I say, can such an absolute principle be the object of religion, if its activity be manifested not less truly in murder and lust than in heroism and unselfish- ness ; if the darkest forms of evil stand to it in a relation just as necessary as do the highest forms of good ; if by it, in a word, all moral distinctions whatever are really annihilated ? Between Pantheism and an earnest hatred of moral evil there is accordingly a necessary opposition, and this reason alone establishes a permanent divorce between it and any true effort at communion with the All-Pure, such as all that is best in us enjoins. But further, that which in a Christian, as in any earnest Theist, makes Pantheism im- possible, is the first article of his creed : " I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." As the act of creation was not witnessed, so it cannot be demon- II.] Relapse of Pantheism into Materialism. 65 strated. " By faith we understand that the worlds were made by the word of God." x Creation interposes an immeasur- able chasm between the Creator and the creature ; be- tween that Pure and Awful Life Which is indebted to none else either for existence or support, and this life of depend- ence, weakness, corruption. And belief in creation is a necessary outwork of any true theism whatever: deny 1 Heb. xi. 3. That God created the universe is the first truth which Scrip- ture teaches us about Him, Gen. i. 1. Cf. Job xxxviii. 4-7 ; Ps. xxxiii. 6-9, thus revealing His majestic beauty; Ps. xix. 1-7 ; xcvii. 1-6 ; cxix. 64. The Jews knew that this creation involved not merely the bringing order and life, £$■ d/j.6p(pov vXrjs, Wisd. xi. 17, but also originally the calling this form- less material itself into being, ££ ovk 6vtwv, 2 Mac. vii. 2S. In the Testament, creation is generally referred to as furnishing arguments for moral truths or duties ; as by our Lord, Matt. xix. 4-6, for its witness to the indissolubility of the marriage tie ; and by S. Paul, as yielding proof ol I real relation to the world, Acts xvii. 24; or of His interest in the whole human family, and of our duty of seeking Him, ib. 26 ; for the refutation of a false dualistic asceticism, 1 Tim. iv. 3 ; cf. Eph. iv. 6. That He has created all things and for Himself is His title to praise and adoration, Itev. iv. 11. Although the New Testament does not in express terms speak of creation out of nothing, it implies this truth. S. Paul's argument* in Acts xvii. 24, and 1 Tim. iv. 3, would lose their force, if it were true that God was not the maker of matte* M wall as the arti gave it form, while the doxology of Rev. iv. 11 could not be truthfully addressed bo a Being who had not created matter, or who had formed any- material which he did n.«t create. The &nop<; of S. Justin Martyr (Apol. i. Id), and even the i\rj &xpovos of Clement (Phot, Bib! cod. LG9) k not nooasaarOj eternal] the oroalkm ol matti of nothing, ami of the world out of matter, \\< ■ i vali th at distance all human thou mlHaa pointed out that Qermogenee, tn reaching the e te r nity of matter, was really a Ditheist (Adv. Herm. c. 4.) The general U the ancient church is expressed by S. Augustine (Do fid. et symb. o. 2) : CredimuH omnia Deum feoisee de mini... quia, otiamsi de aliquA materift faotus est mundus, eadem ipsa materia, da nihil o facta est, ut ordinatissimo Dei munere primo oapaoitas formarum o deindf forman mtur qusBcunque formate sunt Hoc autem diximus, ne <|uis ( \i tim. t contraries sibi esse Scripturarum sententiaa : quoniam et omnia Drum Meat dl nihil-, script uui et, et lnundum MM factum dc in- fonni 66 The Creator present in His Works. [Lect. creation and you deny God. If God in His unfettered freedom did not summon into existence all that is, if the universe escaped from Him against His will, He is not alone the Omnipotent : if anything that we term matter or spirit has from the beginning co-existed side by side with Him, He is not alone the Eternal. 1 The difficulty is not met by phrases about the eternal Idea passing into reality ; since it will be asked how such a passage could have been effected, or rather, why it should have taken place at all ? A creative Will having no limits to its power, is at least intelligible, but the mind refuses to dwell seriously on such a process as a transmutation of thought into matter. In its attempt to explain itself, Pantheism practically sinks back into Materialism ; it has no expedients equal to the task of saving its god from burial beneath the materialistic chaos of matter and force. Will it be said that to believe in a Creator-God is to close the eye to the presence of God in creation ? But who that believes in the Omnipresent can limit His pre- sence ? Is not the original act of creation a warrant for the Creator's continued presence with and action upon His work? 2 The Apostle who taught the Athenians that God made the world and all things therein, taught them also, and in the same great sermon, that " He is not far from every 1 Cf . S. Aug. Conf. xii. 7. Fecisti ccelum et terrain non de Te, nam esset sequale Unigenito Tuo, et aliud praeter Te non erat, unde faceres, ideo de nihilo fecisti ccelum et terram. S. Iren. Hser. ii. 10, 4. Homines quidem de nihilo non possunt aliquid facere, sed de materia subjacenti: Deus autem materiam fabricationis suae, cum ante non esset, ipse adinvenit. 2 S. John v. 17. II.] S. Augustine 011 God and the Universe. 67 one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being." 1 To assert God's presence in His works is one thing ; to identify Him with them is another. His omnipresence is a necessary attribute of His Deity ; while if He could be identified with nature He would cease to be. If the mystery of life, which attests God's presence in the natural world, was ever felt in all its awe and its beauty by any human soul, it was felt by the great Augustine. Witness the often quoted passage of the Confessions in which he tells us why nature was in his eyes so beautiful, by telling us how nature had led him up to God. " I asked the earth, and it said: 'I am not He;' and all that is upon it made the same confession. I asked the sea and the depths, and the creeping things that have life, and they answered: 'We are not thy God; look thou above us.' I asked the breezes and the gales; and the whole air, with its inhabi- tants, said to me : ' Anaximenes is in error, I am not God.' [ asked the heaven, the sun, the moon, the si s;ii hoiv far affected by the Fall. [Lect. the Universe." But although the human conscience is an earnest theistic apologist in exact proportion to its vitality, its affirmation of God should not be divorced from the in- tellectual inferences which the universe suggests to us. The evidential strength of Theism, like that of Christianity, lies not in any single proof, but in the collective force of the various evidences which are producible in its favour; and of these, the cry of conscience, if the strongest practically, is, after all, only one. Nor does it follow that because con- science is a true guide towards the throne of a Living and a Moral God, it is therefore an infallible judge in reviewing all that He may reveal to us about Himself or the laws of His government. We may reasonably accept the witness of the universal conscience of good men in favour of Theism, without binding ourselves to accept all that has been pleaded by individuals in the name of conscience against portions of the Jewish history, for example, or the doctrine of the Atonement. If it be urged from another side that it is after all " the conscience of fallen man upon which we rely for this great affirmation of God," the reply is, that the Fall cannot have destroyed our powers of apprehending truth, or it would have destroyed our responsibility, and that it is not the weakness which the Fall has wrought in human nature, but the strength which still survives it, whereby man affirms the existence of a Moral God and seeks Him. So far as man is a fallen being, no doubt, at the approach of the Lord God, he " hides himself amid the trees of the garden," to the end of time. But those truth-seeking II.] Feebleness of conscience wilhout a Revelation, 7 3 elements of his spiritual nature which, as the Christian creed teaches, were in Paradise invigorated by a robe of supernatural grace, afterwards forfeited by the sin of our first parents, are throughout heathendom still kindled into activity by the prevenient grace of the Holy Spirit, breath- ing as He wills across the deserts; and thus fallen man seeks the Lord, if haply he might feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us, 1 instinc- tively assured, as all good men must be, of His existence, and hoping that He may be fully unveiled at last. Yet the feebleness of conscience in fallen man is a fact of significance. Although conscience seeks in God, not merely, as does intellect, a solution of the problem of the universe, but a Legislator Who has given and Who will enforce the law of right and wrong wTitten in the human heart, conscience is nevertheless in the mass of men. if left to itself, too enfeebled to keep a Moral God clearly in Flew, even when it has caught, sight of Him. It requires an aid external to itself, a token from its Object that it is not mistaken about Him. It requires a revelat ton, With- oul iwcliition, historical theism is either the fruitless ilation of a few isolated thinkers, or the underlying idea of a popular superstition which obscures and degrades it. In a certain true sense it is itself a revelat ion ; 1 utterances require a countersign in the world without, which m;iv make it certain that the inner legislator is also the Ruler of the D niverse. Conscience itself, exactly in the 1 Acta xvii. 27. 74 Identity of the God of Conscience and the [Lect. ratio of the clearness with which it discerns the moral na- ture of God, discerns the implied necessity of a revelation. It is sure that He Who is Himself just and merciful, cannot leave men altogether to themselves: that the All-Good cannot permanently disappoint the desires and powers which He has Himself implanted. And thus the antecedent proba- bility of a revelation is to a good man not less than over- whelming; and Christianity assures us that his conviction is warranted by the fact. The substance of the Christian revelation of God con- sists not merely in the teaching of Jesus Christ, together with the old Hebrew literature on which He sets His seal, and the apostolical doctrine which He warrants by anti- cipation, but also in His life. His life was an unveiling of God to the eye of man's sense, that the eye of man's spirit might understand Him. Christ's life, not less than His teaching, confirms the highest instincts of the human conscience, and educates them up to a point which of themselves they could never have reached. But how is man enabled to identify the Author of this law within him, perfectly reflected, as it is, in the Christ, with the Author of the law of the universe without him ? The answer is, by miracle. Miracle is an innovation upon physical law, — or at least a suspension of some lower physical law by the intervention of a higher one, — in the interests of moral law. The historical fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead identifies the Lord of physical life and death with the Legislator of the Sermon on the II.] God of Natter e certificated by Miracle. 75 Mount. Miracle is the certificate of identity between the Lord of Nature and the Lord of Conscience, — the proof that He is really a Moral Being Who subordinates physical to moral interests. Miracle is the meeting-point between intellect and the moral sense, because it announces the answer to the efforts and yearnings alike of the moral sense and the intellect; because it announces revelation. It may be asked whether miracle, in revealing God, is not subversive of the idea of God, Whom it reveals. Does it not postulate in Him two contradictory wills, the one whereby He enacts a permanent law, the other whereby He suspends it? And is not this irreconcileal >le with the highest views of His nature, as the Immutable, Who is what He is unchangeably, because what He is, is abso- lutely the best? No. For this is to apply to the Divine Mind a human standard of measurement. Succession is a law of human thoughts; because the mind of man is finite. If I resolve to spend each day for the next six months in a given way, and then, three months hence, determine that I will spend one particular day very differently, I am without donht -nilty of traversing my original ami general inten- tion by a second and particular intention which contradicts it. Bui with God, no such self-contradiction is possible -. n the Divine Mind there is no succession, whether of ideas or resolves. The Eternal Being sees the end in the beginning; He sees the exception together with the rule so simultaneously, that it is untrue to say that He anticipates it. ItisaSUnplCj indivisihle aet of w ill. wl J 6 Dignity of God not compromised [Lect. by He everlastingly wills the rule together with the excep- tion — the exception with the rule. "With Him is " no variableness, neither shadow of turning." 1 The idea that God, in working a miracle, contradicts His own earlier purpose in giving to the physical world unchangeable laws, not merely betrays a conception of law as something independent of the free activity of God, but introduces into our conception of the Divine Mind the finite and human idea of succession in thought and will. Whereas, in truth, He, the Infinite, embraces, by one single act, present, past, and future, the general and the particular, the individual and the universal; reaching, as the Wise Man says, "from one end to another, mightily, and smoothly and sweetly ordering all things." 2 But does God compromise His dignity by working a miracle, or by exerting a special Providence over His works ? It is pleaded, indeed, that He must do so. It is said to be inconceivable that the Maker and Monarch of all these suns can interest Himself in the concerns of one of the smallest of His planets; in a particular race of creatures on its surface, in individual members of that race, in you and me. To imagine this, we are told, is only to indulge human self-love, which interprets all things, even the Deity Himself, by the promptings of its own boundless self-complacency. And yet, what kind of "dignity" is it which is thus pleaded in order to depreciate the freedom, energy, and 1 S. James i. 17. 2 Wisd. viii. 1. II. ] by miracles which attest His morality. 77 ubiquity of God's Provideutial Eule ? It is at best the dignity of . an oriental despot ; lie is too engrossed in the cares of personal government, or in the pursuits of personal indulgence, to listen to the voices and to study the wants of the poor, who struggle and suffer around the walls of his seraglio. The notion that a really great intelligence will concern itself only and exclusively with broad principles and general interests, to the neglect of particulars and details, is, even when we are speaking of human minds, a mistaken notion. This vulgar contempt for details belongs to the pretentious imitation rather than to the reality of mental power. A really great intelligence combines the observation and study of details with the firm grasp of comprehensive principles ; and in this power of combining tilings, which in lower minds are found apart, lies the strength and secret of its greatness. Nor is Un- less, rather it is much more the case, with the Eternal Mind God is not less Divine in literally numbering the thai fall to tli« ground, and the hairs of the human head, than in formulating tii laws which govern either planetary systems or spiritual intell ; while this comprehensive and penetrating interest and art ion, spending itself upon the whole outwaid and inward life of His creatures, is the symptom mid expression of the moral interest which the reasonable creation eommands in the hear! of the ( 'reator. No; God's greatness is not enhanced by systems which would banish Hun from the world, or condemn Him to 78 God revealed to the soul in Christ, [Lect. impotence. The miracles of Christianity are so far from compromising its Theism, that they illustrate and secure it. The God of Christianity is no mere First Cause, or Supreme Intelligence. He is a Moral God. If He is Power and Wisdom, He is also Sanctity, Justice, Providence, Mercy, Love. According to the Gospel, Love is His Essence; and love is interest in, and self-sacrifice for that which is its object. It is such a God as this alone Who can be the adequate object of religion. Traceable everywhere in human history, traceable especially in the history of one separated and chosen race, the interest of the Perfect Moral Being in the moral and thinking creatures of His hand culminates at Beth- lehem and on Calvary. The Incarnation of the Eternal Son, the manifestation of the Divine life of Love, and Justice, and Compassion, and Purity, flashing through a veil of flesh, and leading up to a death of agony and shame, which alters the whole existing moral relation between earth and heaven ; this is the glorious creed which rivets a Christian's conviction of the moral intensity of the life of God. " God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." What could He do more in order to con- vince us that He is not merely a Force or an Intelligence, but a Heart ? At the feet of Him who could say, " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," we understand, and feed upon the certainty, that God is moral as well as intellectual " light, and that in Him is no darkness at all." When a man's hold upon this creed is gone, his thought II.] Practical considerations. 79 falls back, at best, upon the more rudimentary and less adequate ideas of the Godhead ; the darker mysteries of the world's history present themselves with more painful force ; and the mind tends inevitably, in the last resort, either to Deism or to Pantheism ; to a Deism which just permits God to create, and then dismisses Him from His creation ; or to a Pantheism which identifies Him with all the moral evil in the universe, and ends by propagating the worship of new Baals and Ashteroths. A few words in conclusion. God being really alive, His existence is a fact with which no other fact that the human mind can come to recognize will possibly compare. Nothing among created things that can engage and stimulate thought, nothing that can warm and expand affection, nothing that can invigorate will and purpose, ought, in tin- judgment of any thinking human being, to compete with t lie Eternal God. Our reasonable duty towards God is "to believe in Him, to fear Him, and to love Him, with all the heart, with all the mind, with all • id, and with all the stren-t h." And vet that unhe-un, unending, m -If existent Life; that boundless Intelligence administering a boundless Power; that long army of moral Attributes which win our love while tiny must also more our reverence and fear ; what is lie, our God, to us? Do we thirst B a God ? As the days, and months, and years pass, do we ever look out of and beyond ourselves upon that vast ocean of Uncreated Life Which encircles us, Which pene- trate our inn if Do W6 ever think steadily, SO as to 80 Practical considerations. [Lect. II. dwell with a real intellectual interest upon Him "Who is the first and highest of truths, to Whose free bounty we our- selves owe the gift of existence, and to Whom we must one day account for our use of it ? Do we ever sincerely desire to love Him, and to live for Him ? Or are we con- stantly hurrying along our solitary path from one vanish- ing shape towards another, while we neglect the Alone Unchangeable ? Be sure that, if we will, in God revealed in Christ, the soul may slake the thirst of the ages ; and the dreariest, and darkest, and most restless existence may find illumination and peace. " This God is our God for ever and ever: He will be our guide unto death, and beyond it." To each one of us, now, He is, if we will; if we will, He will be, for ever, to each the Eternal Truth, wherein thought can never find its limit; the Uncreated Beauty, "most Ancient, yet always Fair," whereof affec- tion can never tire; the Perfect Eule, existing eternally in the Life of the Necessary Moral Being, whereunto each created will may perpetually conform itself, yet never ex- haust its task. Without this Awful and Blessed Being, man has no adequate object, even during these days of his brief earthly existence; his thought, his affection, his pur- pose spring up and are exercised only that they may presently waste and die. With God, the human soul not merely interprets the secret of the universe; it compre- hends, and is at peace with, itself. For God is the satis- faction of its thirst; — He is the object of Religion. LECTURE III. 3Ei)irtJ jjutrtiag in ILent. THE SUBJECT OF RELIGIOX— THE SOUL Ps. viii. i. WJtat is man, that Thou art mindful of him t . "D ELIGION, we have seen, is not a sentiment, or an idea, -" or even a code of moral practice. It involves the establishment and maintenance of a real bond between God on the one hand and man on the other. To the perfeei erf this bond, feeling, thought, and moral earnestness on the pari of man, contribute elements which are indispensable to it; so that religion in itself, although beyond eaeh of them, is dependent upon all. Its object, as we have also seen, is the Personal and Moral Cod. In a mere firstcause, in a mighty force, in an all-surveying intelligence, reli finds nothing to which it can attach itself; and systems which, like Pantheism, deny the personality of God, or, as did ill.- old 1 >« ; mi, remove Him from all interest in and moid action upon the world, are thereby destructive of religion. And we have bo t pated the matter Q 82 Value of the inquiry, [Lect. before us, as to observe that, whatever else may be said for or against it, Christianity satisfies those conditions of a real religion, in which these theories severally fail; and that in Christendom, the purity and spirituality of a Personal God on the one hand, and His intimate contact with us men on the other, by means of a Personal Incarnation, are fully and equally recognized. But this brings us face to face with a question of scarcely inferior importance, at least from our human and practical point of view. Eeligion being a real relation between man and God, it is natural and inevitable to pass from considering one of its terms to the consideration of the other. If God be the object, what is the subject of religion? What is this created being who can thus enter into relations with the high majesty of heaven? or, as the Psalmist puts it at once more reverently and more truthfully, " What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?" What is it in man which makes him capable of this exceptional relation to God, as implied in his capacity for religion? It would be a mistake to treat this inquiry on which we are embarking as so entirely speculative that it can secure or fortify no practical results. It is easy, but unwise, in days like ours to ignore the great questions which open be- neath our feet as well as above our heads, under the pretence of being practical men who have neither time nor inclination for theory. No doubt, it is better to be a good man than to be a good psychologist; but an accurate notion of the real nature of the soul may contribute very materially in III.] Why is man capable of religion? 83 an age like ours to personal enthusiasm for practical good- ness. How are you to decide whether man is capable of religion, or how far his capacity extends, until you know what, in his inmost, deepest being, man really is ? In other words, this question of man's capacity for religion is sub- stantially the question whether man be not merely a bodily organism, but also and especially a spiritual personality. Certainly Eevelation has familiarized Christians with the angels, as supramundane beings, in a very high degree cap- able of religion. But religion, as it comes before us on the surface of this planet, is a monopoly of man. Among the lower creatures we find nothing like it; we can discover no place for it. Man is the highest being of which these creatures have cognizance. Often, indeed, may we discover in their attachment to ourselves, in their fidelity, in their tenderness, in the true delicacy of the attention which tin v shew us, much that rebukes us when we reflect on the poor service that we ourselves pay to a Higher Master. Bui having n<> unseen world open to them, and being, as they are, incapable of any properly reflective thought, they are also incapable of religion, of any consciously personal relationship to the Souroe of all Life. But man can look above and beyond this \\<>rhl of sense; he can enter into real communion with the Monarch of both worlds; and the el of his doing in that which, by \ ixtue « t God's bountiful gift and appointment* he himself is as distinct from the c re a t ur es around him. 84 External aspects of man, [Lect. What is man ? What, let us ask, is this or that given man of our acquaintance, a near relation, one of ourselves ? In the distance, or at first sight, a single human being is what the world chiefly associates with him ; he is so much property, so much professional skill, so much political influence, so much social power, so much literary reputation, so much practical capacity for public affairs. Upon these things the public eye is wont to rest chiefly, if not exclu- sively; these things are labelled with this or that great name when it is repeated in conversation or in the news- papers. But they are only the accidents of any human life. They are external to it. They tell us nothing about it, nothing at least that a true appreciation of human greatness would most care to know. When do we see the man himself ? We stand face to face with him ; we listen to a voice ; we note the peculiarities of a manner ; we study the ever- varying lines of a human countenance ; but we are still outside the real man. His voice, his manner, his expression, may tell us something about him ; it may be a great deal ; but they are not himself. We get nearer his real self, when we can observe and compare and take to pieces what he says and does ; in his speech and his action, he reveals at least some portion of his character. But that which speaks and acts is beneath speech and action ; it is always and necessarily invisible. The knife of no anato- III. ] Man himself a person. 8 5 mist, however delicately wielded, can detect it in the folds of any human brain ; no psychologist can draw it out into the light by an exhaustive analysis of any human thought. Underlying all the outward decorations of man's life; underlying the human face, and form, and speech, and action, although thrilling through them as if threatening ever and anon to become visible ; underlying all that is most private and subtle even in secret thought, is that around which all else is gathered, and without which all else would be stripped of its significance, without which it would never have been or would cease to be. What is man ? He is, in the root and seat of his bei a person. He is that which each of us means when he says, " I." Let us turn to look at this question t within, rather than from without; for after all, it is within ourselves that we can, each for himself, only and really grapple with it. What do u. each of us, by "I." We mean, first of all, something distinct, utterly, profoundly distinct, from all thai is not"I"; some- thing which is conscious, as nothing else is concious, of this deep distinctness. I think, and 1 know that it is only I who think; I think al-mit myself, and I know that it is myself only upon which 1 only am thinking; no other self commingles with this consciousness, or I should not be myself; I am thus conscious of my own identity, and of my radical supamteness from all besides. Nay, more, I can trace and asserl this Identity of myself with mj this separateness of myself from all that is not n a Long term el* pa8l years, When the OUtwaid ciiviun- 86 The sense of personality. [Lect. stances of my life were far other than they are now ; when ray bodily mien was so different that none could recognize in it the myself of to-day ; when the inner companions of my secret being were not as they have been since, so that I had other thoughts, other feelings, other resolves than now ; yet still underlying these differences there was, deep down at bottom, the same self, thinking, feeling, resolving then, even as it resolves, and feels, and thinks now. And of no one fact am I more certain, or so certain, as of this ; — that this self of the present is the self of thirty or forty years ago ; that it was then as it is now, that it is now as it was then, a thing distinct from all else in the universe ; and a thing of which, among creatures, I alone have actual cognizance. And as I am certain that it is separate from all besides, and that, as long as my memory will serve me, it has never been otherwise ; so I feel at this moment, as I always have felt, that I possess it ; that its thoughts are my thoughts ; that its will is my will ; that this thought and will are not powers which come in upon me like a flood and possess me, but that they are strictly forms of my own activity. If I think, I choose to think ; if I will, it is I, and no other being in the universe, who does will ; my will is the exercise of a freedom, unshared by any partner of my life ; and, if I choose, indestructible. 1 1 See Psychologie, by Amedee Jacques, in the Manuel de Philosophie, Hachette, 1867. In Is. xxvi. 9, the Ego ">J^ is clearly distinguished both from the >£%)3 and the VlVl > m Prov. xxxiii. 15, and Eccles. vii. 25, it is distinguished from the ij? oi the Speaker. In Scripture irpbcrooTrov (2 Cor. i. 11) refers to external manifestation of the person, and viroa-Tacns (Heb. i. III.] The lower animals do not possess it, 87 Such, or, at least, something of this kind, is the sense of personality as we, each one of us, experience it. As long as we can remember, it has been at the bottom of all that we have felt, thought, and done ; it has penetrated every movement of our minds and hearts ; it has welded the many elements of our lives, outward and inward, moral and intellectual, spiritual and even bodily, into a con- sistent whole. When it is felt, our inmost being is felt ; we can get no deeper than that reflective thought, than that conscious will. Here we touch, so far as we can touch, personal spirit ; and it is because man is a personal spirit, or, as Scripture terms it, a being made in the image of God, that he is master of the world around him. 1 The mere animal is not thus conscious of, and capable of reflect- ing, on his own existence. He lives and feels; he cairn s instinct forward, it may be, to the very confines of reason. But he does not comprehend his life; he does not reflect that it is he who lives; he is not conscious of reinem Wr- ing a line of personal existence, unshared by any otlu-r being, and threading a scries of years ami a lung train of divergent circumstances. He does not anticipate a future. ::. \i 1) to tho Hubetance that underlie* the appearance. There is no word in Scripture to express I !'•'] r < r s art Seele in Wetaer and W' tte ; ] dot EnoyoL 1 On tho 1 . ImhI in 111:111 '<•, Dslllsmh BtbU ■• In Piyohoiogie, iJ . § ± Tiic Divine lm:ige OOnsisti in man* Belf-cousciouimess ami muml free- dam, t6 rorpop *ai adrtfofaoi'. Man's dominion ov«r the earthly wof|d in ";u» efflui not ol the Divine likeness, 1 Ine likeness itself." By meani ol the EUem una rt)¥ tU6*a rod iirovparlov (1 Oor, xv. Hi), iii that it ti transfigures 1 Image ol the God-man. Seetb i * interesting so- 88 Personality not merged in species, [Lect. Neither is he free or deliberate in his exercise of will : his will is only impnlsive desire or passion, unregulated by intelligence ; it is not his instrument ; it is his master. Being thus the slave of nature around him and of his own nature, of his own instincts, and of the force of circum- stance, he never can project himself beyond nature, and so rise above it, and take the measure of it and of his own relation towards it. He is thus passive when face to face with his nature, he is thus entirely under its control, because he altogether belongs to it ; because in him there is nothing which comes from a higher world, and is inde- pendent of the world of sense. 1 Accordingly the single animal is only a specimen of his kind, the individual exists only in the species: but man, besides belonging on his animal side to an animal species, yet knows himself to be, in his individual capacity, a solitary essence, personal and indivisible. With man, the animal species, the lower nature which he shares with his kind, is subordinate to the individual, because in man that which constitutes the individual, his inmost being, belongs to a separate and a higher order of existence. 2 1 Worter, art. Seele, ubi. sup. 2 It were to be wished, observes Delitzsch, that personality and individu- ality were less frequently confused in common language than they are. Personality is common to all men as such : by it men are raised above plants and beasts. Between the " thought," feeling, instinct of the brute, and the inner life of man, who is conscious of himself, and can in thought project himself beyond himself, there is an impassable gulf. Individuality only marks off the single specimen of the kind, whether it be man or beast ; it implies nothing as to his subjective life. Although this obvious distinction is not formally expressed in Scripture, it is observable that in the narrative of the creation pft is used only of plants and beasts, not of man ; as if III.] Doctrine of " internal facts? 89 This consciousness of personal life is not to be referred to anything in man's physical constitution. Thought after all is not merely phosphorus ; and psychology is not correctly described as a branch of physiology. The great Scottish thinkers of half a century ago laid much stress upon the doctrine of what they called " internal facts." By an internal fact they did not mean a fact removed" from the cognizance of the five senses ; because there are many purely physiological facts which might be defined in this way, — as, for example, valvular action in the circulation of the blood. They meant an act of which the personal consciousness alone takes cognizance. If you lift a 1 weight, so far as the visible muscular exertion of the arm goes, that is an external fact; but the cause of tibia external fact is an internal fact, a determination of \n at- will — that is, of yourself; and of this cause you alone are conscious. How your will acts upon your muscles. cannot say; but this at least yon do know, that it is will which, by ;i voluntary self-determination, caused the movement of the muscles ol your arm: and this internal fact is just as certain to you as the external one. Or suppose that you feel annoyance at some action of a neighbour, and relied almost immediately that this !'«•, is undeserved, and fall hack upon this and that considera- tion in order to Bet it aside, and succeed in doing so. Sere you have three distinct internal facts; th< lo imply that in.m is man A D in \ x\ kind, — that he ■ • rton. Bibi Piyoh. iv. 1. 90 Spirituality of the soul. [Lect. feeling, the bringing reason to bear upon that feeling, and the altered state of feeling which succeeds. All of these are strictly internal, strictly peculiar to the consciousness ; yet as appreciable by observation, and as immediately appreciable, as any fact of physiology. There is no necessity, exclaims the eminent thinker who suggests this illustration, for losing ourselves " in metaphysical hypotheses, in order to demonstrate the spirituality of the soul, and Kant was right in throwing these old- fashioned arguments to the winds. The spirituality of the soul is a fact; it is a positive fact; it is a fact just as notorious as the sunlight. Men are still inquiring, and will probably inquire while time shall last, what matter is. But we do practically know what spirit is, for we have each one of us a sample of it in ourselves, that is to say, in the thinking, feeling, determining subject which we name 'self.'" 1 It would be an impertinence to say that the spirituality of the human soul " is taught in Scripture," because Holy Scripture everywhere presupposes it, and is unintelligible without it. But a question may be raised as to the form in which it is taught there. Scripture sometimes appears to exhibit human nature as composed of two elements, sometimes as of three. Moses represents man as origina- ting from " the combination of an immediate breathing of God with an earthly body," 2 and Solomon distinguishes 1 Saisset, L'ame et la Vie, pp. 16, 17, 18, 22. 2 Gen. ii. 7 ; cf. Del. Bibl. Psych, ii. § 4. III.] Scriptttral analysis of mans nature. 9 1 the dust which at death must " return to the earth as it was " from " the spirit " that " shall return unto God who gave it." 1 After a like manner our Lord distinguishes the true life or soul of man 2 from his animal life, and the " spirit," which in His disciples was " willing," from the " flesh " that was weak ; 3 and in dying He resigns His Human Soul to the Father, with the words, " Into Thy hands I commend My Spirit." 4 In the same manner S. Paul bids Christians glorify God both in their body and in their spirits, since both body and spirit belong to Him; 6 and S. James compares faith without works to that separation between the body and the spirit which implies the death of the body. 6 In these passages, man is regarded as composed of a body and of a single super- sensuous nature, which is sometimes called life or soul. 7 and sometimes spirit; but elsewhere, this immaterial nature itself is subdivided into self-conscious, self-determining spirit, and animal life-power or soul. Thus S. Paul prays that the spirit, and soul, and body of the Thessalonian Christians, cadi part subsisting in its niav be preserved blameless until our Lord's set 1. s. xii. 7. 9 S. Matt, ft 85, ovyX ii \f/vx^ xXeW* i)> frequently denotes the entire inward nature of man.*" This is true even oi s. laul. If \j,ixt in bk writing! meant nothing more than "via qua corpus vi : ;.i <\ m..\ . i ur." he ii at issue with S. Luk. . with tho Epistle to the Hebrews, and withEphlvi 8, CoLiiLSS, Phil L87;maHoi passages the. i it of moral resolve is placed in the ^»«xij. Cf. Delitssch i. iii. | '.». 92 Oneness of the vital principle in man. [Lect. coming ; x and the word of God is described in the Epistle to the Hebrews as having, from its moral power, an analytical efficacy which separates as clearly between the spiritual and psychical elements of man's immaterial nature, as between the life of sensation and the life of motion in his corporeal nature. 2 Still it cannot be concluded from these two pas- sages that man consists of three essentially distinct elements. If this language of S. Paul obliges us to see in soul and spirit something more than two distinct relations of man's inward nature, it does not imply more than two distinct departments of that nature, the higher region of self-con- scious spirit and self-determining will, which belongs to man as man; and the lower region of appetite, perception, imagination, memory, which in the main is common to the undying soul of man and the perishable inmost being of the brute. Man's soul is not a third nature, poised between his spirit and his body ; nor yet is it a sublimate of his bodily organization, any more than his body is a precipitate of his soul. It is the outer clothing of the spirit, one with it in essence, yet distinct in functions; the centre of man's life, psychical and animal, is his spirit. 3 But whatever Holy Scripture may explicitly say about 1 1 Thess. v. 23, okoKkrjpov v/jl&p to irvevjxa, kcl! i) ipvxy, Kal rb aw/ma. 2 Heb. iv. 12, huKVOvjxevos &xpi fMepta/JLou ^I'X'^s re Kal irveti pharos, apfiGiv re Kal p,ve\&p. s In our own day Anton Giinther revived the psychological dualism of Occam, by making the distinction between the soul and spirit in man an essential distinction ; in other words, by representing each man as possessed of two souls, one the seat of reason, the other of sensation and growth. III.] Our Lord's estimate of what man is. 93 the spiritual personality of man as a formal doctrine, it implies much more by its constant appeal to man's higher nature. From first to last it treats man as a being who, although clothed in an animal form, is essentially and in himself a spirit. It surrounds him with precepts which a self-determining spirit only can obey ; with examples, of which only a reflecting spirit can enter into the force and drift ; with prayers, aspirations, modes of thought and feel- ing, that have no meaning for a being who is not experi- mentally conscious of his spiritual subsistence. Especially is this observable in those Divine pages which form the inmost sanctuary of Holy Scripture; in the Life and Words of our Lord Jesus Christ. As human forms pass before Him, in the Gospel, although He is constantly relit human want and pain, it is plain that the outward man means for Him, relatively, almost nothing, and that His eye rests persistently, exclusively, upon t lu- man within. As we accompany Him in that brief but exhaustive study of humanity, we feel before the centurion <>r Pilate little or nothing of the majesty of the Soman name. Although (! appeared when the Empire of the Oman was in Its splendour He speaks of the " Idng8 of the (Jentiles," in a phrase of studied vagueness; as if to suggest the utter insignifioanoe of the political interests which onlv touoh DQ outward life, when they are contrasted with those higher in- Hurt thii theory has ii.. ■hewn l'.v DeHti oh : its experimental difficulties are obvious. Tin* / which thinks, reasons, wills, is, ws :ill <>f us know, identi which r\} < riences the sensations of sight, smell, hern i 94 A personal spirit only capable of religion. [Lect. terests of the human spirit which He had come to promote. Even the greatness and authority of the successors of Aaron disappears, or recedes into the background, in the atmo- sphere of this exacting estimate, which knows no respect of persons ; while on the other hand, at His bidding, a few obscure and illiterate Galilean peasants become respectively a S. Peter, a S. John, a S. Mary Magdalen — names which of themselves recall neither political weight nor intellectual prestige, but types of spiritual character, beautiful and majestic, upon which already eighteen centuries of pro- gressive civilization have been forward to lavish all but the best of their reverence and their love. It is indeed as personal spirits, tabernacling in bodily forms, that we men are capable of religion. Eesolve man's higher nature into physiological sensation with Materialism, and religion becomes an absurdity. As spirits, we are linked and bound to the Father of Spirits ; as spirits, we believe, we hope, we love ; as spirits, we enter into the com- plex mystery and activities of prayer ; as spirits, we take in each other that deep and penetrating interest which pierces beneath the outline of the human animal, and holds true converse with the supersensuous being within. All that weakens or lowers our consciousness of being spirits, weakens in that proportion our capacity for religion : all that enhances that consciousness, as surely enlarges it. III. ] Theory of the soul's pre-existence. 9 5 II. Man, then, if we track him to the centre of his being, is a spirit, whatever be the dignity and organic indis- pensableness of his outward form. What do we know about the origin of man's spirit, of his deepest self ? We know when and under what conditions a human body comes into existence. What do we know about the origin of a human soul ? If we take account of the ancient and of the I world, one of the most popular answers to this question will be found in the theory that the soul exists before the body. Sometimes this is stated without an attempt at closer definition; more frequently it takes the form of a doctrine of Metempsychosis. According to this doctrine the spiritual part of each man's being is as a forced emigrant, who has previously occupied other frames, ami who may have others to inhabit hereafter; although man's inextinguishable hope tstli;it an escape from this fatal cycle may be achieved by pre-eminent virtue, which will at length secure an in- corporeal immortality for the weary wanderer. 1 The Western and less systematized form of the doctrine is due to Plato. Plato, who did so much in the way of training the ancient world to realize the greatuess and Uniqueness Of the seal, accounted for the soul's present 1 Km a nr.nt i:ur<>]>oan theory of a curiously Gnostic complexion, see " \.< Lrntlrnmin ■ turo eelon U Science,'* par i v. Paris, 1871. g6 Platonic form of the theory. [Lect. and, as he deemed it, humiliating relation to the body, by saying that the soul had existed previously in another state of being, and was condemned to tenant a human frame as a kind of punishment. Plato was probably less anxious to give a complete account of the origin of the soul, than to explain the source of certain ideas which he encountered in the human mind. They occupied much of his attention, and he desired to invest them with' an authority that might place them beyond the reach of popular discussion. To Plato it seemed that these ideas were relics of a higher knowledge enjoyed by the soul in some earlier stage of its existence ; he could account for them no otherwise, because they so transcended the poor realities of man's present experience. Thoughts which appeared to result from scientific speculation were in truth only a form of memory — memory of some bygone existence, passed in an ideal world from which the soul had fallen down into the sphere of sense and under conditions of time. 1 Plato's speculation about the soul was of deeper and more permanent interest to humanity at large, than the particular theory which led him to adopt it. It naturally found its way, in company with his other guesses, to Alex- andria. It was adopted by Neo-Platonist thinkers, and even in the Jewish schools ; it was taught by Philo, as well as by Plotinus ; it was filtered through Essenism into the religious philosophy of the Talmud and the Cabbala ; 2 1 7)fxtv 7) fxddrjais ovk cLXXo tl t) avdfAV7](ris rvyxdvei otcra. Cf. Plat. Phsed., E. 73-77, 246. 2 Delitzsch quotes Joel, Religions philosophic der Sohar, pp. 107-109. III.] Pre-existence of the soul not Scriptural. 97 it entered into more than one type of Gnosticism ; it appears among the other eccentricities of the eccentric Origen; it forms a link between the philosophical bishop of Cyrene, Synesius, and the outer world of Pagan thought. But it was stoutly opposed by the immense majority of Christian teachers, 1 and was finally condemned by the collective Church, as an untenable error. 2 For it never had any basis in Holy Scripture; not even in those writings which are historically connected with Alexandrian thought, or which have been supposed, on strictly internal grounds, to have an Alexandrian colouring. 3 To suppose that it underlies the doctrine of an original or birth-sin, as taught in the New Testament, is to forget that the great teacher of that doctrine expressly states that the conse- quences of the first sin devolve upon those who have not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression. 4 1 Even by Clement of Alexandria, 6 Geds i)jj.as iwoirjfffv ov irpdovrav fxP 1 )" yb.p kclI e/5^j>eu 7]fias 6trov fj/j.ev cl irpo rnxtv, Qu. 1>\ Klee, Dogroatik. p. from Strom. \iii. ; Maii, turn. vii. p. 88. S. Peter of Alexandria characterises it as a shred of heathenism : rb ykp /xdOrj/xa tovto t iart 0iXo(ro0/o5 Ktvqs kclI dWorplas otitrrjs rdv h Xpt. I >.• Aniiu. Crag., . a In the Beoond ( kranofl of Constantinople; Hefele, Conciliengesch. ii ., Dot in Wis. I. viii. 19, 80, which refers to an altogether excep- tional attribute or Personality. Tin? < abbalkt reference to Eccles. I and 1 hrigen'l t.. Rom i\. 1 1-13, Luke i. 47, Jerem. i. 5, are set aside on ex« ambling tha passages. Nor are such argumen: ii to the point lli i> ro existence of our Lords Divine Person, as taught in S. John and s. Paul, would bt retarant, if those Apostles had taught the pre-existence • i anv our , l ,-, ami it', in lli* caso. 1 1 1 is pre-existonce did not clearly attach pres entati on of His Personal Dignity as superhuman. His 11 Soul was, like His Body, created in time, and then hypostatically united ill ! 4 Bom. v. 14, ixl rods /if) dfiapHjaarTas 1x1 rtf 6fjL< inj. 1m fore the formation of his body, is it a part, the highest part, of that transmitted inheritance niam contVrtur ittqvdd tt utroque; de laimii enim* non potest, quia ex re tcnui el incompreht . nihil potei ' 8 Delitzsch's attack upon tho position that "the assumed ability of spirit to propagate itself is contrary to the dualism of nature and spirit," does not up <■< >n\ in. in-. The Divine Nature being the Parent of the materia] ai well ai of the Spiritual I'uiverse, those Eternal Truths Interna] to It. which areahadowed out l>y the Names of Father, and Son, may well be the archetypes of material rather than oi q iritual EaOti b tin- advene. The Eternal Spirit Himself is "not begotten but proceeding." II" VlWn >. is to be referred to the Son, who is identical with the \\ • «l.in i .f the Proverbs. Tho application of the metnp P'lirration and Wrth to God's natural (Job xxxviii. 28; Ps. xc. 2 ; Deut. 18) and lupernatnra] :* ; James L 18; 1 S. John nvatii-ii -.,■■.'■.•':'.■■ ship between one created spirit and another. The angelic reference in Gen. \i. 1 i t lie least, far too doubtful to l>e made the basis of an argu- ment But of BJbt Piyoh, ii. | ;\ rob 102 Theory of Creatianism. [Lect. ment, as belonging to the region of animal life-power ; but that no such resemblance can be calculated on, or, where it does occur, regarded as other than purely accidental, in respect of strictly personal qualities, such as genius, or will. * Traducianism can undoubtedly point to great names who favour it in ancient and modern times ; 2 and it rests on too large an area of possibilities to be rejected with anything like peremptoriness. But the general sense of the Church is now, as it has been in past times, against it ; it does not seem to harmonize, at least naturally and easily, with the fixed outlines of a consistently spiritualist philosophy, or, notwithstanding the easy explanation which it affords of a doctrine of transmitted sin, to make itself really at home with such an estimate of man's spiritual nature as is implied by the great doctrines of the Christian creed. The other and more generally received doctrine, is known as Creatianism. Each soul is an immediate work of the Creator: He is perpetually creating souls out of nothing, and infusing them into bodies. 3 He creates each soul at the moment when the body which is destined for it enters 1 As by Worter, ubi supra. 2 S. Jerome, indeed, himself an earnest Creatianist, attributes Tradu- cianism to the majority of Western teachers in his day : maxima pars occi- dentalium, Ep. 78, ad Marcell ; but in antiquity Tertullian stands out almost alone in his unfaltering decision. Augustine hesitates. Of modern Traduci- anists, Delitzsch among Lutheran, and Klee among Roman Catholic writers, are perhaps the greatest. 3 Quotidie Deus operatur animas et in corpora mittit nascentium. S. Jerome; adv. Ruf. Apol. xvi. 1, 3. Traducianism he thinks absurd: Satis ridendi qui putant animas cum corporibus seri et non a Deo, sed a corporum parentibus generari. Qu. by Klee, Dogm. III.] O71 what grounds it is excepted against. 103 really and properly on its inheritance of life. x Creatianisin recognizes that sense of the immateriality of the human spirit which expressed itself falsely in the doctrine of a pre-existence, and which is so seriously compromised by Traducianism. Personal spirit, it is asserted by the Creatianist, cannot be transmitted from one created life to another, like animal vitality. Yet Creatianism recognizes the truth for which the Traducianists contended against the advocates of the soul's pre-existence, when it maintains that the soul and body are strictly contemporaneous in their origin, and that they have profound and ineffaceable relations to each other. When it is pleaded against this theory of the origin of the soul that it is at issue with the Scriptural representa- tion of a Sabbath rest, which brought God's creative activity to a close, 2 it is sufficient to reply that such an interpreta- tion of the Mosaic narrative would oblige us to close our eyes to the proved fact of a later origin of new species of animals, besides being inconsistent with any adequate idea of God's providential relation to tin- world. ;i When it is said that (Creatianisin, if true, would enslave (Jod, l>\ bidding Him give existence to an immortal spirit at the will <>f the adulterer, and in delianee of His own law, this objection 4 does indeed reveal the peculiar malignity «»f sins against 1 Thii It apparently the drift »>f Peter Lombard's often-quoted maxim: 1 Yraiuln infmulit animal Deus et infundemlo creat. I>y Klee, DogmaJ I. y. V.\\ . ■ S. John v. 17. * S. Augustine admit- ■• s •'■ •■■■■" ■ ; •' • ; ;. ■• u, : - • this difficulty, he bad oixneeli lolled a bj dwelling on < k l*i | m t ■ 104 Creatianism how taught in H. Scripture. [Lect. marriage; but it is merely an extreme illustration of the general truth, that man can only sin with God's assistance ; that all sin consists in the employment of God's bounty against Himself. When, lastly, it is urged that the trans- mission of original sin is on this hypothesis unintel- ligible, it may be sufficient to say that original sin, being rather of the nature of a defect than of a positive taint, there is no difficulty in understanding how created souls did not receive a gift which had been withdrawn from the race to which at birth they became united. Upon the whole, the Creatianist theory seems better to fall in with the scattered hints and with the general language of Scripture. It is apparently more in harmony with the account of the creation of man, and with the general representations of God's creative relationship to the spirit of man, which we find in the Old Testament. 1 Especially does it seem to be borne out by the distinction which is drawn in the Epistle to the Hebrews between the " fathers of our flesh " and the " Father of spirits." 2 These expres- sions discriminate with an accuracy from which there would seem to be no escape between the contribution made to the composite being of man by our heavenly to draw good out of evil in all His earthly providences. The giving being to a soul, capable of knowing and loving its Creator, is of itself a good, how- ever it may be occasioned. Ep. ad Hieron. 166, c. 5. 1 Gen. ii. 7; Job xxxiii. 4; Ps. cxix. 73; Zech. xii. 1. 2 Heb. xii. 9. The contrast, Delitzsch admits, between rrjs crap/cos tjjaCov irarepes, and the Divine irarrjp rCov Trvev/xaTUv, is physical and not ethical. " There can hardly," he remarks, " be a more classical proof -text for Crea- tianism." The passages which imply the organic oneness and responsibility of the race of Israel do not set this aside (vii. 5, 10.) Cf. Num. xvi. 22. III.] Bearing of these theories on Religion. 105 Parent immediately, and that which He bestows through created channels of the gift of life. x This question of the soul's origin has carried us into a region where we have at best to deal with high proba- bilities; where revelation has rather hinted at the truth than unveiled it, and where reason certainly cannot pre- tend to dogmatize. But it is not altogether unfruitful to look at this side of our subject, even where certainty is unattainable. To do so makes us all the more thankful for certainty, when we know that it is within our reach. After all, the difference between the Creatianists and Traduci- anists does not raise the question whether the human soul is made by God, but only the question whether it is immediately created by Him. All that we are and have, except the evil which we have wrought, and which olinge to us, comes from the One Source of Life; but if rebgioD finds its strength in this general conviction, it is especially stimulated by the belief that the soul is God's immediate handiwork. The belief that the inmost being of each one of us is created as immediately by God as was that of our first parent Adam, brings each of us into a felt relation ship with God, and reminds us of our obligations towards Him, more effectively than would be the case if we supposed ourselves to receive spiritual as well as corporeal life through a long series of ancestors. It is Uus persuasion which underlies Iiislmp Andrewes* favourite ejaculatory 1 Of, IMitzsch's Discussion of Heb. xii. 9 against Elvard's theory that means here the natural lift in opposition to the regenerate life. Sebraerbr, in loo, io6 Destiny of the soul. [Lect. prayer from the Psalter, " Despise not Thou the work of Thine own Hands." It is not in the anatomy and faculties of the body, it is in the analysis and study of the soul, that the greatness of human life is best realized, and our indebtedness towards its Giver most deeply felt. This re- flective reason ; this heart, capable of a boundless expan- sion ; this will, which may be trained to a freedom and an intensity of extraordinary power; — of what are these faculties so suggestive as of the knowledge, love, and service due to that Being of Beings Who is the End, as He is the Author, of this centre of complex and self- controlling life ? III. Man, then, is a spirit ; and, as it would seem, he is, as such, immediately created by God. The gravest question yet remains : What is his destiny ? Whatever may be said of the importance of questions bearing on the soul's origin, no reflecting man will deny the interest of all that bears upon its future. It is true that even this question is ostentatiously set aside on the ground of its being un- practical to discuss it. " The dead," it is argued, " do not return to tell us their experience. What then can be known certainly of that which befalls them ? We may hope, or we may conjecture; we may desire, or despair ; we III.] Inevitableness of death. 107 may dogmatize in the air, and make creeds of our aspira- tions ; but would it not be better to confine ourselves to subjects that are well within the range of our experience, and where sure results are attainable, than to waste time and sympathy upon that which belongs really and only to the realm of fancy ?" This way of treating the subject is possible and not un- common among young men and women in good health, who have never known a heartache ; and in the pages of clever serials, where readers are carried forward almost unresistingly, by clear type and well-turned sentences, over the dreary wastes of sceptical thought. But the question of the eternal future is too pressing to be thus left at a dis- tance, permanently. If religion has many enemies in the predominant tendencies of the modern world, she certainly has steady and inalienable allies in the permanent circum- stances of human nature. To the most refined and cultured of ourselves, death is just as certain a contingency as it was to our rudest forefathers, and its dread solemnities enter as penetratingly into the homes of rank and science, as into the ImniMrst cottages in the land. Sooner or later it comes close to all of us, and tin mists winch hide its stern Kali! its from our eyes roll away, and leave us face in faoe r iili them. '• They think thai their houses shall contii and that their dwrll | shall endure from One generation to another; and call the lands after their own li;iln 108 Inevitableness of death. [Lect. " Nevertheless man will not abide in honour : seeing that he may be compared unto the beasts that perish ; this is the way of them. " They lie in the hell like sheep, death gnaweth upon them, and the righteous shall have domination over them in the morning : their beauty shall consume in the sepulchre out of their dwelling. " Be not thou afraid, though one be made rich: or if the glory of his house be increased ; " For he shall carry nothing away with him when he dieth : neither shall his pomp follow him. " For while he lived he counted himself an happy man : and so long as thou doest well unto thyself, men will speak good of thee. " He shall follow the generation of his fathers : and shall never see light. " Man being in honour hath no understanding : but is compared unto the beasts that perish." 1 This is the solemn irony of life, and from year to year we find ourselves face to face with it. Death does not move us much, when it visits those whom we do not know, or whom we know only slightly ; when it only meets us as it wends its way gloomily through the crowded thoroughfare towards the distant cemetery, or as it catches our eye in the supplement of our daily newspaper. It 1 Psalm xlix. 11, 12, 14, 16-20. / III.] Questions raised at the sight of death. 109 does not touch us as being what it is, so long as it only produces social changes which excite our interest, while it keeps sufficiently at a distance not to wound our hearts. We drape it in phrases which treat it as a solemn abstrac- tion. No doubt it is solemn; but so is the war lately raging in Paraguay, or a Eussian campaign in Central Asia. We should speak very differently of a revolutionary struggle in the streets of London, upon the issue of which it was clearly understood that our own life and property might immediately depend. But we find that at last death comes home to us, even to us, in all the closeness of its dreadful embrace. Not, it may be, this time to ourseh es : that were perhaps more bearable. The one human being whom we have loved best on earth — the parent, the husband, the wife, the child — lies before us. We see what is coming. It is very gradual, perhaps, and there are many rallies in which vital power struuejes with disease, in which hope flickers up in its contest with the presentiments of reason, only to die back into a deeper despair. It is very gradual — a slow processional movement to the grave : but the end comes at last. At last a day comes to which the preceding areas if they had not been; a day comes which lives ii memory. We can no longer reckon on hours; we dare not be away even for a few minutes, lest we should be too late, A change has taken place, which they know well who arc familiar with death, and of which none can mistake the import. We feel, all feel, that the time is short, and •. words are said into which is compressed a lii 1 1 o Questions raised at the sight of death. [Lect. its most sincere thought and love — a few assurances, messages, entreaties ; no more is possible. Already, one by one, the vital powers take their leave : first speech, then movement, then hearing, then even eyesight. Still there is breathing, now rapid and deep, now weaker and inter- mittent ; and then there comes a last breath ; and we wait ; and there is none after it. It lies before us, that loved form : only an hour ago it spoke : we speak to it now, but in vain. We bend over it in our agony, as if it was still what it had been ; but we know — what would we not give to escape from our convic- tion ? — that neither thought nor feeling tenants it now. And the question must rise then, if it never rose before, with an urgency proportioned to the grief which asks it ; — Is all really over ? Has the real being, which one short hour ago thought and felt so keenly, actually and for ever ceased to be? Do you say that in presence of that passionate agony it is folly to ask for a decision which should only be dictated by the coolest, the calmest, the most unimpas- sioned, the most disinterested science ? I answer that that agony, if it be not itself an argument, is well fitted to win a hearing for arguments to which, under ordinary circumstances, our materialistic science is deaf. Such a condition of feeling may be impatient on the one hand of a physiology which seeks for the immaterial spirit in the brain ; as it cannot, on the other, enter into a meta- physical discussion of the alleged indestructibility of III.] Jttstice demands a future state. 1 1 1 uncompounded essences. But being itself pain, mental pain, one of the great chastening, illuminating powers of the moral world, it is at least in a mood to understand a moral argument. And the moral argument for our immortality is, after all, the strongest of those upon which reason can fall back. It is no fancy which insists that Eternal Justice cannot close His account with any human conscience at the moment of death; that there must be an after- world in which the too unequal balance of suffering and happiness, of good and evil doing during life, will be surely rectified. We must do stern violence to the best and deepest instincts of our better nature before the voice of this argument can be silenced. It is a moral conviction which protests against the Materialistic theory that the soul is but an animated vapour which becomes extinct with the life of the bodily frame. It equally rejects the Pantheistic dream, that what looks like a separate personality ceases when we cease to breathe, while the soul sinks back into the vast under- current of boundless life, which is the fabled vital force of the Pantheistic universe. If morality lias any serious basis in the nature of things, if it be not a dream or a con- ventionalism, there must he a future wherein each personal Spirit will suhsisl under conditions whieh will have direct reference to its moral and spiritual attainments here. For if one thing is evident to a man who takes notes of what passes within him with the lapse of time, it is that the inward being which he contemplates as "self," is con- tinually developing. As the years pass, whether Eta good ii2 Immortality, how taught in H. Scripture. [Lect. or evil, this immaterial, thinking, resolving being acquires accumulating strength and intensity. Long after the animal life of man has reached its highest point, and is fairly on the decline, the spirit feels itself sensibly growing; growing in the range of its intellectual grasp, growing in its power of will, growing in its sense of being a centre of life, unlike any of the forms of animal or vegetable life around it. Is it possible that death will abruptly put an end to this hitherto uninterrupted development ? Is it possible that we thus continuously expand in all that constitutes our real human selves, only to find at the gate of death that we were nothing but brutes after all, although endowed with sensibilities and imaginations just keen enough to make us the victims of an immense and ex- ceptional delusion ? It is often remarked that the Bible nowhere deals with the natural immortality of the human soul as a thesis to be proved. 1 As in the case of the soul's spirituality, the Bible scarcely asserts, but it everywhere takes the truth 1 It is not meant that the soul of man is immortal through any internal necessity, such as might be held to belong to an uncompounded essence. In this sense God is 6 fx6vos ^x cov ddavacriav (1 Tim. vi. 16). In all creatures, indestructibility is a gift. It is a gift to the spirit, as di tinct from the animal life-power of man. The ancients, Tatian and Justin Martyr, who protested against the Greek idea of a necessary immortality inherent in the soul, did not deny the gift of immortality, which as a matter of fact the Creator had bestowed. Just as man conceives of God, so he con- ceives of eternity, and longs for it. His longing shows that he is designed from eternity ; it is otherwise inexplicable. " God has placed eternity, D71JJ m the heart of man" (Eccles. iii. 21). It is a matter of experience ; and the argumentum ab appetitu seternitatis to the reality of an eternal future is an adaptation of the Cartesian inference from the idea to the being of a God. Cf. Belitzsch, Bibl. Psych, vi. § 2. Ill,] The doctrine of Scheol. 113 for granted. When patriarchs and kings are said in the language of the Old Testament to be gathered to their fathers, it is not merely meant that their bones were laid in the common family resting-place. The natural scenery of Palestine probably suggested the word which described the revealed invisible home of the spirits of the dead. 1 It was "a land of darkness, as darkness itself;" 2 the common receptacle of the " small and great," of the " servant and his master," of kings and counsellors of the earth, of prisoners and of oppressors. 3 All were gathered there, under new conditions of life, incompatible with those earthly forms of activity 4 which cease at death. Not that the dead are passive or unconscious. Isaiah's description of the movement of spirits in the unseen world at the descent of the spirit of the King of Babylon can hardly be resolved into poetical license; and it is observable that tin heathen monarch is there together with the rulers of Israel. 6 This doctrine of ScJieol is perfectly consistent with the general truth that at death the human spirit returns to God, ft and that the souls of the righteous are in " His hands/ 1 in the sense of being exempted from torment. 7 Nor is it in any way at issue with the doctrine of a bodily resurrection, which, while its early and distinct appearance in the Psalter" is utterly inconsistent with the theory of 1 h')$V/ 1H property "hat is sunk deep, bent in; hence a ravine, abyss, depth. Cf. Fuerot, Lex. in voc. W»x. -Jl. :i J..I. ni r: ;:< los.9,10. • Is. xiv. 9, tqq. Oltt. xii. 7. T WW, iii. 1. xn L 10, 11 1 A Cf. also Ts. xlix. 16 tqq. 1 1 14 Immortality in the New Testament. [Lect. its being due to Eastern influences 1 upon the Jewish Eevelation at the period of the Captivity, does undoubtedly, in the later books, come very prominently into view. Apart from a popular belief in this doctrine, the imagery of Isaiah 2 and Ezekiel 3 would have been unintelligible to their con- temporaries ; and both in the dark days of the Captivity in Babylon, 4 and in the later struggle of the Maccabees against Antiochus Epiphanes, this faith in a Kesurrection sustained the oppressed against the persecutors, even the martyrs in their agony. 5 So far as Alexandria influenced Judaism, it discouraged faith in a corporeal Eesurrection. Philo, like a genuine Platonist, sees in death the emancipation of the soul from its bodily prison-house. But the ruling religious minds in Palestine at the time of Christ's appear- ance believed in the resurrection of our actual bodies. 6 Such a doctrine of course implies the immortality of the soul ; but the only demonstration of the truth of the soul's immortality is given in our Lord's reply to the Sadducees on the subject of the Eesurrection. He argues from the title, " the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," which God was pleased to claim in centuries long after the death of the patriarchs, that the patriarchs must still be living, because God is the God, not of the dead, but of the living. 7 By this general statement our 1 As suggested by Jul. Miiller, Studd. und Kritt, 1835. 2 Is. xxvi. 14-19. 3 Ezek. xxxvii. 1-14. Cf. Hos. vi. 2 ; xiii. 14. 4 Dan. xii. 1-3, 13. 5 2 Mace. vii. 9, 11, 14, 23 ; xii. 42-45 ; xiv. 16. 6 S. Matt. xxii. 24, sqq. ; Acts xxiii. 8, xxiv. 15. Joseph. Ant. xviii. 1-3. Bell, Jud. ii. 8-14. Qu. by Grimm. 7 S. Matt. xxii. 32 : S. Mark xii. 27 ; S. Luke xx. 38. III.] Immortality and our Lord's Resurrection. 1 1 5 Lord apparently implies that God does not create spiritual beings only that they may sink back into nothing. The distinctive teaching of the New Testament about the future world everywhere presupposes the soul's immortality. If death were annihilation for all of us, or for all but the just, the descriptions of the end of the world, of the last judg- ment, 1 of the general resurrection, 2 and of the future state, 3 would have no interest for any but a minority of mankind. It is the steady conviction that, in some way, we shall each and all personally subsist after death, which secures to these pages of our Bibles such universal interest. This conviction of our immortality rests on what is for Christians an unquestioned certainty. In Christian eyes, the central fact of the world's annals is the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. It occurred in the full daylighl of history: it was attested by hundiv< Is of witnesses. 4 We can only deny its truth upon & priori principles, which are not merely destructive of serious belief that God is a Mora] and even a Living Being, but which are also fatal to confidence in hu man history. The Resurrection of Christ is the guarantee of our own. The clouds whirl 1 hung a nan id the gate of death in earlier ages have rolled away 1 S M .at. xv 81-46; AcU xvii. 31 ; Rom. xiv. 10; 2 < 'J Tun. iv. I ; 1 8. Pet iv. 5. John \. U \\iv. l.v mi. ii . I". vi,, l i 12; 1 S. ' ; Hob. x. 26, 27 ; u 18 j S Matt M.i U; S. Mark ix. 43, tqq.; & John xii 26, •', tqq, : w ii. '.' 1 1 ~. 8. 4 1 (\ r \v 6, ityfy (irdvu) irtvTaKoalou dd'eX^oTr t 1 1 6 Can the body be dispensed with for ever ? [Lect. since the day of our Saviour's triumph over death; the presumptive speculations which were previously rife as to the future state have been exchanged for strong certainties. " Life and immortality have been brought to light by the Gospel:" u God has begotten us again to a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead:" Christians are " not to sorrow as those that have no hope :" Death has lost its sting, and the grave its victory. 1 Here, too, let it be noted, that although the soul is the seat of man's personal life, it is not, as has been already hinted, man in his completeness. Man is a body as well as a soul. Materialism itself has here done valuable service in correcting the exaggerations of a one-sided spiritualism. It is common, but erroneous, to speak of man's body as being related to his spirit only as is the casket to the jewel which it contains, or only as a prisoner to the walls of his dungeon. 2 But as a matter of fact, the personal spirit of man strikes its roots far and deep into the encom- passing frame of sense, with which, from the first moment of its existence, it has been so intimately associated: in a thousand ways, and most powerfully, the body acts on the soul, and the soul on the body. They are only parted at 1 2 Tim. i. 10; 1 S. Pet. i. 3; 1 Thess. iv. 13; 1 Cor. xv. 55. 2 The false spiritualism which is implied in these metaphors is, in modern times at least, chiefly due to the Cartesian philosophy. Descartes held that the human soul was made only for the purposes of thought (Disc, sur la Me'th. pt. 5.) ; the animal-life of man was, as a consequence, in his judgment, merely that of an independent machine. Madame de Sevigne rallies this once popular theory "des machines qui aiment, des machines qui ont une election pour quelqu'un, des machines qui sont jalouses, des machines qui craignent." (Euvr. t. iii. lett. 170. III.] The body essential to maris full identity. 1 1 7 death by a violent wrench. The spirit can indeed exist independently of the body, but this independent existence is not its emancipation from a prison-house of matter and sense; it is a temporary and abnormal divorce from the companion whose presence is needed to complete its life. Would the soul, permanently severed from the body, still be, properly speaking, man ? Would it not really be some other being? Our inmost consciousness here echoes the answer of science. The body which has been so long the associate and partner of the soul's life, the instrument of its will, the minister of its passions, mingling lower phv sensations with that higher life of thought and feeling which belongs to it, could not be altogether cast away without impairing the completeness of our being, without imperilling the continuous identity of our changeful existence. This, then, is the true ground of the general resurrection, which is no eccentric or gratuitous miracle, but the restora- tion to man of that completeness of identity which is iin- paired by death. If tin- body did not rise, man would, by dying! not simply enter upon a new stage of being; he would exist as a different order or species of creature. His moral history would have changed its conditions and character, The disembodied spirit might repudiate the weaknesses or excesses of the eompanion with whieh it had finally parted company. As a matter of fact, all men are to rise again with their bodies, and to give account of their own works: 1 1 in jl \ being which acted here, is to be judged hereafter. 1 1 8 Bearing of religion on outward things. [Lect. The body and soul together share here in one composite existence; each acts upon the other as well as with it. The corruptible body presseth down the soul. The passions which have their seat in the soul depict themselves upon the surface of the body. On the one hand, an Apostle reminds us that fleshly lusts war not merely against the bodily health, but against the soul. * On the other hand, a beautiful soul illuminates the face of a S. Stephen with angelic light ; 2 and hereafter the bodies of the blessed will be "glorious," that is to say, translucent with the splendours of the glorified spirit. 3 IV. Eeligion, in order to meet the wants of human nature, will take account of man's composite being : she will have lower relations to the bodies as well as higher relations to the souls of men. As man has, besides his unseen person, an outward and visible shape, so will religion herself pro- vide sensible forms as well as supersensuous realities. She will exact outward as well as inward reverence, because in a composite being like man, the one is really the con- dition of the other. There are bodily postures which absolutely forbid heavenly exercises to the soul : to lounge in an arm-chair is inconsistent with the tension of thought 1 1 S. Pet. ii. 11. 2 Acts vi> 15# 3 ! Cor. xv. 43. III.] Religion based on sense of immortality. 1 19 and will which belongs to adoration of the Most Holy. Eeligion, like man himself, is a beautiful spirit tabernacling in a body of sense ; her divine and immutable truths are shrouded beneath the unrivalled poetry of Bible language ; her treasures of grace beneath the outward and visible signs which meet us in sacraments. She proclaims the invisible by that which meets the eye ; she heralds the eternal harmonies by a music that falls upon the ear. She certainly is not all form, for man is not a brute ; but also she is not all spirit, for man is not an angel. She deals with man as being precisely what he is, and she enlists the lower faculties of his being in aid of the higher. Yet if she is true to man and to herself, she never allows hi in to forget the unseen in the seen, the inward in the outward, the soul in the body. For religious purposes, the soul must always be incomparably of the highest importance, as being the very man himself, the man in the secret recesses of his being, the man at the imperishable centre <>f liis life, the man as he lives beneath the Eye, and enters into relations with the Heart of his infinite Creator. Certainly if belief in our being personal spirits is essent ial to religion, and belief in the immediate creation of the soul bj ( k)d is stimulating to it, belief in the soul's immortality is of yet higher religious importance. The relation between (iod and the snu\, in which religion consists, would be little more to us than a « utiment or a literary taste, if we were persuaded that we should have taken leave of it. m shall have tal of our clothes and of our books, 120 Religion impossible, if 'all ends at death, [Lect. when we are laid in our coffins. Would religion be worth our attention as serious men, would it be anything more than a plaything, if all really ended at death ? That the soul is immortal, standing in its immortality, for weal or woe, face to face with the Everlasting God ; — this truth, dimly grasped by natural religion, has been wrought into the very heart and fibre of Christendom. It is taken for granted by Christian faith just as naturally as is the fact of life itself. It underlies that sense of an eternal life which good men already enjoy here, and which implies not simply a consciousness that admits of no idea of succession or time, but an immortal soul in fixed communion with an Eternal Object. It teaches man to look upon all the acts and habits which really feed and strengthen religion as a part of his preparation and outfit for eternity, to be in some sense carried with him as he crosses the heights which form his present horizon, and which shut out from his view the eternal world. And thus it has elevated and enriched human nature in a thousand ways, which we only do not sufficiently appreciate because we are so entirely accustomed to them. Let me illustrate this by an example. Putting religion for the moment out of the question altogether, there is no doubt as to the view which a philanthropist must take of suicide, supposing it to become general, and regarding it in its influence upon society. When a popular Cyrenaic teacher, Hegesias, advocated suicide, at Alexandria, as being the course upon which a really wise man would III.] Christian estimate of suicide. 121 resolve after comparing the sum of the pleasures of life with the sum of its misfortunes, Ptolemy felt it necessary, in the interests of good government and of society, to oblige him to close his lecture-room. But the sentiment with which suicide is practically regarded among us is not based on any mere estimate of its social bearings, still less is it looked upon only as a mode of passing out of life. The announcement that this or that well-known man had destroyed himself would create in any modern society a sensation distinct in kind from that which would be caused by the simple announcement of his death. 1 Why is this? It is because Christianity, revealing to man as a certainty the fact of his immortality, has given a new meaning, value, solemnity to life. To live is to be on our trial, with a tremendous future immediately before us ; and to shorten this trial by a voluntary act, is, apart from other and even graver aspects of such an act, felt to be altogether irrecon- cileahle with this, the Christian estimate of life. 2 Considering the strength of the instinct of self-preseni tion which is naturally implanted in us, suicide shock- oa a violent contradiction of that instinct. Yet while cases of suicide are to be found here and there, in all times and districts of history, there have been periods and places when ii 1 le has been nothing less than a passion 1 Sin. . this dbMrvaHon was made, it has boon painfully illustrated in the case of tin? liiuicntiMl M. PreTOel Pamunfcag in ILent THE OBSTACLE TO KELIGION- SIN. S. James i. 15. When desire hath conceived, it bring eth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bring eth forth death. rjIHE ground which we have hitherto traversed is, in the -*- main, common ground to those who accept the idea of religion in any serious sense at all. Eeligion is im- possible, except as a bond between a real, that is to say, a moral and governing God, and a real, that is to say, a conscious, self-determining, immortal soul. Deny either term of the statement, and religion dissolves into an unpractical sentiment, which either has no adequate object, or else no adequate subject and field for its existence. Hitherto, therefore, at least generally, we have occupieoT positions which may be taken up even by theories which are very earnestly opposed to some of the most distinctive features of the Christian creed. But to-day we advance a step further; and this advance, it is well to say at the outset, must forfeit the sympathy of many who have thus Lect. IV.] Sin, not an invention of Christianity. 1 29 far been able to accompany us. We have reached a point at which we encounter a fact of such widespread and deep significance, that it must perforce colour and impress any real religion, from first to last; so that its pressure and importance are felt both in the drift and substance of religious belief, and in the characteristic temper and dis- positions of a religious mind. The fact in question is moral evil. Moral evil, or sin, is the disturbing and dis- organizing force which breaks up the original relationship of love and confidence between God and man. In view of moral evil, revelation must be not merely illuminative, but remedial ; and religion, in order to be true to the facts of human nature, must consist predominantly of penitence and contrition. And Christianity is broadly at issue with not a few of the religious proposals which aspire to take its place to the present day on this very ground. It does, and they do not, practically recogniae this universal and Fundamental fact: they do, ami it will not, consent to gloss it over, or to explain it away, or to assume that man's religions wants can he, really satisfied without looking it boldly in the face, and providing against it a cure and an antidote. It would be a very great error to suppose that Christi- anilv has invented the idea of sin mdv fox the purpose of remedying n If sin were not a hot independent of Christianity; if it were not an integral feature of human life, Christianity would long ago have perished. In the spiritual world, too, there is such a thing as supply and K 1 30 Sinrecognizedinjttdaism & Heathendom. [Lect. demand; and if a religion pre-supposes wants which do- not exist, and brings remedies for diseases of which nobody is conscious, it has already signed its death-warrant. It is true that Christianity, as a revelation of the highest moral truth, has, beyond any other religion, educated man's sense of sin ; but this sense of sin was not itself a result of Christianity. Long before Christ came, the moral sin and sickness of the world was felt, rather than explicitly recognized. It was of course recognized by the educated conscience of Israel, with its moral law, creating a know- ledge of sin, and its sacrificial system, deepening the sense of the guilt of sin, and its prophetic ministry, bringing these general truths home with an unflinching courage and precision to the sinful kings and populations of the later centuries of its history. But this heart-sickness of the world was also a fact very vividly present to the com- paratively uneducated conscience of Greece. What makes a great heathen say that even if death does involve endless unconsciousness, it ought, nevertheless, to be looked upon as substantial gain ; a deep sleep throughout a lifetime, a sleep unbroken by dreams, being, in his opinion, preferable to the active life of the most fortunate of mankind ? Probably he could not have told us the real reason ; this was an instinct of his rather than a reasoned judgment. He instinctively perceived that in human life, as he saw it, even under its brightest aspects, there was on the whole more evil than good. More evil than good, — but not merely or chiefly more physical evil. The natural courage IV.] The sense of sin in Heathendom. 1 3 1 of a great soul would never have regarded a preponderance of misfortune or of pain in a human life as a reason for wishing to be practically non-existent. The evil which decided the balance of judgment against the expediency of life, was more penetrating, more oppressive, more fatal to the sense of having a right to live than any pain of body, or loss of friends or of goods could possibly be. It was, in a word, moral evil. The heathen knew of the existence of moral evil, but they had very imperfect ideas of its extent and nature. They knew that there was a right and a wrong, to which man is bound to conform himself; but what is right and what is wrong, and why right is right, and wrong is wrong, these were subjects upon which their knowledge was exceeding imperfect. But the general fact of man's disloyalty to such moral troth, as he knew, is often admitted by the leading minds at antiquity. They acknowledge man's secret misery; his proneness to yield to temptations which his conscience condemns; his forfeiture of the lighi which he actually enjoys by disobedience to its requirements. " I see and approve of the better course," says Horace, " I follow the worse." " Nature has given us small sparks of knowledge, 1 ! says Cicero, "we corrupt and e them by our immoralities." "We are all wicked," says Seneca, "what one of us blames in another, each will find in his own bosom. 11 l The Epistle to the Romans itself, which sets out by shew in ; ; that both the Jewish and (lentile worlds, by 132 The melancholy of Werther. [Lect. reason of the sin which had overmastered them, stood in need of the justifying righteousness of Christ, is scarcely more explicit in its assertions than are these great heathen. For to ohserve human life at all, and to reflect on the ohservation, is to be conscious of its moral anomalies. This consciousness often takes the disguised form of a bitter complaint against the external conditions, nay, the very fact of life itself. So it was at the end of the last century. Werther translated Hamlet into the language of modern life, and Goethe made Werther European. Werther embodied the philosophy of melancholy; of dis- satisfaction with life, grounded on a sense of hopeless irretrievable failure. In days nearer to our own, this Pessimism has found a prophet in Schopenhauer, the philosopher of Frankfort. " The history of every life," he says, " is but a history of suffering ; the course of life is generally but a series of greater or of less misfortunes. The true sense of the monologue in Hamlet may be thus summed up. Our condition is so wretched that utter annihilation would be decidedly preferable." ..." The oft-lamented shortness of life may perhaps be its best attribute." ..." Life," he pursues, " may be re- presented as a constant deceiver in things both great and small. If it makes promises, it never keeps them, except to shew how undesirable is that which was desired. First the hope, then the thing hoped for, disappoints us. Life gives only to take away. The charm of distance shews us a paradise, which vanishes like an optical delusion, if we IV.] The Pessimism of Schopenhatier. 1 3 3 allow ourselves to approach it. Hence our happiness ever lies in the future or in the past ; the present may be com- pared to a dark cloud which the wind drives before it over the sunny plain ; behind it there is the sunshine, beneath it a constant shadow. Life is consequently ever unsatisfy- ing; the future being uncertain, the past irrecoverable. Life with its hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly, little, great, and greater discomforts; with its disappointments, its misfortunes, baffling all calculation; bears so plainly the impress of something which is to be spoilt to us, that it is difficult to imagine how this could ever have been mistaken, and how any one could have conceived that life was given to be thankfully enjoyed, or man made to be happy. The general structure of life would rather produce the convic- tion that nothing is worth our efforts, our energies, and our struggles; that all possessions are vanity, the world a bankrupt in all quarters, and life a business which does nut pay its expenses. Satisfaction and prosperity are merely negative — merely the absence of suffering] only sorrow and waul can be positively felt." . . . "We do not perceive that certain days of our lives have been happy till they 1 is vo given place to unhappy ones. It. then, there were a hundred times less sorrow in the world than there is, its mere exist en.v would l>e enough to confirm a truth expressed in various ways, though always with some indirectness — namely, that the existence of the world is a matter not of rejoicing but of grief ; that its annihil would be preferable to it- 1 . that it is fandamen- 134 S- Paul on the groans of creation. [Lect. tally something which ought not to exist. Human life, far from wearing the aspect of a gift, has every appearance of an incurred debt, the payment of which is exacted in the form of the urgent necessities, the tormenting desires, the unceasing want which life involves. The whole period of life is generally consumed in the liquidation of this debt, and yet it is only the interest which can be thus paid off. The payment of the capital is effected by death." 1 Such is Schopenhauer's reply to the sunny Optimism of Leibnitz, who deems this "the best of possible worlds" ; and in this philosophy of despair we listen to the same chord as that already struck by the Platonic Socrates, only the despair is deeper and sadder than was possible for a heathen, who had never heard of a Christian's hope. For Schopenhauer might also seem at times to be expanding and paraphrasing S. Paul's picture of the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain together until now ; only S. Paul saw light upon the distant horizon, and he knew the secret of the present distress. It was moral evil which had introduced this unrest and disorder, or which, if it had not introduced all physical suffering into the universe, at least had made it so intolerable. The aggravated, un- appeasable restlessness which results from a conscious forfeiture of the harmony of our being with the moral law of the universe; — this it is which quickens the agony of that piteous wail to which we have just been listening : 1 Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, § 67, 59, ii. 46, qu. by Luthardt, Apolog. Vortr. Vorles, 2, Notes. IV.] Origin of moral evil, 135 this it is which lights up in the human consciousness the sense of an almost infinite capacity for pain. I The presence and power of moral evil in the world has ever afforded matter for the persevering, anxious, weary exercise of human thought. The difficulties of the problem have not silenced inquiry ; the failure of one generation of tli inkers has not discouraged another. Like the movements of the heavenly bodies, or the laws of health, the existence of moral evil is too patent, too importunate a subject, to be permanently set aside by human beings : it exerts over all who seriously consider the meaning and facts of life too irresistible a fascination not to demand from each generation sonic, attempt at accounting for it, how may have failed to do so. And in dealing with this problem let us observe that there are two fatal tendencies, which beset, on this side and on that, the necessary path of inquiry with the importunity of a resistless fa- lake Scylla and Charybdis, they divide between them the great majority of those who would attempt a passage ; to escape from the one is .generally to fall a victim to the attractions 01 violence of the other. Our path then lies between the temptation to extenuate the idea of evil, and the temptation to tamper with the idea of God. 136 Spinoza s theory of moral evil. [Lect. 1. Of these, the more welcome to the spirit of our time is the former. It is impossible to deny that moral evil exists ; but is it impossible to soften that stern idea of evil which haunts the human conscience, and which is sanctioned by Eevelation ? May not moral evil be represented as a necessary product of man's nature and constitution, as the mere expression and symptom of his place among created beings, nay, even as an indispensable condition of his turning his opportunities to the best account and of fulfilling his destiny ? Yes, it has been said, sin in man is only the measure of his failure to achieve ideal or metaphysical perfection. Man is confessedly a finite being ; and the evil which clings to him, or which he does, is but an appropriate feature of his original circumstances. * The good is that which is, or the real : evil begins with that which is not, or with the unreal." Therefore the Unbounded, All-powerful Being is alone the good, be- cause of His Infinity and Almightiness. Creatures are partly good and partly evil ; they are good so far as they exist; their evil begins with their finitude; it begins at the point where their little life shades oft through weak- ness into non-existence. In this sense too, " whatever is, is right :" whatever tries to be, and cannot be, is wrong. Sin and weakness, strength and virtue, are interchangeable terms. Man as a moral agent suffers in two ways for this metaphysical imperfection of his life. His knowledge of duty is very limited, so that, while he really aims at what is good he constantly does something less than good, only IV.] Sin not due to our limited knowledge. 137 from want of that enlarged information which is denied him by the limited conditions of his being. And he is also tied down to a gross material body, filled with sensual impulses and instincts, which control and overmaster his loftier aspirations. His sensuous nature necessarily and perpetually depresses the level of his thought and action ; and in this depression, thus physically necessitated, from the line of his ideal attainments to that of his actual attainments, consists his sin. Now, so far is sin from being the product of im- perfect knowledge, that the imperfection of man's know- ledge is the measure of his innocence. Knowledge is essential to responsibility; the latter can only exist in the ratio of the former. The lower creatures cannot sin against the knowledge which we have, but which they do not possess: we cannot sin against a higher knowledge than that which baa been vouchsafed to us. But we know enough to have enormous opportunities for sin open to us; and when we do sin, our consciences do not whisper that had we known more we might have been innocent still. Omniscience is not a condition of virtue ; philosophers axe not always saints, nor little children always criminals. Nor is sin accurately attributed to the necessary action of our sensuous nature. It is not, by any means, universally or even generally the product of in • •lit senses. Ruinous as are the sins f«»r which per- verted Bensnal instincts furnish the material, there are many tins of the darkest type which have nothing to do 138 Our sensuous nature not the source of sin. [Lect. with sense. We should be just as capable of envy and hatred, of ambition and pride, of untruthfulness, or the desire to destroy a fellow-creature, if we had no bodies at all. Sin then, as such, is not the irrepressible product of a sensuous body ; nor is it the imperfection of moral or spiritual effort which alliance to such a body is thought of necessity to imply. In order to practise virtue, it is indeed often necessary, with the Apostle, to keep under our body and bring it into subjection ; x but the body does not exert any irresistible power of depression over the higher instincts of the soul, of it would be useless to struggle against it. The seat of sin is in the will, whether sin be chiefly spiritual or sensual; the body merely furnishes one of the spheres wherein temptation may be found and sin is possible ; and sin is a much graver thing than any failure to attain ideal goodness which arises from our being weighted with a body of sense. If sin were only inevitable weakness ; if it were nothing more serious than a lowly condition in the scale of being resulting from man's physical circumstances ; the conscience of man would no more torture him on account of it than the conscience of the cripple or the blind accuses him of his misfortune. Sin differs from virtue not as a flower which has been frostbitten differs from a flower which has escaped the frost, but as a self-made devil differs from an angel ; and the body can no more fetter the will of the saint than the triumph of its rebellious senses can be held to measure or diminish the responsibility of the sinner. 1 1 Cor. ix. 27. IV.] Sin not simply a failure to be good. 139 So faint an estimate of evil may help us to create a morality that shall accommodate itself to human life as it actually is. It will not furnish us for long with a standard of moral truth which will remind us of what our life actually is not. It may recommend itself at once, and very per- suasively, to our self-love. It were pleasant to think, if we could think, that we have never been in the terrible predicament of opposing and refusing a known standard of goodness ; that, at the worst, we are only pardonable and even interesting instances of failure to be all that we conceivably might have been. To see in evil nothing beyond the result of man's finite nature; to see in it a \ privation only and not a contradiction of good, is undoubt- edly calculated to put us all on very good terms with our- selves. But is any theory of the kind consistent with the most rudimentary idea of evil ? Surely our consciences tell 08 thai evil is a great deal more than a maimed effort at goodness, more than a privation of goodness which might be but is not. Evil and good are not, so to put it, upon the same line of advance, with only this difference, that while -oodness is success, evil is failure. If. instance, I tell a very deliberate lie, with a view to getting possession of a sum of money by doing so, I surely do something more than fail to reach an ideal of perfect truthfulness. I move very deliberately in an opposite direction bo thai <>f broth; I do not come short of il . I contradict and trample il underfoot It' nobody ever told a lie without wishing to tell the truth, while yet he baled, 140 The idea of sin in Holy Scripture. [Lect. from defective knowledge, to do so perfectly, this theory of evil as the symptom of man's finite nature might at least claim a hearing. As it is, the real facts of every human conscience are against it. And accordingly Holy Scripture speaks of sin in terms which are utterly at variance with any such estimate of moral evil as this. It speaks of " sin having dominion over us," 1 and of the justified being " dead unto sin;" 2 but we are not ruled by imperfect forms of goodness, nor do we " die " to moral efforts which were only less successful than our present ones. It speaks of sin as a service, the wages of which is death; 3 as a defilement from which we must be cleansed and washed; 4 as a bondage from which Christ makes us free. 5 There is, it appears, a law of sin in our members, to which we maybe brought into captivity; 6 and sin it is which constitutes the sting of death, 7 and which in its deliberate and emphatic form is the death of the soul. 8 How is all this language, which presupposes an energetic contradiction to exist between sin and holiness, to be reconciled with any representation of sin as being merely imperfection, whether of knowledge or of moral force ? As if there were no sins except those of negligence and omis- sion, no sins of set purpose to do evil; as if there were no such thing as knowing evil to be evil, and deliberately embracing it! 9 1 Rom. vi. 14. 2 Rom. vi. 2. 3 Rom. vi. 23 ; cf. 1 S. John iii. 8. * Ps. li. 2-7 ; Isa. i. 16 ; Jerem. iv. 14 ; Acts xxii. 16 ; 1 Cor. vi. 11 ; Rev. i. 5 ; Rev. vii. 14. 5 Rom. vi. 16-22. 6 Rom. vii. 23. 7 1 Cor. xv. 56. 8 1 S. John v. 16. 9 Rom. i. 32. IV.] Is sin a necessaiy foil to virtue? 141 Indeed, to represent sin as something due to the original imperfection of human nature is to contradict the sanctity and justice of God. God is the Maker of His creatures ; and if creatures are imperfect, as compared with the Creator, it is from the necessity of the case, because the creature is not the Creator. But this inherent or metaphysical imper- fection does not necessarily imply moral imperfection : had it been so, God could not have created at all without violating His own attributes. And certainly, if man only sins because his views of absolute good are limited, and his higher aspirations weighed down by the body of sense which encompasses him, the author of that intellectual finiteness and of that sensual frame is the author of man's sin; and God, in creating, forfeits His sanctity, and in for- feiting His sanctity ceases to be the object of religion. This conclusion, indeed, is not declined by the Pantheistic philosophy, and by that large hody of thought in our day, \\ 1 1 i f Loudness. As in the world of Hegelian thought, truth, we are told, is not to be looked r«»r in any sin urinations, but only as the term of a series of contradictions, which not only m true together, but are t<>-rt her necessary to express the full truth; so it has he en asserted, that in the moral sphere thrre is a somewhat similar law of eontnulu tnries; that it is as 142 Evil Hot therej "ore good, because overruled. [Lect. unphilosophical to find fault with what is vulgarly described as sin, as it is to keep no terms with what is coarsely described as falsehood. Sin is the necessary foil to goodness: without sin goodness would never be roused into active life. Con- tradiction is a condition of moral life: goodness is not tranquil conformity to law, but energetic struggle against that which contradicts it, and which by contradicting it makes it what it is. " Just as nature is made up of con- trasts, and in it we see light opposed to darkness, and heat to cold, and expansion to concentration, and pleasure to pain, and health to sickness, — even so does the true life of the human soul emerge from deep contrasts ; it is only developed by the encounter between truth and falsehood, between good and evil." . . . " Evil is thus a condition, almost an ingredient of good. Goodness would slumber in itself, it would be without the necessary impulse to exertion, unless it were constantly kept on the alert by the antago- nistic energies and excesses of evil." 1 This singular travestie of the account which the revela- tion has given of the permission of moral evil in the world, involves a fallacy of confusion. It confounds the good ends which evil, against its nature, may subserve in the purposes of an overruling Providence, with the inherent qualities of evil itself. Certainly it is better for the health of the body that latent disease should shew itself in pronounced illness; and when such illness is over, a patient may be all the stronger and better for having 1 Cf. quot. by Klotz, in his art. Siinde. IV.] Goodness independent of evil. 143 been ill. But for all that, disease is disease, and not a variegated form of health; and a man in whom disease had never been latent, and whose constitution had been even monotonously free from its assaults, will be, at least, as well as another who may have happily survived a scarlet fever. What God in His loving Omnipotence may make evil do in spite of its nature is one thing; what it is in itself is another. Vice is not a necessary aliment, it is not even a necessary foil to virtue. The devil is not necessary to the existence of God; and goodness does not depend either for its beauty or its strength upon the antagonistic efforts of sin. If it were so, we should at once reach the practical conclusion of the Materialistic philosophy, which denies the existence of any free will in man whatever, and sees in all moral actions, whatever their colouring, the inevitable result of antecedents which create them, by as necessary a law as any which rules the world of matter. Upon Mate- rialistic principles, the murderer Tran pinann ought 1 to have been executed: he was no more responsible t atrocities than a Hash of lightning or n \ aid be for the destruction of a human life. P>ut upon the principles of the je^thetie Pantheism, it might even ha\ ques- tioned whether French society did not on the whole gain by his horrible ;i,ti\ ity: and whether 01 bo much to exhibit the virtue of respect for human lii high relief, by so emphatically contradicting it. was n- t in consideration of his services, entitled to receive some hi and more substantial reward than a reprieve of the penalty which he actually SUfifi 144 Evil, if necessary, must be condoned. [Lect. Indeed, it is here that we see how irreconcileable any such theory is with the plainest instincts of a healthy conscience. If evil is necessary to the existence of good, why should conscience condemn evil? How can conscience condemn that which is necessary to the good which it approves? How, if we are to pursue this line of thought, can we ulti- mately avoid acquiescing in a theory which, denying all distinctions of right and wrong as of the nature of baseless prejudice, sees in evil, as in good, only an energetic mani- festation of life apart from any moral colouring whatever? A last protest may indeed be made to the effect that man's business is to contradict the metaphysical necessity for evil by the moral demand that it should be resisted. But this very demand, if it is to be enforced, must proceed upon the serious conviction that moral evil is evil; that it is a some- thing which need not be; and that if we will, we are indi- vidually and perfectly free to accept or to reject it. Theories such as these are in truth expedients for repre- senting sin as being less serious than it is; for softening the repulsive contrasts which it presents to holiness; for securing to it a right to feel at home in human conduct and in the human soul. Every such theory attempts to put forth a more or less disguised justification and apology on behalf of sin, at the bar of intellect, that sin may, if possible, be received without dishonour, if it be not wel- comed at the court of conscience. But conscience, when she is not benumbed or asleep, must protest implacably against these attempts to make sin respectable. She can see in IV.] Doctrine of Two Principles. 145 them only so many invitations addressed to the single sonl, bidding it look tolerantly or fondly on the snre instrument of its degradation and ruin; so many invitations addressed to human society, bidding it recognize or welcome the foe who is sworn to impede and to destroy the indispensable conditions of its coherence and progress. 2. It has indeed been the dread of softening down the idea of evil which has led the human conscience in very early ages to tamper with the idea of God. The instinct ive recoil from the one error has plunged it into the other. The physical evil of pain, of disease, of death, inflicts itself upon the senses; and conscience accounts for physical evil by tracing it to moral evil. Conscience cannot deny the malignity of moral evil without dethroning herself. But why should moral evil exist? The All-Holy could not have created it: to have done so would have been to cease to be Himself. But why did Ho permit it? And who ii being, that He should permit it? In ages and civilizations when the idea of God was im- perfect or impoverished, men accounted for t be existence of evil by ascribing it to a being or principle, coeval with God, independent of Him, and of course opposed to Him. Whether this evil was supposed to be matter out of which the ( ! ! had fashioned the world, or whether it was eoii.-cived of as something mow spiritual, the object and origin of the system was identical. It was an effort to account for the great perplexing mystery— the existence of evil. It is impossible, argued these aftrienl thiol L 1 46 Ormuzd and Ahriman. [Lect. that moral life and death, that good and evil, can flow from a single source. It is impossible that a Holy God can have been the author of evil. Evil, then, must be referred to some other origin: it must have had an author of its own. So far we cannot but follow; but then the argument appeals, in order to sustain its own false inference, to the gigantic proportions which evil has actually assumed. Considering how world-wide and imperial is the sway of evil, must not evil, it asks, be referred to some person, principle, force, or tendency, higher and older than created things; to some almighty source, existing side by side with the Author and Source of goodness, in eternal contradiction to His mind and work? If we take the ancient Parsee doctrine as a sample, we find, in the lines of the Bundehesch, the good and evil principles — Ormuzd and Ahriman — contrasted as follows: — " Ormuzd is the light; This light is without beginning; Ormuzd is on high, Ormuzd is Holy, Ormuzd hath all knowledge." On the other hand — "Ahriman is in darkness; This darkness is without beginning; Ahriman is in the depths; Ahriman delighteth in strife; Ahriman hath only a derived knowledge." 1 Here, while Ahriman is in respect of knowledge the inferior of Ormuzd, they are represented as coeval; al- 1 Ahardanesch, qu. by Hanneberg from Jos. Miiller, art. Parsismus. IV.] Anti-dualism of Isaiah. 147 though the modern Parsees, especially when in conflict with Christianity, have tended, by exalting Ormuzd alone, to approach more and more closely to a practical Monothe- ism. 1 But there is no real question as to the practical Dualism of the earlier doctrine, which prevailed in Persia at least from the date of Darius Hystaspes to that of Alexander the Great, and again after the fall of the Parthian dynasty, — the doctrine which is confronted in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. In Isaiah, the God of Israel proclaims — " I am the Lord, And there is none else : There is no God beside Me I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things." 1 Here we have a revelation probably designed to protect the faith of Israel against the Dualistic influences to which it would lie exposed during the later period of the I lapl h The Eternal Lord of Heaven was much more ancient than this antagonism ■■!' ..| and evil which meets men's eves in the world, and which suggested the faith from which was evolved the Zendavesta. The evil principle itself in t his sense only created by Him, that He had formed the wills which, in their perverted freedom, gave it birth. I am the Lord, and there is none else." 1 Cf. Hanneberg, who quotes Wilson, "The Parse© Religion," Bombay, 1843, p. 107. it would seem that the superiority of Ormuzd was never supposed to imply his power of preventing the birth of Ahriman or of ;i 11 nihit.it iuu liini. 1 .:. .'. 8, 7. 148 Dualism is, in fact, Atheism. [Lect. In Christian times we find S. Panl insisting upon the truism, as it appears to us, that " every creature of God is good, and nothing to be despised," 1 as a reason for reject- ing certain distinctions of food which were insisted on by some ancient ascetics at Ephesus. But here he is really combating another form of the doctrine of Two Principles ; which held matter to be the seat and source of evil, and certain kinds of food to be peculiarly representative of the grossness of matter. When Augustine, in a later age, as a still unconverted young man, giving the freest license both to sensual passions and to intellectual enterprise, was casting about for a theory which would at once countenance his excesses, and furnish him with a working philosophical explanation of the universe, he found it in Manicheeism. Manicheeism was the Dualism which had acquired a Christian flavour by coming into contact with Christianity ; and we may form some idea of the strength and fascina- tion of the theory, by observing how tenacious was its hold upon the strong and beautiful mind of the greatest of the Fathers, even when the full light of Catholic truth was already breaking upon him. / Isaiah's words will have already suggested that seriously to believe in two eternal principles is fatal to serious belief in the existence of God. God is the one Self-existent Being ; the Maker of all things, visible and invisible. To assert that another — whether essence, person, or even matter — existed eternally side by side with God, is to deny 1 1 Tim. iv. 4. IV.] The idea of evil impaired by Dtialism. 149 God's first and necessary prerogative, as the Alone Eternal, and Self-existent. If God is to be screened in human thought from the blasphemy which would credit Him with the origination of evil, it must be by some doctrine which, unlike Dualism, does not virtually annihilate Him in order to do so. But the doctrine of Two Principles does not succeed even in its main object, namely, the protection and affirmation of the unimpaired idea of evil itself. Evil is, in its quaintly perverted estimate, rather a growth of nature than the free product of a created will : evil has a positive substance of its own. Evil must therefore be conquered by a ph\ rather than a spiritual or moral treatment. This would seem to have been the idea of these mistaken ascetics at Colossi, 1 whom S. Paul observed and reproved. And the error leads to consequences beyond itself. If evil is physical, there is no more reason for distress at a habit of lying, than a1 tuberculatum of the lungs. If sin is ;il, i» niedies may or may not succeed ; and a moral struggle is on the whole less reasonable than a torpid resignation. . At any rate, it mivbe said, we of this generation are not Dualists: and what good is to he done by disinterring and gibbeting the corpses of ancient errors? But lot us recollect thai when error is buried as a formal theory, it often leaves behind it a miasma whieh infects the world of tliMU; lit I'm- niaiiv ;i sn, , , 1 -,!in : .;. 'iteration. \\ 150 Dualism in everyday life. [Lect. cally affirm a second evil principle in the universe when we acquiesce in the notion that evil in ourselves or in others, in individuals or in societies, is invincible. We do not talk of a second principle ; we assume one. "We assume not merely a powerful but an unconquerable devil, when we despair of expelling, by God's grace, that which is evil in ourselves or in others. We bow, as we say, to the inevitable ; we recognize such and such tendencies of the times. They are perhaps at issue with what we know to be right. But there they are ; the current flows all one way and with increasing strength, and we say that it is useless to attempt to make head against it. Instead of over- coming evil with good, like the Apostle, we philosophically resign ourselves to being overcome with evil. But our notion of the invincibility of sin and error is at issue with our still professed faith in the one Ail-Powerful and Holy God. Our faint-heartedness, our despair, our abject fatalism in presence of evil, within and around us, is properly a relic of the old Dualistic leaven, which sees in evil the resistless play, the unconquerable energy of an eternal principle ; which refers it to a power that, could it have existed, would have made God impossible. No. There must be no tampering with the idea and character of God ; with His Unity, with His Omnipotence, with His Sanctity. To deny these is to destroy, in human thought, the ascertained object of religion. If there is one God, All-powerful and moral, and if moral evil is a fact in the universe, the existence and nature of moral evil must IV.] Desire the raw material of sin. 151 be in some way accounted for by serious Theists, if it can be accounted for at all, without impugning the morality and the Omnipotence of God. IL What, then, is sin in itself? What representation of it will neither obliterate the lines of moral truth, nor do injustice to the Sanctity or the Omnipotence of God ? S. James, in the passage which is before us, furnishes us with materials for answering this question. He says that desire when it hath conceived bringeth forth sin. He tli us places the origin of moral evil in the created will, of which desire is the moral ingredient. Desire is, indeed, the raw material of moral life. It is the plastic force which may become, under ditlerent circamstanoes, either sanctity or sin: and thus S. Augustine has defined virtue as "love or desire ruled by true order." Desire is pari of tlif original outfit of every human being; a sympathetic force by which the various instincts and faculties <»f nur nature are drawn towards a Boinething external to itself. What is that something? In man's unlallen state of old, and in his state of perfectly restored sanctity hereafter, God is the trim object of all human desires: man desires God for His o\v ml all ereated objects only for the sake of God. In the original design 152 Selfishness at the root of sin. [Lect. of God, desire in the moral world corresponds to the law of attraction in the physical ; and the perfected saint, in all the activity of his moral and intellectual life, moves around the great Centre of his adoration with an undeviat- ing regularity, such as is that of the planet circling in its orbit around its parent sun. But the planet cannot modify or weaken the attraction which governs it. It cannot plunge anarchically through space, seeking a place in some other system where it may move around some other sun, or itself become the centre of other satellites ; whereas desire, being moral, does not bind free agents to loyal revolutions around their true Centre by any such necessity. Man may at his option cease to desire God : he may, in the stead of God, desire one of God's creatures for its own sake, and with the vehemence of an absorbing passion. 1 And since no other creature can really take God's place, man thus comes to make himself his own centre ; to view all persons and events relatively to him- self ; to think of God, if at all, as only one of the points on the circumference of his own petty and fictitious universe. When desire is thus perverted, by being wedded to the things of time and sense, as if they could really satisfy the yearnings of the soul, it " bringeth forth sin." Like an atmosphere charged with infection, desire spent upon created things is pregnant with sin: it implies that idolatrous surrender of self to creatures, that passionate claim upon creatures on behalf of self, which in the end 1 S. John ii. 17, k-KiQv^ia. rod k6(t^ov. Tit. ii. 12; Eom. vii. 7, 8. IV.] Other aspects of an act of sin. 153 breaks the bond between God and the soul. * And hence an act, or series of acts, whether of thought, or word, or deed, to which in its freedom the will consents, and which contradict the moral order of the universe. And this is sin. Sin, to be complete, need not become speech or action : a formed desire, deliberately assented to by the will, constitutes sin. " He that looketh on a woman," says our Lord, " to desire her, hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." 2 Indeed, it is the internal act, and not the material product of the act, which is chiefly of moral importance. What is the precise form or turn of the inward act? Here the beautiful and suggestive words, which are used to express the idea of sin in the sacred language, but which an untranslate- able into our clumsier Western tongue, will help 08. In the fifty-first Psalm, for instance, besides the generic expression for evil, 3 there are three words which describe different aspects of the idea of sin. Of these, on tlinl God's will beinu the aim which man rightly pursues, sin is a missing his true goal in life. 4 A second regards 1 Thii aspect of sin has been well re-stated in Jul. Midler's Lehr. v. d. Btmde, L L 0. 3. 9 S. Matt. v. 28. 8 jn, v. »•>, l.r.'.ullv opposed to 3to— Gen. xxiv. 50; Levit xxvii. 10. In 1 ■ :i 111. .iv emphatic moral MOM, l'r..v. \iii. 1 B j IV vii. 10, M^ ■•■■■ • n nii!]\ I i tempestuous; the transition to the idea of moral i appears in pm, which is primarily used of breaking in pieces with Job w\i\ j i r ii .': then of evil generally, and finally, in th»> Hij 1 i evil action. — J. Muller, Lehr. v. d. Stinde, i. i. c. 2. 1 KBft, v. 5. The primary idea seems to be that of stmnMini: OB the way ! • :! •■ ! IV.'\. \i\. 2j in win, li [| impli> v. 5. y$pj primarily implies faithless rebellion against a covenant, as in Isa. i. 2, xliii. 27 ; Jerem. iii. 13; Amos iv. 4; 1 Kings xii. 19, &c. IV. ] and therefore the self-existent nature of God. 1 5 5 we know to be false is true ? Why not ? Because, in sanctioning us, God would be contradicting, not a law which He might have made other than as He has made it, but a necessary truth of His own eternal nature. A moral truth is like a mathematical axiom ; we see it intuitively, and we do this because it is necessarily true, and as being necessarily true, is also a truth of God's eternal nature. Can any reasonable man, for instance, without destroying and uprooting the very constitution of the mind which God has given him, conceive that under any possible circumstances it could ever have been true that things which are equal to the same are not equal to one another ? If not; then, here we have an Eternal Truth. And if this be an Eternal Truth, it is, as such, a real part of ( Eternal Nature ; since if this be denied, we must admit that there are eternal truths independent of God, and exk eternally apart from Him. Would not this in ei denial of His solitary self-existence ? Either God does not exist, or all that is eternal is God. Hut if pure mathe- matical truth, 88 being eternally true, be thus l>i\ ine, moral truth is not less so. If we cannot believe that a lie was ever right, this is because veracity is an eternal law <>f the Divine nature; and this applies to (he whole moral law, which is. in reality, the Divine nature formulated into rules wlii.li suil the eonditionsof creaturely existence. Thus, given tli elatimisliip. it never ooold have beau right to dishonour a Either or a mother: given human life, murder ooold never have been other than criminal: 156 Permission of evil by God. [Lect. given the responsibility of transmitting the gift of life, and adultery, which trifles with that responsibility, could never have been condoned : given the idea of personal rights, of property, and stealing is necessarily condemned. And thus it is that sin does not contradict a rule which God has made of one kind, but which He might have made of another; it contradicts a rule which, in its principle, is necessary and eternal ; a rule which does not depend even upon the will of God Himself, since it embodies and expresses His Divine and unchanging Nature ; a rule which accordingly it is impossible to contradict, without running counter to, and, so far as we can, setting at naught and destroying the very being and nature of God Himself. " Against Thee only have I sinned," is the voice of the sinner's deepest knowledge of himself. And it was this which led ancient divines to say, that if, per impossibile, moral evil could be pushed to a point of sufficient exaggera- tion, it would annihilate God. By this saying, they ex- pressed the vital and fundamental antagonism which exists between sin and the Divine nature. Now, such an account of moral evil cannot be said to attenuate its malignity; but is it equally careful of the character of God? If evil be thus antagonistic to God, how can God, at once Almighty and All-holy, have allowed it to exist ? As All-holy, He must abhor it ; as Almighty, He surely might have proscribed what He abhors ? The answer is, that, notwithstanding the inherent quality of evil, the possibility of its existence is, so far as we can IV.] Sin an abuse of God's generosity. 1 5 7 see, a needful condition of true moral freedom. God might have created a universe ruled from first to last by physical law, and so incapable of deviation from the true rule of its action. In such an universe, moral evil would have found no place, only because there would have been no creatures properly capable of moral good. Our experience tells us that God has not chosen to stint down His creative activity to these proportions : that we are free agents, is not more a matter of faith, than of experience. We know that God has created beings whose high privilege it is to be able 1 to choose Him as their king, as the accepted Master of their whole inward life ; but if this privilege is to be real, it also carries with it the implied power of rejecting Him. The alternative risk is the inevitable condition of the consum- mate honour: it is actually a substantial pari of the honour. A moral being must at least have a capacity disobedience if he is to be able freely to obey. If, then, ( tod has permitted evil, it is not beoause He has I i" I.- Himself, but because His generosity has been abused The source and root of moral evil is to be found, not in the Good God, but in the abused freedom of the creature, whether it be man or angel. It were hard is to blaspheme God for His generosity; to oomplain that He has made us men and not brutes or stones, because, sooth, as fl well as in our indivi.lu.il lives, W« turned Bis bounty against Bimself, and made the great- ness of His gifl the measure of oui degradation. It will be urged that • ' the 1586". Paul and S.Augustine on permitted sin. [Lect. abuse that would follow upon His gift of freedom. Cer- tainly. But those who believe in His wisdom and His love at all, must surely believe that He foresaw much else. They will believe with S. Paul that if, in the event, sin has abounded, grace has much more abounded. 1 They will believe with S. Augustine that " God knew it to be more agreeable to His almighty goodness even to bring good out of evil, than not to permit evil to exist." 2 He might be trusted to strike the balance of advantages between a universe ruled only by physical law and a universe so open to the possible invasion of evil as to be darkened by its actual presence and apparent victory, but withal illuminated by the remedy, which, in the long run, was to be much more than equal to grappling with the disease. Sin might be tolerated, if the Eternal Son was to^redeem the world. We know at any rate how the world's Euler has decided, and it is scarcely reasonable to complain that He has not admitted us to share all the reasons which governed His decision. III. Here, then, I repeat the statement with which I began, that if a religion is to be real life-controlling power, it 1 Rom. v. 18, 19, 20, ov dk €Tr\e6va(J€V 77 afiapria, virepeirepiaffevaev 77 x^P LS ' 2 De Cor. et Gr. c. 10. Qui creavit omnia bona valde et mala ex bonis exoritura esse prseseivit ; scivit magis ad omnipotentissimam suam bonitatem pertinere etiam de malis benefacere quam mala esse non sinere. IV.] Religion must grapple with sin. 159 must practically recognize the fact of sin. For, since sin provokes God's necessary displeasure on the one hand, and destroys man's power and even his wish to seek God on the other, its direct effect is to break up that bond between God and man in which religion essentially consists. Eeli- gion, therefore, must deal with sin, not as if it were making a supererogatory exertion, but as a condition of its own exist- ence. It must remove this fatal obstacle to its proper activity, if it is to exist at all. Not less necessary is this practical recognition of sin by religion, if religion is to be of anv real benefit to society. Go out into the streets of this great capital, or read the daily journals which register the thought and incidents of our national life, and w T hat are the two spectres which meet you most constantly ? Are they not suffering and crime? And what is snllerin least in the main, but the effect ami shadow of sin ; if not of the sufferer's own sin, yet at least of some physical or social legacy from a parent's error? What is crime in its most venial form, but sin, prompted by suffering and aized and solidified, until in its brutal exuberance it threatens even the existence of society? Has religion nothing to say to the moral mischief which is tl of these dark phantom Is she dreaming I Is she power- less ? Is she nhandoning her ul mission of saving humanity from it- worst enemies? It is here that true religion parts company altoge with certain phases of so-termed religious thought, which are not without an ambition to be considered at Least the 1 60 " Religious " philosophies which ignore sin. [Lect. rudiments of some future religion of civilization. Doubt- less they embody much which recommends them, at any rate, to the interest of educated people. They are philo- sophical; they are enterprising; they are in good taste ; they occupy a large amount of attention in our journals and periodicals. Nor are they insensible to the evil of crime, considered as a cause of social disturbance and danger. They would sometimes deal more hardly with it than would be morally possible for men who had a deeper insight into the relative responsibility of criminals. But ignoring the awful yet blessed doctrines of Eedemption and Grace, they have no remedy for sin ; no remedy, that is, of any practical value ; and after all, sin is the great fact with which they ought to deal. Animated speculation on religious topics, careful reproduction of the external drapery of scenes in early sacred history, quick capacity for analyzing and deline- ating sentiment, is very welcome in its place. It has indis- putably a literary value ; but it does not help us to confront the stern realities of this human world. The religion which has no fixed doctrines, or scarcely any ; no code of absolute truth, to be taught and suffered for at all costs ; no word of heart-searching warning, and yet of tenderest consolation for sinners, — is not really a religion at all. It is at best a very one-sided philosophy. Its endeavours to deal with the great heart-sores of humanity remind us of some great physician who, at the bedside of a patient, writhing in pro- tracted agony, should airily discuss his own last excursion in the Alps, or the last debate in Parliament, or at best the IV.] Jesus teaches the nature of sin. 161 most recent resolution arrived at by the Metropolitan Board of Health. The religion of Jesus Christ, as taught by His Apostles, does not thus trifle with the seriousness of sin. It begins by deepening the sense of sin, the perception of its real area and power in human life. It adds poignancy to the feeling of shame and guilt which follows upon deliberate sinful action in a healthy conscience. By the Mosaic law there was a knowledge of sin. * By the teaching and example of Jesus Christ there is a much truer and deeper knowledge of it. 2 That faultless and unapproached Life which we study in the pages of the Gospels, brought home to the heart as well as to the understanding by the secret teaching of the Eternal Spirit, endows the Christian with an ideal of sanctity alto- gether his own. 3 Around the Sermon on the Mount, or the last discourse in the supper-room, there is an unearthly atmosphere of purity and holiness, which lights op in the soul, with microscopic distinctness, the consciousness of secret evil, more perfectly than could any code of precepts. One only appearing among us in human form has been able to ask the tremendous question, " Which of you con- vinceth Me of sin?" 4 And as we gaze on Him, holy, harmless, undeliled, separate from sinners, in His pu His courage, 1 1 , Hia tenderness, His majestic moral strength, His fearless loyalty to truth, His vast charity, we see that which reveals us to ourselves. A' feel of the Land) without hlemish and in 1 Bom. iii. 20. -■ S. M.. B, • a John \iii. 18. ■ S. .Mm \iu. 46. H 1 62 Jesus teaches the consequences of sin. [Lect. with Job, that the report of God's sanctity has been at length exchanged for sight; 1 we exclaim with the Apostle, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord." 2 Nor does Jesus Christ stop here. He reveals, as does no other, not merely the fact and malignity of sin, but its consequences. The sternest things that have ever been said, as regards sin's prospects in another world, first passed the tenderest lips that ever proclaimed God's love to man. 3 Our Lord would not leave the revelation of the penal future to His Apostles: He took the unpopularity of making such a revelation upon Himself. No unbelieving criticism can really touch the plain meaning of the tremen- dous words in which the All-Merciful One has depicted the case of a moral being, stiffened by final impenitence into a permanent self-torturing rebellion against Eternal Justice and Eternal Love. But for that awful measure of sin, the saying concerning Judas had been a paradox ; " It were good for that man if he had never been born." 4 Yet if Jesus Christ had only taught us the penalties of sin, He would but have enhanced the terrors of the ancient law. Whereas, in reality, He has made it possible for us to look at moral evil as it is. We Christians can dare to face it, for He has brought us both a pardon and an antidote. His cross and passion are a revelation as well as a cure. When dying, He shews us what sin is. At least to those who take Him at His word, and see in Him One Higher 1 Job xlii. 5. 2 S. Luke v. 8. 3 S. Mark ix. 43-48 ; S. Matt. xxv. 46 ; S. John v. 29. 4 S. Matt. xxvi. 24; S. Mark xiv. 21. IV.] Jesus is the Atonement for sin. 163 than the sons of men, the Cross will surely have this mean- ing. Why could not the Holy One, manifested to His reasonable creatures in a form of sense, have ended a life of beneficence and glory by such a visible ascent to heaven as was that of the Tishbite ? Why those years of privation and sorrow, those sufferings and insults, that shame and scorn ? Why the prostration in the garden, and the Wounds and the Blood, and the agony lengthened out by ingenious cruelty, and the ostentatious exultation and triumph of the hosts of evil, and the darkness and gloom of the closing scene ? Would not tins mean failure, if it had not been proved by the event to mean a victory, wherein the Divine Sufferer was triumphing, as His Apostle notes, over the associated powers of darkness? 1 That unfathoincd pain is the true measure of sin for Christians. In that keen sensi- tiveness, in that strength of a self-sacrificing Will, in that exhaustive anticipation of and intellectual familiarity with liy, followed by so entire an acceptance of it, we Christians discern the real character of the adversary which the Perfect Moral Being conquered by Eie voluntary death From thai fountain of pardon and strength which He opened upon Calvary, all 9 the resources which His Church can wield in her . ith His great enemy, and in her continuation of His wori of reoom iation and peace, are consistently derived. No virtue exists in then which is not His; no cleansing which His Blood has not made good ; beneath the Cross, we can never 1 Ool ii. 15. •ActsiT. 12. 1 64 The sense of sin in a faithful Christian. [Lect. deem moral evil less or other than the greatest, if it be not rather the only evil. Kneeling before the Crucified, be our sense of guilt what it may, we can never despair; since the complete revelation of the malignity of sin is also and simultaneously a revelation of the Love that knows no bounds. 1 It is these concrete truths, and no abstract considera- tions, which really keep alive in the Christian heart an abhorrence and dread of moral evil. With that evil, even when all has been pardoned, every Christian life is, from first to last, in varying degrees, a struggle. There are great conflicts, and there are periods of comparative repose ; there are days of failure as well as days of victory ; there are quickenings of buoyant thankful hope, and there are hours of a discouragement which is only not despair. But two things a genuine Christian never does. He never makes light of any known sin, 2 and he never admits it to be invincible. 3 "While he constantly endeavours, by the sanctification of his desires, by entwining his affections more and more around the Source of goodness, to destroy sin in the bud, or rather in its root and principle, he is never off his guard; never surprised at new proofs of his natural weakness; never disposed to underrate either his dangers or his strength. He knows that now, as eighteen centuries ago, he wrestles not against flesh and blood, 4 but against principalities and powers that bear him no good will: he 1 2 Cor. v. 14 ; Rom. v. 15. 2 1 S. John iii. 9 ; v. 18. 3 1 Cor. x. 12. 4 Eph. vi. 12. IV.] The victory over sin. 1 65 knows, that as at the first so now, " if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and He is the propitiation for our sins." 1 And thus, in his inmost life, he is at once anxious and hopeful; confident yet without presumption ; alive to all that is at stake day by day, hour by hour ; yet stayed upon the thought, nay, upon the felt presence of a Love Which has not really left him to himself. And at last, when it seems best to that Eternal Love, the day of struggle draws to its close, 2 and the towers of the Everlasting City come into view; the city within whose precincts intellectual error cannot penetrate, and moral failure is unknown. " Thanks be to God Who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." s Your alms are asked to-day on behalf of the additional clergy needed by this great parish with its twenty thousand poor. 4 You will feel that this is an opportunity of testing the earnestness of your desire to struggle against our com- mon enemy, whether in the world or in your own hearts, by freely placing your means at His disposal, Who is its only real Conqueror. M S.John ii. l «2Tira. iv. 6. • 1 Cor. »▼. 57. * St. James's, Piccadilly, Additional Curates* Fund. LECTURE V. dTiftS Stmtiag in stent* PEAYEE, THE CHAEACTEEISTIC ACTION OF EELIGIOK S. Matt. rii. 7. Ask and it shall be given you. T) ELIGION is the bond between the soul and God, which ■*-*' sin, by virtue of its very nature, breaks up and destroys. It is of importance to inquire whether man can strengthen and intensify that which he can, it seems, so easily ruin if he will. Does his power lie only in the direction of destruction ? Has he no means of invigorating and repairing a tie, in itself so precious, yet in some respects so frail ? The answer lies in our Lord's promise. Prayer is the act by which man, conscious at once of his weakness and of his immortality, puts himself into real and effective communication with the Almighty, the Eternal, the Self-Existent God. I say, effective communication. Eor prayer, as our Lord teaches in the text and elsewhere, is not without results. God answers prayer in many ways. His answers to the soul's petition for health and strengtli Lect. V.] Prayer the language of all religions. 167 are collectively described as grace ; grace being the invisible influence whereby He on His part strengthens and quickens the tie which binds the petitioner to Himself. " Ask and it shall be given you." Prayer then braces the bond of religion from the side of man ; and grace, God's highest answer to prayer, braces it in a different and far more powerful sense on the part of God. It is not too much to say that the practice of prayer is co-extensive with the idea of religion. Wherever man hafl believed a higher power to exist, he has not merely dis- cussed the possibility of entering into converse with such a power ; he has assumed, as a matter of course, that li- do so. Upon desert plains and wild promontories, not less than in crowded thoroughfares and gorgeous temples, priest- hoods, and kings, and multitudes have taken prayer for granted, as being the most practical as well as the most interesting and solemn concern of life. The surface of the earth, Of parte Of OUT OWD island, is still covered with the of some among these ancient worships. And if the implied conceptions of doit \ degraded, and the rites Cruel, or inhuman, or impure, and the minds of the worshippers not seldom imbrnted by the very acts which should have raised them heavenward; -till the idea of • natural correlative of belief in the raper- huni, lway« there. To know that a higher Being d. and interested llim-clf. in whatever way. in the ics of man. was to feel that it was at once n and a duty to approach llim. 1 68 Prayer in Holy Scrip here. [Lect. And as we pass the historical lines within which, as Christians believe, mankind has enjoyed a knowledge of God's successive revelations of His true self and His true will, we find that prayer is the prominent feature, the characteristic exercise of man's highest life. Sacrifice begins at the very gates of Eden. 1 The life of early Patriarchs is described as a "walking with God," a con- tinuous reference of thought and aspiration to the Father above, Who yet was so near them. 2 And after the Mosaic Law was given, when the idea and range of sin had been deepened and extended in the mind of Israel, we find prayer organized in a system of sacrifices, suited to various wants and moods of the human soul, consciously dealing with its God as the King, both of the sacred nation and of the individual conscience. Penitence, thanksgiving, inter- cession, adoration, each found an appropriate expression. 3 Later still, in the Psalter, prayer — the purest, the loftiest, the most passionate — took shape in imperishable forms. And when at length a new revelation was made in Jesus Christ, there was little to add to what was already believed as to the power and obligation of prayer, beyond revealing the secret of its acceptance. Our Lord's precepts 4 and example 5 are sufficiently emphatic ; and His Apostles appear to represent prayer not so much as a practice of 1 Gen. iv. 4. 2 Gen. v. 24 ; vi. 9. 3 Levit. i.-vii. 4 S. Matt. vi. 9 ; S. Luke xi. 2 ; S. Matt. xxvi. 41 ; S. Mark xi. 24 ; S. Luke xviii. 1, &c. 5 S. Matt. xiv. 23 ; S. Mark vi. 46 ; S. Luke vi. 12, ix. 28 ; S. John xvii. 1. V.] Religion as S7ick has its specific work. 1 69 the Christian life, as its very breath and instinctive move- ment. The Christian must be "continuing instant in prayer f he must " pray without ceasing." x Each faculty, or endowment, or form of activity that belongs to man has, over and above a number of mora indirect effects, its appropriate and characteristic action, in which its whole strength is embarked, and in which it has, so to speak, its full play. To this law religion is no excep- tion. While its influence upon human life is strong and various in proportion to its high aim and object; while it is felt, when it wields real empire, in every department of human activity and interest, M an invigorating, purifying, chastening, restraining, guiding iniluence, it too has a work peculiarly its own. In tin's work it is wont, if we may so speak, to embark its collective forces, and to become peculiarly conscious of its direction and intensity. This work is prayer. Prayer is emphatically religion in action. It is the smd «.f man engaging in thai particular form of activity which 1 poses the existence of a great bond between itself and God. Prayer is, therefore, nothing else or less than the noblest kind of human exertion. It 1 Eton, \ii. 18; 1 Xhm r, 17, 1 70 Objectio7itoprayerasmerely u sentimental!'\\^Q,T. is the one department of action in which man realizes the highest privilege and capacity of his being. And, in doing this, he is himself enriched and ennobled almost indefi- nitely: now, as of old, when he comes down from the mountain, his face bears tokens of an irradiation which is not of this world. That this estimate of the value of prayer is not universal among educated people in our day, is only too notorious. If many a man were to put into words with perfect honesty and explicitness what he thinks, he would say that prayer is an excellent thing for a clergyman, or for a recluse, or for a sentimentalist, or for women and children generally; that it has its uses as a form of desultory occupation, an outlet for feeling, a means of discipline. For himself, he cannot really think that much prayer would help him much. It implies a life of feeling — perhaps, he would say, of morbid feeling ; and he prides himself upon being guided only by reflection. It is sustained, he thinks, by imagination, rather than by reason ; and he deems imagination puerile and feminine. His religion, whatever it is, has nothing to do with imagination, and is hard reason from first to last; and accordingly prayer seems to him to be altogether less worthy of the energies of a thinking man than hard work, whether it be work of the hands or of the brains, whether it be study or business. The dignity of real labour is pro- verbial, but where, he asks, is the dignity of so sentimental an occupation as prayer? "For his own part, he thinks," (I am quoting words which have actually been used) " that V.] Serious prayer is a form of hard work. 1 7 1 religion is not worship, but only another name for doing good to our fellow-creatures." Now, without saying one word to disparage the intimate connection between religion and philanthropy, let us ex- amine the idea of prayer, which is taken for granted in such language as the foregoing. Is it true that prayer is, as is assumed, little else than the half passive play of sentiment which flows languidly on through the minutes or hours of easy reverie? Let those who have really prayed give the answer. They sometimes describe prayer with the patriarch Jacob as a wrestling together with an Unseen Power, which may last, not unfrequently in an earnest life, late into night hours, or even to the break of day. 1 Sometimes they refer to common intercession with S. Paul as a concerted struggle. 2 They have, when praying, their eyes fixed upon tlic Great Intercessor in Qethsemane, upon the drops of UihhI which fall to the ground in that Agony of Et and Sacrifice. 3 Importunity is of the essence of m prayer. Our Lord's references to the subject especially imply this. The Friend who is at rest with his family, will rise at last to give a loaf to the hungry applicant.' The Unjust Judge yields in the end t«> the ivsiatleaa eager- ncss «.r the widow's cry. 8 Our Lord's blearing oe theSyro- riiu nician woman is the consecrat ion of importunity God. 6 And importunity m< I dreaminess, but sus- tains! work It is through prayer especially t : »Gon. \\\ii .24. *Rom.xv.30. •aLuk •S. Luke ntfi. 5. • S. Mat- ; S. Mark yil 2S 172 Prayer exercises the under sta nding, [Lect. kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force." 1 It was a saying of the late Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury, that " no man was likely to do much good in prayer who did not begin by looking upon it in the light of a work, to be prepared for and persevered in with all the earnestness which we bring to bear upon subjects which are, in our opinion, at once most interesting and most necessary." This indeed will appear, if, looking to an act of real prayer, we take it to pieces. Of w T hat does it consist ? It consists always of three separate forms of activity which, in the case of different persons, co-exist in very varying degrees of intensity, but which are found, in some degree, in all who pray, whenever they pray. To pray, is first of all to put the understanding in motion, and to direct it upon the Highest Object to Which it can possibly address itself, the Infinite God. In our private prayers, as in our public liturgies, we generally preface the petition itself by naming one or more of His attributes. Almighty and Everlasting God! If the understanding is really at work at all, how overwhelming are the ideas, the truths, which pass thus before it; a boundless Power, an Existence which knows neither beginning nor end. Then the substance of the petition, the motives which are alleged for urging it, the issues which depend upon its being granted or being refused, present themselves to the eye of the understanding. And if our Lord Jesus Christ is not Him- 1 S. Matt. xi. 12. V.] the affections, and the will. 1 73 self, as being both God and Man, the object of prayer, yet His perpetual and prevailing intercession opens upon Christian thought the inmost mysteries before the Eternal Throne. And thus any common act of real prayer keeps, not the imagination, but the understanding, occupied earnestly, absorbingly, under the guidance of faith, from first to last. 1 Next, to pray is to put the affections in motion: it is to open the heart. The object of prayer is the Uncreated Love, the Eternal Beauty; He of Whose beauty all that moves love and admiration here is at best a pale reflection. To 1 His presence in prayer, is to be conscious of an expansion of the heart, and of the pleasure which accompanies it, which we feel, in another sense, when speaking with an intimate and loved friend or relative. And tins movement of the affections is sustained throughout the act of prayer. It is invigorated by the spiritual sight of God, bat it isalso the original impulse which leads us to draw mar to Him. 1 In true prayer as in beaching, "out of the abnndanoe of the heart Mm mouth speaketh." 1 Once more, to pray, is to put the will in motion as decidedly as we do when we sit down to read haul, or to walk up a steep hill against time. 4 That sove- power in the soul, which we name tlu j \ Rph.Ti.18; & J< ha to. IS ttj Rom, \. 14; Hob. xi. 6. Matt. w. B; ia Johi 1 s. Matt. \i. ::i ; s. Lnki 1 4 s. John be. SI ; s. Matt. HI M j s. Jamai to, 7 8. These pa— got all Imp]] that prayer in which the vrflj it not engaged U worthless. 1 74 Prayer more exacting than other work. [Lect. merely, in prayer, impel us to make the first necessary mental effort, but enters most penetratingly and vitally into the very action of the prayer itself. It is the will which presses the petition ; it is the will which struggles with the reluctance of sloth or with the oppositions of passion ; it is the will which perseveres ; it is the will which exclaims, " I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me." 1 The amount of will which we severally carry into the act of prayer is the ratio of its sincerity ; and where prayer is at once real and prolonged, the demands which it makes upon our power of concentrating determination into a specific and continuous act are very considerable indeed. Now, these three ingredients of prayer are also ingre- dients in all real w r ork, whether of the brains or of the hands. The sustained effort of the intelligence and of the will must be seconded in work no less than in prayer by a movement of the affections, if work is to be really successful. A man must love his work to do it well. The difference between prayer and ordinary work is that in prayer the three ingredients are more equally balanced. Study may in time become intellectual habit, which scarcely demands any effort of will : handiwork may in time become so mechani- cal as to require little or no guidance from thought : each may exist in a considerable, although not in the highest degree of excellence, without any co-operation of the affec- tions. Not so prayer. It is always the joint act of the will 1 Gen. xxxii. 26. V.] Prayei' deepens thesenseofapersonal existence, i 75 and the understanding, impelled by the affections ; and when either will or intelligence is wanting, prayer at once ceases to be itself, by degenerating into a barren intellectual exer- cise, or into a mechanical and unspiritual routine. The dignity of prayer as being real work becomes clear to us if we consider the faculties which it employs. This will be made clearer still if we consider the effect of all sincere prayer upon the habitual atmosphere of the soul. Prayer places the soul face to face with facts of the first order of solemnity and importance ; with its real self, and with its God. And just as art, or study, or labour in any department is elevating, when it takes us out of and beyond the petty range of daily and perhaps material interests, while yet it quickens interest in them by kindling higher enthusiasms into life; so in a peculiar and transcendent it is with prayer. Prayer is man's inmost movement towards a Higher Power; hut what is t lie intellectual view prehension of himself that originally impels him to mow \ Under what aspect does man appear to himself in er? In a former lecture we have encountered the it which lies enclosed within each one of us, — the mystery which is yet a fact, — of an undying personality. It is that which each human j eaker describes as "I." It is that of which each of us is conscious as no one else can be conscious. Its existence is not proved to us by a demonstration, since we apprehend it as immediately obvious. Its certainty can be shaken by no al or dest motive argument, since our - u of its reality is 176 Prayer an escape from self to God. [Lect. based upon a continuous act of primary perception. No sooner do we withdraw ourselves from the importunities of sense, from the wanderings of imagination, from the mis- leading phrases which confuse the mental sight, than we find ourselves face to face with this fact, represented .by " I." For it is neither the body which the real self may ignore, nor a passionate impulse which the real self may conquer, nor even that understanding which, close as it is to the real self, is yet distinct from it. The body may be in its decrepitude ; the names of passion may have died away ; the understand- ing may be almost in its dotage ; yet the inward, self-pos- sessed, self-governing being may remain untouched, realizing itself in struggling against the instincts of bodily weakness, and in crushing out the embers which survive the fires of extinct passions. Now it is this self, conscious of its great- ness, conscious of its weakness, which is the real agent in prayer. In its oppressive sense of solitude, even in the midst of multitudes, this self longs to go forth, and to com- mune with the Father of spirits Who gave it life. This real self it is which apprehends God with the understand- ing, which embraces Him with the affections, which re- solves through the will to obey Him ; and thus does it underlie and unite the complex elements of prayer, so that in true heartfelt prayer we become so conscious of its vitality and power. It is in prayer especially that we cease to live, as it were, in a single faculty, or on the surface of our being : it is in prayer that we cease to regard ourselves as animal forms, or as social powers, or as family characters V.] Greatness of communion with God. 177 and look hard, for the time being, at ourselves, as being what we really are ; that is to say, as immortal spirits, outwardly draped in social forms and proprieties, and linked to a body of flesh and blood, but in our felt spiritual soli- tude looking steadily upwards at the face of God, and straining our eyes onwards towards the great eternity which lies before us. 1 Prayer is then so noble, because it is the work of man as man; of man realizing his being and destiny with a vividness which is necessary to him in no other occupation. But what shall we say of it, when we reflect further that in prayer man holds converse with God: that the Being of Beings, with all His majestic attributes, filling and tran- scending the created universe, traversing Inn nan history.. traversing each man's own individual history, is before him: that although man is dust and ashes, he is, by prayer, already welcomed in the very courts of heaven ? It is not necessary to dwell on this topic. Whatever be the daily Occupations of any in this ( Inuvli, he he a worker with the bands or a worker with the hrain, be he gentle or simple, be lie unlettered or educated, be he bigh in the state or anion- the millions at its base, is it not certain that the nobleness of his highest forms of labour must fall infinitely below that of any single human spirit entering oonsoionaly into converse with the Inlinite and Stern 1 s. Lain ott. 13, 14. 1 78 Natural effects of prayer, [Lect. II. But granted, men say, the dignity of prayer — granted even its dignity as labour: what if this labour be mis- applied ? There are many functions in many states, very dignified and not a little onerous, yet in a social and human sense not very productive. Is prayer, in its sphere, of this description ? Has it no tangible results ? Does it end with itself ? Can the labourer in this field point to anything definite that is achieved by his exertions ? The question is sufficiently serious at all times, but especially in our own positive and practical day. And it is necessary to make two observations, that we may see more clearly what issue is precisely before us. In the first place, there is here no question as to the subjective effect of prayer ; the effect which it confessedly has upon the mind and character of the person who prays. Such effects have been admitted on the part of those who unhappily do not pray themselves ; just as the Jews, at the time of the Betrayal, were so alive to tokens in the disciples of companionship with Jesus. That all the effects of Christian prayer upon the soul, or most of them, are natural, a Christian cannot admit : he believes them to be chiefly due to the transforming power of the grace of God, given, as at other times, so especially in answer to prayer. But that some effects of prayer upon the soul are natural consequences of directing the mind and the affections V.] Intellectual, moral, social effects. 1 79 towards a superhuman object, whether real or ideal, may be fully granted. Thus it has been observed that per- sons without natural ability have, through the earnest- ness of their devotional habits, acquired in time powers of sustained thought, and an accuracy and delicacy of intel- lectual touch, which would not else have belonged to them. The intellect being the instrument by which the soul handles religious truth, a real interest in religious truth will of itself often furnish an educational discipline ; it alone educates an intellect which would otherwise be uneducated. 1 The moral effects of devotion are natural lv more striking and abundant. Habitual prayer constantly • outers decision on the wavering, and energy on the listless, and calmness on the excitable, and disinterested- ness on the selfish. It braces the moral nature by 1 unsporting it into a clear, invigorating unearthly atmosphere: it builds up the moral life, insensibly but surely remedying its deficiencies, and strengthening its weak points, till there emerges a comparatively symmetrical a&d consistent whole, the excellence of which all must admit, though its secret is known only to those who know it by experience. 1 Akin to the moral are the social effects of prayer. Prayer makes men as members of society different in their whole 1>< mn those who do not pray. It gilds social intercourse and conduct with a tenderness, an unoUrusiveness, a sincerity, a frankness, an evenness of tamper, a cheerfulness, a collectedness, a con- • Pa. xxvii. 4, 5, 6. 1 80 Prayer, as meaning communion with God. [Lect. stant consideration for others, united to a simple loyalty to truth and duty, which leavens and strengthens society. Nay, it is not too much to say that prayer has even physical results. The countenance of a Fra Angelico reflects his spirit no less than does his art : the bright eye, the pure elevated expression, speak for themselves. It was said of one who has died within the present generation, 1 that in his later years his face was like that of an illuminated clock ; the colour and gilding had long faded away from the hands and figures, but the ravages of time were more than compensated for by the light which shone from w r ithin. This was what might have been expected in an aged man of great piety ; to have lived in spirit on Mount Tabor during the years of a long life is to have caught in its closing hours some rays of the glory of the Transfiguration. Secondly, prayer is not only — perhaps in some of the holiest souls it is not even chiefly — a petition for some- thing that we want and do not possess. In the larger sense of the word, as the spiritual language of the soul, prayer is intercourse with God, often seeking no end beyond the pleasure of such intercourse. It is praise ; it is congratulation ; it is adoration of the Infinite Majesty ; it is a colloquy in which the soul engages with the All- wise and the All-holy; it is a basking in the sunshine, varied by ejaculations of thankfulness to the Sun of Eighteousness for His light and His warmth. In this 1 Rev. J. Keble. V. ] Prayer not always intended to get something. 1 8 1 larger sense, the earlier part of the Te Deum is prayer as much as the latter part ; the earliest and latest clauses of the Gloria in Excelsis as truly as the central ones ; the Sanctus or the Jubilate no less than the Litany; the Magnificat as certainly as the fifty-first Psalm. When we seek the company of our friends, we do not seek it simply with the view of getting something from them: it is a pleasure to be with them, to be talking to them at all, or about anything; to be in possession of their sympathies and to be shewing our delight at it; to be assuring them of their place in our hearts and thoughts. So it is with the soul, when dealing with the Friend of friends— with God. Prayer is not, as it has been scornful Iv described, " only a machine warranted by theologians to make God do what His clients want :" it i> a more than petition, which is only one department <>f it: nothing less than the whole spiritual action of the soul turned towards God as its true and adequate object Ami if used in this comprehensive sense, it is dear that, as to much prayer, in the sense of spiritual intercourse with God, the question whether it is answered can n.\.r arise, for the simple reason that no answer is asked for. \\\\\ whether prayer means only, as in populai language it does generally mean, petition for a speeitie ol the whole cycle of possible communion Mweqp the soul and God, the question whether it is heard is a very practical one. We do not address inanii however beautiful they may be, «\ , m in the way of 1 82 Prayer involves waste of time, [Lect. poetical apostrophe. We do not enter into spiritual colloquy with the mountains, or the rivers, or the skies, with a view to discharging a duty to them, or really improving ourselves. 1 If there is really no being above who does hear us, what can be the use of continuing a practice that is based upon an altogether false presump- tion ? The subjective benefits of prayer depend upon our belief in its real power. But even if they did not, who would go through a confessedly fictitious exercise at regular inter- vals with a view to securing them ? Who would continue to pray regularly, if he were once well persuaded that the effect of prayer is after all only like the effect of the higher philosophy or poetry ; an education and a stimulus to the soul of man, but not an influence that can really touch the mind or will of that Being to Whom it is addressed ? Nobody denies the moral and mental stimulus which is to be gained from the study of the great poets. But do we read Homer, or Shakespeare, or Goethe each morning and evening, and perhaps at the middle of the day ? Or if such were the practice of any of us, should we have any approach to a feeling of being guilty of a criminal omission, if now and then we omitted to read them ? No : if prayer is to be persevered in, it must be on the strength of a conviction that it is actually heard by a Living Person. We cannot practise any intricate trickery upon ourselves with a view to our moral edification. We cannot 1 The apostrophes of the Psalms and the Benedicite are really acts of praise to God, of which His creatures furnish the occasion. V.] unless God is really alive. 183 pray, if we believe in our hearts that in prayer we are only holding communion with an ideal world of our own creation; that we are like children, with overheated imaginations, vainly endeavouring to pass the barriers which really confine us to our dark earthly prison-house ; while, in our failure, we half consciously, half uncon- sciously, cheat ourselves with the consolation of talking to shapes of power or benevolence traced by our fathers or by ourselves upon its inexorable walls. We cannot fall into the ranks of the Christian Church, lifting up the holy hands of sacrifice and intercession on all the mountains of the world, if in our hearts we see in her only a new company of Baal-worshippers gathering upon the slopes of some modern Carmel, and vainly endeavouring to rouse her idol into an impossible animation ; while the Elijahs of materialistic science stand by to mock her fruitless efforts with the playful scorn of that tranquil irony to which their higher knowledge presumably entitles them. The question whether God hears prayer, is at bottom the question whether II r. illy alive ; whether in any true sense of the term He exists at all. No word is used more equivocally thin the word "God" in the present day. 1 1 by "i tod " we mean only a product of the thought or consciousness of man, to which it cannot be certainly pre- sumed that any being actually corresponds; the highest thought of man — y et only man's highest thought ; then there is of course no one who can heai oa It has been said that if a man talks OUt loud to himself, apostrop' hal are in 1 84 If God is really alive, [Lect. truth only his own conceptions, it is difficult not to credit him with a certain tinge of madness; and it would be just as practical to address our prayer to the carved and gilded idols of Babylon, whose manufacture roused the sternest satire of the Evangelical Prophet, as to the unreal abstrac- tions, which, labelled with the Most Holy Name, are sent us from the intellectual workshops, ancient and modern, of Alexandria or of Berlin. And if by " God " is meant only the unseen force of the universe, or its collective forces; if He is the principle of growth in the plant, the life-principle in the animal or in man; we need not read Spinoza in order to convince ourselves of the fruitlessness of prayer. A self-existing force or cause, if such can be conceived, with- out intelligence, without personality, of course without any moral attributes, may be a thing to wonder at, but it cer- tainly is not a being to speak to. "We may of course ejaculate to such a thing if we like; but we might just as well say litanies to the winds or to the ocean. The ques- tion may be safely left to our utilitarian instincts. Time and strength, after all, are limited, and we shall not in the long run spend " our money," at least in this direction, " for that which is not bread, or our labour for that which satisfieth not." 1 If, on the other hand, God exists, whether we think about Him or not ; if He be not merely the mightiest force, the first of causes, but something more; if He be a personal Being, thinking with no limits to His thought, and willing 1 Isaiah lv. 2. V.] He must hear prayer. 185 with no fetters around His liberty; then surely we may reach Him, if we will. What is to prevent it? Cannot we men, at our pleasure, embody our thought, our feeling, our desires, or purposes in language, and so make them pass into and be apprehended by the created finite personalities around us ? Where is the barrier that shall arrest thought, longings, desires, entreaties, not as yet clothed (why need they be clothed ?) in speech, as they mount up from the soul towards the all-embracing Intelligence of God? And if God be not merely an infinite Intelligence, but a moral Being, a mighty Heart, so that justice, and mercy, and tenderness are attributes of His character, then to appeal to Him in virtue of these attributes is assuredly to appeal to Him to some purpose. If an Omnipresent Intelligence is a sufficient guarantee of His being able to hear us; an interest such as Justice and Mercy imply on His part towards creatures who depend upon Him for the original gift, and for the continued maintenance of life, > ;intcr of Bis willingness to do so. It is on this ground that (Jod is said to hear prayer in Holy Scripture. That He should do so follows from the reality of His nature as God. Elijah's irony implies that He is unlike the Phomieian Baal in being really al A later Psalmist contrasts Him in like manner with the Assyrian idols, in that " they have eyes but see not, they h;i\.- .■.!!■-; hut hear not." a They do hut till their temples with gorgeous impotence. But Israel's God is the an 1 K -, o. 1 86 Scriptural inferences from the life of God, [Lect. of the very senses whereby we are conscious of each other's presence and wishes, and can enter into a com- panionship of thought and purpose. Is He debarred from the use of the gifts which He Himself bestows with so bountiful a hand ? " He that planted the ear shall He not hear, or He that formed the eye shall He not see ? " 1 Is it not, on the contrary, reasonable to believe that these powers must exist in a much higher and more perfect form in the one Being who gives them than in the myriads upon whom they are bestowed, and by whom they are only held in trust? And if it is improbable that, amid the innumerable beings who are alive to the sights and sounds of His creation, the Creator alone should be blind and deaf; is it more probable that He who has implanted in our breasts feelings of interest and pity for one another should be Himself insensible to our pain and need ? Our hearts must anticipate and echo the statement of the Psalmist, that God does hear the desire of the poor ; that the innocent, the oppressed, the suffering, have especial claims upon Him. And, to omit other illustrations, our Lord reveals Him as a Father, the common parent of men, of whose boundless love all earthly fatherhood is a shadow and a delegation. If the earthly parent, being evil, does not yet give a stone when his child cries for bread ; the heavenly Father will not fall short of the teachings of an instinct which He has Himself implanted, by failing to give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him. 2 1 Ps. xciv. 9. 2 S. Luke xi. 11-13. V.] Barriers sitpposed to arrest prayer, 187 III. If a man is a good Theist — we need not say, a good Christian — he must believe that the Father of Spirits is not deaf to the voice of the human soul; that the thanks- giving and praise, the intercessions and supplications, the penitence and the self-surrender of beings to whom He has given moral and intellectual life, is not utterly lost upon the Giver. But will He indeed answer prayer, when prayer takes the form of a petition for some specific blessing which must be either granted or refused ? There is no doubt as to the reply which the Bible and the Church have given to this question. But what do some modern thinkers say about it ? Do they not deny the power of prayer, by surrounding the Throne of God with barriers, which, as they would have it, oblige Him, while "the sorrowful sighingB of the prisoners" of this rale of t» a rs incessantly "come before Him," to make as fchough lie heard not, ami to shorten Mi hand as if it could not save ?" The first presumed barrier against the efficacy of prayer to which men point is the scientific idea of law, reigning bhroughoul the spiritual as well as the material universe. This idea, as we are constantly reminded! is one of the most remarkaHr eon.pn-M^ .■!' modern thought; and no man, so it is said, can enter into it with an intelligent symp without abandoning the fund conceit that God will •. a particular favour to on ol B I creatures up* 1 1 88 i. The barrier of law. [Lect. to do so. It may have been pardonable to pray for rain, for health, for freedom from pestilence and famine, when these things were supposed to depend upon the caprice of an omnipotent will. But the scientific idea of law renders these prayers absurd. We know that a shower is the pro- duct of atmospheric laws, which make a shower, under certain circumstances, inevitable; that the death of an individual is the result of physiological laws which abso- lutely determine it. The idea that a shower or the death of a man are contingent upon the good pleasure of a Being Who can avert or precipitate them at pleasure is unscientific ; it belongs to days when the idea of law had not yet dawned upon the intellect of civilization, or when, at any rate, large margins of the physical world, and the whole of the spiritual world, were supposed to be beyond its frontiers, as being abandoned to the government of a capricious omnipotence. Surely, it is added, we have really attained to a nobler idea of the universe, than was this old theological conception of the Bible and the Church: the superiority is to be measured by those fundamental instincts of fitness within us, which assign to law and order a higher place in our minds than can belong to a personal will. Does not the very word law, by reason of its majestic and imposing associations, here involve us in some indis- tinctness of thought? What do we mean by law? When we speak of a law of nature are we thinking of some self- sustained invisible force, of which we can give no account except that here it is, a matter of experience? Or do we V.] What is meant by law? 189 mean by a law of nature only a principle which, as our observation shews us, appears to govern particular actions of the Almighty Agent Who made and Who upholds the universe? If the former, let us frankly admit that we have not merely fettered God's freedom; we have, alas! ceased to believe in Him. For such self-sustained force is either self-originating, in which case there is no Being in existence who has made all that constitutes tins universe. Or otherwise, having derived its first impact from the creative Will of God, this force has subsequently 680 altogether from His control, so that it now fetters I i is liberty; and, in this case, there is no Being in existence who is Almighty, in the sense of being really Master of this universe. If, however, we mean by law the observed regularity with which God works in nature as in grace; tlicn, iii our contact with law, we are dealing; not with a brutal, unintelligent, unconquerable force, but with the free will of an intelligent and moral Arti-t. Who works, iii His perfect freedom, with sustained and beauti- Mimietry. Where is the absurdity of asking Eim to hold His hand, or to hasten Hi- work I He to Whom we pray may be trusted to grant or to refuse a prayer, as 111 best to the 1 in and the truest love. And if He grant it. He is not without resources; even although we should have asked Eim to suspend what we caU a natural law. Can He not then pro- vide tor the freedom of His action without viaktui Order? Can Ee DOt supersede a lower rule of working i go 2. The barrier of a Divine predestination. [Lect. by the intervention of a higher ? If He really works at all ; if something that is neither moral nor intelligent has not usurped His throne, — it is certain that " the thing that is done upon earth He doeth it Himself;" and that it is therefore as consistent with reason as with reverence to treat Him as being a free Agent, Who is not really tied and bound by the intellectual abstractions with which finite intellects would fain annihilate the freedom of His action. No ; to pray for rain or sunshine, for health or food, is just as reasonable as to pray for gifts which the soul only can receive — increased love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith. All such prayers presuppose the truth that God is not the slave of His own rules of action; that He can innovate upon His work without forfeiting His perfection; that law is only our way of conceiving of His regularized working, and not an external force which governs and moulds what we recognize as His work. It dissolves into thin air, as we look hard at it, this fancied barrier of inexorable law; and as the mist clears off, beyond there is the throne of the Moral King of the universe, in Whose eyes material symmetry is as nothing when compared with the spiritual well-being of His moral creatures. A second barrier to the efficacy of prayer is sometimes discovered in the truth that all which comes to pass is fore- determined in the predestination of God. How is the effi- cacy of prayer to be reconciled, asks the fatalistic predesti- narian, with the boundless power and knowledge of God ? V.] Prayer a department of human freedom. 1 9 1 Is not everything that happens to us the decision of an Almighty, Wise, Beneficent Will ; a Will which, in human phrase, has ordained it from all eternity ? Could this Will have been, could It be, other than It is ? Has time any meaning for It ? Is It not in Its Omniscience and Omnipo- tence eternally what It is ? Where, then, is there any room for the effect of prayer? Can it be conceived that the erring understanding and finite will of the creature will be allowed to impose its decisions on the infallible Mind and resistless determinations of God ? Surely if we are to go on praying, after recognizing the Sovereignty of God, we must give up the notion of exerting a real influence upon the Divine Will : we must content ourselves with resigna- tion, with bringing our minds into conformity with that w lii( li, ;is a matter of fact, is quite beyond the range of our influence. This language does but carry us into one department of the old controversy between the defenders of the so\ of God on the one side, and the advocates of the free will of mill on the other, Tlu> very idea of God, asitoccurs to tin- human mind, and the d m met statements of revelation, alike lvpivsnit the Divine Will as exerting sovereign and resistless sway. If it were otherwise, God would not be Almighty, that is, He would not be God. Qn the other hand, our daily experienee and the language of S both assure us that man is literally t free agent : his freedom is the very ground of his moral and religious responsibility. Aiv these two truths hopelessly incompatible with each 1 9 2 Prayer is itself predestined, yet free. [Lect. other ? So it may seem at first sight ; and if we escape the danger of denying the one in the supposed interests of the other, if we shrink from sacrificing God's sovereignty to man's free will with Arminius, and from sacrificing man's freedom to God's sovereignty with Calvin, we can only express a wise ignorance by saying, that to us they seem like parallel lines which must meet at a point in eternity, far beyond our present range of view. We do know, however, that being both true, they cannot really contradict each other; and that in some manner, which we cannot formulate, the Divine Sovereignty must not merely be com- patible with, but must even imply the perfect freedom of created wills. So it is with prayer and the Divine pre- destination. God orders all that happen to us, and, in virtue of His infinite knowledge, by eternal decrees. But He also says to us, in the plainest language, that He does answer prayer, and that practically His dealings with us are governed in matters of the greatest importance as well as of the least by the petitions which we address to Him. What if prayers and actions, to us at the moment perfectly spontaneous, are eternally foreseen and included within the all-embracing Predestination of God, as factors and causes, working out that final result which, beyond all dispute, is the product of His good pleasure ? Whether I open my mouth or lift my hand, is, before my doing it, strictly within the jurisdiction and power of my personal will ; but however I may decide, rny decision, so absolutely free to me, will have been already incorporated by the All-seeing, V.J3- Anthropomorphic conception oj r God\ dignity. 193 All-controlling Being as an integral part, however insignifi- cant, of His one all-embracing purpose, leading on to effects and causes beyond itself. Prayer too is only a foreseen action of man which, together with its results, is embraced in the eternal predestination of God. To us this or that blessing may be strictly contingent on our praying for it ; but our prayer is nevertheless so far from necessarily introducing change into the purpose of the Unchangeable, that it has been all along taken, so to speak, into account 1 >y Him. If then, with " the Father of Lights " there is in this sense " no variableness, neither shadow of turning," it is not therefore irrational to pray for specific blessings, as we do in the Litany, because God works out His plans not merely in us but by us; and we may dare to say that that which is to us a free self-detenu i nation, may be not other than a foreseen element of His work. A third barrier supposed to interfere with the efficacy of prayei LB the false idea <>f the Divine dignity which is borrowed from our not ions of human royal' lammed thai a supreme governor cannoi ted to take account. of trifling e ire u mstan ees, or to decide between petty and con- Bicting claims, 1! or the universe; but it is not to be supposed that He will also discharge all the minute and hare dng duties of a local executive, The power of] implies a special providem 1 special providence, we are told, is beneath the dignity of i\ ine 1 94 Material bulk not the test of greatness. [Lect. Nature. " Do you imagine, men ask, when you reflect upon the vast universe in which we live — upon that immeasur- able space — upon those innumerable worlds — upon those systems beyond systems of suns which are discovering themselves slowly but surely to our telescopes — that He who made this mighty whole has nothing to do but to listen to the little story of your wants and hopes and fears ? He has instituted some good and universal rules of govern- ment under which you live : if they sometimes bear hardly upon you, your case is only that of others, and you must take your chance. To expect Him to suspend or to revoke His legislation on your particular account, is to sacrifice common sense to outrageous egotism ; the egotism which can suppose that a petty individual life, a worm crawling on the surface of one of His smallest planets, can be an object of this particular consideration and interest to the Almighty Creator." Even at the risk of representing human egotism, it must be here and again asserted that man's place in the creation is not determined by the considerations which this objection supposes. In the eyes of an intellectual and spiritual being, material bulk is not the only or the highest test of greatness. If God is not to be supposed to be mainly interested in vast accumulations of senseless matter; if there be in the estimate of a Moral Being other and worthier measures of greatness ; if the organic be higher than the inorganic ; and that which feels than that which has no feeling; if that which thinks be higher than that V.] 4. The barrier of opposing human interests. 195 which only feels ; and that which freely conforms to moral will higher than that which only thinks ; if a fly be really a nobler thing than a granite mountain, and a little child than a rhinoceros or a mammoth, — then we need not acquiesce in this depreciatory estimate of man's place in creation, or of his claims upon the ear of God. On his bodily side man is insignificant enough. As a spirit conscious of his own existence, and determining his action in the freedom of his will, he does not deceive himself in believing that God has crowned him with an especial glory and honour among the visible creatures. 1 But even if man were not thus honoured, it is, as we have seen, no part of the Divine dignity to be inattentive even to the lowest creatures of His hand. The Throne of heaven is not modelled upon the type of an Oriental despotism, and God's Greatness is not compromised by the duties of administration any more than it is lici-lil cued by the enactment of law. The Inlinitc Mind is not less capable of formulating the most universal principles because He with perfect sympathy and intelligence into each of our separate wants and efforts, the wants a 1 id efforts of creatures who are really greater, because infinitely more like their Creator, than arc the largest stars and suns. A fourth barrier to the efficacy of pray< be discoverable in an inadequate conception of the interests of human l < ings as a whole. To suppose that God can answer indi\ idual prayers f..r sp.vitic I 1 Pi, ri .. 1 96 No man injured by another s real good. [Lect. sistent, we are told, with any serious appreciation of human interests. One man or nation asks for that which may be an injury to another. The Spaniards prayed for the success of their Armada: the English prayed against it. Both could not be listened to. The weather cannot consult the con- venience of everybody at once : and therefore the specific prayers of well-meaning villagers, if they could be attended to, could only be attended to by a God who, instead of being the Father of all His creatures, reserved special indulgences for His favourites. Here it is natural to remark that if God should think fit to grant a large proportion of the particular requests which would be found among the daily prayers of an earnest Christian, He would not, to say the least, thereby do any injury to others, whether they were Christians or not. Prayer for the highest well-being of any human being may be granted without damaging other human beings. If God should condescend in answer to prayer to teach one of His servants more humility, purity, or love, this would not oblige Him to withdraw spiritual graces from any others in order to do it. Nor are other persons the worse for coming into contact with one whom God has made loving, or pure, or humble, in answer to prayer. Is it not nearer the truth to say that they are likely to be much better, and therefore that a large number of answers to prayer for personal blessings necessarily extend in their effects beyond those who are immediately blessed ? But observe further that every prayer for specific bless- V.] All prayer tacitly conditioned. 197 ings in a Christian soul is tacitly, if not expressly, con- ditioned. The three conditions which are always under- stood are given at the beginning of the Lord's Prayer — " Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done." In effect these three conditions are only one. If a change of weather, or a restoration to health or any blessing be prayed for, a Christian petitioner deliberately wills that his prayer should be refused, supposing that to grant it should in any way obscure God's glory in other minds, or hinder the advance of His kingdom, and so con- travene what must be His will. Every Christian tacitly adds to every prayer, " Nevertheless not my will but Thine be done." All Christian prayer takes it for granted, first, that the material world exists for the sake of, and ifl entirely subordinate to, the interests of the moral; and. Secondly, thai God is the best judge of what the true interests of the moral world really are. Therefore, if his specific petition is qoI granted, a Christian will not con- clude thai his real prayer is unanswered, lli^ real prayer was from the first thai God's Name might be hallowed anion- men by the advance of His kingdom and the doing of His Will, through God's granting a particular req which he urges. Be knows thai his own I be best secured hy the refasal ^ the veiy Messing for which lie pleads; and he finite knowledge and his narrow sympathies into the hands of Infinite Wisdom and [nfinite Love, with perfect confidence thai the ion will be the best answer to bis real and 198 5- The barrier of human self-reliance. [Lect. prayer. It is thus that he realizes the promise, "Every one that asketh receiveth." He too receives that which he really wants, though his specific petition should be refused. A last barrier to faith in the efficacy of prayer is really to be discovered in man's idea of his own self-sufficiency. It can scarcely be doubted that one of the excellences of our character as a nation is constantly a source of danger to our faith in the power of prayer. Pelagius was him- self a native of Britain ; and the old heresy of substituting human self-sufficiency for dependence on the grace and help of God is very congenial to the temper which we English cultivate, with such success, in individual action and in political life. After all, we say, do we not depend on our own efforts for being what we are, and for doing what we do ? Whatever God may see fit to do for us, our best form of prayer is work ; it is the determination to secure what we want by personal efforts to get it. The indolent or the imaginative may be left to lengthen out their litanies ; but practical men will fall back upon the wise proverb, that " God helps those who help them- selves." Here, however, it must be insisted on by the one side, and admitted on the other, that many objects of prayer are altogether out of the reach of human effort, and that if they are to be secured at all, they must be given freely by God. But the fact of our moral freedom, as felt in the capacity for work, to which Pelagianism appeals, is not more clear than the fact of our dependence. Do what we will, we V.] Work and prayer, how related. 199 depend on others. We are linked to them by a thousand ties ; we are, all of us, acted upon most powerfully by the circumstances which surround us ; the governing moods of thought and feeling within ourselves are often determined by these circumstances. This is true of " self-made men," as we call them, not less than of others. How much did not Faraday owe to Sir Humphrey Davy ! And this dependence upon circumstances is in fact dependence upon things which God controls. Facts are not less facts be- cause they seem to be incompatible; because the effort to reconcile them teaches our reason that its limits are narrower than we wish. It is easier to say that m entirely free, that he depends on nothing; or to say that man is simply the creature of circumstances, that he is never really free; than to say, what is the real truth, that man is, in his entire freedom, absolutely dependent, that ntiiv dependence, absolutely free. Yet this apparent paradox is the literal truth, which tefoaea to ignore facts in order to make the task of reason ee and to enable it the letter to roundoff its 1 I hut Inconclusive theories about human action. And because life is bo subtle as intermixture of dependence and action, prayer is the most practical of all forms of v. one- the activity of man's freedom, and the expression of his dependence ; and the answer which it wins is D0t less, in one sense, the result of human effort, than in another it is the work of ( Jo 1. And thus it is in and hv prayer that the two governing 200 Speculation and action meet in prayer. [Lect. elements of religious life, thought and work, alike find their strongest impulse and their point of unity. Such is our weakness, that we constantly tend to a one-sided use of God's gifts. We are either absorbingly speculative and con- templative on the one hand, or we are absorbingly practical and men of action on the other. Either exaggeration is fatal to the true life of religion, which binds the soul to God by faith as well as by love ; by love not less than by faith ; by a life of energetic service not less truly than by a life of communion with light and truth. It is in prayer that each element is at once quickened in itself, and balanced by the presence of the other. The great masters and teachers of Christian doctrine have always found in prayer their highest source of illumination. Not to go beyond the limits of the English Church, it is recorded of Bishop Andrewes that he spent five hours daily on his knees. The greatest practical resolves that have enriched and beautified human life in Christian times have been arrived at in prayer ; ever since the day when, at the most solemn service of the Apostolical Church, the Holy Ghost said, " Separate Me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them." 1 It is prayer which prevents religion from degenerating into mere religious thought on the one side, or into mere philanthropy on the other. In prayer the man of action will never become so absorbed in his work as to be indifferent to the truth, which is its original motive. In prayer the man of 1 Acts xiii. 2. V.] Answers to prayer a matter of experience. 201 study and contemplation will never forget that truth is given, not so much that it may interest and stimulate our understandings, as that it may govern and regenerate our life. And thus it is that prayer is of such vital importance to the well-being of the soul. Study may be dispensed with by those who work with their hands for God : handiwork may be dispensed with by those who seek Him in books and in thought. But prayer is indispensable; alike for workers and students, alike for scholar and peasant, alike for the educated and the unlettered. For we all ha\ seek God's Face above; we all have souls to be sanctified and saved ; we all have sins and passions to beat back and to conquer. And these things are achieved pre-eminently by prayer, which is properly and representatively the action of religion. It is the action whereby we nun, in all our frailty and defilement, associate ourselves with our Divine Advocate on high, and realize the sublime bond which in Him, the One Mediator between (Jod and man, unites us in our utter u n worthiness to the Strong and All holy God Thai prayer, sooner or later, is answered, to all who I prayed eamrstly and constantly, is, in different degrees, a matter of persona] experience. David. Klijah, Beiekiah, Daniel, the Apostles of Christ, were not ms of an illusion, in virtue of which they eonneeted partienl which would have happened in any case with prayers that preceded it. They w ho never pray, or who never pray wit h the humility, confidence, and importunity that wins its way 202 The claims of prayer upon our time. [Lect. to the Heart of God, cannot speak from experience as to the effects of prayer; nor are they in a position to give credit, with generous simplicity, to those who can. But, at least, on snch a subject as this, the voice of the whole company of God's servants may be held to counterbalance a few a priori surmises or doctrines; and it is the very heart of humanity itself which from age to age mounts up with the Psalmist to the Eternal Throne — " Thou That nearest prayer, unto Thee shall all flesh come." x And Christians can penetrate within the veil. They know that there is a majestic pleading, which for eighteen centuries has never ceased, and which is itself omnipotent — the pleading of One who makes their cause His own: they rest upon the Divine words, " Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My Name, He will give it you." 2 A time will probably come to most of us, if it has not come to some already, when we shall wish that the hours at our command, during the short day of life, had not been disposed of as they have. After all, this world is a poor thing to live for, when the next is in view. Whatever be their claims, created beings have no business to be sitting on that highest throne within the soul that belongs to the Creator. Yet, for all that, too often they do sit there. And time is passing. Of that priceless gift of time, how much will one day be seen to have been lost; how ruinous shall we deem our investment of this our most precious stock ! How many interests, occupations, engagements, 1 Ps. lxv. 2. 2 S. John xvi. 23. V.] The view of time from the Eternal World. 203 friendships — I speak not of the avowed ways of " killing time," as it is termed with piteous accuracy — will be then regarded only as so many precautions for building our house upon the sand : as only so many expedients for assuring our failure to compass the true end of our exis- tence ! It may not now seem possible that we should ever think thus. Life is like the summer's day; and in the first fresh morning we do not realize the noon-day heat, and at noon we do not think of the shadows lengthening across the plain, and of the setting sun, and of the advancing night. Yet, to each and all, the sunset comes at last; and those who have made most of the day are not unlikely to reflect most bitterly how little they have made of it. Whatever else they may look back upon with thank ful- ness or with sorrow, it is curtain that they will regret no omissions of duty more keenly than neglect of prayer; that they will prize no hours more than those which have been passed, whether in private or in public, b Throne of Justice and of Grace upon which the] hope to throughout eternity. LECTURE VI $alm Sutrtmg. THE MEDIATOR, THE GUARANTEE OF RELIGIOUS LIFE. S. Matt, xxiii. 41. Jesus asJced them saying, What think ye of Christ ? A T length, we reach the limits which the season assigns ■*-■*- to our scanty treatment of a subject that is in itself inexhaustible. The relationship or bond between God and the soul of man, which we term religion, is obscured and interrupted on man's side by sin ; it is reasserted and strengthened by prayer. But no human efforts can of them- selves avail to establish or to restore it. If God answers the prayers of individuals, has He answered the prayer of prayers ; the great prayer of humanity in all the ages ? Has He deigned to grant the prayer that He, too, would on His side give some sign or pledge of real communion with us ; that He would not leave us to ourselves, walking after our own ways, feeling after Him if haply we might find Him, but only feeling on, century after century, in the twilight of reason ; that He would, in prophetic language, Lect. VI.] Moral probability of a revelation. 205 rend the heavens and come down, and bid the skies pour down righteousness ? Is religion only a human in- stinct or effort upon which no encouragement, no sanction, no corresponding and invigorating acknowledgment has been bestowed from on high ? Or has God spoken ? Has He unveiled Himself? Have the clouds and darkness that are round about Him rolled away, so that the righteousness and judgment which are the habitation of His seat might become clearly manifest to us ? If we really believe God to be a Moral Being, we shall be prepared to find that He has spoken to us. The strength 1 if the confidence with which we anticipate a revelation will vary exactly with our faith in the morality of God. It 1 le were only an intelligence, or a force, there would be no reason or apology for listening to hear whether any 1 breaks the silence of the spheres. Bui if Be 1ms. or n is, a Heart; if the moral qualities which are discoverable in ourselves have any transcendent and majestic OOUl pari in Him ; tin n, supposing the question whether Se has -i\cn ;i revelation to be for us still unanswered, or even unexamined, we do well to traverse all the corridors of history, to take counsel with the OUITOnt wisdom and e\- j.erienee of the living, and to cross-question com Lc1 Lone of the dead, until we s« «• reason to hope that a solution is at least at hand ; until * the day dawn and the day-star arise in our heart Already, indeed, and almost at each stage of our progress, we have ever and anon halted our steps, and hush 2o6 Jesus Christ as Teacher of religion. [Lect. disputants around us, that we might listen to One Whose place among men, at least as a Master and Teacher of religion, does not really enter into controversy. It is He Who has set forth in its fulness the parental character of God. It is He who has fully unveiled to the eye of the human soul the secret of its boundless capacities, and of its disheartening impotence. It is He Who by His life of unassailable purity, and by His death of voluntary sacrifice, has lighted up the dark realities of moral evil. It is His example, His precepts, it is widespread faith in His assist- ance and intercession, which have popularized prayer, with- out degrading its idea. It is through Him that prayer has come to be the most serious and welcome occupation of the noblest and purest in the human family ; the continuous expression of a desire to assert and strengthen the link which binds man to the Source and End of his existence. And thus, besides placing before us the idea of religion, He has, as no other, taught us to know Him between Whom and ourselves religion is a bond; and what it is, call we it disease or antagonist, that breaks religion up; and what the spiritual action in w T hich it is especially embodied and re- asserted. Has He done more for religion than this ? Is His relation towards it only an external one, such as was that of a Eaphael or a Michael Angelo towards their majestic creations, such as was that of a Newton or a Cuvier towards the great subjects of their lifelong study ? Or is He, besides being a Master and Teacher of religion, some- thing more, and altogether distinct from this ? Is He the VI.] Is Jeszis Himself the object of religion ? 207 masterpiece of His own art ? Is He the subject of His own teaching ? Does He enter into the object-matter of religion as an integral part of it ? Is He not merely the greatest of religious teachers, but also the first and greatest of religious lessons which God has given to man ? Is He, in short, God's answer in history to man's constant aspira- tion heavenward ; the impersonated bond between God and man ; a " Mediator," as Scripture terms it, Who bridges over the chasm which sin had opened between earth and heaven ? In pausing to consider this question, it is natural to every Christian heart to express the joy of finding ourselves at His blessed feet, Whose name is above every Name thai is pronounced, whether in His temples or elsewhere. On the last five Sundays in which you have accompanied me with your generous sympathy, it has often happened to us to sir; iv for a while into schools of thought* where He, our Lord, is (Mllicr unknown, or denied His due. We have occasional Iv been listening to teachers and glancing at systems which profess, in whatever sense, to be able to dis- pense with Mini. No men love home as do those whose duly has for awhile obliged them to reside abroad ; and the atmosphere of the New Testament and of the CI m re h is not the less welcome, because it is a change from that of human literatures and of earthly philosophies. To-day we cease, ;it hast in the ma in, to measure the forms and density of the clouds whioh veil the face of heaven from sad but eager multitudes, We pass into the light and warmth 208 Historical importance of the Life [Lect. of the Sun of Bighteousness, to occupy ourselves from first to last with His glory and His beauty ; we advance to recognize, as I trust, in Him the living bond of unity between the great empire of souls on the one hand, and the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible on the other. Jesus Christ is a Name around which a vast accumula- tion of histories, ideas, beliefs, have gathered. Christianity has many aspects; literary, philosophical, moral, historical, political, theological, spiritual, practical. What is the reli- gious aspect of Christianity and of Christ? What is the aspect which exhibits our Lord's relation to religion, consi- dered as the bond between God and the human soul? " What think ye of Christ?" Is He a subject of the highest historical interest ? No educated man, at least, whatever be his faith or his life, can deny the reality or the greatness of Christ's place in human history. Nothing is more certain in the annals of mankind than this, that Jesus Christ lived in Palestine, and was put to death eighteen centuries and a half ago. This fact belongs to general human knowledge, just as much as does the life of Julius Caesar, or of Alexander the Great, or of Socrates, or of Mahomet. Nobody, indeed, does deny the general fact. VI. ] of Jesus Christ, ttndeniable. 209 Strauss, for instance, though he endeavours to distinguish between the residuary historical element in the Gospels, and the incrustation of legend, which, in his opinion, has somehow become associated with it, yet fully admits that there is history in the Gospels; he admits that Jesus Christ lived and died in the age of Tiberius. And if even this be admitted, the life and death of Jesus Christ must possess for any intelligent man the highest possible degree of interest. He must feel that, in point of social and historical importance, it stands alone. No doubt, at the time, the Ca3sar Tiberius was everywhere on the lips and in the minds of men; while the retired religious Teacher, as He seemed to be, in Palestine, was by His teaching, His acts, and the opposition which they aroused, only furnishing a lilt 1(5 conversation and excitement to the peasantry and to the officials of a remote province. But if the importance of a life is to be measured by its results in history and to civilization, even although we should put all religious and even moral considerations aside, who would think most of the Emperor? What is the lasting and living influence which Tiborius now exerts upon the world, except it be to famish a thesis now and then to clever essay writers, who wish indirectly to attack or to defend modern imperialism? But who can deny that at this moment, explain it ho v. will, Jesus Christ, His life, His work. Bifl Peroon, lives in the hearts of multitudes as the « >bject of most . i ami devoted homage; that lie ^overna I he ideas, the aspira the social and political action ^( millions of mankind; that P 2 1 o Distinction between an i7itellectual [Lect. the most active and enterprising section of the human family, still, in various senses, places itself under the shadow of His Name and patronage; and that if He has many opponents, there is no serious probability of His being spiritually or intellectually dethroned ? All this is a matter of simple observation. The truth of it is most obvious to those who know most about human affairs and human his- tory. And it at once invests the earthly Life of Christ, and all that illustrates and belongs to it, with the highest practical and speculative interest ; with the interest which belongs to the great problems of past history, and with the interest which belongs to those great living forces that make themselves felt day by day around us, and contribute powerfully towards determining the current of events. Not to be interested in the life of Jesus Christ, then, is to be, I do not say irreligious, but unintelligent. It is to be insensible to the nature and claims of the most powerful force that has ever moulded the thought and swayed the destinies of civilized man. But to feel this interest, it is almost unnecessary to add, a man need not even profess to be a Christian. He may indeed be earnestly opposed to Christianity: and his opposition can scarcely in any case be formidable, unless he has given his mind to the careful study of that which he opposes. To such men as Celsus, or Lucian, or Porphyry, or the apostate Emperor Julian, or the philosopher of Ferney, Christianity was a matter of the deepest intellectual interest. Men do not write like Celsus, or act like Julian, or epigrammatize with the VI.] and a religious interest in yesus. 2 1 1 bitterness of Voltaire, about a doctrine in which they feel little concerned. Nay, in order to have such an interest, a man need not be an active opponent of Christianity. Looking upon it with the eye, and only with the eye, of a philoso- pher ; jealously excluding from his estimate every trace of passion, whether it be the passion of hatred or the passion of affection ; he may yet understand that it is too great, too powerful, in a word, too original a phenomenon, to be ignored, or rather not to be investigated with patient per- severance. Such might seem to have been the case with that most accomplished of modern critics, the lateM. Saint - Beuve. His History of Port-Eoyal betrays an intimate acquaintance with the most delicate and beautiful forms of Christian faith and Christian love. None knew better than he t lie claims of Jesus Christ — of His life in itself, and of His place in history — upon the attention of all earnest students of nature and of man. No pages are more marked than his by a sustained and rigid just ire which is incapable of condescending to a phrase that is dictated by any but that which the writer intends and believes to be a severely critical judgment This lofty impartiality could not but make him write at times like a devoted Christian in virtue of his lu.nal ami literary sympathies; and many men have read him without suspecting his real place in the world of thought Yet, at his last hours, we are told, be purposely declined the ordinary consolations of a Christian deathbed: his interest in Christianity did not imply abend to any living person with Whom, in the most solemn and 2 1 2 Impressionmadeby } our -Lord V' 'character -."[Legit. critical moments of existence, there are histories to be reviewed, and accounts to be settled. That a literary and historical interest in Christianity and Christ has its value, who would deny ? It may, in union with faith and love, achieve services of no common order for the kingdom of the truth. It may, under any circumstances, enable Christians to realize the historical settings of their faith, more truly and vividly than would otherwise be possible. Thus, in a very creditable sense, it may hew wood and draw water for the sacred camp, and we must thank it with all our hearts for its services. But it is not of itself a religious interest. It is only an intellectual and scholarly taste dealing with a religious subject-matter. It is one thing to cleanse the glasses of a powerful telescope ; it is another to use them as they should be used by an observer and student of the heavens. II. But the question must occur, What was it in Jesus Christ which gave Him, in spite of social and political insignificance, so commanding, so unrivalled a position in history ? The least answer that can be given — I am far from implying that it is an adequate answer — is, that His character made a profound, an ineffaceable impression upon VI. ] Character appreciated by the moral sense. 2 1 3 His contemporaries ; an impression so deep and abiding, that it moved them, peasants and paupers as they were, to achieve the moral revolution of the civilized world. And we are told that admiration for Christ's human character is still the sustaining element in Christianity; that it explains its perpetuation as it explains its original victories; that it furnishes, in fact, the true answer to the question, " What think ye of Christ ?" Undoubtedly the appreciation of moral character is a higher and more religious thing than the appreciation of any external historical fact, how- ever imposing. In order to enter into the political con- sequences of a decisive campaign, a man requires only a well-stored and cultivated intellect ; in order to do justice to a saintly character the observer must have that which is infinitely higher in itself, though of less account among men — a sensitive moral instinct, a tender and penetrating heart. And yet, happily, the higher gift is the more common. The questions which may be raised about our Lord's genealogies in the first ami third Evangelists can only be answered by a few well-trained scholars. Rut every child can feel the pathos of the relief suddenly n to the hungry multitudes; of the visit to the house of mourning at Bethany; of the successive in- cidents of the stern conflict with the Jews of Jerusalem; of the lit Supper; of the Agony; of the Betrayal; I the Cross. A great character, even more than a great picture, or a great poem, or a magnificent mountain, speaks for itself. It commends it self to average men, even tli 214 Our Lord' s "character" not the product [Lect. they cannot take their sympathies to pieces, and say pre- cisely what is the feature in it that fascinates them. There is that in their humanity which responds, however imperfectly, to the form of moral beauty before them, and they surrender themselves to an instinct which they do not explain, but which they can implicitly trust. Thus it is that our Lord's simplicity, His self-sacrifice, His love of the humble and of the poor, joined to His resistless moral ascendancy, His fearless courage, His strength which is so entirely compatible with the utmost tenderness, touches us all. Nothing perhaps shews Jesus Christ more clearly to us than the circumstances under which He delivered the Sermon on the Mount. For here we are convinced that His character was so far from being a product whether of His nation or of His age, as to be in marked opposition to some of their ruling tendencies. In the Jew of the age of Tiberius, the national feeling, in- tensified by the Eoman conquest, had almost killed out the human. The children of the men who under David and Solomon had ruled Western Asia, beheld on every side the symbols of their political slavery. The Eoman legionaries were keeping guard near the temple; the Eoman tax-gatherer was making his presence felt in every home. And so the Jew wrapped himself more and more closely and sullenly in devotion to the ideas and institutions of his ancestors, and looked forward to a time when the prophecies would be fulfilled in the rigid political sense in which he read them ; when the Eoman invader would VI.] of His age and circumstances. 2 1 5 be driven by an indignant people, headed by their King Messiah, from the sacred soil. There were adventurers in that age who really endeavoured to meet this predomina- ting national temper, and the effort led to some well- known catastrophes. And doubtless it was such a political expectation as this which was kindled in the breast of multitudes by the announcement throughout Galilee that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. The phrase fired their imaginations. They followed the Teacher Who uttered it out of their towns and villages to a distant hill-side, that they might listen, as they trusted, to His plan for an approaching insurrection or for a decisive campaign. And what was His manifesto? He uttered the Beatitudes; He compared the Pharisaic with the true morality; He proclaimed the law and unfolded the prospects of a spiritual empire, of the kingdom of the truth. It is not iu the unrivalled exhibition of any one f«»nn of human excellence, whether purity or humility, or oharity, or courage, or veracity, or self-denial, <>r justice, or con- sideration for others, that we best appreciate the signifi- cance of our Lord's human eharacter. It ia in the equal balance of all < \v which human personali- ties arc marked." " What other notion than this," asks 1 Ibid. \x 18. 2 1 8 Astonishing self -proclamation of Jesus. [Lect. the writer, " can philosophy form of Divinity manifest on earth?" 1 These eloquent and sincere words of Professor Goldwin Smith will need no recommendation or comment. And yet they suggest a question, which is in the path of our subject, and which, under any circumstances, cannot be overlooked. This ideal Character of the Gospels is, on one side, at issue with what we should abstractedly conceive to be a perfect human ideal. For He who presents it to us proclaims Himself, in terms and to an extent which are alto- gether inconsistent with any true ideal of a purely creaturely perfection. In the words of another writer of our day, " The unbounded personal pretensions which Christ advances, remain throughout a subject of ever-recurring astonishment. It is common, in human history, to meet with those who claim some superiority over their fellows. Men assert a pre-eminence over their fellow-citizens or fellow-countrymen, and become rulers of those who were at first their equals ; but they dream of nothing greater than of some partial control over the actions of others for the short space of a lifetime. Few, indeed, are there to whom it is given to influence future ages. Yet some men have appeared who have been as levers to uplift the earth and roll it in another course. Homer, by creating litera- ture ; Socrates, by creating science ; Caasar, by carrying civilization inward from the shores of the Mediterranean ; Newton, by starting science upon a career of steady pro- gress, — may be said to have attained this eminence. But 1 Ibid. p. 22. VI.] " Christ's discovery is Himself!' 219 these men gave a single impact, like that which is con- ceived to have first set the planets in motion: Christ claims to be a perpetual attractive power, like the sun, which determines their orbit. They contributed to men some discovery, and passed away: Christ's discovery is Himself. To humanity, struggling with its passions and its destiny, He says — ' Cling to Me : cling ever closer to Me.' . . . He represented himself as the Light of the world, as the Shepherd of the souls of men, as the Way to immortality, as the Vine or Life-Tree of humanity. . . . He commanded men to leave everything and attach them- selves to Him; . . . He declared Himself King, Master, and Judge of men; ... He promised to give rest to all the weary and heavy-laden ; . . . Be instructed His followers to hope for life from feeding on His body and His blood." * If this statement only suggests the complete truth, it is true as Ear afl it goes It illicit he sustained hy a hundred texts. That which is so striking, so overpowering in the Gospels, is perhaps less the precise language which our Lord uses about Himself, than the consistent bearing which lit assumes towards His disciples and mankind. His attitude is that of One Who takes His claim- far gianted . Who has no errors to confess, no demands to explain, or to apologize for; no restraining instinct of self li to keep Him in the background; no shrinking from high 111111 ml. hi r 1 upon a sense of the possible si lOooe Homo, ' pp 220 Language of Jesus Christ [Lect. of those around Him. It is the bearing of One Who claims to be the First of all, the Centre of all, with entire simpli- city indeed, but also with unhesitating decision. Let us dwell more in detail upon some of the language which Jesus Christ really uses about Himself. He is greater than the most venerable names in Jewish antiquity; greater than the men whose greatness had been felt most widely and deeply beyond the boundaries of Israel. He is greater than Jonah, whose preaching brought Nineveh to penitence ; x greater than Solomon, in whom not Israel only, but the whole East, recognized the wisest of men. 2 Not merely is He David's descendant; He is David's Lord. 3 When Abraham was yet unborn, He was already in existence. 4 Thus He could refer to " the glory which He had with the Father before the world was," 5 and to the fall of the rebel-spirit, which he had witnessed. 6 God is, in an entirely unique sense, His Father ; 7 the Jews feel that He uses the word in a manner which implies a tremendous claim. 8 For, indeed, He is conscious of being "from above," 9 of having "come down from heaven," 10 of having come forth from being 1 S. Matt. xii. 41. 2 S. Matt. xii. 42. 3 S. Matt. xxii. 41-46 ; Ps. ex. 1. 4 S. John viii. 56, 57, 58 ; cf. i. 15, 27, 30. 6 S. John xvii. 5 ; cf. verse 24. 6 S. Luke x. 18. 7 S. Matt. x. 32 ; xv. 13; xvi. 17; xviii. 19; xxvi. 39, 42; S. Luke xxiii. 46 ; xxiv. 49 ; S. John v. 30 ; x. 29 ; xiv. 2, 6. 8 S. John v. 17-18, Trartpa 'Cdiov eXeye rbv Qebv, tcrov eavrbv ttol&v ry Gey. 9 S. John viii. 23, eyCo e/c tCov &voj elfxt. 10 Ibid. vi. 38, KCLTa(34(3r)Ka in rod ovpavov; v. 51. 6 £k rod ovpavov KaraBds. VI.] about Himself and His claims. 2 2 1 with the Father, 1 .of having come forth out of God. 2 He knows, not merely that He lives ; but that He has in Him- self, that He is, the Life; Life in the deepest sense of the term, — perfect, blessed, absolute existence ; eternally re- ceived from the Father, yet shared with Him thus from everlasting to everlasting. 3 Although, then, He is visibly upon the earth, He is still really in Heaven. 4 He is united to the Father not merely by a moral, but by a natural union, 5 and so intimately, that " to have seen Him is to have seen the Father, 6 to have known Him is to have known the Father." 7 He is in the Father, and the Father is in Him, by a perfect reciprocity. 8 Of the Father He only has adequate knowledge: He Himself is known only by the Father. 9 As a consequence, He has all ll lings in common with the Father. 10 Men, whom He wills to redeem, are already His own. 1 x The Kingdom of God is His Kingdom. 1 ■ The Angels jut His Angels. 11 Hw " Church of the Living God" 14 is His Church. 15 1 I Ibid. xvi. 28, ^rj\0ov rapa rod warpbs, Kal i\^\v$a fls rbv k6c^w. ■ Ibid. viii. 42, 4k tov GeoO i£ij\$o¥ Kal fjicu. Cf. S. John xvii. 8; xvi 30 ; Ps. ii. 7 ; Micah v. 2. •S.John v. 26; d U j rfl <'• ; cf. S. John i. I ; 1 S. .John i. 1, 2 ; v. 20. * 8. John iii. !•">, 6 vlbt tov avOpuirov 6 ti>v i¥ t<£ ovpavtj). 6 S. John x. 28-30, iyto Kal 6 warty lr icfitp. ■ Ibid. \iv. 9. ii. 19. •S. JohB \i\. 1" ; wii. 81, 22. • S. V 7. Cf. S. John vi. 40, 6 &* wapa roG 6«o0, oftrot itipax* rbv irartpa. Ibid, \ 14,16. i •S.John kH L6;xrhM0j o£ s. Matt d 27 ; Hob. 13; S. M»tt 88; Actex. 36. ; S. Join. ill. II s. John x. 1 1. 16, 87, U | ivE 10-12. • Matt. xiii. n ; B kei. 33 ; Pcv. xi. »»S. Matt. \iii. H ; xm. I7| nh 14 1 Tim. iii. Li, 16 B. Mitt \m ::>• xxi it 222 Would our Lord's language about [Lect. given Him not merely over the human race, 1 but also with- out any assigned limits in heaven and in earth; 2 and the glory with which He will appear at the last day is not other than His Father's. 3 His working in the sphere of sense and time corresponds to the ceaseless activity of the Father. 4 He too quickens and will raise the dead. 6 He too forgives sins, as to the Paralytic; 6 He too will save the world ; 7 He will seek and save the lost ; 8 He will give eternal life. 9 To Him all judgment is committed, and all nations shall one day be gathered before His Throne. x ° Even now all men are to honour Him, even as they honour the Father. T 1 His words are familiar to our ears; but do we dwell upon their real and awful meaning ? "What should we think of a religious teacher now who could ' permit him- self to say that Eternal Life consisted in the knowledge of himself as well as in knowledge of the Father; 12 that dislike of himself implied dislike of the Father; 13 that belief in himself secured eternal life; 14 that disbelief in himself involved present condemnation? 15 What, if he should tell us that without him we could do nothing; 16 that united with him, we should bring forth much fruit ; x 7 1 S. John xvii. 2. 2 S. Matt, xxviii. 18. 8 S. Matt. xvi. 27. 4 S. John v. 17, 19, 20. 5 Ibid, verses 21, 28, 29; xi. 25, 40. 6 S. Matt. ix. 2-7 ; S. Luke vii. 36-50. * S. John iii. 17. 8 S. Luke xix. 10 ; ix. 56. 9 S. John xvii. 2. 10 S. John v. 22, 27 ; S. Matt. xxv. 31-39. -Cf. Is. xi. 3. 1 » S. John v. 20-23. a 2 S. John xvii. 3 ; xii. 44. 1 3 S. John xv. 23 ; S. Luke x. 16. 14 S. John iii. 16 ; v. 40 ; vi. 47. 1 5 S. John iii. 18 ; viii. 24. » c S. John xv. 5 ; xiv. 6. 1 7 S. John xv. 4. VI. ] Himself be tolerable in any other? 223 that, although leaving this world before us, he was going to prepare places for us in the Eternal Home ; x that his name would have resistless power with the Father; 2 that in his name his pupils would cast out devils ; 3 that he would send the Divine Spirit from the Father 4 Who, when He came, would glorify the sender ? 5 What should we say of the promise of a perpetual presence, 8 of the pretension to found an imperishable society, 7 of the delegation of power to forgive sins, 8 of the claim to be so faultless that in him the Prince of evil had no part whatever ? 9 Much else to the same purpose might be quoted from the three earlier Gospels, as well as from the last; and the question arises, how we are to account for this earnest self-assertion on the part of Jesus Christ, to explain such language ? How are we to adjust it, on the one hand, with the sobriety and truthfulness of a perfect human character; on the other, with a due recognition of the rights of God? There are men who decline to entertain this inquiry. They are not by any means forgetful of God. He weighs upon their conscience, upon their imagination, upon their life of daily though! and action, as the greatest and most solemn of all facts. They are not inlo to the niOWd beauties of the earthly life of Jesu • ; on the con- trary, they profess to be so enamoured of these beauties, or of *S. John xiv xm. 18 ; »S. Ma.k xm IT, 18; cf. 20. ♦& Johnx •8, John kH 11. «S. Id ? S. Matt hL 18. •8. John s. Matt. x\. ... 18. •S. John \iv. 30. 224 Our Lord's self-proclamation [Lect. some of them, as to be impatient of all other aspects of our Lord's "Work and Teaching, But they do not allow them- selves to reflect steadily upon the question whether their loyalty to the supreme rights of God, and their love for Jesus Christ, do not alike oblige them to " consider the re- lation which exists between Christ and God." Christian theology appears to them in the light of a wanton importa- tion of worthless metaphysics into the heart of a moral history of simple and faultless beauty; but they do not reflect that their moral ideal itself must fall to pieces, unless they are prepared in some way to attempt the chief problem with which Christian theology deals. Is our Lord's language imposture ? The suggestion can only be mentioned to be condemned by the entire drift and atmosphere of His Life. Is it the hallucination of an en- thusiast, so entranced in his idea as to be insensible to the world of facts around him ? But even Channing has pointed out that the enthusiasm takes a turn which would be incon- ceivable, for a deranged enthusiasm, under the circum- stances of Jesus Christ: " I can conceive," he says, " of His seating Himself, in fancy, on the throne of David, and secretly pondering the means of His appointed triumphs; but that a Jew should fancy himself the Messiah, and at the same time should strip that character of all the attributes that fired his youthful imagination and heart ; that he should start aside from all the feelings and hopes of His age, and should acquire a consciousness of being destined to a wholly new career, and one as unbounded as it was new — VI.] "unlike anything in the Hebrew Prophets. 225 this is exceedingly improbable." 1 Was it, then, only the natural manner of an oriental mind ; the habit of seizing truth intuitively and enunciating it authoritatively, in contrast with our western methods of demonstration and argument ? But this explanation, even if on other accounts it could be admitted, does not cover the ground required. It does not justify the actual substance and contents of our Lord's language about Himself. It does not explain the fact that His language about Himself is unlike anything which we find in the Hebrew prophets. The prophets, if you will, announce truth in the intuitive manner ; but they do not make themselves the subjects and centres of the truth which they announce. They draw the deepest distinctions between themselves and their Master : they are sinners, and He is the All-holy; they are foolish and incapable, He is All-powerful and All-wise. The rela- tion in which Christ claims to stand, both towards the Father and towards mankind, is utterly unanticipated by anything that can be traced in the prophetic literature of Isiiiel; it reveals a Personality distinct in kind from any that had previously appeared in Hebrew history. And at this point we cannot hut observe that our Lord's language about Himself is entirely in harmony with the character of certain of the miracles ascribed to Him in the Gospels. The miraculous element cannot be weeded out of the Gospel narrative^ without altogether impugning the historical value of those documents; and to do this mainly 1 Chauning : Works, il 56. Q 226 Our Lord's miracles illustrate His words. [Lect. because one department or one age of human experience does not positively correspond with what we know as yet about another, is not reasonable. Now, the Gospel miracles fall, speaking roughly, into two classes; they are acts of mercy, or acts of power. In one sense, they are all acts of power; but the motive of compassion towards human suffer- ing apparently predominates in the one class ; while, in the other, the reason for working them must be chiefly looked for in the need of demonstrating the personal power of the Agent. Thus, among the miracles of mercy, there are seven- teen cases on record of His healing bodily disease; there are six cases of the cure of demoniacal possession, each of which is described in detail; there are three cases of restoration to life. On the other hand, the miracles at Cana in Galilee, and of feeding the four and the five thousand, suggest, first of all, the creative power of the Worker, although it was wielded with a philanthropic object. The element of power is more distinctly and exclusively apparent in His stilling the tempest, and walking on the sea; in His rendering Him- self invisible to a hostile multitude; in His awing by a glance the traders in the temple, and the multitude that came to take Him ; in His cursing the barren fig-tree. Some of this class of miracles are, in fact, objected to by a recent writer, 1 on the specific ground that they only befit a superhuman personality. We therefore do not strain the import of such miracles in saying that they are, at least, in harmony with Christ's language about His claims and His superhuman Person. 1 Schenkel : Characterbild Jesu. Absch. iv., Kap. 11, p. 123. VI. ] Significance of His sinlcssncss. 227 But our Lord's references to Himself are also in keeping with another phenomenon. He was sinless. Upon the positive side of Christ's character we have already dwelt ; upon the balanced perfection, the ideal universality of the type. It was a life such as Paganism had not conceived ; it was higher than, and distinct from, the unimpeachable justice, the calm superiority to misfortune, the proud self- respect, which constituted, in various proportions, the Pagan ideal. It was a life of love and humility, of the highest forms of holiness, expressed by example as well as recommended by precept. But the most startling moral feature in this life is that we ran trace nowhere in it any — the faintest — consciousness of guilt The best men ordinarily feel the taint of moral evil most constantly ami acutely: their language about their sins and shortcomings seems even exaggerated to those who live at a greater distance from the Source of sanctity than they them- Bui Jesus challenges His enemies t<» convince Him "t" sin, if thev can. lie never hints that He lias done OX any one thin-- which needs foxgivenesa Be teaches II - disciples I our trespasses:" He never prays for pardon Himself. Borrow makes all of us think of thai in our past lives, which, as conscience whispers, has hut too well deserved n : Jeeus, in Sis sorrow, thinks only of the sins of others. Oertainlj Ee m tempted; but there is nothing within Sim that spond to the temptation: He is "holy, harmless, undefiled, Separate from sinners." And no attempts to fasten BUI Upon 11 m 228 Christ only sinless, if He [Lect. have had a trace of success, except so far as they have gone hand in hand with a denial of His personal claims. Strauss, for example, thinks it not merely fanaticism, but " unjustifiable self-exaltation, for a man to imagine himself so separated from other men, as to set himself before them as their future judge." 1 Strauss, we must admit, is per- fectly right, if the claim of Christ to judge the world is not strictly based upon fact. It is strictly impossible to maintain our faith in the faultlessness of His character if we deny that a fundamental necessity of His Being forced Him to draw attention so persistently, so imperiously, to Himself. But, on the other hand, if His words about Himself are sober truth, they only afford another illustra- tion of His compassionate love for those whom He came to enlighten and to save. Doubtless it has been a favourite object with a modern school, as men have said, " to bring down Jesus from the clouds, and to restore Him, by criticism, to the domain of history." This enterprise assumes that " the theological and metaphysical Christ of the creeds," is a very different person from " the living Christ of the Gospels." But when such criticism enters upon its task, what happens ? If, in- stead of declaiming vaguely against dogma, men really wish to get to the bottom of this problem, they will find that, of two things, one becomes absolutely necessary. Either they must consent to forfeit the moral ideal which they admire in the Gospels, and which, to do them justice, they 1 Leben Jesu fur das Deutsche Volk, p. 242. VI.] is indeed Divine. 229 are sincerely anxious to preserve ; or they must fall back upon those very statements of the creeds which, by affirm- ing Christ's personal Divinity, really and only justify His constant references to Himself, and His unbounded claims upon mankind. His precepts about humility are contradicted by His example, unless His statements about Himself are dictated by that true humility which would rather incur the suspicion of pride than conceal the simple fact. His enforcement of sincerity ceases to awe us, if, in His language about Himself, He was indeed guilty of consistent and almost boundless exaggeration. His very charity lose lustre, and becomes suspected, if we are forced to feel that He is ever capable of putting Himself unduly forward ; its highest forma cease to represent in our eyes the Universal Love ; they remind us rather of the efforts of this or that tribune of the people, who clothes a personal beneath the activities of an ostentatious disinterested: and whose eilbrts are at last crowned by a catastrophe which they have really deserved If, on the other hand, we how he to re the general impression produced by Christ's character, and Ee be taken at His word, He must he believed to be, in the absolute 861186, Divine. There is no room for an intermediate being, such • ianism imagined, who is neither God nor an angel, in a serious theistie ereed. And our Lord's words are 8t 1 inennsistent with wh.it w.mld be 80ber and true in creature, however exalted. re not surpassed ; I are only unfolded by the ! 230 Harmony of revealed truth. [Lect. creeds. The Christ of S. Paul's Epistles is really the Christ of the earliest Evangelist ; the Christ of S. John is the Christ of S. Paul ; the Christ of the Creeds and the great Councils is the Christ of S. John. He Who alone knows the Father, and Whom none but the Father knows, 1 is the Image of the Father, 2 is in the Form of God, 3 is the Effulgence of God's glory and the exact Impress of His Being, 4 is over all God blessed for ever. 5 He, the only Begotten Son, or God, Which is in the bosom of the Father, 6 is of one substance with the Father, 7 as being" God of the substance of the Father, begotten before all worlds." 8 The later statements may be more elaborate; but they are implied, in all their completeness, by the earlier. Just as an anatomist, from his knowledge of the animal frame, can pronounce upon the age and size of a skeleton of which he only possesses the fragment of a single bone; so with our eye upon S. John, and the Nicene confession, we can see statements in S. Mark which can only be maintained when men acknowledge the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. There are deep harmonies in truth which, from first to last, bind it in its integrity rigidly together. They cannot be set aside or trifled with; for truths which we in our narrowness deem obscure or unimportant, are often vitally necessary to the maintenance of others which we are better capable of appreciating. Our Blessed Lord's Divinity, instead of obscuring His true 1 S. Matt. xi. 29. 2 Col. i. 15. 3 Phil. ii. 6. 4 Heb. i. 3. 5 Rom. ix. 5. 6 S. John i. 18. 7 Nic. Creed. s Athan. Creed. VI] What is " the religion of Christ?" 231 Manhood, is the safeguard and justification of its moral perfectness : and we do the most beautiful of moral histories a fatal injustice, if we forget that, in the words of the Creed, its subject " is perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting ; equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood ; Who, although He be God and Man, yet is He not two, but one Christ." x This is the full and solemn truth ; that Jesus Christ is not merely the Teacher but the substance of Christianity ; not merely the author of the faith which Christiana profess, but its central object. For Christians the popular phrase, " the religion of Christ," does not mean, as Lessing suggested, only or chiefly the piety which in the days of His flesh He exhibited towards the Father. It means the piety, the submission of thought and heart, the sense of obligation, the voluntary enthusiastic sei Of Which He, together and equally with the Father, ifl the rightful and everlasting Object; which, when H. .»ii earth, He claimed as His due; and which has been rendered to Him now for more than eighteen bun years by the best and noblest of the human race. 232 Jesus the living bo7id [Lect. III. In Jesus Christ, then, we have the guarantee or bond of religion ; He is the means of an actual communication between the soul of man and the Eternal God. " There is one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." x He is the Mediation in virtue of the very terms of His Being : His office of Mediation is based upon the two Natures which are united in His Single Person. On the one hand, as the Eternal Son, He is One with the All-Holy and Infinite God ; on the other, as the child of Mary, He shares all the finiteness and weakness of our manhood; He shares everything with it except its sin. Thus He impersonates and maintains, by the very fact of being what He is, a true vital bond between earth and heaven. To us men, He is the last and most complete unveiling of the interest which God takes in the well- being of His moral and reasonable creatures ; the Highest Organ of the Divine Mind and Will ; the only and certain channel of those " unsearchable riches " 2 which flow down from the Fountain of all goodness upon the beings whom He has made. Before the Majesty of God He is the unique and ideal Bepresentative of our race : He represents us, not as being what we are, but as being what we were meant to be by the Great Author of our existence. And yet, although we are only weak and sinful, we may unite ourselves to Him by faith, and love, and contrition for the 1 1 Tim. ii. 5. 2 Eph. iii. 8. VI.] between God and the Soul. 233 past, and be "accepted in the Beloved." * His obedience as Man, reaching its climax in the self-sacrifice of the Cross, becomes ours through His free grace and mercy. His invigorating life, which restores our race to its original strength and beauty, is still communicated to us by His Spirit and His Sacraments; so that all who will, may " put off the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts ; and be renewed in the spirit of their minds; and put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. ,, 2 This cannot be done by fallen man for himself, and out of the resources of his warped and impoverished nature. But "what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ; that the righteous- ness of the law might he fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." 8 lain- as 11- ; I 'ivine as well as Human, Jesus is "made oni lorn, and Righteousness, and Sanetilieation, and Redemption." 4 Thus in anion with BQm, those religions aspirations, which are part of our natural outfit. And their true exercise, their lull satisfaction. As the Light of the world, lie Lb Satisfaction of the intellect. As ~ Fairer than the children of men," He is the delight of the heart. As "Holy, harm- less, nndefiled, separate bom Burners," He challenges the submission of the will Intellect. moral el each have their part in Him. He rec con- 1 t - h. i. C. « Rom. viii. 3, 4. 4 1 Cor. i. 30. 234 Difficulties of revelation [Lect. secrates them. He leads them upwards, in and through His own Holy Humanity to the All- wise and All-beautiful. The soul finds that in Him " is the well of Life, and that in His Light it will see light." Does it seem inconceivable that the Eternal Son of God should have, indeed, thus come among us men, to teach and to save us ; to make reconciliation between us and the Almighty Father ; to bestow on us the priceless gift of a new Nature ; and to lead us back, first one and then another, to our true home and peace ? Certainly, it may well move our wonder to think of such grace and mercy. The Chris- tian creed, when once it becomes precious to us, takes us altogether out of the daily range of earthly thoughts and interests, lifting us into a better, and brighter, but not more mysterious, or less real, world than this. The Incar- nation and Death of the Everlasting Son seem impossible, only because we do not steadily reflect upon the simple but momentous truths which lie at the root of all religion, and which all who are not Materialists or Pantheists generally admit. Is the Incarnation so improbable, think you, if God is indeed a moral Being, if man has an immortal soul, if moral evil is inherently deadly in itself and in its effects ? Do we not name " God," " immortality," " sin," without thinking what we mean ; as if these tremendous words were the symbols of trivial commonplaces, which implied nothing beyond themselves ? And is not this careless treatment of these solemn truths which we profess to own, the reason why many of us do not understand the VI.] not greater than those of natural religion. 235 truths beyond them ? If the awfulness and magnificence of God, the reality of eternity, the power arid sting of moral evil, were more often subjects of our thought, would our imagina- tions be so startled, as they often are, by those doctrines of grace which adjust and harmonize what else is so full of perplexity ; by the Incarnation of the Blessed Son of God ; by His plenary Atonement on the Cross for the sins of men; by His unceasing Intercession for us before the Father ; by the sanctifying energy of His Holy Spirit ; by the power of His Sacraments, to renew and sustain our life ? Surely the earlier truths are just as full of difficul- ties for the imagination and the reason as the latter. We put them out of sight as being less importunate ; but there they are. That the All-foreseeing and Holy God should have created us at all, is at least as startling as that, hav- ing created, He should have redeemed us. Or rather. when we reflect upon His morality, upon Bifl justice, upon His love, we must think thai Bia Redemption of the fallen is really less wonderful than His Creation of a race capable of such signal failure; and we must find in our daily experience of life, of the crimes and sullerinu's, which so largely compose it, more embarrassment and distress for reverent reason than can be famished by critical specula- tions upon the explanatory and OOnSoling truth, that "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever bdieveth on Kim ihonld not perish, have everlasting lite.'* 1 1 s. X hn iii. L& 236 Why the evidences of Christianity [Lect. " Whosoever believeth in Him." It is not then, you say, a matter of strict mathematical demonstration. No ; it is not a matter of strict mathematical demonstration. If it were, there would be no more room for faith than there is in the process of learning a proposition of Euclid. Not to acquiesce in the conclusion of a proposition of Euclid, is to be intellectually deficient ; but to refuse assent to the Christian creed does not necessarily imply intellectual deficiency. Why not ? Because for such assent moral dispositions are necessary as well as intellectual capa- city. The evidence for Christianity, intellectually viewed, is something short of mathematical; and intentionally so. Christian truth makes a demand upon the will as well as upon the intellect ; and the will, to avoid the foreseen con- sequences of assent, will often prevent the intellect from doing its work, honestly and thoroughly, in investigating the claims of Christ. This is a reason why so much store is set upon faith in St. Paul's Epistles. Faith is a test of the moral drift of our whole being, and not merely of the soundness or acuteness of our understandings. If an act of faith in Jesus Christ implied no more than an act of assent to the conclusion of a demonstrated proposition ; if faith were nothing higher and nobler than the forced result of a victorious assault upon the human understand- ing, conducted by columns and batteries of mathematical evidence ; then all that is said about its moral and spiritual worth, about its purifying and elevating power, would be simply unintelligible. The most accomplished mathema- VI.] are not mathematical. 237 tician is not necessarily moral ; and the most fervent be- lievers, ancient or modern, have not been always Pascals and Newtons. Our Lord did, indeed, by His miracles, and notably by His resurrection, address Himself to the experience of His contemporaries in enforcing His claims ; and by certain portions of His teaching, He appealed no less truly to the operations of their natural reason. But, in order to accept Him as He is, reason and observation must be seconded by the heart and the conscience. There must be a true desire to know all that can be known of the Author of the law of right and wrong within us. There must be a real an to escape from the moral anomalies of life; a recognition, and sense of human goodness ; a strong anticipation that He Who is its Source cannot have left ua in weakness and darkness to struggle alone. Why this temper is found in one man and not in another, is a question w hi.h 1 hack into the deepest secrets of our several moral oati into the varying histories of our loyalty or disloyalty to God's original gift of natural light But upon the exist- ence or non-existence of such moral dispositions depends our way of looking at the evidenoe whieh Jesus Christ has thought ;.:- >•! 1'efore us on behalf of His claims. In one case that evidenoe will appear sufficient; in in another. It will be held insufficient by the man who thinks to become a believing Christian, as he would become a mathematician, without any 1. the temper of his heart, or even in spite of its decided 238 Faith in our Lord's Divinity the basis [Lect. bent against the moral teaching of the Gospel. It will be deemed sufficient — nay, more than sufficient — for those who amid perplexities are "waiting for the consolation of Israel." l They understand that religious truth, to be embraced at all to any purpose, must be embraced, not simply by a dry assent of the logical understand- ing, but by a vital act of the whole inward man; by moral sympathies even more earnestly than by an intel- lectual grasp. Christ, our Lord, in various ways, teaches us as much as this; and Christian apologists can only make that portion of the act of faith which belongs to the understanding easier to it, by removing obstacles to the reception of truth or by exhibiting its inward har- monies. They cannot, if they would, do the work of the Divine Spirit, and control the fevers, the prejudices, the cowardice, the rashness of the heart. He only Who made the heart can soften, or subdue, or change it. He only Who made the light to shine out of darkness can so shine in the hearts of men, as to "give the light of the know- ledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 2 And they to whom He has taught this great lesson will know and feel, that believing in the Divinity of our Incarnate Lord, we stand, as it were, upon the heights of Pisgah ; and that a new and vast prospect, grateful to eyes that are wearied with the long glare of the desert, is opening before us. Before us is a land of vineyards and oliveyards; a land flowing with milk and honey. It is a region of repose 1 S. Luke ii. 25. 2 2 Cor. iv. 6. VI.] of practical religion. 239 for faith and love ; it is an atmosphere where communion with God is easy and natural. It is the proper home of spirituality and benevolence, of that internal and external practice of religion, day by day, which is so altogether higher and better a thing than the profoundest study of its theory. For the Divinity of the Son of God is the adequate warrant of all His promises ; of the power of His death; of the gift of His Spirit; of the efficacy of His sacraments; of the converting and hallowing power of His written word; of the Divine character of that socie souls which, by His Spirit, He has organized into Bis Church since the Day of Pentecost. How vast in their range, how interesting in their idea and scope, how ener- getically practical in their bearings on all earnest lite. are these great Christian doctrines which form the hills and vales of our Gospel Land of Promise ! AW strain our eyes; we would fain go forward to study their to try, if it might be, to understand and to surmount their difficulties. But it cannot be; — at least now. If only we sincerely cling by faith and love to our Divine aud Human Lord, all else will follow. For the present, like the can but hold Him by the feet, and entreat Mini t'» teach us that personal dev«»;edne8S to Hii:. which is the secret and soul of genuine religion; since without it the love of God soondies away iuto an attenu- ated mystiei^m, while the love of n ally hol- 1 out into a mechanical philanthn inking of Him. praying to Sim, working y, as 240 Conclusion. [Lect. our living, tender, mighty, and wise Friend, we strengthen our hold upon the one certain bond between earth and heaven; upon Him through Whom, in all our feebleness and sin, we have real access in one Spirit unto the Father. 1 Personal devotion to Jesus Christ is the exercise of thought, and of affection, steadily directed upon His ador- able Person. But it is also the exercise of will: it is pre- eminently practical. There is much to be abstained from for His sake; there is much to be done and to be endured; there is some danger, perhaps, of our doing nothing very definite, where the opportunities of action are so various and so complex. And, therefore, that you may do some- thing for Jesus Christ now and here, you are asked to support with your alms the St. James' Penitentiary. Its object is to carry out our Lord's work in the world as the Healer of souls, whom sin has separated from God, by bringing them back to purity and peace through a re- covered union with Himself. It has been said that Peni- tentiaries are too costly a method of restoration from sin. They who speak thus can have thought little to any pur- pose about either the malignity of moral evil, or the mean- ins of the Self-sacrifice of the Son of God. The institu- tion which I have named has done and is doing good, and, as we trust, lasting work among our unhappy sisters, who may well be so much less guilty in the eyes of the 1 Eph. ii. 18. VI.] Conclusion. 241 Eternal Justice than are many upon whom, in this present world, and often to their own endless loss, the breath of censure never falls. Be our case what it may, we surely do well to support an undertaking which honours our Lord, by its disinterested work of unwearied compassion ; and which, while labouring for the social recovery of our poor countrywomen, aims much more directly at promoting the eternal well-being of their souls, — as capable as our own of enjoying, through the Divine Mediator, the pre- sent and future blessings of religion. BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Divinity of otir Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ : Eight Lectures preached before the University of Oxford, in the Year 1866, on the Foundation of the late Rev. John Bampton, M.A., Canon of Salisbury. Fifth Edition. 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