Part 2 (2/2)

The one needful condition for the redemption of these natures is the objective presence and action upon them of a divine person to lift the breath of trust the strength that only pants itself away in feverish effort

Every doctrine of sacrifice necessarily contradicts its own preuilt, which is personal and inalienable, it offers a con, and meets a moral ill with an unmoral remedy True and sound as a mere confession of weakness, it runs off from that point into mere confusion and morbidness But add to it the doctrine of faith, and it acquires its proper complement; balances its hu its captive through dark labyrinths of vain experiment, opens a direct way from the chambers of humiliation to the prophet's watch-tower of prayer and vision Without this complement, the doctrine created priesthoods; with it, destroys theht up in their moments of helplessness, and handed over to ritual quackeries; with it, they are seized in their hour of inspiration, and flung into the arms of God The susceptibility for either treatment depends on the predoination and strength of will In short, there are minds whose power is shed, if we may say so, in _pro_tension, precipitated forwards in narrow channels with impetuous torrent There are others whose affluence is in _ex_tension, and spreads out like a still lake to drink in light fro hills And there are others yet again, whose character is _in_tension, and that move on in full volu little with the seasons, and holding to the lio The faith of the first is _sacrificial_; of the second, _pantheistic_; of the third, _theistic_

Of the four cardinal tendencies we have named, the _scientific_ has never been provided for within the interior of Christianity; whose organic life and structure are complete without it It re at present its atheistic propensions: and the part it has played, however ionise, and slighted interests of mankind This cannot possibly continue for ever; nor is it at all consistent with experience to suppose, that either of the opponent influences will obtain a victory over the other Their reconcileh the mediation and within the compass of some third andfor the philosophy and charity of the future We feel no doubt that it will be accomplished; and will spare us that revolutionary extery and metaphysics which is proclaimed, on behalf of positive science, by the self-appointed Committee of the ”Republique Occidentale” The other three tendencies early worked their way into the Christian religion, and vindicated a place within its organisenesis of the Catholic Church consists of little else, on the inner side of dogma and ethics, than the successive and successful self-assertion of each of these principles; and, on the outer side of ecclesiastical polity, than the construction of a social framehich held theenius of three distinct peoples conspired to fill up the ht with it a separate constituent The Hebrew believer contributed his theistic conscience; the hellenic, his pantheistic speculation; the Romanic, his passionate appropriation of redemption by faith The eleether; so that the phenomena of no period, probably of no place, serve to show theed from one another and insulated But the Ebionitish period, with its rigorous monachism, its historical and huainst wealth, represents the _ethical_ principle in its excess The Logos idea, and indeed the whole development of the Trinitarian doctrine, exhibits the effort of the _Greek_ thought to obtain recognition, and qualify the Judaic And the _Augustinian_ theology, pleading the wants of fervid natures, on whose surface the web of hts only to be shrivelled and disappear, coencies from whose confluence the faith of Christendoredients unite in one composite result; and hence the tenacity hich that system keeps possession of the most various types of hue, returns with the reaction of another The ethical feeling finds satisfaction in its theory of hurace; the sacrificial, in its conditions of redeh the realism of the mediaeval schools, its eucharistic doctrine, which is only the theological side of that philosophical conception, becomes a direct transfusion of hellenic influence into the Church And its faith in perpetual inspiration, in the unbroken chain of physicalof sacramental mystery with the very substance of this world, so far softens and diffuses the concentrated personality of the Divine Essence, as to indulge the free fancy of art Nor can we deny the same capacity of beauty to its hierarchy of holy natures,--froels, to the Son of God,--all blended in living sympathies that cross and recross the barriers of worlds This coencies ofcan be more absurd than the appeal to it in proof either of preternatural guidance, or of human artifice, in the constitutive process of the Ro in the fact, that a system which is the product of three factors should contain them all No doubt if these factors are, as we contend, primary and indestructible features of our unperverted nature, no religion can be divine and completely true which refuses to take any of them up; and this _one_ condition of the future faith we may learn from the Christendom of the past The condition, however, eries of profound truths and puerile fancies which is dignified by the name of ”Catholic doctrine”

For, be it observed, this system has no intrinsic and necessary unity, which would hold it together when abandoned to the free action of thefor conscience, so for passion, each in its turn; but it is not a whole that can satisfy all together Its contents, gathered by successive experiences, cohere through the external grasp of a sacerdotal corporation; and if that hand be paralyzed or relaxed, it becoether Hence the phenomena of the sixteenth century, whose revolt was the expression, not of theological dissent, but of ecclesiastical disgust; and in which doctrine only accidentally fell to pieces, because the authority that guarded and wielded it became too rotten to be believed in The secondary revolution, however, was incomparably more momentous than the primary The treasured seeds that dropped froain in the fresh soil of the richer European reat year of their development is still upon its round The outward dictation of the Apostolic See being discarded, it became necessary to find another clew to divine truth; and the inner wants of the hue came into play, with no restraint within the ample scope of Scripture A reconstitution of Christianity began,--on the basis, no doubt, of materials already accumulated,--more eclectic, therefore, and less creative, than in the infancy of the religion; but proceeding, nevertheless, by the sa a similar cycle The _order_ of development in this second life of Christendoh transposed, do not differ taken one by one It is only this,--that whilst in the formation of the faith the dominant influences were Conscience, Art, and Passion, in its Re-formation they are Passion, Conscience, Art At the moment when Luther shattered the fabric of pretended unity, and compelled the husk to shed its kernels, the season and the field were unfavorable to two out of the three, and they lay dorenial times The _moral_ element had been discredited by the casuistry of the confessional, the ”treasure of the Church,” and the trade in s, was flung away in generous disgust The _aesthetic_ eleanized in Italy, and was so identified with the reproduction of the very tastes and vices, the thought and style, nay, even the ion had expelled as the work of demons, that the new piety shrank froe when episcopates on by an ear for hexameters or a Ciceronian Latinity, when priests defended materialism in Tusculan disputations, when popes frequented the comic theatre and Plautus was acted in the Vatican, when the proceeds of a purgatorial traffic were spent in destroying ancient basilicas and raising heathenish temples over the sepulchres of saints, it was inevitable that beauty should become suspected by sanctity There reeneration, the _iustine; and this, accordingly, was the direction in which the whole early Reformation advanced It was not the accident that Luther was an Augustinian monk, which determined the character of his movement The sickened soul of Europe could breathe no other air E at the chopped straw and apples of Sodohed for escape froion fresh with the mountain breath of faith and love, and not quite barren of ”angels' food” The burdeneddeluded and abused, reduced to self-conscious dotage by vain penances and vainer pro away all belief in itself, asked leave to lay its freedom down, and went into captivity to Christ So exclusively did the feeling of the time flow into this channel, that no doctrine which had an ethical groundwork, or attempted to soften in the least the irace, obtained any success; while every enthusiastic excess of the anti-catholic ideas spread like wildfire The irreproachable innocence and piety of the Salzburg _Gartner-bruder_ did nothing to save them from quick martyrdos of the Anabaptists of Munster scarcely sufficed to stop the triudoli, earlier and more moderate than either Luther's or Calvin's, was easily restrained by thee, whilst the Genevan Reforical fuel, and kindle the terrible fire of his dogma, and it spread frodoms in its flames That men without passion or pathos themselves, who do their work by force of intellect and will, should be successful disseminators of a doctrine that can live in no cool air, only shoide was the preparation ofdesire of nations

The first stage, then, of the new development of Christianity was its _Puritan_ period The natural perdition of ious indifference of all his states and actions, and the consequent worthlessness of his morality, except for civil uses and social police, constitute the fundamental assumptions of the system From this basis of despair its doctrine of atonement comes to the rescue The obedience of Christ is accepted in place of that which men cannot render, and his sacrifice instead of the penalty they deserve Not, however, for all, but for those alone who may appropriate the deliverance by an act of faith, and present theto God, with full assurance of their sufficiency Nothing but a divine and involuntary conversion can generate this faith, which follows no predisposition from the antecedent life, but the inscrutable decree of Heaven Once transferred frorace, the disciple becoh the Holy Spirit, a new creature; is conscious of a sacred revolution in his tastes and affections; gives evidence of this by good works, which, now purified in their principle, are no longer unacceptable to God; and knows that, though he is still liable to the sins, he is redeemed from the penalties, of a son of Adam The Church is the body of the converted, and while the Sacrament of Baptism initiates the candidate, and provisionally secures him, the Communion seals his adoption afterwards; the efficacy of both being conditional on the inner faith of the participant The intense and unulf, impassable except by arded as the most characteristic feature of this scheme Its text-book contains the Pauline Epistles, and opens most readily at the Roustine, Luther, Calvin, and Edwards

With vast internal differences in their particular conceptions of Christian truth and of ecclesiastical governelical sects retain the iin in the dearth of any ethical or aesthetic eleion

From this alone must have resulted the fact which a plurality of causes has concurred in producing; viz that the Reformation soon (within a century and a half) reached its apparent liated itself only internally by further evolutions of thought It had taken up and exhausted the class of minds to which it was specially adapted; and after appropriating these, found itself arrested Under the impulse of a neakened piety men are disposed to feel that they cannot attribute too e nuious sentiment, or the dominance of predestinarian theory, or the ill balance of partial cultivation, abdicate all personal power of good in favor of irreversible decrees But as the tension relaxes or the culture enlarges, the moral instincts reassert their existence; and the monstrous distortions incident to any theory which denies their authority become too repulsive to be borne Hence a reaction, in which the natural conscience takes the lead, and insists on obtaining that reconciliation with God which has already been conquered for the affections Men in who is deep cannot divest themselves of reverence for it as authoritative and divine; nor can they truly profess that it is to them an empty voice, which, venerable as it sounds, they are never able to obey They knohat a difference it , whether they are faithful or whether they are false; that this difference belongs alike to their state of nature and their state of grace; that it is as little possible to withhold adan Socrates as from that of the Christian Paul; and that the sentie to both is the same that looks up with trust and worshi+p to the justice and holiness of God: how, then, can they consent to draw an unreal line of impassable separation between ethical qualities before conversion and the very saate in the one case the moral distinctions which become valid in the other? The two lives,--of earth and heaven; the two race; which it is the impulse of enthusiasm to contrast, it is the necessity of conscience to unite When Luther first blew up the sacerdotal bridge which had given a path across to the steps of centuries, the boldness of the deed and the inspiration of the ti over with hi of faith But when the van had passed, and the eneration were brought to the brink, there seemed a needless rashness in the attempt, and foundations were discovered for a structure based on the rock of nature, andas he yielded to his leader's more powerful will, could not permanently acquiesce in the complete extinction of human responsibility; and vindicated for the soul a voluntary co-operation with divine grace This se the later Lutherans, especially of Brunswick and Hanover; next into the school of Leyden; and finally into the Church and universities of England Quick to seize the reaction in the temper of the times, the Jesuits put themselves at the head of the saainst the Jansenists a doctrine of free-will beyond even the liustine, as a patriotic theologians the authority of the Latin Church gave way in favor of the early Christian apologists and Greek Fathers, who knew nothing of the scheuidance of More and Cudworth, no longer disdained to replenish her oil and revive her flame from the lamp of Athenian philosophy And the conception of a universal natural laas elaborately worked out by Grotius As the sixteenth century was the period of dogy, the seventeenth was that of ethical philosophy; the whole modern history of which lies mainly within that limit and half a century lower; and conclusively attests the decline of a scheme of belief incompatible with the very existence of such a science When the Protestantisift, offered as its representatives Locke and Lie which had come over it declares itself It was the revolt of ed it,--the re-development, under new conditions, of the ethical principle which had fallen neglected from the broken seed-vessel of the Catholic faith

The second season of the Reforeh-Churchmen may be ashamed of an archbishop who proposed a scheelicals, of a preacher who applauded the Socinians; and Coleridgians, of a theologian as no deeper in metaphysics than the ”Grotian divines”; but neither the Erastianism, the charity, nor the common sense of a Tillotson would be at all unsuitable at this moment to a church openly torn by dissensions and really held together only by dependence on the state It has been a current opinion, perseveringly propagated by adherents of the Geneva theology, that the spread of Arious decline, and concurrent with the growth of a worldly laxity and selfish indifference of character The allegation is absolutely false In literature, in personal characteristics, and in public life, the Latitude-men and their associates in belief bear honorable coorous forerunners There is not only less of passionate intolerance, but a nobler freedoreat writers of the second period, than in the Refors of disinterestedness and elevation of mind in Cudworth and Clarke than in Calvin and Beza Nor did the return of ethical theory weaken the sources of religious action The very enterprises in which evangelical zeal most rejoices,--missions to the heathen, and the diffusion of the Scriptures,--were not only prosecuted but set on foot in new directions and with more powerful instrumentalities, in the very midst of this period, and by the very labors of its uished philosophers The Society for the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, were both born with the eighteenth century; and while the latter addressed itself to the natives and slaves of the American provinces, the former first made the Scriptures known on the Coroe, displayed the enerous zeal for thetheir translation into four or five languages For thirty years he was governor of a y is sufficiently indicated by the fact that he bought up Pococke's Arabic translation of Grotius (De Veritate Christianae Religionis), and was at the cost of its wide distribution in the East

And who that has ever read it can forget Swift's letter to the Irish viceroy (Lord Carteret), introducing Bishop Berkeley (then Dean of Derry), and his project for resigning his preferht devote himself to the conversion of the Aood Dean prosecuted his object, the self-devotion hich he eratefulness hich he accepted frorant, and the treachery which broke the promise, and after seven years compelled his return, make up a story unrivalled for its contrast of saintly simplicity and ministerial bad faith These and similar features of the tiant assu and profound except that which disbelieves all natural religion, no gospel holy which does not renounce the ins with despising theospel of conscience

Regarding the world and life as the object of a divine ad to interpret them by a scheme of final causes, it holly occupied with the conception of God as proposing to hi thewiththe is for a purpose, and subsists for the sake of what is ulterior, and for out a prescribed proble will inevitably be, to hunt for providences These the narrow mind will place in the incidents of individual life; the comprehensive intellect, in the laws and relations of the universe; not perhaps in either case without soood and ill which is relative to man The infinite perfections of God will be concentrated, so to speak, too much in the notion of His WILL, and the pohich subserve its designs; and will in consequence be as much misapprehended as would be our own nature by an observer assu that we put forth all its life and phenomena _on purpose_ Indeed, the exclusive and unbalanced ascendency of the moral faculty teht one for hi, and call hihter, or the surprise of sudden tears, and aim at an autocratic command of his own soul It is not wonderful that his ideal of human character should reappear in his representation of the Divine The error deforms his faith ashi is _for_, it hinders hi what it _is_; in search of the _ transitive, he sinks into it with no sympathy on its own account This is only to say, in other words, that his prepossession detains him from the _artistic_ contemplation of objects and events; for while it is the business of science to inquire their _origination_, and of morals to follow their _drift_, it remains for art to appreciate their _nature_ To feel the type of thought which they express, to recognize the idea which they invest with form, the mind must rest upon them, not as products or as instrunificance must not be i which art detects in life and the world is not a purpose, but a sentiment; in its view the present attitudes and develop than the tools of a re must be added to the ethical representation of God He ed in processes of intention and volition, but as having, around this ht and affection, which, like the native inspirations of a pure and sublime human soul, spontaneously flow out in forms of beauty, and movements of rhythion demands the admission of this free element: and without it, will cease to speak hoenius and poetic nature, and must limit itself ulation, and the moral that have too much A God who offers terms of communion only to the passionate and to the conscientious, will not touch the springs of worshi+p in perceptive and meditative men _Their_ prayer is less to know the published rules than to overhear the lonely whispers of the Eternal Mind, to be at one with His i into articulate utterance the silent inspirations of which all existence is full Their peculiar faculties supply them with other interests than about their sins, their salvation, and their conscience; they feel neither sufficiently guilty, nor sufficiently anxious to be good, to ion out of the one consciousness or the other; but if, indeed, it be God that flashes on thehts of soles, that wipes off sometimes the steams of custom from theof the soul, and surprises it with a presence of tenderness and ht in the i perfect, be an unconscious aspiration towards Him,--then there is a way of access to their inner faith, and a temple pavement on which they will consent to kneel It is, we believe, the inability of Protestantism, in either of its previous forms, to meet this order of wants, that has reduced it to its state of weakness and discredit; and the struggle of thought, characteristic of the present century, is an unconscious attempt to supply the defect, and to vindicate, for the third element of Catholic Christianity, the possibility of developan, like both of the earlier ones, in Germany; and it was from Plato that Schleierht create a diversion from the disastrous assaults of French ht An hellenic spirit was infused into the scientific theology of the Continent, and has never ceased to prevail there, though Aristotle has long succeeded to Plato as the channel of influence When Hegel, long the rival of Schleiermacher, triumphed over him, not only in the coteries of Berlin, but in the schools of Germany, he no doubt turned the philosophy which had been invoked to preserve the faith into a dialectic, at whose ic touch it deliquesced; and no one who has followed the application of his principles to history and dogma can be surprised at the antipathy they awaken in the Church But it would be a mistake to suppose that the step into Pantheisians raised up by the great preacher of Berlin occupy in this respect any different ground Since the time of Jacobi theism proper has not been heard of in Germany: the very writers who _uise of their definition of personality; and so steeped is the whole national ht, that froment, only different shades of the same pantheistic conception What does this denote but a universal sigh after a God, who shall be neither a Jehovah, a Judaic a?t???at??, nor a redee upon the theatre of history, but a living and energizing Spirit, quickening the very heart of to-day, and whispering round the dome of Herschel's sky not less than in the third story of Paul's heaven? In so breaks out in devilish defiance, as in the unhappy Heinrich Heine's saying, ”I am no child, I do not want a Heavenly Father any more”: in others it breathes out, as with Novalis, in a tender mysticism, and is traceable by the reverent footfall and uncovered head hich they pace, as in a cathedral, the solemn aisles of life and nature The expression of this tendency has passed into the literature of our own language, and every year is tinging it more and more with its characteristic hues Emerson affords the purest and s of Carlyle,--before the divine thirst had advanced so much into a human _rabies_,--and more especially his _Sartor Resartus_, ospel of this sentiment The intense operation of these essays, so entirely alien to the traditions of English thought and taste, is an evidence of soenius of their authors: it is proof of a certain coht and deadness to burst into the flah the very air of the time, has unmistakably evinced its essential identity with the instinct of art; in part, by a direct affluence and excellence of production unknown to the preceding age, but stilllove for the creations of artistic genius Thesusceptibility only a morbid symptom of decadent civilization, are misled, we hope, by imperfect historical parallels The flower, no doubt, both of Athenian and of Italian culture, was most brilliant just before it drooped But the soil which bore it, and the elements that surrounded it, had no essential reselish society, in which, above all, there are the unexhausted juices of a moral faith and a strenuous habit, not stiainst the open air and the natural seasons

By the rules of technical theology, it e to reckon the turn froe of the Reformation_; as if it could be at all included in the interior history of Christianity, instead of being treated as a direct apostasy And it is in reality a very serious question, whether, without unfaithfulness to its essential character, the Christian religion can doht, or must from the first visit it with unqualified exco can be in, a faith whose very hypothesis is sin, and whose aspiration is oing pantheisratuitous than to assu the whole itiether at the expense of Christian truth If we mistake not, the pith of the matter lies in a small compass _Let Christian Theism keep Morals, and Pantheism may have Nature_ This rule is no ruous elements, but is founded, we are convinced, on distinctions real and eternal So long as a holy will is left to God, and a power committed to man, free to sustain relations of trust and responsibility, room remains for all the conditions of Christianity, and the field beyond e of mystic perception, and railed off for the sacrament of beauty But whether this or any other be the just partition of territory between the two clais le human faculty, but to har that, on its first re-birth, the gospel of nature should deny the gospel of duty, or so take it up into its own fine essence as to volatilize all its substance away

This is but the natural revenge taken for past neglect, and the needful challenge to future attention Each one of the three developments has in its turn run out beyond the limits of the Christian faith, and yet, hitherto, each has established a place within it The Hegelian, or E phenomenon to the Antinomianism of the first, and the Deism of the second And as these have passed away, after surrendering into the custody of Christendoth, so will the Pantheis of its charge, and seen the Church complete its triad of Faith, Holiness, and Beauty

This question, however, will be asked: If the Reformation only repeats, with some transposition, the cycle of the pri thus to do our work again? Are we to end where the sixteenth century began, and to reproduce the Catholicism which was then resolved into its elements?

And does some fatal necessity doom us to this wearisome periodicity?

Not in the least However little the seeds ress the liuishable frorowth are so different as practically to cancel the identity in the result Taken even one by one, the modern forms of doctrine are far nobler than their early prototypes The narrow Ebionitisinal Church is not comparable, as an expression of the conscience, with the ht, flowing by Berlin, has entered the Church in deeper channels than when infiltrating through the theosophy of Alexandria It is only in relation to the passionate eleained in truth and grandeur by passing the religion of Augustine through the minds of the modern reformers; and whether the Jansenists within the Church do not exhibit a higher phase of character than the Huguenots without it But at any rate, the modern development, taken as a whole, is secure of an inner unity and completeness which before has been unattained It is an obvious, yet little noticed, consequence of the invention of printing, that no one eneration of ain, with change in the intellectual season, rot utterly away, and give place to a successor no less absolute Generations and ages now live in presence of each other; the impulse of the present is restrained by the counsels of the past, and, in fighting for the throne of the hu prepossession, but guarded by shadowy sentinels, encircled by a band of iain so ard and fitful as it was in the first centuries of our era; losing all interest at one period in the questions which had ; for a time covered all over with the pale haze of Byzantine metaphysics, and then suffused with red heats of African enthusiaset the old, and thrive wholly at its expense, or even make a compact with it to take turn and turn about, but ement rather than its rival The ustine better than did the old Pelagians; ”Evangelical” teachers begin to insist on Christian ethics; and the increasing disposition, even in heterodox persons, to dwell on the Incarnation as the central point of faith, sho credible and welcome becomes the notion of the union of human with divine, and of the moral manifestation of God in the life and soul of one, for the merely linear advancement of the European ated doards, and wasting centuries on phenoht co-exist Henceforth it may open out in all dimensions at once, and fill, as its own for ever, the whole space of true thought into which its past increments have borne it Sects, no doubt, and schools, will continue to arise on the outskirts of the intellectual realm, possessed by partial inspirations; but the world's centre of gravity will be more and more occupied by inal excesses, that can round off the sphere by inner force of reason, and, dispensing with the outer mould of sacerdotal co, without alarm for the eternal harmony This is the form in which nature will restore, and God approve, a Catholic consent

The idea we have endeavored to give of the genesis of Christian doctrine, and the law of its vicissitudes, is offered only as conveniently distributing the subjective sources of faith It cannot be applied to the phenomena of particular countries apart froe of the concurrent social and political conditions, without which the ht_ can only mislead as the interpreter of concrete _events_ When, for instance, we look around us at holish representatives of the several tendencies explained above, we may, no doubt, find the the facts of our tilicans--seeins to clear ae reland _Schism went before Reformation_ The aim of Henry VIII was simply to detach and nationalize the Church in his dority instead of provincial dependence; and could this have been done withoutwith the system of Catholic doctrine at all, the scheme of faith would have been preserved entire While Luther and the Continental opponents of Rome were faithful to the idea of the unity of Christendoeneral council to restore it by a verdict on doubtful points of faith, the English monarch, undisturbed by doubt or scruple, broke off from Ro the ecclesiastic jurisdiction into his own hands and stopping its passage of the seas

In the new land tended to becoht a universal church reformed

Neither aim admitted of realization To repudiate the supreme pontiff, and substitute a civil head, involved a fatal breach in the sacerdotal systerity of Catholic dogma; so that reformation was found inseparable froed as universal, was called to give authoritative settleerew i