Part 13 (1/2)

The evidence on this point is so positive and overwhel, that critics such as Olshausen, whose testi it Nothing, indeed, can be opposed to it but a kind of interpretation which is the opprobriuather an author's thought frohts to find the one that will sit the least uneasily under his words Thus ”the end of all things” is explained away into the founding of the Christian Church; the ”co of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven,” into the Jear under titus; the last judg to his works,” into the escape of the Christians and the slaughter of the Jewish zealots at the destruction of Jerusaleood and well-instructed ht of hand they could save Apostolic and other infallibility We can only say, that when piety supplies theveracity of apprehension, two rich and noble endow a nobler, which is the life of them both

To the moral _sentiments_ which should occupy the soul, itthe world is to last But to the course of _action_ which should engage the hand, it is a matter of primary moment All human occupations rest on the assus; nor is it less true of a planet than of a farm, that mere tenants at will, unsecured by lease and even served already with notice to quit, will undertake no improvements, and will suffer the culture to decline to the lowest point What profession could remain respectable if society had no future? What interest would attach to the administration of law, on behalf of property which was not worth six months' purchase, and life which, stripped of survivorshi+p, had lost all sacredness to the affections? Who would sit down to study the Phar shi+p? What zeal could be felt by the states from his country an injury that could never be repeated, or rerievance on the point of supernatural death? The fields would scarce be tilled which the angels with flaht coht of him ”who treadeth the wine-press alone” All the crafts of industry, all the adventures of coiven element of _time_; and, when deprived of this, fall away into inanity No one would build a house on ice ht shi+ps over an ocean which earthquakes were to drain away; or fabricate silks and patent-leather for appearance at the last tribunal And the loosened hold of these pursuits upon huher and more spiritual, involves the direct reverse They cannot be abandoned; the stern punctuality of hunger, the peremptoriness of instinctive or habitual want, compel their continuance; and Paul hie But they are kept up only because there is no help for it; they sink into es frorim cannibal level All work in this world, no doubt, rests at bottom on the elementary animal requirements of our nature; but it is then most worthily performed, not when these requirements are most obtrusive, but when they are most withdrawn It is the specific anization confers upon man, that it enables him to retreat from the constant presence of sheer necessity, and stand at a sufficient distance fros to connect the to consult for the natural wants of primitive appetite, than for the artificial love of order, neatness, security, and beauty; and a craftsift for his wife or child, than when toiling for the bitter loaf that staves off starvation An art prosecuted without pride in its ingenuity, without intellectual enlistraded fro for food,--froainst death To take away the future, therefore, from secular pursuits, is simply to draw off froreedy isolation, as reat hunity Areatly checked by the fresh aiion created; and in devotion to which the more enthusiastic spirits found a like an intrenched camp in a hostile land, had to , and for captives to the faith An aggressive activity of coaged from secular pursuits; and the new relations into which their religious profession threw thean worshi+pper, supplied them with continual problems of conscience, severe, but wholesome to the mind So peculiar, indeed, was their position, that, even if they had reckoned on a continuance of huled much with a world that drew them with such slender sympathies Separated in ideas and affections, they must in any case have created a new and detached centre of social life Still it is undeniable that their isolation was favored and exaggerated by their faith in an approaching end of all things; and that they withdrew from human interests, not simply because honorable contact with theht entire indifference to thenition given to the pursuit of art and letters, and the citizen's duty presented only on the passive side; but even the relations of doed, and the slave is dissuaded froround that it is not worth while, on the brink of a great catastrophe, to assume any new position, or commit the heart by new ties The time is too short, the crisis too near, for the career of a free life, or the building of a human home It is better for every one to continue as he is; and instead of waiting to have the world perish froard himself as already dead to the world To stand impassive and alone, neutral to joy or sorroith soul intent on the future, and disengaged froht on its watch-tower the beacon of faith, but resolute to descend no more into the plain below, appeared to the Apostle Paul the highest wisdom And how could it be otherwise? Seen froation The constitutions, the arts, the culture, of civilized nations were about to be superseded; and the Christians who had already retired from them needed no new ones to take their place, except such provisional arrange the world's brief respite Equally natural and suitable to their conceived position were the non-resistance principles of the early disciples

What right could be worth contending for on the dawn of a great day of redress, when every wrong would be brought to its account? Who would carry a cause before Dikast or Proconsul to-day, when Eternal Justice was pledged to hear it to-n to human coercion what a retributive Oreat assizes of the universe are about to be opened, it were a poor thing for the suitors to begin fighting in the vestibule In all these respects the practical code of the Apostolic age was inevitably influenced by the mistaken world-view prevalent in the Church For the plaintiff, the hour was fixed when his suit would be called; for the slave, the emancipation-day was declared; and from him that bound himself in heart to the past, the past was about to be snatched away

The rules of action dictated by these notions are e,--correct deductions from a misconceived system of external relations They are wholly dependent on this misconception, and have no necessary connection with the interior spirit, the characteristic sentiion If the Apostles had lived on till their mistake had worn itself out, and they had discovered the per of Scripture till this lesson of experience had been learned,--we apprehend that their scheenial recognition would have been given to natural huovernment, the private concerns of education and self-culture, the personal responsibilities of genius and intellect, would have been less slightingly dismissed, and reduced to clear reatly modified which now support the delusions of the i Unhappily, Apostles do not live for ever, so that we are denied that chance; and _successors_ of Apostles, though seldo chiefly marks of an absent inspiration The task, therefore, of applying the essential Christian sentih avowedly undertaken by the Roman Catholic Church,--remains unperformed; and instead of it we have, in the common Protestantism, a violent misapplication to human nature and all ti, we fear, in a caricature injurious alike to that first age itself, and to all true apprehension of the nature and proportions of human duty

Expressions abound in the literature ofan antithesis between teion, between the world and God No one can fail to observe that this antithesis, whether founded in reality or not, has becoment extant for the estimate of character and life; one set up in the pulpit, the other recognized in the foruives the order in which we pretend, and perhaps ineffectually try, to ads; the latter, that in which we do admire them Under the influence of the one, the entleman is professedly in love with the innocent i into the other, he sells all his cotton in expectation of a fall, or drains his farms for a rise of rent On the Sunday, he applauds it as a saintly thing to present the patient cheek to the smiter; on the Monday, he listens with rapture to Kossuth's curse upon the house of Hapsburg, and the Magyar vow of resistance to the death He assents when the Apostle John is held up to his veneration as the beloved disciple, but, if the truth were known, the Duke of Wellington is ratherit all true that is said about the vanity of earthly pleasures and ostentations, he nevertheless lets his daughters send out next day invitations to a grand ball, and makes his house busy with dress-makers and cooks He is accusto, and that all his thoughts and works are only evil continually; yet he is pleased with hiardener as killed on the railway last week In these and a thousand other for and unreconciled standards, the relations bethich are altogether confused and uneasy Whoever is interested in following up the genealogy of ideas, and would search for the origin of this mixed and mischievous state of mind, must look first to the influence of Luther, and thence to the Pauline doctrine, which he ierated We will endeavor to trace the development of the sentierm to the modern fruit

Paul the Apostle proclaieneration and acceptance To appreciate this s;--namely, (1) what it was from which men were to be rescued on these terms; (2) what other conditions had been elsewhere insisted on instead of this, and were put aside by Paul in favor of this Now enough has been said to show that what he feared for the world which he labored to convert was, primarily, exclusion from the theocratic empire which Messiah would return to erect; nor is it clear what ulterior consequences, if any, he conceived this exclusion to carry with it This banishative of that ”salvation” to which the disciples were called; and which consisted in their registration as qualified citizens of the kingdom for which the earth was about to be claiether Jewish; not at all the ions to which individuals, one by one, pass after death forup of history, affectingthe purpose for which God had created this world While, however, the thought of the Apostle's mind was national, the coh, he felt that the future could not be closed upon the great Gentile world; that his own people were not so sublime a race as to have the issues of Providence all to therees, and let the Divine plan, which for a while had narrowed its original universality within the current of Hebrew history, flow out at its end into the full breadth of its first scope But if so, a new qualification must be found; one open alike to Hebrew and to alien, yet nursing the pride of neither

These requisites are fulfilled in simple Faith, which, as a catholic possibility of every huhts and untenable merits It was the only condition which there was time to realize To insist instead on a mere moral fitness, on a character of mind suitable to meet the eye of infinite purity, would be a mockery in a state of society at once decrepit and corrupt The hour pressed: it was not the case of a young and fresh generation, that , to the sanctities of nature and conscience; but an old and callous world, that could do little for itself, had to be got ready in hot haste A kindled enthusias reverences, is the only hope Once fix the gaze of faith, the si been clad in the sorrows of this earth, waits to bring in its everlasting peace; and this affection alone, co in it every lesser purity, will soften even arid natures, and enrich therace

Preach yourheroes, whose soul is noble and whose limbs are free; but at the baths of Baiae, a the foot, and cripples orn-out bodies and halting wills, if you cannot touch the spring of faith, you may spare your pedantic rules of exercise Thus the Apostle's deenerous stimulant of hope and recovery to an invalided world, whose natural forces were broken, and which had but little ti areverence upon the sickly souls and languid levels of this world It was an atteency, and, by an intense action, condense the powers of preparation It was therefore an expression, not of the narrowness, but of the universality of the Gospel It shows the great heart of the religion bursting bounds, and the strong hand of its noblest servant tugging at the gates to get the the scrupulous gravel of obstruction

The doctrine, however, assunificance when snatched by Luther out of its historical connection, and held valid as a sufficient theory of huion The palsy of will, the incapacity of self-cure, the hopeless ht the world, as it lay beneath the eye of Paul, Luther assuenital incompetency of faculty, instead of a contracted depravity of state Not that he disowns the human will as an executive power, or denies it a sphere of operation

It can go forth variously into action,--can do what, in the view of mankind, is better or worse,--can coms, however differently they affect ood or evil; in the supreme view they are neutral auto or a fall of rain; their real character all lies in the inner spiritual springs from which they issue in the soul: on these alone is the infinite gaze fixed; and these are turbid all through, and all alike, with the taint and poison of a ruined nature As all natural actions derive an equal guilt from the impurity of their source, so, when the source is purified, is the guilt equally re which the unconvertedthat is performed in faith can come amiss to him Be it what men call crime or what they praise as virtue, it makes no difference if only it be done in faith Furnished with this supernatural charh any mire and come out clean

”A Christian cannot, if he will, lose his salvation by any nitude of sins, unless he ceases to believe For no sins can da else, provided his faith returns or stands fast in the Divine proiven in baptism, is absorbed in a moment by that faith”[55]

Here is a conception of faith altogether distinct from Paul's It is here no act of reverential enthusiasm and affection, no kindred movement of the soul towards an object beautiful and holy, but a ness to trust a verbal assurance of atonen to the ift Nor is its efficacy to be sought in its transfor power on man, but in its persuasiveness with God It does not ennoble anything that is the worshi+pper's own, but si sanctity of another; it is, indeed, described by Luther as the ed with the treasures of Christ's obedience,--treasures so acceptable that they char that accompanies them Thus the effect of faith on the disciple is not to inspire hi any dae theory, both sin and sanctity area transn donation; and his individual character sits in the eable with the dark hue native to its coht which it wears as a robe No room is found, either in the child of Adam, or in the redeeoodness whatsoever The misery and deformity in which the Gospel finds him is un-moral,--the mere scrofula of inheritance; the redemption into which it lifts him is un-moral,--the mere usufruct of an alien purity: and thus the whole business of religion begins and ends without approaching, and without i, any law of conscience at all; morality remains absolutely cut off fro disowned and degraded, and losing the prestige of a Divine authority This consequence of his doctrine is not in the least disguised by Luther, whose i phrases of opposite stamp, by which he may put the brand of insult upon Morals, and burn characters of glory into the brow of Religion The latter, he again and again insists, is to be set in the heavenly realround; the two being kept as absolutely apart as the sky froarded as not less incapable of a coht

Do we speak of faith and our relations to God? then we have nothing to do withon the earth Do we speak of conduct and our relations with et no nearer to heaven and its lights The protests of our better nature against our own shortcouilt, so far froion, are shown to be mere delusion and idle self-torture; and the conscience that can feel such co in the dust and flats of this world beneath a servile burden it need never bear To trouble the heart with any moral anxieties or aspirations is the e from heaven over the precipice of hell The ht to any allegiance from the soul[56] In any personal and historical estimate of Luther there would be much to say in palliation of these monstrous positions; it would be easy to show their connection with soenius, and their antagonisarded in their influence on Christendoround of a theory for the governance of life, they can only be laance For in what light do they present Morality to us, after stripping it of all sacredness? What ground is left on which its obligation iven for its aim? It exists, as Luther himself declares, only as a _provision for social order and external peace_ It is not concerned with the perfection of the individual, but with the organization of the world; and is nothing but the system of rules and customs requisite for the safe coexistence of many persons on the same field It is thus reduced from an inspiration of conscience to an affair of police; the private senti vigils over the temper of the mind and habits of the home, is a mere substitute for public opinion, and no representative of the eye of God In this way, es are first voted into existence as eneral voice, yielding as their product in the individual an artificial sense of obligation; and it is a delusion to invert this order, and say that the natural sense of obligation, inherent in each individual, creates by syes of mankind This extreme secularization of morals places Luther in curious company with Hobbes; and the followers of both have not been altogether unfaithful to the original affinity of their ethical ideas Both schools have withheld froion; both have been jealous of its ; both have applied to it purely objective criteria, and regarded it as a statutory affair, susceptible of codification, and then needing only a logical interpreter This singular alliance between sects regarding each other with the greatest antipathy, exhibits the irresistible tendency of a wholly _super_-natural religion to produce an _infra_-natural morality

The result of this sharp separation of the ethical from the spiritual province of life is, that both are deprived of elements indispensable to their proper culture Our devout people are not res on moral questions; while the conscientious class are apt to be dry and cold precisians, truthful, trustworthy, and huenial, so devoid of ideality and depth, that poet or prophet is struck dumb before their face Till the two classes had discovered their mutual alienation and collected theelical and worldly,--the evil was inconspicuous For some time after the Reformation, both coexisted, without articulate repulsion, in every church, and each silently qualified the other extrerateful trust in such a one as Christ, could not be awakened in a people into whoht say of the thethem ”stupid ass,” but would nevertheless object to have the ass abused In truth, no sooner was the law of Duty driven from Christianity, than the claim of Honor was invoked to take its place; and the believer was exhorted not to take unworthy advantage of his rede the service exacted by penalty no ive Such appeal touches a spring powerful in noble hearts, and is, in fact, only the awakening of _a higher order_ of uise of transfiguration, of that very sense of duty which had been professedly expelled In the first enthusias off the sacerdotal incubus of centuries, were burning to breathe freely, and felt the healthy throb of a new joy, this appeal would meet a full response The doctrine of faith was but the appointed way of bursting through the miserable scrupulosities, the life of petty debts and casuistic book-keeping, by which a priesthood hada Divine inde the wholesome existence of devout instinct

If the inspiration of the sixteenth century could be permanentlysnatched up by a ind of heavenward affection, if the surprise at finding that the soul had wings of its own could last for ever, the principle of gratitude and pious honor ht answer every end, and hu no security for it; for you ht which otherwise you will scarce drag upon the ground But the fire of an age of Reforratitude an affection on whose tension life can be securely built;--you cannot educate people by the force of perpetual surprise There is a large natural order offervor, for who the chariot of fire and horses of fire by which prophets fly to heaven, and who are content with the hu spirits in their ascent Quiet, reflective, self-balanced persons are not to be taken by storht to betray the solid citadel of this world, and say ugly things of the hborhood They are capable of being led by reverence for what is _better_, but not of being kindled by the rays of what is _intenser_ If they are ever to be lifted into a life _beyond_ conscience, where reluctance and resistance are felt no more, and the instincts of affectionat the other end,--by the _religious discipline of conscience_, by pious consecration of this earth and its instant work, by faithful and frugal care of the smaller elements of duty, as of the sacred crumbs of eucharistic bread, not without a Real Presence in theion, by a decree of their nature, can only exist under ethical conditions, are wholly unprovided for in the Protestant syste to the school of worldly unbelief; and though their nu for a century and a half, and constitutes the vast majority of educated people in this country, they are without any recognized religion; either veraciously disbelieving and waiting for so, suspected by clergymen, in the midst of churches whose theory of life has ceased to be a reality to them With a faith traditionally shy of morals, and morals not yet elevated into faith, we have two separate codes of life standing in presence of each other,--one religious, the other secular,--and neither of them with any true foundation in hueries of ious, the product of an arbitrary spiritualism, lax and ascetic by turns

It is the peculiarity of modern Christianity that these two codes coexist within the same social body, and even rule over different parts of each individual The Pauline antithesis between the world and the Church was not less sharp than ours; but it was a distinction of persons and classes, and nobody could occupy both the opposite ends of it Once within a society of disciples, he was out of the world, and belonged to ”the assembly of the saints”; and the whole realm of heathendom beyond constituted the contrasted terround and the other on the common earth; whatever were the principles of the coh, and did no violence to the unity of his nature Praying or dining, weeping or laughing, in the workshop or the prison, he was the saed, we should therefore expect the world to be driven to a distance, till it was absent from whole countries and continents But a neorld” has been discovered, not only within the Church, but within the person of every disciple; his body and li under the law of a morality quite secular; his soul and its eternal affairs sitting apart in a love quite spiritual Who shall draw the line between the provinces, and know practically, hour by hour, where he stands?

Living confusedly in both, a man is apt to acquire a sort of double consciousness, and fluctuate distractedly between Caesar and God He believes, perhaps, that the kingdorace are destined always to re the other till the day of doom In that case, he will let other es, thealoof fro in with them freely in his own case Theyto the Devil's world, and are as good rules as can be expected froue of Satan Why should he decline to profit by them, now that they are there? When Eve has plucked the apple, it is too late for Adam not to taste the fruit

The pious broker con world, on which he is pushed by hu necessities, and in which he feels an interest derived from them alone: he has his citizenshi+p elsewhere; he disdains naturalization; he is but a te them as they are, cuts his crop and retires The coolness hich people who live above the world soe is truly aious profession, subscriber to Gospel schools, believer in prevenient grace, and otherwise the pride of the Evangelical heart, found himself not insensible to the approaches of the Hudson mania, speculated far beyond the resources of his fortune, declined to take up his bad bargains, and thus, at the expense of utter ruin to his agent, escaped with co but an honorable sinner of the worldly class, was struck down by the blow into great depression His employer was enabled to take ahis poor victihts, so different froned and coot,” he added with a sigh, ”you are not blessed with ious consolations!” Where no such positively odious results as these are produced, there is still often observable the negative selfishness of indifference to political welfare and political morals,--an affected withdrawal frohborhood or the State, and an insensibility to public injustice strangely disproportioned to the zeal displayed against innocent amusements and the nervousness on behalf of invisible subtilties of creed

The false opposition, however, between the world and the Church is not always thus passive and quiescent It is not always recognized by those who hold it, as being a perhed over and let alone Many men are too earnest and truthful to settle down and pitch their tent upon a ground rocking with contradiction; to live two lives wholly unreconciled, one in the sharace; or to belong to two societies,--one political, the other spiritual,--conducted on principles at incurable variance with each other That a rule of action should be secularly good and religiously hateful,--that a sentiroaned over in the conventicle,--is to them an intolerable unreality, like the celebrated verdict of the University of Paris, that a doctrine y In their hands, accordingly, the antithesis between the hu dualisressive, and assume a commission to drive back and humble the world They claim the earth for God, and think the surrender inco natural rehter unstifled, any genius, however pure, a law unto itself The crusade against temporal interests and pursuits, consequent upon this state of e In the early years of the Reformation, when the whole Bible was spread open beneath the thirsting eye of an undistinguishi+ng enthusiasm, the effect threatened at one tilorious The full thunder-cloud of the Hebrew prophets, stealing over a world in negative stagnation, waked the sleeping lightnings of the soul, and for a while streaked the at that had been written of the chosen people, their exodus, their law, their poetry, their passions,--everything except the relentings of their nature and the unsteadiness of their faith,--beca of their early history, the harp of their sweet singer, the choral pomp of their priestly rule, the mystic voices of their lonely men of God,--all were Divinethan the Seruish in Gethsemane Such was the sequence and connection of the Divine dispensations supposed to be, that Christianity was simply the Jewish theocracy, only let loose out of Palestine to make a promised land of the whole world The downtrodden serfs of Franconia had not long heard the glad tidings froan to draw parallels between themselves and the old Israel when the desert had been passed They had been brought to the brink of new hope, and looked, as across Jordan, to an inheritance verdant and te to their eye The earth was the Lord's, and the army of the saints was come to take it; the bannered princes, the unGodly priests, the ”men with spurs upon their heels,” all the carnal who peopled this Canaan and perched their ”eagle's nests” on every height, must be smitten and cleared off The time of jubilee was coe; nay, the birds in the forest, the fish in the strearound, whatever has the sacred seal of God's creative power, should be free to all, and the noble should eat the peasant's bread or die The lawyers should take their heathenish courts away, andto the spirit and the word The harvest was ripe, when the tares arnered for the Lord

These were the ideas which thousands of armed men, with a clouted shoe and a cart-wheel for their standards, and a leader who signed hih the forests of Thuringia and beneath the citadel of Wurzburg Nor was the ripest learning, enerous spirit of the tiainst the adoption of their doctrine It was not Munzer alone who breathed the fierce inspiration, exhorting his swarthybravely with their strokes”; but the honest Carlstadt, too, scholar, preacher, dialectician as he is, lays aside his broadcloth, and appears in white felt hat and rustic coat at the cross of Rothenburg, to preach encouragehout the great movement which in the third decade of the sixteenth century spread insurrection froau to Saxony, the peasants were animated with the belief that the Gospel, arate the world, and that all the conditions of property, of law, of civil administration, under which secular communities exist, were to be superseded by institutions confor Reforious socialish to denounce and crush it But in truth their own idea differed fro the power in different hands, and prescribing to it a differentto it a sidodom of the Lord and of his Christ; and the temporal poas everywhere to assuression on whatever opposed itself to the severity and sanctity of the Divine Word The converts of Knox, the troopers of Cro on this doctrine, claimed the whole of human life as their domain, and pushed the inquisitions of police into private habits, and even the secret inclinations of personal belief