l|l|l|l,>,l,l,l,l.l,l,l,I,l,I.I.T,l.l.l.l.l.l.l.l,l,l.l.l,Tp7TrTTTrriTn7TiTTT

T^TIJRAX^Y

^TwTl^i^

Class -No.. . . .iT^
Cost.fy.r.ry".. . .

'i «iii'itTr,i,i,i,i,i.i,i,i,i,i,ifrrii,i,i,i|i,i|i,i,i,i,i,i,i,t,i,i,i,il

Please

handle this volume

with care.

The University of Connecticut
Libraries, Storrs

»^-^-»

BOOK 239.B964 c 1
BUSHNELL # NATURE AND
SUPERNATURAI. AS TOGET

HER CONSTITU

3 T1S3 OOObbbbM b

,6J'-'

DR. BUSHNELL'S WORKS.

NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 12mo. $1.50.

CHRISTIAN NURTURE. 12mo, $1.50.

SERMONS FOR THE NEW LIFE. 12mo, $1.50.

CHRIST AND HIS SALVATION. 12mo, $1.50.

SERMONS ON LIVING SUBJECTS. 12mo, $1.50.

THE VICARIOUS SACRIFICE. Two vols., 12mo, $3.00.

GOD IN CHRIST. 12mo, $1 50.

WORK AND PLAY. 12mo, $1.50.

MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS. 12mo. $1.50.

BUILDING ERAS IN RELIGION. $1.50,

WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE: The Reform Against Nature. 12mO;
$1.50.

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS. Cloth, r^et, 60 .-«nts ;
paper, net, 40 cer»ts.

NATURE

THE SUPERNATURAL,

TOGETHER CONSTITUTING

THE ONE SYSTEM OF aOD>

BY

HORACE BUSHNELL

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1895

e^jM

€k)PTBiaHT, 1858, 1877, 1886, BT
MABY A. BUSHNELL

TROW 9

WINTING ANt BOOKBINDING COMPAUT,

NEW YORK.

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE.

Tliero ha8 hitherto been no iinifonn edition of l)i
UiieliuelPs works. Appearing at wide distances of time,
Ihcy have taken sucli shape as suited the occasion ; and
It has for some time seemed very desirable that they
Bhould be brought together in a more permanent and
lerviceabie form. It was Dr. BushnelTs own wish that
this should be done ; and he has largely revised his books
in preparation for this end. It is only to be regretted
that it was not reached during his lifetime and under
his supervision ; but his failing health compelled him to
relinquish the task, which his death has left to other
hands to complete.

In the present volume we offer to his readers the first
of the ])roposed uniform edition, in which most of his
works will be included. . The other volumes will follow
this as rapidly as possible, not in the original order of
theii- publication, but rather in that of their relative
importance to the public ; and it is hoped that the edition,
wlien finished, may prove so compact and attracti\e ir
form, as to fulfill the design so long entertained, aiuj
latlflfy the ex\>ectfttion that has awaited it.

4

.■■■*

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITIO!^

As the naturalistic theories and destructive criticisms of ihi
fiospels are becoming more popularized and obtaining a wider
circulation, a cheaper edition of this treatise appears to be called
for. In this form, accordingly, it is now submitted to tlie pub-
lic ; in the hope that it may reach another class of readers, and
extend the range of whatever good effects it may be expected to
produce.

A good many critical notices and reviews — the greater part
of them sufliciently favorable — have been bestowed upon thia trea-
tise; and in those which have been less favorable, I have met with
nothing that has at all shaken my confidence in the argument.
On the contrary, it seems rather to have come out experimentally

^ proved. The objections it has thus far encountered have all come
from the believing side, and not from the side of the adversaries-
representing, simply, points of dissatisfaction, that arise from mj
not managing the subject matter of the question according to the
prepossessions or favorite modes of the objectors. I am not aware
that any single notice of my argument has ever been put forth on
the side of naturalism — whether because it has been too little or

itoo much respected, or because it is the manner of the writers on
this side to take by assumption just what I am here concerned to
disprove, T will not undertake to say ; probably, however, the last

IV PREFi.CE.

aijutioned is tie true reason. They have come, in fact, to looi
upon this prior question, the question of the possibility, or possible
credibility, of what is supernatural, as being virtually given up to
Uieni — they have it even iis by concession ; for though they
know the supernatural verity of the Gospels to be still abundantl_i
itdSnned, they have learned to look for no argument that is noi
ander a previous doom of failure, and so to assume, in quiet us-
rorance, the final closing up of the question.

I think there was never any school of writers before, who
could take so much by assumption, with so little misgiving; part-
ly because we have trained them to it, by a certain habit of im-
potency which they have learned to appreciate, and partly be-
cause an immensely overgrown personal conceit is required, to set
any man to the taking down of the Lord Jesus by criticism. Other
forms of disbelief, or denial, have drawn their argument from
generally accepted premises; but the critical deniers take new
premises by assertion, or by a supposed sharpness of insight not
given to other men. This is true, in a remarkable degree, of
Hennel, and Parker, and Strauss, but more especially still of M.
Renan, in his late brilliant work on the Life of Jesus. The mir-
acles of Christ are dismissed by him, with scarcely a show of dis-
cussion, over and above the simple regret expressed, that some
committee could not have been raised, to report upon them, and
pe» haps to have them repeated 1 Beginning in this very superla-
tive key of confidence, he tosses the four Evangelists away to the
right and the left, by the dashing cavalry assault of his judgments,
and, rescuing Jesus from them, takes Him into the particular pat
ronage of his own finer and more q lalified appreciation I I recol
lect no example of opinionative wisdom more amazing, or mora

PKEKACE. Y

oearlj sublime. It is the authority of M. Renan against th«
authorit} of Olirist, and tlie critic carries the day !

Probably nothing can ever stop this kind of extravagance, Int
to let it have its way, and go on \o the point of exhaust:' oa. The
andacity of it has a certain spice of interest, but the din it nnikea,
by long hammering on our reverence, will grow wearisome enougb
probably, even before it has lost breath and can no farther go.
Meantime it is none the less to be regretted that we give so good
occasion for this kind of assumption, by setting ourselves in just
the position that is weakest for assault, and most incapable of de*
fence — a complete surrender, in fact, only not running up the flag.

Thus we let everything turn, how often, upon the credit of
the poor Evangelists, without allowing the Master himself to fur
nisli any chief part of the story, by the really astonishing self-evi-
dence of His character.

We make up an issue for inspiration so stringently close and
verbal, that we take the short end of the lever ourselves, and give
the long end to our adversaries ; consenting that if we fail on syl-
lables, they shall have their own way about chapters and books.

"We assert the supernatural in a way too fantastic and ghostlj
to admit a possible defence, and then, if an assault breaks through,
where there is, in fact, no line to break, we expect by some re-
ductio ad absurdum, or fetch of negation keenly put, to maintain
what uavar can or even ought to be maintained by any but the
broadest and most p )sitive methods of doctrine.

We define mirac'es to be suspensions of the laws of nature, and
aoAke it impossible, gratis, from that time fcirth, to offer an argu-
mei t for them, which any bravely rational person, or mind wel"
gro mded in science, can ever be expected to admit

n PKEFACE.

And then we come in finally, in due course, to surrender, ii
fact, th(3 credibility of anything supernatural or miraculous, by re-
nouncing the credibility of any such thing occurring now. Th<
d'edibility of all such wonders we think is according to the ratio
of their distance ; which is the same as to admit that they are, ii'
fcot, credible nowhere.

I do not complain, at this point, of the disrespect tnis volume
has encountered with some, on the score of its fourteenth chapter
— ''''Miracles afid Spiritual Gifts not Discontinuedy I understood
as well beforehand as now, at what cost it was to be inserted, and
I thank God that I was able to stand by the Mala Question at the
point w here it really turns — my fidelity in which has been dul>
appreciated by several of the most competent critics. We caB
never put a stop to the bold assumption which takes for granted
the incredibility of supernatural inspirations and miracles, till we
dare to bring down the question of fact, and have it for at least an
open question now. Our timidity here loses everything. If tho
followers of Christ had courage to assert that, as Elias was a man
of like passions with ns, so we are men of like passions with him,
and that God is the same God that He was, giving us the same foot-
ing with himself; if we could stand up squarely to the doctrine that
God answers prayer in just the same way that he did of old ; if we
could even rejoice in the confidence that Stephen Grellet, and
John TVoolman, and Gilbe 't Tennent, and a long roll of the Scot?
Worthies, Lad their revelations outside of the canon, just as truly
a.M Paul and John inside, and that possibly there have been as
good e<5stasies in our day, as they had in theirs, putting the disc)
pie in as proper doubt whether he wf.a in the body or out cf tl.f
body; if ve could say with Luther, " How often has it happened.

PREFACE. 7\]

tnd »till does, that devils have been driven out iii the nauie of
Christ, also, by the calling of his name and prayer, that the sick
have been healed ! " — holding generally such a ground as this, vrc
should no more be offended, as now, every few days, by another
And still another denier of the Gospels, beginning at an assumption
which really takes everything for granted that is at issue between
as.

"What I advanced on this subject, in the chapter referred to,
was not designed as an avowal of my fixed belief in any of the
particular facts there recited, but simply to show how we are
living always or the confines, so to speak, between the natttral
and the supernatural, and that whoever will have his eyes open
will see matters enough occurring, which it may not be the noblest
candor, or even the truest intelligence, to set down as cases only
of illusion. I am not ignorant that in opening this gate of heaven
80 long shut, we should make room for illusions and delusions
without number. And so, in fact, does Christianity itself. What
kind of religion would it be that, to keep out the fact of delusion,
should forbid even the possibility of delusion ? A full half the
value of our Christian experience lies in the fact, that we can be
enthusiasts, visionaries, fanatics, false prophets, or wild mystics,
and notwithstanding learn how not to be. On the other hand,
may God save us from a gospel that will keep us back from such
kind of fiightiness by giving us nc air to breathe, lest we som«
lime fly away in it! IIow many miserable and really foolish
'lelusions are the result of our private judgment, or intellectua.
libdrty ! Why not stifle also this? No; the very thing we mosi
wa.'it, in these times, is that kind of reverence and open docilili
tliit looks for great and divine things, glorious incomings of (iod

nU PJiKFA-CE.

gifts, and wonders, and powers from on high — occur nng no^
Nothing but the liberty of believing much will save us from be
lieving nothing. And if, to save us from the mischance of believ-
ing too much, we 'wq forbidden to believe anything, or any but
Pome old thing, let us not wonder if there come about u? swarnni
of unbelievers tliat reject the old things too.

IToy, 1864.

PREFACE

Thb treatise here presented to the public wan written, as regardi
llie matter of it, some years ago. It has been ready fcf the presi
more than two years, and has been kept back, by the limitations 1
am under, which have forbidden my assuming the small additions,
care of its publication. It need hardly be said that the subject
has been carefully studied, as any subject rightfully should be,
that raises, for discussion, the great question of the age.

Scientifically measured, the argument of the treatise is rather
an hypothesis for the matters in question, than a positive theory of
them. And yet like every hypothesis, that gathei-s in, accommo-
dates, and assimilates, all the facts of the subject, it gives, in that
one test, the most satisfactory and convincing evidence of its prac-
tical truth. Any view which takes in easily, all the facts of a sub-
ject, must be substantially true. Even the highest and most diffi-
cult questions of science are determined in this manner. While it
is easy therefore to raise an attack, at this or that particular point,
call it an assumption, or a mere caprice of invention, or a paradfT,
01 a dialectically demonstrable error, there will yet remain, after
aH such particular denials, the fact that here is a wide hyj)othe6i8
of the world, and the great problem of life, and sin, and super-
aatural redemption, and Christ, and a christly Providence, and a

vinely certified history, and of superhuman gifte entered into thf

IV PREFACE.

»v)rld, and finally of God as related to all, which liquidates thas(
stupendous facts, in issu« between Christians and unbelievers, and
^ives a rational account of them. And so the points that werf
iifis:iulted, and perhaps seemed to be carried, by the skirmishes of
detiiil, will be seen, by one who grasps the whole in which they
are comprehended, to be still not carried, but to have their reason
sertified by the more general solution of which they are a part.
One who flies at mere points of detail, regardless of the whole to
which they belong, can do nothing with a subject like this. The
pomts themselves are intelligible only in a way of comprehension,
or as being seen in the whole to which they are subordinate.

It will be observed that the words of scripture are often cited,
and its doctrines referred to, in the argument. But this is never
done as producing a divine authority on the subject in question.
It is very obvious that an argument, which undertakes to settle the
truth oi scripture history, should not draw on that history for its
proofs. The citations in question are sometimes designed to correct
mistakes, which are held by believers themselves, and are a great
impediment to the easy solution of scripture diflBculties; some-
times they are offered as furnishing conceptions of subjects, that
are difficult to be raised in any other manner ; sometimes they are
presented because they are clear enough, in their superiority, Ic
stand by their own self-evidence and contribute their aid, m that
manner, to the general progress of the argument.

I regret the accidental loss of a few references that could nol
bo recovered, without too much labor. B B.

CONTENTS,

CHAPTER .

INTRODUCTORY — QUESTION STATEL.

15 lirS'JTD naturally predisposed to believe in supernatural facts. 13 Neolo-
giats spring up, whom the Greeks called SophL^ts, 14. The RomMU
had their Sophists also, 15. And now the turn of Christianity is come^
V6. The naturalism of oui day reduces Christianity to a myth, in the
same way, 17. This issue is precipitated by modem science, 19. "With
tokens, on all sides, adverse to Christianity, 21. First, we have the athe-
istic school of Mr. Hume, 22. Next, Pantheism, 23. Next, the Phys-
icalists, represented by Phrenology, 23. The naturalistic characters of
Unitarianism, 24. The Associationists, 24. The Magnetic necromancy,
25. The classes mostly occupied with the material laws and forces, 25.
Modem politics, 26. The popular hterature, 28. Evangelical teacherg
fall into naturalism, without being aware of it, 28. But we imdertake
no issue with science, 29. Our object is to find a legitimate place for the
gupematural, as included in the system of God, 31. And this, with an
ultimate reference to the authentication of the gospel history, 32

CHAPTER II,

DEFINITIONS — NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL.

Nature defined, 36. The supernatural defined, 37. Do not design to
limit, or deny the propriety of other uses, 38. Definition makes us su-
pernatural beings ourselves, 42. Our supernatural action illustrated, 43,
"We operate supernaturally, by making new conjunctions of causes, 45.
Not acted on ourselves, by causes that are eflBcient through us, 46. Not
scale-beams, in our will, as governed necessarily by the strongest mo-
tive, 47. In wrong, we consciously follow the weakest motive. 49. The
other functions of the soul, exterior to the will, are a nature, 51. Atlan-
tic Monthly on executive hmitations of power, 53. And yet wo are con-
scious, none the less, of liberty, 55. Self-determination indestmctible, 56.
Hence the honor we put on heroes and martyrs, 57. If we act supemat-
urally, why not also God? 59. Not enough that God acts m the causoa
of nat'^re, 60.

CHAPTER III.

NATURE IS NOT TEE SYSTEM OF GOD— THINGS AND POWERS, HOW RELATED

Nature oppresses our mind, a;> first, bj her magnitudes, 64. Men, after all,
demand something supernatural, 66. Hence the appetite we discover
for the demonstrations of necromancy, 67. Shelly, the atheist, makes a
mythology, 67. The defect of cur new literature, that it has and yields
no ius^jiration, 63. The agreement of so many modes of naturalism,
?i^ifiea nothing, because they have no agreement among tbemselvea 70

1*

Vi CONTENTS.

Familiarized to the subordination of causes in nature, that we may ao\
be disturbed by the Siiino fact in rehgion, 72. Strauas takes not* of thia
fact wiieu denying the possibility of miracles, 74. Geology shows thai
God thus subordinates nature, on a large scale, 76. In the creation
of 80 many now races, in place of the extinct races, 77. He crea-
ted their germs, 78. But man must have been created in maturity, 79.
The development theory inverts all the laws of organic find inorganic
substance, 81. The aspect of nature indicates interruptive and clashing
forces, tliat are not in the merely mineral causes, 83. Distinction of
Things and Powers, 84. Both fully contrasted, 86. Nature not the tin i-
vorso, 86. A subordinate part or member of the great universe sys-
tem, 87. The principal interest and significance of the universe is in the
powers. 89.

CHAPTER IV.

PROBLEM OF EXISTENCE, AS RELATED TO THE FACT OF SIN.

The world of nature, a tool-house fer the practice and moral training ot
powers, 91. Their training, a traming of consent, which supposes a
j)ower of non-consent, i. e. sin, 92. Possibility of evil necessarily in-
volved, 93. No limitation of omnipotence, 94. Why, then, does God
create with such a possibility ? 9i>. May be God's plan to establish in
holiness, in despite of wrong, 96. No breach of unity involved in his
plan, 98. The real problem of existence is character, or the perfection
of Uberty, 99. Which require a trial in society, 100. And this an em-
bodiment in matter, 101. Will the powers break loose from God, as they
may? 103. God desires no such result, 104. When it comes, no sur-
prise upon His plan, or annihilation of it, 105. Illustrated by the found-
ing of a school, 105. No causes of sin, only conditions privative, 107.
What is meant by the term, 109. First condition privative — defect of
knowledge, 110. Have all categorical, but no experimental knowledge,
111. The subject guilty, as having the former, without the latter, 114.
Second condition privative — unacquainted with law, and therefore un-
qualified for Uberty, 117. A kind of prior necessity, therefore, that he
be passed through a twofold economy, 119. Discover this twofold econ-
omy in other matters, 120. A third condition privative, as regards social
exposure to the irruptions of bad powecs, 123. This fact admitted by
the necromancers, 125. Sin then can not be accounted for, 128. No
vahdity in the objection, that God has been able to educate angels with-
out sin, 129. Proof-text in Jude explamed by Faber, 130. No objeo
tion Ues, that sin is made a necessary means of good, 133. The exist-
ence of Satan explained, or conceived, 1 34. The supremacy of God not
diminished, but increased, bv an eternal purpose to reduce the bad posai-
bility, 137.

CHAPTER V.

THE FACT OF BIN

All nataralisni begins with sonio professed, or tacitly assumed, denial of tn4
fdct cf sin, 142. On this point, Mr. Parker is ambiguous, 143. Fouriei
enargOB all evil ;l^^'\inst society, 145. Dr. Strauss, all against the individ-
ual and none against society. 146. The popular, pantheistic literature
denies the fiei of sin, 148. Apne:*! to observatior for evidence. 149

CONTENTS. VI

We blame ourselves, is vrong-doers, 151. Our deraonstratioiis show uf
to be exercised by th3 c jnsciousness of sin. 154. "We act on the suppo-
sition that sin is ever to be expected, dreaded, provided against, 16Ci
ij'orgiveness supposes the fact, 159. So the pleasure we take in satire, 160.
So the feeling of sublimity in the tragic sentiment, 161. Solutions of
fered by naturalists, iisufficient and futile, 162. They call it "misdirec
tion," but it is self-misdirection, therefore sin, 163.

CHAPTER VI.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF SIN.

Sin has two forces, a spiritual and a dynamic, 165. By the latter ai a
power of disturbance among causes, it raises storms of retribution against
itself^ 166. It also makes new conjunctions of causes, tliat are destruct
ive and disorderly, 169. So that nature answers to it with groans, 170.
Thus it is with all the four great departments of life, and first, with the
soul, or with souls, 172. No law or function is discontinued, but all its
functions are become irregular and discordant, 173. Similar effects in
the body, or in bodies, 174. Hence disease, and, to some extent, certainly,
mortality itseli^ 176, Society is disordered by inheritance, througli the
principle of organic unity involved in propagation, 177. Objection con-
sidered, that God, in this way, does not give us a fair opportunity, 178.
Two modes of production possible ; by propagation, and by the direct cre-
ation of each man, 179. The mode by propagation, with all its disad-
vantages of hereditary corruption, shov/n to be greatly preferable, 179.
And yet, in this manner, society becomes organically disordered, 183.
Similar effects of mischief in the material world, 186. Not true thai
nature, as we know it, represents the beauty of God, 187. Swedenborg
holds that God creates through man, 188. And somehow it is clear that
the creation becomes a type of man, as truly as of God, 189. Battle
of the ants, 191. Deformities generally, consequences of sin, 191. Not
true that they are introduced to make contrasts for beauty, 193.

CHAPTER VII.

ANTICIPATIVE CONSEQUENCES.

V/e find disorder, prey, deformity, in the world, before man's arrival — what
account shall be made of such a fact? 194. There are two modes of
consequences, the subsequent, wbich are physical eff'ects, and the antici-
pativo, which respect the same facts before the time, 196. Propose 'iow
the question of the anticipative consequences, 198. Evil beings in <ie
world, before the arrival of man ; how far disorders in it may be due to
the eff«€t of their sin, 199, Anticipative consequences just as truly con-
sequences, as those wiiicli come after, 200. Intelligence must give to
kens beforehand of what it perceives. 201. Agassiz and Dana— p-remt^l
itations and prophetic types, 202. Such anticipative tokens nece.^sary, k
show that God understands his empire beforehand, 205. The more im
pressive, that they are fresh creations, to a great extent, as shown by Mr.
Agassiz, 207. Misshapen forms shown by Hugh Miller to iricrease, as tli«
era of man approaches — as in the serpa \t race and many kinds of fishes,
208. God will moderate the pride of science, thus, by the facta of
•r'.fMice 210. The world as truly a conatus, a-s an existing feet. 'li\

Vm CONTENTS.

The Pantheistic naturalism ffives a different account of these doft>nni
ties, 211. Wliich account neither itee:8 our want, nor oyen explains th«
facts, 212. Sin is seen to bo a very great fact, as it must be, if it is anj
thing, 214. Objection considered, that there was never, in this view
any real kosmos at all, 215, Unnature ia tl«> grand res'ilt of sin, 216
Tb© bad miracle has transformed the world, 218.

CHAPTER VIII.

NC REMEDl IN DEVELOPMENT, OR SELF-REFORMATION.

Ivo rivAl gospels, 221, The first, which is development, or the progrefii
of the race, will not restore the fall of sin, 221. No race begins at the
savogo state, and in that state there is no root of progress, 223. AD the
advanced races appear, more or less distinctly, to have had visitations of
supernatural influence, 225, If there is a law of progress, why are so
many races degraded or extirpated ? 226. The first stag# of man is a
crude state, and the advanced and savage races are equally distant from
it, 227. Geology shows that God does not mend all disasters by devel-
opment, 227, Healing is not development, 228. Generally associat.id
with supernatural power, of which it is the type, 230. No one dares, m
fact, to practically trust the development principle, whether in the state
or in the family, 232. Tlie second rival gospel proposes self-reformation
or self-culture, with as little ground of hope, 234, No will-practice, or
ethical observance, can mend the disorder of souls, 235, These can >iot
restore harmony, 236, Nor liberty, 236. The only sufficient help, or
ixjliance, is God, 237. There is really no speculative difficulty in the dis-
abilities of sin, 238, Even Plato denies the possibility of virtue, by tny
mere human force, 241. Seneca, Ovid, Zenophanes, to the same effect, 244
Plato, Strabo, Pliny, all indicate a want of some supernatural light, or rev-
elation, 245, The conversion of Clement shows the fact in practiiul t x-
hibition, 246.

CHAPTER IX.

raE SUPERNATURAL COMPATIBLE WITH NATURE AND SUBJECT TO FIXED

LAAVS.

The world is a thing, into which all the powers may rightfully act then.-
selves, 250. Children at the play of ball, a good image of this higher tTuth,
251, Not the true doctrine of a supernatural agency, that God a"*»
through nature, 254. Did not so act in producing the new races of g&-
flogy, 254. Office of nature, as being designed to mediate the eff'ects ini-
plicd in duties and wrongs, 255. Nature the constant, and th.e super-
natural, the variable agency, 257. God ref ily governs the world, and by
r supernatural method, 258. Without this he has no liberty in natuTe,
more than if it were a tom'j, 259, Manifestly wo want a God living and
S/Cting now, 260, And yet all this action of God, supposes no contraven-
tion of laws, 261. Reasons why this is inadmissible, 261. Several kin(ii5
of law, but all agree in supposing the character of uniformity, 262. Thut
we have natural law and moral law, but God's supernatural action not
determined by these, is submitted always to the law of his end, 264.
Eis end being always the same, he will be as exactly submitted to it as
""^tu re to her laws. 266. No returningf here into the same c'*cler,Pir)

CONTENTS. U

nature, but a perpetually onward motion, 266. What occurs tut cnc<
here^ is done by a fixed law, 269. Many of the laws of the Spir t w«
know 270. The idea of superiority in nature, as being uuifoiin oot-
footed. 271. Also, the impression of a superior magnitude iL natrra
27 J.

CHAITER I.

res CHARACTER OF JESUS TORBIDS BSB POSSIBLE CLASSIFICATION WR'H MiN.

rhe 'juperhuman personality of Christ is fully attested by his character. 277.
And the description verifies itself^ 277. Represented as beginning with
a perfect childhood. 278. Which childhood is described naturally, and
without exaggerations of fancy, 280. Represented always as an Inno-
cent being, yet with no loss of force, 283 His piety is unrepentant, yet
successfully maintained, 285. He united characters which men are never
able to unite perfectly, 286. His amazing pretensions are sustained so as
never even to shock the skeptic, 288. Excels as truly in the passive vir-
tues, 292. Bears the common trials, in a faultless manner of patience, 293.
His passion, as regards the time, and the intensity, is not human, 295.
His undertaking to organize, on earth, a kingdom of God, is superhu-
man, 298. His plan is universal in time, 300. He takes rank with the
poor, and begins with them for his material, 301. Becoming the head
thus of a class, he never awakens a partisan feeling, 304. His teachings
are perfectly original and independent, 306. He teaches by no human or
philosophic methods, 308. He never veers to catch the assent of multi-
tudes, 308. He is comprehensive, in the widest sense, 309. He i& per-
fectly clear of superstition in a superstitious age, 311. He is no libeml,
yet shows a perfect charity, 312. Tlie simpHcity of his teaching is perfect
314. His morality is not' artificial or artistic, 316. He is never anxious
for his success, 317. He impresses his superiority and his real greatness
the more deeply, the more familiarly he is known, 318. Did any such
character exist, or is it a myth, or a hunr.an invention? 323. Is the char-
acter sinless ? 324. Mr. PaVker and Mr. Hennel think him imperfect, 326.
Answer of Milton to one of their accusations, 329. How great a matter
that one such character has lived in our world, 331.

CHAPTER XI

CHRIST PERFORMED MIRACLES.

Miracles do not prove the gospel, but the problem itself is to prove the
miracles. 333. Geieral assumption of the skeptics, that miracles are in-
credible— Spinoza, Hume, Strauss, Parker, 334. Miracles defined, 335.
What miracle is i-Ot, 337. Some concessions noted of tlie dcniers of
mbaclea— Hennel, 339. Also of Dr. Strauss, 340. His solution of the
Liimedial* and the mediate action of God, 341. Proofs— That the super-
natural .'iction of man involves all the difficulties, 345. That sin is nea-
m appearance to a miracle, 346. That nature, assumed to be perfect and
mt to be interruptel by God. is in flict become unuature already, 341s.
That without something equivalent, the restoration of man is impossi-
ble. 348. That nature was never designed to bo the complete empire o!
God, 349. That if God has ever done any thing he may as well do a
rail ficle now , 'ioO. Then He is shown even bv science, to h »t j rM-vfompJ

CONTENTS.

miracles, 350 But t/ie great proof is Jesup himself, having power
without suspending any law of nature, 351. On an errand high «n(uul:
to justify rairaclos, 353. It is also significant that the deniers can make
no account of the history, which is at all rational — Strauss, 355. Mr
Parker concedes the fact that Christ himself is a miracle, 357. Objectior
— why not also maintain the ecclesiastical miracles? 359. That accord
ing to our definition there may be false miracles, 360. That if they ar.
credible in a former age, they also should be now, 361. That mira3le
are demonstraticia of fcri e, 363. But we rest in Jesus the chief mtr«i
els. 365.

CHAPTER XII.

WATE*^ -MARKS IN THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINK.

n iC most convincing evidence, that which is already on hand, as in water
mark, undiscovered, 367. Principal evidence of the kind, the two econo-
mies, letter and spirit, as being inherently necessary, 368. Overlooked
by oar pidlosophers, 369. More nearly discerned by the heathen, 370.
Once thought of as necessary, the necessity is seen, 372. Scriptures an-
ticipate all human wisdom here, 373. And, in this precedence, we dis-
cover that they are not of man, 375. Another strong proof in the gos-
pels, not commonly observed, that the supernatural fact of the incarna-
tion is so perfectly and systematically carried out, 376. There is no such
conci unity of facts in any of the mythological supernaturalisms, 376. It
appears in a multitude of points, as in the name, gospel, 377. In the
name, salvation, 378. In salvation by faith, 379. In justification by
faith, 381. In the setting up of a kingdom of God on earth, 384. In
the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and his works, as related to Christ
and his, 385. In the doctrine of spiritual regeneration, 388. In the
sacred mystery of the Trinity, 391. Hence Napoleon, Hennel, and oth-
ers, express their admiration of the compactness and firm order of Chris-
tianity, 396. Whence came this close, internal adaptation of parts in a
matter essentially miraculous? 397. Only rational supposition, that tho
fabric is all of God, as it pretends to be, 399. May see in Mormonism,
Mohammedanism, and Romanism, what man can do in compounding su
pematurals, 400.

CHAPTER XIII.

irtE WORLD IS GOVERNED SUPERNATURALLY, IN THE INTEREST OP CUE'S

TIANITY.

Ti.ere is but one God, who, governing the world, must do )t ooiiicidenllj
ivith what he ia doing in Christ, 405. And this Christ himself boldly
Affirms, 406, Two kinds of Providence, the natural and supernatural—
a.'.'^ura the fixed term between us and God, 407. And then there is a vari-
able mode, in which \^ n 2ome into reciprocal relation with God — this if
the supernatural, 408. And in this field, God rules lor Christianity's sake,
400. The evidences are, first, that things do not take place as thet
fchould, if the eftec'.s of sin were left to the endless propagation of cauaca,
J 11. Hence then, while th? great teachers of the world and their schooh
ii^iappaar, Chriatianitv r^naina. 412. Itself an institution, in the \-ep

CONTENTS. Xl

current of thj flood, 414. A second evidence, that the events of th€
world show a divine hand, even that of Christ bearing rule, 415. Hie
Jewish dispersion, the Greek philosophy already waning, the Greek
tongue every where, the Roman Empire universal, a state cf general
peace and so the way of Christ is made ready, 417. So with the events
that followed, 418. But what of the dark ages, and other adverse facts?
421. Enough that this mystery of iniquity must work, till the gospel is
proved out, 422. Some events confessedly dark, and yet they might be
turned to wear a look of advantage, if only we could fathom their
import, 425. A third evidence, in the spirit^jal changes wrouglvt in
men — difficult to change a character, 428. The cases of Paul, Augustine,
and others, 431. The changes are facts; if Christianity did not work
them, a supernatural Providence did, for Christianity's sake, 434. Not
changed by their o\\ti ideas, 436. Not by theologic preconceptions — ease
of a short-witted person — Brainard's conjurer, &c., 437. More satisfac-
tory to conceive these results to be wrought by the Holy Spirit, which
comes to really the same thing, 440. How the critics venture, with
great defect of modesty, to show the subjects of such changes, that chov
misconceive their experience, 443.

CHAPTER XIV.

lOEACLES AND SPmiTXTAL GIFTS ARE NOT DISCONTINtJED.

[f miracles are inherently incredible, nothing is gained by thrusting tnexu
back and cuttmg them short in time, 447. The closing up of the canon,
no reason of discontinuance, 448. Certainly not discontinued, for thia
reason, in the days of Chrysostom, 448. There have been suspensions,
here and there, but no discontinuance, 449. Does not follow that they
win occur, in later times, in the exact way of the former times, 450.
The reason of miracles, in that oscillation toward extremes, which be-
longs to the state of sin, 452. First, we swing toward reason, order,
uniformity ; next, toward fanaticism, 453. Hence almost every appear-
ance of supernatural giils, that we can trace, has come to its end in some
kind of excess, 455. Why it is that lying wonders are generally con-
temporaneous, 456. The first thing impressed by investigation here, that
miracles could not have ceased at any given date — ^no such date can be
found, which they do not pass over, 460. Newman and the ecclesiastical
miracles, 460. Miracles of the " Scots "Worthies," 461. Les Trembleura
des Cevennes, or French prophets, 462. Les Convulsionnaires de Saint
Medard, 462. George Fox's miracles, and those of the Friends, 463
Abundance of such facts in our own time, as in premonitions, answers to
prayer, healings, tongues, of the MacDonalds and the followers of Irving,
467. Case of Miss Fancourt, 467. Not true that the verdict of the
thinking men of our day is to decide such a question, 468. The thinking
men can make nothing of Joan of Arc, of Cromwell, and many other
well-attested characters, 472. But why do we only hear of such at a
distance ? — v/hy not meet the persons, see the facts ? 474 We do — Cap«
tain Yonnt's dream, 475. The testmg of prayer by a physician, 477.

Appear to have had the tongues in H , and other gifts, 478. Case of

healing by an English disciple, 479. Case of a diseased cripple mad*
whole, 483. The visit of a prophet, 486. Obhged to admit that, whil,
such gifts are wholly credible, they are not so easily believed by or ^
whose m.nd is preoccupied by a contrary habit of expectation, 491

jlIi contents,

chapter xv

CONCIUSION STATED — USES AND RESULTS

Argument "secapitulated, 493. It does not settle, or at all move the ques
iion of inspiration, but sets the mind in a position to believe insp'-ratioa
easily, 495. The mythical hypothesis virtually removed, without aui
direct answei, 496. Have not proved all the miracles, but miracles — let
every one discuss the particular questions for himself, 497. Objectior
that every thing is thus surrendered, 498. Relation of the argument tc
Mr. Parker's, 499. Particularly to his view of natural inspiration, .'iOl.
The argument, if carried, will also affect the estimate held of natural the-
Dlogy, or modify the place given it, 505. And preserve the positive in-
stitutions by showing a rational basis for their authority, 609. And
correct that false ambition of philanthropy, which dispenses with ChriS'
tianity as the regenerative institution of God, 512. And restore the tru«
apostolic idea ^f preaching, 514. And require intellectual and mora4'
philosophy to raise the great problem of existence, and recognize the fac^
of sin and supernatural redemption, 516. And, hist of all, will giv«
to faith and Christian experience that solid basis on which, thej ciaj
ha expected to unfold greater results, 520.

^ CHAPTER I.

rO [NTRODUCTORY.-QUISTION STATE .

f

i>' tl^3 remoter and more primitive ages of tLo world
^yjiDetimes called mythologic, it will be observed that man
kind, whether by reason of some native instinct a.s yet
uncoriupted, or some native weakness yet uneradicated,
are abundantly disposed to believe in things supernatural.
Thus it was in the extinct religions of Egypt, Phoenicia.
Q-reece, and Rome ; and thus also it still is in the existing
mythologic religions of the East Under this apparently
primitive habit of mind, we find men readiest, in fact, tc
believe in that which exceeds the terms of mere nature
in deities and apparitions of deities, that fill the heavens
and earth with their sublime turmoil ; in fates and furies ;
"^^in nymphs and graces; in signs, and oracles, and incanta
tions ; in " gorgons and chimeras dire." Their gods are
charioteering in the sun, presiding in the mountain tops,
rising out of the foam of. the sea, breathing inspirations
in the gas that issues from caves and rocky fissures, loos
ing their rage in the storms, plotting against each other
in the intrigues of courts, mixing in battles to give
success to their own people or defeat the people of
eome rival deity. All departments and regie ns of tat
world are full of their miraculous activity. Above
ground, they are managing the thunders; distilling Id
showers, or settling in dews; ripening or blasting the
harvests; breathing health, or poisoning the a'r with pesti
lential infections. In the ground they stir up volcanic
fires, and wrestle in earthquakes that shake down cities

14 TTIE CREEK SOPHISTS

111 tlie <leep world uiulergroiHid, they receive tlic ghosts cl
departed men, and preside in Tartarean majesty over the
realms of the shades. The unity of reason was nothing
to the^e Gentiles. They had little thought of nature fu»
an existing scheme of order and law. Every thing was
supernatural. The universe itself, in all its parts, was
ordy a vast theater in which the gods and demigods were
acting their parts.

But there sprung up, at length, among tHe Greeks, some
four or five centuries before the time of Christ, a class of
speculative neologists and rationalizing critics, called Soph-
ists, who began to put these wild myths of religion to the
test of argument. K we may trust the description of
Plato, they were generally men without much character,
either as respects piety or even good morals ; a conceited
race of Illuminati, who more often scoffed than argued
against the sacred things of their religion. Still it was no
difficult thing for them to shake, most effectually, the con-
fidence of the people in schemes of religion so intensely
mythical And it was done the more easily that the more
moderate and sober minded of the Sophists did not pro-
pose to overthrow and obliterate the popular religion, but
only to resolve the mythic tales and deities into certain
great facts and powers of nature; and so, as they pretended,
to find a more sober and rational ground of support foi
their religious convictions. In this manner we are in-
formed that one of their number, Eumerus, a Cyrenian,
" resolved the whole doctrine concerning the gods into s
history of nature." *

The religion of the Eomans, at a later period, under-
went a similar process, and became an idle myth, having

* Neandcr, Yol. I., p. 6.

AND THEIR TIMES. 15

no earnest significance and as little practical authority in
the convictions of the people. And, when Christ came
the Sadducees were practicing on ihe Jewish faith in much
che same way. As philosophy entered, religion was fall-
ing everywhere before its rationalizing processes. It nvr.*
poetry on one side and dialectics on the other: and u.v
dialectics were, in this case, more than a match for the
poetry, — as they ever must be, until their real weakness
and the cheat of their pretensions are discovered. What
the Christian father, Justin Martyr, says of the Sophists
of his time, was doubtless a sufficiently accurate account
of the others in times previous, and may be taken as a
faithful picture of the small residuum of religious convic-
tion left by them all. "They seek," he says, "to con-
vince us that the divinity extends his care to the great
whole and to the several kinds, but not to me and to you,
not to men as individuals. Hence it is useless to pray to
him ; for every thing occurs according to the unchange-
able law of an endless cycle."*

Or, we may take the declaration of Pliny, from the side
of the heathen philosophy itself, though many were not
ready to go the same length, preferring to retain religion,
which they often er called superstition, as a good instru-
ment for the state and useful as a restraint upon the com«
mon people. He says : — " All religion is the offspring of
Qecessity, weakness, and fear. What God is, if in truth
he be any thing distinct from the world, it is beyond the
Rompass of man's understanding to know." f

Thus, between the destructive processes of reason enter-
ing on one side to demolish, and Christianity on the othei

♦ Neandor, Yol. T p. 9. f Neander, VoL L, p. 10.

16 THE CinUSTl.vN SOPHISTS,

to offei" itself as a substitute, the old mytliologic religion*
fell, and were completely swept away.

And now, at last the further question comes, viz.,
whether Christianity itself is also, in its turn, to expc ri-
<ince the same fate, and be exterminated by the same oi f
closely similar process? Is it now to be found that Chiis
tiauity is only another form of myth, and is it so to be ro
solved into the mere -'history of nature," as the other re
ligions were before it ? Is it now to be discovered that the
prophecy and miracle of the Old Testament, and all the
formally historic matters even of the gospels and epistles
of the New, are reducible to mere natural occurrences,
"under the unchangeable laws of an endless cycle?"
Is this process now to end in the discovery, beyond
which there can be no other, that God himself is, in
truth, nothing "distinct from the world? "

This is the new infidelity: not that rampant, crude-
minded, and malignant scoffing which, in a former age,
undertook to rid the world of all religion ; on the contrary,
it puts on the air and speaks in the character of a genuine
scholarship and philosophy. It simply undertakes, if we
can trust its professions, to interpret and apply to the facts
of scripture the true laws of historic criticism. It more
generally speaks in the name of religion, and does not
commonly refuse even the more distinctive name of Chria
tianity. Coming thus in shapes of professed deference to
revealed religion, many persons appear to be scarcely
aware of the questions it is raising, the modes of thought
it is generating, and the general progress toward mere
naturalism it is beginning to set in motion. Many, also,
are the more effectually blinded to the tendency of thf

OR NATURALIZING CRITICS. 1^

times, that so many really true opinions and so maiiy light
sentiments, honorable, to God and religion, are connected
with the pernicious and false method by which it is, in one
way or another, extinguishing the fa th of religion in the
worli. It proposes to make a science of religion, and
^ bat can be more plausible than to have religion become
r* icience?

It finds a religious sentiment in all men, which, in one
view, is a truth. It finds a revelation of God in all things,
which also is a truth. It discovers a universal inspiration
of God in human souls ; which, if it be taken to mean
that they are inherently related to God, and that God, in
the normal state, would be an illuminating, all-moving
presence in them, is likewise a truth. It rejoices also in
tbe discovery of great and good men, raised up in all
times to be seers and prophets of God ; which, again, ia
not impossible, if we take into account the possibility of a
really supernatural training or illumination, outside of the
Jewish cultus ; as in the case of Jethro, Job, and Cornelius,
including probably Socrates and many others like him,
who were inwardly taught of God and regenerated by the
private mission of his Spirit.

But exactly this the new infidelity can not allow. All
pretenses of a supernatural revelation, inspiration, or ex-
j»erience, it rejects ; finding a religion, beside which thero
ie no other, within the terms of mere nature itself ; a uni-
versal, philosophic, scientific religion. In this it luxuri-
ett5s, expressing many very good and truly sublime senti-
ments ; sentiments of love, and brotherhood, and worship;
quoting scripture, when it is convenient, as it quotes the
Oq^hic hymns, or the Homeric and Sibylline verses, and
testifying the profoundest admiration to Jesus Christ, im

18 PRESE XT TENDENCIES,

common with Numa, Plato, Zoroaster, Oonfuci.is, Moham
med, and others ; and perhaps allowing that he is, on the
whole, the highest and most inspired character that liaf
ever jet appeared in the world. All this, on the level of
mere nature, without miracle, or incarnation, or resuneo
lion, or new-creation, or any thing above nature. Such
.representations are only historic myths, covering perhapb
real truths, but, as regards the historic form, incredibla
Nothing supernatural is to be admitted. Redemption it-
self, considered as a plan to raise man up out of thraldom,
under the corrupted action of nature, — rolling back its
currents and bursting its constraints, — is a fiction. There
is no such thraldom, no such deliverance, and so far Chris-
tianity is a mistake ; a mistake, that is, in every thing that
constitutes its grandeur as a plan of salvation for the
world.

We have heard abundantly of these and such like aber-
rations from the christian truth in German}^, and also in
the literary metropolis of our own country. But we have
not imagined any general tendency, it may be, in this
direction, as a peculiarity of our times. If so, we have a
discovery to make ; for, though it may not be true that
any large proportion of the men of our times have dis-
tinctly and consciously accepted this form of unbelief, yet
the number of such is rapidly increasing, and, what is
worse, the number of those who are really in it, without
knowing it, is greater and more rapidly increasing still.
The current is this way, and the multitudes or masses of
the age are falling into it. Let us take our survey of the
fonns of doubt or denial that are converging on this com-
mon center and uniting, as a common force, against thf
faith of any thing supernatural, and so against the posf^i

CHEATED BY SCIENCE, 18

Diliij, ia fact, of Christianitj ai? a gospel of salvatioii to
tlie world.

From the first moment or birth-time of modern science
if we could fix the moment, it has been clear that Chri*
tianitj must ultimately come into a grand issue of life au'j
death with it, or with the tendencies embodied in its pro
gress. ]N'ot that Christianity has any conflict with the
facts of science, or they with it. On the contrary, since
both it and nature have their common root and harmony
in God, Christianity is the natural foster-mother of science,
and science the certain handmaid of Christianity. And
both together, when rightly conceived, must constitute one
complete system of knowledge. But the difficulty is here ;
that we see things only in a partial manner, and that the
two great modes of thought, or intellectual methods, that
of Christianity in the supernatural department of God's
plan, and that of science in the natural, are so different
that a collision is inevitable and a struggle necessary to
the final liquidation of the account between them; or,
what is the same, necessary to a proper settlement of tlie
conditions of harmony.

Thus, from the time of Galileo's and Newton's discove-
ries, down to the present moment of discovery and researd)
J3 geolof^cal science, we have seen the Christian teach-
ers stickling for the letter of the Christian documents aad
alarmed for their safety, rmd fighting, inch by inch aru!
with solemn pertinacity, the plainest, most indisputable or
even demonstrable facts. On the other side, the side ol
science, multitudes, especially of the mere diltttanti^ have
been boasting, almost every month, some discovery that
was to make a fatal breach upon revealed religion.

20 OR THE METHOD OF SCIENCE.

And ci niucli greater danger to religion i.s to be iippre
hended from science than this, viz., the danger that comei
from what may be called a bondage under the method of
science, — as if nothing could be true, save as it is proved
by the scientific method. Whereas, the method of all the
liigher truths of religion is different, being the method -jf.
(kith ; a verification by the heart, and not by the notiou5
of the head.

Busied in nature, and profoundly engrossed with her
phenomena, confident of the uniformity of her laws,
charmed with the opening wonders revealed in her pro*
cesses, armed with manifold powers contributed to the
advancement of commerce and the arts by t,he discovery
of her secrets, and pressing onward still in the inquest,
with an eagerness stimulated by rivalry and the expecta-
tion of greater wonders yet to be revealed, — occupied in
this manner, not only does the mind of scientific men but
of the age itself become fastened to, and glued down upon,
nature; conceiving that nature, as a frame of physical
order, is itself the system of God ; unable to imagine any
thing higher and more general to which it is subordinate.
Imprisoned, in this manner, by the terms and the method
of nature, the tendency is to find the whole system of God
included under its laws; and then it is only a part of the
same assumption that we are incredulous in regard to anv
modification, or seeming interruption of their activity,
from causes included in the supernatural agency of pei-
?ons, or in those agencies of God himself that completv
tin unity and true syster i of his reign. And so it comes tc
pass that, while the physical order called nature is [)erhapfc
only a single and very subordinate term of that universaj
rlivinc system, a mere pebble chafing in the ocean-bed o'

THE REVISION PREPARING. 21

its eternity, we refuse to believe that this pebble can be
acted on at all from without, requiring all events and
changes in it to take place under the laws of acting it ha*
in wardly in itself There is no incarnation therefore. : o
miracle, no redemptive grace, or experience; for Go^j'p
system is nature, and it is incredible that the laws of
nature should be interrupted ; all which is certainly true,
if there be no higher, more inclusive system under which
it may take place systematically, as a result even of sys-
tem itself.

And exactly this must be the understanding of mankind,
at some future time, when the account between Christianity
and nature shall have been fully liquidated. When that
point is reached, it will be seen that the real system of God
in(iludes two parts, a natural and a supernatural, and it
will no more be incredible that one should act upon the
otlier, than that one planet or particle in the department
of nature should act upon and modify the action of another.
But we are not yet ready for a discovery so difficult to be
made. Thus far the tendency is visible, on every side, to
believe in nature simply, and in Christianity only so far as
it conforms to nature and finds shelter under its laws. And
the mind of the christian world is becoming, every day,
more and more saturated with this propensity to natural-
ism ; gravitating, as it were, by some fixed law, though
unpsrceptibly or unconsciously, toward a virtual and I'ea]
aabelief in Christianity itself; for the Christianity that L'
become a part only of nature, or is classified under natur'3,
is Christianity extinct. Tliat we may see how fax the mind
of an i».2:^ is infected by this naturalizing tendency, let us
QOte a few of the thousand and one forms in which it
appears.

22 ATHEISM NATURALISTIC, OF CCUitSE

Fii-st we have the relics of the old school of denial und
atheism, headed most conspicuously by Mr. Hume and the
French philosophers. All atheists are naturalists of neces-
sity A.nd atheism there will be in the world as long ak
sm js in it. If the doctrine dies out as argument, it will
remain as a perverse and scoffing spirit. Or it will be re-
produced in the dress of a new philosophy. Dying out a-i
a negation of Hobbes or Hume, it will reappear in the
positive and stolidly physical pretendership of Comte.
But, whatever shape or want of shape it takes, destructive
or positive, — a doctrine or a scoffing, a thought of the head
or a distemper of the passions, — it will of course regard a
Bupernatural faith as the essence of all unreason.

Still it can not be said that the negations of Mr. Hume
are gone by, as long as they are assumed and practically
held as fundamental truths, by many professed teachers
of Christianity ; for it is remarkable that our most recent
and most thorough-going school of naturalists, or natural-
izinfi critics in the Christian scriptures, really place it as
the beginning and first principle of criticism, that no
m^'.racle is credible or possible. This they take by assump-
tion, as a point to be no longer debated, after the famous
argument of Hume. The works of Strauss, Hennel, New-
man, Froude, Fox, Parker, all more or less distinguished
for their ability as fur their virtual annihilation of the
gos])els, are together rested on this basis. They are not
all atlieists; perhaps none of them will admit that distinc
lion; some of them even claim to be superlatively chris-
tian. Bat the assault upon Christianity, in which the^
agr?e, is the one from which the greatest harm is now to
be expected, and that, in great part, for the reason that
they do not acknowledge the true genealogy of their ^f*c

PANTHEISTS AND PHRENOLOGISTS. 23

tnne, and that, hovering over tlie gulf that separates athe-
ism from Christianity, they take away faith from one, with-
out exposing the baldness and forbidding sterility of the
other. They have many apologies too, in the unhappy
incumbrances tlirown upon the christian truth bj its de
fenders, which makes the danger greater still.

Next we have the school or schools of pantheists ; who
identify God and nature, regarding the world itself and its
history as a necessary development of God, or the con-
sciousness of God. Of course there is no power out of
nature and above it to work a miracle ; consequently no
revelation that is more than a development of nature.

Next in order comes the large and vaguely-defined body
of physicalists, who, without pretending to deny Chris-
tianity, value themselves on finding all the laws of obliga-
tion, whether moral or religious, in the laws of the body
and the world. The phrenologists are a leading school in
this class, and may be taken as an example of the others.
Human actions are the results of organization. Laws of
duty are only laws of penalty or benefit, inwrought in the
physical order of the world; and Combe "On the Con-
stitution of Man " is the real gospel, of which Christianity
is only a less philosophic version. Thousands of persons
who have no thought of rejecting Christianity are sliding
continually into this scheme, speaking and reasoning every
liour about matters of duty, in a way that supposes Chris-
tianity to be only an interpreter of the ethics of nature,
and resolving duty itself, or even salvation, into mere pru-
dence, or skill; — a learning to walk among things, so aft
not to lose one's balarce and fall or be hurt ; or, when it
is lost, finding how to recover and stand up again.

Closely: related to these, or else inclu led among them

24 ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS OF UNITAR1/»NB.

we arc to reckon, with some exceptions, the vei j intellii
geut, iufluential body of Unitarian teachers of Christianity.
Maintaining, as they have done with great earnestness; the
truth of the scripture miracles, they furnish a singular aiiJ
striking illustration of the extent to which a people may
ho slid away from their speculative tenet, by the practical
drift of what may be called their working scheme. Deny-
ing human depravity, the need of a supernatural grace
also vanishes, and they set forth a religion of ethics, instead
of a gospel to faith. Their word is practically, not re-
generation, but self-culture. There is a good seed in us,
and we ought to make it grow ourselves. The gospel
proposes salvation ; a better name is development. Christ
is a good teacher or interpreter of nature, and only so a
redeemer. God, they say, has arranged the very scheme
of the world so as to punish sin and reward virtue ; there-
fore, any such hope of forgiveness as expects to be deliv-
ered of the natural effects of sin by a supernatural and
regenerative experience, is vain ; because it implies the
failure of God's justice and the overturning of a natural
law. Whoever is delivered of sin, must be delivered bj
such a life as finally brings the great law of justice on hia
side. To be justified freely by grace is impossible.*

Again, the myriad schools of Associationists take it as
a fundamental assumption, whether consciously or uncon-
s.MOQsly. that human nature belongs to the general ordci
■ )f nature, as it comes from God, and that nothing is want'
ing to the full perfection of man's happiness, but to have
society organized according to nature, that is scientifically
No new-creation of the soul in good, proceeding from a point
4bove nature, is needed or to be expected. The propensi

• D©wov'n SpPTTon nn Retribution

ASSOCIATIONISTS AND MAGNETISTd. 2^

ties and passions c/f men are all nght now ; " attractionB
are proportioned to destinies " in them, as in the planets.
What is wanted, therefore, is not the supernatural redemp-
don of man, but only a scientific reorganization of
f'ociety.

Next we have the magnetists or seers of electricity,
opening other spheres and conditions of being by electric
nnoacts, and preparing a religion out of the revelations of
natural clairvoyance and scientific necrornanoy ; the more
confident of the absurdity of the christian supernaturalism,
or the plan of redemption by Christ, that they have been so
mightily illuminated by the magnetic revelations. They are
greatly elated also by other and more superlative discove-
ries, in the planets and third heavens and the two superior
states ; boasting a more perfect and fuller opening of the
other world than even Christianity has been able to make.

Again it will be observed that almost any class of men,
whose calling occupies them much with matter and its
laws, have always, and now more than ever, a tendency to
merely naturalistic views of religion. This is true of phy-
sicians. Continually occupied with the phenomena of the
body, and its effects on the mind, they are likely, without
denying Christianity, to reduce it practically to a form of
naturalism. So of the large and generally intelligent class
of mechanics. Having it for the occupation and principal
<;tudy of life to adjust applications of the great laws of
chemistry and dynamics, and exercised but little in sub-
jects a id fields of thought external to mere nature, they
very many of them come to be practical unbelievers in
every thing but nature. They believe in cause and effect
and are likely to be just as much more skeptical in regard
to any b./ifher and better faith Active-minded, it genicus.

ZO MATERIAL ENGAGEMENTS,

and sharp, but restricted in the range of their exerciBeij
they surrender themselves, in great numbeis, to a feeliDg
of unreality in every thing but nature.

Again the tendency of modern politics, regarded afe
concerned with popular liberty, is in the same direction
C ivil government is grounded, as the people are every duj
informed by their leaders, with airs of assumed statesman-
ship, in a social compact; a pure fiction, assumed to
account for whole worlds of fact ; for every body knows
that no such compact was ever formed, or ever supposed
to be, by any people in the world. It has the advantage,
nevertheless, of accounting for the political state, atheisti-
caiiy, under mere nature; and is, therefore, the more
readily accepted, though it really accounts for nothing.
For if every subject in the civil state were in it as a reai
.•/m+^actor, joining and subscribing the contract himself,
what is there even then to bind him to his contract, save
that, in the last degree, he is bound by the authority of
God and the sanctions of religion. Besides there never
can be, in this view, any such thing as legislation, but
only an extended process of contracting: for legislation
is the enactment of laws, and laws have a morally binding
authority on men, not as contractors, but as subjects. It
seems to be supposed that this doctrine of a social compact
has some natural agreement with popular institutions,
where laws are enacted by a major vote; whereas thr
major supposes a minor, non-assenting vote ; and as this
minor vote nas been alwaj^s a fact, from first to last, the
compact theory fails, after all, to show how majorities ge*
a right to govern that is better, even theoretically, th.in
the right of any single autocrat. There is, in fact, no cod*
cftivable basis of civil authoritv and law, which does not

rOLITICS AND PROGRESS. 21

recjgnize the state, as being, in this form or in that, a crea/
tion of Proviaence and, as Providence manages the world
in the interest of redemption, a fact supernatural ; which
does not recognize the state as God's minister in the super-
natural works and ends of his administration — appointed
by him to regulate the temp3rs, restrain the passions, re
dress the wrongs, shield the persons, and so to conserve
the order of a fallen race, existing only for those higher
aims which he is prosecuting in their history. Still we
are contriving, always, how to get some ground of civil
order that separates it wholly from God. A social com-
pact, popular sovereignty, the will of the people, any
thmg that has an atheistic jingle in the sound and stops in
the plane of mere nature best satisfies us. We renounce,
in this manner, our true historic foster-mother, religion,
taking for the oracle and patron saint of our politics Jean
Jacques Eousseau. And the result is that the immense
drill of our political life, more far-reaching and powerful
than the pulpit, or education, or any protest of argument,
operates continually and with mournful certainty against
the supernatural faith of Christianity. Hence too it is that
we hear so much of commerce, travel, liberty, and the
natural spread of great inventions, as causes that are start-
ing new ideas, and must finally emancipate and raise all
the nations of mankind. In which it seems to be sup
pDsed that there is even a law of self-redemption in socicity
Itself. As if these external signs or incidents of progress
were its causes also ; or as if they were themselves un-
Ci'uised by the supernatural and quickening power of Christ
Whether Christianity can finally survive this death-darnp
of naturalism in our political and social ideas, remains tc
be seen.

28 KKIGNING LITERATURE.

1 have only to add, partly as a result of ail thcsi
causes, and partly as a joint cause with them, that th€
pop'u.lar literature of the times is becoming generally saiur-
af.ed with nat-iralistic sentiments of religion. The lit(Ta
ture of no other age of the world was ever more religious m
che form, only the religion of it is, for the most part, rathei
A substitute for Christianity than a tribute to its honor ; —
a piracy on it, as regards the beautiful and sublime pre-
cepts of ethics it teaches, but a scorner only the more
plausible of whatever is necessary to its highest authority,
as a gift from God to the world. It praises Christ, as great
or greatest among the heroes; finds a God in the all,
whom it magnifies in imposing pictures of sublimity ; re-
joices in the conceit of an essential divinity in the soul
and its imaginations; dramatizes culture, sentiment, and
philanthropy ; and these, inflated with an airy scorn of all
that implies redemption, it offers to the world, and
especially to the younger class of the world, as a more
captivating and plausible religion.

To pursue the enumeration further is unnecessary.
What we mean by a discussion of the supernatural truth
of Christianity is now sufiiciently plain. We undertake
the argument from a solemn convictiou of its necessity,
and because we see that the more direct arguments and
appeals of religion are losing their power over the public
mind and conscience. This is true especially of the young,
who pass into life under the combined action of so many
caases, conspiring to infuse a distrust of whatever is super-
naiural in religion. Persons farther on in life are out of
•he reach of these new influences, and, unless their atten-
tion is specially called to the fact, have little suspicion of
vhat is going on in the mind of the rising classes of tht

ORTHODOXY NO SKCURITY 29

world, — more and more saturated every day with tLi:i in-
sidious form of unbelief. And yet we all. with perbapb
the exception of a few who are too far on to suffer it, are
more or less infected with the same tendency. Like an
atmosphere, it begins to envelope the common mind of ih'
world. "We frequently detect its influence in the practica;
difficulties of the young members of the churches, who do
not even suspect the true cause themselves. Indeed, their.
is nothing more common than to hear arguments advanced
ar.d illustrations offered, by the most evangelical preachers,
that have no force or meaning, save what they get from
the current naturalism of the day. "We have even heard
a distinguished and carefully orthodox preacher deliver a
discourse, the very doctrine of which was inevitable, un-
qualified naturalism. Logically taken and carried out to
its proper result, Christianity could have had no ground
of standing left, — so little did the preacher himself under-
stand the true scope of his doctrine, or the mischief that
was beginning to infect his conceptions of the christian
truth.

In the review we have now sketched, it may easily be
Been on what one point the hostile squadrons of unbelief
are marching. Kever before, since the inauguration of
Christianity in our world, has any so general and moment
ous issue been made with it as this which now engager
and gathers to itself, in so many ways, the opposing forces
of human thought and society. Before all these combina-
tions the gospel must stand, if it stands; and against all
these must triumph, if it triumphs. Either it nmst yield,
or they must finally coalesce and become its supporters.

Do we undertake then, with a presumptuous and ever

30 WHAT WK DO NOT ATTEMPT,

preposterous confidence, to overturn all the science, argu
ment, influence of the modern age, and so to vmdicat«
the S'lpernaturalism of Christianity ? By no means. Wt
do not conceive that any so heavy task is laid upon us.
On the contrary, we regard all these adverse powers aa
I'pcing, in another view, just so many friendly powers^
every one of which has some contribution to make for the
firmer settlement and the higher completeness of the chris-
tian faith. They are not in pure error, but there is a dis-
coverable and valuable truth for us, maintained by every
one, if only it were adequately conceived and set, as it will
be, in its fit place and connection. Mr. Hume's argu-
ment, for example, contains a great and sublime truth;
viz., that nothing ever did or will take place out of sys-
tem, or apart from law — not even miracles themselves,
which, must, in some higher view, be as truly under law
and system as the motions even of the stars. Pantheism
has a great truth, and is even wanted, as a balance of rec-
tification to the common error that places God afar off,
outside of his works or above, in some nnimagined alti-
tude. No doubt there is a truth somewhere in spiritism
which will yet accrue to the benefit of Christianity, or, at
least, to an important rectification of our conceptions of
man. So of all the other schools and modes of naturalism
that I have named. I have no jealousy of science, or any
icur whether of its facts or its arguments. For God, we
i'a..y oe certain is in no real disagreement with himself.
It is only a matter of course that, until the great account
between Christianity and science is liquidated, there should
oe an appearance of collision, or disagreement, which doe*
not really exist. As little do we propose to go into a des-
ultory battle with the manifold schemes of natural isn)

AND WHAT WE DO, 81

al)ove described; stil] Jess to undertake a i econ(:iliatiou ol
each or any of them with the christian truth. What J
propose is simply this; to find a legitimate place fijr the super
natural in the system of Ood. and show it as a necessary pan
of the divine system itself

If I am successful, I shall make out an argument for tho
supernatural in Christianity that will save these two con-
ditions:— First, the rigid unity of the system of God;
secondly, the fact that every thing takes place under fixed
laws. I shjill make out a conception both of nature and
of supernatural redemption by Jesus Christ, the incar-
nate Word of God, w^hich exactly meets the maginficent
outline-view of God's universal plan, given by the great
apostle to the Gentiles, — "And He is before all things, and
by Him [in Him, it should be,] all things consist." Chris-
tianity, in other words, is not an afterthought of God, but
a forethought. It even antedates the world of nature, and
is ''before all things," — "before the foundation of the
world." Instead of coming into the world, as being no
part of the system, or to interrupt and violate the system
of things, they all consist^ come together into system, in
Christ as the center of unity and the head of the universal
plan. The world was made to include Christianity ; under
that becomes a proper and complete frame of order; to
that crystalizes, in all its appointments, events, and expe-
riences ; in that has the design or final cause revealed, by
^'hich all its distributions, laws, and historic changes are
determined and systematized. All which is beaut: fully
and even sublimely expressed in the single word ' ' co7i ■sist,'*^
a word that literally signifies standing together ; as when
many parts coalesce in a common whole. Hence it is thf
more to be regretted that the translators, in the rendering

82 TO FORTIFY

"i^ him," instead of the more literal and exact rendering
" in him," have so far confused the significance ana
cbsuured the beauty of a passage that, properly translated,
is so remarkable for the transcendent, philosophic snb
limity of its import.

The same truth is declared more circumstantially and 3ii
n:uch less succinctly in the gospel of John. ^' All thinors
are made by Him, and without Him \i. p., apart from Him
as the formal cause or regulative idea of the plan,] wa&
not any thing made that was made." Or to the same
effect, — "He. was in the world," — " he came unto his own,'*
affirming that he was here before he came as the son of
Mary ; and that, when he came, he came not as an intruder,
defiant of all previous order in nature, but as coming unto
" hii own," to fulfill the creative idea centered in his per
son, and to complete the original order of the plan.

Such is the general object of the treatise I now under-
take • and, if I am able, in this manner, to obtain a solid,
intellectual footing for the supernatural, evincing not only
the compatibility, but the essentially complementary rela-
tion of nature and the supernatural, as terms included, ah
origine^ in the unity of God's plan, or system, I shall, of
course, produce a conviction, as much more decided and
solid, of those great practical truths, which belong to the
eupernatural side of Christianity; such as incarnation
regeneration, justification by faith, divine guidance, and
prayer; — truths which are now held so feebly, and in ii
manner so timid and partial, as to rob them of their genu
ine power. Any thing which displaces the present jeai
ousy of what is supernatural, or stiffens the timidity o/
fiaith, must, as we may readily see, be an important contri

hution to christian experience and the practical life of
religion. Nothing do we need so deeply as a new inau
guration of faith ; or, perhaps I sl^ould rather say, a rein-
auguration of the apostolic faith, and the spirit which dis
tinguisled the apostolic age. And yet a reinauguratioii
of this must, in some very important sense, be a ne^^
Inauguration; for it can be accomplished only by some
"victory over naturalism, that prepares a rational founda-
tion for the supernatural — such as was not wanted, and
was, therefore, impossible to be prepared, in the first age
of the church.

It is scarcely necessary to add that, while I am looking
with interest to the emboldening of faith in the great
truths of holy experience, I have a particular looking in my
argument toward the authentication of the christian scrip-
tures, in a way that avoids the inherent difficulties of the
question of a punctually infallible and verbal inspiration.
These difficulties, I feel constrained to admit, are insuper-
able ; for, when the divine authority of the scriptures is
made to depend thus on the question of their most rigid,
strictest, most punctual infallibility, they are made, in fact,
to stand or fall by mere minima and not by any thing
principal in them, or their inspiration. And then what-
ever smallest doubt can be raised, at any most trivial
point, suffices to imperil every thing, and the main ques-
tion is taken at the greatest possible disadvantage. The
argument so stated must inevitably be lost ; as, in fact, H
ftlways is. For it has even to be given up, at the outset
by concessions that leave it nothing on which to stand.
For DO sturdiest advocate of a verbal and punctual inspir-
ation can refuse to admit variations of copy, and the prob-
able or possible mistake of this or that manuscript, in s

i4 TO ESTABLISH

transfer of names and numerals. It is equally difficult
to withhold the admission, here and there, of a possible
interpolation, or that words hare crept into the text
that were once in the margin. Starting, then, with a
dsfinition of infallibility, fallibility is at once and so far
idmitted. After all, the words, syllables, iotas of the
oook are coming into question, — the ^j;ifallibility is logi-
cally at an end even by the supposition. The moment
we begin to ask what manuscript we shall follow ? what
^;\^rds and numerals correct? what interpolations extir-
pate? we have possibly a large work on hand, and
where is the limit? Shall we stop short of giving up
1 John, v., 7, or shall we go a large stride beyond,
and give up the first chapters of Matthew and Luke?
We are also obliged to admit that the canon was not
made by men infallibly guided by the Spirit; and then
the p»ossibility appears to logically follow that, despite of
any power they had to the contrary, some book may have
been let into the canon which, with many good things,
has some specks of error in it. Besides, if the question
is thrown back upon us, at this point, we are obliged to ad-
mit, and do, as a familiar point of orthodoxy, that our own
polarities are disturbed, our judgment discolored, by sin;
80 that, if the book is infallible, the sense of it as infallible
is not and can not be in us ; how then can we afl&rm it,
or maintain it, in any such manner of strictness and exact
perception? We could not even sustain the infallibility
of God in this manner ; i. e. because we are able to know \\
item by item, as comprehending in ourselves a complete
sense of his infallibility. We establish God's infallibility
dnly by a constructive ise of geneials, the particulars of

THE GOSPEL HISTORY. 3?

*vhich are coiiceivod by us only in tbe faintest, most par.
tial manner.

I^ow these difficulties, met in establishing a close and
punctual infallibility, are rather logical than real, and
originate not in any defect of the scriptures, but in a state-
{nent which puts us in a condition to make, nothing of a
good cause, — a condition to be inevitably worsted. Indeed
there is no bt-Her proof of a divine force and authority in
the scriptures, able to affirm and always affirming itself in
its 0W1 right, even to the end of the world, than that they
continue to hold their ground so firml}^, when the speculat-
ive issue joined in their behalf has been so badly chosen and,
if we speak of what is true logically, so uniformly lost.

I see no way to gain the verdict which, in fact, they
have hitherto gained for themselves, but to change out
method and begin at another point, just where they
themselves begin ; to let go the minima and lay hold of
the principals ; — ^those great, outstanding verities, in which
they lay their foundations, and by which they assert them-
selves. As long as the advocates of strict, infallible
inspiration are so manifestly tangled and lost in the trivi-
alities they contend for, these portentous advances of
naturalism will continue. And, as many are beginning
already, with no fictitious concern, to imagine that Chris-
tianity is now being put upon its last trial, — whether to
Bland or not they hardly dare be confident, — why should
they be farther discouraged by adhering to a mode of trial
wrhich, in bemg lost, really decides nothing. Let tbc
church of God, and all the friends of revelation, as a
word of the Lord to faith, turn their thoughts upon ai^
issue more intelligent and significant, and one that can h^
certainly sustained

CHAPTER II.

DEFIN1TI0N8.-NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL.

In order to the intelligent prosecution of our subject
y^ e need, first of all, to settle on the true import of cer-
tain words and phrases, by the undistinguishing and con-
tused use of which, more than by any other cause, the
unbelieving habit of our time has been silently and im-
perceptibly determined. They are such as these : — " na-
ture," ''the system of nature," "the laws of nature,"
"universal nature," "the supernatural/' and the like.
The first and last named, " nature" and the " supernatu
ral," most need our attention ; for, if tliese are carefully
distinguished, the others will scarcely fai I to yield us their
true meaning.

Tne Latin etymology of the word naturf^ presents the
true force of the term, clear of all ambiguity. The na-
ture [natitrd] of a thing is the future participle of ita
being or becoming — its about-to-be, or its about to-come-t/j
pass, — and the radical idea is, that there is, in the thing
whose nature we speak of, or in the whole of thingr, called
nature, an about-to-be, a definite futarition, a fixed Jaw of
coming to pass, such that, given the thinsr. or wiioie of
things, all the rest will follow by an mherent necessity.
In this view, nature, sometimes called " universal nature,'^
aiid sometimes "the system of nature," is that created
realm of being or substance which has an acting, a going
on or process from within itself, under and by its own
laws Or, if we say, with some, that the laws are but an
other nrme for the immediate actuating power (»f God

NATURE DEFINED. 87

still it makes no difference, in any other respect, -with oui
conception of tlie system. It is yet as ?/tlie laws, the pow-
ers, the actings, were inherent in the substances, and were
hy them determined. It is still to our scientific, separated
from our religious contemplation a chain of causes and
:?frects, or a scheme of orderly succession, determined from
A "thin the scheme itself

Kaving settled, thus, our conception of nature, our con-
ception of the supernatural corresponds. That is super-
natural, whatever it be, that is either not in the chain of
natural cause and effect, or which acts on the chain of
cause and effect, in nature, from without the chain. Thus
if any event transpires in the bosom, or upon the platform
of what is called nature, which is not from nature itself, or
is varied from the process nature would execute by her
own laws, that is supernatural, by whatever power it is
wrought. Suppose, for example, (which we may, for illus-
tration's sake, even though it can not be,) that there were
another system of nature incommunicably separate from
ours, some "famous continent of universe," like that on
which Bunyan stumbled, "as he walked through many
regions and countries;" if, then, this other universe were
f-wung up side by side with ours, great disturbance would
result, and the disturbance would be, to us, supernatural,
because from without our system of nature ; for, though
d.e lavs of our system are acting, still, in the disturbance,
:hey aie not, by the supposition, aciing in their own sys-
tem, or conditions, but by an action that is varied by the
forces and reciprocal actings of the other. So if the pro-
cesses, combinations, and results of our system ot natui'O
sfre interrupted, or varied by the action, whether of God,
or angels, or men, so as to bring to pass what would no/

88 ALSO THE SUPERNATURAL.

come to pass in it by its own internal action, under the
laws of mere cause and effect, the variations are, in like
manner, supernatural. And exactly this we expect to
show : viz., that God has, in fact, erected another and high-
er system, that of spiritual being and government foT
which nature exists ; a sj^stem not under the law of cause:
and effect^ but ruled and marsha'ed under other kinds of
laws and able continually to act v-^ - or vary the action of
the processes of nature. If, accuxv^x^gly, we speak of sys-
tem, this spiritual realm or departui^ixi is much more prop-
erly called a system than the natural, because it is closer to
God, higher in its consequence, and contains in itself the
ends, or final causes, for which the other exists and to which
the other is made to be subservient. There is, however, a
constant action and reaction between the two, and, strictly
speaking, they are both together, taken as one, the true sys-
tem of God ; for a system, in the most proper and philo-
sophic sense of the word, is a complete and absolute whole,
which can not be taken as a part or fraction of any thing.

We do not mean, of course, by these definitions, or dis-
tinctions of the natural and supernatural to assume the
impropriety of the great multitude of expressions, in
which these words are more loosely employed. They may
well enough be so emploj^ed ; the convenience of speech
requires it ; but it is only the more necessary, on that ac-
WMint, that we thoroughly understand ourselves when we
use them in this manner.

Thus we sometimes speak of " the system of nature,"
using the word nature m a loose and general way, as com
prising all created existence. But if we accommodate
ourselves in this manner, it behooves us to see that we dc
not, in using such a term, slide into a false philosoph7

LOOSEU L'SES, 8^

which overturns all obligation, 1)y assuming the real uni-
versality of cause and effect, and the subjection of human
actions to that law. It may be true that men are orily
things, determinable under the same conditions of causality,
hut it will be soon enough to assert that fact, when it U
ascertained by particular inquirj^; which inquiry is mncL
more likely to result in the impression that the phrase^
*' system of nature," understood in this manner as imply-
ing that human actions are determined by mechanical laws,
is much as if one were to speak of the " system of the
school-house," as supporting the inference that the same
kind of frame- work that holds the timbers together, is
also to mortise and pin fast the moral ordor of the school
In the same manner, we sometimes say "universal na-
ture." when we only catch up the term to denote the whole
creation or universe, without deciding any thing in regard
to the possible universality of nature properly defined.
To this, again, there is no objection, if we are only care-
ful not to slide into the opinion that natural laws and
causes comprehend everything; as multitudes do, without
thought, in simply yielding^o the force of such a term.

The word '■'• Nature^'''' again, is currently used in our
modern literature as the name of a Universal Power ; be \\
an eternal fate, or an eternal system of matter reigning by
its necessary laws or an eternal God who is the All, and
is, in fact, nowise different from a system of matter. Nature
undergoes, in this manner, a kind of literary apotheosiSj
and receives the mock honors of a dilettanti worship.
A.nd the new nature-religion is the moi*, valued, be-
cause both the god and the worship, being creatures of the
feigning school of letters, are supposed to be of n more
puperlative and less common quality. But, though some

40 PERMISSIBLE WITH CAUTIOJl.

thing is here said of religion, v\nth a religious air, the
word 7ia^wre, it will be found, is used in exact accordance
eiill with its rigid and proper meaning, as denoting t;ha1
which has its fixed laws of coming to pass within itself
The Dnly abuse consists in the assumed universal exten't
:>f nature, by which it becomes a fate, an all-devouring
abyss of necessity, in which God, and man, and all free
beings are virtually swallowed up. If it should happei^
that nature proper has no such extent ; but is, instead, a
comparatively limited and meager fraction of the true uni-
verse, the new religion would appear to have but a very
shallow foundation, and to be, in fact, a fraud, as pitiful
as it is airy and pretentious.

We also speak of a nature in free beings, and count
upon it as a motive, cause, or ground of certainty, in re-
spect oi* their actions. Thus we assign the nature of God,
and the nature of man, as reasons of choice and roots of
character, representing that it is " the nature of God " to
be holy, or (it may be,) "the nature of man to do wrong."
Nor is there any objection to this use of the word "nat'jre,"
taken as popular language. There is, doubtless, in God,
as a free intelligence, a constitution, having fixed laws,
answering exactly to our definition of nature. That there
is a proper and true nature in man we certainly know ; foi
all the laws of thought, memory, association, feeling, jd
ilie human soul are as fixed as the laws of the heavenly
oodies. It is only the will that is not under the law of
■'iuisc and eifect ; and the other functions are, by their lawS;
subordinated, in a degree, to the uses of the will and itg
directing sovereignty over their changes and processes
And yet tlie will, calling these others a nature, is in turij
solicited and drawn by them, just as the expressions alKuJed

r.OOSER USES I KRMISSIBLB.. 41

to imply, save that they have, in fact, do causative agency
on the will at all. They are the will's reasons, that in
view of which it acts, so that, with a given nature, it may
be expected, witl\ a cei'tain qualified degree of confidence
wo act thus or thus ; l)ut they are never causes on the will^
and the choices of the will are never their effects. There-
fore, when we say that it is "the nature of man to do
this," the language is to be understood in a secondary,
tropical sense, and not as when we say that it is the nature
of fire to burn or water to freeze.

As little would I be understood to insist that the term
supernatural is always to be used in the exact sense I have
given it. Had the word been commonly used in this close,
sharply-defined meaning, much of our present unbelief, or
misbelief, would have been obviated ; for these aberra-
tions result almost universally from our use of this word
in a manner so indefinite and so little intelligent. Instead
of regarding the supernatural as that which acts on the
chain of cause and effect in nature from without the chain,
and adhering to that sense of the term, we use it, very
commonly, in a kind of ghostly, marveling sense, as if
relating to some apparition,' or visional wonder, or it may
be to some desultory, unsystematizable action, whether of
angels or of God. Such uses of the word are permissible
enough by dictionary laws, but they make the word an
offense to all who are any way inclined to the rationalizing
habit. On the other hand, there are many who claim to
be acknowledged as adherents of a supernatural faith, with
as little definite understanding. Believing in a God supe-
rior to nature, acting from behind and through her laws^
they suppose that they are, of course, to be classed as be-
lievers in a supernatural being and religion. But the

42 riSTINCTION SEEN

geiiame supernaturalism of Christianity signifies a greai
deai more than this; viz., that God is acting from without
on the lines of cause and effect in our fallen world and
our disordered humanit}', to produce what, by no rnero
laws of nature, will ever come to pass. Christianity,
therefore, is supernatural, not because it acts through the
ia-^s of nature, limited by, and doing the Tvork of, the
laws ; but because it acts regeneratively and new-creative-
ly to repair the damage which those laws, in their penal
action, would otherwise perpetuate. Its very distinction,
as a redemptive agency, lies in the fact that it enters into
nature, in this regenerative and rigidly supernatural way,
to reverse and restore the lapsed condition of sinners.

But the real import of our distinction between nature
and ihe supernatural, however accurately stated in words,
will not fully appear, till we show it in the concrete ; for
it does not yet appear that there is, in fact, any such thing
known as the supernatural agency defined, or that there
are in esse any beings, or classes of beings, who are distin-
guished by the exercise of such an agency. That what v*^e
have defined as nature truly exists will not be doubted,
but that there is any being or power in the universe, who
acts, or can act upon the cliain of cause and effect in nature
from without the chain, many will doubt and some will
strenuously deny. Indeed the great difiiculty heretofore
encountered, in establishing the faith of a supernatural
9igency, has been due to the fact that we have made a
ghost of it ; discussing it as if it were a marvel of super
stition, and no definite and credible reality. Whereas, h
▼ill appear, as we confront our difficulty more thought-
fully and take its fall force, that the moment we begin to

IN THE WORLD O iT FACT. 43

conceive ourselves rightly, we become ourselves supernat-
ural. It is no longer necessary to go hunting after mar-
vels, apparitions, suspensions of the laws of nature, to
find the supernatural ; it meets us in what is least trans-
cendent ?.nd most familiar, even m ourselves. In our-
^jtlves we discover a tier of existences that are above na-
ture and, in all their most ordinary actions, are doing theii
will upon it. The very idea of our personality is that of
a being not under the law of cause and effect, a being su-
pernatural. This one point clearly apprehended, all the
difficulties of our subject are at once relieved, if not abso-
lutely and completely removed.

If any one is startled or shocked by what appears to bvi
the extravagance of this position, let him recur to our
definition; viz., that nature is that world of substance,
whose laws are laws of cause and effect, and whose events
transpire, in orderly succession, under those laws ; the su-
pernatural is that range of substance, if any such there
be, that acts upon the chain of cause and effect in nature
from without the chain, producing, thus, results that, by
mere nature, could not come to pass. It is not said, be it
observed, as is sometimes done, that the supernatural im-
plies a suspension of the laws of nature, a causing them,
for the time, not tc be — that, perhaps, is never done — it is
only said that we, as powers, not in the line of cause and
effect, can set the causes in nature at work, in new combi-
nations otherwise never occurring, and produce, by our
O/Ction upon nature, results which she, as nature, could
never pr )duce by her own internal acting.

Illustrations are at hand without number. Thus^ na
ture, for example, never made a pistol, or gunpowder, oi
pulled a trigger; all which being lone, or procured to bf

44 SUPERNATURAL ACTION

done, by the criminal, in liis act ( f murder, he is himg foi

what is rightly called his unnatural deed. So of things
QOt criminal; nature never built a house, or modeled a
sliip, or fitted a coat, or invented a steam-engine, or wrote
n book, or framed a constitution. These are all events
ihat spring out of human liberty, acting in and upon tlie
realm of cause and effect, to produce results and combina-
tions, which mere cause and effect could not ; and, at some
point of the process in each, we shall be found coming
down upon nature, by an act of sovereignty just as per
emptory and mysterious as that which is discovered in a
miracle, only that a miracle is a similar coming down upon
it from another and higher being, and not from ourselves.
Thus, for example, in the firing of the pistol, we find ma-
terials brought together and compounded for making an
explosive gas, an arrangement prepared to strike a fire into
the substance compounded, an arm pulled back to strike
the fire, muscles contracted to pull back the arm, a nerv-
ous telegraph running down from the brain, by w^hich some
order has been sent to contract the muscles; and then,
having come to the end of the chain of natural causes, the
jury ask, who sent the mandate down upon the nervous
lelegraph, ordering the said contraction? And, having
(bund, as their true answer, that the arraigned criminal did
11, thsy offer this as their verdict, and on the strength of
the veriict he is hung. He had, in other words, a power
Ui set in order a line of causes and effects, existing element-
ally in nature, and then, by a sentence of his will, to start
the line, doing his unnatural deed of murder. If it be
inc|uired how he was able to command the nervous tele-
graph in this manner, we can not tell, any more than W4
can show the manner of a miracle. The sc^me is true v

F A M Ui I A K 45

regaid to all our most common actioh.s. If one simpl]^
lifts a weight, overcoming, thus far, the great law of grav
ity, we may trace the act mechanically back in the same.
way ; and if we do it, we shall come, at last, to the man
acting in his personal arbitrament, and shall find him send
'.ng down his mandate to the arm, summoning its contrac-
tions and sentencing the weight to rise. In which, as wc
perceive, he has just so much of power given him to vary
the incidents and actings of nature as determined by her
own laws — so much, that is, of power supernatural.

And so all the combinations we make in the harnessing
of nature's powers imply, in the last degree, thoughts,
mandates of will, that are, at some point, peremptory over
the motions by which we handle, and move, and shape,
and combine the substances and causes of the world.
And to what extent w^e may go on to alter, in this man-
ner, the composition of the world, few persons appear to
consider. For example, it is not absurd to imagine the
human race, at some future time, when the population
and the works of industry are vastly increased, kindling
so many fires, by putting wood and coal in contact with
fire, as to burn up or fatally vitiate the world's atmosphere.
That the condition of nature will, in fact, be so flir changed
by human agency, is probably not to be feared. We
only say that human agency, in its povv'er over nature,
holds, or may well enough be imagined to hold, the sover-
eignty uf the process. Meantime, it is even probable, as
a matter of fact, that infections and pestilential diseascis
invading, every now and then, some order of vegetal)le or
animal life, are referable, in the last degree, to something
done upon the world by man. For indeed we shall shew,
bf4bre we have done, that the scheme of nature iUeV

46 THE WILL IS NOT

IS a scbeme unstrung and mistuncd, to a very great de
gree, by man's agency in it, so as to be rathei unnatnrej
after all. than nature; and, for just that reason, demanding
of (jod, even for system's sake, in the highest range of
fiiat term, miracle and redemption.

Suffice it, for the present, simply to clear, as well as we
are able, this main point, the fact of a properly supernat-
uial power in man. Thus, some one, going back to the
act by which the pistol was fired, will imagine, after all,
that the murderer's act in the firing was itself caused in
him by some condition back of what we call his choice, aa
truly as the explosion of the powder was caused by the
Qre. Then, why not blame the powder, we answer, aa
readily as the man — which most juries would have some
difficulty in doing, though none at all in blaming the
man? The nature of the objection is purely imaginary,
as, in fact, the common sense, if we should not rather say
the common consciousness of the word decides ; for we are
all conscious of acting from ourselves, uncaused in our ac-
tion. The murderer knows within himself that he did the
deed, and that nothing else did it through him. So hia
consciousness testifies — so the consciousness of every man
revising his actions — and no real philosopher will ever
undertake to substitute the verdict of consciousness, by
mother, which he has arrived at only by speculation or a
logical practice in words. The sentence of consciousnesi?
iri ^nal.

Hence the absurd and really blamable ingenuity of those
would-be philosophers who, not content with the cleai
indisputable report of consciousness in such a case, go on
to ask whether the wrong-doer of any kind was not act
Ing, in his wrong, under motives and determmed bf

A SCALK-BEAM. 4l

[he stiongest motives, and since he is a being made to
act in this manner, whether, after all, he really acted
himself, any more than other natural substances do
when the J yield to the strongest cause ? Doubtless ko.
acted under motives, and probably enough he felt
beside that half his crime was in his motive, being thai
vvhich his own bad heart supplied. The matter of the
strongest motive is more doubtful ; but, if it be tiiie, in
every case, that the wTong-doer chooses what to him is the
strongest motive, it by no means follows that he acts in the
way of a scale-beam, swayed by the heaviest weight;
for the strength of the motive may consciously be derived,
in great part, from what his own perversity puts into it;
and, what is more, he may be as fully conscious that he
acts, in every case, from himself, in pure self-determina-
tion, as he would be if he acted for no motive at all. Con-
sciously he is not a scale-beam, or any passive thing, but a
self-determining agent ; and if he looks out always for the
strongest motive, he still as truly acts from his own person-
al arbitrament as if he were always pursuing the weakest.
It does not, however, appear, from any evidence we can
discover, that human action is determined uniformly by
the stronofest motive. That is the doctrine of Edwards, in
his famous treatise on the will,"^ but as far as there is any

""The fortunes of this Treatise, in the world of morals and religion, have
tjeen quite as remarkable as the puzzle it has raised in the world of k-ltera.
The immediate object of the writer was gained, and the faith of God's etemaJ
•government, assailed by a crazy scheme of liberty which brought in open
question the divine foreknowledge and the proper self-understiinditg of
God in his plan, was effectually vindicated. So far the argumeiit availed tc
Borve the genuine purposes of religion. But, from that day to this, passiug
over to the side opposite, it has been turned more and more disastrously
against the christian truth, and (ven against the first prindpleg of rcon^

48 NOT DETERMINED BT

appearance of force in his argument, it consists in tin
inference drawn, or judgment passed, ajU^r any act ot
tiioice, that the inducing motive must have heai the
strongest because it prevailed. Whereas, appealing to his
s'mple consciousness, he would have found that ht had
f.;'Ver a thought of the l^uperior strength of the motive
chosen, before the choice; and that, when he ascertained the
fact of its superiority, it was ciilj by an inference or specu-
lative judgment drawn from the choice — just as some
harvester, noting the heavy perspiration that drenches his
body in the field, will judge from such a sign that he must
be dissolving with heat ; when the real sense of his body,
wiser and truer than his logic, is that he is being cooled.
And what, moreover, if it should happen that Edwards,
in his inference, is only carrying over into the world of
mind a j udgment formed in the world of matter ; subj ecting
human souls to the analogy of scale-beams, and conclud-
ing that, since nature yields to the strongest force, the
supernatural must do the same. Meantime, what is the
consciousness testifying? Here is the whole question.
There is no place here for a volume, or even for the

obligation. Priestly was an implicit believer in the doctrine, holding it as the
foundation principle of a scheme of necessity which could hardly be said to
leave a real place for duty in the world. And now, in our own day, it has
'escerded to the level of the subterranean infidelity, and become a familial
tnd standing argument with almost every moral outcast, who has thought
enough in hi:n to know that he is annoyed by the distinctions of virtue,
having turned philosopher on just this point and shown that we are aUgDV-
.:5meii by the strongest motive, he 5/skg, with an air of triumph, where, th(-a
is the place for blame ? "VThat do we all but just what we are made to do 1
Could Edv/ards return to look on the uses now made of his argumer t, his
Baintly apirit might ])Ossibly be stirred with some doubts of its validity.
CompAre the able stiiteraent of this subject by Harris —(Primevai ifaf

100 Sk. ri.

THE STRONGEST MOTIVE. 45

amodnt of a syllogism. Find what the consciousness test-
ifies and that, all tricks of argument apart, is the truth.
Taking, then, this sin: pie issue, the verdict we are quite
5ure is against the doctrine of Edwards ; viz., that, in al'
wrong, or blamable actir n, we consciously take the weakost
notive and most worthless; and, partly for that rerson.
Ma me our own folly and perversity. It may be thai the
good rejected stands superior only before our rational con-
victions, while the enticement followed stirs more actively
our lusts and passions Still we know, and believe, and
deeply feel, at the time, — w^e even shudder it may be in the
choice, at the sense of our own perversity — that we are
choosing the worst and meanest thing, casting away the
gold and grasping after the dirt. Probably a good many
crude-minded persons, little capable of reporting the true
verdict of their consciousness, would answer immediately,
after any such act of choice, that they made it because the
motive was strongest ; for every most vulgar mind is so
far under the great law of dynamics as to judge that
whatever force prevails must be the strongest. Besides,
how could he be a reasona'ble being if he chose the weak-
est motive ; therefore it must he that he chose the strongest.
So it stands, not as any report of consciousness, but simply
as a must he of the logical understanding. Whereas, the
real sin of the choice was exactly this and nothing else,
that the wrong-doer followed after the weakest and worsi^
and did not act as a reasonable being should; and that is
what his consciousness, if he could get far back enough
into the sense of the moment, would report. Nor does
it vary at all the conclusion that a wTong-doer chooses
the weakest motive, to imagine, with many loose-niinded
teachers, that the right is only postponed, and the \vrong

t)0 thp: will not under

chosen for the monient, with a vi<.w to secure the double
\)eiiefit, both of the right aud the wiong ; for the real ques-
tion, at the time, is, in every such case, whether it is wisest
best, and every wa}' most advantagec as, to make the
lolay and try for the double benefit ; and no man ever yet
believed that it was. Never was there a case of wTong
or sinful choice, in which the agent believed that he waa
really choosing the strongest, or weightiest and most valu-
xble motive.*
So far, then, is man from being, any proper item of

* A certain class of theologians may, perhaps, imagine that such a viovt
Df choice takes away the ground of the Divine foreknowledge. How can
God foreknow what choices men may form, when, for aught that ap-
pears, they as often choose against the strongest motive as with it?
He could not foreknow any thing, we answer, under such conditions, if he
were obliged to find out future things, as the astronomers make out almanacs,
oy computation. But he is a being, not who computes, but who, by the
itemal necessity even of his nature, intuits every thing. His foreknowledge
does not depend on his will, or the adjustment of motives to make us will
thus or thus, but he foreknows every thing first conditionally, in the worlc^
of possibility, before he creates, or determines any thing to be, in the world
of fact. Otherwise, all his purposes would be grounded in ignorance, not in
\vis(l(^m, and his knowledge would consist in following after his will, to learn
cvhat his will has blindly determined. This is not the scripture doctrine,
which grounds all the purposes of God in his wisdom ; that is, in -vs hat he per
ceives by his eternal intuitive foreknowledge of what is contained in all possi'
ble systems and combinations before creation— "whom he did foreknow, thcH,
CO also did predestinate " — " elect, according to the foreknowledge of God.'
It) then, God foreknows, or intuitively knows, all that is in the possible sys
km an I the possible man, without calculation, he can have little difficulty
aflor that, in foreknowing the actual man, who is nothing but tl e possible
hi tho world of possibles, set on foot and become actual in the world oi ac-
tuals. So far, therefore, as the doctrine of Edwards was contrived to sup-
port the certauity of God's foreknowledge, and lay a bas.s for the systemaiit
^verrment of the world aud the universal sovereignty of God's pnrpoics
it i^peara to be quite unnecessary.

CAUSE AND EFFECT. 51

nature. He is under no law of cause and effect in hu
choices. He stands out clear and sovereign as a being
supernatural, and his definition is that he is an original
power, acting, not in the line of causality, but from him ■
self. He is not independent of nature in the sense oi
being separated from it in his action, but he is in it, en\i-
:x3ned by it, acting through it, partially sovereign over it,
ulways sovereign as regards his self-determination, and
only not completely sovereign as regards executing all
that he wills in it. In certain parts or departments of the
soul itself, such as memory, appetite, passion, attention,
imagination, association, disposition, the will-power in him
is held in contact, so to speak, wdth conditions and quali-
ties Jhat are dominated partly by laws of cause and effect ;
for these faculties are partly governed by their own laws,
and partly submitted to his governing will by their own
laws ; so that when he will exercise any control over them,
or turn them about to serve his purpose, he can do it, in a
qualified sense and degree, by operating through their
laws. As far as they are concerned, he is pure nature,
and he is only a power superior to cause and effect at the
particular point of volition w^here his liberty culminates,
and where the administration he is to maintain over hia
whole nature centers.

It is also a part of the same general view that, as all
functions of the soul but the wdll are a nature, and aie
011I3' qualifiedly subjected to the will by their laws, the will,
without ever being restricted in its self-determination, will
often be restricted, as regards executive force to perform
what it wills. In this matter of executive force or capaci-
ty, we are under physiological and cerebral limitations
limitataons of asflociation, want, condition ; limitation? of

t>2 EXECUTIVE FORCE

miseducated thought, perverted sensibility, prejudice; su
perstition, a second nature of evdl habit and passion; bj
which, plainly enough, our capacity of doing or becoming
is greatly reduced. This, in fact, is the grand, all-condi
tioning truth of Christianity itself; viz., that man has nti
'Jjility, in himself and by merely acting in himself, t(i
become right and perfect; and that, hence, without some
extension to him from without and above, some approach
and ministration that is supernatural, he can never become
what his own ideals require. And therefore it is the more
remarkable that so many are ready, in all ages, to take up
the notion, and are even doing it now, as a fresh discovery,
that these stringent limitations on our capacity take away
the liberty of our will. As if the question of executive
force, the ability to make or become, had any thing to do
with our self-determining liberty! At the point of the
will itself we may still be as free, as truly original and
aelf-active, as if we could do or execute all that we would ;
otherwise, freedom would be impossible, except on the
condition of being omnipotent ; and even then, as in due
time we shall see, would be environed by many insuper-
able necessities. As long ago as when Paul found it pres-
ent with him to will, but could not find how to perform,
this distinction between volitional self-determination andex*
scutive capacity began to be recognized, and has been ro
cognized and stated, in every subsequent age, till now. No
one is held, even for a moment, to a bad and wrong self-
determination, simply because he has not the executive
force to will himself into an angel, or because he can noi
become, unhelped, and at once, all that he would He ig
therefore still a fair subject of blame; partly because h«
bas narrowed his capacities, or possibilities, of doing or b^

UNDER LIMITATIONS. 5.^

coming, by Ms former sin, and partly because he onsci-
;)usly does not will the right aod struggle after God now,
j^hich he is under perfect obligation to do, because the tciint
of duty are absolute or unconditional ; and, if possible, stil'i
more perfect because he has helps of grace and favor put
m Ins reach, to be laid hold of, which, if he accepts theni,
will infallibly medicate the disabilities he is under.

That mankind, as being under sin, are under limitations
of executive ability, unable to do and become all that is re«
quired of them b}^ their highest ideals of thought, is then
no new doctrine. Christianity is based in the fact of such a
disability, and affirms it constantly as a fact that creates no
infringement of responsibility and personal liberty at all,
as regards the particular sphere of the will itself. And
therefore it will not be expected of any Christian that he
will be greatly impressed by what are sometimes offered
now as original and peremptory decisions against human
liberty, grounded in the fact that man is not omnipotent —
not able to do or become, what he is able to think.
Thus we have the following, offered as a final disposal of
the question of liberty, by a very brilliant, entertaining,
and often very acute writer': — " Do you want an image of
the human will, or the self-determining principle, as com-
pared wirh its prearranged and impossible restrictions?
A drop of water imprisoned in a crystal ; you may see
mcb a one in any mineralogical collection. One little par-
uicle in the crystalline prism of the solid universe. * '*
The chief planes of its inclosing solid are of course organ-
ization, education, condition. Organization may reduce
the will to nothing, as in some idiots; and, from this
zero, the scale mounts upward, by slight gradations.
Education is only second to nature. Imagine all ♦hfi

6*

54 SELF-DETERMINATION STILL

infants born this year in Boston and Timbuctoo to cliSwr.gi
plac«is I Condition does less, but " Give me neither pov-
erty nor riches" was the prayer of Agur, and with good
Tegison. If there is any improvement in modern theology,
it is in getting out of the region of pure abstractions, ai d
taking these every-day forces into account." *

It may have been a fliult of the former times that, in
judgments of human character and conduct, no sufficieni
allowance was made for these "every-day forces" and
others which might be named , if so, let the mistake be
corrected ; but to imagine that the freedom, or self-deter-
mining liberty of the human will is to be settled by any
such external references, even starts the suspicion that the
idea itself of the will has not yet arrived. So when the
doctrine is located as being a something in "the region of
pure abstractions," because it is not found by some scalpel
inspection, or out-door hunt in the social conditions of life.
What can be further off from all abstractions than the im-
mediate, living, central, all-dominating consciousness of our
own self-activity? Is consciousness an abstraction? Is
any thing further off from abstractions, or more impossible
to be classed with them ? On the contrar}^, the very con-
ceit here allowed, that a great question of consciousness
may be settled by external processes of deduction, and by
generalizations that do not once touch the fact, is only ar.,
attempt to make an abstraction of it. And yet, after it ii
done and seems to be finallv disDOsed of in that manner,
after the discovery- is fully made out that our self-determin-
ing will is onl}^ "a drop of water imprisoned in a crystal,
one little particle in the crystalline prism of the solic
universe," who is there, not excepting the just now verj

♦Atlantic Monthly, Feb., 1858, p. 464.

A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 55

much humbled discoverer nimself, whj does n^t know
every day of Ms life, and does not show, a thousand tiniea
a day, that he has the sense in him of something dilfcrent.
Even if he does no more than humorously dub himsel/
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, it will be sufficiently plair
that his autocracy is a much more considerable figure with
him than a droj) of water in a crystal. He most evidently
imagines some presiding and determining mind at the
Table, that is much more of a reality and much less of an
abstraction.

And so it will be found universally that, however
strongly drawn the supposed disadvantages and hin-
drances to virtue may be, there is, in every mind, a large
and positive consciousness of being master of its own
choices and responsible for them. A translation from
Boston to Timbuctoo will not anywise alter the fact
There was never a man, however miseducated, or sup
pressed by his necessities, or corrupted by bad associations,
or misled by base examples, who had not still his moral
convictions, and did not blame himself in wrongs commit-
ted. So firm, and full, and indestructible is this inborn,
moral autO(iracy of the soul, that, as certainly in Timbuc-
too as in Boston, it takes upon itself the sentence of wrong,
and no matter what inducements there may have been, no
matter how brutalized the practices in which it had been
trained, recognizes stil' the sovereignty of right, and
l»l.}mes itself in every known deviation from it. llifi
judgment of what particular things are necessary to fnliill
the great idea of right may be coarse, and, as we should
Bay, mistaken ; but he acknowledges, in the deepest con-
victions of his nature, that nothing done against the
eternal, necessar»' ia,w of right can be justified. The facf

56 HENCE ALL GREATNESS

that his wild nature is ao nearly untamable to right, Oi
that being or becoming the perfect good he thinks, is &:
tar off from his capac'.ty, so nearly impossible under hk
executive limitations, is really nothing. Still he must,
and does, condemn the bad liberty allowed in every
conscious wrong.

Self-determination, therefore, as respects the mere will
ks a power of volition, is essentially indestructible. And
it IS this gift of power, this originative liberty, consti-
tuting, as it does, the central attribute of all personality,
that gives us impressions of what is personal in character,
so different from those which we derive from any thing
natural. Hence, for example, it is that we look on the
nobler demonstrations of character in man, with a feeling
so different from any that can be connected with mere
cause and effect. In every friend we distinguish some-
thing more than a distillation of natural causes; a freC;
faithful soul, that, having a power to betray, stays fast in
the integrity of love and sacrifice. We rejoice in heroic
souls, and in every hero we discover a majestic spirit, how
far transcending the merely instinctive and necessary
actings of animal and vegetable life. He stands out in
the flood of the world's causes, strong in his resolve, not
knowing, in a just fight, how to yield, but protesting,
wi*ih Coriolanus, —

Let the Yolsces
Plow Rome and harrow Italy. Til never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but giand,
As if a man were author of himself,
And knew no other kin.

Hence the honor we so profusely yield to the martyrs,
who are God's heroes ; able, as in freedom, to yield thei?

IN CHARACTEE 57

flesh up in the fires of testimony, ajii sing themselves
away in the smoke of their consuming bodies. Were
they a part only of nature, £*nd held to this by the law
of cause and effect in nature, we should have as much
reason to honor their christian fortitud3, as we have tc
honor the combustion of a fire ; even that which kindled
thrir faggots : — as much and not moru.

Such is the sense we have of all great character in men.
We look upon them, not as wheels that are turned by
natural causes, yielding their natural effects, as the flour
IS yielded by a mill, but what w^e call their character ia
the majestic proprium of their personality, that which
they yield as the fruit of their glorious self-hood and im-
mortal liberty. What, otherwise, can those triumphal
arches mean, arranged for the father of his country, now
on his way to be inaugurated as its First Magistrate?
wliat those processions of women, strewing the way with
flowers? what the thundering shouts of men, seconding
their voices by the boom of cannon posted on every hill?
Why this thrill of emotion just now running electrically
through so many millions of hearts toward this single
man? It is the reverence they feel, and can not fitly ex-
press, to personal greatness and heroic merit in a gnsat
cause. Were our Washington conceived in that course of
good and great action, by which he became the deliverer
of his country, to be the mere distillation of natural causes,
wh^ "^ -as would allow himself to be thrilled with any such
eentmients of reverence and personal homage? It is no
mere wheel, no link in a chain, that stirs our blood in thifl
manner; but it is a man, the sense we have of a man, rising
out of ihe level of things, great above all things, great as bo-
rn^ himself. Here it is, in demcnstrations like these, thai

&8 WE OUKSELVES, rit4>N

we meet the spontaneous verdict of mankind, apart from all
theories, and quibbles, and sophistries of argument, testify-
ing that man is a creature out of mere nature — a free cause
in himself — great, therefore, in the majesty of great virtuew
and heroic acts.

The same is true, as we may safely assume, in regard
tc all the other orders and realms of spiritual existence;
to angels good and bad, seraphim, principalities, and
powers in heavenly places. They are all supernatural,
and it is in them, as belonging to this higher class of ex-
istences, that God beholds the final causes, the uses, and
the grand systematizing ideas of his universal plan. Na-
ture, as comprehending the domain of cause and effect, is
only the platform on which he establishes his kingdom as
a kingdom of minds, or persons, every one of whom has
power to act upon it, and, to some extent, greater or less,
to be sovereign over it. So that, after all which has been
done by the sensuous littleness, the shallow pride, and
the idolatry of science, to make a total universe, or even a
God, of nature, still it is nothing but the carpet on which
we children have our play, and which we may only use
according to its design, or 'may cut, and burn, and tear at
will. The true system of God centers still in us, and not
in it; in our management, our final glory and completeness
uf being as persons, not in the set figures of the carpei
irt'c so eagerly admire and call it science to ravel.

i^'^inding, now, iji this manner, that we ourselves are
su}.*ernatural creatures, and that the supernatural, instead
of being some distant, ghostly aflair, is familiar to us as
our. own most familiar action ; also, that nature, as a realm
of cause and effect, is made to be acted on from without

ARK SUPERNATURAL AGENTS 59

bv US and all moral beings — thus to be the environment of
our life, the instrument of our activity, the aiedium of
our right or wrong doing toward each other, ar i so the
school of our trial — a further question rises ; -viz., what
shall we think of God's relations to nature ? If it be
nothing incredible that we should act on the ^hain o!
cause and effect in nature, is it more incredible that God
should thus act? Strange as it may seem, this is the
grand offense of supernaturalism, the supposing that God
can act on nature from without ; on the chain of cause and
effect in nature from without the chain of connection, by
which natural consequences are propagated — exactly that
which we ourselves are doing as the most familiar thing in
our lives !^ It involves, too^ as we can see at a glance, at>d
shall hereafter show more fully, no disruption, by us, (;f
the laws of nature, but only a new combination of its
elements and forces, and need not any more involve such
a disruption by Him. Nor can any one show that a mira-
cle of Christ, the raising, for example, of Lazarus, in
volves any thing more than that nature is prepared to be
acted on by a divine power, just as it is to be acted on by
a human, in the making of gunpowder, or the making and
charging of a fire-arm. For, though there seems to be an
immense difference in the grade of the results accom-
plished, it is only a difference which ought to appear, re-
garding the grade of the two agents by whom they are
wrought. How different the power of two men, creatures
though they be of the same order; a IS'ewton, for exam-
ple^ a Watt, a Fulton ; and some wild Patagonian or stunted
Esquimaux. So, if there be angels, seraphim, thronea
dominions, all in ascending scales of endowment above
rme another, they will, of course, have power? supernatii'

♦ Note, page 63,

60 so ALSO IS vl 01),

ral, or capacities to act on the lines of causes in iiatur(\
that correspond with their natural quantity and degree.
What wonder, then, is it, in the case oF Jesus Christ, thai
he reveals a power over nature, appropriate to the scale of
his being and the inherent supremacy of his divine
person.

And yet, it will not do, our philosophers tell us, to ad-
mit any such thing as a miracle, or that any thing does,
or can, take place by a divine power, which nature itself
does not bring to pass ! God, in other words, can not be
supposed to act on the line of cause and effect in nature ,
for nature is the universe, and the law of universal order
makes a perfect system. Hence a great many of our nat-
viraJists, who admit the existence of God, and do not mean
to identify his substance with nature, and call him the
Creator, and honor him, at least in words, as the Governor
of all things, do yet insist that it must be unphilosophical
to suppose any present action of God, save what is acted
in and through the preordained system of nature. The
author of the Vestiges of Creation, for example, (p. 118,)
looks on cause and effect as being the eternal will of God,
and nature as the all-comprehensive order of his Provi-
dence, beside which, or apart from which, he does, and
can be supposed to do, nothing. A great many who call
themselves Christian believers, really hold the same thing,
and can suffer nothing different. Nature, to such, ^r
eludes man. God and nature, then, are the all of exisi
encc, and there is no acting of God upon nature ; for that
would be supernaturalism. He may be the originative
source of nature ; he may even be the immediate, all-im-
pelling will, of which cause and effect are the symptoms
that is he may have made, and may actuate the nrachine

OTHERWISE A NULLITY, 61

in that fateti, foredoomed way which caT:.se and effect de
scribes, but he must not act upon the machine-system out*
side of the foredoomed way; if he does, ne will distur
the immutable laws! In fact, he has no liberty of doing
any thing, but just to keep agoing the everlasting trundle
of the machine. He can not even act upon his worka,
save as giving and maintaining the natural law of his
works ; which law is a limit upon Him, as truly as a bond
of order upon them. He is incrusted and shut in by his
own oiftjnances. Nature is the god above God, and he
can not cross her confines. His ends are all in nature ;
for, outside of nature, and beyond, there is nothing but
Himself He is only a great mechanic, who has made a
great machine for the sake of the machine, having hia
work all done long ages ago. Moral government is out
of the question — there is no govern ment but the predes-
tined rolling of the machine. If a man sins, the sin is
only the play of cause and effect ; that is, of the machine.
If he repents, the same is true — sin, repentance, love,
hope, joy, are all developments of cause and effect ; that
is, of the machine. If a soul gives itself to God in love,
the love is but a grinding-out of some wheel he has set
turning, or it may be turns, in the scheme of nature. If I
look up to him and call him Father, he can only pity the
conceit of my filial feeling, knowing that it is attributable
to nothing but the run of mere necessary cause and effect
in me, and is no more, in fact, from me, than the rising of
a mist or cloud is from some buoyant freedom in its par-
ticles. If I look up to him for help and del verance. He
can only hand me over to cause and effec: of which I
am a link myself and bid me stay in my place to be
what I am made to be. He can touch me by nc

62 A BEING ENTOMBED

extension of sympathy, and I must even break tlirougt
nature (as He Himself can not,) to obtain a look of recog-
nition.

How miserable a desert is existence, boih to Hiir.
and to us, under such conditions — to Him, because of
his chaiacter; to us, because of our wants. To bt
thus entombed in his works, to have no S30pe for his
virtues, no field for his perfections, no ends to seek,
CO liberty to act, save in the mechanical way of mere
causality — what could more effectually turn his goodness
into a well-spring of baffled desires and defeated sympa-
thies, and make His kingship itself a burden of sorrow.
Meantime the supposition is, to us, a mockery, agaii\st
which all our deepest wants and highest personal af&ni-
ties are raised up, as it were, in mutinous protest. If
there is nothing but Grod and nature, and God Himself
has no relations to nature, save just to fill it and keep
it on its way, then, being ourselves a part of nature, we
are only a link, each one, in a chain let down into a well,
where nothing else can ever touch us but the next link
above ! 0, it is horrible ! Our soul freezes at the
thought I We want, we must have, something better — a
social footing, a personal, and free, and flexible, and
conscious relation with our God ; that he should cross
over to us, or bring us over the dark Styx of nature
unto Himself, to love Him, to obtain His recognition,
to receive His manifestation, to walk in His guidance,
and be raised to that higher footing of social under-
standing and spiritual concourse with Him, where out
inborn affinities find their center and rest. And whai
v^^e earnestly want, we know that we shall assuredly
find. The prophecy is in us, and whether we caU

IN HIS WORKS. 63

ourselves prophets or not, we shall certainly go on to
publish it. it is the inevitable, first fact of natural convic-
tion with us. Do we not know, each one, that be is
more than a thing or a wheel, and, being consciously
a man, a spirit, a creature supernatural, will he hesitato
t(j claim a place with such, and claim for such a place "i

* It has been objected that the ar^ment of my treatise is nugatory,
because it does not meet the particular question of creatorship, or the
Aupematural origin of the world. And it does not show, as I readQy
grant, that the atomic forces of the world have not themselves organ
ized and kept in progressive development the general system of nature.
But it certainly does make room for the coexistence of God witb
nature from eternity, in a relation side by side with it, of supernatural
agency and control. There is nothing incompatible, in other words,
between the two ideas, God in supreme working and nature in com-
plete orderly subjection to his will. Then, having reached this point,
and found that all the difficulties in the way of a supernatural suprem-
acy over nature are already surmounted, we have scarcely a stage
farther to go, when we assume that the said supernatural supremacy
itself supposes the fact of a supernatural creatorship, for in that only
could it have begun.

It is very true that the argument instituted does not join issue with
the pretended self -development of nature, as it is now suggested and
taught by a certain school of science. That would have carried me
off into a different field, where all that I am here proposing to gain
would be virtually renounced. To require it was to require a whoUj
lifferent treatise.

CHAPTER III.

NAICRt; IS NOT THE SYSTEM OF GOD. -THINGS AND PO HF
ERS, HOW RELATED.

God is expressed but not measured by bis works ,
'east of all, by the substances and laws included under the
general term, nature. And yet, how liable are we, over-
powered, as we often are, and oppressed by the magni*
tudes of nature, to suffer the impression that there can be
nothing separate and superior, beyond nature. The
eager mind of science, for example, sallying forth on
excursions of thought into the vast abysses of worlds, dis-
covering tracks of light that must have been shooting
downward and away from their sources, even for millions
of ages, to have now arrived at their mark; and then dis-
covering also that, by such a reach of computation, it
has not penetrated to the center, but only reached the
margin or outmost shore of the vast fire-ocean, whose
particles are astronomic worlds, falls back spent, and,
having, as it were, no spring left for another trial, or the
endeavor of a stronger flight, surrenders, overmastered
and helpless, crushed into silence. At such an hour it
is any thing but a wonder that nature is taken for the all,
tlie veritable system of God ; beyond which, or collateral
■vith which, there is nothing. For so long a time is
Bcience imposed upon by nature, not instructed by it ; as
li' there could be nothing greater than distance, measure,
quantity, and show, nothing higher than the formal plati-
tude of things. But the healthy, living mind will, soonei
or later, recover itself. It will spring up out of this pros*
tration before nature, to iiuagine other things, which ey«

J? A.TURAL MAGX1TUJ)ES OPPRESSIVE. 65

hath not seen, nur ear heard, uor science computed. Ii
^-ill discover fires, even in itself, that flame above the
stars. It will break over and through the narrow con-
fines of stellar organization, to conceive a spiritual Kos*
mos, or divine system, which contains, and uses, and is
f.>nly shadowed in the faintest manner by, the prodigious
trivialities of external substance. Indeed, I think all
minds unsophisticated by science, or not disempowered
by external magnitudes, will conceive God as a being
whose fundamental plan, whose purpose, end, and system
are nowise measured by that which lies in dimension,
even though the dimensions be measureless. They will
say with Zophar still, — "The measure thereof is longer
than the earth and broader than the sea." And the real,
proper universe of God, that which is to God the final
cause of all things, will be to them a realm so far trans-
cending the outward immensity, both in quantity and
kind, that this latter will be scarcely more than some
outer gate of approach, or eyelet of observation.

What I propose, then, in the present chapter, coinci-
dently with the strain of remark here indulged, is to
undertake a negative, showing (what, in fact, is decisive
upon the whole question,) that the surrender of so many
minds to nature and her magnitudes is prematuie and
weak ; that nature plainly is not, and can not be, the proper
and complete system of God ; or, if we speak no more of
Qod^ of the universe.

It would seem that any really thoughtful person, when
about to surrender himself to nature, in the manner jaat
described, must be detained by a simple glarco at the
manifest yearning of the human race, in all ages and

66 HUMAN NATURE CRAVES

Qatio/is, for something supernatural. Tlieir aflinity fo:
objects supernatural is far more evident, as a matter oi
iiistory, than for objects scientific and natural. Instead of
reducing their gods and religions to the terms of nature,
they have peopled nature with gods, and turned even theii
Agriculture into a concert, or concurrence, with the un
seen powers and their ministries. Witness, in this view,
the immense array of mythologic and formally unrational
religions, extinct or still existing, that have been accepted
Dy the populations of the world. Notice in particulai
also, that, when the keen dialectics of the polished Greeks
and Eomans had cut away the foundations of their re-
ligions, instead of lapsing into the cold no-religion of the
Sophists, the cultivated mind of their scholars and
philosophers passed straight on by the dialectics, to lay
hold of Christianity ; and Christianity, more rational but
in no degree less supernatural than the religions over-
turned, was accepted as the common faith. And what is
not less remarkable, Christianity itself, as if not supernat-
ural enough, was corrupted by the addition of still new
wonders pertaining to the virgin, the priesthood, the sac-
raments, and even the bones of the saints; indicated all,
and some of them (r^uch as that Mary is the Mother of
God,) generated even, by dialectic processes. And so it
ever has been Men can as well subsist in a vacuum, or
oii a mere metallic earth, attended by no vegetable or ani-
mal products, as the}" can stay content with mere cause
and effect, and the endless cycle of nature. They may
drive the Diselves into it, for the moment, by their specula-
tions ; but the desert is too dry, and the air too thin — they
can not stay. Accordingly, we find that just now, when
the propensities to mere naturalism aie so maniPold anc

4. SUPERNATUR.iL RELtGION. 07

eager, they are yet instigated in their eagerness itself bj
an impulse that scorns all the boundaries of meie knowl-
edge and reason ; that is, by an appetite for things of faitk,
or a hope of yet fresher miracles and greater mysteries —
gazing after the Boreal crown of Fourier, and the thaw
\ng out of the poles under the heat of so great felicity to
come ' or watching at the gate of some third heaven to be
opened by the magnetic passes, or the solemn incantationa
of the magic circles ; expecting an irruption of demons,
in the name of science, more fantastic than even that
which plagued the world in the days of Christ, and which
so many critics, in the name also of science, were just
now laboring most intently to weed out of the gospel his-
tory. True, the magnetic revelations are said to be in
the way of nature ; no matter for that, if only they are
wonderful enough ; all the better, indeed, if they give us
things supernatural to enjoy and live in, without the
name. Only we must have mysteries, and believe, and
take wings, and fly clear of the dull level of comprehen-
sible cause and substance, somehow. Such is man, such
are we all.

We are like the poet Shelley, who, after he had sunk
ir.to blank atheism, as regards religion, could not stay con-
tent, but began forthwith to people his brain and the
world with grifiins, and gorgons, and animated rings, and
Sery serpents, and spirus of water and wind, and became,
in fact, the most mythologic of all modern pcets; only
tnat he made his mythologic machinery himself, out of
the delirious shapes exhaled from the deep atheistic hunger
of his soul. And the new Mormon faith, or fanaticism,
that strangest phenonenon of our times — what is it, in
fact, but a breakino^ loose bv the human soul, nres-iec''

58 Shelley's mtthology.

down by ignorance and unbelief together, tc find some
element of miracle and mystery, in which it may range
and feed its insatiable appetite; a raw and truculent im-
posture of supernaturalism, dug up out of the earth but
yesterday, which, just because it is not under reason
and is held by no stays of opinion, kindles the firec
of the soul's eternity to a pitch of fierceness and a
really devastating energy. And were the existing faith
of powers unseen and worlds abcve the range of science
blotted out, leaving us shut down under atheism, or mere
nature, and gasping in the dull vacuum it makes, I verily
believe that we should instantly begin to burst up all into
Mormonism, or some other newly invented faith, no better
authenticated.

Into this same gasping state, in fact, w^e are thrown by
our new school of naturalistic literature, and we can easily
distinguish, in the conscious discontent that nullifies
both our pleasure and praise, the fact of some transcend-
ent, inborn affinity, by which we are linked to things
above the range of mere nature. Who is a finer master
of English than Mr. Emerson? Who offers fresher
thoughts, in shapes of beauty more fascinating? Intoxi-
cated by his brilliant creations, the reader thinks, for the
time, that he is getting inspired. And yet, when he has
closed the essay or the volume, he is surprised to find — -
who has ever failed to notice it? — thitt he is disablctl
instead, disempowered, reduced in tone. lie has no great
thought or purpose in him; and the force or capacity fox
it seems tc be gone. Surely, it is a wonderfully clear
atmosphere that he is in, and yet it is somehow mephitici
llow could it be otherwise? As it is a first principle tha»
water will not nse above its own level, what better reasoo

KMERSON S BRAMINISM 6P

is there U; expect that a creed which disowi-s duty and
turns achievement into a conceit of destiny, will bring to
man those great thoughts, and breathe upon aim in those
gales of impulse, which are necessary to the empowered
state, whether of thought or of action? Grazing in tlie
field of nature is not ejiough for a being whose deepest
affinities lay hold of the supernatural, and reach aftei
God. Airy and beautiful the field may be, shown by so
great a master; full of goodly prospects and fascinating
images ; but, without a living God, and objects of faith,
and terms of duty, it is a pasture only — nothing more.
Hence the unreadiness, the almost aching incapacity felt
to undertake any thing or become any thing, by one who
has taken lessons at this school. Nature is the all, and
nature will do every thing, whether we will or no. Call
it duty, greatness, heroism, still it is hers, and she will
have more of it when she pleases. If, then, nature does
not set him on also, and do all in him, there is an end;
what can he expect to do in the name of duty, faith,
sacrifice, and high resolve, when nature is not in the plan?
What better, indeed, is there left him, or more efficient,
than just to think beautiful thoughts, if he c?n, and sur-
render himself to the luxury of watching the play of hi;;
own reflective egoism? Given Brama for a god an i
a religion, what is left us more certainly than that we out •
selves become Asiatics? Such kind of influence would
turn the race to pismires, if only we could stay content in
it, as happily we can not; for, if we chance to find ou»
pleasure in it for an hour, a doom as strong as eternity .^
us compels us finally to spurn it, as a brilliant inanity.

Bat we are going further with our point than we
intended. Admitting the universal tendencv of the Tace,

TV) THE HOST IN OPPOSITIOIS-

ill past ages, to a faith in things supernal aral, it may be
imagined by some that, as we advance in calture, we
must finally reach a stage, where reason will enforce a
different demand; they may even return upon us the
list we gave, in our introductory chapter, of the paitie.«
now conspiring the overthrow of a supernatural faith,
requiring us to accept them as proofs that the more
advanced stage of culture is now about to be reached. In
that case, it is enough to answer that the naturalizitg
habit of our times is clearly no indication of any such
new r.tage of advancement, but only a phase of social tend
ency once before displayed in the negative and destruct-
ive era of the Greek and Eoman religions ; also that the
grand conspiracy, exhibited in our own time, signifies
mnc'i less than it would, if, after all, there were any real
agre-iment among the parties. Thus it will be found that,
whr.e they seem to agree in the assumption that nature
includes every thing, and also to show by their imposing
air of concert that in this way the world must needs grav-
itafce, there is yet, if we scan .them more carefully, no such
agreement as indicates any solid merit in their opinion, oi
even such as may properly entitle them to respect.

Thus we find, first of all, a threefold distribution
among them that sets them in as many schools, or tiers,
b:itween which there is almost nothing in common ; one
^;ction or school maintaining that nature is God, anothci
liiat it is originally the work of God, and a third that
there is no God. If nature itself is God, then plainly
God is not the Creator of nature by his own sovereigc
act ; and if there is no God, then he is neither nature no7
its CreatD)'. Their agreement, therefore, includes noth
ing but a point of denial respecting the supernatural

ALSO CONTRADICT EACH OTHER. 71

maintained for wholly opposite and contradictory reasona
So, as regards religion itself; to seme it l«, a natural effect
or growth in souls, and in that view a fact that evinces
the real sublimity of nature ; while to others it is itself u
matter only of contempt, a creation of priestly artifice, or
an excrescence of blind superstition. One, again, believes
in the personality, responsibility, and immortality of souls,
finding a moral government in nature, and even what he
calls a gospel; another, that man is a mere link in the
chain of causalities, like the insects, responsibility <\
fiction, eternity a fond illusion ; and still another that,
being a mere link in the chain of causalities, he will yet
forever be, and be happy in the consciousness tbat he is.
The contrarieties, in short, are endless, and accordingly
the weight of their apparent concert, when set against the
general vote and appetite of the race for something super-
natural, is wholly insignificant. If it be a token of
advancing culture, it certainly is not any token that a
wiser age of reason or scientific understanding is yet
reached; and the grand major vote of the race, for a
supernatural faith, is nowise weakened by it. Still it is a
fact, the universal fact of liistory, that man is a creature
of faith, and can not rest in mere nature and natural caus-
ality. Nothing will content him in the faith tbat nature
is the all, or universal system of being.

But the indications we discover within the realm of
nature, or of cause and effect, are more stniiing even
than those which, we discover in the demonstrations of oui
own history. We bave spoken of a system supernatural,
Buperior to the system of nature, and subordinating
always the latter to itself; understanding, however, thai

72 NATURE ITSELF OFFERS TYPES

both together, in the truest and most proper sense, consti
tute the real universal system of God. Now, as if tc
show us the possibility, and familiarize to us the fact cf a
subordination thus of one system and its laws to the uses
and superior behests of another, we have, in the domain
of x].iture herself, two grand systems of chemistry, or chem-
ical force and action ; one of which comes down upon the
other, always from without, to dominate over it, decompos
ing substances which the other has composed, producing
substances which the other could not. We speak here, it
will be understood, of what is called inorganic chemistry,
and vital chemistry, the chemistry of matter out of life or
below it, and of that which is in it and by it. The lives
that construct and organize the bodies they inhabit, are
the highest forms of nature, and are set in nature as types
of a yet higher order of existence ; viz., spirit, or free
intelligence. They are immaterial, having neither weight
nor dimensions of their own ; and what is yet closer to
mind, they act by no dynamic force, or impulsion, but
from themselves; coming down upon matter, as architects
and chemists, to do their own will, as it were, upon the
raw matter and tbe dead chemistry of the world. We
say not that they have in truth a will ; they only have a
certain plastic instinct, by which their dominating chemis-
try is actuated, and their architectural forms are supplied^
We have thus a world immaterial within the boundaries
of cause and effect ; for the plastic instinct has causes of
action in itself, and acts under a necessity as absolute as
fche inorganic forces. It belongs to nature, and not to the
Buj>ernatural, because it is really in the chain of cause and
effect, and is only a quasi power. The manner cf work
mg, in these plastic chemistries, no science can dis

ur SUPEKNATCHAL AGENCY. 73

cover and their products no science can imitate
Elements that are united by the laws of matter they wiU
somehow resolve and separate, and elements which th.^
laws of matter have ever united, they will bring into a raya
tic union, congenial to their own forms and u?es. Thus
In place of the few distinct substances we should have.,
■were the earth left to its pure metallic state, invaded by
none of these myrmidons of life and the chemistries they
bring with them, we have, provided for our use, immense
varieties of substances which can not even be recount-
oA — woods, meats, bones, oils, wools, furs, grains, gums,
spices, sweets, the fruits, the medicines, the grasses, the
flowers, the odors — representatives all of so many lives,
working in the clay, to produce what none but their exter-
nal chemistry, entering into the clay in silent sovereignty,
can summ.on it to yield. They are types in nature of the
supernatural and its power to subordinate the laws of n^
ture. They come as God's mute prophets, throwing down
their rods upon the ground, as Moses did, that we may
see their quickening and believe. We do believe that
they contain a higher tier of chemical forces, superior to
the lower tier of forces in the dead matter, and we are
nowise shocked by the miracle, when we see them quicken
the dead matter into life, and work it by their magic pow-
er into substances, whose afl&nities were not inherent in
the matter, but in the subtle chemists of vitality b^
whom they were fashioned.

Nothing is better understood, for example, than that
the three elements of the sugar principle have :ao discov-
erable affinity by which they unite, and that no utmo3l
ttrt of science has ever been able, under the inorganic
laws of matter, to unite them. They never dc u?iite, save

/4 AS DR. STKAUSS HIMSELF

by the imposed chemistry of I he sugar-n.aking Uvea
And so it is of all vegetable and animal substances. Tho^
exist because the system of vital chiemistries is gifted
with a qualified sovereignty over the system of inoi-
ganic chemistry. And it would seem as it it was the
special design of God, in this triumph of tne lives ovei
the mineral order and ii<5 laws, to accustom us to the fact
of a subordination of causes, and make us so familiar with
it as to start no skepticism in us, when the sublimer fact
of a supernatural agency in the aifairs of the world is dis-
covered or revealed. For, if the secret workings, the dis-
solvings, distillations, absorptions, conversions, composi-
tions, continually going on about us and within, could be
iefinitely shown, there is not any thing in all the mytholo-
gies of the race, the doings of the gods, the tricks of fairies,
the spells and transformations of the wizard powers, that
can even approach the real wonders of fact here displayed.
And yet we apprehend no breach or suspension of the
laws of dead matter in the manifest subordination they
suffer; on the contrary, we suppose that the dead mat-
ter is thus subordinated, in a certain sense, through and
by its own laws. As little reason have we to apprehend
a breach upon the laws of nature in one of Christ's mira-
cles. Whatever yields to him, yields by its own laws,
and not otherwise. So significant is the lesson given ua
by these myrmidons of life, that are filling the world with
Iheii activity, preparing it to their uses, and transforming
t- — otherwise a desert — into a frame of habitable order
and beauty.

It is remarkable that even Dr. Strauss takes note oi
this sama peculiarity observable in the works of nature
"It is true," he says, "that single facts and groups

CANDIDLY ADMITS. 76

of facts, witli their conditions and processes of change.
are not so circumscribed as to be unsusceptible of ex
terna] influence; for the action of one existence oi
kingdom in nature trenches on that of another; human
freedom controls natural development, and material laws
react on human freedom. Nevertheless, the totalitv ol
finite things forms a vast circle, which, exce]-)t that it owes
its existence and laws to a superior power, suffers no
intrusion from without. This conviction is so much a
habit of thought with the modern world, that in actual
life the belief in a supernatural manifestation, an immedi-
ate divine agency, is at once attributed to ignorance or
imposture."* But, what if it should happen that above
this "totality of things" there is a grand totality superior
to things ? Wherein is it more incredible that this higher
totality should exert a subordinating "external influence"
on the whole of things, than that "one kingdom in nature
trenches on another ? " Why may not men, angels, God,
subordinate and act upon the whole of what is properly
called nature? and what are all the organific pov/ers in
nature doing but giving us a type of the truth, to make it
familiar ? And then how little avails the really low ap-
peal from such a testimony to the current unbeliefs and
crudities of a superficial, coarse-minded, unthinking
world? It is not these which can convict such opin-
ions of "ignorance or imposture." Had this writer,
:m the contrary, observed that the subordination of one
kingdom of nature and its laws to the action of anotii-
er, covers all the difiiculties of the question of miracles,
he could havt had some better title to the name of h
philosopher.

♦Life of Jesu^ Yo\ I, p. 71.

r6 GEOLOGY FURNISHES

Meantime, while we are familiarized, in this mauner.
with the subordination of one yystem of laws and forcei
to another ; and prepared to admit the possibility, if we
nliould n'jt rather say forewarned of *he actual existence
of, anotlier system above nature subordinating that; we
nlso meet with arguments incorporated in the works of
nature^ that have a sturdier significance, rising up, as it
were, to confront those coarse and truculent forms of skepti
(jism on which, probably, the finer tokens just referred to
would be lost. The atheist denies the existence of any
being or power above nature ; the pantheist does the
same— only adding that nature is God, and entitled in
some sense to the honor of religion. Now, to show the
existence of a God supernatural, a God so far separated
from nature and superior to it as to act on the chain of
natural cause and effect from without the chain, the new
science of geology comes forward, lays open her stone
registers, and points us to the very times and places where
the creative hand of God was inserted into the world, to
people it with creatures of life. Thus it is an accepted or
established fact in geology, that our planet was, at some
remote period, in a molten or fluid state, by reason of the
intense heat of its matter. Emerging from this state by a
gradual cooling process, there could of course be no seeds
ii: it and no a estiges or germs of animal life. It is only
a vast cinder, ii. fact, just now a little cooled on the sur-
fac©-, izi still red hot within. And yet the registers show,
beyciid the possibility even of a doubt, that the cindci
v\\as, in due time and somehow, peopled with creatures of
life. Whence came they or the germs of which thej
sprung? Out of the fire, or out of the cindei ? The nre
would exterminate them a 1 in a minute of time, and \i

ANOTHER KIND OF PROOF. 77

will be di flic alt to imagine that the cinder, the nere me-
tallic matter of the world, has any power to resolve itself,
under it'5 material laws, into reproductive and articulated
formis of life.

Again, these ancient registers of rock record the fact that,
here and there, some vast fiery cataclysm broke loose, sub-
merging and exterminating a great part of the living tiibea
of the world, after which came forth new races of occu-
pants, more numerous and many of them higher and more
perfect in their forms of organization. Whence came
these? By what power ever discovered in nature were
they invented, composed, articulated, and set breathing in
the air and darting through the waters of the world ?

Finally man appears, last and most perfect of all the
living forms; for, while so many successive orders and
types of living creatures, vegetable and animal, show ua
their remains in the grand museum of the rocks, no ves-
tige, or bone, or sign of man has ever yet been discovered
there. Therefore here, again, the question returns,
whence came the lordly occupant? Where was he con-
ceived ? In what alembic x)f nature was he distilled ? By
what conjunction of material causes was he raised up to
look before and after, and be the investigator of all
causes?

Having now these facts of new production before us,
vre are obliged to admit some power out of nature anci
above it, which, by acting on the course of nature, started
the new forms of organized life, or fashioned the germs
out of which they sprung. To enter on a formal discussion
of the theory, so ambitiously attempted by some of the
nat^iralists, by which they are ascribed to the laws of
oiere nature or to natural development, would carry W9

78 IT REFUTES

farther into the polemics of geology and zoology thaa ib«
limits of my present argument will suffer. I will onlj
notice two or three of the principal points of this devel
opmcnt theory, in which it is opposed by insurmountabk
facts.*

First of all, it requires us to believe that the origina'
g-irms of organic life may be and were developed out oi
anatter by its inorganic forces. If so, why are no new
gerrns developed now ? and why have we no well-attested
facts of the kind? Some few pretended facts we have,
but they aie too loosely made out to be entitled, for a mo-
ment, to our serious belief Never yet has it been shown
that any one germ of vegetable, or animal life, has been
developed by the existing laws of nature, without some
egg or germ previously supplied to start the process. Be-
sides, it is inconceivable that there is a power in the metal-
lic and earthy substances, or atoms, however cunningly
assisted by electricity, to generate a seed or egg. If we
ourselves can not even so much as cast a bullet without a
mold, how can these dead atoms and blind electric cur-
rents, without any matrix, or even governing type, weave
the filaments and cast the living shape of an acorn, or any
smallest seed ? There can be no softer credulity than the
skepticism which, to escape the need of a creative miracle,
resorts to such a faith as this.

But, supposing it possible, or credible, that certain germs
of hfe may have been generated by the inorganic forces,

♦ "U hoever wishes to see this subject handled more scientifically and in a
noEi masterly manner, may consult the "Essay on Classification ' prefixed
to tho great work of Mr. Agassiz on Natural History, where the conceit
that u \v an ir al and vegetable races were started in their several eras b»
physical agencies, without a creative Intelligence, is exploded sr as to b<
<*«)iever incapable of resuming- even r p'etense of reiason.

■THE DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 79

the development scheme has it still on hand to accounl
for the existence of man. That he is thus cc;mposed in
full size and maturity is impossible ; he must be produced,
if at all, in the state of infancy. Two suppositions, then
are possible, and only two; and we find the speculations
nf the school vibrating apparently between them. First,
that there is a slow process of advance in order, through
which the lowest forms of life gradually develop those
which are higher and more perfect, and finally culminate
in man. Or, secondly, that there is a power in nU vital
natures, by which, at distant but proper intervals, they
suddenly pro luce some order of being higher than they,
much as we often see in those examples of propagation
which we denominate, mosl unphilosophically, lusus natu-
rcE, and that so, as the last and highest lusus^ if that were
a scientific conception, man appears ; being, in fact, the
crown, or complete fulfillment, of that type of perfection
which pertains to all, even the lowest, forms of life. In
one view the progress is a regular gradation; in the other
it is a progress by leaps or stages.

As regards the former, it is a fatal objection that no
8uch plastic, gradual movement of progress can be traced
in the records of the geologic eras. All the orders, and
genera, and species, maintain their immovable distinctions;
and no trace can any where be discovered, whether there or
in the now living races, of organic forms that are interme-
diate and transitional. Tokens may be traced in the
rocks of a transitional development in some given kind cr
species, as of the gradual process by which a frog is devei*
oped; but there is no trace of orgnnized being midway
between the frog and the horse, or of any insect o/
tish, c-n its way to becor.ie a frog. Besides, il is wIicIIt

80 I T l{ E F C T E S

inconceivable that there should be in rerum i.atv.ra anj
kind of creature that is midway, or transitional, between
the oviparous and mammal orders. Still further, if man ifl
the terminal of a slow and plastic movement, or advance,
what has become of the forms next to man, just a little
^?hoi*t of man? They are not among the livicg, noi
among the dead. No trace of any such forms has ever
been discovered by science. The monkey race have been
set up as candidates for this honor. But, to say nothing
of the degraded consciousness that can allow any creature
of language, duty, and reason, to speak of his near afl&nity
with these creatures, what one of them is there that could
ever raise a human infant? And if none, there ought to
be some intermediate race, yet closer to humanity, that
can do it. Where is this intermediate race ?

Just this, too, is the difficulty we encounter in the sec-
ond form of the theory. There neither is nor can be any
middle position between humanity and no humanity. Tf
the child, for child there must be, is human, the mother
and father must either be human or else mere animals.
If they have not merely the power of using means tc
ends, but the necessary ideas, truth, right, cause, space
time, and also the faculty of language, that is of receivini^
the inner sense of symbols, w^hich is the infallible test of
intelligence, \inius lego^'] then they are human ; otherwise
they are animals. No matter, then, hew high thev may
be in their order; their human child is a different form of
being, with which, in one view, they have nothing in com-
mon. And he is, by the supposition, born a child ; the
son of an animal, but yet a human child And then the
question rises, what animal is there, existing or conceiv
abio, wtat accident, or power in nature, that can nurse o:

THE DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 81

Shelter Irom death, that feeblest and most helpless of al]
vjfeatuies, a human infant? Neither do we lind, as a ma1
ter of fact, that the animal races advance in their nursing
and protecting capacity, accordiagly as they advance ir
the scale of organization. The nearest approach to thai,
'iind of tending and protective capacity, necessary to the
raising of a human infant, any where discernible in the
animal races, is found in the marsupial animals ; which are
yet far inferior, as regards both intelligence and organiza-
tion, to the races of dogs, elephants, and monkeys. Nay,
the young salmon, hatched in the motherhood of the river,
being cradled in the soft waters, and having a small sack of
food attached underneath, to support the first weeks of their
infancy, are much better off in their nursing than these
most advanced races. Any theory, in short, which throws
a human child on the care of an animal parentage, i3
too nearly absurd to require refutation.

But there is a scientific reason against this whole theory
of development, which appears to be irresistible ; viz., that
it inverts the order of causes, and makes exactly that whicii
distinguishes the fact of death, the author and cause of life.
For it is precisely the wonder, as was just now shown, of
the living creatures, or vital powers, that, instead of being
under the laws of mineral substances, they are continually
triumphmg over them. Never do they fall under and
gulmiit to them, till they die, aid this is death. Thus,
when a little nodule of living matter, called an acorn, i»
placed in the ground, it takes occasion, so to speak, from
its new conditions, begins to quicken, opens its ducts,
Btarls its pumps into action, sets at work its own wondrous
powers of chemistry, and labors on through whole ceu*
tuiies, composiing and building on new lengths of wood

35 -75-

82 IT iS REFUTED TOO

tir. it hiis raised into the sky, against gravity and the hiwfc
of dead chemistry, a ponderous mass of many tons weight
thers to stand, waving in triumph over the vanquishec
chemists of the ground, and against the raging storms of
ages ; never to yield the victory till the life grows old by
sxhau^tion. Having come now to the limit of its owd
vital nature, the tree dies; whereupon the laws of inor
ganic matter, over which it had triumphed, fall at worh
upon it, in their turn, to dissolve it ; and, between them
and gravity, pulling it down upon the ground, it is disin-
tegrated and reduced to inorganic dust. Now what the
theory in question proposes is, that this same living noduk
was originally developed, organized, and gifted with liff.,
by the laws of dead matter, — laws that have themselv».'S
oeen vanquished, as regards their force, by its dominating
sovereignty, and never have been able to do any thing
more than to dissolve it after it was dead.

We are brought, then, to the conclusion, which no inge-
nuity of man can escape, that the successive races of liv-
ing forms discovered by geology are fresh creations, by a
power out of nature and above it acting on nature; which
it will be remembered, is our definition of supernatural
ism itself And this plainly is no mere indication, but ai.
a^)?olute proof, that nature is not the complete system of
God. Indeed, we may say, what might well enough be
cl-^ar beforehand, that, if man is not from eternity, aa
?jology proves beyond a question, then to imagine that
mcie dead earth, acted on by its chemical and electric
force3, should itself originate sense, perception, thought,.
iT^ason, conscience, heroism, and genius, is to assert, in the
name of science, what is more extravagant than all tlic
Tiiracles even of the Hindoo mythology.

BY OTHER REASONS 88

Theie is jet aootner view of nature, at once closer at
hand and more familiar, which demands a great deal more
of attention than it has received, from those who include
all existence in the term. I speak of the conflicting and
mutually destructive elements known to be comprised in
It. In one view, it appears to be a glorious and complete
system of order; in another, a confused mixture of tumult
and battle. One set of powers is continually destrojnng
what another is, with equal persistency, creating ; and the
whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together.
[f then system is that which stands in the unity of reason,
by what right are we able to call nature a system ? That
it is a system, or more properly part of a system, I do not
question ; for the subjective unity of reason is an instinct
50 powerful in our nature, or so nearly sovereign over it,
that we can never expel the faith of such unity, even
when it is objectively undiscoverable. What I here insist
upon is, that nature, granting the most that can be said of
it as a system, is manifestly no complete system in itself.
On the contrary, it takes on appearances, in all its mani-
festations, that indicate the action in it and upon it of
powers extraneous. It seems to be no complete thing in
itself, otherwise it would flow in courses of order and
harmony, without any such turbulence of conflict and
mutual destruction as we now see. We even look upon it
as a realm played upon by forces of mischief, mixed up
somehow with the disorders of disobedient powers, or, at
least, penally accommodated to their state of sin, as it was
originally subordinated to their uses. Most certain it la
that, if cause and effect are universal, and in that view a
complete universal system, such as our pantheistic and
other naturalizing writers pretend, — subject 'n vio out^idf

64 lUSTINCTIOK RAISED

action, subordinate: to no other and higher tiers of exist
ence, — there could be no aspects of strife and tunxult in tL<
plan ; all, in such a case, must represent the necessar^)>
harmony and order of the system; flowing together on.
down the easy track of its silent, smooth eternity. As i»
is, then, we have manifestly no sufficient right to speak <iJ
system at all, in the proper and true meaning o.' the ten/i,
till we bring into the account existences above nature^
such as have it in their way to will, and war, and bring in
disorder, presupposing thus a plan that mcludes possibili-
ties of strife and conflict. And then, when w^e speak of
system, it will be in the sense of the apostle, when, passing
above the mere platitudes of things, he rises, in the man
ner already described, to the contemplation of invisible
dominions and powers, and of Christ, their everlasting
head, and says inclusively of all created beings in heaven
and in earth, — " For in him all things consist." In this
word "con5z^^," [standing together,] we have the essential
and highest conception of system. Here is opened a
glimpse of the true system of God ; any thing less, or
lower, or different, is only a fiction of science, and no
truth.

But we come to a point more positive and decisive ; viz.,
that we do positively know existences that can not be in-
cluded in nature, but constitute a higher range, empowered
to act upon it. This higher range we are ourselves, ai^
already shown by our definition of nature and the supei-
iiatural in the last chapter. By that definition we are noTV
prepared to assume and formally assign the grand two-
fold distinction of things and persons^ or things and poiiers.
All free intelligences, ii was shown, the created and the

BETWEEN POWERS ANJ THINGS. 8fi

oncTcated, aie, i3 being free, essentially supernatui-al in
their action; having all, in tae matter of their will, a
power transcending cause and effect in nature, by which
ihey are able to act on the lines and vary the combinations
of natural causalities. They differ, in short, from eTery
ihing that classes under the term nature, in the fact thut
chey act from themselves, uncaused in their action. They
are powers, not things ; the radical idea of a power being
Ihat of an agent, or force, which acts from itself, uncaused,
initiating trains of effect that flow from itself.

Of the two great classes, therefore, named in our distri-
bution, one comprehends all beings that are able to origin-
ate new trains of effects, — these are the Powers ; and the
other is made up of such as can only propagate effects un-
der certain fixed laws, — these are Things. At the head
of one class we conceive is God, as Lord of Hosts ; who,
in virtue of his all-originating power as Creator, is called
the First Cause ; having round him innumerable orders of
intelligence which, though caused to exist by Him, are as
truly first causes in their action as He, — starting all their
crains of consequences in the same manner. In the other
3lass, we have the immense catalogue of what are called
the natural sciences, — the astronomical bodies, the imma-
terial forces, the fluids and solids of the world, the ele-
ments and atoms of chemistry, the dynamics of life and
instinct, — in all of which, what are called causes are only
propagations of effects under and ly fixed laws. Hesce
iliey are second causes onl}^; that is, causes whose causa-
tions are determined by others back of them ; never, in
any sense, originative, or first causes. The completeness
of the distribution will be yet mor(} clear, and the im
ncense abyss of distance between the two orders, o/

8

86 POWERS ARE

classes, more visibly impassable, if we add such points o*
contrast as the following: —

Powers, acting in liberty, are capable of a double
action, — to do, or not to do, (God, for example, in creat-
ing, man in sinning;) things can act only in one way,
viz., as their law determines.

Powers are perfectible only by exercise, after they are
made ; things are perfect as made.

Powers are perfected, or established in their law, only
by a schooling of their consent ; things are under a law
mechanical at the first, having no consent.

Powers can violate the present or nearest harmony,
moving disorder in it; things are incapable of disorder,
save as they are disordered by the malign action of
powers.

Powers, governed by the absolute force or fiat of omni-
potence, would in that fact be uncreated and cease ; thing'^
exist and act only in and by the impulsion of that fiat.

We have thus drawn out and set before us two distinct
orders and degrees of being, which, together, constitute
the real universe. So perfectly diverse are they in kind,
that no common terms of law or principle can, for one
moment, be imagined to include them both ; they can be
one system only in some higher and broader sense, which
subordinates one to the other, or both to the same final
causes. One thing is thus made clear ; viz., that nature ia
not, in any proper sense, the universe. We know that it
is not, because we find another kind of existence in our-
selves, which consciously does not fall within the terms of
nature. Probably the disciples of naturalism will make
answer to this course of argument, by complaining that
wc gain our point thus easily by means of oar definitioD

THE TRINCIPAL MAGNITUDES. 87

which definition is arbitrary,- —drawing a distinction be-
tween nature and the supernataral, or between things and
powers, that is not usual. AVhether it be usual oi not is
not the question, but whether it is grounded in reality an^
witnessed immediately by our own consciousness, [f i\
has been the prime sophism of the naturalists, to assume
the universality of nature, and still more if they have
carried the assumption so far as to hold, in fact and even
formally, that men are only things, — under the same lawa
of eternal necessity with things, and equally incapable of
obligation, thus a part of the system of universal nature, —
we certainly have as good a right to raise definitions, that
meet the truth of consciousness, as they to overlook and
hide them, in plain defiance of consciousness. There may
be something exact in such definitions, but there certainly
is nothing arbitrary.

Receiving it now as a truth sufficiently established thai
nature, or the realm of things, is not the system of the
universe, that there is beside a realm of powers, it is dif-
ficult to close the survey taken, without glancing, for a
moment, at the relative weight and consequence of the
two realms. When such a question is raised, there are
many who will have it as their feeling, whether they say
it in words or not, that the world of things preponderates
ir. magnitude ; for what are we doing, a great part of 'OF,
whether men of action or men of science, but chasing the
shows of our senses, and magnifying their import, by the
fftimuidtion of our egregious idolatry? And yet it would
«;cem that any most extempore glance at the world of
po\^"ers would suffice to correct us, and set the realm of
things, vast as it is, in a very humble place. First, we
recognize in the grand inventor}' our fwn human race

88 NATUKE ONLY A FIELD

We call ibeui jiersons, spirits, souls, minds, intelligencea
iree agents, and we see them moving out from nature anc
above it, consciously superior: streaming into it in cur-
rents of causality from themselves; subduing it, develop
ing or detecting its secret laws, harnessing its forces, and
a%ing it sls the pliant instrument of their will ; first causes
all, in a sense, and springs of action, side by side with the
Creator, whose miniatures they are, whose footsteps they
distinguish, and whose recognition they naturally aspire
to. Next adjacent to these we have the intelligent powers
of the astronomic worlds, and all the outlying populations
of the sky ; so numerous that we shall best conceive their
number, not by counting the stars and increasing the
census obtained by some factor or multiplier greater than
the mind can definitely grasp, but by imagining the stellar
spaces of infinity itself interfused and filled with their
prodigious tides of life and motion. All these, like us,
are creatures of admiration, science, will, and duty ; able
to search out the invisible in the visible, and find the foot-
steps of Grod in his works. Then again, also, we recog-
nize a vast and gloriously populated realm of angels and
dspai-ted spirits, who, when they are sent, minister, unseen,
about us ; mixed, we know not how, in the surroundings
of our state, with unsaintly and demoniacal powers oi
mischief, not sent nor suffered even to come, save when
they aie attracted by the low affinities we offer as open
p^^\^s to their coming. To which, also, we are to add
those unknown, dimly-imagined orders of intelligences, of
which we are notified in the terms of revelation, — seraphim,
living creatures, thrones, authorities, dominions, princi
pulities, and pow(;rs.

Now all these living armies or hosts of God, and God

89

the Lord of Hosts, capable of character, society, duty
lo\e, — creators all, in a sense, of things that oth(3rwise
could never be, first causes all of their own acts and
doings, able to adorn what is and contrive what is not,
and carry up the worlds themselves in ascending scales of
unprovement, — can we look on these and imagine that
nature includes ihe principal sum and constitutes the real
system of being ? Are not these other forms of being the
transcendent forms, and if we will inventory the universe,
are they not all, in fact, that gives it an assignable value?
If God Himself be a real existence, what is he, by the
supposition, but the major term of all existence, — the all-
containing substance, a being so great that we scarcely
need refer to the free populations just named, to sink all
that is below Him, and is called nature, into comparative
insignificance. But, when we regard Him as the Uncre-
ated Power at the head of his immense family of powers,
all systematized or sought to be systematized, all perfect
in good or else to be perfected under one law, viz., the
eternal, necessary, immutable law of right^ — a law which
.le first of all accepts himself, in which his own character
of beauty and truth and even his felicity is based, and
which therefore he ordains for all, to be the condition of
their character, as of his own, building nature itself to it
as a field of exercise and trial ; then do we, for once, catch
a true glimpse of the significance of nature. It is no
more that universe the philosophers speak of; it is raised
in dignity by the relation it fills, and, for a like reason,
sunk in quantity to comparative nothingness. Its dis-
tances no longer occupy us, its magnitudes appall us nc
more, the astronomic splendors are tinsel ; nothing is solid
or great, or high, but those transcendent powers whow

8*

90 AND THEIR EXERCISE.

eternities are the main substances of the worlds. Nature
in short, is only stage, field, medium, vehicle, for the uni
verse; that is, for God and his powers. These are tn€
real magnitudes; because thej contain, at once, the import
and the final causes, or last ends, of all created substance.
The grand, universal, invisible system of God, therefore,
IS a system that centralizes itself in these, subordinating
all mere things, and having them for its instruments. For
the serving and training of these, he loosens the bands of
Orion and tempers the sweet influences of Pleiades ; spread-
ing out the heavens themselves, not for the heavens'
sakes, but as a tent for these to dwell in. la, it any thing
new that the tent is a thing less solid and of meanei con
sequence than the occupant?

CHAPTER iV.

PROBl EM OF EXIS'i'ENCE, AS REf.ATED TO THE riCl 0!

EVIL.

W E have reached a summit now, where a wider proi*-
pect opens, and God's true system begins to i-eveal its out-
lines. Nature, intelligently defined, is not as we have
seen^ that system, but only a subordinate and humble
member of it. The principal existences are not the things
or magnitudes which science has for its subjects, but those
everlasting populations of powers that inhabit the realm
of things and do their will upon it. The real universe
invests, or takes in nature, even as the blooming and sue
culent peach gathers its fruity parts, its fibers, veins and
circulating juices, about the nut or stone. Scientifically
speaking, botli parts together constitute the real unity of
the peach. But, if any one should claim this distinction
for the stone, be(3ause of its stability and because it is a
point of inherence and a basis of reaction for the vascular
and fleshy parts, it would he a good and suf&cient reply
that, practically, or as regarding considerations of value,
the fruity part is all ; and that, when we name the peach,
we commonly do not so much as think of the stone, either
as being or not being included. So it is with cause and
effect, laws and instincts, all that we call nature ; it is not
fhe system of God, and is really no co-ordinate part of hia
a inverse, considered as related to the powers that have
bheii" society in :t and get their reactions from it. They
are the universe^ practically, themselves; onh'- having na-
ture as their field and the tool-house of their instrument
ati >nft

92 POWERS x^OT MANAGEABLE

Regarding them now as powers, and so as the giand
reality of God's universal system, let za consider moie
carefully what their relations are to the natural forces and
the general order of the system. They can not, by the
supposition^ be operated under laws of causation, or be, in
aoy sense, included in the order of nature. As little
admissible is it, supposing the strict originality of thvsii
actions, and regarding them as properly first causes each
ol his own that they are subject to any direct control, oi
impulsion of omnipotence. We set no limits, when we
thus speak, to omnipotence ; we only say that omnipotence
is force,. and that nothing in the nature of force is appli-
cable to the immediate direction, or determination of pow-
ers. At a remove one or more degrees distant, force may
concern itself in the adjustment of means, influences, and
motivities related to choice ; or, by spiritual permeations,
it may temper and sway that side of the soul which is
under the control of laws, and so may raise motivities of
thought and feeling within the soul itself; but the will,
the man himself as a power, is manageable only in a
moral way ; that is, by authority, truth, justice, beauty,
that which supposes obligation or command. And this,
again, supposes a consenting obedience, and this a power
(»f non-consent, without which the consent were ini^'^'gnifi-
cant. Which power of non-consent, it will be observed, b
a power also of deviation or disobedience, and no one car.
sliow beforehand that, having such a power, the subje^*;!
w 111 not sometime use it.

S:> far the possibility of evil appears to be necessarily
involved in whe existence of a realm of powers; whether
it shall also "b ". a fact, depends o i other considerations yei
to be named. One of the most valued and most tn'umph-

BY OMNIPOrEXCE. 93

antlj asserted arguments of our new scbcol of Sophists m^,
dismissed, in this manner, at the outset. God thej say l-
omnipotent, and, being omnipotent, he can, of course, dc
all things. If therefore ha chooses to have no sin or
dLsobedience, there will be no sin or disobedience; and if
we fall on what is sin to us, it will only be a form of good
to Him^ a ad would be also to us, if we could see fa*
enough to comprehend the good. The argument is well
enough, in case men are things only and not powers ; but
if God made them to be powers, they are, by the supposi-
tion, to act as being uncaused in their action, which ex
eludes any control of them by God's omnipotent fc:ce,
and then what becomes of the argument? Omnipotence
may be exerted, as we just said, one degree farther off, or
in that department of the soul which is under conditiona
of nature ; but it does not folio w that any changes of view,
feeling, motive, wrought in this manner, will certainly
suffice to keep any being in the right, when he is so far a
power that he can even choose the weakest and most
worthless motive — as we consciously do in every wrong
act of our lives.

We dismiss, in the same short manner, the sweeping
inferences a certain crude-minded class of theologians are
accustomed to draw from the omnipotence of God. They
take the word omnipotence in the same undiscerning and
coarse way; as if it followed indubitably, that a being
cninipotent can do every thing he really wishes to have
done ; and then the conclusion is not far off thai God, foi
some inscrutable reaso)i, w^ants sin, wants misery — else
why do they exist? — therefore that the existence of sin
ind misery supposes no real breach of order, and that
^hefl they come, they fall into +,he regular train of G^u'

94 WHICH IS YET NO LIMITATION

ideal harmony, as exactly as any of the heavenly inoliona
or chemical attractions. All such idolaters of the fore©
principle in God will, of course, be abundantly shocked
by what appears to be a limit on the sway, or sufficiency of
their idol. And yet, even they will be advancing uri-
eons(,'lously, every day of their lives, something which
implies a limitation as real as any they complain of. Thug,
how often will they say, without suspecting any such
implication, that God could not forgive sin without a ran-
som, and could not provide a ransom, save by the incar-
nate life and death of his Son. Why not, if he is omnip-
otent ? Can not omnipotence do every thing ? This very
question, indeed, of the seeming limitation of God's
omnipotence, implied in the sacrifice of Christ, was the
precise difficulty which Anselm, in his famous treatise,
undertook to solve. He states it thus: — "To show for
what necessity and cause God, who is omnipotent, should
have assumed the littleness and weakness of human na-
ture, for the sake of its renewal;"* or, as he had just
been saying, f how he did this to restore the worlds when,
for aught that appears, "he might have done it merely by
his will."

The difficulty was real, no doubt, to a certain class ol
minds, in his time ; but to another class, inthralled by no
Buch crudities in respect to force, it never was, or could be,
any difficulty at all. As little room for question is there
m oar doctrine, when we say that a realm of powers is
not, by the supposition, to be governed as a realm of
things, that is, by direct omnipotence; for we mean by
omnipotence, not power, in the sense of influence, oi
moral impression, but mere executive force ; we mean that

♦Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. XI, •>. 737 fib., p. 736

O F O M N I P O T E >' tJ E . 9(j

God. as bemg omnipotent, is in force to do ull that force
can do — this and nothing more. But force bai? no rela-
tion to the doing of many things, [t can overturn mount-
iiins, roll back the sea, or open a way through it; hot
iiamfestly it has nothing to do in the direct impidsion ^ 1
i soul ; for a soul is a power, capable of character ann
responsibility, as beiag clear of all causation and acting by
its own free self-impulsion. Therefore, to say that pow-
ers, or free agents, can not be swayed absolutely by
omnipotent force, is only to deny the applicability of
such force, not to place it under limitation. It might as
\7ell be called a limitation of the force of an army, to say
that it can not compute an eclipse, or write an epic ; or that
of an earthquake, to say that it can not shake a demonstia-
tion of Euclid.

The doctrine I am stating involves, in fact, no limita-
tion of the power of Grod at all. It only shows that the
reason of God's empire excludes, at a certain point, the
absolute dominion of force. I^or is it any thing new,
more than in the question of Anselm above referred to,
that the force of God consents to the sovereignty of his
eternal reason, and the counsel of wisdom in his purposes.

But it will be peremptorily required of us, at this point,
tc answer another question; viz., why God should have
C3 eated a realm of powers, or free agents, if they must
leeds be capable, in this manner, of wrong and misery ?
Without acknowledging, for one moment, that I am re-
sponsible for the answer of any such question, and deny-
ing explicitly the light of any mortal to disallow or dis-
credit any act of God, because he can not comprehend the
reasons of it, I will simplv say, in reply, that it is enough
for me to be allowed tne simple hypothesis that Go(]

96 IN A KINGDOM OK !'(► W !•: R S ,

preferred to have powers and not things only ; oecanse he
loves character and, apart from this, cares not for aU the
mere things that can be piled in the infinitnde of space
itself, even though they be diamonds ; because, in bestow-
ing on a creature the perilous capacity of character, he
bestows the highest nobility of being and well-being; a
capacity to know^, to love, to enjoy, to be consciously great
and blessed in the participation of, his own divinity and
character. For if all the orbs of heaven were so many
Bolid Kohinoors, glittering eternally in the sun, what were
they, either to themselves or to Him ; or, if they should
roll eternally, undisturbed in the balance of their attrac-
tions, what were they to e?.ch other ? Is it any impeach-
ment of God that he did not care to reign over an empire
of stones? If he has deliberately chosen a kind of em-
pire not to be ruled by force, if he has deliberatelj^ set his
children beyond that kin(*l of control, that they may be
governed by truth, reason, love, want, fear, and the like,
acting through their consent; if we find them able to act
even against the will of God, as stones and vegetables can
not, what more is necessaiy to vindicate his goodness, than
to suggest that he has given them, possibly, a capacity to
break allegiance, in order that there may be a meaning
and a glory in allegiance, when they choose it?

There is, then, such a thing inherent in the system of
powers as a possibility of wrong ; for, given the possibility
of right, we have the possibility of wrong. And it may,
foi aught that appears, be the very plan itself of God, tc
establish his powers in the right, by allowing them an ex
periment of the wrong, in which to school their liberty
bringiup^ theo up again out of its bitterness, by a delivw

KVIL INHERENTLY POSSIBLE. 9?

ing process, to shup it with an intelligent and forever £xed
abhorrence afterward. And then, if this should be his
plan, what an immense complication of acts, events, pro-
cesses contrarieties, and caprices, must be involved in it.
Nature, considered as the mere run of cause and effect, ia
giinplc as a jewsharp. But here we have a grand concilium,
or republic of wills, acting each for himself, and in that
capacity to be trained, governed, turned about and about,
and finally brought up into the harmony of a consenting
choice and a common love and character. The system
will be one that systematizes the caprices and discords of
innumerable wills, and w^orks results of order, through
endless complications of disorder ; having, in this fact, its
reaJ wisdom and magnificence. Thus how meager an
affair to thought were our American republic, if it were
nothing but the run of causes in the climate and soil, and
the mere physiology of the men ; but, when it is consid-
ered as containing so many wills, acting all from them-
selves, incomputable in their action because they are un-
caused in it; reducing so many mixtures of contrarieties
and discords to a beautiful resultant order and social unity;
striving still on, by the force of its organic nisus, toward a
condition of historic greatness hitherto unknown to the
world — considered thus, how truly sublime and wonderful
a creation does it appear to be. And yet there are many
who can not imagine that God has any system or law, in
bis gr^at republic of freedom, if there be any discord, any
contrarieLj, any infringement of his mandates, any dis-
turbance of nature; or indeed if he does not really impel
and do every thing himself, by his own immediate and
absolute causation. Whereas, if they could rise above the
f<5C>)]e conceit bv which thev make the force of God theiT

98 THK I' HO in. KM OK KXISPKNCfc.

idol, they W(nil«l sec ll-mt, possibly, it may i)L' the highest
point of grandeur in his system, that it systematizes
powefH trfjiscending nature, and even disorders it) the fiela
of nature itself.

Or, if it be oljjeeted that tlie athuission or fact of such
Jisorders annihilates the unity (jf God's empire, leavinj.^ il
in a fragmentary, eloven state, whieh excludes the scien
tif^c idea of a proper universe, it is a good and 8u(Iiei<int
answer that Gcjd's unities are all, in the last degree, unities
of end, or counsel as related to end ; consisting never in a
perfect concert of parts, or elements, but in a comprehens-
ive order that takes up and tempers to its own purposes
many antagonisms. What, in fact, is the order of heaven,
or even the atomic order of paiticles, but a resultant of the
eternal strife by which they are instigated? What then
if the powers are able to break loose, and do, from obliga-
tion ; when the system or plan of God is made large
enough to include such a breaking loose, and deep enough
in counsel, from the beginning, to handle it in terms of
sovereign order. The higher unity is not gone because
discord has come in points below, and would not be, even
if the discord were eternal. Still it remains, comprehends
every thing, moving still on its ends, as little diverted oj
disturbed, as if the ])owers all came to wed themselves to
it in loving obedience. There is a real universe now aa
before, because the universal rnsus of the plan remains
3nd because the regulative order that comprehends so
great irregularity retains its integrity unbroken, it^i equi
librium undisturbed.

If now we raise the question more distinctly, wh-it \i
ti^e great problem of existence; as regards the orde? of

A TRAINING INTO PERFECTION. 99

powers, or the human race as being such, it is not difficuli
to answer, following out the view tluis for presented, that
it is our perfection ; the perfection, that is, of our liberty,
the schooling of our choice, or consent, as powers, so that
wc may be fully established in harmony with God's will
iiid character; unified with Him in his will, glorified with
Sim in the glory of his character, and so perfected with
Him in his eternal beatitude. Persons or powers are crea-
tures, we have seen, who act, not by causality, but by
consent; they must, therefore, be set in conditions that
invite consent, and treated also in a manner that permits
the caprices of liberty. It is also a remarkable distinction,
we have noted, that they are creatures perfectible only
after they are made, while mere natural quantities and
objects are perfect as made. Just here, accordingly, the
grand problem of their life and of the world begins.
They are to be trained, formed, famished, perfected ; and
to this end are to be carried through just such scenes, ex-
periences, changes, trials, variations, operations, as will
best serve their spiritual perfection and their final fruition
of each other and of God. If there are necessary perils
in such a trial of their liberty, then they are to be set upon
the course of such perils. Kor will it make any difference
if the perils are such as breed the greatest speculative dif
Acuities. God does not frame his empire to suit and sat-
isfy our speculations, but for our practical profit ; to bring
OS up into His own excellence, and establish us eternally
in the participation of his character. On this subject there
would seem to be very little room for doubt. The scrip-
ture revelation proposes this view of life, our own observ-
ation confirms it, and besides there is really no other in
which even our philosophy can comfortably rest.

100 WHICH TRAINING, AS BETNG FOR,

But this training of consent, this perfecting of .ibertj
in the issues of character, it will help us at thi.4 (sarlj
point to observe, is notliing different from a preparation
for society and a drill-practice in the principles of society
tliat is, in truth, in purity, in justice, in patience, forgive*
aess, love, all the self-renouncing and beneficent virtues.
Accordingly the course of training will itself be social; a
trial under, in, and by society. The powers will be
thrown together in terms of duty as being terms of society
and in terms of society as benig terms of duty. Morality
and the law of religion respect society and the condition
of social well-being, which is the grand felicity of powers
Things have no society, or capacity of social relations. In
mere nature, considered as a scheme of cause and effect,
there is nothing social, any more than there is in the mem-
bers of a steam-engine. And if we really believe that we
ourselves are only wheels, in the play of an all-compre-
hending causation, it should be the end even of the feeling
of society in us. Love, benefit, sympathy, injury, hatred,
thanks, blame, character, worship, faith, — all that consti-
tutes the reality of society, whether of men with God or
ot men with each other, belongs to the fact that we are
consciously powers. Strip us of this, let all these fruits
be regarded as mere dynamic results, under the head of
natural philosophy, and they will change, at once, to be
mere tricks, or impostures of natural magic. Our disci-
pline, therefore, is to be such as our supernatural ancj
social quality I'equires, the discipline of society. Since it
is for society, it m.ust be in and by society. We accord-
ingly shall have a training as powers among other powers,
such as will qualify us for a place of eternal unity ancj
baTniony with them under God, the central and Firs*

MUST BE IN, SOCIETY. 101

Power; so to be set by Him in a consolidated, everlasting
kingdom of righteousness, and truth, and love, and peace.
And thus it is that we find ourselves embodied in matter,
to act as powers unon, for, with, and, if we will, against
each other, in oil the endless complications of look, word^
:ict, art, force, and persuasion; in the family and in the
btatc, or two and two upon each other ; in marriage, frater-
nitj, neighborhood, friendship, trade, association, protec-
tion, hospitality, instruction, sj^mpathy; or, if we will, in
frauds, enmities, oppressions, cruelties, and mutual tempta-
tions,— great men moving the age they live in by their
eloquence ; or shaping the ages to come by their institu-
tions; or corrupting the world's moral atmosphere by their
bad thoughts, their fashions and vices; or tearing and des-
olating all things by irruptions of war, to win a throne of
empire, or the honors of victors and heroes. By all these
methods do we come into society, and begin to act, each
one, upon the trains of cause and effect in nature; thua
upon each other, from our own point of liberty. And ac-
cordingly society is, in all its vast complications, an ap-
pointment— we can not escape it. We can only say what
kind of experience it shall be as regards the fruits of char-
acter in us. Meantime God is reigning over it, socially
related Himself to each member, governing and training
that member through his own liberty. Life, thus ordered^
IS. a magnificent scheme to bring out the value of law and
teach the necessity of right as the only conservating prin-
ciple of order and happiness: teaching the more power-
fully that it teaches, if so it must, by disorder and sorrow.
And nature^ it will be observed, is the universal medium
by or through which the training is accomplished. Th§
powers act on each other, by acting on the lines of ciiuse

9*

102 AND SOCIETY IS CARRIED ON

and effect in nature; starting tlius new trains of events
and conscqaences, by which they affect each other, in ways
of injury or blessing. Tliey speak and set tlie air in mo
t'on, as it otherwise would not move; and so the obedieni
air, played on by their sovereignty, becomes the vehicle
of wonLi that communicate innumerable stings, insults^
Hatteries, seductions, threats; or tones of comfort, love
and blessing. So of all the other elements, solid, fluid, or
aerial— they are medial as between the powers. The
whole play of commerce in society is through nature, and
is in fact a playing on the causes and objects of nature by
supernatural agents. All doings and misdoings are, in
this view, a kind of discourse in the terms of nature, by
which these supernatural agents, viz., men, answer to each
other, or to God, in society. Their blasphemies and pray-
ers and songs and threats, their looks and gestures, their
dress and manners, their injuries and alms, their blows and
barricades and bullets and bombs, these and such like are
society, the grand conversation by which our social disci-
pline is carried on. And it is all a supernatural transaction.
As a conversation in words is not reducible to mere natural
causation, no more is that conversation in bullets and bombs
that we call a battle. Nature could as well talk, as com-
pound her forces in cartridges and fire them with a lev
eled aim. Her activity in all these exchanges, or me
dial transactions, that are carried on so briskly, is only the
activity of the powers through her, and is, in fact, super
latural. They start all these nimble couriers and set their
flying back and forth, by the right they have to come
down upon nature and act t-hemselves into it. To a cer-
tain extent, they are inserted into nature and conditioner/
>y it. They li ve in nature and are of it, up to the point of

THROUGH NATUKE. 108

their -will, but there they emerge into qualified .soveroigiity.
Without this inherence in nature they would have no me-
dia of action, no common terms of order, interest, or trial,
and no such basis of reaction as would make the conse-
quences of their action ascertainable, or intelligible ; with-
out this sovereignty they would not be responsible. Hence
God's way has been, in all ages, and doubtless in all worlds,
to set his supernatural agents in the closest connection with
nature, there t ) have their action and there to perceive its
effects on themselves and others. Even the miracles of Je-
Bus are set as deep in nature as possible ; showing the wine
of Cana to be made out of water, and not out of nothing ;
the multitude of the loaves out of seven, not out of none;
that so the mind, being fastened to something already ex-
istent, may see the miracle as a process; whereas, without
a something in nature to begin with, there could be no
process, and therefore nothing to observe.

How far this range of society extends, whether nature
is not, by some inherent necessity, a medium open to the
commerce of all the powers of all worlds, involving, in
that manner, a perilous exposure to demoniacal irruptions,
till moral defenses and safeguards are prepared against
them, are questions not to be answered here ; but we shar
recur to them shortly in another place.

It has been already intimated, or shown as a possible
thing, that the race, regarded as an order of powers, may
bieak loose from God's control and fall into sin. Will
they so break loose ? Eegarding them simply as made
and set forth on the course of training necessary to their
establishment in holy virtue, will they retain their inno
oence? Have we any reason to think^ and if so what

104 PROBABILITY OF EVIL,

reason to think, that they will drop their allegiance and
fjy the experiment of evil ?

It is very certain that God desires no such result
When it takes place, it will be against His will and against
every attribute of his infinitely beneficent and pure char-
acter. It will only be true that he has created moral r.nd
accountable beings witn this peril incident, rather than to
create only nature and natural things ; having it in view,
as the glorious last end of his plan, finally to clear us of
sin by passing us, since we will descend to it, completely
through it. He will have given us, or, at least, the orig-
inal new-created progenitors, a constituently perfect mold ;
so that, taken simply as forms of being, apart from any
character begun by action, they are in that exact harmony
and perfection that, without or before deliberation, spon-
taneously runs to good ; organically ready, with all heav-
enly affinities in play, to break out in a perfect song. So
far they are innocent and holy by creation, or by the
simple fact of their constituent perfection in the image of
their Maker ; only there is no sufficient strength, or secu-
rity in their holiness, because there is no deliberative ele-
ment in it. Deliberation, when it comes, as come it must,
will be the inevitable fall of it ; and then, when the side of
counsel in them is sufficiently instructed by that fall and
the bitter sorrow it yields, and the holy freedom is restored^
it may be or become an eternally enduring principle.
Spontaneity in good, without counsel, is weak; counsel
and deliberative choice, without spontaneity, are only a
chaiacter begun ; issued in spontaneity, they are the solid
reality of everlasting good. Still it will not, even tnen,
be true that God has contrived their sin, as a means of th€
olterior good, though it may be true that thcj, by theb

AGAINST THE WILL CF GOD. lOt

knowledge of it as being only evil, will be intelligentlj
fixed, forever afterward, in their abhorrence of it. Nor
if we speak Oi" sin as permitted in this view by God, will
it be any otherwise permitted, than as not being prevented,
either by the non-creation, or by the unereating of the roce

It may ap})ear to some that such a view of God's rela
tions to sin excludes the fact, or faith of an eternal plan,
showing God to be, in fact, the victim of sin; having
neither power to withstand it, nor any system of purposes
able to include and manage it. On this subject of fore-
ordination or predetermined plan, there is a great deal of
very crude and confused speculation. If there be any
truth which every Christian ought to assume, as evident
beyond all question, it is that God has some eternal plan
that includes every thing, and puts every thing in its
place. That He "foreordains whatsoever comes to pass " ia
only another version of the same truth. Nor is there any
the least difficulty in distinguishing the entire consistency^ of
this with all that we have said concerning God's relations
to the existence of evil — no difficult}^, in fact, which does
not occur in phrasing the conduct and doings even of men.

Suppose, for example, j;hat some person, actuated by a
desire to benefit, or bless society, takes it in hand to estab-
lish and endow a school of public charity. In such a case,
he will go into a careful consideration of all the possible
plans of organization, with a view to select the best. In
order to make the case entirely parallel, suppose him tc
have a complete intuition of these plans, or possibilities—
A, B^ and C, &c., on to the end of the alphabet; so that,
given each plan, or possibilit}^, with all its features and
a[)pointments, he can see precisely what will follow — a^
the good, all the mischief, that will be incurred by over}

106 GOD STILL GOVERNS

child that -vill ever attend the school. Foi, in each ol
these plans or possibles, there are mischiefs incident: and
there will be children attendant, who, by reason of no
fault of the school, but only by their perverse rvbuse of it,
will there be ruined. The benefoctor and founder, having
thus discovered that a certain plan, D, combines the great
OJj amount of good results and the smallest of bad one<=,
the question rises whether he shall adopt that plan ? By
the supposition he must, for it is the best possible. And
yet, by adopting that plan, he perceives that he will make
certain also every particular one of the mischiefs that will
be suffered by the abuse of it, and so the ruin of every
child that will be ruined imder it. As long as the plan is
only a possible, a thing of contemplation, no mischiefs are
suffered, no child is ruined ; but the moment he decides to
make the plan actual, or set the school on foot, he decides,
makes certain, or, in that sense, foreordinates, all the par-
ticular bad conduct and all the particular undoing there
to be wrought, as intuitively seen by him beforehand.
Nothing of this would come to pass if the school, D, were
not founded ; and, in simply deciding on the plan, with a
perfect perception of w4iat will take place under it, he
decides the bad results as well as the good, though in
senses entirely different. The bad are not from him. nor
from any thing he has introduced, or appointed; out
wholly from the* abuses of his beneficence practiced by
others whom he undertook to bless. The good is all from
bim, being that for which he estaolished the school. Both
?je knowingly made certain, or foreordained by his act.

Ii this illustration it is not difficult to distinguish the
true relation of Goc to the existence of evil. In selecting
the best possible plan among the millions of possibles

BY AX ETERNAL PLAN. 107

open to his «.*untemplation, and deciding to set on foot, oi
actualize that particular universe, he also made certain all
the evils, or mischiefs seen to be connected with it. Bui
they are not from him because they are, in this indirect
manner, made certain, or foreordinated by him. It u
hardly right to say that they are permitted by him. They
come in only as necessary evils that environ the best plan
possible. Such are the relations of God to the existence
of evil. If it comes, it is not from Him, any more than
the ruin of certain children in the school, just supposed,
are from the benevolent founder. And yet He is not dis-
appointed, or frustrated. Still He governs with a plan, a
perfect and eternal plan, which comprehends, in its exact
date and place, every thing which every wrong-doing and
rfivolting spirit will do, even to the end of the world.

Thus far we have spoken of God's relations to the ex-
istence of evil, or its possible prevention. We pass over
now to the side of his subjects; and there we shall find
reason, as regards their self-retention, to believe that the
certainty of their sin is originally involved in their spiritual
training as powers. Madp organically perfect, set as full in
God's harmony as they can be, in the mold of their con-
stitution, surrounded by as many things as possible to
allure them to ways of obedience and keep them from the
seductions of sin, we shall discover still that, given the
fiict of their begun existence, and their trial as perso^is or
powers, they are in a condition privative that involves
their certain lapse into evil.

If the language I employ in speaking of this matter ia
peculiar, it is because I am speaking with caution and
carefally endeavoring to find terrns that will oor vey th?

108 ev:l from a coniiition

right, separated from any false, iinjjrcssion. I speak of a
"condition privative," it will be observed; not of any
positive ground, or cause, or necessity; for, if tlicie were
nny natural necessity for sin, it would not be sin. 1 il
were caused, as all simply natural events are caused ; or,
wliat i^ the same, if it were a natural effect, it would nol
be sin. We ^migbt as well blame tlie running c.f the
nvers, in such a case, as the wrong doing of men; foi
what we may call their wrong doing is, after all, nothing
but the run of causes hid in their person, as gravity is hid
in the running waters. If we could show a positive
ground for sin ; that man, for example, is a being whose
nature it is to choose the strongest motive, as of a scale
beam to be turned by the heaviest weight, and that the
strongest motive, arranged to operate on men, is the
motive to do evil, that in fact would be the denial of sin,
or even of its possibility ; indeed it is so urged by the
disciples of naturalism on every side. So again if we
could, in a way of positive philosophy, account for the
existence of evil — exactly what multitudes even of chris-
tian believers set themselves to do, not observing that, if
they could execute their endeavor, they could also make
as good answer for evil, on the judgment-day of the
w^orld — if, I say, we could properly and positively account
for evil, in this manner, it would not be evil any longer.
When we speak of accounting for any thing, we suppose
a discovery of first principles to which it may be referretl*
but sin \an be referred to no first principles, it is simply
the act of a power that spurns all inductives back of the
doer's will, and asserts itself, a part from all first principles.
or even against them. Therefore, to avoid all thesrj false
implications, and pi'esent the simple truth of fact, I speai

NOI FROM A GKOUND POSITIVE. 10*

of a "condition privative;" by which I mean a moral
state that is only inchoate, or incomplete, lacking some
thing not yet reached, which is necessary to the probable
rejection of evil. Thus an infant child runs directly
toward, and will, in fact, run into, the fire ; not because of
my necessity upon him, but simply because he is in a
«;onditicn privative, as regards the experience needed tc
prevent him. I said also " involves the certain lapse intc^
evil" — not "produces," "infers," "makes necessary."
There is no connection of science or law between the sub-
ject and predicate, such that, one being given, the other
holds by natural consequence; and yet this condition
privative "involves," according to our way of apprehend-
ing it, a certain conviction or expectation of the event
stated. Thus we often attain to expectations concerning
the conduct of men, as fixed as those which we hold con-
cerning natural events, where the connection of cause and
consequence is absolute. We become acquainted, as we
say, with a certain person ; we learn how he works in his
freedom, or how, as a power acting from himself, he is
wont to carry himself in given conditions ; and finally we
attain to a sense of him so intimate that, given almost any
particular occasion, or transaction, touching his interest,
we have an expectation, or confidence regarding what he
will do, about as fixed as we have in the connections of nat-
ural events. The particular thing done to him "involves,''
In our apprehension, as the certain feet, that he will do a
particular thing consequent. And 3'et we have no concep-
tion that he is determined, in such matters, by any causa-
tion, or law of necessary connection; the certainty we
fee] is the certainty, not of a thing, but of a power in the
sovereign determination of hi^^ liberty. I'l this and ik

10

110 OUR NECESSAKV DEFECT

othor sense do we sptak of a condition pri\ative, that
involves a certain lapse into evil.

Having distinguished, in this careful manner, the trut
import of the terms employed, it now remains to look foi
that condition privative on which so much depends. And
H e shall discover it in three particulars.

1. In the necessary defect of knowledge and consequent
wer.kness of a free person, or power, considered as having
just begun to be. We must not imagine, because he is a
power, able in his action to set himself above all natura.1
causes and act originatively as from himself, that he is
therefore strong. On the contrary, even though he begins
in the full maturity of his person, having a constitution
set in perfect harmony with the divine order and truth, he
is the weakest, most unperfect of beings. The stones of
the world are strong in their destiny, because it stands in
God, under laws of causation fixed by Him. But free
agents are weak because they are free ; left to act originat-
ively, held fast by no superior determination, bound to no
sure destiny ; save as they are trained into character, in
and through their experience.

Our argument forbids that we should assume the truth
of the human genesis reported in scripture history; for
that is commonly denied by naturalism. I may not even
assume that we are descended of a common stock. But
.his, at least, is certain, that we each began to be, and
ibeiefore we may the more properly take the case of Ad-
am for an example; because, not being corrupted by any
causes baclv of him, as we most certainly are, and, making
a beginning in the full maturity of his powers, he may be
supposed to have had some advantages for standing fast
ill the right, which we have not.

OF KNOWLEDGE. ^ Hi

As we look upon him. raising the question whether he
has moral strength to s^and, we observe, first of all, tha)
being in a perfect form of harmony, uncorrupted, clean,
in one word, a complete integer, he must of course b€
spontaneous to good, and can never fall from it until his
spontaneity is interrupted by some reflective exercise of
contrivance or deliberative judgment. But this will come
to pass, without fail, in a very short time ; because he is
not only spontaneous to good, but is also a reflective and
deliberative being. And then what shall become of his
integrity?

Entering still further into his case, as we raise this ques-
tion, we perceive that he holds a place, or point, in his ac-
tion, between two distinct ranges of thought and motivity
between necessary ideas on one hand, and knowledges oi
judgments drawn from experience, on the other. In the
first place, being a man, he has necessarily developed in
his consciousness the law of right. He thinks the right,
and, in thinking it, feels himself eternally bound by it.
We may call it an idea in him, or a law, or a category of
his being. He would not be a man without it; for it is
only in connection with 'this, and other necessary ideas,
that he ranges above the animals. Animals have no ne-
cessary ideas; these, especially such as are moral, are the
necessary and peculiar furniture of man. What could u
man do in the matter of justice, inquiring after it, deter-
mining what it is, if the idea of justice were not first de-
veloped, as a standard thought or idea, in his mind?
Who would set himself on inquiries after true things and
iudgraents, if the idea of truth were not in him, as a regu-
lati\-e thought, or category of his nature? Thus it is, bj
our idea of right, that we are set to the coineiv'iif^, oj

112 OUR NErt:sSARY UEFECT

thought of duty, as well as placed under obligation itself,
and we could not so much as raise the question of virtue
or morality, if we were not first configured to its law, and
set in action as being ojnsciously ander it. Herein, too,
we are specially resembled to God; for, by tnis same ides
of right, necessary, immutable, eternal, it is that He is
placed in obligation, and it is by His ready and perfect
homage to this that His glorious character is built. And
this law is absolute or unconditional to Him as to us, to ua
as to Him. No matter what may befall, or not befall us,
on the empirical side of our life. No impediment, no
threat, or fear, or force can excuse us ; least of all can any
mere condition privative, such as ignorance, inexperience,
or the want of opposing motive. Simply to have thought
the right, is to be under obligation to it, without any mo-
live or hope in the world of experience, and despite of all
opposing motives there. Even if the worlds fall on us,
we must do the right.

Pass over now from the absolute or ideal side of our
existence, to the contingent, or empirical. Here we are,
dealing with effects, consequences, facts; trying our
strength in attempts; computing, comparing, judging,
learning how to handle things, and how they will handle
us. And by this kind of experience we get all the fumi-
lure of our mind and character, save what we have as it
were concreated in us, in those necessary ideas of which
we have spoken, and which are presupposed in all expe-
fieii.ce. What now, reverting to the case of Adam, as a
just begun existence, is the amount of his experimental,
empirical, or historic knowledge? The knowledges wf
here inquire after, it will be observed, are such as are got
ijen historically, one by one, and one after another, under

U F K N O W L E L G £ . 1 Lfi

30ii<iition3 of time; by seeing, doing, suffering, comparing,
distinguishing, remembering, and otlier like operations
A. man's knowledge here is represented, of course, b\
svLat he has been through, and felt, and thought. A^hai
then can he know, at the first moment of his being, wheiL
hy the supposition, he has never had a thought, or an ex-
j erience ; or, if we take him at a point an hour or a day
later, none but that of a single hour or day ? Being a per-
fectly disposed creatui-e, the first man sets off, we will say,
in a spontaneous obedience to the right, which is the abso-
lute law of his nature and is in him originally, by the ne
cessary conditions of his nature. But there comes np
shortly a question regarding some act, confessedly not
right, or some act which, being forbidden, violates hiS
sense of right, No matter what it is, he can be as prop-
erly and will be as effectually tested, by adhering to the
sense of obligation, in withholding from an apple forbid-
den, as in any th?ng else. Here then he stands upon the
verge of experimental wrong, debating the choice. What
it is in its idea, or obligatory principle, he knows; but what
it is in the experience of its fruits or consequences he
knows not. The discord,' bitterness, remorse, and inward
hell of wrong are hidden, as yet, from his view. If mi-
natory words have been used, pronouncing death upon
him in case of disobedience, some degree of apprehensioii
may have been awakened in him anticipatively, under the
naniral efficacy of manner and expression, which, even

I'l

>r to any culture of experience, have a certain degree of
I>»>wor. But how little will this amount to in a way of
guard or security for his virtue, for lie is a knowing crea-
ture still; wanting therefore to know, and, if it were nc,
for ihia noble instinct of knowledge, would not be a man,

10*

114 OUR NECESSARY J'EHIL

What then is this wrong he is debating, what (U es it signi
fy ? He does not ask whether it will bring him evil or good
for what these are, experimentally, he does not know.
Enough that here is some great secret of knowledge to be
i>pened; liow can he abstain, how refuse to break through
the mask of this unknown something, and know ! He is
tempted thus, we perceive, not by something positive,
placed in his way, but by a mere condition privative, a per-
plexing defect of knowledge incident to the fact of his
merely begun existence.

Doubtless it will be urged that no such wrong would ever
be debated, if some positive desire of the nature were not
first excited, some constitutional susceptibility, or want,
drawn out in longing for its object. Even so, precisely
that we have allowed; for what is the desire of knowledge
itself but a positive and most powerful instinct of the soul.
Only the more clear is it that, if the desired knowledge
were already in possession, the temptation itself would be
over. So if some bodily appetite were excited; how trivi-
al and contemptible were this, or any proposed pleasure;
if only the tremendous evil and woe of the wrong were
already known, as it will be after years of struggle and
suffering in it. The grand peril therefore is still seen to be
of a privative and not of a positive nature. There must
be positive impulses to be governed, or else there could
not be a man, and the peril is that there is yet no experi-
laental krowledge on hand, and can be none, sufficient to
\>rotect and guard the process.

And ye'j the man is guilty if he makes the fatal choice.
Even if the strongest motive were that way, he is yet y
being able to choose against the strongest, and he consci-
ously knows that he ought. In any view hf is not

UNDER SL-CH DEFECT. 116

obhged to choose the wrong, more than a child is obliged
to thrust his hand into the blaze of a lamp, the ex})erienc.c
of which is unknown. The cases are, m fact, stiong]^
analogous, save that the wrong-doer knows beforehand;
us the child certainly does not, that the act is wrong
>r criminal; a consideration by which he consrious-
Ij ought to be restrained, be the consequences Tvhat they
may. And yet, who can expect that he will forever be
restrained, never breaking over this mysterious line to
make the bad experiment, or try what is in this unknown
something eternally before his eyes I If we rightly re-
member, the false prophet somewhere represents the diffi-
culty of a certain course of virtue, by that of crossing the
fiery gulf of hell upon a hair. Possibly our first man
may cross upon this hair and keep his balance till he is
completely over, but who will expect him. to do it? He
may look upon the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
(rightly is it named,) and pass it by. He can do it; there
is a real possibility as there is a real obligation ; but Adam,
we are told, did not, neither is there any the least proba-
bility that any other of mankind, with all his advantages^
3ver would.

K it should be apprehended by any that a condition pri-
vative, connected as it plainly is with such perils, quite
takes away the guilt of sin, that, I answer, is by the sup*
position impossible. It really takes away nothing. The
right and only true statement is, that the guilt of fdn is not
as greatly enhanced as it would be, if all the knowledge
needful to the strength of virtue were supplied. We dif
fer in this matter from those naturalistic philosophers, who
reduce all human wrong to weakness, and obliterate, m
that manner, all the distinctions of good and evil, We

116 WHICH PERIL DOES NOT

really excise nothing; we only do not condemn as scverelj
as if the eternal and absolute oblip^ation of right, revealed
in every human bosom, were more thoroughly fortified bj
prudential and empiric knowledge.

It may also be objected, as contrary to all experieni^.
as well as to the nature of sin itself, that sin should impart
strength, or increase the capacity of virtue. What in
fact does it bring, but bondage, disability, and death?
Even so — this is the knowledge of sin, and no one is tht
more capable of holiness on account of it. It is the very
point indeed of this knowledge that it knows disability,
helplessness, despair. And exactly this it is that prepare?
the possibility of a new creation. Impotence discovered
is the capacity of redemption. And then, when a soul
has been truly regenerated and set in union with God, its
bad experience will be the condition of its everlasting
stability and strength.

It will naturally enough be objected, again, by some,
who hold the principle of disinterested and absolute vir-
tue here assumed, that no mere defect of empirical knowl-
edge— the knowledge of prudence or self- interest — createa
a condition privative as regards the security of virtue; —
what need of experience to enforce obligations that are
perfect, apart from all consequences? If one is loving
God, as he ought, simply for his own excellence or beauty,
and living by the inspiration of that excellence, what mat-
ter is it whether he knows the practical bitterness, the woo,
the hell of sin, and understands the penal sanctions of re-
ward and penalty set against it, or not? Is he going ic
fall out of his love a: id his inspired liberty, because he ''p
not sufficiently shut in to it by fears and apprehended
miseriesi There is an appearance of force in ihe objec

EXCUSEOUKSIJ^ 117

tion, and yai it is only an appearance For, in the firsl
place, it is not assumed that Adam, or any other man. put
to the trial of a right life, is weak in his spontaneous obe-
dience, because he is not sufficiently held to it by the pru
dential motives of fear and known destruction; but be
'..ause his curiosity, as a knowing creature, is provoked, oi
will be, by not so much as knowing what the motives arc;
in a word, by the profound mystery that overhangs ths
question of wrong itself. Indeed he does not even so
much as know what it will do, whether it will raise
to some unknown pitch of greatness in power and intelli-
gence or not. In the next place, it is not assumed that
the prudential motives of reward and penalty will eve^
recover any fallen spirit from his defections and bring him
into the inspired, free state of love. The office of such
means and motives is wholly negative; viz., to arrest the
bad soul in its evil and bring it to a stand of self-renun-
ciation, where the higher motives of the divine excellence
and love may kindle it. In the third place, it is not as-
sumed that, when souls are recovered from evil, and finally
established in holy liberty, which is the problem of their
tnal, they are made safe for the coming eternity by know-
ing how dreadfully they will be scorched by evil, in caae
they relapse ; but their safety is that, having been dread-
fully scorched already by it, they have thoroughly provod
v«hat is in it, and extirpated all the fascinations of its
.T.ystery.

2. It is another condition privative, as regards the mor-
al perfection of powers, that they require an empirical
training, or coarse of government to get them established
m the absolute law of duty, and that this empirical train

l18 inherent need also

iiig must probabl}^ have a certain adverse eflecl fc r a time
before it can mature its bett(ir results. The eternal ide*
of Justin makes no one just; that of truth makes no one
true; that of beauty makes no soul beautiful. So the
r)ternal law of right makes no one righteous. All tliepe
standard ideas require a process or drill, in the field of
experience, in order to become matured into characters, or
to fashion character in the molds they supply. And thia
orocess, or drill-practice, will require two economies or
courses; the first of which will be always a failure, taken
in itself, but will furnish, nevertheless, a necessary ground
for the second, by which its effects will be converted into
benefits; and then the result — a holy character — will be
one of course that presupposes both.

The first named course, or economy, is that of law;
which is called, even in scripture, the letter that killeth.
The law absolute, of which we just now spoke, is a mere-
ly necessary idea; commanding us, from eternitj, as ii did
the great Creator himself — do right — making no specifica^
tions and applying no motives, save what are contained in
its own absolute excellence and authority. Bat the receiv-
ing it in that manner, which is the only manner in which it
can be truly received, supposes a mind and temper already
configured to it, so as to be in it in mere love and the
^spontaneous homage that enthrones it because of its ex
ifcllence, anu God because he represents its excellence
FJere, therefore, is the problem, how to produce this prac-
tical configuration. And it is executed thus : — God, as a
power and a force extraneous, undertakes for it, first of all,
to enforce it empirically, by motives extraneous; those oi
reward and fear, profit and loss. He takes the law abso-
lute down into the world of prudence, re-enacting it ther*

OF THE LETTER THAT KILLETH, lift

and preparing to train us into it, by a drill-pTactice undei
sanctions. In one view, the sanctions added are inappro-
priate; for they are opposite lo all spontaneity, being ap
pe^ls to interest, and so far calls that draw the soul awaj
from the more inspiring considerations of inherent excel
lence. The subject is lifted by no inspiration. He is
U3wi\ under the law, at the best, trying to come up to ii
by willing, punctuatim et seriatim^ what particular things
arc required in the specifications made by it. If we could
suppose the law thus enforced to be perfectly observed
under this pressure of prudential sanctions, it would only
make a dry, punctilious and painfully apprehensive kind
of virtue, without liberty, or dignity. The more probable
result is an habitual and wearisome selfishness; for, as long
'is the mind is occupied by these empirical and extraneous
sanctions, it is held to the consideration of self-interest
only ; and the motives it is all the while canvassing, are
sucli as the worst mind can feel, as well as that which is
truly upright. And yet there is a benefit preparing in
this first, 01 legal economy, whicli is indispensable; viz.
this, that it gives adhesiveness to the law, which otherwise,
as being merely ideal, we might lightly dismiss; that the
friction it creates, like some mordant in the dyeing process,
Bets in the law and fastens it practically, or as an expei i-
m rental reality; that the woes of penalty wage a battle for
it in which the soul is continually worsted and so brokei:
Li khat it develops in short a whole body of moral
judgments and convictions, that wind the soul about as
cords of detention, till finallj- the law to be enforced be-
somes an experimental verity fully established Just
here tlie soul begins to fee? a dreadful coil of thraldom
rriund it To gret awav from the law ir impossible; for it i?

120 AS A STAGE

hedged iiboiit with fire. To keep it is impossible; fcr iht
struggle is onl}^ a heaving under self-interested motive, tc
get clear of a state whose bane is selfishness. What '*\
means, the subject can not find. He is in a CDndition of
bitter thraldom; his sin appears to be sin even more thai)
■ ver; and the whole discipline he is under seems only tc
I iinijter the knowledge of sin; he groans, as it were, un-
der a body of sin and death that he can not heave.

And so he is made ready for the second economy, that of
li'berating grace and redemption. For now, in Christ, the
law returns, a person, clothed in all personal beauty, and
offers itself to the choice, even as a friend and deliverer; sc
that, being taken with love to Christ, and drawing near at
his call in holy trust, the bondman is surprised to find that
he is loving the law as the perfect law of liberty; which
was the point to be gained or carried. And so, what be-
gan, as a necessary idea, is w^rought into a character and
become eternal fiict. The whole operation, it will be ob-
served, supposes a condition privative in the subject, sucft
that he suffers, at first, a kind of repulsion by the law, and
iu only won to it by embracing the goodness of it in a per-
.sonal friend and deliverer.

And something like this double administration of law
and liberty we distinguish, in many of the matters even
of our worldly life. No exactness of drill makes an anny
-fiicient or invincible, till it is fired by some free impulse
fjom the leader, or the cause; and yet the wearisome and
tedious drill is a previous condition, without which this
latter were impossible. No great work of genius was ever
written in the way of work, or before the wings were
lifted hj some gale of inspiration ; which gale, again, would
never bav^ begun to blow, had n M; the windows of thoiigl: f

OF TRANSITION 121

and the chambers of light and beauty within been opened,
by years of patient toil and study. The aitist iDlods on
wearily, drudging in the details of his art, till finally the
inspiration takes him and, from that point onward, hi?
baud is moved by his subject, with no conscious drudger;y
cr labor. In the family, we meet a much closer and
equally instructive analogy. The young child is over-
taken first by the discipline of the house, in a form cf
law ; commanded, forbidden, sent, interdicted, all in a way
of authority, and to that authority is added something
which compels respect. If he is a ductile and gentle child,
he will be generally obedient; but the examples are few in
which the child will not sometimes be openly restive, or
even stiffen himself in willful disobedience. In any case,
it will be law, not coinciding always with the child's wish-
es, or his opinions of pleasure and advantage; and there
will be a sense of constraint, more or less irksome, as if
the authority felt were repugnant and contrarj- to the de-
sired happiness. By and by, however, authority changes
its aspect and becomes lovely. The habit of obedience,
the experience had of parental fidelity and tenderness, and
the discovery made of absurdity and hidden mischief in
the things interdicted, as it seemed arbitrarily, gradually
abolishes the sense of law and substitutes a control not
felt before, the control of personal love and respect. Sc
that, finally, the man of thirty will carefully and rever
t u tly anticipate the minutest wishes of a parent, and, if that
•'Au be called obedience, will obey him; when, as a cnild
of ihree, he could barely endure his authority, and sub-
mitted lo it only because it was duty enforced.

Such is the analogy of common life. Law and Llerty
are the two grand terms under which it is passed — la i

n

l22 TO SPIRITUAL LIBERTY.

first and liberty afterward. And with all this correspond!
what is said, in the Kew Testament, of law as '•elated to
gospel. It is said, in one view, of the laborious ritual of
Moses; yet, by this historic reference, it is designed tio
lead the mind back into a more general and deeper truth.
[t is called "the letter that killeth," as related to "the
spijit that giveth life." It is said to have its value in the
development of knowledge; for by the law is "the knowl-
edge of sin" — "that sin by the commandment might be-
come exceeding sinful." It is bondage introducing and
preparing liberty. "The law gendereth to bondage,"
but the gospel, 'Jerusalem that is above, is free.'" "If
there had been a law that could have given life, verily
righteousness should have been b}^ the law;" but that was
impossible. " It is the schoolmaster to bring us to Christ,''
and then, having embraced him, he becomes a new inspir
a^ion in our love, after which we no more need "to be
under a schoolmaster." "The law made nothing perfect,
but the bringing in of a better hope did."

There is reason to suspect that many will reject what I
am here advancing. They will do it, of course, for the
simple reason that they know no other kind of virtue but
that which is legal, having therefore, in their conscious-
ness, nothing which answers to the liberty of the Spirit,
To them, what I have here said will have an appearance
of cant. Exactly contrary to which, I affirm it as the only
competent philosophy, perceiving, I think, ns clearly as 1
perceive any thing, that the conjunction discovered in
Christianity :f these two ininistrations is not any casual
01 accidental matter — as if men had somehow fallen un-
der law, and God was constrained, afterward, to do some
tiling for them — on the contrary, that the w" ole manage

A THIRD LIABILITY 123

ment is from befure the foundation of the world, having
respect to a grand antecedent necessity, involved in the
perfecting of virtue. God never proposed to perfect a
character in men by mere legal obedience. But he insti
tuted law originally, no doubt, as a first stage, preparatory
to a second; both of which were to be kept on foot to-
gether, and both of which are blended, in one way or an-
other, probably, in the training of all holy minds in all
worlds.

8. There appears to be yet another condition privative,
as regards our security against sin, in the social relation of
powers and their trial in and through that relation ; viz.,
that they are, at first, exposed to invasions of malign in-
fluence from each other, which can nowise be effectually
prevented, save as they are finally fortified by the defenses
of character. In this view, if I am right, a great part of
the problem of existence must consist in what may be
called the fencing of powders; that is, by assorting and sep-
arating the good from the bad, and rendering one class ii»-
accessible to the arts and annoyances of the other.

The individual, as we' have seen, is to be perfected for
society ; and, for that reason, he must needs have his trial
m and through society. A still wider truth appears to be
that the perfect society thus preparing is to be one and
aniversal, comprehending the righteous populations of all
=;«OTlds and ages; for the terms of duty and religion are
In their nature universal; and for this reason it appeaia
iilso to be necessary, that the trial and training should be
in some open field of activity common to all the powers
Accordingly as we are made with social, and, if I ma)
use the term, commercial natures; having inlets of sympi^

i24 TO INVASION,

ihv and impression, by which we may feel one another
capacities to receive and give, to wrong, to offend, to oom-
fort, to strengthen, to seduce, and betray one another; 3C
tliere is an antecedent probability that the terms of social
( KPOsure will involve some possibility of access, on the
j;art of beings unseen, that are not of our race. Indeed,
if it should happen that spirits are impossible to be sorted
and fenced apart by walls of matter, or gulfs of distance,
or abysses of emptiness, something like this would seem
10 be necessarily involved, till they are sorted and the
gates of commerce are shut fast, by the repulsions of con-
trary affinities. And accordingly, till this takes place
there must be exposures to good and malign influence,
more numerous than we can definitely mark or distinguish.

With this corresponds, it will be observed, all that is
said in the scriptures of the activity of ministering angels
engaged to confirm and comfort us, the insidious arts of a
bad spirit to accomplish our fall, and the manifold entice-
ments and malignant possessions of evil demons generally.
But I advert to these representations, it will be observed,
not in a way of assuming their authenticity, for that is for-
bidden by the nature of my argument. I only cite them
as offering conceptions to our mind, or imagination, that
may be necessary to a full comprehension of what is in-
cluded in the subject.

Many will object most sturdily and peremptorily, I mn
well aware, to the possibility of enticements and arts, prac-
ticed by unseen agents, to draw us off from our fidelity tc
God; alleging that such an exposure impeaches the
fetherliood of God, and virtually destroys our responsi
bility. But what if it should happen to be involved, as
the necessary coiditioii of any properly social exiptenre'

AT A G R E .A T D I S A D V A X T A G E , 12£

And it might as well be urgeo that every lemptation is ar.
'mpeachment of God, which comes from sources unseeii.
being an approach that takes us off our guard, and upsetf
the balance, possibly, of our judgments, just when we ai^":
most implicitly confiding in them. Allowing such an ob
[ection therefore, responsibility would be impossible; fb?
vho of us was ever able to see distinctly, by what avenues
all of his temptations or enticements came? Besides, say-
ing nothing of bad spirits, by how many methods, by air
look, sympathy, do we produce immediate impressions in:
each other, whose sources are never noted or suspected;
conveying sentiments drawing to this or that, fascinating,
magnetizing, playing upon one another, by methods as
subtle and secret, as if the mischief came from powers of
darkness. And yet we never imagine that such entice-
ments encroach at all on the grounds of our just responsi-
bility ; and all for the manifest reason that it never mat-
ters whence our enticements come, or by what arts the
color of our judgments is varied and their equilibrium
disturbed; still we know, in all cases, that the wrong is
wrong, and knowing that is enough to complete our re-
sponsibility.

I am well aware of the modern tendency to resolv^=
what is said on this subject in the scripture into figures of
speech, excluding all idea of a literal intermeddling of
bad spirits. But that there are bad spirits, there is no
mere reason to doubt, than that there are bad men, (who
are in fact bad spirits,) and as little that the bad spirits arc
spirits of mischief, and will act in character, according to
their opportunity. As regards the possession by foul spir-
its, it has been maintained, by many of the sturdiest sup*
prirters of revelation, and by reference to the words era

11*

126 FROM THE ASSAULTS

ployed in one ur two e;tses by the evangelists t.liemselves
that they were only diseases regarded in that light. Oth-
ers have assumed the necessary absurdity of these posses-
sions without argument; and still (tliers have made them
A subject of much scoffing and profane ridicule. B\>1
the last half-century, and contemporaneously with out
Gcodern advances in science, there has been a general
gravitation of opinion, regarding this and many other
points, toward the doctrine of the Sadducees. Which
makes it only the more remarkable, that now, at last, a
considerable sect of our modern Sadducees themselves,
who systematically reject the faith of any thing supernat-
ural, are contributing what aid they can to restore the
precise faith of the New Testament, respecting foul spirits.
They do not call their spiritual visitors devils, or their de-
monized mediums possessed persons. But the low man-
ners of their spirits and the lying oracles which it is agreed
that some of them give, and the power they display of
acting on the lines of cause and effect in nature, w^hen
thumping under tables, jolting stoves, and floating men
and women through the upper spaces of rooms, proves
them to be, if they are any thing, supernatural beings;
leaving no appreciable distinction between them and the
demoniacal irruptions of scripture. For though there be
some talk of electricity and science, and a show of redu-i
irg the new discovered commerce to laws of calculable
recurrence, it is much more likely to be established bj
Uieir experiment's, as a universal fact, that whatever being,
of whatever woild, opens himself to the visitation, or in-
yites the presence of powers, indiscriminately as respects
iheir character, whether it be under some thin show of
•icientific practice or not,, will assr.redly have the commerof

OF BAD SPIRITS. 12?

invited I Far euougii is it from being t llier impossible,
cr incredible, and exactly this is what cmr new school oi
charlatanism suggests, that immense multitudes of powers,
interfused, in their self-active liberty, through all tht
abysses and worlds of nature, have it as the battle-field
cf their good or malign activity, doing in it and upon it,
as the scriptures testify, acts supernatural that extend to
as. This being true, what shall be expected, out that
where there is any thing congenial in temper or character
to set open the soul, and nothing of antipathy to repel;
or where any one, through a licentious curiosity, a fool-
ish conceit of science, or a bad faith in powers of ne-
cromancy, calls on spirits to come, no matter from what
world — in such a case what shall follow, but that troops of
malign powers rush in upon their victim, to practice theii
arts in him at will. I know nothing at all personally of
these new mysteries ; but if a man, as Townsend and many
others testify, can magnetize his patient, even at the dis-
tance of miles, it should not seem incredible that foul spir-
its can magnetize also. This indeed was soon discovered
in the power of spirits to come into mediums, and make
them write and speak their oracles. It is also a curious
coincidence that no one, as we are told, can be magnetized,
or become a medium, or even be duly enlightened by a
medium, who is uncongenial in his affinities, or maintains
any quality of antipathy in his will, or temper, or charac-
ter; for then the commerce sought is impossible. Beside
It is rcTT-iirkable that the persons who dabble most freely
in this Kind of commerce, are seen, as a general fact, to
nm down in their virtue, lose their sense of principles,
and oecome addled, by their famil'.arity with the po-wers
of mischiefl

128 CONCLUSION REACHED.

In tbese references to bad spirits, and the matter tt* de
inonology in general, I do not assume to have estaljlishec
any very decisive conclusion; for the scripture representa-
tions can not he assumed as true, and the new demons of
science I know nothing about, except by report. This
only is made clear; that the suggestion of a condition pii-
native in men, as regards their defense against the irrup
tion of other powers, is one that can not be disproved by
any facts within the compass of our knowledge. And
since other powers doubtless exist, both good and
bad, who are being sorted and fenced apart by the con-
trary affinities of character, nothing can be more con-
sonant to reason than that there must be exposures to
unseen mischief in our trial, till these eternal fences
are raised.

We find then — this is the result of our search — that sm
can nowise be accounted for; there are no positive grounds,
or principles back of it, whence it may have come. We only
discover conditions privative, that are involved, as neces-
sary incidents in the begun existence and trial of powers.
These conditions privative are in tlie nature of perils, and
while they excuse nothing, for the law of duty is always
plain, they are yet drawn so close to the soul and open
their gulfs, on either hand, so deep, that our expectation of
the fall is leally as pressing as if it were determined by
some law that annihilates liberty. Liberty we know is not
annihilated. And yet we say, looking on the state of raan
made perilous, in this manner, by liberty, that we can not
expect him to stand.

Some persons, who are accustomed to receive the scrip-
tures with great rtjverence and whose fseling therefore is

THE CASE OF GOOD ANGELS 129

the more entitled to respect, may be disturbed by tin
apprehension, that we violate what they take for an evi-
dently seriptdral truth concerning the good angels. Tnese
are finite beings, and had a begun existence, and yet we are
taught, as it will be urged, that they have never fallen',
"•.^iowing 1 complete possibility of creating free beings, or
prwers that will never sin; — at which point our doctrine
IB seen to come into open and direct conflict with the
scriptures.

I have no pleasure, certainly, in raising a conflict with
any opinion not absolutely corrupt, when it has been so
long held, and with such unquestioning deference, by
multitudes of christian believers. But I am obliged, by
the terms of my argument, to make a revision of the evi-
dences by which this opinion is sustained. In the Ante-
Copernican conceptions of the universe, such an opinion
was more likely to be taken up than now ; and it seems to
be a relic of false interpretation then introduced. I find
no clear evidence of any such opinion in the christian
scriptures. They do affirm the existence of good angels,
who, for aught that appears, have all been passed through
and brought up out of a fall, as the redeemed of mankind
will be. They affirm the existence also of bad angels,
who certainly have not been kept from the experiment or
(choice of evil. A significant intimation is supposed to be
found in the text, — " To the intent that now, unto the
principalities f^.nd powers in heavenly places, might be
iQO vn by the church, the manifold wisdom of God " — a9
if htie for the first time, they were to be instructed, by
the fact of human redemption. But every thing mani
festly turns here on the epithet *• manifold," ['7r'oX'j'7ro»3ciXor,j
vliich, in fact, means only diversified^ not something xiqh

iSO AFFORDS NO VALID

and iJtrange ; yielding us a bint, rather, which runs exactl*
contrary to the common opinion ; viz., that the heavenly
powers discover, only through the church of our world,
ano'iher plan of grace and mercy unfolded, different from
Iheir own. In respect to the " new song," so often referred
» in this connection, it is sufficient to say that it is joined
)y beings not of our race, and is abundantly new aa
related to a work of redemption among men ; different in
form and manner, as in sphere, from any other.

But the principal or hinge text on this subject is the
6th verse of Jude's epistle, — ''And the angels that kept
not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath
reserved, &;c.," — leaving the implication, it is supposed,
that other angels have kept their first estate, and stood
fast in obedience. But this, it has been shown by Mr.
Faber, in a full and somewhat overdone discussion,* is a
totally mistaken conception of the passage. The term
" angels," he has shown, refers to the " sons of God,"
whose apostasy is set forth in the 6th chapter of Genesis.
The term ol^x'^^ rendered " first estate," as denoting a moral
condition, has no such meaning in any known example.
It signifies rather a prmcipate^ or principality^ and the rep*
resentation is, that certain persons of the Sethite, or church
people, growing lewd and dissolute in their life, went over
to the corrupt Cainites and joined them in their vices.
This also is implied in the phrase " left their own habita
•ion/' [oiy.riTripm,'] their domicil, or native place andcoun-
iiy ; language entirely malapropos, when referred to celes-
tial beings. Besides their crime was not angelic — the
'' going after strange flesh" — and, what is yet more string-
ent, tiieir crime is defined by a comparison which showi

* Three Diflpengatio:is, Vol. I., pp. 344-431.

dR SCRIPTURAL OBJECTION. 13:.

exactly what it was — "Even as Sodom and GomoiTak
and tlie cities about them, iu. like manner, giving
themselves over to fornication and going after strange
flesh/' &c. And finally, to render this interpretation yet
more certain, it is shown that Joseph us, in speaking of the
'*sons of God" in Genesis, calls them angels^ and uses the
same, word [apx^ij principality^ in describing their apos-
tasy. On the whole, it does not appear that there is any
vestige of authority, in Scripture, for the opinion that the
good angels are beings that have never sinned.

Contrary to this, there are many passages that, without
being severely pressed, might be made to indicate the fact
that they are all redeemed spirits. Thus, where the desire
of "angels to look into these things" is spoken of, an
indication is given, not that they are unacquainted with
any su^h fact as redemption, but of the contrary fact, that
this appetite is whetted by their experience. Why should
they be so eager to look into a matter wholh^ unknown?
So when the angels break into the sky, at the advent of
Christ, crying " Peace on earth," they seem to know, in
their deepest heart's feeling already, what this "peace"
signifies. It is remarkabje also that the one only text of
scripture thai could fairly be insisted on, as a direct and
formal declaration of scripture on this point, is that of the
apostle, when, extolling the universal headship of Christ
ne says what appears to be directly contrary to all these
>issumptions, — "By him to reconcile all things unto hira
i?€lf, whether they be things on earth, or things ir.
heaven."

Falling back then upon our own first principles, as re
quired by the tenor of our argument, we find that angels
like men, are, by the supposition, finite boino-g. If finite

182 NOT IMPLIED THAT SIN

then are they beings who think in succes«iDn one tling
after another, as we do. If so, then there wiis a point in
the early date, or first hours of their existence, when they
had thought little and had little experience, and of course
knew as little as they had thought. And ^o^ given Lhf
fact of their finite and begun existence, it seems to follow
as a conclusion, that they were in the same weakness, o1
condition privative, with us. What then can we judge^
bat that, probably, there is some ground-principle, or law,
common both to them and to us, that involves them in the
same fortunes with us, and requires a method of training
and redemption analagous to that which is ordained foi
men? God, as we all agree, is a being who works by
system — with a glorious variety and yet by system — and
it would be singular for his plan to break down in some
little department like ours, and go straight forward to its
mark, in other and better-contrived parts of his creation.
How much better and more consonant also to our feeling
to suppose that there is some antecedent necessity, inhe-
rent in the conception of finite and begun existences, that,
in their training as powers, they should be passed through
the double experience of evil and good, fall and redemp-
tion.

At the same time I am not anxious to carry my argu
iue.it so far ; and I readily concede that it might be pre-
sumptuous to insist on such a conclusion, as being one of
the known truths. I only ask that a similar concessicn
be allowed, on the other side, as regards an opinion cer
tainly not authenticated by scripture ; for, when that li
taken out of the way, as being a scriptural objection tc
my argument, I have no longer any concern with iu If
ru'v not be amiss to add, further, that what [ have

IS ANY MEANS OF GOOD. 13S

here advaDced, in a somewhat positive form, (xjncerning
sm, I value mostly as an hypothesis. Indeed what we
want, to clear cur difficulties here, is not so much a doc-
trine, as to find that some rational hypotliesis is possi-
ble. And my object is sufficiently gained when that if*
admitted.

II it should be objected that my doctrine, or hypothcisiB
here, is only another version of the scheme that accounts
for sin as being the necessary means of the greatest good,
it is enough to answer that I see no great reason to be
concerned for it, even if it were. Still I do not perceive
that it proposes to account for sin as being a means of any
thing. It makes much of the knowledge of sin, or of its
bitter consequences, and especially of the want of that
knowledge, save as it is gotten by the bad experience it-
self. But the knowledge of sin is, in fact, knowing — that
is the precise point of it — that it is the means of nothing
good, that it is evil in all its tendencies, relations, opera-
tions, and results, and will never bring any thing good to
any being. If then the knowing of sin to be the possible
means of no good is itself a means of good, wherein does
it appear that I am reproducing the doctrine that sin is the
necessary means of the greatest good? Because, it may
be answered, sin, as a fact of consciousness, is by the sup^
position the necessar}^ means of the knowledge of sin.
But thit, I reply, is a trick of argument practiced or the
v.^ra means. Undoubtedly sin, as a fict of ccnsciousness,
.T tlie necessary subject of the knowledge of sin. If it
w tn affirmed that the knowledge of certain sunken rocks,
in the track of some voyage, is necessary to a safe passage.
hr»w easy to show, by just the argument here employed, that,
since the rocks are a necessary means of the knowledge of

134 THE TRUE CONCEPTION

the rocks, the rocks are therefore, and by necessary coum
({name, the necessary means of a safe passage I

There is still another point, the existence of Satan, o]
the devil, and the account to be made of him, which ii
aiwa3^s intruded upon discussions of this nature, and can
ftot well be avoided. God, we have seen, might create p
realm of things and have it stand firm in its order; but,
if He creates a realm of powers, a prior and eternal cer-
tainty confronts Him, of their outbreak in evil. And at
just this point, we are able, it may be, to form some just
or not impossible conception of the diabolical personality.
According to the Manichees or disciples of Zoroaster, a
doctrine virtually accepted by many philosophers, two
principles have existed together from eternity, one of
which is the cause of good and the other of evil ; and by
this short process they make out their account of evil
With sufficient modifications, their account is probably true.
Thus if their good principle, called God by usj is taken as
a being, and their bad principle as only a condition pri-
vative ; one as a positive and real cause, the other as a bad
possibility that environs God from eternity, waiting to be-
come a fact- and certain to become a fact, whenever the
opportunity is given, it is even so. And then it follows
that, the moment God creates a realm of powers, the bad
possibility as certainly becomes a bad actuality, a Satan, oi
devil, in esse; not a bad omnipresence over against God,
and His equal — that is a monstrous and horrible crncep-
tion — but an outbreaking evil, or empire of evil in created
spirits, according to their order. For Satan, or the de\'il^
taken in the singular, is not the name of any particular
^rson, neither is it a persoration merely of temptatior.

OF SATAN OH THE DEVIL. 13r

01 impersonal evil, as many insist ; for there is really no
such thing as impersonal evil in the sense of moral evil
but the name is a name that generalises bad persons ot
spirits, with their bad thoughts and characters, many ip
one. That there is any single one of them who, by ;\is-
ti action or pre-eminence, is called Satan, or devil, is
wholly improbable. The name is one taken up by the
miagination to designate or embody, in a conception the
mind can most easily wield, the all or total of bad minds
and powers. Even as Davenport, the ablest theologian
of all the New England Fathers, represents, in his Cate-
chism; answering carefully the question, — "What is the
devil ? " — thus : " The multitude of apostate angels which,
by pride, and blasphemy against God, and malice against
man, became liars and murderers, by tempting him to that
sin."

There is also a further reason for this general unifying
of the bad powers in one, or under one conception, in the
fact that evil, once beginning to exist, inevitably becomes
organic, and constructs a kind of principate or kingdom
opposite to God. It is with all bad spirits, doubtless, as
with us. Power is taken' by the strongest, and weakness
falls into a subordinate place of servility and abjectness.
Pride organizes caste, and dominates in the sphere of fash ■
ion. Corrupt opinions, false judgments^ bad manners, an(!
» genercl bod}^ of conventionalisms that represent t].e
:notherhood of sin, come into vogue and reign. And so,
doubtless, every where and in all worlds, sin has it in ita
nature to organize, mount into the ascendant above God
and truth, and reign in a kingdom opposite to God. And.
Ill this view, evil is fitly represented in the sciipture as or-
ganizing itself under Satan, or the devd, or the prince o

186 THE TRUE CONCEPTIOK

this world, or the prince of the power of the ah-;- -no pi>
ling fiction of superstition, as many fancy, but, rightlj
conceived, a grand, massive, portentous, and even tremen-
dous realliy. For though it be true that no such bad cm
mprescnce is intended in the term Satan as some appear tc
tancy, there is represented in it an organization of baii
iniiid, thought, and power, that is none the less imperial a*
regards resistance.

At just this point many fall into the easy mistake of
supposing that the bad organization finds its head in a
particular person or spirit, who has all other bad spirits
submissive and loyal under his will, and is called Satan as
being their king. But they press the analogy too far,
overlooking the fact that evil is as truly and eternalh' an
archy as organization. It is much better to understand,
as in reference to bad spirits, what w^e know holds good in
respect to the organic force of evil here among men. Evil
is a hell of oppositions, riots, usurpations, in itself, and
bears a front of organization only as against good. It
never made a chief that it w'ould not shortly dethrone,
never set up any royal Nimrod or family of Nimrods it
would not sometime betray, or expel. That the organic
force of evil therefore has ever settled the eternal suprema-
cy of som«; one spirit called devil, or Satan, is against the
known nature of evil. There is no such order, allegiance,
iojalty, faith, in evil as that. The stability of Satan and
Lis empire consists, not in the force of some personal chief
tainship, but in the fixed array of all bad minds, and even
of anarchy itself, against wha*: is good.

As regards the naming process by w^hich this devil, oi
Satan, is prepared, we may easily instruct ourselves b^
other analogies; sich, for example, as "the man of sin.*

OF SATAN OR THE DEVIL. 181

ahd 'anti -Christ.' These are the names, evidently, of
no particular person. "The man of sin" is in fact all the
tn^n of stn, or the spirit that works in them; for the con-
ception is that, as Christ has brought forth a gospel, so is
is inevitable that sin will foul that gospel in the handling,
Uiid be a mystery of iniquity upon it. And this myster;y
oi iniquity, as Paul saw, was already beginning to work,
as work it must, till it is taken out of the way. And this
working is to be the revelation of evil thix)ugh the gospel,
and of the gospel through evil. It includes the dogmatic
usurpation, the priestly assumptions, the mock sacraments,
and all the church idols, brought in as improvements —
every thing contributed to, and interwoven with, the gos-
pel, by sin as a miracle of iniquity. When that process is
carried through, the gospel will be understood ; not before.
It is also noticeable that what the devil, or Satan, is to God
as a spirit, that also anti-christ is to Christ, the incarnate
God-man. Anti-christ is, in fact, the devil of Christianity,
as Satan is the devil of the Creation and Providence. As
ih'j devil too is singled out and made eminent by the defi-
nite article, so is anti-christ spoken of in the singular as
one person. And then, again, as there are many dcvila
spoken of, so also it is declared that "now there are many
anti-christs."

Satan then is a bad possibility, eternally existing prioi
t ' the world's creation, becoming, or emerging there into,
fi bad actuality — which it is the problem of elehovah's gov-
ernment to master. For it has been the plan of God, in
iho creation and training of the powers, so to bring them
on, as to finally vanquish the bad possibility or necessity
that environed Him before the worlds were made; so to
^reate and subjugate, or, by his love, regenerate the bad

188 god's plan not broken up,

powers iO*Dsened by his act of creation, as to have them it
eternal dominion. And precisely here is He seem in the
grandeur of his attitude. We might yield to some opiTi-
ion of his weakness, when pondering the dark fatality by
which he is encompassed in the matter of evil; but when
we see his plan distinctly laid, as a fowler's when he seta
his net; that he is disappointed by nothing, and that all
his counsels unfold in their appointed time and order, as
\^hen a general marches on his army in a course of vie
tory ; that he sets good empire against evil empire, and,
without high words against his adversary, calmly proceeds
to accomplish a system of order that comprehends the sub-
jugation of disorder, what majesty and grandeur invest
his person ! Nothing which he could have done by om-
nipotence, no silent peace of compulsion, no unconsenting
order of things, made fast by his absolute will, could have
given any such impression of his greatness and glory, a?
this loosening of the possibility of evil, in the purpose
finally to turn it about by his counsel and transform it by
his goodness and patience. What significance and sub-
limity is there, holding such a view, in the ecstatic words
of Christ, when just about to finish his work—" I beheld
Satan as lightning fall from heaven!" Nor any the less
when his prophet testifies after him — "And the great
dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the devil and
Satan, which deceiveth the whole world." "Now is como
nalvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our Lord and
cf his Christ."

That salvation, strength, and kingdom, be it also b
served, are not patches of mending laid upon the rentgai-
ment of a broken pian, but issues and culminations of the
•-li^rnai plan itself. The cross of redemption is no after

BUT REACHING ON TO VICTOKY. 139

thought, but is itself the grand all'dominaling idea around
which the eternal system of God crystallizes; Jesus Christj
the '^appointed heir of all things" — "the Lamb slain frons
the foundation of the world." Here stands out the final end
or cause of all things, here emerge the powers made srrong
and glorious. Weak, at first, unperfect, incomplete, they
are now completed and glorified — complete in bin,, wLo
IB the head ^f all princ ipaiity and power.

CHAPTER V.

THE FACT OF SIN

Wl have hecn discussing the question of eril as I
question of possibility, probability, prospect; we new
corae down to the question of fact — is it, or is it not a fert
that sin exists?

But in passing to this question, it appears to be required
of us to state the object we have in it, and also to indicate,
in advance, at the stage we have now reached, the course
or drift of our argument. We propose then to show, first
of all, the fact of sin. This being established, we shall next
go into a computation or inspection of the effects of sin,
and show that it is followed and must be by a general dis-
turbance or collapse of nature ; what we call nature being,
in fact, a state of unnature induced by the penal or retri-
butive action of causes provoked by sin. Hence, unless
disorder and frustration are to be eternal, a second higher
movement is required, having force to restore the lapse of
nature ; which higher movement is the supernatural work
of grace and redemption. In this view the unity itself of
ths system of God comprehends, it will be seen, two ranges
of existence and operative force; nature and the supernat-
ural; ^X)th complementary to each other; while the latter
comprising the powers, and all divine agencies exerted in
their restoration, and containing all the last ends and high
i'si workir gs and only perfect results of God's plan, is, bj
the supposition, chief above the other; having that tc
serve its uses, and be the organ of its exercise. The crea
tion therefore is made fo: Christianily, and without that

THE FACT OF SIN. 14:1

as a kingdom supernatural, the kingdoiQ cf nature is only
&n absurd and fragmentary existence, having no signifi-
cance or end. The argument will lead me, of course, to
an examination of some of the supernatural facts, or sup
posed facts, of Christianity.

I am well aware of the necessary obscurity of this state-
ment, but as it is offered rather to indicate the course, than
to convey any sufficient impression, of the argument pro-
posed, 1 hope it may at least satisfy the purpose in-
tended.

I begin then with the question, whether it is a real and
proper fact that sin exists? In discussing this question, I
abstain altogether from any close theologic definition of
sin. Undoubtedly there is a something called sin in the
christian writings, which is not action, or wrong-doing;
something not included in the Pelagian definitions of sin,
as commonly presented. But my argument requires me
to look no farther at present than to this, which is the
simplest conception of the subject; inquiring whether
there is any such thing in the world as properly blamable
action? Is there a transgression of right, or of law, a
positive disobedience to God — any thing that rationally
connects with remorse, or carries the sense of guilt as a gen-
uine reality ? Of course it is implied that the transgressor
does what no mere thing, nothing in the line of cause and
effect, can do — acts against God ; or, what is nowise differ-
ent, against the constituent harmony of things issued from
tiie will of God. Hence the bad conscience, the sense of
guilt or blame; that the wrong-doer recognizes in the acf
something from himself, that is not from any mere prLuci
pie of nature, not from God, contrary to God.

It appears, in one view, to be quite idle to raise thi*

Ii2 THE FACT OF SIN

nuesciot: Why should we undertake the serious discus
eioji of a question that every man has settled; why argut
for a fact that every man acknowledges? It would indeed
be quite nugatorj^, if all mankind could definitely sec
wliat they acknowledge. But they do not, and, what
IB more, many are abundantly ingenious to escape doing
it In fact all the naturalism of our day begins just here,
in the denial, or disguised disallowance of this self-evident
and every where visible fact, the existence of sin. Some-
times, where no such denial is intended or thought of, it
is yet virtually made, in the assumption of some theory, or
supposed principle of philosophy, which, legitimately car-
ried out, conducts and will conduct other minds also to the
formal denial, both of the fact of sin, and of that respon-
sibility which is its necessary precondition. We have
thus a large class holding the condition of implicit natural-
ism, who assert what amounts to a denial of responsibility,
and so of the possibility of sin, without denying formally
the fact, or conceiving that any truth of Christianity as a
supernatural religion is brought in question. Of these
we may cite, as a prominent instance and example, the
phrenologists, who are many of them disciples and earnest
advocates of the Christian doctrine. Still it is not diffi-
cult to see that, if human actions are nothing but results
brought to pass or determined, by the ratios of so many
quantities of brain at given points under the skull, then
are tney ni more fit subjects of reward, or blame, than the
motions ot the stars, determined also by their quantities oi
matter. Therefore some phrenologists add the conception
of a higher nature than the pulpy quantities; a person, 8
free-will power, presiding over them and only using them
as its incentives and instruments, but never mechanically

OFTEN DENIED UNDESIGNEDLY. 145

aetermiiied by them. This takes phrenology out of th(
conditions of naturalism and, for just the same reascn, and
in the same breath, renders sin a possibility ; otherwise the
science, however fondly accepted as the ally of Christianity,
(a sorry kind of ally at the best,) is only a tacit and Ini
plicit form of naturalism, that virtually excludes the faith
of Christianity.

On the other hand, we have met with advocates of natu-
ralism, who have not been quite able to deny the existence
of sin, or who even assert the fact in ways of doubtful sig-
nificance. Thus Mr. Parker, in his "Discourses of Eeli-
gion," having it for his main object to disprove the credi-
bility of miracles and of every thing supernatural in
Christianity, still admits in words the existence of sin.
He even accounts it one of the merits of Calvinistic and
Lutheran orthodoxy that it "shows (we quote his own
language,) the hatefulness of sin and the terrible evils it
brings upon the world;"* and, what is yet more decisive,
he represents it as being one of the faults of the moderate
school of Protestants, that "they reflect too little on the
evil that comes from violating the law of God."t And yet
the whole matter of supernaturalism, which he is discussing,
hinges on precisely this and nothing else; viz., the question
whether there is any such thing as a real "violation of the
law of God," any "hatefulness in sin," any "terrible evils
brought on the wcrld" by means of it. For to violate
the law of God is itself an act supernatural, out of the
order of nature, and against the order of nature, as trulj'
even as a miracle, else it is nothing. The very sin of the
sin ie that it is against God, and every thing that comes
from God ; the acting of a soul, or power, against the con

* Discourses of Religion, p. 453 f Idem, p. 466

144 AMBIGUOUS DOCTRINE

stituent frame of nature and its internal harmony
lollowed therefore, as in due time, we shall show, by i
rea. disorder of nature, which nothing but a supernatu
ral agency of redemption can ever effectually repair.
Of tliis, the fundamental fact on which, in reality, the
A'liole question he is discussing turns, he takes no mannei'
3f notice. Admitting the existence of sin, his specula-
tions still go on their way, as if it were a fact of no sig-
nificance in regard to his argument. If he had sounded
the question of sin more deeply, ascertaining what it is
and what it involves, he might well enough have spared
himself the labor of his book. He either would never
have written it at all, or else he would have denied the
existence of sin altogether, as being only a necessary con-
dition of the supernatural.

And we are the more confirmed in the opinion that his
denial of supernaturalism begins in a state of mental am-
biguity respecting sin, from the fact that exactly this am-
biguity is manifested in his work itself. Thus, when
speaking of the wrongs and the oppressive inequalities
discovered in the distributions of society, he refers them,
if we understand him rightly, to causes in human nature,
not to the will, in its abuse or breach of nature. He
says, — "We find the root of all in man himself In him
is the same perplexing antithesis which we meet in all hia
works. These conflicting things existed as ideas in hiin,
before they took their present concrete shape. Discordant
causes [in his nature we understand,] have produced
effects not harmonious. Out of man these institutions
have grown; out of his passions or his judgment, hia
senses or his soul. T'aken together they are the exponent
which indicates the character and degree of development

OF MR PARKER. 145

fche race has dow attained."* Out of his passions or his
judgment, his senses or his soul ! Whence then did they
come? for this appears to be a little ambiguous. And
?v]:at if it should happen that they came out of neither —
out of no ground, or cause in nature whatever, but out of
the will as a power transcending nature. If these bitter
wrongs of society, such as war, slavery, and the like,
which Mr. Parker has so often denounced in terms so
nearly violent, kindling, as it were, a hell of vvords ii»
which to burn them before the time ; if these bitter wrongs
are nothing but developments of " discordant causes" in hu-
man nature, then wherein are they to be blamed ? "Viola-
tions of the law of God ! " do God's own causes violate his
law ? Bringing "-terrible evils on the world ! " how upon
the world, when God himself has put the evils in it, as truly
as he has put the legs of a frog in the tadpole out of which
it grows. "Hate fulness of sin!" Is the mere develop-
ment of God's own constituted works and causes hateful ?
Is the dog-star morally hateful because it rises in July?

But the advocates of naturalism are commonly more
thorough and consistent ; not consistent with each other,
that is too much to be expected, but consistent with them-
selves, in trying each to find some way of disallowing sin,
or so far explaining it away, as to reduce it within the
terras of mere cause and effect in nature. Thus, for
( xample; Fourier conceives that what we call sin, by a
Lind of misnomer, is predicable only of society, not of the
individual man, Considered as creatures of God, all men,
as truly as the first man before sin, have and continue
always to have a right and perfect nature, in the same
manner as the stars. He accordingly assumes it as the

D-Bcourses of Religion, p. 12.
13

146 ASSUMPTION OF FOURIER.

tundameiitai principle of the r.ew science tliut, — " Man's
attractions," like theirs, **are proportioned to his destin
ies ; '* so tbat, bv means of his passions, he will ev-.«
gravitate naturally toward the condition of order and
well-being, with the same infallible certainty as they, li
only happens that society is not fitly organized, and tlin^
produces all the mischief. There really is no sin, apai i
from the fact that men have not had the science to )rgan-
ize society rightly. He does not appear to notice tne fact
that if these human stars, called men, are all harmoniously
tempered and set in a perfect balance of inward attrac-
tions, by them to be swayed under the laws of cause and
effect, that fact is organization, the very harmony of the
spheres itself. And then the assumption that society ie
not fitly organized, or badly disorganized, is simply
absurd; not less absurd the hope that man is going to
scheme it into organization himself. Doubtless society ia
badly enough organized, but we have no place for the fact
and can have none till we look on men as powers, not
under cause and effect ; capable, in that manner, of sin,
and liable to it ; through the bad experiment of it, to be
trained up into character, which is itself the completed
organization of felicity. Under this view bad organiza-
tion, or disorganization, is possible, because sin is possible;
and will be a fact, as certainlj as sin is a fact — otherwis<^
neither possible, nor a fact.

But as we are dismissing, in this manner, the in-
consequent and baseless theory of Fourier, there cornea
ui). on the other side, exactly opposite to him, the very
celebrated theologian of naturalism, Dr. Strauss, who iu-
verts the main point of Fourier, charging all the misdo
ings and miseries of the human state, commonh called

DENIAL OF DR. STBAUSS. ^ 147

Sins, on the Ie dividual^ leaving society blameless and even
perfect. Finding the word sin asserting a rightful place in
human language, he is not so unphilosophical as to insist on
its being cast out; on the contrary, he even speaks oi "the
sinfulness of human nature;" but by this he understands
3nly that individuals must needs suffer so much of per-
sonal mischief and defect, in a way of carrying on the
historic development of the race. In this view he says, —
" Humanity \i. e. taken as a whole,] is the sinless exist-
ence ; for the course of its development is a blameless one :
pollution cleaves to the individuals only, and does not
touch the race and its history." "Sinful human nature"
turns out, in this manner, to be the "sinless existence.''
The individuals whom we call "sinners" and regard as
under "pollution" are yet seen to be "blameless" sinners;
so ingeniously "polluted" that the pollution which infects
all the individuals does not once touch the race I If there
be an}' miracle in supernaturalism more wonderful than
this, let us be informed where it is. The truth appears \4t
be that Dr. Strauss could not formally deny the fact of
sin, and yet had no place for it. He threw it, therefore,
into a limbo of ambiguities, where he could recognize it
as a fact, and yet make nothing of it.

Still there is so much of ingenuity in this method of
getting rid of sin, the absurdity of it is disguised under so
line a show of philosophy, that much weaker and less cub
tivated men than Dr. Strauss anticipated him in it, and,
without knowing, as well as he, what their wise saying
meant, were as greatly pleased as he with the plausible aii
of it. Pope rhymes it thus, a hundred ways, that, —

" Respecting man, whatever wrong we call
Mf)v, must be rigiit as relative to all."

148 THE POPULAR LITERATURK.

The popular literature of our time, represented hy ^iich
writers as Carljle and Emerson, is in a similar vein; not
always denying sin, for to lose it would be to lose the spice
and spirit of half their representations of humanity; but
contriving rather to exalt and glorify it, by placing botl,
it and virtue upon the common footing of a 7aatural use
and necessity. Glorifying also themselves in the jlausi-
ble audacity of their offense ; for it is one of t'ne frequeni
infirmities of literature that it courts effect by taking on
the airs of licentiousness.

But this kind of originality has now come to its limit
or point of reaction; for, when licentiousness becomes a
theory, regularly asserted, and formally vindicated, it ia
then no better tli; n truth. The poetry is gone, and it dies
of its own flatness. Thus we have seen a volume recently
issued from the American press, the formal purpose of
which is to show, even as a christian fact, the blameless-
ness of sin; nay more, that the main object of Jesus Christ
in his mission of love, is to disabuse the world of the im-
posture, deliver it of the terrible nightmare of sin. Not
to deliver it of sin itself — that is a mistake— -but to delivei
it of the conviction of sin, as an illusive and baleful mis-
take gendered by the superstition of the world ! If any
thing can be taken for a certain proof that mankind
are infatuated by some strange illusion, such as sin alone
may breed, it would seem to be the fact itself that they are
iible to impose upon themselves and one another, by these
feeble perversities that, despite of all the best known,
best attested facts of life, contrive to put on still the air?
of science and maintain the pretences of reason.

Passing on from these oppositions of science, falselv sc

APPEAL TO OBSERVATION. 148

sailed, let us refer to some of the formal proofs that sin is
an existiijg fact. Scripture authority is out of the ques-
tion, which wc do not regret: for the practical and palpa
ble evidences that meet us in the simple inspection of hn
manitj itself are abundantly sufficient.

The question here, it will be observed, is not whethci
mon are totally depraved, or depraved at all ; nor whether
they sin continually; but simply whether they do actual-
ly ein? — whether, in fact, sin exists? Nor is it implied
that all sins are equally blamable; for, beyond a question,
great numbers of persons are steeped in contaminating in-
fluences from their earliest childhood, and pass into lifp
under the heaviest loads of moral disadvantage. Regard-
ing their acts, nothing is sin to such, but what they do as
sin. The object we have in view is sufficiently answered
by the adequate proof of a single sin ; for the argument of
naturalism goes the length of denying all sin, even the
possibility of sin; so that if one man is able, as a power,
to break out of nature and do a sin against it, the whole
theory is dissolved. The power of liberty that can do one
sin, can do more ; and if only one man has it, he must
either be a miracle himself, or else other men can do the
same.

We begin vith an appeal to observation, alleging as a
fu';t that we do, by inevitable necessity, impute blame t(j
fvcts of injury done us by others. We can as easily avoi(^
making a shadow in the sun, as we can avoid a sentiment
of blame, when we are designedly injured by a fellow
Dian- We do it, not as a pettish child may pelt a thistk
on which he has trodden, not in any dispossessed state or
momentary fit of anger, but even after years of reflecti<Mi

150 APPEAL TO OBSERVATION.

have passed away ; nay, after we have bathed the wrong
done ua, for so long a time, in the cleansing waters of for
giveness. Still we condemn the wrong and must, as long
as we exist; our forgiveness itself implies that we do; fo)
what is there to be forgiven, if there be nothing that v, v
.ic-ndemn ? Thus, if there be two partners in trade, and
)ne of them absconds with all the profits and funds of the
•jsiablishment, leaving the other, with his family, victims to
the common liabilities, and to a necessary doom, for life, ^f
poverty ; by what art can either he, or they, ever manage
to eradicate their sense of wrong, or the blame they im-
pute to the perfidious man whose crime has been the de-
spoiler of their life? They may forgive him, they may fol-
low him with their prayers to the hour of his last breath, but
they will pray as for a guilty man, whose crime is the bit
terness of his life, as it has been tbe burden of theirs.

Suppose now tbey turn philosophers and make the dis-
covery that there is no sin, that all actions take place un-
der the necessary law of cause and effect, and manage tc
smooth over, with this fine apology, all the crimes they
hear of in the world; still that one man that robbed them
of their all — how stubborn a fact is he, hov/ unreduci-
ble to their theory! His very name means all that sin
ever means, and they can as easily tear out their own
heart-strings, as they can empty that name of the blame it
signifies.

Or suppose a man writes a book, the precise object oi
Al_,h is to show that there is, and can be no such thing
«\s sin. and then that his work is assaulted, as he thinks,
with unlair representations and malicious constructions,
what will you more certainly see, than that he is out im-
tiediately against his accusers, in the most violent deniir.

APPEAL TO CONSCIOUSNESS. 151

ciiitions O- their bigotry, and the wicked untruths of tneii
criticism. Now, if the book was true, if there is no sin
that is blamable, what have they done to be so bitter]^
blamed? What they have done is simply natural, and n
no more to be condemned than a frosty night. It will no-
wLse diminish tlie force of our supposition to add that it
might well enough be given as historic fact. In which^
also, we may see how certainly every man's rational and
moral instincts will triumph, after all, over his theories and
formal arguments, when he undertakes to deny or dis-
prove the fact of sin.

We go farther. So confident are we in this matter that,
if there be any man living who undertakes to be consist-
ent in the denial of sin, setting it down however firmly, as
a point of will, never to blame any injury done to others
or to himself, we will engage, in case he is able to spend
four waking hours without any single thought or feeling
of blame as against any human creature, to admit the
truth of his doctrine.

We have another proof, in the fact that we as positively
and necessarily blame ourselves; not in every thing — my
argument does not require me to go that length — enough
that we do it on particular occasions, distinctly noted and
remembered. And here we are bold to affirm that everv
person of a mature age, and in his right mind, remembers
turns, or crises in his life, where he met the questiori of
wrcng face to face, and by a hard inward struggle brc^ke
through the sacred convictions of duty that rose up to
fence him back. It w^as ^ome new sin to which he had ]iot
become familiar, so much worse perhaps in degree as to be
the entrance to him consciouslv of a new stage of guilt

£02 APPEAL TO CONSCIOUSNESS.

He reraeinbers how it shook his sonl and even his body
how he shrunk in guilty anticipation from the new stej
of wrong; the sublime misgiving that seized liim, the
awkward and but half-possessed manner in which it was
taken, and then afterward, perhaps even after years have
passed away, how, in some quiet hour of the day or wake
ful hour of nig it, as the recollection of that deed — not a
public crime, but a wrong, or an act of vice — returned
upon him, the blood rushed back for the moment on his
fluttering heart, the pores of his skin opened, and a kind
of agony of shame and self-condemnation, in one word,
of remorse, seized his whole person. This is the conscious-
ness, the guilty pang, of sin ; every man knows what it is.

We have also observed this peculiarity in such experi-
ences; that it makes no difference at all what temptations
we were under; we probably enough do not even think
of them; our soul appears to scorn apology, as if some
higher nature within, speaking out of its eternity, were
asserting its violated rights, chastising the insult done to
Its inborn affinities with immutable order and divinity,
and refusing to be farther humbled by the low pleadings
of excuse and disingenuous guilt. To say, at such a time,
the woman tempted me, I was weak, I was beguile^l^ 1
was compelled by fear and overcome, signifies nothing.
The wrong was understood, and that suffices.

Nor is it only in these times cf conscious compunctioj)
that we are seen to blame ourselves as transgressors. We
do it tacitly or unconsciously, in ways that are even more
striking. Thus it may be seen that large assemblies of
men, not the worst of their species, not the ignorant or the
broken -spirited victims of depression, not the felons oi
outcasts of soc'.ety, but the most intellie^ent. most honesl

APPEAL TO CONSCIOUSNESS 168

and lioiiorable, and genv^rally most exemplary as regards
their cotdact, will come together once in seven days, and
sit down to the exposure and charge of their sin, without
even a thought of offense or insult. And what is morq
that kiai of preaching which probes them most faithfully,
and most disturbs their consciences, will most invite theii
attendance, if only there is no violence, or fanaticism ic
the manner. Any sober and rational exposure of theii
sin, however piercing, they will submit to, take it as theii
privilege, and pay for it cheerfully, year by year I Wh}
now is this? Simply because they are sinners and know
the charge to be true. Were they charged in this manner
with being thieves, pickpockets, or assassins, all husbands
and wives arraigned as false, all children as parricides, all
citizens as perjurers and traitors, all merchants and bank-
ers as dishonest and fraudulent dealers, they would in-
stantly repel the charge ; their indignation could not be
restrained for a moment. Nor is it any thing to say that
they have Been educated into the faith that they are trans-
gressors, living in the guilt of sin, and submit to the charge
as to one of their superstitions. It is not as being a dog-
ma that the charge has^any reality to them; indeed they
often repel it as such and deny it. It has never any pow-
er, till it is wielded in such a manner as to stir the con-
sciousness, and draw out thence a fresh verdict of convic-
tion.

We do then blame ourselves. It is one of the most real
and tremendous facts of our consciousness; which, if a
man will seek to explain away, by resolving it into cause
and effect, it will yet remain, defying and scorning all hia
arguments. He knows that he himself did the sin, and no
cause back of himself. It is a facti, self-pronouncedl in his

154 OUR INDICATIONS bHOW

consciousness, and of which he can no more di"vest him-
self than he can stay the consciousness of his existence
Chloroform may rid him of it, but not argument.

Again ; it is a fact constantly peroeived that, wh' ir
in^n do not occupy themselves with thoughts of blame,
or conscious admissions of guilt, they are yet exercised in
ways that imply it, and prove it only the more convinc-
ingly. The moment we look out upon the race, and
take note of mankind, as revealed in their most super-
ficial demonstrations, we discover that they are out of rest,
plagued by the foul demon of guilt. A malefactor aspect
invests their conduct. Not by altars only of sacrifice,
smoking under every sky ; not by pilgrimages, abstinen-
ces, vigils, flagellations of the body, self-immolations, and
other voluntary tortures; not by the giving way even of
natural affection before this dreadful horror of the mind,
yielding up the children of the body to pacify the sins of
the soul — not by these misdirected expedients and pains
of guilt alone do we discover its existence, but by others,
more silent and convincing.

Take, for a single example, the remarkable fact of a uni-
versal shyness of God — a fact conceded by society, and
made the basis even of a common law of politeness,
"Why is this, why is it accepted as a universal law of po-
liteness, never to obtrude upon others the subject of re-
ligion, or of God and the soul, without some previous
intimation or discovery that the subject will not be un
welcome. Because it is presumed not to be welcome. Ii
is not because God and the soul are questionable realities —
we love to converse of things unreal, or imaginary, as wel]
se of those which are real. It is not because, being real

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SIN. 155

IJaey are matters about which there are many different
opinions — so there are about politics, literature, philoso-
phy, science, art, and almost every other subject. It is
not because being real, God is not the loftiest, purest and,
in himself, most ennobling, most inspiring, most radiant
.subject of communication; his government the richest
i'oiintain of wisdom ; and the soul an interest to itself that
dwarfs all others. Neither is it because a population of
pure^ angelic intelligences, occupying this same world of
ours, and immersed in similar employments, would not
meet the vision of God in all his works, and would not
hasten to refresh themselves in these transcendent themes.
The only and true explanation is that God and the soul
are themes that move disturbance. They suggest blame,
they lacerate, in this manner, the comfort of the mind.
So well understood is it that mankind are shy of God,
and that humanity is itself the sign of a bad conscience,
that it is tacitly voted and becomes an accepted law of
politeness, never to approach this one proscribed subject,
without a previous discovery that it can be done without
offense.

Nor is it any excuse or clearance of the sign, to say that
manifestly such subjects ought not to be promiscuously
spoken of in all places and circles. This we admit. Stil]
the question is, why they may not? And the only an
swer is, that which we have given; that men are undci a
giibtle and tacit, but damning sense of blame, and can not
i .ar, on all occasions, or any where but in the public as-
semblies of religion, to have subjects introduced that re-
mind them of it, and stir again the guilt of their conscience.
There ^ould never be any such places or occasions, m »
population of sinless beings.

156 WE ACT ON THE ASSUMPTION

Is this tacit blame then, that appears to haunt the world
and drive it from its rest, a mere fiction? Are we stil)
under cause and effect, as truly as a river flowing towarc
the ocean, only not able ourselves to discover the fact?
Bitter hardship, that we can not be allowed the placidity
of the river I

We have yet another proof, in the fact that mankind
are seen to be acting universally on the assumption, thai
wrong is done, or is likely to be done in the world. Every
man of business, having only ordinary intelligence, as-
sumes it as a point of natural discretion, that he is beset
with wrong-doers, who will take every advantage and
seize every opportunity, and holds it as a first maxim tc
trust no man, till he has somehow given a title to confi
dence. Not that men are generally weak, and prone to
what is miscalled wrong, by reason of their natural infirmi-
ty. Contrary to this, it is the very point of his concern,
that they are so capable and so ready to be wicked in the
use of their capacity. The smallest part of his concern is
to look out for such as may fail him by their lack of ener-
gy or talent, and these are a class by themselves. Tc
guard against the others is his principal study, and they
are so many, so greedy, and plausible, and false, and hasten
to the prey by so many methods, that his only safety is in
tlie presumption that every man will take advantage an-l
do him a wrong if he can.

So, in what is called family government, every thing is
Bct upon a footing that anticipates wrong. Otherwise we
might exist in a family state and never hear or think oi
a government as pertaining to it, any more than we nov^
do of a government in the garden, to preside ovor t\\i

THAT WKONtiS ARE A GREAT PERIL 15"

conduct of tlie flowei-s. Indeed, if there is no danger ol
wrong-doing in children, the forming of perverse tempers
the indulgence of wicked passions, the breakirg down, by
wills unchastened, of all sacred principles, why not suife^
tnem to unfold naturally, as the flowers do ; for even in
experience and neglect will as certainly blossom into vir
tue, if virtue it can be called, as they into their owd
odoi s and colors. Contrary to this, we assume the need of
government, that is of authority, command, correction,
that the beginnings of evil may be checked, and principles
of virtue established. Doubtless there is such a thing as
unrighteous and barbarous severity practiced in the name
of government; still there must be government; for what
ever parent undertakes to act on the assumption that the
misdoing will be only mistake, or inexperience, and no
intended or blamable wrong, (as we understand some are
now doing, in order to justify their theories,) will assured-
ly find that something comes to pass, in the history of
their children, that is a great deal more like wrong thar>
they could wish!

Why, again, do we organize the civil state, why fence
about society with laws, enforcing them by severe and
even sanguinary punishments? If there is no blamable
wrong in the world or danger of any, why so careful to
defend ourselves against what our laws, b}^ a mistake, call
wrongs, or crimes; such as frauds, forgeries, robberies, vi-
olations of liberty, character and chastity, murders, assas-
rrinations? Why these manifold acts of penal legislation
against wrong-doing, if wrong, as a matter of blame, is
out of the question, or if nothing has ever occurred in
the world to suggest the fact, and discover the danger o^
strong? "^^bt answer to all this \\ill be, t\iat what wf

u

168 TO OUR EXISTENCE.

liiill wrong, in this manner, is public evil, and must bt
restrained, but still is not really blamable. because il
takes place under la^s of nature, and bj natural nect-i-
sity. Are we then *^xpecting, in this manner, to punish
and put a stop to the laws of nature? and so to perform,
by legislation, the miracles we deny in our arguments?
What means this array of courts, constables, and marshals,
the grated prisons, the hurdles and scaffolds, the solemn
farce of trials and penal sentences? Are they simply
barriers or institutes of defense, in which we array causes
against the harmful action of other causes, as the Hol-
landers raise dykes against the sea? Then why do we
call this '■''criminal laioV and why has it never occurred
to the Hollanders to conceive that their dykes are raised
against the criminal misdoings of the sea?

Besides we are afraid even of the law ; trying, by every
method possible, to invent checks and balances against usur-
pations and abuses of power ; so to make power responsi-
ble, and to hedge about even our tribunals of justice by pe-
nal enactments against bribery, connivance, and arbitrary
contempt of law; as if wanting still some defense against
even our defenders, and the more terrible wrongs they
are like to perpetrate, in the abuse of those powers which
have been committed to their hands. And then, again^
when the people, groaning for long years under the mis-
rule of a tyrant, rise up against him, instigated by the woea
they have suffered, and pluck him down from his throne,
brijig hini to solemn trial and sentence him to die, do they
lay no IV.ame on his head, or do they onlv cut off the thing,
tia the blameless in pediment to their rights and liberties?

We perceive, in this manner, how the whole superstruct-
ure of the civil order rests on the conviction that sin is iu

FORGIVENESS SUPPOSiiS SIN. 159

fcbe world. We assume it as a fact, the terrible fact, of Im-
man existence. No one doubts it, save here and there
some busy Sophist, who thinks to hold his theories againet
all fact and experience, and against the spontaneous, praitti-
cal judgments of the race — protected, while he does it, ii
the very liberty of his mind, and the life of his body, by lawF
tliat, under his theories, might as well set themselves to
forbid the fermentation of substances, or to arraign and
punish the poisonous growth of vegetables.

We have still another class of proofs, that are more sub-
tle and closer to what may be called the latent sense of the
soul; and, for just that reason, as much more convincing^
when once they are brought into the light; we speak of
certain sentiments that appear to be universal, and the
natural validity of which we never suspect.
■ Take, for a first example, the sentiment or virtue of for*
triveness. Does any one doubt the reality of forgiveness?
does any one refuse to commend forgiveness as a necessary
and even noble virtue? Forgiveness to what? Forgive-
ness to cause and effect, forgiveness to the weather, for-
giveness to the mildew,' or the fly that brings the blasted
baj'vest? No! foigiveness to wrong, blamable and guilty
wrong. Forgiveness and wrong are relative terms. If
there is nothing to blame — there is nothing to forgive
One of two things, then, must be true : either that tlierc
'h\\s been some blamable wrong in the world, or else that the
forgiveness we think of^ speak of, inculcate, and commend;
u« a baseless phantom, out of all reality, as destitute of
dignity and beauty as of solidity and tr ith. Ir deed, th.'^rr
is no place in human language for the word, any more
».ban for the naming of a sixth sense tuat d^es not exist

f60 SATIRE A.\D TRAGEDY

The pleasure we take in satire, may be cited as unothei
(tjxample. This pleasure consists in cauterizing, or seeing
cauterized by wit, the perverse follies, the abortive pride,
or the absurd airs and manners of such as morall}* de-
Borve this kind of treatment. Satire supposes a free and re-
sponsible subject, who might be seriously blamed, but can bt
more efficiently treated by this lighter method, which, in-
stead of denouncing the guilt, plays off the absurdities, and
mocks the sorry figure, of sin. Satire supposes demerit, or a
blamable defect of virtue; and, where the mark is too high
to be reached by rebuke or civil indictment, even crime
may be fitly chastised by it. The point to be distinctly
noted is, that there is no place for satire, and we
have no sympathy with it, except where there is, or is sup-
posed to be, some kind of moral delinquency or ill desert.
Ko poet thinks to satirize the sea, or a snow storm, or a
club foot, or a monkey, or a fool. But he takes a man, a
sinning man, who has deformed himself by his excesses,
perversities, or crimes, and against him invokes the terri-
ble Nemesis of wit and satire. Regarding him simply as
i\ thing, under the laws of cause and effect, we should have
as little satisfaction or pleasure in the infliction, as if it
were laid upon a falling body.

Ws have yet another and sublimer illustration, in the
aDysses of the tragic sentiment — that which imparts an
interest so profound to human history, to the n(;vel and
>he drama, and even to the crucifixion of Jesus hiniscjf!
I^he staple matter of emotion, all that so profoundly moves
our feeling in these records of fact and fiction, is that here
we look upon the conflict of good and b&vl powers, the
gloi'j and suffering of one, the hellish art and malice o!
the '-ther, followed or not followed by the sublime viudi^

KUPPOSK THE FACT OF SIN. 161

tions ol' piovidential justice. It is the war, actaal or im
agincd, of beauty and deformity, good and evil, in thcij
higher examples. In this view, we have a deeper sense
of awe, a vaster movement of feeling, in the contempla-
tion of a man, a mere human creature, in a character Je
monized by passion, than we have in the rage of the sea, oi
the bursting fire-storm of a volcano; because we regar(i
liim as a power — a bad will doing battle with God and the
world. Be it a Macbeth, an Othello, a Eichard, a Faust,
a Napoleon, or only the Jew Fagin, we follow him to hin
end, quivering as under some bad spell, only then to breathe
again with freedom, when the storm of his destiny is over,
and the wild, fiery mystery that struggled in his passion ia
solved. But suppose it were to come to us, in the heat
of our tragic exaltation, as a real conviction, that these
characters are, after all, only natural effects, mere frictions
of things, acting from no free power in themselves ; forth-
with, at the instant, every feeling of interest vanishes, and
we care no more for their petty tumults than we do for the
effervescence of a salt, or the skim that mantles a pool.
All tragic movement ceases when the powers make their
exit; for, if now we call them men, they yet are onl)
things, like Lion, Wall, and Moonshine, left to fill tlie
stage with their absurd mockeries. What means it now
for the Lady Macbeth to be crying to the blood, — " Out,
da:nned spot! " if there is no longer any such thing as a
damned spot of guilt in her murderous soul. Exp mge
ibe faith of that, and the rage of her remorse turns at once
to comedy — that, and nothing more.

Now, in these and other like sentiments, '-.onstantly
brought into play, spontaneous, clear of all aftectation.
never quei^tioned as absurdities or fictions, we encounte?

14^

J62 MISDIRECTION, NO TRUE

Bome of the sublimest, most irresistible evidence 3 that met
are capable of sin and are in it. If it is not so, then it ia
very clear that all the deepest sentiments of the human
bosom are only impostures of natural weakness, destitute
of dignity as of truth.

It remains to add that the objections offered to disprove
the existence of sin, and the solutions of what is called sin,
advanced by the naturalists, are insufficient and futile, and
even imply the fact itself Most of these have been
already answered in the course of our argument — such aa
that the acting of a creature against God is inconceivable;
for such a capacity was shown to be included in the very
conception of a free agent, or power ; — that if God really
desires no sin, he has all force to prevent it ; for a power,
it was shown, is not immediately controllable by force; —
that sin supposes a breach of God's system • for his sys-
tem is a system, we have seen, not of things, but of pow-
ers, and maintains the organic nisus of its aim as perfectly
among the discords it has undertaken to reduce and
assimilate, as if no act of discord had occurred. Mean-
lime it will be seen that the notion of evil, most commonly
advanced by the naturalizing skeptics, is one that really in-
volves and admits the guilt of sin, even though advanced to
near it of the element of guilt. ^^ Misdirectiort'' is the woivl
lliey apply — they call it misdirection — and in this, or
i3( mething a)iswering to this, they universally agree. Even
w here there is only a partially developed system of natu
ralism, and the existence of sin is not formally denied, a
certain affinity for this word will be discovered. Thus
Mr. Parker, speakmg of piracy, war, and the slave trade,
BUggests that these and similar evils are wrongs that comf

SYNONYM OF SIN. 16S

of the "abuse, misdirection, and disease of human na
lure."* This word misdirection has the advantage that i1
slips ail recognition of blame or responsibility, because i1
brings into view no real agency or responsible agent.
And hence it becomes a favorite word, and is formally
piopDsed by many advocates of naturalism, as the philo-
sophic synonym of sin.

Be it so then, put it down as agreed, that sin is misdi-
rection, and that so far there is a real something in it.
Then comes the question, who is it, what is it, that misdi-
rects? Is the misdirection, of God? That will not be
said. Mr. Parker uses also, it will be observed, the term
^^ diseased Will it then be said that piracy, war, and the
slave trade are the misdirections only of disease, as when
the hand of a lunatic, misdirected by a pressure on the
brain, takes the life of his friend ! Was it only for such
innocent misdirection as this that Mr. Parker inveighed sc
bitterly against the great statesman of ISTew England,
as having bowed himself to slavery ? Was it then the mis-
direction of cause and effect, in the constituent principles
of human nature ? This indeed appears to be intimated in
another place, when it 'is declared that, — "Discordant
causes have produced effects not harmonious."f Is the
boasted system then of nature a discordant, blundering,
misdirecting system ? If so, it should not be wholly in-
credible that nature may sometime blunder into a miracle.
h it then given us, for our privilege, to look over the sad
inventory of the world's history, the corruptions of truth
-and religion, the bloody persecutions, the massacres of the
good, the revoluti :>ns against oppressions and oppressorg,
and the combinations of power to crush them, if success-

♦ Discourses of Religion, p. 13. f Discourses of Religion, p. 12

164 MISDIRECTION, NOT SIN.

fill, jaste, slavery and the slave trade, piracy and wai
tramping in blood over desolated cities and empires— can
we look on these and have it as our soft impeachment to
say, that they are only the misdirections of discoidani
ca'oses in human nature? That has never beeh the bense
ol" mankind, and never can be. There is no accou:»t t^»
be made of these misdirections, till we bring into view
man as he is; a power capable of misdirecting himself and
guilty in it because he does it, swayed by no causes in or
out of himself, but by his own self-determining will.

Doubtless there is abundance of misdirection; almost
every thing we know is misdirected, the world is full of it,
the whole creation groaneth in the sorrows, wrongs, pun-
ishments, and pains of it. And then we have it as the
tiue account of all, that man is the grand misdirector.
He turns God's world into a hell of misdirection, and that
is his sin. Apart from this, any such thing as misdirec-
tion is inconceivable. Nature yields no such thing ; and,
if man is a part only of nature, under her necessary laws
jf cause and effect, there will be as little place for misdi-
rectiun in his activities, as there is in the laws of chemistry,
or even of the solar system. The plea of misdirection,
therefore, is itself a concession of the fact of sin, which
fact we now assume to be sufficiently established to sup-
port and be a sure fo^indation for our future aTgumeut.

CHAPTER VI

THE CONSEQUENCES OF SIN.

It is vi;ry evident that, if sin is a fact, it must be fol
\,'wcd by important consequences ; for, as it has a mora.
significance considered in the aspect of blameworthiness^
guilt, penal desert, and remorse, so also it has a dynamic
force, considered as acting on the physical order and
sphere of nature ; in the contact and surrounding of which
its transgressions take effect. In one view, it is the fal.
of virtue; in the other, it is the disorder and penal dislo-
cation both of the soul and of the world. As crime, it
demolishes the sacred and supernatural interests of charac-
ter; as a force, operating through and among the retribu-
tive causes arranged for the vindication of God's law, it is
the disruption of nature, a shock of disorder and pain that
unsettles the apparent harmony of things, and reduces the
world to a state of imperfect, or questionable beauty.

What I now propose, then, is the investigation of sin
regarded in the latter of these two aspects ; or to show
what consequences it operates or provokes, in the field of
nature.

It is not to be supposed that sin has power to annul or
discontinue any one of the laws of nature. The same
lavs are in action after the sin, or under it, as before.
Afld yet, these laws continuing the same, it is conceivable
that sin may effect what is really, and to no small extent,
a new resolution or combination, which is, to the ideally
perfect state of nature, what disorder is to order, deformity
to beauty, pain to peace. This, of course, it will do, if ai

166 SIN PROVOKES

all, by a force exerted in the material world, and througl
the laws of nature.

At the point of his will, man is a force, we have seen,
outside of nature; a being supernatural, because he is abV
to act on the chain of caase and effect in nature fron
without the chain. It follows then, of course, that by act
ing in this manner upon nature, he can vary the actiou
of nature from what would be its action, were there nc
Buch thing as a force external to the scheme. Nature, in-
deed, is submitted to him, as we have seen, for this very
purpose ; to be varied in its action by his action, to receive
and return his action, so to be the field and medium of his
exercise.

Thus it is a favorite doctrine of our times, that tne laws
of the world are retributive ; so that every sin or depan.-
ure from virtue will be faithfully and relentlessly punished.
The very world, we say, is a moral econom}^, and is so
arranged, under its laws, that retribution follows at the
heels of all sin. And by this fact of retribution, we mean
that disease, pain, sorrow, deformit}^, weakness, disappoint-
ment, defeat, all sorts of groanings, all sizes and shapes of
misery, wait upon wrong-doers, and, when challenged by
their sin, come forth to handle them with their rugged
and powerful discipline. We conceive that, in this wiy,
the aspects of human society and the world, are to a
considerable degree, determined. But we do not always
observe that nature is, by the supposition, just so fai
displayed under a variation of disorder and disease. Firsl
appear the wrongs to be chastised, which are not in
eluded in the causations of nature, otherwise they wei€
blameless; then the laws of nature, met by these provo
'jatiDns, commence a retributive action, such as nature.

KETEIBUTIVE CONSEQUENCES. 16?

an provoked, would never display. The sin has fallen
III to nature as a grain of sand into the eye — and as the ey«
is the same organ that it was before, having the same lawe^
and is yet so far changed as to be an organ of pain rathei
than of sight, so it is with the laws of nature, in their penad
and retributive action now begun. Sin, therefore, is, by
the supposition, such a force as may suffice, in a society
and world of sin, to vary the combinations, and display a
new resolution of the activities, of nature. The laws remain,
but they are met and provoked by a new ingredient no*
included in nature ; and so the whole field of nature, other-
wise a realm of harmony, and peace, and beauty, takes a
look of discord, and, with many traces of its original glory
left, displays the tokens also of a prison and a hospital.

Thus far we have spoken of the power there is in sin to
provoke a different action of natural causes. It also has
a direct action upon nature to produce other conjunctions
of causes, and so, other results. The laws all continue
their action as before, but the sin committed varies the
combinations subject to their action, and in that manner
the order of their working. Indeed, we have seen that
nature is, to a certain extent, submitted by her laws to the
action of free supernatural agents; which implies that
her action can be varied by their sovereignty without dis-
placing the laws, nay in virtue rather of the submission
they are appointed to enforce. I thrust my hand, for ex-
ample, into the fire, producing thus a new conjunction of
Ciiuses, viz., fire and the tissues of the hand ; and the result
corresponds — a state of suffering and partial disorganiza-
tion. In doing this, I have acted only through the laws
of nature — the nervous cord has carried down my man-
date to the muscles of the arm, the muscles have contracted

168 SIN ALSO PRODUCKa

olx;diently to the mandate, the tire has done itA part, thi
nerves of sensation have brought back their report, all in
due order, but the result is a pain or loss oi the injured
member, as opposite to any thing mere nature would hare
wrnxght by her own combinations, as if it were the fruil
of a ^liracle. So it is with all the crin:es of violence, rob-
bery, murder, assassmation. The knife in the assassin's
hand is a knife, doing w^hat a knife should, by the lawa
which determine its properties. The heart of the victim ia
a Heart, beating on, subject to its laws, and, when it is
pierced, driving out the blood from his opened side, as cer
tainly as it before drove the living flood through the cir-
culations of the body. But the thrust of the knife, which
is from the assassin's will, makes a conjunction which
nature, by her laws alone, would never make, and by
force of this the victim dies. In like manner, a poison
administered acts by its own laws in the body of the
victim, which body also acts according to its laws, and
the result ensuing is death ; which death is attributable,
not to the scheme of nature, but to a false conjunction of
Bubstances that was brought to pass wickedly, by a human
will. In all these cases, the results of pain, disorder, and
death are properly said to be unnatural; being, in a sense,
violations of nature. The scheme of nature included nc
ejch results. They are disorders and dislocations made
by the misconj unction or abuse of causes in the schemo
oi naiure. And the same will be true of all the events
that follow, in the vast complications and chains of causes.
U) the end of the world. Whatever mischief, or unnatural
result is thus brought to pass by sin, will be the first link
of an endless chain of results not included in the scliemc

NEW CONJUNCTIONS OF CAUSES. lt)V^

of nat ire, and so tlie beginning of an ever- widening (drclf
of disturbance. And this is the true account of evil.

But it will occur to some, that all Luman activiti(;s, tli€
good as well as the bad, are producing new conjunctioni
of causes that otherwise would not exist.. Mere naturo
Kr'ill never set a wheel to the water-fall, or adjust the sub
8ta:3ces that compose a house or a steamboat. How theb
does it appear that the results of sin are called dislocationa
or disorders, or regarded as unnatural, with anj greater
propriety than the results of virtuous industry md all
right action ? Because, we answer, the scheme of nature
is adjusted for uses, not for abuses ; for improvement, cul-
ture, comfort, and advancing productiveness; not for de-
struction or corruption. Therefore, it consists with the
scheme of nature that water-wheels, houses, and steam-
boats should be built ; for all the substances and powers
of nature are given to be harnessed for service, and when
they are, it is no dislocation, but only a fulfilling of tb(!
natural order.

We come, also, to the same result by another and differ-
ent process ; viz., by considering what sin is in its relation
to God and his works. ' In its moral conception, it is ar.
act against God, or the will and authority of God. And,
since God is every where consistent with himself, setting
all his creations in harmony with his principles, it is of
coarse an act against the physical order, as truly as against
llie mond and spiritual. Taken as a dynamic, there fore,
it wars with the scheme of nature, and fills it with the
turmoil of its disorders and perversities. Or, "i' we take
the concrete, speaking of the sinner himself, he is a sub
stance, in a world of substances, actmg as he was not madt
to act. He was not made to sin, and the world was not

170 SIX THE ACTIXCi OF A SUBSTANCE, MAN,

made to help h'un sin. The iiind of God being whollj
agaiiiiit sin, the 2ast of every world and suostunce is re
pugnant to sin. The transgressor, therefore, is a free powei
footing against God morally, and physically againist th«=
cast of every world and substance of God — acting in, oi
among the worlds and subsuince.s, as he was not made to act.

This, too, is the sentence of consciousness. I'he wrong
doer says within himself, — '' I was not made to act thus,
no laws of cause and etfect, acting thi'ough me, did the
deed. I did it myself, therefore am I guilty. Had I been
made for the sin, it had been no sin, but only a fulfillment
of the ends included in my substance.'' And how teiribly
is this verdict certified by the discovery that the world
refuses to bless him, and that all he does upon it is a work
of deformity, shxme, and disorder. The very substances
of the world answer, as it were, in groans, to the violatioiig
of his guilty practice.

Suppose, then, what all natural philosophers nssame,
that nature, considered as a realm of cause and effect, is a
perfect system of order ; what must take place in that sys-
tem, when some one substance, no matter what, begins to
act as it was not made to act ? What can follow, but some
general disturbance of the ideal harmony of the system
itself? It will be as if some wheel or member in a watch,
bad been touched by a magnet and began to have an
action, thus, not intended by the maker; every othei
wheel and member will be affected by the vice of the one
Or it will be as if some planet, or star, taking its own way,
were to set itself on acting as it wa& not made to act; in
stantly the shock of disorder is felt by every other meiD
ber of the system. Or we may draw an illustration, closei
to probability, from the vital forms of physiology. A

AH HL \\ A S NOT MAI;E TO ACT. 171

viutJ Croat are i.s a kind of unit, nr little universe, fashioner]
by the life. Thus an egg is a complete vital system, havins
all its vessels, ducts, fluids, quantities, and qualities, ar-
Hinged to meet the action of the embryonic germ. Sup
pose, novf , in the process of incubation, that some smalJ
ppcck, or point of matter, under the shell, should begin, a«
the germ quickens, to act as it was not made to act, or
against the internal harmony of tlie process going on,
what must be the result? Either a disease, manifestly, that
Ktops the process, or else a deformity ; a chick without a
wing, or with one too many, or in some way imperfectly
organized. What then must follow, when a whole order
of substances called men, having an immense power over
the lines of causes in the world, not only begin, but for thou-
sands of years continue, and that on so large a scale that
history itself is scarcely more than a record of the fact, to
act as they were not made to act? We have only to raise
this question, to see that the scheme of nature is marred,
corrupted, dislocated by innumerable disturbances and
disorders. Her laws all continue, but her conjunctions
of causes are unnatural. Immense transformations are
wrought, which represent, on a large scale, the repugnant^
disorderly fact of sin. Indeed what we call nature must
bo rather a condition of unnature ; apostolically represented,
a whole creation groaning and travailing in pain together
with man, in the disorder consequent on his sin.

The conclusion at which we thus arrive is one that will
be practically verified by inspection. Let us undertake
then a brief sui*vey of the great departments of humaD
existence and the world, and discover, as far as we arc
able, the extent of the e\'il consequences wrought bv
sIe.

172 OONSEQUENCEiJ OJ SIN,

We begin with the soul or wiih souls. The soul, ii. its
normal state, including the will or supernaturai power, to-
gv3ther with the involuntary powers subordinated to it by
their laws, is an instrument tuned by the key-note of thr
:X)ns'3:ence, viz. rigJit^ to sound harmoniously with it; oi
it is a fluid., we may say, whose form, or law of crystalli-
zation is the conscience. And then it follows that, if
the will breaks into revolt, the instrument is mistuned in
every string, the fluid shaken Vjecomes a shapeless, opaque
mass, without unity or crystalline order. Or, if we resort
to the analogies of vital phenomena, which are still closer,
a revolted will is to the soul, or in it, what a foreign un-
reducible substance is in the vital and vascular system of
the egg^ or (to repeat an illustration,) what a grain of sand
>s in the eye — the soul has become a weeping organ, not
in organ simply of sight. Given the fact of sin, the fact
of a fatal breach in the normal state, or constitutional or-
der of the soul, follows of necessity. And exactly this
we shall see, if we look in upon its secret chambers and
watch the motions of sins in the confused ferment they
raise — the perceptions discolored, the judgments unable to
hold their scales steadily because of the fierce gusts of
passion, the thoughts huddling by in crowds of wild sug-
gestion, the imagination haunted by ugly and disgustful
f?l-?pes, the appetites contesting with reason, the sensea
victorious over faith, anger blowing the overheated fires
:>{ malice, i")w jealousies sulking in dark angles of the
soul and envies baser still, hiding under the skim of its
grcon -mantled pools — all the powers that should be strung
in hamcony, loosened from each other, and brewing in hopo
less and helpless confusion ; the conscience meantime thun.
Jering wrath fully above and shooting down hot bolts i

[N SOULS. 17ft

judgment, and the pallid fears hurrying wildly about
with their brimstone torches — these are the motions cf
sins, the Tartarean landscape of the soul and its disorders,
when self-government is gone and the constituent integ-
rity k dissolved. We can not call it the natural state of
man, n iture disowns it. No one that looks in upon *>he
ferment of its morbid, contesting, rasping, restive, uncon-
trollable action can imagine, for a moment, that he looks
'ipon the sweet, primal order of life and nature. No name
sufficiently describes it, unless we coin a name and call
it a condition of unnature.

Not that any law of the soul's nature is discontinued, or
that any capacity which makes one a proper man is taken
away by the bad inheritance, as appears to be the view of
some theologians; every function of thought and feeling
remains, every mental law continues to run ; the disorder
is that of functions abused and laws of operation provoked
to a penal and retributive action, by the misdoings of an
evil will. Though it is become, in this manner, a weep-
ing organ, as we just now intimated, still it is an organ of
sight; only it sees through tears. And the profound re-
ality of the disorder appears in the fact that the will by
which it was wrought can not, unassisted, repair it. To
do this, in fact, is much the same kind of impossibility- -
the phrenologists will say precisely the same — as for a
man who has disorganized his brain by over-exeition, or
by st.3eping it in opium, or drenching it in alcohol, to take
hold, by his will, of the millions of ducts and fibers woven
together in the mysterious net-work of its substance, and
bring them all back into the spontaneous oi ;ler of health
and spiritual integrity.

Xo! it is one thing to break or shatter ai organization

fc74 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN,

Rnd {I very different to restore it. Almost any one cai
break an e^s^, but not all the chen ists in the world car
make on 3 whole, or restore even so much as the slightest
fracture of the shell. A& little can a man will back, inu.
order and tune, this fearfully vast and delicate complica
tion of faculties ; which indeed he can not even conceive,
except in the crudest manner, by the study of a lil'e.

It is important also, considering the moral reactions ctf
the body, and especially the great fact of a propagation
of the species, to notice the disorganizing effect of sin, ifi
the body. Body and soul, as long as they subsist in their
organized state, are a strict unity. The abuses of one are
abuses also of the other, the disturbances and diseases of
one disturb and disease the other. The fortunes of the
body must, in this way, follow the fortunes of the soul,
whose organ it is. Sin has all its working too in the work-
ing of the brain. To think an evil thought, indulge a
wicked purpose or passion, will, in this view, be much as
if the sin had brought in a grain of sand and lodged it in
the tissues of the brain. What then must be the effect,
when every path in its curious net-work of intelligence is
traveled, year by year, by the insulting myriads of sinning
though ■"., hardened by the tramp of their feet, and dusted
b)' their smoky trail.

E"at we Lre speaking theoretically. If we turn to prac-
tical evidences, or matters of fact, w^e shall see plaiiil)
enough that what should follow, in the effects of sin upon
the body, actually does follow. How the vices of the ap
petites and passions terminate in diseases and a final disoi-
ganization of the body, is well understood. The false con-
junction made by intempen'e drink, deluging the tissues

IN THE BODV. 17f

of iLe body with its liquid poisons, and reducing the bodj
to a loatlisome wreck, is not peculiar to that vice. The
3ondiiion ol sin is a condition of general intemperance.
Ft takes away the power of self-government, loosens tbo
passions, and makes even the natural appetite for food an in-
stigator of excess. Indeed, how many of the sufferings and
infirmities even of persons called virtuous, are known by
all intelligent physicians to be only the groaning of tbe
body under loads habitually imposed, by the untempered
and really diseased voracity of their appetites. And if we
could trace all tbe secret actions of causes, bow faithfully'
woijld the fevers, tbe rheumatisms, tbe neuralgic and by-
pochondriacal torments, all the grim looking woes of dys-
pepsia, be seen to follow the unregulated license of this
kind of sin. Nor is any thing better understood tban
that whatever vice of the mind — wounded pride, unregu-
lated ambition, hatred, covetousness, fear, inordinate care
— -throws the mind out of rest, throws tbe body out of rest
also. Thus it is that sin, in all its forms, becomes a pow-
er of bodily disturbance, shattering tbe nerves, inflaming
tbe tissues, distempering the secretions, and brewing a
general ferment of disease. In one view, the body is a
kind of perpetual crystallization, and the crystal of true
health can not form itself under sin, because tbe body has,
within, a perpetual agitating cause, which forbids the pro
ocss. If then, looking round upon the great field of hu-
mauity, and noting the almost universal worknig of dis
•3ase, in so many forms and varieties that they can not be
named or counted, we sometimes exclaim with a sigh, w hat
a hospital the world is! we must be dull spectators, if we
stop at this, and do not also connect the remembrance that
B>n is in tbe world: a gangrene of the mind, poisoning ali

176 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN,

the roots of health and making visible its \\ Des, by b(
many woes of bodily disease and death.

The particular question, whether bodily mortality hax
entered the world by sin, we will not discuss. That i£
principally a scripture question, and the word of scrip-
ture is not to be assumed in my argument. There obvi
ously might have been a mode of translation to the second
life, that should have none of the painful and revolting
incidents which constitute the essential reality of death
We do moreover know that a very considerable share ol
the diseases and deaths of our race are the natural effects
of sin or wrong-doing. There is great reason also to sus-
pect, so devastating is the power of moral evil, that the
infections and deadly plagues of the world are somehow
generated by this cause. They seem to have their spring
in some new virus of death, and this new virus must
have been somewhere and somehow distilled, or generated.
"We can not refer them to mineral causes, or vegetable, or
animal, which are nearly invariable, and they seem, as they
begin their spread at some given locality, to have a hu-
manly personal origin. That the virus of a poisonous
and deadly contagion has been generated by human vices,
we know, as a familiar fact of history ; which makes it the
Tiore probable that other pestilential contagions have been
generated in the deterioi'ated populations and sweltering
vices of the East, whence our plagues are mostly derived.
On this point we assert nothing as a truth positively dis-
covered; we only design, by these references, to suggeal
the possible (and, to us, probable,) extent and power o{
that ferment, brewed by the instigations of sin. in the dis
eased pDpalations of the world. What we suggest re
Bpecting the ^^^us of the world's plagues may be trae, oj

IN SOCIETY. 177

It maj not; this at least iS sliowi. beyond all question, thai
si n Hi a wide-spreading, dreadful power of bodily distem-
per and disorganization, wbicli is the point cf Drincipa.
consequence to our argument.

Passing now to society and the disorganizing effects o\
■ihi there to appear, we see, at a glance, that if the souJ
and body are both distempered and reduced to a state of
u'lnature, the great interest of society must suffer in a
correspondent manner and degree. Considered as a growth
or propagation, humanity is, in some ver}^ important sense,
an organic whole. If the races are not all descended of a
single pair, but of several or even many pairs, as is now
strenuously asserted hj some, both on grounds of science
and of scripture interpretation, still it makes no difference
as regards the matter of their practical and properly relig-
ious unity. The genus humanity is still a single genus
comprehending the races, and we know from geology that
they had a begun existence. That they also sinned, at the
beginning, is as clear, from the considerations already ad-
vanced, as if they had been one. Whence it follows that
descendants of the sinning pair, or pairs, born of natures
thrown out of harmony and corrupted by sin, could not, on
principles of physiology, apart from scripture teachings,
be unaffected by the distempers of their parentage. They
must be constituently injured, or depravated. It is not
3ven supposable that organic natures, injured and disoid-
'ired, as we have seen that human bodies are by sin, should
propagate their life m a progeny unmarred and perfect.
If we speak of sin as action, their children may be inno-
cent, and so far may reveal the loveliness of innocence;-—
still the crystalline order is broken; )he passic^ns, tempe'^s

i;78 CON SEQUENCES OF STN,

appetites, are not in the proportions of bariaou}' and ren»
son ,• the balance of original health is gone by anticipation ;
And a distempered action is begun, whose affinities sort
with evil rather than with good. It ia as if, by th^v owt
sin, they had just so far distempered their organization
Thus far the fruit of sin is in them. And this the scrip
tares, in a certain popular, comprehensive way, sometimes
call ''5^n;" because it is a condition of depravation that
may well enough be taken as the root of a guilty, sinning
life. They do not undertake to settle metaphysically the
point where personal guilt commences, but only suit their
convenience in a comprehensive term that designates the
race as sinners; passing by those speculative questions
that only divert attention from the salvation provided for
a world of sinners. The doctrine of physiology there-
fore is the doctrine of original sin, and we are held to in
'ivitable orthodoxy by it, even if ihe scriptures are ciist
away.

But if the laws of propagation contain the fact, in this
manner, of an organi<^ depravation of humanity or human
society, under sin once broken loose, many will apprehend in
such a fact, some ground of impeachment against God ; as if
he had set us on our t' ial, under terms of the sorest disadvan-
tage. If we start, they ask. under conditions of hereditary
damage, with iiaiures depravated and affinities already diii-
tempered by the sin of progenitors, as truly as if we had
commenced the bad life ourselves, what is our bad lilc'
vhen we begin it, but the natural issue of our hopeless
misbegotten constitution? It is no sufficient answer to sa)
*liat no blame attaches to the mere depravation supposed
whether it be called sin or by any other name ; it fhocks
them t^ hear it even suggested, that a gfx)d being like

IJ3 SOCIETY. 17S

God can have set us forth in our trial, ur der such immense
disadvantages. Probably enough they assail the doC'
trine of inherited depravity, in terms of fiery denuncia-
tion, whether taken as a dogma set up by theologians, oi
as being affirmed by christian revelation itself; not ob-
serving that it is the inevitable fact also of human histo-
ry; and, admitting the fact of sin, a necessary deduction
even of physiological science.

Now so far from admitting the supposed disadvantage
incurred by this organic depravation of the race, or the
mode of existence to which it pertains as a natural inci-
dent, we are led to an opinion exactly opposite. Indeed
there appears to be no other way possible, in which the
race could have been set forth on their trial, with as good
chances of a successful and happy issue.

Thus, taking it for granted, that God is to create a
moral population, or a population of free intelligences,
that, having a begun existence, are to be educated into, and
finally established in, good, there were obviously two
methods possible. They might always be created outright
in full volume, like so many Adams, only to exist inde-
pendently and apart from' all reproductive arrangements,
or they might be introduced, as we are, in the frail and
barely initiated existence of the infantile state, each genera-
tion born of the preceding, and altogether composing a
;igidly constituent organic unity of races.

In the former case they would have the advantage of a
perfectly uncorrupted nature, and, if that be any advant-
nge, of a full maturity in what may be called the raw sta-
ple of their functions. But such advantages amount to
scarcely more than the opportunity of a greater and nicrre
iremendous peril; for, being all, by supposition, undo?

180 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN,

the same conditions privative with the first man of scrip
tiire,* they would as certainly do the =ame things, de
BCending to the same bad experiment, to be involved ir
the same consequent i\ill and disorder. They would only
be more strictly original in their depravation, having )l vj.-
the fruit of their own guilty choices.

And then, as regards all mitigating and restoring iallu
ences, the comparative disadvantage would be immense.
Self-centered now, every man in his sin, and having nc
ligatures of race and family and family affection to bind
them together, the selfishness of their fall would be un
qualified, softened by no mitigations. Spiritual love they
can not understand, because they never have felt the natu-
ral love of sex, family, and kindred, by which, under con
ditions of propagation, a kind of inevitable, first-stage vir-
tue is instituted; such as mitigates the severities of sin
softens the sentiments to a social, tender play, and offerj-
to the mind a type, every where present, of the beauty and
true joy of a disinterested, spiritual benevolence. They
compose, instead, a burly prison-gang of probationers,
linked together by no ties of consanguinity, reflecting no
traces of family likeness, bent to each other's and God's
love by no dear memories. Society there is none. Law
is impossible. Society and law suppose conditions of or-
ganic unity already prepared. Every man for himself, is
the grand maxim of life; for all are atoms together, in the
medley of the common selfishness; only the old atoiiiu
))=jive an immense advantage over the young ones fresh ar-
rived; for these new comers of probation, come of coiirse
to the prey, having no guardians or protectors, and no
tender sentiments of care and kindred prepared to shelter

* Chapter IV. p. .11.

IN SOCIETI 18J

ihem and smooth their way. Besides, the world into
which they come must have been already fouled and dis
ordered by the sin of the prior populations, and musl
therefore be a frame of being, wholly inappropriate to theii
new-created innocence; or else, if not thus disordered,
must have been a casement of iron, too rigid and impas-
sive to receive any injury from sin, and therefore inca^ a-
ble of any retributive discipline returned upon it. There
is, in short, no condition of trial w^hich, after all, is seen t<J
be so utterly forbidding and hopeless as just this state of
A-damic innocence, independence, and maturity of faculty,
which many are so ready to require of God, as the only
method of promise and fair advantage, in the beginning
of a responsible life.

HoW' different the condition realized where men are
propagated as a race or races. Then are they linked to-
gether by a necessary, constituent, anticipative love.
Moved by this love, the progenitors are immediately set to
a work of care and benefaction, beautifully opposite to the
proper selfishness of their sin. The delicate and tendei
being received to their embrace, circulates their blood,
will bear their name, and is looked upon, even by theii
selfishness, as a multiplied and dearer self. They are even
made to feel, in a lower and more rudimental way, what
joy there is in a disinterested love ; and they pour out
i^eir fondness, in ways that even try their invention, insti-
{>ated by the compulsory bliss of sacrifice. They want
the best things too for their child, even his virtue ; and
probably enough his religious virtue ; for they dread the
bitter woes of wrong-doing. This is tine, at least, of all
but such as have fallen below nature in their vices, ann
ceased to hear her voice. They even undertake to be »

16

(82 CONSEQ U KN JES OF SIN,

[)rovidence; and do foi their child all which the k ^-e ol
God, even till now rejected, has been seeking to do foi
themselves; commanding him away from wrong, and
warning him faithfully of its dangers. Besides it is 2
great point, in the scheme of propagated life, that tlic cbilJ
learns how to be grown, so to speak, into, and exist in,
another will ; which is an immense advantage to the relig-
ious nurture, even where the parental character is not
good. He is not like a population of untutored, unrrgu-
lated Adams, who have just come to the finding of a man's
will in them, and do not know how to use it, least of all
now to sink it obediently in the sovereign will and author-
icy of God. The child's will grew in authority, and he comes
out gently, in the reverence of a subordinated habit, to
choose the way of obedience, having his religious con-
science configured and trained, by a kind of family con-
science, previously developed. There is almost no family
therefore — none except the verj worst and most de-
praved— in which the rule of the house is not a great
spiritual benefit, and a means even of religious virtue.
How much more, where the odor of a heavenly piety fills
the house and sanctifies the atmosphere of life itself. In-
stead of being set forth as an overgrown man, issued from
the Creator's hand to make the tremendous choice, undi*
rected by experience, he is gently inducted, as it were, by
choices of parents before his own, into the habit and
ftccepted practice of all holy obedience ; growing up in the
nurture of their grace, as tr'ily as of their natural affec-
tion. Furthermore, as corruption or depravation is propa-
gated, under well-known laws of physiology, what are we
to think but that a regenerate life may be also prcpaga
ted; and that so the scripture trutl of a sanctificatior

IN SOCIETY. la*?

tT\)m the womb may sometime cease to be a tbing remark-
able and become a commonly expected fact? And then.
if a point should finally be reached, under the sublime
pcdingenesia of redemption, when christian faith, together
'Aith its fruits of nurture and sanctified propagation, should
be nearly or quite universal, and the world, which is nov»^
in its infancy, should roll on, millions of ages after, train-
ing its immense populations for the skies, how magnificent-
1}^ preponderant the advantages of the plan of propagation,
which at first we thought could be only a plan to set ua
out in the wrong, and sacrifice our virtue by anticipation.

This comparison, which might otherwise seem to be a
digression, will effectually remove those false impressions
so generally prevalent concerning God's equity in the fact
of natural corruption; and if this be done, a chief impedi-
ment to all right conceptions of the human state, as affect-
ed by sin, will be removed. In this manner, wholly apart
from the scriptures, instructed only by the laws of physi-
ology, we discover the certain truth of an organic fall or
social lapse in the race; we find humanity broken, disor-
dered, plunged into unnature by sin; but dark and fearful
as the state may be, there'is nothing in it unhopeful, noth-
ing to accuse. "We are only where we should be, each by
his own act, if we were created independently; with im-
mense advantages added to mitigate the hopelessness of
our disorder.

It is very true that, under these physiological terms of"
propagation, society falls or goes down as a unit, and evil
becomes, in a sense, organic in the earth. The bad in-
heritance passes, and fears, frauds, crimes against property,
character and life, abuses of pr t\^er, oppressions of the
weak^ persecutions of the good, piracies, wars of revolt, an(^

184 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN,

wars of conquest, are the staple of the world's bitter liistc
ry. All that Mr. Fourier has said of society, in its practi
nal operation, is true; it is a pitiless and dreadful power,
as fallen society should be. And yet it is a condition of
existence far less dreadful than it would be, if the organic
nrce of natural affinities and affections were not operative
-iti]], in the desolations of evil, to produce institutions, con-
sti'uct nations,* and establish a condition of qualified
unity and protection. Otherwise, or existing only as
Ecparate units, in no terms of consanguinity, we should
probably, fall into a state of utter non-organization, or,
what is the same, of universal prey. The grand w^oe of
society, therefore, is not, as this new prophet of science
teaches, the bad organization of society ; but that good or-
ganization, originally beautiful and beneficent, can only
mitigate, but can not shut away, the evils by which it is
infested. The line of propagation is, in one view, the line
of transmission by which evil passes; but it is, at the same
time, a sure spring of solidarity and organific power, by
which all the principal checks and mitigations of evil,
save those which are brought in with the grace of super-
'xatural redemption, are supplied. Otherwise the state of
evil, untransmitted and purely original in all, would mak«
a hell of anarchy, unendurable and final.

Nothing, in this view, could be more superficial than
>i r. Fourier's conception of the woes of society. Ignoring,
at the outset, the existence of sin, and assuming that every
luan comes from the hand of his Maker in a state thai
rr presents the Maker's integrity, even as the stars do, he
lays it down as a fundamental maxim of science, that all

♦The word iUelf represents ujon its face the common life of a commoi
root or parentage.

IN SOCIETY. 186

the passions and appetites of the race are like gravitj^
itself, instincts that reach after order — in his own rather
pretentious and extra scientific language, that "attractions
are proportioned to destinies.'' The attractions of the
worlds of matter adjust their positions; so the perfect
order of the heavens. So the attractions of men, to
wit, tlieir lusts, appetites, passions, will adjust the perfe --t
order of society. Why, then, do they not? Because of
social mal-organization. And, with so many impulses
or passions gravitating all toward order, whence came the
Dial-organization? — why are not the heavens, too, mal-
organized, and with as good right? But I refer to these
insane theories of social science, not for any purpose of
argument against them, but simply to get light and shade
for my subject. The woe of society is deeper and more
difficult; not to be mended by artificial reconstructions
apart from all ties of consanguinity, not by contracts of
good will and mutual service, not by bonds of interest and
licenses of passion. It lies, first of all, in the fall of man
himself, which includes the fall of passion ; a fall which is
mitigated even compulsorily by the organific power of
consanguinity, but can, by no human wisdom, or skill, or
combination, be restored. Organization will do what i1
can, it will be more or less bad as it is more or less per-
verted by injustice, or misdirected and baffled by the
uistigations of selfishness and the bad affinities and de
n ■)nized passions of sin.

It now remains to carry our inquest one step farther,
[f sin has power, taken as a dynamic, to affect the soul,
the body, and society, in the manner already indicated,
reducing all these departments of nature to a state nn*

186 CONSEQr ENCES OF SIN,

Qatural, it should not be incredible that it may also liave
power to produce a like disorder m the material or physi
caJ world. The immense power of the human will ovei
the physical substances of the world and the conjunctionB
of its clauses, is seldom adequately conceived. Almost
every thing, up to the moon, is capable of being some-
bow varied or affected by it. Being a force supernatural,
it is fionUnually playing itself into the chemistries and
external combinations of matter, converting shapes, re-
ducing Oi' increasing quantities, transferring positions
framing and dismembering conjunctions, turning poisons
into medicines, and reducing fruits to poisons, till at
length scarcely any thing is left in its properly natural
state. Some of these changes, which it is the toil oi
human life to produce, are beneficent; and a multitude of
others represent, alas ! too faithfulh^, the prime distinction
of sin ; the acting of a power against God, or as it was not
made to act. Could we only bring together into a com-
plete inventory all the new structures, compositions, in-
ventions, shapes, qualities, already produced by man,
which are, in fact, the furniture only of his sin — means of
self-indulgence, instruments of violence, shows of pride,
instigations of appetite, incitements and institutes of cor-
rupt pleasure — all the leprosies and leper-houses of vice, the
prisons of oppression, the hospitals and battle fields of
war, we should see a face put on the world which God
never gave it, and ^vhich only represents the bad conver-
sion it has suffered, under the immense and ever-indu&
trious perversities of sin.

But we must carry our search to a point that is deeper
and more significant. In what is called nature, we find
a Wge admixture of s! gns or objects, which certainly dc

IN THE NATURAL WORLD. 18T

not belong to an ideal state of beauty, and do not, there-
fore, represent the mind of God, whence they are supposed
to come. The fact is patent every where, and yet the
superficial and hasty multitudes appear to take it for
granted, that all the creations of God are beautiful of
course. They either assume it as a necessary point o!
rev(jrence, or deduce it as a point of reason, that whateve?
comes from God represents the thought of God; being
cast in the mold of his thought, which is divine beauty
itself. Not only do the poets and poetasters in prose go
the round of nature, sentimentalizing among ber dews and
flowers, and paying their worship at her shrine, as if the
world were a gospel even of beauty ; but our philosophers
often teach it as a first principle, and our natural theolo-
gians assume it also in their arguments, that the forms of
things must represent the perfect forms of the Divine
thought, by which they were fashioned. It would seem
that such a conceit might be dissipated by a single glance
of revision; for God is the infinite beauty, and who can
imagine, looking on this or that half dry and prosy scene
of nature, that it represents the infinite beauty? The fact
of creation argues no such thing. For what if it should
happen to have been a part of God's design in the work to
represent, not himself only as the pure and Perfect One,
the immutable throne of law and universal order, but
quite as truly, and in immediate proximity, to represent
jian to himself; that he may see both what he is for, and
what he is, and struggle up out of one into the other.
Then, or in that view, it would be the perfection of the
world, taken in i ts moral adaptations, that it is not perfect,
and does not answer to the beaut}^ of the creative miiid^
save under the large qualification specified.

iSt COySEQUKNCES OF SIN",

And exactly this appears to be the true concepticri ol
the physical world. What does it mean, for example, that
the vital organizations are continually seen to be attem lut-
ing products which they can not finish? Thus a fruit
tree covers itself with an immense profusion of bios
soms, that drop, and do not set in fruit. And then, of
those fruits which are set, an immense number fall, strew-
ing the ground with deaths — tokens all of an abortive at-
tempt in nature, if we call it nature, to execute more than
she can finish. And this we see in all the growths of the
world — they lay out more than they can perform. Is thi.s
the ideal perfection of nature, or is there some touch of
unnature and disorder in it? Is God, the Creator, repre-
sented in this? Does he put himself before us in thia
manner, as a being who attempts more fruits than he can
produce? or is there a hint in it, for man, of what may come
to pass in himself? an image under which he may conceive
himself and fitly represent himself in language? a token,
also, and proof of that most real abortion, to which he may
bring even his immortal nature, despite of all the saving
mercies of God?

Swedenborg and his followers have a way of represent-
ing, I believe, that God creates the world through man,
by which they understand that what we call the creation,
is a purely gerundive matter — God's perpetual act — and
that he holds the work to man^ at every stage, so aa
to represent him always at his present point, and act upoa
him fitly to his present taste. Not far ofi" is Jonathan
Edward's conception of God's upholding of the universe —
it is in fact a perpetual reproduction ; the creation, so called,
being to His person, what the image in a mirror is to the
person before it, from whom it proceeds and by whom it

IN THK NATTRAL W0RI1>. 189

IS sustained. Indeea this latter conception runs into tbc
other, and becomes identical with it, as soon as we tak(i ir.
the fact, that God is always being and becoming to man
both In counsel and feeling, what is most exactly fit tc
jnan's character and want; for, in that view, God's image,
otherwise called his creation, will be all the while receiv
}ug a color from man, and will so far be configured to him
Accordingly, we look, in either view, to see the Kosmos oi
outward frame of things held to man, linked to his for
lunes to rise and fall with him, and so, under certain
limitations, to give him back his doings and represent him
to himself — representing God, in fact, the more adequately
that it does.

The doctrine of types in the physical world, to represent
conditions of character and changes of fortune in the
spiritual, is only another conception of the same gen-
eral truth. And this doctrine of types we know to be
true in part; for language itself is possible only in virtue
of the fact that ph3^sical types are provided, as bases of
words, having each a natural fitness to represent some
spiritual truth of human life; which is in fact the princi-
pal use and significance of language. Whence also it
follows that if human life is disordered, perverted, re-
duced, to a condition of unnature by sin, there must also
be provided^ as the necessary condition of language, types
that represent so great a change ; which is equivalent to
saying that the fortunes of the outer world must, to some
very great extent, follow the fortunes of the occupant and
groan with him in his disorders.

Or we are brought to a cor elusion e<=isentially the same,
by considering the complete and perfect unity of natural
causes; how they form a dynamic whole, resting in an ex-

190 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN,

act balance of lautud relationship, sc that if any world
or particle, starts from its orbit, cr posirion. every othei
v^orld and particle feels the change. What then must fol-
low when the given force or substance, man, begins and
for long ages continues to act as he was not made
to act; out of character, against God, refusing place, and
breaking out on every side from the general scheme of
unity and harmony, in which the creation was to be com-
pr3hended? What can his human disorder be, but a prop-
agating cause of disorder? what his deformity within, but
a soul of deformity without, in the surroundings of the
field he occupies?

And this again is but another version of the fact that
the final causes of things are moral; the arrangement be-
ing that natural causes shall react upon all wrong-doing,
in retributive diseases, discords, and pains, to correct and
chasten the wrong; which, indeed, is the same thing as tc
say that the world was made to share the fortunes of man,
and fall with him in his fall.

Whichever of these views we take, for at bottom they
all coalesce in the same conclusion, we see, at a glance,
that, given the fact of sin, what we call nature can be no
mere embodiment of God's beauty and the eternal ordei
of His mind, but must be, to some wide extent, a realm of
defoTmity and abortion; groaning with the discords of an
and keeping company with it in the guilty pains of its
apostasy. Even as the apostle says, meaning doubtless
bil whicl lis words m-ost naturally signify — "For the
whole creataon groan eth. and travaileth in pain together/

We 1X30 A not therefore scruple to allow and also to main-
tain the iadgment, that many tilings we meet are not beau-
tiful; we should rather lojk for many that are not. Thiif

IN THE XATTRAL WORLD. 19*1

we have growths ii) the briars an.l thorns that do not rep
resent the beauty and benignity of God; but under hi8
appointment take on their spiny ferocity from man, whose
surroundings they are, and whose fortunes they are made
to participate. The same may be said of loathsome and
ilisgusting anin.als. Or we may take the pismire lace for
ail example — a race of military vermin, who fight pitched
battles and sometimes make slaves of their captives; rep-
resenting nothing surely in God, save his purpose to re-
flect, in keenest mockery, the warlike chivalry and glory
of man. It was our fortune once to see a battle of these
insect heroes. On a square rod of ground it raged for two
whole days, a braver field than Marathon, or Waterloo
covered with the dead and dying, and with fierce enemies
rolled in the dust, still fighting on in a deadly grapple of
halves, after the slender connection of their middle part
had been completely severed in the encounter. That these
creatures image God in their fight, can not be supposed,
save as God may reveal, by a figure so powerful, the
sense he has of w^hat we call our glory, the bloody glory
of our sin.

Under the same principle that the world is linked to
man and required to represent him to himself, we are
probably to acc«^unt for the many and wide-spread to-
kens of deformity round us in the visible objects of
nature. Whoever may once set his thought to this kfnd
of inquiry, will be amazed by the constant recurrence of
deformities, or things which lack the beauties of form.
After all the fine sentimentalities, lavished by rote and
without discriminating thought on the works and pro-
cesses of nature, he will be surprised to find that the world
i» not as truly a realm of beauty, as of beauty flecked hy

192 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN,

mjiirj. The growths are carbuiicled and diseased, aiic
the children have it for a play to fetch a perfect leal
Fogs and storms blur the glory of the sky, and foul days,
rightly so called, intei^pace the bright and fair. The cartL
itself displays vast deserts swept by the horrid sirr^com;
ixuddy rivers, with their fenny shores, tenanted by hide
ous alligators; swamps and morasses, spreading out iii
provinces of quagmire, and reeking in the steam of death.
In the kingdom of life, disgusting and loathsome objects
appear, too numerous to be recounted ; such as worms and
the myriads of base vermin, deformed animals, dwarfs,
idiots, leprosies, and the rot of cities swept by the plague;
history itself depicting the mushrooms sprouting in the
bodies of the unburied dead, and tlie jackals howling in
the chambers, at their dreadful repast. Even more sig-
nificant still is the fact, because it is a fact that concerns
the honor even of our personal organism, that no living
man or woman is ever found to be a faultless model of
beauty and proportion. When the sculptor will fashion
a perfect form, he is obliged to glean for it, picking out
the several parts of beauty from a hundred mal-propor-
tioned, blemished bodies in actual life. And what is yet
more striking, full three-fourths of the living races of men
are so ugly, or so far divested of beauty in their mold,
that n( sculptor would ever think of drawirg on them foi
a single feature!

This word deformity^ which is properly a word of sight,
may be used too in its largest and most inclusive import.
to covei aU the ground of the senses, together with a whok
family of words in de or dis^ that indicate a relation oj dis
junction — the dis-gasts of the taste and the smell; the dis
easement, or pain of the sensibility; the dis-cords and the

IN THE NATURAL WORLD. 19S

nnmelodious notes that storm the offended ear of music—
the manifold braying, cawing, screeching, yelling sounds,
Buch as would be low in a farce, but are issued still from
e& many badly- voiced pipes in the great organ of nature
A nd then besides we have dis-tempers, dis-proportions, di*
loftions, dis-orders, de-rangements, answering all, shall wc
Btiy, to the dis-location of our inward harmony, and, reveal-
ing in that manner the desolating effects of our sin.

If it should be urged that all these deformities and dis-
cords are necessary contrasts, to enliven the beauty and
Lighten the music of nature, it is enough to answer that
pain is as necessary to joy, eternal pain to eternal joy; or
better still, because the analogy is closer and more exact,
that moral deformity is just as necessary in God to the suffi
cient impression of His moral beauty. Though, if wc
take them all together in their moral import and uses—
the abortions, the deformed growths and landscapes, anu
the strange jargon of sounds — regarding them as prepare.,
by the Almighty Father, fitly to insphere a creature super
natural whom he is correcting in his sins and training
unto Himself, then do they rise into real dignity and reveal
a truly divine magnificence. This, we say, is indeed the
tremendous beauty of God; and the strange, wild jargon
of the world, shattered thus by sin, becomes to us a mys-
terious, transcendent hymn. Still it is deformity, jargon.
death, and the only winning side of it is, 1ha1, it ansMen
to the woe, and meets the want of our sia

17

CHAPTER Til.

anticipative consequences

In thf. accoant offered of the iy)nsequences oi sin, wc
ha»'e spoken of these consequences as effects transpii'ing
under laws, and so as matters 'post in respect to the fact of
sin. The result stated coincides, in all but the positive or
inflictive form, with the original curse denounced on man'a
apostasy, as represented in the Adamic history or sin-
myth, as some would call it, of the ancient scriptures.
That primal curse, it is conceived, penetrates the very
ground as a doom of sterility, covers it with thorns and
thistles and all manner of weeds to be subdued by labor,
makes it weariness to live, brings in death with its armies
of pains and terrors to hunt us out of life, and so unpara-
dises the world. Call it then a myth, disallow the notion
of a positive infliction as being unphilosophical ; still the
matter of the change, or general world-lapse asserted in it,
is one of the grandest, most massive, best-attested truths
included in human knowledge. It is just that which
ought to be true, under the conditions, and which we have
found, by inspection also, to be true as a matter of fact

Still there is a difficulty, or a great and hitherto insuffi-
ciently explored question, that remains. It is the question
of date or time; for when we speak, as in the pievious
chapter, of the consequences of sin, we seem to imply that
upon, or after the fact of sin, the physical order of the
world, affected by the shock, underwent a great change}
that amounted to a fall ; becoming, from that point on
ward, a reabn of deformity and discord, as before it was

TWO KINDS OF CONSEQUENCES. 195

fiot, aad displaying, in all its sceneries and combinations
the tokens of a broken constitution. All which, it wil.
readily occur to any one, can not, in that form, be tr'ie.
For the sturdy facts of science rise up to confront us in
such representations, testifying that death, and prey, and
deformed objects, and hideous monsters, were in the world
long before the arrival of man. Nay, the rocks open their
tombs and show us that older curses than the curse, oldei
consequences ante-dating sin, had already set their marks
on the world and had even made it, more than once, an
Aceldama of the living races.

"I need scarce say," remarks Hugh Miller, "that the
paleontologist finds no trace in nature of that golden age
of the world, of which the poets delighted to sing, when
all creatures lived together in unbroken peace, and war and
bloodshed were unknown. Ever since animal life began
upon our planet, there have existed, in all the departments
of being, carnivorous classes, who could not live but by
+ he death of their neighbors; and who were armed, in con-
sequence, for their destruction, like the butcher with his
knife and the angler with his hook and speai'."" This being
true, the paradisaic history, as commonly understood, is still
Airther off from a possible verification, unless we suppose the
curse to be there reported as a fact subsequent, thougli
1 itently incorporate before, because it is there discovered.
and plainly could not be conceived, at that time, as tlie
ftcts of future science may require.

For the true solution of this apparent collision between
geologic revelations and the paradisaic history, lies in tLt
fact which many have not considered, that there are tw(i
modes of consequence, or two kinds of consequences; those

* Testimony of the Rocks, p. 99

196 WHAT EVIL CONSEQUENCES

which come as effBcts under physical causes, ami ha7e
their time as events subsequent; and those which come
anticipatively, or before the facts whose consequences they
are, because of intellectual conditions, or because intelli-
gence, affected by such facts, apprehended before the
dine, could not act as being ignorant of them. These two
iQodes of consequence, and particularly the latter, now
demand our attention.

As regards the former — the consequences of suffering
and dislocation that follow sin, as effects in time subse-
quent— there is happily not much requiring to be said; for
the truth on that subject is familiar, and is in fact over-
much insisted on by the modern teachers. Only it hap-
pens that, while they so frequently make a gospel of the
mere retributive principle thus arrayed against evil, they
do also contrive to narrow the bad consequences of sin to
a range so restricted, and to results of mischief so nearly
trivial, that really nothing is involved m disobedience, ex-
cept in cases of extreme viciousness and moral abandon-
ment. They do not conceive such a thing as the real dis-
solution of the primal order and harmony even of the
soul, and the ceasing to be any longer a complete integer,
i\hrn it drops its moral integrity. What I have ac
abundantly shown in the previous chapter, they do nof
allow themselves to see — that any beginnirg, or outbreak
)f sin oarries with it the inevitable fact of a shock to the
<^<yQeriil state of order; starting trains of penal and retri-
liitivc consequences, which have no assignable limit, and
which none but a supernatural and divine agency can re
verse. Any thing entering into God's world, or felling
■^mt in it, that is against his will, breaks of course the

ARE SUBSEQUENT IN TIME. 191

crystalline order, and how far the fracture will go lc on<".
can tell.

When, therefore, we meet any given token of lapse, or
disorder, it may not be clear to us, on mere inspection,
how ii came in, whether among the subsequent or the an-
I icipative consequences of sin. Thorns and thistles — did
ihey take on their spiny and savage armor before the siii
of m.an, or after? Possibly after. No man can tell be-
forehand how far such a beginning of disobedience and
apostasy from God might penetrate the fabric, and poison
the substance, and so determine the form of growths in the
world ; for, in a scheme of perfect reason, any violation of
wrong travels fast and far, and no one can guess how far
But if the geologist, opening the hidden registers of the
world finds, the portrait, or even the indisputable analogon
of a thistle in the stone, that is the end of the inquiry.

The substance then of what I would desire to say on
this particular point is that, without some conviction oi
evil and pain following after sin as its necessary effect,
there could be no such thing as a practically real moral
government in the world. That such evil and pain do
follow, with inevitable ce'rtaint}'', even as all effects follow
after their causes, we perceive and almost universally ad-
rait; for they are distinguishable in all the four great de-
partments of being — the body, the soul, societ}', and the
world. And since it is theoretically true that, in any per-
fect system of being, the disturbance of a particle disturba
the whole, we are to admit, without difficulty, and as it were
by intellectual requirement, that evils most remote, deep-
est, widest, and most comprehensive, may be effects, or in-
evitable sequents of human transgression. On this point
onr faith should properly be shocked by nothing; for it if

198 PRE-EXISTING EVILS, HOW FAR

a fact visible beforehand, all time apart, that sin inuSi
be a grand, all -penetrating sacrament of woe to the world
:hat contains it. And we shalJ most naturall)^ taic all
the evils we meet to be the dynamical effects of sin, till we
iind them penetrating also the pre- Adamite conditions o/
being, and setting their type in the registers of the gee-
logic ages.

We come now to the matter of the anticipative conse-
quenca^; where it will be required of us to speak more,
carefully and to dwell longer.

And here the first thing to be noted, as respects the
consequences of sin in our particular world, is that the
subsequent effects of the sin of other beings might very
well bring in disorders here that anticipate the arrival of
man. There had been other moral beings in existence
doubtless before the creation of man. So, in fact, the
scriptures themselves testify. They also testify that some
such were evil and, as we are left to judge, fixed in a
reprobate character, by long courses of evil. As they are
shown to have had access to our world, after we came in
as a race to possess it, so doubtless they had been visitors
and travelers in it, if we mav so speak, during all the long
geologic eras tliat preceded our coming — hovering it may
be in the smoke and steam, or watching for congenial
sou ads and sights among the crashing masses and grind
iug layers, vv n before the huge monsters began to wallow
in i^he ooze oi' the waters, or the giant birds to stalk
along the hardening shores. What they did, in this 07
that geologic layer of the world, we of course know not
As little do we k'.iow in what numbers they appeared, OJ
by what deeds of violence and vTong they disfigured the

SEFERRIBLE TO OLDER POPULATIONS. 19£

existing order. Wv, do not even know that the suc-
cessive extinctions of so many animal races, and the
deformities found in so many of the now existing races,
were not somehow referrible to the audacity of thei?
wrongs and the bitter woe of their iniquities. As already
intimated,* the fencing of spirits ' may be an essentially
moral affair — such that having, by their very nature, the
freedom originally of the physical universe, the universe
might well be visited by all such myrmidons of evil and,
being so visited, might show, as a necessary consequence,
the tokens of their evil contact or inhabitation. Indeed it
might well enough show such tokens of their sin in worlds
they had never visited; for the universe, as we have seen,
is a whole, and a shock to any part of that whole must
have its effects of some kind, in every other. How far
the solidarity of the universe and its fortunes extends, or
how many things it embraces, we certainly do not know,
and are therefore not qualified to assume that "the whole
creation" does not necessarily feel the touch of every
bad mind and act, and suffer some consequent disorder
in ever J part. Finding then tokens of deformity and
prey, and objects of disgust appearing in the world, long
ages before it was inhabited by man, we are not hastily tc
infer that these are not actual consequences of sin. They
may be such, in the strictest terms of retributive causality,
though not as related to the sins of man. Preceding thai,
by long ages of time, they may yet be subsequent and pe-
•lal effects, as related to older, vaster, outlying populations
of sinners that had visited, or sent the shock of their sii?
into the world, before the human race appeared.
It is not proposed, however, to account for all tho pre

* J baDter TV., vn. 123-128.

200 CONSEQUENCES PREVIOUS,

vioaslj existing marks of evil in the world, in ihis maimer
It is most agreeable not to do it. For we shall easily con.
viuce ourselves that vast realms of consequences, auo
cnese as real as an}^, precede and, in rational order, cAighl
to precede, their grounds, or occasions. Indeed il i-
Ihe peculiar distinction of consequences mediated by in-
telligence, that they generally go before, and prepare the
coming of events to which they relate. Whoever plants
a state erects a prison, or makes the prison to be a neces*
sary part of his plan ; which prison, though it be erected
before any case of felony occurs, is just as truly a conse-
quence of the felonies to be, as if it were erected afterward,
or were a natural result of such felonies. All the machin-
ery of discipline in a school, or an army, is prepared by
intelligence, perceiving beforehand the certain want of
discipline hereafter to appear, and is just as truly a conse-
quence of the want, as if it were created by the want
itself, without any mediation of intelligence.

So also any commander, who is managing a campaign,
and has gotten hold of the intended plan of his enemy,
will be utterly unable to project a plan for himself, or even
to order the manoeuvers of a day, so as not to show a look-
ing at the secret he has gained, and also to prepare in-
numerable things, that are, in some sense, consequences
of it. What then shall we look for, since God's vphole
plan of government is, in some highest view, a campaigo
against sin, and is from the beginning projected as such,
b'at that all the turnings of his counsels and shapings of
his creations, should have some discoverable reference to
it? And how in ihat case, could they be more tru/y and
rigidly consequences of it? Indeed all consequences post
aie, in fact, anticipative first, and are, as really existent, ir

MEDIATED BY IXTELl IGENCE. 201

the laws ordained bv intelligence to bring them to pass, as
they are in their actual occurrence in time, afterward. Il
is by no fiction therefore, and as little by any fetch ol
iugeimi:/, that we speak of anticipative consequences; foi
they are the unfailing distinction of every plan ordered
by intelligence; every system or scheme, comprehended
in the molds of reason, will disclose, in the remote.-l an .'
most subtle beginnings, marks that relate to events future
and even to issues most remote.

This too, so far from being any subject of wonder, is
even a kind of necessary incident of intelligence. For
every thing that comes into the view of intelligence, must
also pass into the plans of intelligence. How can any in-
telligent being frame a plan, so as to make no account of
what is really in his knowledge ? Or how could the all-
knowing God arrange a scheme of providential order, just
as if he did not know the coming fact of sin, eternally
pi-esent to his knowledge? Mind works under conditions
of unity, and, above all. Perfect Mind. What God has
eternally in view, therefore, as the certain flict of sin, that
fact about which all highest counsel in his government
must revolve, and upon the due management of which all
most eventful and beneficent issues in his kingdom depend,
must pervade his most ancient beginnings and crop out
m all the layers and eras of his process^ from the first
chapter of creative movement, onward. As certainly ao
sin is to be encountered in his plan, its marks and conse-
quences will be appearing anticipativeh^, and all the grand
arrangements and cycles of time will be somehow prelud
ing its approach, and the dire encounter to be maintained
with it. To create and govern a world, through long eras
of time, and p^eat physical revulsions, yet never discover

202 PREMEDITATION' OF GOD,

to our vievr any token that he apprehends the grand cuta
cl jsni of shi that is approaching, till after the fact is come^
he must be much less than a wise, all-perceiving Mind.
Much room would be left for the doubt, whether he is auy
niird at all; for it is the way of mind to weave all coun-
•jcl and order into a web of visible unity.

It accords also with this general view of the subject, as
related to mind, that our most qualified teachers in science
discover so many tokens of premeditation, or anticipative
thought, in the earlier types and creations of the world.
"Premeditation prior to creation"* — this is the grand,
intellectual fact which Mr. Agassiz verifies with a con-
fidence so calmly scientific, in his late introduction to the
study of Natural History. All sciences, he shows, are
in things because the creator's premeditative thought is
there ; every first thing accordingly shows some premedit-
ative token of every last. "Enough has been already
said," he remarks, "to show that the leading thought
which runs through the successions of all organized
beings, in past ages, is manifested again in new combina-
cions, in the phases of the development of living repre-
Bentatives of these difierent types. It exhibits every
where the working of the same creative Mind, through all
time, and upon the whole surface of the globe.' f He
p.isses directly on, accordingly, in his next section, tr
?l)L'ak of the " Prophetic Types among Animals," discov-
ering, in the earlier types of animated being, what readi
" like a prophec}-" of all the types to come after. " There
are en'>ire families," he says, " among the representativo&
of older periods, of nearly every class of animals, w hich,
hi the j^ate of their perfect development, exemplify sucb

ir«(5;iv DTI f 'In'^sifipotion. p. 0 +11'. v 11fi

iJlSCOVERED IN THE FACTS OF SCIENCE; 203

j>rophetic relations, and aftbrd, within the limits of the
animal kingdom, at least, the most unexpected evidenct
rhat the plan of the whole creation had been mature!}
considered, long before it was executed." * All this, it will
be observed, by the mere dry light of reason and of posi-
tive socnce, apart from any consideration of a service to
be rer^dered to revealed religion.

Prof. Dana, in like manner, though with a somewhat dif-
ferent purpose, observes, in " the survey of geological facts,
a remarkable oneness of system, binding together, in a
single plan or scheme, the successive events or creations,
from the earliest coral or shell-fish to man." f The whole
geologic series or progress constitutes, in this manner, he
maintains, '' One grand history, with the creation of man,
the last act in the drama of creation."

The point of conviction reached by these great masters
of science, and stated thus in terms of the truest intellec-
tual insight, is still not the end of all reason as pertaining
to the subject in question. If we speak of "prophetic
types " fulfilled or perfected by future creations, there will,
in the same manner, be types also that have their fulfill-
ment after all creations are ended ; in the spiritual state of
men, and the remotest issues and last ends of human exist-
ence. Ard as all that God ordains or previously creates,
will have some respect to these last ends, and the condi-
tions of trial and bad experience through which they are
to be reached, it is even probable that, if we had a perfecl
insight of any humblest thing, be it only a mollusc, or an
insect, we efiould find some subtle type or reference in it,
ro the grandest ^nd most radical facts of the spiritual his-
tory of the universe. For the premeditation of God and

♦Essay on Class'ficatioP p 117. f New Englander, Vol. XVI,, p. 96

20:4 WHIG II V K I-; M K I) 1 T A T I O N

the intcllccLuiil unity '>t' his thought comprehend uior<
than any uere matter of species, or frame of geological
order; viz., that for which all species ar;d all focts of
science and all objects of scientific study exist.

So also, if we speak with Prof Dana of a *' remarka]>k
»>Leness of system," geology is, in i-eal fact, no system of
(jod, except as we say it by accommodation, which doubt
less ne would also admit ; for there is but one system and
can be only one, as there is but one systematizing mind,
and one last end, about which the inferior combinations,
sometimes called systems, revolve. When, therefore, it is
remarked tliat God's one system visibly comprehends all the
creation, from coral and shell-fish up to man, why not also,
we ask, to something farther? — to what man will do, and
what will be done upon him and for him, and finally to all
that he will become, when God's last end, that in which
all system centers, and for which it works, is finally con-
summated! And what can w^e look for, in this view, but
that God's premeditations about sin, the images it raises,
the counsel it requires, the deaths and abortions it works,
and the new-creations it necessitates, will be coming into
view, in all the immense, ante-dated eras and mighty revo-
lutions of the geologic process? By the mere unity of
God's intellectual system, they ought to appear, and, when
they do, they will as truly be consequences of sin as if
I hey were merr physical effects, subsequent in time to the
^acts.

There is also another account to be made of these an
ticipative consequences of sin; viz., that they are neces
saiy for great and importar t uses, in the economy of lile
as a spiritual concern. "Were there no toker.s of death
deformity, prey, and abortion in the geologic eras, previ

IS UNIVERSAL. 20^•

ous to man's arrival, and were it left us to believe that jusi
then and there discord broke loose, and the whole frame
of paradisaic order was shaken to the fall, we might im
sigine that God was overtaken by some shock for which
be was not prepared, and that the world fell out of his
hands by some oversight, which probably enough he can
never effectually repair. But with so many tokens of an ■
ticipative recognition found laboring, and heard groaning,
through so many eras of deaths and hard convalsions, prior
to the sin they represent, we see, every one of us, in our
state of wrong-doing and denial of God, that He under-
stands his work from the beginning, is taken by no sur-
prise, meets no shock for which He is unprepared, and
holds every part of his kingdom, even from the founda-
tion of the world, in fit connection with the tragic history
of sin and salvation afterward to be transacted in it. In
part, we see the world reduced to unnature, infected
mth disease, shaken by discord, marred by deformity,
subsequently to the fact of sin, just as it must be by the
retributive action of causes, or by the false conjunctions
produced by the wrongs and abuses of sin. For the rest,
it was anticipatively di'sordered for the sake of order, or
in terms of necessary unity and counsel, as pertaining to
ihe Governing Mind; displaying thus, in clearer and
diviner evidence, the eternal insight and all-comprehend-
ing intelligence of His appointments. For, in being set
with types all through and from times most ancient, of
Buffering and deformity, prefiguring, in that manner, the
being whose sublime struggles are to have it for their field,
and showing him, when he arrives, how Eternal Foie
thought has been always shaping it to the mold of his
rbrtuues — thus and thus only could he be fitly assured, in

18

20(? GEOLOGIC TYPES

ihe wild (iliaos of sin, of iiiiy such Counsel, or Power, ai
can bring liim safely through.

Hew magnificent also is the whole course of geology, oi
the geologic eras and changes, taken as related to the fu'
turo great catastrophe of man, and the new-creating, super«
natural grace of his redemption. It is as if, standing on
some high summit, we could see the great primordial
world rolling down through gulfs and fiery cataclysms,
where all the living races die ; thence to emerge, again and
again, when the Almighty fiat calls it forth, a new crear
tion, covered with fresh populations; passing thus, through
a kind of geologic eternity, in so many chapters of deaths,
and of darting, frisking, singing life; inaugurating sc
many successive geologic mornings, over the snioothed
graves of the previous extinct races ; and preluding in this
manner the strange world-history of sin and redemption,
wherein all the grandest issues of existence lie. This
whole tossing, rending, recomposing process, that we call
geology, symbolizes evidently, as in highest reason it
should, the grand spiritual catastrophe, and christian new-
creation of man; which, both together, comprehend the
problem of mind, and so the final causes or last ends of all
God's works. What we see, is the beginning conversing
with the end, and Eternal Forethought reaching across the
toUering mountains and boiling seas, to unite beginning
and 3ud together. So that we may hear the grinding lay-
eis of the rocks singing harshly —

Of man's first disobedience and the fniit
Of that forbidden tree —

and all the long eras of desolation, and refitted bloom ano
beauty, represented in the registers of the world, are buf
the epic in stone, of man's great history, before the time.

OF SIN AND RLDEMPTION. 20'/

And of this we are tlie more impressed, in tbe fajt sc
poweri'ully shown by Mr. Agassiz, that the successive new*
populations of the geologic eras are, bej'ond a question
fresh creations of God, summoned into being by his act,
and fashioned in the molds of his thought; impossible tG
he created or fashioned, by any existing laws and forces
In nature. He does not say distinctly that they are super-
natural creations, he might not so understand the word, as
to be clear of all disrespect in regard to it, but the fresh
act of creation which he affirms and even scientifically
proves, exactly answers to our definition of the supernat-
ural, as being the action of some agent on the conditions
of nature from without those conditions, and so as to pro-
duce results which the laws of cause and effect in nature
could not produce. What a consideration then is it that
the great question of the supernatural, which is now put
in issue, and upon which depends even the faith of Chris-
tianity, as a grand supernatural movement of God on the
world, is settled, over and over again, and the verdict aa
many times recorded in the rocks of the world!

In these great anticipative facts of the world, it is very
nearly impossible to resist the conviction of the eternal
and original subserviency even of its solid material struc*
ture to religion, and especiiilly to Christianity. And ex-
actly this ought to be true, if the Christ and his religioD
be such, and so related to the creation, as we suppose him
to be. All God's most ancient works are of coui^se to be
found thus in the interest of Christianity, answering to it
from their distant past, types of its coming in the distant
future, one with it in design, as being issues of the same
Eternal Mind.

Tt is difficult also to resist the conviction of a use more

Jff08 DEFORMITIES I>CREASE,

specific and pointed than those to whicu we have referred
Thus, in respect to misshapen monsters and deformed
growths, it is a remarkable fact that, as ibe layers of ge-
ology rise, and creatures are produced that stand higher in
I he scale of organic perfection, the number of deformities
Kud retrograde shapes is multiplied. This fact has been
''trikiiigly exhibited by Hugh Miller, in refutation of the
development theory. It permits another use taken as a
moral type of human history. Thus the serpent raco.
makes no appearance, he observes, till we ascend to the
tertiary formation, and there it wriggles out into being,
contemporaneously with the more stately and perfect
order of mammalia. When the mammoth stalks
abroad as the gigantic lord of the new creation, the ser-
pent creeps out with him, on his belly, with his bag of
poison hid under the roots of his feeble teeth, spinning
out three or four hundred lengths of vertebra, and having
his four rudimental legs blanketed under his skin; a
mean, abortive creature, whom the angry motherhood of
nature would not go on to finish, but shook from her lap
before the legs were done, muttering, ominously, " cursed art
thou for man's sake above all cattle ; upon thy belly shalt
thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life," —
powerful type of man, the poison of his sin, the degrada-
tion of his beauty under it, the possible abortion of his
Ti(A)lo capacitie? and divine instincts!

It is also shown by Miller, in the same manner, that the
fishes lost ground, or grew deformed in organization, aa
the human era drew nigh.* Kegarding man as the highest
fonn of organization, havmg a head, neck, two hands, and
two feet — the latter answered by the four legs of the beast^

♦Footprints of the Crealor, jp 1B3-191.

aS the human era approaches 209

the two wiugs and legs of the birds, and the four fins c { the
fishes — every creature will be i nost perfect in form, when his
parts are adjusted most nearly accoi ding to the human analo-
gies; and it is found that all the first fishes were actually in
this t/pe of agreement. In the second formation, the for-
ward fins are found to have slid up, not seldom, and stuck
^.hemselves close upon the head, leaving no neck; much
as if a man were to appear with his arms fastened to his
hi^ad, close behind his ears. In a later formation, both fins,
representing hands and feet, have mounted into the same
position; and, as if this were uncomfortable, some races
have dropped a pair altogether. Then, next, in the chalk
formation, where the nearest vicinage to man is attained,
appears the remarkable order that includes the plaice, tur-
bot, halibut, and flounder; the two latter of which are fa-
miliar in our American watera. They have the four fins
stuck close upon the head. They are capsized so as to
swim on the flat side. The mouth is twisted so as to ac-
commodate their false position. The two sides of the jaw
lo not match, one being much larger and having three or
four times as many teeth as the other. The backbone is
ititerai occupying one side of the body. One eye is fixed
in the middle of the forehead, and the other, which is much
smaller, is thrust out upon one of the side promontories
t f the face.

Wha : now does this stiange process of deformity, chroni-
cled in the rocks of the world, signify? What but that
(iod is preparing the field for its occupant; setting it with
t;f])es of obliquity that shall match, and faithfully figure to
man the obliquity and deformity of his sin ? Now then he at
last appears, the lord of the creation, a being supernatural,
clothed in God's image, a power to be trained up to great

18*

210 Ui?ES OF SUCH DE F t) R M I F I ES.

ness an J glory — o!ily Le will liud liin way to the magu'iD
•^nt destiny of character appointed him, by struggling ou
through falls, disorders, and perishing abortions, and do-
fonnities of misdoing, that implicate the whole creatioa
causing it to groan and travail with him in his trial.

It will signify much to such a being, and especially in
ihc advanced ages of time, when he seems to be conquering
the w^orld by his sciences, to find that, as the creation of Goo
was rising in order, and higher forms of life were appear-
ing, in a series to be consummated or crowmed by the a})-
pearing of man, tokens also of retrOgradation, abortion,
defect, deformit}^, were also beginning to appear; as if to
foretoken the moral history he will begin, and the humilia-
tions through which he will require to be led. Coming in
originally as lord and occupant to have dominion, 2nd
taking possession of it finally in the higher dominion of
science, a most strange, powerfully humbling lesson meets
him, exactly suited to his want, and one that ought to
moderate all undue conceit of science in him, and temper
him to that teachable state of inquiry that allow^s the no-
bler and diviner truths of Christianity to visit his heart.
What does it mean — let any student of nature answer —
what does it mean that a Perfect Mind, whose very thoughts
are beauty, generates in the same era and side by side with
man, such outrageous deformities as we see, for example, in
the halibut species? Here is a deep lesson, worthy of much
^.udy. There is plainly no account to be made of such ap
pearanceSj or factw« till we bring in the sovereignty of moral
•deas, and assume the necessity of moral types and lesson?

On the whole, as the result of this inquiry into the
anticipative consequences of sin, w^e most naturally take
up the conviction, that the world, or what we call the crc

Pantheistic view of them 211

Ation, is not so much a completed fact as a conatj.9, strug
giing \ip concomitantly with the powers that are doing
battle in it for a character ; falling with them in the ir fall,
rising with them or to rise, to a condition, finally, cf com-
:)lefe order and beauty. There is much to be said for such
nn expectation, and it appears to be just what is held up,
m the promise of a new heavens and earth, wherein dwell*
eth righteousness.

The pantheistic form, of naturalism, it is well known,
makes a very different account of the abortions and de-
formities of the world, and also of its future possibilities
It assumes, for a fact, that nature is an incomplete or par-
tially developed form of being, going on toward perfec-
tion, under laws of development, contained in itself; there-
;ore necessarily plunging into mischances, and producing
uncomely, or unperfect fruits. Accordingly God, who is
in fact the all of nature, is a tardy but sublime Naturas,
who is sometime about to be, if he can attain to a more
complete consciousness in his children, and be cleared of
the blundering process of development by which necessity ia
at work to shape him into order. Meantime, we ourselves
are blundering on with hirii, they suppose, undergoing a like
development. What we called sin, before we became phi-
losophers, we now call development, and excuse ourselves
M zri\ all blame in it, because we are only parts of nature,
■subject to her laws; parts, that is, of God. and subject to
:he eternal fate that rules him.

That a soul, pressed down by the great questions of ex-
istence, should sometime reel into this gulf, is scarcely a
subject of wonder; but no healthy, manly soul, none but
one that is hag-ridden by the dark and spectral difficul-
Lies of the world, will lonii stav in it. There is in the

212 TANTUElSTiC VIKW OF TIIEM,

scheme, at first view, a certain imposing air of ratiooal
magnificence — it includes so much, it handles even Goo
and his myster}- so coolly, and clears the question of qv\\
ty a solution so easy.

But after all it is not cleared. We "tave called our col-
ficiousness a fool, it is true, in reporting such a thing a--
sin, and have taken the police of our souls into custody to
escape the conviction of it, and still the sin is here — in us
and around us. We can not act our part, for any two
hours of our life, without assuming its reality. What then
becomes of our great philosophy, when, amus.ng itself thus
in its lofty airs of reason, it is yet confronted every mo-
ment by the plain, simple denial and even scorn of our
consciousness?

With this too comes the argument of our woe. The
air of such a creed is too thin to support our life. There
is no object meeting us to fill our want, there is no mean-
mg, or heart, in the mute, dead All ; nothing in existence
to give it significance, or inspire any great act or senti-
ment. We live in a disabled, stunted subjectivity. The
inspiration of faith is replaced bj^ the impotence of con
ceit. The world is a blunder, consciousness is a lie, the
dark things of sin are developments, and the All is a Uni-
versal Mockery. And then what remains but to go back
and set up again the great first truth, which no mortal can
spare for a day, that whatever is wanted^ is — therefore Gcd,
the Living God shall be our faith; for Him we want, £^
the complemental good, without which existence is but a
aame for starvation.

How many things too are there in the world, after all
that can nowise be accounted for by this pantheistic
theory. If the disorders and deformities of nature are i^od

(JNREASONABLE AND UNSATISFACTORY. 21S

ill partial development, how is it conceivable that anj
being in a sta.te so raw, could ever have organized such
complicated structures — human bodies for example—
where the design is so evident, the parts so many anO
dehcate, the offices so manifold, the unity so perfect
It is inconceivable that any power — call it God, or nature,
01 by whatever name — capable of constructing an organiza-
tion so wonderful, should still be struggling up into order,
through such grotesque and misbegotten shapes as are here
accounted for, by the necessary imperfection of its, or his
development; composing first the glorious order of the
astronomic mechanism, then faltering afterward in the
absurd composition of a flounder; able to fashion a crea-
ture of reason, but not to stand the criticism of reason;
able to start new races of living creatures in the successive
eras of geology, but having yet no will to start any thing,
apart from the control of fate. And what can such a doc-
trine make of Jesus Christ, what place does it provide in
the world for such a being? If nature can develop noth
mg perfect; if, by reason of inherent defect, it must need&
develop itself in blunders of abortion, deformit}^ and pain ;
will it still suffice to form the mind, fashion the beauty,
finish the character of a Jesus?

But I ail assuming here a superiority and perfection of
ordei in the character of Jesus, that may not be admitted
by the pantheist, and as the question is hereafter to be dis-
cussed, and will be made a point of consequence in tlic
argument, I desist for the present; only requiring .i of
Buch as look for a God in development, to answer how
theii blind force, called nature, staggering on through the
disorders, abortions, and deformities of so many ages, and
even falling into retrogradations as remarkable as its ^m

214 THE IMMENSE SIGNIFICAISCE OF SIN,

provements, can be imagined to have produced sucli a sou.
and character as that of Jesus; a beiig, whether perfect
or not, so high, so peculiar, original, pure, wise, great in
goodness ?

In this and the preceding chapter, we have now tracoci
the consequences of sin : there the consequences that must
needs follow it, as effects their causes, showing what results
of mischief and disorder it reveals in the soul, the body,
society, and the world ; here accounting for a large display
of correspondent facts in the geologic history precedent,
or before the arrival of man, showing that they still are
as truly consequences of the fact of sin as the others^
being only just those marks that God's intelligence, plan-
ning the world and shaping it, even from eternity, to the
uses and issues of a trial comprehending sin, must needa
display. Sin, it will be seen, is, in this view, a very great,
world-transforming, world-uncreating fact, and ao such
mere casualty, or matter by the way, as the superficial
naturalism, or half naturalistic Christianity of our time
supposes. It is that central fact, about which the whole
creation of God and the ordering of his providential and
moral government, revolves. The impression of many
appears to be, that sin is this or that particular act of
'V7'ong, which men sometimes do, but wliieh most men dr.
not, unless at distant intervals ; and who can imagine thai
a]iy thing very serious depends on these rather exceptional
nisdeeds when, on the whole, the account is balanced by
do many shows of virtue? The triviality and shallowness
ot such conceptions are hardly to be spoken cf with
patience. It is not seen that when a man even begins to
flin he mu3t needs cast away the princi])le, first, of al'

IS rHU>5 DISCOVERED. 213

holy obedience, and go down, thus, into a general la];sc
of condition, to be a soul broken loose from principle
and separated from the inspirations of God. Only a very
little pliilosophy too, conceiving the fact that s.n is the
acting of a substance, man, as he was not made to act
rjdst saffice to the discovery that, in a system, or schenio
of perfect order, it will start a ferment of discord among
causes, that will propagate itself in every direction, carry-
ing wide-spread desolation into the remotest circles. The
whole solidarity of being in the creation, physical and
spiritual, is necessarily penetrated by it and configured to
it. Character, causes, things prior and post^ all that God
embraces in the final causes of existence, somehow feel
it, and the whole creation groans and travails for the pair
of it. The true Kosmos, in the highest and most per-
fectly ideal sense of that term, does not exist. Nature is
become unnature, and stopping at the point reached,
which of course we do not, we must even say that th*'
i^.reation of God is a failure.

But there is an objection to be anticipated here which
requires our attention, before we dismiss this part of our
subject. It is that no proper Kosmos, no cr3\stalline order
of nature, according to the view stated in this chapter, haa
ever yet existed. For, if we speak of the state of unna-
ture as a consequence of sin, that state of unnature haa
existed, in part, or as far as it should, anticipatively,
through all the precedent eras and geologic processes of
the world. The true ideal system of nature, therefore, has
iiever existed, and tliere was never any such condition, or
ch:'me of order to fall from, or tc shatter by sin, as we are
trying all the while to suppose. All which is certainly
I ue, if we must go entirely back of Gcd's purposes anf^

216 THE KOSMOS STILL EXISTS.

beyond them to lind it; for what we have beer tracing as
the anticipative consequences of sin is nothing but the
working of his ancient counsel concerning it. But tbf.
real truth is that nature, original and true nature, has ex*
Uted and does now exist ; for, if we call our present state,
:is we truly should, a condition of unnature, we mean by
it nothing more than that the causes included in pure
nature are working now more or less retributively, pain
fully, diseasedly, and so as to create a state of dislocation
in the outward harmonies ; a state of incapacity and bond-
age in the spiritual aspirations of the soul. Nature is un-
aature, when her causes are acting retributively — they are
not, in such cases, discontinued, or thrown out of their
law ; but they act, in their law and under it, as perfectly
and systematically as ever. The unnaturalness oi our pres-
ent state under sin consists, not in the fact that nature is
gone by, or is broken up, but only in the fact that her causes
are all at work on the contrary ingredient, sin. It is as if
a good and healthy stomach were at work upon a stone, to
digest it — still it is acting by its own laws and powers, as
truly as if the stone were meat, though its acting is only
a throe of distress. Were every thing, indeed, now rolling
on, in sweetest bonds of harmony, according to thr
pur 3 ideal of what we call nature, nothing of bad conse-
quence or penal and retributive action any where appear-
ing in it, no disorder of sin visible any where as a fact
of anticipation, still nature would not be more truly extant
ihai: now ; for the disorder and unnature w^e speak of are
really order and natare chastising the false fact, sm;
which process of chastisement and groaning we call unna-
^.ure, only because it does not answer, thus far, to the laeaJ
working of the scheme, disturbed by no such enem^

NATURE AS A WHOLE, 211

of God and all good as it has here met. Nor does it make
aTij the least difference, except with some speculative
wordsman, grubbing under space and time, whether death
a a., prej and other like consequences of sin began tc
work, before the arrival here of man, or only after. li
rod's Whole Plan respects the fact of sin before the fact,
cbe scheme of nature was none the less real or perfect
because of the un nature working anticipativelj in it, any
more than it follows that the unnature subsequent has dis-
continued nature, whose retaliatory action it really is, and
nothing more.

Unnature then — this is our conclusion — a far-reaching,
all-comprehensive state of unnature, is the consequence of
sin. It mars the body, the soul, society, the world, all
time before and after. What an argument then have we,
and especially from the ante-dated tokens of evil, for the
oelief that God's original plan comprehends a rising side,
an economy supernatural, that shall complement the dis-
order and fall of nature, having power to roll back its cur-
rents of penal misery and bring out souls, into the estab-
lished liberty and beauty of holiness. How manifest is it
in the world's birth, th^t God, from the first, designs
It for a second birth; some grand palingenesia that shall
raise the fall of nature and make existence fruitful. It
has been a great fault, as was just now intimated, that we
have made so little of sin. It is either nothing, or else it
IS a great deal more than it is conceived to be by the mul-
titude who admit its existence. The mental and mora]
philosophers make nothing of it, going on to construct
tlieii sciences, so called, precisely as if the soul had re-
ceived no sho<>'k of detriment; and even the most ortho
dox theologians do scarcely more than score it with guilty

19

218 BECOME UNNATUKE.

couviction, regarding it seldom as a dynamic lorce, and
then \»ith a comprehension too restricted to allow anj
true impression, of its import. Hence, in great part, the
general incredulity in regard to the supernatural facts of
Christianity. There can be nothing supernatural, we think
because it would violate the integrity of nature. The in-
tegrity of nature! What but a world of unnature has il
be(K)me already? And what has sent these hard pangfi
into it and through it but a supernatural force, even the
human will; for this, we have seen, is a power supernat-
ural, BS truly as God, though not equal in degree ; able to
act on the lines of causes and vary their conjunctions from
without, even as He is represented in the christian truth to
do. Hence the disorder and disease; hence the groan-
ing and travailing in pain together of the whole creation —
it is all the supernatural work, the bad miracle of sin.
No other name will fitly name it. Indeed, if there should
be, somewhere in the universe, a race of beings that have
never sinned, and they should have it set before them, in
all its consequences to the physical order of things, they
would look upon it, we suspect, as a miraculous agency,
exerted in God's universe opposite to himself. And they
would begin, we fear, to say with Mr. Hume, unless they
were better philosophers thdn he, that such a miracle is
wholly incredible; that the confidence they have in the
beneficent, harmonious action of nature, is too strong to be
broken by any possible testimony to such doings. There
fore this tremendous, all-revolutionizing miracle must be s
fiction.

Of course it is not a miracle. It is only a fact super
natural, a grand assault of man's supernatural agency upot
the world. We shall speak more definitely of miraclet

IS :.'HERE TC BE A REMEDYf 219

hereafter. For the present, we only say that the super
natural agency of God in the world's redemption, is no-v^
shown to be most clearly wanted ; and we do not perceive
wherein it is more incredible that God should act, in his
way, upon the lines of natural causes, than that we should
do it, in ours. Of course he will act with a higher sover-
eignty, worthy of himself His divine supernatural power
will be divine, our human will be human. If we have
broken or clouded the crystal and can not restore its trans-
parency, he .can. If we bring deformity, he will bring
beauty. K we di 3, he will bid us live. Will he do this?
'^hat is now the c lestion that remains.

CHAPTlilR VIII.

HO REMEDY IN DEVELOPMENT, OR SELP-REFORM ATION

We are now at the point of catastrophe in God's plaa
where it is next in order to look about for some remedial
agency, or dispensation, that shall restore the lapse and
bring out those results of order and happiness, that were,
proposed by God, as we must believe, in his act of crea-
tion. Are we then shut up to nature and the hope thai
she will surmount her own catastrophe, or may we believe
that her inherent weakness will be complemented by a su-
pernatural and divine movement, that shall organize a new
economy of life?

The former is the ground taken by all the naturalizing
classes of our time. Nothing can take place, they say,
which is not operated under and by the laws of nature.
To believe that any thing can take place which is from
without, or from above the laws of nature, is unphilosoph-
ical and savors of credulity. That there is such a thing
as misdirection they will admit, and some will admit also
the fact of sin: and it will be agreed by them all that, in
consequence either of misdirection, or of sin, there are
a great many apparent disasters and disorders in the world,
or especially in human society, that want some kind ol
nnnedy. Our present object is to look into their priuci-
oal remedies, dt grounds of expected restoration, and try
what virtue there is in them. They are two, or presented
under two distinct forms, both of which may be taken a^
rival gospels opposite to Christianity.

By tho cLas8who formally reject or ignore Chi-istianity

NO liBMEDY IX DEVELOPMENT. 22 i

development is regarded as the universal panacea —all th<!
apparent evils of the world are to be cured by develop-
ment.

The class who professedly teach and believe the chri^
tian gospel, reducing it still to a mere scheme of ethics, oi
natural virtue, rely more on the individual will to be ex-
erted in self-government, self-culture, and the doing of
justice, mercy, and other good works.

Of these rival gospels, both from within the terras of
nature, I will now speak, in their order.

I. Of development, or as it is often phrased, the natural
progress of the race.

The w^orld is just now taken, as never before, with ideas
of progress. The human race, it is conceived, exists un-
der laws of progress. The philosophers, or would-be phi-
losophers, have even undertaken to reduce the laws of
progress to a scientific statement. They conceive that all
the advanced races of mankind began at the level of the
savage state, and have been set forward to their present
pitch of culture, civilization, wealth, and liberty, by laws
of development in mere nature. The multitude go after
them, embracing the welcome idea of progress only the
more enthusiastically, that they are so much taken with
the new word development^ conceiving that there is great
science in it, or, at least, some unknown kind of power.
If there are any evils, or bitter woes in societ}^, develop-
ment is going to cure them; for the laws of development
are at worK lo produce progress, and they will as certainly
do it, as the laws of matter will determine its motions
All crime and sin are going finally to be cured in this
manner, and character is going finally to blossom, on the
broken stock of nature, even as flowers are developed out

222 THE TRUE DEVELOPMENT

OL stocks not broken, and roots not yoisoned by discifla
Finding thus a gospel of progress in the world itself and
the mere laws of existence, what reed of any such anti-
quated raythology as the christian gospel brings us? Or,
it the argument is not openly stated in this manner, still
.t is virtually adopted; for how many that suppose Chris-
ifinity to be true, still have it only as a thing by the way, n
straw floating down this flood ana passing on with us, to see
the brave work human progress is doing. If it is not
called a myth or wild tradition, still the really trusted gos-
pel is phrenology, chemistry, and the other new sciences,
with their grand economic creations, such as telegraphs,
railroads, steamboats, and the like — (not omitting the new
and better bible discovered in the oracles of necromancy ;)
and these are going at last to raise the world, no thanks
to Christianity, into a state of universal brotherhood and
felicity ! The lowest charlatans and some of the most culti-
vated savans hold much the same language, and trust in
the same gospel of development.

Now that there is, or should be such a thing as devel
opment, we certainly admit. All the human faculties are
capable of development by exercise or training, and every
human being will, of necessity, be developed to a certain
degree^ both in mind and body, by the growth of years
and the necessary struggles of life. But that human so-
ciety was ever carried forward, by a single shade, in the
matter of religious virtue, under mere laws of natural de-
velopment, we utterly deny. It is even a fair subject of
doubt whether any nation, or race of men, was ever ad
vanced in civilization by inherent laws of progress. Cer
tain it is that no individual was ever cleared of sin by do
veiopment, or restored even pToximately to the st.aie o^

INCLUJES REGENERATION. 22S

primal ord3raTid uprightness; equally so tbat the vast, far-
spreading, organic woes of the world are forever immedi'
cable by any such remedy.

In one view, it may be rightly said that the whole ob
ject of God, in our training, is to develop in us a charao
ler of eternal uprightness; developing also, in that man-
ner, as a necessary consequence, grand possibilities of so-
cial order and well being; though, when w^e thus speak, wc
include the fact of sin and the engagement with it of a
supernatural grace, to lift up the otherwise remediless fall
of nature. But this, if we must have the word, is chris-
tian development; a development accomplished, by carry-
ing us across and up out of the gulf of unnature, where
the hope of all progress and character was ended. We
are developed, in this sense, by and through an experience
of that state of wrong, whose woe it is that it is the fall of
nature and, in that sense, the end of all development.
But this, it will be seen, is not the popular doctrine of
progress, which assumes the fact of a progress in right
lines, without any call for supernatural interference, with-
out any regenerative or new-creative process. There may
be hard throes of suffering experience and bitter struggles
with individual and social evils, but time, it is supposed,
will teach, and experience redeem, and so the great battle
of natural development will lead to final victory. In this
manner, progress, it is supposed, will at last cure all the
£ vils which we have been recapitulating as the fruit and fall
♦'►f sin. That such a hope is groundless we will now undet •
Uike to show.

Cvmsider, first, the savage state, whence it is contmually
o&sumed that history and civilization spring. The doctrine
is that all the advanced nations of mankind began as sav-

224 THE SAVAGE RACES

ages, and that all the peoples of the world now existing
are on their way up, out of the savage state, into eiviliza
tion and a state of social virtue. Contrary to this, no sav
age race of the world has ever been raised into civilization
least of all, into a state of virtue, by mere natural devel
cpment. All which is evident by just that which distin-
guishes the savage state; for it is the principal and, in fact,
only comprehensive distinction of the savage races, thai
they arc such as have fallen below progress, living orx from
age to age without progress, and sometimes quite dying
out; for the simple reason that there is no sufficient capac-
ity of progress left, to perpetuate their life, in proximity
with more advanced races. They are beings, or races
physiologically run down, or become effete, under sm;
fallen at last below progress, below society, become a hfjrd
no longer capable of public organization, and a true, socia]
life. It signifies nothing for such races to ask more time;
lime can do nothing for them better than extermination.
It is well, if even a gospel and a faith above nature can
now get such hold of them as to raise them. They are, in
fact, just as far off from the original unpracticed, unde-
veloped state of nature, as the most advanced races; and,
as David said over the child — "I shall go to him but he
shall not return to me," so it is possible for the living and
advanced races to go downward, but never for these dead
ones, unassisted, to rise. We have proofs enough that
!)eoplej advanced in culture may become savages, but no
fiolitary example of a race of savages that have risen to a
civilized state, by mere development. And the real fact
.'.i, that we may much better assert a law of natural dete
noration, than a law of natural progress; for, apart from
Bomo injfluence or aid of a supernatural kind, the deterio

MAKE NO PROGRESS. 226

ration of safety, under the penal mschiefs of iin, woulo
be universal. By the supposition it should be so; for, af
all society is uLder sin, it is of course suffering the retn-
butive action of penal causes, and as all discord propagates
only greater discord and can not propagate harmony, ii
follows that the run of society under sin must be down-
ward, f^om bad to worse, unless interrupted by some re-
medial agency from without.

It is somewhat difficult to test our particular opinion on
this subject by actual examples; for we can not common-
ly trace the unhistoric and subtle methods, in which any
race of men may have been impregnated with new possi-
bilities; sometimes by other religions, with which the}^
are made conversant by commerce and travel; sometimes
by sporadic and supernatural revelations; traces of which
are discernible, not only in the extra-Jewish examples
cf Jethro, Job, and Cornelius, but in the literature of
all the cultivated races, and sometimes, here and there, in
the demonstrations even of the wild races. That the old
Pelasgic race was raised, by a mere natural progress, to the
high pitch of culture displayed by the Greek civilization,
we have no reason whatever to believe. Their literature,
from Hesiod downward, is sprinkled with too many traces
of sentiment derived from the Jewish and Egyptian relig-
i<)ns, to suffer the opinion that they are a nation thus ad-
vanced, by the simple motherhood of nature. The Roman
r;iviiization was, in fact, a propagation of the Greek, n'itli
the advantage of a right infusion from her serious and
venerable fathers, who, like Numa, communed with iji vis-
ible powers in retired groves and silent grottos. The
Teutonic race, often named as an example of natural de-
7elopn;ent, is known to hav( been set forward bv the

226 THE SAVAGE IS NOT A FHKSH

civilizations it conqueied and its early conversion to lat
Christian faith. Meantime how many great and powerful
races have become extinct. Wc look for the Ninevitea
with as little hope as for Ninus himself. The Assyrians,
Babylonians, ;ind Medes are also vanished. The Egy})
tians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Komans, once tho great
powers of history and civilization, are extinct The
Aztec race, run down to such a state of incapacity as not
even to understand their own monuments, or know by
whom they were built, we rightly call savages, and look
upon as having just now come to their vanishing point.

What now does it mean that so many races, empires,
languages of the world, have become extinct? Is this a
token of infallible development? Do we see in this the
proof that all the evil and sin of the world are going, at
last, to be surmounted and cleared by the inevitable ^aw of
progress ? What would our new prophets of development
say, if they were told, when exulting so confidently in the
glorious future of their own and all other nations, that a day
will certainly be reached, when the Anglo-American race
is become an extinct race, Washington a contested locality,
and the Constitution of the United States a hopeless search
of the world's antiquarians? Distant as such an expecta-
tion may be from our thoughts, and contrary as it may be
to the illimitable progress of which we hear so often, it id
'jnly that which has happened a hundred times already,
iiid, Christianity apart, may as well happen again.

We have spoken of the evident falsity of the supposi
lion, that all the advancement of the world begins at ai
origjially savage state; that being, in fact, no first, but an
old and decayed state rather, where long ages of doterio
ration under sin have finally extirpated the original possi

BUT AN OLD STATE. 22)

bilities ol {,'dvancement. The first stage of human so-
oietj was simply a stage of crudity, or crude capacity,
and was not more remote from the state of high
civilization than it was from the low, decrepid, ani-
malized condition which we now designate by the term
t'Xvage. All races begin together at the state of simple
being, or crude capacity, and only make the fatal leap of
sIe together. After that they separate, some ascending,
\el up by their holy seers and lawgivers, and others, not
having or not giving heed to such, going down the scale
of penal deteriorations to become savages. A full half
the globe is peopled thns by tribes which are either
reduced to tno savage condition, or else are far on their
way toward it ; humbled in capacity, physically deterio-
rated, and that, to such a degree, that the springs of recu-
perative force appear to be quite gone. Considering now
the certain fact, that all these had their beginning in a
simply crude state, having the same high possibilities and
affinities, which the races had that are now most advanced,
what are we to think of mere development ? This advant
age or condition of crude possibility they had, many thou
sands of years ago, and the result is what we see. Having
run down thus miserably under the boasted gospel of
natural progress, what hope is there in this gospel for the
final restoration of all things?

It is fatally opposed too by the geologic analogies
Here it stands, the settled verdict of science itself, that tho
euccessive eras of vegetable and animal life have not been
introduced, by any law of progress, or by any mere devel-
opment of nature and her forces. The attempts that have
been made to show this are even pitiable failures. They
a«k us, in fact to believe greater miracles in the name ol

228 THE HEALING F U N C T ION.

development than any wo onoonnter in the gospel liistDi)',
Thus, we have displayed in the new ereati >ns of the vockf
i-heniselves, a standing type of that moral new cre-;i
don. bv whieh the distempered and fallen raees of ire
world are to be raised up. Lest we should think t.iiy
5ueh divine intervention innvdible, and try to lind some
better hope for man in the gospel of development, we are
here fiimiUiU'izeJ with the taet, that no sueh law of devel
opment has been able to earry on the geologic progress ol
the planet, and that G«^d has been wont, in all its ancient
depopulations, to insert new germs of life ereatively, and
people it with living creatures fresh from his hand.

Ag-ain it is a consideration sc.nrcely less impressive, that
Gcd has managed to insert into the physiological history
of animals and vegetables an always present, living type
uf the process itself, by which, as transcending all niere
development, his supernatural remedy operates; so that
we mav see it, as it were, with our eyes, and become famil
iar with it. I refer to that wondrous, inexplicable func-
tion of healing, discovered in the restoration or repair of
animals and vegetables, that are wounded or sick. When
a tree, for example, is hacked, or bruised, a strange nurs-
ing process forthwith begins, by which the wound is
healed. A new bark is formed on the edges of the
wound, by what method no art of mau can trace, the
dead matter is thrown oft^ and a growth inward narrows
the breach, till finally the two margins meet and the tis-
sues interweave, and not even a scar is left So in all the
flesh wounds of animals, and the fractures even of boneti
So too in regard to all diseases nc-t terminating mortaliy ^
tliev pass a crisis, where the healing function, whatever it
be, triumphs over the poison of the disease and a recovery

so MODK OF DEVELOP VI EN r. 228

follows, in whi.h the whole flesh and fiber apyte^r even
to be produced anew.

flere then is a healing power, whose working we can nc
way trace, and one that, if we look at the causes of disin
tegration present, appears even to accomplish what is ira-
rx»s?iible. Regarding the body as a machine — and taken aa
1 ri-jerely material organization what is it more? — it is
plainly impossible for it to heal, in this manner, and repaii
itself" The disordered watch can never run itself into
good repair. In machines, disorder can only propagate
and aggravate disorder, till they become a wreck. The
physicians and physiologists call the strange healing func-
tion the vis medicatrix; as if it were some gentle, feminine
nurse, hidden from the sight, whose office it is to expel th«
poisons, knit the fractures, and heal the wounds of bodies.
And as names often settle the profoundest questions, so it
appears to be commonly taken for granted here, that the
healing accomplished is wrought by a nursing function
thus named, as one of the inherent properties of vital sub-
stances. It may be so or it may not; for the whole ques-
tion is one that is involved in the profoundest mystery.
The healing property may be one of the incidents of Hfe
itself, or it may be a distinct power whose office it is to be
the guard and medicating nurse of life, or it may be the
working of a grand supernatural economy set in closest
vicinage to nature, to be the physical, visible, always pres-
. r t token of a like supernatural economy in the matters
i character and the soul. But whatever view we take of
his heahng power in physiology, or whatever account we
■-Kake of it, these two points are clear.

First rliat the healing accomplished is no faot of devel
op-nent. There is no difficulty in seeing how existing

20

230 THE HEALING FUNCTION

tissues and organs may create extensions within their owt
vascular sphere, and this is development. But where a nem
ekin or bark is to be created, or a new interjocking made of
parts that are sundered, the ducts and vesicles that might acl
in development, being parted and open at their ends, wail
mending themselves. Thus, when the parts of a fractured
H-Dne are knit together, and we see them reaching after each
other, as it were, across a chasm, where there are no vessela
to bridge it or carry across the lines of connection, devel-
opment might well enough make the parts longer, but how
could it make them unite across the fracture, by which they
are separated? The development of a tree, wounded by
some violence, would only enlarge the wound, just in pro
portion to the enlargement of the surface which the bark
should cover. A fevered body does not cure itself by de-
velopment. As little can we imagine that the restored
health and volume of the body is created by the develop-
ment of the fever. No shade of countenance therefore Ih
given to the hope that human development, under the re-
tributive woes of sin, will be any sufiicient cure of its dis-
orders, or will set the fallen subjects of it forward, in a
course of social progress.

This also, secondly, is equally clear, that, as the myste
rious healing of bodies yields the development theory no-
token of favor, it is only a more impressive type, on thai
ancount, of some grand restorative economy, by which ihc:
condition of unnature in souls and the world, is to be su-
pernaturally regenerated — ^just such a type as, regarding
the relations of matter to mind, and of things natural to
things spiritual, we might expect to find incorporated, in
Kome large and systematic way, in the visible objects and
pro<>esses of the world. And how much does the healing

NOT DEVELOPMt NT. 231

(»1 bodies signify, when associated thus -with the grand
elemental disorder and breakage of sin! What is ii, in
tact, but a kind of glorious, every where visible sacrament,
that tokens life, and hope, and healing invisible, for all the
letributive woes and bleeding lacerations of our guilty, fall
en state, as a race apostate from God.

Hence too probably the fact that transactions of healing
are so closely connected, the world over, with sentiments
of religion. Perhaps the fact is due, in part, to some la-
tent association that connects diseases with sin and, to
much the same extent, connects the hope of healing with
some possibihty of a divine medication. However this
may be, the mystery of healing, as we are constituted,
stands in close affinity with God and the faith of his su-
pernatural operation. Thus it was that the priests both of
the Egyptians and the Greeks were their physicians, and
that their precepts and prescripts of healing were kept in
their temples. Esculapius too, the god of medicine, had
his own altars and priests. At a latter period, the Essenea
and the christian monks, accounted by some to be their
successors, bad their pious explorations of diseases and
the sacred powers of remedies ; reducing medicine itself to
a function of religion. Later still, Paracelsus himself be-
gan the restoration of medicine, as a kind of chemical the-
osophv. And as Christianity itself classes healings among
the spiritual gifts, and calls the elders of the church to
oray for the sick; so we find that some of our Indian
O-ibes have traditions of one whom, as related to the Great
Spirit, they call the Uncle, and who came into the world
by a mysterious advent, long ages ago, and instituted ihn
"Grand Medicine," which is, in fact, their religicm.

It is difficult tc resist the impression, in sur-.h demon

232 WK HAVE NO FAITH

dtrations as thetje, of some very pi-ofound conrectioii be
tween the healing of bodies and the faith of a supernat
ural grace of healing for the disorders of souls. Else whj
this p irsistent tendency in men's opinions of healing, ic
rijsociate the fevered body and the leprous mind, and seek
\he medication of both, in the common rites of religion.

But there is a shorter argument with the scheme thai
propos(\s to find a remedy for all the ills of character and
society, in what it calls a more complete development. It
is this: that no one ever dares practically to act on the faith
of such a doctrine, whether in the state or the family. The
civil law is, in fact, and to a very great extent, a restraint
on development, and has its merit in the fact that it is
It forbids men to unfold themselves freely, in their base
passions and criminal instigations, and deters them from
it. Were it not for the state, protecting itself by such
means against development, society would be quite dis-
solved. What we discover in families is even more re-
markable. There are multitudes of parents that believe,
as they suppose, with all their hearts, in the good day
coming through the progress of human development.
And as part of the same general faith, their views of edu-
cation make it to consist siniply in educing or developing
just what 'iS in the child's nature. But they do not act cd
that principle in the house, and dare not; though probably
'enough they are never aware of the fact. Thej maintain
a family regimen that consists, to a great degree, not ir
ievelopment but in repression. To let the child have hh
•vay and act himself out freely, without restraint, is do
part of their plan. Probably it never occurs to them as a
rational possibility. Just contrary to this, they lay theii
foundations in a restriction of natural develoDment; hoping

IN DEVELOPMENT. 28o

m that manner to extirpate unrul}^ and base instigations,
a/i'l form a habit in the chi^d of doing better things than
he would most naturally do. And it is remarkable that,
iu the fulfilling of their office, which is so far an office of
repression, they are acting as a force supernatural. Ac-
tording to our definition, it will be remembered that hu-
man wills are strictly supernatural in their action, and the
child, we here discover, spends all the first years of his
life under the regulative and repressive action of such
wills. He is in them, in fact, more truly than he is in na-
ture, and the house is a little creation made for him by
their keeping. He is handled in infancy as they direct, fed
as they direct when he begins to ask for food, clothed as they
direct, commanded, limited, forbidden, repressed, and so is
finally grown up to an age of self-regulation. The pro-
cess may be called his development, but the most remark-
able thing in it is that it is a restraint of development.
Why this restraint ? If development is going to be the gos-
pel of the world's redemption, what makes it wise, in the
common sense of the world, to restrain that gospel? Are
the ills of society and the world going to be cured toe
soon? If development can do all that is promised, why
not give it a hearty godspeed everj^ where, and let every
human creature, old and young, act out what is in him, in
ihe speediest, most unrestricted manner possible ? A glance
in this direction is sufficient to show us that all we hear of
inevitable progress, and the necessary laws of develop-
ment, is hollow and deceitful. It is not development but
new creation that can bring us the remedies we look for.
N ature lias powers and capabilities that want development.
Reduced to real unnature (which is her present state,) shfi
also has disordered passions, base instigatioiis, greedy a]v

20*

234 SELF-KEFORMATION,

petit(is, ferocious animosities, propensities to cunning anri
falseliood, which want no development, and which, if they
nre developed, unrestrained, annihilate all chance of pro
gress, and even forbid the existence of society. Mere do
velopment therefore promises nothing.

We come now —

II. To the other rival gospel, that which proposes to
dispense with all supernatural aids, and to restore the dis-
orders and the fallen character of sin, hy a self-cultivated,
or self-originated virtue.

Expectation is here rested on the human will, whi';h, in
our view, may be done, it will be said, with greater rea-
son, since we make it, even by definition, a supernatural
power. But there are different orders or degrtes, it must
be observed, of supernatural power; the human, the an-
gelic, the divine; which all are alike in the fact that the
will acts from itself, uncaused in its action, but very un-
Hke as regards potency, or the extent of their efficacy.
What we are endeavoring, in our argument, to show, ia
the fact of a divine supernatural agency concerned in the
upraising or redemption of man. But if man can raise
himself, by his own will, that is, by his humanly super-
natural force, then plainly there is no need of a divine in-
tervention from without and above iiature, to regenerate
his fallen state. Still it will not be denied by the class of
(liachers most forward in maintaining this form of natu-
] iiism, that all religious virtue is dependent, in a certain
sense, on the concourse and spiritual helping of God:
Only that concourse and helping, it will be said, belong?
to the scheme of nature, and never undertakes to help us
out of the retributive woes and disorders of nature; foi
aature is the system of God, including all he does oi can

TVO SUFFICIENT HOI E. 235

rationally be expected to do. To imagins tliat sacli u
mode of piety, or religious virtue, bliould be maintained
by the human will, would be less extravagant if there ^ere
no sin, no consequent woes and disorders; though even
(;h(in it would be the faith of a God imprisoned, or en-
tombed, in the inexorable laws of nature; with whom the
soul could aspire to no real converse and could have ito
social sympathy, more than with a wall. Before this un-
bending prisoner of fate, this nature-God, this dead wall,
he might go on to dress up a character and fashion a mere-
ly ethical virtue; cultivating truth, honesty, justice, tem-
perance, kindness, piling up acts of merit, and doing legal
works of charity ; but to call this character religious, how-
ever plausible the show it makes, is only an abuse of the
term. Religious character is not legal. It is an inspira-
tion— the Life of God in the Soul of Man ; and no such
life can ever quicken a soul except in the faith of a Living
God, which here is manifestly wanting. Not even the
pure angels could subsist in such a style of virtue; for it
is the strength and beatitude of their holiness, that it is no
will-work in them, but an etei-nal, immediate inspiration
of God. Consciously it is not theirs, but the inbreathing
life of their Father.

But this ethical gospel, this religion acted as in panto-
mime, becomes even more insipid and absurd, when the
fact of sin, with all its consequences of distemper and dis-
order, is admitted. Now the problem is to find b}" what
power the original harmony of nature can be reconstructed,
and its currents of penal disaster turned back. Can the
human will dc this? That it can act upon the counses
of nature we know, — sin itself indeed is the staring and
incontrovertible proof that it can. But it does not follow,

ti36 SKLF-RESTORATION

as we have said already, that the power which has brokct
an eggj or shivered a crystal, can mend it. That is a thing
raore difficult, and demands a higher power.

Consider simply the change that is needed to restore
che lapsed integrity of a soul. Its original spontaneity to
good is gone, its silver cord of harmony is broken, the
sweet order of life is turned into a tumult of inward bii-
iorness, its very laws are become its tormentors. All its
curious, multiform, scarcely conceivable functions, submit-
ted by its laws to the will, are now contesting alw^ayy
with each other and are wholly intractable to its sover-
eignty. And still it is expected of the will, that it ia
going to gather them all up into the primal oider, and
reconstruct their shattered unity I Why, it were easier, a
thousand fold, for man's will to gather all the birds of the
sky into martial order, and march them as a squadron
through the tempests of the air! Manifestly none but
God can restore the lapsed order of the soul. He alone
can reconstruct the crystalline unity. Which, if He does,
it will imply an acting on those lines of causes in its nature,
by whose penal efficacy it is distempered ; and that is, by
the supposition, a supernatural operation.

Besides, the work is really not done, till the subject is
lestored to a virtue whose essence is liberty. And how
U man, b - his mere will, to start the flow of liberty? lie
\n;>y do this and do that, and keep doing this and that,
-;a'efully, punctiliously, suffi^ring no slackness. But it
mil be work, work only, and the play of liberty will
ne^er come. He can never reach the true liberty till an
inspiration takes him, and the new birth of God's Spirit
makes him a son. The light he manufactures will be
darkness, or at best a palo phosphorescence, till Chibat i£

18 IMPOSSIBLE. 237

revealed withiii. Ris self -culture may fsuhion a j^ioture
with many marks of grace, but the quicken iug of God
alone can make it live. If he rehsh his work in a degree^
it will be the relish of conceit — there is no fountain of heav
f nly joy in it, bursting up from unseen depths witliin. lie
will advance fitfully, eccentrically, and without baJance,
making a grimace here, while he fashions a beauty there;
for there is no balance of order and proportion till hia
faith is rested in God, and his life flows out from the
divine plenitude and perfection. Meantime his ideals will
grow faster than his attainments, and if he is not wholly
drunk up in conceit, he will be only the more afflicted
and baffled, the greater his pertinacity. 0, if there be
any kind of life most sad, and deepest in the scale of pity,
it is the dry, cold impotence of one, who is honestly set to
the work of his own self-redemption !

Do we then affirm, it will be asked, the absolute inabil
ity of a man to do and become what is right before God i
That is the christian doctrine, and there is none that is
more obviously true. Wherein, then, it may also be
asked, is there any grouna of blame for continuance in
sin ? Because, we answer, there is a Living God engaged
to help us, and inviting always our acceptance of his help.
Nor is this any mere gracious ability, such as constitutes
the joy of some and the offense of others. No created
being, of any world, not even the new-formed man be-
fore his fall, nor the glorified saint, nor the spotless angel,
nad ever any possibility of holiness, except in the embrace
of Go(\. This is the normal condition of all souls, that
they be filled with God, acted by God, holding their will
in his, irradiated always by his all-supporting life. Jusi
I his It is that constitutes the radical idea of reliffioE ancl

238 SELF- RESTORATION

differs it from a mere ethical virtue. God is ihe prime
necessity of all religious virtue, and is only more em-
phatically so to beings under sin. The necessity is <50ii-
3tituent, not penal ; it becomes penal only when communi-
cations originally given to the fallen, but now cast away
by their sin, require to be restored.

There is really no difficulty in this question of disability
under sin, save that which is created by the fogs of unin-
telligent speculation. It is taken extensively, as if it
were a question regarding man's inherent, independent
ability, when in fact he has no such ability to any thing.
Can he obey God, or not ? is he able to do God's will, oi
not? is the question raised; and it is understood and dis-
cussed as being a question that turns on the absolute
quantities of the man, and not in any respect on relative
aids and conditions without ; much as if the question were
whether he has weight, apart from all relative weights oi
attractions ? or whether he can stand alone, apart from any
thing to stand upon ? or whether he has power to live a
year, apart from all food and light and shelter and air?
The true question of ability is different. It is this:
whether the subject is able to rise into a holy life, taken
as insphered in God, and all the attractive, transforming,
and supporting influences of the grace of God ? Apart
from this, he certainly is not able. By mere working on
him3elf and manipulating, as it were, his body of sin anl
leatL he can do just nothing in the way of self-perfcc
tioD *, and, if he could even do every thing, as regards
self -transformation, there would be no religious character
in the result, any more than if his works were done before
the moon. Religious character is God in the soul, and
without that all pretenses of religious virtue are, in f:ia

IS IMPOSSIBLE. 28P

atheistic. Such is the disability of a fallen inaL fcaken a**
acting on himself; and the condition of an angel, acting
in that manner, is no better; for he could not begin to act
thus, without being himself fallen, at the instanl. But if
the question be what a man has power to do, taken in the
surroundings of divine truth and mercy, wh;ch in fact
include the co-operating grace of the divine Spirit, the
true answer is that he can do all things. He Las, at every
moment, a complete power as respects doing what God
requires of him at that moment, and is responsible accord-
ing to his power. And yet, when we say a complete
power, we mean, not so much that he is going even then
to do som.ething himself, as that he is going to have some-
thing done within, by the quickening and transforming
power of his divine Lord, in whom he trusts. His power
is to set himself before power, open his nature to the rule
of power, and so to live. Even as we may say that a
tree has power to live and grow, not by acting on iiself
and willing to grow, but as it is ministered unto by its
natural surroundings, the soil, the sun, the dew, the air.
It has only to oifer itself openly and receptively to these,
and by their force to grow.

Where, then, it may be asked, is the significance of
free will, which we have even shown to be a power su-
pernatural? If the disordered soul can not restore itself,
or by diligent self-culture regain the loss it has made by
fin, wherein lies the advantage of such a power, and
where the responsibility to a life of holy virtue? Out
answer is, that by the freedom of the will we understand
simply its freedom as a volitional function ; but mere
volitions, taken by themselves, involve no capacity t*:
reg«-'n era te, v'^:"^ constitute, a character. Holy\irtiie is noi

240 RESTORATION POSSIBLE,

an act. or compilation of acts taken nicrelj as volitions
but it is a new state or status rather, a right disposcdnesa
whence new action may flow. And no mere volitioniiJ
exercise can change the state or disposedness of the soul,
without concurrent help and grace. We can will anj?
tiling, but the execution may not follow. To will may
he present, but how to perform, it may be difficult to find,
— difficult, that is, when simply acting in and upon our-
selves; never difficult, never possible to fail in doing,
when acting before and toward a Divine Helper, trustfully
appealed to. And this is the power of the will, as regards
our moral recovery. It may so offigr itself and the sub-
ordinate capacities to God. that God shall have the whole
man open to his dominion, and be able to mgenerate m
him a new, divine state, or principle of action ; while,
taken as a governing, cultivating, and perfecting power in
itself, it has no such capacity whatsoever. And this is
the only rational and true verdict. Say what we may of
the will as a strictly self-determining power, raise what
distinctions we may as regards the kinds of ability, such
as natural and moral, antecedent and subsequent, we have
no ability at all, of any kind, to regenerate our own state,
or restore our own disorders. Salvation is by faith, oi
there is none.

There is then, we conclude, no hope of a restoration of
'j.')ciety, or of a religious upraising of man, except in a supei-
aatural ai d divine operation. Progress under sin, by la va
(■>f nat'iral de^velopment, is a fiction — there is no hope of
progress, apart from the regenerative and quickenmg
power of a grace that transcends mere natural condi-
tions and causes. As little room is there to expect tha*

ONLY BY THE GRACE OF GOL. 2tti

men will be able to lieal their own spiritual maladies and
3ultivate themselves into heaven's order, bj a merely eth-
ical regimen maintained in the plane of nature. The on]y
remedy for the human state, under sin, is that which comei
irito nature, as the revelation of a divine force.

Suppose now there might be found some great and pro-
Joind thinker, who has never come under the irapiess of
Christianity, or even heard of such a thing as a plan of
supernatural redemption ; a man of the highest culture,
least under the power of superstition; a free-thinker a-
regards the religion of his country and times; and sup-
pose that he, by the mere force of his own thought,
struggling with the great problem of humanity, society,
and progress, should be found to rest his hope deliberately
on some supernatural remedy, as the only sufficient rem-
edy for the world; giving forth a testimony that has been
audited and accepted by the greatest and best minds of
all subsequent ages; revealing, as it were, a Christianity
before the time, as far as the want of it and the fact of
some such operative power are concerned ; how unlikely
will it be that some new science of development, or some
more rational gospel of self-culture, has just now dis-
covered the essential weakness or childishness of a sujtct-
natural faith. Precisely such a witness we have in the
-rreat Plato, seconded by the coincident testimony of
many others, only less conspicuous than he.

Beginning at the base note of human depravity, he
iays, " I have heard from the wise men that we are now
lead, and that the body is our sepulcher."* Again he
says, "The prime evil is inborn in souls;" "it is implanted
in men to sin."f Again, "The nature of mankind

* Gorgias, foL 493. f Leg., p. 731

242 THE SAMK IS HHLi:,

IS gi>eatly degenerated and depraved, all niaimer cf dis
orders infest human nature, and men, being impotent, art
torn in pieces by their lusts, as by so many wild horses."*
rio also speaks of an "evil nature," "an evil in nature,'
"a disease in nature," "a destruction of harmony in the
soul," and much more to the same effect. Then again,
tracing the origin of this diseased state, he says, "Thai
in times past, the divine nature flourished in men ; but, a^
length, being mixed with mortal custom, it fell into ruin ,
hence an inundation of evils in the race."t Again, " The
cause of corruption is from our parents, so that we never
relinquish their evil way, or escape the blemish of theii
evil habit."t

Inquiring now for the remedy which is ablo to restore
and re-establish the virtue lost, he discusses at large
the question, whether virtue can be taught, and delibe-
rately concludes that it can be produced by no mere teach-
•ng. He says, "If, in this whole disputation, we have
'ightly conceived the case, virtue is acquired, neither by
nature's force, nor by any institutes of discipline or
teaching, but it comes to those that have it, by a certain
• liv'ne appointment [or inspiration,] over and above the
mii-J's own force or exertion. "§ He also adds that, if we
could Vs dressed up into a show of virtue by teaching, it
would be the same as "to be adorned with a shadow,
whereas virtue is a thing real and solid," — rooted, that is,
in the heart's inmost life. The same conviction is ex
pressed in a different form when he says, "That aftei
the golden age, the universe, by reason of that confusion
that came upon it, would have been quite dissolved, had
not God again taken it upon him to sit at the helm and

•Politic^', p. 274, f Oritiaa p. 400. J Timaeus. K 3. g Mono.. 89

BVE»" BY THE WISEST HEATHENS. 243

go /em the world, and restore its disordered and .dmost
disjointed parts to their primeval order."* And accord-
antlv with such a conviction, he recommends a faith in
divine help and supernatural guidance, and says, "he
who prayeth to God, and trusteth in his good favor, shall
do well."f Again, " God is the beginning and end of all
being, and whoever follows his guidance shall be happy.":f
And that he means, by this, to commend a faith in super-
natural aid, is evident when he says, in his Timseus, "that
beatitude, or spiritual liberty, is only to have the demon,"
that is, the good spirit, "dwelling in us," alluding probably
to the remarkable declaration of his teacher, Socrates,
" that a certain demon, or good spirit, had followed him
even from his childhood, with his good suggestion oi
influence, signifying what he should do."§ He brings in
Socrates also maintaining this remarkable dialogue with
his pupil, Alcibiades: "Dost thou know by what means
thou may est avoid the inordinate motions of thy mind ?"
He answers, "Yes." Soc. "How?" Al "If thou wilt,
Socrates." aSoc. "Thou speakest not rightly." ^Z. "How
then must I. speak?" Soc. "Say, if God will,"|| &c.

Here then, we have a man rising up out of heathenism,
one of the greatest of maakind, testifying his convictior.
of the disability and ruin of human nature, and his confi-
dence in some supernatural aid, as the only hope of the
world — all this instructed by his own consciousness, and by
TO many years of philosophic study, in the great problem
^f humanity and human progress. For no teacher, ever
of our modern time, is more intent on the possibility of
some better ideal state of the world and society than he

♦Politicus, 251. f Epinoni., 980.. J Lei?., 716.
gTbeages, 128. | Alcib., l?5.

244 TUEY ARE OPPRESSED

In this problem, indeed, it may even be said that he wore
out his life.

Seneca speaks quite despairingly of our possible recov
cry by any means. He says, " Our corrupt nature has drunk
in such deep draughts of iniquity, which are so far incor-
porated in its very bowels, that you can not remove it,
save bj tearing them out." And yet he conceives, in
the faintest manner, some possibility of supernatural aid.
*'No man is able to clear himself, let some one give him a
hand, let some one lead him out"* — as if asking for some
Christ unknown, to come and bring the .^oid forth from it^
thralldom.

He also says, as if he were writing out another Vlltl
chapter of the Romans, "What is it, Lucilius, that, when
we set ourselves in one way, draws us another, and when
we desire to avoid any course, drives us into it? What is
it that so wrestles with our mind, allowing us never to set-
tle any good resolution once for all?"f

And Ovid also joins in the same confession — " If I could,
[ would be more sane. But some unknown force drags me
against my will. Desire draws me one way, conviction an-
other I see the better and approve, the worse I follow."!
"0 wretched man that I am, who shall deliver?" is the
sigh that interprets and fitly concludes their confession.

Passages in great number could be cited from other ai)-
cient writers, in which they express the same conviction,
that man can never be raised out of his sin, by any mere
natural force. But these are points of opinion. We pre-
fer to add, as being more significant, some illustrations
also of the practical longing they had for the appearance
of some divine helper, and the manifestation of God in

♦ Ep., 52. f Ep., 52. I Metam, vii. : 1&.

BY THE UNCERTAINTIES OF TRUTH. 245

some gracious revelation of bis pres(mce. In illuS'
trations of this kind, we shall see exactly what would be
our own condition, if these supernatural manifestations,
denied by so many in our times, were taken away, and w€
were really set back, as we require ourselves to be, in the-
proper darkness of nature. It was a continual source ol
miaery to the most enlightened of the pagan scholars and
philosophers that, whatever they seemed to discover, or to
establish by the light of natural reason, was yet never dis-
covered, never established, but was still overhung by a
3loud of uncertainty. Thus we hear Xenophanes closing
off his work on Nature, in these words — "No man has
discovered any certainty, nor will discover it, concerning
the gods, and what I say of the universe. For if he ut-
tered what is even most perfect, still he does not know it,
but conjecture hangs over all."

Oppressed by this feeling of uncertainty, they were only
goaded the more painfully in their search after the real
meaning of life, and waited, with a longing only the more
hungry, for some revelation of divine things, if haply iX
might sometime be given. Thus Plato, speaking in his
Phaedo of the soul, and its destiny, says — "It appears to me
that, to know them clearly in the present life, is either im-
possible, or very difficult; on the other hand, not to test
what has been said of them in every possible way, not to
investigate the whole matter, and exhaust upon it every
effort, is the part of a very weak man. For we ought, in
respect to these things, either to learn from others ho'W
they stand, or to discover them for ourselves; or, if both
these are impossible, then, taking the best of human rea-
Bonings, that which appears the best supported, and em-
barking on that, as one who risks himself on a raft, so to

21*

246 AND TESTIFY THEIR LONGING

sail through life — unless oue could bt carried more safely
or with less risk, on a secret conveyance, or some Divine
Logos." What a condition of hunger for knowledge!— a
great and mighty soul, prying at the gates of light, to forco
them open, catching the faintest gleams of truth or opin
ion, and conmiitting his all tenderly to them as to a slen-
der raft upon the sea, only venting, with a sigh, the mys-
terious hint of a Divine Logos, who will possibly come to
him within, and be a surer light, a safer guide. And this
dim hint of a better revelation is ventured more boldly in
his Alcibiades, when he says — "We must wait patiently
until some one, either a god or some inspired man, teach
us our moral and religious duties and, as Pallas in Homei
did to Diomede, remove the darkness from our eyes." Ho*,^
little incredible was it to him, the highest philosophic in-
tellect the world has ever seen, that some incarnate mes-
senger of God, or teacher supernaturally sent, may some-
time come to enlighten the world! What in fact does he
tell us, but that he is waiting for Jesus the Christ !

At a later period, or about the time of Christ, when the
faith of the ancient religion or mythology had become
more nearly extinct, the struggle of souls, shut up to the
mere darkness of nature and reason, became more sad and
painful. Strabo, for example, falling back on the religion of
Moses, received from him a faith in one Supreme Essence,
who he thought should be worshiped without images io
g3cred groves; and there, he said, "the devout should lay
vhemselves down to sleep, and expect signs from God in
dreams."* Not daring to look for any waking experience
of God supernaturally revealed in the soul, he must stilJ
indulge the hope that the Eternal will, at least, come to il

♦Lib. XVI. Chap. 2.

rOR A SUPERNATURAL REVELATION^. 241

in the land of sleep and dreams. 'Poor Pliny, confessing
too the wretched hunger of his soul, saw no lelief to it
better than suicide. "It is difficult," he writes, "to say
whether it might not be better for men to be wholly with-
out religion, than to have one of this kind [viz., that of
his countT}',] which is a reproach to its object. The vani-
ty of man, and his insatiable longing after existence, havo
led him also to dream of a life after death. A being full
of contradictions, he is the most wretched of creatures,
since the other creatures have no wants transcending the
bounds of their nature. Man is full of desires and wants
that reach to infinity, and can never be satisfied. Among
these so great evils, the best thing God has bestowed on
man is the power to take his own life."* Scarcely less
sad is the desperation of the pagan Cecilius, represented
in the dialogue of Minutius Felix, as maintaining that,
mthout any reasonable evidence for the old religion, they
must yet cling to it as a tradition; for he felt that they
must have some semblance of a religion, some opinion of
a supernatural care and a converse of Deity with men.
"How much better is it," he said, "to receive just what
our fathers have told 'us, to worship the gods they
taught us to reverence, even before we could have any true
knowledge of them, to allow ourselves no right of private
judgment, but to believe our ancestors who, in the infan-
oy of mankind, near the birth of the world, were even
considered worthy of having the gods for their friends."
What a strait is this for an intelligent being to be in —
holding fast, by his will, upon the belief of a supernatural
approach of tlie gods, in times gone by, without any pros
eot evidence!

* Hist. Vf t.. Lib. VIL

248 IN ALL WHICH, THEY AilE

ft IS a very fine thing for many, saturated as tLe;y are
with christian truth, and all but oppressed with tte evi-
dences of a new creating grace and gospel, to invent spec-
ulative difficulties, and finally take it up as wisdom or the
better reason, to believe in nothing but mere nature, and
lior laws. But the recoil of the soul from such negations
wi U come after, and it will be terrible quite beyond their con-
ception. We see this in the facts just stated, and yet more
affe(5tingly in the history of Clement the Roman, and of hia
conversion. He tells how he was harassed from his child-
hood, by questions which paganism could not help him to
answer; such as relate to his being and immortality, the
origin of the world and its continuance, when it began,
when it will end, and whither his present life is to carry
l.im. "Incessantly haunted," he says, "by such thoughts
as these, which came I knew not whence, I was sorely
troubled, so that I grew pale and emaciated. * * * J
resorted to the schools of the philosophers, hoping to find
some certain foundation. I saw nothing but the piling up
and tearing down of theories. Thus was I driven to
and fro, by the different representations, and forced to
conclude that things appear, not as they are in them-
selves, but as they happen to be presented on this or that
side. I was made dizzier than ever, and from the bottom
cf my heart, sighed for deliverance."* Then he tells how
I.c resolved to visit Egypt, the land of mysteries and ap-
raritions, there to hunt up some magician who could
eumm.on a spirit for him from the other world; for ho
thought, if he could see a spirit, that would settle the ques-
tion of immortality, and give him a 'ixed point of truth
But in this unhappy state, inquiring, distressed, agitated, be

♦ Neander'8 Kist., Vol I., pp. 32-33.

WITNESSES FOR CHRIST. 249

fell in with a christian gospel, heard it preached, there dis-
covered what his soul had been aching so long and bitterlj
to find, and there he found rest.

These illustrations from history show us most effectu*
ally how little of true science there is, after all, in those,
who boast the laws of progress, or a gospel of self-culti
vation, as more rational and hopeful than a gospel of faith.
After all, they may see that, when left to the proper dark-
ness of nature, it is no such rational and luminous state ag
they thought, but a night of gloom, a longing vacancy, £
hungoT insupportable. Nature has no promise for society,
least of all, any remedy for sin

(JHAPTER IX.

THE 8UPIBNATURAL COMPATIBLE WITH NATURE ANB
SUBJECT TO FIXED LAWS

Jf, as we have shown, there is no hope for man, or human
soo.'et}^ under sin, save in the supernatural interposition of
God, we are led to inquire, in the next place, what rational
objr-ction there may be to such an interposition ? And we
find two objec\ions alleged. First, that any such inter-
ference of supernatural agency is incompatible with the
order of nature. Secondly, that the supernatural agency
supposed, is itsel.'' dispensed without law, and contrary, in
that view, to reasoj. Of these I will speak in their order.
And—

I. I undertake to show that the supernatural divine
agency, required uo provide an efficacious remedy for sin,
is wholly compatible with nature; involving no breach of
her laws, or disturbance of their systematic action.

T have already shown that nature is not, in any proper
and complete sense, the system of God, but is in fact a
subordinate member only, of a higher and virtually super-
natural system, to wnose uses it is subject. It is, in fact,
a Thing; while the real kingdom of God is a kingdom ol
Powers, Himself the Eegal Power. Both He and they
are continually using the Thing, and pouring their activity
into it, as the medial point of their relationship; and this,
in a way, we now propose to show, that is nowise inconr
patible with its laws ; for the very sufficient reason thai,
by these laws^ it is originally submitted to their activity.
Not even what we call the distemper and disorder o/

COMPATIBLE WITH NATURE. 25i

wrong supposes any overturning of those laws , it is onlj
a result of miscliief, produced by throwing in that which
provokes their penal consequences. In the same manner^
it will be seen tliat not even miracles, wrought by a super-
natural divine agency, necessarily imply any removal, or
suspension of such laws; for nature is subjected, by net
laws, both to God's activity and to ours, to he thus acted
on, and varied in her operation, by the new combinations
or conjunctions of causes, we are able to produce. Ac-
cordingly every result produced, in this manner, whether
by God or by men, represents nature supernaturally acted
on, not nature overturned; that is, it is natural in one
view, in another supernatural ; natural as coming to pass
under and by the laws of nature ; supernatural as coming
to pass by new conjunctions of causes, which are made by
the action of wills upon nature.

What an immense action upon nature are we ourselves
seen to have, as a race, when we consider the multifarious
wheels and engines we have put at work, the heavy bur-
dens we carry round the globe in our ships, the structures
we raise, the cultivation we practice. "We make the world,
in fact, another world. ' All of which is referrible to a force
supernatural, in the last degree. Kature, unapplied or
ancombined by our wills, could do no such thing. Wills
only have this power, and wills are supernatural. If now
we have a power so immense over the world, as we see in
all our works and wonders of contrivance, is it credible
thai God can have no way of access to nature, no power
at all ove^ nature ? Is he the only will excluded from a
sovereignty over it ?

To illustrate this point yet farther, we will suppose
a company of jouth or children, engaged in playing^ af

2b2 THE 3UPEKNATURAI

ball. The ball is an inert spherical substance, thr^i wiL
lie on the ground forever, unless it is i-aised by some cause
out of itself, and will never act, save as it is acted on. It
has a certain tenacit}^ of parts and an elastic body, but n^^
power in itself to move. Nevertheless we see it flylLe
through the ai.' in lively play, smitten, caught, thrown- -
the central object and instrument of what is called a game ;
that is of a social strife between the players. It is, for the
lime, a medium of commerce, in the lively battle of ita
motions, between so many contesting agents. But the
motions it has in the air, we observe, represent so many
arms throwing it by its weight, or driving it by its elas-
ticity. So far its play is natural only. Then, if we in-
quire what moves the arms, we discover that it is done by
the sudden contraction of muscles acting under purely
mechanical principles, and this is natural. K now we
push our inquiry still farther, asking why the muscles
contracted thus and thus, we discover that this also hap-
pened, by reason of mandates sent down to them on the
nervous cord, which, again, was equally natural. But if
we go still farther and ask what originated or caused the
wills to originate the mandates, the true answer is, that it
was the wills themselves, acting by no causation, able to
act or not ; so that, if some one or more of the players ia
a truant from school, or from home, transgressing, in the
play, a direct order of restriction, he will know that he 'j
doing wrong and blame himself for the wrong he doea ,
simply because it is an immediate, irresistible convictior
of liis mind, that he is impelled to his disobedience by qo
cause whatever. Doubtless he has ends, reasons, moti^'ea,
but these are no causes of his act ; for he knows that he
oould and ought to have resisted them all Here then wi

COMPATIBLE WITH NATURE 258

finally arrive at a pow(;r supernatural, moving all the
hands and bats of tlie players. The ball is at one end of
so many chains of causes, and the free wills of the playera
at the other. The ball would never have stirred but foi
the arms, nor these but for the contractions of the muscles,
nor these contracted but for the mandates sent down tn
them, which mandates, in the last degree, are the peremp-
tory acts of so many free wills, or powers, that act super-
naturally, from no causation. Just here then rises the
question, if the play is thus carried on by causes which,
in the last degree, are supernatural, is there any overturn-
ing o' disorder of nature implied in it? Manifestly not;
and for the simple reason that the bats, and arms, and
hands, and muscles, are by their very laws subordinated,
as chains of causes, to the supernatural power that wielda
them. The play is natural therefore, as being through
and by those subordinated agents ; and supernatural, aa
being from that power. We have no thought of a miracle
in the case, or of any implied overturning of nature
which is shocking to our faith. On the contrary, the
event is so common, so remote from any thing extraordi-
nary, that we are very likely to look upon it as a trans-
action, wholly in the world of natural cause and eftect.

We come now to the application. Nature is to Goc
and his spiritual and free creatures, what the ball is to the
players. In one view, we may regard the Almighty
Ruler of the world as the sensorium and active brain of
the world; having an immediate power of action through
every member and every line of causes in it; able, in
that manner, to maintain a constant living agency in its
events, without really infringing its order, or obstructing
and suspending its laws in any instance. Nature is plianl

22

254 THE S U P E Ji \ A r U R A L

thus to him, us the body of the pLayers to them; invi
as the natural order of their body is not violated by the
mandates they put upon it, so there is full opportunity foi
God to do his wonders of power and redemption in the
earth, without violating any condition of natural order
^nd system whatever. His access to all the lines of
causes in nature may be as truly normal as that which
vhe soul has, at that secret point of the brain where it
delivers its mandates to the body.

We are speaking here, it will be observed, not of God'a
possible activity, as being the activity of nature. That ia
a different conception. What we now say is, that, sup-
posing all the forces and laws of nature to continue for-
ever, there is also room for the perpetual acting of God
upon the lines of causes in nature, doing his will super
naturally in it, or upon it, just as we do, and yet in per-
fect compatibility with the laws and the settled order of
nature. He may as well act Himself into the world as
we, and nature will as little be overturned by his action
as by ours. Nor will it create any difficulty that He acta
like Himself, and in ways proportionate to his infinite
majesty.

That nature is in fact submitted to his action, as to
ours, in the manner supposed, is evident from the report
[jf science itself For when the geologists show that ne"W
'aces of animal and vegetable life have taken a begin*
(ling, at successive points in the history of the creatica,
that whole realms of living creatures disappear again and
again, to be succeeded by others fresh from the hand of
God, what does it signify but that the atoms and ele-
mental forces of nature are so related to God, that they
«^o, by their own laws, submit themselves to his will

COMPATIBl.E WITIJ .XATL^RE. 255

flowing inio new combinations, and composing tiins ne^
germs of life? These successive repopulations of the
rocks were not produced by so many overturnings of
nature—that is too extravagant for belief, and stands in
no harmony with what we know of God. On the coiv
Irary, every element of force and every atom of matter
concerned in these new births of life, was acting, we are
to believe, in its moment of new combination, precise?y
as, according to its inherent properties and laws, it ever
had done and ever will do. It was only instigated by a
divine lorce not in its natural laws ; and in the quickening
of that, yielding itself up, by these laws, to organize and
live. Nor was the visitation of Mary, glorious and sacred
as the mystery was, a transaction at all different in prin-
ciple, or one that involved, in fact, any violation of nature
not involved in the other just named. So also when we
discover the world, or human race, groaning under the
penal disorders and bondage of sin, the deliverance of
those disorders by a supernatural power involves no over-
turning of the causes at work, or the laws by which they
work, but only that these causes are, by their laws, sub-
mitted to the will and supernatural action of God, so that
he can arrange new conjunctions, and accomplish, in that
manner, results of deliverance. Indeed, a physician does
precisely the same thing in principle, when, appealing as
he thinks to the laws of substances, he brings them 'uto
lyDmbinations that are from himself, and places them in
connections to exert a healing force.

It will farther assist our conceptions and modify oui
impressions of thij subject, if we inquire briefly into the
office and piobable use of what is called nature. Thai
aatiue is not appointed as any final end of God, we havp

256 NATUKE IS ADJUSTED

before sbt.wn. It is only ordained, as we then intimateA
to be played upon by the powers; that is, by God hinisel?
and all free agents under him. Instead of being the ver
itable system or universe of God, as in our sensuality, oi
scientific conceit, we make it, we ma}^ call it more truly
the ball o^ medial substance occupied by so many players;
that is, by the spiritual universe under God as the Lord of
Hosts. There could be no commerce of so many player?
m the game referred to, without some medium or media]
instrument; and the instrument needed to be a constant,
invariable substance, as regards shape, weight, size, elas-
ticity, inertia, and all the natural properties pertaining tc
it. If the ball changed weight, color, density, shape,
every moment, no skill could be acquired or evinced in
the use of it ; there would be no real test in the game,
and no social commerce of play in the parties using it.
Therefore it needed to be, so far, a constant quantity. So,
demonstrably, there needs to be, between us and God,
and between us and one another, some constant quantity,
80 that we can act upon each other, trace the effects of our
practice and that of others, learn the mind of God, the
misery and baseness of wrong, the worth of principles,
and the blessedness of virtue, from what we experience ;
attaining thus to such a degree of wisdom, that we can
flet our life on a footing of success and divine approba-
tion. What we call nature is this constant quantity inter-
posed between us and God, and between us and each
other — the great ball, in using which, our life battle is
played. Or, considering the grand immensity of planetary
worlds, careenng through the fields of light, all these, wc
may say, rolling eternally onward in their rounds oi
cider, bear'ng their wondrous furniture with them, sucl

TO RECEIVE THE SUPERNATURAL. 257

a? science discovers, and weaving tbeii* interminable lines
oi causes, are the ball of exervdse, in whicb and hj
which, God is training and teaching the spiritual hosta
of his empire. They are set in a system of immutable
Older and constancy for this reason; but with the design,
beforehand, that all the free beings or powers shall play
their activity on them and into them, and that He, too,
oy the free insertion of his, may turn them about by hia
counsel, and so make himself and his counsel open to the
commerce of his children.

So far, therefore, from discovering any thing undigni-
fied or superstitious in the admission of a supernatural
agency and government of God in the world, it is, in fact,
the only worthy and exalted conception. It no more
humbles the world or deranges the scientific order of it
U) let God act upon it, than to let man do the same : as
vve certainly know that he does, without any thought of
overturning its laws. On the other hand, to imagine, in
the way of dignifying the world, that God must let it
alone and simply see it go, is only to confess that it was
made for no such glorious intent as we have supposed.

To serve this intent, two things manifestly are want-
ed, and one as truly as the other; viz., nature and
the supernatural, an invariable, scientific order, and a
pliant submission of that order to the sovereignty and
uses of wills, human and divine, without any infringement
of its constancy. For if nature were to be violated and
tossed about by capricious overturnings of her laws, there
would be an end of all confidence and exact intelligence.
And if it could not be csed, or set in new conjunctions,
by God and his children, it would be a wall, a catacomb,
and nothing more And yet this latter is the world of

22*

25S NO RESIRICTION THEREFORE

scientific naturalism, a world that might well enough
answer for the housing of manikins, but not for the exer
else of living men. It would seem to be enough to for-
ever dissipate any such unbelieving tendencies, simply to
hav^e caught, for once, the difference between the constancy
of causCvS separated from uses, and the constancy of causes
hrnbered and subjected to the uses of eternal freedom and
intelligence. That is the world of causation, this of relig
ion ; that a dumb-bell exercise for arms that are dumb-
bells themselves, this a living order, set in the contact
and consecrated to the uses of spirit; that a world
as being a world, this a grand gymnasium of powers
whom God is training for society and commerce with
himself.

Furthermore, it is plain that, if there is no supernatural
agency of God permissible or credible in the world, then
there is practically no government over it. It makes no
difference, touching the point here in question, whether
we regard nature as being literally a machine, wound up
to run by its own causes apart from God, or whether we
regard the causes and laws as being themselves the imme-
diate action of God, always present to them and in them.
For if he is present thus, only as the soul of its causes
or the will operating in its laws, then that presence, if
restricted, as naturalism requires, to the mere run of
nature, and allowed no liberty of help in the disorders
". f evil, is soircely better than the presence of Ixion
it his wheel. K we speak of God, the Almighty, he is a
being mortgaged for eternity to the round of nature ; a
grim idol for science to worship, but no Father to weak-
ness or Redeemer to faith.

Or if we imagine that God has so planned the work-

UPON god's liberty. 259

ol nature that, running on by its own inherent laws and
causes, it will always, by a pre-established harmony
bring just the events to pass that are wanted; soothe tne
Borrows, comfort the repentances, hear the prayers, redress
the wrongs, chastise the crimes of his subjects; still it i?
witH our faith practically as if it were lining in a miiJ,
and not as if it were ccncerned, hour by hour, with tbu
living God. God is really not accessible. We have
access only to the mill we are in, with joy to feel it run-
ning ! There is no such reciprocity between us and God
as to answer the wants of our hearts, or the necessities of
our moral training.

Besides, if it be maintained that nature is the proper
universe of God, and that no conception is admissible of
powers outside of nature acting upon it, to vary the
action it would otherwise have by itself, then follows the
verj^ shocking consequence that, since the creation, God
has had and can hereafter have no work of liberty to do.
Nature is his monument, and not his garment. Not only
are miracles out of the question, but counsel and action
also. He is under a scientific embargo, neither hearing
nor helping his children, nor indeed giving any signs of
recognition. And the reason is worse, if possible, and
more chilling than the fact; viz., that if he should stir,
he would move something that science requires to be let
alone ! A great many christians are confused and chilled
by a difficulty resembled to this, feeling, when they go t(^
God m worship or prayer, that nothing can reasonably bo
expected of him, because reason allows him to do nothing.
It is as if he were rue of those spent meteors to which
the Indians offer sacrifice — a hard, cold rock of iroa
which they worship for the noise it made a long time ago

THE SUPiCRXATURAL DISPENSED

when it fell from the sky, and not because it is likelj evei
to make even a noise again.

Just here, the view we are advancing is seen to have
an immense practical as well as s])eculative consequencti
It finds how to conceive God in a state of as great activity
now, as he was when he made the world — always active
from eternity to eternity. Every work of his hand in
pliant still to his counsel. He is doing something, able to
do all we want. In all events and changes he has a pres-
ent concern. He turns about not the clouds only, but all
the wheels of nature, by his ever-living power and gov-
ernment. He is an Agent, as much more real than Na-
ture, as he is wider in his reach and more sovereign. He
can produce variant results through invariable causes,
and so can make the world of things keep company with
the ^•uriant demands of want, weakness, wickedness, and
merit; of love, truth, justice, and holy supplication, in
his children. It is no longer as if, at some given point in
the solitude of his eternity, he waked up and created the
worlds, since which time he has neither done nor can
ever be ex})ected to do any thing more, because it is the
right now of the laws of nature to do every thing unin-
terrupted. Contrary to this, he is the Living God, and
uan as readily meet us and bend himself and his works
to our condition or request, as a man, without any in
fringement of his body, can bend it to his uses. Nature
•g seen to b3 subjected to his constant agency by its laws
themselves, which laws he has never to suspend, but only
to employ, having the great realm of nature flexible as a
hand, to his will forever. Now he is no more fenced
away from us by nature, no more closeted behind it, tc
Sleep away his deaf and idle etemitv; bui he is with m^

BY FIXED LAWS. 261

and about us, filling all things with his potent eueigy and
fatherly counsel. He maintains a relationship as real and
(practical with us, as we have with each other.

II. I undertake, in opposition to the objection which
supposes that the supernatural agency of God is itself sub-
jeot to no law, or system, to show that it i? regulated Mid
dispensed by immutable and fixed laws. As intelligent
creatures, we can have no comfort unJer a condition ruled
by no law or system, and conformed to no principles of in-
telligence. We instinctively demand that every thing in
God's plan shall stand in the strict unity of reason, even
IS the old astronomers strive to comprehend the heavenly
bodies and their motions, in the figures of geometry and
the fixed proportions of arithmetic. This high instinct of
our nature God, we may be sure, will never violate.

1. Since God has inserted in our nature this instinctive
opinion of law, as necessary to the honor of his govern-
ment and the comfort of our reason under it, we have, in
the fact, a very certain proof that his government will be
Buch as to meet our respect, and satisfy the yearnings of
our intelligence.

2. The fact that nature is a realm, organized under fixed
laws, is itself the best and most satisfactory evidence that
such is the manner of God also in things supernatural.
Who that simply looks on the heavenly worlds, for exam-
ple, can suffer a doubt afterward, that God will do every
thing in terms of law and strict sj^stematic unity.

3. Since God is the sovereign intelligence, the Perfect
Reason, he will himself have an affinity for law and sys-
r6i.iatic unity, as much stronger than we, as he is higher
iTi ordei than we, and broader in th<^ pomprehension of hi**

262 THERE ARE DIFFERENI KINDS

understanding. Hence it is impcBsible to believe that, it
any thing, even the smallest, he "will deviate from rules ol
universal application — least of all in the highest order of
his works, even such as he displays in the grace of ou.'
redemption.

4. The moral and religious need we have of suca a faith
makes it indispensable. To let go of sucn a faith, or lose
it, is to plunge at once into superstition. If any christian,
the most devout, believes in a miracle, or a providence
that is done outside of all system and law, he is so fai
on the way to polytheism. The unity of God always per-
ishes, when the unity of order and law is lost. And we
may as well believe in one God, acting on or against an-
other, as in the same God acting outside of all fixed laws
and terms of immutable order. Indeed I suppose it was in
just this way that polytheism began. The transition ii
easy and natural, from a superstitious belief in one God
who acts without system, to a belief in many who will
much more naturally do the same.

But the main difiiculty here, is not to establish a reason-
able conviction that the supernatural works of God must
be dispensed by fixed laws; it is to find how this may
be, or be intelligently conceived. And here lies the main
Btress of our present inquiry.

To open the way then to a just and clear conception oi
the great fact stated, it will be necessary to enter into sumo
important distinctions concerning la'v, or what is properly
meant by the word law.

The word is used with many varieties of meaning, bul
always, and in all its varieties, having one element that is
constant, viz., the opinion had of its uniformity; as that, in
exactly the same circumstances, it will always and foreveT

AND ORDERS OF LAWS. 268

do, briag to pass, direct, or command precisely the same
thing. Without this no law is ever regarded as a law.

Observing this fundamental fact, we notice the distinc-
tion next of natural and moral law. Natural law is the
law by which any kind of being or thing is made to act
inyariably, thus or thus, in virtue of terms inherent in
Itself; as when any body of matter gravitates by re£*son
of its matter, and according to the quantity of its mattei .

Moral law pertains never to a thing, or to any substanc€i
in the chain of cause and effect, but only to a free intelli
gence, or self-active power. Its rule is authority, not force.
It commands, but does not actuate or determine. It speaks
to assent or choice, inviting action, but operating nothing
apart from choice. It imposes obligation, leaving the sub-
ject to obey or not, clear of any enforcement, save that of
conviction beforehand, and penalty aTterward.

It will be seen at once that God's supernatural works in
Christ and the Spirit are not reducible under either of
these two kinds of law, the natural or the moral. To a
certain extent God's nature will be a law to his action,
even as ours is a necessary law to us. Thus, if we are in-
telligent, our intelligent ilature will manifest effects of in-
telligence. If we form necessary ideas of figure, space,
time, truth, right, justice, there will be something in our
action that reveals these ideas. In like manner, if we are
free agents, it is made impossible for us, by a fixed law of
nature, to act as mere things, under the law of cause and
effect. So, if God is infinite in his nature, then it is a fixed
iaw of his nature that he shall indicate infinity in his ac-
tion, and if he has geometric ideas, that his works shall;
by a necessary consequence, have some fix( d relation tc
the laws of geometry ; such as we discover in their spheres

264 THERE ARE DIFFEREIST KINDS

and orbits, and projectile curves, and in the subtle trian
gulations of light. Thus it is rightly affirmevl by th€
great Hooker, that "the being of God is a kind of law tc
his working."* And so far does he carry this opinion ixs.
to hint the probable necessity that God, being both one
and three, an essential unity and a threefold personality,
''.here will, of course, be something in his works corres-
pondent with his nature.

So again if we speak of the law moral, that is a law aa
completely sovereign over God as it is over us. It is the
eternal, necessary law of right, or of love; a law that he
acknowledges with a ready and full assent forever; that
which determines the immutable order, and purity, and
glory of his character. And then, of course, the law ac-
cepted in his own character, wall be the law published to
his subjects to be the rule of theirs. Moral law then, by
the free consent of God, shapes the divine character, and
so the character and ends of his government.

But though natural law and moral law have much to
do, as here discovered, in determining and molding all the
conduct of God, we do not immediately conceive what iy
meant by the fact, that the supernatural works of God are
dispensed by fixed laws, till we bring into view a third
kind of law, viz., the law of one's end, or the law which
one's reason imposes in the way of attaining his end.
Moral law, w^e have said, shapes the character of God,
and that determines his end. Since he is a morally perfect
being in his character, moral perfection or holiness will be
the last end of his being, that for which he creates and
rules; for, if he were to value holiness only as the means
of some other end, such as happiness, then he w^ould ever

♦Ecclesiastical Po! :y, Vol. I., p. 72.

AND ORDERS OF LAWS. 266

disrespect lioliness, rating it only as a convenience: which
is not the character of a holy being, but only an impos-
ture in the name of such a character. Regarding holiness
tlien as God's last end, his world-plan will be gathered
n und the end proposed, to fulfill it, and all his counsels
^ ill crystallize into order and system, subject to that end.
For this nature will exist, in all her vast machinery of
causes and laws; to this all the miracles and supernatural
works of redemption will bring their contributions. Kav-
ing this for his end, and the supernatural as means to his
end, the divine reason will of course order all under fixed
laws of reason, which laws will be so exact and universal
as to make a perfect sj^stern.

How this may result, we can see from a simple reference
to ourselves. Thus, if a man undertakes to be honest,
having that for an end, then it will be seen that his end so
far becomes a law to all his actions; that is, a law self-
imposed, one which his reason prescribes, and which, in
accepting his end, he freely accepts. So if a man's end is
to be rich, we shall see that his end is a law to his whole
life-plan, or at least so far a law that it fails only where
his reason or judgment falls short of a perfect perception.
Or we may take a case more exact and palpable, the case
of a player at the game of chess. • The end he proposes is
to w^in the game, and that end, subordinating his reason
or skill, will become a law to every move he makes on tlio
diagram, except where his skill is at fault, c r his under-
stantling short of comprehension. If now we suppose
him to be gifted with a perfect skill or an all-perceiving
reason, it will result that every move made will be deter-
mined with such exactness and uniformity, that, if he were
to play the game over a million of time.«. he would neve?

Z66 god's laws, in the supernatdral,

in a single case move differently, in exactly the same cil
oumstances.

Here then is what we mean by affirming that all Go^'i
3iipernatural acts, providences, and works, supematiiral
lliough they be, will yet be dispensed, in all cases, by immu-
table, universal, and fixed laws. It will be so because
his end never varies and his reason is perfect. Therefore
his world-plan, though comprehending the supernatural,
will be an exact and perfect system of order, centered in
the eternal unity of reason about his last end. There
will be nothing desultory in it, nothing irregular, nothing
so particular as to happen apart from rule and universal
counsel. The order of the heavens, and the angles of the
light will not be more perfect, because the reason of the
supernatural is equally precise and clear. The same
work will always be done, in the same circumstances,
without a semblance of variation. Even as the dial,
under the laws of nature, will make the same shadow, at
the same hour, for an eternal succession of days, so the
good gift and perfect from above will come down from
the Father of lights, punctual and true in its order, aa
from one whose counsel is perfect, and with whom is no
variableness, neither shadow of turning. Order, everlast-
ing order, reigns where least we look for it, and where the
unthinking and crude mind of superstition would deem it
even a merit, that God had broken loose from his eternitj
of lav, to bless the world at will.

Bu* how is it conceivable, some one may ask, that such
works as are comprehended in the range of human re-
demption should take place, systematically, under fixed
laws ? To this, we answer that it is not necessary to such
A convietion fhat we should be able to conceive hovj these

AKE SHAPED BY UIS ENDS. 267

O'perats, or what they are. All we need is to find the
possible and probable fact ; which having found, we can
ns little doubt, or dismiss the conviction of some presiding
law, as we can the faith of universal law^s in nature, where
"^•jfe do not know the laws, or can not discover the secret
:rf their action. For example, we knew, in general, what
is the law of miracles; viz., that they are wrought as
attestations of a divine mission in those by whom they
are wrought ; but their particular occasions, times, and
properties, why wrought by this and not by another, why
at one time, or in one age, and not in succeeding ages, we
may not be able to discover. The law is beyond our
investigation, but that there is a law, and that exactly the
same miracles will be wrought, if wrought at all, in ex-
actly the same conditions, or spiritual connections, even
to eternity, we have no more room to doubt, than we have
to question God's intelligence. For, if God's end is the
same, he can never deviate or omit to do exactly the same
things, in exactly the same circumstances, without some
defect of intelligence. Either now, or before, he mu.st
confess to a mistake. If he is perfect in wisdom now, he
was not then ; if then, he is not now. But when we say
"exactly the same circumstances," it is important for ug
to notice the extent of the qualification; for this will
bring into view a great principle of distinction be-
tween the natural and the supernatural, apart from which
the extraordinary and apparently desultory manifestations
of the latter can not be understood. Nature is a machine,
compounded of wheels and moved by steady powers.
Hence it goes in rounds or cycles, returning again and
again into itself, producing, thus, seasons, months, and
years- repeating its dews, and showers, and storms, and

268 THEY OPERATE AS LAWS,

varied tcinpt'i-atuivs; in the same circumstances, ur fimcft
dcing niucli the same tilings. But it is not so in the
affairs of a mind, a society, or an age. There the motior
13 never in circles, but onward, eternally onwai'd. Notlh
ing is ever repeated. No mind or spirit can reproduce a
yesterday. No age, the age or even year that is past,
The combinations of circumstances may have a certain
analogy, but they are never the same, or even nearly so
If they are near enough to require a repetition, by the
Saviour, of his miracle of the loaves, they will yet be so
far different as to require a difference in the miracle.
And where the outward conditions appear to be exactly
the same, the inward states and spiritual connections may
be so various as to take away all resemblance ; requiring
Paul to raise a Publius out of his fever at Malta, and
leave a Trophimus sick at Miletum. We have no argu-
m>ent against uniformity and law in such diversities ; for,
in reality, there is no recurrence of circumstances and condi-
tions such as, at first view, might be supposed. So, if mir-
acles appear in one age and not in another, it is because
the world is moving on in a right line, reproducing no
conditions and circumstances of the past, but, by condi-
tions always new, is demanding a treatment correspond
ently new. Hence, while the course of nature is a round
of repetitions, the course of the supernatural repeats
nothing, and for that reason takes an aspect of variety
hat appears even to exclude the fact of law. But it is so
oiiiy in ap])earance. God's perfect wisdom p^till requires
^ie same things to be done in the same circumstances;
find, when not the same, as nearly the same as the cir>
ctimstances are nearly resembled. Every thing transpire?
\v the uniformity of law.

WITH ETERNAL UNIFORMITY. 26^

Thus we maj assert as confidently, as if it occurred a
hundred times a day, that a supernatural event, nevet
known to occur but once, takes place under an immutable
and really universal law; such, for example, as the great,
world-astounding miracle of the incarnation. In exactly
the same conditions, if they were to occur a million of
times in the universe, (which may or may not be a vio'
lent supposition,) precisel}^ the same miracle also would
recur, and that with as great certainty as the natural law
of gravity will cause a stone to fall, when for the mil-
lionth time its support is taken away. Living here upon
this ant-hill, which we call the world, and seeing only the
yard of space and the day of time our field occupies, we
are likely to judge that an event which never occurred
but once since the world began, must be an event apart
from all order and system ; even as a savage, but a little
more childish than we, might imagine that some new
deity is breaking into the world, when he sees the air-
stone fall, because he never saw the like before. Indeed,
we have only to look into the appearing? of the Jehovah
angel, previous to the incarnate appearing of the Word,
noting all the approaches and gradual preparations of the
event, to see how certainly God has a way and a law for
it, and will not bring it to pass till the law decrees it and
the fullness of time is come. Could we look into the his-
tory, too, of the innumerable other worlds God has com-
prehended in his reign, what a lesson might we thenoe
ierivo from events counterpart to this of the incarnation,
varied only to meet the varied conditions of their want,
character, and destiny. Though we may not be able.,
creatures of a day, to unfold the law of this grand mira^
ale, and reduce it to a formula of science, bow little reason

23*

270 THEY ARE OFTEN AS WELL KNOWN

have we, in our inability, to question the fact of su(3L t
law.

Besides, it is a fact that the laws of a grea. many of
God's supernatural works are made known, or discovered
to us. Thus God dispenses the Holy Spirit by fixed laws.
Prayer, also, is heard by laws as definite as the laws of
equilibrium in forces. And what is called the doctrine
of the Spirit and the doctrine of prayer, as given in the.
scriptures, is, in fact, nothing more nor less than the un*
folding to us, if we could so regard it, of the laws of the
Spirit and the laws of prayer, as pertaining to the super-
natural kingdom of God. Indeed, there is wanting now,
for the more intelligent guidance of christian disciples, to
consolidate their faith and save them from the extrava-
gances of fanaticism, a practical treatise on the laws of
prayer, of spiritual gifts, and of the dispensation of the
Holy Spirit generally. These two great powers, the
hearing of prayer and the dispensing of the Spirit, are
lii:e the waterfalls and winds of nature, to which we set
our wheels and lift our sails, and so, by their known laws,
take advantage of their ef&cacy. A crystal, or gem, that
is being distilled and shaped in the secret depths of the
world, is not shaped by laws as well understood as the
law of the Spirit of life, when it molds the secret ordei
Avd beauty of a soul.

Our conclusion therefore is, that all God's works, even
fluch as are most distinctly supernatural, are determined
by fixed law^s. This is true of all supernatural events,
with the single exception of the bad and wicked actions
of men. And these are out of all terms of law, not be
3ause they are supernatural, but only because they are
bad Indeed it is a somewhat singular and even curioufl

AS THE LAWS OF NAT'JRE. 271

Fiict, tliat while so g-eat jealousy is felt in <^ai time, ol
miracles and all immediate spiritual operations of God, aa
being so many violations of order and lixed law in the
universe, the only known events in the world, of wnich
that is really true, are the bad actions of bad men, or of
bad spirits generally. These are not subject to any fixed
laws; they consent to no law. They are determined, nei-
tlier by the laws of causality, nor by the laws of a good
end; which are laws of reason, truth, and beneficence.
They have no agreement with the world, or with God, oi
even with the constituent well-being of the doers them-
selves. All that can be apprehended of miracles is true
of them and even more. Their damning miracle is every
where, and the confusion they make is real. If those per-
sons who are so ready to apprehend some destruction, or
implied destruction of law in the faith of miracles, would
turn their thoughts upon these real disorders, and con-
ceive them as the only known facts in our world that have
no subjection to law, they would have a good point of be-
ginning for the cure of their skepticism generally

It can not be necess'ary to pursue this topic farther.
But it may be well to notice, before we^drop the subject,
one or two false impressions very commonly entertained
by the natural philosophers and poets of nature, whose
skepticism is oftener grounded in such impressions than in
formal arguments. They are greatly impressed by the
immutable reign of order and law in nature, deeming it
the highest point of sublimity, in all the known manifest-
ations of God. Not seldom indeed is this point magnified
by them, in terms of admiration, that reflect a certain con
tempt on the christiau ideas of Go-i: as if it wer(i possiMt

272 god's highest wjrk

only to aa overeasy credulity, to imagine that Gcd will
descend from his high position of law, to do such things
as the preaching and praying disciples of Christianity e?.
pcct of Him. Gazing into the sky, and beholding the
elerLal, cha^igeless roll of the worlds, every orb in the
stack, where the astrologers of Babylon and Egypt saw it
long ages ago, never to vary or falter in the longer ages to
como — image, how sublime, they exclaim, of the divine
2,reatness! Greater and sublimer still, that the same un-
deviating rule of law is equally conspicuous in the small-
est things; that in every salt and pebble there is a little
astronomy of atoms whose laws are as old as the stars,
and whose constancy is a reflection of theirs! No, the
wonder of God's way is not here, but it is that he car.
make constancy flexible to so many myriads of uses, and
the uses themselves — all but the abuses — a system of or
der and law, as complete and perfect as that of the stars
Constancy, as a mere post, or position, has no dignity.
The true dignity and miracle of order is constancy made
flexible to use and expression. Sir Charles Bell had im
such thought as that he could magnify the beauty of God'd
way in the hand, by simply showing the curious articula-
tions by which itts mechanically streng-thened in its gripe;
the chief wonder, the real miracle of beauty in the in-
strument, as he well understood, lies in its flexibility, ita
jeady submission to so many and such endlessly varied
ises. Let us not be taken by the mere stability of nature,
ijecause it compliments our vanity by the easy understand-
ing it pc^'mits. Magnitudes, weights, distances, regulari
des, are not the highest symbols of God's creative dignity
The glory, the true sublimity of God's architectural wi&
dom is that, while his work stands fast in immutabl i or

18 NOT THE WORLD OF NATUKE, 27JI

der, it bends so gracefully to the Lainblest \biiigs, wnhoui
damage or fracture, pliant to all free action, both His an(''
ours; receiving the common play of our liberty, and ])e
coming always, a fluent mediumx of reciprocal action be
tween us; to Him a hand showing his handy work, oi
even a tongue which day unto day uttereth speech, and
night unto night showeth forth knowledge of Him ; to us
the ground of our works, the instrument of our choices,
and yet, in the order, all, of a perfect counsel and of lawa
as immutable as his throne. In this rests the doctrine of
faith, the doctrine that justifies prayer, enables the disciple
to believe that God can notice him. and move among
causes to help him ; raising him thus into a state of ennobled
consciousness, how superior to the low mechanical skepti-
cism which thinks itself dignified in the discovery that
God, incrusted in the stiffness of his scientific order, has
no longer any power to bend himself to man.

The other point alluded to has reference to the compar-
ative estimate of nature and the supernatural. Unexer-
cised in the great world of christian thought, uninitiated
by years of holy experience in its deep mysteries, the nat-
ural philosopher and poet very commonly look upon the
supernatural, or what is the same, Christianity, as com-
prised of a few stray facts, or ghostly wonders, m\ich less
credible than they might be, and turn away, with a kind
of pity, from a field so narrow, to what they call a broad-
er an»i more satisfactory teaching; that of the great school
of nature. Here is variety they say, beauty, magnifi-
cence) greatness, and a sound, consistent order, worthy oi
God. This, they imagine, is the true revelation.

How little do such minds conceive what the world c»f
supernatural fact comprises. Go to nature for the grcal

B74 ASV THE HIGHEST SUBJECTS

and quickening thoughts, the wonders and broad trulks
Call nature the grand revelation ! Is it more to go to na
lure and ki-ow it, than to know God? Are there deepei
depths in nature, higher sublimities, thoughts more capti-
vating and glorious? In the mineral and vegetable shaj)es
ire ihere finer themes than in the life of Jesus? In the
dtorms and gorgeous pilings of the clouds, are there man-
ifestations of greatness and beauty more impressive than
in the tragic sceneries of the cross? Nature is the realm
of things, the supernatural is the realm of powers. Th(!re
the spinning worlds return into their circles and keep re-
turning. Here the grand life-empire of mind, society,
truth, liberty, and holy government spreads itself in the
view, unfolding always in changes vast, various, and di-
vinely beneficent. There we have a Georgic, or a hymn
of the seasons; here an epic that sings a lost Paradise.
There God made the wheels of his chariot and set them
rolling. Here he rides forth in it, leading his hosi after
Him; vast in counsel, wonderful in working; preparing
aud marshaling all for a victory in good and blessing;
fashioning in beauty, composing in spiritual order, and so
gathering in the immense populations of the worlds, to be
one realm — angels, archangels, seraphim, thrones, domin-
ions, principalities, powers, and saints of mankind — all to
find, in his works of guidance and new-creating grace, a
voluxne of wisdom, which it will be the riches of their
iternity to study.

Thus we conceive, alas! too feebly, the true scale of dig
nity in God's two realms In one the order is superficial
and palpable. In the other it is deep as eternity, mysteri-
ous and vast as the counsel that comprehends eternity, in
its development. Still it is counsel, it is order it is tru

ARE NOT THOSE OF SCIENCE. 275

and reason. Even as the Eevelation of John contrives, ir
BO many ways, to intimate, by the using of exact numhera
for those which are not ; in the seven angels, and seven
trumpets, and seven vials; in the four beasts, and four and
twenty elders; in the hundred, forty, and four thousand jf
chem that are sealed; in the city, the new Jerusalem, that
is foursquare, having its hight, length, and breadth equal ;
with twelve gates, tended by twelve angels, resting on
twelve foundations, that are twelve manner of precious
stones — by such images, and under such exact notations
of arithmetic, does this man of vision put us on conceiv-
ing, as we best can, the glorious and exact society God is
reconstructing out of the fallen powers. We shall see it
to be all in law ; settled in such terms of order, that all
counsel, act, and joy, both his and ours, will be in terms
of everlasting truth and reason, a realm as much more
wonderful than nature, as liberties of mind are more difl5-
cult to master than material quantities.

CHAPTER X.

THE CHARACTEU OF JESUS FORBIDS HIS PC88IIIE

CLASSIFICATION WITH MiN.

The ueed of a supernatural, divine ministration, u
restore the disorders of sin, is now shown ; also that such
i, ministration is compatible wi+^ .j.e order of nature, and,
being in that view a rational possibility, that it may well
be assumed as a probable expectation. In this manner
we are brought directly up to confront the main question —
Is the exigency met by the fact ? is the supernatural divino
ministration actually set up, and shown to be by adequate
evidence ?

Here we raise a question, for the first time, that puta
the christian scriptures in issue ; for it is the grand pecu
liarity of these sacred writings, that they deal in super
natural events and transactions, and show the fact of a
celestial institution finally erected on earth, in the person
of Jesus Christ, which is called the kingdom of God oi
of heaven, and is in fact a perpetual, supernatui'al dispens-
atory of healing and salvation for the race. Christianity
js, in this view, no mere scheme of doctrine, or of ethical
proctice, but is instead a kind of miracle, a power out of
nature and above, descending into it ; a historically supei
natural movement on the world, that is visibly entered
into it. and organized to be an institution in the person of
Jesus Christ. He therefore is the central figure and
power, and with him the entire fabric either stands OJ
falls.

To this central figure, then, we now turn ourselTCS

THE GOSPEL HISTORY HOW USED. 277

and, as no proof beside the light is necesFaiy to show that
the sun shines, so we sliall find th^t Jesus proves himseh"
by his own self-evidence. The simple inspection of his
life and character will suffice to show that he can not be
classified with mankind, (man though he be,^ any raorc
fchan what we call his miracles can be classified with inert
natural events. The simple demonstrations of his life
and spirit are the sufficient attestation of his own profes-
Bion, when he says — "I am from above'' — "I came down
from heaven."

Let us not be misunderstood. We do not assume the
truth of the narrative by which the manner and facts of
the life of Jesus are reported to us ; for this, by the sup-
position, is the matter in question. We only assume the
representations themselves, as being just what they are,
and discover their necessary truth in the transcendent,
wondrously self-evident picture of divine excellence and
beauty presented in them. We take up the account of
Christ, in the New Testament, just as we would any othei
ancient writing, or as if it were a manuscript just brought
to light in somxC ancient library. We open the book, and
discover in it four distinct biographies of a certain remark-
able character, called Jesus Christ. He is miraculously
born of Mary, a virgin of Galilee, and declares, himself"
without scruple, that he came out from God. Finding
the supposed history made up, in great part, of his mighty
aots, and not being disposed to believe in miracles and
marvels, we should soon dismiss the book as a tissue of
absurdities too extravagant for belief, were we not struc];
with the sense of somethir g very peculiar in the charactei
of this remarkable person. Having our attention ariested
Vhus by the impression made on our respect, we are pa'

'>4

278 THE LIFE OF JESUS BEGINS

on inquiry, and the more we study it the more wondei
fill, as a character, it appears. And before we have done,
it becomes, in fact, the chief wonder of the story ; hfting
all the other wonders into order and intelhgent proportion
round it, and making one compact and glorious wonder
of the whole picture — a picture shining in its own clear
:«uulight upon us, as the truest of all truths — Jesus, the
Diyine Word, coming out from God, to be incarnate with
us, and be the vehicle of God and salvation to the race.

On the single question, therefore, of the more than
human character of Jesus, we propose, in perfect confi-
dence, to rest a principal argument for Christianity as a
supernatural institution ; for, if there be in Jesus a char-
acter which is not human, then has something broken into
the world that is not of it, and the spell of unbelief is
broken.

Not that Christianity might not be a supernatural insti
tution, if Jesus were only a man ; for many prophets and
holy men, as we believe, have brought forth to the world
communications that are not from themselves, but were
received by inspirations from God. There are several
grades, too, of the supernatural, as already intimated;
the supernatural human, the supernatural prophetic, the
supernatural demonic and angelic, the supernatural divine.
Christ, we shall see, is the supernatural manifested in th«^
liighest grade or order; viz., the divine.

"VVe observe, then, as a firbt peculiarity at the root of
his character, that he begins life with a perfect youth.
Ilia childhood is an unspotted, and, withal, a kind of ce-
lestial flower. The notion of a superhuman or celestial
childhood, ttie most difficult of all things to be conceived

WITH A PERFECT CHIIBHOOD. 279

LS yet successfully drawn by l few simple touclies He
IS announced beforehand as "tbat Holy Thing;" a beau
tiful and powerful stroke to raise our expectation to tae
level of a nature so mysterious. In his childhood, every
body loves him. Using words of external description^ he
is shown growing up in favor with God and man, a child
so lovely and beautiful that heaven and earth appear tu
smile upon him together. So, when it is added that the
child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom,
and, more than all, that the grace or beautifying power of
God was ujjon him, we look, as on the unfolding of a
sacred flower, and seem to scent a fragrance wafted on us
from other worlds. Then, at the age of twelve, he is
found among the great learned men of the day, the doc-
tors of the temple, hearing what they say and asking
them questions. And this, without any word that indi-
cates forwardness or pertness in the child's manner, such
as some Christian Eabbi, or silly and credulous devotee,
would certainly have added. The doctors are not offended,
as by a child too forward or wanting in modesty, they are
only amazed that such ^ degree of understanding can
dwell in one so young and simple. His mother finds him
there among them, and begins to expostulate with him.
His reply is very strange it must, she is sure, have some
deep meaning that corresponds with his mysterious binh.
and the sense he has ever given her of a something
itiangely peculiar in his ways; and she goes nome i'c op-
ing his saj'ing in her heart, and guessing vainly what his
thought may be. Mj^sterious, holy secret, which thia
mother hides in her bosom, that her holy thing, her child
whom fhe has watched, during the twelve years of hifl
oelestial childhood, now begins to speak of being "al">oiit

280 HIS PEEFECT CHILDHOOD

his Father's business," in words of dark enigma, whid
she can not fathom.

Now we dc not say, observe, that there is one word of
truth in these touches of narration. We only say that,
whether they be fact or fiction, here is given the sketch
(fa perfect and sacred childhood — not of a simple, lovely,
liigonuous, and properly human childhood, such as the
))oets love to sketch — but of a sacred and celestial child-
nood. In this respect, the early character of Jesus is a
picture that stands by itself. In no other case, that we
remember, has it ever entered the mind of a biographer,
in drawing a character, to represent it as beginning with
a spotless childhood. The childhood of the great human
characters, if given at all, is commonly represented, ac-
cording to the uniform truth, as being more or less con-
trary to the manner of their mature age ; and never aa
being strictly one with it, except in those cases of inferior
eminence where the kind of distinction attained to is that
of some mere prodigy, and not a character of greatness
in action, or of moral excellence. In all the higher
ranges of character, the excellence portrayed is never the
simple unfolding of a harmonious and perfect beauty
contained in the germ of childhood, but it is a character
formed by a process of rectification, in which many follie?
[ire mended and distempers removed ; in which confidence
\.-i checked by defeat, passion moderated by reason, sraart^-
Moss sobered by experience. Commonly a certain plea^
ure is taken in showing how the many wayward sallieu
of the boy are, at length, reduced by discipline to the char-
ftcter of wisdom, justice, and public heroism so much
admired.

Besides if any writer, of almost any age, will undei

UENUINELY DESCRIBED. 281

talie to describe, not merely a spotless, but a superbiiman
or celestial childhood, not having the reality before him,
he must be somewhat more than human himself, if he
does not pile together a mass of clumsy exaggeratiouSj
and draw and overdraw, till neither heaven ^-"or earth
•;an find any verisimilitude in the picture.

Neither let us omit to notice what ideas the Rabbis and
/earned doctors of this age were able, in fact, to furnish,
when setting forth a remarkable childhood. Thus Jose-
phus, drawing on the teachings of the Rabbis, tells how
the infant Moses, when the king of Egypt took him out
of his daughter's arms, and playfully put the diadem on
his head, threw it pettishly down and stamped on it.
And when Moses was three years old, he tells us that the
child had grown so tall, and exhibited such a wonderful
beauty of countenance, that people were obliged, as it
were, to stop and look at him as he was carried along the
road, and were held fast by the wonder, gazing till he was
out of sight. See, too, what work is made of the child-
hood of Jesus himself, in the Apocryphal gospels. These
are written by men of so nearly the same era, that we
may discover, in their embellishments, what kind of a
childhood it was in the mere invention of the time to
make out. While the gospel'? explicitly say that Jesus
wrought no miracles till his public ministry began, and
(hat he made his beginning in the miracle of Cana, these
re ambitious to make him a great prodigy in his child-
hood. They tell how, on one occasion, he pursued, ia
his anger, the other children, who refused to play with
him, and turned them into kids; how, on another, when
a child accidentally ran against him, he was angry, and
killed him bv his mere word ; how, on another, Jesus had

28^ UISTINGUISHED FROM MEN

a dispute with his teacber over the alphabet, and wbtc
tlie teacher struck him, how he crushed him, withered hia
arm, and threw him down dead. Finally, Joseph tells
Mary that they must keep him within doors ; for ever^"
body perishes against whom he is excited. His mothei
K5nds him to the well for water, and, having broken liia
])itcher, he brings the water m his cloak. He goes into a
dyer's shop, when the dyer is out, and throws all the
cloths he finds into a vat of one color, but, when they are
taken out, behold, they are all dyed of the precise color
that was ordered. He commands a palm-tree to stoop
down and let him pluck the fruit, and it obeys. When
he is carried down into Egypt, all the idols fall down
wherever he passes, and the lions and leopards gather
round him in a harmless company. This the Gospel of
the Infancy gives, as a picture of the wonderful childhood
.Df Jesus. How unlike that holy flower of paradise, in
the true gospels, which a few simple touches make to
bloom in beautiful self-evidence before us !

Passing now to the character of Jesus in his maturity,
we discover, at once, that there is an element in it which
distinguishes it from all human characters, viz., innocence.
By this we mean, not that he is actually sinless; that will
h)e denied, and therefore must not here be assumed. We
mean that, viewed externally, he is a perfectly harmlcBft
being, actuated by no destructive passions, gentle to infe-
ri<»rs, doing ill or injury to none. The figure of a Lamb,
which never was, or could be, applied to any of the great
human char:;cters, without an implication of weakness
fetiil to all respect, is yot, with no such effect, applied tc
hira. We associate weakness with innocence, and th<

BY HIS INNOCENCE. 28B

aasociation is so powerful, that no humau writer would
undertake to sketch a great character on the basis of inno-
ceuce, or would even think it possible. We predicate
innocence of infancy, but to be a perfectly harmless, guile
less man, never djing ill even for a moment, we considei
to be the same as to be a man destitute of spirit anv^
manly force. But Christ accomplished the impossible.
Appearing in all the grandeur and majesty of a supeihu
man manhood, he is able still to unite the impression of
innocence, with no apparent diminution of his sublimity.
It is, in fact, the distinctive glory of his character, that it
seems to be the natural unfolding of a divine innocence^
a pure celestial childhood, amplified by growth. We feel
the power of this strange combination, but we have so
great difficulty in conceiving it, or holding our minds to
the conception, that we sometimes subside or descend to
the human level, and empty the character of Jesus of tho
otrange element unawares. We read, for example, his
terrible denunciations against the Pharisees, and are
shocked by the violent, fierce sound they have on oui
mortal lips ; not perceiving that the offense is in us, and
not in him. We should suffer no such revulsion, did we
only conceive them bursting out, as words of indignant
grief, from the surcharged bosom of innocence , for there
is nothing so bitter as the offense that innocence feels,
when stung by hypocrisy and a sense of cruelty to the
p:)or. So, when he drives the money-changers from the
temple, we are likely to leave out the only element that
ti&ves him from a look of violence and passion. Whereas
it is the very point of the story, not that he, as by mere
force, can drive so many men, but that so mauy are seen
retiring before the moral power of one — a mysteriouf

2y4 HIS RELIGIOUS CHA RACIER

being, in whose face and form ihe indignant flush of innu
cence reveals a tremendous feeling, they can no- wise c:>m
prchend, much less are able to resist.

Accustomed to no such demonstrations of vigor anc
decision in the innocent human characters, and having h
AS our way to set them down, without farther considera-
tion, as

"Incapable and shallow innocents," —

we turn the indignant fire of Jesus into a fire of malig-
nity ; whereas it should rather be conceived that Jesus here
reveals his divinity, by what so powerfully distinguishes
God himself, when he clothes his goodness ia the tempests
and thunders of nature. Decisive, great, and strong,
Christ is yet all this, even the more sublimely, that he
is invested, withal, in the lovely, but humanly feeble
garb of innocence. And that this is the true conception,
is clear, in the fact that no one ever thinks of him aa
weak, and no one fails to be somehow impressed with a
sense of innocence by his life; when his enemies are
called to show what evil or harm he hath done, they can
specify nothing, save that he has offended their bigotry.
Even Pilate, when he gives him up, confesses that he
finds nothing in him to blame, and, shuddering with ap-
prehensions he can not subdue, washes his hands to be
clear of the innocent blood ! Thus he dies, a being holy,
harmless, undefiled. And when he hangs, a bruised
Sower drooping on his cross, and the sun above is dark^
and the earth beneath shudders with pain, what have W€
in this funeral grief of the worlds, but a fit honor paid
to the sad majesty of his divine innocence.

We pass now to his religioas character, which we shaU

iS WITHOUT REPENTA^^CK. 285

fiiscov^er, nii>i tlie remarkable distinction that it proceeds
frora a point exactly opposite to that which is the root, oi
radical element in the religious character of men. Human
piety begins with repentance. It is the effort of a btiiig
implicated in wrong and writhing under the stings oi
guilt, to come unto God. The most righteous, or evei
jclf-righteous, men blend expressions of sorrow and 70^9
of new obedience with their exercises. But Christ, in the
character given him, never acknowledges sin. It is the
grand peculiarity of his piet}^, that he never regrets any
thing that he has done or been ; expresses, nowhere, a
single feelmg of compunction, or the least sense of un-
worthiness. On the contrary, he boldly challenges his
accusers, in the question — Which of you convinceth me
of sin? and even declares, at the close of his life, in a
solemn appeal to God, that he has given to men, unsullied,
the glory divine that was deposited in him.

Now the question is not whether Christ was, in fact
the faultless being, assumed, in his religious character. All
we have to notice here is that he makes the assumption,
makes it not only in words, but in the very tenor of hia
exercises themselves, and th^t by this fact his piety is
radically distinguished from all human piety. And no
mere human creature, it is certain, could hold such a
religious attitude, without shortly displaying faults that
would cover him with derision, or excesses and delinquen-
sies that would even disgust his friends. Piety withom
one dash of repentance, one ingenuous confession of
wr.:ng, one tear, one look of contrition, one request tc
heaven for pardon — let any one of mankind try this kind
01 piety, and see how long it will be ere his righteousnesg
will prove itaclf to be the most impudent conceit; hov

286 UK rxiTKs orposiTEs,

long, before bis passions, sobered by no contrition, his
pride kept down by no repentance, will tempt him intc
absurdities that will turn his pretenses to mockery. N<:
sooner does any one of us begin to be self-righteous, than
he ]->efnns to flill into outward sins that shame his conceit.

o

l"^vil, in :he case of Jesus, no such disaster follows. Beg-ii-
ning w: ch an impenitent, or unrepentant piety, lie holds it
to the end, and brings no visible stain upon it.

Now, one of two things must be true. He was either
Binless, or he was not. If sinless, what greater, more pal
pable exception to the law of human development, than
that a perfect and stainless being has for once lived in the
flesh ! If not, which is the supposition required of those
who deny every thing above the range of human devel-
opment, then we have a man taking up a religion without
repentance, a religion not human, but celestial, a style of
piety never taught him in tiis childhood, and never con-
ceived or attempted among men — more than this, a style
of piety, withal, wholly unsuited to his real character as
a sinner, holding it as a figment of insufPerable presump-
tion to the end of life, and that in a way of such nnfalter-
ing grace and beauty, as to command the universal hom-
age of the human race ! Could there be a wider deviation
from all we know of mere human development ?

He was also able perfectly to unite elements of char&c
U^r, that others find the greatest difficulty in uniting, how-
ever unevenly and partiall}^ He is never said to havt
laughed, and yet he never produces the impression of aus-
terit}', i^ioroseness, sadness, or even of being unhappy
On the contrary, he is described as one that appears to hi
C50iiimonly filled with a sacred joy; "rejoicing in spirit,

AS NO HUMAN SAINT EVER DOES. 281

aud leaving to his disciples, in the hour of his depart 'ire,
the bequest of his joj — " that they might have mj joj
fulfilled in themselves." We could not long endure
human being whose face was ne;ermo\ed bv laughtei",
or relaxed by a gladdening smile. AVhat sympathy coul J
YTp have with one who appears, in this manner, to have
ao human heart ? We could not even trust him. And
yet we have sympathy with Christ; for there is some-
where in him an ocean of deep joy, and we see that he is,
in fact, only burdened with his sympathy for us to such a
degree, that his mighty life is overcast and oppressed by
the charge he has undertaken. His lot is the lot of pri-
vation, he has no powerful friends, he has not even where
to lay his head. No human being could appear in such a
guise, without occupying us much with the sense of his
affiiction. We should be descending to him, as it were,
in pity. But we never pity Christ, never think of him
as struggling with the disadvantages of a lower level, to
rise above it. In fact, he does not allow up, after all, t)
think much of his privations. We think of him more as
a being of mighty resources, proving himself, only the
more sublimely, that he is in the guise of destitution.
He is the most unworldly of beings, having no desire at
all for what the earth can give, impossible to be caught
with any longing for its benefits, impassible even to its
charms, and yet there is no ascetic sourness or repugnance,
n'j misanthropic distaste in his manner; ay if he were
bracing himself against the world to keep it off. The
more closely he is drawn to other world?, the more fresb
and susceptible is he to the humanities of this. The little
chi"! is an image of gladness, which hif. heart leaps forth
to embrace. The wedding and the feast and the funeral

286 HIS ASTONISHING PRETENSIONS

Qave a^l their cord of svin])atLy in bis bosom. At tlu
wedding he is clothed in congratulation, at the feast ir.
doctrine, at the funeral in tears ; but no miser was cvei
drawn to his money, with a stronger desire, than he to
worlds above the world. Men undertake to be spiritr.ui,
and they become ascetic ; or, endeavoring to hold a liber?»J
view of the comforts and pleasures of society, they are
Boon buried in the world, and slaves to its fashions; ofj
holding a scrupulous watch to keep out every particular
sin, they become legal, and fall out of liberty ; or, charmed
with the noble and heavenly liberty, they run to negli-
gence and irresponsible living; so the earnest become
violent, the fervent fanatical and censorious, the gentle
waver, the firm turn bigots, the liberal grow lax, the be-
nevolent ostentatious. Poor human infirmity can hold
aothing steady. Where the pivot of righteousness is
broken, the scales must needs slide off their balance.
Indeed, it is one of the most difficult things which a cul-
tivated christian can attempt, only to sketch a theoretic
view of character, in its true justness and proportion, so
that a little more study, or a little more self-experience,
will not require him to modify it. And yet the character
cf Christ is never modified, even by a shade of rectifica
tion. It is one and the same throughout. He makes nc
improvements, prunes no extravagances, returns from no
eccentricities. The balance of his character is never dis
hirbed, oi readjusted, and the astounding assumption or
which it J based is never shaken, even by a suspicion
that he falters in it.

There is yet another point related to this, in which the
attitude of Jesus is even m.ore distinct from any that waf

ARE FULLY SUPPOKTED. 289

t^ver taken by man, and is yet triumpliantly sustained, i
speak of the astonishing pretensions asserted concerning
his person. Similar pretensions have sometimes been as
sumed by maniacs, or insane persons, but never, so far a?
r know, b}^ persons in the proper exercise of their reason.
Certain it is that no mere man could take the same atti-
tude of supremacy toward the race, and inherent affinity or
oceness with God, without fatally shocking the confidence
of the world by his efPronter3^ Imagine a human crea-
ture saying to the world — "I came forth from the Father"
— "ye are from beneath, I am from above;" facing all the
intelligence and even the philosophy of the world, and
saying, in bold assurance — "behold, a greater than Solo-
mon is here" — " I am the light of the world" — " the way,
the truth, and the life ;" publishing to all peoples and re-
ligions— "No man cometh to the Father, but by me;''
promising openly in his death — "I will draw all men
unto me ;" addressing the Infinite Majesty, and testifying
— "I have glorified thee on the earth;" calling to the
human race — " Come unto me," " follow me ;" laying his
hand upon all the dearest and most intimate affections of
life, and demanding a precedent love — "he that loveth
father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me."
Was there ever displayed an example of effrontery and
spiritual conceit so preposterous? Was there ever a man
that dared put himself on the world in such pretensions?
—as if all light was in him, as if to follow aim and be
Novthy of him was to be the conclusive or chief excel-
lence of mankind ! What but mockery and disgust does
he challenge as the certain reward of his audacity ! But
no one is offended with Jesus on this account, and wha)
is a sure test of his success it is remarkable that, of ali

2A

290 HIS ASTONISEING PRETENSIONS

the readers of the gospel, it probably never even occuri
to one in a hundred thousand, to blanae his eonceii, cf
the egregious vanity of his pretensions.

Nor is there any thing disputable in these pretensiong^
^east of all, any trace of myth or fabulous tradition
They enter into the very web of his ministry, so that ii
th.^y are extracted and nothing left transcending mere hu-
manity, nothing at all is left. Indeed there is a tacit as-
oumption, continually maintained, that far exceeds the
range of these formal pretensions. He says — ' I and the
Father that sent me." What figure would a man present
in such language — I and the Father? He goes even be-
yond this, and apparently without any thought of excess
or presumption, clai5sing himself with the infinite Majestj
in a common plural, he says — " We will come unto him,
and make our abode with him." Imagine any, the great-
est and holiest of mankind, any prophet, or apostle, saying
we, of himself and the Great Jehovah! What a concep-
tion did he give us concerning himself, when he assumed
the necessity of such information as this — ''my Father is
greater than I;" and above all, when he calls himself, as
he often does, in a tone of condescension — "the Son of
Man." See him also on the top of Olivet, looking down
on the guilty city and weeping words of compassion like
these — imagine some man weeping over London or !New
York, in the like — "How often would I have gathered
:hy children together as a hen doth gather her chickens
under her wings, and ye would not!" See him also in the
supper, instituting a rite of remembrance for himself, a
Bcorued, outcast man, and saying — "this is my body" —
"this do in remembrance of me."

I have dwelt thus on the transcendent pretensiOBB o/

ARE FULLY SUPPOKTED. 291

Je3us, because then^ is an argument here for his su})erliu
manity, which can not be resisted. For eighteen hundred
years, these prodigious assumptions have been published
and preached to a world that is quick to lay hold of con
ceit, and bring down the lofty airs of pretenders, and yet,
during all this time, whole nations of people, composing
as well the learned and powerful as the ignorant and hum-
ble, have paid their homage to the name of Jesus, detect-
ing never any disagreement between his meiits and hia
pretensions, offended never by any thought of bis extrav-
agance. In which we have absolute proof that he practi-
cally maintains his amazing assumptions! Indeed it will
even be found that, in the common apprehension of the
race, he maintains the merit of a most peculiar modesty,
producing no conviction more distinctly, than that of his
intense lowliness and humility. His worth is seen to be
BO great, his authority so high, his spirit so celestial, that
instead of being offended by his pretensions, we take the
impression, of one in whom it is even a condescension to
'jreathe our air. I say not that his friends and followers
take this impression, it is received as naturally and irre-
sistibly by unbelievers. I do not recollect any skeptic, oi
infidel who has even thought to accuse him as a conceited
person, or to assault him in this, the weakest and absurd-
est, if not the strongest and holiest, point of his character
Come now, all ye that tell us in your wisdom of tlu
mere natural humanity of Jesus, and help us to £nd Low
it is, that he is only a latural development of the human;
select your best and wisest character; take the range, if
you will, of all the gi'eat philosophers and saints, and
3hoof?e out one that is most competent ; or if, perchance
*orae one of you may imagine that he is himself abou?

292 HE EXCELS l^' THE PASSIVE,

(ipon a level with Jesus, (as we hear that some of you do^)
let him come forward in this trial and say — "follow me"—
"be worthy of me" — "I am the light of the world" — "ye
are from beneath, I am from above" — "behold a greatei
Chan Solomon is here;" take on all these transcendent as-
^-umptions, and see how soon your glory will be sifted out
of you by the detective gaze, and darkened by the con-
tempt of mankind! Why not; is not the challenge fair?
Do you not tell us that you can soy as divine things as
he? Is it not in you too, of course, to do what is human?
are you not in the front rank of human developments? do
you not rejoice in the power to rectify many mistakes
and errors in the w^ords of Jesus? Give us then this one
experiment, and see if it does not prove to you a truth that
is of some consequence; viz., that you are a man, and
that Jesus Christ is — more.

But there is also a passive side to the character of Je-
sus, which is equall}^ peculiar and which also demands
our attention. I recollect no realh^ great character in his-
tory, excepting such as ma}^ have been formed under
Christianity, that can properly be said to have united the
passive virtues, or to have considered them any essentia"!
part of a finished character. Socrates comes the nearest
to such an impression, and therefore most resembles Christ
in the submissiveness of his death. It does not ap})ear,
'lowever, that his mind had taken this trrn previously tc^
^J^ tnal, and the submission he makes to the public S(. n-
w^.ncc is, in ff^ct, a refusal only to escape from the prison
iiurreptitiously; which he does, partly because he thinkfc
it the duty of every good citizen not to break the laws
and partly, if we judge from hij manner, because be i*

AS IN THE ACTIVE VIRTUES. 293

detained by a subtle pride, as if it were something unwoi
thy of a grave philosopher, to be stealing away, as a fugi
tivo, from the laws and tr.bunals of his country. The
Stcics indeed have it for one of their great principles, that
[he true wisdom of life consists in a passive power, viz., iii
\>oing able to bear suffering rightly. But they mean by
j))is the bearing of suffering so as not to feel it; a steeling of
Ihe mind against sensibility, and a raising of the will into
such power as to drive back the pangs of life, or shake
them off*. But this, in foct, contains no allowance of pas-
sive virtue at all ; on the contrary, it is an attempt so to
e-s:alt the active powers, as to even exclude every sort of
passion, or passivity. And Stoicism corresponds, in this
respect, with the general sentiment of the world's great
characters. They are such as like to see things in the he-
roic vein, to see spirit and courage breasting themselves
against wrong, and, where the evil can not be escaped by
resistance, dying in a manner of defiance. Indeed it has
been the impression of the world generally, that patience,
gentleness, readiness to suffer wrong without resistance, is
but another name for weakness.

But Christ, in opposition to all such impressions, man-
ages to connect these non-resisting and gentle passivities
^ith a character of the severest grandeur and majesty;
and, what is miore, convinces us that no truly great chai-
joter can exist without them.

O'^serve him, first, in what may be called the commoa
trials of existence. For if you will put a character to the
severest of all tests, see whether it can bear, without fa I
tering, the little, common ills and hindrances of life,
Many a man will go to his martyrdom, with a spirit of
firmnes-s and heroic comj)Osure, whom a little wearin(K< oj

2M ME IS IsEVER DISCOMPOSED

Qenous exhaustion, some silly prejadice, or capriciout
opporiition, would, for the moment, throw into a fit of vex-
ation, or ill-nature. Great occasions rally great principles,
and brace the mind to a lofty bearing, a bearing that b^
even above itself. But trials that make no occasion at nU
leave it to show the goodness and beauty it has in its owj
diaposition. And here precisely is the superhuman glor^
of Christ as a character, that he is just as perfect, exhibits
just as great a spirit, in little trials as in great ones. In
all the history of his life, we are not able to detect the
faintest indication that he sL'ps or fldters. And this is
the more remarkable, that he is prosecuting so great a
work, with so great enthusiasm; counting it his meat and
drink, and pouring into it all the energies of his life. For
when men have great works on hand, their very enthusi-
asm runs to impatience. When thwarted or unreasonably
hindered, their soul strikes fire against the obstacles they
meet, they worry themselves at every hindrance, every
disappointment, and break out in stormy and fanatical
violence. But Jesus, for some reason, is just as even, just
as serene, in all his petty vexations, and hindrances, as if
he had nothing on hand to do. A kind of sacred patience
invests him every where. Having no element of cru'le
will mixed with his work, he is able, in all trial and oppo-
sition, to hold a condition of serenit}^ above the clouds,
and let them sail under him, without ever obscuring the
5un. He is poor, and hungr}^, and weary, and despisedj
insulted by his enemies, deserted by his friends, bat never
disheartened, never fretted or ruffled. You see, meantime,
that he is no stoic; he visibly feels every such ill as hu
ddicate and sensitive nature must, but he has some sacred
and sovereign good present, to mingle with his pairL<^

ur HINDRANCES AND TRIALS. 296

which, as it were naturally and without any self-watching
allajAs them. He does not seem to rule his temper, bul
rather to have none; for temper, in the sense of passion,
is a fury that follows the will, as the lightnings follow the
disturbing forces of the winds among the clouds, and ac
?ordingly where there is no self-will to roll up the clouds
and hurl them through the sky, the lightnings hold their
equilibrium and are as though they were not.

As regards what is called pre-eminently his passion, the
scene of martyrdom that closes his life, it is easy to distin-
guish a character in it which separates it from all mere
human martyrdoms. Thus, it will be observed, that his
agony, the scene in which his suffering is bitterest and
most evident, is, on human principles, wholly misplaced.
It comes before the time, when as yet there is no arrest,
and no human prospect that there will be any. He is at
large to go where he pleases, and in perfect outward safety.
His disciples have just been gathered round him in a scene
of more than family tenderness and affection. Indeed it in
but a very few hours since that he was coming into the city,
at the head of a vast procession, followed by loud acclama-
tions, and attended by such-honors as may fitly celebrate the
inaugural of a king. Yet here, with no bad sign apparent,
we see him plunged into a scene of deepest distress, and
racked, in his feeling, with a more than mortal agony.
Coming out of this, assured and comforted, he is shorlly
arrested, brought to trial, and crucified; where, if thcT-o be
.^ny thing questionable in his manner, it is in the fact that
he is oven more composed than some would have him tc
be, not even etooping to defend himself or vindicate his in
ftocence. And when he dies, it is not as when the mar
cyrs die They die for what tliey have said, and remain

296 HIS AGONY NOT HUMAN.

ing silent will not recant. He di^s for what he Las nol
said, and still is silent.

Bj the misplacing of his agony thus, and the strange
silen<^e he observes when the real hour of agony is come,
wo aro put entirely at fault on natural principles. But it
was njt for him to wait, as being only a man, till he is
arrested and the hand of death is before him, then to be
nerved by the occasion to a show of victory. He that
was before Abraham, must also be before his occasions.
In a time of safety, in a cool hour oi retirement, unac-
countably to his friends, he falls into a dreadful contest
and struggle of mind; coming out of it, finally, to go
through his most horrible tiagedy of crucifixion, with the
serenity of a spectator!

Why now this so great intensity of sorrow? why this
agony? Was there not something unmanly in it, some-
thing unworthy of h really great soul? Take him to be
only a man, and there probably was; nay, if he were a
woman, the same might be said. But this one thing is
clear, that no one of mankind, whether man or woman,
ever had the sensibility to suffer so intensely ; even show-
ing the body, for the mere struggle and pain of the mind,
exuding and dripping with blood. Evidently there ig
something mysterious here; which mysterj' is vehicle to
our fesling, and rightfully may be, of something divine.
What, we begin to ask, should be the power of a superhu-
man se:* sibility ? and how for should the human vehicle
shake under such a power? How too should an innccenl
and pure spirit be exercised, when about to suffer, in his
own person, the greatest wrong ever coiimitted?

Besides there is a vicarious spirit in love; all love in
serts itself vicrvriously into the sufferings and woes and, ii

HIS PASSION A MYSTERY. 297

a certain sense, the sins of others, taking ttem on itself as
a burden. How then, if perchance Jesus should be di
vine, an embodiment of God's love in the world — how
should he feel, and by what signs of feeling manifest bis
sensibility, when a fallen race are just about to do the
ri?\!Tining sin that crowns their guilty history; to cnKify
ihe orly perfect being that ever came into the world; to
crucify even him, the messenger and representative to them
of the love of God, the deliverer who has taken their case
and cause upon him! Whosoever duly ponders these
questions, will find that he is led away, more and more,
from any supposition of the mere mortality of Jesus.
What he looks upon, he will more and more distinctly ser
to be the pathology of a superhuman anguish. It stands,
he will perceive, in no mortal key. It will be to him the
anguish, visibly, not of any pusillanimous feeling, but of
holy character itself; nay, of a mysteriously transcendent,
or somehow divine, character.

But why did he not defend his cause and justify his in
tiocence in the trial? Partly because he had the wisdom
to see that there really was and could be no trial, and that
one who undertakes to plCad with a mob, only mocks hirf
own virtue, throwing words into the air that is already
filled with the clamors of prejudice. Tv. plead innocence
in such a case, is only to make a protestation, such as iudi
cates fear, and is r(?ally unworthy of a great and compose',)
epiiit. A man would have done it, but Jesr« did not
Besides, there was a plea of innocence, in the manner of
Jesus and the few very significant words that he dropped
that had an effect on the mind of Pilate, more searching
and powerful than any formal protestations. And tht
more we studv the conduct of Jesus during the whoV

2^8 HIS UNDERTAKING

scene, the more shall we be satisfied that he Baid encAigh
the more admire the mysterious eomposare, the wisdom,
the self-possession, and the superhuman patience of th(
sufferer. It was visibly the death scene of a transcendenl
iove. He dies not as a man, but rather as some one might,
who i/J ni.ysteriously more and higher. So thought aloud
the hard-faced soldier — " Truly this was the Son of God.-'
As if he had said — "I have seen men die — this is not a
man. They call him Son of God — he can not be less."
Can he be less to us ?

But Christ shows himself to be a superhuman character,
not in the personal traits only, exhibited in his life, but
nven more sublimely in the undertakings, works, and
teachings by which he proved his Messiahship.

Consider then the reach of his undertaking ; whicn, if
he was only a man, shows him to have been the most ex-
travagant and even wildest of all human enthusiasts. Con-
trary to every religious prejudice of his nation and eveo
of his time, contrary to the comparatively narrow and ex-
clusive religion of Moses itself and to all his training
under it, he undertakes to organize a kingdom of God, o '
kingdom of heaven on earth. His purpose includes a ne^
moral creation of the race — not of the Jews only and of men,
proselyted to their covenant, but of the whole human
i:\ce. He declared thus, at an early date in his ministry,
P.iat many shall come from the east and the west and sil
down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob m the king-
dom of God ; that the field is the world ; and that God ?o
loves the world, as to give for it his only begotten Son
He also declared that his gospel shall be puhlished to
«11 nations, and p^ave Ids apostles their commission, ti

IS NOT HUMAN. 298?

go into all the world and publisli his gospel to ever}
oreatarc.

Here then we have the grand idea of his mission --it is
tv) n'^w-create the human race and restore it to God, in tne
uritv of a spiritual kingdom. And upon this single facr^
Reinhard erects a complete argument for his extra-human
character; going into a form.d review of all the gical
founders of states and most celebrated lawgivers, the great
heroes and defenders of nations, all the wise kings and
statesmen, all the philosophers, all the prophet founders of
religions, and discovering as a fact that no such though:
as this, or nearly proximate to this, had ever before been
taken up by any living character in history ; showing also
how it had happened to every other great character, how
ever liberalized by culture, to be limited in some way to
the interest of his own people, or empire, and set in oppo-
sition, or antagonism, more or less decidedly, to the rest of
the world. But to Jesus alone, the simple Galilean car-
penter, it happens otherwise; that, having never seen a
map of the world in his whole life, or heard the name of
half the great nations on it, he undertakes, coming out
of his shop, a scheme as much vaster and more diffi-
cult than that of Alexander, as it proposes more and what
is more divinely benevolent ! This thought of a universal
kingdom, cemented in God — why, the immense Romai.
Empire of his day, constructed by so many ages of war
and conquest, is a bauble in comparison, both as regards
the extent and the cost! And yet the rustic tradesman of
Galilee propounds even this for his errand, and that in a
way of assurance, as simple and quiet, as if the iramer.se
reach of his plan were, in fact, a matter to hira of no cod
Bideratioii.

aOO avr HIS confiuknce

Nor is thia all, there is iiieludeJ in his plan, what, to an)*
mere man, would be yet more remote from tbe possible
uoniidence of his frailty ; it is a plan as universal in time,
as it is in the scope of its objects. Tt dooe not expect tc
be realized in a life-time, or even in ma.jy centniies to
come. He calls it, understandingly, Lis grain of niu8'
lard seed; which, however, is to grow, he declares, and
overshadow the whole earth. But the courage of Jesus,
counting a thousand years to be only a single day, is equal
to the run of his work. He sees a rock of stability, where
men see only frailty and weakness. Peter himself, the im-
pulsive and always unreliable Peter, turns into rock and
becomes a great foundation, as he looks upon him. "On
this rock," he says, " I will build my church, and the gates
of hell shall not prevail against it." His expectation toe
reaches boldly out beyond his own death ; that in fact is tc
'oe the seed of his great empire — " except a corn of wheat
fall into the ground and die, it abideth," he says, "alone."
And if we will see with what confidence and courage he
adheres to his plan, when the time of his death approach-
es— how far he is from giving it up as lost, or as an ex-
ploded vision of his youthful enthusiasm — we have only
to observe his last interview with the two sisters of Beth-
any, in wjose hospitality he was so often comforted.
When the box of precious ointment is broken upon hia
head, v/hich Judas reproves as a useless expense, he dis-
.ovei-s a sad propriety, or even prophecy, in what the
tiroman has done, as connected with his death, now ai
hand. But ii does not touch his courage, we per-
ceive, or the confidence of his plan, or even cast a shad^
on his prospect. "Let her alone. She hath done whai
she could. She is come aforehand to anoint my bod y U

NEVElt FALTERS. 801

the burying. Verily I say unto you, wheresoever this
gospel shall be preaclied throughout the whole world, this
also that this woman hath d^ne shall be told for a memo-
rial or her." Such was the sublime confidence he had in
a plan that was to run through all future ages, and would
iscaruely begin to show its fruit during his owm life time.

Jg this great idea then, which no man ever before con-
ceived, the raising of the whole human race to God, a plan
sustained with such evenness of courage, and a confidence
of the world's future so far transcending any human ex-
ample— is this a human development? Regard the be-
nevolence of it, the universality of it, the religious grand-
eur of it, as a work readjusting the relations of God and
his government with men — the cost, the length of time it
will cover, and the far off date of its completion — is it ir
this scale that a Nazarene carpenter, a poor uneducated
villager, lays out his plans and graduates the confidence
of his undertakings? There have been great enthusiasts
in the world, and they have shown their infirmity by luna-
tic airs, appropriate to their extravagance. But it is not
human, we may safely affirm, to lay out projects transcend-
ing all human ability, like this of Jesus, and which can
not be completed in many thousands of years, doing it in
all the airs of sobriety, entering on the performance with-
out parade, and yielding life to it firmly as the inaugural
of its triumph. No human creature sits quietly down to
a perpetual project, one that proposes to be executed only
at the end, or final harvest of the world. That is not
human, but divine.

Passing now to what is more interioi in his ministry
taken as a revelation of his character, we are struc;k witL

26

R02 HIS EXPECTATION

aiiolher distinction • viz., that he takes rank with the |X>ui
and grounds all the immense expectations of his cause oi,
a beginning made with the lowly and dejected classes 0/
the world. He was born to the lot of the poor. Hii
manners, tastes, and intellectual attainments, howevei,
visibly outgrew his condition, and ihat in such a degree
^hat, if he had been a mere human character, he must
have suffered some painful distaste for the kind of society
in which he lived. The great, as we perceive, flocked tc
hear him, and sometimes came even by night to receive
his instructions. He saw the highest circles of society and
influence open to him, if he only desired to enter them.
And, if he was a properly human character, what virtaous,
but rising young man would have had a thought of im-
propriety, in accepting the elevation within his reach ; con«
sidering it as the proper reward of his industry and the
merit of his character — not to speak of the contempt for
his humble origin, and his humble associates, which every
upstart person of only ordinary virtue is so commonly
seen to manifest. Still he adheres to the poor, and makea
them the object of his ministry. And what is more pecu-
liar, he visibly has a kind of interest in their society,
which is wanting in that of the higher classes; perceiving,
apparently, that they have a certain aptitude for receiving
right impressions, which the others have not. They are
not the wise and prudent, filled with the conceit of learn-
ing and station, but they are the ingenuous babes of
poverty, open to conviction, prepared, by their humbk
lot, to receive thoughts and doctrines in advance of theii
age. Therefore he loves the poor, and, without descend*
mg to their low manners, he delights tc be identified with
them. He is more assiduous in their service than othei

IS IN THE POOR. 80?

men have been in serving the great. He goes about on
foot, teaching them and heahng their sick ; occupying hi3
great and elevated mind, for whole years, with details of
labor and care, which the nurse of no hospitfJ had ever
laid upon him — insanities, blind eyes, fevers, fluxes, lep-
rosies, and sores. His patients are all below his level
and unable to repay him, even by a breath of congenial
sympathy; and nothing supports him but the conscious-
ness of good which attends his labors.

Meantime, consider what contempt for the poor had
hitherto prevailed, among all the great statesmen and phil-
anthropists of the world. The poor were not society, or
any part of society. They were only the conveniences
and drudges of society ; appendages of luxury and state,
tools of ambition, material to be used in the wars. No
man who had taken up the idea of some great change or
reform in society, no philosopher who had conceived the
notion of building up an ideal state or republic, ever
'ihought of beginning with the poor. Influence was seen
to reside in the higher classes, and the only hope of reach-
ing the world, by any scheme of social regeneration, was
to begin with them, and through them operate its results.
But Christ, if we call him a philosopher, and, if he is only
a man, we can call him by no higher name, was the poor
man's philosopher ; the first and only one that had ever
appeared Seeing the higher circles open to him, and
Unnpted to imagine that, if he could once get footing for his
ioctrine among the influential and the great, he should
thus secure his triumph more easily, he had 3^et no suet
thought. He laid his foundations, as it were, below all
influence, and, as men would judge, threw liimself away,
A.nd precisely here did he display a wisdom and a charac

304 HE B E C O M E S

ler totally in aJvuncc of his age. Eighteen centiuies Havt
passed away, and we now seem just beginning to under-
stand the transcendent depth of this feature in his mission
and liis character. We appear to be just waking up to » I
•iJ ii discovery, that the blessing and upraising of the
tnsses are the fuciamental interest of society — a discov-
<Ty, however, which is only a proof that the life of Jesua
has at length, begun to penetrate society and public his-
tory. Tt is precisely this which is working so many and
great changes in our times, giving liberty and right to the
enslaved many, seeking their education, encouraging theii
efforts by new and better hopes, producing an aversion to
war, which has been the fatal source of their misery and
depression, and opening, as we hope, a new era of comfort,
light, and virtue in the world. It is as if some higher and
better thought had visited our race — which higher thought
is in the life of Jesus. The schools of all the philosophers
are gone, hundreds of years ago, and all their visions have
died away into thin air ; but the poor man's philosopher
still lives, bringing up his poor to liberty, light, and char-
acter and drawing the nations on to a brighter and better
day.

At the same time, the mere than human character ol
Jesus is displayed also in the fact that, identifying himself
thus with the poor, he is yet able to do it, without elicit*
irg any feelings of partisanship in them. To one who
will be at the pains to reflect a little, nothing will seen:
more dilJlcult than this ; to bt come the patron of a class,
a down -trodden and despised class, without rallying in
cnem a feeling of intense mah'gnity. And that for the
reason, partly, that no patron, however just or luagnaii

BUT WILL ^UT H.\VE THEM P A K TIS A N 8. 806

unoas, IS ever quiu able to suppress the fet lings of a par-
tisan in himself. A little ambition, pricked on bj a little
abuse, a faint desire of popularity playing over the face
of his benevolence, and tempting him to loosen a liitle of
'ILnature, as tii^Ier to the passions of his sect — somethins;
f f 'his kind is sure to kindle some fire of malignity in his
/ licnts.

Besides, men love to be partisans. Even Paul and
Apo'dos and Peter had their sects, or schools, glorying in
one against another. With all their efforts, they could
not suppress a weakness so contemptible. But no such
feeling could ever get footing under Christ. If his disci-
ples had forbidden one to heal in the name of Jesus, be-
cause he followed not with them, he gently rebuked them,
and made them feel that he had larger views than to suffer
any such folly. As the friend of the poor and oppressed
class, he set himself openly against their enemies, and chas-
tised them as oppressors, with the most terrible rebukes.
He exposed the absurdity of their doctrine, and silenced
them in argument ; he launched his thunderbolts against
their base hypocrisies ; but it does not appear that the pop-
ulace ever testified their pleasure, even by a cheer, or
gave vent to any angry emotion under cover of his lead-
ership. For there was something still, in the mani;er an^i
air of Jesus, which made them feel it to be inappropriate,
and even mad b it impossible. It was as if some being
were here, taking their part, whom it were even an irrev-
erence to applaud, much more to second by any partisan
clamor. They would as soon have thought of cheering
the angel in the sun, or of rallying under him as the head
of their faction. On one occasion, when he had fed the
multitudes by a miracle, he saw that their natioral super

26*

806 THE I'ERFECT ORIGINALITY

nitrons were excited, and that, regarding binn as the Mc8
siaii predicted in the scriptures, they w(;re about to take
him by force and make him their king ; but this was a
national feeling, not the feeling of a class. Its root was
superstition, not hatred. His triumphal entry into Jeru
»>aJem, attended by the acclamations of the multitude, if
'ibis be not one of the fables or myths, which our modern
cnticism rejects, is yet no demonstration of popular fac-
tioi:, or party animosity. Robbing it of its mystical and
miraculous character, as the inaugural of the Messiah^ ii
has no real signification. In a few hours, after all, these
hosannas are hushed. Jesus is alone and forsaken, and
the very multitudes he might seem to have enlisted, are
crying, " Crucify him !" On the whole, it can not be said
that Jesus was ever popular. He was folio w^ed, at times,
by great multitudes of people, whose love of the marvel-
ous worked on their superstitions, to draw them after him.
They came also to be cured of their diseases. They knew
him as their friend. But there was yet something in him
that forbade their low and malignant feelings gathering
into a conflagration round him. He presents, indeed, an
instance that stands alone in history, as God at the sum-
mit of the worlds, where a person has identified himself
^dth a class, without creating a faction, and without be-
coming a popular character.

Consider him next as a teacher; his method and man
aer^ and the other characteristics of his excellence, apart
Jroir his doctrine. That will be distinctly considered in
another place

First of dl, we notice the perfect origina'itj and inde-
pendena^ of his teaching. We have a great many meo

OF HIS TEACHING SOi

^ho are original, in the sense of being originators, wiihiD
a certain boundary of educated thought. But the crigin
ably of Christ is uneducated. That he draws ncihing
from tlie stores of loarning, can be seen at a glance. The
improssion we have in reading his instructions, justifies
to the letter, the language of his cotemporaries, whtn
tkgy say, "this man hath never learned." There is nothing
in any of his allusions, or forms of speech, that indicates
learning. Indeed, there is nothing in him that belongs
to his age or country — no one opinion, or taste, or preju-
dice. The attempts that have been made, in a way of
establishing his mere natural manhood, to show that ho
borrowed his sentiments from the Persians and the eastern
forms of religion, or that he had been intimate with the
Essenes and borrowed from them, or that he must have
been acquainted with the schools and religions of Egypt,
deriving his doctrine fi'om them — all attempts of the kind
have so palpably failed, as not even to require a deliberate
answer. If he is simply a man, as w^e hear, then he is
most certainly a new and singular kind of man, never
before heard, of, one w^ho visibly is quite as great a miracle
in the w^orld as if he were not a m.an. We can see for
ourselves, in the simple directness and freedom of his
teachings, that whatever he advances is from himself.
Sliakspeare, for instance, w^hom we name as being proba-
bly the most creative and original spirit the w^orld laa
rver produced, one of the class, too, that are called self-
made men, is yet tinged, in all his w^orks, with human
learning. His glory is, indeed, that so much of what is
great in history and historic character, lives and appears
ill his dramatic creations. He is the high-priest, we somo
rimes hear, of human nature. But Chrst, understanding

308 NO DIALECTICS, NO ART.

human nature so as to address it more skillf illy than he
derives no help from liistoric examples. He is the high
priest, rather, of the divine nature, speaking as one thai
has come out from God, and has nothing to borrow from
tlie world. It is not to be detected, by any sign, that l)'*"
bumnn sphere in which he moved imparted any thing tf
him. His teachings are just as full of divine nature, -J?
Shakspeare's of human.

Neither does he teach by the human methods. He
does not speculate about God, as a school professor, draw-
ing out conclusions by a practice on words, and deeming
that the way of proof; he does not build up a frame of
evidence from below, by some constructive process, such
as the philosophers delight in ; but he simply speaks of
God and spiritual things as one who has come out from
Him, to tell us what he knows. And his simple telling
brings us the reality ; proves it to us in its own sublime
self-evidence ; awakens even the consciousness of it in our
own bosom ; so that formal arguments or dialectic proofs
offend us by their coldness, and seem, in fact, to be only
opaque substances set between us and the light. Indeed,
he makes even the world luminous by his words — fills it
with an immediate and new sense of God, which nothing
has ever been able to expel. The incense of the upper
world is brought out, in his garments, and flows abroad,
as a perfume, on the poisoned air.

At thf samfc time, he never reveals the infirmity so
co.nmonl} shown by human teachers, when they veer u
httle from their point, or turn their doctrine off by shades
uf variation, to catrh the assent of multitudes. He never
conforms to an expectation, even of his friends. When
they look to fir.d a great prophet in him, he offers nothing.

dIS COMPRLHENSIVENEeS IS PERFECr. 308

in the modes of tlie prophets. When they ask for pLiceg
of distinction in his kingdom, he rebukes their folly, and
tells them he has nothing to give, but a share in his re
preaches and his poverty. Wnen they look to see bin"
take the sword as the Great Messiah of their nation
calling tne people to his standard, he tells them he i^ ii«j
wanior and no king, but only a messenger of love to lost
men , one that has come to minister and die, but not to
get up or restore the kingdom. Every expectation that
rises up to greet him, is repulsed ; and yet, so great is the
power of his manner, that multitudes are held fast, and
can not yield their confidence. Enveloped as he is in the
darkest mystery, they trust him still ; going after him,
hanging on his words, as if detained by some charmed
influence, which they can not shake off or resist. Never
was there a teacher that so uniformly bafl&ed every ex-
pectation of his followers, never one that was followed so
persistently.

Again, the singular balance of character displayed in
the teachings of Jesus, indicates an exemption from the
standing infirmity of human nature. Human opinions
are formed under a law that seems to be universal. First,
two opposite extremes are thrown up, in two opposite
leaders or parties; then a third party enters, trying t:=
find what truth they both are endeavoring to vindicate,
and settle thus a view of the subject, that includes iLo
truth and clears the one-sided extremes, which opposii:g
tvords or figures, not yet measured in their force, had pro
(iu(.ed. It results, in this manner, that no man, even tlit
broadest in his apprehensions is ever at the point of equi
librium as regards all subjects. Even the ripest of us ai(
coDtinually falling into some extreme, and losing our baJ

81.0 HE IS CLEAR

aiice^ afterward to be corrected by some other wiio dis
covers our error, or that of our school.

Bat Christ was of no school or party, and never went
to any extreme — words could never turn him to a one-
i^ided view of any thing. This is the remarkable Paci
thai distinguishes him from any other known teacher of
the Y.'^orld. Having nothing to work out in a word
process, but every thing clear in the simple intuition of
his superhuman intelligence, he never pushes himself to
any human eccentricity. It does not even appear that he
is trying, as we do, to balance opposites and clear extrav-
agances, but he does it, as one who can not imagine a one-
sided view of any thing. He is never a radical, never a
conservative. He will not allow his disciples to deny him
before kings and governors, he will not let them re-
nounce their allegiance to Caesar. He exposes the oppres-
sions of the Pharisees in Moses' seat, but, encouraging no
factious resistance, says — " do as they command you."
His position as a reformer was universal — according to
his principles almost nothing, whether in church or state,
or in social life, was right — and yet he is thrown into no
antagonism against the world. How a man will do, when
he engages only in some one reform, acting from his own
human force; the fuming, storming phrenzy, the holy
rage and tragic smoke of his riolence, how he kindlen
against opposition, grows bitter and restive because of
delay, and finally comes to maturity In a chaiacter thor»
oughly detestable — all tnis we know. But Christ, with
dl the world upon his hands, and a reform to be carrier!
in almost every thing, is yet as quiet and cordial, and aa
little in the attitude of bitterness or impatienje, as if aU
hearts were with him, or the work ajreadj- done: so pof

OF ALL 8UPERSTITI0^. 811

foct is the balance of liis feeliim-, so intuitiveW moderated
is it by a wisdom not human.

"We can not stay to sketch a full outline of this j)artic'
alar and sublime excellence, as it was displayed in his
ife. It will be seen as ciearly in a single comparisou oi
3i)ntrast. as in many, or in a more extended inquiry
'J'ake, then, for an example, what r.iay be observed in hii
open repugnance to all superstition, combined with liia
equal repugnance to what is commonly praised as a mode
cf liberality. He lived in a superstitious age and among
£ superstitious people. He was a person of low educa-
tion, and nothing, as we know, clings to the uneducated
mind with the tenacity of a superstition. Lord Bacon,
for example, a man certainly of the very highest intellect-
ual training, was yet infested by superstitions too childish
to be named with respect, and which clung to him, despite
of all his philosophy, even to his death. But Christ, with
no learned culture at all, comes forth out of Galilee, as
perfectly clean of all the superstitions of his time, as if
he had been a disciple, from his childhood, of Hume or
Strauss. " You children of superstition think," he says,
'' that those Galileans, whose blood Pilate mingled with
their sacrifices, and those eighteen upon whom the towei
;n Siloam fell, must have been monsters, to suffer such
things. I tell you, nay; but except ye repent, ye shall
!j11 likewise perish." To another company he says — "You
iraagine, in your Pharisaic and legal morality, tliat the
Sabbath of Moses stands in the letter; but I tell yoa tha^
tlie Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sab-
bath ; little honor, therefore, do you pay to God, when
yuu teach that it is not lawful to do good on this day
Your washings are a great poiit, you tithe herbs aiio

512 HE IS NO I.IBERALIST.

seeis with a sanctiinonious fidelity, would it not be fU
well for you teachers of the law, to have some respect to
the weightier matters of justice, faith, and benevolence?"
ThuL-5, while Socrates, one of the greatest and purest of
human souls, a man who has attained to many worthy
rv)nce})tioiiS of God, hidden from his idolatrous country
nien, is constrained to sacrifice a cock to Esculapius, the
uneducated Jesus lives and dies superior to every super-
stition of his time; believing nothing because it is be
lieved, respecting nothing because it is sanctified by cus
tom and by human observance. Even in the closing
scene of hi'^ life, we see his learned and priestly assailants
refusing to go into the judgment-hall of Caiaphas, lest
they should be ceremonially defiled and disqualified for
the feast ; though detained by no scruple at all as regards
the instigation of a murder! While he, on the other hand,
pitying their delusions, prays for them from his cross —
" Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
And yet Christ is no hberal, never takes the ground or
boasts the distinction of a liberal among his countrymen,
because it is not a part of his infirmity, in discovering au
error here, to fly to an excess there. His ground is char-
ity, not liberality ; and the two are as wide apart in their
practical implications, as adhering to all truth and being
looise in all. Charity holds fast the minutest atoms of
liutn, as being precious and divine, offended by even so
Liuch as a thought of laxity. Liberality loosens the terms
of truth ; pernritting easily and with careless magnanimity
variations from it; consenting, as it were, in its own sov-
ereignty, to overlook or allow them ; and subsiding thus, ere
long, into a licentious indifference to all truth, and a gen-
eral defect of responsibility in regard to it. Charity ex-

HIS SIMPLICITY IS PERFECT. 318

wnds aJlowance to men; liberality, to falsities thtmselves
Charity takes the truth to be sacred and immovable ; lib
erality allows it to be mariid and maimed at pleasure.
How different the manner of Jesus in this respect from
that unreverent, feeble laxity, that lets the errors be '>M
good as the truths, and takes it for a sign of intellectual
eminence, that one can be floated comfortably in the
abysses of liberalism. "Judge not," he says, in holy
charity, "that ye be not judged;" and again, in holy ex-
actness, "whosoever shall break, or teach to break, one
of these least commandments, shall be least in the king-
dom of God;" in the same way, "he that is not with us,
is against us;" and again, "he that is not against us, is
for us;" in the same way also, "ye tithe mint, anise, and
cummin ;" and again, " these things ought ye to have done,
and not to leave the other undone;" once more, too, in
the same way, " he that is without sin, let him cast the
first stone;" and again, "go, and sin no more." So mag-
nificent and sublime, so plainly divine, is the balance of
Jesus. Nothing throws him off the center on which
truth rests; no prejudice, no opposition, no attempt to
right a mistake, or rectify a delusion, or reform a practice.
]f this be human, I do not know, for one, what it is to be
human.

Again, it is a remarkable and even superhuman dis-
linction of Jesus, that, while he is advancing doctrines so
iitr transcending all deductions of philosophy, and opening
mysteries that defy all human powers of explication, he
ia yet able to set his teachings in a form of simplicity,
that accommodates all classes of minds. And this, for the
reason that he speaks directly to men's convictions them-
selves, without and apart from any learned and curiou«

i1

Sii HE IS INTELLIGIBLE

elaboration, sucli as the uncultivated can not follow. "Ni
one of the great writers of antiquity had even \)Ti>
pounded, as yet, a doctrine of virtue which the multiiad^'.
CO aid understand. It was taught as being ro xa>ov, 'the
fair,] or to -Trps-rov, [the becoming,] or something of that
nature, as distant from all their apprehensions, and as dea
titute of motive power, as if it were a doctrine of mineral
ogj. Considered as a gift to the world at large, it was
the gift of a stone, not of bread. But Jesus tells them di-
rectly, in a manner level to their understanding, what
they want, what they must do and be, to inherit eternal
life, and their inmost convictions answer to his words.
Besides, his doctrine is not so much a doctrine as a biog-
raphy, a personal power, a truth all motivity, a love walk-
ing the earth in the proximity of a mortal fellowship.
He only speaks what goes forth as a feeling and a power
in his life, breathing into all hearts. To be capable of his
doctrine, only requires that the hearer be a human creat-
ure, wanting to know the truth.

Call him then, who will, a man, a human teacher;
what human teacher ever came down thus upon the
soul of the race, as a beam of light from the skies —
pure light, shining directly into the visual orb of the
mind, a light for all that live, a full transparent day, Id
which truth bathes the spirit as an element. Others
talk and speculate about truth, and those who can may
follow; but Jesus is the truth, and lives it, and, if lie
is a mere humar teacher, he is the first who was ever
able to find a form for truth, at all adequate to the
world's uses. And yet the truths he teaches out-reach
ali the doctrines of all the philosophers of the world.
He excels them, a hundred fold more, in the scope and

T(^ ALL CLASSES. 815

grandeu: of his docfme, tban he does in his simplicity
itself.

Is this human or is it plai/ily divine? If jou will see
what is human, or what the wisdom of humanity would
ordain, it is this — exactly what the subtle and accom-
j-lished Celsus, the great adversary c»f Christianity in ita
original promulgation, alleges for one of his principal
irguments against it. "Woolen manufacturers," he says,
*' shoemakers, and curriers, the most uneducated and boor-
ish of men are zealous advocates of this religion ; men who
can not open their mouths before the learned, and who
only try to gain over the women and children in fam-
ilies."* And again, w^hat is only the same objection, un-
der a different form, assuming that religion, like a philoso-
phy, must be for the learned, he says, "He must be void
of understanding, who can believe that Greeks and barba-
rians, in Asia, Europe, and Lybia — all nations to the ends
of the earth — can unite in one and the same religious doc-
trine."t So also^ Plato says, "it is not easy to find the
Father and Creator of all existence, and when he is found
it is impossible to make him known to all.":}: "But ex-
actly this, says Justin Martyr, "is what our Christ has ef-
fected by his power." And Tertullian also, glorying in
the simplicity of the gospel, as already proved to be a
truly divine excellence, says, "Every christian artisan
has found God, and points him out to thee, and, in fact,
ghows thee every thing which is sought for in God, al*
though Plato maintains that the creator of the world is not
easily found, and that, when he is found, he can not
be made known to all."§ Here then, we have Chrisl

♦Neander'a Memorials uf Christian Life, p. 19. fib., p. 33.
ITimfleus. § Neandsr's MeL.orials of Christiar Li^e, p 19

516 HIS MOKALITV

flgaiust CelsuM, and Christ against Plato. Those agree in
assuming that we have a God, whom only the great can
mount high enough in argument to know. Christ reveals
a God wliom the humblest artisan can teach, and all
mankind embrace, with a fiiith that unifies them all.

i^.gain, the morality of Jesus has a practical superiority
to that of all human teachers, in the fact that it is not an
artistic^ or theoretically elaborated scheme, but one that is
pr. oounded in precepts that carry their own evidence, and
are, in fact, great spiritual laws ordained by God, in the
throne of religion. He did not draw long arguments to
settle what the summum bojium is, and then produce a
scheme of ethics to correspond. He did not go into the
vexed question, what is the foundation of virtue? and
hang a system upon his answer. Nothing falls into an ar
tistic shape, as when Plato or Socrates asks what kind of
action is beautiful action? reducing the prmciples of
morality to a form as difficult for the uncultivated, as the
art of sculpture itself. Yet, Christ excels them all in the
beauty of his precepts, without once appearing to consider
their beauty. He simply comes forth telling us, from God,
what to do, without deducing any thing in a critical way;
and yet, while nothing has ever yet been settled by the
critics and theorizing philosophers, that could stand fast
and compel the assent of the i-ace, even for a year, the
morality of Christ is about as firmly seated in the c.nvii-
l\ons of men, as the law of gravity in their bodies.

He comes into the world full of all moral beauty, lu,
God of physical ; and as God was not obliged to set him-
Hclf to a course of aesthetic study, when he created the
forms and landscapes of the world, so Christ comes tc
his rules, by no critical praoiice in words. He opens hip

IS SOV AHTlSriC. 811

Li])8, atd the creative glory of Lis niiiid poui-s itsdlf forth
ill living precepts — Do to others as ye would that otherH
should do to you — Blessed are the peacemakers— Smitter
upon one cheek, turn the other — Resist not evil — For
give your enemies — Do good to them that hate you — Lend
nol, hoping to receive — Receive the truth as little children.
Omittir.g all the deep spiritual doctrines he taught, and
making all the human teachers on their own ground, the
ground of preceptive morality, they are seen at once, to
be meager and cold; little artistic inventions, gleams of
high conceptions caught by study, having about the same
relation to the christian morality, that a statue has to the
flexibility, the self-active force, and flushing warmth of
man, as he goes forth in the image of his Creator, to be
the reflection of His beauty and the living instrument of
his will. Indeed, it is the very distinction of Jesus thai
he ceaches, not a verbal, but an original, vital, and divine
morality. He does not dress up a moral picture and asL
you to observe its beauty, he only tells you how to live;
and the most beautiful characters the world has ever seen,
have been those who received and lived his precepts with-
out once conceiving their beauty.

Once more it is a high distinction of Christ's character,
as seen in his teachings, that he is never anxious for the
success of his doctrine. Fulh^ conscious of the fact that
the world is against him, scoffed at, despised, hated, alone
too in his cause, and without partisans that have any pub-
lic influence, no man has ever been able to detect in him the
least anxiety for the final success of his doctrine. He is
never jealous of contradiction. ^ hen his friends display
their dullness and i^icapacity, or even when they forsake
him. he is never rufiied or disturlied. He r^'stM on hiy

318 NEVER ANXIOUS FOR SUCCESS.

words, with a composure as majestic as if he Trere sitting
on the circle of the heavens. Now the consciousness of
truth, we are not about to deny, has an effect of this na-
ture in every truly great mind. But when has it had ai:
effect so complete? What human teacher, what great phi
'osopher has not shown some traces of anxiet}'' for his
fjchool, that indicated his weakness; some pride in hia
friends, some dislike of his enemies, some traces of wound-
ed ambition, when disputed or denied ? But here is a lone
man, a humble, uneducated man, never schooled into the
elegant fiction of an assumed composure, or practiced in
the conventional dignities of manners, and yet, finding all
the world against him, the earth does not rest on its axle
more firmly than he upon his doctrine. Questioned by
Pilate what he means by truth, it is enough to answer —
■'He that is of the truth heareth my voice." If this be
human, no other man of the race, we are sure, has evei
lignified humanity by a like example.

Such is Christ as a teacher. When has the world seen a
phenomenon like this; a lonely uninstructed youth, coming
forth amid the moral darkness of Galilee, even more dis-
tinct from his age, and from every thing around him, than
a Plato would be rising up alone in some wild tribe in
Oregon, assuming thus a position at the head of the world,
and maintaining it, for eighteen centuries, by the pure self-
evidence of his life and doctrine ! Does he this by the force
3f mere human talent or genius? If so, it is time thai
wti begin to Iook to genius for miracles ; for there is really
no greater miracle.

There is )'et one other and more inclusive distinction oi
tiie character of Je»us, which must not be omitted, and

THE MOKE FA.MILIARLY KVOWX, 319

whic.h sets him off nore widely frcn all the mere men of
the race, just because it raises a contrast which is, at once,
total and experimf^ntal. Human characters are always
reduced in their eminence, and the impressions of awe
they have raised, by a closer and more complete acquaintr
ance. Weakness and blemish are discovered by familiar-
ity; admiration lets in qualifiers; on approach, the halo
dims a little. But it w^as not so with Christ. With his
disciples, in closest terms of intercourse, for three whole
years; their brother, friend, teacher, monitor, guest, fellow-
traveler; seen by them under all the conditions of public
ministry, and private society, where the ambition of show,
or the pride of power, or the ill-nature provoked by an-
noyance, or the vanity draw^n out by confidence, would
most certainly be reducing him to the criticism even of
persons most unsophisticated, he is yet visibly raising their
sense of his degree and quality; becoming a greater won-
der, and holier mystery, and gathering to his person feel-
ings of reverence and awe, at once more general and more
sacred. Familiarity operates a kind of apotheosis, and the
man becomes divinity, in simply being known. At first,
he is the Son of Mary and the ISTazarene carpenter. Next,
he is heard speaking with authority, as contrasted even
with the Scribes. Next, he is conceived by some to be
certainly Elias, or some one of the prophets, returned iii
power to the world. Peter takes him up, at that pointy as
l)!?ing certainly the Christ, the greiit, mysterious Messiah ,
( idy not so great that he is not able to reprove him. whoa
lie bug in 3 to talk of being killed by his enemies; protest-
ing— *'• ce it far from thee Lord." But the next we see of
the once oold apostle, he is beckoning to another, at th^
table, to whisper the Lord and ask who it is that is gcru^^

820 THE 1) E E F K H THE HE \- E K E N C E

to botray him^ uutible himself to so much as invade tte
sacred ear of his Master with the audible and open ques
lion. Then, shortly after, when he comes out of the hali
of Caiaphas, flushed and flurried with his threefold lie, and
his base hypocrisy of cursing, what do we see bat liiat.
riimply catching the great master's eye, his heart breakf.
down, riven with insupportable anguish, and is utterly dis
solved in childish tears. And so it will be discovered in ah
the disciples, that Christ is more separated from them, and
holds them in deeper awe, the closer he comes to them and
the more perfectly they know him. The same too is true
of his enemies. At first, they look on him only as some
new fanatic, that has come to turn the heads of the peo
pie. Next, they want to know whence he drew his opin-
ions, and his singular accomplishments in the matter of
public address; not being, as all that knew him testify, ar
educated man. Next, they send out a company to arrest
him, and, when they hear him speak, they are so deeply
impressed that they dare not do it, but go back, under a
kind of invincible awe, testifying — "never man spake like
this man." Afterward, to break some fancied spell there
.nay be in him, they hire one of his own friends to betray
him; and even then, when they are come directly before
him and hear him speak, they are in such tremor )f appro-
hcmsion, lest he should suddenly annihilate them, that they
tee! incontinently backward and are pitched on the ground
.^ilatvi trembles visibly before him, and the more because o(
his silence and his wonderful submission. And then, when
ihc f^tal deed is done, what do we see but that the multi
tude, awed by some dread mystery in the person of tlie eru-
citied, return home smiting oi^ their breasts for anguish, ir
the sense of what their infatuated and guilty ra^e has done

IN WHICH HE IS HELD. 821

The most conspicuous matter therefore, in the history
of Jesus, is, that what holds true, in all our experienc(f
of men, is inverted in him. He grows sacred, peculiar
wondcrfal, divine, as acquaintance reveals him. At first
he is only a man, as the senses report him to be ; knowl
edge, observation, familiarity, raise him ;'nto the God
man. He grows pure and perfect, more than mortal in
wisdom, a being enveloped in sacred mystery, a friend to
be loved in awe — dies into awe, and a sorrow that con-
tains the element of worship! And exactly this appears
in the history, without any token of art, or even apparent
consciousness that it does appear — appears because it is
true. Probably no one of the evangelists, ever so much
as noticed this remarkable inversion of what holds good
respecting men, in the life and character of Jesus. Is this
character human, or is it plainly divine?

We have now sketched some of the principal distinc-
tions of the superhuman character of Jesus. We have
seen him unfolding as a flower, from the germ of a perfecl
youth ; growing up to enter into great scenes and have hi?
part in great trials; harmonious in all with himself anc
truth, a miracle of celestial beauty. He is a Lamb in in-
noc'ence, a God in dignity; revealing an impenitent but
faultless piety, such as no mortal ever attempted, such a.«
to the highest of mortals, is inherently impossible. Ht
advances the m)st extravagant pretensions, without a/i>
v.now of conceit, or even seeming fault of modesty. Ut
guflfers without affectation of composure and without ro-
Bxraint of pride, suffers as no mortal sensibility ca7J, and
where, to mortal view, there was no reason for pain at all;
giving us not only an example of gentleness and pAtiennv

522 SL^CII A t'HAKACTEK

in all the small tiials of life, but revealing the deptlis evet
of the passive virtues of God, in his agony and the
patience of his suiFering love. He undertakes also a plan,
universal in extent, perpetual in time; viz., to unite al]
uations in a kingdom of righteousness under God; laying
aifl foundations in the hearts of the poor, as no great teach
?.r nad ever done before, and yet without creating ever a
^aciion, or stirring one partisan feeling in his followers.
In his teachings he is perfectly original, distinct from his
Age and from all ages; never warped by the expectation
of his friends ; always in a balance of truth, swayed by no
excesses, running to no oppositions or extremes ; clear of
all superstition, and equally clear of all liberalism ; pre
sen ting the highest doctrines in the lowest and simplest
forms ; establishing a pure, universal morality, never be-
fore established ; and, with all his intense devotion to the
truth, never anxious, perceptibly, for the success of his
doctrine. Finally, to sum up all in one, he grows more
great, and wise, and sacred, the more he is known — needs,
ill fact, to be known, to have his perfection seen. And
this, we say, is Jesus, the Christ; manifestly not human,
not of our world — some being who has burst into it,
and is not of it. Call him for the present, that "holy
thing" and say, "by this we believe that thou camest from
God."

Not to say that we are dissatisfied with this sketch,
ift-ould be almost an irreverence of itself, to the subject ol
i Who can satisfy himself with any thing that he can say
of Jesus Christ? We have seen, how many pictures oi
the sacred person of Jesus, b}^ the first masters; but noi
one, among lhem all, that did not rebuke the weakness
wMcb eould dire attempt an impossible subje;t. So o/

DID ACTUALLY EXIST.

the cliaracler of Jesus. It is necessar}^, for the holy inter-
est of truth, that we should explore it, as we are best
able; but what are human thoughts and human concep-
tions, on a subject that dwarfs all thought and immediately
outgrows whatever is conceived. And yet, for the rea-
son that we have failed, we seem also to have succeeded.
For the more impossible it is found to be, to grasp the
character and set it forth, the more clearly is it seen to be
above our range — a miracle and a mystery.

Two questions now remain wliich our argument requires
to be answered. And the first is this — did any svch char-
acter, as this we have been tracing, actually exist ? Ad-
mitting that the character, whether it be fact or fiction, is
Buch as we have seen it to be, it must inevitably follow,
either that such a cliaracttM- actually lived, and was possi-
ble to be described, because it furnished the matter of the
picture, itself; or else, that Jesus, bemg a merely human
character as he lived, was adorned or set off in this man-
ner, by the exaggerations of fancy, and fable, and wild tra-
dition afterward. In the former alternative, we have the
insuperable difficulty of 'believing, that an}^ so perfect and
glorious character was ever attained to by a mortal. If
Christ was a merely natural man, then was he under all
the conditions privative, as regards the security of his vir-
tue, that we have discovered in man. He was a new-cre
atod being, as such to be perfected in a character of stead
fast holiness, only by the experiment of evil and redemp-
Uon from it. We can believe any miracle, therefore, more
easily than that Christ was a man, and yet a perfect char-
acter, such as here is gi^en. In the latter alternative, we
have four differeut writers, widely distinguished in their

324 HE WAS AN ACIUALLY

Btyle and mental habit — inferior persons, all, as regur.U
their accomplishments, and none of them remarkable fot
gifts of genius — contributing their parts, and coalescing thu?^.
'.n the representation of a character perfectly harnionioo?
with itself and, withal, a character whose ideal no poe-.
had been able to create, no philosopher, by the profoiJD •
est effort of thought, to conceive and set forth to th(;
world. What is more, these four writers are, by the sup-
position, children all of credulity, retailing the absurd gos-
sip and the fabulous stories of an age of marvels, and yet,
by some accident, they are found to have conceived and
sketched the only perfect character known to mankind.
To believe this, requires a more credulous age than these
writers ever saw. We fall back then upon our conclu-
sion, and there we rest. Such was the real historic char-
acter of Jesus. Thus he lived, and the character is possi-
ble to be conceived, because it was actualized in a living
example. The only solution is that which is given by
Jesus himself, when he says — "I came forth from the Fa-
ther, and am come into the world."

The second question is this; whether this character ia
to be conceived as an actually existing, sinless character in
the world? That it is I maintain, because ihe character
can no otherwise be accounted for in its known excellences.
How was it that a simple-minded peasant of Galilee, was
able to put himself in advance, in this manner, of all Lu
aian teae-hing and excellence ; unfolding a character so pe-
•uiiar in its combinations, and so plainly impossible to an;;^
mere man of the race? Because his soul was filled with
internal beauty and purity, havmg no spot, or stain, dis
torted by no obliquity of view or feelmg, lapsing there-
fore into no eccentricity or deformity. We can make (*u\

SINLESS CHARACTER. 826

ao account oi iiira sc etisy to believe, as that he was sin
less; indeed, we can make no other account of him at
all. He realized what are, humanly speaking, impossibil-
ities; for his soul was warped and weakened by no hu-
maQ infirmities, doing all in a way of ease and natural-
! ess, just because it is easy for clear waters to flow from a
; <u re spring. To believe that Jesus got up these high con-
ceptions artistically, and then acted them, in spite of the
cxjnscious disturbance of his internal harmony, and the
conscious clouding of his internal purity by sin, would in-
volve a degree of credulity and a want of perception, as re-
gards the laws of the soul and their necessary action un
der sin, so lamentable as to be a proper subject of pity.
We could sooner believe all the fables of the Talmud.

Besides, if Jesus was a sinner, he was conscious of siii
as all sinners are, and therefore was a hypocrite in the
whole fabric of his character ; realizing so much of divine
beauty in it, maintaining the show of such unfaltering har-
mony and celestial grace, and doing all this with a mind
confused and fouled by the affectations acted for true vir-
tues ! Such an example of successful hypocrisy would be
itself the gTeatest miracle ever heard of in the world.

Furthermore, if Jesus was a sinner, then he was, ol
■;}ourse, a fallen being; down under the bondage, distorted
by the perversity of sin and its desolating effects, as men
ire. The root therefore of all his beauty is guilt. Evil
l:as broken loose in him, he is held fast under evil. Bad
iLoughts are streaming through his soul in bad succes-
Bions, his tempers have lost their tune; his affections
have been touched by leprosy ; remorse scowls upon hip
heart: his views have lost their balance and contracted ob-
liquity ; in a word, he is fallen. Is it then such a being, on*

28

326 8PECIFiCAT\0NS AGAINST IT

who bas been touclied, in this manner, by the demonic
spell of evil — is it he that is unfolding such a character?

What thtn do our critics in the school of naturalisir.
say of this character of Christ? Of course they aiv
obliged to say many handsome and almost saintly things
of it. Mr. Parker says of him, that — "He unites in him
self the sublimest precepts and divinest practices, thus
more than realizing the dream of prophets and sages;
rises free from all prejudice of his age, nation, or sect;
gives free range to the spirit of God, in his breast; seta
aside the law, sacred and true — honored as it was, its
forms, its sacrifice, its temple, its priests; puts away the
doctors of the law, subtle, irrefragable, and pours out a
doctrine beautiful as the light, sublime as Heaven, and
true as God."^ Again — as if to challenge for his doc-
trine, the distinction of a really superhuman excellence —
" Try him as we try other teachers. They deliver their
word, find a few waiting for the consolation who accept
the new tidings, follow the new method, and soon go be-
yond their teacher, though less mighty minds than he.
Though humble men, we see what Socrates and Luther
never saw. But eighteen centuries have past, since the
Sun of humanity rose so high in Jesus; what man, what
eect has mastered his thought, comprehended his method,
and so fully applied it to life!"f

Mr. Hennel, who writes in a colder mood, bat nas, ojj
the whole, produced the ablest of all the arguments yet of
fered on this side, speaks more cautiously. He say»-
'* Whilst no human character, in the history of the world,
can be brought to mind, which, m proportion as it coaW
be closely examined, did not present some defects, di&

* Discourses of Religion, p. 294. f lb,, p. 303.

i3Y PAKKKR AXD HENNEL. 827

qualifying it for being the emblem of moral perfect] jn, we
can rest, with least check or sense of incongruity, on the
imperfectly known character of Jesus of Nazareth,"*

But the intirnt-tion here is that the character is not per-
rci.t ; it is only one in which the sense of perfection safferp
** lea,st chc^k." And where is the fault charged ? :Vhy,
it IS discovered that Jesus cursed a fig-tree, in which he is
Been to be both angry and unreasonable. He denounced
the Pharisees in terms of bitter animosity. He also drove
the money-changers out of the temple with a scourge of
rods, in which he is even betrayed into an act of physical
violence. These and such like specks of fault are discov-
ered, as they think, in the life of Jesus. So graceless in
our conceit, have we of this age grown, that we can think
it a point of scholarly dignity and reason to spot the only
perfect beauty that has ever graced our world, with such
discovered blemishes as these ! As if sin could ever need
to be made out against a real sinner, in this small waj
of special pleading; or as if it were ever the way of sin
to err in single particles or homeopathic quantities
of wrong! A more just sensibility would denounce this
malignant style of criticism, as a heartless and really low-
minded pleasure in letting down the honors of goodness.

In justice to Mr. Parker, it must be admitted that he
does not actually charge these points of history as faults,
'>! blemishes in the character of Jesus. And yet, iu
justice also, it must be added that he does compose
a section under the heading — " The Negative iSide, or the
LimitaP/)ns of Jt^iis^''^ — where these, with other like mat-
ters, are tarown in by insinuation, as possible charges
Bometimes advanced by others. For himself, he alleges

♦Inquiry, p. 451.

528 THE MANLIER OPINION

QOthiiig positive, but that Jesus was under the popului
delusion of his time, in respect to devils or demoniaxjaJ
possessions, and that he was mistaken in some of hia rcf
erences to the Old Testament. What now is to Ix'
thought of such material, brought forward under such n
heading, to flaw such a character ! Is it sure that Christ
was mistaken in his belief of the foul spirits? Is it cer-
tain that a sufficient mode of interpretation will not cleai
his references of mistake? And so, when it is suggested,
at second hand, that his invective is too fierce against the
Pharisees, is there no escape, but to acknowledge that,
"considering his youth, it was a venial error?" Or, if
there be no charge but this, " at all affecting the morixl
and religious character of Jesus," should not a just rever-
ence to one whose life is so nearly faultless, constrain u?
to look for some more favorable construction, that takes
the solitary blemish away ? Is it true that invective is a
necessary token of ill-nature? Are there no occasions
where even holiness will be most forward in it ? And
when a single man stands out alone, facing a whole living
order and caste, that rule the time — oppressors of the
poor, hypocrites and pretenders in religion, corrupters of
all truth and faith, under the names of learning and relig-
ion— is the malediction, the woe, that he hurls against
them, to be taken as a fault of violence and unregulated
passion ; or, considering what amount of force and public
influence he dares to confront and set in deadly enmity
against his person, is he rather to be accepted as God's
champion, in the honors of a great and genuinely heroic
spirit ?

Considering how fond the world is of invective, ho-w
to admire the rhetonc of sharp words, liow manv

OF MILTON. 829

speak CIS study to excel in the tine art of excoriation, how
manj'- reformers are applauded in vehement attacks on
nharacter, and win a great repute of fearlessness, just be-
cause of their severity, w^hen, in fact, there is nothing to
tear — when possibly the subject is a dead man, not ye^
buried — it is really a most striking tribute to the more
than human character of Jesus, that we are found
to be so apprehensive respecting him in particular,
lest his plain, unstudied, unrhetorical severities on this or
chat occasion, may imply some possible defect, or " venial
error," in him. Why this special sensibility to fault in
him ? save that, by his beautiful and perfect life, he haa
raised our conceptions so high as to make, what we might
applaud in a man, a possible blemish in his divine ex-
cellence ?

The glorious old reformer and blind poet of Puritan-
ism— vindicator of a free commonwealth and a free, un-
prelatical religion — holds, in our view^, a far worthier and
manlier conception of what Christ does, in this example,
and of what is due to all the usurpations of titled conceit
and oppression in the w^orld. With truly refreshing ve-
hemence, he writes — "For in times of opposition, w^hen
against new heresies arising, or old corruptions to be re-
formed, this cool, impassionate mildness of positive wis
dom is not enough to damp and astonish the proud resist-
ance of carnal and false doctors, then (that I rr.ay havr
leave to soar awhile, as the poets use,) Zeal, w^ht;ge yub
stance is ethereal, arming in complete diamond, ascends,
his fiery chariot, drawn by two blazing meteors figured
like beasts, but of a higher breed than any the zodiac
yields, reseml^iing thoso four which Ezekiel and St. John
Baw, the one visagod like a lion, to express power, liiglr

28*

880 THE CHANGE, SUCH A CUARACTKR

QUtliority, anJ. indigiKiti<>ii, the other ot man, to <"'.asi de
rision and scorn upon perverse and fraudulent seducer^--
with them the invincible warrior. Zeal, shaking loosclj
the slack reins, drives over the heads of scarlet prelates
and such as are insolent to maintain traditions, bruising
their stiff necks under his flaming wheels. Thus did the
i/ue prophets of old combat with the false ; thus Christ,
Kimself the fountain of meekness, found acrimony enough
to be still galling and vexing the prelatical Pharisees.
But ye will say, these had immediate warrant from God
to be thus bitter; and I say, so much the plainer is it
found that there may be a sanctified bitterness against the
enemies of the truth."*

And what other conception had Christ himself of the
meaning and import of his conduct in the matter in ques-
tion? He felt a zeal within him, answering to Milton's
picture, which could not, must not, be repressed. He
knew it would be blamed, or set in charge against him,
by false critics and uncharitable doubters — and he said,
" The zeal of thy house hath eaten me up." And still it
was, when rightly viewed, only a necessary outburst of
that indignant fire, which is kindled in the sweet bosom
of innocence, by the insolence of hypocrisy and opprep-
sion.

I conclude, then, (1.) that Christ actually lived and bore
the real character ascribed to him in the history. A nd
(2.) that he was a smless character. How far off is he
now from any possible classification in the genus human-
ity I Having reached this point, we are ready to pass, in
the next chapter, to the christian miracles, and show that
Christ, being himself the greatest of all miracles, in his

* Apology for Smectymnus, Sect. I.

83i

own person, did, in perfect consistency, and without creat-
ing any greater difficulty, work miracles.

But before we drop a tliemo like this, let us note more
distinctly the significance of this glorious advent, and
have *ur congratulations in it. This one perfect charac-
ter has come into our world, and lived in it; filling all
the molds of action, all the terms of duty and love, with
his own divine manners, works, and charities. All the
conditions of our life are raised thus, by the meaning he
has shown to be in them, and the grace he has put upon
them. The world itself is changed, and is no more the
same that it was ; it has never been the same, since Jesus
left it. The air is charged with heavenly odors, and a
kind of celestial consciousness, a sense of other worlds, is
wafted on us in its breath. Let the dark ages come, let
society roll backward and churches perish in whole re-
gions of the earth, let infidelity denj^, and, what is worse,
let spurious piety dishonor the truth ; still there is a some-
thing here that was not, and a something that has immor-
tality in it. Still our confidence remains unshaken, that
Christ and his all-quickening life are in the world, as fixed
elements, and will be to the end of time; for Christianity
is not so much the advent of a better doctrine, as of a ]/er-
fect character ; and how can a perfect character, once en-
tered into life and history, be separated and finally expelled?
It were easier to untwist all the beams of light in the sky,
separating and expunging one of the colors, than to get the
character of Jesus, which is the real gospel, out of the
world. Look ye hither, meantime, all ye blinded and
fiillen of mankind, a better nature is among you, a pure
heart, out of some pure world, is come into jour prison

882 IS RADICAL AND FINAL.

and walks it with you. Do you require of us to show whc
he is, and definitely to expound his person? We may
not be able. Enough to know that he is not of us — some
strange being out of nature and above it, whose name ig
Wonderful. Enough that sin has never touched his hal-
lowed nature, and that he is a friend. In him dawns a
hope — purity has not come into our world, except to pu-
rify. Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sinn
of the world ! Light breaks in, peace settles on the air
lol the prison walls are giving way — rise, let us gc.

CHAPTER XI.

CHRIST PERFORMEl; MfaACLES.

It used to be the practice of theologians, to cite the
aJracles of Christ as proofs of his doctrine, and even of
the gospel history ; Dot observing that the conditions of
tlie question are entirely changed since the days of the
first witnesses. To the cotemporaries and attendants on
the ministry of Jesus, he might well enough be approved
of God, by miracles and signs; for, being themselves
eye-witnesses, they could easily be sure of the facts. But
to those who saw them not, to us who have heard of them
only by the report of history, they can never be cited as
proofs, because the main thing to be settled, with us, is
the verity of the facts themselves. The gospel history,
instead of being attested to us by the miracles, has them
rather as a heavy burden resting on its own credibility.
Doubtless it is true that, if such a being as Christ were to
come into the world, on such an errand as the gospel re-
ports, we should look -to see him verify his mission by
miracles, and without the miracles we should suspect the
authenticity of his pretensions. As far, therefore, as the
miracles sort with the person of Christ and his mission, as
set forth in his gospels, there is a harmony of parts in the
histor}^, that is one of the evidences of its truth. It is
even a necessar}^ evidence, yet scarcely a sufficient evi-
dence by itself. We still require to be certified that the
miracles reported are facts. This done, Christianity, as a
supernatural revelation of God, is established. ITntii
then, the miracles are, it must be admitted, a subtTactioE

634 MODES OF DOUBT, OR DENIAL

from its rational evi Jtnce ; even though the subject mat
ter of the history be incomplete, and so far wanting in
rational evidence, without them.

The ground taken against the Christian miracles, by
Spincza, in which he is followed by Mr. Parkei, is this*
that they dishonor God, as involving the opinion that his
great revelation in nature is insufficient, and needs fafter-
ward to be amended, and that, in doing it by miracles, he
is conceived to overturn his own laws, and break up the
order of his work.

Hume was an atheist, and, of course, had nothing to
say of God, or the confusion of his plan. Assuming that
we know nothing save by experience, he argued that we
know by experience the fallibility of all testimony, and
the uniformity of the laws of nature. Hence that no
amount of testimony can justify our belief in a miracle;
for we have, and must have, a stronger faith in the uni-
formity of the laws of nature, than we can have in any
testimony.

Assisted in this skeptical tendency by modern science,
which has set the laws of nature, for the time, in such
prominence, as to operate a real suppression of thought
in the spiritual direction, Dr. Strauss assumes the incredi-
bility of miracles without much care for the argument,
md bases on that assumption his deliberate and powerful
assault upon the gospel history.

Against these and similar modes of denial, which di^-
tmguish the naturalistic tendencies of our time, we new
undertake, assisted by the material already prepared, it
the preceding chapters, to establisli the fact of the Chris-
dan miracles. Our argument will not prove every onf
of tiiem, or, in fact, anj^ particular one ; for the question

MIRACLES DEFINED. 335

will still be open, for such as choose to engage in it,
whether this, or that, or some of them, are not to be dis-
credited for particular reasons, which display the mistake
or credulity of the narrators. We shall only show thai
Christ wrought miracles, which is the great point in issv/t.

Let us endeavor, then, first of all, as a matter on which
ever}^ thing depends, to settle what is to be understood by
a miracle, or what a miracle is.

We have raised a clear distinction already between na-
ture and the supernatural; viz., that nature is the chain
of cause and effect — that coming to pass which is deter-
mined by the laws of cause and effect in things. The
Bupernatural is that which acts on the chain of cause and
effect, from without the chain ; not being caused in its
action, but acting from itself, under no conditions of pre-
vious causality. The distinction of nature and the super-
natural is the distinction, in fact, between propagations of
«3au6ality and original causality, between things and powers.
In this view, man, as a power, together with all created
spirits, good and bad, is a supernatural being co-ordinate
with God, in so far as he acts freely and morally. If he
moves but a limb in his freedom, he acts on the lines of
cause and effect in nature ; and if, in moving that limb
he has committed a murder, we blame him for it, and
bring him to a felon's punishmeiit ; simiply because 1 e
was not caused to dc the deed, by any efficient cause bac k
of him, but did it of himself; or, as the common law ho?
it, *'by malice aforethought."

But we do not call these free moral actions of man.
miracles, because they are common, and because there i-i
uo attribute of wonder connected with them. What liien

386 THREE E L E M K N TS I N C L U I) E P

is a miracle? It is a suj^criiatural act, an act, lliat is
which operates on the chain of cause and effect in nature
from without the chain, producing, in tlie sphere of the
senses, some event that moves our wonder, and evinces
the presence of a more than human power. Observe
tliree points. (1.) It is by some action upon^ not m, the
line of cause and effect; (2.) it is in the sphere of the
senses, foi-, though the regeneration of a soul may i-equire
as great power as the raising of Lazarus, it is yet no
proper miracle, because it is no sign to the senses ; (3.) it
must be understood to evince a superhuman power, other-
wise feats of jugglery and magic would be miracles. We
commonly suppose, in miracles, a deinc power, though
sometimes we refer them to a subordinate, angelic, or de-
moniacal power; as when we speak of signs and lying
wonders, that are wrought by no divine agency. The
word miracle, which is a Latin diminutive, properly de-
notes (iome limited or isolated fact, that we wonder at. M
takes the diminutive form probably because it relates tc
something parceled off from the whole of nature, which,
in that view, is small, or partial. The scripture uses sev-
eral terms or names to denote such events, calling them
''signs," "wonders," "powers:" and once, trapa^ola, trans
iated " strange things."

To make our definition yet more exact, or to ilear it
yet farther of ambiguity, let us add the following nega-
(ives.

1. A miracle is not, as our definition itself implies, any
wonderful event developed under the laws of nature, oi
oi natural causation. Some religious teachers have takcc
this ground, suggesting that nature was originally planneci.
^T preformed, so as to bring out these p*^.rticular surprises

FOUlt MISCONUEFTIO.XS COKRECTED. 837

at the points where they occur. Doubtless God's origina]
scheme, taken as a whole, was so planned, or preformed;
but that scheme included more than mere nature, viz., all
supernatural agencies and events, and even his owu
workn, or actions, in the higher, vaster field of the super
aatural. But it is a very different thing to imagine thai
nafure is every thing, and that the surprises are all devel-
opments of nature.

2. A mxiracle is no event that transpires singly, or apart
from system ; for the real system of God is not nature, as
we have seen, but that vaster w^hole of government and
order, including spirits, of which nature is only a very
subordinate and comparatively insignificant member. In
this higher view, a miracle is in such a sense part of the
mtegral system of God, that it would be no perfect system
without the miracle. Hence all that is said against mira-
cles, as a disruption of order in God's kingdom — there
fore incredible and dishonorable to God — is without
foundation.

3. A miracle is no contradiction of our experience. It
is only an event that exceeds the reach of our experience.
We have a certain experience of what is called nature and
the order of nature. But v,^hat will be the effect, in the
field of nature, when the supernatural order meets it, or
;itreams into it, we can not tell; our experience here is
limited to the results or effects that may be wrought, by
{)MT own supernatural agency. What the supernatural di

\ iae, or angelic, or demonic agency may be able to do in
It, we know not. Therefore, all that is alleged by Mr,
Hume falls to the ground. It may be more difficult to
believe, or more difficult to piove such facts, wrought by
such agencies: but not because they are contrary, in aai

2ft

tfbd ADM1SS10^'S MADii:

proper sejise, t«) our experience. The} are only loon
Btxange to our experience.

4. A miracle is no suspension, or violation, of tlie law»
Ci nature. Here is the point where the advocates o1
miracles have so fatally weakened their cause by too largt:
t statement. The laws of nature are subordinated to mir
acles, but they are not suspended, or discontinued by them.
If I raise my arm, I subordinate the law of gravity and pro-
duce a result against the force of gravity, but the law, oi
the force, is not discontinued. On the contrary it is act-
ing still, at every moment, as uniformly as if it held tlie
arm to its place. All the vital agencies maintain a chem-
istry of their own, that subordinates the laws of inorganic
chemistry. Nothing is more familiar to us, than the fact
of a subordination of natural laws. It is the great game
of life, also, to conquer nature and make it what, of it-
self, by its own laws of cause and effect, it is not. We
raised the supposition, on a former occasion, of another
physical universe, separated from the existing universe,
and placed beyond a gulf, across which no one effect
ever travels. If now that other universe were swung up
side by side with this, it would instantly change all the
action of this — not by suspending its laws, but by an ac-
tion that subordinates and varies its action. So the realm
of spirits is a realm that is permitted, or empowered to
come down upon this other, which is called nature, and
play its activity upon it, according to the plan God /iM
l)efore adjusted; bu': this activity suspends no law, breaks
no bond of system. Nature stands fast, with all her terms
of cause and effect, as before, a constant quantity, inter-
posed by God to be a medium between supernaturaj
beings, in their relative actions. They are to have theii

BY OPPOSEJiS OF MIRACLES. 339

excTcisij in it, and upon it, and so, bj their activit3', tbe^
Hxe to make a moral acquaintance with each other ; men *vith
meu all created spirits with all, God with creatures, creat-
ures with God ; acquaintance also with the uses of lawa
by the wrongs they suffer, and with their own bad rain«l
by seeing w^hat v/rongs they do — so by their whole ex
iAirience to be trained, corrected, assimilated in love, anii
jnished in holy virtuf . There is no more a suspen
sion of the laws of nature, when God acts, than when we
do; for nature is, by her very laws, subjected to his and
our uses, to be swayed, and modified, and made a sign-lan-
guage, so to speak, of mutual acquaintance between us.

By these four negatives, distinctly premised, we seem
to have cleared the faith of miracles of all needless incum-
brances, and, in that way, to have cut off the principal ob-
jections urged against their credibility. Before proceed-
ing, however, to inquire after the more positive proofs of
the christian miracles, it may be well to glance at the po-
sitions taken, by some of the principal advocates of natu-
ralism, and especially to the admissions they are sometimes
constrained to make.

Thus it is conceded by Mr. Hennel that — "It seems be-
yond the power of intellect to decide a priori, whether
a miraculous revelation, or instruction through nature
alone, be more suitable to the character of God."* There
is then no inherent absurdity in the supposition, that God,
as the spring of scientific unity and order in his works^
should yet perform miracles. Whatever doubts we sulfei
of their Duality must be grounded in defects of histori(
evidence. This is a large concessicn.

♦Inquiry, p. 96.

iJ40 ADMISSIONS MADF

Ooincideiitly with this, Mr. Parker admits, that *' thei^.
is no antecedent objection" to miracles, if only tliey are
wrought " in conformity with some law out of our reach."*
And exactly this is true of all supernatural divine agency,
as we have abundantly shown — only the laws of God's p'j
pernatural agency are laws of reason, or such as respecl
his last end, and the best way of compassing that end;
which laws are yet so stable and so exactly universal, that
he will always do exactly the same things, in exactly the
same circumstances or conditions.

The admissions of Dr. Strauss are even more remark
able. We have already referred to his admission that one
"kingdom in nature may intrench on another," and that
"human freedom " may, in this way, modify " natural devel-
opment."f Ask the question accordingly, wherein is it
less credible that the freedom of God may do as much?
and we have, as the necessary answer, what contains the
whole doctrine of miracles. Doubtless it will be added
that man belongs to "the totality of things,^^ and that God
does not; that man is in "the vast circle" of nature and
natural laws, and that God is not. But the answer, we
reply, is grounded in an assumption, as regards man, that
is justified by no evidence, and is contradicted even by
the evidence of consciousness. Man, as a being of free
will, is no part of nature at all no arc in the circle of nn
tiire. He belongs, we have abundantly shown, to a high
er kingdom and order; having it for his prime distinctioD
that he acts supernaturally, acts upon the circle of naturt
from without, and never as being determined by the caus
alities of nature. All the free intelligences of the ani

•• Diacoureeg of Religion, pp. 269-70. f Life of losas, Vol. I. p. 72

BY OPPOSERS OF MIRACLES. 841

verse are acting on the circle of nature, in this marnei,
and why then may n)t God Himself?

But we have another cc?icession tha\ is even more to
our purpose. Adverting to the fact that the ancient peo
[jhs, especially of the East, begin at God, and see a!.'
oil iRges take their spring in his immediate agency, while
the moderns begin at things, and see all changes come to
pass, under natural laws, he distinctly rejects the latter, as
being, by itself, any complete and sufficient view of the
subject. "It must be confessed," he says, "on nearer in-
vestigation, that this modern explanation, although i1
does not exactly deny the existence of God, yet puts aside
the idea of Him, as the ancient view did the idea of the
world. For this is, as it has often been well remarked,
no longer a God and Creator, but a mere finite Artist, who
acts immediately upon his work, only during its first pro-
duction, and then leaves it to itself; who becomes exclud-
ed with his full energy from one particular sphere of
existence."*

There is then, he admits, no validity in the modern
opinion, which assumes that all things take place by force
oi second causes, and without an immediate divine agency.
Indeed he explicitly acknowledges, on the next page, thai
"our idea of God requires an immediate, and our idea of
i.he world a mediate divine operation." He only man-
ages to quite take away the value of the admission^ by
raising the question, how to combine, or settle the relative
adjustment of the mediate and immediate operation, and bv
so conducting the process as to come out in the conclusion,
'uhat "God acts upon the world as a whole, immediately,
but on each part, only by meaas of his action en even

Life cf Jesus, VoL I., p. 7".
29*

842 ADMISSIONS MADE

:)tlier part," that is to say. "by tlie laws of .lature.'' And
so miiacles are excluded.

But there is a mistake here, first in his premises, ana
next in his conclusion. It is not true that our "idea ol
the world" requires us to hold the faith of a merely "me-
iliate" action of God upon it. Exactly contrary to thi?
the idea of the world, taken as disordered by sin, demand.'i
his innnediate action. It is not only necessary, in order to
realize the idea of God, or make room for his practical ex-
istence, that we conceive him to have some kind of imme-
diate action, but the world, under its disorders, asks for it,
and waits for the restoring grace of it. It is very true
that if the world, as an organized frame of scientific or-
der, under second causes, were in no way disturbed by our
immediate action upon it, there would seem to be no de-
mand or even place for an immediate operation of God.
Why should the watchmaker turn the hands of his watch
directly by the key, when he has made them to go mediate-
ly by the spring? Bat this is not any true statement of the
question; the world is in no such state of primal and ideal
order. Making due account of sin, as our philosophers,
alas! never do, we have a condition that, for order's sake,
asks an intervention of God's supernatural and powerful
hand. The world, in fact, was made, to be unmade by sin,
and become a state of unnature ; made to want, thus, inter
ventions and immediate operations, to carry it on and bring
it out, in the final realization of its perfected ends E' en aa
a watch, being no infallible machine, is submitted to exter
nal action, by means of the regulator; and as, without a
regulator prepared for the immediate touch of some hand;
it would be no manageable or serviceable thing, so it is the
particular merit of nature, that it is originaUy ordered tc

BY OPPOSERS JF MIkACLEd, 348

receive the touch of free-will forces from without; first ol
such as are human, and then, as the only sufficient powe.
of conservation, of such as are divine.

I'he error referred to, in the conclusion at whicn Dr,
Straurfs arrives in his analysis, is too obvious to require o
particular refutation. Enough that any one but a mere
words-man, will find some difl&culty in conceiving how
God should act "immediately on the whole" of the world,
without acting immediately on some one, or all of the
parts. Acting in, or upon some one wheel of a watch,
the whole action of the watch will be affected; so when
every wheel is acted on; but what is that immediate ac-
tion upon the whole of a watch, that does not immediately
act on any one of the parts? Besides, the argument by
which all particular action is excluded, would require
that God should never have begun to act immediately
any where. Creation is thus philosophically impossible.
God, therefore, has had nothing to do, but to be chained
to the wheel from eternity, acting immediately on some
eternal whole that is self-existent as He; allowed to be-
gin nothing, vary no part or particle, held by a doom
to his eternal totality.' Is it this which "the idea of
God" requires, this by which our idea of God is fulfilled?

On this particular question, however, of an immediate
j^nd a mediate divine agency, we are not disposed to spend
a great deal of time. We strongly suspect there is a
si^phism in the question, much as .f the inquiry were
whether God, who is above time, acts in this tense or
the other? All that we can say with confidence on thifl
subject, appears to be that, so far as we can see, it is nec-
essary for lis, under conditions of time, to hold the two
•3cmceptions, of a nature set on foot in some past time?.

S-i4 THE MEDIATE AND IMMEDIATE,

and a divine force, acting supei naturally upon it now,
and that God so distributes his action or plan, as to give
us what will thus accommodate our finite conditions
Nature, practically viewed and wholly apart from specu
lation, is a kind of third quantity between us and Gcd, tci
^H3 reciprocally acted on; so that we can see what we are
doing toward Him, and what he is doing toward us. It
is words to the great life-talk of duty, a medium of ac-
tion and reaction that interprets to us the divine relation-
ship in which we stand. Laying hold of nature by her laws
and causes, to build, produce, possess, and also to fi'ame a
scientific knowledge, we get a footing and a basL) of re-
action for our freedom. If we descend into sin, we set
the causes of nature in courses of retributive actiun, and
this reveals what is in our sin. Then, as God will redeem
us, we are able to see a force entered into nature, which
is not nature's force. One may be as truly a divine force
as the other, but they are yet so ordered as to be relative
forces to our apprehension, acting one upon, nr into, thu
other. In all christian experience, and in tiuies of pray-
er, we get a divine help, entered into our staro, which wt
apprehend distinctly, and with a conscious intelligence,
as we could not, if all divine agency were homogeneous.
But while we need, so manifestly, to think God's agency
in this manner, under a twofold distribution, it is by no
means certain that he, from his hight of eternity, classi-
fies his action, under our finite categories of teni,e and
relative casuality It is very certain, as we Lave already
shown, that nature is not, to Him, the universal system.
All his doings, whether past or present, mediate or imme-
diate, rest in laws of reason, determined by his end, and
it is m these, iiot in the physical laws magnified by sci-

POSSIBLY A HUMAN D J ST INCTI 0:N-. 84fi

cncu, that he beholds the real S}stem of his univei^e. Id
this viey., nature may be to huii a kind of continuous
creation, coalescing, as it flows from his will, in a com-
mon stream with his supernatural action, and crystallizing
with it, in the unity of his end. Enough that, to us^ «a
conception of his work is given, which better meets oui
finite conditions. Enough that we may call it natural and
Bupernatural ; cause and effect, and miracle ; mediate and
immediate; and that so, without any real error, we may
have our human want accommodated. The twofold dis-
tinction is permitted as a practically valid form of thought,
without which we could have no sense of relationship
wdth God, under the experience of life; and, without
which, nothing done by him, as prior to our sin, in the
way of judicial arrangement, or posterior, in the way of
recovery, could ever be intelligible.

Having noted some of the admissions of the natur.'J-
izing teachers, we will now proceed to adduce some pro . fs
of the christian miracles; or rather to gather up t/ie
proofs already supplied, by the course of our argum*. nt
itself.

1. We have seen that man himself acts supernatu rally,
in all his free accountable actions. That is, he acts upon
the chain of cause and effect in nature, uncaused him?d^
in his action. This is no miracle, but it involves all ihc
speculative diffi(iulties encountered in miracles. Thest are
nothing but acts, every way similar to ours, of God or
auperhaman agents, on the lines of causes in nature; only
differerit in effect or degree, as they are different I eLigs
fix)m us. We have only to suppose that nature is, by
Uef veiy laws, submitted to them as to is, and that i» the

846 AKGUMENTS FOR

end of all difficulty. We may wonder at their mauifeai
ations^ and not at our own ; but our wonder alters nothing
creates no derangement of nature, any more than if w(
were so familiar with such doings, as to experience no won
dcr at all. K the sun darkens, or the earth shudden
with Christ 11 his death, that sympathy of nature is just
as appropriate for him, as it is for us that our skin should
blush, or our eye distill its tears, when our guilt is upon
us, or our repentances dissolve us. It is not cause
and effect that blushes, or that weeps, but it is that
cause and effect are touched by sentiments which connect
wiih our freedom. Nature blushes and weeps, because
she was originally submitted, so far, to our freedom, or
made to be touched by our actions; but she could not even
to eternity raise a blush, or a tear of contrition, if we did
not command her.

2. Consider how near the fact of sin, which is the ad
of a supernatural human agency, approaches to the rank
of a miracle. Sin, as we have shown in a previous chap-
ter, is the acting of a free being as he was not made to act ;
for, if it were the acting of a being under laws of cause
and effect established by God, then it would \e no sin.
God made sin possible, just as he made all lying wonders
po.'^sible, but he never made it a fact, never set any thing
in his plan to harmonize with it. Therefore it enters the
world as a forbidden fact, against every thing that God
has ordained. And then what follows ? A genera, disrup-
tion of every thing that belongs to the original paradisaic
order of the creation. The soul itself begins, at the first
moment, to feel the terrible action of it, and becomes a
crazed and disordered power. The crystal form of thf
Bpirit is broken, and it is become an opaque element, a Itv

MIRACLES. 847

iiig malformation. The conscience is battered huC tram-
pled in its throne. The successions of the thoughts are
become disorderly and wild ; the tempers are out of tune :
the passions kindle into guilty fires, and burn with x con-
suming heat; the imagination is a hell of painful, ugly
phantoms ; the body a diseased thing, scarred by deform<
■ty. Society is out of joint, and even the physical world
itfjelf, as we have shown, is marred in every part by abor-
tions, deformities visible, and discords audible, so as no
more to represent the perfect beauty of its author. What
devil now of confusion has thrown a magnificent creature,
and a realm of glorious natural order, into so great confu-
sion? Where are those sovereign laws of beauty and
order which they tell us nothing can disturb ? We care
not to call sin a miracle. We only say that no one mira-
cle, nor all miracles, ever heard of or reported, can be im-
agined to have wrought a thousandth part of the disturb-
ance actually wrought by sin, the sin of mankind. Who-
ever then has yielded to the really shallow dogma of ra-
tionalism, which teaches that cause and effect in nature must
have their way, fulfilling causes of ideal harmony, and
forever excluding the possibility of a miracle, need not go
far to find a corrective. Let it be distinctly noted then—
3. That what we call nature, and what the mere natu-
ralists are so bold to assume can not be mended or altered
by any interference of miracle, does in fact no longer ex-
ist. Sin has so far unmade the world that the divine ordei
is broken. The laws are all in action as at the first, never
disco itinued, or annihilated, but the false fact or lying
wonder of sin, has made false conjunctions of causes, and
3et the currents of causality in a kind of malign activity,
which displaces forever the proper order of nature. It i?

848 ARGUMENTS FOR

with Qature as with a watch in which some wheel ha«
been made eccentric, in its motions, by abuse. The whole
machine is in disorder, though no one part is wanting.
It is no longer a watch, or time-keeper, but a jumble of
useless and absurd motions. So nature, under sin, is no
lonorer nature, but a condition of unnature. Yet this it
h that our scientific naturalism assumes to be the perfect
order; which not even God may toucb by a miracle, with-
out a breach of its integrity! It is nature, they say
and God, who is the God of nature, will not, can not
touch ii, witliout either cor.senting to its original im-
perfection, or producing a general wreck of its perfection.
Why, the perfection of it is gone long ages ago ! From
the moment, when a substance or power located in it, viz.
man, began to act as he was not made to act, that is to sin,
it has been a disordered fabric of necessity. No longer
does it represent only the beautiful mind of its author, but
quite as often the shame, and discord, and deformity con-
sequent upon sin. And no man, we are sure, who regards
it for a moment, will have any the least apprehension that
a miracle wrought in it, by its author, can be any thing
but a hopeful sign for its systematic integrity. That he
would never work a miracle in nature proper, as it came
from his hands, we are quite willing to admit, but since
nature is gone, Mien with man in the bad experiment ol
'^vil, and since it was originally designed to be acted on.
botl by man and by Himself, in a process of training thai
;:u'\rries him through a fall, and brings him out in redemp-
tion, we see nothing to discourage the faith of miracles
but much to prove the contrary. This brings us U
S])eat5: —
4. Of tht (act that, without a putting forth of the di

MIKACLE?i. S4f.

vine p)Ower, in some action sovereign as miracles, there
can be no reconstruction of the proper order of na-
tare, no recovery of the broken state of man. The law?
of nature, without him and within, are now running per*
versely, as laws of sin and death. 1 he crys+alline order
of souls and of the world is broken, and it is plain, at
a glance, that no being but God, the Almighty, can avail
to restore the disturbance. The laws have no power ol
self-rectification, any more than the laws of a disordered
machine have power to cure the disorder by running. v^-S
certainly therefore as sinners are to be restored, as certain
ly, that is, as that all God's ends in the world and human
existence are not to fail, there will be, must be, miracles,
or puttings forth, at least, of a divinely supernatural
power. Every thing in the whole creation is groaning and
travailing in expectation of so great a redemption. The
very plan was originally, as we have shown, to bring out
the grand results of spiritual order and character intended,
by means of a double administration ; that is by the crea-
tion and the new-creation, the creation disordered by sin,
the new-creation raised up and glorified by grace and its
miracles. Go back then a moment —

5. To things precedent and see what considerations and
facts may be gathered there. First, we discover, what the
naturalists and men chiefly occupied with matters of sci-
ence so generally overlooK, the foct that nature never was,
and never was designed to be, the whole empire of God;
that the final ends of God are not contained in nature at
all, and that it was appointed by Him to be only a raeani
to his ends, a mere field for the tn.ining of his children,
In tliis view spiritual creatures, creatures supernatural, com-
p«ise t\xe veal body and substano<^ of his empire, and to the8«

860 ARGUMENTS FOB

nature was to be subjected, by these to be played upon h
the great life-battle of their trial — disordered by them and
restored by Himself. Accordingly it is not implied thai
the divine system is, in any degree, marred or broken by
his miracles On the contrary, every thing done by Hin\«
will be done iie fulfilling that system. There is no change
10 reconsideration, no breach of unity, but a doing of pre-
cisely that which was set down to be done at the first. He
proceeds, in fact, by laws predetermined, in his miracles
themselves ; of course by a perfect and orderly system.

Observe, again, the fact that God has either never done
■jr can do any thing, or else that he may as well be sup-
posed to do a miracle now. To create any thing that was
not, to set any plan on foot that was not on foot, was itself
a miracle that involved all the difficulties of a miracle sub-
sequent. To create a scheme called nature and retire to
see it run, is itself a miracle, and we may just as well sup-
pose that he continues to work, as that he so began. He
has either never done any thing, or else he may do some
thing now. There is no way to escape the faith of mira
cles and hold the faith of a personal God and Creator. It
is only pantheism, or, what is not flir different, atheism,
that can rationally and consistently maintain the impossi-
bility of miracles. Any religion too absolute to allow the
raith of miracles, is a religion whose God never did any
thing, and is therefore no God.

Again, it is discovered and proved, by science itstli",
that God has performed, at least, one miracle, or class ot
miracles, in the world, previ )us to the date of human
existence. We speak of the great geological discovery
that new races of animals and plants havp, at diifereni
times, been created, and finally man himself. The mer»

MIRACLES. 851

metallic earth, wliich, at one time, was the all of nature,
did not make or sprout up into any form of life. Tl si
would be a greater miracle, done by nature, than the rais
ing of Lazarus — as great as if the earth had raised him
yea, as great as if the earth had invented and shaped hin»
and breathed intelligence into him. Here then is proved
to us, out of the infallible registers of the rocks, that God
has sometime wrought a miracle upon nature. And, as
we said just now, one miracle proved, decides the ques-
tion ; for there may as well be a thousand as one. We
pass now —

6. To the subject of our last chapter, w^here we meet a
proof that concludes all argument. We there showed,
by a full and critical examination of the character of
Jesus, that he is plainly not a human character, and can
not be rightly classed in the genus humanity ; also, that
the character is not an invention, but that such a person
must have lived, else he could not be described; also, that
being such, in external description, he must have been,
what he himself claimed to be, a sinless being. Here,
then, is a being w^ho has broken into the world, and is not
of it; one who has come out from God, and is even an ex-
pression to us of the complete beauty of God — such a?
he should be, if he actually was, what he is affirmed to
be, the Eternal Word of the Father incarnate. Did ho
work miracles? this now is the question that waits io'
our decision — did he work miracles? By the supposition,
ho is superhuman. By the supposition, too, he is in the
world as a miracle. Agreeing that the laws of nature
will not be suspended, any more than they are bv oui
o'.vn supernatural action, will they yet be so subordiTintcd
to his power, as to permit the perfcrm.ance of signs aiif'

852 THE GRAND A R G L' M K N T

woudera in which we may recognize a superhuman ibrx^
Since he is shown to be a superhuman being, manifestlj
nature will have a relation to him, under and by her ov;l
lavn such as accords with his superhuman quality, and it
will be very" singular if he does not do superhuman
things ; nay, it is even philosophically incredible that he
should LOt. An organ is a certain instrument, curiously
framed or adjusted in its parts, and prepared to yield
itself t-o any force which touches the keys. An animal
runs back and forth across the kej^-board, and producer a
jarring, disagreeable jumble "jf sounds. Thereupon he
begins to reason, and convinces himself that it is the na-
ture of the instrument to make such sounds, and no other.
But a skillful player comes to the instrument, as a highei
presence, endowed with a super-animal sense and skill.
He strikes the keys, and all melodious and heavenly
sounds roll out upon the enchanted air. Will the animal
now go on to reason that this is impossible, incredible,
because it violates the nature of the instrument, and is
contrary to his own experience? Perhaps he may, and
men ma}- sometimes not be wiser than he. But the player
himself, and all that can think it possible for him to do
what the animal can not, wall have no doubt that the
music is made by the same laws that made the jargon.
Just so Christ, to w^hose will or touch our mundane sys-
tem is pliai t as to ours, may be able to execute results
lb rough its very laws, subordinated to him, which to un
*iro impossible. Nay, it would be itself a contradicticn
of all order and lit relation, if he could not. To suppose
that a being out of hi^manity will be shut up within all
tlie limitations of humanity, is incredible and contrary to
reaaoa The very .aws of nature themselves, having liir>

TH^T CHRIST IS A MIRACLE 853

presunt to them, as a new agent and higher first term,
would require the development of new consequences and
incidents in the nature of wonders. Being a miracle him-
seJiJ it would be the greatest of all mirac es if he did nol
work miracles.

Let it be farther noted, as a consideration important tc
the argument, that Christ is here on an errand high
enough to justify his appearing, and also of a nature to
exclude any suspicion that he is going to overthrow the
order of God's works. He declares that he has come out
from God, to be a restorer of sin, a regenerator of all
things, a new moral creator of the world ; thus to do a
work that is, at once, the hope of all order, and the
greatest of all miracles. Were he simply juggling with
our curiosity, in the performance of idle and useless won-
ders, doing it for money, or to show what is of no conse-
quence; as that he is a priest, or has the power of second
sight, or that the sun shines, or that he is right in assert-
ing some insignificant opinion, it is allowed that we
should have no right to believe in him. But he tells us,
on the contrary, that he is come out from God, to set up
the kingdom of God, and fulfill the highest ends ol' the
divine goodness in the creation of the world itself, .md
the dignity of his work, certified by the dignity also of
his character, sets all things in proportion, and commends
him to our confidence in all the wonders he performs

But our human supernatural acticn, it will be suggeBtcii.
id through the body, while the raising of Lazarua dis-
penses with all natural media and instruments. And yet,
as our body is a part of nature, it will be seen that we a<?t
upon the body as being itself nature, without media be-
tween it and our will, in the same manner. The relation

80*

SM ANP OUGHT THEREFORE

ship existing between different orders of beirg and nature
may also vary according to their degree. On this subject
we know nothing. We can not even say, that, to such a
being as Christ incarnate in it, the whole realm jf pliysi-
i^al existence was not present as a sensorium, quickeneJ
l)y his life. Mere ignorance is not competent here to hojil
HB objection. If we can not see how Christ could woi k
his miracles, or send his will into things around him,
there is nothing singular in the fact. There are many
things that we can not understand.

Nor sh^l we apprehend in his miracles any disruption
of law ; for we shall see that he is executing that true
system, above nature and more comprehensive, which is
itself the basis of all stability, and contains the real im-
port of all things. Dwelling from eternity in this higher
system himself, and having it centered in his person
wheeling and subordinating thus all physical instruments
as doubtless he may, to serve those better ends in which
all order lies, it will not be in us, when he comes forth
frcmi the Father, on the Father's errand, to forbid that he
shall work in the prerogatives of the Father. Visibly not
one of us, but a visitant who has come out from a realm
of spiritual majesty, back of the sensuous orb on which
our moth-eyes dwell as in congenial dimness and obscurity
of light, what shall we think when we see diseases fly
before him, and blindness letting fall the scales of ob-
•cured vision, and death retreating from its prey, but that
die seeming disruption of our retributive state under sir*,
is laade to let in mercy and order from above. For, i f
man has buried himself in sense, and married all sense t<;
sin, wliich sin is itself the soul of all disorder, can it bt
to us a frightful thing ihat he lays his hand upon the per

TO WORK MIRACLES. 555

<rerK^d causalities, and says, "thou art made wLolt?"^ Ji
the bad empire, the bitter uniiature, of our sin, is somo
where touched by his heahng power, must we apprehend
some fatal shock of disorder? If, by his miraculovia
force, some crevice is made in the senses, to let in tne
light of heaven's peace and order, must we tremble lest
the scientific laws are shaken, and the scientific causes
violated ? Better is it to say — " this beginning of miracles
did Jesus make in Galilee, and manifested forth his glory,
and we believe in him." Glory breaks in through his
incarnate person, to chase away the darknese. In him.
peace and order descend to rebuild the realm below, they
have maintained above. Sin, the damned miracle and
misery of the groaning creation, yields to the strongei
miracle of Jesus and his works, and the great good mmds
of this and the upper worlds behold integrity and rest
returning, and the peace of universal empire secure. Out
of the disorder that was, rises order ; out of chaos, beauty.
Amen ! Alleluia 1 for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth I
Once more, it is a powerful evidence for the historic
verity of the Christian miracles, that their deniers can
make no account of them, as reported in the christian nar-
ratives, which is rational or even credible. Dr. Strauss
maintains that they are myths or legendary tales, that
grew up out of the story-telling and marveling habit of
the disciples of Christ, within the first thirty years al^ei
their Master's death, at which time many of tht> eye-Tw it -
n-esses of the miracles were still living. That such a con-
version of history into fable should have taken place m
the traditions of a much longer period of time, is not im-
possible. But ho is compelled to shorten his time in this
manner, as it would seem, because there is no allusior

S6e NO O'lHEK ACCOUNT

made in the gospels to the fall of Jerusalem ad aii accoin
plished fact. For, had thej Veen written after the over
throw by Titus, it is inconceivable that his nanu; should
not have been mentioned in those chapters of the gospels
that foretell the overthrow, and also that the shocking
scones of the siege, should not have been even too distinctly
desciibed. On the supposition, too, that the first age of
discipleship was fertile enough in the mythical tendency, to
have oenerated so many miraculous stories, within the short
period of thirty years, this grand catastrophe of the na-
tion must have been set off with a profuse garnish of
fictions, and Christ himself, coming in the clouds of heaven
to be the avenger of the cross, must have had such prom-
inence in the transaction, as to quite leave the Roman
commander in the shade. Hence the necessity that so
short a time should be fixed. And thus we are required
to believe that all these myths were developed and re-
corded in the lifetime of the eye-witnesses of Christ's
ministry, and some of them recorded by eye-witnesses
themselves. The faith of miracles, we think, would be
somewhat easier than this. And still the difiiculty is
forther increased by the fact that the epistles, the genuine-
ness of which is indisputable, present exactly the same
Christ, and refer to the same miracles, in a manner clear
of all pretense of myth or extravagance.

But the mythologic hypothesis of this critic breaks
iown more fatally, if possible, in the necessary implica-
lion, that four common men are able to preserve such a
< h aracter as that of Christ, while loading down the history
thus, with so many mythical wonders that are the garb of
their very grotesque and childish credulity. By what
accident, we are compelled to ask, was an age of mytha

OF 'I HE MIRACLES 357

And fabler able to develop and set forth the onl) concep
tion of a perfect character ever known in our world?
Were these four niythologic dreamers, believ'ng theii
>>wn dreams and ail others beside, the men to produce '.he
perfect character of Jesns and a system of teachings that
transcend all other teachmgs ever given to the race? li
t.bcre be a greater miracle, or a tax on human credulity
mere severe, we know not where it is. Nothing is s') dif
ficult, all human literature testifies, as to draw a character,
and keep it in its living proportions. Hov7 much more to
draw a perfect character, and not discolor it fatally by
marks from the imperfection of the biographer. How is
it, then, that four humble men, in an age of marvels and
Rabbinical exaggerations, have done it — done what none,
not even the wisest and greatest of mankind, have ever
been able to do?

So far, even Mr. Parker concedes the right of my argu-
ment. " Measure," he says, " the religious doctrine of
Jesus by that of the time and place he lived in, or that
of any time and any place. Yes, by the doctrine of eter-
nal truth. Consider what a work his words and deeds
have wrought in the world. Remember that the greatest
minds have seen -no farther, and added nothing to th(i doc-
trine of religion; that the richest hearts have felt no
deeper, and added nothing to the sentiment of religion;
have set no loftier aim, no truer method than his, of per-
fect love to God and man. Measure him by the shadow
he has cast into the world — no, by the light he has shed
Gpon it. Shall we be told such a man never lived? the
7/ hole story is a lie? Suppose that Plato and Newton
never lived. But who did their wonders, and thoughl
their thouaht? It takes a Newton .o forge a Newton

868 IS TENABLE.

What iniin could have fabricated a Jesus? Nor.e but a

Jesu.«."*

Exactly so. And jet, in the middle of the very para-
graph from which these words are gleaned, Mr Parkei
flays, " We can learn few ficts about Jesus ; '' also, that in
certain things — to wit, his miracles, we suppose — " Ilerculec
was his equal, and Vishnu his superior." Few focts about
JesuT)! all the miracles recited of him, as destitute of cred-
ibility as the stories of Hercules and Vishnu ! And yet
these evangelists, retailing so many absurd fictions and so
much childish gossip, have been able to give us a doctrine
upon w^hich the world has never advanced, a character so
deep that the richest hearts have felt nothing deeper, and
added nothing to the sentiment of it. They have done,
that is, the difficult thing, and broken down under the
easy ! preserved, in the life and discourses of Jesus, w^hat
exceeds all liuman philosophy, all mortal beauty, and yet
have not been able to recite the simplest facts ! Is it so
that any intelligent critic will reason? Suppose, if it
please, that they are not infallible in their narrative, for
we have not proved them to be. Still, as we would trust a
carrier who has brought us a case of the rarest diamonds,
sei in the frailest and most delicate tissues, proving at
once his capacity and his honest fidelity to hu. trust, ac
much more will we trust these simple men. w^ho have
given us the perfect life of Jesus, discolored by no stain
from their own fond prejudices and weaker infirmitieg.
Nor, if this carrier may have once stumbled at oui
door, when bringing us some bundle of meaner con-
sequence, do we set him down, after bringing us the
casket safely, as one who i-5 riureliable in these (common

* Life of Jer-us, p. 363

OBJECTIONS CONSIDtKED. 85J

errands. No more can we set down our evangel sts, aa
unreliable in matters of fact, after they liav(; brought oa
the glorious, self-evidencing character of Jesus, oven
though, to suppose the worst, they should be auspected,
OMce or twice, of mistake, in the external facts of hia
ministry. But there are objections to be considered.

First objection. That if the miracles of Christ are to
be believed, why not those also of Hercules and Vishnu,
and the ecclesiastical miracles of the Papal church ? Un-
doubtedly they must be, if they are wrought by such a
character as Jesus, engaged in such a work. But it ia
rather too much to insist that, because we take good
money, we ought therefore in consistency to take counter-
feit money. If it be said that the Popish miracles are as
well attested as those of Jesas, we have made nothing at
all, let it be observed, of the mere testimony of witnesses.
We have proved the witnesses by that which stands in
glorious self-evidence before us, and not the miracles by
the mere testimony of the witnesses. We will believe
the miracles also of Hercules, when Hercules is seen, by
the holy beauty of his perfect character, to have cevtmniy
come out from God. So, too, we might well enouglj
agree to believe the miracles of the apocryphal gospels,
that, for example, of the Infancy of Jesus, could the
vrriter only manage to give us the character of that in
tancy, without reducing it to a disgusting picture of pet-
tishness and passion. Until then, we must discover, in
what is called his gospel, how certain it is that the pen
which gives us only myths and marvels, for the ^ts of a
perfect history, will give us, for a perfect character, what \a
wilder still and more absurd.

860 OBJEcrioNS considered.

Second objection. That, according to oar dc6iiilion
there may be false miracles. That is certainly the doo
trine of scripture. Neither is tbo^e any thing essentiallj
incredible in it. They are wrought, of course, by nc con-
curreu3e of divine power, but only by such power as ha-
longs to the grade of the spirit by whom they are
wrought — by ''him whose coming is with signs and Ijing
wonders," "by the spirits of devils, working miracles."
According to : ir definition, any invisible spirit, who can
do what is superhuman, can do a miracle. That there are
invisible spirits, we have no doubt, and what kind of ac-
cess they may have to nature, in what manner qualified
or restrained, we do not know. But it will never be diffi-
cult to distinguish their prodigies and freaks of mischief
from any divine operation. Their character will be evi
dent in their works, and no one that loves the divine truth
will ever be taken by their impostures. We express nc
opinion of the utterances and other demonstrations which
many are accepting in our times, as the effusions of spirits
— they are beyond our range of acquaintanr^.e. "We say
that if these things are really done, or commivuicated, by
spirits, then they are miracles, bad miracles, of course;
and thus we have it established as a curious phenomenon,
that the men who are boasting their rejection of all divine
miracles, are themselves deepest in the faith of those
which are wrought b}'' demons. Nor is it impossible that
God has suffered this late irruption of lying spirits, to be
a. once the punishment and the rectification of that shal-
low unbelief which distinguishes our age — thus to shame
the absurd folly of what is here called science, and bring
us back to a true faith in the spiritual realities and powerf
of a flUDcrnatural kingdom.

OBJECTIONS CONSIDEKED. 3Hi

Third objection. That if miracles are credible in anv
particular time or age, that, for example, of the New Tes
fcament, they must be now and always credible. To this
we answer tliat they are now and always credible. Bui it
does not follow that they are now and always a fact
That n>ust depend npon historic evidence. The scriptures
nowhere teach, what is often assumed, the final discontinu-
ance of miracles, and it is much to be regretted that such
an r.Gsumption is so commonly made, for wh^n it is taken
for an authorized doctrine, that God will no more allow
any real miracle to be wrought, since the apostolic times.
it renders even the New^ Testament miracles just so much
more difficult to be believed. There is no certain proof
that miracles have not been wrought in every age of the
christian church. There is certainly a supernatural ana
divine causality streaming into the lives and blending
with the faith of all good men, and there is no reason to
doubt that it may sometimes issue in premonitions, results
of guidance and healing, endowments of force, answers to
prayer that closely approach, in many cases, if they do not
exactly meet, our definition of miracles.

We answer again that if miracles have been discontin-
ued, even for a thousand years, they may yet be revived
in such varieties of form, as a different age may re-
(]^uire. They will be revived without fail, whenever the
ancient reason may return, or any new contingency may
occur, demanding their instrumentality.

And yet, again, we answer that there may have been
good and sufficient reasons why the more palpable mira-
cles of the apos*.olic age could not be continued, or must
needs be interspaced by agencies of a more silent charao
ter. It may 1 ave been that they would by and by cor

862 OBJEC'lIONS CONSIDERED.

pipt the impressions and iLtas even of religion, sett Jug
men to look after signs and prodigies witli tbeir eyes, ii>
dueing a eontempt of every thing else, and so, instead of
attesting God to men, making them unspiritual and even
incapable of fixith. Traces of this mischief begin to aj>-
pear even in the times of the apostles themselves. There
fore, when the fire is kindled, the smoke, it may be, ceas-
es; or rather it becomes transparent, so that we do not so
readily see it, though it is there. Christianity, it is very
ob^nous, inaugurates the faith of a supernatural agency in
tbe world. It is either supernatural or it is a nullity.
Hence, to inaugurate such a faith, it must needs make its
entry into the world, through the fact of a divine incarna-
tion and other miracles. In these we have the pole of
thought, opposite to nature, set before us in distinct exhibi-
tion. And then the problem is, having the two poles of
nature and the supernatural presented, that we be trained
to apprehend them conjunctively, or as working together
in silent terms of order. For, if the miracles continue in
their palpable and staring forms of wonder, and take theii
footing as a permanent institution, they will breed a sens-
uous, desultory state of mind, opposite to all sobriety and
all genuine intelligence. The invalid will now pray to be
healed by pure miracle, and will never learn or be taught
how to pray, in a manner that contemplates a unifying
of the supernatural force with nature and the system of
nntaral causes. At a certain point the miracles w^ere need-
ed a3 the polar signs of a new force, but, for the reason sug-
S^esttd, it appears to be necessary, als), that they should not
be continuous ; otherwise the supernatural will never be
thought into any terms of order, as a force conjomed with
nature in oui- c-^mmon experience, but will only insti

OB.TECTICNS CONSIDERED. HbH

gate a wild, eccentric temper, closely akin to unreason
and to all practical delusion. And yet there may bt
times, even to the end of the world, when some outburst
of the miraculous force of God will be needed to break
T(p f. lethargy of unbelief and sensuous dulln(^.ss, equally
r* 25 reasoning and delusory.

Fourth objection. That whatever may be true of mir-
acles in other respects, they are only demonstrations of
force; therefore, having in themselves no moral quality,
there is no rational, or valuable, or even proper place foi
them in a gospel, considered as a new-creating grace for
the world. To this we answer that it is a thing of no sec-
ondary importance for a sinner, down under sin, and held
fast in its bitter terms of bondage, to see that God has en-
tered into his case with a force that is adequate. These
mighty works of Jesus, which have been done and duly
certified, are fit expressions to us of the fact that he can
do for us all that we want. Doubtless it is a great and
difficult thing to regenerate a fallen nature ; no person, re-
ally awake to his miserable and dreadful bondage, ever
thought otherwise. But he that touched the blind eyes
and commanded the leprosy away, he that trod the sea, and
raised the dead, and burst the bars of death himself, can
tame the passions, sweeten the bitter affections, regenerate
the inbred diseases, and roll back all the storms of the
mivid. Assured in this manner by his miracles, they be-
come arguments of trust, a storehouse of powerful images,
that invigorate courage and stimulate hope. Broken
as we are by our s:>rrow, cast down as we are by our
guiltiness, ashamed, and w^eak and ready to despair, we
can yet venture a hope that our great soul-miracle may b<
done; that, if we can bu: t()U';h the hem of Christ's gar-

864 OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.

meat, a virtue will go out of liim to heal as. In all dark
days and darker struggles of the mind, in all outward
disasters, and amid all storms upon the sea of life, we can
vet descry him treading the billows and hear him sayinor,
•Mt is I. be not afraid." And lest we should btlieve ih<
miracles faintly, for there is a busy infidel lurking alwaye
n our hearts to cheat us of our faith, when he can not rea-
3on it away, the character of Jesus is ever shining with
and through them, in clear self-evidence, leaving them
never to stand as raw wonders only of might, but covering
them with glory, as tokens of a heavenly love, and acts
that only suit the proportions of his personal greatness and
majesty.

There are many in our day, as we know, who, without
making any speculative point of the objection we are dis
cussing, have so far yielded to the current misbelief as to
profess, with a certain air of self-compliment, that they are
quite content to accept the spirit of Jesus ; and let the mir-
acles go for what they are worth. Little figure will they
make as christians in that kind of gospel. They will nrft.
in fact, receive the spirit of Jesus; for that unabridged ii:
itself the Grand Miracle of Christianity, about which all
the others pLay as scintillations only of the central fire.
Still less will they believe that Jesus can do any thing in
I hem which their sin requires. They will only compli-
nent his beauty, imitate or ape his ways in a feeble lift-
.'rg of themselves, but that he can roll back the currents
nC Tiature, loosem.d by the disorders of sin, and raise them
lo a now birth in holiness, they will not believe. No sucb
v/atery gospel of imitation, separated from grace, will have
liny living power in their life, or set them in any bond oi
unity with G od. Nothing but to L-^py- -"Jesus of Nazareth,

CHRIST THE TRLE EVIDENCE H6i

a man approved of God by miracles .Mid signs wLi(-.h God
did by him " — can draw the soul to faith and open it t^ the
power of a supernatural and new-creative mercy.

We come back then, in closing, to the grand first prin
j.iple of evidence, and there we rest. The character and
loctrine of Jesus are the sun that holds all the minor orbe
i)f revelation to their places, and pours a sovereign self-
evidencing light into all religious knowledge. We have
been debating much, and ranging over a wide field, iii
chase of the many phantoms of doubt and false argument,
still we have not far to go for light, if only we could cease
debating and sit down to see. It is no ingenious fetches
of argument that we want; no external testimony, gath-
ered here and there from the records of past ages, suffices
to end our doubts; but it is the new sense opened in us
by Jesus himself — a sense deeper than words and more im-
mediate than inference — of the miraculous grandeur of his
life; a glorious agreement felt between his works and his
person, such that his miracles themselves are proved to us
in our feeling, believed in by that inward testimony. On
this inward testimony we are willing to stake every thing,
even the life that now^ is, and that which is to come. If
the miracles, if revelation itself, can not stand upon the
superhuman character of Jesus, then let it fall. If that
character does not contain all truth and cent]*alize all truth
m itself, then let there be no truth. If there is any thing
worthy of belief not found in this, we may well consent
to live and die without it. Before this sovereign light,
streaming out fi'om God, ths deep questions, and dark sur-
mises, and doubts unreso'.ved, which make a night sc
gloomy and terrible about us, hurry away to their i ative
abyss. God. who commanded the light to shine out of

31*

366 IN HIM WE REST.

darkness, hath shined in our hearts to give the hgnt. ol
the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesui
Christ. This it is that has conquered the assaults of doubt
and false learning in all past ages, and will in all ages to
come. No argument against the sun will drive it from
the sky. No mole-eyed skepticism, dazzled by its bright-
ness, can turn away the shining it refuses to look upon.
A nd they who long after God, will be ever turning theii
eyes tliitherward, and either with reason or without reason,
or, if need be, against manifold impediments of reason,
will see and believe.

CHAPTER XII.

WATER-MARKS IN THE CHR1STIA^ DO;rfiINE

There is no kind of evidence that is so convincing oi
is received with so great satisfaction, as that which, aflei
long and doubtful search, is suddenly discovered to have
all the while been on hand, incorporated, though unob-
served, in the verj^ subject matter of inquiry. Thus, fox
example, a suit upon a note of hand had long been pend-
ing in one of the courts of our commonwealth, payment
of which was resisted, on the ground that it was and must
be a forgery, no such note having ever been given. But
the difficulty was, in the trial, to make out any conclusive
evidence of what the defending party knew to be the
truth. His counsel was, in fact, despairing utterly ot
success; but it happened that, just as he was aboui
closing his plea, having the note in his hand, and bringing
it up, in the motion of his hand, so that the light struck
through, his eye caught the glimpse of a mark in the pa-
per. He stopped, held it up deliberately to the light, and
behold the name, in water-mark, of a company that had
begun the manufacture of paper after the date of the in-
strument ! Here was evidence, without going far to seek
it — evidence enough to turn the plaintiff forthwith into n
felon, and consign him, as it did, to a felon's punishment.
Just so there is, we now propose to show, a certain
divine water-mark in the christian doctrine, which, wheth-
er we see it or not, is there, waiting, at all times, to be
seen, and to give to all who will look for it, indubitable
proof of its supernatural and divine origin.

868 A DISTINCTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

And, first of nil, we selcci for an example, or principa
instance, the grand comprehensive distmction of the chrie
tian system, viz., the assumption it every where makes of
a necessai ily twofold economy in the training of souls.
This assumption, or assumed necessity, appears and reap-
pears on almost every page of the New^ Testament. The
two economies are "two covenants;" two ministrations,
*'a ministration of condemnation," and a " ministration of
righteousness;" "law and grace;" "bondage and lib-
erty;" "the letter that killeth, and the spirit that givetb
life;" "the law that makes nothing perfect;" and
" charity which is the bond of perfectness."

We have spoken already* of this twofold process in the
training of a soul, and shown the privative condition it is
necessarily in, till it has passed through the first stage or
economy, and come forth in the second. Our object here,
in recurring to the subject, is different; viz., to show the
remarkable advantage Christianity, or the christian gospel
has, in the positive and deliberate recognition of a truth
so plainly fundamental, and one that, as soon as it is defi-
nitcl}^ stated, inevitably verifies itself and becomes an im
movable conviction in every thoughtful mind. Christian-
ity is just here quite alone; alone, that is, in the deepest
and most radical of all conceptions that pertain to the dis-
cipline of virtue ; alone, that is, in perceiving beforehand
the necessary duality of the process, and conforming itself
di^liberatety to what is required, in the preparation of a
j^raLd dual economy. In this fact all the human philoso-
phers arc left behind. For, while the christian scriptui'es
are so forward, and full, and explicit, in asserting the twc
testaments, and displaying their relative use and powei

♦CbaoterlV., p. 117

THE I) U A I. ECONOMY OF VIRTUE. 3(iS

throwing themselves out boldly on their doctrine, i/i thf
noble confidence of truth, the philosophers do not appear
as yet, even to have had their attention attracted to the
question. Such of them as were educated under Chris
(iaLity, appear to have regardc^d its manfold represe.iva
Oons of letter and spirit, law and grace, a ministration
•jf condemnation and a ministration of righteousness, as
the unnjcaning jingle or pious cant only of revelation ;
entitled, in that view, to no philosophic respect. Indeed
it is not a little remarkable, that some of the heathen phi-
losophers appear to have approached the christian doctrine
more closely than ihey.

Our christian philosophers, so called — christian, not be-
cause they teach any thing that deserves the name, but
because they are born in christian countries — commonly
begin with man as being simply a conscious intelligence,
conceiving him to be in his proper normal state, and to
have, in that view, certain susceptibilities to virtue; a
conscience, a free will, a power of doing good and receiv-
ing injury. Then, ignoring, as a fact of no consequence,
the abnormal and diseased state of sin, they go on to build
up their schemes of ethical practice; showing what the
foundations of virtue may be, and upon those foundations
erecting their codes of observance. But as they never al-
low themselves to look on the fact of depravity, and the
'jonsequent state of psychological disorder, so the}^ nevei
rouble themselves about any such superlative notions of
virtuous living, as respect the peifection and final beati
mde of the soul. Their concern is simply to detenn:ue
luc authority of what is called virtue, and show the mat-
ters of good behavior that are bindiiig on men, in the
relations of domestic, social, and public life. They incul

870 lUE DUAL ECONOMV OF

cate uothing but legalities. It is virtue enough to do tbt
right things, no matter whether they are done grudginglj
and by hard constraint, or willingly, cheerfully, and
gladly, as the spontaneous tribute of a full and readj
heart ; no matter, indeed, whether it be only the doing of
■=t3rae right things, such as concern human society, leaving
out the duties owed to God, or whether it include all duty
and so the possibility of a principle ! Meager, sad-look-
ing impostures, these ethical schemes, that bear the name
of philosophy I

But the heathen philosophers, as we have already inti-
mated, often do better. It is not any part of philosophy
with them, to steer wide of the truths of Christianity,
and ignore all the great questions of revealed religion.
Their ignorance of Christianity delivers them of any
such feeble and absurd jealousy. Accordingly they go
directly into the great and solemn problems of human
existence, with a free mind, and a universal aim. They
take up the question of evil. They recognize, in the full-
est manner, as we have shown already, the depravity of
human nature, and the state of general distemper pro-
duced by sin. They recognize also the sense of bondage
encountered by every soul, in its endeavors to resume self-
government, and re-establish the harmony of virtue.
They go farther, they conceive a new and higher state of
possible assimilation to God, or the gods, which they eel-
&l rite as the liberty of virtue. Thus Plato shows thai
'* tne more conformed the soul is to the Divine Will, sc
much the more perfect ana free it is."* Even Aristotk
recognizes the necessity of freedom in virtuous exercisea
ne being the only sufficient ground of stability in them

A d:stinction of Christianity. 87i

''' because blessed souls live and dwell always in such ex-
srcises, without tediousness or staleness of mind.'** Epic
tetas, in like manner, shoals that "submitting the mine
to I he mind that governs all things, as good citizens tc
the law, is perfect liberty."f And Seneca coinci les with
all such testimonies, in the declaration " that it is a great
and free mind that has given itself up to God." It 30uld
also be shown, by abundant citations, that they even dis'
allowed the name of virtue to any merely legal or con-
strained practice. Having advanced so far, in the right
direction, we almost look to see them taking up the im-
pression of some necessary twofold process, in the grand
economy of virtue. But they are in a limitation. The
assimilation to God, in which they rest their hope of lib-
erty, or the complete state of virtue, is not prepared by a
gospel and a new, supernatural, and redemptive move-
ment, but only, as they conceive, by an application of
their minds to God. "The philosopher," says Plato,
" conversing with what is divine and excellent, becomes,
as far as what is human may, divine and excellent.":]:
Again, "Assimilation to God, in righteousness and holi-
ness, is the result of wisdom or philosophy."§ They had
no conception, therefore, of two ministrations, and could
not be expected, under a scheme of truth so deficient, tc
take up the yet deeper conception of a necessarny two-
fold process, in the economy of virtue. As the christian
philosophers have never taken the hint of this antecedent
necessity, from the manifold declarations of the scripture,
so these others have fallen short of it, because they had
nothing to yield them such a hint.

And yet how easy it seems, having the hint of it once

* Ktb.. L. I., C. 10. fin Arrian, 1:2. J Repub. § ThoAtf^

372 THE I UAL ECONOMY Ol VIRIUE,

given, to verify this necessity I ''J.'hough no one of lh(
philosvtpbers was ever able to take up such a conception
it requires no philosopher, when it is once given, but onl)
a thoughtful man, to perceive the certain truth of it. If
(1.) there is to be a moral regimen set up in souls, it masi
begin with law, or imposed obligation ; no matter whethei ii
be only pronounced in the conscience, or outwardly also iu
a revelation. Again, (2.) it is equally plain that mei-e la\v
can bring nothing to perfection. The experiment of dis-
obedience will be tried. The very motive it supplies to
virtue, viz., retribution, makes the virtue wearisome, and
a burden certain to be cast off. It has no motivity that
generates liberty ; on the contrar}^, the motivity it has, ap-
pealing only to interest, detains from liberty. And yet,
(3.) the law, it is equally manifest, will be a necessary
condition, or first stage in the process of holy training.
It will impress the sense of law, as a condition of well-
being. It will also develop the knowledge of sin — what it
is, and does, and deserves. And the bondage it createSj
or which is created under it, the hopelessness, the death,
will prepare the want of a deliverer. The regimen of ab-
stract law, again, (4.) is, in this view, seen to be inherently
faulty, even though the precept be perfect ; hence that noth-
ing but a personal homage, or faith in a divine person —
whose character and life, embraced in love, suppose the
embrace of all law — can finally bring in its principle, and
establish it in the liberty of an eternal and celestial love.
See, then, how distinctly all this ard moi'e is said in
the Christian documents. Hold them up to the light, and
let the divine water-mark, or inwrought signature of God.
appear! Whence comes it that these gospels and epistles,
clothed in no pomp of philosophy, and decked with nc

A DISTINCTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 873

literary liietensions, so far ti^anbcend all the philosophy ol
all ages, opening up deeper truths regarding the greal
problem of human existence, than have any where else
been discovered to the thought of man ? They tell us, iii
the utmost simplicity of manner, and with no air of di<»-
oovery, that God has two ministrations for us, letter and
zpirit, law and grace. As regards the first, they tell us
that it is a fundamental and first fact in God's economv,
no jot or tittle of which can ever fail — a perfect law, and
so the basis, or formal idea, of all perfection. Yet, as an
abstraction, commanded by authority, and enforced by
power, it makes nothing perfect. It is only a schoolmas-
ter, that sets the training on foot, and brings it on a single
stage. It is more unfortunate, however, than most school-
masters, for the stage it prepares is one of loss and defeat,
and not of gain — ordained to be unto life, it is found to
be unto death. It is a ministration of condemnation. It
is the letter that killeth. It entered that the ofPense might
abound. Weak through the flesh, it accomplishes noth-
ing but a state of bondage, and the loosing of retribative
causes that set the whole creation groaning and travailing
in pain together. And all this, we perceive, was under-
stood as well at the beginning as afterward. For, if there
had been a law given that could have given life, then
verily righteousness should have been by the law. But
that was inherently impossible, and the impossibility ia
recognized from the first. The legal state was instituted,
not as a finality, but as a first stage in the process of
ti^aining ; to develop the sense of guilt and spiritual want,
to beget a knowledge of sin, its exceeding sinfulnef«, and
the insupportable bondage it creates. And then appears,
in the person of the incarnate Redeemer a ne^ and

32

874 THE DUAL ECONOMY OF VIRTUE,

higher mi..ii.«tration, designed, frorji the foundatioQ of the
world, to complement, or even in superseding, to establish
the other. Now he hath obtained a more excelleni
ministry, by how much also he is the mediator of a l)ettei
covenant, which was established upon better promiwcv
^or, if that first covenant had been faultless, then should
no place have been sought for the second. Now it is no
more a question of works ; there never could have been a
rational expectation of human perfection on that basis;
but it is a question of simple faith. The righteousness
of God without, or apart from the law, is now manifested,
even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus
Christ, unto all and upon all them that believe. What
we call our virtue now is no more a will-work, or a some-
thing done according to law, but it is a continuous and
living ingeneration of God, who has thus become a divine
impulse or quickening in us, and so the life of oui
life. Therefore now we are free. Embracing the person
of Christ, and yielding the homage of our hearts to him,
we do, in fact, resume the law, in our deliverance from its
bondage. We keep his commandments, because we ad-
here to his person, and we enter thus into a liberty that
fulfills all law, the liberty of love. There is therefore
now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.
For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made
us free from the law of sin and death. For what the law
could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh. Goo,
sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and
for ain, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness
of the law [t. e., of the precept,] might be fulfilled in ua,
who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. The
bondage now is gone. The stage of liberty is come. This

A DISTINCTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 875

ifi tLe Spirit that giveth. life. This is the miuistral )ii of
righteousness. And if the ministration of condemnation
be glorious, much more doth the ministration of righteous-
ness exceed in glory.

This exposition of the two ministrations we have given
as nearly as possible in the language of scripture. No<
to be struck by the magnificence of the thought, would
argaie great dullness. All known speculations of philos-
ophy regarding the moral economy of human life, sink
into littleness and utter incompetency by the side of it.

A very curious question, then, it is, whence came this
Soctrine, and what should have set any writer, or any
christian school of writers, on the conception of it ? Why
does it appear in the scriptures of the New Testament.
and nowhere else ? It has, at first, a canting sound, it
wears a strange, peculiar air, and comes to us in strange,
half-mystic words — "letter" and "spirit," "law" and
"grace," two "covenants," two "testaments," two "mitt».
istrations" — but it grows under inspection, fills itself oa\
m the sublimity of its reasons, and finally stands confessed
as the only adequate, the only true and real philosophy.
It is no crude suggestion, 'or new thought half discovered.
It is fully wrought out ; all the points are stated. P]verv
thing i? set in complete working order; yet with no p-i
rade of >e-ience or of definition, and, as it weie, no con
sciousnes^ of the transcendent superiorit}^ it rovra!.^
Whence, then, came it? that is the question. And thfte
is but one answer. We could sooner believe that PlatoS'
dialogues were written by some wild herdsman of Scythia,
than that this grand distinctive doctrin^ of the scripture
is of human invention. It bears the eternal water-mark
0^ divinitv, and that ends all iiujuirv.

376 :N O OTHER supernatural RELfGIOS

Wc pass on now to observe another mosi impreseivf
liistiuction of Christianity, in what may be called tht
grouping of its ideas; and especially the fact that thfj
group theraselves in such beautiful order and harmouj
about the grand, supernatural fact of the incarnatiotu
Taat it is a fact supernatural in its form, will not be de
nied; this indeed is one of the chief grounds of impeach-
ment against the gospels. It will also be agreed, that if
any such divine movement is really inaugurated in the
Aorld, there needs to be also a whole system of ideas and
doctrines, springing forth and grouping themselves in or-
der round it. Otherwise we have no sufficient instrument-'
ation, for our human use or handling of so great a fact, and
our personal appropriation of it — no fit medium of thought
respecting it.

Here then we discover, again, upon a large scale, the
secret evidence of a higher presence in the gospel. To
frame such a fitting of ideas and doctrines, by human in-
dention, out of the materials of natural sagacity and rea-
son, we may fairly say is impossible. There have been as
many as nine avatars or incarnations, the Bramins tell us,
of their god Yishnu ; and multitudes of incarnations can be
cited, from the various pagan mythologies; but when has
there been developed, round the pretended supernatural
fact, any scheme of ideas or truths, internally agreeing with
it and having their roots of life in it? It is a very easy
'.King, we may admit, to imagine a supernatural fact, ao
incarnation for example, but to fit it with a range of doc-
liines and holy ideas, such as will connect it with human
e s:perience and make it practical, is what no mortal wis-
dom was ever able to do. Thus, if there were given the
fapt of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, or his miraculous

INTELLECTUALLY COMFLETil 877

birth as the Son of Mary, thero is no philosopher of man-
kind vrho could invent, around that central fact, a system
cf ideas and doctrines that would not, by their wild ex
travagance, and also by their manifest want of any vital
agreement or coherence with it, turn it into mockery.
Much less could he form a vehicle of doctrine, that would
make that central fact a power, in the practical life, and
dovetail it into the experience of mankind.

But all this we shall see accomplished, in the easiest and
most natural manner possible in the christian doctrine.
And this is the line of our argument; that all the capital
points or ideas of Christianity, frame into the supernatu-
ral, on one hand, in such beautiful order and facility, and
without any strain of contrivance or logical adaptation;
and into human experience, on the other, in a way so con«
sonant to the dignity of reason, and the wants and disa-
bilities of sin, that the signature of God is plainly legible
in the documents. The examples to be cited are numer-
ous, and we set them forth under numerical notations.

1. The new religion, or that of the divine advent, ia
called a gospel. Why a gospel more than a wisdom, or
philosophy, or doctrine?' These, and such like, are the
names assumed b}' all the world's great teachers; but it
occurs to none of them to call their utterance, whatever it
be, good news or a gospel. Whence the distinction? It
grows out of the simple fact that they offer a doctrine
drawn out of premises in nature, and the contents of natu-
ral reason, a doctrine which, being in those premises, is
al really given, and only waits to be deduced. Whereas,
Christ comes into the world frcm without, and above it,
und brings in with him new premises, not here before.
He is therefore proclaimed as news, good news — "behol(^

878 NO OTHKR SUPERNATURAL RELIGTON

I biing you good tidings of great joy which shall be to au
people." Christ also conceives himself and his woik
111 the same manner — "Go ye into all the world and preach
the gospel to every creature." His apostle= all follow teip
Jiifying the fact, as new tidings — "God was in Christ to-
conciling the world unto himself." If it should be Siii.i
that the work of Christ is called a gospel by mere natural
tjuggestion, because it is a real communication from an-
other world to this, we care not to object, because the
term is thus accounted for in a way that supposes the fact
of a supernatural mission ; though, if the supposed mis-
Bion were a fact given, it is doubtful whether any human
skill, left to itself, would ever suit the fact with a name
that so exactly corresponds with its peculiarity, as a fact
appearing in the world, but not of it. It would be called
by any other name, probably, as soon as by the name gos-
pel, and if some name in great repute with men were at
hand, such as woild mark it with a special honor, prob-
ably sooner. But suppose there were no supernatural fact
at all in the case, and that all we find of that character in
the work were reducible to myth, or quite explained away
by a rationalistic interpretation. Whence, in that view,
will the name gospel come? If there is no supernitural
fact at all, nor any thing more than a pretense of it, who
is going to handle even that fiction so nicely, as to fit i\
with the very peculiar name, gospel ?

2. We have another of the radical notions of this gos-
pel presented in the word .salvation. The work is called a
salvation. The incarnate Word is named Jesus, by antic-
ipation; because he will save the people from their sins.
Ho declares finally, that he came to seek and to save, and
his work is published, after he is gone, as the grace of

INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE 87S

God that bringetb salvation. Meantime no human leiichei
has ever come to men with ai.y thing called by that name,
The human teachers come with disquisitions, theories, phi-
losophies, pedagogies, schemes of reformation, ideal repub-
lics, doctrines of association. But they, none of theia,
«])eak of salvation. And that, for the simple reason, that
they have not conceived the state of unnature undej sin,
as a really lost or undone state, requiring a supernatural
and divine interposition to restore the ruin suffered. This
is the point distinctly conceived by Christianity, and there-
fore it is called a salvation. Plato saw distinctly enough
the depravity of human nature, and his doctrine of virtue,
we have seen, was that it can be formed in the soul, only
by a divine communication. It is therefore only the more
'mpressive, as a contrast, that, having these two elements
of Christianity on hand, he nowhere conceives the virtue
wrought to be a salvation. After all, the state of sin is not
to him a practically lost state, but the transition to virtue,
slurred by indistinctness, is virtually regarded as a growth,
or advance, on the footing of nature; not a rescue from
nature by a power above nature; therefore not a salvation
3. The doctrine of this salvation makes it a salvation,
by faith; in which we have another ruling idea of the
scheme that coincides with its supernatural facts and char-
acter. Christianity differs from all philosophies and ethic-
al doctrines of men, in the fact rbat it rests all virtue in
laith ; exactly as it should, if it be a grace imported into
nature from without, an advent in the world of one who
is from above. T^uch a salvation lies not within the prem-
ises of natural fact and reason ; it is not therefore a mat
ter of science, or of logical deduction. It makes its act-
flress, therefore, r>ot to reason, but to faith. Reason may

eiSO NO OTHEK SUPERNATURAL RELIGION

be uLovvcd to have a tribuiiitial veto against it, provi'led
the doctrine is certainly proved to be contrary to reason ,
but it can not be receive i by reason. It is only recei\ cd,
when faith comes, laden with sin and fettered by its iroD
iDondage, to rest herself, in holy trust, on the transcendenl
'(KQt of such an appearing, and to find by experiment thai
ic is, in sacred reality and power, what it assumes to be.
It finds the new premise true, proves it to be true, intuita
it, in and by the immediate experience of the mind. The
new salvation is by faith, because it is a supernatural sal-
Vcitii^n; for whatever virtue the plan ministers must be
in and by the receiver's faith, practically trusting soul and
spirit to the fact of such a Saviour and salvation.

There is much quarreling with the New Testament on
this ground. It becomes an offense because it requires
faith. Where is the merit of mere believing, that it should
be made the necessary condition of salvation? In one
view there is none, we answer, and it is not required be-
cause there is any. There is no merit in trusting a phy-
sician, but it may be a matter of some consequence that
his medicines be taken; as the\ v/ill not be, without some
kind of faith in him. So it is a matter of consequence that
the christian grace be accepted, as it certainly will not be,
unless the soul is practically trusted to it, and the giver.
If there is to be a healing, a new ingeneration of life and
holy virtue, it can never be, save by the efficacy of a su*
pernatural remedy. Believing in that remedy is the same
thing as coming into its power; and, therefore, on this
faith the gospel hangs salvation. It could not be other
wise. If Christianity, being supernatural, offered salvation
on any other terms than faith, the offer w^ould even be ab
surd, havmg no agreement with the grace offered Thai

INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE. o81

it hangs salvation on this condition, indicates a tlioiougb
insiglit of its own nature, and the more ready the shallops
wit of man is to find fault with such a condition, as bu
nilliating or insulting to rcas-on, the more evidently it ifi
not from man, but from a superior and superhuman source

Regarding faith, in this manner, as having its value, nci
111 its own merit, but in what it receives, we would not he
understood to represent it as an optional matter, withoul
any positive obligation. It is a duty binding on every
moral being, to believe and practically receive every thing
that is true; and this on the principle that mind, honestly
used, will distinguish all important truth. Doubtless one
may become so entangled by the ingenious -sophistries of
sin, or so darkened by its baleful shadow, that he can not
in a moment find, or finding, can not embrace the truth
In such a case, the blame must rest upon his guiltj^ past^
and the mental distortion he has created, by his former
abuse of truth, until such time as he can recover his sight.
And this he may do rapidly, if only, trusting in God, he
w^ill take into practice, for medicine, every single truth he
is able to find. All his unbeliefs and misbeliefs will be
certainly cleared in this manner. And therefore Christ
requires it of him, that they shall be; throwing his salva-
tion even upon his belief of the truth.

4. Justification by faith is another distinctive point of
the christian gospel. And this includes two principal
matters combined; that the transgressor, believing, has a
righteousness generated in him, which is not built up un
der the law, by his own practice; and that something has
been done to compensate the law, violated by his past of-
reiiaes, and save it in honor, when his sin is forgiven.

As to the former, the righteousness ingenerated. tht

882 NO OTHER .SL I'EK NATURAL RELIGION

maiii.er is sufficiently indiiated. when it is called the
righteousness that is of God by faith, unto and upon all
them that believe. It is unto and upon such only as be-
lieve; because, as we just now said, speaking of salvation,
it is only by faith that the soul is so trusted to, and depos
tted in, the supernatural grace of God, as to be invested
with his righteousness, or assimilated to it. Besides it
will be observed that this is called justification, partly be-
cause the natural laws of retributive justice, which are
penally chastising the sinner, holding him fast in the
meshes of inextricable disorder and woe, can be contro-
verted, or turned aside, only by a power supernatural and
divine.

As to the latter point concerned, the implied compensa-
tion to law, in the supposed free justification, it is not that
something is done to be a spectacle before unknown worlds,
or something to square up a legal account of pains and
penalties, according to some small scheme of book-keeping
philosophy, but it is simply this; that, as there must be
two stages of discipline to carry on the world — viz., letter
and spirit, law and grace — the introduction of pardon, or
the universal and free remission of sins, must be so pre-
pared, as not to do away with the law stage that is prece-
dent, but must let them both exist together, to act
concurrently on the world. And this is done by the obe-
dience of Christ, obedience unto death. Who can say oi
think that God yields up his law in the foi'iiivijnosa
of sins, when the Word incarnate, bowing to that law of
'ove himself- -the same that oiir human sin has broken —
renders up his life to it, and goes to the a^vful passior
of the cross, that he may fulfill its requirements. Mag
nified and made honorable, ")y such a contribution of re

TNIELI ECTUALLY COMPLETE. 88j

spect, no tree remission or removal of penalties running
against us, can be felt to shake its authority.

It is hardly necessary to suggest the fact, that Christian
ity is radically distinguished, in this matter of justin^ia-
tion, from the philosophies and the known religions. They
•ce nothing in sin, or its penal disorders that requires t
iicitinctly supernatural remedy ; or, when they are re-
moved, any apparent infringement of law and justice.
They only think to make men better by something done
upon the natural footing; which, if they can do, they
have no farther concern. They have no such conception
of a twofold economy of God as makes it a matter of
consequence to see that, when he forgives, the law is saved
to the world and kept on foot, as an element of training
and discipline. If they speak of pardon, it is no such
pardon as partakes a judicial character. Or if they speak
of expiation, offering up their children, it may be, to buy
the release of their sin, it is the passions of their God they
seek to arrest, and not his desecrated authority they will
sanctify. They have no care for law, and no suspicion
that their God has any. They have no conception of any
such solemn relations between their sin and the eternal
government of the world, as creates a difficulty in the way
of releasing their punishment. No difficulty is apj)r(>-
bended, save in the ill-nature of their God ; and they (Ex-
pect to appease him by giving him pains enough, and
goiy bodies enough of the innocent, to satisfy him. But
the christian truth is deeper in its reasons, and has a more
benign character. It comes into the world as a divine ad-
vent, to fulfill a second stage in the moral economy of ho-
liness. As the law begins with nature, so this finishes
with supernatural grace. As one binds, the other liber-

384 NO OTHER S U P E K N A r U K A L K E L 1 G i O ^:

ates; as one kills, the other makes alive; and yet so teni
pered are they both, that they are kept in perpetual actioc
together. Let the philosophers and human teachers show
U3 that they have some comprehension of the great proi.^-
lem of life, and of orod's relation to it, equally compit
hensive in its breadth, and deep in its reasons.

5. It is another of the grand distinctions of Christian if y
that it sets up a kingdom of God on earth. It is called
*'the kingdom of God" or "of heaven ", because the or-
ganic force by which so many wills and finally all man-
kind are to be gathered into unity, is not in nature, but
comes down out of heaven, in the person of Christ the
king. It is very natural that the different political organ
izations of the world should be employed figuratively, as
terms of representation, in matters not political. Thus
we have theoretic commonwealths, and ideal republics.
Truth is conceived as an empire. In the natural sci-
ences we have what are called three kingdoms, the ani-
mal, and vegetable, and mineral. But here we have,
what is not elsewhere conceived, a supernatural kingdom
in souls, the kingdom of God ; a real, living polily, organ-
ized by a real king, and swayed and propagated by the
powers of truth and love, centered in his divine person.
Jesus coming into the world, as the incarnate Word of
God, brings a new force with him, entering into souls aa
the advent of a new divine power. In him therefore
begins, of course, a new organization, the kingdom of
God in souls — righteousness, and peace, and joy in the
Holy Ghost. This accordingly is the great thought oj
Ohristis.nity — the kingdom of God ; the implanting of a
divine rule in lost men, and ^he gathering in, at last, of
all people and kindreds oi the earth, inV^ a vafit

INTELLKCT JALLV COMPLETE. 885

universal order of peace and ti'utli under Christ the
anointed king.

The fact grows out of the incarnation, so that when
Jesus is about to appear, the kingdom of heaven is at
hand. IS'o other religion, no priest or seer, no avatar oi
deity, has ever raised such a conception. It is the peculiar
thought or fact of Christianity. And yet, daring as the
proposition is, so extravagant that no mere man could
make it without a charge of lunacy, Christ undertakes it —
Christ, the Nazarene carpenter — and what is more, as-
sumes the dominion and makes his kingdom good. And
yet, if he could not make it good, his incarnation could not
stand, as an accepted fact. So closely interwoven are these
tv>^o, the incarnate appearing, and the kingdom of God.

6. The Holy Spirit also is a christian conception, stand-
ing in profound agreement with the supernatural fact of
the gospel. As Christ, incarnate, is a supernatural em-
bodiment, or manifestation localized in space, so the Holy
Spirit is a supernatural indwelling force, by which Christ
is perpetuated in the world, universalized in all localities,
and brought nigh to every being, in every place. And
that there may be no mistake regarding the supernatural
character of his agency, he is represented as being inau-
gurated by external signs, and by gifts of utterance and
healing, that transcend all human power. He is not tu
be confounded, in this respect, with concej^tions often ta-
ken up by the eastern sages and philosophers, that are
analogous in form, but really suppose, in their minds, uu
agency of God, save that which is implied in his omni-
present dominion over nature. " God, they conceived, per-
meates or passes through all things,"* and they called hini

* Cud. II., 498.
83

886 NO OTHER SUPERNATURAL RELIGION

in this view, *'tlic di\iiio spirit."* Thus Apuleius saya
that "nothing is so e.NCtllent, or great in powei', as to be
content with its own nature alone, void of the divine
aid or influence." Philoi)oniis, with our Tery point of
need in his eye, calls what should be the Spirit, simply n
Providence. "Though the soul be lapsed intoapretei-
nalural or unnatural state, still it is yet not neglected by
Providence, but has a constant care taken of it, in order to
its recovery."! Seneca distinctly conceives a divine
spirit, active in us, and yet this spirit dwindles into a min*
ister only of natural retribution. "The sacred spirit
dwells in us, observer of our evil things, guardian of
our good, and he treats us as we treat him.":]: None of
these conceptions really meet the case of a supernatural
religion. This demands a Spirit engaged to deliver and
competent to deliver from the lapse of nature, by acting
on the fallen subject, and separating him from the re-
tributive action of natural causes; dwelling in him thus,
holdmg him up, guiding him on, extricating his liberty,
and witnessing in him, as a divine revelation to his con-
sciousness.

There is also a profound necessity for the Holy Spirit,
thus conceived, in the miraculous advent of Christ itself
Christ and the Spirit are complementary forces, and, both
together, constitute a complete whole; such a kind of
whole as no man, or myth, or accidei/t ever invente<i.
There wae an inherent necessity that whatever supernal •
iiral movement, for the regeneration of man, might be un-
dertaken, should include, both a moral, and an efficient
agemiy; one before the understanding, and the other back
of it, in the secret springs of the disordered nature; a di

♦ De Mundo, 53. f Proem in Ariatotla de Anima. X ^?i *^'

INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE 881

VMiQ object clothed in beauty, and love, and justice, to bt
a mold into which the soul maybe formed, the typeol
a divine life in which it may consentingly be crystallized;
an efficient grace, working within the soul, preparing it to
will and to do and rolling back the currents of rctribu'
iivc causes in it, opening it to the power of its glorioiiy
exemplar and drawing it ever into that and a life pri>-
ceeding from it. Without the former before the mind,
whatever is done within, by efficiency, would be only a work
of repair, a something executed, of whose way or method
we should know as little as we do of health restored by
hidden causes. The change would be merely physical,
not any change of character at all, more than when the
secretions oi the body are changed. Without the latter —
the efficient working — the model set before us in the "-
vine beauty of Christ and his death, would find us dulled
m understanding, blurred in perception, and held fast in
the penal bondage of our sins; approving the good before
us only faintly, desiring it coldly, endeavoring after it, if
at all, impotently, even as a bird might try to rise whoso
wings are cut.

Such is the profound agreement of Christ and the Holy
S])irit. One is naught without the other. Given then the
fiict of the incarnation, and of Christ's human appearing.
by whom was this remarkable counterpart or complement
to his appearing invented? Who, in other words, con
trived the day of pentecost? Was it a man? was it sevT-
al men of only common faith? or was it done by the loc-so
gossip of a wondering and credulous age? The history
says thatChrist himself gave the Spirit, by direct proiaise;
declaring that it was expedient now for him to retire froni
before the eyes, that tlic Sjnrit might come, and taking hi?

3b8 so OTHEll SUPERNATUKAL RELIGION

exemplar into men's bosoms, in every place, all ove: the
world, shew it to them there. Who but Christ and
he, the eternal Son of God, ever generated this concep-
tion?

7. The doctrine of spiritual regeneration, propo"ando.l
in the gospel, is another point, where it meets, at once,
our human state and the fact of a supernatural economy
This truth of regeneration supposes a loss out of human
nature, of the seed-principle of a good and holy life;
such that the subject has really no good in his character,
and never can by himself generate, or set himself in, the
principle of good. He can do many good things, such aa
men call good, according to the standard of ethics or of
human custom (which is the world's law of virtue,) and
may fitly enough be praised, for the comely parts thai
make up the figure of his life. But these comelinesses are
a virtue of items, mere will-works that proceed from no
seed-principle of good. Sometimes even the worldly-
minded teachers of Christianity take up with this kind
of virtue, and form their estimates of character, by in-
specting the atoms collected in the life. Some things
done, they say, are good, and some are bad — the good
things ought to be increased, and the bad reduced. They
see, of course, no radical defect back of the particulars
noted, and therefore no need of a radical change in the
life. It is the things done that make the character, and
-•! the principle, or want of it, that gives character to the
•liii.gs. Their gospel is even more shallow than a pagan's
ihilosophj. According to Seneca, who penetrates the
real ground-work of human character — '' all sins are in
all men, but do not appear In each man. He that hatb
^nc sin, hath all. We say that all men are mtenipf rata

INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE. 88S

avaricious, luxurious, malign — not that these sins appear
in all, but because they may be yea, are, in all, though
latent."* Nothing is more rational ; for, if nothing ia
•lone from any right principle, then nothing done is ri^ht^
lud iJiere is no seed of right-doing in us. The doings
ini^y bo kept up by our will, without an}^ seed-principle,
so attentively and punctiliously as even to become tastes;
but tastes are not inspirations, and the only true virtue
of man is that which he does from God, in the inspiration
of a divine liberty. Separated from God, he is a monster,
and not a proper man, however plausible the show he
makes. And this is the effect of sin. It alienates the
subject from the life of God. Under sin, he is no more
conscious of God, as in his normal state he was and must
be. Pie is therefore uncentralized by it, dead at the core.
The seed-principle of eternal life and beauty and order is
gone. He centers in himself, gravitates downward into,
collapses in, himself; and he could as easily leap out of
the maelstrom, as set himself in the true liberty and seed-
principle of holiness.

It is therefore declared, as the necessary condition ol
our salvation, that we mtist be born again, born not ol
blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man,
but of God. And this great change is the beginning and
&])ring of all true heavenl}^ virtue, because it is the re\ ela-
tion of God in the soul. Now the soul is conscious of God
Igain. Now it moves in the line of the divine movement,
which is moving in the Spirit; which, again, is the inspi-
ration of liberty. All this, of course, not without consent
in the subject, probably not without s^me deep and vio-
lent struggles on his part, to make way for the divine

*Ep., 50.

890 NO OTHER SUPEKJ^ A.TCRAL RELIGION

revelation. He must offer up himself to the divine will.
and to all the approaches of the divine love ; and thij
includes much • a removal of all obstructions, a renuncia-
tion Df self, a free commitment of all things to ChrisL,
and a pliant, unequivocal, and humble faith in him. But
none of these are, by themselves, regeneration. That is
of God, and is, in fact, the soul's assumption, or resump-
tion, by God. To say that it is a change of the soul's
love, is only another version of the same truth ; for the
love is changed b}^ the entering in of God and his love,
into the soul's faith. For love is of God, and every one
that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. Old things
are passed away, and all things are become new; because
God is revealed within, changing, of course, the principle
of all action, and the meaning of all experience. That
this new revelation is supernatural, coinciding, in every
thing said of it, with the grand central ftict of the incarna-
tion, need not be shown. Enough that it is the initiation
of a sinner and alien into the kingdom of God — except a
man be born again, he can not see the kingdom of God.

8. The christian doctrine of Providence coincides, also,
with the fact of a supernatural work in the redemption of
mankind. It assumes, without misgiving, the bold con-
ception of a supernatura] Providence, under which the
world itself is ruled in the interest of Christianity ; a con-
ception that will be verified in the next or following chaj •
<,er, and therefore need not be discussed here. Nothing
more is necessary to our present purpose, than just to caL'
attention tc the remarkable fact that this myth, this mar
vel cf superstition, this gossip of miracle, that we call
Christianity, dares to claim the government of the world
(as in real consistency it should,) in its interest, and, whai

INTELLECTUALLY COMFLETE. 891

is more, history, as we shall see, audits the claWi, anc
makes it good.
9. We name, as another point of the chrisiian doctiine,

strangely and surprisingly coincident with the supernatu-
ra] idea of the plan, introduced by the incarnate appea;
ing of Christ, the Trinity of God. I say, strangely ami
surprisingly coincident, because the last thing that woulc
occur to any human being, in the exercise of his naturaj
wisdom, would be the introduction of a new, or modified
conception of God, to accommodate the new fact of a
gospel. And yet, exactly this is what we discover in the
matter of that gospel ; and, what is more, having the fact
before us, we can easily enough distinguish a practical
reason for it, in the requisite instrumental use, or handling
of that gospel ; or, what is no wise different, in the prac-
tical adjustment of our relations to God, under the two-
fold conditions of nature and grace, in which he is now
set before us.

We can not here go into the learning of this great
question. Suffice it to say, that the Old Testament scrip-
tures contain the rudiments of a trinity, and that the Pla-
tonic, Alexandrian, and Christian trinities are either sug-
gested by, or developed from these rudiments. That the
Old Testament scriptures are prior in date, even by hund-
reds of years, to the writings of Plato, is not to be denied.
The east was full of traditions from these scriptures, and
he himself, a traveler in those parts, professed that he de-
lived many things from the traditions of the " Barbarians."
It can not therefore be charged that the Christian trinity,
as given by Christ, in the baptismal form'ila, was origin-
ally a prcduct of natural reason, and was transferred
from Plato's thcosophy. No trinity was ever suggested

392 NO OTHER SUPERNATURAL RELIGION

by mere thought, or generated by mere natural reason
Reason takes the road of unity^ and the conception of £
tnad comes out, if at all, from the process of a supernat-
ural revelation. Thus came the Christian trinity, ac a
fact histoiically developed; first in the Almighty Crea jOI
end Father, the Jehovah -angel or "Word of the Lord, and
tne Holy Spirit, of the Oil Testament; then in the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the New. It is a concep
tion generated by supernatural transactions, and is needed
to accommodate the uses of a supernatural salvation.

Thus, if there were but one economy, or ministration
of God, known to us, viz., that of nature, we should
never need, and, in fact, should never have, any concep*
tion of the divine being, save that which is named by the
terms God, the Almighty, the Creator, and others, con-
formed to the notion of the divine unity. But, having
fallen into a state of retributive disorder, from which we
can be delivered only by a supernatural salvation, we are
obliged to adjust ourselves toward God as filling two
economies, and that requires a new machinery of thought.
If now we have only the single term God, we must speak
of God as dealing with God, or of the grace-force of God, as
delivering from the nature-force of God. If the work
includes an incarnation, as we suppose it must, then it
must be God sending God into the world; and, if it
includes a renovating, new- revealing ageucy within, then
we can onl}^ go to God to give us God, and ask of God to
roll back the retributive causations of God, that are fast-
ening their penal bondage on us. All which, we maj
Bee, is a method too clumsy and confused to serve, at all
the practical uses of the salvation provided. Thei b is, ii
«hori, no intellectual macliiner}-, in a 3lose theoretic mc v

INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE. 898

Olbeism, for any sucii thing as a work of grace, or super
natural redemption. In the Christian trinity, this want ii
supplied. First, we have the Father, setting God before
us as the author and ground of all natural things and
causes. Then we have the Son and the Spirit, which
represent what God may do, acting on the lines of cause?
in nature ; one as coming into nature from without, to bo
incarnate in it, the other as working internally in the
power of the Son, to dispense to the soul what he ad-
dressed outwardly to human thought, and configure the soul
to him, as an exemplar embraced by its faith. Then,
putting our trust in the Son, as coming down from God,
offering himself before God, going up to Him, interceding
before Him, reigning with Him, by Him accepted, honored,
glorified; invoking also God and Christ to send down
the Spirit, and let him be the power of a new indwelling
life, breathing health into our diseases, and rolling back th^
penal currents of justice to free us of our sin, we are able U'
act ourselves before the new salvation, so a*, to receive the
full force of it. Having these instruments of thought and
feeling and faith toward God, and suff^iring no foolish
quibbles of speculative logic to plague us, asking never
how many Gods there are? nor how it is possible for one
to send another, act before another, reconcile us to an-
other? but, assured that God is one eternally, however
multiform our conceptions of his working, how lively
and full and blessed is the converse we get, through these
living personations, so pliant to our use as finite men, so
gloriously accommodated to the twofold economy of cui
salvation as sinners I L? this i.ow a conception gotten up
by man, upon his natural ]evel ? Is there any phiiosopliic
theosophic, or mythologic mark upon it?

S94 so OTHER SUPERNATUj^AL RELIGION

We have thus brought into review as man^ as nini
of the principal facts and prominent articles of (j\u's
L:anity, and find them crystallizing into a perfectly har-
monious and orderly system, round the one central fact
of i\ supernatural religion, initiated in the incarnate ap
pearing of Christ. His work is called a gospel on thie
account, precisely as it should be, and yet by no human
suggestion would be. It is also called a salvation, differ-
ing from all theosophies and mythologies, in the fact that
it is a supernatural restorative force, and, in that view, the
only real salvation ever known. It brings the salvation
also to faith and hangs it on faith, as by the conditions of
the case it must, and as no other known scheme of virtue
does. It justifies also by faith, communicating, in tliis
manner, the righteousness of God and preparing acquittal
in a way that keeps the law in full force, as the nature-
side and necessary element of human training. A king-
dom of God, or of heaven, is erected by it on earth ; in
which we see, by the name itself, that the reigning force
of the new kingdom is not of nature, but from without
and above the world. The Holv Spirit is inaugurated as
a conception of the divine working, different from that
which is included in the laws of nature, and delivering
from the retributive action of those laws. This deliver-
ance, connected with a renovated principle of life in the soul,
i!: calls regeneration, conceiving, in a way peculiar to itself,
;'hat, without the change thus denominated, as a second
})irt h, or newly regenerated life, there is and can I e no seed*
principle of heavenly virtue. Here too is propo.'ed, fcr tlie
first time in the world, a properly supernatural P: evidence
that is, a Providence which governs the world, in the in
merest of salvation, or roironorntf 1 holiness. A rccrdantlv

INTELLECTUALLY COMPLtiTE. 89«.

also with such a conception of God, as presiding over 3
double aiministration of law and grace, nature uxd the
supernatural, the divine anity is reproduced as trinity; iii
which, whatever may be thought of other trinities, Cbria-
tiaiiity holds, at least, the honorable distinction of being
the only doctrine that conceives a trinity, in and through,
and practically operative with, a double economy ol
ili\'ine government.

Is there not something remarkable in this general cou-
Bent of the christian names, facts, ideas, and doctrines?
and the more remarkable that it appears in matters where
we should least look for it, if left to ourselves and the
natural processes of our thoughts? And still the list
might be indefinitely extended. Thus preaching is to be
the means of propagation for this gospel, and what but a
supernatural gift to the world could ever be heralded or
preached? Prophesying in the Spirit is a supernatural ut-
terance. The ministry are conceived to be set apart by
the' Holy Spirit, which is true of no other class of teachers,
on the footing of reason, or of natural science. Spiritual
gifts belong to a plan transcending nature. The sacraments
are consecrated vehicles of grace and power. Visions
and revelations are from above. The resurrection of the
dead is not of nature. The history of the original propa-
gation of Christianity, taken as a whole, is in fact a
miraculous process, and nothing less. In short the whole
fabric of the christian institution — ^thought, name, office,
tact, an i doctrine— centers, we discover, in the one grand
idea of a supernatural movement on the world. Inhere is
nothing eccentric, that will not fall into the general ainc
of the plan, and chime with it ; no fantastic matter tliat is
unreducible, as we sliould expect, if human wisdom only

THIS CO.MlM.KTKf) SCHEME

had undertake 11 the devising and tt.B adjustnien - of tl'*;
parts. As Napoleon not.jed, with an impression of 'von-
der, "one thing follows another like the ranks of a celes-
tial army." lie knew what an army was, and the ordet
of a well-set discipline, but he finds a higher, eveL
celestial order, whieh his phalanx is a thing too loose tu
represent, in the gloriously compacted truths of a heaven
born, supernatural faith.

Even Mr. Hennel admits a correspondent impression of
the compact unity, and the admirable working order of
the christian plan ; admitting, strangely enough, that it ex-
cels all other fruits of human learning and philosophy in
this respect, and yet conceiving that, with all its high pre-
tensions of a supernatural origin, and the undeniably
supernatural guise in which it stands, it is itself a strictly
human product! He says, "Christianity has presented
to the world a system of moral excellence. It haa
led forth the principles of humanity and benevolence
from the recesses of the schools and groves, and com-
pelled them to take an active part in the affairs of life.
It has consolidated the moral and religious sentiments intc
a more definite, influential form than had before existed,
and thereby constituted an engine that has worked power-
fully toward humanizing and civilizing the world.''"
Moral and religious sentiments ! as if it were only a coin'
pa".t of thsse and such like human qualities, when it 12
Talking all the w^hile of the incarnation, of faith, of justi-
ilcatTon, of the better covenant, of regeneration, of the resur
rection of the dead, and commanding its apctotles to preach
the trinity of God Are these staple matte s of Christianity
^nv "moral and relionous sentiments? ' "Consolidated'

* Inquiry, p. 48.

CAN NOT BE OF M\N. 397

also they aru "into a more definite and inflaential form T
Ts it in such lofty and transcendent spiritualities as these
which are named, that our mere human notions are ,vcnt
to get consoHdated? And why could not the philoso-
phci-s, such men as Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and
Seneca, consolidate such human notions as well, or to as
good effect, as the rude fishermen of Galilee ? And yet
what is there of solidity, in giving to these mere natural
things or sentiments, a form so fantastical and flighty,
and calling them by names to which no human thought
can reach? Doubtless Christianity is "more influen-
tial," but it is so, because it is so truly unsolid, so spir-
itual, and so visibly superior to the world, and to all those
dull imbecilities sometimes called religious sentiments.
God is in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself — that
is influential, that is power !

And now the question is, whence comes this super-
natural, world-transcending institute, erected among us,
in so many tokens of a perfect intelligence? Whence
this more than logical, this organic unity in things so re-
mote, and to mere human thought un discoverable? for if
it be possible that human thought should stumble on a
fiction so magnificent, it certainly could not frame it into
crder, and offer it as a truth of salvation.

In adjusting our answer to this question, it is important,
first of all, to observe that the christian truth has obviously
nothing of the form of a scheme thought out by the
natural understanding. It is not metaphysical or deduct-
ive. It proposes itself to faith, under laws of exprea-
sion, and is plainly seen to be no product of mental analj'
gis, or constructive logic. It has the form not of some
thing t':enerated hy., but of something offered to, the wo? Id

34

898 THIS COMPLETED SCHEME

It coines down into history, as it represents, from a joinl
above liistor J ; standing out in symbols of fact and ex
pression, that are to report and verif}^ themselves. It ii?
in form, a something to be believed, not a something rea-
son jd — incarnation, love, miracle, a calling of God aiit/
men, a communication of the divine nature. Admitiiiig,
as we safely enough may, for the present, that criticism
discovers tokens of human activity and frailty in the
record, still the operative system stands forth in its own
simple confidence, in its own heavenly form, as a gospel
to tho world, and as such it reveals the solid unity, tho
glorious depth of harmony and self-understanding, we
have discovered in its doctrine. It speaks as if it never
had X thought of system, and yet reveals a reach of system
wid^;r than all human philosophy.

Put this will be denied, and still it will be maintained
that this unconscious, inartificial fabric is a work of art.
That, if we know any thing of what is in man, is impos-
sible. If the scheme were down upon the footing of na-
ture, as on the face it declares it is not, then it might not
be difficult to admit that human skill, or even the silent
process of human history, as in the case of the English
common law, should shape it into a system of apparent
order and scientific unity. But being a scheme supernat-
ural, not even the first facts or premises were included
in our knowledge, as derived from our natural expe-
rience, and required therefore to be invented by us ; and to
§uj)pose that our human faculties, breaking over the coiv
fines in this manner of all knowledge, could there build
ap, in the cloud-land of unknown, merely imagined fact, %
sober, thorc iglily coherent scheme of truth and renova
ting life, adjusting the infinite to the finite, law to meny;

CAN :N0'1' IK OF MAN. 39t

discord and death to liberty and salvation, and setting alj
its grand array of facts, names, doctrines, and powers in a
frame of solid and compact unity — such a supposition \f.
too extravagant to be rationally entertamed. It is sup-
posing that we are able to build, in the realm of fiction it
%elf, a vaster and more solid economy of intellectual and
practical truth, than has ever yet been built on the basis
of experience.

Three suppositions may be raised in regard to the mat-
ter in question ; viz., that the work is all of man ; that i1
is partly of man ; and that it is all of God. The first of
these we have discussed already; for, if such a work
could not be invented, much less could it be accomplished
by the hap-hazard process of myth and wild "tradition.
The second, which supposes, some central point of a su-
pernatural plan being given — the fact, for example, of the
incarnation — that this fact was wrought up by the human
understanding, through a course of active development,
into the complete scheme and perfect unity we have de-
scribed, need not be particularly discussed, because it
allows the fact of a supernatural root and beginning,
which is the principal matter in question.

The third supposition is the only one that is rationally
tenable; viz., that this grand out-birth of a new divine
economy, called the gospel, is, in fact, supernatural, and
otands in the compact order of a complete intellectual
unity, because it was given by a comprehending mind
equal to the reach of the plan. Not that every thing
written, or advanced in the canonical books of the New
Testament, is historic fact, or infallible truth — o\ir preseni
supposition does not reach so far as that, but leaves a
space to be filled up by other kinds of argu-nent — 'V

400 THIS COMPLKTED SCHEMJC

3iinply supposes that all such prominent ileas, tokon^
facts, and doctrines as \vc have named — that is, cverj
thing whicli goes to shape the new economy, as being
iTitegral to it — is brought into ki.owlcdge and published
to the world supernaturally. And the proof is that al-
ready given; viz., that the consent of so many parts and
token J in one central fact and design, can not otherwise
be accounted for, and is otherwise trul}^ impossible
The human understanding may frame a theory out of
data, or phenomena, supplied by experience; it may
scheme out a system or hypothesis, regarding matters
known, that is coherent, and stands in the complete unity
of reason ; but it is a very different thing to make up a
supernatural kosmos of fact, doctrine, idea, relatively
consistent, and converging, all, on the common point of a
spiritual renovation of souls. That, we may affirm with
entire confidence, is not within the compass of any human
power.

Of this, too, we have abundant evidence, besides that
which rests in any mere judgment of human capacity.
The whole religious and mythologic history of the world
is such evidence. In the first place, every pagan religion,
every mythology, is in form a supernatural machinery ; a
fact which Mr. Parker and others who endeavor to reduce
Christianity to a common footing with such mythologies,
and so to a mere product of nature, have strangely over-
'ooked. In the next place, what one of these pagan tu-
pernaturalisms has ever proposed the problem of salva-
tion, or the deliverance of man from sin and the restora-
tion of his divine consciousness? — the only real problem.,
manifestly, that requires to be supernaturally solved
A/]^ain, what one of these mythologies propose' to ereci

CA.N NOT BE OF MAN. 401

the kingdom of God among men, or has any consistent
and concentrated action bearing on that one result, oi
indeed on any other ? "What one of them, we may ask,
e yen proposes a pure morality ? So plainly impossible is
it for man, or human history, tD develop any intelligent
and rationally harmonious scheme of supernaturalism.

And yet we have more convincing proofs even thaji
these See what figure is made by Mormonism, Moham
medanism, and the Eomish Church, all of which begin
with supernatural conceptions, or data, furnished b}
Christianity. If we will ascertain what it is in man to do,
in the way of composing supernatural verities, see whal
additions or amendments these have furnished. The ne\\
faith of Mormon pretends to be christian still, only it is a
more complete and finished form of the christian truth.
But the ungodly and profane mummeries it has added, in
the new revelations of the book, the new priesthood, and
the new sainthood, all of which are boasted and accepted
as improvements, it is verj plain are only mockeries of
all the practical aims of the gospel, and of the virtues it
came to restore. Mohammedanism, borrowing from the
Christian scriptures, proposes for its aim, to perfect in men
a heavenly virtue. But the doctrine of fatalism it estab-
lishes, forbids, at the outset, every struggle after such
heavenly virtue, and the sensual paradise it promises,
generates, as far as it goes, a hf bit opposite to every thing
m the nature of that virtue.

But these, it will be said, are not, in any proper sensa
developments of the Christian supernaturalism, at whici:
tbey begin ; but tricks of knavery, or ravings of fanati-
cism. Pass then to the Romish Church, and see what the
venerable, slew moving wisdom of ages can do. ?\ero

34*

402 THIS COMFM.ETEI) SCHEME

we meet the councils, age iifter age, in their high delib
erations. All the lean ing of the world, for many hutid
reds of years, is here concentrated. Heretical ad (itioni
are here carefully scented, and pror^ptly burnt out by th*^
(ires of purification. All deteiminations pass by debal'*.
.ind sometimes by the debates of ages. The history is ti
process slow and laborious, like that which generate^ the
common or the civil law ; and the result is even called ;i
development of Christianity. What then do we find?
Is the glorious order and regenerative unity of the gosptM,
as a power of salvation, preserved and augmented, or is
it overlaid and stifled, by a mass of antichristian inven-
tions and corrupt traditions, that have really no agree-
ment with it? And yet they are all introduced to give
it greater effect. The exorcisms were to expel devils; but
the solemn trifling of the ceremony only turned the disci
pie away from faith, to look after powers of magic. The
amulets were to be pledges, on the person, of God's keep-
ing and defense, against devils and all disasters ; but these
were accepted as charms als(3 of magic. The sacrament
itself of Christ's body and blood, ordained to be the ve-
hicle and sign of a co-operative grace to the recipient,
must needs be farther intensified in its power, and, to thia
end, was transmuted into the very substance of Christ, by
a perpetual miracle ; which miracle, again, was taken as
another feat of priestly magic, and watched as a pious
'.rcantation by the receiver. Celibacy and monastic re-
tir(;ment were to beget a higher and more superlative
nrtue; turning out, iistead, to be only the scandal and
aisgust of the world. Pictures were added, to assist the
^lind in conceiving things high and remote; operaiingj
insteao, as a stricture udou it, and cliaining it dcwn to a

CAJS NOT BE OF MAN. 40t

Dew antichristian idolatry. Ascetic practices were added
to chasten the soul and refine its spiritual fires; on\y
kindling, instead, the fires of a new fanaticism. The wav
to Christ would be more easy, it was conceived, if his
mother could be invoked to present the cause of the sup
•^)liant ; and lo ! Christianity becomes no more a gospel of
•ife, but a fantastic scheme of Mariolatry. A vicar of
Christ was wanted, many thought, to represent him on
ei.rth, and be a visible mark for their faith ; but the vicar
displaced the principal, becoming a mark, instead, of su-
perstitious homage, and a receiver of deific honors.

And thus we have a proof irresistible of what man
can do, in the way of thinking out, or dressing up, a
scheme of supernatural truth. Four or five common
persons, without learning or culture, assisted by one
other distinguished by higher advantages, have pre-
sented, we have seen, such a scheme. All the parts they
have set in harmony with each other, and made them
crystallize into the perfect unity of the plan. But herfj
we find all the great mmds of the church, the learned, the
wise, the prudent, and even the good, slowly elaborating
their additions, or, as some will say, their developments,
of the doctrine handed down to them, and producing just
that which has no agreement whatever with its genuine
import and the real movement it proposes — joining, aa
Kne classic poet says, a " horse's neck to a man's head,''
^nd expanding the simple, life-giving truth, into such the-
atiical pomps and scholastic wisdoms, that a cap and bella
would scarcely be a less appropriate honor.

What, then, hav^e we to do, after such a reference aa
this, but to gather up all these prominent facts, idejia
names, and doctrines, which we have seen cplesce so per

404 THE SCHEME NOT OF MAN.

fectly in the central fact of a supernatural grac-e foi
the world, composing, when taken together, the total
frame-work and complete virtuality of the gospel, and
say that, in this secret and every where present water-
mark, we read the signature of God? None but lie
C5oiild have organized this heavenly kosmos that we call
the gospel.

CHAPTER XIII.

tHB WORLD IS 30YERNED SUPERNATURALLI IM 131
INTEREST OF CHRISTIANITY.

Chkistianity, as planted by Christ, is a di\ine irj=tituU
m the world, the particular design of which is to act re-
medially, as against the mischiefs introduced by sin, and
propagated by the retributive causes of nature. The Holy
Spirit also is, by the supposition, a divine force or deific
agency inaugurated in the world, to carry on, through all
the coming ages, this same new-creating work. Now, as
there is but one divine being or God, who is entered thus
into so great a work, with tokens of feeling so impressive-
ly indicated, it follows by a very short inference, if in-
deed by any inference at all, that the one God of thi
world, governing it always accordantly with Himself, must
govern it in the interest of Christianity. Christianity,
plainly, is either nothing to Him, or else it is more than
any secondary thing; the hinge of his counsel, the mis-
sion of his love, the grand, all-inclusive, and eternal aim
of his purposes. And if this be true, he will not govern
the world in a way that forgets or overlooks Christianity,
but will govern it rather for Christianity's sake; which,
again, is the same as to say that he will govern it by a su-
pernatural regimen, even as Christianity itself is a super-
natural institution.

Exactly *his, too, is the assumption of Christ b imseli.
He opeiily ciaims the government of the world, as being
in Lis interest, or at the disposal of his cause and king-
dom; saying — *'all power is given unto me in heaven and

406 THE TWO KIN1»S

in earth." He is also declared by his apostle to have *'afi»
ceiided on high, leading captivity captive," that he migh<
be a dispenser of divine gifts in this manner; "for God
hath set him at his own right hand, in the heavenly places,
far [>bove all principality and power, and hath put all
things under his feet, that he might be head over all things
to the Church." He also publishes, himself, a doctrine of
prayer that supposes the same thing; or that, if any one
will ask in his name, or as abiding in him and doing his
will, he shall have his petition — guidance, light, deliver-
ance, healing of the sick, support against enemies,
power to work, patience to suffer — every thing that sup-
poses the government to be enlisted, as a supernatural
Providence, in the furtherance of his christian welfare.

Indeed we shall not sufficiently understand the christian
ideas of Providence, till we conceive it to be a twofold
scheme of order and divine dispensation. Nature, in the
first place, is a kind of Providence, being so adjusted as to
meet all the future uses it can, as nature, meet. But it
requires little insight, to perceive that it can not meet those
uses that suppose a need of deliverance from nature
Manifestly nature can not rescue from the disorders, pro-
duced by a retributive action of her own causes. And if
all Gt/l's action were included in the operations of nature,
nothing plamly could ever be done for man, as regards the
wants of his sin, the cries of his repentance, or the r^trug-
,^les of his faith. Nature can throw him, and trainple
hi'n, by her retributive causes, but she has no help to give
him in rising, or rolling back her causes.

On this subject of Providence, there is much of unreg-
ulated thought and crude speculation. Thus it is a greatly
iobated question, whether there is a special, or only a ger

OF PROVIDENCE. 40'«

eral Providence? For it is conceived, by a ccrirln class
tli?t God lias a special meaning or design, in some fevj
things of their experience, and not in others. This plain
iv is a faith of credulity, and one that accommodates Gofi
to tlic measures of human ignorance. Another class •wb.
assume to be more philosophic, holding a general, and Jo-
llying a special Providence, onty substitute an absurdly
for a superstition ; for what is a general Providence, that
comprehends no special Providence, but a generality made
up of no particulars, that is, made out of nothing? The
only intelligent conception is, that every event is special,
one as truly as another; for nothing comes to pass in God's
world without some particular meaning or design. And
so the general Providence is perfect, because the special is
complete.

vVnd yet even this is no sufficient conception of Provi
dence. There is yet, after all, a real truth associated witli
the specialty view just stated, and covered, in part, by the
scanty garb in which it is dressed; A-iz., that God is more
warmly reciprocal with us and the struggles of our faith, in
some things than in others — more reciprocal, that is, and
closer to our want, and warmer to our feeling, in his su-
pernatural Providence, than he is in his natural.

The truth will be set in a more definite light, if we con
oeive, first of all, that nature is a kind of constant (juau
l,ity and fixed term between us and God. It needed to \.t
so, for many reasons. We could not even keep our f/,*et if
the ground had no stable quality. We could do nothing
in the way of ind istry, attain to no exercise of pov/er;
there would be no law, no science, nothing to meet our in-
telligence; we could not act responsibly toward each othet
without some constant, calculable, or known medium

408 PROVIDENCE NATURAL

between us. We could apprehend no retributive force la
Qature, waiting by the laws of obligation, to be their sanc-
tion. Even God himself would be a vague and desultorj
phantom, if he were not represer.ted to us by the fixed
laws and the orderly enduring processes of nature. Wili-
jut these, even the light and shade of his supernatural
Qianifestation would be insignificant — just as the living
play of a countenance would signify nothing, if it had no
lines of repose at which the play begins, and into which it
returns.

But, while such is nature, it is yet, as we have seen, sub-
mitted, by its YCTj laws, both to our supernatural action,
And to that of God. As we act our liberty in it and upon
it, never suspending or defrauding, even for a moment,
any one of its laws, so it would be singular, if He could
not do the same, and that upon a scale correspondent with
the magnificence of his attributes. So, in millions of
ways, at every minute, the courses of things may be
touched by his will, and turned about, as the holy Poet
says of the cloud, "to do whatsoever he conimandeth
upon the fiice of the earth." By means of the constant
element between us and God — limbered, though constant,
to our common action — we are set in terms of reciprocity
as living persons or powers, and are found acting, as to-
ward each other, in a perpetual dialogue of parts. Takofi
ihus, in the whole comprehension of its import, our world
is nothing but a vast, special, supernatural, reciprociO.
Providence, in which our God is reigning as an ever-pres-
ent, ever-mindful counselor and guide and friend, a Re-
deemer of our sin, a hearer of our prayers. It is not that
te, long time ago, put causes at work to meet our wants,
and answer our prayers, but that he worketh hitherto

AND SUPERNATURAL 409

He is no dead majesty, but a living; and, if we want a
special Providence, he is special enough to give us his r&
(cognition. He will even teach us how to pray, correcting
our petitions to make them meet his counsel, and giving
5is desires, leveled to the exact aim of his purposes; even
*s the eagle teaches her young how to set their wings, an J
rest them on the air in flight. Ivlot that he means, when
speaking of things "agreeable to his will," that we are
merely to come, guessing at things already fixed, and try-
ing to suit our petition to the motion of the wheel as it
rolls, sliding it carefully in, at the right place, but that he
will have us pray as in power; for it is agreeable to his
will that we have power with God, and prevail — power to
come and lay our hand on his, as his is laid on the world's
causes, and, by the suit of our want, emboldened by the
acquaintanceship of our faith, to move that hand. And
to just this end, as 'Christ himself teaches, all things in
heaven and earth are submitted pliantly to him, so that,
without shock or miracle, he can, if he will, turn them to
his friendly and gracious purposes. The world and it«
affairs are so to become coefficients only of his gospel.

Such is the conception Christianity holds of Providence,
or the providential government of the world — it is supe?'-
natural, it is christly, and is to be relied upon ever, as a
power operating for Christianity in the earth. Is the con-
ception true, is it borne out by sufficient proofs? This, i
shnll now undertake to show.

Let us note, in passing, however, as a fact introductory^
that just such a government, as respects the mode, would
be wanted and really required, apart from any fall of sm;
»>r work of deliT;erance from it. For, if there be only na.
ture, with her constant quantities and endlessly propa^a-

ftlO APART FROM SIN, WK WANT

ted causes, if there be no divine supernatural agency ilk
the world, then there is no conceivable footing of society,
or social relationship with God left us. Nature, in such &
acheme, is only a machine, and that machine is all that we
haTC contact with. And if we should maintain our up-
rightness, holding on in ways of unfaltering obedience,
we shall none the less want to know God, and have our
society with him. But we get no terms of society in a
machine, we can not seek unto a wall. Acting supernai*
urally ourselves, we need also to be supernaturally met
and acted on. Without this, we have no terms of reci-
procity with God more than with a volcano, or a tide of
the sea. Society between us there is none. Society is rig-
idly definable, as being a supernatural commerce between
parties acting supernaturally. As between us and God, it
is a doing and receiving; if we do not sin, a righteousness
looking up to God in confidence, and a smile of approval
looking down to commend and bless. But if there be no
such thing as a divine supernatural agency, then is no such
footing of society conceivable. We exist as a solitary
party. Nature is our cage, and the nearest approach we get
lo a recognition, is to find that we are shut up in it. Is it so?
Do any of us think it is so? Did we really believe it, what
could our erdstence be but a conscious defeat and mock-
ery, a longing that 13 objectless, a breathing without air?

But our state is not a state of sinless obedience. We
have set the retributive causes of nature against us, and
Christianity undertakes to be our deliverer. And the
claim now is, that the government of the world is super
naturally ndministered, so as to work with it. We al
lege, then, in evidence —

L Th^* facts do not take place here, in human [?cci€tv

A GOVERNMENT NOT MECHANICAL. 411

government, and the church, as they should, if events!
•pvere left to the mere causalities of nature, and were no
way controllable by a supernatural ministration of divine
government, or by some genuinely Christian providence,
in the management of human affairs.

The fact of sin is palpable, and is shown by evidences
not to be questioned. What shock of disorder it must
have given, or has in fact given, to the mundane kosmos,
in all its parts, we have also shown. Taking now the
supposition that there is nothing else but nature, and
nature a scheme of universal cause and effect, that is, a
machine, propagating its activities by its own organic
laws, we ought to see no improvement, no advance, but a
regular running down rather from bad to worse, and a
final disappearance of all vestiges of order. Society and
human capacity ought to sink away, universally, toward
barbarism, and nature itself to grow weaker, more sterile,
deeper in deformity and confusion. So it ought to be —
speculatively viewed, or according to conditions of scien-
tific order and law, nothing else could be. And yet we
are just now taken with such confidence of progress in
our human history, as to imagine that progress is even a
prime law of natural development itself. In which we
are doubtless right as regards the general fact of progress,
(it is no fact as regards the savage races,) but are only the
more strangely blind to the higher fact, which that prog-
ress indicates ; viz., the regenerative action of supernatu-
ral forces, that, in spite of the downward tendency of
mere nature under sin, are creating always a new heavens
and earth, out of the ruins of the former beauty, and
making even the losing experiences of evil, conditions of
spiritual and social prjgress. Plainly no such progress

112 THINGS DO NOT TAKE FLACJC

evcT ought to be, or ever would be made, apart from tki
supernatural causes which are its spiing.

But there is a more deliberate way of testing this point,
Mnd a method of inquest that reaches farther. We turn
ourselves to the courses and the grand events of human
history, all that we include in the providential history oi
the world — the w^ars, diplomacies, emigrations, revolutions,
persecutions, discoveries, and scientific developments of
the world — and we are immediately met by the appearance
of some wonderful consent or understanding, between
Christianity and the providential courses of things.
Christianity is, in form, the supernatural kingdom and
working of God in the earth. It begins with a supernat
ural advent of divinity, and closes with a supernatural
exit of divinity; and the divine visitant, thus entered
into the world and going out from it, is himself a divine
miracle in his own person ; his works are miracles, and
his doctrine quite as truly, and the whole transaction,
taken as a movement on the world, or in it, that is not of
it, supposes in fact a new and superior kind of adminis-
tration, instituted by God Himself Accordingly, if it be
true that God is in such a work, having all the highest
and last ends of existence rested in it, he ought to govern
the world, as we have already said, for it, and so as to
forward this as the main interest included in it.

Now whatever may be true, as respects the positive and
iirect evidence of such a fact, this, at least, is a matter
ihat will strike any one as being truly remarkable, and,
moreover, as being quite unaccountable, except on the
ground of iti truth, that Christianity has never been ex-
terminated, cut still lives, and even holds a reigning
power at the head of all learning, art, commerce, society,

A 8 THEY OUGHT UNDER MERE NATURE. 41^3

polity, and political doiniuiou in the eailL. Pythagoras,
Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Aristotle, Seneca, all these great
founders and law-givers in tlie tvorld of philosophy are
gone ; the Academy and the Porch and all the schooii=
that were gathered b}^ the wisdom and the mighty and
beautiful thought of these first minds of the world, are
scattered ; but Jesus, the unlettered rustic, lives, and his
simple words, distinguished by no literary pretensions,
and recorded only in the simplest and most fragmentary
way, by the unlettered men that caught them, live also.
Studied in deepest reverence, and expounded by all the
richest, nicest learning of the world, and fed on by the
praying souls of the faithful in all walks and conditions
of life, chey are continually gathering new followers, and
composing a larger school, .o which no inclosures of
Academy or Porch, nothing but kingdoms and conti-
nents, can think to give their name. Why now is it,
that time and the world's government conspire so power-
fully with Jesus, and not with such a great and deeply
cultured soul as Plato? Why with Christianity, and not
with any proudest school of human opinion? All the
mere human teachers are much closer to nature certainly
than Jesus was, and if the world's government is wholly
natural, or in the interest of nature, it would seem to be
a very plain inference that what belongs to nature will be
most easily perpetuated. Why should a government, in
the interest of nature, concur to enthrone and crown what
is really supernatural ?

Besides, nature, as we have seen, is a power acting
retributively, in a process of self-chastisement and deteri-
oration naturally endless, and upon this falling flood, oi
into it, Christianity settles, to grapple with its mad causa-

35*

414 THINGS DO NOT TAKE PLACE

lions, iUid roll tliem back, and Imsli their elemental war,
by its words of peace; bow tben is it, tbat a new. super
natural dispensation, which arrays itself, at all poiuts,
against nature and its penal disorders, erects upon the
lusteady vvaters of so fickle and wild a sea, the only
institution that for the last eighteen hundred years baa
been able to challenge the honors of permanence? If
Ihere be no power but nature, no government superior to
the interest of nature, it certainly ought not to be so. On
the contrary, whatever pretends to be supernatural, ought
to die soonest, and show the greatest frailty — even as the
pouring waters of Niagara may well enough keep on o\e\
the rapids, down the fatal leap, and no cessation make,
even for millions of years ; whereas, the slender, light-
trimmed vessel, that sets her sails for the ascent of those
same rapids, ought not to stem them by one inch, and
least of all, to become an institution in them, stiffly and
steadily breasting the current for ages. And yet, if
there were some Higher Providence governing those falls
in the interest of the vessel, and not, as nature would, the
vessel in the interest of the falls, then plainly it would no
longer be absurd, for that same frail craft to become an
institution even, half way down the final leap itself.

If it be suggested that other religions, such, for exam-
ple, as Buddhism and Mohammedanism, are also super-
natural in their form, and have survived, one of them a
bird longe., and the other two-thirds as long, as Chri>*
danity, it is enough to reply, as regards the latter, that
all tho forces of reality it had were stolen from Christian-
ity, and that, in spite of these, it is liow just upon the
death; and, as regards the former, tnat while its machine-
rie« aie in form supernatural, it really undertakes to d*

AS THEY OUGHT UXDKR MERE NATURE. 415

nothing, as against the lapse ami disability of nature, bal
rather settles into the same disorder wHh it, and takes a
show of perpetuity, because it flows with the current and
wins a kind of permanence which is only another name
for the disability it creates. This is true of all the false
religions ; they belong to nature, and become constituent
elements in that hell of disability which nature makes out
of sin. Christianity rises, and raises its adherent races
with it. These others fall, and finally die, when their ad-
herent races die out of the world, assisting and hastening
that event, each in its own way. When, therefore, we con-
sider that Christianity goes directly into a conflict with
nature, calling nature death, and engaging to combat the
death by its regenerative power, and that still, after so
many centuries, it holds on victorious, what shall we
infer, with greater certainty, than that the governmerit of
the world is with it, in its interest, engaged to give it suc-
cess? Without or apart from this fact, it plainly could
not have held its ground, even for a single year. No!
Christianity stands, and will, because the God of Chris-
tianity is the God of the world. The kingdom is not
moved, and can net be, as it certainly should under a
mere providence ot natural causes, and that for the mani-
fest reason, that all power in heaven and in earth is given
into the hands of the king. And this brings us to a —

II. Argument which is more general and more positive,
viz. this; that, if we could make a perfectly intelligent
aui vey of the great world's history itself, and see how ita
principal events are turned, we should only discover the
same thing on a larger scale ; that the world itself is gov-
erned in the interest of Cliristianity, or the supernatural
grace and kingdom of Jesus Clirigt. We plainly can not

il6 I'KEPAKA 1 lOX OF

undertake any such review, for the reason that no L imar.
inr>ight is equal to the task ; but if we just glance aloi^g thf
inventory, so to speak, of the matters of this history, re-
calling chapters by their titles, and only having in mind
ihe relation of so many things to the central figure, Christ
find bis kingdom, we shall find that, in his gloriou'' per
•8071 we get the key by which their mystery and meaning
ai'C solved, their practical harmony expounded.

Thus we have the Jewish dispersion, before Christ, ii,
all the principal cities of the world, and the establishment
there of the synagogue worship; so that, when the apos
ties go abroad with their message, they have places in
wJiich to speak made ready, assemblies gathered, and what
is more than all, minds prepared by Jewish symbols and
associations, to receive the meaning of the new gospel, as
related to a first dispensation of law; without which, as
we have seen, its true place in God's economy is undis-
covered; without which too, it is bolted into the world,
separately from all historic connections, and from all the
evidences to be shown for it, by its fulfillment of ideas hid
in ancient rites and forms.

Next we observe that philosophy had just now culmi
Lated among the Greeks and Romans, and was giving ^vay
as a force that is spent. The Sophists had run it into the
ground. Faith in it was gone, and with that, all faith toe
in the gods of their religion. In this manner a deep and
painful nunger was prepared, and multitudes of the mosi
tlioughtful mmds were actually groping after the ven
food which Christ was to bring.

A.t this time too th3 Greek tongue, which, for ages U'
some, was to be the general vehicle of thought and com-
n(;rce V>etween the peoples of tlie world, had becorie, to i

THE WOKl-D V\)U CHRIST. 411

[feai extent, the vernacular ct the country, and a Gentik
Bpeech or medium was thus made ready, to receive and
convey the grace that is given to the Gentiles.

The Romans too are now masters of the country, ami
the Roman Empire, of which it is become an integral j)aTl
IS well nigh universal. When Christ therefore is crucificJ,
it is, as it should be, the public act of the world, decreed
by the Roman procurator in the name of the world.
There is also now a more open state of society between the
nations and races of mankind than was ever known before;
because they are all, in fact, one empire. The apostles
therefore may well enough go into all the world, as they
are bidden, because the pass of a Roman citizen is good in
all the world.

It has also been noted as a remarkable fact, that when
the Incarnate Word appears, it is a time of general peace;
and it is remarkable, not only as a matter of poetic fitness,
or esthetic propriety, but still more, in the deepei- and more
cogent sense of a practical necessity; for if Christ had
come, in the tumult of a time of war, his glorious, but
gentle, appeal of truth and love would have been utterly
drowned and lost. In the din of so great noise and pas-
sion, who could feel his want of a salvation? who be at-
tracted by the beauty of a character? who descend to a
cross to look for the Incarnate Word, and catch his mourn
ful testimony ?

Take now these familiar facts, and what are they all but
(i visible preparation of human history for Christ, showing
on how vast a scale the world is managed in the interest
of Christ and his supernatural advent ? Why else, t<X), do
they all concur in time, when the}^ might as well have
happened centuries apart? A^lience comes it that, when

i\S THE SUBSEQUENT HISTORY

liamau history has been brewing in so great a lerment, foi
no many ages, all these great preparations should just no^
be re-ady, calling for the king with their common voice and
(paying — ''the fullness of time is come"?

As it was with the events that preceded and prepared
;tie gospel, so it has been with those which followed ita
^.publication. They give us their true sense and guage of
power, in the fact that they inaugurate a new era. called
the -aristian era. And what are we to see in the simple
A7ino Domini of our dates and supersciiptions, but that,
for some reason, the great world-history has been bending
Itself to the lowly person of Jesus, from the hour of his
miraculous advent onward through so many centuries ot
time. The christian era! a new formation, speaking geo-
logically, in the domain of human life and society I
Christ, who is called by many the impossible, the incredi-
ble person, the gospeled carpenter raised into a mythic
divinity — to him it is that the great world has so long
bent itself, and dated its history from his yeaij*! So clearly
is it signified, that the government of the world is waiting
on Christianity, and working in its interest, and is thus, in
highest virtuality, a supernatural kingdom.

The events themselves of the new era indicate the same
thing. First, we hear Porphyry and other assailants of
the gospel complaining, strangely, that their gods are grown
dumb, refusing any more to heal, or give oracles. The
Jewish unbelievers are smitten next wdth a token of dis
couragement even more appalling, in the terrible aiege and
dreadful overthrow of their Holy city; in which chey are
shown, as convincingly as possible, that God has brought
their ancient specialty of theocratic rule and distinction
to a full end — -just that which even i^rophecy had foretold

IS MANAGED FOE CHRIST. 4\i}

B8 the inaugural of a univers?! religion. Aftei long and
bitter persecutions, Constantine is finally enrolled as a
:onv(;rt, and Christianity takes the ascendant above all rht
gods of the empire. The northern hordes begin to pciir
down the Alps, overrunning the distracted and worn-o'it
civilizations of the empire, and conquering, in fact, a relig-
ion, by which they are themselves to be tamed and so
cially regenerated. The false pro})het appears, propagating
his new dispensation by the fierce apostleship of arms, and
the world is to be shown what is the value of a triune
grace and gospel, by a grand collateral experiment, in
which both trinity and grace are wanting. The crusaders
follow in successive repetitions of defeat and disaster; as
if God's purpose were to stamp it on the christian sense
of the nations, that Christianity is forbidden by the eter-
nal proprieties of its mission, to strengthen itself by any
victories but those of peace. The discovery of the mar-
iner's compass leads off the discoveries of Yasco de Gama
and Columbus. Printing is invented, and the age of learn-
ing revived. This prepares the great Eeformation of relig-
ion ; for it, Luther ; and for Luther, God so musters forces,
as to give him alwaj's civil protection, keeping him in for-
tress, and compelling even the combined fury of kings and
kingdoms to pass by harmless. The Puritans are driven
out of England, to plant their gospel of liberty and ligbl
on the shores of a new world. Cromwell breaks down
the monarchy, to inaugurate, in England, religious tolera-
tion ; so to regenerate the laws and political libeilies of the
Knglish nation. The American Revolution, followed by
t\iQ federal constitution, fulfills the christian aim of I*ari-
tanism, and lays all claims and titles of legitimacy at the
feetof human liberty and progress. The wars of Nap^^leor

t2d THE SUBSEQUENT HISTORY

follow, by which the oppressive dynasties i>f Europe aw
broken up or shattered, to let in the light of a new age of
improvement. The revelations of christian science, mean
time, are uncovering and transforming the world, tenfold
ing its forces and uses, and all that constitutes its value, ]".
a single generation. The grand commercial apostleship r f
9team and telegraph, hurrying the intercourse and short-
ening the distances of the ends of the world, fixes the su-
periority of the christian nations, and prepares the speedy
sovereignty of the christian ideas.

What now do we distinguish in these facts, but an out-
Etanding, world-wide proof of the truth we just now stated,
that the government of the world is in the interest of
Christianity, and so far is itself a really continuous su-
pernatural administration? These events are a kind of
providential procession thiit we see, marching on to
accomplish the one given result, the universal and final
ascendancy of Jesus Christ. They m.arch, too, in the
beat of time, preserving their right order, and appearing,
each, just when it is wanted, not before or after. When
has it ever been seen that the government of the world wag
conspiring, in this large historic way, across the distance
of remote ages, with any merely natural man. his teach-
ing5!, or plans, or work"^ Whatever else may be true, this
Ft least is plain, that between Christianity as a fabric all
supernatural, concerned for nothing but to do a supernat-
•iral work, and the world as mere nature, suffering noti-
ng above nature to be, there ought to be, and indeed
never could be any such concurrence. Besides, the progress
indicated by these facts, is plainly impossible on the foot-
ing of mere nature; for nature, under sin, becomes, wt
have seen, a grand dcptruetive causality rather, such afl.

IS MANAGE J) FOR CHRIST. 42J

running bj its own mechanical laws, can of couise breec
ao result of self-restoration, but must run itself (iown*
ward, instead, into a worse and more fatal deterioration.

But it will be imagine i by some, that these are factk:
which we obtain by gleaning; that, meantime, there is ai^
i''i:ndance equally copious of adverse fticts, such as have
•tO concurrence with the gospel of Christ, but seem, in-
sKad, to offer only hindrance. What account, for exam-
ple, can we make, of the dark ages so called, and of the
confessedly base corruptions that have been allowed to
overrun Christianity, as a doctrine of faith and salvation ?

To this I answer, that, by this question, rightly viewed,
is opened one of the most fruitful and convincing chapters
of christian evidence; showing, as no other does, that
Christianity is upheld by nothing but the fact, that the
government of the world is with it. What could follow,
but a corruption of Christianity, at the beginning, from
our very belief in it ? for by our faith we bring ourselves
to it, as a contribution ; contributing, of course, out
misbegotten opinions, our confused passions, our habits,
prejudices, weaknesses of every kind, and so infusing
our poison, more or less hurtfully, into that which saves
us ; even as the patient will communicate his plague to
liis physician, or the bad wine give its smell to the jai
into which it is poured. The disciple will as certainly
uive his form to Christianity, when he preaches it, ot
'v^mmcnds it, as he will receive a regenerated life from it.
I he new gospel, accordingly — it could not be otherwise-
will gc intc a grand process of corruption, at first, such
an YiiW perchance be called improvement, and the prob-
lem of history will be, to settle and discriminate tbe truth,
by winnowing out the forms of human error an J corrup

422 THE DARK AGES

tion from it. Without some process of this kind, it could
Qever be seen what really belongs to the gospel, and what
to the unwisdom and unbelief of those in whom it dwelU
As the gDspel was revealed to sin, so there was a difl^^rcnt
kind ol necessity that the gospel should be revealed ex
rcrimcntally through sin. Man, the believer, must, iu
olher wor-ls, be allowed to try his hand upon it, and mako
it his gospel — make it wiser by his philosophy, stronge?
by his regal patronage, more conspicuous and stately by
the paraphernalia of forms and the robed officials he may
dress up for its due embodiment.

This is that mystery of iniquity that an apostle saw,
even in his time, beginning to work ; which he said must
work, till it should be taken out of the way. This is
that falling away first, that must come, the man of sin
that must be revealed. It is not the papacy exactly, but
that which made the papacy ; viz., faith, not able, without
a severe schooling, to mind the distinction between a sub-
jection to and a supervision of the gospel ; for, in becoming
responsible for it as a servant, what will the new believei'
more certainly do than take it in charge, patronize it,
mend it, that is, disfigure and hide it ? And there will
be no limit to this wrong. Unable to stay content with
the humble guise and the simple doctrine of the cross, he
will exalt himself unwittingly above what is called God
in the work, and will go on to be so grand a supervisoi
that finally, as Vis sins are added to the forwardness of hij
Bor^dce, we shall begin to see that he has contributed hia
whole self, and e- en taken God's seat, in his preposteroui
ambition ; becoming first the minister, then the vicar, and
tastof all, to give atrue name, the usurper of God's authority
Christianity is now in his charge, and is not improved b\

ACCOUNTED FOR. 423

his additions. Disappointment follows , this compels a
reconsideration, this a reformation, and so the true gospe]
is finally restored, with its reasons only certified, hy
the human abuse through which it has passed, and the
'ines of contrast drawn by so many miserable corruptloni-i.
Thus, at a very early period, we hear such men a??
Justin and Clement of Alexandria, proposing to give tlie
christian doctrine the dress of a philosophy, and find
them earnestly at work to accomplish a point of so great
consequence, imagining tliat so it will be more able to
command the respect of the learned, and will better sat-
isfy the want of the world. The work goes on, till, at
last, some centuries of dialectic industry may be said to
have completely finished all that could be done, when lo I
the beautiful, life-giving truths of Christ, offered by him
to faith, are converted into a dry, scholastic jingle, ad-
dressed to speculative reason, without value even to that,
and as easily rejected as embraced. Monasticism and
vows of celibacy are added in the same way, to give
Christianity, in certain special examples, the advantage of
a more superlative virtue than God had planned for, in
the practical relations of life ; finally to result in corrup-
tions too monstrous ever to have been gendered in those
relations. Constantine, having become a disciple, must
needs contribute not his person only, but all the power of
his throne, to the gospel, expecting in that manner ta
'Dake it partake of his imperial pre-eminence, and become
strong by a strength thus contributed. Uniting it, in thi?
manner, to the state, he not only stays the woes of perse-
■jutioD, but he lifts the church into a rank of political as
cendanc'' ; which is the same as to say that he dooms it,
for ag:es to con\e, to be the mother of all unhoiv arts and

1124 THE DARK AGES

oppressions, and the source of unspeakable public iiiiserio^
Gregory the Great can find no rest tc his prayers, till the
church is consolidated under the acknowledged primacy
of St. Peter; and when it is done^ he may fitly rest in his
p?*£yers, having made the church such an organ ( f aljuser,
< ppressions, and religious woes, as the world uad never
St en before, and never will see again. Images and pic-
tures are at length set up in the holy places, under the
fair pretense that they are needed to represent the spirit-
ual truths of religion to the eye, and so to accommodate
the apprehension of weak and ignorant minds. And
then, finally, behold ! as the fruit of so great an improve-
ment, whole nations of people worshiping the images,
and before them, transformed into nations of idolaters !

So the mystery works, and so the true gospel is becom-
ing distinguished from the false, the gospel of the Son of
Grod from man's gospel of additions, improvements, and
airy conceits. As Christ revealed his gospel by commu
nication, so here it is revealed again, as it needs must be,
by the light and shade of historical experiment ; settled,
or adjusted, or practically defined, by use and abuse.
These facts appear to be entirely adverse to Christianity.
They are so, and, in that, have their value. That tho
government of the world, therefore, has passed by on the
other side, and let Christianity fall in these fact?, we are
not to suppose. Being a gift to human liberty, it ccald
not otherwise be established. When '^iic ; xpenment is
finished, ihen the DiWne Word will burst up into a second
coming, through t\ e human incrustations^ consuming by
bis breath and destroying bj his brightness, the accurau-
latcd wisdoms and pomps of his mistaken followers. Il
all these losing agencies, thero is yet no losn. Tiie dark

ajcounted fcu. 425

ages we speak of arc jet in no I ackward motion. Stili
the marcli of Christian history is onward. If these bad
impediments were not alread}^ raised, why, then thzj
were yet to be raised. Just so far on its way to the state
of universal dominion, is the gospel and supernatural
kiTigdom of Jesus Christ.

Still there have been events, it must be admitted, iij
what is called Christian history, which are darker and
more difficult of solution. They appear, at first view, to
have no place mider a scheme of providential govern-
ment, such as we are now supposing. And yet, if we
could hold a longer reach of times, and seize the connec-
tioi s of history with a broader grasp of intelligence, they
mip:ht fall into place and become as transparent, under
such a scheme, as any other. As it is, we can only sug-
gest possibilities, and start guesses, and rest till our facul-
ties grow to the dimensions of the subjects. What does
it mean, for example, that the Jesuits and the C<^uncil of
Trent were able to stop, or set a limit to, the Reformation
of the church? We can not answer, and probably shall
never know. Jjik^ all evil, it may be referrible to the
necessary scope of human liberty. Or it may be that the
Reformation itself was a thing too incomplete and partial
to be allowed a sweep of universal triumph. It might
have been a great disaster to the religion of Christ, to bo
resolved into a mere Refoimationism, and left confronted
by no antagonistic force. Why, again, was it, or how,
chat the churches of Northern Africa were allowed to be
oveimn by barbarians, and finally, in the loss o( thei?
(aith, to give way utterly, and fall into extinction, before
a barbarous religion? Was it that occasional ex.imples
of loss and retrocession -nust be suffered, in order to the

i26 ADVERSE FACTS

snf(>r2ement of a just responsibility for the ^^ospel in iti
adherents and followers, otherwise ready to assume that,
having God for its author, it will take care of itself?
This we can not answer, but we can without difficulty
imagine it to be so. Why, again, were the French LLu
guenots, the religious hope and glory of their time, suf-
fer-''.d to be butchered or expelled the kingdom ? Was b
that so many great and noble men might endanger agair
the simplicity of the truth, and could only give their most
valuable testimony for Christ by their death or exile ? Oi
was it that Calvinism itself, preparing, at this time, to es-
tablish a new type of individualism under its doctrine of
an electing and special grace, and so to inaugurate a new
state of ecclesiastical and civil liberty, might have stiff-
ened, having God's decrees all with it, into a form of
christian absolutism too closely resembled to the faith of
Mohammed, and must needs be tempered therefore, in
this manner, by the experience of a predestinating coun-
Bel opposite, shaking even it to its fall ? Or, if we ask
why it is that so great decay of faith is suffered in Ger-
many and in the Christian world generally, at the present
time ? why it is that learning is turned against the gospel,
to explain it away, or reduce it to the terms of nature and
Bpeculative reason? the question may be dark to many,
aud may seem to admit no satisfactory answer. Still, to
a-iy one who has thought deeply, it will be something tu
ask whether it was possible for the principle of faith ever
to be set in its true post of honor, till the relations of na-
ture and the supernatural are settled by a thorough dis
uussion, such as brings every truth of Christianity into
question?
On the whole, wo discover nothing: in any of these dark-

PROBABr.Y CCNSISTE:<n. 427

est and most adverse facts of history, to shake ourronvie^
tion tjiat the world is governed, as we said at the begin-
ning, hi the interest of the incarnation or supernatural
advent of Jesus Christ. zVhnost all the great staple
events of history reveal this fact, in forms of palpable
evidence, and if in some it seems to be less plain, there
yet is nothing in them to dislodge our faith, even for a
moment. Besides, we have always before us the one ma-
jestic fact, that Christianity still lives. The church, being
a supernatural institution, all history bends to it, and it
proves its sublime peculiarity in the fact, that it is forever
indestructible by time and its changes. The schools of
Pythagoras, and all the great teachers after him, have
Qourished for a da}^, and vanished — tokens, all, of the
necessary frailty of mere natural wisdom — bat the church
(•f Jesus Christ, the Nazarene teacher, stands from age to
age. It began with a feeble knot of disciples, it haa
s})read itself over a vast field or kingdom, including in
ita ample scope all the foremost nations and peoples of the
world. Persecution has not crushed it, power has not
beaten it back, time has not abated its force, and, what is
most wonderful of all, the abuses and treasons of its own
friends have never shaken its stability. Mohammedan-
ism, punctually served and to the letter, by the bigoted
tidelity of its adherents, grows old and dies in a much
sliorler time. Christianity, betrayed, corrupted, made to
be the instrument of unutterable woes, by its disciples, ia
yet forbidden to die. God will not let the dissensions, the
treasons, the unutterable and abominable profligacies, that
are mortal to the life of other institutions, have any power
of death upon it; upholding it visibly Himself, and
ehowinf^ by that sign, as he could by nothing else, that

428 THE INTERXAI GOVERNMENT

the settled })urpose ol his will is to establish it as tht
universal religion.

But the government ol the world includes, in its largesi
view, the interior history of sonls. Before we aiTive a(
Ohnstianity, therefore, what we there eall the domain of
the Spirit, and of spiritual experience, is to be classed un-
der providential history. We cite, therefore, in this con-
nection,

III. As a distinct argument, the spiritual changes
wrought in men, and the testimony given by the subjects of
such changes. Nothing is better attested, than the fact, that
men of our race, whether under Christianity, or without
any knowledge of its truths, do undergo changes of char-
acter and life, that can no way be accounted for, without
some reference to a supernatural power, such as Chris-
tianity affirms in the doctrine of the Spirit. The subjects
themselves, can nowise account for the change, except by
the supposition of a divine agency in them, superior to
the laws of natural development, and also to any force of
will they could themselves exert on their own dispositions,
and the moral habit of their previous life.

To change the type of a character, and above all, to do
it in such a manner, that, from and after a given date, it
shall b^3 confessedly different, more widely different than
if a thief were to become suddenly honest, a licentious
man sr.idenly and delicately pure, a violent gentle, a
x> hardly heroic — this, it will be agreed, is a thing most
unieult to be accomplished. Many will even declare it tc
be impossible; nothing more is possible, they will say
than for the subjects to set their will to a reformation,
which doubtless they may do, at any given moment, batj
in doing it, hew far off are they still from any change o/

OF SOULS IS WITH CHRIST. 429

cuaracter; persisting against what sti-uggles of per/ersd
habit, hearing spasmodically under what loads of coirup-
lion, ready to fall again, how easily, back into what hai?
all the while been and still is their character. But if they
vio, perchance, succeed in finally changing any thing, how
■1 lowly must the change be wrought. Even as one habil
^ives way to another, by a long and wearisome reiteration
(>f practice. Exactly so it is, we admit, with all changes
in mere natural character, all improvements in the plane
of the natural life. If there is no force but mere will,
acting in this plane, to change us, there can be no sudden
reverse of character; no reverse at all, which is more rad-
ical than what the phrenologists give us to expect, when
they set us on courses of practice, to increase or diminish
given lobes of brain under the bony casement of the skull.
Whoever undertakes any such improvement of his char
acter, in a bad point, doing it by his will, we 'expect to
see relapse and fall back. We have a way indeed of say-
ing, "it is in him," when a bad man is repressing his par
ticular sin ; by which we mean to intimate our convic-
tion, that what is in him will assuredly come out and
show itself, even more flagrantly than ever. Thus we
reason, and we are right in it, if uo account be made oi
faith and the influence of a supernatural power.

Thus it w^as that Celsus reasoned, utterly denying the
credibility of any sudden change of character from bad to
good, such as the christians spoke of; for, not being in
ihe faith of Christ, he had no conception of the super-
natural efficacy embodied in his plan of salvation lie
Kays, *' those who are disposed by nature to vice, a'.id
accustomed to it can not be transformed by puniphnent,
much less by mercy ; for to transform nature is a mattei

l-3(> THE INTEKNAL GOVERNMENT

of extreme difficulty." lie did not understand, idasi
what ''mercy" .s. But Origen does. Having it revealed
m him, bj his own holy axperience, he replies, hov?
beautifully, " When we see the d jctrine Celsus calls fool-
(flh, operate, as with magical power, when we see hew it
brings a multitude, at once, from a life of lawless excesses
to a well regulated one, from unrighteousness to goodnes.^,
from timidity to such strength of principle, that, for the
Bake of religion, they despise even death, have we not
good reason for admiring the power of this doctrine."*

The picture given by Justin Martyr corresponds ; at
once proving itself by its own beauty, and revealing the
hand of the divine Spirit, by w^hom it is wrought. ''We,
who once were slaves to lust, now delight in purity of
morals ; we, who once prized riches and possessions above
all things, now contribute what we have to the common
use ; we, who once hated and murdered each other, and,
on account of our differences, would not have a common
hearth with those of the same tribe, now live in common
with them, and pray for our enemies, and endeavor to
persuade those who hate us unjustly, that, living accord-
ing to the admirable counsels of Christ, they may enjoy
a good hope of obtaining the same blessings with our-
selves, from God the ruler of us all."f

That changes such as these are sometimes wrought in
men and societies of men, under the gospel of Christ, we
certainly know. There is almost no one who has not,
tkjmetime, witnessed such examples. And yet, where com-
munities are taken, the results will be so far mixed bj
cases of spurious faith, of hypocrisy, of backsliding, and
apostasy, as to blur and sadly confuse the evidence di»

♦Neander's Mem Chrut Life, p. 17. •} ib., p. 61.

jF souls is with CHRIST. 481

played Oar best and least ambiguous examples of spir-
itual renovation, therefore, ^rill be found in the case of in
dividual persons.

The case of Paul is familiar, and it is remarkable that
no other ancient human character comes to us attested, il
Us genuineness, by such evidence. Whatever the learned
.-ritics say, or assume to show, concerning the gospels,
there is certainly no myth in the epistles. When they
come to these, their theory breaks down, their occupation
is gone. That such a man as Pliny lived, and such a man
as Cicero, is not as well attested, or shown by as good
evidence, as that Paul the apostle lived, wrote the epis-
tles ascribed to him, and bore the double character, first,
of a persecutor and fierce enemy of the cross, then, by
the grace of God revealed in him, that of a preacher of
the cross; sacrificing all things, enduring all pains and
severities, for the name of Christ, his Master. This
change, he tells us, was a change supernaturally wrought
gives us the day and the hour on which his bad carec
was stopped, and shows himself to us and all the world
from that moment onward, to be another man. From {
most bitter and relentless' persecutor, he has become a be
liever in Christ, the most powerful, and chief advocate of
his gospel. A profound self-evidence verifies the man and
the change, and the divine life in him is not less visible.
Elis own account of the change, which he testifies openly
in every place, is that, "by the grace of God,'^ he is whai
he is — "new-created in CJirist Jesus unto good works."

And of such examples the church is full, in all ages,
By some wondrous Providence in souls, if we do net ao
cept the christian mystery of the Spirit, a stream of new
oieative power from God is entering into men's hwr1»

132 THE INTEI'NAL GOVERNMENT

Lran^lbrming their lives, and with tliis one uniform resuU
that, if Christianity is a fiction or a myth, it makes them,
as certiiinly its friends and disciples, as it makes then:
better and more akin to God.

AugU'3tin2, for example, was, before his conversion, i
loss violent ?.ni bloody man than Paul, had far less pre-
wnse of virtue, and a much feebler sense of principle, and
wi\s in fact a really less hopeful person, as regards the
prospect of his becoming a holy character. And yet,
from a given moment, onward, which moment is exactly
specified in his "Confessions," he becomes another charac-
ter. Neither can it be said that he was turned about thus
suddenly by some fit of superstition. He was not a super-
stitious character, but a loose, free-thinking, sensual per-
son, whose habit was opposed to the spiritualities in every
form. His own account of his conversion is, that it wat?
the prayers of his saintly mother which took hold of him,
drawing down upon him, from above, that divine influ-
ence and grace, by which his life was so remarkably
changed. We can see too, for ourselves, in his whoie
subsequent life, his action, his temper, his great and massive
thoughts, his burning contemplations, that he is lifted above
his natural force, to be a man above himself The rhetori-
cian is gone, and the apostle has taken his place.

The conversion of Raymond Lull, of Col. Gardiner, of
John JSTewton, of Dr Nelson, and of hundreds whom we
kiiovr, S3 our living contemporaries in the church ccrres*
ponds. The number is so great in fact, examples of the
Idn :1 so familiar, that any attempt to specify names musi
be insignificant. A great many supposed changes of the
tind turn out, as we admit, to have no sound reality ann
are followed by no correspondent change of life. It wouh)

OF SOULS IS WITH CHI 1ST. 43S

C€ SO as a matter of course ; just as there will be s[)uriou«
examples of honesty, honor, and cou::tige. But the
spurious no more disproves the true in one case, than id
the other. The question is simply this, whether, in given
Aases, we do not see men entered, more or less suddenly,
by what is callei their conversion, into another and differ-
jni kind of life the violent becoming gentle, the deceit-
ful true, the covetous unworldly and liberal, the selfish
benevolent and self-denying, profanity changed to prayer,
drunkenness to sobriety, revenge to long-suffering, blood-
thirstiness to love and compassion ; the subject becoming
thus, in truth, from thai lime onward, a confessedly new
man, in all these his several habits and relations? We
are all familiar, certamly, with such examples. They are
among the most prominent and impressive facts, in the in
terior, personal history of mankind. And they are so
well attested, in myriads of cases, by the practical results
of the life, as to make the unbelief which denies their
verity, or classes them as examples of spiritual illusion, a
prejudice that amounts to weakness, or supposes a real in-
capacity for evidence.

Now in these changes of spiritual experience, called con-
versions, the christian word, and the truths of the life of
Jesus, are commonly supposed to have an important instru-
mentality. The subjects uniformly say it, in the confessions
they witness. They suppose that God, revealed in Christy
13 so, by a transmission inward, revealed in their conscious-
ness. But if Christ was only a simple, natui =il man, and
if all wrhich is reported of him in the gospel: transcend*
<ng the supposition of his simple humanity, ts wild ex
cess, or legendary exaggeration, the account which refers

these inward changes or conversions to Christ, can harcllj

37

134 MEN ARE XOT CONVERTED

be true. That any mere illusion should be fo lowed, age
liiler age, by such wondrous and manifestly real changes,
making human souls visibly akin to God, is net to bf
supposed. That would be to account for the soundeFl
and profcundest facts of human history, by referring theiu
to causes most purely fanciful, and doctrines wide of all
■irue intelligence.

Here then we find ourselves, with these facts on our
^inds, without any christian truth to account for them.
For when we have dismissed the gospels, or thrown them
aside as unreliable, or incredible, these facts are not auui-
liilated. These converts, these transformed men — the
giandest truths, and most quickening powers, and most
glorious characters, in human history — are still left, living
and blooming and blessing their times, for all these
eighteen centuries. They certainly are no fictions, or
myths, or fables of tradition. They testify, all, that they
are consciously transformed by some divine power. A
kind of gospel is in them. God has v/rought in them, if
Christianity has not. Only it is remarkable that when
they are so transformed by His inner visitation, they im-
mediately declare for Christ, and cleave to him with ine-
radicable affection. We seem thus, in fact, to discover
that, as we are casting Christianity away, the government
of the world is turning the inmost heart of the repenting
aiid holy iDward it, and giving, in that manner, indispn-
table evideace that it is itself willing, whether we are ^-j
6r not, to serve in the interest of Christianity.

It docb not apj)ear to have been as carefully consideied
bs it should be, by the disciples of naturalism, in what
manner these converts, and the testimony they give, :'b U
be disposed of. For, in oui" view, they are ev^Q a more

BV NATURE OR BY SELF-WILL. 43P

intractable subject to handle, than the gospels theni-
aftlves. To (ieny the reality of their change, and reduce
their whole life and experience to a matter of illusion,
requires a degree of effrontery and personal conceit, thai
;^ould repel any critic of only ordinary intelligence. For
in these Christian myriads, are grouped almost all the
^jTcatest scholars, philosophers, and lawgivers, the most
revered and stateliest names, the most beautiful and holi-
est characters of Christendom.

It can not be said that these conversions are, in any
3ense, natural, or produced by natural causes, in the feel-
ing and condition of the subjects. Their affinities are all
visibly transcendent, and their life itself is, in one view, a
kind of protest again t nature and withdrawment from it.

They are not changed, in this manner, by their own
mere will. Whoever believes that a mortal man can take-
hold of the moral jargon, into which his thoughts and
passions are cast by sin, willing himself back, item by
item, into peace and harmony and the ennobled conscious-
ness of good, oughf to be able to believe in Christianity
much more easily. A bad man may reduce, or hold in
check, the evil instigations of his habit, by his mere will ;
he may even drag himself into positive acts of duty and
observance, and become a sturdy legalist in the practices
of virtue; but to bring himself out into a luminous, joy-
ous, and spontaneous virtue, and make himself free jq
l5(X)d, as having the principle installed in his heart, is a
different thing. Nothing, in short, is wider of all rational
belief, than that the converted men or disciples of Chris-
tianity could make the beginning, act the part, fashicjH
the character, kindle the fires and conquer the elevations
visibly displayed in their life doing it by their human wiU

156 THEY ARE NOT CONVERTED

But tnere is a certain inspiration, it may said^ that flowfl
inU) men, from the ideas they assume. Thus, it may he
conceived, that the supposed convert, iu these remarkable
transformations of life and character, received, first, a the-
ological preconception, that a change thus and thus de-
sciibed is necessary to his salvation; and then, having his
imagination powerfully excited, by the struggles of sup-
posed guilt and danger he is in, he conceives at last, that
the change required is actually passed upon him ; where-
upon he is set forward in high impulse, into a new style
of life, correspondent with the auspicious hallucination that
has triumphed over his sin. And this is really the most
plausible account that can be made of these changes in
the intei-ior history of souls, which does not suppose them
to be referrible to a supernatural divine agency or Prov-
idence.

But what kind of mind is it that can be satisfied with
one of its w^ise inventions, when, to account for the high-
est and divinest range of fact in man's spiritual history,
it supposes whole myriads of the strongest minds, and
noblest characters, to have been inspired with so much
goodness all their lives long, by a hallucination?

In the next place, we are led to inquire, why it is that
men pass no such crisis of inspiration in other matters ?
Whence comes it, that, having formed some preconception
of honesty, truth, parity, wisdom, art, the auspicious hal-
hioin^tion that is to shape their transformation does not
^iddenly take them up, as here, and carry them forward
into the inspired liberty? Why do not men becorcti
heroes, poets, lawgivers, in this manner? Have they not
thoughts enough of being thus distinguished? and are not
6uch kind of thoughts, in them, commonly hallucina+iong?

BY THEIR PRECONCEPTIONS. 43"

But it is not true, in a very great mulatude of
sases, tliat any sucli preconception has been taken ujx
vVhat thought had Paul, on the way to Damascus, of
neing converted to Christ as the necessary condition of
his salvation? As little had Augusdne, till his rnind
was opened from within to such a thought. Besides, wc
have multitudes of cases in our own time, where any
Buch manner of accounting for the change of character
actually wrought is plainly inadequate; cases, for exam-
pi*^ where there is too little of personal vigor to carry
Dut any preconception, even if a beginning were made in
that manner. Thus a ministerial acquaintance, whose
name is before the nation and the world, as a public
name, had living in the place where he was pastor,
a short-witted person, generally taken for an idiot, who,
in addition to his natural disadvantages, was deep in
the vices of profanity and drunkenness. At a time of
general attention to the things of religion, this forlorn
being came to him to inquire the way of salvation. The
first impulse of prudence was to put him off, as being
incapable of religious experience, and as one who would
onl}^ turn it into mockery by his absurdities. On farther
consideration, it was found to be rather a duty to give
him even the greater attention, according to the pro})or-
ti<»n of his want. In a few days, it became a subject (»f
mirth, with all the light-minded class of the community,
tint this man was a convert. The christian peoples looked
on him with pity, and were silent; they had no hope ( *
hun. But from that hour to this — and many years liav(
now passed away — he has never faltered in his course
never yielded so n.uch as an inch to his vicious habitu
His constancy and consistency are even as much tuperin)

488 iN MANY CASES

to that of other disciples, as his simplicity is greatei thai
theirs. He is always in liis place. He has worn out two
or three bibles, for he had before learned to read a little,
and now put himself to the task in earnest. He gets a
few dollars of earnings, which he does not want, and goes
to tiis pastor, requesting him to apply it to some good x-se.
which he does not know how to select. When asked by
his friends — for that is the general wonder — how it is that
his old habits of profanity and di'unkenness have never
once gotten advantage of him, his uniform reply is,
" Why, I have seen Jesus !" The critic of naturalism
can not, of course, admit any such mystic notion as that
— Jesus was a man, and, if he is any thing now, he is still
a man. Will he account for such a character, initiated by
a sudden change, by supposing a preconception that
shapes it, and maintains it against infirmities so great, for
such a course of years? There is a much deeper and
more adequate philosophy in the subject himself Take
his own account of it, and the fact is possible ; take this
other, and it is not.

There are multitudes of cases also, in every age, where
heathers who have never heard of Christ, or of any terms
of salvation at all, and sometimes even the rudest of hea-
thens, are passed into a manifestly new character, by a
changvi correspondent, in ever}- respect, with what is called
:^r.n version under the gospel. And if God, as we main-
tain, V3 reigning supernaturallj over the world and in it, to
2-stij.bli.sh and complete the kingdom of his Son, wliai shalj
we lock for but to find sporadic cases of conveisicm, oi
spiritual illumination, even an^ong the heathen peoples,
before the knowledge of Christ is received?

Socrr.tcs is best conceived in this manner, and, according

THERE AKE NO PK EC02C CE PTI OXS. 43f;

to his own impressions, he was guided supernaturaViy, b^
a secret grace and ministry, in whose teaching he rc.ceived
all that most distinguished his personal history. Clement
of Kome, as we have alread}' observed, was a man myste-
riously led, as by some divine impulse, and f.ppeans
to have come into the spirit of a new-born life, before he
had even heard of Christ. In him, therefore, his heart in-
stantly rested, finding there the grace that he wanted, and
the divine beauty that he already longed for.

And what forbids that we include in the reckoning ex«
amples of a class more wild, where it is impossible to sus-
pect any distemper of the experience, under preconceptions
imposed, either by philosophy or by the gospel — such, for
example, as the strange devotee discovered by Brainard,
among the children of the forest, and called by him "the
conjurer." "He said," so Brainard represents, "that God
had taught him his religion, and he wanted to find others
who would join heartily with him in it. He believed God
had some good people somewhere, who felt as he did. He
had not always felt as now, but had formerly been like
the rest of the Indians till about four years before that
tim.e. Then his heart, he said, was much distressed, so that
he could not live among the Indians, but got away into
the woods and lived alone there for mor ^hs. At length,
he said, God comforted his heart, and showed him what
be should do, and since that time he had known God, and
tiied to serve him, and loved all men, be they who they
would, so as he never did before."

Brainard was also told by the Indians, "that he opposed
their drinking strong liquor with all his pov ?r, and thai
if, at any time, he could not dissuade them f om it, he
would leave thon^. and go crying into the woods. He was

no THE WORK OK THE SPIRIT

looked apon and derided, among most of tli.j la
dians, as a precise zealot, who made a needless d >ise
about religious matters. There was something in hift
temper and disposition which looked more like tTUo
religion, than any I have ever observed among oti M
lioatUens."*

In the same manner, a forlorn woman, discovered V»y
i»Le of our missionaries, in the depths of Central Africii,
is reported by him to have broken out, in the most affect-
ing demonstrations of joy, when Christ was presented to
her mind, saying: "O, that is he who has come to me so
often in my prayers. I could not find who he was !"
And if God holds any terms of society and reciprocal feel-
ing with our race, what should we more naturally expect,
than that he will always be revealed, in this manner, to
such as earnestly seek the right, and give play to their in-
born, though distracted, affinities, longing and searching,
if haply they may find Him? But if God is revealed
thus tenderly, even to minds in the darkness of heathen-
ism, it is plain as it can be, that the great, internal changes
of character we are discussing, are not to be accounted
for by the preconceptions that ire taken up and become
operative in the subjects.

After all, this question is more naturally and satisfacto*
rily handled, in the more ordinary form ; viz., as a ques-
tin:: of christian experience; what it is, whether it sup-
poses, necessarily, a supernatural power, and what ij thi
real significance of the testimony given by so many "fit-
nesses for Christ? For the work of the Spirit, which is
the christian conception, is but another name, as already
intimated, for that supernatural Provider ce or governinenl

♦ Memoir, p. 174-6

IS GOVEKNMENT IN SOULS. 441

jf the world in souls which, we are endeavoring to show
is dispensed in the interest of Christianity.

Thus we have vast crowds of witnesses, rising \ip in
every age, who testify, out of their own consciousness, to
the work of the Spirit, and the new-creating power of Je-
sus, who, by the Spirit, is revealed, in their hearts. In
nothing do they consent with a more hymn-like harmony
than in the testimony that their inward transformation \sf
a divine work — a new revelation of God, by the Spirit, in
their human consciousness. They are such men too aa
the world are most wont to believe, on all other subjects.
Neither has any one a particle of evidence to set against
their testimony. All which the stiffest unbeliever can al-
lege against them, is that he himself has no such cor-
Bciousness, or has found no such discovery verified to his
particular experience. They testify, on their part, with
one voice, to a truth positive, and the whole opposing
world can offer nothing, on its part, against their testi-
mony, but the sim.pl e negative fact of having in them-
selves no such experience.

Meantime, their very word itself conveys a look of veri-
similitude, and makes a show of God, so necessary to U2,
and so honorable to Him, that it challenges the spontane-
ous faith of every ingenuous and thoughtful soul. We
never hear any single man of them speak of his better
life as a development, or a something merely unfolded in
liim, by natural laws. No preacher preaches, no martyi
goes to the fires in that vein. But they all talk of their
fidth, and of what God gives to their faith; the coE«iiouB
impotence of all their struggles with themselves, and the
easy victory they find in God ; how they are borne up aa
oa eagle's wmgs, their wonderful light, their peaxie, ihd

442 THIS IS THE WITNESS

love they could not have to their enemies, but now, b^
Chriflt revealed within, are able to exercise, unstinted and
free. Consciously they are not living in the plane of na
ture, they do and suffer things which nature can as little
do, as she can raise the dead. They conquer their fears.
God helping their faith. Pride, passion, habit, they sub-
due in the same manner. Keligious prejudices also, ani-
mosities of race, the contempt of learning, and the bigotry
of schools melt away in them, leaving a character that is
visibly a new creation. Even the skeptic who has come-
to such a state of intellectual disease, that he can no lon-
ger find how to believe any thing, is filled and flooded
with the light of God, in Christ and the Spirit, as soon as
he can heartily ask it, with a will to be taught. And so
we have a vast cloud of witnesses, testifying in all ages, to
the reality of a supernatural grace, which is the root and
power of all their works, and the hidden spring of their
unspeakable joys. They know it to be so; for they con-
sciously get their impulse wholly from without any terms
oi power in themselves, or of causality in nature. They
could as easily believe that they make the rain in their
own cisterns, as that their holy experiences are not trom
Grod Himself So do they all testify with one voice — Paul,
Clement, Origen, St. Bernard, Huss, Gerson, Luther, Fene-
Ion, Baxter, Flavel, Doddridge, Wesley, Edwards, Brain-
ard, Taylor, all the innumerable host of believers that
have entered into rest, whether it be the persecuted saint
of the first age, driven home in his chariot of bl )od, or
the saint who died but yesterday in the arms of his family
They live in the common consciousness of a power super-
natural, saying — "Yet not I but Christ liveth in me.*"
Nothing; in short, would violate, or in real truth ^biite^

f ^ F T H E I K C O N S C I 0 U S N ?: S S . 44S

ite, so n.iucli of the christian history, as to qualify it dowD
to the mere terms of natural development. Indeed it
would be the virtual expurgation from it of all the saint?
of God, whatever they have done, or been, or said.

Holding the subject in this form, our critics of tlie natu-
ralistic school commonly turn their account of the matter,
in some such way as this. They say to Paul, Luther,
Knox, Edwards, and, in fact, the whole church of God:
"we do you full credit, as being made just as much bettei
men as you say you are, and as being exercised subject-
ively, in just the way you think you are. You are only
mistaken, as we have now discovered, in respect to the
manner and grounds of your experience. You have
prayed and thought you were heard, you have believed
and thought your success was a gift of faith, you have
been strengthened against fears and pains of death — all
you that have been martyrs — others have been strength-
ened in their times of temptation, and you all think it wiis
God who bore you up by the immediate gift of Himself:
but we are able now to tell you that you were, so far, mis-
taken. There is a law of nature, by which all these things
come to pass, and it is so fixed that nature will help you
always, or even inspire you, just according to what you
do. All this which you think comes from God, by a re-
generative dispensation, is the development of nature, by
a generative.''

There wo aid seem to be a rather remarkable defect oi
aiodesty in this assumption, of which it :ian not be sup-
posed that its authors are themselves aware. It not only
shows the whole church of God, that their conccptiuus of
christian experien( e are mistaken, but it corrects them in
precisely that which they testify, in the philosophic melho^

i44 THIS IS THE WITNESS

Itself. This, they say, we find by experiment. It is uoi
our speculation, it is not any theoretic interpretation put on
our experience, but it is our experience itself. When they
say tliat God consciously strengthens them in their day
of trial, gives them what to say, hears their prayera,
koips them in peace by the testimony that they please
Him, fills them day and night with his fullness, and <.'ur
modern critic runs to them to mend their phraseology, and
shows them how to come at the same things in a more
rational way, even by letting the divinity that is in thenj
already have a free development, according to natural
laws, it would not be strange if they should answer with
a sigh, "Ah dear child, we can not get on thus; for all
that bread on which we feed is manna that we gather, and
not a loaf that is hid in our nature. Turn us down thua
upon nature for a gospel, and our wings are cut. All
that we know of God and divine things, we know by
stretching upward and away from nature, and believing
in God, as in Christ revealed. Every success we get,
every joy we reach, comes of rejecting just that method,
by which thou proposest to regulate our experience. May
it not be that what thou hast discovered by reason, has
kept thee from faith, and that still thou needest some one
to teach thee, what be the first principles of the doctrine
of Christ? '

What we find then as the result of our inquiry is, thai
the government of the world shows the same hand whicb
appears in the character and work of Jesus. In the first
place, we discover that nothing takes place in the w(^rld
that ought to take place, and even must take place, if ^hc
government and supreme law of thi^igs were confined to

OF Til El K CONSCIOUSNESS. 445

mere nature and her processes. Next, we find that the
issues of wars and discoveries, the migrations, diploma-
cies, and great historic eras of races and nations, the extinc
tions and revivals of learning, and the persecutions and
GorruptionSj not less than the relbrmations of churchog^
are all so modulated by the superintending government of
the world as to perpetuate the gospel of Christ, and, as fai
as we can see, to insure its ultimate triumph. Then pass
ing into the interior history of souls, which, after all, is the
chief field of God's government in the earth, w^e meet vast
myriads of witnesses in all the walks of life, and in all the
past ages, who profess to know God in the witness of their
internal life and show, by tokens manifold and clear, that
they are raised above themselves, in all that makes the
character of their life. To sum up all in one brief ex-
pression, we have found a New Testament in the govern
ment of the world. It penetrates all depths of matter,
heaves in the roll of the sea, administers back of the
thrones, tempers the courses of history, restraining re-
mainders and excesses of wrath, overturning, conserving,
restoring, healing, and reaffirming thus, in all the grand
affairs of human life, without and within, just what Christ
the Word declares, when ascending to reign — All pover is
given unto me in heaven and in earth. What, in fact, do
we see with our eyes, but that the scheme of the four gos-
(wls ifi the sclieme of uoi versa] government itself?

88

CHAPTKR XIV.

MlRiCLES AND SPIltlTUAL GIPTS NOT DISCONTIK U Ali

If tli(j world is managed supernaturally, or as being ir
vhe interest of Christianity, wliicli is the doctrine main-
tained in the last chapter, a subordinate and vastly infe-
rior, though, to many, much more pressing question, re-
mains to be settled ; viz., what has become of the miracles
and supernatural gifts of the gospel era? These were
associated historically with the planting of Christianity.
By such tokens Christ authenticated his mission, giving
the like signs to his apostles, to be the authentication of
theirs. What, then, it is peremptorily required of us to
answer, has become of these miracles, these tongues, gifts
of healing, prophecies? what, also, of the dreams, pre-
sentiments, visits of angels? what of judgments falling
visibly on the head of daring and sacrilegious crimes?
what of possessions, magic, sorcery, necromancy? If
these once were facts, why sliould they not be now ? If
they are incredible now, when were they less so ? Does
a fact become rational and possible by being carried back
into other centuries of time? Is it given us to see that
Christianity throws itself out boldly on its facts, in these
matters, or does it come in tlie shy and cautious manner
8ome appear to suppose, assei'ting a few miracles and
half-mythologic marvels that occurred in the rom^antic
4ges of history, where no investigation can reach them:
adding, to escape all demand of such now, in terms of
present evidence, that they are discontinued^ because

THE CANON IS CLOSED, 44^

the canon is closed and there is no longer any use foi
them ?

Such a disposal of the question, it must be seen, vrean
a suspicious look. If miracles are inherently incredible,
which is the impression at the root of our modern unbe-
lief, evidently nothing is gained by thrusting them back
into remote ages of time. If, on the other hand, they are
inherently credible, why treat them as if they were not?
raising ingenious and forced hypotheses to account for
their non-occurrence ? Christianity, it is true, is, in some
sense, a complete organization, a work done that wants
nothing added to finish it ; but it does not follow that the
canon of scripture is closed — that is a naked and violent
assumption, supported by no word of scripture, and justi-
fied by no inference from the complete organization of
the gospel. For still, even according to Christ's own
thought, it was a complete mustard seed only ; which,
though it is complete as a seed, so that no additions can
be made to it, has yet, nevertheless, much to do in the
way of growth, and no one can be sure that other book«
of scripture may not some time be necessary for that
We do not even know that a new dispensation, or many
Buch, may not be required to unfold this seed, and make
it the full-grown tree. It may not be so. I have no
present suspicion that any such new contributions, or va
I ieties of ministration, are needed. But it is better not w
issime that of which we have and can have no possible
evidence; least of all are we called to do it, when the
assumption itself is evidently made for a purpose, and
wears a look of suspicion that weakens the respect of
really important trutlis.

A.S little does it follow that, if the canon of scripture is

$48 BUT IT DOES NOT FOLLOW

closed up, there is no longer any use, or place, foi niir»
cles and spiritual gifts. That is a conclusion taken by a
mere act of judgment, w len plainly no judgment of man
is able to penetrate the secrets and grasp the economic
reasons of God's empire, with sufficient insight, to afilrj:i
any thing on a subject so deep and difficult. There maj
ceitainly be reasons for such miracles and gifts of the
S]>irit, apart from any authentication of new books of
scripture. Indeed, they might possibly be wanted even
tlio more, to break up the monotony likely to follow,
when revelations have ceased, and the word of scripture
is forever closed up; wanted also possibly to lift the
fjhurch out of the abysses of a mere second-hand religion,
keeping it alive and open to the realities of God's imme-
diate visitation.

And yet, for these and such like reasons, it is very
commonly assumed, and has been since the days of Chry-
Bostom, that miracles and all similar externalities of divine
power have been discontinued. It is not observed that
the date itself is contradicted by the reasons ; for no book
of scripture had then been written for at least two hund-
red and fifty years ; though the miracles had never come,
as a matter of fact, to any supposed vanishing point, till
that time. But, that miracles continued for two handred
and fifiy years after there was no reason for them, is nd
great obstruction to a theory of the fact and the reasons,
aftei it has once gained acceptance. Hence there i^.
almost nothing, known to be derived from the scripture
itself which is affirmed more positively, or with a more
eettJed air of authority, than this discontmuance of mu'a-
cles and spiritual gifts. Possibly some may even take i1
as a heresy and a great scanda' to the cause of imth, tc

THAT THE GIFTS ARE I.' ISCOM TlN U E D. 449

suggest a j)ossibility of mistake in the assumption. Nay,
there are probably many christian teachers who -would
even think it a disorder in God's realm itself, if now, :l
tlicse modern times, these days of science, the well-gi'ada
ated uniformity of things were to be disturbed by an
irruption of miraculous demonstrations. It would upse^.
many whole chapters of theory.

At the same time, there are classes of teachers and dis-
ciples, now and then, who spring up, raising the question
whether miracles are not restored, or some time to be re-
stored? Even Archbishop Tillotson was of opinion that
they probably enough might be, in the case of an attempt
to publish the gospel among heathen nations.* But in
all these cases, the point is virtually conceded that mira-
cles have been discontinued ; whereas the truer and mere
rational question is, whether they have not always re-
mained, as in the apostolic age? Of course there have
been cessations, here and there, just as there have been
cessations of faith and decays of holy living ; just as there
are cessations of spiritual influence, for the same reason ;
though no one supposes^ on that account, that the work
of the Holy Spirit has been discontinued, and requires to
be reinstituted, in order to be an existing fact. There ia
no likelihood that a miraculous dispensation would be re-
Btored, after being quite passed by and lost. But there
may be casual suspensions and reappearances, somo
times in one place, and sometimes in another, that are
qaite consistent with the conviction that the dispenaa-
tion is perpet'ial, never withdrawn, and never t(» be with
drawn.

And this, on very deliberate and careful search, appears

* Works.' Vol. X., p. 230.

A60 fEESE MEI:K i'KC»r>IGIES

to be tbt true opinion. We aie able too, it will be seen, tc
veiify this opinion by abundant facts. Of ccurse it i<
not implied, if we assert the continuance of these super
natui'al demonstrations in all ages, that they will, m oni
time, be mere repetitions, or formal continuations, of those
which distinguished the apostolic age ; it must be enough
ihat such works appear, in forms adapted to our particular
time and stage of advancement. Many per*>ns demand
that Christianity shall do precLsely the same things which
it did, or claims to have done, in the first times; not ob-
serving that the doing of a given thing is commonly a
good reason why it should not be done again, and that
the great law of adaptation, which is a first law of reason,
will always require that there should be a change of ad-
ministration, correspondent with our changes of state or
condition. No one ever charges it as a defect of evidence
for the supernatural gift of the decalogue, that God has
not continued, since that day, to give decalogues from
every hill. On the contrary, when Christ appears, taking
awa}', in some sense, the first covenant, that he may estab-
lish the second, we recognize a degree of evidence for
both, in the fact itself that there is a show of progress in
the transition. This progress of manner and kind we
want in things supernatural, as well as in things natural ;
i)lse, if God were forever to repeat his old works, in their
(/id forms, we should have a dull time of existence
\VTiat, then, if it should appear that our piophesyings,
interpretations, healings, and other such gifts, have so far
disguised their form, as to be sometimes recognized onl 9
with difficulty? Instead of discovering an objection to
Christianity in the fact, what Lave we in it, possibly, but
K confirmation of its rational evidence? And yet it if

ARE XOT CHRISTIANITY. 45]

chiefly remarkable, that the forms of the gifts are o>n
tirued with so little appaient vaiiaticn.

It is very obvious^ or ought to be, beforehau'', that
these pi odigies are not Christianity ; the substance is nol
;q them; they are only signs and tokens of the substance
Their propagation, therefore, is no principal interest of
Christianity, and the living power of Christianity is never
lo be tested by their frequency, or the impressiveness of
their operations. There may evidently be too many of
them, as well as too few. As soon as they begin to be
taken for things principal, or for the real substance, they
become idols and hindrances to faith. When the world
that ought to be repenting is taken up with staring, the
sobriety of faith is lost in the gossip of credulity. And
then, instead of a solid, ever-during reign of Provi-
dence, that is governing the world in the interest of
Christianity, we should have a glittering fire-w^ork round
us, that really governs nothing, has no power to regener-
ate souls, or strengthen the kingdom of Christ in tne
earth. Indeed, we actually see this folly beginning, in a
very short time, to get ^ possession of men's minds, and
find the apostles, on that account, contending most delib-
erately against it.* It was a great evil that so many were
more ready to figure in the gifts, or go after and admire
the gifts, than to live by faith, and walk with Christ, and
hear fruits meet for repentance.

It is our impression, to speak frankly, that the party ci
discontinuance, and the party of restoration, and the party
also ol denial, who make so much of the fact that these
prodigies are gone by, and are even conceded to be iao"W
incredible, do all concur in a partial misconception of

* 1 Cor., xii-xT.

i52 USES AND LAWS

their place in God's economy, and of ihcir relativfi im
portance to it To distinguish truly their office, we i.eeu
to consider the two opposite extremes of chara-^ter If
which they are related. We are Lever to lock at Gcd's
means, as being perfect or not, in themselves; they arc
good only as medicine for a fevered and disordered nature
in man, requiring also to be increased, or withdrawn, ac-
C(>rding to the oscillations of that imperfect and disjointed
nature, as it swings to this or that opposite of excess.

To see. how these gifts operate^, or what place they fill,
lot us suppose it to be an accepted fact that God is reign-
ing in a grand supernatural scheme of order, and govern-
ing the world, externally and in souls, for Christianity's
sake; let it be understood and asserted that, even in
things supernatural, God rules by eternal and fixed laws ;
and it will not be long, before the sottish habit of remain-
ing sin, will begin to settle even christian souls into a stu-
por of intellectual fatality. Does not every thing continue
as it was from the beginning? Prayer becomes a kind of
dumb-bell exercise, good as exercise, but never to be an-
swered. The word is good to be exegetically handled,
but there is no light of interpretation in souls, more im-
mediate; all truth is to be second-hand truth, never a
vital beam of God's own light. To subside inio sacra-
ments, that are only priestly manipulations, is now easy.
The drill of repetitions it is more readily hoped will
wear into the rock, than that grace will dissolve it. A
ihurcL worship is easily taken for piety. Or, if theie be
no external change of the moaes of religion, it is itself
bwered and disempowered, as much as if a lower and
more earthly form were chosen. All the possibilities are
narrowed and shrunk away Expectation is gone— G(X?

OF SUCH GIFTS 465

is loo far off, too mucb imprisoned by laws, t<..» allow ex-
pectation from Him. The Christian world has been gi-av-
italing, visibly, more and more, toward this vanishing
point of faith, for whole centuries, and especially since
ihe modern era of science began to shape the thoughts of
!)ien by only scientific methods. Keligion has fallen int/'
d\e domain of the mere understanding, and so it has be-
come a kind of wisdom not to believe much, therefore to
expect as little.

Now it is this descent to mere rationality that makes
an occasion for the signs and wonders of the Spirit. The
unbelieving and false s|)irit in half-sanctified minds, con-
verts order into immobility, laws into lethargy, and the
piety that ought to be strong because God is great, grow a
torpid and weak under his greatness. Let him now break
forth in miracle and holy gifts, let it be seen that he it?
still the living Grod, in the midst of his dead people, and
they will be quickened to a resurrection by the sight.
Now they see that God can do something still, and has
his liberty. He can hear prayers, he can help them tri-
umph in dark hours, their bosom sins he can help them
master, all his promises in the scripture he can fulfill, and
they go to him with great expectations. They see, in
these gifts, that the scripture stands, that the graces, and
works, and holy fruits of the apostolic age, are also for
cliem. It is as if they had now a proof experimental o'
the resources embodied in the Christian plan. The Living
God, immediately revealed, and not historically only, be-
gets a feeling of present life and power, and religion is no
ii:ore a tradition, a second-hand light, but a grace of God
onto salvation, operative now.

But it will shortly l)ooii. tobe discovered, now, that the

i64 USES AND LA%VS

sin-spirit is weak on the opposite side, and runs to tin
opposite excess. Before, it went back to the understand*
iug, to nature, and lo general unbelief. Now it rushes on
to fanaticism, and has even a pride in believing things
really incredible. It does not follow, because one healr
the sick, or speaks with tongues, that he is therefore cleai
of hn moral infirmities, as a fallen man. He is taken
with the Ptare of multitudes, gives way to a subtle
ambition, magnifies overmuch his particular gift, runs
into shows of conceit, grows impatient of contradiction,
and loosens the rage of passion — by that, driving himself
into even wild excesses both of opinion and practice — and
finally coming to a full end, as one burnt up in the fierce-
ness of his own heat. As before, without the miracles
and the gifts, religion went down to extinction, under the
wear of mere routine, so now the miracles and the gifts
have issued in a wild Corinthianism, which whole chapters
of apostolic lecture can hardly reduce to sobriety. And
the result is, that now all the supernatural demonstrations
are brought into disrespect, and a process begins of oscil-
lation backward, to the ordinary and regular ; then toward
rationalism again, unbelief, and spiritual impotence.

Now, between these two kinds of excess, the church is
always swinging, and by a kind of moral necessity must
be. It is not that Grod's administration is irregular and
desultory, but that such is the unsteadiness and unreliable-
ness of our poor disjointed humanity The oscillation
back toward order and reason, is commonly longer and
niore gradual ; that toward miracles and gifts, shorter and
sharper, because there is more heat and celerity in it, and
less time is requisite to bring it to its limit.

It need hardlj^ be observed thnt every outbreak o/

OF 'J' HE GIFTS. i65

Bupp'.)sed miracle and supernatural demonstration has
run its career in just this manner. It has begun with a
most fervent seeking unto God, and a remarkable single-
iiess of de Virion to Christ. The mighty works appeared
as revelations of divine power, scarcely expected by
the subjects themselves, and there was no excess excep
as the ideas and maxims of a non-expectant piety in the
church, were scandalized by such displays of God. But
there was no sufficient balance in the moral infirmities of a
state of sin, to keep down the passions, and hold in check
the wildness of conceit, and the consequence was, that
the subjects, unable to distinguish what was from God,
and what from themselves, took their thoughts for oracles,
and their fancies for visions, and very shortly ran the
true work of God in them, into the ground. So it has
been hitherto, and so it probably will be, till Fome age or
state is reached, where men are sufficiently modulated
and sobered by truth, to have the heavenly gifts in terms
of heavenly order, and be fired with all highest mount-
ings of love, without setting on fire also ^.he course of na-
ture, in their corrupted hearts and bodies. Then the oscil-
lations, of which we have spoken, will cease, the ordinary
and regular life will be raised up to meet the extraordi-
nary, and become a state of immediate divine knowledge
and experience. Then the extraordinary, the miracles
and gifts, will lose out their explosive violence, and be-
come the steady, calculable quantities of a really godly
life. That is the true kingdom of God, fulfilled in its idea—
His tabernacle pitched with men, Life is new an opec
etat« of first-hand experience, full of God, where the young
men see visions, and the old men dream dreams, withoat
becoming either visionary or dreamy in their exceases,

466 WHY THE LYING W0N1»ER«

where feeling and reason coalesce, and Ibe dear bumilifcj
of love chastens all tke flaming victories of fiiith and
prayer.

It bag been a ver} common thing with christian teach
ers, and even with the writers of deliberate history, to
discredit all appearances of supernatural wonders, sncb
as miracles and spiritual gifts, because they make so bad
a iigure in the end. Whereas the true, and only true test
of them is their beginning. We may as well test the
opposite oscillation in this manner, and because it ends in
the state of unbelief and all impotence — a religion without
life and sanctifying power — have it as our conclusion that
the convictions of order and holy regularity, which it set
up at the beginning, are a dismal and cold illusion, dis-
honored by its fruits. It is, doubtless, true that, as men
judge, the excesses of fanaticism are less respectable than
the excesses of deadness and immobility. It is so, be-
cause the common vote of the w^orld is on that side, mak-
ing it always a most creditable thing to live in such dead-
ness to God and all holy things, as answers no one of the
intelligent uses of life. But whoever ponders thought-
fully the question, will find ample room to doubt, which
is really widest of a just respect, the excesses of fanaticism
and false fire, or the comatose and dull impotence of a
religion that worships God without expectation.

It may occur to some, to raise the question, why ii m,
that the lying wonders of necromancy, and magic, and
demoniacal possessions, are wont to be grouped contem-
poraneously with the true wonders of prophecy and di-
vine gifts. The answer is readily supplied by the general
Bolution of the subject here offered. The two kinds
probably, are not strictly contemporaneous, and it is ver>

ARE ATTENDANT. 43*1

likely that the bad wonders will precede the others, even
as they seem to do just at this particular crisis. For, aftei
all the flxcts and functions of religion are reduced to a
second-hand character — a reported historjj a contrived and
reasoned dogma, a drill of observances, where no fir(
I j urns, and no glimpses into eternity are opened h}
visions and revelations of the Lord, or where no God a}'
pears to be found, who is nigh enough to support ex
pectation in his worshipers — then, at length, even the outel
people of unbelief begin to ache in the sense of vacuity,
and there, not unlikely, the pain is first felt. Their relig-
ious and supernatural instincts have been so long defraud-
ed, that it would be a kind of satisfaction to get the silence
broken, if only by some vision of a ghost — any thing to
show or set open the world unknown. They would even
go hunting, with Clement, for some one to raise them a
spirit. Hence the strange zeal observable in the new
sorcery of our da^^ ^^hy, it shows the other world
as a living fact! proves immortality! does more than any
gospel ever did to certify us of these things! But the
secret of this greedy, undistinguishing haste of delusion
is the sharpness of the previous appetite ; and that was
caused by the abstinence of long privation. We had so
far come into the kingdom of nullities — calling it the
kingdom of God — we had become so rational, and
gotten even God's own liberty into such close terms of
natural order, that the immediate, living realities of re-
ligion, or religious experience, were under a doom of sup
pression. It was as if there were no atmosphere to
breathe, and the minds most remote from the impressiona
and associations of piety, naturally enough felt tie buDger
first. Which hunger, alas ! they are thinking to feed, hjf

30

468 SPORADIC CASES^ DOrBTLESH,

a superstitious trust, in the badly written, silly oraclee oi
our new-diseovered, scientific necromancy. But the churc':.
also, or christian discipleship, begins of course to ache witi
the san:3 kind of pain, feeling after some way out of the
dullness of a second-hand faith, and the dryness oi };
merely reasoned gospel, and many of the most longi ig,
most expectant souls, are seen waiting for some liveKei-,
more apostolic demonstrations. They are tired, beyond
bearing, of the mere school forms and defined notions ;
they want some kind of faith that shows God in living
r.ommerce with men, such as he vouchsafed them in the
former times. And if we can trust their report, they arc
not wholly disappointed. Probably enough, thereforCj
there may just now be coming forth a more distinct and
widely-attested dispensation of gifts and miracles, than
has been witnessed for centuries. If so, it will raise great
expectations of the speedy and last triumph of holiness
in the earth. But these expectations may be delayed.
By and by the subjects of the gifts, or those who think
to go beyond them, may begin to approach the bad ex-
treme on this side. Ambition may stimulate pretense,
and the false heat of passion. Then come wild excesses;
then a general collapse, in which the wonders cease.
And perhaps only this may be gained; that the
sense of something more immediate than a religion of
second causes has been burned into christian souls^
which it will take a century or two to exhaust. How
ever, as the sense of laws becomes more pervasively
fixed in human thought, it is allowed us to believe that,
as the gifts are themselves dispensed by fixed laws, th«
church will gradually come to be in tnem in that marner
and ha^d them in the even way of intelligence.

iS ALL THE PAST AGES. 45S

flolding this general view of miracles, and sapemat-
iiral gifts, it should not surprise us to find sporadic case?
reported here and there, in '.his or that age of the world ;
as little, to fall on periods in the church history, where
large bodies of disciples, driven out into exile, or perse-
cuted and hunted in their own country, are brought so
close to God, and opened so completely to his Spirit, as
to become prophets, and doers of mighty works. It may
not be true in any age of the world, and probably is not,
that such gifts are absolutely discontinued; so that no
supernatural wonder of any kind takes place. Such won-
ders will vary their form ; but in some form, scriptural or
providential, ancient or new, social or only personal, they
could be distinguished probably by any one, having a
sufficient knowledge of facts.

What is wanted, therefore, on this subject, in order in
any sufficient impression, is a full, consecutive inventory
of the supernatural events, or phenomena of the world.
There is reason to suspect that many would, in that case,
be greatly surprised b}' the commonness of the instances.
Could they be collected and chronicled, in their reaJ
multitude, Arhat is now felt to be their strangeness would
quite vanisn away, and possibly they would even seem to
recur, much as in the more ancient times of the world.
But no such revision of history is possible. The material
is accessible only in the most partial manner, and, if it
were all at hand, could not be managed, or even bo
summed up, in such a recapitulation as cur present limits;
will permit.

The first thing arrived at, by any one who prosecnitea
this kind of inquiry, apart from all prepossessions and
saws of tradition, will eertniiilv be, that the clumsy as

4dO srcH Gins appear

'jamptioii commonly held, of a cesaation of the original
apostolic gifts, at about some given date, is forever ex-
ploded; for, as in fact they never consented to be
dia^^ed or concluded by any given time, so in history
I hey peraist in running by all time, till finally the inveati-
calor, unable to set down any date after which they
were not, comes into the discovery that the stream is a
river, flowing continuously through all ages, and always
to flow. He could not give us the wonders of Ignatius^
Poly carp, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Ireneus, Tertul-
lian, Origen, and there declare the point of cessation to
be reached. He would not come down to Cyprian, or
Augustine, and settle it there, or down to Paul the Her
mit, and settle it there. The dreams of Huss, the proph-
esyings of Luther, and Fox, and Archbishop Usher, the
ecstasies of Xavier, with innumerable other wonders, and
visitations of God, in the saints of the church, during all
the intervening ages, bridge the gulf between us and the
ancient times, and bring us to a question of miracles ana
gifts, as a question of our own day and time. Such
demonstrations became more nearly frivolous, when every
thing was frivolous, and more visibly infected with super-
stition, when the church itself fell under the shadow of
this baleful power; but, though the evidences of super-
!\atural facts were correspondently diminished, there was
never any sufficient reason for the conclusion that they
y rre quite gone by and finally discontinued.

It Las been a subject of wonder, that Mr. Newman,
with all his remarkable powers as a writer, and a man o/
genius, should venture on the deliberate ^tiempt tc
vindicate the authenticity of the ch-irch miracles. And
probably enough, it is a fair subject of wonder, eonsidei

TX A LL AGES. 46J

mg that his purpose reqinred him to vindicate as well
those which are trivial and ridiculous as those which weal
the dignity of truth and reason. His argument must, of
course, break down, under such a load of absurdities ; but
it does not follow that a more discriminative argument^
unencumbered by church restrictions, would not fare
differently.

Descending now to the times we call modern, the times,
for example, subsequent to the Reformation, nothing ifl
easier, exactly contrary to the very common impressioiij
than to show that the same kind of prodigies are current
here, in the last three, as in the first three centuries of the
church. Whoever has read that christian classic " The
Scots WortJnes,^^ has followed a stream of prophecies, and
healings, and visible judgments, and specific answers tc
prayer, and discernments of spirits, corresponding, at al
points, with the gifts and wonders of the apostolic age.
And the men that figure in these gifts and powers, are
the great names of the heroic age of religion in their
country — "Wishart, Knox, Erskine, Craig, Davidson
Simpson, Welch, Guthrie, Blair, Welwood, Cameron, Car-
gill, and Peden. And it is a curious fact, in regard to
this great subject, that, while we believe so little, and
deny so much, and hold so many opposite assumptions,
this same book of Howie, that chronicles in beautiful
simplicity more gifts and wonders than all of Irving's,
is published by one of the largest and most conservative
bodies of Christians in our country, and is read by thou-
sands, young and old, with eager delight. Is it that we
like miracles and supernatural wonders, so far off \h.dX we
aeed not, or that we can, believe them ?

At a later period, on the repeal of the edict of Nantz
39*

462 THEY APPEAR SUBSEQUENTLY

and ill the persecutions that folk wed, a large body oi
the Protestant or Reformed di&'iiples, called Huguenot^
hunted by their pursuers, fled to the mountains of Ce-
vennea. Some of them also escaped to England and
other Protestant countries. Among these unhappy peo-
ple the miraculous gifts were developed, and by them
jrere more or less widely disseminated abroad. They had
tongues and interpretations of tongues. They had healings,
and the discerning of spirits. They prophesied in the Spi rit.
Intelligent persons went out from Paris, to hear, observe,
and make inquiry, and these people ^vere much discussed aa
*'Les Trembleurs des Cevennes." In England they were
also discussed, as the "French Prophets," and the fire
they kindled in England, caught among some of the
English disciples, and burned for many years."^

About forty years after this appearing of the gifts
among the Huguenots, a very similar development ap'
peared among the Catholic or Jansenist population of Paris.
Cures began to be wrought at the tomb of Saint M^dard,
and particularly of persons afflicted with convulsions.
And, as the Jansenists were, at this time, under persecu-
tion at the hands of the Jesuits, and bearing witness, aa
they believed, for the truth of Christ, it is not wonderful
that they began to be exercised, much as the Hugue-
nots of the Cevennes had been. They had the gift of
tongues, the discerning of spirits, and the gift of prophe-
Bying, These were called "Convulsionnaires de Sainl
Medard," because of the extatic state into which they
seemed to be raised, f

The sect of Frienis, from George Fox downward, hav«

• Vforuing Witch, VcL lY., n 38-3. f Fb., YoL lY. p. 386.

TO THE REFORMATION 461^

Gad It as a principle, to expeot gifts, revelations, discern-
ings of spirits, and indeed a complete divine ncovemeul;
Thus Fox, over and above his many revelations, wrought,
as nj altitudes believed, works of healing in the sick.
Tnke the following references from the Index of his
"Journal," as affording, in the briefest form, a conception
of the wonders he was supposed, and supposed himself to
have wrought; "Miracles wrought by the power of God —
The lame made whole — The diseased restored — A distracted
woman healed — A great man given over by phj^sicians re-
stored— Speaks to a sick man in Maryland, who was raised
up by the Lord's power — Prays the Lord to rebuke J. C'a
infirmity, and the Lord by his power soon gave him ease.'
Led on thus by Fox, the Friends have always claimed
the continuance of the original gifts of the Spirit in the
apostolic age, and have looked for them, we may almost
say, in 'he ordinary course of their christian demonstra-
tions. We are not surprised, therefore, to find such a
man of policy and incomparable shrewdness as Isaac T.
Hopper, believing as firmly in the prophetic gifts of hia
friend, Arthur Howell, as in thos(3 of Isaiah, or Paul.
This Howell was a preacher and leather currier in Phila-
delphia, a man of perfect integrity in all the business of
his life, and also a most gentle and benignant soul, in
all his intercourse and society with men. One Sunday
morning, on his way to Germantown, he met a funeral pro-
CX?sdion, when, knowing nothing of the deceased, " it waa
(Suddenly revealed to him," so says the liistory, "that tlie
oocupant of the coffin before him was a woman, whose
life had teen saddened by the suspicion of a crime which
she never com,mitted. The impression became strong cs
his mind, that she wished him to make certain stat or'/ frits

464 THESE -i 1 F r S APPEAR

at her fuceral. When the customary services were fin
ished, Arthur Howell rcse and asked \ ermission to speak
"I did not know the deceased even by name," said he
"but it is given me to say that she suffered much, and un-
justly. Her neighbors generally suspected her of a crime
that she did not commit; and, in a few weeks fiom this
dme, it wi]' be clear!}' made manifest that she was inno-
«nt. A few hours before her death, she talked on this
sibject with the clergyman who attended upon her, and
who is now present; and it is now given me to declarf
the communication she made to him on that occasion.''

He then proceeded to relate the particulars of the inter
view; to which the clergyman listened with evident aston
ishment. TThen the communication was finished, he said,
*^I do not know who this man is, or how he has obtained
information on this subject ; but certain it is, that he has
repeated, word for word, a conversation which I supposed
was known only to myself and the deceased."* The ex-
planation came, it is added, in exact accordance with
Howell's promise.

We are brought down, thus, to our own age and time —
IS it credible that the apostolic gifts and all the original
wonders of the church are extant, or in real bestowment,
even now? My aigument does not imperatively require
it of me to go this length, and say that they are. It is only
a little better sustaincl on the supposition that they are.
I am well aware, at the same time, that a sober recapitu-
lation of what appear to be the facts of the question, will
appear to many to be even a kind of weakness. Eaougb
that, consciously to myself, it requires a much stronger
balance of equilibrium, and a much firmer intellectual ju»

•Life of Isaac T Hopper, pp. 258-00.

IN OUR OWN TIME. A6t

tice, saying nothing of the necessary courage, to lepoii
th*3se facts, without any protestations of dissent or dist
credit, than it would to toss them by, with derision, in
compliance wdth the mere conventional notions, and cur-
rent judgments of the times. I shall therefore dare to r>>-
[.ort as true, facts which, neither I, nor my body else, had
(;v-on so much as a tolerable show of reason for denying
or treating with lightness.

How many cases of definite answers to prayers, such as
are reported in the cases of Stilling, Franke, and others,
are brought to our knowledge, every week in the year.
Cases of definite premonition are reported so familiarly
and circumstantially, as to make a considerable item in
the newspaper literature of our time. Prophecies of good
men, or sometimes of poets and other literary men, are su
often and particularly fulfilled, as to be the common won-
der of the merely curious, who profess no faith in theii
verity, as communications from God. Dreams are reported,
how often, foreshadowing facts, in a manner so peculiar, aa
to forbid any supposition of accident, under conditions of
chance. The state of trance is exemplified in Flavel and
Tennent, and indeed hundreds of others, as remarkably as
in Paul, in his vision of the third heaven. Cases are re-
ported in every community, where the defiant wrath of
hlasph'jmy has been suddenly struck down, as by some
bolt of invisible judgment; others, wliere a slowly coming
I tribution has so exactly retaliated the shape of a sin, d.s
■^, raise the impression, that nothing but some direcrag
will of God can account for the correspondence. A great
Eonsation was made in the christian wc-rld, only a few
years ago, by the recurrence of tongues, healings, proplie-
f»ies, and othf:r gifts, both in London, as conuected with

^66 THESE CtIF1\< appear

lije preaching of Mr. Irving, and at Port Glasgow in Scot
laud, in the more humble but not less respectable demon-
•itrations of the two MacDc nalds. The question has beec
very summarily disposed c»f, and the conclusion has beer
generally taken, that these reported cases of spiritual giftJ
7:' ere unworthy of credit — mere hallucinations of the pai-
lies concerned. On a deliberate revision of the question.
T am induced to admit, and, since I have it, to express^
a very different impression. These MacDonalds, for ex-
ample, are men of unimpeachable character, one of them,
(as will be seen, from the cogent articles he wrote, remon
strating against the new churchism taken up at length by
Mr. Irving,) a man of great calmness, and remarkably
well poised in the balance of his understanding. And
yet this man is not only gifted with a power of heal-
ing the sick, but he is overtaken unexpectedly with the
strange gift of tongues ; \nz., an ecstatic utterance, in words
and sounds, which neither he, nor any that hear him, un-
derstand. Now there is nothing in this apparent gibber-
ish, that could any how become a temptation to the enthu-
siast or the pretender. It seems, at first view, to be an
exercise so wide of intelligence, as to create no impression
of respect. And for just that reason it has the stronger
evidence when it occurs; for, notwithstanding all that is
said by the commentators about tongues imparted for the
[•reaching of the gospel, I have found no one of all the
eported cases of tongues, in which the tongue was intelli
gible^ either to the speaker or the hearers, except as it wai'
made so tv a supernatural interpretation — which accorls
exactly, also, with what is said of tongues in the Nev«
Testament. And yet, on second thought, they have all
the greater dignit}^ and propriety, for just the reason thai

ly OUR OWX T]ME 487

they require anv)t"h€r gift to make them intelligible. Foi
this gift of tongues, representing the Divine Spirit as play-
ing the vocal organs of a man, which arc the delivering
powers of intelligence in his organizatiou is designed to
be a symbol to the world of the possibility and fact of a
divine access to the soul, and a divine operation in it — a
symbol more expressive, in fact, than any other could be
And then it is the more exactly appropriate in its adapt-
ation, that it wants another gift in the hearer, exactly cor-
respondent, to understand it or give the interpretation.
For so it is with all revelations of the Spirit, they are not
only uttered or penned by inspiration, but they want a
light of the Spirit in the receiver, to really apprehend thei r
power. Not even the prophets understood their visions.
Besides, there is I know not what sublimity in this gift
of tongues, as related to the gi*eat mystery of language;
suggesting, possibly, that all our tongues are from the
Eternal ^ord, in souls; there being, in his intelligent
nature as Word, millions doubtless of possible tongues, that
are as real to him as the spoken tongues of the world.

Tongues were also spoken every week in London, and
there was much discussion there of the case, in particular,
of Miss Fancourt as a case of healing. She was a crip-
ple, reduced to a bed-ridden state, by a curve of the
spine, and the painful disorder of almost all the joints of
her body. She had been lying for two years on a conchy
padded and curved, to suit her distorted form. Her
family belonged to the established church, and she was
herself a deeply christian person. A christian friend, who
had been greatly interested in her behalf, called one eve-
ning, when the subject of miraculous healing was difl-
\MiS8ed. The friend, Mr. Graves, was a believer in ?uch

fttfS OPINIONS or THINKING MEN

gifts, but Mr. Fancourt, the father, a genuinely chnstittn
person, was not. After a time, he disappeared, and
during his absence from the room, Mr. G. arose, as MLss
h\ supposed, to take his leave. But instead of the " gooii
night" she expected, he commanded her to stand on hct
feet and walk. Forthwith she rose up, stood, walked, wrv?
clear of her pains, took on all the characters of a well
person, and so continued. A great discussion was raiseil
immediately in the public journals, and particularly be-
tween the Morning Watch and the Christian Observe:* ; in
whicli the Observer took precisely the ground of Mr. Hume,
as respects the credibility of miracles performed now ; insist
ing that, henceforth, since the scripture time, "we must ad-
mit any solution rather than a miracle." Little wonder is
It that we have difficulty in sustaining the historic facts of
Christianity, when the most christian, most evangelic
teachers, assume, so readily, the utter incredibility of any
such gifts and wonders as the gospels report, and as they
themselves have it for a righteousness to believe.

But the doubt will be thrust upon us here, at the out-
set, as we come down to our own times — and it might as
well be discussed here, before we proceed to other cases in
hand — whether such things are really credible now, or en-
titled to even so much as the respectful consideration of
thinking men. And I make no question that the clase
called thinking men, in our age, will be readj^, with fei^
e:xceptions, to reject, in the gross, and without hesitation,
all such pretended facts. They are the illusions, it will be
Baid, of ignorant minds, weakened by superstitio a, heated
by religious enthusiasm ; stories that are published, it ma}i
be, with honest intentions, but which any philo80Mho\
vTili dismiss without a moment's consideration.

HAVE LITTLE AJTHURIIY HERE. 4:0*

But whoever is ready, in this manner, I reply, to erect
the thinking men of an age, into a tribunal of authori-
tative judgment on such questions, has studied history to
little purpose. There certainly is such a thing as religious
delusion, or a faith of ignorance, in the world, and the
humbler class of people are somewhat more exposed to
this kind of infirmity. But their demonstrations have
never been as eccentric, or their mistakes as contagious,
or as difficult to rectify, as those of the thinking class. In
matters of thought and opinion, there is no end either to
the new crudities generated, or the newer criticisms by
which they are extirpated. New types of thought sway
the successive ages. One school, or system, expels an-
other. Nothing rests, nothing gets a final form, in which
it either can or ought to stand. The thinking and
educated class of minds, too, are less capable of many
truths, because they are so generally preoccupied, wit-
tingly or unwittingly, by a contrary fashion, and have
Buch an implicit faith in what the learned world pretends
just then to have settled. On which account, our
Saviour himself was obliged to seek his adherents, and
raise up his apostles, among the ingenuous and humble
poor, saying — I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven
and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise
and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. The
wise and prudent knew so much, as even to be incapable
of faith in him; and if there had been no other class
tut these learned gentlemen, these thinking men of their
time, he would scarcely have left a follower. But tn«
fishermen, the babes of poverty, were less preoccupied,
and capable of better things. And for just this reason,
abating their greater exposure to fantastic and extrava-

iO

470 OPINIONS :)F THINKING MEN

eant delusions, it will be found, as a matter of fact, thai
Lhe gospel of Christ has been more geDuiuely anri
evenly held, among this class, than it has among the
professors and learned disciples. They testify one faith,
and Uve one common life of grace, in all ages.

In view of considerations like these, how much does ii
lignify, that the thinking men of our time are so ready
to pronounce on the incredibility, or even inadmissibility,
<)f the supernatural facti just referred to? Nothing, it
may be, but simply this ; that the human iQind, as edu-
cated mind, is just now at the point of religious apogee;
where it is occupied, or preoccupied by nature, and can not
think it rational to suppose that God does any thing
longer, vvhich exceeds the causalities of nature. Is there,
m this, any proper ground of assurance, that, within fifty
years from this time, it will not be set in a position to re-
gard the ftiith of supernatural facts, as being even neces-
sary to the rationality, and the complete system of the
universe? If, as I have shown, by the argument here con-
structed, we act supernaturally ourselves, and if the fact
of sin supposes a higher ground of unity in God's plan
than is comprehended in mere nature, what less ought we
to expect, than that, when the thinking mind of the world
has finally worn a way through natuie, ceasing to be ham-
pered and shut in by it as now, it will strike into a brop.d-
er field, and be as ready to believe these supernatiLraJ
facts, as it is at present to reject them ? Indeed, there is
a kind of law in skepticism itself, that must final .y bring
it back from its denial of a supernatural revelation, to a
hearty and hungry embrace of it ; for, no longer staggered
by the supposition, as thousands now are, that the s< rip-
turcs represent a dispensation gone by, which is hence

HAVE LITTLE AUTHORITY IIEUK 471

forth incredible, it will finally discover that they may hi
rationally believed, for just the reason that God is doing
si [nilar wonders now. And as certainly as no human soul
can rest in mere negation, or, what is no better, in nature
ns the only medium and symbol of religion, this discove/y
will be made. There are, in fact, two roads into this faith^
the direct road, and the indirect or round-about road of
doubt and denial. One is taken by the humble, godly
souls, whose only want it is to find their Lord, and walk
with him ; these go straight in, to his seat, know him in
his private testimony, and the glorious induement of his
power. The others, wanting only to find him scientifi
cally, begin at nature, jealous of all but nature. They
go round and round their idol, looking to find a Creator,
and Christianity, and a present living God, in it, and, aftei
they have torn their feet long enough, in beating through
the briars of scientific reason, they will finally come in,
as laggards, weary and sore, and join themselves to the
little ones of faith, saying truly, "this, after all, is rea-
son; to believe the scriptures, just because the God
of the scriptures is the God of to-day; as conversable
now as ever, working as mightily, redeeming as glori-
ously ; to believe in the supernatural, too, because we be-
lieve in nature; which, without and apart from thi? necea
sar}^ complement, were only a worthless abortion, a ^V^c
tion whose integer is lost."

It is also a matter worthy of particular note, when ^V€
are falling into the impression, that a verdict of the think-
ing men of our time, is entitled to authority on such a
question as this, that we have so many characters in
iiistory which they can no way interpret, and which are
m fact impossible to exist, under their theory. How

472 THEY MAKE SO GOOD ACCOUNT

awkwardly do they handle such characters, and hoi«
poorly do they get on in their attempts to solve, or evei)
to conceive them Joan of Arc, for instance— who had
Dot observed the strange figure of imbecility made *>y
the. modern school of literary unbehef, in the attcmpv to
find a place for any such character? They can do nothing
with her. In their view, she is impossible. And yet sho
nas a place in history, and enters into the public life of
the French nation, as a determining cause of great events,
Id the same manner as Charlemagne, or any celebrated
commander. She is a phenomenon, for which naturalism
has no account, and which, under that kind of philosophy,
had no right to happen. It can say that she was a prod-
igy of straw got up by the leaders, who sought in that
manner to retrieve the desperate state of their cause ; or,
that she was insane ; or that she was romantic ; or that
she was a nervous and flighty girl, doing she scarce knew
what ; or, finally, that she is a myth, and no real person-
age. And yet the history laughs at all such wisdom,
showing us a character real and true, that refuses to be
explained by any such feeble inventions in the plane of
nature, and can be nowise comprehended in that manner.
She begins to be intelligible only when she is classed with
Deborah, as a chieftain called out from the retirement of
her sex, by the election of God, and prepared, supernatu-
rally, in the place of secret vision.

The same thing, in general, may be said of the intei-
preters of Cromwell. Nothing can be made of him as a
mere natural man. Hume and Clarendon call h:m a re-
ligious hypocrite; as if a hypocrite could be a heiot
Lamartine, simply because he believes in a light which is
not church lig^ht. calls him a f^matic. Carlvle is wiser

OF KNOWN HISTORIC CHARACIERS. 473

and, as far as possible, contrives to let him report hiniself:
but as soon as be chances to loosen his own self-retention,
for a moment, and let us see the man through his panthe-
Lstic glasses, a strange letting down will be observed, how-
ever slight or casual the glimpse taken — it is Cromwell by
mooidight, and not the real hero. He ceases to be m*
ijpired, and begins to phosphoresce. He is no more a
battle-axe, swung by the Lord Almighty, but one that lays
on automatically, with force enough to make us think
that he is. He is great in his faith, only it turns out that
his faith, meeting no real object, is, though he thinks it
not, a merely subjective impulse. Known to be a stout
predestinarian, he is fitly shown to be a thunder
shock in battle, as by the momentum of God's eternal
will in his person ; only it is recollected that predestina-
tion, by God, is more philosophically phrased by the
single word destiny ; a force without will, or counsel, oi
end. He is great in power therefore, invincible, irresisti-
ble, as being set on by the universal Nobody. Is this
Cromwell? No genuine Cromwell is found, till he is
shown by the side of Moses, a man who takes power as a
ourden set upon him by God, and wields it only the more
sternly and faithfully, as power; a man "not eloquent,"
but "slow of speech," coming down out of the mount,
where God has taught him, to be the leader, liberator,
and lawgiver of his people. This is the view of Croni-
vell toward which historic criticism runs more and more
distinctly, and when, at some futura day :)ur literature
has gotten over the shallows of naturalism, and dares to
speak of faith, this will be the Cromwell shown. He
may not be counted a man equal to Moses, but all that is
most distinctive and greatest in his life will an certainly

40*

i74 SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANT

be refoired to a supernatural ard diviQC movemeDt ii
him.

And how many characters are there in the history of
our modern world, who can as little be conceived on tLe
footing of mere nature, as these. Savonarola, the " fanatic"
of history, will emerge, not unlikely, clad in the honoia
<^f a prophet. So of Columbus, Fenelon, Fox, Frankc, and
a thousand others, who walked, consciously or uncon-
sciously, by a supernatural instigation — they were nothing,
it will be seen, save by the secret inspiration that bore
them on. And how many of God's little ones, living and
dying in obscurity, have yet done as great wonders in
His name, as if they had been teachers and heroes.

But why is it, some will ask, that we have only to hear
of these things, and do not see them ? Why must we
know them only through a degree of distance that takes
away knowledge? But the truth is not exactly so. We
come a great deal closer to them than we think. Having
had this great question of supernatural fact upon my
hands now for a number of years, in a determination also
to be concluded by no mere conventionalities, to observe,
inquire, listen, and judge, I have been surprised to find
how many things were coming to my knowledge and
acquaintance, that most persons take it for granted are
utterly incredible, except in what they call the age of
miracles and apostolic gifts ; that is, in the first three cen-
tuiies of the church. Indeed, they are become so famil-
iar, after only a few years of attention thus directed, and
without inquiring after them, that their unfamiliar and
strange look is gone; they even appear to belong, more oi
less commonly, to the church and the general economy oi
the Spirit.

IN OUK OWN TIMES. 475

1 will instance, first of all, a case not so clearly re-
LTgious, but explicable in no way, by the mere causalities
9f nature. As I sat by the fire, one stormy Novembei
night, in a hotel parlor, in the Napa Valley of Californifi,
there came in a most venerable and benignant looking
[■/orson, with his wife, taking their seats in the circle.
The stranger, as I afterward learned, was Captain Yonnt,
a man who came over into California, as a trapper, more
than forty years ago. Here he has lived, apart from the
great world and its questions, acquiring an immense landed
estate, and becoming a kind of acknowledged patriarch
in the country. His tall, manly person, and his gracious,
paternal look, as totally unsophisticated in the expression,
as if he had never heard of a philosophic doubt or ques-
tion in his life, marked him as the true patriarch. The
conversation turned, I know not how, on spiritism and
the modern necromancy, and he discovered a degree of
inclination to believe in the reported mysteries. His
wife, a much younger and apparently christian person,
intimated that probably he was predisposed to this kind
of faith, by a very peculiar experience of his own, and
evidently desired that he might be drawn out by some
intelligent discussion of his queries.

At my request, he gave me his story. About six or
ieven years previous, in a mid-winter's night, he had a
dream, in which he saw what appeared to be a company of
t migrants, arrested by the snows of the mountains, and
^verishing rapidly by cold and hunger. He noted the very
cast of the scenery, marked by a huge perpendicular front
of white rock cliff; he ?aw the men cutting off what ap-
peared to be tree tops, rising out of deep gulfs of snow .
he distinguished the very features of the persons, and tlie

*76 SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANT

look of their particular distress. He woke, piofoumllj
impressed with the distinctness and apparent reality of his
dream. At length he fell asleep, and dreamed exactly tLe
eanie dream again. In the morning he could noC expel
it from his mind. Falling in, shortly, with an old hunter
comrade, he told him the story, and was only the more
deeply impressed, by his recognizing, without hesitation,
the scenery of the dream. This comrade came over the
Sierr^ by the Carson Valley Pass, and declared that a spoi
in the pass answered exactly to his description. By this
the unsophisticated patriarch was decided. He immedi-
ately collected a company of men, with mules and blank
ets, and all necessary provisions. The neighbors were
laughing, meantime, at his credulity. '' No matter," said
he, ''I am able to do this, and I will, for I verily believe
that the fact is according to my dream." The men wen;
sent into the mountains, one hundred and fifty miles dis
tant, directly to the Carson Valley Pass. And there the^
found the company, in exactly the condition of the dream,
and brought in the remnant alive.

A gentleman present said, "you need have no doubt
of this; for we Californians all know the facts, and the
names of the families brought in, who now look upon
our venerable friend as a kind of saviour. These names
he gave, and the places where they reside, and I found,
afterward, that the California people were ready, every
« here, to second his testimony.

Nothing could be more natural, than for the good-
hi-jarted patriarch himself to add, that the brightest thing
m his life, and that which gave him greatest joy, was his
simple faiih in that dream. I thought also I could see m
that joy, the glimmer of a true christia?i love and 'ife

IS OUR OWN TIMLS. 47/

into -which, unawares to himself, he had really been en-
tered bj that faith. Let any one attempt now to accoant
for the coincidences of that dream, bj mere natural caa^ali-
ties, and he will be glad enough to ease his labor, by the
acknowledgment of a supernatural Providence.

I fell in also, in that new world, with a diffeient
and more directly christian example, in the case of an
acquaintance, whom I had known for the last twenty
years; an educated man, in successful practice as a physi-
cian ; a man who makes no affectations of piety, and puta
on no airs of sanctimony; living always in a kind of jovial
element, and serving ever}- body but himself. He laughs
at the current incredulity of men, respecting prayer, and
relates many instances, out of his own experience, to show
— for that is his doctrine — that God will certainly hear
every man's prayer, if only he is honest in it. Among
others, he gave the following: — He had hired his little
house, of one room, in a new trading town that was plant-
ed last year, agreeing to give a rent for it of ten dollars
per month. At length, on the day preceding the rent day,
he found that he had nothing in hand to meet the pay-
ment, and could not see at all whenc^j the money was to
come. Consulting with his wife, they agreed that prayer,
io often tried, was their only hope. They went, accord-
ingly to prayer, and found assurance that their want should
be supplied. That was the end of their trouble, and there
they lested, dismissing farther concern. But the morning
came, and the money did nor. The rent owner made his
apjjcarance earlier than usual. As he entered the cL-»^r»
their hearts began to sink, whispering that now, for
once, they must give it up, and allow that prayer Lad
Failed. But before the .demand was made, a ueiglibor

<78 SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANf

coming in, called out the untimely visitor, engaging liia
in conversal ion, a few minutes, at the door. Meantime a

stranger came in, saying, "Dr. 1 owe you ten dollars^

for attending me in a fever, at such a time, and here is the
money." He could muster no recollection, either of the
laan or of the service, but was willing to be convinced, and
50 had the money in hand, after all, when the demand waa
made. When Stilling and Franke recite their multitudes
of specific answers to prayer, their reports are very hast-
ily discredited by many, because of their strangeness.
But I have heard so many examples, personally, of the
kind just cited, that I begin to think they are even com-
mon.

Nothing is farther off from the christian expectation
of our New England communities, than the gift of tongues.
So distant is their practical habit from any belief in the
possible occurrence, that not even the question occurs to
their thought. And yet, a very near christian friend, intel-
ligent in the highest degree, and perfectly reliable to me
as my right hand, who was present at a rather private,
social gathering of christian disciples, assembled to con-
verse and pray together, as in reference to some of the
higher possibilities of christian sanctification, relates that,
after one of the brethren had been speaking, in a strain
of discouraging self-accusation, another present shortly
rose, with a strangely beaming look, and, fixing his eye
en the confessing brother, broke out in a disccnirse cf
sounds, wholly unintelligiV.^, though apparently a true
language, accompanying the utterances with a very strange
and peculiarly impressive gesture, such as he never made
at any other time; coming finally to a kind of pause,
and commencing again, as if at the same point, to go ovo:

IN OUR OWN TIMES. 479

m Englisli, with exactly the same gestures, what had just
been said. It appeared to be an interpretation, and the
matter of it was, a beajtifully emphatic utterance of thu
great principle of self-renunciation, by which the desired
victory over self is to be obtained. There had been n..;
'Xjnversation respecting gifts of any kind, and no rei-
s/ence to their possibility. The circle were astounded
by the demonstration, not knowing what to make of
it. The instinct of prudence threw them on observing
a general silence, and it is a curious fact that the public

in H have never, to this hour, been startled by so

much as a rumor of the gift of tongues, neither has the
name of the speaker been associated with so much as a
surmise of the real or supposed fact, by which he would
be, perhaps, unenviably distinguished. It has been a
great trial to him, it is said, to submit himself to this
demonstration ; which has recurred several times.

I have heard also of as many as three distinct cases of
healing near at hand; one where a father whose nearly
grown-up daughter, supposed to be near to death, under
the ravages of a brain fever, ;vas permitted, in answer
to his pr.ayers, to see her rise up almost immediately, and
the next day walking forth completely well; one where a
bad and dangerous swelling was immediately cared; an-
other where a sick man was restored, when life wita
despaired of by his family.

In addition to these more domestic examples, I becumf'
h j][uainted, about two years ago, in a distant part oi ilie
world, with an English gentleman, whose faith in the gift
of healing had been established by his own personal ex-
ercise of it He was a man whose connections and culture
whose well-formed, tall, and robust lookini? person, whose

*80 SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANT

beautifully simple and humble manners, and whoso blame
less, universally respected life among strangers not of th<
same fait.i, and knowing him only by his virtues and the
sacrifices he was making for his opinions, were so many
conspiring tokens winning him a character of confidence,
tl^at excluded any rational distrust of his representationik
Ee gave me a full account, in manuscript, of some of the
cases in which the healing power appeared to be given him,
with liberty to use them, as may best serve the convenience
of ray present subject.

It became a question with him, soon after his conver-
sion, whether, as he had been healed spirituall}^, he ought
not also to expect and receive the healing of his body by
the same faith; for he had then been an invalid for a long
time, with only a slender hope of recovery. After a hard
struggle of mind, he was able, dismissing all his prescribed
remedies, to throw himself on God, and w^as immediately
and permanently made whole.

At length, one of his children, w^hom he had with him,
away from home, was taken ill with a scarlet fever. And
"now the question was," I give his own w^ords. "what
was to be done? The Lord had indeed healed my own
sicknesses, but would he heal my son? I conferred with
a brother in the Lord, who, having no faith in Christ's heal
ing power, urged me to send instantly for the doctor, and
dis] atched his groom on horseback to fetch him. Before
the doctor arrived, my mind was filled with revelation oi-
the S'lbject. I saw that I had fallen into a snare, by turn-
ing away from the Lord's healing hand, to lean m medicai
skill. I felt grievously condemned in my conscience. A
feur also feM on me. that if I persevered in this unbeliev-
ing course, my son would die, as his eldest bn ither had

IN OUR OWN TIMES. 4Sj

rhe symptoms in both were precisely similar. The doc-
tor arrived. My son, he said, was suffering from a scarlcl
fever, and medicine should be sent immediately. While
he El Dod prescribing, I resolved to withdraw the child, and
cast him on the Lord. And when he was gone, I callen
the nurse and told her to take the child into the nursei 7
and lay him on the bed. I then fell on my knees confess-
ing the sin I had committed against the Lord's healing
power. I also prayed most earnestly that it would please
my Heavenly Father to forgive my sin, and to show that
he forgave it, by causing the fever to be rebuked. I re-
ceived a mighty conviction that my prayer was heard,
and I arose and went to the nursery, at the end of a long
passage, to see what the Lord had done, and on opening
the door, to my astonishment, the boy was sitting up in
his bed, and on seeing me cried out, *I am quite well and
want to have my dinner.' In an hour he was dressed,
and well, and eating his dinner; and when the physic ar-
rived it was cast out of the window. Next morning the
doctor returned, and on meeting me at the garden gate,
he said, 'I hope your son is no worse!' 'He is very well,
I thank 3"ou,' said 1, in reply. 'What can you mean,' re-
joined the doctor. 'I will tell you, come in and sit down.*
I then told him all that had occurred, at which he fairly
gasped with surprise. 'May I see 3'our son,' he asked.
* Certainly, doctor, but I see that you do not believe.' We
proceeded up stairs, and my son was playing with hia
brother, on the floor. The doctor felt his pulse and said,
'Yes, the fever is gone.' Finding also a fine, healthy
aui'face on his tongue, he added, 'Yes, he is quite well, I
suppose it was the crisis of hi.=; diseased"

A.uother of the 'oses which he reports, sTiows more fuily

41

l82 SUCU FACTS ARE ABCNDANT

the Tvorking of his own mind, on the instant of healing
It was the case of a poor man's child, who had heard
tnm advocate the faith of healing, and, now that the phy
sician, after attending him for many months of illness,
had given the little patient up, saying that he could do nc
/nore, the parsnts sent for him, in their extremity, to
co*ne and heal i^heir son. He replied to the father, "My
dear friend, I can not heal your son, I can do nothing to
help him. All that I can do is to ask you to kneel down
and pray with me, to Christ, that we may know what is
his will in this matter." " He immediately knelt down with
me, and," the written account continues, "my prayer was a
reminding of the Lord Jesus Christ of his mercy to the
sick, when he was on the earth, and that he never sent
any sick away, unhealed. I then presented the petition
of the fiither and mother, that their son might be healed,
and besought the Lord to show what his will was in the
case. Whilst I was making the supplication, it was re-
vealed to me, through the Holy Spirit, that I was to lay
hands on the boy, and receiving, at the time, great faith to
do so, I arose and, not wishing to be observed by the fa-
ther, I laid my hand on the lad's head, and said in a low
tone of voice — ' I lay my hand on thee in the name of
Jesus Christ.' In an instant I saw color rush into his
pale cheeks, and it seemed as if a glow of health was giv-
en, insomuch that I said involuntarily, 'I think your li'on
IV ill recover.' I '.hen hastily left the room. In less than
an houi tlie mother came to my house and insisted on
seehig me, to tell ma the wonderful things that had hap-
pened u her son. The result was that the boy was aboui
the next day."

The otuer cases narrated by him, are scarcely less re

TN- OUR OWN TIMES. 488

fliarkable. At the same time, he admits, with character-
istic ingenuousness, that no such gift has been vouchsafed
him Gow, for a number of years, and that most of the ex-
pectations he had in connection with the apostolic wonder^
thus restored, have been disappointed. What God s design
was, in the gift thus temporarily bestowed, is a profouii\3
mystery to him, and he submits himself calmly in it to the
better, though inscrutable wisdom of God. Probably
enough, the reason of his gift was exhausted in affording,
to these truths of faith, that evidence which is necessary
to their just equilibrium.

I have hesitated much whether to speak of a case that,
in all its varied stages, has been under my own personal
inspection, and I am decided by the consideration that,
while it shows no healing, by a gift, it does show, only the
more convincingly, a supernatural grace of healing entered
into the faith of the subject herself. She is an intelligent,
well-educated young woman, of a more than commonly
strong and somewhat restive natural temperament, the
daughter of a christian man, living in rather depressed cir-
cumstances, but profoundly respected for his character.
Eleven years ago this daughter, who before had begun to
show symptoms of disease, in a considerable distortion of the
spine, became a great sufferer in the still worse complica-
tions of a hip disease. I have never looked on such
ecenes of distress in any other case, and hope I may nevei
witness such again. Several times she was given up by
her physicians, and her death was expected daily; I
should hardly tell the whole truth, if I did not say, longed
for, even more constantly. After about two years, how-
ever, her disease took a more quiet shape, and the suffei-
ing was greatly diminished. Thus she lay for nine long

tS4 SUCH FACTS ARE ABVNUANT

yeais of lielplessness, with both feet drawn up under h«;i
and C)ne of them so close that it was difficult to get in a
thickn(iss of cloth under the knee, to prevent inflainma
tion. The physicians agreed that there was nothiiig
more to be done, and that she must wait her time; whijlt
after a while, she had learned to do, with the sweetest pa
tience and equanimity. Every impulse in her restive na^
ture was now tamed to God's will, and she blessed the
hand which was pressing her so close to the divine friend-
ship. If inquired of, at any time, whether she would like
to get well, she uniformly answered, "No;" adding that
she was afraid she might not stand fast, but might turn
away from her fidelity, in which she was now so pro-
foundly peaceful and happy.

But it occurred to her finally that, if God could restore
her, he might also keep her, and the question arose
whether she ought not to trust Him. At last, she was
Leginning to think it might be her duty to believe in God's
healing as well as keeping, and in that manner to pray.
Having some attack of acute disease, a physician was
called in, and, after the attack was quelled, he began to
give some hopeful answers to her queries about the possi-
bility of a restoration of her limbs. Shortly before this,
too, her father, who was visited with a great accumulation
of trials, went through an awful struggle with Srod's jus-
tice, rising up against him in agonies of accusation. But
he was quelled and comforted, and filled, as the result,
•with all divinest peace. And shortly after that, he had a
dream, which presented his daughter as well, completely
healed, before him. But it raised no expectation, eithei
then or afterward, and he does not refer to it now as hav
ing had any connection at all with the subsequent facts--

IN OUK OWN TIMES. 48^

he does not mach confide in dreams. Bii: his duughtei
was beginning now to believe that £De might be made
well, and really set herself to it as her settled faith ; an 1
he himself was allowing, often, the thought that possibly
it might somehow be otherwise with her. Remedies were
not discarded, but applied faithfully and perse veringly.
The problem was, how to use natural causei^ with a
faith in supernatural helps. In a short time the limbs
were brought down, one of them to touch the floor, then
both, then she stood, and next she walked. I knew the
change that was going on, but, not having seen her for
some weeks, I was none the less surprised, when walking
in a neighboring street, to see her skipping down a high
flight of steps, with scarcely a perceptible token of lame-
ness. Ask her family now what this means, and by what
power it has come to pass, and they answer promptly,
"by the power of God." She herself says the same, an-
swering out of her own consciousness. She believes that
tier physician has done well, and that God sent him to be
a minister to her faith, but she declares that she ha£, all
the while felt the vigor coming into her by and through
her faith, and that, when she first stood, she consciously
stood by a divine power, and could no more have stood
without the sense of it, or the day before it came, r,han
she could have supported the world. This protesti.tion
of hers I feel bound to honor ; though very well aware
that the case may be turned, by saying that the second
causes appealed to wrought the cure. But is it not m,«it;
philos(jphical, a great deal, to take the inward testimony
of the subject, and see the higher ccnsciousness of her
faith struggling with the remedies, and contributing a
force superior, in fact to all ren.edies? Indeed, I have 8

41*

48« SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANT

peculiar satisfaction in the facts of tlis case, just becaus*
the natural and supernatural are so rationally and soundly
combined. The problem of their possible concurrence ifi
evenly held, and there is time enough occupied, in the
cure, to show a process. "Go to the pool of Siloam, au.l
wash " — even Christ himself used nature as a means, tc
provoke the necessary faith, when nature had, in fact, no
virtue in itself.

I cite only one more witness; a man who carries the
manner and supports the office of a prophet, though with-
out claiming the repute of it himself. He is a fugitive
from slavery, whose name I had barely heard, but whose
character and life have been known to many in our com-
munity, for the last twenty years. He called at my door,
about the time I was sketching the outline of this chapter,
requesting an interview. As I entered the room, it wag
quite evident that he was struggling with a good deal of
mental agitation, though his manner was firm, and even
dignified. He said immediately, that he had come to me
"with a message from de Lord." I replied, that I was
glad if he had any so good thing as that for me, and hoped
he would deliver it faithfully. He told me, in terms of
great delicacy, and with a seriousness that excluded all
appearance of a design to win his way by flattery, that he
had conceived the greatest personal interest in me, be-
cause, in hearing me once or twice, he had discovered
that God was torching me, and discovering Himself to me
ik a way that was specially hopeful ; and that, for this
very reaso~, he had been suffering the greatest personal
burdens of feeling on my ac<^ount. For more than a year
he had been praying for me. and someti:nes in the nighty
iecause of his apprehension that I had made a false step

IN OUR OWN TIMES. 481

and been disobedient to the heavenly vision. During all
this time, he had been struggling also with the question,
whether he might come and see me, and testify his con-
I'.ern for me ? One must be a very poor christian, not tc
be deeply touched by such a discovery— one of the hum-
blest of God's children, a stranger, trembling and watch-
ing for him, in his place of obscurity, and daring, only
with the greatest difficulty, to come and disburden ui
heart.

I asked him to explain, and not to suffer any feeling of
constraint. In a manner of the greatest deference possi-
ble, and with a most singularly beautiful skill, he went
on, gathering round his point, and keeping it all the whil",
concealed, as he was nearing it, straightening up his tall,
manly form, dropping out his Africanisms, rising in th(i
port of his language, beaming with a look of intelligence
and spiritual beauty, all in a manner to second his pro-
phetic formulas — " The Lord said to me " thus and thus ;
'* The Lord has sent me to say ;" till I also, as I gazed
upon him, was obliged internally to confess, "verily,
Nathan the prophet has come again!" It was really a
scene such as any painter might look a long time to find —
Buch dignity in one so humble; expression so lofty, and
yet so gentle and respectful ; the air of a prophet so com-
nianding and positive, and yet in such divine autliority,
as to allow no sense of forwardness or presumption.

It came out, finally, as the burden of the message, that
on a certain occasion, and in reference to a certain pubiir
matter, I had undertaken that which could not but with
draw me from God's teaching, and was certain tc obscure
tlie revelations otherwise ready and waiting to be mada
''Yes," I replied, "but there was nothing wrorg in vhat

l88 SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANT

I undertook to set forward. It brought no scandal Ji
religion. It concerned, you will admit, the reai Uen^tfii
of the public, in all future times." "Ah, yes," he an
Rwered, " it was well enough to be done, but it was tK i
for you. God had other and better things for you. He
was calling you to Himself, and it was yours to go with
Him, not to be laboring in things more properly belong
ing to other men." I had given him the plea, by ;vhich,
drawing on my natural judgment, I had justified myself
in going into the engagement in question. Indeed, to
have had any scruple on this account, I have no aoubt,
would be commonly considered, by intelligent persons, to be
even a weakness. And yet, I am obliged to confess to a
strong, and even prevalent impression, that my humble
brother was right. For the real stress of his message lay,
not so much in the particular instance referred to, as in
that more general infirmity or mistake, which the instance
might be used to represent ; viz., the tendency of every
most earnest scul to be diverted from its aims, by things
external. His spiritual perceptions were deep enough to
la}^ hold of a general infirmity, which was only the mort
impress! vel}' corrected by a particular example, and, in
chis manner, his piercing words of love were answered by
the settled assent of my christian consciousness.

I thanked him for his message, and even looked ujDon
liim with a kind of reverence as we parted. I found, or
i'.iquiry. that he was a man without blame, industrious
pure, a husband and father faithful to his office, and
always in the same high key of christian living. But
the people of his color, knowing him well, and having
nothing to say against him, could yet offer no opinion at
h11 coftcerninp: him. He was plainly enough a strange

IN OUR OWN TIMES. 489

being to them ; thej could make nothing of him. The
most thej could saj was, that he is always the same.

I have since visited him, in his little shop, and drawn
out of him the story of his life. He became a Christian
about the time of his arrival at manhood, and gives a very
cle-ar and beautiful account of his conversion. And the
Lord, he says, told him, at that time, that he should be
fiee, soul and body. To which he answered, "Yea Lord,
I know it." A promise that was afterward fulfilled in a
very strange and wonderful deliverance. I observed that,
in the account he gave me, he was continually saying, in
the manner of the prophets, "the Lord said," and "the
Lord commanded," and "the Lordpromised," and I called
his attention to the fact, asking — what do you mean
by this? Do you hear words audibly spoken? "Oh
no." "What then? Do you think what appears to
be said to you, and call that the saying of the
Lord?" "Yes, I think it— but that is not all." "How

then do you know that it is any thing more than 's

thought?" "Well, I know it, I feel it to be not from me,
and I can tell you things that show it to be so ;" reciting
facts, which, if they are true, prove beyond a question
the certainty of some illumination not of himself. "Why
then," I asked, "does God teach you in this manner and
not me ? I feel a strong conviction, sometimes, that I am
m the will, I know not how, and the directing counsel c f
God, but 1 could never say, as you do, Hhe Lord said
thus to me.^" "Ah," said he, "but you have the means —
you can read as I can not, you have great leaniing. But
f am a poor, ignorant child, and God does with me just
as he can." Whatever may be thought of his revelations
tione, T think, will deny him, in his reply, the credit of s

490 AND STILL Wii ARE SLOW

true philosophy. What can be worthier of Q:d than M
be the guide of this faithful, and otherwise dejected man.
making up for liis privations of ignorance, by the fallc/
and more open vision of Himself?

And yet I should leave a wrong impression, were
I not to say, that this christian fugitive, this un-
lettered body servant, now, of Christ, as once of hii
earthly master, is deep in the wisdom of the scriptures,
quotes them continually with a remarkable eloquence
and propriety, and with a degree of insight which
man}^ of the best educated preachers might envy.
He also believes that God has healed the sick, in
many instances, in immediate connection with hia
Drayers, giving the names and particulars without
scruple.

Such now are the kinds of religious exercises and
demonstrations that are still extant, even in our own time,
in certain walks of society. In that humbler stratum of
life, where the conventionalities and carnal judgments of
the world have less power, there are characters blooming
in the holiest type of christian love and beauty, who talk,
and pray, and, as they think, operate apostolically, as it
God were all to them that he ever was to the church, ii)
the days of her primitive grace. And it is much to know
Ihat, while the higher tiers of the wise and prudent arc
assuming, so confidently, the absolute discontinuance <>[
all apostolic gifts, there are yet, in every age, great num-
bois of godly souls, and especially in the lower ranges of
life, to whom the conventionalities of opinion are nothing,
and the walk with God every thing, who dare to claim an
Dpen state with Him ; to pray with the same expectation,
and to speak of faith in the same manner, as if they had

TO BELIEVE WHAT IS CREDIBLE 491

lived in tlis apostolic times. And tliey are not the r.oisy,
violent class, who delight in the bodily exercises that
profit little, mistaking the fumes of passion for the rtive-
lations of God, but they are, for the most part, such aa
walk in silence, and dwell in the shades of obscurity.
And that man has lived to little purpose, who has not
learned that what the great world pities, and its teachers
disallow, even though mixed with tokens of weakness, is
many times deepest in truth, and closest to the real sub-
limities of life and religion.

That I may not leave a wrong impression, or an
impression that is not according to truth, I feel obliged
to add, in concluding this chapter, that I do not
seem to be as positive and full in my faith on this
subject as I ought to be, and as my arguments them-
selves may seem to indicate. As regards the general
truth that supernatural facts, such as healings, tongues,
and other gifts may as well be manifested now aa
at any former time, and that there has never been a
formal discontinuance, I am perfectly satisfied. I know
no proof to the contrary that appears to me to have
a straw's weight. And yet, when I come to the ques-
tion of being in such gifts, or of receiving into easy
credit those who appear to be, I acknowledge that,
for some reason, either because of some latent subjection
to the conventionalities of philosophy, or to the worse
conventionalities of sin, belief does not follow, save in
a somewhat faltering and equivocal way. Arguraenta
for the possibility are good, but evidences for the facjt do
not correspond. But there is nothing peculiar in tVis; it
s even so with many great questions of God and ii in) or

492 SLOW TO BE.LIEVK.

tality. The arguments are good and clear, but, for somt
reason, they do not make faith, and we are still surpritec
to find, in our practice, that we only doubtfully believe
To believe these supernatural things, in the form of par-
ticular facts, is certainly difficult; and how consciou.^
are we, as we set ourselves to the questions, of the
weakness of our vacillations! Pardon us. Lord, that
when we make so much of mere credibilities and ra-
tionalities of opinion, we are yet so slow to believe,
that what we have shown to be credible and rational, ifl
actually coming to pass.

CHAPTER XV.

COKCLUSION STATED-USES AND RESULTS.

Tre course of argument proposed in this treatise is iio^
cotn})leted. It only remains to state, as definitely as may
be, liow far it goes, or in what way and degree it estab-
lishes the main point in issue; and also to gather up some
of the remote and subordinate results that appear to be
involved in it.

It was undertaken, mainly, to establish the credibility
and historic fact of what is supernatural in the christian
gospels. The problem was, in fact, to frame an argument
that, on one hand, will virtually settle the question of a
mythical origin of the gospels, without going into a direct
controversy on that footing, where the points made are too
many and loose to allow any very decisive result; also to
frame an argument that, avoiding, on the other, the issue
of infallible inspiration, which involves insuperable diffi-
culties in the statement, will yet virtually gain all that is
sought for the christian revelation under that issue ; viz.,
a genuine, comprehensive faith in its supernatural origin
as a gift of God to man.

The argument presented turns principally on two facts;
Tiz., the fact that we act supernaturally ourselves, which
God and other created spirits may as well do as we; and
the fact of sin, which is both a fact of universal observa-
tion and of universal consciousness. On the ground of
these two facts, it has been shown, first, that nature is not
the proper system of God, but only an inferior, subordin-
ate, and merely instrumental part, and, in that sense, a p,:]

43

494 THE ARGUMENT ESlABLlSHtth

tompleiiiintiil to the grand supernatural empire, in wliieh
the real system of God is centered; secondljj that yhat ig
commo:ily called nature is no sucli integer of order and
harmony cm is commonly assumed, but is, in foct, a condi-
tion of unnature, being a scheme of causalities disordered
by sin, and set on courses of retributive action that imply
perpetual misdirection; so that, apart from a coeternal
factor of supernatural redemption, what the naturalists
regard as the real totality, or system of nature, is not
only become a whole that groaneth and travaileth
in pain together, but must inevitably continue to groan,
till relief and deliverance are brought, by some force su-
pernatural that is equal to the occasion.

A supernatural work of redemption becomes, in this
view, a kind of intellectual necessity; because otherwise
the integrity and real unity of counsel, in a proper frame
of order, appear to be wanting. The strongest possible
presumption is raised, in this manner, for just such a work
as Christianity undertakes and declares to be undertaken —
as it should be — from before the foundation of the world ,
a work that ih no afterthought, but enters into the origin-
al unity of the great scheme of existence itself When
Christ app-^ars, therefore, we take up the record of his life,
and show Jnat he is not only a supernatural person, as all
m.en arc, but a supernatural person in the still higher de-
gree of being also superhuman; that he has come into
our WDrld as not being of it, that his character can be no-
•vise classed with human characters; in short, that he is a
li-«T.ng, self-evidencing miracle in his person. Then, thai
he should perform miracles, is scarcely less than a necetf
Bary consequence. We also show that Christianity, as »
plan of supernatural grace, contains hidden marks f

THE VERITY OF THE GusriLi^a. 495

fenty, whicli only appear, when it is "held up in a light tc
show them and which, as being latent in this manner,
could not be of man. "We have also shown inat the world
itself is governed in the interest of Christianity, and tb^t
supernatural facts are occurring now, or have never bee)3
finally discontinued. It may hi too much to claim thai
we have unanswerably established the fact of miracle«
performed in our time — it is more exact to say, that Wf
have shown the assumption of their non -performance, oi
which so much is made by many critics, to be groundless,
and that their continuance, which may be asserted with
sufficient reason, they can no way disprove.

What now is the precise bearing of all this on the his-
toric verity and the supernatural origin of the gospels, oi
of the christian revelation generally? As regards the
matter of an exact verbal inspiration, nothing directly;
that is a question waived, or kept out of sight; and yet
the mind is brought to a landing place, where, without
being perplexed by impossible definitions, and strained
arguments in their behalf, it will acquiesce, as it were,
naturally, in the fact of a general, undefined inspiration,
having no longer any quarrel to maintain, because the
conditions of quarrel are taken away. The question of
inspired verity is not left, by our argument, in any such
position, as when it is held that the moral ideas and spirit-
ual truths only of the scriptures are infallibly given, and
their historic matter left to be disposed of as it may; foi
ti)e great, commanding, principal facts are shown to be
historically true. If any debate is to be had, it must be
^jgarding certain subordinate and particular facts, that are
questioned, because of some specially suspicious icdica
dons, that stumble belief. And little stress is likelj to b<

i96 THE ARGUMENT ESTABL[SHEb

laid { m these, because the working plan of Christianity, ai
a regenerative, supernatural grace, is now on foot as a ver-
ity already established; so that the mind is set on a high-
er plane of thought, than when it only admits a Christian-
ity qualified, or about to be qualified, down to a mere drc
trine of nature and natural development, and is prepared
in taat manner, to be stumbled by the smallest difficulties

The mythical origin of the gospels is, in this mannei ,
refuted, without any particular notice of its proofs, by u
process farther back and more summary. To untwist,
one by one, its perverse ingenuities, and wade through ita
mires of false learning, will be necessary to no one who
has found a Christ among men, impossible to be classed
with men ; doing his miracles, and erecting, on the earth,
his supernatural kingdom. Not even Dr. Strauss would
ever have undertaken this kind of argument, if he had not
first assumed the incredibility of any thing supernatural; in
which assumption, after all, the main plausibility of his
argument consists.

It is very true that we have not proved the historic ver-
ity of all the miracles. We have only shown that Christ
was a miracle himself, in his own person, and performed
miracles. Whether he performed this or that miracle, ex-
actly as related, may yet be questioned. Some of the facts
'•eported as niracles, looking only at the form of the Ian*
gnage, may b3 otherwise explained; as, for example, the
disturbing oi the water by the angel in the pool of Be
thesda; where it may have been the writer's intention,
oidy to give the current faith or impression of the time
If any one chooses to deny the cursing of the fig-tree, be-
cause it was an act of ill-nature, he can take that low view
of the transaction, only he is likely, wher confronted with

THE VERITY OF THE GOSPELS 497

the sugg3Stion that it was done, as an eloquent exhibition
of the great moral truth, that God will blast every tree
that bears no fruit — a truth w aich could not be as impress*
ively taught in words — to feel the lowness and perversity
of his construction too sensibly, to find much comfort in
it. The miraculous nativity of Jesus may be questioned,
by any one who can see nothing in it but aL extravagance
shocking to reason, or a myth, in the semblance of narra-
tive, that displaces any supposition of historic verity in the
fact. But, given the fact that an incarnation is wanted, that
Christ is declared to be the Word incarnate, and shown,
by his character, to have come into the world as not being
of it, what more can be needed than to put the objector
on the question, in what other manner, a real incarna-
tion of the divine in the human could be accomplished,
that should be as close to human feeling, and as strictly
historic, in its introduction, as this of the miraculous na-
tivity? And if the objector will but let his imagination
rise to the real pitch of the subject, it will be strange, if
he does not even begin to feel himself kindled, with Maiy,
in her song of triumph, and accept the whole history, aa
one transcendently beautiful and sublime. In the same
manner, any one is at liberty still, as far as our argument
is concerned, to speak of discrepancies between the gos-
pels, or between the Acts of the Apostles and the Epis
ties, but now that Christ, and his miracles, and his super-
catural kingdom, are seen standing forth, as facts already
established, facts which can not be shaken by any mere
discrepancies in the narrative, he is much more like*
ly to accept these apparent disagreements, in matters triv-
ial, as confirmations of the christian truth, and use them OM
<»onamendatioiis of it to our confidence.

42*

t98 THE ARGUMENT ESTABLISHED

But 11 may be objected, contrary to this, by some ove?-
stieiiuou), or overpunctual believer, that our arguraeDt,
which stops sliort of proving every thing, leaves a gate
opened tc every sort of looseness; that, as the issue ia here
quaii^ed, a war begun on each particular fact will, finally
ciut oiF, in detail, all that seemed to be established in the
general; so that nothing will, in fact, be left. I think oth-
erwise. The difficulty never has been to establish this oi
that miracle, but to establish any miracle at all, or the
credibility of any. One miracle proved, or the credibility
of one, is virtually an end of all debate, for the back of
skepticism is there broken. Besides, the argument we in-
stitute puts the doubter in a new and advanced position
He has vei-ified Christ, the grand, central wonder, the dis-
order and fall of nature, the need of a supernatural grace
and power, even to complete the intelligent unity of God's
plan, and, what is more, the fact that he himself exists in a
heavenly, supernatural kingdom, where he meets, on every
side, the manifested love and reconciling grace of God.
The atmosphere of doubt and debate is already cleared.
To break loose now, on some particular miracle, or ques-
tion of fact, is impossible. Even if he gain his point, he
is the loser; for he only mars the glory of a faith that ia
already established, and spots with blemish the religion
that already 'las a right to his faith. He does not break
Christianity cown, he only makes it a faith less welcome
and clear. In such a position, he will naturally prefer
lo have the gospel of his faith strong as it may be;
hi)lding always a presumption against the suggestions
of doubt, and allowing to all the minor points of diffi*
cnlty, that favorable construction by which they wDl l)f
cleared.

THE VERITY OF THE GOSPELS. 491

On the whole, we seem to make out, b}' our argumem
a vindication of the supernatural truth of the gospel?
that is not only sufficient, but practically complete, and
besides, one that has many advantages. We go into ^(,
debate about the canon, which is likely to issue in a man-
nor that is not really convincing ; we start no claim oJ
verbal inspiration, such as takes away the confidence and
establishes the rational disrespect of the skeptic, before
the argument is begun ; we sharpen no point of infalli-
bility down, so as to prick and fasten each particular iota
of the book, afterward to concede variations of copy,
defects of style, mistakes in numerals, and as many othei
little discrepancies as we must. But we try to establish,
by a process that is intelligent and worthy of respect, the
historic outposts, Christ and his miracles, and with these,
also, the grand working-plan of a supernatural grace and
salvation. After this, the mind will gravitate, as of
course, toward a general, inclusive, comprehensive faith,
and we shall find no language that so fitl}^ expresses out
conviction, as to say — All scripture is given by inspira-
tion of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for
correction, for instruction in righteousness.

Superficially viewed, there is a certain parallelism be-
tween this argument for the supernatural in religion, and
*hat of Mr. Parker and the naturalistic school geneidllv
? gainst it, and it is possible that some will be per/erjic
utiough to accuse me of a similar treatment of revelation.
[ will nevei condescend to widen, purposely, or for reo-
Aims politic and prudential, the distance between me an«l
another who has oflended the christian public. But ii
may show the method of my argument more exactly, if ]
ikotch a brief coraparisn —just as I have been r ferrii;^

500 HOW RELATED TO THE METHOD

heretofore to Mr. Parker, to get light and shade for mj
Kubject, withoit raising any special controversy with him.

Mr. Parker undertakes to frame a rational view of le*
ligion, that sets it on the footing of nature. I have un-
dertaken to frame a rational view of religion, that coir-
piehends nature and the supernatural, as coeternal factors
in the universal system of God.

He maintains the complete universality of natural laws,
and refuses to believe in a miracle, because it is a suspen-
sion of the laws of nature. I believe, as firmly, in the
universality of laws, but not of natural laws; maintain-
ing that the human will itself is regulated by no laws of
natural causality, and has power even to act upon the
lines of cause and effect in nature. God, of course, may
do the same; which, if he do it, is a miracle. Not a mir-
acle because the laws of nature are suspended ; for they
are not, but are only varied in their action by the inter
vention of a power external, as when we vary theii
results ourselves. Yet still there is a law for the inter-
vention of God, viz., the law of his end ; which, though
it be no term of nature, but a rule of intelligence anc
rational sovereignty, would require Him to perform the
game miracle again, a thousand times over, in exactly
the same conditions. To define a miracle, therefore, tc
be a suspension of th:) laws of nature, is irrational and
wholly below the subject. With Mr. Parker, 1 believe
Ir no such miracle. And yet m the result of this argu-
taunt, I am brought to accept all the miracles of Christ,
while he reje:5ts them all.

Mr. Parker takes up the admission, so frequently ani
^atuitously made, that miracles and all supernatural gifti
have beer^ discontir ued, and are now no longer credible;

OF NATURALISM. 60j

and presses the inference that, being now incredible, thej
never were any less so ; that pushing them back, in time
Is only a trick to get their in 3redibility so far off that we
shall not feel it, and that the only ingenuous conclusion if,
'SLa\ not occurring now, they never did occur. It is cer-
'ui. ly a very remarkable turn, as I think any one must
i>/lmit, that supernatural facts, being credible down to
soMie certain year of the w^orld's almanac, then begin 1o
b; incredible; incredible in their very nature, so that any
one who pretends to believe in them is, of course, to be
set down as an enthusiast, or a charlatan Mr. Parker
takes the assumption tendered, and reasons from it. T
reject the assumption, and his inferences with it.

Mr. Parker has much to say of inspiration. He be-
lieves that every man will be inspired under fixed laws
of nature, just according to his goodness. In maintaining
that all God's supernatural works, which include inspira-
tions, of course, are ordered by fixed laws, I may seem to
coincide. But the fixed law^s of intelligence or counsel,
the laws of reason as related to his end, are a very differ-
ent matter from the fixed laws of causality in nature.
Besides, if we look at the question with christian eyes,
there appears to be a little inversion of method in the
doctrine that, if men will be good, they shall be rewarded
'jy a consequent inspiration. It would be as much more
raticnal, as it is more christian, to put the insp:' ration in
;i.lvance of the goodness, and say that men will be good
iccorlingly as God inspires them. Not even this will
hold, however, for God no doubt exerts an inspiring force
in men, to make them good, which they may even fatally
obstruct by their perversity. The true doctrine of inspi*
ration can not be stated in an}" such summar r manner.

602 HOW RELATED TO THE METHOT

All inspirations are acts of divine sovereigntv, ander la\f i
of reason which rtgulate that sovereignty. And thee
there are two modes of inspiration, one that is ccmcemL'i)
tc rt-establish the normal state of being, or the state c f
divine consciousness, in which the soul, as a free ^firii
oimes to abide and live in the di\-ine movement and i;
kept, strengthened, guided, exalted, bv the inward revela-
tion of God ; where it may be truly said that the soul is
inspired, accordingly as it yields itself conformably to
God's will, and trustfully to the inspiring grace. The
other mode of inspiration may be called the inspiration
of use ; where the doctrine is, that God inspires men, ac-
cording to the use he will make of them. And here the
kinds, or qualities, are as many as the uses. He inspires
the shepherd, Amos, not to write Isaiah's prophecy, but
the prophecv of Amos. He inspires Bezaleel to devise
cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in
brass, and in cutting of stones, and Moses to be the leader
and lawgiver of his people. He will give the same man
a variable inspiration, setting Paul, for example, in one
moo^i of power, when he lays his scorching rebuke on the
head of the Corinthians, and in a very different, when he
cliants. in the fifteenth chapter, his sublime Ivric on the
resurrection. It is doubtless true, also, that as God has a
^lace ani a use for every man, so he has an inspiratior
for him ; adding honor thus, and comfort, and capacity,
to every employment. The degree also of this inspim
tion may be supposed to have some fixed relation to tho
faith and faithfulness of the subject; though it is difficult
to say what we mean by degrees, where the kinds are and
must be different The doctrine of Mr. Parker wholly
Ignores or disallows this inspiration of use, and rccoornizes-

OF -N'ATUKALISM. O^)!

r.nihirg but the inspiration of cliaract^r. If £ prophet
laerefore, writes a book of scripture, witb a higner inspi-
ration than another man has, who writes nothing, it if
because he is a better man. Let all men be good theiL
and all will be able to write as good books as he. A
verv convenient and short war of letting down the honors
of scripture ; bnt it may be that God wants onlv a few men
for this particular use, or to write books of scripture ; ae
he wanted onlv one to be a Moses, and one to be a BezaleeL
And if this be so, it is verr certain, that he will inspire as
miinv as he wants, for the nses wanted, and no more. It
may be that, as he never wants another Moses, so he never
wants another book of s-zripture written, and it may be
that he does. Should he ever want another, he wiH be
able to qualifv his man ; if not, no other will be quali-
fied. Meantime, it must t^e enough that he will have hia
own connsel, and will aid and qualifr all men for the -oses
he appoints. On this ground, it is no such offense to rea-
son, to suppose that God has inspired particnlar men-4o
have a part in the written revelation of his wilL as Mr.
Parker thinks it to be, and the air of confidence he as-
s^imes, when settinsr forth the conditions, under which all
men may have as gCK>i or the sa:ne insptiration as the wri
teis of scripture, indicates rather a want of due considera-
tion, than a philosophic superiority. God conducts things
to their uses by laws of causality ; spirits to their u .^es, ly
iii?j»' rations; and, as the different kinds of things, ponder-
able.' and imponderable, solid and fluid, elastic and inelas-
tic, organic and inorganic, are kept to their uses by di5ei
eni kinds of laws, so it is but rational to t-elieve that God
Will prepare men to their difftient places and uses, by b'f
ferect kinds of inspiration.

604 HOW RELATED TO THE METHOD

I miike no apology, then, for any look of parallelisnc
that may be observed, between the shaping of my argu
inent and that of Mr. Parker. On the contrary, I prcjfei
to recognize the fact, thus far indicated, that he is pressed
by the real difficulties of the question, and conceives intel-
ligently many of the points that must appear, in any gen-
ninely intellectual solution. It has sometimes seemed to
me that, with all his aversion to supernaturalism, he
might as well be satisfied with the general solution I have
given, upon the footing of supernaturalism, as with his
own upon the footing of nature. Had he sufficiently
weighed certain questions that are fundamental, but
which he virtually ignores ; had he determined what is
the exact definition of the supernatural, as related to na-
ture, and, in that manner, come upon the fact that we act
supernaturally ourselves; had he also brought his mind
closely enough to the great question of sin, to expel all
ambiguity concerning it — holding the fact of sin as posi-
tively, in the field of criticism, as he does when he attacks
slavery as a reformer, and tracing that fact to its legiti-
mate results — I see not how he could have escaped a differ-
ent conclusion. Instead of making nature the kingdom
of God, he would have made it the instrument only, or
mere field of the kingdom ; a theater in which the powera
of the kingdom have their parts. Instead of looking foi
Irispiration by the laws of nature, which, if the word naa
any meaning deeper than semblance, is even absurd, ha
would have seen it to be a fact supernatural. He would
have found a place for prayer, better than a dumb-bel]
exercise before the terms of natural causality and conse*
quence. His remorseless fidelity to a mistaken argumem
would not have comDelled him to rob the christian scrip-

OF NATURAL THEOLOGY. 60^

tiires of their glorious distinction, as a revelation of God.
He would not have been obliged to spot the divine beautj'
of Christ, to reduce him to his own human level, or tc
shock his own better sense and that of the world, by giv'
ing out the expectation that other and better Christs wil!
yet be developed, bj the progress of his sinful race.
Faith he would have discovered, as the sister of reason ;
grace, as the medicine of nature. In a word, he would
have been a christian in his doctrine, which now he ia
not ; for, if there be any sufficient, infallible, and always
applicable distinction, that separates a christian from one
who is not, it is the faith, practically held, of a supernat*
ural grace or religion. There is no vestige of christian
life in the working-plan of nature. Christianity exists
Dnly to have a remedial action upon the contents and con-
ditions of nature. That is development ; this is regenera
tion. No one fatally departs from Christianity, who rests
the struggles of holy character on help supernatural from
God. IS'o one really is in it, however plausible the sem-
blance of his approach to it, who rests in the terms of
morality, or self-culture, or self-magnetizing practice.

If the argument we have traced should be found 1o have
established a solid conviction of truth, in the supernatural
tacts and powers of Christianity, it will go far to inveit
the relative opinion of nature and faith in all christian be-
lievers, and must therefore work important changes in many
things pertaining to the interests of the christian truth. It
must vary the estimate, for example, that is currently held
of natural theology. It is even a principal distinction of
our modern Christianit} , that it has submitted itself so
implicitly, to the dominating ideas and fashions of the rev

506 now RELATED TO THE METHOD

religion, science, or supposed science, that passes by thii
name. It is a kind of revised Christianity, a gospel that
ife preached in the method, set np in the plane, satu-
rated with the spirit, and even, wliere it is not suspect
ed, compoundei of the matter, of the science. Thf
'jliristian schools begin with natural theology, because it
is conceived to be fundamental, and the young men
arc long in disabusing themselves of their mistake; for
any thing which can be proved for religion out of nature,
and in the field of natural reason, is conceived to be spe-
ciall}^ solid, and impossible to be doubted longer. All
which I call a mistake, however, not because of any
positive mischief in deductions of this kind. The evil
suffered is due, not so much to what our natural theology
does, as to what it requires to be left undone; or, to be
more explicit, to the fact that it requires all supernatural
evidences to give way to it, as being themselves a more
questionable kind of verity; even as the ill-favored and
lean kine of Pharaoh's dream devoured those which were
better. The opposite pole is represented here by Dr.
Henry More, who builds his argument for the existence of
God, to a considerable degree, on the basis of supernatural
facts; such as dreams, prophecies, premonitions, visions,
revelations, and the like — a curious and striking evidence,
when viewed in contrast with our present conceptions, of
the change of mental position that may be wrought in tho
thinking world, in a comparatively brief space of time.
Thr. modern advances in science compelled the change_
and it could not be resisted. Neither was it desirable thai
it should be: for, when the new theology of nature is oncy^
qualified, by restoring the other pole of the sul ject, which
belongs more distinctly to Christianity, it .tIII be found to

OF NATURAL THEOLOGT. 501

have expelled multitudes of superstitious and uiiillumii>
ated vagaries, necessary to be expelled, before it was pf^-
sible to hold the supernatural evidences, in the manner of
true intelligence necessary to their genuine effect. TheE
the two worlds of evidences are seen to be complementary
to each other, and the argument for God, the christian
God, is complete as never before.

The evil in our present stage of thought, is that nat-
ural theology has the whole ground to itself, and the God
established, is not a being who meets the conditions of
Christianity at all. We get, of course, no proofs out of
nature, that go farther than to prove a God of nature, least
of all do we get any that show him to be acting super-
naturally, to restore the disorders of nature. What we
dipxiover is a God, who institutes, is revealed by, and, as
many will suspect, ts the causes of nature. A latent pan-
theism lurks in the argument. Calling the God we prove
a personal being, and meaning it in good faith, we yet
find ourselves living before causes, and looking for conse
quences. We only half believe in prayer. We expect
to be delivered of sin, by a long course of duty and self-
reformation, that will finally pacify the offended laws ol
nature, and bring them on our side again. That God will
do any thing for us Himself, or hold any terms of real
society with us, we but faintly believe. That used to
be the opinion of ancient times, but the world, we
imagine, is now growing more philosophical. The result
Is that, professing Chrstianity, in the most orthodox man*
ner, we live, in natural theology, half way on the road to
pantheism. Even the incarnation and the miracles of
Jesus drop mto a virtually dead faith, beccming forns
in i>lace of living and life- giving realities.

508 HOW RELATED TO

And the reason is, that our God, derived from nature
18 a monosyllable only, or at best a mechanica] first causej
and no such being as the soul wants, or, as Christian-
ity supposes, in its doctrines of regenerated life, and in
al] ita supernatural machineries. Besting here, there-
tore, or allowing ourselves to be retained by what we
call our natural theology, Christianity dies out on our
hands, for the want of a christian God. And, according-
ly, it is a remarkable fact, even of history, that we have
lost faith in God, just in proportion to the industry we
have spent in proving his existence, by the natural evi-
dences. First, because the God we prove does not meet
our living wants, being only a name for causes, or a
God of causes ; secondly, because, in turning to Christian-
ity for help, we have rather to turn away from the God
we have proved, than toward Him. We may seem to
have established the fact of God's existence, but if God is
gained, Christianity is lost!

There is no relief to this mischief, but to conceive, at
the beginning, that nature is but a fraction of the com-
plete system of God, and no integer ; that the true, living
God, beautifully expressed in a small way in nature, is a
vastly superior being still, who holds the worlds of nature
in his hands, and acts upon them as the Kectifier, Redeem-
er, Regenerator, and is even more visibly, convincingly,
and gloriously expressed in Christianity than he is in the
worlds. Show Him at the head of the great kingdom
of minds, compassionate to sin, conversant with sinners,
SI hesjer of prayer, an illuminator of experience, a deliverer
from the retributions of nature, the glorious new-creatoi
of all the most glorious characters in the world. Display
the self-evidencing tokens of his feeling and woi]:, as tnc

THE POSITIVE IXSTTTUTIONS. 509

God supernatural — God in Chrisb, reconciling the world
unto himself. There is more convincing eridence foi
God, in ihe life and passion of Jesus, than in all the me
chanical adaptations of the worlds. Tne God of the Bible
and the Church, the God that rules the world in the inter-
est of Christ and salvation, manifested in the divine
beauty, and the mighty works and heroic sufferings ol
his saints — this is the God that speaks to our true wants
Provoke such wants, and let him speak. This kind of
evidence restores the equilibrium of the mere natural evi-
dences, makes the God established a person, the true
living God, and the supernatural facts of Christianity are
sustained and not discredited by our belief in Him.

It does not appear to be suspected that our modern
tendencies to pantheism are at all related to our over-
doing in the matter of natural theology, but it will by
and by be discovered, that we were greatly imposed
upon by our zeal, and took our ingenuity, in this kind of
proof-building, for a good deal more than it was worth.
Never is God conceived to be really personal, till he is
shown outside of nature, acting upon nature, even as we
do ourselves. The proofs we seek are genuine, only when
they correspond, and show us what wants to be shown.

It is also a matter of consequence in our argument,
as related to the wants of the age, that it provides a placje
for the positive institutions of religion, and prepares a
rational basis for their authority. It is frequently re-
marked that, for some reason, these positive institutions
are falling rapidly into disrespect, as if destined finally to
be quite lost, or sunk in oblivion. Various reasons are
B/^signed for this fact, which amiDunt to nothing more del]

43*

bio HOW RELATED TO

nite, tluiii that aucli is tlie spirit ( 1' the times. TiiC tnif.
reasca is the growth and pervadir:g influence of nataral-
ism, which not only does not want; but excludes such in-
stitutions. This doctrine assumed, they are theoretically
impossible. As the word institution itself indicates, they
ire sup^^rnatural creations; that is, something sei up on the
jTorld of nature, not developments out of nature. Be
:ides, it is the manner and temper of naturalism, to be
mpatient of any thing, not established in terms of natural
reason, and spurn it as having no sufficient authority.
Accordingly it will be seen, that, as we grow more
naturalistic, just in the same proportion do these institu-
tions lose their hold of us. What have we to do with
the church — can we not be as good christians out of
the church as in it? What signify the sacraments, even
if they were distinctly appointed by Christ? they can not
save us, and we can v\^ell enough be saved without them.
And what is a holy day but a needless restriction, wheu
one time ought to be as holy as another? So too of the
Bible ; that, as related to nature, is a positive institution.
And so again of Christianity itself, which began to be in-
stituted in the ancient ritual, and was finished, or fully
completed, w^hen the higher sense of that ritual was dis-
played, in the terms of the christian salvation. It was set
up on the world, by a God who is not imprisoned in it,
hLt IS acting on it from without, to I'escue it from the ac-
•Jon of its disordered causalities. What are all these pie-
:.€uded institutions of God, but incumbrances and en-
(;roachments on our liberty? And \A'hat necessary use di.
uiey ser^'e? They are, I answer, what body is to sou]
All vitjd or vitalizing power? are oiganific, and live hy
means of their emb ;diment. These institutions are thi

THE POSITIVE INSTITUTIONS 51 i

body of religiovis organizatioi], the ccmditions, in thai
manner, of religious power and perpetuity. Cast awa^
thii body, and religion is a disembodied ghost only
flitting across the world, but never resting in it. Truto
V.ecomes a vagrant. Worship has no time or seat
L^reacheio have no calling or commission. And the no
uhurch, no-observance people, come into the world tc
Durely v/ear out and die, without faith, without holy vir-
tue, without great sentiments to conserve society, or illu-
minate the night of their virtual atheism. If we talk of
an "Absolute Religion," that is going to abide and reign
without institutions, it will reign as Absolute Vacui'iy.
However eloquently preached, for the time, and however
promising the show it makes, by works of reform and
social philanthropy, it will be seen to organize nothing
and, when once its aim is accomplished in the extinction
of all that Christianity organizes, it will simply cease to
work, as all poison does, when the subject is dead.

That Christianity will utterly die, however, for this or
any other cause, we are not to believe. But the tendency
of our time is one that must be finally arrested, by one or
the other of these two methods: by I'estoring a distinct
and properly intelligent feith in the supernatural reign of
Christ, such as I have here undertaken to set forth, or else
by a blind recoil, such as mere vacuity and the pains of
vagrancy will instigate. In the first and true method, we
ghall have the positive institutions, holding them in re-
^pect, and observing them in practice, because we conceive
a God who is not waiting for the develoj)ment of nature,
but working to regenerate nature, by what he can creci
upon it and do in it. But if religion gets no body and uc
oTganized state, by this rational and true method, then i?

512 HOW RELATED TO

Will liJive them by a worse; for, when we have gDni
loc;se for a long time, in this kind of dissipation, and
scattered the bodv of religion as fine dust on the wines,
there will finally come a reaction, a painful want of forms,
c^jservances, and organizations, and a greedy, irrational
hurrying back to the church that offers such a bountiful
supply. The Absolute Keligion that excludes a church
will conduct us back to the Absolute Church, and there,
as disappointed victims of one, we shall go in, to 1)C
busied and fooled by observances and sacraments of the
other, losing out our intelligence, and even God's light
itself, under an immense overgrowth of institutions which
He did not appoint, and which have really no agreement
with His truth.

The conception we have raised of Christianity, as a
regenerative work and institution of God, separates it, by
a wide chasm, from any mere scheme of philanthropy oi
social reform. As to reforms that begin at the out
side, and stop at the rectification of the outward conduct,
they may be beneficial or they may not. There i? a de-
gree of vice, and consequent misery, that, for the time,
incapacitates the subject for the reception of truth and
the christian influences. There are also external wrongs
and disorders of sin, that only represent to men the
inward state of their hearts; holding up the glass in
which they may see themselves ; and it is no genuine in-
terest of Christianity to get these smoothed away It is
even a great part of God's wisdom, in casting the plan of
our life, that he has set us in conditions to bring cut the
evil that is in us. For it is by this medley, that we make,
of wrongs, fears, pa-'ns of th^ mind, and pains of the

MATTERS OF SOCIAL REFORM. 61H

body, all the woes oi all shapes and sizes that follow a1
the heels of our sin — by these it is that he dislodges ouj
perversity, and draws us to Himself. If, therefore, bj 9
grand comprehensive sweep of reform, we could get ali
the misdoings, that we call sins, out of sight, and the sin
of the spirit, as a state separated from the conscioasnesa
of God, shut in, so as nowhere to appear, it would be
the greatest imaginable misfortune. We should have a
race acting paradisaically in their behavior, when they
have no principle of good in their life. It is very true that
no mere reform is likely to reach this point ; for it is very
certain that men will do sins enough, or have vices
enough to represent and shame their sin. And yet the
merely naturalistic reformers go to just this task; the
task, that is, of an external purgation of the world. This
is their religion, and they take on often such airs, ii\
what they imagine to be the superior philanthropy,
or the superior fidelity and boldness of their course,
that they seem even to be holding out a challenge
to Christianity to come and try, if it can do as much
as they I Are they net going to take care of the
progress of society? Are they not also going finally
to get all the evils of life away? Christianity under-
takes no such thing — unless by undertaking more. It
goes only a certain way in the matter of reforms ; viz.,
far enough to show its true interest in every thing hu-
man, and especially far enough to get those vices and
sins in hospital, which, as they continue to rage, take
away self-possession, abate the force of reason, and dis
qualify the subject for the gospel. But it has a quiet per
ception of the £)lly and absurdity of any plan, which ex-
pects to smooth up the world in its sin, or its alienati :>r

614 HOW RELATED T(>

from God. Back of sins, it recognizes sin; back of tue
acts, a state which they express and represent. Thij
it regenerates; and so, working outsvard from the inmost
DentQr, it proposes to reform every thing.

Great reforms are certainly wanted. No christian there
^■>re will dishonor the faith of a supernataral remedy in
L'hridt, by taking refuge behind it, and a\ oiding, in thai
manner, his responsibilities — how is he going to regenerate
all the sin of the world, when he dare not speak of the sins '!
On the other hand, he will not be intimidated by the outcry
of the reformers, that upbraid his christian slowness, or
beguiled by their pretentious airs, when they make it a
religion, or even a more superlative religion, to be doing
such prodigious things for society. Their appeal is to
public opinion, not to God. They make their own
gospel as they go, and have undertaken, themselves, to
do such things for the world, that men will say, "behold
Christianity was a failure !" The force too by which
they operate is in their will, and this strikes fire into the
nitrous element of their passions, the moment they en-
counter resistance. They grow hot and violent. Denun-
ciation becomes their element, and, as numbers are added,
they run to a genuine fanaticism. No christian has any
place on this level. As far as he undertakes to co-operate
in reforms, he must do it as one who stays above with
Obrist, and works with him ^ retaining his passions, by
"^rt loo^^ing his will ; mixing his reproofs with his prayers^
iud noderating his amb.tion by resting his cause, in ih«
U light}- power of God.

To admit, ii its full force, the reality of our christian
O) Bupei'natural relations to God, would also very certaii "■

THE MANNER OF PREACHING, 5U

result in a more apostolic nanner of preacliing. Foi
[(reaching deals appropriately in the supernatural, j)uh-
liphing to guilty souls what has come into the world flora
above the world — Christ and his salvation. We ask, ho\^
often., yyith real sadness, whence the remarkable impottacc
of preaching in our time? It is because we concoct ol;
gospels too much in the laboratories of our understand
jng; because we preach too many disquisitions, and look foi
eflr3cts correspondent only with the natural forces exerted.
True preaching is a testimony ; it offers, not things rea-
soned, in any principal degree, but things given, supernat
ural things, testifying them as being in their power, by a'l
utterance which they fill and inspire. It brings new pren.i
ses, which, of course, no argument can create, and, therefore,
speaks to faith. And, what is most of all peculiar, il as-
sumes the fact, in men, of a religious nature, higher than
a merely thinking nature, which, if it can be duly awak-
ened, cleaves to Christ and his salvation with an almost
irresistible affinity. This religious nature is a capacity for
the supernatural ; that is, for the divinely supernatural ; in
other words, it is that quality by which we become inspir-
able creatures, permeable by God's life, as a crystal by the
light, permeable in a sense that no other creature is. In-
deed, the great problem of the gospel is, in one view, to
mspire us again, at a point where we are uninspired; to
permeate us again by the divine nature, and make us con-
scious again of God. In this view, it assumes to speak as
k? a want, and what a want it is, that a capacity (ven %t
God; in the soul, stands em^ty! And hence it k that so
many infidels have been converted under preaching, thai
went directly by their doubts, only bringing up the mighty
themes of God and salvation^ and throwing them in a?

616 HOW RELATED TO

torches into tlie dark, blank cavern of their empty heart
They are not put upon their reason, but the burning glow
of their inborn affinities for the divine are kindled, and
the blaze of these overtops their speculations, and scorched
them down by its glare. Doubtless there are times and
(ii"icaaions, where something may be gained by raising a
trial before the understanding. But there may also be
something lost, even in cases where that kind of issue is
fairly gained. Many a time nothing is wanting, but to
speak as to a soul already hungry and thirsty; or, if not
consciously so, ready to hunger and thirst, as soon as the
bread and water of life are presented. If the problem is
to get souls under sin inspired again, which it certainly
is, then it is required that the preacher shall drop lectur-
ing on religion and preach it ; testify it, prophesy it, speak
to faith as being in faith, bring inspiration as being in-
spired, and so become the vehicle, in his own person,
of the power he will communicate ; that he may truly be-
get in the gospel such as will be saved by it. No man is
a preacher, because he has something like or about a gos-
pel, in his head. He really preaches only when his persoT?
is the living embodiment, the inspired organ of the gos-
pel; in that manner no mere human power, but the.
demonstration of a christly and divine power. lu is in
this manner that preaching has had, in former times ef-
fects so remarkable. At present we are almost all .nide:
*he power, more or less, of the age in which we live. In-
fected with naturalism ourselves and having hearers thai
are so, we can hardly find what account tc make of ouj
barrenness

Tt is also a ma'rter of consequence to be anticipate* l in 5

INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL PHI LOSOPH T. 5 /

jost aud full establishment of supernatural virities^ ;L .1
intellectual and moral philosophy are destineti, in this
way, to be finally christianized; and so, that all science
will, at last, be melted into unity with the religion oJ
< Jhrist Our professors of '')hilosophy leave it to the the-
logians to settle the question whether man is a sinner or
not, and go on to assume that he is in the normal state of
jia being, acting precisely according to his nature; when,
if the theologians chance ^to doubt any of their conclu-
sions, the reply is, that they do not understand philosophy.

Now it is either true that man is a sinner, or it is not.
If he is not a sinoer, then he exists normally, and what he is
in his action, he is in his nature, and a great many questions
will be settled accordingly. On the other hand, if he is a
sinner, actingr ao^ainst God, actinsr as he was not made to
act, then he is, by the supposition, a disordered nature, a
being in the state of unnature. Any philosophy therefore
which does not recognize the fact, but deduces his nature
from his present demonstiations, must be wholly at
fault.

And how different any philosophy of man must be,
which ignores the fact of sin, from one that does not, may
be easily seen. Let the subject be the relation of our
powers and capacities to our ideals. One who makes no
account of sin, will say, develop the capacities and yon
tavc the ideals — he will even infer the capacities from the
'deals. But to one who duly recognizes sin, there is
.lothing so sad, as the fact that the mind flowers into
ideals that it can not reach, conceiving a beauty, a per
fectly crystalline order, when it can as little drag itself
into this beauty, this crystalline order, as it oo* -Jd a si at
tered firmament.

518 HOW RELATED TO

Or, let tue subject be, what is tlie nature of virtx^c, jr
more particularly, whether self-love is the determining
motive in all virtue? Taking it lor granted that, what
men do they are made to do, and finding that the
common world of men are actuated by self-love in their
virtue, the inference is that such is the manner of all vk-
tnc ; it is what men do for fear, for gain, or for some mat-
ter of mere self-interest; in which virtue and vice are ex-
actly alike. But one who recognizes tho fact of sin,
immediately suspects that the self-love power enters into
men's virtue, thus largely, because they are sinners. In
the highcb., the truly divine virtue, he looks for a sponta-
neous or inspired movement, where the good is followed
because it is good, the right because it is right, God be-
cause He is God. And the conclusion is, that what the
other calls virtue, is only a form of sin.

Or again, the question may be, what is the perfect state
of man? Ignoring the fact of sin, the conclusion will be
that he is perfected, in squaring himself by the rules
of virtue ; he is consummated, that is, in the matter of
ethics. But where sin is taken into account, it will be
recollected that men, as commonly observed, are out of
place and out of the true line of experience; that they
have departed from God, and that their properly religious
nature is detained by sin, or closed up. To be completcl}
died with God and perfected in the eternal movement o1
G(»d, in a word, to be conscious of God, and dwell in the
di^Mie impulse, or inspiration — that is the perfect stata
JEe has found, in other words, that man is just what he
most entirely omitted 1o be, or perhaps never onc<
thought of in his fallen life, an inspirable creature^ hav
mg, in that fact, the real summit, the grandeur, and glorv

INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY. Mii

of his being. He culminates in God, not in any rules of
ethics. His goodness is not the perfect drill he submita
to, and tries to observe, but it is the freedom of a sponta-
neous, inspired, and trulj^ divine beauty.

How different a thing must it be, to philosophize about
a substance that acts according to its nature, ana about
one that acts in contradiction both of its nature and lU^
God I Doubtless the latter is a much higher form of
being than the other; for it can not be a thing, it can
be jiothing less than a power, glorious and transcendent ;
and therefore it is that man, contemplated at just this
j)oint of sin, rises to a pitch of tragic sublimity and
grandeur, as nowhere else. Why then should our philos-
ophy refuse to look at him, just where his real stature is
revealed ? When this fact of sin is referred back to the-
ologians, and declared, either with or without a sneer, to
be in their province, a much greater compliment is paid
them than is commonly thought. It is giving them up
all that belongs to man's real greatness, and claiming the
husk that is left.

This separation of intellectual and moral philosoj)hy
from the great religious problem of our existence, the
foot of sin, and the want of salvation, is the more remark-
able, fiat it is a descent from the more dignified and no-
bler conceptions of the ancient heathen masters. It \a
unnatural, and even unintelligent. How can philosophy,
dealing with a supernatural subject, stand off from the
fticis of his supernatural history ? Endeavoring to stay
by nature, and magnify the natural history, it only takes
a biick for Babylon, and gives a science of the brick.
There is to be a speedy revision of this false method. Nc
real philosopher can long i^iiore the supernatural. Rb

520 HOW KELATEI) TO

ligion then takes held of philosophy, and sets it to the
•jtudy of her problems. All natural science will follow^
sotting itself in affinity with things supernatural. The
pliilosophics are then baptized," in being simply inducted
Id to a just conception of the one system of God. Kow
the young minds trained in such studies are not led
away^ but led directly up to Christ and the glorious truth
of hia mission. That mission is become the pole star of
learning, and how great the change that must follow I

Once more it appears to be an important consequence
of the argument we have instituted, that, in assigning the
supernatural a definite place, and a firm, intellectual
ground, it contributes a valuable aid to christian experi-
ence. There is a feeling widely prevalent that when we
talk of faith, we are covering up the want of intelligence;
that when we speak of the supernatural, we mean some-
thing ghostly, supplied by the imagination, and verified
only by our superstitions ; that when we name the matter
of religious experience, we suppose a driveling, and, as it
were, forced submission of tlie soul, to what a rational
philosophy must of course reject. All such impressions
will, I trust, be removed, as unworthy and really unjust,
by the argument I have now presented.

It finds a place for the supernatural in the scheme of
^iJListence itself; showing that we ourselves are supemat
ural agents as really, only not in the same degree of pow-
er, as Christ in his miracles. It gets a footing, in this
manner, for supernatural facts and agencies, among the
known realities. More than this, it shows that nature is
Qot, by itself, any complete whole or real universe, but is
in fact only a scaffolding, the smallest, humblest part of

o b: R 1 ir r I A X E X p E K I fc N c E . 521

the iDtellectual whole, or system of God's empire; Tvaile,
on the other hand, the supernatural side of his plan, con-
cerned with tree intelligences, their government and re-
demption, and the building of them into a temple of eter-
nal Love and Beauty round himself, comprises all the real
and last ends of his throne.

Every thing is thus made ready for the best advances in
religious experience. For there is a close relation, scarcely
different from identity, between faith and what is called
experience ; and both are terms that have a fixed refer-
ence to the fact, that Christ and Christianity are supernat-
ural bestowments. If they could be reasoned out of
premises already in the mind, they would not require
faith. But Christ comes into the world from without, to
bestow himr-elf by a presentation. He is a new premise,
that could not be reasoned, but must first he, and then
can be received only by faith. When he is so received, or
appropriated, he is, of course, experienced or known by ex-
periment; in that manner verified — he that believeth hath
the witnes-s in himself. The manner, therefore, of this di-
vine experience, called faith, is strictly Baconian. And the
result is an experimental knowledge of God, or an experi-
m.ental acquaintance with God, in the reception of his su-
pernatural communications. Which knowledge, again, or
acquaintance, is, in fact, a revelation vdthin, a divine
t'lanifestation, a restored consciousness of God ; or we may
'rfill it peace joy, strength, a growth into the divine parity
— it is any and all these together. And it should not be
strange that, in such a participation of God, we are lifted,
empowered, assimilated, or finally glorified.

It will be admitted that what is properly calljd religious
experience runs low in our time. Even the phrase itse]

U*

622 HOW RELATED TO

is carefully eschewed, by many, as a term of cant, that
lacks, or is suspected of lacking, any basis of intelligenco
We learr. to be familiar with the phrase "philosophic con-
sciousness," and speak with satisfaction of "cultivating
tne philosophic consciousness," but religious experience
belongs to a lower class of people, who can not ascend to
80 high a matter. One pertains to a rational culture, the
other is a relic of pietism now gone by, with all but the
feebler minds. No fact presents the intellectual habit of
our time in a more pitiable light. To get experience of
ourselves, or a practical consciousness of our own little
subjectivity, we account to be something of importance;
but to recover, unfold, grow into, and become ennobled
by the consciousness of God, united to Him as the all-suf-
ficient object and fullness of our life — this, we think, is
something related to weakness ! And to this folly we are
shrunk by the wretched conceit of our naturalism. What
if it should happen to be true, that we are all inherently
related to God, having our summits of thought, power,
quality, greatness in Him, made to be conscious of Him
as of ourselves, and in that nobler consciousness to live?
What if this too should happen to be the truth waiting our
embrace, at the point of littleness and mere self-con-
eciousness sharpened by our sin I How sorry the picture
we make, when we figure it in this manner, as the super-
lative wisdom, to have a cultivated power of self-reflection.,
and only another name for weakness to speak of religious
experience I If I am right in the matter of my argument^
a very different impression is justified. Mere naturalism
it shows, in fact, to be a fraud against nature. It soundly
auihenticates the grand supernatural verities of the gospel
and of christian experience, showing that, without thenv

CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 523

there is no rational unity, even in what we call the
universe.

The utnic st confidence may now be felt, in all the ex
pectations and exploits of faith; in prayer, in divine guid
ance, in the cares of a supernatural Providence, in all the
heavenly gifts. Clear of all reserve the disciple may
go to his calling, as one detained by no misgivings, or lurk-
ing suspicions. And his success will be according to his
confidence. Weakened by no foolish suspicion of being
at fault, intellectually, he will go on manfully and boldly,
instructed always by his experience, and advancing al-
ways upon it ; removing greater mountains, as he gets more
faith ; and giving all men to see, who chance to observe him,
what power and luster there is in a life thus hid with Christ
in God. Yerily, such it is that we want, as the preachers
and pastors and saints of our time ; men, whose strength is
the joy of the Lord; men who dwell in the secret place of
the Most High ; men who walk in glorious liberty, living
no more to themselves, but to Christ who bought them ,
preaching Christ by their example, their prayers, theii
prophesyings, and witnessing by the blessed fruits of their
laith, to its ennobling verity and greatness.

The argum.ent we have traced, prepares also a yet far-
ther ivOntribution to christian experience, in bringing more
distinctly forward, the question of a possible discovery
and statement of the laws of the supernatural. How
great a change has been wrought in the creative and pro
ducti/e processes of human industry, by a scientific dis-
covery of the laws of nature. The address we make to
nature, and the forccF of nature, is now intelligent, ani)
our productive powers are as much greater, as the forcei
ff{i harness are stronger and more obedient. Tbe worlc'

524 HOW RELATED 10

itself is quite another world, displaying lew and vaatli
higher possibilities. What now is wanted, in the domaic
of christian experience, is a similar development of the
laws of the supernatural; when a correspondent change
will be observed in the productive forces and the progress-
ive conquests of the spiritual life. "When these laws arc
once developed, the men of the kingdom will see it, aa
never before, to be a kingdom, and will know exactly by
what process to be advanced and established in it. It
will be as when alchemy gave way to chemistry, astrolo-
gy to astronomic computations, the divining rod and other
saws and superstitions of mining to the intelligent pros-
pecting of geologic science, agriculture in the times of the
moon to agriculture in the terms of experimental and
scientific guidance. Not that any science of supernatural
things, or things of religious experience, is possible to be
created, that shall prove itself in the same manner, to the
mere natural judgment or intellect. It must be a science,
if we use that term, that pertains to the higher realm of
the Spirit. It must, therefore, stand in terms of analogy
and figure, which can fully unfold their meaning only to
minds enlightened, in a degree, by holy experience. It
must be a contribution to faith, of the laws by which it
may address itself to the supernatural forces of grace, and
the manifestations of Grod. In the initial points of faith,
ifc must approve itself to the mere intelligence; .n point.*-
(art tier on, it must approve itself, more and more, to spir
itiial insight, in its advanced stages. Hitherto there hn?
been a large mixture of superstition in religious expen-
cne^. Proposing to get on by application, it has yci
trusted more to heat than to light. It has looked foi
visions and revelations without law. It has been a kind

(-HKISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 52ft

ot spiritual alchemy, taken by wonderful surprises, and
blown up as often by fanatical explosions. The progress
it had made has been fantastic, and it has finally reached
tlio abiding place of order and sobriety, only by a long
v>oarse of eccentricities and blindfold experiments. There
h^ even been a kind of impression, that God himself is
irregular, and, in some good sense, capricious in his super-
natural gifts, therefore to be reached by no certain method,
but only by a sort of adventure, that will some tine
chance to find Him. How different the fortunes of relig-
ious experience, when it is regarded — which, in some fu-
ture time, it will be — as a coming unto God by the laws that
regulate His bestowments; when the world of His super-
natural kingdom is conceived to be as truly under laws,
as the world of nature, and these laws, accurately distin-
guished, enable the disciple to address himself accurately
to the powers of grace, as now to the forces of nature.

Our argument favors such an expectation. It brings
the supernatural into the grand, fore-ordinated circle of
existence, and makes it even a central part of that stu-
pendous whole, or integer, which we call the universe.
It also conceives that God works by laws in the supernat-
ural, in the incarnation and the miracles of Jesus, in hia
sacrifice and death, in the mission of the Spirit and all
spiritual gifts. Indeed, there is no being but a bad one, a
sinner, that is not punctually and exacuy determined by
some law. Not even the atoms of a crystal are more ex-
actly set by law, than the thoughts and choices of a per-
ftXJt mind. And though it be not any law of physica
necessity, such as we discover in the causalities of nature,
it is none the less a law of unalterable and undeviating
conlJ'ol. In God Himself it is the law by which, as pre

526 HOW RELATED TO

Biding over the thoughts, the ends, and the detenninaticifl
of his perfect mind, the laws of nature were themselvea
coneeived and appointed — the higher law of his goodntan
and his moral reason. Neither let it be imagined that
ilia higlier tier of law, which governs God, in his supei-
oatural dispensations, is to us in^^ccessible or undiscernible.
A A the fall of an apple showed to Newton's eye the la^/f
that presides over the remotest worlds of the physical
universe, so we shall find, not seldom, in the most familiar
principles of duty and sentiments of religion, things in
ourselves, that infallibly interpret Him. A large infer-
ence may be also derived from the admitted fact of his per-
fection ; for, while nothing definite or certain can be pred-
icated of imperfection, in a subject unknown as regarda
its law, the exact, ideal perfection of God, like that of the
astronomic order, suffers a large and free deduction re-
specting all his tempers, ends, and methods. Much also
may be gathered from the general economy of the super-
natural, as displayed in the work and counsel of human
redemption. Much is given by express revelation ; for,
though it is not common to regard, as definite and fixed
laws o^ divine action, or bestowment, the familiar rules
by which our approach to God is regulated in the scrip-
ture, they do yet suppose that he is regulated himself by
terns correspondent. The rule — to him that hath shall be
given — first be reconciled to thy brother — if two of ycj
fhall agree as touching any thing — :f our heart condenir?
as not — if a man hate his brolhei — as we forgive them
tnat trespass against us — if ye keep my commandn.ent —
if ye search for me with all the heart — all these conditions
of prayer, and terms of approach to God, arc, in a yel
higher view, laws of the Spirit, supposing that God's giftf

CHRISTIAN EXPEKIENCt. 627

iheinselves are dispensable only in terms that corrt-spoacL
And besides all these, a laige discovery also can be made
of things supernatural and their laws, by our own expe-
risDce; for, as he that loveth, knoweth God, so the whole
life of faith is an experience and spiritual discovery (4
Ood, And no discovery of natural science is more valid.
Nor is there any thing in which a ripe christian can do
more for experimental religion, than in giving to the help
of 3uch as will seek after God, a treatise drawn from all
these sources, on the laws of God's supernatural kingdom
— the kingdom of grace and salvation. No other contri-
bution to the truth of Christ is so much needed, or prom-
ises results of so great moment. First, that which is nat-
ural, afterward that which is spiritual. It was necessary
to this higher kind of progress, that the discoveries of
natural science should precede, and raise the expectation
of laws here also to be verified. And when it is done, as it
will not be in any brief space of time, the world may begin
to think of a general consummation at hand. Faith will
now grow solid, and overtop the temples of reason with
its grandeur. Eeligious experience, conceived and proved
to be the revelation of God, will become a general embod-
iment of the divine in human history, fulfilling the idea
of the incarnation, never till then completely intelligible.
There will be order without constraint, and liberty with-
<mt fanaticism. The desultory will give place to the reg-
ular, and a kind of holy skill will distinguish all the ap-
proaches of men to God, and all the works they do in his
name. The power of christian piety will be as much
greater than now, as it knows how to connect more cer-
tainly, and more in the manner of science, with the 19
ijources of God.

528 HOW RELATED TO EXPERIENCE.

Until then the highest and even truest principled of
christian experience, are likely to involve some danger of
fanaticism. I can not be sure that persons will not
appear who, professing to lay hold of points advanced in
this treatise, use them fanatically, as the fuel of their Strang*
fire. Fanaticism can certainly find a shelter under it.
and gather out of it many pretexts for extravagance
and delusion; even as it has done in all ages, out of
Christianity itself; but I cherish a degree of confidence,
that what I have advanced will be a contribution rathei
to the intelligence, than to the delusions, of the christiai
world. It has been my endeavor, to put honor on faith —
to restore, if possible, the genuine, apostolic faith. I have
even wished, shall I dare to say, hoped, that I might do some-
thing to inaugurate that faith in the field of modern sci-
ence, and claim for it there that respect to which, in the
sublimity of its reasons, it is entitled. And great will
be the day when faith, laying hold of science and rising
into intellectual majest}' with it, is acknowledged in the
glorious sisterhood of a common purpose, and both lead
in the realms they occupy, reconciled to God, cleared of
the disorders and woes of sin, to set them in that final
unity wliich represents the et'irnal Headship of Clirlst.

CHURCH HISTORY.

BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX: The Times, the Man, and his
Work. An Historical Study in Eight Lectures. By RICHARD
S. STORRS. 8vo, $2.50.

THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. With a View of tn«
State of the Roman World at the Birth of Christ. B>
GEORGE P. FISHER, D.D., LL.D., Professor of Church
History in Yale College. 8vo, $2.50,

THE BOSTON ADVERTISER.— "Prof. Fisher has displayed in this, as in his
previous published writings, that catl»)Uclty and that calm judicial quality of
mind which are so indispensable to a true historical critic."

THE EXAMINER.— "The volume is not a dry repetition of well-known facts.
It bears the marks of original research. Every page glows with freshness of
material and cholceness of diction."

THE EVANGELIST.— "The volume contains an amount of information that
makes It one of the most useful of treatises for a student in philosophy and
theology, and must secure for it a place in his library as a standard authority."

HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. By GEORGE P.
FISHER, D.D., LL,D., Professor of Ecclesiastical History in
Yale University. 8vo, with numerous maps, $3.50.

This work is in several respects notable. It gives an able presenta-
tion of the subject in a single volume, thus supplying- the need of a
complete and at the f«iine time condensed survey of Church History.
It will also be found much broader and more comprehensive than other
books of the kind.

HON, GEORGE BANCROFT.— "I have to tell you of the pride and deUght
with which I have examined your rich and most instructive volume. As an
American, let me thank you for producing a work so honorable to the country."

REV. R. S. STORRS, D.D.— "I am surprised that the author has been able to
put such multitudes of facts, with analysis of opinions, definitions of tendencies,
and concise persona) sketches, into a narrative at once so graceful, graphic, and
compact."

PROF. ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN, Episcopal Divinity School, Cambriagf,
Mass.— "Jt has the merit of being eminently readable, its conclusions rest on the
widest research and the latest and best scholarship, it keeps a just sense of pro-
portion in the treatment of topics, It is written in the interest of Christianity as a
whole and not of any sect or church, it is so entirely Impartial that it is not easy
to discern the author's sympathies or his denominational attitude, and it has the
great advantage of dwelling at due length upon English and American Church
history. In short, it is a work which no one but a long and successful teacher c»
Church History could have produced,"

STANDARD TEXT BOOKS.

HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. By PHILIP SCHAFF,
D.D. New Edition, re-written and enlarged. Vol. I.— Apos*
tolic Christianity, A.D, 1-100. Vol. II.— Ante-Nicene Chris-
tianity, A.D. 100-325. Vol. Ill.-Nicene and Post-Nicene
Christianity, A.D. 311-600. Vol. IV.-Mediaeval Christianity,
A.D. 590-1073. 8vo, price per vol., $4.00.

This work is extremely comprehensive. All subjects that properly
belong to a complete sketch are treated, including the history of Chris-
tian art, hymnology, accounts of the lives and chief works of the
Fathers of the Church, etc. The great theological, christoiogical, and
anthropological controversies of the period are duly sketi^hed ; and in
all the details of history the organising hand of a master ia distinctly
Been, shaping the mass of materials into order and system.

PROF. GEO. p. FISHER, Of Tale College.— "Dr. Schaff has thorougmy and
Buccessfully accomplished his task. The volumes are replete with evidences of 3
careful study of the original sources and of an extraordinary and, we might say,
unsurpassed acquaintance with the modem literature— German, French, and
English— in the department of ecclesiastical history. They are equally marked by
a fair-minded, conscientious spirit, as well as by a lucid, animated mode of
presentation."

PROF. ROSWELL D. HITCHCOCK, P.O.— "In no Other single work of
Its kind with which I am acquainted will students and general readers find so
much to instruct and interest them."

DR. JUL. MULLER, Of Halle.— "It Is the only history of the first six cen-
turies which truly satisfies the wants of the present age. It Is rich In results of
original investigation."

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF CHRIST, IN CHRONOLOGI-
CAL TABLES. A Synchronistic View of the Events, Charac-
teristics, and Culture of each period, including the History of
Polity, Worship, Literature, and Doctrines, together with two
Supplementary Tables upon the Church in America; and an
Appendix, containing the series of Councils, Popes, Patri-
archs, and other Bishops, and a full Index. By the lata
HENRY B. SMITH, D.D., Professor in the Union Theologi-
cal Seminary of the City of New York. Revised Edition.
Folio, $5.00.

r.EV. DR. W. G. T. SHEDD.— "Prof. Smith's Historical Tables are ^l'^ best
Ihat I know of in any language. In preparing such a work, with so much care and
research. Prof. Smith has furnished to the student an apparatus that will be ol
Ule-long service to him"

REV. DR. WILLIAM ADAMS — "The labor expended upon such a work la
tmmense. and its accuracy and completeness do honor to the research and
Icholarship of its auLhcr, and are an Invaluable acquisition to our literature."

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS'

LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF THE JEWISH CHURCH. B|
ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, D.D. With Maps and Plans.
New Edition from New Plates, with the author's latest revis*
ion. Part I.— From Abraham to Samuel. Part II.— From
Samuel to the Captivity. Part III.— From the Captivity to
the Christian Era. Three vols., 12mo (sold separately), each
$2.00.

The same— Westminster Edition. Three vols., 8vo (sold in sets
only), per set, $9.00.

LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF THE EASTERN CHURCK

With an introduction on the Study of Ecclesiastical History^
By ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, D.D. New Edition from
New Plates. 12mo, $2.00.

LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF SCOT-
LAND. By ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, D.D. 8vo, $1.5a

In all that concerns the external characteristics of the scenes and
persons described, Dr. Stanley is entirely at home. His books are not
dry records of historic events, but animated pictures of historic scenes
and of the actors in them, while the human motives and aspects of
events are brought out in bold and full relief.

THE LONDON CRITIC— "Earnest, eloquent, learned, with a style tliat !■
never monotonous, but luring tlu-ougli its eloquence, tlie lectures will maintain
his fame as author, scliolar, and divine. We could point out many passages that
glow with a true poetic fire, but there are hundreds pictorlally rich and poetically
true. The reader experiences no weariness, for in every page and paragraph,
there is something to engage the mind and refresh the soul."

THE NEW ENGLANDER.—" We have first to express our admiration of the
grace and graphic beauty of his style. The felicitous discrimination in the use
of language which appears on every page is especially required on these topics,
where the author's position might so easily be mistaken through an unguarded
statement. Dr. Stanley is possessed of the prime quality of an historical student
and writer— namely, the historical feeling, or sense, by which conditions of life
and types of character, remote from our present experience, are vividly con«
ceived of and truly appreciated."

THE N. Y. TIMES.— "The Old Testament History is here presented as It
never was presented before ; with so much clearness, elegance of style, and his-
toric and literary illustration, not to speak of learning and calmness of judgment,
that not theologians alone, but also cultivated readers generally, are drawn to tta
pages. In point of style it takes rank with Macaulay's History and the beet
chapters of Froude."

BIBLICAL STUDY.

BIBLICAL STUDY. Its Principles, Methods, and Historyc By
CHARLES A. BRIGCS, D.D., Professor of Hebrew and
Cognate Languages in Union Theological Seminary. Crown
8vo, $2.50.

The author has aimed to present a guide to Biblical Study for the
intelligent layman as well as the theological student and minister of
the Gospel. At the same time a sketch of the entire history of each
department of Biblical Study has been given, the stages of its develop-
ment are traced, the normal is discriminated from the abnormal, and
the whole is rooted in the methods of Christ and His Apostles.

THE BOSTON ADVERTISER.— "The principles, methods, and history of
Biblical study are very fully considered, and It is one of the best works of Its kind
In the language, If not the only book wherein the modem methods of the study
of the Bible are entered Into, apart from du-ect theological teaching."

THE LONDON SPECTATOR,— "Dr. Briggs' book la one of much value, not the
less to be esteemed because of the moderate compass Into which its mass of In-
formation has been compressed."

MESSIANIC PROPHECY. The Prediction of the Fulfilment of
Redemption through the Messiah. A Critical Study of the
Messianic Passages of the Old Testament in the Order of
their Development. By CHARLES A. BRIGGS, D.D., Pro-
fessor of Hebrew and the Cognate Languages in the Union
Theological Seminary. Crown 8vo, 82.50.
In this work the author develops and traces "the prediction of
the fulfilment of redemption through the Messiah " through the whole
eeries of Messianic passages and prophecies in the Old Testament.
Beginning with the first vague intimations of the great central thought
of redemption he arrays one prophecy after another ; indicating clearly
the general condition, mental and spiritual, out of which each prophecy
arises ; noting the gradual widening, deepening, and clarification of
the prophecy as it is developed from one prophet to another to the
end of the Old Testament canon.

THE LONDON ACADEMY.— " His new book on Messianic Prophecy is a
worthy companion to his indispensable text-book on Biblical study. He has pro-
duced the first English text-book on the subject of Messianic Prophecy which a
modem teacher can use."

THE EVANGELIST.— "Messianic Prophecy Is a subject of no common inter-
est, and this book is no ordinary book. It is, on the contrary, a work of the very
first order ; the ripe product of years of study upon the highest themes. It la
exegesis In a master-hand."

CHARLES SCIilB NEB'S SONS'

tHE DOCTRINE OF SACRED SCRIPTURE. A Critical, Hi^
torical, and Dogmatic Inquiry into the Origin and Nature
of the Old and New Testaments. By GEORGE T. LADD,
D.D., Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy in Yale
College. 2 vols., 8vo, $7.00.

J, HENRY THAYER, D.D.— "It is the most elaborate, erudite, judicious dls-
euasion of the doctrine of Scripture, in its various aspects, with wlilch I am
acquainted. I have no hesitation in saying that, for enabling a young minister
to present views alike wise and reverent respecting the nature and use ol
Sacred Scripture, nay, for giving him in general a Biblical outlook upon Chris-
tian theology, both in Its theoretical and its practical relations, the faithful study
of this thorough, candid, scholarly work will be worth to him as much as hall
the studies of his seminary course."

GEORGE P. FISHER, D.D., LL.D.— " Professor Ladd's work is from the pen ol
an able and trained scholar, candid in spirit and thorough in his researches. It
is so comprehensive in its plan, so complete in the presentation of facts, and so
closely related to ' the burning questions ' of the day, that it cannot fail to enlist
the attention of all earnest students of theology."

WORD STUDIES IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. By MARVIN R.
VINCENT, D.D. Vol. I.-The Synoptic Gospels, Acts of the
Apostles and the Epistles of Peter, James and Jude. Vol.
II.— The Writings of John— The Gospel, the Epistles, the
Apocalypse. 8vo, per vol., $4.00. Vol. III. ready.

The purpose of the author is to enable the English reader and
student to get at the original force, meaning, and color of the signifi-
cant words and phrases as used by the different writers. An introduc-
tion to the comments upon each book sets forth in compact form what
is known about the author — how, where, with what object, and
with what peculiarities of style he wrote. Dr. Vincent has gathered
from all sources and put in an easily comprehended form a great quan-
tity of information of much value to the critical expert as well as to
the studious layman who wishes to get at the real spirit of the Greek
text.

REV. DR. HOWARD CROSBY.— " Dr. Vincent's 'Word Studies in the New
Testament ' is a delicious book. As a Greek scholar, a clear thinker, a logical
reasoner, a master in English, and a devout sympathizer with the truths ol reve-
lation, Dr. Vincent is just the man to interest and edify the Church with such a
work as this. There are few scholars who, to such a degree as Dr. Vincent,
mingle scholarly attainment with aptness to Impart knowledge in attractive form.
All Bible-readera should enjoy and profit by these deUghtful ' Word Studies.' "

DR. THEO. L. CUYLER, in The K Y. Evangelist.— " The very things which
a young minister— and many an older one also— ought to know about the chief
words in his New Testament he will be able to learn in this affluent volume.
Tears of close study by one of our brightest Greek scholars, have been condensed
Into Its pages."

CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES AND
HOMILETICS.

MANUAL OF CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES. By Prof. GEORGE
PARK FISHER, D.D., LL.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical
History in Yale College. 16mo, 75 cents.

The aim of the book is to present the Evidences of Christianity in
a concise, lucid form, for the benefit of those who have not the leisure
to study extended treatises on the subject. It is intended both for
private reading- and for the use of classes in public institutions. Al-
though brief, it includes a distinct statement of both the internal and
external proofs. The arguments are shaped to meet objections and
difficulties which are felt at the present time, and the historic evidence
is carefully confined to the present state of scholarship and learning.

THE EXAMINER.— "It Is worth Its weight in gold. It is by aU odds the best
treatise on tlie Evidences of Christianity for general use tliat we tnow. It ia
sound, judicious, clear, and scholarly."

THE N. Y, SUN.— "Compact, thorough, and learned, its simplicity of style
and brevity ought to commend it to a wide circle of readers."

THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF. By
Prof. GEORGE P. FISHER, D.D., LL.D. Crown 8vo, $2.50.

FROM THE PREFACE.— "This volume embraces a discussion of the evidences
of both natural and revealed religion. Prominence is given to topics having
special interest at present from their connection with modern theories and diffi-
culties. The argument of design, and the bearing of evolutionary doctrines on
Its validity, are fully considered."

JULIUS H. SEELYE, President of Amherst College.— "I find it as I should
expect it to be, wise and candid, and convincing to an honest mind."

PROF. JAMES O. MURRAY, o/Pn'nceton CoZJ^ge.—" It is eminently fitted to
meet the honest doubts of some of our best young men. Its fairness and candor,
its learning and ability in argument, its thorough handling of modem objections
— aU these qualities fit it for such a service, and a great service it is."

ESSAYS ON THE SUPERNATURAL ORIGIN OF CHRISTIAN*
ITY. By Prof. GEORGE P. FISHER, D.D., LL.D. 8vo,
new and enlarged edition, $2.50.

THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE.— " His volume evinces rare versatility of intellect,
with a scholarship no less sound and judicious in Its tone and extensive in Ita
attainments than it is modest in its pretensions."

THE BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW.— "We know not where the Student wlU
And a more satisfactory guide in relation to the great questions which have grown
up between the friends of the Christian revelation and the most able of ita assaiV
ants, within the memory of the present generation."