I Fame ar ene pw baa
SOI Ia eee IT
See
SSD ee Seas : = a See See : Sei ae z reese
Ce i
ea ee ee ey
ee ene tenes
Se pee ee
Saree SS = : eee
ah Se Se SEES =
eee
SE ee ee
Se,
Re eI Ea
za Sse ES
Se
oe
Som
See
Hit i
Potts
Tey
he
gi the Gheologicns 5,,,
y
“itty
a PRINCETON, N. J.
Inbrary of Dr. A. A. Hodge. Presented. -
Brey ye D4 1885
Defence and confirmation of
the faith |
oa eer es
=e
oe Lp Seth
—
pts It ngnt x
ee
RY ae ee) A as
Sees, had
?
Tae oe
LY ae at
“DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION’
OF
APACE. enya) aD eT.
Six Lectures
DELIVERED BEFORE TH“ WESTERN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY IN
THE YEAR 1885, on THE FOUNDATION OF THE
ELLIOTYr LECTURESHIP,
FUNK & WAGNALLS
NEW YORK: 1885,
10 AND 12 Dey STREET.
All Rights Reserved.
LONDON:
44 FLEET Srreet,
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1885, by
FUNK & WAGNALLS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C.
PREFACE.
Tue Elliott Lectureship is so called in honor of the
Rev. David Elliott, D.D., LL.D., who was for sixty-
three years a minister of Jesus Christ in the Presbyterian
Church, and for thirty-eight years a professor in the
Western Theological Seminary.
For the purity of his life, for the beauty of his moral
character, for the abundance of his labors in the Church,
and especially for his eminent services as a professor of
theology through so many years, this honor is peculiarly
due to his revered memory.
The first course of lectures given under the Lecture-
ship was delivered in 1880 by the Rev. Alexander F.
Mitchell, D.D., St. Andrews, Scotland.
The second course, given during the winter of
1884-85, is now presented in printed form to the alumni
and friends of the Seminary.
r= ins
*
¥
eat x
oo A ree - a he
=e ee a a = i hs
CONTENTS,
LECTURE I.
By Rev. Witu1am M. Taynor, D.D., LL.D., New Yor.
PAGE
The Argument from the Messianic PYOPHOCIOSS. Vives.cvcce dives: 70
LECTURE IL.
By Rey. Carrorz Curter, D.D., Presmpentr or WESTERN Rez-
SERVE COLLEGE, CLEVELAND, O.
The Philosophy of Religion Considered ag Pointing toward a
Divine Redeemer of Men......... ..... ease eee eWC daaeee s 28
LECTURE III.
By Rey, Srmon J. McPuerson, D.D., Cuicaco, Inu.
Jesus Christ, the Unique Reconciler of Contradictories in Thought
and Oharacter:.... 00... ..s 05. .e Rate 9 hase t RE Ate arin, 59
LECTURE IV.
By Rev. Natuanten West, D.D., St. Paun, Minn.
An Apologetic for the Resurrection of Christ............... see 80
LECTURE V.
By Rey. Syzvester F, Scoven, PResIDENT oF THE UNIVERSITY oF
Wooster, Woostzr, O,
Christianity and CRYIN ASOD AN, tateg oo oe Utne ie inat maath g 130
LECTURE VI.
By Rev. Henry OC, McCoox, D.D., ParapEnpata.
Foreordination in Nature: As an Argument for the Being of
God, Illustrated from the Maternal Instinct of Insects....,, 174
2s athe bat. ~e
. >
*
“\
4 "ae
od as
Am Ae ee wh a P a ie | aye.
Pe a’ Oe
ef & \o= ae VE
- ye va un tr
: ey x J
gk tee HS bia 2 Ao PRP Oe,
« p ipa re et
LECTURE I.
The Argument from the Messianie Prophecies.
BY REV. WILLIAM M. TAYLOR, D.D., LL.D.
In support of their claim to be received as the word of
God, the Scriptures, among other evidences, set before
us that of prophecy ; and I propose at this time to give
a specimen of the argument which is built thereon, A
full treatment of so large a subject would require a
volume; but I must content myself with bringing under
your notice only a few of the more important Messianic
predictions contained in the Old Testament, together
with their historical fulfilment, and drawing the infer-
ences which are fairly warranted by the correspondence
between the two. |
The term prophet means one who speaks for another.
It implies that he has received both his authority and his
message from him whom he represents. Thus Jehovah
said to Moses,* ‘‘ See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh ;
and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet ;’’ and what
these words denote is made perfectly clear by those
others spoken shortly before at the bush +—‘‘ And Aaron
shall be thy spokesman unto the people : and he shall
be, even he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and
thou shalt be to him instead of God.’’ In the specific
scriptural sense of the word, therefore, the ‘* prophet”
was one authorized and qualified to speak to men the
A i ay ee + Ex. 4:16.
8 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
message which he had received for them from God, and
‘* prophecy”’ was the message so delivered by him. Their
discourses partook both of an ethical and a predictive
character ; but the predictive was subordinated to the
ethical, which, indeed, was always the staple of their ut-
terances. Their highest duty was to declare the truth in
God’s name; and in their labors among God’s chosen
people they wrought for the preservation of Israel’s polit-
ical existence—for morality, for education, for everything
that tended to elevate those to whom they were primarily
sent, while at the same time they secured ultimately for
all mankind a written record of the revelation which had
been made through them. This implied a claim on their
part that God was supernaturally present with them, to
guide them what and how they should speak and write ;
and of that claim prediction was the authoritative indorse-
ment. It was to the message by which it was’ accompa-
nied what the miracles of Christ and His apostles were
to the doctrines in connection with which they were
wrought. Indeed, in this case the prediction was the
miracle, for foreknowledge is as supernatural in the psy-
chological sphere as the power ina miracle, commonly
so called, is in the physical.
But just as Christ and His apostles were more than
miracle-workers, so the prophets were more than mere
foretellers of future events. They were, in truth, the
representatives of God among the people, to keep alive
His knowledge in the midst of them, to stimulate them
to holiness, to reprove, rebuke, and exhort them as occa-
sion might require, and especially to prepare them for
the coming of that great Deliverer who was to appear
- once ‘in the end of the world to put away sin by the
sacrifice of Himself.’? The manner in which the truth
which they were to proclaim was revealed to them is
THE ARGUMENT FROM MESSIANIC PROPHECIES. 9
beyond our ken, but the revelation itself took its form
from the cireumstances in which they were placed, and
from the individuality of the prophets themselves. God
used them as men, and not as machines, and through
their message to their own times He spoke to men of all
times. To have, therefore, anything like a just concep-
tion of the work which they did we must set them in the
environment of their age, and get a correct idea of the
kind of evils with which they were required to contend,
and in this department good service has been rendered to
the Biblical student, even by writers from whom he may
be constrained to differ on other matters of great impor-
tance. But when we get a full appreciation of their
work we are able to see how, apart altogether from their
predictions, and looking only at the ethical character of
their messages, a striking and irrefutable argument may
be drawn for their divine inspiration. Just as the
supernatural in Christ may be conclusively proved from
the peerless excellence of His character and the lofty
morality of His teachings, taken in connection with the
absolute impossibility that these could be the simple prod-
ucts of such an age as that in which He appeared upon
the earth, so the divine mission of the Old Testament
prophets may be established from the contrast which
their writings present, especially in their theology and
morality, to the religious literature of contemporary
times in other lands. Here were a body of men stand-
ing forth for centuries as witnesses for monotheism in
creed and for holiness in life, in the face not only of the
polytheism and immorality of surrounding nations, but
also of a perpetual tendency toward these same evils
among many of their own people ; and yet from first to
last they never wavered in their utterances, or lowered
their testimony in the least. Take the oldest religious
10 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
books of other nationalities, and mark the contrast be-
tween them and the writings of the Hebrew prophets ;
then explain, if you can, on merely natural principles,
how it came that in such a number of short treatises,
written by men at distant intervals, there is one purpose
running through them all; how that purpose was not
merely of national importance, but included in it all the
people of the earth ; and how such a world-embracing
purpose was conspicuous in the sacred writings of a
people who have been correctly described as ‘‘ of no
great power or influence, limited in number, possessed
of many high qualities, but narrow-minded, prejudiced
against foreigners, and devoid of all cosmopolitan ten-
dencies.’’* Truly, to believe that such a literature was a
spontaneous growth among such a people is harder far
than it is to accept the statement that it was God who,
‘‘at sundry times and in divers manners,’’ spake thus to
the fathers of the Hebrew nation by the prophets.
I have said so much to indicate that [ am by no means
insensible to the cogency and importance of the argu-
ment which may be drawn from the writings of the Old
Testament, apart altogether from the consideration of
the predictions which they contain. But it seems to me
that too little attention has been given, in recent times,
to the predictions. In the controversies of the eight-
eenth century the ethical character of the writings of the
prophets was all but entirely ignored, while the predic-
tions were exclusively regarded ; but now the pendulum
has swung to the other extreme, and the tendency is to
depreciate the predictions by giving undue prominence
to the didactic element in the prophetical books. We
* See Prophecy a Preparation for Christ, by Dean Payne Smith,
p. 3.
THE ARGUMENT FROM MESSIANIC PROPHECIES. th
cannot forget, however, that the Lord Himself and His .
immediate followers made great use of the Old Testament
in their reasonings to show that the Christ must needs
suffer and rise again from the dead; and in a day when
the very possibility of the supernatural is by many
denied, it must be of immense service to bring up the
facts which here are indisputable, and ask how else they
are to be accounted for than by the inspiration of the
prophet on the one hand, and the all-controlling provi-
dence of God upon the other.
Without further preface, then, let me address myself
to the work which I have taken in hand. And, first, let
me lay down the conditions under which alone any valid
argument from the alleged fulfilment of a prediction can
be drawn. They are these three: First, the prediction
should be not only anterior to the fulfilment, but so long
anterior to it as to lift it above the range of mere human
foresight ; second, it should be so constructed that the
story of the fulfilment could not be manufactured out of
its terms; and third, the fulfilment should be uncon-
scious and undesigned on the part of those who brought
it about.
Now, with these conditions in mind, let us open the
Old Testament Scriptures. Almost on the very first
page, and in connection with the punishment of our first
parents for the first sin, we come upon these words in
the doom of the serpent: ‘‘I will put enmity between
thee and the-woman, and between thy seed and her seed ;
it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his
heel.’’ * Now, the discussion of the date of Genesis is
quite unnecessary here, and it makes little matter, so far
as the present argument is concerned, whether this was
* Gen. 3: 16.
12 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
first written by Moses, or whether he found it in an
ancient document and incorporated it in his narrative.
In any case, it was written many hundreds of years before
the advent of Christ. It is of no consequence, either,
for the purposes of this argument, whether we take the
story as an allegory, or, as I feel bound to accept it, as a
veritable history. However regarded, the serpent stands
for Satan; the woman is viewed apart from the man;
and her seed denotes some individual in human nature in
whose history the conflict between the serpent and the
race as a whole should culminate, the result being the
crushing of the serpent’s head and the bruising of the
conqueror’s heel. As one has put it, the words imply
‘that the human victor would himself experience the
whole power of the enemy in the very act of overcoming
him.”? All this seems enigmatical enough ; but when
we read it in the light of the New Testament we have
the true interpretation given to it, for the first time, by
its fulfilment. In the Lord Jesus Christ, who was
‘conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin
Mary,”’ we have one who is, as no one in human nature
but Himself has been, ‘‘ the seed of the woman,’’ while
in the crucifixion on Calvary we have the death-blow
given to Satan when Christ, ‘‘ having spoiled principali-
ties and powers, made a show of them openly, triumph-
ing over them,’’ and introducing a new birth for the
race by His own death. No one looking at the original
words could of his own ingenuity have devised such a
fulfilment ; yet when it came it fully met the require-
ments of the case ; and as the seed of the serpent—those
murderous Jews, who were of their father the devil—
hissed out their malice at the meek and lowly sufferer,
they knew not that they were verifying this first of all
the Messianic oracles.
2
THE ARGUMENT FROM MESSIANIC PROPHECIES. 13
Passing on, in our perusal of the Book of Genesis, we
come upon the promises made to Abraham; and though
we might find in them all much material for profitable
remark, it will be sufficient for our present purpose that
we dwell only upon one. Take, then, the first of them,
which was given to the patriarch ere yet he had left his
native Ur of the Chaldees, and for the purpose of
encouraging him to leave that for another, but yet un-
known, land. ‘‘ I will make of thee a great nation, . ..
and in thee shall all the families of the earth be
blessed.”? * Here again the date of the promise, ‘‘ I
will make of thee a great nation,’’ on any theory regard-
ing the age of the Book of Genesis, was long anterior to
the rise of the Jewish nation. Yet how completely it
has been fulfilled in the history of that people! But
more remarkable still the prediction, ‘‘in thee shall all
the families of the earth be blessed,” was, as Paul has
made abundantly plain, a preaching of the Gospel unto
Abraham, a foreshadowing of the fact that ‘‘ the blessing
of Abraham should come on the Gentiles through Jesus
Christ, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit
through faith.’’+ There, millenniums ago, is the predic-
tion, and even now it is being fulfilled before men’s
eyes. or wherever the Gospel has gone it has carried
richest blessings in its train. It has elevated woman,
purified the family, taken the little children in its arms,
stimulated benevolence, widened civil and religious lib-
erty, emancipated the slave, lifted the savage into civili-
zation, and dispelled the darkness of the tomb by bring-
ing life and immortality to light. These are facts that
cannot be controverted, and yet, as we see, they are but
the onward march toward its fulfilment of this prophecy,
* Gen. 12 : 2, 3, + Gal, 3:14,
14 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH,
which was given more than three thousand years ago to
Abraham, ere yet he left his country and his kindred to
become the first and greatest of the Pilgrim Fathers.
Take, next, that remarkable utterance of the dying
Jacob, in his blessing of Judah—*‘ A sceptre shall not
depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between. his
feet, until that Shiloh come; and unto him shall be the
obedience of the peoples.’?* This is the translation
given in the Speaker’s Commentary and sanctioned by
many eminent Hebrew scholars ; and the variation sug-
gested by some, ‘‘ until he came to Shiloh,’’ has found
little favor. The term Shiloh has been differently un-
derstood ; but now the best expositors are divided be-
tween these two meanings, ‘‘ The peaceful,’’ or ‘* He
whose it is,” the one referring to the character of the
coming ruler, and the other to his right to the sceptre of
Judah ; but as the latter would require a considerable
change in the Hebrew word, involving even the leaving
out of one of its letters, I prefer the former. Now,
from the first this oracle has been understood of the
Messiah, and as such it indicates that He should be of
the tribe of Judah ; that when He came He should be
‘‘ the peaceful one,’’ and that He should come just before
the sceptre should depart from Judah. The date of the
prophecy is that of the Book of Genesis, at least, and
therefore on any theory it was long anterior to the
advent of Christ. Moreover, the character of the facts
foretold is such that no one could of himself bring about
their fulfilment. Now we know that our Lord sprang
out of Judah, and every one must recognize the appro-
priateness of Shiloh, the peaceful one, as the name of Him
on whose birth night the heavenly host sang, ‘* Glory to
* Gen, 49 : 10,
THE ARGUMENT FROM MESSIANIC PROPHECIES. 15
God in the highest, peace on earth, good will to men.”
But more difficulty has been felt about the time of His
appearance, as here indicated ; yet even here we have no
need to shrink from the strictest scrutiny. I cannot put
the truth about it into briefer compass, or in a clearer
manner, than it has been expressed by Dr. W. H.
Thomson, a beloved office-bearer of my own church, in
his admirable work on Christ in the Old Testament,
which he has named ‘‘ The Great Argument.’’? * ‘* The
figures used,’’ says he, ‘‘ denote a continued national
existence on the part of Judah. . . . The sceptre is em-
blematic of an actual executive authority, whether king
or magistrate, bearing sway over some definite territory
or country rather than over a scattered race. . . . The
lawgiver denotes that other indispensable adjunct to a
real nation—namely, the possession of its own courts and
institutions. (Now) over against this ancient prophecy
stands this fact in history, that with the brief exception
of the stay in Babylon . . . the tribe of Judah main-
tained its specific existence from the beginning of He-
brew history down to the overthrow by Titus, a nation
in the strict sense of the term, when that is used in dis-
tinction from a race or people.’’ Under the Persians, in
the years of its independence after the successful conflict
with a portion of the empire left by Alexander, and
under the Roman power, though such a thing was
exceptional in its dealing with subject peoples, the
Jewish nation retained these badges of its existence, and
lost them only after that memorable siege which Josephus
has described, when Jerusalem was destroyed. Since
then the Jews have been a race, a people, but not a na-
tion. The sceptre has departed, the lawgiver has dis-
- * The Great Argument, p. 104.
16 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
appeared, but not before the Shiloh had come, to whom
—and here we have a repetition of the promise made to
Abraham—‘‘ shall be the obedience of the peoples.”
Thus distinct, on the one hand, are the meaning and the
antiquity of this prophecy ; and on the other the precise-
ness of its fulfilment—a fulfilment which, as it extended
through centuries and involved the action of a state like
that of Rome, whose rulers had never even heard of the
existence of the prophecy, could not have been brought
about by any collusion.
We take, next, the prediction of Moses concerning his
greater successor. It is to be found in Deut. 18 : 15,
‘* The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet from
the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me ; unto
him ye shall hearken.” Now, it makes little difference,
for the cogency of this argument, how you settle the ques-
tions concerning the authorship and date of Deuterono-
my. Ina matter of this kind, the prescience that sees
through seven centuries is just as supernatural as that
which sees through thirteen. We know that the book
was in existence before the captivity of the Jews, and
that is enough. Yet see how thoroughly this prediction
was fulfilled in Christ. It may have had, as some
imagine, a partial verification in the case of the different
prophets that appeared in the history of Israel, but its
terms are satisfied in none of these. The pith of the
prediction is in these words, ‘‘ like unto me ;’’ and the
likeness is not moral, but official. Now, as Moses was
the mediator between the nation of Israel and Jehovah,
so Christ is the Mediator between God and men; as
Moses was the introducer of a new economy, so Jesus
was the Inaugurator of a new dispensation ; as Moses
was the intercessor for the people, so Jesus ‘‘ ever liveth
to make intercession for them that come unto God by
a
THE ARGUMENT FROM MESSIANIC PROPHECIES. 1%
Him.’? Thus we have the official likeness in every par-
ticular, and Moses here has given a description out of
which no mythical Messiah could be constructed, but by
which the real Messiah might be easily recognized when
He appeared.
We have a similar prediction in that message which
Nathan brought to David, when the King of Israel ex-
pressed his purpose to build a temple to Jehovah. The
only difference is that, while Moses speaks, as became his
time and his office, of the great coming Deliverer as a
Prophet, Nathan now, in the fuller development of the
nation, refers to Him as a King, and as the Son of
David. Thus He who was at first described as the seed
of the woman is gradually more and more definitely
characterized as the Son of Shem, the seed of Abraham,
of the tribe of Judah, a Prophet like unto Moses, a King
in the family of David. Here is the gist of Nathan’s
message : * * It was in thy heart to build God an house,
but the time has not yet come for that ; it is well that it
was in thy heart to do it, and thy son shall carry out thy
plan ; but God will build thee an howse’’—that is, will
maintain thy dynasty—for ‘‘ thine house and thy king-
dom shall be established forever before thee : thy throne
shall be established before thee.”? This might not be
very clearly intelligible either to David or to Nathan at
the time ; but when, now, we take into consideration the
fact that Jesus was of the house and lineage of David,
that He came to found, and did found, a kingdom not
of this world, but spiritual, and set up in the hearts of
men—-a kingdom yet to be universal and destined to be
perpetual, we are at no loss to find the interpretation of
the promise in its fulfilment, for, as Keil has said, ‘* The
* 2 Sam. 7 : 5, 16.
18 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH,
posterity of David could last forever only by running
out in a person who lives forever—that is, by culminat-
ing in the Messiah, who lives forever, and of whose king-
dom there is no end.”’
But now let us take the oracle of Micah as to the place
of the great Deliverer’s birth. ‘¢ But thou, Bethlehem
Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of
Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that
is to be ruler in Israel ; whose goings forth have been from
of old, from everlasting.’’ * I cannot go into the minute
consideration of the section of Micah’s writings of which
these words form a part; let it suffice to say that from
the time when Micah uttered them up till that of the
rejection of Christ by the Jews, the Israelites themselves
universally regarded this oracle as strictly Messianic.
Even the chief priests and the scribes, when Herod asked
them where the Christ was to be born, answered, without
hesitation, ‘“‘ In Bethlehem of Judea,”’ with a reference
to this passage ; and it was only when they found that
this interpretation of the prophecy identified Jesus of
Nazareth as the Messiah that the later Jews began to
seek for it another explanation, But a close inspection
of the whole tenor of the context will lead to the conclu-
sion that this original application of the passage is cor-
rect. Here, then, we have the birthplace of the Mes-
siah specified. And when we open the New Testament
we find that Christ was born at Bethlehem. Yet His
birth there was what men nowadays, perhaps, would call
an accident. Mary had gone thither with Joseph, not
dreaming of this prophecy at all, but in obedience to the
decree of the emperor, which required the enrolment at
that place of all belonging to the family of David; and
* Micah 5 : 2,
THE ARGUMENT FROM MESSIANIC PROPHECIES. 19
so, in a quite incidental and undesigned manner, the
prediction of seven hundred years before was fully veri-
fied.
Turn with me now to the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah.
That prophecy was long prior in date to the appearance
of the Messiah. We do not care to inquire here whether
it was written by Isaiah himself or by Ewald’s ‘‘ Great
Unknown.’’ We have evidence, in the Septuagint ver-
sion, of its existence, at least two hundred years before
Christ. Neither can it be alleged that it was so plain a
description of the events that one might have con-
structed the Gospel history out of it; for though the
Jews originally referred it to their Messiah, they still
failed to get out of it the idea that he was to be a
sufferer. Yet mark how the history at once interprets
and fulfils it. The ministry of our Lord prior to His
death was to human view so unsuccessful that He might
well say, ‘‘ Who hath believed our report, and to whom
is the arm of the Lord revealed?’ His bearing before
His accusers was such as exactly to harmonize with the
words, ‘‘ He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He
opened not His mouth: He is brought as a lamb to the
slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so
He openeth not His mouth.’? The manner of His death
is indicated in the expression, ‘‘ He was numbered with
the transgressors ;’’ yet no one was thinking of that
when they crucified Him between two malefactors ; and
the peculiar incidents connected with Mis burial are
shadowed forth in the clause, ‘‘ His grave was appointed
for Him with the wicked, but He was with the rich in
His death,” a statement never thought of, either by
the Roman soldiers when they prepared three graves for
those who were executed that day on Calvary, or by
Joseph when, in the kindness of his heart, he offered his
20 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
new tomb because it was nigh at hand. Then, in the
description which comes after, ‘‘ He shall see His seed,
He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the Lord
shall prosper in His hand. He shall see of the travail of
his soul, and shall be satisfied,’’ we have a reference to
events which, without expressly mentioning His resur-
rection and ascension, do yet fit in fully with what we
know were the results of His entrance into glory and
His bestowal of the gift of the Holy Spirit. For my
part, I do not see how one can read the history in the
light of this prophecy, or this prophecy in the light of
the history, without feeling the force of Peter’s words,
‘‘ Now, brethren, 1 wot that through ignorance ye did
it, as did also your rulers; but those things which God
before had showed by the mouth of all the prophets that
Christ should suffer, He hath so fulfilled.”
Your time will permit me to refer to only one predic-
tion more. Let it be that in the ninth of Daniel,
wherein, in answer to Daniel’s prayer concerning the
close of the captivity, Gabriel gave him a revelation,
which not only unfolded to him the nature and effects of
Messiah’s work, but also the time of His appearance.
True, the date of Daniel’s own book has been disputed ;
and some have contended, falsely as I believe, that the
prophetical parts of it were not written until after the
days of Antiochus Epiphanes. But that is of small
account here, for we find this also in the Septuagint ver-
sion of the Hebrew Scriptures two hundred years before
Christ, and prescience such as that is as much above
human foresight as it would be through five hundred
years. Here, then, are the words, given in the best
translation which I have been able to find: ‘‘ Seventy
sevens (of years) are determined in reference to thy
people and thy holy city, to shut up, or restrain sin, to
THE ARGUMENT FROM MESSIANIC PROPHECIES. 21
sea] transgression, to cover iniquity, to bring in everlast-
ing righteousness, to seal the vision and the prophet, and
to anoint the Holy of Holies. Know and understand ;
from the going forth of a decree for restoring and re-
building Jerusalem unto Messiah the Prince are seven
sevens and sixty and two sevens. Thestreets shall be re-
stored and built again ; it is decided and shall be, though
in distress of times. And after sixty-two sevens Messiah
shall be cut off, and there shall be nothing more to Him.
Then the people of a prince that shall come shall destroy
the city and the sanctuary ; its end shall be with that
sweeping flood ; even unto the end of the war desolations
are determined. One seven shall make the covenant
effective to many. ‘The middle of the seven shall make
sacrifice and offerings cease ; then down upon the sum-
mit of the abomination comes the desolator, even till a
complete destruction determined shall be poured upon
the desolate.’’* Now here, more important even than the
date, are the descriptive passages referring to the work
of the Messiah. The phrases to ‘‘shut up or restrain
sin’? and to ‘‘ cover iniquity,’’ describe most appropri-
ately the sacrificial nature and sanctifying effects of the
death of Christ ; the expressions to bring in everlasting
righteousness and to seal up the vision and the prophet,
refer to the work of Christ as furnishing His people
with an everlasting righteousness, and sealing up by ful-
filling the prophecies of the Old Testament; and the
anointing of the Holy of Holies, may refer to the purifi-
cation and consecration of the Temple by the presence
in it of the incarnate God. The portion of the oracle
referring to the first seven sevens of years we need not
go into now ; but in the description of what should come
* See Coles on Daniel, p. 401.
RR DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
at the end of the sixty-nine sevens, we find that in the
middle of the next heptade sacrifice and offering should
be made to cease, which clearly points to the doing away
of all legal sacrifices by the death of Christ. Other
expressions are equally significant, and all identify the
Messiah here with Jesus of Nazareth. Now, let us look
at the matter of the date. The point from which these
seventy sevens are reckoned is the issuing of a command-
ment to restore and rebuild Jerusalem. But that cannot
refer to the edict of Cyrus, or its repetition by Darius
Hystaspes, for these had respect only to the Temple, and
said nothing about the city. Itis probable, therefore, that
it designates either the commission given by Artaxerxes
Longimanus to Ezra in the seventh year of his reign, or
that given by the same monarch to Nehemiah in the
twentieth year of his reign. The former of these is pre-
ferred by Pusey and other commentators of authority in
the case; and as the seventh year of Artaxerxes Longi-
manus corresponds, in the most accurate chronology,
with the year 457 B.c., we may easily calculate thus.
Sixty-nine sevens, or four hundred and eighty-three
years, bring us to the year 26 of our era. But if, as
many have shown with much probability, Christ was
really born four years before that which was fixed on
ultimately as the year a.p. 1,* He would be, in the year
A.D. 26, in His thirtieth year ; and we know from Luke
that His baptism, or public manifestation to the people,
took place ‘‘ when He began to be about thirty years of
age.”’ Further, in the middle of the seventieth seven,
or heptade, the Lord was crucified, for, as almost all are
agreed, and the Gospel by John makes it all but cer-
tain, His public ministry lasted three years and a half,
* See Pusey on Daniel, p. 172.
THE ARGUMENT FROM MESSIANIC PROPHECIES. 29
Still, again, it is said, ‘‘ One seven shall make the covenant
effective tomany.’’ During the first half of this period,
as we have just seen, the Lord’s personal ministry con-
tinued ; but the people, as a whole, would not receive
Him—‘‘ there was nothing more to Him” from them :
and the remaining three and a half years probably mark
the time during which the Gospel was preached to the
Jews after Christ’s resurrection and before the conver-
sion of the Gentiles showed that the special privileges of
the chosen people were at an end. Finally, we have
here a very distinct indication of the overthrow of Jeru-
salem by the Romans, which followed not indeed imme-
diately in time, but yet as the immediate effect of the
rejection of the Messiah by the Jews. Now, bear in
mind that four hundred and ninety years from the year
B.c. 457 bring us to the year a.p. 33 ; that, according
to the corrected chronology of many, the crucifixion took
place in the year a.p. 29, and that that is the middle of
the last of Daniel’s heptades at which the Messiah was to
make an end of sin by the sacrifice of Himself, and you
will see how marvellous the fulfilment is. I know that
in the matter of dates we must speak with caution, and
therefore I have been the more particular to give the
greater emphasis to the phrases in this prophecy which
describe the nature and effect of Messiah’s work. Still,
‘it is remarkable that the widest divergence between
the many different computations made from this starting-
point to the end of the sixty-nine sevens, when the Mes-
siah should appear, do not vary ten years either way from
the date of the preaching of John the Baptist and the
first appearance of Jesus Christ.’ *
Here, however, I must rest my case. I have given
* The Great Argument, p. 339.
24. DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
you only a specimen of the Messianic predictions, It
would require not one discourse, but a whole course of
lectures, to go over them all; but I have brought out
sufficient to form the basis for the argument which I
proceed now to construct.
I want a satisfactory explanation for the converging of
so many prophecies upon Christ and their fulfilment in
Him. You need not speak to me here of human fore-
sight. That might account for the warning given by a
deep thinker of some danger that lies in the near future,
but it is ridiculous to name it in this connection. It
might explain, for example, De Tocqueville’s forecast of
our civil war, but it will furnish no satisfactory cause
for such things as I have set before you now.
Equally idle here is it to speak of accident or mere
coincidence. There might be some ground for believing
that the fulfilment of a prediction is accidental if it stood
alone and by itself, an exception in the history of an
individual ; but when we have so many predictions all
pointing to one person and verified in him, no man with
any candor will account for such a thing by mere coinci-
dence. In scientific investigations, when we have a case
like this, the philosopher, no matter what may be his
creed, sees some design in the converging of so many
lines toward one point, and asks, in spite of himself,
What is the purpose of all this? What end is it meant
toserve ? Andinthat way he arrives at some of his most
important discoveries. When we look upon a modern
map and observe a great many railroads from different
directions approaching to and centring in one point, we
immediately infer that the design of them all is to reach
some important city that is situated at that point ; and
the same principle will lead us infallibly to the conclu-
sion here that these predictions were intended to furnish
THE ARGUMENT FROM MESSIANIC PROPHECIES. 25
the means for the perfect identification of the Messiah
promised to the Fathers when He should appear among
men.
Still less can we talk here of these fulfilments having
been brought about by collusion. Those concerned in
the matter were working, for the most part, in igno-
rance. They knew not what they did; and yet, while
acting with perfect freedom, they verified all that had
been written hundreds of years before. The. only
hypothesis that will meet the case is that the prophets
spoke under the guidance of God, and as directed by His
foreknowledge. No doubt we are met here with the
objection that this is a form of miracle, and that the
supernatural, in any form, is impossible. But to that
we may answer, in the words of Dean Payne Smith, that
‘‘the prophecies contained in the Old Testament are so
numerous, so consentient one with another, and yet so
contrary to the whole tenor of Jewish thought, so mar-
vellously fulfilled in Christianity, and yet in a way so
different from every anticipated fulfilment, that while it
is unscientific to refuse to listen to the proof of their
reality, because of any @ priori supposition, it 1s even
worse than folly to speak of them as mere forecasts and
anticipations.’’*
Here are two classes of facts. On the one hand, the
predictions hundreds of years before the events ; on the
other, the events thoroughly fulfilling the predictions.
Neither of these can be got rid of. They must be
accepted as facts. Now, the great principle of the in-
ductive philosophy is that nothing which claims to rest
on actual fact is to be rejected without examination ; and
it is an axiom in science that nothing shall be accepted
* See Prophecy a Preparation for Christ. Pref. pp. xv., xvi.
26 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
as a cause which is not adequate to produce the effect
that is attributed to it. By these we stand as strongly
as any man of science among them all, and when these are
applied to the facts which I have now brought before
you, I feel persuaded that every unprejudiced inquirer
will be led to the admission that God is in these ancient
Scriptures, and that the prophets spoke and wrote as
they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
Further, these facts prove that God is in history.
Men in working out their own designs are yet only ful-
filling His purposes. We cannot tell how this is accom-
plished without doing violence to their free agency ; but
we see that it is really so, and are prepared to assent to
Peter’s words, ‘‘ Him being delivered by the determi-
nate counsel and foreknowledge of God ye have taken
and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.”’
Finally, we are warranted from these facts to conclude
that God is in Christ. Be sure that in believing on
Jesus you are following no cunningly devised fable, but
are becoming the disciples of Him to whom God has
pointed by the finger of Moses, and David, and Micah,
and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Daniel, as well as by that
of John the Baptist, saying, ‘‘ Behold the Lamb of God
which taketh away the sin of the world.”? In building
on this foundation you are not laying stones on a quick-
sand, in which they disappear as soon as you have placed
them, but you are setting them upon the Rock of Ages.
In venturing on this bridge you are not trusting yourself
to a tiny plank which will break beneath your weight,
but you are treading on a structure stable as the throne
of God itself. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the
world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto
them.’’ If Christ is not certainly the Son of God, then
there is no certainty. If this is not proof that He is the
THE ARGUMENT FROM MESSIANIC PROPHECIES. 27
Author of eternal salvation to all them that obey Him,
then all proof is impossible. I repeat, therefore, with a
firmer emphasis than ever, the precious words, ‘“¢ This is a
faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ
Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’’? But as L
think of old Jerusalem, and see the Roman eagles shin-
ing in the lurid light of the conflagration by which its
temple was consumed, I am constrained to add, ‘‘ Be-
cause of unbelief they were broken off and thou standest
by faith. Be not high-minded, but fear ; for if God
spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He spare
not thee.”
LECTURE IL.
The Philosophy of Religion Considered as Pointing
Toward a Dwine Redeemer of Men.
BY REV. CARROLL CUTTER, D.D., PRESIDENT OF WESTERN
RESERVE COLLEGE, CLEVELAND, OHIO,
Tue subject of my lecture to-night is, The Philosophy
of Lfreligion Considered as Pointing toward a Divine
ftedeemer of Men. I propose to show what I under-
stand by religion, by the philosophy of religion, what
the outlines of such a philosophy are, and how it points
to a divine Redeemer of men.
This is obviously a large field, which presents many
deep problems for discussion, rather than topics for pop-
ular discourse. But the substantial facts and relations
may be presented in a plain way, without complicated
criticism and refutation of other views, so that even the
common mind may grasp them without being lost in
doubts and hard questions.
Religion is such a common fact in our experience and
observation that we scarcely think of defining it for our-
selves or others. We point to the exercises of it which
we daily see in a Christian community, and attempt no
farther determination of its nature. When we see vari-
ous forms of religion differing from each other and from
our own in creed, life, and worship, some are apt to
refer them all without inquiry, as perversions or diseases
of the soul, to the class of superstitions unworthy of
THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 29
respect or study. Others of a more sceptical mind are
inclined to rank Christianity with the rest, as only a less
baneful and irrational superstition, destined to pass away
in its turn, as fetichism, the worship of animals or of
nature, as Greek polytheism, has passed away. The
great number and variety of religions is often made the
ground for rejecting all religion as a product of vain
fears and baseless theories. If there be therefore a true,
real, and well-grounded religion, having substantial and
permanent causes in the soul of man,—if there is a real
fitting object toward whom these activities go out,—if the
nature and situation of man and the nature of the object
of religion demand its exercise, then by defining what
religion essentially is, pointing out these permanent
eauses, showing the reality of the object and our rela-
tions to it, we shall do something to defend and establish
it ; because we thus give a rational account and intellect-
ual justification of it ; we give a philosophy of religion.
If we show that religion thus defined and accounted for
requires a divine Mediator and Redeemer, we shall do
something to defend and establish the Christian system.
There have been many attempts to give a brief and
comprehensive definition of religion in a single sentence.
Examples of these are the following: ‘‘ Religion is the
observance of the moral law as a divine institution ;” it
is-‘¢ faith in the moral order of the universe ;” ‘‘ the
union of the finite with the infinite ;” ‘‘ the union of
God with man;’’ ‘‘ faith founded on feeling in the
reality of the ideal ;’’ ‘‘ the recognition of our duties as
divine commands ;” ‘‘ conscious participation in the
highest reason ;’’ ‘‘ the feeling of absolute dependence.”
Such vague, abstract, or metaphysical phrases may
suggest to the imaginative particular aspects of religion,
but they can convey no definite conception of any sub-
30 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
ject, much less of that great concrete reality which so
absorbs and controls all human life, and which we call
religion.
Dr. Whewell defines religion as ‘‘a man’s belief
respecting God and His government of men.” This
gives religion wholly an intellectual character. Belief
concerning these things is certainly involved in religion,
or constitutes one element of it, but not the whole. If
a man’s belief on the question whether God is, and
whether He exercises any government over men, should
happen to be that there is no God and no divine govern-
ment, that would not be religion. Bretschneider has
said, with more correctness, ‘‘ Religion is faith in the
reality of God, with a state of mind and mode of life in
accordance with that faith.’? Professor W. D. Whitney
defines more at length by saying that ‘‘ Religion is a
belief in a superhuman being or beings whose actions
are seen in the works of creation, and in such rela-
tions on the part of man toward this being or beings
as prompt the believer to acts of propitiation and wor-
ship, and to the regulation of conduct. It is a philoso-
phy with the application to human interests added, and
not only added, but made the prominent consideration.”
The Westminster Review (April, 1881, p. 194) says
that, ‘‘in all acts or states of religion two characteristic
features are invariably present: First, an emotion in the
mind of the devotee, manifested with more or less in-
tensity in the form of reverence, awe, and dependence ;
second, this state of feeling as related in some form or
other to a supernatural being or power. The former is
the product of our emotional, the latter of our intellect-
ual, nature.”
The defects of the latter two definitions will appear in
the sequel, but they are far superior to those briefer
THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 31
ones. Religion is a hard thing to define adequately,
‘because it is so comprehensive,—in logical language,
becanse it has so many essential marks. Any proper
conception of it must be as broad as the nature and life
of man, and must have reference to a real being outside
and independent of man, which is its proper object. It
we look at it as we experience it ourselves, or as it is
reported by others who have had a deep experience of it,
we find that it includes knowledge and feeling, choice
and action,—that is, it includes the whole of man ; all
his powers and activities have a part in it. If any of
these elements is absent, or defective, or perverted in its
action, the religion is either changed into a superstition,
or loses its full and proper nature. It is something
which takes the place of religion or a diseased and dis-
ordered exhibition of it ; not religion in proper propor-
tions and balance of its elements.
If we should attempt to define religion so broadly—that
is, by so few marks—as to bring under the definition all
its perversions and defective types, all those things
which have ever taken the place of religion, we could
give only the fewest qualities, and must leave out many
essential elements of real and true religion. The more
correct method would be to define the true, real, and
full conception, and then, if need be, point out the de-
fects by which other things fall short of this conception,
even though they may practically take the place of
religion.
When we speak of a philosophy of religion, we
properly mean religion as a psychological activity and a
psychological product. If we speak of it as an outward
form or exercise, as a performance or ceremony, it is a
perversion of language. Performances are a mere husk,
and of no account except as an expression of a psycho-
32 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
logical activity. But religion as a psychological activity
and a psychological product can have no occasion and no
existence except with reference to an object, which must
be, or be conceived, as a superhuman being, and, in the
strict sense, as a supernatural being. It must be super-
human in such a sense as to have power over man ; it
must be above, superior to man. It must be supernat-
ural in the sense that it has power over the mind and
soul of man as no other man and no material thing as
such, has, even though it should be itself a material
thing, as the sun, the ocean, fire, some force of nature,
or a mere idol of wood or stone. It is not common
matter or common material force. It has, by some
means Which the believer may not understand, become
separated and lifted out of the class of ordinary material
things. Perhaps the thought may not rest, or intend to
rest, in the material thing at all, but that may be consid-
ered merely as the representative embodiment or sug-
gester of an unseen power which is served and wor-
shipped. And even if the thought does rest in the
material thing, it does not rest in it merely as material ;
for then all material things alike would be gods; but as
distinguished in some way, however dimly the way may
be apprehended, from all other material things, so that
this has some special power and right over the man
which cannot be set aside or successfully opposed.
Religion, then, implies, first, knowledge of a Being
who is to be served and worshipped,—knowledge of a
God who is so far above us and in such relations to us as
to have power and right over us. By some means or
other all men have some conception of such a Being or
beings, and belief in them, and that they stand in such
plaiots to the gods.
Second. If there are conceived to be such arrsie
THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 5
beings or such a Being, it must also be conceived that
there are certain feelings due to him, corresponding to
his nature and our relations to him. If he has a power
over us, we must inquire how we can render him such
service as will satisfy him ; if he has also a right over
us, we must cherish and express awe, reverence, duty,
and submission. If we should have besides a high con-
ception of God’s wisdom and goodness, of the benefi-
eence of His dealings with us, that calls for love and
gratitude. Whatever perfections we might discover in
the Deity would call for special feelings. These are
religious feelings, and their fulness, as well as their pre-
cise character, will depend on the knowledge or belief
which prepares the way for them, as feeling always
depends on knowledge and on the degree and kind of
contemplation of the object.
Third. If there is such a Being, with power and right
over us, with wisdom and goodness, his will, if we can
learn it in any way whatever, must govern our choices
and be the law for our actions. Our view of God’s
character and attributes will determine whether we can
obey His law with a high, generous principle and pur-
pose, or whether we shall obey with a cringing, slavish,
ignoble spirit.
If we look over the religions of the world, I think we
shall find these three elements present in them all,—per-
haps varying much in degree and with many strange and
deadly errors in thought and exhibition.
Now, reducing these explanations to the form of a
definition, 1 would say that religion is a knowledge or
belief of some supernatural Being with power and right.
over men, together with the exercise toward him, or
toward one another in obedience to him, of feelings,
choices, and actions corresponding to the character of
/
34 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
that Being, and our relations to him and to one
another.
It is now plain that religion, if this be a correct defini-
tion, is not the exercise nor the product of any one
faculty of the soul; it is an exercise of the whole soul,
of the whole man, and it embraces all the activities of
the man. It does not differ in kind from other activi-
ties. It is knowing, willing, feeling, acting. It hasa
special object of knowledge ; the feelings, choices, and
actions correspond to the object and the relations. The
chief difference between religions will grow out of the
view which their votaries take of the divinity, whether
there be one or more gods, what the character of the
god is conceived to be and his relations to men.
Now, such a fact or series of facts as this definition of
religion implies is found universally among men in some
form or other. There is everywhere belief in supernat-
ural beings. The attempt to prove that there are tribes
of atheists is a failure. There is everywhere worship of
gods, often degraded and degrading, but some service
rendered, some ceremony performed, some thoughts,
feelings, purposes, cherished, as due to the gods or
required by them. There is everywhere conduct toward
fellow-men supposed to be required by the gods. Relig-
ion may not be anywhere all-controlling. We confess
that even our own exalted religion has far too little inilu-
ence over us; but reason tells us, and we acknowledge,
that it ought to control us wholly. A philosophy of this
series of religious facts would consist in accounting for
them—that is, in pointing out their causes, and in show-
ing how the facts are intellectually justified from the
nature and situation of man.
The philosophy of religion must rest, first of all, in
———
THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 35
the facts of psychology—that is, in the nature of the
human soul, where we must seek the causes. If we find
religion everywhere, man must be essentially a religious
being in his very construction. It rests, in the second
place, in the reality of an object of religion known to
man. Our reasoned certainty that there is such an object
known to us rests largely in metaphysics—the meta-
physies of knowledge, the metaphysics of the substantial
world, the metaphysics of ethics.
We must first inquire what are the causes of religion
in the constitution of the human soul. [First of all,
there is the fact that man ts an intelligent beg. As
such he cannot shake off the belief that there is some great
superior power controlling the world. I am not speak-
ing of philosophers consciously reasoning to prove that
there is a God ; but all men with the most casual thought
see too much intelligence in things, too much harmony,
order, regularity, law, too much plan, too much rich and
varied beauty in things, too much in their own lives
above their control and yet evidently ordered, to permit
the idea in their minds that chance or blind force is
supreme. Even the lowest are prone to project some
magnified image of their own personality over all things.
There have been a few men, we must admit, who have
professedly laid aside this belief in a God, who have set
up the theory, the speculative opinion, that there is no
God ; but no man can work theism as an active practical
force out of his soul. It is presented to our minds, it is
urged upon us, from so many sources and in so many
ways, it strikes our nature on so many sides, that we
cannot practically resist it, even while we speculatively
deny it. A natural theism in the soul, forming the
basis of all its activities, will break out to control the
life, to make it harmonious and beautiful if accepted, or
36 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
to shatter and torture it if rejected. I am not now
justifying this deep thought and fixed belief, but only
calling attention to it as a fact. And I maintain that
this natural belief in gods in some form or other shows
that man, as intelligent, is essentially a religious being,
however ignorant and degraded he may become. He
always finds some object whom he thinks he ought to
worship, whom he wd/ worship and serve.
Second, there is the fact that men are moral beings.
They have a conscience, a sense of duty, of obligation,
of law, of right and wrong, and an intellectnal percep-
tion of the same. All men know and feel that there are
some things which they ought to choose and do, and
others which they ought to reject and avoid. We find
the most various and strange views of what in particular
we ought to do and what to avoid, the most marvellous
contradictions ; but the strangeness and variousness of
these views does not diminish the proof that man is
essentially a moral being. They rather increase this
proof, since they show that the moral is deep and strong
enough to break through every crust of ignorance, error,
and wickedness even, and to assert itself against the
greatest and most varied obstacles. Man did not create
this feeling of duty ; he cannot eradicate it or lay it
aside. He may dull, impair, or pervert it, just as he
may any other faculty. ‘‘It does not wy to be
consulted or advised with ;’’? it does not come out of
education or religion ; is not dependent on any opinions
concerning our origin or destiny. It springs up spon-
taneously, ‘and asserts itself magisterially.’’ It carries
with it a dread of the consequences of wrong-doing.
Wrong-doing creates fear, right-doing creates peace of
mind and a sense of safety.
This moral element in the human soul is a powerful
THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. ot
cause of religion, No other animal has it, and there is
no sign that any other inhabitant of this earth 1s a relig-
ious being.
This sense of duty causes religion in two ways: First,
because, intellectually considered, it implies that there is
a God over us: a Lawgiver, a Ruler, a Judge. I do
not speak of the philosopher who speculates on the
meaning of such things ; but the common man, the dull
and degraded man, though he may frame no theory,
inarticulately feels that the implanted law itself declares
that there is a Lawgiver, the necessary correlate of the
law. Second, because we are thus brought into vital
relations with the superior power which, on other and
merely intellectual grounds, we believe to exist. This
ever-active moral principle brings us into relations of
accountability and responsibility toward God. We are
to be judged for our conduct, and we cannot shake off
this thought and feeling. These relations with a supe-
rior lawgiver are permanent, delicate, and sensitive. It
makes a great difference, we feel, how we conduct our-
selves, which side of the dividing line between good and
evil we are on. This hope and fear, connected with the
sense of duty, do not stop with our earthly life; they
reach out into another life ; they carry immortality with
them ; they carry rewards and punishments with them ;
they are rewards and punishments begun here, and they
anticipate a personal and final decision upon conduct by
a righteous and authoritative Judge.
I cannot attempt to bring out all that this ethical ele-
ment in the soul implies. It carries with it a great deal
philosophically, in the way of proving that there is a
God ; in the way of giving reality and present force to
the doctrine, and in showing what God is; in the way
of showing what human nature is as a whole, what
38 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
human life is in its unity and purpose, what this world is
in its structure, laws, order, and beauty, as a theatre for
man ; as well as in the way of showing more specifically
man’s relations to God and what his religious life must
be. In all these respects this ethical element is, intel-
lectually considered, a ground of religion which can
never be shaken, and practically it 1s the most powerful
cause of religious feeling and action. It is such a power- -
ful practical cause of religion that even if the intellect is \
uncultivated and incapable of forming correct speculative
views of the world, or if for any reason the mind has
gone away into confusion and error, this ethical element
will work out some form of religion. This is the prime
characteristic of the ethical in man, that it makes him
religious independently of speculative views, of any rea-
soned doctrine that there is a God and another life. It
is an irresistible religious force within every human soul.
Many seem to suppose that the proper sphere of ethics is
only to regulate our social life among men. That is the
least part of ethics, and that is not for social, civil, and
temporal ends alone, or chiefly; it is for disciplinary
ends with reference to God and another life ; it is for
religious ends. The deep, inarticulate feeling that this
is its real meaning and force is seen in the fact that it
always comes out in some form of religion.
The third thing which makes man essentially a relig-
ious being is the feeling of dependence and limitation.
We are never suflicient for ourselves ; we always feel the
need of support, and are conscious of our ignorance and
helplessness in every crisis of life. We come into the
world without our own choice, we know not whence ;
we are kept in life often without any wisdom of our
own, or when our own wisdom would destroy us; the
most trifling accidents shape our destiny without any
THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 39
foresight on our part ; we cannot escape the control of
fixed laws of life, nor the toils of what seem mere chance
circumstances ; we are helpless and alone in death ; we
go out into the blank unknown never to return. The
stoutest man feels his weakness, his need of help, his
dependence in these physical things.
There is a sense of moral dependence, of uncertainty,
of timidity before the moral forces of the world, a felt
need of guidance, instruction, and help, as to what is
duty and right, how we shall place ourselves in harmony
with the moral law and the moral forces of the universe.
This sense of dependence does not have reference
merely to our fellow-men and the material world about
us. They do not give a satisfying support. They are
not self-sufficient nor sufficient for us. This solid earth,
this grand cosmos, is finite and dependent ; it has its
being and support in something beyond itself. So the
family, the community, the state, as social and civil
bodies, are all dependent, subordinate, unsatisfying.
They point to and rest in the controlling ethical forces of
the universe, and these in turn carry us on to a supreme
ethical author and supporter acting for ethical ends.
The dependent physical and moral world alike refer us
to God as the only adequate, satisfying support. We
are thus brought into conscious practical relations with
God which we cannot evade or lay aside the thought of,
and that without any conscious reasoning or speculation
on our part. We are inwardly practically impelled to
reach out beyond the fleeting, failing forms of things to
the permanent, unchanging supporter of them all. Our
very souls push us into relations with God and make us
recognize these relations through their conscious weak-
ness.
The fourth element in the soul which causes religion is
40 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
what I may perhaps eall the obverse of the last, the belief
in the boundless and unlimited, the sense of our limita-
tion or relations to the unlimited, the struggle to escape
bounds and dependence. Man is a limited, finite, and
dependent being, but he is not contentedly and passively
dependent like the brutes. He is deeply conscious of his
dependence just because he is ever reaching out beyond
it, longing and striving to break out of his limits, to lay
hold on the infinite and independent, to associate with
and share in the infinite, the boundless, the perfect, the
self-sufficient. Weights hold him down when he strives
to soar, but he strives none the less. He distinguishes
himself, his permanent and abiding self, from all his
particular acts, feelings, impulses; from all that is low
and holds him to low and temporary things, and asserts
his superiority to them ; he feels himself humiliated and
kept below his native privilege by them. Thus every
soul is carried out toward God, not in the way of reason-
ing and conscious, deliberate search, but in the way of
native tendency. The impulse may be blind and vague,
may lead to untold errors and follies, but it is real and
active, and is satisfied only when the soul is united with
God, when it is lifted by the Infinite One into some
conscious union with itself.
A fifth cause of religion in the soul is the affections,
the tendeney to love something, and the longing to be
joved. The soul goes out in love toward other persons
—parents, friends, neighbors. But none of our fellow-
men satisfy us; they have too many faults and defects,
too much selfishness; they are too little responsive.
Inven if their whole souls should come back to us in
reply, it is too little to meet our longing.
respect to all events within their jurisdiction, regardless
of the mode of their occurrence. Either this or universal
blank nihility.
And as to the question of ‘‘ probability,’’ we prove
that even an incipient adverse probability loses all its
force beneath the power of cumulating tests and testi-
mony, passing over its fixed limit in the mind, emerging
in a favorable probability, which, as in the present case,
waxing from one to five hundred, increases to a certainty
so strong that no additional amount of testimony could
augment its value, and that we are fully entitled to invert
Hume’s celebrated maxim, and assert not only that it is
infinitely ‘‘ more likely’? that the alleged fact of the
resurrection of Christ should be true, than it is ‘‘ dzkely’’
the testimony to it should be false, but that, under all the
circumstances, it is absolutely ampossible and incredible ut
should be false. And, finally, when we remember that
Hume’s whole attack upon the resurrection and all mira-
cles—denying the very idea of cause—is at bottom
nothing more than the application to history of the defi-
nition given to science by our modern evolutionists, the
mere ‘‘ observation and classification of the co-existences
and sequences of material phenomena’’—the ‘‘ dirt-phil-
osophy,”’ as Fichte called it—rather, that the modern
evolutionary science, in whose interest [Luxley has repub-
lished Hume, is the application to science of Hume’s own
principle in reference to history —viz., that Azstery has
nothing to do with a supernatural eause, but only with
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 105
the co-existence and sequence of events in space and
time due to the ordinary course of history, then no more
need be said. We detect the sophistical magic at once.
We see the philosophical manipulation. We discover
just how it comes to pass that the fact of the resurrection
itself is denied, as ‘‘ contrary to all experience,’’ even
the experience of the past, our own, and that of others,
impossible, incredible, while yet the existing belief of
the Church, affirmed by experience and which none
can deny, is admitted, obliged to be accounted for as a
fraud, a myth, or a mere delusion. The magic is this.
The rational element in the philosophy of belief is di-
voreed from the empirical, cause from effect, reason
from sense, and the necessary logical judgment, or infer-
ence of the truth, due upon notice of evidence given by
the senses, is foreclosed, and—both cause and logical
nexus gone—the contemplation is shut up and locked im
the sphere of the senses alone, powerless to account for
the fact by the ordinary course of nature, powerless to
reach to anything higher, and so is forced to doubt or
deny the fact because compelled to discredit the proof.
It is both speculative and practical atheism. God is ex-
cluded, the credibility of evidence is gauged by the uni-
formity of nature’s laws, all experience outside of this
impossible. Against such philosophy our apologetic is
directed, in order to refute the higher critics, as well
as evolutionary scientists and theologians, who, follow-
ing Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Mill, Comte, Hegel, Strauss,
Bauer, Renan, Keim, and others, deny the resurrection
altogether, or explain it away.
And now, while defending the possibility and credt-
bility of the resurrection as against the sophistry drawn
from the uniformity of nature’s course, the latest revived
error we are called to refute comes from the so-called
106 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
evangelical side itself, and is born of a compromise be-
tween the Word of God and the claims of evolutionary
science. It is no less than the doctrine that scientific
evolution can account for the resurrection of Christ, as
it pretends to do for the incarnation itself. What is
attempted is a speculative resolution of the miracle of
the resurrection into the sporadic development of a sup-
posed or imagined ‘‘ higher physical law.’’ It is the
enterprise of the Lord Bishop of Exeter, announced in
his recent course of lectures on the Bampton foundation,
the joy of materialistic scientists, so far as this point is
concerned, and of all who, like Spencer, talk of a
** reconciliation’ between science and religion. Conced-
ing all that mechanical and chemical pangenesis would
ask in this matter, Dr. Temple says: ‘‘ It is quite possi-
ble that our Lord’s resurrection may be found hereafter
to be no miracle at all in the scientific sense” (2.e., inex-
plicable by natural law), ‘‘ but only the natural issue of
physical laws always at work,’’ and that, in the day of
universal resurrection, it may be discovered that the
resurrection of Christ and that of all the dead has been
‘* brought about by machinery precisely the same in kind
as that used in governing the world,”’ or, as he further
says, ‘‘ by the working of a law till the last day quite
unknown.” This agnostic adjournment of the determi-
nation of the question on which all salvation depends until
the day after judgment will hardly meet the necessities
of either scientists or sinners anxious for certitude as to
what they must do to be saved. The possible discovery,
ina far-off day of uncertain decision, that the central
doctrine of Christianity and crowning credential of the
claims and mission of its Founder was simply the tempo-
rary spurt of a physical law till then unknown, will come
too late, if at all, to serve any good purpose, unless it be
-
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 107
the pursuit of biology in a future state. When Chris-
tian apologetics is driven to such circular motion, in its
conflict with science, as to petition nature to grant a
mortgage on the last resurrection to secure the determi-
nation of the question whether the resurrection of Christ
was an immediate act of God, or the result of a physical
law, it is well to remember that nature has no such
mortgage to give, the last resurrection itself standing in
need of a like decision. This effort to explain the mira-
ele by really ‘‘ obliterating” the antithesis between the
supernatural and natural, or identifying both these factors
in the hypothesis by some unknown physical law, is the
last refuge of apologetic weakness doomed to end in the
denial of the resurrection itself, and of Christ and Chris-
tianity. If the hypothesis is possible the Word of God
is false. As well seek to explain the pre-existence of
the Son of God, His miraculous conception, birth, life,
ascension, and Second Coming by cosmical process, and
Pentecost, answer to prayer, and regeneration in the
same way; as well maintain that God, having made
matter, or having found it already existing, impressed
upon it ‘‘ Zaws,”’ and then commissioned it to create and
redeem a world by its own force. It is evolutionary
agnostic exegesis, built upon *‘ may,” ‘< yerhaps,’’ and
‘© don’t know.’’ All that is left for such apologetics to
do, as they file before the ‘‘Zec¢-Gerst” of our century,
is to imitate the doomed gladiators, who entered the
ancient arena saying, as they bowed to the emperor,
“ Morituri, te salutamus !’’ This conceit of the Bishop
of Exeter, confounding cause with law, nature with
God, and acts with processes, 1s not new. Schleier-
macher, influenced by Kant, ruling out the supernatural
from the sphere of nature by abolishing the antithesis
between them, made everything natural, and so excluded
108 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
the resurrection of Christ from the category of miracles.
Baur, following Hegel, made everything supernatural,
in like manner abolishing the same antithesis. Each
suppressed the alternate factor. Neander, influenced by
Schelling, mixed the factors together, and made the only
question one of quantitative difference, or the relation of
more or less, in each event. Argyll’s extreme position as
to the ‘‘ reign of law’ tends to the same result. If the
resurrection, as recorded in Scripture, or the incarnation,
is to be explained by natural law-—if, as Schleiermacher
held in his ‘* Doctrine of Faith,’’ ‘‘ there is nothing
supernatural which cannot be conceived at the same time
to be natural,’’ then Christ was but one in a series of
heroes, or world-reformers, in line with Socrates and
Sakya-Muni, who have appeared from time to time,
according to the law of necessary development in the
history of the human race, and the wonders ascribed to
them are only such as may be explained by physical law,
or are purely frauds, or myths, or legends, as Matthew
Arnold would have them. The hypothesis of a higher
physical law really abolishes the antithesis between the
supernatural and the natural, and virtually concedes all
that Hume and Mill would demand for the unbroken
uniformity of nature’s course. On the contrary, the
resurrection of Christ was an act of the undivided
Trinity, a direct act of God, wholly supernatural, in the
supernatural person of Christ, instantaneous, transcen-
dent, full of redemptive meaning, and not the issue of a
physical process ; nor is there anything in the analogy
used by Christ and Paul as to the springing grain of
corn or wheat to favor an opposite view. Only by a
distortion of the meaning of analogy from the resem-
blance of the relations of things different to the resem-
blance of things alike can any shadow of support for.
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 109
this error be found. Science has no ground for teaching
that the intervention which in nature or history has dis-
turbed the natural sequence of phenomena is due to
natural law. The resurrection of Christ was the instan-
taneous, immediate act of God.
III. We reply to the various theories devised to account
for the Church’s belief in the resurrection of Christ,
apart from the fact of it, and say that neither the fraud
nor swoon theories deserve much notice, nor that of
spirit-manifestation. As to the fraud theory, invented
by the Sanhedrin, formulated by Celsus, and revived by
Reimarus, it is a self-refuting fable. If the grave was
plundered, the sacrilege was that of either the friends or
foes of Jesus. Not of His friends, for this would com-
promise the veracity and moral character of Christ and
His apostles. Not of His foes, for Sadducean hate and
Sanhedrin opposition would have produced the body,
and extinguished at once the public preaching of the
resurrection. The supposition that the corner-stone of
Christianity is a stolen dead man, whose body His friends
were only concerned to hide, and His enemies dared not
produce, is too absurd for the utmost credulity to enter-
tain. It is powerless to explain even the police proceed-
ings at the grave and the military guard. As to the
swoon theory, invented by Paulus of Heidelberg, and
embraced by Schleiermacher, it is not less objectionable.
Its dextrous way of getting rid of the resurrection by
simply denying the death of Christ, leaves nothing of
either morality or miracle to Christianity, and nothing of
redemption to man. Strauss smote it mortally, saying,
‘* A half-dead man, crawling about, sickly, in need of
a physician and a nurse, could never have made upon
the disciples the impression of His being the Lord of life,
nor changed their mourning into exultation.’’ Auberlen
110 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
says: ‘‘It is without defence.’? Ullhorn characterizes
it as ‘‘ overwhelmed with contempt and scorn on ail
sides.’ Keim calls it ‘* paltry andabsurd.’’ The spirit-
manifestation theory, rejected already in germ from
Paulus to Schleiermacher—a theory whose seeds are
found in Spinoza, then approved by Hegel, and next
adopted by Weisse, Lotze, Keim, Geiger, Gritz and
Noack, reappears as a vain substitute for the vision
theory, whose doom is already impending. Co-ordinate
in error with the foregoing, its special demerit is this,
that while the others involve Christ and His apostles in
the guilt of moral fraud, this includes the ‘‘ glorified
Spirit of Jesus’’ in the same crime, through the action of
the Holy Ghost, and, doing so, dies by that self-contra-
diction which requires for its postulate the existence of,
the supernatural—the very thing it was meant to evade.
As to the vision theory, invented by Celsus, revived
by Spinoza, perpetuated by Strauss, Bauer, Renan,
Scholten and many more, and advocated warmly by
Holsten and the author of the English work entitled
‘ Supernatural Religion,” it is now the theory generally
accepted by the higher critics, and deserves special
notice. It is condensed in one sentence, truly artistic
and French, made by Renan when describing the loving
recognition of Christ by Mary Magdalene, on the morn-
ing of the resurrection : ‘‘ La passion dune hallucinée
donne au monde un Diew resuscitée!”’ ** The passion
of an hallucinated woman gives to the world a resusci-
tated God!” Inlike manner the original Eleven, all the
disciples, and Paul besides, were the victims of the same
illusion, honest but mistaken. It is well known that.
Luther threw his inkstand at the devil, and the black
mark on the wall is religiously preserved to this hour !
Ile really believed he saw Satan before him. He was,
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 111
however, a morbid visionary then. Sana mens in sano
corpore is not universal. The senses often deceive.
The French Camisards, the Jansenistic visionaries, the
Miinster-men of the Reformation time, the Montanists
and Maximilla were all deluded. The Maid of Orleans
~ saw Michael the Archangel just as Francis d’ Assisi be-
held the Lord as a seraph. Aurelian saw Appolonius
of Tyana risen from the dead, and Mahomet, Sweden-
borg, and ‘*‘ Joe Smith’’ had strange revelations made
to their sense. Not unlike these nervous and excited
people were the first irrepressible adherents of Jesus,
who projected their own imaginations into the sphere of
external fact, mistaking subjective impressions for ob-
jective truth. If the vision of the Prophet of Islam
hovered before the Moslem’s mind long after the
prophet’s death, should not the same be true of the
Prophet of Galilee? Besides all this, we are told that
the dogma of the resurrection was borrowed by the Old
Testament prophets from the Persian eschatology, and
had already corrupted Christ and Christianity. And, to
crown all, is it not true that Philip and Stephen, An-
anias and Cornelius, and many others in the apostolic
age, rich in visions, had their self-engendered sights
and dreams? Such stories are found only in the He-
brew legends and pagan writers like Pliny and Diod-
orus. Such the vision theory and argument. The
first Christians were hallucinated—a desperate device,
contrived by the enemies of the supernatural, to evade
the difficulty of the empty tomb of Jesus, leaving it still
tenanted, and seeking to account for the believed appear-
ings of Jesus. The one foundation on which it rests, and
by which it seeks to justify itself, is that the disciples
were unable to distinguish between fancy and fact, or
between the inward and outward manifestations of
112 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
Christ. Optic reality was produced by cerebral excite-
ment. A morbid sensorium begets the phantom of a
risen Saviour !
We reply to all this by denying the postulate on which
it rests, and affirm
(1) That the disciples were able to distinguish be-
tween subjective impression and objective reality. The
question becomes one of psychological, physiological,
medical, and historical study, and such study determines
the case in favor of the literal truth of the Christian
records. The conditions necessary to hallucination are
(a), previous ocular beholding of the person whose image
. inhabits the mind. Imagination can create nothing
new. It combines only the old. Psychologically, the
subjective image of Christ, as rzsen, must be precon-
ditioned by an objective vision of Him in the same
character ; (6) tension of the mind, or a state of what
is called mental exaltation ; (¢) confident belief and
expectation of the event ; (@) absence of all doubt from
the mind of the visionary. None of these conditions
existed in the case of the disciples. The last paintul
impression of Christ on their minds was that of torture
and disgrace, a spectacle of agony and shame upon the
bloody cross. S06 far from there being any excitement,
all was a surrender to the sense of deep and sad aban-
donment. As to belief or expectation of the resurrec-
tion, they had none. A more thorough-going set of
sceptics never existed than those disconsolate, despair-
ing, crushed, paralyzed, hopeless, mocked, and scat-
tered sheep, whose Shepherd had fallen a prey to the
wolf. He who knows what sorrow is can well under-
stand how the power of sorrow had obliterated from
their minds, even in so short a time, the memory of His
latest words. As to doubt, its dark presence made be-
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 113
lief at first almost impossible. Not one of the condi-
tions which experts in medical science declare necessary
to hallucination existed. When, therefore, the author
of the work entitled ‘‘ Supernatural Religion’”’ informs
us that *‘ the strong impression that Jesus would rise again
would create the vision,”’ he indicates to us precisely
just what there was wanting! And yet more : even
were the supposed ‘‘ strong impression” a reality, still a
‘“ vision”? of the risen Lord would not have been a neces-
sary result. Professor Milligan, of the University of
Aberdeen, has admirably said, ‘No belief was stronger
in the early Church than that the Second Coming of
Christ was soon to take place, and yet the belief led to
no vision of His appearing.’? Even Keim has admitted
that ‘‘the disciples, by no means, expected the resurrec-
tion of Jesus.”
(2) We reply, again, that the disciples did distinguish
between illusion and reality. The testimony of the New
Testament records being granted, this point is established
beyond the possibility of refutation. They stopped not
short of ‘“‘many infallible proofs” of the certainty of
their Lord’s resurrection. Grant that the sense of sight
may be deceived, yet the probability of deception is di-
minished in proportion as the number of the senses, ap-
plied to test the phenomenon in question, is increased.
And where suspicion is excited, and all care is used, and
men combined are on their guard, and all unite to test
the question of reality, deception is impossible. Eyes
may fail at first, but eyes, ears, and hands—sight, hear-
ing, touch—cannot fail. The concurrent triple evidence
of these different senses to the reality of an object unani-
mously acknowledged by a jury indisposed to credit, and
doubting much before admitting, the fact, compels either
the denial of the trustworthiness of all our senses, and
114 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
thus a repulsion of the only evidence science has to :
boast of, or the assertion of our certain knowledge and
belief of the fact alleged. We have no other rule for
practical life. And this is our case. The three senses
concurred to prove to the non-hallucinated minds of the @
disciples the real bodily presence of the risen Jesus: the
eye, at first reluctant, as in the case of Mary blinded by
her tears, yet re-enforced by the ear, on which the soft
voice of Jesus fell, calling forth her recognition— Rab- —
boni !” then, next, the eye and ear, both reluctant at first,
yet re-enforced by the hand touching Jesus, as in the :
case of Thomas, eliciting the exclamation and confession,
‘My Lord and my God !” then, again, the same con-
current evidence on the part of the Eleven, oft-repeated.
Even the eyes, without the personal appearing of the
risen Jesus, were enough for Peter and for John as they
gazed upon the empty tomb and folded clothes. Rob-
bers do not wait to fix the wardrobe of the dead. Eyes
and ears together were enough for weeping Mary. Kyes,
and ears, and hands, enough for doubting Thomas. And
all enough for all, the living Saviour in their midst. ‘* Be-
hold my hands and my feet. Zandle me and see. Tival
myself! A spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me
have! ‘Thomas, reach hither thy finger, and behold
my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into
my side, and be not faithless, but believing.”? How ten-
der! How decisive! Ocular, audible, tangible evi-
dence, testing and retesting, with the same ever-recur-
ring result ; what could be more conclusive, what better
evidence could we ask, what better have? Are we not
satisfied 2 So far from being deceived by illusion, the
very first care of the disciples was that they should not
be so ; their very first fear lest they ght be so. They
did distinguish between fancy and fact, between phan- > |
SE ts?
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 115
tom and reality. They saw, they heard, they handled,
spake, ate, and companied with their living Lord, who
appeared to them in fulfilment of His own promise. *
Thrice the Lord Himself repelled the possibility of all
deception : once, when Mary, in her tears, mistook Him
for the ‘‘ Gardener ;’’ once when the Eleven “ were ter-
tified and affrighted, and supposed they had seen a
spirit ;’’ once in the crucial case of Thomas. And when
to all this we add the occurrences of forty days and the
testimony of ‘‘ above five hundred brethren at once,”’
.the cloud-ascension, angels’ words, and the uncontra-
dicted universal tradition of the charch, dating the resur-
rection from ‘‘ the third day,” then it is that the hollow-
hess and emptiness of the vision theory, in the case of
the first disciples, become manifest, and we learn to ap-
preciate the force of that witness-bearing formula of
John, who speaks in the name of all the rest of the dis-
ciples, ‘What our eyes have seen, and our ears have
heard, and our hands have handled of the Living Word,
that declare we unto you.”?
——_—_—_—_+@+—_____.
Our apologetic is not yet discharged from its task.
Our adversaries reject the ‘‘ four gospels,’’ and especial-
ly the ‘‘ fourth gospel,’’ so excluding the remarkable
testimony of John, and confine us to the case of Paul. It
is said that Paul admits himself to be a visionary. He
*The word ‘‘ appear” is never applied to the Father nor to the Holy
Ghost, but only to Christ, the incarnate Son, and in every case de-
notes His ocular manifestation in bodily presence before men,
The term Kvpioc, ‘‘ Lord,” is never applied to Him except as risen
from the dead. It involves and is grounded in His resurrection, “ Our
Lord Jesus Christ?’ means a risen Saviour. Peter argues this, Acts 2 36,
and Paul delights in it, 1 Cor. 1:1-10; Rom. 8 : 34.
116 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
speaks of ‘‘ visions and revelations,’ ‘‘ trance,’’ and
‘rapture to the third heaven,”’ and ecstasy, ** whether
in or out of the body” he ‘‘ could not tell.” Appeal is
made, furthermore, to such expressions as ‘‘ When it
pleased God to reveal His Son in me,”’ and “* God, who
commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined
into our hearts.?? More: it is said that, from the time
of Stephen’s death, he had compunctions of conscience,
which issucd in a morbid state of mind, and, assisted
by more than usual excitement and fatigue, produced
the vision near Dasmascus. Ardent, nervous, moody,
and self-punctured, a believer in the resurrection from
the dead, it needed only some special evolutionary shock
to disturb unduly the grey matter of his brain, in order
to develop into outward fact what now was struggling
for objective birth. The opportunity arrived. The
Syrian ride was too much; remorse was too strong ;
sunstroke or epilepsy came to help; the day was too
hot ; the imagination too vivid, and the strain too great.
The optic and auricular nerves tingled and vibrated be-
yond all bounds as he neared the Damascene gate, when,
thrown from his horse, he fancied that he really saw
‘“‘ Jesus of Nazareth’’ transfigured in the sunlight, and
heard His voice from heaven. It was allillusion! Some
crities deny the Syrian ride altogether, and confine Paul’s
experience to purely psychological phenomena. Others
combine the external and internal. |
To all this we reply, (1) that, as in the case of the early
disciples, so here, all the conditions necessary to halluci-
nation were wanting. There is not a line in all the his-
tory to show that Paul was of a saturnine mood or con-
stitutionally given to visions, nor a line to intimate that,
for six or seven years previous to his conversion, he was
the victim of remorse, as Canon Farrar, following the
EE
lr
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 117
higher erities, wrongly holds. Up to the last hour of
his Syrian ride he verily believed that what he did he
‘ought to do,’’? and was ‘‘ exceeding mad ;’’ (2) that
there was nothing in the times or circumstances in Pales-
tine or Syria that could lead him to expect a vision of
such a kind ; (3) that there is no similarity between any
of his visions and those of Swedenborg, or Luther, or
d’ Assisi, or the Camisards, or the Montanists, all which
were isolated, unverifiable, and without any moral effect
upon the persons seeing them, or upon the history of
mankind ; the supposed analogies are not analogous ; the
homologies do not homologate ; (4) that the divine ‘‘ rev-
elations and visions’? granted him were such as already
had been foretold in Joel’s prophecy, the whole New
Testament period being but the unfolding of Old Testa-
ment eschatology, or what should ‘* come to pass in the
last days,’’ and therefore these ‘‘ revelations and visions”’
were different from the hallucinations of a morbid or
diseased mind ; (5) that Paul himself distinguishes be-
tween subjective and objective visions, or what he calls
visions ‘‘ from” the Lord, and visions ‘‘ ef” the Lord,
as also between the teimple-trance and the rapture to the
third heaven, on the one hand, and that outward visible
beholding of the risen Jesus, on the other hand, which
antedated all his other visions. Still further, we reply
(6) that, in the Galatian passage, to which such constant
appeal is made, and on which such reliance is placed—
‘‘ When it pleased God to reveal His Son a me’’—
Paul specifies both an inward and an outward revelation
of Christ, and puts the inward last—viz., (@) a pre-natal
separation to the apostleship, by the good pleasure of
God ; (b) a post-natal ‘‘ cad” to that apostleship ; (c) an
accompanying revelation of God in Christ to his soul, an
inward work of grace. The argument, therefore, of the
118 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
critics, which restrains this passage to a subjective inter-
pretation, is unhistorical, illogical, uncritical, unexegeti-
cal, inasmuch as every apostle must not only have ‘*‘ seen
the Lord’’ objectively, but have been ‘‘called’’ objec-
tively as well, ocular sight and audible voice of Jesus,
being the two great pre-conditions of the apostolic office.
‘Am I not an apostle ? Have I not seen the Lord ?”’
‘He called me by His grace ;”’ (7) that, in his letter to
the Corinthian church, he co-ordinates his vision ‘ of ”
the Lord near Damascus, in kind, with all the previous
ocular beholdings of Christ, and marks it as the ‘* dast,’’
and unrepeated, in a series of apocalypses, appearings,
unveilings, or personal showings of Christ to His disci-
ples, after His passion, affirming that even as Cephas,
James, the twelve, the five hundred, so he too had
‘* seen”? the Lord, with bodily sight, as the Greek term
imports ; ‘‘ Zas¢ of all, He was seen of me, also, as of one
born out of due time”—7.e., six years after all the rest ;
and (8) he appeals to the co-existing testimony of these
many witnesses, three hundred of whom were still liv-
ing contemporaneously with himself, twenty-five years
after the event, so that any sceptic might inquire if
what he said were true about the risen Christ ; evidence
exposed so long to every test of criticism, yet unover-
thrown! In a true summary—not hearsay—he historizes
not alone the faith, but the facts of the times, and chal-
lenges their contradiction. He does it under the most
solemn sense of his responsibility to God and men, shrink-
ing with horror from the thought, that in the judgment
day he should be ‘‘ found” a ‘‘ false witness,’’ and as
solemnly declares that if his testimony is not true, then
both he, and the religion, and the Saviour he proclaims,
and the faith of all believers, are unmitigated frauds, to
be abhorred by every honest man. And for twenty-
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 119
five years he does this, closing up at last and sealing
his testimony with his blood. Such the evidence we get
from only two of the four letters granted us as genuine.
And (9) only to refer a moment to the Acts, which the
critics use in order to sustain their theory, but we to
‘overthrow it. Never does Paul once refer to his Dam-
ascene sight of Jesus in the terms he uses when speaking
of his visions “‘ from” the Lord. On the castle-stairs he
tells the crowd it was his first and last outstanding vision
‘Sof’? the Lord ; that it came upon him from without ;
that its glory seared his eye-balls, and its voice subdued
him into meekness, as a helpless child. To Agrippa he
describes it as a personal apocalypse of Christ, whose
splendor was above the solar beam at noon, and repeats
the words of Jesus. And (10)—to return to the Corin-
thian letter—like the trained logician, he meets the univer-
sal negative of the Corinthian sceptics who said ‘* there
is no resurrection of the dead,’’ by the particular affirm-
ative that ‘‘ Christ is risen ;’? and reduces the whole de-
bate to two pairs of great alternatives, (@) either the
bodies of believers shall rise from their graves, in the
victory, glory, beauty, and likeness of Christ, at His
second coming, or Christ, the Head, is not risen ; and,
as already said, (0) either Christ is risen, or Christianity
is a gigantic lie, and—in spite of all shallow pretences
and vain theories about illusion, innocent mistake, and
swoon, and spirit-form, and what not ?—the whole college
of apostles, himself among them, are simply public and
inexcusable liars, ‘‘ false witnesses,’’ because testifying
that God raised up Christ, whom He raised not up, if so
be that the dead rise not: ‘‘and if Christ be not raised,
your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins ; then they
also who are fallen asleep in Christ are perished,”’ and
we, whose ‘‘ hope” is only here, in this world, are Or
120 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
all men most miserable !’? Not once does he confound
the inward with the outward vision. The fact of a risen
Jesus was the Archimedean fulerum by which he over-
turned the Greek scepticism. It is his preaching and
his testimony everywhere that ‘‘ Christ should suffer
and be the first to rise from the dead, and show light to ~
the people and the Gentiles.”? And when ridiculed
and repelled by Festus as a literary crank, he vindicates
his testimony as the word of ‘‘ truth and soberness,’’ not
the gush of mere excitement, nor a madman’s dream,
but the proclamation of a mighty fact, of which the
world had heard, and which the king himself well knew —
was *‘ not done in a corner.”’
And now in leaving this theory, and in view of these
considerations, 1 think we have the right to ask, Is it
rational to suppose that this honest, maddened, and dis-
mounted cavalier of the Sanhedrin, whose breath was
odored with the slaughter of God’s saints, could, under
the foreclosure of all examination of the claims of Jesus,
believing Him accursed of God by hanging on a tree—a _
false Messiah—and under lack of all illusion or remorse,
suddenly reverse his former convictions, accept the new
faith, and counting all things loss, go forth, flaming with.
an inextinguishable zeal and love for Christ, preaching
everywhere, “‘ It is Christ that died—yea, rather that is
risen again,’ himself enduring all manner of reproach,
privation, and persecution for twenty-five long years,
encountering martyrdom at last, or, even because one day —
he saw a phantom near Damascus, or, if you please, be-
cause he was a nervous, moody, morbid, conscience-punc-
tured, seriously inclined, solemnly religious, and_hal-
lucinated crank? I say it is irrational. It is insulting.
It is absurd. It is for you to judge, from the evidence
admitted, whether these modern higher critics, with their
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 121
huge ‘encyclopedic learning,” shapeless, one-eyed,
and blind, monstrum horrendum, informe, imgens, cur
‘lumen ademptum, have convicted Paul of lunacy, or
whether there is any other real explanation of the facts
than that ‘‘ the man Paul is the practical demonstration
of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.’? Absurdity
or miracle are the only alternatives here.
The critics, then, have not ‘‘ accounted for’’ the
Church’s belief in the resurrection, apart from the fact
of the resurrection. Neither by the robbery of the
grave, nor by the swoon of the sufferer, nor by the
erotic sentimentalism of a visionary woman, nor by an
epidemic of delusion, nor by the morbid brooding of a
visionary man, nor by a spirit-fraud effected by the Holy
Ghost, can they explain the wonderful phenomena to
which the resurrection, or, if you please, the Church’s
belief of it, gave birth—the sudden change of conduct in
the disciples, from that of deep depression to that of
boldest courage and exulting joy, the opposition of the
~ Sadducees and Sanhedrin, the strangely simultaneous
sight of Jesus by five hundred, the cessation of His per-
sonal appearings precisely at the close of forty days, the
origin of the New Testament church, Stephen’s death
and Paul’s conversion. As little can they explain the
whole body of New Testament doctrine, order, and wor-
ship ; the persecutions of three hundred years ; the sym-
bols of the resurrection in the catacombs of Rome; the
wheat-sheaf—anchor, bellied sail of ship full-pressing into
port ; the palm branch ; the invariable standing posture on
the martyr-slabs, and the hand pointing to heaven ; the
silent eloquence of the dead confessors of Jesus celebrat-
ing His triumph over death in their very tombs; the
victories of eighteen centuries without a worldly weapon ;
the experience of believers, and the mightiest moral revo-
122 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
lution ever known to history in the fact of Christendom.
One circumstance alone condemns all these wild theories.
It is that, while professing to account for the belief of
the Church, they need an hallucinated church in order
to account for them !
Lixtent of the Luidenee.
A word must be allowed as to the ewtent of the evi-
dence of the resurrection of Christ. It is not confined
to the New Testament records. Four thousand years of
preparation for it, from the first utterance of the penalty
of death for sin to its exhaustion in the dying and the
rising of the Son of God, and the gift of life eternal,
were more than a presumptive proof that history one
day would be enriched and thrilled by its occurrence. In
advance of the fact, not only type and ceremony fore-
shadowed it, but the voice of the Son of God Himself
was heard through the prophets, anticipating the great
event—‘‘ Thy dead men shall live ; my dead body shall
arise ; awake and sing, ye dwellers in the dust, for the
dew of herbs is thy dew, and the earth shall cast forth
the dead.”? ‘‘I will ransom them from death. I will
redeem them fromthe grave.’? And the exultant voice
of faith was heard responding, ‘‘ My flesh also shall rest
in hope.”’ ‘* Thou wilt not abandon me to the grave.”’
‘’ He will swallow up death in victory !’’ closing with
that weirdly solemn word, ‘‘ Many from among the sleep-
ers in the dust of the earth shall awake ; these shall be
to everlasting life, but those shall be to shame and ever-
lasting contempt !”
But wider still is the evidence. All that follows as a
result of the fact enters also into the proof of the fact
—the origin and history of the Church ; the whole New
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 123
Testament Scripture, every doctrine of it tied expressly
to the central fact of a risen Jesus ; our regeneration,
ow justification, our sanctification, our life, faith, hope,
prayer, praise, and service ; our preaching, and our fel-
lowship and consolation ; our comfort on the bed of
death ; the resurrection of our bodies, and, still more,
the deliverance of a groaning creation, and the final re-
genesis of all things—I say this whole body of doctrine,
order, and worship, this whole system of being and of
knowledge, put under the headship of a risen Christ, and
sealed by two perpetual sacraments, one grounded in His
death, the other in His resurrection, and linked together
by a monumental day, the whole plexus of things in
ages past and to come, Himself the nexus of all, is
valid proof of the historic fact that Christ is risen from
the dead. In Him all relations converge. His risen
person binds all things. Ontological, His person reaches
back to His pre-temporal existence, and His union with
the Father ; cosmological, He made all things, and still
Ile rules the world ; biological, it is His life that lives in
all the Church ; eschatological, He points to future times
and to eternity, where His glory will be seen in every-
thing that moves, or breathes, or lives. He is the union-
point of God and man, of heaven and earth, eternity and
time. “‘ By Him are all things!” Such a system is un-
imaginable by man. Only God could give it being.
The Find Alternatives.
Our task is done. All that remains is to state the two
pairs of alternatives our apologetic presents, and then to
close. (1) Hither Jesus Christ is risen from the dead,
or we have no proof that Jesus Christ ever lived. The
testimony to His resurrection is the same testimony we
124. DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
have for His incarnation, life, and death—the testimony
of the senses. If the supernatural character of the fact
invalidates the testimony of the senses to His resurrec-
tion, it invalidates their testimony to His incarnation as
well. The denial of His resurrection involves the denial
of His miraculous conception and of His birth, as also
of His life and death. It necessitates the extinction of
Christ and Christianity. The alternatives remain : either
Jesus rose from the dead, or you have no proof that
Jesus ever lived. (2) Hither Jesus rose from the dead, or
there is no proof that anything exists. The supernatural
cause that attaches to the miracle of the resurrection at-
taches also to the miracle of nature. Vain the effort of
evolutionary science to evade the issue here, and plead
agnosticism, or declare that science has ‘‘ nothing to do
with origin or cause of things.’’ It is bound to explain
the fact of nature. The testimony of the senses is the
prime testimony of science herself. The production of
life alone, in nature, the passage from the inorganic to
the organic world, is a fact confessed as battling every
effort to explain it by natural law. If the supernatural
character of this and other like facts where the secret
cause is unseen, and hidden process unknown, invalidates
the testimony of ‘the senses to the visible fact itself, then
the same testimony is invalidated everywhere else, wher-
ever the secret cause remains concealed. The senses are
untrustworthy for all the supposed facts of science and
nature alike. Certitude is gone. The whole inner foun-
dation also for our knowledge of the external world is
gone. Not agnosticism nor scepticism, but absolute nihil-
ism is the last and logical result. All is illusion, ideal,
nothing real. The alternatives remain. Either Jesus
rose from the dead, or science has no basis and no fact
established beyond dispute. A risen Christ or nothing.
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 125
The denial of the principles that prove the resurrection
is the denial of all science, philosophy, history, morality,
and religion. But science, philosophy, history, and
morality have something fixed and established, and veri-
fied, too, by means of the identical principles here in de-
bate. Therefore the resurrection of Christ is a firmly
established historical fact.
Christ Eisen is the Refutation of all Error.
Thus does Christ risen from the dead refute all the
errors of a ‘‘ vain philosophy”’ and of a ‘‘ science falsely
so called.’’ His resurrection refutes atheism and panthe-
ism alike, for it requires a personal God, by whose power
the resurrection is effected. It refutes deism, for it pro-
claims the boundless interest a loving God takes in the
affairs of men. It refutes scientific naturalism, which
chains all things to fate and uniform law, making
miracles impossible. It refutes agnosticism by giving
us the knowledge of Godin nature and salvation. It re-
futes materialism by teaching the immortality of the soul,
an Kternal Spirit whose presence in the world is the re-
sult of triumph over death, and whose presence in the
souls of men secures the resurrection of believers to
eternal glory. It refutes idealism by the objective real-
ism of the person and the work of Christ, and of things
eternal and unseen. It refutes empirical scepticism by
the historic demonstration of the fact that all our know]l-
edge isnot derived from the senses or reflection, and
that our experience is not the sole ground of faith or
measure of reality. In short, it refutes both the false
postulates of our adversaries and all the arguments by
which they are supported, and presents to us a living
Christ, the ‘‘ power” of God as against all natural force
126 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION Of THE FAITH.
and false science, and the ‘‘ Wisdom”? of God as against
all world philosophy, and world-religion, too, One ‘‘in
whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knovwl-
edge,’’ and we ‘‘ complete in Him.”
Universal Victory not yet.
Do not think, however, that a successful apologetic
will terminate the great conflict in which we are to-day
engaged. Spinoza and Hume, answered, ever needing
answer, and underlying all false systems, will live on till
the Lord comes. They are truly representative men.
Every generation must fight its own battle and learn its
own lesson. The office of apologetic is not to convert,
nor always to convince, the adversary. Itis ‘‘ set for
the defence of the gospel.’’ Its one object is to reduce
the debate to the two alternatives of miracle or absurd-
ty, and then call on every man to choose for himself
between a philosophy, science, and criticism, on the one
hard, which substitute nature for God, man for Christ,
doubt for certitude, fraud for honesty, lies for truth, and
the power of delusion for the power of the Holy Ghost ;
and, on the other hand, a philosophy, science, and criti-
cism which acknowledge God, exalt Christ, repose con-
fidence in the trustworthiness of our faculties and senses,
credit the testimony of God, and guard the foundation
and building alike of all true knowledge and religion.
A choice must be made. And the choice once made,
the battle will still go on, from age to age, as before. It
is part of that wayy aGavaros of which Plato speaks,
that ‘‘ immortal conflict’? which is the inheritance of
time and the agony of mankind, and never can cease
until the power of falsehood is broken. Choose we
must, and fight we must. It is in direct connection
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 127
with his great apologetic for the Resurrection of Jesus
from the dead, Paul’s imperial voice is heard exclaim-
ing and exhorting: ‘* Watch ye; stand fast in the
Juith ; quit you like men; be strong’’—the voice of
a brave commander inspiring his troops! Now, as then,
there are ‘‘ false apostles, deceitful workers, transform-
ing themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no
marvel ; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel
of light ! ? It is the old story over again in our times,
The ad of this age circles back to its beginning.
Lischatology and Apologetics.
It is not without the deepest significance that the chief
apologetic of the Christian faith is eschatological, or
that the “last things ’—death, resurrection, the reap-
pearing Christ, and the gift of life, in the resurrection of
the bodies of the saints, and the new creation— should be
the very ‘‘ first eet to engage our attention, and
stand in the front line oi the Ghatatian defences. Accom-
plishments of prophecy they are, themselves prophetic,
for the contents of the prophecy are not exhausted.
The promise of life fulfilled itself, first of all, com-
pletely in the person of the Son of God made man, at
His first coming, assuming man’s responsibilities, maa
who thereby Bone in His death a Redeemer from sin
and death and in His resurrection a Redeemer from death
and the grave. It fulfils itself, next, in the person of
His church, made one with Him, oienen faith, first
operating inwardly by the gift of life to Saag aie
and progressing through ihe ages, till it reaches its com-
pletion in the resurrection of the just, and passes over
to eternal glory. The awaking of the ‘“‘ many bodies of
the saints that slept?’ and the shower of life “ shed forth”
128 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
at: Pentecost were the first effects of a risen, reappearing,
and ascended Jesus, under which the crucified and pros-
trate Church, ‘‘ planted into the likeness of’ His death,”’
was ‘‘ planted,’’ also ‘‘ into the likeness of His resurrec-
tion,’’ and revived; all this a type and pledge of still
another great outpouring, at another reappearing, at-
tended by a wider and a larger resurrection of the dead
in Christ. So did the present age begin, with a resur-
rection of the saints and a baptism by the Holy Ghost.
So shall it end, and another age begin, salvation all vic-
torious, amid the scenes of judgment, opening the vista
of a better future age. Each end of every age un-
folds itself in a new development, and, so on, unto
‘ages of ages.” The defence of a risen Jesus is,
therefore, the defence of the present life and future
resurrection of the Church—‘‘ life from among the
dead’’—in every sense; the defence of her “living
hope,” the certainty of her complete deliverance, and
the splendor of her fullreward. Full of immortality and
holiness is this thrilling expectation. There is no true
apologetic, as there is no true piety, that has not the
blood of eschatology in its veins. The life of the true
Church is just the daily expression of the fellowship of
Christ’s sufferings, the power of His resurrection, and
her inevitable loving, longing, and looking for His reap-
pearing. It is her palpitating pulse. It is written so on
every page of the New Testament, and was the great
character of the apostolic church—a church Dorner has
called ‘‘ predominantly eschatological,’ as we know it
was predominantly apologetical. So has it been, in
every age, wherever the Church has ‘‘ witnessed a good
confession’’ for Christ. This expectation keeps the gar-
ment clean, the loins girded, the lamps trimmed and
burning, the believer panoplied with helmet, sword,
APOLOGETIC FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 129
shield, and breastplate, a tried Smyrnean and not a com-
promising, self-applauding, rich, statistical, and lukewarm
Laodicean. And, as it was in the beginning, so once
again will it be in the end of this age, as the conflict
waxes to its height and optimistic folly dies too late.
Apologetics and eschatology will stand side by side in
the defence of truth whenever a spark of the real life of
Christ is found, and these two supernatural watchwords
ofa living Church, ‘‘ The Lord ts Risen!” « Behold,
He comes in clouds,’ will strike the hour when, in
presence of the reappearing Lord, Spinoza and Hume—
the very etymology of whose names reminds us of the
thorns that pierced Him and the ground that sepulchred
His body—will receive their final answer, and the great
debate will close ! Then, not only will crowns adorn
the heads of the just, but “* The teachers shail shine as
the brightness of the Jirmament, and they that have
turned many to righteousness as the stars JSorever and
eoer,”?
LECTURE V.
Christianity and Civilization: the Argument from
Civilization Introduced and Developed as to the
Indwidual.
BY REV. SYLVESTER F. SCOVEL, PRESIDENT OF THE UNI-
VERSITY OF WOOSTER, WOOSTER, OHIO.
No matter, now, how the world became barbarous.
It is to be civilized. A portion of the work is already
done, and the remainder is in rapid progression. We
are at the point of sufficient advancement to learn some-
thing of what has been effected and how it has been
accomplished, and thus in position to use what we can
learn in hurrying the whole work to its completion.
Never was the responsibility of correctly reading the
lessons of the history of civilization so grave. A mis-
take would be not only a bad philosophy of history, but
might lead to putting out the very eyes of civilization
and quenching the hope of the race. A right under-
standing cannot but put us forward toward the great
goal longed for, and dreamed of, and consecrated by
promise and prophecy.
In so interesting a territory past and so inviting a
future, and amid the multiform factors in so complex a
result as that we call civilization, it is no wonder that we
find rival claimants for the position of primal and con-
trolling force. There is constant need that the place and
power of our common Christianity as the great civilizer
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION, 131
should be demonstrated and exhibited. For example,
a noted unbeliever thus raised the question, in December
last : ‘‘ For thousands of years men have been asking,
How shall we civilize the world? How shall we protect
life, liberty, property, and reputations ? How shall we
do away with crime and poverty ? These are questions
that are asked by every thoughtful man and woman.
The business we will attend to now is, How are we to
civilize the world? What priest shall I ask? What
sacred volume shall I search ? What oracle shall 1 con-
sult? At what shrine shall I bow to find out what is to
be done?’ (Address of Robert Ingersoll, ‘‘ Which
Way,”’ Cleveland, O., December 11th, 1884.)
The remarkable thing is that, after such multitudinous
questioning, he has not a syllable of reply to make, and
consumes nearly two hours in making that fact evident.
And another remarkable thing is that, having turned
away silenced by the recoil of his own interrogatories, he
seeks to fill the void with vociferous declamation against
the clear answer of Christianity. He represents it as
having no message for the inquiring world, and limits its
functions to teaching that “all that is to be done in this
world is to get ready for the next.”” He says of this
busy religion, which has its ringing ethical message
ready for every man and for every moment of every
man’s life, and for every power of every possible com-
bination of men, that it ‘‘ treats time as a kind of dock
on the shores of eternity, and treats men as though they
were congregated there sitting on their trunks and wait-
ing for the Gospel ship to come and take them on
board.’’ So profound a misunderstanding is most re-
markable for even a ‘‘ stranger in Jerusalem.’’ I cannot
but think that if the Master were in that ship it would
make no landing at that. port. Rather would the hail be
132 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
answered by the message, ‘‘ Lift up your eyes and look
upon the fields, for they are white to the harvest, and
he that reapeth veceiveth wages.” What ineffable stu-
pidity (to say nothing of the criminality) for a man to
be crying out in the closing decades of the nineteenth
Christian century, when the world is bounding forward
under the influence that was turning it ‘‘ upside down”
in its first century, that Christianity has no answer to
make to the question, ‘‘ How shall we civilize the
world 2? Open your eyes, man! The work itself is far
advanced ; while the principles of it are all known and
the main methods are wrought out, why—Christianity
has nearly civilized you !
Those who deny Christianity’s power to civilize, and
assert their independence of it, are really built on its
foundations and are breathing its atmospheres. They use
in their assaults the ideas—nay, the very words—which
Christianity has coined for them. Every ringing appeal
they make against religion vibrates with tones that were
never heard before Christ, and ave never heard where
He is not known. The standards of judgment to which
they pay deference (either in their ignorance or their
arrogance) are divine standards, and they can only move
in the grooves which Christianity has prepared for them.
The winds of its great influences play with their voci-
ferations, and awaken echoes which are filled with the
name they hate. Civilization is shown to be the prod-
uct of Christianity by the very name we give that form
of it which is regnant to-day. Our religion has wrought
itself as distinctly into our civilization as it has into the
measurement of the centuries, and in each case the
world’s confession of the fact is explicit and beyond
recall.
I scarcely need delay to attempt any precise definition
— ee
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION. 133
ot the place of this argument in a scheme of apologetics.
It is external rather than internal, and historical rather
than critical. It is an argument not so much for the
Christian book as. for the Christian life. It is an appli-
cation of the Master’s major test, ‘ By their fruits shall
ye know them.”
But the very statement of its place and nature secures
the rank of the argument. It is a high rank certainly.
There can be nothing better to prove a cause than the
character of its effect. And this whole line of argument —
proves whatever it proves for the religion as a whole.
Fruit implies vitality in the tree, though there be here
and there a dead twig. The waning snows of a severe
winter mean the whole sun. All great social changes
clearly traced to Christianity constitute an argument for
its whole inner life by the outer life it creates.
It cannot but be an attractive argument, because it
deals with things that are concrete and level to observa-
tion and portions of our own experience. It is far more
empirical than speculative, and its elements are large
and visible facts and movements. It does not depend
on the age of a document, as proved by ‘‘ Elohim’? or
** Jehovah,” or by archaic forms of certain words. It
does not lie in the apex of one letter or the length of
another.
It is a constantly increasing and obtrusive argument.
It grows with every century-breath of Christianity. It
is beginning to be so clear through the vistas of the
nearer and of the remoter past that history has become
the storehouse of apologetics. Since what Christianity
has done has been exclusively done (¢.¢., whenever it is
absent the effect is absent), and since it has been uni-
formly done (¢.e., whenever it is present the effect is
present), and since it has been done with “‘ concomitant
134 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
variation” (¢.e., with an intensity of effect varying
exactly as its own intensity varies), the conclusion is
irresistible that Christianity is the cause of civilization.
And I need scarcely note the scope of the argument.
It includes everything in religion, of course. It em-
braces almost everything valuable in our collective life,
and all in our individual life which is directly related to
that (which, again, is nearly everything). It may well
contain the testimony of principles (a sort of a priory
study of what Christianity is fitted to produce and must
produce), with the testimony of the facts (the @ poste-
rioré and inductive discovery of what Christianity has
produced), and thus it must cover the whole philosophy
of religion and its whole history. To be exact, it should
be comparative, and hence should cover the whole terri-
tory of the known operations of religions, and religious
ideas, and religious fragments and comminglings, which
is, again, the whole history of mankind and a central
and soul history. The mission-territory of all religious
propagations are its surface, and all the race-transforma-
tions are its materials. To be complete it should be
polemic, and all contestants for its claimed results should
be met and gainsaid. But this would be to take into
consideration the'whole discussion represented by Buckle
and repeated in the thousand echoes of popular infidel-
ity. By many avenues and in many forms the argument
will go forward, as it is now going, until all this territory
will be made tributary in a systematic and comprehen-
sive way.
A moment as to the arrangement of the argument.
One might take the elements of our nature and, begin-
ning with the religious elements of civilization, demon-
strate how deeply this element has characterized civiliza-
tions, and compare the Christian with other civilizations
~~ ee
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION. 135
in the doctrines which control and mould it. Selecting,
next, the moral element, the dominance of the ethical
element in Christianity might be shown. Coming to the
intellectual elements of civilization, it might be shown
how these are provided for in the stimulating force of
our holy religion. Looking out upon the social elements
of civilization, the noblest of them would be found trace-
able to the same great source. And then, considering
the material elements, the review could be finished by
proving that both health and wealth came by and in pro-
portion to Christianity. Or the scheme might be based
upon an inquiry concerning the relation of Christianity to
the sources of civilization—the original powers productive
of betterment in mankind—morals, motives, laws, etc. ;
next, to the erdteria of civilization—national progress,
arts, and sciences, general education, position of women,
charity, international relations, ete.; then to the prob-
lems of civilization—land tenure, distribution of wealth,
employers and employés, social legislation ; and, finally,
to the Aistory of civilization—when and where its effects
emerge, ete. |
But a possibly less fragmentary and still simpler way
will be to proceed not by the elements of civilization (as
we might pick up minerals, and by analysis locate them
in our cabinets), but by beginning at the point of life—
the ¢ndividual—and tracing the civilizing power and
progress of religion through all his greater relations in
the life of the state, the life of soctety, and the race-life [
As man emerges into the larger spaces, one after
another, I think it must be seen that Christianity, the
civilizer, accompanies him, proves his sufficient mentor,
and indicates the point of solution in all the great prob-
lems which arise from these divinely-ordered relations.
Our endeayor would be to note (were the scheme to be
136 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
realized) most of the great departments in which the
teachings and influences of Christianity come to the sur-
face in that whole broad region we call civilization.
There can be for us no digging in the strata, but there
may be a diligent examination of the outcroppings.
Proceeding from the individual onward, we enter upon
the real life of mankind, and discover an organism like
that of a tree or animal life developing from a cell.
From the individual outward we must go, because life
develops that way. All relations interact. The indi-
vidual is never the same when the race changes, nor the
race the same while the individual changes. Nor is any-
thing between the two, from centre to circumference,
the same when there is change at either end of the
radius. History and fact will have it thus, and Chris-
tianity must have it thus, since its whole spirit is to con-
sider man as never less than man, even if there be bill-
ions of him ; and it makes nothing of the race-problems
when held away from the facts of individual life. Let
the relations, then, overlap as they may, they will not
be interfering, but only ¢ntersphering, as the strands do
when a rope is being twisted.
And let us remember, further, that this position is
claimed for Christianity (the civilizer), not as a product
of development from the human soul, nor as a recollec-
tion of broken echoes, nor as an eclecticism from all
religions (rejecting most), nor as a syncretism of all
(accepting almost anything). No! The Christianity
we mean is revealed, authorized, and a system in itself
contained. |
The large claim is made fearlessly, because the relation
between the product affirmed and the elements of power
in question is strictly proportionate. Immense effects
are expected of no other than immense forces. And
~~ eS ee ee ae
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION. 137
there is as full and adequate a proportion in Christianity
to the demands of the work of civilizing the world as
there is between the miracle of spring’s new mantle and
its causes. Silent mainly, but deep and pervasive, it
can easily become universal and effect vast changes.
Nor in this argument is Christianity to be taken by
and large as an intangible and indefinable somewhat,
either afraid or ashamed to give itself a local habitation
oraname. It can endure dates and specifications in any
indictment, and freely gives them to support its claims.
It freely acknowledges all sorts of individual weaknesses
and clinging errors, and even secular evil tendencies. It
asks only the justice of discrimination which will show
that Christianity is not always to be identified with either
the acts or doctrines of those who ‘‘ profess and call
themselves Christians.” I mean to call that Christianity
which is embraced in the ordinary evangelical scheme,
such as characterized the primitive church, such as may
justly be considered the consensus of the reformers, such
as to-day finds expression in the nine articles of the
Evangelical Alliance, and exponents in the great co-
working instrumentalities of Christendom—bBible and
tract societies, and in the numberless organizations for
practical charity, and reform, and social beneficence.
And yet this Christianity stands close enough to Liberal-
ism, on the one hand, and Romanism, on the other, to
gather from both all that rightly belongs to the content
of truth common to all, while so distinctly separated
from them as to disclaim the oppression of the latter,
which has so seriously hindered the advance of civiliza-
tion, and the lifelessness of the former, which makes it
evident that Liberalism and new departures of all kinds
will do little more to civilize men than they can do to
save them.
1388 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
Nor is it necessary to this argument to consider civil-
ization as the chief end of Christianity. It is not even
approximately such. The force is too deep and broad to
empty itself into such an effect. It can appear at the
surface and be recognized as civilization, but it begins
lower. It can carry civilization as an incidental, but
reckons it only such. Its forward sweep is too vast to
be satisfied with any aim bounded by time. But, on the
other hand, it reckons upon civilization as its inseparable
concomitant, and expects to make of it a most helpful
instrument to the farther and higher purpose with which
it glows. And this leads directly to the statement that
there is nothing extraneous, nor accidental, nor transitory
in the nature of Christianity as a civilizer. It does this
work in doing its own work, and therefore does it within
the heart and soul of the race, and does it forever. Be-
eause this work is an incidental result, Christianity
becomes the only civilizing force which is perpetual, and
Inner, and independent. It moves men onward in many
things as the great winds move the individual ship, just
because they are already going somewhere on their own
errands, according to the great laws that gave them being
and keep them in motion. Christianity civilizes as the
glaciers cut away precipices and hew out mountains as
they go onward with resistless pressure, heaped from
above by the cold and drawn out below by the warmth.
It civilizes as the upheaval forces which make eoast-lines
make here and there an island.
Thus we reach the final and highest future in this
statement. The religion we profess can civilize just be-
cause it can do so much more. The assurance is doubly
sure when the force is seen to be directed toward and
adequate for greater results than that which we are
immediately concerned about. An electrical machine
" , Pe
= ns a eames eerste sae
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION. 139
which can light a city can charge a Leyden jar! And
thus that master of this whole theme, Dr. Richard Storrs,
has phrased it: ‘‘ The religion of Jesus has not merely
rectified particular abuses, removed special evils, exerted
a benign and salutary influence on local institutions. It
has formed and introduced into the world a general
Christian consciousness which is practically ubiquitous
and commanding in Christendom ; to which institutions,
tendencies, and persons are more and more distinctly
amenable ; which judges all by an ideal standard ; to
which flattering concessions to wealth, or power, or
genius, or culture are inherently offensive ; which consti-
tutes a spiritual bond of union between the most widely
separated states, and which affirms, with sure expecta-
tion, its own approaching supremacy in the world.”
‘‘ Certain peculiar and transcendent elements have en-
tered the governing life of mankind through this religion,
and its effect thus far has been to elevate, and purify, and
uplift, and set forward the race in a wholly unique mode
and measure’”’ (D. O., of Chr’y, p. 850 and 821).
Nor must it be forgotten, in closing this introduction,
that there is a certain good—reflex good—to be gained
for religion itself by the study of the materials which go
to make up the argument under consideration. Chris-
tianity renounces, when thus engaged, any small, or
ignorant, or purely official, or local conceptions of its
nature and mission, and it has been obliged to contend
with all these. It emphasizes the universal petitions of
the Lord’s Prayer, and breathes a large missionary spirit,
and speaks confidently of the King’s crowning-day. We
learn in such studies that the policy which retires Chris-
tianity into a certain spiritual function and sees it only as
a gospel of ‘‘ repentance and remission of sins,’’ is false
to that other form of the great commission which makes
140 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
‘* whatsoever’ Christ has ‘‘ commanded ’”’ the means to
the broadest and most comprehensive and beneficent
changes through which the world can pass. In such
lines of inquiry we are forced to the conclusion that
the timid policy is unworthy of the ‘* King of kings and
Lord of lords.’ We hear //zs challenge: ‘‘O ye of
little faith, wherefore did ye doubt !’’ and come to some-
thing like vision of the unseen agencies that surround us
as ‘‘ horses and chariots of fire.’? We grow unwilling to.
have any forget all there is of commanding evidence of
divine origin to be found in tracing the beneficent out-
goings of that power, the ‘‘ hidings’’? of which are no
doubt at the cross. James Martineau is quoted as say-
ing: *‘ The thorough interweaving of all the roots of
Christianity with the history of the world on which it
has sprung is at once a source of its power and an assur-
ance of its divineness.”’
Nort to tue InrrRopvuction.
Acknowledgments of the argument may be here in-
serted—a few out of many—as evidences of its recogni-
tion and rank.
(1) A city daily’ of large influence, and secular, of
course, says: ‘‘ It is the weft of the world’s history for
the last eighteen hundred years, exultingly traced by
Bossuet, quietly recognized by Guizot, and sowing with
gibes the brilliant pages of Gibbon. . Through the diffu-
sion and vivifying power of this light our civilization
derives its distinctive character. The great charters of
our civil liberties, the elevation of women, our schools,
our life-breathing literatures, our noble achievements in
medicine and surgery, and in the arts, that ‘ tend to the
relief of man’s estate ’—these are a few of the things
a ee
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION. 141
which give the modern West its predominance over the
older civilization of the East, and which may be traced
to our common Christianity.”’
(2) General Grant—as President—wrote to the chil-
dren of the United States: ‘‘ Hold fast to the Bible as
the sheet-anchor of your liberties ; write its precepts on
your hearts and practise them in your lives. To the
influence of this book we are indebted for the progress
made in true civilization, and to this we look as our
guide in the future.”
(3) Dr. Andrew P. Peabody assigns, in Joseph Cook’s
Symposium, this ground for belief in the divine origin
of Christianity : ‘‘ Because in the history of the world it
is the only cause of all that has been best and noblest in
humanity since the advent of Christ ; because I can trace
under its influence a constant and unintermitted progress
of which there is no other assignable cause.”’
(4) Bishop Huntingdon writes (March, 1885): ‘‘ The
undeniable effects of Christianity on national, domestic,
and individual progress, wrought through the organiza-
tion, ministries, and missions of the Christian Church, in
knowledge, virtue, order, freedom, and mercy, testify
not only that the God of truth revealed it, but that the
God of history is with it and within it. Christendom is
accounted for only by Christianity, and Christianity
broke too suddenly into the world to be of the world.”’
(5) President George F. Magoun follows : ‘‘ Its effects
upon the world crown all. These are chiefly moral, and
all its primary and direct effects are. But there are
secondary ones, unexampled, marvellous, though not of
the nature of miracle. Nothing else so falls in with and
fulfils the best possibilities of human nature. Why
should it not be divine? Christendom is one great rea-
son why I believe in Christianity.”’
142 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
(6) And President Mark Hopkins presents this:
‘‘ Because Christianity has so greatly modified social life
and institutions, has founded new civilizations, and has
in it the only principle and method of permanent prog-
ress.”
I. We begin with Christianity and the individual,
and, first, with the doctrine of manhood.
Profoundly philosophical is this point of beginning
which Christianity makes everywhere evident as its own.
Here is the true ‘‘ unit’’ of civilization and the real pro-
toplasm of every social structure. It has been urged as a
distinct reason for the divinity of our religion that, *‘ as
gravitation is universal by reaching the masses through
its action on each particle, so Christianity seeks to
become universal by dealing with men as individuals.”
Its position here might be regarded as in a certain sense
a test of Christianity, and how well it bears the compari-
son with other religions at this point! How strikingly
it differs from the Platonic dream and the Roman actual-
ity which destroyed the individual by smothering him in
the state! And surely manhood in the individual is the
test for civilization. The civilized man is the best prod-
uct of any civilization, and therefore the best measure
for its relative superiority. How quickly we turn from
the African pigmy to Stanley as index of civilization’s
power! What a world between them! Whatever
makes men (the word pronounced with such emphasis
on so many oceasions) is civilizing. But who does not
know that Christianity is the mother of men? That for
which our faith is often reproached from the standpoint
of Carlyle’s ‘‘ Kénig-mann,” is its veritable glory. It
does its work with the man essential, and makes much
more of him than of the man accidental. Its most im-
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION. 143
portant contributions to history have been by the many
and not by the few, in striking contrast with every
other force, philosophical or religious, which the world
has ever known. The achievements of Christianity have
been (according to Brace, in ‘‘ Gesta Christi,’ p. 2)
through ‘‘ simple men and women not known, perhaps,
to history, or even to those of their own time, whose
souls and lives were filled with the principles of this new
faith. These gradually affected social habits and prac-
tices, sometimes changing them before they influenced
. legislation, sometimes, by a favoring accident, being able
first to reform laws and public officials, thus day by day,
by imperceptible steps, purifying church, state, and
people.’’
It is writ large in all history that the recognition of
the mdividual has been the most powerful influence of
the ages. _Growths toward liberty have been by convul-
sions cracking the upper crust and allowing motion to
the masses beneath, and individualization is always the
result of life-movements. The progress of liberty is the
history of the rise of the average man. And the same is
true for equality and fraternity. The point reached in
the general diffusion and power of the sentiment of the
honor of humanity is really the characteristic glory of
the nineteenth Christian century. It is made the test of
everything. No literature, no statesmanship, no educa-
tion, no art is now widely acceptable, and none certainly
is regarded with enthusiasm which has not in it some-
where the enthusiasm of humanity.. No growth of sci-
ence or taste is equal in importance to this development,
and in no other thing is the plastic hand of Christianity
so plainly visible.
The foundation for it was laid deep in the Old Testa-
ment declaration: ‘‘ Behold, God is great and despiseth
144 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
not any,’’ and in the glory of God’s judicial character as
‘‘ accepting no man’s person.’’ It is buried deep in the
great doctrines of the moral nature of man, his immor-
tality, his being the object of divine love in providence,
and of divine self-sacrifice in redemption, and of divine
indwelling by the Holy Spirit, in the awe of the final
judgment and the serviceableness of man as an instru-
ment to the glory of God here and hereafter. The
truths that Christianity makes true of every man com-
bine to weave a halo about the brow of the meanest man.
They sweep away all human distinctions of wealth, learn-
ing, position, education, or color. They make such
infinite spaces for the human soul that the diversities of
man’s outward circumstances have no parallax. Chris-
tianity both creates and sustains the sentiment by the
measureless dignity with which it crowns human nature
(concealing nothing, meanwhile, of its needs). It is in
contrast, here, with the abuse of the word ‘* humanity”’
by atheistic infidelity, which has been called a “ book
with three pages—(1) an animal, (2) a man, (3) death”
(K6gel).
How soon this upward lift of the average man began
to be felt after Christianity dawned! Our Lord made it
known by every act and word of His life. He taught
‘what ’twas to be a man,’ and that every one might
reach it, and chose His place with the lowly and made
fishermen His apostles and called not many ‘‘ rich and
noble.”” The middle wall of partition was seen to go
down as the Gospel area widened. Church history con-
firms the principles of the faith, and now the doctrine of
manhood leads and rules the world through the dominant
Christian nations. At the very beginning it brought
out the dignity of labor amid a slave population in Rome.
‘* AJ] the useless servants of Roman society, the parasite,
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION. 145
the pimp, the circus-rider, the gladiator, the debauched
actor, the servant of idols, the obscene comedian and
prostitute were changed by the new faith into industri-
ous producers and workers, Work became honored
under the new religion’’ (Brace, “ Gesta Christi,’’ p. 69).
Slaves were known to plead at the Roman bar: “I am
not a slave ; I am a Christian. Christ has freed me.”’
Think how the free, earnest, spiritual meetings for devo-
tion and instruction, where ‘each had a psalm,’* must
have given the sense of equality! These could not
co-exist with caste. Brahmanism—the synonym of caste
—is declared to be ‘ utterly selfish, being constructed
and maintained in all its features solely for the interests
of one class—the Brahmins. To elevate and benefit the
masses it has no lessons and no influences”? (D. Rowe,
Guntoor, India), Not only the milder, but the severer
doctrines of Christianity are full of this equalizing force.
See how it deals with sin and makes it the close-lying
and universal characteristic of mankind ! Tow impar-
tially its punishments are distributed ! And nothing in-
dividualizes more signally than the doctrine of separate
and individual responsibility after death. Sir Henry
Maine notes its influence in lessening, through the ancient
faiths of India, some harsher features of the written law
of the Hindoos, and its full revelation in Christianity
brings compassion for the guilty as nothing else ever has
or ever can. To seek and to save “the lost’? Christ
came, and the Christian goes, and Christianity invariably
prompts.
And it is curious to note how certainly they who seek
to state the truth of humanity in supposed original terms
will be sure to employ Christian ideas—e.g., ‘‘ Man’s
destiny is to progressive civilization and a constitution of
society which makes progressive civilization the exclusive
146 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
property of the few and practically debars the vast mass
of the people from participation in it, stands in the pres-
ent age self-condemned.’’? This is Lasalle’s idea in the
celebrated Workingmen’s Programme (of 1863), and yet
it is the purest Christianity. The spirit of our religion
is certainly the greatest good to the greatest number. In|
methods we may be the poles apart from Lasalle, but our
goal is the same, and we will reach it far sooner; for
Christianity meets just here the great danger of a god-
less rule of the many. Nothing is plainer than that the
masses may trample the individual and pulverize him as
effectually as the brutal tyrant. “ Whatever may be the
case with democracy triumphant and settled, democracy
militant, the democracy of an agitating party, is neces-
sarily penetrated by an overmastering sense of the claims
of numbers and by a most dangerous depreciation of the
rights of individuals and the value of ‘individuality’
(John Rae, Cont. Soc., p. 107). Thus the balance is pre-
served. The one for the many, but also the many for
the one. :
It cannot then but be true, as claimed, that if civiliza-
tion begins with, implies, is built upon and measured by
the individual, then Christianity is the great civilizer.
For here is disclosed his dignity, and by doctrine and
practice the equality is created which makes room for the
individual when created. And all that Christianity does
is done for all men and from within and forever. The
market value of souls knows no fluctuation. Christ’s
sacrifice is the perpetual standard of a soul’s worth.
The fraternity it weaves is a seamless coat, and fits every
man. The individualism of Christianity is its true uni-
versalism. The Church is catholic before it is holy.
Lines which human imperfection have drawn over its
fair surface are perishing as the children’s play-marks in
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION. 147
the sands are obliterated by the irresistible tides. The
more God we have, the more man. The more law, the
more conscience, the more eternity, the more man.
That which was the demand of created nature is yet the
demand of the rising race—the man. That within us to
which Christianity appeals yields the noblest possible
product of our nature. Man has been revealed to him-
self. Once revealed, all things give place to him, and
civilization to its outmost periphery glows with the
inspiration kindled at this centre. Tf this doctrine of
manhood “‘be not correct, Christianity is in error from
the root upward. If this is correct, the glory of that
ever-living religion which taught it to the world seems
as apparent as the splendor of Uriel sitting amid the
sun’s bright circle’? (Storrs).
II. Looking more narrowly at the individual, we dis-
cover that Christianity affects favorably his physical
culture and comfort.
In the evolution of civilization nothing” is more strik-
ing than the physical betterment which Christianity is
sure to bring to the race upon which it enters. Nor is it
difficult to account for this when we remember how thor-
oughly clear our religion is from that Eastern mysticism
which identified the body with sin, and made their rela-
tion that of cause and effect, inseparable and essential, so
that one must despise his body who cared for his soul.
Nor less clear is it (though sometimes misunderstood)
from all ideas of asceticism and bodily mortification for
the sake of mortification. That from within ‘‘ defileth
the man,’’ and fastings are only to control, not to injure,
and thereby to benefit the body. And more. It is
positively filled with such consecrating and conservative
ideas as insure culture of the body as well as control.
The body is immortalized by the resurrection. It be-
148 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
comes the choicest instrument of an obedient spirit in a
service which is liberty. It takes on the aspect of a
temple as dwelling-place of the Holy Ghost and a house
of communion with God. It is cut off from the taint of
every vice as part of the body of Christ, of whom all its
parts are °° members.’ All which makes it certain that
the body will be cultivated and conserved so that it shall
express while it shares all the activities of a clear and
clean soul-life. Nowhere is there better foundation for
or quicker sympathy with the cheer of admiration for
every bit of honest muscle and the hardihood and endur-
ance which furnish the physical basis for Christian
heroism. Itcannot but be that real Christians will grow
(taken by and large) to be a healthy race. And this is
visible in a still larger way in that the play of all the
great forces (selection, and heredity, and persistence)
insures the continuance and growth of that race that is
characterized by precisely those virtues which Christian-
ity is alone competent to nourish and preserve in the
best way.
Nor is Christianity in the least indifferent to physical
comfort. It likes it from the African’s first cotton shirt
(which also comforts the missionary) up to the latest
addition—natural gas fuel in a cold Northern winter.
All unnecessary hardships, all the sufferings incident to
disease and vice and war, and all the poverties which de-
prive men of warmth and cheer, it sets itself vigorously,
and as part of its most sacred commission, to remove
and to prevent. Every real comfort, made possible to
every man, helping the great output of life’s activi-
ties, and abolishing every hindering inconvenience in
homes and roads and seas, is its ideal. It loves not
luxury, but that just because it loves diffused comfort,
as appears in John Wesley’s famous maxim, *¢ My lux-
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION. 149
uries for other people’s comforts, my comforts for their
necessities.’’ It loves not waste, for that makes want.
And it is all the more sure to accomplish physical
development, beauty, and comfort, because utterly un-
willing to make any or all of them its first concern. It
does care for physical beauty in both sexes, relishing just
as much that characterized by vigor as that redolent of
grace ; and it has a supreme contempt for mere pretti-
ness that does not mean vigor and usefulness on either
side ; and it has a strong denunciation for every vice, or
vicious amusement, or foolish fashion which can cut
away the early strength of man or woman ; but it does
not seek to create a race of athletes or of professional
beauties. or both sexes it honors the perfection which
is the mark of healthful play of every function, and it
seeks that perfection, with its beauty and power, for the
sake of noble purposes beyond, ‘This gives the equi-
poise which a godless civilization has never been able to
preserve. The idolatry of the body ends in nameless
vices. The idolatry of comfort ends in sybaritic good-
for-nothingness. Nothing is so effective in saving from
the brutality of the slugging-match, or the sensuality of
the modern stage, as the uplifting purposes which Chris-
tianity puts behind strength and beauty. Nothing can
so effectually prevent our becoming slaves to the very
conveniences of modern life as the Christian idea that
comfort ceases where indulgence begins; that whatever
keeps or increases power is itself to be judged by the use
of which that power is susceptible. So, then, nothing
can so make comfort and keep it from unmaking men as
the nobler Christian conceptions. Either strength or
beauty, when knitted into the texture of an ennobling
life-purpose, is more easily and certainly reached and
more surely conserved. Neither can abuse us, and we
150 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
will not abuse either. Ah! there is no physical regen-
erator of men and races like the simple, pure upper: wir
‘nto which Christianity brings us. It has all the sparkle
of the sea, and the purity of the Adirondacks, and the
resin of Michigan pineries. Historically, this Christian
nurture of the body has told in the shocks of every war
‘1 which the Christian races (sometimes to their shame)
have met the uncivilized, and has told again as the
‘‘Giant in the Spiked Helmet,” rich as yet in the
virtues that make bone and muscle, and skilful in the
culture which shows how to use them, has brought his
powerful mace down to the south and west of him. If
now there shall be Christianity enough in the races which
Christianity has made physically strong, to keep them
away from Satanic ambitions for territorial aggrandize-
ments, and keep them at peace with one another, and
enable them to prevail against the gnawing vices of their
still unchristian elements, then we shall see what races
Christianity can produce. Oh, for more Christianity to
perfect its own already magnificent products! Such
men and women would be, as they walked the earth, an
anthem of perpetual praise and a reminiscence of Eden.
III. But Christianity would have a sore task even
to improve the bodies of men if it could not reach
their minds. Just here we discern its yet greater
results. The intrinsic power of Christianity to awaken
mind cannot be too confidently asserted. Men must
think to be Christians. Religion has no objection to
being made an object of thought, but, on the contrary,
by the very strength and determination with which it
posits itself in the world of thinking does it challenge
attention. We care not whether men call it a ‘‘ science
of religion” or a ‘‘ philosophy of religion,” the thing
is certain that nothing will ever be pursued more in-
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION. 151
tensely as matter of thought. In agnosticism there is no
rest for the wing of the dove. While philosophy can
hold to any real knowledge, it will hold religion with the
same grasp. Christianity will be the last of the certain-
ties to retire defeated from the intellectual arena. Tt
furnishes man’s best reasons for maintaining a standing
in the realm of spirit, and will ever awaken mind, if for
no other reason, in order that it may vindicate its own
existence. Religion is essentially a thing of intelligence,
because it depends upon truth, whether abstract or con-
crete, and provides for no emotions save on the basis of
intelligence.
Christianity is greater here than other religions, but
yet, like them, by the nature of the case. Nothing has
ever been so attractive to men of thought. The greatest
names of history—those whose impress is on the real life
of men—are all connected with religion. Zoroaster,
Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Thales, Socrates, Plato, Zeno,
Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus. That which men
most remember about them is their teaching of religion.
Great systems of world-thought are religious systems,
more or less. Religion is at home in the realm of mind.
It is neither exclusively ethical nor exclusively specula-
tive, but demands the practical reason. The literature
of Christianity is addressed to mind, and demands an
awakened mind to comprehend its basal ideas. How
extended and varied it has become! Think but a mo-
ment of what themes those are with which Christianity
appeals toman! Their grandeur, and even their difi-
culty with the fineness of discrimination they demand,
cannot be forgotten for a moment. And they are omni-
present. They lean out of every side of nature and life,
and when once proposed they are like some strange pict-
ures—the outlines of their faces peer out from every
152 DEFENCE AND CONFIRMATION OF THE FAITH.
point of life’s surface. All great subjects are full of
them, and no man can study nature, history, philosophy,
or law without meeting religion. How can it fail to
provoke thought and arouse mind ?
Take the study of its evidences alone. The large
claims and the larger arguments take in the whole man.
The breadth of the territory is astonishing. Miracles
mean the whole of nature from atom to evolution.
Prophecy means all history. Providence and grace raise
the deepest questions of metaphysics, and moral evi-
dences call for all the ethics of the ages. Such “ great
wakening’’ lights cannot fall upon men’s eyes without
exciting men’s minds. ‘‘ Grand and distinctive truths,”’
President Porter has called them, ‘‘ which are no sooner
thought than they fill and expand the mind with some
worthy conception of its own greatness, or, rather, over-
whelm and confound it by contrast with its own little-
ness.” ‘* God, self-existent, all-knowing, all-present,
creating yet working after a plan from the beginning, as
science and history both declare. . . . Is there sucha
being? on
rm ede
- hie. >
Wot dnaad aio r
Rees yas Ri
pe
a
i
Set ne = ee
he a
Pes
a
we
pw Daal i
wee ae ge
2 oe
Kea
fous
<
y Ys
¥ we od
ed ee rn
ms 2 aed dee te Re eee ; ‘
7 das ae ~~ a Wee Pe et eee 1 —>
Dak _— . a Pit ts } —" + +9 PY rh a
: i Aad oe Ys ,
7."
ee
a .
Seg ay
roa
Ey