5,n. \4- ^ ^"^ %<^ ^{ \\Lt Mtohsimt j^ %: PRINCETON, N. J. % % Presented by Lr, F L.Palto-n BT 75 .M575 1887 Miller, John, 1819-1895 Theology n 1. xx^^^. .-. -^. ^/i. (^i2mo.) .... $i.oo 2. Commentary on Romans. Pp. 390. (8vo.) . 1.50 NEW EDITIONS. 3. Are Souls Immortal? 3d Ed. Pp.178. (i2mo.) .80 4. Was Christ in Adam? 3d Ed. Pp. 97. (i2mo.) .60 5. Is God a Trinity? 3d Ed. Pp. 152. (i2mo.) .70 6. Questions Awakened by the Bible, (being Nos. 3, 4 & 5 in one volume). . . . . .1.25 7. Fetich in Theology. 3d Ed. Pp. 264. (i2mo.) i.oo 8. Theology and Fetich in Theology (in one volume). . . . . . . . . 1.50 9. Commentary on Proverbs 2d Ed. Pp. 721. (8vo.) • 2.00 10. Metaphysics. Pp. 430. (8vo.) . . . 1.50 11. Creed. (In paper.) ...... .10 Nos. 2, 6 & 8 (when mailed or bought together). . 3.50 " 2, 6, 8 & 9 (A'hen mailed or bought together). . 5 00 " 2, 6, 8, 9, lo&ii (when mailed or bought together). 6.00 Jlfaikd post-paid on receipt of price and furnished to the trade by the EVANGELICAL REFORM PUBLICATION CO., PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY. THE TRADE ALSO SUPPLIED BY Charles T. Dillingham, 678 Broadway, New York ; J. B. LiPPiNCOTT Co., 715 & 717 Market Street, Philadelphia A. C. McClurg cS: Co., 117 to 121 Wabash Avenue, Chicago C. H. Whiting, 168 & 170 Devonshire Street, Boston. I.OO. THEOLOGY BY / REV. JOHN MILLER. PRINCETON, N. J.: EVANGELICAL REFORM PUBLICATION CO., 1887. Mailed post-paid by this Company on receipt of price. Copyright, 1887, By JOHN MILLER. Press of W. L. Mershon & Co. Rahway, N . J. PREFACE. No one doubts that the Syrian bishops bred Mohammed. If Mohammed had confronted a purer Christianity, the world would have been spared Islam. No one doubts that Catholicism bred Voltaire. If Paris had been Switzerland, and Voltaire had witnessed a rural priesthood, he would have had no zeal to *' crush the wretch," and would have shrunk abashed from the role of a blasphemer. No one doubts that Lambeth bred Jefferson. If London had not made a Botany Bay of the Chesa- peake, and given the Colonists drunkards and dead- beats for clergy, Virginia, of all States, would have been devout ; at least, she would have been respect- ful, and Monticello would have been busy on other tasks than a brutal skepticism. The veriest child in reasoning, looking along the line of years, would say. The best way to prevent Islam would have been to reform Syria ; and, kind- ling at the thought, would swell with a sort of im- patience at the wish that Rome had not fed Voltaire, and that Lambeth had found out the work she was doing for her distant missions. But alas ! States repent, but the Church hardly ever. Britain yields and slowly listens to the truth, 4 Preface, and shapes her state constitution, but who ever heard of a Cliurch doing this? The Church is a Rehoboam, and it is a sort of satire upon her history that she speaks of reform, and takes the name upon her books of the '' Great Reformation," and when we come to fathom it, there never was a reform at all. The Church unbendingly kept on in her course, and what was called a reform was the expulsion from her side of her purest saints, and the rallying of these in a separate and disowned communion. When did a church ever reform ? An opportunity for this very thing is what this book, with all the zeal that it can command, would like to offer. What is it that is bringing such assaults in our day? Who is creating IngersoU ? What is the Lambeth or the Syrian quag that poisons Science, and makes all but believing men despair of Christ, and half give up our inherited religion ? Is there anything in the direction of the attacks, which, like the iron in the mountain, tells where the thunderbolt most loves to strike, and as watching Voltaire shows where religion suffered, and watching Islam shows where Syria was weak, is there anything in Spencer, or anything in Mill, or anything in IngersoU, which shows where they like to thrust, and wdiere there are some hidden spots that belong not to the gospel ? If there be, then, in our day, two courses are pos- sible, either the universal course, which returns with the certainty of light, and which gives up Christian- ity to its corruptions, or else the ideal course, never Preface, 5 yet adopted by the good, of finding these corrup- tions out, and actually avoiding scoffs by clearing off the sottishnesses which have mixed with our religion. And now, to take specimens of these things: — I. The doctrine oi Atonement \ook?> like an angry boil upon the body of the Redeemer. All men are embittered. Christians have never rested in one theory of the transfer. Protestants have tried to make one, but they have been as variant as their schools, and infidels could go leisurely through the Church and pick out, in the hostile camps, the in- vectives they required, in the speeches of one school of Christ denouncing and ridiculing another. Why was it not long ago that the Church, doting upon the Atonement, and believing, as a good man ought, that it is the very essence of salvation, en- quired down to the very roots of the idea, and found that there had been a splinter — that there had been a foreign substance at the very bottom of the sore, and that the infidel was right, that the atonement, with that in it^ was an atrocity as a gospel ? Instead of that the Governmental and the Moral and the Exemplary and the Penal, all have taken their places as Atonements. They have given up each other. Combined, they have given up Christ. And Ingersoll comes in, and denounces the whole gospel, and brands as a bloodthirsty God the Being that could have revealed such essential parts of it. Now why, at this late day, cannot the Church 6 Preface, come in, and ferret out its angry difficulty? All these theories are right. The Governmental and the Moral and the Exemplary and the Penal, all are elements of truth, and are only brutal when they decry each other. The splinter lies deeper. We are not to cut out the Atonement as a tumor, and that, practically, all these combatants do, but to treat it for its life, and to find out that the whole festering is around its root, and that Vindicatory Justice, that elemental point in Ethics, is at the basis of the whole disorder. What is Vindicatory Justice? This book will show that our treatment of it may be altogether human. Protestants have been told for centuries that it is a native trait, that it stands on its own bottom. No help has been given to it but that it be the blood- thirstiness seen by IngersoU. It is a native revenge, seated as lawfully as pity. And all through these sad years men have been up in the branches debat- ing consequential facts, when the whole difficulty in the case lay in the meaning of Vengeance. Give God revenge, and not simply (i) benevolence, and (2) a love of holiness, and make this trait prim- ordial (though it be forbidden to men), and you have a Monster, and you have this Monster crushing you for years, and patterning to Mill and Hume the whole nature of your believing. So much for one point. Teach a vengeance which is derivative, and not primordial, and which flows from a love of holi- ness, and not a thirst to smite, and which is made Preface, 7 necessary by a need to punish, as a constitutional necessity of a King, and you rob IngersoU at once ; you enthrone a God of pity, and, instead of cutting out the vitals in order to get rid of the disease, you have found out the splinter, and you simply remove it, and keep unhurt the very essence of our system. II. And so of Hell. The world seems moving against it. The Congregationalists made President in Britain a man who denies Gehenna. No faith is rising faster than "Conditional Immortality." Whose fault is it ? If there be an eternal pit, it is cruel to hide the news of it. And yet, as in the case of Ransom, the Church has provoked the defection. It will be seen in this book how Sovereignty has been lifted up. We will not anticipate. Place God out of the sphere of our humanity; (i) let Him do as He please ; (2) let Him act for display ; (3) let Him live for Himself ; (4) let Him damn as He lists, and not out of the necessities of His reign ; and (5) let Him take that damnation (hard enough to be believed) and represent it as for His own glory; and no wonder the Church shrinks. Examine where the catapult strikes, and we will find that it is at these spots every time. Make God a loving Father ; show His own horror for wrath ; tell His own story of sac- rifice ; show His own eagerness to redeem; deny sovereignty except as it is holy, and deny Hell ex- cept as it is a hard need, as unwelcome to God as to 8 Preface, man ; and the whole strain is taken off. Ingersoll would not be able to triumph so against the Pit, and we could return to its eternal vengeance, if we gave God human traits, and gave Hell human qualities, of unconquerable and dauntless sinning. We grime our God, and then, of course, feel the pressure, almost unbearable, of these terrible reve- lations. III. Giving God an excuse for Hell in so light a thing as display, we give a man an excuse for Heaven in so light a thing as faitJi. The rows of felons that are saved, and come out radiant under the noose, create a recoil that ministers know little of. It is a standing burlesque upon Redemption. In this whole region of salvation by faith is the Church's greatest danger. Put together certain modern reformations, first, Conditional Immortality, second. Perseverance of the Saints, and third, this salvation which comes punctually to nearly all that are hanged, and you have a system against which a heretic may be the friend of God. This book as- sails (i) the Trinity ; (2) ghost life ; (3) un-Adamic relations of Christ ; (4) un-moral and merely believ- ing Faith ; (5) Protestant Justification ; (6) Certain Perseverance, and (7) Sovereignty, hung like the stars of heaven upon sovereignty itself. Had it been printed centuries ago, and had it opposed in the same strain (i) Monkery; (2) Martyrdom; (3) the Wafer ; (4) the Right of Kings ; (5) Forgiveness by the Priest ; (6) Intercession by the Dead, and (7) PvCgeneration by the Rite of Baptism, it would have Preface, g stood about where this book will now, except that book and pen would have been alike given to the flames. Ought not the good to look prayerfully into their Autos-da-Fe ? What if this book is on the side of the Redeemer, like that other? Mistake has two treatments, that of Jefferson, and that of Luther. Both are surgical attempts. This last is the gospel's best friend. The other is the truth's worst enemy. The one cuts out the life. The other saves it by dissecting away the error. May God in His infinite mercy print for His people abler and better books, which will make His gospel more simple and more moral ; which shall make His sovereignty more humane and more holy; and which, in these better days, shall break the crust of a profane and old-time rationalism. John Miller. Princeton, /;//;/ 6, 1885. CONTENTS Page. PREFACE, 3 INTRODUCTION, 19 BOOK I. Righteousness, chapter i. How Far all Men Agree, 25 CHAPTER II. The Word, Righteousness, 30 CHAPTER III. Benevolence, 34 CHAPTER IV. The Moral Quality 39 CHAPTER V. Are there more Righteous Things than Two ? . . . 42 CHAPTER VI. The Highest Good, 45 CHAPTER VII. Rewards, 48 1 2 Contents, Page. CHAPTER VIII. Sin 49 CHAPTER IX. The Greatest Evil, 52 CHAPTER X. Punishment, 52 CHAPTER XI. Sinfulness, 55 CHAPTER XII. Hell, 56 CHAPTER XIII. Guilt, 56 CHAPTER XIV, Vindicatory Justice, 57 CHAPTER XV. Confusion of Words, 59 CHAPTER XVI. Pardon, 61 CHAPTER XVII. Justification, , . 63 CHAPTER XVIII. Obligation 63 CHAPTER XIX. Occasion for Theology, 64 Contents. 13 BOOK II. Man. Page. CHAPTER I. Conscience, 65 CHAPTER H. All Else in Man, 66 CHAPTER HI. An Impaired Conscience, 69 CHAPTER IV. Conscience not by Nature Curable, 70 CHAPTER V. Singularities of Man's Condition, 71 CHAPTER VI. The Bible, 72 CHAPTER VII. Man's Origin, , . 78 CHAPTER VIII. Man's Fall, , 82 CHAPTER IX. Man's Chief End, 86 CHAPTER X. Man in God's Image, go 14 C 071 tents. BOOK III. God. Page. CHAPTER I. God's Conscience, 92 CHAPTER H. All Else in God, 93 CHAPTER HI. Man's Rights over God, 98 CHAPTER IV. God's Rights over Man, icxs CHAPTER V. The Universe, the Best Possible, . . . . . . loi CHAPTER VI. Each Creature the Best Possible for It, . . . . 104 CHAPTER VII. God's Decrees, 104 CHAPTER VIII. Anthropomorphism, 108 CHAPTER IX. Thz Simplicity of God, no CHAPTER X. Worship, in Contents. 1 5 BOOK IV. The God-Man. Page. CHAPTER I. God's Chief End with Man, 114 CHAPTER H. Reasons for a God-Man, 116 CHAPTER HI. Nature of the Man, 127 CHAPTER IV. Nature of the God, 129 CHAPTER V. Redemption, 137 CHAPTER VI. Justification, . . . ' 142 CHAPTER VII. Probation, 152 CHAPTER VIII, Regeneration, Sanctification, Repentance and Conver- sion, 158 CHAPTER IX. Faith, 162 CHAPTER X. Justification by Faith, . , 172 1 6 Contents. Page. CHAPTER XI. Prayer, 178 CHAPTER Xn. The Law, 181 CHAPTER Xni. The Works of the Law, 184 CHAPTER XIV. The Weakness of the Law, 186 CHAPTER XV. The Two Covenants, 188 CHAPTER XVI. Perseverance, 191 CHAPTER XVH. History of the Trinity, , • i97 CHAPTER XVIH. The Trinity, if False, a Curse and a Blasphemy, . . 205 <* ♦ »> BOOK V. The Hereafter. CHAPTER I. Death and the Resurrection, 210 CHAPTER II. Romish Errors, . , , , 216 Contents. 1 7 Page. CHAPTER III. Hell and Heaven, , . 218 CHAPTER IV. The Millennium, 227 ^ ♦■ » BOOK VI. The Church and its Ordinances. chapter i. The Church, a Visible Body, 234 CHAPTER II. The Church, Itself an Ordinance, 235 CHAPTER III. The Church, of a Certain Form, 237 CHAPTER IV. The Church, a Republic, 242 CHAPTER V. Members of the Church, 242 CHAPTER VI. Officers of the Church, 245 CHAPTER VII. Councils of the Church, 246 CHAPTER VIII. Authority of the Church, ,.,,,,, 248 1 8 Contents, Page. CHAPTER IX. A Call to the Ministry, 251 CHAPTER X. Preaching, 252 CHAPTER XI. The Sacraments, , 256 CHAPTER XII. Baptism, ; 258 CHAPTER XIII. The Lord's Supper, 260 CHAPTER XIV. The Old Evangelical Church, 263 INTRODUCTION. There are two theologies, one that places God above morals, the other that places morals above God. The former is more one, in seeming, with the name, for it makes everything centre in God ; the other is really a universal ethics, for it makes every- thing centre in holiness, and makes God Himself a subject of the moral law. There is no more crying need in our day than of passage out of one of these theologies into the other. That movement has begun, and it becomes us to help it with every effort in our power. God above morals breeds such wickednesses as these : — First, that God is above morals literally, and in such a sense as that " the will of God is the ground of moral obligation" (Hodge, TheoL, vol. i. p. 405); Second, that God is sovereign by a sovereignty that is sovereign in itself, and not sovereign because He is holy ; Third, that this sovereignty is with man an innate idea, or, looked at man-ward, that we have an innate sense of responsibility and dependence ; Fourth, that God does as He pleases, and that not because He pleases to do right, but by a pleasure 20 IntrodticHon, antecedent, and because He makes that right which He pleases to do ; Fifth, that He damns the lost on account of morals in them, but not, in their selection from the beginning, on account of morals in Himself ; and that the question who the lost shall be, is not a question of morals, but a question of choice, with no stress of obligation, but out of simple sovereignty ; Sixth, that attending on this choice, and, after a sort, producing it, is what is called electing love, a sort of hybrid of the divines, which is not moral in the sense of pity for all, or moral in the sense of the love of the holy, but sovereign, as though there were some third commandment, and as though benevo- lence and the love of holiness were all of man, but not all of the conscience of the Almighty; Seventh, that God has made every thing for Him- self ; Eighth, that God's chief end is the display of His perfections ; Ninth, that vengeance or vindicatory justice, original and on its own account, is wrong in man, but right in God ; and that benevolence and revenge in the instance of God are equal traits and both primary ; Tenth, that, as above morals, faith saves, and not a change of moral condition, and that the faith that saves is believing of the simplest sort, or, incident to this, a personal trust in a described or promulged Deliverer; Eleventh, that the helplessness that dooms is a Intro due tion. 2 1 helplessness absolute and entire ; not disinclination, but something other and more helpless ; and that God is so supreme that the sinner could not if he would obey the gospel ; Twelfth, that, being above morals, creation is never the holiest and the best, and that to say that it is, is to stint omnipotence, and to blind our sense of the sovereignty of Heaven ; Thirteenth, that reason is not our highest guide, but the Almighty ; and that to look for the Almighty in our reason, and to believe that reason is ourselves, and to deny that we can be guided by any innate sense or written word without our reason, is to for- sake our allegiance to faith, and to challenge again the Supremacy on High : Lastly, that God speaks to us in other ways than through our reason, or even through our conscience, which is reason when its subjects are moral, viz., by some language of His own, and that that is not by awakening conscience, or by clarifying reason, but by such inexplicable ways as '' the witness of the Spirit," or in that much abused matter, a " call to the ministry," which are not allowed to be our best judgment in answer to prayer, but some super- stitious somewhat that offends away more sensible believers. It will be seen how all these things exalt sove- reignty. The reformation that is required is one that shall exalt holiness. I. Instead of the will of God being the ground of 21 IntrodMction, moral obligation, moral obligation must be the ground of the will of God. 2. Instead of God being sovereign by a sove- reignty that is sovereign in itself, He must be made sovereign by His holiness. 3. Instead of a sense of responsibility being an innate idea, it must be shown that we are not responsible except to Holiness. 4. Instead of God doing as He pleases, He must do infinitely less as He pleases than any of His creatures, except as He pleases to be eternally righteous. 5. Instead of predestining the lost out of naked sovereignty. He must not predestine them at all, except as decreed to Himself by His holiness. 6. Instead of *' electing love " as an original affection, it must be expounded as of an Eastern rhetoric, whereby wisdom is said to love her lovers, or they that hate her to love death. 7. Instead of all for Himself, God must be painted as all for holiness. 8. Instead of display, God's chief end must be His glory, and that in the Hebrew sense of weight or excellence. 9. Instead of vengeance, God's wrath and anger and revenge must be considered condescensions to our language, and vindicatory justice a terse expres- sion for describing the necessity to His holiness of that constitutional instrument — punishment. 10. Instead of a faith arbitrarily appointed, exclu- sive of all morals, and anterior to the repentance of the sinner, we are to teach a faith which is the Introduction, 23 beginning of morals, the opening of the conscien- tious eye, the discoverer of the turpitude of sin, the receiver, as Paul expresses it, of ** the love of the truth " (2 Thess. ii. 10), and, therefore, no more the queen than any other grace, except that the com- mon faith with which it begins, was the mechanical guide which brought me to the mercy-seat. 11. Instead of helplessness entirely helpless, we are to teach a helplessness scarcely worthy of the name ; a helplessness not helpless if the sinner will ; the helplessness, therefore, of being unwilling ; a helplessness, hence, not arbitrarily left to perish, but consisting in the iniquity of refusing to submit to rescue. 12. Instead of its denying Omnipotence to say that this universe is the very best, we are to ask whether God would be omnipotent if He could not have it so. 13. Instead of denying reason in order to submit to sovereignty, we are to show that we submit to sovereignty by exalting reason ; that reason is our Urim and Thummim ; that reason is conscience, when in the domain of morals ; that a renewed con- science, which is the very essence of salvation, is but the highest reason, made such by the Spirit of God ; and that to deny conscience in order to be devout, is like extinguishing life in order to taste the bless- ings of our highest being. 14. Lastly, instead of superstitious taints, we are to show a bright simplicity. Instead of a " call to the ministry," which hard-headed men grope after in 24 Introduction, vain, we are to have a supernaturally directed choice ; a choice supernaturally directed because we have asked on it the direction of God ; and we are to have '* a witness of the Spirit," not mystic, but like the other, through our natural thoughts ; and therefore, though all our sanctified life is supernatural, we are to be conscious of it in our being better, and we are to be guided by it, not by voices and sounds, or by some tertium quid oi intimation, but by our common judgment, on which we have lovingly asked the direction of the Almighty. It will be seen from all these points that we pray for a new theology that will ask more morality from man, and ascribe more morality to God, and that we impugn the theology of the Reformed for having too much sovereignty, instead of beginning with the morality of God, and arguing down from that to His right to govern. BOOK I. RIGHTEOUSNESS. CHAPTER I. HOW FAR ALL MEN AGREE. The ultimate idea of this volume is, that right- eousness is the highest good and sinfulness the greatest evil. The ultimate appeal is to conscious- ness ; and, as books cannot supply a consciousness, the sole office of this work is to open the way, that, with a proper arrangement of material, there may be seen the ultimate reality. All the religions of the world give the first place to morality. If there are any exceptions, they are at the extremes, Congoism on the one hand and Protestant Christianity on the other. A poor widow, sick and old, has struggled faith- fully, and has a neat hoard to keep her from being a burden. In a moment of extreme pity she gives to some awful sufferer half of what she is possessed. The fiend, making discovery of her store, breaks in upon it at night, and escapes with her whole living. Now, morals may be endlessly confused. Women may drown children. Men may burn widows. Chil- dren may expose parents. And Jews may teach 26 Righteousness, [Book I. that we are to love our friends and hate our enemies. There may be endless dislocation of morals, as there is, saddest of all, among ourselves. But two ulti- mates remain, first, that there is some righteousness, which is everything, as between Heaven and Hell, and second, that there is some agreement in what it is, as seen in the light of the aforementioned picture, with more or less haziness of outline, and yet in its reality as between saint and devil. No fabulous scheme has dared to leave out right- eousness. The nobler Paganisms are singularly express. The Rig Veda — what would it be without morals ? The Zendavesta, the Koran, the oral traditions of sava- ges, all reek with it. And our mistakes bring it into light. We talk of Devil worship. But all along the Atlantic coast no Guinea tribe has any such expres- sion. " Worship " comes from worthiness or worth. The Congoese would scorn that as applying to the Devil. They serve the Devil. Their whole religion is made up of it. But to call it worship is absurd. They serve him because he is so wicked. Nzambi is their good Deity. They are purely monotheist. But Nzambi is so good that he does not need pro- pitiation. This is thoroughly understood by their better class. The gree-gree and other fetich are to charm with, not to worship. And all the attention to demons is given, not for their divine grace, but for their desperate wickedness. This is why badness among Christians is so sadly undoing in missionary schemes. They are not so Chap. I.] Hozu Far all Men Agree. 27 confused as we are about morality and religion. Let me modify that : — They are more confused prac- tically, but not so doctrinally and theoretically bewildered. We have hinted at the strange likeness of mythological extremes. There is nothing higher than Protestant Christianity. There is nothing lower than so-called Devil worship. And yet it is a part of this work to show their points of affinity. Congo feels its sufferings more than its sins, and, therefore, attends to the Devil more than to the Almighty. There is a Devil and there are sufferings, but there is also a glorious Nzambi, and the only cure for suffer- ing would have been to get up to its highest source, and to lay hold of sin as the very evil that empowers and engenders Belial. This Congo does not do. And, infamously like them, are the Reformed. We lay hold of lower truths. Hell is painful, no doubt, but its curse is wickedness. God has sover- eignty, no doubt, but its source is holiness. Just as the Congo man settles upon his pain and forgets his wickedness, so we of the Church imitate his devil. We have a Deity of pain and a Deity of power, and forget that both power and pain are the results of higher things, viz., on either hand, of holiness and sinfulness. We are certain that this is not an exaggerated view. The Guinea worshipper applies himself to the Devil, leaving Nzambi unslandered and undisturbed. The Protestant worshipper unseats Nzambi himself ; 28 Righteousness. [Book I. seats a Sovereign, made a sovereign on other than a moral base; and then worships Him, not with an eel- skin or a tooth, but with something more cunningly devised — a faith, not made such by its love, and a trust (precisely as to the eel-skin), to a theoretic and explained, but not morally adored Deliverer. Now, to the remedy of all this, this work, with what light it can get, addresses itself. It wishes to abase sovereignty and exalt holiness, and then, as a result, to exalt a sovereignty that consists in holi- ness. It wishes to ascribe more morality to God, and to demand more morality of man, and in this way to bring Christianity nearer to the other great faiths ; and then, to sunder it infinitely far aloof by showing that it has something in court which no other reli- gion has, viz., redemption, and has something in the heart to which no other religion is fitted, viz., bettcr- ness of life, and a Christ-produced morality which consists in homely character, and which has no other distinction than this, that it was a growing better, and that it grows continually better in answer to prayer, and in response to the effort of the Christian to fol- low his Redeemer. If any man grows better, he will be saved. In answer to the question, Would any man grow better without a redemption? I say, unquestionably never, any more than Satan. In answer to the question. Would any man be saved without knowing of a Redeemer? I say. What do we mean by knowing? Peter knew very little ; Abraham still less ; Adam scarcely anything. John instigated his mother to Chap. I.] How Far all Men Agree, 29 office-seeking under the new Chief Magistracy of Israel! What did Andrew know when he was re- turning to his fishing nets? And yet he was a con- verted man. Morality is of the essence of religion. If a man is more moral, he is a Christian, for that change can come in no other way. If a man asks to be made moral, and appeals, in his efforts to be better, to the mercy of his Maker, and perseveres in that, where was Job's chance a better one.? The question is not. Who will God pardon? but Who are like to ask ? Christians are few enough under the gospel ; they would be infinitely fewer without it. But God has really answered the question, for when a Pagan captain, as a rare fact, ''gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God always," though as to his chiefest chances he had little more than lighted upon the coast, and was from Italy with his garrison, yet Peter was inspired to say, '' In every nation, he that feareth God and worketh righteous- ness is accepted of Him." We are not zealous to show that any heathen was ever saved. But we are zealous to show that no heathen was ever lost who became a better man ; and that no Christian was ever saved except in the act of becoming better, and that this act was not the consequence of faith, but faith itself, the loving acceptance of a morally excellent Redeemer. 30 Righteousness, [Book I. CHAPTER II. THE WORD, RIGHTEOUSNESS. Taste is the mind as it discovers beauty. Con- science is the mind as it discovers righteousness. It might be imagined that these two things have equal boundaries, but nothing could be further from the truth. Beauty is a word used almost capri- ciously. Color and flavor and odor have each ex- quisite delicacy. Why should a color have beauty, and not a smell ? The taste of a peach seems near enough allied to its fragrance, and both to elegancies of sense that go by the name of beautiful. Things that are beautiful, too, are so utterly dif- ferent. A sound and a sight and a face and a song and an arch and a sum in arithmetic are all ranked under the same attribute of taste. It is not so with conscience. It has not even the colors of the rain- bow. Conscience looks out upon one light, and, therefore, if righteousness is the highest good, it is a great thing to know that it is but one thing. We are not to be confused by its endless vocabulary. The moral idea is, literally speaking, unitary. Good- ness, truth, wisdom, righteousness, uprightness, holi- ness, piety, moral excellence, rectitude, virtue, are endlessly different in their adjuncts, especially in their mistakes, but as far as they are used for morality, have but one morality. There are a million of right things, but the Tightness of them is but a single quality, and it has been a great snare in the Church Chap. II.] The Wo7^d, Righteottsiiess. 31 to suppose that the wrecks of virtue in the Devil, and its perfectness in God, and its want in Hell, and its fulness in the Heavens, are anything else than the want or the fulness or the perfectness of but the one thing — that moral quality which is a perfect unit in the consciousness of the creature. Now we shall be clearing this when we say that righteousness is really three words. Righteousness is not the highest good in its simple and most seminal conception. All these moral terms, like a shut ring, can be divided into three. Righteousness, first and foremost, is a quality, as when we say. The righteousness of love or kind- ness. Righteousness derivatively from that, is the thing that is righteous, that is, the love or kindness itself. And righteousness still differently from that, is the habit of having such feelings, or the character of those who continually feel that way. It is the original thing, therefore, and at the start of the moral idea, that a feeling should have righteousness. It is the second thing, and a linguistic flight from the other, that a feeling should <^f righteousness; but third, that the habit of having the feeling, or, in other words, the character, should be called righteous- ness. So that there are three righteousnesses, of course altogether different : of which we can pick out the last and say that the word in this last sense is the term for the highest good, whether in God or man. There are two other uses of the word: (i) one is reasonable, and it is found in Scripture ; (2) the other 32 Righteoitsiiess. [Book I. is spurious, and should be corrected, and has been bred of the excesses of the Reformed theology. (i) The use that is reasonable is of these moral words as applied on earth. We are none of us righteous. The strength of this statement is entire. The noblest Christian not only sins, he does nothing else. The philosophy is plain. There is but one virtue, and this inheres in two feelings, benevolence on the one hand and the love of virtue on the other. The Christian comes short in both : and as sin is nothing else than coming short in either, he is never righteous in the least, unless that term is used in some accommodated way which is other than its strict significance. Rather than not use it at all, men call good nat- ural characters upright, and the Bible, entering upon our use, applies all moral encomiums to men who strictly deserve not a single one of them. Thus we hear of saints and the devout ; men are called righteous and holy ; Job was perfect and up- right ; '' Now ye are clean," said Christ to a family of sinners. We call an impenitent man upright when he is better than his neighbors, and a sinner righteous when he is better than he used to be ; and as long as this is understood, it all goes well, though it leads sometimes to Pelagian ideas. (2) But there is another sense which is different. Men imagine that it is common. Older lexicons conceive that it is primary. I mean the sense of righteousness as that which satisfies a court, or might hold me perfectly righteous, though I be Chap. I I.J Tlie Word, Righteousness. 33 wicked. This is a modern solecism. There is not a trace of it in any language. If any one cries out with indignation, let him justify his outcry by a single instance. Imperatively as men believe that the Bible is full of it, no literature, Bible, or other- wise, ever imagined it. Nothing justifies a man except his own righteousness : I mean a righteous- ness pretended or imparted, and that, more or less perfectly, as his own attainment. We hear of justifying the wicked, but it means pretending that he is not wicked. We justify God, but that means literally, telling the unvarnished truth. We justify ourselves, but that means lyingly, telling the unvarnished falsehood. The publican was justified, but the Bible explains it : he was actually righteous, or, in earth's accommodated language, made righteous rather than the other. There is no syllable, sacred or profane (always excepting the Reformed theology), that takes a man clean out of himself, and makes over to him a righteousness as God's mode of justifying. There is no man more earnest than we to insist upon that one thing, a forensic ransom. But it is one thing, not two. Make over to me the sufferings of Christ, and what are they unless I am pardoned ? And give me pardon, and what is all that unless I am delivered ? And give me deliverance, must it not be from sin? And deliver me from sin, and must not that be imperfect righteousness on earth, and perfect righteousness in the garden of the blessed ? Righteousness, therefore, never satisfies 34 Righteousness, [Book I. law except it be my own ; and it never satisfies law, therefore, until it is perfect. Before that, satisfac- tion is made by the sulTerings of Christ ; and even after that, my own perfect righteousness satisfies the law, but not for the past. My own perfect right- eousness, even in heaven, is kept up in me through the forgiveness of the past, and that remembered Sacrifice who ever liveth to make intercession for me. . CHAPTER III. BENEVOLENCE. We have seen that all men admire righteousness, and that few dream of a God in no wise possessed of it. We have seen that righteousness is a single quality, with no variations such as are found in beauty, and that an immense moral vocabulary, virtue, uprightness and such like, are all unitary. Conscience has but one light, and is not even, like the eye, capable of dividing the light into an immen- sity of colorings. Yet though righteousness is but a single quality, we have seen that by the incidents of speech, it resolves itself into three expressions. First, it is a quality of feelings ; second, it is the feelings themselves ; and third, it is the character that may possess them, but we can never too much insist that the character that may possess the feel- ings, and the feelings that may possess the quality, can never be so varied as to destroy the fact that the whole of the ricrhteousness of Heaven, and the Chap. III.] Benevolence. ^^ whole of the unrighteousness of Hell, are built upon the presence or else the absence of a certain char- acter of beings that shall possess feelings of a cer- tain quality. Now, what are those feelings ? And first and foremost comes benevolence. Let us examine this to the very bottom. There is no good in the universe except in feel- ing. The universe would be all a waste except for that phenomenon which we call emotion. Matter, which is the hugest mass, never would have been worth existence except for life. And life in the next hugest mass, viz., in the flora of the universe, would have been idle for lack of sentient living. Here again would have been waste if what was sentient was not emotional. The highest archangel, if he did but think, would be a bauble. God would be without an object. If God Himself were naked intellect He would be a failure. It must be the emotional part of everything that constitutes its end. And, there- fore, that one attribute of all thinking, viz., that it is emotional, constitutes its benefit, and is the only reason why matter and plants should have been con- ceived of or brought into our vision. Now emotions are of two kinds ; but as pain can only be instrumentally good, pleasure is the only great end for which the universe came into beino-. But here is a great danger. Some of the vilest forms of ethics are those that teach that our true end is happiness. Let us proceed carefully. 36 Righteousness. [Book I. For that part of creation capable of having pleas- ure, having the pleasure and loving to have it are very nearly the same. We have only to attempt the idea of a man thoroughly happy and }^et not loving to be so, to see how necessary the thought is of lov- ing our own happiness. But we pass the frontier at once, and get out of the region of the necessary, when we think of other people's happiness. What is another man's happi- ness to me ? It may be tangled with m.ine, and then I will desire it. But loving to be happy and loving that my neighbor be, are two things quite different. I may see the good to my neighbor, and seethe good to the universe, and have the whole picture of other men's distress vividly before me in its actual evil, but to desire it different is a thing altogether by itself. No reasoning can create it. It is the first moral emotion. There belongs to it what we have called righteousness, and it is an emotion by itself, a thing of another substance from anything we can feel in regard to our own felicity. If I say, I like my own happiness for that is nat- ural, but I like other people's happiness through the supernatural and as a gift of my Creator, I err ; one is no more supernatural than the other. I was born for both. To see red and to see right are both gifts of my Creator. If I have fallen from the right, and that becomes a supernatural condition of my spirit, then to restore me to what is right is super- natural. But to love my own happiness and to love my neighbor's happiness are both natural, only one Chap. III.] Benevolence, 37 could never have been different, and the other has become different, or else it might universally have been supposed to be necessary, like the other. Here then is an emotion for which I can give no reason. It is a reason by itself. I am conscious of it. And I am conscious of it as a pleasure. And now I am conscious of two other things about it, and I wish to be very careful in bringing those two things to the front of our discussion. I. First, on grounds that I cannot give by any pro- cess of argument, it is the highest pleasure in the universe. I can state why it ought to be, and why it is very important that it should be. And that is for the reason that the world would be a hell without it. It would be like physical worlds with no gravitation. The highest pleasure would bg gone. That would be one loss. And all other appetites would be let loose, so that the raging Pit would be a paradise in contrast with the ruin. But even this would not prove benevolence to be the highest pleasure — in fact would not hint at it. It must be highest in itself. But you cannot prove such things. No man will question that the happiness of conscience is the very highest happiness that can be dreamed of in our being. 2. Let us be still more careful. Is it because it is the highest happiness that right- eousness becomes what it is — righteousness ? It might seem so. The end of the universe is emotion. The good of emotion is a pleasure. The quality of o 8 Righteousness. [Book I. a certain pleasure is its righteousness. And the only righteous pleasure that we have yet consid- ered is benevolence. How then do we stop from the result that righteousness consists in pleasure, though it be a very high one ? We have already hinted at the idea that there may be something better in a pleasure than its pleasurableness. My pleasure in^the stars may be less than my pleasure at a feast, and yet the less may be better than the greater. This now is the whole secret of morals. Benevolence is a simple pleasure. It is not right outside of its conscious pleasantness. It is my love of my neighbor's wel- fare, or, to stick to the same language, my pleasure at it, that constitutes my righteousness in the acts that may flow from this feeling of happiness. But now I think it^can be seen that there is more in this feeling of happiness than its happiness that constitute it right. I say to a lad that plays mar- bles, you ought to quit that and look up at this beau- tiful Apollo — and the lad goes on playing marbles. Because he is happier does that make my speech to him meaningless? One pleasure is nobler than an- other. And if that reigns in the region of taste, does it not still more distinctly in the sphere of morals ? There is an aroma to every pleasure. Like the peach or like the rose, there is a flavor to the hap- piness which each pleasant thing offers to the sense. It is a flavor which the sense only can consider. And so of benevolence. There is a flavor to it distin- guishable to the taste, and that flavor is like nothing Chap. IV.] The Moral Quality. 39 else, carrying the idea of nobiii.ty and obligation, and ministering to the man an imperativeness of the right which will actually drive him into unhappiness in order to indulge it. It is not that the benevo- lence is not all pleasure, or the very highest form of pleasure, but that it is right apart from its pleasur- ableness, and such consciously in its form of pleas- urableness as to become excellent in itself, and so consciously good as to become good other than happy, and, as we shall see, the highest and the best even for our Maker. CHAPTER IV. THE MORAL QUALITY- It will be remarked that we have not said that benevolence is the only thing that possesses the moral quality. The moral quality is but one, and the conscience that is conscious of it is but one faculty of the mind ; but righteousness, it will be seen, is the quality of another thing beside the feel- ing of benevolence. This it is important to show, because Edwards, when he inoculated New England thought with the expression, " All virtue consisteth in benevolence," sinned in two particulars, — first, virtuousness is not a feeling at all, but a quality, and second, it is a quality, not of one feeling alone, viz., benevolence, but of that and still another, and what that other feeling is is now the important point in an improved theology. If I say, I am happy and love to be, T am not say- 40 Righteousness. [Book I. ing more in one part of that sentence than I say in the other ; but if I say, I am happy and love others to be, the case is altogether different. I have taken a tremendous stride from that which is utterly with- out morals, to that which is the first beginning of the whole system of morality itself. I cannot rea- son myself into such a feeling. The world would perish without benevolence. That could not make me benevolent. It could be shown that this affec- tion of the creature is the greatest treasure of his history. That could not create it. Benevolence is an original feeling ; given of God ; experienced by conscience ; and so conceived of by conscience that the quality of it is so conceived ; in other words, the same conscience that has the benevolence, sees its quality ; and this perception of its quality is just as much from conscience as the benevolence itself. There emerges, therefore, into our discussion two feelings, one a love of others, and the other a love of the quality of this affection itself. Both of these are righteous. There are, therefore, two right- eous feelings, one, the feeling of benevolence, and the other, which can easily be confounded with it, the love of this affection. Positively these are not the same. The love of others' welfare and the love of this as excellent are obviously different affections. And now, if ^ve give breadth to this lat- ter by saying that we love in turn this love, and then love in turn this, we go feeling back and find that there are two loves that possess morality, one Chap. IV.] The Moral Quality. 41 the love of the welfare of others, and the other the love of the quality itself which is first seen in the benevolent thought, and afterwards in our admiration of the introspected righteousness. This is Christ's ethics. When He tells us to love our neighbor, that means benevolence, and when He tells us to love God, that means the other ; for God is embodied righteousness. And this latter com- mandment is more imperative than the former. For, to love our neighbor is good, but to love this love is better; for the very highest affection of God is to love what is moral, sovereignly and with all the heart. But how, it may be asked, if the quality is only one, and conscience always the same, can different feelings be experienced by conscience, and one of them be stronger and more imperative than the other ? We easily answer, The differences are not merely two, but many. The Tightness of a thing is of all degrees. It is more sinful to lie than to loaf. If I tease a fly, that is a less wicked thing than to mur- der. And yet who shall say that in the virtues corres- ponding to these sins, there is a different conscience to take note, and a different quality in every one of them ? So then we have reached the results that right- eousness is a moral quality ; that conscience takes note of it ; that it is a quality which is but one ; that it belongs to two emotions ; that one of these is benevolence, and that the other and more impera- tive is the love of what is moral, or the affection of conscience for the right quality itself. 42 Righteousness, [Book I. CHAPTER V. ARE THERE MORE RIGHTEOUS THINGS THAN TWO? To clear away embarrassments, let us pass our eye over the whole field of morals, and ask whether there be anything that has the quality of righteous- ness except the two feelings that have just been noted. If anyone should say, There are more than five senses, we would not refute him by standing over the five and arguing by anything that we saw in them that there could not be others ; but, we would command him to bring on the sixth. And so in this region of morals. Benevolence is no doubt right, and so is the love of it, and the love of this last love, and the love of any affection which is started in this region of benevolence. Benevolence, therefore, and the love of the quality of righteous- ness are undoubtedly righteous. Is anything right- eous but these two affections? Now, no mortal denies that justice and chastity and truthfulness are righteous, and that what is righteous in them are feelings, and, therefore, that there might seem to be other feelings that are righteous besides benevolence and the love of the quality that is in it. But when we look at the whole herd of righteousnesses such as these last, we soon find that they have one very surprising difference from the tv/o that we are putting forward, and that is that they admit of exceptions. I am not to lie. But give me an enemy to deal with, and I may lay Chap. V.] Only Two Righteous Things, 43 an ambush, or display false signals, and find a war- rant for it even in the word of God. I am not to kill, but I may hang a traitor, or kill my son, like the patriarch Abraham. I am not to steal, but I am to take the widow's last mite in the exigencies of some important service. I can make no such exceptions to benevolence. Nor can I disesteem holiness for any motive under Heaven. And this leads to the superb solution. The exceptions are at the call of these two, and, therefore, the virtues themselves are these two. Chastity and patriotism and honesty and gratitude and faithfulness are but benevolence and that sister feeling cast into their endless forms. We might have modesty about this were it not the doctrine of the Bible. But where Moses distinctly states it, and Christ announces it anew, and Paul argues about it and reiterates it and gives its reasons, we need have no modesty and no pause as to the facts whatever. Moses distinctly intimates that ten are two in the region of morals. Christ echoes the fact and expands it. He holds that all religion is in this region of Sinai. And he packs it into one expression ; finding the whole of faith to be embraced in a single volume, he finds all that volume to have exhausted itself upon these two emotions ; for he says, " On these two com- mandments hang all the law and the prophets." We come down to the days of Paul, and he throws it into a philosophic mould. " He that loveth another hath fulfilled the law." He expands it into acts, " Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt 44 Righteousness. [Book I. not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not covet, and if there be any other command- ment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." And then he gives his reasons, — '' Love worketh no ill to his neighbor," will not dishonor, will not kill, will not rob, will not deceive, will not unbenevolently covet, " therefore " (and this is as clear metaphysics as anything in the Bible), for this definite reason, love is the whole of morals (Rom. xiii. 8-10). Chastity is not a separate righteousness, but an order of the Almighty, and for the welfare of the people. Cain will marry his sister for kindred reasons. Self-love is not a righteousness at all. Natural affection would not be, except as a height- ened benevolence. Love to God is for His holiness. Love to the good is for theirs and for benevolence also. Love to honesty or love to justice is for kin- dred reasonings. There is not a virtue among the twenty millions which has not exceptions to its decisions, and whose exceptions are not determined by the two great original righteousnesses, to wit, benevolence and a love of the quality of virtuous- ness. If any one asks, Is not this second but a varying of the first? I say. By no means. It could not exist without the first. Benevolence must show its bright sides before I can stand enamored. But the fact of being enamored is different from the fact of my benevolence. I admire my being enamored, and, after that, I admire my admiration. No moral Chap. VI.] The Highest Good. 45 sentiment could arise without benevolence. But after that sentiment has arisen, I admire it as a thing by itself. And I admire it as more imperative to me than the very welfare of my neighbor in the very love of which it must originate. CHAPTER VI. THE HIGHEST GOOD. All good being an emotion, and all emotion, to be a good, needing to be a pleasure and not a pain, it might seem to follow that benevolence and the still higher love, being the highest pleasures, were, in that very fact the "highest good. An angel on high would scoff at any pleasure that would contrast itself with the love of the Almighty. But here we put in two demurrers. In the first place, love is an evanescent feeling. Ten million acts of affection, even acts of an angel, would pass and be forgotten. His character would remain. It is an easy sum in arithmetic to argue that character is more than act ; and, therefore, we move easily to the idea that righteousness in the third sense, that is the character of the God or of the angel that feels the emotion, is a higher good than one right- eous thought, or than ten million of ages of affec- tion which one day or other shall pass and end. But, secondly, nor is pleasure as pleasure the highest good. Righteousness is the highest form of pleasure, but it is best irrespective of its pleasantness. There is a nobility in benevolence above its nature 46 Righteousness, [Book I. as being happy. We may attempt to describe this. We may call it obligation. But this has partly to do with what the Almighty threatens. Righteous- ness is our duty. But with all the forms of speech we do not get beyond this thought, that benevo- lence has a certain form of pleasurableness that has a nobility of pleasantness above the pleasantness itself; that the discoverer of this excellence is con- science ; and that we can no more describe on paper the excellence of righteousness, than we can describe the blueness of the sky, or paint the beauty of some awakening melody. What we have arrived at is simply this, that a character for righteousness is bet- ter than its acts, and that a character for righteous- ness is the highest good either for man or the Almighty. If a character for righteousness is the highest good for the Almighty, we bring an end at a blow to cer- tain miserable solecisms. " God has made all things for Himself ""^ it has been ventured; and this Almighty selfishness has been reduced at once by our idea that God has made everything for His holi- ness, because, if a character for righteousness is the very highest good of the Almighty, His righteous- ness is to be put boldly forward. When we say that God's chief end is to display His perfections, w^e sin * Most exegetes turn this text (Prov, xvi. 4) into the English, " God has made everything for itself," a rendering either too obvi- ous or evidently false. Ewald has pointed out an article which upsets all the heretofore derived meanings, and leaves it thus: "Jehovah has made everything for His decree," that is for His one purpose (see this explained in Author's Com.). Chap. VI.] The Highest Good. 47 shamefully. God's chief end is not to display His perfections, but to have them. If righteousness is His highest good, then that is His chief end. This is the ^^ glory " or iveight, as the word is in the Hebrew language. God has made all things, as a little child would say, that He might do right. And there is no more ennobling tenet than this with which all theology should begin, that a character for righteousness is God's highest good. One word now and we are ready for the next step. What is man's highest good ? We have already said, chaiacter. But whose character? As- similating him with the case of God, we might easily say, his own. But a million of ages in the future, man's character, though higher than Gabriel's, will be infinitely less and lower than the character of his Maker. In all time the character of the Most High will be our highest good. And in scrupulous truthfulness, other people's character, they being higher and more numerous than we, may be prayed for more and loved the better, out of the very excel- lence of our righteousness, than that one righteous habit and possession that may belong to ourselves. But, putting Deity apart, and putting humanity apart except in my narrow possession of it, and shutting me down into myself, we may say boldly as concerns this separate interest, that my personal righteousness is my highest good ; partly because it will reveal to me the characters of others, and partly because it is itself the treasure of my happiest and noblest feeling. 48 Righteousness, . [Book I. CHAPTER VII. REWARDS. If this personal character is the repository of our highest and noblest feelings, then it seems simple that righteousness, in the third sense of the word, is our highest reward. But nothing has been so mistaken about as recom- pense. Men have imagined that desert of one kind or the other is a consciousness. I am surprised at the number of books that wrap up in the very nature of sinfulness a sense of its ill-desert. This ought to be easily unlearned. There would be a sense of sin if there were no Hell and no hereafter. In fact consciousnesses are not prophets, and there is nothing innate to reveal a rectoral God. But postponing that — if there seemed a conscious- ness of reward, it would be a blunder, for this is the most difficult of all our knowledge. Where was the reward of Satan ? When he sinned he was punished, and that seems the most easy side of the question of recompense. There seems to be mathe- matics for guilt, and every sin receives an accurate infliction. But reward is neither a consciousness nor a fact. Where was the reward of Adam ? It is not true that every right feeling deserves a recom- pense, for Satan had every right feeling, and, for aught we know, centuries of perfect living, and yet one sin, as in the instance of Eve, destroyed him, Chap. VIII.] ^ Sin. 49 and one instant could undo what months or years had not been able to perpetuate. Punishment seems to be a thing of law, and reward a thing of covenant, and yet in the end the whole system will be just. And all we need in this chapter is the idea that the highest reward is the conferring upon a man a righteous character. CHAPTER VIII. If righteousness be but a single quality, and the emotions which possess it, only two, it miglit be im- agined that sin would possess a like duality; but there are three distinct pairs of mental states that might be imagined to be our only sins. If all our righteousnesses are either the love of our fellow men or the love of the attribute of holiness, all our sins might be either of three contradictorinesses to these : — either first, the hatred of others and the hatred of holiness ; or second, the love of self, and the love of wickedness ; or third, the want of the love of others and the want of the love of the attri- bute of holiness. It is these last alone that are the only possible sins in Hell or in the universe. The first pair are mere derivatives. They do not exist as original transgressions. The second pair 'do not exist at all. The third pair are original facts, and make up the sum of all possible transgression. The first pair derive their character from the last pair. I do not hate others without a motive. They must 50 Righteottsness. [Book I. cross me, or vex me, or injure me."^ Give me plenary benevolence and I will hate nobody, or, as hatred has two senses, give me holiness and I will hate the man who is thoroughly unholy, and I will hate no one in the sense of wishing them evil. All crimes under the head of the first pair are simple derivatives. All sin is a negation. The trespasses of the pit, the most violent and awful, all consist in a want of benevolence and a want of love for the principle of holiness. Nor can the second pair that might be imagined to be original, at all alter our decision. With these we can act summarily ; for they are no sins at all. Self-love is constitutional ; in fact it is a truism. How can I help self-love? The most self-loving being is the Almighty. And as to love to wicked- ness, f who can dream of such a thing? Men hate wickedness. Other things being equal, no one would be wicked ; and for the visible reason that no one could hate benevolence any more than a beautiful picture. It must thwart us, or shame us, or sting us * " Men loved darkness rather than light ; " but Christ gives an im- mediate reason. They loved so deformed a thing, not for that it was itself lovely, but because it troubled them. They hated the light, neither came to the light, because their deeds were evil, and they trembled at the light " lest their deeds should be reproved " (Jo. ill. 19, 20). f This is the secret of hatred to God. "The carnal mind is enmity against God." Why? Not because it would be possible to bate so spotless a being, but because he crosses us ; as the Apostle expresses it, " because it is not subject to the law of God, neither in deed can be " (Rom, viii. 7). Chap. VIII.] Sin. 5 1 before the memory of it can awaken anything else than admiration. What breeds the violences of Hell is, to let our self-love, which is in itself innocent, strip our life of any moral balance. The act of selfishness becomes an act of sin, not -because it is wrong to love our own happiness, but that it is bitterly cruel to consult it to the neglect of our benevolence. He that stabs his neighbor and seizes his purse, sins, not because he wanted the purse : I would, and so would any- body ; but because he wanted it away from his neigh- bor. The most demon act distils itself down to a negation. Take away from me my moral tastes (and these consist in benevolence and a love of holi- ness), and all other tastes run riot without restraint, and these are that ''flesh'' of the Apostle, com- prehending some beautiful '' lusts," which, in the noblest form, Paul cries out against as a "body of death." Sin, therefore, is a sinful act, and sinfulness is the character that habitually commits it, and, according to our account, sin has to look for its sinfulness, not to its own nature by itself, but to its want of vir- tuousness. Giving soup to the dying is not a sin in itself ; but has always been a sin since the world be- gan, both to the Christian and those who are tech- nically called sinners, not because it is not partially benevolent, but because it is not benevolent enough. I poison my wife. I am tired of her wicked tem- pers. It is no sin to be tired. If God had stricken her, I might innocently be resigned. But Hell is 5:2 Righteousness. [Book I. full of such enormities, not because loving my own ease is wicked, but because of the awful deficiency of the higher and nobler desires. CHAPTER IX. THE GREATEST EVIL. We showed that righteousness, like gravitation, was vital, and that the absence of it would wreck the universe ; and yet w^e showed that the love of righteousness was not a sense of this, but a native feeling: and that righteousness was the greatest good, not so much because it propped the universe, but because it was so in itself, and that what revealed that fact to us was not reasoning upon its results, but a god-like taste, that splendid conscience which is itself the highest good that is personal in the creation. Now the like thing decides itself of sin. Sin is the grandest evil : and that not because it turns life into a Hell, but grandest in sin itself : of course, a habit of sin is worse than a single act. That splen- did conscience which enamors us of right, pronoun- ces a kindred sentence in respect to wickedness. By every well regulated taste, sinfulness is the largest evil that can be conceived of in the universe. CHAPTER X. PUNISHMENT. If sin be the grandest evil in the universe, sinful- ness is the severest punishment. This really opens up our whole moral constitution. Chap. X.] Punishment, 53 Let me begin at the beginning. Sin is the grandest evil in the universe, not because of its mischief, but because it is infamous in itself. The conviction of this is a consciousness. The foetid abomination is not pronounced such by logic, but by taste. The secret of Hell and the secret of Heaven are revealed to that lordly eye which we share with our King, which Paul calls our *' spirit " (Gal. v. 17), and which in modern times goes by the name of conscience. But this moral taste has nothing to tell of punish- ment. The impression has been different. The common understanding has been, that a conviction of ill desert is just as original as our conviction of iniquity. We have shown that this is not the fact in the instance of well deserving. For why did not Satan deserve well ? An inborn declaration that Adam would be prospered because he Avas righteous, would be a mistake, for he was spotlessly righteous like Satan. There is no mystery to be compared to this. And it leaves us to this natural decision, that recompense is not posited by conscience as turpi, tude is; that reward has been a strange thing of which we know very little, and that punishment is strict and seems to have no exception, but that it seems to have been marvellously administered, fear- fully delayed, wonderfully transmitted to a Substi- tute, and altogether so mixed up that conscience would be absurd to think of as a native original power bred to pronounce upon it in all these changes of administration. 54 Righteousness, [Book I. All that we can agree upon is this, — that while reward is an enigma, punishment is a constitutional instrument. God makes use of it because it is wise in the nature of a creation. He has pledged His truth to it, and, therefore, must punish. He has writ his law for it, and so it will be upheld. It is throughout an instrument, sad and strange. But it is not the out-birth of resentment : nor is the demand for it written upon conscience : nor is the necessity of it an original moral; any more than it is an original morality in God to do what is wise, and hence that He must necessarily choose so vital a thing with which to uphold the universe. Now punishments vary. Any form of suffering may be administered as a punishment. It is impos- sible to foresee by any figure of the Bible what the sufferings will be in the eternal world. But it is vital to our whole understanding of sin to say that one form of punishment never varies. All punish- ment is measured ; but this not only is measured, and continually increases by unvarying laws, but never varies in its kind. It is a riddle. Men never realize it. It is the commonest thing on earth, and yet there are ministers of religion who would almost challenge it if brought under their notice as of the nature of punishment at all. It is that sinfulness or loss of character, which, from the beginning of the creation, has been the most uniform punishment of sin. Chap. XI. J Sinftilness. 55 CHAPTER XI. SINFULNESS. Why am I a sinner ? It is easy to say that at any time back I sinned and continued to be a sinner. But why ? That is the question. We have long ago found out that sin is incurable, but let us meet the difficulty. In the government of a Holy Father, why are bad men not made good -^ If conscience were an intuition of ill-desert, we might answer more positively, but as it is not, we can only say that such is the administration of the Almighty. And it has never varied. Every sin since time began (putting the gospel apart), has begotten sin. It seems necessary. We call the condition it begets, helplessness. But that is no other than a name. Undoubtedly it is in nature. But it is a law of the Almighty. The Bible is full of it. It is thundered in Eden. '' In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt die." And far down in the history of our planet, Paul makes it plainer: '* The wages of sin is death." And he tells us it is a law of government. " The strength of sin is the law." He sets us to imagining the case had it been differ- ent. ** I had been alive without the law at any time." Fix differently the law, which we can be sure God in His mercy could not have done, and I would have been all right ; but when the command- ment came in, sin got a sort of life. It grew by 56 Righteousness. [Book \. every act of sinning. Sin acquired all the life, and Paul the death that comes by sinning. Sin, therefore, being the greatest evil in the uni- verse, has this other horrible sort of evil, that it grows by the very constitution of the universe like an unhealthy plant. CHAPTER XII. HELL. If sin is incurable in its nature, and we mean by that that, in the constitution of things, sin has need to be punished, and that, in like constitution, sin itself is a punishment of sinning, then, throwing the gospel out of view, this seems to be asserting eternal retri- bution. How can it be different ? Either sin changes, or quits one day its punishment for sinning, or sin must go evenly on, or that which seems the most inward Constitution of our lives must be altered, or else the Bible must be literally true when it speaks of '' eternal sinning " (Mr. iii. 29, see Revision).^ CHAPTER XIII. Words are of two kinds, either for consciousnesses, like beauty, or like sin, or like yellow color, or like righteousness as a quality of emotions, or they are the art of the rhetorician wrapping much in a single * On inspection we see that the Revised Version, though it avails of a correct reading, does not yet reach the Greek. It should be translated, " Is subject to eternal sinning." Chap. XlliJ G^iilt, 57 vocable. Guilt is of this lattei' character. We are not conscious of guilt. We are conscious morally of only two things, the excellence of benevolence and of the admiration of such excellence itself, and the turpitude of the want of this, or of what we have shown to be our only wickedness. To speak of ill- desert as conscious, is to trench upon the other form of expression. Guilt answers to ill-desert. Guilt is that condition of a man's account in which, having sinned, or some one else having sinned, the punishment, which is constitutionally wise, and for that reason has been promised, is sure to follow. This is the meaning of guiltiness. It is a whole story, not a consciousness. How could we be conscious of Adamic guilt ? How could Christ be conscious of our guilt ? And how can we be con- scious of any meaning of our guilt in Adam, or of Christ's guilt at all, unless we consider it as a de- scription ? Turpitude is an affair of conscience. Guilt is a necessity of government. And we would not know our guilt, until life discovered it in the necessity of punishment, or God revealed it in His divine administration. CHAPTER XIV. VINDICATORY JUSTICE. The same may be said of vindicatory justice. If ill-desert were in our consciousness of sin, ven- geance might be primordial with the Almighty. 5^ Righteousness. [Book I. And yet it would be very strange. Vengeance is wrong with us. What makes it right anywhere ? And here is the opportunity of a great, reform. Starting with the words of Christ, we eHminate re- venge. He Hfts to the top the two righteousnesses. They are the same in God and man (i Jo. ii. 8). He quotes them from Moses. Their philosophy is fixed. They are benevolence and the love of holi- ness. And when He has brought them before the eye of the inquiring Jew, He cuts off all possibility of others. "' Thou shalt love thy neighbor," and that covers the whole field of benevolence, and "thou shalt love God," and we are not bound to love Him except as He is holy ; and then Christ shuts the book. There is no ground for anything else to be primordial, for He says in the most sweeping way, *' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Vindicatory justice, therefore, is not of the same order as benevolence, but, as a secondary thing, re- cites a whole history of government. First, sin is consciously abominable. That flows at once from a love of holiness. Second, punishment is a means to abate it. Third, God must necessarily employ it. All this is recited when we speak of vindicatory jus- tice. This attribute of vengeance is nothing more than the derived fact that God, being a hater of in- iquity (that hatred being primordial), finds need to punish it, that thought not being primordial, nevertheless based in the nature of things, and, on that account, wise and necessary for the government of the creature. Chap. XV.] Confusion of Words. 59 God and man, therefore, are absolutely alike. Vengeance is wrong in man, and, for the same reason, also in God. Vengeance is right in man, and, on the same occasions, right in our Creator. There is no difference. When vengeance means necessary- punishment, it is right in anybody ; and when it means resentment, or clogs our desire for the wel- fare of our enemies, it is wrong; and it makes not the least difference whether it be of God or man. "Vengeance is God's" (Rom. xii. 19), but only in like cases where any judge would insist that it should stay in court, and where individual men must not seize the ermine of the Almighty. CHAPTER XV. CONFUSION OF WORDS. Revenge, therefore, being an incidental con- sequence of God's hatred to sin, or an instrumental method of driving it to the wall, a whole dictionary full of disturbing expressions are most significantly explained. Anger is not the paroxysm of a brute, or the flush of a man, but is the name of that in God which is as quiet as His love. In reality it coexists with love, or, in other words, is that con- dition of God in which His hatred, which is intense for sin, is obliged to punish, for lack of any expia- tion. God is " furious " when He would be crlad to pardon, but cannot with wise administration. Those words, therefore, are infinitely accommodated, and borrowed from what is passionate in men. Wrath, 6o Righteoitsness. [Book I. anger, jealousy, reconciliation, propitiation, electing love and the whole genus of humanly expressed appellations are, like weariness, or still more emphatically, like repenting, a thing asserted of God, when He never changes, and could find no place of repentance in a scheme that pleases Him per- fectly from the very beginning. God is reconciled when unchanged in His benevolence. He is pro- pitiated, when it is Himself that has invented the ransom. And, therefore, electing love is not ben- evolence for His saints, for He has benevolence for all, but, like repentance, a piece of rhetoric, combin- ing the idea that He would gladly save, and that other gospel fact, that He has found a possibility of doing so in certain instances. The confusion of thought, therefore, that resorts to two persons of a Trinity, crudely imagining, as many do, the anger of one Person, and the placating, or, as the more ignorant would fancy, the soothing influence of Another, all derives from these anthro- pomorphist notions. The insulted and resisted Father is the very fountain of grace. The Redemp- tion is His own scheme. The Propitiation is out of His own benevolence. And He has no electing love except that which simply expresses His success with some, and that, v/ith reasons in every case. His bene- volence for all triumphs sometimes, as it would do always if it were eternally wise. We do not mean that propitiation is less neces- sary, or that there is less distinct satisfaction to justice, but that it is justice that is appeased, not Chap. XVI.] Pardon. 6 1 anger, for that wrath is appeased, not in the sense of a brute or of a man, but in the sense of a com- passionate Father, who never ceases to pity, but must indulge His pity within certain laws ; who abominates sin' and must necessarily punish, but who, under the pressure of His love, has a positive plan by which He may be just, and yet the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. This positive propitiation does not make Him more benevolent, and does not appease any passion- ate anger, but simply satisfies wisdom, and sanctions an act which God would perform, with like opening, even for the Adversary. CHAPTER XVI. There are few words in any language that are so cut away from in their original meaning, and so added to for peculiar use, as pardon is when it comes into the region of religion. A neighbor's pardon is different from the pardon of a court, and a court's pardon is different from a pardon on high. A neighbor's pardon carries the idea of anger, and he changes his feeling generally when he holds out his hand. It is this mixture of the human that spoils our notions of the gospel. But when we band neighbors in a government, or speak of forgiveness by a king, the idea changes a little. There is no anger of a king. And forgiveness by an earthly court is the best adumbration of the higher pardon. 62 Righteo2tsness, [Book I. And yet it is not perfect. The act on the part of Heaven is strangely artificial. In the first place, it is not entire. I go out of an earthly court, and my friends are shouting my deliverance. I am as free as air. But God forgives me, and I must immedi- ately begin with my reserves. Wherein am I for- given ? Not in immunity from suffering, and not in immunity from sin. The robber is turned right out of jail : but Paul, a superb believer, drags his fetters yet. Where, precisely, does the act come in ? It may be said it will become complete, and that a large number of the Reformed believe. But the Scrip- tures throw it into doubt. Pardon is neither whole nor certain. But then, in the third place, it has a character, setting it quite aloft, and entirely separ- ating it from pardons among men. Pardon by the Almighty includes cleansing. We have already seen that sin is our greatest evil, and discovered text after text showing that it is our chiefest punishment. Pardon without any relief would be nought. Forgiveness, which does nothing of the kind in human verdicts, must cover the whole penalty. And as in God's kingdom it is double, partly sin and partly suffering, forgiveness must banish both, and as notoriously it does not do it, then, to sum up the whole case, forgiveness in this fallen earth means just what we see,^ — -that partial deliverance from punishment which .puts a gradual end to sin and suffering. A man is pardoned and suffers yet. A man is pardoned and sins yet. A man is pardoned and Chap. XVIIL] Obligation. 63 may cease to be pardoned, so that sins once for- given may be punished. All we can say of pardon is that it is that artificial thing that means all this, and, as Augustine declares, can be crowned with perfectness only by persevering to the end. CHAPTER XVII. JUSTIFICATION. That trait of pardon which rids us of our sins, is called justification. We will have to prove this in an after chapter. CHAPTER XVIII. OBLIGATION. That law of sin which is called ill-desert, is not a consciousness, but is a thing discovered and expe- rienced. Obligation is still more complex. There is an oughtnessm beauty when we look at a gorgeous sunset, and say, That ought to be appreciated. But in the region of morals, the word is much more sig- nificant. There is a nobleness in right which corres- ponds to the idea of ought. But ouglitness has become complicated. Our fears enforce it, and all our gratitude to our Creator. Our comfort sanc- tions it, and our public spirit. It is a w^ord as universal as motive, and we only mention it to keep clear of multiplying consciousnesses. There are but two intuitions of conscience, one the nobility of right, and the other the desirableness in itself to us of the welfare of others. Obligation is 64 Righteousness. [Book I. not a separate consciousness, but the blending of all enforcements of these two necessary things. CHAPTER XIX. OCCASION FOR THEOLOGY. There could be no Theology without God, and there could be no theologizing without creatures. There could be some things true without either. We have wished to disengage those true things. Two and two would be four if nothing had ever been. So, in conceptUy sin would be sin, and honor would be good and great, without the universe. We wished to state that before anything concrete. Sin has been so mixed with God, and morals so buried in the Almighty, that they have lost their nature. And the atheist's clamor, that virtue is good in it- self, and should reign even if there be no hereafter, has been so fought against as to make atheists, and to put atheists in the right on a greater question than the existence of the Almighty. Undoubtedly, virtue is more important than God. It would be important to man, if he had no Creator. It would be important to have no Creator if there were no virtue. And in God and in man and in all their mutual acts virtue is the sole relief for the desire that we might have annihilation. Virtue first then ! and let that be thoroughly con- ceived before that of which it is all the value, viz., either man or God. BOOK II. MAN. CHAPTER I. CONSCIENCE, So huge an affair as the universe is dealt with very summarily when we declare that there is no good in it except in emotion. You may include God in the idea. Pause and consider. What good could there be except pleasure, or some nobility of pleasure ? Pile up material masses: are they not all Cheops, built for some little chamber? And ascend to the dignity of life. What, is life in a bean plant? Sup- pose the worlds were ivied with vegetation, what would that amount to ? And this is not conjecture^ but the finest of reasoning. God might be willing to create a universe for such tremors of sense as are in a sponge or a snail, but that He piles worlds with- out pleasure, and without the capacity of emotion either in Himself or them, is not only improbable, but impossible. He has endowed us with too much sense to imagine that mere matter, or even mere life, or, still more than that, mere thought, if it be machine thought with no pleasurable emotion, is all that eternity will 66 Man. [Book II. achieve. We arrive at this much, therefore — that the only good of the universe is emotion. But we have seen that there are two emotions that have the grandest eminence. They are alone. There is nothing like them. The pleasure they give is higher. And it is grand, not simply in its happi- ness, but in the glorious nature of its happiness. It is noble in itself, just as some tastes of beauty are lovely and exquisite themselves. And the quality of this pleasure is such that the habit of having it is the highest good for either man or Deity. It will be seen, therefore, why we begin with con- science. If the world without emotion were no good, and all sorts of emotion were worthless in comparison with two, it will be seen how the mind, as it can have these two, is the chamber in Cheops, the only thing much worth considering when we treat of man. CHAPTER 11. ALL ELSE IN MAN. Conscience, if it is the mother of but two emo- tions, seems to take little room in our humanity. It must be the quality rather than the quantity that must attract our admiration. There being no con- science in brutes, the capacity of other emotions is their highest good. The capacity of other emotions in man is infinitely greater than in the instance of the brutes, and that in two particulars. There are more of such emotions, and their nature is higher. A Chap. II.] All Else in Man. 67 dog may enjoy the chase more than his master, but, on his return home, he cannot revel in a sun- set. There are exquisite pleasures of the intellect outside of conscience. But the pleasures of con- science are of that strange nature that the measure of them is the secret of Hell and the secret of Heaven. A linnet may possess its pleasures without fault and Avithout danger ; but a man must throw all of himself, outside of conscience, into a fearful foe- manship. What is innocent in a bird, becomes not onty sinful in a man, but the whole of sin that I am capable of committing. I have a conscience, and, therefore, some love of right ; but if I have not a perfect conscience, then, by the constitution of my nature, every other emotion becomes what we call sin. If I could die, I would quit sinning. If I could sleep, the arrest of conscious life would pi'*- a stop to all transgression. But if I think, then I feel ; and if I feel, then I sin ; and it makes no difference what the feeling is, if it be the enjoyment of the most exquisite taste, it is not only sin, but, in a wide range, of a class that are my only possible sins. Conscience has the narrowest kind of a king- dom, viz., but two emotions, but of so imperial a hold, that all else in man is swept into sin if these two fail. Sin is any emotion of heart unattended by these two ; and, therefore, suppose a soul not perfect in love to others and in love to holiness, and every emotion in that soul, being deficient, is sinful, and it has all the consequences of being sinful, viz., the necessity of being punished, and that its severest 68 Man, [Book II. punishment shall be, the increase of its heartless- ness when it comes to be experienced again in another instance. Paul has words to meet this. He calls conscience '* spirit." He calls all else of our conscious nature *' flesh." We ought to keep this in constant remem- brance. " Flesh," with Paul, is not lust, like greed or gluttony. The most refined likings, as for art or courtesy, are *' flesh " in the language of this writer. When he says, ''Beware of fleshly lusts," we are to beware of paying our store-bills out of a liking for repute among our people. What is innocent in the brute becomes the whole of sin to the fallen, if con- science be not strong enough to hold her sway with- in our nature, and to make all sensitive traits meekly surrender to her simple government. Paul tells how this is to be changed. "There Is a soul-body," he says, and he means by this a body under influences like the brute's. The brute has a soul (Gen. i. 20, Num. xxxi. 28), and, as the brute has a soul without a conscience, all goes right. In the instance of the brute a " soul body " is body enough for an inno- cent existence. But a man has a " spirit-body ; " and Paul declares that it is to be a "spirit-body" par excellence in the saints' resurrection. " It is sown a ' soul-body ; ' " that is, a body inspired by the soul to the neglect of the '''' pneiimay That is, when the Christian goes to the grave he carries there a body in which the conscience has waked up again, and is doing better, but in which the ^' pneuma " or conscience has only in part revived, and, therefore, Chap. Ill.j An Impaired Conscience. 69 in which every other part is still sinful. But, in the resurrection, conscience will come up like a giant. It will take entire possession of the body. Conscience will be complete ; and, therefore, all other faculties will be as innocent as the birds', now no longer because they have the birds* fleshliness, but because they are at the other extreme. Con- science has taken her place as reigning fully over all our nature (i Cor. xv. 44). CHAPTER III. AN IMPAIRED CONSCIENCE. Taste is the whole sense by which we discern beauty. Let it become dimmicd, and we have the bad eye or the bad ear that we hear of in tint or tone. Conscience is our whole of morals ; that is, a perfect conscience is the whole condition of holi- ness. Let conscience be dimmed (and, strange to say, it is never blinded like an eye totally dark), and that is the condition of sinfulness. If a man looks out upon others with a dimmed conscience, he is a hopeless sinner, and as we shall see, we are born into the world in this dimmed condition. Now, if, looking out upon life with this imperial eye, we do not see clearly, all other objects that we see, attended by their emotions, are occasions of sin. The brute can feed and sleep and roar after his prey in perfect innocence. Why? Because he has no conscience. The saint, millions of ages hence, may drink the nectar of the good, and why? Be- 70 Man. [Book II. cause he has a perfect conscience. But in this home between, the case is different. A nerve in a man's tooth may work him agonies. That slender thing, which is hardly less shut in — we call it conscience — if it be ever so little dimmed, damns a man. There are such singular facts about it ! Afterwards every other consciousness is a transgression. Then follow the most horrible results, i. Every sin is to be pun- ished. 2. Every punished sin, beside its sufferings, engenders higher iniquity. 3. This engendering of iniquity simply consists in a further dimming of con- science. 4. A dimming of conscience is the foun- tain curse of the creation. It is itself the substance of our sinfulness. It will go on through the ages of the wicked. And the room for it to be increased is "the bottomless pit " of the lost transgressor. CHAPTER IV. CONSCIENCE NOT BY NATURE CURABLE. If conscience be our moral sense, and the dimness of it our sinfulness, and other emotions, when our conscience is dim, our only sinnings ; if each sinning is punished, and each punishment of sin is not only suffering, but an increased dimming of our con- science, we arrive at the conclusion that conscience, once dimmed, cannot be restored to sight. This is the condition of the angels. Once blinded, they are lost; and the blindness must deepen through the endless ages of their being. *' From darkness to light" is a path which can only be travelled through a divine Redeemer. Chap. V.] Singular 2 ties of Condition, 71 CHAPTER V. SINGULARITIES OF MAN'S CONDITION, We have met, in the pages passed, one Stygian mystery. It is, how a good man can become a bad man. Gabriel will never unravel it. We have made "The Bible," therefore, the subject of the next chapter, not because of this mystery, for it cannot clear it. "The wages of sin is death," and the sim- plest reasoning might naturally be, " The wages of right doing is life." But in two instances of right doing — yea, more boldly than that, in every instance of sin, it began with righteousness. Eternity hardly will solve so deep a mystery. But while the origin of sin must remain dark, we need the Bible in en- countering three other mysteries which belong specially to man. The first is that man is born a sinner. It was not sin that begat sinfulness in the instance of any one of us. In the second place, sin, though it measures sinfulness, and increases it by unvarying laws, yet has respite from suffering, or, as we commonly ex-' press it, is not punished in the present world. In the third place, there seem exceptions to sinfulness. Sin does not always produce it. In other words, there seem to be some sinners in whom sin is dying out, and in whom it does not produce its increase of sinfulness. We shall never conceive how Satau could be the noblest of the good, and suddenly fall, or how Adam could be tenderly devout, and ever 72 • Man. [Book II. perish ; but these other things the Scriptures dis- tinctly explain, and I do not mean that even these are intelligently fathomed, but we are told of their occasions, — on whose account men are born in sin, on what pretension they are not immediately punished, and for what reasons of grace some men sin less and are not punished by sinfulness. A discussion of these will be seen to cover all the ground of our Christianity. CHAPTER VI. THE BIBLE. There is an unnoticed sentence, — '' Thou hast made thy charges positive commands in order to their thorough keeping" (Ps. 119. 4). The idea is a fine one in connection with the Bible. If it is not inspired in every part, it is a mere whim of the reader where or in what degree it shall be looked upon as inspired at all. It is like the original Sun- day, a custom from the very beginning. Make it voluntary, and you dethrone it. Make it partial, and you bring it to an end. How can there be any Sabbath if men may cut and carve, and use whole masses of it for their worldly pleasure? The only philosophy of the day is that which m.akes it per- fect, and which allows no deviation from it in any case, except, as under any other statute of the ten, a deviation taught by the absolute necessity of the creature. To make the Bible of the highest value to the Chap. VI.] The Bible. jt, lost, it must be perfect. This is the theory of it. This is what it claims (Jo. x. 35, 2 Tim. iii. 16). The triumphs wrought by its light have been wrought by a Bible which had this advantage given it of whole authority. Men have been very unfor- tunate in their way of defending the Bible ; but it is those who have defended it, that have built the ships, and run the roads, and ruled and taught and owned this planet, and struck the highest paths, whether of learning or dominion. I say, unfortunate, for men have separated their proofs and given room for the strategy divide et ini- pera, A large brotherhood believe the Bible, be- cause the Church tells them to. They give scant weight to any other authority. A large brother- hood suspend the Bible, much like Mohammed's coffin, as though a ''Thus saith the Lord " made it stay in the air by something like a support in itself. The mass plead the supernatural, and prop the book by prophecy and a testimony to miracle. A class, increasing in our day, point exclusively to con- science, and these are the class that decry revelation. They take as much of the Bible as they think good. If Abraham was to kill Isaac, they cut that out. If Joshua was to slay the Hittites, they blot that. If Moses commanded slavery, or our Saviour created wine, it will be seen how to such people the Bible is their will, and not the will of the Almighty. What is the use of such a book? Here, building itself upon conscience, is created in our day the worst form of unconscientious infidelity. 74 Man. [Book II. What is the remedy? Beyond all manner of doubt, to bring all these evidences together. Professor Henry believed in God, because He was the theory that contained all the facts. And this, now, is the reasoning that befits the Bible. Who- ever asks. What proof of plenary inspiration ? The answer ought to be, Every possible proof of which the mind is capable. Then all the brotherhoods can bring their contributions. The Roman Catholic can bring the Church, for, undoubtedly, the substan- tial Church of every age has spoken for the Bible. This is indeed our practical beginning, for our first trust to revelation was derived from our mother, and she to us was but a fragment of the Church. All ages have produced saints. AH saints have be- lieved the faith. All the faith is included in the Bible ; and therefore the testimony of the best of men is no mean proof of the truth of revelation. Next comes Mohammed's coffin, and that extreme class of Protestants who forget themselves so far as to be quoting nakedly, " Thus saith the Lord." But if we watch them closely, they forget them- selves sometimes the other way. Out of the bosom of these groups have come the noblest elenchtic writings that the Vs'orld has seen. Testimony, in all its lights, and miracle, in all its methods, have built up " external evidences," as they are called, to the very extreme, and contributed their God-appointed part of the required demonstration. But now, last and noblest -of all, this dangerous Chap. VI.] The Bible. 75 infidelity! It is indeed " a jewel of gold in a swine's snout." After the dream of childhood, and after the scaffolding of the Church, and after the gymnastics of external argumentation, the soul, settling down upon her rest, leans most upon her conscience. There is no God — I mean for us — and no Heaven, and no possible Hell, without the light of conscience. There can be no law, and, of course, no sin, and even for Lucifer, the fallen Prince, no torment, with- out a conscience. Satan must have some moral light, or he can not be continued in penal darkness (Rom. iv. 15). Then, signally, the moral proofs must be topmost after all. The Ingersolls, who use them to overturn the Bible, are simply inistake7i in their morals. If God stoned Achan's children, and killed the Hittites, and put their women to the sword, and stole their dwelling places for the habitation of his people, the God that sweeps with pestilence, and kills with earthquake, must have a right to do it, or the Bible is not worth the tablet on which it was inscribed. The knife of Abraham must be, to his Creator, like the virus of the plague ; and the direct message out of Heaven must turn the saint and the father into a like role with the elements of death, or Jehovah is a myth, and this singular book merely the prince of cunningly devised impostures. And so of science. It is no less wise to give up Moses on the ground of slavery, or to give up Christ for his fermented drink, than to take that ground which some foolish exegetes think discreet, that the 76 Man, [Book ii. Bible is not a book of science. It would be as smart to say that the Bible is not a book of morals. The Bible is the book of morals. What the Most High does in Scripture, it is safe for man to do, tantis pro- tantis. And so of science. It is cowardly to give it up. The Bible is the book of science. The cavils against it are' like garlic in the field, spindling and weaker as we begin to extirpate it. The flood-cavils of Paine, and the sun-cavils of Rome against ill-fated truth, were marvellously more robust than modern difficulties. Cavil seems going to seed. To take a book that tells of the creation, that reveals, more than any laboratory, the origin of species, that ex- plains among palaeontological facts the recency of man ; and that when palaeontological facts are the crudest infants, shaking their callow heads at hoary revelation ; and, as a tribute of friends, to try to retire the Bible out of the contest, as really knowing no better, because not scientific, is like a general surrendering when he has pierced a centre. There are such things in war; but God knows He will never allow them for the defeat of His people. Toiling painfully up, till the battle with science is really the noblest part of external confirmation ; till broken darts are emphatically the breastwork of the Scripture; till the fuss about the Mentone skull shows how science longs for even crumbs of replica- tion, and then to say that the Bible, thus victorious, is not scientific ; or, worse than that, to go off into senile theories of the evolution of the body of man, but the late planting of the soul, is certainly to Chap. VI. \ The Bible. yj furnish what some day will be gathered as "■ The Curiosities of Exegetes," and deserves at once, from masculine minds, the most sturdy denunciation. Let Scripture stand through its truth. It is both moral and scientific. It is more moral than men, and more scientific than the newest theories of nature. If it cannot sustain that, it is false. If it was not right for Christ to drink that which would intoxicate, and not possible that God within a few millenniums created man, all Christendom is a dolt, and all Scripture is a stupid imposition. But, differently still; — To go maundering over chapters ; to pretend to great scrutiny of styles ; to move great masses of the book over to what is taste- fully called a post-exilian age ; to say, "The Lord spake by Moses " means by some one else, and that centuries after Moses was dead ; and then to dignify ail this with the title of " The Higher Criticism," is one of those ephemeral trifles which modern rest- lessness has cast up ; like a flag that will return to its place when the mud ceases to thaw ; a conceit at which angels laugh ; a plot with which devils have had to do ; and yet a scholarship so shallow, that even if profound scholars have had their part, it can easily be brought to bay with this question, — What, after all, is your reason ? What one solid reason has ever been given ? That is the mannerism of these assaults, a wonderful assuming and delay in the argu- mentation, till even the peasant exclaims, What is the ground for all this that they are saying ? for even if there were a transmutation of the style, and pre- 78 Mail, [Book II. cisely that we might deny, it would be easier to imagine a post-exilian alterer of style, than a devout inspiration that would dare, as a nova de plume, to personate the Lawgiver. CHAPTER VII. man's origin. Believing the Bible to be true, and that that is the grand effect of varied inspirations, we are to teach that man came into being some thousands of years ago. We do not say that a person must be lost who denies that story of Eve, any more than that Luther must be lost for scoffing at the Epistle of James. The inspiration of the whole book is a doctrine, and men may deny many doctrines, and yet turn from sin, and believe in the Redeemer (Matt. xii. 32). But the denial of any doctrine is unsafe ; and it is a great luxury to believe, as we do, in the whole of Scripture. The objections of infidels may be tied in bun- dles, and that is the way to deal with every one of them. Suffered to go loose, they break out at dif- ferent points under the pen of a skilful rhetorician, and they look like legion ; but bring them to their classes, and they are two or three. Abraham and his knife is the champion case of commanded cruelty. The only question is, as to the command. The God that sweeps by small-pox, has He a right to employ Joshua or Abraham or any of His people? And so of Eve, it is idle to tarry upon her case. Put in all Chap. VII.] Mans Origin, 79 like it. There is Jonah and the fish, Jesus and the swine, Christ and the tree, EHsha and the axe, Elisha and the bears, Moses and the rod, Jonah and the gourd, and half a scorce of others of kindred littleness. Now what is the real difificulty? We believe that Adam was created a man, and that our first mother was builded from a rib got from him in his slumber. Let us throw it into its class. We merely insist that we shall know the difificulty. Is it that the emerging of our mother is too singularly wonderful. What folly ! Who ever heard of an un-wonderful miracle ? And that is the answer to that whole department of the reasoning. Go back to the beginning. The question is, have there been miracles? If there has been a single one, the won- der of the thing is in its very nature, and there remains but one other cavil, and that is that the rib is too comical a conceit ; that it sounds like the acts of Vishnu : which really means that Jonah with the fish and Jesus with the swine might really have been at better work than palming such pleasantries upon the Israelitish people. What if God wills to try our faith by this very littleness ? Eve was to be tempted by an apple ; what if God willed to try her love in this very fact of insignificance ? We cannot tell. And is not that the very vindication? The Power that works the miracle is alone the judge. God ventures two considerations, first, that the man might not be taken from the woman, but the woman from the man, and second, that their close union might be figured: — ''Therefore shall a man 8o Man. [Book II. leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh." We believe that our' present fauna were created some six thousand years ago. We believe that, before that, were millions of ages. Wc believe that palaeontological remains are from those millions of ages. We believe the second verse (Gen. i.) de- scribes a blighted planet, after it had undergone one of its many catastrophes. We believe that the dark hulk was the subject of a six days' miracle. We believe that the first relieved the Stygian dark- ness of its atmosphere. We believe that the second cleared it further, so that there was open firmament between cloud and sea. We believe that the third reduced the sea in part of the planet and created our present continents, and that then, forthwith, on the wet earth, plants were created. We believe that the fourth cleared away the cloud, and warm sun- shine fell upon our globe. On the fifth came fish and fowl, and on the sixth, all land animals, and eminently man. This is our cosmogony. If any scientist ridicule it, he must do it for something un- natural in the detail. We scorn the natural when we are dealing with miraculous acts. Water, it may be said, would take months instead of hours to travel from the land into the sea. We never pro- posed that it should travel. Tw.enty-four hours were too much for God. Like the rib of Eve these things were allegories. They consumed six days to make the bolder pageant. The God who created out of nothing could put the seas into their Chap. VII.] Mans Origin. 8 1 place. And there are sentences in the narrative that seem to have been overlooked ; '' Every plant " — how? by evolution? Infinitely the other way. There is a labor in these sentences that has hardly succeeded with the exegete. It tells of a creation immediate, and, as though of cultivated ^xq\\^\.\\?,. We believe that whole forests stood up between suns. We believe that Eve cultivated cultivated flowers, and if anybody asks what w^e mean by that, we quote the passage, " Each plant, before it was in the earth, and each herb before it grew ; " for there had never been rain and had never been cultivation, and yet there sprang things betokening both ; for listen to the language, " God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there had been no man to till the ground." We are not to mistake the idea; for the passage goes on. Afterward both instruments came afield. " Vapor went up," and there came the usual watering of the ground, and '' God breathed into man the breath of life," and lo, the gardener came upon the planet ! That man, therefore, was created like the plants, and that Eve was made out of a rib, has not only room to be believed by the absence of their phos- phatic bones from among other less durable fossils, and of anything like neighbor beasts constituting a missing link, but has every claim to be believed, for even Darwin needs an original creation (Var. An. and PL, pp. 20, 21, 24), and why there could have been but one, we never could see on the part of a Being capable of any. 82 Man. [Book II. If creation was originally a miracle (Heb. xi. 3), why might not God repeat it ? And as to the story of Eve, we end now with a single justification. The God that made an ^%%, and brings chickens into the world by such a comic process of incubation ; the God that made a hive, and created that unfor- tunate community, the ridiculous and much injured drones ; the God that made a bug, to all intents and purposes a bug in look, but really a bean ; the God of still ruder freaks in the management and make and laws both of the flora and fauna of His kingdom, why could He not make Eve out of a rib, just as probably as Christ could spit upon the ground and make clay of the spittle, and anoint the eyes of the blind man with the clay ? We do not teach that the man who denies about the rib will have perished, but we do say that, like a stitch in a stocking, it is perilous to unravel rev- elation, and that the man convinced of it as a whole, is the happy man in the possession of his religion. CHAPTER VIII. man's fall. The central idea of the gospel is, that a man will be saved for the sufferings of Jesus Christ, and that the man who will be saved is one who becomes better, at once by resisting sin, and, as the base of all, by crying to God for help for the sake of the Redeemer. This is the most that can be known of practical salvation. Chap. VIIL] Mans Fall. %'i^ Of what need then, it may be exclaimed, is the Garden of Eden ? And it may be rejoined, Of no need that shall entitle any such narrative of the Bible to a vital place in our deliverance. Who shall say that if the creation occupied one week, the man who spreads it into centuries can never be forgiven ? We ought to be careful where we lay our empha- sis. Suppose a man denies Adam. Suppose he holds that all was a myth. Suppose he believes in a pre- historic species, and that the race was evolved, and that its progress was written upon the rocks. His- tory is of no such value as that a mistake like that can shut heaven or alter the one condition of a man's forgiveness. And suppose we go further, and sin is denied, I mean that puzzle of original sinfulness; suppose a man believes that we were born like Gabriel, with just the character with which we were intended to begin, and that our need of Christ comes from our feebleness, and that our refusal to receive His help is the catastrophe that we call ruin, who will say that he must necessarily perish? Who will say that he may not sweep all Eden as a myth, and yet be, like Pelagius himself, an eminent be- liever? Who can limit the Almighty? And yet the story of our creation, and the story of our fall, and the story of our rise again by what was done on Calvary, are all best for us when we receive them as they are. There is a loss in any mutilation. That Eve ate 84 • Man. [Book II. the forbidden fruit puts me in my place as a man born a sinner. And that I was born a sinner explains to me why I am so stupid about any- thing better. That a yelping infant, that shows passion from the very threshold of his birth, is clean as a white paper, is no very sanctifying idea. That I was altogether born in sin (Ps. li. 5), helps me in my confession, and, besides explaining the fact, deepens the sense of universal evil. Nor are we to be moved a whit by any ridicule. That Eve ruined millions by an apple, sounds not half so fanciful as that Christ saved millions after hosts of them were dead. The fact is, how dare men judge ! We have capped the boldest pinnacle. We have said in the teeth of science, The Bible is a primer for your facts, and, The Bible is a horn-book for our morals. Catch it tripping and we yield ; show any absolute defect and we give it up. And when we have survived all this, and our book has buried cart loads of scientific trifling ; when we have seen the Vedas of the race hide their heads before its unsullied righteousness, to bid us despair on account of its fancifulness, is absurd to an extreme. That Christ drove the demons into the swine is no more fanciful to me than the fluke in a sheep, or the bot in a horse, or the gad upon an ox's back or any other queer discovery of our soberest un folders of the sciences. But while we go in for the literal acceptance of the documents, and for this, if for no other reason, Chap. VIIL] Mails Fall, 85 that there is no other from which grave men will not ultimately return, we are utterly opposed to that form of departure which develops what the Bible says, and puts it into shapes that seem fuller and more reasonable. Such is that theory of the Reformed, that Adam was our " federal head." The difficulty aimed at is justice. How can it be just in God to punish us for the sin of our parents? But can we support a chain by adding to its links? If a covenant was made with Adam, and he knew that he would damn his children, that makes his infamy greater, but how can it be just to us ? The question rushes to our lips, Where do we hear of a covenant ? In a doctrine simply revealed, and which we would not dream of without the Scriptures, how absurd to take anything but what they say; and there is not a lisp in Scriptureof a*' federal relation." Rival teachers have noticed this, and taught the equally unknown idea that men were somehow in Adam, and that .when Eve reached up into the tree, I had a hand in it in actual inculpation (see Shedd's TheoL). No wonder that infidels blaspheme. When will we ever learn that the strict Scripture is all that we possess? W^e know what Adam did, and we know what we do from the day that we are born, and we know that one is the consequence of the other (i Cor. xv. 22). But why it is the consequence, and what Adam knew, and whether he knew anything except what we are told ; whether 86 Man, [Book If. he conceived of a child, or what a child would be, born small and feeble as he had not been ; or, if he had many, how his soul and their souls would have any interest in common, it is sheer inanity to guess ; and, therefore, covenant or no covenant, it is miserable work to build any theory whatever. We know two things, — First, that like begettings are universal in nature, and, second, that, in the instance of man, they are Scriptural and just ; but why they are just, and, therefore, why they are natural, we do not begin to know, any more than why the sacrifice of Christ atones for the sins of His people. This then is our doctrine of imputation. Adam sinned, and we have borne his iniquity. And all we know about its reasons are the two simple facts, — first, that it is natural, the likeness of the thing running all through nature ; and, second, that it is just, this justice being the essential fact ; but why it is just, lying, like the origin of evil, outside of thought, and to be trusted piously to the administra- tion of the Most High. Recollect, our great challenge is that more be produced from the Bible. CHAPTER IX. man's chief end. We have already seen that righteousness, as an English word, has three distinct significances. First, it means a quality of two emotions. Second, it means the emotion that possesses the quality; and, Chap. IX.] Mans Chief End, Sy third, the character which has the habit of such an emotion. We have denied that righteousness was the Reformed Protestant's righteousness, viz., a something that can stand before the law ; and we have admitted that it might mean a putative right- eousness, not one imputed from Christ, but one, Hke hoHness and cleanness (Mark v*. 20, Ps. Ixxiii. i), called so ex concessit, and really that condition of less sinfulness which is the germ and earnest of a perfect righteousness, to which it may at length attain. We have seen, also, that righteousness was the highest good, and it was easy to distinguish that this was not the first righteousness, but the third. It is not the highest good that there should be one right- eous emotion, but the habit of it. Righteousness, therefore, in the sense of character, is the highest good either of God or man. But it is not all settled yet. Wliose character are we considering? The character of an ant, if w^e could imagine a conscience, is not as important as my character ; and my character is not so important as my city's ; and my city's is not so important as the world's ; and the w^orJd's, present and past, is not so important as the character of the Almighty. The character of God therefore, is the highest good either for Himself or the creature. But what do I mean by my proposition ? Do I mean in the abstract? Why of course it is. There is more of God, and therefore, more in His character. Or do I mean that the righteousness of God is the highest good to me or to any of His creatures? SS Man. [Book II. And even here there are two senses. Do I mean that I as an honest thinker admit that the righteous- ness of God is the highest good, or do I mean that it is my highest good? I mean this latter, and I mean, not that it does the very topmost good forme in its righteous administration, but (to come now to the cream of the idea) that it is the topmost good in me ; that is, that I am constituted to love righteous- ness more than anything beside, and, therefore, to be glad for the righteousness of God more than for anything else in the thinkable creation (Ps. Ixiii. 3). Then, coming down in the inventory of righteous- ness, the universe would come next, then the largest fractions, then my planet, then my country, then my town, last of all myself, for though, as a personal thing, my own righteousness is my highest good, two things are to be said about that : first, that it is my highest righteousness to prefer the world's, and secondly, that a pious conscience will find more joy in the mul- titude, than seeing my own soul on the way to the Kingdom. A missionary for an age in India might surely be forgiven for prizing the righteousness of thousands more than his own poor virtue. But, now, my subject was ''Man's Chief End," not man's highest good. Man's chief end is not the righteousness of the Almighty, for how could we promote it ? Man's chief end is not even to glorify God, for there follows immediately the question. What is the end of that? Man's chief end must be, first, some certain something that shall be practica- ble, and, second, that certain something, whatever Chap. IX.j Mans Chief End. 89 it be, which, being practicable, is among practicable things the very highest good. And, therefore, we move into our answer. Man's chiefest end, under the direction of the Most High, is " to do good and to communicate," and that, first and least, in making other people happy, and second and chiefest of all, in extending righteousness, and in making other peo- ple holy to the extent of our power. It is good to know what our sole end is. The sole end of man, in the sense of the chiefest and the noblest, is to make others better ; and the greater and the more sinful, the higher the act of leading any prince among the people into the everlasting kingdom. Converting men is, therefore, our highest act, and damning men is our lowest, especially if they were poor souls that had climbed already into safety ; for " whosoever shall stumble one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a mill- stone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea, than that he should stumble one of these little ones " (Matt, xviii. 6). It is curious how documents that are admirable in themselves, become deified when long cherished. The Papists make an idol of the Vulgate, and seem to be tempted more toward Jerome sometimes than toward the great originals; the Jews wor- shipped the Septuagint, and even our Protest- ant Fathers, warned as they were against super- stition, fell under the influence of their own books. '^The Shorter Catechism," modern as it is, hedges itself with the same reverence. And when it says, 90 Man. [Book \\. ** The chief end of man," which might philosophi- cally be expected to be one, divides itself into two, and when it makes these two a glorification or dis- play on the one side, and an enjoyment in our own poor spirit on the other, we feel no shame for this be- ginning of our symbol; we think it almost profane to censure it ; we would go on teaching it to our children if this error were pointed out ; we would hide its better parts by defending its worst, and we tempt sharp unbelievers, who, when gravelled by a mistake like this, sweep all the book, and say, like Mill, " I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-men " (Exam, of Ham., Boston ed., vol. i. p. 131) ; or more tellingly, like Spencer, '' It is difficult to conceal (one's) repugnance to a creed which tacitly ascribes to the Unknowable a love of adulation such as would be despised in a human being " (First Prin- ciples, p. 120). So that we are hardly irresponsible for Mill's profanity when he adds to what we have quoted above : ''And if such a being can sentence me to Hell for not so calling Him, to Hell I will go." CHAPTER X. MAN IN god's image. Our first book was on the subject of righteous- ness, and we found that righteousness was the high- est good. Our second book is on the subject of man, and we find that righteousness is man's highest good. Chap. X.] Man in God's linage, 91 Our third book is on the subject of God, and we are to find again that righteousness goes to the sum- mit even here. How do we find all this? Simply by one unchanging consciousness. In fact, the sec- ond book is the ^^^ both of the third and of the first : in fact it is the basis of half its own asser- tions. What do I know of man except through what I call myself ? What do I know of righteous- ness except as of my own righteousness ? The figures walking around me are as invisible as God, except as I infer them as other selves. What is God but "the Big Injun" of the savage? Revela- tion helps; but what is that but information for my consciousness? Think of all His attributes. What is will but my will? and power but my power in- finitely exaggerated? What is intelligence but my intelligence ? infinitely changed, I know, and sub- ject to infinite adjustments as inferred from mine, but in those very adjustments showing their origin ; for when we begin to adjust, we drift away from clear ideas. That man is in the image of God is, therefore, the fact on the basis of which we can move from one of these books to the other. BOOK III. GOD. CHAPTER I. god's conscience. If it be the fact that out sole idea of right is from our conscience, and that our sole idea of God, in His essential attributes, is derived from ourselves, we must either ascribe some of our poorer attributes to our Maker, or else unite with His word in giving Him a conscience, and making it supreme. But if He has a conscience, and it is His highest good, it must either have the same righteousness as ours, which our conscience seems to declare, or else He must have some other righteousnesses for which we are incapable of worshipping Him, and which His word also seems to forbid, for we are commanded to be " holy as He is holy," and told of essential and innermost right by the Apostle John in the unflinch- ing language, "which thing is true in Him and in you " (i Jo. ii. 8). God's conscience, therefore, dictates, as His high- est motive, (i) benevolence to other beings, and (2) a love, with all His might, of the character of holi- ness. Chap. II.] All Else in God. 93 It is blasphemous, therefore, to imagine that God's highest motive is display, or that His chiefest object is Himself, or that a co-ordinate principle is vengeance, or that He does as He pleases; in that He does least as He pleases of all existences (of course in the lighter sense), and most, in everything He does, in simple obedience to the principle of right. CHAPTER II. ALL ELSE IN GOD. To take two emotions and say, All else in God is secondary, is a strong way to speak, but a useful thing to consider. In the first place, without these two there could be no creation ; in the second place, without them there could be no sovereignty ; and in the third place, no love or worship. These are grand points. Cre- ation and sovereignty and a claim of love by God are all impossible without these two emotions. I. For, first, as to the creation, God has infinite power, and could create in an instant all this vast universe. Judging from our own gifts, He has mind and will and purpose in every conceivable degree. But what, out of the womb of time, could set this vast machinery afloat ? We have seen that there is no good possible except emotion. And as to all possible emotion, except goodness, God is sufificient to Himself. Let His emotions be what they will, they cannot give birth to a universe 94 God. [Book III. till we come to two, and those two constitute His righteousness, a love for the welfare of others, and a love, on its own account, for the principle of holiness. All else in God would be sterile. These are the germinant traits in Jehovah's kingship. II. But, second, He could not be a King. What could make Him such? He might destroy me. He might build Tophet high. He might own me, in a certain mechanic sense : but if Satan owned me, would that make him King? Sovereignty may best be defined as a right to rule. Would God have a right to rule if He had no conscience ? And would I not have a right to rebel if I . could plunge into nothingness from such a brutal Deity ? It is idle to exalt sovereignty in God unless we make the essence of His sovereignty to consist in His perfect character. III. And then, of love. How can I love God except for righteousness? Can I love Him for His power? Our Saviour lifts this commandment as the very highest and the best (Matt. xxii. 37, 38). But if I am to love God as my supremest object, how can I translate that except as of my love for righteousness? Suppose there were no God, that I must still love. And suppose Satan were God. He might be strong, and he might be wise, and might have every mechanic trait to the extent of my con- ception, — for he has : but would that call forth my love ? Would it not, my hate ? So then the com- mand, " Thou shalt love God," is but the command, Thou shalt love holiness, and we are back at our Chap. II.] All Else in God. 95 beginning, that the love of others and the love of holiness are God's highest good, and His only claim either to create or govern. We see then how trifling the definition, that God is an innate idea, and that our innate idea of God is a sense of responsibility and dependence (Hodge, Syst. TheoL, vol. i. pp. 23, 195). In the first place, God is no one idea at all, but a framework of inferences from man and the Bible. In the second place. He is not primarily a supreme, begetting a sense of responsibility and dependence, but He is primarily good. And in the third place, a supremacy is not innate, but inferred, and a sense of responsibility is a much delayed and a most patiently increased experience. Light, too, is shed upon that burst of enthusiasm which followed the answer (so we are told) of one of the youngest men in Westminster. The question had come in turn, *' What is God ? " And there was a pause! when the young man, whose name is given, stood up and uttered the words which have gone unchanged into the catechism, ''God is a Spirit." — First, we dissent from that. God is not a Spirit. He is called a Spirit often, but not in cir- cumstances to make it true when a name is sought for a supreme definition of the Deity. When a name was needed to mean life, by Old Testament people, a word was chosen that meant breath, and it became the word that meant life, and men forgot, perhaps, its original signification. When a name was further needed to mean soul, a word was again g6 God. [Book III. chosen that meant breatJi, and sank down again in the uses of the Hebrew. Time advanced, and they needed a farther name, meaning spirit, and with singular steadiness of thought they chose breath again, and our Enghsh spirit, from spiro, is a good reminder of this most persevering tendency. '' Spirit," therefore, is a good name for man ^ in fact it is a modest name, and reminds us of our origin from the breath of the Almighty. And it is a good name for God where that breath is to be remem- bered, as for example where He is called the Holy Breath (Ps. li. ji, Is. Ixiii. lo) because He breathes into our hearts a holy influence ; but to say that " God is a Spirit " is about like saying in a general and supreme account of Him, "God is an Arm (Ps. Ixxi. 1 8, Is. li. 9), infinite and eternal and un- changeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.'* How much better to say, '' God is that one self-existent being, creator of all others, a conscious person, infinite in power, knowledge and duration, whose highest good and sovereignty are His absolute righteousness." But some one is laughing all this time, and sup- posing that we forget that " God is a Spirit " is a text from Scripture (Jo. iv. 24). We come to that next. *' God is a Spirit " is a text in English, but in the Greek the lanefuafre is reversed. No text in Scripture can be found that calls God a Spirit, in any general connection. Christ is speaking of wor- ship. He tells the woman of Samaria that the true worshipper must worship the Father in spirit and Chap. II.J All Else in God. 97 truth : and then, as an enforcement of tliis, He says, " Spirit is God." That is, a breath, in its last and highest sense, is God in the human heart : and therefore it is, so He is intending to say, that the true worshipper must worship the Father in this God part. To that old-fashioned argument that the article calls for the inversion, the still more old- fashioned grammar, carefully prepared by Middle- ton, gives just the necessary exceptions. I usually say, " The knife is steel," the article cleaving to the subject ; but if some fool, on high sophistic ground, would make the knife one thing, and steel another, it would be absolute good English to say, Steel is the knife. It would be absolute good Greek to say, "Spirit is God." It is absolute good sense to say, " God was the Word," when the Apostle wished to deny that there was a separate Logos. And so Paul spoke good Greek, which is for once not subjected to inversion (E. V.), when he imagines the mistake of "supposing that gain is godliness " (i Tim. vi. 5). That "God is a Spirit," therefore, is a blunder in the young assembly-man, I mean if he would ennoble the Almighty ; and then there is great weakness again in the closing stretch of the definition, where, instead of saying, "in His righteousness," or, if he thought better, "in His holiness," or, as was cer- •tainly best, in some one name for the one character of Jehovah's " goodness," he spins it out into a list, and spoils the terseness of his sentence by the re- duplication, " holiness, justice, goodness and truth." There remains nothing more, except a guard upon 98 God, [Book III. the too extreme pushing of this chapter. If God were not so great, He would not be so good. As we have already seen, an ant, furnished with a con- science, though that conscience be unstained, could not be so high in holiness as God Almighty. " God is love," and there is nothing worth while in His existence, except for the one trait of His infinite righteousness. And yet, though all other attributes of God are secondary, they have one grand part to play, viz., that they make this one primary. The doctrine already taught, that God's holiness is the highest good either for Him or for His people, gauges itself simply by the measure that He is greater than His people. And Gabriel, who is as holy as his Maker, is not as holy as his Maker in one prevalent sense, viz., that he is not as great as his Maker; for God, as the origin of all things, sheds His other glories upon this one, and His power and wisdom and immensity, though otherwise of no account, raise to their own infinite pitch this sole ground for His being either loved or worshipped. CHAPTER III. man's rights over god. If God be greater than any other being, and, therefore, holier, not simply because He is the ori- gin of holiness in others, but because He has a larger conscience, there follows, what is seldom thought of, that God has heavier obligations, and that the rights of man over God, are higher than the rights of Chap. III.] Mans Rights over God. 99 God over any of His creatures. God could sin more against man, than man could possibly sin against the rights of his Creator. There is something wonderful in this. I have a right to God's utmost mercy. Let us disabuse ourselves of certain things. The idea that Heaven is all of grace, is not true in the grander thinking. Where grace means pardon of the sinner, and where the meaning is that God grants the pardon out of mercy, the word is well enough. For, of course, the law condemns, and gives us no manner of right under its violated cove- nant. But to talk of a something that is of mere mercy, is really to talk of God's highest obligation. A Holier than any of the creatures is simply one who has more of a benevolence for others and more of a love for the principle of holiness. These are not sovie of a long list of duties, but they are all of them. They are the emotions which are God's highest good ; and they are the things in the Most High Avhich are His sole obligation. Then, obliga- tion being the counterpart of right, we come easily to this idea, that the right of man over God is a right to His utmost mercy, there being no limit to its length, except that higher love, a love to holi- ness. Man's rights over God, therefore, are that he shall be made the happiest possible and the holiest pos- sible within the bounds of the creation. lOO God, [Book III. CHAPTER IV. god's rights over man. God cannot get possession of a man by creating him. Under other arrangement of His power than simple hoHness, that act would be an outrage. I have a right to nothingness, till I am properly brought out. To that strongest complaint of wickedness, that God had no right to create when He saw that I would perish, we may reply with an admission, that God had no right to create unless benevolence and that other virtue, not only per- mitted, but demanded my being brought into being. That is the simplest answer after all. ** The Lord is righteous in all His ways, and holy in all His works." He is a King, but simply as an executioner of holiness. He tells us so with care. *' Justice and judgment are the habitation of His throne." It is an instance of how mad men are, when, in our holiest books, we take a sentence from Paul, " Hath not the potter authority over the clay," and actually with a sober face, ascribe that to the Almighty. God's rights over man are simply to treat him righteously. And to paint the potter over the clay, and to put God for the potter, and to imagine Him to turn upon the wheel a something for agony and shame, and to do it out of *' authority," is really the greatest atrocity in any language. Paul never dreamed of it. Indeed, if we translate the Greek, Chap. V.] Best Possible Universe. loi and notice all the particles, we find he was teaching the very opposite. That chapter is one of the grandest in the Bible (see Author's Com.). And, instead of Paul teaching a right to create devils, he is shocking the saints by such an idea. If we exam- ine the passage, we will find that he pits one mad- ness against another, and is simply telling the *' Vain Man," that, as against one extreme, he might as well go to the other, and that stark authority in God is no more vain a madness, than the want of all power either to damn or govern. The rights of God over man are, therefore, the two emotions. He has a right to love them as ob- jects of benevolence, and then, as a still higher taste, to cherish and promote the widest holiness. Besides these, God has no rights either to create or minister. CHAPTER V. THE UNIVERSE, THE BEST POSSIBLE. If holiness be the highest good, and God, unable to increase it in Himself, has for His highest prac- tical end its promotion in others. He gains that end or is defeated of it. Unless God, therefore, is defeated of His end, the universe He has called into being is the holiest He could have made. This has not been the common idea. If it is the holiest possible, it must also be the happiest possible, or we should be wandering into 102 God. [Book III. the thought that a universe, happier than this, could have been made out of one less holy. Now, across this path, comes the idea that God is omnipotent. Take the universe as it is, is it not a conceded fact that it is finite? And if it be finite, how can it be the best possible ? Though God has lavished upon it unspeakable gifts, does it not end the controversy to remember that He could lavish more ? With all its assembled wealth, could He not, any May morning, launch upon the heavens quite another universe, leaving the present to ride in its glory besides ? So we might imagine. But we are stopped, just as He is, by certain inevitable reason- ings. In the first place, the universe is finite. Do what He can, God could not create an infinite crea- tion. Second, the universe, being finite, it must necessarily be decided what that limit or end must be. Third, who must decide that point ? Fourth, if God must decide, must He not decide it wisely, and can He decide it wisely unless He decide it by His highest motive? But, fifthly, and to retort the argument, can God be omnipotent if His limitation is such, that, in case He should desire the best pos- sible universe, by arguments implied in any creation at all it can be set down as certain that He could not have it? But a difficulty that is more formidable far, is, that a best possible universe should pretend to such a distinction, and confess all along the presence of iniquity. How are we to account for that? We have confessed long ago that it is the riddle of our Chap, v.] Best Possible Universe. 103 being. But therein lies the very reply. How a good man can become a bad man we have a secret suspicion that none but the Almighty will ever fully conceive. But this is a difficulty in there being a creation at all, not in there being a universe which is the wisest and the best. Fortunately for our argument, the creation is a fact. There can be no doubt of it, and no doubt of its wickedness. It lends its aid with obstinate reality. And our rejoinder is complete. There is indeed sin in the world, but why is it there? The difficulty that it should be, under a compassionate Prince, is diminished rather than increased by the supposition that it is necessary to the best possible creation. Our answer, therefore, is this: It is the sum of all mysteries how evil came into the world. But, being there, we have to treat it as a fact ; and, treating it as a fact, we do so in four particulars : First, as olie that we cannot understand ; second, as one that we cannot impeach, no man's conscience being enough to penetrate the government of Heaven; third, as one that may be necessary to the freedom of the will ; and, fourth, as one that may be neces- sary to God, God being unable, except as confronted by evil, to produce the universe that shall be the wisest and the best. With increment by time, therefore, and admitting the principle that holiness will increase, we teach the doctrine that the holiest, and, therefore, the happiest creation is precisely that which God has achieved. I04 God, [Book III. CHAPTER VI. EACH CREATURE THE BEST POSSIBLE FOR IT. When we speak of the universe, of course we remember the lost, and when we speak of the hap- piest, of course we remember rocks, which have no happiness at all, and insects, which have very little. We do not mean that Hell is the best possible crea- tion, or that flies, in their abstract case, are the hap- piest, for God could lift Satan out of his place, or raise a fly to the glory of the blessed. We are not speaking of power or skill or wisdom, or what God could do for me if I stood alone in the creation. But I am speaking of things as a whole. God would change a fly into an angel, or lift Satan out of chains, if it were consistent with the whole. His highest motive is to bless ; and, therefore, each atom that exists, has the highest place that could be secured for it by the Almighty. ^ CHAPTER VII. god's DECREES. If God has a highest motive, it follows, as a logi- cal idea, that He has but a single motive in the gov- ernment of the universe ; for the higher motive would logically absorb the others. If God has a highest motive, it is easier to see that He must have a single plan. It is almost tiresome, therefore, to think how God has been confined. His highest mo- Chap. VI I. j God's Decrees. 105 tive being holiness, it took possession of Him. He had no Hcense. We who are creatures do as we please. God pleases, to be sure, to be holy, but not, as we men claim, to alter His plan as seasons roll. Islam's fate is not more iron. Back in the everlast- ing, all that God must live up to was settled. He could no more alter methods, than He could sin. This is His Decree. And if we were all happy, no one would cavil. It is where sorrow stands thwart across our path that it seems a wickedness to have fixed it from the beginning. And yet sorrow was a part of the plan. Men try to escape this by separating foreknowl- edge. And we notice God does separate it in many parts of the inspired volume. " Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and fore- knowledge of God, ye have taken " (Acts iii. 23). That the crucifixion should be a divine decree is trying, and if *' foreknowledge " can save anything of the bitterness, it is timely, to say the least. And then notice its introduction again : — '' Elect accord- ing to the foreknowledge of God the Father" (i Peter i. 2), and again, " Whom he did foreknow, them He also did predestinate" (Rom. viii. 29). ''Known unto God from the beginning are all his works" (Acts XV. 18). "God hath not cast away His people which He foreknew " (Rom. xi. 2). But then, if we are to use this in any elenchtic fashion, we must take care how we use it. Fore- knowledge does not alter in the least the gripe of lo6 God. [Book III. the decree. It was complete. It was complete before we were born. The Moslem's fate does not differ from it, except in the one element. What Islam teaches blind, the Bible teaches all radiant with tenderness : and here is what it is our refuge to say. God has but one motive. That motive is holiness. He speaks so much of foreknowledge, because His eye runs along the ages to see what that motive will create. And here we should make a full stop. When we arrive at the judgment bar the first bolt shot will be, that holiness fixed all our history. When we gather up our defence, our cavil will die upon our lips. We shall find that what God did. Holiness did. As Solomon says, That ''was by His side a builder " (Prov. viii. 30, see Com.). And though to unnumbered ages Heaven may not decipher it, yet we will reach, as Moses reached (though we may be for ever veiled in the cleft of the rock), that all-satisfying sentence, *' I will show mercy to whomsoever I can show mercy, and have compassion on whomsoever I can have compassion " (Rom. ix. 15, see Author's Com.). The doctrine of a Decree, therefore, is the doc- trine that in an Infinite Nature there must be a highest motive, and, therefore, a single plan. The Divine Decree is that single plan as it has existed from everlasting. The difficulties in respect to its results must be met in this way: — F'irst, by our ignorance. We are utterly unfit to judge of a higher administration. Second, by our conscience. Know- ing what righteousness is, and, being obliged by the Chap. VII.] God' s Decrees, 107 very necessities of thought to consider that as the very highest possible good, we bow to that as the creator of the Decree, and teach, even in the face of there being a perdition, that love of others and love of holiness must have been the determining will of the Creator. Third, by conjecture ; for though a certainty must be beyond our depth, there is room to guess, that, if myriads are to be moral agents, some must sin, if there is to be liberty under a moral choice. Here there is the utmost mistiness of view. Foreknowledge does not relieve it. Omnipotence vastly deepens it. Holiness, even, increases it. For if actual benevolence, and active promotion of holi- ness are God's only end, how sad my fate, if, as the progeny of such an end, I am eternally wicked. And yet the monotony, to use a suggestive word, the dead level of uniform success, the establishment of a trial, and the cloying certainty that no one fail in it, the pretence that there is a moral choice and that the reward of standing firm in it is to be established in well doing, there being millions of worlds of righteousness as we hope, and no worlds of misery, would create an obscurity in the idea of choice that might awaken a suspicion, at least, that that might not be the best for holiness. And, therefore, that is our fourth thought, that granting the idea of the Almighty, that a love for others and a love for holi- ness are His highest end, it cannot be made practically certain that a universe where some will fall, may not be the best to promote it, and therefore, that if the holiest universe and the happiest'universe spring out Io8 God. [Book III. of just this one that God hath ordained, we may not, considering our ignorance, dismiss our anxiety as to the administration of Heaven. CHAPTER VIII. ANTHROPOMORPHISM. The idea of God as innate must be changed under our simple reasoning into the idea that He is empirically descried. The Bible says as much. "The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and God- head " (Rom. i. 20). And yet, though our noblest ideas of God are thus attained, and the facts of His conscience are His noblest facts, yet there are dan- gers in this, just as in every extreme of Bible doc- trine. Anthropomorphism is our life on the one hand, just as it maybe greatly our ruin on the other. Anthropomorphism is our life when we dismiss a sovereign Creator, and substitute a holy one. This is a great advance in theology. God is entirely sovereign, but He is not sovereign at all, except as holy. He is not holy at all, except in conscience. He has no conscience at all, except like ours. Con- science is simply the organ of two distinguishable emotions, one, benevolence, and the other, the love of the quality of right. God comes quite close. These are His highest end. Power is very different and knowledge is very different in man and his Creator ; but conscience is very similar. And this Chap. VIII.J Anthropoinorphism. 109 is very blessed, that the Bible never says, Be pow- erful as I am powerful, or knowing like Me ; but only that which it is worth while to have, viz., holi- ness, — " Be ye holy as I am holy :" the " substance of things hoped for" (Heb. xi. i) being that which is most in common as between God and His people. But though this is delightful on the one hand, we are dreadfully distracted on the other. We speak of God as though one of His persons were angry, and another pleased, and trying to soothe Him. We speak of God's will, as though it were God's wz7/that created the heavens, instead of the inbreathing of His power. We speak of God's w^orks, as though they stood out like a locomotive, and He could look at them after they were done. We speak of God's kingship, as though it were a thing by itself apart from His character. Anthropomorphism teaches us, and then ruins us, if we are not careful. It actually governs us ; for no man can thoroughly repel it. A man who can think of holiness as at the head, and God the machine-like power who simply lifts it to be supreme ; or, to express it still better, the man who has his notion of God as one who obeys righteousness, and then enforces it, is a rare man upon our planet, or, perhaps, will be a rare creature even as among angels in such absolute adoration. I lO God. [Book III. CHAPTER IX. THE SIMPLICITY OF GOD. If we have arrived at any idea, it is, that God is the simplest of all existences. '' Jehovah is one, and His name is one." When the infidel says that Jehovah is a power that tends to righteousness, he comes nearer to God than he or the Church discovers or intends. Atheism, like all other error, has a large percentage of truth, or it would vanish from the earth. When the Christian says that, in the sun, the optic and the calorific and the actinic rays, all in one luminary, or, coming nearer, that spirit, soul and body, all in one creature, are like the three Persons of the Trinity, all in one essential Deity, it seems to me like breaking a great vase. Before, it was complete. Out of the eternity past God came up One Great Sun. The Incarnation took its place like any advancing Providence. But to go back to the everlasting, and break God into a trio, and then compare that to -utterly earthly things, like the radiations of the sun, or like the faculties that can be found in man, is indeed anthropomorphism in its most shallow guise. If there be a Trinity, I will believe it, but it must be taught out of God's holy word ; and until Christ's texts can be overthrown which refer everything to God, even the Father (Jo. vi. 57, viii. 16, 19, 26, X. 30, 36, 38, xii. 49, 50, xiv. 9-1 1), I Avill hold that the Trinity is the first rude assault upon Chap. X.] Worship. 1 1 1 the one righteous Jehovah, and the first step by Christians back to the damaging ideas of a dreary Polytheism. They tell us in the village where I live, that God is one substance, and that in that one substance there is but one consciousness, but that in that one conscious substance there are three persons, and that in the eternal past these persons kept company with each other, and relieved intolerable loneliness by intercourse together before the first creation! There is nothing I will not believe simply because it is incomprehensible. I do not understand my book falling to the floor. The pull of the sun, when there is nothing to pull upon, that drags the earth, ninety- four millions of miles distant, Gabriel may under- stand, but I simply believe. I could believe nothing on any other terms. But to believe a thing like that above, which really has no idea; to believe the word Trinity when there is nothing under it ; to be- lieve that one consciousness can sit in a group, and mutually commune and love, may God deliver me from that ! Such surd sores upon the souls of the intelligent are chronic mischiefs, the whole miseries of which will only be computed in another being. CHAPTER X. WORSHIP. Here again a tinge of idolatry cleaves to believers. The Pagan has got so far that he burns joss-sticks, and whirls prayer mills in the face of his Deity. Com- 112 God. [Book III. ing farther back, the more corrupted Christian tells his beads, and endlessly repeats his prayers, and eats a wafer, as though it were the flesh of his Creator. It is interesting to see how idolatry clings to our very highest Christianity. Neither prayer nor song is left in its simplicity. Not the Bible and not the foolish- ness of preaching is left as God meant it, as a rational means of grace. A touch of opus operatiuii lasts even with evangelic divines. And, therefore, in closing our section upon " God," it is ''well to say carefully in respect to worship," that the word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon weordk, and refers to ivorth or worthiness; and that the very highest worsJiip is a sense of the worthiness of God, and springs glor- iously out of our leading doctrine. He that teaches that God is a Sovereign, and that there is a native born idea that He is stark supreme ; he that thinks of Him as a King, and that His chief object is Himself, and His chief end His personal display; he that pictures Him in revenge, and thinks of Him as doing as He pleases ; and then gathers under this the solemnities of our being, and the hardship of everlasting fire, surely degrades Heaven's Majesty. Is not that incalculable wickedness ? He that paints Him in His holiness, and makes that His sovereignty; he that exalts His holiness into two pure emotions, benevolence and the love of right ; he that lifts these into the supreme, and makes them the secret creator of all created being; he who glorifies these, and makes them, in God, the Chap. X.] Worship. 1 1 3 sole object of worship, and, in man, the sole method and the sole means of worshipping the Almighty, he is the true Protestant believer; and he who refuses all this, grieves his Deity, and is responsible for that much decay in the worship ot the God who made him. BOOK IV. THE GOD-MAN. CHAPTER I. god's chief end with man God's highest good is righteousness. God's high- est end, next to being righteous, is not the increase of His own righteousness, for that is endlessly the same. But God's highest end is the promotion of righteousness in others. It was with that end He created others, and, ever since the universe began, the whole was (up to each particular moment) the highest and the best. To promote this particular purpose of His being, He employs each part of the universe to promote the righteousness of the whole. He employs the devil for that purpose (Jer. ii. 19, Rom. viii. 28). Let it be distinctly understood. God is as simple as man in the bonds He is imagined to give to eter- nal righteousness. Righteousness is His simple law. Righteousness has but two commandments. Obedi- ence to those commandments is His eternal task. The fruit of that task is the universe as it is. And, as those commandments are, to love the welfare of Chap. I.] God's Chief End with Man. 115 others, and to love the principle of holiness, either God has been defeated in his task, or this universe is the best possible. When we come, therefore, to consider ^' God's Chief End With Man," we cannot displace the higher purpose, which is to make man useful to the rest of the universe ; but when we can drop below, and look at him in himself, God's highest end with man, cutting off all other implications, is to lift the individual man to the highest holiness which his circumstances will allow. God's highest end in the instance of Satan, is to promote the holiness of the universe by the help of Satan. God's highest end for the individual Satan would be to save him if He could. We understand, therefore, what has taken place. God's omniscience has searched His administration, and found no possibility for Satan. And this ex- plains the gospel. The like search has been made for man, and turned out gloriously successful. Benevolence for man and benevolence for Satan are precisely similar. " Electing love " is a myth, except as singly expressing the results of but two affections. In fact for Satan the pity is greater, for the fall is more. Satan would have had a Redeemer if what was best possible would permit, and Chris- tians have a Redeemer because unspeakable cost was nothing to God if it could be made right to pardon. God's highest motive with man, therefore, is to rnake him a blessino- to the universe, and if that 1 1 6 71ie God-Man. [Book IV. motive will admit, to save his individual self from the effects of his iniquity. CHAPTER II. REASONS FOR A GOD-MAN. All that we know about Adam is, that it is natu- ral and just that his children should be cursed as he was. It is natural, because plant-breeding and brute- breeding make like breed like ; and it is just, because the Bible says so, and because it is absolute nature, and we cannot denounce nature, be- cause it is the work of the unquestionably just Jehovah. But why it is natural, and why it is just, is above the amosphere of conscience. It is one of those doctrines that we have to accept from the evi- dences we do possess of the righteousness of the Most High. Now, the like may be said about Christ. Paul chooses the best word in his language. He calls Christ the airioi. The verb means to charge or accuse {alridopiai). The noun derived from it is about as near as we can come to the Redeemer. Adam was^tlie person judicially charged " if man was ruined ; and Christ was '* the person judicially charged " .if man was saved. The passage is in Hebrews, — " He became the airiob of eternal sal- vation unto all them that obey Him " (Heb. V. 9). The reason for a God-Man, therefore, is like the reason for Adam ; and I mean by the reason for Chap. Il.j Reaso7is for a God-Man. 117 Adam, the reason for implicating millions in the downfall of one. We can make puzzles out of the Second Adam as deep as out of the First. Never- theless there are some features of the Second that are more simple than that of his forefather. 1. Can God forgive? We must answer, No, with all the light upon the case of Satan. 2. Can God redeem ? We would answer, No ; by any plan or right that we could possibly imagine. And yet it would seem strange that so great a being could not name some terms on which man could be delivered. Strangeness, how^ever, does very little for us, for stranger things lie right behind it. Satan is a higher being than man. Satan is a sadder being ; Satan is a suffering being, beyond anything we can think of in ourselves. Satan is a sinful being; and so sinful that he is the topmost object of compas- sion to his great Creator. No theology is wise that does not put its hand upon its lips. To say that Satan pulled down his own castle, is a difference to be sure, but Adam pulled down his own castle. '' There is a path which no fowl knoweth ; " and when God " laid help on one that is mighty," He did a thing which is the twin marvel of his government. We do not know how we were lost in Adam, and we do not know how we are saved in Christ ; and yet there are simplicities in this latter which make it to the full as clear as the earlier sacrifice that was made to justice. In the first place, it was an affair of justice ; '' that 1 1 8 The God-Man. [Book IV. (God) might be just, and (yet) the justifier of him which beiieveth in Jesus" (Rom. iii. 26). In the second place, it was an affair of punish- ment. The hopelessness of Satan is an affair of this very thing. Punishment is a natural expedient. It is founded in the constitution of the universe. God was bound to resort to it. He bound Himself additionally by His truthfulness. Justice, in its government sense, is simply this needful obligation. When we say, therefore, that sacrifice is an affair of justice, we mean that it takes the place of punish- ment ; if you choose to give extension to that word, you may say that it is a punishment ; not that the Almighty loves to punish in that primordial sense in which He loves to bless, but that He gave over millions for the sin of one, just as He gave over one for the sin of millions, for a certain penal end, using that word punishment in a wide, unusual and very specific sense, impossible to be brought into the light by any human illustration. In the third place, it is an affair of substitution. In the fourth place, it is an affair of suffering. So far the Bible is full of confirmations. It is not an example alone, though it is an example. It is not a martyrdom alone, though it is a martyrdom ; but it is a sacrifice. Keep only from pretending to under- stand it, and we are no more under penalty from Adam than Christ is under penalty from us, and both are thoroughly contemplated in the words of Scripture. But now, what is a penalty? We have cleared Chap. II.] Reasons for a God-Man. tig this in a former part of our theology. We shall not have fitted it to Christ, till we have shown, in the fifth place, that his sacrifice was an affair of trial. There have been, many times, trials in the creation, (i) Far back, Satan was on trial, and so was Gabriel. (2) Far back even of that, perhaps, there have been unnumbered w^orlds. (3) Tlien our world came upon the scene, and began by a distinct probation, and we failed, as Satan did. (4) Then Christ came, and His sacrifice was not naked suffering, but probation. (5) Last of all comes our trial. We are not rocked to Heaven in a cradle, but put upon a probation; for after the sufferings of Christ, we are still to deter- mine, as Gabriel did, and Satan, and as Christ our Lord determined, whether we shall gain the prize; grace to Gabriel, and grace even to our Lord, and grace unspeakable to us, being the necessary cause of any succeeding in the trial. And in respect to the probation of our Master: — We have seen that sin has two retributions. The fiercer of them is not often thought of. We speak of suffering, and, when we think of Christ, we think of One who took our suffering. But when the first Adam began our sins, suffering, either present or eternal, was the least of punishments. '* The wages of sin is death " (Rom. vi. 23). And when Paul lets that out of his mouth, we are carried back to Eden ; and then we are carried to Calvary. We note that word in both scenes of suffering, and then we begin to reflect. It is outrageous to preach that Adam deserved Hell for eating the forbidden fruit 1 20 The God' Man. [Book IV. if Hell means merely a place of misery. If Adam ate the forbidden fruit, and then recovered himself, that act might stand out as a damned spot in the history of his being, but a year of agony for it might seem ample penalty. We know little about such things; but, as the absolute experience, sinfulness is the monster penalty. And the Bible is full of this. The advertisement to Adam was not, Thou shalt suffer, but, Thou shalt die. The grimmest casualty in life, viz., its departure, gives its name to the grimmest penalty of sin, which is not suffering by any means. We hold that if suffering were all, it would soon be over. But the death of which the Almighty speaks, is sinfulness. In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt become a sinner. Suffering, therefore, is the lighter curse ; and we keep out of view the heavy penalty of sin, if we forget that it is sin itself, and that sin increases sin, and makes it heavier and more suffering throug;h all the ages of its bondage. Now, can we take a proper view of the substitu- tion of our Lord, if we only regard His suffering? We might, if that be the revelation. But hovering all about the person of our Redeemer is that same word "death" (Rom. v. lo, vi. 3-5, 9, 10, 16, 2 Cor. V. 15). It cannot mean His physical death. Suppose He had never suffered it. It cannot mean His blood. Suppose He had been drowned or hanged or tortured in bloodless agony. It cannot mean His cross. We make too much of old gospel words. It means life more than death, and His Chap. II.] Reasons for a God-Man. 121 previous sorrows more than the ecstatic moment of absolute dissolution. What does it mean ? It means His TRIAL. And now let us speak of the God-Man. What sort of a deliverer would we require ? In the dim lights that are possible we have caught a glimpse of four particulars: first, of justice ; second, of punishment ; third, of substitution ; fourth, of suffering : the mystery of salvation seems to mark a Deliverer who answers to all these. But now comes in the fifth particular. How can there be a square substitution, if the greater and sterner and more comprehensive mischief is entirely forgotten and unsustained? If the threatening to Adam, " Thou shalt die," and the announcement of Paul, '* We died," and the declaration as to Christ, that " He died," mean some- thing more than suffering, let us find that out, and let us find it out by putting together an image of the God-Man, such as Scripture shall paint, and such as these five points shall thoroughly require. Imagine God in the counsels of eternity, to deter- mine to become some day impersonate in a creature. ** No one hath seen God at anytime." Our English has it, '' No man," but " man " is not in the Greek. Suppose it is true that God is the " Ring invisible," and that Gabriel has no more seen Him than we have; that the atheist is right in pronouncing Him buried, and that God, in His wisdom, determined to be manifest ; to choose a Capital for His dominions : 152 The God-Mail. [Book IV. to sit in ocular appearance upon the throne of His power; and to realize the language of His word, " The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath revealed Him" (Jo. i. i8). This would be the grander reason for the God-Man, and would be a good foundation to think of before all the others. But now, as to the lesser reasons, (i) If God was to become impersonate in a creature, it would be like Him, according to the revelation of His word, to become impersonate in a very low creature. Isaiah tells the Israelites, '' An abomination is he that chooseth you " (Is. xli. 24). " Base things of the world, and things that are despised, hath God chosen " (i Cor. i. 28), for this reason, among myriads, " That no flesh should glory in his presence." "Thou hast set thy glory above the Heavens," is the exclamation of the Psalmist " (Ps. viii. i) ; and when we come to discover the reason of this ascrip- tion, it is the conception of Emmanuel : *' Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast ordained strength." The man, elevated to be a God, is of an infant race, nay, of a very unhappy race. God has " set His glory above the Heavens," because, ''when I consider the Heavens, what is man ?" and yet this infamous creation, with heart and lungs and liver like a brute, 'Thou hast made kindred to God ! crowned him with honor ! given him dominion ! and set him over the works of Thy hands ! It was becoming to Christ, therefore, that He should be a very low creature. Chap. II.] Reasons for a God-Man, 123 (2) But, carrying ourselves all over to what seems entirely opposite, it was becoming to Christ that He should be an exceedingly high creature. That worm Jacob must afterward ennoble Himself. Apart from His being the Most High, He must stand in the annals of eternity as the sternest hero. It will be comfortable to adore a man who has outshined the immortals. And, therefore, Christ, not simply pure like Adam, not simply serviceable like Gabriel, but beyond all other creatures the pattern even of the great, is the very sort of low creature who, as the inconceivably high, shall deserve \.\\q: place of the Supreme in the creation. (3) It w^as becoming to Christ as God as well as man, to take in His way to empire the salvation of a world. How nobly this fitted our redemption ! God needed 2i person, that is a mask in the old Greek sense. It was grand that He should be low, and grander that He should be high, that is, that the representative of Majesty should lift Himself out of nothing to be the very Wonder of time. But the very theatre for doing this, and a glorious history by the way, is the redemption of the world to Him- self. If we could confine ourselves to this, the reason for a God-Man could be easily stated. (i) It was an affair of justice. God, not incarnate, must curse the devils, and must curse all of us. (2) It was an affair of substitution, and there God would be everything. If there is to be a substitute for millions, it must be the Almighty. There is the rock on which the sunshine of hope must constantly 1 24 The God'Maft. [Book IV. be beaming. Is it impossible for God to save ? And when the whole universe is His, how can law be of such an iron mould that He who owns the damned sinner cannot substitute something for his per- dition ? But substitute what ? (3) A certain dim glimmering suggests the idea of suffering. And there, of course, bursts upon our vision the gospel reason for the God-Man. (4) But if there is to be a substitution, and that substitution is made necessary by justice, and that justice is of the nature of punishment, and that pun- ishment is of two parts, how can Christ escape the heavier part, and yet the work of the God-Man be a full redemption ? It is time thoroughly to consider this. The punishment of sin is pain and sinfulness. Of these two, pain is very artificial, and sinfulness the heavier and more direct. This is so signally the history, that two sins of Adam and of Eve sowed the world with its universal sinfulness. Now, how can God be a substitute for the crea- ture, unless He can sin as well as suffer? Before we close the leaf angrily, as we must do at the very thought of such a sacrifice, let us look at the whole thing more narrowly. What is meant by Adam's death? (Gen. ii. 17). It means that he was a siu' ner. What is meant by my death? (i Cor. xv. 22). It means that I am a sinner. What is meant by Christ's death? (2 Cor. v. 15). It cannot mean that He was a sinner ; for then God would be imper- Chap. II.] Reasons for a God-Man. 125 senate with sin, and Christ would be offering to others the suffering that He needed for personal wickedness. Yet what does it mean ? We are dis- tinctly told that He died for us (Rom. v. 6), and neither death nor resurrection (Phil. iii. 10, ii), as spoken of in the person of Christ, can at all be exhausted by physical significancies. We abhor theological schemes that are built of speculation, and will push our inquiry till we land in the teaching of the Bible. But to make sure of doing so, let us imagine certain things. Suppose that I were the Redeemer. Suppose God (to die as well as suffer) met me at my maturer age, and became God incarnate in a dead sinner. All stand back aghast. None of the reasons for a God-Man would at all be answered. Not justice. It would be crushed. Not punishment. I would need it myself. Not substitution. I would have none to offer. I must put quite out of account that Christ actually sinned to be a substitute for sinners. Suppose the incarnation were in Cain. Eve thought it would be."^ Or, to bring it nearer to the facts, suppose it were a more recent child, four thousand years after, a child of Joseph and Mary, and that God waited, like the Devil in the vision, to seize upon the child on the moment that it was born. There again vicarious '* death " might be * " I have gotten a man, Jehovah," seems to imply that she thought Cain the promised Victor. When she called "Abel" by that name {Hebhel) Vanity, it seems to imply discoveiies in Cain {ka}tah, possession), that shocked and disappointed her. 126 The God-Man. [Book IV. imagined, but alas ! as in the other instance, too much death. That child would have " seen corrup- tion," and we can know, on easy principles, that our substitute must be " holy, harmless, undefiled, sepa- rated"^ from sinners," as well as made higher than the heavens. One more imagination will land us direct in the realities of Scripture. Suppose He ante-dated birth, so that it could never be said of Christ, '' Thou wast altogether born in sin." Bat suppose that any- thing otherwise than that were simply a matter of date, and simply a seizure of sure priority. Suppose the Christ were from a sinful womb; suppose that from nature, otherwise than as acted out, He was as good as dead, " a dead man according to the flesh" (i Pet. iii. i8) ; suppose that He had '' infirm- ities," Heb. iv. 15, V. 2 (and we have a right to leave upon Scripture the onus of the necessary explanation) ; suppose that He never sinned, but that by nature He would have sinned, unless born from the beginning of the Holy Spirit (Lu. i. 35) ; suppose that to be so born He was of a virgin ; suppose that to be of a virgin, God begot Him into being ; suppose that, to be a *'holy thing," the Most High overshadowed Him ; but, that this might be a ''death " and " dying," and that the life might be a " cursed " thing, and the whole a horrible probation, suppose that here was not a '' holy thing" as it is now in the everlasting kingdom, nor a rapturous sinlessness as it is with us the moment we rise on Chap. III.] Nature of the Man. 127 high, but a perfectness which was an awful misery to keep, and a sinlessness which it was '' death " to fight for. This '* death " of a Saviour is not so hard to understand. Take any struggling saint. In minia- ture he is a crucified one (Rom. vi. 6, Gal. ii. 20, V. 24). He is a sinner, and that spoils the resem- blance. But suppose he were not so. Suppose he had the Spirit '' not in part " (Jo. iii. 34). We can conceive of the struggle still : but suppose the per- fect Spirit that I shall have in heaven, came to me on earth, but not in that easy method that would make it rapture to obey, but simply to stir me to a fight, to make that fight perfect, but, for the very end that it might be perfect, to make it awfully fierce and fiercely dangerous on the question of victory. This now is the God-Man. Adam had an easy trial for all our race, and per- ished miserably. Christ had an awful trial, and won, and all the parts we have mentioned are now com- plete in this perfect Redeemer. CHAPTER III. NATURE OF THE MAN. Christ, therefore, was not a man with the reserve of not being implicated in Adam. He was a man like you or me. He would have been more like each of us were it not necessary that He should be kept from sinning. That He might be kept from 128 The God-Man, [Book IV. sinning He was born of a virgin. That He might be born of a virgin He was begotten of the Ahnighty. That He might be begotten for trial He was begotten in a sinful womb. That left Him ''infirm" (Heb. v. 2). That made Him ''a dead man according to the flesh" (i Pet. iii. 18). That ensured Him to be a sinner, unless quickened by the Spirit (Eph. ii. 5). That filled Him with tempta- tion ; made it an agony for Him to live ; gave a sig- nificance to it that he "died;" and quite smothered all physical anguish in the hotter ordeal of unparal- leled probation. Christ then was of Adam. He had a body and soul. He was ignorant (Mar. xiii. 32). In the three days of the sepulchre as a man He had ceased from living. In the eternity to come He will be finite, growing eternally. He was cursed. He inherited from the first sinful pair. He received His inheritance in weakness (Heb. iv. 15), but not in sinfulness. He would* have been a sinner but for grace. The grace was of His own coinage, but of the whole God-Man. It was applied to Him in His conception. Nevertheless He was stinted of it — sometimes more than others (Matt. iv. i). He was played upon like a great harpsichord. The Spirit announced to Him His own departures (Matt. xxvi. 39), and in the agony of the thought, His faith almost departed. *' If it be possible," He cried, let me be spared in this. And like an ivy toward an oak He leaned toward His disciples (Matt, xxvi : 38-40) only -to fulfil the oracle that there should be Chap. IV.J Nature of the God. 129 none to help ; and, in the agony of His sinlessness (for one sin would have ruined everything) the spirit only was willing, the flesh was weak ; and in the fervid language of Isaiah, He had to tread the wine-press alone. Now we can take up all the particulars, (i) There was justice, and He satisfied it. (2) There was pun- ishment, and He bore it. (3) There was substitu- tion, and He furnished it. (4) There was suffering, and He endured it. (5) And there was trial, and He went regularly to work, like Satan and like Adam, and like Gabriel, and like us at the narrow gate, only, with the least ease of all, to try after a victory. The God-Man, therefore, could parcel out all these prerequisites as to penalty that were to be borne for our deliverance. CHAPTER IV. NATURE OF THE GOD. The Socinian says, that the God in the God-Man was simply a Divineness, like the Divinity in any heroic soul who acts grandly on the scale of life. This will not answer: for justice w^ould laugh at the propitiation of any mortal. Moreover this is not the account of Scripture (Heb. i. 8-12, Jo. viii. 58, Acts XX. 28). The Arian says, that the God in the God-Man was a high creature. But this will not answer (Lu. i. 35, I Tim. ii. 5, Heb. i. 10), and it is strange that 1 30 The God-Man, [Book IV. the noblest intellects on earth have wandered this way in the understanding of the gospel (Newton, Milton, Locke). We are yet to show where Arian- ism comes from. The Sabellian says, that the Three Persons are three Modalities. But this will not answer, for bet- ter make a Trinity in full than put a Modality for the Godhead of my Master. The Trinitarian, therefore, says that God is in Three Persons. It is the Fable of the ages. It is the most dignified deceit that the gospel has ever known. It m.akes the Spirit God, and that is a blessing. It makes the Son God, and that is vital. It makes the Father God, and these correct ascrip- tions mollify the error. And the Church has grown with much comfort and with many pieties of effort under these belittling polytheisms. But is it not time to drift free ? Martyrdom ended, because it destroyed life. Jacobitism ended, because it cut off the heads of subjects. And so of the Mystic Pres- ence and Baptismal Birth and Pontifical Unity and Priestly Absolution ; they have partially vanished because they meddled with what is vital. But the Trinity is a stolid thing ; and, though it bereaves us of all chance either among Jews or Moslems, and though it has most certainly had a track of engen- dered heresies, yet we have fought a good fight, and reached a high degree, even with this wooden evil. It is not of the least use to the gospel. It is the idea that it is of use to the gospel that has preserved it. Chap. TV.] Natttre of the God. 131 Dorner says that the Trinity has grown upon the necessities of Christology. But now we have arrived at the chapter w4iere we are to show that the gospel does not need it, if that is to be the plea. Where does the gospel need it ? The gospel needs a God and a Man united in one person. It needs a God to suffer and die and be a substitute, and after He has been a substitute, to apply by Almighty powxr the advantage gained, to dead men's hearts. It needs a Man, one with this God, to do the suffering part and the dying part and the human part in this great transaction. What does it need more? If we make the God-part a sec- ond person, we weaken the whole design. How spirited the words of Christ when He puts the whole thing directly! " I live by the Father." If He lived by Himself in "hypostatic difference," how well to say so ! He mentions a Comforter : but hardly has He brought Him forth before He steps down upon Him. "/will not leave you orphans. / w^ill come to you " (Jo. xiv. 18). He mentions Him again, and this time confuses Him with the Father. " All that the Father hath is mine : therefore I said He shall take of mine and show it unto you " (Jo. xvi. 15). There is not the least effort to keep them apart as separate hypostases. "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (Jo. xiv. 9). " Novv^ the Lord is that Spirit" (2 Cor. iii. 17). "I and my Father are one " (Jo. x. 30). And at last, jumbling the names all together, we have a complete 1 3 2 The God'Man. [Book IV. surrender of the Paraclete to Christ. We read it in an epistle. '' If any man sin, we have a comforter with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous" (i Jo. ii. i). The Almighty, therefore, and the Comforter, and the Father, and the God-head of Christ are the one thing, the God-part of Emmanuel, not simply one in essence, but one Person ; and all disturbance of this unity of thought embroils rather than advances a simple salvation. Men smile as we write this. We are in awful com- pany. Spot after spot of our planet has reared an orthodox Church, and, like some phylloxeras of the plant-world one single mischief has beset each one of them. How ridiculous it seems to speak of the Trinity as corrupting faith ! Geneva rose and stamped England, and stamped the Continent, and stamped this continent, and stamped Scotland with the purest thought, and the date of its betrayal was precisely the date of its departure from the Trinity. Holland followed suit with the like decay. And so of London, and so of Boston, and so of the North of Ireland. They gave over whole churches of Christ to a less earnest gospel : such is the history when they were taught to waver about the Trinity of the Most High. This at least is the impression seated upon our minds. And in each instance of the sort controversies have raged. Men adore a thing when they have fought for it. The Genevese breaking- away leaves a chosen remnant who tremble with feel- ing when they think of the deniersof the Trinity. It is so in London. Men in Ulster and at the Hague, Chap. IV.] Nature of the God. 133 though careless in other things, yet, like Andover, spring to their guns the moment the Trinity is laid bare. This makes our part a hard one. But may it not be true that the Trinity has been \.\\^ point d'appuioi those very errors that have come in in each of these places ? How interesting if the oversetting of the Trinity should now be the act by which dangerous freethinkings are deprived of cover ! For see what the progress has been in each of these seats. Men have denied depravity. They have em- braced Arminian extremes. They have advanced to Pelagian beliefs. They have rid themselves of the yiecessity of redemption. And having arrived so far, they have denied a necessity for Christ, and lost by that route a care for the Trinity. This has been the unfailing order. And mark now what we mean by a cover. Abandoned by all these more important faiths, they have nevertheless found the last and least im- portant of them all to be the most easy to defeat. In bolder language, they have found the weak spot among the orthodox ; and as the Trinity is not really true, they have found that out, and found this by far the thriftiest place to pursue the argument. It was so in old Arian times. Had there been no Trinity at all, it would have been easier to reform. But Plato created for Philo, and Philo for Cerinthus, and Cerinthus for the enemies at Nice a miserable Threeness, which, if it had been thrust utterly away, would have saved the centuries from half their polemics. 1 34 The God- Man. [Book IV. Will it not be possible to do this in the more reasonable future? For see ! What do we need of a Trinity ? We need a Man. " Till God in human flesh I see, My thoughts no comfort find." Let that Man be the Son of God, and it brings into shape a text so frightfully quibbled over (see the commentaries), '' Thou art my Son ; this day have I begotten Thee." We need a God, and we beg to be excused from appearing among those opposers of the Trinity who corrupted Geneva, for we go to the opposite extreme. Instead of an anti-Trinity that denies the Godhead, we advocate one that clears it and lifts it up. We pine after a Nice which shall say that the Second Person is God, but that he is no Second Person, that the One Personal Jehovah is incarnate in Christ, and is the Holy Ghost. This is our belief, and it ought not to bring us into the category of previous anti-Trinity. Such is our doctrine, and see now how a pure gospel comes out : — We need a Man, and see therefore how the only begotten of the Father arrived in the City of Beth- lehem, and how, in no higher book than Cruden,the big S appears upon the Son only in that part of reve- lation that surrounds the Manger. All that God could not do, the Man did. When it comes to suffer ; when it must be said, '' I thirst " ; when the Deliverer must pray ; when the Substitute must die, Chap. IV.] 'Nature of the God. 135 or, as we have explained it, must be tried in a hor- rible gauntlet with the Adversary, what God could not do, Man must do ; and it would not help the sufferer in the least to claim Godhead from the Son, rather than to be Himself the Son, and to claim God- head from the simplest Unity. If this be not so, tell us why not. And then, over all, we need a God, and the more a God, we would carefully teach, the better. What single good is there in dividing the Sovereign ? As every finite load must be borne by the Man, so the weight of the dignity of the sacrifice must be of the One Almighty. Not only so, but the idea helps. We get it into our head, if we adore a Trinity, that the Son was in one mood and the Father in another when they achieved the Sacrifice. The worst errors of the Atonement beset this duality. It is impossible to clear our speech of the angry God, and a yearning and compassionate Redeemer. How monstrous ! When with the One Jehovah we have a God bearing our sins in His own body on the tree, reconciling the world to Himself, so loving the world as to give His only begotten Son, the Son being the Man God-be- gotten, and the Father being the God begotten into the Man, and the two together being the God-Man, furnishing in their blended being, not that thing which a First Person fiercely asked, and a Second Person did not need, but that satisfaction to justice which the whole Godhead needed, and which was arranged and ratified by the One Almighty. 136 The God-Mail. ■ [Bookiv. It has been a foolish cavil that this gives two persons in Christ. What matter? There are two beings in Christ. That seems as strong as '' persons^ It would be a right thing to say that there are two persons in Christ if we meant hy person, which is not a Bible word, two conscious intelligences. This indeed might be a very tolerable definition. There are two such in Christ. He is a finite being and an infinite being ; omniscient and ignorant ; self-exist- ent and dependent ; indeed, much more discrepant in His two existences than, in our spoiled notions about a Trinity, we usually imagine ; and though we are fond of calling Him One Person, because (i) He is one in court and (2) one as King and (3) one in spiritual purpose, yet, as this difficulty is stirred, it is beautiful to think how, under that other definition of a person, though not the right one. He thoroughly provides all the mutualities of an efficient gospel. If He prays, it is not God who could pray, even if He were a Second Person. If He intercedes, it is not God who could occupy middle ground, but the Man with God incarnate. If He suffers ; if He is tried ; if He wrestles with temptation ; if He shrinks from His own shrinking, and fortifies His will by the cry, *' Let Thy will be done"; all these could only be enacted by a man ; and if the Third Person could do nothing other than God, why make a Third Person, and why make a Second on any plea like Dorner's that it helps Christology? Jesus Christ, in all that He says, speaks as a- God (Jo. viii. 58, xiv. 9), or as a Man (i Cor. xv. 28, Chap. V.] Redemption. 137 Jo. xiv. 28), and there is no reason why, as separate consciousnesses, these two should not deal as well as speak with each other in the work of our salva- tion. CHAPTER V. REDEMPTION. We are in danger of saying too much rather than too little on the subject of Redemption. The words of the Bible can rarely be taken literally. When they apply to God they can never be taken literall}', for words coined for earth, never can match the things of the Almighty. When God is called our Father, the analogy is distant ; though so close in respect to absolute de- rivation, that we are told that from Him " all fa- therhoods in heaven and on earth are named " (Eph. iii. 15). Still He is not our Father in any even proximate human sense. These are the healthiest reminders in beginning a chapter on Redemption. When man redeems, he does so so squarely, that to use the word for anything in the gospel should put us on our guard against doing so in an absolute sense. To go back to the beginning — when Satan fell, the sin that he committed was punished by eternal sinfulness. Why he was not redeemed we cannot tell. When Adam sinned, the sinfulness to which he was given up, was transmitted to his off- spring, and redemption, to be taken in its most 138 The God-Man. [Book I \^. simple sense, would have bought off the whole world into immediate holiness. But now, see how distant the fact is from any such meaning of redemp- tion. When I was born, my parents, though re- deemed, were sinful, and I came into the world lost, just as though no ransom had ever been paid. Im- agine me to be converted. lam not converted from suffering, and only partially from sinning. My neighbor is not converted at all. Time passes, and I reach heaven. There my redemption becomes complete. And as a result of these three different epochs of the work, redemption has really three sig- nificances, the work that was done upon the cross (i Pet. i.' 18), the work that was done when I was converted (Rev. xiv. 4), and the work that became complete on the day called for that great reason " the day of redemption " (Eph. iv. 30). Now the very straggling nature of this experience might have cured us of the danger of being misled by the word ; but, strange to say, it has been differ- ent, and two disagreeable consequences remain of making a human word rule too literally the conduct of the Almighty. (i) When Christ redeemed. He redeemed, in the most general sense, all mankind. This is what the Bible asserts ; and it asserts it in the very face of the discrepance. It says, "Who is the Saviour of all men, especially of them that believe " (i Tim. iv. 10). The very idea of redemption has led men to refuse any such sense, and begotten those odious doc^mas in the Church, that Christ redeemed only Chap, v.] Redemption, 139 His people, and that there was really a limited atonement, and that millions are preached to who cannot possibly be saved, because ransom is a posi- tive thing, and Christ definitely ransomed only His people. Men seem insensible of the fact that they desperately outrage by such speech the more intel- ligent of the wicked. And it seems such wanton outrage. Hosts of words modify themselves by changes of circum- stance. Propitiation does not propitiate in any sense of softening the Deity. Expiation does not expiate. The guilty soul remains as guilty, in all but a narrow sense, after the sacrifice. Pardon does not pardon, for the pardoned soul sins and suffers. So redemption simply shadows the meaning, and the only way to arrive at it is to consult the facts. The exact condition of the facts is what the Bible means by the figure of redemption. (2) And when we consult the facts, another er- rancy must come in, which the strict word redemp- tion might seem to deny. Not only may a man be redeemed and yet not saved, and redeemed in a very substantial sense, making his own sinfulness now the only thing that can defeat his deliverance ; not only may a man be redeemed and yet born wicked ; not only may a man be converted, and yet be so little redeemed that he both sins and suffers, but a man may be converted and then fall and perish, and it is only the snare of speech that has fixed by these human vocables a different idea. Redeem is a criorious word when we remember 140 The God-Man. [Book IV. how much we are redeemed from, and how much the angels have endured for the lack of just our ran- som. But we are never safe in running wild with the word. We must stop to remember that it is just our ransom. It will not do to say that it bought for us another probation. It must do more or nothing. And yet it is equally false that it redeemed any body in the sense of no probation ; in the sense of no delay ; in the sense of no imperfectness, or, to crown the list, in the sense of not falling from grace, if the grace, so amply paid for, is resisted and grieved by returning to evil. The redemption, thus sketched, is the whole foren- sic work of our Redeemer. Since Luther this has been dangerously overset. If a man is redeemed, and enters upon his probation, what follows ? Un- doubtedly pardon. Now what does he need over and above pardon ? Luther says he needs justifica. tion, and in a most amazing degree this has been caught up by religious people. It has been echoed from pulpits since, as " the doctrine of a standing or falling Church." Yet what is pardon ? It is a relieving of the curse. And what is the curse? It is pain and sinfulness. And can a man be said to be pardoned whose sinfulness is not reduced ? Un- doubtedly not. Then what is the difference between reducing my sinfulness and making me righteous ? None, if I refer to that sort of righteousness, viz. : my diminished sinfulness, to which the word is ap- plied in this world. Will any one, therefore, please to indicate where Chap, v.] Redemption, 141 is the room for justification, I mean in the Protes- tant sense? I am redeemed. Under the influences of grace, I repent. My redemption becomes precious through success in my probation. As its result I am pardoned. As a result I am made holy; and of course we are to understand, I am made less sinful, for that is all the attainment of righteousness that we dis- cover in this world. Now how dishonoring to redemption to add to it justification ! Where can it come in ? Pardon continued to the last, and sanc- tification made complete in heaven, what can I have more ? And why disturb the fulness of re- demption by this vagary of these last centuries of time? It might be gravely asked, how Christ could spare His righteousness from His own standing in the court. He could spare His sufferings, because, by the very force of His righteousness. He did not deserve them. But, that apart, we have but one need in law. Grant that we be forgiven, and righteousness must follow. There is no cause for leaving us in sin if rid of guiltiness. Pay that off, and sanctifi- cation follows. And, with pardon for the past, and purity for the future, all forensic need is met, and we weaken redemption when we add to it another transfer. 14.2 The God-Man, [Book IV. CHAPTER VI. JUSTIFICATI ON. Justification, in the language of Luther, is the making over to us of the obedience of Christ, to serve as merit as though it were our own, and to be our quotable righteousness both in judgment and through eternity. We pronounce the doctrine an arrant superstition. And to guard against too swift a censure for so rough a speech, we win time for its defence by the shelter of a most startling statement. No mortal ever conceived of sucJi a doctrine till the time of Lnther. Has the Church sufificiently thought of that ? Her shelves groan with the testimony of the best of men. Never in a single instance do they breathe of righteousness except as one imparted inwardly to ourselves ! Match such a contrariety as to any great truth of modern symbols. Abraham, we admit, did not understand Christ ; and we might starve for any Christ in after Rabbinic testimonies. But that is not a parallel. " The doctrine of a standing or falling Church " not known in the church, and that for a millennium and a half, is a thing at least to pause at. A millennium and a half did not need it. Acute and earnest to the last, they did without it. Leaning on something else, they had no room for it. And, affectionately pious, the first Fathers of the church, like the great leaders afterward, filled up all the ground without so much Chap. VI.] Justification. 143 as dreaming of such a ^bstitution. Observe what they say. — Chemnitz says for them (though a dis- ciple of Melancthon), " We enter into no controversy with the Fathers, though, for the most part, they take justification for that renovation by which works of righteousness are wrought in us by the Spirit" (Exam. Cone. Trident., pars i., p. 6^6). Accord- ingly Ambrose, — '' The Spirit of God is given for justification, that he may justify by his help " (Ambrose, vol. ii., pars ult., p. 72). '' Say whether justification seems to be conferred on thee in body or in mind. But thou canst not doubt, since right- eousness, whence justification has been derived, is of the mind undoubtedly and not of the body " (lb., vol. i., p. 131). Then Augustine, — " Christ alone is He in whom all may be justified ; because, not only does the imitation of Him make men righteous, but grace regenerating by the Spirit " (Op., vol. x., p. 119). " For what is being justified other than being made righteous, to wit, by Him who justifies the ungodly, that from being ungodly he may be made righteous ? " (Vol. x., p. 228). " This justification, therefore, my brethren, we shall both have, just as far as we have it, and increase in proportion as we lack, and make perfect when we come where it shall be said, ' O death ! where is thy victory?' etc." (Vol. v., p. 922). ' *' When (nature) is justified from impiety by its Creator" (De Trin. Ixv., C. 8). '' Who has wrought righteousness in a man, but He who justifies the ungodly; that is, by His grace makes a righteous nian of an impious man.^" 144 ^-^^^ God-Alan. [Book I v. (Com. Ps. cxviii., vol. viii).» "As the salvation of the Lord is spoken of, not as that by which the Lord is saved, but as that which He gives to those whom He saves, so also the grace of God by Jesus Christ our Lord is called the righteousness of God, not because the Lord is righteous, but because He justifies those whom out of a condition of impiety He makes righteous" (Vol. v., p. 753). "That men may understand that they are justified from sins by the same grace by which it was effected that the man Christ could have no sins " (Vol. vi., p. 250). "Justification here is imperfect in us " (Vol. v., p. 867). " When our hope shall be com- pleted then also our justification shall be com- pleted " (Vol. v., p. 790). We charge that Luther, recoiling from the self- righteousness of his Church, went among the half- dozen subjective words of the gospel, and carried one off, and carried it over, without the least sub- jective difference, to the forensic side. It is rare that a theologic error can be so chronologically traced. The half dozen are these: — "We are (i) washed, we are (2) justified ; we are (3) sanctified ; " we are (4) cleansed ; we are (5) set free ; we are (6) quickened. Of these, half are a text in the Bible (i Cor. vi. 11), and that text itself tells the story. We are said to be justified " by the Spirit," (How is that for the forensic?), and "justified" in the same way with our being " washed " and " sanctified." Dr. Hodge asks what is the use of two words if justifying and sanctifying mean the same ? It is Chap. VI.] Justification. 145 an instance of the headiness of debate ; for, quite over-riding such an argument, and, indeed, smother- ing it up, is the fact that there are six words ; in reahty there are many more. Why should there not be ? How many words are there for God ? God is the most important being in theology : and Father, Word, and Holy Ghost, Jehovah, Jah and Shaddai, Lord and King, and Arm, Most High and Almighty, and in fact, a legion more, testify to the greatness of our Master. This gives the timber for a Trinity. A Tetrad could be con- ceived, and if there were a Paganism to back it, like the Triality myth, could be taught, and could be quoted for out of the Holy Books, — a Tetrad or a Quint, or any other celestial Pleiades. The '' Word " is almost the same emblem as the Breath {"■ Spirit ") ; yet, if the Fathers had their way, some of them would have schemed still other Per- sonages, and made the Arm and the Arch^ still further hypostatic in the essence of the Godhead (Cyprian, vol. ii., p. loi ; Clark's Ed., Irenaeus, Haer. i., 8. 5). But if God be the highest King, sanctification is His highest act, and why stumble at the thought that it should have many appellations ? Putting by this, we come to the graver plea that Justify does not mean sanctify, ?ind that ''righteous'' has a putative sense that takes it out of the category of the other adjectives. Where could there be a greater mistake ? There is no ethical term that is not putative in the word of God. 146 The God-Man. [Book IV. Paul says, " Holy brethren " (Heb. iii. i). Our blessed Master says, *' Now ye are clean " (Jo. xv. 3). The Psalmist says, '' Mark the perfect man " (Ps. xxxvii. 37). God tells Satan that Job, who cried out that his " own clothes would abhor him," and who said some bad things for a rigid follower of the Almighty, was ''a perfect and an upright man " (Job i. 8). It means simply that saints had become less sinful ; what else could it mean ? A dawning righteousness being all that is left upon our planet, is all that could use the name, scripturally among the saints, except, lower still, in comparisons among the wicked. When, therefore, an exegete says that, in the Bible, justify is solely forensic, his mistake is a curious one, for it divides itself oddly into three, (i) It cannot be solely forensic, for we are told of those who ''justify many" (Dan. xii. 3). Paul says we are " justified by the Spirit of God " (i Cor. vi. 11). Isaiah says, ''By his knowledge (of course under its subjective power) shall my righteous servant justify many" (Is. liii. 11). Christ Himself was justified in the Spirit. And John closes the revelation. " He which is filthy let him be filthy still, and he that is righteous, let him be justified still," ^ that is, " be made much more righteous " (Rev. xxii. 1 1). (2) It cannot be proved incontest- ably forensic by force of the fact that the other terms are so entirely subjective, for, oddly enough, the other terms are oftener putative than this par- * The Revisionists, however, adopt a various reading ; — " Let them 4o-righteousness stjll/' Chap. VI.] JustiJicatio7i, 147 ticular one which Luther bore away. This makes this idolism of the Reformed so strangely baseless. Christ says, *' Now ye are clean." Paul says, '' Now are they holy." And Paul's saying is worse than Christ's, for while Christ spoke to His filthy disciples, Paul was speaking of children, ungodly in their state, and, in vast numbers, never converted. We can't match that for putativeness in the uses of dinaio^. And when we come to the verbs, the instances are stronger. Moses says, " the priest shall cleanse him" (Lev. xiii. 13, 17), the meaning being so evi- dent that King James translates, shall " pronounce him clean." A little lower down " the priest shall foul him " (Lev. xiii. 6, 8, 1 1), that is, shall " pro- nounce him unclean" (E. V.). ''What God hath cleansed" (Acts x. 15), God Himself says, and that of heathen still in their wickedness. '' The unbelieving wife is sanctified of her husband " (i Cor. vii. 14), that being said by Paul of a lost woman, and she a Pagan. So that the word to "justify" is more free than the other words from these unsub- jective uses. (3) But, oddest of all, Luther claimed that to be forensic which he did not make forensic himself! Justification in the Lutheran ideal has outraged Roman Catholics ; it has driven away from the Reformed such men as Newman, and what is strange, achieved the whole by linguistic trifling. We have had pleaded for us the forensic meaning of the word to justify, and had given to it in the same breath other than a forensic meaning, and, disastrously above all, had given to it no mean- 14B The God-Man. [Book IV. ing, I mean by that given to it no meaning which the word possesses in any writing under Heaven ! What is a forensic meaning? A forensic meaning actually acquits a culprit of being unrighteous at all. That is not the Lutheran idea. When I justify the wicked (Is. v. 23), I assert his righteousness ; just as much as when I justify the righteous. When I justify God (Lu. vii. 29), I do the same. When I justify myself (Lu. x. 29), there is not a shade of difference. The caveat is never in the word, but, if at all, it is in my falsity. When the publican was ''justified," he was made "more " righteous than the other. I do not deny a putative idea to justify, for I have shown it in cleansing (Acts xi. 9), and in " sanctifying" (i Tim. iv. 5), but I do deny any further putative idea, and do hold that it is no known forensic sense, when I am not justified at all, but have made over to me in an unnecessary way the obedience achieved in another man's probation. What we mean by justifying, is the same that we mean by sanctifying, only, as in cleansing and quick- ening, with another pictorial impressiveness. When I read that I am not to have " my own righteousness which is of the law" (Phil. iii. 9), I mean that though *' the law " contain the Gospel, and is thun- dered to me from Sinai, and repeated by our Master, and I am told that the gospel part of the law is the more dangerous, so that speaking b}^ contrast, if He had not come and done the works that none other man did, we had not had sin, yet all this would not Chap. VI.] Justification, 149 convert a sinner. *' By works of the law no flesh would be made righteous." And the whole thing will be exhibited better by pausing on this very text, and settling its furthest meaning. Law {toraJi) is derived from a verb that means to throw. When I direct a traveller, I throw up my hand. Direction^ therefore, is the first idea of a law. Moses received direction on Sinai. And if we count the pages, we will find there was more of gospel on the Mount than of the Ten Commandments. Direc- tion, therefore, includes the gospel. And '' works of the law " is a title. that will reveal to us " works of our law," or works (whatever that means) of all that " law " or direction that we preach to the people every Sabbath day. Now let us draw nearer to the phrase. The general counterpart to it occurs some dozen times in Scripture. What does '' work of grace " mean ? If in a dozen texts such genitives had but a single meaning, could we hesitate? And that is the fortunate light that is shed upon the phrase, the " works of the law." Let us go over all the list. Works of light, works of the Devil, works of dark- ness, works of Christ, works of the Spirit, work of God, work of grace, work of faith, work of an evan- gelist, works of Abraham, works of the flesh, works of their hands ; this is a wide generalization ; and yet in every instance it means works produced by these things, and not works enjoined by these things. What a shame that this should have lain hid ! Works of the gospel, which answers in part to works of the 150 The God-Man. [Book IV. law, for the gospel was the chief of the direction given on Sinai, cannot mean enjoined by the gospel^ for they indeed would certainly save us ; but it means produced by the gospel, and simply declares, what Paul everywhere insists (i Cor. i. 18, iii. 6, I Thess. i. 5), that the gospel saves nobody ; that the throwing up a hand, and giving a direction is but the letter that killeth ; that Sinai with all its Christ, gendered to bondage (Gal. iv. 24) ; that the Sinais of the Church smoke use- lessly, without the Spirit; that they must come ** not in word only, but in power" (i Cor. iv. 20), and that by the works of the law, i. e., produced by the law, no single soul, that is merely preached to, has ever been delivered. It is idle to treat this with a scoff ; because we have the whole generaliza- tion. Till works of flesh mean something else than works produced by flesh, it is impossible to turn aside the one meaning for " works of the law." And now, in respect to 'j'ustified^' the speech will be pronounced wild, but wild speech ought to be easily refuted, and our venture is this, that there is not a case in the word of God, in which to justify appears in any gospel sense, in which it does not mean to make righteous, that is to make holy. The easiest way to exhibit this is to match it by expressions that have evidently the sub- jective sense. '' Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?" (Gal. iii: 2). Turning in the same context Godward, we have the equivalent idea, " He that ministereth to you Chap. VI.] Justification, 1 5 1 the Spirit (which surely means grace subjective), doeth he it by the works of the law, or by the hear- ing of faith ? "^ (Gal. iii. 2, 5.) Our position, therefore, will be understood. Justi- fication, in the Bible sense, is the great work of re- demption. It is the removal of our sinfulness. Sin- fulness being our heavier penalty, sanctifying or cleansing is our most essential release. Without a word of reserve or modification, that is what is meant by justifying. It is a work of Almighty grace. We hearof sanctifying "gold" and" gifts "and "guests " (Matt, xxiii. 17, 19, Zeph. i. 7), but w^e never hear of justifying them. We pray, " sanctified be Thy name " (Matt. vi. 9). If this varied use of the verb to sanc- tify does not destroy its subjectiveness in its tech- nical cases, such expressions as justifying the wicked (Is. V. 23), or justifying God (Lu. vii. 29), are not to destroy the subjective use of justifying. Hence to sum up : — Three things must be insisted on: — First, we are not a whit less forensic than Luther. Instead of putting our eggs in two baskets, we put them in one. We centre on redemption as sufficient for all our curse. Instead of weakening our view of the transference of Christ's sufferings to us, by mending what that could accomplish, and stating altogether a second imputation, we rest satisfied w^ith the first, and vest all our hope in one all-sufficient substitu- * As textual refutations require much space, and lie chiefly in the Epistle to the Romans, we beg to refer the reader to our own Com. on that book. 152 The God-Man. [Book IV. tion. Can that be a lessening of Christ which makes one transfer enough, and detects the vice of the Re- formed in inventing at this late day a dual depend- ence for our safety ? Second, we defend from alienation a vast deal of Scripture speech. Getting holy is man's highest change. Making holy is God's highest act. Pre- cisely this is Christ's only purchase. Being happy is a mere result. There ought to be many words to express the blessing. Detaching one of them, and that conspicuous on the list, dislocates the work of the Spirit : and Third, tempts the heretic. The Catholics know of our mistake. They have discussed it shrewdly. They refute it perfectly (see Newman and Bellar- mine). And finding us to be wrong, they mistrust us in other things. Permitting them one advantage, they assume many. And as with Islam in the instance of the Trinity, we build a Church up w^hich is all vile with fault, by allowing it to see that we are false and that it is true as to one of our more con- spicuous and common statements of the gospel. CHAPTER VII. PROBATION. We know of no person, unless it be God Himself, who has arrived at permanent blessedness without probation."^ Of all the instances of probation that have occurred in the universe, we can conceive of * If there be any exception to this, it is in idiots and infants. Chap. VII.] Probation. 153 but six: (i) the instance of other worlds; (2) the instance of Adam ; (3) the instance of Angels ; (4) the instance of Demons ; (5) the instance of Christ ; (6) the instance of His people. In all these, two things are to be noticed ; first, that no one has either lost or won except through his own exertion, and, second, that no one has ever won, not Gabriel, not Christ, not any of His people, except from free grace from God Almighty. "Who maketh thee to differ? " is a question that might be asked from all of them. This is an intensely interesting theologi- cal fact. Men are in the habit of imagining that grace is favor to the wicked. It is not so. Grace is favor. That is the meaning of the word. Favor to the wicked is eminent grace, but favor to Gabriel was all that saved him. Had Satan recognized this he would not have fallen. We say it is intensely interesting, because it clears, more than anything, two facts ; first, entire moral agency, and, second, entire divine help. That will be a grand theology that will keep these two things together. We are accustomed to see moral agency in the instance of Gabriel, and to proclaim him free, and to count him meritorious. We are convinced that he won his ovv^n integrity, and fancy that Paul is with us ; and that the angelic victory was by works, and by self-conquest with which man has nothing to do. We venture to remark that man is saved by works as much as Gabriel. Let us make here a great dis- tinction. We put out of sight altogether grace forensic. Throw that over the wall. We build a 154 The God-Man. [Book IV. coffer-dam, and shut out one set of gospel facts in absolute separation. We have nothing to do with them. As concerns his situation in- court Gabriel stood upon his works, and was forensically perfect. It is the opposite of all this in man which is climb- ing over the wall and mixing itself perpetually with his oblis:ation to do work. Works can't save him forensically, but works must save him in his pro- bation. Gabriel was created and put upon his trial. He must be saved sheerly by his agency. And yet he must be saved by grace. This we fix much quicker in the instance of Gabriel than in the instance of ourselves. And again, it was free to him to stand, and to do so, as all admit, necessarily by his moral agency. Then Adam came upon the scene, and with the identical moral trial. Then Christ was drafted for the fight, and with the identi- cal probation ; that is to say, He must stand by His own moral act, and He must lean heavily for help upon the God within Him. What is forensical must be put quite out of sight, for there man and angel differ immensely; but what is probational brings all tribes together. No soul without a probation. And, that one tribe starts fair and that another tribe starts fallen, makes no difference as to the facts ; grace and personal exertion must reign in all of them. If any man ask, therefore, how much must I look for in myself, and how much must I look for in my Maker ? I give him his clearest view by pointing him to Gabriel. I say how much had he to look Chap. VII.] Probation. 155 for? In one conscious sense entirely to himself and in one conscious sense entirely to his Creator, and we do not begin to understand the nature of grace till we feel that we are put upon a trial as much as Adam. It will be seen that this alters entirely the nature of redemption. It is not a common ransom like many on our planet. It did not finish transgression and make an end of sin, so that when Christ died everybody was bought off, and, like a disinfected ship, the pestilence w^as ended. It was rather like a chance to try again. Adam had a chance to remain holy. We have a chance to recover holiness. This was the purchase of our Sufferer. Grace was re- quired for Gabriel, but more grace is required for us; in fact very different grace; for, in the first place, forensic satisfaction had to be procured, and then abnormal influences. The actual results were these : — First, a new probation was offered, with abnormal influences of grace to assist the combat- ants, and, second, forensic satisfaction, so that a faithful combatant should be rid of his guilt, and win his way back into the garden of the blessed. I do not see that I am omitting anything. We shall hear the outcry. Salvation by works ! Paul says, There is such a thing (Rom. ii. 13). We shall explain that in another chapter. Suffice it to say. Redemption sheer Is not met with. Otherwise all men altogether would be redeemed, and that from all sin and from the beginning. Broken of that, we have to feel our way for the reality, and the 156 The God-Man. [Book IV. reality comes to this, that the poor sinner has another chance, out of unmerited grace, as by a ran- som, with forensic release if he applies for it, with gradual betterment if he tries after it, and with sovereign grace, allthe way higher and more remark- able and yet not a whit more decisive than that which saved the angelic remnant. If I be asked. Do you believe, therefore, as an Arminian, that grace floats like an atmosphere about our planet, and that the saved soul is the one that is shrewd enough to breathe it, and that the richness of this grace and the forensic settlement that will follow are just that which was purchased by the blood of sprinkling, I say. Unquestionably not. Gabriel was saved by grace. Moses was saved by grace. Gabriel did not snatch at a circumambient influence, the same as floated by the less prudent Lucifer ; but he was what the Bible calls an elected angel (i Tim. v. 21), and yet it is easier to see in him than in a lost man, that it was himself that saved himself; that he had to stir himself up to lay hold of the Almighty (Is. Ixiv. 7), and yet that a downright and special grace seized him and stirred him and made him to differ. These two facts have to be held in solution, the one with the other. Instrumentally he saved him- self, and yet, sovereignly, the Almighty saved him, by influences that moved upon his will and held him steadfast by their superior graciousness. And yet, if the question be asked. Why is William saved more than Richard, or to go out to a clearer Chap. VII.] Probation. 157 atmosphere, Why was Gabriel saved more than Satan, we have to go back toward that circumam- bient thought, after all. God is no respecter of per- sons. He has certain rules for saving His creatures. He never changes. We can change, but not He. Gabriel had really privileges that God had not. Known unto God from the beginning are all His works. We are undoubtedly free. We may repent to-morrow, and do those simple things which will invite deliverance. But God is governed by a plan. We cannot sufificiently remember that that plan is eternal righteousness. He can save one man, and not another. And Paul lets us into some occasions ; for he says (tracing his salvation to himself), I ob- tained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbe- lief (i Tim. i. 13). And even Christ is not ashamed to utter principles that govern God, for He says, " Father, forgive them ; they know not what they do " (Lu. xxiii. 34). Probation, therefore, with grace to use it to our advantage, is the shape in which Christ's redemp- tion comes to His people. And a man may be saved by effort of his own, as surely as Adam could have been saved, or Gabriel could have been saved, or Satan or Christ could have been saved, that is by grace appearing in these very efforts, made possible by a righteous plan, and administered to those who are pointed out for it by eternal rectitude. 158 The God-Man. [Book l v. CHAPTER VIII. REGENERATION, SANCTIFICATION, REPENTANCE, AND CONVERSION. It is useful to fix theology by points, as a sculptor does his clay model. One pin that can be fixed, is a better life. All pardon must come through a proba- tion, and, as all probationers, even the vilest, have a conscience, the pin that can be fixed is this, that whereas, before his pardon, a sinner was grow- ing worse, at the date of pardon he converts, that is, he grows better ; to speak with respect to God, he is converted, that is, he is made better ; he is sanc- tified, a word that alludes to his betterment after- ward as well as to the first act of betterment ; he is regenerated, which is the first act of betterment alone ; and he repents, that is, he thinks back to what he has been in the past, and hates, on its own account, his discovered wickedness. These all indi- cate one thing as of God and as of the man. Con- version and repentance indicate it as of the man, and conversion (in a transitive sense), regeneration and sanctification indicate it as of God. But all these vocables cover the one change. The change is a fixed pin. Fix what others we may, this one will never be displaced. And it is of infinite importance in preaching. The man who grows better, is being saved. The man who grows worse, is being lost. And the betterment must be in the ten command- ments, that common improvement in morals which consists in higher benevolence and higher regard for the principle of virtue. Chap. VIIL] Regeneration etc. 159 And, now, a fixing of this moral pin settles some things peremptorily. Other pins may be fixed, but they must not interfere with this. (i) A man who preaches. Grow better and you will be saved, or. Grow worse and you will be lost, is not preaching law simply, but gospel. (2) The man who says. The soul is active in sanc- tification, but passive in regeneration, has pulled the one pin out and set in two. If repentance be the beginning of a saved life, and regeneration be its beginning also, and repentance be so absolutely the beginning, that nothing but forensic ransom precedes it in the order of events; moreover, if we are com- manded to be regenerate (Jer. iv. 14, Ez. xviii. 30-32), precisely with the same emphasis with which we are commanded to repent, and if the grace to make us repent is precisely the same grace that makes us regenerate, what a snare it is to lift an ounce weight from our sense of obligation, and to produce what has actually been the result (Is. v. 19), a waiting for the coming of the Spirit, in that which, of all other moments, should be summoning our utmost activeness. All our help must come from our Creator. All our righteousness must have its light given from on high. But not only had we some light before, viz., our common conscience ; not only had we more light just before, viz., our convicted conscience; not only was this convicted conscience at work, and that in the most active form ; but, in the very act of conversion, and, speaking simply in an obverse view, in the very 1 60 The God-Man, [Book IV. act of being converted (in which there is no difference from being regenerated),convicted conscience merged into converted conscience, no moment relaxing its acts, but each moment increasing them as the very subjects of God's moving graciousness. To this agrees the idea that we are saved by the truth. What influence could the truth have unless winged by the Spirit ? And what wing could the truth have except the wing of thought, and the power that it could exert as God's actual power, not on a passive state, but on a state active with thought, approaching the right condition, and moved on to it, not in the dead of sleep, but work- ing its salvation with fear and trembling (Phil, ii. 12)? (3.) It may be said, we speak nothing about faith, and that is the thing we have yet to explain. We have fixed one sculptor's point, and in faith we proceed to set in another. It is like a tent pin ; it must not be allowed to pull out its mate. When we come to speak of faith, it must start fair like horses upon a track. The theologians tell us that sanctification is the consequence of faith (Hodge, Syst. Theol., vol. iii., p. 108). This is true in one unfair particular — that sanctification is the conse- quence of sanctification, or one degree of faith of another. But that anything displaces our first pin, viz., that betterment is the very dawning of the gospel, is to flout Christ, who began, '' Repent," is to provoke the prophet, who said, " Make you anew heart " (Ez. xviii. 31), and is to counter-teach the Chap. VIII.] Regeneration etc. i6i apostles, who, we are told plainly, went out every- where teaching Repentance and Conversion for the remission of sins (Acts ii. 38, iii. 19). To say that holiness is the effect of faith (Hodge, vol. iii., p. 109), is to forget all that the theologians them- selves have taught. What is regeneration but a moral change ? Nevertheless we have been dis- tinctly warned that faith is the effect of regenera- tion {ib. vol. iii., p. 59). Now to teach that faith is the effect of regeneration, and then to teach that regeneration is the effect of faith, is to make fun of all logic. The radical idea is an error. Faith, as we shall see, is itself a holy act. It is one of the things that regeneration appears in, like charity or holy liv- ing. This is a definition that Luther displaced. Common faith is not a fruit of regeneration ; but when common faith has driven us to terror, the prayer we offer is heard in saving faith; that is as much a holiness as repentance or any grace. The whole choir of graces spring into existence at a blow. They are all regeneration. They are all sanctifica- tion and newness of life. And Christianity on earth is nothing but a series of faith : love and any other divine perception being but the opening of a moral eye ^ (Matt. vi. 22, Eph. i. 18), the receiving of the love of the truth (2 Thess. ii. 10) and, of course, the essence and beginning of a life of holiness. *\Ve stamp, thereftre, upon our covers Christ's great text about the " EYE" ; and, above all, upon the title-page, that long-lost wording of the MSS., not, '■'■the eyes of your urtderstandingbemg enlightened'''' (E. V.), but "the eyes of you?- heart '^ (Re.), a great boon from the Greek, and a great motto for reform in the Metaphysics and in the Hermcnentics of our common Protestantism. 1 62 The God-Man, [Book IV. CHAPTER IX. FAITH. Redemption not being redemption absolute but conditioned, and the condition of redemp- tion being success in a new trial, it has pleased God that success in that new probation shall not be achieved without His help, and that His help shall not be received without asking for it, and that with persevering strength. This, perhaps, is not peculiar, for we have already surmised that Gabriel won his victory by asking help. Perhaps it is not even inexplicable ; for, the thing needed being holi- ness, and God being the fountain of all good, it would seem impossible that a man should set out to get betterment of life without two things, first, an effort to be better, and, second, a prayer for it ; and these are the two great seminal graces, watching and prayer, and the latter of these is done up in that current word in theology, so frightfully abused, which we wish now to discuss, viz.. Faith. The unregenerate long after some subterfuge. The Patriarchs found it in sacrifices; the Jews, in circumcision and the blood of Abraham ; the Catho- lics, in confession and an outward Mass ; the Protest- ants, in Faith. This is really the history of the true religion. It begins pure, with a downright demand upon the soul of a better life, and it is evaded every time. We are not sure that the church is not more corrupt now than in the days of Luther, and that Chap. IX.] Faith. 1 63 enormous frauds, most often through the confidence of good men, are not indicative of a more dignified form of wickedness, but of a wickedness more pro- foundly deep than of those vulgar grossnesses which prevailed in the age of the Reformed. The fiction of the Protestant religion is more strangely insidious than Ashtaroth or the Popish Mass. It is, that men can get to Heaven by believ- ing things. To put it in familiar words, that faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, made as simple as we can, and with everything dissected out of it save a per- sonal trust to Him, will save a soul. See how the real condition is dexterously evaded. Christ's first outcry was. Repent. We have seen how a moral betterment was the first requirement of salvation. The world has heard it and escaped it from the Patriarchs down ; and now we have it moved back and got out of the way in our highest Protest- antism by the idea that repentance is the conse- sequence of faith (Hodge, vol. iii, 108-9), ^^<^ by the Pelagian thought that he that believes will be will- ing to obey, from his acknowledgment of his debt to the Christ that saves him (Hodge, vol. iii. p. 94). Let us plainly exhibit, therefore, what faith is. It is not a mere believing. The man who has the sharpest faith is not the man most likely to be saved. Some old negress may have scarcely any. A man may be convicted every year, and that with the very strong- est beliefs ; and if belief be all, and that dissected down to the very simplest conception of believing, where is the difference, and what change does the 164 The God-Ma7t, [Book IV. man's believing take on, when it emerges from that which is common into that which must be totally another thing, viz., gracious and saving ? Now supply one feature, and the difficulty van- ishes. Say simply that it must be MORAL. Bring back the old Catholic definition that it must be '* a faith infused with love." A man will be regener- ated when he does two things, (i) try to be holy, and (2) call upon God for help. He must do it per- severingly. Indeed, short of full perseverance, what is his condition? Surely not a saved one. And yet, in his earnest calling, he has undoubted faith. He would not call unless he believed. And yet his belief does not save him (except as the im- pulse a parte ante) till his prayer is heard. The whole enterprise, I mean the whole man's earnest setting out to pray, is covered by that vocable ''^ faith!' and yet it is not a successful enterprise till it succeeds, that is, till God hasshined into the heart, and blessed moral illumination makes the faith the faith of a regenerated conscience. This solves the puzzle to which I have already alluded. If faith were the effect of regeneration, and holiness the effect of faith, we would have the sole- cism, that a moral change was that which produced faith, and that faith was that which produced a moral change. Whereas, if faith itself must be esteemed moral, then it takes its place with love and hope and all our moral grace. It is but one act of a new- born sanctification, and a very seminal act, because a common faith mergres into it. A common faith Chap. IX.] Faith, 165 brought me to my knees ; a common faith was the beginning of an essential seeking ; and just that, an essential seeking, when effused with moral suc- cess, is but another name for faith, and an abund- antly sufficient name for actual regeneration. I do not care to settle the question how far a faith in God must be a faith in the blessed Redeemer. Of the original Great Po^^er **he that cometh must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him." How far it must be God in Christ, no mortal can determine. The *' Father of the faithful "could hardly have understood Him, or Solomon either, or Peter either (Acts i. 6), or Salome either (Matt. xx. 21), or Cornelius either (Acts X. i). How far a man can be ignorant of Emmanuel, and yet repent, no tongue can tell. No man can do without Emmanuel, for He must look after our forensic state (Heb. ix. 22); no saint can reject Emmanuel, if He is preached to him, and he looks Him in the face (Lu. x. 16, i Cor. xii. 3); but that a man may misunderstand Emmanuel, or be largely ignorant of His person, is a condition the salvableness out of which no mortal can settle, if only the man believes in his Maker, and believes in that mercy and love so beautifully incarnate in that misunderstood Deliverer. To get ready for the next chapter we are ready now to take very strong ground. All righteous- ness, in the second meaning of that word, that is, not (i) quality, and not (3) character, but (2) things that possess the quality, or form the character, must 1 66 The God-Man. [Book IV. be actual exercises, or, to come closer down, things that are instances of the emotion of benevolence or the love of holiness. If faith be such an instance, if the Roman Catholic account of it is true, and fides forniata, being saving, is faith infused with love, then faith, when it reaches that quality of holiness, has as good a right to be the condition of salvation as any other holy exercise. The Bible tells us we are saved by hope (Rom. viii. 24), ^ve are saved by love (Ex. XX. 6, Jas. i. 12), we are saved by the new birth (Ti. iii. 5), we are saved by works (Rom. ii. 13), we are saved by patience (Matt. x. 22) ; it not even shrinks from our being saved by baptism (i Pet. iii. 21), baptism, in that case, meaning all that the emblem shadows forth. And it is especially fond of exalting faith ; and the reason is not far to travel after. If seeking God is essential to deliverance, and faith is nothing more than seeking God, then (like repentance when it is no more common re- pentance), when it becomes saving-faith, and, like alms-giving, when it is no more from imperfect motive, it enters the round of graces, and if hope (made at last holy), will be our salvation, faith eminently will, and that it was imputed to Abraham for righteousness has nothing to do with a forensic act, and means that the Great Patriarch himself was accounted righteous. The very form of the statement, then, is easily managed. It was imputed to him. He was not really righteous. His very miracle of faith was a grievous short-coming. *' There is no just man Chap. IX.j Faith, 1 67 (Ec. vii. 20). We have looked at that already. When Phinehas slew the Midianitess (Num. xxv. 8), it sends a sunbeam into our chapter through the imputation of that for righteousness (Ps. cvi. 30, 31), and it shows what that expression means. It means what Christ meant (Jo. xv. 3), and what Paul meant (i Thess. V. 27), and what Job meant (Job xvii. 9), and what the whole Bible means, when they call men holy who are less sinful. It means a righteous- ness of their own. It means the dawning of a better life. It means what would consign a man to the pit if it were not some day better. It means what Paul calls the hope of righteousness which is by faith. It means the path of life which is upward for the wise, to depart from hell beneath (Prov. XV. 24). It means that Phinehas believed God, and was warmed up in that act to a high moral life : but that what was righteousness in him was sinful, be- cause it was a condition of only less sinfulness ; that it was called righteousness for short, and for its promise in its growth and end ; and, therefore, that with Abraham and with Phinehas and with all the saints, that is true which has been spoken, that their very best righteousnesses were but as filthy rags. We can understand now a great round of Scripture texts. We are said to be '' sanctified " or ^' purified " or (as we shall see in the next chapter) "justified" in different relations to faith. These relations are expressed by cases and by prepositions. Let us study this whole subject. The prepositions are 1 68 The God-Man. [Book l v. three, in, by, and out of. The cases are two, Genitive and Dative. And first of the Genitive ; when we read of *' the righteousness of faith " (Rom. iv. 13) we mean that which consists of faith, and we defy any Greek scholar to understand it differently. '* Obedience of faith " (Rom. i. 5) means faith as the absolute obe- dience, or, in other words, that vital obedience of the sinner which is urged upon him in that vital duty of seeking God (Ps. xxiv. 6). " Hearing of faith " (Gal. iii. 2) means that hearing which faith does or has. The Genitive in all such instances is the '' Genitive of material.'' Then comes the Dative. " Purifying their hearts by faith " (Acts xv, 9) means, if we study the cases, '' in the shape of faith," or that the faith was itself the purity. By faith we understand (Heb. xi. 3). Why ? Because the understanding is itself the faith. And so of the other sentences. '' By faith Abel offered unto God." That is faith made the offer- ing. Coming nearer : " Sanctified by faith " (Acts xxvi. 18). In this case sanctification is the faith. Strong in faith (Rom. iv. 19), and weak in faith (Rom. iv. 20), access in faith (Rom. v. 2), standing by faith (Rom. xi. 20), justified by faith (Rom. iii. 28), continuing in faith (Col. i. 23), striving (Phil. i. 27), united (Heb. iv. 2), steadfast (i Pet. v. 9), building yourselves (Jude 20) in faith, all show the Dative of material, and all mean that the strength and the weakness and the access and the stand and the continuance and the striving and the uniting Chap. IX.] Faith. 1 69 and the steadfastness and the building and, there- fore also, the justification, are the faith ; the weak- ness itself even (Rom. iv. 19), being the material state of the weak believer. When the prepositions are introduced, the idea changes a little. It changes very little in fV, a little more in in, or out of, and a good deal more in 8ia, or by means of. Let us give instances of each of the three : When Paul says, '' I live by faith of the Son of God " (Gal ii. 20), the preposition is iv ; and the sense has but little divergence from the material Dative. The idea is that the faith is the life. When he says, ''established in faith " (Col ii. 7), it means, as far as human eye can see, the same as '' estab- Hshed in faith " (Acts xvi. 5) with the material Dative. The translators have no right to say, " in the faith," for the article is appearing always. They should translate it generally, or omit it generally.^ *We have been greatly interested in this by a recent study of Jude. An unnoticed aim of that epistle is to warn against a fall from grace. "Kept in Jesus Christ " (v. i), corresponds to a closing counsel, "keep yourselves in the love of God '' (v. 21) ; and the danger of not persevering is expressed by the Israelites' passing the sea and then smitten in the wilderness (v. 5), and again still more appositely by the angels' keeping not their first estate (v. 6). The Apostle gives a re- cipe against such a disaster by the veiy peculiar and very intelligent entreaty that we push faith, when we once get it in possession. " Urgently exert faith when once bestowed " (v. 3). The same idea occurs afterward — " Building yourselves up on your very holiest faith "(v. 20); the commandment being, that, in order to keep our faith, we are to push it when once possessed ; the warrant for such a translation being, first, that "'the faith," as meaning the thing to be believed, is probably without warrant, no such use being found in the classics, the article meaning nothing in the case (see Matt. ix. 22. Lu. xviii. 8, Acts xv. 9), and no text of Scripture meaning neces- 170 The God-Man. [Book IV. It Is used In the most spiritual sentences. And, therefore, when the English gives it, " Stand fast in the faith " ( i Cor. xvl. 13), it gives it with no more right than in a score of other sentences (Rom. Hi. 25, 30, 31, iv. 14, 19, 20, I Cor. xiii. 2). The mean- ing is, that we are to stand fast in faith, and the iv manifests that " in " which we are to stand fast, viz., that faith itself is the thing to be established. With 8K it begins to veer a little. Faith is not only itself our righteousness, but the germ of a bet- ter and a higher. We are sanctified out of our faith as an earnest of growth, as well as in it as the inatei'ial thine. The ideas are different. Faith is itself sancti- fication, inasmuch as, being a moral act, it is as much holiness as hope or love or what, as belonging to a sinner, is holiness itself (i Tim. ii. 15). But faith also is a promise of more, and, therefore, in is highly appropriate. And not to tarry, 8ioc is of the same complexion. Not only is faith itself sanctification ; not only is it a germ of more sanctification {iit), but still further, too, it is as an instrument of sanctification. " By means of {dia) faith " is no more a puzzle in cleans- ing, than by means of charity, or by means of holy living. And as faith, after it becomes holy, still em- bosoms the seeking, which, as we have seen, is a peremptory demand of God, It should give us no sarily any such thing (i Tim. i. 2, Ti. i. 2, iii. 15); second, that fighting the good fight of faiih (i Tim. vi. 12, see Greek), is a cor- responding sentence (see also 2 Tim. iv. 7); and, thirdly, that this subjective sense is a much more salutary one than the blast on the bugle-horn of a vain sectarianism. Chap. IX.] Faith, 171 trouble to see that we are justified, or sanctified, or made better (for to Augustine they were the same) by means and make it lay all its accent upon intelligent believing. The fruit of this is an immense exaggeration of doctrine, and an immense decay of righteousness of life. The like may be said of the doctrine of Perse- verance. Richard Baxter tells us that it was not known in the church for a thousand years (End Controv., chap. xxii). Augustine distinctly pro- claims that we may fall from grace (Migne's ed., vol. X. pp. 927-8). Hardly have we got the idea that life is a probation, before, first of all, it is superficial- ized by mere doctrinal faith, and then dismissed Chap. XVI.] Perseverance, 193 altogether by one act of faith as fixing us unchange- ably. The Scriptures give us no such warrant. We are told that the " just shall live by faith, but if he (see Revision) draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him" (Heb. x. 38). The meddling of King James's version with this simplicity is one of those suspiciousnesses that ought to make us scrutinize the whole belief for which the addition " if any man " has undoubtedly been made. The strongest expres- sions for conversion are used in connection with the strongest expressions for falling away. ** When the righteous turneth away from his righteousness " (Ezek. xviii. 24). This spectacle is repeated in many forms (Lu. xxii. 32, Heb. x. 39, Lu. viii. 13, 14). "■ Enlightened and tasted of the heavenly gift," says the Apostle Paul ; how could it be more express ? He goes on, ** Partakers of the Holy Ghost" ''tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come," and then boldly meets the contingency, " if they shall fall away " (Heb. vi. 4-6). It is trifling to try to dissipate such affirmations. " If we sin wilfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth " (Heb. x. 26). Peter, who ought to have understood apostasy if anybody did, says, ** Better not to have known the way of righteous- ness, than, after we have known it, to turn, etc." (2 Pet. ii. 21), and the very text that is always quoted in our modern Reformed creeds to establish the doc- trine of perseverance, comes, when we scrutinize it narrowly, to be one of the strongest the other way. 194 The God-Man, [Book iv. It tells us that *' he that hath begun a good work in you, will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ " (Phil. i. 6), but just as we are beginning to suppose that that settles the matter, Paul spoils it all by giv- ing a reason. Why do we require a reason if every- body perseveres ? He gives a reason why those special followers of Emmanuel will be sure to go on. He gives a reason incident to his own manner of labor. Every creed quotes this text, but it is spoiled for their purposes by this word ** BECAUSE. " It points to Paul as inspired. " I have prayed for you " (vs. 4-9, see also Lu. xxii. 32). They differed from other men. They had a discernerof spirits to announce their persevering piety; just as, with no discernment, or, at least, any claim to being in- spired, a mother, overflowing with faith, might announce her feeling sure that the child of her un- ceasing thought would, in the end, be brought into the kingdom. When we climb higher, and appeal to great blocks of texts, and make one truth bear upon another, our point becomes still stronger. Men appeal to election, and a favorite feeling is, if a m.an be elected, of course he must necessarily persevere. We do not doubt it. And Augustine never doubted that, but distinctly stated it. But that is a mere tautology. If a man is elected, he is elected. What does it say more than that? If God elects a poor sinner, what could He say less than that? If God elects me to be saved. He must sure enough elect me, and how can He elect me, unless He gives me grace to the Chap. XVI.] Perseverance. 195 last, for he that endureth to the end alone shall be saved (Matt. x. 22). Election, therefore, has noth- ing to do with falling away ; for the very question is, whether every converted man is elected to salva- tion? And now, to bring on another block, all those texts that have to do with redemption. How can a man be redeemed, and not finally persevere ? We have already studied much on this point (B. iv., chap. v.). Redemption has different boundaries. We were redeemed at the cross (2 Pet. ii. i), some too more literally than the others (i Tim. iv. 10). We were redeemed when we became saints (i Cor. i. 3o\ but some more thoroughly and abidingly than their fellow believers (Matt. xiii. 20, 21). Again, we are to be redeemed among the blest (Eph. iv. 30), and then, for the first time, not to fall away (Jo. x. 28, 29, I Pet. i. 3-7). What exactly is the point, that redemption forbids apostasy ? Surely the first kind of redemption does not. All men have been died for, but all men are not kept from losing the bless- ing. Where then are the special texts that forbid apostasy? A thousand things come to us by re- demption, light and truth and churches, and ordi- nances and daily visitations of the Spirit (Job vii. 18); anon the deepest convictions flowing directly from the cross, and what appears thorough conver- sion with every sign of being genuine (Rev. ii. 2-5). What shall determine that all these others shall spring from Christ, but the sprouting upon the rocks (Matt, xiii, 5) not, or what Ezekiel calls downright 1 96 The God-Man. [Book IV. and actual '' righteousness ? " It is, after all, a mere begging of the question. And the same may be said of what seems to rouse still more horror, viz., that the life of 6^^<^ should go out. Either this is the same horror as the other, or it is not. If the same, we have already answered it. If it is not, it is quite apart from it. If the life of God is quite apart from redemption, I mean in the pres- sure of the argument, then it is easy to discuss. What greater life of God can there be than was in Satan? If I feel to myself very much propped up by the Spirit, how much more was Adam propped up ! I have the first fruits of the Spirit. Lucifer had Him at the full. I tremble with unbelief. Adam was perfect in his confidence. If my life of God is a poor trembling thing, which could be snuffed out by an accident of trial, how can I con- sider that profane, when God's highest life, viz., the most splendid piety of the time, was snufifed out in Satan, and, as Ezekiel expresses it, was never ''men- tioned " (Ez. xviii. 24)? Recollect, we do not rest upon these rationalistic arguments, but shape them to meet their like. Our great agreement with Augustine is built on the very explicitnesses of the words of God (Ez. xviii. 24, Heb. X. 38). Chap. XVII.] History of the Trinity. i(^7 CHAPTER XVII. HISTORY OF THE TRINITY The Christology which we have thus far found, and the gospel which we have thus far laid bare, are strangely simple and complete, and yet utterly in- dependent of any Trinity. A mystery like that must either make or mar. It is so full of intent, that, if it hang for a moment in the wind, it shakes with suspicion. If God need not be divided, from eternity, or place a second Person in the man, or send a Third Person on the errand of the new birth, and, in this way, the simplicity of God can be preserved ; and if the closest scrutiny of Scrip- ture shows that what Christ satisfied was not a First Person, and that what He bought and sent was not a Third Person, but that He satisfied the One Per- son, and sent the same Person, and was, too, Himself the same One Person, the whole Christological effect was strangely simplified. What Christ needed to satisfy, was justice ; what He needed to do it with, was suffering ; what He needed for suffering, was a finite nature ; what He needed to give it value and make it tell upon our race, was the right of a God ; what He needed to keep Him innocent and to make His people innocent, was the power of a God. God and man, therefore, and the more simple the union the better, are the only elements of Christology. And when Dorner says, " That the doctrine of the Trinity was indebted for its development to Christ- i 98 The God-Man. [Book IV. ology is universally acknowledged " (i A. p. 354), he really bears a testimony such that when it is found that the Holy Ghost never does anything that God may not do, and that Christ never does anything that either the man deified or the God impersonate in the man may not through the One Great Person always accomplish, he really opposes the Trinity rather than helps it. The Trinity is such an artifice as cannot lie idle. Once dig around it and sap under its base and make it appear that it has no necessary force in the offices of salvation, and it is turned out to die. It is too expensive of our faith, and has made too many covers for blatant unbelief, to keep it long in its place, if it once appears as not necessary to salvation. And to get it ready for such a fate, we are to ask the question, Where did the Trinity come from ? We do not admit the necessity for such a question. There is implied under it the idea that peculiar doc- trines must have a detected origin. That notion will not hold. Must transmigration have a detected origin because it is peculiar? Let errors account for themselves ! The Mass is very peculiar. Has it a claim on that account ? But as a step for its own sake, and a wonderful confirmation of the Scripture, we wish to show that what cannot be found there, can be found elsewhere, and that this strange belief, which has enabled dan- gerous heretics, like Mohammed, to score a strong point against the gospel, entered by a Pagan door, and triumphed by the best learning of the Greeks, Chap. XVII.] Histoiy of the Trifiity. 199 and has scandalized the Church by half the follies that she herself gives up as Pagan heresies. Now, to do all this, we mean to pursue a peculiar plan. If we gave a continuous history, and filled up all the outline with what we believed to be the fact, we would be harassed by assault, and lose the main points in distracting defence of the detail. Like a mountain city that made its crossings of high step- ping stones that the rain torrents might pass between, we mean to take conceded facts, and by these few numbered tokens show where the Trinity came in, and how it travelled down without the least Scripture authority except from spurious revelation (I Jo. V. 7). In the first place, Noah became a God, and his three sons started the world in a Triad as the " Three Kings " of the old philosophy. We merely mention this. Some will believe it. Some will deny it. We rest nothing upon it. We believe that these three saviours of the world were deified in Egypt (where Kham (Ham) or Ammon was the admitted leader), were philosophized upon by Zeno and his time, and confessedly fell to Plato as the foundation of his mischief-bearing Three. Some will deny this ; but nearly everybody will accept it. Still we neither rest upon it or number it, and merely mention it as paving the way for many minds to the numbered facts which all are forced to acknowledge. I. First, the Pagans had a Trinity, and that written out in many a sentence in their first philosophers. 2CX> The God-Man. [Book IV. This no one who submits to chapter and verse will be likely to deny. II. Second, the Scriptures had no Trinity; I mean by that, revealed none ; I mean by that, could not have succeeded in revealing any, through the four thousand years of the earlier canon. It is astonish- ing how all agree. And is not the insistence mon- strous — that the Trinity is the foundation of Christ ; that its belief is essential to salvation (A. A. Hodge, Outl., p. 198); that Newton and Milton and Locke and Watts must have been damned for the want of it ; and yet, that for four thousand years the world had it in a spurious shape, but the Church was with- out it, or, if she was not, had it by some other books than those brought down to us as their ancient revelation ? Is not this a token, at the very start, that this cannot be a vital doctrine, which, like no other vital doctrine in the list, is believed by Bellarmine and Calixtusand Petaviusand Theodoret and CEstertzee and most of the Reformed theolo- gians to be incapable of proof, as Calixtus expresses it, " from the Old Testament Scriptures alone." III. The Jews, while they taught no Trinity, or, to rule ourselves down to a precise form in the admission, while their Scriptures do not impart any, had a superstition, notorious to scholars, of refus- ing to pronounce the name Jehovah. They said Adhonai (Lord) when they came to those other let- ters. Two hundred times the Targums or Aramaic paraphrases, even before they became written, put ''the Word of Jehovah'' in the place of the more Chap. XVII.] History of the Trinity. 201 dreadful utterance. The Septuagint embalmed this by throwing out what they dreaded, and we have followed suit. By a strange Gentile compliance we have framed our English so as to say ''^ the Lord** almost always in the Older Scriptures,^ instead of the august word wdiich the Jews, out of mere super- stition, were afraid to pronounce. Clear this, there- fore, down to its absolute intimation. The Jews, no matter what their motive, by the confession of every- body, had filled their literature with a certain ex- pression to avoid uttering the name Jehovah, and that certain expression, ''the Word of Jehovah," was rife upon their lips when Plato or his followers were teaching a Trinity. IV. Fourth, Ptolemy at last brought them to Egypt. He founded his University. He rallied at one spot the learning of our planet. He immensely advanced it. He created Jewish literature to such an extent that its Augustan age began at Alex- andria. Recollect, he was no Jew. He evoked the Septuagint, and mightily increased Jewish wisdom, simply in a college of scholars that invited all schools, and endowed all study of all arts and all systems among men. It was a glorious center. And here the Jew actually culminated : not in truth, for * We are shocked to see the Revisionists perpetuating this mistake. Think of throwing out the word of the Spirit, actually arranged for by the Almighty (Ex. iii. 13-15, vi. 2, 3), and, in a book, claimingto be inspired, putting in a Jewish word, and a word deliberately inter- posed in a corrupted age, and on the base of acknowledged supersti- tion ; and doing this, too, when many a passage feels the loss, and is made scarcely intelligible by the lack of one of the few names directly and divinely sent down to men (Is. xlii. 8, i Ki. xviii. 2i ; see the inconsistency, Jer. xvi. 21). 202 The God'Man. [Book IV. that was at Sinai ; not in grace, for that was at Calvary; but in splendid gifts. The Jew of Alex- andria was the Regent of the future ; and our Prot- estant world is still feeling, after the lapse of age, the fruit of the fables put upon her "by that mongrel school : for, V. Fifth, a higher authority in letters met at this great foundation the highest authority in the world's religion. The Jew, ambitious of fame, found him- self confronted with the highest fame, viz., the clas- sical distinctions of the Greeks. Moreover, his superstition was nursed. What he brought as a reverence, he carried away with him as a creed. The '' Word of Jehovah," in which he had taken refuge from pronouncing His name, he found turned into a Person, and he took kindly to the ''Three Kings " of Plato, and adored the Providence by which his reverence for God had been rewarded by an extension of his vision. At any rate, no one denies that Plato had a Trinity when the Old Tes- tament could not impart it ; that the Jews had a superstition that met, by the mere sound of the name, the logos of the Greek ; that the Greek carried his logos upon the wave of classic preeminence ; and that the Jew, borne by that wave, and carried upon it by the enchantment of its letters, took in the nev/ superstition. At least no one will deny, that, failing other tracks, here was a way that the triune idea could have entered to the religious mind. VI. Sixth, it will be equally admitted that the first Jewish Trinity, I mean by that the first one of Chap. XVII.] History of the Trinity. 203 which we have any record, is Arian, like that of Plato. It was not Three Persons, but the Great Father and two subordinates. We hear of none other for centuries. In Christ's time it is described by Philo. In fact that Jew ripened it, and gives it in strict detail. It is not the Nicene Trinity, but the classic and Pagan one, and, moreover, the only one that the history of that time unveils. We creep on, and, VII. Seventhly, Philo the Jew reappears, in the doctrine he taught, in Cerinthus the Christian. There is hardly any difference : and then, VIII. Eighthly, the scheme moves on to Arius. These things are all admitted. I do not mean that this is all that is advanced. It is advanced that Christ had a Trinity, and His apostles ; and that is the very doctrine that is here assailed. But I mean that when Irenaeus says that John zvrote his gospel to answer the errors of Cerinthus, and that when he tells us what those errors are, and they are much what is shadowed in Plato, and when he tells us that Cerinthus taught that there was an Emanation, and that that Emanation was in time, that it was not the Eternal God, and was not distinctly a creature, but that it was between God and a creature, and was before all worlds, much as Philo taught, and when we take up John and read, '' In the beginning was the Word," trampling in the first step on the idea that he was '' in time,'' and " the Word belonged to God" (ttp^)?, like roc npbi rdv Sebv, *' things belong- ing to God," Heb.v. i) like His hand or His arm, and 204 The God- Man. [Book I v. when, above all, we read '' and God was the Word " (plainly the Greek), which sets Alford to crying that that order would destroy the doctrine of the Trinity ! — we see how smoothly, all the way down, agreed upon history should give us occasion to doubt, and serve in the end to upset the evil. For see, all the way down, what bloody difficul- ties have beset the Triad ! The Platonist, a con- fessed Pagan ; Philo, a perverted Jew ; Cerinthus, from whose side the beloved John sprang with hor- ror from the bath ; Arius, who convulsed three conti- nents ; Socinus, who denied the Deity of Christ ; Sabellius, who turned His Godhead into a mere manifestation ; and Swedenborg, who denied the soul of His humanity — all illustrate the sadness of such a fable, and all illustrate the hope that now, at last, when the firmest evangelic beliefs are for the first time associated with its denial, its doom has come, and that the anti-depravity of Socinus, and the anti-Deity of the Arian and Sabellian, and the anti-humanity of Swedenborg, may no longer take refuge, and find the best place for their fight to be on that most superior ground of opposition to a fable. We might mention lesser histories : — (i) the forgery in John (i Jo. v. 7); (2) the declaration by many of the Reformed that a belief of this forged doctrine is essential to salvation (A. A: Hodge, Outlines Theol., p. 198) ; (3) the consigning, there- fore, of Milton, and Watts, and Locke, and Sir Isaac Newton, and the sainted Ware, and our mod- Chap. XVIII.] Trinity a Curse if False, 205 ern Peabody and Clarke to necessary perdition ; (4) the giving up of ancient arguments for the Triad as not sufificient, and then, like a piano key, letting them fly back into their place ; (5) the turning of the Trinity into a rationalism, as, for example, Power and Mind and Will, or Being and Love and Power, or God and Reason and Act, and let- ting that stand to keep the proposer of it safe in his place in the Church (see Edwards, Calvin, &c.) ; (6) and lastly, the shaken minds of men like Melancthon, who wrote his Loci-Communes without the Trinity, and then returned to it in dread of leaving it out, and like Calvin and other of our Reformed theolo- gers, who dropped uneasy whisperings, and rather excused themselves, in their pressure of ruder reforms, from leisure to undertake the Trinity — all these are causes of suspicion, and may be looked upon some day as strangenesses that should have excited thought, and, indeed, as refutations in them- selves, and spectacles that should have unmasked a fiction. CHAPTER XVIII. THE TRINITY, IF FALSE, A CURSE AND A BLASPHEMY. Grant that the Trinity is a mistake, and then all would admit that it is a curse and a blasphemy. L It is a curse, in the first place, because it tempts back toward Polytheism the nations that have so hardly escaped from it ; Second, because it has been a nesting-place for 2o6 The God-Man. [Bookiv. abominations. What bred Mohammed ? Undoubt- edly the three Gods of the Syrian bishops. Run over the dangerous sects. Half of them make some point against the Trinity, and learn by a mute in- stinct to press that point, while behind it are their real aberrations. The Genevese are not most dan- gerously Unitarian, but most dangerously Pelagian, and it is their superior Scripture for the one, that keeps them from battling much on the side of the other. A sacrificial atonement could support itself by Scripture ; but when it is mad enough to link itself with the Platonic Three, it succumbs in the fight, when its opponents are shrewd, and assault the Godhead of Christ as though only possible in a triune relation. Third, it limits missions. What can we do against Islam ? It would be worth while to deny the Trinity to disencumber somebody who might go in and save the Jews. If the Trinity be false, how un- welcome to our Master that there is no church that can approach a Turk without a scandal at the very entrance of her teachings. Fourth, it perverts redemption. Instead of a satisfaction of divine justice, in spite of ourselves it breeds the notion of the placating of one Power by another. Then it^ corrupts the very idea of punish- ment itself. Set one God over against another God, and we not only revert toward Polytheism, but we grime our idol. We make it the ''First King" (Plato in Tim. ii. 93) mad upon his vengeance. We erect what we call Vindicatory Justice. We Chap. XVIIL] Trinity a Cttrse if False. 207 instal a " Second King," milder and more gracious than the " First " ; and we erect a Vindicatory Jus- tice, not a derivative from holiness, but itself a principle of holiness, pari passu with mercy, and having an original claim upon the Father of men (see Hodge, Syst. TheoL, vol. i. pp. 238, 420). If we could trace the Trinity, we should find it, like the thread in the rock-crystal, that about which the chemicals have gathered, and which agglom- erates to itself much of the heresy of man. II. If the Trinity be false, it is more than a curse, it is in its very self a blasphemy. (i) It divides God. That is no mean crime. A Book that cries, " Jehovah shall be one and His name one " (Zech. xiv. 9), is strangely ravished when it is made to divide the Eternal. This is a crime against nature. When nature looks down with so clean a face, and would carry to our ear so unitary an Origin of All, it is death to separate, and the penalty has been cruelly high, when, through all the age, it has tormented us when we came to worship. If the Holy Ghost be simply the Father (2 Cor. iii. 17, Jo. xvi. 15), then the Moslem has advantage of us when he cries from the minaret, "Allah is one Allah; " and, if Christ be the same Father incarnate in a man, then Israel shames our folly Avhen he puts at the fore-front in the Syna- gogue, " Hear, O Israel, Jehovah, our God, is one Jehovah " (Deut. vi. 4). The first profanity, therefore, is in the thing itself, dividing God, 2o8 The God- Man. [Book IV. (2) But the second is in the way we have been talking about it. To defend so foolish a notion as the Triad, we have waked up a loveliness in it, and a benefaction to the Persons of the Almighty. We have been pointed to the eternity past, and told how lonely God must have been if there had been no Triality ! The Deity, we have been told, is one essence, and we have been forced, under the cry of Tritheism, to admit that He is one essence with but a single con- sciousness, and yet, with this admission, which makes what follows doubly foolish, we are told that the One Conscious Essence had intercourse together! and that the mutual love, made possible by the Three, held at bay the terrible loneliness of the One Almighty ! That a godly professor should look bearded youths in the face, and tell them of such a phantasy, can only find in the innocence of the speech a chief excuse for its utter blasphemous- ness. (3) But, thirdly, this figment of a Trinity has given cover to that profane thought of a kenosis (Phil. ii. 7), or emptying of Himself by God. If we contemplated One Jehovah, it would be difficult so to trifle. But having separated Him into Three, One becomes a more easy victim. (4) Precisely similar is a fourth notion, of the Patripassians. It is dangerous to begin compli- ances. The anthropomorphistic fable of the Three easily gives up One of the already undeified Triad to this other profane touch. Instead of a Maker ab- Chap. XVIII.] Trinity a Curse if False. 209 solutely perfect, instead of a God necessarily happy, instead of a Power utterly unchangeable, we come at last to assail even the Father with the idea of emptying Himself; or, with very much the same thought, that He chose to suffer, that the Most High King, for a grain of sand like this earth, for a race of ants like us its people, could abdicate His most high state, and could absolutely make nugatory His incarnation in a suffering creature. Preposterousnesses do not seem to hold such theorists. How the church has spawned profane conceivings ! Beginning with a Trinity, even in our attempts to escape it we have the same trend toward what seems constitutionally profane. The Monarchians, instead of going boldly out into the deep, and conceiving the Israelitish God with even more purity than either Jew or Moslem, contami- nated Him with the Three, left Him to be stripped, gave Him over to suffer, and, after all, clave to some sort of Threeness, and, instead of treating boldly a God to forgive and His humanity to endure the sac- rifice, got mixed up more than others (see Dorner, A. ii. pp. 7-26, Eusebius, Mosheim), and prevented the world, ages since, from doing without the Pla- tonic misery. BOOK V. THE HEREAFTER. CHAPTER I. DEATH AND THE RESURRECTION. That which claims to be natural, if it seem vio- lently against nature, is harder to establish with proof than that which is confessedly supernatural. It is so with the Trinity. That God is Three by nature scoffs more at the possibilities of proof than that He chose to be incarnate. The same is true of immortality. The bean dies and perishes, and that too when its life is something more than its matter. A dog dies and perishes, and that when its flesh is something less than its spirit. But a man dies, and w^e are to be taught that he goes right on to live. We open his body, and he is like animals, heart and spleen. Every viscus is in place. Moreover the beating of his pulse and the current of his blood and the action of his stomach and his diseases were as theirs are. They have conscience and reason in incipient shadow, and some measure of taste, like his. They die and sleep in the dust, and he dies and lives ! Now I am not saying that this is impos- sible, but that it is to the last degree improbable, Chap. 1.] Death and the Resurrection. 2 1 1 like the Triality of our Maker ; and the more, because, like that TriaHty, it pretends to be natural, instead of an open miracle like the rising from the dead. Like the Triality also, it pretends to miracle be- sides. Ghost-life is not enough, but, striking now the actual revelations of the Bible, it adds resurrec- tion. As the Logos must miraculously enter the Gal- ilean, so the ghost, after flitting for years, must be- come incarnate ; that is, the undying ghost must return, and revivify the body at the last day. Now, our principle is not to deny all this. We are ready for ghost-life if the Bible teaches it ; just as we are ready for the Trinity, absurd as it seems, if it is taught in Scripture ; but all we are pleading for is this — the evidence has to be very great. When one grand resurrection would accomplish all ; when ghost-life might rest, and man die and pass out of life like other creatures ; when all analogy might hold, and all appearances be met, and many errors be cancelled, by allowing him to sleep in his grave ; when the objection, that, once dead, he can- not be arraigned, is met by the fact that we are arraigned for what passed in Eden six millenniums ago : when the plea that, expecting to slumber, we can hardly be roused by the same fear of eternal wrath, is met by the fact that the slumber will be dream- less, and the trumpet-clang break instantly upon our conscious seeming, all we say is, that, as this view is more solemn than the other, it should only be by irrefragable tests that the other should be even tolerated. 212 The Hereafter. [Book v. * Before you begin,' some one may cry out, * say where this ghost-thought ever could have come from.' The same, you remember, was claimed as to the Trinity. If the Trinity is not true, where could it have come from ? And the reply you remember, " Let the dead bury their dead." Where did the Mass come from ? We are not responsible for the nesting-place of heresies. Nevertheless, you remem- ber that we did show how it came among the Jews at Alexandria. And the smile will be awakened when we turn to Plato again. The resurrection had been forgotten. A trace of it remained in Egypt (as to India, see Alger) ; but so bold a doctrine among Gentile men had passed measurably out of view. Vague traditions of immortality bred the manes and shadows of Eastern superstition. Plato, that great digester of dreams, wove it into his books. Man has never shaken it off. Luther tried to (Op. Witt. V. 4, p. 36). Tyndal called it the " fleshly doctrine of philosophers " (Op. p. 327). The Old Testament, we shall see, refuted it ; but the Jew, like a child, held on to the old apple while he grasped the new ; and we, in the ages since, have jumbled both the theories ; and, though the grand resurrection has been revealed, have held on to Plato's ghost, and applied the Christian resurrection only to the revivifying of the body. Having, therefore, increased the marvel of immor- tality by making it begin at death, and then adding to it the miracle of resurrection, and in a form more unlikely than the other, we might suppose that so Chap. I.] Death and the Resurrection, 2 1 3 difficult a conceit would be found propped by the strongest revelation. Instead of that, revelation itself has to be mended to make it bear less palpably against the system. Where the Bible makes the soul to be ourselves (Is. xlvi. 2, Hos. ix. 4), and, in fact, the usage of the Hebrew language, growing out of such a reality, makes the soul mean self in one of its sig- nifications (Gesenius), we would hardly know by the translation that such was the process of thought (Ex. xxi. 23). Where souls are the souls of brutes (Gesenius), we avoid the inconsistency by giving them some other version (Gen. ii. 19). Where fishes are represented as souls, and men are not, in the first chapter of Genesis (vs. 20, 21), King James is innocent of such a language, and calls them '' liv- ing creatures." "Dead souls" (Heb.) are just un- blushingly called " dead bodies " (E. V., Lev. xxi. 1 1, Num.vi. 6); and where Solomon, in a way strangely enlightening, asks, " Who knoweth of any spirit of man that goeth upward, and of any spirit of a brute that goeth downward to the earth? " (Ec. iii. 21), the translators cast it into this taking-for-granted mould. Instead of '' a spirit " or " any spirit," they say " the spirit," as though there were such a thing, and, with this slight interpolation, work a whole difference, for they read it thus : " Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?" (E. v.). And yet, with all this modification, the truth will break out. The whole language of the Hebrew is 2 1 4 The Hereafter. [Book V. redolent with man's entire death. Expressions of ours have never a counterpart. We never hear of our ** remains." Joseph died, Jacob was buried, Joseph was put in a coffin in Egypt. We never hear of leaving the body. Resurrection of the body is never talked about. Continued consciousness of the soul is never even hinted. But, on the contrary, coming to bold testimonies. Job settles the question : " Till the heavens be no more they shall not awake " (Job. xiv. 12); David bears witness, " In that very day his thoughts perish" (Ps. cxlvi. 4); Solomon declares, As the beast dies so dies the man (Ec. iii. 19), and sweeps all away, for he says, " There is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave whither thou goest " (Ec. ix. 10). When we come to the New Testament, the whole ground is more thoroughly entrenched. What could " the judgment " be (Matt. xxv. 32) if we had been centuries in hell ? What could the surprises be (Matt. xxv. 11)? Why do we hear of ^^ that day'' (2 Tim. i. 12, 18)? Why does everything centre upon the coming of our Redeemer? And then, as didactic proof, what does Paul mean in that fifteenth chapter (Corinthians)? *' If the dead rise not," he evidently believes life is over. He says that in perfectly irrefragable speech. The Scripture says afterward, ** These all, attested by faith, received not the promise, God, on our account, having looked forward to the something better, that they without us should not be made perfect " (Heb. xi. 39, 40) ; but in that chapter of Corinthians Paul Chap. I.] Death and the Resurrection, 215 cannot be read except only in one meaning. Let anybody try. He says, "If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advanta- geth it me if the dead rise not ? " (i Cor. xv. 32). He gives as the alternative, " Then they that have fallen asleep in Christ are perished" (v. 18); and he gives as his alternative, boldly and wickedly uttered, I mean if Platonism is to be our eschatological belief, that wassail-song of the Greeks, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." There is a fatality, too, about all objections. The objection about Dives (Lu. xvi. 19)! If that be sound, Hell is in the grave (v. 23), and the lost have tongues, and can be cooled and comforted by a drop of water. It is evident that the scene is an allegory, like the sitting up of the kings (Is. xiv. 9), or like the souls of the beheaded (Rev. xx. 4), true in moral, but not in the least intended either as to time or circumstance. So of the cry upon the cross. It does not mean, " This day thou shalt be with me," but *' I say unto you to-day " (Lu. xxiii. 34). The thief had shrunk from asking his tormented Partner, and begged Him only to " remember " him. Christ turns upon him at the moment, and settles that question for ever : I say unto you at once, " Thou shalt be with me in Paradise." A strange interest lies in the two strongest pas- sages. They are the bulwarks of the doctrine of ghosts ; the one in Corinthians, " Present with the Lord " (2 Cor. v. 8), and the other in Philippians, " To depart and be with Christ which is far better " 2 1 6 The Hereafte7\ [Book V. (Phil. i. 23). We have expounded both at length in another book (Are Souls Immortal ? p. 78). We would expound them over again were it not that in so short a theology the testimony of first-class scholars is more effective, if they personally believe that the soul is not mortal ; and such a testimony we