mM

'j/-^

THE

ORTHODOX THEOLOGY OF TO-DAY

NEWMAN SMYTH
AUTHOB OP "THK BELIQIOITS FEELING" AUD "OLD FAITHS IN NEW LiaHT"

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
743 AND 745 Bboadwat
1881

OOFYBIOHT BT
CHARLES SCBIBlilEB'S SONB
1S81

5 n; 9

Trow*s
Printing and Bookbinding Company
201-213 East T2tk Street
NEW YORK

COI^^TENTS.

PAGE
Pkepaob,  V
L
The Chukches and Cbebds,  13
II.
Does Okthodoxy Misundeestand God? . . . .38
IIL
FOEGIVENESS AND StTEFEBING, ...... 61
lY.
Imperfect Theories of the Potubb Life, . . ,83
Y.
Nbgattve aud PosmvB Elements in the Conception of
the Futuee Lieb, ....... 108
YI.
SociAii Immobtality  139
APPENDIX,  163

PREFACE.

These discourses were originally prepared in
answer to certain objections which had been
urged against evangelical teaching in the col
umns of a local newspaper in my own home, and
which are often raised, in various forms, as dif
ficulties in the way of the popular acceptance
of the doctrines of the churches. They are
now printed substantially as they were first de
livered, as, in consenting to their publication, I
have felt that the attempt to nieet an expressed
want ia any one locality might prove the most
hopeful fidelity to a real need of the larger
public to whicli these discussions of some vital
questions of Christian thought are now ad
dressed. Though they were in form a reply to mis
conceptions and objections urged upon the at
tention of the pulpit in behalf of popular

vi PREFACE.
scepticism, I trust that their spirit may not be
found to be controversial. I have sought rather
to avail myself of admitted difiiculties and com
mon perplexities concerning the doctrines of the
churches, as a background upon ivhich I would
bring out the hopeful convictions and assured
beliefs of those evangelical scholars with whom
I find myself to be most in sympathy, and who,
as it seems to me, are giving the simplest form,
and the truest expression, to Christian theology
at the present time. The positions and views
of these Christian thinkers of to-day can hardly
be measured or defined by any traditional lines
of division, or by theological names derived
from the past. The more recent phrases of
ecclesiastical separation, "Old School" and
" New School," represent to them issues of yes
terday rather than of to-day ; and the definitions
and phraseology which some who still stand
marking time in those old ways are careful to
maintain, seem to them utterly inadequate de
terminations of the advanced line of Christian
reasoning and belief which they are compelled
to occupy, as they seek to face the great ques-

PREFACE. vii
tions with which faith is now confronted. They
do not stoop down and watch anxiously lest
the "foundations" be shaken; but, knowing
that God's words cannot pass away, they are
eager to look up and face present responsibil
ities of Christian thought, and to catch what
revelations of truth may be dawning upon the
horizons of to-day.
While, thus, in common with an increasing
number of Christian thinkers I must disclaim the
terms, and decline myself to be classified by the
-nomenclature of the schools, I would still retain
and use as descriptive of a reverent, but pro-|
gressive. Christian theology the old word ortho
doxy, especially since a distinction of no little
present importance is coming to be made, and
needs to be emphasized, between orthodoxy and
orthodoxism. By orthodoxy I would mean the
continuous historical development of the doc
trine of Jesus and his apostles ; and the ortho
dox habit or temper of mind I would consider
to be simply fidelity to the teachings of the
Spirit of Truth throughout Christian history,
as the things of Christ have been witnessed to

viii PREFACE.
the church in its great confessions, and as the
words of the Lord are still opening their mean
ings, under new -providential lights, in the en
larging thought of the Christian world. Or
thodoxism, on the other hand, is the dogmatic
stagnation and ecclesiastical abuse of ortho
doxy. Orthodoxism is an orthodoxy which has
ceased to grow — a dried and brittle orthodoxy.
Orthodoxism ofEers a crust of dogma kept over
from another century; it fails to receive the
daily bread for which we are taught this day
to pray. It has been my desire, therefore,
throughout these discourses, to represent, so
truthfully as I may, the orthodox spirit and be
lief — only not the orthodoxy of yesterday, but
of to-day.
It should be remembered that the first of these
discourses was intended for the relief of a popu
lar prejudice against all creeds, and the reasoning
pursued should be judged with reference to the
object which I had immediately in view; if I
had been called to address upon the same topic
an ecclesiastical assembly, my growing convic
tion of our need of a revised theology, suited to

PREFACE. ix
our scientific environment, and fitted to survive
in modern thought, would have led me to lay
the stress of my argument even more strongly
upon . the desirability of a restatement of the
standards, particularly of my own, the Presby
terian church; and the conservatism usually
audible in such assemblies would have relieved
me from the necessity of pleading that justice
be done the old and hallowed forms of faith,
while urging timely preparation for the coming
of another of the days of the Son of man.
The view of the Atonement which is sug
gested in the third discourse seems to me to be
in harmony with the truth of Christ seen and
welcomed by many minds who have been awak
ened, by the, touch of Dr. Bushnell's magic
thought, to simpler and more purely moral con
ceptions of the work of Christ; while, at the
same time, the Cross is regarded as in some real
sense necessary for the self-satisfaction of God's
own nature in forgiving sin; and therefore I
shall not, I trust, be found to have missed
wholly the truth hidden in the heart of the
older, sacrificial theology.

X PREFACE.
My dealing with current objections of popu
lar scepticism would have been singularly in
complete without some endeavor, at least, on
my part to wrestle with the acknowledged dif
ficulties of our belief in a future life of rewards
and punishments. My reasonings and conclu
sions upon these momentous questions may seem
to some too cautious and hesitating; others
whose minds are darkened under the shadow
of the awful possibilities of the retributive
government of God, may possibly be helped
by them to wait and trust ; I can only say of
them that I have gone as far as I think reason
and the Scripture allow us to go with unhesi
tating feet, and I have stopped, and am waiting
for more light, where a step farther would
seem to me to be a step beyond the limits of
revelation — a doubtful leap which orthodox
theology should not push faith to take in the
dark. To the discussion of the doctrine of the
future life I have added a sermon upon Social
Immortality, without which one chief element
of the hope of immortality would have been

PREFACE. xi
left untouched. It may, also, help to swell the
needed and growing reaction against that exag
gerated and extreme individualism which has
been at once the strength and the weakness of
Protestantism, both the truth and the sophism
of Calvinistic philosophy.
A few critical notes have been appended, in
order to indicate more definitely, at some im
portant points, the relation of positions assumed
in the discourses to existing questions and be
liefs. These discourses, without further preface, I
would introduce simply as one series of a pas
tor's working sermons ; they are not sent forth
under " the philosopher's cloak," but clothed iu
the working-dress of the ordinary ministratioji
of the Word, and for the purpose of helping
among men the removal of some common diffi
culties in the way of the coming of a better
day of faith.
Q01NCT, III., June, 1881.

DISCOURSES.

the churches and creeds.

Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by
the same rule, let us mind the same thing. — Phil. iii. 16.

We are told that the creeds of the churches
are obstacles in the way of Christianity. If
the doctrines upon which, as it is often, but in
correctly said, the churches are founded, should
be removed, men would flock into them, and
they would be filled to overflowing. But
though in not a few churches creeds have been
taken out of the way, the logic of facts has
hardly justified the expectations of those who
would banish them, and in no creedless church
'has Christianity come to its kingdom. I would
not form a generalization from isolated facts.

14 DISCOURSES.
but the whole history of the church seems to
show that the flow and power of a progressive
Christianity has kept within certain general
limits of belief, and that, too far beyond those
limits, both churches and individuals lose the
deep, strong current of the divine influence in
human history. The repeated failures of at
tempts to build churches upon a basis of pure
individualisin, and the incontestable fact that
Christianity has made steady progress along the
lines of certain common beliefs and historical
confessions, are reasons sufficient, at least, to
prevent us from dismissing these creeds with
an impatient gesture, as though we had only to
bow them out in order to bow the world into
the church.
I have spent many delightful hours of my
life in the woods, but I have never seen a tree
that had grown up through the storms — I have
never noticed'a single living twig — which nature
had not provided with a covering of bark. A
creedless church is like a barkless tree. The
bark, it is true, should grow with the growth
of the tree ; but some bark seems to be a neces
sity of growth. Some creed is essential to the

THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS. \ 5
development of Christianity. I have looked
down through tbe microscope into the first be
ginnings of life, and seen at the very bottom of
all existence a mass of protoplasmic pulp ; but
the cell which is the unit of growth, the unit of
the ^forming tissues, is a nucleus of life pro
tected by an envelope, or wall, of formed mat
ter. This analogy of natui'al growth will hardly
mislead us in the higher spheres of mind and
morals. Some formed matter, some fixed beliefs,
would seem to be necessities of the growth of'
religion. Some creed — I am not speaking just
now of its contents — is necessary to the men
tal growth of individuals. Christianity would
be singularly incomplete did it not furnish
materials for reason to fashion into systems
of thought ; and the intellectual completeness
of Christianity has been to many profound
intellects one of the evidences of its divine,
origin. Some creed, moreover, some fixed idea of con
duct, is necessary to the growth of character.
We are not beyond the wisdom of the proverb,
"As he thihketh in his heart" — that is, as a
man really believes — "so is he."

1 6 DISCOURSES.
Some creed is still more a social necessity,
essential to the existence and perpetuity of the
new society which it is the distinctive glory of
Christianity to have called forth. Jesus came
preaching the kingdom of God. His object
from the first was not simply to call the indi
vidual disciple to follow him, but to create an
apostolic fellowship ; not merely to save the in
dividual soul, but to save it for a society of the
redeemed. The new, higher society created in
this world by Jesus, affords, by its existence
and perpetuity, one of the distinctive and char
acteristic evidences of his supernatural virtue.
Christianity issues, as no other religion so na
turally and so powerfully, in a church. But
this new society is and must be a fellowship in
the truth. The doctrine of Jesus, therefore, as
it was received by the apostles, and as it opens
its manifold meanings with the growth of Chris
tian thought, is not only to be regarded as an
essential part of Christianity, but also as one of
its first social necessities, y;;?^
Most men, therefore, may agree with me that
some creed is a necessity required by the very
nature of mind and morals, and indispensable

THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS. \-j
to the upbuilding of a higher Christian society.
Their objections to creeds, however, really lie
against their contents dr their abuses. I shall
refer, therefore, to several objections of this
description against our present forms or admin
istration of Christianity. I would not, how
ever, take up these objections in any spirit of
controversy, for I have noticed that when men
begin to debate, truth usually begins to sufEer ;
but there are doubts and difficulties concern
ing our creeds which sometimes find expression
in our popular literature, which ought to be
frequently and fairly weighed by the orthodox
clergy, and which, so far as they may be found
to spring not entirely from our mistaking Jesus'
method, but from some misapprehension of our
real intentions in the administration of Christ's
church, or from popular prejudices resting upon
half truths, we should spare no pains to remove
or correct.
The first objection which has recently been
brought to our attention, is that the churches
have a "tendency to repress free thought," and
that " no progress has been made in theology."
I ask first of all, whether statements such as

1 8 DISCOURSES.
these, though now frequently alleged, are wholly
in accordance with the facts? A tendency is
a long-continued movement, not always to be
determined by the apparent direction of the mo
ment. We must not judge the sweep of a moun
tain range by the foothills ; we should not meas
ure the trend of the coast by the little inlet
upon whose shore we may dwell. Estimated
by any large historic judgment, determined by
any fair observation of the present condition of
theological studies, I ventui-e to affirm that it is
not true that the churches have a tendency to
repress free thought. But I may be asked : Do
you forget Col. Ingersoll's array of thumb-
. screws ? No : I do not forget them, nor the
labored and ingenious unfairness of Prof. Dra
per's book upon the " Conflict between Religion
and Science." In any scientific test, however,
we should determine the invariable antecedents
of any given phenomenon, if we would discover
its true cause. If we study the history of intol
erance in a truly scientific method, and not our
selves under the influence of some narrowing
prejudice, we shall find that persecutions and
bigotry have flourished not only in the heated

THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS.

19

air of a tropical religious fervor, but also under
the arctic chill of stoic coldness ; not only within
the pale of Christian faith, but also amid the
most opposite beliefs, and even in the domain of
science; and that, under all forms, and every
where, the invariable antecedents, the ultimate
causes, of intolerance and persecution are certain
natural limitations of men's minds, certain evil
propensities of human nature, and bad passions of
men's hearts. Some beliefs, it is true, may lend
themselves more easily than others to the abuse
of blind prejudice, and as some of the brightest
virtues may be shadowed by the darkest faults,
so there are noblest truths which may be turned
to the basest uses. But many of the faults of
Christians, and many evils to be deplored in the
churches, I would cite rather as evidences of one
of the fundamental doctrines of the church — the
sad corruption of human nature, and our need
of regeneration by a purer and divine Spirit.
" What drives poetry out of the world ? " asked
Goethe ; and he answered, " The poets." " What
drives Christianity out of the world?" it might
be asked, and we might answer, "The Chris
tians." But, in either case, a clever satire should

20 DISCOURSES. I
not be mistaken for a sober, historical judg-
mejit. I am not contented, however, with a merely
apologetic or negative answer to this objection.
I reply again, that on the whole it does not seem
to be true that the churches have repressed free
thought. I will not dwell now upon their gen
eral service to liberty. The lawgiver of old,
coming from the presence of the Great King to
stand before an earthly monarch, to bid him let
a whole people go free, was a true prototype
and image of the mission through the centuries
of the religion of the Bible. But I wish to give
a more speciflc answer to the objection. I affirm
that these very creeds of the church themselves
were the results of progressive thought, and
marked epochs of free inquiry. They are
the high-water marks of great movements of
thought. That earliest of the general creeds,
the Nicene, had three centuries of thought
behind it. Three centuries of mental wrestling
with the greatest problems of human thought,
three centuries of free discussion by awakened
and earnest minds, stand behind that creed.
Let any man here do as I was once required to

THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS. 2 1
do in the class-room of a theological seminary,
follow the course of the growth of that creed,
from mind to mind and from age to age; let
him seek so to enter into and understand the
thought finally issuing in that creed, as to be
able to pass an examination upon it ; and, I ven
ture to suggest, he will find that he has sub
jected himself to no easy mental discipline, and
he will feel himself, at least, debarred hence
forth from speaking of the creeds of the churches
as the work of "blind belief," of "ignorant and
superstitious ages^'
The same remark holds true of our great
Protestant confessions of faith. They were
born in liberty. They were wrought out in free
discussion. They have passed through the flre.
They were the work of men in whose souls were
ringing the words with which Luther awoke
Germany in his address to the " Christian No
bility," and whose hearts were vibrating to his
lofty strain in his sermon on "The Freedom of
the Christian Man." These words of confession
" have drawn transcendent meanings up " from
the lives of martyrs. When I can take my
little boy to the State capitol, and bid him

22 DISCOURSES.
laugh at the tattered flags, torn to shreds, upon
which are written the names of great battle
fields of freedom, and which brave hands and
loyal hearts once bore through the battle's storm,
— then, but not till then, can I speak aught but
words of reverence and gratitude for the sym
bols of faiths so nobly realized as these confes
sions which have come to us from out the great
conflicts of the ages — ^faiths which have been
borne aloft as banners by heroic spirits — creeds
which martyrs have sealed with blood !
But, it may be said, we admit that these creeds
were once wrought out in liberty, but have they
not since become oppressive ? It is true that in
literature, in art, in civilization, a great creative
age is usually followed by an age of formalism
and stagnation. Theology is not exempt from
this general law of human progress. The crea
tive theology of the Reformation was succeeded
by a period of pause and dogmatism. In the
seventeenth century a Protestant legalism and
a Protestant traditionalism sprang up and threat
ened to overgrow the theology of the Reforma
tion. Something of that tendency to embalm
faith safely in confessionalism may possibly still

THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS.

23

linger, and manifest itself occasionally, in a stiff,
pulseless orthodoxism ; but the spirit of seven
teenth century dogmatism is certainly not the
spirit of the living orthodox theology of to-day.
The late Prof. Bagehot, in his bright little book
on " Physics and Politics," remarks that one of
the first necessities for a savage tribe becoming
civilized, is to gain a "legal fibre," a "crust of
custom." And the next necessity, he says, may
be to break up that crust. The growth of
Christianity may not be free from this general
condition of progress. But Christianity has
shown wonderful power in breaking up its own
crusts. They are breaking up now. The ice is
going out. The primal Christian faiths are not
departing ; never fear that they shall be swept
away ! But every form that is in the way of
true religious progress, every crust which is no
longer useful, Christianity in the churches is
preparing to break up.
Neither is it true that at the present time our
creeds are generally used repressively as con
ditions of membership in the church. Has any
member of this church, as a condition of admis
sion to its fellowship, ever been asked to sub-

24 DISCOURSES.
scribe to the Westminster Confession? There
may be instances where good men have been
kept by doctrinal obstructions from the Lord's
table, but they are rare, and happily are becom
ing rarer. Why, two hundred years ago, in that
denomination which traces back its faith to the
same general historical confessions which we
follow, in the Cambridge platform of the Con
gregational churches, it was expressly written
that in the examination of candidates for admis
sion to the church "a rational charity" should
be exercised, and "the weakest measure of
faith " should be accepted.
If any man wishes to be known as a dis
ciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, to confess him,
and to keep his commandments ; if he is willing
to come humbly and sincerely as a disciple, and
in the spirit of a disciple ; let him knock and
see whether any orthodox church, in any intelli
gent Christian community, will now turn bim
aside, even though he be weak in the faith,
before he complains that our long creeds are
put in the way between him and the Master ;
and then, if he should be rejected, I am not the
only orthodox clergyman who would stand with

THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS. 25
him outside the church, if needs must be, for
the principle of Christian liberty !
Though our creeds are not now generally
abused as conditions of church-membership, we
are reproached, however, on account of the re
strictions placed by most evangelical bodies
upon their clergy ; it is said that they are " not
free to express their honest convictions." If
that is the fact, I have happily been uncon
scious of it. I have not, up to the present
hour, found my liberty to think under the law
of truth — and that is the only freedom an
honest mind can desire — abridged, or inter
fered with, in the church. It is true that
there are still to be found in some churches
a few theological Nimrods who are mighty
hunters before the Lord, and the beginnings
of whose kingdom is Babel. It is true, also,
in any of our denominations, that if a man
brings to them a contentious spirit, he will
very likely receive of the same measure which
he gives. If he begins his ministry vtdth the
sword, he will probably perish by the sword,
and he ought to perish by the sword ! But if
any man does, to-day, honest, constructive work ;

26 DISCOURSES.
if he tries to bring to this generation the truths
of God which it needs, he may hope to find
friends springing up all around him, to receive
words of encouragement from brave men in all
the churches, and to meet with scholarly criti
cism even from seats of conservatism.^
" Yes," it will be said, " but there stands the
Westminster Confession, gloomy and forbidding
— what will you say of that ? " It does not
stand as a prison-house in which any of us are
shut up. The system of philosophy which was
built up into that confession we are not com
pelled to accept. But, if you admit that its
language is moss-grown, and its philosophy an
tiquated, why do you not at once remove or
revise it? I might answer with truthfulness
that a historical confession, historically inter
preted, may possibly afEord larger liberty fhan
could be enjoyed under a modern confession
legally interpreted. But more than this needs
to be said. Our " Confession of Faith " is under
revision at the present time. It is under revi
sion in every intelligent sermon in every thought
ful Presbyterian pulpit. It is under revision
in every live Presbyterian seminary, and in every

THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS.

27

good Presbyterian paper. Moreover, within the
memory of this generation, the Westminster Con
fession has been factually revised — revised in
fact, if not in form. Thanks to the fathers,
many of whom are still living, such a revision
took place in the admission of the New Eng
land, or New School, theology into full recogni
tion in the reunited Presbyterian church ; and
that revision, real, if not formal, is my warrant
— and it is the sufficient warrant for any minis
ters whose are the fathers, but whose faces are
turned toward the future — for occupying in
good conscience a Presbyterian pulpit.
Still it may be asked, why not bring at once
your ecclesiastical standards into line with the
more enlightened theology of the church? I
answer again, creeds are not to be made in a
day. They are necessarily of slow growth.
Many of us may think the old house needs to
be rebuilt; some of its chambers may be too
narrow, some of the ceilings too low ; but we
do not mean to move our family until we are
sure that the new house is thoroughly built and
seasoned. We are not so impatient as to be
willing to put green timber into its construe-

28 DISCOURSES.
tion. We prefer to build of seasoned timber.
Some question whether this is a creed-building
age. There are still open questions upon which
we are looking for more light. There are re
sults of modern investigations to be thoroughly
sifted and tried. Let the work of formal revi
sion of our standards go on and be brought to
completion as speedily as it may. Many of us
will rejoice in that day, and are indeed strait
ened in mind until that good work be accom
plished. • But we are more anxious to do the
real work of revision, to adjust our own faiths
happily to modern conditions of thought, and to
learn to preach them in the new tongues of
knowledge, than we are impatient to record the
results of our labors in the organic law or con
stitution of our church. So long as that law is
not used oppressively ; so long as we have ac
corded to us the liberty of Christ in the church ;
we will seek first, as far as the truth may shine
before us and lead us on, to do the real work of
revision, and be content to leave the results to
time. Conflicts, indeed, may yet arise for liberty
within the church, as they have in the past.
Then the hour will find the men. But conflicts

THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS.

29

shall not be precipitated by any impatience of
ours. True reform «annot be Avrought in an
hour ; the great base of the advancing wave
does not move so fast as the curling crest which
breaks into foam upon the beach. Reformed
creeds come not in a moment, but they are
always only questions of time. The best
thought in all Christian denominations is at
work simplifying, elevating, reforming our the
ology ; lifting the whole body of it up into a
purer ethical light ; and we can wait in hope ;
we shall have revised confessions of our faith,
if not to-day, perhaps to-morrow.
This whole objection, therefore, that our
churches and our creeds stand in the way of
free Christian thought — thought loyal to Chris
tian truth — seems to be at the present time, to
a very large extent at least, an anachronism —
an objection which, as somewhat out of date
and really behind the times, may be deemed
outlawed in any court of large, reasonable
judgment of present facts and tendencies.
It has been urged, however, that theology
has made no progress. Here, also, I would join
issue upon the facts, and reply that theology

30 DISCOURSES.
has made great and gratifying progress ; and I
will give the following specifications that my
assertion may not be left indefinite : (1.) The
ology has made progress in its methods. There
are theologians who have been quick to avail
themselves of improved scientific and historical
methods of .inquiry. It costs more now, more
time and more study, than it did formerly to
obtain a good theological education. One must
receive a broader and more varied training to
be held now in any repute among theologians.
(2.) Theology has made progress in its language.
The natural language for the expression of spir
itual truths has been greatly enhanced by our
sciences. Nature was never so rich a parable
of the kingdom of heaven. Any one familiar
with our best current theological literature is
sensible of this freshness and new power of ex
pression which -spiritual thought is receiving
from natural science. (3.) Theology has made
progress along the lines of certain great doc
trines, among which I will specify these: our
idea of God, and the relation of the natural to
the supernatural ; our conception of the Person
and the work of Christ, and our view of the

THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS.

31

future life. These particulars will form the
subject of subsequent discourses.
I pass now to a second general objection to
our creeds recently urged among us, one often
felt, too, by believers as well as by unbelievers.
Difficulty is found in the fact that the Christian
doctrines, as commonly received, transcend expe
rience and contain mysteries. " Nothing which
is revealed," it is popularly urged, "can be mys
terious." What ? A revelation cannot be mys
terious ! But the very day is a mystery of light
which, with all our science, we cannot under
stand. Can tliere be no partial revelations, no
progressive revelation ? Are there not realities
coming for a moment within the dim horizons of
our consciousness — realities more felt than seen ?
" Nothing which is revealed can be mysterious ! "
One needs only to dwell amid the daily revela
tions of a Christian home to know that there
are verities of affection believed in with all the
heart, love which
"My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace,"
the depth and breadth and height of which eter
nity only can comprehend. " Just so far as the

32 DISCOURSES.
Bible is a revelation," we are assured, " just so
far it ceases to be mysterious." That reasoning
which is so often urged against the Christian
doctrine, is at best only a half truth ; it needs
to be completed with this truth — ^just so far as
the Bible is a revelation it will bring to light
mysteries still to be revealed. This common
difficulty with revelation on account of its mys
teries is an instance of the frequent fallacy of
suppressing the minor premise in our thinking.
The objection urged is true only according to
the idea of revelation which is left unquestioned
and unmentioned in the reasoning ; but that is
the very idea that needs to be determined. To
wards the close of the last century a system of
philosophy was built upon this idea that only
those things are true which can be clearly un
derstood. But the period of "Illuminism" in
Germany proved to be shallow and transient,
and this philosophy of wisdom without myste
ries bore very much the same relation to the
real life of reason that a Japanese picture, with
out light or shade, bears to a painting of Rem
brandt. Every science reveals mysteries. You
cannot talk to your child about your own life

THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS. 33
in the world without exciting his. wonder by
your words. Every light brings to view the
larger circle of darkness. What is knowledge
but a growing wonder ? No revelation, then, of
a future life could be given to us which would
not leave even more than it discloses in shadow
and mystery. We should remember that per
plexities which we often feel with regard to the
future life — the burden of questions which we
cannot lift — are occasioned by the very fact
that we do have some faith in immortality, and
that Christianity has opened to us some revela
tion of the hereafter.
Having thus pointed out the evident fallacy
in this popular objection against the doctrines of
faith because they contain mysteries, I should
do work very unsatisfactory to myself, at least,
if I did not hasten to point out the truth, also,
which is in it. For there is a truth underlying
this reasoning of doubt. A revelation which
contains mysteries, and in many respects tran
scends experience, must have, at least, some
points of contact with human reason, and in
' part it will verify and confirm itself in human
experience. This is precisely what the religion

34 DISCOURSES.
of the Bible does. It finds us in our truest
human experiences. If I am reading a book of
travels and find the descriptions trustworthy of
places where I have been, and of scenes with
which I am familiar, I may give credence to the
writer when he describes countries which I have
never visited, or narrates events unlike any which
I may have witnessed. This is Jesus' own argu
ment for his authority in declaring truths which
transcend our little experience : " If I have told
you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall
ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?"
Because we can and have verified revelation in
those teachings in which it does submit itself to
reason, conscience, and the proof of experience,
we believe it, also, in those heavenly teachings
which transcend our understandings, and of
which Jesus has many things to say, but not
now. Those who object to the churches on account
of their creeds remind us sometimes, and with
reason, that we should prefer above all things^
the " spiritual teachings" of Jesus. But let us
take care not to play fast and loose with the
meaning of words. The word spiritual is rich

THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS.

35

and comprehensive. It implies that we are
spirits; that there is a side of human nature
turned toward, the unseen; that the soul, itself
an unseen presence, has some relation to the In
visible ; that there is a Father of spirits. The
spiritual teachings of Jesus comprise more than
our mere human duties or moral conduct ; they
involve our religious position and bearing, our
obligations to God, our relations, right or wrong,
towards God. But still more than this is com
prehended in these teachings. Christianity is
not a mere philosophy; it is a spirit of life, em
bodied in historical fact. It is a divine Spirit
living, breathing, among men, actuating and in
spiring a chosen people, its organ and means of
revelation — the Spirit given at last without
measure to the Christ in whom all the law and
the prophets were fulfilled. The spiritual teach
ings of Jesus involve, therefore, his teaching
concerning the work of God in the history of
the chosen people, and concerning his own Per
son and life as a revelation in the form of man
of the glory of the Father ; in short, his whole
doctrine of the kingdom, of God already come,
and to come, on earth. These " spiritual teach-

36 DISCOURSES.
ings" of Jesus in their comprehensiveness the
churches seek in their confessions of faith to
embrace and to interpret.
We would not, then, be understood to hold
our creeds as perfect ecclesiastical fortifications,
or even as complete statements of theological
truth. Revelation, like nature, is larger than
our largest knowledge of it, and whenever one
finishes his system of thought, and closes up all
its definitions, he is sure to have left some truth
out. We would leave, at least, on every side of
our spiritual heritage, gates open into the undis
covered country — those realms of life and light
which stretch beyond our present horizons; but
while we would not shut ourselves up in dog
matic exclusivenesSj-^while we would keep the
windows open for any ray of light to stream in,
or for any birds of passage to pour in upon us
theip songs from the skies, — we rejoice that we
are not left by the God of the Bible without
shelter and houseless, to wander in orphanage of
spirit, without country or home. There are
truths old and familiar, -at whose friendly hearth
we have learned to rest and to wait ; there are
some faiths, tried and sure, in which, as did

THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS. 37
our fathers before us, we can live and would^
die. But if, after all that has been said, any one
should still ask, why not, in view of the ad
mitted difficulties of doctrine and creed, suffer
us to live contented with the simple, moral pre
cepts of Jesus, I will answer that question when
any man can tell me if he has ever seen a field
of wheat growing and ripening without any ex
panse of sky over it ? The grain cannot mature
without a sky. There can be na perfect moral
ity without some chemistry of the heavens in it.
Every life needs some sky. Every man, we
urge, has a larger life to live than that part of
it which is turned towards this world or one's
fellow men. Religion is moralitv towards God.
A man's real creed is his vrorking-theory of life^

The churches seek, by their doctrines, however
far short of the spiritual teachings of Jesus they
may fall, to present to men the largest and best
working-theory of life. We would warn the
young against partial and defective working-
theories of life. We would preach the Gospel
of Christ as the one sufficient, and complete, and
tried, working-theory of life.

II.
does orthodoxy misunderstand GOD?
God is love. — 1st John, iv. 16.
If one should pursue in the pulpit, with pains
taking thought,, the line of reasoning which the
Christian scholarship of to-day regards as com
manding the lower lines of materialism and
modern scepticism, he would very probably be
met with the reproach that he was evading the
objections which are popularly urged against
the Bible, and the difficulties which are still
lying unremoved in the minds of the people. I
think that is true, and I am glad that it is true.
The best Christian scholarship does evade the
common troubles of popular infidelity as a
traveller up an Alpine pass evades the fogs and
the mists which lie in the valleys beneath.
The Christian scholarship of the present day
does escape the difficulties upon which an In-

DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD ? 39
gersoll expects faith to make shipwreck of itself,
as the mariner avoids the shoals and the break
ers on the coast, who has the courage to spread
his sails to the airs of heaven, and chooses the
breadth and freedom of the ocean for his heritage.
Having already considered some objections
which are popularly raised against the manner
in which our creeds are held in the churches;
having urged their necessary uses, while admit
ting that a progressive church, led by the Spirit
of Christ, must always keep its historical con
fessions under the process of revision and adap
tation to new environments of thought ; I have
now to enter upon a somewhat larger field of
discussion, and to take up the question which
we ought fairly to consider, whether the ortho
dox theology of the present hour stands in the
way of faith. We should be willing, in the in
terest of truth, and of faith as well, to review
at any time our own positions, to search our own
creeds, to satisfy ourselves whether, in the con
tents of our beliefs, there is anything which can
justly be sub jected, to the charge of being a
hindrance to spiritual faith among thoughtful
and honest minds. In such review and revi-

40 DISCOURSES.
sion of our beliefs, I do not, however, feel called
upon to answer old objections, often urged,
against the Latin or Calvinistic theology. I
am to speak simply for what I regard as the
orthodox theology of to-day. Are its beliefs
oppressive to moral reason, or difficulties in the
way of spiritual thought ?
The particular class of doubts and misgivings
concerning our theology which I would consider
this evening, may be fairly summarized, I think,
in this single sentence : Orthodoxy is charged
with misunderstanding and misrepresenting God.
This is certainly a most serious charge, and one
which orthodoxy should be ready ear;iestly and
humbly to weigh. Of all beings God has been
most misunderstood — misrepresented by many
who have not wished to do his will, and misun
derstood ofttimes in the bosoms of his chosen
friends. It is a coarse, and yet too common re
mark that the creed of the churches " sets up a
demon in the place of God " — a being who " con
forms more nearly to our idea of a devil than
of a God."
*;-^^here is one thing with regard to this re
proach so often cast upon our theology which I

DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD? 41
can say without any fear of contention : should
any person seek for admission into this, or any
other evangelical church, and say, " I am will
ing to confess faith in your creeds — ^I will be
lieve your doctrines — though they make God
seem to me to be a terrible being, like a de
mon ; " our answer would be prompt and deci
sive. No ! we will not accept such a confes
sion ! Let God be true, though every man be a
liar ! We do not want you so to believe, so to
understand, our creeds, as to make the church
to you a place of devil-worship. Rather wouldj
we have you come in as a little child, knowingi
only that you have a heart that needs God, a
heart that needs divine mercy and forgiveness, \
than have you stand here and confess with your(
lips our systems of divinity, if their meaning to )
you should darken the heavens, or rob your)
own conscience of its sense of the truth and
beauty of the LorcL^j^^^
But more than this might be said. It might
be shown that the whole history of the ortho
dox conception of God, from the flrst century
until now, has been the history of a progressive
idea. The revelation which began in the He-

42 DISCOURSES.
brew fear of the Lord God Almighty, and which
was finished in the manifestation of God in the
person of Christ — the completed revelation of
God in the Bible — arose, at length, upon a
world full of false ideas of deity, into whose at
mosphere, laden with emanations of evil, it shone,
burning up the fogs, sometimes, indeed, itself
overclouded, but always breaking through the
clouds, and filling the whole world more and
more with the knowledge and glory of God.
Leaving, however, this possible historical
justification of the idea of God which has been
growing in Christian theology, I wish rather to
ask whether the idea of God now cherished in
the representative minds of representative
churches, is justly liable to this reproach of
morally misunderstanding God. On the con
trary it seems to me that the representative
evangelical theology of the present day is avail
ing itself reverently, yet boldly, of the best
methods of growing in the knowledge of God.
It is not with men in general a question,
must we worship? but whom, and how? We^
might almost assert that there are no confessed,''
educated atheists at the present day. For sci-

DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD?

43

ence does not say, "There is no God;" but, "I
cannot see ; I do not know." The great ques
tion is, can God be known ? and orthodoxy, in
stead of degrading man's being, and regarding
the moral nature as a paralytic to the touch of
divine influences, affirms that the spirit which is
in man can and does respond to the energy, in
its own thought and life, of the Spirit of God ;
that man is capable of some real, though par
tial, knowledge of God ; that the reason and the
conscience are the organs of spiritual apprehen
sion through which man looks up into the very
nature of deity. You will find the orthodoxy
of to-day asserting in the schools of philosophy,
as well as before the people, the fact that man
has a spiritual birthright, that in every beat of
his heart, in every thought which he thinks, he
can, and he does, know something about God.
Orthodoxy, then, honors the reason and the
conscience as the organs of spiritual knowledge.
It finds a higher power at the fountains of our
moral and religious consciousness; and all ra
tional thought is the outflowing, or develop
ment, of the divine life which is in us, and of
the divine truth revealed to the spirit in man.

44 DISCOURSES.
of which all visible things are the metaphors
and expression.
But this is not all. Our Christian theology
not only avails itself of these natm-al means of
knowing God — means of spiritual apprehension
which have not been wholly lost or destroyed
by the terrific, blinding power of sin; but
Christian theology remembers, also, with grate
ful recognition, this great truth of God, " He
first loved us," and it would, therefore, accept
the providences in which that Love, before our
thought of God, has sought to make itself
known among men, and it would look up to
the mysteries of God, and study the thoughts
of God toward us, through a historic revela
tion. But here I strike upon one of the strongest
objections that has ever been made against
Christian theology. I will not state it to you
in the imperfect and more easily answered fojm
in which it lies before me in a popular presen
tation of it ; for I think there is a real difficulty
here which should be fairly met, and I will
bring it before you in the form in which it has
entered into the history of modern thought, in

DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD? 45
its strongest and most formidable presentation.
I shall read to you Lessing's famous reason for
his disbelief in historical Christianity, for I wish
to show that Orthodoxy at least is honest, and
will keep nothing back; that there are Chris
tian ministers in Christian pulpits who prefer,
when occasion offers, not to take advantage of
imperfect popular statements of objections to
their faith, but to deal honestly and fairly with
those objections in their strongest and best
forms. " If no historical truth can be demonstrated,"
wrote Lessing, "then, also, can nothing be dem
onstrated through historical truths. That is,
accidental truths of history cannot be the evi
dence of necessary truths of reason." That is
the brightest and best thing that rationalism |
has ever said. It presents the most serious dif
ficulty which philosophic doubt can raise against I
a simple historical faith in Christianity. " This,"
says Lessing, continuing his argument that
truths such as the received belief in Christianity
affirms, cannot be demonstrated by truths which
are only historically certain, " This is the foul,
broad ditch over which I cannot come, often

46 DISCOURSES.
and earnestly as I have made the spring. Can
any one help me over? Let him do it, I entreat
him ; I adjure him ! "
Providence was already leading the church
over that chasm between historical and spiritual
faith which Lessing found unbridged by the
theology of his day. The practical answer, as
has been well said, which Providence gave to
rationalism was Moravianism and Methodism.
Through the historical gospel of the life and
work of Jesus, souls became filled with a new
sense of God, and aglow with the light of the
Spirit ; — the Spirit of truth and of power used
these facts of the gospel history as the chosen
means of its own work of saving souls.
Providence gave, also, as the philosophical
answer to Lessing's reluctant rationalism, a pro-
founder and a purer theology than Lessing
found in the orthodoxism of his day — a theology
which has searched the depths of Christian con
sciousness, and which has found in Christian
life and experience the present and immediate
evidence of the religion of the Bible. This re
vivified theology sees in Christianity not simply
a Christ-idea, but a Christ-fact in the world, and

DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD ? 47
it finds the real and commanding evidence of
that divine fact in humanity in its present and
continuous power, in its living energy and spir
itual efficacy, in the consciousness of believers.
Experience proves that when a mind is brought
into vital contact with historical Christianity,
"with the facts of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that
mind at once, and as though a new and divine
energy had touched it, expands and rises to
enlarged and purified conceptions of God.
Thus a boy in Japan once found a leaf of the
Bible — a simple, bare record of historical fact.
But it led him across the ocean in search of the
Christian's God. He learned our language, and,
as historical Christian records were brought to
his knowledge, just as any other book might have
been brought, his mind seenied to pass through
what was almost a new creation ; it rose to such
conceptions of the Deity as it had never before
imagined — the witness of the Spirit within con
firmed the record of God given in the historical
gospel ; and that boy, become now a Christian
man, has gone back to Japan a missionary of the
Cross of Christ, and has lived to see his own
parents destroy their idols under the influence

48 DISCOURSES.
of the same historical testimony to God in
Christ. This, I say, is what historical Christi
anity has done thousands of times in bringing
to men knowledge of the true God — that knowl
edge which is eternal lif^/^
The vast difference between a merely moral
or ideal belief in God and that knowledge of
God which is given and assured in Christian
experience through God revealed in Christ, may
perhaps be made visible by a simple illustra
tion. Suppose a child to have lost its parents
in infancy, and to have been carried to another
country and brought up among strangers who
never had known them. That child might
gain, as he grew of age, a theoretical, but not a
personal, knowledge of what it is to have a
mother and father. He would come to know
these first, best facts of human experience by in
ference and deduction, but from no real vital
experience of them, as the child cradled in love,
and growing up in a happy Christian home,
knows them by heart, and can never forget them
in the after years, wherever he may wander.
Such is the difference between natural and re
vealed religion — between a faith in God de-

DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD ? 49
pendent upon philosophical conclusions, and a
real experience of God manifest in Christ. Our
Christian faith is the experience of the man who
has been brought up from childhood in the
Father's house. For God revealed himself of
old, in the childhood of humanity, as the one
supreme authority and guide, the law of human
history. He gave commandments, promises,
warnings, through holy men inspired by the
Holy Ghost. The Word came and dwelt among
us in the form of man. He has lived — ^the
Lord has lived — a divine life upon this earth,
with us, and for us — a life of God in our hu
man history and through history ! " My Father
worketh hitherto, and I work." God has not
remained beyond the stars, unknown and at an
infinite distance. He has been present as a
divine fact and a divine power among men,
present in the supernatural development of that
religion whose supreme and final revelation is a
sinless life, and a character unique and peerless,
through which is declared the very glory of the
Father. Therefore we say, we have more than
a religion of ideas; ours is a better confession
of faith than that; we have a religion of what
3

so DISCOURSES.
God has done for us; a religion of historical
facts, which are full of the glory and praise of
the Father; a religion which, upon the founda
tion which is laid deep in the earthliness and
sinfulness of our history, rises to heights of
Christian experience around which still shines
the light of the love of God. So the past fact
of Christ in history becomes the present truth
of the Spirit of Christ in human heaits.
Many who seem ready to cast loose from his
torical Christianity would retain their belief in
the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of
man. But do they not know that those very
beliefs came through these historical channels,
came borne to earth upon these historical
facts ? that what no pagan philosophy had ever
succeeded in accomplishing was historically
wrought into the character of a chosen people ?
and that Christianity, the outcome of the re
ligion of the Bible, first bore to a world of bend
ing slaves and woman, degraded and forlorn,
these great faiths, which are our Christian heri
tage — the fatherhood of God and the brother
hood of man ? *
To sum up, then, the result, so far, of my

DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD? 51
reasoning, orthodoxy, I would claim, avails it
self of the best methods of knowing God, viz.,
conscience and reason, and historical revelation.
I may go still farther, and assert that, partial
and unworthy as we must confess are our best
thoughts of God, nevertheless, our progressive
orthodoxy has gained, and is growing in, the
most pm'ely moral conception of God which can
be found anywhere in this world.
In this direction there has been great and
gratifying progress since the reformation. Re
member that the reformers brought, and it was
necessary that they should bring to their world,
this truth : that God is Lord, alone is King. By
two revolutionary truths — truths which came to
them through a historical revelation — Luther
and Calvin changed the face of modern civiliza
tion. Luther rose up in the freedom of the
Christian man against a soul-enslaving power,
and proclaimed the doctrine of justification by
faith. John Calvin stood over against that great
world-enslaving power, the power of the papacy,
which was assuming God's throne on earth, and
proclaimed — there is only one King, one Lord,
whose government not only controls nations, but

52 DISCOURSES.
whose decree, also, reaches down beneath indi
vidual liberty, and upholds all things by its in-
f rustrable power ; — and by that mighty truth of
divine sovereignty Calvin and the reformers did
what infidelity has never done, what a thousand
IngersoUs could never do, sounded forth a tri
umphant peal for the liberty of the souls of
men, and set the modern nations free. It is to
Calvinism, more than to any other single power,
that the modern State owes its liberty; and,
though we may have found a larger life and a
higher thought of God than our fathers knew,
there is a needed reproof for any who would
belie the spiritual parentage of our laws and
liberties in the old and homely proverb, " It is
an ill bird that-fouls its own nest."
Orthodoxy has accomplished more than Cal
vinism began to do. Progressive orthodoxy has
reached a higher conception of the Godhead
than it was permitted the Calvinistic reformers
to gain. For Calvinism, as it confronted the
great despotism over souls with its sublime doc
trine of the divine sovereignty, after all pre
sented but a half-truth of divinity to men, and
it had itself much of the Gospel still to learn.

D OES OR THOD OXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD? 53
Theologians, seizing its leading truth, worked it
out to its extreme consequences, and we should
be thankful that they did; for just as material
ism, or Haeckelism, has shown that Darwinism,
if carried to its extreme results, fails to give a
complete solution of the problem of life, so Cal
vinism, logically worked out, carried to its ex
treme consequences, shows itself to be in need
of Christ, in need of the Gospel of love, in need
of being lifted bodily up into a higher, more
ethically Christian conception of God, our
Father in heaven. The chief want of Calvin
istic confessions of faith is the play of the
light and hope of the gospel over them. Their
divine truths are left too much in the shadow
of their human philosophy. A system of theol
ogy may be firmly constructed, and solid as a
granitic formation ; but if it is to be true to
nature and the Bible, God's sunlight must not
be shut out.
The reaction from Calvinistic theology at first
tended toward the other extreme. Men began
to chase the sunbeams and to lose firm footing
on everlasting principles. After the reformers,
by sterner truths, had gained men's liberty, their

54 DISCOURSES.
descendants seemed disposed to enthrone a com
plaisant good-nature, or a distant indifference,
as God; they remembered that the Lord is mer
ciful, and they began to overlook the dark, world-
destroying power of sin. But orthodoxy, hav
ing learned something of its own earlier fatal
istic error, but avoiding this other humanitarian
extreme, went on to work out from nature, the
human heart, and the Bible, its own truth of
the Godhead ; and I have before me a book
that has just come from the press, in which the
greatest living theologian. Prof. Dorner, has
gathered up the ripe fruit of his theological
studies, and I find there such conceptions of God
in the completeness of his attributes and fulness
of his love, as make both mind and heart rejoice
in the glory of the Lord. Where else in the
whole field of theological literature can be
found nobler, worthier, more thoroughly ethical
conceptions of God than the orthodox theology
of to-day is giving through its living masters ?
Escaping the limitations both of Calvinism and
humanitarianism, it would have us worship God
as infinitely majestic, and holy, and yet un
speakably beautiful and attractive. God is

D OES OR THOD OXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD? 55
love. This is the Christian philosophy of God,
working itself out through the centuries, freed
from the corruptions of Paganism, and clearing
itself, also, from the shadows of scholastic the
ology. God is love — love which itself is a
trinity, the unity of three primitive rays divine.
For love, in the one ray or primal color of it, ia
benevolence — the giving of self for another's
good ; and love is, also, sympathy — the putting
self in place of another, living another's life, the
vicariousness of the cross ; and love is also self-
respect — the unselfish assertion of its own
worth, the preservation of its own good in the
world. Benevolence, vicariousness, righteous
ness, form the three-fold nature of love, which
itself is a unity of life. God is love ; love which
includes all hia attributes — mercy, sympathy,
goodness, justice — all that can enter into the
nature of a perfect and adorable Deity, so that
the very omnipotence of God is itself an attri
bute of love, and with the wisdom of God
serves always hia love. "Love," insists Prof.
Dorner, " ia the power in God over hia own om
nipotence." If we once rise freely and exult-
ingly to this thoroughly evangelical conception

56 DISCOURSES.
of God, we shall find that we are above and
beyond many of the difficulties and doubts
which often perplex and imprison f aith.^
Orthodoxy, then, takes its doctrines and the
facts of nature, and thinks them out just so far
as it can without coming in conflict with its
own conception of God ; and when it finds that
it is coming into conflict with its own faith in
God, it stops short in its reasonings, and bows
its head, and hides its own questionings in the
heart of its assured knowledge of the Love
whom it adores. Predestination, election, all
these objectionable doctrines, these "horrible
doctrines" — what will orthodoxy do with them?
The worst doctrine of election to-day is taught
by our natural science. The scientiflc doctrine
of natural selection is the doctrine of election
robbed of all hope, and without a single touch
of human pity in it. I blame not our science ;
it simply seeks to be true to the facts of law
and life ; it finds even in nature a continuous
process of selection unbroken from the begin
ning until now; but while it holds that all
things may possibly work together for some far
off and larger good, it has not a single tear of

D OES OR THOD OXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD? 57
pity to let fall for the individual who may be
crushed beneath life's heavy load. What does
our theology — our " hard theology " — have to
say? It will not turn from the facts. What
ever else you may say of it, modern orthodoxy
is no coward ! It has become used to the edge
of the precipice, it has looked down into the
depths, ita ear is haunted with the sound of the
cataracts ! It will look the facta in the face —
the fact of sin, the fact of divine law, the fact
of condemnation and death. But orthodoxy
does also what no science can do ; it takes these
f actsland holds them up before its clear, shining
faith that God is love. It takes these facts,
awful though they are, and brings them to
Jesus, and leaves them at the foot of the Cross.
Orthodoxy sees the chasma, and the precipices;
and the wild cataracts; but it sees, also, shed
abroad over all, the light of the love of God ;
it would behold them no more under any cloud
of its own foolish imaginations, or heavy, over
shadowing traditions ; it would see them in the
5 sunlight of the Gospel, in the joy of its faith in
the perfect goodness of the perfect God. And
so, reserving many questions, as Erasmus once
3*

58 DISCOURSES.
said they should be reserved, not until the next
general council, but until that hour when we
shall stand face to face with God, our theology
haa patience, and can wait. Having rested as
a child upon the bosom of the infinite Father
hood of God, our faith is content if it can feel
close to its own trembling heart the beatings
of that heart which is ever true and unchange
able in its goodness, even though it may be
darkness and night round about it aa it Ilea
upon the boaom of God.
If, however, we are asked why should our
theology trouble itself with thought about these
high themes, the answer is. Christian theology
cannot shirk ; it must think out and work out,
so far aa it haa power, under its own pure con
ception of God, these ever-present problems of
human existence; and I reply again that the
belief in God, the theology which we may gain
and hold through all our questionings, is of
most practical moment to us — the whole direc
tion and conduct of life will be determined
by it. Our theology ia really the most practi
cal concern of human life. The ancienta had
no true knowledge of the earth, aa they had

DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD?

59

no just conception of the sun ; so there must
be some true idea of God in order that there
may be any adequate understanding of man,
hia wants, his range of capabilities, and his des
tiny; and civilizations are made to differ by
the ideaa of God which shine over them, as they
are clear and true, or clouded and corrupted.
A man's theology enters as an essential element
into his daily life. It does make a difference I
in the- color of the life whether, when we awake
in the morning and enter upon the duties of the
day, we believe in God; whether, as we go
forth*to our work, we walk as seeing Him who
is invisible; whether, when we return to our
homes, we gather our families together and
offer our prayer of thanksgiving and praise to
our Father who is in heaven. It doea make a
difference in the complexion and tenor of the
life whether we believe in God so that our
hearts are not troubled or afraid; and it does
make a difference, too, in the rightnesa of a
man's character, whether he holds a true filial
relation to the person of God; for, if God is
love, capable, because he is love, of entering
into personal relations with his creatures, then

6o DISCOURSES.
there are duties which we owe to God — and one
duty cannot be made the substitute for another
duty. Honesty in your buaineaa would not ex-
cuae you for a lack of patriotism, nor patriotism
for a want of kindness in your home ; and if
there be a God, our Father and our Friend, ,
then, as we have duties toward one another, so,
also, there is a morality which we owe to God.
Christ, then, waa right when he said, " Seek ye
first the kingdom of God and Hia righteous
ness " — that righteousness which ia the sanction
of every human duty, the inspiration of every
moral enthusiasm, the security of true affection,
the peace, the joy, the eternal life of the soul.

III.

eorgiv:eness and suffering.
In the sixteenth verse of the third chapter
of the Gospel of John is thia word from Jesua — it
must have been a revelation from Jesus, for no
human mind ever could have invented it, no
human heart ever would have dreamed of it, it
could only have proceeded from a divinely filled
consciousness : " For God so loved the world
that he gave His only begotten Son, that who
soever believeth in him should not perish, but
have everlasting life."
I take up again the dialogue which I am
trying to follow between belief and unbelief.
Unbelief says. The Goapel, as generally re
ceived, is inconceivable, and therefore impossible.
Belief answers. It is a fact, a divine fact in
history, and therefore it is possible.
Unbelief replies, The testimony upon which
these alleged facts are based giay be untrust-

62 DISCOURSES.
worthy; the witnesses may have been them
selves deceived, if not deceivers. Small germs
of fact may have grown and blossomed into a
cloud of beautiful myths. Or, if the time of
the formation of the Gospel narratives seems
too short, and the date of Christ's coming too
late in history for this mythical explanation,
there may have been artifice and more or less
conscious tendency to fabrication on the part of
the early disciples.
Belief answers. The Gospels are as trust
worthy as any historical narratives. But we
do not rely simply upon direct and explicit tes
timony to the facts of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ. We have other and greater reasons for
our faith. These facts are necessary facts. We
cannot explain the connections and course of
human history, before or since Christ, unless
we admit the substantial truth of the Gospels.
We must admit theae facts, we must accept
them in their integrity ; for otherwise the order
and continuity of history are strangely broken.
The facts of the Gospel are not what Lessing
would call " accidental truths of history ; " they
are necessary facts — necessary to an adequate

FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 63
and thoroughly rational understanding of the
order and issues of history. Moreover, belief
proceeds to answer. These facta are not dead
facts, they are living powers. The life of Juliua
Cseaar we receive as a matter of historical testi
mony, and yet, in a certain aenae, it ia a dead
fact rather than a living one — a fact of ancient,
not modern, hiatory ; but these facta of the Goa
pel of Jeans Christ are still living facta — living
historic forces, active energies in modern his
tory. These divine facts came into the world
as impulsions from the Unseen; as powers of
the world to come ; and as such their stren.gth
is not abated with the years; they are still
present and efficacious in modern society, in its
truest life and best growth. We have, then,
in the experience of Christian hearts and Chria
tian society, under the preaching of the Gospel,
the living testimony of truth to truth — the heart
of man still answering to the revelation of the
heart of God. The persistent vitality and con
tinuous growth of evangelical religion are facts
for which we should have some adequate ex
planation. Here is a marvellous fact of growth
which implies throughout the energy of some

64 DISCOURSES.
hidden life. There does seem to be something
in the heart of humanity which responds to the
presentation of the Cross of Christ; the heart
of man knows its divineneas, and f eela its quick
ening power; and, as those flowers which fol
low the sun through the day, follow it still
though the heavens may be overspread with
clouds ; so, although the truth of the Gospel
may often be hidden behind our imperfect in
terpretations of it, nevertheless, the purest intui
tions, the highest aspirations, the largest hopes
of humanity, do follow the glory of that true
light which lighteth every man that cometh
into the world. Here orthodoxy well might
rest its case ; here, as matter of fact, many be
lievers do rest, contented to receive the gift of
forgiveness of sin, and the love of God shed
abroad in their hearts, in which they find life's
best hope and sweetest joy.
But unbelief is compelled to support ita rea
soning against the supernatural facts of the
Gospels, by bringing into question certain fun
damental ideas, also, of Christianity; and so
belief, too, rising from the facta of Christian
experience to the ideas of Christianity, is willing

FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 65
to meet the appeal to reason and conscience.
To reason and conscience we are asked to go ;
and to reason and conscience we will go. To
this tribunal we would most confidently appeal ;
but we would appeal to reason in the highest —
a reason informed with conscience, and full of
heart — a reason that haa power of insight into
moral realitiea, and intuitiona of the deepest
spiritual truths.
The class of obj editions to evangelical Chris
tianity which we have next, then, to consider,
relate to the views we are supposed to hold
concerning the Person and the work of Christ.
When Dr. Johnson was travelling one day in a
rural district, he was asked by a country-woman
how he could have defined in his dictionary a
pastern as the knee of a horse. He replied, " Ig
norance, madame, pure ignorance." I certainly
intend no discourtesy, yet in justice to the
churches I am constrained to say that ignorance
of what evangelical teaching really is seems to
be the occasion of not a few common objections
to it. When it is said, for example, that the
church founds its belief in the divine person of
Christ upon the miracles which he wrought, the

66 DISCOURSES.
statement falls very far wide of the facts. It is
the character of Christ which ia the supreme
evidence of his supernatural person. The chief
argument for the divinity of Christ is his hu
manity. Close your eyes for the time being to
all accounts of the mighty work of Jesus ; seek
to form a clear conception of his person and
life ; and that character, when once really seen,
will be its own evidence, the proof of Jesus'
unique oneness with the Father. Then read
again the accounts of the miracles, and they
will seem no longer miracles when narrated of
such a Christ ; they are as natural to him aa
our commonest deeds are to us ; they are con
trary to our experience of other men, but not
contrary to the world's experience of Jesus
Christ. The divine humanity of Christ is the
citadel of evangelical faith. Miracles have still
their evidential value; they are the collateral
securities of faith : but why question the col
laterals when the divine handwriting in the
character of Christ remains unimpeached and
unimpeachable ? I
Leaving, then, with a single word, this argu
ment for belief in the glorious person of the

FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 67
Lord Jesus Christ, which is now the ultimate
and commanding reason for faith usually given
by evangelical believers, I turn to another part
of the objection often urged against evangeli
cal faith in Christ.
What does the orthodox theology of to-day
have to say concerning the so-called sacrificial
theology — the atonement for sin effected, as the
churches teach, through the sufferings of Christ?
Can we be expected still to cherish a moral and
rational belief in the orthodox idea of atone
ment? I might, in reply, ask you to look with me
through that progressive revelation of God, of
which our Bible ia the record and witneaa, and
to seek, as we gaze down that divine perspective
of covenant, law, and sacrifice, to determine in
relation to the chief facts of the history of re
demption the place of the cross upon which the
Messiah died ; or, I might ask you, leaving the
circle of apostolic thought, to enter into the
history of thia doctrine, and to follow from age
to age its development ; and thua we should be
fitted to understand those views of the atone
ment which are now prevalent in the evangeli-

68 DISCOURSES.
cal churchea. But I shall invite you to a shorter
yet more arduous task — to attempt to climb
with me straight up to the very heights. I shall
urge you to endeavor to take thia whole doctrine
of the work of Christ up into the pure sunlight
of the best and most heavenly conception we can
gain of the character of God himaelf — the height
to which thia doctrine is uplifted in our text :
For God so loved the world.
The firat two ateps along this path which I
would take are indicated for me by the diffi
culties which are ordinarily found with the
theology of the Cross. " The Bible," it is said,
" teachea that the wages of sin is death. But
when the church tells us that Christ's sufferings
and death have substituted eternal life for this
death, then our knowledge of sin — of its conse-
quencea aa felt in our own souls, and as seen in
others — tells ua that thia cannot be true." It
was the first and the greatest orthodox theolo
gian who once, wrote : " Whatsoever a man
soweth, that shall he also reap;" and evangeli
cal theologians can hardly be accused of neg
lecting to preach, and with the utmost earnest-
neaa, the inevitable consequences of sin, and the

FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 69
certainty of the laws of retribution. What
then ? Can there be no forgiveness ?
Whoever accepts the simple human truth in
Jeans' parable of the prodigal son, has already
risen above the course of natural retribution
upon which the objector just stood, and ap
proaches the higher ground of grace. In that
parable Jesua laid down the first, broad truth
which underlies the whole power and efficacy
of his own atoning work. Sin, he would teach
plainly, ia forgivable. It ia in the moral nature
of God to forgive ain. The elder son might
have answered, in the language of some who
are troubled with our evangelical preaching:
My knowledge of sin leads me to believe that
sin must be punished; I see no justice in for
giving and restoring a worthlesa prodigal; I
cannot " comprehend how any faith, of whatever
nature or degree, can suapend the eternal lawa"
by which the Father governs the world. I can
not see how any violation of law can justly
escape the inevitable penalty — " a penalty which
no belief or no prayers can avert." The prodi
gal must suffer the " natural penalty of his sin;"
" we cannot divorce one from the other." How

7o DISCOURSES.
can the Father, who governs by "unchangeable
laws," make a feast for him ? Are not the wages
of sin death?
Over and against the elder brother's reason
ing ; over and againat the theology of deapair ;
over and againat this hard truth of natural retri
bution, Jeans taught unmistakably that the
Father can forgive ; that in aome diviner way sin
is forgivable ; that there ia some possibility for
forgiveness in the heart of the nature of things,
in the bosom of the Eternal. Thia parable doea
not yield the whole of Jesua' truth; it is the
beautiful beginning of the evangelical doctrine,
the end of which waa the teaching of Jeaua in
that upper chamber, when he made known to
the disciples — ^to their afterthoughts, at least,
upon his worda-^how, through his own suffer
ings, sin could be forgiven of God ; how he was
love's own atonement for the sin of the world.
What, then, we ask, ia the divine method of
forgiveness? How would Jesus reconcile for
us these conflicting truths, that sin is punish
able and sin ia forgivable? At thia point let us
seek at once to take thia doctrine up into the
light in which Jesus left it, the light of the love

FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 71
of God. I believe that the whole universe waa
first for the Christ, and then Christ was for the
whole universe. I believe that the possibility of
the cross of Christ ia a possibility in the moral
nature of things; and orthodoxy asserts with
grateful exultation that the Gospel of the Cross
is in accordance with our best knowledge of the
nature both of God and man, and that doubt or
denial of it dims the glory of Deity, and lowera
the dignity of human nature. Let ua see if it
be not so. You remember that in speaking of
the Christian conception of God I remarked,
love is itself a trinity. I ask you now, there
fore, to look up at the Cross, and to behold the
work of the Redeemer, in the light of each one
of thoae primal rays which form together the
perfect unity of the love of God.
First, love is benevolence — the giving of
self — self-impartation. Shall the love of God,
then, pause — shall it stop in the ascent of life,
until it has given of itself to the utmost ? until
it has imparted the divine nature itself to the
heart of humanity ? Love, secondly, is sympa
thy — the power of putting ones' self in the
place of another; and you know how human

72 DISCOURSES.
friendship enables one sometimes to enter into
the very heart of the experience of another;
how human affection enables the father or
mother to take the sin and shame of an erring
child to their ovra. bosoms, grieving over it, and
suffering through it, as though it were their
own sin and their own shame. Thia vicarious
power of living in the livea of others is of the
very essence of love — and ahall God be lesa
perfect than man? shall human friendship in
ita power of sympathy be more beautiful than
the infinite love of the perfect God? shall the
mother's heart poaseaa a power to enter into
and feel as ita own the suffering and shame of
a lost child, which the God who made that
mother's heart himaelf cannot have? I aay,
then, that to deny the vicarious power of love ia
to put a limit — a limit of nature, a limit of our
poor understanding — upon the perfectness of
divine love, and to make God morally less than
man. When will we learn, when will we have
faith enough in God's own image in humanity,
to dare, reverently and humbly, to look down
into the depths of the purest human affections,
and to find mirrored there most brightly, mir-

FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 73
rored as nowhere else reflected from all the
world beside, the very perfections of the Deity ?
Love, then, in its sympathy, its vicariousness,
must be able to do what its benevolence would
prompt it to do in bearing our sins. But there
ia a third element in love — the element of right-
eousnesa. This ia love'a aelf-reapect, its true self-
assertion, the affirmation of its own worth or
good, eternal faithfulness to itself. Thia is the
holiness of love; and without this element of
self-respect human love would sink into license
and lust. Righteousnesa is the genuineness of
God's love. How, then — this is the very diffi
culty of the whole queation — how can sin be
forgivable in view of the righteousness which
belongs to the very nature of love? Look
again, not at any of the lower illustrations of
mediation which may be derived from other all
too imperfect analogies ; but look at what love
itself can do, at what love has done. What
must it do to forgive sins against itself ? If love
simply ahould consent to take the offender back
without any penitence on his part, or without
feeling and ahowing on its part any grief and
suffering for the wrong with which it had been
4

74 DISCOURSES.
pierced, then love would indeed lose its self-
respect, and be robbed of its worth and purity.
Love can forgive — but it must suffer in forgiv
ing, and by its own pain and grief for the wrong
done, show ita own recoil from sin, and condem
nation of it, even while it forgivea and delighta
in giving back again its trust ; and there can be
no genuine human forgiveness, no real reconcili
ation between friends, unless there be some suf
fering upon the part of both. Oh, my friends,
perhaps this ia the reason why forgivenesa is for
ua so hard a virtue; we cannot truly forgive
without some cracifixion of our very selves ! We
do not choose to cover the wrong done to ua in
our own shame and sorrow for it, and, condemn
ing it by our own suffering for its ainfulness, to
be willing and able, with a true heart, to forgive
our brother; we too often would rather aee the
wrong condemned through his suffering the full
consequence of his offence; and not by any
suffering of our own for him and with him.
But God in hia perfect love chooses the better
way of forgivenesa, condemning the sin of the
world, while he forgives it, through a divine
sorrow for it, through Gethsemane and the

FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 75
Cross ! So, often, in our human homes, the
mother's tears, the hairs of the father turning
gray, are the signs of the sorrow through which
love manifests its sense of the ill-desert of sin,
its deep, unalterable abhorrence of wrong-doing,
while it keeps the door open for the feet of the
returning child, and is ready at any hour to
take ita own, lost and found again, mourned
over, suffered for, and forgiven, back to its pure
home and happiness. If we can do this — if we
know that we can do thia — ^if you father.s and
mothers know that there is a way for human
affection to forgive without dishonoring itself,
though it be a way of tears — cannot God do it ?
Cannot God find the same way of forgiveness ?
Can God be less than our human hearts ? But
how can God suffer? How shall the infinitelj'^
Blessed One find the way of tears ? How shall
He condemn our sin and forgive it by suffering
its wound and hurt aa though it were his own ?
The answer of revelation, the answer of history,
ia the Cross of Christ. Aa the benevolence of
God's love finds at the end and at the head of
the creation the place for the God-man; as it
takes the whole chain of created being up in its

16 DISCOURSES.
laat link and binda it to the throne of the
Eternal ; as through ita vicariousness the divine
love enters into man's very life, puts itself ip
the form of man in our very stead, being
tempted as we are, making its own our experi
ence of sin, desertion, and death; so also the
righteousness of love is satisfied — satisfied once
for all and forever — in the infinite aorrow for
sin which is manifested upon the Cross. There,
where humanity comes nearest to the heart of
God, where man approaches nearest to the life
of God, where the Deity . takes humanity to
itself — there is the altar, there ia the holy-place,
there is the Gethsemane of Spirit, where, sin ia
suffered for with an infinite and an efficacioua
suffering. The anawer of orthodoxy, then, ia complete.
It ia an answer resting first of all upon divine
facts in hiatory, and confirmed by the gracious
experience of Chriatian life. It ia an answer
which is then seen to be in its ideas, alao, most
consonant with our highest and beat conceptions
, of the possibilities of love, human and divine.
Through the sufferinga of One who repreaenta
God's whole feeling toward the sin, of the

FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. yj
world, through love'a perfect conquest of evil
upon the Crosa, all the interests of the heavenly
home may be preserved, and the righteousness
of the Holy Father be manifested and main
tained, while sinners, forgiven and welcomed,
may find free entrance into every one of the
many mansions. Should the elder brother now
say, Father, why not inflict the thi-eatened pen
alty? how can you rejoice over one who went
and wasted hia substance ? then the answer of
eternal love is, that sin has been condemned
already; condemned more earnestly, with a
deeper condemnation, in the suffering which
has been incurred, in the very willingness to
bear with it, to receive in ita own bosom sin'a
deadly wound, and freely to forgive it. The
Father's sorrow expressed in the Christ, the
divine feeling of shame for sin manifested in
Christ's measureless grief for it, in one word,
divine love vicariously suffering for sin, is ita
sufficient and God-like atonement. And by
that work of God in which he satisfied himself
in forgiving us, we are lifted, out of the lower
courses of retribution into a higher order, into
the order of the moral universe, into the order

78 DISCOURSES.
of moral freedom and grace. It is true we are
not delivered from the purely natural conae-
quences of sin ; but does it not make a differ
ence whether, as we suffer the inevitable natural
pains of sin, we suffer them in the consciousness
that they are no longer divine inflictions of
penalty, since God, for Christ's sake, has for
given us ; or whether we must endure them aa
under the diapleaaure of God, in utter lonelineaa
and baniahment of spirit ? Would it not make
a difference to your child, who, in diaobedience
to your instruction has put hia finger in the fire
and been burned, whether it be left to suffer
alone, or in the mother's arms? Does it not
make a difference with us, whether, when we
die, we die alone, suffering in the darkness the
penalty of sin, or whether we die knowing that
even in death the everlasting arms are beneath
us, and that close to our fainting heart beata the
heart of the eternal Love ? Oh ! thia is what
God in Christ doea for ua — He takes us, even
while we are under many of the natural conse
quences of sin, up into the fellowship of His
Spirit; takes us out of the dark sense of guilt,
and the fear of death, up into the peace of

FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 79
the Holy Ghost, and the communion of the
Father. y
I have been presenting, I am aware, but one
aspect of the atoning work of Christ — that view
of it which seems to me to be the highest, most
purely ethical, and most satisfying.* There are
other views of it opened at different points in
the progressive revelation of God in the Bible
— other views corresponding to lower stages
and analogiea of human experience. But if you
have climbed to the height of this text, God so
loved the world ; if you have once looked abroad
upon the revelations of divine things opening
like broad and luminous horizons from the ele
vation of this truth of God, then you are above
and beyond most of the difficulties and limita-
tiona which too often narrow and confine evan
gelical explanations of the atonement. And here
I may safely leave it to your own better reason
— to the heart in the reason — if Jeaua did not
know the very nature of God when he taught
that, notwithstanding all the appointed retribu
tions of nature, sin is forgivable ? Unless you
are prepared to make God morally less than
man, you will gratefully own that there must

8o DISCOURSES.
be found, as the Goapel of the Crosa assures us
there haa been found, for infinite love a way of
atonement — a way which even human love has
often learned through love's instinct of sym
pathetic grief — a large, beautiful, tranafiguring
forgiveneas, conaiatent with its own pure self-
respect, and satisfying every thought of right-
eouaneaa. The atonement is thus seen to be love's
perfect self-satisfaction in the forgiveness of sin,
and reconciliation of the world to God.^
And now I ask, in all fairness, that thia teach
ing of the evangelical pulpit shall not be cari
catured; that men should at least take the
pains to understand its true spirit, and to judge
it by the real morality of forgiveneas. I ask
you to look at human nature on its diviner side,
and not to be satisfied with low and narrow
conceptiona of its possibilities. I aak you to
admit something of the capacity of God for
loving man, and something of the capacity of
man for the indwelling of God. Man waa
made for God, and God loved to give himaelf
to man — that is the simple deep" meaning of
Jesua' Gospel. Human nature was not made
to be a little, bustling independency of God;

FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 8 1
but to dwell in God, and God in it. I urge
you to view theae evangelical doctrines not
aimply aa hiatorical facta, but also in their ideal
completeness and truth ; and, when they are
thua viewed, the person and work of the Lord
Jeaua become tranacendently glorioua to the
reason aa he ia unspeakably precious to many
hearts. ''HLet it be remembered, finally, that orthodoxy
teachea there can be and is but one limit to this
redeeming power of God's love in Christ, and
that is the limit of a will which persistently re
jects the divine. Jeaua whom we love may be,
as often he haa been, miaunderstood. Education
'and training, aa well aa the mistakea of hia
friend a may prevent hia light from shining un-
dimmed upon many who fain would see him as
his glory has shone full upon other uplifted and
glovring soula; but no friend ia more patient
than he, or so willing to wait, if need be, through
the agea for the world'a perfect understanding
of hia work for it ; and words spoken against
the Son of man, he himself haa told ua, shall be
forgiven. Evangelical theology, in remembrance
of thia attitude and thia gracioua word of the
4*

82 DISCOURSES.
Master, would not make salvation dependent
upon intellectual appreciation of its doctrines.
Many a soul may grow to be Christ-like even in
the dark. Chriatian life can spring up even
around dim beliefs. A wise orthodoxy would
devoutly hope that upon many soula there may
dawn at the laat day such revelations of light
and glory from the ascended Lord, now hidden
from them, as shall make their human virtues
blossom into angelic beauty, and flood their
lives with joy. But orthodoxy, obedient to the
Master's word, teaches that there is one sin of
the utmost danger, against which, with all
earnestneas, it would warn men again and
again. To resist in aught the divine influence ;
to grieve the Holy Spirit; not to be willing to
follow the light of God which ia now manif eat ;
not to be ready to receive and to welcome the
Christ so far aa he has made himself known to
the conscience or the heart, that is sin, deep,
dark, and dangerous — sin, which, if it grows into
the habit, the determinate purpose of the life,
may become the sin against the Holy Ghost
which hath never forgiveness. '

IV.
imperfect theories of the future life.
While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things
which are not seen : for the things which are seen are temporal ; but
the things which are not seen are etemal. — 3 CoK. iv. 18.
Twice during my summer ramblings I have
succeeded, after a hard climb, in gaining the
summit of Mt. Katahdin. I stood upon a lofty
ridge of roc^ on the one side of which there
waa a steep descent where one, had he slipped,
could hardly have kept hia footing ; and on the
other side fell a sheer precipice, partially en
circling an abyas, in which the clouda boiled
and sm'ged, and the winda moaned through the
vapora like the criea of lost souls.
He who once succeeds in climbing the height
of evangelical truth up to which in the laat
sermon I tried to lead your thoughts, will be
confident that he stands upon an everlasting
foundation, exalted though he be above the

84 DISCOURSES.
clouds ; and he vrill be aware, alsd, of the dan
ger of loaing firm foothold in the truth, or of
falling headlong into abysmal unbelief, if he
ventures too carelessly and too far on either
side. The Biblical truth of the nature of the
Godhead, if we stand upon it, will preserve
ua, on the one hand, from plunging into
utter scepticism, and, on the other hand, from
descending into untenable views of divinity,
at the bottom of which lies the hopeless
jungle of pagan superstitiona. So the evangeli
cal truth of the divine humanity keeps us, on
the one side, from falling into sheer fatalism,
and, on the other, from slipping into theories of
human nature, which, though they seem at first
lofty, nevertheless are sure in the end to land
us in pessimism and despair. So in regard to
Christian morality, one who stands upon the
exalted doctrine of God's grace in Christ is pro
tected at once from lawlessness and license, and
from worldliness and merely prudential virtue
— the epicureanism down which the descent is
easy into lowneaa and vice.
But at this point I meet with another objec
tion to evangelical religion which shall serve as

IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. 85
the stepping-stone to our present reasoning. It
is often said that evangelical theology appeala
unduly to the hopea and feara of men, thereby
producing a morality of mere policy. Men are
urged to unite with the church in order that
after death they may escape from hell. Now^
so far as the objection made lies against the
motives of some professed Christiana, I would
not care to interpose a word to break ita force.
Jesua himself rebuked the multitude who fol
lowed him for the sake of the loaves and fishes ;
and I might appeal to the echoes which linger
in our churches, the echoes which linger around
the best orthodox pulpits, to prove that true
evangelical religion makea ita appeal to the
noblest motives, to whatever is childlike in
childhood, to whatever is womanly in woman
hood, to whatever is manly in manhood.
But, if it still be urged that any appeal to
men's hopes and fears is unworthy a lofty
morality, one curious fact of modern literature
would of itself be enough to warrant me in
calling a halt to this attack upon the church.
The fact is, that thia objection to Christian
motives on account of what Herbert Spencer

86 DISCOURSES.
cleverly satirizes as their other-worldliness, and
John Stuart Mill regards as their appeal to
mere policy, has singularly enough been raised
recently against Christianity by the two lead
ing representatives of that very morality which
is based upon utility, or inherited experiences,
at least, of utility; while, on the other hand,
Jonathan Edwards, who used to make the very
souls of men tremble by his intense pictures of
the agonies of the lost, waa the very theologian
who worked out a theory of virtue so high
and so disinterested that the chief apostle of
scientific utilitarianism, Mr. Spencer, who can
not even "define virtue except in terma of
happiness," fails to underatand it, and mia-
statea it.
The simple truth of the matter is, that evan
gelical theologians are the very thinkers who
have exalted most highly the idea of immut
able moral distinctions, and the love of virtue
for ita own pure sake. Moreover, fear is a mo
tive which ia naturally and necessarily recog-
'nized in all government, in society, and even in
the discipline of the home ; so that those who
'object to the use of these motives in religion

IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. 87
might well be left, as Bishop Butler would say,
to hold their dispute with the constitution and
course of nature.
The question really to be considered is not,
should we be influenced by hope or fear ? but,
for what may we hope and of what ought we
to be afraid ? In order, therefore, to deal satis
factorily with the doubts and difficulties of faith
which are to be met with in this direction, we
should enter into a full discussion of prevalent
orthodox views of the future life : What, as
generally held by evangelical churches now,
what, aa taught by really representative minds
at the present time, are the orthodox views of
the future life ?
Let me remind you at the outset of this in
quiry that the difficulties which surround thia ¦
subject, and which seem sometimes to riae up
againat the government of God himself — the
shadows our earth in its hiatory of sin seems to
cast against the very glory of Heaven — are not
the creation of Christianity. Revelation only
serves to bring them out ; they are difficulties
which run down into the depths of the moral
nature of things ; they are problems which lie

88 DISCOURSES.
back in the mystery of the creation of a moral
universe. Around the second star in the sword-handle
of Orion there is a remarkable nebula, which
seems to hang in the skies like a bridal veil, its
threads of white light woven into an infinite
tracery, and through its folds stars sparkle and
gleam ; but this veil of light surrounds a spot
in the sky of utter darkness. I have seen sen
sitive girls start back with a shudder from the
telescope, as that veil of light flung across its
field seemed to bring out, like a darkneaa that
could be felt, the black sky within ita folds.
And often in the silence of the night, as I have
gazed at that mystery of light and darkness in
the skies, I have felt that I could form some
conception of what Jesus meant when he spoke
of the heavenly glory and the outer dark
neaa. But the telescope through which I looked
did not create that darkness, it only revealed
it ; and so the teaching of Jesus Christ only
brings out the darkneaa which sometimes seems
to be the deepest and most unutterable upon
the very borders of celestial light and glory
In wrestling with this confessedly difficult

IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. 8g
and awful subject, one of the first thinga for us
to endeavor to do will be to aatiafy ourselves
whether we can win any conception of the future
life, particularly upon the retributive side of it,
which shall relieve our perplexities, and enable
us to bring into order and harmony all the
analogies of experience, aa well as the teachings
of Scripture. I shall not weary you with a
recital or discussion of those numerous >theoriea
of the future life which are at best only fanci
ful ; what we have to do is first to project upon
the future, so far aa we can, the lines of present
experience. I shall review briefly aeveral theo-
riea which have been suggested, not without
reason and support from analogy, and which
have found some recognition within the pale of
evangelical Christianity.
First, there ia the theory of annihilation, or
conditional immortality. In one form of this
theory it ia held that the impenitent, those whose
soula become in this life thoroughly wedded to
the flesh, periah at death ; that immortality is
not the natural right of the soul, but that it is a
gift of God to man, made dependent upon his
obedience to the will of God, and conditioned

90 DISCOURSES.
upon his sympathy with the character of God.
Against this theory it has often and well been
urged that it rests upon a literal and crass in
terpretation of the Scriptures; that it contra-*
dicta a natural right to immortality which would
seem to be guaranteed by a faithful Creator in
the very conatitution of our nature ; and that it
involves an imperfect and unworthy conception
of the soul to which its Maker has delegated
something of his own being, and in the very
creation of which He haa so far limited his own
omnipotence, or placed it beyond his moral
power, at least, to deatroy it.
I assume now the general belief in the im
mortality of the soul. Your hearts are the
witnesses for it; your memories are the pro
phets of it ; Christianity is the evidence of it,
wrought into the very substance of history.
It is urged, then, against this hypothesis of
conditional immortality that it conflicts with
thia natural and inalienable right of the soul to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, from
age to age, and through all aeons — a right which
would seem to have been granted by the Creator
and secured in the very constitution of the soul.

IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE.

91

There is, however, another form of this
theory, which relieves somewhat the force of
this argument from nature against it. It may
be held that the soul doea not go out of exist
ence at once when the body dies; but that,
whether good or bad, it shall continue to be
through other periods of duration until it is
fully ripe for its final judgment; or that all
souls must be supposed to continue, somewhere
and somehow, in existence until the last great
day, when all probation shall be finished; and
then, when this world-age shall be over, when
the new heavens and the new earth shall ap
pear, then whatsoever is like God, whatsoever
bears the image of Christ, shall be presented to
the joy and glory of heaven's eternal King ; but
that whatever ia unlike God, every soul which,
by a life of persistent sin, may have lost God's
image and forfeited ita native right to life and
immortality, ahall be deatroyed from God's
presence with an everlasting destruction.®
This form of the theory of annihilation ap
parently relieves some perplexities of the dark
problem of the future of evil ; but, after all, it
only pushes the. difficulty farther back. The

92 , DISCOURSES.
real question is not. When will probation be
over, when will the judgment come ? but. What
is to be the final issue of evil in the creation of
a good God? And annihilation by a fiat of
God, and aa a laat resort of the Creator in deal
ing with sin, would seem like a confession of
divine inability to overcome evil with good,
rather than a final solution of the problem of
evil in the perfect vindication of love.
There ia still another possible form of this
theory, for which, as it seems to me, there
might be found stronger supports from our
present experience — a theory of partial and
gradual annihilation. You have often noticed
the power which an evil life haa to dwarf and
deaden the personality of a man. The process
of creation was a process ever working upward
— up from the dust of the earth to life ; up from
living matter to the human brain, the very per
fection of the material creation ; up along the
line of human history until at the head of the
creation stands the God-man in the glory of the
Father. The process of love is ever upward —
up from the pure child to the strong man or
thoughtful Woman ; up to the still more angelic

IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE.

93

grace and virtue of the spirits of the just made
perfect. But the process of sin is ever down
ward, destroying all that is manly or womanly,
extinguishing in the lusts of the flesh the light
and glory of the soul. Our very words for
sina are derived from the naturea of the lower
animala and the coaraer characteriatics of the
material world. Aa the man enslaved by his
appetites and pasaiona ainka lower and lower,
he seems to lose soul, to lose the power of
discriminating between good and evil, and the
capacity of entering into the enjoyments of
a pure, happy home. The mark of the beaat
comes out upon his very countenance; down
even beneath the level of the brute creation
doea sin seem sometimes to sink the soul, even
in thia present world, until — utterly hard and
coarse, a thing rather than a man — the drunk
ard, the debauchee, the criminal, meets the hour
of his extinction. Now, suppose thia course
of degradation, so painfully and so repulsively
obtruded upon ua in aome livea, to be carried
on indefinitely ; let thia process of self-extinc- .
tion, of emptying the very personality, of de
stroying the soul, go on through ages of agea

94 DISCOURSES.
— and what would be left at last? What but
the aahes of flames ? what but the graves of
soula? what but the shades of immortal minds?
what but a world which would be the insane
asylum of the universe? Is that what Jesua
meant when he spoke of him who ia able to
destroy both soul and body in hell ?
While, then, this theory of the gradual waste
of personality and loss of soul does seem to
carry out certain proceaaea of moral consump
tion which we can see already begun in this
world, and while it is juatified by some very
significant analogies of our present experience
of the death which is the wages of sin, never
theleas it doea not comprehend within itself all
the lines of our experience, and still less doea
it comprise all the teachings of the Bible. Op
posed, therefore, to thia conception, and sup
ported by some facts and moral reasonings
which it leaves out of the account, we find a
second general theory with regard to the ulti
mate condition of the impenitent — that of a
final restoration, the restitution of all things.
There is certainly much in our personal feel
ings to give wings to thia thought of the final

IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. 95
reconciliation of all thinga in Christ. There
are many sentimenta in our hearts which leap
up at the very mention of thia " eternal hope."
Often, through the darkness of the mystery
of evil, do we not long to see shining from
afar a single star of hope? And it might
be urged, from the conception which we have
gained of the perfect God, that He never could
give up the evil, never could give up the work
of redemption, until sin's last contradiction of
hia own glory should be turned to praise, until
at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
not in fear, but to the glory of the Father.
So this hope of final reconciliation of all things
in Christ, dim and vague though it be, has been
cherished within their sterner creed by not a
few Christian hearts, and has been avowed and
defended by some evangelical scholars. But
comforting as this hope may seem to be, com
prehensive aa it is of many analogies and moral
experiencea, supported, also, as it appears to
be, by some hints contained in expressions of
the apostle Paul, nevertheless it is surrounded
with difficultiea; it fails to take up into itself
all moral facts, and leads into fresh perplexities

96 DISCOURSES.
and doubts. There are lines of present experi
ence which seem to run the other way, and can
not easily, even in our imaginations of the
future, be bent around in the direction of thia
hope. There are aouls now living which seem
to grow less and less human, more and more
Satanic, even under increaaing light. There are
livea which, ao far as we can judge from the
little arc of them to be measured upon this
earth — like a parabola whose curve, if prolonged
into infinity, would never return into itaelf —
seem to recede ever farther and farther froin
the light and the love of God. Their direction
ia toward the outer darkness. Besides thia
painfully evident, unmistakable tendency of sin,
we cannot overlook the argument for the future
permanence of moral character from the analogy
of the present hardness of habit. Human nature
tends to become flxed in formed growths and
tenacious habits; the heart seems to posseaa
sometimea a fatal facility of hardening itself
against the purest influences even of the best
homes. And while there are some passages of
Scripture which seem to warrant the hope of
final reconciliation, if they are interpreted aa

IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE.

97

literally aa are the texts usually relied upon to
prove the endlessness of punishment, there are
other passagea of Scripture which it would be
difficult to bend into thia theory.
What relief, then, can I find from the diffi
cultiea under which the heart bows, as under an
incubus, when I think of future retribution?
Is there any clear way of thought out from the
perplexities which confessedly surround thia
subject on every side? Each theory which we
have thus far tried, promises to the heart more
than it can fulfil to the reason, and is found at
last to lead no whither.
I turn again to the Scriptures, but I cannot
find that I am able, even after every effort, to
combine all their teachings and suggestions
naturally, without any artifice of interpretation,
into any one clear and determinate picture of
the future life and its rewards and punishments.
Rather I see many of these teachings as one
might see the colors of a painter on hia palette ;
they are all true colora, they all will be needed;
doubtlesa they are complementary colors ; but I
do not now, at least, see them combined and
harmonized as I shall hope to do when the
S

98 DISCOURSES.
divine Idealist shall have finished his picture of
human hiatory, and it shall be unveiled at last,
in that day of revelation, ready for the judg
ment. I cannot say that theae Scriptural teach
ings and hinta concerning the future are contra
dictory ; I cannot say that these divergent lines
of human experience shall never find a common
meeting point ; I can only say that I, a mere
child of yesterday, with all the mystery of the
infinite skies above me, with this earth of
sepulchres beneath me, with thia heart crying
out for the living God of love within me, yet
with thia eye of reason compelled to aee the
facts of sin, and penalty, and death — I cannot
reconcile all difficulties which I must feel and
learn ; I do not have the knowledge by means
of which these conflicting analogiea of experi
ence may be brought to their point of stable
union, and all these teachings of the Bible be
made clear and plain.
What, then, should we do ? What, as ortho
dox theologians who would be true to God and
to his Word, who would obey the Scriptures
and hold the Bible above creed, what are we
to think, what are we to teach ?

IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE.

99

It is flrst a word of humility which the ortho
dox theology of to-day should utter upon thia
subject — a word of lowly- mindedness which
every earnest man who haa wreatled with this
subject will first wish to speak.
I have thus far been bringing but a negative
to your consideration. I have felt it necessary
to begin by proving this negative, by showing
our incapacity at present to form any perfect,
comprehensive theory of the future life and the
final issues of evil, because we are too inclined
to demand more both of conscience and revela
tion than it was ever intended that they should
make known to us in thia present world-age.
While we should seek to be wise up to that
which ia written, we should not desire to be
wise beyond that which ia written. I want a
creed covering the Bible, but not a creed over
lapping the Bible. It seems to me, therefore,
that after having first satisfied ourselves that in
no one theory or conception, heretical or ortho-
doxistical, can we solve the mystery of evil,
past, present, or to come, we need, then, to turn
back and examine this whole doctrine of the
future life in the same light in which our best

IGO DISCOURSES.
Christian scholarship now searchea other teach-
inga of the Scriptures ; to bring to thia part of
the Bible the same broad principles of interpre
tation which are enabling us so successfully to
find our way above many popular objections
against revealed religion, and which to many
tried minds have placed the great faitha of
Christianity above reproach and beyond con
tradiction. The next thing, therefore, for us to do, will
be to seek for the purpose of revelation in its
partial diaclosures and intimations of the future
life of rewarda and punishments. We shall
need to mark with painstaking care, also, the
limits of revelation ; and upon this whole sub
ject, perhaps, more than upon any other, ortho
doxy needs to avail itself of what might be
called the statute of limitations in theology.
We must determine, if we can, what parts of
this doctrine are purposely left in obscurity,
and what parts are brought out into the clear
light of revelation — for it is a happy and too
rare art in religioua thinking to be able to locate
mysteries wisely and well; — and, then, having
located the myateries of retribution, we may be

IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. lol
able, as we read the Scripturea, to gain for our
selves some very practical and urgent truths
concerning heaven and hell. That sturdy ques
tioner, Mr. Greg, urges very pertinently that
the common theology does not so appeal to the
hopes, and so lay hold of the fears of men, as to
bring to bear a direct and powerful influence
upon the present conduct of life. What ortho
doxy now should seek to accomplish, is to put
its doctrine of retribution into such a relation
to the thoughts, the studies, the pursuits, of the
men of this generation, that they shall be com
pelled to feel its force, and to be swayed in
their real livea by ita power. But we cannot
do this simply by repeating the old words, or
reviving the reasonings of a former generation.
The very word hell has become all too inopera
tive and inefficient — a word useful for men to
swear by; and we greatly need, as orthodox
theologians we should earnestly endeavor, to
bring to bear upon this present world, upon the
passions, the conduct, the pursuits of this life,
the power, the grand, majestic power, of the
world to come.
If men were made to realize the power of the

I02 DISCOURSES.
eternal life, as Jesua and his disciplea preached
it, then the great practical purpose and intent
of revelation would be gained. But you will
sometimes hear the sentiment expressed and ap
plauded, as though it were a moral truth, " Give
ua one w;orld at a time, and when we reach the
other side of Jordan we will attend to the next
world." No popular sophism could be more
misleading or despicable. It is simply impos
sible for ua to have one world at a time. Go
home to yoiir children and tell them, if you
please, to have their school-days for themselves
alone, without any reference to the life before
them; try, if you please, to have thia life in
isolated sections, childhood in its place, then
youth, manhood, and old age, each for itaelf;
but do not be so foolish, so stupid, nay, do not
be so impious, aa to dare to go into your closet
and look your Maker in the eye, and tell Him
you will take the present world and do with it
what you please, and by and by have the future !
The future is always in the present, and what
soever a man soweth that shall he alao reap.
But this sophism involves more than a moral
impossibility. My illustration does not present

IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. 103
the whole fallacy of it. It is also a natural
as well as moral impossibility for us to have one
world at a time ; for, as matter of fact, in every
thought that we think, in every breath which
we draw, in every beating of our hearts, we are
living all the while in two worlds ; we are liv
ing a two-fold life — we are dwelling amid the
forms of thinga which are seen and passing, and
with the realities which are spiritual and
which cannot pass away. Two worlds are ours
— thia world of shadows, thia world of echoes,
this world of strange and unsubstantial forms,
which often aeems to us to be the only reality ;
and that other, better world, unseen but not
unreal, untouched but not unknown, the world
of thought, the world of love, the world of the
soul dwelling in the light of spiritual truth and
divine reality. Take this earth out of the skies
in which it liea ensphered — take the soul out of
the body — take love out of the heart and
thought out of the brain — if you would live in
one world at a time ! Orthodoxy at least doea
this — with unhesitating and constant voice
evangelical preaching asserts this — that the
future life is vitally related to the present life;

I04 DISCOURSES.
that the unseen universe holds within its larger
sphere the world which is seen ; that the one
universe comprehends both, comprehends all —
not simply the starry skies, but also the heavens
in which God dwells — not merely this little
earth and its visible horizons, but also that
world of power, beauty, truth, and eternal rest-
fulness, in which this present life, with all its
joys and sorrows, all ita lighta and shadows,
lies ensphered, as the earth is upheld quietly
and powerfully in the all-encompassing sky.
But while orthodoxy asserts, thus, the im
mediate organic relation between this life and
ita future, and while evangelical preaching is
burdened, therefore, with the thought of the
unseen and the eternal as well as with the care for
the present; a humble and earnest theology
will be willing to wait for the day of revelation
to make known the mysteries which still lie
like shadows over its own faith. When the
voice of God ceases to speak, silence becomes
the only orthodoxy. Our evangelical theology
would enter into the myatery and darkness of
this truth in the spirit of the little child who,
when asked, as the railway train swept into a

IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. 105
tunnel, if she were not afraid, replied, "Afraid !
No, God sees." Yes, God sees ! through the
darkness, through the deep shadow of our
history of sin God sees ! and evangelical faith,
while it will not deny the night-side of nature,
¦while it will not dispute one single awful word
of Jesus concerning the day of judgment, will
still believe in God, and wait — its heart is not
troubled, neither is it afraid. We remember,
that the Master was not troubled, that Jesus was
not afraid for God, as he looked on to the end of
the world-ages ; that he who spake the strongest/
words of condemnation of sin which have ever
fallen upon human ears — he who possessed the
power of perfect manly indignation, but who
was, nevertheless, compassionate with a love
passing the love of woman — even when he
waa enshrouded in all the darkness of our sin,
never doubted the Father's goodness ; he knew
that whatever the future might be, God would
be there — God would be there in the perfect-
neaa of hia beauty and his love — and where (
God ia, there no wrong can be done forever !
Thua Jeaus Christ, whose eyes, even while dim
with tears of anguish for our sins, looked far-;
5* ^

Io6 DISCOURSES.
ther into the future than any human eyes have
ever seen — who even while gathering around
him the heavy folds of darkness of our sin and
sorrow, for the joy set before him endured the
cross, despising the shame — he, the one perfect,
the true revelation of God, knew that eternity
would disclose nothing which should not justify
and glorify the ways of God, and show that
upon the throne of the universe Love, infinite,
pure, and righteous. Love that can make no
mistakea, is Lord and King.
In concluding thia preliminary discourae upon
the orthodox doctrine of the future life, let me
remind you that to our Lord and hia diaciples
the hour of the great change for us ia not the
hour when the eye grows dim, and the sound of
friendly voices becomes far off and unreal in
death; but that hour when God comes near,
and the eyes of the spiritual understanding
being opened, the soul sees how beautiful God
is, and how hateful sin is ; that hour when the
will of self is crucified, and the God-wUl is
born in the reaolutiona of the new heart. Oh !
that is the passing from death unto life, the great
change in the history of a soul of which what

IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. 107
we call life and death are in Jesus' language
only the metaphors. By whatever influences
that spiritual change may be brought to paaa,
suddenly as by a lightning-flash of conviction,
or gradually and beautifully as the brightening
of the dawn; through whatever procesaea of
experience and . grace the soul may be led up to
its hour before God ; the crisis of its whole age
long history is ita decision between a life grow
ing rich unto God, or starving upon self — its
real final choice between the true, the eternal
life, or the eternal death of the heart.

V.

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS IN THE CON
CEPTION OP THE FUTURE LIFE,
Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man
in all wisdom ; that we may present every man perfect in Christ
Jesus.— Col. i. 28.
Disbelievers in revelation seem sometimes
to suppose that if they could succeed in dethron
ing the Bible from ita place in the Christian
church, they would succeed, also, in consigning
the belief in a future life of rewards and pun
ishments to the limbo of old and out-worn
superstitiona. A friend of Voltaire once wrote
to him : "I have succeeded in getting rid of the
idea of hell." Voltaire replied, "Allow me to
congratulate you; I am very far from that." A
keen-sighted intellect, like Voltaire's, could
hardly stumble into the delusion into which
some of our lecturers against Moses and the
Bible seem to fall so readily, that if Chris-

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 109
tianity could be destroyed, we should lose from
the sanctities of conscience man's natural and
ineradicable belief in future retribution. Our
faith in future rewarda and punishments is in
stinctive and primary ; our doubt is secondary
and contrary to nature. Only when we endeavor
to conceive what the future life is like, to form
some intelligible ideas of what its occupations
and enjoymenta may be, do doubta rise un
avoidably, and perplexities begin to overgrow
hope, and we feel as if the faith in immortality
were almost too great a truth for the human
intellect to contain.
Evidently the hour has gone by for the
child's picture-book of heaven and hell. Yet
we may still carry God's ovsm promise of heaven
— if no longer before us aa a pictured glory— at
least, and possibly to better purpose, within us,
in the pure affections of our own hearts. And
even while we turn from all outward represen
tations of the judgment-day, we may atill keep
the awe of it in our own consciences, and find
the living prophecy of it in the moral separa
tions and destinies of the men among whom we
dwell.

I IO DISCOURSES.
Having already shown how difficult it is to
form any one conception of the world to come
and ita iaaues, which shall be inclusive of all
the Scriptures, and comprehensive of all moral
trutha and analogiea, I have now to push the
inquiry a little farther, and perhaps to some
more poaitive resulta, in the direction indicated
toward the close of the laat discourse. Let us
seek to determine the purpoae of revelation in
making known to us what it has diaclosed con
cerning the future, and in withholding what it
has left in obscurity.
Observe, then, these suggestive facts concern
ing the aim and method of revelation in ita
teaching with regard to these matters. Notice
that the Scriptures relating to the future life
occupy but a comparatively small part of the
whole Word of God. One might print upon
fifteen or twenty pages all important texts
which throw any light upon our future ex
istence; what we might expect would be the
major part of revelation ia the minor part of
our Bible.
Obaerve, again, even this partial revelation
was given little by little; the doctrine of im-

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS, m
mortality waa gradually unfolded. In the Old
Teatament, trial and suffering, and the disap
pointment of the national hopes, were necessary
in order that through the darkness the star of
hope might at length break forth and shine
bright and clear. And we find that Jesus be
gan his gospel of the kingdom of heaven by
putting his teaching into the forms of prevalent
Jewish conceptiona, gradually leading his dis
ciplea out and up into higher and purer ideas,
until, just before hia departure, in that upper
chamber, he gave them hia last and richest word,
his fullest revelation, concerning the eternal life
which he promised, when he prayed the Father
that " they all may be one as we are one ; " when
he made no visible splendors, or glory of out
ward things, the imagery of hia kingdom ; but
when he made human friendahip, when he made
perfect and divine companionship, the prophecy
and assurance to hia diaciples of what the
heavenly life shall be.
You will observe further, not only that the
Biblical teaching is progressive, but also that
those very disciples to whom the fullest revela
tions were given were most conscious that they

112 DISCOURSES.
prophesied in part, and that the heart of man
cannot conceive of the glory which Bhall be re
vealed. Revelation, then, even at its highest
and its best, is but in part. Revelation began
with a promise and ended with a sunset ; but
those disciples „who stood at the close of this
day of the Lord, gazing into the glory of that
Apocalypse, did not attempt to fix in their
gospel the colors of that sunset, to portray in
definite hues and determinate forms the glory
which it tranacends the power of human imagi
nation to conceive.
It ia very evident, therefore, that the object
of revelation in these partial disclosures of the
future life, could not have been to gratify hu
man curiosity, or to answer those many ques
tions which our hearts are always asking.
But let us look a little deeper and farther.
You will observe that the Bible, in all ita teach
ing concerning the world to come, carefully
keeps within certain general limits of revela
tion. These limits are in part limits of nature,
determined by the range of our powers in their
present stage of development.
This necessary natural limitation of revela-

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 113
tion may be illustrated by reference to a sup
posed process of formation of the eye, and its
increasing power of vision. It is imagined liy
some scientists that the eye was at first in some
lower organism a mere susceptibility to rays of
light — some spot in the nerve-tissue becomes
capable of responding to the beatings of the
luminiferous waves. Now, if we should suppose
an intelligence possessed of that mere germ of
an eye, such a being might rightly conclude
from its germinal sensations of light that there
must be beyond itself some larger and wonder
ful sphere of existence. But, though all the
colors of a sunset had been spread before it,
that beginning of an eye could . not have been
sensitive to their resplendent hues, and the rev
elation of light would have found a limit in the
imperfection of the eye. Suppose it, then, to
have been carried to a still higher development,
to have become sensitive to marked differences
of color, but to be aa yet without percep
tion of distance, or depths of perspective, its
apprehension of the external world not yet co
ordinated with the knowledge to 'be gained by
touch and the other senses, — ^then there would

114

DISCOURSES.

be still at that stage of the evolution of sight
corresponding limitations of the revelation of
light to it. Now, I say, that our eyes for spir
itual thinga may be, aa it were, but eyes in the
germ; — from what we do feel, from the heavenly
influences which do beat upon our spirits, we
are warranted in assuming that there is a larger
sphere of being, there is a more glorious uni
verse still to be revealed, into whose splendors
as yet we have no power to look and live ; but
though that unseen world may be shining all
around us, revelation finds a necessary limit of
its light in the present conditions and imper
fections of our powers of spiritual apprehen
sion. Besides these natural limitations of posaible
revelationa, there are limitations, also, of moral
purpose and design. There may be poasible
revelationa which God might give to ua even
here and now, but which it might not be best
for us to receive. We have a significant illus
tration of the harm which might be done
through overmuch revelation, in the imaginary
disclosures of modern spiritualism; overmuch
revelation might interfere seriously with the

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 115
natural course of human life, with the regular
order of those pursuits and employments which
are the appointed discipline of thia life, and in
which, through patient continuance in them, we
are to work out our powera for enlarged and
happier spherea of existence ; so that doubtless
God has judged for us, and with a wisdom be
yond ours, between a revelation adapted to our
present education, practical and useful for us
now, and. overmuch revelation altogether be
yond our present moral verification of it — a
revelation whose brightness might dazzle the
eye; whose very power and glory might cause
the intellect to reel, and make the reason lose
its self-possession, overcome by the supernal
vision. Too bright, as well as too dark, a reve
lation might defeat the very objects of revela
tion. When faith shall be lost in sight the day
of probation may be over. Would not the
perfect vision of God be the final judgment of
character? Keeping in mind, then, these natural and
moral limitations of revelation, let us now take
one step farther, and seek to understand what
parts of the doctrine of the future are left in ob-

Il6 DISCOURSES.
scurity, purposely left, it may be, iu the shadows
of revelation. . ¦
I shall mention three elements of this doc
trine which, it seems to me, both reason and
the Bible leave in the shadow — and in the
shadow it is wisdom for our hearts to be will
ing for the present to leave them.
The first of these obscure elements of this doc
trine is the relation of our future life to space.
Space is a metaphysical idea. You may all
imagine that you know what space is ; but the
nature of space and its relation to the thinking
mind constitute one of the old, perpetually re
curring, and unsolved problems of metaphysics.
The Bible does not commit the fatal mistake of
entrusting its truth of immortality to any human
imagination of the relation of the future life to
space. Suppoae Jeaua had attempted to make
the Jews of hia day understand where heaven
is — to teach hia diaciplea the particular direc
tion and position of the place which he was to
prepare for them. They possessed a knowl
edge of the universe too limited and beggarly
to render it possible for them to have gained a
conception of where heaven may be which our

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS.

117

larger science might not now laugh to scorn ;
and Jesus did not try to instruct them beyond
their age and capacity, but was content to tell
them, " I have yet many things to say unto you,
but ye cannot bear them now," "Thou shalt
know hereafter." Or, suppose that inspiration
had given to Moses and the prophets some such
view of the future life in its relation to the
preaent system of things as the authors of the
" Unseen Universe," for example, hold to be an
admissible scientific speculation, in harmony with
our present knowledge of the universe ; such a
revelation would have been utterly unintel
ligible and practically useless to the Jews of
old ; and so, possibly, a revelation expressed
in the terms of modern science, in twenty-five
or a hundred years from now, might appear as
mere guess-work to those who at that time
shall have peered farther into the mysteries of
creation. One added sense might open to our
view worlds of heavenly felicity ; some in
creased development even of these poor and
limited senses might enable us to answer ques
tions before which now our wisest science must
stand dumb. When you can tell me the rela-

Il8 DISCOURSES.
tion of your mind to your body ; when you can
locate in the brain or heart the thought which
you are now thinking; when you can locate
human affections in the body — those affections
which, though we know of no cell of matter
which is their local habitation, are neverthe
less real and abiding, if anything in this world
is abiding; — then you may be warranted in
finding trouble with the Bible on account of its
silence concerning the place of heaven; then
you may require Christian theology to answer,
where ia heaven ; but not until you can locate
the human soul in the body, need you be dis
turbed about the failure of the Bible to locate
hbaven in the univerae, or anxious about the
relation of the world to come to astronomy.
Again, the relation of the next life to time is
left in the shadow of our preaent ignorance.
Time, like space, is a metaphysical problem.
What we call time, indeed, is a rate of motion
to which our present vital processes have been
adapted, and to which we have become habitu
ated. It is easy for us to conceive that this
i-ate may be different for different worlds;
that within the limits of the sidereal system

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 119
one day in one star, in comparison with the
revolutions of other stars, may be as a thousand
years. Time is accordingly a relative concep
tion, not the same thing perhaps for the insects
of a summer's day as for man in hia life of
three score years and ten. It changes with the
more slow or more rapid pulsations of life in
the animate creation; and of what abaolute
time or eternity may be we have no adequate
conception. Eternity is an order of existence
to which our present pulses of life have not
been made to beat, and into which our souls
while tabernacling in this mortality are not yet
introduced. These words, the infinite, the
eternal, are by no means meaningless to us
now ; they do express to us, at least, the spirit's
native sense of its own birth into a higher
order of existence than can be seen, or marked
by the successions of outward nature. These
words are not utter blanks, they are the spirit's
assertion of something more than the finite
and the temporal, the sense and joy of which
cannot be taken from it; but these words of
spiritual suggestion cannot be brought down to
the definitions of the understanding, they

I20 DISCOURSES.
transcend all thought. Let us not forget that
the very word over which faith and despair
raise so hot a contention is a word incapable of
definition, and suggestive of an order of exist
ence utterly beyond the realization of the hu
man imagination. Part, at least, of the
difficulty in the ordinary discussions of the
doctrine of eternal punishment is due to our
confusion of the difference between the two
kinds or modes of existence indicated by the
words, the temporal and the eternal, and our
attempt to conceive of the one in terms of the
other. But this confusion of terms is without
warrant either in reason or Scripture. The
Bible nowhere attempts to repreaent eternity
by a succession of periods of time indefinitely
prolonged. Scholars frequently dispute con
cerning the meaning of those Greek adjectives
by which Jesus characterized real life and
death; whether they mean endless, or for
ages of ages ; everlasting, or for some period of
duration ; forever, or as long as the object to
which they are applied has ita natural con
tinuance. But it is enough for me to know that
Jesua used these adjectives to impress men with

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 121
the vast, unspeakable difference between the
true life and sin in their divergent moral desti
nies ; yet he never sought to define the mean
ing of these words; he left them indetermin
ate, as they must be, to the understanding —
words of great suggestion, but not to be
measured by us in any terms of duration.
Jesus taught plainly that men are deciding
here and now between life and death, and he
used the strongest adjectives of human speech
to indicate the absolute moral difference in this
world, and in the world to come, between those
two states; but he did not endeavor to depict
before the imagination of his hearers the pos
sible length of duration of the future life ; he
did not gather together the years, and heap up
ages upon ages, in order that by a mere human
imagination of time indefinitely expanded and
prolonged he might appall them, and for aught
we know utterly mislead them as to what the
reality of the eternal existence shall be — that
final state of existence when the angel shall
proclaim that time shall be no longer. There
is absolutely no justiflcation in Scripture for
the crude metaphysics, the vain and painful

122 DISCOURSES.
fiction, of the once too customary theological
massing of* times and multiplication of the
ages, to represent the thought of Jesus in his
solemn words, tremulous with meanings beyond
meaninga — icternal life, eternal sin. I accept
these words of Jesua as he uttered them, but
not as they have often been misunderstood and
overburdened with human definitions and vain
imaginations. Jesus, as I cannot but think,
purpoaely left this side of his doctrine in awful
indefiniteneaa, knowing that we are not capable
of receiving more than intimations of the here
after. I accept with implicit faith theae fear
ful sayings of our Lord, but I will not forget
that he remembered our ignorance when he
used them, and that his adjectives represent
what to a large extent must remain the un
known quantities in the aa yet unfiniahed
problem of good and evil ; and I deny, there
fore, the Christian right of any theologyj or any
church, to trouble me with difficulties beyond
the grasp of my understanding, drawn from
that portion of revelation which is left in ob
scurity ; or to disturb and confuse my faith in
those truths of eternal life and eternal sin of

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 123
which I can now have some comprehension, and
gain some verification in my present experience,
by bringing to me questions, or dark heart-de
vouring doubts, which may be drawn forth by
a remorseless logic from the shadows of the
mysteries of God's wisdom in which Jesus, with
a finer human instinct as well as diviner com
passion for our weakness of faith and littleness
of knowledge, chose to leave them undisturbed.
Then there is a third truth which seems to
be left in the shadows of the Gospel of the
kingdom ; and that is the nature and intent of
the divine administration of Hades — the place
of departed spirits — from the time the dying
leave the present world until the judgment day.'^
There is a period of life after death and before
that last, great day when this world-age shall
be over, of which the Bible gives us some intima
tion, but concerning which it affords no distinct
revelation. It does tell us something concern
ing that intermediate state ; enough, at least, to
assure us that it shall not prove to be a loss of
consciousness, and purposeless sleep of ages for
souls awaiting the great day of awakening.
The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is

124 DISCOURSES.
sufficient to dispel this thought of an inter
mediate suspension of activities among the
waiting dead — a supposition which would be,
indeed, alike unworthy of the soul and of God's
resources for its continued growth and perfect
ing. But the Bible only yields hints enough
concerning God's purposes in Hades to show us
how much there is still to be communicated to
us, and to prevent us meanwhile from dogmatiz
ing overmuch upon this whole subject of the final
destiny of the departed. There are those pas
sages which speak of Jesus' descent into Hades,
and of his preaching to the dead, to a class of
souls represented as being in prison; and we
should interpret these passagea by the same rules
which govern ua in the interpretation of other
Scriptures. It will not do for ua to take literally
some text concerning the final atate of the im
penitent, and then to accommodate to them
these obscure passages ; it would be fairer and
wiser to admit that they may be intimations of
some truths now missing in our doctrine of
eternal punishment, and for the lack of which,
if we choose to put aside utterly these hints and
to forget our own ignorance, our very faith in

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 125
God's justice and mercy may suffer harm. I
will not allow myself, by any dogmatic bias, to
strain or warp the meaning of any of these
doubtful or apparently conflicting passages of
Scripture. If I cannot understand exactly what
they do mean, I can at leaat refrain from put
ting my own meanings into them. These texts,
and certain glowing passages in which St. Paul
speaks of the final completion of Christ's king
dom, do not teach explicitly a second probation,
or mean without doubt that there shall be a
final reconciliation of evil to God ; they do not
alter the fact that the burden of the Scripturea
ia the utter urgency of a right moral decision
now before the Cross, and they hold up no
promise of the hereafter to any man who here
and now determines himself against the Spirit
of Christ ; yet so long as such expressions have
been left in the Bible, our theology ought, at
least, not to be over-confident that it has learned
the whole mind of the Spirit concerning God's
work and purpose in the interval — we know not
how long it may be — between death and the final
judgment ; and Ihese Scriptures are sufficient to
give us a needed, though too often overlooked,

126 DISCOURSES.
intimation that the Lord haa his own adminis
tration of the regions of the dead until the Mes
sianic kingdom shall be delivered up to the
Father ; and of what the Father and the Christ
are working there we need to know far more
than has been disclosed to ua before we are
competent to judge the waya of God to men,
or have reason to doubt that the awards of the
laat great assize shall be in accordance with
truth, justice, and mercy. I feel that I have a
moral right — a right guaranteed by these
Scriptures — to take refuge from the perplexi
ties of the final issues of evil in my own igno
rance and in the silence of God's Word ; to find
peace, comfort, and hope in the merciful ob
scurities of revelation. It is hard, indeed, for
us to imagine how the procesaea of life can at
any point be brought to a sudden halt ; how
the mere accident of death — for death is only an
accidental circumatance, not an inward change
— can fit an untrained and unchastened Chris
tian for the pure vision of the supernal glory.
All the analogies of experience would seem to
compel us to believe that diaciplinary procesaea
of life must be continued after death ; and in

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 127
this intermediate period, suggested by some
Scripturea, room would be found for the play
of thoae forces of moral development whose
working we observe in the present life. Not,
then, until the day of revelation shall disclose
to our eyes the secrets of Hades, are we war
ranted in raising one question of our troubled
understandings, or one doubt of our beating
hearts, concerning the just judgments of God
in eternity.
The reformers found in their day that thia
half-revealed truth of the intermediate life had
developed into the overgrown and corrupt
doctrine of purgatory — a doctrine saturated
through and through with the poison of meri
torious works and penance; and rightly, there
fore, the reformers laid the axe at the root of
the tree, and cut down the whole deadly doc
trine. But back in the minds of the Christian
f athera had been simpler ideas of moral purifi
cation which had grown into that corrupt Papal
teaching ; and back still in Scriptural ground
may lie, perhaps, the germs of a better doctrine
of an intermediate life, and its processes of puri
fication and perfecting, which it may remain

128 DISCOURSES.
for our Protestant theology more carefully to
discriminate, and to cultivate, for the healing
of many souls now bruised and wounded by
too bare and crushing dogmatism ^ I do not
know — I speak now not for orthodoxy, I speak
only for myself — but I have often been disposed
to question as not in accordance with the truest
instincts of hearts under the illumination of the
Spirit of Christ, and as alien to an older and
better faith, traces of which are to be found in
the liturgies of the early church, that Protestant
tradition — for it is only a Protestant tradition —
which, while it permits us through all the days
of our friend's lives to bear ever upon our hearts
before God those who are near to us, and dearer
than life, forbids us, the moment after the acci
dent of death has happened to them, to mention
before the God of the living the names which
for years have always been remembered in our
prayers ',
So much, then, should be said of those ele
ments of thia doctrine which are left in the ob
scurities of revelation; and when we once suc
ceed in locating much that is mysterious, and in
determining wisely what we are not yet able to

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 129
know, or ought not to expect now to be taught
of God ; then, if I am not greatly mistaken, we
shall find our faith happily delivered from the
burden of many difficulties, which, if we try to
carry them, will surely oppress our reason and
bruise our hearts.
But now I wish to look at those portions of
this doctrine upon which the light of revelation
doea seem to fall. What parts of this truth, in
its whole extent too great for us, are brought
down to the grasp of our reason and conscience ?
What lines of it can we follow and verify in our
present moral experience?
The first truth of the doctrine of future retri
bution, which is now verifiable in part, at least,
is this : God in eternity, and for eternity, shall
judge every man according to hia real, fully-
determined character" — not according to the
appearance, not according to the profession,
nor yet in accordance with any interrupted and
incomplete determination of character — but ac
cording to the true and final reality of hia being.
Wherever, whenever, however, that judgment
shall be pronounced, or executed, it shall be a
discrimination of characters according to their

I30 DISCOURSES.
inmost truth and final possibilities. This abso
lute moral truth of God's eternal judgments is
so firmly declared in the Scriptures, and appeala
so directly and powerfully to the moral reason,
that I will not take time in discussing the evi
dence of it, but will simply state it and affirm it.
Again, the Bible, as it seems to me, does turn
to the light in which our human reason may
see this truth of the doctrine of retribution : real
and final judgment of character is a judgment
based upon, and determined by, the relation of
the heart of man to God. The decisive test of
character, beyond which there can be no other,
is the relation of the life to the living God.
This ia the only comprehensive judgment of a
moral agent; all other means of judgment, all
other relations in which men may be judged,
are but partial. You cannot know fully and
finally what a man is by observing him in his
relation to hia neighbor, his parents, or his
family ; one man may be a good father, a faith
ful husband, a kind neighbor, and yet be utterly
dishonest in hia business; while another man
may be strictly honorable in all his business
transactions, and yet a disgrace to the very

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 151
name of man in his home. There is no human
relation which is not partial; which encloses
manhood or womanhood on all sides, and which
can, therefore, be the means of a comprehen
sive judgment of character; nor can all these
relations together give the full measure of a
man. But God is all in all ; and in the relation
of the soul to the God who made it, all these
human relationships are summed up and in
cluded, and its whole life may, therefore, be
judged. If the heart be really good toward
God, it will not be bad toward any created
things What a man is toward his God, that he
is in his heart ; that he is in the reality of his
character. Hence there shall come at the end
of time a day when God shall be seen to be
all in all, and when our whole human history
shall be brought for its last judgment under the
light of perfectly manifested divinity ; when as
the souls of men ahall be found in sympathy with
God, or shall be pierced by the beams of the
ineffable holiness, as they shall be drawn by a
sweet and resistless attraction to the very
throne of grace, or as they shall be repelled by
the evil magnetism of their own sinful desires

132 DISCOURSES.
away from the One central Light and Glory,
they shall find every man hia own place — and
it may be the mercy in the justice of God which
shall suffer every man to find hia own place —
in the heavenly light, or in what Jesua calla the
outer darkneaa.
There ia a third and moat important element
of thia doctrine upon which the Scripture sheda
some light, and which appeals directly to our
moral reason, viz. : There shall be differences of
degrees in the rewarda and punishments of the
future life. Heaven ia not one vast celestial
communism. But this Scriptural and rational
truth of distinctions in glory and differences of
blessings hereafter seems to have fallen almost
into disuse in our current Protestant theology ;
yet it was a church father who said that the per
son who denies degrees in rewards and punish
ments is a heretic. Evangelical preaching can
ill afford, among its motives to right and beau
tiful lives, not to insist upon this too neglected
truth, that there are, and from the very nature
of virtue and moral agency there must be, dif
ferences of degrees in the happiness or unhap
piness of the future life ; differences of capacity,

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS.

133

among saints and sinners, for heaven and hell.
Scriptural hints should have kept us in mind of
this influential truth of immediate practical con
cern, as it surely is, in the conduct of life. You
remember we are told that the servant who
knew his lord's will and prepared not himself,
neither did according to his will, shall be beaten
with many stripes ; but he that knew not, and
did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be
beaten with few stripes ; and in the parable of
the talents we have Jesus' express declaration
that unto every one that hath shall be given,
but from him that hath not shall be taken away
even that which he hath ; — it shall be given, that
is, to every one who hath, according to his ca
pacity to receive; and he who hath not shall
suffer loss according to his capacity to lose.
You remember, also, that in the Sermon on the
Mount the rewarda which crown the different
virtues are each admirably adapted to the spe
cific nature of the several virtues ; there seems
to be a peculiar fitness and some law of propor
tion in the bleaaings promised. Thus the Bible
does suggest quite plainly this truth, which we
ought to take almost for granted, aa a matter

134

DISCOURSES.

of course, without any need of revelation to
teach it to us, that, as there are now differences
of capacity for things good or evil developing
themselves among men, and within the same
church-fold, so there shall be differences of
quality and degrees of happineaa in the future
life. In heaven every cup doubtlesa shall be
full, but this life may determine great differ
ences between the sizes of the cups. Each soul
shall doubtless be aa happy then as it can be ;
but what differences of capacity for love and
heaven human hearts are developing now! So,
then, there ia a real and delightful sense in which,
all along through our earthly existence, we may
lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven. A man
can take nothing with him from this world —
the gold which he hoards up will fall into the
grasp of other handa, — but what a man haa
gained in himaelf that he takea with him into
the world to come; — the splendid treasures of
memory, the treasures of disciplined powers, of
enlarged capacities, of a pure and loving heart,
all are treasures which a man may carry iu
him and with him into that world where neither
moth nor rust doth corrupt. The eye, indeed,

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 135
may lose its sight at death, and the cunning
hand of the workman may lose its skill, but
that enrichment of mind which may have been
gained through the eye in patient and loving
observation of thia world, so beautiful and ex
pressive of God's thoughts, shall not be lost,
and the discipline of powera which may have
been acquired through years of faithful work-
manahip shall continue as a apiritual capacity
in the world to come. What we lay up, too, in
the livea of others are richea which may return
to us again in the world to come. Souls that
have gone before us freighted richly with our
affections, and carrying parts of our lives with
them to the other shore, shall await us there to
share with us once more the treasures of friend
ship which in them we may ali'eady have safely
laid up in heaven. All that we may do or gain
in the development of our powers, in enlarging
the soul, in enriching the heart, in increasing
our capacity to love; all that providence may
gain for us through sorrow, trial, and the " with
held completions" of the present, in quicken
ing our susceptibility of mind and heart for
heaven; all these acquisitions shall enter into

136 DISCOURSES.
the happiness and rewards of the future life.
Of such rewards we may well deem ourselves
unworthy, and it will be of grace that we are
saved; but these attainments of Christian en
deavor, these rewarda of faithfulnesa to our
own powera, and our ovra. opportunitiea, are
held out to ua in the gospel of the kingdom of
heaven aa incentivea to every noble ambition,
every honorable pursuit, every true study of
God's thoughts, and every life-long imitation of
the Christ.
This, then, seems to me to be the purpose of
revelation, not to gratify curiosity, but to train
character ; not to give the future to our knowl
edge, but to save our hearts for its possibili
ties of immortality. This mortal stage in all
its lights and shadows seems arranged for
scenes of probation. The intent of God in the
Bible evidently is not so to open the secrets of
the hereafter aa to enable us to answer those
questions, deep and dark, whose shadows fall
upon us as we think of the past and the future ;
but Jesus taught his disciples to impress upon
men with all earnestness the unspeakable im
portance for our whole future of making a

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 137
right decision of life now ; and to open before
our aspirations such views of the future life, of
its enlarged opportunities, its grand possibili
ties, and its divine attractiveness, as shall be to
us in our toil and in our sorrows, in our studies
and our business, in all our thinking, and in all
our loving, an inspiration and a joy, a pure
enthusiasm of spirit, and as a very baptism of
grace from on high upon our daily life. ^.-
Revelation, then, to put what I would say^
into one word, does give to our rational belief
a practical heaven and a practical hell — enough
of each is declared for all practical purposes of
the present life. We do know and can under
stand enough concerning both to lead us to put
ourselves at once into training for the life of
glory and virtue which we may hope through
Christ to find as the heavenly fruition of earth's
best life ; and to fear as the loss of the soul
itself, aud the darkness of all true life and love,
the death of eternal sin ^°.
'T Remember, then, let me m-ge as the conclusion
of the whole matter, that we do have Bible
enough for present duty. Though the doctrines
of our faith may be left in partial obscurity,

138 DISCOURSES.
and there are great spaces of shadow even in
revelation, the duties of the right life are the
illuminated texts of Scripture. Repent, believe,
be converted, love, pray, have the spirit of
Christ, — there can be little moral doubt about
the nature of the life which the commandments
of Christ enjoin. And though we must needs
walk ofttimes in the mists, we may keep with
resolute feet the way, seeing not far on either
hand, yet following surely the path of duty
once trod by the Master who has gone to pre
pare a place for ua. Are we obeying that
Goapel which haa in its voice to our hearts the
very sweetness of God's charity blended with
the deep undertone of his justice ? the Gospel
in which heavenly mercy and hope are in
harmony with infinite truth and power, as the
songs of birds of the air make no discord over
the deep sub-base of Niagara's ceaseless music ?^

VI.
SOCIAL IMMORTALITY.
Aud I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from
God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. —
Rev. xxi. 2.
Society, then, is immortal. It is the city of
God which the revelator saw coming from
heaven. The hope of social immortality forma
the ground-tone, and runs through the whole
woof of the Biblical doctrine of the future life.
This idea of the immortality of society is one of
those traths which might aptly be called the
unconscious beliefs of the Bible. The inspired
writers, almost without noticing it, or .thinking
about it, seem to take it for granted in all their
discourse concerning the hereafter. We ought
to receive with the utmost confidence those
truths which pervade, like an atmosphere, the
whole Bible. The everywhere understood, un
conscious faiths of the Bible are the very

I40 DISCOURSES.
last truths which we should doubt or question,
even though it might be difficult to find in the
Scriptures a single proof-text of definite teach
ing concerning them. The hope of social im
mortality — the expectation of the city of God —
belongs to this order of Biblical truths. Yet so
far have we departed from this all-pervasive
Scriptural thought of the city of God and the
immortality of society, that we sometimes hear
Christians asking whether we shall recognize
our friends in heaven. As though an isolated
immortality were any more a future possibility
than a merely individual life is a preaent pos
sibility ; aa though God had made each soul a
little drop of being by itself, and not caused
eveiy child rather to be born into the depend
encies of human existence, and to come to ita
own life only through the livea of others.
When did God ever create a single soul to
abide in itself alone ? to dwell unrelated and
complete in the closed circle of its own little
individuality? Even if we could conceive of a
soul existing by itself as a solitary human atom ;
if it ever were possible for a human being to
become a man in and of himself alone, it would

SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 141
be better for that man if he had never been
born. An isolated, friendless life of a few
years becomes almost unendurable. Loneliness
prolonged to eternity would be intolerable tor
ment. That man who can even imagine him
self as enjoying heaven for himself alone is not
fit for the kingdom of heaven. The perfect in
dividual is not possible apart from society.
Very different from the severe, excessive in
dividualism which pervades the Calvinistic
philosophy of man, is the broad, healthy, social
philosophy of "human nature which is taken for
granted in the Bible, and which gives form and
shape to the revelator's vision of the coming
from heaven of the city of God. Indeed, if we
will but divest ourselves of merely textual and
school-boy habits of interpreting the Scriptures,
and seek rather to follow the movement, and to
catch the spirit, and so to receive the real in
spiration of the Bible, we shall find ourselves
with regard to the whole doctrine of the future
life, as well as in respect to many other truths,
believing vpith a much healthier, stronger, and
exultant faith. If we take pains to follow the
growth of the hope of immortality through the

142 DISCOURSES.
Bible, we shall not be at a loss to see how the
whole Biblical teaching of immortality comes to
fruition in this final truth of the holy city, the
new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of
heaven. For the idea of the perpetuation of a chosen
race, not the idea of continued personal exist
ence, forms in the Old Testament the founda
tion, the broad fundamental basis, for the up
building of the hope of immortality. The
Hebrews looked forward to the continuance of
the family -name in Israel, and to the final
splendors of a Messianic kingdom. Then, upon
that broad, social ground, the hope of personal
immortality might spring up, and reach ita
Christian perfection.
But we usually reverse the Biblical argument.
We reason that the individual soul cannot
cease to exist; and then, having satisfied our
selves that we personally are to keep on living
after death, we begin to wonder whether we
shall live also in the renewed companionship of
our old friends. So we make the Biblical faith
in immortality stand upon its apex instead of
upon its broad social base. The Bible, we

SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 143
seem to forget, rests the hope of the individual
upon the good purpose of God for the race ;
the blessed life of the saved soul here and here
after depends upon the gracious work of God
for humanity — not for the elect — ^but for hu
manity, in that Christ died for all.
When Jesus came, bringing immortality to
light, we read that he went about all Galilee
preaching the Gospel of the kingdom. In
Jesus' speech we do not find the period put to
this sentence where our popular usage usually
stops; — we say preaching the Gospel — here it ia
said, preaching the Goapel of the kingdom.
He preached not the Goapel merely of indi
vidual salvation, as though each little man were
saved for his own little self — but the Gospel of
a redeemed society, a new, purified, glorified
society, the Gospel — there is no better phrase
for it than Jesus' own word — the Gospel of the
kingdom. To preach Christ's Gospel, therefore,
is not merely to preach to you in order that you
may be saved at last, but that you may be saved
as members of the new heavenly society; not
for your own aelves only, but saved in and for
the communion of the saints, and for the delight-

144 DISCOURSES.
ful friendships and reciprocities of the society of
Christ on earth and in heaven. And as Jesus
preached, so he worked; and the Father was
with him in that divinest of works, the creation
of a new society out of the chaos of sin. This
is Christianity — not a new doctrine, not another
law, not a better code of ethics — ^but a new
society of forgiven souls, founded in the love of
God, and made one in the communion of the
Holy Ghost.
You can hardly fail to notice how widely our
common sp^ch concerning salvation has de
parted from this broader and deeper Biblical
teaching. I wish now to present the argument
for immortality in the light of this purer and
most Christian conception of the holy city of
God. We may infer that human society is immortal
both from what it is and from what it is not.
So far as it is now finished, and so far, also, as
it is at present incomplete, human society
prophesies the coming from heaven of the holy
city of God.
First, then, I argue social immortality from
what society already has become so far as

SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 145
the Creator has finished it and pronounced it
good. Let me at the outset put the reasoning before
you in its bare intellectuality, and then we may
feel the moral force of it through some concrete
illustrations of it. Human society, then, I
would say, so far at least as it is finished, is a
creation possessing absolute moral worth, and
therefore it must belong to the eternities.
Society is not an accidental condition, a mere
circumstance of human life, but a moral good
in and of itself, absolutely indispensable to
finite beings for their full, personal growth
and perfection. The wilderness is, indeed, a
necessary part of every true, great life, but in
the wilderness alone no man ever reached his
full stature. The least in the kingdom of
heaven is greater than John the Baptist. As
possessing absolute moral worth, then, and as
essential to the full fruition of individual life,
society is, and from its very nature must be, of
the eternal. It cannot pass away.
Such ia the argument for social immortality
presented in the dry logic of the intellect. But,
in order to realize and to keep fresh our great
1

146 DISCOURSES.
natural faiths, in order to find the deep sources
of permanent joy, we must be guided by some
thing better and diviner than the mere logic of
the understanding. We must search the deep
things of God with what Wordsworth calls the
" feeling intellect," the " vital souL" And surely
the vital soul entering into and making ita own
the relationa of human society, and the intima
cies of pure friendship, needs no voice from
heaven to come and sing in its heart of their
immortality. Thus it is noteworthy how in
Carlyle's recollections of his father, and his
richly pathetic tribute to his wife, this native
and inexhaustible belief of the " feeling intel
lect " in the immortality of our lives in others,
and theirs in ours, wells up at times to the sur
face out of the deeps of Carlyle's rugged nature.
A lesson, not without its special significance for
our age, lies before us in the contrast between
the labored and conscious unbelief of the great
mind of John Stuart Mill, who had never
known a true human childhood, who never
speaks of the touch of a mother's love upon all
the springs of his being, and whose one strong
affection ripened late upon the trunk of a life

SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 147
sturdy and straight, but all too leafless and
songless ; and, on the other hand, the primal
faith, greater and more vital than conscious
thought or confession, of this rugged, rustic
nature, which was full of thorns and repug
nances, indeed, against the careless, passing
world, but which, as these " Reminiscences "
show, blossomed into at least one deeply human,
unspeakably tender, life-long love. Life-long?
Age-long rather, in itself heir of immortality !
At the close of one of these reverent memories
of his "bright one," he exclaims, as though
compelled by the very truth of the love in him
to think of immortality in the same thought
with her, " What bounty too is in heaven ! "
Memory becomes itself an upward glance — the
past of love is the best prophet of its futui-e.
" What bounty too is in heaven ! " So love,
like a sunbeam, proceeding forth from the
primal source of life, can be bound by no little
earthly horizons, but, touching this world with
ita brief moment qI brightness, glances away, to
shine on and on in God's heavens forever.
The absolute moral worth of the society into
which we are born, and hence, in some form of

148 DISCOURSES.
it, the eternal conservation of its good, may be
known by any man or woman who will enter in
a large-hearted way into any of its obligations
and reciprocities. If we would believe in im
mortality we must live as immortals. If men
are content to live as the brutes that perish,
they can hardly be expected to rise to a human
faith in immortality. A pure heart, expanding
in the possible affections of humanity, is its
own best reason for faith in immortality.
' There is one human relation, in particular,
which, as it may become an almost ideally per
fect type of friendship, contains, to my think
ing, an inexpressibly rich presage of social im
mortality — I mean the relation of brother and
sister — a relation too often, I know, made
prosaic and commonplace, but in God's thought
of it, I must believe, and in some human realiza
tions of it, ideally beautiful. When Charles
Lamb might have been seen walking with the
sister for whom he had willingly sacrificed the
happiness of other love, upon one of those sad
days when the approaching shadow of her
strange visitation warned them that they must
seek the only refuge earth could give until the

SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 149
storm should be overpast — an insane asylum —
leading her with the straight- jacket under hia
arm through the streets of London to the only
safe retreat, and waiting in hia own deserted
chambera till the viaitation were over, to lead
her home again; was there not in that rare
affection conquering death in life something im
mortal? something by its present existence
proving its right to be forever ? something
which God could not have made for naught,
but which, as He looked down fiom his throne
among the stars upon those two friends in their
sad walk through the streets of London, in
their lifelong faithfulness of joy and sorrow,
must have seemed to his pure eye of pity to be
of great price ? Brother and sister — he who
may once have been so blessed of heaven as to
have learned the real meaning of those words ;
he to whom in the mystery of this life, bounded
its whole radiant circumference around by
death's darkness and the great unknown, these
words, brother, sister, may have become full of
pure depths of remembered meanings ; he has
had opened in the knowledge of his own heart
one of God's own, best reasons for immortality.

150 DISCOURSES.
Never can those sacred words, brother, sister,
fall lightly from his lips ; and in his inmost
soul he will shrink from the debaaement of
those rich words in the counterfeit sentimental
ity of pious speech. Words to him genuine aa
gold, and stamped with the mintage of life's
truest worth, he can ill endure to see debased,
chipped, and soiled, in the small change of
religious and professional intercourse; he will
not accustom himself to the counterfeit use of
that word, brother, in ordinary clerical inter
course and mere business correspondence ; and
he will wish always to retain a reverence for
unselfish and radiant womanhood too sincere
and holy to suffer his lips to be betrayed into
the unmeaning, vulgar, cant use of that pure
word — to me a bright memory of youth become
a brighter hope of heaven ! — sister !
But, not to wander from my theme, this rela
tion of brother and sister, I would say, often so
singularly complete and beautiful, and in ita
very completeness and beauty ideal type almost
of a perfected society, is itself, in its own worth,
a reason for its continuance after death. Its
very existence contains an implied promise of

SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 151
immortality. It does not look as though it
were made but for a moment. It must be one
of the eternal counsels of God. For, if we be-
believe that there is a Creator, then, I argue
most confidently, a God could not have been
great and good enough to think of a relationship
so rich and beneficent, and then have called it
forth to shine aa a mere earthly irideacence, and
after a moment of divine delight in it have let
it go out in etemal darkness. I cannot believe
that God has created such clear, steady, shining
affections in man and woman as mere will-o'-
the-wisps to mislead us ; they are implications
of immortality — they contain in themselves the
Creator's intimation of their immortality. There
is hardly a reason for the persistence after death
of the individual mind, which is not enhanced
and multiplied many-fold when we consider
man as God has created him in the family ;
when we reflect that all of the moral motives
which we may reverently imagine could have
been in the thought of the Creator when he
called human society into existence, are reasons
which still more, and with mightier cogency of
love, might lead Him to make that society to

1 52 DISCOURSES.
exist forever, an indestructible and immortal
good. But there is another aspect of thia argument
for social immortality to be taken into our
view. That which is still unfinished in human
society is a reason for our trust in God's pur
pose to complete in his own time a redeemed
and perfected society. It looks, that is to say,
as though the Creator had begun a good work
in the formation and development of human
society, which he has not yet carried to com
pletion, and the very fact that he has begun it,
and done already so much divine work upon it,
is a strong presumption for the belief that he
will never leave it until he shall have finished
it. It would not be like God to leave his work
half done. God's purpose cannot prove to be
but a broken column. Every shaft must find
at last its capital in the divine order of the
architecture of the universe. Therefore, society,
already so firmly founded and so well begun in
these human relationships and affections, shall
be completed in glory. This, expressed in a
few words, is the great argument for social im
mortality which will grow upon us as we learn

SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 153
from experience the present incompleteness of
God's own best work in human society.
To give this reasoning force and point, I need
only remind you of the many unmistakable
signs that human society is as yet only begun,
and is very far from being finished. The best
system of society possible in this world-age is
only rudimentary. The outward, physical con
ditions of this world are fitted only for an
embryonic stage of society, not for a full- winged
and full-grown society. In its idea and ap
parent intention human society is something
evidently above this earth, and for a larger than
this temporal life, but it is still bound within
earthly conditions. Its highest spiritual re
lationships are rooted and grounded in laws of
physical descent. The best society is some
thing celestial confined still within a shell of
earthliness. It is useless, it is wicked to wish
even to break prematurely, before death, the
shell of earthly conditions and limitations
vrithin which society must be carefully matured
for the free, sinless life of heaven. Human
lusts breaking through the laws of the social
order would quickly turn this world into a hell.
7*

154 DISCOURSES.
Human love, growing strong and pure in obedi
ence to the laws of the social order, makes of
happy homes beginnings of heaven. Genius
has sometimes felt itself free to soar above
common social restrictions into an empyrean of
its own ; but it only repeats by ita folly the
old fable and melta ita own wings. When did
genius ever become stronger, brighter, more
inspired, by disregard of common morality?
Byron singed his genius in his own passion.
Shelley's wild fancy might have become a
steadier, higher flame, had it been fed, in one
lifelong marriage, upon the pure oil of domestic
truth and happiness. Goethe's poetic art was
not made more deeply human and more heavenly
pure by his selfish loves for women, and hia
imagination needed for its glorification a touch
of the sacred enthusiasm of the poet who
lived " As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."
Possibly George Eliot might have come nearer
finding the missing truth in her life's thought
of self-renunciation, had her genius not been
drawn still farther into the cold shadows of the
eclipse of faith in George Lewes' home.
There are, then, conditions and necessities of

SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 155
human society which may at times prove
burdensome to the individual who suffers from
circumstances, or his own fateful mistakes ; but
which, nevertheless, are essential to the very
existence of a growing organism of society such
as that of thia earth ia, and which we must
quietly accept, therefore, as for thia world, at
least, the wisely ordained laws of social life.
Socialism in its various forms is a vain rebellion
against them. But if we do feel at times their
pressure upon our individuality, or if in others
they seem sometimes to be hard necessities of
toil, or sacrifice, or loneliness, we should re
member that aociety is in the narrowneaa of the
bud now, not in the openness of the flower, and
some leaves may be cramped for a season before
it be full-blown. There is much in the present
system of corporate existence which is neces
sarily limited and temporary — much scaffolding
of the rougher elements of this world which
shall come down when the temple of God, held
in its perfectness in his eye from the beginning,
shall at last be finished. As the human body,
in which whole agea of aacending types come
forth at last completed, is, nevertheless, but the

IS6 DISCOURSES.
temporary physical basia for the life of an im
mortal soul, and, while serviceable for the first
few score years of our exiatence, would not do
at all for the activitiea and poaaibilities of a
full-grown and perfected soul ; so this present
form of human society is the fruition of the
social instincts that have striven up to man, and
answers wisely and well ita purpose for a sea
son; but it would hardly be good enough to
last forever, and it shall at length give place to
the higher and perfected organization of society,
the new Jerusalem, the holy city coming down
from God out of heaven, prepared aa a bride
adorned for her husband. How many preaent
imperfectiona, how much incompletenesa re
mains to be done away ! Enforced separations
of friends ; great spaces of abaence ; strange
interruptions of happy companionships — ^to say
nothing of lesser breaks and flaws in the social
happineaa of even the beat men and women ;
imperfect sympathies ; cares treading affectiona
down in hard, worn lives ; circumatancea cloaing
opportunities ; aickneaaea shutting the outflow of
activitiea ; necessities and responaibilitiea with
out number repressing oft with heavy weight

SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 157
the play of spirit ; these, and other such limita
tions and incongruities of the present system of
society as we see it now begun among us, and
ourselves are parts of ita imperfection, belong
all of them, as we may devoutly hope, to its
present world-and-time conditions only, not to
its eternal fruition. These earthly and tem
poral limitations shall fall away, aa the sheath
ia stripped from the ripened grain, when the
harvest shall come which is the end of the
world. The whole creation now travails in
pain together for the liberty of the sons of God.
Then, when the end shall come, when the city of
God shall be the final and perfected form of
society, these former things shall have passed
away. The physical, earthly laws of birth and
death shall have accomplished their work, and
be needed no more for the fulness and manifold
ness of life in the kingdom of heaven. The
long succession of the generations shall cease,
and society become an ever-present companion
ship of the redeemed. The days of upbuilding
which God haa carried on through the ages in
which, as Jesus said. My Father worketh hither
to and I work, shall be ended, and the day of

158 DISCOURSES.
joyous rest shall begin. The Sabbath of society
shall come at last. So Jesua thought of the
perfect society, complete in the glory of the
angels, when he answered the Sadducee's puz
zling question concerning that poor, overmuch
married woman. They could form only a low,
worldly conception of what society may grow
to be. They could only project the temporary
conditions of life in this world into the next, as
they thought of the hereafter. So they were
perplexed to imagine how human society could
pass on into immortality, and they thought by
their shrewd difficulty to puzzle the very Christ !
But with a divine insight into the abiding reali
ties beneath passing forms of things, Jesus
brushed away their vain imaginations with a
single word of truth : " For in the resurrection,
they neither marry, nor are given in marriage,
but are as the angels of God in heaven." These
familiar forms of social life are temporal ; but
the substance — the reality which we carry
hence with us in our hearts — is eternal. The
outward shall pass away, but the inward truth
of love shall abide forever. For in the resur
rection — when this world-age, that is, shall be

SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 159
over, and the fruition of all its struggle of life
upwards shall appear — they shall neither marry,
nor be given in marriage. Whatever in human
relationships and affections was only of the
earth earthy shall pass away, but love shall
abide — ^love pure and true, radiant and change
less ; for they shall be as the angels of God in
heaven. My thought haa skirted but the shores and
shallows of a boundless hope. The horizon of
it liea ever beyond ua, and as in the light of set
ting suns. But enough may have been suggest
ed to awaken in some hearts afresh the joy of thia
great hope. This whole argument for a com
plete and bleased social immortality rests in the
last analysis upon this simplest yet profound-
est of truths that God has made everything in
this world and its history to grow until his own
harvest time ; a truth this to be found alike, in
some form of it, in all scientific study of the
nature of things, and hidden, also, in the very
heart of Scripture. Human society is only in
the germ now ; hereafter shall God gather the
ripe fruit of this tree of life for his heaven.
Go then to your firesides, and, as you take

i6o DISCOURSES.
your children in your arms, in the delight of
their fresh lives rejoice in the hope of the im
mortality of the household love and joy ; for of
such is the kingdom of heaven. Take this
blessed hope Avith you into the desolate home —
the rooms, so empty now, where everything sug
gests a presence that never comes again — keep
this hope singing in your heart of hearts as you
still dwell for a little while amid the many fad
ing thing^ with which but yesterday a vanished
love was clothed; there too in the deserted
home, faith may hear the angel say, " He is not
here, for he is risen ! " Cherish this blessed truth
which pervades with its sweet comfort all God's
word of promise, and is near to nature's heart,
that society is immortal, and the holy city
shall come down from God out of heaven. Ye
are come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of
ithe living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and
to an innumerable company of angels.
That bright, restful world-future we do not
and need not envy, for our work may hasten the
coming of that day, and by the grace of God we
are the heirs of it ; and the redeemed of the Lord
from all the agea past wait for ua, as we shall

SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. i6l
wait also for others after us, until that day ;
" that they " — aa an Apoatle said with a deep,
touching sense of the mutual dependence of
God's people in all the generations, and their
final completeness in the society of the finished
and perfect kingdom of God,- — " that they with
out ua should not be made perfect."

APPENDIX.

DlSCOtTESE I.  ^NOTB 1, p. 26.
This hopeful opiaion with regard to present theo
logical toleration was expressed before the recent un
usual proceeding in the Free Church of Scotland had
deprived Prof. Robertson Smith of his professorship.
It should be remembered that the Free Church by this
exceptional action has rendered no direct decision
against his teaching, or the right of a clergyman within
its pale to pursue critical studies of the literary history
of the Bible. It cannot be too strongly urged that a^
real faith in God's "Word can be afraid of no science.
On the contrary, the prevalence of unhistorical as well
as of extreme rationalistic views of the Bible, and the
increasing circulation among the people of the assump
tions of destructive critics who proceed from a denial
of the supernatural (as in the " Bible for Learners ") lay
a duty upon evangelical churches of encouraging among

1 64 APPENDIX.
their ministry the science of historical and Biblical
criticism. Scholars of evangelical faith should be
beforehand in sifting out the truth from these new
studies, and in briaging the wheat from these fresh
fields of investigation to the people. Protestant faith,
surely, cannot be saved by any protective policy of
ignorance ; and any appeal in these high matters to
popular prejudice or ecclesiastical fears is unworthy
^e Protestant Church. Should a conflict similar to
mat now going on in the Free Church of Scotland
ever arise in our own land, it is devoutly to be hoped
that impossible, because utterly unhistorical, theories
of inspiration may not betray any church into the
suicidal policy of laying hands of ecclesiastical violence
upon the sincere and candid Biblical scholarship which
in its own better way finds the authority and power of
God in the Scriptures. The beginnings of intolerance
toward more scientific views of revelation and inspira
tion should be discouraged everywhere by all good men
who believe that the Word of God is able to stand in
its own commanding truth, and that it does not peed
to be propped up by any mechanical devices of human
invention. Free_ and thoughtful discussions, not eccle
siastical bulls, are what the interests of faith and the
truth of God's Word demand of theological leaders at
the present time.

APPENDIX. 165
DiscoTJBSB II. — Note 2, p. 50.
I do not forget that not a few sentiments of human
ity and fraternity may be gathered from classic writers,
particularly from the later Stoics, such as Mr. Lecky
in his " History of European Morals " has taken pains
to coUect ; the darker side, however, of the history of
the decaying empires of the Old World makes itself
painfully felt. JSTeander in one of his minor, and I be
lieve untranslated writings (" Wissenschaf tliche Abhand-
lungen," s. 140 f.), with his usual profound historical
analysis, has probed to the quick the moral incom
petency of the ancient social philosophy. The pre-
Christian ethics were powerless to create, and even to
conceive of, the one true society, the real brotherhood
of man. In this essay on the " Relation of Hellenic to
Cliristian Ethics," Neander quotes the remarkable saying
of Zeno, that there shall he one life and one world, as
one flock led by a common law ; but he shows that
antiquity possessed no power to realize this conception,
and that the idea itself, moreover, was defective and
unrealizable. It resembles an unclear, communistic
idea of society, a tendency to reduce humanity to an
inorganic mass, ending in the dissolution rather than
the fulfihing of the natural differences and original
orderings of society (Ibid., p. 152). Neander concludes
this comprehensive survey of the ethical course of
antiquity with these weighty words upon Neoplaton-

1 66 APPENDIX.
ism : " So we see the development of ancient ethics, in
opposition to the principle of a divine humanity to be
realized in all, which has been brought by Christ into
the world, close with that egotistic, aristocratic, parti
cularism." (Ibid., p. 214\
For a full substantiation of the statement made
above, I need only refer, among recent books, to Uhl-
horn's " Conflict of Christianity and Heathenism."
DisooTntsE n. — ^NoTE 3, p. 56.
From an exalted ethical conception of the Divine
Reality, large and illumined aqcws open out in every
direction through our theology. To gain it is therefore
the first duty of the Biblical theologian ; and if theology
is surveyed from any lower point of view, all the doc
trines "will be thrown out of their true relations and
right adjustment. Frequent points of confusion and
contradiction in our doctrinal lines indicate that we
have started them from some too low, partial, or un
moral idea of God. Could we gain a perfect moral
apprehension of God, such as the sinless Christ pos
sessed, all doubt and perplexity would disappear from
.our thought of His ways and works.
The ethical, rather than the metaphysical, being of
God, it should ever be remembered, is the subject of
revelation, as the Bible is the book of religion rather
than a system of philosophy. A real knowledge of the

APPENDIX. 167
true God can be gained only through a true life, as
Jesus (Jn. xvii. 3.) identifies knowledge of the only
true God and etemal Kfe. So, also, 1st Jn. v. 20.
The philosophical advantages of an ethical method
of apprehending the idea of God are such as these;
viz., 1. It lifts thought out of merely metaphysical]
difficulties and subtleties. God as love is a positively
known God, however finite aud inadequate may be our
thought of him. Christian theology does not have
to do with a blank Absolute, or negative Infinite, or
metaphysical Indifference, but with the living God, the
Father of spirits, who has revealed himself in his es
sential reahty as love. 2. It overcomes deism while it
saves the truth at the heart of pantheism. The ethical
conception of God is the reconciliation both of the im
manence and the transcendence of God. God as the
supreme Moral Power must be both above and in his
creation. His relation to the created universe is
primarily ethical ; and the physical and metaphysical
nature of things, and their relation to the divine Will,
are to be studied and interpreted in Christian theology
under this higher and primary ethical relation of the
Creator to his works. Love is at the heart of things,
as it is the essential nature of God. 3. From this
ethical method we gain a consistent conception of God's
unchangeableness in relation to a changing world.
Immutability is a moral predicate of God. He is a con
stant providence, a continuous thoughtfulness, over us

1 68 APPENDIX.
and through history. Historical sameness in the divine
conduct of the world might be moral mutability. On
this subject especially see Dorner, " Christliche Glau-
benslehre." 4. This ethical conception of the nature of
God is indispensable to any Biblical view of the person
and work of Christ (as shown in the third discourse). 5.
In the light of the moral revelation of the divine glory
we can read most inteUigibly the Scriptural intimations
of the triune nature of the Godhead. The words used
in the Bible, the Father, the Son, imply real distinc
tions, an ontological Trinity ; but the revelation of the
unity of the Father and the Son, which is vouchsafed
in the Bible, presents it predominantly in an ethical
light for our present thought of it. God as love is
blessed forever in the communion of his own triune
Being. God is not revealed to us as a blank unit, but
as a living unity, possessing divine society in himself,
and morally and spiritually complete in his own mani
foldness of being. The creation, thus, is in no sense
necessary to the perfectness of the triune God over all
blessed forever. Thus, as a relation in love, Jesus,
" the Son of his love," speaks of his own oneness with
the Father. Jn. xvii. 21, 24. The doctrine of the
Trinity is more accessible to our. approach from this
moral apprehension of it than it is from the meta
physical side. We are obliged, however, to distinguish
in thought what may be one and inseparable in God
and the nature of things ; viz., the moral and the real.

APPENDIX. 169
the reasonable and the actual, the ethical and the onto
logical. It is one of the profoundest ideas of modern
German thought that " the ethical has in it, also, some
thing ontological. y

DisoouBSB m. — Note 4, p. 79.
The following note is designed to indicate more
fully the relations of the view of the atonement given
above to other theories of it, and also to suggest certain
directions in which it may be profitably thought out.
The form of our conception of Christ's work depends
ultimately upon our idea of God. If the divine Will
be made the one-sided centre of theology, as is fre
quently the case in Calvinistic discussions, then the
whole conception of the atonement will be thrown out
of moral adjustment, and at more than one point it will
cause friction with the moral sentiments. The centre
and radiating point of our reasonings concerning re
demption should be a thoroughly spiritual and ethical
belief in God as love in its comprehensive integrity.
Starting from this idea of God, and recognizing God's
eternal will of reconciliation as grounded in his ethical
perfectness as love, we have then to view the incarna
tion and atoning work of Christ as the necessary out
going and satisfaction of God's own moral being in
forgiving sinners ; and then to contemplate the fact of
Redemption in its various historical relations to law.

I/O

APPENDIX.

sacrifice, moral government, and the power of sin.
We need not reject utterly other partial views, and
lower analogies which may serve to illustrate different
aspects of redemption ; but from our higher ethical
conception we should work down among these imperfect
views, and along these lower lines, correcting what is not
purely spiritual in them, and bringing their partial truths
into harmony with the central idea of love. The rela
tions of law, government, honor, covenant, public justice,
etc., express real relations of the highest personal Love
to the universe ; and theories of atonement based upon
them (as the chivalric, or Anselm's, the governmental,
the juridical, the federal, etc.) correspond, each and
all, to something true in God or man ; but they rest
upon partial and secondary truths, and should be rec
ognized and used as derivative and secondary concep
tions of the original and comprehensive truth that God
so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.
The personal (ethical) relation of God to man is before
the governmental ; it is first in the order of time and of
thought ; and, above all dispensations of covenant and
law, it remains the primary and supreme relation of
man to the Father of spirits. Before the law was
given, Adam was born a hving soul, and man is first
and in his essential moral being a son of God. The
vicarious work of the second Adam satisfies and can
harmonize all other necessities, all historic relations of
God to the world, because it is the completion and per-

APPENDIX.

171

feet moral satisfaction of this first, personal relation of
the Father to the son that was lost and is found.
The necessity of the atonement, according to this view
of it, lies in the moral fact that God is not, and as per
fect Love cannot be, eternally reconciled to sin in him
self, in the quiet depths of his own pure being, without
some activity of righteous Love in view of sin ; — re
conciliation is not a mere state, if one may so speak, of
the divine consciousness, but it is the act of an out
going God toward the sinner. It will be seen, there
fore, that our idea of the atonement, though starting
from a supreme moral thought of God, is not a merely
subjective view of it. Sin has become objective in a
history of wrong-doing — objective, too, both as the fact
of guilt, and as the power of evil in the world. But,
beginnipg as we do with the purely moral, primary per
sonal relation of God to man, we can then hope to
survey in their true light, from this centre and height,
the various historical relations and transactions of God
toward man, and of man toward God, such as law,
revelation, promise, disobedience, sin, penitence, rejec
tion of the Holy Spirit.
The view of *the Atonement which I have suggested,
may readily be worked out critically in reference to
prevalent theories of it. Thus, the older juridical and
penal theories begin with a genuine idea of righteous
ness, and the demands of strict justice, but they fail to
recognize with clear ethical insight the essential oneness

172 APPENDIX.
of all moral predicates in the divine nature, and hence
their necessary unity in all revelation or activity of
God in history ; and they proceed, accordingly, to con
ceive of the nature of Christ's work too much under
the domination of some one divine attribute, or in view
of the demands of some special moral relation of God
to the universe, making the requirements of justice, or
law, or the divine veracity, or the terms of a supposed
covenant, their rule and measuring-rod for the work of
perfect Love in forgiving sin ; and hence these theories
run into legalism, or artificial imputation, or even into
a quantitative substitution of Christ's suffering for the
penalty of sin ; and they fail in proportion to be under
stood by the simple Christian conscience, or to carry
the full consent of Christian hearts.
On the other hand, the New England, or govern
mental theory of the Atonement, reacting from these
artificialities of the older theology, begins with certain
well defined moral axioms rather than from a deep
ethical consciousness of grace ; and it proceeds by a
dialectic method rather than through spiritual insight,
to analyze the nature of the Godhead into different
species of benevolence and justice, and to construct a
series of moral plausibilities concerning the divine
government of the world, and the purposes secured
under it by the sufferings of Christ, which are logically
connected and satisfactory . to any one who does not
venture to question its definitions, or whose spiritual

APPENDIX.

173

thirst for reality in theology does not lead him beyond
its phraseology to search for the fountains of moral
truth and spiritual life. As the governmental theory
does not begin far enough back, so it does not end in
the comprehension and fullness of all other theories of
Atonement, as we may be sure the true and final
philosophy of it will do ; but we find that it divides
farther down into two different modes of thought, one
the moral influence theory, the other a tendency to re
turn toward older theories in the feeling that some
deeper, spiritual truth of Christ has been lost. The
governmental theory, unless we take its truth up into
some larger spiritual thought of God, is in danger of
leaving for us a reconciliation of policy, rather than
from the heart of God.
A few words may need to be added to prevent mis
understanding of the view of the necessity of suifering
in forgiveness which has been outlined merely in the
sermon upon this subject. 1. With regard to the
person of Christ, and his qualification for the work of
reconciliation, it should be noticed that both natures,
and their union in Him, are as necessary upon this
view as in any other theory of his atoning sufferings.
Both the vicarious principle of love in God, and the
capacity in human nature for vicarious representa
tion, are met in the person of Christ ; so that in his
sufferings for sin there may be the perfect recognition
on the part of humanity of the righteousness of love

174 APPENDIX.
which cannot fopgive without at the same time con
demning sin in sorrow for it, as well as the perfect out
going and manifestation on the part of God of his
whole feehng toward sin in Christ upon the cross.
The person of Christ is seen to be necessary in stfil
another light, when we ask the question, why could not
God's eternal will of forgiveness through suffering have
been carried out without the incarnation and death of
Christ ? Why could not the Father, taking the sin of
the world- to his own heart, out of his own pure divine-
ness have forgiven it ? We have seen that the
righteousness of love is a moral necessity of suffering
for sin in forgiving it. But the perfectness of God's
b.eing precludes the thought of God's suffering in Him
self ; He cannot be conceived as suffering in his own
pure divineness, but only in some outgoing from him
self, in some vicarious entering into the life of the
world, and its sin and shame. The Incarnation, which
independently of sin we hold to be the consummation of
creative love, becomes in view of sin the possible mode
of God's participation in the shame and the pain 'of our
human history. God in HimseK is God over all
blessed forever ; God going out of Himself in the form
of man becomes the suffering Godman. There is an
intimation of this twofold.^ truth, of this divine unity
of blessedness and sorrow, even in vicarious human
suffering ; for there is with those Christlike ones who
suffer for the sins of others a double consciousness — a

APPENDIX. 175
heart at peace in God, secure and restful in its own
gracious goodness, beneath the sympathy and behind
the suffering of the heart going forth in compassion and
tears for others. Indeed, this deeper consciousness of
good, this reserved power of blessedness, is necessary
to genuine vicarious suffering for others ; our sympathy
never would be unselfish and life-giving to others,
were there not this higher consciousness of love, restful
in its own felicity, behind it. So the blessedness of
the etemal Father is the peace and security of Heaven
above the darkness and the passion of the Cross !
The sufferings of Christ, I hold, therefore, are not
merely modes of manifestation of God's feeling toward
sin — an exhibition on earth of " a superhistorical pro
cess in God himself." For " the reality of reconcilia
tion" they are necessary. The incarnation is the
necessary and real form of divine suffering for sin.
Tn union with man, in the one Person of the Godman,
the efficacious suffering of Love for sin is both possible
and actual. Christ's passion is thus more than a mani
festation, it is a realization of the love of God in im
mediate, organic relation to man's hfe of sin in the
world. Our statements will thus be seen to avoid
entirely the old error of patripassionism.
In this view of the atonement the extent of it is
determined, not by any arbitrary election, or secret
will of God, but by God's eternal wiU of redemption,
which is grounded in his essential nature of Love, and

176 APPENDIX.
realized in Christ's assumption of the very nature of
man. Its extent can be limited, then, only by the
breadth and height of God's love on the one hand, and
the last and lowest limit, on the other hand, of the
nature which the Son of man assumed. Any other
limitation would make Christ cease to be the repre
sentative and head of our race, and would contradict
our idea of God.
One more remark is in point. A distinguishing
merit of this endeavor to conceive of the work of
Christ in its primary and supreme relation to Love,
seems to me to be the circumstance that it enhances
our sense of the higher naturalness of Christ's life and
sufferings. They were not imposed, that is, by mere
WiU, by an arbitrary decree ; they were not invented
by divine Wisdom as an after-thought of mercy for the
propitiation of justice. They grew spontaneously, as it
were, out of the very nature of God, and came to
Christ in the natural working out of his mission from
the Father. This higher moral naturalness both of the
unique Person and the unique work of the Christ, is
one of the most fruitful and grandest conceptions of
modem theology. DlSCOtTRSE m. — NoiE 5, p. 80.
It did not come within the original plan of these
discourses to follow out this view of the Gospel of for-

•APPENDIX.

177

giveness in its relation to morality and influence upon
character. Justification, or love's free welcome of the
sinner through Christ, is the first condition of a new,
quickened moral life. Orthodox theology has much
that is fresh and inspiriting to say of the creative
power of manhood which proceeds from the Christ.
The source and life of morality is contained in the
truth which St. John felt, — We love him because he
first loved us. God is before us in our own virtue, and
in the growth of character, as He is before us in our
thought of him, and in all our life. True morality is
applied religion, and there can be no human goodness
without something from God in it. Evangelical faith
secures, thus, and vitalizes every moral instinct. But
the consideration of this fruitful subject would itseK
require a volume. DiscouESE rV. — Note 6, p. 91.
Among those who advocate the possibility of con
version after death and before the last judgment,
Rothe is careful to insist that " even at best the result
of conversion in the kingdom of the dead .... would
remain far behind the perfected condition of those who
during this life in the senses,- and not first, indeed,
upon the death-bed, have tumed themselves to the
Redeemer." (" Theo. Ethilc," § T96). This conclusion
Rothe reaches from his view of the relation of the

178 APPENDIX.'
spirit, as a transforming and appropriating power, to
ward outward nature; he holds that, relatively, the
earlier the conversion, the richer the fuhness of spiritual
life that may ensue.
DiscouESB V. — ^NoTB 7, p. 123.
The Westminster Confession says : " The souls of the
righteous, being then (immediately after death) made
perfect in holiness, are received into the highest
heavens, .... and the soids of the -wicked are cast
into Hell .... Besides these two places for souls
separated from their bodies, the Scripture ackiiowl-
edgeth none." (Chap, xxiii.) But, as the same Con
fession places above itself the Word of God, it may be
deemed permissible to quote against this positive
declaration' the foUo-wing Scriptures : Job xxxviii. 17.
Gen. xxxvii. 35, xhi. 38, xHv. 29, 31. Ps. xvi. 9, 10, ~
xviii. 5, xlix. 15, Ixxx-^iii. 12, Ixxxix. 48, Ixiii. 9. Ez.
xxxii. lY-32. (See Oehler, " Theo. d. A. T.," 1, § 259.
Also art. " Hades " in " Herzog's Encyclop.") Beside
these texts from the Old Testament should be placed
the passages from the New Testament given in the fol
lowing note. It should be remembered that according
to the New Testament the souls of Dives, Lazarus, and
Jesus, after death are represented as going to Hades.

APPENDIX.

Discourse V.— Note 8, p. 128.

179

The Biblical elements of this doctrine may be briefly
summarized as follows :
I. Those words of Jesus which refer to a time or
state of existence between death and the last judg
ment; viz., the promise to the thief upon the cross,
Luke xxiii. 43 ; and the parable of the rich man and
Lazarus, Luke x-d. 19-31. JesiiS used a word which
the thief, with his Jewish ideas, coidd understand,
Paradise. The promise implied that the crucified
Messiah would be at once after death present, rec
ognized, and influential among the departed. It is
thus an anticipation of the Apostolic teaching of the
descent into Hades, 1st Peter iii. 18-19. The second
passage cited (the parable of Lazarus) contains the fol
lowing truths : 1. A retributive state begins after death.
Each character of the parable begins in Hades to re
ceive according to his moral capacity and deserts. 2.
The dead are not yet finaUy separated and judged.
They exist each in his o-wn place and manner in the
same world of the dead. There is conversation between
Abraham and the rich man. 3. The good can do
nothing to change the condition of the bad. The bad
can do nothing to hurt the good. Beside aU this (pr,
" In aU these things ") there is a great gulf fixed between
them ; for good or evil they cannot go to one another.
Now is our time for Christian influence, for "the

l8o APPENDIX.
night cometh, when no man can work." 4. Nothing is
taught clearly concerning the effects of his torments
upon Dives, and Jesus lets the curtain fall over his
final state. The parable leaves him in suffering with
out possibility of help from Lazarus or Abraham. It
does not come within the scope of the lesson which
Jesus was intent upon impressing, to give any informa
tion as to whether or not a better mind might begin to
be wrought in Dives through his punitive sufferings, or
whether the gulf, impassable to human pity, could
ever be crossed by the divine mercy. The parable
teaches directly nothing at all upon these points, and
would not be inconsistent with any revelation which
might be made conceming the last judgment. We
must take the parable for the obvious truths which are
its first intention. 6. It teaches that character may be
come so determined at a lower stage of revelation as to
render it morally certain that it would not change
under a higher revelation (v. 31).
H. The apostolic teaching of the descent into Hades.
1st Peter, iii. 18-22, iv. 6. The weight of modem inter
pretation is on the side of taking these words to mean
exactly what they seem to say. The traditional ortho
dox interpretation either leaves them unexplained, or
refers them allegorically to the deepest sufferings in
spirit of the Messiah, or resorts to various artificialities
of treatment ; as Calvin regards Christ's preaching to
the spirits in prison as addressed to the souls of the

APPENDIX. I8l
pious dead of the Old Testament, and coolly justifies
his grammatical liberty with the text by saying that
the apostles often substituted one case. for another!
This passage, if taken to mean what the words say,
yields the following teaching : 1. Christ reaUy went to
the place of departed spirits. 2. He went in his
quickened spiritual life to the dead. The expression,
quickened, or made alive in spirit, refers here as else
where to the life of the resurrection. In that form or
mode of being in which after death he was made alive
in the spirit, Christ went and preached to a class, at
least, of the dead. 3. This advent of the crucified
Christ in Hades was not a still deeper humiliation, but
the first moment of his exaltation, the beginning of the
glory of the resurrection. It was the Lord who had
conquered death, and had begun to be made alive ac
cording to the power of the resurrection, -who appeared
in Hades. It is noticeable that in the mind of the
Apostle the going to preach to the spirits in prison is
directly associated with the resurrection, and ascent
into heaven (v. 22), as though these were all parts of
one and the same quickened Ufe. The hour of Christ's
advent among the dead is not determined by the text ;
the general opinion has been that it took place before
the resurrection (so Alf ord, in loco) ; but the older
Lutheran theologians placed it " after his quickening in
the time between that and his going forth from the
tomb " (Huther, m " Meyer's Com." mloco). It evidently

1 82 APPENDIX.
was before tbe mmdfested resurrection on the morning
of the third day ; but the implication of the text is that
it was after the quickening, or actual beginning of the
resurrection. Our conception of it at this point will be
determined by our general view of the resurrection. If.
we conceive of the resurrection as a supernatural de
velopment of life, a process of glorification, not a
catastrophic change, then this Scripture, together with
others, would indicate three chief epochs in the resur
rection of Christ ; viz., his presence and working among
the departed in the beginning of the new life made after
the spirit ; his appearance on earth to the disciples in
a body, in which his personal identity was recognizable,
but which as possessed of higher powers was by no
means the " self -same body " which died — the period of
" rrbomifested " resurrection ; and, finaUy, the vanishing
into invisibUity, the conclusion and perfecting of the
resurrection in the ascension and glorification of the
Lord. The spirits in prison may be, accordingly, in the
beginning or first era of the resurrection-life, having
the pledge of its final completion in the glorified hu
manity of Him who is the first fruits of the resurrection.
4. Christ in the first moments of his quickened life
went to Hades to preach the Gospel. Any other inter
pretation of this word, as the idea that it was a preach
ing of condemnation, is, as Huther remarks, " a whoUy
arbitrary supposition." As the rising Redeemer and
Lord, Christ entered the region of departed spirits. In

APPENDIX. 183
the fresh, opening power of the resurrection and the
life he preached to the dead. To imagine that he
went there in the new-born joy of his triumph over
death to tantalize hopeless spirits by announcing glad
tidings which could do them no good, would be to deny
the very spirit of Christ, and to contradict the love of
God which he had just sho-wn upon the cross. 5. We
rightly infer that this preaching the Gospel among the
dead by the rising Lord, was the completion of his
prophetic office, being necessary to the universality of
his gospel, and the absoluteness of his work of redemp
tion. 6. The mention of a particular class of the dead
may have been suggested by the figure of baptism in
the context ; but these departed spirits certainly could
not have been selected by Christ to receive his message
on account of any pre-eminence in piety or faith. On
the contrary, it appears that they were spirits of men
who had lived in one of the worst ages of human his
tory ; that they had been disobedient, or unbeUevers ;
and the expression " in prison " would seem to indicate
that they were not in paradise, or partakers of the freest
spiritual life of Hades. Inferences from obscure Scrip
tures should be put forward -with great hesitancy ; but
if any inference -be permissible- from these cir
cumstances, instead of saying with Cal-rai that these
were spirits of the "pious dead," we should be war
ranted rather in surmising that they represented the
lowest and most sunken of the dead before Christ's

l84 APPENDIX.
coming ; and that as he sent his disciples into the high
ways and hedges to invite the blind and lame to the
wedding-supper of the Lamb, so he descended himself
to the very bottom of Hades with his gospel. Thus
the universality of his preaching would enable him to
become at last the judge both of the quick and the
dead. From 1st Peter iv. 6, Buther (in Meyer) con
cludes that by the dead are there meant " aU whom
Christ at his coming shaU find as dead." " It is said
that to aU — irrespective of when or how — who are dead
at the time of the judgment, the Gospel shaU have
been preached." Y. Nothing is said or implied concern
ing the effect of Christ's preaching among the dead.
IH. To these passages relative to the intermediate
life should be added those expressions which indicate
that the Apostles looked forward, not so much to the
hour of death, as to the last great day, the final coming
of Christ, for the end and confirmation of their faith.
PhU. i. 6. 1st Peter v. 4. 2d Tim. i. 12, iv. 8. Ist Thes.
iv. 13-17. Col. iii. 4. 1st John iii. 2.
rV". Besides these direct teachings and suggestions
of the New Testament, there are other passages which
throw indirect light upon this subject, or themselves
receive Ught from the Scriptures already considered:
e.g., Rev. y\. 9-11 ; Jn. xiv. 3 — an intimation that the
risen Lord will stiU have a work of preparation
to do for his disciples. Mark xvi. 15, 16 ; 1st Tim. ii.
4-6; Luke xix. 10; 1st John ii. 2 — assertions of the

APPENDIX.

185

universaUty of the preaching of the Gospel. Luke
vii. 11-15 — prolongation upon earth of probation after
death had ensued, which could not be if at death the
final judgment takes place. Matt. 12. 32 — implication,
perhaps, of forgiveness for other sins than that against
the Holy Ghost in the world to come. 1st Cor. xv. 29 ;
Rev. XX. 13-14.
Such are the Biblical elements of the doctrine of the
intermediate life, and they ought not to be quietly
ignored by orthodox theology, or left unadjusted to our
whole teaching concerning the last things. If it be
said that there is danger that the consideration of these
obscure passages might lead individuals to whom the
Gospel is now preached to cherish fallacious hopes of a
second probation after death, it is also true that the
failure to take into account these hints and possibilities
of Scripture may involve for us the righteousness of the
government of God in great difficulty, and betray us
into an un-Scriptural dogmatism with regard to God's
dekling with those who die without the Gospel. The
only really dangerous thing is error — to go beyond, or
to fall short of, the truth of revelation. Romanism in
Luther's day had gone far beyond it ; but that is no
reason why Protestantism should now fall short of it.
This whole subject of the intermediate life, as was in
timated above (p. 182 ), needs further to be thought out
in connection with improved mo'dem conceptions of the
resurrection. If we regard the resurrection as a process

1 86 APPENDIX.
of spiritual embodiment, beginning at the death of the
individual, but dependent for its full completion and
manifestation upon the conclusion of this whole world- .
economy ; then it will be easier to harmonize in one
consistent idea those Scriptures which imply that the
resurrection is " a present and continuous reaUty,"
wrought through Christ's present power, and those pas
sages in which it is regarded as a stUl future event.
The successive epochs in Christ's rising from the dead
into the glory of the heavens become thus typical and
light-giving. It is a possible suggestion that, as Jesus'
resurrection was manifested for our sakes (visibUity not
being a constant, or necessary part of it), so the first
resuiTection, Rev. xx. 5, may be likewise some excep
tional manifestation of the power of the resurrection in
the appearance of saints fitted and chosen for some
special ministery, who, nevertheless, must wait vrith
all the dead, both the great and smaU (Ibid., 11-12), for
the last great day to attain in the new heavens and the
new earth their fuU and final perfection.
I have elsewhere indicated my views upon the process
of the resurrection (" Old Faiths in New Light," chap.
viii.) ; but while a discussion of the better form in
which this blessed hope may be conceived did not faU
within the immediate scope of these sermons, I would ,
caU attention here to the importance of considering it (
in close connection with the doctrine of the inter
mediate Ufe. This seems to me to be the missing Unk

APPENDIX.

187

in Dr. Whiton's recent book upon the " Gospel of the
Resurrection." While bringing out forcibly the Scrip
tural testimony to a present and continuous resurrec
tion. Dr. Whiton seems to me to faU to grasp the fuU
doctrine of the Bible, because he misses this idea of a
resurrection begun, indeed, at death, and begun according
to spiritual law, but dependent for its completion upon
the connection of the individual with the whole creation
and its glorification in Christ. (Rom. viu. 19-23.) The
individual neither in this world, nor the world to come,
can be made perfect alone. The fruition of the hope
of the resurrection-life is conditioned upon the consum
mation of all things. The resurrection is not merely a
development according to the spirit from -within, as
Dr. Whiton rightly holds, but also a development con
ditioned upon great cosmic forces. (See Dorner, Opus
cit., § 958.)
This idea would relieve Dr. Whiton's argument of no
little strain in the exegesis of those Scriptures which
lead hope forward to the second coming of Christ, or
final form of His presence, and the regeneration of all
things. It should never be forgotten that in the
Biblical philosophy of salvation the life of the in
dividual is bound up with the life of the whole, and
reaches its fulness and completion only in the liberty
for which the whole creation waits.

1 38 APPENDIX.

DiscoTTESB V. — Note 9, p. 128.
The belief of the primitive Church respecting prayers
for the dead has recently been collated and carefully
examined by Canon Luckock in his- book, "After
Death." "The conclusion," he writes, "from a full
consideration of the foregoing arguments is, that the
practice of praying for the faithful dead was universally
adopted in primitive times; and though, as we have
seen, for wise reasons it was allowed to drop almost
entirely out of our public worship, yet such a state of
things cannot possibly be regarded as permanent " (p.
252). Referring to the mediaeval abuse of this primi
tive custom which led to its abandonment in the Re
formation, he says : " We may weU believe that in the
temporary obscuration of the primitive practice, and
the almost complete withdrawal of what is confessedly
a most consolatory doctrine, we can see a distinct sign
of a punitive purpose, and a visitation upon this and
preceding generations for other men's sins " (p. 245).
It is certainly a fair question whether in a deep con
sciousness of the oneness of Christ's kingdom in this
world and the world to come, we might not now safely
avail ourselves in public worship, as well as in private
devotion, of such expressions with regard to the dead
as are to be found in the epitaphs in the Catacombs,
and in the ancient liturgies of the church. So St. Paul

APPENDIX. 189
expressed out of a fuU heart his wish that the Lord
might grant to Onesiphorus to find mercy in that day.
2d Thn. i. 18. DiscouBSE v.— Note 10, p. 137.
WhUe I have not cared to burden these pages -with
citations from the extensive modem literature upon
these subjects, I would acknowledge my sense of the
great value of Prof. Dorner's grand contribution to
theology in his " Glaubenslehre," the last volume of
which, containing his discussion of eschatology, has
come to hand since these discourses were prepared.
He puts forward the element of freedom as the reason
for dogmatic uncertainty in our judgment of the final
state of aU men (2d Bd. §. 968). His whole discus
sion of these themes I would commend to the attention
of theologians of our o-wn churches as an example of
the calm, catholic tone and temper which is greatly
needed in the consideration of these difficult questions
upon which Revelation is fragmentary, and where too
confident judgment may easUy betray us into untruth
fulness to the heart of faith.

Old Faiths in New Light
BY
NEWMAN SMYTH,
Author of '* The Religious Feeling:'*

One Volume, 12ino, cloth, - _ . $l.BO,
This work aims to meet a growing need by gathering materials of
faith which have been quarried by many specialists in their own depart
ments of Biblical study and scientific research, and by endeavoring to
put these results of recent scholarship together according to one leading
idea in a modern construction of old faith. Mr. Smyth's book is remark
able no less for its learning and wide acquaintance with prevailing modes
of thought, than for its fairness and judicial spirit.

CRITIC A Ii NOTICES.
" The author is logical and therefore clear. He also is master of a singularly
attractive literary' style. Few writers, whose books come under our eye, succeed in
treating metaphysical and philosophical themes in a manner at once so forcible and so
interesting. We speak, strongly about this book, because we think it exceptionally
valuable. It is just such a book as ought to be in the hands of all intelligent men and
women who have received an education suflRcient to enable them to read intelligently
about such subjects as are discussed herein, and the number of such persons is very
much larger than some people think." — Congregaiionalist.
** We have before had occasion to notice the force and elegance of this writer, and
his new book shows scholarship even more advanced. * * * When we say, with
some knowledge of how much is undertaken by the saying, that there is probably no book
of moderate compass which combines in greater degree clearness of style with profundity
of subject and of reasoning, we fulfil simple duty to an author whose succes.=; is all the
more marked and gratifying from the multitude of kindred attempts with which we have
been flooded from all sorts of pens." — Presbyterian.
"The book impresses us as clear, cogent and helpful, as vigorous in style as it is
honest in purpose, and calculated to render valuable service in showing that religion and
science are not antagonists but allies, and that both lead up toward the one God. We
fancy that a good man^r readers of this volume will entertain toward the author a feeling
of sincere personal gratitude." — Boston yournal.
" On the whole, we do not know of a book which may better be commended to
thoughtful persons whose minds have been unsettled by objections of modem thought.
It will be found a wholesome work for every minister in the land to read."
— Examiner and Chrofiicle.
'* It is a long time since we have met with an abler or fresher theological treatise
than Old Faiths in Neiv Light, by Newman Smyth, an author who in his work on
"The Religious Feeling" has already shown ability as an expounder of Christian
doctrine." — Independent.

*^For sale by all boaksellers, or sent postpaid., upon receipt of price.,
^' CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS,
Nos. 743 AND 745 Broadway, Ne-w York,

THE
RELIGIOUS FEELING.
BY
Rev. NEWMAN SMYTH.

One Volume, 12xno, cloth, ..... $1.25.

In this volume Mr. Smyth has it for his object to formulate the
religious feeling as a capacity of the human mind, and to vindicate its
claims to authority. He sets before himself at the outset the task of
convicting sceptical philosophy out of its own mouth. The work is
thoroughly logical, and displays a familiarity with the most recent German
thought- which is rarely to be found.

CRITICAL NOTICES.
Mr. Joseph Cook's opinion of " The Religious Feeling:^'*
" A fresh, keen book, copies of which I wish were scattered broadcast throughout the
land : " and, in a letter to the author, " I admire exceedingly the familiarity you exhibit
with the latiist scientific literature. The reverent spirit with which you treat all Christian
truth, the elegance of your style ; the searching originality of many a page in your
»olume, insure it a lasting, and, I hope, a wide usefulness."
"The argument in its clearness, force and illustrations, has never, to our knowledge,
been better stated. Mr, Smyth has brought lo his work a clear, analytical mind, an
extensive knowledge of German philosophical thought, and an intellectual familiarity
with the later English schools. He does his own thinking, and writes with perspicuity
*^nd vigor," — The Advance.
*' Upon his own field of metaphysical and moral philosophy he displays a degree of
Klear, acute, and analytic reasoning which is of a high ord'-r and exceedingly effective,
•loih in demolishing the semi-materialistic philosophy of Darwin and Spencer, and in
lemonstrating the spiritual nature and supernatural origin of the human soul.'*
— Chicago hiterior.
"We welcome this volume as a valuable contribution to that type of thought in the
.nndication of theism which is speciaUy demanded at the present time. The discussion
throughout evinces much reading and vigorous thought, and is conducted with marked
candor and ability." — Netv Englander.
"We can cordially recommend Ihe reader to follow the author through his entire
.jifgument, for Jt is hoth brief and clear. The book will form a help to many perplexed
minds, and it epitomizes very satisfactorily some of the best results - of conservative
German thought." — Cincinndti Gazette,
*'1'his very interesting book is always eloquent and suggestive. What makes it
especially noteworthy, seems to us its significance in relation to our day."
— Ne7u York World,
"" The argument contained in these pages is^minently satipfactory. It is one of the
best answers to Darwin and his followers we have ever met with," — The Churchtnaji.

*#* For sale by all booksellers^ or ivill be sent, prepaid, upon receipt of price^
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS,
Nos. 743 AND 745 Broadway, New York.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

3 9002 08837 6851

if