Dedicatory Letter

TO THE MEMBERS OF THE YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION

My Friends,

According to the maxims of the world, I have no right to address you so familiarly; for as individuals and as a body you are unknown to me; and till last February, I suspect that a majority of you had scarcely heard of my existence. The information which you received about me, at that time, is not likely to make you desirous of my friendship, probably will make you zealous to repudiate it. Nevertheless, I thrust it upon you in this rude manner, because all that I have been told of you, and of the motives which have led you to form yourselves into an association, inspires me with an esteem and affection which the absence of any corresponding feelings on your side cannot extinguish.

Though you may think me bold in speaking of you as friends, you will not, I think, dispute my claim to be heard by you in my own defence. An eminent divine of the Free Church of Scotland selected you, last winter, as persons who were fit judges of a book which I had published a few months before. To all intents and purposes, he impanelled you as a jury to try my treasons against a higher authority than that of our Sovereign Lady the Queen. By accepting him as a lecturer on the subject of my Essays, you took upon yourselves the office which he had assigned you. I need not tell you, that I had no power of challenging my jurors. Each one of them was to decide in his own conscience whether he was in possession of such evidence as would enable him to pronounce a just verdict. I hope none of you think that the charges were less serious, than those which are brought against any criminal at the Old Bailey. To me they seem immeasurably more serious. They affect my moral character infinitely more than a charge of some fraudulent transaction in relation to money could affect it. I was distinctly accused before you, of professing to believe, of professing to preach, that which in fact I deny. Ask yourselves what guilt is comparable to this? If you refuse to hold intercourse with a man who has committed a forgery,—even with one who has stolen a loaf, perhaps, under the strong temptation of poverty,—how must you regard a man who has been for years lying to God, and forging His name in support of the frauds which he has practised upon His creatures? This charge, and nothing less than this, was brought against me by Dr. Candlish. You were constituted as judges to examine it. I venture to think, that as Englishmen, you will hold, that I am entitled to tell you why I say ‘not guilty’ to it.

But this is not my chief reason for writing to you. I do not consider you my judges, though Dr. Candlish does. I can leave my own cause and my own character to that day in which he says I do not believe. The craving to justify one’s self is, I know well, a very strong one. How strongly it has been working in me for the last six months, I might find it difficult to explain to you. But I have resisted it, for many reasons. I have felt that it was very dangerous, to mix up petty questions concerning myself with the solemnest and deepest questions concerning man and God. I have been reminded by Dr. Candlish’s book of the infirmities of my temper. He has discovered in almost every line I have written, some proof of personal irritation. He has even supposed that I quoted the awful words which our Lord spoke to the Pharisees, respecting the damnation of hell, for the sake of gratifying my spite against some who had found fault with me. My conscience acquits me of that enormous wickedness. If I had committed it, I ought never to write another line, nor to speak another word. But I must have given some excuse for so dreadful a suspicion, or it is hardly possible that a man of ordinary candour would have indulged it. I felt, therefore, that I was bound to be on my guard, and rather to omit any opportunity of self-defence, than let any persons who would suppose that I admitted the accusations against me to be true, than incur the risk of mixing private passions with what I believe to be the cause of God, and of His Church. And most people, I should suppose, at this time have some intimations, that their tongues and their pens were given them for other purposes than those of controversy; and that they had better let judgment go by default against them, than disturb with miserable personal apologies the sorrows of mourners, and the words of Christian consolation. I have, therefore, allowed you to fancy till now, that I have cared nothing for your good opinion, or that I was totally unable to refute the charges which may have robbed me of it. And I should not have broken silence now, if an opportunity had not been afforded me of showing you, without reference to anything that has been said by Dr. Candlish, what kind of teaching I give my ordinary hearers on the subject upon which I am accused of being most heretical; and if I did not think that I might use that opportunity, to remove impressions from your minds, which will hinder you from understanding, not me, but your own selves and the word of God.

I believe that it will be the fairest and best course, not to go through Dr. Candlish’s lecture (for how could I hope to do justice to so elaborate a discourse in a short preface?), but to select some one passage of it, in which he has condensed his complaints against me,—and which, at the same time, touches upon topics of so general a character, that I may make the vindication of myself entirely subordinate to the purpose which I have in view—that of explaining to you the principles, which in other books, and especially in this book, I have been endeavouring to assert. I take the following, because it contains some most true assertions respecting me; because it is evidently intended to wound my vanity more severely than any other in the lecture; and because it sums up the imputations to which I have already referred, those imputations which, if they are well founded, ought to exclude me from my function as a Clergyman—from the Church of Christ—from the society of all honest men.

“I had intended to trace slightly the author’s views, as developed in this book, to some of the sources whence they might have been, if they have not been derived. There is little or nothing that is really new in them. Mr. Maurice cannot be called an original writer as to matter, though his manner and style are fresh. He is not probably much acquainted with the literature of Protestant theology. If he is, it is the worse for his candour, for in that case his misrepresentations are inexcusable. He writes as if the field had never been gone over before, and as if he was making discoveries; never indicating any knowledge of the fact, that all his reasonings against the current orthodox and evangelical doctrines have been anticipated and answered over and over again. I might show the coincidence of his views, as to the inward light, with those of Barclay and the Friends; the extent of his obligation to Edward Irving and Thomas Erskine for his ideas of the Incarnation and Atonement; and the agreement of his opinions on all the leading points of Christian doctrine, with those of ordinary Unitarians: with these two exceptions, that under whatever limitations, they admit a resurrection, a judgment, and a future state of rewards and punishments; whilst on the other hand, with whatever explanations, he asserts strongly the doctrine of the Trinity.”—Pp. 483, 484.

How thankfully do I accept the testimony of Dr. Candlish to the fact, ‘that there is little or nothing that is really new’ in my writings! It is the point which I have been labouring to establish in every one of them. If he can point out even ‘the little’ which he has found new in any part of them, I shall at once begin to suspect it; nay, I shall cheerfully give it up to his mercy. I have affirmed continually–I have affirmed again in this book,—that I have discovered nothing; that what I am saying is to be found in every creed of the Catholic Church; in the Prayers and Articles of the Church to which I belong; most emphatically in the Bible, from which they derive their authority, and to which they refer as their ultimate standard. But while I utterly disclaim novelty, which, I suppose, is what Dr. Candlish means by originality in matter, there is a sense in which I earnestly desire to be original myself; and in which I desire that you, and all the young men of England, should be so likewise. An original man is not one who invents—not one who refuses to learn from others. I say, boldly, no original man ever did that. But he is one who does not take words and phrases at second hand; who asks what they signify; who does not feel that they are his, or that he has a right to use them till he knows what they signify. The original man is fighting for his life; he must know whether he has any ground to stand upon; he must ask God to tell him, because man cannot. I have met some of these original men in all classes of society, in all religious schools. Wherever I have found them I have felt that I could not copy them, but that I could sympathise with them; that they did me good when I differed with them most; that they instructed me, though they might scarcely know their letters. All men are capable of this originality; it is not a special talent; it comes from that earnestness of purpose, that longing to find what is not dependent on ourselves or on human caprice which, I believe, is awakened in us by the Spirit of Truth, and by Him only. I have not this originality, may that Spirit impart it to me, for to be without it is death. If I have it in any measure, I shall not make anyone who receives any influence from me the retailer of my opinions; I shall help to put him in a position in which he can unfold my imperfect perceptions and correct my errors—because I shall point him to the true Teacher of him, of me, of every man.

I am, therefore, most anxious to confess what I owe not only to the Creeds and to the Bible, but to those men of different communions—from every one from whom Dr. Candlish thinks he has caught me robbing. I cannot give him credit for any particular sagacity in this instance. The robbery was done in broad daylight. I confessed it instantly. Seventeen years ago I declared in print, how thoroughly I sympathised with Barclay and the Friends, in what is called their main doctrine. All that Dr. Candlish knows of my debts—ever increasing debts—to my honoured friend, Mr. Erskine, he learnt from a dedication which I prefixed to a volume of Sermons on the Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament. He did not guess from my Theological Essays that I was under obligations to the Unitarians; I said so in plain terms, and that I felt bound to return the obligation, by showing them how dear those doctrines were to me which they rejected. He has, however, mentioned one name, which I have never uttered, publicly nor privately, without honour and admiration, but to which I have not done the same justice in print as to the others. I will repair the fault by putting that name first in my confessions here. I do it the more gladly, because it is the name of a Scotchman and Presbyterian.

(1.) I had no personal intercourse with the late Mr. Irving, and I heard him preach very rarely. Though I know a few members of that Church, which is, wrongly, connected with his name, and respect them highly, I have no special sympathy with their modes of thinking and acting. But I learnt lessons from some of Mr. Irving’s books, which I hope I shall never forget. I recollect with gratitude portions of his sermons on the Incarnation of our Lord;—by some portions of them I was grieved. What peculiar views he had on the subject of the Atonement I do not know; if he had any, I never entered into them. What he taught me was to reverence the education he had received in the John Knox school, and the fathers who had imparted it to him. I had not that reverence before; I had shrunk from what I believed to be hard, narrow, and inhuman. He showed me, that the old patriarchs of Scotland had a belief in God, as a Living Being, as the Ruler of the earth, as the Standard of Righteousness, as the Orderer of men’s acts in all the common relations of life, which was the most precious of all possessions to them, the want of which is the cause of all feebleness and immorality in our age. He made me perceive how entirely different their godliness was from the sentimental religion, which consists in feelings about God; or from the systematic religion, which consists in notions about Him. He led me to see, that unless we begin from God—unless we start from the conviction, that the thing which is done upon earth He doeth it Himself—the belief in Christ will pass into a belief in a mere Saviour for us—the belief in a Spirit will be at first a mere recognition of certain influences acting upon us, and will evaporate at last into Pantheism.

I perceived, clearly, that Mr. Irving had not acquired these convictions in England. He acknowledged—brave man as he was—his obligations to Coleridge as a teacher, at a time when such an acknowledgment was perilous, almost fatal, to his reputation with the circle which then paid homage to the young Scotch preacher. It is no courage for any man—above all, it would be no courage in me who have no reputation to lose, who cannot be in worse plight with the religious world than I am—to express the utmost depth of gratitude to that benefactor; still I am sure that what Irving owed to him, though it was theological lore in the strictest sense, was not this theocratic faith. That he brought with him; it was part of his covenanting, Calvinistical culture. As such I paid it, and still pay it, the profoundest homage. I have learnt since to honour the teaching of the English Church. I have to bless God for teaching which belongs to what calls itself the Catholic Church. But I have found nothing in either to supersede this. I have found nothing in either which is good without this. I reverence it as Protestant theology in the highest, purest meaning of that word, and as the very ground of all theology.

Dr. Candlish has told you, that I am ‘not probably much acquainted with the literature of Protestant theology; if I am, it is the worse for my candour; for, in that case, my misrepresentations are inexcusable.’ I am much less acquainted with the literature of Protestant theology, and with all literature and all theology, than I wish to be; if Dr. Candlish will put me in the way of improving my knowledge, I shall be most thankful to him. But when he spoke of my misrepresentations of this theology, he was bound, I think, to point them out. I have gone, at some length, in my ‘Kingdom of Christ,’ into a consideration of the services which Luther, Calvin, and Zuinglius, have rendered to the Church and to mankind. If he finds there any disposition to undervalue the work which they accomplished, or the principles which they brought to light, I hope he will expose me. He will find there very deep regrets expressed,—in which, I suppose, every Protestant shares,—that they were not able to agree among themselves; very deep regrets for the divisions which have been perpetuated and multiplied by men who have inherited from them the negative opinions that kept them apart, but who have—if we believe the statements of the different reformers, such as Spener and Francke, that have risen up in their communities—speedily forgotten the truths to which these opinions attached themselves. I have endeavoured to trace the causes of these failures, and to remove the excessive despair which they commonly occasion to the student of history, by showing that their principles, though buried under notions and negations, are still vital, and will rise again, and will become united whenever Protestants shall once more feel that they have a Gospel from God, and a Gospel concerning God,—not a scheme of religion to be set up against the scheme of religion which Romanists maintain. The Protestant of old, as I conceive, shook the vast fabric of Romish despotism, because he proclaimed that God Himself was justifying, and calling, and redeeming His creatures; because he threw down the ladder by which men hoped to climb to heaven with the proclamation,—asserted in every Romish creed, denied in a thousand Romish practices,—that heaven had stooped to earth. Protestants are now trembling, and with good reason, lest that despotism should utterly vanquish them; because they have a number of theories about justification, election, redemption; because they have their ladders which are much more awkwardly constructed, and are made of more flexible materials than the Romish; because they deny in fact what they declare in words, that God has reconciled the world to Himself. I thank Mr. Irving for showing me that this must needs be; that if Protestantism is only a religious machinery, it must be a very bad religious machinery; that if it assumes its higher, diviner right, it will be stronger than ever it was—just because it cannot stand alone, but will demand a humanity as wide as its theology, and grounded upon that.

(2.) Mr. Irving did not, however, show where I might find this humanity, or how I might connect it with God. He did make me feel, by his own—commonly, desperate and abortive—attempts to bridge over the chasm, that there was something wanting in the teachers of his country. By observing the incapacity of the great Genevan and German theologians, from whom they had learnt, to establish peace among themselves, I was led to perceive more clearly where, and what this deficiency was. God was the absolutely good and righteous Will. To proclaim Him as the source of all good and righteousness to men, as the only mover of their wills to good, was to preach the Gospel, the doctrines of grace. But how had this good and righteous Will manifested itself as such? How had it proved its might against that which opposed it? I found most various answers to these questions, given by those who were called orthodox and evangelical divines. They were perpetually engaged in answering objections to their doctrines. As Dr. Candlish says, with melancholy truth—though it is a truth of which he proclaims me to be ignorant—they were ‘answering these objections over and over again.’ That seemed to be especially their function; not to preach a Gospel or good news to men, but to answer ‘over and over again’ the doubts and difficulties that arose in human hearts respecting their views of the character of God and of His relation to His creatures. The doubts and difficulties were not satisfied; they were not even quelled. And of what kind were they? They were doubts whether what was preached was a Gospel at all, whether it was not a message of curses rather than blessings; they were difficulties whether God’s righteousness was asserted in this Gospel, whether it was not utterly denied, whether He was not represented as doing acts which He forbad men to do, as having feelings, which men, according to Christ’s teaching, ought not to have. These mighty questions were at issue. Dr. Candlish says, they have been answered ‘over and over again.’ If they had been answered once, it would have been enough. That is what men demand; that is the demand which must be met. You divines can justify God ‘over and over again;’ but has He, as your fathers said, justified Himself? Has He made His own righteousness clear? Has He removed the blackness and darkness which are over it? I do confess my obligations to that other Scotchman of whom Dr. Candlish has spoken, and to his friend Mr. Campbell, for making me see, as I had never seen before, that the death of Christ was the answer, given once in the end of the world, to that demand; that in it God did fully manifest His own character; that when a man accepts that death as the revelation of God, he owns Him as altogether righteous, as altogether hating sin; sees that His will is that all should be saved from sin; sees that when righteousness and evil were brought into the most tremendous of all conflicts, righteousness prevailed, and evil was discomfited.

(3.) But it is evident from Mr. Erskine’s book on Election, that he has perceived more to be involved in this belief than he, perhaps, at first, was aware of. ‘God,’ it is said, ‘was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.’ ‘It pleased God,’ says St. Paul, ‘to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles.’ Was man, then, according to his original constitution related to Christ? Was the reconciliation of the world to God, the restoration of it to its proper condition in the well-beloved Son? Was that Son really in Saul of Tarsus, and did he only become Paul the converted when that Son was revealed in him? Could he preach to the Gentiles, who were bowing to gods of wood and stone, Christ is in you? So, ‘Barclay and the Friends’ had said. It was very shocking to agree with Barclay and the Friends; but I saw no help for it. They said what I found St. Paul and St. John saying. They said what Philo the Jew, and a number of the Christian fathers had perceived that all the prophets of the Old Testament were saying; what they perceived was implied in the true words and acts of every heathen. They said what I found enabled me to read the Bible with open eyes; to accept its words literally; to feel their connexion with each other. They said what enabled me to understand the contradictions in myself; to feel how the light had always struggled with the darkness; how the darkness had tried to comprehend it and could not. They said what enabled me, when I grasped it and believed it, to feel that I was in union with every man, however he might differ from me; and that I had nothing good in me, but what belongs equally to him. They said what cleared up to me difficulties in the Evangelical divines, and showed me the deep foundation of those doctrines which the early Quakers scorned; for the sake of which some of the latter were disposed to abandon the teaching of their ancestors. What they said discovered to me the spiritual, eternal ground of those sacraments which the Quakers cast aside as material and earthly. It could not signify whether Barclay the Quaker, or Philo the Jew, or Socrates the Heathen, had had apprehensions of this truth; if it were a truth, God had given it to them, and I could ask Him to give me strength to hold it fast, and to declare it to my fellows.

(4.) In doing so, words which I had always known, but which had not the same traditional hold upon me as upon many of my countrymen, presented themselves to me, with a power which I had never dreamed was in them. I mean the words of our Articles, of our Catechism, of our Prayers. I was conscious of very radical differences between us and the Scotch people, for whom I had begun to feel so much respect; I had felt that there had been, on the whole, a larger and freer humanity in this country than in theirs, with probably a greater tendency to secularity and State churchmanship. I had been taught that Scotchmen were less bound by forms than we were;—and I thought that they had maintained a very brave fight against our prelacy, when Charles and Laud would have forced it on them. I tell you this, that you may not fancy I had any strong prejudices which inclined me to see a meaning in our services that was not in them. But when I began to study the Articles, for the purpose of discovering their theological method, I perceived one characteristic contrast between them and the Confession that was drawn up by Knox for the Kirk; a contrast which, it seemed to me, had been unaccountably overlooked. The second article in Knox’s Confession is on the Fall of Man. The second article in our Thirty-nine is on Christ the God-Man. Not till the ninth article do we speak of the Fall; and then not historically, as if it explained the condition of mankind, but morally, as accounting for ‘an infection and corruption of nature which exists in every man of the progeny of Adam, even in the regenerate.’ The importance of this diversity could scarcely be overrated. I was sure that it could not be confined to a learned and formal exposition of doctrine; I was sure there must be some practical and general expression of it. That expression was not far to seek. The Catechism, which we teach to all children who have been baptized, tells them that they are members of Christ, children of God, inheritors of the kingdom of Heaven. Prayers framed for all the motley body which frequents our Churches, assume that all may call upon God as a reconciled Father. Here was the article translated into life. Human beings were treated as redeemed, -not in consequence of any act they had done, of any faith they had exercised; their faith was to be grounded on a foregone conclusion; their acts were to be the fruits of a state they already possessed.

The more I became acquainted with the parties in the English Church, the more I felt the necessity of standing upon this principle, that Christ is in every man, if I was to use our formularies in the plain literal sense. I found that literal sense evaded or denied by some of the most devout men among us,—because they could not reconcile it with their strong conviction, derived from the express assertions of Scripture, that in us, that is in our flesh, dwelleth no good thing; with their equally strong and reasonable conviction, that we cannot be made spiritual by a few drops of water, or by certain words acting as a charm. I found other excellent men as zealous for the literal sense of the words,—because they had believed, also on the testimony of Scripture, that God has called us in Christ to be sons, in a sense in which men did not and could not claim that title under the earlier dispensation. I had no dream that I could reconcile these parties. I knew from history and a little experience, that I should be denounced as a silly coxcomb by both, if I made the experiment. But for myself here was the reconciliation. I needed it for my own life, whether others saw any sense in it or not. I felt that it enabled me to love and learn from the Prayers; which, if I adopted either of the opposing hypotheses, would have tormented me continually, and have forced me at once to become a Protestant Dissenter, or a Romanist. Whereas while I clung to it, these Prayers, instead of separating me from either of the classes which repudiate and despise us, gave me the power, if I would avail myself of it, of claiming unity and fellowship with both. I could feel the Protestant Dissenter had done a good work, in asserting Protestantism to have a positive worth of its own, distinct from our Anglicanism, —though it seemed to me that he had failed to realize its worth. I could see that the Romanist was bearing witness for an Universal Church, governed and filled by the Spirit of God,—though I thought that he had enfeebled and destroyed that witness, had changed his Church into a sect, had made that which was spiritual, mundane and material, by representing the belief in God as dependent on the belief in the Church, and not the belief in the Church as dependent (according to the Creed) on the belief in God.

(5.) I have now given you a glimpse, my friends, into a part of the history of my own ‘Christian instruction.’ I have shown you how a foolish young man was led by his folly to seek for a wisdom, which the arguments that have been repeated ‘over and over again’ by Dr. Candlish and his friends could not supply. And now I come to that part of his accusation which concerns the Unitarians. I will repeat his words, that there may be no mistake about them. ‘I ’might show… the agreement of his opinions ’on all the leading points of Christian doctrine ’with those of ordinary Unitarians: with these ’two exceptions, that under whatever limitations, ’they admit a resurrection, a judgment, and a ’future state of rewards and punishments; whilst ’on the other hand, with whatever explanations, ’he asserts strongly the doctrine of the Trinity.’ That is to say, Dr. Candlish told you (the 3,000 in Exeter Hall, who knew next to nothing about me but what he chose to tell you), that he could show that I, being under the most solemn pledge when I took orders to teach doctrines which the Unitarians reject, and having renewed, year by year, and day by day, my protestation of adherence to these doctrines, am, nevertheless, in agreement with those who say they are false; with these exceptions, that they admit, under some modification, a resurrection and a judgment, —whereas I, who repeat daily the words, ‘I ’believe that Jesus Christ shall come again to ’judge the quick and dead; I believe in the ’resurrection of the body,’ admit them under no modification whatever. This is literally the statement which he made to you, and which he deliberately printed, after he had made it. And it is respecting that statement that I affirmed before, and I affirm now again. It is an immeasurably more horrible libel,—more destructive of my moral character,—than if he had said, that on a certain day, I committed a forgery on the Bank of England, or that I had, in some court of justice, been guilty of a wilful and corrupt perjury. That is my fixed, considerate opinion. I shall be grieved, if you who are, as I trust, honest men, do not share it with me. I shall fear that your moral standard is not what the standard of Christian young men ought to be. I shall begin to think, that you judge of the magnitude of crimes by the amount of the external and visible penalties to which they subject those who commit them. I shall suspect that you have fallen into that incredulity respecting a day in which the secrets of all hearts shall be made known, and acts seen as they really are, which Dr. Candlish attributes to me.

I must do Dr. Candlish the justice to say, that he does wish that I might be brought before another tribunal than yours. The main object, I suspect, of his coming to England was, not to arraign an individual whom he knew to be insignificant, but to arraign the English Church for not treating me as his Church would have treated me, if I had belonged to it. He explained to you how, if I had been subject to that jurisdiction, I should have been convened, not before a college tribunal for corrupting the minds of young men about the one point of everlasting punishment, but before an ecclesiastical tribunal for my whole scheme of doctrine, that I might show cause why I should not be silenced as a Minister, and excommunicated from the body of the faithful. I am perfectly aware that I should have experienced that difference of treatment if my lot had been cast among Presbyterians, or among English Dissenters. And if that difference had involved a more full and thorough examination into all my words and acts,—if it had led to a trial according to the evidence, and to a decision such as would be given in Westminster Hall, or in the Court of Session upon any ordinary case, between man and man, or between the Queen and her subjects,—no one could have rejoiced more than I should have done. But Dr. Candlish must permit me to doubt, whether I or any man brought before one of his tribunals would have experienced this kind of justice. I must suppose that he is a fair, an advantageous specimen of the temper which would prevail in them. And I do say, that I should use the old formula, God give thee a good deliverance, with a very solemn and a very melancholy feeling to any accused man having a righteous cause, who had this representative of the Scotch Free Church to conduct his trial, and to pronounce his judgment. For I cannot pretend to regard that man as having in him the conditions of a righteous judge—(I ask for no mercy or courtesy) who took advantage of a moment when he knew that I was under a stigma from a learned body in my own country, and that the religious press of Great Britain was almost without exception ¹ denouncing me, to appeal to your passions and your ignorance, and to the passions and ignorance of the clergymen and Dissenting ministers who were countenancing him on the platform of Exeter Hall, in support of a charge which I solemnly declare (and I call upon the authorities of the College which has condemned me, upon the Bishops of my Church who suspect me, upon all who have impugned my preaching and my manner of life, and who personally dislike me, to say if they know, to examine if they do not know, whether I am speaking truly or falsely), is belied by all that I have written or preached, by every line of the book upon which he professed to rest it.

Did I not then say, in that book, that I had learnt much from Unitarians, and that what I had learnt from them were truths—essential truths—the very staff of my being? Have I not confessed as much in this Letter? Most assuredly. I said there—I say here—that just as I accepted the positive teaching of Mr. Irving, and of his Calvinistical Scotch forefathers, respecting God and His righteous government, and His war against evil, and did not accept that negative teaching which seemed to me to weaken and darken His righteousness, to contract His power, to make His war with evil ineffectual; just as I accepted the positive teaching of Barclay and the Friends, respecting the Inward Light, and rejected that negative teaching which made the manifestation of this Light in the acts of the Son of God on earth and in heaven, of such small significance;—just so I testified the most entire and cordial sympathy with the declaration of the Unitarians, that God is pure and absolute Love—that God is a Father; and therefore expressed the most thorough dissent from every one of those negative doctrines of theirs, which, as I affirmed, and in my book endeavoured to prove, turn the love of God into an unreality; into an indifference to evil; into a tolerance of the sins and miseries which are destroying God’s creation. This language I used at the outset of that book which called forth Dr. Candlish’s lecture; this language the whole of it is written to explain and illustrate. I have maintained that the Unitarian denial of the fact, that the Son of God—being of one substance with the Father, being the Eternal Word of God, the express Image of God, the only Lord, and Teacher, and Guide of Man—took human flesh and died man’s death, and that by these acts God reconciled man to Himself, justifying us in Christ from all things from which we could not be justified by the Law of Moses, glorifying our Nature at the right hand of God, is, ipso facto, a denial that God loves man, and has interfered to rescue our race from the misery and curse, which all history shows that mankind has felt and groaned under, which each one of us groans under. I have said that the denial, by the old or ‘ordinary’ Unitarians (to use Dr. Candlish’s word), of a Spirit, or personal Comforter, and the substitution for that denial, by some modern Unitarians, of a vague belief in Influences or a pervading universal Spirit, empties God of His fatherly character, and robs us of the privileges of sons. I have further contended with what some of the orthodox journals seem to think excessive vehemence, that the denial of an Evil Spirit, of a Devil, confuses the facts of the universe, Our own inmost experience, and the divine witness concerning God’s victory over evil. It is in this way, members of the Young Men’s Christian Instruction Society! that I have shown the agreement of my opinions on all the leading points of Christian doctrine with the ordinary Unitarians.

But there are exceptions, ‘The Unitarians believe in a resurrection under certain modifications.’ There, says your lecturer, I am not in agreement with them. Will you listen for a moment to the ground upon which this charge stands? I found the ordinary Unitarian acknowledging, as Dr. Candlish says, a resurrection. The Resurrection of Christ from the dead seemed to him a proof, which he could not obtain elsewhere, that men are immortal, that they do not perish altogether, when the breath leaves their bodies. I rejoiced, I said, that any had that faith, because more was implied in it than those who held it knew. But I contended that this was not the meaning of Christ’s Resurrection, as St. Paul sets it forth to us. According to him, Christ died for our sins and rose again for our justification. If He did rise to prove that we were immortal, He would have proved what the conscience of men confessed, with trembling and horror. To deliver us from that horror, to show us that God claimed us as His sons and daughters, was surely a nobler result of so transcendent a work. It was the foundation of a Gospel; the other could never be. But I contended as earnestly, that this emancipation of men’s spirits was not the only or final effect of Christ’s Resurrection. The redemption of the body was quite as much a part of His work for man; its redemption from death, the grave, and hell. What I believed that orthodox Christians, being in this respect ‘in entire agreement with the ordinary Unitarians,’ had done, was to exhaust the belief of the resurrection of the body of all its force, its meaning, its consolation, by substituting for the resurrection of the living powers and principles of which our bodies consist, the renovation of those elements which were the signs of its decay, its curse, its death. By substituting a gathering together, at some distant day, of them, for that gathering together of all Christ’s members in Him, which the Apostle spoke of, they have destroyed the connexion between our resurrection and Christ’s; they have justified the Romish worship of relics; they have made the reunion of the soul with the corruption, which we desire to be rid of, the very object of our hopes. Because I have asserted in this full manner the resurrection of both spirit and body as the fruit of the Resurrection of Christ, I am said to be far worse than the Unitarians, in that they do, with some modifications, admit a resurrection!²

But they differ from me again, because ‘under whatever modification, they admit a ’Judgment.’ I acknowledge that they admit it, much in the same way, so far as I can gather from his lecture and his book on my Essays, as Dr. Candlish admits it. That is to say, they admit that God will hereafter pronounce a certain sentence upon good acts, and upon bad acts; the sentence upon one to be followed by certain rewards; the sentence on the other by certain punishments. There is to be a great trial day of the universe, they think, when these sentences will go forth, and when the rewards and the punishments will begin. I say, I apprehend this is both the old Unitarian idea of a judgment, and Dr. Candlish’s. If it was not his, he would not have joined the word ‘Judgment,’ which occurs in almost every book and every page of the Bible, to the phrase ‘Future state of rewards and punishments,’ which is to be found in no book or page of Scripture, which belongs peculiarly to the age that all Evangelical writers have described as the Unitarian age — the eighteenth century. What I have tried is to recover for the Scriptural word the sense in which Scripture employs it; a sense immeasurably deeper and more comprehensive than any conveyed by the eighteenth century phrase; a sense often in direct moral contradiction to that. A judgment of the heart and reins, a judgment of the man, a judgment of the principles from which acts flow—this is what the Scripture teaches me to believe in here, to expect hereafter. Under the sense of this judgment—in the confidence that the Judge is always at the door—it desires that I should live every day and every hour; it teaches me also to look for a complete day of revelation, when everything that has been hidden shall come forth; when every creature shall be made manifest in God’s sight. This is that day of Christ to which I desire that I myself, and that every one of you should look forward; and which I am sure will come to me and to you, because Christ is the King and Lord of our hearts now,—and because the word which He has spoken will judge us then. And, therefore, you are told that I do not admit a judgment, which the Unitarians, under whatever modification, do admit.

But Dr. Candlish makes a concession, which he felt to be singularly liberal. He acknowledges—reluctantly, but still he acknowledges—that I do, with whatever explanations, assert strongly the doctrine of the Trinity. This is the conclusion of the passage I am now commenting upon. I shall speak of it for a moment, since there is none which more curiously illustrates the mind of the author, or throws more light upon his theology. He regards the Christian faith as made up of a certain set of opinions—an opinion about the resurrection, an opinion about the judgment, an opinion about sacrifice, an opinion about the Trinity. He finds me wanting in the proper opinions about some of these subjects; he finds that I entertain something like what he has been used to hold about another, though with explanations which puzzle him. Shall I tell you what these explanations are? I affirm that when I believe in God the Father, in God the Son, and in God the Holy Ghost, when I give glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost,—I am escaping from opinions. I believe that I am at the centre of God’s revelations of Himself; I believe that He has led us out of our crude and miserable opinions about Him, to that Name which expresses what He is in Himself, what He is in relation to me, and to all the universe. And, therefore, believing in the Trinity,—or if you must put Him, in whom you live and move and have your being, at a greater distance from you—in the doctrine of the Trinity—I am at the point whence all other truths radiate, and to which they converge. I cannot separate the belief in Christ’s incarnation, or death, or resurrection, or in the death and resurrection of myself, or any human being, from this Name. It is the only explanation of them all; it is that which reconciles and harmonizes all the brighter thoughts of God, that men have been cherishing in all ages; it is that which scatters their darkness, it is that which declares to them, that there is an Absolute Root of truth and good at the foundation of all things,—the Eternal Father; that there is a perfect Utterer and Revealer of that truth and good,—the Eternal Word, the only-begotten Son; that there is a Living Person, who carries out that truth and good, and makes it effectual and triumphant over rebellious wills,—the Spirit that proceedeth from the Father and the Son and with the Father and the Son together, is worshipped and glorified for ever.

These ‘explanations’ of mine make Dr. Candlish feel that our faith in the Trinity, though it may be expressed in the same words, is substantially different. I am most unwilling to think so, I trust and believe that the ‘explanations’ of the doctrine, which I have read with exceeding pain in his book, do not express his inward mind; but only show what a hard, intellectual, logical crust has formed about it. If I had not that confidence, I should tremble indeed for Scotland. I will tell you why. Nothing has seemed to me more beautiful than the pictures of patriarchal life, which have been drawn from the homes of the old Scotch Calvinists: that life of which Burns, with all his hatred of some of their opinions and habits, has spoken as the very bulwark of his land. Now this domestic life, grounded first on the authority of the father, and the example of righteousness which he afforded to his children, had its ultimate root in the belief that God was the righteous Father, and that each head of a household was to present Him in that character through his own acts. But I have now heard a Scotch preacher, the very head of the body in Scotland which boasts that it preserves most of the old faith, actually complaining of that idea of the Trinity which makes it the ground of human relations; and insisting that the idea of Persons who perform certain acts of creation, redemption, sanctification (which, subject to the other, I accept also), is the only orthodox one. I am certain that every early Church father, every sixteenth-century reformer, would have seen in this complaint that which threatens all orthodoxy and all faith. And I beseech you, young men desirous of Christian instruction, if you care to restore the old domestic morality, which is so fast deserting us,—if you care to leave to your sons a belief which they shall feel is really the ground of their life,—not to admit into your minds these dead, official explanations of a mystery, which God, in His Bible, has revealed to us through our actual relations; which He would have us accept as the great instrument of exalting and transfiguring them.

There is another particular, in which I have found Dr. Candlish strangely at variance—so far, at least, as his language goes—with the maxims of his forefathers. His objections to my mode of speaking against ‘current’ notions and habits, strike at the root, it appears to me, of the office of a minister of God. If he is not to be a reprover in the gate, he is nothing; if he is to confine his reproofs to those with whom he is scarcely ever brought into contact—to Romanists, for instance—he is making his work an easy and popular one enough; but he is not imitating those who denounced Popery in other ages, for they did it at the risk of their reputations and their lives. If he talks against the world—meaning thereby the gay or fashionable world—and sympathizes with what is called the religious world, he may again get great credit to himself, and contemplate his own position with much contentment; but he will find, by degrees, that the world which flatters him, and which he flatters, is that very one whereof St. James spoke, when he said, ‘To be in friendship with it, is to be at enmity with God.’ So the prophets of old found; so the apostles found; so the reformers found; so it was in the days when our Lord walked on earth. All had to contend with the religious world of their day—He most of all. What were the Scribes and the Pharisees but the most respected, and most exclusive, portion of that world?

This is a most serious question for a disciple of John Knox to consider. Dr. Candlish has appeared among you, not so much to denounce me, as to represent and advocate the ‘current’ religious notions of the day, which he supposes I have impugned. He has had no excuse for saying that I have denounced any individual teacher; if I had, I should have escaped many of his censures which turn upon my vague use of the words ‘divines’ and ‘religious teachers.’ I was aware of the vagueness. I was tempted to remove it, by quoting instances, and producing authorities. I resisted the inclination. I would not imitate the religious periodicals, by denouncing men instead of systems;—men, who may be blessing God in their hearts, and teaching others to bless Him, while they use language which seems to me utterly inconsistent with all that His word declares respecting Him. While, therefore, in my Theological Essays, I often spoke by name of the great Evangelical teachers of the last century, because I never felt disposed to mention them without honour, I alluded only to maxims and habits, when I referred to my contemporaries. I had no need to prove that the opinions and maxims exist; the groans of thousands in religious families testify to that fact. I knew very well that they might be explained away—as all the most idolatrous practices, and all the most subtle outrages upon Scripture and morality, in Romish countries, have been explained away—‘over and over again;’ but I knew that they remained, in spite of the explanations,—and I believed that they were destroying the Christianity of our land. Dr. Candlish has come to England to convince the religious world, that it is in a very right and satisfactory state. Who can doubt that he will succeed? Who can wonder that the religious periodicals which embody all the tempers and inclinations of that which he has defended, should hail such a champion? But is he doing you good by his apologies? Are they such as would have been heard from one of the old men whom he reveres? Would not they have appeared as witnesses of God, to show the people of Israel their sins? Would they not have called those false prophets, who said, ‘Peace, peace’?

I would say again, that I do not take Dr. Candlish’s lecture, or his book, as evidence of what he himself is. I know nothing of him personally; but I know enough of his history to be aware that he has not lived to make his own countrymen content with the notions, at least on the subject of church government, which he supposed were ‘current’ among them. I know that he has made sacrifices to what he holds to be a neglected principle. I would ask of God, that we may imitate his faith, and apply it in the way that it is wanted in our country. I do not think, if we cherish it, we shall cause any disruption in the church of our fathers. I do think that we shall be continually at war with the religious world, which is the counterfeit of the Church, and which is trying to reduce all Churches into a Babel of sects.

I have now said all I intend ever to say on the subject of Dr. Candlish, his lecture, and his book. I have to thank him for some passages in both, which I had not the least reason to expect. Once or twice, he has spoken of me, almost as if he thought I might be a believer in Christ; he has even expressed something like a sympathy with some words I have written; he has half admitted that I may not be merely throwing out mystical or ‘misty’ phrases, when I have discoursed of the divine Word as the great Teacher of mankind. I see that some of his reviewers, in his own country, are scandalized and alarmed at ‘these expressions’; they earnestly beg him to cancel them in a future edition. So far as consistency goes, I believe they are right. He should not lead you, or any, to milder thoughts of one whom he has pronounced a deliberately and habitually dishonest man. I value the words, however, not for my sake, but for his; or for mine only, because they enable me to separate, as I always desire to do, the man from the apologist and the controversialist, and make me ashamed of myself, whenever, for a moment, I confound them.

Having taken leave of my accuser, I wish to explain, as shortly as I can, how the work, which I now present to you, is connected with the subjects which he has brought under your notice, and of which I have been speaking in this letter. My desire is to ground all theology upon the Name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; not to begin from ourselves and our sins; not to measure the straight line by the crooked one. This is the method which I have learnt from the Bible. There everything proceeds from God; He is revealing Himself, He is acting, speaking, ruling. Next, my desire is to ground all human morality upon the relation in which man stands to God; to exhibit whatever is right and true in man, as only the image and reflex of the original Righteousness and Truth. I cannot base this morality upon the dread of some future punishments, upon the expectation of some future rewards. I believe the attempts to make men moral by such means have failed always; are ever more egregiously and monstrously failing than now. I believe that they fail because they are in conformity with our notions, and not with God’s purpose, as set forth in Holy Scripture. There I find God using punishments, to make men sensible of the great misery of being at war with His will; showing them the blessed results to their spirits, to their bodies, to nations, to families, to individuals, to the father and the child, the master and the workman, to the persons who subdue the earth, and to the earth which they subdue, from conformity to His will. There I find the kingdom of Heaven set forth as the kingdom of righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost, which Christ, the only-begotten of the Father, came to reveal; the kingdom over our spirits, the kingdom into which the poor in spirit, who renounce themselves and trust in God, enter. There I find Hell set before me, as the loss of this state, as separation from God, as the darkness into which those fall who love darkness rather than the light which has come into the world, and is shining into their hearts. There I am taught, that God by all His discipline and government here, is leading men to fly from the darkness and turn to the light; and that they are resisting His will when they prefer Hell to Heaven. There I learn to look upon the future state, as even a divine of the eighteenth century represented it to be, not as the commencement of a new state of things,—but as the carrying out and consummation of all God’s plans and government,—as the state in which the victory of good over evil is no longer a question of doubt or uncertainty.

Now this theology and this morality are all, I think, involved in, and tested by, the doctrine of Sacrifice. That doctrine I hold, as our forefathers held it, to be the doctrine of the Bible, the doctrine of the Gospel. The Bible is, from first to last, setting forth to us the meaning of Sacrifice. If we cannot preach that that meaning has been accomplished, that the perfect Sacrifice has been made for the sins of the whole world, that God has made peace with us by the death of His Son, I do not see that we have any gospel from God to men. As little do I see what ground there is for human morality; since that morality consists, as I believe, in the giving up of ourselves. All immorality consists in self-seeking, self-pleasing, self-glorifying. But I find from the history of the world expounded by the Bible, that there has been always a tendency in the corrupt heart of man to make Sacrifice itself the minister of man’s self-will, self-indulgence, self-glorification. Instead of giving himself up to God, man seeks to make his God, or his gods, give up to him; he offers sacrifices, that he may persuade the power which he thinks he has wronged, to exempt him from the punishment of his wrong. This is man’s theology; this is what has produced all the hateful superstitions under which the world groans. If I say that the seeds of this theology, of these superstitions, are not in your hearts and in mine, I contradict the Bible, I contradict the witness of my conscience. If I suppose that there is any heathen tendency to which a Christian man is not liable, I deny the fact of the corruption in the heart of every man of the progeny of Adam, or I suppose that, by some marvellous accident, we are exempted from the operation of it. I must, therefore, ask the Bible, the book of God, to explain to me in what form that evil is likely to appear in my age and in me; I must ask God Himself to tell me how I may be delivered from it,—how I may receive the true sacrifice which taketh away the sins of the world,—and so be prevented from accepting notions of sacrifice which increase and deepen the sin of the world, which suggest thoughts of God that destroy His righteousness, and make Him after the image of my unrighteousness, which lead men to practices that are hateful to Him, and destructive of themselves.

In these Sermons I have compared these two sacrifices; the sacrifice which manifests the mind of God,—which proceeds from God, which accomplishes the purposes of God in the redemption and reconciliation of His creatures, which enables those creatures to become like their Father in Heaven by offering up themselves;—and the sacrifices which men have dreamed of in one country or another, as means of changing the purposes of God, of converting Him to their mind, of procuring deliverance from the punishment of evil, while the evil still exists. If you like to read what I have written, you will see whether, as you have been told upon authority which you are not likely to dispute, I do reject the faith of our forefathers in the might and efficacy of Christ’s Cross; whether I disbelieve in His advocacy, and intercession, and eternal priesthood; whether I measure the glory and the end of His Sacrifice by some paltry notions of my own; whether I ask the Bible to confirm those notions, or to deliver me from them; whether I am introducing a ‘cowardly philosophy’ which shrinks from the thought of God as a punisher and as a judge; whether I am guilty of ‘dishonesty’ in using words in some sense of my own, not in the sense in which God’s word and His Church have used them; whether I am one of those accursed men who rob the world of the Gospel which God has sent them to proclaim in it, and substitute another of their own.

I have tried to speak of Sacrifice under every aspect in which the Bible presents it. If I have not connected it with the adjective Vicarious, which is so favourite a one in modern theology, the reason is that I did not find that word in the Bible. Nor does it occur once in our Thirty-nine Articles. Nevertheless, I do not object to the word. It may have, I conceive, an excellent meaning. If, when we call Christ a Vicar, we understand what the Scripture understands when it calls Him a Redeemer, a Reconciler, an Advocate, a Priest, a Mediator, a Son; if when we call His Sacrifice a vicarious one, we understand what the Scripture understands when it says that He was set forth as a propitiation, that He bore the sins of the world, that He was made a curse, that He was made sin; then I hold that He is a Vicar, and that His sacrifice is vicarious in the fullest sense; for I only complain of those who would evade or dilute the force of these expressions. But if a meaning is attached to Vicar or vicarious, which is not in harmony with this language, most assuredly I reject that meaning, and have taken some pains to show how mischievous it has been.

I preached these Sermons with an oppressive feeling that a crisis may be at hand which will try us all of what sort we are: which will ’show whether we believe in God or are Atheists; whether we worship Him or the devil. But I preached them also with a strong and ever growing conviction, that if some of the notions of sacrifice which prevail among us are doing more than anything else to separate us from God and from each other, the true Sacrifice, which was made once for all, will be found to be a bond of peace between God and man, and between all the different tribes, races, and sects of men. In that bond may you and I be united for ever.

Your Friend and Well-Wisher,

F. D. Maurice.