Section I. The Leading Principles of the Reformation
Justification by Faith—Election—The Written Word—Authority of National Sovereigns
1. The inward struggles of Martin Luther were at least as terrible as those of George Fox, and they have left far more remarkable testimonies of themselves in the history of Europe. For as the character of Quakerism was determined by the conflicts in the mind of the Drayton shoemaker, so the character of the Reformation is interpreted by those which tormented the Monk of Wittenberg.
In some respects there was a resemblance between them. Anyone who reads attentively the first document which Luther put forth against the sale of indulgences, must perceive how deeply and inwardly he had realised the conviction, that he was a twofold being; that there was in him that which required to be crushed and destroyed; that there was that in him which was meant to enjoy life and peace and freedom. A man could hardly have arrived at such a conviction, or at least have been able to express it in such language, who had not experienced much of what Fox describes. But yet the history of their minds was altogether different; nay, the contrast is as remarkable as we can expect to find in the lives of two men, both equally sincere and brave.
Of a light speaking to his conscience, and warning him of the evil he had done, and of the temptations within and without which were tempting him to forsake it. Luther knew as much as any Quaker could have told him. But the thought of such a light, instead of giving him peace, was the cause of all his tumult and confusion. It spoke to him of a Being of absolute power and wisdom and righteousness, between whom and himself there was no sympathy. It bade him seek, by all means, to be reconciled to that Being, and account all trials and sufferings light, if so be they might but give a promise, now or hereafter, of such a blessing. But it told him also of a strict, irreversible law, from which there could be no departure, no dispensation; and the recollection of which made every effort to heal the breach between him and his Maker a new witness to him that it was perpetual. Then came the dream of a possible deliverance from the curse of this law, brought to him in words which he had heard from his infancy, but to which till then he had been unable to attach any meaning. He had been told of a Mediator between the Creator and His creatures; of His having offered a sacrifice for men: of their being united with or grafted into Him; of their possessing a righteousness in Him which they had not in themselves. These words, or words like these, had been uttered again and again by doctors and schoolmen whom he had studied. But they had been mixed with the strangest perplexities about cases of conscience; the effects, kinds, and degrees of repentance; the distinction of mortal and venial sins; the nature and the mode of justification. And if there were such scholastic obstructions to a man’s escape from that which he felt and knew to be a state of evil, there were still more monstrous practical obstructions which seemed to destroy all intercourse between the soul of man and his Deliverer. The sops which were given to the conscience by indulgences, the unfulfilled promises held out to it by penances which really tormented the spirit more than the flesh, all the notions of intervening mediators, beseeching for the removal of the curse which had been already borne by Him who alone could bear it, and who alone could fully sympathise with the miseries of those for whom He suffered, were so many bandages and fetters upon the human soul; making it content with the sin that it loved, or hopeless of real deliverance from the sin which it loathed. It was the Bible which set Luther’s mind free from the perplexities of the scholastic logic. It was by help of the creeds and sacraments of the Church that he was able to disengage himself from the intricate web of papal inventions. The written word of God seemed to him, from beginning to end, to be witnessing that a man is justified by faith; no school phrases being used to express the idea, but every act of affiance in a Divine Person who had revealed Himself to man as the object of his trust and confidence being an exemplification of it. He could thus see the meaning of St. Paul’s assertion, that Abraham was justified by faith. He trusted in God’s promise and word, and that made him a godly and righteous man. All the Psalms, in like manner, were nothing but acts of faith and affiance, whereby a man, crushed down with all kinds of evils, inward and outward, rose up and claimed that relation to God which His covenant had given him, and shook off the sins into which he had fallen through forgetting it. Still these, properly speaking, were acts of trust in a Mediator; they were recognitions of one to whom the suppliant himself was related, who was a bond between him and the absolute God, in whom alone he could dare to call upon Him. Therefore all these justifications were foretastes and anticipations of that justification which the Son of God made for all who would trust in Him, when, having offered up His body as a sacrifice, He rose again from the dead. To announce this work as accomplished; to tell men that they became righteous by believing it, and so entering into union with their Lord and Master—this was, Luther believed, the great end of St. Paul’s life. He believed also that it was his own appointed office. It was the business of the preacher in every age to tell men this truth simply, using the direct personal language of the Bible, instead of the formal and dogmatic language of the schools. But not the man only was bearing witness of this principle. The Creed was preaching it, the Sacraments were preaching it, and the truly instructed doctor would find in these the deepest wisdom, and would labour that they might carry that home practically and in effect to men, which he could only utter in words. This, it seems to me, is Lutheranism according to Luther; and in this Lutheranism lies the germ of all the doctrines which peculiarly belong to the Reformation, though it might be the work of other minds than his distinctly to evolve them.
2. The principal of these is that which Luther proclaimed with so much vehemence in his controversy with Erasmus, but which yet, it is quite evident, could not have been as habitually present to his mind as it was to that of the Genevan Reformer, John Calvin. The idea of an object to which a man might look, and in which he might rest, took precedence of all others in the heart and reason of Luther. Unless when he were driven to it by some dogma like that of Erasmus, which seemed to him to threaten the revival of all Papal contrivances for the reconciliation of man, he troubled himself little about the origin of those feelings and acts, whereby a man apprehends Him who offers himself to his faith and hope. It is clear, however, not only from this treatise1 of Luther, but from the very character of his doctrine, that this question must suggest itself, and that it must receive some such solution as he and Calvin found for it. The idea of an absolute will, with which man must be brought into reconciliation by a Mediator, lay at the base of all Luther’s thoughts. Any man, fixedly meditating upon those thoughts and the results to which they had led, must have asked himself: But who devised this whole scheme of reconciliation and redemption? Who is it that leads men to avail themselves of it? Who is it that determines the operations of their minds, and the consequences to which they shall lead? Such questions had at all times occupied the schools. Augustine, who appeared to have determined them in the same way as Calvin, had ever been regarded as one of their highest oracles. The difference was the same in this case as in the last: the principle that man is to look up to God as the direct source of his acts, and thoughts, and purposes, was presented to the faith of men in the real language of Scripture, and not to the understandings of men in the abstract language of the schools. Those who apprehended their relation to Christ were to speak of themselves as the elect people of God, just as Samuel, or David, or the Israelites did, and to believe that they would have been miserable and accursed if God had not elected them. They were not to trouble themselves with questions about the will, or to seek any other reason for their blessedness than that it was God’s good pleasure to give it them. On the other hand, this belief was to be the conclusive barrier against all impostures of Romish priests, those impostures being attempts to persuade men that they must seek by their own efforts to win a position, which ought to be received as the gift of God. This, I think, is the Calvinistic side of Protestantism. To some it may appear that I have given to it, as well as to the doctrine of justification, too little of a scholastic character; that I have spoken of it too much as something that opposed itself to the logical systems of the previous age, whereas Calvin as well as Melanchthon and some of the German Reformers, were remarkable for their devotion to logic. Nevertheless, I believe that I am right. How the scholastic tendencies of the Reformation afterward developed themselves, I may have occasion to explain presently. Here I will only remark that the Reformers who had been trained by the schoolmen would of course preserve many of their characteristics; that men with a strong bias for dialectics may often be those who are led to feel most strongly the want of what is practical and popular, and to seek out a practical and popular language; and that, in fact, those who have commented most, either in the way of praise or blame, upon the scholastic qualities which appear in the controversial writings of the Reformers, have yet always contended also that the Reformation itself was an appeal to the feelings and sympathies of common men.
3. If then the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith be the first, and the doctrine of election, as formally asserted by Calvin, the second, I think most persons will agree with me in considering a certain peculiar estimate of the Scriptures the third characteristic of Reformation theology. But there are one or two questions connected with this point. No one acquainted with the writings of the Reformers would say that they were more scrupulous in their treatment of their Canon of Scripture than the doctors who preceded them. Luther’s language about the Epistle of St. James and the book of Revelation, though it may have been retracted in his later days, would be conclusive against such an opinion, even if there were nothing similar in the writings of his contemporaries. Neither can it be said that either Luther or Calvin regarded the Bible as a book from which persons without any previous initiation would, as a matter of course, derive light and teaching. They rather looked upon it as a divine witness to men already engaged in a conscious struggle with their evil nature, respecting the character of that struggle, and the means whereby they could obtain deliverance out of it. Such at least, I conceive, was the view most present to the mind of the German Reformer; the Bible was especially the preacher’s book, out of which he was to tell men how those of the same flesh and blood with themselves had fought the battle with the world and the flesh and the devil before them, and what manner of strength and help God had vouchsafed them in it. At the same time, it was a fixed and permanent authority, which mounted above all the notions and experiences of particular minds, and enabled them, even in defiance of such notions and experiences, to discover solid grounds of peace and comfort. It is manifest then that veneration for the Bible, high place as it held in Luther’s mind, was subordinate to his zeal in asserting the doctrine of Justification. He looked upon the Bible mainly as the witness for that doctrine, and because it was such a witness he loved it with all his heart, and would have given up his life that men might in their own language hear what it said. The same, though in a less degree, must have been true of Calvin; the Bible was the witness to him of the divine Election; on that account mainly it was precious to him, and no diligence that could be employed in studying and expounding it were thrown away. But if the Scripture were valuable as the announcement of one or other of these great ideas or principles, was it not in itself a great idea or principle that there was such a book as a Bible, a book speaking directly to the conscience of men, a fixed and permanent utterance of the divine will? To some (I should think to Zwingli) this seemed the cardinal idea of the Reformation, to which other ideas were subordinate. At all events there was a body which gradually began to be separated by important peculiarities from the other Reformers; and of this body, faith in the Scriptures, with a less distinct reference to the principles taught in them, seems to have been the most striking positive characteristic.
4. These three principles seem to me, in the strictest sense, positive principles. They are not the less so because they were brought forth in opposition to certain popular notions and current practices. On the contrary, here lies the very test and proof of their positive character. There were a number of abominations prevalent when Luther appeared, which Romanists not only now but then abhorred. Some of them were corrected or mitigated at the Council of Trent; some of them disappeared when the infidel temper of Leo and the Roman court of that day gave place to the more earnest spirit of the succeeding popes. But great as this disgust may have been, evident as it was that the disgust had reached to the people of the different countries in Christendom, and that a class had arisen in them which was disposed to assert a position independent alike of the hierarchy and of the aristocracy, it was still a question—a very solemn question—with the wiser and better men, how far it was possible to remedy, or safe to denounce, even the most crying abuses. The building is tottering; ought we to touch it under the pretence of repairing it? This was a question which Sir Thomas More, and other men as good as he, may have asked themselves, and for which it may have been out of their power to find a theoretical answer, though they did practically answer it by sitting still. Were they wrong? I would not dare to say so. It seems to me, that looking upon these corruptions merely as the excess of something that was good, they were clearly right. Nay, even if they felt, as I make no doubt they did feel, that the loss of faith was, in some most important sense, the cause of these superstitions—still more of the contrivances to make them profitable—yet if they could not perceive that there was some great truth hidden or contradicted by these portions of the popular system, they would evidently have been committing the great hazard—if we ought not rather to call it the sin—of taking away something which had a certain hold upon the affections of men without giving them any substitute for it. Which argument must have acquired a great confirmation in the minds of those men who had wisdom and opportunity to remark what kind of change had been taking place in the mind of Europe, and what kind of cravings those were which threatened the Church. The feeling—I do not belong merely to a great Christendom, I have a distinct individual position—was evidently that which had developed itself in the members of the new class; which made them eager to grasp at novelties, ready to follow particular guides, but impatient of systematic authority. The wise observers, in some countries, might be able to perceive that this feeling was connected with another, which they could allow to be more wholesome and more worthy of encouragement. The tradesman, German or English, along with his Hussite or Lollardite notions, had a sense of belonging to a particular soil, and speaking a particular language, which was often far less strong in the nobleman. But this conviction interfered as much as the other with submission to Church authority, and with an affection for Church ordinances. It gave rise to strange questionings about the dominion of the Roman Bishop, to stories about the spirit with which kings and emperors in former days had resisted him, to a dislike of the universal language. Was it not clear then that the age had a violent inclination towards infidelity and irreverence; that every acknowledgment of an error which had been sanctioned or tolerated by Churchmen, tended to make this inclination irresistible; and that the only duty of men, who wished well to the preservation of society, nay, of truth, was to uphold, as well as they could, the entire system?
It seems to me that the Reformers were led by God’s Providence to find the only escape which was possible out of this fearful dilemma. They were led to perceive that certain great moral principles, involved in the very idea of a relation between God and His creatures, say rather that the belief in that relation itself—were outraged by the existing Roman system. The abuses of that system were not excesses; they were essentially evil; they had their root in a great denial and unbelief. They set at naught great facts concerning man and concerning God—facts which had been announced by an express revelation from heaven. Here was a standing-point; and I do maintain, and would earnestly press the assertion—that Protestantism has a standing-point of its own; that it is not merely condemnatory, merely negative; and that so far as it keeps within its own proper and appointed province, it denounces and condemns only that which is itself negative, and which sets at naught something that is needful for the life and being of man.
To the question, what that something is, and what therefore is the appointed province of Protestantism, I have already indicated what seems to me the true answer. The feeling which was most strongly awake at the time Luther appeared, was the feeling in each man that he was an individual man, not merely one of a mass. Luther did not create this thought; it was there. He struggled with it in himself, and would fain have overcome it; but it was too strong for him. He was obliged to find some interpretation of it; he was not at peace till he found one, which told him that the only safe, free, true position of a man, is not a position of rebellion, but of allegiance; a position involving the subjection of the whole soul to a righteous and divine government. The clue which led him out of the perplexities of his own mind was that which thousands besides him needed; they received it and rejoiced. To say that he was a minister of sedition, or that he raised up ministers of sedition, is easy, because it is easy to misrepresent history, and to attribute the evil consequences of certain states of mind to those who were God’s instruments in preventing them from being universal. But those who look steadily and impartially at the facts, not wishing (and I think I have shown that I have no wish) to represent them to the disadvantage of those who opposed Protestantism, will, I believe, be more and more convinced, that the Reformers did not call forth the rebellious activity of the period in which they lived, but when it was seeking a refuge in infidelity, taught it to find one in faith.
The three principles of which I have spoken contained the religious satisfaction of that sense of an individual position which the men of the sixteenth century were experiencing. I have hinted that closely connected with this, was another—the sense of a distinct national position. The fourth principle of Protestantism was the recognition of this feeling also as true, and as having a religious basis. The protest against the usurpation of the Bishop of Rome was not mainly grounded upon the idea of its interference with the prerogatives of Christ over the whole Church. I do not say that this idea may not have been often put forward by the Reformers; I do not say that it may not have frequently dawned upon them as the principle which the Papal usurpation invaded. But I do not think it was constantly present to their minds, that it was ever fully developed in them, or that when they used language which implied it, that language conveyed precisely the same meaning to them which it conveys to us.
They may also have alluded, in terms of displeasure or even reprobation, to the assumption by one bishop of an authority over others; but I cannot persuade myself that this was a sin which would have induced them to reject the Papal authority. Their contempt of it arose, as they became more and more convinced that that was true and necessary which an infallible wisdom had pronounced to be erroneous and mischievous, and as they observed how it had interfered with the power and functions of the National Sovereigns. By many links the peculiar theology of the Reformation was connected with the assertion of the dignity of this office and of the national distinctness which it represents; one is very obvious. The Reformers had resorted to the Scriptures not merely for their authority, but for their practical character. But that practical character is especially exhibited in the Old Testament, and in the Old Testament every truth is brought out in relation to the events of a national history. Their own time interpreted the Scriptures to the Reformers, and the Scriptures in turn interpreted their own time.
Section II. Objections to the Principles of the Reformation Considered
I have already noticed one primary objection against all these doctrines, one which, according to my judgment, would be fatal to them; that they are merely negative—merely the contradiction of that faith which Romanists hold.
But there are also particular objections against each of them which it is necessary to examine.
I. 1. One charge which is brought against the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith, belongs especially and characteristically to the Quakers. It is said that justification by faith either means the same thing as the doctrine of the Indwelling Word, or, if it mean something different, that one of them is false. Hither (it is contended) the light dwelt with men or it did not: if it did, the following that light is justification; if it did not, the whole doctrine of Fox (which I have defended) is untenable. Men must be justified by the agreement of their minds with a certain inward principle, or by certain outward acts done on their behalf. To say that a man is in his right state with himself and before God when he subjects himself to the Indwelling Word, and that a man is justified in consequence of certain acts which Christ performed as his representative, is impossible. Now I readily admit that the temper of mind, which leads a man vehemently to assert one of these doctrines, is not the same temper of mind which leads him to assert the other; nay, that these tempers are not very often found co-existing in any great strength. The Quaker and the Mystic (to use that word in an indifferent sense, not in the evil sense which I gave to it in my first chapter) habitually contemplate a divine presence in the heart; they associate that presence, very probably, with the life of our Lord; but if they do so, consciously or unconsciously they affix an import to His acts and words which is different from their obvious historical import. The Lutheran habitually contemplates a Divine Person, having a real distinct life; rejoices that He entered into ordinary human relations and circumstances; realises his own connection with Him through those relations and circumstances. Unquestionably anyone who has observed himself, and knows how very different were the feelings which at different times of his life have attracted him in these two directions, will not be slow to confess that Quakerism and Lutheranism have something in their nature which is even curiously antipathetic. But I fancy the same observation will equally incline him to the opinion that each of these doctrines is the complement of the other, and that in spite of their apparent opposition, neither can exist in any real strength if the other be denied.
To explain what I mean, let us consider what were the actual wants and anxieties of the men in the old world, who experienced the struggle between the light and darkness of which Fox has spoken. Must not such thoughts as these have been continually present to their minds: Here are two powers struggling within me, one good, one evil; sometimes one prevails, sometimes the other; sometimes the darkness seems about to be scattered, sometimes the light seems almost quenched: but I, who am I, in the midst of all this awful struggle? Do I belong to the light, or to the darkness? Of which have I a right to call myself the child now; of which shall I be the child for ever? The consciousness of evil, of rebellion against a power continually exerting itself for my good, testifies against me; my belief in the graciousness, in the mightiness of the Being who is on my side, speaks in my favour: but then, what awful outward facts seem to corroborate the former conclusion! All the outward sicknesses, sorrows, troubles of the world, seem to be lifting up their voice to condemn me,—to be proving that my unseen Friend is either not omnipotent, or that His forbearance with my often repeated disobedience will at last have a limit;—and what is that limit? May not Death at last decide this struggle? May he not be God’s permitted minister, to decide it against me? These thoughts do not imply the least unbelief in a future state; that was not the anxious question of the heathen, as all their mythology proves: but it was, What shall I be, in that state? Some ethereal particle in me may mount up and enter into rest, and even be united to the Divine Essence;—but will it be myself? I cannot believe that I shall die, in the sense in which all the things about me die. Whenever I feel that I am at all, I feel that I am immortal; I may lose the thought while I am speculating; I can never lose it while I am acting and living. But this is the point—Shall good or evil, shall light or darkness, be that to which I am united, when all the spiritual energies, by which I seem to have asserted my connection with something better than myself, shall be as much crushed by pain and weakness and death, the great consummation of them, as the energies by which I eat and drink and walk? The Jews were taught to experience precisely the same difficulty, only with still greater power and reality, only with a brighter and better hope as to its solution. They felt in themselves this struggle; but then, taking hold of the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they were able to believe that the righteous Lord who revealed Himself to their hearts was indeed their Lord, and would be so for ever and ever; and coming with the appointed sacrifice, at the appointed time, in the appointed place, to the appointed priest, they were able to believe that that covenant had not been destroyed through their iniquity; that they still had an inheritance in the King of their nation; that they should behold His face in righteousness; and that when His glory was manifested to the whole earth they should partake in it. Yet it was a hope still; still the doubt rested upon their minds, and at times would gain a dreadful ascendency—Is this evil and accursed nature which belongs to me, my own self? Are not its evils imputed to me? Are not they counted a part of me? Will not Death destroy that nature; and when he destroys it, shall I be spared? These questions must have occupied men, not because they did not possess the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, but because they did possess it;—yea, according to the degree in which that light was revealed to them, or in which they followed it. Surely some answer was needed to them; surely it is a mockery to say that the light itself was the answer. If we accept the doctrine of Luther, the answer is clear and intelligible. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; in this flesh He passed through the conflicts and trials of men; He died a real death; He brought back a real body from the grave. This was the voice from heaven replying to the voice from earth. The man asks: “What am I; am I to account myself a child of the light or a child of the darkness?” Christ dying and rising from the dead, declares: “Thy nature is accursed, thy person is justified; married to thy evil nature, thou art sinful and under the curse; claiming thy portion in me, thou art holy, and righteous, and redeemed.” Is this merely the doctrine of an Indwelling Word? Does it contradict that doctrine? Or does one prove the necessity and the reality of the other?
It is most true, however, as I have said already, that there is one side or aspect of the Lutheran doctrine, to which there is nothing corresponding in the mystical. The outward acts of our Lord in human flesh, considered as assertions of the right which creatures bearing that flesh have to rise above themselves and claim a portion in Him, have been recognised by many an earnest mystic in his later years, as most needful portions of a spiritual economy. But the feeling which was at the root of all others in Luther’s mind, that these acts were mediatorial, propitiatory acts, having for their ultimate object the satisfaction of the will of the Father, has been generally received by persons of this temper with coldness if not with disgust. It should, I think, be distinctly understood by them at first—for they must arrive at the discovery sooner or later—that they cannot hope to connect this faith with, or to reduce it under, any of the ideas which belong properly to mysticism. If those ideas do include all truth, this Lutheran doctrine is not true, for the very assumption upon which it proceeds, and to which everything is referred, that there is an Absolute Will which is the ground of all things, of all being, life, thought, forms no part of mysticism, however mystics may have adopted or grafted it into their faith. The Divine Word is the only real subject of their meditation; a vague gulf of being beyond they may awfully think of, but they dare not speak of it in the forms of human language, or bring it within the region of personality, or dream of it as the ground of human relations. Now that the mystics have most reasonable complaints to make against the systems to which the Lutheran theology has given rise, on this very ground, that they have despoiled the idea of God of its fearfulness and grandeur, and reduced it under human notions and experience, I shall be presently obliged to admit. But the question here at issue is— Does or does not evidence, similar to that which compelled us to acknowledge the truth of the mystical idea of an Indwelling Word, compel us to acknowledge that there is a truth beside and beyond this, which involves, under some terms or other, the belief of Mediation, Sacrifice, Satisfaction? Supposing, for instance, we attached any value to the discovery, that the doctrine of a Divine Indwelling Word was not merely asserted in certain detached texts of Scripture, but that it imparted a coherency and clearness to the whole course of Scripture history, giving a sense to the word Idolatry, showing how and why that was treated as the sin of mankind, explaining the lives and language of those who kept themselves free from it may we not observe a parallel line of proofs bearing just as strongly in favour of these other principles? Is the Lutheran obliged to depend upon certain words or texts, in order to show that the idea of human Mediation is contained in Scripture? Is it not worked into the very tissue of the history which the Scripture contains? Is it not involved in the constitution of the Jewish commonwealth, which it treats of? Can less be said concerning the kindred ideas of Propitiation, Atonement, Sacrifice? May it not be more correctly affirmed, that what gives the sense of continuousness and unity to the books of Scripture, written under so many different circumstances, and at such wide intervals of time, is this fact, that lawgivers, psalmists, prophets, are, one and all, according to their various functions, in obedience to their inward promptings, and to meet the necessities of their respective times, gradually drawing out these ideas which were already embodied in the institutions and life of the Jewish nation?
If, again, it seemed to us a remarkable witness in favour of Fox’s principle, that one great portion of Gentile records was scarcely intelligible without it; have we no witness in favour of these principles from another part of those same records? The philosopher discovered a divine light, or wisdom, which he was to cry after and to follow; did not the whole body of the people believe that there was an invisible power, which it was to propitiate, which it was to reach by mediation, to which it must offer sacrifices? Did not the wisest statesmen, even in days when all actual faith had disappeared, still recognise these thoughts as strange and mysterious, which the nation must acknowledge if it were to be a nation, though they might dispense with them, or overlook them? Was philosophy ever able to get above these ideas, or to merge them in that which was peculiarly its own? Many philosophers laboured hard; the best of them felt more strongly than all others, that there was in the popular faith upon these matters, that which contradicted truths which seemed to him most sacred: yet he was the least disposed to attack that faith; the most inclined to recognise it as something which the philosopher needed so much the more, because he was a philosopher.
In this view of the subject he was, as I have hinted before, almost peculiar; nearly all others wished either to extinguish the existing theology by philosophical notions, to translate it into philosophical notions, or to invest philosophy with the mysterious and miraculous character of revealed theology. The records of each experiment are preserved, the more they are studied the better. The fact has survived them all—these ideas in one form or another have been and are the most characteristic and fundamental ideas of humanity; the very proofs and witnesses that we constitute a kind. Explain them as you will or as you can, but remember that an explanation is not the thing. If these ideas be not delusions, there is some reality corresponding to them; and that reality, could we know it, might be expected to contain the explanation of them, and also of the partial, false, and mischievous notions which may have encompassed them; if they be delusions, it would seem that all humanity must be a delusion; that there can be no common principles to form the groundwork of it. I cannot think, then, that the mystical objection to the Lutheran doctrine, on whichever side we view it, is a tenable one.
2. Another class of persons, who oppose the doctrine of justification, as it was stated by Luther, maintain that it exaggerates a mere fact or crisis in the history of individuals, into a fixed and permanent law. “At a certain period,” they say, “a man who has been careless of religion, acquires a conviction of his error. He is sensible that he has been leading a faithless, godless life. He has been acting as if there were no Lord and Saviour whom he was meant to trust and to love. He begins to recognise such a Saviour—to believe in Him. It is unquestionably a new feeling; the beginning of a different class of feelings from any of which he has hitherto been conscious. It is, therefore, invested by him, and rightly, with great sacredness; but it is only the first in a series of spiritual acts. His belief, if it be not stunted by the notion that it is all-sufficient, grows into love and good works. And this it might have done if there had been no such sudden discovery as that to which he gives the name of Justification. From his baptism upward he might have led a faithful and pure life; then that baptism would be just as rightly and reasonably called his justification, as that a primary and preliminary act of conscious faith. Luther,” they continue, “was led by his own circumstances, or by those of his age, to dwell with particular delight and emphasis upon the transition moment of his spiritual history; yet even he speaks frequently of baptism, as if that was entitled to the credit of his justification; it is evident then that there was a confusion in his mind which, though it might not unfit him for an active reformer, certainly must make us suspicious of him when he assumed to be the enunciator of a great principle. And everything in his words, and the history of his doctrine, tends to heighten that suspicion. For why did he dwell so much upon a formal release from guilt, and a formal imputation of righteousness? Surely it is a real deliverance from sin, and a real righteousness that man requires. Give the best form you can to the other notion; strip it of the fictitious character, in which it must be offensive both to God and man; and still it can only point to some feeling on our part of a position offered to us, which we may, if we please, realise; and then to speak of that position as something independent of the realisation, while yet you say that it is a position granted to faith, and that faith is the realising principle, is to give us shadows for substances, a dream of food to satisfy our hunger.”
I have stated the argument, I hope, fairly, avoiding only the use of one or two favourite phrases,2 which have become catchwords, and, I believe, embarrass the minds of all, on either side, who resort to them. I at once acknowledge the great plausibility of the statement, the admirable piety of those, who, in former days or of late, have brought it forward, and the difficulty of shewing why I think the substance of it to be fallacious, without seeming to reject portions of it which I believe to be both true and important. I think, however, that by at once going to the heart of the question, we may be able to relieve it of many of its perplexities. Everyone must have been struck with these words of St. Paul,—“That I may be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is by the faith of Christ; the righteousness, that is, of God by or upon faith” (Phil. iii. 9). What is remarkable in these words is, of course, their connection. St. Paul is speaking of some very high attainment, some end which was to be the consummation of all his strivings. And this attainment, this end, is what? Having an individual righteousness? No; but precisely the not having it. The highest perfection this saint and apostle could think of, one which he could not dare to say he had achieved, was the ceasing to be anything in himself, the acknowledgment of his whole moral and spiritual life and being as in another.
I do not believe that the excellent men, who argue against the Lutheran doctrine upon the grounds I am considering, have the least difficulty in interpreting this passage. I do not fancy that they wish to explain away its force. On the contrary, I am quite persuaded they would say, “Certainly this is one of the paradoxes of divinity; but it is a paradox upon which every new fact in our spiritual history throws a new light; a paradox so involved in the idea of Christianity, nay, in the idea of our own moral constitution, that there are few persons who do not frequently justify it by their unconscious expressions, even if they have little apparent insight into its meaning. Every man knows, that just so far as he contemplates self in his acts as an object for gratulation, so far those acts are contradictory, and that just so far as he can renounce self, and look upon his acts as beginning and terminating in another, just so far he has fought the great fight of life, and has attained his true state.” Such language as this is most common in writers who have a strong dislike to Luther. Let us look steadily at it for a moment.
It is admitted that this state of self-denial, in the highest and fullest sense of the words, is the true state of a man; not a fantastic imaginary state at all; something which every good man is to desire and strive after: and to sorrow because his vanity and pride continually check him in his efforts to reach it. Assuredly then it ought not to be assumed that there is something necessarily fictitious in the idea of abandoning a self-righteousness, and acquiring another righteousness; there is a sense in which that idea is not only not fictitious, but the very reverse of fictitious; the deliverance from the perpetual fictions and counterfeits of our selfish nature. Nor, again, can it be maintained, that the doctrine of renouncing our righteousness, and receiving another, does necessarily belong to one stage—the lowest stage—of a man’s spiritual progress; it would seem, that in some sense it appertained to the very highest stage of it. But then, it is said, this cannot be the Lutheran sense, for that sense is, as clearly as language can describe it, this—that a sinner, a man pursuing an evil course, does by an act of faith, in the righteousness of another, become a righteous and justified man. No one, not wishing to pervert and confuse things essentially distinct, nay opposite, can identify this assertion with one which evidently relates to the most advanced period of Christian life and experience. Now let it be remembered, that the especial charge against Luther is, that he mistook the phenomena of a certain crisis in our life for a fixed law applicable to the whole of it. He is blamed for attaching so much importance to this doctrine, as if it were the key to the entire meaning of a man’s spiritual existence, when in fact it merely describes the first conscious feeling of such an existence. May we not fairly suggest the thought to the objector, that possibly he may be falling into this very error himself, and mistaking Luther just because he was free from it? May there not be a law which is expressly the law of a man’s being; complete conformity to which is his perfection; but which, from the first hour of his life to the last, is his law; which does not depend the least for its reality upon his recognition of it, or his denial of it; which will judge him at the last day; and which must not, therefore, be concealed from him at any time, but be announced to him as that against which he is rebelling? May not this law be, must it not be if St. Paul’s words are to be received in their simple sense, the law of union with another, the law of self-renunciation? Suppose then I see a man pursuing an utterly wrong course—a course of indulgence in the most ordinary sense of the word—have I not a right to say to him, This is an evil course; and if he ask me why, to answer, Because it is a course of selfishness, and because you were not meant, and your conscience tells you you were not meant, to be selfish. And if he reply to me, as in nine cases out of ten he will—“But how can I be otherwise? every man is selfish; selfishness is our nature, our necessity; God made us so, we cannot help it,” am I hindered from asserting God’s ways against man’s blasphemy in some such words as these,—“I care not whether you call selfishness your nature or not: if it be, your nature is a contradiction and a lie, for it makes you do that which you cannot do without being at war with yourself. If that be your nature, then you are not meant to live according to your nature, but to rise out of it—above it. And there is One who has come to redeem you out of your nature, and to unite you to Himself. In Him you may believe and live; in yourself you cannot?” In saying this, I have preached to this sinful man the Lutheran doctrine of justification. I have told him that there is a state belonging to him, with which he is not living in accordance, but with which he is living at variance. I have said, that union with another is his law; separation from him, his transgression. I have said, that that union is not a natural, but a spiritual one. It is a union which is maintained by faith; unbelief is the renunciation of it: therefore an anomalous sinful condition. There is a fiction here assuredly: it is a fiction to have a state and not to enjoy it; a fiction to possess the conditions of a spiritual being, and to be acting as if these conditions did not exist. But it is the fiction of an evil world; and I know not how we are to get rid of the fiction but by declaring the fact to which it is opposed.
The dream, that because it is announced as a fact it will be at once received as a fact, that there will not be a fierce conflict with the selfish nature before it can be acknowledged at all, and that these struggles will not be repeated every day of a man’s pilgrimage through an evil world, was certainly not Luther’s dream. Every page of his writings, like every hour of his life, bears witness to a tremendous struggle. The question which he thought to be all-important, was this—Is the struggle against the too great proneness of the evil heart to believe and trust, or against its reluctance to believe and trust; against its overeagerness to cleave to its Lord, or against its passion for a selfish independence?
His conviction was, that when he distrusted Christ he was a bad and evil man, with no capacity for doing any right or good act. To trust then must be a duty; a man could not be just or righteous who did not trust; so far as he did trust he must be so. If he were asked whether nothing must precede this trust and give a warrant for it, he would have answered— Assuredly God’s word and promise must precede; the declaration, that this state is yours, must be your warrant for claiming it. The words of the Bible generally, the assurance of baptism to you particularly, give you the right to believe. To seek the right in anything else, in any outward acts or inward feeling of yours, is to commit a contradiction; for these acts and feelings, if they are lawful and right, are acts and feelings which imply trust—are expressions of trust. A man’s repetition of his Credo does not give him a right to trust in God’s mercy and forgiveness; but if he repeats it, as he should, it is a form of trust and affiance in God. A man’s comfortable impressions and feelings are not reasons of confidence; if they are not mere physical sensations, they are the effects of his resting in his true Friend. Faith then, according to him, could not be looked upon as a grace which we may contemplate and reflect upon in ourselves. By its very nature it is the act of going out of self, the act of entering into union with another from whom all our graces are to be derived. That the power of performing such an act is conferred by God, and is therefore a grace, he of course asserted stoutly; but it made an immeasurable difference whether the grace was supposed to be given to a man as so much stock which he might call his own, or whether its effect was to induce him to disclaim all property in himself, and to live entirely in Christ. It was on this account that he resisted so strongly the argument which the Romanists deduced from the relative excellence of faith and love. Love, they said, is a higher grace than faith, by the testimony of your own St. Paul, and yet you make the grace of faith and not of love the ground of justification. I do not, he would answer, make what you call the grace of faith the ground of justification. I do not tell a man that he is to ask himself, how much faith he has, and if he have so much, to call himself justified. What I tell him is precisely that he is not to do this, that this is the very trick which he has been practising upon himself, while he has been under your teaching. He is not to think or speculate about his faith at all. He is to believe, and by believing, to lose sight of himself and to forget himself. And, therefore, I cannot allow that he is justified by his grace of love, though I admit that it be the highest of all graces. Trust is the beginning of love, the way to love. A Being who shows that he cares for me, and in whom all love dwells, proposes himself to me as an object of my trust; I trust him, and so enter into a knowledge and participation of his love. And that love works in me to will and to do of his good pleasure.
I do not say that on all these points Luther may not have fallen into a hundred inconsistencies. Those who search his writings for such inconsistencies will, I doubt not, be amply rewarded for their pains. Those who look in him for a strong, steady current of thought and meaning running through all his perplexities and contradictions, and often made more evident by them, will also, I think, find what they desire. One remark I would venture to make in support of the view which I have taken of his theology. It is certainly a rare case that the character of the doctrine which a man spends his life in proclaiming should stand out in direct contrast to his own personal character. In nearly all cases the one receives some strong impression and colouring from the other. Those who read Luther’s history, would certainly not expect to find an exception to this rule in his case; they would fancy that he must have thrown more of his own personality than another man does into any principle he defended, not less. Now Luther is often condemned as coarse, rude, impatient; did ever anyone affirm that he was not sufficiently plain-spoken and substantial? Is there not then a rather strong à priori improbability in the notion, that his doctrine, to whatever charges it may be open, is obnoxious to just this one, of being a mere pursuing or fighting of shadows? Might not one be glad to discover some escape from a supposition which, to any ordinary person who is not a theologian, must seem most utterly startling and inexplicable?
3. When I have mentioned one other objection to this principle, I believe I shall have encountered all those by which persons in this day are likely to be perplexed. Many students are at a loss to discover how the doctrine of justification by faith differs from the general doctrine of atonement, which was as strongly recognised, in words at least, by the Romanists as it could be by Luther.
We can understand, they say, that many practices may have been sanctioned at that time, which interfered with the full acknowledgment of our Lord’s sacrifice. We can suppose that it may have been important to reassert the principle strongly for the purpose of protesting against these abuses. But the doctrine was there; the Romanists insisted upon faith in it; what more have we to do? If Protestantism have got rid of any mischievous outgrowths of the elder system, let us be thankful; but why endeavour to maintain this particular mode of expression which was, to all appearance, adopted for a temporary purpose, and has accomplished that purpose?
I think that the statement I have given of Luther’s doctrine is, to a certain extent, an answer to this difficulty. He did not call upon men to acknowledge either a new doctrine or an old one, to believe either in a certain opinion concerning justification or in a certain opinion concerning the atonement. He called upon them to believe in God the Father Almighty—in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, and in the Holy Ghost. He said again and again, that the Credo was justification. He told men that union with Christ was deliverance from sin and condemnation; that that union was claimed and maintained by faith; that faith was therefore justification. Such an assertion was true or false; if it were true, it cannot have ceased to be true; all the circumstances and occasions which called it forth may have passed away; but the law which it proclaimed must be as much a law for us as it was for those to whom Tetzel sold his indulgences. And so far from thinking, as those who make this objection seem to think, that we of this day can afford to substitute faith in a certain notion or dogma, for faith in a living person, though the men of the 16th century could not, I rather fancy that this is a temptation to which we have yielded more than even the Romanist did, and from which we almost need a second Reformation to deliver us.
But I do believe that the objector really means this; I suspect that this difficulty about the relation between the idea of justification and the idea of atonement is a very important difficulty indeed; that it is one which did not force itself upon the consideration of the Reformers; that it is one which does force itself upon our consideration; that people are taking various methods of expressing it to themselves—some of them being very confused methods, tending to increase rather than to remove our perplexity and to rob us of distinctions and principles which with great difficulty have been established for us; but that it must be earnestly considered, and will receive some practical resolution—a very mischievous if not a satisfactory one. The question is this. Can this doctrine of justification, if it retain its Lutheran meaning, if it be the assertion of a man’s personal position and personal duty, if it do not degenerate into the most lifeless of all formulas—assume the position which it does assume in a great part of our Protestant divinity? Can it be put forward as the truth which lies at the foundation of the Christian Church? Does this view honour the doctrine, or only kiss it, in order to kill? This is a question which we shall have to consider when we inquire into the Protestant systems and their practical workings. Perhaps the reader may be the less unwilling to enter with me upon the examination, if he perceive, as I hope by this time he does, that it is as much my desire as it can be his, to assert the principle in its integrity and fulness.
II. 1. It is evident that the mystics, who oppose themselves mainly to that side of the doctrine of justification which connects it with the idea of the Divine Will, must dislike to see that idea so prominently exhibited as it is in the Calvinistical theology. And it is not difficult to understand, from the style of their previous arguments, what kind of substitute they would be inclined to offer for the doctrine of Election as it appears in that theology. Each man, they say, stands in a certain relation to the light and to the darkness; following the light, and submitting to the Divine Word, he enters into an elect state; preferring the darkness he becomes reprobate. In the first case he acts according to the purpose of God; in the second he resists it. But because this is the case, man is not therefore to be spoken of as the author of his own salvation; the nature of the act which he performs proves that he is not so; it may be more properly called an act of submission than of choice, though it involve choice; it is the surrender of his own will; whereas the opposite kind of act is emphatically the assertion of his own will, a declaration of independence.
I have already recognised so strongly the principle which this statement embodies, that I am not likely to make any exception against it. I receive it as a satisfactory explanation of the practical conditions under which every man acts; conditions which must remain true, whatever other truth there may be involved in them. The only question is, whether this doctrine respecting the Divine Word, can set aside, or make unnecessary, the distinct formal belief of a primary, absolute, originant Will? I have already said that I think it cannot. That belief seems to lie deeper than the one respecting our relation to the Divine Word, and to be the necessary ground of it. Take away that ground, and I cannot see that we retain any acknowledgment of God in himself; that we contemplate Him otherwise than in reference to us, or his operations upon us. The mystical doctrine may explain the position and circumstances of man; but these very circumstances, if the doctrine be true, imply a theology, and that theology it seems to me is the very thing which mysticism wants.
2. Again, the class of persons who complain of the Lutheran doctrine of Justification, as leading to the belief of a fictitious righteousness, see in the doctrine of election an arbitrary dispensing with all righteousness. “A person receives eternal life because it is the good pleasure of God that he should receive it. Supposing we grant that the obedience is decreed, as well as the reward of it, yet where is that which is the essence of all obedience that can be acceptable to a perfect Being, freedom? You cannot, therefore, make the doctrine reasonable, except by admitting Divine election to be the foresight of human obedience.”
Unquestionably I would admit that proposition, or any other, were it never so startling, rather than acknowledge that great primary contradiction, that the source of all being is self-will. But one contradiction is not the escape from another, and assuredly the idea of an obedience in man, which has no ground to rest upon; which was foreseen by God, but not derived from Him; of something good, therefore, which cannot be traced ultimately to the Fountain of good; nay, which exists independently of it, that is to say, under what are we wont to consider the very condition of evil—is a most agonizing contradiction. And what need have we of it? Only do not suppose the Being whom you worship to be a mere power; only acknowledge him to be that in reality which you say in words that He is, the essential truth and goodness; only suppose the absolute will to be a will to good, and how can we imagine that happiness, obedience, freedom, have their origin any where but in Him; that misery, disobedience, slavery, mean anything but revolt and separation from Him?
3. The last complaint against this doctrine runs parallel with the last against Luther’s. Does not the election mean the election of a body? Has it anything to do with the election of individuals? I would make the same answer here which I made in the other case. Every individual man must be in some state or other. Every individual man ought to know to whom he is to ascribe that state in which he is. The Reformers were especially dealing with the circumstances of individual men. They meant to explain to whom each individual should attribute his election. But what the true state of each man is; in what relation each man stands to a body; whether the election of an individual can be viewed apart from the election of the Church;—these are questions which are forced upon us at this time, and which it is possible may be resolved in a way in which some of the Reformers and most of their disciples would not have resolved them.
III. 1. The language of the Reformers respecting the Bible was probably more offensive to the Quakers and the mystics generally, than even their doctrines of justification and election. The notion of a book to which men, possessing the Inward Light and guided by the Spirit, must defer as an absolute authority, puzzled and confused them. Nevertheless, they were by no means inclined to deny that, the more they were walking in the Light and submitting to the Spirit, the more sympathy they had with the words of this book, the less they were disposed to cavil at them. In this, therefore, as in the two former cases, they were inclined to translate the language of the Reformers into their own, and to affirm that in any other sense except that it was false. The spiritual man had a capacity for discerning spiritual truths under the letter of the Scriptures; to him, therefore, they had a meaning and an exceeding value. But to call them in themselves, as words, as records of facts, divine; to hold them up, in this character, as objects of reverence, was to turn men’s eyes away from the true light, and so far as you could to quench it.
The truth of this statement, so far as it describes the faculty which the Scripture addresses, I have already admitted, and have maintained that it is implicitly recognised by those who seem to be most startled by it. That all revelation is to the conscience, to the inner man, and that when that conscience is not awake, when that inner man is buried, the revelation is not really made, most persons, under some form of language or other, are ready to confess. And that the most consistent and intelligible interpretation of this truth is contained in the doctrine that man is created for union with the Living Word, and that except in union with Him he is not in a true living state, I, at least, am most anxious to maintain. But then if this be the state, not for one man but for all men, and if each man, just so far as he enters into his true state, becomes more of a man and less of a mere individual, does it not seem strange that there should be no instrument through which the mind of the Living Word is expressed to the race, and which therefore overreaches the feelings and judgments of each particular mind, while it imparts to these feelings and judgments clearness, purity, and strength? Does not the expectation of such an instrument, a certain conviction that it is necessary and that it will be given, grow up just in proportion as we take in the other idea, and observe how entirely it contradicts the notion that each man is a law to himself? Now, supposing there were such an instrument, of what kind must it be? You say that the same set of facts, words, records, conveys a different meaning to the spiritual enlightened man and to the fleshly ignorant man. Be it so; then what is there to prevent us from believing that the truth which is meant to be conveyed, should be conveyed in facts, records, and words? Why may it not be a spiritual communication, because it is embodied in the ordinary forms of human discourse? Can you imagine how it should be embodied in any other forms? That you may not be able to conjecture what facts and events would be adequate to make known to man the law of his own being, his relation to God, the character of God, I willingly acknowledge. But suppose you were told that a set of men—a peculiar nation—had been selected as the organs of divine communication to the nations generally, and that all their circumstances had been contrived for the purpose of fitting them for such a function, would you say there was an a priori improbability that this would be the method adopted by the Lord of man for speaking to his creatures? Would you not feel there was a singular fitness in it; that there was some difficulty in conjecturing how any other could be equally in accordance with the principle which we have acknowledged?
Whence, then, comes the reluctance of the mystic to receive the reformed doctrine on this subject? It may be traced, I believe, to the same defect which we have observed in him already. He perceives the conditions under which man exists, the relation in which he stands to a divine guide and teacher, but he does not trace that relation up to its ground in an Originating Will. Stopping short of that, he cannot, it seems to me, heartily believe in a Revelation. He thinks of the eye which receives the Light; he cannot steadily reflect that there was a Light before the eye, and that it called into existence the eye which should behold it. I do not say that he does not implicitly acknowledge this truth. But the explicit acknowledgment of it is that which I believe gave the Reformation all its moral strength and grandeur, and above all, which imparted to the Protestant doctrine respecting the Bible all its meaning.
2. The Quaker complains of this doctrine because it subjects the spiritual man to the government of words and letters. A much more popular objection to it is, that it sets particular men, however ill-taught and undisciplined, free from all authority but their own. “Interpretations of Scripture have been compiled by a series of wise, learned, holy men; some of them receiving their lessons immediately from the apostles. Evidently, therefore, there are difficulties, amazing difficulties, about its meaning. Yet the most ignorant mechanic is to be treated as if he could take cognizance of it, and attain to a complete understanding of it.”
Now it should be understood or remembered, that however the doctrine of the Reformers respecting the Scriptures may have become identified with the doctrine of private judgment, it did not present itself to them in that form but in the most dissimilar form imaginable. They expressly proclaimed the Bible to be that book which puts down and humbles private judgments; which asserts its claim to be heard above them all and in opposition to them all, and which is able to make that claim good. They believed that its words were with power; that when it spoke, man felt that power, and either submitted to it or consciously rebelled against it. I appeal to any one who has looked at all into the writings of the Reformers, whether this be not the tone which habitually pervades them. Was this notion of theirs absurd or extravagant? Assuredly it might have been justified—it was justified to the men who lived at what is called the revival of letters—by the most obvious analogies. Was it the fact that the men and women and children in the Greek isles and on the shores of Asia had heard the Homeric songs from the lips of wandering rhapsodists, and had received them into their memories and their hearts? Was it the fact that in the most cultivated period of Athenian life these same songs were listened to, with less of genuine admiration perhaps, but still with delight and a confession of their strange power? Was it the fact that afterwards they became subjects of philosophical speculation to Aristotle, but at the self-same moment stirred the spirit of Alexander to the invasion of the East, without any reference to his master’s criticisms upon them? Did English or German schoolboys wait till they had studied Aristotle or Eustathius to feel them—nay in the best sense to understand them—in their first dress or in their own tongue? What man in his senses will say that there was any arrogance of private interpretation in all this; that it was the setting up a right to criticise, and not much rather the abandonment of all such right in submission to an influence which could not be resisted? Were the Ionian women and children, the Macedonian prince, the English schoolboys, disparaging the labours of Aristotle or Eustathius? Were they not affording the best justification of them?
All then that the Reformers said when they claimed the Bible for peasants was this—that if it pleased God to make Himself known to His creatures, and if this book contained the records of His revelation, it was not more strange to expect that His power would go forth to carry the meaning of the book home to those for whom it was meant, and that the words of a human book should be able to make themselves intelligible; it was not more necessary that the peasants of Christendom should wait for a commentary before they opened their ears and hearts to receive the words of the one book, than that the peasants of Greece should wait for a commentary before they opened their ears and hearts to receive the words of the other. This was their notion, which did not, however, require even this process of reasoning for its confirmation; seeing that they had evidence before their eyes that the Bible did speak to poor men, and did make itself heard by them, the more in proportion as it was more directly and livingly set before them. I say livingly, for we must not impute to the Reformers the opinion that the power of the book would be felt by the mere reader of it: they attached, as every one knows, an importance and sacredness to the office of the preacher which we are apt, and not without reason if the circumstances of our own day are to regulate our belief, to consider extravagant.
3. There is however another side to this objection. The doubt recurs here, as in the other cases—Is this power promised to individuals or a certain body? Are individuals as such to expect that the word of God will reveal itself to their hearts and consciences? And the former answer must be repeated. Unquestionably the Reformers believed that the word was to each man, not to a mere mass of men. They believed that the Bible had its peculiar lesson for every one, and not merely its general lesson for the world. But to ascertain how the peculiar lesson and the general lesson bear upon each other, and under what circumstances and conditions any given man may hope to profit by either, we must know whether he is in his true state when he is living in a certain body, or when he is standing aloof and asserting his independence. This is, as I have said already, a very important question—perhaps the question for us in this day to decide. A kind of help to resolving it may perhaps be obtained from the comparison which I first used in defence of the Reformers. The Homeric poems were sung to Greek women and children. They were received and loved by them because they had Greek sympathies: we receive and love them because we, being members of a nation, are able to enter into those sympathies. Whether a set of savages, without any sense of society, could have listened to them with equal rapture, or with any rapture at all, is a point worth considering. But this is merely a hint for reflection; the subject must receive a more full consideration.
IV. I believe it will be more convenient to pass over for the present the objections which are made to the doctrine of the Reformers, respecting National distinctions and the power of Sovereigns. Till we have considered many topics which have not yet come under our notice, the force of these objections could not be appreciated; it would be therefore unfair to attempt a refutation of them. And the omission is of less importance, as we shall find that the systems to which the Reformation has given birth have been but indirectly affected by this particular tenet.
One remark, however, I must make, which is necessary in order to understand the contrast which I have attempted to exhibit between the Quaker tendency and that which characterised the Reformers. I said that the assertion of an Absolute Will was the main peculiarity of the latter, the assertion of a relation between the Divine Word and His creatures of the former. It might seem that this assertion was scarcely consistent with another which I made (and which will be at once admitted as true), that Luther delighted to realise the connection of our Lord with all human circumstances and relations, and that Fox turned away from such contemplations altogether. But a minute’s thought will remove the apparent contradiction. The relation between the heart and spirit of man and its Divine Teacher was the one which the Quaker perceived. To connect ordinary human relations with this seemed to him impossible; it was almost profanation. The Reformer, taking his stand upon the ground of the Divine Will, and looking upon the Bible as containing the revelation of that Will, had no such delicate feeling. The common earth was God’s creation. Kings, fathers, and husbands had been appointed by Him and were spoken of in His word; the whole economy of His kingdom had been transacted through their means. The Papists had treated the world as the devil’s world, with their “touch not, taste not, handle not;” but there was no safety in such abstinence—the security was in serving God with a clean heart, and giving Him thanks for His gifts. Such was the Reformation feeling, wherein we must perceive indications of a high truth, which might lead to a deliverance from sensuality or materialism, or might be perverted into them. This was, at all events, the immediate effect of its proclamation. The Teutonic nations, in which family life had always flourished, and in which the King had been able to assert his position as something distinct from that of the premier baron of his realm, and in which there was a tendency towards business and enterprise, became Protestant; the Latin nations, in which there was a lower standard of domestic and national feeling, but more of the feeling and sympathies which dispose to general social intercourse, with more also, as I think, of a tendency to pure contemplation, continued to call themselves Catholic.
Section III. Protestant Systems
What I have maintained that the Protestant principles are inseparably connected, and that all are implicitly contained in the first, I have hinted also that they presented themselves in quite different aspects and relations to the different Reformers. Justification was the central thought in Luther’s mind; Election in Calvin’s; the Authority of the Scripture in Zwingli’s; the Authority of Sovereigns in all the political patrons of Protestantism, and in some of its theological champions, especially here in England. And as these differences indicated the existence of different, nay, opposite, habits of mind in persons who bore the common name of Protestants (and had a right to that name, not only as being all opposed to Romanism, but as all recognising the positive doctrines which Romanism denied), so it portended the growth of immediate divisions.
I. The character of the German Reformation is mainly, but not wholly, expressed in Martin Luther. Most students feel that in order to understand it fully we must connect with him, at all event, Philip Melanchthon. It has been a wonder to some that Luther, whose language against the teachers of the Church, not only in his own time but in past times, is probably more vehement than that of any other Protestant, should nevertheless have felt so much sympathy with the man who was least disposed to commit any act of separation from the old Church, and should have turned away with dislike from those who were labouring to consolidate a Protestant System. The circumstance is undoubtedly very curious, and cannot, I think, be explained merely by the influence which a man of calm character and logical intellect is wont to exercise over one of ardent temperament and practical energy. The truth seems to be this—Luther believed at first, and believed to the end of his life, that the Creed and the Sacraments were the great witnesses for justification—if it was not proper to call them acts of justification. They were such partly because they were acts of affiance in a person; partly because they, the sacraments at least, were, as he believed, not merely human acts, but acts on the part of God, recognising and adopting those who would receive them. But everything in the new endeavour to create a Protestant system was drawing men away from this creed and these sacraments. Systematic articles and confessions were beginning to be formed; justification was again taught scholastically as one of a set of dogmas; the very meaning of it was escaping. Now Melanchthon probably was scarcely aware of this danger, for he was an Aristotelian schoolman, and was half disposed to acquiesce in the scholastic theories which Luther abhorred. But his dislike of separation led him to the same result. There was something terrible to him in the thought of leaving the old German Church—the Church of his fathers. He would have said: “We have made our protest against the abuses of Romanism; possibly we have fulfilled our work.” And if he were asked, “But what then becomes of the doctrine of justification?” he would have said, “Has it not been asserted, in a sense, in the Church at all times? The doctors maintain a justification.”
For a moment such words may have come with power to Luther’s mind; whether they occurred to himself, or were suggested by his friend, they will have derived strength from some Anabaptist atrocity, or some Zwinglian discourse on the Eucharist. But an infamous proceeding of the Romish court will just then have come to light, or a decree will have gone forth from the emperor making reconciliation impossible. Then such thoughts will have been cast away as the suggestions of a fiend. To assert justification, not a justification, but the one only real justification, was the business of his life. He who did assert this could have no peace with Rome; he must break all bonds; the name of Catholic itself must be cast away. There must be an Evangelical Church; a Church witnessing for justification by faith, though all Christendom witnessed against it; Germany is to be the seat of such a Church. But it shall not be built upon a mere notion. The Sacraments shall be the great constituents of it. Baptism shall declare to its members their spiritual citizenship. They shall not regard the Eucharist merely as a feast, at which they are to express their own faith and love. The consecrated elements shall not be spoken of as if they were made something by the receiver; they are something in themselves; they are consubstantiated with the Divine Presence. This is the Lutheran system, and of this the Evangelical Church of Germany professes to be the great Conservatrix.
II. It is evident from these remarks, that though the leading Protestant doctrine was meant to be embodied in Lutheranism, we must look, for the purely Protestant system, to Calvinism. It is not necessary to suppose that Calvin, from the first moment that he began to bear witness against Romanism, contemplated a separation from the old Church. Such a notion would be contrary to all that we know of ecclesiastical history, and of the lives of those who acted in it. But the idea of an Ecclesia, consisting of individuals taken out of the world by Divine Election, was the one which was continually present to his mind, and which gradually subordinated every other to itself. As all the appearances and conditions of the so-called Church outraged in Calvin’s apprehension this idea, it must embody itself somewhere else. No self-willed act for the construction of a new body of faithful men might be justifiable. But the circumstances of the time seemed to point out the will and purpose of God; and his position as to Geneva might enable him to carry out that purpose, by planting the seed of a divine society.
That this society should, except in its acknowledgment of a Pope, correspond to that which Calvin did not deny had been once established by God, though it had fallen into so great corruption, would at first have been his wish; that it should feel itself to have some links of connexion with that old stock might be well on some accounts, though on others dangerous. But the main point was, that it should bear witness to the idea of a distinct election. The question, therefore, practically decided itself. The Church was essentially a collection of individuals. Now, an instinct taught Calvin, and his learning helped his instinct, that the existence of Episcopacy involved another idea than this; it was the witness of something besides mere individual association. Episcopacy therefore was, at all events, not necessary; might it not be on the whole rather a perplexing and unintelligible institution?
In some other points Calvin could use language not very different from that which had prevailed among the Fathers, and in the Catholic Church. He attached a high importance to Baptism, and a mysterious worth to the Eucharist. Wherein then consisted his difference from them, and even from Luther? The Fathers actually regarded the Incarnation—Luther wished to regard it—as the foundation of the Church; Calvin sought for this foundation in individual election. In this difference all others are included. This idea of election involved the idea of a particular redemption; the selection of particular men being regarded merely in the light of a Divine decree, logically implied the reprobation of the rest. Thus the Calvinistic system is formed—a system essentially distinct from the Calvinistic principle, but necessarily involved in the constitution of the Calvinian Church. To Geneva, as the nucleus of this system, the cradle of this Church, men repaired from other lands for teaching and illumination. Thence came John Knox, and planted that which was destined to be the most vigorous shoot from the Genevan stock. Thence came Englishmen, who had been refugees during the Marian persecution, to lay the foundation of our Puritanism, and of the different nonconformist sects which have issued from it. Of all these bodies, however much they may differ from each other, the Calvinistical doctrine is the animating principle; when that is forgotten, or merged in any other, there ceases to be any meaning in their existence.
III. Luther and Calvin entertained a great reverence for the old Creeds of the Church, and some for the teaching of the Fathers. Those in whom reverence for the Scripture took the place of every other feeling, gradually acquired the habit of disparaging both; but this was not their main or distinguishing characteristic. Looking at the written Word of God, as the declaration of God’s will, and as His great gift to man, they became impatient of the value which the other Reformers attached to the Sacraments, especially to the Eucharist. Had not this been the great snare of the Romanists? Had not the belief of sacramental grace made them substitute something else for the great facts of which the Bible is the record? It was well, no doubt, as it was commanded, to keep a memorial feast in remembrance of those facts, or of that which is the most transcendent of them. This was to be the sign and bond of church fellowship in all ages; but the notion that this memorial feast had the virtue which the German, and even the Genevan doctor, was inclined to attribute to it, opened the way to all superstition. These were unquestionably the elements of a peculiar system; but they had not strength to be the groundwork of a society. The Zwinglians succumbed for a time to the Calvinists; their maxims were not embodied anywhere; but on that very account they were destined to exercise a more powerful influence over the whole Protestant mass.
Another influence of the same kind began to make itself manifest within the century which produced the Reformation; of the same kind in more senses than one, though apparently most unlike the Zwinglian influence, inasmuch as that seemed to contain the very essence of Protestantism, and this to be in direct contradiction to its most remarkable peculiarity. I allude to the doctrines of Arminius and Grotius. These doctrines looked at on one side bore the distinct impress of the Reformation. They were set up in opposition to all mystical notions; they were presented as the plain, popular, practical view of men’s duties and responsibilities; they were deduced from texts of Scripture; they were probably felt by their principal propagators to be much more unlike the sacramental views of the older Church than the Calvinistic views were. But on the other hand, an acknowledgment of the absolute will of God was believed to be—as we have seen that it was—the recognition upon which, not one, but all the Protestant doctrines were grounded. Because Calvinism had put forth this acknowledgment more prominently than Lutheranism, Calvinism had become almost identical with Protestantism; it had been believed to be the witness against the selfwilled inventions and self-righteous doctrines of the Romanists. It was not strange, then, that the vehement Protestants in England and elsewhere should identify Arminianism with Popery, and should believe that the same decisive measures were necessary for extirpating one as the other. They were successful in preventing Arminianism from establishing itself into a rival Church; they were quite unsuccessful in preventing it from leavening the minds of those who adopted the Genevan model, and subscribed the Genevan confessions.
IV. Our last duty in this section would be to consider how far any of these systems became connected with the government of the nations in which they established themselves, or whether any other has arisen to assert the relation between Protestantism and national life. But the last of those questions is closely connected with the history of the English Church; the first will be better considered under our next head.
Section IV. The Practical Working of the Protestant Systems
I. The character of Luther, like that of most true Teutons, was compounded of hearty joviality and deep sadness. It has often been remarked that the latter element, which was inseparable from his conflicts and his vocation, painfully predominated in his later years, in which one might have hoped there would have been serenity, if not sunshine. Romanists, and many who are not Romanists, have said, that but one inference can be drawn from such a fact; he felt a bitter sense of disappointment in the result of his labours; if pride had permitted him, he would have confessed that he had rashly and sinfully entered upon them. Such observations are very plausible, and very convincing to those who fancy that a man commences a work, like that to which Luther’s life was devoted, from some calculations of producing an effect that will redound to his own satisfaction, or profit, or honour, or even to the advantage of the world. He cannot be governed by any such calculations: no one to whom mankind really owes any great gratitude was ever governed by them. A mighty Power which he must obey is urging him forward; at every step there is reluctance; oftentimes he says to himself, “I will speak no more words in His name;” he is ashamed and confounded that one like him should pull down and destroy: but the fire is in his heart, and it must come forth from his heart, whatever it consumes. A man who obeys such an impulse will have much sorrow in himself, and will be little understood by others. All he can say in his own defence is, “I know this was to be done, and that I was to do it.” Men will tell him that a knave might use the same language; he will admit it, and will only answer, “Whether I be a knave or no, I do not stand before your tribunal. My judgment is with the Lord, and my work is with my God.” It will be time for the Romanists to say that Luther did not accomplish anything which he wished to accomplish, or which his time required, when they are able to explain without reference to him the extraordinary change which took place in the morality and energy of their own hierarchy in the generation following. It will be time for Protestants to sneer at Luther, when they have fully ascertained that every step out of the errors which they deplore in their own systems will not be made most effectually when they understand the spirit in which he acted, and enter into it; and whether every attempt to set aside the principles which he promulgated will not establish the evils of those systems, and strengthen them by the addition of others from which they may have been separated.
The fact, however, must not be concealed—Luther did feel that Protestantism in every form, even that form which he had been the means of establishing, would not be an adequate or faithful witness for the truth which he had existed to proclaim. It was not merely that he foresaw a loss of the freshness and fervour by which new converts are wont to be distinguished; he felt—though he might not be able to find a reason which satisfied him for the feeling—that there was something in the idea of the Evangelical Church which would involve the necessity of great practical contradictions. Experience has justified his fears, and, faithfully used, may perhaps assist us in discovering the ground of them.
As soon as a body was expressly established for the purpose of asserting the doctrine of justification by faith, the confessions and formularies which set forth that doctrine began of course to be in the highest esteem. They were the casket which contained the jewel, and the jewel could not be preserved without the casket. It was all very well to say, The Creed contains it; or, as Luther would say, He that can declare, I believe in God the Father, etc., is justified; but the Romanists acknowledge the Creed too, and we are to defend justification against the Romanists. It was still more unsatisfactory to say, The Bible contains the doctrine: the Romanists acknowledge the Bible; the Bible, interpreted in a particular way, or not interpreted in another way, might seem to deny it. Consequently, a certain interpretation of the Creed and of the Bible must be guarded and upheld; these formularies have been carefully worded to include that interpretation, and to exclude every other; to these we must adhere.
How to escape from an argument of this kind, none could tell; it seemed perfectly conclusive. Nevertheless, in a very little time, some men arose who said they had been deceived. You tell us justification is our bond of union; but it is not so: justification is a living thing, the justification of which Luther speaks, and of which St. Paul speaks, means the deliverance of a man’s conscience from a burden and a bondage. But the justification of which you speak means a notion or theory about something which you call by this name; which theory is contained in a certain document you call a confession. This will not do. The Evangelical Church is no Church, it does not deserve its name, if it do not consist of men who are really justified. Moreover, the Bible, which is a real book, and speaks of the real justification, must be the book of the Church, and not these formularies; otherwise Protestantism is not Protestantism.
The proclamation went forth; it was heard and felt to be true; the living preacher was followed, the dry doctrinalist deserted. But what is the living preacher to do with those who follow him? They are to form the true Church. But how is it to be ascertained that they do form it? We must see that they really feel what they profess, that they experience this justification, and do not merely use the name. Well then, there must be another set of tests introduced, and another set of books written to ascertain which of these tests are sound and which fallacious.
And now comes another reaction. What! it is said, and do you call this Lutheranism? Feelings, experiences—Luther abhorred the words. All Romanist imposture lurks in them. Luther set up his doctrine of justification as a witness against them. This proclamation also goes forth. It is seen to be true; men hearken to it; the preachers of feeling and experiences are pronounced unsound. Then what can we do but return to the good old way. The confessions regain their esteem. Believing these confessions must mean believing justification; there is no help for it; we cannot come at any other rule. The records of this series of reactions form the longest and most important chapter in the history of Lutheranism.
But there is also another chapter.
The ideas of Imputation, Satisfaction, Representation, were, I said, expressed to Luther in living acts of faith and devotion—in the Psalms, in the Creed and Sacraments. Apart from these, he did not wish to contemplate them, though he might be compelled to do so by the necessities of controversy. But it was the business of his disciples to exhibit all these ideas—being inseparably connected with justification—in very precise and accurate expressions. The nature and mode of imputation must be described in propositions; it must be made clearly and definitely intelligible to everyone how the divine Justice was satisfied; it must be shewn what is the amount and measure of sacrifice which was necessary for the deliverance of man from the penalty of sin.
If these statements had taken the purely scholastic form which was given to theological propositions before the Reformation, it would have been seen that they were not, at all events, sufficient for men’s wants; that there must be something else, since the Gospel was meant for the poor. But the Reformation had, as we have seen, a peculiarly popular character. Protestantism addressed itself to common men. Even the books that were written for the preachers must have something of this character, as they were to deliver to the people the dogmas which they learnt. Hence these definitions and propositions became strangely mingled with popular illustrations. The language of the schools and of the world was blended into a most bewildering mosaic. Precedents and customs from the law courts, maxims of trade, the vulgarest proverbs of worldly men, were all pressed into the service of the sanctuary, and used to explain and defend the acts of Him to whose righteous judgment all these customs, and maxims, and proverbs must at last be brought. And because in the dealings of men, what are really deep and true principles, sometimes, through misunderstanding or misapplication to purposes for which they were not intended, come to have the effect of fictions, and to be so regarded, and as fictions are praised and accounted clever by men who know not that any utility they may possess is derived from the original truth that is in them; these theologians of the semi-scholastic, semi-popular class introduced this habit of thinking into their own study, and taught their disciples to believe it nothing horrible that fictions should be attributed to the God of Truth.
I do not say that the temper I have described was more characteristic of the Lutheran or Evangelical Church, than of the other Protestants; but it particularly affected the class of doctrines which that Church especially undertook to defend, and the opposition to it was perhaps more marked in that than elsewhere. This opposition arose from the feeling that these dogmatic teachings had nothing to do with practical morality, nay affected it injuriously. The Reformers had withstood the Popish notion that family duties, national duties, the transactions of common life, were less holy than the services of the cloister; they had openly or implicitly discouraged the opinion that men who will renounce the ordinary routine of social life may hope to attain a peculiar saintship. Now their language was turned against the doctrines which they had bequeathed. Christianity, it was said, must have for its main object the inculcation of a pure, simple, and practical scheme of Ethics; it could not be intended to introduce a theory more difficult or embarrassing than that of any heathen philosopher who had not professed to provide a gospel for the poor and ignorant; least of all could it be made to contain notions respecting the ways, designs, and character of God which actually contradicted all the notions of justice and benevolence which we recognise in ordinary life. As this tone of thinking diffused itself more and more widely, a set of maxims, partly appertaining to outward conduct, partly to the discipline of the temper, affections, dispositions, gradually shaped themselves out and were received as the essential part of Christianity. These became the main topics in the discourse of the preacher; it was the business of the schoolman to show how the Bible might be interpreted, not to mean more, or much more (doctrines being freely interpreted) than these maxims. Some could satisfy themselves more easily than others that they had succeeded in this task. Those who were critically honest felt that there were great difficulties; that much of the Bible must be given up in order that the notions of their opponents might not derive a support from it. The precedent had been given by Luther himself; it was possible to believe that the carrying out of that precedent was the carrying out of the principle of the Reformation. Hence, the commencement of that form of Rationalism which characterised the last age.
It was a simple, practical, intelligible system, which the wayfarer who ran might read, that was demanded by these modern Protestants. But it was found by experiment that the wayfarer who ran did not read the scheme of Christianity which was thus presented to him. The poor men said that it had nothing whatever to do with them. This was a startling practical difficulty which led to results affecting Protestantism in all directions, and not merely the Lutheran form of it. But what I wish the reader to observe here, is, how little the body which took justification by faith for its motto and principle, has been able, in any stage of its history, to assert that doctrine; how constantly the system, whether interpreted by earnest believers or stiff dogmatists, by orthodox doctors or mere moralists, has been labouring to strangle the principle to which it owes its existence.
I cannot touch at present upon the later history of Lutheranism. It belongs to the records of a great struggle of which our time has witnessed the commencement and may witness the completion, whether the doctrines which the Reformers proclaimed are to be overcome by Romanism, to be merged in Pantheism, or to find for themselves some surer basis than either.
II. Some of my remarks upon Luther must of course apply to the Calvinistic bodies; still they have features of their own, which are well deserving of a separate consideration. We have seen that the idea of an Absolute Will, choosing individual men out of a fallen world, is not merely recognised by these bodies; that it is actually the ground of their existence. What strength there is in that belief, what deep irresistible truth there is in it, has been demonstrated in all ages of the world, and certainly not least in the history of Calvinism. The same divine might—I dare not call it by any other name—which was permitted to go forth with the Islamite armies, when, in the sight of Christians who had lost the faith that they were God’s chosen and appointed servants, and had sunk into a low slavish unbelief of a spiritual Presence and a spiritual Kingdom, they proclaimed that God’s will was still the supreme law, still the actuating spring of all human energy—that same might was given, as I believe, not seldom, to the Covenanters of Scotland and the Puritans of England, when they dared to put their trust in a spiritual arm, and to mock at all human and material weapons which set themselves in opposition to it. God forbid that we should lose the lesson, which the records of their victories contain, or that we should deny that they were victories given to faith with whatever inconsistencies that faith may have been mingled.
But there did lie in the heart of the Mahometan conquerors—mingled with the very truth which gave them all their power, and to their understandings inseparable from it—a dark and desperate fatalism, which was to prove how unlike it was to this truth, by the difference of its effects; which was to prove that the system of Mahomet—the system which owed its life to this principle—was a lie, and was charged with a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The history of the Calvinistic bodies ought to shew whether any similar fatalism be hid in their creed, and whether they owe it rather to the sound portions of that creed, or to the influence of a surrounding atmosphere which they did not create and would have been glad to exhaust, that they have escaped from the same gloom and helplessness which has succeeded to that early vigour in the soldiers of the Crescent.
1. The Calvinists on the Continent, since their first establishment, have exhibited little of the energy which I have attributed to their principle. A Dutchman or a Genevese might ask me with a sad smile, to what period in the history of the Reformed Church I could point as affording the least illustration of it. But the conflicts of the Synod of Dort soon brought to light the denying side of the doctrine, and gave it the most evident predominance. The Arminian doctors set up, or seemed to set up, the belief of a will in man against the idea of Election. The Calvinists began to set up the idea of the Absoluteness of the Divine Will against the idea of a will in man. Dogmas and determinations came forth—perfectly adequate for the purpose of contradiction, utterly inadequate for the purpose of assertion. In the next age the Calvinist found that he had got the notion strongly grafted into his creed and rooted in his mind, that he had not a free will; all that he had lost was the clear conviction that there was a Divine will, and that he had any connexion with it.
Then began some of the same reactions as in the Lutheran body; men feeling that they wanted more than logical formulas about Election; declaring that the sense and experience of a Divine election was the condition of it; this declaration leading to tests for ascertaining who possessed that condition; such tests again denounced as setting aside the very idea of absolute and unconditional sovereignty.
A combination of the spiritual and dogmatic elements is found in the able Dutch and German Commentators, who arose in the early part of the last century; but they resorted to that same method of illustrating the scheme of God by human precedents, which I have already noticed. The clear acute reasoning temper, which Calvinism especially fosters, detected the inconsistencies of it: the disciples of the Genevan Reformer said that they were meant to be witnesses for simplicity; and that simplicity in forms ought to be sustained by simplicity of doctrine: the Ethical system became universal, and Voltaire wrote to tell D’Alembert that there were few preachers in Geneva who believed a word of the doctrine which Calvin spent his life in propagating.
2. I have expressed, in as strong language as it is possible to use, my belief that there was a vital and powerful element in the Scotch Kirk and in English Puritanism, which came out in the formation of the one, and in the conflicts of the other with our Royalty and Episcopacy. I am not anxious to qualify the assertion by dwelling on all the cruelties and meannesses, the alternate cringing to the State and insolent domination over it, which marked the history of Scotch Presbyterianism in the sixteenth century, or the intolerance and persecution which characterised the English assertors of religious freedom in the seventeenth. These indications may be attributed to the temper of the age, and to the evil lessons which the Calvinistical bodies learnt from our Church. It is more important to observe, how these bodies testified for the principle which called them into existence after the motives to violence had disappeared. The difference in their position makes the experiment a fair one. The Scotch Presbyterian body after the Revolution was raised to the dignity of an establishment; the English sects acquired a recognised position in the country, but, as they boast, were not hampered by any state alliance. Moreover the English Calvinistical sects were several distinct experiments, as to the mode of expressing the principle which was common to them all. To the Presbyterians it seemed that there was one general scheme or platform of polity laid down in Scripture for all the faithful; the Independent asserted the right of each distinct congregation to be its own lawgiver; the Anabaptist maintained that each individual ought to be conscious of his own adoption into God’s covenant, before he received the sign of it. In the doctrine of this last named sect, we clearly discern the idea which all were labouring to embody. Each of the others confessed that it was not a Church, but the shell of a Church, and the effort to become one; the Anabaptists believed that if they had not actually solved the problem how to make the professing body identical with the elect body, they had at least made the nearest possible approximation to a solution of it.
In the period which followed the Revolution we have the most numerous testimonies from their own authorities, that a gradual decay of faith and doctrine took place both in England and Scotland. In the latter country it was ascribed by all the older Covenanters to the convention with the government; the English dissenters can only account for it by the general temper of the times. What renovating principle there was in either, to overcome the effects of state influence, or of the world’s infidelity, does not appear; they both alike attribute the restoration of their old doctrine, and of something like their former zeal, to an action from without, to an action proceeding from a corrupt body, against which they were each protesting. The preaching of Whitfield in Scotland, of Wesley and Whitfield in England, we are told by Presbyterians and dissenters, awakened a spirit which had been long dormant among them. But only one of these Oxford divines was a Calvinist, and his preaching was not at all of the kind which was likely to recreate a Calvinistical system. The quickening influence, however, being once imparted, these bodies began to require a doctrine. Just at that time an American divine appeared, who united remarkable strength of thought to an earnest spirit, and to what he believed was a profound veneration for the name and creed of Calvin. The Edwards version of that creed, or some modification of it, became from this time forth the recognised system amongst English and Scotch Calvinists. Now this system, just so far as it received its complexion from the piety of its author, is unquestionably an assertion of a Divine Will. The strength of Edwards’ mind seems to have been derived from his acknowledgment of a distinct Being, dwelling in his own Absoluteness and Awfulness. But that which gives his system the logical consistency which its disciples so much admire, is his manner of dispensing with a Human Will. Man is a piece of mere mechanism, acted upon by a certain set of motives; he is not a stone, for he has certain affections and sympathies, which are susceptible of outward influences; but the notion that he is capable of being determined from within is utterly repudiated; the very object of the scheme is to set it aside. But any one who looks at the nature of that power, which the earlier Calvinists put forth in action, or who even attends steadily to their deeper utterances, must perceive, not merely that they did recognise these inward determinations, but that the belief in them was the life-giving principle of their minds. Whether they could explain the connexion philosophically or not, the idea of the Divine Will was inseparably involved with the energy and activity of their own human will; they realise the one in the other. This logical development of the Calvinistical idea has therefore the strange peculiarity, that it stands in the most direct practical contradiction to that idea as it existed in the mind of Calvin himself, and of all who sympathised with him. I say practical, for this is no difference about words. In Scotland especially, the working of the new system has been very remarkable. Find any man who has drunk deeply into the spirit of Knox and the old Covenanters, and ask him what manner of doctrine he hears from the Scotch preachers generally (I do not mean of the Robertson school, but of that which is most opposed to it); whether it be essentially the same with that which he supposes was delivered two centuries ago? In one form of language or another he will give you to understand that he is sensible of the most violent contrast; that the modern Calvinism is a compound, to which if John Knox has contributed one part, Thomas Hobbes has contributed three. The consequence is, that a young man going from the house of his fathers to a Scotch university, passes by the most natural steps possible into the philosophical system with which the religious one has been leavened;3 he adopts it as the most consistent interpretation of the phenomena of the world; the idea of anything spiritual becomes lost in his mind. Afterwards, perhaps, he may take up some one of those philosophical theories by which his countrymen have endeavoured to modify or subvert pure Materialism and Utilitarianism. But he takes it up as a theory merely; it has nothing to do with his life; the maxim of the other system reigns there, only the more undisturbed because it presents itself less formally and obtrusively. Then if he have a good hardy Scotch understanding, which, though it may dally with abstractions, has great sympathy with the palpable and the actual, he soon becomes weary of this child’s play, and goes forth into the world, to show, by his successful management, that he has not lost that sense of an individual importance and position which characterised his forefathers, though he may turn it to a different, and what he considers a much more profitable, account. I know well what noble minds there are in Scotland, in whom another influence from that which I have described is at work, and who think, with bitter pain, of the materialism which has crept over their land. But these have no dreams that the old faith can be restored. They speak with great reverence of the first age of their Kirk; they denounce Prelacy and the English Church with vehemence; they dwell with affectionate tenderness upon the patriarchal life and discipline, which existed in the rural districts of Scotland (among the middle classes), but a short time ago, and which was at all events connected with Presbyterianism; but they acknowledge that the system is worn out, that it has no longer power to produce energetic action, deep thought, or a simple form of society; that it flourishes only while it has something to fight with; that the symptoms which it exhibits in its decrepitude are the consequences of evils and weaknesses which were concealed in it when it was in its best estate; that in that best estate it could not satisfy the wants of which they are conscious. What these wants are, and in what forms they have expressed themselves, are questions belonging to a larger subject, upon which we must presently enter.
The present political crisis in the Kirk will be more properly spoken of when we touch upon its connexion with England. The circumstances of the Nonconformists here are still more involved with the circumstances of our own Church; still, it is almost impossible to notice them as illustrations of the history of Calvinism, without looking at them on their political side. As theologians they have struck out no path for themselves; what philosophy they have is derived from Scotland or America. It is therefore precisely as bodies possessing a certain outward organisation, that they suggest any important topic for reflection. Of this fact, they are themselves apparently sensible; they feel more and more that they exist to oppose and destroy certain institutions, which they find established about them. If we look at the sects separately, we find that they are confessedly not spiritual bodies; only bodies professing to include within them a certain number of spiritual individuals. We find new congregations arising out of the old, protesting that these have become earthly and corrupt; that the only hope of a pure Church is in fresh division and secession. We find the members of the old societies denouncing these endeavours after an ideal perfection, and maintaining that experience has always confuted them. We find accounts given by their own members of proceedings resorted to in the election and deposition of ministers and the formation of congregations, which are, to say the least, what men commonly call secular. We find these sects engaged in angry controversies with each other; the Pedobaptists for instance vehemently denouncing the Anabaptists, because they maintain the fearful heresy that immersion was the earliest mode of initiation into the Christian Church. We find the leaders of these bodies complaining of the great deadness of their congregations, and endeavouring to produce revivals in them, by methods which seem to us of the most mechanical and material character. These are the indications which the different dissenting bodies present, when looked at separately or in their relations to each other. Is it wonderful that they should wish rather to fix our attention on the great united force which they are able to bring into play at public meetings, in vestry rooms, and in newspapers, against that which they name the secular anti-spiritual Church of England? Unquestionably, if she be secular, or just so far as she is secular, these weapons may prevail against her, for that which is secular may be destroyed by that which is secular: if she be spiritual, they will be as powerless against her, as secular armour has always proved against a spiritual principle, whether it has come forth in Puritanism, or in any other shape. But this is not the question now before us. It is, whether the evidence furnished by the Reformed Church on the Continent, the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland, and the English Nonconformist sects, tends to confirm or refute the notion that the Calvinistical principle is a sufficient foundation for a universal Church, and the notion that that principle can be safely preserved in a Calvinistic system?
III. As the Zwinglian doctrine was not able to work out a system or church for itself, and as I have already noticed, while speaking of the Lutherans and Calvinists on the Continent, how faith in the Bible, which was the strongest element in that doctrine, fared under the protection of those who put it forward as their exclusive profession, I may here close my remarks upon pure Protestantism. Our next duty is to trace the characteristics of that system, of which Zwinglism has often been called the parent, and in which, as we have already seen, all the Protestant systems in the last century showed a tendency to merge.
Notes
De Servo Arbitrio.↩︎
Such as “forensic.”↩︎
I may probably be encountered by the observation, that Hobbes is, of all authors, the least likely to find favour with a young Scotchman; for that he was a Dogmatist, whereas Hume the proper idol of Scotland was a Sceptic. The criticism I believe is of no great value. No young men are Sceptics in the sense in which Hume was a Sceptic. Their infidelity, as much as their faith, is dogmatic. If they worship Hume, they worship him, because they imagine, however falsely, that he arrived at certain conclusions. They suppose him to have believed and proved that the world is under the dominion of Necessity, not of God—the very principle of Hobbes. It is the point wherein these writers are identical, not that wherein they disagree, which the youthful philosopher, escaping from a Calvinistical school, takes notice of.↩︎