Section I. Religious Movements
Methodism—Religious Societies—Search for a Theology.
The History of Methodism, in one of its aspects, belongs to the history of the English Church, and does not therefore form a part of the subject I am now considering. But any considerate reader will admit, that as France has been the centre of the political, and Germany of the philosophical movements of the last hundred years, so England has been the centre of all religious movements which have occurred within the same period. It is not necessary to maintain that the first impulse to them was given in England; Wesley may have derived much of his teaching from Zinzendorf, and the different efforts made by him and others to awaken a more earnest religious feeling, may take chronological precedence of those which our countrymen witnessed: still the form which they assumed here was so much more determinate, their influence so much more extensive, that if we wish to investigate their character generally, we shall find that our own soil is the proper place for the experiment.
It is often said, that the Methodist movement had for its object and its effect the revival of the great principles of the Reformation. There is a sense in which this remark is unquestionably true; but if that sense be not carefully noticed and defined, we may, I think, fall into great mistakes. The Unitarianism which formed so large an element in the religious sentiments of the eighteenth century was, as we have seen, essentially impersonal. It was so, even in its best form; for those who felt most deeply and earnestly the necessity that great and wide principles should be asserted respecting the unity and character of God, found no way of connecting these principles with the individual conscience. It came out in direct opposition to Calvinism—as an escape from it, and yet as what seemed a consistent deduction from some of its maxims; and the more it advanced towards a mere system of denials, the more it was proclaimed as a deliverance from the narrowness of this theology. Above all, Calvinism had maintained, that a set of individual believers constituted the Church, and were to bear witness against the world; the Unitarians affirmed that no warrant existed for any such protest; that an enlightened age or world was far in advance of those who pretended to be in separation from it; that the great object which such an enlightened world should propose to itself, was the extinction of the idea of an Ecclesia, in whatever shape that idea might present itself.
It was inevitable that, in any strong revival of religious feeling, these notions should be first attacked; in other words that the personal interest of men in religion, and the distinction of those who felt and acknowledged that interest from those who were indifferent to it, should be asserted. Such convictions are characteristic of any strong awakening in men’s consciences; they may be said to be the awakening. But then the vague phrase—personal interest in religion—cannot long be adequate to describe the feelings of men who have begun to use it in a real sense. One who knows that he is a person requires a personal object—an abstraction cannot satisfy him. The doctrine therefore that a man is justified by faith, and lives by faith in Christ, became a principal element in the Methodist, as it had been in the early Lutheran teaching; the doctrine that individual believers constitute a peculiar Ecclesia grew out of that; and the Bible began again to be put forth as the poor man’s book, which he could receive in its simplicity, though the learned sought to explain it away.
But it is remarkable that the most decided proclamation of these Protestant dogmas grew not out of Methodism itself, but out of a reaction in the minds of those who had been brought, more or less directly, under its influence. The history of the very violent conflicts of the Calvinists, under Toplady and Sir Richard Hill, against Wesley and Fletcher, is abundant evidence of this fact. It is true that the most powerful of the Methodist preachers, Whitfield, joined the opponents of his master and early coadjutor; but it is highly probable that he was led to this step by observing how much his own preaching had tended to stir up affections and feelings in men’s minds rather than to give them a firm resting-place, and that he sought in the Calvinistical doctrines for a balance and counteraction to this danger: at all events it is quite certain that though a far greater influence was attributed to him in his lifetime than to Wesley, he left a comparatively insignificant body of disciples. It must then, I conceive, be admitted, that the revival of these Protestant doctrines, though it might be an inseparable accident, was not the essential distinction of Methodism. There was something in it different from the feelings which worked in the minds of the Reformers—nay opposite to them, though not therefore incompatible with them.
I think everyone must admit that Luther and Calvin directed men very much more to the invisible object which men are to contemplate, or to the original source of their faith in the Will of God; and the Methodists very much more to the operations of the Divine Spirit upon their own minds. This distinction is so obvious, and was so clearly brought out in the controversies to which I have alluded, by persons who acknowledged that they had once adopted the Methodist peculiarity themselves, and who shewed clearly that they could not divest themselves of it even while they laboured diligently to speak another language, that it needs not to be established by proofs, though it ought to be very carefully noticed. The denial that it was possible for men to be the subjects of a spiritual influence, was the great characteristic of Unitarianism, and of the age which was imbued with it; the assertion of the reality of such an influence, and of its continual manifestation, was the distinguishing property of the teaching which disturbed and partially subverted the liberal system.
But there were other peculiarities connected with this. Methodism was not, like Quakerism, the proclamation of a law in each man’s own mind, or of a power working there. It was expressly addressed to large masses of men; the power was believed to descend upon them, especially when they were met together; and though every individual was, in an important sense, said to be taken apart and brought into debate with his own conscience, it was not denied that the feeling of a united influence had a great tendency to increase the consciousness of it in each one. All that was most fanatical in the Methodists was undoubtedly connected with this belief, and it gave the most plausible, often the most just ground, for the assertion, that the effects said to be produced by their preaching might be traced wholly to contagion and sympathy, and would disappear when the moving cause had ceased. Still we do not get to the meaning of a fact, merely by using the words “contagion and sympathy” to describe it; fanaticism and even consciously dishonest quackery cannot produce any results unless they have some true principle to work with, and it seems as if the principle involved in Methodism might be one which has often been dawning upon us in our previous inquiries, though we have never yet found any satisfactory development of it. We have often been obliged to ask ourselves, whether these distinct individual acts, on which Protestantism dwells so exclusively, may not, must not, depend at last upon some relation in which men stand to their fellows; whether we can take our start from individuals, and form a society out of them; whether the existence of society be not implied in their existence; and whether, consequently, if each man have a spiritual existence, and be subjected to a spiritual government, there must not be somewhere a spiritual body, of which he should account himself a member? The facts of Methodism may offer but few helps for solving this problem, but assuredly they force it upon our attention, and make it more abundantly necessary that we should seek the solution of it somewhere.
There are other points of great importance and interest closely connected with the two to which I have adverted. This proclamation of a spiritual power went forth from men who had been brought up in a university which had the reputation of preserving more of the old Catholic temper than could be found elsewhere, and whose very nickname indicated that they had been more scrupulous and regular than the majority in their devotion to forms and ordinances. Those who are acquainted only with the practices which the Wesleys afterwards tolerated, and which their followers regard as characteristic of their system, would not easily believe how much importance they attached in the outset of their career to the episcopal ordination of ministers. Nevertheless a certain impatience of order—nay, a conviction that it ought to be broken through—might be discovered in them from the first. It seemed to them that there was an immense body of human souls, which had no national position, and of which the nation took no account. The upper classes in England cared not much for religious ministrations, but they might have them if they would; the middle class, if they were not particularly well affected to the National Church, had provided for themselves in different organised and tolerated sects; but the class below these, the mob, the canaille, as they were then named by their despisers, the masses, as they are now called by their flatterers, were as little regarded by the churchman who inherited the family living, as by the dissenting minister who received his appointment from the tradesmen of the market town. To these, therefore, the Methodists, like the friars of old, addressed themselves; in them they, like those friars, awakened thoughts and hopes to which their educated countrymen had appeared for a long time to be strangers; in providing for their wants, like the friars, they invaded the privileges of the parochial (both alike would have called them the secular) clergy. I know not in what way Bishop Lavington maintained the position that the enthusiasm of the Methodists and of the Papists had many points in common; but no one who considers these facts, or a hundred others connected with the peculiar superstitions to which they respectively gave currency, will doubt that he may have found very plausible arguments in favour of his opinion. At all events, it must, I think, be admitted, that Methodism had some important peculiarities which it did not derive from Protestantism, and with which a pure exclusive Protestantism can scarcely co-exist.
2. The practical belief of a spiritual operation upon the minds and the hearts of men, may be said to constitute Methodism so far as it is a creed. But as soon as the creed had obtained prevalency, a system developed itself, which, as Mr. Southey has remarked, is a more complete specimen of organisation than any which has been produced in Europe since the days of Loyola. The more this organisation is examined, the less it seems to have to do with any spiritual principle; the more evidently it proves itself to be an invention of human policy. This assertion will scarcely be denied by the Wesleyans themselves; though they are stronger than most in asserting the principle of divine inspiration in individuals, they have pretended less than almost any that their scheme had a divine origin; they attribute it with scarcely any hesitation to the wisdom and sagacity of their founder and of his successors. In one respect only is there a resemblance between the system and that which called it into existence: the spiritual feelings of the Wesleyans led them to overlook national distinctions; the system of the Methodists is essentially extra-national. It is the effort to establish a powerful government in the heart of a nation, which at no point shall impinge upon, or come into contact with, the government of the nation. It differs from the systems of the old dissenting sects in this important point; the limits of each of them are defined by the profession of some peculiar tenet in which they differ from the others, and from the rest of Christendom; that of the Wesleyans, professing no tenet which is not recognised or tolerated by the National Church, simply exists to assert their own independence of it, and the importance of such an organisation as theirs for the conversion of mankind.
In this respect Wesleyanism is an indication and specimen of the religious tendencies which prevail in this age very far beyond the immediate circle of its influence. The religious feeling of the last century has given birth to religious societies, between which and their parent one finds it difficult, for some time, to discover a feature of resemblance. The first tended to draw men into themselves; the last throw them altogether out of themselves. The first was grounded upon the acknowledgment of a directly spiritual influence, as the only source of any moral change in the condition of individuals or of the world; the latter are constructed upon the most earthly principles, and seem to attribute all power to them. Accordingly the contrast has been felt, as well by the good men who took part in the movements of the last age and have survived them, as by the younger men who have grown up under their teaching. The first confess, with something of timidity, as if they were afraid of appearing to disparage the fruits of a tree which they believe to have been planted by a divine hand, that the restless turmoil and bustle of a modern religious life is not what they or their fellow-labourers would have wished to produce; the latter in more open, sometimes in more angry language, complain, that under spiritual words and pretexts there has grown up amongst us a great machinery—complicated, noisy, but inefficient to produce any great results; acknowledging no law in its workings, save certain vulgar maxims, which are applicable only to trade, if even trade itself do not demand principles of a simpler and nobler kind. Nevertheless we find the very persons who make these complaints confessing that they know not how to dispense with this machinery, for that there must be some method of combined voluntary action, grounded not upon our relations to each other as members of a state, but upon some higher and more universal relation. Here again then we are struck with indications of a Catholic feeling arising out of the very heart of Protestantism.
3. The religious feelings of our age, in both the forms which they have taken, seem almost incompatible with the existence of a positive theology. Men studied the movements and operations of their own minds till these and their endless vicissitudes acquired such an absorbing interest, that the idea of the absolute and the permanent was almost lost. They fled from these inward contemplations to occupy themselves with an external mechanism, which they believed was meant to promote the glory of God; how difficult not to believe that any meditation upon His being and nature was an idle occupation for schoolmen! how difficult not to feel an entire alienation of mind from such studies! Therefore it has come to pass that the main part of what is called theology in Great Britain of late years has been an attempt to systematise individual experiences, or else to discover some general theory about the condition and prospects of the world at large. Still the craving in men’s hearts after something deeper and larger than this can never be extinct; the literature of past times, which bears witness that men have ventured into a more awful sanctuary, was not wholly closed; and by degrees, either weariness of merely experimental divinity and mere views about the world, or a conviction that they cannot subsist alone, has led to the inquiry, whether that which was once called Theology be a reality or only a dream?
In Germany, where outward religious excitements are so few, where students are students in the strictest sense, and where habits of meditation are assiduously cultivated, those who had felt the evangelical influence, and had been delivered by it from the materialism of the last age, soon perceived that, unless this influence led to a search for theological principles, it would melt away, or only produce a succession of fever paroxysms. They therefore applied themselves earnestly to consider how the religious feelings, without being lost or weakened, could be turned in this direction. They had seen the mischiefs which the dry dogmatism of the Lutheran and Calvinistical bodies had produced; they had seen that the spirit of man, whenever it was strongly stirred, became impatient of this dogmatism, and sought to escape from it by making spiritual motives and consciousnesses all in all. Did not these observations prove that the affections—the seat of these consciousnesses—are the proper and appointed organs of religious belief? And may it not be, that all religion—so far as it acts from without—is simply an orderly cultivation of these affections; educing them, and enabling them to perceive those objects and that character which must correspond to their wants, and which are fitted to give them a living and permanent form? Every one must perceive how much there was in the circumstances of the age to suggest the thought, that this is the all-comprehending, all-satisfying idea of Christianity. It was in fact the scientific methodism of the Evangelical feelings and tendencies, which at once vindicated them from the charge of being incoherent and fanatical, and promised them an escape from the peril of becoming so. It seemed to justify much in the Scriptures which philosophical men in the last age had given up as untenable, and at the same time to make the abandonment of much which religious men had thought indispensable, no longer unsafe. It was a strange contradiction upon this hypothesis to believe, that the all-perfect Being should manifest himself to men in one of their own nature; that was evidently the form in which alone he could present himself as an object to their affections, and in which the affections witnessed that they needed he should present himself. Symbols which brought this image more near to men’s hearts and sympathies, carried in them an evidence of their truth which no abuse of them could set aside, and they preserve us from the tendency of mere intellectual dogmatism. On the other hand, the history of the way in which the divine manifestation took place might, perhaps, be open to criticism. Criticism could do no harm by dealing severely with the shell of it; for the kernel within was something which the affections could not afford to part with, and would defend, in defiance of all efforts to rob them of it. The criticism of the last age, because this principle was not admitted, was generally false. Much had been thrown away as superfluous which the affections felt to be necessary: many things perhaps suffered to remain against which they protested. For it will be found, say these teachers, that they reject as incongruous with themselves whatever the understanding on other grounds insists should be thrown aside. “Upon this principle we are to deal with the Jewish records; they explain how the religious feelings of a certain nation were awakened; but we must not invest them with an exclusive dignity; we must not make Christianity dependent upon them. The affections being in all men, every history and every theology will contain hints of the efforts which men have made to discover what they needed for this portion of their being; every scheme of philosophy (though philosophy has a distinct province of its own), will have tried to methodise these hints. Christianity must be looked upon as the announcement to men of what they had been seeking after.”
Though some of these views may be very offensive to those who compose the evangelical school in this country, they certainly have been adopted by men of deep thought and learning, and as I believe of simple, earnest piety, in the most thoughtful country of Europe, as the only scheme of theology which a person starting from the evangelical premises, and admitting no others to be sound and true, can consistently acknowledge. And I do not believe that the history of the progress of this doctrine in the country which gave it birth, will prove that they were wrong. If indeed it be asked whether it has been found in practice, that those who embraced this scheme could abide in it, however elaborated and fenced it may have been by the art of a clear logical understanding, sustaining a devout and honest heart, I imagine the answer would be, No. Those who have taken up this theory have been compelled either to advance or to retreat. The principle of it is, that the manifestation of Christ is the one great fact in the Bible history, to which all others are subordinate, and which we may continue to recognise, even though we should be compelled to reject many of the records which have been supposed to foretell it, as well as some parts of the story which contains it. To this fact the believer in this system clings as the deliverance from large Pantheistic notions about the Godhead, and as the warrant and protection for that personal religion which he takes to be the especial characteristic of Protestantism. But in following out the plan of discriminating between that which men must receive as congenial to their inward feelings and wants, and that which belongs only to outward form and history, it has been found that the recognition of a personal object has evaporated altogether. Our Lord’s life does but embody certain great ideas and principles, which have been at work in men’s hearts at all times; which probably did exhibit themselves very remarkably in Him, and may have seemed to His affectionate, credulous, or interested disciples, to exhibit themselves in Him as they never did or could in any other; but which can be contemplated by us apart from the accidental form which they assumed in that or in any age, as principles appertaining to our general humanity. Such is one result of this method—a result, it will be seen, as directly in opposition as any that can well be conceived to the feelings and intentions of its originator, and which yet has seemed to be merely a natural deduction from it. On the other hand, many of those who would have been most inclined, by the habits of their minds and the mode of their initiation into Christianity, to adopt this form of theology, and who probably did adopt it, have been led more and more to feel that the doctrine of a personal manifestation of God cannot rest merely upon the individual experience or feeling of its necessity, however deeply they acknowledge that experience in themselves and would wish to produce it in others; that it must be sustained by a still more awful truth, and that that truth must in some sense have been given to men in order that they might enter into it. This, I apprehend, is a faith which is every day growing to greater strength in many serious German minds, and which must in due time bear important fruits. What these fruits may be, I shall not here inquire. This fact I conceive is at all events established, that as there is a Catholic tendency even in those views concerning spiritual influence, and in those concerning outward organisation, which seem at first sight to be of the most exclusively Protestant character, so likewise there is a Catholic tendency in that theology which can be traced most directly to a Protestant origin. Even that system which builds theology upon something purely internal, yet makes the idea of a divine manifestation or incarnation its central idea, and connects with this the use of outward symbols, and two opposite schemes which have grown up by the side of it and seem to have developed themselves out of it, bear unequivocal witness that Protestant Germany cannot be content with a purely Protestant system. Catholicism it must have either in the form of Pantheism, or of definite Christianity.
I said that Unitarianism in the form which it took in the last century was crushed, and only not extinguished, by the Evangelical movement. But it was susceptible of another form, which it has assumed among the descendants of the English Puritan colonists of North America. The coating of dry materialism with which it was associated, and from which it appeared to be inseparable, has been cast away; the orthodox systems are charged by the modern Unitarians with disregard of man’s spiritual nature and his spiritual powers; the idea of a divine humanity in one person is only rejected because it interferes with the acknowledgment of it in every one. It is not pretended by these teachers that the idea of the Divine Being can be otherwise than a mysterious idea; no attempt is made to refute the old doctrine of Christendom by exhibiting its absurd inconsistency with notions which are applicable to sensible things; it is rather accused of being formal and systematic, of making accurate distinctions when all ought to be left vague and indeterminate. Sabellianism has in fact superseded Socinianism.
The views of the modern school respecting the world or the age, are also different from those of their predecessors. Everything is growing and progressive; the existing age sees further than its predecessors, and can afford to reject much which they believed. But the age is only to be contemplated in a few illuminated persons who are setting themselves in opposition to the ordinary feelings and habits of their contemporaries. The idea of an Ecclesia has thus come to light in another form, and in a very remarkable form, for it is assumed that the Ecclesia (a very narrow and exclusive one, consisting of men of genius and intellect,) is the proper world of which what is called the world is only the counterfeit. Such is modern Unitarianism, against which the different sects in America feel that they have need to strive with great earnestness, and of which they say, I believe most truly, that it makes quite as little appeal to the conscience, has as little to do with the life and heart of men, as that which it has succeeded. The wise members of these sects affirm (experience will soon show whether they are mistaken) that between this Unitarianism and Pantheism there is only an imaginary boundary, which must soon be transgressed. But neither of their assertions acts with any great power as a check upon the progress of the system. The Americans are craving for something which is Catholic, and not sectarian. This system appears to have that merit, and it is a common opinion that either Unitarianism or Romanism will overspread America, or that the two will divide it between them. If there be no Catholicism which is not identical with one of these schemes, I cannot doubt that they are right.
Some allusion has been made to a feeling of discontent in the minds of earnest and pious Scotchmen with the Necessitarian system, which has assumed in that country the name and reputation of the old Calvinism. There, as in Germany, though for somewhat different reasons, men cannot be content with mere individual feelings or mere schemes of action; they require a theology. Now the great solitary principle of Scotch theology, that the Will of God is the original to which everything that is real in the universe or in man must be referred, may, as we have seen, take two entirely opposite forms. It may be an assertion, that there is a sovereign over the world who disposes of all things and persons according to his pleasure; it may be an assertion that there is one from whom all good is derived, all evil being the contrary of his nature and the resistance to his purpose. As the former of these views became more and more characteristic of the new Calvinism, the latter began to be proclaimed as the only principle which is consistent with Scripture by a small minority of Scotch divines, whose zeal, love, and in many cases knowledge also, compensated for their numerical weakness. After a short but violent struggle, they were excluded from the Kirk; the doctrine of the Universal Love of God being declared to be incompatible with its formularies and its existence. But the fact that such a principle once proclaimed can never be suppressed by any efforts of any body of men, is not the only one which makes this apparently insignificant demonstration of great importance to those who are taking account of the religious tendencies of this age. We have seen how the idea of the incarnation or manifestation of God in the person of man has presented itself to the Evangelical Germans as that which must be the groundwork of religion, if there be a religion, and how remarkably this question, whether the incarnation be a fact or only a dream, has become the turning point of all theological controversies there. Thus that Church body which was created to witness of justification by faith, has found that it must have a deeper ground than this to rest upon, if it rest at all. Again we have seen how among the Unitarians in America—the body which imagined that it existed to protest against the possibility of God taking the nature of man—language has become prevalent and popular which, however vague and however unlike the doctrine of a divine humiliation, yet involves all the difficulty and mystery belonging to that doctrine. Yet neither of these changes seem to me so remarkable as the fact, that Scotchmen, trained from their infancy to look upon the fall of man as the only foundation of divinity, and upon the incarnation as only intelligible when regarded as a means of deliverance from the effects of it, should have been led to acknowledge this as the central truth, and to exhibit all other truths in the light of it. Now this is the case with those I have spoken of as protesting against the Calvinism of modern Scotland; all without exception have spoken of the divine manifestation in Christ as that which constitutes Christianity. But it was remarkably the case with the Scotch divine, whose name, for good and for evil, is best known in this country, and whose thoughts have left upon many minds traces which will remain long after the body which bears his name shall have been forgotten. The late Mr. Irving, bred in the straitest school of Presbyterianism, and retaining, I believe to the last, a vehement admiration for Knox and his principles, was yet led to adopt the conviction, that the doctrine of the Incarnation had been strangely kept out of sight in all Protestant systems; that it is the centre of all divinity; the deeper mystery of the Trinity being at once the foundation upon which it rests, and the truth, to the full knowledge and fruition of which it is to lead us. In the attempt to reassert this doctrine, he was betrayed, it is well known, into the use of strange and perilous language, which was vehemently attacked and often greatly misrepresented—language which a man will, I believe, inevitably adopt who has not quite divested himself of the notion that the Fall is the law of the universe, and is trying to reconcile that Calvinistical theory with the Catholic faith. But Mr. Irving was not content with the bare proclamation of a principle. He felt that this principle must be the foundation of one Catholic Church; that if a Church existed, this must be the truth on which it rests; that if this be a truth, there must be a Church. No man had taken more pains to proclaim the coming of a future and perfect dispensation. But he found that the mere prospect of a Church did not satisfy the language of Scripture, nor the faith of one who had really believed in a divine humanity. The existence of such a divine humanity was not a prospect, but a reality; facts had attested it; the society which was built upon it must be a fact too. But such a Church, he contended, does not exist; it has been, but it has ceased, or is on the point of ceasing to be; it must then be restored; it can only be restored by a divine intervention. There must be a fact embodying the principle of a union of God with man which is the Church; this is the incarnation; there must be an organised body built upon that fact; there must be the manifestation of a spiritual power to attest its existence, and to enable its respective members to perform their functions. The religious public of England might safely indulge their humour, if these be ever safe occasions for jesting, with the evidence which the disciples of this system produced to show that they had been constituted the Church of God in the world. But I maintain that this public cannot set at naught the principles which led men to desire such evidence, and to accept almost anything as if it were the answer to their wishes. For whereas the three characteristics which we have noticed in our modern religious movements, the first, the recognition of a spiritual influence; the second, the demand for an outward organisation; the third, the craving for a positive theology, have been existing hitherto in the greatest contradiction to each other; each by turns putting itself forth as the great necessity; each by turns crushing and extinguishing the others; here was an attempt to combine them all, and to exhibit them in that relation which I think we all feel to be the right one. If then there be a falsehood in a conception which seems to unite so many elements, all indispensable, yet unsociable—and every fact in the history of Irvingism convinces me that there is a great and terrible falsehood—one would think it must be in the assumption, that there is not already a Catholic Church which is grounded upon a theological truth, possesses a divine organisation, and is endowed with the living Spirit; and that, therefore, it is to be founded in the nineteenth century,