In some recent English attacks upon the Fathers (I do not refer to that of Mr. Taylor, who has taken a somewhat different line) the charge of adopting the Quaker doctrine respecting the Logos, was put very prominently forward. But these writers did not know how strong their case was. They fancied that the Greek Fathers were merely advancing this notion as one among a great number of others. They should have said boldly, “This heresy is not one which these teachers took up accidentally; it is woven into the very tissue of their thoughts; their minds were infected by it to the very core. You might as easily take away the doctrine of Justification by Faith out of Luther, as this doctrine out of them.” Such language as this would have been perfectly true, and it would have brought matters much more directly to an issue. If, for instance, instead of giving a number of extracts, all certainly much to the point, but still leaving room for the hope that the general tone of thought in the first three centuries might be sound, they had given an analysis of the Pedagogus of Clemens, or indeed of any of his other writings, or had availed themselves of those which the present Bishop of Lincoln has introduced into his lectures, they would have left their readers without a doubt, that the acknowledgment of the Divine Word as the invisible teacher of man in all periods, was involved in the very conception of Christianity which belonged to these Fathers; that if this acknowledgment be heretical, Clemens, and the Church generally, which did not condemn him but sympathised with him and regarded him as one of its greatest lights, were habitually, wilfully, radically heretical. Let such an opinion be but stated in terms, together with the ordinary defence of it, that by this doctrine the authority and inspiration of the Scriptures are set at nought; and we, who believe this principle to be involved in every part of Scripture, who cannot see any grounds for its authority and inspiration when it is denied, who attribute much of the lifelessness of the Church in our day, much of the feebleness of our theology, much of our strife and division, to the habitual disregard of it, will be able frankly to state the grounds of our belief, and by God’s grace, to encounter any consequences which may follow from the profession of it.
In speaking of Philo, I have stated why I think one of these consequences is not the necessary adoption of all the different theories, respecting the interpretation of passages in Scripture and of symbols in nature, which have been promulgated by him, and by those who have acknowledged the presence of an invisible teacher. Of course, I cannot be so inconsistent as to deny the application of the same principle to the study of the Fathers. I have stated in another part of these volumes, why I suppose they, just as much as Philo, must have been without the means of entering into the practical life of the Hebrews. I do indeed discover in them a very different tone from that which I find in him; all that difference in tenderness, consciousness of evil, a readiness to acknowledge themselves in the character of sinners, rather than to claim that of saints, sympathy with men more than with philosophers, which we might expect from those who acknowledged a teacher who had taken human flesh, who, as Clemens expresses it, “assists us in all things, both as man and as God; putting away our sins as God; training us not to sin as man.” Above all, I can trace in them a sense of unity and fellowship, as members of one body, as inhabited by one Spirit, as worshipping the one Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which is a contrast rather than a resemblance to the isolated esoteric temper of the theosophist. But as to the outward relations of life and society, it seems as if their knowledge must have been very much on a level; and therefore one cannot be surprised to find the same habits of thought in one as in the other. The hypothesis which has been put forward in a late publication, that the cabalistic interpretations of Scripture by the early Fathers, may have been communicated by a special revelation, is surely one of the most gratuitous that was ever propounded by a theological writer. Its plausibility to students who have been used only to “modern Protestant divinity,” arises from the feeling, “this is so unlike anything which other persons say, that it must have been given directly by some Divine authority.” But when we turn to a sage of an earlier time, who to all appearance never received the Gospel at all, who at any rate has never been reckoned among the teachers of the Church, and find precisely the same tone of thought prevailing in him, nay, probably a number of the very thoughts themselves, which are supposed to have been specially imparted to the Christian sages, or to have been sacred traditions of our Lord’s own words; when we find again in the writings of those whom our patristic schools most despise—of Protestants and Quakers—a tendency of the same kind, nay, oftentimes most curious resemblances to the actual cabbala of the first ages, we may surely inquire whether such thoughts do not belong to human nature under certain circumstances and conditions of it, though they of course presume that nature not to be untaught from above.
The Fathers, I apprehend, would have disdained altogether the kind of honour which their admirers are seeking to put upon them. Believing their hearts and reasons to be under the teaching of the Divine Word, believing themselves to be created and constituted in him, they will have been much more disposed to regard their thoughts respecting nature and scripture as spiritual intuitions, than as authoritative traditions. That they may have been tempted to attach great sacredness to these intuitions, to speak of them as if they were certain, is very true. Everyone who has them feels them for the time to be certain; he cannot feel otherwise. And hence the value of that corrective which was supplied to this dangerous but inevitable conviction in the acknowledgment that those things only were stable and everlastingly true for man which belonged to the whole Church, not those which were the utterance of individual minds. These two principles, balanced and harmonized, seem to supply the true witness and protection against both ancient and modern fanaticism, against both ancient and modern formality. The Divine and Everlasting Word is the teacher of each man; his guide through the sensible into the spiritual, through the individual into the universal. In each man there is according to the temper and habits of his age, a continual tendency to mix that which is sensual with that which is spiritual; that which belongs to the idiosyncrasies of his own mind with that which is permanent and for all. These utterances are not meant to be stifled. They remain as witnesses of what each age is; the truth which that age was especially to defend and develop, could not be seen if they were withdrawn. Then certain men of each particular age say, that what belongs to them is true and perfect; and other men rise up to show how much deeper wisdom was taught by a former age. Each would stamp with sacredness that which belongs to the fleeting accidents of a particular period in the world’s history. But He remains who is the Father of the ever-lasting age, the perpetual Guide of the spirits of all who will obey Him—he remains by the fixed records of His own revelation, by the fixed ordinances of His own Church, by the order and succession of His own natural universe to teach His servants how to discriminate between that which belongs to the constitution in which He has placed them, and that which belongs to their own, or to other men’s apprehensions of it. Take away the belief of his presence, and the teachings of antiquity, yea the written Scriptures of God themselves, become but oppressive restraints upon the spirit, unable to raise it above its own modes of thought only imparting to it a miserable sense that it ought to rise, and cannot. Losing the conviction, that the whole Church is under His guidance, we at one moment affirm that we will believe nothing but what antiquity tells us, or nothing but what the Bible tells us; the next moment we are the sport of every dreamer, who affirms that he has the Spirit which the Bible and the Fathers spoke of. For he speaks to something within us which tells us that we are meant to follow a living and not a dead voice, and because we will not receive the truth which is implied in that witness, it becomes to us a mischievous falsehood. We do not acknowledge the Word, the great distinguisher between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, “the discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart,” who unrolls the volume of experience, and binds times and seasons together, and therefore the Spirit who is the knitter together of hearts, who would bind us into one family, and lead us into the knowledge and enjoyment of the Divine and ineffable Unity, seems to us a Spirit of division, who enters our minds that He may exalt us in our own conceits; may lift us up one against another, may make us heady, high-minded, “lovers of ourselves more than lovers of God.”