Section VI. The Modern Interpreters of Prophecy

There is one class of persons for whom I entertain a sincere respect, who may, I fear, be offended by some of these observations: I allude to the modern interpreters of Prophecy. First, they will think that while I have professed great reverence for the Old Testament as containing the national history of the Jews, I have overlooked one of its most remarkable features, its promise of permanence and restoration to God’s ancient people; that hereby I have shewn an indifference to the words of inspiration, and a preference for my own theories. 2ndly, they will say that my notion of a Divine constitution already established, which is not merely spiritual and universal but national, practically sets aside the doctrine of the second coming of Him who is to make all things new. 3rdly, that when I have spoken of the Romish system as distinct from the Latin Church, I have overlooked the clear declarations of the Divine word respecting the judgments upon the apostasy and the ultimate excision of all bodies which belong to it.

1. I agree with those who look forward to a national restoration of the Jews, that much of the language which is commonly applied to their views, is the result of prejudice and misapprehension. I do not, for instance, understand what is meant by the word ‘carnal’ when it is used in connexion with the doctrine that other privileges exist besides those which belong to the Church as a spiritual body, and that of these the Jews were formerly and shall be hereafter the possessors. If I am right these privileges are just as necessary witnesses against carnality (when by carnality is meant the inclination of that flesh which is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be), as those which directly appertain to us as children of God and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven; nay, in one sense, they are stronger witnesses against this carnality, for they come more directly into contact with the acts and proceedings of our earthly life, which are wont to call it forth. And so far from considering this witness as less belonging to our age than to previous ages, I believe it is our characteristic infirmity, that we are disposed to place religion in a middle region, and that we will not understand it either in its most transcendent character or in its application to common doings and daily occurrences. I cannot help, therefore, suspecting these phrases about carnality; they indicate a tendency which the sight of a national commonwealth constituted as the Jewish commonwealth was, might counteract more effectually than anything which one sees at this time, or perhaps has seen at any time in the Catholic Church. Neither, again, do I understand how the reappearance of such a commonwealth on the very soil which was the original seat of it, could be other than a very marvellous and glorious testimony to the mighty scheme which God, whose works are known to Him from the beginning of the world, has been carrying on, and which no human self-will can frustrate. To me it seems that everything is tending towards this result; that so strange a body as the Israelites are could not have been permitted to exist for so many generations unconnected with any country or polity, if such a destiny were not in reserve for them; that it is a strange and painful effort for the mind even to imagine all traces of national distinctness lost in men who, in their glory and depression, have been for nearly three thousand years witnesses for the existence of such distinctness; that this miracle would be infinitely more startling than the establishment of a Hebrew commonwealth in Palestine; but that the first miracle would be in violation of all the analogy of God’s dealings, the other, the natural consummation of them.

These conclusions seem to me so reasonable, that I cannot help asking myself why I have had so much difficulty in arriving at them, and why so many persons, less hindered than I may be by prejudice or want of faith, should still experience the same difficulty so strongly. And I cannot help feeling that the mode in which the claims of the Jews are ordinarily stated has been, at all events, one great obstacle to our acknowledging them. At one time it would seem as if the modern interpreters of prophecy expected that the Jewish nation should take the place of the universal Church; at another, as if they expected Jerusalem to be the centre of that Church in the next age, even as Rome has tried to be the centre of it in this; at another, as if they believed that in the restoration of all things, the Jews were to furnish the one specimen of a true and godly nation. Now it is very possible that none of these views may really be entertained by those who use language which appears to imply them. But surely the very approximation to such notions may well inspire good men with some alarm. If we are to relapse into a national dispensation, if the idea of the universal Church is to be absorbed in that of an exclusive society, all the promises made to the Fathers, it seems to me, are set at naught; the very truth of which Old Testament history was pregnant has come to nothing; the mighty conflicts of St. Paul, to prove that it had actually been brought into light, were idle and vain; the last eighteen centuries have been a dead blank in the annals of mankind. If, again, the principle be admitted, that in any corner of the universe, in profane land or in holy land, the spiritual Church can find a visible capital for herself, the principle of Romanism seems to be confirmed, and all the sad experiments which have demonstrated it to be an ungodly principle are set aside, as of no worth. If, lastly, the Jewish nation or the Jewish Church is to exalt itself in solitary greatness over the ruins of a fallen universe, it seems to me that Isaiah and the prophets were wrong, and the Pharisees in the days of our Lord’s incarnation strictly right. I do not mean merely that Isaiah and the prophets looked forward to a universal dispensation, to a Church which should develop itself out of a particular nation; but I mean that they uniformly speak of Judea, even in their time, as the centre of a set of countries, each of which was (or was trying to be) a nation. The burden of the ‘Valley of Vision’ stands not alone, it is connected with the burden of Egypt and the burden of Moab, with the burden of Tyre and with the burden of Damascus. The Jewish nation interprets to each of these what it ought to be. But each is looked upon as standing in some relation to the Lord God of the Hebrews; each as connected with His scheme of judgment and mercy, each as threatened by the same Babylonian power. This feeling had been wholly lost by the Pharisee; their only desire was that Judea might be supreme as Rome was supreme, that it might, in fact, be that Babylonian monarchy against which it had been for so many generations bearing testimony. But supposing all these views of Jewish restoration were abandoned, then I think, that the way in which I have spoken of the state in this chapter may possibly strike earnest and thoughtful men as the true explanation and justification of an idea which they cherish so devoutly, and which I hope they may not be obliged, through the arguments of their opponents or through their own inconsistencies, to abandon.

I look upon the Jewish nation as an abiding sign to the Christian Church of the honour which God has put upon national life, and of His will that the Church should never strive to set itself up as something separate from the nations. I look upon it as the sign to each nation in the East or West of the law under which it is constituted, and according to which it will be judged. And because I believe this to be a true unchangeable law, therefore I believe it will at last make itself good in each case. One great central manifestation of it may be, and I trust and believe will be, the restoration of the Jewish Commonwealth. And that restoration will, as I hope, be followed by the restoration to national life, in connexion with Christian and Catholic life, of those countries which are now combined under the sceptre of the prophet, separated from each other by the most violent sectarian controversies, incapable of understanding how they may be distinct and yet one. In a Christian Jew a Mahometan sees what he was meant to be; sees the truth embodied which he has been twisting into a denial and a falsehood. I cannot, therefore, quarrel with the conviction of those who dream that Jews will be the agents in the conversion of Mahometans, and that a Hebrew nation will be the sun and centre of the Eastern world. But if no one pretends that such a result will be accomplished without great conflicts and heavy judgments, why may I not suppose that the West will, through the like process, attain to a like blessing? Why may I not suppose that the principle of Judaism will be asserted, the exclusiveness of Pharisaism be confounded, by the full development of European nations, and of their colonies in the other parts of the world, the universal Church being still the lifegiving power, the uniting principle to them all?

2. But it is indeed a decisive confutation of all these hopes, if they set at naught the truth of the second appearing of our Lord, upon which the Church has been resting in her greatest troubles, and to which the Scriptures urge us so continually to look forward. I should be more sorry perhaps than most, to say a word which could weaken this faith in any mind, because it seems to me that the revival of it in our day has been one great means of removing the clouds which had hindered us from looking at Christ’s Church as a Kingdom, and from connecting all individual blessings and rewards with its existence and its establishment in that character. The wretched notion of a private selfish Heaven, where compensation shall be made for troubles incurred, and prizes given for duties performed in this lower sphere—this unnatural notion, clothing itself in the language of Scripture and of other days of the Church, but severing that language from the idea with which it was always impregnated, and connecting it with our low, grovelling, mercantile habits of feeling, had infused itself into our popular teachings and our theological books. It could not be driven out by those who merely preached the doctrine of justification by faith, for they, in their eagerness to get rid of the doctrine of human merit, seemed to take away the hope of reward altogether, and while giving a present relief to the conscience, to leave the heart and spirit without any future object after which they might aspire. If to the state of feeling which either of these forms of teaching was likely to produce, there has succeeded in any country of Europe a vague and indistinct but still perhaps a real acknowledgment of another end which men may seek after than the selfish individual end, even the end of beholding Him in whom is no selfishness, no darkness at all, of sharing the light of a common sun, of feeling a common warmth and life from his rays, the change, I believe, must be ascribed in a great measure to those who have steadfastly asserted, amidst much opposition from others, and much discouragement from the confutation of their own favourite schemes of interpretation, the doctrine that the Church is to live in the expectation of the appearance and the triumph of her Head.

But the more strongly I feel our obligation to these teachers on this account, the more I must regret, not perhaps particular crudities of opinion which may have mingled themselves with this faith, for these we must always expect, but any great central confusion which may have weakened the grounds upon which it rests, made it unacceptable to wise and thoughtful men, and given an almost unlimited licence to the speculations of those who are not thoughtful or wise. Such a confusion seems to me to lurk in the notion that the Advent, or, as St. Paul far more frequently describes it, the Epiphany of our Lord, will be the beginning of a new order and constitution of things. Now it seems to me that the phrases in Scripture which refer to this event positively refute any such imagination. The appearance of a light which shall shew things as they are, and before which the darkness shall flee away, the day of judgment and distinction, the gathering of all together in one, the restoration of all things, this is the language in which we are taught to express our thoughts and anticipations respecting the future. Nay, such is the language we are obliged to use, even though our own theories might suggest some other as more suitable. And what do such words imply, but the full evidence and demonstration of that which is now; the dispersion of all the shadows and appearances which have counterfeited it or have hidden it from view? What do they imply, but the existence of a kingdom, or order, or constitution, which men have been trying to set at naught and deny, but under which they have been living notwithstanding, and which, in the clear sunlight of that day, is shewn to be the only one under which they can live? Is not this view of the case exactly in accordance with the language of those who speak most about the second Advent, when they say that it will take place at a period of great darkness and almost universal denial? Denial of what?—if not of a truth which has always been recognized in our institutions and our ordinary habits, which men have only just found courage utterly to reject as inconsistent with their conduct and their other professions, at the moment which shall shew that conduct and those professions to have been false, the witness of conscience against them, and in favour of that which they resisted, to be true? Is there any shelter from this conclusion in the distinction between the spiritual dispensation or spiritual kingdom which has existed since our Lord’s first Advent, and the outward visible kingdom which shall be established after His second? If by the words outward and visible it be meant that something less spiritual is in reserve for the time to come than for the time which is; that now we are living by faith, that then we shall live by sense; that now we recognize the highest glory in that which “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor it hath entered into the heart of man to conceive;” that then we shall recognize all glory as being in the visible and comprehensible: I cannot conceive a darker or more dreadful vision than this of a millennial perfection. But if it be meant by outward and visible, that Christ’s dominion will not be merely over the heart and spirit of man, over that which directly connects him with God and the unseen world, but over all his human relations, his earthly associations, over the policy of rulers, over nature and over art, then, I say, this is as much the truth now as it ever can be in any future period. This dominion has been asserting itself, has been making itself felt, for these eighteen centuries. The Son of Man claimed it for Himself when He did not abhor the Virgin’s womb, when He mingled with the ordinary transactions of men, blessing their food, their wine, and their marriage feasts. The claim may have been denied at all times; it may be denied especially at the time to which we are looking forward; but that time must assert it, not as something new, but as something old; as a government which has been actually in exercise, and the easing of which, even for a moment, would have been followed by dreariness and death throughout the universe. Now if this be so, I think that the principle which I have endeavoured to defend in this book is not one which interferes with any sound or true apprehensions of our Lord’s second coming, but only with a system which has tended to prevent men from acknowledging it; to make them think lightly of their present responsibilities, to give them a fantastic habit of speaking respecting the course of God’s providence in the world, as if it signified nothing now, but was only leading to something hereafter; and which is very likely to suggest the thought, that when He has taken the power whose right it is, the Cross will not any longer be the symbol of glory and victory.

The Romish System.

With a few remarks upon the charge of underrating the guilt and punishment of Romish apostasy, I will conclude this part of my work.

A reader who has followed me through the discussions in my last and present chapters will scarcely suspect me of an inclination to look more mildly upon Romanism, when it presents itself as a sworn enemy of nations and national Churches, than when it came before us as the corrupter of creeds and sacraments. One evil seems to be necessarily implied in the other; the same assumption which made it an uncatholic principle has made it an anti-national principle. It has perverted the idea of spiritual power, therefore it has interfered with civil power. And yet if we look at it on another side, that which we call in common parlance the Church of Rome has borne and does bear a very striking witness on behalf of the truth that Christ’s Church is the kingdom, and not merely a collection of sects bound together in the profession of particular dogmas. I have never concealed this fact, for no fact ought to be concealed which concerns the history and government of the world.

But what is that we call the Church of Rome? I call it the diocese over which the Bishop of Rome presides; I know no other Church of Rome than this. Certain people may have invented another notion for it, but I do not adopt their notion: if I did, I should adopt the Romish system. Now this Church of Rome, this Italian diocese, may be in a very corrupt state—I am afraid it is. I think many persons who belong to it, and who acknowledge the jurisdiction of its Bishop, would acknowledge that they, therefore, must agree with us in desiring that it should be reformed. Perhaps they would agree in acknowledging, also, that the reformation is likely to be accompanied with many punishments and judgments for the sins of which its members have been guilty. The nature of those sins and the roots of them I have partly considered in this chapter. The nature of the judgments I am not competent and I have no wish to consider. They may be heavier or lighter than any other which will come upon the other portions of the Church; they may even go to the length of leaving Rome a prey to some infidel power. The determining of this question is in the best hands, and in those hands we must leave it, as we may leave also the fate of the Spanish, or Gallican, or of any other Church.

But the end of these judgments, I conceive, be they more or less tremendous, will be the destruction of a false apostate system. You say that the system is part and parcel of the Church; that if one perishes, the other must perish. That is precisely the point about which I know nothing, and about which you know nothing. But this I do know, that as long as a man is alive and struggling, I have no business to say that his disease and he are identical, that the cure of the disease must be the death of the patient. Here it is that I am at issue with our modern interpreters of prophecy. I do not differ with them in that I hate the Romish system less than they do. It often seems to me that they do not hate it sufficiently; that they do not see where its extreme evil lies; that they are ready to tolerate a portion of its evil in themselves. And this want of sufficient appreciation of its mischiefs, I discover especially in their language respecting the Latin Church. They do not seem to see that popery is continually undermining the Church, and therefore they do not feel, that the more you can persuade men to be Churchmen, the more effectually you deliver them from popery. They cry out to the members of the different Latin Churches: ‘Come ye out of Babylon, and be ye separate. Take the words as they stand in Scripture, and as they are explained by the whole context of Scripture, and there cannot be any more important. But how are they to be obeyed? The common answer is, ’By leaving the corrupt Church to which you belong.’ It seems to me that the person who does so, is exceedingly likely to carry the Babylonian system along with him, and to leave nothing behind but the good elements which were mixed with it. Whereas, he who will stay in the Church of his fathers, maintaining resolutely that it is a Church, and that those who have struggled to deprive it of its distinct ecclesiastical character are his enemies, and are to be resisted, must, I think, arrive at a deliverance from popery. He will not be delivered in the same way in which the Protestant nations in the sixteenth century were delivered. God has a different method for working out the freedom of His servants in each different age; but I cannot see why it should be a less effectual method; I hope and trust it will be far more effectual. The serpent at the Reformation was scotched, not killed. It could not be killed so long as there was anything good remaining in it. Once separate the belief of Christ’s kingdom from this system, once believe that they are not necessary to each other, and the moral power of the papacy is gone. What signifies it, then, if all the physical power in the universe should for a time be granted to it, if kings should send presents to it, if all forms of infidelity and false worship should combine themselves with it? The Church may then with confidence take up the language of the prophet, “Associate yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces; gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces; take counsel together, and it shall come to naught, for God is with us.”¹