In former Lectures I have considered the relation in which Christianity stands to the existing religious systems of the world, to Mahometanism, Hindooism, Buddhism. In this, the last Lecture of the course, I ought, according to the plan which I laid down for myself, to consider in what relation it stands to those which I called the defunct systems of ancient Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Gothic world. But it will strike you at once that this subject has, in a great measure, been anticipated.
I could not allude to the facts which justified my use of the word defunct, in reference to these religions, without indicating the kind of influence which Christianity had exercised over them. I was obliged to tell you that the worship of the god of Light in Greece, the state religion of Rome, the worship of Odin amongst the Goths, had given way before the preaching of the Crucified Son of God. I could not omit to notice the way in which the Gospel had established itself in the Greek cities of Egypt, or the influence it had received from the culture previously existing in them, or the resistance it had met with in the country districts where the old Egyptian doctrine had its strongest hold. I could not but speak of the revival of the old Persian faith, which took place in the second century of the Christian era, of the obstruction which that faith offered to the Gospel, of its remarkable reaction upon some of the teachers of the Gospel. I should have no excuse for travelling again over this ground, though the observation we took of it was so rapid and superficial, were it not that the facts to which I have just alluded, taken in connexion with those which have engaged our attention elsewhere, suggest a painful doubt to the mind, one closely related to those which it has been the object of the whole course to examine.
The aspect of Christianity in the first ages, notwithstanding the exceptions which I have noticed, is that of a youthful, growing, victorious doctrine; its roots laid in the deepest humiliation, its branches spreading over the earth, and reaching to heaven. But then came Mahometanism, utterly exterminating that Persian doctrine with which the Christian teachers had so unsuccessfully fought, bringing Egypt, great part of Asia, and a section of Europe, under its yoke. When we studied the history of this faith, we learnt that it had conquered much from the Gospel, and had scarcely, through twelve centuries, yielded to any permanent impression from it. The latter assertion is almost as true of Hindooism, in spite of the establishment of a Christian empire in the East. Buddhism still holds a third of the globe in almost undisturbed possession. Now a person comparing these two sets of facts will be very likely to say, “Supposing your answers to the philosophical objectors, who maintain that Christianity is a decaying, nearly obsolete, creed be ever so relevant and strong, yet what are they when weighed against this startling confirmation of their statements? Must not that faith have had a fitness for other ages, an unfitness for ours, which, during six centuries, accomplished so much, which now seems to be accomplishing almost nothing; which could then encounter the wisdom and power of those nations which we still recognize as having been the wisest and mightiest in the world, which now fails in a conflict with the ignorant and incoherent worshippers of Buddha. And if you escape by pleading that the human professors of this doctrine are less sincere and energetic than they were, what is this but saying that it depends on human energy; that it is, in fact, a human system, strong whilst those who hold it are strong—sure to wither when their zeal withers?” Such an objection as this cannot be evaded. In considering it, I shall be led to examine the different steps we have taken, beginning with the question, How did Christianity address itself to the systems with which, in its infancy, it came into collision?
I am forced to use the word Christianity; for many purposes it is a convenient one. But I must remind you, that it was not a word which was familiar to the Apostles, or to those who succeeded them in the first ages. We are not told that they went forth preaching Christianity. The writer of the Acts of the Apostles says that they preached the “Kingdom of God,” or “the Gospel of God, or Christ,” or “the Gospel of Christ.” To expound these words fully, would be to expound the New Testament. But this meaning lies upon the surface of them: the Apostles came witnessing of a Lord and King; the King and Lord of men. The proclamation of the Crucified Man, as the Son of God, was their Gospel, or good tidings. In that character men were invited to receive Him. The Apostles believed their own words; they could therefore trust God to prove them true. If this Man were the King of the World, strange and ridiculous as the proposition might sound in the ears of Jews or Heathens, He would be shewn to be such by one means or other. Some of the Apostles knew nothing of the previous feelings and discipline of the nations; some, as the Apostle Paul, might have meditated on that subject, and have conversed much with men of different opinions. But all alike met the people among whom they came, not with arguments to prove this true, or that false, but with the announcement of a Person who had a right to men’s obedience, and whom it was good that they should obey.
I. St. Paul at Athens encountered Epicureans and Stoics; he disputed with them in the marketplace: when we are made acquainted with his words, we find they were of this kind, “Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.” ‘Your poets have said, that we are the offspring of God; it is true; therefore do not make Him after the likeness of things you see and hear. He is not far from any of us, for in Him we live, and move, and have our being. He has appointed a day in the which He will judge the world by that Man whom he hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.’ This language, you see, assumed that the Athenians were in search of God; that they were ignorantly worshipping Him; that they had a sense of His being a father; that they wanted some one living, human image of Him, to supplant those images of Him which they had made for themselves. In Athens itself the words were little heeded; men there were busy seeking for some new thing to talk of; they were occupied with schemes of the universe; of realities they had lost the perception. But the teaching was adapted to all that was sound and true in the Greek mind; it met whatever actual wants were awake in that mind. The Greek asked for one who should exhibit humanity in its glory; he was told of a Son of Man. He felt that whoever did so exhibit it must be divine. The Son of Man was declared to be the Son of God. He had dreamed of one from whom the most perfect glory man could conceive must have proceeded. He was told of a Father. He had thought of a divine Presence in every tree and flower. He heard of a Presence nearer still to himself. He was not told that he must cease to believe in powers ruling in the Sun or Moon, or over any portion of the earth. The Apostles had no commission to declare there might not be such Powers, or whether they had actual personality; they were not to deny the existence of kingly men upon the earth, or of angels or saints in the unseen world; only they were to say, This is the King of kings, the God of gods. Of his fulness must all they have received who are anything, or ever were anything, here or elsewhere; their graces can only be a reflection from His grace. They were to say, He is nearer to you—more directly related to you than all these can be; for He has taken the nature of all, and borne the sorrows and sins of all: in Him there is nothing partial, nothing imperfect; no feebleness of sympathy in any single direction. They were to say farther, If in any of the objects of your reverence there is anything earthly, sensual, evil; anything belonging to human nature in its corruption: then that must be contrary to Him; that must be at war with Him. So far as any creature is endued with such qualities, it is an evil creature; it has the evil spirit; it is not to be worshipped as if it were glorious, but renounced as devilish; as that which would draw you from the true estate into which Christ, by taking your nature, has redeemed you. Therefore the Greek mythology was met at all points by this Gospel. What was actually or possibly good in it, the Revelation of Christ comprehended; what was evil and degraded it wrestled with, by proclaiming the good which it had counterfeited. But this was its charm, The Greek had a world without a centre; the preachers of the Gospel made the centre known to him. What could revolve about it, fell into its proper orbit; what determined to move independently of the centre, was seen to be unnatural and distracted.
II. How the Gospel found its way into the Egyptian heart we are not informed so distinctly. This however we may remember; Our Lord spoke to his disciples in parables; through them he declared the mysteries of the kingdom. The facts of outward nature, the ordinary transactions of man, he recognised as a sacred writing, in which God had expressed part of his meaning, a meaning which he did not will to remain hidden, but which the Son of God unfolded. That the preachers of the Christian kingdom in Egypt should think much on this method of discovering the divine treasures was inevitable. But the substance of the communication was still the same. The Egyptian was questioning all nature to tell him of the Ammon, the hidden God: the Christian answer was still, “Him declare we unto you.”
III. So it fared likewise with the Roman, whose worship had really, as we saw, a different direction from that of Greek, however in various points they might intersect each other. The clear intellect, the beautiful form, were not in his mind the constituents of Kinghood or Godhead. Order, self-government, the capacity of ruling others, submission of individual will to law, he demanded in the chief man; and qualities corresponding to these alone seemed to him divine. A faith without an organized, harmonious society, was to the Latin a dream. After many struggles his own mighty commonwealth had felt that it could only continue to exist under the guidance of one head; and that head one uniting military and religious titles; a ruler of armies, an object of adoration. A king, in whom was seen the perfect fulfilment of law—the surrender of the individual Will to the Higher Will; the entire self-sacrifice; a King who was the centre of a society, the head of many members, was proclaimed by the fishermen of Galilee, by the tent-maker of Tarsus. That announcement met Roman life on all its sides and aspects; adopted its highest maxims; overreached its noblest idea of fellowship; shewed that the true society had for its head one altogether unlike the emperor; one whom he must crush, or to whom he must bow. And so, by slow degrees, the Roman state-idolatry, like the Greek idolatry of individual forms and persons, perished out of the world.
IV. The Goths, again, heard the same proclamation of a kingdom of God. It did not find them watching the embers of an expiring civilization, but full of boyish vigour and life, and rudeness, eager to break and subdue the earth; possessed by the wildest dreams of powers in earth and sea wrestling for victory; doing homage to a champion of a strong hand and seeing eye, the leader of hosts and their prophet. With much joy, though amidst much confusion, these barbarians welcomed the tidings of a Mighty Redeemer in whom men could own at once their Lord and their brother.
A redemption of man, a redemption of all that had been lost, or disorderly in creation, was equally assumed in the preaching to Greeks, Romans, and Goths:—It was set forth as an accomplished fact; as laying the only right and reasonable ground-work for human life; as that of which the Church, by its very existence, was to bear testimony. And it was signified in the very word Redemption, that the partakers of it were not brought into some novel or unnatural state, but into that for which they were created, that which was implied in their human constitution.
V. If this was the nature of the Christian proclamation and its success, we may understand where it was likely to encounter the greatest obstructions. The Persians believed in two rulers of the world, one good, one evil. The great Reformer had indeed affirmed strongly that the Lord of Light would prevail at last. He seems to have continually hovered about the conviction that the Prince of Darkness was a rebel against him; not originally a divider of his throne. But he never quite realized this conviction; he could not entirely deny the outward universe to Ahriman; the Persians generally believed him to be the creator of it.
The two powers were regarded as having each a right over man, his flesh and his external circumstances being especially the property of the dark Spirit. What mighty evidences there seemed to be in favour of this hypothesis! How all history, from its beginning onwards, seemed to vouch for it! What obstinacy in the old forms of evil; what new floods of it were continually pouring in as from a perennial source! In the second or third centuries, when the Roman empire was tottering to its fall, under the weight of its own wickedness, the proofs of Ahriman’s sovereignty were surely not less than they had been before. Had the Gospel of Christ permanently altered this state of things? When the Persian conversed with Christians, he found them more ready than others to acknowledge an evil in themselves, more sensitive to its existence in the world. They even seemed to admit its supremacy, and to speak of the higher and purer state which they said Christ had established as a deliverance out of the natural human condition; of His saints as rebelling against the Prince of this World. Such language, often carelessly and ignorantly used, often misunderstood when it was rightly used, may at first have led the Magian to think that the Gospel had not undermined his primitive doctrine—had rather brought new facts in confirmation of it. And yet he will have found Christians ready to live and die for the assertion that Christ was the one only Lord, that all things in heaven and earth and under the earth were subject to Him; that no power of evil could measure itself against Him; that He held an undoubted, undivided authority. He will therefore have felt that, in spite of seeming coincidences, this faith was one with which his could not consist; that he was bound to exterminate the believers in Jesus, if he could not convert them.
We have good evidence that no question was so profoundly agitating to men’s minds in the first ages as this. The Magians, as I said, succeeded in re-establishing their old doctrine, and with it the old Persian empire. But the belief in rival powers of good and evil, to the latter of which the origin of all visible things might be ascribed, spread far beyond its limits. It incorporated itself with all the religious and philosophical views of the age; it penetrated deeply into the Church of Christ, was the great characteristic of its most prevalent heresy, and mingled, in different forms and measures, with every other. Of all tests of the reality of Christian humility and faith, the greatest seems to have been the power of practically meeting this temptation, of resisting the conclusion that a perfectly good being could not be the author and ruler of the universe; that man could not really be a holy and redeemed creature; that the material world, at all events, must be given up as an evil thing. Only the simple, child-like trust which said, ‘There are many things I cannot explain, but this I know, that the Son of God has taken my nature, and made it holy, has walked this earth and made it holy, that he has adopted us into fellowship with Him, and taught us to look upon ourselves as holy, in spite of all the evil that is in us; and to treat every creature as holy, though corruption and death may have set their mark upon it’—only a faith of this kind, surmounting present appearances, and laying hold of a higher truth, waiting calmly for them and it to be reconciled in God’s good time, and meanwhile bracing their hearts to those daily duties, which, on the other hypothesis, would have been thrown aside as useless and hopeless, could have hindered any Christian from becoming inwardly, if not professedly, a Manichean. St. Augustine has given us, in his own biography, a clear and wonderful picture of this conflict. With a Christian mother and a heathen father, brought up in the feeble rhetoric of his time, but full of earnest thoughts, which made him long to understand the nature of himself and of God; full, at the same time, of violent passions seeking for gratification; he eagerly embraced the doctrine of the Manichean teachers, for it served at once to explain the problem of the universe, and to justify the indulgences which something within him condemned. He shews us how he was forced from speculations upon things without, to a more awful study of that which was passing in himself; how he learnt to perceive that the evil within him was the resistance of his will to a perfect and Holy Will; how this discovery did much more than scatter his old notions; how it led him to ask what that pure and Holy Being had been doing on behalf of his race; and whether He had offered men the means of knowing Him and being like Him. Then the meaning of Christ’s coming dawned upon him; he believed that the Perfect and Holy Being was manifested in Him; that in Him man might behold his own true and proper state, and rise to it; that in His strength we may cast off evil from us, as an enemy which has no proper right or dominion over us, or over any creature; that man degrades himself when he becomes the slave of outward things, not because they are evil in themselves, but because they take him out of his true condition. These truths slowly working themselves out in his mind, amidst great discouragements and bitter sorrows, were those which he was appointed to proclaim in the world, and which, under one aspect or other, he was asserting all his life through. Shadows of his old system were probably often darkening his intellect; when he was tempted to make Christianity a system, they were nearly sure to re-appear. In general, however, no one saw with so much clearness that evil is not a part of the order of the universe, but essentially disorder; that every creature seeking to dwell in selfish independence, of necessity embraces that disorder, and becomes a part of it; that every creature entering into God’s covenant and yielding itself to Him, becomes orderly, reasonable, blessed.
But it required more than the teaching of any man, however wise, to check a belief which was so natural and so plausible as this. Though only open heretics declared that the world was essentially an evil thing, and originated in an evil being, from whom Christ came to deliver his disciples, and though these statements were generally felt to be blasphemous, yet numbers acted as if they were true. Those who decided to live pure and holy lives, left the world that they might do so. The sphere of human action was more and more regarded as an ungodly one, and those who moved in it and ruled it, showed by their actions that they adopted the opinion. There was no distinct, audible voice, declaring, “The kingdoms of this world are the kingdoms of our God and His Christ.” The belief silently gained ground, that there was not a warrant for any such assertion, that the redemption which our Lord had wrought, whatever it might mean, did not mean this.
VI. But soon a voice was heard, speaking these words most clearly in the ears both of Persians and Christians: “This earth is the possession of the One Lord, the God of Abraham; He claimed it as His when He called out Abraham, and promised that he and his seed should possess a portion of it. The earth is still His. Those who say he has an equal or rival are liars.” This was Mahomet’s language. His sword was ready to make it good. The Magian faith, the Persian empire, fell to pieces before it. Of all the Mahometan enterprizes this was the most startling, and that by which its other triumphs may be best understood. We complain of its hard outward character; the materialism of its acts and its rewards. But see how well suited it was in this very respect to meet and confute precisely the evil tendency to which men’s minds had yielded. The denial of God’s dominion over the actual world; the notion, that though He might have some dominion somewhere else, it was not here; this was the unbelief which was destroying all ordinary morality, all simple trust in a Father, was introducing atheism, or else devil-worship among those who pretended to worship the Holy God, and utterly to renounce evil. Now no mere spiritualism, if it had been ever so fine and true, could have broken this spell. Palpable proofs were wanted that the kingdoms of this very world were subject to an Unseen and Absolute Sovereign. And the Mahometan conquests from generation to generation remain a testimony, not against the Gospel, however mighty a testimony against Christians, but for it; a testimony to one necessary, forgotten portion of it; a proof that, if the Church of Christ forgets its own proper position, God can raise up the strangest instruments to do His work.
I say one portion of this Gospel; for you will remind me that if Mahometanism asserted half the doctrine of the text I quoted just now, “The kingdoms of this earth are God’s:” it denied the latter half of it, “and His Christ’s.” But this remark requires to be explained and qualified by two others.
Mahometanism does, indeed, deny the fact on which our Gospel rests, that a man is verily, and indeed, one with the Lord of All; how that denial has affected the whole system, I have considered in a former Lecture. But if we remember what the doctrine was which Mahometanism subverted, we shall see that it involved a much greater and more direct denial of Christ, of his rule over this universe, and of his relation to God. The disposition to look upon the world as the possession of an evil power, which belonged to the Persian, and to the Christian who had caught his temper, made it impossible even to think of it as connected with Christ. The idea of Christ as a deliverer of man from the power of his Creator, went far deeper than the denial of His essential oneness with the Creator. So far as Mahometanism helped to clear the air of these pollutions, it removed the greatest of all impediments to the recognition of that doctrine which it set at nought. But secondly, in order to understand the effect of a system, and the place it occupies in the scheme of Providence, we should think not only of itself, but also of that which has been called out in opposition to it. The formation of society in modern Europe stands in close relation to the history of Mahometanism. The Christian nations were brought to feel that they were connected with each other, and what connected them, by seeing such large portions of the world knit together in the acknowledgement of the Arabian prophet. Then was the feeling distinctly realized, that all government has a Divine basis, that kings must be anointed with oil in the name of Christ, that the different members of the community hold their possessions, offices, powers, ultimately of Him; that they depend in different gradations upon each other; that fealty is due to that which is unseen, reverence to that which is weak. Thus, in short, those institutions, forms, habits of thought established themselves which characterize the middle ages; which may be mischievous when they exclude other principles, more clearly perceived in later times; which have become mixed with corruptions, counterfeits, and tyrannies, and confounded with them; but which are essential elements of our social existence at this day, and cannot perish until we perish. Now these embodied the other half of the great truth which St. John’s words express: “The kingdoms of this world are the kingdoms of his Christ.” Nor should it be forgotten, that while the Mahometan doctrine has been proved by the evidence of history to be maimed and self-destructive, so long as it stands alone, rejecting the principle of European society; that society was continually in danger of losing its own foundation and stability, and of becoming utterly idolatrous and depraved through forgetfulness of the principle which the Mahometans put forth. The worship of the men who uttered, of the visible symbols which shadowed forth, divine truths, might have effaced those truths, but for the testimony which Islamism was permitted to bear on behalf of them.
VII. But though the Gospel, as it was preached by the Apostles and others who followed them, involved the assertion that the earth was redeemed and claimed as God’s possession by Christ, I am far from affirming that this was its only or its most characteristic affirmation. The Old Testament was especially the witness for God’s government of the earth. The New speaks of the Kingdom of heaven. John the Baptist said the kingdom of heaven was at hand. Our Lord illustrated its principle in every discourse and every miracle; His Apostles invited men to enter into it; in their Epistles they unfolded its nature to those who had believed the message and sought the privilege. This kingdom they described as one of righteousness, peace and joy; the eye could not see it, but it was most real. It was a kingdom for the heart and spirit of man, for that which was most properly himself, for that in which dwell all his capacities of sorrow, of sympathy, of trust, of hope, of love. It was called the kingdom of God because communion with Him is the great blessedness of it. And it is the kingdom of God because men are brought into it that they may see themselves, their fellow-creatures, the whole universe, as He sees them; not partially, or merely in reference to themselves, as we naturally do. Into this kingdom, our Lord said, men were pressing. Experience of sorrow, a sense of weariness and dissatisfaction with all that was visible, the feeling of a good almost within reach, and yet never quite attained; above all, the bitter consciousness of something wrong within, which needed to be purged away, of a hollow which needed to be filled up; these were intimations to men of an unseen treasure which they were meant to possess, which only some one mightier than they could enable them to possess. Such thoughts and longings would especially haunt the hearts of poor and suffering people; they would be rarer in men who had outward ease and comfort. But our Lord spoke of a divine power which could awaken in men the desire and capacity for this good; of a birth from above by which their spirits might be made fit for the Kingdom of Heaven; of an inward eye which might be opened to see it. The Apostles, when they baptized men into the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, bade them understand that this power was given them, and that though their bodies dwelt in Corinth or Ephesus, their real home was with Him whom they could love but not see. These were the words which stirred the hearts of the early Christians and led them to that indifference for outward things, which afterward blended so easily with the Persian notion that they were to be despised and regarded as in themselves evil. But the truth was not the less mighty because it was capable of a grievous perversion. The belief in it was the strength in which the Christian confessor lived and died. The invisible world was his dwelling; each day he sought to become more familiar with it, to have every thought and feeling brought into harmony with it; to show forth more of the temper and spirit of it in his converse with his fellow-creatures. While, indeed, he kept his Lord’s words and example in recollection, he could not scorn any earthly task, he must look upon all the creatures of God as good; while he remembered for what end Christ had come upon earth, he must deem fellowship with men more blessed than separation from them. Still it was the first gift of his redemption, that he could rise out of this circle of things. And when he saw to what coldness and hardness of heart, to what gross superstitions, men yielded, whose thoughts and aspirations were bounded by what they could see and handle, he could understand those words of St. Paul in which he blessed God for having delivered the Galatians out of this present evil world. It was an evil world, because men made it so, by renouncing the privilege of men; by living as if they had only senses and were not spiritual beings capable of spiritual enjoyments; as if each man could only realize the little portion of the goods of earth which he calls his property, and might not enter upon that inheritance of true blessedness which all may share together, as all may share the light of the sun together.
Now if men could so pervert these truths as to forget that the outward world was redeemed to be a part of God’s kingdom, and if their inward life suffered terribly from the forgetfulness, it became manifest in the course of ages that they could quite as easily lose sight of that which was specially and emphatically the Christian doctrine while they seemed to admit and value its material results. Since the active energies of men’s minds have been awakened, since we have felt that it is our vocation to subdue the earth, to trade, colonize and conquer, this has become the characteristic temptation of all Christian nations, perhaps I may say, especially the characteristic one of our own; for it lies close to some of our highest virtues, our business-like habits, our preference of action to speculation, our impatience of what does not look real and practical.
Englishmen in the last century seem almost to have persuaded themselves that man is not in any sense a mysterious being, that the Gospel does not address him as such, that its main use is to make servants respectful to their masters, to keep the humble classes from interfering with the privileges of their superiors, that the kingdom of heaven is a place where certain rewards are bestowed hereafter for decency of conduct here. And those who did not act upon these maxims, but earnestly devoted themselves to a spiritual life, fancied, not unnaturally, that the desires of which they were conscious did not properly belong to human beings; that all men ought to have them, but that in fact scarcely any had them; that the unseen world is for the select few, not for mankind.
But to Englishmen in the 18th century, the continent of India revealed itself with its treasures and its wonders. Its material treasures might help to strengthen the worldly appetite which went in search of them; but its wonders, if they were well considered, might surely have supplied the counteraction, might have proved that men everywhere need a kingdom of heaven as well as a kingdom on earth. The Hindoo lives in a world of thought. He is certain that divine knowledge, the knowledge of Brahm, is the highest end of life. He cannot be satisfied till he is united with the Divinity. The divine man, he says, must be a twice born-man, must be raised out of his natural condition, must not lose himself in communion with outward things. Indications of this faith are forced upon the observation of every Englishman in India; he may explain them as he will, but he cannot deny them. Do they not say to him just, perhaps, when the associations of his childhood are about to be cast off altogether—‘What you used to hear from your nurse and your mother may after all mean something. You were told that you were a twice-born man, a member of Christ, a child of God, an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. May there not be treasures nearer to you than these Indian treasures, treasures which are yours by the clearest title, and yet which you have never reduced into possession? If you could impart them to these subjects of ours, might you not do that for them which the best legislation cannot do? Will you not at least ask whether the Hindoo is wrong in thinking that man is made for something else than to buy and sell, to eat, drink, and die; and whether if he is right, there is any escape from his restless self-torture, except in the calm faith that it is our Father’s good pleasure to give us that kingdom which the idolator would at the price of any anguish wring from the objects of his worship?’
Here then is a voice coming from the most opposite quarter to that whence the other was brought to us—a voice of the most different kind. Yet it comes as a witness not against but for that which we have been taught to believe, a witness not for but against our indifference to it. So that these two voices compared together, may, I think, help to answer the question we have been examining, whether Christianity be not dependent for its evidence and its success upon the faith of those who promulgate it. There cannot be a truer assertion than that this is the criterion of a human system; there cannot be a more undoubted prophecy than that the Gospel, if it be a human system, must perish, as all systems are perishing. On the other hand, if it were anything more than this, we should expect that the weakness, heartlessness, cowardice, baseness of its advocates would themselves be in some way converted into demonstrations of its truth; that when men were holding their peace respecting it, the stones would cry out. Have we not found this to be the fact? You say that Islamism has not fallen before the Cross. No, but Islamism has become one of God’s witnesses for the Cross when those who pretended to bear it had really changed it for another standard. You say that Hindooism stands undisturbed by the presence of a triumphant Christian nation. Yes, for Hindooism has been wanted to teach this nation what it is very nearly forgetting itself, very nearly forcing others to forget, that Christianity is not a dream or a lie.
I believe these conclusions must be brought home, in some way or other, to the hearts as well of those who are earnest about heathen missions as of those who are indifferent to them. For what is it that palsies all efforts of this kind; what is it that produces the contrast which we have confessed between those of our own and those of earlier days? Is it not that we have more than half subscribed to the philosophical doctrine; more than half acted as if we were engaged in propagating a system of our own? Has not the impression we have conveyed to the minds of Mahometans and pagans been something of this kind: ‘These Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards, or Englishmen, acknowledge a certain teacher, to whom they attach very high titles. They wish us to acknowledge their teacher instead of those whom we in Arabia, Persia, or Hindoostan, have been accustomed to honour. In other words, they wish to make us Europeans, to bring us over to their modes and habits of thinking.’ I know and thank God that other impressions than this have been made by the Christian missionaries of all ages and nations upon those among whom they have gone. I know that the hearts of many of them have been so possessed with the love of Him who died for them and for all mankind, that they could not speak of Him as if he was their teacher, the Head of their sect. By their language, by their acts, by that higher, simpler teaching which the Bible supplies, they must have carried home to many a broken-hearted creature, crying for a Comforter, the assurance that there is One who has taken the nature, not of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, but of Man; who has entered into man’s misery and death; has borne the sins of man; has encountered all his enemies, and vanquished them.
The history of Missions would be barren indeed if this were not the case. But the more we admit the worth of such testimonies—(how great it has been we shall not know till the great day of Revelation)—the more convinced must we be that the old proclamation of a divine kingdom, the old Gospel, that the Son of God, the Deliverer of Man, has appeared, and will be shewn hereafter to be the Lord of the Universe, is the only effectual one; that this is as fresh to-day as it was 1800 years ago, because it is a Revelation of the Eternal Law of the Universe, which wears not out, which grows not old; is not, in any sense whatever, our scheme, or theory of the Universe, but is sent to confound, to break in pieces, our theories of the Universe, to shew how feeble and contemptible we and our theories are; how little we or any human creatures want a theory; what absolute need all creatures have of a Living God, who will reveal to us Himself; what relation there is between us and Him; how he works in us to bring us to know His purposes, and to move in accordance with them.
That last discovery is indeed one without which the words I have just been speaking would seem only words of discouragement. To look out upon the world, and see a valley covered with the dry bones of different systems, to hear them clashing together as if they might be joined to each other, and then to be told, ‘It is all in vain; there is no voice which can bid the breath enter into these bones; perhaps it might have come from Christians, but it does not; they too occupy part of this valley; their creed has become one of dry bones, very dry indeed; clashing always, never uniting’—such an announcement as this, however softened by thoughts of the past or the future, must be a very mournful one. But that third great religion of the world comes to turn the current of these thoughts, to check this despondency. We are but ill provided with a theory, say the Buddhists; we have tried many, and little fruit has come of them. But this we are assured of: you Christians may not have heard it, but there is a quickening, life-giving Spirit, which is meant for humanity; which all may possess together; which alone can bring a universe out of chaos, unity out of division. Wonderful testimony to be borne from the ends of the earth, from such a medley of strange people, so different in their thoughts, so incoherent in their utterances! Is not the report of it like the sound of that rushing mighty wind, which was heard on the day of Pentecost, not indeed itself the promised Power, but the type and herald of it? Does it not say that we too might have cloven tongues to declare, in different tones and measures, according to the different thoughts, habits, and apprehensions of men, the same wonderful works of God, and that these tongues might be of fire if only the same living inspiration were realized and obeyed by us? Does it not bid us remember that with this Spirit of Peace and Love and a sound mind we have been sealed; that the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, which was to be the blessing, the permanent blessing, of Pentecost, has been bestowed upon us; that we hold this Spirit, not as the Buddhists dream, by our own right, to be therefore the witness of our independence, flowing from no source whence it may be replenished, but as the very bond of our dependence and childhood; as the Spirit of adoption, whereby we are to cry, Abba, Father; as the power whereby we can ask and receive a new life day by day. If so, there is cause enough for humiliation in all of us, but for despair in none. The broken limbs of the world may yet be united, if the broken limbs of the Church were united first. But are these the limbs of a great system, or of a living body? Holding the first opinion of herself, the Church has been either held artificially together, the children within her groaning under the bondage to which she has subjected them, those without hearing in her invitation a message not of deliverance but of heavier slavery; or else, these artificial joints and fastenings being removed, she has split into fragments, with which those who are clinging to them become more and more dissatisfied, which offer to those without an excuse for adhering to the tradition of their fathers, be it ever so dreary, till those who bid them leave it are agreed what they should adopt in its place. But if the Scripture language be true, if the Church be a body constituted in a Head, the Buddhist proclamation carries with it the reproof and consolation which we require. There is a Power which can bring us not into some imaginary condition of excellence, but precisely into our true condition: can remove the individual interests, selfish feelings, national antipathies, narrow apprehensions which all our efforts to produce unity only evoke and strengthen, can bring down our high notions and conceits of what we are and what we can do, can enable us to be God’s servants and to do His work in the world which He has redeemed. Having confessed our rebellion against this Spirit, and sought the renewal of it in us and in the whole Church, we shall no longer say, as we have been tempted to say, ‘The power of evil is supreme over the universe; only there have been some special deliverances vouchsafed to us;’ we shall, from our hearts, abjure such blasphemous Manicheism; we shall say boldly to all people among whom we go, ‘The devil is not your master, he has no right to your worship: the God, in whom is light and no darkness at all, has claimed you and the whole creation for His own. His marvellous light is as much for you as for us. We only enjoy it upon the condition of renouncing all exclusive claim to it, upon the condition of bidding you enter into it.’
Buddhism, then, like Hindooism and Mahometanism, has its lesson for us. We are debtors to all these in a double sense. Nor, I think, is it otherwise with those modern infidels whose objections I have been considering throughout this course. Our obligations to them are not slight if they have been sent to break down a low grovelling notion we had formed of our own position and work; if they have been employed to convince us that human systems must indeed perish, one and all, that what survives must be something of a much higher derivation, of a more eternal character. We owe them the deepest gratitude if they have led us to ask ourselves more earnestly whether there is any faith, and what kind of faith it is, which must belong, not to races or nations, but to mankind; still more, if they have forced us to the conclusion, that the real test, whether there be such a faith, and whether it has been made known to us must be action, not argument; that if it exist, it must shew that it exists; that if it have power, it must put forth its power. So, in this 19th century, the opponents of Christianity will return to the maxim which the wisest of them announced in the first: “If this be of men, it will come to nought; if it be of God, we cannot overthrow it.”
I have been anxious in these Lectures to shew that I did regard this practical experiment of our faith as the really decisive one. In compliance with the directions of Boyle, I sought for that which seemed to be the most prevailing form of unbelief in our day; and I found in it the tendency to look upon all theology as having its origin in the spiritual nature and faculties of man. This was assumed undoubtedly to be the explanation of other systems, why not apply it to Christianity? The questions we have asked have then been, ‘Is it the adequate explanation of any system? Do not all demand another ground than the human one? Is not Christianity the consistent assertor of that higher ground? Does it not distinctly and consistently refer every human feeling and consciousness to that ground? Is it not for this reason able to interpret and reconcile the other religions of the earth? Does it not in this way prove itself to be not a human system, but the Revelation, which human beings require?’
‘Prove!’ you cry: ‘Yes, on paper! It is easy to prove many things about human creatures when you are not actually dealing with them. Assuredly, most easy. It was of this that the other clauses of Boyle’s Will warned me. They said very significantly, ’Your business is to urge upon your countrymen the duty of not proving Christianity upon paper; but of entering into actual intercourse with Jews, Mussulmans, Hindoos, Buddhists, for the purpose of shewing that it is a reality.’ Accordingly, I have never lost sight of this object. My questions have been, ‘How may we bring Christianity into contact with the actual convictions of these different people? How may we put it upon the broadest trial? Where have other instruments and appliances failed? for that is the point to which we would apply this. Where may it most certainly prove its inefficiency, if it be inefficient?’ In no case have I wished to disguise any apparent symptoms of its failure. I have entreated Christians and infidels to investigate these, that they may ascertain the causes of them. And lest you should fancy, from the view I took of these systems, that I was recommending some new method of dealing with them, which could only be learnt and applied after a long discipline, and at last would be scarcely adapted to simple ministers of the Gospel, I have endeavoured to shew you in this Lecture, that precisely the course I have suggested is that which the preachers of the Gospel in the first ages actually adopted, that our departures from it have arisen from want of simple faith; that the discipline we require is especially one to restore this faith. And lest, from what has been just said about the unity of Christians, you should conclude that I suppose missions to the heathen should be deferred till some indefinite time when the nations of Christendom can make a simultaneous assault upon the outlying world, I would remind you that my reference to the first ages, and to the successful missionary efforts of any subsequent age, precludes such a notion. What nation of the earth owes its Church to a simultaneous effort among nations or among men? If any one nation takes its stand upon its true ground as a member of that body whereof Christ is the Head, that nation becomes a witness to all Christian nations of their true Unity, if they care ever so little for it; that nation can fulfil its own task of vindicating the truths which its heathen subjects confess, by imparting to them the truths which they want, though all the other Christian nations should smile or frown upon its endeavours. Any Christian man who takes his stand upon the same ground of unity in the Church whereof Christ is the Head, who acts consistently with that position, fulfilling the office to which he is called, and not seeking some other to please himself, may become a witness in every land to which he goes of the fellowship into which his baptism has brought him; may in his words or life expound the principle of this fellowship; may shew how universal its privileges are, and how each may for himself partake of them.
But I know that there must be many on whom the often-repeated words, ‘There are heathens at our doors, we ourselves are half heathens; leave Buddhists and Mahometans till you have provided for these,’ will have an effect sufficient to destroy their interest in all such exhortations. One answer to these objections is well-known, and has been sufficiently used. If Englishmen did abstain rigidly from all intercourse with Mahometans, Hindoos, Buddhists, if no body of our countrymen were engaged in trading with other countries, or in conquering them, or in keeping possession of them, the interdiction of all spiritual communication might be judicious—at all events possible. But as the points at issue are, what kind of communication shall we hold with these people, what kind of help or protection shall we extend to them: if they are spiritual creatures, and as such must in some way be dealt with, then how? since this, I say, is the fair statement of the case, such appeals to our home sympathies seem rather capricious and rhetorical than benevolent or sensible. But this is not the only reply which is suggested by our particular circumstances; or which lies in the nature of the subject itself. A faith which boasts to be for humanity cannot test its strength unless it is content to deal with men in all possible conditions. If it limit itself to England, it will adapt itself to the habits and fashions and prejudices of England, and of England too in a particular age. But doing this, it never will reach the hearts of Englishmen. You say, ‘Try your Christianity upon the cotton-spinners of Manchester, upon the hardware men of Birmingham; if it fails with them, do you expect it will succeed in Persia and Thibet?’ But we know it will fail, it must fail in Birmingham and Manchester, if it address the people in those places mainly as spinners and workers in hardware. This has just been the mistake we have made. We have looked upon these ‘hands’ as created to work for us; we have asked for a religion which should keep the ‘hands’ in the state in which they will do most work and give the least trouble. But it is found that they are men who use these hands; and that which is a religion for hands, is not one for men. Therefore it becomes more evident every day that there is a demand in Manchester and Birmingham for that which, till we understand human beings better, we cannot supply. To acquire that understanding we need not grudge a journey to Persia or Thibet; we need not think it an idle task to inquire what the people want, who are not called to spin cotton or work in hardware, but who are creatures of the same kind with those who do. When thoughtful men say that a working age of the world is about to begin, they mean, I suppose, an age in which those essential qualities of humanity which belong to working men as much as to all others, shall be more prized than the accidents by which one class is separated from another. Most important is it then to ascertain whether we are holding a faith which addresses us as members of a class, a class of fine gentlemen, philosophers, divines, or any other; or one which addresses us as men, which explains the problems of our human life. Two centuries ago Boyle was led in deep anguish of spirit to consider that question for himself; for himself, and not I think without something of the like anguish, must each one of us consider it in this day. We are told that circumstances have changed, that our condition is a different one from his. Doubtless, the saying is true; circumstances are always changing; but the necessities of man’s being do not change. What was true of man generations ago, is true now. If our condition is different from that of men two centuries back, the difference is this: we are come nearer to the great crisis of all controversies, there is less power of hiding ourselves from realities amidst shadows and appearances. Thanks be to God that such a time has come, terrible as it may be to many, nay to all of us! For this is the time which will shew that His truth is not of man, neither by man; but that it is for man, here and everywhere. Only then when the grass withereth, and the flower fadeth, so speaks individual experience, so speaks the voice of history—is it known assuredly that the Word of our God shall stand for ever.
The End.