The illustrious poet to whom these Essays were dedicated had asked—
The wish, that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave;
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?
The old Theology of the Church, it was said, forbids this “larger hope.” But might not a Theology be found which is adapted to modern notions and feelings? Some, perhaps, were induced to read my book under the impression that I had produced a scheme of this kind. I am sure that if they were, they experienced a grievous disappointment.
I do indeed accept, with all my heart and soul, the belief that it is what is “likest God within the soul” which cherishes the poet’s amazing expectation. If men stood in no relation to God, if they did not feel, however faintly, that they were made in His image, that they may call him Father, it would seem the idlest of all fancies, either that mankind does form a “living whole,” or that each life has a preciousness and sanctity which He will acknowledge. But I cannot find that modern opinions—the current philosophies—give us any hint that we are related to God; that His image is stamped upon us; that we have a right to call Him Father. I do find all the warrants and pledges of our likeness to God, of our fellowship with Him, in the old Theology of the Bible and the Creeds. I strove in these Essays to assert the principles of that old Theology, and to set them in contrast with certain notions which have been grafted upon them, and which, it seems to me, are destroying our faith in them. If I did not accept the revelation of God in Christ—if I did not acknowledge the Redemption and Reconciliation of the World in Him— if I considered it a mere idle phrase that He had destroyed death—if I thought that He had not gone into the grave and to hell, and come back as their conqueror—if I was not convinced that He had sent His Spirit to dwell among men, and to bind them into one family— if I considered the Baptism into the name of the Father the Son, and the Holy Ghost, an empty formula, and the Communion of Christ’s body and blood a pledge of a victory which has not been won, and is not to be completed,—then the facts of Sin and Misery which I witness around me, which I feel within me, would be far too mighty for any dreams of a restoration which may sometimes visit me. Though I might own that these dreams were dear to that which is likest God within me, I must then yield them up to the voice which comes from what is likest the devil in me; from the depth of a despair for mankind and for myself. Knowing my own evil as I do not know that of any other man, how dare I think of a better fate for me than for my race? If God has shown no care for my race, if He has left it to perish, we must sink together. And, oh, how much deeper is the abyss which the conscience opens to a man, which it shows to be yawning for himself, than all the pictures of torments with which the most eloquent preachers have terrified for a few moments a few of their hearers! If the torments could be pictured, how much they would be abated. The undying worm is preying on thousands of hearts whose faces are merry. The unquenchable fire is burning within them. What is any talk of the future compared with this actual, present experience? If you dare tell men and women of One who has come to deliver them from this worm, to raise them out of this fire, they may welcome you as heavenly messengers, for are you not announcing that there is an escape from sin and the devil to Righteousness and God? But if all you can say to these men and women is, “Unless you believe what we tell you, God will keep you in hell for ever and ever,” they must understand the words to mean ‘God will keep you in Sin for ever and ever.’ Can these tidings have been brought from the region of life and purity? Must they not have ascended from the bottomless pit?
These Essays were not intended, as I mentioned in the introduction to them, primarily for those who accept the current dogma respecting the future state of the wicked; but for Unitarians who reject it. I grew up among them. I look back with reverence and thankfulness to many lessons which I learnt from them. But I cannot say that their teaching on this subject had the attraction for me which it might be supposed to have. It gave me a dreamy sense of something pleasant to be enjoyed somewhere after death; it stood in no relation with my experiences of inward evil, and of the evil which prevailed so mightily in the world. Unless I could find some link between our existence here and the promised bliss hereafter, it seemed to me better to face the problems of the world as I could—even if the unfathomable gulf which the popular divinity spoke of was the only solution of them—than resort to what I thought was a subterfuge for evading them. I saw, indeed, that a number of Unitarians had found in actual trust in a God without iniquity, and an enemy of all iniquity, what no vague anticipation of future felicity could have given them. It was a fact on which I have pondered since with great satisfaction. But it did not show me what ground I had for such trust, or how I could call on other men to exercise it. Not till I took refuge from their easy interpretations of the Universe, in those Creeds which they pronounced to be antiquated and absurd, did I find what gave me a valid ground of hope for me, for them, for all the children of men.
I am bound, however, to say, that in finding my way back to those Creeds, I derived much help from their instructions. Immensely valuable as I hold the Methodist preaching of the last age to have been, with the Evangelical movement in the Church and among the Dissenters which was the result of it,—utterly dead as I conceive the faith of the English Nation would have become without this rekindling of it— I cannot but perceive that it made the sinful man and not the God of all Grace the Foundation of Christian Theology. What help a man tied and bound with the chain of his iniquity could get to rise out of it was the question; all others were subordinate to that. When the modern Oxford School rose up in reaction against the school which had been born of this teaching, it spoke much of the Church, still more of the Church System. Its most devout champions laboured to show how much more might be done for the sinner by their processes than by those which the preachers of justification had made popular. No one of them recalled the minds of their disciples to the method of the Creeds—Apostles’ or Nicene. No one said, “See how all begins from the Father, goes on to the Son, finds its completion in the Holy Spirit.” On the contrary, some of the most eminent of them did more to invert this order than any of their predecessors. They said, some of them explicitly, most of them by implication, “We believe in the Father, the Son, and the Spirit because we have first believed in the holy Catholic Church. Without its authority we could know nothing trustworthy about God.”
Now, having learnt in the Unitarian school to feel and think first of the Father, that order which had been practically abandoned by both our leading Church schools commended itself to me as the reasonable and natural one. And having once felt that a Father could not be a mere name, could not be a mere synonym for “Creator,” that belief in a filial Word became necessary to me which had been exchanged by Unitarians for a mere human Christ,—retaining, possibly, the name of Son of God, and many of the associations which have been linked through ages to that name, retaining even a dangerous amount of the affection and worship which yet they said it was treason to bestow on any one not divine. Again; I perceived that the idea of Unity, which they had taught me to regard as of infinite worth, was in manifest peril—was always in hazard of becoming a mere name or the shadow of a name—unless there were such a fellowship between the Father and the Son as surpassed all other fellowship, and yet explained the meaning of all. The Unity in the Spirit appeared to me the Unity after which the Unitarian was seeking, which was haunting him continually; and yet which his theory compelled him always to exchange for a dead material conception—for a mere exclusive Unit.
I make these remarks which, in one form or another, I have sought for many years to impress on the few who have listened to me, because they will show how well-founded was one of the charges which was brought against these Essays when they appeared,—that there was no novelty in them. They were an effort, if ever so feeble an effort, by one who, when they were first published, was a professed teacher of Theology, to lead young men back to the principles of Christian Theology as they are expounded in its oldest forms. They were intended, unquestionably, for the generation in which they were written, not for some other generation. I have felt a little of what its struggles are. I hope I shall never cease to sympathise with them; shall never wish that I had been born into some other time, or could revive the fashions and modes which belong to some other. But the cry which I hear most loudly about me, which rings most clearly within me, is this: Has this Age any connection with the Permanent and the Eternal? Is there any link between our present, our past, and our future, in One who unites the past, the present, and the future in Himself? Is there an Eternal God? Has he made Himself known to us? Has He given us a right to trust Him now and for ever? These are the questions which I have discussed in these Essays. All other questions, I think, must be subordinate to them, and are nothing in comparison with them.
I have omitted in this Edition of the Essays a preface which was prefixed to the Second Edition. It alluded to circumstances which were of some interest to the public as well as to me at that time, but which have been long forgotten. Part of it was an answer to a very able criticism, in a review which has ceased to exist,—a criticism, I have reason to suppose, written by one who is now one of my most honoured and valued friends. I should be ungenerous and cowardly if I did not say that it also referred to the great kindness and manliness of another friend—the Bishop of Natal—of whom, however he may dissent from some of my strongest and deepest convictions, I hope never to think without gratitude and affection.
September 1871.