My note-book; fragmentary studies in theology and subjects adjacent thereto

Front matter

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UNITED STATES OF AMEKICA.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Fragmentary Studies in Theology (I.) ... 1

II. Fragmentary Studies in Theology (II.) ... 27

II

FRAGMENTARY STUDIES IN THEOLOGY. II.

1. Reasonings like those contained in the preceding pages need to be enforced by the fact that we are set upon an intense strain of life here, anticipatory of a more intense sequel in an endless future. This allotment is not restricted to men of regal endowments who are created for great destinies. It is the common law of common life. Said an illiterate Catholic woman, speaking of a bereavement which had set her mind to thinking into the underground of her dim creed, " Such things make us see what we are here for."

That one hint from the Holy Spirit thrust underneath the forms of her Church touched the whole secret of the endless life. Science and philosophy in their most far-reaching adventures into the mysteries of providence make no more profound discovery. We are here, not only " to be, but to become" Everything made or done here is organized for migration. It is like the anatomical structure of birds of passage. Everything has wings.

2. We discover also a moral significance in that feature of suddenness, by which many dark phenomena in nature and in providence shock men into affrighted silence. Abruptness is an awful factor in probationary training. Men hear invisible monitors saying, " Be still and know that I am God." It is the only monition they can hear or heed. How fearfully is this illustrated in the annals of certain families ! Some homes are shadowed by tragic histories. Without herald, cold, cadaverous fingers have written on their walls.

3. In our modern civilization there is an unwritten discipline by the telegram. Do not afflicted men and women often forebode evil at the sight of one? Do not some who have been elected to a tragic experience, often say in the nightwatches, " After this, anything may happen ; nothing can be reserved in God's silence which is so shocking or so improbable as to take us by surprise"?

4. Family history sometimes undergoes a revolutionary change, like that which occurs in crises of a nation's life, in the displacement of civil law by martial law. After a long period of serene prosperity there comes suddenly an interval of rigor and desolation. The angel of the scourge alights at the door. Affliction follows hard upon affliction. The prattle of children is hushed at noonday. The beauty of young maidenhood is laid low. For years the habiliments of mourning are not laid aside. Yet sudden calamities, even a fleet-footed succession of them, may give to a human life its most central depth of meaning, as preliminary to an endless career of moral enterprise in other worlds.

5. One of the perils against which an undisciplined being whose destiny looks out upon unknown cycles, may need a protective discipline, is that of surprisal into apostasy from God. In this world sin often springs upon unconsolidated virtue from ambuscades of evil. Men are overborne by the spur of the moment. Who can tell what multiplied encounters of that kind may lie in the endless pathway of one whose loyalty is not compacted by a solidifying and protective discipline here? There as here God works by means. He begins far back in the infancy of being. Then as now the perseverance of the saints may be vitalized by moral forces accumulated in this life. That may be the thing which many of us "are here for."

6. Is it not obvious that future crises of moral peril will be met and mastered with most secure and concentrated virtue, by those who have been schooled into moral repose by events which have given a shock to their whole moral being ? Said an English colonel in India, " In the first charge of my cavalry in battle, I always tremble into courage and self-collection." So, a godly character, in some of those immortal types which men need to carry into Eternity, grows to its destiny there by means of such disciplinary shocks to moral inertia here. Their suddenness is the chief element in the discipline. Courage to give grows undei the blows it takes.

What other probationary devices, then, can give to character this reduplication of conscious strength more effectively than those which inject into life the catastrophic element of its training? This is a thing of which no man can know anything worth knowing but his own experience. It cannot make a transit from one man's life to another. Character can carry no trace of it into Eternity but thai which the man himself has lived through.

7. Real life discloses another fact from which reappears from another phase of rigor and necessity the moral value of the phenomena now under consideration, as probationary expedients. It is that some men do not work their way to any overmastering sense of God's existence till they have known what it is to be God-forsaken. In this, as in many other phases of moral growth, a sense of necessity generates a sense of reality. We have what we must have ; no more, and no other.

8. There is a supreme faith, which some have inaccurately defined as "the consciousness of God." More correctly stated, it is a conscious union with God, in sympathy with His thoughts and sensibilities and eternal purposes. It is an experience which often works by reactions. In one swing of the pendulum the occult force is generated which starts its opposite. Faith springs by a rebound from unbelief or from despair. It may grow, therefore, out of that moral solitude in which prayer creates only a sense of orphanage. God appears to have retired beyond the reach of suppliant voices.

9. Probationary schooling by that awful seclusion works directly into line with the necessities of certain minds. Its moral uses are sometimes disclosed in the training of elect spirits for elect services. In some cases it is the training which discovers the election. Men are put upon the track of their life's mission by the strain laid upon them in the discipline preparatory to its achievement. Pre-eminent saints and elect forerunners have often commenced their careers under a crushing sense of personal abandonment by God. They were orphans in a desolate universe before the Fatherhood of God illumined their pathway.

10. The two great departments of theological thought, — those of natural and of revealed religion, — in the general trend of many of their teachings, lie on substantially parallel lines. At certain points of proximity, the one crosses over into the domain of the other. Especially is it true, that the grandest and toughest inquiries of natural theology find their most luminous responses in the disclosures of Revelation.

11. Such is the fact in the case here brought under review. The consciousness of the loss of God is created by some of the most common varieties of affliction. The discipline suggests an opportunity for a solemn and tender fellowship with Christ. This may be the prerogative of all believing souls who are called to an exceptional intensity of trial. Our crucified Lord endured the discipline in question in an extreme unequalled in any other human sufferer. He could not otherwise compass the culmination of His atoning pains. He could not find it in His heart to say, in the dawning consciousness of the reward set before Him, " It is finished ! " till He had first passed through that blackness of darkness in which all that He could say of filial trust in His Father and ours was that climax of all human anguish, "My God! My God ! Why hast Thou forsaken Me ! "

12. Probably no other problem suggested by the mysteries of evil in the Divine government presses with such cold, leaden weight upon the popular thought as that of the inquiry, " Where, under the law of non-intervention, is the place for prayer ? "

Everywhere. The law of non-intervention does not abrogate the law of prayer. The concealments and silences of God do not restrict the range of its operation. Whatever will explain any instance of unanswered prayer will explain every instance which to human vision appears to occur in consequence of Divine seclusion. Like every other law, that of non-intervention is but one of the expressions of Divine decree. It covers only those probationary experiences which are foreordained by the will of God. Moral solitude is one of His chosen conditions of moral trial. He is no more oblivious of its working than of that of the law of gravitation by which the sparrow falls. Nor is there any more mystery in its phenomena than in those of the laws which fix the orbits of the stars.

13. To the popular mind the most transparent conception of the relations of prayer to Divine decrees may be founded on the image of the Divine government as a network of laws. To human vision laws run parallel with laws. Laws cross and recross the grooves of laws. There is a Law r of Light, which regulates its undulations to the frontiers of the stellar universe. So is there a Law of Prayer, by which as grandly and as benignantly and as far away in the stretch of human thought, God adjusts His responses and His silences, His self-disclosures and His concealments. Each and every one is His eternal purpose. The innumerable reticulations of their interplay are but the rhythmical utterances of His will. Not one controverts another. Not one tangles or suspends another, even in appearance, but at His bidding, and for reasons infinite which make it seem good in His sight.

14. There is an illusion in practical astronomy which may serve to illustrate the complication of laws with laws in the administration of the Divine government. To the naked eye the orbits of the stars seem to cross and recross each other at angles and right angles, which bring them into perilous convergence. To an inexpert observer it would appear that contradictory attractions must bring on abrasions and jostlings and collisions. The heavens, as they look on an astronomical map, appear as if they must some day be crowded with the wrecks of dislocated worlds. A cyclone in the sky, in which Orion and Cassiopeia and the Pleiades should be hurled crashing and ablaze into chaotic space, is not an impossible catastrophe. One touch of retributive decree upon the law of gravitation might bring it to pass. Yet the sidereal universe moves in such exactest order, that no sign of minutest friction even has appeared from the beginning until now.

15. The explanation is that the stars are not located on one extended plain as they appear on a celestial map. Some are at such unmeasured distances in the rear of others, that immense spaces intervene between them, when to our vision they are less than one inch asunder. There is and can be no foreclosure of orbit upon orbit, and no ejection of planets from their spheres till the heavens shall be rolled together.

16. Every Autumn witnesses a beautiful illustration of this astronomical fiction. To the naked eye the planets Jupiter and Venus appear to be approaching each other. Evening after evening the intervening space is abridged by instalments till it dwindles to a cipher. Yet at the hours of their nearest approximations the actual astronomical distance between them varies from four hundred and thirteen millions to five hundred and forty-seven millions of English miles. Ample space this, it should seem, for morning and evening stars to come and go without perilous intervolution of their orbits or dislocation from their places.

17. This is a sufficiently accurate emblem of the complication, which is not contradiction of laws with laws, and of decrees with decrees, in the administration of the moral world. The look of contradiction is an illusion. It is caused by a foreshortening of perspective by our contracted range of vision. Ultimately it grows out of the contrast of the magnitude of God with the littleness of man.

18. We flee therefore when no man pursueth if we are intimidated by discoveries of science which the wise men tell us leave no room for prayer. Just as unreasonably do we quake at the shocks and heavings of natural forces against the moral decrees of God. It is yet to be proved that a cyclone cannot be forestalled by believing prayer.

19. When the question confronts us, of conflict between spiritual and material powers, both acting by laws which are the very breath of God, we need to be very intelligent in our wisdom or very modest in our assertions. The wise men are neither, when they assure us that they have risen in their might, and have driven prayer beyond the confines of a respectable universe. We ourselves are neither, when we are scared out of the birthright of Christian believers, by mysteries of evil, and shocks of suffering which we do not comprehend.

20. Suggestions of an overruling Mind in human history are found in the concealments of Nature and of Providence.

The hiding of the American continent till a new world was needed for the further development of the race ; the concealment of certain metallic mines till the financial resources of commerce required their discovery; the burying of anthracite and petroleum till other means of artificial heat and light were approaching the point of exhaustion ; the silence of the clouds respecting the occult forces of electricity, till near the time when mechanical invention rose to a level with the discovery; England's ignorance of the value of her coal and iron mines, till they became indispensable to her advancement to imperial rank as the bulwark of Protestantism and of civil liberty ; the delay of the manufacture of paper from the pulp of vegetable fibre, till the time when the practical value of the art of printing depended upon it, — these are signs of a comprehensive and far-reaching plan of history. It antedates and outlives the forecast of any human mind.

21. Wise men have often observed the singular marriage of invention to discovery, and of discovery to invention ; sometimes the one and sometimes the other being the senior in the order of time — but without which in union, human progress would have suffered a deadlock. Discovery stimulates invention with prophetic forecast. Every great epochal event in history is brought out of the arsenal of the ages by a law of predestination. It comes when it must come. It is as if "He who made the lock knew where to find the key."

22. To conceive and to execute such a plan of critically significant events and agencies and combinations must have been the work of some other intelligence than that of man. William Pitt, when he heard of the victory of General Wolfe on the " Heights of Abraham," said, " The more a man is versed in the history of nations, the more he sees of the hand of an overruling Providence everywhere." A devout student must observe the same in the discoveries of science and the history of invention. Man has executed them, but some other Mind than that of man has timed them.

23. Supernatural agency in human affairs is forcibly suggested by the mysterious supremacy of right over wrong. We often reason as if this were an intrinsic necessity in the nature of things. Where is the evidence of that? Who has ever proved it ? In a world which has lapsed into sin, the very contrary is the " nature of things." By the innate law of character, by which it perpetuates itself, and reduplicates its forces, in such a world as this, the wrong should rise and the right go down. Such is the drift of moral gravitation. Character once set on a downward plane has in itself no recuperative force for a return. What it is, it will be, till remedial power controls it from without.

24. Yet, on the grand scale of trial, right is never defeated, but by a colossal inequality of numbers and resources. In the wrestlings of races, if it has anything like an equal chance, right never goes under. Moderate majorities never crush it. Reverses never put it out of average. It has become one of the axioms of reform, that God works with minorities. In the conflicts for human liberty, and the rise of despised races, right has always triumphed with a minority behind it. When majorities come to its support, they consist largely of reluctant multitudes, who are drawn over to it by the suction of events. They come to its defence when it needs no defence. They do not support it — it supports them.

The most philosophical solution of the paradox is the Christian disclosure of a remedial system which brings supernatural powers into secret alliance with men in the execution of the purposes of God. Our mundane atmosphere is thronged by them. But our eyes are holden that we may not see them.

25. The same truth is more signally suggested by what are called " the fortunes of war."

Why is it that of all the great operations of men in masses of physical potency war is the most uncertain ? Why do victories occur in defiance of all visible probabilities ? Why is it that Providence, so often, is not on the side of the strongest battalions ? Why do reverses often contradict all calculable chances ? Why do panics make cowards of veteran brigades ?

The science of war gives no satisfactory solution of such problems. The great Captains of all ages have confessed the insoluble mystery, unless Napoleon, who exalted the " strongest battalions," is an exception. Yet no hero in military history was a more conspicuous illustration of the truth than he. He declared at St. Helena that the most astounding surprise in his career was the failure of the campaign in Russia. At Dresden, on his march to Moscow, when a half-million of soldiers, the majority of them veterans, were at his command, he said that every military forecast of events gave him assurance of success. By the laws of war, which had been the study of his life, it was impossible that he should fail. Why did he fail ?

26. No other hypothesis explains the class of events to which the contradictions of the " fortunes of war" belong, so philosophically as the biblical theory of the intervention of supra-mundane auxiliaries, who march under orders unheard by us. Our atmosphere is a non-conductor to the sound of their movement.

27. The first thing which shook the confidence of Napoleon in his " strongest battalions," after crossing the Russian frontier, was the devout tone of the intercepted despatches of the enemy, and of the appeals to the Russian soldiery. The recognition of other than human allies was a factor in the problem for which the Napoleonic theory of war had made no provision. The destruction of the hosts of Sennacherib between the evening and the morning twilight — a hundred and eighty-five thousand strong — was of a piece with countless phenomena in military history, which no other force accounts for but that of the " Angel of the Lord."

28. The triteness of the beauty of the material universe renders us insensible to the symbolic testimony which it gives to the moral perfections of God. The blunt antagonism between right and wrong might have been symbolized by things repulsive and uncanny. The rectoral and retributive goodness of God is symbolized by volcanic fires and the tragic severity of the laws of nature. But the holiness of God has a serene beauty which demands more tasteful emblems. It could not have been inscribed on a world destitute of colors. Heavens void of stars could not have expressed it. Benignant virtues require for their emblematic painting things of exceeding loveliness in earth and sky. The wondrous exuberance of God's benignity demands a corresponding profusion, even an apparent waste, of things fascinating to eye and ear.

29. We find that in this mood God has created the heavens and the earth. Tropic flora, cascades, and rippling brooks, sunsets, and the dawn of morning, humming-birds and orioles, and a constellated firmament are the natural concomitants of a world which is the handiwork of One whose name is Love. The fitness of things is specially witnessed in the fact that the most significant symbols of His character are the most common.

We do not have to search for them in the arcana of science. They are not stored in cabinets of natural history. The very clouds over our heads on a summer day can scarcely take on other configurations than those which artists love to paint. The smoke from the chimneys of our winter homes assumes the form of spiral wreaths, the beauty of which poets sing. The winning attributes of God require and receive for their symbolic utterance a magnificent and ornamented globe which the sun gilds and the moon silvers, and the stars greet. One such vision of His glory as that of Jungfrau at sunset, as seen from Interlaken, gives one an emblem of His benevolence, which lives in memory forever.

30. Agnostic educators do not appreciate the loss they inflict on the culture of the young by eliminating from its moral elements the idea of a personal God. As a power developing and uplifting the human intellect, what other conception within the range of human thought is its equal ? What other idea puts significance, as this does, into the phenomena of natural science ? Without it, moral science does not exist. Nothing else philosophically interprets human history. Nothing else so magnifies and ennobles literature. The great bulk of human libraries, so far as their educating power over the human intellect is concerned, is nullified when the idea of a personal God is expunged. No act of vandalism is so frightfully destructive to the interests of culture as that of uprooting the natural faith of childhood in the Divine existence. The conflagration of the Alexandria Library was but a spark in the comparison.

31. Our age deifies its material prosperity. We stand in awe, almost up to the level of worship, before the marvels of invention and discoverj r . Wise men put them in a nut-shell by saying that all that civilization had achieved for the welfare of mankind before the last fifty years, does not equal its triumphs during this half-century. Measured on the scale of material advancement, it may be true. But the real civilizing forces which have made the world what it is to-day are not such things as steam and electricity. We are not civilized by our command over the law of gravitation. Nations are not made great by Atlantic cables and Pacific railroads. The civilizing powers in all history are Ideas, not things. Of these the regnant forces are religious ideas; and of these the one supreme power is the idea of a personal Creator. A soldier in Cromwell's army struck the keynote of everything in history which lives and wears, when he said, " The best courages are but beams of the Almighty."

32. A large literary assembly happened to be convened at a semi-centennial anniversary on the day on which the tidings reached this country that the first Atlantic cable had brought an intelligible message from the eastern to the western shore of the ocean.

Mind had at last traversed three thousand miles of the under-world of the sea without sail, or steam, or keel to navigate it. At the word, the entire audience sprang to their feet. At first, cheers rent the air. But the sober second thought of the whole assembly was the request that a venerable clergyman who was present should lead them to the throne of grace in prayer. The idea which lies back of every great causal fact or event in the history of civilization is the idea of God. Well is it for human culture that the Theistic instinct of the race is so obstinate in its demand for a personal God. Literature and philosophy are beneath the average of civilized thinking when they blink the idea of personality in their notions of a Supreme Being. In such repudiation of spiritual cognitions wise men take a long stride toward barbarism. The popular mind of any civilized people is wiser than they.

33. To a working theology in the pulpit, certain elements are indispensable. They are freedom from self-contradictions ; consonance with the intuitions of the human mind ; a comprehensiveness which shall forbid omissions of essential truth ; a perspective of doctrine which shall give pre-eminence to Christian ideas as related to those of natural religion or those of the Old Testament; harmony with the Scriptures as a whole, and as the intelligent popular mind reads them ; and statement in such forms as shall carry intense convictions corresponding to the necessities of a mind awakened to the exigency of sin.

34. The initial fact in all theology, as it is in all religious thinking which is truthful in its adaptations to human life, is the fact of sin. The consciousness of sin is an intense experience. In the order of time it is probably the first development of conscious moral being. Man first knows himself as a subject of moral government in the intuition of his moral sense that he is a sinner. In the order of nature, that intuition is intensified by time. The process of deliverance from it involves immeasurable cost in suffering and death. Praise for recovery from it is ecstatic. Therefore the forms of faith which shall meet the conditions of the Christian pulpit must carry the most profound and exalted ideas which the human mind can conceive. Such the redemptive ideas are, in their full significance.

35. Theology adjusted to the uses of the pulpit emphasizes a quadrilateral of doctrines which intensify each other, and give character to all the rest which enter into the system of Christian beliefs. These are the depravity of man as the Gospel finds him; his exposure to retributive suffering in a future life ; the necessity of his regeneration by influences of the Holy Spirit ; and the dependence of pardon as a judicial act of the Divine government, upon the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ. A preacher's personal faith in any one of these will measure his working faith in the rest. The intensity of his faith in them all will measure the force of his ministrations as a whole. In the popular thinking they need to be held in an equilibrium which shall make each an auxiliary to the others. Essential error can scarcely find a lodgement in the popular theology if this equilibrium is kept intact.

36. Errors, like truths, grow and decay in the religious convictions of a people, in clusters. A single error is never long insulated. Its cognate group is soon developed. That the germ of a system of beliefs is an error, sometimes is not proved except by its reproductive affinities with kindred errors. A belief, like a man, is known by the company to which it gravitates. New ideas in theology may be tested by the reception given to them by the enemies of the old. When alleged improvements of an ancient faith are greeted with loud applause by its hereditary opponents, and gratulations on deliverance from bigotry fill the air, those improvements are probably illusive. Prove all things ; hold fast that which is good.

37. When an ancient faith is caving in, the most sagacious judges of the drift of opinion are often found among those who have long watched the old faith with an evil eye. They know by heart the process of transition from the old to the new. The snapping of ancient ties is familiar to them. The pioneers in a revolution of opinion are apt to be very honestly insensible of the tendencies they have evoked. The ultimate developments surprise and grieve them.

38. This was affectingly illustrated, if report be true, in the mental history of the Chief of the Unitarian defection from the popular theology of New England. Dr. Channing was a man of transparent mental integrity. His theology was not of speculative origin. Professor Stuart, his chief opponent in the controversy of the times, revered him as a devout believer to whom the faith he held was a life. It was not possible for such a man to wander from the faith of his fathers in a somnambulistic dream. Every step of the way was doubtless trodden in tears. He lived long enough to discover the ultimate extremes to which the revolution he had evoked was rapidly hastening. And if common fame spoke truth, his closing years were clouded by the vision.

39. When a great truth is dislocated from its socket in the popular theology, the danger of its absolute and final overthrow is proportioned to its intrinsic dignity. It is as if one should pry up a boulder on the summit of a mountain and send it bounding to the valley. The velocity of its descent is proportioned to its weight. So of an imperilled doctrine in the faith of a people ; the more massive it is, the more potent are the forces which must be set to the work of lifting it from its place. Therefore the more sure is its fall, and the more disastrous is the ruin which its fall evokes.

40. It is remarkable with what unerring aim a false departure in theology, starting anywhere, reaches the central doctrine of the atonement in the sweep of its forces. Error achieves no fatal ruin till it gets possession of that citadel of the faith. Consequently, begin where it may, its march thither is prompt and swift. The chief object for which men need a faith is to determine the problems which the experience of sin creates, and the atonement of Christ solves. A tangent in theology, to reach its resultant, must pursue that line in its divergence.