The Christian life

Front matter

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Preface

In the opening paragraphs of his powerful essay on Jonathan Edwards, Professor M'Dongall remarks on the too extensive diffusion of the idea that evangelical religion, in its strict, personal form, comports ill with solidity and compass of intellect. In a course of somewhat desultory reading, I was forcibly struck with the prevalence of this idea in- certain departments of our literature ; and it occurred to me that a statement of the Christian view of the individual character, together with a fair representation of the practical embodiment and working of that character in our age, might not be unattended with good. It was thus that the composition of the following chapters had origin. With the first idea certain others became gradually allied, and especially it seemed to me important that the position and worth of Christianity as a social and reforming agency should be, at least, in outline, defined. The twofold statement and delineation which I here attempt was the final result.

The first and third divisions of the general subject may seem not to bear a due proportion to the second. The disproportion is only apparent : if I may be permitted to speak somewhat pedantically, the relation between the three parts is that of stem, foliage, and fruit.

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The second part is biographic throughout : and in each of the Books into which it is divided, the working of the individual Christian life is intended to be represented. In the first of these, as I would have it specially noted, this hfe is manifested in the case of persons not extremely remarkable in an intellectual point of view, and who received their belief in the Christian Revelation in the natural way in which an accepted form of religion is transmitted from generation to generation, not through argument and unaffected by intellectual doubt : in the second, it is exhibited in the case of minds which will be allowed to belong to a high order, and in which the Christian faith became finally the pillar of character, only after having been more or less rocked in the wind of doubt. The first may meet the floating notion that Christianity is powerless with the popular mind : the second, that it has lost its grasp on thinkers.

In the First Book of the Second Part, I treat also, though not, as I have said, exclusively, of the manifestation of Christianity in social life. In order to unite this endeavor with the general biographic plan of the work, it was necessary that the men selected should be more or less representative of public movements or characteristics. They are so : yet I have not been able to attain here a symmetry to yield me satisfaction. I must beg the reader, however, to remark, that I refer only incidentally to what is strictly the national life — that which one nation has as distinguished from another — and that my object is the general structure of

PREFACE. V

tlie internal social economy. A man in private life may well enough represent or introduce a phase of this.

It was my idea and endeavor to represent the whole life of each individual of whom I spoke. I think that Mr. Carlyle has demonstrated, that a biography can be given in the compass of a review article : his essay on Burns I consider, in the full signification of the term, one of the most perfect biographies I ever looked into : and the highest success at which I aimed, in a literary point of view, was the introduction into Christian biography of certain of the methods of him whom I believe to be the greatest biographic writer that ever lived. My failure has been only not so complete as to hide itself from my own eyes.

My relation to Mr. Carlyle is twofold. The influence exerted by him upon my style and modes of thought is as powerful as my mind was capable of receiving : yet my dissent from his opinions is thorough and total. I believe that, without a grand rectification, his views must be pernicious in their every influence ; when Christianity gives them this rectification, I think they convey important lessons to Christian men and Christian churches. Whether the streams that flow from that fountain are to spread bliss or bale, depends upon whether there can be put into it a branch from the Christian vine : and this, since no better has attempted it, I endeavor to do.

Let it not be thought, however, that the following pages contain nothing but argument. Argument, indeed, does not very much abound. I endeavor to let

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facts speak In delineating the Christian life, moreover, one can never even approach truthfulness, if he regards only one aspect of character : Christianity, by hypothesis, makes all things new.

The book is popular in the sense that I desired its style to be such as would please all readers : but I must beg to state that, in the first part, I endeavor to lay the foundation on the deepest and most stable ground.

I have throughout abstained from quotation of book and page. The facts I state in connection with each man of whom I treat, are what might have been embraced in a pretty long re^dew article. I state my obligations to the authors of the several biographic works I have consulted : and it will be no unimportant result, if my essay should lead to a wider and more practical use of the valuable and varied materials afforded by our now rich literature of Christian biography ; from such a reservoir, streams might be led off to water many a particular field, and cause many a particular crop to grow.

In my first chapter, and in the first of the Second Part, I speak occasionally with a decision and succinctness which may seem somewhat assuming. I must excuse myself by saying, that I have almost entirely given results, and that I did not rashly satisfy myself of their soundness. I may mention that, in defining the nature of happiness, I do not mean to assert that the theory of Sir William Hamilton is identical with that of Butler, but only that they can be shown to harmonize.

Chapter I

In perusing The Tale of Goethe, a piece which is wonderful even among the works of that supreme literary artist, and which his worthy exponent and interpreter, Mr. Carlyle, has deemed, no doubt with perfect correctness, a picture, in the colors indeed of fantasy and dream, yet, to the seeing eye, nowise indefinite, of the whole future, attention can. scarce fail to be arrested by the destiny there appointed for the Christian religion. In the Temple of the Future, the little hut of the fisherman, to which former and darker generations had looked for aid in every great emergency of existence, still found a place. The light of reason entering in breathed through it a new life and an immortal beauty. " By virtue of the Lamp locked up in it, the hut had been converted from the inside to the outside into solid silver. Ere long, too, its form changed ; for the noble metal shook aside the accidental shape of planks, posts, and beams, and stretched itself out into a noble case of beaten ornamented workmanship. Thus a fair little temple stood erected in the middle of the large one ; or, if you will, an altar worthy of the temple." The whole passage, of which this forms a part, is perhaps the finest illustration to be found of a certain wide-spread and multiform intellectual phenome-

12 THE I ND I Y ID UAL LIFE.

non of our time. In the higher walks of modern literature, an attitude is not unfrequently assumed toward Christianity which, in these ages at least, is new. It is concluded by the serene worshiper of reason or of man, that the Christian religion may now be treated with that polite and complimentary tolerance with which a generous victor treats the distinguished prisoner whose sword he has huug on the side of his tent. We are told that Christianity is the highest thing man has " done," that it is the purest of earthly religions, that it has given voice to the deepest emotions in the human breast. Language, which reaches the gorgeousness, and force, and sweetness of poetry, has been woven into wreaths to crown it ; intellect, which, in the width of its domain and the greatness of its might, suggests comparison with the centrcil power of imperial Eome, has shrined it in a temple, or offered it a vassal throne. And how are Christians bound to receive the haughty condescension of all this praise ? They are not left without an example by which to shape their conduct; their fathers taught them how to act in still more trying circumstances. We have not forgot the ancient offers, tacit or express, which were made to the religion of Jesus, and the wrath which awoke on their rejection. It might have obtained a seat on Olympus, a niche in the Pantheon of the ancient world ; it might have sheltered itself under the wide wings, dropping gold and manna, of the Eoman eagles. That the Crucified of Jude^ should be deemed mightier than the Jupiter of the Capitol, that the words of a few fishermen were to be esteemed more worthily than the ancient voice of the Sybil, and the mystic whisperings of a thousand sacred groves ; this astonished and incensed the Pagan world, this cut to the heart the pride of Rome. But the declaration of the smitten Galileans was explicit and unchanging: the Gospel of Jesus is every thing or nothing ; if true at all, every god and oracle must absolutely vanish before it. Our answer now can be no other than that given of old. Christianity either lives a divine life or dies ; until the concession is made that it is divine, in no qualified sense but to the express intent that it came down from Heaven, no approximation is made to what it demands. It will not enter that temple, arrayed, as it is, in the still artisic beauty of Greece, which Goethe has reared for it; it either fades utterly, or that temple crumbles into the dust before it.

There are but three hypotheses on the subject of the existence of the Divine Being, and our relation to Him, which in our time deserve attention ; those of atheism, pantheism, and monotheism. Of the first of these, we do not now speak. The tone of unbelieving tolerance to which we have just referred, is used chiefly by the disciples of that great school of pantheism which originated in Germany in the last century, and the ramifications of whose influence, more or less disguised and modified, we think we can detect very widely in our present literature. Its principal philosophic representative in Germany was Fichte ; its greatest embodiment in our country is in the works of Mr. Carlyle. The former of these may be called its originator, although it is our strong impression from what we know of the Kantian philosophy, and from the fact that Fichte was at first a disciple of Kant, that its original suggestion was found in the self-contained and self-sufiicient law, the categorical imperative, of that philosopher. We do not intend to enter upon the exposition of this pantheism. We consider it now in one point of view, in application to one problem ; and we mean to evolve the essential points of its solution of this problem, in contrast with that which we purpose briefly to sketch, the solution offered by Christianity. This problem is the formation of individual character, or rather the procuring for its formation a vital principle and solid basis.

Long and careful study of the works of Fichte and Mr. Carlyle give us assured confidence in defining the essential starting-point and characteristic of Fichtean pantheism. It is . its assertion of the divinity of man. This is of course broad and explicit in the philosophy of Fichte. It is not so clear and definite in the works of Mr. Carlyle ; that great writer, although giving evidence of a powerful influence from Fichte, having experienced one still more powerful from Goethe, and having clothed his doctrines, not in the statuesque exactitude of philosophic terminology, but in the living language of men. It were, however, we think, difiicult to conceive a more perfectly worked-out scheme of pantheism, in application to practical life, than that with which Mr. Carlyle has furnished us, and its essential principle ever is, the glory, the worship, the divinity of man. In our general literature, the principle we have enunciated undergoes modification, and for the most part, is by no means expressed as pantheism. We refer to that spirit of self-assertion, which lies so deep in what may \ be called the religion of literature ; to that wide-spread tendency to regard all reform of the individual man as being an evolution of some hidden nobleness, or an appeal to a perfect internal light or law, together with what may be called the worship of genius, the habit of nourishing all hope on the manifestation of " the divine," by gifted individuals. . We care not how this last remarkable characteristic of the time be defined ; to us its connection with pantheism, and more or less close dependence on the teaching of that of Germany, seem plain, but it is enough that we discern in it an influence definably antagonistic to the spirit of Christianity.

The great point to be established against pantheism, and that from which all else follows, is the separate existence of a »^ Divine Being. We shall glance at the evidence of this in one of its principal departments — a department in which, we think, there is important work to be done — that of conscience.

There has appeared, in a recent theological work, what we must be bold to call a singularly shallow and inaccurate criticism of Butler's doctrine of conscience. It has been spoken of as depending on "probable" evidence, and certain problems which it enables us to solve are alluded to as momentous or insuperable difficulties. The former of these assertions seems to us plainly to amount to an absolute abandonment of what Butler has done, to a reduction of it to a nonentity or a guess. As Mackintosh distinctly asserts, and as might be shown by overpowering evidence, his argument is based on the " xmassailable" ground of consciousness — on that evidence which is the strongest we can obtain. Even the author of the Dissertation, however, has fallen into palpable error in treating of Butler ; and we must quote the following clauses from him, both to expose their inaccuracy and to indicate wherein consist that definiteness and that precision which the author to whom we first referred desiderates in Butler's masterly demonstration : — " The most palpable defect of Butler's scheme is, that it affords no answer to the question, ' What is the distinguishing quality common to all right actions V If it were answered, ' Their criterion is, that they are approved and commanded by conscience,' the answerer would find that he was involved in a vicious circle; for conscience itself could be no otherwise defined than as the faculty which approves and commands right actions."

Let us hear Butler : — " That your conscience approves of and attests to such a course of action, is itself alone an obligation. Conscience does not only offer itself to show us the way

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we should walk in, but it likewise carries its own authority with it, that it is our natural guide," &c.

This is quite sufficient. The supposed circle of Mackintosh is at once broken. To the question, What is the distinguishing quality common to all right actions 1 our answer is explicit : The distinguishing quality is, that they are approved and commanded by conscience ; and, we add, the word " right" is that by which, in common speech, the common consciousness recognizes them to be thus approved and commanded. To the question, What, then, is conscience 1 we answer. Not a faculty which approves and commands right actions, as if they were right before, and were enforced for some outlying reason, but one which claims a power, whether original or derived, to set apart certain actions, and stamping them with its approval, constitute them right.

In one sentence, we think, we can sum up what Butler has done in this all-important matter. His doctrine simply is, that, by the constitution of the human mind, the essential characteristic of conscience is its power supreme among the faculties to adjudicate on actions ; that the man who calmly interrogates consciousness, finds its declaration explicit, to the effect that refusal to obey the dictate of conscience is a denial of his nature.

Does this imply that man, by obeying conscience, becomes infallible ? On no conceivable hypothesis. It is right, in a matter of inductive reasoning, to consult the logical faculty, and not the imagination ; a man who substitutes the fantastic Jimning of the latter, beautiful indeed in its place and time, for the substantial chain-work of the former, outrages his nature. But do we therefore say that the understanding errs not in the search for truth '? or do we consider the fact that it does often and grievously fail, an argument for discarding it from its office, and giving the place to some other faculty ? Precisely so is it with conscience. The theory of its legitimate supremacy asserts not that it does not err ; but it affirms that, in all circumstances, it is the faculty to decide on duty. We hold this precisely with the same degree of tenacity with which we hold the conviction that, though reason may err, intellectual skepticism is intellectual suicide: conscience may not be infallible, but rejection of its authority is moral skepti cism, that is, moral death. Butler shows the highest point on which man can stand, in order, with his unaided powers, to see God ; but can we for a moment allege, that the author of the Analogy did not perceive the fact that this is but climbing to the top of a ruined tower, and that, though from its head w^e can see farther than from the plain below, the only hope for man is, that, gazing thence, he may see the dawning of the Sun of Righteousness 1

The above is, strictly speaking, all that Butler has done. The distinct and verbal testimony he bears to the fact that conscience naturally refers to God, is in itself of great value ; but it is of the nature of a testimony, not a proof; it has all the weight that the deliverance of the individual consciousness of one of the clearest and strongest thinkers that ever lived must be allowed to possess, but this is very far from equivalent to a demonstrative dictum of the universal consciousness. Morality he demonstrated : to godliness he bore witness.

The numerous expressions of agreement with Butler in his belief that conscience naturally spoke from God, can not b considered, more than his own, as constituting any such proof of the point as he offers for the supremacy of the moral faculty. Dr. Chalmers, perhaps the ablest of the writers who have thus recorded their assent, does, to an important extent, suggest the mode and indicate the materials of this proof j his refeience to the phenomena of remorse and self-complacency is a very valuable hint ; and his assertion of the fact that conscience points to the being of God as "with the speed of lightning," shows at least what has to be proved ; but even he makes no stated attempt to connect the truth he asserts with the consciousness of the race, and thus vindicate for it a place in that fortress whose assailing is the assailing of the possibility of truth. Perhaps the greatest achievement now possible in ethics is to connect indissolubly with the universal consciousness the fact that the moral faculty speaks by a delegated authority.

We shall not pretend here to draw out the demonstration which we believe to be possible. We shall merely oifer two considerations, without fully unfolding either. We think that the second admits of being shown to be of itself conclusive.

I. The human consciousness, as revealing itself in history, has borne witness to the fact that it is natural for man not to regard the voice of conscience as final. We here point to no particular system of belief ; we care not even though the name of the religion was pantheism. We point simply to that one fact, whose exhibition seems co-extensive with history, that the human race has not worshiped itself. There has ever been manifested an irresistible conviction that the phenomena of conscience were knit by a whole system of relations to somewhat beyond and external to the breast ; that their meaning and efficacy were thus essentially affected. Did remorse cause the soul to writhe in hidden anguish 1 The hecatomb was straightway piled, the altar smoked : some external power believed capable, in what way soever, of sending forth a gentle wind to calm and cool the troubled spirit, was appealed to. Did a feeling of mild satisfaction breathe through the breast, in the consciousness of duty performed or nobleness evinced 1 The present re-ward was not deemed exhaustive. Before the eye, resting afar, as on the still evening horizon of a troubled day, there beamed out softly the Elysian fields, with their tranquil rivers, on whose banks rested heroes, and their unfading flowers that breathed balm odors through the cloudless air. Every Pagan nation has had its mythology, and each mythology is essentially an attempt of the mind to shape out in visible form the several relations in which it believes itself to be joined with some external but invisible power. In one word, the conception of man as self-complete, as all in all to himself, as his own God, has been in all ages foreign to the mind of the race ; perhaps of no phenomenon could it be more confidently asserted that it is a universal habit of mankind, than of the tendency to associate internal monitions with some great external reality or realities.

II. This seems to be a necessary and demonstrable case of the action of the great mental law by which a cause is demanded for every effect. As if impressed by God with a necessity of bearing testimony to His existence, every thing within the realm of finitude, from Arcturus and the Pleiades to the tiny moss that clings to the ruined wall, presents itself to us with an irresistible power to compel reference to a cause. If we are to retain faith in mind, we must believe that, in the region of the finite, this urgent necessity has a significance. Now, if the voice of the moral faculty is heard by the human soul as final, it is the one phenomenon within the bounds of conception which claims exemption from this law ; it alone breaks the bonds of finitude. No such exemption can be pleaded ; as surely as a monition of conscience is a phenomenon, so surely does it impel the human mind to seek its cause. The great historical fact we noted is thus at once confirmed and explained. It is seen that it was a resist-

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less necessity which in all ages urged the human mind to seek its Deity without. We do not hesitate to go further. We think it would admit of being shown that the law here acts in its most express form, and with clearest suggestion of intent. All nature bears the stamp of its Maker ; but conscience names His very name.

The above proofs, w^e are well assured, admit of being elab orated into an irrefragable demonstration, that consciousnes: teaches us to refer the commands of the moral faculty to an external authority ; and if this is so, it will not be disputed that there is but One authority to which they can be thus referred. We conclude, then, that the doctrine of the delegated nature of conscience is grounded on evidence, of similar nature and like conclusiveness with that of its supremacy among our faculties : godliness is natural to man in the same sense as morality.

Pantheism is a theory of God, man, and the universe, which can not be denied to contain elements of great sublimity ] atheism can say nothing of the world, but that, for the living, it is a workshop, and for the dead a grave ; nothing of the soul of man, but that it is the action of organism, and that the possibility of its separate existence is a dream ; but pantheism, whether delusively or not, and at least in its popular representations, admits a theory of the world v/hich is sublime, and a theory of man which is exalted. When clothed in the chastened beauty of the language of Fichte, or wrapped in the poetic gorgeousness of that of Carlyle, these can scarce fail to awake enthusiasm ; and it is when, with express intention or not, such writers cast a passing glance of contempt on the apparently dead and rigid universe of one who refuses to say that the All is God, that an entrance is apt to be found for those general modes of thought which are of

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the nature of pantheism. It were well, therefore, to look fairly in the face the express or tacit assumption of the pantheist; to contrast, with all impartiality and calmness, his universe and his God with those of the Christian.

Ye make the great All a machine, say the pantheists, a dead piece of very superior mechanism ; the tree Igdrasil of the old Norsemen was better than that ; to look on the universe as godlike and god, how infinitely better is that ? Let us consider. One mighty tide of force filling immensity, its waves, galaxies and systems, its foam sparkling with worlds, one immeasurable ocean of life, swelling in endless billows through immensity at its own vast, vague will ; such is at once the universe and the God of pantheism. The pantheist is himself one little conscious drop in the boundless tide, in the all-embracing infinite. In the branching of the stars, this infinite rushes out ; in the little flower at your feet, it lives. In all the embodying of human thought — in the rearing of nations and politics, in the building of towered cities, in the warring and trading of men — it finds a dim garment ; in the beauties, and grandeurs, and terrors of all mythologies — the grave look of the Olympian King, the still and stainless beauty of the woodland Naiad, the bright glance of the son of Latona, the thunder-brows of Thor, the dawn smile of Balder — it is more clearly seen ; tRe beauty which is the soul of art — the majesty that lives from age to age in the statue of Phidias, the smile that gladdens the eyes of many generations on the perfect lip and in the pure eye of a Madonna by Raphael — is its very self You may look at it, you may, by effort of thought, endeavor to evolve it within you ; but the drop holds no converse with the ocean, the great rolling sea hears not the little ripple on its shore ; you can hold no converse or communion with your God ; your highest bliss is to cease individually to be, to sink into unconscious, everlasting trance.

What, now, do we behold, when we turn, with unsandaled foot, to look upon the universe and the God of Christianity ? An immensity, to the bounds of which, urge them never so wildly, the steeds of thought shall never pierce, thronged with ordered myriads of worlds, all willed into existence and ever upheld by a Being, of whom tongue can not speak or mind conceive, but who lit the torch of reason, who hears the voice of man, and whose attributes are dimly mirrored in the human soul. Endeavor to embrace the universe in thy conception; let thought take to it the wings of imagination, and imagination open the oceanic eye of contemplation ; view this stupendous illimitable whole. Then conceive God infinitely above it ; filling it all with His light, as the sun fills with its light the dewdrop ; as distinct from it as the sun is from the dewdrop ; to whom the countless worlds of immensity are as the primary particles of water composing the dewdrop are to the sun. Then add this thought: that He, around whose throne the morning stars for ever sing, to whom anthems of praise from all the starchoirs of immensity go toning on eternally from galaxy to galaxy, hears the evening hymn of praise in the Christian home, the lowly melody in the Christian heart, the sigh of the kneeling child ; and, when ""the little task of his morning sojourn on earth is over, will draw up the Christian, as the sun draws up the dewdrop, to rest on the bosom of infinite Love. Such is the universe, and such the God of the Christian, in what faint and feeble words we can image the conceptions. Is the universe of pantheism more sublime than this 1

We must, however, pause. We have, in the preceding sentences, not unallowably conformed to those general ideas of God which must float in the general intellect. But in order to show what Christianity here affords us, we must endeavor to define, with briefness, but precision, the ultimate idea of God at which philosophy can arrive. We shall not enter into any proof of the fact, that the human mind can not conceive the infinite ; that the sphere of thought is limited by the relative, the conditioned. We assume this point, or rather we accept regarding it, as what may now be considered final. Sir AYilliam Hamilton's demonstration. We shall agree with the declarations on this subject, which he cites as those of a " pious philosophy :" — " A God understood would be no God at all ;" " To think that God is, as we think Him to be, is blasphemy." The general intellect of the race has always sought for, and believed in, supernal power ; this grand characteristic may be affirmed of all nations and ages ; if some appearance of exception has been presented, it has been by no means of an extent or nature to invalidate the general evidence. This belief, however, has been either instinctive and imperfect or blind ; either accepted at the instinctive bidding of those laws which will not permit man to consider phenomena causeless, and finitude final, or the faint echoes received without question or examination, of an original revelation. The general idea formed in all ages of the Divine, has admitted of being analyzed into two components ; a personality either human, or strictly analogous to that of man, and a supplement of human power, beauty, and wisdom, by more or less skillfiil borrowing from those examples of force, loveliness, or design, which are manifested in nature, and were recognised to transcend human attainment.