Regeneration

Front matter

RBI

Wt

EI

Part II. The Spiritual Nature

Chap. I. The Holy Spirit ....

n. Its General and Special Influence

HI. Spiritual Influence

IV. The Primal Innocence

V. Light in Darkness ....

VI. Distinctions .

VH.

18 29 36 40 46 52 59

67 . 73

. 89

1*

Q CONTENTS.

Part III. The New Man

. 121 Chap. I. Regeneration

lOD

H. Choice

III. The Books opened

IV. The Books opened . •

1 61 V. The Books opened

VI. Another Book opened .

VII. Conflict and Victory

VIII. The Mediator 2Qg

IX. Gethsemane ...

214 X. The Atonement

XI. New Heavens and a New Earth XII. Retrospect and Prospect

. 244 XILI. Vistas

INTRODUCTION

No higher question can be offered to the human intellect, than that of the method of salvation by- Jesus Christ. Its unmeasured importance is obvious to us, whenever in contemplative mood we open the pages of the New Testament, and find that a splendid apparatus of means has been provided ; for we know that this would not have been done unless momentous interests were at issue. These two questions, What are we ? and Whither do we tend? will at times press painfully upon thoughtful minds, and demand an answer. Ideals of a bettei state are haunting them, and producing within them unutterable longings after peace.

There are three topics which cannot fail to command the interest and attention of those whose minds are revolving the great problem of life : —

The evil, depravity, and suffering involved in the human condition; the darkness that broods upon the earth and upon our own spirits.

Conceptions of a better state; dreams of perfeco INTRODUCTION.

tion, visions that come in shapes of unearthly beauty, floating out of a purer ether, and giving us gleams of a better world.

The way that lies out of one condition into the other, out of the darkness into the light, out of storms to the haven of Happier Isles ; in short, the method of salvation.

These are the topics which . we now approach, and we do it in the persuasion that they underlie all our business and all our theologies, and that, though they have occupied so much of human thought, yet they never pressed more urgently upon the common mind than now. The old theologies do not satisfy. They do not answer these questions. They do not so much give light, as hang in the way of it. And yet, because they are gradually changing and softening like convolving clouds, and reflecting new, though ever-varying hues, they show that the light is coming, and that they are finally to break away. Meanwhile let us use the light already shining, and that will be a preparation for more.

The theme we have in hand will lead us to discuss the following topics : the state of man by nature, his spiritual capacities, his regeneration and the means of it. If any of our reasonings should seem to lie remote from our beaten paths of inquiry, or if they should not sound like the traditional utterances of denomination, we would beg the reader to consider whether they may not be just as worthy of his attention. All sects are liable to

INTRODUCTION. U

fall into provincialisms of thought ; to sink the language of the universal Reason into a corrupted dialect ; and so it is better, if possible, on such themes as these to rise above sect and take our stand outside of it, haply if we may stand on those sublimer heights, where we may catch the clearer responses of the Divine word. In the following pages, therefore, we propose to leave behind the old controversies, except so far as to be intelligible, and so far as is necessary to show the truth in bolder outline by its juxtaposition with error.

Impressed with the solemn magnitude of these themes, we approach them in reverent and listening mood,

Part I. The Ancient Desolations; The Ruins Of Many Generations

Isaiah lviii. 12.

" These are ruins indeed ; but they proclaim that something noble hath fallen into ruin, — proclaim it by signs mournful yet venerable, like the desolations of an ancient temple, — like the broken walls and falling columns and hollow sounds of decay that sink down heavily among its deserted recesses." — Dewey.

Chapter I. Theories

" If our native propensities are themselves a sin, then the conclusion seems to be plain and inevitable, that God is the author of sin ; not merely that he has made beings who can commit sin, but that he has made beings a part of whose very nature, as it comes from his hands, is sin I am unwilling to plunge into the

yawning gulf which is laid open by such a process of thought." — Professor Stuart.

The actual state of man by birth and by nature is a question still involved in the controversies of the schools. To turn aside to these would divert us from our main object ; and fortunately this subject can be taken out of the province of polemics, and brought to the test of sober fact and reality. We will only allude, then, to the theories of the sects, so far forth as to give precision and completeness to the argument. With some variety of statement and confusion of coloring^ where different creeds shade off into each other, we shall find in the main that the prevailing theologies on this topic fall asunder into three forms.

The first form is this, — that man comes into being burdened with hereditary guilt, inclined to all evil by the original bend of his faculties, and capable of no good until God by a sovereign act creates him anew. But iest we should misrepresent this form of belief, we prefer to state it in its own language, which lacks nothing in strength and clearness. The Westminster divines say : —

" The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity, all mankind descending from him by ordinary generation sinned in him and fell with him in his first transgression.

" The sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell consists in the guilt of Adam's first sin, the want of original righteousness, and the corruption of his whole nature, which is commonly called original sin, together with all actual transgressions which proceed from it."

Another standard of faith states the doctrine thus : —

" By this sin they [the first parents] and we in them fell from original righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.

" They being the root and by God's appointment standing in the room and stead of all mankind, the guilt of their sin is imputed, and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation.

" Every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression of the righteous law of God, and contrary thereunto, doth in its own nature bring guilt upon the sinner, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God and curse of the law, and so made subject to death, with all miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal." *

* Ratio Discipline. Confession of Faith, Chap. VI.

THEORIES. 15

We confess to a shudder of the nerves when copying these words, which we do chiefly to make our statement exhaustive. We are apt to confound truth with error under the fog of indefinite language. It is a great deal better to lay them side by side, stripped of all the fine gauze which a more modern fastidiousness would weave around them, that each may be seen in its sharpest individuality. Then Christians would better understand each other, and the unwary would not be beguiled.

We find a difficulty in framing an argument against the theory of man here drawn out. An argument starts from premises that are self-evident, and proceeds to conclusions that were not. But we could not start with any thing more obvious than the axiom, that no man is guilty for what took place before he was born. We could not get back to any premises more self-evident than the absurdity which these propositions start with. They begin where reasoning generally ends. The result of a reductio ad absurdum, which generally comes out at the end of a demonstration, they put at the beginning as a truth assumed. How unprofitable, then, this whole controversy ! How much better for the parties rather to cease from their logic and examine in a friendly way their logical machinery, if perchance they may find whose it is that is so out of joint, that in the moral calculus it refuses to give the result that two and two make four !

There is another reason why it is not worth while to enter on this branch of the subject. Pleasing omens already indicate that this form of belief is ceasing to become active. We lay it off, then, in the persuasion that it is taking its place among the fossilized remains of a former theologic world, which old convulsions had turned up and left bare' to our wondering and curious gaze.

There is another view which may briefly be stated thus. Men, as they now come into the world, are in the same moral state in which the first man was created. His sin affected no one but himself; and human nature is not changed by the fall. The farther we trace the stream of life towards its beginning, the purer we find it, and with every one it is perfectly pure at the period of infancy. Man's true culture, then, is the development of his powers from within outward, under such external aids as this probation affords. "What is corrupt comes to him from without, from wrong education, from vicious example, from the influence of a bad state of society. He starts in life entirely disconnected with the past, and has only to choose the good or the evil that is offered him.

This theory of man, which " cuts the thread of history from behind us every hour," is here stated very nearly as it came from the lips of its reputed framer,* and with some modifications and additions it has maintained its integrity for ages in the progress of human opinion. Its history has run nearly parallel with that of the doctrine first described, perhaps

* See the account of the system of Pelagius, Murdock's Mosheim, Vol. I. p. 371.

THEORIES. 17

sometimes borrowing from it a darker tinge than its own, or a clothing from its mystic phraseology. May we suggest that it is a survey of human nature only upon the surface, without sounding its mystic and troubled deep ? Hence those who adopt it so often recede from it as the mysteries that lie within successively reveal themselves. Hence a church formed around this as one of its central principles will seldom retain that class of minds whose habits of thought are ascetic or introspective, or whose deep and surging sensibilities demand some potent voice to guide and to soothe them, some light to explain their dark and terrible on-goings. Its recruits come from the side of the world; not from those who had before left it, and are passing on to deeper experiences.

The first theory so merges the individual in the species, that he is there lost and buried in one solid and gloomy mass of corruption, and the sin of one man was the sin of all. By the last it is resolved back into that extreme individualism which admits of no unitary life, but makes it exist in fragments or in endless and independent atoms. Does this last meet the facts of history, of consciousness, of revealed truth, better than the other ? Does it meet the demands that come up from the profounder depths of human nature itself? We shall see, while, having done with the negative side of the question, we now advance to the positive.

CHAPTER, II.

HEREDITARY CORRUPTION.

" Though all animals be fitted by nature for the life -which their instincts teach them to pursue, naturalists have learned to recognize certain aberrant and mutilated forms, in which the type of the special class to which they belong seems distorted and degraded And now, in the times of the high-placed human

destiny of those formally delegated monarchs of the creation whose nature it is to look behind them upon the past and before them with fear and mingled hope upon the future, do we not as certainly see the elements of an ever-sinking state of 'degradation which is to exist for ever, as of a state of ever-increasing perfectibility to which there is to be no end ? " — Footprints of the Creator.

There is a distinction, obvious to any one, between original sin and original propensities to sin; between hereditary guilt and hereditary evil. Man is guilty for what passes into wrong action through his free volitions ; for what is wrong in his volitions, but not for what is wrong in his original structure. He is guilty, not for the wrong dispositions he inherits, but for the wrong dispositions which he admits into his own voluntary life; not for the depravity that was innate, but for the depravity that passes into conduct. His original moral constitution, whether good or bad, he could not control any more than he could control the color of his complexion ; and he is no more responsible for the one than the other. Hence the obvious distinction between a nature which is sinful and a nature which is depraved.

Putting theories aside, we now come to the stern facts of experience and history. "We must take these, not as we would have them, but as we find them. Hereditary sin or transmitted guilt is an idea which cannot be conceived without conflict of thought, or expressed, but in terms of self-contradiction.

But transmissive dispositions, and proclivities to evil, coming- doivn along a line of tainted ancestry, and gathering strength and volume on their way by every generation that transmits them, is a fact that is universal, and so an irreversible laiv of human descent.

In unfolding the evidence of this proposition, let us commence with statements of a general nature, which challenge universal assent, and whose truth is open to the eyes of all.

"What, then, is the actual condition of the race ? Taken in the mass, it lies in spiritual darkness, each generation receiving from the past its gloomy superstitions and horrid idolatries. A race in its true condition, not less than a family or a state, would form a certain organic whole. It would be a family of nations, society in its grandest form, and that a form of beneficence, taking up every people and every tribe into one circulatory system of benefits and blessings, that poured life and happiness from all to each and from each to all. Diplomacy, trade, commerce, would form a grand system, that kept girdling the globe with charities, or perhaps rather the arteries and veins that kept sending life into all the members, and bringing it back. Instead of this, the nations and peoples are fallen asunder ; we debate whether they belong to the same species ; each is parted off to its solitary darkness and its bloody customs, and they present the spectacle of the fragments of a mighty ruin.

But survey the fragments themselves, and what do we find? Each organized around its favorite falsehood, or else disorganized altogether, as is the case with the savage tribes. They present the spectacle of class preying upon class, the weak lying as victims to the power of the strong. If you choose to except the Christian nations, which are no exceptions at all, yet remember that three fourths of the world lie under the night of barbarism, and need, not merely improvement, but re-creation out of chaos. And let us remember that the mission of Christianity was not development^ but reconstruction* Its history would show how slowly the work is done. A distinguished statesman of the last century declared that the history of nations was a record of wrongs, and that the offices of kindness which one nation had rendered to another would not fill ten pages of its annals. The signs of a better day which now appear would mitigate, but hardly reverse, his judgment.

Now we must not look exclusively at the individual virtues that bloom out among every people. We must survey human nature through its grand organizations, and accept the fact that evil and wrong are not functional, but organic also. And we must also

* Isa. lx.; Rom. viii. 19-22; Isa. lxviii. 12.

remember that we are surveying a race of which we ourselves are members, and that our judgment is exposed to the sway of its corruptions. Could we rise out of it, and survey it from a point outside ; could we look down upon it with an angel's eye, from some mild-beaming and sinless planet, and take into one view the bloody march of its history, though we might not say with Mr. Burke, that this earth is the " bedlam of the solar system," we should certainly allow that it lay in wickedness, and that we surveyed the moral ruins of an apostate world.

Passing on to a view not quite so general, we come to the fact that the human species fall into divisions of races, and that each race has its own peculiar life and type of character descending through innumerable generations. Time, culture, and physical environments exert their plastic power within a certain range; but during three or four generations, and, indeed, during any known historical periods, they never break up the type. The origin of races is a question from which we retire. It is all the same, as regards this argument, whether the streams of migration first radiated from one or from many centres. We simply point to the fact, that each bears along its own qualities and colorings, which do not disappear through series of ages ; that they become more distinctive in their divergence, and cut their channels deeper as they flow. The African is torn from his native groves, and driven through every variety of clime and fortune, but his ancestral life he never loses. The cold of Canadian hills does not freeze it up. The fire of tropical suns does not melt it out of him. The Jew floats on for ever, an element in the world's population, which all its attritions cannot break in pieces, nor its fiercest surges dissolve. Let art and civilization cover up this ancestral life under fairer forms and shows ; let time file away its rougher features as man emerges out of barbarism, and then let the old temptations encircle him anew, and the old spirit will sweep through him and reappear. Refinement of manners and national comity will give way before it like threads of gossamer. A desire for his neighbor's lands was the unappeasable greed of the Anglo-Saxon and his cognate tribes, emerging grimly out of the Cimbric forests, and pouring successive waves of conquest over England. After the lapse of a thousand years, its motions are beating over the Mexican and the Sikh, in a resurgent wave of the same barbarism.

When a nation is composed of the same race, and is therefore homogeneous, a national life and national character become developed, the most intense and distinctive. Individuals become members of the same collective body, thrilled by its pulse, and marching to the same drill. They form one medium for the same mighty spirit which sways the individual, as the music-master touches to one tune all the strings of his lyre. Nor does it make any difference when its master minds disappear from the earth, except that the national life becomes still more deep and intensive. As if they departed only to come nearer on the spiritual side, and breathe on the souls of the living, they become its gods and heroes, and live in its history and its songs. The past is alive in the present, and common vices and virtues are perpetuated, and stamp the same lines on individual character. The same hatreds • descend from parent to child, increasing in rancor on their way. If the common life is prevailingly corrupt, the corruption will thus channel its bed deeper and broader, till the last barriers break away. It destroys the organization through which it acted : the nation's life is consummated : it falls in pieces, and perishes miserably from the face of the earth. This was the " progress and termination " of the Jewish commonwealth, and all its neighboring nations.

But we suppose that the educationists of a certain school might here say, This is all the result of bad example and influence ; take the youth out of this corrupt society, and from amid those unpropitious circumstances, and all would be changed. Waiving now the question whence originated this corrupt society and these unpropitious circumstances, we will only say that it would be exceedingly edifying to see this notion brought to the test of experiment. Let the educationist take the babe of the Bushman, and rock him in a New England cradle and a New England home, and see if a New England character would be produced as his natural faculties unfold. We do not say that he would grow up the same being that he would in his native society, under the re-creative agencies that now act upon him ; but whoever denies that the instincts, biases, and impulses of his tribe would surely appear and enter as an indestructible element into his character, denies what every naturalist knows to be true. The outward man even to the body, the most external clothing of the spirit, is shaped and moulded in some sort by the faculties that lie within. And this holds not of mere feature and expression, but of the whole internal structure of brain, nerve, and muscle, making the entire human form the exponent of the soul. The ancestral spirit, by a sort of elective affinity, appropriates the matter and form that shall fitly configure and manifest its own peculiar life. So that the naturalist, as soon as he looks on the human form, though it be that of the sleeping child, knows the race, and sometimes the tribe and family, to which it is to be referred; and he knows, unless some powerful countervailing agencies come in, the forms of domestic and social life, including customs, manners, art, worship, in which the spirit within will seek embodiment and exercise. The ancient tendencies have the moulding of us, then, before we are born. In their book " all our members are written." They shape and tone the finest tissues of our mental, moral, and physical structure, ere yet we have seen the light. So that the infant bears the stamp of his lineage, and is himself the configuration of the old ancestral spirit. Where a race is on a course of degeneration and moral decay, we see it in the forms and features of the youngest offspring. "Where there is purity, intelligence, and celestial love, they put on the forms of masculine dignity, womanly grace, and those early spiritual charms that beam out from within all conscious and personal attainments ; but there are tribes of men of whom just the reverse is true, and where humanity recedes and sinks down through the whole scale of brutal deformity, where what is manly is almost lost and what is brutal almost alone appears, where the brow retreats away, and the lower features project forward, which the lowest appetites and fiendish passions have made their own disgusting image.

All violations of the divine laws, as they pervade our entire constitution, tend not only to individual ruin, but the degradation of species. The tribes to which we have just referred hold a relation to the whole human family, such as monsters and idiots hold to the particular families in which they are born. Malformations of mind and body are referable to preexistent infractions of these laws, and sometimes many generations intervene between the causes and their ultimate and dismal results. This is a law of transmission through all known grades of being. It is not peculiar to man, but it runs along the descending scale of all created natures below him. It underlies all the phenomena of reproduction, growth, and decay. And the malformation ranges through the vast interval between the first slight distortion from the fair and symmetrical original, to where the distortion is complete in monster individuals of a family, or monster families of a species.*

* See an interesting chapter in Miller's Footprints of the Creator, on the degradation of species.

If we narrow down our sphere of observation from races and nations to private households, we get illustrations of the law of descent which are familiar to all. The resemblance which was general becomes more and more special till we come down to single families. How notorious is the fact, that the peculiar mental, moral, and physical qualities of the parents are coined anew and expressed in the features and toned in the temperaments of the children! When children of the same family have been separated wide asunder, and the streams of migration have diverged into regions having no intercommunication, and the modifying influences of climate, marriage with other families, and diversified occupations have been at work two hundred years, still we have known the stranger pass from one region to the other and point out the common descendants before hearing their names. Thus habits of mind become inwrought and infibred with the natures of offspring. And thus fearful are our responsibilities, for such is the poison or the healing virtue which we infuse into the stream of being that sweeps by us. According to the life within which we choose to cherish and manifest, we leave an inheritance of blessing or a cleaving curse to the generations !

Scarcely less in form and feature than in language are the transmissive qualities and dispositions of a people to be discerned. Language is never an assemblage of arbitrary signs among the people with whom it is native and living. It is the crystallization of their most interior mind, and it shows the most peculiar colorings of their thought and sentiment fixed and preserved. Hereditary dispositions not only shape the features, but the vocal organs ; and they give them that tone, compass, texture, and flexibility, whereby they shall prepare for themselves an appropriate utterance. They form their own gamut, and then they rise and fall through it as they will. They shape the human lyre for their own use, and then they sweep it with their own music. We know that every animal species is born into the instinctive use of a natural language, whose signs are uniform from age to age. Just as true is it that the same propensities in men will seek the same expression, and pre-adapt the organs to every shade of meaning, and that these organs are touched by the hereditary life and toned by the ancestral spirit, — for it is spirit that appropriates matter and moulds it and makes it flexile to its uses. Hence those who have strong mental and spiritual affinities soon learn and speak each other's language ; but let the children of a people long savage and brutalized be taught a language flexile to the higher sentiments, and then be left to themselves. They will most assuredly sink such a language into miserable barbarisms, which, though not cognate with their own tongue, shall be allied to it in sound. For it is not they that speak, but a line of foul ancestry is speaking through them. The missionaries, when translating the Bible into the tongues of native savages, put the best Christianity into those tongues that they will hold. It is curious sometimes to render back literally, and see the Christianity that comes out of them. Let our educationist take the youngest child of the Polynesian savage, and teach him to speak with " pure tone " the dialect of mercy. Or if he can find a lineal representative of a tribe of the Northern forests, whose language Pfitchard says " resembles the cries of wild beasts rather than the sounds of the human voice," since bestial passions so long had growled through its gutterals, let him train his larynx at once to vibrate to the soft sounds and the breezy motion of Tuscan airs. Scripture saith that the primitive men had first one language and "one lip." But they "travelled from the East" ; they left the golden regions of that love by which human thoughts and sentiments are fused together and find harmonious utterance, and the primitive language was resolved into jangling dialects, each the howl of some selfish passion, — like a strain of many parts breaking down into discords, when each is glad to withdraw his part from the o-eneral clans. And hence the dispersion of ancient and of every modern Babel.

Chapter III. Acquired Instincts

" It might be sufficient, perhaps, to state the well-known fact, that dispositions and propensities, and consequently all habits that have acquired the force of these, are actually transmitted to descendants." — Kinmont's Natural History of Man.

We suppose that, if Pelagius were to rise from his repose, he might bring an objection somewhat on this wise. The facts which have now been stated do not prove any innate depravation of human nature. All its propensities are in themselves good. They only become depraved through voluntary perversion and abuse. The senses are all good, and even the animal appetites and passions. Things in themselves good may be used either for good or evil purposes. Appetite is for self-preservation, desire for property is to excite to industry, combativeness to defend the right, reason to investigate truth, and reverence to worship God. If in their perversion they produce licentiousness, avarice, murder, sophistry, and superstition, the fault lies in the use and not in the possession, and so all that is in man is originally good and pure.